Normal Woman at the Saturday Morning Farmer’s Market

I meet Evette for lunch at a busy cafe in the sun. We don’t live together anymore, but she still lives in the same apartment in Elwood, where we used to watch the neighbours fucking from the balcony. Evette knows the waiter at this café and he clears us a table on the footpath. The light dapples the table.

When the waiter returns with two menus, Evette says, “This is my sister.”

He looks at me with a different smile, a tighter smile, than when I was just an anonymous friend.

“The sister! I’ll bring you a mimosa.”

“No, thank you, just orange juice,” I say. I have to give up alcohol again. I feel it deep inside of me, the pain settling back in.

“Okay.”

He returns with a glass of orange juice and a bloody mary I didn’t notice Evette order. When he sets Evette’s drink down, he brushes her shoulder, his fingers in her hair for a moment.

“Did he just touch you?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, and swirls the stalk of celery in her drink.

Later, he touches me when we’re leaving, a broad hand on my back. I jolt.

It wasn’t my idea to get the puppy, but I am the one who wakes in the night when she cries.

Jonah and I spend Saturday morning at the farmer’s market in the local primary school’s playground. He wears the broad-brimmed hat that he only ever wears on Saturday mornings when we come to the farmer’s market. Earlier that morning, when we were still in bed, he planned a menu for the week.

I said, I don’t want to plan everything I eat for the next week.

He said, That’s the best way to save money.

I said, I’m not interested in saving money.

He said, We need to save money.

I said, Why?

And he didn’t reply, just got up and got dressed and wrote a little list on his phone.

I trail behind Jonah, drinking a coffee that tastes slightly burnt, an empty string bag handing from my bent elbow, the puppy pulling on her lead. He doesn’t turn his head, not event slightly, to check that I’m still with him, not even at the baker’s stall when he is choosing the bread. He chooses the dark sourdough. I wish he’d chosen the light one. At the stall where the loud woman sells eggs, I stand beside him, so he knows I am there, that I also plan on eating this food we’re buying.

“Are you going to eat eggs?”

“I’m not sure, maybe,” I say. I never know how I am going to feel about eggs until I’ve cracked them and scrambled them or poached them or fried them and they’re sitting on the plate in front me, sweating.

“So, should I get a dozen? Half a dozen?”

“A dozen?”

“But are you going to eat them if I get a dozen!”

I float away, melt away, go look at a stall selling micro greens. The puppy pulls at my shoelaces. When I find him later, Jonah is buying a bottle of hemp infused gin. I don’t even bother reminding him that I’ve had to give up alcohol again. The pain is vibrating deep inside me.

Her first week with us, the puppy refuses to eat from her bowl. I spoon feed her every morning and night.

The woman standing in front of me has blood dripping from her right heel. We’re waiting at the pedestrian lights, waiting for the little man to turn green. A blister has burst and rubbed itself into a deep cut. The blood is soaking the back of her sandal, bright red. Cars flash past, a tram rumbles, I can’t stop looking at the blood. It starts to drip off her shoe, spread in a dark pool at her feet. I can see my reflection in it, the outlines of me blurred.

I am late meeting Evette, but she doesn’t say anything about it. We are at a pub on Smith Street, across the road from the cafe where she knows the waiter. She sits with her back to the cafe.

“What are you drinking?” she asks.

“Soda water.”

“With lemon or lime?”

I think about it for a moment, “Lime.”

She nods and goes into the pub. I sit back in my chair, rock slightly on the back legs, testing it, I let my head drop back, close my eyes and swing, imagining the shadows from the oak tree slashing across my face, blood seeping from shallow wounds. The beer garden is pretty full, but I can only hear two voices clearly above the murmur of collective conversation.

The first voice (deep, confident) says, Yeah, my dad, he had that triple bypass – didn’t even have a heart attack, the doctors got in before that. The second voice (also deep, also confident) says, Ah fuck, that’s rough. Good though.

The first voice says, They say that you’re never truly the same after someone has touched your heart – like literally, physically touched it. And you know, I saw that with my father.

The second voice says, Right, yeah, really?

The first voice says, Yeah, he just cries all the time now.

I open my eyes and sit up when Evette places the schooner of soda water on a coaster in front of me. Across the road, the waiter waves at her, but she sits down without acknowledging him.

When I pick the puppy up from the vet, the young vet nurse says, ‘It’s just like if you or I had a hysterectomy.’

Jonah and I go to the hospital on Thursday evening. This is not the first time I’ve visited a boyfriend’s sister in the maternity ward. It’s not the first time I’ve stood back from the bed while the family cooed. Just like last time, his sister’s hair is flat and matted against her scalp, and just like last time, I wish I hadn’t come.

Jonah sits in a chair by the window and his mother passes him the red, wrinkled baby. He looks down at the baby and then up at me and his eyes shine. I look at his sister, with her head tilted to the side, so she can watch as her baby is passed around the room.

I’m shaking my head before they even offer me the baby. I have to step backwards. Jonah’s sister’s head swivels to watch me refuse to hold her new child.

Just like last time, I can feel the churn of our life faltering as we walk down the quiet corridor. The night sky is big and inky and I shiver as we search for the car. When we find it, Jonah says, ‘You really don’t have a maternal bone in your body, do you?’

For a moment I’m confused, thinking he is talking about forgetting where we parked

the car.

We get in the car. I say, “No, I told you that.”

“I thought seeing a baby would change it.”

“I’ve seen a baby before. I’ve never felt the urge.”

He says something under his breath that I don’t catch, but by the time we get home, I realise he said, “A normal woman would.”

I want to ask if the vet nurse knows how hard it is for her or I to get a hysterectomy, but I just kiss the puppy’s soft head.

We go for dinner in the city. The night is balmy and my thighs are tacky with sweat. We Uber to the restaurant and the driver is listening to kookaburra noises. Jonah taps his finger against the inside of my wrist the whole drive.

We sit at an outside table in Federation Square and the waiter brings us a menu. He fills our glasses with chilled water.

We order food. Jonah orders a craft beer. I stick with the water. The food comes on sharing plates – pulled wild boar with river mint yogurt dressing, Warrigal greens and saltbush damper, charred figs with desert raisin dukkah, a whole bowl of Goolwa pipis.

Jonah eats one pipi, two pipi, and then pushes the bowl away from him.

“Tastes like mud,” he says.

But they don’t taste like mud. They taste sweet and nutty. I eat the whole bowl.

We walk further into the city to find gelato. My phone buzzes in bag and I stop to fish it out. Tourists stream around me. It is Evette. I answer and she is crying. Her breaths are big gulps.

“What is it? What is it?'“ I ask. I am jostled by the crowd. Jonah continues walking up

the street.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Evette says eventually. She has self-soothed, but her voice is still shaking. I close my eyes and I see the waiter she knows raising his hand in a wave from across Smith Street. I open my eyes and I’ve lost sight of Jonah.

Evette tells me not to come to her, that she’ll be fine, and when I find Jonah watching old Chinese women pull noodles in the window of the restaurant, he says, “Do you always have to answer the phone when Evette rings?”

“She’s my sister.”

When we get the gelato, we eat it in silence. There is a girl sobbing in the Uber Pool on the drive home. I sit next to her. Jonah gets in the front passenger seat.

The puppy wets herself with excitement when we walk through the front door. I soak it up with paper towel.

Jonah is wearing his broad-brimmed hat. The puppy is still wearing her cone. There is a pain pinging its way around my pelvis. We haven’t had sex for a week because of it. Jonah has a list of groceries on his phone.

There is a man set up with a microphone under a flowering gum in the middle of the market. He’s wearing a sombrero and singing Mexican children's songs. A crowd of kids jig around him.

Jonah buys eggs and bread. I buy a croissant and eat it. I am covered in flakes. When I pick up the puppy as we walk across the market to the spice stall, she licks the crumbs from my chest.

I buy tri-coloured peppercorn and pink rock salt. Jonah passes me a packet of green cardamom.

As I’m paying, a man starts yelling from somewhere in the market. He is calling for his son.

“Marcus! Marcus!”

The spice vendor asks if I want a receipt. I shake my head as I turn towards the man. He’s grabbed hold of the Mexican singer’s microphone.

“Marcus!” His voice booms and then crackles with static. “Marcus, come to daddy.”

“Are we eating meat this week?” I ask Jonah. He looks at me and then back at the father at the microphone.

“That man has lost his son.”

“He’ll find him,” I said. “Do we need meat?”

Jonah nods. The man continues to call in the microphone. I walk the puppy to the butcher’s trailer. The back doors are wide open. I can feel the refrigerated air as I look at all the vacuum packaged meat.

“Marcus!”

I pick up a package to read the label. Lamb heart. I turn to show it to Jonah, but he isn’t there. He’s under the flowering gum, talking to the father with the missing son. The father is crying, his arms flailing. I watch as Jonah runs to the other end of the market, where the school buildings are clustered. I hear him calling for the lost child.

I turn back to the meat. I smile at the butcher. I am a normal woman at the Saturday morning farmer’s market buying lamb heart.