by Kim Lock
Thomas saw the quaver in Aida’s hands as she sliced the meatloaf. ‘Because she’s a bored gossip,’ she said, ‘with nothing better to do than stick her nose into other people’s business.’
Thomas’s anger stoked itself. ‘That may be true, but that doesn’t excuse that you let somebody see you. What were you thinking?’
‘Thomas, calm down.’
‘How does it make me look that my wife kisses another woman?’
‘No one listens to Gloria Watson. Don’t worry.’
‘How can I not worry? If the wrong person finds out I could be charged with a crime, for all I know!’
The kitchen went quiet, the three of them staring each other down.
‘Of course not,’ Aida said, breaking the silence ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Bigamy is illegal,’ he told her.
‘And I’m not your wife,’ she retorted.
Elsie said warily, ‘Come on now, let’s all calm down.’
‘No, Elsie, this is not on. If you’re in public, you cannot act like a pair of lovesick teenagers.’
‘We’re hardly –’
‘Are you forgetting that you’re both women? It’s against the law.’
‘Between men.’ Aida’s voice was stony. ‘It’s only sodomy the law has a problem with.’
Elsie said, ‘Let’s change the subject.’
‘You need to be more careful,’ Thomas said.
‘You don’t think I’ve spent enough time being “careful”?’ Aida said icily.
‘Love, I’m sure Thomas didn’t mean –’
‘Christ, Ay, I’m sorry,’ Thomas shook his head, feeling like an arsehole, but then growing even more indignant because of that. He didn’t want to feel like an arsehole – but he hadn’t been the one locking lips at the Show. ‘I might sound like a right bastard but this reflects on me. What if Bagnoli found out? I could lose my job.’
Aida slashed at the meatloaf. ‘Of course. Make it all about the man.’
Thomas tossed up his hands. Millie ran back into the kitchen, clutching a stuffed bear with one eye. Elsie picked her up, chattering about playing with Mummy’s necklaces like she always wanted, and disappeared from the room.
Thomas rubbed his jaw anxiously. ‘Who else knows? What about your friend over the road, what’s her name? Has she seen you two together?’
‘Sara Scott. And no, she doesn’t know.’ Aida slammed the knife down. ‘I know you’re upset, Thomas, but it’s been six years now.’ She slapped slices of meatloaf onto plates. ‘Bloody hell, I’ve only just started getting out again. You know we’re discreet.’
‘I know that, love, but necking at the Spring Show is not discreet.’
‘We weren’t “necking”.’ Elsie appeared without Millie. ‘Mrs Watson is exaggerating.’
Aida lay a hand limply on her breast, feigning astonishment. ‘Gloria Watson, exaggerate? Nooo.’ They both chuckled and, feeling outnumbered, Thomas’s irritation skyrocketed.
He turned to his wife. ‘Elsie, you’ve told me before that Gloria Watson is a voice of the community. Her opinion matters. Remember how worried you were about not being good enough for her knitting group?’
Elsie, the smirk wiped from her face, looked uncomfortable.
‘Nonsense,’ Aida broke in.
‘He’s right,’ Elsie said. ‘We should have been more careful. This is a small town.’
Thomas stifled a sense of triumph.
Aida narrowed her eyes. ‘I love you both, and Thomas, yes, maybe we weren’t cautious enough. But I will not be made to feel guilty again, when I’m finally feeling good about myself.’ Her voice wobbled. ‘I refuse to feel ashamed anymore.’
Silence fell again. Internally, Thomas churned, as he glanced from one woman to the other.
‘I do understand, I do,’ he sounded flustered, and that aggravated him even further. ‘But you do need to be more careful – if I get found out –’ he looked pleadingly at Elsie.
Elsie’s expression was miserable. ‘It’s my fault. I suggested the day out.’
Thomas was struck by how the slice of meatloaf, as it sailed across the kitchen, demonstrated uncannily robust aerodynamics. Perfect lift, without inaccurate yaw, it sailed over the bench, across the table and went splat onto the glass on the back door. Grease smeared in its wake like a blurry contrail as it sank idly down the glass and plopped onto the floor.
‘Don’t you dare start self-flagellating, Else,’ Aida snapped. ‘Don’t you dare. I am a grown woman and I can make my own damn choices. Do you think I haven’t tried to protect you? And Thomas?’ Her voice was straining to stay contained. ‘You think I don’t realise how . . . how . . . weird this is? How dangerous it is for both of you? You think I don’t know anything about hiding, worrying about what people will think and being ashamed?’
‘Love,’ Elsie said, softly now. ‘I’m sorry. Thomas is too –’
Aida’s eyes glistened angrily. ‘When I left here, after Millie was born, I asked my mum if she had heard anything about Jimmy and she told me I should pretend he had died. Pretend he died. Like I should erase from my mind entire people, entire life experiences, as though that somehow makes them go away. And it hurt. My parents believed we could all pretend the baby had never existed and all I could think about was you, Elsie. And you, Thomas. And how I fall in love with the wrong people.’
Elsie shot Thomas an imploring look. He said, ‘Oh, my dear, I didn’t mean –’
‘I tried to stop loving you but I couldn’t!’
Millie bustled into the kitchen. Layers of Elsie’s strings of plastic pearls and coloured beads were draped about her body, wrapped around her wrists. The one-eyed bear was being garrotted by a string of fake pearls.
‘Mummy’s necklaces are fun!’ Millie declared, running a lap of the kitchen table. She stopped by the back door. Bending carefully, she picked up the slice of meatloaf in her chubby hand, shoved in a mouthful and grinned at them all.
54
After Millie was born, and grew, and eventually started school, a point had arrived where Elsie believed she would never fall pregnant again. Folding laundry in the lounge room one morning, Millie building a block tower at her feet and a temperamental rain clacking at the windows, Elsie had felt it strike home in her – maybe the reason she hadn’t conceived again was because she simply never would. Like it had been ordained by some standing directive from nature: Elsie Mullet (nee Rushall), issue: One (1) live child.
For six years following Millie’s birth, her body’s healthy bleeding had mocked her. Some months it arrived on time; some months it came a few days late and other months, cruelly, the blood would come a few weeks late, blackish and clotted and painful.
So it wasn’t until July of 1969, six years and two months after Millie’s birth, that Elsie, her monthly absent for over six months, allowed herself to believe the unbelievable. She was pregnant again. Earlier than that, not the doctor’s pronouncements of her healthy pregnancy, nor Thomas and Aida’s exclamations over how swiftly her body was expanding, would allow her to truly believe it. Even when she felt the unworldly movements of limbs from inside her body, she simply placed a quiet hand on the swelling and breathed, grateful for that moment.
And now, in October of 1969, as Australia geared up for another federal election dominated by increasingly divided public sentiment about the Vietnam war, Elsie waddled across the living room, one hand pressed low and firm to the drum of her middle. Snapping off the wireless, cutting short the announcer’s anti-war oration, she turned to Aida.
Elsie said, ‘It’s time.’
*
Arthur Roy Mullet was born at 4.02pm, Thursday 23 October 1969, six and a half years after his sister.
The delivering doctor, whom Elsie later heard the nurses whispering about as modern, didn’t believe in drugging the mother with twilight slee
p and so Elsie felt as though the outlines of her bones were coming through her with every push. She felt each scissor snip of her intimate flesh as the doctor, calmly panicked, hurried the baby out when he saw a purple rope of cord peeking through before the rest of the baby’s body.
Drugs or no, not long after she heard the first feeble cry of her infant, Elsie disappeared; she floated strangely away.
55
Sara Scott approached Aida as she stood chain-smoking beneath a knotty old callistemon at the bus stop, watching the school bus shudder and belch to a standstill. Bees droned in the tufted scarlet blooms above her head.
‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ Sara said as she sidled up, ducking to enter Aida’s line of sight. Red flares hugged her legs, a floral headband sat low on her forehead and wrapped around her long hair. Aida toed out her fag and greeted Sara warmly, not realising the relief a familiar face would bring her right now.
‘Elsie’s had the baby,’ Aida said.
‘How wonderful,’ Sara said. ‘When?’
‘Yesterday. A boy.’
A handful of kids tumbled down the bus steps. Aida flicked her gaze between Sara Scott and the children scattering onto the side of the road. When Millie spotted Aida her face broke into a grin. She waved and ran, her pale skinny legs pumping, satchel a-flap.
Millie flung herself at Aida. ‘Is the baby home yet?’
Sara said, ‘Sounds like someone’s excited.’
‘We’ve been waiting for the baby for ten years,’ Millie explained. ‘Mum’s so fat she can’t even get out of her chair by herself.’
Sara burst into a laugh. ‘God, I know the feeling.’
Aida did too, but she kept that to herself. Then, on account of the fear and apprehension knotting about inside her, she heard herself asking Sara if she and the kids would like to come over for a cup of tea and to play, and she heard Sara responding how much she would love to.
*
‘She seems to really like you,’ Sara said.
They were sitting on the back porch, watching Millie introduce Sara’s two youngest – Jess, six and in Millie’s class at school and Fred, eight – to the chickens at the bottom of the yard. Aida had brought Sara to Thomas and Elsie’s house, aware that her own was sparsely furnished and had the air of an occasional holiday rental rather than a home. She liked that Sara hadn’t seemed to need any explanation, that Aida’s familiarity at the Mullets’ didn’t seem noteworthy to her.
‘I like her, too,’ Aida said. She waited for a comment about how ‘lucky’ Elsie was to have her assistance, but it didn’t come.
Aida sipped her tea and glanced at her watch; it was after four. She hadn’t heard from Thomas since 5 am that morning, when he’d finally called to tell her the baby was born.
Sara said, ‘My ex-husband didn’t even like his own kids.’
Aida found her use of the word ‘ex’ interesting. Sara and her husband weren’t divorced, that much she knew. Too hard; too much hassle in court. But he had left a couple of years ago and Aida, desperate for a diversion from waiting for the phone to ring, found her curiosity roused.
‘You ever hear from him?’
‘Oh, hell no. He’s gone for good.’ She said it with a laugh. ‘Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. I’m a free woman.’ She flicked her eyes at Aida, adding quickly, ‘Sorry,’ and Aida remembered to give the automatic nod of acknowledgement for the sympathy for her dead fictional husband.
Sara sighed and stared down the yard. The kids were sitting in a circle in the dirt, their knees pressed together, each holding a chook in their laps. ‘It’s easier now that they’re older – my eldest is almost sixteen, so the older ones can help with the younger ones.’
‘Six kids,’ said Aida. ‘That’s a lot of kids.’
‘I always wanted a lot. My grandmother was one of thirteen; my mother the youngest of nine. Folks have changed now though – no more of these huge families. Women have a choice these days, rather than breeding over and over. Did you, I mean, do you . . . ?’
‘Want children?’ Aida lifted her cup and pretended to squint against the steam. ‘I did. But I’ve accepted now that I won’t.’
Since Elsie had become pregnant again, she had been unable to get the pill from her doctor for Aida, and Aida had taken extreme caution to avoid any contact with Thomas’s naked groin. Soon, she knew, she would have to find an open-minded doctor and get a prescription of her own,
Aida glanced again at her watch; her knee was jiggling a tattoo of its own accord.
‘You’re worried about her.’
Aida looked at her; Sara’s face was open and kind.
‘Yes,’ Aida admitted. ‘The nurses told Thomas that she lost more than five pints of blood. She had to be taken for a transfusion.’
Sara clucked her tongue.
Aida heard herself go on: ‘I’ve been with Millie since they left yesterday afternoon . . . after they left for the hospital I didn’t hear anything until five o’clock this morning.’
‘How’s the baby?’
Aida finally smiled. ‘Apparently he’s perfect. Fine, healthy.’
The baby was born quickly, Thomas told her when he finally called. Arthur Roy had arrived not long after they got to hospital. But Elsie had lost blood, so much blood. Aida had waited until Thomas hung up before she cried. Sinking down on her haunches in the hallway, outside Millie’s bedroom, she stuffed her fist into her mouth and sobbed. She wept for the arrival of the new baby they had joyously anticipated for so long; with fear for Elsie; with grief for herself, for the emptiness of her arms despite having so many people to hold.
Sara fished what Aida thought was a hand-rolled cigarette from her pocket, until she lit it and Aida smelled a sweet, pungent scent that wasn’t like tobacco. After a couple of puffs she offered it to Aida.
Aida hesitated. She’d never tried pot before. Years of hiding – her twenties had almost passed her by. Images flashed in her mind from when she was seventeen: Jimmy, her girlfriends from school, dance halls and rock and roll music and punch spiked with rum. It was like leafing through the photographs of a stranger. Where had she gone? Who was Aida, now? A lover to a married couple. A mother without a child of her own; a mother to another woman’s child.
A reclusive, quiet lady in a house.
‘It’ll help you relax,’ Sara said. She nudged Aida’s shoulder. ‘Go on.’
Aida took it, holding the smoke in her lungs until she felt her wrought nerves slowly smooth out.
‘Wow,’ she said, exhaling. She took another drag.
‘You know,’ Sara said, grinning at Aida slyly, ‘If you ever felt ready to try again . . . I might know a bloke I could introduce. Or two.’
Aida felt laughter bubble up in her chest. Two committed lovers, and yet she also had to be a lonely, chaste widow. She pictured meeting a man – the early, novel anticipation. But at almost twenty-eight, she could only imagine the male types she would be considered eligible for: the long-singles her mother had once paraded in front of her (only now a few years older, a few years more dejected) or those men who had already had wives but no longer did, for a plethora of unappealing reasons.
Millie was holding a chook on her head and dancing across the yard, making the other children laugh. Thomas would be home soon, and she thought of the comfort his arms would bring. Aida thought of Elsie tucked up in hospital, nursing the new baby. Their son. In her life there was more love than she could have hoped.
‘Thanks, but no.’ Shaking her head, Aida passed the joint back. ‘Are you seeing anyone?’
‘One?’ Sara blew smoke into the air and gave her a wry smile. ‘I’ve always got a few on the go.’
‘Tell me about the latest one,’ Aida laughed and allowed herself to feel the tiniest bit normal.
*
The first few days after Arthur’s birth were fidge
ty. Thomas couldn’t tell Aida much from his trips back and forth to the hospital other than that Elsie was resting, recuperating, and the baby was fine. He went back to work after the third day, falling-down tired, and in the mornings and evenings the two of them skirted each other fretfully, drawing equal amounts of comfort and anxiety from each other’s presence, Elsie’s absence a tangible thing in their midst. More than once Aida considered going next door, to give Thomas some space and so their apprehension wouldn’t feed and build on each other’s, but where would that leave Millie? Someone had to make her breakfast and pack her lunches and get her to the bus – she was still too young to do those things herself. And for that matter, someone had to do those things for Thomas, too.
Aida found herself stepping into the role of wife. Grocery shopping, school pick-ups – one day, she even dropped Thomas’s lunch box at the store after he left home without it. Though her heart had pounded and she’d been dizzy for the entire bus ride into town, Thomas had beamed at her as she walked in with his lunch box, and introduced her to his colleague as his neighbour, and it had been fine. A friend helping out another friend. Normal.
Of course Thomas, being a middle-class man in the suburbs temporarily without his spouse, was not short of offers of female assistance. Gloria Watson delivered baked goods and volunteered to clean via her husband at Bagnoli’s (Mrs Watson was scarcely seen in person at the store these days). Mrs Swaffer, the shopkeeper’s wife, dropped loaves of bread and tins of condensed tomato soup on the front porch and offered to take Millie to their farm in Freeling for a few days (an offer Millie received with mild horror). Elsie’s sisters phoned several times and on day six Elsie’s mother simply rocked up at the house bearing fortitude and a beef stew.
When Aida opened the door her first thought was, Far out, it’s Elsie in thirty years.
‘I’m Alice Rushall, Elsie’s mum.’ Alice Rushall held the heaving casserole pot effortlessly in one arm. A tidy, triangular shaped woman, she had Elsie’s rounded face and wavy hair, dusted salty where Elsie’s was still glossy brown. She exuded a kind of practical cheerfulness, the sense that everything was going to be all right. Aida felt a wave of tenderness and upwelling emotion at the sight of her. Seven years with Elsie and they had never crossed paths. Never been reason to; always excuses not to.