On a late autumn evening in 1963, Thomas awoke in that unexplainable way. A sudden awakening, abruptly conscious in the night. Around him the house was silent and still. The moon pushed blueish light through a crack in the curtains.
On his right, Elsie snuffled in her sleep, her foot hot against his ankle. Lifting his head, he looked across Elsie and saw the other edge of the bed was empty; Aida was missing.
Thomas’s left arm was cold. In his sleep he had flung it out of the blankets and now it dangled off the edge of the mattress. His fingers brushed against the wall.
They had always needed a bigger bed. Trouble was, nothing larger would fit in the room. Over a year ago, after that first night when Elsie and Aida took him by the hand and led him to bed, the three had curled together, night after night, in Elsie and Thomas’s double bed. It hadn’t mattered so much back then, Thomas going to work bleary-eyed, barely having slept. He had run on the novelty of it: the nervous excitement, the sense of curiosity, the unfathomable thrill of three.
Three! It had felt forbidden, exotic. Something that happened to other people, to characters in risqué stories – not to nice, polite people from the suburbs with politicians and farmers for fathers.
Thomas sat up and eased the blankets away, careful not to disturb Elsie.
After a time, as the initial roaring flames settled and a sense of normality eased itself into their three-way union, they had all craved more sleep.
Especially so when Elsie became pregnant.
He looked across at the shape of his wife in the moonlight. They had been married for two and a half years. Elsie was always complaining of the heat now, despite how the morning grass was laced with ice. Her nightie was tangled about her thighs and her bare arms were curled about her vast belly. He watched the swell of it, heaving softly with her breath.
He listened into the silence for any sounds, but wherever Aida was, she was quiet. The clock read 1.30am.
Not long after Elsie learned she was expecting, Thomas had brought home a single bed mattress. He had extended the double bed base with pieces of pallet timber and butted the single bed mattress snugly alongside the double. Elsie had sewn sheets together to cover the whole bed, and knitted a huge blanket out of grey and red squares. It had taken her four months.
Sliding out of bed, he made his way into the hall, opened the back door and tasted a soft gust of cigarette smoke.
On the porch, Aida stilled the chair swing and let him sit alongside her.
‘She’s taking up too much of the bed.’ The glowing tip of her cigarette bounced as she spoke. ‘She’s the size of a bloody whale.’
Only Aida could get away with saying so.
As soon as Elsie had missed her monthly, she had told them. Thomas was so thrilled he picked her up and spun her around. Aida had cried tears of joy. But Elsie hadn’t let herself feel any excitement until her fourth month.
‘That rooster’s going to start up soon,’ he said.
Elsie, sympathetic in her maternal state, had finally relented and put some fertilised eggs beneath the hen that seemed in a perpetual state of broodiness. Two tiny, fluffy chicks had hatched out, one of which had turned out to be a rooster. For the past few days its half-strangled attempts at crowing had begun to assail the neighbourhood well before dawn was even thinking about it.
‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ Aida said. ‘She won’t. But she’ll happily put him in a pot for soup.’ She crushed out her cigarette and exhaled. ‘It’s unlike you not to be able to sleep. Something the matter?’
There was an unsettling tone in her voice. As though she wasn’t one hundred per cent set on the question, or the answer. She wasn’t all there. He knew what she was thinking.
‘You tell me,’ he said.
She let out a small, humourless laugh.
He hesitated, uncertain if he’d be overstepping. ‘You’re thinking about her?’
Aida pulled her robe tighter. ‘I remember what it was like, being that close to the end. That big. You can’t think of anything else.’
Thomas was taken aback. When he’d said ‘her’, he hadn’t expected for Aida to assume he had meant Elsie. He waited, letting Aida swing them back and forth.
‘But you didn’t mean Elsie,’ she said, reading his thoughts. ‘And yes, I’m thinking about her. She’d be almost two years old now. I’m trying to picture her newborn face and turn it into a two-year-old, but I can’t.’
Thomas gazed out into the moonlit yard. The trunk of the gum tree caught a slat of moonlight. He wished Elsie were here, squeezed on the seat between them. When Aida became pensive, brooding like this, Elsie always knew the right thing to say. Or the right silence to adopt.
The swing came to a halt and Aida shifted closer. She leaned her head on his shoulder and pushed with her feet, setting the swing in motion again.
‘I remember what labour felt like,’ she said. ‘I remember the pains. The fear. It’s going to be so different for her.’
It was the first time Aida had spoken of it to him. He knew she had hinted, on occasion, to Elsie about what had happened to her at the lying-in home, but never had she disclosed anything to him directly. He paused, choosing his next words with care. He wanted to hear it; he wanted her to speak – instead of the clammy, stoic silence she usually kept. A silence that made him feel uneasy.
He said, ‘I’m sorry you were frightened, love.’
At first she didn’t reply and he closed his eyes regretfully. But then she spoke, and he found himself too afraid to open his eyes again in case even that tiny movement should interrupt her.
‘They told me the labour pains were punishment for my sins.’ Her voice was soft and toneless. ‘The nuns said that the pain was my penance. And I believed them.’
Thomas touched her hand.
‘My parents kept telling me how grateful I should have been that I got to spend most of my time here in a quiet house of my own in the suburbs. It was true enough – some of the girls at St Agnes’ had spent their whole pregnancies there. Scrubbing floors, doing laundry, working in the kitchens . . . But grateful?’ She scoffed. ‘It will be so different for her,’ she repeated.
Thomas kissed the crown of her head. For some weeks now, Aida and Thomas had been able to feel the baby move for themselves. Placing their hands on Elsie’s belly, they would feel the pokes and prods from within. Once, the baby had kicked so hard that tea had sloshed from Elsie’s teacup onto her lap.
He thought how different it was going to be for all of them.