The Beaumont Mother- M. Lambie- Year 11

“Out with you all! I just need some quiet!”

Nancy feebly leaned down, gathering the two halves of the broken plate, fingers trembling with a subdued exhaustion.

Moments earlier, her three children had been assembling chaos around her small kitchen; now, they froze. The heat always made them infuriatingly restless. They had screamed and teased and chittered, refusing Nancy’s pleas of desperation to sit down and play nicely.

She’d never yelled at them, though. Not until today.

Jane, the eldest, hung her neck low. She’d been balancing plates to amuse Arnna and Grant when her mother’s favourite willow-patterned china inevitably slipped, tumbling towards the sweating linoleum floor and breaking with a terrible crack.

Now, she looked at her mother, and her heart sank. Her mother had lost weight recently; her eyes were permanently dulled by an aching sense of fatigue, and she appeared to move in slow-motion, gazing trance-like past the children whenever they spoke to her.

Today, Jane sensed an extra layer of depletion. So, she firmly grabbed both siblings by the arm, grasped at a stack of crisp, perfectly folded beach towels, and hurried to the front door.

“We’ll go to the beach. We’ll be back by one.”

Nancy seemed not to hear, staring listlessly at the fractured mosaic laying before her.

Jane’s guilt deepened and expanded.
“I’m sorry about the plate, Mum.”

The front door groaned and whined, shutting with a gentle click.

***

Nancy stood, still and compressed in the dry rasp of the Australian summer heat, watching the last charcoal-black wheels of the children’s bus disappear behind a squat yellow-bricked house on the corner. The searing road rippled and hissed, disturbed by the tread of tyre. Nancy felt a strange sensation, as if she, too, were the road, bending and fracturing under a pressing weight –

She carefully set both jagged halves of the plate on the countertop, and clasped together the calloused heels of each of her palms. A tight, decisive squeeze wrung out any trace of the inexplicable feeling. Nancy brushed a short, sweat-streaked curl across her forehead, contemplating her prior reprimands of Jane. Had she been too harsh? It was just a plate, after all.

It wasn’t the plate.

It was the choking heat, the noise, the endlessness of the days. It was the way the tight walls seemed to close in on her, how the dense, prickling hot air refused to move.

Habitually, she circled the dining table, assembling teetering stacks of cloudy, clinking drinking glasses and smeared dirty plates, before turning on the sink. Today, it spluttered and wheezed, sending out mouthfuls of sun-scorched pipe water and clouds of steam. Nancy struggled to scrub the crumbs off Arnna’s plate, clotted together with tacky drops of jam, because the water was just a little too hot, So, when her hands emerged from the wash water tinged fuchsia and throbbing, she set aside the remaining dishes for later.

Outside, the Hills Hoist stood, immortalised in the stagnant warmth, but whenever Nancy hung a new shirt, it seemed to bow and sag a little under the weight, as if melting in response to the torturous summer weather. The ghostlike silhouettes of the children’s clothes cast onto the decayed grass with an unnerving stillness.

She checked her wristwatch. One-thirty.

The quiet no longer provided such comfort and peace as Nancy hoped it would – instead, a nauseating unease sat at the bottom of her throat, fizzing softly.

The enthusiastic chittering of children’s voices drew her to the window. Buses filled with bronzed strangers dumped their contents on to the side of the road. Nancy searched, agonizingly, for the familiar stripe of Jane’s bathers, for Arnna’s frayed straw hat, or Grant’s emerald-green beach towel. Yet, she was merely met with the regretful sight of dismissive parents and crimson-faced strangers, weary in the heat.

Two-thirty. The doorway remained distressingly vacant.

She continued her routine, folding washing that didn’t need folding, rearranging the fruit bowl she’d only curated half an hour prior; convincing herself of certain uncertainties. Maybe they’d just gone for a longer swim. Perhaps there’d been a queue at the ice-cream parlour.

She reimagined Jane’s lively actions, her wide, eye-to-eye grin stretching across her inspired face as she took on the role of entertainer in her mother’s emotional absence. The breakage was made amidst a moment of enthusiasm – it was a simple mistake. A childish, carefree mistake.

Nancy wished she hadn’t yelled.

Three o’clock. The house felt enormous in the heaviness of the quiet. Nancy practiced her monotonous rotation. She dusted spotless side table and pedantically smoothed non-existent creases from each child’s bed, but an entrenched line of concern on her forehead continued to grow.

Her wristwatch limped through five o’clock.

The last bus of the day emerged, lumbering across a rippling mirage of suffocating heat, with viscous jet-black tar clutching to the hind wheels. It rolled to a lazy stop, and only a bitter-faced businessman, and an elderly lady desperately clutching to her groceries, stepped onto the pavement.

Nancy’s stomach contracted, churning with a perplexing cocktail of feelings as she stood, immobilised, at the doorway. Outside, cicadas crooned in the sweltering late-afternoon humidity, a mournful elegy to her worst fears. For so long, Nancy had longed for the smallest scrap of reprieve from the relentlessness, the day-in day-out of it all. But now, she felt the sickening cruelty of cosmic retribution coming to claim its due.

The fractured shards of the plate glared accusingly at Nancy from across the kitchen.

She meandered over lifelessly, and collected both pieces in her melting hands, raising them to the dim flickering kitchen light to align their scars.

Then she realised. The plate had not broken cleanly in half. There was a miniscule sliver of ceramic missing, right in the centre. The gap was tiny – insignificant, even, if you didn’t look closely – yet, the plate would never be whole again.

Glenelg beach remained bright and sunny; exposed and vast and never-ending.

Somewhere amongst the thousands of shifting footprints, three small pairs had disappeared.

Tides rolled on lazily.

Summers respired and passed.

And Nancy stood, clutching a broken plate, realising some cracks could never be mended.