‘The police made an open finding. No blame was ever attributed to anyone.’
‘But that’s so ambiguous. Did you try to find out more?’
‘No. Because sometimes answers don’t help, love.’
I snap off a retort before it can come flying out of my mouth because Louisa does not deserve my wrath which is, in any case, not really directed at her. We both say I love you and I leave. But I am left walking through the noisy half-dark of the hospital ward with a thought that is as relentless as Addie’s disease. What happens if the version I had depended upon, the version Louisa gave me – There was an accident, she was taken away – is nothing but a story? What if Alix left me, which is something entirely different.
I don’t go straight home. Instead I ring Sarah and organise to meet her at the gallery. We have paintings to hang, sculptures to place and for a solid couple of hours we direct her staff as to where everything should be positioned. The plaques with my notes are arranged and I have a copy of the catalogue in my hand.
Then Sarah opens a bottle of wine, pours two glasses and we collapse into chairs and chink glasses.
‘To you, Camille,’ she says. ‘It’s perfect.’
‘So tell me something fun about your life,’ I say as I lean back into the chair and sip my wine. ‘Let me experience something amusing, even if it’s only vicariously.’
‘I’m sleeping with Ian,’ she says. ‘One of the guys who was just here helping us.’
‘I thought you gave up sleeping with your employees.’
‘He’s a contractor so he doesn’t count.’
I study her face and then say, ‘There’s more, I can tell. What else are you up to?’
‘I’m sleeping with someone else too. An up-and-coming visual artist who spends more time waiting for inspiration than doing any work.’
‘Well, maybe you’re distracting him.’
‘Oh no, I’m his muse, he says. Supposedly I help him “create”. But I can’t think of one single thing he’s done that seems to be in any way inspired by me. I think he just likes the idea of having a muse. Makes him a real artist.’
I laugh. ‘He must love the idea of this exhibition then.’
‘He does. In fact I’m sure that’s what gave him the idea that he needed a muse. He’s not clever enough to think of it himself.’
‘You’re terrible!’ We both giggle as if we are back at uni and boys are the only thing that matters. Then I say, ‘What’s it like to sleep with two men?’
Sarah thinks for a minute. ‘Messy. Sometimes I forget which one I’m with.’
‘Do you think they notice?’
‘Yes. You always know when the person you’re with longs for someone else.’
‘I went for a run with a guy from work the other night.’
‘Camille! I’m shocked. That’s not like you.’ Then she loses the fake censoriousness and asks, ‘Surgeon?’
‘No. Neuro.’
‘Cute?’
‘Very.’
Then Sarah puts down her glass, shrugs and says, ‘Maybe for once you should do something that makes you happy.’
I finish my wine and say, ‘But will going for runs with cute neuros make me happy?’
‘It probably won’t make you unhappy.’
‘I would so gladly trade every bit of my own happiness for one fucking liver.’
‘Stop thinking of things in absolutes, Camille. Making yourself unhappy will not get you a liver. So, while everything else turns to shit, do what you can to make one part of your life a little bit better.’
When I arrive home, Rosie has already been put to bed by Julie. I lie down on my bed, too tired to go to sleep. I try push everything that I have been thinking, about Alix and Paul and Addie and Nick and Jack, to a space in my mind labelled Things to deal with later, a place that seems so full it is likely to spew forth my every procrastination should even one more thing be put off until that long away moment called Later.
When Paul arrives home from work he does not expect me to be at home; I can tell by the clattering in the kitchen as he makes a coffee and brings it up to our room. He turns on the light, sees me on the bed, jumps and spills coffee on the floor.
‘Shit Camille, what’re you doing here?’
‘Lying down.’
He chooses not to respond to the sarcasm so I prop myself up on one elbow and that is when I say to him, ‘I meant what I said.’
‘You say lots of things, what are you referring to now?’ He moves into the dressing room to change into his pyjamas. I wait until he emerges because I do not want to have this conversation through a wall.
‘About getting divorced. Once Addie has her liver.’
‘I’ve already spoken to a lawyer.’
No. I stop the word before it escapes.
Paul moves into the bathroom to pee, not bothering to close the door.
It strikes me then that marriage is the most unceremonious of things, providing an excuse to fart and pee and pick the spots on your face in front of another person in a way that you never would in front of anyone else. And these are the things about Paul that I see most of all because we are both usually home together first thing in the morning and last thing at night when the bathroom and thus bodily functions are most in use. It is the other parts of his life that I do not see, just as he does not see the other parts of mine. Surely that means everything is around the wrong way. Wouldn’t it be better to see Paul dressed in his suit and conducting an interview where he charms and breaks down his subject, rather than standing in front of the toilet, legs spread, pointing his dick into the bowl and letting out a noisy stream of malodorous urine?
And so perhaps it doesn’t matter that he has called my bluff. Because it is hard to imagine missing the things I see most of him, hard to see that divorce should bring sorrow. Not for me. But what about Addie and Rosie? What about the child in my womb who is not to blame for any of this?
‘So you have time to talk to lawyers but not to come to the hospital.’
‘I didn’t want to be accused of holding things up.’
‘What about the baby?’ I can’t help but ask it and I despise myself for the way I sound. So needy, as if I cannot work things out myself.
The toilet flushes. The tap turns on. Then off. The sound of hands wiped on a towel. Paul stands in the doorway.
‘If I don’t give my liver to Addie because of the baby then what do we do about Addie?’
‘We wait.’
‘You’re not even sorry,’ I say.
‘I never thought it was a great idea for you to give up part of your liver anyway.’
I shake my head at him. ‘I meant about divorcing.’
‘Look at you, lying there trying to pick a fight. You don’t seem too cut up about it either. You can’t blame me for everything.’
‘Takes two to tango, right? So it must be as much my fault as yours?’
Paul gets into the bed because it is not in his nature to make dramatic gestures and storm out with a pillow to sleep on the couch. I have to stop a smile at the thought of two people arguing about divorce sleeping comfortably together in the same bed. He rolls onto his side, snaps off the light and says, into the dark, ‘Maybe it’s no one’s fault. Maybe it’s just what happens when no one cares enough to stop it from happening.’
It takes all my willpower not to be the one to leave the room with a pillow after that comment. Because, all I can think is that it can’t be true. We care enough about Addie and yet we can’t stop anything happening to her. I must fall asleep because I wake myself when I roll over to face the centre of the bed. Paul is facing the same way and I can see his open eyes shine in the dark.
He does not say anything, just reaches across with his hand, threads it through my hair and pulls me towards him, kissing me, opening my mouth to his with his tongue, and then taking his hand out of my hair and parting my legs beneath my nightie, stroking back and forth with first his fingers and then the palm of his hand. His mouth mo
ves away from mine and kisses the skin of my chest, licking in soft wet circles the skin just outside my nipple until I push my breast closer to him and he takes the whole nipple into his mouth, pulling hard. I begin to come but that is not enough for him; he moves his mouth down my body, catching my clitoris with his lips and I can do nothing but press against him, coming again and again into his mouth, crying out too loudly at the bittersweet, beautiful agony of it all.
I wake up moaning softly, my clitoris throbbing from the remains of my dream. I turn and make sure Paul is asleep and has heard nothing before I slide my hand between my legs and rub myself, trying to replay the dream. But it is not enough and it does not work and I am left with nothing but ache and want and emptiness.
NOTES ON AN EXHIBITION
THE WALTZ
(Oil on canvas, 152x111.5cm. The most well-known of the artist’s works.)
Alix didn’t see Jack for two days because she worked thirty-six hours straight, living on whatever she could get from a vending machine.
When he saw her next he said, ‘You’re superhuman.’
‘I have to be.’
‘Not all the time.’
They were at his house because she was too tired to go out and he’d tucked her in bed and brought her dinner on a tray so that she could eat real food and then go straight to sleep.
She took a bite of salad and said, ‘I do. I can’t cry along with a family when their child dies, I can’t faint when I’m covered in someone else’s blood, I can’t flinch when I examine a hideously obese man. I have to be completely self-possessed otherwise no one gets fixed. My patients want me to be calm because it makes them feel hopeful. They want me to be infallible because otherwise the risks of handing their hearts over to me are too great.’
Jack leaned back against the pillows, arms behind his head, studying her face. ‘But sometimes it must bother you.’
‘When you begin studying medicine you learn that it’s best not to think. If even one of the other students starts to talk about how they feel, then it shatters the illusion that we don’t feel. Everything falls apart.’
‘It’s like a collective art project,’ said Jack. ‘You all have the sense that you matter because of what you do so you don’t want anything or anyone to make you stop believing that.’
Alix laughed. ‘I like that. A collective art project.’
Jack didn’t laugh. Instead he said, ‘Doesn’t it just burn you all out in the end?’
And Alix replied, ‘More members of the medical profession kill themselves than any other.’
‘The exhibition’s going to be on February 14.’
They were drinking champagne at a bar because Alix had been awarded a major research grant to lead a team investigating ways to improve the preservation of hearts in transit.
As she and Jack toasted her success, she recalled the look on the faces of her male colleagues when the announcement was made. She would have liked to have thought it was a case of stereotypical male resentment at a female getting ahead but she supposed the look on her face would have been the same if one of them had been awarded the grant instead of her. But that was not something she mentioned to Jack because she was stuck on the date he had just mentioned. February 14.
‘I’m busy,’ she muttered.
He laughed. ‘Yeah, yeah. We’ll change the date just for you.’
He thought she was joking. Of course he did, because what else would she be doing on the opening night of his first exhibition of new work for eighteen months? There was enough time to organise to be rostered off at work, to book a babysitter.
But it wasn’t work, it wasn’t Camille. It was Dan. Dan would have been dead two years on February 14.
The only benefit that Alix could see in the exhibition was that Jack seemed to have forgotten about meeting Camille because he hadn’t mentioned it again. He was too busy painting – what he was painting she didn’t know, because he hadn’t shown her and she hadn’t asked to see. Except for a couple of line drawings of a woman that looked like her but didn’t.
‘Working drawings,’ Jack had said as he laid them in front of her one night.
The pictures in front of her reminded her of Dan’s sculpture of the woman with the hole in her chest and the heart in her hand. The woman in Jack’s drawings seemed to have something heart-like in her hand also. As Alix looked closer, she could not be sure if the woman was offering her heart or throwing it away. Everything about Alix’s own history suggested it could be either. But perhaps the woman in the picture wasn’t her after all.
Luckily her pager beeped before she had time to comment and she thanked God for heart transplants as she got into her car and drove away. Jack didn’t show her anything that he was working on for the exhibition again.
February 14 appeared on her calendar much more quickly than it should have until she found herself with only half an hour to shower and dress and feed Camille.
‘Just three more bites, darling. Look, I’ll have one, then you have one, then I’ll have one and we’ll be finished in no time.’
Camille shook her head. ‘No like it.’
‘But it’s yummy. Sultana chicken. You love sultanas.’ Not tonight, apparently. And pretending that Moroccan chicken was called sultana chicken was not working either. ‘Okay. Let’s put it in the bin.’
Camille grinned. She’d won the nightly dinner battle. Alix ran the bath and jumped in with Camille to save time. She’d have to wear her hair up; there was no time to wash it. But Camille had other ideas. She began to splash. Water sprayed over Alix’s hair, drenching one side.
‘No!’ Alix shouted, grabbing Camille’s hand.
As soon as she let go, Camille grinned at her and splashed again.
‘I said no.’
Alix held her daughter’s wrist tighter this time and Camille wriggled, trying to pull away, hurting her wrist beneath the pressure of Alix’s hand. The howling, echoing so loudly in the tiled bathroom, commenced. What Alix wanted to do was this: leave Camille in the bath, get up, take a towel and dry herself. Throw on an old dress and walk out of the house, away, anywhere, to a place where there were no food battles, no splashes, no tantrums, no tears. Where she herself was barely there, her body a kind of mist, her mind as insubstantial as breath.
What she actually did was this: she picked up her daughter and turned her around so that Camille’s back was pressed against Alix’s front. She folded her arms around Camille and held her there, in the bath, water dripping from her hair into Camille’s tears, washing them away as if that was enough. Enough to cleanse them both, to scour away Dan and the fact that he was not really dead; no, he was there in the house, in the bath, arms around them both, for a moment as long as the flicker of her pulse, and then he was gone again, rising with the steam of the bath into the ceiling, condensing there, and evaporating.
Jack was early to Alix’s house by at least ten minutes, something he explained with a smile more constricted than usual as, ‘Opening night nerves.’
He began to walk into the house before Alix could stop him and he saw Camille, in her nightie, sitting on the couch, Possum Magic open in her lap.
He walked over to her and held out his hand. ‘Hi Camille, I’m Jack.’
Camille backed off into the cushions of the sofa, a reaction she had to all strangers but most particularly men. Jack sat down beside her and pointed to the book. ‘Can I finish reading that to you while your mum gets ready?’ He’d obviously noticed Alix’s shoeless state, the lack of lipstick.
Alix shook her head but there was no need to intervene; Camille shook her head also, said, ‘Mummy,’ hopped off the sofa and ran towards Alix.
‘I’ll put Camille to bed and be down as soon as I can. You can go on ahead if you like; I’ll meet you there.’
Jack shook his head. ‘They won’t start my exhibition without me.’
Alix walked over to the sofa to collect the book. Jack reached out a hand to touch her as she passed and she instinctively pulled aw
ay, knocking her shin on the coffee table but not stopping to bend down and rub the bruised skin. She picked up Camille and carried her upstairs, finishing the story about an invisible possum that eats lamingtons and becomes visible, and Alix wondered why life was not truly that simple. As she tucked Camille into bed, kissing her on the cheek and then again just above her ear in the space between her father’s eyes and her mother’s hair, Alix wondered if perhaps it was but she just didn’t see it.
The exhibition was called Body of Work. Alix thought what a mundane title it was as they stepped into the gallery, which was an aluminium space of light and air in an old warehouse that had been remodelled into something new.
Jack was whisked away from her by the curator, by his agent, by everyone who stood to make their money out of him that night. Alix wanted to step back through the doors, withdraw before she could see but there were too many people behind her and so all she could do was press forward with the crowd into the gallery which had been set up for this exhibition to resemble a maze.
There were no linear walls hung with paintings in a neat row; instead there were many short walls, each leading around a corner and on to another wall, each hung with a painting.
All of the paintings were of Alix.
And then there was the one in the middle of the labyrinth.
It was a painting of her dancing in the blue dress he’d bought for her a couple of months ago. She looked happy; there was a smile on her face that touched her eyes. What she was smiling at could not be determined because the painting did not show what she was looking at. She was dancing with a man in a suit. Jack had painted the features of her face so precisely that the fact she was not just happy, but elated, could clearly be seen. But the man’s face was a blur. It was impossible to tell who he was. On first glance his eyes were coloured like Dan’s, the blue of a stormy sky that you could not quite see through, but on second glance the eyes were every colour and no colour all at once. He was no man and yet he was someone she knew because the way they were dancing suggested a kind of intimacy. But then there was the matter of the smile; it was a smile she would only give to someone she loved and she was not giving it to the man she was dancing with.
If I Should Lose You Page 16