by Carl Shuker
‘Is Jeany a member of the family?’
‘Jeany is our other daughter,’ the man said and his face was still with anger but there were tears and he was staring at her. ‘She’s got an I . . . U . . . CD too.’
Elizabeth said, slowly, ‘I know this is really hard. Lisa had trouble breathing in intensive care. The infection was too much for her body. This led to her cardiac arrest.’ She waited and she looked at them. ‘Is Jeany going to come to the hospital?’ she said more softly.
‘Yes,’ the father said, and shook his head.
‘Do you all have somewhere to stay together?’
‘We’re in a motorhome,’ the father said. ‘At Kaitoke Park. She was camping beside us in the tent. With Stuart. We’re just in a motorhome. We’re not from here.’
‘Do you want the staff to organise a motel for you closer by? We can find a motel nearby, or elsewhere?’
They stared and stared. The clock ticked. The woman’s mouth hung open and she turned slightly to her husband. The man’s eyes tracked back and forth across the carpet. Then they whispered together a moment, then they stopped.
He looked up.
‘What’s your name again?’ he said.
‘My name is Elizabeth Taylor,’ she said, and smiled.
He reached into his pocket and took out his iPhone and touched the screen a few times.
Then he raised it and he took her picture.
She left the hospital at 10 p.m. into the surprise of windy misty night. The first rain in forever. The streets were empty and dark apart from the lights always on at Ronald McDonald House. Traffic lights all green through Newtown. She bought some half-price rotisserie chicken and mayonnaise and capers and a stale baguette at Countdown and she looked down Adelaide Road towards town and thought about renewing her CrossFit and knew it was pointless and she thought about the RACS conference in Queenstown in a few days, and then Vladimir’s posture, suddenly, at the anaesthetic machine, and how she liked it, his straight shoulders and his slim hips and his patience.
She walked the other way up Adelaide Road towards the house and she was soon desperate for the toilet and it sullied her calm and she stepped and stepped at her doorway, feeling in the bottom of her handbag for her keys snarled in all the ribbons of her lanyards.
The house was a railway cottage, built in 1881 on the ridge above the flat stretch of Adelaide Road before the hill to MacAlister Park. Less than a kilometre to Wellington public, half that to Wakefield and the Southern Cross private hospitals. Perfect, easy for a surgeon, to do the public work in the morning, and pay off the mortgage in the afternoon. Pregnant, 19 years ago, she had torn up the carpet and ripped out the hardwood interior linings in the long narrow hallways by hand. Piled it all in the tiny front yard. There were layers of wallpaper underneath she’d stripped to get to the sarking but before that was a layer of newspaper from 1881 glued to the hessian scrim. Still readable. She’d ripped out a well-studded cupboard that hid a corner of pretty stained-glass windows, hearts and roses, that she could see in the exterior but were nowhere to be found inside. Nails so old the heads popped off in the claw hammer. She had to buy what her father called a jimmy bar to get under the timber. She hired a floor sander and sanded the kauri floors of all three bedrooms and the hallways herself. Mixed the sawdust and polyurethane into a glue she scraped into the gaps between the floorboards. She bought a haircap and kneepads and 3M goggles and used a surgical mask from work and went down under into the crawlspace through a small and crooked wooden door in the foundation. Alone down there, two days on her back on the dry sour dirt, she insulated under the tightly fitted kauri floorboards with bales of glasswool she stapled to the joists. Each staple sending clouds of borer dust from the tōtara uprights down upon her, where it congealed into a paste on her face in the sweat from the heat of the halogen lamp, $49.95 from Mitre 10.
As she peed and then as she sat and thought in the quiet of the house she resutured the cut in the artery in the girl’s psoas muscle.
She was calm and very tired and she thought she might dream it again tonight. The girl’s thin red muscle opening cleanly. The slack white skin around the incision brown with povidone-iodine. The sutures gathering the lips of the wound. Ordering the error, reshaping the artery, gathering its meaning. And the theft of that glory, that could not be enjoyed until later, now, here, on the toilet. The joy of work that could only be lost within, anticipated, and recalled. You want to live in that moment but you can’t. Her face calm, a child on a lake somewhere, 15 days in the country. While a kilometre away in the morgue the wound did not heal and the body did not recognise itself, nor gather itself to itself, nor rise again. She sat on the toilet with her first finger and thumb gently clasped, dipping and dabbing and darning.
She went through her team and she felt good. Richard, Robin, Vladimir, Mei-Lynn. She liked it and they were strong and they had recovered and coped and even excelled. And as if her guarded comfort were a warning she thought past how she would feel if it were disturbed and the team disrupted or scattered, how she could use this lesson and this moment to salvage this dynamic and make it persist past the problem of people.
Outside the wind blew and the old house cracked. Robin had left her toothbrush in the jar. The streetlight through the trees and the stained glass of the bathroom window made a strange camouflage that flexed across the wall.
A sudden burn of peppermint in her mouth. She thought of the sutures dissolving in the dead wounds. In the morgue the cuts would drape open. The vessels sag and stiffen. All the work unwinding in the freezer. Lisa Williams. Her irises gone silver-blue and the eyeballs slack in the sockets. What a name. What was her middle name? She didn’t know her middle name. She tried out some that might fit. Jocelyn. Lisa Jo Williams. Sophia. Marie. For the rhythm. Lisa Marie Williams. Her hair cold to the touch on the tray.
She thought of the Petone woman’s pulse and of her father’s good British boots, made by Tricker’s. She’d bought this house with her inheritance as deposit. Her father had died thinking his daughter was a doctor and was going to have his grandchild. She thought of the heat of the cheap Mitre 10 halogen bulbs, and the costs for halogen throughout the DHB. She thought of the way you cut insulation—against the stud it would butt against. Hard against the thing that shapes it and holds it in place. She thought of other cases. She thought of Richard’s sutures on the skin flaps of the Petone woman’s stump. They’d filed down the spurs with the surgical rasp and before they closed she’d buried the nerve deep, deep with her forefingers back inside the muscle to dull the pain that would come. But suddenly she didn’t like it—the old woman’s skin was slack and thin and freckled lightly over fishbelly white—and she was suddenly sure the stump flap wound would infect and she was angry about it and she wiped herself and rose and put on her pyjamas and stood in the living room.
She had stripped the scrim and sarking and the cloth binding herself, and wired and insulated the walls and gibbed it herself, all but one wall, and she looked at the gib plasterboard as she ate her mean sandwich standing at the counter, searching out errors, unevenness, in the screwed and taped and stopped-up seams of the plasterboard, looking for the flaw.
What’s not so well known about the fact of the cold O-rings on Challenger is other forces, other contingencies.
The launch had been delayed so many times. July 1985. November 1985. January 22, 1986. January 23, 1986. January 25, January 26. January 27 was postponed due to high winds. There was urgency to go. The shuttle was over time and over budget. They were carrying the Spartan satellite to observe Halley’s Comet, which would not be seen from earth again until 2061. It was cold on January 28, 1986, and the wind shear at 45,000 feet was high; high, though within the limits measured and allowed.
The burning fuel escaping through the gap left by the cold O-ring in the right-hand rocket was quite visible on camera later. Black puffs of smoke that became a plume of fire as the O-rings vaporised, kilometres in the air.
But a
by-product of the burning APCP was a crust of aluminium oxides that plugged the hole. It was sealed. The rocket burned on and the shuttle climbed, and climbed straight as it ought, with a good roll. Into the high winds aloft where, when Challenger’s computers automatically adjusted to the lateral forces of those freezing winds, the scab cracked open.
If the winds had not been high the seal might have held through burnout, and the SRBs would have separated, fallen silent and descended through the atmosphere by parachute to be retrieved from the Atlantic and towed back to Canaveral by ship. It would have been found and shared and learned from, how close they had come to something utterly unknowable.
Jessica
That night Elizabeth dreamed of Jessica, tall in silhouette, turning and turning away from her in hallways where the boxes were stacked, because Elizabeth was moving house.
She woke early in the dark and lay and listened. Key in the front door. Grind of the latch. Steps in the hall, quick and light. The wind had stopped and the house cracked at the footfalls. The toilet flushed. The door opened and Robin came in naked and pale and carrying her clothes. She walked hunched to the closet. So-silent nurse. Elizabeth watched her body bend in the glow of the Adelaide Road streetlight, and the moles the size of wedding rings rough as cinnamon on her lower back.
‘Hey,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Awake.’
‘Sorry,’ Robin whispered.
‘Nah.’
Robin put on her pyjamas. Elizabeth pulled up a little spare duvet for her.
‘Get a taxi?’
‘No.’
‘I said to this late,’ Elizabeth said.
‘It’s a nice night.’ Robin took a long breath and sighed. ‘No words left,’ she said. ‘Up at six.’
‘I’ll speak to Alastair tomorrow.’
‘No, my decision.’ Robin rolled over. She lay there, then grunted gently, and shifted in the bed. ‘You can’t do stuff like that. It’d ruin things. They’d move me.’
‘Ruin things.’
‘It might.’
‘He needs to be reminded.’
‘It doesn’t mean we go round holding hands. It’s not him anyway it’s nursing.’
Elizabeth sighed.
‘We have to be careful,’ Robin said. She shifted again, and then was still. After a while she said, ‘So not hungry.’
‘Got some chicken,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Maybe for breakfast.’
‘Might be a bit suss,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Dunno.’
‘Dunno, dunno,’ Robin said. She sighed again. ‘Dunno.’
It was silent.
‘Night, girl,’ Elizabeth said.
She was already asleep.
The next morning, her first day off with no on-call in forever, Robin was already gone. Elizabeth got up and in her pyjamas sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and wrote a thousand words for the peer reviewers for the Royal London Journal paper with Andrew McGrath.
She wrote for an hour and a half in the quiet house. She described her work like it was a procedure, an operation. She wrote that what ultimately happened for the patient, whether they lived or died, whether a prostate resection meant a man got his erectile function back or exactly how painful a hip replacement was six weeks or six months later—it was because of a team. Not just one person, one surgeon. But a team, even if the lead surgeon was in charge of that team. That the results of surgery depended on the patient’s other conditions and the hospital in which the operating team worked. How they were cared for afterwards. She described the process of publicly reporting a surgeon’s outcomes as ripping off a dressing again and again to check on the healing of a wound. She referenced it thoroughly. She used ‘he’ for her hypothetical surgeon throughout and quoted Onora O’Neill from memory: ‘Plants don’t flourish when we pull them up too often to check how their roots are growing.’ She googled that line and she’d remembered it perfectly. She went on and on and it was unstructured and odd as a response to peer reviewers and she wrote it with no sense of whether it was something else or where to publish it, or to whom she might send it. Then she stopped writing and made tea and looked at the screen and frowned with a pained smile at what she’d done. She went through it all and changed he to she. She sat and looked at the screen and sipped from her cup. Then she googled Lisa Williams.
A self-proclaimed psychic, the first result said, a medium and healer who starred in two shows on Lifetime TV. Lisa Williams is a magical English woman living in Los Angeles. Lisa Williams is a Qantas Media Award-winning business journalist and marketer. Ten years’ experience in planning and traffic engineering. Be the first to find out about Lisa Williams. Sent the card telling her children that she loved them before she was found badly burned at Newry Beach in Anglesey, Wales. Is a physical education professor. Is raising funds for Life with Lisa Williams on Kickstarter. Is an international heroine in her innovative efforts to counter child sex trafficking. Lisa Williams is a fraud.
She googled Lisa Marie Williams and Lisa Jo Williams. Lisa Marie Williams has an extensive career and Lisa Jo Williams is on Facebook and she searched Facebook for half an hour and then she googled ‘Lisa Williams was’ in quotes. Lisa Williams was born in 1973. Was live. Was described as ‘beautiful’ by her family. Was honoured as a ‘Woman of Worth’ by L’Oréal. Was still not convinced that she was really sorry or even had any remorse. Was found by a security guard. Was four years old.
She eventually stopped herself and cleared her browsing history and went out and stood in the garden.
When she came back in she started her reading and she wrote up some notes and then suddenly it was 3 p.m. and she hadn’t even had her usual run and she had to think about going out. It was Saturday night. Ryan Adams was playing at the Opera House. It was hot and sunny and she was going out with Jessica.
Showered and changed, Elizabeth Taylor taxied to the biggest, whitest house on St Michaels Crescent in Kelburn and texted Jessica from the car as they had agreed. So she didn’t have to talk to Jessica’s husband Stephen, who was only 40 years old and had been made a district court judge two months ago. She didn’t want to talk to him and she didn’t want to have to deal with their kids either but Jessica wasn’t outside when the taxi pulled up. She sat back and waited and stared at the house. Her heart beat lightly.
They’d had it professionally stripped and painted. Taken right back to the raw timber, she knew it cost them nearly $50,000 for the exterior painting alone. There were a few square metres of picket fences on weird angles at the street to cope with the slope outside. A crooked little garden of roses. But down the hill in the back of the house where you couldn’t see it from the street was a kind of high-bourgeois paradise of terraces and bricked patios and concrete outdoor furniture and a pizza oven and play areas and even a flying fox. She could feel her face settling into a mask and her concentration narrowing to a still point—there were finials and chrysanthemums and a brass knocker on a great red door—and she paid and got out and went and took the brass knocker, let it fall.
She heard the scrabbling of claws and barking inside. Their dog was a black lab named Atticus who had a dicky hip and Jessica had two children, a boy and a girl, and Elizabeth could not remember their ages. Stephen opened the door. He was holding Atticus back by the collar and he was wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt and icewashed blue jeans with bare feet. She smiled as he held the dog back and he didn’t look up at her but down at the dog and he said to it—‘No, Atticus, no—’
‘Hello Stephen,’ she said.
‘Hello, Elizabeth,’ he said and he grinned and grinned. He was very buff and tanned. He said sorry about Atticus, that he was going deaf now and he gets surprised by visitors as if Elizabeth knew all about him and shared their great affection. ‘Oh,’ she said, and Atticus reared awkwardly in Stephen’s hand. ‘You look well, Stephen,’ she said, as if it were a question and she didn’t know why, and he said, ‘As do you, all flash for the girls’ night out,’ and he meant he knew he was handsome but he was
charming too. It was just a fact like others on his CV and that Elizabeth was Elizabeth, a clotted spiderweb of stuff like threat and ability and willpower, and she said, ‘Shall I just wait outside,’ and it was already fairly ruined.
‘No no, come on in, can I pour you something as we’re having some preliminary bubbles, preliminary to me babysitting but, ha ha ha.’
‘Do you call it babysitting when it’s your own children?’ said Elizabeth and looked away around the room. Inside the house was all white walls and kauri floorboards and was filled with golden light from the sun wet over the Karori hills. There seemed an unlikely number of children roaming around. They ignored her like she was sending them a message to do so and she was.
‘These aren’t all mine, I don’t think. Otto—’ Stephen suddenly shouted at Elizabeth in exactly the same tone. ‘Otto—take Atticus,’ and a little boy came out of a cushion fort with his shoulders slumped and eyed her and sighed and took the dog by the collar. Stephen was grinning and he went into the kitchen looking away from Elizabeth and this was how you did courtesy, wasn’t it, with people you don’t like and who don’t like you but are never going away, anywhere, ever.
‘What did you paint the interiors in the end, Stephen,’ she said to his back.
‘Oh it’s Resene Quarter Pearl Lusta,’ he said.
He was waiting. He was waiting, she suddenly saw, as he poured her drink, for her to say something knowledgeable. Like oh for the warmth. Like oh it’s actually whiter than the Spanish White isn’t it, or oh it just glides on like maple syrup doesn’t it, or something.
So instead she said, ‘It looks great.’
He waited another moment and then he said, ‘Well, I know you would have done it all by yourself. I don’t know how you find the time,’ and she decided if she was going to do this she may as well do it properly.