‘Told you I’d make a mess,’ she says. ‘Now you know why I need art school.’
And, of course, it is no mess at all. Perhaps the eyes are a tad small, or close together—not quite generous enough in dimension (his eyes are neither small nor close together). But she’s made up for it with a nice long neck and, overall, the image is to his liking, a fine fucking addition to their wall. It might be the best thing on it. He takes a fresh piece of green chalk from the floor and hands it to her.
‘Sign it.’
Maggie signed it, and it stayed there after she was gone. She banged on the door and drew his picture on the wall.
Maggie V.
Fire in her eyes, but so serene.
Even if he wanted to he couldn’t keep her.
It was Maggie Varga’s voice again but she sounded scared now and she was asking him to come back to her. Come back to me, darling man. When he opened his eyes people rushed around in a mad, fluorescent fuss, Maggie V in the middle with her hair cut shoulder-length and streaked with grey. Next to her a doctor with his sleeves rolled up told him that he’d had a stroke, then pushed his sleeves even further and said it wasn’t Martin’s first stroke. The other man said nothing. ‘You didn’t feel it, the first stroke,’ the speaker said. ‘They call it a silent stroke. Maggie said you’ve been experiencing problems with your memory. Now we know why.’
He looked back to her again, this older Maggie with lines around her eyes—still beautiful. If anything, her body seemed stronger, her shoulders broader. She nodded her head now in time with the doctor like this whole hospital show was rehearsed, and they’d agreed on the final scene in his absence. He wondered how long they were going to hold back on the bottom line. When the doctor kept talking it was like someone had turned the volume down. Martin couldn’t hear it all, but he didn’t mind. He nodded like Maggie, in time. Like he was in on it too. After a while, though, they weren’t nodding anymore and no one was speaking. They were just looking at him, waiting. It was the first time it had crossed his mind to speak.
‘Sorry?’ he said. Only it wasn’t ‘sorry’; it was ‘thourry’.
Everyone tried to look pleased, but they hadn’t rehearsed it well at all. Maggie smiled and held his hand while the doctor talked about speech therapy. He was glad he was tired again, not just weak, weary, but the kind of tired where he could feel himself disappearing and there wasn’t anything he could do but slide down into the deep, dark one-man hole, the hospital room and all its lights safely behind him . . .
‘So what are you going to do, Maggie Varga?’ he asks.
When he stares, her cheeks flush pink beneath her grey-green eyes.
‘You mean when I get home?’
He shrugs. ‘When you get home,’ he says. ‘Or now, today. Whenever.’
Now, he means now, it is an invitation; what could it hurt? It was her last day; they’d spend a few hours together, and then they would say goodbye and one day he’d bump into her on a street in Sydney.
She smiles like she’s inside his head, and when he asks the question he doesn’t mind if she is.
‘You want to go for a walk?’
Chapter 8
The frizzy-haired nurse offered only momentary eye contact and a kind smile; gone were the chat and nursey cheer.
It was Martin’s third day in hospital, and what the doctors had told them in terms of his recovery—his speech, his memory—was that anything was ‘possible’. That was as far as they would go, reluctant to say ‘probable’, or ‘likely’. Sometimes the brain repaired itself, sometimes another part of the brain stepped in to compensate, and sometimes the damage was done. A scan could tell them one thing, but the only real evidence would be in the coming days and weeks. So it was that the nurse’s changed demeanour as she completed her tasks and left the room gave Maggie the sure feeling that the woman knew something she didn’t, and that in the rooms where visitors were not permitted a whole different set of words was being used.
Later in the afternoon, around four o’clock, her suspicions were confirmed, though not at all in the way she had anticipated. Passing the staff tearoom, she heard the nurse’s voice: ‘. . . It’s that judge in room twenty-three, I told you the story. Look, I’m not laughing, I wouldn’t—but you’ve got to see how they’ve cocked up the headline . . . So men in comas are driving cars now! We’ve got our very own killer zombie, eh?’ And then there was indeed laughter, the kind you get after a bad joke.
Ethan had left the paper yesterday but she hadn’t read it. There on page fifteen as she opened it now was a short column underneath two photos, Martin in his wig and gown, and an Aboriginal boy dressed in his footy clothes, eyes shining white against his brown skin. The headline read: JUDGE IN COMA RUNS OVER DOG.
Maggie nodded. Our very own killer zombie. She started to read:
Supreme Court judge Martin Field is in a coma after suffering a stroke on Sunday in the streets of La Perouse . . .
The article went on to describe how Martin had reversed his car and hit the dog. The only quote in the article came from a witness who said that when the judge got out of the car he ‘looked lost’. Maggie wondered who had called the paper, how the incident had become news—but the question was not a burning one, and when she came to imagine their friends who might not yet know turning to page fifteen, even then she felt strangely removed. At least this way, she told herself, she wouldn’t have to make any calls.
What did it matter how people would read the headline?
She placed her hand on the side of Martin’s face, rough and warm, and she held it there. Strange how all the days leading to this were stripped of consequence, how she lunged now into a future with no attachment to the world she had known. Already it seemed an artifice, that world—a stack of boxes behind a wall of windows. Her son and her grandchild, the paintings and empty canvases, the shelves of her studio crammed with the props of her craft, her friends, her home—all that she had treasured packed away in storage while the calamity played out. Strange again that there was a sense of relief in that, an unburdening. Ethan and Laini came and kept watch, Annie too—and there were dozens of messages. All of which belonged behind a window, in a box . . .
‘Get on with it, my love,’ she said to him as she began to rub the hand that was free of tubes and needles.
And somewhere between the wrist and the thumb came his delayed response, a lovely slurred whisper: ‘Right you are.’
An hour later, as he sipped his soup, he asked the question: ‘What happened?’
Maggie had asked the doctors if Martin would remember the events leading to his stroke, realising even as the words left her mouth they were a waste of breath. It was, they told her, possible.
‘Do you remember anything?’ she asked him.
There was no reply. He was waiting for her to go on.
‘Do you remember driving? Do you remember going to La Perouse?’
At that he looked wary, shook his head.
‘You reversed,’ she told him. ‘The car hit a dog.’
He nodded then, narrowing his right eye into a slit. The left remained open but lazy, and when the right corner of his mouth drooped into a quasi-scowl, the left corner held still, stubborn.
‘But the dog is alright?’ Butha doge ith au-rye-at? He shuddered at the sound of his words, as though they tasted sour. Saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth. She dabbed it with a tissue.
It crossed her mind he needn’t know that he had killed the dog, or at least he needn’t know it yet—the doctor had warned of a risk of a further stroke in the first months in the event of undue stress. But no, she told herself, state it plainly now; speak the truth. Ignorance would only weaken him, push him further into the outer.
‘It wasn’t alright, darling. The dog was killed.’
His eyes filled with mistrust, then emptied of all recognition as though the speaker was not known to him. ‘Why do you say that to me?’ Tawmay.
Because it was true, she said. ‘It wasn�
��t anyone’s fault. It was an accident.’ But already he had turned away; already his eyes were closed.
Over the course of a week in hospital Martin’s speech improved rapidly, remarkably—no more than the odd slurred word. As to his memory, it was quite normal that he didn’t remember anything of the incident that had brought him here. That in itself, they were assured, was not indication of further deterioration. In a separate meeting alone with the doctor, discussing the memory problems that preceded the stroke—or, as it turned out, the second stroke—the doctor again could speak only in terms of the possibilities: it was a mild cognitive impairment, or it was the beginning of vascular dementia. Either was possible (not likely, not probable); they would have to wait and see.
Though the doctor was circumspect when he told them Martin could be home by the end of the week, Martin shook his hand and his eyes welled with tears of joy. It was a happy day, of course it was. He had done so well, in so little time. But inside Maggie there was a small voice prodding her to test him. She sat down next to him on the bed, and held up the newspaper article for him to see. ‘You saw this?’
He squinted at the page. ‘I did. Terrible photo. I look a hundred.’
She smiled; it was true, and it was a relief to get a glimpse of the old vanity. ‘You remember nothing?’
He shook his head, but she persisted, and when she did he looked away. She took his hand in hers. ‘You don’t remember driving there? Did you know that place, that street?’ She held up the newspaper again and showed him the picture of the boy. ‘He was there, this boy . . . do you remember him?’
Silence. His hand began to shake. She caught herself and squeezed it tight. ‘Let’s talk about this later,’ she said.
Already as she released his hand she could feel that it was steady again, and as he spoke he smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I think that would be best. What is next?’
The last words he uttered as though he were in court presiding over a list of matters to be heard in sequential order. Accident. Hospital. Home. Maggie did not reply, and he did not repeat the question. Swinging her legs up next to his and leaning back on the cold metal bedhead, she reminded herself that the method was not new. By no means was it the first time that Martin had constructed his reality, cutting and pasting to a point where the image was acceptable. He would have them believe now it was a lapse of memory or an inability to process, but even then, sitting on the hospital bed by his side, she suspected that Martin was at work. There would be no explanation as to why the judge drove into the street and shifted his car into reverse, not for Maggie, and not for the boy in the football jersey who had lost his dog. There would be no explanation because Martin would never dig to find it. Another bone would be buried, another secret preserved . . . Drive. Run over dog. Forget.
She could cast her mind back and find other such sequences, ending with a scuttling of the aftermath, but for now she looked down at the page in her hand, to the smiling eyes of the brown-skinned boy, still in her mind Martin’s unanswered question: What is next? Never more than now did the future seem so uncertain, so precarious, and never more than now did it seem so inexorably linked to the past. A simple truth turned in her mind: she could not answer ‘What is next?’ before she knew what it was that had come before.
The ambulance officer’s name was Peter. He didn’t seem at all surprised that Maggie had made contact with him. ‘You see he doesn’t remember anything about it, my husband, and I just felt—’ But he stopped her there and, in a voice that hinted at relief, said it was a good idea that they meet. It seemed that the man had a story to tell.
They sat down at a small table in the middle of the hospital coffee shop. His smile was curt, his voice firm.
‘It was no easy task for starters,’ he said, without waiting for a question. ‘There was a bit of a crowd.’
‘A crowd?’
‘Well, by the time we got there, half a dozen or so . . .’ He paused. ‘There were seven.’
As he described the events it was evident to Maggie that he was taking care to give an accurate account, as though the details mattered. As Peter and his co-worker Gerry drove into the street they saw Martin lying on the road. Squatting next to him was an Aboriginal man who had put Martin onto his side, and behind the man was a semicircle of onlookers, among them a woman who had stepped closer ‘to get a good look-see’. And further down the street, they could see the dog lying on the road.
‘There was a boy there, kneeling over the dog, and an old lady with her arms around the boy. He had the dog’s head in his lap; he was sort of cradling it, and rocking. And there was this noise—at first I thought it was the dog howling, then I realised it was the boy, this God-awful wail, like he was figuring to call the animal back to life.
‘The old bloke with your husband had done a good job—told us he’d checked the pulse and his breathing, a bit of a citizen, I’d say . . . who’d have guessed that? Anyhow, things got tricky pretty quick. First the boy runs up; he’s got the dog’s blood on his hands, and it’s smeared on his cheek and his forehead. It was something to see . . . like warrior paint—you know, like in those tribal dances? He asks if we can help with the dog, see if it’s alive. We’re getting your husband into the van and I’m trying to tell him we can’t do that, we can’t help a dog, we’ve got to get to the hospital. So he starts pleading: “Please help him,” he’s saying over and over, and he’s stepping in my way and I’m pushing past him to get from the back of the van to my door, so I didn’t hear it, what Gerry said, but it set her right off . . .’
‘Sorry.’ Maggie stopped him. ‘I’m getting lost. Set who off?’
‘The woman, the one who was at the front looking down at the judge. I’m guessing it was the boy’s mother.’
‘And Gerry said something to her?’
‘Something about the police coming, not to touch the car. I didn’t hear it exactly, but there wasn’t much more to it than that. There wasn’t any delay, mind you, and your husband was stable, no question. This all happened at once, you know, like in a couple of seconds. Twenty seconds, tops. I might have been checking the straps, and Gerry’s sizing it all up, looking at the fancy car that’s sitting there in the middle of the road—door open and keys in the ignition and a bunch of blackfellas—and I guess he joined the dots: goodbye, car. We’d be sending the police and he wanted to make sure they knew that. Anyhow, whatever he said, maybe he shouldn’t have said it, I grant you that. But she went off, that woman, like I’ve never seen. One minute she’s staring down at the judge like she’s seen some kind of ghost, the next she’s charged up, cursing us every which way, mostly our white skin—effing white c’s and what have you. We just took off. We had to.’ Peter paused before going on, looking at Maggie as though waiting for her approval.
‘Of course you did,’ she said quickly.
He looked down at his untouched coffee then back at her. ‘I had to push the boy away.’
‘You pushed him.’
‘I had to. He grabbed my arm. I said that—’
‘Sorry, I thought you just said he got in your way.’
‘No, he grabbed me; I think he was trying to pull me down the street, to the dog. I had to get him off me to get into the van.’
And again, he waited.
Maggie nodded. ‘You had to get to the hospital.’
When he spoke again, the corners of his mouth quivered. ‘And as we drove away, I looked in the rear-view, and there she was, kicking the car, the boy too.’ Shaking his head at the memory, he picked up the saltcellar and rolled it in the palm of his hands. Then he stopped, looked at Maggie. ‘I saw the thing in the paper, one of them must have called. I thought there might be some kind of complaint, I don’t know what about, but you know, you just nod your head the wrong way these days and it’s racist.’ And when she didn’t respond, he persisted. ‘You know what I mean?’
Maggie shrugged. ‘It sounds like an awful situation to be in, for you, for them. And you did your best, I’m su
re.’
‘I don’t know if there was any damage, was there?’
‘Damage?’
‘To the car?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. Just at the back where he reversed.’ But she wasn’t thinking about the car; she was thinking about the boy with the blood on his face. ‘How old was he, do you think—the boy?’
‘I’d guess eleven or twelve. And if that was his mum, you have to wonder what his chances are. Gerry didn’t mean anything by it, I know he didn’t. And there she had him pegged as the friggin’ Ku Klux Klan.’
‘Yes, but I mean, she was upset, the dog had been killed.’
‘But that wasn’t—’
‘Of course that wasn’t your fault—I am just saying, they were upset, the boy—’
‘Sure, sure. I get that. But they don’t do themselves any favours with that sort of carry-on. There they were, laying into the car like they’ve got a God-given right. I’ve got a son not much younger, and I’ll tell you now if I saw him kick a car . . . It shouldn’t be any different for that young fella, black skin or white skin, dead dog or no dead dog.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Even as the words left her mouth she recoiled from her assent. ‘I don’t suppose you know which house he lived in?’
The ambulance officer looked wary then. ‘You want to find him?’
She nodded. ‘I do.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
Even in her own mind she needed a moment to find the answer to his question, relieved at the sense of clarity when she did: ‘I want to say sorry for what happened. And to ask if he would like me to buy him another dog.’
On the morning he was to be released, Martin was showered and dressed when Maggie arrived—showered and dressed and smiling, like a child who had got up early all by himself to be ready for the first day of school.
This Picture of You Page 6