Honk If You Are Jesus

by Peter Goldsworthy

  I also felt oddly proud, as though I had somehow shared in the scientific triumph, was actually part of the team. And perhaps I was, loosely speaking: is it too pompous to claim that those squat, waddling birds represented a human enterprise that we were all part of?

  8

  I felt more friendly towards Pfitzner as he farewelled me in the Departure Lounge at Coolangatta. Even the fawning smile no longer grated.

  ‘I’m only sorry that Hollis Schultz was unable to welcome you personally — Professor.’

  The title seemed a better fit each time I heard it, like a pair of stiff new shoes that needed wearing in.

  ‘He is a very impressive man. But of course you know that from his television programmes.’

  ‘I’m more acquainted with the newspaper headlines.’

  He flashed another smile from his repertoire: a smile with perhaps a tinge of warning for the first time that there might be limits: ‘You can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.’

  I trumped his cliche with another: ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire.’

  He handed my ticket to a stewardess; he might have been a parent handing over the care of an infant child. A gate swung shut between us.

  ‘We’ll all pray for the Lord to guide your decision,’ he said.

  I could detect no irony. I turned back, and managed a teasing, parting shot: ‘I thought you said it was up to me.’

  I slept for a time on the plane, woken mid-flight by a headache, and fresh doubts. The dodo was forgotten, the wine had leached from my system, normal programming had been restored. That promised Chair of Reproductive Medicine seemed too magical — an offer pulled out of a hat.

  I don’t believe in magic. I don’t trust it; I never have. I still remember a famous disgrace as a girl, at a classmate’s party. A magician had been hired for the day; as he stood before the assembled girls, conjuring scarves from sleeves, vanishing and unvanishing pingpong balls, I jumped to my feet and began to heckle: ‘That’s not real magic. I know how that’s done.’

  Six years old? Seven? I could have been any age. Nothing changed in the years that followed — unless it was for the worse. Some deep core of suspicion in me insisted on looking every gift horse in the mouth, microscopically.

  Especially that Chair in Queensland. I needed it; I needed to escape. I had grown far too weary of the world; or not so much weary of the world as weary of the people who lived in it, the people who contaminated it: that race of people who clog waiting rooms with endless shopping-lists of complaints. Is this the reason I prefer the operating theatre to the consulting room? Asleep, they can’t answer back, can’t plague me with their endless problems. A career in anaesthetics might have suited me better — as a student, I considered it. Or in pathology: even better dead, than asleep. The happiest time of my medical life was spent as an intern, working in the emergency wards. Here was a world akin to the speed-and-accuracy tests of school arithmetic — a world I excelled in. Problem, decision. Right, wrong. No grey areas, no uncertainties. Patients died, or they survived — in the various compasses of that word — and moved on into other areas of the hospital, into (most important, this) the care of others.

  Of course I ended up in research for the same reason: I came to prefer the company of human eggs to human beings.

  And still I could not make up my mind to take the job. As I flew back to Adelaide, returning to my xeroxed life, I remembered a story from childhood: a favourite story from a favourite book, an ancient volume of the Arabian Nights, its pages thick as cardboard. A genie, corked inside a bottle, is tossed into the sea. At the end of his first year on the ocean floor the genie vows to shower whoever releases him with rubies and diamonds. At the end of the second year, with gold and silver …

  At the end of the seventh year the genie vows to kill whoever sets him free.

  I couldn’t understand the story as a girl. Not remotely. Kill someone who set you free? And yet the story fascinated me, I read it night after night, I studied it; its absurdity itched at me for years, speaking to deeper parts, some deep, dark kernel.

  As I flew home from Queensland, corked inside an Ansett Airbus, I understood that bitter kernel for the first time. I sat hunched at the window, my nose pressed to the perspex. Night had fallen; the aircraft floated high above a soft dream landscape, a quilt of snowy cloud, moon-silvered, endless. These things, at least, still reached me, still had the power to touch my tired heart: inhuman things, landscapes uninfected by people. Midway through the flight, dinner was served; I leant back in my seat and the cloudscape outside vanished, the lit interior of the plane appeared in the glass, reflected. I was back in the world of people, the world of me. A pair of spectacles — mine — glinted back at me from the window; the small mouth beneath (downturned at the ends, determined, prim, sour) seemed incapable of even a smile of recognition.

  Why had I been so difficult in Queensland, played so hard to get? Here was a far happier ending from the Arabian Nights; a genie called Hollis Schultz had offered to grant the only three wishes I would ever want: a personal Chair, a handpicked team, a free hand. And yet some part of me had been tempted — was still tempted, flying home — to throw that job offer back in his face.

  A dark, tightly-stoppered part inside me wanted to shout: ‘Too little, too late!’

  9

  The phone woke me at three that night: woke me, as always, clairvoyantly, a split second before it began to ring. Years of on-call duty seem to nurture this ability: the brain learns some trick of premonition, picks up the incoming signals before they arrive.

  ‘Dr Fox? It’s Jill Ward. From the Assault Clinic.’

  ‘It’s not my night, Jill.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry to wake you.’

  ‘Whose night is it? Have you checked the Duty Roster?’

  ‘Jenny Crane. But her son is ill. She’s been up with him all night. She wondered if you could cover.’

  ‘You want me to come in?’

  ‘Could you? The police just rang. They’re bringing a girl in. Pack-rape. Shall I send a taxi?’

  ‘I’ll drive.’

  The girl was fourteen. I had met her many times before in the smallest hours of many other nights — or if not her, her clones. Black jeans bought several sizes ago; a single small tattoo on the cheek or shoulder; crude eye-liner ruined by tears.

  ‘All the other boys in the car seemed so nice,’ she said, sniffling.

  Or if not those words, something similar: something I had also heard too many times before. Over the years, these stories had ground me down. I sought escape in the paperwork: precise measurements of the bruises, exact descriptions of the torn tissues, the ticking of small, neat boxes in neat, square case-folders. There was escape, also, in the finicky gathering of forensic specimens: driplets of semen, fingernail scratchings, tiny bloodstains, cloth-fibres.

  ‘Will this hurt?’

  ‘I’ll try to be gentle.’

  ‘Bobby — he was driving — he promised to pay for my leg wax. Do you think he will now? I don’t suppose he will, do you think?’

  I had heard more stupid stories on the Assault Roster. I had seen far younger girls in far worse shape. But suddenly it was too much. The cunning and cruelty of men, the boundless delusions of women: I was sick of them. Both their houses. I realised suddenly — with a slight shock, like the startled shock of waking when you are overtired — that it was a long time, too long, since I had felt sympathy for any of these victims, even the most tortured. My heart had shrunk to a tight fist; whatever sympathy it still contained was reserved for myself.

  In that moment I made my decision.

  The eastern sky was filling with light as I drove home: the hills a dark knife-edge above the city, backlit, sharply defined. My future seemed as clearly defined; I felt relaxed, my mind cleaned of debris. At home my mother was awake and fussing in the kitchen.

  ‘How was Queensland, dear?’

  I stood above her like a gangling cuckoo: ‘Fine.
’

  ‘The strangest thing happened. Someone rang from the hospital yesterday. While you were away. A Dr Hemmings?’

  ‘Henning. Max Henning.’

  ‘He didn’t seem to know that you went to Queensland for the day. He seemed to think you were home ill.’

  She didn’t pursue the theme, although years of city living had sharpened her country-girl senses; she had developed a nose for the lie.

  ‘I’ve done some handwashing. And ironed you a blouse. I didn’t think you would have time.’

  ‘What would I do without you?’

  She glanced at me, suspecting sarcasm. I poured out a bowl of muesli, wondering how to tell her the truth.

  ‘I’ve resigned my job,’ I finally said, bluntly. ‘I think we’d better talk.’

  She said very little as I talked; sat and sipped and listened for the most part. She was welcome to join me, I said. In fact I said more than this; forced myself to say many things I didn’t mean. That she was a great help to me. That I would miss her if she remained in Adelaide. We both knew this to be a code: a language in which the forms of politeness meant their exact opposites. The fact that such things had to be said at all meant that they were lies.

  ‘Well, if you’ve already made up your mind,’ she finally said, trying for an injured tone of voice, but in fact revealing only that she also had made up her mind, and wasn’t prepared to argue too strenuously.

  ‘I’d like to keep my room. Things may not work out. And I’ll be back for holidays.’

  She smiled, as relieved to be free of me, I suspect, as I was of her. I smiled back, feeling a small, genuine tenderness for her: this ageing, ‘compact’ woman so disappointed in her changeling daughter. Not even a Nobel Prize for Medicine could have have redeemed my unmarried and childless state, or the fact that I was Not Like Other Little Girls.

  ‘That’s that then,’ she said, briskly. ‘I won’t stand in your way.’

  I knew that she would never abandon her friends, her golf, her church, for a second time; I knew therefore that it was safe to press.

  ‘Come with me to Queensland,’ I urged, again. ‘If not now, later.’

  She shook her head: ‘Good luck, Mara. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.’

  PART

  TWO

  1

  The residential terraces at Schultz University are arranged in tiers, ascending one side of the shallow valley rice-paddy fashion; those few department heads who chose to live on campus — me among them — inhabited the topmost tier, most distant from the lake.

  Even higher, on the valley rim, is a vast Spanish-style villa, surrounded by high stucco walls: the ‘White House’, Queensland home of Dr Hollis Schultz.

  My apartment was fully furnished; the possessions I chose to bring with me from the south were scanty: books, for the most part. And clothes: my various xerox copies of The Uniform. Tad arrived a week after me; a container-load of his favourite Beautiful Objects arrived the day after that; we spent a weekend arranging and rearranging his furnishings.

  Did the neighbours imagine us to be husband and wife? Perhaps in some senses, unintelligible to them, we were. I had often dreamt, vaguely, of having a ‘wife’; envious of male colleagues who arrived home at day’s end to find food on tables, clothes washed and pressed; who were able, in short, to concentrate totally on their work. Men whose achievements match mine always seem backed by these vast domestic life-support systems, with wifely love and devotion as perhaps the most nourishing part of the package.

  My mother’s move to the city had solved none of these problems. Love, especially, had been no more plentiful in our new house than it had been in my childhood.

  Tad met one of the criteria for the role of Wife: he was a fine cook. He was also the world’s worst housekeeper, entirely happy to prepare and eat exquisite meals in filthy surrounds. And so once again I found myself taking part in the Modern Women’s Pentathlon: Washing, Ironing, Shopping, Cleaning — and Career. At least I had company. Tad followed me about on my odd cleaning binges like some kind of useless caddy, handing over implements as I needed them: mop, bucket, featherduster, broom. Three-iron.

  There was ample time for housework. Teaching duties through those first months in Queensland were near zero; the handful of First and Second Year students enrolled in the Hollis Schultz Medical School — last preference on their list, surely — had not yet reached the clinical years of study.

  As for the hospital work: easily delegated. I was top hen in the pecking order; on the fifth floor — The Department of Reproductive Medicine — my word was law. In fact the work was mostly gynaecology. Blue-rinse gynaecology, post-menopausal gynaecology: prolapses, adhesions, messy bleedings, the standard tumours of the aged. I kept my distance. I was closing fast on that age myself; a few years at most from The Change. I could do without reminders of the lot of the Crone. I kept my hand in when needed, surgically: the occasional hormone-secreting tumour or teratoma — rare, beautiful cancers, these — were still worth a visit to theatre. The stodge-work I left to the interns. Keeping the widows alive and happy, the donations flowing in, a cynic might have called it — and I suppose I just have.

  Obstetrics? There were women of child-bearing age on the Gold Coast: the occasional blonde-rinse or brunette could be spotted among the blue. Their pregnancies were largely in private hands: local midwives and specialists. These practitioners formed my own immediate catchment area. From their various practices, and from the wealthy Asian rim — Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan — enquiries from infertile couples began to trickle in: the test-tube candidates, the contestants for the egg-and-sperm race.

  Tad’s phrase — a favourite.

  Of course that race had been won long ago, elsewhere. My aim was to refine the process, to improve success rates. In Adelaide we had been proud of our fifteen per cent, among the best in the world, but nowhere near high enough to guarantee continuing commitments in a world of shrinking funds.

  As for anti-obstetrics: no scrapes were performed at Schultz. This was spelt out to me early: the sin of abortion was forbidden by Hollis Schultz himself, on behalf of God Almighty.

  These, also, I didn’t miss. To repeat: I’m not opposed, on principle. I’ve done my quota, served my time. I can scrape out a twelve-week embryo as freely and guiltlessly as I scribble the ugly word here, on this page: scrape.

  I simply had better things to do. The promised endoscope was waiting when I arrived: state of the art flexible fibre-optics. The instrument-tip was barely a millimetre across: fine enough to thread through any human orifice, and into the most complicated anatomical maze. An expensive precision toy — quarter of a million dollars, and insurance premiums to match — but worth every cent. I spent the first months at Schultz playing endlessly: guiding that luminous pin-head into largely unexplored areas, the innermost cavities of the body.

  Sometimes even my own body. Often my own body.

  At times it was easier to use the thing on myself: a matter of locking the office door and switching on the power. No volunteers to persuade or bribe, no theatres to book, no consent forms to be signed, in triplicate

  And no danger of being sued if something went wrong; if the tip of the instrument nudged a blood vessel, bruised a nerve, perforated a viscus.

  Again, I feel no shame in setting down these facts: no more certainly in writing about it than I felt at the time in actually doing it. Twenty years of medical practice had long sealed off the normal avenues for shame.

  Steering the instrument through my own innards was difficult at first — a little like writing in a mirror — but I soon learnt the knack. Once the cervix was breached it was mostly hands-off: a television screen and a clutch of simple steering controls. By mid-year I had caught the process of ovulation on film: the actual eruption of eggs from ovaries — my eggs among them, my ovaries. Using a suction tip in parallel with the scope I was even able, although not reliably, to harvest my own ova.

  There can nev
er be enough human roe in an embryology laboratory.

  A confession: it was oddly reassuring — even for me, an unmarried nullipara, verging on menopause, not interested in having children — to see that eggs were being produced, that the potential, at least, was there. That I was — inescapably — woman.

  By July several dozen eggs were stored in Tad’s freezer in the Embrology Lab: mine and others. By September I had photographed a human ovum (mine, again) being beaten down its long salpingeal tunnel towards the womb. I would have liked to capture this on video; stills did not quite do the process justice. There was something driven about it, something harassed, almost panicky in the movement of that tiny egg-bubble: flushed by waves of cilia like a tigress through long grass.

  By Christmas I had photographed fusion: the point of impact, tadpole and egg (not mine!).

  All of which — I admit — was mostly icing. PR fun and games. Glossy portraits for the journals. My real intention was to become so adept with the instrument that I could plant an egg wherever I wanted; for that matter fertilise an egg wherever I wanted.

  And keep an eye on the growing blastocoele for the first crucial days thereafter.

  Tad spent those first months playing in his own lab (the Embryology Labs with a variety of lasers, teaching himself new techniques of cell manipulation: methods of handling an individual cell, of turning it this way or that, with a focused beam of laser light.

  Weekends were difficult. New patterns of living were forcing themselves on me; I was attempting to make sense of the strange notion of leisure. In this I was usually alone: each Friday night Tad vanished by bus in the direction of Brisbane, in search of various pleasures that only the larger, darker city could offer.

  The Gold Coast was a little too clean for him, he complained. Too much the artificial, created city. Too new. There were no dark corners, no alleys — no opportunites for any kind of reasonable evil. Rarely he returned on the Saturday, more often late on Sunday, too exhausted to cook. He had never learnt to drive; the prospect terrified him. On Sunday nights I chauffeured him into Surfers Paradise for a meal: mostly Japanese, his preferred cuisine. His weekends of adventures in the bigger city were never mentioned; nor was our work together. He preferred to swap gossip over food than talk shop; when pressed on the progress of his work he invariably steered the conversation elsewhere.