38

Beckett Keele is born after a day and night of monumental struggle. A cap of fine dark hair hugs her small round head and her eyes are the midnight blue of memory. Louisa sees Emmett’s eyes in them and, though the power of his reach lives in them, when she holds the child he is transformed into purity. If this is love, she thinks, then here it is again.

A few days after they get out of hospital, Peter buys a soft pink rabbit for Beck as a welcome for being born. He already has something for Tom. It’s a blustery Saturday afternoon and the occasional leaf and stick brushes up against the window; it feels like the end of something though he realises his feelings are often early, long before the actual event, and even when it happens you’re never sure whether that moment of recognition was about endings or beginnings.

Louisa’s living room is cluttered with teetering stacks of folded nappies and impossibly small baby clothes. Tom’s toys are strewn around carelessly. Last night’s pizza box is open on the coffee table and Pete has a nibble at a crust that’s a serious danger to teeth while Louisa tries to settle the baby. Maybe he should make a cup of tea, he considers. He would really like one but somehow the room is like an inertia trap that has taken him into itself, so he stays still and watches it all like a bemused spectator.

Outside, the choppy wind hurries through a clump of swaying gum trees down at the park and then the moaning begins. It seems there might be a storm. There’s no sign of John even in the room, not a book or a coat, nothing.

‘He’s at a poetry reading,’ Louisa says curtly. Having given up on putting the baby to bed, she’s folding a nappy longways to place on Pete’s shoulder – Beck spills after she’s been fed. ‘I’ll get us a cup of tea,’ she says but then sits down as if she’s forgotten the next step in tea-making requires walking to the kettle.

Peter holds the baby gingerly, as if she might explode, and Tom is enticed away from his uncle’s knee and over to his mother by the absence of that rotten baby and by the idea of showing Mum his new red matchbox car.

‘One of Dan’s,’ Pete says and Louisa feels tears stabbing at her. ‘Are you sure? No use keeping them for nothing, better to see young Tom enjoy them.’ She tries a smile at her brother but it’s not quite there because exhaustion has claimed her. People always say their babies are so good, they just sleep all night. How come hers never do? Typical, she thinks as she lays her head back on the couch and sees a tree outside bending before the convincing wind, the granite clouds huge behind it.

She closes her eyes but tears fall straight down her face anyway, at the thought of Daniel, at the hole John has left in her life, at this endless consuming weariness. The cat moseys on over and settles up against her leg. Tom waves the toy in her face, saying ‘car Mummy car’ over and over, and then Peter realises he’s never seen anyone so tired. That you could even be so tired.

He gets up carefully and, with the gentlest movements he can manage, places the fragrant sleeping baby into her basket and mimes ‘shoosh’ to Tom. He pushes the snoozing cat down from beside Louisa and the cat stands, affronted by this startling displacement. Peter then puts an arm around his sister, who wakes instantly, and he says, ‘Louisa, rest. I’ll look after the kids.’

He steers her into the bedroom, finds a blanket piled on the floor, covers her with it and pulls the blind down then goes outside to Tom and Beck. ‘Now young Thomas,’ he says, ‘dishes are our first priority.’ At the sink with Tom beside him, he feels the strength of something beginning.

Mr Conti, Louisa’s new boss, is as short and wide as a tram. His face is completely round. He is so short he can’t reach the top shelf near his desk and he keeps a little wooden box for that purpose. He combs the last strands of his dark hair across his shiny brown scalp and, obediently, they stay put all day.

He calls her Luisa and it sounds exotic. He has no time for computers which are just starting to revolutionise the industry because he prefers the old methods of forms and phone calls. He thinks they should work civilised hours and that they should always take care to be accurate. His loyal clients come to him because of his old-fashioned ways.

He runs the family company like a benevolent dictator. Gives the staff access to every junket that comes in but never takes them for himself and neither does Louisa because of the kids. His wife, Eleni, with her dark eyes and her host of gold rings, shows up occasionally at the agency as do their three daughters, Paula, Maria and Kylie, so named when Eleni thought something more Australian was required. Kylie Conti has a thatch of dyed blonde hair with dark seeping through at the roots like soil.

The girls are always jetting off here and there. Jetlag is an excuse to stretch on the couch where the customers should sit. Louisa reckons this is the way work should be, plenty of giving and taking. You do your job and you get it right. There’s no need to be the smartest or the rudest or the funniest and no need to have your copy dissected or spiked by ambitious dolts. No need to compete for favour with worn-out editors. Especially when everyone is better at most things than you are.

Stepping into the office in the mornings is like walking onto a Greek island. Greek coffee, hot and thick, becomes her favourite kind. She works hard and learns well, even picks up rudimentary Greek, and the girls are there to help her when she strays. Eleni brings her trays of moussaka and in time Louisa returns the favour; her own is declared almost as good. When she works on Saturday mornings, she brings Tom and Beck with her and the Greeks cherish them. How did she get so lucky?

Some days, she has lunch with Gary who’s still at The Ant, he’s on industrial relations now and she notices a certain hardness creeping into him. He always keeps her waiting because he’s so busy and when he strides into their Malaysian restaurant, The Golden Noodle, he pecks her cheek rather than hugs her, which leaves her feeling cheated.

He asks after John but not Tom or Beck, even though he must see John at the office, and then launches into the current gossip (affairs and promotions) with a seriousness of intent as if journalists are the only people worth talking about.

Warren Silk, his new partner, is an arts journo on the local broadsheet and he reminds Louisa of Mel Gibson. She once interviewed Mel, and on arriving back declared to the office that ‘men don’t get more handsome than that’. And so it is with Woz.

‘How’s Woz?’ she asks, thinking of Mel. Gary’s hopping into a plate of lemony seafood noodles and says tersely, ‘Haven’t seen a lot of him. He works so much it’s becoming a joke and then he plays water polo or he’s off at gallery openings. There’s always something going on.’

‘You sound like the wife,’ she laughs, trying to keep her voice light. She’s diligently picking out the tasty bits from a seafood mee goreng but she’s not hungry. ‘For some men, there’s always somewhere more interesting than home,’ she adds, and pushes away a curly piece of squid that looks like elastic.

Though he agreed to be Tom’s godfather, Gary is not fussed about even hearing the details of motherhood. He does his duty though and on each of Tom’s birthdays he’s arrived with a different children’s classic carefully wrapped and ribboned. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Tom was two and at three, Kidnapped.

Gary seems to regard being a parent as a diversion from Louisa’s real life. She believes the colour in his eyes fades when she talks about her family. His own spare time goes into getting fit and these days he has biceps like Sylvester Stallone. Louisa could not believe they were real until she touched them one summer afternoon. ‘Didn’t know you had it in you,’ she gaped, and he grinned like a boy.

He thought she was insane to leave journalism. ‘How could you just chuck it all away?’ he asked her incredulously. ‘How?’ He was honestly mystified. Journalists were his world and gossip was its fuel. He was cynical, funny, bitchy, very well-informed, and made you feel anything was possible; and she thought, he’s definitely lost interest in me. Perhaps the price of admittance to his world was a press pass. Ah, Mr Turner, where have you gone?

Walking back to work after lunch, it seems to Louisa that Gary and maybe even John are being swept away from her. That she is here in the middle of a wide prairie, alone, tending to things, checking the walls of the house and trying to get things to grow. And growing her kids.