Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  There was no pain. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light. Blood was running in thin ribbons down my thighs. I got under the shower and rinsed myself clean, put on clean clothes and then called your mother, who called the ambulance and said she would meet me at the hospital. Only after I had hung up the phone did I realise that she hadn’t known, before I called, that I was pregnant. The ambulance officers were calm and quick, one of them measuring my blood pressure and temperature while the other asked questions. They didn’t drive very fast or turn on the siren as we drove to the hospital. It was the middle of the night and there was no traffic on the roads.

  There was no panic, no rushing. Eliot was right, I thought, This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

  At the hospital they wheeled me through corridors filled with dim antiseptic light. I was lifted onto a hospital bed in the labour ward and told to stay lying down until the doctor came. To relax and breathe and try not to worry. They strapped monitors to my belly with the sound turned off and the screen turned away so I couldn’t see whether our child was dead or alive. A midwife came and looked at the printout and frowned, and then a doctor. They spoke to me without saying anything I understood.

  Finally, your mother was allowed in to see me. She had been there the whole time, waiting, speaking with the doctors and nurses in the corridor outside my room as they went in and out, trying to find out what was happening, trying to make them let her come to me.

  As soon as she came in and saw me, she climbed up on the bed and lay down and held me. It wasn’t easy: I was strung about with wires and cables, and the bed was narrow and high, but she curved her body around mine and wrapped her arms over me and put her cheek against my own. I could feel every inch of her long body curling around me, holding me together. She was wearing perfume – something old-fashioned – but I could smell the medication on her skin as well, and the chemical strangeness of her breath.

  In the next room, I could hear a woman labouring. Deep, long moans followed by the clap of doors opening and closing. I was lying on my side. Tears seeped out of my eyes, though I didn’t feel as though I was crying, couldn’t recall having started. They pooled in my ear, and overflowed onto the pillow and the sheets. Solange wiped them away with her bare hands, and licked them from her lips and held me close.

  When the doctor came in she moved to sit up and give him room to roll me over and examine me, but she never let go of my hand. All night she held me. She sat on the bed with an arm around my shoulders while they did a pelvic exam. The doctor’s gloves came away bloody but he seemed unperturbed as he stripped them off and dropped them into the yellow bin. ‘There’s a heartbeat,’ he said. ‘No signs of foetal distress at this stage. No dilation of the cervix. The bleeding appears to be the result of a minor placental tear. We’ll keep you here, under observation, until morning to make sure the baby is doing okay and the bleeding subsides.’ He smiled up at me. ‘First baby?’ he asked. ‘First pregnancy?’

  I nodded. Liar.

  ‘I know it’s frightening, but a bleed like this is fairly common. Up to thirty per cent of women experience vaginal bleeding during pregnancy without it leading to a miscarriage. While you will need to keep an eye on things – take it easy, monitor any continued blood loss – there’s no reason to suspect that things won’t progress normally from now on.’

  Early the next morning, as it was just starting to get light, it began to rain. I had fallen into a light sleep but woke when a nurse came into the room. Solange was already awake, curled around me as though I were her own child. She brushed hair back from my forehead and kissed the side of my head, told me the baby was doing fine. Just fine.

  We drove home to her house, where she made tea and asked if I’d prefer to stay with her for a few days, while you were away. She showed me the spare room with its clean white walls, white linen, pale timber furniture. There was a white cane rocking chair near the window with a pink quilt folded over the arm, and an antique cradle: a powder-coated white net of steel. As though the baby it was intended for were a large fish to be scooped out of the ocean. She opened the windows and a swell of damp jasmine-scented air came in.

  ‘You were very brave,’ she said. ‘Very calm.’ I could see the curve of your cheek echoed in her face. The shape of your mouth, and that of your brother, in a face that was thinner and older and more worn. ‘I lost three babies after the boys. Paul’s three daughters, one after another. I don’t think he ever forgave me for being unable to carry them to term, as though it were something I did deliberately, just to hurt him, to punish him.’ She glanced over at me and grimaced and I saw again the doctor’s bloodied glove dropping into the bin. Slumping like a discarded skin among the swabs and pads. For a moment I imagined a baby there as well: a dark clot of cells, waxy white skin folded up in a sheet of blue plastic and thrown away with the other hospital waste. ‘Men don’t understand these things very well,’ she said. ‘What it is to be a mother. To be so completely embodied.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I’d known.’

  Solange peered at me unforgivingly. ‘I don’t need your pity. Who else is there? Who else would come? I don’t know what your story is, but you are carrying Samuel’s child and I know what it is to be a woman, and to bear a child. He is a good boy – a good man – but he would have been of no use to you had he been there tonight.’

  ‘I cut my hand once, when I was working on a sculpture, and he turned so white I thought he was going to faint.’

  ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t.’

  Rachel arrived with a cake and the three of us went out into the garden, wiped the furniture dry with an old towel, and sat and talked. The bleeding had stopped, but we were both tired. I fell asleep on a sun lounge and woke to find the pink quilt had been laid over me. Your mother and Rachel were playing Scrabble at the table. Solange cheating and Rachel letting her. ‘You’re awake, sleepyhead,’ said Solange. ‘It must be time for lunch.’

  Rachel went in and made lunch for us all, and while she was gone Solange tipped all her letters back into the bag and chose new ones. Pawing through the old-fashioned timber tiles for the ones she wanted. Every now and then she glanced up at the house to see if Rachel was coming.

  ‘Did he read them?’ she said. ‘Did you read them, the letters?’ she asked.

  ‘What letters?’

  ‘Don’t play games,’ she said. ‘The letters I sent to Morgan. The letters from his father.’

  ‘I read them,’ I said. ‘Morgan refused to. He said the past was not his business and that whatever –. He said that whatever you and his father – the man you had an affair with – had done, whatever had happened between you, it was nothing to do with him. He said you and Samuel were constantly trying to drag him back into your dramas but he had more important things to worry about.’

  Solange snorted, almost laughed. ‘That sounds like Morgan.’

  I nodded and shifted a little, sat up so that I could see her face as she sorted and rearranged her Scrabble tiles.

  ‘He knew, then, before he died, that Paul was not his father.’

  ‘He’d always known, I think. Or at least he’d known for a long time.’

  She glanced at the house and then squinted at me. ‘How long?’

  She was watching me – carefully – weighing up the look on my face, the gestures I made, the words I said. ‘Since Paul died. He knew, that day in the shed. Paul showed him the letters.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Paul told him that he wasn’t their real father. He told him that their real father had been his best friend, ever since they were boys. That they had gone fishing together, but that his friend – Michael – had gone away to uni and it had been years since he had seen him. He told Morgan that he had met you when he went down to the city to see his friend because his friend was dying, and that you married him – that he believed you had married him – out of grief, and fear. That the two o
f you were bound together by your mutual loss and that he had offered you protection, and a safe home, and a father for your dead lover’s sons, but that you had betrayed him.’

  Your mother nodded and sighed, pulled herself upright in her chair. ‘I betrayed them both,’ she said. ‘Michael wanted me to move on after he died, and he was worried about his sons, about my ability to raise them on my own. I’d refused to marry him, and he had nothing of any consequence to leave me – no money, no belongings to speak of. He was so young – too young to be a father, and far too young to die. He begged Paul to marry me. To teach his sons to sail, and to fish, and to be men. Paul agreed, but he had his price, and he and Michael agreed on what it was. Once Michael died Paul wanted me to forget he had ever existed. I wasn’t to mention his name, or keep any of the gifts he’d given me. No photographs, no letters. I promised to erase him, and to give myself to Paul properly.’

  ‘He had no right to ask that of you. Neither of them did.’

  ‘Paul was engaged to someone else, you know. Someone who loved him, and would have made a better wife for him. I didn’t know about her until much later – until after the boys were born and she sent us a card and a gift: little booties she had knitted herself, two sets, with matching sailor’s caps. She was a nice woman. Very kind. If he had married her, he would have been happy. But he promised Michael he would marry me, even though he knew – he must have known – that Michael should never have asked that of him. Possibly he never expected us to honour our promise, after he died. And once he was gone …’ She shrugged. ‘Who was there to hold us to it? I thought Paul was weak: to marry someone who loved someone else, who was grieving another man, and to raise another man’s sons as his own. But I was wrong. Paul knew exactly what Michael had asked of him – what it meant, what it required of him – and he was prepared to do it. I was the fool. I was the selfish, cruel one who was too frightened to admit I couldn’t turn my back on the past. I accepted Paul’s proposal, but I didn’t accept the conditions he imposed alongside it, and I never intended to.’

  Your mother didn’t look away from me. Not once. Though her look dared me to do so. I met her gaze with as much firm acceptance as I could, refusing to flinch, or pity her. Finally, she lay down her tiles on the board and wrote down her score. ‘What about Samuel?’ she said. ‘Does Samuel know?’

  I shook my head. I held my tongue. As I have too often done.

  ‘You haven’t told him.’

  ‘It’s not my place,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I suppose not.’

  39 Weeks

  A few days later, when I returned to her home, your mother opened the door to me. I was awkward with my umbrella, belly, bag full of fruit and tea, and a pile of books from the shop.

  ‘I’ll take the books,’ she said, holding out her arms.

  ‘Rachel?’

  ‘I sent her off to do something useful. Do you want to go into the kitchen?’

  I glanced into the lounge room. No fire, but a handful of thin logs piled up. ‘Do you want me to light the fire?’

  ‘Are you cold?’

  I shook my head. There was a hall mirror, before which I could appraise myself, knowing that I always looked mildly dishevelled. There were specks of rain on my shoulders and in my hair. My face was flushed and plump – unfamiliar. Next to Solange’s compact frailty my thickness felt obscene. The child turned in me, its head pressing up against my ribs. I wondered how she could bear to look at me.

  ‘How have you been?’ I said, following her into the kitchen. The old radio on the kitchen bench was on, the light soft and warm, the newspaper spread out on the table with a dictionary and a pencil, the crossword half-completed.

  She shrugged with her back turned, filling the kettle at the sink. She talked clearly and brazenly about the pain, as though it were a lover and I was the only one who knew about it. This was my role. With you she was careful and protective. Every twinge she reported showed on your face. With Rachel she was efficient: pain was recorded in numbers that corresponded to the relief she was offered. With me, she told the truth. Pain was an old companion, more familiar now than Paul had been. It had taken possession of her, knew her intimately. Woke with her, slept with her, covered her over.

  The pain had been, for a long time, amenable to distraction. But in the later months, it had taken absolute occupancy of her. She could barely walk. Barely think. She had been doing that damn crossword for a week. The pain was taking her into death, and she was fighting it. There was no way to give in to it, and no way to bear it. Some days there was no Solange left, no woman, no self, only pain. Simple, unadulterated pain.

  Rachel urged her to lie down and rest all the time, but when she lay down she felt as if she was going to drown in the pain, and be buried in it. ‘She held me down yesterday,’ your mother said, standing over the kettle, spooning tea into the pot. ‘I wanted the relief, but I fought her, too. “Accept it,” Rachel said, and I thought she meant death. I was delusional. I thought her arms were the arms of death, pushing me down into the grave. I was fighting her, and begging her to help me at the same time.’ She grimaced at me. ‘I never used to be so fanciful.’

  She had forgotten that it was me who had fought her, who had held her down. That it was me she had scratched and torn at while her face twisted in fury. Me she had whispered to, finally, ‘Help me.’ And though I had known I couldn’t do what she wanted, my hands had ached with murderous love. I knew in that moment I could kill her if I had to – to relieve her pain, and to relieve you of the debt her pain accrued in you. To give you both peace, even if it cost what little peace I had of my own.

  When Rachel came home, I went out to meet her in the hall. ‘Give her something stronger. Never mind whether it kills her or not.’

  Rachel looked at her reflection in the hall mirror, hung her coat on the hook next to mine.

  ‘She wants to see the baby. She wants to last long enough for that.’

  ‘She won’t tell you how much pain she’s in. She won’t tell Samuel. She tells me. You’ve got to do more to help her.’

  ‘She’s a very strong woman,’ Rachel said. ‘Very determined.’

  We heard a sound in the lounge room, where I had lit the fire, and both of us looked up. It was nothing. The fire crackling, the heat seeping into the walls. Your mother was seated on the lounge with one of the books I had brought open on her lap. She was quiet, but not resting. She sat rigid in the chair. Staring death in the face, daring it to come for her.

  ‘If only she’d give in to it,’ Rachel said quietly.

  ‘She can’t,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not her daughter,’ Rachel said.

  I shook my head. I could not tell her that Solange had been more of a mother to me than any other woman. I could not tell her how your mother’s trust had gently wounded me, how her uncomplicated friendship, her simply accepting me with all my flaws and secrets, had made me helpless. I was not there because she had no daughter. I was not even there because of you, or the baby, or Morgan. I was there because of Solange: because she had looked at me, and seen me, and not looked away. I was there because I loved her.

  40 Weeks: Birth

  So that’s it. That’s my story. I can never go back, never fix the mistakes I made. Though the days claw at my back and the past floods my dreams, though I am overwhelmed by it, drowned in it, the past will never let me make amends. I am a ghost. I am dead. I have been dead since you kissed me and I knew that you loved me.

  I should have known better than to hold you. I should have known better than to let you in, to press my mouth against yours. I swallowed the steam from your mouth. I was so hungry for the fat of being loved. For the gleam of it. I licked the wet glimmer of your open eye. I bit and gnawed and sucked at you. I wanted to get inside you. I should have known what was happening. I should have known it couldn’t last. I felt myself blurring. All my bullshit being stripped away. Soon there would be nothing left. But I was dazzled by the seeming ease o
f loving, and of being loved. I did not want words. I didn’t want anything to come between us. When you touched me, I was so naked I was nothing but bones and air. Nothing but loss, waiting to occur.

  But being dead was not what I had expected. I had imagined skinlessness and frailty, the cells of my body like stars after the big bang, slowly drifting further and further apart. But death was not kind; it would not let me go so easily. Death was meat and fat congealing on my bones. Old blood coagulating in my veins. I grew fat and slow. My heart thumped and mumbled in my chest: a bird drowning in thick paint. I breathed you in and grew thick as a sail full of wind. I would have given anything to make you happy, but there was only one thing you truly wanted.

  Night after night I lay down in my dreams and returned to Amsterdam. I took off my shoes. I took off my pants and socks and shirt and lay them down on the edge of the dyke. I waded out into the current. I put my arms around the drowning boy, your beloved, your brother, but I could not lift him from the water. My arms were breezes. My hands soft as steam. They ached with the effort, but his face never drew any closer. His eyes did not open. He would not speak. He would not tell the truth.

  I am a liar, a storyteller. I guess you know that now. Everything I said about love, everything I wrote, was always less than the truth. I tried to hide it; I tried to keep it quiet, but my own body betrayed me. The child and the man I love lie sleeping in my bed. If you wake and turn, blinking in the moon’s ruined light, you will see me standing there. You will see me for what I truly am.