The Best Thing Read online

  ‘Why are you runnin’, then? Why are you lookin’ like that?’

  Because I’m bad for you. Because you were right; I will move on.

  His letting go sets me back a pace; there’s a thrust in it, of anger.

  ‘Will you let me past, please?’ I say quietly, presenting the top of my head to him.

  ‘Will you come back?’

  Too long a pause. ‘Sure.’ I still don’t look up.

  ‘Mel?’ His voice shrinking. Beware quietness, where disaster happens.

  I push him aside like a gauze curtain, this man who can stop a 76-kilo fighter. I don’t look back. I swing round the post on the landing and thud down the stairs. I’m a coward; I’m running; I’m gone.

  I ring Mum from King Street. It sounds as if a corpse answers the phone. ‘Yes.’ Not even ‘Hullo?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose it’s too much to expect you went to school today?’

  ‘I went to a friend’s. I had a bad migraine.’

  ‘Right. So you’re checking how badly you’re in trouble now, hey?’

  I laugh, embarrassed. ‘I guess.’

  She doesn’t sound amused. ‘Well, I’ve run out of anger for today. You might as well come home.’

  ‘Is Dad there?’

  She snorts. ‘You think he’d stay? By choice? With boring old me?’

  Pause. ‘You haven’t run out of anger, then.’

  She sighs. ‘Honey, I’m all over the bloody place. All I ask is, we make an appointment to talk about your problem tomorrow morning. I just couldn’t face it tonight. I mean face it again, because of course we’ve faced it before, haven’t we?’

  She just thinks it’s the same as last time, where we pop off to the clinic and get me scraped out. She doesn’t know about the forgetting, the not-saying, the waiting for and not getting periods. For months. It has to be too late for that ‘option’. Which means …

  ‘I’ll be back in a little while.’ I hang up and step out into the night.

  When I get back she really looks at me.

  ‘I should’ve guessed,’ she says. ‘Here was I going to get you blood-tested for anaemia! And your weird eating habits, of course.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning Mum,’ I say. I can’t face it, either.

  She gives me such a hug—more than that, a holding on to.

  ‘I have to tell you that your dad left this morning,’ she says, standing back.

  ‘Left? As in …?’

  ‘As in went. As in doesn’t look like coming back. Left home.’

  She’s looking into my face, her hands on my shoulders. I did that. I split up our family.

  I never noticed this before, but the left side of her face has got a very slight sag to it. Her left eye is just the tiniest bit downtilted, the way our balcony floorboards tilt to let the rain run off the edge.

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘To Ricky’s place. She called me at work, to explain things.’

  ‘Explain? Explain what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t listen. I was trying to work, didn’t want to think. Trouble is—’ She pushes off from my shoulders and goes over to the dining table, which is covered in files and papers. ‘This is the sort of thing I’d normally ring up Ricky about, and work it out with her. Ricky being who I thought she was, not who I know she is, now. I can hardly believe it’s the same person.’ She stands there with a file in her hand, fallen silent. Then she looks at me. ‘I’m tired. And you look pretty shattered too. We’d better switch off our brains and try to get some sleep.’

  She follows me up the stairs, both of us moving really slowly. She laughs at our creeping. ‘The walking wounded.’ It’s a joke and it isn’t a joke.

  2

  CONFESSIONAL

  I don’t know how they trained. There ain’t but one

  way to train. Running is the same, punching the

  bag is the same, jumping rope’s the same, resting,

  and going to camp, following the dietary laws.

  Clean living is the same. They must have felt like

  I felt. It’s grueling, it’s rough, it’s agony,

  the training.

  Muhammad Ali

  ‘Not Brenner.’ Mum brings her mug of full-strength heart-starter coffee to the table.

  ‘A boy I met last year, before Christmas.’ A boy. A tiny boy no bigger than my thumb.

  ‘Briefly?’ I shake my head. ‘That’s where you were yesterday?’ I nod. ‘How far along are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe four months.’ Her eyes widen. ‘Three. I don’t know. I only did the test yesterday.’

  Long silence. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘Why only yesterday, if you’ve been months without a period?’

  ‘I didn’t get any other signs, like throwing up or feeling faint. I just felt as if a period was always about to start, and seeing’s they’ve never been all that regular I just … I was just expecting one to come, that’s all.’

  ‘For three or four months?’

  ‘Well … they’ve been a busy three months.’

  ‘I can imagine—keeping up the HSC and this secret boyfriend, and all that socialising.’

  ‘I wasn’t socialising,’ I mutter. ‘I was seeing Dino.’

  ‘And what does “Dino” think about this?’

  I shake my head. ‘I haven’t told him. I don’t want to.’

  ‘You don’t want to tell him.’ She lifts the coffee and takes a slow sip. ‘Any reason?’

  ‘No, no reason.’

  ‘He doesn’t beat you up or anything, does he?’

  ‘Oh, no. He thinks I’m the best thing since sliced bread.’

  ‘Why keep him in the dark, then?’

  ‘Because, okay?’

  ‘No! Not okay!’ She stops herself, goes on slightly less fiercely, ‘Not okay, Mel, and not because. The boy has some rights, you know. You have to have a reason, and a good rock-solid one, for keeping him out of this if you go ahead with it. The two of you made this happen, you know, so don’t go taking the full burden on yourself, just to be holy or for God knows what other reason.’

  ‘Look, I’m the one who kept forgetting the Pill, right? And forgetting to tell him.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, it’s my fault, then, isn’t it?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, you just said, about the burden of it—he didn’t know he was even likely to get me pregnant.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Stop saying that, Mum!’

  ‘Look, accidents happen all the time—pills fail, condoms split, diaphragms get holes in them. The fact is, you get a baby from a mother and a father and the father usually, unless he’s a complete ratbag, takes some kind of responsibility. Helps, you know?’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Supports. Money, if nothing else.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want his help and support.’

  She touches her forehead. ‘Let me just check with you. We’re talking single parenthood here, are we? We’re talking Melanie Dow having a child and bringing it up on her own.’

  ‘Well, there are other people. You, and people I’d meet—’

  ‘Me?’ she interrupts. ‘You think, when I’m just beginning to look life-after-children in the face, that I want to go back to the nappy stage?’

  ‘Oh, shit, sorry for spoiling your life, Mother!’

  ‘Oh, sit down, Mel! It’s not my life we’re talking about anyway. It’s this child’s. Is there a rock-solid reason why you’re denying him or her a father? This is all presuming that you’re perfectly happy to be the mother, of course.’

  ‘Well, what’s so fantastic about fathers?’

  Mum watches me curiously, rubs her cheek and settles it into her hand. ‘Quite a lot, actually, if you look back over sixteen years or so.’

  ‘Yeah, but for how many of them was he having it off with Ricky?’

  ‘One. One year, if he’s to be believed. Since our Easter holiday with the Lewises at the beach house.’<
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  That long! I stare at her, see her eyes fill. She sees me watching, blinks and snatches a tissue from the box at the end of the table. ‘Don’t get me started. We’re talking about a different father here.’ She blows her nose efficiently. ‘I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘We’ve sort of broken up.’

  ‘But you were there yesterday.’

  ‘We sort of broke up yesterday.’

  She stands up, takes her mug to the sink. ‘Well, you’d better sort of get back together again, I reckon. Sounds like you broke up under false pretences. Or did you not give him any reasons either?’ She grimaces over her shoulder. ‘Did you just tell him because, too?’

  I sit in mutinous silence. She is too smart, my mother, far too sharp and clear-headed. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be woolly and confused, to have feelings about things rather than incisive, rational thoughts, to only know things for sure when you look back on them. I’m not going to give in to her pressure; she can be as impatient as she likes. I’m going to wait until things come clear for me, and until then I’ll follow my own instincts.

  ‘And another thing,’ I say. ‘I’m not going back to school.’

  My mother is slightly taller than me, but thinner, frailer-looking. Sometimes I can’t believe the power she has in her slender bones, her long delicate hands. Her quiet voice: ‘You didn’t have to get pregnant, you know, to get out of going to school. You only had to ask, and we would have worked out something.’ I get the feeling she’s slipped in time, that the ‘we’ includes Dad, indicates the good old days, the days before yesterday.

  ‘I didn’t, I didn’t,’ I protest. But she makes me wonder.

  Boxing is unique amongst sporting activities in that victory is obtained by inflicting upon the opponent such a measure of physical injury that he is unable to continue, or which at least can be seen to be significantly greater than is received in return. For this reason alone many people will advocate that boxing be banned altogether as vicious and uncivilised. Others find some advantages in learning ‘the noble art of self-defence’ or believe that society is not yet ready to eliminate boxing altogether; they therefore press for rational controls designed to achieve the greatest possible level of protection of the participants.

  The weekend is murder. It’s like a long dive-bombing mission, this ‘discussion’. Mum keeps coming at me, dropping some explosive question like, ‘Where do you plan to have this baby?’ or ‘What will you do for money?’, listening while I jitter about, unable to answer, then wandering away, leaving me all in bits, jangling with possibilities.

  And there’s no normal corner of our lives to hide in now. It’s just her and me, a glider and a high-tech bomber, circling each other, with no Dad to ground us. I float along waiting for wind-currents and thermals to point me in the right direction, while she cruises overhead and strikes at random.

  Sometimes she loses it. When she comes up against my decision not to tell Pug and sees she can’t budge me, she really goes off the deep end. ‘You just won’t be told, will you! You think you already know everything you need! Well, one day you’ll see that you can’t just pick up people’s lives, turn them upside down and then walk away thinking it’s okay because you don’t feel the damage. One day you’ll feel it, you’ll see it, and you’ll look back on the way you’re behaving now and be mortally ashamed!’ She had tears in her eyes then, before she slammed out, like a kid having a tantrum.

  She can’t understand, from the outside. How could she? What’s to understand? I don’t understand myself. It’d be easy to say, ‘Sure, I’ll go and see him now.’ But when I think of doing it, walking that distance, facing that face, speaking those words … it just can’t be done—not at this moment, not by me.

  Sunday night. Rob Lewis, the Wronged Husband, pays us a call. By the slump of his shoulders you can tell how very Wronged he is.

  I get to sit in on the conversation. ‘It’s all right,’ Mum says in the special lifeless voice she uses to talk about the situation, ‘Mel knows what’s been going on better than I do. So do your kids, it seems.’

  That obviously shakes him—what, hasn’t he even talked to them?

  It turns out that Ricky’s booted him out and installed Dad in his place (like a big ugly trophy on the mantelpiece). I’m glad I’m not at school to face Josh and Ambra! Mr Lewis is pretty wrecked. At one point his voice starts going all throaty and he has to pinch the top of his nose before going on. He doesn’t actually break down and sob, but if Mum were just a whisker less lifeless and Wronged herself he probably would.

  It’s awful. They’re slumped opposite each other, swapping these awful facts in dull, dull voices. I get them cups of coffee and sit for a while in the combined stink of two wrecked families. I did this.

  It’s a matter of waiting and seeing, they decide. We just sit for twelve months and as long as we get some respected community member to swear that Dad and Mum split up twelve months ago, the divorce goes through. Rob and Ricky—well, Rob still hopes ‘something can be sorted out’.

  ‘What, you want yours back, do you? I don’t want mine,’ says Mum—it’s as if she’s talking about a stolen car! ‘He had his chance and he blew it.’

  ‘This is not the first time, then?’

  Mum glances at me. ‘No, it’s not. The temptation’s always been there, in his line of work. Insurance assessors are always cruising around, seeing clients—a bit like prostitutes, really.’ God, what an awful thing to say. Awful, but funny—but awful!

  As he’s leaving, Rob says, ‘There’s no comfort in being the ones in the right, is there?’

  ‘No, it’s just as painful. But it’s only a matter of time, Rob. This is the worst of it. It can only improve.’

  I think of him walking through the dark to his bare flat, pure miserable pain on legs. How many people do you pass in the street every day without knowing that they are simply anger or sadness bound into a body? It’s a lot to assume, that they’re all balanced, their emotions reined in to bearable levels. How do you know which ordinary-looking person is the Wronged Husband with the machine-gun, the one to stand in King Street and start spraying carnage around? You don’t, you just don’t. It could be anyone.

  Primarily the Judge awards points for true scoring blows … Boxing is an attacking sport. A boxer strives to win by striking more blows than his opponent, but the blows must be struck fairly, and in accordance with the Rules.

  (a) Scoring blows. Blows struck with the knuckle part of the closed glove of either hand on the front or sides of the head or body above the belt

  (b) Non-scoring blows are—

  Blows struck while committing any of the infringements … Blows on the arms or on the back

  Soft blows or ‘taps’ with no force behind them

  A working day is a long time. I spend five days learning just how long. Maybe for the first two I keep thrilling to the fact that I’m not at school, that I’ll never go back, that I don’t ever have to see Lisa again, there in the midst of her group wielding her full strength.

  On Wednesday I feel a twinge of panic when Mum leaves for work. The house closes in. It feels like minutes since she arrived home yesterday. I shower and dress and it’s only eight-thirty. I read yesterday’s paper from cover to cover and it’s ten to nine. It’s a cloudy day; the light sits at the windows like fog. Oh, God.

  I walk to the hospital, a few blocks away. It looks like a prison, or a barracks, but tucked into one corner of it is a doorway marked ‘Birth Centre’, a picture of a baby curled up in one loop of the B. I go into an empty waiting room. Two women (nurses?) are chatting behind the desk. One looks round immediately.

  ‘Hi. What can I do for you this morning?’ She smiles. The other nurse picks up some papers and goes away.

  ‘Hi.’ I cross to the desk, not sure what I’m supposed to say. ‘I—I’d like to book in to have my baby here.’ There, I’ve said it, to someone official.

  She’s really nice. She can tell I don’t know the f
irst thing about having babies. She tells me there are classes I can take, books I can read (she gives me a list), ways I can find out how many months pregnant I am (something called an ultrasound), prenatal visits I have to make here. She shows me around the centre. One of the two rooms is occupied, which I find stunning, amazing, with everything going on so normally outside. From behind the door comes a long, low moan, and I look at the midwife in alarm. ‘It’s okay,’ she smiles. ‘She’s fine. Early stages yet.’ Oh, that’s really reassuring.

  Then when I’m leaving I have to stand aside to let a vastly pregnant woman in a blue maternity smock in the door. Don’t stare. I force my eyes to her face, which is smiling, perspiring, red.

  ‘Hullo, Marlene,’ she says to the midwife.

  ‘What are you doing here, Annie?’

  ‘I don’t know! Induce me, induce me!’ The door closes behind me on their laughter.

  I walk down the street, away from Newtown where I might run into Pug. It’s real. I’m going to be as huge as that woman. I’m going to be in there moaning as that hugeness tries to get out of me. How can it? I’ll be too little. I’ll have to go up to the labour ward, where they have planks with stirrups instead of those nice hotel-like double beds. I’ll be sent to the operating theatre and have it cut out of me. I’ve seen it on television, surgeons’ green hands digging in through the weepy red layers and pulling out a waxy, scrunch-faced … God, it’s impossible to believe. Me. Inside me.

  But that nurse sees babies born all the time, and she wasn’t shocked or horrified at what I was letting myself in for. ‘She’s fine,’ she smiled at that moan behind the door. She smiled. ‘She’s fine.’ How can a person be fine with that happening to them?

  The lights change and I cross Parramatta Road, semis puffing and pawing to get going again. ‘How far gone are you?’ she asked me, as if pregnant people fade away to nothing the further along they get, or go deaf and have to be shouted at, or slip into unconsciousness, or turn into giant, mindless cocoons for their babies. I’d believe it, after that woman in the blue dress—I could hardly see her for being aware of her great belly. I’ll have to wear those clothes, tent dresses, drapes—I’ll look like a walking lampshade, all my tassels swinging.