by Robbi Neal
‘Well go on then, I’m only going to sleep anyway. You go, dear,’ Lucy said, but he didn’t move.
‘I don’t want to leave you.’
She tried to laugh but only a small wheeze came out. ‘I’m not going anywhere in this condition. Going to church has done me in for the day.’
‘I would have thought Edie would have worn you out for the day. If I’d noticed she was going to church practically showing her undergarments I would have locked her up. But all I’ve been thinking about is you.’ He walked over and put his hand on her forehead. Dear God! She was burning up. Paul lay down beside her and put his head on her belly. Her clothes, damp with her sweat, wetted his cheek. The growing baby inside, feeling the presence of its father, somersaulted in its wet cocoon. He remembered reading once about the underground houses the opal miners built in the middle of the desert to stay cool in the searing heat. Lucy felt the heat so badly and the summer was coming. He wished he could give her one of those houses.
He stood and bent to kiss her cheek, taking in the sweet smell of her perfume and the warmth of her neck. She turned her head towards him and her soft black hair, speckled with grey and released from its usual bun, fell momentarily across his cheek. He was reminded of the first time he had loosened it with trembling fingers, pulling each clip out slowly as if pulling out fragments of her soul. When her hair was free he’d buried his face in it.
The first time he saw her she had been wearing a white summer dress and a wide-brimmed hat with a pale blue ribbon that lifted gently in the breeze. She was holding her baby sister in her arms and singing to her, and her voice was tender like whispers on the wind. The hat cast a shadow over her, as if she and the baby were in a separate world created by her song, and he wanted desperately to enter that world. His own was full of rules and precedents, claims and litigation; he knew he needed her quietness, her voice to lull him to a place of gentleness.
She was sixteen when they met, eighteen when they married, and they had hoped for so many children. But till now only Edie had come.
He kissed her cheek again and said, ‘I can stay,’ but she shook her head and said, ‘Go, go.’ So reluctantly he left her room.
‘I’ll be back by five,’ he said, but she was sleeping again. Every time he left her it felt as if it would be the last, and it was like a kick in the gut.
‘I’m off now, Edith,’ he called and closed the front door behind him.
He stepped out into the afternoon sun, looked up and swore at it. ‘You’re a bloody problem you are!’ The sun smirked and grew hotter, and the hotter it got the more he could feel Lucy slipping away from him. It was as though she was melting away to nothing.
Last year the summer heat spawned bushfires that ate up farms and took jagged bites at the edges of the town. The heat and smoke from the fires filled everyone’s lungs. Women dissolved in their skirts and corsets, and men put on brave faces. Lucy had wilted like a plucked wild daisy. Watching her, Paul’s heart had seared and stung. Then winter had come and she had picked up for a while, but now it was warming up again and she was dwindling away. There seemed to be nothing he could do to help her. He jabbed his umbrella at the sun seven times and then sighed and set off.
It was a comfortable stroll to the office. He always said to his clerks that it was important for a man to be on his own between work and home to make the transition from the duty of work to the duty of home. A man’s life is a matter of keeping these two responsibilities in equal balance so that neither is neglected nor put upon by the other. That’s what he told his men and what he lived by. His walk was his space, and he banged his umbrella along the fence posts making a racket the way schoolboys do with sticks. By the time people looked out their windows he was gone, so they ran to their front gates and shook their fists at the boys who were kicking tin cans down the street. He got to Drummond Street and decided to cross the main road and walk down Dana Street. It was steeper but it was downhill and his office was right on the corner of Dana and Armstrong in the centre of town, just a block from the Town Hall. The Town Hall clock sounded as loudly in his office as if he was standing under it.
His mind turned back to Lucy. He might have a son this time. Not that he cared, as long as Lucy was all right. He hadn’t missed having a son; he always told people that ‘You don’t pine for what you’ve never had.’ But thinking about it as he walked, his umbrella now tapping on the road, he thought it might be nice to have a son, someone to leave the business to. But his bones ached with worry and his chest refused to take in a decent amount of air. If Lucy didn’t survive the coming summer there might not be any baby at all, and even worse there might not be any Lucy. He thought of the miners who worked beneath the very streets he walked on, working away in the dark coolness. The idea grew in him and gave him hope.
‘Why couldn’t I?’ he said to himself. What was to stop him? Not money. ‘Why bloody not?’ He smiled.
He turned the key in the office door, pushed it open and secured it with the boot scrape so a breeze could blow in. It was silent inside. Dead silent. No tapping typewriters, no chatting staff, no clients making demands. He was surrounded by the woody, responsible smells of oak and teak and he let them seep into him. He propped his umbrella in the stand and he went to his desk behind a glass partition at the back of the office. He was protected there. Clients had to get past his staff to get to him and he could see everything from where he sat. There was his pipe, patiently waiting for him. He took it and filled it with the Havelock that he kept in his top drawer. The tobacco, the wood, the oily polish seeped decency and steadiness into his pores.
He dipped his nib in the inkwell and thought of what he wanted to say at tomorrow night’s meeting. Most likely his audience would be a bunch of rowdy miners and some council members, not to mention hecklers. If he was lucky there’d be some like him who were concerned about the future of the nation. He should mention Eureka. He thought of Eureka as Australia’s first war. Most of the miners could cite an uncle, a father or grandfather who had been part of the uprising fifty-odd years ago. It had taken place just a few blocks from his office. The town had memories of rebellion that sat rumbling and fermenting in its bowels. He wrote:
I have never come across a miner who would take tributes if he could take wages and the miners of this town only take tributes because they CANNOT get wages! What man would work for piece rates instead of a wage? The chance of a miner coming across a block that will give him twenty pounds a fortnight is as likely as winning one thousand pounds in Tattersalls sweeps …
Paul paused to collect his thoughts. He looked at his watch and the time surprised him. Already it was past three and here was Beth coming in to see him. He smiled.
Five
The Gift
Which is unwanted and cannot be returned.
It took Paul a moment to realise that Beth was in a panic. She leant on the clerk’s counter, her whole body heaving. Beads of sweat wet her hair and tears stained her cheeks. He jumped up and ran to her.
‘You must come. Edie sent me and said to come immediately,’ she panted.
Paul didn’t ask any questions; he was too afraid of the answers. He kicked the boot scraper away from the door too hard and it toppled over and he had to kick it again to get it out of the way. As the door swung shut he caught it and held it open for Beth. He told himself not to panic until he knew what he was panicking about, even though he knew full well what he was panicking about. His pulse was racing and he could hear his breath coming in short ragged gasps. He grabbed his umbrella and bowler hat. Beth stepped into the street, still breathing heavily and holding her waist and he wondered how quickly she’d be able to get back home in this state.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked at last, bracing himself. But Beth just looked at him.
‘Go on,’ she said, ‘hurry.’
And he did. He ran home, his heart thumping furiously, his thighs burning. What had seemed a short walk now seemed like an expedition. Finally he got to his
house, which buckled and bowed, its iron lacework drooping like melting ice-cream as moans and sobs escaped its walls. He gasped for air. His lungs had shrivelled and the air he needed wouldn’t come.
‘Oh house,’ he said, ‘what shame are you hiding?’
He went in through the back door that was always open and in the kitchen his heart froze at the sounds of pain echoing down the hallway. He dropped his umbrella on the kitchen table. It rolled off and clattered onto the floor but he left it and ran up the hallway to Lucy’s bedroom and stood in the doorway. Edie was bent over the bed, mopping her mother’s forehead with a flannel. He saw his wife, her skin clammy, her body heaving. Sweat trickled down her forehead.
Edie was crying. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. She collapsed in the hallway. There’s blood. If you call Doctor Appleby he’s more likely to come than if I call him. He’ll think I’m just a panicky woman.’
‘I think this is normal. This is what happens. It’s just too soon, that’s all,’ he said.
‘What’s normal?’ Edie cried, terrified. ‘What’s too soon?’
He tried to answer, but the words suffocated in his airless lungs.
‘I’ll call the doctor,’ was the best he could manage.
He went to the telephone on the wall beside the hallstand and put the call through.
‘There’s no answer,’ Doris the operator told him in her I-don’t-care voice. He looked accusingly down at the earpiece and slammed it into its cradle. He went back to the bedroom door. He wanted to go to her and sweep her up in his arms but it was as if there was an invisible barrier that he couldn’t get past — women only.
‘He’s not there, we should get your mother to the hospital, I’ll call the ambulance cart,’ he said.
‘I don’t need the hospital, call Nurse Drake,’ said Lucy from the bed. It didn’t sound like her voice; it was harsh and rasping instead of supple and inviting. She hardly sounded alive. He watched with sudden horror as she heaved herself out of bed, stumbled to the door, leant her weight against it and shut it in his face.
He was on his own now. Shut out of their world. He heard Lucy cry out again and he had never felt lonelier in all his life than he did in that moment. The hallway that he walked up and down each day was now alien and cold. Another cry stabbed into his heart and he shivered. He had to do something, take some kind of action no matter how futile, so he went to the telephone again and commanded Doris to try this Nurse Drake.
‘I would,’ said Doris curtly, ‘but p’raps you should remember that most of us isn’t made of money and most of the town hasn’t got a telephone!’
He slammed the telephone down. Useless contraption. He swore and thumped his fist against the wall, not knowing what to do. He paced the hallway, past the portraits that looked at him accusingly and the landscapes that beckoned and he struggled to breathe. Fears swirled inside him and gave him a splitting headache. He fretted for Lucy, for his unborn child, for his daughter who was unmarried and knew nothing about the birthing of babies.
‘Well, I suppose she’s about to learn,’ he laughed out loud to himself in a brief minute of respite but then the fears grabbed him again and he had to do something so he picked up the telephone again.
‘Try for Doctor Appleby again!’
‘I have!’ Doris said.
‘Well, keep trying until you get him!’
Doris told him that she didn’t need reminding to keep putting the call through thank you very much and disconnected him before he could hang up on her again.
Eventually Edie appeared, white faced and stony, and he watched her walk straight into her bedroom and emerge with the scissors she had used on her skirt that very morning. She walked past him as if he was a shadow she could walk through and into the kitchen. He followed uselessly and watched as she got a pot, filled it with water and put it on to boil. Then she threw the scissors in.
‘Who told you to do that?’ he asked.
‘Mama.’
He stood there for fifteen minutes watching her watching the clock. Neither of them said anything until Beth burst through the door.
‘What’s happened? Has the doctor come?’
He shook his head and thought that Beth was looking at him accusingly, as though it was his fault the doctor hadn’t shown up.
‘What about a midwife then? Nurse Drake’s real good, she delivered me and my sisters,’ said Beth, thinking they were useless without her around to organise them.
‘Where’s this Nurse Drake live?’
‘Eddy Street,’ said Beth, ‘off Peel down near Grant. I sometimes see the boy that lives next door.’
This was news to Edie and Paul but it went by without even a wink. Their minds were congested with fear for Lucy. Paul shook his head again. He watched Beth join Edie standing over the stove. The two girls stood studying the boiling scissors as if it was the only thing happening in the entire world. He wanted to join them at the stove but felt outcast. Then when the hands on the kitchen clock ticked over again Edie grabbed the scissors with the dish towel and, with Beth behind her, hurried back to Lucy’s bedroom. The door closed in his face.
Slam.
He couldn’t stand it so he went outside into the front yard. The children next door were playing cricket using a rubbish tin as a wicket. He called, ‘Arthur, Arthur, I need you to run a message for me.’
The boy came over to the fence, followed by his two younger brothers Geoffrey and John. Paul thought Arthur was about eleven, certainly old enough for responsibility. Paul fished in his pocket and pulled out a coin.
‘Do you know where Eddy Street is? I need you to run to Eddy Street, off Peel. Find Nurse Drake, she lives there. Tell her she’s wanted here — no, tell her she’s needed here immediately.’
He looked at the younger boys, ‘You two, go and tell your parents what Arthur’s doing for me.’ He handed Arthur the coin. ‘Well, go on Arthur, quickly — a life may depend on it.’
The boys scurried off, the younger ones jealous that only Arthur got a coin. Why weren’t they getting a coin when they were also delivering a message? It wasn’t their fault it only had to be delivered to the kitchen where their ma and pa were having a pot of tea and what they called ‘a discussion’.
Paul walked in circles and prayed to God to save his wife and child, but if a choice had to be made he’d have his wife. He prayed until he heard Edie calling him. Then he rushed inside, where the door of Lucy’s bedroom was wide open. He blinked at the scene before him, trying to make sense of it.
Beth was picking up bloodied linen and cloths.
Edie stood still against the wall, her back pressed against it hard, as if she wished hard enough it might swallow her up and take her back to the beginning of the day and they could all start again. Her father looked at her and his soul filled with pity. Her day had started out so bright and was ending up so black.
‘Edie,’ he called.
Edie didn’t hear him. Her ears were filled with buzzing and she was wringing her hands. Her white, tense knuckles knocked against each other, her fingernails dug into the skin and a drop of blood spilt to the floor. She hadn’t even noticed. The pain in her heart was so great. She didn’t know yet that her mother was dying, but she did know that this baby that had appeared out of nowhere was an evil thing. It had been here no more than a few minutes yet had brought nothing but sorrow and pain to those she loved. Imagine what horror it would wield over the course of a full life. All her fear, all her shock over learning where babies come out, was dissolved in her hate for it as quickly as sugar dissolves in hot tea. She would drown it later, like an unwanted kitten.
Her brain was hurting, the blood tearing through her veins at impossible speeds, and with it, shards of her heart.
Paul wanted to comfort his daughter but his wife needed him more and he needed her. He went to the bed, bent over her and kissed Lucy and saw the new baby, wrapped in a thin tea towel, cradled in her arms.
‘She’s heavy,’ whispered Lucy.
The baby was so tiny and scrawny he wondered for a moment if it was even alive, and decided that it wasn’t. It was so small it couldn’t be. But Lucy was alive and for that he was grateful.
‘Beth, get me a knee rug,’ he said, and he ran a trembling finger through the river of sweat on Lucy’s brow, saying ‘Sshhh’ over and over. When Beth brought the rug he reached to take the dead infant from Lucy’s arms and it screwed up its face. It was alive.
He wrapped the baby in the rug. It was wet and damp, covered in the fluids that had aided its birth. He pulled up a chair and sat next to his wife, clutching his new child in his arms as though it was made of fairy floss and would float away and disappear.
The room was filled with silence. Everything was shocking and new.
Paul was so wrapped up in his new child and his wife that he didn’t hear the knock at the front door or see Beth leave the room.
‘Beth, let me in,’ said Doctor Appleby, suddenly appearing far too late. ‘The operator said you tried to ring.’
Paul moved to stand up, but the doctor motioned for him to stay where he was as he strode into the room.
‘The doctor’s here,’ Paul said to Lucy, but she barely opened her eyes. He looked at Doctor Appleby and could read the worry in his face. Paul felt his heart lurch as he registered that look.
Doctor Appleby lifted the blankets and murmured, ‘A lot of blood loss.’
Lucy’s eyes were closed now.
Paul watched as Doctor Appleby picked up Lucy’s fragile wrist. He knew somewhere inside him that Doctor Appleby was taking her pulse but routine actions seemed out of place in a world that was churning and turning. The doctor leant over and whispered in his ear so Edie couldn’t hear.
‘This happens with the change of life ones — always a risk. Not much I can do here for the moment.’
Paul stared vacantly at the meaningful glance the doctor was giving him. He knew what the glance meant but he wouldn’t acknowledge it. He’d prove the doctor to be an unreliable witness, guilty of perjury, even. Paul could feel Edie looking at him, her panic rising. To restore some normality he said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Doctor Appleby?’