Small Blessings

by Emily Brewin

  A couple pushing a stroller with a gangly toddler hanging out of it pass by. She stares after them, warmed by their easy talk, and decides to call Marcus with the news. He’s been hard to pin down lately. It’s difficult to tell if he’s working more or if she’s just more aware of his absence since being at home.

  She holds her breath and waits for him to pick up. When he doesn’t respond she tries the main office line. Mrs Peel, the ancient receptionist, answers.

  ‘Lovely to hear from you, Isobel. How are things?’

  She tells Mrs Peel everything is fine.

  ‘I’ll put you through to Marcus … oh, one minute, I see him.’ Mrs Peel calls out and Isobel hears a muffled reply.

  ‘Hello, Isobel?’ Mrs Peel chirps. ‘I’m afraid he has to step out, something urgent apparently. Can he call you back?’

  Isobel’s excitement shrinks as she tells Mrs Peel he needn’t bother. She holds the phone in hand after saying a quick goodbye and waits for the frustration to pass, determined not to let it ruin her mood.

  From the foyer she takes the lift to the reception area. Her casual clothes make her self-conscious. In a suit she is Isobel Hutchins, law professional. In slacks and a cardigan, she’s …

  The prospect of running into Bernard doesn’t help. He texted back to say he was happy to talk but she hadn’t replied. News of the fertilised eggs has eased the disquiet she’d been feeling.

  She examines herself in the full-length mirror on the lift wall—the narrow shoulders and long neck but also the fine lines arching across her high forehead and around her eyes—before turning away. The lift comes to a grinding halt. She steps out and walks through the sliding glass doors to the office.

  ‘Hutchins!’ Malcolm spots her and approaches with his arms outstretched. ‘Back already?’

  They’ve never hugged before and she hopes they’re not going to start now. He gives her the grin he uses in court then pats her firmly on the upper arm. ‘How’s life at home?’ The tone is vaguely patronising.

  ‘Fine,’ she replies with an edge.

  The lift doors shut behind her.

  ‘Right.’ He doesn’t seem interested in details. ‘And Marcus?’

  ‘Yes, he’s fine too.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Malcolm sniffs and glances about.

  The place smells like photocopier ink and carpet cleaner, same as always. She peers past him to the empty reception desk and wonders where Penny is.

  She’d sounded a little confused at the luncheon invite, or maybe she was flattered.

  The silence grows uncomfortable. Without work, there’s not much for them to talk about.

  ‘I’m meeting Penny for lunch.’

  Malcolm nods. ‘How about I go and find her for you,’ he says. ‘Nice to see you.’

  She waves airily as he walks away. It’s strange waiting in the deserted reception area when she knows what mayhem lies beyond it.

  She stands for a moment, listening for familiar voices, then checks the state of her hair with her hand and wanders over to the desk. It’s a minimalist arrangement involving sticky notes, a biro and a single silver laptop.

  She leans over so the desk presses against her chest and takes a closer look. In cheap plastic frames beside the computer, hidden from public view, are photographs of Penny with her daughter. In one they pose beside a koala birthday cake with four candles. In the other they are squashed cheek to cheek, shiny with pleasure. There’s no grinning father in the shots. Penny’s husband left when their daughter was two. She rarely talks about him.

  Mother and daughter have the same dimpled smiles and broad foreheads. It makes her think of Grace’s hair. People always told her she was lucky she inherited it, but she never thought so. It was a nightmare to style. Relief finally came in the form of a hair straightener in her twenties, too late for high school. Her mother never felt the need to rein hers in, and so it remained the kind of hair you could get lost in, thick and wavy with the scent of the ocean.

  ‘Isobel!’

  She leaps back from the desk.

  ‘Bernard. I was just checking Penny’s …’She struggles. ‘Workstation.’

  He grins in his silly lopsided way. ‘All in order?’

  She’s never felt nervous around him; desired, yes, and later, irritated before years of indifference set in. But now, she’s speechless.

  ‘How are you?’ He shoves his hands in his pockets in a laddish way, managing to look like a teenage boy despite his suit.

  She inhales slowly. ‘Everything’s going to plan.’

  ‘Ah, the plan.’ He arches an eyebrow.

  She wants to eat her words. She hadn’t meant to tell him her five-year plan that night at the office party, but his teasing made her feel girlish and the red wine loosened her tongue. Afterwards, it felt like part of the intimacy.

  She examines the large potted fern in the corner so she doesn’t have to look directly at him and hopes he’s forgotten the text.

  ‘You wanted to talk to me?’

  She contemplates a reply as Penny hurries around the corner in a kimono-style jacket and flat shoes.

  ‘Oh, Isobel, hi,’ she waves. ‘I was just in the loo. Are you early?’

  She watches Penny fuss with the sticky notes and ignores Bernard.

  ‘I’ll just pop on a spot of lippy. It always brightens my day.’

  The photocopier whirrs into action beyond the partition.

  ‘I’ve made a reservation for noon.’ Isobel makes a show of looking at her watch.

  ‘Really?’ Penny seems a little stunned. ‘I thought we’d just grab a sandwich from 7-Eleven and go for a stroll. I don’t have much time.’

  Bernard looks amused.

  ‘Bernard, why don’t you come too?’ Penny smiles at him as she snaps her handbag shut. ‘You can keep Isobel company after I go.’

  ‘Why not,’ he grins in return before Isobel has time to protest.

  At the little Vietnamese restaurant on Collins Street, Penny orders a latte so big she barely has time to touch her lunch.

  ‘I’d better get back,’ she smiles soon after, shovelling her lunch into a takeaway tub the waiter had provided. ‘Andrew’s left me with a pile of photocopying. You know what he’s like …’

  Isobel half nods, thankful she’s never been on the receiving end of Andrew’s photocopying.

  ‘See you back at the office, Bernard.’

  He waves.

  The mountain of Asian greens in front of Isobel seems insurmountable now that she’s sitting alone with him.

  ‘Great food.’ Bernard forks a strip of beef into his mouth while Isobel pushes a floret of broccoli around her plate.

  After their first night together she tried to end it. But he pulled her close in the stairwell and kissed her until she gave in. He was young and single and had nothing to lose compared to her. It didn’t add up. But whenever Marcus talked about babies, the affair with Bernard would make sense all over again.

  He wipes his face on his napkin and glances at her untouched plate. ‘So, what’s up?’

  There’s a flicker of something familiar across his face that catches her off guard. It reminds her of the warm skin beneath his shirt and the press of his lips against hers.

  Rosie

  THEY WERE SQUATTING in an old warehouse in Footscray when life completely unravelled. It was one in a long line of draughty buildings she called home for a while. She did her best to decorate it with chairs from hard rubbish and jars of stolen garden flowers, even built a bed from wood pallets.

  Joel made the most of her hard work. He lay back on the rough blankets she’d scavenged from the Salvos and smoked cigarettes, so she thought he was happy for now at least. But it never lasted long. He was a tomcat, always leaving but coming back now and then to mark his territory. In the end she wasn’t sure if he was coming or going, or if she wanted him to stay. She wasn’t sure of anything. She spent hours staring at the rough brick wall opposite the bed, waiting for his footsteps on the concrete floor
.

  ‘Ya gotta tidy yourself up a bit, Rose,’ he said one day, as they lay on the mattress smoking a spliff.

  The dope relaxed him. She let her guard down and turned into him until she could feel his ribs. His clothes smelt like hers, dank and sour. It was weeks since they’d showered. In summer she’d scam her way into the local pool and use the change rooms. She’d get lucky sometimes and an unsuspecting swimmer would find their clothes gone or their shoes missing. Once she even scored a purse, left in a bag on the bench. Joel loved her for it for a while and they lived off the spoils until he buggered off with the credit cards.

  ‘You’re letting yourself go. You’re starting to smell.’

  She tried to ignore the growing tightness in his voice, watching instead the ghost of smoke in the air above their heads. There was a time when she might have told him to get fucked. But that time had passed. She nuzzled closer, a dog trying to avoid a kick.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ His body tensed and she knew he wasn’t about to let it go.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ya really are.’

  His words stung through her smudgy high. It was true. People put their hands to their noses when she got on the tram and pressed their faces to the windows. She was an outcast looking in. Even Vera told her to have a wash on the rare occasions they saw each other, which was rich coming from a woman who’d hardly ever bathed her as a kid.

  She tried not to move, not to breathe. He wedged his skinny leg roughly between hers, making her stomach churn. Joel trod a fine line between love and hate. You never knew what to expect.

  ‘I know I do.’ She knew the drill.

  But Joel was on his high horse now.

  ‘You don’t get it. You really fucking reek.’

  He shifted away and clambered off the mattress then stood over her, dick dangling from under his t-shirt. And she laughed, despite herself, at the sight of it, hanging all limp and useless.

  His fist came out of nowhere, ripping a hole in her laughter, splitting her face. She saw stars. Stared at him through them while he landed another.

  ‘You stupid bitch.’

  Too late, she tried to cover her face.

  ‘You’d be nothing without me.’

  And another.

  Something cracked inside her skull, bones or teeth maybe, or her will to live. It was hard to tell through the barrage. She couldn’t say where each hit ended and where the next began. They formed a drumbeat in her head until she stopped fighting, stopped trying to protect her face, stopped begging him to leave her alone. That might have been the point he walked away, she couldn’t say. By then, everything was darkness.

  She stayed still and quiet for a long time, minutes perhaps or hours bleeding together, and imagined shrinking under the blanket and into the filthy mattress where Joel couldn’t find her. When she finally opened her eyes, crusty with blood, the warehouse was dark and her body was beginning to feel again. She touched her face, inhaled sharply at the pain then spat muck from her mouth. Her eyes were slits and she could hardly see to find her pants. It took all she had to squeeze through the rip in the tin door out onto the street, to move one heavy limb slowly after the other.

  Outside she staggered, following the fuzzy glare of the streetlights. A car passed, blasting its horn when she stumbled onto the road, then drove away. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t care. She focused on each step instead, the soft, broken thud of them taking her away from Joel, before he killed her.

  ‘Christ almighty.’

  An arm grabbed hers just before she hit the ground, dragging her upwards with terrifying force, convincing her this was it. This time he wouldn’t let her go. She howled like an animal.

  ‘It’s okay,’ a woman’s voice said gently but firmly. ‘You’re okay.’

  She doesn’t believe in luck even though Bea, at the refuge, insisted she was lucky. She got away from Joel after all, not to mention the gear.

  But Rosie knew that had nothing to do with luck. It was hard work and bloody-minded determination. Luck is easy, and leaving Joel was the hardest thing of all. Harder even than getting off heroin. He was bad for her, but she wanted him anyway. The story of her life, like a moth to the flame. But once she made the first move, the rest followed.

  She went to rehab, let the gear leach from her system so her gut clenched and every muscle in her body twitched in agony. She thought she was dying until one morning she realised the air around her head was easier to breathe.

  Slowly life seeped back into the cracks of her body and soul. At first it frightened her, all this feeling she’d managed to dim down with junk and hopelessness. But life persisted until the world stopped being too bright and she looked forward to getting out of bed each day. The refuge helped.

  It was the closest thing she’d had to a home in a long time. She loved the way the bedsheets rubbed against her skin, clean and white and slightly scratchy. The room she shared with Bea had a framed picture of a whale and its calf on the wall. At night she imagined them calling to her across the ocean.

  She did the lunch dishes every second day and cleaned the bathroom once a week.

  ‘To build your self-worth,’ Bea laughed as she pointed at the roster on the fridge.

  Rosie didn’t care. She took her time with each dish, enjoying the slip of the soap on her fingers while she washed them all clean. Through the kitchen window she could see the other women’s kids in the backyard. They played, full of energy despite the padlocked gates and security cameras on the building’s brick walls that protected them all. Their chatter and laughter and shrieks brought her to life again. They’d survived and so would she.

  One morning a couple of months after arriving, Bea sat on the edge of her bed and watched her dress. Rosie ignored her for a while, pulling on her jeans before struggling to do the button up. She was getting fat and her gut ached. Some mornings she even vomited. All part of the healing, she told Bea while hanging over the bowl

  ‘What?’ She glared at Bea, sucking her stomach in. It made her nauseous.

  ‘Been to the doctor’s lately?’ Bea asked.

  Rosie frowned, one hand still trying to get the zip up on her pants.

  ‘Still feeling sick?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Rosie released it. ‘So?’

  Bea shook her head, the pink tips in her hair highlighted by the sun streaming through the window. ‘Take a look at yourself.’

  Rosie did. Her body was rounder, covered in flesh from the food she couldn’t stop eating. The snags and mash the women made for dinner and the endless rounds of raisin toast. It was making up for lost time, all those months of near starvation.

  Bea exhaled loudly. ‘When was the last time you got your period?’

  She sucked her lip, a bug of realisation creeping in. ‘Four months, maybe five.’

  It was hard to tell because it had stopped for a while. But as she spoke her body began to make sense, the blossoming parts of it coming together so that she dropped onto the bed behind her. Time had lost its markers as her habit got worse, its passing measured instead by the number of hours between hits.

  Bea raised a pencilled-on eyebrow. ‘Better get one of the girls to pick you up a pregnancy test, honey.’

  Rosie sat very still, heat thrumming through her, and stared at the whales.

  Isobel

  ISOBEL BELIEVES IN LUCK, although she would never admit it. She knows from experience that it can make or break a case, sometimes letting a bad man walk free. It comes in the form of a human hair or a witness who’s had a change of mind. It was sleek and slippery and could never be counted on. But it existed.

  Not that her promotion had had anything to do with luck. It was all down to tenacity and hours of overtime, the result of years of hard work and a resolve to be the best in the business.

  She knew what happened to women who didn’t aim high. They ended up living in Altona, working in cable factories to get by, cooking meatloaf for their husband and children. She hated meat
loaf.

  Marcus, on the other hand, loved it. It was his grandmother’s signature dish. So when he talked about starting a family, that’s what she envisaged. Meatloaf and mashed potato, drowned in thin, watery gravy.

  ‘You’re not getting any younger,’ he said one day as they lay in bed. She wondered how long he’d been assessing the situation.

  She’d met Bernard twice more after work at a cheap hotel on King Street. It was suitably tasteless, from the gaudy floral bedspread to the temperamental mood lighting. Things were obviously getting out of hand, but frankly it felt liberating.

  Isobel rolled onto her side, let the mattress grow between her and Marcus then got out of bed to find her yoga pants. In the wide mirror over the sink in the ensuite there was a line between her eyebrows, but only when she frowned. She yanked her pants from the towel rack and pulled them on, warning herself not to get flustered. It was bad for the skin.

  ‘Neither are you,’ she yelled back childishly at the bedroom. They rarely argued but he wouldn’t let this rest. On their walk to the tram in the mornings he told her their child would be tall like his father or have Grace’s bone structure, if it were lucky. She tolerated the talk, hoped he’d eventually run out of steam. But his sidelong glances at passing prams made her nervous.

  He came into the ensuite and rested his chin on her shoulder, his body pressing into her back.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice though?’ He brushed her hair aside and kissed her neck the way she liked.

  She stepped away.

  ‘You said,’ he continued, an edge in his voice, ‘by thirty-seven.’

  She rolled deodorant under her arms then placed it clumsily back on the basin, trying to restrain the rising panic. It clattered to the tiles.

  ‘That wasn’t set in stone,’ she said, grabbing her sports bra and pulling it over her head until it hitched her breasts into an uncomfortable position.

  ‘It’s your bloody plan,’ Marcus snapped.

  ‘That’s right.’ She fumbled blindly with the bra strap. ‘My plan.’

  Marcus’s fingers swiped hers away and untwisted it. The relief was instant.