‘We need a general statement that can be used for all stake-holders. The media are probably already onto it,’ I said.
Michael looked at me stiffly. ‘Then get on with it.’
I didn’t want to be there, but forced myself to work. The words came. A headline, then the first line and first paragraph, and then a second, third and fourth. I wrote his quotes, saying how much he cared, that he regretted the glass breakage had occurred and that Wrens were recalling the organic lamb with pumpkin and peas as a precaution. The factory was reviewing its procedures but believed the incident was isolated to one batch. Anyone with the Batch Code of 16740EC should return it to their place of purchase for a full refund. He apologised unreservedly to consumers for any inconvenience.
Michael stood behind me, reading over my shoulder, that spicy-sweet aftershave. A slight brush of his hand on my back, or I imagined it. One final check and I hit send.
‘I hate this silly media game,’ he said.
‘It’s the way it works.’
He shifted his weight and cleared this throat. He was about to say something else, something personal, so I spoke first and asked him to sit because we needed to start returning the media calls that were now coming in. I looked at my watch. We had to move quickly so I could pick up Sophie.
I started dialling and handed the phone over, listening carefully as Michael did the interviews. He wasn’t bad, sticking to his key messages, sometimes elaborating with the self-assurance that only some chief executives have. The calls kept coming in, newspapers and radio. I glanced at the door. I needed to get going. Then a woman was standing in front of me talking about negative comments appearing on Wrens’ Facebook page. She wanted them taken down, the lot deleted.
‘If you do that, you’ll make it worse,’ I said.
Frowning, she turned to Michael and waved for him to join us. She was pretty in a fake blonde and heavy make-up sort of way and I wondered if she was one of the others Neil had said Michael took back to his house. I dismissed the thought and repeated my position.
‘This story will die a quick death,’ I said.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Michael asked.
I counted reasons off on my fingers. ‘The footy is on tomorrow. Saturday housing auctions will demand crazy prices. There are street marches on climate change. And the polls are bad for the government.’
Then a kind of internal tapping: something else worried me. My phone was in my hand and I looked at the time. 5.40 pm. Dread washed through me. Sophie. It was impossible to get to her by six. After-school care was a forty-minute drive through the traffic.
I turned, my mouth open.
‘What’s wrong?’ Michael said.
‘Sophie,’ I said, looking at the door. ‘I’ve got to get her from school.’
‘Neil will go.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘He can bring her here.’
‘No.’
‘You can’t leave.’
Jane. She would help me. I moved across the office, thumbs dialling.
She picked up.
‘I need help. I’m in a terrible crisis here. Can’t get Sophie.’
‘I’m putting together a late story for tonight.’
‘Shit.’
‘Hang on. I’ll ask Liam to get her.’
I had known Jane since uni and Liam was her new boyfriend, a cameraman at Channel Nine. We had met a couple of times, at the pub and a barbecue. He was fine. He was nice. Sophie had met him too. This would be okay, just till I could get there.
‘He’s off today. I’ll ask him,’ Jane said.
‘I’ll call the school and say he’ll be there.’
‘Wait till I check.’
I glanced at the clock. 5.43.
Sophie would be on the little chair watching the door.
I would leave and just walk out. I saw myself running to my car. My bag and laptop were on the table. I took a step forward. The traffic would be heavy, making me at least thirty minutes late. I’d need to phone to explain and apologise. And was there a shortcut, a quicker way than Punt Road?
I was unplugging my laptop when Michael came close behind me. ‘What’s going on?’
I stared into his pale fleshy face, at the yellow flecks in his eyes, and felt ridiculous for wanting to love him.
He stepped closer. ‘There have been two more reports of glass. That’s what happens when this kind of thing goes public – all the loonies come out of the woodwork, making up stories.’
‘I’ve got to leave.’
‘You can’t.’
My phone rang. Jane.
‘Liam’s on his way now. Call and let them know. I’ll get to his place as soon as I can. Won’t be too long.’
A silent thanks to Jane, who since Nick and I broke up had been the friend who listened to my sad rages as I adjusted to a life half-bearable – to what my life was now. Most of the old group worked in the media – journalists, producers, editors in television, radio and newspapers, who quietly drifted away from me because that’s what happens: people choose. And Nick was so stunningly interesting with his worthy war stories, the features he had published. Just last month he’d cracked the New Yorker with a story on Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon. As for me, I worked at the murky bottom of journalism in PR. Never mind that they reported and produced the easy stories with scandalous promos and headlines to chase ratings. Whatever. Nick had always been proud of me and I was good at my job and made at least double the money of any of them.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ Michael demanded.
I walked away, phone to my ear. The after-school carer listened as I authorised Liam – a good family friend – as the responsible person who would be picking up Sophie.
‘What’s his surname? I’ll put it in the book,’ she said.
I didn’t know.
‘He’ll be there soon,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much.’
I was so relieved that when I turned to Michael I smiled, and his face transformed into an equal grin.
I drafted a Q&A for the staff in the Wrens call centre and letters to the supermarkets and health authorities. Then we watched the news reports and the current affairs shows milking the story – an agitated mother holding her crying bald-headed baby, rocking him, saying he had been X-rayed to see if he’d swallowed glass. I glared at Michael and his team who were all staring ahead, not moving or looking at each other.
At eight-thirty I left Wrens and headed to Liam’s place in Richmond. The media monitoring service kept forwarding updates from every state on how the recall was being reported. Information from Perth had still been arriving when I said I had to go. Jane hadn’t replied to my messages asking how everything was going, but I wasn’t worried. She would be doing something with Sophie, reading to her or braiding her hair. Driving behind a tram on Bridge Road I tried her number again. No answer.
A right turn on an amber light into Coppin Street, the blare of a horn trailing behind me. The pink line on my GPS led me along until I pulled up outside a semi-detached red-brick house. I hadn’t been to Liam’s before and it felt strange that Sophie was in there without me.
A sensor light flashed as I ran up the cracked concrete path. The uncut lawn was thick with capeweed, large and small wheelie bins leaned against the fence. I climbed two steps.
I rapped twice on the heavy black knocker. I should have brought a bottle of wine, at the very least, to say thank you for helping me out. Sophie would probably be asleep by now and I would’ve liked a quiet drink or two. God knows I deserved it. The veranda floor was inlaid with green, blue and cream mosaic tiles, lumpy and curved with old age. Just as I reached out to check whether the door was unlocked, it opened. A bare-chested stranger wearing black-and-fluoro-green shorts stood in front of me. His hair was blond and his three-day growth was dark.
There was a pause, a moment of uncertainty in which I thought about the address, realising I must have made a mistake. I was at the wrong place.
‘
You the kid’s mum?’ he said. ‘Finally. Jesus. Where the fuck have you been?’
‘What’s wrong? Where’s Sophie?’
‘Just come and get her. This is bullshit. I’ve been waiting.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Jacob.’
‘How do you know Liam and Jane?’
‘Live here with Liam.’
I stepped inside.
‘Where’s Jane?’
‘Not here.’
‘What do you mean?’
He flicked his hand as if dismissing them.
‘She’s with Liam.’
‘So where are they?’
‘Dunno.’
I followed him down the hall. The house smelt of trapped dust and hoppy beer. A bike rested against the wall and a helmet dangled from a handlebar. A Camcorder was on the floor inside a door. This was all terribly wrong. I needed to call Jane again, but she hadn’t been answering her phone. I caught a glimpse of an unmade bed and an upright ironing board. The hall seemed very long. I could hear a television.
In the back room, straight ahead, was a bench-press and weights. Sophie’s backpack was on the floor and I scooped it up and flung it over my shoulder. We walked around the corner and entered an open space with a glass ceiling. There she was, small and huddled in the far deep corner of a black couch. Her pale face was mottled red from crying, her nose was snotty and she was sucking a finger. The footy was on and players were running on the field.
She blurted out a single loud cry.
I grabbed her up.
‘Sweetheart.’
Sophie’s legs and arms went around me. Her school uniform was soaked through and cold. Her urine blotted into my suit.
‘She pissed herself,’ Jacob said. ‘I told her where the toilet was.’
He folded his arms, impatient and furious at being an unwilling babysitter.
Sophie clung on tighter and pressed her head into my neck.
‘I offered her sausage rolls. But she wouldn’t eat anything,’ he said.
‘Has Jane been here at all?’
He shook his head.
‘How long was Liam here?’
‘Not long. Jane phoned and he left.’
None of this made sense and I couldn’t think. Sophie wiped her nose on my shoulder. I put a hand on her hair and almost ran down the hall, balancing her in the groove of my hip. Before we’d reached the door, I heard the metal slap of weights. I ran across the veranda, down the steps and the path, and all the while Sophie was crying, humming sobs through closed lips.
‘It’s okay, okay. Shh. Come on.’
For a minute, I was all business, buckling her in, ignoring her terrible sounds and wet clothes. Everything was all right, she was safe and with me now. But behind the wheel I kept fumbling as I tried to put the key in the ignition. Then I dropped the whole set on the floor beside my feet. I rested my head on the steering wheel and closed my eyes.
‘Mummy.’
Sophie hadn’t called me Mummy in years.
‘Come here,’ I said
She undid her seatbelt, climbed over and sat on my lap and put her wet face against my chest. Her breathing was fast and shallow and she was clammy to the touch.
‘I love you, honey. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
She didn’t speak or move.
‘I promise I’ll never let anyone else pick you up from after-school care again.’
Fear crossed her face, a terrible helplessness, and I realised she didn’t trust me.
At home, I bathed her in warm soapy water. Then I held my six-year-old on my lap like a baby while she drank milk and ate toast with cheese. I put her in my bed, snuggled her under the doona and rubbed her back until her eyelids stopped flickering and her breathing steadied.
Then I sat on the couch with the lights low and a full glass of unchilled riesling. I sipped while staring ahead into the Zambian drum with its yellow-and-green tassels. I noticed everything in the room. The Burmese silk cushion I was slumped against, the Ethiopian Coptic cross lying flat on the coffee table, the wooden Malian masks on the wall in front. There were so many things, all of them from Nick: homecoming gifts and apologies and reasons to brag.
The bottle lasted until almost midnight and by then I was fully attuned to my shame. Sophie had been in that place. And the day before I’d been with Michael. At the sudden high-speed roar of a motorbike over on Chapel Street, I looked across and through the sheer curtains as if I might see it. I swirled the glass and drank the last of the wine. Some deep-welling conviction was brewing that I needed to do something. I had no clue what that meant, but as I pushed myself up from the couch, I felt a little better than when I had sat down.
The bleep of a text. It was Jane explaining herself, saying her car wouldn’t start, that Liam had come to help but it needed to be towed away. And the battery on her phone had run out. She was relieved that at least his housemate had been there to look after Sophie. She signed off with several kisses and a promise to catch up soon. I supposed it was true, about her car and phone. But why hadn’t she called me on Liam’s phone? I started to tap out a message but couldn’t think what to say, so in the end I didn’t reply. I wasn’t up for an argument about what had happened, because in the end, I was the only one to blame.
4
SOMETHING was wrong yet I was struggling to surface from sleep. My bed was warm, the place where I was safest, and I wanted to stay there. With Sophie’s feather touch on my face, I remembered the night before. Her child’s breath. I opened my eyes.
‘Watch.’
I sat up and watched her twirl, the skirt on her pink spinning dress flared wide. Then she raised her arms like a ballerina and twirled again on tiptoes. Even though her face was stiff with concentration, her smile was wide – little white teeth and a front tooth missing.
Then I remembered the muscled back of a man wearing black-and-fluoro-green shorts. What was his name? And Sophie, small and shrunken on the couch sitting in a pool of urine. I dropped back into the pillows.
‘Come here, my clever girl.’
But she was intent on spinning and dancing. I lay there, watching.
I had already been judged by that bare-chested man. Jane had excused herself and Liam from any responsibility. Sophie was young and would forget. It was a weight on my chest, pressing down. I felt the need to call someone and share this terrible thing, to explain myself and in doing so be somehow absolved. I wanted the comfort of Nick, but I’d never confess to him because we would end up accusing each other, and besides, he was often difficult to reach. I longed for my mother – the idea of her rather than her, because she couldn’t give me what I needed. She lived in Noosa with her new husband and barely answered the phone between golf and the next dinner party. After Dad left, Mum joined one of those happy-clappy churches – for a few years it became a sort of obsession. That’s where she met her second husband. I didn’t like him and as soon as I finished school and got accepted into Monash University I took off. There was a lot I could say about that time in my life – Dad’s new girlfriend, Mum singing and swaying in a church. Ewan joining the Army and not saying very much to me, or anyone else after that. Anyway, it turned out Mum didn’t like husband number two either, because she quit going to church and was now onto her third husband and finally seemed happy.
Sophie and I arrived at Oscar’s later than usual. People were out. The café was full of couples and small families with prams, all quietly settling into the weekend. I found a table against the sandstone wall, close to the burning wood heater. Three women in black lycra were at our usual place, Nick’s table, leaning in to study the menu. I imagined he was sitting with them, the fourth person. And there he was, wearing his Khmer scarf, entertaining them with stories of where he’d just been and what he’d seen and done. They would be captivated, impressed, urging him to go on. Then what happened? He would order a short black, probably have eggs with the lot, and take his time eating it because he’d be too engaged with the buzz arou
nd him.
I turned to the weekend papers, hunting for the glass in baby food reports. A mass shooting in a US supermarket and the high prices of housing in Sydney were the lead stories. Wrens appeared on page five – not too close to the front and the coverage was generally supportive, with a warning to parents to return the product to the place of purchase. The recall advertisements were further back, low profile and not overwhelmingly alarming. It was the best outcome. As I pulled the sections apart, looking for the magazines, Sophie showed me her latest wobbly tooth. I felt it and confirmed, Yes, the tooth fairy would be coming soon.
The space between the chair and narrow table made it difficult to fold and turn the broadsheet pages.
And then, like a glossy brown fish, a magazine slipped out onto the table. I opened it and half read a column about the value of local corner stores, then a feature on an environmentalist who had been murdered. I turned the pages, despondently flicking in search of a story to distract and not bore me.
As my fingers went to turn another page, I hesitated. Something. A feeling of recognition. I leaned in. It took a moment to take it in. There in the magazine was Nick’s name and a close-up posed photo of him with his Nikon D4 raised to his squinted hazel eye. I knew the beautiful sculpture of his face – every expression, his laughing smile. They had published a human interest story on him, the Aussie photo-journalist who worked for the UN in dangerous places, topical because he was in the Middle East as it descended further into disaster.
I called Sophie to look, ‘Here’s Daddy’, but when she turned I was skim-reading, not taking anything in, blindly searching for key words, but what words? Another page and another photo of Nick and my body went still and I missed some breaths because he was with someone. Someone else. A woman was standing beside him and they were smiling at whoever was taking the photo. Nick had his arm around her, that perfect measure where bodies connect between the armpit and hip. The caption said her name was Lila Attar, his Iranian partner, and I didn’t know anything about that. I mean, he had only been gone five months.
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