For a Girl

by MacColl, Mary-Rose;

  The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. Along its length, I discovered, are cement pylons which have something to do with holding the bridge in place. They appeared very sure of themselves on that flimsy structure of wires and bolts. The pylons are large—I could not get my arms around them—and painted the same russet as the rest of the bridge. I don’t know how many pylons there are on the bridge; I didn’t count them.

  What I did on the Golden Gate Bridge that day when my fear of bridges hit me for the first time was walk between those pylons, and at each pylon I stopped. I didn’t care who was watching or what kind of ritual they thought I was enacting. As I walked, every muscle in my body was tense with fear. I stopped at each pylon and hugged it. The pylons were not quite safe, but they were heaven compared with the open bridge, which was less than air. I held each pylon until I felt I could go on.

  My fear became more and more intense. My heart was pumping so loudly in my ears, my chest hurt. David read from a guidebook that the two main cables of the bridge each weigh 11,000 tons. They have 25,572 separate wires. Imagine if one unravelled, he said, trying to help with a joke. I did not laugh.

  Afterwards, we told the story at dinner parties, him doing the walk, looking like the Tin Man, me describing the feeling. People wanted to know why I kept going. Some assumed I saw it as a way to conquer my fear, to show it for what it was, some memory of unsafety, but I had no such goal. Some thought me brave in a weird way. I am not brave.

  It was simple. I am an optimist in my deepest heart and remain optimistic through much discouragement. I knew fear was behind me on the bridge. I’d felt it, each step leaden, my legs heavier and heavier, my arms and neck like planks, my head like a medicine ball on top of me. Behind me was fear—I knew that—and what lay in front must be better, I thought to myself. So rather than turning back to fear, I kept going.

  The only way forward was through.

  As it turned out, I was as terrified in the last steps of my walk—between the final pylon and the bridge’s end—as I was at the first. More so, because fear has a way of manufacturing itself. And the fact I walked across the bridge and lived made me no less frightened when, later, I was driving across the Oakland Bridge, a feat of engineering you might marvel at. All I could do was watch the bumper of the car in front, my shoulders hunched over the wheel, convinced I was driving to oblivion.

  At the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge is Sausalito, an ordinary town where I walked around as if I was a normal person.

  I went home to Australia and conceived a child most people thought was my first child.

  The only way forward was through.

  Otis in the world

  BETWEEN DAVID AND ME WAS the question of children. I asked myself the question and I never knew the answer. I wasn’t sure why. David was ambivalent, he always said, but of course he’d go along if I wanted children; he just couldn’t quite see himself as a father.

  And then, at thirty-eight, I wanted a child. I just knew I did, as simple as that.

  We tried for several years, doing the things you do, having sex, and when that didn’t work as quickly as expected, undertaking research on the internet, adopting its many helpful suggestions. Having sex at special times of the day, the week, the month; rubbing cervical mucus between one’s fingers to determine an ovulating consistency—egg white being the goal; changing the food I ate; changing the food David ate, the kind of underpants he wore—the looser the better to keep those poor little sperms cool—the position in which we lay with one another. It can become an obsession. It did.

  And then I had an early miscarriage—a blighted ovum, it’s called. Dr Tig, who’d been my doctor for twenty years and knew the truth about my earlier life before many people, rang to tell me the blood results. ‘I’m sorry to say it’s bad news,’ she said in her lovely Dr Tig voice, ‘but there’s a silver lining. It means everything is working according to plan. So just keep trying.’

  Fine, I thought. We’ll keep trying.

  No problem, David said.

  The weekend after the blighted ovum was our tenth wedding anniversary. We didn’t normally go to Coolangatta but that was where David had asked me to marry him so we decided to book a unit there.

  I was out of sorts, tired beyond belief, a weight behind my heart, muscles aching. I didn’t connect my mood with the miscarriage. I didn’t even think about it. I had no idea the blighted ovum would raise any feelings at all in me. I never connected what had happened to me as a teenager with me as a middle-aged woman. I was in my head not my body where I had been since I was a teenager.

  On the way down to the coast, I picked a fight with David about where we were staying. We bickered about the car I rented too. We bickered about bickering. I withdrew from David, went inside myself seeking safety. And then I fell apart.

  I was alone in the apartment we’d rented. I’d told David to get out. I remember I was crying, coughing and choking. I couldn’t get air into my lungs for a time. It was very frightening. My body was responding and I had no control.

  It was late the same afternoon. David had come back and I had calmed down enough to let him hold me. I said I was sorry for yelling. I didn’t know what was wrong. I had been so afraid. Now I wanted to leave Coolangatta. I needed to be somewhere else.

  In the rental car we’d bickered over earlier—a sports car of sorts, a Volvo convertible, which was the opposite of a sports car, as David pointed out—we drove down to Byron Bay for the sunset.

  It was like stepping outside after a storm, entering the world after all that emotion, for now everything was peaceful and charged with meaning and filled with beauty. Just for those hours, I was back in my body, back to myself and I felt at home. On the way back to Coolangatta, I had Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night blaring through the Volvo stereo. Even David sang along. He is not normally a fan.

  I thought we would be all right. I told David I was giving up on having a child. I stood on the beach and looked out through The Pass. I thought we would be all right.

  We bought a new car, a small car. We bought our architect-designed clinker-brick townhouse in St Lucia that had so many child hazards you wouldn’t in all conscience consider bringing children there, not even to visit—a mezzanine floor with a toddler climbable balustrade onto slate tile, stairs with no balustrade over the same slate tile, a veranda with low railings and a drop to paving.

  I started a corporate-writing business to supplement my novel-writing income. University colleagues and then government clients started engaging me to write their reports. I discovered I loved researching an issue in as much depth as I could, listening to a single reviewer or group, and coming up with a report. It was intellectually challenging, interesting and great fun.

  I started making money. We had a couple’s car and a couple’s house and a couple’s income. I said I would get on with life without children. I didn’t really feel too bad about it; I told myself I didn’t. I thought I wasn’t meant to have children. I think in truth I thought I wasn’t good enough to have children.

  And then I was pregnant.

  We called him Otis from the start, from the time he was an unblighted ovum, not because we’d intended to name him Otis—we didn’t even know his sex—and not because I was set on having a boy, but because I would not call the baby ‘it’ and as far as I knew Otis was a name a boy or girl might have. I had never met an Otis. I loved Otis Redding’s version of the Sam Cooke song ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. There were the elevators, and the dog and cat movie, but I didn’t think of either of those. It wasn’t as if we were going to name a child Otis. It was just a name for now.

  We had bought a Judy Watson etching called Visceral Memory that year. I loved its strength, soft black lines on an ochre background around a core of life. Much later I read that Watson had painted her spine series, including Visceral Memory, when she was heavily pregnant with her son Otis. I later met the artist and told her how we’d come to her work and that o
ur son was named Otis too. What are the chances? we both said.

  Visceral Memory was on our bedroom wall when Otis was conceived. It’s on our bedroom wall still.

  I didn’t know the writer Kim Wilkins well, but we read together at a writers’ cabaret early in my pregnancy, and I thought she was immensely clever and funny. After the panel, we were talking and realised we would both be on Mount Tamborine, south of Brisbane, one weekend soon. I was house-minding and she and her partner—musician Mirko Ruckels—were visiting friends, so we had lunch together. Kim and Mirko talked about wearing their earth suits. David and I used to say, ‘Imagine the moon.’ We knew we would be friends.

  Somehow, although neither of us was supposed to tell anyone we were pregnant, waiting the sixteen weeks, we both stumbled out with it that day on Mount Tamborine. I was further along, almost sixteen weeks. Kim’s baby would be born two months after Otis.

  Like almost everyone in my life, I hadn’t told Kim I’d already had a baby, and by the time I was ready to tell her, it was too late. For me, it was a blessing. Kim would be the friend I could be a first-time mother with, could be unsure with, could feel I had a right to be a first-time mother with. I knew it wasn’t honest, but I didn’t know how to tell her the truth, not then.

  I was heavily pregnant in the turning of summer into fall, surely the most beautiful few months on the planet. The light is soft, the days short and the air crisp. I remember watching small things in the garden of our townhouse—light on rocks, a baby turkey, a lemon tree next door—and feeling that I was part of everything.

  I remember the first night with Otis in the world as if it was yesterday. Louise and Gerard had been up to visit and they had left, and then David left. I was alone with Otis, exhausted and euphoric.

  There was a woman in the bed next to me, yet to be delivered of her twins, and she was snoring sporadically and unpeacefully, like a plane taking off. It woke Otis, who woke me with his cry. I had no idea what to do and a kindly midwife came and changed his nappy and put him into bed facing me and left us.

  For the rest of the night, we stared at one another in the strange light of a night-time hospital while the woman snored. I looked into his face and had the only glimmer in my life of understanding God. I looked into his face and he looked into mine and I was thinking about him having been inside me not a few hours before and now he was this whole little person in the world. And he was thinking about nothing, just staring at me, just being. I don’t imagine I’ll ever fully appreciate that moment.

  We would name him Otis after all. He had a mullet of dark red hair, a cone head on one side from his trip through the birth canal and a lightning strike birthmark between his eyes. We couldn’t give him an ordinary name. He was not an ordinary child, although I suppose there’s no such thing as an ordinary child.

  When I was in labour, I’d been unable to accept that I was going to give birth to a baby any time soon. My main midwife, Maureen, who called me Mary-Rose and not an elderly primip, wanted me to get up on the bed so she could do an internal examination to see how far along I was. At first, I wouldn’t do it.

  We had only just arrived at the hospital. I had stayed at home as long as I could, the hospital being a place where I knew I wouldn’t feel safe, even if I didn’t know why. Finally, with both Maureen and Louise coaxing, I got up on the bed and Maureen did the examination and said, ‘You’re at ten centimetres,’ which meant I was ready to give birth.

  ‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘You’re just trying to make me feel better.’ When the obstetrician arrived, I told her what was going to happen. ‘Barbara,’ I said, ‘we haven’t met but let me tell you how it’s going to be. We won’t be doing an epidural. And we won’t be having a caesarean.’

  ‘You’re about to have your baby,’ Barbara said. ‘There’s no time for any of that. I’m just going to rupture your membranes.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said in a panic. ‘It will speed up the labour.’

  ‘The membranes are the only thing holding the baby in,’ she said, exasperated at my failure to grasp the simplicity of the situation. ‘Birth is imminent.’

  Otis was born just a few minutes after that. He was lifted up onto my chest, where he stayed for the next hour because nobody had a mind to take him away.

  I tell this as a funny story, the story of my labour with Otis, that here I was about to give birth but still not quite sure I was in labour. I tell it as a funny story. But it’s not so funny really.

  If my body betrayed me during my labour with Otis, if it lied about what was happening, who could blame it? My body knew, as none of the rest did—not Dr Barbara, not Maureen, not Louise or David, or even me in my mind. My body knew, as no one else knew, that to go on to that place of birth was the most dangerous thing; that birth is where the real pain begins.

  Our old townhouse belongs to friends who have their own baby now. When I visit I remember everything. It’s as if my whole body is loose and warm and free again, surely for the first time since baby Ruth was born. A family of butcher-birds raised their young in a tree in our bushland park two, perhaps three years running while were there. We fed them from our veranda, to the chagrin of our greener neighbours. When Otis was tiny, those nightjars, mother and baby, sat in the tree outside his window. They made him safe, I believed, although I’ve since learned that nightjars and owls are dumb not wise—that’s just PR—and could not keep a child safe.

  Otis brought baby Ruth back to me, in his way, made me know finally what I’d lost when I handed my child to strangers, what I could never ever get back, and the act for which I cannot atone, the life I must let go of in order to live the life that’s now mine.

  PART III

  Returning

  Homeless

  DAVID AND I HAD ALWAYS lived on terraces with trees. The hot brick unit we rented in Bellevue Terrace had a big old gum waving in the bedroom windows, promising breezes. We bought our first apartment in Stanley Terrace because it overlooked a giant fig in the park below. We traded up to our Prospect Terrace townhouse with its child hazards because it overlooked a bushland park.

  When Otis came along, we made our townhouse as safe as we could. We had an architect design a retro-balustrade for the open staircase. We put shutters on the mezzanine and fixed a lockable screen to the door leading to the veranda with its low railing onto pavement.

  But in the months after I hurt Otis with the stroller clip, I started to think we should move. It began as a vague notion and, over time, it became increasingly important. My body, which I’d always been able to rely on to do what it was told, set out on its own, reclaiming its right to have a say in things.

  I would find myself on the floor like the first time, shaking and crying uncontrollably, with no idea what had set me off or what would calm me. I never knew when it would happen, where it came from, or when it would end. It frightened me.

  I hadn’t felt at home in my body for years, although I also hadn’t been aware of that fact. Suddenly, now, I knew I wasn’t at home in my body and it was terrifying.

  I started to believe that if we moved we would be all right. We were a family. A boy needed a yard and dirt. We should find a real house, a proper home, and I would be all right.

  We searched for a house in a terrace. We searched the internet and then, on weekends, we spent hours walking through other people’s houses, finding out what books they read. I decided I wanted an old house because Louise had an old house. Old houses don’t have the poisons of new houses, the formaldehyde and other chemicals that leach out of new building materials, I said to David. Otis will be safe in an old house. There will be other children, and every weekend we’ll wear old business shirts as smocks and paint each other’s noses while we laugh uncontrollably at what fun we’re having.

  David was not so sure.

  After a year of searching, Brisbane was at the top of a boom and houses were even more expensive than when we started. Our townhouse had sold and we didn’t have enough money to buy a hou
se in the areas where we were looking, let alone one in a terrace with trees. The houses we looked through were not flash or well-to-do, just inner-city. Inner-city had become the place to be, the real estate agents told me. Traffic, they said. People are giving up their outlying mansions so they don’t have to sit in traffic.

  When I was pregnant with Otis, I’d been to see a woman named Stace who did pregnancy massage in the kahuna style, a Hawaiian treatment based on movement and breath. I thought it would help me to get ready for labour. After Otis was born, I stopped seeing Stace, but in the week after I hurt him with the stroller clip, she contacted me, out of the blue, to say she had moved. She wanted to give me her new number, her message said.

  I have always been a cynic when it comes to spirituality, both the traditional kind that incorporates incense and the sacred host, those small circles of dry bread that stuck to the roof of my mouth in childhood, and the new age kind that leads all sorts of practitioners to tell me the most outrageous things about my irises, auras and past lives. I am the daughter of two journalists. My father schooled me in scepticism. I can laugh with anyone who cares to about crazy therapies. My jokes will probably be funnier than theirs.

  I was this cynic until I hurt Otis with the stroller clip and then I was willing to do anything to get my life back. I was not a woman who was running with the wolves. I was limping through life, hoping no one would notice.

  Stace broke her back in her life as a circus performer, recovered and studied bodywork. Before I saw her, I’d been deaf to my body, or my body had been mute.