Forgotten E-Book

Nicole Trope

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A moment of distraction, an unlocked car and a missing baby. How on earth could this happen? All Malia needed was a single litre of milk and now she's surrounded by police and Zach has disappeared. Detective Ali Greenberg knows that this is not the best case for her, not with her history - but she of all people knows what Malia is going through and what is at stake. And then there is someone else. Someone whose heart is broken. Someone who feels she has been unfairly punished for her mistakes. Someone who wants what she can't have. What follows is a heart-stopping game of cat-and-mouse and a race against the clock. As the hours pass and the day heats up, all hope begins to fade. A gripping, haunting family drama shot through with emotion and suspense.

Leseprobe

Nicole Trope is a former high school teacher with a Masters Degree in Children’s Literature. In 2005 she was one of the winners of the Varuna Awards for Manuscript Development. In 2009 her young adult novel titled ‘I Ran Away First’ (unpublished) was shortlisted for the Text Publishing Prize. Forgotten is Nicole’s seventh novel. Her previous titles include the acclaimed Blame, The Boy Under The Table, Three Hours Late, The Secrets in Silence and Hush, Little Bird.

Other books by Nicole Trope

Blame

Hush, Little Bird

The Secrets in Silence

Roar

Three Hours Late

The Boy Under the Table

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in 2017

Copyright © Nicole Trope 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The moral right of Nicole Trope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26-27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Web:www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781760296773

eISBN 9781760638832

Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Cover designer: Alissa Dinallo

Photo by Rafa Elias / Getty Images

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Acknowledgements

For my mother, Hilary, who reads first

Chapter One

8.00 am

The bowl spins across the floor, ricochets off the cabinet and shatters into pieces, showering Coco Pops over every square foot of the kitchen. Malia watches as her five-year-old son, Aaron, stamps his feet, crushing the cereal into dust.

‘I want Coco Pops with milk! I want Coco Pops with milk. Now, now, now.’

Small fists clenched and a face coloured with rage, he vents his fury at the world, at his dry cereal and, mostly, at his mother.

‘Mind your feet!’ yells Malia, matching his decibels, drowning out the television where puppet animals are singing about a day on the farm. ‘Now, look at this mess. Just look at this mess. I told you Aaron, there is no milk.’

Malia grabs her son by the shoulders and lifts him onto a chair, grunting at how heavy he is, while he attempts to kick her in the stomach.

‘I want milk! I want milk!’ He stands up, poised to jump.

‘Sit down while I clean up this mess!’

As Malia steps towards the cupboard under the sink for the dustpan and brush she feels the sharp sting of a piece of the splintered cereal bowl pierce her foot.

‘Shit!’ she cries.

‘You sweared!’ shouts Aaron. ‘Bad mum.’ Tears stain his face.

‘Just sit there and be quiet,’ snaps Malia, sweeping up the Coco Pops and the shattered bowl, staining the kitchen floor with blood as she moves.

‘Too much noise, too much noise,’ sings Rhiannon, who had been sitting with her back to the kitchen, glued to the morning television show. She picks up the remote and turns up the volume.

‘It’s a happy, happy day, when you get to work and play,’ sing the animals.

‘Turn it down!’ yells Malia.

She throws away the last of the mess and sits down on the floor to examine her foot. The splinter has gone deep, but a small piece protrudes, allowing her to pull it out. Aaron watches, momentarily silenced by the sight of blood.

Malia holds a piece of tissue against the wound and takes a deep breath. This is not how she likes to handle the mornings with her children. She closes her eyes and resolves to take back control of the situation. Aaron sniffs dramatically, alerting her to his tears.

‘You need to stop crying now, Aaron, and eat something or we’re going to be late,’ she says.

‘But Mum …’

‘We don’t have time to argue anymore. You know that Mrs Epstein doesn’t like you to be late.’

She makes sure her tone is light but firm—just the way the last book she read about raising children advised her to do. Creating Calm from Chaos is the latest in a long line of parenting books that Malia has downloaded. In the absence of her parents and extended family, who live in Melbourne, Malia has turned to the experts for help—all of whom have different ideas, although this has never stopped Malia trying to find the one expert who will help her be the perfect mother.

‘Don’t they all say the same thing,’ Ian had laughed when she tried reading him a passage on dealing with tantrums in children.

‘No, they don’t,’ Malia had replied.

‘Yes, they do babe. Every book you read tells you that the best way to get through the day with three kids is to relax and take control. You just need to chill.’

Malia had given her head a shake, dismissing his opinion. Ian was usually at work when the children were at their most demanding.

‘I’m sure Mrs Epstein has something wonderful planned for today,’ says Malia to her son. ‘You may get to do some painting. What do you think you’ll paint a picture of?’

Aaron regards her sceptically; her change in tone has been too quick. He knows he’s being handled.

Distract your child with questions and new ideas and soon the tantrum will be a thing of the past.

‘I can make you some yummy toast for breakfast. What would you like on your toast?’ says Malia, attempting to make toast sound like a treat instead of a poor second choice.

‘I don’t want toast. I waaant milk,’ whines Aaron again, not willing to give up on his specific need for this morning.

‘All you had to do was bring home some milk,’ says Malia to herself, picturing Ian, at work in the car yard, holding a steaming cup of coffee, freshly made by one of the admin staff—all of whom were women and all of whom, she believes, probably have crushes on her blond-haired, blue-eyed husband. ‘I don’t see anyone but you, babe,’ Ian always assures her.

Malia sees her own hand grab Ian’s cup and upend it on his head. She smiles briefly at the image of her husband with coffee dripping down his beautiful suit, staining the crisp white shirt he was wearing this morning.

‘Miiilk,’ moans Aaron softly. Malia can hear that he’s losing interest in his tantrum and she congratulates herself on sticking to the advice she has read.

Rhiannon turns around to see why her older brother has stopped crying and Aaron seizes the opportunity to include her in his mission.

‘I want milky Coco Pops,’ he says, looking at his sister to encourage her to join the melee.

‘I want milky Coco Pops,’ seconds Rhiannon, jumping up and running to her brother. At three years old she is his willing accomplice against what they both seem to view as Malia’s unacceptable expectations—things like eating vegetables and getting to bed on time.

‘Eee!’ she shrieks.

‘What?’ says Malia.

‘My foot, sore, sore!’ she screeches, already hysterical.

‘Oh God, Rhiannon, stop jumping. Just keep still!’

‘Milky Coco Pops!’ shouts Aaron, ramping himself up again.

Malia takes a wide step towards Rhiannon, hoping to avoid standing on anything else she may have missed, and then picks up her daughter and sits her on top of the kitchen table.

‘I want my dummy,’ cries Rhiannon, pulling her foot away as Malia tries to examine it for a splinter.

‘There’s nothing there, Rhiannon!’

‘Coco Pops, Coco Pops,’ chants Aaron.

‘Coco Pops, Coco Pops,’ says Rhiannon, forgetting her sore foot.

Malia looks at her children and wishes just for a moment that she could join in the wailing as well. The pounding in her head is exacerbated by the feeling that she is moving underwater—from a lack of caffeine, she’s sure. She wants milk for her coffee as well. She wants milk and coffee, she wants milk and coffee. She can’t seem to think straight. The noise gets louder as Aaron and Rhiannon attempt to outdo each other.

‘We get up with the sun, we always have such fun,’ warble the animals on the television.

‘Right, fine!’ shouts Malia. ‘We’ll go and get milk. Put on your shoes and get into the car now.’

She snatches the remote control from Rhiannon’s hand and turns off the television, silencing the animals.

‘But …’ says Aaron, momentarily stunned to have won the argument.

‘Right now, or there’ll be no milk and no breakfast at all.’ Malia looks at her watch. It’s already seven forty-five and the traffic is going to make a five-minute trip to the 7-Eleven take at least twice that.

‘Do I have to put on my shoes?’ says Aaron.

‘Yes.’

‘I losted my shoes,’ says Rhiannon.

Malia stifles the urge to scream. She closes her eyes and reimagines the morning with a full bottle of milk in the fridge and then she sighs as she catches the scent of a giant cup of coffee. ‘Just get on with it, Malia,’ she mutters to herself.

It takes another five minutes to get both children into the car and only as she pulls out of the driveway does Aaron say, ‘What about baby Zach?’

Malia pulls back into the driveway and drops her head onto the steering wheel. ‘Idiot,’ she whispers. She’s going to be late for work at the bakery. The kids are going to be late for school and day care. She hasn’t even had a shower yet because at six o clock this morning Ian, the same Ian who forgot the milk, had pushed up against her in bed and instead of telling him to leave her alone she had given in, despite the fact that he still smelled like beer after stumbling into the house somewhere around two that morning.

‘I need you,’ he had said and she knew that meant a lot of money had gone into the pokies at the pub and very little had come back out. If he won he crowed about it, explaining his strategies and laughing at his luck, but if he lost he needed to conquer something else. Pushing Malia into sex was as close as he could get. ‘Not pushing,’ she admits to herself now, ‘more like gentle coercion.’ Even after three children and nearly ten years together, eight of them as husband and wife, Ian still manages to make Malia’s stomach lurch just a little every time he touches her.

After she’d given in, Zach’s cries had filled the house. ‘Leave him, he’ll be fine,’ Ian had said. Malia had bitten down on her lip and endured her son’s anguish and her husband’s pleasure. Ian wasn’t bothered by Zach crying; he never was.

She hadn’t asked much of him, just a litre of milk bought on the way home from the pub. The empty bottle was still in the fridge, left there because it still contained a few drops and only discovered after all three children had been sound asleep. The idea of a hot cup of tea, drunk in front of some mindless television show had carried Malia through dinner and bath time and story time and ‘I want a glass of water’ and ‘I’m still hungry’ and ‘I’m not sleepy’ time.

She’d had half a glass of acidic red wine instead.

Ian had not made it home for dinner. ‘Work meeting, babe,’ he had said on the phone, and she knew that was code, and not even very good code, for the pub and his favourite pastime. The pub was close enough to the house that if he did drink a little more than he should he could always walk home and pick up his car the next day. Something that Malia saw as a mixed blessing. He was already up to three nights this week. She had a speech ready to deliver when and if he made it home for dinner one night. It was the same speech she had delivered time and time again and so far it hadn’t had much impact, but she still hoped to get through to her husband.

Please bring home milk, she had texted him.

Sure thing, he had replied. Home soon.

But Malia had rolled over in bed at 1 am to find his side cold.

‘Maybe it was only fifty dollars or so,’ she had tried to convince herself as Ian grunted and kissed her neck, before leaping out of bed to shower and dress.

It had only taken him fifteen minutes to get himself out the door to work, where someone else was responsible for buying the milk and a selection of breakfast pastries for the salespeople to indulge in.

‘How much?’ she had asked as he whirled around the bedroom finding clothes, and he’d at least had the good grace to hang his head and tell the truth.

‘Just a hundred, but I was up by about two hundred at the beginning. Gotta go.’ She had wanted to grab his arm and stop him walking out of the front door, had wanted to force him to speak to her, but Ian was focused on the day ahead and she knew that he wouldn’t want to be late for work and his morning sales meeting.

Only when she had heard Aaron shrieking about the milk had she realised that Ian had not done the one thing she’d asked him to do. She had wasted futile minutes arguing with her son about choosing a different breakfast while she fed Zach.

In the car she lifts her head and takes a deep breath, ‘Okay guys, stay here and don’t move. I’m going to get Zach.’ Aaron and Rhiannon nod and remain silent. They can sense her breaking point. Malia gets out of the car and goes back into the house, thinking that on any other day the sight of her two little blond-haired carbon copies nodding together would have made her smile, but today she can’t even dredge up a grimace. Even as babies Aaron and Rhiannon had looked so alike that paging through photo albums is confusing. ‘Is that me?’ Aaron will ask. ‘Is that me or Ri Ri?’ Sometimes it will even take Malia a moment to work out exactly which baby she is looking at. If they were the same height Malia is sure they would be mistaken for twins. She is always amazed at the genetic mix that has gone into her producing three children who look exactly like their father but seem almost unrelated to her, with her black hair and dark brown eyes.

Malia unlocks the front door, wondering briefly about the wisdom of leaving her children in the car in the driveway. Anyone at all could walk by. She pictures the double garage with internal access that they would add to their home when they finally did the big renovation she and Ian have been discussing for years. ‘Any day now babe, I promise,’ Ian said month after month and year after year. The three-bedroom, single-level brick and fibro home in a suburb filled with families and only twenty minutes from the city had seemed perfect when she was pregnant with Aaron, but now it feels as though the family is almost bursting out of the small house, using every inch of space for children and toys and the other detritus of family life. Malia longs for a large ensuite bathroom with a big bath and soft towels and no children knocking on the door.

‘Not this year,’ she sighs as she makes her way down the passage to Zach’s tiny bedroom.

Last night she had pored over the bills once again, hoping that she had somehow missed a loophole that would give her a little more time. But there was nothing to find except final demands and threats to cut off the electricity. She would need to ask Sean, her boss and the owner of the bakery, to pay her early, humiliating herself again, bearing his kind ‘not a problem’ once more.

Ian was having a bad month at work with one sale after another falling through. He had only managed two sales so far and it was close to the end of the month. His commission from those sales was not enough to take care of all the bills. There were always bad months and they mostly seemed to be ill timed with the quarterly bills and the breakdown of major appliances. Malia can’t quite remember when they went from being financially okay to struggling but lately it seems worse than ever. Even with her part-time job she never seems to pay anything off on time. ‘A few good months,’ she whispers to herself, ‘just a few good months.’

Part of the reason she had agreed to sex this morning was because she’d hoped that it would put Ian in a mood to discuss what to do, but as she opened her mouth to say something he had turned on the shower. ‘Sorry, babe, running late for a staff meeting and we don’t need me to lose my job, do we?’ So there had been no conversation and no time for her prepared speech on gambling, and all she had been left with was the knowledge that she had even less money to cover the bills than she thought she had.

It wasn’t that Ian didn’t understand their financial predicament; it was just that he believed—truly believed, as though he had a direct line to the universe—that he was going to win big, so big that he would be able to solve all their financial problems. This belief refused to be daunted by the science of slot machines, which explained the impossibility of ever coming out ahead.

‘It has to happen for someone, Malia. Why not me?’

Even Malia believed it was possible when Ian talked about the powers of positive thinking and the benevolence of the universe. ‘Good things happen all the time, Malia,’ he would say, his blue eyes shining with absolute certainty. His persistent belief that amazing things were just around the corner for both of them was one of the reasons Malia had fallen in love with Ian in the first place. To him the world has always been filled with exciting opportunities and wonderful adventures and all he needs to do is be prepared and wait.

And he has proved himself correct in his thinking over and over again. When he applied for his current job he had said, ‘I want this so I’ll get it,’ and he had. When they began looking for a home to buy Malia loved their house as soon as she saw it, attracted to the large front yard and the endless potential of the space, but it had been priced over what they could afford. ‘It’s meant to be ours, babe,’ Ian said, ‘just wait and see.’ A month later the estate agent called them, letting them know the owners had lost a buyer and were willing to drop their price.

‘Told you,’ grinned Ian when Malia relayed the message. ‘The good stuff happens and it may as well happen to us.’

His belief system felt magical and Malia couldn’t help but be swept along with it, until it stopped working and then she found it harder and harder to remain in step with his way of thinking.

The realities of marriage and children meant someone had to be pragmatic. Even though he was two years older, he made her feel that he was decades younger than her thirty-three years. Becoming a mother had made her more cynical than she wanted to be, but raising children required money and all the positive thinking in the world wouldn’t bring back fifty or a hundred dollars lost in a slot machine every week.

‘I’m not sure you can out-think the randomness of pokie machines, Ian,’ she would say. Sometimes he would agree with her but look so crestfallen at having to acknowledge it that Malia would feel bad for bursting his bubble of belief. But even if he did agree with her one day, he was usually back at the machines the next.

It was an addiction. Ian was an addict. Malia had read all the articles and visited all the chat rooms, but the fact that she knew what the problem was made little difference to Ian. ‘There’s always enough to eat, isn’t there, babe, and I’ve never missed a mortgage payment, have I, even if I was a little late?’ he would say whenever she urged him to get some help. ‘It’s my way of staying sane, Malia. You have no idea how much pressure there is at work.’

Malia understood his need to blow off steam after a tough day at work. His natural charm made him an excellent car salesman but the Walt White car yard where he worked was filled with men and women oozing natural charm. Competition was fierce. ‘I always feel like complete shit whenever I lose a sale, and Walt always makes me feel like an idiot in front of the other guys and …’

‘And?’ said Malia.

‘Nothing,’ he would say, shaking his head, not mentioning the main reason he hung around in the pub, numbing his mind with pictures on a slot machine, which was that the domestic realities of children were never what he had wanted for his life. He rarely brought it up, but it was always there, always in danger of being spoken of.

Malia continually comforts herself that his gambling has never really gotten out of control, not to the point where the house is in jeopardy, but each month is a struggle and the bills get paid with only a little to spare. The extra few hundred dollars he spends each week at the pub could cover the water bill or the gas bill or a visit to the grocery store, and sometimes when Ian is relaxed and the kids are asleep, Malia broaches the subject with him, hoping to get him to see sense and maybe even agree to therapy so he can commit to change, but it never works.

‘We always manage, don’t we? No one has turned off the gas or the electricity, and the kids have everything they need. Please don’t take this away from me, Malia.’

And implied in that statement was all that she had taken away from him. Mainly she had taken his freedom, his precious freedom. She had chained him down to a house and children when all he had wanted was a life where the only reason he got up to go to work every day was to save money to travel the world, visiting the best surfing beaches on every coast. ‘I need more,’ she told him when he asked her to marry him and he’d nodded like he agreed, but he hadn’t really. Even marriage hadn’t been part of his life plan, but when Malia told him that her parents would not accept her living with him without being married he proposed in a hot-air balloon, getting down on one knee, making the basket wobble and Malia shriek, ‘Are you sure?’ she asked before she said, ‘Yes!’

‘No way I’m letting some other bloke have you,’ he had replied, making her laugh.

‘I want kids, Ian. I really want kids.’

‘Will they look like you?’

‘They may look like you.’

‘I’ll love them anyway.’

But now Malia knew that for Ian the promises he had made, drunk on too much champagne, have often been regretted.

Seared in Malia’s memory is one night, after Rhiannon had finally weaned herself at ten months old, when she and Ian were celebrating with a glass of wine that turned into two. Malia hadn’t had a drink for months and she had felt the room tilt as she giggled at Ian’s impersonation of customers at the car yard. She had closed her eyes and felt herself drifting into a doze when the folly of marrying a man who had little interest in children suddenly crystallised from a few words Ian voiced aloud.

‘This is so nice, babe. It’s been a long time since we talked like this. I forgot how much fun we can have when it’s just you and me.’

‘Until one of them wakes up,’ Malia had said, feeling herself dropping into sleep. ‘I thought you weren’t serious, you know?’ Ian had said. ‘About what?’ she had murmured.

‘About having kids. I thought you would see that life was better without them, that I could change your mind.’

Ian had whispered the words and Malia had understood that he hadn’t thought them through. Maybe the alcohol had released his tongue or maybe he needed to say the words out loud sometimes, to admit the truth to himself and to her. Malia had felt the shock of them sober her up. She had kept her eyes closed and dropped her head to the side, feigning sleep, rather than admit she had heard what he’d said. It seemed the safest option. The ‘kids’ Ian hadn’t wanted to have were here now and the idea that he could still want to imagine them away made Malia profoundly uneasy. She had been sure that if she confronted him in the morning he would be deeply sorry for saying anything. When he was with the children his love for them was obvious. He made himself a human climbing frame as he walked through the door at night, spent hours pushing Aaron and Rhiannon on the swing set or playing cricket and soccer in the backyard. He listened to the same jokes from Aaron over and over again, laughing just as heartily each time. When he was home he read stories and managed to turn bath time into the most exciting part of the day. But lately, he was rarely home and on nights when Malia felt she would never get five minutes to herself she resented his freedom to come and go as he pleased, despite the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Ian loves his kids but sometimes he wants to be able to shift them off to one side so he can do whatever he wants.

‘That’s not how it works,’ Malia tells him, but Ian has the luxury of not listening when he doesn’t want to. He can walk out the door and pretend he doesn’t even have a family.

‘A nice Greek boy, Malia … What would have been wrong with a nice Greek boy?’ her mother had said after meeting Ian. But Malia wanted blond Ian with the smell of the sea permanently in his hair and his belief in the general munificence of the world.

Malia had met Ian at a New Year’s Eve party at a restaurant near the river. She had been pressed up against the glass railing of the balcony, waiting for the midnight fireworks when she felt someone elbow her in the back. She had turned, laughing, assuming it was her friend Leigh, who had gone to the bathroom, only to find Ian grinning at her. ‘Just because you’re beautiful doesn’t mean you get to be in the front row,’ he said, his words slurring a little.

Malia noticed his lips first and without thinking she reached up to touch them, wanting to know if they were as soft as they looked. She pulled her hand away just in time and giggled at how forward she was being. It was not the way she had been raised to behave. The fireworks had begun and she had felt him behind her the whole time, pressing up against her a little, reminding her he was there.

He was nothing like any of the other boys she had dated before, all of whom had mostly come from her family’s large circle of Greek friends.

‘But where does he come from?’ her father had asked when she told her parents about him.

‘He’s Australian, Dad, I think his family came from England or Ireland. I don’t know, we haven’t really discussed it.’

‘You haven’t discussed it? What do you talk about?’

Malia had rolled her eyes at her father and wondered again why she still lived at home with her parents when she was working full time as head of marketing for a company that produced hand-made shoes. She was desperate to move out but every time she brought it up her mother went into hysterics about a ‘woman living on her own like a dog’.

She and Ian talked about everything, about life and books and movies and art and philosophy. They discussed politics and how they would change the world if they could. His impressions made her laugh and he told her she was the ‘most beautiful creature he had ever set eyes on’.

Being with Ian felt different. There was no serious discussion about marriage and work. No boasting of properties owned and plans for the future. There was just today and now and the freedom to do whatever they wanted.

Malia had grown up in a suburb populated by friends and family. Everyone knew everyone and there were times when she felt she could have been living in a small Greek village in the middle of nowhere. For years Malia had been chafing at her strict upbringing, at still being treated like a child even though she was in her twenties. The year before she met Ian she had gone to Europe with friends and had felt herself suffocating under her mother’s lists of ‘Don’ts’. Don’t go out with strange men. Don’t walk down dark alleyways. Don’t drink anything you can’t recognise. Don’t try too many new foods. Don’t go into nightclubs.

After yet another ‘Don’t’ lecture, she had rolled her eyes at her mother and waited until she left the room to appeal to her father: ‘Papa, she’s driving me mad. I’m twenty-five already. Please make her stop.’

‘Malia, my girl,’ he had sighed, precisely folding his beloved Greek newspaper so he would know which article to read next, ‘one day you will be a mother and you will understand what it means to love something more than yourself. What a wonderful, terrible day that will be.’

‘But Papa …’

‘But nothing, Malia. You listen to your mother.’

Ian made a different life seem possible. He took her to Sydney to climb the Harbour Bridge and to Adelaide to taste wine. They travelled to Bali and Thailand and China. It felt like Ian had taken her out of her small village and shown her the world. It was only when she’d had Aaron, and Ian began his regular visits to the pub and the pokies, that Malia began to wonder if his desire for freedom was incompatible with her desire for a family.

‘It’ll all be fine, babe, don’t you worry,’ he said whenever they argued about how they were going to pay the bills.

Malia did worry, and in the last few years she had begun to understand that she would always be worrying alone. She had married a twenty-eight-year-old boy thinking he would turn into a man, but he never had. Just about every article she’d read on marriage held the truth that you can’t change your spouse into the person you want them to be. This knowledge hadn’t stopped Malia from marrying Ian, or Ian from marrying Malia, and she was sure that there were millions of people who’d made the same mistake.

But if her marriage was not brilliant, the poverty that would come with a divorce would be disastrous. And there was always the small problem of how much Malia actually loved Ian. Even today no one could make her laugh like Ian could, or make her as angry as Ian could or as happy as Ian could. If Ian was addicted to the pokies, Malia was addicted to Ian.

Zach is fast asleep in his cot. It’s a wonder all the noise his brother and sister had been making hadn’t woken him, but babies are like that. Sometimes a light breeze will wake them and sometimes they can sleep through a thunderstorm.

Malia rubs her eyes and sighs. Waking Zach now would mean that his whole schedule—as much of a schedule as a five-month-old could have—would be thrown off. She only has enough milk pumped for one feeding at day care. Now she would need more.

Malia picks up her son as gently as she can and is relieved to feel the heaviness of deep sleep. There’s a chance she can get to the shop and back without waking him and then, if she gives him a quick top-up when she drops him off, she will be able to get through her shift at the bakery without worrying about him needing to be fed in between.

She hates that he has to be in day care. It doesn’t seem fair when Aaron and Rhiannon both got to be at home with her until they were eighteen months. But last year Malia had been forced to admit that she needed to go back to work so she could always be sure of having a certain amount of money coming in. Ian’s base wage was eaten up by the mortgage and the bigger bills. If he earned no commission at all for a month, they would be short of even food money. The few times that had happened had terrified her. Her father had always frowned on people who lived off credit, and she couldn’t help feeling ashamed when she had to resort to buying groceries with her credit card. The job at the bakery, serving customers for a few hours a day, was a lifetime away from her job at the shoe company, where she had worked until Aaron was born. It required very little of her and it worked with Zach’s hours in day care and Aaron and Rhiannon’s days at school and preschool.

She makes her way carefully back to the car, where Aaron opens the door so she can slip Zach into his car seat. ‘Thanks, my boy,’ she whispers, and Aaron nods. Malia wants to stroke his serious face. He is used to being a big brother, but is not quite ready to give up being little, hence this morning’s tantrum. His behaviour has been unreasonable, but Malia can see him trying to sort out his place in the family. He coped with one sibling, but two makes things difficult.

‘Mum’s tired, Aaron,’ is a phrase he hears more than he should. The first year of school is an important one and Aaron wants to share everything with her, but the response is usually: ‘Mum’s tired, Aaron, can we read tomorrow? Mum’s tired, Aaron, can you finish your spelling without me?’

It’s only his first term but most afternoons he stands in the kitchen, holding his school diary, waiting patiently for Zach to go down for a nap or for Rhiannon to finish her tantrum, or for Malia to finish dinner preparation, or for her to finish her phone call to her mother, whom she speaks to nearly every day, keeping her up to date on her grandchildren who, according to her mother, ‘live on the other end of the earth’.

‘Just give me one more minute, Aaron,’ she whispers while she listens to her mother detail what her cousins are doing or yells at him as she tries to get Rhiannon to eat her dinner.

‘But you have to sign my diary, Mum. Mrs Epstein says you have to sign every day that we did my homework or I don’t get my star sticker.’

Every night Malia goes to bed and vows to do better the next day, to become more organised and efficient in the afternoons so she can give him her full attention, but something always gets in the way, like Zach refusing to go down for his afternoon sleep or Rhiannon having a toilet-training accident. Getting milk for Aaron’s Coco Pops won’t make up for the fact that last night she had fallen asleep while listening to him sound out the simple words in his new reader, but it would have to do for now.

In the car she edges into the traffic and wants to squeal with joy when she catches a rare gap. Once she arrives at the 7-Eleven, she finds parking close to the store, mere steps away from the entrance.

‘Okay, I’m going inside to get the milk,’ she says.

‘I wanna come,’ says Rhiannon.

‘No, you stay here with Aaron and Zach.’

‘I wanna come, I wanna come,’ says Rhiannon, her voice climbing.

‘Shush, you’ll wake the baby,’ says Malia in a fierce whisper.

This morning is never going to end. She looks over at the entrance to the store. If she takes Rhiannon she knows that Aaron will have to come too because how can his little sister be allowed this treat without him. She knows if she picks up Zach a second time she will surely wake him, and she can’t let that happen.

‘Okay, both of you climb out quietly and stand next to the car.’

The children do as they are told and Malia also climbs out and then nudges the doors closed. I’m ten feet away, she reasons. There are people everywhere. He’ll be fine.

She puts out her hands for Aaron and Rhiannon to take and then she stops. She shouldn’t leave Zach in the car. It’s a stupid thing to do. ‘Wait …’ she says, but before she can finish the command Rhiannon darts away from the car towards the store as another car pulls into the petrol station and seems to head straight for her.

‘Stop!’ shouts Malia and she moves away from the car, covering the distance to Rhiannon in seconds. She picks her daughter up and holds her tightly as the car stops in front of an open pump, nowhere near where Rhiannon was. ‘We do not run away from Mummy, Rhiannon.’

‘’Kay, Mum, ’kay,’ says Rhiannon and she kicks to be put down. Malia turns, relieved to find Aaron at her side. The doors to the store slide open and icy air washes over them, inviting them inside.

Inside Malia realises that she has left Zach in the car after all. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she says to herself. She looks down at her keys in her hand and tries to remember if she locked the door or not. She thinks about pushing the button but worries that the noise might wake Zach. She can remember berating her sister Cassie, who is older by four years, for being obsessed with not disturbing her first child’s sleep.

‘It’s like it’s the only thing you can think about,’ she had said when Cassie yelled at her for calling during Sophia’s nap time.

‘Wait, Malia,’ said Cassie. ‘One day you’ll have a baby and then you’ll understand.’

‘And one day you’ll understand that we never see each other anymore because you have a baby and I work. You’re my sister and we need to speak to each other,’ Malia had replied and then she had hung up the phone, furious with her sister.

Cassie had called her the next day with a question about something she was cooking, and just as it had always been with her sister, the argument was over before it began. Only weeks after Aaron was born she had apologised to Cassie because she had finally understood about not disturbing a sleeping baby.

I won’t be more than a minute.

She quickly finds the milk, glancing at her car over and over again as they wait in the check-out queue. Aaron is beside her, but as she gets closer to the counter Malia notices that Rhiannon has moved away.

‘Ri Ri!’ she calls. ‘Time to go.’

It’s a small store and she can hear Rhiannon singing to herself a few aisles away.

‘Rhiannon, come now.’

‘’Kay,’ says Rhiannon, and then Malia hears the distinctive sound of something breaking.

‘I’ll go see,’ says Aaron.

‘No, you stay here and give the man the money for the milk.’

Malia shrugs at the shop attendant behind the counter, but he doesn’t meet her eyes. She had seen his mouth move with the word Fuck as the sound of glass shattering reverberated around the store. He knows he has something to clean up and Malia understands his irritation.

‘Welcome to my life,’ she would like to say, but is afraid that the words will come out sounding bitter.

She goes to the back of the store where Rhiannon has knocked over some jars of baby food, breaking one.

‘Janelle, get out here!’ she hears the man yell as he continues serving other customers.

‘What are you doing, naughty girl!’ Malia exclaims.

‘For Zach,’ Rhiannon says, pointing at the picture of a baby on the jar’s label.

‘Rhiannon, you know you are not to touch anything in the store.’

Malia picks up the unbroken jars of baby food and searches in her bag for something to clean up the mess when another store attendant appears next to her. ‘Just leave it,’ snaps the young woman, who has a mop in one hand and her phone in the other. Malia can’t help noticing long, perfectly painted purple fingernails.

‘I’m so sorry … I’m just … I’m sorry she didn’t mean it. I can pay …’

The woman waves her hand at Malia, as if flicking away an irritation.

Malia stands up and again thinks about Ian at the car yard, sees that cup of coffee upended on his head. She takes a deep breath.

‘I got the milk, Mum,’ says Aaron, who has come to stand next to her.

‘Right, let’s go,’ says Malia and she thinks about apologising to the attendant again but decides against it. The girl looks about eighteen and her eyes are fixed on her phone. Tap, tap, tap go the perfect purple nails.

It takes another few minutes to get everyone in the car and buckled up because Rhiannon insists on doing it herself. Malia rests her head on the steering wheel while she waits, grateful that Zach is obviously still asleep, thinking that she herself could fall asleep right there and sleep for hours. In the back seat she hears Aaron sigh and then the magical click that means Rhiannon is safely strapped in.

Finally they are in the queue to get back out onto the main road.

Coffee, here I come.

‘Mum …’

‘Not now, Aaron, I’m trying to concentrate.’

The traffic has built up in only a few minutes and cars scream past the service station. Malia feels her headache settle in.

This day is never going to end.

‘But Mum …’

‘What Aaron, what?’

‘Where is baby Zach, Mum? Where is he?’

Chapter Two

‘You see,’ I whisper to myself as I walk away from the service station. ‘Anyone can make a mistake. Anyone can slip up or drop the ball. Anyone.’

No one hears me speak. No one gives me a second glance. There is nothing to see here, nothing of interest.

I feel a surge of happiness at my invisibility on this busy street. I like being anyone and no one. I like being able to simply walk away from a place. The first thing I did when I was released was go for a long walk. I feel as though I will never get over the simple joy that comes from being able to walk and just keep walking. For the first few days I kept waiting to reach a fence or to have someone stop me. It’s been two weeks now but I don’t know if I will ever get used to being able to do what I want to do. I used to dream of travelling the world, of visiting every country on the planet. I was so jealous of the journalists at the magazine where I used to work because they had the privilege of flying to different destinations every week, but now I know that what I need from life is so much less than that. I just need to be able to walk.

This is not the nicest place to take a walk. I don’t like being on a main road but now I’m glad I was here.