One Way or Another (19 page)

By the thirteenth of February I was irritable and impatient. The Artist had not been in class that day and I'd gone to the maternity ward in case she'd had her baby. She was due a few weeks after I was. But she wasn't there, and I realised with dismay that I didn't even have her phone number. I arrived home to an answering machine message from Dr Oscar; he'd induce me the following Tuesday, he said, if nothing happened in the interim.

And then I received a phone call from the wardrobe department of
The Clean Machine
.

‘Hi, Nikki, this is the wardrobe mistress ... just quickly, can I get your measurements? Chest, waist and hips.'

I don't know if she heard me laugh. What should I say – 200/700/150? I decided to project a nice set of optimistic post-pregnancy statistics and went with 36/25/34. I couldn't have known how naïvely hopeful that was.

Billy came home from work with flowers to cheer me up.

‘Hey, gorgeous,' he smiled as he boiled the kettle for yet another cup of rosehip tea, ‘The Angels are playing tonight for black Friday. The gig's called Howling at the Hordern. You know, Friday the thirteenth and all that. I've got passes. You could say hi to Bob.' I could tell he was itching to go. I had nothing better to do and figured a good blast of rock and roll might be just what the baby needed to get things moving.

‘Sure,' I nodded. ‘Let's go.'

I'm sure I was the most pregnant woman ever to stand stage-side, next to an enormous amp. Doc Neeson dedicated ‘We've Got to Get Out of This Place' to my unborn baby – but despite the mega-decibels, he or she stayed firmly in utero. The band played well but Doc seemed tired and Bob appeared tense. I was starting to look at rock gigs with a jaded eye. It was really just a bunch of blokes, gyrating and making a lot of noise. I wanted to get home to bed to finish my book.

*

Nothing did happen in the interim, and on Tuesday morning we woke at 6 a.m. I nervously packed my toiletries into the top of my overnight bag, which had been sitting ready by the front door for over a month.

‘Happy birthday, my darling.' Billy kissed my ear. It was my twenty-first birthday. Fate had a sense of humour. Maybe today would see me finally grow up.

St Margaret's was a private hospital. I was admitted as a public patient but with my own private doctor attending. We'd saved relentlessly for the room, which cost a whopping three hundred dollars a night. I might as well have given birth in the presidential suite at the Hilton. Up on the third floor, we were ushered into a delivery suite. While I waited for a nurse to come, I wandered around, looking at the alien furnishings. There was a small plastic crib on a trolley with a blanket folded neatly at the base. I touched it and thrilled at the idea that my son or daughter would soon be snuggled under it. There were oxygen tanks and masks and a machine with all sorts of leads and buttons and lights next to the bed. A drip was set up on a stand at the head of the crisply linened metallic bed. Billy had gone off to the cafeteria to find some breakfast, leaving me to endure the humiliation of an enema and a shave.

We'd spent months discussing possible names for our child. I liked Brittany for a girl. I'd heard that Lyn Baron, the super groupie from that first Australian Crawl gig, had gone on to marry Christopher Atkins from
The Blue Lagoon
, and that they'd called their first daughter Brittany. It was a province of France and I thought it a beautiful word. Elizabeth was another more old-fashioned contender. I was a little obsessed with Elizabeth I, Tudor queen of England. Boys' names had been harder to settle upon. I liked Oscar but Billy hated it. The one name we did agree on was Benjamin. I loved Biblical names, and this one wasn't as common as Matthew or Joshua, which were topping all the name charts in 1987. Michael Jackson's ‘Ben' – written for a giant rat in the horror movie of the same name
– made me cry the first time I heard it. And of course, there was Benny's.

Billy returned to the delivery room with a
Countdown
magazine for me and a Snickers bar for himself, just as the nurse slipped a cannula into my wrist and attached the drip, which began to drizzle synthetic oxytocin into my bloodstream. Doctor Oscar appeared with his flashing smile and wished me a happy birthday.

‘I'll give you your present later today. A beautiful baby.' He winked and went to attend to a patient in the next room. She was already making noises that sounded unpleasantly like pain.

Within a handful of minutes I felt a strong tightening in my abdomen and a sensation like someone had drawn a wire about my belly and pulled. It wasn't exactly painful, just uncomfortable. Another nurse appeared with something that looked like a crochet hook.

‘Okay, sweetie. I'm going to break your waters so that Bub can get a bit more motivated to come out. This usually speeds things up a bit.'

She got me to flop my knees apart and poked around inside me until she found the cervix. Then she gave the baby-bag a nick. It was not pleasant at all and with frightening suddenness, a veritable bucket of fluid rushed from between my legs. The uncomfortable tightening sensations grew in intensity and began to sting.

‘Just breathe,' Billy reminded me, as if I were likely to forget. He held my hand and watched the machine beside the bed. I had a belt wrapped around my giant girth, monitoring the length and magnitude of my contractions.

‘Whoa,' Billy sounded impressed. ‘That got up to sixty-three.'

Three hours passed, punctuated by increasingly acute pain, but I prided myself on my stoic resilience. The machine was registering over one hundred. The woman in the next room was groaning and grunting and sounded like a bad porno actress doing a very over-the-top rendition of an orgasm.

‘If I end up sounding like that, gag me,' I laughed, before grimacing at another pain.

Dr Oscar strode into the room, all smiles, and checked my dilation.

‘Only two centimetres,' he frowned. ‘You're going to get too tired. This might take a while. I suggest you have an epidural.'

I was dubious. Mum had warned me that she'd read about women being permanently paralysed from the waist down. But Dr Oscar dismissed my fears.

‘I wouldn't suggest it if I wasn't one hundred per cent sure you needed it. It's completely safe.'

I trusted him implicitly and agreed.

‘It might relax you enough to get some dilation happening.' He smiled and nodded to the nurse to call the anaesthetist. At that moment, after a guttural howl from next door, the feeble cry of a baby crept into the room.

Sitting perfectly still on the edge of the bed, I bit my lip as the anaesthetist gave me a local anaesthetic before inserting the spinal block.

‘Holy mother of God, look at the size of that thing,' Billy whistled. ‘Nik, it looks like a bloody horse needle.'

‘Thanks for that,' I mumbled into my chest, curling into a prayer that all would be well.

Within a minute I could no longer feel my toes or my legs. Billy kept pinching me, thinking it was funny. I tried to read
Countdown
but found it hard to concentrate. The contractions were still coming fast and furiously according to the machine beside the bed, although I felt nothing but a dull tightening. Eventually I fell asleep.

Two hours later, I woke with an odd sensation between my legs. A pressure was exerting itself against my colon and I thought perhaps I needed to go to the toilet. My face felt hot and a little voice in the back of my head whispered that my baby was trying to evacuate. A nurse doing the rounds came in for a routine check of my progress.

‘I'm fine. Nothing happening here,' I hurried to inform her, suddenly terrified that the birth was imminent. She did a quick inspection of my nether-regions and grinned up at me.

‘You're ready to push. I can see baby's head.' She called on the intercom for Doctor Oscar and everyone seemed suddenly animated.

Billy's face was flushed and he put aside the tuna sandwich he'd ordered from the cafeteria for lunch. The nurse got me into a sitting position and had me pull my knees up to either side of my chest. I needed assistance as I was not completely in charge of my legs yet. Billy held one leg and the nurse the other. Dr Oscar arrived and put on a facemask and gloves.

‘Showtime,' he winked at me.

I pushed until I was red in the face. The epidural had taken the edge off the pain, but had worn off enough for me to have control over the pushing. Between contractions I panted and the nurse mopped my brow.

‘You're doing great,' Billy whispered in my ear, kissing my forehead.

‘There's the head,' Doctor Oscar announced and Billy dropped my leg to get a better view.

‘It looks like a purple walnut,' Billy frowned.

‘Do you want a mirror?' asked the nurse, beaming at me.

‘Dear God, no,' I answered without hesitation. A powerful sensation tore through my body, impelling me to push until I felt I was turning inside out. A guttural roar from some primal place filled the room and the intense burning between my legs gave way to the slippery sensation that a giant wet fish had slithered from my loins. And then relief. No pain. Nothing.

The moment hung in the air like a freeze frame. Billy's face glowed. I held my breath. Waiting. And then with a frail bleating noise, everything began to move again.

‘A son. A beautiful little boy,' Doctor Oscar announced. Billy and I burst into tears as the wet, purple creature was placed on my belly. With tiny hooded grey eyes my little boy blinked at me, trying to focus. Through a curtain of tears I reached out and held his tiny fist. Ben.

Billy leaned in and kissed me, blinking back tears and stroking the slippery pink skin. Our son had a glistening film of fair hair on his head and he licked his lips with the tiniest of tongues. Doctor Oscar helped Billy to cut the umbilical cord. The baby was just perfect.

My life seemed to flash before my eyes and I watched as any need for validation through sex or drugs dissolved into a clear and pure sunrise on a brand-new day. I suddenly understood how deeply my mother must love me. My mother, my self.

All night I held my son, just looking at him sleeping peacefully as the breeze from the warm Darlinghurst night played on our skin. I watched him twitch the corner of his mouth while he slept and I put him to my breast and fed him from my body. We fell into a rhythm as old as time and he squeezed my finger tightly as he sucked.

Billy went out with Jackie and Brian to celebrate.

On Friday, before we left the hospital, I let Billy take Ben for his heel-prick test while I wandered down to the antenatal class. I was still a bit sore and my belly felt like a sack of mashed potato. The Artist was absent again and I was worried.

When the teacher saw me she raised her hand; the whole class turned and, seeing me minus my giant girth, burst into a round of applause. I gave a little self-conscious bow. The teacher came over and took my hand. When I asked if she had seen my friend, she led me out into the corridor.

‘Her mother died and she flew back to England. The doctor had to give her permission to fly. She'll be staying there for the birth of her baby.'

This was sad news. I had learned so much from her and from the book she gave me, I wanted to thank her. And I wanted to see my portrait!

Back at home, Billy and I leapt into parenthood with gusto. Billy was a warm and attentive Dad, so proud to have a little boy, and Ben was an easy baby. He fed well and slept well and stayed happy in between. I would drag his little bouncer around the house with me and talk to him while I did the housework.

I began a journal and found that I loved writing in it at the end of each day.
My Mother / My Self
had opened up so many hidden corners of my psyche and I was starting to understand that my adolescent sexual adventures were not at all deviant, but a natural and healthy part of growing up. I had gone on a book-buying spree, discovering a whole new field of literature on the ‘self' and on what it meant to be a woman. I realised that I had been acting only semi-consciously for much of my life. Maybe it was becoming a mother, or turning twenty-one, but I felt like I was experiencing a psychological growth spurt. I felt the old fog of shame lifting to make way for a more confident and self-assured version of myself.

I looked in the mirror and saw something in my eyes that I hadn't seen before. I saw my mother looking back at me and I loved her and myself and forgave us both for having drifted apart. I saw that her unhappiness had made me feel that she was unhappy with me. I had made it all about me, as teenagers are wont to do, and adopted the role of the disappointing daughter. But now I understood that her unhappiness was something quite separate from me. I couldn't make her happy. I couldn't make either of my parents proud of me. That had to come from within them. And so I began to let go of my need for their approval, something that had been so fundamentally necessary to me for so long.

It was liberating, as though I had dropped a heavy load that I'd been carrying around behind me. Writing in my journal one night, I addressed the God of my youth: ‘You don't have to forgive me, Father, for I have never sinned at all and never will, because sin is something that belongs to you, not to me. I have nothing to confess.' Keeping a journal helped me to make sense of my new thoughts and preserved the new memories I was making. Without it, I felt, my daily life might sink to the bottom of the sea and dissolve.

*

Filming for
The Clean Machine
was approaching and I was pleased to see my belly shrinking. My breasts, however, had swollen to twice their size, which was extreme for a big-boobed girl.

‘They will shrink when you stop feeding, won't they?' Billy asked. He said he'd never seen anything like them, except perhaps in a freak-show porn movie. I had nipples the size of saucers and my bra size was a J. J for juggernauts.

When the first day of filming arrived, I expressed a bottle of milk, left it with Billy and set out for the Botany set. I only had three scenes and we would film them all on the same day. I had been so nervous that morning, I'd considered pulling out. The thought of showing my lactating boobs to Grigor Taylor – not to mention a national television audience – was more than disconcerting.

I arrived on set and met Grigor. He was charming and just as good-looking in person as on TV. Our first scene went well, although my projected measurements were somewhat out and my yellow dress stretched uncomfortably, squashing my breasts into one enormous ball. But I scored my first screen kiss with someone I'd watched on television as a young girl, which was thrilling and a little bit creepy all at the same time.

Next was our bedroom scene. I stripped and slipped into a robe. The set would be a ‘closed set', but that still left the actor, director, cameraman, lighting guy and sound guy. When I finally dropped the robe, I couldn't miss the dumbfounded expressions on their faces. I perched on the end of the bed and shook my head, a smile creeping onto my lips. Ken was filming me from behind as promised – but he had me sitting in front of a mirror. Now, that was cheating! But everyone was so business-like, my modesty soon disappeared and I got down to the business of acting. I felt good about my performance and Ken made nice noises about how talented I was. Grigor looked a little pale when I started leaking unexpectedly; as the milk geysers began to spout, I swallowed my pride and asked for a towel.

The show would air a month after editing. I hoped my performance would redeem me somewhat from the ignominy of
Dead End Drive-In
.

*

At home, I began thinking about taking little Ben north. Mum was dying to meet him. We had bought a disposable camera and sent her some photos, but she wanted to hold him and play with him. My little brother David was apparently chuffed to be an uncle at such an early age. And I was ready to go home as an adult woman.