The Slap (32 page)

Though it was an accent that Rosie had come to understand while living in London, it would be unrecognisable to anyone actually from the British Isles. It was an accent learned from the ABC and the BBC World Service generations ago.

‘Did Joan call around?’ Joan was her mother’s best friend. Joan was her mother’s
only
friend, she thought spitefully.

‘She did.’

Ask about your grandchild. Will you ask about your grandchild? ‘Did Eddie call?’

‘No, Edward did not call.’

‘I’m sure he will.’

The sniff from the other end of the line was almost coarse. ‘Your brother will be propped against a bar getting drunk. I doubt he realises what day of the week it is, let alone it is his mother’s birthday.’

Such spite, such sourness in her tone. Rosie felt her prickliness evaporate, felt only pity for her mother. She was relieved; soon the conversation would be over and there would be nothing to regret.

‘Joan is the only one who thinks of me.’

She should answer, I called. She should say, you make it so difficult. She could say, we don’t call because we don’t like you. What Rosie did instead was not answer at all. Soon, soon it would be over.

‘Your brother is a drunk. The men in our family are all drunks and the women in our family all marry them.’

Rosie felt herself blush. And as she felt the flush of warmth travel across her brow, her cheeks and neck, any sympathy she felt for the lonely old woman disintegrated. You malignant old bitch. It was not true. Gary was not an alcoholic. To drink at all was a sin in her mother’s fucked-up middle-class Christian worldview. Why couldn’t she be honest? The real reason she couldn’t stand him was because he was a tradesman.

‘Okay, I just rang to say happy birthday.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll let you get to bed.’

‘You really should be putting Hugo to bed earlier.’

She could not think fast enough, could not find a way to disentangle herself from her mother’s trap. So she did the wisest thing. ‘He’s usually in bed much earlier,’ she lied. ‘Maybe he’s a little sick.’

‘Are you working? Mothers always find the need to create problems for themselves when they’re not working.’

Yeah, Mother, I am fucking working. I’m raising my child. ‘I’ll find work next year, when Hugo starts kinder.’

‘Please don’t tell me you’re still breastfeeding?’

That could only be answered by another lie. ‘No.’

‘Thank God for that. I don’t understand this obsession young women have to return to the days of being cows. I couldn’t bear breastfeeding.’

I bloody know.

‘When did you stop?’

‘Four months ago.’ She made it up.

‘Totally ridiculous. My God, he’s four isn’t he?’

‘Just turned four.’ She couldn’t resist it. ‘You didn’t call on his birthday.’

Rosie quickly glanced up at the doorway. Gary was stumbling towards the loo.

‘
I sent a card.
Is that why you called me? To hurt me?’ Her mother’s tone was furious.

Game, set and match. There was nothing else to do but that which her mother expected. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Good night, Rosalind. Thank you for calling.’ With that the phone went dead.

For a moment Rosie couldn’t move. She sat with the phone against her ear, listening to the phantom hiss of electricity. She slammed the phone on the table, feeling sixteen again, wanting to fuck a boy, fuck a man, fuck anyone, drink, shoot drugs, get paralytic, steal from a shop, curse and scream, anything to upset her, anything to make her mother hate Rosie as much as she hated
her
. She reached out for her husband’s tobacco pouch. Smoking would have to do.

‘You don’t need that.’

She felt caught, guilty; but her hand did not move away. ‘I just got off the phone with Mum. Yes I do.’

They stared at one another. She couldn’t read her husband’s face. Don’t yell at me, don’t be a smart-arse, don’t get pissy. Gary walked over, leaned down and kissed the top of her head, squeezing her shoulder as he did so. The tenderness made her teary. He wiped at her eyes, took the pouch from her hand and started rolling a cigarette for her.

‘She makes me feel like shit. She makes me feel like I’m a bad daughter, a bad wife, a bad mother.’

Gary snorted. ‘You know that’s bullshit. You’re the best mother. You know that.’

She was a good mother. She did know that, though it had taken so long to discover. Being a mother was what had given her a sense of completion, had made sense of the anxiety and rage and fear that had so long dominated her life. Being Hugo’s mother had finally given her peace. She sucked on the cigarette, prised a strand of tobacco from between her front teeth. She wanted to take advantage of this moment of rare, unguarded affection to say to Gary, please give me another child. She bit back the words, knowing he would withdraw from her, become angry. She feared the year to come, when Hugo would go to school and she would be left alone again. She knew her husband thought of the coming year as an opportunity in which she could find work and he could cut back his days, take up his art again. His bloody useless painting. They both needed to be working next year, to save up for a house. They needed more money.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Gary murmured to her. ‘Hugo’s asleep. You coming ?’

‘In a moment.’

He kissed her on the lips. She breathed a sigh of relief as she heard him make his way to the bedroom.

The smile on her face dropped away and she stared down at the phone. You’re wrong, she swore at her mother. I am a good mother. I am.

 

Nothing any of her friends had said to her had prepared her for the shocking assault of the birth. She had so long fantasised about having a child—had pushed, needled, baited, nagged, threatened Gary into assenting to her desire—that she had not once thought she would hate it. She had loved being pregnant, was fascinated by the changes in her body, the independence of it to herself. She had loved the fact that she smelled and looked different. Her body had altered, turned from being angular and boyish into supple and feminine. But the birth had collapsed her back into herself. The only word for it was hell. If pregnancy had been an escape from herself into her body, the labour had been a rebirth in which she had confronted her duplicity, her falseness, her ugliness, her self-hatred. She had been convinced of the sanctity of a home birth and natural delivery. Then it had begun and she had immediately realised her mistake—and by then it was too late to ask for drugs. The actual memory of it was, thankfully, fragmented: opaque flashes from a hallucinogenic nightmare. But what she did remember vividly—could never forget—as they tried to prise the child out of her, was that all she knew, all she wanted, was that it be taken away from her. She had made a terrible, unspeakable mistake.

For the first six months, every time she held Hugo she shook with terror. She was convinced that she would kill him. Every time he cried she felt herself shrinking further from him. He was an alien being; he was going to destroy her.

For six months after the birth, she had continued to go to yoga, had kept wanting to meet regularly with Anouk and Aisha, had wanted to sleep, drink, take drugs, have sex, had wanted to be young.

She did not want to be a mother. She’d felt as if she were about to break in two, that she was no longer Rosie but this strange, evil beast that could not feel love for the child it had brought into the world. She hated reminding herself of it: God, how she had hated the child. She couldn’t even call him by his name. She
distrusted
him, was scared of him. She must have been mad, must have gone mad. The uncontrollable sobbing, the fantasies of drowning him in his bath, of snapping his neck.

For six months she had been insane and during that time she had not said a word about it to anyone—not to her husband, to Aisha, to the mothers’ group, to her family, not anyone. She had not dared. She’d smiled and pretended to love her baby. Then one morning she had been frantically trying to organise herself to go to yoga. The child was screaming, crying incessantly. Feeding, lullabies, screaming, nothing would stop the terrible sound of him. She felt a moment’s strange calm. She would let him cry, leave him in the house, the shitty little one-room box they were renting in Richmond, leave him there, let the little prick cry himself out, she wanted nothing of it. She was at the front door, keys in her hand, her sportsbag over her shoulder. She was going to get into the car and drive. Let him howl, let the little bastard howl himself to death. Let him choke.

She had opened the door and looked out to the street. It was summer, there was sunlight and no breeze and there was no one around. She had stood in the doorway for a good ten minutes, her bag still over her shoulder, her fist clenched around the keys, looking out to the world. You are not free, she’d told herself. If you want to survive this, if you don’t want to kill yourself or kill your child, you must realise you are not free. From now on, until he can walk away from you, your life means nothing—his life is all that matters. It was then that she had stepped back and shut the door. She shut out the street, the world. She had picked up the screaming baby and hugged it close. Hugo, Hugo, it’s alright, she whispered. It’s going to be fine. I’m here.

He was the focus, he was the centre, he possessed her body. She lost herself in him. That’s how she had set herself free. Not that the pain had ceased then. It was as if in the savage animal agonies of giving birth to Hugo a sadness had entered her that was to never go away. He had broken her, shattered her girlhood self. But she managed, slowly, with effort and determination, to put the pieces back together. The only evidence of the melancholy now was when Hugo or Gary were not physically with her, when she was left alone. For Gary had been wonderful in those first few months, had nursed her, comforted her, praised her, held her, saved her. It was always best between them when it was just her and Gary, when they were separate from the world. Without Gary, without her child, she could no longer survive in this world.

 

That night she dreamed of Qui; he returned to her so clearly that days after the dream she could bring his features to sharp relief in her mind. The firm grip of his dry, strong hands, the wariness and occasional reproach in his coal-black eyes, the cool, smooth texture of his skin. The dream narrative was less solid, it had almost completely evaporated on awakening in the morning—just fragments remained. They had been sitting at dinner, though there was no food on the table, in a restaurant high above the harbour in Hong Kong. Then sometime later in the dream he was fucking her, the flicker of image brutal and pornographic, which was faithful to the reality of the sex between them. He
had
been brutal, he
had
been dirty: on waking up she’d felt unclean. The way he had often made her feel. Hugo was curled asleep beside her, Gary was snoring, and she crept quietly out of bed. She walked naked to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. Her skin was still white, unblemished, that of a young woman. Only her breasts betrayed her age. They were certainly fuller than when she had been with Qui, and now carried the telltale cruel streaks of stretch-marks and sag. Christ, Rosie, she admonished herself, you were eighteen. A woman stared out at her from the mirror. She had been a girl.

‘I dreamt about my first lover the other night.’

‘
Lov-er
.’ Shamira elongated the word, her tone playful, teasing. ‘My, that’s such a big word.’

Rosie couldn’t help laughing. ‘No other word fits. I couldn’t really call him a boyfriend.’

And it didn’t. Qui had been twenty years older than her; lover was the only word that fitted. She was conscious that Shamira was hanging expectantly on the phone. Of course, Qui would mean nothing to her.

‘It was nothing. It was just odd. I haven’t thought about him in years.’

‘How did Gary take the news about the hearing?’

‘He was fine. He was happy.’

And he had seemed pleased, had quickly read the notice and given it back to his wife. Good, he said. I’ve been wanting this fucking thing to be over with for months. He walked over to the fridge and pulled out a beer. She’d been wary, watching him, but he betrayed no signs of anger or resentment. It had been a perfect Friday night. Fish and chips, falling asleep on each other watching crap English detective programs on the ABC.

‘Can I tell Bil?’

‘Of course.’

Shamira wasn’t interested in Qui. She was right not to be. Qui was over twenty years ago. Qui was before marriage and child, before Melbourne. He was another life. She heard Hugo running helterskelter down the corridor towards her and she knew Gary would be up any minute.

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘I’ll see you at ten.’

‘Sure,’ Rosie assented. She put down the phone, put on the coffee, prepared toast for Hugo, whose clear blue eyes looked up at her, pleading hunger. ‘Boobies,’ he pleaded. She loved it when he said that. It was her favourite word.