He was wearing a pair of pinstriped pyjama pants and Alix wished she was asleep against his chest just as Camille was against hers. He said nothing and turned around, leaving the door open, which Alix took to be an invitation in the absence of any conversation. She placed Camille on the sofa, covered her with a blanket and looked at Jack.
He was standing between her and the front door. He was neither in the room nor out of it and Alix didn’t know how to begin to have a conversation with someone who was there but not.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and did not say for what, in particular, but added, ‘I’m sorry for everything except having met you.’
‘And that’s the one thing I’m sorry for,’ he said and she wondered what the point was in continuing but as Camille rolled to her side Alix was reminded too clearly that the only thing she now had left to lose was her daughter and that would not be an outcome of this conversation, whatever happened. So she continued.
‘I was going to say that I wished I hadn’t done what I did but I’m glad I did. If I hadn’t, we’d have broken up anyway because I would have found another way to make us stop. Stopping was the easy thing to do. I thought I was still going on with life, being strong, that I hadn’t stopped because I looked after Camille and went to work. But it wasn’t me doing those things. It was what I had left of myself. It was just a layer of skin over bones, organs functioning, heart still beating, but hollow. And that’s what I wanted to be like. So how dare you try to fill my heart with feelings? But now I think: how dare I refuse to be filled.’
He shook his head and she thought that was it; she had lost him. But he walked towards her and shrouded her in his arms. She laid her head on his chest and listened and knew she did not need her stethoscope to interpret the sounds that she heard, the auscultation, because she understood it at last.
The months that followed were romantic, sentimental, passionate; a fabrication, a falsehood. Because romance belonged to imagination, to art, to a week in a life. Not to the sustained longevity of the everyday. Not for Alix anyway.
They were always together, Alix and Jack and Camille, burying their feet in the sand at Bondi, putting a star on the top of a Christmas tree, jumping on the trampoline at Louisa’s while she made them dinner. The kinds of things you might see in a painting, lovely to behold until you realised that the people caught there would have only those moments because they were stuck forever in oil on canvas.
CAMILLE
NINETEEN
Addie is now considered to be in a critical condition, much to Paul’s pleasure. To him, this means things are happening at last. He does not understand how waiting lists work, that Addie isn’t first in line, that another child is at the top of the mountain and Addie is still to face the climb.
She is now awaiting resurrection, a kiss from a storybook prince or a bolt of electricity passing through God’s hand, miracles, which of course I don’t believe in. I believe in the drowned child in PICU with a liver to donate.
This child is just a few beds down from Addie and I think, if only my hands could scoop that liver out of her and stuff it inside Addie before anyone noticed then that would solve everything.
I walk down to her bed and pretend to be stretching my legs as I look. She is only a little bigger than Addie. Her hair is blonde and she looks like the type of child people would notice, would stop to tell her mother how beautiful she is and her mother would be so gratified, more so than if she herself were told she was beautiful; she would reach out a hand to her daughter, to brush the hair out of her eyes and say, ‘Thank you.’ I know because that is what I do.
As I watch the girl I see her through her mother’s eyes, in a way I have never seen a donor before. Her cheeks are blushed with life, her chest rises and falls, her skin is warm and soft. I remember my high-school Shakespeare, the unveiling of Hermione’s effigy in A Winter’s Tale and the lines Paulina utters: prepare/To see the life as lively mock’d as ever. And Leontes’ reply, Would not you deem it breathed? and that those veins/Did verily bear blood?
Brain death. What a mockery it is, what a mockery of life. How can anyone believe in it? How can anyone believe that that the living person before them is really dead?
I walk back to Addie’s bed and everything seems to be around the wrong way. She is the live one yet she does not look it. The girl down the hall is pinker and more peaceful and it is easy to imagine that she is simply asleep. Addie is as thin as my finger bones, her skin so white it appears that her veins no longer bear blood and in sedation she is not reposeful; she is annihilated, everything has been knocked out of her, including, it seems, life.
Not five minutes have passed before I walk back to the other girl’s bed. The curtains have been pulled right back and I do not know how long I stand there but I suddenly realise that the father and mother are staring at me as if I am appalling. And I am. Because I am coveting their dead daughter.
I turn and run. Run hard. Run fast. Run away from the person I have become. Leave that person standing beside a hospital bed. That person who thought she could fly up close to the gods and play games with another child’s life. Play games with her daughter’s life.
I get in the car and drive to Jack Darcy’s house. It is still the same terrace in Paddington that my mother visited so many years ago. It’s distinctly grand now, renovated, classic, all shabbiness polished away.
I knock on the door and hope to God that he doesn’t have a wife at home to answer the door.
‘Come in,’ he says when he sees me, as if it were an ordinary event, the daughter of his long dead lover appearing on his doorstep without warning.
I blurt everything out as we walk down the hall, before we even sit down because I feel as if I don’t say it then I may lose my courage. ‘I’m the same as her. As Alix. I saw it in the painting last night.’
Jack shakes his head. ‘You’re like the Corinthian maid.’
‘What?’
‘The Corinthian maid who traced the shadow of her departing lover on the wall so she had an image to remember him by.’
I shake my head; I do not understand the riddle, how it relates to girls with livers and girls without, what it has to do with me and with my mother.
‘The shadow body of her lover is a thing outside him. My painting of Alix isn’t Alix; it’s something outside her too.’
‘You’re telling me not to read anything into it.’
‘The painting will only tell you what you already know. I don’t know you well, Camille, but it doesn’t strike me that you’ve ever thought you were like Alix.’
And then I say it. ‘She killed herself, didn’t she?’
Jack sighs. ‘She wasn’t driving a car. She was on foot. There was a footpath beside the road. But she wasn’t on it.’
‘Of course she wasn’t!’ I’m shouting now, not at Jack, at myself. ‘Why did everyone love – no, fucking adore – someone so selfish?’
‘Did you finish reading her diary?’
‘What?’
‘After she left my house she went to Dan’s studio. Louisa only found out later that Alix’d been home because of the diary she’d left open on the desk. It had the date. And the time.’
‘I didn’t read the last few pages. I had enough stuff for the catalogue and then Addie got sicker and...’
‘And you didn’t want to know. Nor did I, for a long time. But if you read it then you won’t waste time wondering about it, inventing what she might have said, making it into the worst possible thing. You’ll just know, and then you can live with it.’
I speed back to the hospital. On the way, my phone beeps. A text. Addie. Something’s happened.
I don’t even pull over, I just yank the phone out of my bag and open the message. But it’s not about Addie. It’s another secret that I shouldn’t know.
The urgent listing’s been removed. But I didn’t tell you that.
‘Oh,’ I whisper. There are only two reasons why the urgent listing would have been removed. The chi
ld received a new liver. Or the child died waiting.
The liver is Addie’s.
I press down harder on the accelerator. Drive onto the wrong side of the road to overtake cars. Just two minutes from the hospital, the road is being repaired. The cars are trapped, going nowhere.
I pull over onto the footpath. Pedestrians shout at me, ‘What the fuck?’
As I rush into ICU, the drowned girl’s body is being wheeled away.
I run forward, towards her bed, and her family stare at me again with slapped-face shock. I spin around and scream at Felicity, ‘What happened?’
‘It’s not Addie.’
‘I know it’s not Addie. But she’s taking Addie with her.’ I am so loud, everyone has come out to see the woman standing in the centre of intensive care, reaching out to a trolley carrying a dead girl who is not her own.
Then Liz whispers in my ear, ‘They’re not going to donate.’
I shout at the girl’s mother, ‘Why not?’ but she does not look at me; she looks down at the cloth covering the body of her daughter, that is all she has eyes for, that is all she sees.
Felicity pulls me away and wraps her arms around me, saying my name, ‘Camille,’ over and over just as Paul walks in and hears my howl, which is a sound that every parent in ICU turns away from, because it is a sound that they all want to make as they watch their children die.
TWENTY
Hours pass. Addie’s monitors shriek. Her body starts to fail. By the end of the day she is an urgent listing. I have got what I wanted without having to do anything.
As I sit beside Addie’s bed I read Alix’s diary. These are her last words.
Jack was so matter-of-fact about it, like Dan was; and his words were almost the same. I’ve got cancer. I did not need to hear any more, the prognosis, the number of months, the treatment plan because none of those things are about the real thing which is death. I cannot fix death; I tried, but Dan never came back.
And yet, in the space of that one word, cancer, Dan has come back.
Tell me Dan: if you are your body and your body is gone then aren’t you gone too? You don’t feel gone. I thought you had but here you are. My open eyes cannot see you but when I shut them, there you are behind my closed lids.
You are in the studio, looking up and smiling when I open the door. You are wearing your work jeans, the ones with rips and holes and plaster crusts, the ones that you shake the dust out of, watching it fall through the air, tiny refracting motes.
You are here in that sculpture and in that one. They were all sculptures of me but now they are not. They are about you. When I look at them, I can see the way you carved my eye socket as you gave that sculpture the ability to look out and into the eyes of its viewer. As you let that sculpture tease the viewer into thinking it was a woman’s face they beheld, when in fact it was you they were seeing all along. You are everywhere and yet you are nowhere.
But what if you were somewhere and I could go to that somewhere too? Did you put that thought into my head or did I? Perhaps you are one of Rilke’s terrifying angels because now you tempt me into thinking that there is a way – a way to see nothing but you.
I drop the red and gold book, drop my mother’s words, her selfish, stupid, stubborn words, into a bin.
As I stand, staring down at the diary which is nestled amongst latex gloves and syringe wrappers I remember other words that described my mother. Her obituary, a piece of newspaper that I kept throughout childhood and into adulthood. The words on that piece of paper said that my mother was a renowned surgeon, the first female heart transplant surgeon in NSW, a trailblazer. That she saved the lives of many terminally ill patients in her short but illustrious career.
But how many lives didn’t she save? I wonder. How many did she squander? At least one.
There was always, before, a possibility, even a likelihood, that it had been an accident. But there was also something unsaid and this unsaid thing has lived in my body since I was two years old, not growing, not festering, just present, like a heart, an essential part of me; without it, I would not be who I am.
She stepped off the kerb and into the path of the car because she wanted to. She didn’t stumble or trip or forget to look both ways before she crossed the road. It was not an accident. There was Jack. There was his cancer. And there was my mother with one dead husband, one dying lover – or so she thought – and a knowledge better than most of how to die.
As it hit her, did she think? Or was there only the skin beginning to break, to bruise, to split open, her skeleton cracking into pieces, no longer a body but a series of broken white bones, just like Dan’s sculptures. A tibia on the road, a femur on the path and a scapula stuck in the front grille of the car, a heart pushed into her back, ripped from its berth, smashing against the cliffs of her ribcage, battered with lost blood.
I remember what Jack had said to me, just half an hour ago. You’ll just know, and then you can live with it. And he’s right.
I pull the diary out of the bin, read over the last, the very last, of my mother’s words. I think how funny it is that, until now, I had believed Rilke’s words – every angel is terrifying – because all the many unknown things about Alix had frightened me so. Now as I sit by Addie’s bed all I can see is the waste – that Alix could be so careless as to never consider what it might be like at some moment in the future to hold her granddaughter’s hand.
TWENTY-ONE
Everyone knows that a three year old is too young to die. But only the good die young. What kind of person would invent such a truism? Not a mother.
Was Addie good? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Every time we went for a walk she would pick flowers from the neighbours’ yards and when we returned home, she would hand them to me and say, ‘I love you Mummy.’ She always held her sister’s hand, without needing to be asked, when we crossed a road or walked through a car park.
But take, for instance, a time when she was eighteen months old. Rosie had just been born and I was trying to resettle her, to get her to sleep. Addie stood in the middle of her sister’s room, screaming.
Her mouth was stretched open so the skin on her lips looked as though it might split. It reminded me of one of my father’s sculptures, the one he used to call the lady trap because he and my mother had met in discussion over it. Alix had thought the mouth in the sculpture was saying something that no one wanted to hear. But Addie couldn’t speak well enough to say all the things she wanted to say, the things that no one wanted to hear such as, I hate my new sister, I want my mummy back, I hate that Mummy picks Rosie up more than me, I want my sister to go away, I hate, I want, I hate, I want ... So she was using the only sound she knew that declared what she felt.
And now Addie is frozen like that, mouth open in a mute wail, like the figure in Edvard Munch’s painting.
I want to freeze myself in the same way, to tip back my head and unseal my mouth. To undo my voice and cast my scream out, out beyond me and into the ears of everyone, so it reaches up to the roof, inflates the sky, and fills my daughter’s empty body with its reverberation, its echo, and that the power of this scream would be enough to bring her back from the silent screamless place to which I have lost her.
Felicity finds me sitting beside Addie’s bed, making records of a death that has not yet occurred, but which I can feel close by, in the room. I show her what I have been writing and say, ‘If I don’t do it now, I’m worried that I won’t be able to when the time comes.’
But she doesn’t tell me off or accuse me of being morbid. She says, ‘When we were growing up, even though you were younger, I always wanted to be like you.’
I laugh. ‘Bet you don’t now. See, I can still joke. I’m coping.’
Felicity smiles at me. ‘And that’s why I wanted to be like you. Because you coped with everything. There was nothing you couldn’t handle. Even when you were little you were completely self-assured. One day, when I was grumpy because it was raining, you said to me that all I needed to do wa
s ask you to fix it because you knew how to talk to the clouds and you could tell them to go away. I believed you and you went outside, stood in the rain and shouted at the sky and within a minute, the sun started to shine and a rainbow appeared. You had the biggest smile on your face when you came back in and I thought you were supernatural.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t remember that.’
Felicity touches my hand. ‘You don’t always have to be the one who makes the rainbows appear. Let Paul try sometimes.’
I am about to say, I do let him but he won’t. I don’t say it though because I know that somewhere along the way I decided that I was the only one who could make the rainbows shine for my children. So then he stopped trying to make them shine for anyone, including himself.
TWENTY-TWO
I leave the hospital for half an hour to go home and get supplies. A change of clothes. Clean underwear. A real coffee. But instead of gathering those things together, I walk into my father’s studio and stare at the moon.
I am thinking of the new baby inside me, just as my father thought about his wished-for baby. The baby he named Camille, back when I was just a dream. My very dearest down on both knees before your beautiful body which I embrace. Rodin’s words to that other Camille. Words between lovers; they could also be words from a mother to her child.
I put Alix’s diary away in the drawer of Dan’s desk but, as I do, a folded corner of paper juts out. I am about to push the paper back into the book until I notice that it has been tucked away beneath the back cover. I pull it out and read it. It is a poem. Rilke. His ‘Slumber Song’. Copied out in Alix’s hand.
Then I see a movement outside, on the driveway. It is Paul. He is pushing something and then he sits down on it. It is the tricycle he was making for Addie, finished now, with smooth, varnished wood, a silver bell and a rainbow of streamers flickering from the handlebars.
If I Should Lose You Page 19