She lies awake with darkness lapping at tired eyes. Exhaustion heavy in her limbs. He is part of the weight tonight, her first son. In her waking dreams he has shape-shifted; from happy baby to coddled child to angry young man who hates her, hates her. And back again, back to what she dreads most, the boy lost. She tries to blink it all away but so many nights this boy lies down with her, clawing at her heart. What if is the refrain, what if. A soft tearing sound.

In the morning she will begin again. She will set out breakfast cereal, milk, spoons, she will tie shoelaces and hair ribbons, cut sandwiches in neat triangles for lunchboxes. Peel oranges, winding the skin back on for their schoolbags. She will tidy, wipe faces clean, floors, plates. Set vegetables to soak for dinner. Loop clothes along a washing line in white midday sun; mix eggs and milk for custard. Her hands can never be busy or full enough. Despite what they do and what they hold, pegs, dishes, laundry, soap, she can still feel the precise shape and weight of a child, thirteen months old. His limbs circling her. The phantom at her hip.

December is the worst. Heat accumulates in her body as the eighteenth approaches. She tries to hide her preoccupation. It’s just Christmas, she’ll say if someone asks. Too much to do. On the day, she washes and cooks and purses her lips hard over all they threaten to release: words, a name, the cry that will undo her. Commemoration.

Some years she will allow herself this: his baby photograph. A wish. Even the courage of speaking: Today, she’ll say, he’ll be ten, eleven, twelve, to her husband or her sister as they sit at the table with their tea. No more is necessary, only a hand on her back, on her arm. The unspoken hangs between them – I wonder if, how, where. And the longing, endless, palpable.

Sometimes the weight, the exhaustion of carrying it, is too much. This is such a day, despite the sun after endless rain, and children running in the yard – Ashley, Andrew, little boys from the neighbourhood – despite the satisfaction of clean white sheets on the line. She breathes them in: for her it’s the smell of salvation – clean washing, scrubbed lino, cotton pressed hot by the iron. From the hoist she can see women in other backyards heaving washing into the sunshine, or bending to pull weeds from damp soil. Sometimes this gladdens her, the communal rituals of women. But not today. She turns back into the laundry, an ache building within her.

She pummels clothes in the concrete tubs and readies them for the wringer, twisting and flattening and guiding them through the rollers. At least once her fingers gain traction and she reefs them out with seconds to spare. There have been days when she wasn’t so nimble, the rollers catching and bruising her fingers, black and blue. She’d been grateful they weren’t broken.

Outside, the boys’ game has built to a crescendo. They shriek like banshees, a wild sound, and she can tell they’re running, from the breathless laughs, louder and louder. She steps outside to check on them. And catches her own breath. There on the line, on the spanking white sheets: the travesty of mud, great gobs of it. As she watches, a boy hurls another; it smacks against fabric. They all screech, hysterical with the joy and terror of it; they run, bend to scoop mud and run again, hurling it at each other and missing, their filthy little faces alight. There’s the slap of wet earth against skin and wet cotton.

The weight in her shifts dangerously. She’s quickly upon them, barely aware she’s moved at all. Aware only of this sullying, this rampant carelessness. She shouts at the neighbours’ boys to get home. Their faces whiten beneath the dirt and they vanish. As they do, Ashley slips beneath the low stumps of the workshop and Andrew follows. Their fear, the shaking in their skinny, dirt-crusted legs does nothing to diminish her rage.

They’ll never forget it: their mother – her face, her whole person, transfigured. Screaming at them to come out, it will be worse if they don’t. The belting she delivers with hands she’s lost control of, or that’s how it seems, the red welts that stay on their legs for hours. And this: their own distress, not just at the rare punishment, and their mother’s face, but at the tears that stream down her cheeks as she smacks them, the tears that match theirs. Later, remembering, they’ll both wonder who hurt the most.

By now the children sense the sadness that tightens their mother’s face so many mornings; they sense but cannot know the subterranean emotions and the pain. So they do what many children do when they’re confused: they take her pain as their own. Because surely, if she is unhappy, it is something to do with them. If something is wrong, they must have done it. So all they can do now is make up for it somehow, for what they’ve done or haven’t done, what they are or aren’t enough of.

They don’t know how close this is to the truth. They aren’t enough. When you have five children and there are only four beneath your roof, running about the yard, then four is not enough. I wonder now that she didn’t explode more often. Not just in the privacy of her home but outside, at the corner shop, the doctor’s surgery, in the street, anywhere there were children and idle conversation and someone blithely asked her: And how many children do you have? The betrayal of numbers, whatever her reply.