He folds his legs up so his knees almost touch his chin and he puts his feet on the pedals. He bends his arms, holds the handlebars and begins to cycle so the bike moves, awkwardly, hesitating; his legs are too long to relax into any kind of smooth rhythm.
I watch him ride, up and down, clownish really, ungraceful, but that is not what I see. I see love that I have overlooked, love that I have forgotten. Love for our daughter that he has kept too well disguised out of a fear of losing her. We have lost so much and there is so little left, which is why I go downstairs, step outside and watch him.
He cycles up to me and stops. ‘It’s finished.’
‘It is.’
The moon is adrift in cloud now; I cannot see Paul’s face and he cannot see mine. So I say to him, ‘The girl who died in PICU, the one I was crying about; I wanted her liver. I wanted to do something to Addie that would make her nearly die so she would get the liver, so another child who was sicker than Addie wouldn’t. I didn’t care about that other child. And I was going to do something to Addie.’
It is so dark outside it is as though my eyes are shut and I am looking at not just the inside of my lids, but the inside of myself.
Paul’s reply is seemingly unlinked to anything I have just said but when I listen to him I hear that it is his inside space. ‘I made you stay in the room with Addie because I couldn’t. I cried the whole time I was there, except when someone else was in the room and then I tried to make them angry so they would go. If I went to work then I didn’t feel as though I was nothing but a coward.’
Of course it would have been so much better to have said these things to each other before. But perhaps we wouldn’t have heard them the way we are hearing them now. Not just the words, but what sits underneath, the blood flowing below the skins of our sentences.
He continues. ‘It’ll be nice to have another baby. I want to have another baby, Camille. And I want to be here for the baby.’
I step towards him. My head tucks into his shoulder and one of his hands intertwines itself in my hair, the way it has always done since we first met. So much has passed between us since then. Since we fell in love at a party long ago.
As I think of that Paul and that Camille, I remember how fearless we were. Unafraid to speak to one another. Unafraid to be in love. Unafraid of loss, because we did not know what loss was. I don’t know when the fear began. Of becoming estranged. Of losing Addie. Of never being worthy of art in the same way Alix was – adored, captured, transformed. She was like the Lady of Shalott, seeing the world after my father died through the mirror of grief and then dying at last when she looked upon reality – that death could not be undone by her; she was not heroic, but ordinary. You lose so much when you desire the romance over the real.
I look down, over Paul’s shoulder, at the trike he has made for Addie and I know that I no longer want to be the one without fear. The one caught in plaster. The one smashed to pieces on the front grille of a stranger’s car. I know that in losing Addie I might do what my mother did because it would be the only way to stop missing my daughter.
But I will not. Because there is Rosie. And the baby inside me. That is what will stop me. My children.
‘I want to show you this,’ I say to Paul and I put the poem from Alix’s diary into his hands.
‘Some day,’ he reads, slowly, aloud, ‘if I should ever lose you/will you be able then to go to sleep/without me softly whispering above you...’
Death is not a single act of the body. If I should ever lose Addie’s body, I will still whisper things to her, every day: Look at the butterfly; Sleep tight my darling; Mummy’s here.
I hear Paul’s voice drift away with the final lines of the poem – a precious love left alone in a garden full of star-anise. He pauses then says, ‘When I was making the trike, I pictured her riding it through the park across beds of flowers.’
I laugh. ‘That’s the kind of thing Addie would do.’
A simple thing. But real. And very lovely.
Here is Paul, here is Rosie, here is Addie. Here am I. We are around a hospital bed certainly. We are waiting, together.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As always, the biggest thank you goes to my husband and children. This book wouldn’t be here without you.
Thank you to the staff and patients at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, for meeting with me and answering my questions, of which there were many. Special thanks to Dr Emily Granger, Transplant Surgeon and a truly inspiring woman. Thanks also to staff at Donate Life NSW and at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, in particular to Anna Dear and Alasdair Watson.
An early draft of this manuscript was completed during a residency at Varuna, The Writers’ House, and I thank them for much needed writing time and space. I also acknowledge the support of the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, in providing a grant for this book.
Many books provided me with valuable information and ideas for this novel. These include Elizabeth Presa’s essay, ‘White Work’, for introducing me to Rilke and to Rodin’s works in plaster; Christine Montross’s memoir Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, for explaining so eloquently what cutting into a corpse is like; Kathy Magliato’s memoir Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon for detailing the barriers a female faces in her profession; Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria for the idea of the death mask; Lesley Sharp’s Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self for alerting me to the role of the donor coordinator; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Selected Letters 1902–1926, his Duino Elegies and his poem ‘Slumber Song’, which also inspired the title for this book; and Joan Didion’s wonderful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, for its insight into the effects of grief. I have also quoted from Sara Teasdale’s poem ‘I am Not Yours’.
Nicola O’Shea’s editorial advice was invaluable and it inspired many new ideas. Finally, thanks to Fremantle Press and Georgia Richter, especially for the title idea. It’s been wonderful working with you again.
ALSO FROM FREMANTLE PRESS
...this haunting, wise book heralds the arrival of a remarkable Australian talent. —The Age
Available from www.fremantlepress.com.au and all good bookstores.
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