What Was Left, page 1
ELEANOR LIMPRECHT
WHAT WAS LEFT
About Untapped
Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.
See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.
Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.
For Nancy, who is still my first reader.
How strange it is to squander
This birth I have found by some coincidence.
… I have not granted fearlessness to the frightened
And I have not given happiness to the weak.
All I have given rise to is
The agonies in the mother’s womb, and to suffering.
—Shantideva, Bodhisattvacharyavatara
Of all the little ways I’ve found to hurt myself
Well you might be my favourite one of all.
—Gillian Welch, ‘Tennessee’
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
—Mary Oliver, ‘Lead’
Chapter 1
Peter opens the door, finger to his lips. ‘She’s just having a nap.’
They head upstairs and into the bedroom. Sun spills through gaps in the blinds, filling the dim space with narrow stripes of light. They stand in front of the cot. The mobile of black and white penguins spins in a draft of air from the open door.
‘So sweet,’ Sara whispers.
Peter nods. Lola sleeps with her hands in fists, arms thrown above her head. Her lips twitch, purse and open, revealing a dark triangle of mouth. A leg kicks beneath the blanket. They both stop breathing; the leg stills. Peter leads them out of the carpeted room. In the hallway he pulls the door shut, turning the knob ever so carefully so that it doesn’t click.
‘So, downstairs? Would you like a cup of tea?’ he asks, tugging at the collar of his pressed shirt, moisture beginning to bead along his hairline.
Sara follows him down the open stairwell. He is conscious of her eyes on his back, imagines sweat marks on his shirt. He can’t think of the questions he was meant to ask. Downstairs, the house is one great open space, so large that it swallows the furniture. Peter walks to the kitchen and fills the kettle, turning it on, the noise bouncing off empty walls.
‘Did you say yes to tea?’
‘Okay.’
Sara pulls out a stool on the other side of the bench, her back to the sliding glass doors that lead into the garden.
‘So, you’ve done this before?’
Sara nods and rummages in her purse. She produces a resume, folded in half. Peter takes it and pretends to read it, nodding. He can’t make sense of a single word. Is it him, or is it because English is her second language? There—date of birth: 1990. Damn, he thinks. The year I graduated. When did he become so old?
‘You’re only twenty,’ he says, realising the words sound hard. ‘Are you sure you can look after a baby?’
Sara nods. ‘In Sweden, my mum remarried and had another baby when I was sixteen. So I have a little sister who is four. I helped raise her. I love little children.’
It sounds like something a contestant in Miss Universe would say, I love little children, Peter thinks. He has to stop. He has to focus.
‘And you’ve looked after others. Other babies?’
He pours the steaming water into two mugs and begins searching the cupboards for tea bags. He can’t remember where they are kept.
‘Yes, it shows on my resume, there. One family in Sweden and two families here. I have the phone numbers for my references. Is that it?’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘The tea—to the left. The green box.’ Sara points to the cupboard that Peter has been searching.
‘Oh, yeah, thanks.’
Sliding the mug across to her, Peter bends down to study the page again. His hands are shaking and he wraps them around the hot ceramic. He never imagined this part of his life. He wants to get back to his desk, the safety of his computer and his drawings. His jars of pencils and pens.
‘Do you have any questions for me?’ he asks, meeting her gaze for the first time since she rang the doorbell. Her eyes are the kind of blue that you see in backyard swimming pools from an aeroplane—a dreamy, inaccessible blue. She has a freckle-faced beauty that he can’t even think about, can’t let himself notice.
‘Um, maybe you mentioned this over the phone but I can’t remember,’ she says. ‘Where is Lola’s mother?’
He breaks her gaze, and stares down into his cup of tea. He forgot to ask if she has milk, or sugar—and it’s too late now.
‘She left…’ he says. He has practised this answer dozens of times now. At work he says, ‘on a holiday,’ but he can’t say that to the nanny. He has to let her know.
‘Long story,’ he says, watching the steam rise and dissipate into the air.
‘I’m sorry, that’s… I can’t think of the right English word…’ Sara says, forehead crinkling.
‘Fucked?’
She smiles unexpectedly, lets out a sound somewhere between suppressed giggle and a snort.
Peter straightens and jams his hands in his pockets to keep them still. ‘I think we’ll get along just fine,’ he says, ‘if you want the job, that is.’
‘You don’t wish to call my references?’ she says, gesturing at the paper. He has folded it into a small square.
‘I will. But I’m sure they’ll be fine. I’ll call. Can you start next week?’
Sara nods. ‘You have to tell the au pair agency. They work out the cost based on the room and board, I think.’
Peter nods and adds it to his mental list of tasks. A list that has sprouted arms and legs since Rachel left. He looks at the time on his phone. He needs to hurry Sara out the door.
He extends his hand, like a businessman closing a deal, and Sara shakes it. Her grasp is limp. No one has taught her how to shake hands, he thinks. Or maybe that’s how they do it in Sweden. They walk to the door in silence, and he closes it behind her.
‘Done,’ he says, once the door is shut, the house silent again, Lola asleep upstairs, his heart still beating in his chest. For the first time since Rachel left, he slides his body down the solid mass of the door and crumples to the ground, head on his knees. For the first time since Rachel left, Peter lets himself—just for a moment—fall apart.
He is together again when Judy returns from the grocery store. He has to be—Lola woke, her wail muffled by the bedroom walls. She was sweating by the time he climbed the stairs and lifted her from the cot. She is not one of those babies who stops crying when you pick her up. When you pick her up the cries just get louder, closer to your ear. Peter walks around the room with her, stands in front of an open window so that Lola can feel the breeze.
He is still there when he hears the slam of the car door on the street below. Lola’s not crying anymore, but he’s not sure when she stopped, or how long he has been standing there, bouncing in the one spot, humming beneath his breath.
Judy is on the footpath below, her hands full of bright green Coles shopping bags. Judy planned this visit long before her daughter left. Soon, now, she has to go back to America—back to work—and Peter has begun a mental countdown of the days until Judy’s eyes will no longer follow him around the room, waiting for an answer to the question no one will ask. What was it, exactly, that made Rachel leave.
When he walks into the kitchen with Lola, Judy is at the kitchen bench, unloading tins of baby formula, packets of biscuits, plastic bags of fruit and veg. She looks up.
‘How’s my little Lola Wola?’
‘Just woke up. She had a good sleep.’
‘Super. Do you like beef stroganoff?’
Lola is craning her neck towards Judy so Peter turns her, holds her with her back against his belly, one hand holding between her legs, a full nappy against his palm.
‘You don’t have to cook for me, Judy.’
‘What—you don’t like my cooking?’
‘No no. That’s not what I meant. Come, look. Lola’s smiling at you.’
Judy walks close, kisses Lola on her nose. He can see the grey roots on the top of Judy’s head. Nothing about her reminds him of Rachel. Nothing except the way she dances around a subject to avoid the painful truth. Peter holds Lola out for Judy to take and he finishes unloading the groceries i
‘How’d the interview go with the nanny?’ she asks, gazing at her granddaughter.
‘Good. She was good.’
‘Will you hire her?’
‘I think—yeah.’
‘I wish I could stay and look after you myself, little Lola. I wish I didn’t have to go back to work.’
He bunches together the empty shopping bags and shoves them in the cupboard above the fridge.
‘Listen, Judy, I’ve got clients who are really riding me for a set of plans. Is it all right if I go in?’
‘Now? On a Saturday night?’ Judy asks, looking up, her Botoxed forehead as close as it has come to being furrowed with concern.
Peter shrugs, ‘If that’s okay.’
Judy sighs. ‘I guess it’ll just be me and my sweet little girl,’ she says, turning away, walking towards the stairs. ‘I think I’ll go and change her diaper. I mean, whatever you call it, nappy.’
Once she’s gone, he opens the fridge door, grabs a beer, pauses for a moment and puts it back. Not if he’s really going into the office. He hasn’t decided yet whether he’ll work or just escape. He can’t blame Judy for Rachel’s absence. Judy loves Lola: that much is clear. Rachel always talked about how cold she was but Peter can’t see it, the way she dotes on Lola. Maybe it’s different, once you’re older, once you’re a grandparent, once all that pressure is gone. Peter feels all of the responsibility ferment inside him like in the beer he just held, the bottle smooth but the inside waiting to foam up and spill, to run over every edge. To be released—uncapped. Was it like this for Rachel? He tries not to think about it, because somewhere beneath his anger at her for leaving is something else. Something he should have seen. It was right there had he stopped, taken a slow breath, said: talk to me. Tell me what I can do.
He thinks about Rachel during Lola’s birth. Just when he thought she would say give me the drugs, when he thought it had been too much, she went all quiet on him. Went elsewhere. She went inside herself to a place he couldn’t travel. Showed strength he didn’t know she had. And as he watched her—teeth clenched, fists bunched, a low growl in her throat—he didn’t want to be there anymore. Didn’t want to have to watch. How do you talk about this, as a man, as a father, a husband? You have a beer together with your mates afterwards and say: ‘it’s amazing, she was amazing’. No one wants to hear you say that you just wanted to leave the room. Because until Lola was born, until she came out, all slippery coated with blood and goo, he thought it couldn’t be worth it. No way was it worth it to see Rachel like this—so changed, so unfamiliar. Then Lola arrived on the scene. Then life changed. Then it was.
Chapter 2
Lola was born as Rachel squatted on a birthing stool at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred hospital. She laboured for nineteen hours. At the end, as she pushed, the lowest point on her back felt as if it would break. This pain, after everything else, caught her by surprise. It tricked her. It wasn’t what she expected.
They tried everything—the bath, the ball, the mat, the bed, and finally the stool. Something shifted. The pressure moved from Rachel’s back to her vulva.
‘Ooooh, she’s crowning,’ the midwife said.
‘I can’t,’ Rachel moaned. One more push and grunt, and her baby was born.
Lola was born in the caul; she emerged in the amniotic sac, which burst like a water balloon as it entered the world.
The midwife placed the tiny, shrivelled thing on Rachel’s stomach and wiped fluid from her glasses. The baby was slippery as a raw sausage. Still attached by a thick blue cord.
‘It’s Lola,’ Rachel said, and Peter nodded.
He wiped away tears. ‘Lola,’ he whispered.
Lola snuffled at Rachel’s breast with her squashed little nose. She attached and sucked like a champ.
The midwife clapped her rubber gloves together. ‘A baby born in a caul is lucky,’ she said. ‘She’ll never drown.’
But what about me, Rachel wondered, her body torn and burning, her breasts leaking thick yellow fluid. A dull pain radiating from the centre of her tailbone. What will stop me from drowning?
Rachel was stitched up while Lola was cleaned, wrapped in a white and blue cotton blanket, and brought to lie beside her. Lola’s crying made her flinch.
Rachel pressed a nipple into Lola’s mouth and she quieted to a noisy suck. Peter lay on the other side and the three of them fell into dazed sleep.
It wasn’t until a week later, after Rachel kept complaining of excruciating pain when she tried to sit, that the doctor diagnosed a fractured tailbone. ‘It happens during labour,’ he said. ‘It’s rare.’
‘Lie down as much as you can,’ he told her. ‘Let it heal at its own pace.’
So they lie at home in bed, Rachel and Lola. Beside them is the bassinette, which Lola will not sleep in. She nurses, sleeps, wakes, screams, and nurses again, fitfully. Rachel thinks perhaps it’s Lola’s stomach bothering her – she doesn’t feed for more than a few minutes and then screams afterwards, curled up as if in pain. Or maybe she is colicky. Rachel stands and paces the carpeted floor. She jiggles her, sings to her, and tries to soothe her. Lola is tiny and fragile; her scream peels the skin from Rachel’s flesh. So close to her ears, that little mouth, that terrible noise.
Peter is at work. Outside, the sky is a cold blue. The gas heater is on high and Rachel sweats in her dressing gown but worries that Lola is cold. She grabs more blankets and wraps the baby, whose arms and legs are rods of anger, her mouth an open O of accusation. When Lola screams like this, Rachel wants to leap through the glass window, Lola in her arms. When she screams like this, Rachel feels as if she is breaking.
She ought to push the pram while Lola sleeps. Fresh air and exercise. Very important. She ought to be dressed, hair washed, baking banana bread for visitors. Saying yes to visitors. Washing the cloth nappies she carefully researched and bought rather than just opening another pack of Huggies.
Rachel sits on the chair beside the bed to unwrap Lola, whose face is red from heat now. She forgot: a stab of pain in her tailbone. She gives up, lies on the bed again, unrolls Lola from the blankets and unbuttons her shirt. The breast again. For a moment, Lola is happy. For a short silent time, they both drift back into something like sleep.
In the evenings, when Peter is home from work, sometimes they can coax Lola to a few hours sleep in her bassinette. Then Rachel lies on the couch by the fire while Peter prepares dinner. She watches the flames and thinks of things to keep herself from crying. What is the phrase they use—‘first world problems’. Peter tells her the story of a difficult client at work. About a friend whose wife had a miscarriage. He comes over and strokes her hair. ‘We’re so lucky,’ he says, eyes soft in the firelight. ‘Lola is so beautiful. We are so lucky.’
She nods and pulls the neck of her jumper over her chin. Her breasts ache. Lola hasn’t fed for two hours. She will wake up for a feed nearly every hour tonight, until Rachel gives up trying to differentiate and they both drowse, Rachel’s nightshirt hitched to her chin, Lola suckling on and off between fitful dreams.
She cradles her sore breasts in dread. The blisters on her nipples refuse to heal, ugly white things that sting every time Lola cries. Peter looks at her.
‘Your body is so beautiful,’ he says. He reaches out to her.
She cringes, and stifles the reflex to slap his hand away. She closes her eyes and tries to remember what desire felt like, what it felt like to want to be caressed.
‘It’s sore. I’m so tired and sore.’
The tears have come once again and Peter holds her, tells her how well they’re doing. How well Lola is doing. How everything is all right.
‘Easy for you to say.’ She regrets them as soon as the words are out.
The argument is familiar. Peter takes off his glasses and rubs his temples.
‘I know you do a lot more than I do, Rach, but that’s just how things are. We need to pay the mortgage. I work so that we can afford groceries, so we can afford Lola, so we can afford to live the way we do.’
She stares at the flames. Peter knows as well as she does how she will respond. That she would trade all of it for his help, for his presence, to not be in this alone. She feels as if the world has lied to her. They said that she was equal to a man—that she could do anything she chose to do. They forgot to add a disclaimer: unless you have children. And then things will be as they have always, always been, and everything we have told you will be in vain. She looks up at Peter, who watches her, and she holds her tongue. She’d like to think, still, that he simply doesn’t understand. That it’s not that he is complicit—rather that he has no clue why this is so hard. She is so tired she can’t even begin to explain.
