Page 1 of Special Delivery
CHAPTER 1
The sweat had worked its way into new crevices. Literally. New crevices. Nine months ago Poppy couldn’t fill a B cup properly and would have killed for a bit of cleavage. Now, she cursed her sticky double-Ds as a bead of sweat snaked neatly between them. And butt-crack sweat, she decided, was surely life’s greatest indignity.
The lack of air-conditioning in the old LandCruiser on a thirty-seven-degree day didn’t help either. With the windows down and hot air blowing into her red face, she scanned for a car park outside the Orange Base Hospital. The nurse had warned her over the phone it would be hard to find a parking space at 11 am but Poppy hadn’t paid attention. It was Orange, for god’s sake—not Surry Hills during Mardi Gras. Now she cursed that damn nurse for not making her point more vehemently.
Poppy rolled around the car park slowly.Please, she bargained with whatever power was out there,give me a car spaceand I will repent all my sins. (And there’d been a few recently, so this was a real bang-for-your-buck deal.)
Out of the corner of her eye she noticed an SUV near the hospital’s entrance pull away from the kerb. She groaned with relief.Bingo. Revving the ailing engine, she navigated to the space and paused before pulling in. Painted on the tarmac was a clear outline of a pram and the words:PARENTS WITH PRAMS ONLY.
Her belly was straining against the steering wheel. She’d be one of those parents-with-prams in three weeks—maybe less, if this heat had any baby-dropping properties. With a foetus kicking her non-existent abs and a sweat moustache forming on her upper lip, Poppy decided to exploit this loophole. Maybe it was a sign of the new her. The new Poppy who wasn’t actually a good girl and who disregarded signage even when it was painted in shouty all caps.I’m such a badass, she thought as she steered the LandCruiser into the car space, any twinge of anxiety quickly trumped by relief at the prospect of escaping this god-awful hotbox—if only she could unstick her thighs from the vinyl seat.
It was almost as hot outside the car as in it. Her dress—yellow with cute cap sleeves—was crumpled from the drive. As she climbed out and then bent across the driver’s seat to retrieve her handbag, Poppy was vaguely conscious of her hemline fluttering up near her undies. (She wasn’t sure why she was still trying to make an effort to look nice when both the elements and her increasing fleshiness were conspiring against her, but first impressions were lasting, she reasoned, and this town was small.) That was when she heard a cough. A tall man in scrubs was hovering near her tailgate, clearlydiverting his eyes. Ah. He had definitely seen her undies. That was unfortunate.
He coughed again.
‘Yes?’ Poppy said, giving him a quick up-down. He was tall with dark blond hair, the kind her mother would describe as presidential.
‘This parking space is for parents with prams only,’ he told her. ‘You’ll have to move.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Poppy beamed at him, trying to charm her way out of this. ‘I just figured, you know …’ She gestured to her stomach. There could be no misunderstanding what was going on with her belly. She was well past the ‘could it be a big lunch?’ phase; she was in killer-whale-about-to-have-quintuplets territory.
The man just shrugged. ‘You’ll still have to move. Other people need this car space more than you.’
Poppy gritted her teeth and flashed her most saccharine smile, the one reserved for priests and parking inspectors. ‘I know it’s for parents with prams but there were no other spaces and I’m heavily pregnant so I figured it wouldn’t matter this one time.’ What she actually meant was:I am fucking pregnant and I am fucking over it, so give me a break.
He shrugged again. ‘You still have to move.’
What the hell?Poppy glared at him, all pretence at friendliness gone. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m thirty-seven weeks pregnant, I am tired, I am hot, and that car is too tall for me to keep hoisting myself in and out of. It could bring on early labour and that’s not safe for my baby.’ She cradled her belly to make her point.
‘I can assure you there’s no medical research to suggest getting into a car will incite early labour,’ he retorted. ‘So you can move.’ He crossed his arms, glaring back at her.
Poppy felt her brain implode. Who did this guy think he was? Couldn’t he see she was a tiny human with an overly large baby growing inside her? Couldn’t he see the tar literally melting under their feet? Couldn’t he see her sweat patches, for god’s sake?
‘I amnotmoving this car,’ Poppy huffed, squeezing between him and the LandCruiser to the neutral territory of the footpath. ‘If you want to make a complaint about me to the car park police, go right ahead.’ She started towards the hospital entrance then turned. ‘But let me warn you, I will mount a pretty strong counter-complaint against you, you’—she racked her brain for the perfect insult—‘you goody-two-shoes!’
Ah crap. So much for being a badass.
With as much poise as she could muster, Poppy lifted her chin and marched towards the hospital. The nerve of that guy! Hopefully her aggressive stomping would make up for the goody-two-shoes catastrophe.
She was still breathless and simmering with rage when she reached the sweet respite of the air-conditioned prenatal unit. It was shabbier than the one she’d been visiting in Sydney. It had a lived-in look, weighed down by knick-knacks on the reception desk and myriad flyers on the noticeboard. Worried about diet in pregnancy? There was a flyer for that. Need to buy a chicken coop? There was a flyer for that too.
Sitting in the waiting area, Poppy held her face up to the air-conditioning vents and closed her eyes. Maybe one day she’d look back on this moment and laugh at the ridiculousness ofher predicament. No partner, no job, just a big fat baby on the way. Hilarious! At the moment, though, all she could feel was exhaustion—from the heat, from the broken sleep and from lugging the extra kilos around. And the most exhausting thing of all? It was the decisions. So many of them. All whirring around in her head, a million threads that braided themselves into even bigger, scarier decisions. There were too many crossroads to consider at this point in her life, so in lieu of choosing one path, she chose none. That was how she’d wound up back at the same hospital where she’d been born three decades earlier. The irony made her stomach curdle.
The exchange in the car park had shaken her. She wasn’t used to feeling so tetchy. Sure, she was as anxious as any thirty-one-year-old suffering from an oily T-zone and a mild Afterpay addiction, but she was used to hiding it. In fact, she was excellent at it. At her old marketing job they’d nicknamed her Jack Johnson—as mellow as they come. She’d loved that nickname and played up to it. If one of her team missed a deadline, she’d ask herself: what would Jack do? He wouldn’t get angry. He’d drink beers around a fire, dude. If the AV cut out during a presentation? He’d hit the waves, man. It wasn’t a watertight management policy but it gave her a mystique of unflappability and, crucially, her colleagues liked her for it. (And Poppy loved being liked.)
That job felt aeons away now. It had been a world of standup desks and floor-to-ceiling windows, running for trains and racing for promotions. She’d been the office high performer, powered by overpriced caffeine and ambition, and she’d loved it. It almost hurt to think about.
‘Poppy?’ called an older lady, interrupting her thoughts. ‘You ready?’
The midwife had long grey hair which she tied back at the nape of her neck. ‘I’m Wenda,’ she said as Poppy rose to meet her. ‘I’ll be seeing you for the rest of your appointments. Then I’ll help deliver bub.’ She strode down the corridor and motioned for Poppy to follow. ‘It’s a shame we’re only getting to know each other now. Usually I prefer for us to go through the whole journey together, but hey ho—we roll with the punches, hey.’
It was a statement, not a question, so Poppy didn’t reply.
‘This is us,’ said Wenda, unlocking a grey door with peeling plastic letters that declared it to be Office 3.
‘You’ve got your yellow card,’ said Wenda—again, more statement than question.
‘Yes, here,’ said Poppy, fishing the dog-eared piece of cardboard from her handbag. She sat on the patients’ chair and handed the midwife the story of her pregnancy, chronicled in neat black lines on a butter-yellow background.
