Apricots
Gentle clanging in the kitchen stretched Neddy’s sleep towards wakefulness. A few major clangs pointed to Juniper, her six-year-old daughter. It was a noise only a small yet independent child can make, unlike the alternatives of the dog letting itself out through a low swinging door or an unwanted stranger being far too conspicuous.
Last night’s news had predicted that the unseasonable rain would last another day, then summer would resume. She knew she should be joyous for the grass and the plants and the trees but, with the doona pulled up to her nose, she could feel herself mourning the loss of the sun. Rodd slept beside her, his closed eyes an annoyance. That he could sleep through the clamour of another morning was beyond her. He woke up when the alarm woke him, at 6.30 am Monday through Friday. For Neddy, at 5.54, or thereabouts, a maternal alarm called My Child Is Roaming the House jolted her awake. And now the baby’s cry. Neddy stared at the closed blinds in front of the bed, willed the light to make its slow way through the night-time’s shadows and the low morning clouds, and have mercy on their household.
With Willow on her hip, Neddy found Juniper scaling the kitchen bench. ‘You need a bowl, darling?’
Juniper moved quickly off the bench, singing, ‘I’ve got my cereal and milk already!’ and climbed into her chair. She was a morning person.
Neddy placed the bowl in front of her eldest daughter, then sat her youngest in the highchair. Youngest daughter kicked her feet in anticipation. Eldest daughter waited for her mother to pour the cereal. Rodd said good morning to the girls on his way to the toilet, maybe forgetting his wife would have liked some acknowledgement too. They’d fought last night. Sex again. Or better put: no sex again. Neddy shrugged it off and turned on the kettle. The scent of the rain that had yet to begin was already pushing through the cracks of the doors.
She hated these days, when they were trapped inside. To leave the house in this weather seemed dreary, so Neddy clung to domestic jobs and arts and crafts like life support, praying she would not buckle under the weight of the four walls.
‘After breakfast we’ll go outside,’ she told Juniper. ‘Before it starts to rain.’ She touched Juni’s head as she made her way to the fruit bowl. The last banana was deeply speckled with black spots; she was glad she wasn’t the one about to eat it.
She placed half the banana into a bowl and squeezed some breast milk over it: a small puddle of bodily goodness mixed with that which came from the land. She stirred these two basics together until the combination was smooth. Willow kicked her feet some more, this time reaching out her arms, her fingers splayed. Neddy placed the food in front of her baby and fastened on a plastic bib. ‘Here’s your spoon, little one,’ she said, then turned back to the fruit bowl. It was empty but for one orange, and Willow wasn’t ready for oranges. Neddy needed to go to the fruit and veg shop. Did she have to go to the fruit and veg shop? How was she going to manage shopping today – in this rain – with these children? After what had happened to Jean, she didn’t want to be driving in this weather with them in the car, and she didn’t know if she was being paranoid or safe.
‘You just get on with it,’ she heard her mother-in-law saying. That’s what country women always said. Neddy was an urban girl. And though she felt herself skilled enough at just getting on with things, she would forever think of Jean when driving in the rain.
Outside there was a drowsy heaviness in the air as the rain waited to fall; birds were everywhere. Their dog sniffed at his old poo, then moved on to whatever else smelled in the grass. Willow sat in a large plastic swing under the gum tree, chatting with life all around her. Juniper ran to the apricot tree, near-bursting with its early yield. So early, in fact, it was always a surprise when the fruit ripened.
‘Mummy, look! Let’s eat it!’
Neddy got down to Juniper’s level to see what the apricot might look like to a small child. Indeed, it was plump and orange and ready for eating, as was so much of the tree’s yield.
For weeks every morning as the parrots screeched away, trying to define their territory before someone, or something, shooed them away, Juniper had been examining the tree. Usually it was Smiley, their dog, who scared off the birds. He was in charge of all other animals in their backyard. But sometimes it was Juniper being ultra-protective of the fruit. Neddy would marvel daily at her daughter as she stood on her toes to touch the apricots. She adored Juni’s love of nature, and especially trees, as it reminded her of herself as a child. She adored how already her daughter would hang and swing from the lowest branch of the gum, forming a personal relationship with the old tree. How Juni wanted to be the official waterer of the peach tree in the pot because it was just like her: small. And how the girl noticed the evolution of the apricot tree, from spring blooms abuzz with bees to nut-like balls of green expanding with juicy possibilities.
‘It looks ready to me,’ Juniper said with serious eyes. ‘And I’m hungry.’
Juniper was always hungry in the morning. She generally had three breakfasts before Neddy managed to have her own. But Neddy knew this wasn’t about hunger. Neddy knew it was about watching something grow and now reaping the magic. ‘Why don’t you pick it?’
Juniper pulled firmly on the fruit and when it fell from its twig, she was surprised and giddy. She held it up to her mum.
‘You have the first bite, love.’
Neddy watched Juniper’s eyes change from concentration as she waited to find out what summer might taste like, to thrill as she tasted it.
‘It’s yummy, Mummy. Taste it!’
Neddy bit into the fruit. Once again life had persisted and triumphed, and it tasted good.
‘I might give Smiley a quick walk before I leave,’ Rodd said, kissing Neddy good morning. ‘Before it starts to rain.’
Good. She deserved that kiss. They were starting fresh today.
Neddy looked at Smiley, all languid in his soft labrador fur. He hadn’t had a walk for four days because of the rain, which had caused some disagreement between Rodd and Neddy the night before. It had been foreplay to the no-sex fight. Rodd didn’t see what the big deal was: you put the baby in the pram with the plastic covering and the dog on the lead and attach it to the pram and you go for a walk with the six-year-old striding proudly next to you in her duckbilled raincoat and gumboots. Neddy’d accused him of not having a clue what it was like to have to make decisions for the sake of two small children and to have the insight to think of your own self as well. ‘Sometimes you just have to realise that a dog is just a dog.’ She’d regretted saying it as soon as it had come out of her mouth. Her argument fared better when she’d said, ‘It would take us forty minutes to walk around the block; Juniper would start complaining less than halfway through and I’d be soaking because I couldn’t hold an umbrella and push a pram at the same time, probably crying like some hormone-engorged pig, just praying Willow doesn’t start in too. It’d be the highlight of my day.’
The argument had ended with Rodd repeating, ‘Hormone-engorged pig,’ and laughing.
‘Fuck you.’ Neddy was angry, but not so angry that she couldn’t let Rodd’s laughter ease the tension and remind her that they were in this together. For the long haul.
‘You wish.’
‘You wish I wished.’ And then they were both smiling.
So off Rodd and Smiley went on this dark summer morning, Rodd calling out over his shoulder, ‘You going to hospital today?’
‘Not with the kids; maybe later tonight.’ Neddy gathered up the children. ‘Let’s go inside, girls,’ she said, lifting Willow out of the swing. ‘It’s started sprinkling.’
Light flashed in jagged lines in the upper left-hand corner of her periphery. She was nauseous. She called to her daughter to bring her the popcorn bowl. Pain pushed hard on her skull and behind her eyes. Juniper looked up and asked if she was getting another headache. ‘Yes, darling,’ she said. ‘Can you please go get
me the popcorn bowl?’ Juniper did. It was plastic and thick and blue. It caught all of Neddy’s vomit.
Migraines were nothing new to her. When life became hectic, Neddy suffered. When she was at uni and there were essays all due at the same time, she got migraines. During the months it took her to plan the trip to South America, she got migraines. In fact when planning anything – the wedding, the fete for Juniper’s kindy, Rodd’s fortieth – she got migraines. It was no surprise she was getting another one now. Willow was seven months and still Neddy was feeding her at night, so exhaustion added to the regular stress of daily parenting duties. But it was Jean Harley lying in that hospital that was the main cause of this one.
As she lay on the couch, thankful this migraine coincided with Willow’s morning nap, Neddy wondered how she could simplify her life; migraines always told her she needed to slow down. But it was not as if she could ask Jean to please not die because it was making her sick. She couldn’t ask her daughters to grow up and take care of themselves just for the short time it would take for her best friend to come out of a coma. No, there was no way to simplify life because there was no way to simplify catastrophe.
It was Jean who usually cared for Neddy when she went through a bad migraine. Once, during a steady rain, and it was a cold rain because it was a winter rain, Jean had come home to the house the two rented together, soaking, armed with two bags of vegetables.
‘You got caught, you poor thing,’ Neddy had said from the kitchen table, lifting her head from her arms, defeated by not having had enough energy to cut a slice of bread.
‘We needed vegetables. You need soup.’
In fact, Jean showed up, house after house, migraine after migraine, with soup after soup, throughout all of their twenty-two years of friendship. Soup was something Jean believed in as a way to show love and offer comfort to an ailing soul. Neddy believed in doing people’s dishes, sweeping their floors – those necessary things that go undone when a body is in strife. She briefly wondered if she should try to get to Jean’s house and clean the kitchen for Stan.
When Jean had gone through a bad patch years earlier because she and Stan were not getting pregnant, Neddy felt the futility of her household efforts. She’d asked herself what Jean really needed. She’d considered a massage. Some bath salts. A bottle of Bailey’s. In the end, she decided Jean probably needed soup.
It was nearly midnight when she had decided to soak the beans for Jean’s fingers-crossed-for-fertility soup. She’d been heavily pregnant with Juniper, feeling nervous about the birth and guilty, for Jean’s sake. The due date had been less than a week away. She’d gotten a migraine that night too.
Now she was laughing to herself, however feebly, at the ridiculousness of why this one came on. It was her own fault for letting the small things get so big. But the seventh day of rain in the summertime was big. And in a house like theirs, covered in tin, it became so loud. And at 10 am, while Rodd was firmly seated at his big desk in his city office, sketching away at someone else’s luxury, eco-friendly home that probably kept the thundering sound of rain on roofs to a bare minimum, Neddy was struggling for ways to stop worrying about the worsening day and forget the oppression. So, yes, it was exhaustion and, yes, it was Jean and, yes, it was the rain and being stuck indoors, but it was also that one small thing – the missing puzzle piece.
Willow had been rocking herself back and forth in the crawling position, ready, but not quite, to take off, and her body had just given up. She was on her stomach, beginning to grizzle, ready, but not quite, to cry. Juniper and Neddy were doing a puzzle, and Neddy desperately wanted to finish it before Willow dragged her away for the late-morning feed and nap. She felt the letdown in her breasts, which were wet and fetid with perspiration and the scent of milk.
‘Wait, where’d it go?’ They had done this puzzle many times and Neddy knew it hadn’t been missing a piece. She looked under the bed. She picked up toys and smoothed out the rug around Willow in case it was hiding under there. She turned her head in every direction but up. The puzzle was missing a piece.
Juniper had dumped another puzzle onto the floor, having become bored with the unfinished one. In her world, everything was all right because something better was always waiting. She knew how to ‘just get on with things’ without having to analyse and find a solution. Missing pieces carried no burden. Death was still an unknown.
‘But it was here before we started; I know it,’ Neddy had said, panicked. ‘All the pieces were here.’
Juniper didn’t look up – she was happily putting together the Goldilocks puzzle – while on the floor Gretel was missing the hand that held onto Hansel’s. Willow had begun to cry, but the missing piece, in Neddy’s mind, somehow outweighed her daughter’s frustration, hunger and fatigue. She kept looking, her breasts beginning to leak, her forehead soaking and now she could hear the drip from the ceiling in their hallway where the rain had managed to work its way in.
‘Fine!’ she yelled at Willow. ‘Fine!’
Twenty minutes later she’d felt the migraine.
Neddy had met Jean and Viv at university. At a party, actually, where they’d sat on someone’s outdoor couch drinking rum and Coke until three in the morning. Twenty-two years later none of them could remember the name of the host, though Viv was pretty sure she had slept with him once before the fated party, but what they all could remember was waking up the next morning with that sickly sweet taste in their mouths, hungry to continue the previous night’s conversation.
Food had been fairly unstomachable that afternoon, which was why at the outdoor café they ordered only a bowl of wedges to eat amid sips of the house white. It was then that they brainstormed what would become their first Adelaide Fringe show.
Neddy had outlined it for them, as she was clearly the organised one of the trio. She would write the poetry Jean would perform and dance to, and Viv would build the set. They had visions of a discarded ovum, at first comfortable, then journeying down a lonely and confusing vaginal path, until finally bursting towards freedom in a deluge of blood. They would call it A Celebration of Menstruation, half avant-garde, half taking the mickey, largely a coping mechanism for Jean as she’d only just received the news from her doctor that she had dysfunctional uterine bleeding.
Reviews weren’t favourable (though some pointed out that the obvious talent was not yet matured and asked of readers ‘to watch out for these artists in the future’), but the experience had cemented their lifelong friendship. That first lunchtime meeting would evolve into semi-regular Thursday night drinks that Neddy, always Neddy, made sure happen. Overseas trips would follow, an abortion would be had, bridesmaid dresses would be fitted and worn, babies would be born, Neddy would stop writing and Viv would become intensely successful while they both, unknowingly, geared up for Jean’s accident.
Neddy wondered what would happen if Jean died. How do two friends, so accustomed to being a part of a trio, make a happy duo when seeing one another might only remind them that something is missing? Neddy loved Viv and always thought of Viv and Jean as being equal – they were both her best friends – but since Jean had gone into a coma a week earlier, Neddy saw Jean as fatally perfect while Viv was becoming immortally flawed. Jean was the good one, so much like Neddy, a devoted mother and partner. Jean was the caring one, the one who knew how to comfort Neddy with soup when she suffered from what Viv referred to as ‘a headache’. Jean was a dog-lover, like herself, while Viv had a snobby cat. Jean was the one who might die, and Viv had always been so selfishly alive.
When they’d met at the hospital when they’d first learned of the accident, Viv had been dressed in heels and a trendy short skirt and she’d brought along the man from the night before. Neddy was wearing a t-shirt stained with spit-up. Yes, they had hugged and of course they had cried, but when Viv said she needed to get to work after less than an hour at the hospital, Neddy had felt her anger surge.
Neddy hadn’t reached out to Viv over the painful days of waiting. In fact, she had been ignoring Viv’s texts and calls. She knew it couldn’t go on like this forever. She knew Jean couldn’t go on like this forever. What if there was a funeral, a wake, and all of those Thursdays to follow? If Jean was going to die, Viv would still be alive.
Nearly six, later than usual for the girls to have dinner and later than usual for Rodd to get home. Rodd entered quietly, as if he didn’t want to disturb the usual noise of the household. Neddy didn’t turn to look, instead felt a twinge of anger. Typical gendered household, she thought, slicing the fish with more precision as she said hello. She was tired. Her head, the rain, the everyday of these long days.
‘I stopped by the hospital on my way home.’
This time Neddy lifted her head. Her eyes met Rodd’s, where she looked for clues. They were red – bloodshot – and he was biting his bottom lip.
‘What?’ A tightening in her gut.
‘You need to go. They tried to take her out of the induced coma. She didn’t come out.’
What already felt like slow-motion slowed all the way down to pause: Rodd’s face, Juni’s song, the drone of the heroic refrigerator and the monotone of the rain. ‘Did you see her?’
‘Ned, you should go.’
Neddy’s chest tensed and everything on pause gave an enormous shiver. She scanned her mind quickly and flashes of steaming vegetables and frying fish, the avocado, the breast milk, maybe I can pick up some fruit on the way, sped things back up to their regular hectic pace and, as if fated, the sound of her baby’s cry. But with her cry came focus. ‘I need Willow.’
In the lounge room, next to Juniper and her Duplo tower, with her seven-month-old forehead pressed to the floor, lay Willow. Such a teeny face, and Neddy knew it was filled with so much frustration. Her heart momentarily broke before she picked up her daughter and held her cheek to the baby’s head, where hair became the gentlest of drugs in which Neddy could lose herself.
Jean Harley Was Here Page 6
