37

Working as a journalist begins to wear away at Louisa. Every day she feels she has to pull on another personality, to become someone who isn’t herself. Someone bigger and grander and more decisive, even more competitive. Once, she’d enjoyed the swagger of ringing people and telling them she was calling from The Ant. Now it all exhausts her and she misses her young son, Tom, more than she would have believed possible.

Tom is two years old, grown too heavy for sitting on Louisa’s left arm, as he did when he was younger and she made dinner after work. He was so round and peaceful sitting there like an owl that she didn’t like to put him down. Eventually though, she found she wasn’t able to close her left hand and went to the doctor who put it into a splint and told her she had carpal tunnel syndrome. She had to smile because at the time there was a rash of repetitive strain injuries among journalists, so she blended in. Once again, for the wrong reasons.

Now that Tom doesn’t sit on her arm, he stands on a little stool beside her. He has a bowl cut and his hair is long and thick and shot with gold, and his cheeks are round as peaches. He is placid and funny. The first time he had a haircut, he fell asleep. He loves playgrounds and singing ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ in the pusher. Louisa calls him Owl-Boy, and when he calls her ‘Mum’ she knows no one has ever called her anything better.

He is easily the most interesting person in Louisa’s life. Tom made having a baby all right for her, she knows this and every night kissing him goodnight with his ragged bear, Bluey, she is aware that time is moving past her and that he is growing faster than she can believe.

The brightness of certainty has slipped in her. She’s sitting at her desk as ever, shoes off, doodling, when she should be writing a feature about some ageing opera singer. She’d rather be with Tom. She’s sick of asking people questions and hearing their pat answers and watching them check themselves in the mirror.

She’s begun to think about Daniel again. Maybe it’s having Tom, she doesn’t know, but there is something about him that takes her back. We were all so utterly changed when he died, she thinks, it was as if the world had tilted too far, that anything could happen, that we might fall off.

She understands that she should have stopped the death because she was older. Everything, she has realised, changes you incrementally forever. She looks at the picture of the opera singer, so fat and such a voice, and she doesn’t want to be here anymore.

She thinks maybe she’s let the baby take over her special self, that’s what Anne reckons, and maybe it’s true, she keeps nothing for herself anymore, everything is about Tom. So it’s no surprise she’s seen John dimming. Men seem to crave every attention, she thinks. And soon there will be another child. Can she love anyone as much as she loves her first child? She has a feeling she can.

And children heal all things, they even begin to heal Daniel. Now, she thinks, with my children I get another chance. If your childhood was stolen, how do you make sure everyone else’s is safe? How do you make sure it never happens again?

That’s one for another day, she decides, taking a swig of cold coffee and getting on with the piece on the opera singer without mentioning the circumference of her neck.

One Friday afternoon she has an interview with an ageing rock star. He’s lined and grouchy and reed thin and touchy about his lost looks. He directs the photographers caustically and exactingly to his approved side. She’s three months pregnant with Beck and feeling delicate.

Once she’d thought this bloke was magic; now, dressed in black, holding court in the smallish stale hotel room as he chain-smokes, his pleated little mouth puckering with each intake, she’s not so sure. He doesn’t care to say more than three words in a row, or to take off his sunglasses. What a total wanker, she allows herself to think, knowing this approach won’t get her a run.

It’s clear from the clippings that he’s flat broke, that’s why he’s out here inflicting himself on us. Australia is always the last stop for the formerly glorious but he still expects toadying. Who can be bothered? Flogging something – a book, a CD, a tour – always selling something. Louisa sighs as she checks her questions. And then it’s her turn. ‘Jack,’ she starts out and smiles, ‘the last time...’ And that’s as far as it gets.

‘It’s Jackie,’ his PR hisses and Louisa says, ‘Sorry, oh dear, off to a bad start.’ She laughs, coughs and trails off, floundering. A waiter slides in with a tray of coffee to be ignored. She wonders ... and before she can get the question out, that’s it, the end of the interview. He flicks his hand at her. Doesn’t feel like talking to her. She picks up her tape recorder and backs towards the door, barely able to believe the blunder and the consequences. Outside the suite, she holds the tape up to her heart, flicks it off and whispers, ‘That’s it. It’s over now.’

Back at the office, they’re understanding. ‘He’s always been a nasty prick,’ the news editor, Eric Anderson, says soothingly. ‘Don’t worry Louie, we can pick it up from the wires or maybe we just won’t run anything. He’s just another Yank has-been.’ Louisa thinks that’s a good one, of course they’ll run something, everyone else will have him. No choice. ‘Lou,’ he says kindly and lays his heavy hand on her shoulder, ‘go home mate, take the rest of the day off, see the little bloke.’ She doesn’t need any more encouragement.

She gets her coat, and feeling like a girl let out of school early, she can’t get out quickly enough. The day is bright and cold and the air might have been shaved from an iceberg. On the way to the station she walks past three or four rundown travel agencies in the scungy Greek part of town. Around Lonsdale Street, blue and white flags flutter patriotically and souvlaki shops seem to wait for evening when the feeding will begin. This is Greece for Australians.

She comes to the Mykonos Travel Agency and stops dead. A half-size replica of some ancient god stands naked and white on a mini-column by the door. In the window she sees an ad for a travel agent. ‘Willing to train,’ it says, ‘part-time work available.’ If she had money she would not work at all, she’d stay home with Tom, but this looks better than the long hours at The Ant.

She thinks of Tom currently at a crèche and the new baby, who will also need to be handed over to someone, and something rebels in her. She needs to make things more manageable. She stands at the window for a long time. The frigid, broken wind eddies around her. Finally she goes in.

She leaves The Ant with barely a backward glance and spends short days typing in destinations to faraway places, pleased that someone is going somewhere. And her boss, the very round Mr Christos Conti, is understanding of families. You even look a little bit Greek, he says and she smiles.

On Sundays, they go over to Anne’s for a roast. No one does a roast like Anne, Pete reckons, her food tastes so clean and each flavour distinct. The irony of Louisa being a travel agent is not lost on anyone. Rob delights in reminding Pete, ‘The joke is that she’s the worst traveller, possibly on the face of the earth. Gets lost going to the shop to buy a bottle of milk and gets sick as soon as you start moving.’

Pete laughs. ‘Yeah, remember all the times she got carsick? Well, she always did. You don’t remember anything. That’s why she got to sit next to the window. I thought it was an excellent strategy since I was stuck in the bloody middle and then, it got worse, I was always having to nurse Jessie. Sorry, Jess.’

And Jess, who is cutting bread, waves the bread knife at him in a friendly, forgiving way.

‘Which time would that be?’ Rob wonders. ‘That time she heaved when we were going to Maryborough. She must have eaten corn. There was an awful lot of corn in it. Dad made her get out and he took a photo of her covered in sick.’

‘Shut up Robert,’ says Jessie plonking herself down.

‘Pretty funny heh?’ Pete says sourly and takes his plate over to the sink, washes it, then says he has to be off. He kisses Anne on the cheek and waves to the rest as if he barely knows them.

Rob won’t be long heading off either. He’s definitely off the family at the moment. There’s something stilted these days that he can’t put his finger on but then the rest of his life is not working out that well either. He’s had two partners in eleven years, one a horticulturist and the other a hairdresser, and neither lasted.

Still, he thinks, you never know your luck in the big city. He swings by and rents a couple of political thrillers at the video shop and he’s off home to his house behind the hedge. It’s not a cypress, couldn’t quite manage that, it’s a lilly pilly, a native that ripens with purple berries that spurt.