‘And I said I’d take him some soup, but he’s just rung and said he’s nil by mouth because they’re going to operate tonight.’
‘I doubt that. Not on an evening, not on a weekend.’ Mary locked the back door and went to her bedroom for her jacket.
Cooper was off his drip but still in bed. One hand was dark and swollen, with a cannula stub taped and bound tightly, as if it would run away otherwise.
‘I’d kill for a coffee,’ he said.
‘But you can’t eat or drink.’
‘No.’ There was silence as the boy tested the only chair. Experience had taught him they were all wobbly. Mary put her bag down and gazed around. The bed beside the window was empty but the sheets were flung back and a pair of sandals was beside it. The man in the opposite bed was dozing, his mouth an open hole in a skull of yellow skin so thin and stretched it looked like every breath would tear the hole wider and wider. He looked at least a hundred years old. In the fourth bed next to Cooper another man was sitting upright, his hair fuzzy around his pear of a head, his eyes bright, looking for an opportunity.
‘Did you bring your notebook?’ Cooper said in a low voice. ‘It’s like absurd theatre here. All day.’
‘Hey, fella!’ The boy looked up from his phone. ‘Come over here, will you?’
He sauntered over, glancing back at his parents with a wry smile.
‘What’s ya name, fella?’
‘Andy.’
‘Sandy?’ The man barked, cupping his ear.
‘Andy,’ the boy said, louder.
‘Oh, Andy. Listen, Andy, are you good at English?’
He shrugged. ‘Kind of.’
‘Course you are, I can see you’re a clever boy.’ The man was almost shouting, though the boy stood right by his bed. ‘Now I’ve got a question for you, Andy. Is it correct to say the yolk of the egg are white or the yolk of the egg is white?’ Sensing resistance, he added quickly, ‘Are or is, come on, now, what’s correct?’
‘Err . . . is,’ Andy said, smiling at his father. ‘Of course.’
‘NO!’ The man slapped his thigh. ‘The yolk of the egg is YELLOW!’ He laughed so deeply he started coughing.
‘See,’ Cooper said quietly from his bed. ‘Every day, it’s like a play.’
Andy came over. ‘I know it’s yellow,’ he said to his mother. ‘I just thought he was mad and didn’t want to correct him.’
She held his arm and leaned over to his father. ‘Can I get you something? A magazine?’
Cooper shook his head. Mary went with the boy down to the vending machine for a Coke and waited until he finished it all, so as not to be drinking in front of Cooper. When they returned the man in the bed opposite had reappeared and a nurse was writing in his chart. The wispy-haired man was again sitting upright, interrogating.
‘Where do you come from?’ he shouted, after the nurse left, eyeing frankly the long legs sticking out of the gown.
‘Somalia.’
‘Ay? Somalia? Where’s that?’
‘Somalia is in Africa.’
‘AFRICA! Well, I never.’ He paused, glanced round the room. An audience. ‘Somalia. Is that a good country?’
‘No, it is a very bad place.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘There has been a war there for fifteen years.’
‘What are you doing here, then?’
‘I am a refugee.’
‘A refugee!’ This was gold. The man looked around again, trying to catch the eye of Cooper, or Mary, of anyone. He leaned further forward on his bed, his eyes brighter than ever with expectation.
‘And a footballer.’
‘No!’ Now the man leaned back on his pillows, silent for a few moments, considering the patriotic implications of such conflicting roles. Then he said slowly, ‘Footballer, ay? What, here, or in Somalia?’
‘In Somalia I played professional football. Here I am semi-professional.’ He then closed his eyes.
The man crossed his arms and blew loudly out his mouth, fluttering the white hairs fringing his dome forehead. After a moment he leaned forward again and said, ‘What are you in this place for, then?’
The Somali man opened his eyes. ‘Observation.’ Then shut them again. When no more explanation came, the wispy-haired man turned to gaze at Cooper and the boy next to him, open-mouthed, shaking his head. The wonder. The rudeness. Mary saw the Somali man’s lips twitch. His eyes opened again, and he added, ‘Following a car accident. I am in for observation. My car was hit by a truck. We are all alive, but require observation.’
‘All? How many of you?’
‘Five. All members of my football team.’
Then an orderly arrived, followed by another nurse with a clipboard. They all stared as he was helped into a chair and wheeled out again, this time down to X-ray. The man turned to Cooper and said, ‘Somalia, ay. D’you reckon he’s making that up?’ Then the ancient man in the opposite bed groaned in his sleep, his mouth still a wide hole, the noise so long and slow it was like a final exhalation. They all stared at the white mound in the bed until they could see the chest rising again, then falling, slowly but discernibly.
‘Told you,’ Cooper said to Mary. ‘Beckett.’
Just then the nurse who had escorted the patient off to X-ray returned. ‘Sorry to tell you this,’ she said quite cheerfully, ‘but theatre’s rung again and they won’t be doing you until later tonight.’
‘It’s after six-thirty.’
‘I know.’ She smiled, picking up his wrist for his pulse.
‘So it’s already later tonight. They won’t do it tonight, surely.’
She shrugged.
‘Do they even operate at night?’
‘Of course. For emergencies.’
‘Which I’m not.’
She shrugged again, scribbled on his chart.
‘Weren’t you meant to be done first thing this morning, Dad?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re waiting all day and you can’t even have a sip of water?’
‘That’s right.’
The boy dug out his phone and resumed playing. Mary flipped through the colour supplement, then put it down in the litter of newspaper sections beside the bed.
‘Have you heard from her at all?’
‘Once,’ said Cooper. ‘Yesterday.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘You just need to give her some time.’
‘Hey, fella,’ barked the man next to him.
‘I can’t stand it any longer,’ Mary said, jumping up. ‘Come on, I’ll get you a hamburger or something.’
Andy glanced up from his game. ‘But aren’t we having the soup for dinner?’
‘It’ll be too late by the time we get home.’
The hospital café was closing up. There were a few cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, hot pies, a slice of pizza. She bought him the last of the hot chips and a chicken sandwich, set him down at a table, and brought over a packet of tomato sauce. She went back to the cold food bar, inspected a bowl of fruit salad. Picked up a yoghurt, considering, then replaced it. Yoggit. Sometimes I say yoggit. Frances would always eat yoghurt. Her favourite was apple cinnamon, low fat.
She sat back at the table where Andy was squeezing the rectangle of tomato sauce next to his chips. He dipped them one by one into the puddle. They would have the soup tomorrow. The stock needed some mint and noodles, beansprouts and lemon. No chilli for him, lots for her. And fresh fillet steak, sliced thin as wafers. She would half-freeze the meat before cutting it. If there were only the two of them, it would make several meals. Too many. She took her phone out, considered sending a message, then replaced it.
Back in the ward the boy took Cooper’s hand, the one that was not bruised and swollen under the taped cannula. The other men were asleep, and the Somali man had still not returned from X-ray.
‘We’ll get going,’ she said. ‘He’s got school tomorrow.’
The nurse walked in once more. ‘Sorry about this, but your op’s not happening until tomorrow now.’
‘Tomorrow morning or tomorrow night?’
The nurse shrugged. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. But you can have something to eat if you like.’
‘God, so much waiting,’ Mary said. ‘It’s unbearable.’ She dropped into the wobbly chair again, putting her face in her hands. The boy and his father looked at each other, then at her, then away. After a while Andy said, ‘Maybe we could go out somewhere and get you a sandwich, Dad.’
He shook his head, drew the boy closer and held him with one arm.
Finally she lifted her head, drew a deep breath and blew it out again, then said, ‘It’s all right. I’m okay now.’
‘You sure?’ Cooper said.
‘It’s just all the waiting.’
‘I know.’
As they left, the man in the next bed began calling out again but Cooper called out louder, waving his good hand.
‘Stoppard,’ he said. ‘Definitely Stoppard.’
The Recovery Position
A dog bite. Cate slumped lower onto the bench, still shaking her head. The man had asked about venomous dog bites. If she still smoked she would have been reaching for the pack right now. She took another long swig of water. Fat bubbles volcanoed back into the bottle before the soft PET flattened, crackling noisily. She blotted her mouth with the back of her hand and hunched into the covert position she would have been in were she still able to light up.
Before she first gave up – Mara’s insistence: she was threatening to go and live with her mother after the birth if she didn’t – Cate had perfected a furtive crouch, with her back bent around to shield the cigarette from disapproval. By cupping her hand around it, turned inwards to the palm, she could often get away with pretending she was doing nothing at all, provided the wind was cooperative. Or thought she could. She wasn’t stupid, but somehow smokers lost their brains when it came to giving up, or lying about giving up. How many times had she sworn outright she wasn’t smoking when it was obvious Mara could smell it on her? She used to come home and ignore Bethany’s outstretched arms to head straight for the bathroom, pretending she needed to wash her hands or something. After swilling her mouth out, she’d then emerge to embrace the toddling child. Mara would just stare at her from the kitchen. That was after they’d stopped kissing each other hello. Once, out at the barbecue, she’d pushed her hand into her pocket, still holding a lit cigarette, and then wondered why Mara had looked at her hip, the curl of smoke emerging like a question mark, rolled her eyes and walked off again.
She checked the time on her phone. There was not much shade from the sun but there were another three minutes before the session resumed, and the training room was stifling. She popped an Endone from the strip in her pocket, swallowing it with the last of her water, and pressed a paper towel from the medical kit onto her face. She was always thirsty these days, always sweating no matter what the weather was like.
Tall skinny pines stood all along the street side of the industrial estate and the section allocated to the training programs was behind a sand-coloured patch of grass. The estate was next to a new housing block, marked out but not yet developed. Across the street was a parking lot. The whole area had an unrelenting openness about it, so hot and dry that, with half-closed eyes, she could pretend she was back in Kandahar.
She opened her eyes and stood up. Why on earth would she want to do that. She walked back to the demountable. Training stages three and four to get through, then the lunch break. No chance that the idiot had decided to piss off. A lot of them did that by the mid-morning break, the ones who’d enrolled because they were told they had to, it being their only way to keep claiming their Centrelink benefits. She never knew what happened to these people, so frail and dysfunctional they couldn’t focus on a one-day course, even one as dumbed-down as hers. You only had to have your basic senses to pass it. Maybe that was the problem.
She had been halfway through venomous bites, and the fucking idiot had asked about dogs. She’d been running through the obvious ones – funnel-web, red-back, tiger snake, brown snake – when the man’s hand had shot up.
‘What about dog bites?’ he’d said. ‘Do you use the same technique there?’ Cate had just looked at him for a long theatrical pause. Waited three beats. Then replied as slowly as she dared without risking obvious contempt.
Now she flipped through the forms for the test, tapped them into a neat pile on the table and looked up. They were shuffling in and, yes, the dog-bite idiot was there up the back again. Dogs are not venomous. She’d actually had to spell that out to him. Were people really that dumb? Before the start of the session she’d looked at the list of participants and then, sitting outside in the break, mentally run through the possibilities. How likely was it that this man, here to qualify in order to stay in work as a security guard, community worker, certified volunteer, or – god help them – childcare worker, would actually ever need to use his First Aid Certificate? She sincerely hoped not at all.
Spider and snake bites, poisons, toxic plants, done. She handed round the test forms for them to complete their multiple-choice questions at the end of the day. If they all listened they’d realise she would be spoonfeeding them the answers. They could fill the forms in as she spoke, hand them up, and they’d all get out of here by five, certificates printed and laminated. All ridiculously simple. But they didn’t listen. And there was always someone who’d learned first aid back whenever, probably in primary school, and kept asking was she sure you didn’t suck out venom. Or nick the wound with your penknife and let the blood clean it. Did anyone even carry a penknife, for god’s sake? Another idiot refused to believe that oleander was poisonous. ‘That can’t be true!’ she’d said. ‘We had them growing all round my place when I was a kid.’
‘Then you’re lucky to be alive,’ Cate had shot back.
She moved on quickly, not caring now if she seemed rude. The pain in her back was no better despite the Endone. It helped if she stood up and moved around but the room was so cramped that was hard. Weaving between the inadequate desks to hand out the burns and fractures fact sheets, she tripped on someone’s leg sticking out, and when she winced audibly they all stared at her. ‘Army injury,’ she said, limping back to the front of the room. ‘It’s why I’m now here teaching you guys.’ There was a brief and what she thought respectful silence, but as she turned around from the DRSABCD Action Plan poster she saw three or four of the men staring at her. She knew what they were thinking.
Despite everything, Mara had kicked her out anyway. She’d accused her of duplicity, of letting her down once too often, of not being there enough. Then the smoking. It was true, she often went out saying she needed to go to the bank or fill the car with petrol, when instead she was buying a pack at the servo, then driving home via the cul-de-sac. She’d stand against the rear door of the Subaru, gazing across at the kids’ playground in the park, have three or four in a row, then throw the rest of the pack away. How stupid that everything collapsed because of this. They went to counselling a few times, where she almost dared Mara to say it outright: our relationship has failed because of her smoking. How stupid it would sound. And yet Cate could see how much they both needed to focus on something specific. Grabbing hold of the entire truth about why they were breaking up was like trying to throw a net over a cloud and drag it close. Even she didn’t want to think it all the way through, for what she might have to see.
There was no court case, not for the separation. It was the property settlement, the custody drama. Somehow her smoking always got a mention. Fucking Mara. Fucking cigarettes. Fucking whatever. She had never smoked until Tarin Kowt. Fitness, a ten-k-a-day run on her days off, having to be able to jump up and pretty much stay awake for forty-eight hours if necessary, standing for
the entire time during long shifts in the surgical unit. None of that went with smoking. Only after the accident. And now that Mara was gone, with Bethany – in the end she couldn’t fight that, Mara was the birth mother after all, and Cate had always been the absent parent – she had given up smoking anyway.
Next to come were dressings, bandages and splints. As she handed out the dressings she could already see the worst. The stupid jokes about mummies. The ones who always got the stuff tangled, who had no idea how to unroll and dress in the same action. Cohesive bandage was foolproof but they somehow got it wrong, pulling out great lengths then wondering why it all clumped and stuck together. After she paired them up and got them to practise on each other there were two poor bastards to rescue before their toes turned purple. Some of them were using the kit laid out on the back table, and the class clown thought it hilarious when he tickled his partner’s butt with a fake arm. Someone else had stuck an adhesive dressing across his mouth and was pretending to suffocate.
There was always a class clown, several if she was unlucky. Always the mummy jokes. Always the mucking around with syringes. Guaranteed, every time. She could pick them the minute she entered a training session: never a woman, always a guy in his thirties or forties. The banks sent them, the schools or childcare centres, if they were handymen or gardeners. The bigger bars and restaurant venues. They came to training full of resentment. As if they needed to know how to bandage a wound. Last thing they wanted was to give mouth-to-mouth to a drunk who’d collapsed. No matter how often she explained patiently the remote possibility of ever giving mouth-to-mouth to anyone, least of all a bloke suffering chest pains after a night out, they joked about it. ‘Are we meant to be poofs or what? Germs, love, germs! What if their breath stinks, eh?’ The guys from the security sector were less inclined to joke, more determined to direct their resentment at her, personally. They were the ones sitting back in their chairs with arms folded across their chests, singlets too tight, shaved heads held pugnaciously. The ones who’d ask, ‘And how did a sheila like you get to be doing this? Training us in first aid?’
Zebra Page 13