CHAPTER 9
There was no time for coding courses. Hell, there was hardly time for hair washing. At this point, Poppy couldn’t decipher whether Maeve’s gas was burp-related or fart-related, let alone decipher HTML. Twelve weeks into parenthood and Poppy was surviving on a strict diet of coffee, tea and fork food. She hadn’t used a knife in three months. She might never ever use one again.
Poppy eased the pram through her front gate, her eye catching on her elderly neighbour who sat on the verandah next door in a wicker armchair.
‘Morning, Mary.’ Poppy lifted her hand in a wave.
‘Morning, love,’ replied Mary cheerfully.
Poppy had met Mary during her first week in town. She’d been exploring the street and her eighty-nine-year-old neighbour had beckoned her over. Mary had proudly informed her that she sat on her verandah every day so knew everything about the street, including that its newest resident was a soon-to-be single mother. ‘I knew from how often your mother visited,’ she told Poppy, tapping her nose. ‘If there’d been a man, he’d have been out of there like a shot.’ Mary seemed delighted about this situation, declaring conspiratorially that as single girls they should stick together.
Mary had invited Poppy to join her on the verandah for some of her famous jam drop biscuits and proceeded to regale her with a detailed recount of her life, which revolved around her dynasty of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who all had nineties sitcom names like Bobby, Jimmy, Davy, Mikey and Katie. Her other passion was buying useful (read: useless) trinkets via mail-order catalogue. Her latest purchase—a rainbow-hued silicone tea cosy—was proving far more practical than the word-of-the-day toilet paper which, as Mary put it, was ‘more arse than class’.
Any remaining spare time of Mary’s was consumed by her zealous commitment to neighbourhood snooping. Thanks to Mary, Poppy knew that number seven had a pool, number three played jazz too loudly and someone in number eleven was possibly having an affair. Everyone was aged over sixty-five apart from the woman in number five, who dressed entirely in yellow and regularly washed her (yellow) car in a (yellow) bikini. It wasn’t necessarily useful information, but the gentle meandering of Mary’s conversations amused Poppy, whose grandparents had long since passed away. She’d found herself looking forward to her regular chats with her neighbour.
As Poppy came to a halt in front of Mary’s front gate, her neighbour hoisted herself up in her armchair to peer at the pram. ‘How did our girl sleep last night?’ she asked.
‘Woke three times,’ replied Poppy. ‘Or maybe four?’
‘Good girl,’ clucked Mary. ‘She’s learned her day from night already.’
Poppy was continually bemused with how people were overly keen to praise her daughter for all manner of things—her blinking, her burping, her sneezing. Lauding her for waking up four times during the night, however, felt supremely disingenuous when a full night’s sleep was clearly the actual goal.
‘You’re doing a wonderful job,’ added Mary kindly.
Poppy wanted to smile, for Mary’s sake, to make the old lady feel as though she’d done a good job of allaying her fears, but she couldn’t. Her neighbour had no clue if she was doing a good job of mothering. No-one knew. No-one was watching her stumble in the darkness trying to find the bassinet. No-one was making sure Maeve latched on properly. For all they knew, Poppy could have been feeding her daughter Fanta from a bottle, setting her up for a lifetime of sugar addiction and expensive dentistry.
The hardest thing was that even Poppy didn’t know if she was doing a good job. She wouldn’t know for years, and—horrible thought though it was—she might never know. She might be on this hamster wheel of guilt and fear and self-doubt for the rest of her life, always second-guessing whether she’d made the right choice for her daughter, wondering whether bringing her into the world without a father was ruining her life from the start.
She wanted her old boss to walk into her house with a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint presentation and say, ‘These are your KPIs, Poppy. Achieve these targets and you will raise a healthy, well-adjusted child.’ Poppy could work with KPIs. She could work longer hours, she could read more reports, she could pore over the data sets until her eyes watered. It was what she was used to. But her metrics and optics and vision statements wouldn’t work here. For all the love and energy she’d thrown at it, her big shiny career was worthless now. The only thing she could rely on now was her breastmilk—and that, to be perfectly frank, had the pong of old yoghurt.
She finally forced a weak smile as she pushed the pram down the road. ‘Thanks, Mary. You’re always lifting my spirits.’
The first autumn leaves littered the ground beneath her feet and an icy breeze tickled her bare hands. Maeve was wailing irritably in the pram, a lopsided beanie on her head. Poppy had no idea why she was crying. Her daughter was fed, changed, wearing mittens and three layers of clothing—all organic cotton and wool, like an Eastern Suburbs ski bunny ready for schnappy hour. Maeve , she wanted to say, smarten up . Actually, she didn’t want to say that at all. In fact, the only thing worse would be saying, Let it all out like Mariah , while wearing a hot-pink golf skirt with leggings underneath. And yep—she looked down at her hideous, saggy leggings—she was halfway there. Why did no-one warn you that when you became a parent you became your parents? What kind of messed-up Freudian crap was that?
Poppy hitched up her leggings and turned onto the walking track that skirted the golf course. The air was thick with mist and pine. Mercifully, the track was deserted, free of judge-mental ears. Thank goodness capitalism had burrowed through the Blue Mountains to the Central West, forcing people off walking tracks and into offices by 9 am sharp. Poppy checked her watch. Minus the crying, the day was running to schedule: breastfeed, walk, breastfeed, coffee, breastfeed, breastfeed, more breastfeeding. It didn’t calm her anxiety.
Suddenly a kelpie bounded out of nowhere. ‘Argh!’ she yelled as it jumped up on her, leaving streaks of mud down her leggings. ‘Get off!’
‘Ga-ga!’ cried Maeve, suddenly delighted. Her curious eyes were fixed on the dog and its thumping tail.
‘Sorry!’ a man yelled, running up to them. ‘Ran away before I could get the lead on.’
‘You!’ Poppy scowled at the too-tall silhouette jogging towards her. ‘Your dog jumped on me!’
Her former midwife came to a stop in front of her. His hair was dishevelled from the breeze and his long-sleeved t-shirt was a stark white under his puffer vest. ‘Oh,’ James said, without enthusiasm. ‘Hi.’ He’d clearly forgotten her name. His eyes whisked from left to right as if computing the fastest getaway route. He didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. ‘Eileen’s only twelve weeks old,’ he said, by way of unsatisfactory apology. ‘I’m trying to train her.’ He held up the leash as proof.
‘Good,’ Poppy said. She spun around and marched off, but within three paces Maeve was wailing again. As if it were a siren song, the kelpie trotted up and Maeve quietened.
James jogged over and grabbed his dog by the collar. ‘Come on, Eileen, we’re going the other way.’
‘Waaaaaaah!’ screamed Maeve.
‘Come. On. Eileen.’ James tried to pull the puppy in the opposite direction but it was refusing to budge.
Poppy began walking away and the dog strained against its collar, barking at full volume. Maeve started thrashing her head against the pram, which took her wailing to an eardrum-piercing new level.
‘I think Eileen is trying to get back to your daughter,’ called James. ‘I’ve seen this happen before. It’s a protective instinct thing.’
‘I don’t care,’ snapped Poppy. If he thought she was interested in the psychology of canines, he had a sorely misguided idea of what she found interesting (i.e. Mecca sales and pelvic floor war stories). As she strode off, the puppy barked like a maniac and Maeve’s screams rattled the windowpanes of nearby houses.
‘If we walk next to each other’—he was jogging back to her—‘your daughter will stop crying, and Eileen will slow down so she can get used to the leash.’ As if to demonstrate his point, the kelpie parked itself beside the pram and Maeve instantly stopped wailing.
Poppy glared at his perfectly windswept hair. The fabric of his t-shirt was fluttering in the breeze but his features were set in stone, as detached and inscrutable as ever.
Poppy tightened her fingers around the pram. ‘No way,’ she said. Her walks around the golf course gave her time to think and listen to cheesy podcasts and call Dani and her mum and do whatever she pleased while feeling the wind on her face and enjoying the sense of control and purpose that came with steering a pram. Most of her days felt like treading water—waiting for Maeve to go to sleep, waiting for Maeve to wake up—but when she was pushing a pram, she was in charge. She did not need an intruder, especially such a douchey one, ruining this sacred ritual. ‘I walk in silence,’ she added over her shoulder as she stalked away.
‘Waaaaah!’ screamed Maeve.
RUFF-RUFF-RUFF-RUFF , barked the psycho dog.
‘How’s that silence going?’ called James.
Poppy spun on her heels, her blood turning to molten lava. She could feel his smirk. ‘I don’t want to walk with you,’ she hissed. Somewhere inside her consciousness, her mother tutted. Poppy had never been so openly rude in her life. If he hadn’t realised he wasn’t welcome, then he was either outrageously stupid or, as she was beginning to suspect, a bona fide robot.
He shrugged. ‘The feeling’s mutual, but I need to train my dog and my shift starts soon so my time is limited.’ He looked bored now. ‘So we going?’
Poppy’s knuckles whitened on the pram handle. What was worse? His company or a screaming baby? Her brain was not cut out for this mental arithmetic. With a dull clunk in her frontal lobe, she realised the worst would be a combination of the two: her walking ahead with a screaming baby while he walked behind, judging her every parenting move with a full view of her saggy-bum leggings.
‘Fine.’ She pushed off, leaving him to catch up. The nerve of him! Trapping her in this predicament, especially when she’d made it clear how much she didn’t want his company.
They strode in silence, Poppy’s muscles so tense with irritation she was almost spasming. She needed to work out a way to get rid of him. Could she do something to the dog?
Suddenly, Poppy’s phone dinged in the cup holder. She pulled it out and blinked at the name on the screen. Patrick. Of all times!
Her eyes darted to James, whose gaze was locked on the path as if trying to manifest her non-existence. Poppy angled the screen away from him and opened the message.
What was name of shipping heir from Mykonos? Need asap for meeting
The three dots under the message indicated he wasn’t finished. And just as well. After ten months of almost zero contact, this couldn’t be it. You couldn’t spend nine years with someone, have their child and tell them about the birth, only to be met with virtual silence until he needed a business lead.
The next message appeared.
Urgent!
Poppy stared at the phone. Seriously?! This was how he was playing it? No hi , no how are you , no how’s my firstborn child? —just a demand for help remembering the name of a hairy dude from an underground bar. Poppy’s hand dropped to her side and she lifted her face to the sky. Hot tears were suddenly welling behind her eyes and she needed gravity to tip them back down.
This was classic Patrick. He’d hardly acknowledged Maeve’s birth. Why would he suddenly reconnect out of the blue? She should have known better than to expect anything meaningful from him. But then, why did her stomach suddenly feel like a cement mixer on acid?
She snuck a glance at James. For a fraction of a millisecond their eyes met, but just as quickly his gaze darted away. Well, good. She did not want his pity.
Suddenly: another beep.
URGENT!!!
Jesus! Poppy swore under her breath and began tapping furiously. A litany of responses swam through her mind, all of them heavy on the f-word. He’d ignored her for ten months but still expected an instantaneous response?! She tapped and deleted and tapped and deleted. Finally, she pressed send.
Theo Caryannis .
Ah, fuck it. Next time , she would tell him that his behaviour was completely unacceptable. She would definitely do that.
The pram bumped over a crack in the pavement. The phone had absorbed the chill in the air and was cold in her fingertips. Poppy stared at the screen long enough for James’s eyes to flit in her direction again, but it was useless. No matter how hard she stared, she could not make those three dots reappear. Waiting for thanks from Patrick was like her mum’s Zumba era: utterly pointless. She shoved the phone back in the cup holder.
The path beneath them was now carpeted with reddened pine needles, slippery under foot. Poppy tightened her grip on the pram and steered it around the pine cones that cluttered the pavement. They were just what she didn’t need right now: more speed bumps.
She’d always thought of herself as a strong woman— a feminist! —but regardless of how long she spent daydreaming about reducing Patrick to a stuttering mess with her biting put-downs and dazzling intellect, it always seemed that when she was in his orbit, she became a spineless wallflower.
Maeve extended her chubby hand towards Eileen, and James flashed her a tiny smile. When he saw Poppy looking, he quickly turned away, his features morphing back into a square-jawed mask. Men!
Poppy was so intent on staring straight ahead and not looking at James that she hardly flinched when Maeve let out a giant fart. It wasn’t until both James and the dog looked over, and her nostrils registered the acrid smell, that Poppy leaned over the pram hood to assess the damage. She saw it immediately. A mustard-brown splodge was emerging from her daughter’s left buttock with alarming speed.
For god’s sake! Poppy quickly pulled off the path for an emergency nappy change. She looked frantically from left to right, but there was nowhere to lay a change mat. It was a sea of pine cones. She tried to kick one away but the pine needles were slippery and she toppled clumsily, landing with an ungainly crack on a spiky conifer. ‘Ow!’ she cried.
James had pulled Eileen to a halt.
More hot tears were building behind her eyes. Embarrassment tears. ‘Keep walking,’ Poppy hissed. This was precisely why she liked to walk alone. Poonami crisis management was hard enough without an audience.
She clambered up to unbuckle her daughter. The poo was halfway up Maeve’s back and down to her knees, and the kid hadn’t even started solids! What the hell would happen when they introduced fibre?!
‘Ah …’ James shifted on the balls of his feet.
‘Go!’
He began walking away, tugging at Eileen, who began barking emphatically.
Poppy tore off all Maeve’s ski bunny layers, opened the nappy and began scraping as fast as she could. At the sight of the puppy leaving, Maeve screamed louder, flung her body to the left and rolled with a slow thud onto her belly. Poppy quickly grabbed more wipes and began scraping away at Maeve’s bottom, but the rolling motion had displaced even more poo.
Maeve’s cries were met with a booming bark, followed by a roar from James. ‘EILEEN!’
Poppy looked up to see the kelpie running full pelt towards them. Without thinking, Poppy grabbed Maeve and hugged her to her chest, just as the kelpie came to a skidding stop on the change mat.
‘This fucking dog!’ yelled Poppy, as James ran up to them. She gripped her daughter tighter, feeling her sweater transform into an ombre-brown monstrosity. ‘She almost killed my daughter!’
‘She wanted to see her, not kill her!’
Poppy glared at him. Her sweater and singlet were both soaked through. She could hardly breathe from the smell. She’d packed spare clothes for Maeve, but not herself. What the hell was she going to do? Walk home topless?
James was already tugging Eileen away. Poppy scowled at his back. First Patrick, now James—scarpering when they could be helping! She closed her eyes helplessly and a fat tear plopped onto Maeve’s head.
‘Give her to me,’ James said gruffly, suddenly beside her again. Eileen was tied to a nearby lamppost.
Without waiting for permission, he took Maeve from Poppy’s arms. She wiped her eyes roughly as James fished a spare blanket from the pram’s undercarriage, laid it flat on the ground and lowered Maeve onto it. Pulling more wipes from the nappy bag, he began rubbing her clean. Maeve blinked up at him, dazzled. Before Poppy could unclench her molars, her daughter was somehow wearing a new nappy and a clean onesie, babbling contentedly to a pine cone. It had all happened so fast.
James turned to Poppy. ‘You got hand sanitiser?’
‘I’m not a total heathen,’ she retorted, throwing him a bottle. She knew she looked like a murder victim, but brown. She was determinedly not inhaling through her nostrils.
James cleaned his hands, wiped down the pram and lifted Maeve back into it. Poppy glowered at him. He was acting like a better parent than her, the show-off.
When he turned back to her, his eyes were so stormy that Poppy unexpectedly felt a surge of triumph through her veins. His mask of irritating calm had been smashed!
‘Poppy, I swear …’
‘What?’ she demanded, dimly registering that he’d remembered her name.
He threw his hands in the air. ‘I’ve never had so many issues with one patient.’ His eyes flashed over her like lightning in a thunderstorm. Angrily, he unzipped his vest, threw it on the ground then pulled his t-shirt off over his head.
Poppy glared at him. Even shirtless, he was so obviously lacking a normal human level of self-consciousness. He had the smooth, honed ridges of a swimmer and his chest was firm and taut. He looked like he could perform tumble turns under the pressure of Olympic glory and then sell you a box of Nutri-Grain. Poppy’s skin tingled with a sensation that was foreign to her, as though someone had double-bounced her on a trampoline and statically charged her with electricity— angry electricity. Her eyes flared as she spoke. ‘I’ve never met someone whose issue was being so unfriendly.’
‘I’m not your friend,’ he snapped. ‘I’m your midwife.’
Poppy bristled, feeling the static electricity transmute into something more flammable. ‘Newsflash, James , I stopped being your patient three months ago, so you can stop being a condescending prick.’
‘I’m maintaining professional boundaries .’
He was half-naked.
‘You’re maintaining a pole up your arse.’
He thrust his t-shirt at her. ‘Take this.’
Poppy snatched it. ‘Turn around.’
They turned their backs to each other and Poppy tore off her soiled layers and grabbed more baby wipes to clean her stomach. She pulled his t-shirt on and— oh, sweet Jesus —she could breathe normally again. The cool autumn air flooded her nostrils, spiked with that same aftershave scent she remembered from the hospital. The cotton was still warm from his body.
When she turned back, James had zipped his puffer vest over his bare torso. His arms were rippled with goosebumps. ‘You’re lucky I had this vest.’
‘Yeah, I’m so lucky ,’ Poppy replied sarcastically. ‘You and your dog have ruined my only decent sweater and because I forgot to buy laundry powder again , tomorrow I’ll have to start wearing hand-me-downs from my mum from Rivers ! Do you realise how embarrassed I feel on a daily basis, without having to wear my sixty-three-year-old mother’s hand-me-downs? As if I wasn’t deep enough in battler mode, this is really going to tip me into ultimate loser territory, so yes, James, I feel so incredibly fortunate!’
Fluttering at their feet were mountains of used wipes which would have to be bagged up and binned. (Oh, the landfill! Oh, the guilt!) Poppy leaned down and began scrambling to scoop the wipes into plastic bags, which she heaped into the base of the pram. There was no way she could finish this walk now.
She spun the pram to face the opposite direction, at which point, Maeve began screaming and Eileen responded with her own wolverine howling. Over the cacophony, it briefly occurred to her to say sorry, but then she remembered she hated this guy and he knew it and, oh, what a relief not to care about hurting someone’s feelings.
‘Later!’ she called over her shoulder, in what she hoped he would recognise as the verbal equivalent of the rude finger.
She stormed away, her blood boiling at everything: his smirk, his nappy-changing skills, the perfect tessellation of his chest muscles. She could feel a bruise forming on her butt cheek, and as Maeve continued to scream Poppy bit her cheek to keep from joining in.
Rounding the corner back into her cul-de-sac, the woman from number five was carrying a sud-filled bucket to her car wearing nothing but a yellow string bikini and pair of rubber gloves (also yellow). The sight was a welcome distraction from the thundering rage still battering her rib cage.
‘Hi!’ called the woman, her pert breasts shaking as she waved. Her legs were impossibly long and cellulite-free and her long, glossy hair swirled in the breeze. She was almost as tall as … oh, of course, James. Poppy smirked wryly, remembering how he’d arrived for her home visit after a mysterious ‘personal engagement’. He must have been visiting this Bella Hadid clone.
Poppy waved back and smiled, a smug understanding blossoming in her chest. Just as she suspected—James was as unoriginal as an Ikea flat pack, shipped straight from the factory floor. Good-looking men made such obvious choices.