18

Anne keeps the new pregnancy to herself for most of it and then with three months to go, Emmett reveals all with a guess. One night in the kitchen he grabs her, puts his hand on her slightly swollen abdomen and with a leer declares, ‘I think you’re hiding a baby in there, I think you are,’ and laughs as if he’s funny.

Anne swats his hand away and keeps on doing the dishes. ‘I reckon you’re about six months gone,’ he says standing at the kitchen bench as if he’s in a bar, ‘definitely. No ifs or buts.’ He knocks back half the glass and comes up for air.

The kids are cleaning up the table after tea and Rob is gob smacked by the revelation. Can’t stop looking at his mother, stands at the bin scraping his plate for ages. Louisa can’t look at her at all. Peter doesn’t seem bothered.

Outside playing cricket with a tennis ball in the mean little backyard in the width of the summer evening, they talk it over. ‘Why do we have to have another kid?’ Rob says outraged but keeping his voice down. ‘God Almighty! Just another bloody mouth to feed.’

‘I can’t believe she’d let this happen,’ Louisa hisses back through clenched teeth. The ball thuds into the house when she misses it. They all turn to look through the fernery to see if Emmett will charge out like a bull elephant because the ball’s hit the house but no, he can’t be stuffed tonight. She picks up the ball and hurls it at Rob harder than need be. ‘It’s bloody insane.’

‘Watch it dickhead,’ he says, stepping aside to avoid the arrowing throw.

Pete’s batting. ‘I don’t care,’ he says while Rob searches for the ball in the weeds down by the shed, ‘what difference does it make anyway? We used to have Daniel remember?’

They ignore him. ‘You’re just a little shit anyway,’ Rob says, grabbing the bat and chucking the ball at Lou. ‘What would you know anyway? You little midget. And bowl properly Louisa, no grubbers.’

In the privacy of Louisa’s room, they drop the front. ‘What’s going on? This is just mad. Why would anyone want to have another kid in this family?’ Rob says, keeping his voice down. Sitting on Lou’s bedroom floor, they lean on the bed, their legs straight out before them. Louisa feels a bank of anger welling in her. Textbooks spread out around them. She pushes the door shut with her foot.

Above them the light shade moves in the breeze from the window, an illuminated rice-paper planet. It seems Rob is so affronted by the idea of the baby that his hair stands up and his eyes seem huge. ‘We are shit here and nothing works,’ he says. ‘It’s all fucked up, you know it is. Mum’s never here, always out working to support us and he’s a pig and we’re gonna have to look after it. You know it’s true.’ Louisa is looking down at the grey floor. Things, it seems, have turned on them again.

Her voice is not like her when she says, ‘We got no choice Rob. None. We have to help her.’ She’s peeling away at the edge of her ruler with her thumbnail.

‘Jesus,’ he says, laying his head against the wall. There’s so much he doesn’t get. Stuff it, he thinks, I can’t bloody fix it.

In the next few weeks he starts swearing more and it makes him feel older. Louisa is strangely ashamed about the pregnancy. She’s old enough to be the baby’s mother. She tells no one at school.

The baby, when it comes, is sickly, a small whitish droplet prone to rashes. Her eyes are as pale as a dawn sky and her small hands remind Peter of hermit crabs when they move and starfish when they’re still. She even carries a whiff of the sea about her. She’s not yet a Brown but an ocean creature come to stay. She does not open her mouth unless it is to cry and then the thinness of the cry reminds them of wire.

She stays in hospital a month after she’s born to get her weight up. Anne and the kids visit her once a week on a Saturday morning. They dress up and take the bus because Emmett might need the car but it seems a bit like visiting a cemetery, a place where there’s reverence for life but no joy. At each visit Anne holds the baby briefly while the kids look on.

As the baby stays on there, eventually leaving her becomes hard for all of them. Pete gets to pick her name out of Rose or Jessie; he goes for Jessie just because he likes it. He cries the second time they leave. In her dense plastic lens of a cradle, she’s as alone as a small planet. They stand beside her lined up like the kids from The Sound of Music and silently wish her well.

And then it’s determined that Jessie needs an operation on her stomach and things, it seems, just get worse. The sallow quality of her skin has something to do with her immature liver. The Brown kids stream out the hospital feeling like an endangered species.

But after a few more weeks, little Jessie comes home to a house that’s almost forgotten she’s been born. In Louisa’s room, a cradle has been tucked behind the door and she’s been throwing her clothes over it for a while.

The first night Jessie cries for what seems to Louisa to be the whole night. She rocks the cradle and waits for her mother to come and get the child. She tries to turn the baby over. She picks her up and pats her back. Tries to hear the rain on the tin roof. She can hear nothing but Jessie protesting with the searing cries of the newborn. She can see why: she’d com plain too if she ended up here. The years yawn between them.

Anne’s back at work and sits at the industrial sewing machine in the kitchen, her back hooked, and sews plastic suits for fat women to wear while they exercise. The radio is tuned in loud to the doom of commercial talkback. The baby lies on a quilt in a cardboard box at her mother’s feet.

When they come home from school, the kids take over the baby and carry her around, give her a bottle and talk to her. Quieten her. It’s as if they are workers or parents rather than kids. They do what their mother can’t do. They wash nappies in the red bucket until they want to cry but there’s absolutely no point in that.

Jessie’s in with Louisa until they build the sleep-out for the boys. They all try to keep her quiet because of Emmett. He craves peace even while he’s the greatest obstacle to it. He sits in the jaundiced light of the kitchen with his beer in the evenings on his own, weeping and laughing in turns, cornering them if they pass. He cannot relax because his life is lived on a wire. The loss of Daniel will not retreat.

Some days though he can be joyful with Jessie and he might pick up the baby in her holey singlet and sagging nappy and dance to a song on the radio, the baby soaring and laughing in his arms. When this happens, the kids stand a respectful distance with small smiles, feeling shy of this good father throwing the cackling baby in the air. Happiness is always worth watching even if it raises questions. Did he love them once too? Louisa’s not fooled. No, she thinks with her stagnant heart. Or he wouldn’t act like he does.

Rob and Louisa try not to like Jessie but it doesn’t work. Rob ends up loving the little bugger while Louisa holds out longer. Pete likes her well enough from the first day he sees her. ‘She looks,’ he says as they all stand around the bassinet, ‘just like a potato.’ And they laugh with an unnamed relief that he seems happy.

Even when she’s older and she thinks back on Jessie as a baby, Louisa recalls that time exactly. She can smell the petrol station behind them and the fumes from the tankers edging into the kitchen and the tap dripping into the sink and Anne wiping the table in big arcs with the battered pink wettex catching crumbs with the cup of her hand and always, always there’s her ghost smile.

And she knows that things began to change then. That Rob started to go feral and the gap between them widened because Rob started to pick on Peter, always teasing him over something, and Louisa had to stop it. She doesn’t understand even now how you can become the thing you most hate.

‘Why do you torment Pete?’ she screams at Rob one afternoon when they’ve both retired bloody. ‘How could you even want to hurt someone younger than you? Hasn’t there been enough of this shit in this house to last forever?’

He smirks, holds up his middle finger and slams out the door.