by Naomi Booth
I want to see cutis diagnosis and treatment rates; I want to see morbidity and mortality rates, though I hide it a little, wrap it up in lots of other requests.
‘Well, as you’ll be aware, we have a duty of confidentiality to our residents. We can’t make any individual records available. You’ll need to go through the surgeries to get those figures. You’ll need to apply for them, like you would in the city.’
‘But you keep figures on morbidity and mortality rates, like the Department of Health would?’
‘Our surgeries hold those figures,’ Linda says.
‘So how are you monitoring public health?’ I say. ‘Given that your medical surgeries are private practices?’
‘Our medical teams report into the Department of Health, just like any other private surgery in the city.’
‘But there’s a difference here,’ I say. ‘You’re paying these fellas. It’s in their interest to minimise treatment costs for you, right?’
Linda smiles. ‘I’m sorry, ladies, you’ve been here for six hours, and I really do need to draw our meeting to a close. I’ve provided everything that’s required as part of our inspection, and I’m delighted that you find our little place exemplary.’
Melissa sends out a complaint about me: apparently I was bullish and obstructive, and their State doesn’t want me to ‘buddy-up’ for any future inspections. I go ahead and request the figures from the camp’s surgeries anyway. And what I find is an unusually high mortality rate for young people living at the camp. And not one single cause of death recorded as cutis. In fact, no records at all of any cutis diagnoses or surgical interventions. The surgery is costly: they’re leaving it untreated and burying it without a trace, they have to be.
I added all this to my files, which were growing more and more extensive. And then, of course, there was my mother. My mother who died of a heart attack, my mother who, according to official medical records, absolutely did not die of cutis. So you see, with all this going on, I had to carry on recording things, even after Kimmy’s warning. I had to record the signs, hidden but everywhere, of what was really going on.
* * *
It’s late afternoon by the time Pete’s finished his work and we’re ready to set off down the road in search of the neighbours. We walk side by side and we swing our arms. Pete seems happy, carefree almost.
‘How was work?’ I ask.
‘Not too shabby,’ says Pete. ‘Just finishing up a job. Jet-ski brochure.’
‘Yeah?’ I say.
‘Look at this,’ he says, turning towards the valley and the mountains. ‘No smog out here. Clean as a whistle. Smell that air!’
I breathe in through my nose. It smells cleaner than the city, for sure. It’s a complex mix, there are tones in there: the hot acacia hits you first, green and waxy, but then there’s something sharper, a bit like petrol, and after-notes of charcoal ash. Things smell different to me now, stronger and more distinct. Before we left the city, I’d stopped going out on weekends when there was smog. I could smell the pollution hours before it descended: I could distinguish all the different acrid layers that make up its piss-yellow haze. It made me dizzy and nauseated. Pete says it’s the pregnancy, says it can make you hyper-alert to scents and tastes. Says his mother could smell bacon when it was being cooked three streets away when she was pregnant with his youngest brother. I keep quiet about the petrol smell and let Pete enjoy all his outdoor gasping.
When we reach the neighbour’s house, it’s just as it was yesterday: deserted except for the fat cat lying out on the front porch in the sun, like the king of his own prairie. Pete walks up the path and I follow. As we get closer, I see that above the cat there’s a dense canopy of spider webs. Some of them are worked over so thickly that they’ve got the fluffy look of raw cotton. I can see the fat, black, carnivorous centres of several of them. ‘It’s the spit of our house, hey bub? Its little twin.’ Pete crouches down and coos at the cat. The cat regards him with deep contempt. Pete reaches out his hand. In the sunlight, I can see that the cat’s long, white fur is full of dust and pollen, and god knows what else, and that if Pete touches it he’ll feel its horrible, hard knots of mange and his fingers will come back coated in filth. ‘Don’t,’ I say, though I needn’t have. The cat has made its fur even bigger, sinking its head back between its shoulders, hissing at Pete. It slinks off the porch.
‘Who’s there?’ a voice shouts from inside the house.
Pete stands up, grins at the doorway. The door’s open, but there’s a black mosquito net strung across it and it’s too dark inside to make anything out.
‘Watch yourself,’ I say to Pete, pointing up at the dense, white webs above the doorway. No one can have been out here for months. I stand well back on the path and Pete nods, staying off the porch.
‘G’day!’ he calls. ‘We’re your new neighbours. Just moved in up the road. Thought we’d say hello!’ Pete turns to me. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Should’ve brought something. Beers? Flowers?’
‘Clear-off,’ the voice shouts. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’ The shout is an elderly man’s: it sounds raw, as though the sound is being ripped from his throat. At the ends of his sentences the sound splits in unpredictable ways; his voice is breaking again in a reverse adolescence. ‘Bugger right off.’
Pete laughs, turns to me with a check-this-bloke-out expression. ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘you’ve misunderstood me. We’re just here to introduce ourselves. We’ve moved in, further up the street. We’re living up at Mountain View, so we’re neighbours.’
The man appears to be sidling up to the edge of the door, to get a better look at us. I can see the dark outline of his shoulder, and half his face is almost visible, blurred behind the black screen.
‘A’right,’ Pete says. ‘My name’s Pete and this is Alice. As you can see, we’re expecting.’ Pete always says this so proudly. He even leans back a little on his heels, as though he’s the one who’s carrying and having to recalibrate his centre of gravity. There’s no reply from the man and he’s moved his face back out of the doorframe. Then there’s a shuffling sound, which seems to come from further inside the house; it’s a bit like someone clearing their throat, or another exhausted attempt to speak.
‘Clear-off,’ the man cries again, though his voice sounds less convincingly hostile. ‘You don’t want to be hanging around here. Get out of it.’
‘Mate,’ says Pete, taking a step forward. ‘We really don’t mean any trouble. It’s just we haven’t got anything set up yet, in our new place, and, as I said, Alice here is expecting. Do you have a phone-line down here? We might need to use it, if there was an emergency.’
‘Knew you’d want something,’ the man says and it sounds as though he spits. ‘You’re not coming in here. No one’s coming in here,’ he says. ‘Always trying to get us to leave, bloody sticky-beaks, telling us it’s not safe out here, and then coming in here and making her sick.’
‘Who’s sick?’ I call out. I step forward and it’s then that I notice the smell. It’s subtle, but there’s something else there alongside the grass and the warm eucalypt. The smell is too interesting to be disgusting, at first. It’s not a common smell. It’s sharp and sweet, a little bit like vinegar, but more earthy. More intimate. There’s a metallic tang to it too. I finally place it: it’s a smell from back at school, from the summer when everyone got their ears pierced. We had to turn the little gold studs in our lobes every day, to stop them crusting over. We’d do each others’ in the playground at break time. When you broke the crust, something wet would leak out onto your fingers. And it was that smell in the air, the smell of tiny scabs, trying to heal and being broken. A warm smell of skin and pus.
‘Rack off,’ the man shouts again. ‘I mean it. You don’t want to hang around here. Get off my land.’
‘Listen, mate,’ Pete’s still trying, ever hopeful. ‘We’ve got off on the wrong foot. We’re just here to say hello.’
‘Let’s go,’ I say to Pete. The smell is unnervin
g me. Why would a man’s house smell of weeping earlobes?
‘I’ve got a gun,’ the man shouts, and to demonstrate his point he waves something long and thin behind the netting.
‘Chri’sake,’ Pete shouts, ‘we’re only being friendly.’ Pete has moved his body in front of mine and is jostling me back down the path. ‘Bloody mentalist,’ he says to me. ‘That’s not a gun, it’s the handle of a tennis racket or something.’
‘Clear-off,’ the man carries on shouting. ‘Fucking wogs. That’s right. Get off my land. Bloody sticky-beaks.’ He carries on shouting until his voice warbles off, hoarse and painful.
* * *
It’s late and once again I can’t sleep. I’m listening to Pete breathing heavily beside me and I’m listening to the unfamiliar animal noises outside and I’m thinking about the man down the road and why we ever came out here. The whole of the last year now feels like a horrible, mad blur: I was so preoccupied with my glimpses of cutis, with posting them on my blog, with all of the horrible shit involved in sorting out Mum’s affairs (having to tell strangers over the phone – strangers at the utility companies, strangers at banks, strangers at the local housing board – over and over again that my mother had died: ‘Oh we’re so sorry to hear that,’ appropriate pause, ‘do you have a certificate you could send?’; there was always a piece of paper to reproduce, to photocopy again and again to prove that she no longer existed, until all that was left of grief was the thin, papery feeling as I posted one more proof of death), I was so preoccupied that I failed to deal with this enormous problem growing inside me.
When I found out I was pregnant, I booked a termination consultation. And I missed it. I booked it again. And I missed it again. I suppose I never really believed in it, my pregnancy: even when the test said positive – the first one, when I soaked the stick in pee and stared at it for an age, waiting for it to change again, for the little line to shrink back again, and then the second and the third and finally the doctor’s test – even then I still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that my body would carry this thing to term. I couldn’t believe that in the middle of all of the chaos and suffering, something could thrive and grow. So I ignored it, mostly. Perhaps I was daring my body in some strange and reckless way: go on, just see if you can make something, just see if you can make something new and good in the midst of all this.
Pete called me when I was a few months gone, said he knew, said his mum had seen me in the street and told him I looked ‘puffy’, and why hadn’t I bloody told him myself, and was it his, and he didn’t care if it was or it wasn’t, he loved me, he’d always loved me, we should be together, we should give ourselves another chance, a proper chance.
We met in a café in the city centre one night after work. I didn’t think I looked pregnant: my stomach was softer but not yet swollen. My face was softer too, I guess, a new puffiness beginning to be detectable. I’d seen Pete’s mum, Eleni, in the street, when I was checking for post at Mum’s flat, and I thought I’d deflected her. ‘Alice,’ she’d said. ‘You look unwell. Have you been crying? Come inside.’ ‘I’m fine,’ I said. She’d eyed me suspiciously: ‘Your face is swollen, my love. You’ve been crying? Come and have dinner with us. The boys are all out.’ I’d refused. Did my face really look that different? Or was it some weird, grandmotherly intuition? Whatever it was, it had brought me here now, to sit with Pete while he made a case for us trying to be together again.
‘We’ve given it a go already,’ I said to him. ‘We were happy, for a bit, and then we were both more unhappy than we’ve ever been. Remember?’
‘That was different,’ he said. ‘That was years ago. We were still kids really, Ali, both of us.’
We were not kids; not exactly. And I resented the implication that we were both equally at fault, that our break-up was the result of youth and nothing else, nothing Pete had done. But what were my other choices, really? A late-term abortion? Bringing a child up on my own in a bedsit? Everyone who might help me was gone: since my mother’s death, I’d let friendships lapse, burying myself in my records ever deeper. At least Pete was still there, loveable Pete and his enormous family, ready to take me in. And when he suggested we move out here, try to take care of ourselves and become a proper family, part of me wanted a rest. At least, part of me hoped I might remember how to rest.
So here we are, in the middle of nowhere. In the foothills of the mountains, where the eucalypt oil fills the sky and turns the earth blue. Where animals scream in the night and the neighbours threaten to kill us. Here we three are, waiting to be a family.
IV
‘YOU’RE moaning, babe,’ Pete’s voice says in the darkness. ‘And grinding your teeth. Wake up, Ali. It’s just a nightmare.’
The dream has faded instantly to black – I can’t remember a thing. But I can still feel the adrenaline. I’m breathless and my heart flutters. I’m covered in a filigree of sweat, which is cooling quickly. It makes me shiver. I feel a movement above my hip, sharp and painful: I put my hand down there, into the soft tissue, and I can feel a curve of bone that isn’t my bone. A hard foreign body. Its head, I think, or its own hip. I draw my hand away.
My dreams are sometimes so vivid these days that it’s hard to tell where they stop and waking begins. It’s worse now the bump’s gotten so big – it’s lively at night, and even before we got out here I could only sleep in fitful snatches. In some of my dreams we’re back at home, in my mother’s flat, on St Paul’s, at the edge of the city. And it’s the only place left: the world is a crater and her maisonette is perched at the edge of it. Sometimes she saves me: she takes me down into a cellar that the flat never had, she digs it out with her bare hands, and she keeps me safe while everything rages outside. The cellar grows bigger and bigger, she digs more and more of it out, and then we’re living in an enormous bulb, like an onion, something that will blossom when the spring returns, casting me and the baby out into the air as pollen. Sometimes I dream like this. Usually, though, the dreams are less hopeful. I’m with a group of people I know, back in the city, and the people are talking normally, a low patter of talk punctuated with polite laughter. Martha from HR might turn to me – it’s a work meeting – and she’ll ask me casually about whether I’ve completed the mentoring checklist for my new starter. As she speaks, something strange starts happening to Martha’s face. The skin of her neck is rippling slightly; the movement is actually visible, a subtle subcutaneous wave. The skin of her throat seems to be filling up with something, straining, until suddenly it crests up over her chin, spilling across her mouth, and her words are eaten up as the skin rolls up and up, and then she’s buried in a mini-avalanche of pudgy beige matter, her features disappeared into this solid fudge. Martha’s face is morphed into a featureless slab of flesh, and the people around us just keep on talking. Sometimes I dream about the baby being born and disappearing immediately between my thighs, swallowed up in folds and folds of my own skin, suffocated at birth. Walled-up forever inside me.
Often it’s just my mother’s face I see. I didn’t touch it, in the hospital. I wanted to, but I was too afraid. In the dreams, my hand reaches out to touch her eyes and her skin roils up towards me, moving for a moment like silk on a breeze, then beginning to bury my arm.
Perhaps it’s a good thing I can’t remember last night’s dream.
‘I’m getting up,’ Pete says. ‘I’m going to head into town. I want to report that man.’
‘What do you mean, report him?’ Yesterday, as we walked back from the old man’s place, Pete had tried to make light of it, joking about the threats, describing the old man as a rolling-pin assassin. But he kept coming back to it, all evening. I could see that the old man had bothered him. He must’ve been thinking about him all night.
‘He seemed pretty sick,’ Pete says. ‘He was real skinny. It’s off-colour, him being all on his own. That place is in a state.’
‘There was a smell,’ I say. ‘Something not right.’
‘That’s
it,’ Pete says. ‘Something’s not right there.’
‘So who are you going to report him to?’ I ask.
‘Well, there must be a Social Services office,’ he says. ‘He mentioned Social Services.’
‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ I say. ‘Not a local one, at any rate.’
‘Police station, then,’ he says.
‘Oh yeah?’ I say, ‘You going to report him for threatening us with a broom handle?’
‘I’m going to report that he seems unwell,’ he says. ‘A possible danger to himself. I don’t get it. Old people out here on their own. Where are his kids? Where are his nephews?’
‘This would never happen in a Greek family,’ I say, anticipating his next line.
‘No!’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t!’
‘And what would your mother say to that?’ I ask. ‘She’d say, “You’re a Slavic-Greek, Peter. No one is just one thing. Places are not just one place. It’s com-pli-ca-ted.”’
He gives me a look, a frown that turns quickly to tenderness. I think we’re going to laugh together at my impression of Eleni, before I realise that he’s not really looking at me: it’s the bump he’s looking at so tenderly.
‘What do you think he meant, when he said they made her sick?’ I try to sound casual as I ask this. I turn onto my back and wriggle around a bit on the mattress. There’s no real way to get comfy. My stomach feels tight and itchy this morning. The stretched skin on my abdomen has gone dry and there’s a new texture at the sides of the bump, where the skin is cleaving in a sort of raggedy, glinting pattern. It’s like exposed elastin, or a sudden reveal of silverfish just below my surface. And there’s a dark line through the centre of it all now, bisecting my stomach. I try not to look at it. I turn back to Pete. ‘Do you think there’s someone else in there with him?’ I ask. ‘Someone sick?’
‘What, in the house with him?’ Pete says. ‘Oh, right, I see where this is going. You’re going to tell me there’s someone with cutis in there. He’s an old, sick man, Alice. Sick in the usual way. You saw that porch. If there was ever a her, she’s long gone. I’m off,’ he says, and kisses my damp cheek.