by B M Carroll
We get home, and everything continues to revolve around Jasmin.
‘Hey, Jazz, what would you like for lunch?’
‘Want to go to the park for a kick-around?’
‘You want a snack? No problem.’
‘Which movie should we choose, Jazz?’
‘You’re hungry? Again?’
‘Sure, I’ll just find a deck of cards and we’ll have a game.’
It doesn’t stop. All afternoon, on and on and on. Aidan radiates contentment. This is normal to him, the constant consultations with his daughter about food and entertainment. I can’t stand it. Peace and quiet, that’s all I ask for at the weekends. Nothing too strenuous or taxing. Just Aidan and me, pottering around the house, recharging our batteries, spending time together. Instead, I get this onslaught.
By late afternoon my head is beginning to throb and the need to get away from them has become urgent.
‘I need a rest … I’m just going to lie down.’
As soon as the bedroom door is shut and there’s a firm distance established, some of my tension eases. I lie on the bed, eyes closed, my favourite music – Clair de lune, Debussy – filling my earphones. I don’t know how mothers do it, how they keep their sanity, barraged by broods of children and constant demands. One thing I know for certain: it’s not for me. There’s only one of Jasmin, and that’s unbearable enough.
Once I’ve re-established my equilibrium, I pull out the earphones, stack some pillows behind my back and reach for my laptop. People regenerate in different ways: exercise, reading, or – like Aidan – spending time with children. For me, it’s work. Firing off emails, making snap decisions, ticking things off my to-do list, has always been cathartic.
An hour flies past, and it’s time to resurface, unfortunately. The kitchen is chaotic. Aidan is one of those parents who like to cook with their kids. Ingredients are strewn across the countertop. Pots and pans and plates are piled in the sink. Jasmin has a smear of flour on her face that would be endearing if I were in any way maternal. She seems to be munching on something.
‘What’s that you’re eating?’
She sticks her tongue through her teeth to blow a bubble. ‘Chewing gum.’
I raise one brow at Aidan. ‘Isn’t she a bit young for that?’
‘The physiotherapist recommended it. Chewing’s good for sensory regulation.’
Oh, for God’s sake. What rubbish!
‘I’ve opened a bottle of wine …’ He’s tentative, because I don’t often drink, at least not since the accident. It seems to bring on headaches; even one glass is enough to make me feel quite dire the following morning. But if there was ever a night I needed it, it’s tonight.
‘Yeah, pour me one.’
The pasta is delicious, and what’s even better is that I keep my portion small, showing a reassuring flash of my old self-control. I’ve been trying to work on my diet, to cater for the fact that I can’t really exercise. Being back at work has been both a great distraction (I have plenty to think about other than food) and motivator (my work clothes were uncomfortably tight at the start, but already there’s been an improvement). The wine isn’t exactly healthy, but it has mellowed my mood. Aidan puts on the movie. It’s one of those PG-rated family ones, riddled with corny jokes, which Jasmin finds hilarious. After tolerating an hour of it, I retrieve my laptop from the bedroom and shoot out some more emails.
Finally the movie is over – the ending was obvious in the first five minutes – and it’s Jasmin’s bedtime. But, of course, that’s not the end of anything. It’s the start of an extraordinarily long pre-bedtime routine that involves frog leaps, bunny-hops and push-ups.
‘Come on, Jasmin. Press back on your hands. That’s right. Now tuck your feet in … Two sets of ten.’
What is Aidan trying to do? Wake the child up?
‘Shouldn’t Jasmin be winding down at this hour, rather than jumping around the place?’
‘This will wind her down,’ he says, choosing to ignore my sarcasm. ‘It’s part of her sensory diet.’
Sensory diet? Seriously?
Finally he finishes with the aerobics class and puts her to bed.
‘Thanks for today,’ he says when we’re finally alone. ‘You were great.’
Great? I hardly spoke to Jasmin. Didn’t he notice? Of course he didn’t. He’s so fucking focused on her he can’t see what’s right in front of his nose.
‘Fingers crossed she’ll fall asleep straight away. Chloe says she’s seen an improvement.’
I don’t share his optimism. I give her twenty minutes. At best.
He pulls me closer, drops a kiss on my head. Then our lips meet and for a few minutes I forget about Jasmin, at least until the thump coming from her bedroom pulls us apart. Moments later she floats in front of the television, her face as white as her pyjama top. Here we go.
‘Daddy, I can’t sleep …’
‘You obviously need more pressure work.’ Aidan pulls his arm away from my shoulders, leaving a cold draught behind. ‘Come on, down on the floor. Twenty push-ups.’
He gets down next to her and does his own set, the veins on his neck straining from the effort. ‘Eighteen, nineteen, twenty … Right, that should do it.’
It doesn’t do it. Ten minutes later she’s up again, and they each do another set of push-ups, puffing and grunting on my rug. And ten minutes after that she reappears yet again, and, hey, it’s another set of twenty. He sends her back to bed, and we wait for the tell-tale thud. Ten minutes pass, then twenty, then – a fucking record! – a whole hour.
Aidan is actually pleased. ‘Only three times in all. That was pretty good.’
‘She couldn’t bear the thought of doing any more push-ups!’
‘Don’t be like that.’ He’s smiling, but there’s an underlying edge to his voice. ‘The push-ups are part of her treatment plan.’
Seriously? Don’t talk to me about treatment plans. What it feels like to spend months in a hospital bed, to endure multiple operations, to face the agonizing prospect of physiotherapy day after day, not to mention the cocktail of painkillers and drugs that puff up your face and somehow manage to make you both irritable and lethargic. That’s a treatment plan. Not all this airy-fairy stuff about sensory diet, chewing gum and jumping around the place at bedtime.
The bedtime behaviour has nothing to do with sensory overload. It’s attention-seeking, plain and simple. It’s been going on all day – in the car, in the kitchen, during the movie, when she kept glancing at him every time she found something to be funny, making sure he laughed when she did – but Aidan’s completely blind to it. All parents are blind: the kids have them running round in circles. It’s the same with Jacob and his two. But at least they’re younger and the manipulation isn’t so blatant.
‘She’s done so well. I’ll reward her in the morning … Let’s go out for breakfast … Pancakes. She’ll love that.’
Great. Now breakfast – like everything else – will be centred around Jasmin. Suddenly it’s all I can do not to scream at him. Stop it! She deserves a smack, not a reward. Stop being reeled in by her. And stop making her the centre of everything. This is my house, my weekend and I’ve had enough. She’s in bed now – at long last. Can’t we talk about something fucking else?
We can’t go on like this. I refuse to play happy families with Jasmin. Aidan is the one I want. Just Aidan. Is that too much to ask? After everything I’ve been through? So many times today I wanted to shake her. Hard. Scream in her face: You’re not part of the deal.
40
Aidan
Jack’s door is closed. My knock is tentative; there’s a high possibility he’s in the middle of something much more important than my own troubles.
‘Come in,’ he calls, his voice muffled.
I open the door halfway, and he’s surprised to see it’s me. It’s usually the other way around: he comes to my office rather than me to him.
‘Hey, do you have a minute?’
He pu
shes his glasses – small lenses, silver frames – further up his nose. ‘Of course, Aidan … Take a seat … How can I help you?’
I sit down across from him. His office is smaller than mine and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves make it feel even more enclosed. It’s dark enough to warrant a light being on, even though it’s the middle of a sunny autumn day. There’s a distinctly musty smell, and an atmosphere – quiet, reflective – not so different from a real confessional box. Like many before me, it’s hard to know where to begin.
‘Is it about the sentencing?’ he prompts. ‘It’s coming up, isn’t it?’
‘The court date’s in a couple of weeks. But no, it’s not that. It’s something else … I’m in a bit of a moral dilemma …’
He takes this in for a moment. ‘Regarding one of your men?’
I’m sure my smile looks every bit as wry as it feels. ‘Nothing to do with my men – for once. It’s about me … and my wife …’
He nods, his expression carefully blank. I suspect that a generous proportion of the people who sit on this very seat come to unload about their wives, or their husbands, or their long-suffering partners … the unseen casualties of the army. ‘Go on.’
There’s an open Bible on his desk, sitting to one side, and I find myself gazing at it, wondering if Jack was reading it before I came in. I’m tempted to ask. I’m stalling, wasting the man’s time.
‘Well, I think you already know that Chloe and I have separated …’ I look up in time to catch him nodding again. ‘The thing is … the problem is … we have this situation …’ I’m stumbling like an idiot. Just say it. ‘Chloe and I have embryos … Three of them … left over from IVF.’
Jack takes this news without altering his expression in any way. ‘I see,’ is all he says.
But does he see? Does he know what happens to embryos when the people who create them separate or don’t want them any more?
‘Chloe and I need to make a decision about what to do with our embryos,’ I clarify.
‘And what are the options?’
‘They can be destroyed, or donated, or we can continue to pay for their storage, knowing they will never be born.’
‘And you’re here because none of these options sit well with you?’
My first answer is a sigh that leaves me strangely short of breath. Then: ‘Damn it, Jack, we wanted those babies so much. The embryos went from Canberra to Melbourne with us, and then back to Sydney … We were on our way to the fertility clinic when the accident happened …’
‘I remember,’ Jack says, and our eyes meet across the desk. He was a rock after the accident, popping up in my office on a regular basis, often under the guise of other business, but I knew at the time that he was watching out for me, concerned about my frame of mind.
I try to explain, as much for myself as for Jack. ‘If things had turned out differently that day, I could be the father of a newborn baby. Hey, I’d be sitting here moaning about arsenic hour and broken sleep. So, yeah, in that context, especially when I think of those embryos as babies, all the options feel equally wrong. Destroying them is out of the question. Donating to another family is only slightly more palatable. Those embryos are our genetic material, Jasmin’s brothers and sisters … Then the thought of doing nothing, leaving them there, permanently in deep freeze …’
My eyes stray back to the Bible. Where does scripture stand on IVF and leftover embryos? Which of the ten commandments could stretch itself to cover egg harvesting and fertilization, pre-embryo incubation, embryo transfer, freezing and disposal?
Jack clears his throat. ‘As you know, Aidan, my brief as chaplain is to foster faith, character and conduct, which in turn inspire courage and self-sacrifice in adversity. I see this dilemma of yours as a form of adversity, and the answer to it lies in your own character and moral compass.’
Jack’s a great listener, but there is always that moral high ground, an unshakeable belief that doing the ‘right thing’ will ultimately win the battle. But the ‘right thing’ by who? By the embryos? By Chloe? By Jasmin? And what about Sophie? She doesn’t even know these embryos exist. Where Chloe and I were going that morning, what we were doing, ceased to matter. In the aftermath of the accident, all that mattered was Sophie, and if she would recover.
‘That’s not what you want to hear, is it?’ Jack says, his eyes searching mine.
I stand up. ‘It’s just that none of the options we spoke about feels morally right, so I have no damned idea which way my compass should be pointing.’
‘Then don’t make a decision. Defer it, if you can, and I’ll pray that things will become clearer for you.’
Back in my office, I pick up where I left off before I went to see Jack. Months in the planning, our major training exercise – Operation Panther – is now only three weeks away. While most of the men are being transported to the location by coach, some are parachuting in, and others will be scaling the cliff face – in the pitch dark. All units must converge on the ‘enemy’ and attack before daylight. The potential for things to go wrong is astronomical: unfamiliar territory, lack of light, blank bullets. It keeps me awake at night, the fear that someone will get hurt on my watch, on this training exercise that I’ve planned and am ultimately responsible for.
One of my tasks this morning is to arrange for all the ropes to be checked by the climbers, to make sure they’re in good condition. Then I have to organize some extra unarmed-combat training for the men. This afternoon will be mostly taken up with a ten-kilometre run, with the men carrying twenty kilos of equipment on their back. The last time, thirty per cent failed to complete the run within the allotted time. Today – with Panther only weeks away – we need a hundred per cent success rate.
It’s while I’m on the run – my equipment dragging down my shoulders, sweat sticking under my clothes, my boots cutting into my feet – that it comes to me. Something an instructor said, in the early days when I was in military college. He was cut from the same cloth as Jack: strong on character, conduct and morals.
‘The Australian Army protects our country and our national interests, but most of all we exist to protect our people. People of all ages, all religious denominations, all sexes and all ethnicities … In a nutshell, we’re here – all of us in this classroom – to protect human life. That’s our overriding purpose. If you keep that in the back of your mind, you’ll make the right decisions, do the right thing.’
Maybe the question I should be asking myself is if those frozen embryos are ‘human life’.
The part of me that imagined cradling those babies in my arms, holding them closer, to inhale that ‘baby’ smell, pulling on their toes and watching their eyes light up, says, Yes, they are.
41
Hannah
Jane and Mick are drunk. They’ve been at the pub since lunchtime, when the hearing finished. Jane lost. She texted me to let me know, but I had already heard the outcome from Sophie, who returned to the office afterwards.
Jane stands up when she sees me come in. Using a grandiose voice, she reannounces the verdict. ‘On the facts presented by both parties, the commission finds that the applicant, Mrs Jane Dixon, resigned of her own free will and was not in any way forced into tendering her resignation. The unfair-dismissal claim before the commission is hereby dismissed.’
Mick bangs his fist down on the table, mimicking a judge’s hammer, and the two of them laugh their heads off. You could be fooled into thinking they’re celebrating rather than commiserating. Sophie told me that the decision isn’t usually announced then and there, but because the case was so ‘clear cut’ the member of the commission didn’t see any point in reserving his decision.
‘It was a long shot,’ Jane slurs when she sits down again. ‘Now I’ve wasted weeks when I should’ve been job-hunting.’
‘Never mind, love,’ Mick says. ‘You tried your best.’
Mick is exactly how I imagined him: shortish, thickset, salt of the earth.
But Jane, who was laughin
g two seconds ago, now looks as though she might cry. ‘The fact is, I shouldn’t have resigned. It made me appear impulsive and hot-headed rather than the victim of sustained bullying. When I think back to all those times I held it in, when I didn’t utter a single word of retaliation while she was walking all over me …’
Mick slings a heavily tattooed arm around her shoulders. ‘I know you’re disappointed, love. But you did achieve something today. You documented everything that happened, made her sit there and be accountable for it …’
‘But they found in her favour!’
‘Yes, they did. But today must have taken something out of her. And that HR person was there too, the one who was representing her …’
‘Alyssa,’ I supply.
‘Yes, Alyssa. The next time someone makes a complaint she’ll be on to it straight away.’
I hope so, for all our sakes. ‘I feel so bad, Jane. I didn’t fully realize what you were going through until Sophie turned the focus on me. I thought I could handle her … I needed to believe I could …’
She clasps my hand in hers. ‘Poor Hannah. Don’t feel guilty. I’m out of it. I don’t have to set eyes on Sophie McCarthy ever again. I don’t have to speak to her, justify myself to her, or even allow myself to think of her … But I can’t bear that she’s going to continue to get away with it, I really can’t. I can’t bear that now she’s doing exactly the same to you.’