FICTION

The Feel of Men Close Up

I hadn’t gone to dance. I was there to meet the Buddhist who gave good head. That was how Maria had described him. “You’ll like him,” she’d said as we sat in her newly renovated kitchen. “He’s been celibate longer than you have.”

“But-,” I said, curious, careful. “Aren’t you two..?”

“Oh god no.” She shook her head and her long hair moved, shiny as fresh liquorice. “Not at all, we’re just mates. I broke his drought, that’s all. A favour, really.”

We met at the Railway Club, where there was swing dancing. Women in wide skirts and bobby socks. Men in braces and two-tone shoes.

The Buddhist was shy and handsome and we looked at each and smiled. I thought we would dance together, but it wasn’t like that. Everybody danced with everybody.

My first partner was a woman with a swinging ponytail. She taught me the steps, guiding my body with her own until we moved together, swish-swish-spin. The sudden wonder of it made me laugh.

The caller yelled ‘change’ and I found myself before a short bearded man, who swore when I got the steps wrong. He was stiff like a person made of plastic and wire. I bowed my head and watched my feet.

My next partner was tall, beautiful and very young. His name was Jun and when we danced, he led. I’d not known what that meant before. But I got it now. The clues were physical and slight like the ones lovers give each other in sex.

When the caller yelled ‘change’, Jun didn’t. He danced me out of the circle.

My mother always said she married my father because of the way they danced and I saw, now, how you could fall in love with the grace you made with another person.

Jun began to sing along with the band. He sang freely like young children do. He swished me about the herringbone dance floor, throwing me against the lock of his arm then pulling me in close. I felt his young man’s chest and the press of our hips and thighs.

When finally he released me, I could dance.

I danced back into the circle and all around the circle, charmed by the feel of men close up, the texture of stubble, the roll of muscle under my hand.

But when it came time to dance with the Buddhist, he smelled of beer and we were clumsy together. I trod on his foot. His elbow cracked my eye.

My eye watered, but I kept dancing.

At the end of the night, I saw him on the other side of the room with Maria pressed to his neck. When she saw me, her gaze slid away, but I was only happy. I felt filled up with the music and the moment where I had found my own grace, there on the herringboned floor, outside the circle, dancing.

The Feel of Men Close Up was shortlisted for the 2015 Northern Territory Literary Awards. Thank you to the NT Writers’ Centre and the NT State Library for their support and kindness.

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It Feels Like Happiness

I am only afraid at the airport. I walk through the automatic doors with my daughter asleep in my arms. Her plump legs dangle. One tiny shoe hangs from the toes of her left foot, about to fall.

That she will die. This is the fear. Typhoid. Malaria. Terrorism. The town I come from lost three young men in the Bali bombing. All of them blond with sunburnt noses and large brown feet. The only one who came back had freckles and blue eyes and red hair. I didn’t know him well enough to speak to, but I noticed him. Everybody did.

I slide Molly’s shoe back on her foot and she wakes, stretching like a cat in my arms. People stream around us. I lower her onto the floor and we step together towards the security gates. She puts her velvet rabbit on the conveyer belt, watching solemnly as it disappears behind a black rubber curtain into the X-ray machine.

We arrive in the dark, warm, middle of the night, and I push my face against the taxi window. The buildings are worn and beautiful. On the side of the road, a man pushes a huge-wheeled, bright-lit food cart. In front of us, a family of four share a pink scooter. The bare soles of a baby’s feet illuminated in the taxi headlights.

The driver’s name is Nyoman. He has bright, even teeth and smooth skin. His face is hairless as a boy’s, although he is nearly forty. Same age as me.

When we get to the hotel, he lifts my sleeping daughter from the back seat. A moment then, when we are bent together over my sleeping child and he smiles into my face with all his bright teeth, before rolling Molly gently into my arms.

He gives me his card and I carry my sleeping child along a narrow path between a swimming pool and a tall stone wall. The wall is patterned with a vine of heart-shaped leaves. The sound of water rushes from the pool.

And then the soft quiet moment when I stop and see that here we are, unbelievably, in Bali. Not for a holiday. Something else. Something open.

I rent a one-room house made of bamboo with a grass roof that is grey with age and leaks in the rain. But I don’t know this yet. At first, everything is dry.

The woman next door is tall with dark brown hair and a French accent. Her name is Margo. She sits down at our small table, facing Molly, “Where’s your daddy?”

Molly looks at me, then at her spoon.

“Where’s your daddy?” says Margo again. “Papa? Where is he?”

“This spoon is very shiny,’ says Molly, turning the spoon this way and that so the light is reflected brightly in its silver curve.

“He’s in Australia,” I say, leaning over the table to take Molly’s free hand, hold the silky fingers inside my palm.

Nyoman takes us to the supermarket on the back of his small red motorbike. He wears a white cotton shirt he has silk-screened himself. A pattern of water falling. He says he went to art school and sold the shirts in a shop for a while, but there wasn’t enough money. Now he is a driver.

Riding through Ubud, the streets seems emptier than a week ago. The supermarket too.

Nyoman says, “The tourists are leaving. I think they are afraid.”

 “Cause of the rain?”

“A little bit. But also, the Bali bombers. The execution.”

“Oh.”

“They are worried there will be more bombings.”

“What do you think?”

“I think if the tourists go, we will not be able to have any money to buy food and this will be difficult.”

*

Molly and I are lying in bed. Outside a storm is thundering. We listen together. Through the windows on either side of the bed, and the open door at the far end of the room, the sky cracks white with lightning. “Did you see the claws?” she asks, “The claws of light on the sky?”

Her own hands are in the air, claw-shaped.

I make my hand claws too. We lie there under the mosquito net, being lightning.

The sound of water running and rushing all around. Frogsong and swarms of mosquitoes that may or may not have malaria.

Water drips onto the bed.

Thunder rumbles on the other side of the alang alang roof.

She puts her claws down. “What makes the thunder?”

“I think,” I say, “it’s the clouds rubbing together.” I rub my fists together. It seems unlikely.

*

I am on the toilet. Molly comes slamming like a cowboy through the swing doors, leaving them open behind her.

“How do you make a baby?”

“Can you shut the doors please?”

“Why?”

“I like a bit of privacy when I’m having a wee.”

She turns, closes the door. “Now,” she says. “Tell me.”

“Well, first you need a man.”

“No,” she says, adamant. “You don’t need a man.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“No, you just need your mama and your friends, they help you get the baby out.”

“Well. Yes. Often that’s true. But you need a man to put the baby into your belly.”

“Oh.” I watch her face. It is so tiny. A little furrow between her blond eyebrows. She is thinking so hard. “Tell me.” she says.

I don’t know how much to tell.

“Well. It’s best if it’s somebody you love. Love makes for the best babies. You have a special kind of cuddle and this makes the baby get started inside you. At first it doesn’t look much like a baby, but slowly it grows inside you and it gets legs and arms and.

“And eyebrows and a face and a nose.”

“Yep. All that. Everything. And when it’s too big for your tummy, it comes out.”

“Out your vagina.” She bends her knees, whooshes her hands down between her legs.

“Yep.”

“Oh.” She turns then and walks out of the bathroom. I sit there for a moment on the toilet, looking up through the branches of the mango tree. A squirrel runs along one branch, way up near the top.

A moment later, I hear her holler, “MAMA!” and there is such urgency in her voice, I think she must be hurt. I pull up my undies and run fast as I can up the bamboo steps. “What? What is it? Are you alright?”

She is sitting on the edge of the bed. Apart from a pair of bright orange floaties, one on either arm, she is naked.

She says, “Who did you fall in love with when you had me.”

“Ben. Your dad.”

“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t know that.”

*

Coming back from the supermarket, Nyoman carries Molly on one hip and the shopping in his free hand. “How’re you going, Nyoman?”

He shrugs. “I am happy. Always when I see you, I am happy.”

“I take yoghurt from the shopping bag. “How was your day? How’s business?”

He stops smiling. “Not so good. Everybody is leaving.”

“Oh Nyoman, I’m sorry.” I look at him then and think of his children, two boys and a girl. All under five years of age. His brother who is sick and the hospital which is expensive. His mother and father, dried and worn thin by work. His wife. “I’m sorry.”

At the house, he slips his shoes off before stepping inside. He puts the shopping down and then places a frangipani bloom behind Molly’s ear. “Like a Balinese girl.”

She laughs, delighted.

He places her carefully onto the bamboo platform and I give him fifty thousand rupiah. He pushes it into his pocket and we smile at each other.

And then he leans. Towards me. As if to embrace, or kiss.

I lift my spine, the opposite of a lean, but I bow my head, not wanting to hurt him. “Thank you,” I say, again, and he smiles, his open smile, all those white teeth. I turn my body towards the shopping and he steps backwards out of my house. “See you tomorrow.”

*

At the café, a tall loud white American is using Skype at the table next to us.

“Honey, the world banking system is about to collapse. If it does, nobody is going to be able to get any money from the banks. It’s that simple. No. Honey, don’t yell at me. If the world banking system collapses, I’m not going to be able to get any money either. I’ll be in the same boat as everyone else.”

The world banking system collapse? What would I do, what could I do? How would I feed my child?

*

Molly gets sick. A flu that doesn’t go away.

The third morning she wakes up cranky. Slams her legs down on the mattress, rubs her nose. “I’m all sniffy. I can’t smell.”

“Here,” I get her a tissue.

“It’s torn. I want a new one.”

“Use this one, it’s fine.”

“I WANT A NEW ONE!”

“Here.” I try a new tack, “Have some vitamin C.” I reach across the bedside table and pick up the bottle.

“Take it downstairs and then bring it up.”

“Why?”

“TAKE IT DOWNSTAIRS AND THEN BRING IT UP.” Legs slam into the mattress.

“Just have one, sweetheart.”

“NO. I’ll only have one if you take it downstairs and then bring it up.”

“Okay. Don’t have one. I don’t care.”

She starts to sob.

I try to stroke her but she slaps my arm away.

“What’s up, Molly?”

“I want a vitamin C.”

I pass her a tablet.

She scowls. “I’m not going to eat it until you take it downstairs and bring it up again.”

“Well, I’m not going to do that.” I hold my palm out again, “Come on. Just take it.”

But she turns her head to the pillow and howls.

*

Margo is leaving. “The execution is days away,” she says. “That’s what everybody’s saying. There will be reprisal bombings. Against westerners.”

“But Margo. It’s Ubud. It’s not Kuta. Surely we’re safe here.”

“Draw me a spider web.” Molly passes me a blue pencil. I look at her delicate profile, her pale skin and blond hair and for a moment I can’t remember exactly how a spider web goes.

“If you want to be safe, you have to go home.” Margo is all hissing urgency.

“But the Balinese. If we all go…”

“Draw me a spider web.”

I bend to the paper and draw a crooked line.

Molly draws a red spider with eight fat legs. Her face is scrunched with concentration.

Margo stands up, gathers her bag. “If the ATMs shut down, it’ll be impossible to get out.”

Nyoman appears then. Molly looks up, sees him, drops her pencil and scoots, fairy-like, down the stairs and into his arms.

I stand and gather up crayons, bags and follow my child. Margo on the step beside me, says. “Your own government is warning people not to travel. It’s not safe here, anymore.”

*

We are walking along a narrow stone path. Every couple of metres, Molly stops in front of me and puts her hands out, so I bump into her. It is eight o’clock and already hot. “MOLLY. Enough. You’re going to make us late for school.”

She turns and scowls at me. “Why are you so mean?”

“We are running late. Come on, just go.”

Out the front Nyoman is waiting. Molly climbs into his arms while I go to the shop. I imagine Nyoman thinking bad thoughts about me because I am a bad person. I want to cry. I buy Molly’s milk and when I come out, they are both on the bike and I climb onto the back and don’t put my arms around Nyoman. I feel dark and afraid and sad. Molly at the front sings and sings. And I think, I took my panic out on her. I feel like Evil Mother, but then as we crest the hill, she reaches behind her, past Nyoman, to take one of my fingers inside her small hand. She pulls until my hand is on her belly. And suddenly, I am not alone. I am joined to my child and to the gentle man between us.

We ride through rice fields. Bright texta green. Full of reflective water. It is like riding through sky.

On the way back, it starts to rain. All around us, Balinese on bikes ride covered in plastic ponchos. Nyoman calls over his shoulder, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Are you alright?”

“Oh yes.” He laughs. His hand rests on mine, which are clasped around his waist.

The rain gets heavier. We ride into it, take corners that are dark with puddles. We ride past offerings on the road and the huge wooden bull which will be used as a sarcophagus for a cremation next week. The bull is covered in bright skin-tight fabric, red and black and gold.

Then the downpour comes – sudden thick, fat tropical drops, falling straight down.

Quick as thought, Nyoman pulls into an empty concrete garage. He stops the engine, puts the bike onto its stand.

I step off the bike and pull my helmet off, laughing, exhilarated by the storm. When I turn, he is in front of me with his shirt saturated. “Nyoman, you’re soaked.”

He lifts the thin white cotton with his dark large hands. The fabric drops back against his skin, transparent, catching at his dark nipples, his collarbones and belly.

The rain roars and the air inside this small concrete cave is charged and bright. We are laughing with our faces close together and then he leans, suddenly, gracefully, sweetly, puts his head onto my shoulder, lays his cheek against my neck. I feel my breath surge with tenderness.

He lifts his head, his wet shirt. “So wet,” I say, looking at his shirt, not at his face.

“You are dry.” His hand on my belly. A moment, then gone. I am loose and happy, and it would be so easy to fall into him. That this is how love should start, in a sweet moment like this.

“You’re soaked.” It’s like all I can talk about is the rain.

He says, “You’re dry.”

“’Cause I was behind you. You caught all the rain.”

He turns around. “My back is dry.” And we laugh again like this is the funniest thing.

The rain stops. The air is cool and smells of wet stone. Sunlight falls into the garage, on our water-glossed bodies. It feels so completely right that we should kiss. But when he leans in, I duck my head, suddenly awkward.

He kisses me on the cheek, gentle, dry, tender. “I cannot stop thinking about you.”

I want to laugh, but don’t.

But then he says, “Every night when I make sex with my wife, I think of you.”

And then I do laugh, and my mortified hands go to my mouth. “Oh my god, your poor wife, Nyoman. That’s awful.”

He shrugs. “It is how it is.”

I step toward to the bike. The seat is beaded with water. Nyoman sweeps the drops with one long stroke of his palm. He passes me a helmet and puts on his own.

“It’s okay.” I take the helmet, but don’t put it on. “I can walk from here, it’s not so far.”

He smiles, shakes my hand in that gentle way the Balinese do. I step out in the wet sunlight and watch him climb onto the bike and ride away.

*

Molly is asleep in my arms when I find out the bombers have been executed.

They were taken from the prison at 11pm. The dark almost middle of the night. They were driven to a place called Nirbaya. It is in the forest. They were tied to posts with black cloth over their heads. There were three firing squads. It was raining. Ten minutes after they arrived, they were dead.

I think of their mothers. And the mothers in Australia who lost children. The boy who came back to Mollymook without his friends. And Nyoman’s wife, Wayan, and her three small children.

A breeze moves across my face, and I lift my head to look at the ricefields, the patterns the breeze make across the water surface, and then I look back at the child in my arms and I am pierced. This is the feeling. A clear sensation of a long thin hatpin sliding between the ribs, through muscle and gristle, and I think of Cupid’s arrow, fine as a sewing needle, moving deep into my chest. This precise sharp line of love.

I want to hold her forever and keep her safe from all harm, always. But even now, she wakes, wanting to swim. Moving away from me.

At the pool, she stands in the shallow end, grinning up at me. She pushes her left arm towards me and I roll the floatie on. “It feels like happiness,” she says and waves her fat arms in the hot air. The pool is pale and all around us. At each end, stone goddesses pour water from stone urns.

Molly is suddenly, wildly joyful. “This is a good feeling. It’s a shower feeling and a friend feeling and a Mama feeling and a flower feeling!” The sun falls on her skin, glossing her arms. She closes her eyes. “It’s a big feeling, Mama.”

She climbs out to check on her bunny on a wooden deckchair and then stands of the edge of the pool, ready to jump. She flings both arms into the air and says, “I’m strong as King Kong! I’m brave as a woman!” And then she leaps, arms out, eyes shut tight.

This story won the CDU Travel Short Story Award as part of the 2013 NT Literary Awards and was selected for inclusion in the 2013 Award Winning Australian Writing anthology (Editor: Adolfo Aranjuez).

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Two Women

Friday

The first thing that happens is Don’s text.

Pia reads it out to me over the phone.  ‘I’m leaving you, but don’t think you’ll ever get any of the house or anything in it. You are an evil and vindictive person and I don’t know what I ever saw in you.’

‘Nice,’ I say when she finishes reading.

‘I just don’t know if it’s real.’ Her voice is quiet and desperate. ‘I hope it’s real. I hope he’s really gone.’

I sit down, feel my voice drop to meet hers. ‘Me too.’

Months, years, of Don raging at Pia, when everything she did was wrong. When he didn’t get the medication he needed. Or he got it but didn’t take it. Or he just drank and raged or drank and cried. Or spun into wild, irrational mania. When he lost work and friends and money. For so long, she has wanted to leave, and not left, because of the girls. She stayed and put herself between Don’s rage and his daughters.

But now he is leaving, and I feel the relief of this, but also the fear, because this is Don and anything can happen.

Saturday

Don wants to take the girls out for dinner. Without Pia. She says no and he screams down the phone at her. She doesn’t go home. She picks the girls up from school and takes them to Jenny’s place for the night. Jenny was the first friend Pia made when she moved to this little seaside community. Their daughters are in the same class. Together they have organised school fundraisers and coached soccer. Jenny has no husband, a high fence and security cameras. 

When Pia’s daughters are asleep in borrowed pyjamas, she calls me from Jenny’s back yard and talks out her fears in a low voice. ‘What will I do? Where will we live? What if he comes after us?’

Sunday

It’s Mother’s Day. With her daughters around her reading their handmade cards, Pia rings me from Jenny’s place. ‘Mother’s Day must be hard for women who wanted babies and never had them.’ We were both late to motherhood and when she says this, I feel the daughterless life we might have had. A flush of grief, then gratitude for my daughter. For Pia’s daughters. These little girls who will grow into women who know each other.

‘How are you?’

‘I’m okay.’ Rustling, muffled noises as she says goodbye her girls, gathers her bag, her keys, and then she is outside. ‘Don has stopped answering his phone.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘No.’ She gets into her car, starts the engine. ‘He could be anywhere.’

She puts me on speaker as she drives to her house, unsure what she will find. Stones in her belly. A bad hot feeling. Pulling into the driveway she says, ‘Will you stay on the phone with me?’

‘Of course.’

I listen to her footsteps in empty rooms, her breathing. ‘All the doors are open. His computer’s on. He’s been emailing.’ She starts to read. I wait. When she speaks again, her voice is frantic. ‘He rewrote his will two hours ago. He’s emailed everybody he knows saying, “Have a nice life”.’ She starts moving again back through the house. ‘I have to go. I have to go.’ She hangs up and rings Adam, Don’s best friend, who says, ‘I’ll go for a drive, see if I can find him.’

Three hours later, he finds Don alone at the top of a cliff. When he tries to approach, Don screams at him.

Back in his car, Adam rings Pia. ‘Call the police.’

Monday

Pia, on her third day without sleep, rings me from her car. ‘Don’s been institutionalised. He tried to commit suicide.’ Her voice is taut and wired, and yet, there is a deep blue calm in the way she delivers her words, the way she holds herself inside her own skin on the other end of the phone. She doesn’t know the details yet, only that the police took him to be assessed and then he was locked up. ‘The doctors rang me. They said Don wanted to speak to me. They said I could hang up any time. Then they handed the phone over. Straight away he started screaming. He said it was all my fault, that I had locked him up. That I engineered all this.’ She sighs. ‘I hung up.’

Adam says, ‘Don’t stay in the house.’

Jenny says, ‘I don’t like you being in that house, it’s pretty remote.’

And I am thinking about the two women every week in Australia who are murdered by their partners or ex-partners.

Tuesday

Don is out and looking for Pia.

She rings me from the beach, watching her daughters paddle in the shallows. ‘The process is crazy. The doctors asked Don, “Will you hurt yourself if we let you out.” He said no. They asked him if he had plans to hurt anybody else. He said no. So they let him out.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘I have no idea. Maybe they need the bed.’

‘I’m sorry, honey.’ I feel the distance, the longing to be there.

But she says, ‘It’s okay. It’s good to talk.’

In the afternoon, she drives back to her house, this time on a mission. In the front yard, she turns off the engine and climbs out of the car, taking the phone with her. I hear her shoes on the gravel, then, ‘Oh god. No.’

‘What?’

‘There’s rope in the back of his car.’

For a moment, I don’t get it. And then I do. ‘Jesus.’

‘There’s pills too. Everywhere, heaps of packets.’ The front door is wide open. The house is empty. She walks in and out of silent rooms, down the hall and out into the backyard. It’s not until she gets to the chicken shed that she starts to cry. ‘One of the chickens is dead. Oh god.’ She sobs. It’s like this is the thing that breaks her. ‘What do I do? I don’t know what to do.’

‘Call a friend. Somebody who lives close by. Somebody else can deal with the chicken. You don’t have to do that. Somebody will help. People want to help.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Okay. Yes. Jenny’s coming now anyway. I’ll ask her.’

‘Good, that’s good. It’s going to be okay, Pia. It’s all going to be okay.’ I say this over and over, but I don’t know if it’s true.

She walks back into the house, gathering her daughters’ passports, photos, birth certificates, clothes. ‘I won’t ever live under the same roof as him.’ Her breathing comes hard as she runs in and out of each room, taking only essentials, piling them into her hatchback.

When she drives away, she’s crying. I want to fix this for her. I want to make things better. This is what we do for one another. We are great ones for advice. But I have nothing to say.

‘It’s just good having you here,’ she says and I’m struck by this because I’m not there. I’m three thousand kilometres away. I send texts. I ring. When I start and finish my yoga practice, I dedicate it to her. I send her love and hope she feels it.

Thursday

‘What if he’s right? What if it is my fault?’ Her voice is quiet and low, locked in her throat.  ‘I keep thinking maybe I should have just, I don’t know, sat with him more, listened to him, stroked his back.’ Her voice cracks when she says this.

‘You did all those things. You tried so hard. For years and years. And he’s still angry at you. Because this is not about you. He would need to hate anybody he married, it’s how he is.’

I have known Pia for more than half my life. We met at a yoga retreat when yoga was still considered weird. I’d brought a guitar and a packet of Drum tobacco. She’d arrived with a tabla and a Cowboy Junkies tape. By the end of the first day, we were smoking rollies in her Honda Civic with the doors open and singing along to To Live Is To Fly.

Every afternoon, we’d sit on a sandbar and play music until the tide came in around us and we had to wade back to shore, still singing. We have almost always lived in different states. We send each other flowers on Valentine’s Day and the anniversaries of victories and the things that hurt. When she went into labour I pulled photos of her from my albums and laid them on the floor. I lit a candle and watched its flame flicker in the breeze and thought of her like my will had power to keep her safe. When I am afraid, she is the person I call.

‘This is not the time to doubt yourself,’ I tell her now. ‘You need your energy and strength to keep your girls and yourself safe.’

‘Yes,’ she says and I can almost feel her shoulders drop. ‘That’s true.’

Behind her, a car pulls up and I hear the engine through the phone. My belly tightens, anticipating Don, but she says, ‘It’s okay. It’s Jenny.’

‘Will you be alright?’

‘Yes. I don’t know. Probably. I should go.’

But she doesn’t go. Not straight away. There is a beat of quiet and I can feel her looking at the house she is leaving. The life she is leaving.

When her marriage was fresh and her first daughter newly born, I stayed in that house. I was there when Pia and Don planted their baby’s placenta under an apple tree. We took turns shovelling loose, dark earth around the bare roots of the sapling. When it was Pia’s turn, Don turned to her with his body open and his face gentle. Pia rolled their daughter into his arms and for a moment they were joined together, a brand new family. Love turned their tired faces luminous.

I can hear the wind running over the mouthpiece of her phone and I remember that it’s winter down there now. The days are short, the light thin. The paddocks dry and yellow and cold.

‘Are you still there?’ says Pia.

‘Of course. Always.’

Two Women was published in Jacaranda Journal (Edition 12.1) 2025

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Volkswagens

Olive finds the lump on a hot Wednesday afternoon. She’s home from school with a cold and I’m reading The Far Away Tree to her when she pats my breast.

‘I love your bosoms,’ she says. She is young enough to remember breastfeeding and still vaguely proprietorial about my breasts.

‘My bosoms love you too, honey.’ I turn back to the book.

But then she says, ‘What’s this lump?’

I touch the place where her small hand rests and there it is, hard and round like a frozen pea, just under the skin.

Later, when she is asleep, I stand in the shower running my hands over my breasts looking for it. At first, I can’t find anything and I think maybe it was never there at all, but then it pushes back against the questing tips of my fingers. A tiny ball, hard and ominous, lumping around on the left side of my left breast.

There is a woman at Olive’s school who had breast cancer. We stood outside the school when she told me. Children and their parents streamed across the grass and the hot white concrete. The bell had just gone and the air was raucous with freedom.

Hannah bent her face towards me. Her intensity made a quiet pool of space that other people stepped around.

‘It’s not in the glands, which is good. I just want the chemo to start now.’

‘Good,’ I said, knowing nothing. ‘That’s really good.’

I was running late. I don’t remember now where I had to be so urgently, only that I wanted to appear interested, but mostly I just wanted to leave.

I didn’t see Hannah for a long time after that. Sometimes I saw her husband and their daughter moving through the school grounds with their hands clasped.

There are toys in a basket in the waiting room. Olive sits by my feet, building a tower of red and blue wooden blocks. I shouldn’t have brought her with me, but I didn’t think it through.

Every job I have had since she was born, Olive has come with me. When I walk or go to a library or a cafe or a doctor’s appointment, I take her. Although the doctor’s appointments have always been for her … until now.

At my feet, she is singing quietly to herself. I watch her place a worn blue block carefully on top of the tower she has built. The whole thing sways precariously, but doesn’t topple. What will happen to her if I have cancer? I put the thought away. I don’t have cancer. I can’t have cancer.

The doctor’s name is Deborah. Olive climbs onto one of the padded vinyl chairs, and I go behind a blue curtain and take off my dress and bra.

I lay down on the high narrow bed and Dr Deborah presses her fingers into my breasts. Her hands are warm. She looks at my breast, but mostly her gaze is in middle distance, her focus slimmed down into her fingers.

‘Just relax.’

I stare at the ceiling, which is made of tiles, and try to relax.

‘Now raise your arms over your head.’

I raise my arms and her hands move around my breasts again and then up into the armpits.

When I am dressed again, I sit next to Olive and she shows me a house she has drawn. Flowers big as trees in the yard. The pair of us standing together in our matching triangle dresses.

‘That’s beautiful, honey. I like the flowers.’

Dr Deborah sits down in her swivel chair and turns to face me.

‘It’s showing all the good signs. It’s loose. You can move it. Cancerous lumps tend to take the rest of the breast with them. They tend to send out branches that grab hold.’ Her fingers go taut and open – cancer branches. ‘That’s why I got you to lift your arms, so I could see the movement of the nipples.’

‘Okay. Good.’ I will remember this later and bring it back to soothe the fear that rises at 3 am. This is good news. Surely. ‘Thank you.’

At reception, I hand over my credit card and wonder how I will pay for this.

Outside, the heat is thick and heavy. It pushes down from the sky and up from the pavement. It radiates off the black road, the concrete buildings and the shiny metal cars. Everything beams heat. For a moment, I don’t know what to do.

Olive pulls on my hand. Her palm is sweaty.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘What about your crackers and cheese?’

‘I ate them. And the apple.’

‘We’ll be home soon.’ Keys. I need to find my keys. Heat beats down on my shoulders and the top of my head.

I unlock the car and open the windows. We drive out of the car park, down the road and past Elka’s street. I see her unit flash past, and for a moment I think about stopping, about walking up her stairs, how she would meet me at her door and I would say, ‘I’ve got a lump in my breast,’ and she would put her arms around me and I would cry until I wasn’t scared anymore.

She’s probably not there, or if she is, she’ll be busy. I could visit Jen. But Jen is not good with tears. I pull out onto the highway, aware that I’m embarrassed by all this. I don’t know how to be with what’s happening. I think about Hannah and the way cancer put a circle around her, made her different from the rest of us. Isolated her in her sickness. Then I remember her husband, swinging his daughter’s arm as they walked together through the school, bending down to hear what she was saying.

‘I’m hungry.’ Olive’s voice, a high whine from the back seat.

‘I know honey, we’ll be home soon.’ Breathing. Pulling up at a red light.

‘I’m hungry now.’

‘We’ll be home soon.’

‘But I’m hungry now.’ She kicks her feet against the back of the chair.

I lose it. Before I even know what I’m doing, I’m turning around, one hand on the wheel, to yell at her: ‘shut up, all right! just shut up!’

She shrinks back into the blue velour of her safety seat. Her lower lip wobbles and a whimper comes out of her.

‘Oh god, honey, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m just. I’m sorry. I know you’re hungry. What if we stop at the supermarket and I’ll get you a banana or an apple.’ The light turns green and I ease forward, still watching her in the rear-view mirror. I should have brought more food with me. Today, I am a crap mother on top of everything else.

‘Do they have anything else?’ Her voice small.

‘They’ve got lots of things.’ I take the side street and loop back to Woollies, but the car park is jammed. A line of slow-moving cars, all of them looking for parking spaces. We inch forward. I do two slow circuits and nothing opens up. ‘If we can’t find a park soon, it might be quicker to just go home, honey.’

‘But I’m hungry.’

‘I know.’ I want to lay my head onto the hot steering wheel and howl. And just then, a white twin cab pulls out in front of us, right in front of the automatic doors. It feels like a miracle, and for a moment I think it means I don’t have cancer.

I stand in the foyer of the small shopping centre in front of Woolworths and next to Lenard’s Chicken, where a man is giving away samples of fried chicken, and I cry behind my sunglasses.

‘Can I have cherry tomatoes?’ Olive chews her satay and eyes off the fruit and veg section of the supermarket.

‘Of course you can.’

She runs off to grab a packet. I follow, collecting whatever she wants in the red plastic basket.

In the car, Olive eats two bananas, a meat stick, the box of cherry tomatoes and one mint slice.

‘That thing with your body?’ she says.

‘The lump in my breast?’

‘Yeah. Is it okay?’

‘I have to see another doctor and they’ll be able to tell me more. They’ll give me a mammogram and an ultrasound, which lets them see inside my body and then they’ll know.’

‘Like an X-ray.’

‘Just like an X-ray.’

‘It’s only a little thing. It’s nothing to worry about.’ Her hand goes up in the air, waving it all away. I watch her in the rear-view mirror. ‘It’s inside your body. How can anything bad get inside there?’

I see then that this is how she sees the body, perfect and perfectly sealed.

When I pull into the park in front of our flat and turn off the engine, she hands me a cherry tomato, leaning forward against her seat belt.

‘Don’t worry, Mum, it’s all going to be fine.’

The mammographer is narrow in the shoulders and hips. She has dark skin with pale patches under her eyes, like the new skin after bad sunburn. Her name is Sue and when she tells me this, she smiles. Her teeth are neat and even and there’s a fine white scar on one side of her top lip.

She leads me to a tiny cubicle and points at a pile of dark blue paper gowns.

‘Take off your clothes and put one of those on.’ Her voice is soft and with a slight blurring of vowels that makes me wonder if the scar was to fix a cleft palate.

Inside the cubicle, I put on one of the gowns and look down. The paper billows out around me. At the ends of my legs are my new sparkly shoes. I can feel the cool hospital air at my back and my own nakedness under the gown. I point one sparkly foot and it makes me feel braver.

The machine is beige and huge. It takes up almost the entire room, although the room is small, the size of a bathroom.

‘Have you had a mammogram before?’

‘No.’

There are two plates, both square. Sue presses a button and the plates separate.

‘Do you know anything about them?’

‘Not really. Only that they squash your breast.’

‘That’s the important bit. That’s the bit I need to make sure you know.’ She lifts my left breast and arranges it onto the bottom plate, laying it out like an egg. ‘A bit cold, hey?’

I nod. I don’t trust my voice.

She readjusts my breast, pulling it gently, moving my shoulder forward at the same time. Then she pauses and looks at my face.

‘It will likely hurt.’

‘Okay.’

She presses a button that I can’t see and the second plate descends. It is transparent and moves a little fast for my liking. It hits my breast but doesn’t pause. I worry that it won’t stop, that my breast will be squeezed to death. Already it is thinner, wider and flatter than I thought it was possible for a breast to be. The flesh is squashed as flat as rolled-out Play-Doh. But then, miraculously, the descending plate pauses. It does hurt, but not too badly.

Sue runs to the other side of the room, behind a screen where the controls are. She presses a button to take the image. As soon as it’s done, she runs back and frees my breast.

She does the same thing each time, her feet slapping the lino as she rushes across the small space.

‘Why do you run?’ I ask her the second time.

‘Because you are hurting and if I run you will hurt for a shorter time.’

She shifts the position of the plates, rearranges the same breast to take an image from another angle and the plate descends again. She runs back to the button. She’s wearing Volleys, slim and long, and the sound of them against the floor is the loudest thing in the room.

The woman who lives in the house opposite me had a double mastectomy. We were standing by her gate when she told me. Sal has four wild boys under the age of ten and her house is full of noise and music and food.

In the shade of the African mahogany in her front yard, she cupped her breasts through her thin cotton dress. Sal is a tall thin woman and her breasts were small.

‘I mean, they’re not much,’ she looked from one to the other. ‘I’ve breastfed four kids, but still. I always liked my tits.’

‘They’re beautiful.’ I told her, and I meant it, but later I would think how all breasts are beautiful. Pockets of softness and miracle.

She let her hands drop and sent me a wry smile.

‘I’d like to do something for them before they go. Have a party maybe. Make a tit cake. Or drive through Darwin, topless in a convertible. Give them one last good time.’

I laughed. ‘Do it, that’s a great idea. Do it all.’

‘I just might, you know.’ Beside the fence, in the leafy light, she closed her eyes and lifted her arms up and out as if to welcome the blue and golden sky into her body. I could see her then, standing in a roofless red Mazda, or maybe even a Porsche, swinging through the suburbs of Darwin, bare-breasted and free.

‘Other side.’ Sue presses a lever and the entire machine rotates.

We repeat the procedure on my right breast. Like before, as the top plate descends, she holds my breast in place until the very last minute then snatches her hand out.

‘Have you ever got your hand caught?’ I ask when it’s all over.

Her eyes flick at mine, full of humour. ‘When I was training. Yes.’

We laugh, and the sound is unlikely but good in this small windowless room.

‘I’ll be back as soon I can,’ she says, and then she’s gone.

It is only when I am alone in the room that I feel afraid. A poster on the wall opposite reads ‘Life Support System’. The room is grey. The machine is beige, but the room is grey. There are grey walls and grey tiles on the ceiling. There are no windows.

On the chair next to me is a pile of magazines. I look at pictures of Angelina Jolie, her beautiful face and spider hands. Her malnourished, praying mantis body.

I haven’t touched the lump for a week. I remember Sal saying, ‘If it is cancer, by the time they find a lump, it’s too late. Like the oil light in your car. By the time that light goes on, you’ve probably done your engine.’

I put the magazine down. I count the ceiling tiles. It doesn’t take long. There are three rows, five tiles wide. Fifteen. I pick up another magazine but don’t look at it. I think about Olive, then Sue comes back and says I can get dressed.

‘The doctor wants you to have a biopsy. Just to be sure.’

I follow her out of the small room, back to the little cubicle to take off my paper gown. But then, standing in my Bonds undies and my sparkly shoes, I want to call her back. What did she mean? To be sure. To be sure of what? That I don’t have cancer? That I do have cancer?

I walk across the car park under the burning sun, wishing I had a hat. My feet sweat and slip against the soles of my sandals. I slip-slop to my car. I put on the air con and ring Cate.

As soon as she picks up, I start talking. ‘I’m a bit freaked out, I’ve got a lump and I just had a mammogram and I’m scared I’ve got cancer and there will be nobody for Olive. How are you? How are the kids?’

I don’t know why I say this last bit. Now that I’ve said the words out loud – lump, mammogram, cancer – I feel the fear in full force. It blooms in my belly like squid ink in water. I don’t want to know about her kids. I need to talk. I need her to listen. But I asked so she tells me how Lily hurt her lip, but she’s okay now, and in the background I can hear the baby chattering, then Cate says, ‘Lily wants to say hello.’

And suddenly I am yelling, ‘no! I can’t! I can’t. Can I just talk? Can I please just tell you? Please.’

Her voice shifts, drops.

‘It’s okay. I’m here.’ I feel her move towards me. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m so scared. I’m so scared I keep trying to be strong and I know it’s going to be okay, I’m sure it’ll be okay, but I’m so scared and the room where they give you the mammogram it’s got no windows and there’s a weird smell and I had to sit there for forty minutes not knowing what was going on, and oh god, Cate, I’m so scared, I keep thinking about Olive, what if something happens to me who will take care of her and the money, it’s all so expensive. I didn’t know it would cost so much.’ I talk and talk with all my words stuck together.

She lets me talk myself empty and then she says, ‘I will give you money. And we’ll all help with Olive. It will be okay.’ I can hear her kids roaring at each other in the background, but on the other end of the phone, Cate is still and quiet. She is completely here.

I start to cry. I cry with the phone to my ear and my head on the steering wheel and the sun coming through the windscreen onto my arm and my back and the side of my face.

‘You’ve got more support than you realise,’ she says. ‘There are people who love you. People love you.’

There is a television on at the front of the waiting room. It is tuned to an infomercial for an exercise belt: ‘Lose weight without leaving the couch!’ The volume is up loud.

At the end of one of the rows of bolted-down chairs is a man I know, although not very well. We nod but don’t talk. I look at the other people in the waiting room and realise their worlds, too, must be frozen. All of us waiting for tests and results as we hold our New Ideas and Who Weeklys or just stare at the yelling television: ‘Shake off that belly fat! No exercise needed!’

Hannah came back to school, thin and quiet. Her head was bald and her eyes were luminous. ‘I’ve gone completely organic. I meditate all the time. I feel more alive than I ever have.’ I envied her luminosity like I’d envied her the good husband. Although neither was worth the price of cancer.

Sal didn’t go organic. She didn’t meditate. She got stoned. Her chaotic family crashed around her, and she moved like somebody walking through waist-high water. She got stoned and Jamie, her husband, got drunk. He used to drink before, but now he drank to get drunk and then to stay drunk. They fought about it. I could hear them screaming in the early dark hours of the morning.

The noise of their boys went up a level as well. They crashed through their house and down the street, through gardens and, once, a plate-glass window on the first floor of their house. I saw them barefoot on their bikes or running, one with an arm in a sling, the other two fighting on the pavement, rolling over each other like dogs. I bent over to help.

‘Fuck off,’ the older one hissed at me, pausing the fight, but holding his brother down with his knees.

The littler one lifted his head from the pavement. ‘Yeah, fuck off.’

I saw Jamie once at the markets. He didn’t look good. We hugged, and his skin was sweaty and cold despite the heat.

‘How you going? How’s Sal?’

He leaned towards me. He stank of alcohol and old sweat.

‘It’s like Volkswagens.’ His eyes were bloodshot and puffy. ‘You never notice them until you get one yourself. Then you see the fuckers everywhere. Everybody I talk to has got a breast cancer story. Somebody’s mother, aunt, daughter, sister. It’s everywhere. It’s an epidemic.’

Behind him, a group of German tourists were trying to get past. I could see their polite blond wholesomeness, their ‘Excuse me’s falling onto the hot concrete. Jamie ignored them. He was trying to light a cigarette. He couldn’t get the lighter to work.

‘It’s a fucken epidemic,’ he said again. He put the lighter back in his pocket, but kept hold of the unlit cigarette. ‘It’s a fucken epidemic,’ he lifted his voice and opened his arms to include the Germans, who looked startled and stepped backwards, looking for another way out.

I schedule my appointment with Dr Deborah when Olive is at kindy. In the waiting room, somebody else’s children built towers with the wooden blocks. Mr Bean plays on a large television screen on the wall. I stare at it blindly, full of what I am about to find out.

In Dr Deborah’s room, I sit in the black vinyl chair with my back against the wall. She swivels her own chair to face me and leans into the air between us. ‘The results came back.’

Afterwards, the woman at reception gives me back an enormous white flat envelope. I take it and walk down the hall past the low-back couches, the water bubbler and the chemist with its bright jelly beans in rows out the front. I walk through the automatic doors and out into the hot bright sunlight.

I sit in my car with the air con on full and the envelope in front of me. The air con rushes at my ankles and my chin. I put my head against the window. The glass is warm. The sun flows onto my face.

I sit in my car but don’t go anywhere. I close my eyes. I feel the warmth coming through the glass and onto my arm. Whatever you might believe happens after death, there is no sensation of sunlight on skin.

I stay there for a minute, holding the envelope with my eyes closed. And then I ring Cate.

‘I don’t have cancer. It’s benign. It’s just a lump.’

‘That is the best news ever,’ she says, and we laugh as if she has said something hilarious.

‘Thank you.’

‘We will live to be old, old ladies and our great grandchildren will know each other.’

And then we’re both crying. ‘Thank you. Thank you for being there for me.’

‘Stop thanking me. I’m your friend. I want to be here for this. All of it.’

After the mastectomy, Sal wore white bandages under her cotton sundresses until she healed. She and Jamie kept fighting. The boys ran wild. The cancer never came back.

‘Not so far, anyway,’ said Sal last time we spoke about it. We were outside her fence again, a pack of kids around us. There was a storm coming in, and the breeze lifted her hair and mine.

Hannah was in remission, too. Still clear-eyed and clear-skinned, although maybe a little less luminous than last time we’d talked.

‘It’s amazing how quickly you forget. For a while, everything, every moment felt precious. Miraculous.’ She put one hand above her eyes to block the sun, and we watched our girls run, sweaty-faced under cotton bucket hats, across the bright, irrigated grass of the school oval. ‘I was so fucking present. But now, I don’t know.’ She dropped her hand. ‘It’s like it was before, well, not quite, but …’ She stopped.

On the giant rope web, the girls began to climb, racing one another to the top.

‘You forget,’ she said. You forget you’re going to die, and everything becomes ordinary again. You forget to live well, to be present, you just forget. I want it back. Not the cancer. But the rest of it.’ She waved her yoga-muscly arms to encompass the green oval in front of us, the bright sky behind our small climbing children’s dark bodies.

The afternoon I find out that I don’t have cancer, I go home and lie on my bed with my hand on my breast where the lump is. I don’t try to feel the lump. I just rest my hand there. And then I laugh into the hot dark air of my bedroom, realising that I must look like an American taking an oath. Isn’t that what they do – one hand on the heart? I think about what a simple and beautiful gesture this must have started as. To touch your heart and declare your loyalty.

I ring my stepmother, who answers the phone by saying, ‘Who is this?’

‘Peta. It’s Peta. Is this a bad time?’

‘I’m in the middle of something. I’ll call you back.’ She hangs up abruptly and I feel stung and don’t want to talk to her anymore, but when the phone rings five minutes later, I pick up and she’s different. She’s herself. ‘Sorry about that, sweetheart. I was at the cash register and I couldn’t hear properly.’ I remember then what I am always forgetting, that Claire is getting older. My glamorous stepmother is becoming an old lady.

When I tell her about the lump she asks, ‘How big?’

‘About the size of a pea.’

‘Oh, mine was much bigger than that, and it grew really fast.’

‘That must have been scary.’

‘It was. But it was okay in the end. It wasn’t anything to worry about. It was just a lump. They drained all the juice out. It sounds funny to say that. It was hard, but then they took out the juice, maybe it was more like a kind of gel.’

‘You never told me.’

‘I didn’t want you to worry. I would have told you if it had turned out differently, but it was fine.’

Jen says, ‘Nine out of ten are fine. And the one that isn’t. Well. Things are different now. There’s all this stuff they can do. They know heaps more. It’s not like it was.’ She’s driving and she has me on speaker. She always shouts a little when she’s on speaker, and she does that now when she says, ‘I had one.’

‘A lump? You never said.’

‘I didn’t really want to talk about it, to tell you the truth’

‘Really?’ Half of Jen’s conversations are about her illnesses or possible illnesses.

‘I don’t think I could have coped with other people’s worry. It would have just made me more scared.’

Outside, the sun is low and a wide stripe of yellow light falls into the room. ‘But you’re okay now?’

‘Well, I haven’t had a poo for three days.’

‘Oh, honey.’

‘I know. Three days.’ She cuts the engine in the car and in a less shouty voice says, ‘You and Ollie coming over tonight? Mark’s cooking pizza.’

Elka says, ‘My mother used to get these lumps. They were fine. There was never anything wrong. But still, she kept getting the lumps. In the end, she had both her breasts cut off. Because she was afraid.’

I know Elka’s mother. We have shared Christmases and picnics and bottles of red wine. I think of her body naked and her fear and what it cost her.

‘They didn’t know so much then.’

I pick up Olive from school and take her to the pool. She plunges under the surface while I stand breast-deep in light-spangled water, feeling into the line where the water ends and the air begins. The day falls away, and silence rushes in. In the distance, the crooked, perfect branches of a eucalypt pattern the sky. Closer, the tousled heads of palm trees shake their fronds in the wind. A storm coming in, but not yet.

I dive into the blue water, feeling the intimacy of my own body in movement. I swim around my swimming daughter and think how very lovely and precious our bodies are, all bodies are.

When I stand again, Olive slips against me, wrapping her legs around my waist, hanging onto my neck.

‘We are like angels,’ she says. ‘Angels only wear bathers or sometimes nothing at all.’

I don’t think about the lump in my left breast. I am here, alive in my skin and aware of everything it touches – the water, the air, Olive’s glossy limbs and damp fingers. She pats my breasts through my one-piece.

‘I love your bosoms,’ she says, and then she lolls sideways so I am carrying her in my arms, a fainting heroine in an old-style romance.

I can feel the cool of the breeze moving over my wet shoulders and the warmth of my daughter against my breathing belly. A quiet happiness spreads across my lower back, and then she lets go of me, splashing away into the water and the light.

Volkswagens was a finalist in the Furphy Awards and appears in the 2020 anthology.

---

Small

Flying into Hobart, the plane draws an arc above the silver river, the dark mountain. As the wheels touch down, I remember being eighteen and how good it was to leave.

I grew up in Tasmania. I was the fat girl with frizzy hair. The smart one with braces and no mother. Metal cut the inside of my mouth and I was always cold. I remember lunchtimes in the library or the art room. The smell of chalk and etching acid and dark ink. A blue and white uniform. The taste of the small green rubber bands that joined the top set of teeth to the bottom and the way my tongue could not stop flicking at them.

Once in a maths test, a rubber band pinged silently from my mouth. I saw it sail, suddenly freed, through the silent air and slap wetly against the blackboard where it left a small dark patch of my spit on the dust-grey surface.

The shock of it and the moment of stillness before the noise. The heat in my cheeks. Staring down at my desk as laughter broke across my back. Then the kindness of the teacher who said only, ‘That’s enough, settle down.’ And finding refuge in the algebra before me. I felt the space where the rubber band had been, flicking at the emptiness with my tongue.

*

I step off the plane into an icy wind. I hunch around my spine and make myself small as a woman walking late in an unsafe place. I don’t tell anybody that maybe there is a hole in my baby’s heart.

Hobart airport is small, but bigger than it used to be. The squat white building sits ahead of me, a reflection of planes moving in the glass, then sunlight hit the windows and turns them amber. A man in a blue suit steps back to let me pass and suddenly I am here, in the uncertain country of childhood.

I step through the automatic doors and into a rush of artificial heat. It’s Jack and Lily I see first, their wisping hair full of sudden light. A fling of skinny kid arms around my legs and waist, the press of their heads against my belly and my thighs. Then my brother is hugging me too, the prickle of his beard at my cheek. “Alice’s teaching.” He kisses me smackingly. “She’ll see you at home.”

“How is she?”

“Good,” he says. “She’s good,” and we step sideways to let a hockey team in blue and red past, luggage banging at their legs and plastic name tags on their chests. Taroona High school, where I went, a million years ago.

Mary O’Conner was my best friend. She wore white socks up to her knees and black shoes that were always polished. Her uniform came to her knees and was crisply ironed.

My uniform was not ironed. I wore ankle socks and desert boots and one day Mary wasn’t allowed to be my friend.

“Because you come from a broken home,” she explained. “It’s not me. It’s my mother. She thinks you might be a bad influence.”

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“I know.”

“I help you with your maths homework.”

“That’s what I said. She said it doesn’t matter. You’re from a broken home. Anything might happen.”

I didn’t know what to say. We were sitting on the green-painted wooden benches at the front of D block. In front of us, a stretch of concrete, and then a fence. On the other side of the fence, rough blond grass, rocks and the river.

I looked at the river. It was an overcast day and the water was grey and white with wind. The wind blew my hair into my face.

*

Carolyn rings every day with stories she collects for me like shells. “My Nana’s best friend, Essie, had a hole in her heart and she lived till she was eighty-nine. And even then, it wasn’t her heart that got her, but the number 94 bus to Randwick. She never saw it coming. The bus driver came to the funeral. They give them counselling, but I don’t know it helps that much. He bought lilies and cried through the service.”

Not everyone is so kind.

Sitting in Alice’s kitchen, my ungentle aunt swoops like a dark-winged bird over my belly. “You’re very small for six months,” she says and her currawong eyes gleam. “Are you sure everything’s normal?”

I lift my cup. “Everything’s fine.”

“You just seem very small.” She smiles with lips gluey with orange lipstick. “Maybe you should get checked. Have you been checked?”

I sip my tea. Steam rolls up my face. “Everything’s fine.”

My dark aunt takes a slice of carrot cake from the plate on the table between us.

She turns to Alice, “Don’t you think she’s small?” Then before Alice can answer, she swivels like a Darlek back to me. “Your cousin Lisa carried a baby for eight months and it was only then that they found out it had been dead for nearly twelve weeks. Rotted inside her, it had. They had to cut her open to get it out. All black and shrivelled, it was.”

She bites at the slice of cake in her hand. “Poor little mite,” she says.

*

I was the second last girl in my class to get my period.

Small blue tiles covered the toilet floor and behind the door hung a copy of Desiderata.

Go placidly among the noise and haste.

The walls were painted yellow and there was a high window with a security screen behind the toilet. The window was open. I leaned forward to pull off a length of toilet paper and the cold air flowed around my bottom.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars.

A streak of blood on the white toilet paper. Red in the middle, pale pink on the outside. I wasn’t afraid. I knew exactly what it meant.

I had a body that could make a baby.

I was a woman.

*

I lie on the double bed with the electric blanket on. There is forty percent more blood pumping through my body and most of it, I am sure, has ended up at my clitoris. I am aroused all the time. I bring myself to orgasm twice a day. The heat of the electric blanket comes up through my back and the souls of my feet, my hand between my legs. I am so wet these days. Pregnancy has made me juicy as a mango.

Afterwards, I lie and look at the pressed metal ceiling, the intricate old beauty of it, the new paintwork, crisp along the wobbling lines of old architraves.

I close my eyes and I imagine my baby’s heart and that it is strong. Strong and whole. I wrap her little floating body in a white cocoon and put love like light all around her. Every day I do this. I see her heart like an anatomical diagram. I see it beating strong and clear as a bassline through her body and mine. I feel the lion strength of her.

*

Alice’s kitchen is a long thin room full of light. I stand at the sink, put my hands in the foaming washing-up water. The heat of it is lovely.

At the other end of the kitchen, Alice slides diced onions from a chopping board into the cast iron frying pan. “How is it going with Ben?”

“It’s okay.”

“Really?”

“No.” I laugh, but Alice doesn’t. I pull a plate out of the sink, watch the soap fall in a single sloop of white and then I tell her. “He uses the word burden a lot.”

“Oh dear.”

The kitchen smells of onions frying. Outside is the dark green of old pine trees and the bright of the neighbour’s new tin roof, shining like alfoil in the sun.

“He won’t touch my stomach.”

Alice steps across the kitchen and still holding the wooden spoon in her right hand, wraps me like she does her children. Her kindness makes me cry. I cry until my nose runs and then I move backwards looking for a tissue, which I find on top of the fridge.

“It’ll be okay,” she says.

“I know.”

“Most of my friends are single mums.” She puts the spoon down on the beach. “Sometimes it’s easier.”

“I know.” Swallowing tears like an apple in my throat, moving backwards out of the kitchen.

*

When I was fourteen, Mum came back for a visit. We stood on the corner of Franklin Square eating ice cream. Her pink tongue lapping at a vanilla cone she said. “It’s just pigfat, you know. That’s what they make it out of. Pig fat and a bit of colouring and flavouring. And lots of sugar of course. But mostly pig fat.”

I watched her lift the cone above her face, bite the very end off and suck ice cream through the hole. Her cheeks caved inward. The ice cream at the top end shrank and wrinkled. Her throat bobbed with swallowing.

When she’d finished eating, she said, “How’s your father?” Then before I could answer, she said, “Do you think he’s in love with Jennifer?”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted her to ask about me.

“You don’t think he’ll marry her, do you?” She scratched her arm. Her body was covered with tiny scars. If she got a mozzie bite, she would scratch until it bled and then, when it scabbed over, she would scratch it again. Except for parts of her back, which she couldn’t reach, her whole body was covered with small, round, silver scars. They overlapped.

*

In the bath I am warm.

“Hello.” Jack and Lily appear at the side of the bath.

“Hello.”

“What are you doing?”

“Having a bath.”

“Oh.” The air is steaming and the mirror behind them fogged grey. “Is it fun?”

“Yeah, it’s nice.”

They stand side by side, both in baggy shorts. Jack is bare-chested so I can see the birdcage ribcage of his tiny chest. “Can the baby hear us talk?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” We look together at my stomach, laying there in the water. It floats with my breasts above the surface. The water is opaque with soap.

“Can we come in too?”

“If you want.”

They pull their clothes off. Jack is first, climbing over the side of the bath.

“Ooh,” he says, standing with the water around his shins, “It’s hot.”

Lily leans over the edge, tests the water with one hand. “No it’s not.”

“It’s a little bit hot,” he says and sits down.

I move to make room for him. He sits with his ankles crossed and his knees up around his chin. Then Lily climbs in, one pale leg over the bath and then the other.

She stands between us like a lamp post. “Do you think we’ll all fit?”

I shift over until my left hip is hard against the smooth ceramic wall.

“I want to lie down,” she says and then she does, unfolding herself into the water, laying her long body down beside me. Her head on my shoulder, her long hair swishing in the water.

“I want to lie down too.”

“Here.” Lily shifts her legs and points at a triangular space between her hips and my belly. “You can lay here, Jack.”

I look at the space she has pointed to and it seems so little, but Jack lays himself into it, sideways, and then the three of us are still. Our bodies pressed together like packaged sausages. The tap drips, pinging the bathwater. Steam rises and the air is thick and hazy. I put my hand on Jack’s damp hair and he closes his eyes, rests his face against the swelling of my belly.

My muscles soften in the lovely heat of the water. Condensation beads on the metal of the cold tap. The edges of things blur. I’m award of the pulse at my neck and the texture of children pressed against me, the bone of elbows and knees, the curve of their bellies. Lily’s eyes slowly closing and the silk of her hair in the water. Jack’s breath and the press of his head against my belly, listening for the baby.

*

Carolyn says, “I met a woman at the park the other day and she said her baby had a hole in her heart and it fixed itself. No operation. Nothing. Her body just did it. By the time the girl was two years old, the hole had gone.”

I sit in the small room where the phone is. Sunlight falls in a diamond from the window across the wooden boards. I put one hand on my belly.

“Listen to this,” she says and puts the phone up to her breast so I can hear the sound of her baby suckling. It is such small and tender noise. Tiny. Rhythmic. Wet. It makes me hold my breath. This, I think, is what love sounds like.

*

I walk every day. I go down to the silver river, astounded by the beauty of it, and I think, How did I not notice this before? And the mountain too, which sat like a weight against my back my entire childhood, is suddenly glorious. For the first time, I start to love this little city, a town made from stone and wood and set between a mountain and a river. It warms me, somehow, this sudden enchantment, looking at the clinking yachts each evening, holding my belly against the cold air. Walking under a lavender sky.

*

“Things aren’t flowing.” Ben’s voice in my ear, longed for, but saying all the wrong things.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not meant to have this baby.

“What?” The creep of cold up the skin of my arms in a trail that I can see, goosebumped, chickenskinned, fear in very small dots.

“The signs aren’t good.”

“What signs? Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He exhales hard into the phone, a sound like wind on a cold day. Then he says, “Okay. Like the stuff with the heart.”

I am left breathless and wordless, winded by this. A fast jab at the throat.

“Ben. That’s so unfair.”

“I’m just telling you what I think.”

“Unhelpful then. Okay? It’s really unhelpful.” And then I am crying, hunched in a cane chair that will leave the pattern of its weave across the back of my thighs.

From the box on the table in front of me, I pull a eucalypt scented tissue. “I don’t need this right now. This is not what I need.”

Silence.

I stop crying. I blow my nose. “I need you to be steady.”

I can hear the noise of television in his house, not the words, just the burble murmur, the strange laughter.

“Ben?”

“Yeah,” he says, and I hear the shuffle of his movement, the click of the wire screen door opening, the rattle of it closing.

I think of that country sky and one velvet night when he took me by my hand and pulled me into the dark garden to show me the stars. The unbelievable cold of the air, the warmth of his belly against my back. His arms like a good blanket around me.

I let the air out of me, rub my belly clockwise, slowly bend towards the heater. “You on the verandah?”

“Yeah.”

On the street behind me, a clatter of shoes on old stone. The sound disappears down the road and then there is just the silence on the other end of the phone and into this silence I say, “I love you, Ben.”

The silence deepens like dark water under a small boat. I can hear the scratch of a match stuck, the sharp inhale, the long exhale of smoke blown into cold air and in the background, muffled by distance, the sound of dogs barking.

“Ben?”

“I might go now,” he says and then he hangs up. The receiver in my hand, against my ear, is hot and full of the sound of empty air.

*

Jack and I sit side by side on the soft sand at the top of the beach. In the water, Lily stands, bent at the waist, holding a friend’s toddler, lifting him up as each wave comes in, putting his little feet in the water as the break passes. Their bodies are golden in the light.

After a long quiet, Jack says, “It’s such a big world, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I s’pose it is.” The air is cooling, but the sand under my toes is warm and silky.

“It’s such a big world,” he says again, “and it’s such a small us.”

I turn to look at him then. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I’m big enough for the world,” he says. “I think you need to be big for the world.”

I put my hand on his back, and he leans into me, moving inside the nook of my arm, up against my breast.

“It’s okay to be small though,” I say. “There are still small places in the big world.”

“Yeah,” he says and we look at the water again and at Lily and the baby who is laughing. I can feel the nubbly bones of his spine against my arm and the heat of his skin through his shirt. The lean of him into my body. The hummingbird heart beat in his chest, the slimness of him and the smallness of his bones.

Small first appeared in Meanjin in 2010, when Sophie Cunningham was Editor. I will always be grateful to Sophie for her kindness and support and for the moment of seeing my words in print in such a beautiful publication.