‘The porch light went on,’ I argue weakly. ‘In hindsight, it was probably a cat.’
‘I think this story tops the way we met.’
He has to be joking. Nothing tops that.
8
One-year-old Charlie pops off the breast, disgusted.
‘Look at him. Screwing up his face like he’s a food critic sending a dish back to a five-star Michelin kitchen.’ Cam flings a suitcase on the bed and zips opens the lid.
I’ve never been great in the kitchen, so it doesn’t shock me that what I’m cooking up here is falling short of expectations. I sit Charlie up on my lap and re-hook the clip on my nursing bra, defeated. He’s been fussy for days.
Charlie reaches straight for Cam and says, ‘Dadda!’ Cam groans as he picks him up, pretending he weighs a tonne, and I take in the two of them. Charlie’s a genetic miniature of his dad. Dark blond curls, intelligent blue eyes. Same dimpled smile that Cam flashed at me in second year uni, which Charlie now flashes at me when he should be asleep in the middle of the night.
‘I think it’s called a “nursing strike”，’ Cam suggests, reading from a breastfeeding FAQ page on his phone.
‘Oh, no you don’t, Buddy!’ I say, and Charlie giggles as Cam lowers him to the floor of our bedroom. ‘We didn’t put ourselves through that feeding gauntlet just for you to reject Mummy now.’
By ‘gauntlet’， I mean cracked nipples, blocked milk ducts, several bouts of mastitis and an in-patient stay in a maternal and baby health centre, during which I almost lost my mind. ‘How can something so natural be so painful?’ I’d cried, as a lactation consultant manhandled my stinging nipple into Charlie’s mouth for the umpteenth time, unsuccessfully. She reminded me of that string group on the Titanic, determined to keep playing, even though the ship was very clearly sinking.
Cam throws his phone on the bed and starts folding shirts. He’s packing for the Congress of Medieval Literature conference in Rome. I watch as he folds slim-fit, textured layers of brown, green and grey into neat piles on the bed, and imagine him wearing the very same clothes at the Trevi Fountain, where we once tossed in a coin and wished for the baby who’s now crawling around our floor.
I’m trying to hide just how petrified I am at the thought of him being on the other side of the world. Ten days might seem like a fast turnaround to the person having an intellectually stimulating whirlwind trip to one of the world’s most fabulous cities, but it’s a lifetime in stay-at-home-mother minutes.
But I can’t ask him to stay. He’d had to cancel a Parisian research trip earlier in the year because things had hurtled so far out of control on the maternal health front that the doctor was threatening to admit me. I’d always been so good with other people’s babies, so it had come as a huge shock when I couldn’t seem to operate my own child on instinct.
‘Postnatal depression can cause this lack of confidence,’ the doctor explained as she filled out a script for antidepressants that are safe to take while breastfeeding. Over the next few months, slowly but surely, the days became less fraught. I stopped counting down the minutes until I heard the garage door go up, signalling that Cam was home and I wouldn’t be messing this up on my own for the next few hours. It finally became an exercise in falling in love with my baby. Which I did. Hard.
‘What time are you heading to the gym?’ Cam asks. It’s a sentence he’s never uttered previously, but Grace has dragged me into her campaign to conceive. This apparently includes a 7pm BoxFit class at a strength and conditioning torture chamber in Kingston, at which she’s a card-carrying cult member.
‘I so rarely get time out from Charlie,’ I say to Cam while I’m rifling through the back of the underwear drawer, looking for some semblance of a sports bra. ‘Why would I choose to spend it getting punched?’
My idea of fitness is losing track of time in the bush with my camera. At the moment, that’s just the camera on my phone, but once I’m back at work and we’re a little more flush, I’m going to buy a second-hand mirrorless crop sensor and really get into it as a hobby. It’s the only activity in the world where I truly lose myself.
‘What if going back to work upsets the apple cart?’ I ask him as I pull on some leggings. ‘I feel like we’ve only just got our act together as a family. I don’t even know if I can remember how to do my job.’
Cam’s not much better. He’s sifting through a drawer, searching for the international power cord adapters he’s already packed. I point them out and he rolls his eyes. What are the two of us like?
‘I don’t think you just forget how to deliver multi-million-dollar campaigns,’ he argues. But he hasn’t spent nine months growing a human and another twelve keeping it alive via trial and error, until he can barely recall the Netflix password.
Before having Charlie, I’d fallen into fundraising via comms. I’d left a temporary public service position for a job with a heart research institute, pulling together their monthly newsletter and managing their social media accounts. I was always on the hunt for good news stories and spent a lot of time interviewing elite scientists on the cutting edge of heart research – something I loved.
But then their full-time copywriter succumbed to an autoimmune condition and was off work for weeks. I was thrown into interviewing grieving families and creating those sob stories that end up in letterboxes to prod open the hearts and pockets of potential benefactors. I’d never seen such devastation. ‘She was our age, Cam. And a widow!’ I’d said, crying into my parmigiana on one of our weeknight dates. ‘Her husband had been in peak fitness. No warning signs. Nothing. And he dropped dead at the kitchen table in front of their two kids. Literally dropped dead in the time it took her to walk to the front door and pick up their Uber Eats.’
Cam had taken my hand across the table. ‘I’ll try not to die of a heart attack,’ he’d promised, and I’d made sure of that by booking us both in for check-ups at the GP. We were reassured that everything was fine, but the longer I worked at the institute and the more damaged families I met, the more anxious I became.
‘There’s a job going in the expansion team at the uni,’ he says now.
I have no idea what he means.
‘Hang on, it’s not “expansion”。 Another word like that . . .’
I wait, while he consults his enormous mental thesaurus, but he draws a blank.
‘Come on, Cam, you’re the English expert.’
‘It’s on the tip of my tongue. But imagine that, Red. You and me, recreating the university romance of our youth. Same stunts. Different city. Lazy picnic lunches on Fellows Oval outside the Chifley Library . . .’
‘Oh, yes. Wouldn’t that go down well,’ I challenge him. ‘Professor Whittaker rolling around on a picnic blanket in full view of everyone in the School of Literature . . .’
‘Exactly!’ He pulls me towards him by the waist and kisses me, tossing me on the bed like he did when we were twenty-somethings, and less likely to trigger a bout of sciatica. But his neat piles of clothes start toppling, my head is butting up against the lid of the suitcase, and Charlie wants ‘up’， so we forget the romance, drag our baby into a group hug and laugh at what’s become of us.