This Taste for Silence

by O'Callaghan, Amanda;

  As the lift rises, airless already, curiosity will press down. But there will be no wad of bandage, no translucent tubes piping mysterious liquids. You’ll feel an insane desire to apologise. Unable to stop yourself, you’ll remove your hands from beneath the covers. They’ll see nothing missing, nothing serious. They’ll be bored before the doors open.

  The doctor will be kind. ‘A very common occurrence, I’m afraid.’ You will wonder about the word ‘procedure’. It will tumble in your mind for a long time. She’ll tell you it is simple, quick. You will be a model patient.

  At home, you’ll observe life in miniature: ants in a crooked line, a tiny curl of flaking paint, beads of water on glass. You will feel yourself reeling like a giant in a shrunken world. Your lover will take on extra shifts. Your mother will hem ‘after what’s happened’ to the edge of every sentence. There will be no questions.

  The woman at the fruit shop will say you look pale. You’ll astonish yourself by telling her why. ‘Yes, I’m fine now,’ you’ll assure her. ‘Very common. Yes. True.’

  But then she’ll take your arm and gently steer you outside, past wooden crates piled high with apples and pears. She’ll look straight at you and say, ‘I’m so very sorry for your loss.’

  The scent of the fruit will be almost unbearable. And when you cry out, she will not move away.

  The Turn

  It’s the turn that tells you. There you are, idly watching a man carrying a black bin bag, making his way down a lane. You know the bag’s heavy – you see that – and you’ve got nothing better to do than just sit in the car and think that maybe he works in one of those restaurants, so the bag’s full of slops, pulpy and unstable, a horror show if it splits open. Or maybe he’s been cleaning out rubbish, sorting out his spare room or his study. He might live in those apartments stacked above the shops. But you decide that he doesn’t look like the studying kind. Funny how you know these things based on nothing, from just a glance. He’s got his back to you, so you can’t see his face; no idea about hair or skin colour. He’s wearing dark clothes and some sort of beanie, but that’s all you could say. Maybe he’s got an unusual walk. Maybe you’re imagining it. He’s not moving very fast with the weight of the bag, so he might be middle-aged, or older. You know he’s not well, the way he carries his shoulders a fraction too high. Emphysema. Might be lung cancer. A sick old man taking out his rubbish. All these things go through your mind in a matter of seconds.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Jackie used to ask me all the time.

  ‘Nothing,’ I’d tell her. But truth is, you’re always thinking of something, always noticing.

  The guy’s almost at the back of the lane now. The traffic’s heavy enough. Not much business around. He’s about to disappear, and you’ve lost interest.

  But then he turns.

  Still holding the bag clear of the ground, he stops, swivels his body back towards you. You see a flash of white-skinned neck. He looks straight at you, like he can see you, only he can’t because you’re sitting in the dark, waiting for the lights to change. But it’s the turn that makes you look more closely. It’s not like he’s heard something scrabbling near the bins, or footsteps behind him. This is slow, deliberate. Like he’s checking that no one’s watching.

  But you are.

  ‘You’re a gloomy sod, Robbie Quinn,’ Jackie used to say.

  She always called me by my full name. Coming from her, it never felt strange. Same with the way she called me a sod. There was no malice in it. She said it about a lot of people. ‘A poor old sod was brought in this morning and you should have seen his leg …’ Jackie’s sod was harmless, affectionate even, unless she told you to sod off. Then you’d know she was annoyed. She sounded most English when she said that – the little snap of her accent coming through. It used to make me smile.

  And, no, I wasn’t gloomy. Not then. Jackie always thought that having a quiet moment meant you were getting depressed. She didn’t like to think about things too deeply. Some days all I wanted to do was just sit at the table, sip my coffee and stare out into the street for half an hour. But it bothered Jackie. She’d start shuffling papers, pushing in chairs. ‘When’s your shift start?’ she’d say. ‘Aren’t you going to your mother’s first?’ ‘That coffee’ll be cold as charity by now.’ She’d annoy me out of my thoughts and I’d get going again, saving my quiet time for when she was at the hospital.

  I sit at the window a lot now. Everything stays where I leave it. The coffee goes as cold as charity, whatever that means. When I look into the street, I notice everything.

  A crowd is a terrible thing. I know it’s foolish to say so because mostly a crowd has a purpose: commuters, shoppers, that posse of media in my front yard. In a crowd, pretty well everyone has a place to be. But for me, even after all this time, it’s different, unnerving. I look at every face, assess every shape and size. I get entangled in the impossible knot of all those lives: the way they walk, hold their heads; their voices as they pass. Once, near the old bus station, I heard a frantic call, ‘Robbie, Robbie,’ and the accent was English and I said to myself, Don’t turn around. She always said your full name. It’s not her. It can’t be her.

  But at the last minute, I did turn, and I saw a woman with her arms outstretched, and a black dog racing away trailing a glittery red lead. And when someone caught the lead as the dog shot past, bringing him up tight like a cartoon character, front paws pedalling the air, I burst into a crazy cackle. Too loud, too high. And everyone stared – some with frozen smiles from watching the dog – because I was a man laughing alone in a crowd. A man who didn’t have a place to go.

  They thought it was me in the beginning. Some of the papers, all of the cops. Can’t say I blame them. Routine procedure. I heard that a lot.

  Mostly, it was two cops. One was almost small enough to be a jockey, except he had huge hands. The other was about my size, normal enough, but there was something of the cowboy about him. He had a Clint Eastwood squint in one eye when he spoke, like he was looking into a mirage down a highway. If he’d been an accountant or a bus driver you wouldn’t notice it. But a detective; it was almost comical. Once, after he’d been questioning me for a long time, I could see the squint forming, and I’d started to smile.

  ‘Something funny, Mr Quinn?’ he said, and that eye shrank even more.

  The jockey never said much, just watched, hunched over the table, those big hands all knotted up in front of him. Late one night, when Clint had his face up close and I was feeling light-headed, I burst out laughing. The sound bounced all over the room. An older guy in uniform looked in at the door for a few seconds, then went away without a word.

  ‘Your wife is missing, Mr Quinn,’ Clint said, ‘and you’re laughing. Can you explain that?’ And he glanced over at the jockey, who just shook his head and reknotted his hands.

  If Jackie had been there she could have told them that I always laugh when things are really bad. I laughed at my own sister’s funeral – can’t get much worse than that. Poor Lisa. ‘You’re a stupid sod, Robbie Quinn,’ Jackie had whispered under her breath, passing me a folded handkerchief. And I’d sobbed and tittered into the green tartan and everyone except Jackie moved a little bit away, so that when my poor sister was safely out of sight I found myself almost alone, as if I’d been at someone else’s graveside, a different funeral. The smell of the fresh-turned earth that day was oddly pleasant. When the vicar walked back and said, ‘Can I help you, Mr Quinn?’ I let Jackie answer for me. ‘I’m taking him home now,’ she said, and she slipped her hand under my arm and led me towards the road. Tender. Sometimes things could be really tender between us. We actually walked home that day, though it was miles. Halfway there, where the road bends away from the edge of town like it’s trying to escape all the dullness, I threw the handkerchief into the Torrens. For once, Jackie didn’t say a word, just did up her top button where a sharpish breeze was pushing in.
When I turned back to the water, the handkerchief was floating away like a small, checked raft.

  Four miles. That’s the distance between here and the hospital. I know it’s supposed to be kilometres but Jackie never broke the habit of talking in miles, so I kept it, too. I never walked to my shift, not once, but Jackie liked walking. We didn’t use the car for work. ‘I hate those smelly buses,’ she’d say. ‘And those rotten sods, ripping us off with the parking.’

  I wouldn’t let her walk at night, and she’d moan about that sometimes, insisting there were too many freaks on the bus. But she’d humour me.

  ‘Take a taxi if you miss the last bus,’ I’d tell her.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, moneybags,’ she’d answer.

  There are only two street cameras between the hospital and our house. One points at the footpath, one at the road. You learn this stuff. On the night she disappeared, Jackie was picked up on both of them, walking quickly. On the second one, she stops and unbuttons her jacket because she’s got too warm. She’s hurrying because she’s late leaving the hospital and it’s pretty dark, except for the light from Roy’s Discount Meats spilling into the road.

  They showed me the camera footage of Jackie a couple of times. I could hear Clint breathing beside me as I watched, could feel his eyes on the side of my face. As Jackie walks out of view – the last sight of her – her coat, which is slung over one shoulder, lifts in the wind like a purple cape. She looks back, as if someone has called her. Then she turns towards home, stepping into a great pool of darkness.

  Truth is, I was thinking about leaving her. There was never a big fight, no major issue. Most of the time, to use Jackie’s words, we mucked along pretty well. I just wanted to find a bit of peace on my own. I like my own company, always have. At work, the night shifts used to kill some of the others, but not me. I liked the hush that came over the ward late at night. It’s always had a magical quality, like anything was possible. But maybe, on the quiet nights, there was too much time to think. And sometimes, I admit it, I thought about a life without Jackie.

  My feeble half-notions about leaving her make me cringe now. It all seems so petty, after everything that followed.

  ‘I thought you were starting early today,’ I said to Jackie as she sat down at the breakfast table on our last day together.

  ‘Phoned in sick,’ she said.

  Her voice was tight. She hadn’t brushed her hair, which was unusual. She was hugging her coffee cup with two hands, holding it so hard that I thought it might crack open and slosh over us both. I ate my toast and watched her, the crunching loud in my ears. Jackie knew about Ida Costello in Bed 6, I could see that. She was never off that damn phone of hers.

  ‘I can’t stay here now,’ she said, staring. ‘You know I can’t get up every day and look at you, after what went on.’

  I was surprised at how angry she was. ‘Christ, Jackie, she was nearly ninety. The woman had one lung. She was in a lot of—’

  ‘Don’t say it!’ Jackie actually shrieked those words. Later, our neighbour would tell Clint he heard it, clear as a bell. We weren’t shouters, generally.

  Jackie was up on her feet then. She walked over to the window and stood there for a long time, her back to me. Then she turned and said, very quietly, ‘You don’t get to choose these things, Robbie Quinn … And you decided about Lisa, didn’t you?’

  She could see by my face it was true.

  ‘Your own sister, for God’s sake.’ Jackie seemed very small, standing there in her dressing gown, her balled fists like little apples in the pale pink pockets. ‘And poor old Ida. She was a prisoner of war.’

  I started to move towards Jackie but she looked like she might jump through the window if I came any closer.

  ‘So, it was you all that time at Welgrove General, wasn’t it?’ she said. I was close enough to see her eyes fill with tears. ‘That big woman with the sarcoma, and poor old Mrs Lacey. Christ, Robbie, you killed those people.’

  ‘Jackie,’ I said, but more words wouldn’t come.

  She was staring at me with repulsion. ‘You covered it up well,’ she said, her voice suddenly nurse-calm.

  Evelyn Lacey’s face loomed at me out of the past. Relieved. That’s how she’d looked. There was a bit of talk after she died – that nosy new registrar – but nothing came of it and we both left Welgrove soon afterwards.

  Now, looking at Jackie’s disgusted face, I didn’t know whether to feel angry or sad. I thought she’d realised about Lisa. ‘It’s for the best,’ Jackie said at the time, when my sister was finally gone. ‘The best.’ But now I could see the truth: Jackie’s words weren’t some coded message of approval. For the best was just another cliché. Hospitals are full of them. Doctors, nurses, counsellors. Even the tea lady never shuts up. It’s what we say when we can’t make things better.

  Jackie had never mentioned the deaths at Welgrove until that day, after Ida Costello died. Not in any specific sense. Any blaming sense. But something must have clicked for her with Ida’s death. Everything seemed obvious to her then.

  ‘How could you?’ she said, breaking down, fleeing towards the bedroom. I knew she’d leave. In the doorway, only half turning as if she could no longer bear to look at me, she said, ‘It’s murder, you stupid fucking sod.’

  I wasn’t sorry about Ida Costello. ‘Say a prayer for me, won’t you?’ Ida used to say, most days. I told her I wasn’t religious, every time, but she’d just say, ‘Well, maybe today.’ She wasn’t hoping to get better – she knew enough to know that wouldn’t happen. She was hoping she’d die. That’s what all these hypocrites can’t accept, what Jackie could never accept: these people had had enough. My poor cancer-raddled sister wanted to die. ‘Help me, Robbie,’ she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. But helping Lisa didn’t come easily. It’s much more straightforward when they’re just patients.

  Welgrove General is a big country hospital: wide wooden verandahs at the front, farmland in one direction, bush in the other, wallabies on the back lawn of an evening. Beautiful place. I met Jackie there, and we stayed six years before we moved to Adelaide. But Welgrove General is like every other hospital: people get sick, people get better, people die. Jackie was wrong about one thing, though. Yes, there was the woman with the rhabdomyosarcoma – Trudy was her name – and poor old Evelyn Lacey with everything under the sun. But Frank Easton was the first. He was a retired barley farmer, massive guy, never smoked a day in his life, sang in the local choir. Bone cancer – primary – then it raced through his body. Yet he was the man who would not die.

  One night, late, Frank rang the call button. The pain must have been bad. He asked me, straight out, to finish him off. You’d be surprised how common that is. I gave him the usual blather: told him it was impossible, strict protocols, rules, laws. He grabbed my wrist, still a surprisingly strong grasp. He looked directly at me, as much as he could. The rain was striking the roof so hard I could barely hear him.

  ‘Find a way,’ he said.

  So I did. Odd how I didn’t give it much thought at the time. It felt like a job to be done, just like all the other jobs. Drugs, of course. What else? There’s not a thing I don’t know about them. The doctors think the nurses haven’t got a clue but, honestly, it’s usually the other way around. It’s a point of pride for me: three generations of pharmacists and a couple of secret addicts thrown in for good measure. I knew what I was doing.

  ‘All the best, Frank,’ I said to him. I felt faintly nervous when it was over. But there was no trouble. Poor old Frank was out of his pain and no one suspected a thing. Not even Jackie.

  But Frank had a son, a surly little bastard called Frank Junior who’d come up to the hospital most days, always making sure his father’s finances were sorted in his favour. Day after day he’d sit by the bed, buttoning down every last corner of the farm and all the rest. In a weak moment, old Frank was fool enough to tell him that he was t
hinking of approaching one of the nurses on the late shift to finish him off. I think I actually walked in on them having this conversation.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Dad,’ Frank Junior told him, as I came towards them. ‘You’ve got the solicitor coming in tomorrow. The house thing.’ Old Frank hushed him with a waving hand, and Junior sat glowering at me from beside the bed, saying no more. Of course, I had no idea what this meant at the time.

  But it turns out old Frank didn’t want Junior – who must have been fifty, at least – to get the family home. He was going to inherit pretty well everything else, but the house was going to Frank’s niece, not his son. She’d come in, late afternoon on that final day, and left in tears. Real tears. Frank had made his decision; after that he was ready to go.

  The following morning, as I was packing up the room – old Frank’s body had been moved downstairs – Junior came in behind me, closed the door.

  ‘Think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?’ he said, standing very close. I could smell his toothpaste. He was a severe asthmatic; I could hear the pull in his chest as he waited for my response. The barley farm was going to kill him, I thought, with some satisfaction. I didn’t turn around, just kept packing up the kit.

  ‘I know it was you,’ he said. His father was barely cold and it was pretty obvious that he’d already had word that he didn’t get the house in town. ‘I’m going to make you sorry, Nurse Quinn,’ he said.

  Junior was smart enough to know that he could never prove anything, medically. He had taken a long, hard look at me from his perch in the corner of his father’s room and rightly guessed I had everything covered. But I remember thinking, as his eyes followed me around the room each day, that he might be a man who could make real trouble. In a hospital, you get rather good at analysing people. You see everything across those beds. Frank Junior was a hater, I saw that; a vindictive little hater. And I let that slide. I only made one mistake, but it was a big one: I put Frank Junior out of my mind.