Nine Days (11 page)

‘Bless you,’ I say.

Waking to find a stranger peering at you is disconcerting, yet the girl doesn’t make a sound. Her eyes are blue like mine and big as the sea. She purses her bud lips and rubs her nose. A silvery trail remains on the back of her tiny hand.

The woman pretends not to notice the snot. ‘The lady said “bless you”. What do we say, Charlotte?’

The girl blinks.

‘We say “thank you”.’

The woman is towering over the child, who says nothing. Seconds tick by. The mother becomes embarrassed. She is torn between adopting a sterner voice to show that she is not to be trifled with, or letting it slide. Either way she risks being seen as a poor mother. An ego standoff. The silence is pressing but the girl doesn’t notice. Willful disobedience always makes me smile.

‘Charlotte? That’s a pretty name.’ I force my hand to stay where it is and not touch her. Her hair would feel as soft as a kitten. ‘It’s my name too.’

‘Isn’t that funny? I named her after Charlotte Brontë.’

‘Really? Which of her books do you like best?’

‘Oh.’ The woman pauses and glides her tongue along the front of her teeth. ‘I like them all.’

She kneels now and fusses with the girl’s coat and beanie, smoothing the ruffles and running her fingers under the stroller straps that hold her in place. The girl wriggles as
though she’d forgotten she was restrained until her mother reminded her.

I didn’t set out to trick that poor woman. I like to see what people are really like. She couldn’t name
Jane Eyre.
Even if she knew it once, even if she read it while she was pregnant, she has since lost confidence in the things she used to know and the person she once was. Perhaps she is almost certain the book is
Jane Eyre,
but what if she is wrong? Just in case the right answer is
Wuthering Heights,
she will say nothing. She is the kind of woman who cannot risk even a shop assistant, who is unlikely to have read Brontë and does not know her and whom she will never meet again, catching her out in a mistake. Wrapped up in
I like them all
is every bit of her vulnerability. I want more than anything to live in the kind of world where I could give her a hug.

‘I was named after my father’s best friend when he was a boy,’ I say instead. ‘Except he wasn’t a Charlotte. He was a Charlie.’

‘What do you think about that, Charlotte? The lady was named after a boy!’ Charlotte is nonplussed. ‘Your father’s friend must have been proud.’

‘They lost touch well before I was born. Charlie moved to the country or something. Dad says he still thinks about him after all these years.’

‘Huh. So do you think she needs a tonic?’

‘What she needs is less dairy and wheat. She has an intolerance.’

We have a long discussion about the antigens in grains, and pesticides, and the lack of nutrients in conventionally
grown vegetables. She says,
it’s so hard, raising children today.
I show her ancient grain cereals without cane sugar and preservatives. She says,
Charlotte’s such a fussy eater. No vegetables at all. And for lunch, cheese sticks. That’s it.
I didn’t know that cheese came in a stick, but I doubt that Charlotte drives to Coles and buys them herself. I show her sheep’s yoghurt, popcorn for snacks, corn chips made from organic corn.
We didn’t have food intolerances when I was a girl.
I tell her the line across her daughter’s nose is the result of continual itchiness: the child sniffs and pushes the end of her nose up with the back of her hand so often it leaves a white mark because the sun can’t reach it.
All she’ll eat for dinner is sausage and chips. And Kentucky Fried. I’m just glad she’s eating something.
The white band on the girl’s nose is distinct and distinctive. Like so many things that shape us, it’s the smallest actions that add up to leave the deepest marks.

The woman takes one of the cereals I hand her and runs her fingers down the ingredient list. ‘Hmmm,’ she says. ‘Is there a toy in the box?’

‘If Sandra was here, you’d be shot,’ Craig says, when the woman and her daughter leave. ‘A box of cereal. You spent all that time with her and that’s it.’

‘That’s all she needed.’

‘Ascorbic acid, at the very least. Homoeopathics. Just as well you’re not on commission. You’d be earning less than you do now, if that’s humanly possible.’ He walks to the cereal
aisle and moves all the boxes forward one spot to replace the one the woman bought. ‘She won’t use it, you know. She just bought the cheapest one because she didn’t know how to get out of it.’

‘She’s worried about her little girl. She’ll use it. She’ll be back for more in a couple of weeks and she’ll get the corn chips too. You’ll see.’

He leans against the fridge with his arms folded. ‘She’s probably in Coles buying a box of something with extra dairy, wheat, sugar and artificial everything. She was being polite. They’ll both have doughnuts and a soft drink for lunch in the food court. Your box’ll go in the bin as soon as they get home.’

‘It won’t. Every mother wants what’s best for her child.’

‘You should have sold her a bottle of tablets. People like that only trust tablets.’

‘“People like that”? Who are “people like that”?’

He shakes his head. ‘If you can’t tell the bourgeois when you see them, there’s no hope for you.’

Craig’s parents live in Brighton. His friends from school sometimes come to hear him play. They drink Crown Lager and by the end of the night they can’t stand up. Last week, one lurched out the front door and vomited on the footpath in the middle of the final set. Craig’s school tie still hangs in his wardrobe. If Craig’s the expert on picking the bourgeois, he’s right. There’s no hope for me.

‘It’s not easy, raising children. It’s an enormous commitment. The most important job in the world.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘It’s not curing smallpox. It means you’ve fucked someone.’

‘Don’t you think she was a beautiful little girl?’ I keep my voice casual. ‘Gorgeous, wasn’t she?’

‘I guess.’

‘What colour was your hair, when you were little?’

‘I have no idea. I was small at the time.’

‘Don’t you want children some day?’ I turn my back and move some bottles around on the shelf.

‘Get real. The self-centred middle class, desperate to clone themselves to feed their ego. The mess the planet’s in now. You’d have to be a moron.’

Craig is wrong. It’s almost spring, the traditional time for rebirth. We are near the dawning of a new age, only one decade away from a pristine millennium. Last November, I stood in front of an electrical goods store in Smith Street and watched televisions showing huge crowds standing on the Berlin Wall. Just this February I sobbed at the pictures of Nelson Mandela leaving prison, hand in hand with Winnie. After all these centuries of causing our own pain, we are finally getting it. The planet is righting itself. I can feel it.

I can’t wait any longer. It has to be done. I tell Craig I’m not feeling well and leave him to mind the shop. He can ring Kylie and see if she’s available at short notice. She always is, when he’s the one to ring. He’ll sulk for a while but he’ll be over it tomorrow.

At home, Daisy and Jimbo are sitting out the back wrapped in blankets, sharing a spliff. They ask me to join them but
instead I go to my room where the traffic noise is hushed. I light a candle and some incense. I take off my clothes and stand in front of the mirror and look at myself, at the miracle of my body. The skin is stippled with cold. It is strong and healthy and does what I tell it. I am blessed. The female body is the source of all life. It is the body of the living Goddess. We should have statues of it on every street corner, of women of all shapes and sizes, instead of dead explorers and hanging judges.

I open my underwear drawer. At the bottom next to my vibrator is a small inlaid jewellery box. I should wear these things more often but somehow I feel foolish, adorning myself in front of the mirror. I’ve never understood the concept of jewellery; how draping yourself with pretty things like a Christmas tree is supposed to make you look prettier. It makes you look plainer. Regardless of how smooth and even your skin is, it will always look dull next to a precious metal or a gem.

There is a sparkly brooch from an op shop, a bracelet of amber beads. Nestled in the middle is my mother’s pendant, the one she gave me for my eighteenth. An amethyst pendant on a gold chain. At first, she didn’t want to part with it. A classic problem: one pendant, two daughters. Stanzi said she didn’t mind. She said she’d rather have cash, then used the money for the deposit on her car.

I hold the pendant between my hands, I hold it close to my heart, I hold it above the incense burning on my dresser. I close my eyes and say a few words to the universe. I am its child. I know the universe is listening.

I lie on the floor naked. The boards are cold and rough on
my spine and there’s something down here that smells funny. I hold my mother’s pendant tight in my fist above my belly. I centre myself for a few minutes then I drop the pendant down on the length of its chain, hold it directly over my stomach. Hold my breath, still my hand. Soon the pendant will move of its own accord. I wait, and after a few moments it begins to circle, slowly, anti-clockwise. I’m pregnant.

‘A rotating pendant,’ Stanzi says. ‘Wow. Stop right there. Let me call the
British Medical Journal.’

It’s my own fault. When the pendant started circling, I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t centre myself. There was only one place I could go: my sister’s. I threw on my clothes and cycled straight here and paced back and forth in front of her building until she drove up. I couldn’t wait. I blurted it out in the stairwell. We are now sitting at her dining table with the heater on full whack. She’s not even wearing a jumper. In front of us are a bottle of white wine from her fridge and two glasses. Wine glasses. With stems. They match. They are not Vegemite jars with remnants of the label showing fingernail scrapes. My glass is nearly full, hers nearly empty. I don’t drink wine, she knows that. We have very different lives. We do not even look the same anymore, although I know under that flesh is a woman the same as me. Right now, she doesn’t seem impressed.

‘I can see the story now.
Hospitals around the world put their multi-million dollar diagnostic equipment out on the
footpath for hard waste pickup and nip over to Tiffany’s, thanks to medical breakthrough by naked shop assistant slash part-time yoga instructor dangling her mother’s pendant over her beaver.’

‘It was my uterus. And it wasn’t really Mum’s pendant. I mean, it was, but I was using it as a pendulum. I’d cleared it already. A smoking ceremony.’

‘Oh. A smoking ceremony. That’s different.’

‘Plus, I’m late. Two weeks. I’m never late. Plus, I’ve gone off coffee. That’s conclusive.’

‘Did you pee on the pendant and watch it make little blue lines? Because that’s how it’s done, Charlotte.’

‘I’ll do a test if you want. I have nothing against technology. But I know my body.’

‘Right. Is that why I am sitting here talking to someone who allegedly knows her body about her unplanned pregnancy? Body, one. Charlotte, nil.’