Ricochet Baby (14 page)

E
DITH IS LOOKING
for a bottle of gin. She thinks she left it in the trough in the top paddock, but she can’t find it. The arms of her jacket are soaking and slimy from several unsuccessful sweeps of the trough. Perhaps she left it in the blackberry bush near the stream bank. But the blackberry has been cleared, something she had forgotten. May be the toolshed, though that’s a dangerous one; Glass knows most of the spots in there.

She hiccups and sighs. Anyone would think Glass never took a drink himself, which is rubbish. Glass gets pissed as a fart if he gets half a chance. Give me a night off, old girl, your turn to drive home. As if I don’t know he’s trying to put the brakes on me. As if he can stop me if I really want to.

But I do want to. I always want to stop. I want tomorrow to be a better day. But there is that first sweet slide, the lovely burn at the back of the throat, the small sunburst in my head; it is always new, like love. What would I do without that? And the last mouthful of the day, when you know you can’t go on because the walls are shaky, and words are like stones, that’s a nice one, holding it in on the tongue, slowly rolling it around like mouthwash, so that it lingers on.

A warm night. Mulching to do in the morning. Hot roots. And mildew on the Michaelmas daisies. Yes. We must have a party for the baby before autumn grows late. My grandson. My little boy. No, Roberta’s little boy. Tomorrow, I need to see Roberta and the boy. What is the matter with Glass and me? I need Wendy, she’d sort me out. Yes. Bitch. Where have you gone? I was doing fine until you walked out on me. This is because of you.

A patchwork of stars between the clouds. Might be rain tomorrow. How good it would be if it rained. And here is the gin she has salted away, carefully placed in the old hidey hole, the filled-in rabbit hole by the third post of the home paddock. Out of gin, are we, Glass? Up your poo hole.

Edith gives a little hiss of pleasure and sits down beside the post. Very carefully now, Edith, she tells herself. Go easy, just a
capful
, neat like that. Neat. Yes. Oh, God. Oh Mary, mother of Jesus. Thank you.

And where is Glass? Glass is prowling, gun in hand, as far as he can by night around the perimeter of his property. Above him a white moon shifts across the sky, briefly illuminating the bowed heads of his cattle. When a light pierces the darkness he shoots at it, causing a paddock of yearlings to stampede. The light may be nothing more than the milky moonbeams caught on the river. Or a reflection from a distant car light glinting off the window of a barn.

B
ERNARD TRIES TO
write a letter to Orla. Writing letters is painful for him, not because he is bad at writing itself — it’s just that the words won’t come to him. When he thinks of writing words about love and longing he can only think of romantic song titles, and he sees that that won’t do. Dear Orla, love me tender, blowin’ in the wind (that’s me, Orla), only fools fall in love (yeah, yeah, yeah), if you’re going to San Francisco (or any other damn place in the world but here), I’ll follow the sun (tomorrow: maybe). These songs that spring to his mind date back to some time in the past, as if they mark a point where something in his life was arrested, or even ended.

Just once since she left, Bernard has rung Orla in Ireland.

‘And what do you want?’ his mother-in-law asked when she answered.

‘Well,’ he said, and hesitated.

‘Not much use for a well if you don’t have the water.’ Bernard thought how healthy she sounded.

‘I want Orla.’

‘I’ll get her to ring you,’ the old bat said, ‘always assuming you can afford for us to transfer the charges back to you.’

When Orla doesn’t ring (and, of course, he had understood that she wouldn’t from the start, because she wouldn’t have been given the message), he promises himself he will write her a letter, but he doesn’t. The dreams don’t go away.

S
ARAH HUNTS THROUGH
the advertisements of the garden tours until she finds a cellphone number in Walnut. She is answered by a woman who is clearly very drunk.

‘Wendy Mullen? Never heard of her in my life. Who is this woman?’

‘My mother. Well, I was given your number and it just seemed possible. We visited your garden on a tour a while ago.’

The line has a crackle on it as if the phone is out of range, behind hills or something. A sound like a cow moving and lowing quietly in the night interrupts the conversation. Sarah has the odd impression that the woman to whom she is speaking is out in the countryside on her own. Not so odd, really; Sarah, too, is used to listening to the night by herself.

‘What would I be doing with your mother?’ The woman coughs, or heaves; it’s hard to tell either way. ‘No good talking to me, I’m just a drunken old rat.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s just that she’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared mother, eh? Who have you told about this?’

‘Well, nobody really. She goes walkabout — my mother, I mean. I suppose I should advise the authorities. I’m really sorry to have troubled you.’

‘Goes walkabout does she? Sounds pretty odd.’

‘Well, she stays with people. She’s always liked shifting around.’

The woman at the other end sighs. ‘I might bump into her.’

‘You do know where she is, don’t you?’ Sarah demands.

‘No, as a matter of fact, I don’t, not right now.’

‘But if you did know?’

The woman groans. ‘Fools rise all the time. Tell me the
number
and I’ll write it down if I remember. What did you say your name was?’

Sarah doesn’t believe the woman will remember the number. But she decides to leave it a week or so longer before she goes to the police.

O
NE MORNING
, R
OBERTA
receives two phone calls. One is from her mother and the other from Marise. Summer is cruising rapidly into autumn. She can smell the brown, dusty winds that will be
blowing
on the farm, even though she can’t feel them on her skin. Her nose and eyes water sometimes and so she guesses it must be the nor’-westers that are causing it; they can do strange things to a
person
. Everything can be put down to the wind, this is the best way to look at it. Her hair is falling out and she is tired all the time.

When her mother rings, the first question Roberta asks her is what is the wind like?

‘Don’t worry,’ Edith says, ‘the garden is looking fine. Have you set a date?’

‘What for?’

‘I was just thinking about the baptism.’ Roberta notes this, because when Edith had talked earlier of this occasion she had
spoken
of a christening, as Protestants do. Now she is talking like a Catholic.

‘I don’t want any of that stuff,’ she tells her mother.

‘I can’t stop you being a heathen, I suppose, but this is
different
— you’ve got the baby to consider.’ She is talking as if it’s a
decision
like choosing fluoride.

‘When are you coming to see me?’ Roberta asks, trying to change the subject.

‘Really, Roberta’, Edith says, ‘I don’t know what’s got into you since you had this baby. It’s hopeless trying to talk to you.’

‘I don’t get much sleep.’

‘Oh, that. Well, nobody does.’

‘He’s got diarrhoea.’

‘What have you been eating? Chocolate? Grapes?’

‘How come it’s my fault?’

‘I didn’t say it was. Oh for goodness’ sake, after three months you must know that what you put in your mouth is what comes out Nathan’s other end.’

‘Thanks,’ Roberta says. ‘My milk’s drying up anyway. I’m going to give him a bottle.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Oh, can’t I just.’ Roberta hangs up. Nathan loves his bottle. So does she; quickly and secretly she is letting her milk dry up. Doubled his weight, the Plunket nurse had said, approvingly. Roberta sees no need to tell her the truth.

When Marise rings she tries not to reveal how she is feeling, endeavouring to sound light and airy. ‘I’m busy, really must go,’ she says, the bright housewife.

‘He came to see me,’ says Marise.

‘Who?’

‘Josh.’

Roberta’s heart seems to have stopped above the telephone. ‘I do have to dash,’ she says.

‘He’s got something for you.’

‘I can’t think what. All my stuff was accounted for. Paul made sure of that.’

‘Not the placenta.’

‘What?’

‘He’s got Nathan’s placenta in the freezer. He thought you might want to bury it.’

‘I don’t believe this. You’re being disgusting. I mean, this isn’t very funny, Marise.’

‘It’s not meant to be. His girlfriend’s family do it. He just thinks everyone does it.’

Robert’s mind flicks back to the day of the birth. She can see Josh speaking to the midwife, a transaction taking place. She believes Marise, but it is hard to comprehend that this thing, this part of Nathan — part of her, if it comes to that — is in a stranger’s house, tucked up with the cat’s meat and fish fingers.

‘What shall I tell him?’

She laughs, in what she hopes is a merry, clever way. ‘Tell him anything you like.’ For the second time that morning, she hangs up without saying goodbye.

Actually, she has no answer. She has no idea what Marise should say to Josh. She decides that she won’t talk to Marise again. It’s better to keep herself to herself.

I’ve got to get it together, she resolves, I’ve got to get myself together. She sees the way Paul looks at her sideways in the evenings, well, the evenings when he is at home. He works very long hours. Human resources are, of course, endless. He can afford
to be choosy, he says, his firm has a good reputation. They prefer people who are in jobs, and looking for some sort of improvement in their salary packages and status, to people who have no jobs. We upskill, not sideways skill, he explains.

What if someone wants something less important, she asks. What if they just want to take life easier? He looks as if Roberta has taken leave of her senses.

‘I’m just trying to take an interest,’ she says. ‘Unemployment’s on the rise again, if you can believe the newspapers.’

‘It’ll sort itself out,’ he says, without raising his eyes from the work he has brought home.

‘I see,’ she says. ‘Yes, of course.’ There was a time when her views on employment would have been of value; it’s been her
business
too. She folds a pile of napkins, flicking them so they snap, full of clean sunshine and windy air.

‘Couldn’t you have done that earlier?’ he says.

All the same, even if he is being a jerk, she thinks she may need to change. Some people might say Paul has been very patient. They might say things haven’t been easy for him, and she would have to agree with that.

After these phone calls, Roberta gets her car out of the
double
garage and straps Nathan’s carrycot into the back seat. Since Nathan’s arrival, she has ventured only as far as the supermarket, but today she will go out like other mothers do. If she could think of someone to visit she would. Her best friend, Pamela, has gone on a working holiday. Roberta still calls her my best friend and she can’t think of anyone else she likes better. At school they spent every day in earnest consultation about boys and music and their lives. She has become a big-busted, cheerful, capable person who worked for a vet until she went away, and she still calls men boys. All the women from the flat have gone, dispersed to high-powered careers or marriage in other towns.

Roberta thinks longingly of Marise, and puts the thought firmly out of her mind. She can take a walk in the Botanic Gardens, with Nathan in his backpack, letting the sun warm them both. In the end, nobody has bought them a stroller, and she hasn’t seen the need so far to go out and buy one herself.

Her car has had so little use that the battery is flat and she has to roll it down Ashton Fitchett Drive in order to start it. The engine clucks and falters into life. It’s like her, she thinks, too hard to start.
By the time she does begin something, she doesn’t want to do it. She doesn’t stick at things; she has heard this before. Like today. The car park at the gardens is full and when she has driven up and down the line of parked cars twice, she turns round and leaves. Driving home, she loses her way, crossing into the wrong lane on a roundabout. It is so silly, as if she is a stranger. Instead of going up the hill, she has turned down to Newtown. It is here that the car engine dies altogether, giving her just enough warning to pull into a parking space.

For some minutes she sits in the car while Nathan whimpers in the back seat. She is responsible for all of this — her broken-down car, Nathan crying. She has run out of prepared bottles. Her milk is dry, or so nearly that it makes little difference, and she has a raging thirst. Autumn sun simmers on the pavement outside the car. It would be easier to die than to make the effort to go on any further.

‘I’m responsible,’ she says. It means she has to go on. She decides that, if she can get a drink and something to eat, she might be able to feed Nathan. Point to you, Edith. She extracts Nathan from the car and puts him in the backpack. Walking soothes him until they arrive at a milkbar cum restaurant full of chipped formica tables and school chairs. When she sits down Nathan whimpers again. An attendant waving a fan over a row of sandwiches stops to bring her a tray of tea.

This is the moment when the War Woman comes in to the shop. This is what Roberta comes to call her. Her language sounds guttural and coarse, although maybe it is beautiful; her huge face has wide planes and spaces on it, like that of a woman in one of those documentaries where people tear each other apart in snowy wastelands and die in blood on plains, in the streets, before the camera’s eye.

Her eyes are small in relation to the rest of her face, glittering and dark in sunken hollows, her big, loose mouth reveals a black gap where one of her upper front teeth is missing. In her arms she carries a big boy, the size of most children of two or three, although clearly still an infant, to whom she is shouting a song. Behind the counter, the attendant pours a cup of coffee, without being asked, and hands it to the War Woman, who puts money on the counter.

The boy, on this warm afternoon, wears a green and white fake fur hat with ear muffs. His mother tugs them down, as if to keep his ears warm. The child returns a look it is difficult to interpret:
a smile, a crooked leer, a vast indifference to her attention. She shouts with pleasure and drinks some coffee, standing up at a table. Every muscle of her face is contorted into an attentive adoration of the child. She extracts a baby’s dummy from the pocket of her baggy, bibbed overalls (perhaps this is what makes Roberta think she could be Russian? She has seen pictures of women in labour camps wearing clothes like this) and puts it in her mouth. She sucks hard on the dummy and then, with a cry of glee, plunges it into the baby’s mouth, singing her loud song, and looking to see whether the attendant and Roberta are watching.

Nathan starts to scream, reminding Roberta of his presence. She lifts her blouse and offers Nathan her breast, which he nuzzles fretfully. The War Woman roars and drags the dummy from her son’s mouth and for a moment it appears that she will thrust it into Nathan’s. Instead, she casts a look of contemptuous pity on Roberta and bestows lavish kisses on her son’s face. Aaaah, she cries. Aah.

Ah ha ha, her laughter follows Roberta down the street. Roberta runs, because she must save Nathan. She does not adore him in that way. She cannot be consumed by him, or by Paul. Her running footsteps take her to a bus stop, and, for the moment, she believes she can save him. When she is on the bus she realises he is not safe, because he is still with her.

A
S
R
OBERTA STANDS
at the bench the next morning, something
aston ishing
happens. The feeling of having the flu has persisted. She has told Mr Maitland about this at her six-week check-up, when he assures her that everything is fine, she can have sex again — all the stuff that women wait to hear, or their husbands do, although she hasn’t been in the mood and Paul doesn’t seem anxious. Once or twice it has happened. It has occurred to her before that Paul is a very directional kind of lover. I like it like that and that and that, he says lately, sounding like an advertisement for fried chicken.

‘I don’t want to give you antibiotics,’ Mr Maitland said, ‘not when you’re feeding. It doesn’t look like flu to me.’

‘But I have a runny nose,’ she said.

‘Mention it to your regular doctor next time you see him, if it persists.’ He was signing her off, getting rid of her, she felt. A bit of a neurotic, she fancied him writing in his notes. That was nearly two months ago. She has tried ignoring her symptoms.

This morning, as she measures mix into bottles, she sneezes and something slips inside her head. It is like a clot moving under her eye. Roberta blows her nose into a strip of paper towel and finds she is holding something solid. When she pulls it, she feels the thing drawn down out of her sinus cavity, creating a trail of emptiness and relief. In the paper towel lies an angry green piece of mucus, the length of her little finger and nearly as round. Livid and putrid, it is encased in a skin of its own, separate and seemingly alive. She wouldn’t be surprised if it wriggled.

She lays this thing on the bench and studies it with the fear one reserves for unexpected reptiles. But it looks more like a little green haggis than anything. From the open knife drawer, she takes a vegetable knife, and stabs it, but already it is shrivelling in the sun into something smaller and less excessive than the green creature that has emerged from her head. The tip of the knife pierces its skin and it is just another piece of snot.

B
UT MY HEAD
is clear, and I see what I must do. I go to a mirror and look at my face. I don’t like what I see but I hold my own eye.

T
HE TRAIN RATTLES
and slides, entering gullies where ngaio and gorse jostle for space, and rushes up the other side. The back fences of neat houses flash by, with just enough time to glimpse napkins on the lines and paddling pools and women chatting over fences. One of the stops is alongside a garden centre, the parking lot crammed with cars. Women push trolley-loads of plants and bags of manure towards their cars in the lot, mostly two by two with their friends. I imagine my mother, seeing her through the fine mist of water sprinklers. Only Edith was always on her own. The women laugh and call to their children, shout see you soon. Their hair shines and their teeth sparkle, their tight jeans cling to their sensual hips as they walk. This is how mothers ought to look. The women don’t look up and see me watching from the window of the train.

I look down at Nathan in my arms. The train sways into a curve in the hill, Rockin’ rollin’, I sing to him, quietly, so nobody will hear. I am War Woman, I do what I must. I kiss Nathan’s
sleeping
face, his forehead, the tip of his nose, each small ear. My
darling
darling little boy my beloved son, I say to him, my incantation, my song, my sleeping memory.