‘No rush, is there?’ Steve patted the sheets where she’d lain and looked up at her hopefully.
It was only nine-thirty, according to the Timex, and already she felt like a bitch. She ought to get back into bed with him, she knew that. Start the day again. Morning sex was a tradition she could get behind, as a rule. More her bag than Christmas. But the fun had gone out of it lately, and she couldn’t bring herself to fake it.
‘You know it’s been weeks, since we—’
‘It has not.’ She tightened her grip on the ball of paper. ‘It has not been that long,’ she said, smiling through the third lie of the day. ‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘Come back to bed, Mandy.’
‘The Walkers are coming over before lunch. I need to get the house clean.’
‘It’s nine-thirty, Mand—’
‘I know the bloody time.’
‘So are we still trying then or not?’
Her heart thumped at the question, the starkness of it in the morning light of their bedroom. It was typical of Steve to come out and say the thing that needed saying; the thing she was trying to pretend was not a thing.
‘’Course we are. Not right now, is all.’
‘My timing off again?’
‘Don’t go on about it, Steve. Just – leave it. Please.’
He thumped a pillow with the palm of his hand and his face flushed a dark red. He didn’t look at her. ‘Righto,’ he said, to the pillow. ‘I’ll take a shower.’
In the kitchen she leaned against the counter, rubbed her hands over her face and let out a sigh. So warm in here. She turned to look out at the yard, opened the window and got a burst of noise from the cicadas. The heat was taking a grip; you could feel the strength of it, even at this hour. The cloud had burned off already. It was going to be a belter of a day.
She nudged the back door open and sat on the step to light a cigarette. Holding her arm out, she tried to like the watch, to reconsider it. It was a nice enough watch, if you could forgive it for not being the necklace she’d wanted, and for being too tiny for an ample woman like herself. It had a gold-plated strap and a small oval face, with notches where the numbers should be and a dial on the side which moved the hands around. She’d have preferred a watch with numbers on it, since the whole point was to tell her the time. Why would you leave the numbers off a watch?
But that wasn’t it. She disliked the way it sliced time into prim, breathy little ticks. She’d never noticed seconds before, and now they were twitching around the dial, interfering with her natural rhythm. That was why she’d never owned a watch, come to think of it. She liked to do things as and when she was ready, in her own time. The watch was trying to push her around.
She heard him singing in the shower. He was good-natured, her Steve. Didn’t take the hump for too long. She sat back against the door frame and smoked her cigarette, watching the horizon, a fine blue line just darker than the sky, visible through the tea trees at the back of the yard. She could hear the waves from here, whenever the cicadas took a breather: a low boom; quiet; another boom. That was a rhythm she could appreciate.
‘You’ll need to give those up, Amanda.’ Steve was standing in the kitchen with a towel around his middle, dripping on the lino. His skin was paler from the neck down, and the hair on his chest was blacker than the hair on his head. ‘Meant to be bad for you. For your lungs. I read an article in the Herald.’
‘I know. I read the same article.’ She turned back to the yard. ‘You have the odd ciggie yourself.’
‘Let’s pack ’em in together, then.’
‘Since when did you get to be a health fanatic?’
He sat down next to her, holding onto the towel, knees together. It was a squeeze, the two of them side by side on the back step. His skin was damp, soaking through the sleeve of her nightdress. She could see the tracks of the comb through his hair.
‘It can be bad for the baby too, they reckon.’ He watched her crush her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘Bad for the unborn baby.’
‘I didn’t read that part.’
‘It said it can cause the baby to be born too small.’
She looked out at the yard and managed not to say that she thought a small baby sounded better than a big one, from a logistical point of view. ‘I’ll give up if I get pregnant,’ she said. ‘How’s that?’
‘Mandy.’ He reached out and held her hand. ‘You’ll make a great mum, you know.’
She moved her thumb back and forth across the palm of his hand and kept her mouth shut. He didn’t know. He could hope, was all. If she turned out to be anything like her own mother, she’d be a disaster. Mandy had a growing fear, which she would not speak out loud in case it became irreversibly true, that she was very much like her own mother. Her own mother, for example, would have snubbed a kind, well-intentioned gift from Mandy’s father, would have returned it the minute the shops opened. Mandy looked down at the Timex on her wrist and dropped Steve’s hand, hoping he’d go off and get dressed now, leave her alone for a bit.
He didn’t budge.
Steve also didn’t know that Mandy had not yet stopped taking her daily contraceptive pill. Every morning, as she popped the small, white tablet from its foil bubble, she told herself this was a temporary situation. When she was ready for motherhood, she would stop taking the Pill and get herself pregnant and that would be that. The time would come, surely, when she would long for children; she would need to be pregnant and be unable to think of anything else. Louisa next door had told her she’d felt that way before she fell pregnant with Isla. She’d felt ready, and that readiness had been all-consuming. Mandy would have that feeling one of these days, Louisa had told her. But Louisa didn’t know either.
Mandy leaned in against Steve and felt his chin on her head; his good, strong arms around her. She let her head rest against his shoulder. Shoulders like an anvil, her Steve.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said.
Fourth lie of the day. Mandy knew that this lie, the Baby Lie, was the one that made everything else a lie, and made it pointless counting the small, polite ones. She also knew, in a quiet, buttoned-down place, that she was falling out of love with her husband. And she wasn’t fighting it, this fading out, this dimming of the light. Because it made the lie easier to tell.
‘I was thinking,’ he said. ‘I might set off on this job first thing tomorrow. Get it over with.’
‘Oh?’ She managed, she hoped, not to sound delighted. ‘First thing?’
‘Might as well crack on. Won’t be any easier if I leave it.’
‘You’re probably right, love.’ She could smell the sea spray in the air. ‘You’ll be gone a few days, then?’
‘’Fraid so, darl. You know I’d sooner be home with you.’
‘I know.’ She stood and put her cigarettes in the drawer under some serviettes. ‘I do know that.’
Ivanhoe, New South Wales, 1966
Steve saw her first, kneeling in the dirt at the edge of the creek. She looked happy enough. Five or six older kids with her, poking at something in the water with a stick. He turned away, kept his foot on