Suddenly the man gave a yelp of pain. I looked down and saw that Jeremy had whacked him in the shins with Dad’s umbrella.
‘Ya dirty scumbuggits!’ he yelled. ‘I don’t care what country you’re from, you can’t speak to my sister like that!’ He tugged at my hand. He was looking wildly around, searching for an escape. The people had all descended, surrounding us. ‘Gome on, Batman, follow me,’ he hissed. ‘You need protection, and protection is my racket.’
We raced up the steps, pushing past placards and clutching hands. Jeremy held the umbrella out in front of him like a sword. He flashed it from side to side, jabbing it in the air if someone got too close. We stumbled into the doorway, onto calm cream carpet.
We stood there, like refugees. I couldn’t stop trembling.
‘What do we do now, Batman?’ whispered Jeremy. I could feel his legs collapsing against mine.
‘Hang on a sec, Robin,’ I managed. I saw the hallway opened out on the right into a waiting room. I took a couple of steps and peeped in. The room was filled with women sitting on chairs and couches. There was a table piled with magazines, and an urn and coffee cups in the comer. Some of the women looked fairly old, around thirty or forty, others looked quite young. One girl stared back at me. She was skinny as a pencil—she’d have been in Year 8. She gave a crooked grin. I smiled back. The muscles in my back began to unclench. There was a boy sitting next to her. He was handing her a cup of tea. The people in this room looked so normal, flicking through the pages of magazines, sipping coffee. They looked like the women who shopped at the supermarket, or caught the bus to work in the morning.
‘It’s okay, Robin,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and sit down.’
Just then, on the left, I saw the receptionist’s desk. A young woman came toward us. ‘Hi,’ she said with a friendly smile, ‘I’m Lily. Can I help you?’
Jeremy stepped forward. ‘I hope so,’ he said confidingly, ‘because some people out there have just been very rude to my sister. She can’t help it if she doesn’t have any money to give them and all their children are sick. It’s not her fault.’
Lily looked quite unfazed. She nodded sympathetically. ‘We have a lot of trouble with those people. I wish they’d do something else with their afternoons.’ She looked at me. ‘Do you have an appointment? Would you like to see a counsellor?’
I told her I did have an appointment and we talked for a bit. She took us over to the desk and I filled out a form and a health checklist.
‘Are we at the doctor’s?’ said Jeremy, his brow clearing.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said.
Jeremy’s brows knotted again. He clutched my hand.
‘You’re not dying, are you? You’re not old enough yet. Is it those teenage blues?’
Lily looked up and giggled. ‘You know, children shouldn’t really be here. We just don’t have the space. Is someone coming to pick him up?’
I shook my head. I tried to explain about family arrangements getting mixed up, and my mother having a case of terminal unreliability. I babbled on and on (I was nervous) until finally Lily held up her hand.
‘Well,’ she said, tapping her chin with a biro. ‘Let’s deal with you first.’ She looked down at my form. ‘I see that you elected to have an IV sedation when you made the appointment.’
I nodded.
‘Okay. We like to keep you here for a couple of hours after that. You may be a bit sleepy and disoriented. And someone needs to go home with you. Do you have anyone coming? An adult, I mean?’
Oh shit, I’d forgotten that. No, I could say, I have no one in the world. After all, it was the truth. I felt like Oliver Twist. Can I have some more relatives, please? But it would never work. I hated to lie to Lily, I really did, but there was nothing else I could do.
‘My boyfriend’s coming,’ I said quickly. ‘He knocks off work at six. He’ll come straight over after that. He’s a car mechanic—boy, you should see him fix a fanbelt, he’s a real whiz with an engine, everyone at work says he’ll be setting up his own shop in no time. He goes to tech at night, it’s really tiring after a long day’s work, but he’s so revved up, he doesn’t notice.’ Jeremy was staring at me open-mouthed. I could tell he was about to interrupt, but I was ready with more. I’d flow all over him, like an active volcano, and he wouldn’t be able to get a word out. I was really warming to the subject, about how Tim wanted to see me all the time, and the difficulties of juggling an intense relationship with schoolwork, when Lily held up her hand again.
‘That’s great, Callisto,’ she said, smiling. She turned to Jeremy, who had found another biro and was drawing bats caught in a meteor swarm. ‘Now, Robin, what are we going to do with you?’
I snorted.
Lily looked puzzled. ‘I thought I heard you call him that?’ Jeremy dug me in the thigh with the umbrella.
What the heck, I thought.
‘Okay, Robin—you can put the umbrella down now—would you like to sit with me behind this desk? Your sister will have to see the doctor. It will all take a rather long time.’
‘Like how long?’
‘Well, let’s see.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Callisto, you’ll see a counsellor now, okay? And then, if you go in for your operation, you probably won’t be out of here until about 7.30, 8 o’clock.’
‘That’s the night-time!’ cried Jeremy, shocked. ‘The Simpsons are on then! It’ll be dark. What about my dinner?’
‘Can your boyfriend take Robin home when he arrives? He’ll be here soon after six, won’t he? Then he can come back for you.’
‘Who?’ asked Jeremy.
‘I’ll tell you later, Jer-er, Robin. Just let the grown-ups work it out now, okay?’
Jeremy’s shoulders slumped. He went back to drawing bats. I noticed a couple of them had succumbed to gravity. They didn’t survive the swarm.
I told Lily that yes, my boyfriend could look after Robin. She said, ‘Oh good’, because she had to leave around six. My hands were sweating. I couldn’t think straight. It was all becoming too complicated. I felt like a beetle in a spider web. Jeremy would just have to wait. It wouldn’t kill him. I’d make some excuse about Tim later. If I had to leave now and make another appointment I might as well hurl myself under a bus. I couldn’t do this twice.
Jeremy waved reluctantly at me as I went into the waiting room. I saw Lily give him a stash of fresh paper, and she’d found some coloured textas. He was giving her a watery smile. She saw me looking, and mouthed ‘He’s okay, don’t worry.’ I could have hugged her.
She wouldn’t have wanted to hug me. Not if she knew me. I told lies the size of Mount Etna. That’s 3274 metres high. It’s the highest active volcano in Europe, in case you’re interested. I tried to think about Mount Etna, instead of Jeremy, as I sat down in the waiting room.
It wasn’t long before a small, tidy-looking woman came in and called out my name. ‘Hullo,’ she said, ‘my name is Rosa.’ We shook hands. Hers was firm and dry. ‘I am your counsellor for today. Would you like to come with me?’
She showed me into a square room with white walls. Two leather chairs sat around a coffee table. I hovered above them. There was just us.
Rosa took some papers from a desk and gestured for me to sit down. It was very quiet in there. You couldn’t hear the ‘South Africans’ outside. Perhaps the signs had got too heavy and they’d gone home. I couldn’t get over how neat Rosa looked. She was a woman in miniature, doll-like, with shiny blonde hair that fell to her shoulders in one swoop, like a single brushstroke. The red dollops of her earrings matched her suit. She reminded me of those sleepers in overnight trains—everything was in its right compartment, all folded up tight, with no room to spare. She probably carried a spare pair of tights in her handbag.
How could I tell her about me? I was a bunch of unravelled knitting at her feet.
Rosa asked some general questions, and informed me about the procedure. Her voice was light, but warm. I could tell she was trying to be cheerful. I though
t of Richard, and everyone saying, ‘Lighten up, Richo, why don’t you?’ Such a pang shot through me at the thought of him that I winced.
‘Is it hard for you to be here today?’ asked Rosa.
She was looking straight at me, and there was a crease of concern between her brows. She leant forward, and I felt that the thing she most wanted to hear in the world was my voice. Even if Nazi stormtroopers barged in, she’d tell them to wait. She wouldn’t take her eyes off me for a second.
No one had ever looked at me like that. Well, only if they’d wanted sex or astronomical information.
It was amazing what that simple question did to me.
I tried to say ‘Yes’, but I gulped instead. Tears were welling up in my throat and spilling out and I kept trying to say that one word but I was gagged with all this salty H2O. I don’t know where it came from. Rosa just kept nodding. She didn’t tell me to stop, or to cheer up, or that it was all right. She handed me tissues and waited.
I wanted to ask her, Will you keep your eyes like that, all wide and kind and uncritical, while I tell you? In between all the nose-blowing I muttered some things about Tim and the newspaper and the weather. I don’t know what she made of it. I desperately wanted her to like me. She was so calm and neat in her red suit, her legs crossed at the ankles in sheer stockings with no ladders or bits of lint trailing off them.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘And how did you come to make this decision? Did you talk it over with anyone?’
There was a thick silence. It was grainy, like quicksand. My head was clogged with it.
‘Do your parents know about this, Callisto?’
I shook my head. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t lie to Rosa. I just couldn’t.
‘It’s okay. I just think it might be good to talk about your feelings. How do you think your father would react to your having a termination?’
I gave a wild laugh. It came roaring out, like something savage in the jungle. Tarzan, maybe, before he met any other humans.
‘Well, what about your mother?’
‘Mum would just go into a total spin.’ I thought of her lying in the dark with her mantra, wading into the soothing waters of her meditation. She spent her whole life trying to inoculate herself against pain. ‘Cally’s better off without me,’ she’d written in her diary. How could she help? ‘Mum couldn’t cope,’ I said.
‘Okay, so, what about the most important person—you? How do you feel about it? Tell me a little, if you can, about how you came to make the decision.’
She was looking at me, waiting patiently, although I knew she must have ten other women out there lining up. I didn’t know what to say. How can you describe the undertow? There are no words, it’s just a swift current of dread and urgency. It pushes you along, a nameless thing, and it doesn’t let you get organised. It doesn’t let you think.
I sank into it. I didn’t fight it. I spoke to her from the undertow. I could hear my voice sounding harsher, pebblier with the current. Shit, I was like that girl in The Exorcist, except I was inhabited by the undertow instead of the Devil. That movie had given me nightmares. Maybe my head would turn around on my neck seven times like hers.
‘Take your time,’ said Rosa calmly. ‘Take a deep breath.’
‘It’s this feeling of dread,’ I mumbled. ‘I don’t know, that I’d be trapped, trapped forever to stay the way I am.
I couldn’t do it, I don’t know how to look after myself, let alone a baby.’
The woman nodded. I started to cry again. She said nothing, just looked at me as if her heart would break, and gave me tissues.
‘Have you considered alternatives, like adoption?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t want to do that.’
There was a girl at school, Cara, who’d had her baby adopted. Her parents made her go away to a place in the country, a home for pregnant girls. She came back to school eventually. She used to wear the baby’s nametag around her wrist, like a bracelet. On his birthday she would cry all day at school. I saw her once recently. She said she still wanders around, looking for him in prams, at the supermarket. She looks like my mother. She has a secret sorrow.
In that white room, with Rosa’s calm ankles and the comfortable chairs, I felt myself floating away. It was such a relief. For just a moment, I became gossamer-thin, like a worn piece of sheet, and I drifted above everything. I was wafting toward Jupiter, a breath away from Galileo.
I looked down and saw the girl that was me on the chair. You can see things much more clearly from a distance. She sat at attention, her knees together, trying. She’d try anything to be liked. She’d follow people around who set her hair on fire, she’d lie down on newspaper and apologise, she’d swallow plants like a herbivore. She’d swallow anything, that one. She could never say ‘No’. She said ‘Yes, please’.
It was shameful. Someone down there ought to kick her. Wipe the smile off her face. Imagine Mr and Mrs May seeing that girl. Mr’s eyes would roll in disgust. He’d see her get up from the newspaper, glimpse the dirty black smudges on her thighs where the ink had smeared. He’d see her lying on the grass on her back, bitten by insects. Her undies would show. He’d see her gritting her teeth. Smiling.
I didn’t want to go back in there. It was dangerous. It was better to be a ghost.
But there must have been a time, I thought, when I said ‘No’. You heard mothers talking about the ‘terrible twos’, when toddlers stamp their feet and say ‘No’ all day long. Did I do that?
‘Cally’s better off without me,’ Mum wrote.
Well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t. How did I know what to do? And now look where I was. The lady on the phone had said, ‘Don’t come to the clinic in your school uniform, dear, change first.’ She’d said that because no school would want a girl who got herself into this mess. They’d pretend they didn’t know you. It was as bad as being a bank robber and getting caught. When they’re arrested, robbers always put their coats over their heads as the police lead them away. The lady on the phone should tell women to bring their coats, as well as their Medicare cards.
‘Do you need some more time to think about this?’ Rosa asked softly.
Her voice pushed me back down there, into the white room. ‘What?’ I said. ‘I mean, I beg your pardon?’
She repeated the question. Our eyes met. As I looked at her, I wasn’t thinking of what she was saying, or this particular afternoon. I was thinking of the enormity of living life like this. I saw the way I grabbed on to people like life rafts, barely checking if they were afloat. It was only luck that I hadn’t drowned by now.
‘Look, I really do want to go ahead with this,’ I said. I blew my nose. I tried to make my voice firm. ‘It’s just, you know, the sadness. I feel like I’m throwing away a little bit of me. Of what might have been. You know, a possibility. I’ve never been any good at making decisions.’
Rosa waited.
I twisted in my chair. ‘The thing is, well, do you think I’m doing the right thing? I mean, it won’t change my mind or anything, but it would just be good to know, you know?’
Rosa smiled at me. ‘You are the only one who can make this decision. I think you are extremely brave. And I know you will do the best you can.’
I shuddered. Who’d leave all this up to me? But then I felt a wave of certainty. As Rosa said, there really was no one else.
I stood up. Rosa did too, and I took her hand. I felt quite tall. I towered over her, in fact. ‘I want to have the operation,’ I told her. ‘I want a second chance, I really do.’
For once, I was trying to do the best thing I could for myself. When I knew how to do that—after about ten years of practice, maybe—I’d be able to do the best thing I could for my child.
DR KAVAN POINTED to a crisp white folding bed, and asked me to lie down. He turned back to his desk. He was finding instruments, or putting on gloves, or something. I was wondering—should I take my jeans off now, or wait for him to tell me? There should be a guide for young girls: ‘Wh
at to Do at the Doctor’s without making a Fool of Yourself. He was still over there, with his back turned, fiddling on the desk. I didn’t like to be bold and strip off before he told me to. I couldn’t sit on that clean sheet with my bottom all bare. He’d think I was a slutty girl, always dying to get my pants off. I mean here I was, in this situation. I left them on.
‘Well, now, we’ll need those jeans off,’ he said briskly as he turned around.
It’s probably one of the most embarrassing things there is, being examined in the private area by a stranger of the opposite sex. I lay there sweating, my heart pumping away. This was the flight or fight reaction, common in stressed animals. You know, a perceived dangerous situation floods your body with adrenalin to help you survive. Embarrassment can practically kill you.
The doctor was nice. When he put his gloved fingers inside me, he didn’t wrinkle his nose or shake his head or call me a naughty girl. He just poked about with an expression of detached curiosity. I felt like a quite ordinary flower being inspected by a kindly botanist.
‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘You’re not very far along.’
I felt bold enough to ask how far.
‘I’d say just a few weeks. The sac is only as big as your little fingernail.’
I thought of those pictures held up outside. There weren’t any fingernails amongst them. Someone ought to tell those people. Their signs could be a lot smaller, and they wouldn’t have to strain all their arm muscles carrying them around.
He patted me on the shoulder and said we’d be ready to go ahead soon.
Back in the waiting room I found a vacant chair. I put my bag down and went to get myself a magazine. A woman at the urn was dunking a teabag in a steaming cup. She looked up and gave me a friendly grimace. I grimaced back. For the next half hour, while I had my blood pressure and weight checked and talked to the nurse, I must have exchanged about a hundred of those smiles. And each time I felt a little warmer, a bit more connected. Bank robbers never smiled like that.
Jeremy was still drawing bats at Lily’s desk. He came out to show me, although he shouldn’t have. He showed me the King Bat, who had black wings shaped like Dad’s umbrella. He’d even drawn little green men playing golf along the scalloped edges.
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