‘Where you taking us? Mumma?’
‘Nowhere, Henry. Nowhere.’
Beneath the rocket ship she had suspended from the celestial ceiling whose constellations she had set out, one star and moon and comet at a time, she held as much of him as she could, folding both of his arms against her breast, cradling his skull with outspread fingers, nuzzling her nose into his hair.
‘Who . . . who . . . is going to look after to us?’ he asked.
Look after to us. It was a formulation she hadn’t been able to correct.
‘I will, darling,’ she said, her mouth on her son’s sweet cheek. ‘I will.’
It was called The Cottage, although it was no more a cottage than it was a school. It was a low, brick, purpose-built centre and the path to its front door was an avenue of plaster toadstools with plaster hedgehogs, squirrels and rabbits nesting cutely around their bases. In the mornings Nina struggled up that path with Henry’s hand in hers and Gracie on one hip, both children’s bags slung awkwardly over her shoulders. She had to turn sideways to allow for the mothers coming the other way. Nina didn’t mind the tight-lipped ones, the ones who drew their cardigans in tight as the double-glazed doors sealed behind them, shutting off the sound of a child’s wailing. To those ones, Nina would offer a weak, watery smile, knowing as well as they that there was nothing helpful to be said or done.
It was the other mothers she disliked, the ones with older, well-adjusted children in the big preschool rooms at the end of the corridor. Those mothers almost skipped down the path on their way to work and Nina knew they talked about her, and about poor little Gracie, only three months old and in care five days a week. She never heard them, but she saw the way they looked at her, and she knew. She would have talked about herself.
Henry was quiet on the path. He didn’t baulk, or protest. Not then. He would walk with one hand in Nina’s and the other thrust into one of his deep, emptied pockets, calm and self-contained, as if preparing himself. He was docile in Gracie’s room where the younger babies lay on bunny rugs on the carpet and the older ones pulled themselves up to their feet and tottered around the play equipment, falling from time to time back down onto their nappy-fat bottoms. It was almost too easy to leave Gracie, who was pleased to see everyone and too young to know that it was not normal to spend all day with strangers. Nina wrote out labels for bottles of expressed breastmilk, set out Gracie’s day’s worth of nappies, hung her little knitted hat on her own special peg.
Nina did not hurry through the leaving of Gracie, but she always made sure there would be enough time to linger in Henry’s room and help him do puzzles, or make snails from the centre’s bright blue and green and yellow play dough. It gave her time to observe and amass evidence: that unattended child with its nappy loose and brown juice leaking down its leg, the little girl who gave a horror movie shriek as a boy leant in gleefully to fasten his mouth around her forearm, leaving behind a full imprint of his milk teeth. Nina watched the children in the corner with the toy cooker and the timber pots playing at a game they called ‘Mums and Dads’ in which one child would lie on the floor making baby cry noises, while two others gave it a good scolding. After a time they would all swap around.
Henry’s primary carer was Beverly. She was young for a grandmother, with hectic platinum hair and ruby-rimmed glasses that hung around her neck on a lanyard strung with bright baubles. She had the voice of a reformed smoker, sweet but still slightly phlegmy, and her conversations with Nina were seamlessly interspersed with ‘Not them ones, George’ and ‘Can we have a bit of shush please, Lucinda?’ and ‘Hazel, no hat, no play, my little cherub’. Every day Beverly wore the centre’s uniform of navy pants and a navy polo shirt with a red and white toadstool logo and The Cottage embroidered on the pocket, but she wore the shirt unbuttoned and this allowed a glimpse of the Kiss tattoo inked in fading red, blue and black on the crepe-textured skin to one side of her cleavage.
‘You’re a big fan, then?’ Nina said, gesturing to her own décolletage.
‘Love ’em,’ Beverly confirmed and, although her tone was perfectly polite, Nina could tell the conversation was already at an end.
One morning Nina saw Beverly showing a photograph of her infant granddaughter to a colleague. Beverly wished she could afford not to work full-time—Nina heard her say—so she could help her daughter out more. Together the women turned back to the photo, smiling and cooing, but when Nina said, ‘Oh, let me see’, Beverly dutifully passed her the photograph while carrying on the conversation with her colleague without pause.
Nina could tell that Beverly was neither flattered nor intrigued by Nina’s interest in her, and Nina was irritated and vaguely hurt by the fact that she didn’t have, or feel she had, more purchase over Beverly. Although theirs was a user pays arrangement—transactional, as Genevieve would say—Nina couldn’t shake either the sense that she was indebted to Beverly, or the suspicion that Beverly despised her. And not just Nina, but all of them: all the working mothers with their pretty shoes and swishy coats who left their lost little children in her care.
Nina felt she was entitled to know at least something about the woman who was caring for her son, but Beverly refused to open up; and she did so in a way that let Nina know Beverly thought she was asking for something she had not paid for and had no right to expect. Charm didn’t help Nina in her dealings with Beverly. Nina sensed that Beverly came from a place that Nina had never been to—somewhere harder and more honest, where charm was as useful as leftover coins from a foreign country.
Beverly gave Nina advice on saying goodbye. ‘All you say is “I’m going to work now, Henry”. Nothing else. Then you hand him to me and off you go. And no looking back.’
Despite Nina’s best efforts to remain calm and inscrutable, it always happened a few minutes before leaving time that she would feel the guilty prickle of adrenalin in the backs of her hands, and Henry would sense that his time was approaching. A slick of wetness would appear across the surface of his eyes, and his lower lip would begin to wobble.
‘I come with you to work, Mummy? I be good,’ he would say.
Normally, Nina would enter into a long explanation, but here at the centre, Beverly would be watching.
‘I’m going to work now, Henry,’ she would say. ‘I love you.’
Beverly would give Nina a stern little look, hold out her arms to the child.
‘Come on, Henry. You and me’ll go feed the chooky girls, hey?’
To begin with, there would be discernable words: no and Mummy and please. By the time Nina reached the door these would have scrambled into incoherence, although there was no mistaking the meaning of the piercing screams, the way he would punch and kick at Beverly, who held his thrashing little body fast in her tuckshop lady arms. Nina would feel her child’s distress sluice through her, sending a wash of ice up under her hair and down the backs of her legs. She would hear him all the way down the corridor and onto the path, when the door would close behind her, although it didn’t really stop then. His crying echoed within her all the way to the car, all the way to work through the morning-choked streets, stowing away in the curling corridors of her ears even as she entered the station building.
This was a place adapted for the transmission and protection of sound: its doors heavy, its walls padded and ceilings furred. Even the air here had a different quality: thin, as if depleted of some crucial element so that sound might speed through it just a little quicker. Once, Nina had been used to breathing this air, had even thrived on it. But now each time she arrived at work, she felt instantly tired, lethargic and foggy, as if she had altitude sickness. She could see that the station manager was regretting his decision to dismiss a probationary graduate in order to fit her back into the team. And her presenter—an ambitious younger man, stopping off in radio by way of transit to television—did little to hide his disappointment at being landed with a lemon.
Nina found it hard to concentrate. There were days when the whiteboard seemed la
rger than previously and the slots she must fill with controversy and chatter more numerous. She was so distracted that she would dial a number and set someone’s phone to ringing, only to slam the receiver down in a rush of panic at realising she had forgotten in the space of a moment both whom she was calling and why. There were too many occasions when the presenter on the other side of the soundproof glass had to struggle for banalities to fill the passing seconds as Nina’s trembling hands hovered over the blinking lights and dials of the control panel, all the labels and codes suddenly stripped of meaning. While the show was to air, there was no time for the bathroom and yet Nina would find herself there, holding those shuddering hands under the cold tap and trying not to look at herself in the mirror. This was the mirror in which she had observed herself in those early days of her pregnancy with Henry, looking for signs. In the same mirror she had later watched her shape morphing day by day. Now it showed the splashes of white in her hair that looked not so much the result of mishap, but only further evidence of disorganisation and failure.
There were days, though, when the work succeeded in seducing her into the worlds of opinion and talkback, dragging her out into the tired kitchens of the country’s lonely nutcases and pedants. On these days she would slip away from who she was, all the way out to the end of her leash, which would at last snap tight and jerk her heart right up into her throat. Oh, God, the children! The children! Where are the children?
‘You do know that Henry is completely fine, though,’ Genevieve counselled. ‘You’ve seen other children do it, right? Carry on like pork chops until their parents are out of sight and then, suddenly, they’re completely fine.’
But Nina was far from certain that this was true for Henry. At home on the weekends, he became nervous each time Nina picked up her car keys, and a couple of times when he woke from an afternoon sleep while Nina was out at the clothesline, he had become convinced that he had been left alone in the house. When Nina returned with the washing basket she found him walking through the house screwing his sucky blanket into a twist as he cried, hysterical with fear. There were evenings when she would arrive at the centre to find him with his eyes red and puffy, his breathing jagged.
‘Is he like this all day?’ Nina asked Beverly.
‘He’s a little down sometimes,’ Beverly said.
This was understatement, Nina knew. She also knew as well as Beverly did that speaking the whole truth changed nothing about Henry’s situation.
‘Shouldn’t you call me, if he’s distressed?’ Nina wanted to ask more forcefully than, in the end, she felt able to. Beggars can’t be choosers.
‘He’ll settle in. They all do, eventually.’
But although the weeks passed, Henry and Nina’s daily separations became no easier. It seemed not to matter that precisely the same thing happened five days out of every seven: it was clear that each time Nina passed Henry into Beverly’s arms and turned her back, the little boy felt the shock of her betrayal afresh.
Genevieve tried hard to console Nina. ‘You’ve got to admit there’s something gratifying about how pleased they are to see you at the end of the day.’
Nina knew what Genevieve was talking about. Mothers at day’s end were minor celebrities, and in that dismal hour between five and six, when most of the children had already been collected and the carers were tired and trying to set out the next day’s paint pots and felt pictures and box work, one or two children would hover about the door in the capacity of forward scouts, to watch for them.
‘That’s Charlie’s mummy.’
‘No, tisn’t.’
‘Yes, tis.’
‘Charlie’s mummy has tall shoes. That’s Lucinda’s mummy.’
‘Lucinda! Lucinda! Your mummy’s here!’
And Lucinda would appear with her wild hair and paint-smeared clothes and run at her mother’s legs fit to break them. It was only Henry’s second week in care when he gave up responding to the sentries’ announcements. He no longer came running—relieved and rescued—to Nina’s open arms. Instead, Nina would have to go looking for him. She might find him among the cushions in the library corner, or squatting down, alone, in a corner of the small Colorbond shed in which the tricycles were kept. One evening she found him crouching low on the far side of the chicken pen, in a narrow space between the wire and a paling fence. The big tawny birds had only recently been given a reprieve from a battery farm; they were still apt to peck up pebbles and sticks in their blunt clipped-away beaks. Henry watched them sadly, his body juddering with the occasional weary sob.
‘Why don’t you have Lucas take him to childcare some days?’ Genevieve said. ‘Let your bloody husband take his fair share of it. He wanted to become a father.’
Genevieve had a way of making these things sound so obvious.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Why not? Henry might be easier for his dad.’
‘No,’ said Nina. The suggestion made her feel angry and panicked.
Already such a large part of Henry’s day was lost to her. Some nights after childcare, when she lifted Henry into the bathtub, there were marks on his body that he could not explain. They were only small scratches and bruises, just the normal stuff of childhood, but once upon a time she would have known how the tricycle fell over and where on the asphalt of the park Henry had left the scrapings of his knee. Now these marks were the story of his day apart from her. They were all that was left of a stretch of hours that he could not describe, and that remained, to Nina, a blank.
On weekdays, Nina was nothing more than the person who woke and fed and dressed Henry in the morning, and who fed and undressed and put Henry to bed at night. Meanwhile, in the intervening hours, other women were filling his mind. Nina had good intentions of making up for it on Saturdays and Sundays with cooking and nature walks and doing puzzles on the living room floor, but somehow the weekends filled themselves with the chores required to sustain the working week. It was often the best she could do, as she folded the endless piles of washing, to have Henry leaf through an alphabet book beside her.
‘What letter is that one, Henry? You know that one,’ Nina said.
‘Haitch,’ said Henry,
‘Excuse me?’
‘Haitch. Haitch for Henry.’
‘You mean “aitch”,’ Nina said.
‘No, it’s “haitch”,’ Henry said. ‘Bevelly telled me. At school.’
Nina’s nostrils flared. ‘No, Henry, it’s definitely “aitch”. Can you say that? “Aitch”.’
‘Mummy,’ said Henry. ‘At school Bevelly telled me it’s “haitch” for Henry.’
Nina made an appointment with the centre’s manager, but once she was sitting down on the opposite side of the woman’s desk, she realised there was nothing for her to say. Beverly was not a bad woman. Nina had never seen her be anything but sensible, calm and kind; and, now that Nina was here, it was clear to her that transmission of the letter sound ‘haitch’ to a two-and-a-half-year-old was not actually a matter of child abuse. And anyway, it wasn’t the ‘haitch’; it was Nina’s sense that something within Henry was being damaged, even destroyed. It was Nina’s desire to have someone, anyone, to blame. This was guilt. But Nina knew that the centre manager, with her practised gaze of professional concern, kept in the melamine drawers of her desk no magic cure for that.
Back when Nina and Lucas borrowed the money for the extension on the house, Nina bought a fridge magnet with a 1950s cartoon couple in a clinch; the woman opening her perfectly lipsticked mouth to say, ‘Darling, let’s get deeply into debt’. It was still there on the fridge, holding up utility bills and head-lice notices, during the autumn Gracie turned one—and it was still there a few months later in the winter when Henry turned three, and still there a few weeks after that when Nina and Lucas silently colluded to allow their ninth wedding anniversary to slip by without ceremony or even remark. Although it had been a long time since Nina had found the fridge magnet amusing, she’d not got rid
of it. It would have been so easy to slide it off the fridge, bend it until it snapped, toss it in the bin.
‘I feel like debt is the only thing keeping us together,’ Nina confided in Genevieve. ‘If we separated . . . oh, God.’
When Nina thought of the debt, it was as an enormous concrete block that was being slid—long and thin, like a bank’s safety deposit box—into its own purpose-built metal sleeve. It seemed to go on forever, and it left no space around its edges. Mortgage statements came in the mail and when Nina looked at the bottom line she realised that if the debt was a concrete monolith, they were working away at it with a squirt of Jif and a toothbrush. More than once Nina looked up the bankruptcy rules, taking all the secretive care that she would if she were trawling illicitly on RSVP.
‘Separated?’ Genevieve asked. ‘You mean, you’ve thought about it?’
Of course she had thought about it. They spoke to each other, Lucas and she. Normal enough words came out of their mouths, but all Nina ever heard anymore was subtext. Lucas would ask, ‘Is there any more milk?’, but she heard, ‘None of this would be so bad if we only had one child’, and even as she said the words, ‘You were supposed to get milk on the way home, remember?’, she was filled with her own silent translation: ‘Yeah, but who’s the loser who fucked up the business, hmm?’
‘Thought about it seriously?’ Genevieve asked. ‘Or are we in the ideation phase here?’
‘Fairly seriously.’
‘You know the rules,’ Genevieve said. ‘No separating until the youngest child is two years old. Those are the hardest years. Survive those and you’ll be fine.’
Nina wondered where Genevieve got her information from and why she, Nina, had been denied access to this reliable and authoritative source, or its equivalent.
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