The Best Thing (12 page)

Disaster inside me. Leading Pug on to it, really; lying, or moving into a lie; being on the Pill and then forgetting, and not saying, and finally forgetting so often that I’d stopped being on it, and not saying.

I sit up and push back the blanket, listening to the headache, which diffuses forward through my brain, but isn’t very strong. My shoes and socks are right there next to the bed; bending to put them on I ignore the apple inside me, ignore it for a bit longer.

Then the gate clashes and I jump up.
It’s just a Jehovah’s Witness, someone selling vacuum cleaners
. The front door slams. I pick up my jumper and bag.

Pug fills the doorway, in his old black tracksuit with the hood. I’m standing in the middle of the room, red-handed.

‘What’s up?’

‘I have to go.’ I head for the thread of space between him and the doorpost.

‘You feeling okay?’ He closes off the space.

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ Although nausea throbs in my throat.

‘You goin’ home?’

‘Yeah.’ It sounds like a lie.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No! I mean, I’ll be fine. I’ve got some thinking to do. You’d be—I’ve got to work out what to say to Mum, and everything.’ Babble, babble.

He must know exactly what I’m up to. He grabs me with a thump. ‘Mel?’

‘What?’ That little space has opened up again, but my arms are pinned to my body.

‘You tell
me
what. When are you comin’ back?’

‘I don’t know. I have to see what happens at home.’

He tries to see my face. ‘You were gunna just go, weren’t you? Without say in’. Without leavin’ a note. Were you gunna come back?’ He shakes me. ‘Like,
ever
?’ He takes this outlandish thought out of my head and flaps it in front of my eyes.

I look up in shock. ‘What?’ I try for a scowl of disbelief that doesn’t quite come off.

‘The way you’re acting. Like, you’re running away. What’s up? I don’t mean with your dad and that. I mean with you and me.’

‘Nothing’s wrong with you and me.’ I say it as firmly as possible and look straight into his eyes.
Except that I can’t fool myself any longer. I am absolutely on my own. Absolutely, and so are you
.

‘Why are you runnin’, then? Why are you lookin’ like that?’

Because I’m bad for you. Because you were right; I will move on
.

His letting go sets me back a pace; there’s a thrust in it, of anger.

‘Will you let me past, please?’ I say quietly, presenting the top of my head to him.

‘Will you come back?’

Too long a pause. ‘Sure.’ I still don’t look up.

‘Mel?’ His voice shrinking.
Beware quietness, where disaster happens
.

I push him aside like a gauze curtain, this man who can stop a 76-kilo fighter. I don’t look back. I swing round the post on the landing and thud down the stairs. I’m a coward; I’m running; I’m gone.

I ring Mum from King Street. It sounds as if a corpse answers the phone. ‘Yes.’ Not even ‘Hullo?’

‘It’s me.’

‘Oh. I suppose it’s too much to expect you went to school today?’

‘I went to a friend’s. I had a bad migraine.’

‘Right. So you’re checking how badly you’re in trouble now, hey?’

I laugh, embarrassed. ‘I guess.’

She doesn’t sound amused. ‘Well, I’ve run out of anger for today. You might as well come home.’

‘Is Dad there?’

She snorts. ‘You think he’d
stay
? By
choice
? With boring old
me
?’

Pause. ‘You
haven’t
run out of anger, then.’

She sighs. ‘Honey, I’m all over the bloody place. All I ask is, we make an appointment to talk about
your
problem tomorrow morning. I just couldn’t face it tonight. I mean face it
again
, because of course we’ve faced it before, haven’t we?’

She just thinks it’s the same as last time, where we pop off to the clinic and get me scraped out. She doesn’t know about the forgetting, the not-saying, the waiting for and not getting periods. For months. It has to be too late for that ‘option’. Which means …

‘I’ll be back in a little while.’ I hang up and step out into the night.

When I get back she really looks at me.

‘I should’ve guessed,’ she says. ‘Here was I going to get you blood-tested for anaemia! And your weird eating habits, of course.’

‘Tomorrow morning Mum,’ I say.
I
can’t face it, either.

She gives me such a hug—more than that, a holding on to.

‘I have to tell you that your dad left this morning,’ she says, standing back.

‘Left? As in …?’

‘As in went. As in doesn’t look like coming back. Left home.’

She’s looking into my face, her hands on my shoulders.
I did that. I split up our family
.

I never noticed this before, but the left side of her face has got a very slight sag to it. Her left eye is just the tiniest bit downtilted, the way our balcony floorboards tilt to let the rain run off the edge.

‘Where did he go?’

‘To Ricky’s place. She called me at work, to explain things.’

‘
Explain?
Explain what?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t listen. I was trying to
work
, didn’t want to
think
. Trouble is—’ She pushes off from my shoulders and goes over to the dining table, which is covered in files and papers. ‘This is the sort of thing I’d normally ring up
Ricky
about, and work it out with her. Ricky being who I thought she
was
, not who I know she
is
, now. I can hardly believe it’s the same person.’ She stands there with a file in her hand, fallen silent. Then she looks at me. ‘I’m tired. And you look pretty shattered too. We’d better switch off our brains and try to get some sleep.’

She follows me up the stairs, both of us moving really slowly. She laughs at our creeping. ‘The walking wounded.’ It’s a joke and it isn’t a joke.

I don’t know how they trained. There ain’t but one
way to train. Running is the same, punching the
bag is the same, jumping rope’s the same, resting,
and going to camp, following the dietary laws.
Clean living is the same. They must have felt like
I felt. It’s grueling, it’s rough, it’s agony,
the training.

Muhammad Ali

‘Not Brenner.’ Mum brings her mug of full-strength heart-starter coffee to the table.

‘A boy I met last year, before Christmas.’ A
boy
. A tiny boy no bigger than my thumb.

‘Briefly?’ I shake my head. ‘That’s where you were yesterday?’ I nod. ‘How far along are you?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe four months.’ Her eyes widen. ‘Three. I don’t know. I only did the test yesterday.’

Long silence. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘Why only yesterday, if you’ve been months without a period?’

‘I didn’t get any other signs, like throwing up or feeling faint. I just felt as if a period was always about to start, and seeing’s they’ve never been all that regular I just … I was just expecting one to come, that’s all.’

‘For three or four
months
?’

‘Well … they’ve been a busy three months.’

‘I can imagine—keeping up the HSC
and
this secret boyfriend,
and
all that socialising.’

‘I wasn’t socialising,’ I mutter. ‘I was seeing Dino.’

‘And what does “Dino” think about this?’

I shake my head. ‘I haven’t told him. I don’t want to.’

‘You don’t want to tell him.’ She lifts the coffee and takes a slow sip. ‘Any reason?’

‘No, no reason.’

‘He doesn’t beat you up or anything, does he?’

‘Oh, no. He thinks I’m the best thing since sliced bread.’

‘Why keep him in the dark, then?’

‘
Because
, okay?’

‘No!
Not
okay!’ She stops herself, goes on slightly less fiercely, ‘Not okay, Mel, and not
because
. The boy has some rights, you know. You have to have a reason, and a good rock-solid one, for keeping him out of this if you go ahead with it. The two of you made this happen, you know, so don’t go taking the full burden on yourself, just to be holy or for God knows what other reason.’

‘Look, I’m the one who kept forgetting the Pill, right? And forgetting to tell him.’

‘So?’

‘Well, it’s my fault, then, isn’t it?’

‘So?’

‘Well, you just
said
, about the burden of it—he didn’t know he was even
likely
to get me pregnant.’

‘So?’

‘Stop
saying
that, Mum!’

‘Look, accidents happen all the time—pills fail, condoms split, diaphragms get holes in them. The fact is, you get a baby from a mother
and
a father and the father
usually
, unless he’s a complete ratbag, takes some kind of responsibility. Helps, you know?’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Supports. Money, if nothing else.’

‘Well, I don’t want his help and support.’

She touches her forehead. ‘Let me just check with you. We’re talking single parenthood here, are we? We’re talking Melanie Dow having a child and bringing it up on her own.’

‘Well, there are other people. You, and people I’d meet—’

‘Me?’ she interrupts. ‘You think, when I’m just beginning to look life-after-children in the face, that I want to go back to the
nappy
stage?’

‘Oh, shit, sorry for spoiling your
life
, Mother!’

‘Oh, sit
down
, Mel! It’s not
my
life we’re talking about anyway. It’s this child’s. Is there a rock-solid reason why you’re denying
him or her a father? This is all presuming that you’re perfectly happy to be the mother, of course.’

‘Well, what’s so fantastic about
fathers
?’

Mum watches me curiously, rubs her cheek and settles it into her hand. ‘Quite a lot, actually, if you look back over sixteen years or so.’

‘Yeah, but for how many of them was he having it off with Ricky?’

‘One. One year, if he’s to be believed. Since our Easter holiday with the Lewises at the beach house.’

That long! I stare at her, see her eyes fill. She sees me watching, blinks and snatches a tissue from the box at the end of the table. ‘Don’t get me started. We’re talking about a different father here.’ She blows her nose efficiently. ‘I’d like to meet him.’

‘We’ve sort of broken up.’

‘But you were there yesterday.’

‘We sort of broke up yesterday.’

She stands up, takes her mug to the sink. ‘Well, you’d better sort of get back together again, I reckon. Sounds like you broke up under false pretences. Or did you not give him any reasons either?’ She grimaces over her shoulder. ‘Did you just tell him
because
, too?’

I sit in mutinous silence. She is too smart, my mother, far too sharp and clear-headed. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be woolly and confused, to have feelings about things rather than incisive, rational thoughts, to only know things for sure when you look back on them. I’m not going to give in to her pressure; she can be as impatient as she likes. I’m going to wait until things come clear for me, and until then I’ll follow my own instincts.

‘And another thing,’ I say. ‘I’m not going back to school.’

My mother is slightly taller than me, but thinner, frailer-looking. Sometimes I can’t believe the power she has in her slender bones, her long delicate hands. Her quiet voice: ‘You didn’t have to get pregnant, you know, to get out of going to school. You only had to ask, and we would have worked out something.’
I get the feeling she’s slipped in time, that the ‘we’ includes Dad, indicates the good old days, the days before yesterday.

‘I didn’t, I didn’t,’ I protest. But she makes me wonder.

Boxing is unique amongst sporting activities in that victory is obtained by inflicting upon the opponent such a measure of physical injury that he is unable to continue, or which at least can be seen to be significantly greater than is received in return. For this reason alone many people will advocate that boxing be banned altogether as vicious and uncivilised. Others find some advantages in learning ‘the noble art of self-defence’ or believe that society is not yet ready to eliminate boxing altogether; they therefore press for rational controls designed to achieve the greatest possible level of protection of the participants.

The weekend is murder. It’s like a long dive-bombing mission, this ‘discussion’. Mum keeps coming at me, dropping some explosive question like, ‘Where do you plan to have this baby?’ or ‘What will you do for money?’, listening while I jitter about, unable to answer, then wandering away, leaving me all in bits, jangling with possibilities.

And there’s no normal corner of our lives to hide in now. It’s just her and me, a glider and a high-tech bomber, circling each other, with no Dad to ground us. I float along waiting for wind-currents and thermals to point me in the right direction, while she cruises overhead and strikes at random.

Sometimes she loses it. When she comes up against my decision not to tell Pug and sees she can’t budge me, she really goes off the deep end. ‘You just won’t be told, will you! You think you already know everything you need! Well, one day you’ll see that you can’t just pick up people’s lives, turn them upside down and then walk away thinking it’s okay because
you
don’t feel the damage. One day you’ll
feel
it, you’ll
see
it, and you’ll look back on the way you’re behaving now and be
mortally ashamed
!’ She had tears in her eyes then, before she slammed out, like a kid having a tantrum.

She can’t understand, from the outside. How could she? What’s to understand? I don’t understand myself. It’d be easy to say, ‘Sure, I’ll go and see him now.’ But when I think of
doing
it, walking that distance, facing that face, speaking those words … it just can’t be done—not at this moment, not by me.

Sunday night. Rob Lewis, the Wronged Husband, pays us a call. By the slump of his shoulders you can tell how very Wronged he is.