by Kim Lock
Aida sat on a branch and shimmied along its length towards a cluster of fruit.
‘You know,’ she called out, ‘when your mum was pregnant with you, I used to run baths for her every day. I’d put different things in the water – lavender, or sprigs of rosemary. Epsom salts.’
Millie said from below, ‘Sounds wonderful.’
Aida reached the cache of figs. Plum-dark with soft threads of green streaking their sides, they released from their stems easily into her hands.
‘She had such a sweet tooth with you. Condensed milk from the can, golden syrup off the spoon – you name it. I made buttermilk-and-molasses bread almost every day.’
‘No wonder I was nine pounds.’
‘Heads up!’ she called down.
Beneath her, Millie had unclipped the top of her overalls and held the fabric out in front of her like a sling. ‘Joseph thinks he’s a sensitive new age guy and all that, but he doesn’t really know what to do other than be frightened about the whole thing. He thinks caring means reminding me to take my vitamins and driving me to doctor’s appointments.’ From above, the shape her pregnant middle made was like a teardrop. ‘Ready when you are.’
‘Thomas was exactly the same.’ Aida loosed the first fruit, and Millie lunged and it plopped into her overalls.
‘It’s not that men don’t care, it’s that they don’t know. How could they?’ She dropped the fruit, one by one, watching Millie swivel and pivot to catch each fig as it fell.
‘Yeah, but most of us don’t have other women around, do we?’ Millie said. ‘Not like you and Mum had each other. We have our husbands. And maybe a mother-in-law who isn’t a completely interfering pain in the arse if we’re lucky. But half the time they don’t want to help, either, because they had to do it alone, so why shouldn’t we?’
‘How many is that?’
‘Six, seven . . . eleven. That’s plenty.’
‘One more for good luck.’ Aida dropped the last fruit. Gripping a branch above her head, she let her feet swing. She stretched her free hand out into the air and turned her palm up to catch the sunlight pouring warm through the leaves. ‘There are places in the world where women still have each other.’ Her voice was quiet, musing, and Millie called up that she didn’t hear what she’d said.
Aida said, more loudly, ‘There are traditional societies in the world where women still have each other. They share a husband and raise each other’s children together. Sister wives.’
‘Sounds a little close to home, Ma.’
Aida began to climb down.
Millie said, ‘Do you ever think about living more . . . openly?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I mean, aren’t you getting tired of being in the closet?’
A stick grazed Aida’s shin and she cursed. ‘I’m currently half-way up a tree,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about any closets.’
‘What you were just saying about you and Ma – that unique connection you have, the way you’ve always been there for each other, in a way that sometimes only women can – isn’t that something you’d like to, I don’t know, share with people?’
Aida puffed as she reached for a lower branch. ‘Who would I share it with?’
‘Anyone? Besides me and Arthur – who else knows about you and Mum and Dad, now?’
Aida’s feet touched the ground. ‘Well,’ she said, brushing her hands against each other, ‘I do talk to Mrs Southam. And you remember Sara Scott, who used to live over the road? I think she knew, as well. Or at least suspected.’
Millie nodded slowly. ‘Okay, so in thirty years you’ve confided in one old lady, and maybe one past friend you haven’t seen since, what? I was a teenager?’
Aida looked at Millie, cradling the figs in her bulging overalls, her hair lush about her face. ‘It’s not something I need to advertise, honey.’
‘What are you afraid of?’
Aida’s eyes travelled back up into the branches overhead, squinting against the sunlight streaming through.
Millie added, ‘Who are you afraid of, now?’
Aida took a breath, puffed out her cheeks. ‘Many years ago I would have said I was afraid of my parents. Or, that my parents made me afraid. They made me afraid of myself – I felt very ashamed, you see, darling. And for a very long time, I was scared. Quite petrified, actually, to even leave the house,’ she added quietly. ‘You probably don’t remember – that was when you were little.’
But Millie said, ‘I remember.’
Aida ran her fingertips over the fig tree’s knobby trunk. ‘And of course we were scared of what people would say, or think. You have to understand, the threat of scandal, of being ostracised – it’s terrifying. It loomed constantly. Three adults in a committed relationship? What even is that? We believed that Thomas could lose his job, be blacklisted from any other job – or even be charged with a crime. Or that the school would find out and you kids might be . . .’ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Because hadn’t she already known the pain of being deemed by others as unfit – the agony of having a child taken away? Millie shifted her weight, heavy with a child of her own. Aida would not put that image in her daughter’s mind now, that unimaginable tearing.
‘Keeping quiet has served me,’ Aida said. ‘I’ve never wanted to answer questions, because . . .’ She didn’t say Because then I’d have to talk about my baby. ‘Because that’s who I am,’ she finished. She gave Millie a smile. ‘I’m happy enough with the way things are.’
‘Are you?’
Aida drew back. ‘You think I’m not?’
Millie swayed forward and put a hand on Aida’s wrist. She smiled, squeezing her arm. ‘I do think you’re happy. And Ma?’
‘Yes, Millicent?’
‘The threesome thing? It’s called a ménage à trois.’ Millie grinned.
Aida clicked her tongue. ‘Honestly.’
*
Two days later, Millie went into labour and had her baby – a girl, nine pounds three ounces. They named her Jordan Rose.
Thomas, Elsie and Aida’s first grandchild.
Elsie cried; Thomas presented them with a handmade cradle that he’d spent three months labouring over after work; Aida wondered where on earth they got ‘Jordan’ from.
Later, holding her sleeping granddaughter in her arms at home, Aida noticed the lump of her grief had become small, a kernel of scar tissue deep inside. It would always be there. But on the outside, like the family that surrounded her, time had layered her in folds of something that felt like healing.
70
just before the turn of the millennium, when Elsie was almost sixty, Grace Southam passed away. She was ninety-one years old. Aida’s hiking group, still calling themselves the BOGs, scattered Grace’s ashes at the Mannum Waterfalls.
And in the mysterious way that life groups similar events together, three days after Mrs Southam’s funeral, Elsie’s sister Rose died.
Rose Burnett (nee Rushall) left behind a husband (who had recently celebrated his seventieth birthday; photographs of the event made it into the community pages of the local paper), four children, thirteen grandchildren and one great-grandchild – an infant girl who was only eleven weeks old.
At the funeral, Rose’s single great-grandchild was disinterested in the congregation of people and the solemn, sad nature of proceedings. Instead, she protested first the confines of her pram, then the confines of her swaddle, then the desperate attempts of her mother to rock, jiggle or swing her into repose and was finally smuggled apologetically out of the chapel to be silenced by a teat outside.
Elsie gave her grandniece a sympathetic smile as she squeezed by with the bawling infant, then looked across Millie at Jordan, now four years old, sitting on her father’s lap and quietly munching her way through a packet of Barbecue Shapes. Millie had decided that Jasmine, her toddler, was be
st left at home with the babysitter.
‘Isn’t Jordan a good girl?’ Elsie whispered to Thomas.
‘Give it five minutes,’ Thomas said, ‘and she might make as much racket as poor Laura’s kid.’
Elsie sniffed and faced the front, preferring to believe her granddaughters were perfect.
Rose’s husband, Larry, despite watering eyes, finished his eulogy with stoicism. As sniffs, sobs and coughs came from the pews, Elsie’s other sister Lila made her way to the lectern.
Lila had asked Elsie if she would join her in a eulogy but Elsie declined. Public speaking was on a list alongside airplane travel and wringing the necks of chickens: if at all possible, best avoided. Besides, Elsie had told Lila, what could she possibly say better than her? It was Lila who had lived two doors away from Rose for over forty years. It was Lila’s children with whom Rose’s children had grown up. It was Lila’s husband, Roger, with whom Larry had gone golfing and to the football and on two occasions to the Birdsville Races, a four-day drive from Gawler. Elsie, on the other hand, was the far younger sister with whom Rose had had little to do – certainly in adulthood.
As Elsie gazed at Rose’s mahogany coffin, topped with sprays of lilies and orchids and with Rose lying dead inside, she was able to admit to herself that lack of contact, that lost kinship, was not through any fault of her sister. By choosing her own family and by keeping her life obscure, Elsie had lost her blood family.
She felt Aida’s gaze on the back of her head. Aida was sitting behind her, because the front row was reserved for family only.
As they had come into the chapel and made their way reluctantly to the front, Aida had quietly insisted she would rather sit a row back. She could still help Millie with Jordan if needed. But Elsie fretted. Her sister was dead, and she wanted the comfort of Aida’s hand to hold. Especially so now, as Roger pushed her mother’s wheelchair to the front of the chapel. Her mother didn’t always need the chair, but today Alice Rushall looked as tiny and frail as a just-hatched baby bird, as she stretched a quavering hand out and rested it on the gleaming wood of her eldest daughter’s coffin.
Heat rose in Elsie’s throat and she blinked rapidly against tears. She had to fumble for Thomas’s hand; he found her, but not quickly enough.
A stroke had taken Rose. On Monday she was as fine as usual, on Tuesday she dropped herself and a fruit cake onto the kitchen floor, knocked out cold, and by Thursday she had passed away. When her mother called with the miserable news, Elsie herself had dropped the phone and screeched, pleading at Aida, You quit smoking right now, right this instant, not one more filthy cigarette for you, do you hear me? And Aida heard her. It was now eight days since her last filthy cigarette.
The service finished and the mourners creaked and rumbled to their feet, surreptitiously rubbing life back into stiffened limbs as they shuffled outside. Elsie and Lila went to their mother, who was still sitting by the coffin. Thomas stood to one side with Larry and Roger, doing his best not to look frightfully uncomfortable. Thomas’s brother, David, approached Elsie and kissed her cheek. Elsie smiled at him, wished she could invite him home for tea but knew she wouldn’t; she hadn’t seen him for several years. He murmured his condolences to Lila and Alice.
‘Who was that?’ Lila said, when he was gone.
Elsie said, ‘You’ve met Thomas’s brother, surely.’
Lila gave a dismissive shrug, and Elsie made a derisive noise under her breath.
Her sister turned to her, cocked an eyebrow. ‘I’m sorry – do you have something to say?’
‘Not now, girls,’ their mother spoke up, her voice papery.
Grief had shortened their fuses, stirred up all the decades of unsaid pique and resentment. Phone calls dissolving into the obligatory once or twice a year, the declined invitations, the unattended birthdays, christenings and anniversaries. All the I’m busy that day and the I’ve been unwell and the I’m just overcommitted at the moment – Elsie saw it all in her sister’s eyes, unforgiven.
Elsie held her gaze for a long time, excuses and defences swelling and ebbing. In the end she looked away. There was nothing she could say.
On the other side of the chapel, Aida lingered in the doorway with Millie, Joseph and Jordan, who had, as Thomas predicted, begun to fuss and tug at her mother’s dress. When Aida saw Elsie looking over, she caught her eye and smiled.
‘Is that your neighbour there, with Millie?’ Lila said.
‘Yes. Aida Shepherd.’
‘God, she’s still living next door?’
‘Yes,’ Elsie said.
‘Did she ever remarry?’ Lila plucked a couple of wilting leaves from the arrangement on top of Rose’s casket, crumpling them in her hand.
‘No,’ said Elsie. ‘She didn’t.’
‘Nice of her to come.’
Elsie told herself she didn’t have time to reply that Aida was a terrifically nice person, and that she wished her sisters could have learned that for themselves, because Lila’s eldest daughter came and grasped the handles of Alice’s wheelchair, and chattered about how beautiful the weather had turned out for them, and said was time to go into the sunshine.
71
For most of Thomas’s seventy-two years, he had been largely of the belief that life was simply a series of random events strung together by the thread of time. Coincidence happened, certainly. And miracles, they popped up and dazzled people out of their trousers on occasion, too. Hadn’t he, after all, had his share of miraculous occasions? But he couldn’t deny that there were also times – too many times, now – that life had tapped on his shoulder and whispered, Surely you can’t believe this isn’t all orchestrated by something greater, old friend?
Like now, on this rainy Monday afternoon in May in 2009, as Thomas sat watching the news on the TV and he experienced that strange, unworldly tap on his shoulder. There was too much alignment in it. For instance, he had only retired, finally, from the store last week, so he happened to be home on a weekday and watching the afternoon news broadcast. And instead of being at her book club, when Thomas would usually watch the evening news, Aida was at home, coming out of the bathroom with her hair all wet while Elsie set his cup of tea in front of him as he watched the television.
Elsie clicked her tongue at the image that appeared on the screen. ‘Such a terrible thing.’
Aida rubbed at her hair with a towel and said, ‘What’s terrible?’
On the screen was a black and white photograph of a newborn baby. The baby was crying, its eyes screwed shut and its gummy mouth opened wide. In place of arms and legs the baby had four short stumps, hints of hands and feet curling inwards.
Thomas picked up his tea. ‘Some scientists have discovered something new about that drug they used to give pregnant women, the one that caused all those birth defects back in the fifties and sixties.’
‘Thalidomide,’ Elsie said. ‘Appalling what happened. And so many of them.’
Another still image came onto the screen: a girl child in a pretty dress, lifting a toy up with her feet. A voiceover commentary droned about recent research, the blood vessels and limbs of developing foetuses, class actions and lawsuits.
‘That was always unknown, wasn’t it?’ Elsie said, sitting on the couch alongside him. ‘Why it didn’t seem to affect babies whose mothers had taken it later in pregnancy. What are they saying, love? It inhibits the blood-vessel formation?’
Thomas was about to point out that she was watching the same newscast as him, therefore knew as much as he did, and he turned to Aida to bring her in on the joke but the words turned to powder in his mouth.
Aida’s face was white. She was staring at the television, a trembling hand halfway to her mouth.
‘Are you okay, love?’
Aida blinked a few times, but her eyes didn’t leave the television. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
Dismayed, Elsie set down her
cup. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’ve never seen these pictures before.’
More photographs flashed into the frame. Children seated on the edge of a pool, splashing long legs in the water, all with small stumps in place of arms; a young boy bent over a school book, pencil gripped in a hand at his elbow.
Aida was rambling, ‘I mean – I knew about it, I’d heard, but I’ve never seen these photos, those children –’
Thomas anxiously lifted the remote and the screen went blank.
‘No!’ Aida cried.
‘It’s upsetting you,’ he said, confused.
‘I need to see it. Turn it back on.’
He complied. When the television lit up, an advertisement for home air-conditioning blazed across the screen. Aida’s shoulders slumped and she suddenly looked every minute of her sixty-seven years.
Thomas shot a questioning look at Elsie, but Elsie’s gaze was fixed on Aida, watching her take a shaky breath, walk to the armchair and sit herself on the edge of the seat. Training her eyes on the carpet, Aida appeared to try and compose herself.
After what felt like a long time, she said, ‘I took that drug –’ she waved in the direction of the TV ‘– back when I was . . . I didn’t know it was harmful. I guess nobody did then. I only took it a couple of times, for the sickness, but I also took one in the very early days. Dad had a prescription, he took them to help him sleep, and Mum gave me one on the day that she found out I was pregnant. I was pretty distraught, and she thought it would calm me, I suppose.’
Thomas felt his insides curdle.
Elsie said, ‘Oh, love, I’m sure nothing would have happened –’
Aida cut her off. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you. After she was born, I saw her.’