The Predictions

  “Isn’t that sort of a compliment?”

  He continued. “ ‘ . . . but because it doesn’t, it’s hard to know what the audience is for this abomination of an album, which satisfies neither the appetite for destruction of the leather and lace set, nor the baggy trouser brigade’s craving for beats without bombast.’ ”

  There was nothing safe left to say, so I said nothing.

  Lukas went into the bathroom, locked the door, punched it, cussed his head off, then fell silent. I thought about going in, trying to console him, but his anger frightened me. Wasn’t it wiser to leave a rattlesnake alone? I would wait until he had cooled down. Besides, any minute, Zachary would wake from his morning nap, interrupting any headway I’d made with Lukas. I could already hear him bouncing his legs on the mattress and snuffling.

  When Lukas came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, I was stuck in a chair, feeding the baby. He looked defeated, and hunted around for his keys and wallet, preparing to go out.

  “Can you wait,” I said, “until Zachary’s finished?”

  “I have to be somewhere,” he said vaguely. “A photo shoot.”

  “When will you be home?”

  “I don’t know. Later.”

  When he left the flat, taking the tense atmosphere with him, part of me was glad. It was easier to focus on the needs of one human, not two. I gazed at Zachary, his tiny mouth slurping away, demanding nothing more from me than milk on tap and around-­the-­clock devotion.

  For the first time since Zachary’s birth, I thought about the way we had been brought up on the commune, passed from lap to lap, our parents giving up their rights to care for their own children. I didn’t understand how they could have done that, how they could stand it, as though it was no more complicated that sharing clothes or food. The feelings I had toward Zachary were fiercely possessive and exclusive. I did not feel disposed to sharing him with anyone, not even Lukas.

  Cheatah were booked to appear at the summer rock festivals across Europe—­headlining the German ones, novelty side act in England—­and the band had started rehearsing to play the new album live. Lukas was depressed about the whole enterprise. As the first tour date approached I saw less and less of him, and it was difficult to map the pattern of his moods. Sometimes he just seemed exhausted, physically wrung out from the effort of learning to play so many new songs. I would ask him a question—­“How was rehearsal?” or “Do you think Zachary has put on weight?”—­and he would carry on mouthing lyrics or practicing a pose in the mirror, unaware that I had spoken. As time went on, I got better at recognizing when he was distracted, and stopped trying to communicate with him. Whole days went by without a conversation between us, let alone hugs or kisses or any form of touch.

  In early summer, something happened that brought us closer together, and for a few brief moments I had hope. It was a week or so before Lukas was due to go off on tour, and Zachary came down with a rogue fever, his temperature so high that the GP took one look at him and dispatched us to the hospital emergency room. His breathing was labored, a grunting noise, not babyish at all, and he alternated this with bouts of distressed, high-­pitched screaming. He was admitted immediately, his symptoms closely monitored while they tried to work out what was wrong. Two or three baffled doctors examined him before one of them finally suggested a chest X-­ray. I had called Lukas from a pay phone in the lobby, Zachary drooping from my hip. The phone receiver was warm and smelled of other ­people’s spittle. I held it far from my ear, making it hard to hear Lukas on the other end. “Saint Mary’s Hospital children’s ward, third floor,” I repeated, my voice loud and unhinged.

  “Got that,” said Lukas, or maybe, “What’s that?” and I hung up. Zachary had started screaming again.

  In the emergency ward, Zachary was placed in a cot with steel bars, a tiny jail cell. He looked small and forlorn and I picked him up, drawing him to my chest, where he whimpered, continuously, even in sleep. The doctors said I shouldn’t hold him all the time—­it would only raise his temperature—­but I couldn’t stand putting him down, letting go of him for even a few minutes. He wasn’t hungry, wouldn’t feed, and milk leaked from my breasts and pooled in the folds of my bra.

  How long had we been waiting? I had lost all sense of time or of anything existing outside the hospital. Under my breath, I began praying, cutting deals with all the gods I did not normally believe in to please save my child. I was ready to trade anything to reverse the prediction, to avoid the sorrow that was heading our way.

  Lukas, every bit as sick with worry as I was, arrived just as we were about to be taken in to have the X-­ray. We clutched each other’s hands for the first time in months, and when I met his gaze I saw, for a second, the old Lukas, my Lukas, the one I had grown up with, eager and warm and loving.

  “He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?” I said, leaning my face against his.

  “He survived a fall down the stairs—­he’ll be fine.”

  The nurse took Zachary and stripped off his clothes. Still in his nappy, she placed him in a plastic weighing bowl, where he curled up his legs and whined, trying to keep himself warm. Then she picked him up and placed him upright on a metal plate. He was too young to sit up on his own, and she had to prop him up while the doctor buckled him into a medieval torture device—­two clear plastic plates that molded around his torso and the tops of his legs, and cupped the rolls of his chin. He squirmed and kicked to try to get out, and then when he couldn’t he started screaming, a noise that was heart wrenching to listen to.

  I lurched across the linoleum toward him but the nurse ordered me back behind the safety screen, where Lukas had to restrain me. “It breaks my heart too,” he whispered, “but they’re trying to help him.”

  I turned away and buried my head in Lukas’s chest, finding some of the old comfort there. How long had it been since we had turned to each other for shelter?

  In his plastic box, Zachary was wheeled into the X-­ray machine and zapped, once, twice; green lightning lit up the room, and then it was over. He was wheeled back to us, unbuckled from the torture device, and handed over to me to soothe and dress. In my arms he was meek and droopy, his energy spent.

  Back in the cubicle, waiting for the X-­ray results, Lukas held on to Zachary and me as though his survival depended on it.

  “From now on,” he said, “I want us to be together.”

  “How?” I said. “You can’t change what you do.”

  Zachary had fallen into a deep sleep, exhausted by his ordeal, and Lukas stroked his cheek. “I’d walk away from the band in a heartbeat, if I could.”

  “Really?”

  “Every time we play, I’m up there on stage and I feel like everyone is laughing at us.” He pinged the spandex of his leopard-­skin pants, which he wore even on his days off. “Look at me. I’m a joke. I’m in a fucking joke band.”

  I agreed with him, but I couldn’t say it. “Why don’t you just leave, if you hate it that much?”

  “I don’t know how to do anything else. And now I’ve got a family to support.”

  I hadn’t thought about this consequence of having a baby, that it would end up contributing to Lukas’s unhappiness.

  The doctor arrived with a large manila envelope and took out an X-­ray, which he held up to the light. “This lung,” he said, pointing to one side of Zachary’s tiny rib cage, “is perfectly clear. But this one on the right has spots of pneumonia.”

  “Pneumonia?” Just the day before, Zachary had been in bouncing good health. “How did he catch pneumonia in the middle of summer?”

  “We can’t tell if the infection started from bacteria or a virus, but we’ll get him started on antibiotics, just in case.”

  “Does he need to stay overnight?”

  “It isn’t necessary,” said the doctor. “But if you’re nervous about taking him home, I can see if we’ve got a
spare bed for you both.”

  Nervous? I had burned through so much adrenaline there was none left. I glanced at Lukas to see what he thought, and he just shrugged. “Up to you.”

  “I’d like to stay if we can,” I said to the doctor. “I don’t feel comfortable taking him home.”

  Zachary and I stayed in the children’s ward overnight, even though his condition improved immediately, once the antibiotics kicked in. Watching his rapid recovery, I remembered how on the commune, when one of us was sick, the women had run through every remedy in a large, white book of natural healing before anyone was taken to the doctor. Most of the time, they were successful. We didn’t get sick much; the commune was too isolated. But every now and then, someone came down with an illness that seemed to worsen with each herbal poultice or potion. When Meg was eight or nine she had cut her toe open on a piece of glass from a beer bottle that had washed up on the beach, and the skin around the wound turned shiny and red before her whole leg swelled up as though it might burst. After a night of vomiting and high fevers, she was bundled into the Land Rover and driven to Whitianga, where she was pronounced to be moments away from septicemia, which would have killed her, the doctor said. One helicopter ride later, she was in the children’s hospital in Auckland, where she remained for a week. She had come home with mythical tales of rainbow Jell-­O and vats of ice cream for dessert every night, and for months afterward, all of us kids had been on the lookout for broken beer bottles, in case we could catch a swollen leg and eat Jell-­O and ice cream too.

  When Zachary and I came home from the hospital in a taxi, Lukas wasn’t there, but he had thoughtfully stocked the fridge with groceries and left flowers and a scribbled note on the table. The note said he was sorry but they were stepping up rehearsals ahead of the tour. He would try to be home for dinner. He hadn’t made it home for dinner in months, so after Zachary had gone to sleep that night, I overlooked the word “try” and busied myself making a meal out of what Lukas had put in the fridge, a mismatched assortment of lettuce and parsnips, lamb chops and Camembert cheese. Chopping and dicing, sautéing and grilling, I felt a surge of optimism. If I made a good meal, if I was a better wife, more supportive, Lukas might come home more often and we could turn things around. As much as the band was to blame for taking Lukas away from us, I could see that I hadn’t given him much of a reason to come home.

  I set the table for dinner and put on what I hoped, in my doughy condition, was a sexy dress.

  Eight in the evening came and went, and after it, nine and ten. The salad had dried out; the lamb was a Roman sandal. I ate my portion and covered Lukas’s with tinfoil. I still thought he might come home to eat, but I was too tired to wait up any longer. Zachary had settled into something like a routine, waking once in the night for a feed and getting up at six a.m.—­hardly restful—­but there was still no guarantee that I would be able to sleep in between. I had gotten used to sleep deprivation, to spending my days in a fog, but every now and then, when I did get a good night’s sleep, I felt so energetic, so euphoric, that I realized how rubbish I felt all the rest of the time.

  The night of the uneaten dinner, I didn’t hear Lukas come home, but when Zachary woke at two a.m. for a feed, he was in bed next to me, and I got a fright. He hadn’t slept there in months. He was in such a deep sleep that he didn’t even stir when Zachary chirped with excitement all through his nappy change at six fifteen.

  In the morning, his morning, which started much later than ours, Lukas found the dinner I had made. He felt so bad that he insisted on eating it for breakfast, a sweet gesture but one that was hard to carry through. The salad was brown, the lamb chops congealed. I couldn’t stand to watch.

  “Please,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”

  He forced down another mouthful. “But you went to so much trouble.”

  I took away the plate. “Why don’t I make you something else?”

  “Why don’t I take you out for lunch? We could go somewhere flash—­that place in Knightsbridge, what’s it called?”

  “Knightsbridge. Are you kidding?” I fast-­forwarded to Zachary pulling silverware off white linen tablecloths, wailing between itsy-­bitsy courses. The meal would be wasted on me. And why sit in a restaurant when you could be outdoors? Zachary had made a swift recovery, went my train of mad thoughts, but the fresh air would do him good. “Why don’t we go to Richmond Park? Zachary would love the animals.”

  Lukas knifed his leftovers into the bin, put his plate by the sink, then came over and knelt beside me. “I don’t have time for a day trip. Only lunch.”

  “We could go somewhere closer to home.”

  “Sorry, babe.” He planted a kiss on my forehead. “They’re expecting me in the studio. Another time?”

  Zachary and I went to the park on our own, and I took off his terrycloth romper and nappy and let him lie on his back in the nude. Soft, dappled light played across his face as he gazed into the tree above him, blowing raspberries and warbling, each note as clear as birdsong. I wished Lukas was present to hear the lovely noise, but as with so many of the tiny marvels that had occurred since Zachary’s birth, I was the only witness.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER 14

  London

  1989

  ON THE MORNING OF departure for the European tour, the suitcases were out, the cab was due in an hour, and Lukas couldn’t find his passport anywhere. I had tried to be a good housewife, to make sure his eight or nine pairs of leather pants were dry-­cleaned, and these he flung into three suitcases, along with armfuls of cropped tank tops, long fringed scarves, studded dog collars, high-­heeled boots, fingerless lace gloves, chunky silver chains, and miniature fishnet vests. There was even a studded leather G-­string that I hoped was not a costume for the stage. “Will you be warm enough?” I said, with wifely concern, when the last of these cases had been forcefully zipped up.

  “Isn’t that what bourbon’s for?”

  “I thought that was for cleaning your teeth.”

  He had been dreading the tour, the nightly humiliation, but now that it was about to begin, I could tell he was also a teeny bit excited. It was fun to hang out in a gang, to dress up in silly costumes, to travel all over Europe with your mates. That was one of the reasons I didn’t want to go with him—­the vibe when they were together was so clannish. But he wanted us to go. He begged us to go. He said if he knew Zachary and I were waiting for him back in his hotel room each night, he could stand it, the ordeal of performance. But each time he asked, I had come up with a new set of excuses. You’ll be too busy to spend time with us, and I don’t fancy hanging out in a hotel room on my own with a baby. Zachary will take a few days to settle in each place and before he does, we’ll move on. The change of time zones, the baby gear we’d have to take, I have nothing to wear. Your routine would go out the window. And the unspoken fear that if the hotel was a skyscraper, Zachary might fall out a window (there was no end to the sorrow my mind could invent). My reasons were so numerous and stubborn that I barely considered why Lukas was so adamant that we come—­why maybe he needed us with him.

  Just as Lukas found his passport, the cab arrived, and sat, idling, on the curb while we said our farewells. I had kept Zachary up past his usual nap time, and he sat on my hip, grizzling.

  “Are you sure you won’t come?” said Lukas. “Go on—­you could meet us halfway through the tour. You could fly to Berlin with Zachary.”

  For a few seconds, I entertained the idea of jumping on a plane like the free-­spirited Bohemian I was not and never would be. Underneath all my excuses was a layer of plain old terror. I thought if we stayed at home, I could at least keep Zachary safe. “I’ll think about it,” I said, to placate him.

  “You will?”

 
“Sure. I’ll talk to a travel agent on Monday.”

  He kissed me on the lips and fluffed the wisps on Zachary’s head while the driver honked his horn. Lukas’s hand was bony, veins showing through his skin. When had he lost so much weight? He was cold to the touch when we hugged, as though his pilot light had gone out, but his energy levels were high, and he took the stairs two at a time, as he always did, even when there was no rush. At the cab door, he turned around and saluted us good-­bye.

  “Good-­bye,” I said, waving back, and taking Zachary’s fat, coiled fist and waving that at him too. “We’ll miss you!”

  The first week he was away, Lukas rang us every day without fail. The second week he skipped a call or two and on the occasions he did call, he sounded tired and distracted, and was hard to draw out, as though he were calling us out of habit when really he had nothing to say. I felt our connection slipping again and didn’t know how to get it back. Lukas seemed to need my physical presence or he forgot I was there for him, forgot I was his wife. We were so different that way. If anything, I felt surer of my love for him when he was away. In absence I was clear that I loved him whereas he felt abandoned, as though I had left him, or he had lost me, and it wasn’t just a temporary separation.

  From time to time, if I hadn’t heard from Lukas for longer than a few days, I would call one of the hotels on his itinerary and ask for him, or for Fran, if the band members were checked in under false names. In most places that wasn’t necessary, but in certain cities—­Düsseldorf, Cologne, Zurich—­they were superstars, and they’d had trouble with fans ringing the hotel and being put through to their rooms. Some had gone further, dressing up as hotel porters and trying to deliver room ser­vice.

  On this particular date the band’s itinerary said they were in West Berlin (much fewer fans) and the hotel receptionist put me straight through. Lukas picked up the phone after two rings but didn’t recognize my voice or know where he was. When I told him, he said, “No, it looks like Helsinki.”