by Naomi Booth
* * *
When we get out onto the street there are a few more people about, but it’s quiet still. The glare is bright, even though the shadows are lengthening now. I watch an older couple on the other side of the street: their shadows lean back from them, elongated across the pavement. I feel light headed and I can see all the little floaters in my eyes dancing about, like static on an old telly screen.
‘I really need something to drink,’ I say. ‘I’m dehydrated.’ We find a food-mart that’s open, down at the bottom of the street, on the corner. I sit down with a carton of juice in the shade outside while Pete gets the essentials: protected eggs and bread, protected indoor-reared meat, beer.
‘They’re selling loads of unprotected stuff,’ he says when he comes out with a carrier bag full. ‘It’s dirt cheap.’
‘We’re not eating it,’ I say.
‘I’m just saying,’ Pete says, ‘No one has proved anything. All this protected food is probably a racket, if you ask me. I bet we’re paying a bloody fortune for no reason.’
‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘We’re not eating it.’
As we walk back to the car, we pass a blackfella sitting in the shade in front of one of the empty shops. He’s busking. At least I think he is. He’s not wearing any shoes and he’s playing on a wooden whistle, but there’s no sign asking for money, no hat out for coins. I glance down at his feet. Something’s not right. We keep on walking and I glance back.
‘Bloody hell,’ I say to Pete. ‘Look at that fella’s feet. Can you see?’
We’re already a way past him now and Pete hooks his arms through mine, keeping me moving.
‘I have no intention of looking at that bloke’s feet,’ Pete says.
‘Wait up. I think he’s…’ I look back again but we’re too far away to see anything clearly now. ‘I think I saw…’
‘Oh, let me guess what you think you saw. Chri’sake, babe, give it a rest will ya? What was the point of us coming out here if you’re going to keep this up? We agreed, didn’t we? Look how beautiful it is out here. Smell how clean it is.’
We’re back at the car now and Pete inhales theatrically. He turns his head to stare up at the sky. I follow his gaze: the sky is clear and blue, just a few thin clouds drifting above the mountains in the distance. The moon is already high; it’s full and round at one side but one-third is missing at the other side, taken up by a curve of blue. It looks as though the moon is made of the same wispy stuff as the clouds and has burnt clean away in the heat.
‘Let’s get back,’ Pete says. He pulls me close and kisses the top of my head. ‘There’s nothing to worry about out here, Ali,’ he says. ‘Remember: fresh start.’
* * *
I remember, instead, when my skin seemed like magic. We’re in the car driving back to the new house and Pete’s singing along to something on the stereo as he drives and I’m looking at my fingers, at the tiny scuffs of skin around a nail where I’ve caught the cuticle with my teeth and sheared away a stretch of it. There are three pinpricks of old blood, just below the nail bed, and the skin around them is roughed up in tiny bristles. That skin must be dead. And in a few days the pinpricks of blood will be completely gone. The top layer of my skin will have secretly, magically, crept across the tiny wounds, knitting itself back together again. Your skin is ever so clever, my mother used to say when I was a child and had cut myself: it’s like a layer of magic all around you. When I fell down the steps at school and cut my knees badly, jewelled with blood and grit, she picked the wounds clean with tweezers, wiped each one with something that stung so sharp it made me giddy, and then she covered me in fabric sticking plaster. In three nights’ time, we’ll check again, she said, and we did, we checked together, sitting on the edge of my bed, and it was like lifting the lid on an experiment. The first time we looked, the wounds were still wet, but a few days later even the worst of the cuts was starting to heal, the flesh beneath dulled to purple, the skin settling back into a dry gauze of grazes. In another few days, both knees had scabbed over, and then, a few weeks down the line – nothing, no sign of anything, nothing left of the injury at all. My knees had sealed back over, the new skin clean and soft and supple. It made me think of my skin as a silvery fabric that fluttered around me in the night, netting me back together. Just look at my arms! my mother had said, when my wounds were still fresh. She worked in a vet’s surgery back then: an auxiliary who handed cats and dogs into their cages every day. Wrist to elbow she was always covered in scratches, and her hands were often bruised and bloody from cat bites. This one, she said, drawing my finger all the way along a long, thin graze, this one was nasty. A big old Tom caught his claw in me like a hook and unzipped me all the way along my arm. Ugh, I said, and thought of her being unzipped, her skin like a suit, leaving what behind? Not a person, not a person under there, just some awful hot, veiny mess. Ugh. But look, she said, it’s almost healed. You can hardly feel it now. She ran my finger up and down the scratch, so thin now that I could barely find its teeth. That’s how clever your skin is, she said, it makes the bad things disappear.
There was a girl at school got burned by a firework. Everyone knew the story: it had crackled its way round the schoolyard. A rocket had gone off in the Bardis’ backyard on New Year’s Eve, only it had fallen on its side after Mr Bardi lit the fuse, spinning out of control, bouncing off the walls, and chasing the whole family back into the house. Then it burst in through the window, smashing glass everywhere and spearing Leena in the thigh. She was the prettiest, liveliest girl in our class; dark-skinned and tall, her long limbs were always draped around her friends, comforting them, drawing them in close. Afterwards, for a long while, she was jittery. She got thin and withdrawn, and startled at loud noises in the playground. You could see the whites of her eyes all of the time. But, eventually, we saw her skin work its magic. They gave her grafts, taking flesh from her buttocks and plying it back into her thigh. In PE we caught glimpses of the large cotton pads that she wore under her school skirt and speculated eagerly on what was underneath. And when the day came, a year or so later, that the pads were gone, we gathered around her in silence. She lifted her skirt, slowly, coquettishly, and showed us the magic. Her dark skin gleamed: her outer thigh curved ever so slightly inwards where it had once bowed, but the skin had meshed back together, a pale lattice of new scars. She lowered her skirt, smiled shyly, laced her arm around her best friend’s neck again.
* * *
That was the old magic. But we live in new times. I can’t depend on the old magic of skin, on the old secrets of healing. Our skin is a hex on us now: it turns our bodies to puffs of smoke, choking out their own fires.
These are the thoughts I’m not meant to have. This is what Pete wants us to leave behind.
‘Here we are, babe.’ Pete swings the car up in front of the house. Our house, our Mountain View. ‘Welcome home.’
I feel the tiny scuffs of skin around my nail; I press them down with my thumb and I will them to mend quick and clean. Oh lord, keep me safe from harm. Oh lord, keep me safe from my skin.
II
THE next morning it’s my job to go register at the doctors’ while Pete carries on with the unpacking. We found a surgery and marked it on the map before we came out here – which is lucky, because it’ll be at least a week before we get a phone-line and we still can’t get reception on either of our mobiles. I get into the car to drive to Lakoomba. I have to push the seat back and I need to hold my arms at a weird angle to accommodate my stomach. I haven’t driven since I got this big. The bump feels so prominent, so precarious behind the wheel. What happens if I need to brake suddenly? Pete says I’m more robust than I know, that any baby of ours will be made of stern stuff. Still, when I glance down at my stomach, at its improbable roundness, I can’t help thinking of overripe objects splitting and spoiling: of swollen fruit softening to mush, of big, soft egg-yolks bleeding yellow across a plate, of a torn jellyfish I once saw on the beach, spilling out her oily innards. Pete says fixating
on things that might happen only makes life worse. But I’ve seen things that Pete hasn’t, the sorts of things that flash back to you, unbidden, like bright lights that score through the darkness even after you shut your eyes. It’s not easy to forget these things.
I drive slowly, I drive so slowly that braking would hardly be noticeable, and I get a good look at the streets that lead into town. There’s one house that’s probably walking distance from ours, half-an-hour at a push. It’s a similar construction to Mountain View: square, with a pitched, tiled roof, a verandah and a large garden. It’s no longer white: the paint has almost entirely peeled away and the wood underneath is now grey and splitting in places. The garden is overgrown, and a longhaired cat, fat and shabby, sunbathes on the front porch. After this house there are no others for a while and the road banks steeply down into the valley bottom. There’s a clear view of the mountains from here. The nearest edge is made of jagged, golden rocks, a deadly-looking set of giant stalagmites. At the foot of this crop, the dense green of the eucalypt begins. And beyond the green sprawl of the valley the mountains really are blue, shading away into the dark, indigo distance. Trying to see that far feels like trying to peer back through time. My eyes strain and I have to look back at the road. The mountains mark the beginning of the forest. Nearly four thousand miles of it, some of it still unmapped. Swamps and heathlands and rainforest and hidden woods full of relic species. That’s what they call them: Wollemia trees, extinct everywhere else in the world, still grow in pockets here, relics from millions of years back when the continent was still one landmass. No one’s allowed to visit the most ancient trees, in case they bring modern bugs, and their location is kept secret. If anywhere’s still clean, Pete says, it’s here. The forest will clean the air.
On the outskirts of town there are more houses. I can see that this used to be a nice place to live. There are clusters of pretty, red-roofed cottages on the hillside. They look almost Mediterranean. When you get closer up, they’re no longer so picturesque. There are cracked panes, slipped tiles, more splitting wood. This used to be a tourist town, before the summers got so ferocious. At the very edge of town there’s an area of run-down shacks. It’s not quite a shanty, but it’s not far off. The doctors’ surgery is just beyond here, on a corner where the shacks meet the shops that signal the start of the town centre: a couple of mini-marts, a drug store, a discount t-shirt shop that has made a temporary home in an abandoned seafood restaurant. I park the car. At least there are a few more people around today. I inspect them from behind my sunnies. I’d imagined that out here people would seem less frazzled, less worn-down than in the city. Maybe it’s the heat today; the people I pass seem even more broken than back home. There’s a dark-skinned woman carrying a crying child; her skin is oily and the soft spots under her eyes have sunk inwards, making her face look as though it’s collapsing with tiredness. Two old, tanned, white men walk together towards me. One is bow legged and evidently in pain; the other spits as he passes by. Their clothes are smeared with dirt and they smell of fried food and sweat.
When I reach the doctors’ surgery, there are several notices pinned to the door, covering older notices. Some of them are hand-written, scrawled in felt-tip. ‘Emergencies only. For routine medical issues, visit the pharmacy on Freelander Ave.’ When I push open the door, the waiting area is chocka. There’s a queue down the left-hand side of the room, composed of antsy, jiggling people. Others sit on a crescent of chairs at the right-hand side of the room. The heat is unbearable. I hear crying and turn to see a young boy sitting on one of the chairs. He’s covering his ears with his hands and he’s keening like a dog. While I’m staring at the boy, a nurse appears alongside me and takes hold of my elbow.
‘How far along are you?’ she asks.
‘Thirty-six weeks,’ I say. ‘Actually, almost thirty-seven.’
‘Ok,’ she says. ‘You’re in the high-risk category. I can take you straight past the queue to see the doctor. Where are your symptoms?’
‘Symptoms?’ I say. ‘What do you mean? I’ve come to register. I– ’
She pulls up. ‘If you’re not symptomatic you need to leave right away,’ she says. ‘I suppose you didn’t see the signs on the door?’
She’s walking me out now, like a bouncer. I glance over my shoulder, back to the crying boy. He’s pressing against his ears with the flats of his palms, gritting his teeth.
The nurse helps me through the door, ejecting me onto the pavement. Her face is stony: she’s used to reprimanding people. ‘You can’t take up space in here,’ she says. ‘We’re full. Folk keep passing out in the heat.’
‘But I’ve just moved here,’ I say. ‘I need to register before the birth. I need a midwife.’
The nurse pauses and looks at me a little more kindly. Her blonde hair is swept back into a bun. Her eyeliner has turned fudgey in the heat and it’s working its way into the creases around her eyes. She wipes the sweat that’s collecting on her forehead back into her hair. ‘Is it your first?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Why in God’s name have you come out here?’
‘Fresh start,’ I say, softly. I don’t know if she hears me. ‘What did you mean, symptoms?’ I ask, trying not to panic. ‘Do you mean that all those people in there have symptoms of– ,’ I can feel the sting of bile at the bottom of my throat. It’s probably just heartburn – it’s happened a few times since I’ve got this big – though I feel like I might be sick.
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘We’re only doing emergency services from this surgery now. Nowhere that I know is registering regular patients. The midwives are flat out, dealing with… complications. Did you go to antenatal classes?’
‘Yes,’ I say. We attended classes back in the city. Pete had mostly made jokes and flirted with the instructor. I’d assiduously taken notes, but I knew even then that the scant physical details and jolly, convivial atmosphere of the group wasn’t any real sort of preparation. Measured breathing and lavender oil for the ‘discomfort’? I’ve been in maternity wards. I’ve seen the stirrups and the episiotomy scissors and the epidural needles and the scalpels. These places smell more like slaughterhouses than the afternoon spa-trip the instructor was preparing us for.
‘Well, you’ll know how to recognise labour then,’ the nurse says. ‘Once you get established, your partner needs to drive you to the hospital. It’s a little over an hour from here.’ I guess I must look crestfallen, because she says, ‘If you’ve got a partner?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And a car?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘And were there any early risk factors or complications in your pregnancy?’
‘No.’
‘Then just thank your lucky stars. Make sure you ring the hospital as soon as you get going, in case they don’t have beds. They won’t admit you if they’re full with emergencies. If you ring and they’re full, they’ll tell you where to present instead. The next hospital along is an hour-and-a-half away.’
‘Our birth plan was for a home birth,’ I say, ‘so I need a midwife.’
‘Home birth?’ she says, and she laughs out loud. ‘And you’re primigravida? It’s your first pregnancy? And you’re over an hour from the nearest hospital and all of this is going on?’
‘What do you mean, “all of this”? Are all those people symptomatic with cutis?’ Her face turns downwards, severe again, so I try another tack. ‘Listen, I saw some cases in the city. I work for the Department of Housing. I know that something is going on, that it’s more serious than they’re letting on. My partner won’t believe me. Thinks I’m exaggerating things. Is it happening out here, too?’
‘Listen,’ she says, looking me up and down. I made an effort today: a long maternity dress, a brush through my hair, some face-lotion and mascara. Perhaps I look reasonable. ‘You can find all the official advice online. There have been fewer cases out here, up to now. But there are fewer medical staff, too, and we’re not getting any e
xtra support, you can be sure of that. We’re in what they call a “rapidly changing situation”. I’ve got to go. There are people in here who need my help right now.’
‘When you said I was “high-risk” because I was pregnant, did you mean at higher-risk of cutis symptoms, or that the symptoms are more dangerous?’ I ask. And then, ‘What does it mean, “a rapidly changing situation”? Does that mean things are getting worse?’
She turns away and closes the door to the surgery behind her.
* * *
I sit in the car for a while and rest my head against the steering wheel. Even the plastic is clammy. If we were back in the city I’d be recording this now, racing home to put the details into my files: location, number of suspected cases, exact words of medical practitioner. I’d be checking the internet for clues of other cases in the area and I’d be posting on my blog: ‘Central Lakoomba: New cases suspected. Medical staff refuse to admit routine patients.’ My conspiracy files, Pete calls them. I’m not supposed to be recording this stuff anymore. And I’m definitely not supposed to be blogging about it. Pete says it’s ghoulish and obsessive and that the stress of thinking about it must be bad for the baby. And it’s true that it almost cost me my job. So we came to this agreement: we’d get out here, to Lakoomba, and I’d start from scratch, we’d both start from scratch. I’d leave behind my misdemeanours, Pete would leave behind his, and we’d try to make something new together. But how can I leave it behind if it’s out here too? One day, someone’s going to want to know how this all played out, how they tried to cover it up. And my records, at least, will be there for them.
I drive back from Lakoomba more quickly than I drove out, and when I get back to the house I’m sick in the kitchen sink. My gullet stings for a while afterwards, so I rinse out my mouth and gulp down a couple of glasses of water. I was lucky in the early stages of the pregnancy, I guess, and was hardly sick at all. Maybe these things can start to happen in the later stages? Or perhaps this is something else? The water still tastes strange to me out here. I need to ask Pete to check on the paperwork for the pump, make sure the water’s filtered, make sure it’s not making us sick. I feel a flutter of panic. Without the internet there might be no way for me to obsess over what’s happening in the city; but there’s also no way to check what’s normal at this stage in the pregnancy. I’ll ask Pete to drive somewhere he can get reception later on, so that he can ask his mum. There’s no need to panic, that’s what Pete will say. The nurse said I’d be fine and she’s a medical professional. But I can’t help thinking of the boy with the flats of his palms over his ears. What was happening to him? What was happening to the skin of his ears? A rapidly changing situation, the nurse said. I wash my hands and dampen my hair and cheeks with water. I can feel that my skin’s unusually hot. It’s as I’m standing over the sink, resting my weight on its edges, that I notice something out in the garden: some sort of movement. I survey the backyard through the kitchen window. There it is again, a flutter at the edge of the bushes. I move over to the door and step carefully out onto the verandah. Then I sink down low, squatting at the edge of the wooden platform and resting my weight on its lip. I sit very still. I don’t have to wait long and then there it is again: a small disturbance in the clump of bottlebrush at the edge of the flower border. The yellow, fuzzy heads of the flowers shake violently until, gradually, the movement subsides. There’s no breeze, but the bulbs of yellow are still swaying gently. What’s in there? It must be something small and quick. We haven’t seen anything wild in the city for such a long time. I can feel my heart beating quickly in my chest, stupidly excited at the prospect of seeing something feral. People said that animals were surviving better out here, creatures that have long disappeared back home. Perhaps it’s true then, perhaps this is the proof: things are thriving out here, so the air must be cleaner. Maybe it’s a bandicoot? I haven’t seen one since I was small child and they used to visit our backyard on rare, magical evenings. Mum would fetch torches and we would watch them using their long, furry noses to root around for insects at the edges of the flower beds. But bandicoots forage at night. Whatever this is, it’s a daytime critter. It’s too small to be dangerous – far too small to be a dingo, for instance. And it’s too big to be poisonous: no brown snake or funnel-web spider or bull ant could cause this kind of shaking. I carry on sitting, quiet and still, waiting for something alive to reveal itself. There’s another couple of rounds of shaking and then I catch a glimpse of it: the shaking’s caused by the skittish movements of a small bird. It’s not quite as exciting as I was hoping for but, still, birds are rare enough in the city these days. There’s the flutter of a wing and then nothing for a while longer. What can it be doing in there? Perhaps it’s found some tasty but resistant morsel. Perhaps it’s engaged in a protracted struggle with a particularly tenacious worm. Suddenly, the bird spins itself out of the bush and into the open. It spins itself onto the lawn, and then stands still and flaps its wings. Not in a taking-off kind of way; more in a shake-down kind of a way. It’s a pretty little thing: sleek amber feathers on its body, which shade into gold on its back and look greenish on its belly; a black head with little white patches on its cheeks. A honey-eater, I think, with its long, sharp, nectar-drinking beak. I haven’t seen one in years. I want to run and get Pete from upstairs, but if I move I might frighten it away. The bird stands entirely still for a few seconds more. And then it spins on the ground again and flutters its wings. I’ve never seen a bird move like this. It’s as though it’s using its wings to sweep the area around it, or else to show-off, in a kind of dance. Maybe it’s some sort of courtship ritual. But it’s the wrong time of year, surely, and I scan the area for other birds: there’s nothing to see. The bird wheels around again, flutters its wings in an extended circle around its own body. Little by little, it’s moving closer and closer to me. I watch it perform this strange ritual a few more times, as it intermittently spins itself towards the verandah. Between spins it keeps its wings held out at a battish angle. It’s as though it’s poised for movement at any moment, concentrating intensely even while it rests.