Molly looked peaceful and confident handling her child. She was apparently unscathed by the unexpected homebirth. Why had Annie been so worried? Of course Molly was going to manage this perfectly well. The text message with the ducklings — well, Molly had obviously sent that while she was in prelabour. She probably wasn’t serious.
‘I can’t believe Jack missed it,’ said Simon. ‘Lucky bugger.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Naomi. ‘Birth is amazing.’
‘Yeah, I know that. And I’m glad I was there when Felix was born, but he was a C-section. Can’t imagine the other way.’ He gave an involuntary shudder.
‘I’d be quite pleased if you didn’t imagine the other way,’ said Molly crossly. ‘I’m your sister.’
‘I know, it’s just, you know, they say it’s like watching your favourite pub burn down. Puts some people off . . .’ He trailed off as he realised they were all staring at him, their expressions running the gamut from disapproving to disgusted.
‘Have you spoken to Jack yet?’ asked Paul.
‘He’s on his way,’ Molly replied. ‘He’ll be back in a couple of hours.’
‘And, ah, what about old mate next door, Patrick? Was that a bit weird, him coming in when you were having a baby out your —’ Simon gave a quick euphemistic whistle.
Annie interrupted her son. ‘What are you going to call her? Have you decided?’
‘I think so, but I want to tell Jack first.’
They were all agreeing that was sensible when a midwife strode into the room and glared around. ‘Eight visitors,’ she said, in a fearsome low voice. ‘My goodness.’
Paul immediately handed back the baby and stood up. ‘We’ll see you in the morning.’
Everyone left except Annie, who perched where Paul had been sitting, reached over and tucked a strand of Molly’s hair behind her ear. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. You must have been frightened.’
Molly smiled. ‘I only thought I was going to die for a little bit. It was over so fast.’
‘Do you want me to stay with you tonight? I’m happy to.’
Molly shook her head. ‘Jack will be here soon. It’s all right.’ She paused and looked at the baby. ‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
A flash of indecision came over Molly’s face. ‘Do you want to hold her? You haven’t held her yet.’
‘I’m desperate to cuddle her,’ said Annie. ‘But I shouldn’t before Jack has had a chance to.’
‘Dad did,’ Molly pointed out.
‘Yes,’ said Annie. ‘But I would feel like I was pushing in. I’ll be back first thing tomorrow and then I might not let you get a look-in! I’ll come back and hold her and you can tell me how everything happened, but you should rest now.’
The unspoken words hung between them, but Molly nodded.
Annie kissed her and the baby, and left, and walking alone through the quiet corridor to the lift, she hummed one of her new songs to herself.
* * *
Molly woke to a small squeak. She opened her eyes and saw light shining through the beige hospital venetian blinds. Turning her head, she saw Jack sitting in a vinyl armchair. His shirt was buttoned over the baby, who appeared to be mostly naked, if the discarded singlet and little checkered blanket on Jack’s knee were anything to go by. As his new daughter unknowingly yanked on his chest hair, he winced in pain, his eyes watering.
‘Hey. When did you get here?’ she asked.
‘A few hours ago. I didn’t want to wake you. But Moll! Look what you did!’ His eyes shone and his voice cracked. ‘She’s perfect. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.’
She reached out to touch his arm. ‘It’s all right. Turns out I didn’t need any of those courses. She just shot out of me.’
‘Patrick from next door rang. I had a million missed calls from you. I’m really sorry. I was in the pub with my parents.’
Molly remembered now. ‘That’s right. It was Kara-ho-ho-hoke Night, wasn’t it? I should have thought to ring the pub.’
The baby shifted on Jack’s front and made a sound like a creaking gate. Jack looked at Molly in alarm. ‘What does that mean? Is she haunted?’
Molly frowned. ‘I’ve got no idea. Does she need a feed? I thought she’d wake up properly and cry if she was hungry. I haven’t fed her since just after they brought us in.’
‘Who do we ask? The midwife?’ Jack furrowed his brow and looked around the room.
‘Just wait.’
The baby had stopped moving and was sleeping peacefully again.
‘What shall we call her?’ Jack asked. ‘Where’s that list we made? Is it in your phone?’
‘The list of all the names I like that you said no to?’
‘Because they were all dog’s names.’ Jack took the blanket, wrapped the baby tightly and transferred her to the crook of one elbow so he could pull up the list on Molly’s phone. ‘Coco. That’s a Bichon Frise name. Only golden retrievers are called Pippa. Jessies are all kelpies.’
Molly looked at the baby. ‘I don’t want any of those names any more anyway. I want to name her Petula.’
Jack blinked. ‘You what?’
‘Petula. As in Petula Clark. She was my granny’s favourite singer. It’s a beautiful name.’
‘Oh,’ said Jack, looking thoughtful. ‘I suppose it’s all right. It’s not a bad name.’ He paused.
‘What?’ Molly asked. ‘Say it.’
‘It’s just, well, the only thing to shorten it to is Pet. Or Tula. Won’t kids make fun of her?’
‘Kids make fun of all names. What do you want to call her?’
‘I don’t know. Lucy? After my mum.’
‘Lucy’s even more of a dog’s name than Coco,’ said Molly. She took her phone and searched for popular dog names. ‘Oh. Molly’s the number two dog’s name. We won’t be naming her after me. But look, Lucy is here, and Coco. Petula isn’t there.’
‘Maybe Lucy is a dog’s name. But Mum drove me all the way here last night in our car,’ he said. ‘When I got all the messages. I was a bit over the limit. That was nice of her, wasn’t it?’
‘Where did you have to sit?’
‘Oh Molly, don’t.’
‘Go on, where?’ The ghost of a smile began to creep across her face.
‘The back seat, because Toggle gets carsick and needs to be in the front.’
Molly laughed until she cried. ‘Am I going to be a madwoman now too, now that I’m a mother? Do you think I’ll go so bonkers that once the baby is grown up I’ll have to have something else as my baby, until I die? A dog, or a garden, or you? Maybe I’ll treat you like my baby once our real baby is grown up.’
Jack nodded. ‘There’s every chance.’
‘Where’s your mum now? Does she want to meet the baby?’
Jack looked uncomfortable. ‘She stayed with Aunty Robyn in Mosman and Dad’s driven up to collect her this morning. Because of the dogs. And she said you probably wanted to get settled first, before everyone comes crashing in to meet the baby.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Molly, before whispering, ‘you aren’t furry enough,’ to her daughter.
The baby let out another odd sound, this time like she was trying to lift a very heavy box.
‘Here, Jack, give her to me.’
He passed the child over. ‘I still don’t think she’s awake yet. I think that was a sleep grunt.’
Molly cradled the baby and slid her hospital gown from her shoulder, exposing her breast to Jack and the rest of the ward. He got up and closed the curtains around her bed.
She placed the baby’s face near her nipple but nothing happened. She looked at Jack helplessly. ‘How do I wake her up?’
‘Maybe unwrap her?’
Molly removed the swaddling blanket and the baby began to grizzle. Her little mouth nuzzled around for a moment and then she latched on. Molly’s eyes widened and her mouth formed a horrified ‘O’.
‘What?’ asked Jack, with a sharp intake of breath.
‘Holy
shit,’ she squeaked. ‘Oh my god, that hurts.’ Tears sprang to her eyes and her shoulders shot up around her ears. ‘Is it meant to feel like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like she has razor blades instead of gums.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it will get better?’ Jack offered helplessly, and possibly remembering that Molly had given birth at home, in a storm, in an hour, with no pain relief and only a stranger for company, while he was getting drunk with his parents and their neighbours, and undoubtedly winning some alcohol-based prize in a festive singing competition with the Eartha Kitt–inspired version of ‘Santa Baby’ he trotted out every year, he added, ‘I think Petula is a beautiful name.’
Chapter 20
Annie almost didn’t go to the open mike night. She’d assumed, when the call had come through that Molly’s baby had been born early, at home, in a cataclysmic storm, that there would be no way she’d be able to make it to the city the next evening. She’d need to be at the hospital, or at home getting things ready for Christmas.
But Jane wasn’t having it. ‘No fucking way you’re wriggling out of this,’ she said when Annie called her and broached the idea of not going. ‘This is the last open mike night for the year, and then as you well know everyone in the entire country gets drunk and has to have a very big lie down until at least February. If you leave it that long, you’ll never go. I know you: you don’t have that much momentum.’
Annie protested, but she feared Jane was right. She’d lost momentum once before, for almost forty years. She couldn’t risk it happening again. After a brief moment of fear that the evening was Yule-themed, Jane confirmed that wasn’t the case and Annie gave in. Anyway, Molly didn’t seem to need her around. Jack was back now, and that was the way it should be. So she found herself standing in front of her wardrobe, two days before Christmas, staring at its contents with confusion and a nervous feeling not unlike her memories of morning sickness.
Back in the days of Love Triangle they’d worn proper costumes — coordinating outfits in highly flammable fabrics and the kinds of colour combinations you only saw now on the heavily reduced racks at op shops. Clothes used to be fun, she thought. There was more than one tear-away skirt in her past. But after watching numerous videos of open mike nights on YouTube she determined that her best chance of fitting in, of not flagging herself immediately as an ancient throwback, was to wear black skinny jeans and some sort of ironic band T-shirt. It was important to look like she didn’t care. She could manage that. She still had original band Ts from Fleetwood Mac, Elton John and Queen. But maybe wearing an original would only emphasise her age?
She pulled on her jeans, turning around with her neck craned to see the reflection of her rear in the mirror. Fine from the front and from the back, but in profile it was apparent that she had old-lady bum — which is to say, it was just gone. Where was it? she wondered. Where did women’s bums go? And just when having a bum was really in fashion. She’d heard Molly refer to bubble butts. Hers was more of an Iggy Pop butt. Perhaps she would leave her T-shirt down at the back, and just tuck the front in a bit, in the hope of disguising its absence.
She stared at her face, trying to see what other people saw, to figure out if she was kidding herself. Fifty-eight. How was she fifty-eight? Did she look almost sixty? What did that even look like? Did she look old? She didn’t really think so. Justin said she looked late forties. But then Justin would. There were lines around her eyes, and a few on her forehead, but her jaw was still visible. No jowls, and her eyelids were still up where they were meant to be, not hanging down like forgotten blinds over a spare room window. Her hair was okay, more or less. A bit boring.
She’d done her research on the open mike night. Well, Jane had. It was in Surry Hills, and apparently was known for attracting actual music-industry people. The events were held every two months, and there were ten spots each night. It was first in best dressed.
Annie was prepared. She had rehearsed her song, and another as backup — long ago she had learned you never perform without an encore in your pocket — and she’d recorded her five favourite new songs onto her laptop. It was genuinely astonishing how straightforward that was to do these days — there was that phrase again. What used to cost thousands of dollars in studio time and engineers, she’d knocked off in a few afternoons, at home. The hardest part had been finding times when there weren’t people arguing or laughing in the background.
Obviously the sound quality wasn’t brilliant — you wouldn’t record an album like that — but it was absolutely miles ahead of a demo anyone could have recorded by themselves forty years back.
She had five USBs in her handbag now, each loaded up with her five tracks, each tagged with a little typed label bearing her phone number and her name: Annie Thorne. She hadn’t written that as her name since she was twenty-three. After the divorce she’d never changed it back: it was easier to keep the same name as the kids. But it was Annie Thorne who had been the almost-successful musician and Annie Jones who had sat quietly caring for others for so many decades she almost dried up and blew away. She briefly considered dropping the Annie part too, and just appearing as Thorne. The androgynous sharpness of that appealed to her. But she wasn’t brave enough yet. All you had to do was look at her to know she was an Annie, not a Thorne.
Only Jane knew that Annie was going to the open mike night. The risk of other family members — most worryingly Brian and Paul, with their almost parental levels of enthusiasm — coming along to watch was too high to let them in on the plan. It had crossed her mind to tell Heather about it, but she chided herself. That was the seventeen year old in her showing off, wanting to impress Heather as she always had.
Jane caught the bus into the city with Annie, and they listened to old songs they loved on the way, sharing a pair of earbuds like Annie saw schoolkids doing all the time. Jane asked once about the new baby, then they didn’t mention her again. Annie felt a stab of guilt that she didn’t want to gush about her newest grandchild, but it was healed by her gratitude for a friend who didn’t want to talk about the baby either. Jane understood that tonight was an exercise in resurrecting a long-dormant version of Annie: the one who wasn’t even a mother, let alone a grandmother.
* * *
The pub was quiet when they walked in. She supposed that was to be expected — it was very close to Christmas. It was probably good, for her first time. But she hoped all the producers and A&R people hadn’t already gone off on holidays, and that they weren’t too busy snorting lines of coke off interns at their Christmas parties.
The main bar was large and seemed proudly scummy. Annie liked it. Most of the pubs in her area had been renovated to bring in lots of light, and rosé drinkers who would order overpriced grilled haloumi. It was comforting being somewhere that still had a floral carpet that stuck to your shoes.
An elfin young woman with pastel pink hair and the sort of short fringe Annie associated with toddlers who have twisted a comb around and around until it’s had to be cut out with the good scissors stood at the bar looking at a clipboard.
Annie approached her. ‘Hi. Are you where we sign up for the open mike thing?’ Why had she called it a thing? It was a night. Not a thing. Her nerves were already failing.
The girl laughed. ‘Yeah, why, fancy signing up?’
Annie was confused. ‘Well . . . yes, please.’
The girl stopped laughing. ‘Oh, shit, right. Yes, okay. Sorry, I thought you were . . . never mind. What’s your name?’
‘Annie Thorne.’
The girl wrote it down on her list.
‘And what’s your name?’ Annie prompted. Why did people never introduce themselves any more?
‘Aurora.’
Behind Annie, Jane stifled a laugh.
‘Good week to come, Annie,’ Aurora said. ‘This is the week we get the most people like you.’
‘People like me?’
‘First-timers. Newbies. New Year’s resolutions from last year. Try
ing to get it in at the last minute. That’s you, am I right?’
Jane opened her mouth and puffed herself up, but Annie put her hand on her friend’s arm. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a New Year’s resolution.’
‘That’s great! Never too old to have a go. New tricks and all that! Have you ever performed before?’
‘Not for a long time.’
‘You’ll smash it,’ said Aurora, and she gave Annie a patronising smile.
‘Is it true that you sometimes get scouts in here from record companies?’ asked Annie.
‘Yeah, yeah, EMI and Parlophone and a couple others have their offices nearby and sometimes people from there swing in. A couple of our acts have actually ended up being signed.’ She paused and added, trying to be polite, ‘They’ve been pretty, um, fresh sorts of artists, if you know what I mean.’ Her eyes flicked around, not meeting Annie’s as she clarified unnecessarily, ‘Younger types.’ She smiled. ‘But, hey, got to be in it to win it!’ she chirped and marched off to welcome a guy with the look of Jesus’s anaemic younger brother, who was tuning up his guitar with a pained expression on his face.
Annie secured them a small round table near the makeshift stage area, which was only slightly elevated. Her foot wouldn’t stop jiggling, though the stickiness of the floor kept tacking the sole of her sneaker down so she couldn’t actually tap her foot. Jane bought them each a vodka soda, and squeezed Annie’s hand.
‘You’re a hundred times the musician anyone else here is.’
‘I’m a hundred times older.’
‘Nope, we’re not doing that. Not the boring age thing. Ignore it. It has no bearing on what you are doing here.’
‘All right. Tonight I am ageless. Do you know, I half thought I might not call myself Annie? Do you reckon I could pull off just being Thorne?’
Jane stared at her, chewing her lip thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ she said finally, ‘but only if you have a fringe. Hair parted like that, with your cheery bright face, you’re Annie, one hundred per cent. Thorne needs more mystery.’
‘It’s a bit late to get a fringe.’
This Has Been Absolutely Lovely Page 18
