Australian Love Stories (23 page)

There she was: swaddled in a pink blanket with a knitted beanie on her head. She nuzzled his cheek. He breathed in her pure new smell. Ecstasy.

‘We'll take her to your wife's room now,' the nurse said.

He hurried down the corridor. The sun was up and the light golden. Lola lay in the double bed under a downy quilt. Henry sat down next to her, beaming: ‘She's wonderful. Beautiful. I held her.'

The nurse wheeled in the plastic bubble cot containing Dinah. Henry lifted Dinah up crooning her name and attempted to put her into Lola's arms.

Lola shook her head. The baby was so unfinished, so red, so rat-like in its sausage casing of pink. Its face crumpled into cries—big, hungry cries.

‘Here,' the nurse said, ‘I'll help you with the latching on. It takes practice to breastfeed.'

‘No. I want to bottle feed.' Lola pulled the covers over her head.

‘It's not what we planned,' Henry soothed, holding Dinah over his shoulder, patting her back.

And, as if by magic, the baby stopped crying.

From under the covers, Lola said, ‘It's not what
you
planned.'

Henry turned to the nurse, ‘She'll change her mind.'

Popping up from under the blankets, Lola stared Henry down.

‘Get me a bottle,' she said, swishing her hair.

The nurse left to get a bottle.

Henry laid the baby on the bed and unwrapped her. With her arms crossed, Lola watched. He was amazed at how perfectly formed Dinah was; such long-fingered hands and tiny baby toes. She had cornflower blue eyes.

‘Her eyes might change. I hope they'll be grey like yours with flecks of green. Amazing eyes.' Delicately, holding her just right, he took off Dinah's vest to reveal her chest and belly button
with its clamp. ‘The clamp will fall off in a week or so. It doesn't hurt.' He undid the tapes of the nappy and turned Dinah so that now she rested on her tummy along his outstretched forearm, her bottom exposed.

Lola stared; Henry stared. Just above her bottom, half the length of his little finger, was a tiny tail. A vestigial tail.

Lola picked up the baby and held her against her heart. Whether through instinct, evolution or hunger, Dinah reached the breast and began to feed.

Henry cried.

A Blast of a Poem

SUSAN MIDALIA

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it
… It was one of my mother's jaunty numbers as she whisked about with a duster. There were creamy songs as well, about moons and stars and rivers, and one that made me shiver without knowing why:
do do that voodoo that you do so well.
But when she dusted my mother always wore a hairnet and as a child this always made me sad. And once, I remember, when I begged her to release her golden tresses and try to look like a princess, she simply flicked me away.
Chimpanzees in the zoo do it, some courageous kangaroos do it
… She didn't miss a beat.

When I was fourteen years old and gushingly romantic, I asked my mother to tell me how they'd met: she and my longdead father. It was on a train, she said; she was reading a book. He'd tapped her on the arm, pointed to a herd of cows outside the window and told her how to count them in a hurry: add up all their legs and divide by four.
A bit of a dasher
, she called him,
with a roguish smile like a film star
. Then she sighed heavily.
It could have been a riddle,
she said,
but he didn't think to ask me.

When I was twenty-one, my mother came home tipsy from some outing. She whirled into the kitchen and turned in giddy circles, her dress a crimson swirl as she panted to a halt.
Such a good dancer, your father was
, she said.
He knew how to hold a woman, knew how to glide
. Then she leaned on the bench top and glared into my face.
But hopeless in bed
, she snapped.
A taker
,
always a taker
.
He never even kissed me
.

And now, when I recall that moment, I'm sorry I didn't ask her. Not then, not ever. Tell me mother, about your silent longing, the yearning of your body in the stillness of the night.

When I was twenty-four and my heart was shattered, I fell into my mother's arms. He was having sex with my best friend: a double and dismal betrayal. My mother could have said
plenty more fish in the sea
or
better to know sooner than later
but instead she held me close and slowly stroked my hair. I remember the gentle rhythm of her hand and the loving scent of her, like violets, and how, when I couldn't stop sobbing, she finally pulled away from me and looked me sternly in the eye.
Fidelity,
she said.
It's not all it's cracked up to be.

When I first slept with Charlie, I laid down my rule. No sex with anyone else
. Sex is a humanly specific activity
, I said,
and I want you to honour my human specificity
(I remember it so clearly: twenty-nine and bookish, sprouting my textbook words). He laughed and nuzzled my neck.
And another thing
, I said (I was, in those days, what a friend called ‘statuesque', with unfashionable curves and a full ripe mouth),
I want you to listen to what I like and I want you to do more than tweak my nipples and then poke yourself inside me.

Bloody hell
, he said.
Is this where feminism has brought us?

I knew at once that he was joking.

How did I know that I
loved
him? It took me less than a week. He asked me what I liked and he knew without asking about all the other things I liked, and he never once poked. He took his time, made himself wait, made me wait, entered me and found me, lost me, lost himself, and I didn't know where I ended and he began. But it was the poem that really clinched it. I rapped on his door, aching for sex, and he waved at me, book in
hand, from the sofa, asked me to sit down and listen.
It's a poem about cows
, he said,
I mean, who would have thought,
spilling out words about a great fat tongue and sweeping lashes, an udder splayed richly on the green, and his eyes were shining and
isn't it a blast,
he said.

I was straight away undone.
I love you
, I said, and he wrapped me up and told me that he loved my great fat tongue and my sweeping lashes and my voluptuous udders splayed richly on his chest, and we laughed and made love and made many sodden promises.

But in the dark of night I remembered my mother. The cows in the field and the film-star smile and the book she should have kept reading.

I was four years old when my father died, and all I remember is a very shiny forehead, and a pair of legs behind a newspaper, with some cigarette smoke drifting in the air.

My mother told me I was very lucky to have found a man like Charlie.
Kind
, she called him.
He listens to you. And he knows how to have a laugh
. It was the closest she came to expounding a philosophy of love: how you could be sitting in a train and meet a man who could have been another kind of man but wasn't.

She never re-married. She never even brought a man home. She did go dancing for years at the Embassy Ballroom with
a dear old codger
named Frank. She'd met him at her tenpin bowling club and his forte was Latin American. There was also a retired teacher who took her to see foreign films, although she seemed to like the choc bombs best of all. But as far as I could tell there was never any sex: there were no coy smiles or innuendoes, no transfiguring glow. It was Charlie, after all, who claimed her heart, who made her giggle like a smitten young girl.

And how did I know that I loved him even more? We were weeding in the back garden, grunting and complaining, blaming ourselves for being so busy at work and too dog tired on weekends and
now look
, I said,
all these bloody weeds, we'll never be done.
He stood up straight and pulled back his hat, squinting in the harsh morning light. And then he asked me in a very quiet voice—I can still hear the tremor—
Are you…pregnant? Because your belly suddenly seems
…

Fat, you mean
, I said, ready to rebuke, lecture, sulk, but he moved toward me and folded me up, kissed me on the cheek.
Would you like to make a baby?
he said. This man who'd never held a baby in his life. And I gasped and nodded and he cupped my bum and said that he was worried: how with my very juicy arse and his very skinny legs, our baby might never stand up.

I went off the pill and the sex was even better. Through-theroof orgasmic.
It's something primal
, I told him,
like this is what my body is meant for
. He teased me, said I sounded like Sigmund Freud. But
he
felt it too, wanting to come into me so deeply, make a life inside me.
Our life
.
I just want more of us
, he said. I began to dream in pictures, ones I remembered from an old school text: a sweetly alien creature, thumb in mouth, its head much too big for its body; a pair of floating starfish hands. And then my own proud hand on my rounded belly, encountering the world. I began to
notice
babies: unknown ones in prams, whose arms flapped about like wind-up toys; babies peering over shoulders; wide eyes and chortles and spikes of hair glowing in the sun. I held the babies of friends, breathed in their milky scent and stroked their flawless skin, trembled at their tininess. Charlie noticed too, and held these creatures in unsteady arms, until he settled into them, soon began to coo at them, sing to them, soothe
their howls of distress.
Did you see?
he would say to me later.
Those eyelashes, as thick as brooms
. Or
those fat legs like sausages
. Or,
did you see how he chomped on my finger, as if his life depended on it?
We saw scrumptious babies, cheeky babies, very ugly babies, and
what if we had a very ugly baby
, he laughed,
we'd see it on people's faces
. And then he pressed against me.
I want to make a beautiful baby,
he said,
one with your violet eyes and pneumatic lips and everything about you.

They say to give it a year before you need to be concerned. They say. The books were bristling with advice. Check the ovulation cycle. Take your temperature. Eat plenty of greens. Try yoga. Swimming, it's meant to loosen something or other. And so we finally had the tests and there was nothing
wrong
with us at all. Charlie's cousin suggested a holiday, away from the humdrum and familiar:
that's how Lisa and I got pregnant
, he said, puffing out his chest.
You mean
Lisa
got pregnant
, I said to Charlie.
What is it with men these days?
But we followed his advice and took a few weeks' leave and travelled to places that neither of us had been to. We saw the Coliseum and the Spanish Steps and the sad, narrow bed in which Keats had languished and died. We saw the Freud museum and the church of fifty-four hearts. We had sex in shabby hotels and apartments with rusty water, in beds with sagging mattresses that made us roll into the middle. We never argued. We held hands across restaurant tables as we talked. He liked Bella for a girl, and Catherine. Classical, he said. And Joe for a boy, or Adam, what did I think of Adam? But boy or girl, he didn't mind at all,
as long as it's healthy
. I'd scoffed at him, told him that's what everyone says. The dumb things people say.

When I hit thirty-five, I asked my mother if she'd ever wanted another child. She looked up from her sewing, said it
would have been
nice
for me to have a sibling. Then she looked down again, peering closely at her needle.
But I didn't want to… you know,
she said.
Anymore.
That weekend, I told her we were trying for a baby. She was tearily thrilled and mightily relieved to know I wasn't
that kind of woman
.
Who thinks children will interfere with her lifestyle.
She said the word
lifestyle
as though she'd just seen something nasty in the bottom of her glass. We were sitting in our back garden and the sky was piercing blue and there were no more weeds and there was new brick paving and carefully tended plants in cheery red pots. My mother drank beer and I drank water and I remember how the blue of the sky, dotted with fluffy clouds, convinced me that all would be well.

We kept on trying. We kept on talking.
It'll happen soon. Don't worry. We've got plenty of time. No earthly reason. Just relax
, our friends began to chorus, the ones with fuzzy-haired, gurgling babies and dimpled toddlers. One of those dimpled toddlers had a contract with a modelling agency and Charlie called this
child abuse
. We stopped seeing those friends but we didn't stop seeing all the others.
Relax
was what my
GP
said as well, what the expert on the radio said. I tried different kinds of herbal tea and St John's Wort, also known as chase-devil. We did a course in meditation, where Charlie always fell asleep. I tried not to look in shops at jump suits and bonnets and snug woollen bootees, and he stopped suggesting names. I tried not to hate a diminutive friend who even on the verge of giving birth hardly made a blip in the universe.