Australia Day

by Melanie Cheng

  Molly sucks her thumb. She is an elephant person, like her mother. Jules brought me a sandalwood elephant once, as a last-minute gift, at Koh Samui Airport. But that was a long time ago. Back when she and Mick had money to travel. Before IVF, and the miscarriages. Before varicose veins, and Molly.

  ‘Dara’s waiting for me,’ Molly says.

  Dara is the new elephant calf. One of three conceived at the zoo.

  ‘His name means star,’ she says, as we turn our back on the chimps. ‘Like mine!’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say, genuinely impressed. ‘Yours means star of the sea.’

  I don’t mention the Hebrew meaning—and the reason Jules and Mick chose it in the end. Molly. Diminutive of Mary: the wished-for one.

  At strategic points around the zoo there are candy-coloured signs spouting facts about the animals: Did you know that elephant society has a female-led structure that is often called matriarchal? The oldest female is the matriarch. She determines the group’s movements. I try to explain the words to Molly—to convey the complexity of these awesome beasts—but she just hops on one foot and screams that she needs to wee.

  *

  I quit my job, which I hated, at the end of the first trimester. In my spare time I drove to faraway suburbs and sat in cafes, chatting to waitresses about what I would name my baby. It was a game. It didn’t feel real. It certainly didn’t feel dangerous. I was shocked when, at thirty-eight weeks, the doctor told me the baby was breech and I would need a caesarean. I’d never had an operation before.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ the anaesthetist said, but I didn’t trust him. He was too good-looking to be a doctor.

  I watched the painful shrink of Mick and Jules’ faces as the orderly pulled me along the corridor. They didn’t wave—that would have been too much like farewell. They just stood very still. Only then did I see myself as they did: a vessel for their magic bean. For the first time, clutching each other as if they might drown in the linoleum sea, they looked the part: a mummy and a daddy.

  Did you know that the main function of the family unit is the protection of baby elephants? The greater the number of females looking after a calf, the greater its chance of survival.

  I looked at Jules and Mick across the expanse of polished oak.

  ‘Just a formality, hon.’

  The lawyer was an ageless Chinese woman who could have passed for fourteen or forty. She nudged the thirty-page document towards me.

  At birth, the Surrogate will relinquish the Child(ren) to the Biological Father and Biological Mother, and the Biological Father and Biological Mother will assume all parental rights and responsibilities for the Child(ren) from that time forward.

  I was twenty weeks pregnant then. She was the length of a banana. Her ears were perfectly formed. I had just started to feel her dart like a slippery fish inside me.

  ‘We wanted to wait,’ Jules said, as if reading my mind.

  ‘To make sure it was viable,’ Mick explained.

  ‘It?’ I snapped and Mick went white. We had found out the sex at the last scan.

  ‘She.’ Mick corrected himself.

  Jules shook her head. The lawyer pulled a pen from her breast pocket. One of those old-fashioned fountain pens with a reservoir and a nib. She placed it at a ceremonious diagonal across the paper.

  ‘I’m not going to steal your child,’ I said.

  ‘Of course not,’ Jules said, but the baby-faced lawyer disagreed.

  ‘Kids do strange things to people.’

  I looked at my sister’s stony face and her husband’s blotchy, patchwork one. I felt a flutter—the flap of tiny arms, perhaps—below my bellybutton. I picked up the pen.

  ‘They sure do.’

  *

  Dad took me and Jules to the zoo once. I must have been about thirteen. It was a big deal, coming down on the train from Bendigo for the day. We were celebrating Jules getting picked for the under-fifteens hockey team. Mum had to work, but Dad, being a teacher, was off for the school holidays.

  I don’t think they had elephant calves at the zoo in those days. I don’t remember much about the animals, to tell the truth. Mainly I remember how two boys with skateboards stared at Jules on the train. She had just grown breasts—firm things that tented her T-shirt like a couple of smuggled plums—and I remember how she stared out the window, her long, hairless legs neatly tucked beneath her bottom, and how everything in the carriage rattled, it seemed, except for her.

  Did you know that baby elephants can have more than one mother? Sometimes a female cow who is not quite ready to have her own baby looks after her younger siblings and cousins. The practice is known as allomothering. The female is the allomother.

  It is standing room only at the elephant enclosure. Molly is up on my shoulders. The calf, his eyes red with fright, cowers beneath the belly of an elderly cow. I’m reminded of Nanna’s big teak dining table and the long days Jules and I spent playing beneath it. A keeper holds up a loudspeaker. He informs us that an elephant pregnancy lasts nearly two years. There are gasps from the audience. Mothers, mainly. Imagine that, they say, and laugh and rub their deflated bellies.

  ‘You can use this,’ Jules said, uncoiling a bandage. ‘Or take the drugs.’

  My hands crept up towards my breasts. They were hard and lumpy, like pineapples.

  ‘You wrap it tight as you can,’ she said, studying the crepe between her fingers. ‘Harriet’s doula swears by it.’

  I took the bandage and retreated to the bedroom. Jules had never asked me to express and I had never offered, even though we both knew it would be the best thing for Molly. I suspect it would have undone her: another thing my body could do that hers couldn’t.

  It took everything not to scream. Milk seeped through the beige fabric, creating brown stains above my nipples. It hurt like buggery, as my mother would say, but pain was what I wanted. I’d been asleep for the C-section and hadn’t been through labour. I needed to feel tissue tearing, the gush of blood, the placenta shearing from the womb. I’d always thought it should be agonising to the point of torture—the final sundering of a child from its mother.

  *

  In the car on the way home I dissect the day’s events.

  Did you have fun?

  What was your favourite part?

  Did you enjoy seeing all the animals?

  Molly gives monosyllabic answers and goes back to sucking her dirty thumb. She isn’t like me, always looking in the rear-view mirror. She is focused on the road ahead, craning to see what lies around the next bend.

  As we park outside her house, Molly sits up straight in her booster seat. Once out, she holds my hand for a millisecond before breaking away to tear off down the driveway. I watch her bang on the front door with two fists and stand on tippytoes to reach the handle. I can still feel her hot little hand in mine as I see Julie’s long silhouette in the doorway. Molly can’t get inside fast enough. The house swallows her, hungrily.

  White Sparrow

  It’s hot inside the car. Can’t be more than twenty degrees outside, but Bec has been sitting in the Camry for a good half-hour. She’d rather not mix with the other parents, chatting and laughing and asking each other lots of questions.

  Ollie will be out soon enough. For a kid who claims to hate school, he takes a long time to leave. But that’s Ollie, always trailing behind everybody else. Sometimes Bec forgets. Like during school holidays, when it’s just the two of them, and they spend a fortnight pretending the dining table is a pirate ship and the small square of cracked concrete and weeds out the back—their ‘inner-city sanctuary’—is a misty Amazonian jungle. And then term starts, and Bec sees the figure of a boy walking towards her, and for whatever reason—the sun is behind him or he is wearing his sports clothes or she is hazy from a bad night’s sleep—she doesn’t realise that this child, so intent on burying his face in his chest, is, in fact, her Ollie. And then all the fear and the shock come back to roost in her breast, as if they never left.

 
; Bec looks across at the playground. Twins dangle from the monkey bars, their cheeks the colour of beetroot. Beneath the slide, a boy with orange hair shines a magnifying glass at a pile of leaves. A girl in pigtails lies on her stomach in a hanging tyre—arms and legs stretched out, Superman-style—slowly twisting. Bec remembers the way Ollie used to giggle when she pushed him on the swing. He was a brave little bugger back then. Forever falling and sprouting bumps, like hard-boiled eggs, on his forehead.

  Tom had never wanted kids—Who needs all that? he’d say with a wave of his hand. Poo and snot and vomit and tantrums and the Wiggles?—so Bec was nervous when she did the test, but he took it better than she’d expected. Then, while they were watching the footy one day, he’d talked about taking their son to a Bombers game. And then another time, when she was around thirty-eight weeks, she’d caught him in the empty nursery, running his big hands along the edge of the cot.

  Finally, on April Fool’s Day, Ollie had arrived, and everything changed, but not in the way it should. The midwife said he had a good pair of lungs on him, but they all saw it—a big red mark, like a smear of strawberry jam, across his crumpled face. The nurse rubbed Ollie clean with a warm towel, but the mark didn’t come off. If anything, it looked redder, angrier. Bec took the child in her arms, but Tom didn’t move from the end of the bed. It was only once the baby rooted for his first suckle that Bec finally acknowledged the mark’s presence. Tom and the midwife watched as she traced her finger along its wandering edge. For a moment she had them all believing it was a thing of great importance—the coastline of some newly discovered land.

  Bec could see it was painful for Tom. On the rare occasions he looked into the cot, he flinched as if someone had struck him. But the worst was when they took Ollie for walks in the pram. Neighbours stopped them in the middle of the street and wanted to take a peek, and though nobody said anything, Bec and Tom both saw it: the sharp intake of breath, the smile that never quite reached their eyes, the pity in their voices as they said, ‘Beautiful. Just beautiful.’ Those days were the worst. On those days Tom would go to the pub with one of the guys from work. Bec would imagine him, drinking and talking footy and cars until, presumably, he forgot. On those days the resentment was hard to bear. Because Bec knew that no matter what she did, no matter how much she drank, nothing could extinguish this new ache—like a million unrequited first loves—burning inside her chest.

  Bec checks her watch. It’s late, even for him. She steps out of the car. The lollipop lady, a large woman with cottonwool hair, smiles and leans on her stop sign. A couple of girls with lip gloss and breast buds snigger at something on their iPhones. Bec feels a surge of anxiety. But just as she has composed what she will say to the pinched-looking woman in the office—My son, Ollie, he’s new, the one with a birthmark on his face—she spots him, walking across the playground with an urgency to his step she hasn’t seen for a long time.

  His face is shiny with sweat when he reaches the school gates. ‘Where’s my scroll?’

  ‘No Hi Mum, had a great day, Mum, thanks for picking me up?’ Bec says, pulling a paper bag from her tote. Ollie snatches the pastry, sticks his nose in its flesh. When they’re in the car, Bec turns the air conditioner to full blast. It’s not until the third set of lights that either of them speaks again.

  ‘So, really, how was your day?’

  She’s not sure why she persists, except out of habit. It is Ollie’s third week at the school and she knows what the response will be: the universal adolescent reply of a lazy shrug. In this respect her eleven-year-old is well beyond his years. It’s still better than the I don’t want to talk about it that she copped every day at his previous school, so it’s a victory, of sorts.

  ‘S’alright,’ Ollie spits, through a mouthful of raisins and bread.

  Bec is so stunned by his response she doesn’t notice the traffic light change to green. The man in the ute behind them shouts and beeps. It is one of those long I’m-going-to-keep-my-hand-on-the-horn-until-you-move type of beeps. Bec jumps to attention, lifts her foot off the brake.

  Her next move will be crucial. Lately, raising her son has felt less like parenting and more like taming a wild animal. She feels nostalgic for the days when Ollie was still in kindergarten. Bec didn’t appreciate it at the time—she was too busy complaining about the early-morning starts and grubby handprints on the bedroom wall—but now she wishes she could have bottled the love that once poured so freely from those brown eyes. For now she will have to make do with gems like s’alright: two individually unremarkable words rolled into the glorious one.

  It was never really about the birthmark. But the ‘port wine stain’, as the doctors called it, provided a focus for their attention—for Bec’s concern and Tom’s resentment. Tom was not prepared for the witching hours or the poo that looked like mustard or a wife who jumped out of bed to breastfeed but was perennially too tired for sex. As Bec thrived—her cheeks aglow with some new-found zeal—Tom withered. His skin took on that sallow look people get when their kidneys have failed. Only his kidneys were fine.

  She practises questions in her mind as she fries pork chipolatas for dinner. So, what happened today? Too probing. Learn anything useful? Too generic. You know, in the car, when you said things were all right? What did you mean by that? Too…clinical psychologist. The five o’clock news provides the much-needed icebreaker.

  ‘Mum!’

  She looks up from the foaming fat of the sausages.

  ‘Yes, honey?’

  ‘The sparrow Mr Walton talked about. It’s on TV!’

  Ollie is sitting cross-legged on the floor, in a rainbow nest of Lego.

  ‘An albino sparrow, one of the rarest birds on earth, has today been spotted in Melbourne’s south-western suburbs. Local residents have nicknamed it their “little white angel” and are keeping its exact location secret.’

  Ollie has always been obsessed with animals. Not with lions and tigers, like other boys his age, but with insects and birds, rabbits and possums.

  ‘Mr Walton said it’s a one in a million sighting.’

  ‘Wow,’ Bec says, impressed. Mr Walton is young, with sleepy eyes and a mop of limp blond hair. Not her type—too feminine—but right now she could kiss him on the lips.

  The morning after Ollie’s fifth birthday, Tom left. Bec knew it was coming, and in many ways it was a relief. Except for the look in Ollie’s eyes when he asked, ‘When’s Daddy coming back?’ and she replied, ‘Soon, honey. Very soon.’ Because while Tom could barely look his son in the face, Ollie adored his father. He would happily spend three hours on a stool in the corner of the garage watching Tom disassemble the latest broken appliance.

  Tom couldn’t bear it. ‘He’s always hanging around. Watching me with his big possum eyes.’

  ‘He wants to be like you,’ Bec would say. ‘It’s normal.’

  But that didn’t stop the whingeing. Eventually she told Tom to ignore him. Which he did. He snubbed him. He was curt to him. He stayed late at the pub to avoid him. But when Tom got home, Ollie would be waiting, wide-eyed and jumpy, like a puppy. And Bec knew it had to be hard: all that love when he didn’t deserve it.

  It was a risk, coming to Melbourne. Better the devil you know, her mother had always said, and while Ollie had had a tough time in the country, he was surviving. They both were. In the first few months after Tom left, that was enough. But as the years passed and Ollie stopped asking about his dad, Bec thought they could do better. Aim higher. Melbourne seemed as good a place as any. There were enough people that they could disappear, but not so many as to smother them.

  They settled in the northern suburbs, in a red brick unit built in the seventies. Bec found a job as a receptionist. She enrolled Ollie in the local school. She dabbled in online dating. Once a week they went to the pool.

  Bec puts the plate of sausages, mashed pumpkin and boiled peas on the table.

  ‘Dinner!’

  Ollie doesn’t need to be called twice. He sits down and p
lants his fork in the mash.

  ‘So, sparrows, huh?’ she says, wiping her hands on her apron before sitting down opposite him.

  ‘Not just a normal sparrow,’ Ollie says, shovelling more mash into his mouth. ‘A white sparrow.’

  ‘I nursed a baby sparrow once. I gave it water with a dropper.’

  That lazy shrug again.

  ‘Eat your peas, please.’

  Ollie spoons as many peas as he can fit into his mouth. As he chews, bright green pulp spills from the corners of his lips.

  ‘You’ve got your first treatment tomorrow, remember?’

  Ollie swallows. ‘With the laser?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He forms a gun with his hands, makes a noise, shoots.

  When she has finished the dishes, she sits at her desk with her laptop. She types the words white sparrow into the Google search bar.

  The first hit is a newspaper article. An interview with an ornithologist:

  If there’s a funny-looking bird in the nest it almost always gets the flick. Its white colour makes it easy prey. It really stands out.

  Bec can’t bear to read on. She prints a picture of the bird and snaps her computer lid shut.

  She saw Tom, once, after he up and left. He was sitting in a parked car in the street outside Ollie’s school. She’d been daydreaming as she waited, thinking about what to cook for dinner, and looking without really looking into the windscreen of a white Corolla. At first all she saw was the reflection of a plane tree, but then, lurking behind the glassy leaves, she found her husband’s sheepish face. Bec’s heart thumped against her ribs like some kind of caged animal. Then she saw his gaze shift—Ollie, just eight years old, had stepped through the school gates. Looking back, she’s not sure what she was afraid of. He was the one who’d left them. Perhaps he’d had a change of heart. Perhaps it wasn’t Ollie who had driven him away at all. Perhaps it had been her all along, with her tuneless singing and unimaginative cooking and endless sanctimonious crap. Perhaps, after three long years, Tom had arrived to reclaim his child. But before Ollie had even got within ten metres of the car, the engine growled back to life and Tom was gone. Again. Ollie was none the wiser, but it left Bec shaken. Literally. Her limbs trembling like the leaves of the plane tree.