Right after she was born, she filled her nappy with the thick tarry stuff they told me about. They’d put her in the bed with me while they got her cot ready, and I dozed. When I woke, I saw it had spilled out from beneath the cloth and stuck around the insides of her legs.
A nurse found me in the bathroom, lying her in the sink, soaking it away with water and a sponge like I’d seen them do with the other babies. She dipped her finger in the water and tested its temperature.
‘We can clean her for you in the nursery,’ she said.
‘It’s nearly done.’ I lifted the baby away from the sink, held her up. I’d not brought a towel and she dangled there, slippery and damp. My legs wobbled. ‘Can you take her?’
‘Go and lie down,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t be up yet.’
I stayed in my bed all afternoon. Later, a dark-haired nurse wearing lipstick came in, bringing me a cup of tea. She put it down beside me and said, ‘You can go and sit with your baby if you like.’ I must have looked uncertain because she added, ‘She’s in the nursery. If you don’t feel up to walking we can wheel you there.’
I watched her lipstick move around the words.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I can walk. I’ll go in a minute.’ I drank my tea slowly. By the time I went in to see her, she’d been given a bottle and put down to sleep. There was a long line of cots and all of the babies in them looked the same, even mine.
six
I wake before Pete and at first I forget where I am. With its bland beige walls and pin-cord carpet this room could be anywhere. There are furnishings, of course: beside the bed, a couple of vinyl chairs and a small table with a kettle on, a tray with a jar of instant coffee and a caddy of tea, two mugs and some powdered milk. The promised colour television rests on a cabinet opposite the bed. But these things don’t add any real comfort. You’re not supposed to feel at home here. Instead, you’re drawn to the window: there you see the road and think of where you are going.
The only random things in the room are some magazines that lie neatly beneath the table, a Women’s Weekly and a nature journal. There’s a desert landscape on its front, with an image of a fish laid over it. Desert Fish, it says, in bold type across the rocks and red sand. I trace my fingers around the picture and wonder if it’s a joke, the suggestion of fish in a place like that. I want my desert to be a still life, with everything squeezed out and baked dry. Pure and empty.
I drop the magazine to the floor and press my palm against Pete’s back where I know he will feel warm and dry. There’s a firmness about him that makes me feel safe. His skin is that even sort of brown you get when the sun soaks in over time. His hands are smooth with big-knuckled fingers and neat square nails. He even has a taste. I move closer and press my tongue against his back, between his shoulderblades. It’s still there. It’s just the same.
Pete’s breathing changes when I do that. He rolls over and opens his eyes.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You’re awake. Feeling better?’
‘Yeah, lots.’
‘Good,’ he says, and sits up. ‘You know, I wasn’t expecting that, Gilly, what happened back there.’ He speaks slowly and carefully. ‘I didn’t know what to make of it.’ He turns and props the pillow up, leans against it. He brushes the surface of the sheet with one hand. ‘You’re not unwell, Gilly?’ he asks.
‘I was carsick, Pete.’
‘It’s just … Gilly, there can’t be any problems where we’re going. It’s the middle of nowhere. And to be honest, I’d rather have left you with Nora. It’s not too late to change your mind.’
‘I was just carsick, Pete,’ I insist, trying not to plead. ‘I didn’t get enough sleep and I ate too much too quick. I’m fine now.’ The thought of it makes my head spin. Going back there. I couldn’t bear it. And Nora, Pete’s sister, with her slow deliberate words and her hold on him.
‘I want to be with you, Pete,’ I tell him. I can hear the panic in my voice. I mustn’t sound desperate. ‘I’ve waited long enough,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think?’
I move right up against him, pushing the sheet down so I can feel his skin. He opens his mouth for my kiss and I’m so close to him like that, it’s like I’m a part of him again. I smooth my hands down his back. I want him as near as can be. Lips, skin, touch, imprinted on me. Most girls wouldn’t want what I want. Not now, so soon after. But I haven’t been able to think about anything else. I trail my fingers along the inside of Pete’s thigh, and then I try to guide his hands under my clothes. But as soon as they find the loose skin of my stomach he sits up and reaches for his shirt. It sends things tumbling about in my head and churning in my stomach. I keep my eyes averted, for fear of what will be in his face.
‘We should get something to eat, Gilly,’ he says. ‘Reckon you can keep it down?’
‘I already said I’m not ill, Pete.’ I toss my hair over my shoulder and try to appear nonchalant.
He smiles. ‘Good girl.’ He swings his feet over the edge of the bed and opens a drawer. In it is a pile of leaflets, local information and takeaway menus. Flicking through them, he says, ‘We’ll get some Chinese. Bring it back. How’s that sound?’
‘Great.’
‘The Chinese,’ he muses, ‘great migrators.’ He drops the leaflets back onto the table. ‘We’d only have fish and chips to eat in a place like this if it wasn’t for them. You’ll get a Chinese restaurant in just about any town over a certain size.’
Pete can make a whole country seem knowable. Dots on a map you can get in your car and go to. We never had a Chinese restaurant in our town. There was the cafe where my mother worked, which did chicken on a rotisserie and meat pies under a hot counter. And a couple of takeaways that did chips, battered fish and oily frankfurters on sticks.
Pete changes into some shorts and a T-shirt, then he searches for his shoes.
‘Can I come too?’ I ask.
‘You should stay here.’
‘It’ll be okay, Pete. I’m fine now, really.’ Secretly I’m worried he’ll not come back. But I can’t let on. I mustn’t sound desperate. ‘And I could do with some fresh air.’
He’s silent for a minute and I take it as a no, but after he’s found his shoes he turns to me and says, ‘Go on then. Get your gear on. No dramas though, Gilly.’
I pull on my canvas shoes. On the way out to the car I offer my hand, only tentatively, not so it’d be obvious if he didn’t take it, but he does, and I turn my face to hide my smile.
When we drive back to the motel with our dinner it’s properly dark and you can see the neon sign flashing. The pool area is lit up and the suntanned woman is standing near a barbecue. She’s changed into a short frock and heels. Her husband is with her, turning steaks. I can’t help staring at him, her red-blooded male. Even in this light you can tell he’s a good deal younger than Pete. He’s tall and thickset, and his hair curls around his face.
She waves as I get out of the car. ‘You can join us if you like,’ she calls.
Her husband looks up and Pete gives him a cursory nod.
‘Who’s she?’ Pete asks. He cups his hand beneath my elbow, steering me towards our room.
‘I was talking to her today, out by the pool while you were asleep.’
I wave back to her and call, ‘Thanks anyway,’ indicating the take-out. ‘Maybe see you tomorrow.’
Pete drops my arm as soon as we’re in the room. The warmth of his hand remains there on my skin. Silently he lays our food out on the bedside table. Foil tubs with rice and noodles, meat in a sweet-smelling sauce. He opens one labelled chow mein and I’m suddenly disappointed that despite its unfamiliar smell the vegetables studded through it are merely peas and carrots.
When the silence becomes unbearable I break into it. ‘She’s nice,’ I offer, ‘that woman. I met her today. By the pool.’
‘Is that right?’ Pete murmurs.
‘I didn’t meet her husband though.’ I can hear my voice running on, my words tripping over themselves. ‘He was at work.
But she travels with him all the time. She said it’s really boring, but she doesn’t mind.’ I pause and slow down a little. ‘And I told her I’m like that too. I don’t mind at all.’
Pete takes a long time to sort out the plastic knives and forks.
‘You were asleep,’ I remind him. ‘I tried to sleep too, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking. So I went out by the pool and she was there. We chatted for a while.’
‘Yes, Gilly, you already said that.’
Pete looks down and scratches his head in a way that’s suddenly familiar. It’s a disconnecting sort of gesture.
‘You know, Gilly,’ he says, ‘I’m not sure what’s in your head at the moment. But I’m guessing you need to lie low for a while … I don’t know if you’re expecting anyone to come looking for you.’
It’s like he’s stuck a pin in me and burst something. I look down and blink hard.
‘Are you, Gilly?’ he persists. ‘Are you thinking someone might come looking for you?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, Pete, please, don’t.’ It doesn’t seem fair, hinting at what we have left behind when we’re on our way to a new life.
Pete scratches the hair at the back of his head now, and rubs his forehead. ‘Chrissake,’ he breathes. He picks up a fork and begins portioning meat and sauce over the tubs of rice. Without meeting my eye, he says, ‘Maybe you should avoid making friends, Gilly. Just for now?’ He puts the fork down and some rice falls from it, the grains separate and scatter across the table. ‘Gilly?’
‘Yes, Pete. Yes, you’re right.’
‘We’ll be gone soon anyway.’
After dinner Pete watches the colour telly. He lies, not quite stretched but in a relaxed pose on one side of the bed, turned carefully away from me. There are two channels you can watch, and when the first program finishes, he gets up off the bed and switches the channel himself. He doesn’t ask me to do it, even though I’m nearby.
I kneel on the floor beside the bed and unpack my suitcase, reminding myself of what I have with me, and sorting out the things that might still fit my unfamiliar body. I repack slowly, putting the clothes that are too small, at the bottom.
I’ve brought nothing of her with me. While I was in the hospital, I left her things in the nursery, scattered carefully on the white cabinet beside her cot or folded into the drawer. Some baby powder. A blanket. Those romper suits and knitted booties – Nora must have packed them for me, because I was determinedly unprepared. I kept my own things close together and, as much as possible, away from the baby’s.
After my clothes are packed there is only that drawstring bag, closed tight around a collection of things that I’ve kept with me through everything. At the bottom I can feel the key from the tin at the river, and I put my fingers around it, feeling its reassuring shape through the cloth. It’s like a charm, that key. I glance up at Pete without letting it go and he notices me. His look is gentle enough, his face is relaxed.
‘All packed now, Gilly?’ he asks.
‘Yeah.’
I put the drawstring bag back inside the suitcase and then I get up on the bed beside Pete. Comforted by his nearness I fall into a doze with the soft flicker of the colour telly softening the darkness around me.
When Pete turns out the light I wake and remember that key. My blood races as I lie there deciding when to move, what to do to make him aware of me. When I can’t bear it I roll over to face him but his breathing has sunk into a long deep rhythm and he doesn’t stir. I touch his face. He can’t be asleep yet, not so quickly, but he doesn’t open his eyes. Underneath his T-shirt his skin is warm and promising. I let my hand slip across it, feeling the hair beneath his navel and how it trails thin, downwards. I go there, hoping he will give me a sign that he wants something from me. Anything. I lick my lips.
But he only grunts and turns away from me, rolling over and drawing his knees up. His breathing doesn’t shift at all.
Tears prickle behind my eyes. My arms shake. I am too full, somehow. I want too much. But it was so hard to be left waiting. Not knowing when he’d come for me. Or if he’d come at all.
But he’s here now, I tell myself. He didn’t leave me there. He came when I asked, and now we’re together. Nothing else matters.
With my eyes closed, I can keep the tears in. I can put it all away, safe inside.
I’m a girl who can disappear, I tell myself. I’m a girl who can disappear. Over and over, because I am not the girl I was. I am someone else, in this new life with Pete, and reminding myself of that, I begin to feel better.
seven
It didn’t rain all through that January when Pete first came to stay. The days were hot and bright. In the afternoons, we searched the horizon for a hem of cloud that might suggest a storm but the skies remained blank and blue, too tired for the tumult of thunder and rain.
You couldn’t hide anything in that kind of weather. You’d walk along the road and see doors and windows thrown open in the hope of catching a breeze. People moved slowly about their living rooms or lay in the warm gaping shade of porches and verandahs. You could see their empty cups on coffee tables, half-finished bottles of soft drink, clothing that had been peeled off and abandoned. There were the unshaven legs of women, the pink bellies of shirtless men. On the road, the light outlined everything and conversations cut through the air like pictures. There was no moisture to soften the heat. The haze of dust in the distance was the only thing that made a blur.
Soon after Pete moved in my mother decided to remake the front garden. When she told me, I knew she was feeling good, looking ahead. She always started something new when things took an upward turn. When my father began his fruit selling she made me a pair of pink pyjamas on her old treadle sewing machine. I was seven then, and I remember how it took her two weeks by the time she’d bought the fabric and cut it out, pinned and tacked and stitched the pieces together. The buttons had little violets painted on, and there was even a collar, round with a dark pink top stitch where it was joined to the yoke. She bought ribbon too. It matched the violets on the buttons and she wanted to edge the sleeves with it, but she never got around to doing that. I wore them for a month or two without the ribbon with my mother washing them on Saturdays, commenting each time on how she still had to stitch that ribbon onto the sleeves. I didn’t want to tell her that the collar was tight and unpleasant to sleep in, and that I felt too dressed up to be going to bed. But then my dad gave up the truck and she couldn’t bear to look at them anyway. She put them on the mending pile and I never saw them again until I’d grown out of them, when she put them in a bag for St Vincent de Paul.
Now she wanted a flowerbed. She had marked out a patch and turned over the soil. It was Pete she was pleased with. How he’d settled into our spare room, paying his rent each week with a little extra for food, and eating his meals with us. How she had planned this clever thing, getting someone in so our house could be a different sort of home.
Pete seemed to absorb my mother’s tension just by being there. He brought a certain feeling into a room with him. You could sense the air settle as he sat down and if he had something to say, he put it in a direct, matter-of-fact way. He seemed like the sort of person who would always be alright and it made you want to be near him. He got a job at McGill’s Farm Supplies right away. My dad had once worked there, but he’d not lasted long. Pete started on the forklifts and very soon after they asked him to do the stock control. I thought my dad might get a little defensive about this but he didn’t mention it once. He liked having Pete around too.
‘Come and help me, Gilly,’ my mother said. ‘We just have to turn the soil a bit and then we can put these in. We can do it all today.’
I followed her out onto the porch and sat on the concrete steps while she laid out the seeds and the cuttings she’d got. There was a shrub in a pot too, for transplanting. A camellia.
‘We’ll just do it along the front, leading up to the porch,’ she said. ‘Nothing too elaborate. A splash of colour b
efore the front door.’
I shrugged. ‘Okay.’ There had been other flowerbeds before this, one along the side of the house, another near the back fence. There was a mango tree right outside my window that my mother had germinated from a seed when I was just two. It was her success story. My mother thought that because it had been a seed and now it was a tree, she had a secret green finger, waiting to coax life from the soil.
The cuttings were geraniums, and my mother was tearing open the seed packets. ‘Pansies,’ she said, ‘and forget-me-nots. We’ll put them along the front here. The gerberas behind. Those geraniums can go at the far end. And a marigold beside them.’ She put her hand on a pot. ‘I’ll put the camellia at the porch end. The flowers are crimson. They’re lovely.’ She looked away. ‘And your dad …’ She wouldn’t meet my eye when she spoke of him. ‘I’ll get your dad to put a trellis at the back. We’ll get something climbing there.’ She frowned. ‘Nothing thorny though. Maybe some honeysuckle, or jasmine. What do you think? It’ll be like a cottage garden.’
A cottage garden. It made me want to laugh. Our house was made of weatherboard. Its roof was corrugated iron, painted red, and it had a bare sort of uniformity about its exterior that did not fit with my idea of what a cottage was. A cottage belonged in a world where grass grew soft and green, where ivy climbed stone walls and leaves gathered thick around the branches of trees. The ground around our house was flat and bare. There was some patchy grass, tough blades of it that prickled when you sat on them, and apart from my mother’s mango tree, there was only a frangipani tree right near the back fence. My mother’s flowers would struggle unless they got a lot of attention. Native flowers would be better suited to the sparse geometry of our house. Wattle or hibiscus. Bottlebrush with its spindly blooms. I liked the thin-leaved plants with peeling bark and waxy flowers that I saw growing along the top of the riverbank and by the side of the road. But I only knew the names of a few. Not enough to have a debate with my mother. We were not the type of people who knew the names of the things around us. Only the things we put there ourselves. And the flowers that I liked were not the sort you made a garden out of.
Desert Fish Page 4
