The Spill

by Imbi Neeme

  Samantha remembered with a jolt that she hadn’t taken her pill that morning.

  ‘Um, I think we’re missing a couple of presents,’ she told Trent. ‘Can you go check the top of the wardrobe to see if I’ve left some there?’

  ‘Sure. But seriously, Sammy,’ he said as he headed up the stairs, ‘we owe it to humanity to have another child.’

  As she quickly fished out her contraceptive pills from the zipped compartment of her handbag, Samantha tried to imagine any perfection coming from having a second child but could only sense a deepening imperfection in herself.

  She placed the pill on her tongue and swallowed it without water. There was something about feeling it travel down her throat that reassured her.

  ‘Nah, there’s nothing there.’ Trent was already heading down the stairs so Samantha hastily shoved the pill packet into her bag.

  ‘Did you look properly?’ she asked him, annoyed that she hadn’t been able to return the pills to their special compartment. It was another thing she’d need to remember to do later.

  ‘Of course I did,’ Trent replied. ‘Are you sure you didn’t hide any somewhere else? Like inside our wardrobe?’

  Samantha tensed up. ‘No, I would have asked you to check there if I had,’ she replied sharply.

  ‘They’ll turn up eventually,’ Trent shrugged. ‘Shall we start loading the car?’

  Samantha nodded, but her mind was now on the vodka bottle stashed under the false floor of the wardrobe. Since the previous New Year’s, she had been drinking maybe once or twice a week, on the nights Trent was out or working late. She would sit in the dark lounge room, enjoying the silence and the physical freedom that came from not having Rosemary’s small hands pulling at her. And she would drink – vodka, mostly, as it left hardly any trace on her breath and she could mix it with a bit of orange juice, in case Trent came home early. Not that he ever did. She was always in bed before he got back and then up again with Rosemary at shit o’clock to watch ABC Kids and drink black coffee. By the time Trent woke up, she felt almost human again, albeit a human filled with regret and self-loathing.

  To offset the regret, Samantha kept to some very clear rules:

  She didn’t drink every night.

  She never drank before Rosemary was in bed asleep.

  She never mixed spirits.

  She never let the drink get in the way of a tidy and well-run house.

  She never ever drank and drove.

  She didn’t interact with anyone else while she was drinking, unless she absolutely couldn’t avoid it.

  The last two rules were particularly important. She’d always regarded drink-driving as one of the worst things a person could do. And she didn’t like the way her voice came out of her mouth when she was drunk, all thick and syrupy. It sounded too much like Tina’s voice when she used to tuck Samantha and Nicole into bed at night, the voice she still used whenever Samantha rang her after midday any day of the week.

  Samantha knew that if she kept to her rules, she would not be like Tina. And she was managing to keep to the rules. Just. Another baby, however, might push her over some edge. Another baby might turn her into Tina completely.

  When they arrived at Trent’s parents’ house, it didn’t take long for his mother, Barb, to corner Samantha and echo Trent’s call for a second child.

  ‘I’ve been thinking that Rosemary could do with a little friend,’ Barb said, following Samantha into the kitchen, a drink in her hand. Everyone was drinking Moët in tall flutes as they opened their presents. Everyone except Samantha, who was drinking tea out of a mug that said Don’t let the turkeys get you down.

  ‘Someone she can moan about you to when she’s older,’ Barb continued, even though Samantha had barely acknowledged what she’d said. ‘Trent says he doesn’t talk to his brothers about us, about me, but I don’t believe him. The only time I ever talk to my siblings is to moan about my parents, and they’ve both been dead for five years.’

  Samantha poured herself some more tea. ‘We have time,’ she told Barb. ‘I’m still young.’

  ‘You don’t want too many years in between them. And you won’t be young forever,’ Barb warned. ‘Nobody likes an old mother.’

  Samantha sipped her tea and pretended it had a huge slug of gin in it. Her relationship with Barb had always been polite, friendly even. But since she’d had Rosemary, it had felt like Barb had been suddenly promoted to line manager, constantly reviewing her work and giving her tips on how she could do better.

  ‘Let’s get back to the others,’ Samantha suggested.

  ‘Yes, let’s. I’m just going to grab another bottle of bubbly,’ she said, wrenching the fridge open. ‘Also, I’ve been thinking . . . isn’t it time Rose stopped wearing nappies at night?’

  ‘Your mother is even pushier with her advice when she’s drunk,’ Samantha observed, as they pulled the car out onto the road. They were already half an hour late for lunch at Nicole’s house. Not that it mattered. Nicole would probably still be peeling the potatoes when they arrived.

  ‘You shouldn’t let her bother you,’ Trent replied from the back seat, where he was sitting to amuse Rosemary. ‘I’ve mastered the art of switching my brain to a mode that makes her mostly sound like white noise. Or like the teacher in Peanuts, all wah-wah-wah-wah.’

  Rosemary clapped her hands with delight. ‘Wah-wah-wah!’ she echoed.

  Samantha ignored her. ‘Well, now she’s hassling me about having another baby.’

  ‘Did you tell her we’ve been trying? Speaking of which, perhaps we could leave Rose with Nicole after lunch and go home to try a bit harder . . .’

  He reached out to touch her shoulder but she shrugged him off.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘It’s Christmas.’

  ‘Chrissmasss!’ Rosemary exclaimed. ‘I’m getting more presssennntttssss!’

  ‘Yes, baby girl, you sure are going to get some more presents,’ Trent told her, before turning back to Samantha. ‘Do you think it might be time to make an appointment with someone? To check everything is, um, okay?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe that emergency caesarean stuffed up your, um, how do you say, plumbing?’

  ‘My complex reproductive system is just plumbing to you?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ she said. She was feeling tetchy now. ‘Well, in answer to your rather badly put question, I think it’s just time. We don’t need help.’ She rubbed her temple.

  ‘Are you having one of your headaches?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You should take something.’

  ‘I don’t have anything.’

  ‘You always have something,’ he laughed, as he reached forward and plunged his hand deep into her handbag on the passenger seat.

  ‘Don’t go through my bag,’ she said, now panicked.

  But it was too late. Trent’s hand emerged from her bag holding the foil packet, its little coloured pills all round and intact, except for one empty row that she’d already taken.

  ‘What. The. Fuck,’ Trent said, each word falling like a ten-tonne weight onto the car.

  ‘Trent—’

  ‘Faahk!’ Rosemary shouted, now clapping her hands with demonic glee. ‘Daddy said faahk!’

  ‘Rose! That’s a bad word,’ Samantha said, trying to catch Rosemary’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Faahk! Faahk!’

  ‘No, seriously, Samantha, what the actual fuck?’ Trent repeated, over the din. ‘When were you going to tell me about this? I thought we were trying to have another baby!’

  ‘I meant to . . .’ She couldn’t even finish the sentence. She hadn’t meant anything other than to never get pregnant again.

  ‘Pull over,’ he said loudly, while Rosemary continued to clap and say faahk.

  ‘We’re almost at Nic’s.’

  ‘Pull over!’ He was shouting now. ‘I’m not going to Nicole’s, I’m going home.’


  ‘Daddy?’ Rosemary said, and went quiet.

  ‘Daddy’s going for a long walk,’ Trent told her.

  Samantha stopped at the kerb and Trent got out without another word, slamming the door behind him.

  ‘Trent, stop!’ She wrenched her door open and ran after him.

  ‘How long?’ Trent turned to look at her, his face twisted with anger. ‘How long have you been taking them?’

  ‘Since February,’ she admitted.

  ‘The whole fucking time?’

  Samantha nodded. She was on the very edge of the precipice now and it was time to jump. ‘I don’t want another baby, Trent.’

  There. She finally said it. The relief of finally shedding one of the terrible secrets she’d been carrying around was so overwhelming, she felt giddy.

  ‘So why didn’t you just say so? You’ve had, what, ten months to tell me? But instead, you let me believe that we wanted the same thing.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘That’s fucked up, Samantha. We’re married. We’re meant to be on the same team, not working against each other. What else have you been hiding from me?’

  Samantha opened her mouth, ready to jump again, ready to tell him about the tequila bottle with the little red hat and the vodka and all the nights of self-erasure, but then Rosemary started crying from the car. Samantha closed her mouth. Instead, she put her hand on Trent’s arm. She needed to feel his skin, she needed to regain control of the situation. ‘Come back to the car, come to Christmas lunch. We can talk about this properly later.’

  ‘I don’t want to be around you right now,’ Trent said. It was his turn to shrug her hand off.

  Samantha watched him go and then slowly returned to the car and her screaming child. She sat in the driver’s seat, clutching the steering wheel, wondering what to do. She was too tired to go after Trent. She was also too tired to face Tina at Nicole’s house without Trent by her side. But if she went home and Rosemary refused to have a nap while Trent was still AWOL, she wasn’t sure if she could cope. At least at Nicole’s, she might be able to sneak in her own nap while her sister looked after Rose.

  ‘Let’s go see Aunty Nic and Grammy Tina,’ she said, once Rosemary had calmed down enough to hear her. ‘Won’t that be fun?’

  ‘I want Daddy,’ Rosemary said tearfully.

  ‘I want . . .’ Samantha had no idea how to end that sentence. She clenched her jaw and started the car up again, revving the engine a little to drown out Rosemary’s sniffling. ‘Let’s go have ourselves some Christmas!’

  At the mention of the word ‘Christmas’, Rosemary’s tears instantly dried up.

  ‘Did Santa go to Aunty Nic’s house?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, Santa went to Aunty Nic’s house,’ Samantha replied, hoping to God that Nicole had pulled her finger out and made an effort.

  But at Nicole’s, there was no sign of Christmas. No decorations, not even a tree. Not even a sign of Nicole. Just Tina, in the lounge room, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past, her make-up already smudged a little, with the inevitable drink in her hand.

  ‘Hello!’ Tina said brightly.

  Rosemary lingered warily at the front door. ‘Where’s Christmas?’

  ‘Where’s Nic?’ Samantha asked. The chance of a nap felt even further away than ever and she felt so very, very tired.

  ‘In bed.’

  ‘In bed?’ Nicole didn’t have children. She had no excuse to be in bed.

  ‘Lucky I came early and put the ham in the oven,’ Tina said. ‘I’m hoping it’s not still frozen in the middle. Where’s Troy?’

  ‘Trent.’

  ‘Where’s Trent?’

  ‘We . . . we had a fight,’ Samantha said and before she could stop herself, she added, ‘I think we might be breaking up.’

  As she said it, she realised it might be true, and she burst into tears. When Tina put her drink down – actually put it down – to give her a hug, the tears came even harder.

  Piece #20: 2001

  About six weeks after her last break-up with Darren, Nicole bought a pregnancy test. Her period, which usually arrived every twenty-eight days without fail and was the only part of her life that could be relied upon, was about three weeks late.

  While she waited for the result, she imagined what it might be like to have a baby and whether it would be easier with or without Darren around. She thought of the times she’d babysat Rosemary and how Rosemary had cried and cried and how utterly helpless she’d felt, and then she imagined feeling like that twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, across the lifetime of a child. It would be hard to do it on her own. But then she thought about Darren and the way he jutted out his jaw whenever she failed to do something the way he liked it, which was more often than either of them was comfortable with, and she wondered if it might actually be easier without him.

  She picked up the stick and saw the blue line and she knew, Darren or no Darren, that nothing would ever be easy again.

  When she went to Tina’s place for Sunday dinner three weeks – and four more pregnancy tests – later, she was still pregnant. She hadn’t told anyone. Not Darren. Not Tina. Not any of her friends at the bar she worked at, mostly because they were all a decade younger than she was and were likely to freak out. And certainly not Samantha. In the last conversation they’d had, before Nicole knew she was pregnant, Samantha had been talking about motherhood like it was something you needed an advanced degree in. Nicole didn’t want Samantha to make her feel like she couldn’t do it.

  While the roast finished cooking, they sat down in front of Tina’s current jigsaw. It was a European streetscape from the 1970s featuring lolly-coloured buildings and men standing around in flares.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in a few weeks,’ Tina said. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Nicole replied. Hiding in her flat and taking pregnancy tests had certainly taken up a lot of her time.

  ‘It’s a busy time of year,’ Tina said. ‘I’m organising the Kris Kringle at the pub this year. Every year, I swear I’ll never do it again, but by the time November comes around, I’ve forgotten the pain.’ She poured herself some wine. ‘A bit like childbirth.’

  ‘I’ll stick with water,’ Nicole said, as Tina went to pour some into her glass. ‘I’ve . . . got a headache.’

  Tina raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Instead, she asked, ‘How’s That Darren?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. It’s been over two months since we broke up. This time it might stick.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Tina said, sitting back in her seat. ‘It’s probably for the best. Although I’ll miss having him around at parties. It’s been nice not always being the worst-behaved person in the room.’

  Nicole gave a small smile. Tina had once said Darren had the social delicacy of a Pritikin scone. Darren himself blamed it on his time in Japan, but that was now over six years ago, and Nicole had started to suspect he had always been that way.

  She started rummaging through the puzzle box while Tina connected pieces of sky. Most people left the sky until the very end, but Tina always liked to tackle it first.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, as she fished a blue piece out of the box and placed it on the board. ‘Do you ever wish you’d broken up with Dad earlier? You know, before you had kids?’

  ‘And not have had you and Sammy? No. Never.’

  ‘Okay, pretend for a moment that you were able to have had both of us, but without Dad knowing, without him in the picture.’

  ‘I couldn’t have done that to your father,’ Tina said, as she held her wine glass up to the light and swirled the red liquid around. ‘While he and I disappointed each other terribly, you two have never disappointed us. Not at all. You two are the best of both of us and I couldn’t have denied him that.’ She took a sip from her glass and then set it down on the table. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was just wondering.’

  Tina looked at her for a moment and then turned back to the jigsaw.

&
nbsp; ‘Ooh, these two bits of cloud fit together,’ she said, suddenly delighted.

  That night, Nicole sat in her small unit in Inglewood and treated herself to a latest release video, Bridget Jones’s Diary. She watched it from the two-seater IKEA couch she and Darren had put together during one of their happier periods, when it looked like he might be moving in for good. She remembered how she had made sure not to drop the allen key, not even once, and, as a result, Darren hadn’t shouted at her at all.

  As she watched the final scene of the film where Bridget Jones runs out in the snow in her underwear, Nicole realised she was the same age as Bridget, and yet Nicole had never been close to making a grand gesture like that. She’d let Darren come and go like he was a cat, not the love of her life. Maybe, she thought, the reason he had never really given himself to her is that she had never asked anything of him.

  So she decided to tell him about the pregnancy.

  After a few attempts to reach him on his mobile, she rang his parents’ house.

  ‘I’ll get him for you,’ Darren’s mother said, reluctantly. She put her hand over the phone, but Nicole could still hear her say, ‘It’s Whatsherface.’

  Whatsherface. She and Darren had been dating on and off for almost six years and she was still Whatsherface. She wondered if being pregnant with Darren’s child would finally elevate her to something more.

  ‘Hello?’ Darren said. He sounded pissed off.

  ‘Darren, can we meet?’

  ‘We’ve broken up.’

  ‘Yes, I know we’ve broken up. There’s just something I need to tell you.’

  ‘I don’t need any of the stuff I left behind. Give it to charity. Like you did last time.’ He still hadn’t forgiven her for the time she’d given his Steely Dan and Phil Collins-era Genesis records to the Salvos, even though she’d rung him five times to collect them.

  ‘This is another thing. Something a bit more complicated,’ she told him. ‘I’m pregnant. We’re having a baby.’