The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop Page A

born, she spent hour upon hour lying on the bed with the baby and making gooing noises. It was a surprise to see Henry at the end of the day. Sheremembers looking at his head and thinking, My, what a big face you have. How foolishly large adults seemed then, how odd-looking they became—almost monstrous—with their sprouting tufts of hair and yellowed eyes and slabs of flesh and creases.
    Next to her, three women lean in towards one another, gossiping. Two friends confiding in the third. The first woman says, “She looked like a prostitute, didn’t she, love?” All three guffaw.
    Then the second woman. “She was dressed like that to pick the kid up and she goes to me, ‘Does little Bertie want to come and play? We’ve got a new tarantula.’ ”
    â€œShe must have been joking—” says the third woman.
    â€œNo!” The first again now. “She tells us, ‘Don’t worry, it’s in a glass case and everything.’ ”
    â€œThen we saw her, didn’t we,” continues the second, “later that afternoon, getting her shopping out of the boot, still wearing those silver stilettos, with those boobs. She looked like a prostitute, didn’t she?”
    â€œI just have to look at those shoes and I get a nosebleed.”
    â€œShe used to be a hairdresser.”
    â€œYou’d never know from the look of her.”
    â€œLooks like she’s got a cat on her head.”
    A small child in bright red trousers runs up to Charlotte. “I’m a boy,” he says. “My name’s Michael.” Then he runs off again and disappears into the throng of toddlers. She realizes that she doesn’t know how to make friends. She came to the playgroup to make friends, but now that she is here she doesn’t know what to say, what to do. Who is she now? There must be something she can tell them. The mothers who know each other talk about their children. They exchange facts concerning the hours their children sleep, what they will or won’t eat, and swap advice on remedies for colds or stomachache. Or they gossip, cruelly, likethis, about the women who don’t fit in. Charlotte doesn’t want to talk about her girls. She knows no one is really interested in hearing about them and that the other women share anecdotes as a way of boasting about their offspring, not because they are genuinely interested in other people’s children. Besides, when she speaks people look at her uncertainly. They pause in conversation, then say, “You’re not from around here, are you?” And Charlotte explains, her exclusion immediate, her status as an outsider everlasting. “Are you English, or just educated Australians?” asked the man from the nursery when he came to deliver three poplar saplings for Henry to plant by the back fence.
    Across the room a boy slips on a toy truck and crashes down hard on his face. There is an awful silence as his mother gathers the limp, quiet child into her arms, then the air cracks open with a loud, breathless wail like the one you wait for when a child first slithers into the world.
    â€œIs there blood?”
    â€œHe won’t let me look.”
    â€œI’ll fetch ice.”
    The child starts to roar. Charlotte hears the way his voice ­catches against the soft wet membrane of his throat. In the meantime the fat pianist begins telling a story and the other children gather around on the cold wooden floor. Two teddy bears travel on a boat to a desert island. In the bottom of the boat they find a map with an X marking the place of buried treasure. They follow the map past a volcano, past a very tall tree, past a swamp, and find the treasure ­buried on a far beach. The bears dig and dig until out of the hole comes a jeweled box. “What do you think is in it?” the fat woman asks.
    â€œGold!” cries one boy, leaping up and down with his hand in the air.
    â€œAlligators!” says