Sara Scott approached Aida as she stood chain-smoking beneath a knotty old callistemon at the bus stop, watching the school bus shudder and belch to a standstill. Bees droned in the tufted scarlet blooms above her head.
‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ Sara said as she sidled up, ducking to enter Aida’s line of sight. Red flares hugged her legs, a floral headband sat low on her forehead and wrapped around her long hair. Aida toed out her fag and greeted Sara warmly, not realising the relief a familiar face would bring her right now.
‘Elsie’s had the baby,’ Aida said.
‘How wonderful,’ Sara said. ‘When?’
‘Yesterday. A boy.’
A handful of kids tumbled down the bus steps. Aida flicked her gaze between Sara Scott and the children scattering onto the side of the road. When Millie spotted Aida her face broke into a grin. She waved and ran, her pale skinny legs pumping, satchel a-flap.
Millie flung herself at Aida. ‘Is the baby home yet?’
Sara said, ‘Sounds like someone’s excited.’
‘We’ve been waiting for the baby for ten years,’ Millie explained. ‘Mum’s so fat she can’t even get out of her chair by herself.’
Sara burst into a laugh. ‘God, I know the feeling.’
Aida did too, but she kept that to herself. Then, on account of the fear and apprehension knotting about inside her, she heard herself asking Sara if she and the kids would like to come over for a cup of tea and to play, and she heard Sara responding how much she would love to.
*
‘She seems to really like you,’ Sara said.
They were sitting on the back porch, watching Millie introduce Sara’s two youngest – Jess, six and in Millie’s class at school and Fred, eight – to the chickens at the bottom of the yard. Aida had brought Sara to Thomas and Elsie’s house, aware that her own was sparsely furnished and had the air of an occasional holiday rental rather than a home. She liked that Sara hadn’t seemed to need any explanation, that Aida’s familiarity at the Mullets’ didn’t seem noteworthy to her.
‘I like her, too,’ Aida said. She waited for a comment about how ‘lucky’ Elsie was to have her assistance, but it didn’t come.
Aida sipped her tea and glanced at her watch; it was after four. She hadn’t heard from Thomas since 5 am that morning, when he’d finally called to tell her the baby was born.
Sara said, ‘My ex-husband didn’t even like his own kids.’
Aida found her use of the word ‘ex’ interesting. Sara and her husband weren’t divorced, that much she knew. Too hard; too much hassle in court. But he had left a couple of years ago and Aida, desperate for a diversion from waiting for the phone to ring, found her curiosity roused.
‘You ever hear from him?’
‘Oh, hell no. He’s gone for good.’ She said it with a laugh. ‘Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. I’m a free woman.’ She flicked her eyes at Aida, adding quickly, ‘Sorry,’ and Aida remembered to give the automatic nod of acknowledgement for the sympathy for her dead fictional husband.
Sara sighed and stared down the yard. The kids were sitting in a circle in the dirt, their knees pressed together, each holding a chook in their laps. ‘It’s easier now that they’re older – my eldest is almost sixteen, so the older ones can help with the younger ones.’
‘Six kids,’ said Aida. ‘That’s a lot of kids.’
‘I always wanted a lot. My grandmother was one of thirteen; my mother the youngest of nine. Folks have changed now though – no more of these huge families. Women have a choice these days, rather than breeding over and over. Did you, I mean, do you . . . ?’
‘Want children?’ Aida lifted her cup and pretended to squint against the steam. ‘I did. But I’ve accepted now that I won’t.’
Since Elsie had become pregnant again, she had been unable to get the pill from her doctor for Aida, and Aida had taken extreme caution to avoid any contact with Thomas’s naked groin. Soon, she knew, she would have to find an open-minded doctor and get a prescription of her own,
Aida glanced again at her watch; her knee was jiggling a tattoo of its own accord.
‘You’re worried about her.’
Aida looked at her; Sara’s face was open and kind.
‘Yes,’ Aida admitted. ‘The nurses told Thomas that she lost more than five pints of blood. She had to be taken for a transfusion.’
Sara clucked her tongue.
Aida heard herself go on: ‘I’ve been with Millie since they left yesterday afternoon . . . after they left for the hospital I didn’t hear anything until five o’clock this morning.’
‘How’s the baby?’
Aida finally smiled. ‘Apparently he’s perfect. Fine, healthy.’
The baby was born quickly, Thomas told her when he finally called. Arthur Roy had arrived not long after they got to hospital. But Elsie had lost blood, so much blood. Aida had waited until Thomas hung up before she cried. Sinking down on her haunches in the hallway, outside Millie’s bedroom, she stuffed her fist into her mouth and sobbed. She wept for the arrival of the new baby they had joyously anticipated for so long; with fear for Elsie; with grief for herself, for the emptiness of her arms despite having so many people to hold.
Sara fished what Aida thought was a hand-rolled cigarette from her pocket, until she lit it and Aida smelled a sweet, pungent scent that wasn’t like tobacco. After a couple of puffs she offered it to Aida.
Aida hesitated. She’d never tried pot before. Years of hiding – her twenties had almost passed her by. Images flashed in her mind from when she was seventeen: Jimmy, her girlfriends from school, dance halls and rock and roll music and punch spiked with rum. It was like leafing through the photographs of a stranger. Where had she gone? Who was Aida, now? A lover to a married couple. A mother without a child of her own; a mother to another woman’s child.
A reclusive, quiet lady in a house.
‘It’ll help you relax,’ Sara said. She nudged Aida’s shoulder. ‘Go on.’
Aida took it, holding the smoke in her lungs until she felt her wrought nerves slowly smooth out.
‘Wow,’ she said, exhaling. She took another drag.
‘You know,’ Sara said, grinning at Aida slyly, ‘If you ever felt ready to try again . . . I might know a bloke I could introduce. Or two.’
Aida felt laughter bubble up in her chest. Two committed lovers, and yet she also had to be a lonely, chaste widow. She pictured meeting a man – the early, novel anticipation. But at almost twenty-eight, she could only imagine the male types she would be considered eligible for: the long-singles her mother had once paraded in front of her (only now a few years older, a few years more dejected) or those men who had already had wives but no longer did, for a plethora of unappealing reasons.
Millie was holding a chook on her head and dancing across the yard, making the other children laugh. Thomas would be home soon, and she thought of the comfort his arms would bring. Aida thought of Elsie tucked up in hospital, nursing the new baby. Their son. In her life there was more love than she could have hoped.
‘Thanks, but no.’ Shaking her head, Aida passed the joint back. ‘Are you seeing anyone?’
‘One?’ Sara blew smoke into the air and gave her a wry smile. ‘I’ve always got a few on the go.’
‘Tell me about the latest one,’ Aida laughed and allowed herself to feel the tiniest bit normal.
*
The first few days after Arthur’s birth were fidgety. Thomas couldn’t tell Aida much from his trips back and forth to the hospital other than that Elsie was resting, recuperating, and the baby was fine. He went back to work after the third day, falling-down tired, and in the mornings and evenings the two of them skirted each other fretfully, drawing equal amounts of comfort and anxiety from each other’s presence, Elsie’s absence a tangible thing in their midst. More than once Aida considered going next door, to give Thomas some space and so their apprehension wouldn’t feed and build on each other’s, but where would that leave Millie? Someone had to make her breakfast and pack her lunches and get her to the bus – she was still too young to do those things herself. And for that matter, someone had to do those things for Thomas, too.
Aida found herself stepping into the role of wife. Grocery shopping, school pick-ups – one day, she even dropped Thomas’s lunch box at the store after he left home without it. Though her heart had pounded and she’d been dizzy for the entire bus ride into town, Thomas had beamed at her as she walked in with his lunch box, and introduced her to his colleague as his neighbour, and it had been fine. A friend helping out another friend. Normal.
Of course Thomas, being a middle-class man in the suburbs temporarily without his spouse, was not short of offers of female assistance. Gloria Watson delivered baked goods and volunteered to clean via her husband at Bagnoli’s (Mrs Watson was scarcely seen in person at the store these days). Mrs Swaffer, the shopkeeper’s wife, dropped loaves of bread and tins of condensed tomato soup on the front porch and offered to take Millie to their farm in Freeling for a few days (an offer Millie received with mild horror). Elsie’s sisters phoned several times and on day six Elsie’s mother simply rocked up at the house bearing fortitude and a beef stew.
When Aida opened the door her first thought was, Far out, it’s Elsie in thirty years.
‘I’m Alice Rushall, Elsie’s mum.’ Alice Rushall held the heaving casserole pot effortlessly in one arm. A tidy, triangular shaped woman, she had Elsie’s rounded face and wavy hair, dusted salty where Elsie’s was still glossy brown. She exuded a kind of practical cheerfulness, the sense that everything was going to be all right. Aida felt a wave of tenderness and upwelling emotion at the sight of her. Seven years with Elsie and they had never crossed paths. Never been reason to; always excuses not to.
‘You must be the neighbour.’ She bustled past Aida, wafting beef gravy, and availed herself of the kitchen like she’d been born there. ‘Thomas tells me what a help you’ve been. God knows that man needs it.’
Aida knew she should keep a distance, maintain the polite neighbour pretence, yet she felt so comforted in Alice Rushall’s presence that she allowed herself some time to sit at the table and relax: Alice made them both coffee, and said a little later she would mash some potatoes for tea while Aida walked to the bus stop to collect Millie. With Elsie’s mother here, Aida didn’t have to mother herself. It was nice.
When Thomas came home, Aida slipped away next door for a couple of hours; left him with his mother-in-law to talk about his wife, her daughter. Before Aida left, in the privacy of her bedroom Millie cracked a bit of a fuss, wanted to come with Aida, but she was set right enough with a cuddle and a promise of hot cocoa once Granny Rushall had left.
For the first time, rather than unconditional acceptance, Millie looked at Aida with something like resigned knowing when Aida said, ‘Just don’t talk about me to your Granny, okay? She doesn’t need to know I’m here all the time, as well as next door.’ Millie’s expression left Aida with a tense, uneasy feeling beneath her ribs. Like a waiting, a knowledge that the innocence was fading, and soon questions would become increasingly difficult to answer.
Granny Rushall heated their tea and left them to it – Elsie’s sister Rose was dealing with a household of teenagers with the flu and a husband in Phuoc Tuy and needed her to stay the night, apparently. The sun was still trailing its peachy smears over the horizon when Millie came sloping into Aida’s kitchen, asking for her promised cup of cocoa.
‘Have you eaten your tea already?’ Aida asked.
‘No. And I’m starving.’
Millie was being brassy. She knew better than to demand treats before tea time and Aida gave her a look of warning, but the scolding wilted on her tongue.
Back in Elsie’s kitchen, Aida found Thomas restive and maudlin. He was trying to serve tea, scooping drippy stew from Elsie’s mother’s pot with a dessert spoon. Single chunks of beef or carrot were being delivered to paver-like flats of mashed potato and Aida let him continue for a short, tedious while before she fetched a ladle and surreptitiously handed it over.
‘When’s Mum coming home?’ Millie asked as they ate.
Aida said, ‘Soon, honey.’
*
After Millie was tucked into bed, and the dishes were washed and put away, Aida went outside to the back porch and flopped onto the swing. It protested weakly at the hinges. She swung and smoked, flexing her toes in her slippers. The night air had a late spring chill, the pitch sky littered with gritty points of light. The hens muttered on their roost and a cricket chirped beneath the steps.
Thomas came out with whisky.
‘Aren’t you going up tonight?’ Aida asked.
‘I just talked to her on the phone. She said not to. Said I should rest.’
‘How is she?’
‘Doing fine.’ He sighed as he sat. ‘A few more days, she reckons. Sounds like she’s starting to champ at the bit to get out of there, but the doctor says she’s still pale as a sheet. Wants her to regain some colour first before he’ll send her home.’
‘And the baby?’
‘Healthy as anything.’ They both heard the pride in Thomas’s voice, and they were both grateful for it. Thomas dropped three fingers of whisky into her glass and she swallowed its pleasant burn, smoky all the way down. She felt it wrap her like a warm towel, softening her joints and dulling her against the cooling night air.
‘I’m not going to leave this time,’ she said.
‘I’m glad. I think Elsie would divorce me if I let you go again.’
Aida gazed into her drink. ‘But I don’t think I should sleep over every night, anymore,’ she said. ‘I think we need to be more careful. Millie is getting older; she’s started asking questions.’ Not wanting to alarm him, she kept her voice light. She lit another smoke and leaned against him, and he loosed an arm about her shoulder, fond and matey. He quipped about ash on his crotch and she laughed.
‘Now that she’s around other kids she’s going to see we’re . . . different.’
Thomas said, ‘What’s so different about living with an aunty type figure?’
‘But I’m not an aunty, am I? I’m not a relative. It’s not platonic.’
‘Figure. I said aunty figure.’
She blew out smoke with a rueful laugh. ‘That’s the rub though. Soon she’s going to clue up to that hidden nuance. She’s not going to accept “aunty figure” as enough of an explanation. She’s knows that I’m not technically an aunt. Not like Lila and Rose are her aunts. It might not have occurred to her yet, to question that we sleep together, but it will. Very soon. We’ll have to be a little less . . . open, around her.’
‘Millie isn’t allowed in our bedroom,’ he tried, but it wasn’t an argument. It was time, they both knew, for yet another layer of discretion. They both brooded a while after that, remembering the kiss Mrs Watson had seen, the kiss that had sent her storming into Bagnoli’s in tight-lipped moral outrage. What if Millie caught a kiss like that? How would they explain to her that it wasn’t normal?
Gradually the neighbourhood fell asleep. Windows went dark and televisions and wirelesses fell silent as they drank and Aida smoked. They consoled themselves with Elsie’s recovery and took mutual solace in the idea of her homecoming. As the booze took them in its languid embrace they got to reminiscing.
‘Remember that year we went to the Christmas pageant in town? Millie was a little tacker.’
‘The one where we got a picture with Father Christmas . . . ?’
‘He thought you were Millie’s mum.’
‘Elsie corrected him.’
‘He seemed mighty pleased to be wrong.’
Aida slapped a hand over her face and she felt Thomas jiggle with laughter.
‘Dirty old Santa Claus,’ she said. ‘Fancy putting the moves on a lady while a kid tells you what they want for Christmas.’
When they finished laughing, Thomas said, ‘Didn’t Millie ask him for a pony?’
‘A horse,’ Aida corrected. ‘She said a pony was for sissies.’
‘That’s right. Christ.’
Back and forth they went until suddenly the bottle was empty, and Aida was out of smokes, and Thomas groaned that his legs had gone good and dead. They staggered and stumbled to their feet, waving like weeds in the breeze as they made their way to the bedroom. Together they fell onto the bed, Aida’s slippers flung with a double-barrelled thud-thud into the wardrobe door.
Their bodies mashed together into the centre of that huge bed, as though they had both rolled onto the concave floor of a canoe and it was inevitable, this kind of smashing together. Thomas kissed Aida and she felt devotion towards him for it; it felt like a kindness. The kiss went on. Aida waited for something – what was she waiting for? She realised, suddenly, like a door slamming open, that Elsie wasn’t there.
Aida bolted upright.
Thomas launched up onto his elbows like he’d seen a snake. ‘What, what is it?’
‘She’s not here.’
He blinked at her. His hair was dishevelled, sticking out on one side. She watched the realisation play across his face like a comic strip: from startled, to bewildered, to the smacked-home understanding. When did he grow such a mature man’s face? He had always been so playful, so congenial. Perpetually youthful-looking. Now he was approaching his mid-thirties and with the self-effacing, laughing sigh and the swing of his head he wasn’t so young anymore. He wasn’t Elsie’s fresh-faced, eager husband anymore, either. He was Thomas. The second beat in the ba-boom of her heart.
He said, ‘I don’t want you to sleep next door.’
She put her palm on his cheek. ‘It’s only a place to sleep. I’ll still be here.’
Aida crossed her legs and grinned. She shook her head, put her hands over her face and giggled. They laughed, partly because they felt foolish, but mostly because they knew how much Elsie would laugh at them, if she could see them now.
Thomas pulled her into his arms. They lay on the blankets and held each other, and eventually they fell asleep.
*
Closing the book, Aida placed it on the bedside table and reached towards the lamp.
‘Not yet,’ Millie pleaded, her eager face poking out from beneath the covers.
Aida smiled at her. ‘Okay, one more minute.’ She shuffled down the narrow bed, to lay her head on the pillow alongside Millie’s. She tucked the blankets firmly about Millie’s shoulders, stroked her hair back from her face. Millie closed her eyes. Still babyish in the tiny point of her chin, but growing older in the thickness of her hair – dark brown and wavy, like her mother’s. Elsie often said, ‘Thank goodness she doesn’t have my ears.’
Yawning, Aida tucked an arm over Millie’s shoulder. ‘Is the minute up yet?’
‘Umm . . .’ With her eyes still closed, Millie pretended to think, furrowing her brows. ‘No.’
‘How much longer?’
‘Till Mum and Dad get home with my new baby brother.’
‘That’s not until tomorrow,’ Aida protested.
‘I can’t wait. Mum’s been in the hospital for a hundred years.’
‘I know it feels like it,’ Aida said. ‘But it’s only been ten days.’
‘Is that a year?’
Aida chuckled. ‘Close your eyes, darling. You need lots of sleep before you see your new brother.’
Millie huffed impatiently, but complied. Aida switched off the lamp and the room fell into a soft darkness; light from the living room came through the door, left ajar.
‘Ay,’ Millie piped up. ‘How are babies born?’
Oh, shit. Aida considered evading the question, giving her one of the standard trite, fallacious responses reserved for children at such embarrassing junctures. But an image flashed into her mind: the cold tiles of the bathroom at St Agnes’ home, where she had cowered, hiding from the nuns, gripped with a pain that petrified her. She remembered, much earlier still, denying with a sense of dread that her monthly was late – the nausea, the odd metallic taste in her mouth. Feeling so ignorant, uninitiated.
Would it be okay for her to have this conversation with Millie? Wasn’t this something Elsie should do? Then again, Aida’s mother had never had this dialogue with Aida. The facts of life Aida had learned from the girls at school. Whispered behind cupped hands, giggles, faces flushed with burning curiosity and disbelief.
So Aida told her.
Millie listened quietly, and when Aida was done with her explanation – dispassionate, simple phrases, anatomically correct terms – Millie said, quite unruffled, ‘That sounds yuck. No thanks. I’ll just ask Mummy or you to have my babies for me.’
Aida laughed. ‘I understand. Time for sleep now, right?’ Smiling, she tucked the blankets snugly around Millie’s shoulders. She leaned in and kissed her forehead. ‘Goodnight, sweetheart. Get some sleep so you can meet your new brother tomorrow.’
Millie yawned. ‘Love you, Aunty Ay.’