5
2010
Bean There, Done That Cafe,
Randwick, Sydney
Dani
Almost as soon as they walked out of the early childhood centre, Dani was regretting rescuing Liss.
This woman was so fragile and strange. And her thoughts in the very weird mothers’ group that day seemed to have been flitting around the room before settling, in fear, on her baby.
Dani had clocked the other women’s faces tweak with disapproval when this bronze-blonde in loose linen and the kind of leather sandals you couldn’t buy in Kmart had been listing all the things she’d bought to fix motherhood. She’d seen the eye rolls.
But she’d offered a lifeline. And once you did that, you couldn’t reel it back in. At least, not straight away.
She’d steered Liss to the only cafe nearby she knew, and only because she’d been in this shopping centre the week before, groggily pushing Lyra around with a dazed Seb by her side. She’d pointed at the sign and said, ‘If the name’s that terrible, imagine how shit the coffee is.’
The coffee at Bean There Done That was, indeed, terrible: watery and toothless. But there were wide communal tables, some room for parked strollers and sugar.
Liss had paused outside the door when she’d realised that she’d have to lift her baby out of the pram to go into the cafe. ‘She doesn’t like me holding her,’ she’d said, and Dani marvelled, again, at a person who would say something so honest to someone they hardly knew.
‘Of course she does,’ said Dani. ‘You just need to be confident.’
It was a trick, of course. Dani had no more maternal nous than Liss. Baby Lyra was an exhausting mystery; a puzzling little creature Dani immediately couldn’t live without.
She smiled encouragingly at Liss, nodded down to the pram and, soon enough, Liss bent and scooped little Tia up, her muslin wrap trailing like a bridal train as they walked to a table.
They’d only been there a moment, and Dani was working out what to say next to this scattered person with the whimpering bundle, when an enthusiastic holler of recognition signalled the arrival of the woman without a baby.
‘Sadie,’ she said, standing right next to their table, a manicured hand on her chest. ‘I won’t shake hands, I can see you’ve got yours full.’
For Dani, Sadie’s voice was half a decibel too loud, her gaze too direct. Chaotic energy buzzed around her like a swarm of bees.
Behind her were two more women vaguely familiar from the session. The one with the American accent. And the one who looked so tired her eyes were retreating back inside her head. One was holding a baby with the most impressive head of vertical black hair, while the other’s was barely visible inside one of those complex linen wrap-around sling things that made Dani anxious.
‘Juno and Ginger,’ Sadie said, gesturing to the women in turn. ‘I rescued them.’
‘That sounds like an ice-skating duo,’ said Liss.
Dani was starting to think that it wasn’t honesty fuelling Liss but rather that she was so tired that whatever words came into her head were falling straight out of her mouth.
‘Ha!’ Sadie said loudly, rather than actually laughing. ‘Can we join you? Form our own group? A rebel alliance?’
Dani shrugged. This was not what she’d imagined when she had confidently told Seb this morning that she was ‘going to make a friend today’.
But Liss was nodding, and Sadie, in what seemed like slow motion, was leaning down and cooing in Tia’s crumply little face. ‘You’re not a naughty baby, are you? You’re just a tired little poppet, aren’t you?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ The American woman, Juno, was sitting down next to Liss, opposite Dani. She held her baby, the one with all the hair, outwards, and he was awake, eyes open, staring at them.
‘This is Bob,’ said Juno, and Dani considered the confidence it took to give your child such a very ordinary name.
‘And this is James,’ said the other woman, Ginger, nodding towards the squishy linen lump on her chest.
‘Well, this is Lyra, I’m Dani, and this is . . .’
‘Liss. And Tia.’
Sadie was taking Tia from Liss as she spoke, deftly tightening the wrap around her, firmly patting away at the baby’s bottom and bouncing on her toes at the head of the table.
‘And where is your baby, Sadie?’ Dani asked, because someone had to.
‘He’s at home, with his dad.’
A couple of impressed murmurs.
‘Why?’ Dani asked. Everything about Sadie pricked at the worries that had been hard to shake lately.
Sadie just kept on bouncing Tia, who had stopped her squeaky, halting cries and looked like she might be about to sleep. ‘Because he’s his dad.’
‘But why today, with mothers’ group and everything?’
‘It’s mothers’ group,’ Sadie said, still a touch too loud, with emphasis on the mothers. ‘Not baby group. I wanted to make friends.’
Dani wondered if Liss was beginning to get nervous about the woman holding her baby. Was she about to run from the cafe with Tia under an arm? Maybe Liss was secretly hoping she would.
Sadie looked around at the women’s confused faces.
‘We’re separated. He comes over in the mornings for a couple of hours, I let him be with the baby. Here.’ She nodded at Liss. ‘She needs feeding.’
‘How could you be separated . . . already?’ Liss said, with a hand up her shirt, presumably rummaging around for a bra fastener.
A young woman in a tight cut-off T-shirt arrived to take their orders. ‘Coffees?’
‘I couldn’t remember my baby’s name this morning,’ Ginger half-whispered, ‘never mind what coffee I drink these days.’
‘You drink a latte,’ said Sadie, loudly, as she bent down to manhandle Liss’s exposed breast. ‘Big Special K mouth, little one,’ she instructed Tia. ‘Lattes all round, please!’
‘Um, no.’ Dani couldn’t remember the last time she was so irritated by a person, and she’d been living in New York City until four months ago, so that was saying something. ‘I’ll have a decaf long black, please.’
‘And I’ll have soy,’ Liss said, over Sadie’s bent head. ‘I think my milk is irritating Tia.’
‘Only at mothers’ group, or possibly a strip club, would I have seen your nipple before I knew your last name.’ Sadie laughed, straightening up. ‘There you go. Better.’
The waitress looked around. ‘Long black, lattes, soy,’ she said. ‘Anything else?’
Three women said ‘banana bread’ at once. Dani wasn’t one of them.
‘So what happened? With your baby’s dad?’ asked Ginger when the young woman had left.
‘I deserved better,’ Sadie said. And no more.
Dani looked at Lyra and tried to imagine summoning the will to make another major life decision.
‘Yeah,’ she said, finally. ‘I get that.’
Dani didn’t tell them that she was reckoning with the fallout of a seismic life choice herself, only that she and her husband had just moved back from years overseas.
She didn’t tell them how hard it was for her European husband to adjust to this new reality in her home city, how she could feel his resentment hardening against her like firming cement.
She didn’t tell them about how the family she’d moved back to be close to had actually turned out to be the last people she wanted to be around.
That she desperately missed work, where she’d felt competent and in control.
But that also, she couldn’t imagine leaving the house every day now, without her baby, to go to an office.
She didn’t tell them that she was sometimes so lonely it was hard to breathe.
Liss told them she lived in Bronte.
She had been on a hiatus from work when she got pregnant.
She just needed to understand what was happening; why this was so much harder than she’d imagined.
When she knew that, she said, left breast exposed to the entire cafe, she’d be so happy.
She just knew it.
She was made for this, she was certain.
Juno said she and her partner, Emily, had discussed who would carry their baby and she had volunteered because she wanted a holiday.
Everyone at the table choked on their coffees.
Now, Juno said, she realised just how badly that plan had backfired.
‘Emily,’ she said, with just the right amount of drama, ‘is an evil genius.’
And Ginger was a nurse who lived in an apartment block just a few doors down from the shopping centre.
She didn’t offer much more information, every word sapping energy she didn’t have.
But there was a husband, Aiden.
A teacher.
Back at work.
At least today’s outing had armed Dani with an actual conversation she could have with Seb that night.
Something beyond the poo diaries and feeding updates that met him when he walked in the door from the job he clearly thought was beneath him in this city he disdained.
‘Promise me you’ll speak to someone,’ Sadie said firmly to Liss, outside the cafe as they were saying goodbye, as if it was definitely Liss who needed help, and not she, the woman who was on her second round of baby-less mothers’ group meetings.
‘I’m fine,’ Liss said, but her voice was too light, too thin, as if it might splinter.
‘Of course you’re not fine,’ Sadie declared, full volume, pulling Liss into an awkward, cross-pram hug. ‘None of us is fine.’
And then she walked off, swinging her tiny bag, heading home to – who knew? An imaginary baby? A custody handover?
‘See you next week!’ she called over her shoulder.
Dani and Liss had found themselves in the quiet of the underground car park.
‘Well,’ said Dani, ‘it’s been good to meet you, Liss.’ The urge to get away from her, from all the women, with their unpredictable chaos that mirrored her own, was palpable now.
She heard Liss take a deep breath, saw her hands white on the handle of the pram.
‘I came to this group,’ she said, ‘because I can’t tell anyone who knows me that I’ve lost my mind.’
Dani looked at the fragile, odd woman, who was trying so hard not to cry. ‘Why are you telling me?’
‘Because you have no idea who I really am,’ said Liss. ‘And so you can’t be disappointed in me.’
Dani knew that her urge to run away might not, actually, be the right one. ‘That’s true. You’re the last person I’m going to be disappointed in. Listen, why don’t you let me come over tomorrow and we’ll organise to get you some help. No-one needs to know.’ Dani sensed, without knowing why, that she should add this next bit. ‘Not even your husband. If you don’t want him to.’
When Liss looked up again, shaking her head, tears were running fast down her face. ‘He thinks I’m happy. Who wouldn’t be happy,’ she gulped, ‘with a baby?’
Dani took one hand off Lyra’s pram and put it over Liss’s. It was stuffy and murky in the car park. ‘I think we’ve just answered that question upstairs.’
Liss smiled. ‘That was one of the more batshit mornings of my life.’
Dani pulled her BlackBerry out of her nappy bag. This woman, whose red-raw nipple had been on full display in a crowded cafe, who’d told a room of women what brand her highchair was, who had let a complete stranger cuddle and comfort her baby, who couldn’t get through a sentence without crying – this woman was about to become the friend she’d made today.
‘Let me get your number,’ Dani said. ‘I’m coming to your house tomorrow.’
‘My house,’ Liss was breathing more slowly now, calming her tears, ‘shocks people.’
‘Then it will make me feel better about mine,’ said Dani, and she held Tia’s pram handle while Liss tapped her number into her phone.
‘Maybe,’ the strange woman said. ‘What about next week?’
‘You mean, Sadie’s renegade group?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do they make you feel better?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we’ll do that, too.’
And as Dani headed back to her car, Lyra just beginning to cry for her next feed, right on cue, she felt something she hadn’t felt for a while: useful.