At the age of twenty-five, Rita is still young but sitting in the kitchen with the weight of the child inside her she is, more than ever, conscious of drawing away from her youth. Conscious of looking back upon herself as she was not so long ago: a young woman, still a girl really, about to be married. Innocent. Extraordinarily innocent. Innocent, she suspects (observing the girls around her who have lived through this war and who have a look in their eyes of knowledge and experience that she never had at their age), in a way that will never come again, for the world is now beyond such innocence. So when she married Vic four years ago, when the times were at their most violent and sad and it seemed (in Rita’s imagination, which her mother always called too fanciful) as if bombs would drop on them at any moment, she was conscious, above all, of handing over her innocence. The marriage was not simply an act of love, of young girlish love, but an act of trust. Vic knew things she didn’t. He knew the life of the street: paper rounds, odd jobs, bringing money from the moment he could into a house that didn’t have much. And gangs. They all had a gang. From an early age he’d known the life of the street. Too early, she thought. Was he ever a child? Somehow she couldn’t picture it. No, he was born into the life of the street. Made old fast. A rough-nut, he calls himself. Which is why he knew things she didn’t. He knew the grown-up world and he would teach her and from this she would grow out of her innocence (because you can’t stay innocent forever) and into what she might become. And this is what made the marriage not only an act of young, impossibly girlish love, but an act of trust as well. A trust that has been returned and not been returned. An experience that was both worth the acquisition and not worth the acquisition. A knowledge that is worth having but, at the same time, one she would have been better off without, what with all the drinking, the fights, and all those miserable, silent mornings afterwards that were all too common. Still, it is this knowledge and this experience that enables her now to look back on that girl she was and recognise her innocence through the eyes of her older self. This is what distance does, she tells herself. It lets you see things. And by things she means what they were and why they were, and what they both might yet become.
This is also the very distance that the young journalist and the painter, whom she has never met (but who are currently talking in the café with the odd Russian name), wish to acquire when they finally travel far from this place and have the experience of looking back and seeing things the way distance lets you.
For Rita, distance means looking back and seeing the young girl that she was handing over, like the bud of a spring flower, the bloom that she might become in an act of trust that requires the kind of innocence she doesn’t have any more. And just as the distance enables her to see this, it also raises the question, would she do it again? It is a question she has asked herself often enough now, and the answer is always the same at this stage of her life: no and yes; yes and no. Never again (if she were to go back and start again, as she has in her mind time after time). Always the same.
So as much as she might have been thinking about bombs falling on them at any minute back when the war seemed as though it would never end and her imagination ran away from her the way it always has, she was also looking at the world through the eyes of a young bride asking herself if she will bloom or wither, like all those withered lives around her. Now she is about to become a mother and the question still hangs in the air. At the moment the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ are not so important, for she is about to take the next step. This is the step, she tells herself, that she has been preparing to take all her life.
But as much as she tells herself that her body was born to be round, and as much as everybody tells her — the doctors, the young wives of the street, the old women whose children have long gone from them — that her body was born to be round, and as much as they tell her that this body of hers has a memory that goes back a million years and knows exactly what it’s doing, there is also a part of her that is convinced that her body is different, that it was not born to be round, that it does not have a memory that goes back a million years, and, unlike all the other bodies of all the other young wives, this one doesn’t really know what it’s doing after all. For just as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from Vic’s lips, the feeling of being round and heavy and the idea of being a mother do not come naturally to Rita. Her body, she is sure, has a poor memory. And, unlike all the young wives she sees (and she sees round young wives everywhere now), she is convinced that she will have to learn to be a mother more than the rest. That it will not come naturally and that the words ‘Mother’ and ‘Mama’, ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, will ring strangely in her ears as will ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ in Vic’s.
It was one thing that united them both before they ever married, this business of fathers and absence. For Vic’s mother, who lives in a country town not too far away, had come to visit Rita’s mother before they married to unburden herself of her shame. The shame that nobody spoke of, but which was unburdened that Sunday afternoon. And Rita’s mother had told her that she was not alone, that Rita’s father, too, had one day stepped out the front gate of their house in a cloud of pipe smoke and never come back. The two women had nodded to each other in a way that suggested there is a lot of that about. But what Rita’s mother didn’t add was that this absent father never returned because she told him not to. Life, she decided long ago, would be simpler without a drunk drinking all their money away, and so he was dispatched into the realm of the ‘absent father’. It was one of the things they discovered about each other and which drew Rita closer to a ‘yes’ rather than a ‘no’ whenever she posed herself the question of whether she would do it all again. That and the feeling that the past, with all its secret guilt and shame, might now end with them, and that the child and this world they were creating could be the clean start for which they were all searching.
And although these thoughts occupy her mind, it seems to her, every moment, every tick of the day, she is, nonetheless, happy to be distracted this evening. For there, spread out on the kitchen table in the afternoon newspaper, is a photograph of Vic’s Aunt Katherine. Her left arm is raised. Whoever it is — some journalist — that has come to visit, for whatever reason, Aunt Katherine is having none of it.
Aunt Katherine frightens Rita. She has always frightened her, from the night she’d told Rita she was a fool to be marrying Vic because Vic was a drunk who would let her down the way drunks always do, and that her life would be a misery because Vic, for all his looks and his charm and his big laugh, was one of those who carried his misery about with him wherever he went and made his misery your misery. And even though this was all given to her in the manner of good advice, it was also frightening in the way that words from priests and nuns are frightening. ‘You’ll rue the day,’ Aunt Katherine had said, and waved her umbrella at Rita, who sat up for hours in her best dress, waiting for Vic to take her out on pay night. Yes, right from the start she was frightened of Aunt Katherine. Just as she was frightened of them all, the whole bunch, the four sisters. They were scary women. And it wasn’t just the look they got in their eyes, and they all had it (as did Vic), that wild Irish look that said ‘Don’t cross me’, although, she concedes, Vic’s mother, Mary-Anne, was gentler with her than the other sisters (and Rita couldn’t help but wonder if this gentleness had entered her nature when Vic entered her life). No, it wasn’t just the look. It was the way they spoke too. They could command whole rooms, these women. Strong women, from another age altogether. Stronger, Rita was sure, than she could ever be. They had words at their fingertips. One moment playing with them like toys, another firing them off like weapons. And when their words didn’t put you in your place, the look that said ‘Don’t cross me’ did. And so Rita has no trouble imagining the journalist who wrote the story (and for some reason she pictures him as young) stepping back pretty smartly when confronted with that look in Katherine’s eyes and a few well-chosen words.
But as much as she is frightened by Aunt Katherine, Vic isn’t. Aunt Katherine has been around him all his life. His mother’s wacky sister, dropping in at odd times, then disappearing for months, travelling by herself around the country. And while there might have been moments when Vic wondered what she got up to while she was gone, those moments would have been few and brief. For she was always wacky Aunt Katherine, a sort of family embarrassment. A strange old lady with strange ways that she ought to have given up years before. The sort of old lady who turns heads in a crowd for all the wrong reasons. The sort of old lady who embarrasses Vic all too often, especially, Rita muses, when she goes around getting her picture in the evening newspaper so that everybody will know she lives in a tent.
Rita, who is happy to have her mind taken off the roundness of her body, her body that she is quite sure does not have a million-year-old memory, can imagine Vic’s face when she shows him the paper and the photograph of Aunt Katherine standing at the front of her tent. Vic, who is currently turning his bicycle into their street, will lift his face to the ceiling and roll his eyes in acknowledgment that Aunt Katherine is at it again. And that even now, when she is old and he is grown, her ability to embarrass him is as strong as ever. She could be dying and still do it, leave him embarrassed at her death bed, leave him turning his face to the ceiling and rolling his eyes as she fades away into family legend, as she surely will.
Rita leaves the paper spread out on the table, Aunt Katherine, the cranky, unnerving Aunt Katherine, commanding the kitchen the way these sisters command whole rooms with their words and their warning looks.