17

WITH THE BABY news off my chest, I’m hoping we’ll have a pretty good Easter.

Julie, Mick and their family are going to arrive on Easter Saturday and stay for two nights. Mum and Dad decide that it’s best not to tell them about my pregnancy until later on. At first I don’t really understand the reason for the secrecy, but Mum explains.

‘Julie’s always had an opinion about you going to Oakholme College. It upsets her. She says that we’re disrespecting our culture by sending you there, trying to turn you into something you’re not – blah, blah, blah. But I think Julie’s jealous of you.’

‘Oh, Mum, she’s not. . .’

‘No, listen. I think she is. I think she wishes she could do something better than bake bread at the back of Coles, and she’s ticked off that you are on your way. I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that there’s been a bump in the road.’

‘But who cares, Mum?’

‘I do. She might call your school and tell them, just to spoil things for you.’

‘She wouldn’t do that. Would she?’

‘Julie’s a great person to have around when things are going badly. When your life’s going to hell in a hand basket, she loves to help out. But when your life’s going well, it’s much harder for her to take.’

‘But she seems like such a nice person.’

‘And she is. Don’t get me wrong. At least she cares enough about you to have an opinion. But not everyone who loves you wants the best for you. Some people want to keep you in your place so that they can stay in theirs.’

I don’t really get where Mum’s coming from, but I agree to keep things quiet. This applies to my friends around Barraba, too. Not that I have that many left – just two out of four I used to go around with at the time Jamie died. Melinda is dead (she died in a car accident) and Kiara is missing (she disappeared with her deadbeat boyfriend). The other two are still in Barraba. Ashley’s a young mother who lives with her boyfriend in the same street as her parents. My neighbour Taylor is the only one who’s made it to Year 12.

I feel like such a snob when I admit this to myself, but I have a tolerance span of about an hour at a time for both of these girls. Being with them is exhausting because I feel like I have to cut myself in half intellectually to come anywhere near to fitting in with them. They rake over the same small, smelly gossip every time I see them. The most exciting thing that’s happened to either of them is Ashley’s baby, Bella.

Before I tumbled down the rabbit hole of pregnancy and babies, I had been finding Ashley increasingly hard to take. This holidays, though, when my old friends swing by to visit (Taylor just has to walk through a gate in our shared fence), I’m full of warmth and conversation, and it’s completely genuine. I play with eighteen-month-old Bella, interrogate Ashley about sleeping and feeding, and even congratulate her on the great job she’s doing.

‘It’s the hardest job in the world,’ says Ashley. ‘And the most important.’

‘I’m sure Shauna will find a harder job,’ says Taylor, who has a habit of swinging at me every now and then. She could have gotten the Indigenous scholarship, but she refused to want it. ‘Splitting the atom or some such crap.’

I pull a fake greaser at her. ‘I think you’ll find that someone’s already done that Tay-Tay. I’m only interested in breaking new ground. I’m going to split the electron.’

Taylor scrunches up her button nose. ‘Is that even possible?’

‘I don’t do physics. You tell me.’

Taylor’s eyes narrow as she considers whether I’m having her on.

‘I don’t think so. It’s a single particle. There’s nothing to split.’

There you go, Taylor is better at science than me. But I’m guessing she’ll probably take all her intelligence and spark and funnel it into a job at a petrol station and a guy who doesn’t appreciate her. Hopefully she’ll prove me wrong.

In the end, Mum does almost all the cooking for our Easter Sunday lunch. All I have to offer is inspiration and two desserts that require no cooking. I make a Toblerone cheesecake and a lemon meringue dessert using shop-bought meringues and a jar of lemon curd. Mum roasts three chickens and tray after tray of vegetables. Unaccustomed to the workload, she heaves and sweats around the kitchen all Sunday morning, and collapses on the lounge after lunch. Luckily the Kiprioses (Julie’s husband, Mick, is Greek) have brought loads of cold meat and bread with them, and Mum doesn’t have to do any more cooking until Monday.

I spend the weekend hanging out with my cousins and their squeezes-du-jour. I’m a little miffed that Andrew’s new girlfriend ‘Frizz’ (who doesn’t even have frizzy hair but whose name is Caitlin Frismond) is in attendance. She shows me a furry Easter bunny toy he gave her, which has RED HOT LOVERS sewn across its chest in shiny red thread.

‘It’s true!’ she says with a sleazy lurch of her eyebrows.

This dumb present provokes a shamefully sharp stab of jealousy in me. It’s not just that I’d prefer to have Andrew to myself. It’s that Nathan isn’t around to give me cringe-worthy gifts, which I’d dearly love to receive.

I shoot Andrew a withering look, which he blushingly shrugs off. He still hasn’t lost his hallowed status as My Favourite Cousin. I can’t help but adore him, silly girlfriend or not. He’s an acquired taste – old fashioned and masculine. Not everyone takes to him, but I love him because he’s smart and he doesn’t suffer fools. Not unless he’s sleeping with them.

At lunch on Monday, Julie tells us that Andrew’s been offered another promotion, but it depends on whether he’ll do a business degree, which his employer’s offered to pay for. It’s obvious that Julie’s proud of Andrew, but she’s also dead-against him doing the degree.

‘People in our family don’t go to university,’ she says.

‘If the company’s paying for you, why not?’ says Dad.

‘I was really bad at maths at school,’ says Andrew. ‘How am I going to do all the maths involved in accounting and finance?’

‘I’m good at maths,’ I tell him. ‘I could help you.’

‘You’ve got enough on your plate, Shauna,’ Dad says softly.

Julie throws her head back and laughs, high and loud. ‘Oh, Shauna, you’re funny,’ she titters.

‘What’s so hilarious?’ I ask, more confused than offended.

‘Do you really think . . .’ she scoffs, shaking her head, but she doesn’t finish the question. Instead she turns to Andrew. ‘It’s just a piece of paper. It’s not worth anything. Your skills and experience are the important thing.’

I start watching Mum, finally having some insight into her warning about Julie. Mum’s looking between Julie and Mick. Mick’s a soft-spoken, hardworking man who often gets steamrolled by Julie’s brassy personality.

‘What do you think, Mick?’ Mum asks.

‘I don’t see the harm,’ he says cautiously.

‘The harm is that he fails,’ says Julie, gesturing wildly. She’s still smiling, but she’s almost shouting now. ‘Why fail if you don’t have to? Especially if you’re on the kind of salary Andrew’s on.’ She looks at Mum as she mock-whispers, ‘Six figures and he’s only twenty-three.’ Then she continues at normal volume. ‘There are plenty of successful people who didn’t waste years of their life pushing pencils around at university.’

‘I’m going to university next year,’ I say, aware that I’m stirring the pot.

‘Well, I hope that works out well for you, Shauna,’ says Julie. ‘I hope they treat you the way you deserve.’

Though my aunt’s tone isn’t taunting or even all that insincere, I think I finally have a perspective on what Mum was saying about her earlier. A part of Julie is hopeful that I’ll fail. And not just me, but anyone who breaks the mould that has held her in shape since she started making decisions for herself. It’s the mould that she’s forced her own children to fit.

After lunch, I manage to prise the dreaded Frizz from Andrew’s side and get him alone on the back porch. I want to encourage him to do the business degree. It’s impossible to turn him around, though.

‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to do it. I don’t know why Mum keeps rattling on about it.’

‘Because she’s proud of you.’

He shrugs.

‘Maybe she doesn’t want you to do it because she’s afraid you’ll do too well?’ I suggest.

Andrew shakes his head. ‘She’s just looking out for me, and I think she’s right. You stick your head too far out and there’s always someone with a machete waiting to hack it right off.’

‘But who’s got the machete, Andrew?’

‘The bosses. White men.’

This is not the way Andrew usually talks. Generally he’s reluctant to blame white people for anything.

‘So why don’t you become one of the bosses?’

Andrew takes a long time to answer. All the while he’s shaking his head. ‘Life is not like boarding school, Shauna,’ he says eventually.

‘I’m not an idiot, you know. I realise that. And thank God it’s not like boarding school.’

‘Wait till you get out into the real world. Then you’ll understand. Everything is stacked against us. They’ll let us come only so far. And anyway, who wants to be like them?’

‘And you’ve come as far as you’re ever going to? At age twenty-three?’

He pauses for even longer this time.

‘I reckon I’ve done pretty well,’ he says finally.

‘Well, there’s no doubt about that,’ I agree. I know that I’ve pushed him as far as I should. Any further and it will be none of my bloody business. I drop it for another subject. With a sheepish smile, I hand him the envelope he sent me with the five hundred bucks in it. Andrew looks confused.

‘What? You’re not going to Paris anymore?’

‘I’m gonna leave it to another year.’

He pushes the envelope back in my direction. ‘Keep it. Go and buy something you want. A phone.’

‘I don’t need a phone.’

‘Then keep it for uni next year.’

‘I don’t want it, Andrew. I really don’t. Why can’t you just respect my wishes?’

Andrew laughs bitterly, stuffing the envelope into his jacket pocket. ‘Why can’t you just respect mine?’ he retorts.

We exchange fed-up smiles and settle on the porch as the sun sets over the back fence.

‘Hey,’ I say eventually, looking down at the grass, ‘I’m not as perfect as I seem.’

Andrew smiles wryly.

‘Oh, you don’t seem that perfect to me, Shauna,’ he teases. ‘There are plenty of things I could point out, but I’m much too polite.’

‘And I suppose Frizz is perfect?’

‘She’s pretty great.’

‘So is it serious between you guys?’

He gives me a sidelong look.

‘I’d say so, yeah.’

I take a moment to summon the courage for my next question.

‘What would you do if she got pregnant?’

‘Shauna! I don’t wanna have this conversation with you!’

‘I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about pregnancy. What would you do?’

‘Well, we’ve worked out that one leads to the other. And we’re careful. So I don’t have to ask myself that question.’ He elbows my arm. ‘Next topic, please.’

I’d like to confide in him, but his prudish, brotherly attitude just knocks all the will out of me. If I can’t tell someone apart from my parents who I love and trust at home, who will I be able to tell at school? Dread of the new term at Oakholme seeps in and soaks me to the bone.

While the Kiprioses are still staying with us, I sneak onto Mum’s phone and plunge to the hilt into Keli Street-Hughes’s gloriously unprotected social media accounts. She’s in Margaret River, Western Australia, staying on a vineyard with her extended family. There are lots of gastro-porn shots of fancy food on huge, white plates, and people huddled with their arms around each other on a background of endless rows of grapevines running up green hills. I envy the girls and women in the photos their empty wombs and squeaky-clean consciences. For once it’s not their wealth and impressive friends and followers lists that bother me.

I get so wretched that I even look up Andrew’s girlfriend, and when I find a photo of her in an embrace with another man, I take it straight to my cousin, pulling him into the kitchen by his shirtsleeve.

‘She’s two-timing you!’ I shout-whisper.

Andrew combines a deep sigh with a soaring eye roll. I shrink.

‘Is that her ex-boyfriend?’ I whisper, mortified.

‘Her brother,’ says Andrew at normal volume. ‘What’s going on with you, Shauna? Why are you in such a funk?’

He snatches Mum’s phone from my hand.

‘Jackie!’ he calls to the next room, holding the phone out of my reach. ‘Your naughty daughter has been caught playing on your phone!’ I jump up and down, trying to get it back, laughing uncontrollably, and the sounds of my cousin and then my mother cracking up fill me with joy.

It takes a few days after Julie & Co leave for me to start feeling better physically. There’s no explaining it, but the morning sickness goes. I just wake up one day feeling completely normal. After a few months of wanting to vomit myself inside out, normal is better than great. It’s ecstasy, and it makes me feel more positive in general.

On the train trip back to Sydney, I spend a long time thinking about the person inside me, whether it’s a boy or a girl, and what it will look like. I’m about four months gone now, but you wouldn’t know it. My belly has always stuck out a little and it doesn’t seem to protrude any further than usual. The only part of my anatomy that’s exploding out of its garments is my boobs, but that’s hardly something to complain about. No one’s going to call me out for having too much cleavage.

Now that I feel so good and I can imagine my foetus as a real person, I can’t believe that I ever considered having an abortion, let alone made it all the way into a clinic. I wonder how many other girls like me let their morning sickness and crazy hormones tip them into the well-greased abortion pipeline.

And I imagine how hard it would have been to say no if my parents had been real dicks about it or my best friend hadn’t been so supportive. It would have been impossible. For all the wretched cant about women’s choices, there would have been no choice.