Anticipation Read Online Free

Maggie expects of a husband. Roger himself, near-orphan that he is, sent to boarding school at the age of six, has fewer preconceptions of the role. He’s providing well, which seems a good start. He buys flowers for his wife, kisses her hello and goodbye, sometimes takes her dancing. If more is required, then surely somebody will tell him.
    While my father spreads the good word up State Highway 6, my mother is not idle. Not for her the solitary wait, duster in hand, for doorbells and disaster. She has a job of her own — quite a good one, in fact, as a journalist for the
Oreti Reporter
. Maggie is paying into a pension fund, and is co-signed on the mortgage.
    She’s worked her way up from the lowest grade of cadet, and she no longer has to cover the junior netball games at eight on Saturday mornings. She gets the big stuff now, like the new tea kiosk in Queens Park, and the Women’s Institute show — she even fills in, sometimes, on the
Reporter
’s pièce de résistance, a handicrafts column called ‘Dear Dinah’.
    Let’s join her for a moment now, alone on the couch on a Friday night, her swollen ankles up, knitting a pair of bootees (unisex green — Maggie was never one to take chances). By the thorough light of a hundred-watt bulb, it appears a peaceful scene — the second-hand suite made nice with a crocheted rug, the fire safe behind its guard, ‘Four Strong Winds’ on the radio — but while my mother’s busy needles click, something inside her is growing.
    It’s not just me. I’m coming along well enough, hatching functions by the day. But there’s something else in here as well, something felted and dark, less sure of its own pattern. My tender synapses are intrigued. What is it we’re making?
    The next morning Maggie takes us to visit Nanny Biggs, who seizes the opportunity to pour us all a gin and lemonade. Thataccomplished, the excitement of our visit palls. She has no interest in the shiny yellow baby book that Maggie has brought to show her.
    (In another few months there’ll be a photograph of my grandmother inside it, holding newborn me in her arms with an expression bordering on horror. A sagging woman, straggle-browed and baggy-eyed, a muddle of Instamatic greys, her dark roots showing. She’s only forty-eight, but she might as well be a hundred. Sarah Biggs has let herself go, as they used to say in those days. Growing up, I always thought it sounded rather pleasant. Now I’m approaching that age myself I understand a little better. Sarah is drifting like a rogue weather balloon, still going round and round with the earth, but no longer to any purpose.)
    The yellow baby book sets out a number of demands. Dutiful Maggie has come for help with page two — naming the curly pink and blue leaves of Baby’s Family Tree.
    Her mother doesn’t give her much. A corned beef sandwich. Sarah’s mother’s maiden name.
    Maggie crunches away, down the old pink seashell path that had, to a girl fresh off the
Southern Cross
, seemed so exotic. A dead end now. As we drive through the neat and empty streets we feel a wave of something black. Perhaps it’s indigestion.

    On a thin September day in ’69, nominally spring, Maggie gives birth to me. It’s a crushing experience for us both. I form no memory of it at all — a result, no doubt, of millennia of natural selection. After all, if we were forced to carry the weight of such trauma with us, where would we go from here?
    It’s fair to assume that Maggie’s recall is hazy as well, thanks to exhaustion and pethidine, but I can’t say for sure. We’re not as close as we were. From here on in, I’ll never really know what’s going on inside my mother. Indeed, I don’t see her again for a while.
    Eventually, of course, the hospital has to discharge us. Outside we teeter, Maggie and I, back together again on a kerb between tulip beds and an ocean-swept grey sky.
    Wide, flat days pass. My baby book is not filled out. The Plunket nurse is worried.