Hippolyte, a fruit of love, a cherub of a baby boy who might have stepped straight from a Baroque trompe-l’oeil ceiling, was sleeping on his back. One plump fist rested against his juicy face, his cheeks slightly inflamed because he was teething. Blond curls lay damp across his forehead, the curls Scarlett refused to cut, even though everyone took him for a girl. His lips—his lips!—so ripe, so glossy, so swollen, more beautiful than any photoshopped model. He was delicious, lustrous, and Scarlett could eat him, except that eating Hippolyte would wake him up.
Scarlett stood on one leg, looking down into her baby son’s cot, her eldest son stirring in his new bed on the opposite side of the room. Ajax was proudly sleeping in his first grownup bed, fashioned like a racing car; a bed Paul had ordered especially. Paul had put it up himself, too, the kids jumping all over him, and he had never once lost his temper. Afternoon nap time was Scarlett’s favourite, the only moment she felt halfway competent as a mother. She loved to gaze at her children’s sleeping faces—fed, alive, unbroken—astonished that she, Scarlett, could be responsible for a human life, and not just one life but two, keeping them safe from fire, water, snakes, poison. She was not a very good mother, she knew; she could not stop them fighting, knocking each other senseless or else screaming their heads off. Once, when Ajax was not yet walking, she had lifted him into a tree beside the lake, carefully wedging his fat nappied bottom into the fork of two branches so that he resembled a plump koala, stepping back to take a photograph at precisely the same moment he fell headfirst to the ground. There was an awful second of silence before he erupted into a mighty howl; the particular silence that told her it was going to be bad, that he was gathering every ounce of outrage and pain, and that it was going to require yet another call to her mother and a race into Gympie Hospital. Ajax’s lip was split, and there was a nasty cut above his eye, but mercifully no bone was broken. There was so much blood that at first Scarlett was sure she had killed him, that the blood sealed inside his skin had broken free, and was destined to flow till it ran out.
‘You put him in a tree?’ Paul said. ‘A baby who can barely sit up?’
She could not explain how she thought she had thoroughly calculated the risk, nor how she had so spectacularly miscalculated it. That night she cried and cried in Paul’s arms, and it was not until the early hours of the morning, Paul’s mouth upon the soft rise between her legs, her orgasm bursting upon his poetic tongue, that she knew Ajax was going to be all right, that she and Paul were going to be all right, that whatever strange, ravishing terrors were upon them, they had between them forever and ever this stupendous glory, unspooling, a dazzled world.
She heard Paul’s car, the engine, his, the sound she could hear from a thousand kilometres away, distinguishing it from all the other engines, as a new mother distinguishes her own baby’s cry from every other baby’s. Paul! Her lover, her man, and, very soon, her very own husband.
Scarlett was waiting in the yard as Paul drove in. The sight of him still caused her stomach to leap: the curve of his neck, the big, manly bullish chest. She loved his smell; the hair on his chest; the precise shape and feel of his balls and cock. Two children, almost five years since he first lifted her skirt and placed his fingers gently at her centre, causing her heart to go flying up, up, up from her body, flung out, not only to him but beyond him, to that place where love lived, wild, holy. If Scarlett’s fine beauty ran straight down from Marie through the maternal line, her heart was her grandfather Syd’s, destined to make large and inappropriate claims on love, to stake everything she had on a blazing moment. Not for her the crimped life of her mother, the downturned mouth, the might-have-beens, the slow leak of everyday tedium. Scarlett was going down in flames, Scarlett was burning, Scarlett was going to turn her mother’s life on its head, and her father’s, and set the tongues of The Landing wagging so hard they might be in danger of breaking off from their stalks.
‘What are you doing home, babe?’ she asked, running up and flinging herself into her lover’s arms.
‘Can’t a man take an early mark if he wants to?’ Paul had a temporary contract with a small, crappy IT company on the coast, but he was looking for better work.
‘Come on, quick,’ she said. ‘The boys are asleep.’
And Scarlett took Paul’s hand and led him inside, where they lay upon their double bed, breathing into one another’s grateful mouths, the air alive and ringing with birdsong.