Broken (6 page)

There were counters staggered over the width of the huge room, with confusing names such as ‘Newstart' and ‘Parenting Claims'. Each counter had a stretch of yellow tape stuck to the carpet about four or five feet back so that the person being served was separated from the line of people waiting. And there were a lot of people waiting. The Newstart line was mainly made up of younger people dressed very similarly to the group outside. The only exceptions were a girl wearing a business suit, and a black-clad youth who had so much metal on his clothing and inserted into various parts of his flesh that, whenever he moved, he glinted fairy-like in the overhead lights.

Banks of seats made up the area on either side of the doors through which Mattie had entered, and these were filled almost to capacity with people of all ages, backgrounds and styles of dress. And they, like those waiting in the queues, were relatively quiet. In fact, for an area accommodating such a large number of people, the noise level was surprisingly low. Except for the odd muffled conversation and the occasional mother telling off an errant child, most of the people waited silently, their body language speaking of lethargy as they studiously avoided eye contact.

And Mattie didn't want to be there. As she paused just inside the doorway, she was suddenly struck with a sense of alienness, of not belonging. Something had gone wrong somewhere that
she
, with her planned marriage, and planned children, and planned life, should be here, contemplating joining the ranks of the single parents dependent on government handouts for survival. This didn't happen to her. This
couldn't
happen to her.

But it had. And, after a few moments during which her sudden panic attack threatened to send her back out into the safety of the atrium, she got her breathing under control and forced herself to walk slowly past the chairs and join the queue snaking up towards the Parenting Claims counter. She stood behind a young dark-haired woman with a stroller that contained a baby suffering from a nasty cold. With red-rimmed eyes and a constantly running nose, every so often the child punctuated the silence with a loud sneeze that sprayed the air around with tiny droplets of clear mucus.

‘Sorry.' The young woman mopped the baby's nose with the corner of a towelling nappy and glanced apologetically at Mattie. ‘I'd have rather kept her home but I had to come and fix up a mistake. I
had
to.'

‘That's okay.' Mattie tried to smile understandingly, although she really didn't. How could a mother bring out a child who was so clearly unwell? She stood back and looked away, trying to avoid further conversation. She didn't belong here.

It took twenty-five minutes, with the sick child sneezing every five minutes or so, before the young woman with the stroller was called up to the counter and Mattie's toes fronted the yellow line. There ensued a hushed conversation during which the baby's sneezes were greeted not with the nappy but with a distracted rocking of the stroller as its mother concentrated on the Centrelink representative behind the counter. This was a plump man of about forty, with a receding head of thin, sandy hair that flowed down to his shoulders at the back. Mattie glanced behind her and was not surprised to see a line of about seven people, all women, snaking back to where she had started over half an hour ago.

‘Next, please!'

Mattie whipped around to see that the young mother was finished and had pushed the stroller over to the side where she was cleaning up her offspring. Neither looked happy The man behind the counter – Brian, according to his nametag – smiled politely as Mattie walked up, feeling like a fraud. As if he would realise, immediately, that she didn't belong here and send her on her way.

‘How can I help you?'

‘I made an appointment last week, for nine-thirty. Um, see I've just left my – that is, my marriage has broken down and I wanted to apply for a single mother's pension.'

‘It's called a parenting payment now,' said Brian cheerfully, turning towards a computer screen set slightly to one side of him. ‘What's your name?'

‘Matilda Anne Hampton.'

Brian pressed a few keys and turned back to her, smiling genially. ‘I've let the interviewer know that you're here so it shouldn't be too long. Just take a seat over there.' He waved to the rows of seats. ‘Next!'

Mattie moved away as the next person, a plump young red-haired woman, quickly took her place. She stood still for a moment, staring back at Brian as he dealt with the woman in the exact same cheerful manner that he had shown her. No difference at all. She looked away quickly before he saw her staring and turned to the seating by the glass doors. There were about twenty-five people sitting there. In the front row was the young woman with the ill child, rocking the stroller while the baby cried fretfully Next to her was a hugely overweight woman, her bulk overflowing onto the seat either side, who glared at the young mother every time the child sneezed. Then there was a young Muslim couple, the wife with her head modestly covered, and a very well-behaved toddler. On the last chair sat a young man, his legs splayed, who had a large black-inked tattoo running down his left arm that looked very much like train station graffiti. And that was just the front row. There were another four rows behind that.

Mattie's stomach twisted and she sighed, quietly. It was going to be a long, long wait.

She had no friends.

This realisation came to Mattie as she sat at her kitchen table with the Centrelink paperwork spread out in front of her. Her interviewer had been kind and very helpful but, in the end, Mattie elected to take the paperwork home and return it the next day. So, over the past two hours, she'd filled out her details and answered the questions with a steadily growing feeling of humiliation. Not that she hadn't expected to part with a fair degree of personal information to be granted a payment, but the nature of some of the questions left her with a sense of vulnerability and dependency very similar to the one she was trying to escape. However, she was well aware that at the moment she had no room for false pride – she needed this money and she needed it soon. So she worked up and over her resentment, and forged ahead. Until she reached the end and discovered she needed third-party verification of the fact that she and Jake were no longer living under the same roof.

While one part of her was acknowledging the reasonableness of
this requirement, another part was cringing as it methodically evaluated potential referees. And crossed them off. As most people do, she had a number of acquaintances meandering through her life, and they crossed paths with a smile and the occasional chat. There were several couples they'd met through Jake's work, like the Dixons and the De Silvas, whom they'd have dinner with once or twice a year. And there were the much older Carsons, next-door neighbours for the past eight years who occasionally passed some home-grown vegetables over the fence and stopped to discuss the weather. Then there were the other mothers at the primary school, with whom she exchanged pleasantries, or sat next to during extra reading each Monday morning, or did canteen with once a month, and those, such as Rachel and Ginny, who shared a humid hour with her every Monday afternoon as their children learnt to swim at the local indoor swimming centre.

But none of these people were real
friends;
rather, they gathered around the periphery of her life, giving it the appearance of fullness without the actual substance. And she paled with embarrassment at the thought of approaching any of them to verify her separation. So what did it say about her life that she didn't have a single person of whom she was comfortable enough to ask this sort of favour?
Hi, do you mind signing this for me? Let's have a coffee while you do. White and one, isn't it?
Not a single person.

Where had they gone?
When
had they gone? Because once she'd been surrounded by such people. Friends who she could drop in on unannounced, or ring for a good long chat, or meet for a leisurely lunch.
Mattie! Of
course
you can come in. In fact, I was just thinking about you!
For starters there were her three ex-flatmates, all so close at one stage that they'd shared clothing, and baths, and far too many bottles of cheap sparkling wine. Jude had married a navy guy, whose particular job kept his family up at the top end of Australia, while Paula accepted a job promotion that took her to London about six years ago. But didn't either of them ever come back for visits? Or the obligatory births, deaths and marriages? How was it that these two women, once so much a slice of her existence that she knew what brand of sanitary products they used, now just formed part of her Christmas card list rather than her life?

And there was Liz who, as far as she knew, still lived in the innercity area, only about three-quarters of an hour away. Yet the last time they'd met was at Liz's wedding, about five years ago, when she'd wed her long-time partner, Alan, an athletic type whose life was dominated by footy in the winter and cricket in the summer. He and Jake, whose idea of a relaxing evening was bound up either with computer programs or a game of chess, had never hit it off. Perhaps that was why they had all lost contact? Or maybe it was simply because Liz was unable to have children, and Mattie felt guilty with her healthy, happy pigeon pair.

But there had been other friends too, who would cry on her shoulder over the loss of a boyfriend one minute and then drag her out to a nightclub the next. Who would turn up on a Friday night with a tear-jerker movie and a bottle of Baileys, or would sprawl across her bed and offer advice while she cleaned out her wardrobe. How had she not noticed that gradually, over the past decade, she'd drifted away from all those she could lean on and not replaced them with new friends, new confidantes, a new circle of support? So that now she sat alone, without one person who could help her even fill out a damn form.

Mattie flung the pen across the table and leant back, her head pounding with self-pity.
How had this happened?
Had marriage and children taken over her life so completely that she hadn't noticed the loss of friends? Or was this how it was meant to be – that, once married, a person was
meant
to create distance around herself, a space to be filled with family now rather than friends? But then that meant it was even harder to escape, even harder to break away and start again.

Mattie wiped her eyes roughly. It just wasn't fair. Why did everything have to be so damn
hard?
Couldn't one thing, just
one
bloody thing, come easily? She hugged herself and stared at the far wall, allowing her misery full rein. It quickly rose, greedily demanding sustenance until it became so bloated that its very wretchedness began to disgust her. So she got up to wash her hands and then shoved her chair back so that she was facing the fridge, with its confetti messages of hope.
The future depends on what you do in the present. The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings
.

She read through the sayings, and then forced herself to do so again. Because she knew, from years of close acquaintance with the malignancy of self-pity, that taking such a path led her to a place where the misery itself would render her helpless. Feeding on itself until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that threatened to destroy her more effectively than whatever it was that had sent her there in the first place.

So, with practised determination after re-reading the motivational exhortations, Mattie dragged her focus outside of her problems and started to systematically address them. First was the issue of the paperwork and, without suitable friends, there remained only Hannah. Who would make Mattie sweat while she read it through with thin lips, and would, when finished, shake her head and sigh sadly – but she would sign it nevertheless. And then Mattie could submit the whole application and be officially on the government payroll, which meant she would have breathing space until she worked out what to do next.

But the issue of friends was still important, because Mattie knew she was going to need a support network, not so much to unburden herself but so that she could feel
connected
. A community fabric capable of weaving her a richer life. She reached across the table to retrieve her pen and started doodling on the Centrelink instructions.
We will rebuild
. Shades of the six-million dollar man, back when six million actually meant something and Farrah Fawcett Majors was every young guy's pin-up dream.

The phone rang just as she was putting the finishing touches to a cartoon caricature of two little figures holding hands
(Friendship is
. . .), so she abandoned her musings and got up to answer it. No more streamlined cordless telephones networked throughout the house, just a mustard-yellow wall-phone that hung by the refrigerator with a long, tangled cord spiralling nearly down to the floor.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello there, sweetheart,' Jake's voice came warmly down the line. ‘What's up?'