The Best Thing (20 page)

‘Got it looking nice in here.’ Pug comes in and sits on the bed. ‘Mind if I move in?’

‘Sure, go ahead.’ I look up at him. ‘Are you serious?’ I ask, seriously.

‘Nah. Well …’

‘Well,
yes,
you are.’

‘I think about it, that’s all.’ He examines the palms of his hands, then looks up. ‘I wonder what
you
want.’

‘Oh, so do I, don’t worry.’ I push in the last few books, kneel up and walk on my knees to him. ‘What do
you
want?’ I say.

‘I’ve got it already. More. Bloody hell.’ He puts a hand on the baby.

‘What do you want for later, though? In terms of where we live, things like that?’

He shrugs. ‘Geez, Mel, as long as it’s “we”, I don’t give a rat’s where we live.’

‘Oh, well, that’s a nice way of putting it,’ I laugh.

‘Honest, I don’t care. I don’t care if we’re in a
cardboard box
!’

‘I mean realistically. God, Pug, you’re such a romantic! Get your feet down here on the ground.’

He crosses his ankles behind me, puts his hands on my shoulders. ‘Mate, if you want me here, I’ll stay here till you kick me out. If you want me over in Newtown, that’s where I’ll be. If you want me to bugger off completely … well, dunno about that one—’

‘I don’t think I want that one.’

‘Anyhow … pretty well any other thing you want, I can come at it. Just say.’

‘Do I have to decide right away?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, I’m happy just cruisin’ along like this. Everything’s gunna change in four months anyway, so …’

‘Three and a half.’

‘Three and a half! Shit a brick, hey?’

‘More like a shit-a-watermelon. Oof!’

He holds me tight, doesn’t say anything. I close my eyes and rock there against his shoulder.

‘It happens every day, mate,’ he says into my hair. ‘One day it’ll happen to you, and the next day it’ll be over.’

‘And we can start all over again.’

‘Yeah, I was thinkin’ about that the other day. We started so early, we could probably fit in about twenty kids.’

‘Oh,
cool
! What a
fab
idea! God, I’d hate to see my body at the end of it—like an old busted balloon!’ I draw back laughing. ‘But I’d always be beautiful to you, wouldn’t I, my love?’

‘You probably would, if I could
find
you with all those kids runnin’ round.’

‘Oh, God, what a picture! And you’d be completely out of it, after too many fights trying to keep us all fed and clothed!’

‘See? Things aren’t too bad, are they?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Having just one baby starts to look, like—’

‘Easy-
peasy
!’

‘No problems. We’ll be right.’ My laughter winds down as I look into his face. ‘We will,’ he says. ‘Honest.’

The weeks aren’t so horrifyingly long now, not now that I’d like them to slow down a bit and let me think straight. August arrives, and nothing resolves itself. My mind seems to be shrinking as my belly gets bigger; I can only hold very small thoughts in it. Every time I go out I forget one vital thing, like my list-of-things-to-do-while-I’m-out, or my house key, or my wallet.

I stop caring about anything much. I walk, and sleep, and eat, and grow. I sit and listen to the baby. I’m off away from everyone in a hormonal trance. I’m not a person any more—hardly any of Mel-from-before exists now. She’s just a self-contained hydroponic farm, sluicing all the right chemicals through her system, the switching and mixing networks operating on automatic.

We start going to the birth classes up at the hospital, and find out more about how this farm works, how the muscles will contract to push the baby down, how the bones may actually separate to allow its head through. In that class I suddenly feel normal in shape, in fact quite slim—some women are due to have their babies just after the classes finish in six weeks’ time. We are the youngest people there, but it’s funny, nobody seems to notice. We’re all ‘gone’ in the same way, our old identities fading but nothing new established to fill in the gap. Our heads are full of unseen, internal things, fears that our bodies aren’t up to the task, blank disbelief that there are seven invisible extra people in the room with us as we rattle on about herbal teas and sacro-iliac pain and water births, and gigglingly practise birth positions and relaxation exercises.

When we walk home to Pug’s place afterwards, often we’re silent. ‘There’s a lot to get your head around,’ says Pug, and we’ll wander through the dark together, trying to get our heads around it, dazedly watching the Thursday-night fun crowd milling along King Street. I feel calm, content, important in contrast. When we get home we might talk until past midnight, or we might say
nothing and go to sleep. My sleep these days is like a long soak in warm black ink; it’s hard to shake all the drops off when I’ve woken; it’s hard ever to feel fully awake. At the birth classes I’m at my most alert, because all this information matters so much, but for the rest of the time I’m zombie’d out, almost a danger to myself, liable to step off a kerb without bothering to check the traffic, to leave a kettle on the stove until the hot metal smell reaches me dozing in my front bedroom.

Then September comes. Spring. The air grows soft, and smelly with sweet rotting jasmine, great swags of it over the fences between the hospital and home. I’m getting big out front, but from behind you wouldn’t even know I was pregnant. Now I can tell not just when the baby’s awake or asleep, but which way it’s lying. And what’s weirder, Pug can too. ‘See? A foot,’ I say, and we watch as the little bump moves around and then disappears under my ribs. Or the whole baby will squirm about trying to somersault the way it used to, trying to get comfortable, and we’ll stare at it, and hold it, guessing which bits we can feel. ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ says Pug, amazed.

‘Only if I don’t sit up straight, or when it butts my bladder with its head.’ Otherwise it’s nice, scary but pleasant. I can’t help feeling proud of it, even though I can hardly take any credit for the system working so well. I walk and walk, sailing around the streets. I come home and nap, wake up when Mum gets home, cook us some dinner, go for an evening stroll with Pug. If life could go on like this, vague, untroubled, unchallenging, not forever, but for longer than two more months …

We are sent away for a week, like a pair of parcels. Mum lends us the car and Pug drives us down to the beach house. The house still belongs to Mum and Dad; they’ve decided they can bear to share it if the alternative is giving it up completely.

So we get a taste of living together, in a sort of fantasy. We swim in the cold, cold sea, walk the thundering surf beach and the smaller bay beach, and the reserve with its soft tough matted
grass and its sinuous dark trees branching out at the top like feather dusters. We breathe live air, watch galahs and lorikeets at the bird feeder, go barefoot everywhere, sleep long nights with the baby kicking between us, hardly speak. We eat when we feel like it—new season’s fruit, bread bought daily from the hot bread shop, pasta, salads. We have breakfast in bed every morning, and watch the sunset every night from the point.

On the last evening we’re down at the surf beach. Pug walks up from the water, the horizon at his ankles, the seawater clinging all over him. I’m sitting like Buddha, straight, relaxed, my lump just touching my thighs.

‘Why don’t you ask me to marry you?’ I say.

The breeze and the sea-thunder must have made him deaf. He picks up his towel, rubs his hair dry, and his face, sniffs his dog-snarl sniff a couple of times. Yes, he mustn’t have heard.

He throws the towel on the sand, sits on it. Hugs his knees. Wipes his nose on his wrist. ‘Why don’t
you
ask
me?
’ he says casually, out to sea.

‘Is it something you want, us to be married?’

‘It wouldn’t be like this, you know.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like here at the beach.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘I’m not going to.’ He gives me a cheerful smile.

‘Why not?’

He shrugs. ‘Dunno. I’m superstitious.’

I laugh. ‘Superstitious about what?’

‘About talking about getting married, with you,’ he says into the back of his wrist.

‘Well, who else are you going to talk about it to?’

He just smiles at me.

‘Come
on
.’ I put my lips against his bare shoulder, taste the salt. ‘Oh,
come
on, Pug …’ He puts his head down. I peer up at him under his arm; his eyes are closed, his mouth half-smiling. ‘Pu-ug! Pu-ug!’

‘I’m not gunna. Leave me alone.’

‘Pu-ug!’ I wrap my arms and legs around him, kiss up and down the back of his neck. ‘
Please
talk about getting married.
Please!
’

He shakes me off. I fold up like a flicked spider. ‘Look,’ he says quickly. ‘If you and I got married, all you’d wanna do is get free of it. It costs a lot of money—the way
my
family’d want to do it, that is—and it means fuck all, in the end. It doesn’t stop one person leaving the other one. Now stop—stop stringing me along. You asked, and that’s what I think, okay?’

‘Okay, okay! How do you know what I’d want, anyway?’

Already he’s embarrassed. He falters. ‘I know, okay?’ He ducks his head, waves an arm, Italian for
I’m lost for words.
‘I watch you. I listen to what you say. I spend a lot of time with you. I spend a lot of time trying to figure you out. I may not be all that smart, but I do know
some
things.’ He scratches the ear closest to me, glances at me staring at him, gets up. ‘I’m going back up the house.’ He snatches up the towel. ‘You coming?’

‘I will in a minute.’ I sit there like a stone while his feet squeak away in the sand. It’s getting cold, the light turning blue. I wrap my wet, sandy towel around my shoulders. My stupid, pregnant brain tries to hook onto a thought, but they fly through too fast. I end up gazing at the waves, the way they zipper themselves closed the full length of the beach, the way the yellow froth bounces and skids up the sand.

Then Pug’s hands are on my shoulders, pulling me backwards until I lie on my back. His face is above me, upside-down. He kisses my mouth, then looks at me eye to eye. Water hisses and crunches, and wind glides.

‘You’re like my mum,’ I say. ‘You know me too well.’

‘I think your mum’s fantastic. When I look at your mum, I know you’re gunna turn out all right.’

‘What, even though I’m hopeless now?’

He nods. ‘Even though you’re a complete fuckwit now.’

‘Oh well, that’s good.’ I roll my eyes. ‘That’s something to look forward to.’

‘Get up,’ he says. ‘Come home.’

I start to laugh. ‘What, so you can
jump
on me?’

‘So we can play a game of
cards,
deadhead.’

He helps me up the beach. I’m laughing so much I forget to think
Goodbye
to the sea.

The last dawn here. Lying together all three of us, the other two asleep. Who’ll be next in this big double bed? Dad and Ricky? Mum and … some new boyfriend? Us again, with the born baby between us?

Last time I was here I slept next door in the single bed. I was boiling with anger at Dad, missing Pug, going over that first fight in my mind time and time again. Two months pregnant, maybe, and not knowing. Younger. Sillier. Still at school, still frightened of Lisa, still frightened of all those
kids
. Frightened of everything, except the truly most frightening thing of all, the thing inside, growing, getting ready to overturn my whole life, rip it open like a bag of Smarties, spill it in all directions.

Go with your body
, says Fiona, the woman who runs the birth classes.
Listen to your body, work with your body
. Sometimes I feel as if there’s not much else to listen to, not much else my mind can take on. Every thought I have seems to disappear in a crowd of echoes, connections and questions growing bigger and bigger around it like pond-ripples until the whole thing (thought, pond, life, world) is a confused mass, all its molecules vibrating against each other.

Settling. Growing. Summer beginning to steam. It’s becoming hard to ignore this baby-lump, the effort of moving it around. I start to envy Mum and Pug their lightness on their feet, their balance, their swiftness. My shoulders, neck, arms and legs seem to belong to a different body, one that hasn’t been inflated like
the middle of me. The strain of it is marking my belly skin with long red marks like scratch marks, that itch like crazy but are tender to touch. The books say these will fade in time, to silver—
fade
to silver?—but never absolutely disappear. I’m just worried I’ll be stretched beyond endurance and split right open. Sometimes the whole lump goes drumskin-tight, when I first stand up, for example. That’s why you see pregnant women always laying their hands on their lumps: to hold them in, to take a bit of the load off the stretched flesh.

By four weeks after the end of the birth classes, everyone in the class has had their baby except me, and I’ve three weeks to go. I’m literally holding up the party—they have a reunion when all the babies are born, a sort of show and tell. Fiona has called me a couple of times and given me a run-down on everyone else’s births: how Linda was induced and had a short but howlingly painful labour; how Dean and Tracey nearly had theirs on the M4 and didn’t make it to the birth centre; Angela’s textbook twelve-hour water birth, and so on. Now there are six new healthy people in the world, six new families in various states of shock. It feels lonely being the only one left to go through it; I know there’s nothing physically wrong with waiting, and that the baby will come when it’s good and ready, but I’m getting tired of being occupied by this ferocious little animal with its shifting head and rib-kicking feet. I want my body back. I look at the clothes in my cupboard that I can’t wear, and even the ones I wore when I was six months’ pregnant look like they belong to a stick figure. Now I live in giant T-shirts and leggings. Now I’m officially that great blue woman from my first visit to the birth centre, invisible behind the evidence of my baby.