Perfections (24 page)

And maybe that makes the difference.

‘I made Loki because I loved Paul.’ Antoinette pauses, searching for the right words, because the right words seem so very important to find. ‘I loved him so much, more than, well, everything. I wanted to keep loving him, only I wanted him to be, I don’t know, better? Someone who would love me as much as I loved him, who wouldn’t ever cheat on me. Wouldn’t hurt me or take me for granted.’ She laughs bitterly. ‘You know, the standard
Cosmo
bullshit.’

Her mother laughs as well. It’s not a pretty sound. ‘What about now? Do you still love him?’

‘Paul? Or Loki?’

‘Either. Both.’

‘No,’ Antoinette sighs. ‘With Paul, there’s absolutely nothing left. When I think about him, I can remember what it felt like, what
I
felt like, but now it’s all gone. And Loki’s a disaster. He loves me, I mean,
he loves me
, god, so much. And I look at him and I
want
to love him like that, I really do, but . . .’ Her nose itches with the threat of tears, and she pushes the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, presses and presses until light flares behind her lids. It doesn’t help. ‘I’ve tried, believe me, but it’s not there. I don’t love him. I don’t think I ever can.’

‘Stop snivelling,’ her mother says. ‘Love is what you wanted, my girl, and love is what you gave.’

The wooden floor echoes beneath each tap of her shoe. Jacqueline likes the sound. Likes that she makes it. There aren’t as many people inside the Ian Potter Centre as she feared from the high-density crowd outside in Fed Square. Without some blockbuster exhibition as drawcard, a gallery of Australian art obviously cannot compete with alfresco dining or fire-eating, unicycled street buskers.

‘I like it here,’ Loki says. ‘There’s nothing I remember.’

Jacqueline smiles.

Take me someplace that makes you happy
, he told her. This was the first spot that popped into her head. She wonders why she doesn’t come here more often.

Loki catches her hand. ‘Art’s not just a job for you, is it?’

‘No,’ she replies. ‘When I’m in a place like this, or even working at Seventh Circle, I feel connected. Involved. I understand this world. I feel part of it.’

‘But you’re not an artist yourself? You don’t paint, or draw, or sculpt. You don’t even own a camera.’ He gestures to the walls. To the series of oblique, unframed prints that wind around them.
Found images
the artist calls them. Unfocused, hipshot compositions too clever to be entirely accidental. ‘You could take photographs like this, Lina. Hell, anyone could.’

Jacqueline pokes him in the ribs. ‘Shows how much you know about art.’

He grins. ‘Enlighten me.’

‘Execution is only half the story,’ she says. ‘It
tells
the story. But if you don’t
have
a story inside to tell . . .’ She shrugs. The photo in front of them might be a mermaid’s tail, flash-blurred beneath sun-sparkled water. ‘I can handle a brush very well, actually. Give me a painting and I’ll make a copy so fine you’ll be hard pressed to spot the original.
You
will, that is; I couldn’t fool an expert. But give me a blank canvas, and I have nothing to say.’

‘Frustrating much?’

‘Not really,’ Jacqueline tells him. ‘Keeping still, keeping quiet, listening, watching; there’s something to be said for all of that. I like seeing how other people imagine the world. How they make the world.’

Loki is silent as they move through the galleries. He gives the exhibits only a cursory glance. Mostly, he frowns at his shoes.

‘Are you bored?’ she asks after a while. ‘We can leave if you like.’

‘I don’t want to leave.’ He stops. ‘Show me your favourite piece.’

‘In this room?’

‘In the whole gallery. You know, burning building, can only save one thing, blah blah blah. And I don’t want to see the most important thing, or the most valuable thing – I want to see the thing
you
love most.’

Jacqueline doesn’t need to think about it. ‘Follow me,’ she says.

To Antoinette, it reads like a bad joke. To get the thing you want, you forfeit whatever it is that made you want it in the first place? Not quite so simple, according to her mother, but near enough to smell the cigar smoke. There
are
a few clever, careful women who navigate the process with skill, shoring up what they can, salvaging what remains; or at least rumours of clever, careful women. Sally Paige has never heard a single name herself, only whispers about a sister of an aunt of a cousin who once . . . but it hardly matters. Rumour is poisonous enough.

Rumour and hope and the stubborn, stupid hearts of girls barely grown.

‘But why?’ Antoinette can’t fathom it. The rank unfairness of it. ‘Why do it if you know it won’t work out? If
I
had known, if
you
had taught me about this instead of leaving me to scrabble in the dark, I never would have–’

‘Don’t go blaming me. We all think we’ll be the one. You would have too.’

That one clever, careful woman whose love is so strong, desire so bold, whose need is a blistering, unquenchable force that will be ripped from her hands only when they are bloodless and cold. The woman who’ll not only end up with the whole damn cake in her lap, but a silver fork with which to shovel it into her mouth.

‘It’s the lie we want to believe,’ her mother says. ‘Love will conquer all.’

Antoinette feels numb. She presses a hand to her chest, wanting nothing more than to rip through her own skin, to rend flesh and crack rib until her fist closes at last around the Loki-stone and crushes it, tears it in pieces from her body.

‘It wouldn’t do any good.’ Sally Paige playing mirrors, spindle-fingers curled loose between her breasts. ‘This isn’t Kmart, dear, you can’t bring him back for a refund. What’s paid stays paid.’

‘Do you . . .’ Antoinette wets her lips. ‘Can you feel her? Jacqueline?’

Her mother nods. ‘Every single day.’

‘I don’t understand. Why make a baby – two babies – like that?’

Because Sally Paige longed desperately for motherhood. Because after almost eight years of marriage and just about every humiliating test and procedure the medical profession could dig up to throw at her, it seemed the only conceivable option. Because when a husband begins to regard his wife like he might a defective washing machine, when she finds his gaze trailing after young lasses with babe-swollen bellies . . . well, it doesn’t take a genius to calculate the end result of that equation.

Besides, she
knew
it would work. Sally Paige would be that clever, careful woman that others would come to whisper about. A mother’s love couldn’t be bartered, of that she was certain. It was something innate, a property entwined so irrevocably around the core of her being that having it torn loose was unimaginable.

Impossible, she told herself.
Promised
herself.

Such pretty, sweet-tasting lies.

‘All that love,’ she says. ‘All that longing. It went into those babies, every scrap of it. Afterwards, I spent hours by their cribs, looking down at their perfect little faces and perfect little fingers – and they
were
perfect, those two; they slept through the night from day one, took to the bottle without grizzling – and I would look at them and try to dredge up anything, the faintest spark of feeling, some shred that had been overlooked, left behind.’ She slumps forward. ‘They might have been a couple of plastic dolls for all I felt for them.’

Antoinette stares at her hands, at the ragged fingernails she can’t remember beginning to gnaw again. A childhood habit, resuscitated for stranger times. She prods at the absence within her, traces its borders. She does possess some kind of affection for Loki, even if it’s not the romantic love that he craves. If there was nothing inside her but indifference . . . she pushes the thought aside.

‘Your father adored the twins,’ her mother is saying. ‘To give him his due, he did get his hands dirty those first few months. Changed nappies, fed them, tried to give me time to come around on my own.’

Antoinette has no clear memories of her dad. A bearded smile. The scent of sweat and spice. A huge hand ruffling her hair. All the pictures in her mind come from photos. ‘But how on earth did you explain it to him?’

‘He already knew about whimsies – called me his fairy princess, which I didn’t much care for, but still. The twins were a shock, but once he realised they were here to stay, well, it’s surprising how simple it was. Dr Chiang took care of the paperwork, registered them as homebirths or some such.’

‘Dr Chiang? Our Dr Chiang?’

‘We went to school together. He’s a good man.’ Her mother smiles. Shallow and slight, but the first real smile Antoinette’s seen cross her face for a long time.

‘Does he know? What Jacqueline is?’

‘He believes it was an off-the-books surrogacy arrangement, or he lets himself believe it. Stuck by me all these years, in any case.’ She grunts. ‘That’s more than I can say for your father.’

The question that’s been lurking on the back of Antoinette’s tongue for the past hour creeps forth, no longer willing to be denied. ‘What about me?’ she asks. ‘Am I a
perfection
as well?’

Her mother laughs. ‘Don’t be stupid. You’re the one who gave me stretch marks – and haemorrhoids.’

‘But you said you couldn’t–’

‘I said, I
didn’t
.’

More common than she might think, the mysteriously infertile couple who catch pregnant only after they stop trying, once calendars and thermometers and ovulation charts are abandoned, consigned to the scrapheap along with what remains of their dreams. As it was with Sally Paige, her twins barely a year old before their sister took root in her womb, though another four months before she told anyone. Four months weighing a wheelbarrow load of cons against just one hope-tinged feather. That maybe a
real
child – a child drawn from her blood, born from her body – could summon back all the love she had lost. Summon or seed from scratch, but fix it either way.

Fix
her
. Make Sally Paige a mother again.

‘Hope,’ she coughs. ‘Once a poison like that works its way into a woman’s heart, there’s nothing she won’t do in chase of it.’

The morning sickness and swollen ankles, the aching back and a bladder that couldn’t even make it through half a cup of tea after eight months – she gritted her teeth through it all. Told herself that once the baby comes, once she laid eyes on that fresh baby face and smelled that fresh baby smell – her
own
baby, her
natural
baby – it would all change.

Once the baby comes, once the baby comes, once the baby comes.

But then the baby did come, red and wrinkled and squalling louder than a summer storm, and Sally Paige found herself looking into a crib once more, weeping over yet another plastic doll.

‘If I could have been certain . . .’ She flaps a hand. ‘Beggars and horses.’

Antoinette stares. ‘Are you saying that if you’d known having me wouldn’t have made a difference, then you would have . . . not had me?’

‘Don’t take it personally. It wasn’t
you
, it wasn’t
Antoinette
. It was just a decision that needed to be made.’

‘And you think you made the wrong one.’ She feels sick to her stomach. This broken, bitter woman isn’t her mother; this woman isn’t anyone’s
mother
.

‘The point, my girl, is that you’re not a perfection. If you were, you couldn’t have made that boy of yours.’

Antoinette can’t even look at her. She doesn’t want to be here, in a house so permeated with deceit it would likely fall down should the truth ever touch it, sitting across from a mother who doesn’t love her, who has never loved her, who has merely dressed the part and learned the lines and followed – badly – whatever maternal script she managed to draft along the way.

‘A perfection can’t create another perfection,’ Sally Paige is saying. ‘Or anything else, for that matter.
Girls don’t bleed, boys don’t seed
, was how your grandmother used to put it. Crude but accurate, and just as well really, if you ask me.’