The sex we have is neither erotic nor especially arousing; it is two people trying to remember the other, trying to discover the body of the person they married, trying to find out if there is anything left beneath the arguments and the worry and the fear.
Paul falls asleep soon after we finish, lying flat on his back like he always does after sex. That, at least, has not changed.
I haven’t dreamed about Paul since Addie has been in the hospital. I wonder where those dreams have gone; I cannot remember what it was like to wake in the morning feeling that love which, even though it vanished quickly, was better than feeling the way I do now.
I will my husband to come into my night thoughts but he stays away, tucked under the doona on his side of the bed, warm, asleep, breathing lightly. I reach out a hand to him, at around three in the morning when I have been awake for more than an hour. I stroke the skin along his hip, lightly because I do not want to wake him; his skin shivers so I move my hand away. I pick up my mother’s diary, go downstairs, turn on the light and curl up on the sofa with cognac and chocolates, as if I am sitting down with the latest bestseller. But I can’t bring myself to open the covers.
I wait until it is five in the morning and the light is about to creep over the sky. I put on my running gear and take off, fast, too fast, so I am nearly out of breath before I have even reached the park. But something takes over, a reflex that keeps my feet thumping into the ground, my lungs opening and contracting, my body moving forward.
I am sweaty and panting when I return to the house almost two hours later. As I stretch by the front door, I watch the man from across the road fill his car with possessions: a laundry basket full of clothes, a pile of books not in a box, a surfboard. He trips in and out, stuffing the car like a Christmas turkey.
How easy he makes it seem to break up a marriage. It is simply moving things from one location to another, I think as he drives away. A bit like organ transplantation. A heart in one body and then a relocation as it finds another chest to beat within. A chair in one house and then a relocation as it finds another living room to sit within.
My phone rings and it is Sarah, wanting me to come down to the gallery, to show me something. ‘I’ll stop by on my way to the hospital,’ I say as I run inside to shower, hug Rosie, tell Paul that he’ll have to be the one to wait for Julie, and then leave again.
‘Close your eyes,’ instructs Sarah as I step inside the gallery.
‘Why?’ I ask, shaking my head at the thought that there could be anything surprising for her to want to show me.
‘Go on, Camille, just humour me.’
‘Okay.’ I cover my eyes with my hand for extra effect and let her lead me forward.
We stop and then she says, ‘You can open them now.’
‘Oh,’ I say and I reach out my hand, touch one of the sketches on the wall in front of me, feel the shallow groove the pen has left when transferring ink to the paper.
‘I think these should go in the exhibition too.’
‘I thought I was the curator.’
‘You are, but you’d never dream of including these.’
‘I haven’t seen them for such a long time. How did you get hold of them?’
‘I rang Paul and told him what I was after. He left a key out for me and told me to hunt through the studio one day when you were at the hospital. I knew you’d have kept them. You’d never throw art out.’
I give Sarah a half-smile, the curling upwards of one side of my mouth. ‘Yes, but are they art?’
‘Of course they are.’
They are a series of pen and ink sketches that I drew at university. Each sketch is of a part of the body, a subscapularis, a lung, a humerus. They are precisely drawn, except that they are not. In each, I have changed a detail, something small and almost unworthy of notice. The humeral head is, for instance, not shaped like a crescent moon but is scalloped – a lace edge to decorate the scapula. The arteries of the lungs do not reach out like fingers; instead they turn back in on themselves like the heads of birds at rest.
‘Precise but restrained.’ I quote our tutor’s feedback but she has heard it before and shakes her head.
‘What’s he ever produced that anyone can remember? Nothing.’
‘Nor have I.’
‘Only because you stopped, Camille. I always thought you were mad, doing nursing and art history. I mean, no one does that. Then, when you showed me these, I understood. You could get right inside a body, inside what it means to be alive, in a way no one else could.’
I laugh. ‘If only I could still get right inside what it means to be human. My life would be a whole lot simpler.’
‘I always thought of them as what would be inside Dan’s sculptures, if you could turn them inside out.’
‘Yes,’ I whisper, in the same way I used to imagine my father whispering to me as I drew, my only connection to him an unreal voice describing not what to draw, but what lay beyond that, the soul of the piece. In those moments I knew that we humans had it wrong; we did not have a soul or a spirit – we found it only within art.
After I leave Sarah, I sit with Addie, who is in a ward, not ICU, and I have never been so happy to see a hospital ward. Because a ward means progress, improvement. I hear from the nurse about a child a couple of years older than Addie who has just had a successful liver transplant. Everyone is happy. We all like stories such as these where children receive livers, where their bodies accept the livers, where there is a Good Outcome.
I think, That could be us. We might just play the waiting game and win. Addie might be the most compatible child when the next liver comes in. She might stay healthy enough while we wait. She might even be able to wait at home. So my face is full of a smile when I see her.
‘Mummy!’ she cries and we hug squeezily, squashily. Her face is full of a smile too.
I open my bag and peep inside. ‘Hmmm, I wonder if there’s anything in here for a little girl. How about this?’ I pull out my sunglass case and she giggles and shakes her head.
‘No?’ I say. ‘Hmmm, what else is there?’ I rummage around and this time I produce my credit card.
‘No, Mummy,’ she laughs, wincing just a little because something must hurt when she laughs and I suddenly think, even though it is only a game we are playing, how unfair it is of me to make her wait for what I have in my bag when she is about to face the most crucial wait of her life.
‘Sorry darling,’ I say and I give her a kiss and pull a sticker book out of my bag and plump up her pillows to hold her weight better. Then I sit beside her on the bed and help her peel away the stickers and put them in the right place in the book. But soon, even something that simple tires her out and she yawns so I hop off the bed, lay her pillow down flat, tuck her under the sheet and watch her fall straight into a heavy sleep.
I sit down on a chair and begin to sort through the pile of mail in my handbag. I push the window-faced envelopes aside and pull out a thick, creamy envelope that is addressed in writing I do not recognise. I open the envelope and a photograph falls out, as well as a handwritten letter. The letter is from Jack. I found a photograph that I thought you’d like, it says. It was the happiest Christmas of my life.
Great, I think. Jack has succumbed to the curse of the elderly and is spending all his spare time sorting through mementoes from the past and now I’ve been made the beneficiary. Then I look at the photograph and realise it is no ordinary keepsake.
It is of a Christmas Day – there is a tree in the background and a pile of presents, half-opened. At the bottom of the tree sit three people. Alix. Jack. Me. I am sitting on Alix’s lap and I am grinning up at Jack. He is smiling at me and holding Alix’s hand tightly in his own. We look like a family.
I calculate quickly. I must be two years old. Soon, there will be no more Alix and, as far as I am aware, I will never see Jack again, until a meeting I organise with him to discuss an exhibition. How far grief ripples, I think. To people I’d never even considered. Like Jack.<
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I look down at Addie and realise that ripple is not the right word. If she doesn’t get a liver in time, if she were to ... well, it wouldn’t be a ripple of grief that I felt but a riptide and I wonder if you can ever escape such a thing completely. Perhaps we are already in it, Paul and I, dipping our feet into its roiling edges every time we put Addie in an ambulance, every time we hunch beside her bed in ICU.
Paul comes in after lunch so I can spend the afternoon with Rosie at the park, and instead of firing a list of instructions at him I ask, ‘How are you?’
He is scrolling through something on his phone and he doesn’t look up as he says, ‘I’m in the middle of editing a piece.’ He sits down in the chair I have vacated and begins to tap the phone, shaking his head.
‘Don’t forget to give Addie a kiss,’ I say.
‘She’s asleep. I don’t want to wake her up.’
Because then you wouldn’t have time to finish your piece. I swallow the words because he is here and that’s what matters and it’s not his fault that he has work to do.
It is mothers’ group day at the park; I haven’t been for a few weeks and the children look older and the mothers more tired than the last time we met.
Everyone puts on their sympathetic faces as Rosie and I approach.
One of the mothers says, ‘Good to see you. We’re all praying for you.’
Another chimes in with, ‘I’m sure Addie’ll be home soon.’
‘You’re due for some good luck.’ They all nod and smile, thinking, Thank God it’s not my child.
Why do women always seek to press trouble out of their lives with chirpy platitudes, like hands moulding bubbles out of clay? Why can’t someone ask how Addie is and listen, really listen, so they come part way to understanding what I might say in response.
Fuck positive thinking. I look up at the sky and remember how often in art it is portrayed as an image of the divine. ‘If all I have to rely on is luck then I’m...’ I am about to say fucked but stop because of the children. I imagine putti, fat and rapturous baby angels hopping from cloud to cloud in the sky above, the tiny leftover souls of children who ran out of luck. ‘I’m hoping to be very lucky.’ I finish my sentence in the expected way because it is not their fault that they have no idea, not their fault that they don’t want to talk to me about my dying child. Because to talk about it is to think about the possibility of their child dying too.
Rosie runs towards the playground calling out, ‘Swings!’
I peel away from the group who have, in any case, come to the end of the stock phrases that they think can serve them in such a situation and who are now shifting their feet in the silence, eyes turned towards their children, searching for distractions.
‘Careful,’ I hear one of the mothers shout to her child who is climbing a ladder up to the slide. ‘You don’t want to fall.’
Be quiet, I want to shout at the mother. Because to have the chance to fall from the slide is better than never having had the chance to climb. ‘That’s what bandaids are for,’ I mutter as I walk towards Rosie.
I push Rosie’s swing five hundred times, back and forth, but she wants more, more. The sensation of flying, of fresh air, of being with her mother at the park, is something she is afraid will vanish if I stop.
Eventually she says, ‘Turtles.’
We take the plastic bag of dehydrated fish around to the lake, away from the group of mothers and children spread over the grass, and throw handfuls into the water. Rosie squats by the edge and I keep a hand tucked around her waist in case she leans too far forward and topples in.
‘More,’ she shouts every time her hand empties of smelly, bony fish.
‘There’s a big one.’ I point to a turtle that is poking its eyes above the water in search of food. Rosie throws a fish to him.
‘And there’s a little baby,’ I say as a much smaller turtle swims cautiously forward.
I try to help her aim her arm so the fish lands near the baby but of course it doesn’t and she feeds the bigger turtle instead.
‘Mama.’ Rosie points to a turtle swimming near the baby. ‘Dada,’ she says, pointing to the larger one.
‘Is that bubba, mama and dada turtle, do you think?’
Rosie nods. Every book we read at the moment, every picture we look at needs to have a bubba, a mama and a dada according to Rosie. She assigns these roles to pictures even when it is quite clear that it is simply a picture of people or animals who hold none of these roles.
‘Addie,’ she says when another turtle swims up to her invented family group. ‘Slow.’
Then she stands and runs off; she has seen a duck and wants to chase it. Her little legs waddle, moving not too fast because they are short and uncoordinated but she must think she is soaring over the grass because she has her arms outstretched and she is giggling. I take off after her and she squeals. She is being a child, being everything she cannot be when Addie is around because Addie is sick and slow.
I stop to catch my breath because a thought has snatched it away; the thought of what has been taken from her, my Rosie, just because her sister was born with a one-in-fifteen-thousand disease that I have fooled myself into thinking of as a sea dragon lurking beneath the ocean of our lives.
NOTES ON AN EXHIBITION
WHAT SHE HAS LEFT OF HIM
(Plaster, 32x32cm, incomplete. Named by the artist’s wife for the first retrospective of his work after his death.)
Never. So many promises have that word in them. I’ll never leave you, I’ll never stop loving you, I’ll never forget you. Promises or lies? No, things that should never be said – there’s that word again – because someone will always leave and then the loving stops and forgetting begins. That was what Alix was most afraid of.
The day after Dan died Alix went to the electrical store down the road and bought a single bed electric blanket. She took it home and put it on his side of their queen bed. Then she turned it on and waited until that piece of the bed was layered with an almost human warmth, a warmth that she used to curl into at night when her feet were cold and Dan’s were not. She lay for an hour or so beside the hot blanket but then got up, switched it off and tore it from the bed. The warmth it cast was not bodily; she could not feel the slight prickle of his leg hair or the weight of him indenting the bed. There was just air and seared sheets and a plaster mask on a pillow which, when she saw it lying there in a place meant for him, became not even a likeness, just an amateur art project, a bit like the foetus growing in her belly.
What she has left of him: clouds of pubic hair caught in the fluff on the bathroom floor, oiled finger and lip prints pressed onto his unwashed wine glass, a stack of coins on the kitchen bench, a five o’clock shadow in the basin, dead skin on the soap, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas open on his bedside table, dirty shirts in the washing basket, a used tissue in the bin.
Or at least she would have had those things if her mother had not organised a cleaner to come while they were out at the funeral to take away everything that Alix had left of him.
Dan’s wake was in the garden by his studio. Alix would never have found out what her mother had done until after everybody had gone except that she had a headache caused by the constant pressure of her mother’s hand on her left shoulder and so she went into the house to get the Panadol.
She noticed the smell first. It was like Domestos, like the hospital. Scoured. Then his last dirty plate. Gone from the sink. The pile of newspapers she bought to read to him. Gone from the coffee table. No washing in the laundry. No towel in the bathroom. She thought at first of thieves. But then she noticed his scent – of chalky plaster, ginger tea and the cinnamon of his aftershave – had been sucked from the air and she knew the thief was her mother.
‘Alix.’ The pressure of that hand on her shoulder again. ‘It had to be done.’
Alix was only aware of the fact that her clenching jaw was making her headache worse, the pain wrapping itself like a swathe of banda
ges from one side of her head to the other. She was about to speak, to shout, How dare you, but the smell of disinfectant, the smell of her work lodged in her home was causing the Vegemite toast she’d had for breakfast to rise to her throat and into her mouth and then she was staring at semi-digested bread splattering onto the floor. Her jaw released and her head loosened. If he had nothing to read – no open book – if he had nothing to dry himself with – no towel waiting – then how could he ever return? She said to her mother, ‘Please leave.’
‘I’ll get someone to clean this up,’ her mother replied, pointing, but not looking, at the floor.
‘Someone? Get the same cleaners back to finish the job? Can’t bend down with a mop and do it yourself?’
Alix knew she was using her height advantage, knew she was leaning forward and towering over her mother’s head, and she did this until her mother turned, stepped over the vomit and walked towards the front door.
Then Alix remembered. ‘No,’ she shouted and ran out of the house, through the garden and into the studio. On a table in the middle of the room was the beginning of a round belly, the navel only lightly shaped in, the tautness of the skin apparent as it reached around and over the bundle inside.
‘Thank God,’ Alix whispered as she picked it up, curled in a chair and rested the sculpture against her own not-yet rounded belly. That piece was the last one, The End, incomplete, just like Dan.
In the garden, the guests could hear Alix sobbing like a hungry baby, inconsolable because the only thing that could sate her had been buried in the ground that day.
Alix never spoke to her mother again.
Every morning after Dan was gone, every morning of her pregnancy, Alix woke at 5.30a.m. and ran along the harbour. She did this again after her shift had finished at work.
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