by Susan Allott
Christ. He shut the door and lit a cigarette, unsteady with the lighter, sending it black down the side. He turned the radio on. Another battalion to Vietnam before the end of the year. He reached for the dial, turned it quickly, looking for something to calm his head. He found another news channel; Harold Holt was saying he wanted to drop the word British from Australian passports. About time. He found himself half listening. His mind wandered to Mandy on the beach, walking into the water with all her clothes on, wading deeper with her arms up high.
In the bedroom he pulled yesterday’s clothes onto his damp skin and tugged the covers over the sheets. Louisa’s clothes were slung over the chair on her side of the bed. The book she’d been reading was still there where she’d left it, pages splayed open against the bedside table, spine up. The Bell Jar. He picked it up, scanned a few lines, and put it down again, losing her place. His head throbbed. He picked the book up again, put it in the drawer, and slammed it shut. He lifted her clothes from the chair, opened the wardrobe, and threw them into the cluttered space at the bottom where she kept her shoes. The door wouldn’t shut, so he knelt down and pushed her clothes farther back, aware of her blouses and dresses hanging above him, grazing the back of his head. He leaned against the wardrobe until it closed. He was sweating. His shirt was drenched.
He ought to open a window, but if that baby was still crying he didn’t want to hear it. Might be better to get out of the house. Go and buy some coffee and more headache pills. Maybe he’d go as far as Bridge Street and get himself a couple of new shirts. If he could stay off the grog tonight, he’d go into work tomorrow.
The phone rang again as he was lacing his shoes. He didn’t bother kidding himself it was Louisa this time. It would be Stan calling from work, wanting to know where the hell he was. He’d told him he had a bug. First excuse to come into his head. If he’d thought harder, he might have invented something that would last a few weeks. He couldn’t face the office, the stack of papers on his desk, the meetings about meetings, the internal politics. It had been bad enough before his wife left him.
The little girl across the street cycled past. The Walker kid, what was her name? Isla had been so jealous of her on that bike. He’d planned to get her a bike of her own, once the pay raise came through. But he’d put the money in the savings account instead, and Louisa had taken every last cent of it to fly back to England.
He stood and leaned in against the wall, felt his arm draw back and his fist slam against the plaster, once, twice, three times. It was broken already, he was sure of it. The agony made his legs weak. He swallowed the bile in his mouth.
The phone stopped ringing. He sat down on the couch and kicked off his shoes.
28
Sydney, 1997
Isla stands in the hallway and dials the London number. Her parents’ framed photographs look up at her from the hall table. Her younger self holding a gymnastics trophy, posing for the local press in a leotard, surly with embarrassment. (“Couldn’t you have smiled?” her mother had said.) School photos, graduation photos. Her parents outside the house when it was newly built, the sun in their eyes, holding each other at the waist. A happy family, trimmed of its backstory. Isla stares them down.
The phone rings distantly in London.
“Hello? It’s Isla Green, regarding the first-floor apartment on Sinclair Road.”
A British accent replies, saying he’s glad she called. The vendors of the apartment have had to raise the price. The sale will fall through, he tells her, if she doesn’t up her offer. Isla calmly agrees to another £20,000. The property will appreciate in value, he tells her, in clipped vowels. She can’t lose.
“One more thing,” she says. “I’m going to stay in Sydney a bit longer than expected. Something came up.”
The estate agent takes her parents’ number. She walks from room to room, picking up her dad’s overflowing ashtrays and taking them into the kitchen to empty them. Her mother doesn’t allow him to smoke anywhere but the kitchen, at the back door, and he is breaking this rule angrily, pointlessly, since Louisa is not there to notice. She has been gone three days and her absentminded mess has been swallowed up.
In the kitchen Isla stacks the dirty plates next to the sink, runs the tap, and adds soap to the water. Dave Taylor is mowing his lawn next door, pacing up and down, leaving long green stripes in his wake. A cockatoo lands on the arched trellis of his passion fruit vine. Mandy used to sit under there, Isla thinks. A striped chair, white and green. She pushes the image away. She’s been trying not to think of Mandy these past few days. She doesn’t want to imagine the last time her mother walked out, leaving her dad hurt and angry and hitting the bottle. Mandy just next door.
It’s Steve Mallory she remembers. Not his physical appearance or the things he said. She remembers how it was to be in his home. Days spent in his backyard watering plants, digging for worms, always wondering if he’d pull up out front in his truck. A current of fear beneath warm colors. She rinses a plate, sets it down on the drying rack, and looks out at Dave Taylor and his mower, trimming around the eucalyptus. It’s still there, this shadow of Steve at the edge of her vision, the threat she’d picked up on as a child.
She takes another plate and submerges it. She was so young back then. She is remembering through the filter of her adult self, knowing all that she knows. The child removals are all over the news. The Stolen Generation, they’re calling it. Aboriginal people talking about being removed from loving homes, taken to institutions where they were trained to work for white people. Stories of abuse, cruelty, inhumanity. It’s no wonder she can’t think of Steve without this edge of menace.
She leaves the plates in the water and returns to the phone in the hallway. She finds Scott’s office number in the address book. His secretary puts her through.
“Isla?” His voice is loud in her ear. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I need to ask a favor.”
“Ask away.”
“Do you have a computer?”
“I do.” She hears him sit down, the creak of a chair. “What’s this about?”
“I need you to help me find somebody.”
A pause. She feels his impatience. “Isla, the police will have searched for Mandy more thoroughly than you or I could. They’ll have her dental records, medical records, birth certificate. There’s no point me punching her name into AltaVista.”
She stretches the telephone cable into the lounge room, where the fog of cigarette smoke hangs low in the morning sun. Under the armchair, the neck of a bottle of vodka protrudes, instantly familiar. She moves to pick it up, to hide it. She is halfway across the room when she remembers she doesn’t drink these days. She leaves it where it is.
Isla lifts the phone up from the carpet. “It’s not Mandy I want to find,” she says. “It’s Steve Mallory. Her husband.”
29
Sydney, 1967
The smell of baby reached Mandy’s nose before she’d shut the door. Formula milk, and the foul, slightly sweet smell of soiled nappies. The heat had intensified the stink. She ran down the hall to the kitchen with her hand clamped over her mouth and nose. There were babies’ bottles in the sink, and she leaned over them, dry heaving, as she ran the tap and let the water splash against her face. She managed to take a few mouthfuls of water and hold them down. Small dots passed before her eyes. She slid onto the linoleum and sat with her legs apart, her head between her knees. Color seeped back into the room. The baby’s cries rose and fell.
She went through to the hall and nudged the door open with her foot, throwing sunlight into the darkened lounge room. She saw cushions on the floor, the couch pushed back against the wall, the coffee table at an angle, a cloth nappy wrapped loosely around itself on the rug. A baby’s bottle lay on its side on the couch, empty.
Mandy stepped into the room and pulled the door closed behind her, shutting out the sun. Steve was whispering to the baby, shushing it in a sugary tone she’d never heard before.
“There, now. There, now.” He’d pulled the curtains in his clumsy way, leaving a gap in the center where the light bled through. As her eyes adjusted she made out his hunched shape, rocking from side to side. Mandy was sure he knew she was there. He’d have heard her. He’d have been expecting her for hours.
The room was hot and airless. Her head ached, but the half-darkness helped and slowly the cries became softer. Steve turned his body toward her, keeping his eyes locked on the baby, and sat down on the couch. Mandy waited for him to look up. He fussed with the towel the baby was wrapped in, got it positioned right in his lap, stared at it for a long while. She couldn’t make out the baby’s face, but she could hear its steady breathing, the occasional shudder on the in-breath. When Steve finally looked up at her, he was smiling. A proud smile that expected her to smile back. She reeled away from him. His eyes, sunken with lack of sleep, were backlit with surprised, overwhelming joy.
“Come and look at him, Mand.”
She stepped over the discarded cushions and crouched down beside him. He held the baby toward her and raised both eyebrows, still smiling. She leaned across and looked at the child. He was compact and solid looking, with round cheeks, a broad nose, and a small, full mouth. In the dark room his skin was close to black.
Mandy slumped down onto the carpet, her back against the couch. Dots swam before her eyes, bigger than before, darker.
“Steve, what have you done?”
“Shh!” He shook his head. “You’ll wake him. Keep your voice down.”
She mouthed the words silently, “What have you done?”
“I drove halfway to Nowra with him, but I couldn’t face leaving him there. I turned back.”
It was hard to break through the calming fog he’d built up around himself and the child. “Ray’s going to have a blue fit when he finds out you’ve taken a child home with you.”
“Will you give it a rest?” He moved the baby closer to his chest. “It’s taken me all day to get him off to sleep.” He adjusted the towel around the baby’s shoulders. The sun scorched through the curtains, giving a honeyed thickness to the hot room. “I promised his mother he’d be looked after, Mandy. I couldn’t take him to the Home, not after I’d promised her.”
It was as bad as she’d feared, then. Her head thumped. “Steve, you can’t keep him. You’ll be fired, apart from anything else.”
“I was going to resign, anyway.” He hugged the baby to his chest and patted his back. “I know you don’t want to get pregnant,” he said, after a pause. “I understand you feeling that way.”
“Steve, this is not the way to fix things. This is—”
“But we could still bring a child up.” His hand closed gently around the boy’s thigh. “Bring him up as our own.”
“This is crazy talk.” She sat down next to him on the couch. “What are you thinking? You can’t bring a black baby home and stick him in a pram, expect people to think he’s our child.”
“Keep your voice down, Mandy, for God’s sake.” The baby sighed in his sleep, turned his head away and back again. “It doesn’t work like that. We don’t need to pretend he’s ours. We could adopt him.”
“Adopt him?”
“Why not?”
Mandy put her head in her hands. This felt like a retribution. She should have given him babies like he wanted. Out on the street she heard the tick tick tick of Andrea Walker’s bicycle.
“I’m sure Ray could arrange it for us.” Steve smiled his new, peaceful smile. “Why don’t you think it over?”
“I don’t need to think it over.” She stood, and the waft of the nappy met her, making her gag. “I don’t want to adopt a baby. Have you lost your mind?”
The baby stirred and Steve shunted him higher up his chest. “I promised his mother, Mandy.”
“Take him back to his mother, then.” She flung the window wide and opened the curtain an inch or two. The child sighed softly in his sleep. “If she made you promise her, she must love him. She must be breaking her heart, wanting him back.”
Steve shook his head. “Ray wants him removed. You know that. I can’t take him back.”
“Find another family for him, then.”
Steve closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the couch. “You know how much I want a child, Mandy. You know it’s what I want more than anything.”
She watched him with the boy, the way he held him in his arms. The gentle strength in him. Behind her, through the open window, she heard Andrea slow up across the street and lift the bicycle onto her veranda, the dull chime of the bell as the front wheel rolled over the steps.
“He can’t stay here,” she said, pulling the window shut. “That’s final.”
30
Sydney, 1967
At dawn the baby’s cries grew loud enough for Mandy to admit defeat and get out of bed. She could sleep through almost anything, but this was something else. It wasn’t just the noise, it was the fact of this baby being here at all. She splashed her face in the bathroom. She had a stale, grubby feeling in her skin and a pain behind her eyes which had been there for days.
From the room down the hall she heard Steve trying again and again to put the baby down. He was useless, God help him. She moved closer, watched him a while in the dark: leaning against the mattress, inching the boy down, and slowly, silently standing back up. She could see his fear and confusion. The crushing loss of hope as the baby lifted his head and bawled: a long, upward curling sound.
“Steve.” She’d told him he was on his own with this. She’d stuck to her guns until now, but in the name of sanity she was going to have to step in.
“I don’t know what to do.” He picked the child up and turned to face her. The baby was wailing in his arms. “I’ve been up half the night with him. He won’t—”
“You need to feed him.”
“What?”
She raised her voice above the noise. “Feed him. He needs his bottle.”
He frowned. “D’you think?”
She turned back down the hall. He called after her, but she kept going to the kitchen, felt around in the dark for the light switch. By the time he followed her in there she’d gotten his bottle made up.
“I should have thought of that.” The baby was screaming, leaning backward in rage, fists clenched.
She held the bottle out for him to take it.
“Could you—?” He held him toward her. “I need the bathroom, Mandy. Please?”
She gave him a long look. “We agreed I wouldn’t have to do this.”
“I’ll be a couple of minutes, darl’. Please.”
She held her arms out, weakened by the noise. “Two minutes,” she said.
The child was beside himself, howling and thrashing, his body hot and rigid. She almost dropped him in the struggle to bring the bottle to his mouth, and when she tried again he turned his head away, angry, scared by the tension in her.
“Come on.” The teat brushed his lips and he turned his face to it; his breathing quickened. She shifted his position and tried again. “Come on now. That’s it.”
He began to gulp as soon as the milk was flowing, and his body relaxed against her.
“Good boy,” she said. The relief was huge, like a storm passing. “That’s a good lad.”
Steve smiled at her from the kitchen door. His face was pale. “Well done,” he said.
She ignored him. The baby was drinking steadily, the milk inching down inside the bottle.
“You’re a natural,” he said.
“No, I’m not. I remember this from when Isla was a baby, that’s all. I know what a hungry baby sounds like.”
She heard him draw breath to reply, then a pause as he thought better of it.
“Have you spoken to Ray about quitting?”
Steve nodded. “I called him yesterday. He didn’t take it too well. Tried to persuade me to stay in the job.”
“Does he know?” She gestured at the baby with her head.
“Not yet. No.”
The boy’s eyes were closing. She put the bottle down on the countertop.
“He’ll find out,” she said. “If you don’t take him to the Home soon, he’ll get a call from them, won’t he?”
He nodded again, deflated. The child sighed in Mandy’s arms. She rubbed his back and moved him up to her shoulder.
“I think we should consider adoption,” he said. “I’m sure Ray would arrange it if I asked.”
“For God’s sake, haven’t I already told you no? Haven’t I been crystal clear about that?”
“I won’t take him to the Home. I won’t do it.”
“We’ve been over this!” She swayed with the child, patting his backside. “He’s not ours, Steve. I can tell he wants his mum. I can feel it in him.”
He rubbed his hands up and down over his face. “If I take him back to his mother, they’ll just send some other bastard back to get him.”
She passed the baby to Steve. “We can’t keep him.”
“We could, darl’. It’d be the best thing for him.”
She walked over to the back door. The sky was turning violet where the sun was coming up. It brought to mind Joe Green, standing where she was now, in his shirtsleeves, drinking coffee. It was an effort not to remember the rest of it, not to run through it again in her head. More than a week had passed and still the memory was fresh and shocking. It had been greedy and abandoned and revelatory. She didn’t know what would happen if she saw him again. She might not be able to help herself.
At the same time, she knew it wasn’t love. It was a physical thing entirely, a call of the flesh that would burn out soon enough. And what she had with Steve, next to that, felt closer to love. Faded and damaged and disappointing at times, but maybe that’s what love came to look like after a while.
Steve stood beside her with the baby in his arms. “I don’t think I can give him up, Mandy.”
