by Naomi Booth
* * *
When Pete’s gone, I lie in bed for a while, watching the intermittent movements under the surface of my stomach. Sometimes I think I can make out the shape of a tiny fist, punching itself upwards and out. It makes me remember gruesome revenge tales about children baked in pies and all those gory nursery rhymes: four and twenty blackbirds fluttering to escape their crust. The floury skin of my belly is a pastry case as I drum my fingers against it, its live filling wriggling to get out.
I have to get up to retch, and then I wander into the little room that Pete’s calling the ‘nursery’. I haven’t really paid much attention to the things in here. It’s mostly stuff we’ve been given by Pete’s family. There’s an old crib, the one that Pete and his siblings all slept in. It’s not picturesque. It’s from the ’90s and it’s massive. The varnish on the light wood is peeling away in tea-coloured slews, like sunburnt skin. That must be dangerous. God knows what sort of chemicals were used to treat wood back then. The mattress is soiled and looks lumpy. We don’t have any bedding yet. The only other furniture in here is a set of drawers. I open the top one, which is full of small sets of clothes, neatly folded. I didn’t do any of this, Pete must have packed this all away, with unusual care. I glance down at my massive belly alongside the contents of the drawer, and it’s such an alien scene that for a moment I feel as though I’m an intruder: I’ve broken into this house, I’m looking into someone else’s drawers, I’m in someone else’s body. I’m watching a film about a pregnant woman, close third-person. My real body is somewhere else, back in the city, hard and compact and entirely my own, watching all of this. A hand reaches out and touches the baby clothes. These are donations too. Pete’s mother worried we hadn’t thought about the details and tried to make up for my evident lack of enthusiasm about outfits and blankets and prams and pumps. The hands in front of me, the pregnant woman’s hands, are unfolding a little yellow baby-grow. Pete’s mum must have kept all these things for decades. There’s a picture of a bunny on the front of the tiny garment, printed in some kind of thin, adhesive plastic. Where the material has been folded the print is cracking, and the colours have faded, so that the middle of the rabbit’s face, up to and including its eyes, is a blur. The baby-grow looks like it has myxomatosis. I shove it back in the drawer. All of this stuff is bloody toxic. I can taste it, the plastic in the air, the carcinogens. The door slams shut as I leave the room. I’m not going near it again.
* * *
I try to eat breakfast, but nothing will stay down. I wish I could call her now, Eleni, Pete’s mum. Pete is one of four, with innumerable cousins. Eleni is not one of those euphoric birth evangelists. She always makes childbirth sound like a deeply unpleasant but necessary procedure, a bit like a bad trip to the dentist or giving evidence in court. She makes casual pronouncements like, ‘Of course, I couldn’t sit down for a fortnight after Pete. Scissored to kingdom come. But John bought me a rubber ring and we got on just fine.’ In the early stages, I didn’t want to hear any of her dour advice. It was mortifying, the things she’d bring up after dinner. I didn’t want to think about the precautions needed to guard against piles or protect my perineum, and I certainly didn’t want everyone else thinking about them over milk pie. But, right now, hearing her voice, her grim, phlegmatic pronouncements, and, behind them, her unshakeable belief that whatever happens, you just get on with it – right now, I’d like to hear that. She’d tell me straight-off if this is normal, the sickness and the crawling sensation across my skin and the darts of electricity through my abdomen.
I drop an unfinished slice of protected bread and marmalade into the bin and try to think of ways to keep myself busy. I could re-organise some of our things in the kitchen cupboards: Pete has thrown everything in in a haphazard manner, so that the pans in one cupboard are surrounded by tea-lights, and a colander in another is filled with napkins and cutlery. I start to get everything out, so that I can produce sensible taxonomies. I arrange all the pans across the floor in families of use. Dishes are arranged in groups according to size. Cutlery is bunched together, and then subdivided into different clans, the spoons being the most populous. I sit down on the floor and begin to sort through some of the old earthenware I saved from Mum’s flat. But, as I reach across to sort through the plates, something inside me pushes hard up into my ribs, causing a sharp stab of pain through my sternum. I grab at my stomach, breathless. I sit upright, very still, waiting to see if the pain will come again. It does, and this time I can see the movement, something angular momentarily protruding at the top of my stomach. I’ve seen the scan pictures. I know that I’m meant to imagine that this is a baby, that its adorable little foot or elbow is pushing against me. Everyone told me the scan would be the moment when it all made sense, when I would see it and fall in love with what was inside me. The midwife said I should start talking to the baby then, start trying to bond with it. She said that it could hear my voice already. So I watched carefully as the grainy body parts appeared on the screen at the hospital and the cold-handed woman pushed deep into my stomach with the probe in her relentless search for heart valves and lips and genitals. ‘Look there,’ she said, clacking her nails across the screen. ‘No cleft palate.’ And Pete beamed at my side, looking grateful and overwhelmed, given an award he didn’t even know he’d been nominated for. He’d never heard of cleft palate, he told me afterwards. That’s Pete all over: graced with the bliss that comes from ignorance of danger. That scan was it for him: he believed in it all, he could picture a beautiful, healthy baby. It never felt like that for me; the thing inside me was still impossible. I suppose I’d have to feel the wounds, put my hands right in the flesh. And in these moments, when I think about what’s inside me, I still can’t believe it: I can’t believe those weird parts we saw on the screen will add up to a person. Right now, I see the palpitations in my stomach again and I imagine giving birth to a bundle of flesh with no shape; to something entirely sealed in, an oily mass of meat with fists and heels and a skull, without a single orifice. I feel a burning rush of nausea again and get up onto my feet.
I stand over the sink for a while, trying to focus on the concrete things around me. I suck up some water and I look out across the garden, towards the mountains. There’s no rustling in the undergrowth today and I can see birds wheeling about, high above the valley, riding the thermals. Maybe Pete’s right and all of this anxiety is just the hormones. Maybe I see danger everywhere because of an instinct to protect. Pete makes it sound as though it’s a positive thing, as though all of my apocalyptic imaginings are a healthy maternal response that’s just got a bit out of hand. He’s always ready to see the best in a situation; and in me. I look out at the mountains and the blue-grey haze around them. It’s not like the smog back in the city; there’s nothing yellow or septic-looking about it. The softening of the mountain edges is just distance, and eucalypt oil on the air, and low, fine cloud. I breath out. The nausea has passed.
* * *
When he gets back from town, Pete looks distracted. He’s bought some beers and he cracks open a bottle straight-off.
‘How was it?’ I ask.
‘Not great, babe,’ he says. ‘Couldn’t find anyone who gave a rat’s arse about the old bloke.’ He lifts the bottle towards his mouth and sucks off the soapy bubbles at the neck. ‘It’s weird. There’s hardly anyone about.’
‘What do you mean, weird?’ I ask. ‘It’s a small town. It’s not going to be like the city.’
Pete’s not looking at me. He’s not good at keeping things to himself. I can see he’s struggling with something.
‘Look, just tell me what’s going on,’ I say. ‘I’m not going to get hysterical. Give me some credit.’
He looks up at me. His eyes flicker across my face and down to my belly, and I can see that he’s making a quick calculation about my present levels of reasonableness. He’s not convinced.
‘It was nothing, really, babe,’ he says. ‘Some of the services were just… a bit dismissive.’
He swigs his beer.
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ I say. ‘There’s hardly any funding out here. So who did you speak to?’
‘Well, I went to the police station first, to ask where I should go to make a report. They had this old-fashioned bell on the counter, and when I finally spoke to the bloke behind the desk, he told me Social Services are… well, they’ve shut them down for the area. Everything’s being centralised in the next district. So I went down to the doctors’ surgery. Thinking the old coot had shouted about the district nurse, so maybe they knew about him. Christ, Ali, the doctors’ was bedlam.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I tried to tell you.’
Pete is drinking his beer quickly and he’s still not looking at me. ‘Were there any symptomatics?’ I ask. ‘When I was there, there was a little boy,’ I say, and it feels good to talk about it, ‘and he was covering his ears and just whining. I’m pretty sure it was cutis.’
Pete looks up at me. We look at one another for a long moment, for long enough that it feels like we’re properly together again, and Pete’s face is, in that moment, the same, round, gentle face of Anderson Avenue: the face of the beautiful boy next door, the boy who would climb into our garden at night to drink blackcurrant juice with me and Mum under a blanket, who would wait for me after school to show me an unusual rock he had found in the playground, who would sit at our kitchen table to do his homework when his own house was too noisy and full of shouting siblings. My mother loved Pete. He was the kind of kid who always had filthy clothes, and his fingers in his mouth, and a big graze he’d be picking at, constantly lifting its edges and reforming the wound. Mum would tut fondly at his filthy habits and she loved having him in the house. He would pick flowers for her and sit on our doorstep like a hopeful orphan. And she was always pink-faced and happy when she was chiding him. She saved things up for his frequent visits: food, and books I’d finished with, and all the affection that I didn’t want.
He’s not that boy anymore. Or, at least, he is for only a moment. He looks away from me. He tilts the beer back into his mouth. His jaw is stronger now and he’s clenching his teeth so that there are pits in his cheeks. Pete has grown up into that mix of soft and hard that people find appealing in a man: his dark, soft skin, his bright, glittering eyes, alongside the strong chin and massive shoulders. The contrast is in his moods too. He’s buoyant, a perennial optimist, but he has short, wild bursts of anger, and of recklessness. I’ve always been more steadily pessimistic, more consistently angled. A gangly child and a hard-featured woman. ‘Sharp,’ my mother used to say. ‘You’ve got your father’s sharpness.’ High cheekbones, a hawkish nose, vivid lips. The sort of face that made people think I was haughty, even as a child. The sort of face that gets you punished.
‘So,’ I ask again. ‘What was it? What did you see? Were there symptomatics?’
‘Ali,’ Pete says, ‘it was… horrible.’
I sit down next to him. ‘Tell me,’ I say. ‘Tell me what they looked like.’
Pete knocks back the beer again. He’s almost drained the bottle. ‘I’m not sure you want to hear this, babe,’ he says.
‘I need to know what’s going on,’ I say. ‘I’m not recording things, I’m not going to post anything out here, am I? You need to tell me.’
Pete looks at me again. He takes my hand and he stares at me and his eyes widen in that pleading, desperate way he sometimes has just before he comes. His mouth parts, and now I can see how frightened he really is, how much he wants to tell me. But then he glances down at my stomach. His jaw clenches again. He looks away for a few seconds, blinking hard, shuttering something away. When he looks back at me he’s fastened his face back together, collected and resolute. He places my hand carefully on top of my bump and wipes the back of his across his mouth.
‘It must just be the systems here,’ he says. ‘They’re less well equipped than the city, that’s all.’
‘What did you see?’ I ask. ‘What were people’s symptoms?’
‘Look, it’s nothing we haven’t heard about before. It just shook me up, seeing people. They’re all getting treatment, they’ll be ok. Let’s just try to forget everything about today and have a nice, relaxing evening.’
‘What was it?’ I ask again. I’m trying to keep my breath steady and my voice level, but I can hear my own words, weirdly sticky, catching in my throat. Excess mucus production. Another joy of pregnancy. I swallow, and it’s sour and thick. ‘Where were the symptoms? Was it people’s ears, like that boy? Or mouths? Or eyes? What did you bloody see?’
‘I knew it,’ he says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. Of course you’d go over the top.’ He gets up, pushes his chair away from the table. ‘Poor buggers don’t need you with your sticky-beak in their symptoms, recording everything in your morbid little files. And who’s it good for, anyway, Alice, any of this? You’re just getting yourself worked up, and me now as well. And stress is bad for the baby. Chri’sake.’
He opens the door to the verandah and blunders out. He’s pacing about outside, muttering under his breath. A familiar panic is starting to rise up my throat. I rest my hand on my collarbone. I can feel my pulse flickering in my throat through my fingertips. I place my thumb on my windpipe, pressing gently. There are ridges in the cartilage here, hard little circles. They’re moving up and down together as I keep on swallowing, trying to get rid of the phlegm. The movement’s like a brown snake’s when it’s taken on something too big for it. I keep on: I’ve got to clear my throat, my breathing already feels restricted. Another thing no one tells you about pregnancy: that your baby will take your space to breathe, growing upwards, contracting your lungs. At six months I had to stop halfway up staircases. I stopped gasping after a couple of weeks, got used to my newly compressed lungs. But now this, this new attempt to stop me breathing, with mucus and panic. I grip my windpipe, rub my fingers up and down, up and down. It’s nubbed, the trachea; brittle but flexible. My mind flickers back to those images we saw on the screen, of the strange, bony thing curled up in my pelvis. Its little spine, its own ridged columns already forming inside me, an echo of my own. We saw a dead lamb once, Pete and me. We were on a weekend hiking trip and it was curled at the edge of a ranch. It had come too soon, the lamb, and its bones weren’t properly formed. Something had eaten it out from the middle, so that it was wearing its skin like a savaged shawl: head and legs still intact, but the centre entirely gone. You could see its tiny spinal-column, lain out like a row of pearls. The bone was translucent, only half-hardened, glistening in the sun. It had come too early. I run to the sink, and I cough and I cough and I spit into the bowl until my throat is raw and clear.
* * *
Pete comes back inside after a while. He’s drunk. He might even be a bit stoned. It’s difficult to tell with Pete – sometimes, when his mood is high, he’s so blithe he seems stoned anyway. He holds my hand and he covers it in kisses. He looks happy and tearful and he tells me that he loves me, and he loves the baby, and that we’re all safe. He says he’s sorry that he got worked up, that he knows he should be more understanding. I kiss him back and try to shrink my anger, to swallow it down with all the mucus and the bile. But whenever I try to do that, whenever I try to make my anger disappear, it just gets harder and more compact, like sedimentary rock, and then I’m left with this hard stone in my chest. I give up on asking what he saw at the doctors’.
‘Babe,’ he says. ‘The good thing about the trip into town was that I bumped into Paulie.’
‘Paulie?’
‘Paulie. Your remember. Nice bloke from the pub in town. We got to talking. He’s got a girlfriend and a kid, you know. I invited them over for a beer. Thought it’d be nice for you to meet someone else with a baby out here.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘So they’re coming over tonight. Just for a quick pop in. I’ve got in loads of tinnies.’
He moves away from me and starts getting busy in the kitchen now, pouring unprotected crisps into bowls
, then licking the yellow dust off his fingers. He turns and gives me a killer grin: ‘Our first guests, Ali. Look at this. Me and you, entertaining. Like a proper little family.’
‘When?’ I say. ‘When are they coming over?’
‘’Bout now,’ he says.
* * *
Pete’s happy when there’s a bang on the door a little while later. Turns to me with a look that says: ‘Here I go! Answering our front door!’ I’ve been watching him for any signs that he’s still upset. I know he was scared by what he saw in town, I saw it in his face. But as he tidied up the living-room, set out the camping chairs, opened another beer, there was no sign of any fear left. He started whistling and put some music on. It’s gone: the anxiety has passed through him quick as clouds across a blue, wind-blown sky.
When Pete opens the door, Paulie’s standing on the step.
‘A’right,’ Paulie says. He’s wearing a cap and he pushes it further back on his head. Then he puts out a hand. And he instantly regrets it, he regrets putting out his hand. He’s uncertain: I can see it in the tiny waver in the hand that he holds out. He’s just a nervous kid after all, and I regret acting hostile back in the bar.
Pete grabs Paulie’s hand and turns the greeting into a half-hug. ‘Alright, mate,’ he says. ‘Good to see you. Come on in.’
Paulie steps across the threshold, takes his cap off. His coney-coloured hair is damp and flat against his head. ‘Here she is,’ he says, thumbing over his shoulder. ‘My quadroon and our little half-breed.’ Nope, I was right the first time: he’s a malicious little boy, chock-full of spite.
‘Stop being a bloody pig,’ the woman says. ‘Paulie likes to act up, don’t you, babe? Likes to get up people’s noses.’ She steps inside and swats her free arm against his backside. A small child is propped-up in her other arm and he holds clumps of her long, dark hair in both of his fists. His little mouth hangs open, as he stares at me and then at Pete. His cheeks are streaked with old tears. ‘I’m Mara,’ the woman says, ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’ She smiles, a wide and slightly goofy grin. Her face is broad, her jawbone half a hexagon. And her skin is super radiant: the colour of bronze, burnished with perspiration, a dark red blush at the apples of her cheeks. She looks so healthy, her skin seems almost metallurgic. And she looks happy. Maternal glow, I guess – or else the air really is clear out here.
