‘At least eight Iraqis have died in another series of attacks,’ a woman’s voice is saying. There is the usual cluster of men around a molten black car. ‘It’s ordinary Iraqis like these,’ the voice goes on. Tony stares at the screen, trying to picture the reporter. He knows it’s not her, not Mandy Connolly—the voice is younger, sharper—but still he needs to be sure. On the screen some of the men squat, some stand, in the dusty air, wearing their high-waisted trousers, the pale shirts, their beards and the headscarves. Kaffiyehs, they are called. He looked it up on the net.
Now the screen shows the reporter, talking into her mike. Tony leans forward—and he is right, it’s not her but some other younger, skinnier bird. Woman, he corrects himself in his head.
So he is right: she must be coming home. Tony takes another gulp of the beer. A weird feeling in his guts at the idea of seeing her face to face again. After all the years.
He thinks of the father, lying there with his wrecked balloon of face, all juiced up with wires and tubes and the life support. Tony talked to the mother this morning, seeing her gardening magazine. He talked to her about tomatoes, how it’s almost too late now for plants but when his are finished he’ll give her some of his seeds, and also about derris dust. He was careful not to ask her anything, but when he was hooking up another machine across the ward he heard her tell one of the nurses that ‘the girls’ were coming home.
Girls, not girl. Not the brother, not only the sister.
When he thinks she could be here, in town, even now—maybe driving out there on the highway past his gate—he has to take a big breath and then exhale again, to try to quell the nervy feeling in his guts.
He looks up at the dark bare pane of the window. It reflects only the room, the television’s changing light, the furniture. The piles of Time magazine and the newspapers, all the World News sections he has not yet read, stacked on the floor beneath the window. His mother’s hospital wheelchair and walking frame in the corner, that he’s never gotten around to taking back.
He takes another gulp of beer, tries to focus again on the television. People are running—a woman’s hooded black shape moving through the ruined street, a wail coming out of her like death. And now the camera pans back across the curved black fronds of the car’s wreckage, and underneath the reporter’s voice the men still squat or stand in the dust, their numb gazes moving from the ashen blob to stare into the camera, then back again to the car.
Tony knows their listlessness, their defeated eyes. He knows their empty, dangling hands.
CHAPTER SIX
THEIR FATHER is unrecognisable. Obscenely swollen, his face patterned with terrible strange colours. A yellow-brown stain has dried across his cheek; a splash of something that has come, possibly days ago, from his mouth. The ripening plums of his eyes are bulbous, swelling out from beneath his brow. Around his neck is a plastic and foam brace. He wears a hospital gown but it has fallen away, and his shoulder and part of his chest, sparse with grey hairs, are exposed. Despite the hair, this private, bared part of him looks chubby, girlish.
They stand by the bed in the low-lit ward. The young nurses, a woman and a man, stop their talking at the desk and watch the family across the room.
Mandy wants to take a warm cloth and wash the yellow stain away, but there is sticking plaster and threadlike tubing all over her father’s head. She holds her breath as she leans in to kiss him.
‘Hello, Dad,’ she whispers. But there’s no room, between the tubes and the plasters, for a kiss. She puts her lips to his ear instead, just beneath the wound above his temple, the bruising of its edges leaching out from beneath the dressing.
On the other side of the bed Cathy stares in shock. Chris and their mother stand too, not saying anything.
He does not open his eyes. Mandy watches his face for any tiny movement, any sign he is aware of her, of any of them. Of touch, or sound. But there is nothing, except the quiet drone of the ventilator, forcing the breath in, then out. His chest rises and falls in a perfect, inhuman rhythm.
The tubes are everywhere. One—a thick, short concertina like the coil that used to hang from Margaret’s old hairdryer with the shower-cap attachment—is plastered down over his forehead with tape. At this tube’s end another sticking plaster joins it to a thinner, hard one thrust deep into his opened mouth. Into his throat. A tube snakes into his nostril too. Sacs and bottles of liquid hang from the drip stand.
Geoff’s face, beneath his closed swollen eyes, is grizzled with uneven grey stubble. Mandy has almost never, except perhaps for meeting in an occasional night-time stumble to the bathroom as a child, seen her father unshaven.
Noises come from everywhere, nowhere. Not just beeps, but little trills, musical seesaws, as if the hospital is in fact full of birds: tiny, wheezing, beeping, mechanical birds.
On Geoff’s right index finger is a grey rubber clamp; a thick, square thimble. His visible hand—the other is somewhere beneath the sheet—seems too large, and terribly white.
‘What’s that for?’ says Chris, pointing to the end of the bed, where a flat computer screen is connected to a long, flexible metal coil curling down from the ceiling. Beneath it is a tall table with a keyboard, and a black leather stool on a wheeled stainless-steel stalk.
Margaret looks up. ‘It’s new. Everything’s new.’ She casts a glance around at the seven other beds, each with its suspended computer, then at the central desk and its small bank of phones and computers. ‘We’re very lucky,’ she says glumly.
Mandy sits down in the mauve vinyl chair, and puts a hand through the bed’s safety bars to rest on Geoff’s blanketed leg. It seems the only part of him unmonitored, the only part perhaps undamaged. She does not want to lift the blankets to see if this is true.
She bites the inside of her cheek. ‘He should be in Sydney,’ she says. ‘At a proper hospital.’
Nobody answers. Chris and Cathy and Margaret glance at one another, then back at Geoff.
On his chest are several small white adhesive plaster disks, each with a metal nipple in the middle, and coming from each nipple is a plastic-coated wire, flowing down over the bed to somewhere behind it, then to a bank of power points and computerised boxes.
A squat young man, the nurse, appears at the end of the bed and sits on the stool at the computer. His name is Nathan. He taps with two fingers at the keyboard, then peers up at the screen, troubled. Then he grins at them.
‘We dunno how to work all this stuff yet,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Back in a tick.’
He saunters off to the desk to talk to the other nurse again, resting his elbows on the high bench with his chin in his hands as they chat quietly about their weekend plans. Nathan’s going pig-shooting.
* * *
OUTSIDE THE hospital entrance, in the car park, the sky is dark, the air still warm.
Chris says, ‘Are you okay?’
Mandy nods, her mouth closed. She juts her jaw, moving it slowly from side to side, standing with her arms folded across her body.
‘Are you sure?’ Chris’s face is pale, stricken. ‘He looks so terrible.’
‘Mmm.’
It is all she can say. She swallows, looking down at the cement paving. She rubs the toe of her shoe, in a slow circular motion, over a spot on the paving. They stand apart from each other, in the fluorescent twilight of the entranceway. Chris steps to her, puts his arms around her shoulders. Mandy doesn’t move, just stands stiffly in his embrace, her face turned so her cheek meets the dry fabric of his t-shirt and the warmth of his chest. She can hear a skateboard from a distance, growing louder and louder as it approaches, scraping the concrete path, gathering speed. The first time back from Bosnia when she’d heard this scouring of the air, her skin had gone instantly cold and she’d jerked wildly, looking for fighter planes. Now she only tells herself, Breathe, and waits for the crescendo of sound just beyond the hospital’s hedge. Then it curves away down the hill.
* * *
ON THE way home they stop o
utside Liquorland, the only brightly lit shop in the main street apart from the supermarket. Mandy says, ‘I’ll get it,’ and strides through the shop to the wall of fridges, yanks open a door and pulls down three bottles of white wine. She is the only customer.
The young woman behind the counter has a broad, open red face and light-brown hair pushed back behind her ears. She grins expectantly as Mandy moves to the counter. Mandy has two fifty-dollar notes ready in her hand, but the girl takes the bottles from Mandy slowly, still grinning widely, as if accepting a surprise gift.
‘Looks like someone’s having a party!’ she cries cheerfully as she takes the bottles.
Mandy shakes her head with a grimace and says, ‘Not really.’
The girl stands the bottles in a row on the counter and then picks one up in both hands, peering first at the price sticker, then twisting it around to read the label.
‘CAPEL VALE,’ she reads slowly in her flat, high voice, her brow furrowed. She looks up, beaming at Mandy who simply stares back, proffering the notes.
But the girl is still holding the bottle up, looking at the label. She cocks her head. ‘Is this nice?’
Mandy shrugs. ‘Think so.’ She doesn’t bother to return the girl’s smile.
But the girl grins again, knowingly this time. ‘It should be, at that price!’ She puts the bottle down on the counter, but makes no move towards the till, or to take the money. Instead she shifts her weight, ready for a conversation. ‘I’m new,’ she says. She is oblivious to Mandy’s expressionless face, to her fingernail now lightly tapping the counter.
‘It’s just good to know what’s nice,’ the girl chatters on, ‘’cos sometimes customers ask me.’ She grins again. ‘I don’t drink wine. Don’t like the taste.’
She looks back at the label. ‘Sauvignon blanc,’ she reads aloud, sounding out the words phonetically. Then she smiles again. ‘That’s probly not how you say it!’ She laughs, finally picking up the scanner and aiming it at the bottle’s label. There’s no embarrassment in her laughter; it’s convivial, confident.
Mandy feels herself drawing back, but forces a tight smile as the girl finally takes the money and fusses at the till, then tips the change into Mandy’s open hand. Then the girl drags each bottle towards her belly, bending awkwardly to slither one, then the second and third, into separate paper bags. Then she stretches out her arms to carefully gather the three bottles together into a neat triangle. Then she bends beneath the counter to begin searching for a plastic bag.
‘Don’t worry about that.’ Mandy snatches up the bottles with a loud clunking sound. ‘Thanks,’ she grunts, and stalks off toward the glass doors and the headlights of the waiting car. She slumps in beside her mother on the back seat, heaves the bottles into the space between them and slams the door, muttering, ‘Jesus, could she have been any slower.’
Nobody answers. As the car moves away, Margaret looks past Mandy through the window, sending a glance of sympathy to the girl at the counter, still staring after Mandy through the glass doors, bewildered.
BACK AT the house, Mandy fills wine glasses and, clutching her own, walks down the hallway to her room. While Margaret gets the dinner ready, the children drift between their rooms, unpacking, emerging now and then clutching something—a small tissue-wrapped present for Margaret from a Baghdad market, or a tube of toothpaste, a book—and then returning to rummage in suitcases and bags.
Chris leans in the doorway, watching Mandy pull the scarves and long-sleeved shirts, the loose, pastel-coloured cotton trousers and veils from her suitcase, then roll them into a ball and toss them to the floor of the open wardrobe.
He remembers her packing these strange clothes into her bag the first time she left for the Middle East, along with a pile of compact discs and DVDs. He had picked up the DVDs one by one. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Kath & Kim, Little Britain, Seinfeld, Shaun of the Dead. But also Full Metal Jacket; the Rambo series; Black Hawk Down.
‘Who’s this crap for?’ he’d said, flipping through them.
Mandy had been sorting through collections of other stuff on the bed. An old CD walkman, an MP3 player, boxes of tampons and a large mound of packets from the pharmacy: Panadol, amoxycillin, Xanax, Imodium, Sinutab, Berocca, multivitamins, Canesten, insect repellent, cold sore ointment.
‘The reporters,’ she’d said. ‘They love all that shit.’
She would be joining the journalists and assorted stray people living in the Al Hamra hotel in Baghdad. Chris tried to picture her there.
‘Do you have your own room?’ he’d asked, trying to keep his voice light. Mandy had only laughed, not looking at him.
‘Of course I do. Christ,’ she’d said. And she had gone on shoving the boxes of medication into a plastic bag.
Now, here in the doorway, Chris shifts his weight and Mandy glances up. They smile briefly, politely.
Last night, as Chris lay alone in his—their—wide bed in Rose Bay, he’d stared up into the dark and tried to recall how long it had been since he and Mandy had had sex. Istanbul, maybe, when they had met there for her birthday. A long time ago. He imagined her there at home in the bed with him, imagined getting hard, climbing on top of her, pushing his way in. She would close her arms and legs around him and pull him inside, slick and satiny; he would feel the tough skin of her heels on his back. But the thought was only theoretical, and he did not get hard.
Sometimes, when she is far away from him, his wife takes tranquillisers in a Baghdad hotel, gets drunk and watches Full Metal Jacket with strangers. With men.
Chris turns toward the cupboard, sweeping the wire coat hangers to one end of the dark space, remembering the way that she had scowled at this double bed when they arrived today. He imagines sex again with her now, here on the bed. Their bodies, the slithering bedspread.
But once again, it is like thinking about being someone else.
THEY EAT in the dining room, and Margaret reports on the scans, the procedures, the doctors.
‘They have to do something to him, all the time,’ she says in a small voice, pinching some bread crumbs into a little pile on her side plate.
Chris says quietly, ‘Oh Marg—’ but she interrupts.
‘They have to do a sort of draining thing. From his lungs. They push a tube down . . .’ She trails off, blinking fast. ‘I don’t want any of you to watch it.’
Now that she has something authoritative to say, her voice loses its waver.
‘If they do it, you must just stand outside the curtain—they prefer it, actually—until they’re done,’ she finishes firmly. The horror of that first time she watched Geoff in the dreadful soundless convulsion; one nurse cradling his head and shoulders, bracing him, while the other grasped the thin tube with both strong hands, pushing it down inside the thicker tube already in place in his throat. The nurse had had to work hard, leaning in, using her body weight and the strength of both shoulders to force the tube down, a little at a time. And with each push, Geoff’s slumped body, jerking and jolting as if in a terrible gasping or coughing or vomiting fit—but not a sound. Not a sound, or a breath, escaping his colourless lips.
She looks down at the dog, who has been swaggling around the table, nosing for scraps. Margaret seems suddenly cheered.
‘Leia bit Nola Gardiner’s granddaughter at tennis.’
‘Jesus, Mum!’ says Cathy.
The little toddler had waddled over to the seats which Leia was lying beneath, and before anyone could stop her, had put out her pudgy fingers and clamped hold of Leia’s snout.
‘The screams were unbelievable. Bloodcurdling,’ says Margaret, distractedly. There had been blood, she said, but only a little bit.
‘Oh my God,’ says Chris.
‘It was only a tiny nip!’ Margaret protests.
Mandy says, ‘Mum, dogs get put down for that!’
‘But Nola should have been watching her!’ Margaret stares around at them, shaking her head. ‘So anyway, I don’t take her anymore. But they shouldn’t be b
ringing little children to tennis anyway, it’s not safe.’
Cathy sniggers softly. ‘Not with Leia around.’
Margaret bristles. ‘Not anyway. There’s rusty wire and all kinds of things.’
It had been melodramatic of Nola, rushing off to hospital when a Bandaid would have done; but of course, once there, it had to be tetanus shots and dressings and God knew what else. And then Leia had slunk around the courts, in and out of the bench seats so Margaret couldn’t catch her until after everyone had left.
Chris leans down to stroke Leia’s glossy black back, fat as a slug. ‘Naughty Leia.’ He whacks her a couple of times on the rump, making her jiggle with pleasure.
‘Well, I’m not taking her anywhere, after last time,’ he says.
Cathy and Margaret begin to smile, wine glasses raised to their lips.
‘It wasn’t very funny,’ says Chris, but he too is smirking. Then he suddenly makes a wild scrabbling motion in the air before him with both hands, and Cathy bangs down her glass and clamps two hands over her mouth to stop her wine from spurting. They all turn to Mandy.
‘Last time we came up,’ Chris says, as Margaret and Cathy, who has swallowed now, struggle to hold back their laughter, ‘there was a huge storm.’
Margaret butts in. ‘She hates thunder,’ and makes a sympathetic face at Leia.
The dog has always been terrified of thunder; for her whole life the family has had to shut her, shaking and cowering, in the bathroom whenever a storm approaches.
‘I took her for a walk to the video shop,’ says Chris. The others begin chortling, all telling Mandy the tale but watching each other as they speak, interrupting, talking over one another. How Leia had been waiting on the footpath outside the shop when a huge thunder clap struck, how she bolted in through the automatic doors and began streaking about the store, howling.
The Children Page 4