I fall asleep to Monica and Rachel arguing as Rachel moves out. They scream everything they dislike about one another. And then they hug and cry about how much they love one another.
Suddenly Annie is shaking my shoulders gently.
‘Eva,’ she whispers. ‘Happy New Year.’
I grow more disorientated as I wake and realise it’s dark outside. I fell asleep on the couch with the lights on.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I wanted to see in the new year with you.’
It’s twelve twenty. Annie is carrying a string bag. Peeking out the top I can see two candles, several long sticks of rosemary, a big handful of eucalyptus leaves.
‘Do you have a lighter?’
She tiptoes to my kitchen, with exaggerated quietness, and starts opening drawers. Her movements are slightly saggy; she’s drunk. She finds the long stove lighter then pushes the drawer shut. The cutlery crashes around.
‘Sorry,’ she whispers.
I shake my head and smile. ‘Nobody’s home.’
She opens the drawer again and bangs it shut loudly, and laughs.
With the string bag over her shoulder and the lighter in one hand, Annie opens the back door. I get up from the couch and follow her. She drags a metal drum from the back of the yard – the drum we use for fires in winter. She asks if I have any paper. I go inside and see the book she gave me for Christmas face down on the coffee table. I want to burn its inconvenient truths, but of course I can’t do that with Annie here, so I find some old scripts. She starts a fire in the drum then breaks the rosemary into pieces and throws them in. Leans in to smell the smoke, like she’s cooking. I’ve no idea if this theatricality is irony or drunkenness.
She gives me two sheets of paper and a pen, and tells me to write my wishes on one sheet and my fears on the other. We’re going to burn them both.
‘Isn’t that symbolism a bit off?’ I ask. ‘Throwing both your fears and your wishes on the same fire?’
‘They are equal parts of your life, Eva.’
The plan is that we will watch the fire smoulder down and then Annie will create a garden bed and scatter the ashes in it. Our fears and our wishes will help grow the vegetables and fruits we’ll eat in the new year. It seems overly sentimental, not the kind of thing that Sarah would tolerate, which makes me wonder if Annie is actually being very genuine.
‘So, we eat our fears in our vegetables?’ I ask her.
‘We are our fears.’ She’s overly intense for a moment, then she laughs. Relieved, so do I.
I stare at my pieces of paper. The first thing I think of is the vaginal canal, the image of it being torn. Then I think about money. Possibly having to pretend to be other people again. I think about Pat. Is my biggest fear the possibility that he never liked me at all? It doesn’t really work as a fear, given that even if it’s true it’s something that has already happened.
Under fears I write: My baby.
Under wishes I write: My baby.
I hesitate before throwing the lists in the fire, despite how stupid this is; it feels a little aggressive to incinerate something representing my child.
Annie has already done hers. She’s staring into the flames. So animated a moment ago, now she looks vacant, her expression hanging off her face.
‘What did you write?’ I ask her.
She shakes her head, pulling herself back to me, then smiles. ‘I wished that your baby is as great as you are.’
‘What about your job?’
‘My job is fine. I don’t need to wish about that.’
She picks up some sticks that are gathered at her feet and starts dropping them into the flames one by one. She doesn’t ask me what I wrote.
I get the jelly from the fridge and divide it into two bowls. Annie finds half a bottle of wine at the back of a cupboard. One of the bottles I labelled with Travis, which it seems Sarah has opened at some point. I wonder what he is up to tonight. I envisage him high, still harping on about Renee.
I ask Annie about the dinner and she says it was fine.
‘One of the couples announced they’re pregnant.’ She doesn’t say this as though it’s exciting or not exciting. She doesn’t elaborate.
‘Poor woman,’ I say.
I tear off one of the old script sheets and throw it in the flames.
MY BIGGEST FEAR IS BECOMING your parents. I see a child running across a street as a car rounds a corner. All the swimming lessons and everything they learned from prep to year two is obliterated. All that work leading to nothing. The vessel for all that love, shattered. Love left flooding everywhere, dampening everything. Is this why I don’t tell Travis about the baby? Because I don’t want to meet your family? I don’t want to look into their eyes and think, this is what I’m gambling. I could end up like them.
SHOULD IT BE my biggest fear that our natural resources are being exploited by a government I didn’t elect? A future where the planet has warmed, the crops have died, and there is only genetically modified food to eat. Maybe our child will be able to google something just by closing its eyes. One day corporations will be more powerful than governments. Arguably, they already are.
I WISH FOR simple moments. Holding each other, skin on skin. Pushing a pram along the path that Mum and I walked, all the way to Coburg Lake. Making homemade playdough. Constructing things out of Lego. Having nice colleagues. Making small talk with other parents at a school gate in the afternoon. Sharing the banalities of our days over our walk home, itself a banality.
I WISH FOR you to be alive, but I know I can’t have that. So instead I wish for the feeling I had just after I met you. Something to anticipate. Having somewhere to be tomorrow or, better yet, someone to be there for. I wish for someone to love and to love me back.
January
WHILE WE’RE AT THE COAST, the other end of the state is being incinerated. The front pages of the papers show acres of scorched earth; a koala drinking from a water bottle; a smiling fireman, now deceased, holding his young child. News reports attempt to quantify the destruction – hectares burned; animals killed; homes destroyed; lives lost.
Starting the morning with such blunt horror then going about a seaside holiday feels absurd. And yet, here we are. It’s not like going home to Thornbury will change anything, I tell myself, which doesn’t make me feel any better about anything.
The house we’re renting in Mount Martha is large, bare and smells woody, like sawdust. For a few days this confuses me. The pale floorboards in the kitchen are actually laminex. I put my nose close to the tortured wood coffee table, but it smells fruity, industrial. On the fourth day, I go to charge my phone in the lounge and I notice the small canister filled with liquid plugged into the wall. I look closely and see it’s labelled ‘Rustic Barn Scent’. The town is full of these contrived details. Cafes serve salads in jars and sandwiches on wooden paddles.
Still, it’s nice here. It’s green and smells like gum leaves and the ocean. You can hear kookaburras in the morning and see rosellas in the trees. I watch Mum and Ken together. Her hand is always on his back, their banter is easy. He measures half a shot of Scotch into her Diet Coke every afternoon and phones restaurants before we go out to check that they can make dishes for her without the garlic and onions. They play chess, jibing one another while always laughing. One morning Ken can’t find his swimmers for the beach. He left them on the line last night and now they’re gone. He suggests the rosellas took them.
‘Well, I guess we’re going to Sunnyside now, hey, Debbie.’ Ken winks at Mum.
She rolls her eyes. ‘They’ll be in the car.’
‘What’s Sunnyside?’ I ask.
‘It’s a nude beach down the road in Mount Eliza.’ Mum’s voice is impatient, but not without affection.
The dumb joke irritates me. As does their perpetual fussing over the most minute details of their days – which beach, which cafe, what time of day. I realise my annoyance is partly driven by jealousy. I’m dreaming of being fif
ty, with my own grown daughter or son and a man I love easily. I’m impatient for it. I’m not content in this place of flux; I’m ready for what’s next.
My growing unease with my life is paralleled by my discomfort in my body. The mound has become a mountain and I constantly need to pee. I pee before we leave the house and as soon as we arrive anywhere. We only visit the cafes that have toilets and I know which ones those are. Being on the beach helps. It’s sweltering and I can loll in the shallows, not having to make a bathroom trip every eight minutes. Relief for my hands and feet that balloon after seconds in the heat. In the water I am lighter, I’m not coated in sweat. I’ve had to buy bigger swimmers: a small tent that covers my breasts, which are large and streaked purple. My body is marked like a map – cracked earth and waterways. My stomach is always itchy and I remind myself of a man with his hand on his crotch. I waited for the baby to kick for so long and now I’m wishing it would stop. I have an appointment over the phone with a midwife from the hospital. She tells me to count the kicks. Ten in two hours is good. I don’t count. There’s easily more than that.
We see Annie and James every day and a few times we all have dinner together. James and his father go out diving for mussels one day and we eat them cooked with garlic and chopped tomatoes and heaped on top of crusty homemade bread. James’s family’s backyard is large, green and bursting with vegetables. The salad is always from the garden – rocket, tomatoes, zucchinis, eggplants. A grapevine grows over the verandah and bunches of fruit dangle from above like decorations. They must love Annie, I think, and it’s obvious they do. James’s mother calls her Ann, which none of us do. ‘No, Ann doesn’t like beetroot,’ she tells Ken when he’s assembling burgers for dinner.
Annie is different around them. She’s always reticent, even with Sarah and me, but when she does speak it’s clear she has been listening intently, thinking through what to say next. She’s more agreeable here, less technical. Watching her I realise how I could be a blemish on her perfection, the single, knocked-up friend. She never treats me like this. Instead I’m doted on.
James’s parents are friendly, intelligent and retired. They both cook and will tell you about the recipe they used, taking the cookbook off the shelf. The same with their summer reads, which are stacked beside their wicker chairs in the sunroom at the back of the house. They start talking about a book and at some point they’ll go retrieve it; they like props, it seems. James’s mother offers me more water. Asks if I need to lie down. She likes to talk about pregnancy, shooting smug glances at the men. I’m acquiescent, placing my hand on my belly and acting the part of a happy pregnant lady. I appreciate her attentiveness and feel guilty that it only makes me feel more lonely. A single person with a big belly. Not laughing any louder as the night goes on, my water not making me drunk. As much as I am lonely, though, at least I don’t have to ignore questions about getting married or engaged, which Annie and James do every day.
This would be a lovely backyard for a wedding – if you’d like a small event, that is. Better watch her, James. I smile at Annie as she smiles into her drink. James doesn’t respond to the teasing but doesn’t seem bothered by it either. He put a deposit on an apartment recently. He and Mum talk about stamp duty and I don’t listen. Jokes about baby brain are made.
Afterwards, we stroll back along the beach to our rented house. Mum and Ken hold hands, Ken carrying their sandals in his free hand.
‘James is so lovely,’ says Mum. Every night she says it.
MUM PUTS FACE washers in the freezer for me in the mornings and at night I take them to bed. Lay one over my forehead, let the cloth soften and feel the water melt over my face.
I message Fergus from bed, send photos of my naked torso in dim lighting, legs spread. Me on my side, my large breasts melting over my bed. Sometimes I will send a photo followed by nothing.
Too tired to chat tonight. Sorry.
He pleads.
You can’t do this to me.
He never sends me photos of himself, which I’m thankful for. Sometimes I’m asleep even before I read his replies. Never for long, though. My legs cramp. My pelvis hurts. So I message him again. Any time before 2 am he will reply straight away.
Other nights we have phone sex, sometimes for hours. Me under the sheets to muffle my voice so Mum and Ken don’t hear. Occasionally I’ll text him in the morning to say I woke up horny. He responds right away and I don’t. I wait until I have a moment at the beach, write that I’m about to go swimming, describe how my breasts are spilling out of my top, and then I put my phone in my bag on the sand and walk to the water, where I loll with Annie for hours, leaving him waiting.
This summer is scorching and the beach is heaving. Brightly coloured beach boxes line the shore as far as I can see and remind me of being little, when I would line up my Polly Pockets, a colourful housing estate on the floor of my bedroom. This beach is full of families. Teenagers, whose Wild Turkey cans we find in the mornings, swim further south where they try to impress each other by flinging themselves from the rockface into the water. The few people our age are just north of here, on a secluded rocky beach, which, because of the steep incline you have to walk to access it, is free of screeching children. I wouldn’t be able to waddle my way down that hill, which is why we are here and, despite the lack of quiet, I am calmest at the beach, when it’s just the two of us.
‘Look, that will be you next year.’ Annie is pointing to a woman standing knee deep in the water wearing a long white linen shirt, her black one-piece visible beneath it, and a big straw hat. When her hands are free she rests them on her hips, but mostly her hands aren’t free. She grabs at two toddlers in the shallows. Pulls them apart when they’re wrestling. ‘Don’t lick your sister!’ I hear her say.
‘That’s not me. That’s me.’ I point to a young girl in a floral bikini, dipping a fat baby’s toes into the water as it chuckles pleasantly.
‘She’s the babysitter.’
‘Don’t just say that because she’s young.’
‘I’m not just saying that. I know she is. That baby’s family is renting one of Ian and Maureen’s properties.’
‘Which one of their properties?’
We smile to one another. I relish this time with Annie, recapping moments from dinner the night before, joking about making a lasso for her to capture James with. We talk about names for the baby, seriously this time.
‘Have you heard from Sissa yet?’ Annie asks.
‘No. Have you?’
‘No. But, you know, I’m not pregnant. It would be nice of her to check in.’
Whatever we say about Sarah, the last comment is always the same, always from Annie. ‘She was so smashed that night.’ Her gaze is far off across the sand, unfocused, as though she’s thinking some deep and profound observation.
I don’t indulge her wanting to complain about Sarah, because I don’t want to spoil this time. A weight is lifted – literally, as the water holds me up, also because I’m away from Mum and the stress of thinking about money or what I’m going to do for work. I feel free and relaxed, like my baby, comforted as I’m submerged.
I want to see you
Fergus sends me this message almost every day. I respond by reminding him that I’m in Mount Martha, as if this is an explanation, as if when I’m home I’ll see him again, though I’m not sure if that’s true. Occasionally I remember the last time I saw him, when he gave me permission to dump him, which puts me off. But more than that, it’s my body. Inflated and stretched. The pale pink marks on my belly growing darker. A red line splits me down the middle. It’s smeared and fuzzy, like a scar. I look like I’ve been cleaved in two and poorly sewed back together.
Texting Fergus is like porn, an imaginary place where even I feel desirable.
THE MINISERIES I FILMED IN New Zealand is being replayed on free-to-air. Mum and Ken watch it late in the afternoon, even though they’ve seen it before. I’m so skinny. It’s all I can think and I don’t blame Ken for saying it
in exactly those words. In the first episode I’m being held captive by a threatening man. I’m in a dank room in a filthy grey dress. Squatting on my haunches, dirty legs. My arms are sticks. My cheekbones ridgelines down my face. My make-up streaked brown to look like dirt. It’s such a popular genre, this – young girls being held captive.
‘Can we watch something else?’ I ask.
‘I can’t remember what happens,’ Mum says. I wonder if she’s thinking this will entice me to act again.
One day I’m in the ad break as well. Standing with my hand on my fake belly, which is about the size of my belly as it is now, although I look very different, my arse and jawline fuller. ‘Are you ready?’ the TV me asks – a version of me who thought she was ready, that this ad was somehow adequate preparation.
After the ad break I’m out of the dank room. Dressed in blue skinny jeans and a pale pink blouse that is bunched at the shoulders, not the kind of thing I’d ever wear in real life.
‘You people are all the same,’ the television me tells a television police officer. ‘You just wear different clothes.’ I remember the line well. It was one of the sound grabs for the trailer. I’d hated it. Too overdone. Hitting the viewers on the head with a hammer.
‘WE SAW YOU on the TV!’ James’s father is wearing a brown apron. He puts his knife down to kiss me on the cheek then raises his glass of chardonnay.
‘I was really skinny, wasn’t I?’
Annie laughs from the couch where she is reclining, also drinking white wine.
‘Maureen and I watched it when it first aired. I thought I recognised you from somewhere. And then Ann told us you were in Much Ado About Nothing last year.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Who was the other woman in that, Maureen? She was in that new police drama.’
Small Joys of Real Life Page 14