Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  They’ll call my name and I’ll know then if I’ve got the woman instead of one of the men — there’s four of them working here — and if I have I will feel ridiculous gratitude as I walk in there, that small mercy. Here’s what the men do: they put the gel on and apologise that it’s cold and then run the transducer over, looking only at the screen, which they don’t turn around to you, because they’ve glanced at your ultrasound request form and they’ve read the doctor’s code and they know what you’re here to find out. No matter how hard you look at them, they hardly ever meet your eye, just move that mouse back and forth, clicking now and then with it. And if you break and say, Please, is it still alive, they say what they’ve been trained to say, so you can’t blame them, but still. They clear their throat and reply, Your doctor will discuss these results with you. This while they’re looking inside you, that’s the ironic part. This careful professional detachment while they’re gazing at the human map of you, the intimate, failed, faltering misstep, in ghostly black and white. White cloud coursing grainily over a black landmass, some cyclone gathering its bleary force offshore.

  But one time I had the woman, and I didn’t even have to ask her. She moved the transducer and gazed at the screen and then her hand came out and squeezed my leg and she looked at me and said, I’m so sorry, I can’t see a heartbeat.

  Her hand there for comfort. Warmth and pulse flowing between us, skin to skin.

  She let me lie there for a little while too, and pull myself together. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t seem to be here anymore, maybe she let each appointment run too long. Maybe with more and more patients waiting outside, her efficient male colleagues started to get resentful that they were working through the queues so much faster than she was.

  Anyway, it’s been men the last three times. I’m a veteran at this now.

  Lie there and have your fears confirmed, verbally or with that courteous, revealing brush-off. Get yourself back out into the waiting room to wait for the report to be printed, go up to the counter, pay for it all. After you get your Medicare refund up the street, the whole thing costs you seventy-five dollars. They don’t bother giving you the actual ultrasound films now. Well, they don’t bother giving them to me, anyhow. Nothing to see, one of them told me once, dismissively. It’s so tiny in these early stages. Once, though, the girl at the counter handed me a disc along with my receipt. She hadn’t read the report, obviously, just saw the Gynaecological Ultrasound printed there and burned it off for me. Thinking I’d be going home to excitedly push it into a DVD player and watch my baby jumping on the screen, healthy, identifiable. Viable.

  I’ll have to tell them, today, I don’t want a DVD. I know what’s coming. I reached ten weeks last Tuesday, day seventy, and I was standing in the kitchen chewing on a piece of toast, Pete long up and gone, feeding out the last of the hay to the cattle in the top block. I stood there rubbing at a spot on the bench wondering why the dread under the surface was pushing at me more insistently, just scratching at the cork of my bottled-up terror, and it dawned on me.

  No nausea. Dull anguish like a bitter taste in my mouth, heart like a shallow dish of water I was desperate not to tip, filling my chest. That estuarine feeling of something ebbing away; those symptoms that had kept me so stupidly hopeful. Evaporating like a rainless cloud. Giving up the ghost. The spot I was rubbing slid from the bench to the back of my hand and I realised it was light, a spot of light reflected off a bottle on the windowsill. Everything was so quiet.

  They won’t find a heartbeat.

  My doctor just fills out a request form for me now. I don’t have to make an appointment to get it, so I told Pete I was coming up here to do some shopping. Pete’s got enough on his plate. It’s funny, in the pamphlets they hand you they talk about giving yourself permission to grieve and taking time for yourself, but they never talk much about your partner. I’m not pretending I know what it’s like for him, but I look at his face and I can see that he’s worn down as it is, almost to the point of slippage, like a stripped screw. Turned and turned again, straining to hold things together. He put in a crop of wheat this year, gambling on a spring break which hasn’t come, and I know he’s thinking of doing what all the farmers around here are slowly resigning themselves to, which is giving up on the idea and letting the cattle in to eat it down. I’ve watched him out there some mornings, stooping down, looking at the stalks, wondering where the point of non-recovery is, where it comes and what you do once you’ve decided. So this time I spared him. Kept the news of those two blue lines on the test to myself. I look at the calendar and think of him out there on the tractor sowing that wheat, ten weeks ago to the day.

  Understand, I’m not a martyr. When we got married my mother gave me my grandmother’s wedding ring, and I looked at the back of it worn thin from years of distracted rubbing with her thumb as she waited for my grandfather to come home, every shift out of the mines. Those years of wearing away. I do the same with it now, myself. Then, last March, when we got all the way to fourteen weeks and Pete’s face had lost a little of its tightness, I was loading the washing machine and felt that tide ebbing again, the way a sharp wall of sand will collapse into the flow, and I was no more able to stop it happening than I was to turn a real tide. The soak of blood, that wall caving, impossible to ever rebuild.

  In the hospital afterwards Pete stood by my bed, hesitating, as they announced visiting hours were over, and I thought he was gathering his thoughts to say something, and I closed my eyes. Instead I heard him taking off his boots and jeans and shirt, leaving them in a neat pile on the chair. He lifted the stiff white sheet and just climbed in beside me. My husband is an undemonstrative man and that gesture, as he fitted his warm arms and legs around me in the narrow bed, made me see how much he understood. I woke up in the night and felt his thumb, as he slept, absently rubbing the skin on my own arm. Oh, it wears us thin, marriage. It knocks the edges off us.

  But I’m not a martyr, just someone who can see what needs doing, and does it. I’ve learned this from him.

  The magazine’s telling me there are ten steps to a new me. I turn to the page showing a rail-thin actress with a chalky-white arrow directed at her abdomen. Baby bump? asks the caption. I go back to the horoscopes. After I get out of here I will get the Medicare refund and put it back in the bank and then spend some time in the op-shop searching for something I could conceivably claim cost me seventy-five dollars. Do you want a D&C, my doctor will say, putting down the ultrasound results with a sigh, or do you want to wait and let things take their natural course? It’s harder to explain away a day procedure in hospital so I’ll take the natural course.

  The natural course. Nature’s way. I’m baffled by it, I don’t mind telling you. I’ve had a gutful of it. Carving its erosion gullies through us, whipping the rug out from under us, making us eat its dust. I’m waiting for something comprehensible to jump out of this garbled mess and make sense to me. Here is the natural course, now — calling my name. The radiographer with my file, scanning the faces from the door. Blue shirt, polite smile, male. Here it comes. I rise and walk towards the examination suite for what I know is waiting for me in there. I count my steps. Ten steps to a new me. Ten days to a flatter stomach.

  I know what Pete will be doing at home right now. He’s making the decision to open the gate into the pasture with its desiccated, knee-high wheat. Can’t stand its hopeful greenness struggling in that parched ground, knowing what three more days of this heat are going to do.

  Let it go. Let the cows eat it.

  He stands there postponing the moment when he lifts the catch on that gate, scrutinising the sky and the horizon one last time as the cattle cluster on the other side looking hungry and, oh, Pete, I know what you need and I can’t give it to you; I can see it in the way you scratch the dog’s tilting head just where he loves it, the thwarted tenderness of that gesture so familiar to me that I feel the heavy dish of wate
r in my chest teeter and almost overbalance, and I ache with holding it steady.

  I see it in the resigned way you take off your hat to wipe the dirt and sweat from your forehead and, with decisive and methodical force of habit, seeing what needs to be done, how you set it back straighter on your head, ready.

  Static

  ‘Anthony,’ says his mother, ‘what’s this we’re drinking?’

  He’d known this was going to happen, the minute Marie showed him the punch recipe.

  ‘You know they’re hyper-conservative,’ he’d said. She’d rolled her eyes, put a post-it note reminder on the recipe page and added it to her list.

  ‘For crying out loud, what’s not to like about melon ginger punch?’ she’d muttered. The glossy magazine bristled with post-it notes, annotated painstakingly by Marie with dozens of clever and simple Christmas lunch suggestions for people with more to do than slave over a hot stove, et cetera.

  Now his mother prods a perfectly spherical melon ball in her drink, and looks at him as if it was a floating dead mouse.

  ‘It’s punch,’ Anthony says, smiling hard.

  ‘Just something cool and refreshing,’ adds Marie.

  Anthony’s father Frank puts his down and pulls himself off the lounge chair. ‘How about a beer, son?’

  ‘Sure, if that’s what you’re after.’

  Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!

  Then both of them, his mother and Marie, turning the Evil Rays onto him, as if the entire thing is his idea, his fault, when all he’s done is get out his credit card to pay for the whole bloody shebang: the punch and the Peruvian glass punchbowl it’s in and the gourmet chestnut stuffing mix in the organic free-range turkey out there, rolled and boned for easy slicing — Anthony knows exactly how it feels — and the sighing, put-upon lounge suite still on the interest-free nothing more to pay for ten months plan, which Marie is already obsessing is the wrong shade of taupe. Are there actually different shades of taupe? It’s news to him. Hell would be like that, he thinks, gulping punch. It would be shades of taupe that drove you screaming into eternal torment, not the flames.

  ‘Let’s open the presents,’ he suggests.

  ‘But the children haven’t even arrived,’ says his mother.

  ‘I meant just ours,’ he answers feebly. True, for a few seconds there, he had forgotten the children were coming. His sister’s offspring would dominate the day, though it wasn’t the kids’ fault — they’d be desperate to escape into the study as soon as they could to play with the Wii he’d bought them, the poor little buggers. No, they would be used, the children, as deflector shields against the Evil Rays, as ammunition against the day’s parries and thrusts of emotional blackmail. Hannah and Tom. They’d have to be twelve and ten now.

  Marie hadn’t even wanted them to come; she made a big fuss about having to plan a special menu for them and how they’d turn the house upside down, but Anthony, ducking his chin and ploughing through a veritable snowstorm of Evil Rays, insisted that if they were going to have a family Christmas, his sister and her husband and kids had to be there, or his parents wouldn’t show up.

  ‘I don’t care if we have KFC,’ he’d finally said, gesturing to the pile of magazines hawking sunshine and patios and people in uncrushed white linen shirts. ‘If we’ve agreed to do it, they have to come.’ And Marie had slammed off into the study to channel her fury into pumping six kilometres out of the exercise bike. You could bounce a coin off her calf muscles, if you were game to try.

  Rays, rays. One drills into the back of his skull as he leaves the kitchen, another counterattacks with a zap square in the solar plexus as he carries in a platter of smoked-salmon blinis. Marie’s doused them with chopped dill, and his mother looks at them like they’ve been sprayed with grass clippings from the mower. She can get every secret weapon into those rays — contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works. Anthony is determined, fully determined, to thwart her with unrelenting good cheer today.

  ‘Pikelets, eh?’ says his father, eyes swivelling back to the one-day match, luridly coloured on the plasma screen. ‘Well, well.’ He folds one into his mouth to keep the peace while his mother refuses, mouth like a safety pin. Vol-au-vents, that’s his mother’s style. Cheese straws and a sherry.

  Anthony starts eating the things so that when Marie comes back it will look like they’ve been a success. He’s got four in his mouth when a stray caper lodges itself in his throat and forces him to cough a spray of ricotta and dill and masticated pancake into a Christmas napkin. For a second he’s terrified he might actually throw up, and wouldn’t that be a wonderful start to the day, but he swallows down a mouthful of punch and his stomach settles.

  Where’s Marie? If there’s one thing those magazines kept promising, it was that even though you were a hostess you wouldn’t need to be tied to the kitchen all morning; with your new fresh and fun easy-peasy celebration menu you’d be relaxing with those you loved on this special day.

  He can’t go back out to the kitchen yet. It wouldn’t look right. ‘Who’s winning, Dad?’ he says.

  ‘The Pakis.’

  On the screen the tiny bright figures move as if they’re underwater. Bowl and deflect. Go back, wait, run up slowly, bowl and … block. Christ, it’s like watching paint dry.

  ‘I got all my shopping done early and out of the way this year,’ says his mother. ‘And what a relief that was. I can’t stand having to shop when the place is such a madhouse just before Christmas.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s crazy, isn’t it?’ He recalls going to Safeway just the night before, running up and down the aisles searching for cranberries in syrup. The person ahead of him at the check-outs was buying four barbeque chickens, salad mix and a big tub of choc-chip ice-cream, and Anthony had felt an overwhelming, childish longing to follow them out and curl up in the back of their car and go home to their place.

  ‘And I got everything boxed,’ his mother is saying, ‘just big square boxes. I’ll never forget the terrible problems we had wrapping that rocking horse for Tom.’ Seven years later, and she’s still talking about it.

  ‘What did you get him this year?’ says Anthony. He can see the packages under the tree — all the same red paper with identical bows.

  ‘A walkie-talkie set.’ She looks at him shrewdly, and Anthony does his best to simulate admiring delight.

  ‘Oh! He’ll … Was that something he said he wanted?’

  ‘You know how much he loves all his electronic games. He’ll be able to play police games with this, with his friends. You know, hiding round the house.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  She’s on to him in an instant. ‘What? Don’t you think it’s a good idea? Lord knows it cost me enough. I just try to keep up with what the children seem to want; I don’t know all the latest gadgets. I just do my best.’

  God, where is Marie? ‘No, no. It’s a great idea. He’ll love it.’

  When Tom sees the Wii, Anthony knows, the walkie-talkie’s going to get dropped like a dud Tamagotchi.

  ‘I’ll just see if Marie needs a hand,’ he says, weaving through the lounge chairs to the kitchen.

  ‘Honestly,’ he hears his mother tut as he exits, ‘how hard is it to roast a turkey?’

  Listless applause sounds from the TV as someone finally hits something, and the lounge chair exhales a gust of weary depression.

  Marie’s face, as she glances up, is murderous.<
br />
  ‘Pit those,’ she snaps, flicking her eyes to some cherries. ‘If your father cracks a filling on a cherry pip I’ll never hear the end of it.’

  She’s — what the hell’s she doing? Anthony stares at his wife’s hand, vanished to the wrist inside a Christmas ham.

  ‘I’m getting the fat and skin off. I’m not going to drop dead of cholesterol even if they all want to.’ She extracts her hand like a doctor completing an internal exam and peels back the great flapping layer of fat. ‘Look at that. Disgusting.’ She wraps it in a plastic bag, shuddering, and drops it into the bin. ‘We’ll just have this ham cold, sliced and arranged on the platter with some rocket garnish and a scattering of cranberries.’

  Anthony grimaces. He can hear the pitch rising in her voice, the manic brittleness that has nowhere to go but up, up, up into hectic hysteria. It will break later, after everyone has gone, and the tic that’s jumping now under her eye will somehow afflict her whole face and pump itself down her arms and legs.

  ‘Try not to get upset,’ he says as calmly as he can. ‘I’ll do all that before we eat, just come in and sit down for a while.’

  She’s scrubbing ham grease off her hands in the sink. ‘I hate that lounge suite,’ she mutters. ‘I told you it was the wrong colour.’

  Anthony scrabbles in the cutlery drawer for the cherry pitter he remembers buying at Ikea. ‘So I’ll just do these cherries then.’