Afterwards, we lean back on our elbows on the poolside astroturf. Quiet, except for heavy breathing. I watch the coloured bathing caps in the water making their way up and down the lanes like it’s a game of Pac-Man. Sarah and Annie both look alert and slightly mad with white, blotchy skin and red rings around their eyes. I imagine I look the same – my skin is dry and my eyes are itchy. I decide I hate the pool.
‘So, how’s your mum?’ Annie asks me.
‘Yeah, she’s good.’
‘Is she visiting any time soon?’
‘Just Christmas.’ She comes every second Christmas with her partner, Ken.
‘Is she excited?’ Annie does this sometimes – instead of just asking, How did your mum react when you told her you are pregnant, or, Have you told her about the father, she edges towards big conversations, like she’s flirting.
I lie on my back and cross my arms over my forehead. I feel the urge to tell Annie everything about my life, but because her mode of enquiring bothers me, I withhold and am vague. I play hard to get, I suppose.
I answer with my eyes closed. ‘I’m sure she’s worried. Like, I think she’d prefer it if I had a nice boyfriend like James. But at least I’m not married to a fuckwit who’s going to repurpose my business without telling me, so you know.’ I lower one elbow, making a small window in my arms. Annie and I smile at each other.
Sarah is brushing her hand through the green plastic shag rug beneath us.
‘The thing I always think about astroturf,’ she says, ‘is, like, when do they vacuum it?’
We all laugh.
Years ago, Sarah probably would’ve responded to my comment, or a similar one from Annie, either sympathetically or awkwardly. Back then, Sarah thought Annie and I talked like this about our families for attention, almost like we were boasting about how dysfunctional they were. Back in the days when I kept my opinions of my dad private, I too thought people did this. If you made some scathing comment about a drama in your life, I reasoned, it meant you wanted everyone else to know about it.
Annie’s life changed as we were nearing the end of primary school. One morning, her older brother – her only sibling – didn’t wake up. Something was growing in his brain that they hadn’t known was there was how it was described to me back then. Years later, I googled aneurysms and I understand about as much now as I did then. At school, Sarah and I were called to the principal’s office and handed tissues at the door. I don’t remember exactly what he said, only that he ended with: ‘I know you girls are her best friends.’
Mum sewed me a new dress for the funeral. I could hear the machine rattling all night. I know now she would’ve been unable to sleep, worrying about something like this happening to me. I was all she had then. At the funeral, I remember Annie holding her mother’s hand as they walked behind the small casket carried by the men. Afterwards, at the wake, Annie showed us her new Game Boy. Then we started year seven and didn’t talk about Annie’s brother for a long time. It was all a bit much for twelve-year-olds. Annie’s parents divorced that summer, but I didn’t find out until years later that it was during the intense period after Jonathan’s death that her mother’s affair was exposed. Her lover showed up at their house one evening, worried because she hadn’t heard from her. In the midst of their grief, Annie’s mother had to come out to her husband and family. I’ve never been able to decide if this was a good or a bad thing. If maybe the weight of grief meant a hidden sexuality felt trivial, or if it was horrid heaped on horrid. I guess it was probably the latter, but Annie’s mum is still with Janine, so I figure that, despite her grief, she must be happy with how things turned out.
Sarah’s parents are happily married, living the boomer dream in a mansion at Noosa Heads. They’re always renovating. What Sarah doesn’t understand about people in unhappy families, and what it took me a long time to understand, is that you don’t make comments about it for anyone else’s benefit. It’s more about acknowledging your own distance from the pain. It isn’t sad – not now. Very rarely in my life have I sat and felt sad about my father. The feeling is done through other actions that you can’t recognise as such until much later. Like the time in primary school when I went to a friend’s house and, after seeing her parents making toast together, wanted to beat her, so instead I told everyone at school that her house smelled.
Back when Sarah used to party a lot, and therefore cry a lot, I heard friends on the periphery of our lives joke about how she was the one who was fucked up despite being the one who grew up without the fucked-up family. The first time I heard someone say that I realised two things – that Sarah must have told other people about Annie’s and my families, and that our other friends don’t know us very well, not really.
AT HOME IN the evening, Sarah and Annie try to convince me to go with them to the pub.
‘I can’t afford it.’
‘I’ll pay,’ says Annie. ‘We’re just getting dinner.’
They’re meeting up with other friends. Friends who will be drinking. Friends who don’t know that I’m pregnant.
‘I can’t express to you how tired this thing is making me.’ It’s not a lie.
I feel especially nauseous tonight. I blame the exercise. For dinner I boil potatoes and eat them plain, with just a dash of olive oil, a crack of pepper. I don’t pretend I’m going to do anything smart this evening. I just put Friends on right away. At some point between Ross dating a student and everyone making jokes about how Monica used to be fat, I get a message from Fergus.
Tonight?
Out again, sorry.
So, want to tell me what nights you don’t have plans?
I start to reply, No, I don’t. But as I’m typing out the words I realise he might think I’m being playful. I don’t reply until much later in the evening, finishing my message with another ‘sorry’ before deleting it and hitting send. By this time Monica and Chandler are engaged.
Hey, I had fun the other week, but I’m really not in a place to be seeing anybody right now. Maybe I’ll see you around.
I struggle to get to sleep and I wonder if I feel guilty. Eventually I realise it’s actually temptation. I know I won’t be having sex with anyone once the baby is born, nor when I’m heavily pregnant. Maybe this is my last chance. But despite how sick I feel, what I said is true – I’m really not in a place to be seeing anybody right now.
Fergus doesn’t reply.
YOU DIED ON A WEDNESDAY and I found out on the Friday. I came home in the afternoon to find Sarah and Renee on the couch together drinking rosé.
‘Isn’t it a bit early for that?’
It wasn’t early for Sarah to be drinking, but it was early for two people to be drinking together on a weekday.
Sarah stood and went to get a glass for me. ‘You know Pat?’ she asked.
I was staring at Renee. The whites of her eyes were tinged the colour of her wine. She’d been crying. She had just broken up with Travis, which I’d heard she’d been nonchalant about, so I didn’t think it could be that. I was wondering if they were about to tell me Renee was seeing Pat now.
‘He died.’
It was Sarah who said it, but I was still staring at Renee.
‘What happened?’ My brain was limping to catch up. If I’d just been told Renee was seeing Pat, I probably would’ve asked the exact same thing.
‘He took his own life.’ Renee looked down at her lap as she said it, as though she was ashamed.
I sat on the couch for hours, staring out the window, watching the world dim and then darken, and listening to them talk. Renee was telling Sarah about Travis. How worried she was for him. I was still stuck on Renee’s words: He took his own life. If you had taken your own life, it meant that your life was not yours. That your life existed somehow outside of you and you had stolen it. I thought it would make more sense to say you had left your life. Dropped it. Thrown it away. Hanged it. Poisoned it. Shot it. Whatever it was that you did – Sarah did ask, but Renee didn’t know. Eventually I circl
ed back to the original idea, though. Maybe that’s what depression is. My life might be mine, but a depressed person’s life is not theirs. They’re already dead and they take their life from the rest of the people living with it.
‘What are you thinking about, Eva?’ Renee asked.
‘The sky looks inky. There are so few stars.’
I felt sick every day for a week. When I found out I was pregnant I wondered if this was when I started to feel it. The book says not, though. Most people can’t tell that early. I like to think that maybe I could.
I DIDN’T GO to your funeral. Sarah did. She wasn’t going to, as she’d only met you the three times: the same three times I’d met you. Renee was going, as she knew you the best, and she needed to support Travis. But it was awkward, with her having broken up with Travis, so she asked Sarah to go with her in solidarity.
I like funerals. I don’t enjoy what they represent – that emptiness of hope. I just enjoy their pageantry. They remind me of amateur theatre, with people who can’t act reading scripted clichés aloud. Weddings are the same.
A part of me wanted to go. I thought maybe I could wallow in my grief – or shock, as it really was at that point – in a more active way. I regret now that I didn’t. I might have learned something about you. Maybe I’d understand things a little more. But that’s also the reason why I didn’t go. I wanted to live in my version of how things turned out. The fantasies in which you were alive and we were dating. The truth of the funeral would be too specific. Also, nobody expected me to go. Nobody would’ve objected to my presence, but I was in such a state that even the effort it would take to wash a black dress was beyond me.
Sarah didn’t want to go and was complaining about it.
‘At least you’ll get the day off work.’ I kept making these bizarre statements. I felt like I was floating on my back in water, my ears submerged. I could tell there was noise around me, but it was unintelligible. All I could hear was my breathing and my heart pumping away; it sounded like it was racing itself. A pregnant woman’s heart rate increases by almost half. I didn’t know I was pregnant then and all I could think about was your heart lying flaccid and mute. Disgusting without its function. My own body seemed obnoxious. Some part of me must have been functioning in the real world, though, as when I was called upon to speak I did, unsure where the words were coming from since all I’d been thinking about was you.
‘I just don’t want to have to look at his parents and know that their child chose to do this to them,’ Sarah said.
I hadn’t been thinking about your parents. But when she mentioned them, I had a strong desire to lie down. Now your parents flit into my mind a lot and when that happens I go to bed, open my laptop and hope the canned laughter jostles them from my mind.
SARAH CAME HOME that night, pissed off and mildly tipsy. She collapsed onto the corner of the couch, almost missing it and landing on the floor. I poured her a Scotch.
‘How was it?’ I asked her.
‘Bloody awful.’ She tilted her head back and downed the whisky. ‘In the eulogies everyone kept saying how great his life was. But it’s, like, clearly not. Clearly his life was unbearable.’
It was strange for Sarah to articulate her complaint in such detail. Usually she’d have stopped at ‘bloody awful’.
‘How was Travis?’
‘Manic.’ She held her empty glass out and I refilled it, but with less Scotch this time. ‘He was playing music, making jokes. At one point he was talking loudly about the song he was going to write about how much of a fuckwit Pat is for doing this to everyone. A break-up song. I mean, I know the guy’s insane, but it was next level. Renee dodged a bullet there.’
I once had a colleague, Nicholas, who was Greek. He played a beefed-up gym junkie in a pilot we shot. The catalyst for the show was the death of a character offscreen. I was that character’s sister, Nicholas was the best friend. The pilot began at the funeral. We were young, twenty-three or so. The scene was shot in a church in Melbourne even though if it was picked up, which it wasn’t, the show was going to be set in Sydney. There were flowers and extras all wearing black. Older women in hats, which I’ve never seen at an actual funeral, but often on stage or screen. I didn’t have any lines in the scene; the actor who played my father delivered a eulogy. Nicholas and I were seated together in the pew. Between takes, he turned to me and said, ‘This is the weirdest funeral I’ve ever been to.’
At first I froze, thinking I’d forgotten a line, which I never did.
‘Do Australians actually do this?’ he went on.
‘What do you mean?’
I looked around the church. Extras who moments ago had been dabbing at their eyes with hankies were making small talk. I hadn’t been to many funerals at the time, but the ones I had been to were similar to this fake one. It was only the hats that didn’t ring true.
‘In Greece you cry. This hopefulness is weird.’
I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I thought about what he’d said as I watched Sarah, limp on the couch, the back of her hand on her forehead like she was feigning having fainted.
I WAS RIDING along the St Georges Road bike path when I started to feel pregnant, although I didn’t know then that’s what it was. Despite the singular condom, it wasn’t my first thought. I demounted and walked my bike, growing heavier and wobblier as I went. At home, I went straight to sleep. My boobs had been hurting, which always happened before my period. Then they kept hurting but the blood didn’t come.
The next morning, I was on hands and knees, my neck hooked over the toilet bowl. It was the tail end of winter, so the bathroom tiles were freezing. Between heaves I placed my forehead on the cold floor, which was refreshing despite probably being filthy. I watched the condensation from my slow, shaky breaths appear on the tiles and then evaporate.
It felt like my body was trying to turn itself inside out.
One, two, three days the same.
Since your death I’d felt like a bubble. Wafting along delicately, waiting to be shattered – pop!
I had a pregnancy test in my drawer from a previous scare. They come in packs of two so you can confirm the result. I remember that time being so afraid of falling pregnant that I didn’t want to take the second one once the first came up negative. I didn’t need a second one this time either; I didn’t need convincing.
Pop!
My first thought was to get an abortion. A knee-jerk reaction I’d absorbed when I was young. Young, single girls who get knocked up are nothing. They end up alone, without men or money, and they regret everything. It was the surest sign of failure. I was so used to thinking of conception as something to be avoided at all costs I no longer questioned it. I laughed at the thought of Sarah and me getting abortions together. Girls’ day out.
Only an hour after I’d found out I already felt lighter. The sickness had passed for the day and I knew now what that sickness was. I felt present in a way I hadn’t since I found out you’d died. The bubble had burst, but what I was facing wasn’t endless nothing; it was something. Just like when I met you, a match had been struck.
October
SUDDENLY ONE MORNING I’M NOT sick. Suddenly I’m starving. Money I once spent on alcohol I spend on food. Fruits, especially tart ones, and sour things. Kiwifruit and jars of bright pickled vegetables. Fresh lettuce leaves doused in dressing. I dip carrot sticks in vinegar, not hummus.
I’m unpacking groceries from cotton bags. Sarah is leaning over the kitchen counter, her elbows resting on What to Expect, holding it open. She picks at a bunch of grapes, eyes on the book. Her weight is on her left leg, her right leg bent up. She reminds me of a flamingo, all leggy and pale red.
‘It says here you should be twenty per cent more hungry now.’
I twist the lid off the vinegar and take a swig before putting it in the pantry. ‘I feel fifty, at least.’
‘Maybe because you were vomiting for so long. Now you’re just enjoying food again.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It says here you can tell people now, too.’ She doesn’t look at me as she says this. I know she already knew that. Everyone knows that.
‘After today,’ I say. ‘When we know there’s definitely a baby in there.’
‘I wonder if you can go skydiving.’ She turns the book over, thumbing the pages to the index at the back.
ANNIE ARRIVES AN hour later to take us to my scan. Sarah picks up the conversation in the car as though it was just a moment ago.
‘So, you can’t go skydiving. Also, what do you mean by definitely knowing there’s a baby in there?’
‘Lots of people miscarry in the first trimester,’ I answer, automatically. ‘That’s why you don’t tell people.’
‘Have you looked in the mirror lately? You look like me after I’ve eaten fructose.’
‘I just want to make sure everything is fine before I tell anyone.’
I feel a twinge of annoyance that Sarah doesn’t just understand everything I’m feeling. That she accepts I would suffer in silence because of a stupid tradition that made women feel ashamed of their trauma.
I’m meant to have had one scan already. A dating scan to ‘confirm the viability of the pregnancy’. Just hearing that phrase made me want to book an abortion. In so many ways this pregnancy is unviable. Anytime Annie or my mum asked about the scan I lied and said I couldn’t get in, that I was waiting for a slot to open up. I justified putting it off by telling myself humans had babies forever before they had doctors, and that back then they didn’t even have the book. Everyone knows the rules – no darts, no alcohol, no soft cheese. If in doubt: if it’s fun you probably can’t do it. Some women miss a dating scan because they don’t realise they’re pregnant. I realised I was, but I didn’t realise I was going to go through with it. What I haven’t told Annie or Sarah or Mum is that a part of me has been waiting in case I change my mind. I’d suspected that Annie and my mum might conspire together to convince me not to do this, and if they had I’m not sure what would’ve happened. A part of me actually wishes they had, because, even if I’d resisted any convincing, I’d be more sure of myself now. Probably. Waiting to see if I change my mind is also the reason I haven’t told any other friends. That and the fact I’m terrified of telling them. Not just because some – like Renee and Travis – know I slept with Pat and would guess he’s the father, but because I’m scared of their judgement. I don’t have a job, but I’m having a baby.
Small Joys of Real Life Page 5