Sealed

by Naomi Booth

  ‘Pete,’ I say. ‘It’s pretty hard to concentrate on the road while you’re doing that.’

  It’s getting dark now and the streets are deserted. There are a few lights flickering on people’s porches, but most of the houses are the same smoky dark grey as the sky: they have a recently extinguished look, like blown-out candles. Maybe people are leaving already.

  ‘Sorry, babe,’ says Pete, and he sits on his hands, trying to keep still even though I can see the urge to dance twitching through his body. ‘And I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, Ali. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘We just needed to get out of there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he says.

  ‘Mara told me that something is going on. In town. There’s an outbreak, I’m sure of it. We’ve got to leave straight away.’

  ‘What are you talking about, babe?’ he says. ‘Are you getting carried away again?’

  ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘Mara said it. She said there’s been an outbreak. She used that word, it’s not me making it up. She said that the smoke from the fires might be causing it.’

  ‘Well,’ says Pete. ‘I don’t see Mara and Paulie leaving. And where will we go? Back to the city? Which you said was toxic and dangerous? Where we don’t have anywhere to live? Or to one of the camps, which you say are hell on earth? Or into the bush, where there’s no medical help? You want to give birth in a car, is that what you’re saying, Ali? Honestly, it’s getting funny now. There’s no point pretending to talk seriously when you’re like this, babe.’ He laughs. He laughs and starts drumming on the dash again.

  ‘Look, I haven’t worked everything out yet, but it’s not safe here,’ I say. ‘I want you to ring your mum. Ring your mum and ask her what the news is saying. Ask her if we can move in with her for a bit, just until we’ve worked things out.’

  He snorts. ‘You want me to ring my mum now, late at night, to ask if we can live with her, just after we’ve left? That’s insane, Ali. We’ve got a sweet life worked out here. We planned all this – this is what you wanted, too. I tell you what, if you still feel worried in the morning, I’ll drive into town and we can check on the news. I’ll go back to the surgery, see what the deal is. We’ll get some information, right? We won’t go hysterical after a bit of hearsay, ok?’

  He’s trilling and tapping away again. I can see that I’m not going to get anywhere tonight. Pete’s even more blissed out than usual, and it would be impossible to get him to pack-up in his current condition anyway. I briefly calculate the plausibility of leaving him; I could let him fall asleep, pack-up a few essentials, set off in the car back to the city. I’d be there by tomorrow. But he’s right: where would I go? Mum’s flat has new tenants in it, a family of five. In my condition I can barely fit on the backseat of the car, let alone sleep in there. And I won’t be alone, for long, will I? Which of the friends that I’ve so assiduously frozen out for the last year will want me and a screaming baby on their couch?

  ‘You promise?’ I say. ‘You promise that first thing in the morning we’ll go into town and find out what’s going on? And then we’ll figure out how to leave?’

  ‘I promise, babe,’ he says, ‘I do solemnly swear that we’ll investigate things tomorrow, find out what’s going on and then discuss the situation. If you even want me to go in the morning. Things will look different then, after a good night’s sleep, I promise, babe.’ He stares out of the window, blowing air through his lips and making a ridiculous song.

  * * *

  In bed, swallowed up by the dark, I try to lie really still and I listen for signs of what’s really going on. I listen to the noises outside the house, as though the birds and the beasts will speak to me, as though they might pass on some sort of message. I hear a skirmish close by: possums, maybe, wailing at one another, then hissing like cats. Perhaps what happened to the bird is happening to them? What if there are possums out there, sealing over right now, running into one another in fear and blind confusion? I get out of bed, stand in front of the window, try to see if I can make anything out. It’s a clear night and in the moonlight I can see the silhouettes of the low, scratchy bushes at the edge of the garden, and then the start of the rustling crop of jarrah: Mountain Devil, I hear my mother’s voice say, Old Man Banksia, Waratah. A dull, deep pain forks through my lower back and down into my pelvis. It makes me bend and grip the edge of the window. It’s harder than the kicks usually are; perhaps it’s hit my sciatic nerve. The pain’s gone as suddenly as it came. I straighten up again, resume my position surveying the garden. There’s no sign of the animals. Everything is quiet now except for the rustling trees. And then there’s a low, distant, growling sound. The cooling off of hostilities. Perhaps it was just cats after all.

  ‘Babe,’ Pete’s voice trawls through the dark. ‘Come back to bed.’

  I sigh, turning away from the window. When I get back into bed I can feel that Pete’s body is still restless. We played music out on the verandah for a while, when we first got home. I thought Pete might have danced the drugs off. He curls around me now, starts kissing my neck, his nose and his mouth wet and warm. He pushes one hand into my hair. ‘Alice,’ he says, softly. His other hand moves across my bump, searches across this vast place for other parts of me.

  I turn on to my side, facing away from him. I catch his hand, hold it fast. I push my face against the pillow. It’s not just that it would be logistically difficult: the thought of it, the thought of us fucking, makes me want to shrink to nothing. I curl around my bump, hugging myself tight.

  ‘It’s ok, babe,’ he says. ‘I understand.’ He kisses my ear. ‘Do you remember that first time, Ali? The very first time we were together? At Dougie’s house?’

  I close my eyes. Of course I remember. We were just sixteen. We were at a party, a house party thrown by one of Pete’s friends whose parents lived down by the harbour, a tiny white house in the shadow of the bridge. Most people had gone home or passed out; it was early morning and there were already streaks of pink across the horizon, the next day beginning to spread fire into the night sky. Pete had led me into Dougie’s bedroom and we’d fallen onto his bed, kissing, jittery with alcohol and sleeplessness and nerves, our lips sugary and metallic, the blood close to the surface. It had been such a surprise, what our bodies did, their strange intelligence, the way they accommodated one another. We’d curled up in spoons and listened to the gulls cawing over the harbour in the hours afterwards, and Pete had kissed my fingers over and over again as we drifted in and out of sleep.

  ‘I remember,’ I say, and I hold Pete’s hand.

  ‘I’ll always remember,’ Pete says. ‘And the time we made this.’ He scoops both our hands under my bump, so that he’s cradling my stomach, warm and fluid, and somewhere deep inside this fleshy, liquid mesh, he must be cradling the baby too.

  And when he says that, when he makes me remember that time, I feel like I’m falling, tumbling over the edge of Echo Point with my mother’s name. I grip Pete’s hand hard. Why did I shout her name? Why did I make her disappear all over again? That night, the night we made the baby, that was the worst. It makes me feel sick to think of it, it makes me hate him. ‘Why would you bring that up?’ I say. ‘Why would you want me to remember that?’

  ‘Because we made something beautiful, from out of all of… that.’

  But it was not beautiful. Nothing about that time was beautiful.

  * * *

  My mother had gone into a care home. It’s what she wanted, that’s what I kept telling myself at the time. My mother was what they politely called a ‘geriatric mother’: she was forty-two when she had me, and her body was beaten-up by a succession of hard, repetitive jobs: kitchen work, cleaning work, packaging work. She’d had to stop working, by the time I moved out, and her arthritis got bad sometimes, so bad that she couldn’t do her buttons up or take care of herself. She began to stay at a place that provided remedial care when it flared up. A care home called ‘Sunnyside Up’. She�
��d been in several times before; it was only ever for a few days, to tide her over when the pain was at its worst. I’d offered to help, to go over before work to get her dressed, but she didn’t want me to, said she liked the home and they could give her the proper stuff too, the real pain-relief drugs.

  I got the call at work. The voice was familiar: a plump woman with an exhausted manner who I’d met at reception several times when visiting my mother. Her tone was resigned: what she was telling me was entirely ordinary to her, so much so that I had to ask her to repeat it several times, until I understood the words, the importance of them, despite the mundane delivery. My mother had died early this morning. She’d been taken to the hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival. They were very sorry. My mother was a very sweet woman. She’d be missed.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘She only had the pain in her hands and her hips. There must be a mistake. There’s been some kind of mistake.’

  I stared at my office telephone after the woman had hung up, eyeballing the plastic receiver that lay in my hand. How could this dumb object have spoken my mother’s death? Ten minutes ago I was sitting here eating cereal and my mother was alive and pretty much well, doing the crossword or chatting with her friends in the home, taking a walk in the gardens, reading and cracking her knuckles. And now this piece of plastic had made her dead. I glanced at the other objects in front of me, which were illuminated in the morning sunshine: the slow drift of tiny specks circulating through the air; the dusky surface of my laminate desk, scuffed through use; the sellotape dispenser, its reel of tape marked with thumb prints; the screen of my computer, showing now all the human dirt it had caught on its once immaculate surface, its speckles of grease, the dust that had accumulated into sparkling dots of dead skin, the prismatic smudges from human hands. All of these objects, all of these dirty hard plastics, would outlast us, would sit here perfectly still, unflinching, as our deaths were announced. These things had murdered my mother, I felt it even then, even before I knew for sure what had killed her.

  Kimmy drove me to the hospital. Everything outside was colour and movement and speed, but no sound. The only sound was my heart, banging to get out, and a high-pitch whine that felt like a dispersal alarm dispensed from inside me. Where was I meant to disperse to?

  Pete rang me somewhere along the way. ‘Are you ok?’ this other phone said, this phone in my hand, in Pete’s voice. ‘Is there anyone with you, Alice?’ We hadn’t spoken in a couple of months. His voice was newly careful.

  ‘My boss is with me,’ I said. ‘Kimmy. She’s driving me to the hospital.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there.’

  * * *

  People always say that when you see someone dead, they’re so much less than they were alive: something fundamental has gone. What people don’t say is how much more the body becomes, how obese the flesh seems when it’s left behind, slackened away from the quick. It was as though my mother’s flesh had been poured onto the trolley, it was as though the lithe, quick animal of her had been shot and had fallen into dead weightiness.

  The room was brightly lit and I was not alone in it. A nurse hovered behind me, sucking a boiled sweet. The cause of death was a massive heart attack, someone had said to me. It seemed hysterically colloquial in the circumstances, the word massive. Bloody ginormous. The body was in a nightdress. The flesh on the upper arms was already changing, a dappled yellow pattern veining its way through the fat, and a waxy sheen making the skin look vivid, in a different way to the truly alive: it looked tacky, like cold butter about to soften. The face was unbearable. The lips had parted and the cheeks were already drawing back towards the table, so that the jaw was exposed, all the tiny teeth set in a terrible grind. I stepped closer to the trolley. The woman behind me whistled as she sucked her sweet clean away. I reached out to touch the body. It would be cold, I knew it would be cold. My hand murmured above the dead hand and, glancing back towards the face, that was when I saw it: I saw that the eyes were not at all as they had been, that the eyes were quite, quite wrong. ‘It’s not her.’ I turned to the nurse behind me. ‘It’s not her,’ I said. ‘Margery Ford?’ the nurse asked. Her frown gave me hope. Clearly mistakes were made; she was checking the papers held in a clipboard at the foot of the bed. ‘Margery Ford, died 01.07, Sunnyside Up Care Home, following 22 minutes of defibrillation.’

  ‘My mother is Margery Ford,’ I said. ‘But this isn’t her.’

  I moved to the head of the trolley. These eyes were not at all like my mother’s. There were folds of skin around these eyes, which pooled now in tiered mounds. It was as though each eye was covered with stones of flesh. These must have been enormously puffy eyes, completely different from my mothers.

  ‘I think you’re in shock, darl,’ the nurse said. ‘Folk often look different, deceased. It says here, “Possibility of secondary cutis, question mark?” That’s maybe why the eyes look different?’

  I plunged into her face then. I pushed into her eyes with my fingers, trying to dig back the skin, to see if it really was her, to see if her blue-grey irises were there, glittering under this great weight of flesh. The skin was cold and hard and would not give. I fingered through it, greasily, and there was no way in, no hidden aperture. The eyes were entirely sealed. The nurse caught hold of me, pulling me back.

  ‘She’s blind,’ I said, ‘she’s blind. She can’t see a bloody thing.’ And then I knew what must have happened: I knew that she had woken in the night and could not see. I knew that she had torn at her eyes and found only skin. I knew that she had called out and that I had not been there to hear. And I knew that she had died alone, her heart pumping in deadly, blind fear.

  * * *

  The night after the funeral I slept at Pete’s mum’s house, in Pete’s old room. He’d been beside me all day, not touching me but always staying close. I’d been crying; I’d cried from the moment I woke up, all day long, silently and without much feeling. When people tried to console me, I mumbled incoherently. No one wanted to listen, so I stopped saying it clearly. I murmured it to myself over and over. She shouldn’t have died, she shouldn’t have died. It wasn’t a heart attack that killed her, or at least only obliquely: she was sealed in. It should have been recorded: primary cause of death, cutis. It was her own skin that had killed her, it was everything around us and everything we touched and all the poison that even now laced our fingertips and our lips, that travelled into us, deep into our stomachs and our bowels, where it did its obscene work, getting inside our cells, making them go mad, making our skin proliferate, and even now I could see it working anew, the trail of death from Uncle Mike’s cigarette smoke, Uncle Mike who was not a real uncle but a man who had toyed with my mother for years, the way his smoke frilled across the warm air at the edge of the party trying to work its way towards me, and the cheap margarine on the egg sandwiches, half-an-inch of deadly yellow hydrocarbon desperate to slick-up my gullet, and the cling-film over the crisps, Jesus wept, who uses cling-film nowadays? with all its lively little poisons clinging to our food, dying to get inside us, to ingratiate themselves into our oesophagi, into our deepest viscera. No one would listen to this, to what I was saying, under my breath. They patted my upper arm, or hugged me close and made shushing sounds. The hospital had refused to listen too, and the Coroner’s Office: they would not change the cause of death and had declined to conduct a new post-mortem. The tests for a heart attack had been conclusive. Later in the day, I lay exhausted on Pete’s old bed and my face felt bruised and swollen, like rotting fruit. And I was drunk. What else is there to do after a funeral? We’d sat around Pete’s kitchen table and his father had brought out the ouzo. We played cards, and Pete’s little brother, Harris, looked away every time he caught my eye, pushing his thumbs hard into his eye-sockets, then saying, ‘Ali, I can’t bear it, I’m so sad for you,’ lumbering over and grabbing me drunkenly. Pete had slapped him on the head then, told him not to be a fucking goose. Told him that I’d be fine, that he was the
one who should stop being such a prissy cunt. And then Pete’s mother had batted Pete around the head ‘for language’, and we drank more ouzo, and their kitchen was full of noise and light, but I knew, as I turned over my cards, thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum, down onto the table, I knew what was next door: nothing. Full house! But I knew that it was empty, that next door my mother’s rooms were quiet, barely hearing us. That we were just an echo in them. That her clothes were folded on her bed, everything turning blue as the sun set, the air setting into stillness. That the flat was sealing itself into darkness. Was it something in there that had caused it, something in her carpets or the curtains, the old mothballs in her wardrobe, some ancient powder she used to scrub the bath? Was it something at the care home, an air-freshener or old lead pipes or asbestos in the walls? Was it something in the ground, seeping in from the derelict factories at our end of town, soaking up into our water and into our food? Or was it something we were breathing right now, some chemical drifting on the night air from the soft-drink plant at the edge of our neighbourhood, sugar and poison on the breeze? I turned my cards over and then tried to leave. Pete’s mum held me fast, said I must stay at least tonight, that I was to sleep here, that she wouldn’t let me go.

  So Pete kept a vigil, lying beside me, still and unspeaking. Until I couldn’t take it any more, thinking of our old flat next door, wondering what had happened; until I thought I could taste the poison on my tongue and my breathing was accelerating and I could feel my heart fluttering to get out, as though it knew, as though it knew that it was being imprisoned; until I scratched at my eyes and my ears and my mouth, desperately checking, clawing to unseal myself; until I turned over and bit Pete’s neck hard, and told him to fuck me, fuck me, open me back up, don’t let me seal up, don’t let me, don’t let me close off entirely, fuck me, Pete, now, now, no time for protection.

  That was it. That was our beautiful conception.