Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: alcohol, misogyny
Text Baby
The first time I received a text from my friend Sarah’s four-month-old baby, I was wandering the supermarket aisle checking biscuit prices for the perfect middle ground between taste and frugality. The screen lit up the side of my tote bag.
Hey, it said. The top of the screen showed a number but no name.
Hey, I wrote back. Who is this?
Reginald, he replied.
I only knew one Reginald. He had been born into a recent trend of giving babies the names of grandpas.
* * *
Four months earlier, I had received the first pictures of him. He was a prune wrapped in muslin, his face squashed and raw.
Meet Reginald Lucius Pratt! Born 27th April at 2.16pm. We’re obsessed!!
OMG he’s so cute! Congratulations!
Every few days there was another photo. I’d be out for coffee with a friend and my phone would light up with the prune in a nappy, gangly legs akimbo. I’d get out of the shower and there he was looking stunned next to a toy giraffe. I sent a card and a squeaky toy that vaguely resembled a rabbit.
Sarah sent me more pictures. Reginald—now two months old and forming facial features less comparable to dried fruit—lay next to the hunk of painted plastic.
He loves it! she wrote. He’s always reaching for it. He wants to hear the sound!
More photos arrived. Reginald in his cot with his head lolled sideways, the bulky toy vaguely in his eyeline.
He can’t stop looking at it!
Awesome!! I tried to sound enthusiastic.
Eventually, I stopped texting. A couple of months went by. Then came the texts from Reginald.
* * *
Hey Sarah, I texted. How are you?
Hey love, I’m really good thanks, how are you? Just taking Reg out to the park, he’s a bit grizzly today so I thought some fresh air might do him some good. We were up until 4am last night - couldn’t seem to figure out what King Reg was demanding hahaha. Wouldn’t have it any other way though! We’re so crazy about him. Anyway enough baby talk what’s going on with you?
Haha oh no that sounds hectic, glad you’re getting out to the park for some fresh air today. Actually I wanted to talk to you about Reginald. I think he texted me yesterday.
Oh hahaha did he that’s so funny I just bought one of those BabyCom phones, I wasn’t sure if he’d take to it but he loves it! He texts my mum too, so cute!
Oh wow, I didn’t know they had rolled those out yet.
Yeah! We thought we might as well get him one, he’ll have to get a phone eventually and this way he won’t be behind the other babies when he starts daycare. He only has a couple of contacts in there — they recommend close family and friends, as well as an age-appropriate social group. He’s already joined the Inner West Bubs group on WhatsApp, so cute!
* * *
When Sarah fell pregnant, I found out through a general post on social media. One of those cliché reveals with her husband’s hands interlocked over her belly. I wasn’t invited to the baby shower, and maybe that made sense. I lived so far away, and we weren’t as close as we used to be. I’d sat up late scrolling through the photos of flower walls and confetti, ‘baby’ written across every possible surface in every medium: balloons, donuts, garish signs hanging overhead.
* * *
Hey Aunty Viv.
I was lying on my couch at 11pm watching re-runs of Friends. I looked over at my phone and groaned. This baby was a pain in my arse.
You up? He was persistent.
Hey little Reginald. Shouldn’t you be asleep, buddy?
I keep weird hours.
Oh sure.
I wanted to say thanks for the toy.
I shifted on the couch, sitting up a little so I could type better. Oh, no worries.
Its face is funny. I like the colours.
Oh good. I thought your mum might have just been telling me you liked it.
No, it’s my favourite. I scream if she doesn’t put it in the cot with me.
Wow you really are a fan.
It means a lot that you got it for me. You must really like me :)
I didn’t have the heart to tell him about adult conventions, obligations, expectation. That I’d forgotten to buy him something, but the squeaky toy was in a pet store I passed at Westfield and I’d thought it was cute. What did it matter if it was for kids or dogs? I’d cut off the PuppyPals tag and taken it straight to the post office.
* * *
He started texting me at work. Reginald had no concept of time. He was also extremely needy. I’d get a string of eight texts at once.
Hey
What u doing
Hello
U there
Why so quiet
Just got back from rhymetime still no texty?
U mad?
Oh just remembered you’re at work hahahaha
I sighed as I checked my phone in my lunch break. You gotta text me after 5, bud. I can’t answer when I’m working.
Yeah, just forgot again. How come you have to go to work? Mummy doesn’t.
Hate to break it to you but she’ll be going back at some stage.
Three dots danced, disappeared, and danced again.
That’s cool.
* * *
Sarah and I met at Murdoch Uni in the mid-2000s after we’d both dropped out of the state’s name university, tired of rich kids and the constant lecturing about how lucky and brilliant we were to be there while they recycled the same syllabus from 1992. I was walking across Bush Court when she passed me—we caught each other’s eye for a second before double-taking a couple of times each. We stopped and laughed awkwardly.
‘I know you, right?’ she said.
‘Yeah! Not from here though. Weren’t you in my Torts lectures at U-dub?’ We’d never spoken but I’d always noticed her; she had thick curly hair that she wore high on her head in one of those effortless mess-buns I was always trying to not-so-effortlessly achieve.
She clicked her fingers, which struck me as old-timey and great. ‘Oh yeah!’
We bitched about our old uni, standing together on the lawn for half an hour before one of us suggested getting lunch. And then it was always like that, losing time chatting in those in-between places. She always got what I meant. She felt the same about almost everything. She died laughing at my jokes. I started to wonder if I wasn’t so weird after all.
The next semester we chose as many of the same tutes as possible, and for three years we started and ended most of our days together, studying and partying with each other in between.
Sarah was one of those people who came across as a little dumb despite being incredibly smart. It was almost fun to watch people underestimate her, waiting for the look on their faces when they’d inevitably eat shit. It never bothered her—when she did make her intellect known, she was never mean about it. The only time she got mean was if anyone tried the same on me.
‘Viv actually got the only clerkship for that firm in the state, Brendon. Where did you clerk again? Bunbury?’ Brendon rolled his eyes, waving away the cigarette smoke Sarah had subsequently blown in his face.
We would lie in bed at 4am after the Amplifier Bar had closed and we’d outstayed our welcome at City Kebabs, talking about boys we’d hooked up with on the dancefloor and where had Georgie gone again, before going deep into all the things we wanted to do with our lives after study was over. Sarah was going to try and get into environmental law; I wanted to do criminal. We’d move to Melbourne or Sydney and share-house somewhere gritty but cool. We’d date foreign guys because Australian men had the emotional depth of a teaspoon and eventually move out and have babies, but we’d live across the road from each other because obviously our kids would be best friends. We talked about the conundrum of wanting our kids to be cool while also wanting to parent better than ours did, the consequence of which would be kids that were too well-adjusted to be interesting. We agreed to be at least a little aloof with them, handing on enough abandonment issues to make them want to write sad songs and learn to be funny as a coping mechanism.
‘What if my kids aren’t funny?’ she asked.
‘I’ll tell them they ruined your body and your life.’
‘You’re such a good friend.’
Then she would close her eyes, start snoring, and I’d roll her into the recovery position in case she vomited up her City Kebab in the night.
* * *
Hey why don’t you live here?
I paused the TV to look at the message, rolling my eyes at the question.
Because not everyone wants to live in Sydney.
Then why don’t we live where you are?
I thought for a moment. Things just worked out that way.
* * *
We’d both applied for jobs in three cities: Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney. I got my offer first; it was a huge opportunity at the small firm I’d clerked with. Sarah was always the smarter of us, so it wasn’t a surprise when she got more offers—one in each city. The offer in Sydney was the best and she hesitated to tell me she was taking it, standing outside the Moon Café at 1am while she smoked and I watched. She furrowed her eyebrows, worried about my response.
I gathered up my most enthusiastic smile. ‘That’s amazing!’ I told her.
She stayed serious. ‘I was thinking…maybe you could come too? Not right away but after like, a year? You can get some experience with this job, then apply interstate again, or just come over and apply there?’
I plucked the cigarette from her mouth and took a drag. ‘I was thinking the same thing.’
‘Really? Ow!’ She’d grabbed both my arms in excitement and the lit end had grazed her wrist.
‘Oh my god!’ I yelled, dropping the offending cigarette. We laughed, then hugged.
‘I’ll be like the test pilot,’ she said. ‘Go first and suss out the situation. You’ll visit and we can pick out the best neighbourhood to live together.’
‘Cool.’
But when I saw her off at the airport, standing in a group waving next to her parents and a handful of uni friends, it didn’t feel like she was the test pilot. It felt like she was riding in front, in control, and leaving me behind.
* * *
Reginald was coming up to five months now. He started teething and began to get irate.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck. He texted one morning.
I watched the videos of him on Sarah’s socials, trying his first taste of pureed pumpkin, the petrified horror of his face as it dribbled down his chin. He pushed the next spoonful away and shook his head. His hands were sticky from something other than the pumpkin and he communicated in little grunts. He looked so helpless, so different to how he seemed in his texts. I’d read that since the creators of BabyCom were a bunch of tech-bros in Silicon Valley, the translations from the baby neurelectro-transmitters were communicated in their cadence of text-speak. Memes had started to circulate on social media—everyone was similarly amused at where the latest progression of technology had led us: back in time to fielding messages from the toxic dude-bros of dating past. Some mums pointed out that this wasn’t far from what parenting a newborn was like.
Surprisingly though, the technology wasn’t being actively used by the parents of the texting babies.
One father commented, ‘Would you text your housemate from the next room? Keep in mind that housemate is constantly whining and shitting his pants.’
Still, I would have thought Sarah might like to know what Reginald was thinking, or what he needed, all those times his cries were untethered to meaning.
* * *
Hey Sarah, how’s your day going?
Viv! So good to hear from you! Struggling to be honest. Had like 2 hours sleep last night, and Sam is back on shift work so I’m on my own. But me and Reg are chilling this afternoon and watching TV so it’s all good.
Aw that’s good! Sounds like the teething is a real nightmare for him.
It’s a nightmare for ME hahaha
Haha. Hey our old Bloc Party song came on while I was in the supermarket yesterday, made me think of you.
Oh wow! That seems like sooooo long ago now.
Three dots danced, then disappeared. I guess there was nothing else to say.
* * *
Perth had seemed so empty after Sarah left, like she had taken up all the room in it and now it was just wide-open streets, cat-calls by the highway and pubs that closed at 10pm. I started my new job and dreaded going in every day. It was nothing like my clerkship and I wasn’t fast enough or clever enough for all the new responsibilities piled on me. I tried to go out with the same group of friends from uni, but without Sarah there was nothing holding us together and we slowly disbanded. I started staying home, hanging out with my parents and playing Pictionary on Saturday nights. Finally, it was March and I’d saved up enough to go see Sarah.
‘I hate it here,’ she told me over coffee at a grubby kitchen bench in Potts Point. ‘I want to come home.’
I convinced her to stay, to wait for me. I told her I hated my job and planned to put in minimal time before quitting and moving over. We walked along the promenade at Circular Quay and took pictures, ate real gelato and craned our necks to see the top of the skyscrapers, giggling as we stumbled backwards and caught each other.
‘Having you here makes me less homesick,’ she said.
‘Same,’ I said.
Sarah laughed. ‘You’ve been here a week!’
I didn’t know how to explain the feeling, that sense of being homesick in my own home.
* * *
Are you Mummy’s sister? I call you aunty.
No, that’s just something friends do when they’re close.
Are you close?
I hesitated. Of course.
You never talk on the phone.
We’re both pretty busy.
You text me all the time.
Not by choice, I thought. But I did wonder why I kept responding to Reginald. His persistence made him hard to ignore, but there was something else. Something Sarah had said, about only programming in a couple of contacts—her parents, and me.
* * *
My next visit to see her was in September of that year. It was supposed to be the last one before my move, but by then everything was different. Sarah was living in another share-house with a group of new friends she assured me would soon be my best friends too. I didn’t like them; they laughed too much over stupid things and they talked down to me when I didn’t know their suburbs and slang. When we went out, the city’s name seemed to be plastered over everything—the bands even sang it in their songs. The city was so conscious of itself, everyone conscious of themselves living within it. After months of planning, I suddenly couldn’t see my life there. In the time Sarah had gone, I had started to fill out the spaces she had taken up. I’d befriended a group of new grads at the firm and we’d started having Friday night drinks in the city, Tuesday movie nights. I’d made a close friend in the group and was crushing on several of the others. It was nearing the end of the first decade of the millennium and Perth was changing, the stagnant corpse of the CBD slowly revived by the advent of the long-awaited small bar liquor-licence. There were new bars opening all the time, local bands taking off, festivals every season. Soon we’d have our own real gelato.
I knew I was being a coward when I broke the news to Sarah over the phone, sitting in my bedroom two days after the flight back.
‘There’s too much going on right now. I’m sorry.’
She was good about it; said she understood and was really happy for me—stoked things were working out so well at home.
We stayed close in the following years and we still visited each other often, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Sarah never forgave me for the betrayal. The guilt of it weighed on me, and what could have just been our old comfortable silences now held an uncertain tension that I was never sure was entirely imagined.
* * *
I was sitting at a long table at Mechanics’ waiting for my Hinge date to buy us beers at the bar. I got out my phone and texted my friend that my date didn’t look like a serial killer, but still provided my whereabouts and a screenshot of his profile. A text came up from Reginald. As usual, he asked what I was doing. When I told him, he wasn’t surprised. He’d overheard his mum saying I was single.
You should get married so you can have a baby and I can add them to my chat group.
Regardless of how well this date goes — not getting married, not having babies.
WHAT. Three dots danced before I received my first selfie from Reginald. He stared at the camera with his most angelic, bubble-cheeked, wide-eyed pose—neurelectro-transmitters visible behind his little head.
Don’t you want one of theeeeese?
I laughed. No.
Why not??
I hear you guys are a lot of work.
He took a little while to text back. I wondered if the programming was searching out a standard response—it did that sometimes when there wasn’t enough neural activity to estimate meaning.
Worth it, though.
I smiled at the predictability.
To some.
* * *
I first met Reginald’s dad, Sam, when I flew over for Sarah’s thirtieth birthday. By then she had made a wider group of friends and there were many I’d become close to on my visits and really liked. But I didn’t warm to Sam and hoped he would be a short-term thing. I assured Sarah he was cute and seemed very interesting; it wasn’t every day you met a tortured poet working in finance. He was to change jobs several times over the next decade, trying to find himself while Sarah paid his bills. He dominated conversation with his latest updates, his endeavours always more important than hers. She said it was a result of his poor self-esteem. The downside to Sarah’s sweet nature had always been that she would minimise her brilliance if it meant saving another’s feelings, and so she’d often end up with men who liked her to be smart, but not as smart as them.
They moved in together, and my visits became less frequent.
* * *
Aunty Viv?
Yeah
Why don’t you come visit us?
It was late; I hadn’t been able to sleep, worrying about work and another date that had gone badly; the perpetual expectation to be someone I’m not.
It’s like $600 a ticket, I wrote.
I don’t know what that means.
I have to work very hard for money and it takes a lot of money to come visit you.
But didn’t you used to come all the time?
He had a point—I’d travelled a lot more often on pitiful salaries in the past. But how would the baby know that? I asked him.
Your photos are all over the house. In my room too. We say good morning to them.
* * *
By our mid-thirties, Sarah was gearing up for marriage and I had come to realise the younger version of me that wanted babies had not fully understood what that entailed. As I’d gotten closer to the age I should have been thinking of having them with my own long-term partner, the ‘one day’ gradually moved into ‘never’. It turned out having a child was more important to him than having me, and he broke it off. Suddenly there was only one place I wanted to be, and I flew to Sydney to crawl into Sarah’s lap on the couch while Sam brewed us cups of tea at her demand. He placed the mugs down on the table and skulked out; he never coped well with not being the centre of attention.
She stroked my hair.
‘Did you text him back?’ she asked, referring to the ex’s drunken message the night before, accusing me of having known all along—of not having come clean soon enough.
‘I blocked him.’
‘Good. Tea?’
I sat up, letting her place the mug between my two hands like I were a child. I brought it carefully to my lips and took a sip. I smiled at her. ‘Good.’
She took her own mug from the table and snuggled into my side.
‘This reminds me of that share-house in Northbridge, when we’d cuddle in bed after our nights out,’ she said.
‘It was my favourite part of the night.’
‘Me too.’
We sipped in silence.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said carefully, ‘that you stopped wanting them.’
‘I don’t think I ever did want them. I think people around me just told me I did and I believed them.’
She turned to me, alarmed. ‘Did I do that to you?’
‘No!’ I laughed, shoving her. ‘To be honest, that’s the only part that makes me sad. I did want our kids to be friends—I did want to share all that with you.’
We both looked away.
‘I guess that’s not a good enough reason to make a person.’ Her cadence made it difficult to discern if it was a question.
I leaned my head back on the couch, meeting her gaze. ‘Probably not, no.’
* * *
I stood by the kitchen window the next morning after Reginald’s text, looking out while I waited for the kettle to boil. I picked up my phone, and texted Sarah to ask how she was going.
She replied, Not that great, love. I’m not used to being home this much, and Sam is away for work for the next two weeks. I’ve been a little lonely.
I stared at her message for a while before moving to my laptop on the dining table, checking flights for the weekend.
I’m coming.
Rochelle Pickles is a writer, editor and psychologist from Boorloo/Perth, currently living and writing on unceded Gadigal land. Her work has been published in the anthologies Soak: UTS Writers’ Anthology and Our Selves. Rochelle has an MA in Creative Writing and she is working on a novel.
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