Christa has gone off me and it’s all I try not to think about — packing angles of chopped watermelon into tupperware, filling our drink bottles, walking with Lila towards the park. Lila zips ahead like the lines of a poem. There’s one I think of with her, one by Barrett Reid I find unbearably sad, and when I find the words I feel relieved, restored, because for at least two years after Lila’s birth the only language my head seemed to hold were tuneless loops of Incy wincy spider and Twinkle twinkle little star.

Trailing Lila, I think of the last texts I exchanged with Christ — which is what she gets called now but rhyming with the word ‘wrist’ instead of like Jesus. How, of what Lila did, Christ had typed: I thought it was an accident but then I realised that it wasn’t 🙁 and how quickly the hearts and x’s had dropped from our exchange.

I look ahead to Lila, racing through shards of sun that shatter over her through elm and eucalypt foliage and remind myself: she is a good kid, a good kid, a good kid. Sometimes she is a good kid having a hard time.

At home that morning I’d passed her a breakfast bowl and she’d wailed: Yuck! I don’t like that yogurt em-more. Give it to the op shop.

Use a talking voice, please! I’d heard my own voice, too chirpy. 

The op shop is her idea for our cat, too — an aging calico called Tulip, after Plath’s, “too excitable”. I don’t use Tulip anymore, Lila informs me some days, and I practise responding neutrally, even when she pesters: When will Tulip die? Then can we get a rabbit, a goat?

Leaving the apartment, heading down the concrete stairs of the complex, she’d begun a wobbly walk, calling out, Whoa, oh-ah! and I’d pictured the thunk and shatter of her head on the steps. Esther’s making me do it! she’d called back to my “carefuls” and more forceful “Nos”, and I’d snarked, Well, we’ll have to send Esther away — filled simultaneously with shame at the weak threat, its futility.

You can’t, Lila had replied, implacable: she’s pretend.

Esther is one of a gang of babies Lila has materialised in her imaginary world. They are named after babies we know — Isla, Luna, Arlo — and some Lila has come up with herself: Flower, Rainbow, Tree. Some days she is so severe in chiding these babies I feel mortified, that these moments might be my mirror: how I mother.

Other times she invents catastrophes for them: The babies are on the road! The babies are on fire!

Oh no! I will say. What will we do? And Lila leaps ahead, wielding a make-believe hose.

Or she confects conflict: Arlo is hurting me! He won’t stop, he’s not listening! And on she goes until I intervene and try to mediate this made-up drama.

Now, walking residential streets, I find the words to the Reid poem, vivid and clear: “She runs on the beach like that.” Up ahead Lila is the wind fairy, a whale-pool: energy unbound. My voice, immaterial, tries: Check driveways!

We stop at the IGA where I buy a small juice bottle for Lila and a reduced-price iced coffee for me. I plan to finish it before we reach the park, knowing Christ will chide me for drinking almost-expired dairy, or dairy milk, full stop. She has become my inner critic, the disdainful voice at every clumsy parenting moment, and I suspect this is unfair, if not conceited — because I also picture her as Don Draper in the elevator, responding, I don’t think about you at all.

Still, as Lila darts outside while I’m extracting cash from my wallet at the register, fumbling change away, Christ’s voice says, Chill, it’s fine, just let her be a kid. But outside, in the increasing heat of the day, Lila is nowhere — there is only blank concrete and street traffic, the corner intersection — and I’m gripped by another, omniscient voice that tells me: this is it, your worst mistake.

Then Lila is back, shooting out of a laneway, roaring — part lion, part lion tamer — and I crouch to her height, holding her shoulders tightly to reprimand —

But I know! Lila moans. I know to check for cars!

But not people! I want to say. Not people who would grab you, take you, hurt —  The urge I have is to shock but also shield her.

We resume our walk, her small hand in mine, and Lila grumbles: how much farther to the birthday?

Christ’s son, Sonny, is turning two, and it is a joint party for three toddlers and their overlapping social circles, to which — at Lila’s almost-four — we are peripheral at best.

Lila calls Sonny The Sunny, like he is the sun, everywhere. The Sunny is a walking baby, she reminds me as we near the park, each finishing our drinks, and I agree, then add, Or maybe a kid now? But she says no, baby.

Remember, I say as we reach the grass, to use gentle hands, and Lila shakes out her hair, breaking into a pony trot in her red Dorothy shoes. Calling back to me over her shoulder, she counters: the ground is soft here!

I see the balloons first, tethered to a picnic table. There are three helium shapes: a turtle, a tiger, and a foil daisy — which Lila would call a ‘singing flower’ because it has a face like the flowers in Alice in Wonderland. Each balloon face is simultaneously infantilised and suggestive, with rounded eyes, flicky eyelashes and juicy lips.

There are various, bright floral picnic blankets spread over the ground and the walking babies, collectively, are stout and fast — sturdy and sprightly as baby goats on the grass. Some are younger — crawling babies — and others I place at eighteen months or so. The adults are gathered together close by, next to an assembly of pushers, and when Christ sees me I remember her as she was in high school — like Fern Gully’s Crysta with jagged layers of hair and hemline. Now her lines are smoother but she is not soft, not touchable anymore. Still with a rush comes the feeling: you are mine; you are my person.

Hey, she greets us. Hey, Sonny, more friends are here! She crouches next to her son, who smiles at us through his dummy, and I think, Lila is right: he is the sun, everywhere.

Christ stands up and we touch the sides of our faces together in an uneasy cheek kiss, before Christ turns to Lila and says, hey babe! Thanks for coming to our party!

Lila turns a violent pirouette in lieu of reply and I check for a place to deposit our birthday gift — chunky toddler books wrapped in reused paper which Lila has speckled with an abundance of stickers — along with the container of watermelon triangles, but aside from the balloons, the picnic table and blankets are bare. Other adults seem to be feeding children individual snacks of their own — a broken-off banana tip, dehydrated fruit from a small pouch — and for a moment I wonder if I have fumbled birthday conventions and confused “bring something to share” and “BYO”. At that moment Lila pulls at my hem, humming distractedly: Mum-me, I’m hungry, but when she sees what I’ve packed she whines: But I don’t like Water Mountain em-more!

I catch Christ looking over and laughing and feel my perplexity spike. Sonny’s dad, Hayden, is absent from the groups of adults, as far as I can see, and I think perhaps he is bringing some party food — or that he must at least be coming.

Oh, laughs Christ when I ask her, god no, we’ll do our own thing later, as a family, something really chill and fun. She shoots me a frosty smile and I think wait, but where is Hayden?

Hayden is like, I have thought ungenerously, a mashup of Prince William and Jerry Seinfeld — the former in looks and latter in persona, but these layers also overlapping. In the time before Lila, before Sonny, I learned he sometimes listened to Christ’s phone conversations with her friends and appraised them based on the pitch of her voice, whether she laughed or expressed sufficient pleasure throughout the conversation for him to rate it a successful call, a successful friendship. Who the fuck did he think he was? I wonder savagely again now, and why had Christ relayed those episodes — which encompassed our own phone calls together — to me?

I check for Lila where some toddlers are playing under a spray of bubbles from a bubble gun wielded by one of the adults I don’t know. From Lila’s unwilling posture at the sidelines I can tell she would like to wield the gun.

More guests arrive, and more hosts, I gather — there are further picnic blankets amassing, then a small trestle table a short stretch away from Christ’s picnic table. Here I see a woman — a grandparent, I carelessly assume — unloading a container of cupcakes onto a tiered cake stand. The cakes are alternately iced in pink and blue buttercream, and again I second-guess my grasp of this party.

Lila soon materialises to tell me: some of the babies have cake and she would also like a cake.

We approach the grandmother and I introduce myself, smiling, before relaying Lila’s wish — a little ruefully, hoping I sound casually charming, naturally at ease.

The woman presses her lips together without meeting my gaze. Well, she says, I suppose I can spare one.

Thank you, I say. If you are sure, and though I don’t believe she is, the cake is in Lila’s fist, and Lila is away again, quick over the grass. It is, as she’d pointed out when we arrived, spongy, soft lawn, and I wonder how Lila registered this so quickly, and why it was her first thought when I hadn’t specified No Pushing, Don’t Push Any Babies Over. How did she know I could foresee her knocking younger children down like bowling pins? She is, I think, the biggest, strongest billy goat at the party.  

Christ’s younger sister is here and when we embrace I worry my skin is noticeably wet with sweat. The air is heavy with heat now, the sky over us bright and cloudless. I recall Helen Garner’s choice of adverb, violently blue, but was that description for sky or eyes?

Lila is back at my side then with a cupcake licked clean of pink icing. She hands the unwanted cake to me and I think, far too late into the day, to remember her sunhat, to reapply sunscreen —

She is so big now, Christ’s sister is saying as Lila squawks away from my offer to paint a butterfly on her face with SPF. I’m a currawong, Lila calls, flapping out of reach.

One of Christ’s eyebrows sweeps up at this. Bird? she says. For some reason Lila’s vocabulary annoys her, I remember now — the last time we’d spent together she had scoffed at Lila pointing out the wattle instead of naming a tree, as though Lila was showing off, or I was.

I meet two of the other parents who begin agreeing with Christ: two is actually the best age, their favourite so far, so fun, who are all these sad people who hate it? The only thing wrong with two-year-olds are (some of) their parents, these other parents are saying — so many adults just need to leave the kids be. Just let them work it out! They will work it out themselves.

Yes, I think, but Lila will work it out with her fists and nails, would use a brick or glass bottle on another child, it’s occurred to me, if these objects were at her disposal.

At this age, says Christ, turning to me, Sonny and his little friends are sometimes a little rough in their play together, but they would never, she says meaningfully, hurt each other on purpose.

Oh, I say, of course not, and what I want to say is that I’m pretty sure intent comes later, developmentally.

I’m curious about these new friends, who I’ve asked Christ about before: from your mothers’ group? I texted and she’d shot back the water pistol emoji and a skull. Fuck no! Just parents I vibe with way more.

Behind us now comes an American accent calling to her son, Careful, Bud!

Christ makes a gagging face in my direction, though I think bud is quite beautiful, picturing a flower, soon to open. But Christ shakes her head at me in a way I take to mean that particular parent is not a part of her circle but someone else’s guest here.

One of the dads — I presume — is setting up an esky in a blue half-shell paddling pool, filling it with a bag of ice and juice boxes and cans of what from a distance I guess are craft beers. After the cupcake I’m less sure that this joint party means shared, exactly, but I let Lila help herself to a lump of ice she wants to melt down to size in her hands then suck and crunch up with her teeth.

I take her to the toilet block across the park, towards traffic streaming on the other side of a line of peppercorns, and inside the cubicle she pees in uncharacteristic quiet, her expression pensive, or vacant.

You are tired, pal, I think, and flush for her when she’s done. She is still starey as we unlock the cubicle door, wash our hands at the basin. It’s cool inside the chamber of concrete and brick. Dots of sun come through breeze block sections of wall behind us like circles of light from a disco ball and Lila holds out her arms under the patterns, turns a quick pirouette, reviving, returning to herself. Looking at the damp floor, she announces, It’s soggy lands in here! Outside she shuffles her feet in an inexorably slow walk, checking the grass for wishing dandelions and clovers, and the air for thistledown fairies, on which she’ll always wish for fruit: wish me passionfruit, wish me mangoes, I recall from her toddlertalk.

We rejoin the group and a platter of cinnamon donuts has materialised on Christ’s picnic table; Christ’s voice is insisting they are Sonny’s favourite. Lila forces a space for herself between some smaller children on the bench seat and there is a sudden squawk and wail — a crying toddler a few feet away from us.

Oh god, Christ’s sister says behind me. Where’s Lila?

Outside my line of vision Christ laughs and I hear her swift answer: Punching bubs?

They laugh together as I turn to find Christ’s face but her expression is inscrutable. When she spots me, she smiles and approaches us, wrapping a friendly arm around Lila. I expect Lila to object, squirm or complain, but she is focused on sucking sugar and cinnamon from the donut in her hand.

Thanks again, babe, Christ says, for coming to our party, and Lila hums agreeably, licking sweetness from her palm.

But where were you? Christ says now, meeting my eyes through the copper lenses of her sunglasses. You missed Happy Birthday and candles!

What? I say, sure we were gone just minutes to the toilets and back. I should ask, I think, if I heard Christ right, about Lila, but she is looking across the grass to where three of the walking babies are holding the helium balloons by their strings, one apiece, their adults crouched in the foreground to capture photos.

Oh, says Christ, fuck. I spent way too much on those, I hate to even tell you.

As we watch, the toddlers break into a run, single file, and the balloons are let go — daisy, turtle, tiger, one after another. First I feel dread and sorrow for the true sea turtles and other marine life, and then I recall something written about by Joan Didion: an account of a delayed plane flight, a man’s violent outburst at the woman beside him, him disembarking before the plane’s departure, and Didion’s expressed dislike of an epiphany moment: a glimpse of incident or crisis as the makings of a short story.

I won’t let myself, I decide, read anything into the balloons now, as they go from shape to speck in the bright sky. I just watch them lift into the blue — off and apart, away from each other.

This was a runner up in the 2024 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation