‘I love this house,’ Toby said eating his dinner.
‘I love this house too, Tobe.’
‘When does it snow?’ Ben asked.
‘Around July probably. Still got a long way to wait for that. Around the time the baby will be born.’
‘I still think we should call him Optimus Prime.’ Ben laughed.
‘It might be a girl,’ I pointed out.
‘I hope not,’ Toby said. ‘Girls just like playing with Barbie dolls. Boring.’
‘Not any little girl of mine.’ I laughed. ‘Also, we have an appointment at the school on Monday. I’ve heard it’s a great school. You’ll be a big schoolboy, Toby. Are you excited?’
‘Meh, yeah.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t think I’ll like having to wear a uniform though. It’s not yellow is it?’
‘Um, no I think it’s blue or white. Yes, white shirt and grey shorts.’
‘Good, because yellow makes me feel psycho. Hope my teacher is nice,’ he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
After we’d all eaten, I made the boys do the washing and wiping up and then they went to unpack toys. I lifted the phone from its cradle and heard a dial tone. Again. It was definitely connected. Clay had written the new number down and said he’d call me from work as he was finishing. He had been pretty certain he’d get away by three. He was going to load up his car with his clothes and records and weights and stuff before work so he’d get away as quickly as possible. I didn’t have his work number and no one was answering at his mate Matt’s place.
He was so late and I was getting rather pissed off. Maybe the traffic up to the mountains was heavy on a Saturday afternoon, I told myself. Weekenders coming up from the city for a romantic weekend getaway. I couldn’t wait for him to see what I’d done with the place. It looked super great. I was like the clichéd frustrated housewife waiting for her errant husband.
The dusky evening brought a welcome chill to the air. I sat on the top step of the front balcony, sipping on a camomile tea, waiting. The children were making themselves at home, setting up their toys and putting books in their bookcase.
I kept glancing back at the telephone in the front hallway and then back to the long driveway bathed in deep shadows from the formation of pine trees beside it. I heard a howling that sounded like a wolf, and a bagpipe player was practising in a nearby house. It was mournful but beautiful. A ghostly fog rolled down Balmoral Road and I felt the prickle of tears as I wondered where the hell Clay was and why he hadn’t called.
At nine o’clock, with the boys asleep, exhausted, and the sound of the clock in the kitchen tapping out the time, the phone finally rang. I’d assumed by that late stage that either Clay’s car had broken down or he’d had to stay late at work. I grabbed it in two rings and told myself not to sound angry.
‘Finally!’ I said down the receiver.
But it wasn’t Clay. It was Krissy from the surgery.
‘Hey there, dragon features. Are you settled in up there?’
‘Yeah, it’s great,’ I said. ‘Are you missing me already? Ringing me on day one!’
‘Nah, good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.’ She laughed. ‘Hey, I just wanted to tell you some gossip,’ she said, her voice getting all serious. ‘Doctor G got called out this afternoon by the police.’
‘Really? The police? Why?’ I asked, intrigued.
‘Suicide,’ she said. ‘Hanging. It was one of our patients. You’d remember him. The hot one. We used to joke about him. Big muscles. Clay … you remember? His fiancée found him.’
And the bottom of my world dropped out.
Dear Clay,
You didn’t leave me a suicide note so I’ve written one to you.
Here it goes.
I’m speechless. I just can’t deal with this at all. I know, I know you must have lost your mind and been in a complete bubble of despair when you did what you did. But, really, did I mean NOTHING to you? I would have made it better, fixed things up. Whatever drove you to do this, you stupid, stupid bastard, you didn’t have to deal with it this way. Work? You were leaving that behind. You owed them money. So what? Over time you could have paid them back. You hadn’t told that bitch-fiancée of yours that you were with me. Okay, so she’s probably not a bitch and she’s probably feeling exactly like I am right now but YOU are a bitch for a) not telling her and b) for not telling me that you hadn’t told her and that other little snippet of information that you also forgot to tell me THAT YOU WERE LIVING WITH HER! See, I’m hurting, I miss you, I love you, I’m heartbroken but I’m also FUCKING ANGRY with you. What a lame, weak bastard you have been.
Were you even going to move up to the mountains with us? Did you intend to do that and get cold feet at the last minute, or did you let me sign a lease and move my boys out of school to some remote mountain town where I know no one and have no car and no job and your baby in my belly, knowing I would be doing it all alone? Did you let me move here with no intention of moving up here with us? What do I tell your baby? You told me you were really looking forward to being a dad. Was that a lie? Was it all a lie?
What was it that tipped you over the edge? Was it your work and the possibility that they might press charges when they found out you’d been embezzling? See – there – I can’t imagine you doing that. I don’t believe it for a second. But you never told me about these concerns. I wish you had. You could have cleared your name and if you were guilty, well, I would have stood by you while it got sorted, no matter what. Matt told me you had a gambling problem. How did I not see that? How much money did you put through the poker machines? Was it worth your life?
Or was it that you couldn’t decide between the fiancée and me? Did you love us both? Did you love her and just felt trapped by me? Or the other way around? I saw in your eyes that you loved me. Your eyes can’t lie. If you loved me and not her, why was it so hard to tell her? People break up every day. It happens. She would have accepted it and got on with her life.
Or was it the baby? Were you feeling trapped? Were you scared of becoming a parent?
Or was it a toxic combination of all of these factors? (For fuck’s sake, a suicide note would be helpful right now.)
Now I will never know. I have to live with this. You’ve left me broken and pregnant and so guilty because I feel like I killed you, like I pushed you to it and I don’t know if I can keep putting one foot in front of the other. BUT I HAVE TO, don’t I? I’m a mother and I don’t have a choice. I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE.
I am so alone. I am in this mountain house that was going to be our love-nest. I can’t stop crying. I am in so much pain. I wish I was numb. I want to be numb. They say that numbness sets in. Well, I am sitting here with a thousand burning needles of pain stabbing at every part of my body and inside I am screaming for numbness to please come and cloak me.
I want to be sedated. I want to crawl into a long dark sleep but I can’t. And your baby is moving inside me and I wonder if he or she is crying. Is the grief crossing the placenta and making the baby sad and in pain? If I do fall asleep I wake up fitfully thinking it is all a nightmare and in the darkness the reality crushes down on me like a huge rock rolling over my body.
You shouldn’t have done this, Clay. It was stupid and cruel and gutless. You leave behind a hole, a gaping pit of pain while you are just molecules of energy floating about space like electric snow. You have evaporated and all that is left of you is inside my body.
I love you, Clay. I always will a little bit I think. But I will also always be angry at you.
I will give your baby the best life I can and make it wonderful, in spite of you. You won’t be here to hold this child, to comfort this child when he or she is sad. You’ll miss the first smile, the first teeth, the first word, the first step. The twenty-first. You opted out of all of this. Well, I opt out of you. YOU ARE DEAD TO ME and that would be a funny sort of thing to say if you wer
en’t actually dead – to me. Just so I can survive this now, Clay, I’m going to wrap you up like a special toy I’ve outgrown and I am going to put you into the back of the wardrobe of my mind. You opted out. Remember that. It’s so final. I am going to have this baby all on my own. Your baby doesn’t need you. I don’t need you. I will love you a little forever but I’ll put it away where no one can see it.
I’ll put it away now. Goodbye.
Nik x
I looked at my little purple walnut of a son. The boys and I had decided to call him Harrison, mainly because it was Harrison Ford’s birthday the same day and we were all massive Star Wars fans. The mood in the labour ward was festive. My sister Annie, my mother and Ben and Toby were all fussing to touch the little baby. Harry was a hairy little thing and I felt serene in the afterglow of a near-perfect birth. While not pain-free, it had only been three hours long and quite bearable.
‘I saw the baby get born.’ Ben glowed as he shared that information with Toby. ‘And I saw Mum’s liver.’
‘It was a placenta, Ben.’
He shrugged. ‘It looked like a liver.’
‘Well I saw Hey Hey It’s Saturday,’ Toby countered.
Ben had cut the umbilical cord while his younger brother watched television with my mother in the next room. Harry was born at eight twenty-eight pm, weighing eight pounds eight.
I think having Ben present for the birth helped me to deal with it all. I didn’t want him to see me in pain so I somehow managed to get through it all with a minimum of fuss. No drugs! None. Oh, OK, I did beg for an epidural at the end and the anaesthetist did jam the giant horse-sized needle into my spine, but it hadn’t worked. They wouldn’t let me stand up for hours in case it kicked in but it never did. I’m still waiting.
The room was warm and I felt surrounded by so much love. I was also very aware of what was missing. No one spoke of it, and I didn’t even let myself think of it. The thing wrapped up in the back of my mind-wardrobe. The one person who should have been there, but wasn’t.
I’d told my parents that it was a Holy Spirit sort of conception and to leave it at that. I don’t think they bought it, but I’d warned them I would refuse to talk about the baby’s father and they, so far, were respecting that.
‘Can I hold him?’ Toby asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Hop up here next to me.’
He scrambled beside me and I gently placed the baby in his arms.
‘Mind his head, Toby. Just hold him under his neck,’ Mum fussed.
Toby looked down in awe at his new brother while Ben gently stroked his little forehead. Harry made a grimacing face that almost looked like a smile. My three sons. My heart was swollen up to twice its size and it was the first time I had felt pure happiness for a very long time.
After everyone had gone, I lay in the dim hospital light with Harry in my arms. He was so peaceful and looked like a little resting Buddha. Something scratched against the window and I thought it might be raining. Winter in the mountains had crept up and blown a freezing blanket over everything. I had spent the last few weeks of my pregnancy in the bathtub soaking for hours on end, letting out the water as it became tepid, and then topping it up with water just shy of scalding me. I couldn’t afford proper heating.
The central heating in the hospital was a little stifling so I pulled off the tiny woollen skullcap Mum had knitted for Harry. His tiny fist curled around my finger and he made whimpering noises as he slept. Was he dreaming of his fluid, dark world and his sudden dramatic eviction into a new place of space and light and dry air?
He was darker than the other boys, with a tuft of brown down on his scalp. Dark like Clay. His skin was an angry red, still reeling from the sudden infusion of oxygen. I looked for Clay in his face but he looked more like Yoda. Except for the heart-shaped lips. The lips were exactly the same. I kissed them and I inhaled the smell of him. He smelled like buttered toast and love.
When he woke I pressed a swollen nipple into his mouth and he drank deeply, drawing colostrum from my breast to nourish his hungry little body. I felt about as much like a goddess as I ever had. Life was such a miracle.
As the new morning spread a halo of light over us, I blinked at the glare and gasped as the nurse opened my curtains. It had snowed and the pine tree outside my window was iced with white like someone had spilled ice cream over the world.
My head danced a slow waltz over broken glass and my mouth was a gaping desert cave with gunk plastered to the ceiling. Harry was bawling in that hiccupping loop. A human siren. I pushed myself out of bed and lifted him from the cot. He was hungry. He was always hungry and I was so, so tired. My bones were made of stone and I had mercury in my veins.
We lay back on my bed, my baby’s body nestled beneath my underarm, and he sucked voraciously, milk spewing from either side of his heart-shaped mouth, trickling warmly down over my back to puddle on the sheet beneath me. Three months had passed in a blur of tears.
I hated myself. I hated my life. I hated the cold. I hated being poor. But mostly I just hated myself. I felt like a molten wax dummy, shapeless, bland, useless. My life was a Ferris wheel of relentless disappointment. Every day turned about in the same monotonous way. I was sleep deprived. I was money deprived. Winter was over but it was still so damn cold in the mountains. I could not afford the heating. I was heat deprived. I lived a life of abject deprivation. I was so absorbed in my own melancholy but I couldn’t seem to help it. I wondered how much further down this rabbit hole I would need to go to reach where Clay got to at the end. Not far, I thought. Bad Nikki was back and she was meaner than ever.
BAD NIKKI: You killed him. You got pregnant and pressured him and you killed him.
GOOD NIKKI: No. He was just sick.
BAD NIKKI: Yeah, sick of you.
I was drinking too much. Sleeping too little. Alcohol was the only thing that silenced Bad Nikki. The boredom of misery was eating me away like a cancer. I had one good new friend in town and she made me laugh. I’d met her at school during one of the teacher–parent days. Hanging with Rhoni, sharing a coffee after school, was the highlight of my day. Harry was a wonderful baby, as far as babies go, but it was such a demanding job, raising those three boys on my own, and I didn’t know most days if I could do it. Sometimes it all seemed too much. Without a car, life was hard. A carton of milk. A loaf of bread. Those things required a one-hour round trip of walking and there were bastard hills!
Ben and Toby hassled me to buy them a cat. I bought a rescue cat from the pound and Rhoni drove us home with it. But straight up, after the cat was home for about ten minutes, it turned out Ben was completely allergic and the thing was completely feral. This was yet another example of my ridiculous impulsiveness. Get a cat, they’d said. It will be great, they’d said. That cat was as black as night. Evil as all get-out. It sat on the back of the couch, looking at me, plotting ways to do terrible things to me or the baby. I had never seen a cat look the way that one did. He looked taxidermied, although he was large as life. Those eyes looked like yellow marbles. And he was always so still. Hauntingly still. I decided he wasn’t my cat: he belonged to Bad Nikki. She’d sent the cat into my life to watch me.
I tracked down the Sydney address for Clay’s mother and wrote her a letter telling her about Harry. I felt a flutter of joy when I got a letter back and ripped it open. It was a short letter. She told me that, after what she’d learned in my letter, she blamed me for Clay’s death, said I had deliberately trapped him by getting pregnant and that she never wanted to hear from me or have anything to do with us ever again. I felt my whole body go numb and ripped the letter into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.
I had four clients who brought me regular baskets of ironing. Sitting in front of the television and dragging a shitty iron over other people’s designer clothes was not wildly stimulating but it provided some money.
Ben was acting up, refusin
g to go to school some days. One morning he even climbed onto the roof of the shed and just sat there while I screamed like a madwoman at him to get the hell down from there before the school bus arrives. It was still freezing, always fricking freezing, and the fog that hung over Leura reflected my mood. A dark, insidious cloud of melancholy had rolled over my life, bleaching all the colour and excitement from it.
I stood in front of my wardrobe one cold morning, staring at my clothes, and began to cry hysterically. I couldn’t make a decision. I felt like ringing Rhoni to ask her to come over and help me choose my outfit for the day. Nothing fit. Nothing looked any good. I hated everything in my wardrobe. I missed all my Sydney friends. I was all alone. I was shallow and pathetic. I wanted someone to shoot me, to put me out of my misery. I wanted to cop out and wrap myself up and put myself up the back of the wardrobe too, next to Clay. It would have been so easy. Just to leave all my problems for someone else to worry about. Just shake off this mortal fucking coil and be done with it.
BAD NIKKI: Do it. Do it and take those brats with you. The world will be a better place with one less houso mum in it.
GOOD NIKKI: Please, please just leave me alone.
The months ticked by like the timer on a bomb. I prayed to a god I did not believe in to give me the strength to change my life. The drinking was drowning me. I functioned through the day and did all the right things. School lunches. Ironing. Feeding the baby. I was babysitting two other little children one day a week and I did a good job because I had to. I never drank while they were in the house. It brought in some more money but I seemed to only ever talk to children and they jabbered on with a load of nonsense. I did all the right things – all the right things. Healthy, home-cooked dinners. Made the boys eat their veggies. Homework. Bathing. But then as the night drew its curtains around me, I crawled into a cheap cask of wine and stayed there until I crawled, quite literally, to bed. The baby got bottles of formula through the night and in the morning so at least I wasn’t inviting him to the booze party via breast-feeding. The hangovers were intense. The self-loathing every morning almost unbearable.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 20