I don’t remember the night I fell pregnant, at least in any firm way. Memory has allowed me some vague impressions of the haze and heat of the nightclub, but mostly I remember how my heart’s drumming was in time with the music. I let my body flow and melt into the drunken, whirling rhythm. In that glorious miasma of bodies, alcohol and bliss, I clearly remember the beautiful eyes of a stranger coming out of the crowd and the sense of falling.
At first it was just grinding as our bodies twisted into each other, but when our hips brushed, my head lolled back on its own with a wave of dizzy desire. I felt him swoop in and catch me by the small of my back. With oddly cool lips he kissed my neck and the last of my solid resolve melted into liquid lust, so we stumbled to the bathroom.
My short skirt lifted in a moment and the thin barrier of my underwear didn’t seem to be there, instead I just felt the cold porcelain edge of the sink. He had lifted me so easily but he didn’t look strong. I saw leather pants and a white singlet and strands of raven hair across his face. Then he lifted me from the cold perch and I was filled with the searing, glorious heat of him filling me in a single, powerful thrust.
I saw ceiling tiles stained with filth as my head flopped helplessly and then teeth, mouth and tongue on my breast which he freed from my crop top. There was a wild, wonderful, sliding sensation of his manhood burning into me. Sound and sensation faded suddenly as something white hot seemed to bloom inside me and there was a strange light blazing inside my closed eyes. Then I almost fell off the side, catching myself dizzily on the mirror behind me and the defunct hand dryer, barely avoiding the instant nausea. He was gone.
My common sense returned in a rush from the indecent banishment of bathroom sex and I possessed my body fully. Alone, sore, leaking and half naked, I was sitting on the edge of the counter with one sneaker dangling off and my underwear bunched around the other ankle. A girl stumbled in, fidgeting with a baggy of white powder and she saw something in, or on me that made her immediately step back and find a more covert place to get high.
When I felt more like myself I remember clambering down and covering myself again and could not help noticing the bite around my nipple. Teeth had punctured the skin and I had 6 new pin-pricks encircling my areola, but no blood came out. Considering how dangerous this part of town was, I briefly considered myself lucky. In the hours it took me to feel better, I stared at my reflection and wondered why my irises were so large now that they filled my whole, formerly blue eyes. It took a few days for them to recede to their normal size, while something inside me grew.
It was not till a few months later, when I was at work and trying to be normal that I realised I could be pregnant. I was frothing milk for a customer and the smell of it was suddenly repugnant and I had to ask Tanya to finish making the cappuccino. I was barely out of the customer’s sight when I had to empty my stomach into the nearest bin. I remember seeing flecks of red in among my coffee vomit and thinking that the streaks of throat’s blood looked oddly dark and glistening. Tanya could not help but look at it too and sent me home immediately, even though the café was full and busy. I went straight to the doctor, who confirmed with a smile that yes, I was expecting.
Of course I went home as soon as I could. I was terrified and inexplicably unable to get warm and stop shaking until I made it back to Tilling station, which is five hours away from anything resembling a city. The long, flat plains around town were filled with cows and little else, something I resented as a child but now found very comforting. Mum had to leave the hospital mid-shift to get me but any trace of anger she might have had vanished when she hugged me, because she was crying a second later. I was suddenly a child again in her warm arms and I felt how much she’d missed me. She hugged me so hard I could only breathe her in, nothing else, and I let the scent of her soap and skin fill me with a comfort that I didn’t know I craved. Then, still without speaking, she hoisted my suitcase into the ute and we drove off into the red dust path to the cottage.
Dad was sitting with Norm on his knee on the porch, exactly the way they had been when I had left four years ago in an angry storm of teenage rebellion. I was only twenty now, but something in me had snapped in the city and I hated the sixteen year old who had left to be an artist or model or whatever shit I had screamed at them. I remember yelling ‘bourgeois’ among other truly filthy words as I slammed the gate and clambered into Bianca’s Holden. We were going to take the city by force, make the whole world sit up and take notice of us, but of course I ended up making coffee, and Bianca came back in six weeks.
There were moments when I wanted to, but I was stubbornly drunk on my own pride. When my dad had his stroke, I just deleted mum’s awkward, all-caps text. As mum unloaded my suitcase I smiled at her, and she nodded in Dad’s direction. I noted the slope of his right side, like half of his face had melted like candle wax, because it dragged his features down with it. The wind picked up as he walked slowly and weakly to the gate and opened it for me. As I approached his thin arm slipped around me for an awkward hug as he slurred “Welcome home, Mish”
I’m writing this down now as a sort of explanation, more to myself than anything, but I do not remember the months after that, because they must have gone by in that happy blur that turns all good memories into one golden burst. I remember the ‘Congrats Michelle’ banner at a bbq a week later and some awkward questions from a school friend looking for gossip. But the feeling of safety was too strong to ignore; I was back in my childhood bedroom, a woman in a world of too-small, young person’s ephemera.
More than one drunken neighbour asked about the father, but I don’t remember what mum or me answered. I must have gotten pretty clean at that time because I didn’t smoke at all, and I was eating regular meals. Within days I was back on a horse, then on an old dirt bike and zooming around the fields. I was tethered firmly to my parents, but had not felt so safe in months.
I remember my hair grew long and blonde at the roots again and I put on weight as my belly rounded. Mum kept me busy; she found a million activities to volunteer me for and I threw myself into the community, reading to people, serving food, helping people with their gardens. Of course she tried to introduce me to the eligible bachelors of Tilling but to them I was no longer Michelle, the wildcat, but Mish, a sweet, fat piece of spoiled fruit, glowing with someone else’s seed. As I grew larger, I withdrew from activities and began going to the dam for slow, quiet swims and occasionally just walking aimlessly.
I helped dad where I could and just gazed peacefully at the boring network channels that kept mum and dad amused. Reception being what it was made my social media dry up, but for some reason I didn’t mind because I had a strange contentment I had never felt before. Every now and then I remember dad reaching out to hold my hand, gently squeezing with his tough old fingers and once he even stroked my belly. He would have loved to meet Dylan before he died, but he missed it by a month. Dad was in his shed, tinkering away with something when he quietly and permanently keeled over, as Norm whimpered at his now lifeless feet.
It was a horrendous birth, from what I was told. I had found out Dylan was a boy along the way and asked mum and dad for a nice name. Mum suggested what they were going to call the brother I never had, Dylan, and I liked it. Sure, they had wanted another baby, but it just wasn’t meant to be because mum had miscarried. So I borrowed the name and mum dutifully collected every single article of light blue baby clothing she could get her hands on.
We were painting my room when there was a flood of pain so sudden that my knees stopped working and the paint-soaked roller hit the floor with a wet sound. I thought I had pissed myself as my whole groin felt horribly loose and burning hot and I knew he was coming, coming now on the floor of the nursery. Mum’s common sense and nurse training kicked in, or so she tells me, but I remember very little of the delivery other than pain and a needle filling my spine with coldness and numbness when the doctor gave me the epidural. It happened very quickly, but until the day of her death mum told me that no birth had ever bled quite so much as me, even among all the ones she’d assisted with at the hospital. That’s where I ended up recovering, back at the place I had called “mum’s work” for so long.
The first of the many odd things was that Dylan was not much of a crier and refused to latch on to feed, at first. The expert, a sweet and motherly midwife who was a good friend to mum, was worried he’d fail to thrive or get jaundice, because even after a week of recovery, he didn’t seem to want my milk. I remember the doubt in her eyes as she waved us off, no doubt thinking of me only as Jazzy’s junkie daughter who ran off to the big smoke and came back home pregnant like a skank. I could tell, at times, that these thoughts were in everyone who met me and met my sensible, loving mum, who had given a lifetime of nursing to Tilling Hospital.
I wasn’t sure myself who I was, I had just delivered a baby after all. I only knew that when I looked at his tiny red face, his nose and eyelashes were so small and perfect that I learned there was a love in me that I had never felt before. It was all I felt and all I had, from the moment I saw him. So that night, in the rocking chair I had also been nursed in, I tried to feed him again and this time, he latched on.
But it was not without pain, and pain so deep and searing I wanted to rip my tender flesh out of his mouth as he suckled me, yet I kept it there. I panicked silently and without moving: I had read this moment was magical, sacred even, as you nurture your child with unique milk made especially for them, but I had not anticipated the agony, and yet I held on. I gritted my teeth and cried a little as he drank. Then, five minutes later when he pulled away, I saw the six newly opened holes bleeding slightly and his mouth filled with a mix of milk and blood. I waited a second and checked his gums as he slept and there were six, mysterious, sharp little teeth in tiny holes that I later learned he could retract at will. I gazed in shock at his plump, pink lips and smiled at the milk-coma sleep he fell into. He was beaming with complete fullness.
Something seized my reasoning that night and told me, very clearly, I must tell no one. With this thought came horrible images of people kicking down our front door and taking my little boy as he slept. The fear was so real, so all-consuming, I never said a word.
