If I Should Lose You

by Natasha Lester

  ‘It’s fine,’ Louisa had said to Alix. ‘If you get a call at night, just drop Camille off here on your way. And if you’re rostered on for night shift, we’ll take Camille for the night. It’s good for her to be around Felicity. She loves her cousin.’

  And Camille did. Whenever Alix picked up Camille from Louisa’s house, Camille would cry, she would want to stay; she would not want to go home with her mother. It would take them an hour or so to become reacquainted, by which time it was bedtime and so the process would begin again the next day. Hugs and cuddles at breakfast. Tears when Alix dropped Camille at Louisa’s, tears that would vanish when Felicity came running out of the house to smother her cousin in hugs. Tears that would reappear when Alix returned. Bribery with books and toys and then finally Alix found something that worked.

  In despair one night of ever getting Camille to eat anything for dinner in between the sobbing, she took her into Dan’s studio and sat her in front of a bucket of water. Alix sprinkled plaster dust into the water; it sat on top at first, floating, making milky patterns. She handed Camille a stirring stick and watched as her daughter solemnly swirled the plaster into the water, the expression on her face the same as Dan’s.

  From then on, every night, they ate dinner in the studio, playing with plaster in the way other babies played with playdough and Alix would feel as if, for a little while, she had both her daughter and her husband in the room with her, together.

  Most days Alix started work half an hour early. She would go straight to the anatomy lab and take out a cadaver, a cold stiff body that had none of the life of her husband’s sculptures. Finding a heart and dissecting it, reciting the names of its components – semi-lunar valve, tricuspid valve, left anterior descending artery – and practising her technique so that cutting a heart out of a body became an almost meditative experience, in the way that Dan had always described his work, was what she wanted. She didn’t want anyone to ever see even a whisper of hesitation when she faced a patient in the operating theatre.

  As she took out her scalpel, it occurred to her that someone once loved this corpse, held its hand, kissed its mouth. She made incisions into the skin and then peeled it away, opening up the chest, finding the smooth bones of the ribs and the blue-grey muscles that sat between. She ran her finger back and forth along the bones as if she were polishing them with sandpaper. Then she took out her bone saw, a harsher, more brutal instrument than anything Dan had used with plaster, and leaned into it so that her weight helped her to apply the necessary force to push the blade through bone.

  When that was done she stepped back and looked into the open space she had created, a space that nobody had seen before, a space absolutely unrevealed to those with whom this cadaver used to be intimate. She had to put down the bone saw and move away. Every time she had cut into a body, all that she had seen was something disembodied from the person it once was. Not a secret opening into the unknown, into the now always unknowable, because blood and oxygen no longer animated what she had exposed. Not like Dan’s work then; the more he exposed the more there was that became knowable.

  Her pager shrieked from her pocket. She picked up the two flaps of skin from the cadaver’s chest and folded them back over his bones as if she was shutting the covers of her diary. Then she ran to the OR.

  Blood. It was all she could see. Not an unusual sight in theatre but this quantity of blood was horrific and uncontrolled, like the scene of a murder. Which it was, in a way.

  ‘You’ve cut right through his heart,’ Alix said to the surgeon, saying aloud what nobody else in theatre had, what everyone was too frightened to say.

  The surgeon was still holding the saw. Helen was standing by the phone and Alix knew it was Helen who had paged her. No one else would have dared to even think that Alix might be able to save the life of a patient who had been butchered by a male surgeon.

  Alix continued. ‘It’s not the recommended way to open up a chest.’

  The surgeon threw the saw aside and swiped at his neck. Blood had hit the ceiling and was now dripping down the back of his gown from above. It was dripping on glasses, on faces, on masks.

  ‘Don’t just fucking stand there,’ he screamed at Alix. ‘Help me get this under control.’

  He began to shout directions at the nurses, shooting off one idea, changing his mind, asking for suction and sponges and tossing them aside when they proved no match for the blood thrown out by the patient’s severed heart.

  Alix said nothing; she kept her face calm, her arms folded across her chest and waited until all eyes in the OR were on her, attracted to her composure, a composure that set her apart from the prima donna antics of her male counterparts.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do. He’ll bleed out within the next minute.’ Alix delivered her verdict, turned and left and could hear in the escalating fucks, the exact moment when everyone else understood she was right.

  The next day she was called to a meeting. The surgeon who had cut his patient’s heart in two had submitted a complaint about her, that she had not stepped in to help when he had asked.

  As the two men in front of her went through the complaint, Alix wondered if they could hear how ridiculous they sounded, that they could possibly believe she was somehow to blame for a man bleeding to death all over the OR because another surgeon had not the skill to temper his strength when wielding a sternal saw.

  But of course she was reprimanded. The other surgeon was not.

  That night, at the hospital, she began the same ritual she had started at home. The ritual with the pills. Tipping them into her hand. Pouring a glass of water. Placing one in her mouth. Rolling it around on her tongue and making a bet with herself that, if her pager didn’t go off within one minute, she would swallow first one pill and then another until they were all gone. Luckily – or not, she could never tell – her pager would always beep before a minute had passed. But then, she couldn’t remember the last time her pager had ever gone for more than a minute without beeping.

  THE CIRCLE OF SOLITUDE

  (Plaster, 150x52cm. An early work that is unusual in the artist’s repertoire for its scale.)

  Soon Camille was seven months old and Dan had been dead for over a year. Alix had a whole day and a night off work, such a rare occurrence because then it meant she had to think of something to fill that whole day and a night with, something that would keep the memories of Dan away.

  She woke before Camille and lay still in her single bed which was large enough only for her and contained no empty space. She listened to the sound of nothing, a sound full of the freedom of leaves and weather. Then it was full of nothing but Camille’s voice, ‘Dadadadadadamabubbadadado.’

  They’re just sounds, the clinic nurse had said. The da sound is easy for babies to say and so they say it first and a lot. It doesn’t mean she’s calling for her Dada.

  Alix rolled over and put on the robe and slippers that he’d bought for her, the robe and slippers that had flowers blooming across them with the effervescence of a Florence Broadhurst print, that he had wanted her to save until such time as she might be at a hospital with a baby, because they were perfect for night-time breastfeeding. Then she walked down the hall, opened the door to her daughter’s room and put her hand on the cot.

  ‘Good morning baby girl,’ Alix whispered as she leaned over and scooped up a warm bundle, pressing her lips to one sleepy cheek. Camille clapped her palms onto Alix’s back and chest and then flopped her head into Alix’s shoulder. ‘Shall we get your milk?’

  Camille curled into Alix’s left arm and sucked on a bottle while Alix used her free hand to make porridge, pour juice, stack the dishwasher with last night’s dishes, boil the kettle and make rice cereal. Then she and Camille sat at the table and Alix spooned cereal into Camille’s mouth and into her own and over the highchair as she told her daughter things like, ‘I’ve got a meeting tomorrow about new forms. I wish somebody would give the department something better to do than redesign perfectly good
forms.’

  To which the response was ‘Mama,’ or ‘Ah-goo,’ or, less frequently, ‘Dada.’

  Alix agreed to a retrospective of Dan’s work in the end. She did it for Dan because she knew he would have liked to have seen so many of his sculptures gathered together, borrowed from buyers and galleries around the country. She did it for herself because she wanted to see his imagination, his mind, retrieved somehow from the grave and brought back to life within the four walls of an exhibition space.

  It was the only time Louisa ever questioned her. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked and Alix nodded, not really listening because she was watching Camille, who was trying to copy Felicity jumping on the trampoline. Camille was three years younger, had only just learned to walk but it seemed to Alix that she was the more skilful.

  Louisa repeated herself. ‘Are you sure? Alix?’

  Alix nodded again but this time she added, ‘I never thought much of the phrase “body of work” but now I do. Each sculpture was part of something but I don’t know what because I only ever looked at them separately. There was all the time in the world to think about bodies of work, later, I thought. Except now there isn’t.’

  Louisa looked at her daughter, who was daring Camille to jump as high as the clouds. She opened her mouth to remind them to be careful but then closed it because, Alix supposed, Louisa knew they needed to find out for themselves that reaching the clouds was bound to involve a grazed knee at the very least. Then Louisa turned back to Alix and said, ‘Sometimes I feel like his body of work is haunting me. Every time I turn around and see Camille’s eyes laughing, there he is.’

  ‘I know.’ Alix held onto Louisa’s hand and they both watched Camille spin around on the trampoline, her smile shining intermittently in their direction, like a star through windswept clouds.

  When Alix left the house to go to the exhibition, her hair had seemed red enough, for once. It was like the colour of the diary she had written in while Dan was in the hospital, a silky, brilliant red, the colour he loved, the colour he told her he wanted to dye plaster so that he could spend every day trying to create an exact replica of her hair, but knowing he could never craft something as beautiful.

  She always laughed when he said this. ‘Why would you keep trying if you knew you weren’t going to succeed?’

  ‘For the joy of making,’ he always said and then one day added, ‘It must be the same for you. You know the transplants won’t always succeed but you do them anyway.’

  ‘But that’s for the joy of saving,’ she replied.

  ‘Joy or power?’ he asked.

  She thought about it before saying, ‘The joy of power.’

  He nodded as though he understood and she thought that in a way he did because he exuded a kind of power through his sculptures. They made people stop and look; they drew people in, made them want to own the beauty. But no one understood that the beauty could be owned by none other than the piece of art.

  As she walked from her car to the gallery she felt her feet running just a little, her smile lift in time with her feet, the way it always did when she was going to meet Dan. And she had to stop then, to lean on the balustrade of the bridge because the realisation winded her: she’d thought she was going to meet him. Because she remembered thinking, in the hospital by his bed, that he emanated from his hands. Everything in the room that she was about to see also emanated from those hands. So he would be there, in the room, in his sculptures. She had found a way to bring him back. Except now, looking down into the curdled waters of the harbour, she knew she hadn’t.

  But she did her best. She looked at every piece. Some she could barely remember. Some had been cast before she knew him. Those ones most interested her because she felt that by looking at them, she had discovered a way to bypass the grave, to find out new things about him, to see into his past.

  There was one in particular that made her stop. It called to mind another of Rilke’s phrases, about the circle of solitude in which a work of art exists. It was a figure of a sleeping man, which was in itself unusual as Dan had preferred to cast sculptures of women. It was not just the fact that the man was sleeping that made her feel as if she had stepped into a private moment; it was the attitude of the head. The way it curved down so that the cheek caressed the shoulder with the lips resting, slightly open, just below the clavicle, as if engaged in an act of sensual discovery of one’s own skin.

  A male voice jolted her back into the exhibition space, and it was then that she realised the sculptures gained nothing from being collected together because they already contained, within themselves, everything that they had to say about her husband’s mind. The sleeping statue held a part of her husband that she never knew: Dan before he was made, the Dan who created the works that made him a Sculptor with a capital ‘s’, the person he’d been before the night she first met him. And so she just stared at the man who had spoken to her, for a time that was much too long.

  The man let the silence continue.

  Louisa must have sensed her struggle from across the room because she came to Alix’s rescue, pointing to the man and saying, ‘Alix, this is Jack Darcy. He’s a painter. He owns this piece.’

  The man spoke. ‘I think it owns itself. I’m just lucky enough to have it sitting in my studio.’

  Alix knew her face was almost shouting her distrust that this stranger could put her secret thoughts into words. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Whenever anyone looks at a sculpture, or a painting, they try to recast it to make sense of it, to make it say what they want it to say. But it’s never recast. It stays just how it is, how its maker intended it to be. So it owns itself, regardless of what I do with it.’

  Alix turned away from Jack and her eyes searched the room, seeing all the pieces she wanted to take back to Dan’s now empty studio, each of them like a bead threaded with the beauty of her husband’s mind.

  The image that most haunted her the next day when she woke on a mattress on the floor of Dan’s sculpture-less studio was the memory of the painter’s hands pressed to his glass.

  Jack’s fingernails were not manicured and buffed like the silk of his tie; they were chipped and stained with paint. Artist’s fingers, stroking the wine glass just as a brush stroked canvas. Dan’s fingernails were always chipped and filled with plaster and he held glasses as if shaping them.

  She could barely remember if the painter’s eyes were grey or blue, if his hair was light brown or dark, if his skin was tanned or pale. But she could recall the patterns made by the lines on his hands, the size of his fingers and the scar that sat below the second knuckle on his middle right finger.

  THE VEINS OF HER WRIST

  (Oil on canvas, 20x30cm. The first work in the artist’s Shades That Cannot be Replicated series.)

  Alix’s phone rang early in the morning. She wondered if it was someone from the gallery calling to talk to her about Dan’s exhibition, which she imagined would be judged a success just on sheer strength of numbers in attendance. Perhaps they wanted to extend the run for longer than a month but she wanted the sculptures back, the ones that she was lucky enough to ordinarily have sitting on shelves in his studio. She answered the phone with the word no fixed firmly in her mind.

  ‘Have dinner with me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like to take you to dinner tonight.’

  The sound of Jack’s words from the night before was still caught in her mind like a subject in a painting. She said yes to him because she could not say no to someone who had also been trying to hold onto the same ideas as her.

  Dinner was a disaster. Her hair was not at all red, it was limp and flat and most decidedly orange so the only thing she could wear was black. She felt, as she stepped out the door, as though she were in mourning because even the tiny bows at the end of the cap sleeves of her blouse seemed too stiffly tied to be in any way appropriate for something as frivolous as going out to dinner.

  Alix had almost lied to Louisa when she had called
to ask her to babysit Camille. ‘I have to go out,’ she had said in her hospital voice as if there was some matter of great clinical urgency, a question of life or death to which she was the only solution. And of course Louisa didn’t ask anything further, because Louisa would not do that.

  But when Alix dropped Camille at Louisa’s and Camille had run straight out to the trampoline, calling, ‘Fliss!’ in almost unintelligible baby vowels, Alix felt that the least she could offer to someone who had given Camille a good part of her life and her home, was an explanation.

  ‘I’m going out to dinner,’ she said.

  Louisa finished moulding the last hamburger patty for the girls’ dinner. ‘With Jack Darcy?’

  Alix’s voice was reduced to a stutter; she sounded like a child, like Camille; or perhaps she sounded ashamed, embarrassed. She stopped speaking.

  ‘He asked me for your number after you left last night,’ Louisa continued, as if it happened every day, men asking her for her dead brother’s wife’s telephone number.

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t go.’ Alix wanted, for almost the first time in her life, someone to tell her what to do, to decide for her, to talk her out or in, she didn’t know what.

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  Alix tried to read disapproval into the way Louisa put patties in the frypan and flipped them from one side to the other but she could see nothing other than someone cooking her daughter’s dinner. So then she tried to clarify what was going on. ‘It was just the things he said, about the sculpture.’

  ‘So now you’re going to dinner with him to talk about sculpture.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Louisa smiled.

  The restaurant was new, or Alix thought of it as new anyway; it had opened after Dan died and of course she hadn’t been anywhere since then. It was on the harbour and the view should have been spectacular but she couldn’t concentrate on the white sailboat that floated by or the broken reflections of light in the water or the lone albatross with the plaster-white wings that seemed to glow as if lit from within. Because how did she talk to a man over dinner at a restaurant when the only man she’d talked to in such a situation for the last few years was her husband? Back then she never had to think about what to say because there was no thinking involved; he was Dan and she was Alix and they spoke about everything.