CHAPTER 21
The breakup with Charlie happened fast, without warning, just like every time.
It was a Tuesday morning, and Gemma woke up feeling vaguely queasy and out-of-sorts. (She thought it was probably the sardines on toast she’d eaten the night before. She certainly didn’t relate it to that day six weeks earlier when she stood in Charlie’s bathroom, watching a tiny yellow ball rolling rapidly around and around the bathroom sink, as if it were on a spinning roulette wheel, until it vanished down the murky black tunnel of the drain. “Oops,” she’d said. Oops. I just got a new destiny. But she hadn’t even considered the possibility of pregnancy. After all, she’d intended to put the Pill in her mouth, and besides which, it was minuscule! It was only months afterward, sitting in the doctor’s office, that she remembered and was impressed by the power of that little yellow ball.)
She and Charlie hadn’t stayed together the night before, so she should have been pleased to have him drop by unexpectedly. Up until now, each new sight of him standing in a doorway had filled her with fresh pleasure. But today, for the first time, their hello kiss was a little perfunctory, a little rushed. He looked too businesslike and distracted. Plus, he was getting over a cold and his nostrils were pink and flaky.
He didn’t smell as delicious as he normally did. Actually, nothing that morning smelled very nice.
Gemma was in her dressing gown, her hair wet from the shower. She had an 8:30 start at a job walking around North Sydney railway station excitably handing out free “energy” drinks. Eight-thirty was too early to be excitable. People would pretend not to see her. The thought of the gritty morning odors of North Sydney station was making her feel ill.
“Angela just called me,” he said. “Your sister slashed her tires.”
“Good for her,” said Gemma. It was a stupid thing to say. She didn’t even mean it.
“Gemma! She can’t go around just destroying people’s property. She’s got to get herself together. People break up. It happens.”
Yes, thought Gemma. It happens.
It was the first time she’d ever heard him angry, and there was a pedantic, schoolteacherish tone to his voice that Gemma didn’t like. People’s property—really! Men were so precious about cars, as if they were people.
“Anyway,” Charlie had his motorbike helmet under his arm, and he was rapping the top of it with his knuckle, “Ange is upset about it obviously and she’s thinking about taking a restraining order out against your sister. I just thought I should tell you. Maybe you could talk to her. Explain, you know, she can’t do this sort of thing.”
“That’s ridiculous. That’s just going over the top! Restraining orders are for big, violent ex-husbands with guns.”
“She had a knife. Their tires were mutilated.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s going to start mutilating people!”
Charlie compressed his lips and puffed out his cheeks, drawing his eyebrows together.
And there it was. That feeling. The icy breeze whistling through her bones, except this time it was combined with nausea clutching at her stomach.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
His hand holding the motorbike helmet dropped by his side.
“Are you serious? Don’t say things like that if you’re not serious.”
“I am serious.”
“Gemma, don’t. Come on. This is silly. This is nothing.”
“It’s not about Cat.”
“So what is it about?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” She pulled out the old, well-worn favorite. “It’s me. Not you.”
“What? You’ve been thinking about this?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
She looked at his face, and it was like watching something close down—shutters pulled, curtains drawn, doors slammed shut. A polite, immobile, stranger’s face emerged. It wasn’t Charlie anymore. It was just some guy she didn’t know, who didn’t know her, who didn’t particularly want to know her.
Two minutes later he was gone. She sat at the Penthursts’ kitchen table and looked at a photo on the fridge door of Don and Mary all dressed up at their daughter’s wedding, smiling and squinting into the sun.
She listened to his bike roar off down the street. A trajectory of sound that ended in silence.
And that was that.
So he didn’t make the six-month mark, after all.
The weeks that followed were an odd time. She missed him, but in a dreamy, nostalgic, inevitable way, as if it had been a holiday romance, where neither of them had ever seriously considered a future together.
Her stomach problem kept coming and going. She lost her appetite and took a lot of afternoon naps, lying on the big four-poster bed, listening to the wails of the crows. “Aaah” they cried dolefully to one another.
“Aaah,” said Gemma to the ceiling.
“I had no choice, did I?” she said to the Violets.
No, they answered silently. No choice at all.
The day before Gemma found out her tummy bug was actually a baby, she and Cat spoke on the phone about Maddie’s birthday.
“But you can’t just not go!” said Gemma.
“I’ve implemented a new policy,” said Cat. “No more children’s birthdays. Saturday was my last one for all time.”
“Who was the child?
“Emma Herbert’s daughter. They had a jumping castle.”
“Emma from school? Well, that explains it. She was always a bitch. She probably gave birth to a bitch.”
“I was the only childless one there. Also the only single one.”
“So? Why didn’t you just play on the jumping castle?”
“So, I am sick to death of holding other people’s babies and smiling at other people’s babies and hearing about other people’s bloody babies!”
Gemma herself thought there was nothing nicer than other people’s babies. It was especially pleasing the way you got to hand them straight back when they started doing anything complicated, like crying.
“O.K. But you will have your own children one day.”
“I’m thirty-three,” said Cat, as if it were someone’s fault.
“Yes, I do know that, actually. Well, you could meet someone new. Or you could get back together with Dan. Or you could pop by your local sperm bank.”
“I’m thinking about it!” said Cat in an ominous, “that’ll show ’em” tone that made Gemma think of Cat as a little girl, a darkly frowning little girl plotting lavish schemes of revenge against nuns and schoolteachers.
“Apparently cloning technology is really advancing. You could get a little Cat Clone.”
“I’ve already got a clone thanks very much.”
“Yes and she’s not going to be happy when she hears you’re not going to Maddie’s party.”
“I can’t have a baby,” Gemma told the doctor.
She had never thought that her body would do anything so serious, so definite, so permanent.
“Four months is a little late to be considering a termination.”
“Oh no. I can’t have an abortion!”
“Well, then.”
“But I can’t have a baby.”
The doctor lifted her hands in a “What do you want me to do about it?” gesture.
Gemma looked down at her own hands. They were shaking, just like Cat’s did that day in the bathroom when they found out she was pregnant. She thought about that bag with the bright red elephants that Lyn always carried around. It was full of stuff for Maddie. In her room there was more stuff. Important, technical-looking, necessary stuff that kept her alive.
“I read once about some teenagers who had a baby,” Gemma said. “They gave their baby breakfast cereal and it died.”
“Too much salt,” said the doctor.
“But I could do that!” cried Gemma. “I could easily do that! How would you know?”
“You wouldn’t do that. There is plenty of information available. Plenty of support. There are clinic centers for new mothers. Mothers’ groups.”
I don’t even have the right stuff for myself, thought Gemma. I don’t have a fridge. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t concentrate!
“Yes.” Gemma stood up. There were a lot of people in the waiting room. “Thank you.”
The doctor looked up at her. “Adoption is always an alternative, if your circumstances really are such that you can’t have a baby.”
“My circumstances really are such,” said Gemma. I don’t have any circumstances!
“I can give you some information.”
“Actually, that’s O.K.,” she said, because she already knew who would be adopting her baby.
“Don’t be so stupid!” said Cat, who seemed a little doubtful that Gemma was pregnant at all. She kept asking if she was quite sure, as if Gemma might have misheard the doctor’s diagnosis. “I can’t adopt your baby. You’ll be fine. Everybody will help you. Mum. Lyn. Me. You’ll be fine. It’s just the shock. Every new mother feels nervous.”
She was adamant. Gemma pleaded and cajoled, to no avail.
It was only when Gemma put her elbows on the table, her head in her hands, and began to cry that Cat finally said, “O.K., O.K., I’ll think about it!”
She brought her a cup of tea and sat there looking at her doubtfully, carefully. “You seriously don’t want to be a mother? You seriously don’t want this baby?”
There was a wrench of longing in her voice.
“Seriously,” said Gemma. “Really! And you would make a wonderful mother. And we’re triplets! The baby is practically yours anyway.”
“But you’re not just suggesting this to make me happy, are you?”
“No. I can’t have a baby and I don’t want to have an abortion.”
She didn’t, because already she adored the baby. Cat’s little boy or girl, another little niece or nephew. Of course she adored it.
Everything was going to be O.K.
It was a win-win.
Lyn wouldn’t stop talking about Charlie.
“You only met him once,” said Gemma. “I don’t know why you care so much.”
“I just think he’s the sort of guy who would want to know he was having a baby.”
“You’re just saying that because he saved Maddie’s feet from the glass. As if that demonstrated his paternal instincts!”
“I’m saying it because you have a moral obligation to tell him!”
“What if he wants to be involved with the baby? That won’t work. Cat won’t want that.”
“I thought you cared about Charlie.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Much to Maddie’s amusement, Lyn picked up a cushion from the lounge, held it to her face, and head-butted it.
Gemma tried not to think about Charlie during the day, but it felt like she spent every night with him.
Her dreams became garishly colored horror films. They were very vivid, very long, and they all featured Charlie.
Dream-Charlie was not a nice man.
One night he stabbed her, right in the stomach, with the end of a ski pole. Gemma looked down and saw bright splatters of her own blood blossoming on freshly fallen snow. “Here it is!” Charlie plunged his hands into her stomach and triumphantly dragged out a baby. The baby was Maddie, in her blue denim overalls and covered in entrails and bloody mush. She grinned at Gemma and held out her palm for Around and Around the Garden. “F*cking nice, Gemma!” yelled Charlie. “You knew we were going snorkeling!” and he skied off with Maddie on his hip. Gemma tried to run after him but her legs were buried in the snow and she couldn’t move. “Lyn’s going to be really mad at you!” cried Cat, whooshing past on skis. Maxine came stalking across the snow in her high heels. “Retrace your steps, Gemma. Where did you last see Maddie? Think!”
With a tremendous effort, she wrenched herself out of the dream, and her eyelids fluttered open.
Was that a giant splotch of spreading blood on the sheets? Was she losing the baby? With trembling hands, she turned on the lamp and the blood vanished. It was just a white sheet.
She remembered that time with Charlie, when she dreamed she left the baby in the drawer. “Come back to bed, you fruitcake,” he’d said. “We don’t have a baby.”
He’d been so lovely to her. Look at him now, she thought sadly, stabbing her with a ski pole.
“Is it money?” asked Lyn one day. “Do you think you can’t afford to bring up a child?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Gemma. “I’m a humble serving wench who can’t afford to keep my own child, so I’m giving it to the lady of the manor. Oh, m’lady, if you only knew what I’d been through!”
“Shut up. Dad said you were making a lot on the stock market.”
“Well, I was showing off a bit for Dad’s benefit.”
“But you do invest in the stock market? How did you ever get into that?”
“I got some money when Marcus died. I didn’t know what to do with it. Mum wanted me to see a financial adviser. Then, I read a story about how a blindfolded monkey throwing darts did just as well at picking stocks as a professional. So, I got the list of stocks in the newspaper, closed my eyes, and pointed.”
“Gemma!”
“The next week that company made a big profit announcement and the shares went up by two hundred percent. I nearly fainted when I saw it in the paper. It was so exciting! I was hooked.”
“So, do you still close your eyes and pick?’
“Well, actually,” said Gemma, feeling a bit sheepish. “I’m more into technical analysis. I look at ratios. Trends.”
Lyn looked quite scandalized. “You’re kidding me.”
“I always liked math and economics at school. Remember? I used to come first all the time. I always thought I was the sort of person who shouldn’t be good at math. But, um, it seems that I am.”
“So, why don’t you ever have any money?”
“I don’t spend it. I’ve never spent a cent of it. I just reinvest. And now I’ll have a good little trust fund for Cat’s baby.”
“Your baby.”
“Cat’s baby.”
As Gemma’s pregnancy progressed, Lyn’s tactics became nastier.
“You do realize,” Gemma heard her say to Cat one day, “that this baby will actually be related to Angela? The woman who stole your husband?”
Cat said, “I couldn’t care less. This is what Gemma wants! Not me.”
“Are you frightened of looking after a baby? Is that what it is?” Maxine asked Gemma. “Because you know I will help you.”
“Thanks, Mum. Cat will probably need your help,” answered Gemma.
“Gemma! Are you even listening to a single word I say?”
“You and your sister should stick to your guns!” said Frank. “People are too narrow-minded. Can’t think outside the square! I can think outside the square! I said to your mother, If this makes my girls happy, then I’m happy!”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“That Charlie was a lovely fellow,” said Nana Kettle. “I’m sure he would marry you if you told him! I’m sure he would! What does it matter if Dan is off being silly with his sister? I never liked that Dan much anyway.”
Tchaikovsky and Guacamole
Oh him! His name was Alan. Ancient history.
One night the two of us went to Opera in the Park. There was a big family group sitting in front of us. You know how crowded it gets. Alan was getting annoyed because their picnic stuff kept encroaching on our area and they were sort of noisy. But you know, it’s Opera in the Park, not opera at the Opera House!
But this family. They had, I don’t know, charisma! There was a midget-sized little old lady bossing everyone and a teenage girl wearing headphones. They also had a little baby girl crawling around. Dark curly hair and dimples. Irresistible. She was such a cutie. Anyway, about halfway through the night, this little girl was standing up, clutching on to some guy’s sleeve, when she suddenly started this sort of wobbly walk straight across their picnic blanket.
Well, obviously it was her first steps! Her family went wild! Clapping and pointing and grabbing for cameras. One woman started to cry.
The baby was beaming like a little show-off and somebody said, Watch the guacamole, and of course, her foot goes squelch in the dip and she topples sideways into somebody’s lap.
One of them said something like, “Now there’s a girl with style, she takes her first steps to Tchaikovsky.” I said to Alan, “Did you see that?” And he said, “Yeah, do you want to move somewhere else? They’re really ruining the night.”
And I thought, Nah-ah.
I gave have him his marching orders during Beethoven’s Fifth.