‘I can spot a fellow Diet Coke lover from a mile off,’ she said as she lowered herself into the chair opposite Josie’s. She cracked open her can, then poured it into a glass.
Josie did the same and then took a little sip. Despite Clara’s smile, warm tone and attempt to put her at ease, Josie’s nerves were rampant but the caffeine hit helped a bit.
‘Did you have to travel far to come here?’ Clara asked.
‘Not too far. We live in Coogee.’
‘Have you lived there long?’
‘About eighteen months. We moved from Perth.’
‘I see,’ Clara said, in that way psychiatrists in movies speak when they’re analysing someone. ‘And do you like it?’
Josie shrugged one shoulder. ‘What’s not to like?’
‘And how did you find me? Did a doctor recommend you talk to someone about your losses?’
Josie shook her head, her stomach growing hard. The small talk had been an obvious attempt to put her at ease but now they were getting down to business. Doctors had suggested she see a counsellor or reach out to an organisation like this one Clara volunteered for, but she’d resisted—believing talking would be futile. ‘Actually your husband gave me your card,’ she said, thinking of how kind he’d been that night at The Inferno.
‘My husband?’ Clara sounded as if she had no idea whom Josie was talking about.
‘Yes, we met outside a pub in Coogee.’
‘Ah, that sounds about right. Although he’s been my ex-husband for two years.’
‘He was very kind to me,’ Josie said. ‘I was in a mess when we ran into each other. He was a good listener. He told me you could help me.’
The older woman leaned forward and put her glass back on the table. ‘Well, I’m here to listen,’ she said, her warm smile back in place. ‘I hope that helps. Would you like to tell me about your miscarriages?’
Josie had mentioned they were the reason for her visit when she’d called and made the appointment, but once again that voice was loud and clear in her head questioning why she was here. No, she did not want to tell this stranger anything. Her grip on her glass tightened as emotion clogged in her throat. Her eyeballs stung, telling her she was on the verge of tears.
All the while, Clara’s smile—Josie guessed it was supposed to be encouraging—remained firmly in place.
Finally, she broke the silence. ‘I’m not sure you know but all of us who volunteer here as parent supporters have suffered our own devastating losses. I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what you’re going through, Josephine—’
‘Please, call me, Josie. Only my mum ever used my full name.’
‘Let me guess? Only when you were naughty?’
Josie found herself smiling, the tightness in her chest loosening slightly. ‘Something like that.’
Clara continued. ‘Although every parent feels loss differently, I started volunteering because I wanted to help other mothers navigate their grief. I suffered a number of miscarriages and also a stillbirth at thirty-six weeks.’
‘Oh God, that’s awful.’ Josie felt like a fraud sitting here when all her losses had been early enough to be classified as miscarriages, but at the same time she felt a horrific jealousy that at least Clara had been able to hold her baby. ‘I’ve only had three miscarriages,’ she said, almost apologetically.
‘One is too many,’ Clara said simply, leaning forward and pushing the big box of tissues on the coffee table towards her.
Josie didn’t take one.
‘Any loss is devastating. It changes your whole world. It changes you. You’ve probably found it also changes the way others—people you considered friends—act around you and this hurts. I remember people actually crossing the road to avoid me after the death of my daughter.’
‘Yes.’ Josie nodded. ‘I’m a teacher and I’ve noticed some of my colleagues leave the staffroom to avoid talking to me.’
‘Remember it’s not a reflection on you, and it’s not that they’re trying to be cruel, they simply don’t know what to say. The majority of folks don’t know how to act around people who have suffered tragic loss.’
‘I guess that’s why people say you shouldn’t tell everyone till after three months. My first miscarriage was at eight weeks,’ Josie found herself saying. ‘And we’d already told everyone. We went to our obstetrician appointment all excited to get our first ultrasound but,’ she blinked back tears, the memories fresh in her head as if it all happened yesterday, ‘the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I must have heard wrong. I started bleeding the next day.’
Josie swallowed. Clara didn’t say a word.
‘We didn’t tell anyone the second time we got pregnant and although we were terrified it would happen again, it was still a shock when it did because the doctor had told us it was very unlikely. It was almost exactly the same time as the first one. Although everyone said there was nothing I could do, I can’t help wondering if I’d done something wrong. If I ate something or …’
‘We all wonder that,’ Clara said when Josie’s voice drifted off. ‘But you didn’t.’
She shrugged, unsure. ‘Third time we got past the safe mark.’ Her voice filled with scorn on that word. ‘We did the obligatory cute announcement on Facebook and even started buying stuff. I felt a little nervous about doing so but I was so sick with morning sickness and I never had been with the other two, so it felt like this was it. It was all going to be okay. Only it wasn’t.’
A tear slithered down her cheek and she ignored it, hoping if she did so no more would come.
‘How far along were you this time?’
‘Eighteen weeks, so still technically a miscarriage. The doctor called it a “spontaneous end of pregnancy”, but she was my baby.’ Josie winced as fresh pain crippled her. ‘I’m sorry. Every day I wake up no longer pregnant, not a mum, and I feel as if my heart has been smashed to pieces. All I want to do is cry.’
‘And you’re allowed to.’ This time Clara actually picked the tissue box up and held it out to Josie; she took one and buried her nose in it, making a great big ugly sound.
‘It doesn’t feel that way,’ she said through her sobs. ‘Everyone just wants me to snap out of it, but I can’t.’
‘Of course you can’t and neither should you have to. You feel like you’ll never be happy again and that’s a valid emotion.’
After a long pause, Clara said, ‘Did you name your babies?’
‘Yes,’ Josie whispered. ‘We don’t know what gender the first one was but I have a feeling it was a little boy. I call him Jamie. The next two were girls, Sophia and Isabelle.’
‘They’re beautiful names.’
‘My husband didn’t think I should use my favourite names, in case we have other children, but I felt like my angel babies deserved beautiful names.’
Clara nodded. ‘They definitely do.’
At the thought of Nik, Josie recalled how touchy things had been between them. She wondered if that was normal? She wanted to ask if the same had happened between Clara and her husband and that had been the downfall of their marriage.
After a long silence, Clara spoke again as if she could read Josie’s mind. ‘Are things okay between you and your husband?’
Josie sniffed into the tissue, then held it tightly, scrunched up in her hand. ‘Not really. But things came to a head the other night and we finally talked properly.’ She explained how Nik had been holding it all inside, because he’d been trying to protect her.
‘I’m not a relationships expert or counsellor, and that’s not my role, but what you’re describing is very normal. Men think we’re complicated beasts but they are just as complex. They may feel differently to us as they never actually felt the child growing within them but they feel loss just as deeply. It just manifests in a different way.’
Josie sighed. ‘I see that now. I feel so guilty that I didn’t see Nik was hurting too.’
‘Our organisation has male parent
supporters too—fathers who have been through the loss of a child. Your husband might benefit from talking to someone also. Or you could join one of our group support sessions, in which couples talk together about their loss with other couples.’
What Josie thought of that must have been clear on her face for Clara smiled and added, ‘It might sound daunting, but a lot of couples find it really helps.’
‘We’ll think about it,’ she said, and found that she meant it.
‘You said you moved from Perth. Did you move for work? Or did you come for family reasons?’
‘We came for Nik’s work—he’s an aircraft engineer. But I was happy to move. My mum passed away just before I met Nik and I was missing her so much. My dad’s very social and he had lots of friends to look after him but Perth felt wrong without Mum just around the corner.’
And suddenly Josie was crying all over again. The tissues were yanked out at a rate of knots.
Clara let her sob and then when the tears finally started to subside, she said quietly, ‘You were obviously close. Was it sudden?’
‘A heart attack. No chance to say goodbye.’
‘So it’s not just your baby losses you’re grieving, but also the death of your mother. All that on top of a move, a new job … I’m so glad you decided to reach out to us.’
‘Me too,’ Josie said. Although she’d never been one to talk much about herself, she’d found it surprisingly easy to open up to Clara. This other woman might not have been able to bring her babies back, but just talking about them to someone who really understood did make her feel a little better.
When Clara glanced at her watch and said, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to wrap this up,’ Josie couldn’t believe how fast the time had flown.
‘When can I see you again?’
‘How about next week? I’m guessing you’ll be back at school and I also work at the hospital, but I’m here late on Thursday afternoons. Does that suit?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
She usually covered after-school detention on Thursdays. First week back there hopefully wouldn’t be too many students misbehaving, but too bad anyway. Someone else would have to cover it; her mental health was more important.
Clara
The doorbell rang and echoed through the house as Clara slid her second pearl drop earring into its hole. She frowned as she glanced over at the time on her bedside clock. Rob said she was old-fashioned to still have an alarm clock radio, but she liked listening to talkback late at night when she couldn’t sleep and it came in useful more often than not. Like now. She sucked in a breath—the nerves she’d been fighting all morning washed over her like a tsunami.
Gregg was fifteen minutes early.
Although she liked punctuality in a person, she’d mentally prepared herself to have another quarter of an hour to practise a greeting and come up with a list of things to discuss, in case the conversation fell flat once they’d exhausted talking about old school acquaintances.
Taking a deep breath, she looked in the mirror and gave herself a quick pep-talk. ‘Relax, Clara. This isn’t such a big deal. He’s just an old friend you’re having coffee with. And coffee on a Saturday morning hardly even counts as a date.’
So why had she spent all yesterday afternoon getting beautified? She’d waxed areas that hadn’t seen another human in years, had her hair and nails done and suffered through a make-up tutorial at the counter in Myer, which ended with her buying more products than she’d probably use in her lifetime. Half of which she didn’t even know how to use. She’d spent hours trying on dresses until she’d finally decided on a winter knit with long sleeves. It was a little shorter than she’d usually go for but the sales assistant promised she had the figure to carry it off; now she wondered if the lady said that simply to get a sale. Golly, she hoped she wasn’t too overdressed for a coffee date. But the doorbell rang again; there wasn’t time to second-guess her outfit.
So instead, she grabbed her handbag, wove her arms into her black velvet blazer and walked down the hallway telling herself she wasn’t nervous at all. Trying to ignore the heavy beating of her heart, she summoned her most carefree smile and pulled back the door to …
‘Rob?’ Clara’s heart plummeted to her stomach. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘You’re selling the house?’ He spoke loudly, almost shouting and she could smell the liquor on his breath, even at this time of the morning. His long hair wasn’t even tied back in his usual ponytail and she shuddered to think of the last time he might have washed it.
She stepped back a little—resisting the urge to look away—but not enough to give him access inside.
‘How did you know?’
The real estate photographer had only taken photos the day before; there was no sign up in front of the house yet and she’d been told the listing wouldn’t go online until mid-next week.
‘Siobhan bought round some of my stuff and told Mum you were clearing out to sell.’
‘I see.’ It had been almost a week since Clara had given her sister those boxes, but true to her character she’d not delivered them straight away. Talk about timing.
‘How could you sell our home without consulting me?’ Rob demanded, shaking his hands in the air with each word.
Oh my God. He really was delusional. ‘Rob, this hasn’t been your home for over two years now.’
He blinked as if this was the first he’d heard of their separation and she struggled to maintain her exasperation with him. ‘Anyway, you have to go now. I’m … busy.’
‘Doing what?’ He looked past her into the now-bare house.
‘Keep your voice down,’ she hissed, not wanting to bring the neighbours out and praying he’d disappear before Gregg arrived. ‘I have to go to work.’
He took in her new knee-high boots and then slowly glanced up to her made-up face. ‘You don’t look like you’re going to work.’
‘Well, I …’ she spluttered, trying to think of how she could get rid of him quickly. Gregg would be here any minute now.
Rob took a step towards the door. ‘Let me come in. We need to talk about this, about us, we—’
‘No!’ She yanked the door shut behind her. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. Please go.’
But he wouldn’t listen. ‘I’ve been trying to call you. Something must be wrong with your phone. I can’t get through.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my phone. I’ve blocked your number.’
‘What?’ His face fell. ‘Why?’
Her heart squeezed at his despondent expression but she couldn’t do this anymore. She was starting to sweat beneath her winter dress. ‘Because we’re over, Rob. I’m trying to move on. I don’t want you in my life anymore. Please, just go.’
‘No, Clarabel.’ He reached out and grabbed her arms, using her full name, which he only ever did when he was sweet-talking her. ‘Don’t say such things. You and me, we’ve been through too much together. We’re made for each other. Give me another chance.’
She didn’t think he meant to hurt her but his grip was hard and the pungent smell of his breath almost made her sick. To think she’d considered calling him after that poor girl had told her about their chance meeting.
‘Let me go.’
‘I can’t. I’ll change. I’ll get help, I’ll stop drinking, but life isn’t worth living if you’re not in it. I’ve got no one else.’
How many times had she heard these words? She no longer gave any credence to his empty promises and there was nothing but pity left for him in her heart.
‘I hope you do get help, but it’s too late for us. We’ve been over a long time.’
It felt like Groundhog Day. How many times would she have to say it for him to accept it?
‘No, we’re not. We’ll never be finished.’ He tugged at her arms like a man trying to save himself from drowning. ‘Just one more chance. Please, baby.’
‘Don’t do this, Rob. You’re making a scene,’ she pleaded just as a na
vy-blue Lexus parked just in front of her house.
Gregg. The vision brought tears to her eyes. This was not the first impression she’d wanted to give him after all these years.
The car had barely stopped before the driver’s door flung open and in a few long strides he was on the porch beside them.
‘Let her go,’ Gregg roared at Rob.
Rob turned his head to glare but still clung to her. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m a friend,’ Gregg said, ‘and I asked you to let Clara go.’
‘You don’t tell me what to do with my wife!’
‘I’m not your wife!’
At these words, Rob did let go, but there was no time for relief. Clara gasped as he turned and took a slug at Gregg.
Gregg dodged to the side and Rob stumbled forward, planting his hands and knees on the ground. Her chest tightened; she felt as if she was having a heart attack.
‘Are you alright?’ Gregg looked to her, not Rob.
Her hand covering her mouth, she nodded, unable to speak.
‘Okay then. Do you want him to go?’
She nodded again, gulping in an attempt to try and stop the imminent tears. This situation was embarrassing enough without adding waterworks to the display, but Rob’s physical behaviour shocked her.
‘Do you need a hand up?’ Gregg looked down at Rob still sprawled on the ground.
‘Don’t touch me,’ Rob growled, scrambling out of Gregg’s reach and then using a pot plant to pull himself to his feet. He looked back at Clara and she noticed blood on the top of his lip, as if he’d grazed it on the decking. ‘Who is this bloke?’
She swallowed and somehow found her voice. ‘He’s an old friend. We’re about to go for coffee.’
Or at least they were; now Gregg was probably wondering what the hell he’d got himself involved with.
‘Are you seeing him?’ Shock filled Rob’s voice as he threw a scorn-filled look at the tall, smartly dressed man now standing beside her.
‘That’s none of your business, Rob,’ she said, finding her strength again. ‘Now, can I call you a taxi or are you on the bus?’
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