Eve - by Laura Elvery
ISLAND | ISSUE 160
I think Gran is asleep and I don’t want to wake her. I set her tea and porridge on the kitchen table. On my way back to my bedroom, I stop at the sideboard and touch the faded photo of my mother and her six siblings lined up beside a swimming pool. My grey jacket – serious, but not a traumatic colour – is standard issue. I push my arms into the sleeves and wait for the list of Carriers to come through on my phone.
Tess Hamer, 35 y.o. (G1, P0, A1)
Kimberley Shaw, 28 y.o. (G2, P1, A1)
Taryn Obrist, 30 y.o. (G3, P2, A1)
Ellie Howe, 24 y.o. (G2, P1, A1)
‘Big day?’ Gran asks from the doorway.
‘Gran! Shit.’
‘Sorry, love, didn’t mean to scare you.’ She’s already dressed in tennis shoes, visor, gardening gloves clipped to her belt. A bright pink and green jumper is zipped up over her pyjamas.
‘Just the morning shift today,’ I say. ‘Not a long one.’ I make my mother’s face for her. The one that says: I’m a trooper, I’m a martyr, I’ll get through all of this without breaking a sweat.
Outside, people are gathering.
I hear voices in the crowd over the sound of the blender while I make my smoothie, then over the clip of my heels and the roar of the vacuum that I move quickly across the rug in the lounge. Must be hundreds out there on Melbourne Street, but I try not to think about them. Flyers were stuffed in our letterbox yesterday, and last week too. I knew they were coming.
‘Stay safe,’ Gran says, her face appearing behind me in the hallway mirror.
‘God, you scared me again.’
‘Eve?’ She holds her gardening shears out to the side. ‘Be good.’
*
Ms Tess Hamer has short blonde hair, black-rimmed glasses and is wearing jeans and a pink woollen jumper. She invites us in – my work partner, Jacob, and me. They always send us in twos: one man, one woman. We’ve had Carriers think we’re knocking on their front doors because we’re Jehovahs, or out stumping for charities. It must seem like we’re aiming for Good Cop, Bad Cop but it doesn’t play out that way. The Carriers don’t know which of us they’ll get sympathy from, or if they’ll get any at all. I’ve had women think they know me. Assuming that I’ll be the one to get them out of this.
But you got yourself here.
Although what I say, smiling, is, ‘Tell the truth. That’s what’s best.’
I check my watch. Each visit we’re allocated 35 minutes. Take the coffee or tea – there’s nothing in the training manual about that. Wash your own cup. I learnt the script well before Jacob. But sometimes it hardly comes into it. These women – even the ones I feel my sympathy growing for – always begin talking (we don’t use the word ‘confessing’) by the time we’re seated.
Ms Hamer’s house is super nice. She has fat cushions and throw-rugs over the couches we’re sitting on. The timber walls are painted pale green and hanging up on one of them is a vibrant red painting of not much as far as I can tell, but it must mean something to people who know about art and things. One day I might have a house this nice.
A black pug noses around my feet. ‘Good dog,’ I say, before it trots into another room.
Jacob crosses one leg over his knee and clasps his hands loosely against his shin. Ms Hamer nods. She’d like to get started.
‘I was at a wedding,’ she says. ‘Out at Cleveland. For my old neighbour, although she lives in Ashgrove now. I listed her mobile and email on the form, like it says.’
I can tell when Carriers want to cry. I can tell when they can’t cry or when they want to stop the tears coming before they start. I’ve only been in this job for a bit, so that makes me feel proud.
Ms Hamer does this thing where she grips the ends of her hair, clenching and unclenching, like it’s wet hair she’s forcing to dry. She continues, ‘I went to the toilet after the ceremony. A waiter had just given me a drink.’
‘What drink?’ I ask. A beat. ‘Iced tea. I put it on the sink—’ ‘The venue will confirm that iced tea was on the menu?’
Jacob interrupts. He isn’t writing anything at all because he assumes I am, just poises a pen above his notebook as though he’s written ICED TEA?
‘Pardon?’ Ms Hamer looks from Jacob to me. And I know, right at that moment, that she’s innocent, just with that look. Let’s wrap this up, I think. She looks to the space in her palm like the glass might still be there. ‘The drink? That’s what I had.’
Jacob says, ‘Please continue.’
Ms Hamer’s voice changes. ‘So I was in the cubicle – you know – and I saw blood running down my leg, into my shoe.’ Another beat. ‘Left one.’
Jacob begins to speak, but Ms Hamer stares at me and points. ‘It’s bagged for you by the door.’
*
Jacob and I stop at the bakery for lunch. Every day since we started, he’s joked about cops and doughnuts. It’s been a month.
‘We’re not cops,’ I say, a little nastily, and he goes red and I feel bad. So because we agreed on Ms Hamer’s case straight away, and because he does all the uploading since I haven’t done the training for the bloody complicated database yet, I soften it with, ‘But cops can’t do what we do.’
We have a plastic table between us, at knee-height. Jacob lunges at his salad roll and makes me laugh with the huge bite he takes. He’s younger than me but he’s got a real Dad Jokes Vibe going on. Short curly hair, clompy brown shoes, speaks like a thesaurus. No children. We haven’t gotten further into the whys, only being a month into our partnership. I think of my tablets in the bathroom cabinet, plinking around in the turquoise pillbox that looks like something from a doll’s house. I think of my IUD. That’s maybe what a lot of these women don’t understand. I’m just the same as they are: I have sex, I have boyfriends sometimes. I had a boyfriend till January. Even brought him home to meet Gran, who asked about his favourite book, and if he liked sports and knew how to light a fire (‘Not a euphemism,’ she cackled). But I take the pill – I set my alarm to it – then I got the IUD put in, and I never, ever do it without a condom. The way I see it, my chances of getting pregnant sit somewhere around, like, 0.0002 per cent. These girls thinking you can forget a pill for a couple of days. No, you can’t. These mothers-of-three who sure as shit don’t want more kids, but rely on breastfeeding alone to protect them like we’re in a time warp or something? Come on.
Look. I’m not here to judge.
Which is the line I offer Ms Kimberley Shaw (no ‘call me Kim’ here) when she begins weeping two seconds in, me hardly dunked my tea bag at all.
I follow it up, gentle. ‘We’re public servants. We draw up a report to submit to our supervisors and they take it from there.’
‘Judging women?’ Jacob holds up his hands in surrender. ‘I’m a dude, yeah? What right would I have to judge you?’
I’ve heard this line dozens of times. Sometimes Jacob calls himself a bloke, or I’m just a guy, yeah?
Ms Shaw – skin on her face thick like the scum off pancake batter, fat around the arms, but with a terrific singing voice that we heard through the kitchen window before we knocked on her door – seizes a tissue out of her bra. She blows, furiously. She alleges she lost the foetus at eleven weeks, so if anything she’s lucky to have just the pair of us. At twelve weeks, it goes to a different team. At twenty weeks, the Deputy Director-General gets involved, and up and up. You get the picture. It’s not uncommon for the Premier to have five or six of these reports – very similar to the ones I write – across his desk each week.
“She alleges she lost the foetus at eleven weeks, so if anything she’s lucky to have just the pair of us. At twelve weeks, it goes to a different team. At twenty weeks, the Deputy Director-General gets involved, and up and up. You get the picture.”
Why hadn’t you started looking at hospitals and obstetricians if you were excited for the baby, as you say you were? The father of your child says you weren’t all that keen, that in his opinion you were actually distressed. A witness at your workplace says you were quite happy after the alleged miscarriage. Can you explain your seeming joy?
Next, I think, watching her sniffle. Nothing to see here.
*
Jacob drops me off at the bottom of the Go Between Bridge. As well as the Dad Jokes Vibe going on, he’s got a Dad Get You Home Safely Vibe too. I insist on walking the rest of the way.
‘See you tomorrow,’ I call out.
I’m halfway home when I remember the march. There are signs, corflutes, posters. I see union flags, all those initials and symbols: the lightning bolt, a sliver of sun, a triplet of faces in silhouette. Four women holding a teal flag make a detour around me as I move with the trudging crowd up Merivale Street. Local neighbourhood Pirate Guy whizzes past on his skateboard, the skull-and-crossbones rippling behind him.
Someone pokes me in the arm. ‘What are you doing here?’
I turn and my memory shoots me the idea that it’s someone I know, but only just: like a girl from high school or someone I used to work with serving drinks at the golf club. But a split second later and my brain accordions – it’s Tess from this morning. Pretty cushions, the red painting, the bloodstained heel, bagged by the door.
‘Ms Hamer.’
The pink jumper is gone. Instead she’s wearing a purple t-shirt over her jeans. On it is the symbol I’ve been spotting for months – slapped onto power poles, propped up in shop windows and on apartment balconies, a huge poster unfurled down one side of the Powerhouse.
She sneers – I think it’s sneering. She doesn’t take her eyes off me. She speaks loudly to get the attention of someone at her elbow also heading towards the bulk of the rally as it winds towards the river.
‘Hey, Cath? This is the girl who came to interview me.’
Her friend looks me properly in the face. Her hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, like something you’d wear in preschool. ‘This morning?’
‘Yep.’
‘Wow. Jesus,’ Cath says. ‘What a job.’
I go red. She’s older than me by at least ten years. I point to their matching t-shirts. ‘That’s really emotive,’ I say. ‘It isn’t helpful.’
The protestors’ emblem is a coat-hanger twisted into the shape of Queensland. A week ago, someone nailed a bunch of coat-hangers onto trees in New Farm Park. Yesterday, on Shafston Avenue, I saw it on a billboard.
Tess smiles at me and nods, with her lips shut tight. What she wants to say is right there. She looks like she’s about to cry. Cath doesn’t hug her – what sort of a friend is she? Instead she grips Tess’s elbow and glares at me.
The crowd waxes and wanes around us, clumps of people pooling briefly into Tess’s back till they realise she’s stopped. Then they push on, past the Fox Hotel and the Convention Centre. Ahead, police officers have set up roadblocks. A huge silky banner is slung over the QPAC walkway: Hands off! Citizens, not criminals! A girl sitting high on someone’s shoulders in the swarm that marches towards Victoria Bridge raises her arms as though she wants to touch the banner, even though she’ll never reach it. Suddenly, I’m glad I don’t have a uniform. The blazer is enough. I can blend in here.
The chant is loud and heavy, an electric beater of noise, asking nothing it doesn’t know the answer to. Have they stopped and thought about it, all these people? Do they stay awake at night thinking of nothing but rights? Sure, I don’t agree with everything the Premier has done. But a deal is a deal. Would these people prefer a politician who lied? You’ve got to stand for something.
“Do they stay awake at night thinking of nothing but rights? Sure, I don’t agree with everything the Premier has done. But a deal is a deal. Would these people prefer a politician who lied? You’ve got to stand for something.”
‘Look,’ Tess says. Her tone has softened. Surely she’s about to say that she understands what I’m doing, as a fellow woman. A job’s a job. The law is the law.
Cath speaks up before Tess can continue. ‘You’re a traitor.’ It’s the lack of sting in how she says it that really gets me. Like what she’s saying is obvious. You dropped out of high school. This is your first real job.
I feel slapped. ‘What?’
‘Look around.’
Tess steps in closer. ‘At least that guy you’re with has an excuse. I expected to see him at my door.’
I take a breath and remember my obligations, as a public servant, to the government of the day. I lean in to touch her arm, but snap back – obviously against protocol. I feel a bit afraid, which I know is stupid. But these people are propelled by virtue. No fence-sitting, all so galvanised, no room for grey. I think of Jacob, how he used to work for a different department. He just wants a permanent role, doesn’t care where.
I whisper, ‘It’s okay. I know you didn’t break the law.’
Her nodding stops. She touches a hand to her forehead, suddenly looking weary. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I don’t think you know anything.’
Tess and Cath step out of our circle and I watch them pick up where they left off, pushing their way back into the crowd with their sights on parliament.
I’m turning back up Melbourne Street, thinking of home and Gran, the cup of tea she’ll pour while I sit in my room with my folders and the rest of today’s paperwork, but my foot hits the gutter wrong and the twist sends a shard of pain up the side of my ankle that makes me cry out. Nobody comes to help, a few people watch me, maybe look at me a bit strange.
I hobble up the street. I get Gran on the phone. She’s home. There’ll be someone to tell all this to.
*
When I finally make it through the front gate, Gran’s on her knees in the garden, wearing the same crazy jumper from this morning with mud on the shins of her pyjamas. Beneath her visor, her hair is knotted from the wind. Beside her, the shears are stabbed into the soil. I lower myself to the grass a little way down the sloping lawn. I can’t remember: for a sprain, am I supposed to take my shoe off or keep it on?
‘Sounds like you’ve had a day!’ She smooths her hands down the front of her pants.
‘Horrible.’ But that sounds like I’m beaten. ‘What I signed up for, I guess.’ Saying it and I feel powerful, for a bit.
Gran sits up straight, resting back on her ankles. The lovely big yellow Queenslander looms behind her, the green edges recently painted by some retired guy – he was keen on a cash job – she found in the aisles of Bunnings. These old people who scored decent work early, no qualifications. Able to afford cars and inner-city houses like this to hang onto forever. Grandad paid everything off by the time he was thirty – he told me a million times. He was never home that much, always working, working, working. While Gran had baby after baby and pottered around all day in the garden, probably.
With her shears, she motions for me to lie back on the wooden garden seat, set among the lush lawn. Four cushions, sun-faded, are lined up on the slats where my cousins and I used to set ourselves up to play train, tea-shop, school, pub.
Gran bows her head towards the garden. She’s got roses there and other flowers I don’t know the names of – delicate white ones on long green stems, some with fat pink buds. She always could coax anything to life. I rub my ankle.
She prods the earth. ‘Poor girls.’
Girl or girls?
‘Me?’ I ask her. ‘Or them?’
Noise from the march ebbs away. Tess and Cath – they’re probably in the city by now. God, the way they’d looked at me.
She plunges the shears back into the soil. ‘I’ll get you some ice,’ she says.
‘No,’ I tell her. We watch each other carefully. I’m thinking of my bed, and surely she gets that. ‘No, thanks. I’ll go to my room.’
Gran nods. She says, ‘I’ll start dinner,’ but when I reach the top of the stairs she hasn’t moved and sits still among the tossed, dark garden bed. All those flowers.
Mine is the dark bedroom at the end of the hall with the chintzy blue curtains and thick caramel-coloured carpet. There’s a silky oak desk topped with a piece of glass and an upholstered stool tucked underneath. In the wardrobe, Gran keeps her coats and old tennis racquets and the crushed, yellowing dress from her wedding. I unpack the folders and spread them out across the bed. Tess, Kimberley, Taryn, Ellie. I add them to the piles on my desk from yesterday and the day before. One pile means ‘Investigate’ and the other means ‘Pass’.
My phone dings.
Jacob.
I wasn’t going to tell him till tomorrow, face to face, maybe over lunch somewhere new. But I’m composing a text to him in my mind about seeing Tess at the rally, knowing he’ll be sympathetic. I flick open what he’s sent.
Got the AO5! Permanent! The one over at Transport.
The little dots. He’s still there. There’s more coming.
Probably see you next week. But then I’m OUT. Hang in there, Eve ...
I grab Tess’s file and slips of paper slide to the floor. I bend my knees to reach down, then settle up against the bedhead, my tender ankle raised at the other end. I touch the page with the six smudgy, secretive ultrasound images that seem to shift and swim and wink, like a little nightmare underwater. ▼
This story appeared in Island 160 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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