Louisa was certain there was watermelon growing in her stomach. She felt it getting bigger, pushing the boundaries of her body outward more and more every day.
She was born on the farm fourteen years earlier, in the bathtub with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck, depriving her of oxygen. It wasn’t until she was three-years-old—around the time her father disappeared—that they realised something was wrong with Louisa. Her mother refused to believe it. She sent her off to school two years later only to be told by the headmaster that they didn’t have the proper facilities at such a small school to educate such a girl, and suggested she be sent to an expensive and distant special learning centre.
Louisa’s mother home-schooled her from that point. The girl rarely left the farm except for when she was sent in to town with an explicit list of groceries that she was told to give Mr. McKenna at the general store. Louisa always enjoyed the time away.
At 14, she was a plump girl, red-cheeked, with spotty arms and thighs. She wore her hair in pigtailed ribbons that hung high up on the back her head.
One day she awoke, feeling that something was wrong with her stomach. It was harder; her usual soft belly seemed tightened like skin stretched over a drum. Her mother said that it must have something to do with the illness that Louisa complained of for a few weeks prior. Louisa was afraid to tell her mother that she knew exactly what it was. A watermelon was growing inside her, hardening her soft stomach as it expanded.
She stood each morning in front of the mirror, side on. She’d felt it growing for weeks and now it was beginning to show.
She hadn’t known what to do about the watermelon. She wondered whether she should drink the weed-killer kept under the sink to poison it, but her mother always made sure to keep anything harmful out of her daughter’s reach, placing tiny padlocks on each and every cupboard in the house.
Louisa then tried starving herself. First to stunt the melon’s growth, but when that didn’t work, she stopped eating so as to leave the melon room enough to grow without obstruction. She couldn’t stick with it though, and always found herself hungry and unable to resist. The watermelon kept growing.
Louisa always followed the same routine. After breakfast she would let the cat out for the day, throw the chickens some grain and go and play in some remote part of the farm by herself until her mother called her in for her lessons at ten. But in the last few months she’d taken to wandering about the farm to find Mr. Dell—the man her mother hired after her father left—and the other farmhands moving or tagging sheep. It seemed to her that a large part of working on a farm was moving things around, putting sheep in one paddock, then moving them to another. She thought that was nice for the sheep, as they didn’t have to live in the same place for very long and always had something new to look at. She liked watching the men work.
‘Good morning, Louisa,’ Mr. Dell called out when he spotted her watching from afar. ‘That’s a pretty dress you have on. Lovely as always.’
She rarely replied, just blushed and found a spot behind some trees where she could watch them work without being seen.
None of the other farmhands ever spoke to Louisa, and her mother forbade her to speak to them.
‘Boys are nothing but trouble, honey,’ she said when she caught her daughter looking out the screen door as the farmhands passed the house on their way to the break-shed at midday. Louisa started watching through her upstairs window so her mother wouldn’t see.
After lunch her mother would sit with her at the kitchen table, listening to Louisa read aloud. Most of the books she read from were natural history, agriculture and literature; her father’s old books. Louisa was never able to absorb much of it. When she read the literature—the novels, poems and stories—her mother always seemed especially alert. There were sudden moments when her mother would snatch the book away from her, thumb through the next few pages officiously and hand it back for Louisa to resume.
‘Why’d you do that for, Mum?’ Louisa said, inspecting her fingers for paper-cuts, looking out for hair-lines of red, pressing down on each of her fingers till they went white.
‘The story was heading in the wrong direction.’
‘And you found the right one again?’
‘Of course, my love. I always do.’
Even if she’d been allowed to read those forbidden passages she wouldn’t have understood any of it. Louisa was always concentrating much too hard on reading the words individually to ever glean what they actually meant in unison.
In the afternoon Louisa walked down the back paddock to the shelter her father built for storing wood for the stove and fireplace. She would lay there on the soft woodchips under the corrugated iron, balancing bits of damp wood on her round belly until she heard the distant drift of her mother’s voice calling her to dinner. When she went to the shelter, her thoughts usually lead to a boy she knew called Tinny. She couldn’t wait for shearing season to come again, as Tinny might come back and see her.
He was a roustabout on the farm during shearing four months prior. He was the only boy she knew, apart from Mr Dell and Mr Mckenna, who ever spoke to her. One day, after shearing finished and all the shearers headed to dinner, Tinny was left to clean the shearing-combs and sweep up any wayward wool. Louisa stood by the side of the shed, watching him. He was a boy of about seventeen, short and slim, with a crew-cut. His pigeon-chest protruded from a navy blue singlet that was too big for him. He had a long face, a mouth that continually hung open a fraction and dull-blue eyes that no thoughts ever seemed to hide behind. Louisa liked looking at his blue eyes, for their emptiness seemed kind.
When he saw her standing by the side of the shed watching him, he called her over.
‘Hey Louisa, whatcha doing?’
‘Nuthin’.’
‘Do you wanna, do you wanna take a walk with me?’ he stammered.
‘I dunno.’
‘Come on.’
‘Okay.’
They walked down the back paddock and stood under her father’s wood shelter. He put his hand on her arm gently and kissed her. Louisa stood there rigid, her eyes open, stunned. She liked the feeling of his dry lips against hers, and felt warmed by his smell and his closeness. Then he pulled her onto the ground. He promised that it wouldn’t hurt her, but it did.
Lying under the shelter now, she forgot all about the pain and couldn’t wait to see him again.
In the next few weeks, the watermelon grew rapidly. Louisa was miserable. Her mother noticed that she had put on weight and started feeding her plates of steamed vegetables every night. Louisa didn’t know what to do. She hated vegetables, but she was so hungry.
One morning she was awoke to a pounding on her stomach. At first she thought the cat had snuck into bed with her and was batting at her belly, but when she lifted up the doona she saw nothing. The pounding continued, and she realised it was coming from inside her. It was the watermelon, trying to break out.
Louisa ran downstairs to her mother, who was preparing breakfast.
‘What’s wrong, baby?’
Louisa breathed deeply, distress and fear in her voice. ‘Ma, do you remember when I was a little girl?’
‘You’re still a little girl, honey.’
‘Well, when I was littler, ’member when you used to tell me that if I swallowed a watermelon seed a watermelon’ud grow in my tummy?’
Her mother nodded, a soft look of reminiscence upon her face.
‘Well,’ Louisa said, with tears welling, ‘I swallowed one a while ago, just to see what would happen, and now…’ Louisa broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.
‘Honey, honey,’ her mother said, putting her arms around her daughter. ‘That’s just a story. No stories are true. Watermelons can’t grow inside a person’s stomach.’
‘Then what’s growing in mine?’ Louisa lifted up her nightie, exposing her paunch, her belly-button protruding out of it like the tip of a tiny finger. Her mother looked at her sceptically, and almost laughed, but then touched Louisa’s firm stomach. When she did, she felt the movement inside. Her mother stepped away from Louisa with eyes glazed and unbelieving.
‘What can I do ’bout this watermelon, Mummy?’
Her mother’s eyes regained life, looking down at her. ‘You stupid, stupid girl! It’s not a bloody watermelon. You’re pregnant!’
Louisa watched quizzically as her mother raged about the kitchen as though she were about to faint or vomit, grasping the laminex tabletop, uncertain of what to do, and finally falling to the linoleum floor in a heap. Louisa pulled the chair out at the table and sat down. She leaned back and her hands rested on her stomach, a curious expression growing on her face that slowly morphed into something close to a smirk. Her mother looked up at her.
‘What have you got to smile about?’ her mother said. ‘Your life is ruined.’
Louisa shrugged her shoulders, a sense of relief washing over her. ‘At least it’s not a watermelon.’
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