I snorted. “Just imagine how weird it is being the dude talking about his periods and pregnancy scares.”
“’His’,” she observed, “interesting.” I shrugged, and over the next minute or so, she sobered. “Broome was nearly two months ago, wasn’t it?” She went back to anxious silence.
When we arrived at the clinic, I slid my seat back in the car with the intention of making myself comfortable while I was waiting for her, but she came over and surprised me by opening my door. “I’m not trying to tell you how to do you your job, Toyboy, but I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to open doors for me.” She was grinning.
I got out of the car and locked it, and then jogged a bit to catch up with her on the path to the clinic. The temperature had taken a serious dive since sunset and it was really chilly again. Sarah wasn’t wearing a coat, so I went to take mine off. “Can I redeem myself by offering you my jacket? I have a couple of layers underneath.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Min, I drank two bottles of champagne on your birthday and I’ve eaten an entire pharmacy since then. It’s a bit too late to be worrying what’ll happen if I get a bit cold.”
I blinked, cautiously rebuttoning my jacket. I had actually been genuinely worried about her because she’d been feeling so sick, but I decided not to push the point. The clinic was probably going to be heated anyway.
I ended up being right: the big 24-hour clinic was heated, and being the first week of winter, it was also busy. All the chairs were taken, full of people rugged up in scarves coughing into their tissues. Half of the people there also had whimpering, red-nosed kids on their laps. After Sarah had registered for the first available doctor, we went and sat on the carpet against the far wall of the waiting room: as far away from the crowd of infectious people as possible.
“Did they say how long it was going to be?” I asked her as I extended my legs and crossed them at the ankles.
“No, but I did tell you it would be ages,” she reminded me, copying my movement and looking down our legs. Hers finished in the middle of my calves, and mine basically continued out the fucking door of the clinic. She nodded at them. “Can I say something? I always wondered why you wore heels.”
“Because when I wear a skirt with flats, I look like I have skinny flamingo legs with flipper feet.”
Sarah couldn’t help laughing at that, and then looked guilty. “That’s a pretty vivid mental image,” she said, and laughed again. “Were you always a giant, or did you shoot up in high school?”
“I was in the back row for school photos since kindergarten.”
Sarah nodded, settling against the wall. “My dad’s quite tall. I didn’t get his genes, though. I take after Mum.”
Lucky, I thought. I didn’t look anything like mine and she never let me forget it, either. At least these days she was getting a bit rounder and a bit saggier, so I didn’t look so huge and oaf-like next to her. I supposed my tall genes must have come from my dad, like a lot of other stuff. It wasn’t like I could ask Mum about it, though.
“Are you close to your parents?” I wondered aloud.
She shrugged. “I guess? I mean, they live in Bathurst and I don’t see them that often, but they’re pretty cool.” She laughed a couple of times at something. “Actually, they retired last year and did the whole tree change thing which is why they’re up there. They also bought this embarrassingly flashy caravan and they keep taking off in it, it’s so cute. I think they’re in Port Douglas at the moment. They've just discovered Facebook on their ‘smart mobile phones’ too, so they post photos every five minutes.” She unlocked her own smart mobile phone and showed me a few photos of her parents and their embarrassingly flashy caravan.
They were an older couple with big smiles and wrinkled olive skin. I tabbed through photos of them laughing and toasting the camera, posing with a failed and sad-looking beach barbeque, and standing together on a cliff-face with palm trees and the sunset behind them. It was like peering through the looking glass.
“They look like they’re having a blast together,” I commented.
Sarah smiled at that. “Married 40 years last November,” she said, sounding proud of them. “Dad’s heart isn’t that great, so they want to make sure they get all their living done before they can’t.” Her smile faded. “That’s my plan, too.”
I didn’t know how to address that, so I just gave the phone back to her and felt awkward.
She waited a couple of seconds and then rolled her eyes at me, taking my arm and slinging it around her shoulders herself. “You are hopeless. Remember what I told you about reassuring girls? Hug them.”
I rubbed her other shoulder. “I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable, that’s all.”
She groaned. “I feel uncomfortable when you sit there frozen solid and looking like you wish you could run away. And just FYI, it’s always okay to hug me.” She rested her head casually on my shoulder. “Besides, you don’t need to hide that you’re totally into me. It’s so obvious. Everyone knows.”
I deadpanned. “I can’t help it. I go wild for the can’t-keep-food-down, half-dead zombie look.” I paused. “Also, those double-Ds.”
She made a disgusted noise and sat up for a second, shoving me. “Oh my god, there is a line, Min,” she said, and then lay her head back down again. I could see her grinning in my peripheral vision while she flicked through her phone.
When the doctor called her name, I stood so I could help her up. She let me and then shot me a haunted look, shaking the doctor’s hand and walking smoothly into her office. The doctor looked curiously at me for a moment, probably wondering why I wasn’t joining them, but didn’t ask Sarah about it and closed the door.
I didn’t know how long this would take, so I sat down again just as Sarah emerged almost immediately from the room. I was confused about that until it was clear she was heading somewhere else in the building. She pulled a face and held up an empty specimen container.
I mirrored her expression and didn’t try very hard to notice her on the way back.
I took my own phone out to pass the time. It was getting quite late as I flicked idly down Facebook; Gemma had uploaded another photo of her cat asleep in the fruit bowl, Bree was notably absent—although I knew she had a blog elsewhere where she mostly reblogged photos of food and pictures with inspirational quotes—and some of Sarah’s other friends had posted pictures of the sunset, yoga poses, and there was one of Gay Matt and Andrew at a fun run. They were topless, showing off their six-packs and numbers painted in zinc on their torsos. I spent a couple of seconds staring bitterly at their gloriously flat chests, especially when my own gloriously unflat chest was aching from having been in a binder for approaching 16 hours. I stretched painfully and ended up coughing as I put my phone away.
The flow of people into the waiting room was beginning to thin as it got later. There were still a lot of families with overtired children, though, which made the noise level in the waiting room uncomfortably high.
One of those families was sitting across from me. The mother looked very tired and very ill—reminiscent of Sarah over the past few days, actually—and had almost fallen asleep in her chair. Her three energetic young children were buzzing around her and loudly fighting with each other right up until Dad came back with the family iPad and a coffee for Mum. She gratefully accepted the coffee and the kids all piled excitedly onto and around Dad’s lap for story time. I could hear his broad Australian accent as he read to them; it reminded me of Rob, and I spent a few seconds imagining Sarah as that Mum and Rob reading aloud from the iPad to his excited children. It made me smile.
Sarah will probably make a great mum, I decided. She'd been open-minded with me from the beginning, and 'open-minded' seemed like a really good place to start. I just wasn't really sure how she was going to reconcile her tendency to party hard and work herself to the bone with motherhood. Henry had always said he'd take a more flexible job when he became a dad—which is why he was saving like crazy whil
e he had a really good income—maybe that was Sarah's intention, too.
Good, I thought. No one should have to be a parent at Frost.
I must have been giving out some sort of subconscious Bat Signal into the universe while I was thinking about that, because my phone buzzed. I took it out of my pocket, expecting it to be a text message from Bree, but it didn’t stop buzzing. The display read Henry Lee, and the little red and green handsets flashed at the bottom of the screen. It was a phone call.
I took a breath. Fuck, I really want to answer this but… I looked over towards the doctor’s office where Sarah was. I couldn’t go outside, because I wanted to be here when she got out in case she wasn’t feeling great. I was here to support her, after all. I ummed and ahhed through several more buzzes and then eventually did answer it.
Henry didn’t even greet me. “Min, what on earth did you tell James?” he said in a whisper, sounding really stressed out. I wanted to acknowledge that and ask if he was okay, but the waiting room of a busy clinic was no place to have a deep and meaningful. “Jesus Christ, I just had him accost me in my office and—”
“Henry,” I interrupted him in a loud whisper of my own, “it’s a really long story, but can I call you back? I’m at the doctors’.”
That stopped him. “Oh,” he said, and then I heard him swallow. I think I’d been to the doctors’ twice in four years. Henry was the only person who knew that. “Oh dear, it’s not serious, is it? Are you alright?”
“Yeah, it’s not for me, it’s for Sarah,” I told him. “And no, it’s not serious. At least, I don’t think it is. It depends on—actually, no, no, I don’t think so. Listen, can I call you back later?”
“O-Of course…” he said hesitantly, and then let me hang up.
Every minute that Sarah didn’t come out of that room, though, I wished I hadn’t hung up on him. He sounded pretty upset, and at this time of night, he probably didn’t have anyone else to vent to. I could have had a conversation with him again. We could have been talking, and maybe I could have apologised to him and told him about Mum’s marriage ultimatum. But no, I had to hang up on him, didn’t I? I made a face and flopped my head back against the wall with a thump.
I was still kicking myself for that when Sarah emerged from the doctor’s office. She approached me looking surprisingly normal. Maybe it was a false alarm?
“Let’s go,” she said as I pushed up off the floor. “I can’t wait to get these heels off, my feet are killing me.” She began to walk briskly towards the exit.
I followed her through it, waiting until we were outside to prompt her, “Well, how did it go? Are you pregnant?”
“Yes,” she said. “The doctor’s test showed positive too, and she’s taken some blood to be certain. She’ll call me on Wednesday if I don’t need to go into Marie Stopes next Monday.”
I opened the car door for her. “Who’s Marie Stopes?”
“It’s an abortion clinic,” she told me matter-of-factly, and pulled the door shut behind her, fastening her seat belt.
I stood outside her door for a couple of seconds with my eyebrows high and my jaw open, and then closed my mouth and went around to the driver’s side. Despite Sarah telling me hugging her was always okay, I got the sense that it wouldn’t be okay right now. So, I just got in and buckled up.
We hadn’t even made it out of the carpark before she exploded with, “I can’t keep it, Min. I can’t.”
“Erm, okay,” I said, treading carefully. “If you think that’s best.”
She took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’m not ready at all, and even if I was, I’ve basically been fuelled entirely by artificial stimulants for the past week. It’s probably irreparably damaged. And if Frost finds out I’m pregnant…” She shook her head.
I knew what she meant. I glanced across at her before I turned out onto the road, briefly touching her hand. I meant to be supportive, but I think she misinterpreted my silence.
Flopping back against her seat, she said darkly, “You totally think I’m a murderer.”
“Hey, now,” I said, cutting her off before she could say anything else. “No, I don’t. I couldn’t carry a baby either.” She squinted at me as if she expected me to follow up with something that contradicted that but, of course, I didn’t. “I don’t, Sarah. Really.”
“Okay,” she said suspiciously, and then was silent for the rest of the trip home. I turned on the radio, but it hardly made a dent in how tense we were.
Sarah was through the back door before I was even out of the car, and when I made it into the living room, she was already in the bathroom with the shower running. I stood outside the bathroom door for a few seconds, wanting to say something supportive, but in the end just continued to my bedroom. I changed into a hoodie and trackies—finally able to strip my binder off my aching chest—and then went out and sat on the living room couch to nurse my tender ribs and take big, free breaths while I waited for her.
She didn’t have much to say to me when she did come back out in her pyjamas, though. Biro in hand, she made a beeline for the dining table and started punching numbers into her phone, pausing occasionally to scribble them down on a used envelope.
I stood and gingerly approached her. “Thinking of ousting Gemma as Bree’s Maths tutor?” I asked her with a grin.
She made a noise. “No thanks,” she told me. “Gem can keep her imaginary numbers, I’m crunching the real ones.” She continued for another minute or so, and then sat back, pushing the envelope roughly away. “Yeah,” she said. “I knew it. I knew I couldn’t afford the repayments on this place with just Rob’s standby wage and whatever pittance Centrelink gives mothers these days.”
“Frost pays full wages for 13 weeks,” I reminded her.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Tell me you’d be able to show your face back at Frost after taking a quarter of the year off,” she said. “They’ll put me in admin and just lean on me until I quit because mothers have conflicting priorities, or whatever.”
“Then fucking ride them for $120 kay per annum in admin for as long as you can,” I told her. “Show up to work on time, leave on time, take that paycheque home to your baby. They can suck it.”
She briefly smiled, but only to acknowledge my support. “It’s bad enough there now and I’m in most people’s good books,” she said, and sighed. She was silent for a moment, deep in thought. Then, she shook her head vigorously. “No. No, I can’t do it. I can’t. I can have kids later when I’m ready, after I’ve done all the things I want to do and when I can afford it.” She stood, trying to change the subject. “Anyway, I was supposed to spend all of tonight cramming Chemistry. I need to go excavate my old textbook from the cupboards or I’m not going to be much use to Bree tomorrow.”
Before she had the opportunity to retrieve it, though, a key turned in the front door and someone dumped a bag loudly in the hallway. There was whistling.
Sarah’s eyes glazed over. “Shit.”
Rob came striding into the living room in his high-visibility rugby shirt, shorts and Blundstones. He was clearly a bit tipsy, but all it was doing was making his cheeks and nose pink. “Eey!” he greeted us, presenting himself with a ‘tada’ motion, “I just helped build a house! I feel sorry for the poor bugger who has to live in it, though.” He theatrically lopped his phone at the couch like he was shooting a hoop, and cheered when it didn’t bounce onto the floor. “Want a beer?” he asked us as he ducked into the kitchen.
Sarah and I just stood there.
He was opening it with his bare hands as he came back into the living room. “It was nice working in the sun for a change, I’ll tell you that. I’m not going to want to go back down the mines if I do this too much. What a day!” He smiled broadly at us, but stopped when he saw our expressions. “Jesus. What’s going on? You two look like you’re on your way to a funeral.”
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment. “Rob, I need to talk to you.”
His face fell immediately. “What did I do?
” She shook her head and walked towards him, bustling him back up the hallway towards the bedroom. He let himself be ushered away, and the last thing I heard before she shut him in their room was, “Is it because I’m out late? I thought you’d probably be working! I’ll come home straight away tomorrow, Sares, I promise!”
After the door was shut, the house was eerily quiet for a few seconds. I stood in place, genuinely worried I would hear them fighting. They never fought, and even though I would have preferred to know a lot less about their sex life than I did, it was comforting watching a couple who’d been together for years still be actively in love with each other. I hoped an abortion wouldn’t affect that.
So, in the interest of not just standing there and listening for conflict, I had that shower I’d been after in the first place, tried to call Henry back a couple of times—his phone was off for some reason—and then deliberated over whether or not I should ‘excavate’ Sarah’s Chemistry textbook from her cupboards myself. In the end, I decided not to. Bree could wait a week or two to catch up on Chem. I figured Sarah would probably be feeling less sick and be better able to concentrate after she’d ended her pregnancy anyway.
EIGHT
Every morning Sarah got up at exactly the same time and every morning she caught exactly the same train. I figured it would be a piece of cake to set my alarm so I could intercept her and tempt her out of the cold and into my heated Lexus instead. The last thing that poor girl needed was a long walk to the train station while she was in the throes of morning sickness.
Unfortunately, I didn’t wake up to my alarm. I woke up half an hour earlier to the sound of the front door being pulled very gently shut with only the old creaking hinges giving it away. I sat up, confused.
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