‘I just wanted you to be in there with me,’ Mum said. ‘That was all. I needed someone to listen—to acknowledge the pain. That’s all anybody needs. Isn’t it, Cally?’
I didn’t answer. I was wondering—if I put a hand on Dad’s neck, would it be hot? He looked hot. Hot and angry and confused and lonely. I thought of that little Aboriginal girl looking over the fence. I pictured Dad packing his bags while Mum cried on the bed. I remembered looking down at myself in Rosa’s room, alone on the chair. I felt all dissolved inside, liquid with sorrow for me and all the world. For a moment I was small again, under Richard’s big human tent, where no one is separate from anyone else, and everyone’s pain is the same.
Jeremy took a big breath in his sleep. He half sat up and Dad reached over, pulling him onto his lap. ‘He’ll be getting a bit heavy for you,’ he muttered to Mum. I saw him put his nose into Jeremy’s hair, and breathe him in.
Grandma stirred in the armchair. She put her arms into her coat sleeves. ‘Caroline, I, well.’ She struggled with her sleeve. ‘Look, dear, not everyone can say how they feel. Sometimes we don’t even know. Your father was the one in our family who could use words. But me, well, I’m just not… Well, I was frightened for you, like David. We thought it was for the best. Maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was the worst thing. I don’t know …’ Grandma’s voice trailed off. She adjusted her coat collar.
‘You’re not leaving?’ cried Mum.
‘Well,’ murmured Grandma. She suddenly looked so much older, standing there. I’d never heard her not finish a sentence. The buttons on her coat were done up wrongly. ‘I don’t know that I can help.’
‘Christ,’ I said, ‘not you too. What is this, some jinx gene handed down through generations? Are we all going to throw up our hands and say “Oh it’s too hard,” and my children will learn it and their children will, on and on, amen? Even if things aren’t said, you feel them anyway.’ I turned to Mum. ‘You mightn’t have told us about Gany,’ I tried to say the name softly, respectfully, ‘but somehow we always knew, Jeremy and I. We lived with your past, Mum, we lived with it every day. It just didn’t have a name. It drowned us, it was like, I don’t know, old swamp water, it took the freshness out of everything. We only just kept our heads above water, Jeremy and I. And now, tonight, it felt like we’d gone under. You know, outside that clinic? I just wanted to find Jeremy’s hand to hold. I couldn’t find it under all that water.’
Mum drew me onto her lap. I started to struggle, there was all that crusted red and dirt from Jeremy’s bunker and her skirt was cream but for once her arms were strong and she wouldn’t let me pull away. I sank into her and I wasn’t too heavy or dirty. She just let me cry there. She stroked my back.
‘You know,’ said Mum after a while, ‘when you were born, I was so happy. I clung onto your fingers and I remember thinking, I’m going to do it right this time. I held you in my arms and I was holding my future. But your little face made me think of the past.’
I looked down at Jeremy. His eyeballs were moving under his lids. He was dreaming. We never had a chance, he and I.
‘The first loss is like a black hole, Cally,’ Mum said quietly. ‘As the years go on it sucks all other losses, bigger and smaller into it. It colours them and flavours them. It robs them of their own separate identities until they are just feeding the black hole itself. It’s like, oh Cally, it’s like this great empty yawn of grief.’ She took my hand. ‘This is your first loss.’
I snatched my hand away. ‘This is nothing like yours. Don’t make me into you. It’s as if you only see me when you think I’m like you.’
Mum’s eyes receded. She put her hands back in her lap.
‘And don’t go away like that just because I don’t agree with you. I’m just saying that your loss was worse, it was much—’
Mum nodded. ‘I know, Cally. There is nothing worse than losing a baby. A baby that you’ve fed and changed and laughed with and loved. I’m glad you didn’t go through that. I hope you never do.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’
‘It’s just that I want you to realise that you’ve had a loss too.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Only don’t hold on to it, Cally. Sometimes, when you can’t have the thing you lost, you hold on to the sorrow. It’s the only thing you have. I couldn’t see past the sorrow. All this time, all this wasted time. I’m sorry, love. I really am.’
It’s funny, you hear ‘I’m sorry’ twenty times a day—in the supermarket when someone bashes into your trolley, at the shop when the grocer is out of cornflakes. But when you hear it from your mother, that’s something else. You’ll always remember that.
A PLANET REPRESENTS a balance between the gravitational force that seeks to collapse it and the electromagnetic force that props up its molecules. It sounds like an awfully delicate balance. A struggle that makes you shiver. If you added just a little more gravity, a planet could light up and become a star. A slightly different amount and it would collapse.
After that night, in the following weeks, our family was a bit like that. There was this tentative seesaw of goodwill, as fragile as anything. Tempers would flare and someone would rush in and placate. We were all so careful with each other. We were like crystal figurines on a shelf. Dad kept asking me if I wanted a cup of tea. Each time he had to check if I had sugar. He couldn’t remember if it was one lump or two. He still had trouble listening to people. But he was trying. You could tell.
It was weird, and sort of nice. He didn’t even mention the umbrella. But if you really want to know, it was also rather tiring. It was as if we’d stepped onto a new planet, where there were new rules. And every minute we were learning them. Sometimes there wasn’t enough air to go around.
Mum didn’t stop talking. It was as if she’d suddenly been released from a wicked spell, and was making up for lost time. I discovered all sorts of things about her. Like how she’d always thought I was the grown-up in the family. That I could handle anything. That I was a better mother for Jeremy than her.
‘That’s such a copout,’ I told her. ‘You just wanted free babysitting.’ Before, I might have been flattered. It would have appealed to the borrower in me. You know, anything for approval. But I knew what she meant, really. I only had to think of her sitting there on that stool. No one should have had to go through that alone. No one.
Still, I told her, you did go ahead and have two more children—you must have thought you could manage.
‘I know, but I couldn’t get on top of things, and you seemed better at mothering than me,’ she’d say humbly. God, she was exasperating. But at least she was there.
Jeremy loved it. He loved all the words bouncing off the ceiling, he went to sleep with language buzzing in his ear. There were so many words about now, he didn’t have to gaze intently at people when they talked. He could relax. Words weren’t the private, rare little jewels that they’d been before.
And one day, he might even take his helmet off when he goes to bed.
Grandma told him he could bring Sam around to her place, and she’d show him the medal she’d got for discovering all those galaxies. Jeremy did a cartwheel. She said she’d give them both chocolate cake too. But only if Jeremy filled in the bunker. It gave her the creeps.
That night, Thursday the 15th, I reckon we had our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Right there in the living room. It’s true what they say about microcosms and macrocosms. You can see the universe in a single cell. That Thursday night there was the hub of international conflict right in our own small nuclear family.
The only thing that annoys Jeremy about it all is that he slept right through it. He can’t believe Dad went outside to get him in the rain with only his airline slippers on. He would have loved to see that. But I told him not to worry, because I’m writing it all down, and when he’s old enough, he can read it himself.
Jeremy likes to have the last word. It’s on account of having that over-supply of fuel in his brain. He says that h
e’s already written his version. It’s all there in his head. And when I’m having the teenage blues again, and lying quietly on my bed, he’ll tell me about it. The way he sees it.
Epilogue
DON’T WORRY, I’m not going to give you the recipe for life or anything. I don’t know if any of us has turned out all right yet. We’ll have to wait a few more decades for that. But I do want you to know about Richard.
Of course, I told him everything about the night of Thursday the 15th. I suppose you knew I would. He’s the kind of person you can tell those things to. He’s such a good listener. After that night, I felt I’d never be scared of anything ever again. (Well, almost.)
Richard has his own place now. It’s a one-bedroom flat in the city. I stay there most weekends, and we go to the movies or cook dinner together. At first, on Saturday nights, when I was rushing off to Richard’s, Dad would say ‘have you got everything?’ in this really significant tone. Sometimes I’d make him sweat and pretend I didn’t know what he meant. He’d clear his throat loudly and get really busy with his mail or something. He won’t say it, looking me in the eye. I can’t either. I guess it must still be really hard for Dad. For both of us.
But he shouldn’t worry. Not about that, anyway. If I get pregnant again, it will be because I really want to.
As if I could forget.
Richard is working extra nights at the Observatory, but he’s always pretty poor. When he asked me to help him decorate the flat, I brought a whole stack of New Scientist magazines over, and I framed my painting called ‘Hope’. He put it smack bang in the middle of his bedroom wall.
I’ve decided he isn’t an arbitrary light source. We actually have a lot in common. Science, naturally, but also, we see the world in a similar way. Sometimes I feel that if we were artists, we could draw the pictures inside each other’s heads.
He says my thoughts are too weird to illustrate.
He says that, but he finishes my sentences. I finish his. Who knows, one day we might become great inventors together. Or we might just sit at home drinking tea and talking all night. I don’t care.
When we climb into bed, there’s the weather. Sometimes, when we’re lying naked together, a stillness comes, like the eye of a hurricane, and in there we whisper to each other in our language.
WHEN I GO BACK home alone, I take those times with me. I look in the mirror of the May bathroom, and remember his eyes smiling at me. I’m trying, I really am. But often, just out of the comer of my eye, I glimpse something. It’s the dark coming down. It comes with an ache, a dragging menstrual pull.
On the news last night I saw all these people protesting outside an abortion clinic. They were holding placards and signs. I kept looking for that man with the grey hair, but he wasn’t there. There’s a debate going on in Parliament about abortion. All the people debating are men. A senator said that lots of women have their abortions in spring because they don’t want to look fat in their bikinis!
You can tell that he has never been pregnant.
People like him make it all so much harder. I mean, when they’re waving placards and spitting at you, you can’t admit a moment of weakness. You can’t tell about the feeling afterward, the sadness. You just say you’re fine. And you spit back, if you’ve got the gumption.
But I think Mum was right. You have to tell the sadness, otherwise it grows in you, like the shadow of the child you didn’t have.
Every time I watch a movie on TV and the baby dies or is hurt, the tears come. They just spurt out, as if something just struck an underground spring. Maybe it will always be this way. But even so, knowing that, I don’t think I would have done anything different.
I wanted my second chance. I needed it like oxygen. I wanted to grow up first. Richard and I might have children one day. I’d like to. I think Richard would be a fantastic dad. And I’ll make sure our babies don’t have to borrow their light. I’ll give it to them gladly. I’ll be as tall as a skyscraper, as strong as a horse. I’ll give my babies endless helpings of love, just as a mother should. And when they’re old enough, they’ll have all the fuel they need to make their own. Little rockets of energy they’ll be. They’ll have pockets of happiness inside them, like microchips of joy. Well, I’m going to try.
Writing things down makes you feel good. Telling someone is even better.
That’s the closest thing to a recipe as you’ll get from me. I can only tell you what happened, the year I was sixteen. And that’s the way it was, the whole naked truth of it, if you really want to know.
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