After Millie was born, and grew, and eventually started school, a point had arrived where Elsie believed she would never fall pregnant again. Folding laundry in the lounge room one morning, Millie building a block tower at her feet and a temperamental rain clacking at the windows, Elsie had felt it strike home in her – maybe the reason she hadn’t conceived again was because she simply never would. Like it had been ordained by some standing directive from nature: Elsie Mullet (nee Rushall), issue: One (1) live child.
For six years following Millie’s birth, her body’s healthy bleeding had mocked her. Some months it arrived on time; some months it came a few days late and other months, cruelly, the blood would come a few weeks late, blackish and clotted and painful.
So it wasn’t until July of 1969, six years and two months after Millie’s birth, that Elsie, her monthly absent for over six months, allowed herself to believe the unbelievable. She was pregnant again. Earlier than that, not the doctor’s pronouncements of her healthy pregnancy, nor Thomas and Aida’s exclamations over how swiftly her body was expanding, would allow her to truly believe it. Even when she felt the unworldly movements of limbs from inside her body, she simply placed a quiet hand on the swelling and breathed, grateful for that moment.
And now, in October of 1969, as Australia geared up for another federal election dominated by increasingly divided public sentiment about the Vietnam war, Elsie waddled across the living room, one hand pressed low and firm to the drum of her middle. Snapping off the wireless, cutting short the announcer’s anti-war oration, she turned to Aida.
Elsie said, ‘It’s time.’
*
Arthur Roy Mullet was born at 4.02pm, Thursday 23 October 1969, six and a half years after his sister.
The delivering doctor, whom Elsie later heard the nurses whispering about as modern, didn’t believe in drugging the mother with twilight sleep and so Elsie felt as though the outlines of her bones were coming through her with every push. She felt each scissor snip of her intimate flesh as the doctor, calmly panicked, hurried the baby out when he saw a purple rope of cord peeking through before the rest of the baby’s body.
Drugs or no, not long after she heard the first feeble cry of her infant, Elsie disappeared; she floated strangely away.