adelaide sprawls

The cake - banana - was soft and light when they poured it into the tin. They have used the proper sugar - caster - and sifted all of the flour. Nina closed the oven door, Ethan licked the spoon, they shared the bowl.

If there is a doorbell when they get to the house where Nina plans to deliver the cake, Nina will ask Ethan to ring it. Ding Dong, she will say when he presses it. She will remember to comb his hair before they leave and she will change his shirt, but not until they have put the icing on.

She begins the clearing up. She crunches the egg shells before she puts them in the bin, has one last lick of the bowl.

‘My name’s Nina,’ she will say, then smile. ‘I live two doors down.’

The girl will stay behind the security screen at first, but Nina will speak again.

‘We’ve heard the baby,’ she will say, and then, to reassure: ‘it’s nice. You don’t hear too many babies or kids. Not around here. Not during the day.’

The girl will open the security screen and hold it with her right arm. The baby will be cradled in her left and dressed in white. The girl’s eyes will be tired, but she will smile. A soft smile which doesn’t show her teeth.

Nina will not tell the girl about the view from upstairs in Ethan’s room. Green knickers and pink sheets on the line. Geraniums in pots. And every morning, the girl on the garden bench, a cigarette, a piece of toast and a cup of tea.

Up close, the girl will not look quite so young, but still she will be young enough to be Nina’s child. If not in years, then at least in generations.

The girl will use her hip against the door when she takes the cake and Nina will say ‘if you ever need anything, if you get lonely during the day’. Nina will have her arm around Ethan’s shoulder as she speaks. He is tall enough now for that.

Nina practices her smile and the speed of her blink, lets the water out of the sink. The house smells like cake.

But the cake, when she takes it out of the oven and slides it onto the bench, is brown and cracked on top and when she tries to take it out of the tin, too much of it stays behind.

‘Stupid oven,’ Nina says. ‘Bloody tin’. She bites at her lips, rubs at her forehead, pulls at her hair.

Nina hears the baby’s cries. They are hungry cries, she thinks. Nina wants to call out to the girl ‘you shouldn’t smoke, not with a baby, not even outside’.

She pulls the window down and she can’t hear the baby anymore.

‘We can’t take burnt cake,’ Nina says to Ethan. She needs to blow her nose, and the knot in her neck is back. ‘It isn’t neighbourly.’

Ethan wraps his arm around her legs and Nina strokes his hair.

Nina makes chocolate butter icing then she and Ethan sit on the floor and eat the cake in chunks until not quite all of it is gone.

Nicola’s daughter was born the week Gran died.

Everyone said it was fate until Nicola told Auntie Sue about Molly’s condition, and no one said anything about Gran after that. ‘They probably want the name back,’ Nicola said to Jason.

Auntie Sue came back to the hospital before the week was out. She said you’ll love her much more often than you don’t. And then she said and I think Molly is a lovely name.

Kat rang in the middle of the night, but the midwife put the call through.

‘She’s got Down’s Syndrome,’ Nicola said.

‘I should be there,’ Kat said. Nicola cried for the normal girl who wasn’t born, but wasn’t worth a grandmother’s visit home.

When Sophie went to uni, she fell in love with Sid before she fell out of love with Pip and she wrote about it in her journal as if it were the greatest romantic tragedy never suffered by anyone before.

Sid walked around the university barefoot and everyone knew his name. His hair was blonde and it fell in long spiral curls. He was in third year, doing law arts and he filled his academic transcript with credits and distinctions. He was going to do French honours then he would get a job in the Department of Foreign Affairs. He had been to France several times, mostly for the skiing, and he read French novels without looking at a dictionary or the notes. He wrote a column for OnDit and directed the Comedy Revue. Renate and Lucy and Nicola were all in love with him, and when he was doing matric at his all-boys school he took Nicola’s friend Victoria to the winter ball. Victoria told Nicola that his kisses were like fire. Sophie knew all these things without talking to him once and without ever mentioning his name.

By her second day on the sandstone campus, Sophie knew that the world was not as she had thought. She was not as clever or as beautiful as she had believed herself to be and people did not need her for a friend.

She carried her new textbooks in a yellow canvas bag from the army surplus store. She used black texta to write quotes on it by Einstein and Ghandi, and she pinned small round badges on the straps. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a cotton shirt which was printed like a comic strip. Her hair was cut short and it had been streaked in shades of blonde and red. She carried a packet of menthol cigarettes and bought a lighter made of the same clear purple plastic she had used in tech studies three years before. She used mascara, blue eyeliner and strawberry lipgloss which she spread across her lips after each cigarette. She had a bus timetable and a monthpass in her purse. She had her own bank account.

In her first French tutorial Sophie discovered that all the girls who carried Country Road bags and wore Laura Ashley print skirts had been to France. Their fathers paid for trips to say well done for passing matric. And these were girls who had not just passed, they got scores like 98 and 99. Sophie had not believed her mother when she told Sophie that those scores were possible and even her mother had not known that some people are issued passports the week they are born and that aeroplane tickets can be slipped into Christmas cards.

Sophie sat on a vinyl chair in the tutor’s office, and listened to everyone introduce themselves. She wondered whether everyone’s legs felt as wet with sweat as hers. The tutor’s name was Monique. She was doing Honours French, and had been to France. Her mother was French.

The office had a bookcase stretching the length of the wall, but it was only half filled with books, and the other half was frames of photos, and the photos were Monique in front of the Eiffel Tower, and Monique under a tree eating a long bread roll, and groups of people hugging each other and making rabbits ears and poking out their tongues for the camera.

There was one boy. His name was Peter and Monique called him Pierre.

There were six girls, including Sophie, and their names were Renate, Caroline, Katherine, Lucy and Nicola. They had neat bobs and spiral curls. Sophie used her 84 percent French to say my mother is in New York this week, although she lives in Mexico City. Sophie did not say ‘she has dedicated her life to the underprivileged children of the world’ because she did not have the vocab, and because she knew it would not interest anyone else.

At uni, everyone, it seemed, knew everyone. Sophie knew no one and she wished she had enrolled at Flinders where Jacob Humphries had gone.

People went places together, and they all had busy social lives. They went to pubs on Thursday nights. Sophie just had spaces. She found simple routines which helped the time between weekends to pass when she could catch the bus home to go to that week’s backyard eighteenth and she could pretend to know things that the others did not.

During the week, she bought ham salad sandwiches from the Refectory and spread her books along a table and looked carefully at her notes while she ate. She wore her glasses although she could read anything without them. When she had finished eating, she would pack her things into her bag, put her rubbish in the bin and go to the library to find a seat far from the Undergraduate Reading Room. That’s where the Laura Ashley prints sat.

She found a regular spot on the second level where she could look through a window and see green kentia palms. She wasn’t far from the 400s and 800s which is where, she had discovered, the texts for English I could be found.

The notes were left on the top of her books. She found them when she got back from the toilet or from another search in the stacks or from a trip to the reserve collection. The first one said you’re beautiful and the second one said come and have a drink and the third one was suggestively lewd.

She threw them all into the square bin which rested against the concrete column. The paper lining the bottom of the bin was green and the piece of pink gum stayed there day after day after day. She did not screw the notes up or rip them in halves. She did not look around.

The next week, the notes were signed.

Sid.

Sophie did not believe that it was him.