New Australian Stories 2 (16 page)

I turned off the light and waited. The streetlight outside flickered on, and I could see the last of the moths lingering around it, reluctant to leave the bright circle. But it was the end of the season for them. It was time for them to leave.

In the morning I woke up early to the sound of crying. It was a peaceful sound. There were no moths left anywhere in the world.

It's almost a year since Mothboy disappeared, and now I am almost eleven. An only child. Mothboy took half of my mother with him and half of my father too. I didn't know he would do that. Now another winter is over and the moths will soon return. I wonder if there will be a plague this year. I wait for them at my window. I wait for them alone.

There is only one at first. One enormous moth on the glass. I peer at it. The round belly, sticky feet, the perfect featherstripes underneath. She is a queen. I put one finger to the glass where the moth is sitting, wonder if she can feel my warmth. Bring him back, I say. The wings flicker, but the creature stays closed and folded. She stays on my window all night. All night she doesn't move. Now I sleep with the lights on.

The Good Mother

KATE RYAN

It was around six or so, the twins had been fighting, I was going mad and Andy wasn't back till late. He was off to a film with a friend, probably a drink afterwards. It was a new thing, him going out straight from work. It came out of our counselling, his need to do something for
him
. My moods and desires, my desperation for him to get home did not, we had eventually established, mean that he had to.

Anyway, so the twins were half fighting, half playing a game where they were simultaneously chasing each other, laughing and crying, the pitch of both of them getting higher and higher so it was impossible to tell who was hurt or if anyone was. Twice I screamed at them, ‘
Will you stop it!
' A vicious voice, shrill and scary as if the words were going to break out of my head, but which for a second offered a kind of relief.

They kept playing, if anything maybe more frenzied than before. They jumped onto our bed and pulled all the sheets and the doona off so that the torn underblanket was showing and a couple of snotty hankies that Andy always seems to leave lying around — he's had so much hay fever lately. I looked at them and thought I really hate those hankies, and then I turned around and decided to leave the twins to it. I said to them as I was leaving the room, quietly so they couldn't even hear — they were standing up and hitting each other with pillows — ‘You can bloody well kill yourselves for all I care.'

I had already given them dinner. ‘Yuk! I hate couscous!' Gemma had said and she'd actually started sobbing in horror as I grimly poured myself another glass of wine and through gritted teeth said, ‘Oh well. Why don't you make yourself a piece of toast then.'

‘I love it, Mum,' Paddy said, basking in the glory of being the good twin. Then just at that moment Eve dropped her glass of milk — stupid of me to give her a proper glass not plastic — and it fell,
smash
, milk flowing everywhere and bits of broken glass all over the table and on the floor, the children with their bare feet and all the meals virtually untouched. It's a small table and you couldn't tell exactly where the glass went so I had to throw the lot out.

It took ages with the clearing and the wiping and the sweeping and the too-loud calls for everyone to keep still and not pick up any glass or stand on it. I made them all toast then and sliced up cucumber, cheese and tomato and opened a can of tuna. God knows why I didn't just do Vegemite. Somehow it happens like that when I'm exhausted and overwhelmed: instead of cutting corners I actually do more. Thank god at least they all liked it, but maybe because they did there was a lot of tuna and cheese dropped everywhere, smeared glasses and tomato seeds all around.

It all seemed to take ages, what with Gemma eating so slowly and Paddy eating so quickly and Eve watching it all. I tried to sit there when they were all chewing away and laughing and spreading food around and I tried to just breathe, let things go. But the tight feeling in my chest was still there and when I thought of getting them all to bed, books and baths and pyjamas, I just wanted to put my head down on the table and cry.

Paddy was telling me the plot of the latest
Star Wars
film and Gemma was colouring with one hand and eating with the other and Eve was standing up, half leaning over the table to get things and to see Gemma's picture. Every minute I had to tell someone not to do something or get a glass of water or answer a question, and every minute I thought someone would knock another glass over and it would all start again.

And then because Paddy finished first, he asked for ice-cream, and I said no for a while and in the end said all right and it seemed so pointless I wondered why I'd even bothered saying no in the first place. Then Gemma didn't want a cone and Paddy did and they all wanted different flavours — it was Neapolitan — and on it went. So then finally I was herding them upstairs feeling dread in my stomach about how much was involved before I could actually slump down in front of the TV by myself, let alone cleaning up the kitchen, which looked like an utter bombsite.

Those were the things that happened before the twins were in our room having their pillow fight, and the reason I decided to leave them to it. I got Eve into the bath. It was more peaceful in the bathroom despite the overflowing dirty clothes in the basket and the half-finished tiles and the vague smell from the bin that I knew I should have emptied because it probably had Eve's last night's nappy in it and god knows what else — probably a decomposing pear; Paddy never takes his food scraps downstairs to the bin in the kitchen.

I tried to ignore it all. I even had a nice-ish time with Eve and I sang ‘
Row row row your boat
' in a tight sort of way and she splashed away talking in different voices to a cow and a plastic horse that had ended up in there, though I doubt they're meant to get wet. I leaned my back against the toilet and watched her and I even closed my eyes for a minute and tried again to breathe.

After about ten minutes, I persuaded her to get out and I wrapped a towel around her soft wet body and she let me brush her teeth. She often makes this quite hard because she doesn't like the toothpaste we have and I had forgotten to buy another, but tonight she didn't. I smelled her foggy hair and looked at her little pink feet with her perfect toenails, see-through like the blood flowed evenly at the same pace to every part of her body. She was stamping a bit because she wants to learn to skip like Gemma, and I thought she was just perfect, if I could just gaze at her it would be okay, I might even be happy, even though I haven't got a job or a prospect of one and all I do is look after everybody day in day out, clean up and start all over again. So I dried her, even doing the spin dry three times the way Andy does, little sprays coming out from her hair and her joyous laugh making me want to cry.

I still had the dull feeling in my chest but I thought I could do it. Even with Andy gone for the whole evening and the twins out of control and the prospect of Eve waking up at about two or three a.m. because lately she'd been scared. I thought: I can do this. But I did feel tired all of a sudden, maybe it was because I'd relaxed a bit — I knew the two glasses of wine had been a mistake.

I followed Eve into her room to get her pyjamas on. She was pink from her bath and her bum was all mottled and her legs round and I felt I would die of my love for her, it seemed to course down inside me like a liquid. She was holding a teddy, concentrating, trying to get it into a cardigan that was too small. I said brightly, ‘Come on, Eve, let's get your nappy on.' She ignored me, they all ignore me at least three or four times when I ask them to do something. I go through all these stages from a hopeful
maybe it'll be
easier this time
, to this tightness and then sometimes to a full-on rage which I suppress as best I can. ‘Come on, Evie,' I said. ‘Just lie down and I can put your nappy on and then I'll read you a story.'

I could hear the twins downstairs opening cupboards in the kitchen and Gemma shouted out, ‘Mum, can we have a biscuit?'

I didn't reply the first couple of times and then she called out again and I shouted back, ‘No! It's bedtime.' Then I said, ‘Evie,' soft again, the good mother, ‘come on, let's get your nappy on.' She sat down and I somehow levered the nappy under her and then she wiggled back and said in the firm flat little voice she has started using lately, ‘No,' and she kicked the nappy away. She was still fiddling with the buttons of the cardigan, trying to get it done up over the teddy's chest, despite the fact that she can hardly do buttons. I was sort of admiring her persistence when I heard Gemma from the kitchen again shouting, ‘Mum, can we have a biscuit,
please
?' even louder this time and the sound of the fridge being opened. I felt the tightness right up into my throat. ‘Eve … please,' I said.

‘No,' she said.

I'd been holding her by the waist and then suddenly I just let go. I shouted, ‘Fine. Don't put your nappy on then.' And I stood up and put my hands over my face.

I hadn't thought I was supporting her. She is three, so she can sit perfectly well but somehow she lost balance and fell back onto the carpet and she started to cry. At least her mouth opened as if to cry, but it was silent at first, building up in her throat like someone before they are about to sing. But it wasn't like that. I waited, feeling a wash of horror; I had so rarely got angry with her and now I felt I had tipped over into the realm that I had come to exist in with the twins, the one that was terrible and from which I could never get back. There was a
neee neen ee
sound coming out of her.

‘I'm so sorry, darling,' I said, gathering her up in my arms. ‘I'm sorry to shout.'

But when I picked her up she was really crying, hard and high and inconsolable as if she had gone to some other place too. She was holding one of her arms at a weird angle and the cry was one of pain and she didn't want me to hold her and it wasn't just because I'd given her a shock. And I felt it going into my brain with a sort of looseness like fog or alcohol. I'd hurt her. ‘I'm so sorry, darling, I shouldn't have let you go like that.'

‘Oww oww oww,' she said. And there was the sharp cry like a cat's. She kept crying and I didn't even try to get her dressed now, just sat with her on my knee without moving and pulled a blanket off the bed to put around her. I sat there and Eve cried and I thought I don't know what to do. I could see her arm hanging there awkwardly as if it was without nerves. So I sang nursery rhymes and wished I could cry myself and then eventually I laid her naked under her doona on the good side, and even though she said every now and again, ‘My arm hurt, Mummy,' mournfully more like an adult than a child, with the nursery-rhymes tape on, she did fall asleep.

When I came downstairs, I was so relieved Eve had gone to sleep that when I found the twins on the couch eating Teddy Bear biscuits by the handful I just said in a dead sort of voice, ‘Come on, you two, it's time for bed.' We went upstairs and I even read them a chapter of
Pippi Longstocking
and though Gemma asked for another and I said no, they accepted it. I tucked them in and then looked in on Eve. I stood for a minute, looking at her, and I wanted so much to crawl in next to her and hold her small warm hand — but instead I went downstairs.

By that stage I felt as if I had been in a war or a car accident and my head wasn't healing. I sat on the couch and turned on the TV. I flicked around and found a telemovie. Some young girl's father had kicked her out and there she was wandering the streets at night. It was all sinister yellowish lights and swishing rain and the girl with her big eyes pulling her inadequate jacket around her, being passed by creepy-looking people. She went into a café and was too embarrassed to ask for a coffee because she didn't have quite enough money. There was a close-up of the board with the prices and the girl's palm with its coins and her lips being licked and the rows of cakes and salads and wraps in the glass case. And the shop guy saying, ‘Can I help you, love?' and the girl shaking her head, turning around and walking out.

After half an hour or so it looked like she was going to be raped for sure, down in some warehouse near the docks trying to find somewhere to sleep and the sky all dark, and my heart started beating too much so I had to turn it off.

I sat for a minute and then walked upstairs, so tired I could hardly do it. I checked everyone and they were all asleep. I put my head right close to Eve in the dark and listened to her breathing. She seemed okay.

I woke when Andy came home, him too hot and big and beery in bed, and just after that Eve woke. It was the cat's cry again and it cut straight to my gut and I pushed off the covers as if I had never been asleep. I gathered her up, she was crying and I brought her back to our bed, saying ‘It's all right, sweetie,' over and over as if just by saying that it would become so, but inside I felt like the world had changed: it was dark and frightening and terrible now and I was the cause of it. I turned on the light and Andy sat up.

‘What's wrong?' he said, a bit blurry and half drunk, and I felt so alone, maybe more than I ever had.

I said, ‘She fell back when I was trying to get her nappy on and she landed weirdly on her arm.'

‘Let me see,' Andy said.