Nine Days (12 page)

‘This sarcasm is only hurting you. It’s your cynicism that prevents you being happy.’

‘Actually it’s my unhappiness that prevents me being happy, but let’s not talk about me. Just tell me it isn’t that complete moron Craig. Tell me it’s someone else. A guy from that halfway house for the malodorous unkempt you live in. It’s him, isn’t it? Craig.’ She downs her wine then reaches for mine and takes a swig, then rests her arms on the table and buries her head. Her voice is half-muffled by her soft white arms. ‘Who would have thought his sperms had the energy to make it up there?’

‘He’s young. He’s a wonderful bass player. Very caring with the customers. He’s got a lot of potential.’

‘Every half inch they’d be asking
are we there yet
?’ She lifts her head and grimaces. ‘They’d get to the cervix and stop for a round of applause and a podium ceremony. Besides, he’s not young. He’s twenty-four, like us.’

‘Women mature faster than men.’

‘What if it takes after him. Oh. My. God. A hippy groovy baby with Craig’s loser gene. This is a complete disaster.’

She doesn’t mean to be hurtful. She is worried for me, that’s all. It’s reassuring. It shows how much she cares, and besides, if she really thought I was in terrible trouble, she would be gentler. Her manner is a measure of the trust she places in me. It tells me I am strong. It tells me that she knows everything will be all right.

When I don’t reply, she hoists herself to her feet. I can see from her face that it hurts. That’s all the meat and grains she eats causing acid production in her joints. Not to mention sugar. Eating sugar is like pouring ground glass in your cartilage. I can’t imagine what shape her intestinal flora must be in. Poor Stanzi. I could write her out a menu plan if only she’d do what she was told.

‘Stay. Here. Do not go anywhere. Watch some TV. Oh, that’s right. It’s an evil tool of our corporate overlords designed to hypnotise us into buying useless trinkets to mask our deepseated satisfaction with our meaningless lives caused by being out of touch with our spirituality and the energy of the planet. Better not watch TV then. I’m going down to the pharmacy for an actual pregnancy test that’s had double-blind clinical trials, something manufactured by the ill-treated wage-slaves of a corrupt conglomerate. Something that’s been tested on rats.’

When she’s gone, I sit on her puffy couch but it’s leather so I move to a cushion on the floor and try to meditate but I can’t concentrate on my mantra. There is something growing inside me, a mass of cells splitting and re-splitting every second.

It’d be different if Stanzi was pregnant. Stanzi’s going places. She has a degree. That dingy little office next to the dentist, that’s temporary. She’s only working as a counsellor until she saves up enough to do her PhD. She’s going to be a psychoanalyst, the philosophical, Freudian type, unpicking people’s fears from the inside. She has a proper career plan.

I have two casual jobs, no qualifications, no money. She rents a one-bedroom flat of her own. I live in a share house where you’re considered anal retentive if you scrape the mould off last week’s lentil soup before you eat it. She is back in twenty minutes and it seems like three. She hands me a packet.

‘Here. Follow the directions. Can you manage that?’

When I shut the toilet door behind me, I nearly pass out. This is worse than that time I went to Chadstone. There are smells coming from everywhere and for a moment I can’t breathe. The bowl has one smell—maybe bleach—the air itself has another courtesy of the aerosol can on the shelf. Even the toilet paper smells bizarrely of synthetic flowers. There are thousands of microscopic aromatics invading my lungs simultaneously. She’ll get cancer if she keeps this up.

‘Hey,’ I yell, through the closed door. ‘Why is the water in your toilet bowl blue?’

‘Because orange stripes are so last year,’ she yells back.

I balance the stick on my leg and almost drop the
instructions in the blue bowl. ‘How do I tell when it’s midstream? How can I possibly know in advance how long I’ll pee for?’

‘For God’s sake. Make a guess,’ she yells. ‘Did you fail half-arsed at hippy school?’

Eventually I come out with the stick in my hand.

‘Let me see, let me see.’ She takes it from me, holds it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Well. The judges give round one to the pendant.’

‘I want to see Mum.’ I don’t know why. All at once I feel this overwhelming need to be held by her.

‘Are you sure? Charlotte, listen. I’m being serious now. You don’t have to talk about this right away. You can think about it for a while. It can just be between us. You can tell them later.’

‘I want to see Mum.’

‘They’re not home. She told me on the phone yesterday: they’re at Uncle Frank’s for dinner. It’ll have to wait.’

‘No. I need to see her now.’

She walks to the hall table and picks up her keys. ‘Uncle Frank’s it is then.’ Then she stops. ‘Oh my God.’ She takes a few steps and drops into a chair, face in her hands. ‘Dad.’

Our father is the most loving man I know. He knows the bitter-sweet of twin-dom; when we were little, he knew when to encourage our independence and when to respect our bonds. He taught us to take life with a light heart and he did
this in the most unexpected way. He impressed on us that we would die. That one day would be our last. He told us death is always around the corner.

This sounds bonkers, I know. Stanzi shakes her head at the memory of it.
What a way to speak to kids,
she says. If a parent did that today, someone would call community services.

But I knew what he meant. He meant there was no excuse not to take every day with two hands and wring the juice out of it. He wouldn’t tolerate self-pity from us, or embarrassment, or fear.
Ring that boy,
or
try out for the musical,
or
ignore that pustulating zit on your chin. Don’t take yourself so damn seriously. Soon you’ll be six feet under and who’ll care about it then? Nobody.

In my whole life, I’ve only seen him angry once: the time he found Mark Moretti in my room after the year twelve formal and chased him out of the house with a golf club. I wanted to die.

It wasn’t having Mark in my room that made Dad angry. When he first found us together, he actually grinned a little. He said
Oops
and went to close the door. Then he turned back and asked if we had a condom. I hated even hearing my father use that word. I looked at Mark. Mark looked at me. We were flushed and sweaty from the dancing and spiked punch. My dress was mauve taffeta, unzipped at the back.

I’d seen my father every day of my life but never like that. It wasn’t wild and uncontrolled, not fury. He was yelling but his face was ice. ‘Get the fuck out of my house,’ he said to Mark, and he went downstairs to get a golf club from his study and I’ve still never seen anyone move as quickly as Mark
that day, bolting out the door in his socks. As for me, I was irresponsible. I was thoughtless and stupid and a disgrace. For three days, I couldn’t look at Dad.

And now I’m a grown woman, no longer living under their roof, responsible for my own body and my own fertility. I want to see my mother, but that means seeing Dad too. And something tells me nothing’s changed.

We sit in Stanzi’s car out the front of Uncle Frank’s house in Rowena Parade. The engine is on, for the heater. Neither of us has moved. We haven’t even taken off our seat belts.

Sometimes I think my parents come here so Dad can visit the house rather than Uncle Frank. This is where they grew up. Rowena Parade runs across the slope of the hill. It’s wide for a Richmond street: cars park on both sides. It’s halfway up the hill. Uncle Frank’s house is a tiny weatherboard cottage with a lane at the side and at the back. It sits under the shadow of a double-storey house, a former shop-front across the side lane, and it’s joined to a row of terraces on the other side. It’s hard to imagine Dad and Uncle Frank as boys here. Two bedrooms, one bathroom attached at the back. Mum says Uncle Frank only had the toilet brought inside ten years ago. Too small even for three people but there were five at one stage. Their sister and my grandfather both died within a few years of each other when Dad and Uncle Frank were teenagers. Then, Richmond was famed for its slums: grown men killed from falling out of trams, healthy twenty-year-old
girls dying from the flu. Richmond was another planet.

This house couldn’t be more different from Mum and Dad’s sprawling Federation triple-fronter in Malvern. There they’ve left our rooms untouched, down to the Duran Duran (me) and Buzzcocks (Stanzi) posters on the wall. The garden is azaleas and magnolias interspersed with irises and jonquils and lilies in the spring. My father planted those bulbs back when Mum was pregnant with Stanzi and me and twenty-five years later they still bloom. Love letters sent through time, from a sweetheart long ago. At Rowena Parade, there’s hardly any garden. Uncle Frank has cemented over everything.

‘You don’t have to have it, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘They’ll have finished dinner by now. Hospital hours. They haven’t seen us. We can just drive away and they’d be none the wiser.’

‘Yep.’

‘We can go to that styrofoam place on Bridge Road. My treat.’

By this she means my favourite tofu restaurant. She’s trying. ‘Thanks anyway.’

I’ve always wanted to go to India. I don’t know why I haven’t. I could get a better yoga qualification, in a proper ashram. Or take a cooking course. I imagine riding a bicycle through back-country lanes, dodging chickens and cows, smiling at the locals with my smattering of broken Hindi. They’d offer a floor to sleep on, near where they pound the rice, and I’d work in the fields with them and keep the same hours, up with the sun, asleep with the moon because
kerosene for lamps is expensive. I would find a small shrine and centre myself before it and after weeks of prayer and thought, I would find my purpose. I would stay, working for a local charity, living among the people, finding peace. There, it would be natural to be vegan. Here I look around and see people smiling while they gnaw the warm flesh of sentient beings and sometimes I think I am trapped on a planet of monsters.

‘It’s a short operation. No fuss. Besides, I’m too young and beautiful to be an auntie.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m being ironic.’

‘You are beautiful.’

‘I’m not beautiful and I’m not fishing.’

And there’s Craig. I don’t know whether it’s more wrong to tell him or not. It seems unfair to burden him when the band is just beginning to take off. Yet it’s sexist to assume he wouldn’t want to know. Pandering to the pathetic stereotyping of young men as self-centred and irresponsible. What if he wanted to know his child, doesn’t he have a right? He didn’t choose this, though. With his talent, he has a remarkable life ahead of him. I don’t want to be unfair.

I squeeze my eyes closed and try to imagine him carrying a baby in a sling around his chest, sitting on the floor and playing like my father used to. The image will not come. I imagine us married, living in a Californian bungalow with a trampoline and a dog and a bathroom with four different fragrances fighting each other. Buying wheat and sugar cereal from Coles. The image will not come.

‘Your body, your choice.’

I rub the bridge of my nose.

‘That’s what our feminist foremothers fought for.’

All this time and I’ve done nothing. I’ve achieved nothing. I’ve been running down the years of my life. Teaching yoga, trying to help people all day in the shop, spending nights in pubs listening to music I don’t like, doing a million inconsequential things.

‘It’s very common. Lots of women have had them. Millions. No one talks about it because of this ancient gender-loaded taboo, that’s all. Men aren’t judged by the same standards. No one asks a man if a foetus of theirs has been aborted.’

‘Stanzi. Shut up.’

She shuts up. She sits behind the wheel, arms outstretched like she’s in the middle of a long drive, eyes straight ahead, both of us going nowhere. Through the windscreen, the sky is almost dark. I wind down my window and rest my hand against the bottom of my throat and that’s when I feel my mother’s pendant, on its chain around my neck. I must have slipped it on before I rode over to Stanzi’s.