She rolled her shoulders, stretched her neck from side to side, and leaned against the steel wall of the lift, thinking about a hot shower. Aidan stood close to the doors, with his back to her.
She frowned when he stiffened. ‘You OK, Aid?’
He uncrossed his arms and started pressing random floor buttons.
She pushed herself off the wall.
The button pressing became more urgent.
‘Aidan. What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t breathe.’
The doors opened on level two and he strode out. She followed him as he took the stairs down two at a time.
She caught up when he stopped in the courtyard that linked the new hospital building to the old, perspiration glistening on his upper lip.
‘Do you need to sit down?’ She touched his arm.
He pulled away, clasping his hands behind his head. ‘For fuck’s sake, just leave me alone for a minute!’
He might as well have slapped her face. She blinked and took a step back, nodding slowly. His eyes looked darker, almost black, shining. ‘OK. I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said.
She glanced over her shoulder as she walked away in search of toilets; he was pacing the courtyard.
In the old part of the hospital, blue UV light emanated through the open bathroom door. There was a syringe on the windowsill of the cubicle Brigitte chose. She sat on the toilet with her head in her hands. Fucking hospitals. She stayed like that for maybe ten minutes — until she heard somebody come in.
When she returned to the courtyard, Aidan was sitting calmly on one of the concrete-slab seats, sending a text or an email on his phone. He pocketed the phone when he saw her.
‘Want to talk about it?’ she said.
He shook his head, and they walked to the car without speaking.
15
Kerry was holidaying on the Gold Coast but, after Aidan’s call, had left instructions with the next-door neighbour to give the spare keys to the Serras. It was getting dark, and rain drummed on Kerry’s rusted tin roof as Aidan drove away. Brigitte waved from the porch. Car lights splashed rainbows across petrol stains on the wet road. He hadn’t kissed her goodbye. She sniffed as she turned to go inside.
In the spare bedroom, she slipped off her shoes. She thought about Aidan’s reaction at the hospital, the cornered-animal fear in his eyes. Just a panic attack? Out of character, but totally understandable. He had as many reasons, if not more, as she to hate that place.
A train blasted its horn as it rattled through Clifton Hill station, traffic hummed, a cat meowed. She caught a grab of voices as a group of people walked past.
Her shoulders drooped, tiredness melting the tension in her body. There was a spark of pain in her lower back. The image of a chilly, steel operating table came to her: the trough around the edges for fluid drainage, the hook at the end where they attached a collecting pail. No way was she ever going there again, no matter what. The pain wasn’t coming back. It couldn’t. It was just an ache, from sitting too long, from the cold. That’s all.
There was also an ache in her stomach — probably hunger; she hadn’t eaten since a bite of Finn’s hot dog after the footy, forever ago.
Her breath condensed on the windowpane as she pulled back a curtain and pressed her cheek against the glass. She looked across at the only other house in the street that hadn’t been done up: the house that had once been hers and Sam’s and, for a few years, hers and Aidan’s. The light was shining on the porch where Aidan, and then the two uniformed officers, had stood with their bad news. Many nights that porch light had shone in vain for Sam while he was alive. Aidan had always come home, or called if he was running late. The front door Brigitte had painted was still cherry-red, port-coloured in the twilight.
As she padded down the hallway to the lounge room, a splinter of floorboard caught on one of her socks. She couldn’t figure out how to work the remote for Kerry’s reverse-cycle heater, so she used the old gas one instead. The smell of hot dust filled the room.
It felt odd. Not quiet, but empty. When was the last time she’d been alone? She couldn’t remember. She turned on the TV for company, and caught the end of a news update about Maree Carver. A reporter was standing on the Paynesville foreshore, near the Bateau House, her blonde hair barely moving in the wind. ‘… before her body was dumped in this East Gippsland lake. The incident has triggered a Homicide investigation. Anybody with any information should contact police or Crime Stoppers.’
The media had the story on a loop. Maree Carver’s beautiful image splashed across TV screens, and over front pages, selling newspapers. Had the victim been an ugly grandmother or an old fisherman, there would have been few floral tributes on the Paynesville wharf.
Back to the newsreader at the desk. ‘In news after the break, the crew of a Russian spacecraft has landed safely in Kazakhstan after a five-month mission to the International Space Station.’
An ad for Magnum ice-creams lit up the screen. Brigitte’s stomach growled. Her phone rang on the bench: ‘Kiss You All Over’ — she still hadn’t worked out how to reset the ringtone. She answered without checking the caller ID, about to tell Aidan off for using his phone while driving. It was Petula, the manager of Papa’s aged-care facility. Brigitte’s stomach twisted; Petula never phoned.
‘Eddie’s taken a turn for the worse, love.’
‘Is he OK?’ She walked into the kitchen and sat at the scarred wooden table. Her bones ground against the hard chair. Kerry should get some cushions.
‘Pneumonia. We’ve sent him to hospital. I’ve already spoken to your mum, but you need to come down to discuss arrangements.’
‘I’m in Melbourne now. Which hospital?’
Petula told her, and Brigitte said she’d be there in fifteen minutes.
Her phone rang again. Joan. She let the call go to message bank: she’d see her soon enough. She slipped her shoes on, and booked a taxi back to the same hospital.
She sat beside Papa’s bed. He looked like a ghost already: sharp bones and shadows, complexion the yellow-grey of pressed chicken loaf.
She reached for his hand; his skin was cool, translucent, and dry — it reminded her of the twins in the NICU. Paperbark. Birth and death.
Where was he now? Somewhere between this world of slack skin and crumbling bones, and the next where he would be arguing again with Nana about what had happened to the cooking sherry? Brigitte thought about the framed photograph of Nana that had stood forever on Papa’s bedside table. Nana was about twenty, at a party or maybe it was at the dance where they’d met. There was a glow about her that was hard to describe: an otherworldly kind of light that was now photoshopped onto models and celebrities in cosmetics ads. Why had Brigitte never asked if Papa had been there when that photo was taken? She pictured him walking up to Nana, removing his Humphrey Bogart hat, and asking her to dance — a double-breasted suit, broad shoulders. Superman. Nana, smiling, pearly teeth, sparkly eyes, luminous skin — a sleek gown, gathered at the shoulder with a rhinestone brooch. A Grecian goddess. That’s where Papa would be now: in that photograph dancing with Nana, illuminated by her light.
‘It’s OK if you want to let go now, Papa,’ she whispered. Had he ever said something like that during one of his daily visits to her after the car accident? No, he wouldn’t have given up on her. And there was no way he was going to let go easily now. Stubborn old bugger.
She closed her eyes and saw a younger, stronger Papa sitting next to a broken girl.
Nurses came and went: turning Papa, administering morphine, suctioning sputum from his airways. No machines, or alarm bells ringing, here. All about keeping him comfortable now. And waiting.
After an hour or so, Brigitte whispered, ‘I have to go now, Papa, but I’ll be back tomorrow.’ She straightened up, rubbing her back. She bent to kiss Papa’s forehead and told him that she loved him. The
n she went downstairs and did the same for Ryan. Out in the courtyard, a flabby tattooed man and a thin young woman huddled, smoking cigarettes, on the concrete slab where Aidan had sat — not a lifetime ago as it seemed, but just earlier that same evening. The woman’s stick-insect legs dangled below her hospital gown. The man exhaled smoke and swore. His teeth were black. Brigitte hurried past as an ambulance pulled into the bay behind them.
She slipped, but didn’t fall, on the mosaic tiles as she rushed through the old building’s foyer.
The pollution out on the parade felt like fresh air. Brown and yellow elm leaves slicked the footpath, glistening in the streetlight. A plastic bag, too burdened by the rain to take flight, was pummelled in the wind, gathering mud in the gutter.
Did Matt still live nearby?
16
Papa looked worse the next day. A yellower shade of ash. Sometimes his eyelids fluttered as though he was going to wake up.
Brigitte yawned and rubbed her face. After a restless sleep in Kerry’s lumpy spare bed, she’d been at the hospital all day, listening to Joan prattling about celebrity gossip in magazines she’d bought from the newsagency, when she wasn’t at the café next door buying skinny lattes and gourmet muffins.
Brigitte felt in her bag for something to read. Her hand found a book at the bottom: Dead in the Water. How the fuck could she have forgotten it in there? Local murder, spousal rejection, sibling attempted suicide, imminent death of grandfather — such a careless oversight was understandable.
She glanced at her mother; Joan was engrossed in a publication with the headline Exclusive: Teen Mom Jemma Reveals If She’s Still Feuding With Tyler And If She’s Met His Baby With Khloe! Brigitte traced her fingers over Dead in the Water’s glossy cover, thumbed the pages, held her breath, and peeked inside. Brigitte, letting you go was the biggest mistake of my life. Matt x. And a mobile number. She snapped the book shut and shoved it back into her bag.
‘Why don’t you go see Ryan?’ she said.
Joan looked up. ‘I’m not quite ready,’ she gulped a deep breath and clutched the costume pearls around her neck, ‘to see my boy like that.’
Brigitte looked away, rolling her eyes. She needed to move. She stood up and stretched her arms above her head, lengthening her spine.
‘Brigitte! I think he’s stopped breathing!’
She spun around, walked over, held a finger under Papa’s nose, and nodded.
Joan screamed and knocked over her chair as she scurried for the buzzer beside the bed. New Idea, and half a low-fat raspberry muffin and its wrapper, fell to the floor.
A nurse came without urgency. He listened to Papa’s chest with a stethoscope, and then rang a doctor. Joan rushed out in hysterics.
The doctor called the death, wrote out a certificate, and asked if Brigitte would like to spend some quiet time with Papa. She nodded, and the doctor left them alone.
Brigitte pulled up a chair and folded her hands in her lap.
After a long silence, she said, ‘Remember that time Ryan and I went fishing with you when we were little, and I stood on the fish hook?’ It goes in the fishy, but it can’t come out. Clever, isn’t it? Papa had said as he’d tried to calm her. They were on the first jetty — the same place she’d sat with Matt that night. But your foot’s not a fishy, Papa said as he cut the line. The hook can’t go back, it has to go forwards. He pushed the hook out through the soft flesh. ‘You carried me screaming to the house, and Nana fixed it with Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid. Back then, I thought everything could be fixed that way.’ She couldn’t remember the pain of it going in, only coming out.
‘I don’t think Aidan wants me anymore, Papa.’ She sighed. ‘What am I going to do?’
She looked at Papa’s face — relaxed now — for the last time, and an unusual calmness enveloped her. How strange it was that, from inside the building, she could hear birds twittering, and so close to the city.
Outside the window, it was raining but sunny. The sunlight seemed to coat the rain and it looked like snow. A social worker came in, offering counselling. Brigitte held up her hand. She wanted to watch the rain a while longer.
***
Ryan had been moved to a ward. He was sitting up in bed, his face almost as white as the pillowcase, his eyes distant. Next to a water jug and box of tissues on the bedside table sat a gift-box arrangement of purple and cream flowers: Love from Mum was written on the card.
The calmness Brigitte had felt in Papa’s room was replaced by anger — irrational, and directed mainly inward for not feeling more empathy towards her brother. He’d been there for her when the roles had been reversed after her ‘breakdown’. Still, she wanted to slap him, yell that he was forty years old — too fucking old for this kind of selfish shit. And he should have been by her side with Papa. She unclenched her fists, smoothed her shirt, sat beside his bed, and asked how he was feeling.
His voice was croaky as he apologised.
She poured him a cup of water. The need for sleep was in the stiffness of her shoulders and in the twitch of an eyelid.
‘Rosie left. Took Georgia,’ Ryan said.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Said I was a bad father.’
And did he think this was going to help! ‘You know that’s not true.’
‘It is true.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘She won’t let me see her.’
A nurse came in, took Ryan’s pulse and blood pressure, and wrote something on the chart at the end of his bed.
‘Told them I was unfit, an alcoholic.’ He started crying, and spilt water on the sheets.
Brigitte took the cup from him. ‘Told whom?’
‘She’s applied for an intervention order, Brigi.’
She passed him the box of tissues. ‘This was an accident, right?’
He shrugged. ‘I was pretty pissed.’
‘Oh my God, Ryan!’ Joan stood in the doorway, mascara smudged under her eyes. ‘How could you do this to me?’
Thank God she had a train to catch in an hour.
Brigitte left the hospital once Ryan had fallen asleep. Down on the street, with a ball of pain lodged between her chest and throat, she rang Aidan and told him Papa had died. It was peak hour and city-drivers jammed the parade. She covered an ear so she could hear him as an old W-class tram trundled past on its way to Docklands. He said he’d come down, but she convinced him she was OK.
She started walking towards the old neighbourhood.
17
Much had changed in Brunswick Street, and much looked the same. A St Patrick’s Day reveller was vomiting against the tiled wall outside the pub on the corner of Gertrude Street. His gaggle of mates staggered ahead, in search of the next Irish pub. Brigitte had lost track of the dates. She liked to dress the kids in green, and book a babysitter if Aidan wasn’t working, so they could go out drinking khaki-coloured beer. It was the one time of the year he acted more Irish than Italian.
She dodged a woman in a vintage polka-dot dress stepping out of the organic-pizza shop, tattoos down both her legs and up her neck. The pizza shop had once been the tattoo parlour below Matt’s old place. She looked up, half-expecting to see Matt, or at least a memory standing at the window. Just beige blinds and a crocheted granny-square rug.
Letting you go was the biggest mistake of my life. She hailed a taxi, and asked the driver to pull into the next bottle shop.
Kerry’s house was filled with cold and the vague smell of dampness and mould. And emptiness. Brigitte poured some wine and got the old heater and the new Nick Cave CD going.
She heard ‘Kiss You All Over’ and rushed to the kitchen, trying not to spill her wine. She couldn’t find her phone in her bag. She upended it, and the contents spilled onto the table: purse, bills, pens, mints, water bottle, Dead in the Water, and her phone — on its last bump �
��n’ grind. Aidan.
‘Sounds quiet there,’ she said. A Wiggles Band-Aid was stuck to the book cover. ‘Kids in bed?’
‘Almost.’ A kookaburra laughed in the background. ‘Seen the news?’
Did he think she’d had time to sit around watching TV?
‘You all right?’
She swallowed some wine. ‘Funeral guy’s coming over at 10.30 in the morning.’
‘I’ll be there by 10. How’s Ryan?’
‘OK, I think.’
‘Good. Try to get some sleep.’
She was staring at the book, the lonely fishing boat drifting on the illustrated lake.
‘Brig?’
‘Yep.’ She ripped the Band-Aid off the cover. ‘Good night.’ She hung up.
He hadn’t even asked about Papa! She finished her glass of wine, and poured another.
The sounds of traffic sloshing through the rain and a distant siren wailing mingled with that of next-door’s cutlery clashing. She wiped her palms on her jeans before opening the book. She mouthed Matt’s words as she read them again, tracing a fingertip over his neat, old-fashioned cursive handwriting.
She closed the book, opened it, drank more wine, turned another page. It was dedicated to Ethan. His son? No wife or family, aside from his father, were thanked in the acknowledgements at the back. A few women were mentioned, and she wondered who they were. Who had shared his life? The author bio didn’t give much away: Matt Elery is a Melbourne-based author. He has worked as a writing tutor, journalist, copywriter, editor, and restaurant reviewer. Dead in the Water is the fifth book in the Detective Robert Moore series (no wonder the character’s name had sounded familiar).
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