Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Read online

  ‘Thank you for having me,’ came the rote and saccharine response from every one of the suddenly angelic little monsters as they brushed their floppy fringes out of their eyes and smiled cherubically at me.

  ‘My pleasure.’ I smiled at the evil little fuckers, because deep down, even though they were adorable kids on the outside, I had seen them for what they were. Little psychotic devils. Little Damiens from The Omen, all of them.

  Kelly took Hugo’s hand and looked at me patronisingly. Perhaps it was just pity but, given that my hair was a bird’s nest, I had sauce on my blouse as if I was sporting a stab wound and I smelled like ice cream, and she was dressed as if she was about to go yachting, I decided to call the look patronising.

  ‘I let Hugo come, because I didn’t want him left out,’ she said to me, with a strange frown puckered up between her eyes. ‘But I don’t usually ever let him have McDonald’s.’ Kelly said the word McDonalds like she might say the word pustule.

  ‘Oh, I thought everyone did it,’ I said in a rush, trying to suck up or apologise or something terribly pathetic like that. ‘I hate McDonald’s too!’

  ‘Sure you do,’ she smiled, ‘but no … the Clovelly mums are not too fussed on the McDonald’s party but … no big deal. Hope your boy had fun.’

  OK, so I’d committed some Clovelly no-no by having a McDonald’s party. Well I didn’t actually really care in that moment because I had survived and Ben had a smile on his face and right then that was all that mattered.

  ‘Ben did have fun,’ I said. ‘Heaps of fun. It was rad.’

  ‘Is that your other little boy?’ she asked, casting a gaze over my shoulder.

  I looked around to see that Toby was standing on a table, pissing into the fake plant holder. ‘Um, no. I don’t know who he belongs to.’

  Kate and I grabbed a bottle of champagne from the bottle-shop and some plastic cups from the 7-Eleven and took our kids to the beach. We sat on the grassy fringe above the sand and stared out to sea. Neat ridges of froth glided to shore to explode upon the wet sand. Tiny colourful board-riders dipped and swayed to keep balance as they grooved towards the shallows and ant-brigades of walkers combed over the rocky walkways to Bronte. The sun was high and bright and the champagne was going down nicely.

  ‘We sure do deserve this!’ she said, clinking a plastic ‘glass’ against mine with a dull thud.

  ‘Hell yeah,’ I agreed. ‘That was torturous.’

  A biting breeze whipped about our faces. I could see a person swimming way out in the sea, doing the trek from south to north Bondi Heads. It must have been one of the lunatic Bondi Icebergs, I thought, because it was way too cold for normal people.

  Three muscled surfers jogged past, their smell of sweat and exhaustion settling over us. We squinted above our sunglasses at the hot brawn of their limbs, deeply tanned and chiselled.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Kate cooed.

  ‘You’re married!’ I tut-tutted.

  ‘Doesn’t mean I can’t look.’

  I told her about my tryst while the boys were away.

  ‘Go girl!’ She laughed. ‘You should get out more often. Hot Chisel, eh? Damn. I had such a thing for that band when I was younger.’

  ‘Bit hard to get out with the boys, you know,’ I sighed, following the surfers’ tight little bums as they bounded away. ‘I get out so little that I pack it all in and go crazy.’

  ‘We should do a reciprocal thing. You babysit my boys once a month and we’ll take yours once a month. That way you get a night off and I get a date night. Deal?’

  The children ran off their sugar high by chasing manic seagulls about the grass, pelting them with anything they could find while we slurped down the booze before the bubbles hit the surface. Ben’s Batman cape flapped like a torn curtain behind him as he escaped the sharp end of the broken pirate sword Toby was wielding.

  ‘That sounds really good,’ I admitted. ‘One night off a month. It sounds great. And my boys would love yours to come for a sleepover. What a super idea. Deal.’

  We shook hands and then clinked/banged plastic glasses again.

  ‘Might have to wait a week or two before I am ready to go out, though,’ I confided. ‘I’ve had like a period thing for the last few weeks. Won’t stop bleeding. It’s getting really annoying. I’m like … well … I can’t be too far from a loo … ever.’

  I shot a nervous glance at the public toilets and Kate looked at me over her glasses, a frown of concern furrowing her brow.

  ‘When did you have your last pap smear?’

  ‘Ewww,’ I said and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Years ago. Before Toby. Ages ago. I’m only young. Don’t see much point.’

  ‘Do it,’ she said firmly. ‘Promise me. It could be serious.’

  I decided to change the subject. ‘So tell me more about this unit above the purple surgery.’

  ‘Well, it’s owned by a Clovelly dad and he’s the doctor there and he’s renting it out in about a month I think. Huge. Four bedrooms. Would be so handy to the school and the buses for you and a quick walk to my house,’ she said. ‘And he’s a single dad, with two little girls.’

  I swear it was like a comedy skit with precision timing, because there was a beat of three seconds before the pair of us burst into the Brady Bunch theme song. After we forgot the words and stopped laughing I got thinking though: a four-bedroom unit above a surgery. Walking distance to Ben’s school. I’d even be in the right catchment area so Toby would have no trouble enrolling in another year or so. It would have to be better than pulling the beds from the walls every night at Studley, so that the cockroaches didn’t run into our gaping mouths in our sleep. It might be, I thought, just what the doctor ordered. I’d do it. I decided then and there that it was time to move closer to the school and out of the shoebox into something a little better.

  The boys were at school and kindergarten. Kate had taken them for me that morning. I’d been up since the first deathly blue blush had rimmed my windowsill. The hospital was crisp and starchy; the clatter of wheels and the clang of metallic instruments accompanied the squeak of nurses’ shoes. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the envelope of white sheets stretched implausibly over the sharp corners. The pale blue surgical gown wrapped itself around me in an impersonal hug that didn’t quite reach all the way. A cool waft of filtered air breezed down my spine.

  The anaesthetist was all business. Do you have any allergies? Have you had problems with anaesthesia before? Nausea? What operations have you had?

  I answered nervously. Appendectomy. I had never felt so alone and afraid.

  Bobby and Sam were at work. My family was miles away. The prospect of being ‘put under’ was terrifying. Things could and did go wrong. Hearts could stop. Perhaps they would find more inside me than I liked to think about.

  CIN 2. It sounded like the word ‘sin’ and it felt that way too. A rim of pre-cancerous cells leaching into my cervix. Doctor H had delivered my darling Ben and now he was back ploughing into the same landscape to prune the threat of cancer from my core. Lung cancer, brain tumours, breast cancer all summoned great wads of sympathy, but this felt dirty and shameful. Bad Nikki summed it up. Classy chicks don’t get cervical cancer. It was a slut disease. And you are such a worthy candidate, slut-guts, she hissed at me. My smooth doctor shushed such talk away and politely told me it was random and only possibly linked to early sexual activity, which was not a crime. I still felt ashamed and responsible. Sexual karma. Nuns, virgins and spinsters. I could not fall safely into any of those categories.

  The anaesthetist wouldn’t look me in the eye and I imagined he was thinking of my pink winking cervix that looked, I’d been told, like a little sucking sea anemone. The old woman in the bed across the room was frowning at me. I think she had decided I was having an abortion. It was a private four-star boutique hospital in Bellevue Hill but I was only in for day surgery and my doc
tor was bulk-billing because he was a good guy. I just had to pay for the anaesthesia and I’d borrowed that from Kate; something I’d once promised myself I would never do, but this was an emergency. Doctor H would have done the procedure under local anaesthetic in his rooms but I insisted on the full knockout. I did not want to be awake while he shaved and cut my cervical flesh, singeing the edges to cauterise the wound. The smell of scorched reproductive bits was not something I needed to experience while conscious. The other other crackling.

  The anaesthetist left, his shirt wedged tightly into sensible trousers, his walk prim and constipated. A nurse appeared, looking a little disapproving, like I was just another inconvenience in a morning full of inconveniences. I was shaved in a rough and clinical manner like a prisoner about to be electrocuted and then given a pre-med to make me drowsy. An intravenous cannula was inserted into my hand. The sting whittled and wedged its way into my delicate vein like a metal parasite. It hurt and I let myself cry because it felt good to. Comforting. I was so fragile that crying seemed appropriate. The nurse frowned, probably thinking I was a spineless sook.

  ‘Are you having a termination today?’ she asked with as much feeling and expression as a wooden plank.

  ‘No!’ It came out more aggressively than I intended. ‘CIN 2. I’m having a cone biopsy.’

  It sounded like a malignant ice-cream flavour but I felt more assertive and proud that I was knowledgeable about the procedure I was about to endure. She could have just looked at my chart. Insensitive bitch.

  ‘Oh, that’s just a quick little thing.’ She dismissed me with a head flick. ‘You should have just done that in the doctor’s surgery.’

  She was definitely feeling inconvenienced by my hospital admission.

  ‘It’s just day surgery so they’ll be sending me home later today,’ I offered lamely.

  She walked away after glaring and sighing at my bed. I supposed she was thinking of the trouble she would have to take later to strip the sheets and straighten the new ones back into place. But I was beginning to feel sleepy and mellow and I didn’t really care.

  As I got groggier, I started finding obscure things funny. Nurses and doctors were walking around rubbing their hands with cleaning product so that they all looked like super villains hatching dastardly plans. Mwahahaha.

  The wardsman came and rolled me onto his trolley. He looked like he’d just escaped from Long Bay jail but he was quite funny. He said I wouldn’t even remember him. I thought I would. He had a tattoo of a dragon on his wrist, swirling about a plume of green smoke. Green smoke? I etched that into my brain and dared myself to remember it later.

  The next thing I knew, I was choking and the pain was burning from between my legs and up into my centre. I struggled as a nurse pulled a tube out of my throat and the smothering device was removed from my face. I coughed and it ripped a raggedy sandpaper scratch up my gullet.

  ‘Pain,’ I whispered hoarsely.

  The lights above me glowed with a nauseatingly green halo. They seemed to throb in time with the pulsing cramps that were cutting me in half.

  The drone and occasional clang of the trolley sounded like institutional angst. Jail-escapee boy was grinning at me, showing me where his front tooth might once have been.

  ‘I remember you,’ I whispered.

  Back in the bed, I bled into a thick mattressy prison-issue pad and hoped it leaked onto the starchy sheets just to annoy the militant nurse, who reminded me of the stern grey nuns of my youth and insulted me with a pathetic plop of paracetamol and a plastic cup of water.

  ‘That’s for the pain.’

  Where the fuck was the morphine?

  Doctor H saw me briefly to tell me the operation was a success. There had been some rogue polyps so he’d cleaned me up nice and good. Stripped away the rotten flesh and sealed it all with a soldering iron. No sex for six weeks. I had no prospects anyway and right at that point in time felt very much like taking a vow of celibacy. Perhaps life as a nun, a virgin or a spinster might have been a better option for me. I lay there thinking about that while my womb gently wept.

  Later, after a cup of tea and a sandwich, I took a taxi home. I was feeling like shit but I had packing to do. Mum had sent me a big bouquet of flowers. And I had a big cry.

  We moved into the purple unit above the surgery on Bronte Road and it was good.

  Life became so much easier. Instead of getting up with the sun and dragging the boys out of bed, through the reluctant dance of getting ready and out the door at some ungodly hour so that we could catch two buses to drop Ben to school, we all walked. This was less stressful, meant we could sleep in a little later and it was a lovely bonding time. It was about a fifteen-minute walk and half of it was past shops so we got to know the people along the stretch known as Charing Cross – and much to my delight there was a big Vinnies shop there, which soon became my go-to for all the essentials and lots and lots of bric-a-brac non-essentials as well. I may not have lived up to my parents’ dream of having a university degree and a respectable job but I could have written a PhD on finding a bargain. I was good! We may have been poor as church mice, but by God we dressed in some fine designer threads sometimes – and sometimes they even fit.

  We were no longer so cramped it felt like living in a bricked-in caravan. The Purple Palace was spacious. It was so spacious that when we first moved in, having very little in the way of furniture, we echoed every time we spoke. The living room was a huge expanse of purple floorboards. Yes! Purple floorboards. Pale lavender. Double French doors led to a rickety old balcony that had apparently been tacked on as an afterthought. The kitchen was definitely an afterthought and was really just an old oven and a sink in a small alcove. Kate, ever my furniture saviour, gave me her old bar fridge as a house-warming present and even it didn’t fit in the four by three foot ‘kitchen’ and had to live in the living room.

  Toby had a tiny trike, a three-wheeler little thing that he had loved to ride up and down Ramsgate Avenue, and he rode around and around our new living room, round and around until I got dizzy.

  There was even an open fireplace. On our first Saturday there, I lit a little fire just for fun. I’d bought some marshmallows at the corner store and the boys and I had collected some kindling of dry sticks from the small park nearby. After a lot of smoke and not much else, the pink-haired receptionist from the surgery downstairs arrived in my living room, flapping her arms and yelling.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’

  We doused the flames in a flurry as, panting, she told me that it was only a ‘mock’ fireplace and had been blocked up years earlier. I had inadvertently just burned a hole in the floor and was letting ash and wood chips fall into the doctors’ waiting room! It was a baptism by fire and I was lucky they didn’t turf me out on the spot. Instead, everyone had a laugh and they were very nice about it. We ate cold marshmallows and I spent the afternoon cleaning up.

  There was a staircase from my hallway that ran along the middle of my unit and it led straight down into the sterilisation kitchen by the back door of the surgery. So that kitchen was kind of my downstairs entrance foyer. The patients could feasibly have just walked up and into my unit, like the receptionist just had, but fortunately there was a sign at the bottom of the stairs warning them not to! Some security! The building was a huge old corner terrace. Kate told me that it had been a butchery many years back.

  ‘I think it’s haunted,’ Ben decided.

  On our first night in the new place, the kids lay in my bed with me and we listened to the squeal of traffic outside. We were living on a six-way intersection so there was a never-ending parade of traffic heading from Bondi Junction to the airport one way and the beach another, and the sirens of emergency vehicles were constant, all heading to the Prince of Wales Hospital down the road in Randwick. Every ten minutes the red lights and whirr would scream past. The boys loved it. I loved it too. I’d always wanted to live in
New York, ever since I’d watched Sesame Street as a little girl. Living in the thick of the urban sprawl made me feel less lonely. It wasn’t Manhattan but it was almost as noisy.

  I was still cleaning the houses of the rich and famous but all the while dreaming of being an actor or bestselling writer. I was doing, mind you, exactly squat towards making either of those dreams a reality. I was too busy making ends meet to entertain any long-term fantasies.

  After a week in our new digs, we had all decided the place was haunted and we gave the resident ghost the name ‘Shadow’, which was not particularly clever or novel but we all felt a strange shadowy entity in the house.

  Ben invited his best mate (still Ben) to a sleepover and the two of them stayed up all night petrified, with the lights on, swearing they had seen a man in a black hat at the end of the corridor. I slept with the lights on as well. And I hoped that Shadow was benevolent rather than malevolent and was just there keeping an eye on us.

  One day, not long after we’d moved, Toby came home from his day-care centre with a piece of cardboard. The teachers told me to read it because it was so funny. I sat on my bed with the boys as they scribbled in their drawing books and read it to them. It was a list of all the kids in Toby’s class and alongside each name was the one thing they aspired to be ‘when they grew up’. There were the predictable fire fighter, police officer, teacher, actor, soccer player and vet, but alongside Toby’s name was change my name to Sonic.

  ‘Like the hedgehog,’ Toby explained.

  ‘You want to be Sonic the Hedgehog when you grow up?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘No, silly,’ he scoffed, looking at me like I was mad. ‘I can’t be a hedgehog, Mum, I’m a person! I just want to change my name to Sonic. It’s a cool name.’

  ‘That’s so stupid,’ Ben teased, rolling about the bed laughing. ‘Toby wants to be Sonic. Sonic. Sonic. Hahahahha.’

  ‘Shut up! You shut up!’ Toby squealed and clobbered Ben over the head with his book and grabbed a Texta and started trying to stab his brother with it.