Australian Love Stories (34 page)

‘What do you want me to wear?' I ask, thinking how I might fit this body, still loose and misshapen from childbirth, into that kind of frock.

‘Wear whatever you like,' she says. ‘Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.'

My brother's fiancé has been married before. I figure anything formal will do. But it's difficult to find a dress that doesn't make me feel like a postpartum cow. In the change room, two girls with spray tans and g-strings try on tight strappy dresses while their mother sits wearily in a plastic chair. The next day my daughter contracts an ear infection and my doctor says
she can't take the airplane. But my brother's wedding is in two weeks. My only brother. The one we thought would never get married. Fuck it, I think, and book the train tickets.

‘What is the name of the antibiotics prescribed for your baby?' says the doctor on the phone.

It's my ex-husband's doctor, not mine. My daughter is in his care for the weekend. I can hear her father talking to the doctor in the background. I try to remember the name of the script but it's at home on the kitchen bench and I've hit the dress shops again, still trying to find something to wear for the wedding.

‘I can't remember,' I say. ‘But if you could just give me a minute, it will come to me.'

But the doctor doesn't have a minute. She is talking to me like I'm an imbecile. Like she's about to call Social Services and have them knock on my door, and it's all too much. I throw my phone down so hard it skates across the floor, and go out into the street, gulping lungfuls of air.

The train journey to Sydney is eleven hours long. I pack Huggies, baby wipes, creams for nappy rash and cracked nipples, Bonjela, Baby Panadol, dummies and a bear that plays a tinkly song when you pull the cord. My brother's wedding is at a high Anglican church. My daughter sits feverishly on my mother's lap as I walk down the aisle in a black velvet secondhand dress with blue glitter stockings to match my hair. The organist plays ‘Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring'. The bride wears white lace and taffeta. It's like one of those dreams where you realise you're about to give a speech in your knickers, or that you're not wearing any knickers at all.

‘It's too hard,' I tell my doctor when I get back to Melbourne.

I'm sitting in his office with pyjamas poking out from beneath the sleeves of my jumper, using up all his tissues. My doctor has thin sandy hair, freckles and pale Irish skin. The kind of skin that makes mothers tell their kids not to stay out too long in the sun.

‘It's not too hard. It's just
very hard
.' He gives me a weary smile.

My doctor lost his wife to cancer, so he should know.

‘Sometimes I feel like Jo Marsh in
Little Women
,' I say. ‘You know, the girl who rejects the boy next door then pisses off to Europe and falls in love with the professor.'

But my doctor hasn't read
Little Women
. He looks thoughtfully at the shelves in his office, as if he might find the book there, and asks if I'm getting enough iron.

‘There's no easy road,' says the nurse in pathology who takes my bloods.

She's in her mid-thirties, about the same age as me. Her glossy brown hair hangs in a neat pony tail and bounces from side to side against her white uniform when she walks. I wonder how it feels to fit into a size twelve uniform and take scheduled lunch breaks. The nurse looks like she hasn't had one bad day in her life, even though I know that can't be true.

‘When can I come back?' my ex-husband asked, two weeks after I told him to move out.

I had been sitting in the garden with my baby and the phone beside a shed still crammed with his tools and junk. He'd been staying with his mother in the suburbs. The labrador gnawed happily on her bone.

‘You can't,' I said with my heart so full in my mouth I felt it beating there. A mouth full of heart, soft and warm, as if I were trying to swallow it back down or eat it the way cows do their placentas. ‘You can't ever come back.'

‘But I don't have anything for the baby. Not even a high chair.'

‘Then get one.'

When people say, ‘and then my marriage ended', it sounds like something that came to a gentle halt, like when a train pulls up at the station and some people get off and others get on. But actually, it's more like a wreck, with everyone terrified and crushed in the twisted, upturned carriages. And sometimes the emergency workers can cut the people out and fix them and sometimes they can't, or not for a long time.

In December our Mothers' Group talks about where everyone's going over the summer holidays.

‘We've got a house in Rosebud,' says Kath, nuzzling the top of her baby's head with her handsome chin.

‘We go to Inverloch,' says Jude. ‘Been going there for years. Everyone will be wanting to hold this little one. I'll have to fight to get my turn!' She holds out a rattle and her baby grabs it with his fist.

‘Bermagui,' says Vanessa. ‘First time we've been. But John's got the boat now so…'

The Maternal and Child Health Centre where the Mothers' Group meets has walls lined with grey fabric so you can stick posters up with Velcro. I look hard at the posters on breastfeeding and domestic violence and support groups for postnatal depression, feeling the tears prickling behind my eyes. Because if the stats say one in two marriages fail, then how come I'm the only statistic in the room?

‘You could come away with Geoff and me,' says Kath tentatively, bouncing her baby girl on her knee. ‘We could go to the beach.'

But her kindness only makes me cry harder. And it's not pretty, the crying. Because I'm broken and damaged and no beach holiday with someone else's family, no labrador, chocolate, drugs, wine, cigarettes or girlfriends can transcend my particular longing.

‘I want to be held,' I tell a single friend on the phone. ‘And I don't care by whom.'

I tell her how my ex-husband and I used to curl up together like two spoons, and how now when I wake the other spoon is not there and I miss it. Even though it was a stupid, cheap, bent spoon anyway and I don't want it back.

‘You have skin hunger,' she says.

‘It's pathetic,' I say. ‘Plenty of women are happy to be single.'

‘Maybe it's not your thing.'

‘Anyway, I'm not ready for love. I just want sex.'

Once an American woman visiting Australia lent me a book she'd bought during her stay here, and I fell in love with the man who wrote it even though we'd never met. Then the woman went back to America before I could return the book, so I put it on my shelf and went on with my life. I was married. It was not the time for falling in love with men I didn't know. But I still have the book, with sentences underlined. Sometimes I take it off my shelf and read it.

I post my personal profile on
RSVP
and put an ad in the local paper:
Attractive single mother seeks casual encounters for discreet fun times
. It takes me quite a while to get it right. My phone receives 238 text messages in twenty-four hours.

‘Well, it just goes to show there are a lot of lonely people out there,' says my doctor.

He's trying to be non-judgemental. I can tell by the tilt of his head and the way he shifts his glasses on the bridge of his freckled nose. ‘Do you think it was the combination of words you used, or one in particular?'

I select nos. 29 and 32 from the 238 texts and make arrangements to meet them. No. 29 is a barrister who collects antiques. We walk the path around Albert Park Lake with my labrador and talk about mahogany tables. The water is the colour of steel and kitchen appliances.

‘I'm not sure about the blue hair, quite frankly,' he says.

The barrister says ‘quite frankly' a lot. I am feeling fat and tired. It is the day after my thirty-seventh birthday and I've eaten a lot of chocolate.

No. 32 is a fitness instructor. His voice sounds gentle. We meet at the pub on the weekend when my daughter is with her father. He's buffed, in a black t-shirt and jeans.

‘So is it just that you like sex a lot, or what?' he asks.

Maybe the fact he drinks orange juice at the bar and spends most of the time playing Space Invaders should raise some alarm bells. But kissing him is nice. I wish I could stop at the kissing. Because sex with a stranger is like fucking a lamp post. You don't know what it wants and it doesn't care. The gym instructor wants to come on my stomach, and I don't come at all.

Friends who have husbands look at me with pursed lips. My mother informs me I'm committing adultery.

‘Maybe you already have a man who loves you so much you don't need anyone else,' says my single friend.

‘Oh, come off it,' I say. ‘Who the hell does that?'

‘Jesus, of course.'

My friend is trying to be helpful. It's just that she's in the middle of being born again.

‘But Jesus can't have sex with me. Jesus can't hold me or bring me a cup of tea. Jesus can't leave the toilet seat down.'

‘I don't think Jesus ever used a toilet. Historically speaking.'

Sometimes the god-shaped hole is so big even god can't fill it.

Casual sex doesn't work, even if it's good sex. Because you still get attached; to former colleagues you shamefacedly track down and proposition, to tradies in drama workshops who wear t-shirts that say
I'd rather be shagging
; to weirdos you meet on dating sites who stand outside Brunetti's holding bunches of gerberas or who have fantasies of women mud-wrestling each other to death. We are, every one of us, knotted and tangled. I find myself snipping at strings late into the night to get free of them all until I'm running again, with nothing but the laws of physics to keep me from falling apart.

‘That man who likes mud-wrestling,' says my doctor. ‘Flick him off. Fast.'

I google the man who wrote the book on my shelf and jackpot! He's a local. I consider calling him and what I might say. But just thinking about it makes me nervous so I go to Centrelink instead to find out about child care.

‘You have to take a number and wait till you're called,' says the woman when I get to the counter. It's early, and already there's a queue stretching right to the door.

I spend ninety minutes sitting on an orange chair watching
The Morning Show
on a flatscreen that's attached to the wall. A saleswoman called Susan with very white teeth demonstrates how some whiz bang new peeler can cut patterns into vegetables.

‘That's it, Larry,' says Susan to the
TV
presenter. ‘You'll be a masterchef in no time!'

Three toddlers in hoodies are stacking up alphabet blocks then kicking the bottom block out so the stack falls in a heap. My daughter is asleep in her stroller. I rock it gently, hoping she won't wake. When my number flicks up on the
LCD
screen, I go to sit at a desk with a man called Frank who is losing his hair in patches. Frank looks like a school teacher. Or maybe he really was a school teacher who wanted a change of pace so he's taken the job at Centrelink until he figures out what to do next.

‘I want to register for child care,' I say. ‘I need a part-time job.'

Frank consults with a woman at the desk next to his.

‘She'll need to fill out an
FA018
,' she says.

‘How about an
FA002
?'

‘Not if she fills out the
FA018
. If she does that she won't need the
FA002
. Has she filled out an
SC277
? '

‘What's an
SC277
?' asks Frank.

‘It's like the old
SPP
form,' says the woman. ‘Only updated.'

Acronyms and forms always make me cry. I can feel the tears but it's too late to stop them, as if a tide's rising up so quickly all the people sitting on orange chairs holding numbers and waiting their turn have to run for it. The woman's face is blank as a screen. Frank looks dismayed, or disappointed. It's hard to say which. He passes me a box of tissues.

When the settlement money comes through and my ex-husband finally agrees to sell, I think about buying my own house somewhere green on the northern fringe where my daughter can grow up amongst trees and animals. It takes a long time to find
the right place, but finally I do. I down three scotch and cokes in half an hour and phone my friends. It's 11 pm but I don't care.

‘No one will visit you if you move way out there,' says Jude at the next Mothers' Group meeting. ‘At least rent something first. That way you can always move back if you don't like it.'

That's because Jude walks everywhere and doesn't drive. She hardly ever goes further than the bottom end of Brunswick Street, except on summer holidays. And it's too late anyway because I've already bought the house. It's brick veneer and built in the seventies, but there's a path to the river surrounded by bush. Already in my mind I am filling the backyard with as many animals as it can fit; with chickens and ducks and guinea pigs and budgerigars, definitely budgerigars, and maybe something miniature like a pony or a pig. I clear my ex-husband's junk out of the shed and sell our heavy oak bed on eBay. My daughter begins to walk. I enrol in the local
YMCA
gym, put her in the crèche and get strong. I make wild, drunken promises to myself I'm not sure I can keep. Like the next man I have sex with will be someone I love.

I email the author who wrote the book on my shelf, and we begin meeting for coffee. He's a professor with sad eyes and a kind smile, like maybe he's suffered a lot. We talk about poetry and argue about religion. He gives me a copy of Rudolph Otto's
The Idea of the Holy
.

‘How lovely it is to have someone to talk to!' he says.

Nothing else happens except for the coffee and conversations.