Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  I began to make lists. Crossing off each item as it was finished was exhilarating. Well done, Rachel, I whispered to myself. Some days I could do ten tasks before eleven o'clock. I discovered it was better not to put too many hard things on a day's list, because you could become overwhelmed and never start any of them out of fright. Often I put obvious things on my list, things that you would do automatically, just so I could tick them off . That's what Toad did in Frog and Toad, a picture book I read with Clara. He even wrote Wake up and Eat Breakfast and Get Dressed, so I did too. I added Make Cup of Tea – because the early childhood nurse said it was good for Baby if Mother was happy. I didn't like to think of what happens when Mother isn't happy. When I was busy making my lists, I thought about that kind of thing less often.

  While I drank my reward cup of tea, I put Clara on the floor with some toys and my feet up on the desk. Then I'd ring Doreen. Leaning back into the chair I'd wiggle my toes at the baby, and she'd scrunch up her nose in a grin. For a moment it was as if we were conspirators together, Clara and I, getting the better of the enemy, whoever that was.

  Even though Clara was still so small, I borrowed books from the library to show her. She seemed to enjoy it and smiled each time I pulled her onto my lap. It was a lovely time of the day – the words were all there for me to say, such kindly, interesting words that I didn't have to invent, and Clara snuggled close against my chest, sucking earnestly on her dummy. I told her about all the things in the world the book said she needed to know, and pointed to the pictures of happy dogs and birds and sunlight and grass and bunnies and it was lovely when she laughed out loud.

  While the baby slept I made lists about house improvements. The kitchen and bathroom were shoddily built, with chipboard drawers that swelled and buckled with moisture. The small dark cupboards near the ceiling were so high as to be unusable. Drawers didn't close, floors ran downhill. Throughout the house it seemed one surface was incapable of meeting another without argument, leaving gaps like awkward pauses in a conversation.

  It was as the weather grew warmer that I began to notice the cockroaches. No matter how diligently I cleaned the kitchen, fat brown cockroaches four centimetres long flew in and stayed, breeding in the crevices and dark corners. I dreaded coming into the kitchen at night, switching on the light and seeing those hateful creatures scuttling like something from a horror movie, dancing, nibbling, running, fornicating all over my clean kitchen bench. My dreams were full of them; they wandered over my body, in and out of my cavities, leaving their small hard pellets of excrement behind.

  Once, when Guido and I were sitting at the table having dinner, a roach crawled up the wall behind his head. I was caught between trying to think of something fascinating to say so he wouldn't look around and see it, and asking him to swat it. He was in excellent range: if he rolled up that thick poetry magazine next to his plate he could get it for sure. How I loathed those fat, shiny, impervious beings. My hatred won.

  'Quick, kill that roach behind you!' I yelled.

  'No!' he yelled back. I wasn't sure if he was denying the existence of such nightmarish creatures or refusing to hit it. Then I realised he meant both. He shuddered so deeply his wine spilled over the poetry magazine.

  'Porca miseria, what kind of country this is where animals enter the 'ouse? You are the native Australian, you must know 'ow to deal with them. You do it!' And he leapt up, taking his dripping magazine with him, heading for another room where cockroaches had not yet been discovered.

  Doreen told me that cockroaches could live for nine days without their heads, and they had no nervous system. She found the idea interesting. For her it was just a fact, like cows having four stomachs. But this knowledge made the creatures even more alien to me – monsters with no feelings or alarm systems. How could I possibly hope to win, being all feelings and alarm systems?

  The thought of cockroaches spilling their foul traces over Clara's sterilised bottles, soiling the carefully blended baby foods, or getting into her cot became too much for me. Clara's sleep sessions became my busiest times. I bought masking tape and stuck it over the cracks, mixed putt y and sealant for the bigger gaps. I did my best. Sometimes I felt quite pleased with my work, reducing the number of dark inviting crannies where cockroaches met and danced. I imagined the way they'd quiver with disappointment as they hurried to their well-known nightspots, only to find them taped off , like a police crime scene. I'd feel viciously happy – that is, until I remembered they had no feelings, only feelers.

  On my good days, I felt a bit like Barbie, fixing up my toy house with the glue and scissors. I just wished Ken would come home and say, 'Haven't you done well today!' But he didn't seem to notice.

  When he was at home, Guido spent most of his time in his room. I could hear the typewriter clattering, and that busy sound was reassuring. It meant he would emerge reasonably content, with a faraway look on his face, and wouldn't notice the dust on shelves or stains on my clothes.

  The times I found most worrying were when he'd splash on aftershave. I grew to dread the smell of Monsieur Dupont. He'd come out gleaming and shiny from the steaming bathroom.

  'Allora, is Saturday night, where will we go?' His shoes were polished, the creamy silk shirt glowing against his skin. 'Will we go to the cinema? Maybe dinner afterwards? There is a new restaurant at the Cross.'

  I'd look down at my banana-stained tracksuit. It was eight o'clock. 'What about Clara?'

  'Don we have a babysitter?'

  I'm not up to that bit yet, I wanted to say. Hadn't he noticed? But I just mumbled something about not feeling well and crept away. I heard him crashing things down on the big oak desk and stamping up the hall. He was pacing like a prisoner. I hoped he'd catch a cockroach or two under his polished shoes.

  The next Saturday night he showered and dressed and slapped on aftershave, but he didn't ask me about babysitters. He went out by himself. Mostly, I felt relieved. Once he was out of the house, I could get on with my jobs. The baby didn't care if I was still in my pyjamas at dinnertime, or that I hadn't washed my hair in a fortnight.

  Soon Guido was out of the house frequently. With his students he went to see foreign films, ate at new little restaurants, discovered sushi. He went to people's homes to teach Italian and returned with stories about how other native Australians lived. Sometimes there were funny stories, like the time he drove for miles along the coast to a house where the walls were built entirely of beer bottles. In one family a huntsman spider was kept as a pet, called Barry, but then they discovered it was a 'untswoman' because it had thousands of little babies all over the ceiling. I would laugh when Guido recounted his adventures but I began to be afraid of how he would tell the story of our domestic life.

  Doreen also thought I should get out more. She was going back to finish her nursing course, and would work part-time at the hospital. Saraah was going into day care with 'a terrific woman up the road' who looked after four other children. There was no room for Clara right now, Doreen said, but there might be later on. Did I want her to put Clara's name down?

  'Oh, thanks,' I said, but the idea of being away from Clara was unimaginable.

  Well, in the meantime, she went on, why don't you come and meet the Friday women?

  This invitation was much easier to agree to, because babies were invited too. 'That's the whole point,' said Doreen, 'mothers and babies together. We meet on a Friday, there's just three of us, four with you, and we can let our hair down.'

  Like Rapunzel, said the voice, and look what happened to her. But I might learn something. And heaven knew I had a lot to learn. I hoped the mothers would all be nurses like Doreen.

  But only one woman, Rita, was a nurse. Actually, she was a dietician. She was a large, practical woman whose baby slept across her knees for most of the afternoon. I studied mother and baby intently, wondering what kind of magic made this happen. On the first Friday I was even bold enough to get up and move across to sit next to her on the red leather couch, hoping her c
alm confidence might seep into my skin. People brought Rita tea and cakes and small bowls of grapes as if she were a visiting dignitary from another country. No one dared move her because we all understood the preciousness of a sleeping baby.

  Lena, in whose house we sprawled, hardly ever sat down. She paced up and down through the kitchen, into the hallway, opening the long glass doors that looked out onto her porch. No matter how far away she got, she always managed to hear what we were saying, rushing back in to comment. Her baby had dreadful wind and only seemed to be happy slung over Lena's shoulder like a wet tea towel. No one said, 'you should let the baby cry' or 'put her down otherwise she'll learn bad habits'. We accepted that Lena had to pace: that was Lena.

  Rita and Lena were still breastfeeding and often they sat with their breasts out, or the maternity bra only cursorily flung around them, forgetting to cover up after the feed. I grew to know those women's breasts as well as my own. Rita complained of lumpy sore breasts and Lena said how for the first time in her life she had cleavage. She wished she could go naked to parties and show them off; it seemed such a pity to put an ordinary old shirt over them when she went out to do the shopping.

  I grew to love Fridays. What I loved, sitting in that living room crowded with stained bunny rugs and carry cots and milky towels and teacups smeared with lipstick and the wafting odour of filled nappies, was the tacit agreement among us all about the most important things in life: our babies. We discussed whether they were sleeping, feeding, putting on enough weight, smiling, hearing, seeing, sleeping. There was no pretence that any other subject mattered. We all talked at once, over each other, so eager to share our fears, knowledge, mistakes. No one was 'right' – even Doreen and Rita, with their medical knowledge, didn't assume leadership. There was none, just the mess and hysteria of living with babies. We weren't all the same and neither were our babies, but we were all equal.

  We interrupted each other continually, without fear of being thought rude or selfish, clamouring like children to be heard. We didn't have to look after each other or placate or appease: whoever had the loudest voice at the time won the next five minutes' stage, whoever was quickest to get the last caramel cake won. It was exhilarating, edgy, wild – sometimes I'd find I was laughing so hard that I was crying, not sure at all what was the difference. Guido would have been horrified.

  We only saw each other on Friday. No one rang in between to chat, and when we met there was no big talk, only small, the kind as essential as atoms. 'Did you go to the baby health clinic? How much weight has she put on? The hearing test went well, she's rolling over now, how often do you give her solids in the early phase?'

  It was good when we could all stay longer, and witness together the day changing into night. From Lena's porch the sky flamed gold then pink, paling into that tender blue like the veins running beneath the skin of our babies' chests. We'd stand together outside, quiet, holding our glasses of wine, and watch how the gum trees blackened into silhouettes against the gold-rimmed clouds.

  Rita was always the first to break the spell. 'Gotta go,' she'd say, sighing, but you could tell she didn't mind. From little things she said, you knew she had one of those benign fairytale husbands who didn't mind if dinner was late or she made a mistake or his plans were changed.

  'Can I stay here forever?' I wanted to say, just like the hospital. 'I never want to go home.'

  It wasn't until the third Friday that I discovered Lena was a writer. She wrote mainly non-fiction, she said, and enjoyed the research. Her background was in veterinary science but she said being a writer was a lot more romantic than sticking thermometers up dogs' bums. She swore frequently, which was somehow reassuring. She had sharp eyes and a long elegant nose. She'd grown up in England and retained a faint upper-class twang which intensified when she was making a point. But the most interesting thing about Lena was that she had a photographic memory – it was amazing the amount of facts she collected doing research. She told me that turtles are deaf, lions can mate over fifty times a day, and the largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell. Women invented windshield wipers and the laser printer, five minutes of anger disables our immune systems for six hours, and the pupil of an eye expands as much as 45 per cent when a person looks at something pleasing.

  'How are all these facts stored in your brain? I asked.

  She shrugged. 'Who knows? Most of them are totally irrelevant to my life. Like imagine, this thing I read last year – in a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of eighty years, there wasn't one single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand. I can remember things like that, but I can't remember where I put my keys last night. It's so fucking frustrating.' I saw Lena's facts as her tiny pets, all labelled and crowded into their cages like neatly stacked cargo in a ship's hold.

  It was Lena who introduced me to her publisher. I'd been worrying aloud about our dwindling bank balance and the mortgage and how much I dreaded going back to work. One day I'll be ready, I said. Like in about five hundred years.

  'What about children's non-fiction?' suggested Lena. 'You're used to pitching lessons at children – why not books?'

  I thought she was joking and I laughed, but the next Friday Lena presented me with the name and address of her publisher and an appointment for the following Monday.

  Guido thought it was a great idea. 'Children's books can't be hard to write,' he pointed out. 'They're for children!'

  But how would I start, how would I finish, find the time to read, organise the information?

  'How much is the advance?' Guido asked. 'You must go for the biggest you can get!'

  Imagine taking an advance 'as big as you can get', a reward for a job you haven't even started yet. Wouldn't you have to pay it back if you found you couldn't write a word? By then we would have spent it. Maybe I'd have to go to jail. And what would happen to Clara? Can you take babies to jail or is that only if you actually give birth in your cell?

  I tried to smile as he cleared a space next to him on the couch and showed me a poem he had finished, Il Refugio. His English translation was written next to the Italian.

  'Is rough, this English, but gives you the idea. Take a look, and you can tell me 'ow to make it better.'

  But what would happen to all my domestic tasks if I wrote a book instead of cleaning? The house would get out of control – bugs breeding under the sink, cockroach dirt piling up in the cutlery drawers, dust accruing like debts. I'd have to write when Clara was asleep. Write – facts into order! How would I manage that when I was only barely hanging on to the rails of life, each day expecting to be swept away?

  It took me a long time to read The Refuge and when he said 'Allora?' I explained that it was so rich and interesting that I had to immerse myself thoroughly and read it many times. It took five reads to focus, but on the sixth, my mind suddenly went still. The poem was beautiful. It began with an early morning walk in the mountains, the landscape – and the narrator's mind – still blurred with dreams. But when the dawn light strikes, leaves 'swell like grapes in a bowl of blue air', and 'green knives of ferns carve white blossoms'.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, revelling in the scene. Inside, Guido was like an untouched wilderness – pristine, mysterious. Even his uncertain translation shone pure. How did he get his thoughts like that, like clear running water down mountains? The poem was a celebration. Was nature the refuge here? A refuge from his own 'dark mind'? How he must need this outlet, this writing that set him free to notice the world. He really should be able to concentrate on it; what a crime if he had to spend more of his time slogging away at these mundane Italian lessons. I walk through glass/ in the clear-edged morning/ catching falling crystals on my cheeks.

  'Aren't there any other words, sinonimi in English for this?' he said, pointing to 'clear-edged'.

  'Hmm,' I said, to give myself time. I quite liked 'clear-edged'. It brought out the sharpness of the dawn light . . . followed by the 'falling crystals' – dew drops! Suddenly I s
aw my mother's crystal bowl, and the way it had shattered into a million shards of light when I'd dropped it. I remembered the fright and how only moments before my mermaids had sailed inside it, queenly in their diamond boat.

  'What about shattering?' I said. 'I walk through the shattering morning . . . catching falling crystals on my cheeks.'

  Guido was silent, so I rushed in. 'Because, well, the morning is holding still, isn't it, like a held breath, and everything is pure and cut-glass and perfect like crystal. But perfection can be frightening, don't you think? There's always the possibility of its being spoilt, you know, stained or broken . . . You get the feeling that the dark mind in your poem could mar it, that the exquisite morning might be a moment only. Also,' I went on, carried away by the vision his words had conjured in my head, 'sometimes we can feel almost broken by beauty, you know, pierced or changed by it, and in that feeling there's a sort of vulnerability, you lose your familiar hold on things. You've caught that so clearly . . . but well, this sounds clumsy maybe, not what you meant . . .'

  'Shattering,' said Guido. 'Frantumare, ando in frantumi . . . In Italian we don use this verb exactly like that. Interesting – yes, good!' He smiled then, an excited, happy smile, and as we gazed at each other I felt we'd stepped inside his perfect morning, together.

  Guido rushed off then to rework his poem and I went to get Clara ready for a walk. I walked up and down Beatrice Street and into St Paul's and all the way to the park. It was the books or teaching, I told Clara. I'd have to do one of them. I knew it. Clara took her dummy out and smiled. If I chose books, I could keep Fridays and we wouldn't have to be separated. I couldn't imagine being apart now – it was as if she had always been with me, like my arm or leg. She made me anxious but she was the point of me. Being without her would only have made the anxiety worse.