You stupid fuck.
I hate you. I need you. I love you.
Mim wants to lie down and curl herself around her children.
She remembers putting Essie down in her cot, the rituals of protection. Tucking her in under organic flannel sheets pulled tight to the edge, no toys, so there is no way she can get caught, tangled, smothered. A sensor pad will sound an alarm if it cannot pick up the regular movement of Essie’s breath. A camera in the bear on the bookshelf, a monitor to test the air. Mim dutifully records her daughter’s feeds on the FeedApp, which syncs with her FitApp and posts daily records of how much Essie has grown and the rate at which Mim has failed to shrink. There can be no surprises, and if there are, the data will be logged and seen and corrected and all will be well. In this way, they stumble through.
Safe.
But always, from the very beginning, that throb deep inside, what had been part of her is now outside of her. The terror of what is beyond her control, the first moment of clarity: I will feel like this forever.
3
It’s a ten-hour drive from their home in the suburban fringe of the city to the farm, barrelling up the highway, cutting clean across the wide brown northern reaches of the state and crossing the border to dip down into what was once the fertile plains of the food bowl of New South Wales. No one calls it that anymore, of course.
It takes an age to leave the fringe, extended as it has to meet the fringes of the regional centres coming towards them. At least they generate a shitload of energy. All those roofs with all those solar panels, nothing shading them. No trees at all but for the very last of the river red gums dotted sporadically, monuments now to the lives that were lost trying to protect them in the years of eco-terrorism. Native grasses do well. Succulents. The genetically modified perennials designed to attract the genetically modified bees. There was no collapse in the end. Not the kind they expected, anyway.
She knows there is a BestLife estate out this way. Not the one Michael was in, that was in the west.
She remembers the visit. They must have had better water allocation on the estates. Blossoming eucalypts clustered at the edge of the front gates, almost camouflaging the glass gatehouse. The gates, imposing and yet aesthetic, rustic iron hinged onto enormous hunks of sculpted sandstone. It could have been a peninsula winery but for the uniformed guard, who cheerily directed Mim to place her hand on the screen. It looked exactly like a ticket dispenser to get into a parking lot, except this time she didn’t get anything back. As she drove through, she noticed the cameras, the black bulbs of them under each of the architecturally designed streetlights. Who the fuck did they think wanted to get in here that bad?
Michael had agreed to her visit. She supposed that’s why they let her in. But still, she hadn’t spoken to him beforehand. It just came through as an alert on her screen: Approved visit to BestLife, Bacchus Marsh. It took her an hour and a half to drive there. Her breasts were swollen and hard and her left was beginning to leak. She needed to feed Essie.
The estate looked no different to the sprawling new suburbs that had multiplied cancerously in the paddocks on the outskirts of the city when she first moved down. Cookie-cutter houses with imposing front doors and drought-tolerant front yards. There were blocks of townhouses, double storey only, so that the whole place had a country estate feel. A sign ahead told her she was passing a Learning Sanctuary: a safe place for your child to thrive. A canopy of lush trees peeked from behind the high fences. She lowered her window and could hear the kids squealing, a green ball popped high in the air above the fence. For all she wanted to mock it, to be suspicious of the immaculate spin of it all, she thought perhaps they really had done what they said they would: changed the trajectory of people’s lives, given them a second chance.
Michael’s townhouse looked just like the rest of them, heavy door flanked by the ubiquitous black bulbs of the cameras. She thought about poking her tongue out at them but didn’t. She could have used the capsule to bring Essie in but she wrapped her in the sling instead. For her brother’s approval. She thought he might change his mind if he saw that baby Essie was so clearly part of his sister. Tethered to her. That Mim was using old ways to be a mother. Doing it consciously.
He opened the door and he was, for a moment, himself. An eagerness, delight even in his eyes, his mouth. Later she thought he was high, he was just high.
‘Hello, Mim,’ he said and leaned forward to usher her in, peering curiously at the package strapped to her chest, the little fist that had escaped and was resting against Mim’s shirt. ‘This is her?’
It was so good to see him. He looked better than he had in years. They must have been making sure he ate, it must have been part of the deal. Fuck, she had missed him.
‘My boobs are gonna burst,’ she said, instead of hugging him fiercely, letting the last nine months go unspoken. ‘Let me inside so I can feed her, then you can have a hold.’
On the couch she unswaddled her child, unclipped the maternity bra, pulled across her shirt. He looked away at first as she held her daughter’s head firmly, squeezed the tender points of her jaw to help her clamp her hungry mouth against her darkened nipple. The sound of it, perhaps, was what made him look, the gulping slosh of the milk being sucked from Mim’s ducts and into the tiny body.
‘How does she do that?’ he said, face open in astonishment.
‘Ferociously,’ Mim said and snorted. ‘And cos I’m what is keeping her alive.’
‘That’s…’ he shook his head. ‘I didn’t…’
She looked at her brother’s face, saw that this might be the thing to sway him. But she was suddenly engorged with jealousy, that his tenderness was all for her daughter and not for her.
‘It’s been really fucking hard,’ she said, and he looked up, surprised perhaps at the bitterness in her voice.
She told him, some of it anyway, and he listened and Essie slept, milk drunk, against her, and for an hour or so it was something like it used to be. The room was small but new and bright and clean. She was glad for her brother, thinking of some of the dank places she’d gone to meet him when he was deep in the clutches of ice. He was mellow, too much so, she thought at one point, and she asked about the clinical trial. What it involved.
It was cutting edge, the pharmacological team were just ironing out the last glitches in the prescription doses. He said he was feeling optimistic, like this was his chance to really get somewhere.
‘I’m a new person,’ he said.
‘Maybe you could come and stay with us for a bit when it’s over?’ Mim said, thinking about keeping him safe, helping him to stay clean.
He looked surprised. ‘Oh, I can’t leave.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s in the contract.’
‘During the trial?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s how I get the house, the payments, all of it.’
She guffawed. ‘What, you signed a contract to say you’ll stay here forever?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re fucking kidding me, right?’ Essie squirmed on her chest, grizzled.
‘It’s okay. It’s what I want. This project will change the way people treat addiction all over the world, change the way drugs are regulated, save hundreds and thousands of lives.’