Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ I said to her. She didn’t respond. ‘When they cry, that is.’

  ‘Yeah, it is.’ She turned back towards the line-up on the couch. ‘But then you love them so much that it’s all worth it.’

  I smiled back at her. ‘It is,’ I said, and the lie slipped out.

  I looked at Odessa there, at the end, and at Andrew leaning through the others to take the picture, and I wished I hadn’t come. I wasn’t as alone as I thought, but I didn’t realise it at the time. Months later, when I saw some of the women from the class, they too talked about tears, exhaustion, strained relationships and depression, but on that day at Carolyn’s I felt I was the only one who had failed.

  Later that afternoon, I left Andrew and Odessa at home and walked down to the beachfront. I sat on the steps at the southern end and stared out across the promenade. It had been hot and there were people everywhere. Children squealed, couples bickered, music boomed out of cars cruising slowly along the esplanade. An old man stood under the shower, his leathery skin flaked with salt as the water sprayed down, glittering in the last of the sunlight.

  Andrew and I often used to come down to the beach at this time of the day. We would swim, go for a walk, and then perhaps head out to a movie. The life that I had once led was gone and I didn’t know how to enter the new life I had chosen. I didn’t know why I had chosen it. I had not yet experienced the startling love parents have for their children, and all I wanted in that moment was to go back to what I once was.

  In the distance two women walked towards me, a young boy running between them. They were talking to each other, laughing, and I watched as they stopped, the blonde woman leaning down towards her son and opening a juice for him. As they approached, the blonde woman waved, and it took me a few moments to realise that I knew her. It was my friend, the one who had told me that the pain of childbirth was like riding the crest of a wave. I hadn’t seen her since Odessa was born.

  As I raised my hand, she left the other woman with her boy and came towards me.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  I couldn’t answer. I looked at her and beyond, to the people walking and eating and laughing, the sun setting in the west and the ocean, pale blue.

  ‘Oh you poor thing.’ She sat down next to me. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’

  I could only nod.

  ‘So hard.’

  I looked across at her, and I wanted to tell her that I’d been watching her coming towards me and that I had envied her, that I’d seen her laughing, out there, part of it, but with a child, and I had wished that I was her, that I was anyone but me.

  ‘I can’t do it.’ It was all I could utter.

  ‘I know what it’s like,’ she said, and she did not attempt to counsel me.

  We sat in silence. Behind us the park was darkening. The streetlights were coming on, and a full moon was hovering on the lip of the horizon.

  In about six months I would begin, tentatively, to fall in love. In a year, I would know that love was here to stay. By the time Odessa turned two, I would feel, without a doubt, that having her was the most miraculous, wonderful aspect of my life.

  But on that night all I could do was look out across the ocean, and know that I would be grateful for this moment. I had needed someone to tell me that they, too, had found it hard, but right then and there I had no strength even for gratitude. I just had to do this and wait for a change that I had to have faith in.

  I stood up, and took one last look out across the beach. People were heading home.

  ‘You have to go back?’ she asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Shall I walk with you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ I told her, and I turned my back to the sea and headed up the hill towards home.

  THE OUTSIDE COUNTRY

  WHEN ODESSA WAS EIGHT MONTHS OLD, I LEFT HER and Andrew in Sydney and went back to Terowie, a small town in outback South Australia.

  I had only been there once before, six years earlier, on a trip I’d taken with Andrew shortly after we fell in love. At the time I was close to completing my first novel, and I wanted to revisit places in Adelaide I had written about from memory.

  I had spent almost a decade in Adelaide and although I never grew to like the city, I was mesmerised by the country that surrounds it. Driving north on a family holiday, I had stared out the window at the enormity of that land. It was golden in its sweep; dusty dry hills undulated beneath raw blue skies, treeless plains stretched out flat in the heat, and old stone ruins crumbled back into the harshness of the earth.

  South Australia is the driest state in the driest inhabited continent in the world, a fact that was impressed upon all young children who left the tap dripping, spent too long in the shower, or wanted to play under a sprinkler. Reliant on manufacturing industries and farming, both of which are no longer sustainable, it is also the only state in Australia with a decreasing, rather than an increasing, population.

  I had travelled as far north as the Flinders Ranges several times before I, like so many others before me, left Adelaide to live in Sydney. Although I thought I knew the country well, I had never heard of Terowie. It was Andrew who took me there. I had been wanting to show him the land that had captivated me as a teenager, and he had arranged to join me in Adelaide as soon as I had finished the work I needed to do on my first book.

  A friend had told him about Terowie, and the story had fascinated him. Two hundred kilometres north of Adelaide, it was once a railway stop that served as a junction for all lines crossing Australia from east to west and from north to south. During the Second World War, it had a population of over two and a half thousand, but with the rationalisation of the railways and the closure of the station in the early 1970s, this number dwindled to just over one hundred and fifty. As each business shut down, the remaining residents tried to preserve it in an attempt to set up a museum town. They hoped they would be able to survive by clinging on to some corner of the tourism market.

  Andrew and I drove there in the middle of winter, the frost scouring harsh across the flatness of the land, the wind low and mean. Wrapped in scarves, we walked down the empty streets, peering into each yard, past rusted machinery and clapped-out cars to houses that still wore signs of the lives that had been lived within their walls. A child’s toy lay up-ended in a bed of thistles, a rotting curtain fluttered through a gap in a window, a chicken scratched in dirt; no one appeared. I held Andrew’s hand tightly as we skirted the fringes of the town, and then zigzagged our way back to the deserted main street where we had left our car.

  I hadn’t forgotten Terowie. My return journey, when Odessa was eight months old, was ostensibly for work. I wanted to write about the country that surrounded it, and I wanted to capture the town’s slow death. It was my first attempt at working following Odessa’s birth and Terowie’s disintegration spoke to me. I probably could have written from memory, but I wanted to go back there, and it was not just a desire to re-experience that country. There was another reason, one that I found much harder to explain when I told Andrew I needed to go away.

  In the first few months after Odessa’s birth, I dreamt constantly of escape. I would lie in bed, the cockatoos screeching outside my window, and I would envisage it all, buying the airline ticket, packing the bag and leaving the note. I yearned for the past, the time when I had been just me, contained within my own flesh. And I dreamt of a place, small, empty, in which I would live on my own.

  By the time Odessa was eight months old, I was beginning to realise that I had to change; I just didn’t know how. I would look at her huge grey-green eyes, the single tooth that she was born with sticking up like a tombstone in her mouth, her chubby legs and her soft caramel hair, and I would know I’d begun to fall in love. But I was struggling. I wanted to give her the place in my life that she needed and deserved, one that was without my terror and anxiety about loss of self.

  Attempting to write again was essent
ial to this. On the bad days, I’d try to list women who had kept writing after having children, but it seemed I could never come up with any names although there are some, I know. I saw my writing self as childless. I thought that if I could go away and be alone, I could finally put all the pieces together, the person I was merging with the person I had become. And even though I couldn’t articulate this to Andrew when I said I needed to leave, I’m sure he knew. Go, he told me with no hesitation. We will be fine, he said, and I knew they would. I had seen him holding Odessa, his happiness a delight to witness, and I was grateful for the surety with which he loved.

  The bottom of South Australia was once divided by a surveyor-general called Goyder, in an attempt to mark up the areas of the state that were arable. The line, which is still called Goyder’s Line, twists and turns, cutting the region into two areas: one, on the Adelaide side, that supposedly gets sufficient rainfall for crop farming, and the other, that doesn’t.

  The ‘outside’ country is sheep country – the name doesn’t refer to all country beyond the line (outside the outside country it is simply too dry for either animals or grain) – yet even this part of South Australia seems, at times, incapable of sustaining livestock. There are great tracts of sand pocked by saltbush, scrub that rises like tufts of hair on a hide that has long since been rubbed back to a worn leather. Terowie sits right near the line, and attempts to grow wheat in the surrounding country have nearly always failed.

  As I drove north of Adelaide, staying within the ‘inside’ country for most of the journey, the few pubs I passed were closed, the doors barred shut, the windows boarded up. The houses were empty, the gardens choked by thistles. Weeds had overtaken the land, and the dirt collapsed cake-like into ravines where animals fell and rotted, their bones bleached in the sun.

  Although there had probably been little change since the last time I had travelled out here, it seemed different. On that journey, Andrew and I had stopped in small towns and thought momentarily about leaving our lives and spending a few years in each place we visited. We could buy a house for nothing. We could do the work we’d always wanted to do. It was, of course, just talk. Like most Australians, our knowledge of the bush stays limited to brief holidays, and the occasional romantic dream.

  On this journey, I had no visions of buying land and changing our lives. Even in Port Germein, which boasts one of the longest jetties in the Southern Hemisphere, I wondered how we had talked about spending time out here. The jetty, which was built to accommodate a tide that sucks out and out and was once used to ship wheat to the rest of the world, stretches for a kilometre and a half into silvery gulf waters. It was still undeniably spectacular, but I saw that I’d painted the town with a beauty it didn’t have. Concrete dwellings that looked like toilet blocks sat squat and grey in the sandy soil, signs prohibited the dumping of fish offal, and in the local garage a poster behind the cash register recommended ‘Poofter control not gun control’. With the decline in the fortunes of the surrounding region, it is a place that has lost its purpose. Like so many towns in South Australia, it’s only just clinging to life in a land that’s proved too harsh.

  On the morning I drove to Terowie, the winter frost was ghostly white outside the car window. By the time I arrived, the sun was high, warming the sandstone buildings that lined the streets, and for a moment I was surprised by how picturesque the town appeared, how it seemed to have re-emerged from the death I remembered.

  It wasn’t until I got out of the car that I realised I’d been wrong. Peering through each window, I saw that nearly every place on the main street was now deserted, some only recently so. In the butcher’s, the plastic cow and chicken had fallen over on plastic grass that had long since faded to reflect the true colour of the country; in the haberdasher’s, bolts of rotten cloth cascaded across the counter; in the post office, the floor had begun to collapse, leaving great splintering holes, and in the bank, the windows had been smashed and the place ransacked.

  Attempts at preserving the businesses had been abandoned. A notice in the window of a deserted shop advertised what was probably the only available job in the town: toilet cleaning for the Terowie museum and council chambers at $260 a quarter – ‘some volunteer work also required’.

  That morning, before I left for Terowie, I had intended to write up some notes about the journey so far, but instead I read over the few pages in my notebook written shortly before I went away. They were about Odessa and her attempts at crawling. She would roll across the floor trying to get from one place to the next, her aim always hopelessly off-target, her face confused as she found herself at the table instead of her toy box. I flicked back through the pages, reading the little I’d recorded about her since she was born, knowing I’d been writing those details down in the hope that I would be able to enjoy this time in retrospect.

  I used to wonder whether I would have walked away in the first few days after her birth if I’d had greater physical energy and courage. I’d try to think of women I knew of who had deserted their children and I couldn’t name any. Looking out the bedroom window at the empty sky, I knew I wouldn’t leave but I didn’t know how to stay with joy.

  That morning I’d driven to Terowie, as I’d driven to every town I had been to, with Odessa on my mind. As I wandered the back streets, thousands of miles from home, I wondered why I’d come. I was alone, just as I’d wanted, but this self felt like a dead husk, a skin that had been discarded. I had longed for the person I’d once been, but in my attempt to return I found she had gone.

  I passed a couple of occupied houses. The looks from the inhabitants were ones of barely masked hostility. A dog stretched and bared its teeth before barking at me, its saliva dripping onto the dirt. I walked more quickly, the sound of a car behind me, the engine throbbing as it drove slowly past, windows wound up, choking black exhaust mingled with dust in a thick cloud. As I turned quickly into the street where I’d parked, I noticed the faded rainbow that was painted on a board, only one nail preventing it from falling into the dirt. It was the words ‘Tricia’s Treasures’ that made me push the gate open and go in.

  There was a caravan on one side of the garden, and a house on the other. For a moment, I thought it was still occupied, but as I made my way up the path, the bones of rats or feral cats crunching beneath my feet, I became less sure. The well was overgrown, the rusted cover pulled back to reveal nothing other than a black hole, and I stepped back from the darkness. China figurines had been placed along the track leading to the van, Mexicans in sombreros, donkeys carrying baskets that could once have been filled with flowers; they were all smashed now. The stones that had been used to mark the pathway were cracked or missing.

  The van had collapsed into the dirt. Prickly pear pushed up against the rusted sides, obscuring the same rainbow sign painted in flaking colours. Cobwebs were thick on the window, sticking to my fingers as I rubbed a peep-hole in the grime coating the glass. Clothes still hung on the racks, sheets still covered the bed, cups were still stacked in the sink; they were all filthy, but they were all there. I walked back past the house. There was a bath under an open shelter, a face washer still hanging over the tap, dry and stiff now, but otherwise just as it would have been left after its last use.

  Whoever owned that place had just gone; with only the thought of fleeing on her mind, she had slammed the door shut behind her, and run. I looked at the desertion and I wanted to go home.

  Shortly after I returned from South Australia, when I began to sense a true shift in how I was coping, people would sometimes ask me if I thought I’d suffered from postnatal depression. I never knew how to answer. I had been depressed, there was no doubt about that, but it was the connotation that I’d had an unusual or ‘sick’ reaction that I fought against. It still seems to me to have been a completely valid response to such a life-changing event. Some people adapt well; I am someone who didn’t. The difficulty I have, however, is in trying to articulate this state with honesty, while still making it clear to
my daughter that it didn’t mean she was neither loved nor wanted.

  Daughters write about their mothers, but mothers do not often write about their daughters, and now I know why. I worry about writing of my ambivalence about being pregnant and my despair after I gave birth to her. I fear she will misinterpret my words. I am anxious she will doubt the truth of the love I now have for her, and she will think she was not wanted. When she asks me if I was happy after she was born, I tell her that I was, but I struggle with this answer. Perhaps it is best simply to tell her that I love her. What happened was something that happened to me.

  Before I left Terowie, I stopped in one of the three surviving shops, wanting some sign of life to settle me. I chose what looked to be a teashop over a hardware store and a roadhouse. The bell on the door jingled discordantly as I stepped into the gloom. The counter was lined with photocopied pamphlets about the town, relics from its attempts to set itself up as a living museum, and behind it were racks of knitted baby clothes: pink, white and blue bonnets, jackets and booties, and colourful children’s jumpers and cardigans.

  It was the pamphlets that told me about Terowie’s moment of fame. At the Terowie station there is a monument to the occasion. It is a plaque that commemorates a statement made by General MacArthur on 12 March 1942, not long after he had left the Philippines to take command of the Allied Forces in the South West Pacific. Travelling from Alice Springs to Adelaide, MacArthur had changed trains at Terowie. Ambushed by the press, he had made a brief statement on the station platform, ending with the words: ‘I came out of Bataan and I shall return.’