Flesh & Blood

by A. E. Dooland

  Bree gave me a very pointed look. “Um, Min, I think you might know her a bit better than I do…”

  I rolled my eyes at her, and then frowned at my phone, tapping my thumbs on the side of it and trying to think. Above the text box was the last couple of conversations I’d had with her, including the one where she’d called herself a home-wrecker for kissing me while I was with Henry. We’d hardly texted each other since then, and it suddenly struck me as really weird to be asking her what was up when she wasn’t texting back my current partner. “You know what?” I told Bree, “I’m just going to ask Sarah.” I quickly tapped out, “Gemma hasn’t been returning Bree’s messages for a couple of days, do you know what’s going on?”

  I’d barely locked my phone before the screen lit up again. “??? Did Schoolgirl stick her foot in her mouth again or something? Gem can be a bit sensitive.”

  I looked at Bree. She had a completely blank expression as she shook her head. I replied, “She says she didn’t...”

  “Well did something else happen? I have no idea what my friends are doing these days. My life is herbal tea, nausea and hiding my stomach from my co-workers.”

  I was about to type, ‘No, not that I know of’, but I only got halfway through it before I remembered the last exchange I’d had with Gemma and my blood ran cold. I’d lied to her face about not knowing what was going on with Sarah. Her expression when she found out…

  Bree saw my own expression. “What’s wrong?” Grimacing, I told her. Instead of looking worried, though, she brightened immediately. “That’s great!” I gave her a really weird look, and she explained, “Well, it means it’s not my fault, doesn’t it? Oh my god, I was so worried that she thought I was some blonde bimbo and teaching me was pointless. I’m so glad it’s actually your fault!” She paused. “Um, I mean that in a non-mean way. I’m sure it was an accident.”

  Ouch. I closed my eyes for a second. Great, that was person number two who was no longer speaking to me. Henry, and now Gemma. I was doing great at this friendship thing. I exhaled audibly. “I’m sorry, Bree. I completely forgot about that.” I finished my text to Sarah, saying, “I think this is about the fact that Gemma found out I was hiding your pregnancy from her. She’s probably angry at me, and by extension, Bree.”

  “Mmm…” came the very neutral reply. “She’d be more likely to be angry at me for that than you. Let me follow up xx”

  I pressed my lips in a thin line, putting my phone in my pocket. “Sorry, Bree,” I told her. “I’m such a fucking screw-up these days.”

  Bree smiled up at me. “Maybe I’m contagious,” she said sheepishly, and then squeezed my hand. “Anyway, don’t worry, I’m sure Sarah will sort it out.” She sat up and stretched her arms way above her head, yawning. “I’m going to have a shower.”

  Bree disappearing freed me up to continue my quest for work. I’d sat down at the kitchen table to update my resume and make it look like I’d done anything in my life other than being a marketing slave at Frost and painting a wall in someone’s café, when the back door opened again, startling me.

  Rob jogged in, closing the door promptly behind him and taking a few deep breaths. His head and shoulders were wet. I looked out the window; it was pouring outside.

  He spent a few seconds staring out at the rain, and then turned towards me and jerked his thumb at the door. “You know, I was feeling guilty about coming back here to say goodbye to Sares when we’re so behind schedule on Dazza’s contract,” he told me. “But I reckon I wouldn’t be laying a single brick in that anyway.” He walked past me to the kitchen. “Cuppa?” He disappeared before I could answer.

  I was trying to figure out if I should mention the painting in the Frost atrium, when Rob plonked a big, heavy mug of tea on the table next to my laptop and sat opposite me, drinking from his own and looking uncomfortable. His fingers were drumming the table.

  He heaved a sigh when he saw me watching him. “Did Sares tell you about her promotion thing?” I nodded, and he frowned. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

  I squinted at him. He… wasn’t acting like that was how he actually felt about it. “Sarah seemed relatively happy about it,” I said neutrally. “Not happy about the timing… but happy about the project.”

  He sat heavily back in his chair. “That’s what I think,” he said, as the floodgates opened. “It’s great those wankers in head office are finally noticing how awesome Sares is, but… yeah, did they have to fucking pick now to promote her? When she should be taking it easy and relaxing?”

  I chuckled. I could not imagine Sarah with her feet up for any length of time. “Sarah’s a bit Type A for ‘taking it easy’,” I pointed out.

  He gave me that one. “Yeah, okay. That’s probably true. But I don’t mean she should laze around in bed or anything…” He shook his head. “You were bloody stressed out when you were Lead, yeah? When I told Sares that, she just said it was because you were having an identity crisis as well.”

  I tilted my head. She had a point. “Well, that’s true,” I said, and then debated whether or not I should be completely honest with him. I decided I should be. “I also had four team members. She’s going to have—god, I don’t know—I guess 20? 25? Yeah, it will be really full on, even without Jason as a manager. She’ll be doing late nights and seven days a week.”

  His looked mortified. “With how sick she’s been?” I nodded, and his face crumpled momentarily. “That woman kills me,” he told me, looking up at the ceiling for a second and taking a deep breath. “She fucking kills me. I wish she’d just quit working for those bastards. She’s got our little baby inside her, she’s sick, and she’s basically going to be running a fucking department full of wankers who stare down her top and tell her to get back in the kitchen. She shouldn’t be working in that place.” He sighed at length and sat forward again, deep in thought. “Maybe I should sell my house in Broome,” he said eventually. “Maybe that’s the way to go. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about working in a stressful job. She could just focus on taking care of herself and our little one.”

  I watched him. “I don’t think money is the only reason she’s doing this, Rob.”

  He looked at me for a moment and then finished his tea. It was a second before he spoke again. “And that’s why she kills me,” he said, gazing into his empty cup. “Fucking hell. It can’t be good for the baby. It can’t be. It’s not good for either of them.”

  I didn’t have a chance to try and comfort him because there were footsteps in the hallway. Rob stiffened. “Shower’s free!” Bree called, appearing in the doorway with only a towel around her. Spotting Rob at the table, she raised her eyebrows. “Rob? Aren’t you supposed to be going back down the coast somewhere? Sarah said you wouldn’t be back ‘til next week.”

  He twisted in his chair. “Yeah, I shouldn’t be, not with how far behind we are,” he said. “I just wanted to say goodbye to Sares since she’ll be away for ages. I’ll head back there tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh. Well, hello!” she greeted him a bit belatedly, and then went to put some clothes on.

  Rob sighed and turned back to me. “You know, I could really do with a shower I don’t need to share with five blokes, I bet there’d even be some hot water left,” he said, pushing himself to stand. “Sorry about the whinge fest. I’ll leave you to your uni stuff, or whatever you’re doing.” He gestured at my laptop.

  I laughed once. “I should be doing that stuff,” I told him. “But what I’m actually doing is looking for a job.”

  “Another marketing position?” he wondered.

  “Honestly? Anyone who’ll take me. I need money.”

  He was going to say something else—something to end the conversation, I think—but then he froze for a moment, half-turning back towards me. “Anything?” he asked, to clarify. When I nodded, he frowned deeply for a couple of seconds. “You know, I heard Daz say he could use a couple more labourers on this housing estate we’re doing, and that was before the rain. They�
�re hard to get down the coast, though…”

  My heart lifted. Oh my god. “Do you think he’d take someone with no experience?”

  Rob made a noise. “He took me, didn’t he? All you really need to be is fit and strong.”

  I looked pointedly down at my tall but ultimately scrawny body. I was definitely neither of those. “Fuck.”

  He laughed soundly. “To be fair, I only got this way from working the mines,” he said, proudly flexing his tree-trunk biceps. “I probably looked a lot like you before that. I’ll ask Daz, but I’m pretty sure he’ll take you tomorrow and Sunday, at least. I’ll let you know,” he promised, and then went off to have a shower while I did what would have been a very embarrassing little dance if there’d been anyone to see it.

  I could barely fucking contain myself, waiting for the word from Daz. Rob was the exact opposite of me in that he wandered around the house, tinkering with various things, chatting casually to us and not prioritising getting an answer for me. It was agonising. I spent the day trying not to perish with anticipation and sending off my resumes, but by the evening the only emails I’d gotten were from Mum. I was trying to type out a short reply to her about how busy I was—not that she’d believe me without a detailed list of everything I’d done so she could scrutinise it item by item—when Rob held his brick-like phone in front of my face.

  I blinked, and then took it from him so I could read it. “yeah cool tell her ok can do sat & sun not sure about next stage tho we’ll see.” It was clearly from Daz.

  I felt like a million tonnes had been lifted from my shoulders. It was two days, but at least it was money.

  “We’ll drive up at five tomorrow morning,” Rob told me with a broad grin. “You good with that?” I was good with anything at this point, so I nodded. He thumped me on the back so hard it made me cough.

  Rob lent me a high visibility rugby top, and after I’d packed for tomorrow, I sat down with Bree to have a look at what she’d put on her timeline and some of the homework she had lined up. We’d just opened up one of her assignments to go through when my phone buzzed.

  It took me a second to psych myself up to check it in case it was Mum, but it was Sarah. “Are you free? Can I call you now?”

  I frowned at the message. Sarah pretty much never called me. “Give me a sec,” I told Bree, and then went into the kitchen and shut the door so I didn’t disturb her while she was reading.

  Sarah answered immediately. Her voice echoed like she was in a bathroom. “Hey,” she said, rushing to speak, “I’m really sorry to do this, and I have to be quick because I’ve been in here for like 15 minutes, and pretty soon ‘women’s stuff’ isn’t going to cut it and they’re going to suspect something’s up with me. Listen, Gem’s not answering me. She’s not answering my texts and she’s not answering when I call. At first I thought maybe she’d just lost her phone again because she’s hopeless like that, but when I asked Liz to pass on a message, she said Gem wasn’t at work today.”

  A knot formed in my stomach. “So what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, Min,” she said. “I don’t know. Can I ask you a massive favour?”

  Like she even needed to ask. “Bigger than letting someone live with you for several months, rent-free?”

  She snorted. “Okay, good point,” she told me, and then sobered. “It might be one big false alarm and she’s just really pissed off at me because I didn’t tell her for ages that I’m pregnant, but can you go over to her house and check? It’s not that far from mine, I’ll text you her address. I just need someone to see what’s going on.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Sarah wasn’t kidding when she said Gemma lived close by. I took my car because it was late, but after I’d punched Gemma’s address into my GPS, I only drove maybe five or six blocks before it politely informed me I’d reached my destination. I might as well have walked.

  The four-storey building I parked beside seemed really out of place amongst the double-fronted family homes around it, and really dated as well. I found it an odd choice; if you were going to buy an apartment, why buy it all the way out in the middle of suburbia? There was nothing out here.

  I didn’t get out of my car and go in straight away. Gemma hadn’t invited me, and she probably wouldn’t be happy about me visiting either. Ignoring people’s messages was the exact opposite of inviting them to show up on your doorstep—as I knew very well—and yet, here I was.

  I leant heavily on my steering wheel and frowned at the building through the rain. I should turn around and go home, I thought. Gemma didn’t want me here, Bree didn’t want me here, I didn’t want to be anywhere I wasn’t wanted; the only person who had any interest in me being here was Sarah… who also happened to be someone who had done and continued to do countless favours for me, let me live in her house, had arranged an amazing surprise party for me, supported me when I needed it… Okay, okay, I get it, I told myself. Groaning, I got out of the car.

  As I jogged through the rain to the shared entrance, a sensor light clicked on in the doorway. The front door was locked when I tried it, and while I was looking for a buzzer, I found 18 of them in a little grid beside the mailboxes. Number 13, Gemma’s, had ‘G. Rowe’ in neat text beside it. I think that was the first time I’d ever seen her surname.

  Instead of pressing it straight away, I stared at it like an idiot. Go on, Min, I told myself. Just press it, let her tell you to go away, and then you can report back to Sarah that she’s fine, and go home. Not surprisingly, though, I wasn’t that excited about hearing someone be angry with me.

  I made a face at myself, I needed to toughen up. I’d caused this mess: she probably wouldn’t have been angry with Sarah at all if she hadn’t found out I’d known about Sarah’s pregnancy first. Taking a deep breath, I pressed the buzzer.

  My heart pounding, I listened to it crackle. I couldn’t hear anything distinct, though; no footsteps, no movement, nothing to suggest someone was deliberately being silent. I was in the middle of texting Sarah again to ask her if maybe Gemma might have just gone out somewhere since it was Friday night, when I heard the sound of exhaling and the buzzer cut off. I glanced up from my phone. She was home.

  And I should have said something, I thought, my face going red. I was like one of those guys who called up girls and just breathed down the line. I didn’t know I was supposed to speak, though, I thought she’d probably say hello first. I leant my forehead against the wall for a second, grimacing.

  I did eventually manage to convince myself to press it again. “Hello? Gemma, are you there? It’s Min. Um, sorry about before.”

  There was a sharp inhale. “Min? What are you doing here?”

  My face went even redder. What the fuck was I doing here? I swallowed. “I’m sorry, Sarah was worried, and she’s away on business, so…”

  “Oh…” she said, and I couldn’t read her voice. There was a long pause, and during the silence I managed to convince myself that driving here was a huge overreaction and Gemma probably thought I was ridiculous. Her reply didn’t help. “I’m sorry I worried you, I don’t—I mean, I don’t feel like visitors.”

  Ouch. Coming from someone as nice as Gemma, that was basically the equivalent of ‘fuck off’. “Okay,” I said, feeling stupid. “Okay, sorry, I’m sorry to bother you. Sorry.” I winced at myself, and then stood away from the buzzer.

  Don’t say anything else, Shakespeare, I warned myself. You’ve fucked up enough, she already wants you to leave. I exhaled a big puff of air, grimacing. Well, at least she was okay and I’d done what Sarah had wanted me to do.

  Feeling like the world’s biggest screw-up—not only were my finances a smoking wreck, not only was Henry not talking to me anymore, Gemma wasn’t either—I turned and began to walk back out to the car with fat raindrops hammering my scalp and shoulders.

  I only made it halfway across the road before it hit me what a coward I was being. Who was I kidding? This was not what Sarah had in mind, she didn’t want me to c
ome over here and just check that Gemma was alive, because of course she was. Simply being alive and answering her buzzer wasn’t an indication that she was okay. Not in the sense Sarah had meant it.

  I stopped in place and just stood there under the streetlights in the middle of the road. What are you going to do about it? I asked myself, the rain drumming on me. Are you going to bother Gemma when she told you to go away?

  Yes, I decided, and then turned and walked back over to the entrance and spent some more quality time staring very intensely at the buzzer.

  Should I bother her, though? Should I really? Mum was always doing this shit to me, and the last thing in the world I ever wanted was to be anything like Mum. Maybe I just needed to leave it. Maybe this was like the whole Henry-me situation: even though I wanted to make up with Gemma for my own sake—and for Sarah’s and Bree’s—I shouldn’t try because Gemma didn’t want it. If that meant Bree didn’t have a Maths tutor and got kicked out of school, and it meant Sarah lost an old friend, that was on me, wasn’t it? I scrunched up my face, trying to think.

  Fuck it, I should at least apologise to her, I decided. I’m obviously the reason she’s not okay, and she should at least know that I’m sorry.

  Taking a deep breath, I pressed the buzzer. “I’m sorry, Gemma,” I said clearly into it. “I’m sure Sarah would have preferred not to tell me, either, except I caught her with the pregnancy test. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I just didn’t think it was my place.” I paused, waiting to see if she was going to respond. When she didn’t, I sighed deeply. “Anyway, please don’t be angry at Sarah or Bree, because it’s my fault. I’m sorry.” I took a breath. “I guess I’ll leave you alone now.” I stepped back from the intercom, figuring that at least I’d tried.

  The exterior door gave a very pronounced click.