As my family are hours away, Possum is staying at her family day carer’s. It is her first night away from us, ever. Later, Pauline gives me a photo of her in the bath, a polaroid. She doesn’t look distressed. She looks … inscrutable.
Tuesday before. My regular visit to the obstetrician. I am thirty-five weeks pregnant and will be induced in two weeks, given my gestational diabetes.
He is listening to the heartbeat and I have this urge to ask him if I can listen too, but he only has a stupid old-fashioned cone, like a mini megaphone. Then, as I am walking out, he casually asks me if I’ve been having many movements lately. ‘Not as many as with Possum,’ I reply. Now she was a kickboxer. Once I saw the outline of her foot through my skin, like it was poking through Glad Wrap.
That casually asked question while I was already heading out the door. I think about it later, with the benefit of hindsight. But then? I did not have any inkling that anything was wrong, except for that urge to listen to the heartbeat. Some mother’s intuition. While he must have known and was waiting for me to discover it for myself. That’s why he told me to take my time.
The previous Wednesday day, in bed. Completely wrecked. I had been varnishing the timber edge of the kitchen benchtop. Anyone who’s ever been pregnant knows that when you are still, that’s when the baby kicks. It’s not kicking. My husband, who has never been pregnant, says, ‘Things often go quiet just before the birth.’ Humph. That’s when I started to get anxious.
Saturday morning. Four am. I am on my hands and knees. The contractions are strong and regular. I am fully dilated. The doctor is summoned. I feel for him, being called in at this hour on a Saturday to deliver a dead baby.
I have gas for the pain. I didn’t have anything for Possum’s birth, my all-natural woohoo birth. Now, it’s not even significant that I have gas.
It’s quick and silent. There are no reassuring words. No: ‘You’re doing really well’; ‘It won’t be long now.’ Silence.
I gasp in the gas. I am doing really well.
There’s a complication. I don’t know what the doctor is doing but it hurts. I hurt in silence. Sucking that gas. Maybe that’s what they mean by ‘suck it up’.
It’s done. There is no newborn baby cry, the most reassuring sound in the world.
Silence.
‘What did I have?’
‘A girl. We had a girl.’
Like, why did I have to ask? Doesn’t anyone think it matters? We only had one named picked, a girl’s.
They show her to me, wrapped up in a bunny rug. Luckily I’m not squeamish. Her skin has peeled – it is explained to me – because she has been dead for a while. Making me wonder when I had last felt her kick or move. How shocking, how negligent of me, not to notice that. What with the owner-building, the toddler, the finishing up at work … Poor little thing.
Actually, she’s not so little. She’s a boofer. Eight pound eight, with broad shoulders. That was the complication. He had to reach in, to break her little shoulder to get her out. Another indignity.
She looks like me. Poor thing. Boofy, peeled face.
The staff at the hospital are great. They hang a butterfly symbol on the door of our private room. It lets the staff know there has been a stillborn or SIDS baby, so that people don’t say anything inappropriate, or act cheerful around us like we have just produced a miracle. They take polaroids of her, wrapped in her bunny rug. They give us a small booklet containing a tuft of her strawberry blonde hair, her foot and handprints, her weight and date of birth.
We are told to take our time.
Her sister is brought in, with the paternal grandparents. Possum holds the baby and another Polaroid is taken, this time Possum’s face is clouded. Do you think that’s cruel, subjecting her to death? She is more comfortable with the experience, I think, than my in-laws, who don’t really feel too comfortable hanging out with a dead baby, being of the ‘sweep-it-under-the-carpet’ era. Still, they are here to support us.
It is now midafternoon and even though we have been told to take our time, we feel we should vacate the room. Possum says goodbye to her baby sister. We leave the baby, swaddled in the yellow bunny rug. We have the little booklet and the Polaroids.
We wind up the long driveway to our semi-finished home and there is a glorious sunset, the full blood-orange and tequila version, to welcome us home. It really is a heavenly spot.
The house: there are boxes everywhere and the electrician is still working, even though it is sunset on a Saturday.
‘Sorry,’ he says, about the baby, not the lack of electricity. He is the father of five. The power isn’t going on tonight but it doesn’t matter.
We potter about, putting things in place. The in-laws stay two days and then, seeing we can ‘cope’, they leave. The power is finally connected.
Flower arrangements begin to arrive, and visitors with gifts, mainly plants. My sister and mother arrive. I have made a nice lunch for them. Amazing that one can do stuff like that, on automatic pilot.
Like a time-lapse photo of a fungus growing in a petri dish, the flower arrangements multiply. It’s a high tide of flowers and the cards are like driftwood. We decide not to have a funeral, but have a gathering and my friend Bek plays the flute while a big mob of us plant trees for a forest in her memory.
The Tuesday after. I smell like a dim-sim factory. I have cabbage leaves in my bra. Old wives’ tale, supposedly helps with the discomfort. My boobs don’t know that the baby died. My milk has come in and it’s friggin’ painful. My breasts are engorged, rock hard, and I’m weepy. Every few hours I change the cabbage leaves for fresh ones. Maybe it’s just the cold of the leaves but it is a relief.
People say, ‘I don’t know what to say.’ That’s okay. What’s not okay is ‘bummer’. True – that’s how one friend responded when I told him my baby had died. ‘Bummer’ is when your footy team loses the semi by a point. ‘Bummer’ is when the scoop falls off your ice-cream cone three licks in. Please don’t say, ‘It’s nature’s way.’ Or, ‘It was probably for the best.’ You don’t know that. People cross the road to avoid me. When I go back to work, still numb, the childless librarian says, ‘I expect you want to take your mind off it.’ No, I don’t want to take my mind off ‘it’. You do. You don’t want my sadness to remind you that a tragic thing happened. It’s like I’m somehow diseased, contagious. Then there’s the nurturers. Who fuss. Who prepare casseroles. Actually I didn’t get too many of them. Maybe I’m too too too too stoic.
It’s six months later. For an old bird, I do okay. Bang, so to speak, and I’m pregnant again. I’m not too anxious. I’m not fearful. I don’t think ‘it’ is gunna happen again. But the baby is precious. They all are, but this one is precious.
I’m driving down the hill with Possum, now three and a bit. She still wants her baby sister. She asks, ‘Is this baby going to be happy?’ I reassure her. This baby is going to be happy. And she is.
Frank Slim
Tony Birch
Tony Birch is the author of three novels – The White Girl, Ghost River and Blood – and four short story collections. He has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin twice, and has won the NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award for his contribution to Australian literature. In 2021 he will release a poetry book and a short story collection with UQP.
Viola fell for the boy at first sight, leaving her no choice but to care for him. Her brothel was orderly and maintained rules, and near the top of the list was that her girls couldn’t bring their kids into work. It was a decision governed by common sense. Viola had a solid relationship with the local police, one that didn’t come cheap. Every copper at the station, from senior detectives to young recruits on the beat, put a hand out to look the other way. Social Welfare was a different story entirely. They couldn�
��t be accommodated with either sex or money. Any evidence that a minor had frequented a brothel and the business would be threatened with closure. So, when Else Booth turned up at work one afternoon with a ten-year-old boy, Viola was ready to read the riot act to her. Else raised a hand in her defence.
‘I know the rules, Vee, no kids. I only need to leave him for a couple of hours. There’s an emergency I have to deal with tonight.’
‘Like what emergency?’ Viola asked, suspiciously. ‘You’re paid well here, Else. You have no excuse for working off the books.’
‘It’s nothing like that. This morning I got a call from one of my mum’s neighbours. Mum’s had a fall and has been taken to hospital. They’re keeping her in and I need to visit. Take in some soaps and a nightie for her.’
The boy stood in the doorway, staring at the wooden floor, listening to every word. He was slightly built, delicate even, and wore his dark hair long. The child could easily be mistaken for a girl.
‘How bad is she, your mother?’ Viola asked.
‘I won’t know until I see her.’
The house cat, Easy, wandered into the kitchen, looked up at the boy and nestled at his feet. He kneeled and petted the cat.
‘Okay, you go then,’ Viola said, ‘but be back here by five o’clock to pick him up. I can’t have him around when the show kicks off.’
Else said, ‘Thanks, Vee,’ and kissed Viola on the cheek. She walked over to the boy and asked him to stand up. She lifted his chin and whispered, ‘I’ll see you soon,’ before hugging him and leaving the house by the back gate. Soon after, Viola heard a car exit the laneway in a hurry. A woman driven by experience and intuition, Viola knew in that moment that Else would not be back at five o’clock, or anytime soon.
Viola turned to the boy. ‘What do they call you, love?’
He raised his head and said, ‘Gabriel’, in a whisper.
Viola had not seen a more beautiful child. His cheeks were flushed rouge, he had long eyelashes and his deep brown eyes, seeped with sadness, reinforced a sense of innocence. Viola, a hard woman at the best of times, could not avoid touching him. She ran the back of her hand across his cheek and through his hair. ‘You must be hungry. Sit down and I’ll make you a sandwich and a cup of tea.’
As the girls shuffled in for the evening shift, they were equally taken with the boy. More than one of them referred to him as a little angel, without knowing his name. That night he slept in Viola’s room, on the chaise longue in the bay window, beneath an expensive Persian blanket that one of her regular customers had given her as a gift. Although she hadn’t worked the floor for years, many of Viola’s favourites continued to visit. She would pour them a drink, sit and reminisce about the old days before sending the men upstairs with one of her girls, thirty years younger than the client, at a minimum.
Gabriel sat and quietly ate breakfast at the table the following morning. The boy didn’t ask about his mother, not that day, the day after, or in the weeks that followed. Else’s name was rarely mentioned and no explanation for her disappearance was asked for or offered. Viola suspected that one of Else’s regulars had fallen for her and promised her something more than working nights in a brothel. Other girls had been swept off their feet in the same manner, but such arrangements rarely included taking on responsibility for a child and were generally doomed to failure. Sometimes the proposed elopement was a ruse; the new boyfriend secretly intent on putting his lover to work. A pimp took a bigger slice of earnings than a brothel madame, was about as reliable as a cheap watch and easily roused to use his fists.
Sitting across from the boy that morning, Viola realised she was about to break her own cardinal rule. Later that day she sent the house manager, Johnny Circio, out to buy a single bed and set it up in her room. Viola also handed Johnny a roll of notes. He was to take Gabriel into a department store in the city and get him a new wardrobe and a haircut.
‘Why this kid?’ Johnny asked, after returning to the house with shopping bags full of new clothes, shoes and underwear for the boy. ‘I thought you don’t like kids?’
‘Maybe I feel sorry for him?’ she answered, casually, attempting to hide an immediate and deep affection for the boy she could hardly explain to herself.
Johnny laughed. ‘Come on, Viola. You’ve never felt sorry for anyone in your life.’
She didn’t like being challenged and put him in his place. ‘Mind your business, Johnny. I pay you to keep this house in order, not interrogate me. If you feel a need to behave like a copper, go get yourself a sheriff ’s badge and a bad haircut.’
‘Take it easy, Vee. I’m only asking. He seems like a sweet kid.’
Viola stood at the bay window, parted the velvet curtain and looked out to the street. ‘He is sweet. I don’t know how, growing up around Else. I’ve had more than fifty girls come through here and none of them have been as wild as her. He looks as innocent as a doe, and I want it to stay that way. Be sure he doesn’t go upstairs and keep him away from the side door, so he’s not running into customers. Or police coming by for the collect.’
‘So, I’m supposed to be a babysitter now?’
‘You’re what I pay you to be. I don’t want the dirt of this place rubbing off on him. By the way, I need you to get him into school. You can put him down the road with the nuns. Use your home address.’
‘The nuns? What if they find out he’s living here with you? They’ll kick him out.’
‘No, they won’t. They’d only work harder on saving him. If we send him to one of the state schools and they find out he’s here, the head teacher will be on the phone to Welfare in a blink and he’ll be put straight in a Home. One quality I’ve always admired in the Micks; they never give up on a wayward soul. They’d have persevered with Hitler.’
Viola enjoyed having the house to herself after breakfast time. The girls were gone by seven in the morning and the house was cleaned and empty by nine. She’d make herself a pot of tea and send Johnny off with the laundry and a shopping list, leaving her to sip her tea and read the newspaper. Johnny had enrolled Gabriel at the local Catholic school and, while the boy was not overly familiar with learning, he seemed to enjoy the new experience of having a regular routine.
One morning, soon after Viola had kissed Gabriel on the cheek and sent him off to school, she noticed his lunchbox on the kitchen table. A few minutes later she heard a noise at the side door and assumed he was returning home to fetch it. She got up from the table, walked into the hallway and looked across at the brass knob on the door. She watched as it was turned one way and then the other, followed by a loud knock.
Viola opened the door. ‘Gabriel, what are you …’
She looked into the dark eyes of Des Mahoney. He was a small-time criminal with a reputation for thieving from street prostitutes and backyard bookies, people with no place to turn when they’d been robbed. Mahoney hadn’t done any prison time, a clear indication that the man was also a police informant; any decent criminal avoided him. There were also rumours he had an attraction to younger girls. The stories alone were enough for Viola to despise him.
‘What do you want at my door?’ Viola asked, displaying as much hostility as she could muster. ‘We’re shut.’
Mahoney closed one eye and fixed on her with the other. ‘I was looking for one of your girls, Else Booth. She owes me money.’
‘Too bad. She hasn’t been here for weeks.’
‘When’s she due back?’
Viola noticed that Des had stuck a foot in the doorway. She rested an open hand on the back of the door, in case she needed to slam it in his face. ‘She won’t be back. Else has moved on.’
He shook his head, feigning disgust. ‘That’s no good to me. I got hold of some perfumes for her. French gear. She hasn’t paid me for ’em.’
As far as Viola was concerned the perfume story stunk.
‘You’ve waited some t
ime to collect, Des. Like I said, she’s not coming back. You’ll have to track her down yourself.’ She tried to close the door, jamming his boot.
‘I need the money,’ he snarled.
‘I don’t have time for this. I’m busy.’ She pushed her shoulder against the door, shutting it in his face.
Viola went into her bedroom and opened the curtains on the sunny morning, feeling a little anxious about Des Mahoney. It wasn’t uncommon for a customer to knock at the brothel door after hours, and sending them on their way caused no drama. But Mahoney had unnerved her in a way Viola was not used to. She decided to calm herself by running a bath and was about to take off her dressing-gown when she heard a creaking floorboard in the hallway.
Des Mahoney pushed the door open. He was holding a knife in his hand and smiling at Viola, a mouthful of rotting teeth on display. Viola studied the knife. The blade was short, maybe only three inches long, but well sharpened, by the look of it. Without a weapon in his hand, she wouldn’t have hesitated to take Mahoney on. Viola had battled many men over the years, and had the scars to show for her losses and occasional victories, but she wasn’t about to risk her neck.
‘You can’t be coming in here. I’ll call my manager, Johnny. He won’t put up with this.’
‘We both know your errand boy’s not here. I seen him leave earlier.’ Des waved the knife in the air. ‘I want what I’m fucken owed.’
Viola remained calm. ‘All right, then. How much is it? Let me settle for Else.’
‘I’ll take whatever the house is holding, and’ – he lunged at her with the knife, nicking Viola on the cheek, just below an eye – ‘I’ll take whatever else I fancy.’
Gabriel had left the schoolyard immediately after first bell. He ran through the streets to Viola’s and picked up his lunchbox from the kitchen table. He was about to leave the house when he heard a shout from one of the front rooms. He walked through the kitchen, along the hallway, and stopped at Viola’s bedroom door, hesitating before opening it. When he did, he saw Viola on her bed, lying on her stomach, with her face turned to the wall. Her dressing-gown was hitched up around her shoulders, exposing her naked body. He saw a man standing by the bed with a knife in his hand. Gabriel turned to run and fell. The man leaped across the room and grabbed him by the neck before he could get to his feet. Gabriel was thrown across the room and slammed against the side of the bed. Mahoney bent forward to be sure Gabriel got a look at his knife.
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