Ashe Davenport - Sad Mum Lady

My upstairs neighbour and I were home a lot, me being 40 weeks pregnant and Tom a reclusive drug addict. We kept similar hours, sleeping most of the day and shuffling to and from the toilet of a night-time. He shared the apartment with his mother Vivienne, a 70-something ex-private school board member with a shimmering silver up-do. After the divorce, Vivienne sold her florist business and bought the place because of its proximity to the city. She figured her retirement as a sophisticated single woman would be best spent enjoying Melbournes art and food scene, and hadnt planned on her 40-year-old son moving home to burst her bubble with an ice shard.

In the years before Toms arrival, Sam and I had happily co-existed with Vivienne. Our duplex featured stained-glass windows, a sun-drenched courtyard and cheap rent, thanks to a benevolent landlord who had retired to her country home. We knew the milk bar owners kids names and had been on the waitlist for the local daycare centre for a year. It was the perfect place to start our parenting journey.

Vivienne got a job as a receptionist so she could financially support her troubled son. In return, Tom invited strangers into her living room for three-day drug benders when she was down the coast. Given our apartment was one of two, there was little mystery as to where the smell of burning chemicals or the sound of drum and bass was coming from. To get to the party, Toms guests would first have to get past me, the pregnant troll in the stairwell assuming a wide-legged power stance and interrogating them about their life choices.

Do you realise youre about to enter an elderly womans home without her consent? Id ask, turning to profile so my belly could serve as a physical obstacle as well as an emotional one. Is that a choice youre comfortable with? How dare you squeeze past me like that. If you keep me awake I will GOBBLE YOU UP!

I managed to quash a few of the parties, but the feeling of satisfaction was fleeting. Tom would fall behind on the money he owed drug dealers, and shaky demanding strangers would appear outside our building for weeks afterwards. Some scrawled letters and taped them to the security gate. Others attempted to break into the upstairs apartment via my outdoor setting in the courtyard.

Tom refused to answer the door to anyone, especially me. He ignored my passive aggressive notes and aggressive aggressive Facebook friend requests. I tried accosting Vivienne on bin night, to which she responded by explaining her son could have as many guests round as he liked, as if he were hosting a book club, while above us on the balcony her urine-soaked couch cushions aired their grievances.

When the pregnancy clock struck 41 weeks, I switched my phone off to avoid the increasingly frequent calls and texts asking if Id had that baby yet?! Sam became my sole contact with the outside world and my mothers only news source. Id removed her contact privileges after she texted me a four-leaf clover emoji on what she had decided was my due date. It wasnt the date on my file at the hospital, but rather the one my mother had devised from her own calculations and marked in her diary as the day she would welcome her first grandchild. Shed asked to be in the delivery room and I hadnt had the heart to say nothat is, until I received the fateful clover.

How is that helpful in any way? I seethed into the phone, pacing the nature strip.

Oh, youre being ridiculous, she said. It was a bit of fun!

The next-door neighbour turned off her hose and inspected the roses near the fence.

I dont want you there during the birth. You never even asked me. Its not what I want.

Youre just saying that to hurt me, she said.

Its not about you! Hi, Carole No, still no baby Yep, planning on a vaginal birth, thanks for asking Mum, are you there? Mum?

Sam was my birth partner, PR manager and pizza delivery boy all rolled into one, but unfortunately he also had a job he was required to be at Monday to Friday, which left me alone with my thoughts. The hours meandered by. I passed the time packing and repacking my hospital bag, staring from the doorway of the quiet nursery and obsessing over Tom. The art deco era may have blessed our building with stained-glass window features, but it also meant shit was old. The ceiling creaked and groaned with every move Tom made and my neck and shoulders tightened accordingly. Each creak was a reminder that his next bender was just around the corner, and that life as a parent was going to be frustrating and unpredictable thanks solely to Tom. A healthy response might have been to step away from the neutral-toned onesies and go for a walk, but instead I sank deeper into the couch under the groaning ceiling, dreaming of scenarios that would lead to Tom moving out.

I imagined coming home to discover him lying in the stairwell, breathing shallowly, having fallen down the stairs on his way to the shops. Id cradle his head in my lap while we waited for the ambulance, the frailness of his injured body suddenly revealing the fragility of his soul. His pain would flash before my eyes in vivid detailhis absent father, perhaps some vicious bullying he endured at the notoriously toxic boys school of which his mother was on the board, his lack of self-belief, his loneliness, his drug use being the only way he knew how to feel like he belonged, if only for a moment. My tears would rain down on him in a water birth of my higher self. Due to the spinal injury, Tom would move to a long-term rehab centre where he would fall in love with his physiotherapist, with whom he would eventually move to a remote island off the coast of New Zealand. Despite Viviennes joy over her sons newfound happiness, his absence would leave a void in her life, which she would fill by babysitting my child any time of the day or night.

I awoke one afternoon from such a reverie to the sound of Toms doorbell. I was 40-weeks plus ten days, or preg af , as I believe it is referred to in the medical profession. I rolled off the couch into a kneeling position and waited, listening for any movements upstairs like a barn owl locating its prey. There was a single creak, then nothing. I heaved myself into a standing position and padded down the hallway to the nursery, the window of which looked out onto the security entrance. Standing at the gate was the same woman who had rung Toms doorbell several times that week. She looked young and far from home.

Tom! she yelled. Open the door, please!

I gathered shed left something behind and was trying to get it back. Tom and Vivienne had been home during each of her previous attempts to do so, and hadnt come to the door. The cast-iron doorbells in our building could be heard from a block away, so its safe to say this was no accident. Seeing the lights on upstairs, the young woman had grown more frustrated with each visit and had taken to pressing on the bell for minutes at a time. It was loud from our apartment, but upstairs it must have been face-melting. I imagined Tom hiding under the doona of his childhood bed while Vivienne banged dishes around the kitchen sink, humming maniacally until the girl called it quits for the night.

Please! she said, crying now. I just need my keys! I cant get into my accommodation!

I imagined her bag stuffed deep under Toms bed, having taken on the significance of the telltale heart.

Just throw my keys in the laneway and youll never see me again! she persisted.

My heart went out to her. Also, I felt that I could leverage her situation to achieve the Ultimate Goal of getting Tom evicted, and so I went to the gate to meet her.

Hes home, just so you know, I said, leaning heavily against the wheelie bin inside the security entrance. I can hear him scurrying around up there. I live in the apartment downstairs. Are you okay?