by Emily Brewin
Isobel nods, leaves her handbag in the hallway and walks straight into her parents’ bedroom. Her mother is lying on her back in bed, eyes closed, as they often are these days, breathing steadily.
Her father sticks his head around the door before she sits down.
‘She woke up this morning bright as a button. Even smiled at me.’
There’s a plastic tray on the table beside the bed. Half a piece of vegemite toast curls on a plate, the remains of the breakfast her father insists on eating with her mother each morning. An old habit, as if they were still sitting across the table from one and other, as if her mother was still eating.
‘Must be the new medication the doc’s got her on.’
It’s hard to ignore the wavering hope in his voice. He knows as well as Isobel does that she’s going downhill. The odd smile or sigh or creased brow when the pain gets bad is as much as she can muster. But her father copes by carrying on, the way he always has.
Isobel takes the seat beside the bed. She’s grown used to its contours, the way it raises slightly on one side.
‘She might wake up if you’re lucky.’ He walks in and leans over to kiss her mother on the forehead.
Isobel watches silently. Her mother’s skin does seem different today, slightly flushed and shiny as if she’s been exerting herself. It makes her look healthier, disguising the pallor that’s crept in.
‘Tea?’ he asks. ‘Toast?’
‘Thanks, Dad.’ Even the words roll out more easily, as if being here has loosened her tongue. At home, it’s getting harder to speak. She exhales or makes gruff noises as her throat constricts.
Her father goes to the kitchen as Isobel settles in. A resigned peace has settled over the house, from the still blush bloom of the camellias against the window to the low creak of the boards beneath the carpet. Everything is in its place.
But then, it might just be her. Since losing the baby, the yearning to be here has scratched at her. Some nights she wakes, recalling the details of her mother’s face, the green eyes and wide, generous mouth, the freckles, faded by age, across her cheeks.
Her face has withstood poverty, children, the cable factory and her children’s indifference. Now, in small ways, it withstands the illness too. Not in its shape or liveliness but in the breath it expels, in her mother’s sheer determination to exist.
Her strength has always been more than skin-deep. As a child, it encircled Isobel like a safe embrace. The memory forces out the darkness where the baby should be and makes her lighter.
Across the room the window is open slightly and dust motes dance in the sun. A lawnmower, the music of her childhood, rumbles in a yard down the street and the kettle whistles in the kitchen. She shifts in the chair and gazes at her mother’s mouth, willing it to smile.
The smile had been a source of embarrassment at school.
The Mother’s Day lunch at Nottingham was a longstanding year nine tradition. The girls planned the menu in Home Economics with Miss Timmons and talked endlessly about the dresses they were going to wear. It was a day for bonding, for making your mark.
Most of the Nottingham mothers knew each other. Grace Taylor was an outsider from the start. People usually loved her, with her throaty laugh and the fitting compliments she bestowed like carefully wrapped gifts. She was the life of the party. Isobel knew the other girls would be impressed.
They tried on their outfits the night before. Her mother wore a bright blue frock, a full-skirted number that accentuated her hips. It had slices of watermelon all over it that stood out along with her shiny red heels.
‘You look good enough to eat, Gracie,’ her father said as he passed the bedroom door.
Isobel chose something plainer, shying away even then from anything loud. A cream cotton dress with flared sleeves that showed off the silver charm bracelet she got for her thirteenth birthday.
Early next morning, Mrs Warren put their hair in rollers so it bounced when they pranced in a mock show for her father and Lachie. Lachie complained he couldn’t come too, then complained even more when her father promised they’d watch the harness racing together on the weekend.
Her mother took the day off work and for the first time in a long time wasn’t preoccupied. They drove to school with the windows of the EK Holden rolled down so the warm wind rustled their curls while they talked.
Her mother couldn’t stop smiling. She smiled at the manicured lawn as they walked through the big school gates and at the carefully tended rose beds. She smiled at the sandstone buildings with their waxed floors and at the oak bannister leading to the second floor.
‘Well,’ she cooed as she took Isobel’s hand to walk into the room. ‘This makes all the hard work worthwhile.’
Isobel bit her lip.
The year nine common room was transformed. Gone were the rows of wooden desks and chairs. In their place were vast tables draped in white linen with silver cutlery and swan-like napkin arrangements. There were long-stemmed glasses and blue bows on the back of each seat. A pair of year seven girls handed out tiny sprigs of pink flowers. Her mother accepted one, gushing appreciation, before tucking it into her hair. The others inserted theirs into the buttonholes on their blouses.
Jennifer and Marianne stood nearby with their mothers, who wore simple black dresses and gold earrings. They glanced away when Isobel caught them staring, and it occurred to her that Grace’s cheeks were too rosy and her dress showy. And that smile. The more the other women eyed her over the rim of their champagne glasses the wider it got. It was big and silly and sensuous, the opposite of their neat, thin ones.
‘Where did you get your hair done?’ one asked as they sat down to eat.
Isobel glanced sideways at her mother, the sharp jaw and sun-kissed skin, the smile. It faltered a little, just enough to make Isobel flinch.
‘A neighbour did it.’ She jutted her chin out. ‘She’s very cheap.’ The word ran like a tin can across the table.
Isobel knew then, with chilling certainty, that she would never fit in. Her mother had only proved a point. Isobel wasn’t one of them.
The poached fish became too thick to swallow. ‘I don’t feel well,’ she muttered before dessert arrived.
Her mother placed a cool hand on her forehead and cocked her head as if she knew what was really going on. ‘Well, this dress wasn’t made to handle chocolate mousse anyway,’ she grinned, off kilter.
No one except Miss Timmons seemed to notice they were going. She insisted on packing mousse into a plastic container for them. It felt fitting.
Something hard shunted into place as they left. ‘Why can’t you dress like everyone else?’ Isobel snapped at her mother when they stopped to unlock the car.
Finally, her smile faded.
In the bed, her mother shifts beneath the covers and sighs. It’s hard to imagine her ever smiling again.
Anger blooms unexpectedly in Isobel’s chest. Nothing’s changed. She’s still scared and lonely, and her mother is still miles away.
She gets up from the chair, smoothing her navy slacks before walking to the window. Next door, Mrs Warren is hacking the hedge. Her shears are long and sharp, slicing easily through its spikey branches. She pulls the dead wood out and stuffs it roughly into a garbage bag hanging from the fence, leaving the tender shoots beneath.
When Isobel turns her mother is watching and the terrible news she’s been holding onto rises from her belly. Saying it will make it real but there’s nothing she can do to stop it, and suddenly she doesn’t want to.
‘I lost the baby, Mum.’ It comes out, a big angry gasp, as if she’s releasing something sickening into the air. It hurts like hell then feels like freedom, as if the words contain all the others that have been left unsaid for so long.
Her mother groans softly.
Isobel hurries to the bed and takes her hand. And for the first time in years, she lets her guard down and her mother in.
Rosie
AT THE PARK, it’s easy to imagine Petey.
<
br /> There he is clambering up the climbing wall, calling out the colours of the playground or sitting in the dinky yellow car beyond the slide.
‘Mum!’ he yells, spinning the steering wheel. ‘I’m floating!’
But the car is empty like she knew it would be. She closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at it. In her pocket, her palm rests lightly on the baggie.
She grabbed a syringe from the floor next to the mattress in the front room on the way out of Kelly’s place. It was still fresh in its packaging and for a moment it felt like her lucky day.
Beyond the playground is the toilet, the kind that shuts electronically and plays cheesy music while you piss. Petey hates it. She lets him go in the bushes instead. It has a tinny syringe bin inside.
‘I’m sorry, Rosie,’ Detective Khanna said when she rang yesterday afternoon. ‘Still nothing solid.’
‘Why not?’ she demanded. Frustration made her tongue thick. ‘What about the list of people I gave you?’
‘We’re doing everything we can.’
It wasn’t enough. Rosie wanted to scream that they should be working harder, faster, smarter than they were, but Detective Khanna cut her off with reassurances. Rosie hung the phone up. It was all she could do.
But now, with the bag in her hand, she can at least ease the pain. One trip to the toilets and the vision of Petey would be brighter when she closed her eyes. The cool wind chaffed her cheeks and flapped the bottom of her unzipped jacket around.
The promise she made when she was pregnant with Petey is tissue-thin now and useless. It was easy to make when he was tucked safe inside her.
Just once, she thinks, pinching the powder between her fingers. The need for the nothingness is more powerful than the nagging voice in her head saying she’ll hate herself tomorrow. She walks slowly to the cubicle.
A red button on the door flashes ‘engaged’ and she kicks the wall. It makes her toes sting, but once she starts it’s hard to stop. Then it’s her fists belting the metal, dinting the stupid ‘wash your hands’ sign next to the button in her frustration. A woman in a raincoat hurries two children past, clucking like a flustered hen. The little girl’s face is frightened and fascinated in equal measure. Finally, the door slides open.
‘Excuse me!’ A woman in neat navy blue slacks and a slim-waisted coat frowns at her from just inside the cubicle. The toilet is still flushing.
Rosie steps back. She stares at the woman. It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing her opposite. The slick blonde hair and carefully made-up face, straight from a Myers catalogue.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbles thickly, recognising the face, trying to place it.
The woman doesn’t move. She touches her hair instead and says, ‘It’s you.’
It sounds like an accusation and Rosie has to stop from barging past. What was she thinking? No one she knows dresses like this. Then the confrontation on the landing flashes to her mind and she steps back. The journalist … The thought makes her breathless. The last thing she needs is a bloody journalist in her face. The powder in her pocket forms a lump in her palm.
‘Are you done?’
The woman stands her ground, taking in Rosie’s coat and boots. All Rosie wants is to get inside the cold steel interior of the cubicle, away from the woman’s prying eyes.
Finally, she shoves past. There’s no cameraman now. She expects the woman to back away, to shoot her a dirty look before fucking off as fast as she can. Like most people would.
Instead, she continues to stand in the doorway so that even the bloody cubicle starts telling her to move on.
‘Please stand clear of the entrance,’ it says robotically, flashing red at them.
Rosie glares as the woman’s eyes narrow.
‘You lost your son.’ Her voice is all blame.
Rosie inhales sharply, finally recalling the woman who found Petey at the boatshed that day.
‘Pretty lady,’ he sang all the way home. ‘Pretty lady in the park.’ It was irritating at the time and the feeling rushes back tenfold now.
The woman pitied Petey, and Rosie knew why. His mother was a loser. The writing was on the cards as far as she was concerned. He was never going to make it with Rosie around. Turns out she was right about that after all.
The world begins to spin. Maybe it’s the heroin magically soaking through her coat into her veins. Her brain fizzes and her vision spirals to black.
When she opens her eyes again the sky above is wide and rough as an ocean, and her head rests on something soft. For a moment she imagines it’s sand, like the time Vera drove her to the beach. Then she sees a face looking down from the clouds and realises her head is on the woman’s lap. She tries to get up but her neck hurts.
‘C’mon.’ The woman shifts her legs slowly before slipping her arms under Rosie’s to help her to her feet.
There’s a protectiveness to the movement that reminds her of holding Petey, the brush of his hair against her cheek when life gets too much. His face shimmers now just out of reach and her legs lose their resistance again. Suddenly, with the blanched light in her face, she knows how he feels, the sense that the world is beyond her control.
She clutches the woman. Despite her slightness the woman half carries Rosie to the bench next to the playground then sits beside her. Petey is everywhere. She doesn’t want the woman to let go in case the broken pieces of her fly away. No one has held her like this for so long.
Isobel
BY THE TIME THE TEARS SOAK THROUGH her slacks to her skin, they are cold, reminding Isobel that in all the months of her mother’s illness she’s hardly cried. The young woman in her lap makes her realise there’s power in it, the expulsion of sorrow in great angry sobs. She imagines a well inside her emptying slowly and wishes desperately she could do the same.
She hasn’t cried for the baby either, not since that day in the public toilets, or cried for the one she made with Bernard. The abortion haunted her less while she was pregnant, dulling her need to announce it to the world, to him. But it’s back lately, fusing with the pain of her miscarriage, of her mother slipping away. This grief is private though, it’s hers and she wants it to stay that way because it’s all she has left. Bernard doesn’t need to know.
The woman’s sobs grow less unsettling, and for a moment the two of them are the same. Sorrow matching sorrow, until it’s difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Isobel holds tight until the shuddering stops.
She isn’t meant to be comforting the young woman from the flats in her arms. But now she is, there’s a release or an acceptance of something she’s been struggling with.
‘Sorry.’ The woman wipes her hand roughly across her face and sits up.
Isobel recalls her name from the news report. Rosie. The cloying scent of her messed-up hair and crumpled clothing so close should feel uncomfortable, like the time a homeless man tried to hug her on the train. But it’s not. It makes her feel needed instead.
She glances sideways at Rosie. ‘It’s fine.’
The world turns in slow motion, giving them time to catch their breath as the trees around the playground sway sluggishly in the breeze.
Neither moves.
‘He talked about you on the way home.’ Rosie sniffs, tucking a dark strand of hair behind her ear.
Isobel raises an eyebrow.
‘He thought you were pretty.’
Isobel snorts, then laughs at the lovely simplicity of it. Once she starts it’s impossible to stop. If she can’t cry, it’s the next best thing. She laughs until her belly aches. Rosie frowns, shifts slightly as if she’s missed the joke, before smiling too. Her shoulders drop, relax a little, and soon both of them are treading the fine line between laughter and tears.
Isobel wipes her eyes. It feels as if she’s downed a glass of good champagne. ‘I needed that.’
Rosie nods then stands quickly, as if she’s just remembered something. ‘I better go.’
The place on Isobel’s arm where she was lean
ing feels exposed.
‘In case he comes home.’
Reality sets in, a little lighter this time.
‘One minute.’ Isobel rummages through her bag then hands over a business card.
Rosie sniffs. ‘A lawyer?’
Isobel nods.
The branches overhead gain speed.
‘Thanks.’ Rosie taps the card in her palm.
She dismisses it with a wave and Rosie leaves, tossing something from her pocket into the bin.
Isobel watches her walk away and wishes she were going home too, to the house in Altona.
Rosie
ON THE EARLY MORNING NEWS a reporter says a boy matching Petey’s description has been spotted with a dark-haired Caucasian man at Epping train station.
She freezes, coffee cup halfway to her lips, as the photo of Petey flashes on the screen. It chokes her up, like it does every time, and the coffee burns her leg when it spills.
On the tram to the police station she swears at her phone and paces the carriage. Suits on their way to work stare at her over their books and devices. She’s making them uncomfortable, but really she doesn’t give a shit.
Detective Khanna’s number is busy and she can’t get through to the main one either. Her scalp prickles and she tugs at her hair to relieve the pressure. Why haven’t they called her? She leans briefly against the ticket scanner next to the door. Maybe they don’t know. Maybe the journalists know and the police don’t. Jesus. She paces again, from one side of the carriage to the other. The other passengers clear out of her way, so she leaves a trail in the crowd.
‘Useless,’ she mutters, hating the people getting on and off the tram, slowing things down.
Her leggings are still damp from the coffee and the collar of her pyjama top sticks out from under her jacket. It took her three seconds to get out the door. The crowd surges as they pull up at her stop and she whacks the button beside the door, desperate to get out.