Anahera Gildea

Page 2 of 3

The Queen’s Chain

‘When you were born you were sick.’ When my mother would garden all the pretty stuff would let her thinking out.

‘We stayed in the hospital, just you and me, and you had to get fed from a tube.’

She never looked at me when she was telling, she just went back in herself and remembered out loud.

‘I would line up beside the other women in a little room on a chair facing the wall. We had these new electric pumps with long rubber tentacles on them, that you pulled out and attached to your breasts.’ She would show this bit by waving her arms around and I would laugh, kind of faking it.

‘Everyone would just stare at the wall and no one would talk directly with each other cos women were more modest then.’

Whenever she paused to clear the space around a plant I would just wait and then she’d go on again like she’d never had a stop.

‘The sound of the milk hitting the plastic catch bottle and the chug of the machine was like strange music in that quiet room. Suck chug spray. Suck chug spray. I would collect as many bottles as I could fill, and we would all keep looking at that wall while we put the lids on, taking off the tentacles and mopping up our spills.’

Then the bad moment would come and she would get sad and confess, ‘I didn’t breastfeed you.’

‘I know, it’s all good, Mum. No one cares,’ I would whisper but she never heard me. You can’t hear the dead, I reckon.

‘But I did my best,’ she would finish.

Page 2 of 3 | Previous Page | Next Page