Andrea surveys the room, trying not to let the heaviness of despair stop her from doing what she needs to do. Which is everything.
They moved into this house three days ago, and for three days she has been doing little except cleaning and unpacking. This morning it looks as though she hasn’t even begun the mammoth task. Over in one corner of the living room is a stack of boxes as tall as she is, leaning slightly and crumpling with the weight of all they contain. They are labelled garage and garden and terry, because they are the boxes that Terry assured her he would unpack this weekend. They are stacked against a window, blocking out most of the meagre daylight coming in. The heavy grey sky offers little enough light as it is, so, despite the time of day, she switches the lights on and discovers that two light bulbs in the room need to be replaced. Light bulbs are broken all over the house, including in Jack’s room. She really should check on what Jack is doing. The thought slips from her mind as she glances around the room again. ‘Baby brain,’ her mother said with a laugh when she told her she couldn’t seem to hold on to a thought for even a few seconds, but Andrea knows it’s more than that. Her mind is on a constant loop of fear and worry, the overwhelming emotions crowding her brain.
Things are only made worse by the fact that the house – this draughty house on what is, granted, a very good street – is in such bad repair. The carpets are clean and the paint on the walls is new, but everywhere she looks she can see decay, from the pitted timber window frames to the cracks running along the ceiling. They must have reappeared only days after the painters finished. The house creaks and groans all night long as though complaining about being inhabited. The last owner died in her bed, having lived here for fifty years, so perhaps the house misses her and doesn’t want a new family to occupy it.
‘I don’t exactly love you either,’ Andrea mutters, and then laughs at herself for talking to an inanimate object.
‘There will always be cracks,’ Terry said to her last night as he tackled assembling their bed. ‘The house is on clay and so whenever it rains or whenever there’s a drought or…’
‘Or a slight breeze,’ Andrea had added.
Terry had laughed but it wasn’t funny.
Andrea sniffs. The musty, thick smell of mould is everywhere, but then it is everywhere in Sydney these days. Autumn rain turned into spring rain, which turned into summer rain, and now they are at the beginning of April and autumn rain again. The gaps under the doors and at the side of the windows allow sneaky slices of cold air in, making her shiver. She was running the heater but then she thought about the price of electricity and turned it off again. If she just keeps working, she can stay warm enough.
Andrea’s despair is well suited to the weather. It would be wrong for the sun to shine now, when all she wants to do is cry.
‘At least my home isn’t flooded,’ she says aloud, reminding herself to count her blessings, as her grandmother always told her to do. There is always someone whose struggles are greater than yours. Gratitude is the way to get through every day.
Her sister, Brianna, lives in a small country town close to the Queensland border where her husband is the local doctor. Brianna’s home has been inundated with water twice in the last six months as the rain comes down day after day and week after week. ‘It feels like this will never end,’ she told Andrea only yesterday, as she sent through the latest batch of photos – one of which was of her brand-new leather sofa floating out of the living room double doors. ‘I didn’t want the kids to eat on it so they wouldn’t drop any food or drink on the lovely leather and now it’s gone the same way the last sofa did, out the door and into the rubbish,’ she said with a sad laugh.
‘I wish I could come and help you clean up,’ Andrea said.
‘You have a three-year-old child and you’re nearly nine months pregnant,’ Brianna replied. ‘And you’ve just moved. You have more than enough problems of your own.’
‘I sure do,’ mutters Andrea aloud now as her gaze sweeps the room.
She leans over the box marked towels and, using the box cutter in her hand, slices it open, sighing as she confronts a selection of towels that would better suit the garbage bin than her bathroom. They are all slightly threadbare because they are the ones Terry bought when he moved out of home ten years ago. New towels were on her Christmas wish list before… before everything. She takes the blue set to the family bathroom and hangs the green set in the small, old-fashioned en suite, where the walls are tiled in a pink and black mosaic that might almost manage to be chic in a retro way if it weren’t for all the cracks and the fact that whole patches are missing in some places.
‘I’ll go through the garage and see if I can find some spare ones. The old owners must have left some – they always do,’ Terry promised her, but she has little hope of that actually happening.
The small cupboard she has chosen to put linen in is already full of sheets and tablecloths, all neatly stacked, leaving no space for anything else.
‘No storage space and no light,’ she mutters. ‘Right.’ Andrea roughly shoves a bunch of mismatched brown and cream towels into the cupboard. She needs a cup of tea and some chocolate.
‘We have more than most people do,’ Terry said last night and she wanted to agree with him because everything will be easier if she can just convince herself of this. But she is struggling, especially when she looks at the grocery bill after a big shop or reads about electricity prices going up or glances around the house she now lives in.
‘You’re stuck here, so stop whining,’ she says aloud, trying to jolt herself out of her mood, as she shoves the last of the towels into the now messy cupboard.
She has a child and another on the way, and Terry is the breadwinner in the family. She couldn’t leave even if she wanted to. I don’t want to leave. I love Terry. I love or loved the life we created together. Terry is a charmer. A man with the widest smile and the loudest laugh. He’s funny and sweet and no one can make her laugh like he can.
This morning, before he left for work, he kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘Things will get better, I know they will,’ he whispered. She had closed her eyes and sent a plea up to the heavens that they would get better.
In an ideal world, Terry should be making more than enough from his job in a large electronics store, where all the salespeople work on commission and the sales are very large. But this is not an ideal world. It’s not like she can go out and get a job right now, so there is little she can do about the situation. She is tied to Terry and Terry’s problems.
As she flicks on the kettle, Gemma, as the baby is already called, kicks her mightily from the inside. Both she and Terry wanted to know the gender of the baby and they quickly agreed on the name Gemma. It goes nicely with Jack. Terry is surprisingly good with babies, able to soothe them out of crying fits and never averse to changing a nappy. He has a level of patience with Jack that Andrea sometimes lacks and can happily spend hours playing with him, both of them loving the toy cars and the large plastic garage filled with ramps her parents sent Jack for his birthday.
Andrea pushes away the thought that Gemma is a mistake. She had wanted to wait before falling pregnant again.
‘Jack needs a sibling and it’s only a year ahead of your schedule,’ Terry said, shrugging and smiling, when she told him she was pregnant, and Andrea had decided to be grateful for another healthy pregnancy, even though she questioned how on earth they would manage financially.
As the kettle clicks off, a tiny prick of alarm runs through her as she realises she hasn’t heard from Jack for at least five minutes, which means he is doing something he shouldn’t be doing.
‘Jack,’ she calls. ‘Where are you, bubs?’
There is no answer, so she leaves the kitchen and goes in search of her son. She knows he is bored and lonely and has had enough of his grouchy mum. She doesn’t blame him. She’s had enough of herself.
He is in his bedroom, chatting to himself, an entire packet of sliced cheese spread across the carpet, most of it crushed into the grey fibres. The slices are not individually wrapped, so Andrea can see that the whole packet will have to be thrown away. Seven dollars in the bin.
‘Oh, Jack,’ she says, unable to stop some tears escaping as she crouches down to begin picking up enough cheese for at least two weeks’ worth of sandwiches. The ripe smell turns her stomach and she swallows quickly. This pregnancy has been plagued by nausea morning, noon and night.
‘Sometimes stress makes it worse,’ Brianna said when they discussed how sick Andrea was feeling.
‘I’m in trouble then,’ Andrea replied and Brianna had sighed, knowing exactly what Andrea was stressed about.
‘Why would you do this, Jack?’ Andrea asks as she sniffs.
‘I was hungry,’ he says, his big, deep blue eyes the picture of innocence. He has perfected the same ‘who me?’ look his father gives her. He shares Terry’s light blue eyes and chestnut brown hair, so different to her own plain brown eyes and dead-straight mousey brown hair. In the bar where she met him, at a birthday celebration for one of the women she worked with at the online homewares company, she had turned to look at him only because so many of the other women in her group were looking. Terry is really handsome, and when he smiles and the dimple in his cheek appears, Andrea has a hard time staying angry at him.
Jack looks just like his father, right down to the dimple on his cheek, but he has a more serious nature. He’s sensitive to her moods and will try to help her instead of jollying her out of them with a joke. He stands up now and comes over to her, wrapping his arms around her. ‘Don’t cry, Mum. I make you a sandwich.’
If she had the energy, if she had even a single ounce of energy left, she would yell at her small son, who knows better than to take all the cheese out of the packet, but she doesn’t. She leans forward and continues picking up the pieces, hating the cold waxy feel of them.
‘I help,’ says Jack and he picks up a whole lot and then takes a bite of what he has in his hand.
‘Jack, no,’ she says. ‘It’s dirty.’ She grabs the cheese from him and throws everything in his bedroom bin, picking it up to take outside and empty, as he begins to howl in despair. Andrea feels the prickle at her scalp of a headache coming on and then she walks out of Jack’s bedroom and into hers, closing the door behind her, placing her hand over her heart and taking three deep breaths.
Jack should have been at pre-school today but he had a slight temperature this morning, so she couldn’t send him. Whatever he had is obviously over already – in the way that these things usually go with children – but she still has him here the whole day and that means she will get little done. She thinks longingly for a moment of her small house on Robertson Street, forty minutes away from here, of how neat and tidy and clean it was, despite it being small. This house is bigger but it’s so far from feeling like a home it makes her want to sit and weep. She doesn’t want to cry in front of Jack, who hates her tears and has seen too many of them lately. What she would like to do is to call her husband and tell him exactly how much she hates him right now. This is all his doing.
She takes another deep breath, hearing Jack call for her and at the same time the front doorbell ringing – a strange jangly noise that reminds Andrea that here is yet another thing that needs fixing.
‘What now?’ she mutters, opening the bedroom door and lifting her chin. What now?
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