The Spill Read online

  ‘What do you m—’ Nicole began to say, but then Darren appeared.

  ‘There you are!’ he said, grabbing Nicole’s hand. ‘In Japan, I made it my mission to teach as many people the Chicken Dance as I could. Don’t think you can get out of it.’

  Nicole tried to resist his pull and return to her conversation, but Trent was gone.

  After a whole lot of Chicken Dancing and the Nutbush, Nicole and Darren stepped outside onto the terrace and found themselves alone. Nicole was dizzy with the dancing and the drink and was glad to get some cool air into her lungs.

  ‘You’re so much prettier than your sister,’ Darren told her.

  ‘You really don’t have a filter, do you?’

  ‘After four years of living in a place where very few people understood what I was saying, no, I don’t.’

  ‘Well, this is my sister’s special day, and today she’s the most beautiful girl on the planet.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ Darren said, leaning forward to kiss her.

  The softness of his lips surprised her and she found herself melting into him. After a few minutes of silent surrender, he pulled back and looked at her.

  ‘You’re so big and tall and solid,’ he said. ‘In Japan, the girls are all tiny, like little birds that might snap in two if you hold them too tight.’

  ‘Less of the “in Japan” and more of the kissing,’ Nicole said, her voice not her own, while back inside ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ started up on the dance floor.

  Piece #4: 1997

  Even though Samantha’s waters had broken, she and Trent were still standing on the footpath outside their block of flats arguing about who was going to drive to the hospital.

  ‘Seriously, Sam, give me the keys,’ Trent pleaded.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re in labour. I think there are rules against driving a car when you’re in labour.’

  Samantha went to disagree but another contraction took hold and she had to lean on the car while she found her way through it.

  ‘See? You can’t be driving when this happens,’ Trent said in a soothing tone, as he rubbed her back.

  ‘We’ll just have to pull over ever ten minutes when the contraction hits,’ Samantha gasped through the pain.

  ‘Every five and a half minutes,’ Trent corrected her. ‘I’ve been timing you.’

  Even though she was now on the other side of the contraction, Samantha knew she’d lost the fight. She handed him the keys. ‘Don’t become my Most Hated,’ she warned.

  In their antenatal classes, the midwife had told them that there was always a ‘Most Hated’ person who became the focus of all the birthing mother’s anger and frustration, and that all the husbands should hope and pray it wouldn’t be them.

  At the hospital, the orderlies immediately sat her in a wheelchair.

  ‘I’m perfectly fine to walk,’ Samantha was protesting when the midwife showed up.

  ‘You might be able to walk, Mrs Chapman, but you’re not going to,’ she said, in a clipped British accent.

  ‘Give her a copy of my birth plan,’ Samantha told Trent. ‘I’m sure it says something about no wheelchairs in there.’

  ‘Save it for the birthing suite, Mrs Chapman,’ the midwife said, before setting off with a purposeful stride. ‘Come along now.’

  ‘Who calls people by their surnames these days?’ Trent whispered. ‘Mrs Chapman is my mother.’

  ‘She’s calling me Mrs Chapman and yet talking to me like I’m three,’ Samantha whispered back. ‘I’m twenty-five, for god’s sake.’

  As Trent started to push her in the wheelchair, Samantha looked up at him and they exchanged a conspiratorial smile. They’d found their Most Hated.

  Up in the birthing suite, nobody else was interested in her birth plan either, least of all the baby, who appeared to be choosing his or her own path into the world.

  Even Samantha, having emerged on the other side of yet another powerful contraction, was losing faith in her plan. The drug-free birth she’d been imagining was feeling more and more like a fairy story.

  ‘Get me an epidural,’ she said, gripping Trent’s hand. ‘I want an epidural.’

  ‘Can she, uh, have an epidural?’ Trent asked the British midwife, who was currently the only medical professional in the room. Things between Samantha and the midwife had grown so tense that Trent was now forced to mediate every single exchange between them.

  ‘It’s too late for an epidural, Mrs Chapman. You’re too dilated,’ the midwife told Samantha. ‘But you can have gas.’

  ‘You can have gas,’ Trent repeated.

  ‘I don’t want gas, I want a fucking epidural!’ Samantha was seeing red now.

  The midwife just shook her head.

  ‘It’s too late, Sammy,’ Trent translated and Samantha screwed her face up into a small tight ball in response.

  After what seemed like a decade’s worth of contractions, the midwife checked again to see how dilated Samantha was.

  ‘Still at nine centimetres,’ she said, disapprovingly, like Samantha had the ability to dilate her cervix at will and was keeping it at nine centimetres simply to be difficult.

  They had Samantha hooked up to a machine to monitor both the baby’s and her heart rate. The monitor had become the soundtrack for her labour, very different to the Bach cello suite she’d specified in her birth plan.

  A man, presumably a doctor, arrived, had a look at her chart and at the heart monitor, and then walked out without saying a word.

  ‘Nice to meet you, too,’ Samantha called out after him, between clenched teeth.

  A minute or two later, the same man returned. ‘We don’t like the way the baby’s responding to labour, so we’re taking you in for surgery,’ he informed her.

  Samantha wanted to tell him that she didn’t like the way he was responding to her labour, but another contraction consumed her.

  After the contraction had finished, the nurses started to prep Samantha for surgery.

  ‘At least you’re getting your epidural now,’ Trent told her.

  ‘It’s a spinal block, not an epidural,’ Samantha snapped. ‘Didn’t you read the birthing book I gave you?’

  Trent was fast becoming her Most Hated, but thankfully, at that moment, the British midwife reappeared. ‘Come along, Mr Chapman,’ she said. ‘We need to get you prepped for the operating room!’

  ‘No, wait,’ Trent said, holding his hand out towards the midwife, as if fending her off with some wizard’s spell. ‘I need to tell my wife that I love her.’

  The midwife tutted while Trent leant back towards Samantha.

  ‘I love you, Sammy,’ he whispered. ‘I think you’re amazing.’

  He kissed her softly on her forehead and for a moment, everything felt okay. But then the Most Hated ushered Trent away and the nightmare continued.

  As she sat on the edge of her bed, waiting for the anaesthetist to slide a needle into her spinal column, Samantha considered what was about to happen. Yes, she had read that birthing book she gave Trent – she’d read it cover to cover – but she’d glossed over the chapter on Caesareans.

  ‘This wasn’t part of my birth plan,’ Samantha told the anaesthetist.

  ‘It never is,’ the anaesthetist sighed. She seemed quite sad about it.

  ‘Not in the details, no,’ Samantha’s favourite midwife said, now back in the room. ‘But we’re going to get your baby out, happy, healthy and alive. And that was the goal of your birth plan, was it not?’

  Put that way, Samantha had to agree. But she still just wanted to punch her Most Hated in her Most Hated mouth.

  ‘Now, stay very still,’ the anaesthetist said.

  Samantha felt a short intense burn as the needled entered her spine, and then a warm nothingness spread through her legs. This must be what it feels like to be erased, she thought.

  When the spinal block had taken full hold, she was wheeled into the operating theatre, like an item inside a shopping trolley. There,
many people were rushing around, looking incredibly busy, except Trent, who was standing to the side, looking frightened.

  ‘Where’s the machine that goes ping?’ he asked her, trying to make a joke, and Samantha found herself thinking, Please, don’t let me die and have a Monty Python quote be the very last thing I hear. But then she saw how worried he was.

  She held out her hand to him. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she said, wishing he would say the same to her. He just squeezed her hand and tried to smile.

  Samantha closed her eyes. She knew she and her baby were currently the focus of every single person in that busy room, and yet she had never felt more invisible.

  ‘They’re starting now,’ the midwife told them, in a hushed, reverent tone, as if a classical music recital were about to commence.

  After the sensation of some distant tugging that felt like it was happening to a version of herself in a dream within a dream within another dream being had by the real Samantha, the baby was pulled out, healthy and alive but perhaps not happy, from the sound it was making.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ the surgeon announced.

  ‘She’s haemorrhaging,’ someone else said.

  ‘The baby?’ Samantha turned to the midwife.

  ‘No, you. You’re haemorrhaging. Your uterus has turned boggy and they need to stop the bleeding,’ the midwife told her.

  ‘Boggy?’

  Samantha was still trying to get her head around what was happening, when the baby, a red ball of anger, was quickly presented to her and then whisked out of the room, with Trent following haplessly behind.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ the surgeon told her, peering over the curtain again.

  Samantha closed her eyes. Women with boggy uteruses obviously didn’t deserve their babies.

  After an hour and a half alone in recovery, she was finally wheeled up to the ward where she found Trent holding the small, shouting creature.

  ‘She’s perfect,’ he said.

  ‘She’s loud.’

  ‘Do you want to hold her?’

  Samantha wanted to say no. Ninety minutes hadn’t been long enough for her to recover. She needed more time to try to understand what had gone wrong, what she might have done differently to have not ended up in surgery, cut open and bleeding all over the place like an animal in an abattoir.

  But she nodded and held out her arms. She knew that was what was expected of her. She needed to be a mother now.

  Trent handed her the bawling bundle. ‘How’s your uterus?’

  ‘Behaving itself again, apparently.’ Samantha was frowning at her angry baby. ‘What do you think is wrong with her? Why is she crying?’

  ‘They told me she’s hungry.’

  Samantha tried to rock the baby in her arms, like they did in the movies, but it made no difference. She felt panic rising inside her chest. What if this thing that she had always assumed would be easy, as natural as breathing, was something she couldn’t do?

  ‘I called Mum and Dad and they’re on their way,’ Trent said, trying to make himself heard over the baby’s cries. ‘Do you want me to ring Tina and your dad?’

  ‘Call Nicole. She can tell Tina.’ Samantha and Tina hadn’t really spoken in the past three years, not since Samantha asked her not to come to her wedding reception. ‘But tell her I don’t want Tina here.’

  Trent nodded. ‘And your dad?’

  ‘You can try, but I think he and Donna-Louise are in Busselton for a golf tournament. I’m sure they’ll visit when they get back.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll go ring Nicole and then I’ll wait for Mum and Dad at reception.’ He went to leave but then paused in the doorway. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ Samantha said.

  But she wasn’t okay. She couldn’t move her legs. She didn’t know what would happen if she needed to go to the toilet. There was a tube attached to her hand and she didn’t know why. She was thirsty but she couldn’t reach the water jug or the glass on the side table. And she was holding an angry baby.

  Another midwife, slightly less face-punchworthy than the first, bustled into the room.

  ‘Time to get that baby on the boob,’ she said, lifting up one side of Samantha’s gown to expose her breast. As she took the baby’s head and mashed it against Samantha’s nipple, Samantha silently dubbed her the Moderately Hated.

  ‘There.’ The Moderately Hated stood back, obviously pleased with her handiwork. ‘I’ll just go get some paperwork and I’ll be back.’

  Samantha was experiencing the same kind of cold shock she felt after the accident out at Bruce Rock. She remembered the people who had stopped and helped them out of the car, and how they had wrapped them in kind words and blankets. She wished someone would wrap her in kind words and blankets now.

  ‘Is the baby feeding?’ The Moderately Hated had returned, clipboard in hand.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Samantha admitted.

  The midwife peered at the baby on Samantha’s boob. ‘She looks like she’s feeding,’ she said, in a vaguely accusatory tone, as if Samantha were lying. Then she noticed the full jug of water. ‘Why haven’t you drunk anything?’ she scolded.

  Samantha wanted to tell her that she couldn’t bloody reach the jug and, actually, she’d been in the room for less than ten minutes, but she couldn’t find the strength or the words. Instead she sat there, clutching her baby on her breast, helpless and immobile while the midwife completed her paperwork

  A few minutes later, Trent and his parents, Barb and Brian, burst in. Brian was waving a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

  ‘To wet the baby’s head!’ he said.

  ‘None for the new mother. She’s feeding,’ the Moderately Hated said, delivering her parting shot before she and her clipboard left the room.

  ‘Who invited that party pooper?’ Brian said, rolling his eyes.

  ‘How’s my little princess?’ Barb swooped in uncomfortably close to Samantha’s exposed breast to look at the baby, who was still feeding. Luckily, Brian was more interested in popping the cork and pouring the champagne into four plastic cups.

  ‘Samantha doesn’t drink,’ Trent reminded Brian when he went to hand Samantha a cup.

  ‘But this is an important occasion!’ Brian protested. ‘Can’t we entice you to one little glass, Sammy?’

  ‘I will have a glass.’ Samantha had found her voice again. After all, she thought, it’s not every day I get to bring a new life into the world and almost die at the same time.

  Ignoring Trent’s shocked expression, she accepted the plastic cup and took a tentative sip before anyone had actually made a toast. The tiny little bubbles of star-shine slid down her throat, as light as air, hitting a spot inside her that had never been hit before and she felt her body properly relax.

  It was the first drink she’d had since she was thirteen.

  She looked at the baby and felt the love come, now that the knot in her chest had loosened.

  ‘Hello, baby,’ she said, before knocking back the rest of the champagne. It went down easily.

  Nicole

  I woke just after eleven, my mouth dry and my head all soupy with vodka, red wine and grief. On my bedside table, Jethro had left a glass of water and two Panadol, which I duly swallowed.

  I picked my phone up to distract myself from my hangover, only to find a series of texts from Samantha.

  Blue Duck @ noon. Don’t forget!

  Meg has important information about Mum. She wants to tell us both.

  You’re coming, right?

  Please text me to tell me you’re coming.

  Hello?

  I pushed the phone away from me with a groan. Now Samantha was being as bad as Aunt Meg. Her sudden keenness could only mean that Meg’s ‘important information’ was something I wasn’t ready to hear, something that might vindicate Samantha’s decision not to visit Mum in hospital before she died.

  I rolled onto my back and looked up at the shadows dancing on the ceiling. The patterns of light reminded me of the ceiling ro
se in my bedroom in Mount Lawley, when Dad’s house was still the family home and we had all lived there together with Mum. While my parents were shouting at each other in the next room, I would stare at the ceiling for hours, imagining friendly faces in the plasterwork, smiling down on me. Protecting me.

  I thought of Mum lying in her hospital bed, staring at the panelled ceiling and strip lighting, and felt a wave of grief wash over me. There had been no comfort or protection for her – not then, and not in the months beforehand where nobody had been watching her and nobody had noticed her dying, not even me.

  There was a soft knock and Jethro came in with some coffee. ‘Hello, sleepyhead,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Ordinary,’ I admitted, as I sat up in bed. ‘It’s hard to know which is worse: the grief or the hangover.’

  I knew, of course, that the grief was worse. Much, much worse.

  ‘Food is a good way to ease both,’ Jethro said. ‘I’ll make you a proper breakfast once the caterers have been. But here’s some coffee to tide you over. And, um, some light reading material.’

  He sheepishly handed over the architectural plans he’d had drawn up for the renovation just before Mum went into hospital.

  ‘There’s no pressure to look at them immediately,’ he added quickly. ‘I just wanted to put them back on your radar.’

  A year previously, Jethro had decided that it was time for us to either renovate and redecorate this house or to move to another house altogether. ‘I’m sick of us living in Suzette’s shadow,’ he’d said, referring to his cow of an ex-wife who had taken almost fifty per cent of his net worth and an even higher percentage of their mutual friends. In the year before they separated, Suzette had renovated and redecorated the whole house. Not personally, of course – I’m sure she wouldn’t have wanted to spoil her manicure – but with the help of a large team of designers and overpriced tradies. Jethro had told me that he had only just seen the last tradie out the front door when Suzette told him she was leaving him.

  I carefully placed the plans on my bedside table. Even though I was haunted by the ghosts of Suzette and her design team in every room of this house, whenever Jethro tried to talk about renovating or moving, I found myself changing the subject.