Eleven Months Later
Lisa yawned and contemplated rolling over. But the very idea of it made her feel tired. With her stomach the size of a beach ball, rolling would be a three-step process—grab hold of stomach, roll onto back (groaning), then shift bottom so as to re-gather momentum for the final push onto the other side. Oh, it was all too hard. Instead, Lisa lay where she was and moved the only part of her body that didn’t feel heavy—her eyelids. She opened them and looked at the clock.
Oh hell! 9.59 am. Surely not. She blinked again and patted for the spot where Scott’s thigh usually lay.
Empty!
He was up and hadn’t thought to wake her?
Everyone would be arriving in precisely—she checked the clock again—precisely one minute! Catastrophe.
Lisa threw off the doona and summoned her heavy body to leap out of bed. She needed perky-dolphin pace. Instead, her body gave her slow-moving-slug and literally groaned, involuntarily, in protest. Seriously, she was not conscious of emitting noise but now, every time she bent to pick up a toy or put on shoes, her body transmitted a sound from deep in her throat. A bit like the sigh a leather couch made when someone sat on it, only deeper, and more pained.
She was a suffering sofa.
Rummaging through her wardrobe, Lisa pulled out the only items that a) were clean and b) still agreed to accommodate her burgeoning body. That meant leggings with a hole in the knee and an extra-large T-shirt from a corporate team-building day eight years ago. She checked her reflection. There is no ‘I’ in team, the mirror shouted back at her.
But there’s an ‘I’ in failure, Lisa muttered to herself.
It was four years since she was pregnant with Jemima and her brain had conveniently wiped all memory of the hard bits. All that remained in there was a highlights package, like the best bits of a footy game that showed the home side scoring glorious tries. She remembered the delight of feeling the baby kicking, the cute way it got hiccups from amniotic fluid and the mind-blowing amazingness of seeing her little being on the ultrasound screen, like a little ghost-baby in outer-space. But for every cute baby kick and ultrasound, there was a dropped ball or a fumble that the highlights reel had conveniently left out. Pregnancy was combat sport. And right now, Lisa was losing.
How had she managed to forget the difficulty of the final month? She was nearly ten months pregnant. Lisa had done the maths. Forty weeks did not equal nine months—that was simply another myth designed to trick women into this unfortunate state of being—it was nine-and-a-half. And if the baby was late, it was nearly ten months, which is what she was now!
Why had she ever agreed to host a party in her overabundant state?
Lisa knew exactly why.
It was Ava. She’d been so desperate for a sixth birthday party and after the shemozzle of her fifth, Lisa didn’t have the heart to refuse her. Besides, it would be a small affair this time. Just family and one or two of her closest little friends. Still, even the smallest of parties required a modicum of effort. Guests, however few in number, needed to be fed, watered and entertained.
At the top of the stairs, Lisa paused again for one final, side-on check in the mirror. Certainly the team-building T-shirt was less than flattering (elephant-trapped-in-a-tent was the image that came to mind) but gosh her belly was ridiculously large. Lisa raised the T-shirt and ran her fingers over the creamy white skin. So tightly was it stretched across the expanse of baby, it made the blue veins stand out like rivers on a map. She exhaled. It was miraculous, really, to think that just centimetres beneath her fingertips was a living, breathing, baby boy, quite capable of living life on ‘the outside’ but content for the moment to stay in his tummy home.
The baby was one week overdue. ‘Cervix is tight as a clam,’ the obstetrician had announced far too jovially at her last check-up. This kid wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
Lisa caressed her belly one final time before letting the dreadful blue T-shirt drop like a curtain over her wondrous miracle.
Clutching the handrail, Lisa made her way slowly down the stairs, running through a checklist in her mind of all that needed to be completed. Cake? Iced and in the fridge, ready to go. Food? All prepared, just needs to be put on platters. Decorations? Put up last night. Toilet? Clean.
Actually, she was in pretty good shape. If last year had taught her anything, it was that—
‘SURPRISE!’
Lisa clutched the railing with one hand and her stomach with the other as the baby reacted to the noise with a particularly violent karate kick.
‘Oh my goodness! You’re all here.’ Lisa sucked in a breath. ‘Already.’
‘Course we are.’ Jamie let go of Ben’s hand and ascended several steps to take Lisa’s hand. ‘Oh lord, take a look at you, woman!’ Jamie leant back as if struggling to fit Lisa’s girth within her field of vision. ‘You’re like a beached whale that took a wrong turn and ended up at an Anthony Robbins conference. That T-shirt is dreadful!’
‘Thanks, Jamie. You really know how to make a girl feel great.’
‘Hey, I’m not the one who nearly slept through her own party.’
‘Ava’s party, you mean.’
‘No. I don’t,’ said Jamie pointedly, gesturing to the blue and white balloons and bunting now strewn about Lisa’s living room.
‘Oh no!’ she groaned. ‘Did Ava decide she wanted a Frozen party after all? Now the cake’s all wrong and—’
‘No, silly.’ Jamie squeezed Lisa’s hand and led her down the stairs. ‘This party’s for you. It’s your baby shower,’ she said proudly. ‘I know gender-stereotyping is so last century and all, but seriously, I can’t have my nephew schlepping around in all his sisters’ pink hand-me-downs.’ Jamie rejoined Ben at the foot of the stairs and he put his arm comfortably around her shoulder. ‘And besides, my very able assistant did most of the work, including bribing Ava into sharing her party. A promised trip to Luna Park did the trick.’
She kissed Ben on the cheek and he looked at her with such devotion that Lisa nearly averted her eyes. Every time she saw Ben and Jamie together she felt like doing a happy dance. It was thrilling to see a couple so happy with each other and so in love. To think her sister had come within hours of marrying the wrong man—it sent a chill down Lisa’s spine. Ben was the man for her sister. They were partners in life, and in business, a fact that lit a pilot light of jealousy in Lisa’s heart, for much as she loved Scott, she knew that working with him would be a sure-fire ticket to the couch of a relationship counsellor. There were some things couples simply weren’t meant to do together. But Jamie and Ben seemingly knew no obstacles to their partnership. Since Angel’s departure, they’d taken Spin from strength to strength. Certainly Jamie bore the title of Managing Director but as she was so fond of telling everyone, she was nothing without her right-hand man, the man who also happened to be the love of her life. (Of course, she kept the second bit from clients. Sleeping with one’s assistant sounded so much worse than it actually was.)
Lisa clinched Ben and Jamie in a three-way hug. ‘I love you guys.’
‘Ow.’ Jamie pulled away. ‘Your stomach’s squashing me.’
‘What she means is—you look fantastic, Lisa.’ Ben gave her a kiss on the cheek.
‘Always on the job, this guy. Massaging truths everywhere.’ Jamie looked hungrily at Ben. ‘Never stops,’ she murmured.
‘Oh you two should get a room. You’re making me blush.’
Lisa moved away as Ben and Jamie started nuzzling like randy thoroughbreds. A flutter went off in the lower part of Lisa’s tummy—not the baby but something far more basic. It made Lisa blush to even admit it—but she was feeling hornier than a viking’s helmet. The same thing had happened when she was pregnant with Ava and Jems, and apparently it was common for many women. One of mother nature’s little jokes, she supposed, to raise a woman’s libido just as it became nearly logistically impossible to make love, with the tummy and everything.
‘You know you want it, don’t you?’ whispered a sultry voice into her ear. Lisa swung around to find Heather looking very pleased with herself.
‘Heather, hi! Thank you so much for coming,’ stammered Lisa as she leant in for a kiss.
‘Oh, you look like you’re gagging for it.’ Heather clapped her hands.
‘What do you mean?’ said Lisa, taking in the leopard-print singlet-top that had squeezed Heather’s breasts into juicy, mountainous perfection. Oh it was unbearable! Now the pregnancy hormones were turning her into a lesbian.
‘The cake of course! What else?’ Heather took her over to the kitchen table. ‘I remember simply dying for sugar when I was about to give birth to Savannah-Rose.’ She stood proudly in front of the most gorgeous cake Lisa had ever seen—three-tiered and coated entirely with the most delicately piped white rosettes.
‘Oh, it’s even nicer than my wedding cake!’ Lisa gasped.
‘Pierre outdid himself this time.’ She leant in. ‘And under all that buttercream is the richest, most moist dark chocolate mud cake you’ve ever tasted in your life.’
At the word ‘moist’, Lisa lost it and the two women groaned in unison.
‘It looks utterly delicious.’ She hugged Heather tightly, trying to ignore the feeling of squished boobs against her own rapidly expanding bosom, until a thought struck her. ‘But where’s the cake I made for Ava?’
Heather sniffed. ‘Hon, that cake you made last year made even the dog sick.’ She put a consoling hand on Lisa’s arm. ‘It’s about knowing your strengths, babe. I make a mean martini but I cannot make a cake to save myself, so I call in the experts and give precisely zero shits about doing so.’ She made an ‘O’ with her fingers.
Lisa giggled. This was what she loved about Heather, the fact that she was entirely unapologetic for who she was. Together, they’d developed a Friday afternoon ritual of congregating at Heather’s house for ‘drinkie-poos’ where they would workshop the highs and lows of the week over peach Bellinis. Now that the drinks were non-alcoholic, in deference to the pregnancy, Heather had renamed them ‘pussy-tails’—cocktails for pussies. But the tradition had continued and Lisa could always rely on her friend to launch an outrageous rant about a particularly frivolous first-world problem … Lisa, you will NOT believe this but Net-a-Porter had the hide to charge me GST on my new Prada bag because it cost over $1000. That’s an extra 10 per cent! I can’t believe the unfairness … and on she would go for a few more minutes, gradually slowing down, like a wind-up toy in need of another wind. Oh god, I’m a self-entitled bitch, aren’t I? is how she would end, to which Lisa would calmly nod her agreement and the conversation would move on with a clinking of glasses. Cheers to self-awareness, Heather would say. My Buddhist therapist says it’s the pathway to enlightenment. But she’s so fucking zen about everything.
‘You’re hilarious and I love you,’ said Lisa dreamily, draping herself over Heather, who stiffened in response.
‘Your baby just kicked me in the boobs.’
‘Oh gosh, I’m sorry.’
‘No sweat, hon. The silicone softened the blow.’ And off Heather sailed in the direction of the cutlery drawer. ‘Getting a knife so we can gorge on this thing,’ she called over her shoulder.
As Lisa ogled the cake (Heather was right. She did need it. If she couldn’t have sex, then excess sugar would have to do) she felt a warm little hand creep into her own.
‘Ellie, sweetie.’ Lisa gave her a quick hug and took in her pale, solemn face. ‘Darling, what’s wrong?’
‘I’m worried about your tummy,’ she said seriously.
‘It’s a bit of a worry to me too, hon.’ Lisa patted it. ‘But I know it’ll get smaller when the baby’s born.’
‘But how will he fit through your belly button?’ said Ellie, closely inspecting Lisa’s mountainous girth.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Ava did. She said your tummy button opens up like a little door and the baby just pops out like a lolly coming out of a machine.’ Ellie frowned. ‘But your baby is so big, there’s no way he could get through such a small hole.’
‘Oh, honey.’ Lisa leant down and put her arm around Ellie’s shoulder. ‘That’s not quite how it works.’
‘How does what work?’ Missy was holding a tray of sausage rolls, which she offered to Lisa.
Oh, Missy! Just in the nick of time.
Lisa rose, put her hand on Missy’s shoulder and leant in. ‘I think someone needs a little chat about the birds and the bees.’
Missy nodded, a small smile playing at her lips. ‘I think I can manage that.’ She took Ellie’s hand. ‘What do you want to know, El?’
‘Mummy, how will Lisa’s big baby get out of her belly button?’
‘He won’t,’ said Missy matter-of-factly. ‘He’ll come out of her vagina.’
At the mention of the ‘V-word’, Lisa clutched the bench, but Ellie simply said, ‘Ooooh,’ as if everything now made perfect sense.
‘El, why don’t you go play with Ava and Savannah-Rose? I think they’re outside, playing pin-the-needle-on-the-cloth-nappy.’
‘Okay, Mummy.’ And off she trotted like a little, obedient lamb.
‘Such a special little girl,’ said Lisa, gazing after her.
‘I know, right?’ Missy sighed. ‘Especially with such a loser for a father.’
Thanks to the hair salon showdown, Kyle was now ten months into a fifteen-year jail sentence for attempted kidnap. Happily, the courts took a particularly dim view of parolees who dived straight back into crime and then tried to take a child at gunpoint. Kyle would be well into his forties before he could wear anything but green tracksuits and even when he got out, Missy was confident he would do no harm to her or Ellie. Not if he valued his own life. In that regard, old Mr Ivanov had proved particularly useful. Through the post office box, Missy had sent newspaper clippings from the trial which detailed the terrifying events of the hair salon confrontation. Obviously, Mr Ivanov got the message, for one day on her way to work a dark car pulled up beside Missy and from within the murky darkness came a familiar Russian voice. Missy. But with Mr Ivanov’s accent it sounded more like Meesy.
‘Meesy, my dahlink. You and your myshka. You no worry. I take care of your ex. That scum. Pfft.’ With a small spit, the window wound up again and the black car roared away, leaving Missy with heart palpitations that soon slowed into regular beats. From digging around, she’d learnt that Ivanov was a much bigger deal than Kyle in the criminal world, and if he said Missy and Ellie weren’t to be touched, they wouldn’t be. Even Kyle wasn’t dumb enough to take on a Russian mafia boss.
‘Missy, at some point you have to forgive yourself.’ Lisa patted her back. ‘We all make mistakes and you have more than made up for yours by being the best mother I know.’
Missy’s face brightened. ‘You mean that?’
‘I do,’ said Lisa confidently. ‘You know, if it wasn’t for you and Ellie I wouldn’t be having this baby.’
Missy looked puzzled. ‘Lise, even I know enough about the birds and bees to know that babies aren’t made by little girls and their mums. This is all your and Scott’s doing.’
‘I know that, silly.’ She gave Missy’s arm a playful flick. ‘But what you showed me is that a mother’s love is endless. It doesn’t have to stop at two children. The heart grows to accommodate all it needs to.’
‘So, you’ll still have time for Ellie and me when little Master Wheeldon comes along?’ Missy looked nervous.
‘Of course I will,’ she said, wrapping Missy in the warmest hug she could muster. A hug she hoped said You are like family to me.
‘Coming through, ladies!’ At the sound of Heather’s very loud and commanding voice, Lisa and Missy sprang apart. The woman was wielding the largest knife in Lisa’s cutlery drawer and her grin was so wide it appeared to glint off the blade. ‘Cake time, kids!’ she bellowed in a voice that triggered a stampede of footsteps into the kitchen.
As Heather started lighting the candles, Lisa took in the faces around her. Scott, valiantly trying to put his arm around her non-existent waist. Ben and Jamie canoodling. Ava, Jemima, Ellie and Savannah-Rose gazing expectantly on the cake with the candle-flame making their big eyes shine even more brightly than usual. Missy, smiling and looking into Lisa’s eyes in a way that made her feel they were part of a secret club that only they would ever understand. A club where it was understood that a perfect mother was not one who produced Instagram-worthy parties, or dressed their children in a way that made them look at home in a Ralph Lauren catalogue. No. The perfect mother was the one who loved her child with all her heart and did whatever was necessary to keep them safe. Simple as that.
‘All right, how about we have Ava and Lisa blow out the candles together?’ Heather stood back. ‘Though I’m not quite sure where you’re fitting air into that body of yours.’
Lisa took as deep a breath as her squeezed lungs could muster, and blew with all her might. As the flames flickered, there was a watery splat on the floor.
Everyone looked down.
‘God, don’t tell me the dog got into the other cake again,’ Heather groaned and peered more closely. ‘Wait! Why are my Manolos wet! And yuck—they’re slimy. Lisa—you didn’t, did you?’
As a searing pain went through Lisa’s belly, hot and sharp as a blade, her grip on the knife tightened. ‘Wait, I’m okay. Just give me a second.’ She doubled over, puffing and panting and telling herself to visualise the pain as the Harbour Bridge, rising to a peak, then falling away. Everyone watched her, open-mouthed.
The pain had gone. Lisa stood up, knife at the ready. ‘All fine. Just one of those super-intense phantom pains—a Braxton Hicks I think.’ She waved the blade airily at the concerned faces surrounding her. ‘All fine. Now who wants some—’ She gripped the bench again. ‘Cake. Oh no. Actually. Wait.’ Another contraction gripped her belly, even more intense than the first. ‘Nope, sorry. Not a Braxton Hicks after all.’ She put the knife down and doubled over again. ‘Ava, honey,’ she gasped from below the bench. ‘Next year, I think you’re going to be sharing your birthday with another little Wheeldon.’
Scott was at her side, white as the icing. ‘Oh gosh. You mean—’
Lisa grinned weakly as the contraction started to fade. ‘I do. My hospital bag’s next to the bed, hon,’ she called as Scott scooted up the stairs.
‘Shit, Lise. Is there anything we can do?’ Jamie rushed to her side as the pain began to mount in her belly again.
‘Just stay and look after the girls,’ she exhaled.
‘I’ll stay too,’ volunteered Missy.
‘Me as well,’ said Heather.
Leaning on Ben and Jamie, Lisa staggered into the garden as Scott charged ahead to start the car.
‘Oh wow, so on this day next year you’ll be celebrating your baby boy’s first birthday and Ava’s seventh,’ said Ben in amazement.
‘How the hell are you going to manage that, Lise?’ said Jamie, opening the car door for Lisa to lower herself into the seat. ‘Two parties on one day.’
As another contraction took hold of her stomach, Lisa looked at the concerned faces above her. ‘I have no idea,’ she said, smiling widely through the pain. ‘But I can’t wait to try.’