The Lone Child

by Anna George

  Damn, she thought. Not you again.

  In her garage, she cut the engine and listened to the roller doors slithering to a close. The fluorescent lights blinked on; she flicked off her seatbelt and hesitated. In that child’s blanched eyes, she’d seen some pluck, despite her appalling lot. But in the closed-off face of that woman she’d seen something overtly sour. The woman had actually seemed disgruntled rather than grateful. Such blatant discontent was rare coming from a stranger. Stranger still in Flinders. Near the southern-most tip of the Mornington Peninsula, picturesque, rolling-hilled, the place of windy walks and Scrabble, Flinders had always seemed ruggedly beautiful and benign, even dull. Despite what had happened to her mother here. Neve sat, as the engine ticked, and wondered what to do. Her eyes closed. One second. Five.

  In the motionless car, her baby’s cries intensified. The colony of shopping bags surrounded him like a tiny tent city. Her stomach growled. Stirring, she sighed and watched her released breath condense. Perhaps it was the onset of the cold or her mood, but the thick breath whispered of mortality. She watched it thin.

  Perhaps they were doing nothing wrong. It wasn’t her concern what they did on a public road. She roused herself. Hopefully, by morning, they’d be gone.

  Reverting to her schedule, she unlocked the house and, dashing to and fro, unpacked the car. She did it in three trips, bumping into door frames and tripping over her feet. Once everything was inside, in the large open kitchen-dining-lounge room, she hopscotched around the abandoned shopping on the bamboo floor and raced her baby to the couch by the hearth. It was five past six. Not bad. Before too long, his chin was moving up and down, against her flesh, beneath the nipple, his rosy mouth sucking with industrial strength. She licked her lips. She’d forgotten her water. Again.

  Waiting out the let-down, she felt her body flood with hormones. Like being doped, the sensation made her giddy. Sometimes it was pleasant. But not tonight. Tonight remnants of adrenalin were curdling her hormones. Or perhaps it was her wariness, or her hunger. As she waited for the whooshing to subside, she tapped at the nearest remote. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and the glorious voice of Maria Callas began. She tried to sink into the melancholy, one wronged woman to another. It didn’t entirely work. But as the nausea ebbed and the music swelled, she forgot the pair outside. She longed for a glass of the red. The bottle on her granite benchtop whispered to her – drink me, drink me. With the baby clamped to her chest, she manoeuvred herself up.

  She’d downed half a glass before she tasted it. It wasn’t terrific, as far as she could tell. Her tastebuds, like everything else, had been muddled by this baby business. She finished the other half. It felt like the let-down again, but more so. A steel cable within her eased, ever so slightly. She let herself look at the baby, at his fair and foreign little face.

  There’s still nothing of me in you, she thought.

  It was part lament, part fact. In him, she saw Kris’s full, peaked lips, his thick dark eyebrows, even the full-moon shape of his eyes. At least the eye colour wasn’t settled. But would she feel any different, if he had her sea-green eyes? Or her tea-coloured skin? Probably not. He was Kris’s in every way but one. Daily.

  As the baby’s sucking abated, she gave his cheek a teeny pinch. If he drank too slowly, she could be anchored to the couch for more than an hour. She pinched him again. Frustrated, starving, she stared at the ceiling’s timber beams.

  She’d known it would be difficult, on her own. What she hadn’t known was how difficult – juggling him and looking after herself. Nor how much work would be involved. Hard work. Not only cleaning and soothing but deciphering him. She didn’t expect to be so poor at it, nor feel so angry about it. So resentful and exhausted. She’d been so blithely optimistic. Can-do: that was her motto. Had been ever since she was seven. She didn’t want to change it, now, at thirty-nine.

  But she’d been so unprepared. On her due date, she’d wheeled her new silver bag through those wide, sliding doors at the Freemason’s Hospital – as if she were taking a short break at a four star hotel. As if the ensuing five days could be accommodated into her life without too much ado. Ha. Some things, she’d since realised, couldn’t be fully understood until lived. Like falling in love, and orgasm. Childbirth and motherhood.

  How asinine the waiting nurses had thought her, with her sleek, sculpted hair and bespoke jewellery. When she approached their station, she’d felt it. When a po-faced midwife examined her and decided that she was only in ‘pre-labour’, she’d felt it again – their sense that she was, somehow, unprepared. Or worse, unreliable, even a hysteric. She wasn’t sure what had irked her most: being misread or being judged. Or that, partly, they were right.

  ‘Is your partner on his way?’ a scrawny midwife asked, peering over bifocals, after the examination.

  ‘No partner,’ she said, ‘not any more.’

  To their credit, the midwives didn’t exchange a glance.

  ‘A social worker will come and see you in the morning,’ said the po-faced one.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but tell her not to bother.’

  After, in the birthing suite, they moved warily around her, as though she was a small, rumbling volcano, and she was pleased. But, when the contractions were three minutes apart, a young nurse wearing a pink hair band couldn’t help herself: ‘Are you sure there isn’t anyone I can call for you?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said, through gritted teeth. She was no martyr though; she would have welcomed moral support had she had any moral supporters. Her beloved mother would have been a help. She would have held her hand and stroked her hair and wept, copiously. But she was long dead. Her father was as useless, busily escaping his second wife and permanently based in Brazil. That left her two closest friends, both architects, both childless, but neither had volunteered. And it wasn’t the sort of thing you asked.

  The nurse smiled bravely, more distressed about Neve’s lack of attendants than Neve herself. But the po-faced midwife was kinder the next morning. After Neve’s ten hours of labour without gas or drugs. Not thanks to any lofty ‘birth-plan’ but rather grit and luck that she got into ‘the zone’ and managed it, her compact body surprising her with its power. And its tolerance to pain.

  The midwife, Mary, sat on her bed. ‘You have a very beautiful boy, there,’ she said. ‘Does he have a name yet?’

  ‘No.’

  Once, not so long ago, she had names – girls’, mainly, like Charlotte and Lucile and Edie. Once she’d dreamt of a daughter, of drawing a straight line from her mother to her child. But the names, like the girl-child, had taken flight, along with the part of her heart that had hatched them. Early on, Kris had had names too: Will or Ben or Tom. ‘Nothing pretentious or unique or made-up,’ he’d said. ‘No Apple or Wyatt for us.’ Not so long ago, they’d fallen about, swapping loopy monikers.

  To Neve’s faraway stare, Mary said, ‘You take your time, then. Names are tricky.’

  She’d been tempted, fleetingly, to ask Mary to do it: name him.

  When the magnificent bunch of yellow roses came from Kris, on her last day in the ward, she gave them to Mary. It was unfortunate the baby had been punctual; in this meagre way he was like her. And Kris had always had a good memory. How she hated those perfect yellow petals.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Mary. In the crook of her elbow, the flowers looked like a long, multi-headed newborn.

  ‘He’s gone back to his wife,’ said Neve. A regretful wife trumped a pregnant girlfriend, apparently.

  ‘Oh.’

  Neve shrugged as if she’d accidentally dropped something large and fragile on the floor. Mary squeezed Neve’s shoulder and went in search of a vase.

  In the hospital’s car park, she couldn’t find her keys. Or her car. The baby was crying by the time she located the bronze 4WD parked neatly near the boom gate. It took her twenty minutes to unwrap him and insert him, perhaps too tightly, into the child restraint that she’d had fitted, facing the rear.


  Exiting into the impure world of traffic and high-rises, she’d wondered how she was going to do this, alone. She shouldn’t have stonewalled that social worker and her feeble compassion, when the woman had knocked that morning. She should at least have taken the timid woman’s card. But the woman had said, ‘In case there’s anythink I can do for you.’ Years of elocution lessons had echoed in her head. And that had sealed the matter.

  Her left breast seemed empty. The baby had been at it for almost thirty minutes and according to Happy Babies, he was due to swap. On the stroke of 6.35, she took him off one battered nipple and repositioned him, with a wince, onto the other. He peered up at her as he gulped, his large blue-brown eyes blank but alive.

  It didn’t help that it was virtually impossible not to think of Kris, with a mini-version of him suckling at her breast. Kris, her ex-best-friend, her ex-life-partner. It still boggled her that they were over. He had seemed so attuned, dropping a noodle box into her office when she had a deadline and then leaving her be; giving her The Examined Life when she’d expressed a moment’s existential crisis but not once harping on about it. Had she simply been ripe for convincing?

  She’d thought him so sound. On their first night out, he’d picked her up in his sensible Subaru and had one drink. They’d seen a play: Wild Surmise, about infidelity and planets and poetry, which he’d enjoyed but she hadn’t. Afterwards, once the waiter had taken their order, he’d said, ‘I like you.’ She didn’t know what had surprised her more – their effortless talk or his understated declaration. They’d only met three times before, falling into step as they jogged around Albert Park Lake, at dawn, on successive Fridays, his long stride shortening to hers.

  ‘It’s your poise,’ he said, ‘even when you’re running. And your melodious voice, and your work. That house at Airey’s Inlet, and the one at Metung . . .’

  ‘You’ve googled me?’

  ‘I have,’ he said. ‘And you’re formidable.’

  Neve downed her second glass of pinot. ‘Are you always this open?’

  ‘I dare say I am.’

  She’d laughed then, at herself, at him. And he told her he was a doctor of psychology. Whose wife had left him, four months earlier, for another man.

  ‘Is it too late to cancel dinner?’ she said.

  He’d smiled.

  ‘Let’s move slowly,’ he’d said, with a tap of his index finger on her clenched hand.

  And they had, more or less. They didn’t sleep together for three whole months. Not before each trotted off to the doctor to obtain a clean bill of health. Which was quite slow, at least for him, apparently. They didn’t move in together at Neve’s place in Albert Park until six long months had passed, which was slightly less slow. But by then, they’d had at least one proper argument (because Neve preferred early nights and he liked her to stay up late with him). And they didn’t discuss the real possibility of children until the nine-month mark – which was rather quick but, as neither of them were spring chickens, they didn’t want to delay that chat. By then, they’d briefed each other comprehensively about their families, the dynamics and medical histories. A red flag had been raised by the circumstances of her mother’s death but Kris had, on balance, adjudged her as healthy and low risk. They’d had a respectful, mature relationship; and, despite leaping into prospective parenthood, they’d been relatively sensible. Hoping, she supposed, good sense was a form of insurance.

  She should have known better.

  She fell pregnant the second month they tried. They went to the obstetrician together, every appointment. They both gave up alcohol. They framed the twenty-week sonogram. He called at least twice daily and was agitated when she didn’t pick up. This was the only off note in the whole affair: his discomfort with the space between them. Into it, she suspected, he projected his fears. But then, after a year and a half together, when she was eight months pregnant, he left.

  Finally, the baby’s mouth slipped from her nipple and his head hung back. Asleep. Her breasts were a pair of empty wine bladders. It was 7.15. Longing to go to bed herself, she took another sobering breath. His drowsiness was a second, small miracle after his silence at the beach. If she was lucky, he would sleep now until ten. And her routine would return and stick. Stealthily, she carried him to the change table in his room and did his nappy, as he slept. Often, this disturbed her, these rare moments when he was compliant. Tonight, she felt it even more so: his shocking, sleeping vulnerability. Tonight, fleetingly, she felt dangerous. She could do anything she liked to him. He was like putty, like clay. Her mini-Kris. She could wring the life out of him.

  And then she could sleep.

  In his dim, silent bedroom, she stuffed him into his bassinet, on his back, and thrust a teddy-bear-patterned sheet across him. She was shuffling away, as swiftly as she could, when she remembered the monitor. A colleague’s baby son had died the year before in his crib. His motionless body undetected for hours . . . She hesitated, imagining.

  If the baby were gone, she would be free – to sleep and to work, to reclaim her house and her single life: the theatre, restaurants, running. She could put Kris behind her and move forward. Untethered.

  Her baby murmured and she jumped. She switched the monitor on. Instantly, the device’s green light flashed as his chest rose and fell, his body’s movement detected by a sensor pad beneath the mattress. She shook herself free of her disturbing daydream. She’d feel better after she ate. Setting the night light to low, she crept out on her toes into the long hallway. In the laundry, she filled the washing machine. With abandon, she sprinkled powder like salt, like sugar, like snow.

  As the machine whirred, she slipped back into the livingroom and collapsed onto her couch. Now was the time to unpack the shopping and cook. Have that cup of tea. Spy on the interlopers. Fleetingly, she heard someone call her name.

  She slept.

  The sound of yelling woke her. The night was black but her house was bright and her washing machine was beeping. Disorientated, she squinted as if into sunlight. The yelling was surreal in the cavernous room, disembodied, like an angry radio play or someone else’s television. She wiped saliva from her chin, shielded her eyes and sat up. What she could hear was adult, furious and close.

  Panicked, she stole across the space and down the hall to the nursery. But, within, her baby was silent and alone, his monitor’s green eye winking steadily. She pulled the door to and, listening, trotted down the passage, across the living room and out a sliding door into the night.

  On the terrace, the chill hit her in the chest, where her shirt flapped and her right breast flopped. A cold snap gripped the foreshore like a vice. She fumbled, refastening her maternity bra, as the shouting voice grew louder over the constant wash of the sea. At least there were no lights on the beach beneath her or on the hill beside her. Below, the tide was in, moonlight painting a misty corridor to the horizon. Thankfully, above the balcony, the cypress trees that she’d saved during the build screened the road. The voice was growing louder, though, more distinct, up on the other side of her stone wall.

  ‘What do I do now?’ It was a shriek.

  These were not the rounded tones of her sometimes-neighbours, the Rossiters, on the left (retail kingpins), nor the rarely-sighted pigeon pair of jurists on the right. Neve followed the voice and its one-sided remonstrations. Damn and double damn; she should have called the police when she had the chance. Leaving her balcony, she climbed the path beside her house. She was two metres from her tallowwood gate when a child started crying. She stopped, wincing. But it wasn’t a newborn; it was a full-bodied, older cry. The girl from the rock pool?

  ‘There’s no money! No money!’ The woman was yelling so hard her voice was cracking. Rasping. When no one answered, Neve couldn’t tell if the woman was on the telephone, talking to herself or screaming at a child. The wails rose, too immature, Neve suspected, to be the young girl’s.

  ‘Cyn, shut up!’ said the woman. ‘I can’t fucking hear myself think!’ The wo
man’s anger was so primal, Neve was shocked and mildly scared – for those children.

  ‘Hey! Keep it down yourself!’ yelled Neve, to distract the woman more than anything else. Lamely, she added: ‘My baby’s asleep!’

  The woman shrieked again – startled or exasperated Neve couldn’t tell. Footsteps scrabbled across the gravel. Neve heard a thud into something hollow and rattling, like a wheelie bin, and then a tumble. Glass shattered and the woman swore.

  What was she doing?

  ‘If you don’t calm down and leave now,’ yelled Neve, ‘I’ll call the police!’

  The woman groaned, more in frustration than pain but Neve couldn’t be sure. Then a car door slammed. Neve bounded up stone steps to the hardwood gate and her high fence. At the gate she paused to see the Holden fishtail out from under the trees and bump onto the road, with its lights off. She couldn’t see any passengers. It took her a moment to realise that two of her neighbours were emerging: a majestic older woman wrapped in a silken Chinese robe, and a fleshy, red-faced man, scowling from behind his barred gate. The car careened into a telegraph pole, stopped and then reversed wildly.

  A moment later, the car struck Neve’s beautiful granite wall with an almighty crunch. Pieces of granite, the earthy and golden colours of autumn, flew. The middle section of the wall collapsed, leaving a jagged, ugly hole. The boot of the car crumpled, its bumper bar dislodging, its numberplate slipping. The man from two doors down yelped. Then the car zigzagged forwards and away. In its wake, on the roadside, was a fallen wheelie bin and an arc of broken glass, which glistened in the moonlight.