We moved into my mother and father’s house, which had been left to me and managed by Louisa on my behalf. It was an Art Deco mansion in Elizabeth Bay that had been leased for twenty years to groups of students who had treated it like a hostel. When Paul and I pushed open the high wooden door, we could almost hear, in the wind that made the chandelier crystals whine, the despair it felt at such neglect.
And so for the next couple of years all that mattered was that we got married, were promoted at work and that we fixed the house. I had money, all of my father’s money, which Louisa had looked after for me and which I had never spent. Until then, I could not imagine what to spend it on; how could I possibly buy shoes and dresses with money that my father had made from his art?
We camped in the studio while we renovated, with a mattress and sleeping bags for a bed, and a camp stove, saucepan and paper plates for dinner. Nothing tasted like sausage and baked beans when it was eaten on a bed with my legs crossed over Paul’s as he showed me the first full-page feature article he’d been asked to write for the newspaper; and as I told him how many lives I’d saved in my first day as a donor coordinator and how much more fulfilling it was than being just a nurse who did a lot of dressing changes and blood pressure checks but very little life-saving; and as both of us planned which gallery we’d visit on the weekend to buy beautiful things to fill our home with, to make it a living piece of art where works were not on show, but part of our life.
The renovations continued around us; Art Deco ceiling roses began to flourish, shining parquetry floors seemed to beckon dancing feet and the fluted entry columns welcomed us each night as we returned home. That is how I remember those years, as a perpetual summer holiday, always anticipating the next room finished, the house finally complete, the moving in, as mindless of noise and dust as campers are of the insects around them.
Then the house was ready and Paul had made me promise to be home by 6.00p.m. for the great unveiling. I stepped inside just a few minutes late and could see the glow of light from the wall sconces in the living room summoning me through the leadlight doors. On the other side was Paul, in a dinner suit, sitting in one of two leather and chrome Art Deco chairs that we’d been admiring in one of the antique stores in Paddington for some time. He had two glasses of champagne in his hands, along with a white box tied with black ribbon.
‘Happy housewarming,’ he murmured against my lips as I kissed him.
I opened the present and inside was a long, black silk, bias cut dress with a low back which, when I stepped into the other room to put it on, fitted perfectly. I took my hair down from its ponytail and tipped my head up to free the red waves that had been restrained all day at work.
‘Are you ready?’ I heard Paul call. ‘You know you can get dressed in here.’
‘I want to make a dramatic entrance,’ I called back, laughing. Then I put on some dark red lipstick that was one of a collection in my handbag and threw open the doors.
Paul smiled. ‘Definitely worth waiting for. Shall we dance?’
He held out a hand and I realised he’d found the time to clean up my father’s old gramophone and to find an album and put the whole thing together, just for me. So I took his hand and his arms curled around my back as my neck stretched up to meet his and we waltzed together, his fingers stroking the bare skin of my back. We stayed like that for the whole album, lost in our circle, lost in our home, lost in each other.
When the music ended I kissed him, lightly at first, wanting to feel how soft his lips were when they brushed against mine, tasting just the tip of his tongue, feeling the undulation of each rib through his shirt as my hands moved under his jacket and up his back. And then there was no longer any lightness to our kisses; our mouths were pressed hard together and Paul’s hands moved inside the curve of my dress to brush the skin of my buttocks and pull me closer to him. Then his hand slid up my back to the line of fabric covering my breasts and his thumbs found my nipples but that wasn’t enough so I moved back against the wall while he lifted my skirt and parted my legs and I thrust against him until we were crying out, over and over again.
SEVEN
They have dropped Addie’s level of sedation but she sleeps on regardless, her body doing what it needs to do to heal itself. She’ll most likely be transferred to a ward tomorrow; it is a sign of progress, albeit temporary.
The ICU nurse sits by her bed, as do I. The nurse is busy, checking monitors, refilling drips, making notes. I have nothing to do; I have read Addie’s notes, spoken to the intensivist and the hepatologist and, while I am itching to jump up off the chair so I can help, I know better than to interfere with the nurse’s work. I wait for Louisa to arrive and I can’t help but overhear a conversation, conducted in an ever louder whisper, at the bedside of the girl nearest Addie.
‘She is never seeing him again. I’ll lock her in the house or send her away before I let him near her again.’ The mother is speaking to a man who is, I presume, the father. The girl has been in a motor vehicle accident and as I listen, it becomes apparent that the girl, who looks about fourteen, has been critically injured in a car driven at speed down the wrong side of the highway by her underage and drunken boyfriend.
The father shrugs and says, ‘You’ll just end up fighting with her more if you tell her she can’t see him.’
‘I’d rather fight with her every minute of every day if it meant she didn’t end up here,’ the mother replies, clutching her daughter’s hand, holding on tight, lest the girl slip away.
Then Louisa arrives and after I give her a hug and pass on some instructions I ask her, ‘Did we fight much when I was a teenager? I can’t remember ever being grounded or anything like that.’
Louisa laughs. ‘Felicity and I fought all the time. But with you, never.’
‘I was too busy studying I suppose.’
‘You studied a lot. But I do remember one time when you asked if you could go to a party at someone’s house and I’d heard that the kid’s parents were away and he wasn’t supposed to be having a party. I’d just had a huge argument with Felicity about the same thing. So I said no. And you just said okay.’
‘I remember that. You told me it was okay to disagree with one another, that I didn’t just have to say okay and walk away.’
‘That’s right.’
I hesitate only a moment and then I say, ‘All my friends hated their mothers when I was in high school. I didn’t have the luxury. The other girls could hate in the comfort of knowing their mothers would be there regardless. I didn’t want to test the fixity of you in my life.’
‘I know, love.’
There is a moment of silence and then I hug Louisa again before I go home to search for a death mask.
As soon as I pull out the boxes Louisa gave me so many years earlier, I know the mask is in there. I remember long ago seeing a smaller box inside the larger box; it was heavy and seemed, to someone unwilling to search too far, to have nothing inside other than tissue paper. Of course, beneath the layers, there is the mask.
I take it out and look at it for a while, imagining being so attached to someone that you think they are, beyond all logic, going to come back from death. And I realise that this is how I think of Addie, as being always here, always with me, never gone for more than a matter of hours. It is beyond belief that she could be gone, forever.
There is a noise, suddenly, a shouting, voices raised and I cross to the window to look outside. There are two people on the street with loud voices and at first I think they are drunk and walking back from the pub, that the loudness is possibly joviality but then I realise that it is not. The man is shouting, ‘No. I’ve done everything for you. Everything. I’ve given it all to you.’ And then words I never imagined people might actually say to one another, ‘I’ll rip your fucking head off.’ His voice stretches up higher into the extremities of human emotion, then it breaks and cracks and words are dropped and lost but there is no mistaking his intention. He is striding towards the woman. She is
backing away, screaming or pleading. I cannot understand her.
But then a figure appears on the front porch of the house opposite me. A child. A boy of about eight. The woman runs towards him and I realise that these are my neighbours. A middle-class, suburban family whose children have now heard their father threatening to decapitate their mother. Everything ugly about them, things they have kept so well hidden beneath casual waves and hellos, has spilled out of their house and onto the street in a too-public display of marriage collapse.
Another son appears. His mother shouts something at him. He goes inside. Reappears. The children and their mother jump into a car and drive off. The man walks into the house. The lights are blazing on the empty driveway. They blaze all night. Does he hope they’ll return or does he just forget that the lights are on? What do you do when you are alone in your house and your family has just been broken, viciously, before your children’s eyes? Do you get drunk? Make telephone calls? The car does not reappear.
When Paul arrives home I want to tell him about it. The lights shine on, across the road, like a warning.
‘I’m knackered,’ he says, undoing his tie, heading straight for the shower. I wait for him in the kitchen, ready to make coffee, but he does not come down. After half an hour I go upstairs and find him asleep in bed.
As I return to the kitchen I stop and look at a sculpture of my father’s that I keep on the sideboard next to the table as if it was something as ordinary as a dinner plate. Because I see it every day alongside my cornflakes, I rarely see it; it is like a glass of milk – an essential but unnoticed part of life.
But tonight I notice that the heart the woman is holding in her hand in this sculpture is uneven; it is not the stylised, symmetrical symbol I am used to seeing on greeting cards and romance novels. The woman has taken a piece of the heart into her mouth and I realise, for the first time, that her mouth is puckered slightly, as if the bitten heart had not tasted quite as she thought it would.
NOTES ON AN EXHIBITION
DEATH MASK
(Plaster, 24x18cm. Cast by the artist’s wife.)
At least you didn’t have to watch him suffer for months on end. That is what people said to Alix when they came to visit her and Dan in the hospital.
Months on end. How Alix had wanted those months on end. She’d known exactly what would happen, the details, the process. Surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy. Dan would fight. He wouldn’t believe that the treatment could do nothing other than prolong his life, that he could not be cured. The treatment would slow things down, they’d have moments of thinking they’d beaten it, but then there would be no more treatment, just a kind of care labelled as palliative. Drugs for pain, drugs for sleep. Less time out of bed, just an hour or two in a chair by the fire in the studio, her head resting against his knees, his hands tangled in her hair. Then no time out of bed.
About two weeks before, he would no longer recognise her. She would have to get in a nurse to help. Then life would begin to concentrate itself around the heart and the brain. She would watch his body shut off the extremities, watch his legs and arms turn to wet papier-mâché. That would happen about one week before. Then there would be the cessation of movement. Breath. A flatline. No breath.
His life ended just two weeks after their dinner in the restaurant. He became another alive body attached to a brain that had died. The ambos had seen her picture in his wallet and had called ahead to warn someone. He’d tripped, fallen off the curb in front of their house at the exact moment a car came speeding by.
‘You’ll want to see him,’ said Helen, a nurse who was also Alix’s friend, taking this as given; Alix had seen so many bodies and their parts, why not this one?
‘No,’ Alix said.
She turned and walked past broken bodies and found a cab waiting out the front and told the driver that her husband had died so that he’d drive quickly and not say a thing and then she was home and lying on the bed, not wondering where he’d gone, not thinking about why he’d been outside falling off curbs, but staring at a single strand of golden hair sleeping on his pillow and feeling only the cold, hard lack of him.
Of course she returned to the hospital an hour or so later. She talked to him, whispered, Happy Valentine’s Day, and held his hand even though she knew it was not a rational thing to do. But she had always thought of him as extending from his hands. His hands did not look dead.
In fact, the hand she held looked as it always had, with its palm shaped to fit hers exactly. His fingernails had traces of white beneath them – an accumulation of plaster – his skin was pink and even though his hands were immobile they looked ready to stir, as though at any moment his fingers would reach out for something of flesh or art or substance.
If only she’d kissed him harder and longer that morning. If only she’d rolled over in bed before they got up, wrapped one arm around his waist and then wound her body over his instead of jumping up when the alarm sounded. If only she’d waved to him as she walked down the path to the front gate. If only she’d called him just to say hi. If only she’d taken him out to dinner for Valentine’s Day, ordered a bottle of champagne and a plate of oysters, worn the black backless dress that he liked and whisked him off in a plane after dinner to a Fijian island where this could never have happened.
But if onlys didn’t change anything. So she stopped thinking them. Instead she wrote it all down, everything that she saw and thought and felt as she sat beside Dan’s bed; she recorded it all in a diary. Because it was her last chance to hold onto him and she knew, although she did consider it for a moment, that she could not cut off his hands and keep them, so she bore witness to his death in the only way she could.
She watched them carry out the brain-death tests, tests she’d seen a thousand times before, tests that now seemed akin to voodoo. She grimaced as they pressed down hard on his forehead; he slept. She blinked her eyes as they stroked his corneas with cotton wool; he did not. Her pupils shrank when they shone light into his eyes; he continued to stare straight at her. She turned her head away when they poured ice cold water into his ears. They touched the back of his throat and she tasted her lunch in her mouth; he seemed only to smile because of the way they held his mouth. She cleared her throat when they suctioned his bronchi; he did not even cough. When they removed the ventilator she could not help but shout, Shut up, at the doctors because their coats rustled loud enough to disguise a gasp that in any case never came. The ventilator was then reattached and time of death, one o’clock, was declared.
It was only then that Alix realised how medicalised her perception of life had become. In order to have a supply of hearts for transplantation, she had to believe in brain death; that doctors like her no longer waited for the heart to die of its own accord. In fact they kept it pumping with a machine; they kept one part of the body alive for days after another part had died. Laws had been passed to accommodate the new definition of death, a definition which facilitated the work she did.
But now she understood, as if for the first time, that this definition assumed that Dan was only Dan within his brain, that he had ceased to be who he was when his brain had died. So who then was she talking to, whose hand was she holding?
She fell asleep in the chair for only ten minutes but the dream she had seemed to go on for all of that time and into the future. She dreamed that she searched Dan’s body for death.
She dreamed that she watched them wheel him into surgery to take out his organs. They took out his heart and she wanted it back; it was still beating so there must be a piece of him alive somewhere and all she had to do was find it. She crawled through his blood on the floor of the operating theatre, searching in case it had fallen out and no one had noticed it and then she stood and shouted ‘No!’ because they were packing his heart in ice and taking it away to give to someone else and she could not let them do it because what if he was in there, in that heart, and she had given him away to another person who would forever after have her husband’s soul.
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Alix held on to the unsigned consent forms that Helen had given her, forms giving custody of his body parts to a surgeon like her to use to save somebody else’s life. The words on each piece of paper were incomprehensible and so she shook her head: once, twice, three times.
Helen misunderstood her confusion and said gently, as if Alix must have forgotten how the system worked, ‘Dan had a primary brain tumour, not a secondary one. So he can still be considered for organ donation.’
‘I know that,’ Alix snapped. She remembered her dream but she could not tell Helen about that, about wanting to keep his heart for herself. Instead she said, ‘I can’t think of him as a repository. Of his organs as commodities, of his body as a cadaver on a table in an anatomy lab ready to be carved up by queasy medical students, just like I used to saw and cut into cadavers, people who were no longer people, but rather experiments, scientific games.’
‘You know his organs aren’t commodities,’ Helen said. ‘They’re...’
‘Gifts,’ Alix interrupted. ‘Yes, I know the theory. But he still looks like Dan. He still is Dan.’
‘He’s gone, Alix.’
Helen was gentle, kind, just as she should be. And probably right. Because Alix had looked into every part of the human body, beneath every bone, within every muscle and had seen no trace of a spirit, of a soul. She had watched people die in front of her and she had never seen or felt a piece of them projected out of their bodies, into the operating theatre and upwards into the sky.
She put the forms on the floor and said to Helen, ‘I always thought it was funny, the way he treated plaster bodies compared to the way doctors treat real bodies. He was so tender; you have to be gentle with plaster. But no one is tender with a body on the operating table.’
If I Should Lose You Page 6