I ask her how she’s feeling.
‘Really shit.’
‘Well, that’s to be expected.’
She drops her towel and pulls on a t-shirt. For the few seconds her naked body is exposed, I stare at her abdomen, expecting maybe to see a scar, even though I know that’s not how it’s done.
‘Yeah, but it’s hard to know what’s to be expected because I had an abortion and what’s to be expected because I went out last night.’
‘Was it fun at least? Who was there?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says at first. ‘Renee. Ginnie. Matthew. Travis.’
I feel sick when she says his name even though I’d asked wanting to hear it.
‘I can’t believe Travis was there, actually.’ Sarah leans in close to her mirror, runs her fingers over her face. ‘He was all mopey.’
‘Understandably.’
‘Yeah, I know – so maybe stay home if you’re sad your mate died.’
I cross my hands over my abdomen.
When Sarah finishes at the mirror, she turns to me. ‘What are you doing?’ She’s looking at me holding my stomach.
‘I’m starving.’ This isn’t a lie.
‘Me too.’
There’s a KFC at the end of our street. I don’t go there because I’m a vegetarian and actors aren’t meant to have fast food pimples. Sarah isn’t vego, but maintains she doesn’t go because I make her feel bad about it, though I don’t remember ever telling her it was disgusting and neither does she. But about twice a year, if there’s an emergency situation, we go there together. We call it the emergency department. I offer to go alone this time, but Sarah says she’ll come too.
‘Maybe a walk will help me.’
I think this is probably true for the comedown, probably not true for the vacuum.
My sense of smell has become so acute that sometimes I think I can smell the fat from the ED when I’m in our backyard. We’re only halfway down the street when I first think I might spew. I decide to fill up on chips, reasoning that I should be able to stomach those.
On the walk back, a hot plastic bag in my arms, I’m almost quivering with nausea.
We sit cross-legged on Sarah’s bed. She’s eating chicken and I’m washing down chips, one at a time, with a sip of water. A record plays softly below our conversation and we don’t talk about the abortion. We talk about Sarah’s ex who ‘did this to her’, and we talk about a campaign she’s working on that requires her to run an Instagram account for a houseplant. I update Sarah on the situation with my agent. ‘She says I’m too famous to sell insurance, not famous enough to sell face cream.’
‘I never saw it,’ Sarah says. ‘Why everyone thought you were a good actor.’ She pauses, sucking grease from her fingers. ‘Your stage face reminded me of someone looking bored during sex.’
I feel vindicated and offended at once.
Sarah hasn’t noticed that I haven’t been drinking for the past two weeks, or that I’ve been vomiting at least once a day and sleeping in the afternoons. She never seems to notice me much, in fact. Only when she berates me for not being home on a night when she wanted company. Mostly friendships aren’t like relationships, where you check in and evaluate and worry yourself sick if it’s not working. A lot of the time friendships probably aren’t working – not in the sense of being toxic and full of screaming (although occasionally they are), but in the sense that they’re not doing anything, have been put to rest like a bicycle on a rack. You exist alongside one another, separately. Then one day something happens, like one of you has an abortion or maybe you just get high and you have a conversation where you talk about yourselves, and you realise that all that time spent existing alongside one another, seemingly not caring, allowed some kind of understanding to seep between you. Suddenly you’re having this conversation and you realise your friend understands things about you that you didn’t and they’re presenting you and your life to you in ways you hadn’t seen before and you’re falling in love with your friend the way you only fall in love at the beginning of a relationship. And it’s because of this love, its surprising appearance and depth, that I get swept up in our friendship for a moment and I tell Sarah I’m pregnant.
‘Are you kidding?’ She gags on her chicken. Wipes her mouth with her palm and then wipes her hands on her sheets.
‘No. I’m having a baby.’
‘And you’re telling me now?’
I was planning on waiting until Annie got back from Japan for this. I was planning on telling Annie first.
‘I’ve been dying,’ I say. ‘I’ve been vomiting in the shower with the water running so you wouldn’t hear me.’
‘I heard you; I just thought you were hungover.’
Even though I haven’t had a drink in weeks. I feel a twinge of annoyance, despite all the love I felt moments ago. I listen to the record filling the silence and realise that from now on Jen Cloher will probably always remind me of this day with Sarah.
‘Well, I can’t lie to you,’ she says eventually. ‘It fucking sucks. I swear it felt like my cervix was being stabbed with a knitting needle. It was horrid. I’m sorry, but it’s your fault for telling me you’re pregnant when I’m coming down.’
She went under, so she shouldn’t have felt anything. Unless maybe you can still feel something. Or maybe she decided to save four hundred bucks and not go under. I want to ask, but I decide against it for now.
‘I’m having a baby, Sarah.’ I stare at her eating chips. I keep staring until she stops eating.
‘Why?’
‘I want to.’
‘No, you don’t.’
I continue staring at her and I can see the moment she realises what I’m saying. She peers at me, like she’s reading fine print on my face. She doesn’t say anything, just watches me. I feel sick, maybe because of all the salt or maybe the admission or maybe the foetus. It starts to rain outside, slow and heavy drops. I can hear cars driving fast, and that makes me feel sick too. Sarah takes a breath, about to speak, but then I see another thought cross her face. ‘Wait,’ she says, although neither of us was speaking. ‘Who’s the father?’
‘It’s Pat.’
I’m surprised and a little relieved when I start to cry. I thought women got weepy when they’re pregnant, but this is the first time in weeks that I’ve cried, the last time being five weeks ago, when I suggested to Pat that we see each other again and he said no. Since then, when I cried because I thought he didn’t see me as girlfriend material, I haven’t cried. Not when I found out he was dead; not when I was told it was suicide; and not after that, when I found out I was pregnant with his baby. I dry my eyes with my palms because my fingers are salty.
‘I think the salt is giving me anxiety.’
‘Have you told Travis?’
‘I’m not going to tell anyone who the father is. Only you and Annie.’
I’d planned to tell Sarah and Annie what I told my mum – that the father was a tourist visiting from overseas – but the lie wilted in my mouth the second Sarah asked me.
If Sarah feels sorry for me, or happy, she doesn’t show it. She stands up from the bed.
‘Look, maybe I’ll tell Travis eventually,’ I say. ‘I just can’t right now.’ This isn’t true. I know that this is not true at all.
‘I’m going to sleep. Move.’ She takes the cardboard box of chicken with two hands and places it on the floor. She gets back into her bed and wraps her doona tightly around herself. Clenched in the sheets, her face is hidden, but I can see her forehead is furrowed.
‘I thought I’d sleep here with you tonight,’ I say, although I’m already getting up.
‘The doctor said I might bleed in the night. I don’t want to spill my abortion all over you.’ She’s loud and harsh, her words clear even from under the doona. I’m not sure if it’s true about the blood.
When I curl up in my own bed I want to cry again but I’m too pissed at Sarah, so I play the same Jen Cloher album and I stare at the stains on my
bedroom ceiling, misshapen circles of damp. When I’d imagined telling my friends I’d pictured them squealing like girls on television, even though we don’t often do that.
I channel my frustration into masturbating, give it a good shot for a couple of minutes, but I can’t get it going. I haven’t been able to do that in weeks either. I haven’t cried. I haven’t wanked. All I do is feel sick. I refocus my anger on Sarah and eventually, somehow, I feel myself starting to slide into sleep. Pregnancy will do that to you. No matter how angry or worried or busy you are, you’re always twice as tired.
I DON’T KNOW IF SARAH disapproves of what I’m doing or if she’s mad I stole the attention from her own crisis. I don’t know what the rules are for having a dead man’s baby and while it feels as though we’re all meant to treat abortions like root canals now, I don’t know if maybe that’s insensitive too. It’s easier for me to put up with her being momentarily mad and let it pass than it is to sift through these feelings, so that’s what I do. I suspect this is what she’s doing too, and that she knows she can only get away with being angry at me for a short while, so she’ll make it count.
For a week we live like actors in a play that’s been canned by the critics. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and we don’t talk about the fact that I’m pregnant, not directly. Sarah complains the toilet smells like vomit so I go outside to throw up. She cooks salmon for dinner every night, which she wouldn’t usually do.
‘You know there’s going to be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050,’ she tells me, cooking the dinner I can’t eat.
I told her this recently.
‘The world is fucked,’ she finishes.
The fish smells strong and I try hard not to gag.
‘Your plant is dead,’ she says one night, a response to my asking how her day was. She points to the fern in our lounge. Leaves browning at the edges or speckled with yellow and greying in their centres. She looks me in the eye. ‘You killed it.’
I walk in the kitchen and see her reading my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. She puts it down as soon as she sees me. ‘You need vitamin D,’ she says.
‘I’ve been sitting outside every morning.’ I smile at her.
‘Then why are you still so pale?’ She goes back to reading my book.
The house is quiet. The days are long.
I’m heavy and clogged, haven’t shat for days. I google ‘taking laxatives pregnant’. I don’t even need to open any of the search results to learn that I am constipated because I am pregnant. That’s not a side effect they put in a lot of movies. Knowing the cause doesn’t put me at ease. I feel twisted up, physically and emotionally. I’m grumpy because I’m constipated. I’m pissed at Sarah for being pissed with me. Sarah is angry with me because I’m pregnant. I’m constipated because I’m pregnant. If I tried to map out the cause and effect of it all I’d end up with mess on a page.
On Friday night Sarah and I mount our bikes in the driveway to ride to Clarke Street in Northcote.
‘Ready to go?’ I say.
She eyes me critically. ‘You’re not going to be able to do this soon. You won’t be able to balance once you get really fat.’
She rides fast ahead of me, even up the hill on Westbourne Grove that usually we would walk together, bent over, pushing our bikes like prams. Now she stands on her pedals, her arse stuck out behind her, moving side to side. I take my time, arrive long enough after her that our friends might think we’ve come from different places. I’m afraid of them realising she’s mad at me. As though if they realise that they might guess why.
Later, sitting around the fire pit, someone asks why I’m not drinking. I say I have a role as a marathon runner coming up and no more questions are asked. It’s amazing how easily people believe you are going about your life being you.
‘You better lose some weight then,’ Sarah shoots at me across the circle. None of our other friends comment on her comment.
‘It’s okay,’ I whisper to myself back at home, under my doona. ‘Annie will be back soon.’
IN THE MORNING I MADE coffees that went cold while we had sex again. We used a condom that time. I remember walking across my room to the dresser to get it and being conscious of you looking at my arse. Conscious in a good way, as it was taut then; I was still working out. It’s amazing how quickly I’ve changed. I’m softer now, whether because I’m pregnant or because I stopped exercising as soon as I quit acting I’m not sure, as both happened at pretty much the same time.
I should’ve thought then about not having used a condom the night before, and that afternoon I should’ve gone to get the morning-after pill for the second time in my life. But it wasn’t until the next day that I realised. I got the used condom from our morning sex from my paper basket and moved it into the kitchen rubbish that I was about to throw out. I didn’t want the pasty, foggy smell of semen to accumulate in my room. There was one condom, not two.
But it was too soon after my period to be ovulating, surely.
I’d had unprotected sex a handful of times before and never got pregnant.
This, I assume, is what I thought. I don’t actually remember thinking about it that much. What I did think about was lying against your body, tracing my finger through your sparse chest hair and kissing your neck, my nose burrowed in behind your ear. I thought about the conversations we’d had that morning. We’d talked about climate change, about how the international climate council had estimated the human race had twelve years to change course before we reached the point of no return. How many years are we at now – eleven or ten? We’d actually talked about children, which sounds like fiction, but we did. I said I thought it was morally irresponsible to have a child – twelve years! You said, ‘The solution to climate change isn’t to stop having children.’ A simple sentence, uttered with more surety than anything I’d said. Which was why, when I realised I was pregnant, I dismissed climate change as a reason not to go through with it. And I think that was why I took your advice about acting to heart, too. Why I told my agent I didn’t want any more work. You seemed more certain than me. You were definitely more confident, I’d thought.
‘You can’t live your life saying you’ll get around to doing something you know will make you happy,’ you said. ‘You just have to do it.’
ANNIE LOOKS TANNED AND SOMEHOW older, as if her holiday gave her new wrinkles under her eyes. She has big brown freckles on her face that I don’t remember. Her dark, boxy haircut looks fresh, despite her having only arrived home two days ago. It suits her and confirms a suspicion I’ve always had – that Annie will age much better than Sarah and me. We talk about her trip for all of two minutes. I tell her I’ve left my agent, sort of. She tells me she knows I’m pregnant.
‘Are you happy?’
It’s one of those spring days that is warm and cold in patches, changing whenever a cloud passes over the sun. I’m seated on the edge of a large planter box in her garden in Collingwood. She’s in there on her hands and knees, still wearing her netball uniform from a game this morning. I’m drinking a glass of water she had poured for me when I arrived. I can hear the trams on Smith Street behind us. I am pregnant. These are things that I know.
‘I’m doing it.’
‘Good. Then I’m happy for you.’
She tugs at a stubborn weed that’s grown in the tight space between the planter box and the fence. She grunts as she pulls it out.
‘Can you talk to Sissa?’
Annie and I sometimes refer to Sarah by her old Facebook name when she’s acting like a brat. I know she’s already spoken to Sarah – that’s how she knows I’m pregnant; what I’m really asking is for her to tell me what Sarah said. Annie doesn’t answer, doesn’t look at me. She drops the weed on the ground then picks a pea from the vine and eats it, shell and all.
‘Have you been to the doctor?’
‘Yes.’ I answer impatiently, a little offended she thinks I wouldn’t do this.
‘What did they s
ay?’
The appointment basically consisted of another pregnancy test, a referral to the hospital, where I don’t have to go for a while, and where to book in a scan, which I haven’t followed up on.
‘She said I’m doing great so far.’
‘Are you going to contact Pat’s family?’ She hands me a pea, a casual gesture to offset the heavy question. This must be what she and Sarah talked about. I open the shell and run my finger along the tiny blips of vegetable inside. I regret being testy with my first response. I don’t look at her when I speak.
‘Can we just park that one for now?’
‘How are you going to afford it if you’re not acting?’
A born lawyer, her questions are pointed and specific.
‘I have savings from that miniseries in New Zealand last year.’
I can’t help but say this with resentment. When I went to Centrelink, hoping to get unemployment benefits, I found out I have too much money to qualify for government support. I told the woman I was pregnant – one of the first people I told, and one of the least interested. She explained that I would be eligible for money once the baby is born, but not now. I remind myself this is a good thing. Other people need taxpayer dollars more than me.
‘Will you ever act again?’ Annie asks.
‘I don’t know.’ I eat my pea.
I quit my agency before I found out I was pregnant. I ignored calls from my agent, Kate, for a week until she gave up ringing me. When I found out, I rang her back, and with no reference to her ignored calls, asked her if I could do commercials but not actual roles. Kate asked if I was having a meltdown. I said no, but I didn’t tell her about the baby. Sometimes I think that if I miscarry I might just go back to acting, which doesn’t really make sense, because I quit before I knew. I decide if the collection of cells survives this hardest part, I’ll take it as a sign that I’m on the right path. Already I am shifting responsibility.
Small Joys of Real Life Page 2