The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  ‘Where’s Dan?’ asks Sofia.

  Elise swallows hard. ‘He’s got family in town.’

  Which is true, of course.

  Sofia shakes her head. ‘Poor man, to miss out on this.’

  ‘I’m pregnant again,’ says Elise. The words come out before she can even check them.

  ‘What? When? This is amazing!’ Sofia pulls out a stool next to her. ‘Are you okay?’

  Lara comes in and slides her arm around Sofia’s waist, leans her head on her shoulder. ‘What’s amazing?’

  ‘Elise is pregnant.’

  ‘I haven’t told Dan yet.’

  Sofia puts her hand on Elise’s knee. ‘I totally understand. It must be so hard, so terrifying.’

  ‘I think it’s a girl.’

  The strange woman, the hand, the kiss. The unreal becoming real inside her own body.

  ‘That’s wonderful! Congratulations, sweetie,’ says Lara.

  And she and Sofia wrap Elise in a hug so strong and female and happy that it seems to press the anxiety away, and, for this moment at least, she relaxes.

  Elise stays through dinner, and after. Kylie is bathed and put to bed, and Elise sips a green tea from a pink and gold mug. You’re beautiful, it says. The words appear handwritten.

  Across the street, her own house looms dark.

  ‘I want to shed light on the female, how females control reproduction—select the male and the sperm, time ovulation, change their scent.’ Elise sighs. ‘It’s been unbalanced. Science has been so unbalanced towards the male, and I want to fix it.’

  ‘I read this thing once,’ says Lara, ‘that because men spurt all over, it’s easy to associate them with activity, with doing. Active to our passive. But the book argued that we should talk about the vagina in active terms. That it grips the penis, sucks it—’

  ‘You know, that’s not bad! I bet women can manipulate men—or our partners—with our scent, just like all the other mammals do, if we change depending on when we’re fertile.’

  ‘Well, Sofe definitely manipulates me,’ says Lara. ‘And grips.’ She winks, and Sofia, drunk and happy, squeals and punches her on the shoulder.

  ‘When I was younger,’ says Elise, ‘I hated how my body smelled. How my sweat would turn all acidic when I was on my period and I’d feel like everyone could smell how wet and bloody and rotten I was, like if I opened my legs they would get a waft of the real me, the inside me, and that was horrifying. I fucking sprayed perfume down there to cover it. Perfume! But what if those kinds of smells are good, important, advertise fertility? I’ve never thought of it that way.’

  ‘It’s not like you want to advertise your fertility in high school,’ says Lara. ‘Might be distracting.’

  ‘What isn’t distracting in high school?’ replies Sofia.

  ‘Seriously, though, is it my problem?’ asks Elise. ‘Should I have to worry about whether or not I’m distracting? It’s a good question.’ She leans back into the cushions and sighs. ‘You know, sometimes I imagine a big couch like this. Lots of kids. A big table and a big couch for them to grow up with, and come home to.’

  ‘It’ll happen.’

  ‘I don’t know anymore what I want. I want so much. Everything.’

  ‘Well, you know what they say.’ Lara laughs. ‘You just have to grab life by the shaft and suck the hell out of it.’

  Sofia nods towards the window behind Elise. ‘Dan’s home,’ she says.

  Elise turns, slowly sinking. Light streams from the windows of her house as though over dark water, a ship unmoored.

  chapter 24

  Dan leaves the wheel and walks along the wide brown river, every City Cat seeming to bustle upstream, away from him, towards home. He stops at Kangaroo Point to watch two twenty-something men, rugged and athletic, prepare ropes and helmets and harnesses for a climbing course. Dan has never climbed like that, used his body like that, seen the view from the sheer side of a rock.

  Except, maybe, that time in Colorado. He and Elise had hiked so high up they could hardly breathe, paused on a bit of the trail only two feet wide, bounded by the mountain’s flank on one side and a loose scree slope on the other. Elise, all around. In all his senses.

  In that moment, he thinks, he came as close as he ever would to seeing forever, with her beside him, and the lake stream tumbling down through the rocks and shrubs, cold enough to stop a person’s heart. Beautiful enough to make it burst.

  He walks because he is stuck between one fear and another and, were he to stop, they would inundate him, like this river did a few years back, before they moved here. He’s seen the pictures, seen the signs and markings on the walls, how it surged up and flexed across the city.

  A flood like his uncle’s words, his father’s words, how they filled the small curved box with a story not his own—suffocating, overwriting everything he thought he was. His mother, a lie in a lie in a lie. His father, no better. He wants to scream, rent at his skin with his nails. His own orphan skin, remade as a son’s.

  His skin, he thinks. And remembers the swollen black growth he carries.

  He feels it now, not the bit of cotton long gone, but a lump in his pelvis that moves in his body, with him, but not as he himself does. A heavy stone tucked into a pocket of his own skin. And it drags downwards, seeking water and riverbeds and darkness.

  The CT scan is booked for tomorrow.

  The follow-up in the afternoon.

  And then he will know not only what he was,

  or is,

  but he’ll also know the limits of what he will become.

  When he wakes, he doesn’t know where he is. Not the bedroom spare room living room at home, but a strange musty place with putrid green walls.

  A place a person might never leave.

  Or be able to.

  He’s tired. His head throbs. But he does leave, at last, wearing the same clothes he walked and drank and slept in, leaves his room and the white panelled hall and the darkstain stairs and exits the hotel through a side door. The laneway is sunless and smells of urine.

  Good morning, he thinks.

  He makes his scan in time, but the nurse is nervous with the needle and babbles as she cannulates. He does not like to imagine a tube inside his arm.

  ‘The worst,’ she says, ‘is when the vein bursts and the dye leaks out into the tissues. It’s really painful and causes a huge bruise and, on top of that, we have to re-do the scan another day. That really freaks people out.’

  Dan closes his eyes.

  Somewhere, faintly, he hears David Bowie, ‘Life on Mars’. Not the right kind of music for this place, he thinks. More the right kind of music for dying.

  The kind of music Tess loved.

  She gave him Bowie and The Verve, he gave her Vivaldi. Mozart’s Horn Concertos and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty waltz. How they’d tossed art and culture into the air between them, like a poetry jam, both of them laughing, shouting, gasping, Janis Joplin and Anna Karenina, On the Road and Robert Burns, as if it were some contest. As if one could win it.

  When she got sick, really sick, he’d sit in her room at the back of the house and read to her. Matilda and The Witches and other lighter things, and he’d do all the voices.

  She loved his voice.

  He’d been in the kitchen when he heard the bell ring.

  A doorbell.

  A CT scanner.

  ‘All right,’ says the nurse. ‘Just lie down here, don’t move, and when I tell you, I want you to breathe in and hold it, okay?’

  So Dan lies on the tongue-shaped bed, pillow under his head and under his knees. It’s not uncomfortable.

  ‘Here we go,’ says the nurse. ‘There’ll be a warm tingle, and you might feel like you wet yourself, but you haven’t. It’s just the contrast. It won’t last long, the feeling.’

  Dan burns from inside his skin. He closes his eyes again.

  He’d been making a hummus and avocado sandwich when the doorbell rang, and his mother

  n
ot his mother

  seemed to freeze at the sound. But then she wiped her hands on a towel at the sink and set it down and looked at him, looked at him sharply, and went to answer it.

  She spoke softly at the door.

  The woman who came in looked so much like Tess, an older version, a mother-Tess. The woman did not say hello or introduce herself, but followed Sibyl Warne straight up the hall to Tess’s room. Her steps were heavy, loud.

  The air was a current. Something was wrong. He heard Tess’s door pulled shut with a click, the woman inside it. Sibyl emerged from the hall, and he saw, then, how old her face was, how old she’d grown over all these years. He could see the make-up on her, see the hold of her hair against her shoulders, the creases at her mouth and on her neck. She’d been getting older, and he hadn’t seen it.

  But, then, there were so many things he hadn’t seen. He was in love and had made love, his own body was taller and firmer than before, and he knew his place in the world,

  and it was with Tess.

  ‘Who’s that? What’s she doing here?’ he’d asked.

  The microphone crackles near Dan’s ear. ‘Okay,’ says the nurse. ‘Hold your breath for me …’

  ‘Tess is sick, baby,’ said his mother. Sibyl.

  ‘… and, breathe normally.’

  Dan exhales.

  ‘But you’re making her better,’ he’d said. ‘Like you always do.’

  ‘No,’ said Sibyl. ‘It’s not working, baby, and her mother’s come to take her home.’ She put her hands out towards him, fingers extended, but he didn’t take them. His body froze, glacial water, ice. He clenched the edge of the granite benchtop to keep from falling.

  ‘And again,’ says the nurse. ‘Hold your breath for me …’

  ‘What’s not working?’

  But he didn’t wait for the answer. He pushed her away and ran to Tess’s room and pushed open the door and there she was, sitting up on the bed in her mother’s thick arms, both of them crying, mother and daughter. No space for Dan. The bed was full of them, and he was at the door

  too violently opened,

  his skin left behind him, raw raw raw because he loved her.

  The room was to Sibyl’s taste, mauve and cream-frilled, but it was also Tess’s room. She’d made it her own with a black-and-tan blanket, and her clothes, and her smell—only this time it was wrong. This time, the room was like a painting, a portrait of mother and child, women only, and there was no place for his male body to intervene.

  ‘Dan,’ says the nurse, ‘let out your breath now.’

  He’d pleaded with his eyes, but Tess only closed them. He was not invited to go. He died because she was dying, because he couldn’t make it better with how much he loved her, and his memories were already fading. Week by week they faded.

  ‘Dan,’ says the nurse, ‘are you okay? Breathe normally.’

  She left him first for her mother’s arms, and again, not long after, when she died.

  He was not invited to her funeral, but he went anyway. He didn’t know the living people there, but felt the eyes on him, unwelcome, tainted by his mother. The great healer,

  great fraud,

  Sibyl Warne.

  Tess had been loved so much, by her own father and mother, her brothers, her big Southern family, her friends, her teachers, her town. All of them together. It was there, in the air, in the words spoken and left unspoken.

  They hated his mother, and Dan by proxy, and he did not belong. They would erase him from her life as if he hadn’t existed at all. As if she hadn’t loved him.

  I’m on your side, he’d wanted to say, I loved her, too.

  I miss her, too.

  But nothing was, could ever be enough to change things. Not even words on pages.

  Dan exhales.

  Not even lifetimes, he thinks.

  In the evening, he sits in the slipper chair by the window and waits. There is so little time for waiting now, but he does not waste it. He takes in the room, all the rooms of his life. Their life. He takes this moment.

  The lamp throws warm light across his desk, the cairn, the little bird, but Dan sits in near darkness, strokes the cotton-soft dog on his lap, and tells her everything.

  The dog is sleeping; she twitches lightly in her dreams.

  Later, he watches Elise cross the street and climb the front stairs and enter the room in an eddy of anger, as though their life is a matter of fact. As though he’s not broken and will not leave her.

  ‘Where were you?’ she asks. ‘Where have you been?’

  He does not stand, does not angle the chair away from the window, but twists his neck and shoulders towards her.

  ‘Quiet,’ he says. ‘You’ll wake her.’

  ‘What?’ Her voice is sharp.

  ‘Come here.’

  She walks between the bed and desk and stands beside him and he unfurls the blanket on his lap to show her. In it, a small white dog is curled, asleep.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks. ‘Where did you get it?’ She gets down onto her knees beside the chair to have a closer look. Her eyes widen. ‘It’s so little.’

  The puppy whimpers in her sleep, and Dan runs his hand along her back. She’d been so scared, before, and now she’s calmed. Exhausted. Her hair is soft. Strands cling to his palm.

  ‘The car ahead went straight over her. I saw it, like slow motion, like this beagle did when I was a kid, it just ran out into the street. Into the car, like slow motion. It was alive.

  ‘It was alive,’ he says again. He doesn’t know how to say it. ‘And then it was dead. Like a rolled-up t-shirt.’

  ‘Hey, but it’s okay,’ says Elise. ‘The dog’s okay.’

  Dan nods, but he’s already crying.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ She puts her hand on his arm. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘I’m here.’

  And for the first time since William, he feels she means it. But he can’t tell her any of it, how everything’s changed, from forever to nothing in so short a time. All he can do is lean his head into his wife’s bony shoulder, and stroke the sleeping dog, and cry.

  part five

  chapter 25

  The music is the first thing he notices, that Gotye song, ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’. The Gotye song and the scratchy orange fabric on the seats. He tries not to look at the people sitting in them, people like him and not-like him—older, worn-down people, balding from treatment. The television in the corner is on one of those infomercial stations, a new juicer-blender with extra attachments, and the juice and the fervour remind him too much of his not-mother, and he looks away.

  He should’ve brought something to do, a book or something, though his mind is in fragments and he can’t concentrate anyway. He picks up a magazine, imagines how many fingers have touched it, and sets it back on the little table. The cover beams at him: man murders wife, hides body in barrel. It seems somehow funny, in a context like this, all these people with cancer, waiting for treatments or appointments, prognoses. It seems unreal that, somewhere in the same world as this one, a person might cut another one apart. He turns the magazine face down and closes his eyes.

  Four songs later, he hears the shuffle of plastic bags and feels someone take the seat next to him, an unsteady body that leans on the arm of the chair and against Dan’s shoulder as he drops into the chair. Dan tries to remain motionless and invisible, but the words, when spoken, are directed at him.

  ‘You here with somebody?’ The voice is raspy and slow, the accent broad with a tinge of Kiwi.

  Dan blinks open.

  The man is older than he is, but not as old as he expected, and large in the way of ex-football players, rugby players. The kind of muscles Dan never had to lose.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Are you?’ Though he already knows the answer. The man has a scar the size of a banana along the side and back of his scalp.

  The man shakes his bald, marked head.

  ‘Meeting the doc,’ he says. ‘Making plans for what happens next.’


  Dan, who can barely think about his own next, doesn’t ask.

  ‘So what’s a guy as young as you doing in here?’ asks the man.

  This seems obvious to Dan. ‘Cancer,’ he says.

  The man laughs. ‘Don’t take it too hard. It happens to almost everybody eventually. The chemo’s a shit, but then you get through it. You got a missus?’

  Dan nods.

  ‘Well, you be sure and let her take care of you. She needs it as much as you do, I promise you that.’

  A nurse in a teal blue uniform leans her head out of the corridor. ‘Dan Warne?’ she shouts into the waiting room.

  ‘That’s me,’ Dan says softly, and stands.

  ‘Well, all the best,’ says the man, shifting his knees for Dan to step by. ‘Trust me, the hardest thing is getting used to saying yes. But then you do, and things are smooooooooth.’ He draws out the word, sweeps his hand slowly through the air in front of him, and laughs.

  Inside the office, everything in circles. The artwork on the grey-blue wall is simple, abstract—a hole in white card in a tight black frame. His body an image on the computer screen, alive with glowing dots, like teeth, tumours, death. The oncologist himself, saying words, too many words. Words that float like cancer through Dan’s body, like a poem, an erasure.

  ‘No one’s said I’m going to die,’ he says. ‘It’s all numbers, probabilities, like some kind of game. But I feel it, inside me, killing me, and I hate it. I want so much more ahead and so much more behind all at once.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The gallery. The GOMA.’

  ‘You’re echoing.’

  ‘I’m in the River Lounge. It’s too open. High ceilings and glass and every wall is white. It smells like paint. It’s too open,’ he says again. ‘It’s too white. I can’t get my bearing.’ His heart is racing. He sits on a fabric bench and leans forward over his knees.