by Sarah Rayne
After all the talk, the endless hype around the pregnancy and birth, Russell was conspicuously keen to show how cool they still were, how little their lives would be impaired by this new helpless dependant. He started to sing, tunelessly. Matilda was wearing a T-shirt she’d bought as a teenage fan, and a bag whose strap bisected her cleavage. Chris imagined someone else bumping against her down in front of the stage, in the forest of arms and the confusion of bodies, and briefly regretted his good nature as the three of them went on their way.
‘Just text Russell then, if he starts really crying,’ Bec called back through the closing door, but Chris was determined that he would not.
Chris sat in his friends’ bedroom, decorated with photos of the four of them. There was the one at York with the ‘looking down from the tower’ gag. There they were at the zoo, Russell dressed as a gorilla during an unsuccessful stint as a children’s entertainer. Russell getting his degree. For an hour and a half there was no action at all; Chris read one of Bec’s books on ethical shopping; the quiet was almost eerie. Michael slept on in his tiger-striped babygro, small thumb clasped to his mouth, looking much like he was in a TV advert for bedding. His miniature lips twitched in teaspoon-shallow breaths. He muttered crankily to himself. Chris realized that, one day, impossible as it appeared, this tiny thing would be as old as him, and Chris himself would be a middle-aged man. They could have a beer together.
But then Michael started to scream. He began with scratchy screams which ebbed in and out of coughs. Chris decided to ride it out – this was what babies did. Michael’s yells doubled in volume and intensity. Maybe he’s in pain or something, thought Chris, worried for the first time. He tried to think himself into the role of father. Gingerly, he picked up the baby. Michael was startlingly light, insubstantial for a living thing. At the feel of Chris’s hands he redoubled his yelling. The yells built one on top of another, as if they were snatches of music divided into bars, each time culminating in a raw, awful crescendo, the purest expression of pain Chris could ever remember hearing. Shit, thought Chris, his heart beginning to speed up, this is why you’re not meant to give your kid to anyone, this is why parents always stay with their newborns for months and months, every single night. Still he didn’t panic, but shards of fear were gathering steadily in his guts.
He began to walk slowly around the apartment, whispering to Michael. ‘It’s all right! Mum and Dad’ll be back in a second! Won’t they!’ – and so on, more for his own benefit, he thought. ‘It’s all right, Michael!’ Wasn’t that what they said, just walk around with him and he’ll go back to sleep? It’s not as if I’m some stranger, is it, I’ve been with him almost as much as they have. ‘Haven’t I, Mike, you know me, mate, don’t you!’ appealed Chris. ‘We hang out, mate, don’t we!’ He had lost his initial self-consciousness about talking to the uncomprehending bundle in his arms. ‘We go way back, don’t we, Mike!’ But Michael was unmoved. He continued to scream. That was the only word for it now. Chris had never heard screaming until now.
Chris quickened his pace, walking circuits around the little apartment, out onto the cramped balcony and back in again, around the battered sofa, the lounge room with its giant framed movie posters, Jules et Jim, It Happened One Night – Bec’s favourites. RoboCop, Russell’s. The burst of speed seemed to subdue Michael a little, and Chris sank down into a chair, his legs crossed, the baby in his arms. Michael’s knife-like cries had now receded to small sobs. Compared with what had gone before, they barely registered, like the washed-out music that had just started to play at the end of the concert, six kilometres away, after the real band had departed in a haze of noise and light, and Bec and Russell had turned hand in hand to go, stepping across a carpet of discarded plastic cups.
I can handle this, thought Chris, this is fine. This’ll be OK. He sat there, not daring to move for some time. The sobs died away. Michael’s tiny eyelids closed, opened, closed as he floated around the boundaries of sleep. Chris inhaled deeply in relief, but still couldn’t bring himself to untangle his legs or to shift into a more comfortable position. He sat, listening to the familiar noises from the street outside: the clatter and rumble of trams, voices raised in a friendly argument. His right leg was now completely numb; he tried not to think about it. Chris’s index finger brushed against Michael’s mouth and Michael, without opening his eyes, pressed his lips gently around the tip of the finger, sucking it like a dummy. A couple of minutes later, the next time Michael opened his eyes, Chris offered his finger again; but this time, it seemed to upset Michael. He began to scream all over again.
He’s hungry, Chris thought, that must be why he’s nibbling my finger. He wants actual food. Bec had left a bottle in the fridge.
‘All right, Mike, mate, let’s get you some dinner, shall we?’
He rose, sharply, out of the armchair. The sudden movement dismayed Michael, and as well as wailing he began to writhe in Chris’s arms, kicking out wildly and with surprising force.
‘Hey, it’s all right, mate!’ said Chris, but there was a sudden jolt of pain from his dead leg as it came to life, throwing him off balance as the writhing baby kicked ever more energetically at the air. It was then that he dropped Michael.
For several seconds his brain simply refused to process what was in front of him. This hasn’t happened, thought Chris. I did not just feel Michael, for no reason, drop out of my arms. He is not on the floor.
Very quickly the thin screen of denial melted away, and Chris’s body filled with choking waves of panic, and horror, a word he had never understood the real reach of till now. Michael lay motionless and silent on the threadbare carpet, his head slumped to one side and facing away from Chris, his small plump limbs splayed and hanging limp at his sides. He looked like a plastic doll left on a nursery floor.
Chris fell to the ground, his legs feeling as if all the blood had been let out of them. He tried to say something out loud, but no words emerged. Jesus, he thought, no. He already couldn’t remember what had happened, how the baby came to be on the floor. How can you drop a baby? How can you be holding it, then not be holding it? This was a question that Matilda would ask him, that Bec and Russell would ask each other hundreds of times, and of course, that he would ask himself for the rest of his life. But there was no answer.
He called the emergency number and screamed at an incongruously chirpy woman for an ambulance. I don’t know, he said when she asked if Michael was still breathing, feeling as if he was about to throw up. She told him to check for a pulse. Chris thought he was going to faint. He didn’t trust himself to touch Michael. ‘Just send a fucking ambulance!’ he sobbed again. He laid his hand on Michael’s wrist, which was alarmingly cold, but couldn’t look at him. There was a whisper of a pulse, he thought, but maybe he was imagining it. On all fours, next to the baby, Chris began to cry.
Barely able to focus his eyes on the handset of the phone, he called Matilda, then Russell, then Bec, then Matilda again – none of them could hear their phones for a while, above the din of the huge dispersing crowd. In the end it was Russell he managed to get hold of.
‘Mate, it was awesome!’ yelled Russell before Chris could say anything.
But then he couldn’t say anything at all. He sobbed and shouted, he made noises he could not associate with himself.
‘I can’t hear you, mate!’ Russell said, still jolly as hell, always the last to react to things, and he gave the phone to Bec to try her luck.
Chris made one noise at Bec, and Bec knew.
Somehow, Bec made it home before the others, before the ambulance. The moment she ripped her prone – though still breathing – baby away from Chris, actually ripped him away like a prized possession from a thief, was inevitably the beginning of the end of their near-lifelong friendship. Their shared past was pulped at a stroke.
Michael was in hospital for three weeks. For a while it appeared he might not recover at all. When he did, it was with severe cranial injuries and long-term brain damage. That was
the phrase as Chris first heard it, from Matilda, ‘brain damage’, a phrase like a handful of wire. He had to hear everything from Matilda, for weeks. He couldn’t go to the hospital; he couldn’t speak to, or see, two of his three best friends. At this point he thought, in so far as he could absorb it at all, that this was a temporary situation – long-term perhaps, but temporary. It had been a shattering catastrophe, one that would no doubt overshadow all of them for the rest of their lives, but in the end, they had to forgive him, surely.
Fairly soon, though, he realized that ‘forgiveness’ had nothing to do with it. Weeks became months. The story attained local notoriety: there was an inquiry, there could have been a criminal trial, there were a lot of talks. Chris again and again had to explain, with no expression in his voice, how, yes, he had dropped the boy, he could simply not account for it, it was an accident, a terrible accident. Of course Bec and Russell didn’t want anything to happen to him; they just wanted to do whatever they now had to do to survive. On one occasion, Chris’s and Russell’s paths crossed outside the offices of one of the lawyers involved. They looked away from one another.
In the end, there were no proceedings: Michael’s injury was ruled an accident. People had their opinions. What kind of parents go out to a concert with a newborn baby at home? But then, how could anyone be so unimaginably careless as to drop the most precious thing in the world?
Chris stopped going out. He couldn’t watch films or concentrate on books, or even the TV. He left his reviewing job and began claiming unemployment benefit. For weeks he only stepped outside the apartment to collect his dole cheque. The more inactive he became, almost with each day that passed, the harder it was to imagine returning to the things he used to do. The less he did, the more tired he seemed to be. He felt that, while everyone else’s lives had resumed after the tragedy, or were barrelling on in complete ignorance of it, his had frozen where it was; he had become a spectator.
Matilda went to the opposite extreme, tearing into tasks with a cold-eyed and uncharacteristic efficiency. She went trampolining five times a week, rather than twice; she volunteered for more and more overtime; she took no notice of films, declined invitations to parties. Many of her most endearing quirks seemed to have been steamrollered by the events. Instead of her trademark crumpled T-shirts and joyously mismatched accessories, she had taken to wearing polo-necked sweaters and long skirts – dressing, in fact, like Bec. She picked at her food, never finishing a meal. She stopped walking naked around the house. She didn’t swear as much. She took up smoking, having stopped as a teenager. She insisted on his calling her ‘Matilda’, not Mat, on the few occasions they met for long enough to hold a conversation. She often stayed at Bec’s. When she was at home, she and Chris lay at opposite ends of the bed, eyes wide open.
Russell and Bec went for counselling, having been recommended a therapist by the same person they’d once consulted about their sexual problems. Matilda attended all the sessions, but would never discuss them with Chris afterwards. One day she came back much later than expected. It was a beautiful spring evening: planes buzzed lazily over their apartment, office workers in rolled-up shirtsleeves sipped cocktails in rooftop bars, and the faint strains of an open-air concert reached Chris from a couple of streets away. Buoyed by a momentary surge of positivity, he tried to hug Matilda as she entered. She shrugged him off and sat down at the kitchen table, toying with a bracelet which hung loosely around her wrist.
‘How did it go today?’
She shrugged.
‘How do you think it went?’
‘Well, I . . . I don’t know what I can say.’
Matilda was glancing into a pocket mirror, rubbing something off the tabletop, checking her phone.
‘Please, Mat. Matilda. Please look at me.’
She fixed him with two big eyes.
‘There you go. Better?’
‘I don’t know what I can say.’
Matilda bit her lip, scraped her hand violently across her eyes.
‘You know, after it was over today, Bec just cried for, like, a fucking . . . more than an hour. More than an hour. I was just sitting there with her weeping on my shoulder. Bec! Crying like a . . .’
Chris sat helplessly opposite her, trying to picture this.
‘And Russell is on antidepressants. You know?’
‘I’m feeling just as bad, Matilda.’
‘I’m not saying you aren’t. This isn’t a competition. I’m just saying – I just don’t see how this is ever going to get better. That’s all.’
Chris dug out his voice from somewhere.
‘It will get better because . . . because everything gets better. Time . . .’
Matilda sat down next to him and took his hand, almost roughly, in hers. She gripped it with a fury he had never known before. He could feel her whole body shaking.
‘You’re going to have to move out,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I can’t do this.’
‘You think I can do this any better than you?’
Matilda swallowed and looked at him, and he relived, in a few moments, the whole twenty years, all the way from the blood dripping from her nose onto the floor tiles.
‘The thing is, Chris, you can’t see them. Right? There’s nothing you can do for them because you’re not even able to talk to them. I can. So I have to be there for them. So that means—’
‘It means you choose them, not me?’
‘It doesn’t help anyone to put it like that. It’s not “choosing”. I don’t know what else I can do.’
‘And me? What am I meant to do?’
There wasn’t an answer.
‘I need you,’ said Chris. ‘For me to get through this, I need you.’
She didn’t deny this, but didn’t accept it either. Within twenty-four hours he had begun moving out.
Nobody knew what to do for Chris. His father had died a couple of years before, of lung cancer. His mother had begun to recover from that, thanks to the three boys’ collective efforts, and in any case it had been expected, it was prepared for. Nonetheless it was asking too much of the remaining family to be able to rally and tackle another crisis so soon. And this was a much harder one to understand. Rick and Steve put their big hands on his shoulders, muttered about it being rough luck and not to blame himself, that things happen and you move on, that his mates would have another kid. Chris nodded, dumbly, at everything they said. He sat in the corner, watching what went on in the house with the confused detachment with which he now viewed everything.
Rick had a word one evening after a quiet dinner, enlivened only by the tireless capering of his five-year-old son, Jayden.
‘Don’t let Mum see you like this, eh. Try to make yourself useful around the house. Whatever you can do. Just, she doesn’t need to see you in . . . you know, in all this strife. Not after Dad and everything.’
Chris knew this was true, and he did try. He volunteered for decorating, painting, odd jobs around the house, jobs that didn’t really need doing in some cases, but which his mum eagerly encouraged, hopeful that this meant he was ‘on the mend’. He did bar work, on and off, for a couple of months, in a Mexican-themed place in the City, a comfortingly anonymous setting. But still a single moment could shatter his composure, leaving him pale and shaking.
Once it was a bit of chat at the bar, three guys, harmless banter – ‘Jesus, mate, someone drop you on your head as a kid?’ and laughter. Another time it was the mere sight of a baby, and then one night he dropped the cocktail shaker while mixing up a pina colada, and, looking at the oozy mess on the floor, began to cry.
After the first couple of upsets, the manager, a Greek immigrant, was patient with him (‘Toughen up, mate,’ he said with a jocular thump of the back, ‘it’s not the end of the world’).
But after the tears, he called Chris to his office at the back of the bar, a room barely as big as a wardrobe.
‘For your own good, mate, I think maybe we give it a miss,�
� he said. Chris agreed.
Toughen up. Toughen up. It was what Rick and Steve said to him as well. It was the Australian motto for testing times. Even Matilda used that phrase once. She did her best to stay in touch after he’d moved out; they spoke a couple of times a week, then once a week, then things lapsed further until his main point of contact was her calm recorded voice: You’ve got through to Matilda, please leave a message. But I haven’t got through, have I? he would think. Sometimes he would leave a message, politely asking her to call back, and sometimes she would. But, for people who had spent most of their lives together, this chillingly formal contact felt worse than total separation. And so it was towards total separation that they began to drift.
Chris went to three sessions with a therapist, making sure he chose a clinic where he couldn’t possibly run into Bec and Russell by some malign stroke of fortune. When he described the incident, dropping the baby, the therapist did a good job of nodding attentively, but Chris was pretty sure he knew the story already: everyone in Melbourne knew about it, it seemed. The man told him that blaming himself would send him into a ‘spiral of shame’. He had to be kind to himself. Chris tried to explain once again that being kind was not the point; the only point was that he’d hurt the baby and lost his friends, and life had taken a turn from which he couldn’t see how it was possible to recover. The therapist said things might well look different in a year.
Toughen up. Be kind to yourself. Chris stumbled through a couple more months. Summer came and Melbourne was hot and feverish. The grass was yellow in the parks, there were water shortages, the air smelled of barbecues every night. Chris would see groups of high-school kids, students, friends everywhere, going to St Kilda Beach, to music festivals, off for long weekends by the sea. He had started taking pills to get to sleep at night. His world, which had shrunk to the area of his mother’s house, was now essentially contained within his bedroom. He read books without taking anything in. Once or twice he found the nerve to call Matilda, but the pauses were now longer than the stretches of conversation. Once, he even called Russell, and to his surprise Russell answered, sounding guilty and hushed, as if at any moment the call would be brutally curtailed.