CHAPTER 6
‘YOU WHAT ?!’ screamed her mother.
Chrissie McKellar was a woman whose outdoor voice could pierce holes in glass, thanks to a combination of a well-used diaphragm and a sonorous nasal cavity not dissimilar to Barbra Streisand’s.
‘WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL ME?’
Poppy pulled the phone away from her ear to avoid permanent hearing loss. A baby girl lay tightly swaddled in a perspex crib in the corner.
‘Darling, I would have been there in a jiffy! Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I missed this—my first grandchild! I can’t wait to tell the girls at golf!’
‘PAUL!’ she roared in the background. ‘Turn that bloody football off. We’re going to the hospital!’
‘It all happened very quickly, Mum; even the midwife didn’t expect it to go so fast. He said it was one of the quickest he’s had in a while.’
‘ He? ’ her mother repeated, aghast.
‘He,’ Poppy confirmed. ‘Wenda had to leave so another midwife stepped in.’
‘PAUL, HURRY UP!’ her mother yelled. Returning her attention to Poppy she said, ‘Darling, we’re coming as fast as we can, or at least I am. Paul! Your boots aren’t there; they’re in the laundry where you left them. Darling, you just hold tight. We’ll be there before you know it. It sounds like it was an absolute debacle. Oh gosh, the girls at golf will not believe their ears.’
Her mother hung up and Poppy dropped the phone on the bed. She rose gingerly, unsure whether her limbs could still function. She’d escaped with just three sutures which stung as she moved but felt like tiny prickles of rain compared to what she’d been through. More disconcertingly, she had the feeling of having been completely disembowelled, her insides scooped out, leaving her a hollow deflated shell with no connective tissue linking her limbs to her torso. It was disorientating. Every time she moved, she wasn’t sure how it happened.
She padded quietly across the linoleum and pulled the crib next to her bed. ‘Hi, little one,’ she whispered.
Her daughter’s chest rose and fell infinitesimally and her eyes were squeezed shut, blocking out the noisy, beeping world around her. Under the halogen lighting, her skin was pale and slightly downy, her ears tiny miraculous coils of skin and cartilage. You are so small , thought Poppy reverentially. You are so precious .
‘Hello?’ called a deep voice from the doorway. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Yes, I’m decent,’ Poppy replied, immediately regretting her choice of words and the allusion to her prior non-decent behaviour and state of undress. God, she’d talked about poo with this guy. There was no coming back from that.
‘You okay?’ asked James, examining her with those dark eyes.
He moved to the side of the bed next to the crib. The baby was sleeping deeply, oblivious to everything around her. James smiled. Without the haze of contractions, Poppy could see the fatigue in his face.
‘Yes, I’m good … good,’ she repeated, nodding her head. Was she good? She couldn’t tell. She felt okay at this precise moment, with a sleeping baby and the relief of no pain and an expert at her side in case things went wrong, but would she be okay if any one of those variables changed?
It didn’t help that an inconvenient undercurrent of guilt was swelling, starting to course through her veins like a virus. She should tell Patrick about this. It was a pretty big deal, if not the biggest deal he’d ever encounter. He would know the news was imminent. He might be selfish, but he wasn’t an idiot.
She’d been planning this conversation for seven months. How she’d coolly inform him that he had a child, and that no, even if he did want to get back together, she wasn’t so sure. He deserved to sweat a little. She fully expected him to argue back. As a benevolent compromise, she’d decided she would allow joint holidays and visits every weekend. They could build up from there.
The problem was, in among all this scheming for imaginary confrontations, Poppy had a growing fear that it might amount to zilch. Despite all her expectations that he’d try and win her back, Patrick had hardly contacted her since the breakup. There had been one cursory text to point out her due date clashed with the Sydney Test and that had been it. It was both embarrassing and unsettling. Had they grown apart or had she never really known him? At uni, she knew he’d been the party guy. By the time they’d met, he was the career guy who worked hard and partied harder. Travelling, he was the guy who’d befriend the locals and next minute you were sitting in some old nonna’s house eating fresh pappardelle and doing shots of homemade grappa. But was that Patrick or a high-energy facade?
James coughed and Poppy realised she must have been staring. He checked his watch. ‘I’m going home now.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Poppy, remembering they weren’t actually friends. Why would he stick around and keep her company? That whole truce during labour had been a purely functional midwife–patient relationship thing.
‘Right then, bye.’ He raised his hand in an awkward wave. ‘Becky will be here if you need anything.’
As he closed the door, Poppy lay down on the bed and rolled onto her stomach. The weight of her exhaustion washed over her, pushing her deeper into the foam mattress. Never again would she take sleeping on her stomach for granted. Her eyelids fluttered and closed as though weighted down by every muscle she’d used in the last twenty-four hours. She took a deep breath and a sigh seeped from her lips. For a moment, everything was still. There was no energy left in her body. A leaden, dreamless sleep was beckoning.
On the trolley table, something buzzed. Poppy cracked an eyelid. If it was her mother, she would kill her. She grabbed her phone and saw a photo of a grinning brunette with the bone structure of a Filipina princess.
‘PARPEEEEE! My beautiful, beautiful girl,’ Dani cried, half-sobbing, her serious mode fully activated. ‘I just got your text. Tell me everything!’
Poppy smiled. She may suffer from acute verbal diarrhoea more than was healthy, but with Dani as her audience, she was a master storyteller. Everyday chores could become comical inside jokes and disasters became hilarious sitcoms to be pored over in side-splitting detail—and the last six hours had the makings of an SNL Christmas special.
‘Dani, old girl,’ she began auspiciously, ‘you are going to wet your frickin pants.’