Dark Roots (14 page)

Rachel has just discovered she is pregnant again. She wonders what Jerry will say now, and what he might put on the stereo this time. The news has hit her like a stun-gun. It is a twist to the plot she would never have dreamed of. Even now, three days after receiving the results, listening to Jerry trying to sing along to Powderfinger in the lounge room, to Emma describing the musical ambitions of Melting Carpet, watching something as ordinary as cheese melting under the griller, Rachel finds she has to push herself off from the profound edge of disbelief into the far shallows where such ideas might be viewed from a sane and manageable distance. Rachel's mind paddles this way and that, trying to encompass the idea of pregnancy. Faintly across the water comes music; the string section swells as she floats at the far side of possibility. She hears ethereal voices sing:
Out of the blue, you came out of the blue
. She can't decide whether it's something her subconscious has invented, or whether it's Burt Bacharach.

‘You're having me on,' says Jerry the following Saturday. He is washing the dog under the hose, and straightens up staring at her.

Rachel says, ‘Are you happy or not?'

They seem to be floundering with the dialogue; she wants to cut and do the scene again.
Slow pan around the two figures
, chatters the voice in her head,
followed by close-up of husband running a soapy hand through his hair in a gesture of amazement. Close-up of wife's face as she tries to form the words: ‘We don't have to have it.' Long overhead shot of the back garden.

The soundtrack to this confrontation is Melting Carpet, who pound from the back of the house, the same four bars over and over.

Jerry jumps up to hug her. ‘Wow,' he says. Rachel is trying to imagine him with a baby papoose, a baby inside pulling his ponytail done up with a scrunchie. She thinks about disposable nappies, Emma's friends, another eighteen years of running to salsa music every morning, her back as she hauls a two-year-old out of the car seat. And the money — my God. Seconds pass in these flash forwards, tiny zippy scenes Rachel fleshes out with a few moments of dialogue: presents under the Christmas tree, parent–teacher nights, going grey, the bathroom mirror scene repeated for ironic emphasis. She focuses on the dog lowering its head to bite the water flowing from the end of the dropped hose, strains to hear the soundtrack.

‘I think I want it,' she says.

‘Whoa, it's just kind of hard to get your head around,' says sweet, ingenuous Jerry, just as he had done seventeen years ago.

‘Better to burn out and die young,' howl Melting Carpet, ‘that's what Kurt said before he ate his gun.' Rachel, vacuuming, wonders if she has heard the lyrics right. The bass player in the band has a stud through his tongue, and Rachel thinks she might have got off lightly with the yin-yang tattoo. Emma had stared open-mouthed at the news her parents had conceived a baby, then stormed out saying, ‘That is so gross.' Rachel knows she is embarrassed, confused, perhaps threatened. She has read comforting analyses of this in library books. But when Emma screamed that she was moving out as soon as she turned eighteen, and her friends would look at her now like she was some kind of freak, probably, Rachel had found herself screaming back: ‘Good! Go!'

‘I hate you!' Emma had yelled.

Music like heavy metal had filled Rachel's ears, discordant noises full of ear-splitting feedback that made her wince and want to cover her head.

Now Emma is talking with studied carelessness about group houses, about moving in with the band, who sit at Rachel's kitchen table and eat whole cakes slice by slice and giggle uncontrollably. Rachel pictures the batik door hangings, the Kashmir Musk incense, the rattan matting of her own group houses, and doubts anything she can imagine will resemble the household Emma is planning.

The leather jackets of the band members look like some child has been firing at them with a pop riveter. Now Emma is playing the drums; she can hear her, it sounds enraged.
Where does all that rage come from?
wonders Rachel, remembering the meditation tapes and restful dolphin–rainbow mobiles of Emma's babyhood. Massage for your baby. A piece of amber on a leather thong around that chubby, adorable neck, which today sports a livid lovebite covered with pale foundation. Melting Carpet has a gig, at the High School Students Only Rage. They have taken on a keyboard player because his father has a kombivan and can lend it to haul their gear. Jerry has offered to do the sound mixing, news greeted with suppressed, stoned hysteria by the band. Rachel is now five-months pregnant. Her condition has given her vagueness and detached dreaminess a force and a shape. She hears vintage Paul Simon as she walks in the park each morning, sometimes a touch of Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
.

She clings to the soundtrack, conscious that it gives things form; it lets her settle back in the audience and be carried along.
Still crazy … after all these years
… she hums along to herself, pensively viewing a long camera angle of herself kicking up leaves, soft-focused and waiting for the next cue. She looks at baby photos of Emma and thinks:
no bikinis without sunscreen, ever again
and
look at that, not even a hat
and
a piece of Amazon rainforest the size of a football field disappearing every minute.
She watches the real-life cop shows and shakes her head in horror.
What sort of a world
, she thinks, and
I'll be fifty-nine at its twenty-first birthday party
and
how are we ever going to get enough sleep?
She sees Jerry in a misty, future dream he has long held of motorbiking around Australia, both of them, and the soundtrack washes sadly over the filter effects. Impossible now. She almost hears the lyrics whispered, sees a tiny speeded-up video clip of Jerry selling his acoustic guitar, walking away to a lonesome Nashville instrumental solo. She reads in the paper of abducted children, children playing with computer pets, children going on diets at age eight.
Things are out of control
, thinks Rachel.
They are awesome. They are so hard to get your head around.

When Rachel goes into labour Jerry is not home. She eyes her overnight bag carefully packed by the front door, her vision grey around the edges, sweat springing on her forehead.
I've changed my mind
, she thinks as her waters break. She doubles over the table —
zoom in for a close-up on the wedding ring
— her hands flat down in front of her.
Jesus, have I changed my mind
. Her own breath sucks in and comes out a yell. It's not a cry, thinks Rachel from a new abstract eyrie, not a moan, a whimper, a feeble call. With each breath, another yell comes, unpretty and shocking in the silence of the kitchen, and brings Emma running to stare horrified from the doorway. Rachel hears white noise, background hiss, the stylus caught in the last empty grooves of the record, and nothing more to hum along to.

As she sinks deeper and deeper into what her own body is engineering, Rachel feels herself in bed, comes up for air to hear the bedroom phone extension snickering as someone dials out. Emma, Emma. Three calls. Rachel thinks about sinking, the going under in surrender, opening your mouth to water. She surfaces to gulp great lungfuls of air, knowing that the ambulance is not going to get here in time, knowing her husband, who she suddenly wants very much, is somewhere stuck in traffic. She feels transition start and recalls the barked instructions of the on-duty obstetrician she had recoiled from in her other labour, who had turned around and hissed Jerry out of the way, and Jerry's hoarse, humble assent which had made tears spring in her eyes.
It's going to be here
, Rachel thinks, and everything crowding up the airwaves stops suddenly to listen as she twists the Guatemalan quilt in both her hands and sets her jaw.
Here and now, then
, she thinks.
Come on, then
.

‘Up,' says a voice, pushing pillows behind her back, and she's confusing it with those nurses, the one with the chewing gum who did the rounds in her brand new Sony Walkman, bringing Rachel magazines. Rachel's hand goes out gesturing for the mask, for nitrous oxide, and knocks both the digital clock and the bedside lamp off the table.
Without time, without light
, thinks Rachel,
and I'm going to die now.

‘Here,' says the voice, and puts a straw between her lips, and Rachel sucks apple juice like it is ambrosia, hears weeping that is not her own, and is enfolded in patchouli-scented arms which hold her still, slow her down.

Then as her second daughter is born, she sees through a blur of tears only the beloved, holy skin of her first — close, close to her and sheened with sweat; she is eye to eye with a never-ending Celtic twist, two fish tumbling forever in the struggling, messy flux of life.
It is not quiet, it is never quiet
, thinks Rachel, feeling the head crown, a leg jump with anticipation.
It is not a meditation, that is a lie
. At some point she senses Jerry there, she hears Jerry say that it is awesome. And Rachel thinks:
Yes.

‘Hey, Mum. Watch this.' Emma gives the baby a wooden spoon. Rachel gazes on that new body, that unsullied flesh free of tattoos, studs, scars and piercings, dings, bruises, inoculation and stretch marks.
Just wait
, she thinks tranquilly, holding those kicking, uncalloused feet.

Jerry, up all night, has spent the morning playing a selection of records, making a bedtime tape — Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas and the Papas, Queen and Bananas in Pyjamas. The room has crashed to
Bohemian Rhapsody
. Now it is silent. Rachel listens but can hear nothing, stands gazing at the astonishing, abrupt fact of the baby before her.

‘She looks like the Dalai Lama,' says Emma, ‘only new.'

The baby grapples with the wooden spoon's handle with industrious concentration, waves it gently, staring gravely at her observers, her small, devoted audience.

‘Look,' says Rachel. ‘She's conducting.'

Take me anywhere
, she prays silently and fiercely into the invisible music.
Take me anywhere at all
.

Direct Action

Direct action. You don't want to hear it. You want to make another pot of tea, and wait for
Star Trek: The Next Generation
to come on. Direct action means arguing with punters on the street who try to pull your placards off you, and dancing round the missile base so that the cops can laugh themselves sick before they move in on you. It's something you admire hearing about second-hand, shaking your head at someone else's bruises. It's not something you feel like doing, on a cold winter's night after dinner. Except that you can't stop thinking that right now, after dinner or not, and all through tonight, and tomorrow, twenty-four hours a day, in fact, seven days a week, Barron Paper Mills, just up the road, are glugging industrial effluent straight into the river.

Picketing? The laundry is full of pickets.
STOP TOXIC
SPILL
, they say.
THE PLANET IS NOT YOUR TOILET
. And so on. Barron executives, accustomed to paying big dollars to give toilet paper a good image, have an Environmental Impact Study saying that the effluent falls within acceptable levels of toxic contamination. Life seems full of acceptable levels now. I myself fall into the acceptable level of thirteen per cent of qualified tradespeople unable to find employment. I've stood knee-deep in the sludge twenty metres down from the dual-emission outlet pipes and been asked by well-pressed retirees just off to the pokies why I haven't got a job.
Because they've closed. They laid me off. I worked for four years, let me show you my certificate and union card.
No point screaming. No point even answering. There's a photo of us ‘Direct Action' campaigners, cut out of the local rag and brown and oil-splattered now, on the fridge. We look puny and pale in our rolled-up jeans, holding dead fish, and every time I pass it I can't help cringing at the headline ‘Ecowarriors' — saving the public the trouble of jeering at us by doing it myself.

I observe the comforting sight of the Enterprise going where no one has gone before (used to be no
man
but see how non-sexism has changed the world), sip my tea and watch Riker dispensing Klingons. Glug, glug, goes the effluent two kilometres away, unstoppable, poisonous, irreversible. This time of night it slows to a trickle, by 9.30 in the morning it's like the North Sea pipeline.

‘I'm providing jobs,' the executive from Barron had argued with me as I stood in the river that morning, knowing where to hit the nerve. I had an answer ready but couldn't trust my voice, or my hand holding the rotting fish. He'd sneered at my ‘Vegetarians of the World Unite' T-shirt.

‘Sure you've got your priorities straight, son?' he'd said, and when I still didn't answer, he'd said, ‘Come on, speak up, moron', and I'd thrown the fish, and there'd been trouble.

Sometimes Monday mornings I still jump awake at 6.45 and go to roll out of bed before realising there's no whistle to get up for. It'd be a long bike ride to work anyway, even if I'd kept my job, since the factory is now in Macau. Some other poor bastard's starting up the oxytorch now, checking his mask and checking his back. People used to ask for me at the workshop. ‘Get a skill and you'll always be in demand,' is something my Dad used to say, and he believed it too, until they retired him. He says he doesn't miss the work. Tells me this in the middle of his shed, which has more tools in it than Mitre 10. His face lighting up when a neighbour brings their car over, hurrying for a spanner, telling them it's no trouble.