It’s one of those mornings. I wake up and there’s something under my skin, the house feels dirty on me. My mum would have said to me, back in the day, with an expression on her face like her insides are forcing her mouth into a tight line—who got out of the wrong side of the bed, then?
My therapist might say there’s something I’m minimising. The mouth like a line maybe. As I think about it now, I urge my face to relax, to surrender its skeletal edges and bobby pin lips. The look, the feeling is the worst. A kind of gnawing. I think it comes from being frightened and angry at the same time.
Here’s the thing. We’re supposed to be going to church this morning. It’s Food Bank Sunday and my girls have been given readings to do. I don’t usually attend church. The girls go with my parents, to give me a break, and I’ll do a yoga class or submerge myself in salty water or call an old friend in London for a nice, long chat.
They seem to like church, my girls. Even though there are no other kids, just a lot of old people who are happy to see them. They get to be in charge of the candle snuffer at the end of the service and watch as threads of smoke go berserk towards the heavens. Then there’s morning tea laid out on a collapsible table in the vestry. Scones, slices, chocolate fingers and the girls dart fast as flies, run loops around the old people who talk to each other over trembling cups of tea.
Only, lately some other kids have started showing up at church. The girls tell me Tilly and Roland, my old yoga instructors’ kids are there. And Georgie and Isla. ‘You know, Isla, who always wins the cross country at school?’
Soon enough the girls enjoy having the other kids around. They learn to squirm and wriggle in the pews and ask questions about eating the body of Christ. And of course, they know the ropes, so they have important God jobs the other kids don’t. Like candle snuffing and Bible readings. I don’t tell them the new kids won’t be there for long. That they’re just stopping in for God’s watery seal of approval on their promising foreheads and then they’ll be off. Back to active relaxing on Sunday mornings. That their parents are all in a Facebook messenger group called The Diocesan Dip.
God. Why am I so brittle this morning?
I’d been looking forward to this all week. A morning in God’s house, one of his houses anyway, cheering on my girls with their readings, cheering on my dad who plays the church keyboard in organ mode, and even then manages to give the hymns a Bob Dylan lilt. All for a good cause. Food Bank Sunday. Yes. I’d been looking forward to it. The sitting with other people, people you don’t really know and didn’t choose but who live in the same town as you, being a bit bored together, singing badly together, following along from the same photocopied page.
I’d even bought the girls church shoes so they could stop wearing gumboots.
Rush. Rush. Rush. Snap. Snap. Snap. That’s how it goes. It’s normal, okay even, to get a bit cross with your kids when you’re trying to get out the door. Most days the girls brush it off. They can sense when it’s skin deep. That you’ll all be laughing soon about how the cat left the bottom half of a rat on the welcome mat again. Just its haunches, the soles of two pink, rubbery feet and its pink, rubbery tail. It’s a rat bum purse, Mum. And you look again, see the purse, spilling over with intestinal rat-lady essentials. At least you know its dead, and you have to laugh.
Other times, like today, the irritation has fangs. Comes from a place bone-deep, narrow, bobby-pin black. When I start to go there, the girls sense it. My little girl fights back; she’ll whine and shout, intentionally spit toothpaste on the bathroom floor.
And my big girl, my big girl, she goes quiet. Makes herself into a corner and watches me sideways.
‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ The word shoots out incisor-shaped. The shhh sound is the antithesis of the one you make to soothe a baby. Like its slicing off fingers.
The girls look at each other. They know this isn’t the funny kind of swearing.
With no minutes left, the breakfast dishes in a dirty pile on the sink and a promise to listen to a run through of the girls’ Bible readings destined for breakage—I’ve remembered the rabbit.
‘We’ve forgotten Precious,’ I say and roll my eyes in the girls’ direction. And they know from the mean horse-white-eyes and my tone, sharp as the end of that sawn-off bobby pin, that we’ve forgotten is really you’ve forgotten.
Precious is the neighbours’ rabbit. We look after him when they go away.
Doting owner, fourteen-year-old Debbie, writes out step-by-step instructions with cutesy bunny diagrams on a sheet of paper that she pops into a plastic sleeve. Feeding, brushing, poop-scraping, the kinds of cuddles and songs he likes—a list of things that might kill him. Over time it’s become clear that Ruth, not Gracie, is the more committed bunny sitter. So, these days Debbie addresses the instructions directly to her like a birthday party invitation—waves her over the fence for a practical demonstration of the tasks, sweetens the deal with an ice block and a bounce on the tramp.
‘Okay, you two. We really have to hurry now,’ I plead and bark. ‘I need you to be helpful, girls. I need some damn help!’
And there’s some truth in this. I do need help but not so much with the jobs, the dishes, the rabbit. And not from the girls. The help I need in this moment my girls can’t give me. They can’t get to the bone-deep bit where the black is festering. They can’t travel back in time to stand up for the little girl scared of a mother whose rage about a ‘filthy house’ has swallowed the girl up whole.
And the tragedy of it all—is that I know this.
I know what’s going on. That the rage I feel has nothing to do with the here and now. That it’s disproportionate as all fuck. Oozing out of cracks in a vessel too small, too little, too young to hold it.
I think it might be the second most pitiful place a mother can be. Where she wants so desperately to speak and behave differently with her children, to locate the foreign object inside her body and draw it out. And yet, even with everything she knows and all the ways she wants to do better, be different, in this moment... she can’t.
Instead, she says through gritted teeth, ‘Can one of you please head over and feed the rabbit? Can’t you see I’m trying to finish these bloody dishes!’
But Ruth has already gone; wants out of this house. Gracie just ignores me. Knifes Lego around the carpet like she’s opening up the floor.
‘Fine!’ I yell at the small girl. ‘If there’s pocket money for looking after the rabbit you won’t get any. I’ll give it all to your sister. You never help!’ And I yank off the silly tongue-coloured dishwashing gloves and throw them at the sink where they dangle around like useless hands.
I march the shape of myself that feels and looks like a mouth in a tight line up our driveway and down the neighbour’s driveway. I scramble along the fence-line with its birds-of-paradise gawking and pretty, and become aware of the sound of someone breathing. The breaths are shallow and tattered as if the person is very cold or trying not to cry. I stop and look around. Up ahead, I see my daughter... I realise the person I hear breathing is me.
With her spindly arms, Ruth has managed to pull away the large sheet of plywood that sits on top of the rabbit hutch pinned down by bricks and two black rubber tyres. She’s wedged the heavy hutch door up with a stick, slid open the smaller inner door to the rabbit’s daytime run, and she’s fiddling with a blanket on the ground, her small body bent over and inside the hutch like she might just fall in.
‘What are you doing?’ I say, coming up behind her like a tree that’s grown a menacing face. It’s less a question than an accusation. What she’s doing is obvious; what I am doing is less so. ‘We were meant to be at church five minutes ago, Ruth. We don’t have time for cuddles or faffing around today. Just feed him so we can get going, please.’
Ruth turns around, her face going grey inside my shadow.
‘I’m not faffing around,’ she says. ‘I’m following Debbie’s instructions. She told me I have to fold this blanket in half and lay it between the hutch and the run so that he doesn’t cut himself open on the door. On the wire.’ She looks at me. ‘So that is what I’m doing.’
She turns back to the hutch and her eyes well up as she lays the blanket down. Lays it down as she’s been asked to, lays it down just right, lays it down so the creature entrusted to her care will be safe.
Something rips in me then. Something about the scene, the rabbit, my daughter’s defiance and care, the wet sheen over her eyeballs, a brimming that can’t bring itself to brim over or admit to being tears.
My chest cracks and I stop.
I stop.
On the bank by the birds-of-paradise, beside my daughter who is laying down a blanket for the neighbour’s bunny, I stop myself.
And in the stopping I see her.
And I tell the little girl stuck in my gut who is scared of the bobby pin lips that I see her, too.
Little by little, the shape of me softens, expands and I become a forty-three-year-old mother again.
‘Okay, Ruth,’ I say. ‘You’re right.’
I reach over to steady the hutch door that is propped above her body.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ I say. I whisper it to her back.
We sit in the car outside St Peter’s Anglican Church. I apologise again to the rear vision mirror where Ruth and Gracie are contained. Quiet with bruised expressions on their faces. ‘I’m sorry about the shitty morning. For being scary. Shall we go in now girls, you ready?’
Just then the church bell tolls from a cream stucco tower because God is waiting.
‘I’ve still got the bad feeling,’ says Gracie and she pushes her foot into the back of my seat to show me.
‘Yeah. I know,’ I say leaning into her prodding toes, letting her feel me feel it.
A can of tomatoes and a bag of couscous, our food bank donations, eye me up from the passenger seat. I wonder for a moment whether couscous is appropriate, practical, too posh to donate. I consider hanging on to the tomatoes—could really use those myself—and feel instantly cheap. And then it hits me. I turn around and hand the girls an item each. ‘Put the bad feelings here,’ I say. ‘Let’s go give them to God.’
It's random, but it’s genuine. Gracie cracks a reluctant smile and digs her fingers into the soft plastic sides of the couscous packet.
We open the car doors and all the air rushes out and rejoins the world.
Inside the church, Ruth’s eyes start to teem, chafe on air made dusty by Bibles fingered as dollar bills.
The minister, the pastor, the priest, whatever she is—her name is Kristine—rushes over when she sees us, robed and breezy, and leans down as if to tell the girls a secret.
‘Ready for your readings girls?’ she smiles. A wide and reassuring rabbit of a smile. ‘Just remember to go slow. When I finish my lines—these ones,’ she says, as she points to the lines not in bold on the pieces of paper the girls are clutching, ‘take a breath, allow for a pause, count to three before you read your lines.’
And she points to the lines in bold that belong to the girls. The girls nod, they seem unfazed, bored even, but I can tell they’re counting to three in their heads.
Ruth’s eyes, thick with water, now hose down her cheeks and she pushes small brutal fists into the spongy orbs till they go red and she blinks.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask. ‘Are your eyes bothering you?’
‘They’re itchy,’ she replies, ‘but I’m okay. I can still read.’
I’ll admit, I feel bad. I wonder whether the water coming out of Ruth’s eyes is my fault, has been waiting all morning for a safe way to escape, and now in God’s house is finding its release.
Right on time, as though tuned in to my guilt, Mum, who is sitting on the other side of Ruth, leans across her and loud-whispers down the pew, ‘Don’t worry, this always happens to Ruth at church. I think it’s the flowers. Or the dust. Some kind of allergy; it’ll pass.’
I look around, and sure enough, myriad floral offerings, glorious and ordinary, splay out of vases and vessels on all sides—except for two arrangements that perch on the back wall either side of a gold crucifix, so glossy it seems liquified. They are fake. Plastic and conforming and immortal and dead.
A hunch-backed woman named Bess, from whose garden all the living flowers come, is threading the last few stems into a vase at the base of the pulpit, expertly arranging stalks, heads, petals, and leaves.
Bess has silver, cropped hair that on a younger woman you’d call cool and androgynous but on Bess is just plain. She has thick glasses, a moustached upper lip, stockinged legs, and a good soapy heart. She also has a garden by the sea. Sometimes she invites the parishioners over for afternoon tea in the garden. Bess bakes in a kitchen that has resisted renovation or open living—reserving the right to remain its own room. A sacred space with four walls and cupboards and shelves enough to keep jars of pickles, jams, preserves to last through a winter.
You suppose this is how she earned her hunched back. A life bent over growing flowers. It fills you with an acute tenderness. And while it’s plausible that it’s simply the flowers or the Bibles making Ruth’s eyes red and watery, you can’t help but wonder whether there’s more to it—the flowers, Ruth’s tears, Bess and her hunched back, the tender feeling—like it’s all connected, like you’re all implicated.
And then just as quickly you think, ‘For Christ’s sake, Lucia, why must you make meaning out of everything? Why must you always make meaning till you bleed?’
The internal reprimand brings me back to myself with a thud. To unease and worry and Ruth’s teeming eyes.
‘You know, you could always just get up there and tell everyone you have a touch of hay fever before you start your reading. People will understand.’
Ruth turns her clogged eyes on me, horrified.
‘No,’ she says. And that is that.
But the air between us has the stench of something said that can’t be taken back. Because before now it hadn’t occurred to Ruth that she should preface herself with a disclaimer or pre-empt the congregation’s judgement or concern. And that her own mother would prescribe it?
The interaction catches like a fairy knot—microscopic, pesky and hard to un-do.
‘I’m going to get some toilet paper,’ Ruth says, and shuffles away from me along the pew.
‘Yes,’ I think to myself like a corrected child, ‘something to dab the water from your eyes. That’s a much better idea.’
All along the pews we wait for the service to begin.
I can’t believe I spent so much of the morning in a panic, rushing to not be late. I mean, it’s not surprising really. It’s a feature that runs in our family. Hypervigilant early-ness. What also runs in the family, but hasn’t seemed to catch up with my girls as of yet, is what I call sideways crying—an excellent ability to cry openly at all manner of things. For a long time, I saw it as being very emotionally in touch. Crying at movies and TV shows, over episodes of Britain’s Got Talent, commercials, the news—weeping for it all, weeping for the world. And yet, curiously, this wearing of hearts on sleeves comes with an equally exceptional inability to cry for our actual and own tragedies and hurts. Relationship breakdowns and triangles, betrayals, absent fathers, abandoned mothers. I am at my most rational and intellectual in therapy—it really is one of the more enlightening, stimulating hours in my week. But I can’t bloody cry. For the life of me, I can’t cry then. I have to wait for an episode of Britain’s Got Talent so that the tears can come out sideways.
Ruth returns from the bathroom and sits down, a wad of toilet paper in one hand, her readings in the other. She is all set. I rest a hand on her knee, she gives me a smile and then in unison we raise our eyes to the heavens.
A large TV hangs in the upper right corner of the room. The screen will soon display the order of the service, gospel, prayers, hymns—all the words we will mouth along to, but for now it has us beamed into a service elsewhere; one of those contemporary services in which fathers and sons belt out evangelical songs of praise on electric guitars and the worshippers let loose. And well, shit. It’s not what I signed up for today. I wanted dusty, kitsch, my dad on the organ, drab chords, dry communion crackers; proper church, not this ‘God is cool’ shit.
I do my best to ignore the TV and focus on Jesus instead. A stained-glass Jesus cradling a lamb while its mother looks up in reverence. The blues and reds of the glass where colour colludes with light produce a swallowing effect, as though I’ve been imbibed into a body and I’m taking a look around the internal glow of organs, valves and veins. I start to count black and white swirls, hundreds of glassy whirls intricately etched to make the mother sheep’s fleece. I am mid-count when abruptly the TV in the corner cuts not to the order of service for the day, but to an advertisement for the management of erectile dysfunction. Shoulder-to-shoulder with Jesus, a bare-buttocked man is trying to pee. I look around. No one seems to have noticed that there’s an angel relieving himself in the rafters. But I am delighted. The word ‘penis’ in God’s house delights me. That no one is bothered charms me. In my mind I paint wings, large albatross wings, onto the man’s shoulder blades. I switch off my phone. The service begins.
And the whole thing is a splendid anticlimax. The girls deliver their readings, nailing pace, delivery, enunciation. No one bats an eyelid at Ruth’s red rims and snotty nose, and pretty soon, as mum said it would, the water in her eyes resolves. The girls wedge their readings—folded, fingered and inky—into the cracks of the pew and forget all about them. We watch our tomatoes and couscous paraded in a box with all the other donations to the front of the church and Gracie grabs my hand and grins because there they go; all our bad feelings stashed inside small acts of charity, to be metabolised by God into something good.
The sermon today is a Q+A with a woman who runs the Foodbank. I recognise her. A sort of aloof and ageless woman with buck teeth. I try to place her and then it comes to me. Her daughter was on Gracie’s soccer team for a few short weeks. The woman had come up to me at the first practice of the season, as I was settling Gracie in, pushing a stroller with a brood of kids trailing behind her, and asked me to keep an eye on her girl because she had other kids playing and she needed to spread herself around. I remember being struck by how easily she took up space, delegated the duty to me—a total stranger—and how easily I accepted even though I also had two kids playing on different pitches, even though I also needed to spread myself around. I remember feeling resentful. Like somehow I had made myself small. A single mother with never enough of herself to go around, so why bother. Put in her place by this woman with stacks of kids—and I presumed a husband somewhere sharing the load. And the woman’s daughter kept racing off in all directions, demanding attention from me like I was her mother who never had enough eyes to watch.
When the Foodbank woman is asked why people use the Foodbank, she says it’s usually because they’re in urgent need or crisis and can’t get through to welfare services. They need food now. They’ve been on hold listening to Lorde on repeat for eighty minutes and have chewed through all their phone credit. Their hunger or desperation or loneliness can’t traverse the four or five weeks of paperwork, call-backs or the gauntlet of accessing Ministry of Social Development services online. When the woman is asked who uses the food bank, she doesn’t skip a beat, is blunt and emphatic: ‘Mostly single mothers. And lonely old men.’
The air In the chapel hangs static then. The congregation wait politely for her to go on. For a longer list. But there isn’t one. The bucktoothed woman is deadpan with the facts. She looks around the room, comfortable inside the silence. Her eyes settle on me, land with what I imagine is a resounding ‘Amen.’
In the flicker of holy validation, my resentment for the woman deflates and I let myself feel, just for a moment, the hardness of the here and now. Let myself believe that sometimes a day is hard just because it is. And sometimes tongue-coloured dishwashing gloves dangle like useless hands because that’s what they are.
When the service finishes, the parishioners gather outside the vestry on a drizzly lawn for morning tea. Mum makes her way over to me, suggests I leave the girls with her for a few hours, go for a walk, read a book.
I kneel down and empty my mug of milky tea into the grass.
Then I hug the girls and tell them what a great job they did, that I will see them later.
There, but for the grace of God, go I.
Back at home the house is noisy with the girls’ absence. Grey noon light shows up nests of human hair in the carpet, fingerprints swarm like greasy bees over the fridge, cupboards, walls; a fine Bolognese mist coats the stove top. There are cat biscuits sprung like beads across a grubby kitchen floor, a mustard ring has set in around the base of the toilet. Whichever way I turn, I feel shabbier than before. But it’s disorder and gloominess I know how to treat. It’s almost pleasant in that respect.
I vacuum and scrub and vacuum and scrub until my knees and wrists ache, and I’m able to curl up on the couch and love being inside our little house again.
With the distant sounds of other people’s weekends drifting into now tidy, clean rooms, I switch on my phone to message mum and check what the girls are up to. Immediately the phone pings three or four times. Messages from Debbie.
Hi Ruth, I just wanted to see how Precious is doing...
If it’s not too much trouble, could you send me some pics?
I miss him so much!
The messages have come in, one by one, over the course of the morning while we’ve been at church. It feels like an age ago that I was next door at the rabbit hutch scolding Ruth for holding us up. I picture Ruth’s face. Debbie’s neat list of instructions with diagrams. The blanket being laid down. With phone in hand and full of tenderness I head next door to get Debbie some photos.
But redemption is short-lived, the tenderness with which I approach the rabbit hutch is quickly displaced. Something isn’t right.
I hope he’s being good for you?!
Rubber tyres are flung haphazard in the grass; the large sheet of ply that we’d so carefully put back hours earlier is half-off and hanging at an angle, as though slid in haste; the top hutch door bent back on itself and open. My stomach drops, and panic thumps me from inside my ribs. I bend over the hutch, move straw and bedding, wipe my hands through wet pellets of rabbit poo, looking for Precious, for his velveteen ears, his anxious nose and small softness. I scramble around the sides of the hutch on my knees, calling the softness, over and over, searching for movement, sick with guilt.
How has this happened. What has happened? It must be my fault.
Please give him a cuddle from me, xoxo Debbie...
I call again and my voice wobbles. How am I going to tell her? She’s going to blame Ruth. Something the size of murder bears down. And I sit there in the grass, by the orange-eyed birds-of-paradise and the violated hutch, and try to breathe. Those cold, tattered breaths again. Those bobby-pin breaths.
That’s when I feel eyes on me.
I look up at the neighbours’ house and see a figure in the window. It’s hard to make out who it is through the grey glass of reflected treetops. My thoughts clatter into a heap. I squint; lift a hand to my forehead to keep back the harsh and overbearing sky.
It’s Debbie. Debbie is at the window holding Precious to her chest. And in the moment before relief washes through me, I wonder how long she’s been there. Watching me. Looking down on me. A perfect mother with a baby in her arms.