It had started to drizzle. Kate sat at the wheel of the ute, the windscreen wipers sighing across glass. Nell imitated their screech-swipe repetitions with the sway of her head. Annoyed, Kate swore at the traffic lights winking red. She cursed herself for having such a shocking hangover and for once again picking up an anonymous bloke so publicly. Her housemate, Tabby, was right, as usual. She would be late for work. Horribly late.
‘Sssshit, shit,’ mimicked Nell in the back. Kate gave her a stern glance.
Outside the day-care centre in Orange’s leafy city street, Kate hoisted Nell onto her hip and slung a dusty nappy bag over her shoulder. She reached to open the high child-proof gate, fingers grappling with the stubborn plastic catch. At last it opened with a whine. Buggered if she could get the hang of those things. Before she went in, Kate panted a few breaths into her palm then inhaled deeply through her nose. Did she still smell of grog from the night before? On the drive over she’d been having flashbacks of Clothesline Man and his stupefied face when she’d given him his marching orders. Now she was burping up after-rum bile. Fiona the childcarer would surely notice.
The shouts of children grew louder as Kate made her way inside, ducking under wonky colourful fishes that swam on nylon threads from the ceiling, as if fishermen lurked in the rafters.
‘I see you’re admiring our fish theme,’ sang Fiona brightly. ‘Oh, look. You’ve done Nellie’s hair with gel. Very pretty,’ she said, taking the bag from Kate’s shoulder.
‘Ah. No. I think you’ll find that’s orange juice and Vegemite toast,’ Kate said.
‘Isn’t Mummy a trick?’ Fiona said as Kate picked a glob of chewed-up bread from Nell’s curly almost-white hair. ‘What time will you collect her tonight?’
But Kate knew what she meant. Don’t be late again.
‘Same time as usual,’ Kate said.
As Fiona reached for Nell, Nell’s rose-pink bottom lip began to pout and she turned her head away. Wrapping her arms around Kate, she kicked her little legs and screamed.
‘Nooooo! Don’t want to!’
‘Come on, Nell. Mummy’s got to go to work.’
‘Nooo!’
‘Remember what Mummy told you? Mum has to work to pay the rent. And to buy clothes and things. And food … so you can throw it on the floor. I’ll be back soon. I promise.’
Prising Nell’s arms from around her neck, Kate passed the sobbing child to Fiona. God, why wasn’t it getting any easier, Kate wondered?
‘Look over here, Nell. We’ve got a new birdie. Do you want to see his pretty yellow feathers?’
Fiona winked at Kate and began to walk away. Kate tried to shut out Nell’s sobs that came in jagged gasping breaths. A lump rose to her throat. She wanted to hug and kiss Nell and hold her, and never let her go. She wanted to fall down on the floor, right here, right now, and sob into her little girl’s hair.
I’m still a child too, Kate wanted to scream. And I want my mummy! Where’s my mummy? But instead, she turned and quickly walked away.
As she sat outside the day-care centre in the ute, trying to settle herself, Kate remembered the blustery bitter spring days on her Aunt Maureen’s farm on the outskirts of Orange. She had just turned twenty and her stomach was leading the way wherever she walked. She felt like the round dome of skin on the front of her body belonged to someone else. She was seven months pregnant and five months into her first-year studies at the agricultural college. And she was missing her mother every single day.
She seemed to spend most of her time at Aunt Maureen’s kitchen table with her university texts spread out before her and her hand absently roving in circles over the mound of her unborn child. But when she wasn’t bowing her head over an assignment or hiding her pregnant body behind the desk in the university library, Kate was out on the farm, trying hard to conjure the paddocks of home from her memory. She’d offered to check the ewes and lambs for Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tony every morning and evening, just to get away.
As she eased her body awkwardly through the taut fence-wires Kate found her centre of gravity shifting each day. Despite her strong legs, she’d tackle the hills only to find her energy draw away from her. She’d feel her breath catch in the claws of her rib cage, not sure if it was the growing baby or panic that made it so hard to draw air into her lungs.
One very bleak day, when the clouds seemed to hug the neat grapevine-streaks on the hillside, Kate sank onto the cold pasture and put her head in her hands. Pregnant. At twenty. In this strange countryside. Longing for home. Her mother. Her life. Her island. This was not how it was supposed to turn out.
Here on the Tablelands of New South Wales, there was no outlook across the tumblesome grey water of Bass Strait. No sea breeze to bring her the salty freshness of home. Just rolling, naked hills and bedraggled clusters of bushland, sedated with heat in the summer and sulking beneath fog in the winter. She found herself constantly comparing it to the wildness of the angled coastal scrub that clung to the wind-bashed hills of her father’s east-coast farm.
From where she sat, Kate spotted a grey blob in the distance, much like a stump or a boulder on a sloping hillside. She knew it was one of her uncle’s ewes and that the old girl was down, cast on her round-bellied side with her hooves stuck in the air. Straining and straining to push the lamb from her soft pink folds. Kate gagged at the thought. As she hauled herself up and trudged over to the sheep, morning sickness washed through her like a wave. Morning sickness that the doctor had said would go at thirteen weeks. A queasiness she endured along with the reflux, the rashes, the aches in her joints and the intense itchiness of her skin. But even the sheepdogs having a crap on the tussocks still made her gag … just the thought of their slimy turds.
Kneeling awkwardly at the rear end of the ewe, she slid her hand in, hoping to find hooves. Not a head, nor a tail, but hooves. Once she had the tiny bony black ankles in her grasp she muttered something comforting to the ewe, then pulled. The ewe let out a strangled baritone bleat as pain ripped through her body and her legs jerked straight. As Kate pulled, she watched the lamb’s head and shoulders slip through, wet in its sac, so large it seemed to split the ewe’s pelvis and vagina in half.
God, this will be me soon, Kate thought as she heaved again. She listened to the ewe grunt and saw the glazed look of shock pass over her yellow-grass eyes. The lamb slid out, dead, its head elongated and grotesque inside the translucent birth sac. Its tongue poking out, blue. Its body still wet and warm, streaked with globs of yellow membrane and blood. Steam rose from its side into the clear morning air, and with it the smell of rotting meat. It had died inside the ewe days ago.
Kate wiped her slimy hands on the ewe’s flanks and thought about the baby fluttering with life inside her. She grabbed the ewe’s wool above her bony hips and hauled her hind legs up.
‘C’mon, girl. Try to stand.’
Kate watched the ewe totter off, dark crimson placenta trailing from her, her head down, giddy with pain, legs shaking. The dead lamb forgotten for the moment, from shock.
Kate picked the lamb up by the back legs and began to carry it home to throw in the incinerator. As she walked, its head bumped along the ground. It was a big ram lamb.
Kate thought of her mother, and she thought again of death. The way death had taken years to steal Laney. Cancer stripping the flesh slowly from her mother’s bones and sucking the colour from her skin. Skin that became so dry and brittle it rustled like rice paper when Kate gently rolled Laney over in the bed to wash her back or change the sheets. Towards the end, the only place Kate found light and life had been in Laney’s eyes. Only there could she recognise the mother she had known.
After a while, the hocks of the heavy lamb bit into Kate’s knuckles. She couldn’t just sling it in the bush like she would at home. There were no Tassie devils in this countryside to crunch through the bones of the dead, leaving just a scattering of lamb’s teeth or a tiny ivory hoof in the bracken ferns. She looked down at the speckled little lamb and wondered why she didn’t feel sad for it. She imagined having her own stillborn baby out there in the paddock. How would she feel to lose it?
Kate’s shoulder was aching now from carrying the lamb and her breath was coming quickly. Breathing for two. She thought about the way her mother had heaved for air when she last climbed the stairs to the attic at Bronty. She’d wanted to see it one final time. To feel it. Kate now worried what her father’s new wife might do to it. Had Annabelle been up there, hauling down the old hinged stairs with the hand-worn rope? Had the attic whispered its secrets to Annabelle? Secrets that it had held for four generations of Bronty women. Surely, Kate thought, that woman from Sydney wouldn’t dare touch what was kept there. Would she?
She pictured Annabelle, with her whitened teeth, enamel nails and chemical-blonde hair. Kate wished that she’d got a ladder and with her pocketknife cut the rope short so the ceiling door remained shut and out of reach to Annabelle. That way her father’s new wife might forget the room that sat above the house and it could remain cut off, like an island. Perhaps she would ask Will, the next time she phoned him, if he had ever thought to do the same.
Back at Maureen and Tony’s farmyard, Kate flung the lamb into the whispering ash that lay swirling at the bottom of the 44 in the spring winds. She’d burn it later. As she stomped back to the warmth of her aunt’s kitchen she picked at the crusted afterbirth on her reddened hands before plunging them under a hot tap.
At the table, she tried to force down Weet-Bix with warm milk. She had an hour before she had to be at uni, where she would waddle into the austere lecture theatre. As she sat in the front row, not game to make a show of hauling her large body up the stairs, she’d feel the eyes of the other students clamp on her and she’d feel herself almost die inside from shame.
She’d worn her Wrangler jeans as long as she could, until her leather belt had run out of holes. The fabric of her RM Williams T-shirts had stretched out in front of her, making the horns on the Long Horn logo extra long. And when, finally, she’d given in and bought maternity clothes, she still wouldn’t abandon her Canadian cowgirl boots even though she struggled to shove her swollen feet inside their leather confines. A pregnant girl in cowgirl boots. She’d laugh at her image in the mirror. She recalled how she’d stood drunk at the bar in her new maternity clothes, making fun of herself, showing off the wide stretch of elastic that rose up and over her entire bulging gut. Boasting it was all beer in there, not a baby.
The boys had looked on incredulously while the girls laughed. Yet she could tell they were shocked. Shocked that she was drinking. Swigging on cans as if she didn’t care. Shocked that she was their age and pregnant in their midst. Shocked that she thought she belonged.
Now, Kate looked sadly at the cheery yellow and blue flowers painted on the bricks outside the day-care centre. She sighed. She knew she didn’t belong to the world in there either. She fired up the ute’s engine and floored it, revving away down the street.