Fiction

Timbrell

I had forgotten the name of the park, and its general location: neither of those had mattered much four years ago. There was the jolt of recognition when I pulled up, though, a scree of it over my next movements, unloading the boys from the back seat and their enormous cricket bags from the boot, walking them across the dew-damp oval where two coaches, barely more than adolescent themselves, stood waiting beside a pile of stumps. I stood back while their mother did the talking, wiped wet blades of grass out of my sandals.

I drove away, but all day, that day, I kept walking circles of the park’s perimeter in my mind, the dog careening after the unwieldy oversized stick she would bring back to me, again and again, grunting out a single bark if I took too long to throw it. Liv beside me, in her sensible shoes and zip-up fleece, ever practical, even or especially with so much raging through her heart.

They were strange days then. It seems almost too obvious to say.

Liv had chosen this park, that I didn’t know and had never been to, because it was the only one remaining within the overlap of our respective five-kilometre radii from our homes. Just the week before, when the limit had been twice that, we’d met in Petersham Park, walked a more familiar loop around its sunken playing field, past its bleachers, through its coppice of giant fig trees throwing out their cool and earthy scent. She had told me then that she was three days pregnant, due for a scan at her clinic in three more. I’m telling you now, she said, because whatever happens next, I’m going to need you.

She had been, I knew, so close to giving up on this pregnancy that she had longed for, the months of attempts so constant a burden on her body and her heart. The last time we had walked there, maybe a fortnight before, we’d talked of models of family without children, of different ways to distribute love, of a tearful conversation with her husband where she had offered him the chance to leave. Her despair and her desire, the depth of them: I had carried these with me, hurting for her, for days.

Then those days, mid-morning or early afternoon, when we walked here in our long, slow laps, she talked about the strange chemistry of her changing body, the way she was dreaming about her high school with an intensity that sometimes stayed sitting in her chest for hours after waking. It’s funny, she said, I didn’t think I was miserable then. But I really was. I nodded, but I didn’t speak, I didn’t need to. She knows I was too.

We walked past two pigtailed children running up and down a hill, with a skinny puppy yipping at their heels. One of them shouting, Cupcake! Cupcake! and it took us both a moment to realise that this was the dog’s name. There were casuarinas thickly planted in this corner of the park, their sectioned needle-leaves crunchy on the path, and we couldn’t see the fences or the houses here, could almost imagine, for a moment, that we were somewhere wild.

Liv had an app already, for tracking her pregnancy. Week by week, it told her what she might experience in her body; week by week it told her, your baby is the size of a strawberry seed, a blueberry, a grape, an apricot, a kiwi fruit, a lemon. What’s with all the fruit, I said. I know, she answered, it’s very imprecise. One week, she was furious because after the lemon came a lime. I’m sure there’s some place in the world, I said, where a lemon is smaller than a lime. Still, she said. It’s imprecise.

We walked slowly, past the set of goalposts starkly white against the sky, the scraggy, blush-coloured eucalypts beside the road. When I return, after the intervening years, these will be roped off, thick ribbons of hazard tape encircling their mulched bases where asbestos has been found, but at the time we paid them no regard. My friend was afraid. She was excited, of course she was, for the child she had so long wanted, but she was scared for all that it might come with, all that it would mean. She was afraid, she told me, of slipping back into that listless sorrow that she worked so hard to leave behind, she was afraid she might be unequal to the task at hand. She was afraid because she couldn’t imagine what her future looked like, because she could not understand the baby as anything other than an abstraction. Of course you can’t, I said, how could you possibly imagine something for which you have no reference points at all.

We walked slowly, increasingly so across the weeks. Her gait changed early, not into a waddle but something sloping and low, and she told me about elastin, the protein a pregnant body produces in abundance, to soften and stretch the muscles that make carrying, and then delivering, a baby possible. I was awe-struck: I’d never heard of this before, and I tried to say as much, but she grimaced and cut me off. Thing is, she said, it doesn’t happen evenly and my hips have gone all wonky.

I too was afraid. For her, but also for us. I didn’t quite realise this until much later, after the baby was born, this sense I had that this woman, whom I adore and whose steady companionship has meant so much to me for so many years, might be moving beyond my ken.

There is so much we were circling, at that time. That walking like marking time, like a suspension.

Four days of this – their mother doesn’t drive – of dropping the two boys off in the morning and watching their skinny legs flick off across the field, of picking them back up at 3pm and watching them cajole her into taking them for ice-cream on the way home. Four days of this stop-start rhythm and of this sense of everything I once knew speeding up around me, of having somehow lost my footing as it did so. Of all this ache and all this wonder, tightly entwined.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 5, 2025 as "Timbrell".

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