by Kris Webb
‘Sorry, Sophie, but no, you put it on your breasts. There’s something about the chemical makeup of the cabbage that helps to reduce the swelling.’
‘The icepacks will be just fine, thanks,’ I replied firmly, refusing to contemplate sticking cabbage leaves down my bra.
An hour later, after a series of icepacks that had done nothing to alleviate the pain, I was back on the phone to the nurses’ station requesting cabbage leaves.
Something you realise pretty quickly about hospitals is that the doctors and nurses have seen it all before and don’t flicker an eyelid at personal indignities that make patients shrivel up in mortification. The nurse didn’t even snigger as she delivered my frozen cabbage leaves and explained what I should do with them.
As soon as she left the room, I stuck them underneath my bra and the relief was immediate. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the smell. The heat radiating from my burning breasts cooked the cabbage, and within a couple of minutes there was a distinct smell of steaming vegetable that brought to mind memories of my grandmother’s kitchen.
As a green watery substance soaked through my only nursing bra and dripped down my stomach and into the waistband of my trousers, it struck me as highly unfair that humankind could clone Dolly the Sheep, but had been unable to come up with a better remedy for milk-filled breasts than a frozen vegetable.
SEVEN
Saturday mornings at a favourite cafe had been an institution of ours for years (long before they took it up on Friends) and today was Sarah’s official ‘coming-out’.
The weekly ritual had begun when Ben, a friend of Debbie’s younger brother, quit university in the fourth year of his medicine degree and, much to the horror of his parents, bought the King Street Cafe. His claims that he could still use his first aid skills to patch up the drunks who came in for a pick-me-up coffee hadn’t cheered his parents up much.
Ben threw himself into redecorating the place, removing the grease-laden brown wallpaper and replacing it with brightly coloured paint and furniture. He scrubbed the whole place from top to bottom, bought every magazine that had been published in the last two years and threw open the doors with great enthusiasm.
And not a soul turned up.
In those days Newtown was still considered a bit dangerous and people from the eastern suburbs didn’t often make the journey across town (even though it was all of fifteen minutes). Debbie heard about Ben’s plight and immediately insisted that a group of us meet for breakfast at the cafe every Saturday morning.
While we could all munch our way through a lot of fry-ups and drink a lot of flat whites, our efforts alone wouldn’t have been enough to keep Ben afloat. Luckily, though, his business grew quickly as Newtown became a place to be seen and people discovered the King Street Cafe. By then our habit had stuck and we all still took these weekend sessions seriously. The group had changed with time – Debbie’s brother had left for a job on Wall Street, and various others had drifted in and out – but five of us had been meeting almost every Saturday for the last few years.
The rule was that you must appear regardless of where and when the night before had ended, the only exception being if you had arrived home after six a.m. This rule had recently been amended to include childbirth as an acceptable excuse, although only after considerable debate, as a number of our group, with the notable exception of Ben, had believed it would be appropriate for me to give birth on the premises.
Ben’s wife Anna, while insisting that she wasn’t paranoid, could see no reason to tempt fate by having Ben surrounded for twelve hours every day by pretty young waitresses in midriff tops and had decreed that only men could work in the cafe. Ben’s rather bizarre sense of humour led to the cafe being predominantly staffed by burly tattooed men who looked like they’d be more at home on a building site than whipping up macchiatos.
The service in the cafe was very relaxed and people were welcome to sit on one cup of coffee for a whole morning if that was what they felt like doing. People came back because of this, but they all seemed to bring friends as well, so it was very common to see whole groups downing plates of bacon and eggs and one coffee after another.
Max had never been a King Street Cafe regular, but he and Ben had become good friends when they spent three months training together for a half-marathon. When we broke up, I couldn’t help but wonder how much Max had told Ben, and things had been a bit awkward between myself and Ben for a while. My suspicions were confirmed when, far from being surprised when I told him I was pregnant, Ben had smiled and produced a bottle of nonalcoholic champagne. Still, he had never tried to push Max and me back together. He had mentioned once that Max’s job was going well in San Francisco, and while I had pretended to be pleased, I could tell he noticed my lack of enthusiasm.
The only other time we had discussed Max was when I asked Ben to let him know when the baby was born. Ben had promised to call him, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask what Max’s reaction had been.
Some mornings the group would all sit reading the inch-thick weekend papers, other mornings the papers sat unopened on the floor as we caught up on the week’s activities over a breakfast dictated by the previous night’s level of alcohol intake – fruit salad and toast for those who had abstained, heavy-duty fry-ups for those who hadn’t.
During my pregnancy I had arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the dot of eleven, while the others had dragged themselves in some time later with bloodshot eyes and the stamps from clubs where they’d spent the early hours of the morning still on their forearms.
Most of the people I know who have had babies say that they didn’t miss alcohol and they found it easy not drinking for nine months. I did and it wasn’t. By the time I was six months pregnant, I was heartily sick of lime sodas and was dying to have more than one glass of wine or to slug a beer like a normal human being, not sit on it for four hours while it got hot and flat.
Being sober in bars was a totally new experience for me. While the hours between ten and two used to disappear in a blur of laughter and music, they seemed to last an eternity when I was nursing my third mineral water of the evening, well aware that being seen chatting to a pregnant and obviously sober woman was social death. Usually I gave up my pretence of having fun after the fourth or fifth round of drinks and headed home for a bowl of pasta – the lack of alcohol making me all too aware that I’d missed dinner.
However, there were benefits to not drinking. For one thing, I knew exactly what everyone else had got up to when they were drunk. For once I could be the person who said the next day, ‘I couldn’t believe it when you . . .’ or ‘Did you actually realise that you were . . . ?’, instead of lying in bed the next morning trying to piece together the night’s activities and figure out whether I’d done anything truly awful. I also discovered a whole lot of extra time in the weekend, namely the hours before ten a.m., and spent some fabulous mornings wandering along the beach at Bondi. It was a joy to find a parking space right beside the beach and I was back home before the hard-core partiers had even figured out whose bed they had woken up in.
So it was that at eleven o’clock on the Saturday morning eight days after Sarah had entered the world, I strapped her into the baby sling, checked that she wasn’t suffocating against my cleavage and headed out the door towards Newtown. On the phone the night before, my father had assured me that you got used to living without much sleep when you had a baby. But after only a week, I still constantly felt like death warmed up and suspected he had just been trying to make me feel better.
As I walked down the street on my way to the cafe, Sarah’s presence converted passers-by into beaming friends. As with most big cities, Sydney’s unspoken rule is that you don’t look at strangers, and no matter what you do, never, ever smile. Suddenly all those rules were out the window and people were not only smiling at me, they were stopping to talk – to Sarah, that is.
Even though it was eleven-thirty before I made it to the cafe, having been stopp
ed every few metres, I was disappointed to see that I was the first to arrive.
‘Morning, girls.’
I spotted Ben’s lanky body next to the cash register. Although he was smiling, his greeting struck me as a little reserved. I felt that a bit more excitement was in order for Sarah’s first coffee group experience. However, I reminded myself that everyone else had a life and Saturday morning coffee wasn’t the social highlight of their week.
‘Hi, Ben,’ I said, hiding my disappointment as I took Sarah out of her baby sling. ‘Could I just have a coffee to start with?’
The piped music in the cafe suddenly went silent and there was a drum roll. With a loud crash, which Sarah slept through obliviously, the song ‘Baby Love’ started playing. At the same moment, the kitchen door opened and out came my weekly breakfast companions. Using wooden spoons as microphones, they sang and sashayed their way through the tiny cafe, throwing streamers and popping miniature champagne bottles.
The other cafe patrons seemed startled at first (more, I suspect, by the uncool music than the bizarre behaviour of the dancers) but quickly returned to their newspapers or watched, smiling, the rest of the short procession.
In a congo line, Debbie, Andrew, Karen, Ben and Anna snaked through the tiny cafe, stepping out briefly onto the street to circle the tables on the footpath, looking for all the world like a collection of drag queens rehearsing for their next show.
Debbie was the first to reach us and she kissed Sarah, murmuring, ‘Welcome to the world, little one,’ before standing aside.
Andrew was next in the queue. As usual he was dressed in running shorts and a singlet and, judging by the amount of sweat still on him, had just arrived from whatever gruelling course he had set himself that morning. Andrew was a very vocal advocate of exercise as the best way to cure a hangover and would drag himself out of bed for a twenty-kilometre run only hours after he’d stumbled home. Judging by his bloodshot eyes, the endorphins he swore by hadn’t quite been able to overcome the excesses of last night.
‘Well done, Sophie. She’s beautiful.’
‘Thanks, Andrew. Where’s Helena?’
Helena was the current body of choice. She was the kind of woman who had shoes to coordinate with each gym outfit and always knew when to clap in aerobics classes.
‘We broke up,’ Andrew said morosely.
I tried hard to prevent an ‘I told-you-so’ look from reaching my face, but clearly had little success.
‘I know, I know, but I really thought she was different – you know, that we really had something.’
He seemed genuinely upset and I was about to remind him that I wasn’t terribly successful in the romance department either, when Sarah woke and let out an enormous wail. A look of terror came into Andrew’s eyes and he hastily retreated to the far side of the table.
Oblivious to the noise, Debbie produced a bottle of champagne and six champagne flutes. ‘We couldn’t have let this moment pass by!’ she exclaimed. ‘I mean, how often does a child have her official coming-out?’
‘And besides,’ Andrew commented dryly, ‘it’s not every day that Debbie has an excuse to drink champagne this early on a Saturday morning.’
‘Well, it’s a lot more natural to be drinking champagne than running twenty-five kilometres,’ Debbie retorted.
Debbie and Andrew had a tendency to go head to head if they were allowed to and bloodshed in Ben’s cafe was always a distinct possibility.
‘If you two don’t stop, I’ll have Jake and Bruce bounce you,’ Anna threatened, gesturing towards the two muscle-bound staff standing behind the counter in their tight T-shirts.
Unlike Ben, Anna had made it through medical school and was currently working in the accident and emergency department of an inner-city hospital. Just under six feet tall with cropped brown hair, Anna seemed to be trailed by disasters. While she was a part-owner of the cafe, a series of mishaps, the last of which had resulted in the flooding of the entire premises, had led Ben to refuse to leave her there alone. It was a constant source of amazement to all of us that someone as vague as Anna could deal with the pressures of saving people’s lives on a daily basis.
Karen (she of the three children and pregnancy manual library) offered to hold Sarah, who was still crying, as Debbie handed me a glass of champagne. We had first met Karen several years ago when she’d come into the cafe one Saturday morning. All the tables had been full and, seeing her hesitate, I’d suggested she join us. Despite the fact that her life at home with three children was radically different to ours, we’d all hit it off and she’d quickly become an integral part of the group.
Karen had reached a deal with her husband Sam that our Saturday breakfast sessions were her time off. Rain, hail or shine, she could always be counted on to turn up. While she was with us, Sam took the kids to McDonald’s and then put them in front of a video before retiring to his study with the Sydney Morning Herald. Karen had come to the conclusion that her sanity was more important than whatever damage Big Macs and back-to-back videos were doing to her children.
As soon as Karen took her Sarah fell silent. Stunned, no doubt, to be held by someone who knew what she was doing.
‘To Sarah,’ Ben proclaimed, holding his glass in the air.
‘To Sarah,’ the others chorused.
‘How are things going?’ Karen asked after everyone had taken a sip.
‘Fine, I think,’ I answered. ‘I’ve still got no idea what I’m doing, but Sarah seems to be pretty happy most of the time, so I figure I can’t be making too many serious mistakes.’
‘What do you actually do with her?’ Andrew asked. ‘It’s not like you can kick a ball around with her in the back yard.’
Andrew had a point. I’d read an article when I was pregnant that had suggested putting flashcards in front of a baby soon after they were born. Karen had set me straight on that and suggested that the article best belonged in the bin, but I still hadn’t figured out just what I should do with Sarah in the limited time she was awake.
‘Shaking a couple of toys in her face and jiggling her on my knee for a while is generally the best I can come up with,’ I admitted. I glanced sideways at Karen to see if she was horrified at the lack of mental stimulation in Sarah’s life, but she was happily drinking her champagne.
‘Talk us through an average night,’ Ben said.
‘Well, last night I fed Sarah at seven, nine-thirty, midnight . . .’ I paused to try to pick the times out of my weary brain. ‘Then I think it was about three and six,’ I finished.
Debbie, Ben and Andrew all looked aghast, while Karen and Anna just nodded sympathetically.
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Andrew asked.
‘Afraid not,’ I answered, glad that they were as horrified as I’d been after the first couple of nights, which had each felt like an eternity. ‘Although I’m told it should get better,’ I added in an attempt to be positive. I looked questioningly at Karen, who nodded, although not as emphatically as I would have liked.
‘How do you know when to get up?’ Andrew asked. ‘Do you set an alarm?’
Everyone looked at him in amazement.
‘Tell me that was a joke,’ Debbie demanded.
‘I’m serious,’ Andrew insisted, bemused at our reaction.
‘The baby cries, Andrew,’ Debbie said slowly, as if speaking to a two year old.
‘Yeah, but what if you don’t hear it? I can sleep through a ringing telephone, so I doubt that a baby the size of Sarah could wake me.’
‘Trust me, hearing her is not my problem,’ I said, thinking how I often found myself in Sarah’s room, picking her up before I’d even consciously registered the fact that she was crying.
The conversation moved away from my life (or lack of it) and the rest of the morning passed quickly, the usual laughter and high spirits heightened by the champagne. Before I knew it, it was one o’clock and the party was breaking up. Debbie had consumed the best part of a bottle of champagne so I convinced her to co
me home with me for some lunch before driving back to her place.
I’d only been home for two days but had already come to the conclusion that I couldn’t last any longer without shopping for some essentials that had been too unpleasant to contemplate before Sarah’s birth but had suddenly become urgent. The thought of putting Sarah in the car and taking her shopping with me was way too daunting at this early stage, so the only option was to leave her at home with someone.
I looked sideways at Debbie as we walked home. ‘Deb?’ I ventured.
‘Hmmm,’ she muttered distractedly.
‘How would you feel if I left Sarah with you for an hour?’
‘What?’ Debbie stopped in her tracks and looked at me in horror.
‘There are some things I’ve just got to buy but I really don’t want to cart Sarah around a shopping centre. Do you think you could stay while I slip out? I’ll feed her and get her to sleep before I go, so she shouldn’t even wake up while I’m gone,’ I finished hurriedly.
‘But what if I have to pick her up or, God forbid, change her nappy?’ Debbie said, still refusing to budge, as though I were aiming to trap her in the house with Sarah and run away.
‘Debbie, I’ve only been doing this for about a week. You know as much as I do.’
‘Yes, but you’re a mother,’ she said, as if that made all the difference.
Admittedly, despite Karen’s advice otherwise, I had subconsciously thought that having a child would transform me from a self-centred almost thirty something into an earth mother who would effortlessly feed great groups of children and adults around her pine kitchen table and know the words to all the nursery rhymes. However, all it seemed to have done was make me a self-centred thirty something with a baby.
The bribe of dinner at Manchetti’s eventually did the trick and I left Sarah asleep with a suddenly stone-cold-sober Debbie, who had called twice to check that my mobile phone was working before I’d even left my street.
The shopping centre had a couple of baby shops and I headed there, picking up what I needed before heading for the bookshop in search of baby reference material. There were signs over the shelves indicating the types of books they contained and I spotted one headed ‘Parenting’ at the back of the shop. As I got closer I noticed that it was sandwiched between two signs saying ‘Humour’.
