The Best Thing (13 page)

I get to sit in on the conversation. ‘It’s all right,’ Mum says in the special lifeless voice she uses to talk about
the situation
, ‘Mel knows what’s been going on better than I do. So do your kids, it seems.’

That obviously shakes him—what, hasn’t he even
talked
to them?

It turns out that Ricky’s booted him out and installed Dad in his place (like a big ugly trophy on the mantelpiece). I’m glad I’m not at school to face Josh and Ambra! Mr Lewis is pretty wrecked. At one point his voice starts going all throaty and he has to pinch the top of his nose before going on. He doesn’t actually break down and sob, but if Mum were just a whisker less lifeless and Wronged herself he probably would.

It’s awful. They’re slumped opposite each other, swapping these awful facts in dull, dull voices. I get them cups of coffee and sit for a while in the combined stink of two wrecked families.
I did this
.

It’s a matter of
waiting and seeing
, they decide. We just
sit
for twelve months and as long as we get some respected community member to swear that Dad and Mum split up twelve months ago, the divorce goes through. Rob and Ricky—well, Rob still hopes ‘something can be sorted out’.

‘What, you want yours back, do you? I don’t want mine,’ says Mum—it’s as if she’s talking about a stolen
car
! ‘He had his chance and he blew it.’

‘This is not the first time, then?’

Mum glances at me. ‘No, it’s not. The temptation’s always been there, in his line of work. Insurance assessors are always cruising around, seeing clients—a bit like prostitutes, really.’ God, what an awful thing to say. Awful, but funny—but awful!

As he’s leaving, Rob says, ‘There’s no comfort in being the ones in the right, is there?’

‘No, it’s just as painful. But it’s only a matter of time, Rob. This is the worst of it. It can only improve.’

I think of him walking through the dark to his bare flat, pure miserable pain on legs. How many people do you pass in the street every day without knowing that they are simply anger or sadness bound into a body? It’s a lot to assume, that they’re all balanced, their emotions reined in to bearable levels. How do you know which ordinary-looking person is the Wronged Husband with the machine-gun, the one to stand in King Street and start spraying carnage around? You don’t, you just don’t. It could be anyone.

Primarily the Judge awards points for true scoring blows … Boxing is an attacking sport. A boxer strives to win by striking more blows than his opponent, but the blows must be struck fairly, and in accordance with the Rules.

(a) Scoring blows. Blows struck with the knuckle part of the closed glove of either hand on the front or sides of the head or body above the belt

(b) Non-scoring blows are—

Blows struck while committing any of the infringements … Blows on the arms or on the back

Soft blows or ‘taps’ with no force behind them

A working day is a long time. I spend five days learning just how long. Maybe for the first two I keep thrilling to the fact that I’m not at school, that I’ll never go back, that I don’t ever have to see Lisa again, there in the midst of her group wielding her full strength.

On Wednesday I feel a twinge of panic when Mum leaves for work. The house closes in. It feels like minutes since she arrived
home yesterday. I shower and dress and it’s only eight-thirty. I read yesterday’s paper from cover to cover and it’s ten to nine. It’s a cloudy day; the light sits at the windows like fog. Oh, God.

I walk to the hospital, a few blocks away. It looks like a prison, or a barracks, but tucked into one corner of it is a doorway marked ‘Birth Centre’, a picture of a baby curled up in one loop of the B. I go into an empty waiting room. Two women (nurses?) are chatting behind the desk. One looks round immediately.

‘Hi. What can I do for you this morning?’ She smiles. The other nurse picks up some papers and goes away.

‘Hi.’ I cross to the desk, not sure what I’m supposed to say. ‘I—I’d like to book in to have my baby here.’ There, I’ve said it, to someone official.

She’s really nice. She can tell I don’t know the first thing about having babies. She tells me there are classes I can take, books I can read (she gives me a list), ways I can find out how many months pregnant I am (something called an ultrasound), prenatal visits I have to make here. She shows me around the centre. One of the two rooms is occupied, which I find stunning, amazing, with everything going on so normally outside. From behind the door comes a long, low moan, and I look at the midwife in alarm. ‘It’s okay,’ she smiles. ‘She’s fine. Early stages yet.’ Oh, that’s really reassuring.

Then when I’m leaving I have to stand aside to let a vastly pregnant woman in a blue maternity smock in the door.
Don’t stare
. I force my eyes to her face, which is smiling, perspiring, red.

‘Hullo, Marlene,’ she says to the midwife.

‘What are you doing here, Annie?’

‘I don’t know! Induce me, induce me!’ The door closes behind me on their laughter.

I walk down the street, away from Newtown where I might run into Pug. It’s real. I’m going to be as huge as that woman. I’m going to be in there moaning as that hugeness tries to get out of me. How can it? I’ll be too little. I’ll have to go up to the labour
ward, where they have planks with stirrups instead of those nice hotel-like double beds. I’ll be sent to the operating theatre and have it cut out of me. I’ve seen it on television, surgeons’ green hands digging in through the weepy red layers and pulling out a waxy, scrunch-faced … God, it’s impossible to believe. Me. Inside me.

But that nurse sees babies born all the time, and she wasn’t shocked or horrified at what I was letting myself in for. ‘She’s fine,’ she smiled at that moan behind the door. She
smiled
. ‘She’s fine.’ How can a person be
fine
with that happening to them?

The lights change and I cross Parramatta Road, semis puffing and pawing to get going again. ‘How far gone are you?’ she asked me, as if pregnant people fade away to nothing the further along they get, or go deaf and have to be shouted at, or slip into unconsciousness, or turn into giant, mindless cocoons for their babies. I’d believe it, after that woman in the blue dress—I could hardly see her for being aware of her great belly. I’ll have to wear those clothes, tent dresses,
drapes
—I’ll look like a walking lampshade, all my tassels swinging.

I find myself on a corner looking up at another barracks. The children’s hospital. Corridors and corridors, wards and wards, bed after bed of burned, broken, bandaged children, children recovering, children dying, children hanging right on the edge, their parents holding their hands, holding their breath, talking them away from death. Wondrous and unthinkable things going on all day, all night, in there, just like back there at the maternity hospital, and none of it to be seen out here, just a big ugly building almost as bad as the Housing Commission towers opposite. This time next year
I
could be in here, with
my
baby, watching it battle for breath, pacing the lino while the surgeons fix its congenital heart defect.

A truck passes, whirling grit into my eyes. I was right first time around; it
is
too big and scary. The
world
is too big and scary—if we lived in a little house in the country, with no cars around or planes or fires or hard surfaces to fall on or lakes to drown in or
murder-suicides or rapists or wars, maybe then … If we lived in a Polly Pocket of a world, pastel coloured, round cornered, populated with tiny harmless people …

I lean against the traffic-signal pole, my hand over my eyes. I have a very clear memory of myself a couple of years ago standing in the loungeroom in a rage, yelling ‘Why did you
have
me, then, if you were never going to let me
do
anything?!’ Some day some green-eyed wavy-haired child’s going to be screaming at me, ‘Why did you have me?’ Umm, because I forgot
not
to? Because you didn’t disappear of your own accord like your half-brother or -sister? Because it didn’t occur to me that you could be real, that you could one month
not be
, and the next
be
? Because I was that stupid (sjupid)? God, if I’m ‘too smart for’ Pug, what does that make
him
?

The memory of the public is short and the names which have made boxing news are quickly forgotten, to be replaced by those of other simple, ignorant young men with sound brains.

‘Oh.’ Bloody hell. Dad on our doorstep like a visitor. Looking hunted, fists pushed into his jacket pockets.

‘Is Mum in?’ He doesn’t just walk in past me.

‘She’s upstairs. I’ll get her.’

‘I’m here. What is it, Dave?’ Mum looks down from the top of the stairs.

‘Just come to pick up a couple of things. Is that okay?’

‘Depends what they are,’ Mum says flatly.

‘Just clothes and things. Nothing you’d be able to use.’

He goes up the stairs. I hear him in the bedroom and the bathroom. He comes down, goes to the kitchen, comes out with the things in a plastic shopping bag.

He stops uncertainly by the couch where I’m staring at the TV. I look up and turn the sound off.

‘Mum tells me you’re having a baby.’

‘That’s right,’ I say, expecting to hear it all again.
Slut. You’d do it with anybody
.

‘Whenabouts?’

‘November.’

‘Phew.’ He regards me. ‘Hardest thing in the world, being a parent.’

I raise my eyebrows. What does he mean, that I’ve failed him? That I’m making a big mistake?

‘It’s the whole point, though.’ He starts moving towards the door.

‘Yeah?’ I turn around in my seat. He’d say
that
and then just walk out?

‘You’ll see,’ he says with a little smile. The door closes quietly behind him, the gate clicks shut. The people on TV mouth at each other.

The ultrasound is like dolphins echolocating in the ocean. You lie down, the operator spreads a cold green jelly on your abdomen, then she beams in sound with a little black handpiece and a picture comes up on the screen. She doesn’t warn you, because
she’s
seen it a million times before.

Your baby appears on the screen.

There it is.

Perfectly recognisable as a small human being.

‘Oh my God. That’s me? That’s it?’ It must be a test pattern or something.

‘Sure is. Looks good. See, little heart? The black thing—good strong heartbeat, nice and clear. Oops, lively little beggar. Here we are, top of the head. Thirteen, fourteen weeks maybe. Hold still while I get an image of that … Right. Spine.’

‘Oh, shit, look at it!’ A fragile white S of miniature bones.

‘Arms. Legs. There you are, hullo Mum.’ The white arm-bones twitch. A twinkle of white fingerbones. ‘All in order. Too early to tell what sex.’ The handpiece slips across the jelly, the image rolls and a skull-face peers out. Around the curled skeleton the ghost
of flesh, within it the black heart blinking white, fast, like a cursor.

‘My God. I can’t believe it.’ I can’t tear my eyes from the screen. I can’t stop exclaiming. I can hardly breathe.

‘It’s a baby, all right.’ She gives me a brief smile.

Afterwards the receptionist hands me a set of images and a report to take to the birth centre. I rip open the envelope as soon as I’m out the door, but the pictures aren’t anything like as good as on the screen. There is one of the skull, and one in which I can just make out the shape of the body, with the head to one side.

The uterus contains a single foetus lying transversely with biparietal diameter 28 mm indicating 14 weeks gestation. Foetal contour appears normal. The placenta is implanted on the posterior wall of the body of the uterus. Foetal heart movements are evident. The cervix appears closed. Thank you for referring Ms Dow.

‘The uterus contains a single foetus …’ It almost sounds disappointed that there aren’t three or four! It’s all so cool and offhand; it should say, ‘Far out! We looked inside this person and look! We found
another
person, a
fourteen-week-old person
—check out this skull, will you? And look at that heart, that spine, that great placenta, smack in the middle of the wall like it should be! And that cervix, all sealed up and intact. Isn’t it a miracle? Isn’t it unbelievable?’

I get home somehow. I float through the rest of the afternoon, my uterus containing a single foetus. I go from room to room with this miracle inside me, this moving miracle with its own pulse. When I think about that twinkling hand, and the way the body squirmed in irritation when the sensor pushed the womb wall against it … I don’t know, I’ve never had the feeling before. My throat aches, and I’m terrified, and I’m more excited than I’ve ever been about anything. Not a silly, jumping-up-and-down kind of excitement—a giant, world-sized excitement, immobilising, awesome.

It’s just so hard to
believe
! How can we
all
have come into the world like this and just be so cool we never talk about it? Why aren’t we all
awestruck, all the time
, at this unbelievable thing that happens when we start? How can everyone just carry on like normal? How come I never knew about it before this? I mean, everybody
knows
, but why doesn’t anyone
acknowledge
? Why does all this birth stuff happen in books, behind doors, behind screens of medico-speak? Shouldn’t we all stand around amazed, applauding?

When Mum gets home I show her the pictures, try to explain what it was like, because they didn’t have ultrasounds when she was pregnant with me. She sits there in her work clothes, looking from me to the little skull face and back. I’m so high on it all I make her smile.

When I finally shut up she sighs, looks down at the image again. ‘My grandchild,’ she says, trying the word out. She stares at its ghostly face, then shakes her head, and hands the pictures to me. ‘I don’t know. Anything can happen. Anything
has
happened—I never thought we’d find ourselves
here
, in this situation. You can’t help being frightened for the little … for little ones like that.’
She knows
. Why am I so surprised? ‘But you’re right. We are amazing. So complicated. All this from two tiny cells.’ She moves her hand in front of me like a metal detector.