The Best Australian Stories 2010 (14 page)

He rose with his napkin, crouched in front of her wet dress. ‘Here. Let me help.'

Screens 2

Midday soaps, wild crushes, hormones. She is both raw and permeable. Whether Michael will love Jane is of vital importance at this moment. Now, before the commercial break. She
is
Michael and Jane and them together and all of them, all of these characters who stroll through dodgy sets reading bad lines. She is with them all the way. A cry rips her out of the box and tosses her back into the living room. She lifts the child by its armpits and carries it to the change table, her rigid arms stretched straight out. She opens the nappy and, breathing shallowly, she stares, as at a complex yet unpleasant sculpture she is on the brink of understanding. She looks up into its red, unhappy face. She sets to work, two tiny feet pressed together and lifted by one of her hands, holding the bottom aloft. She says,
You know, if you
were older, double incontinence would secure you a nursing-home bed?
Dodgy sets, bad lines. The unhappy face is undeniably sweet – she can see that – but somehow, it is anonymous. She feels this could be any baby. She looks down at her still swollen belly. Ha, she thinks, and I told myself I was eating all those pancakes and guzzling all of that maple syrup for
you
. She looks from baby to belly, baby to belly. It had been in there, it had. Encased in a double layer of specially nurtured pale soft pancake. The child's feet are warm in her hand, warm like shells dug out of white sand on some long hot beach. Ipanema, Kauai, St Tropez. All those millions of dead shells warmed in sand and sun, emitting heat like life.

Ingrid

So Ingrid rings her out of the blue.
Sorry it's been so long since I've
called. I've been
so busy. And Louise says she'll make them lunch.
Yes
, says Ingrid,
it must be easier for you to stay at home
.

Ingrid: assistant curator at some regional gallery, never progressing in her career as she was (Louise thought) not that good at curating. They had been friends since university. They strutted round town, shopped, watched movies and ate and drank together until about the time Louise really started to show. Then her pregnancy unmasked something. Ingrid morphed into the beautiful, thin,
sexy
one of the two; she snatched the role and bloomed within it. So that when they shopped, Ingrid would parade around in her still-tiny underwear and tell Louise not to worry, that she knew other women whose bodies didn't change
that
much after birth.
Just some cellulite,
she said, staring at Lou's hips with carefully blanked eyes. Even though it had been Ingrid who – in reality – had the thick waist and the coarse facial features and the short neck and the dry hair. Everyone knew it except Ingrid. (
Don't you think my hair has a celebrity kink to it
today?
) Even though it was Ingrid who could never get a date. (
Will Tom be home soon? I want to see what he thinks of my new dress.
) So Louise got fat and pregnant and the world-according-to-Ingrid took precedence; between them it became The World, and bit by bit tiny parts of Louise were crushed, little black ants squashed one by one, leaving unmentionable black smudges of fury – until she'd stopped answering Ingrid's text messages.
Thank God
, Tom said,
I never did like that catty woman
. Then of course he apologised, took her out for dinner, told her repeatedly that she deserved far nicer friends than Ingrid. For months he listened to the endless list of Wrongs Perpetrated Against Her By Ingrid.

Ingrid stood at the threshold in a floral dress that accentuated her thick waist, and she looked Louise up and down, eyes like fat-seeking missiles firing at the pillows above her armpits, the loose lines of her slip.

‘Lou! Long time no see!' That fresco smile.

More

She pushes the pram to the café. It's Tuesday. Again. She wades through the heat, sweat dribbling between her thighs, down her legs. She could always not go. But she collects these habits – wading and dragging – until they form currents that carry her. And here she is, wearing dark glasses, rubbing salty water between her ankles, washed up again onto Café Beach. Her child lulled to sleep by the waddle. Everyone orders banana bread and decaf cappuccino. Louise fights the urge to scream:
Just because
they call it bread doesn't mean it isn't cake, you fat fucking cows. It
doesn't mean it won't keep your cow-arses fat fat fat
.

She nods periodically, watches deflating milk, peers into the Bugaboo at appropriate intervals. She whispers to the waiter, ‘One banana ars … I mean bread, please.'

And Then …

Tom calling from the front door: ‘How was your day, honey? ... Honey? ... You here? ... Hon?'

She rolls over, trying to lift her heavy head, trying to get up and out, so Tom doesn't burst in and wake it.

Third Date, In Bed

‘So, Tom. Are you by any chance the piper's son?'

‘Why, yes, wench, as a matter of fact I am.'

‘Why, Tom, that almost makes you an artist!'

‘Okay.' He straddles her, pins her arms back into the pillow behind her head. ‘Don't say I didn't warn you!'

With Tom

‘Once, in third-year uni, I was with this lecturer in his office and we were discussing cyberpunk fiction and we started talking about mutant animals and then phosphorescence and then he made a slip of the tongue. Instead of saying
I could really use a
glow-in-the-dark fly,
he said,
I could really use a blow-in-the-dark fly
.'

‘Understandable.'

‘I couldn't believe it! He didn't even
hear
what he'd said ... So, what about you?'

‘Sure! I'd love one.'

‘No! I mean what about you have you ever heard anyone make outrageously revealing slips of the tongue that you can remember?'

‘Oh … mmm … no, not that I've noticed.'

‘Well do you think we should hold someone responsible for their slips of the tongue?'

‘Hold someone responsible?'

‘Yeah. 'Cause isn't it the case that the slips reveal true feelings?'

‘True feelings?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Aren't they just mistakes?'

‘A
blow
in the dark? Come on.'

Tom shrugged. ‘I've enough trouble accounting for people's actions.'

‘My grandmother always said it was the thought that counted.'

‘How traumatising.'

From Ingrid

‘You look pretty much the same as you always did. You've just got a bit of a stomach now.'

To Tom

‘Can you believe that fucking bitch said I look
pretty much the same
as I always did
? Even though I'm
nineteen kilograms
heavier than I used to be? Even though I look like a goddamn cow? I was
never
this fucking fat. I was far better looking than her. She is such a bitch. She thinks she's so fucking gorgeous and someone should tell her to wear foundation over those liverspots, and she actually said she thinks she looks like Angelina Jolie? She pulled a picture she'd cut from a magazine out of her bag to illustrate the resemblance? I mean that is just psychotic. Oh gosh, I never noticed Angelina's appalling acne scars and lack of a neck before! And you know, she actually asked me when you were due home because she wanted to say hi? As if you would be disappointed if she didn't hang around to say hi?
Hi Tom. Hi TommyTomTom. Wanna feel my smaller arse Tom-Tom?
My
boobs don't leak.
My
bra
doesn't have wires. I'm a size ten, you know. Oh you didn't know? Well
here, let me rip my top off and show you the fucking tag
.'

And More

She used to read things other than
The Baby Whisperer
,
Kid
Wrangling
,
Baby Love
,
Baby Born
. She used to eat things other than cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. Cake. She used to read, ah, who the fuck did she read? Don DeLillo at uni. She remembers that, vaguely. And she must have read Carey, surely, something about a man with no lips in a mouse suit? What has happened to her memory? She worries. Is it prolactin that has her suspended in this fuzzy, fleshy ever-present? Throughout her pregnancy they watched a DVD on the old MacBook almost every night, in bed, their shoulders rubbing, and she can't recall a single plot.

She dresses the baby and sings,
We're goin' to the café and I'm
gonna go cra-a-a-zy, we're goin' to the café and I'm gonna go me-me-mental.

She dresses herself. Maternity bra. New black cotton underpants. How the fuck, she thinks, can something be full
and
brief? White slip with black trousers. Ballet shoes. A relapse. She just feels false wearing anything else.

At the café, rocking The Ambulator with one foot. ‘Aha. Aha. Really? Fillet steak for only sixteen ninety-nine? Gosh you're cheap, I mean, that's cheap.' Behind her glasses Louise crosses her eyes. Shoot me now, no one can see. She holds them that way until the little muscles beside her nose, and the ones inside her temples start to scream. Muscles she didn't know she had, screaming at her. Like childbirth on minimum volume. Like childbirth shushed with a massive morphine OD. It stops her throat from screaming,
Anyone here do with a Blow-In-The-Dark?
Her foot rocks The Ambulator harder, faster. Sunglasses take aim at her ballet slipper. She uncrosses her eyes. She stops rocking. Who exactly the fuck are these women? These old fucking ugly hags sitting on chairs-de-bistro as if they have massive PVC pipes rammed up their barge-arses. Women –
mothers –
discussing all kinds of inane bullshit. What happened to her old friends? What happened to her? Surely this cannot be better than an afternoon in her own home? Louise imagines her desk and then her fridge full of condiments, the drawn curtains, the vomit stain on the living-room carpet, Jane and Michael pashing on her TV. She thinks of Ingrid in her size tens and orders the banana bread.

She's next to Pam – Pam who lives five houses down and was probably a perfectly nice and perfectly competent PA in her previous life, exactly the kind of person Louise would never have had to deal with except on the rare occasion that she had to deal with Pam's boss – and Pam discusses all the different kinds, and all the different forms, and all the different colours of the shit that litters her miserable excuse for a life. And Louise shovels banana bread down her throat, imagining all the rotting, black, rancid bananas they must have smashed together to make this cake that smells like a fucking monkey's sweaty arse, and she thinks she might choke.

Home

Eyes closed, it sucks on one breast, and milk flows from both nipples. Her gigantic milk let-down: this engorgement of her breasts feels like a huge inflation, followed by a powerful squeeze. It cries and then – nipple in mouth – it rears back from the fierce rush of milk, gagging. Ever hopeful – in this just like its father – it gives the breast another chance. It drinks easily now, burps, sleeps. Louise lays it in its crib and stands by, making sure it keeps breathing. It does keep breathing, for a long time it keeps breathing. Breathing, and mouthing phantom breasts. And then it cries. Without opening its eyes, it screams for more let-downs. But she leaves it and walks to the toilet. If it's crying it's not dead. She sits. Looks with disgust at her thighs flowing over the edge of the seat and then looks down, at the green tiles and at the empty toilet roll lying like a carcass about thirty centimetres from the bin.
Right,
she says into the empty room.
I mean why
would you, Tom, put the empty roll in the bin when you can just chuck
it on the floor? How idiotic of me not to realise that the entire bathroom
is your personal rubbish bin. A bin for me to fucking well empty, day after
day after day
. The thought of Tom dropping the empty roll on the floor – brutally, carelessly – is unbearable. She wants to cause him pain. She rips off a handful of paper from the full roll on the holder, wipes herself, stands, viciously pulls up her underwear and, refusing to flush, she goes to feed the kid.

Still More

Louise looks down at her outfit. More uniform than outfit. She looks up and around the table, at the circle of dark glasses. She points to her white slip and says nervously, ‘I actually have four of these, you know.' She giggles. She looks from lens to lens. No one responds. They are waiting for the waiter. Louise clears her throat. She is flushing madly and would like to fan her face with the menu, ‘Well. You know sweetbreads?' she says, clearly a propos of nothing, voice cracking up. ‘I didn't know, but I read that it's an animal's pancreas. But only if you plan to eat it. Because if you're not thinking it's food then it's still called a pancreas. Isn't that weird?' Pam – feeling obliged as she's sitting right next to Louise – says, ‘Hmm, yes.' And then quickly launches into a defence of disposable over cloth. That really gets them going.

Tom

He touches her the way he used to; all of her, as if she's his. There are goose bumps on her skin, a ferocious squeeze inside each breast, then the let-down of her milk. They stop and watch it stream down Tom's chest: thin, white rivulets, the sound of their breathing in the background. The baby starts to cry. Louise whispers, ‘It can smell me.'