Scarlett sat down the back of the bus, as if she were still at school. Hippolyte was on her knee and Ajax next to her; he wanted to sit near the window. ‘Hold on, A,’ she said, which was what she had begun to call her first son, because even a short name can be shorter. No-one ever called her anything but Scarlett.
Paul had the car and she had seen her mother driving off, fast, a while ago. Besides, she couldn’t ask her mother to drive her into Tewantin. Her mother saw everything. Her mother was a bitch. She, Scarlett, was going to be a different sort of mother; she was never going to ask about homework and assignments and getting into university and doing something creative with your life. She and Paul were already thinking about Steiner schools or alternative education, or possibly no school at all. What was wrong with home schooling? What was wrong with taking off to see the world, two kids tied to your coat-tails, flying behind? They would learn a lot more out of school than in it. She had heard that kids picked up fluency in another language in only a few months. Why, they could go anywhere!
And then she remembered her reason for sitting on the bus. She was still breastfeeding and no-one got pregnant while they were breastfeeding. She couldn’t be pregnant. She would never fit into her wedding dress.