Of course I would have cheerfully castrated that teenage rapist, given half a chance. I stress cheerfully, not vengefully. I would have castrated him for his own good; I would have castrated him out of sympathy, out of whatever wobbly trace I had in me of this thing called love.
Or its subspecies, mother love.
9
Scanlon was away for a week: a round of Midday Shows, Late Shows, Face-to-Face Interviews and Personal Appearances in the southern capitals. Halfway through the week — a week which I wanted to set aside for collecting my thoughts, and deciding my long-term Scanlon policy — Tad summoned me to the Sixth Floor:
‘Don’t tarry. It’s eureka time, chérie.’
I found him in the Cell Lab, bent over his binocular microscope. No opera could be heard, for once he was working in silence. He beckoned urgently, keeping his eyes glued to the twin eyepieces. I sat opposite and bent to the accessory eyepiece.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Dr Hollis Schultz. Or part thereof.’
‘Which part?’
‘One gut cell.’
I stared into a round, illuminated field. Two columnar cells, mirror images, were fused at the waist by a narrowing thread of cell substance.
‘Two gut cells,’ I corrected him.
He lifted his eyes from the binoculars; I lifted mine. He shook his head from side to side, smugly, silently.
I asked the question: ‘You mean you’ve done it?’
He rotated the lenses: ‘Come up to higher magnification. Take a look at the genes.’
We bent again; there could be no mistake: each half cell contained a half set of chromosomes. Twenty-three singles.
‘How long can it survive? Any idea?’
‘A few days, with luck. I’ve frozen the division before the final tearing of the cell envelope. I’m trying a new culture medium — Scanlon suggested the mix. Something they used with the Tiger.’
‘He didn’t mention anything to me.’
‘Maybe he had other things to talk to you about.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
He laughed, teasingly: ‘Don’t be coy. I think it’s sweet.’
I interrupted: ‘I’d better ring the White House and give our esteemed leader the good news.’
Tad twiddled his lenses again: ‘I took the liberty of ringing already.’
‘When?’
He bent his face to the microscope, hiding his expression: ‘Just now.’
‘Before or after you rang me?’
‘After, of course.’
This mollified me a little, but only a little.
‘What did he say?’
‘He’s on his way over. Don’t be angry, chérie — Hollis is always up here, poking around. Can’t seem to stay away from the place.’
‘I never see him in my Department.’
‘He and Scanlon are pretty thick. Maybe it’s some American thing. They shut themselves away in Scanlon’s office for hours. I don’t know what they talk about all day … Basketball, maybe.’
Hollis Schultz arrived within minutes, with Mary-Beth in tow: beaming, offering congratulations. They both spent time peering through the microscope under Tad’s supervision.
Hollis lifted his eyes first: ‘So where to now, Mara? We can use this to fertilise Mary-Beth’s eggs?’
‘It’s not that simple. I didn’t expect your genes to be ready for months.’
He wasn’t listening: ‘We want to get this thing moving. A.s.a.p.’
Mary-Beth bent elegantly over the microscope, one hand holding back her hair. She was wearing a simple black skirt and poison-green blouse. She was wearing … Whenever Mary-Beth Schultz finds her way into these pages those words seem to write themselves. I couldn’t help but notice her clothes. And remember. I could probably describe her wardrobe on each of the dozen or so occasions I met her, at times even her complete wardrobe, underwear included. Various pastel-green, lace-trimmed things were folded neatly on a side chair later that morning as she lay on my examination table.
There was nothing much to note: normal pelvic dimensions, no organ abnormalities.
‘There is one thing that worries me, Mara,’ she said, fully clothed again. ‘One thing I want to ask.’
‘I don’t think this is the time, sweetheart,’ her husband said.
I interrupted: ‘No. Feel free to ask.’
She glanced at her husband, then spoke her mind: ‘What are the chances of some sort of birth defect?’
‘Small. But tests can be done at an early stage. If there is anything wrong …’
‘I couldn’t allow an abortion,’ Schultz interposed.
‘All this is hypothetical,’ I said. ‘There is no guarantee that we can do it. We still have to get a full half set of chromosomes out of those cells upstairs, and into your egg. If the technique works — I stress if — your main worry will be choosing the sex of your baby.’
They glanced at each other, surprised.
‘Girl,’ said Mary-Beth. ‘Girl first.’
Schultz appeared disconcerted: ‘I naturally thought — seeing you were using my cells — that the child would be a boy.’
I shook my head: ‘There has to be a choice. No way of avoiding it. You understand that each gut cell is split in two: creating, in effect, one male and one female sperm cell. One X, one Y.’
Schultz rose and walked to the window and turned, mildly agitated. I was surprised that it mattered so much to him.
‘A girl,’ Mary-Beth was saying, using a pleading, mock-little-girl tone herself. ‘Please.’
‘We’ll think about it.’
‘Please, honey.’
Schultz shrugged: ‘okay, a girl,’ he said, and his wife reached out and squeezed his hand.
10
Two observations from childhood: a cup, toppled over, always has liquid in it; a slice of bread, dropped, always lands butter-side down. The Law of Buttered Bread, my mother called it. Most know it as Murphy’s Law: if things can go wrong, they will.
There is a more interesting variant — an opposite variant. When things finally go right, they go right in a rush. They go right too often, in too great quantities.
Scanlon rang from Sydney that night with an invitation: to spend the weekend with him in the mountains. He was full of complaints. Publicity bored him. Interviewers were idiots. He planned to leave the Tiger cub with Heather Sims in Melbourne and fly back; could I meet him at the airport?
‘I need to get away from the human race,’ he said. ‘For a while.’
‘All the human race?’
He laughed: ‘One or two exceptions.’
He kissed me in the arrival lounge at Coolangatta, standing tip-toed: an affectionate, brotherly graze of lips against cheek. He was carrying a single, small overnight bag, barely big enough for a toothbrush.
‘Is that all your luggage?’
‘I was only gone a week.’
He reeked a little more than usual. There was a renewed awkwardness between us; we both seemed more comfortable retreating into the role of Professor. I drove him north towards the College, groping for conversation, unable to think of anything beyond the standard How-Was-The-Trip questions.
‘Very boring. Answering the same questions five times a day.’
‘I saw you on the Midday Show.’
‘You watched TV?’
‘It was compulsory. Alison brought in the videotape.’
‘Stop here,’ he said, suddenly. ‘We’ll need some supplies.’
‘You don’t want to go home first?’
He shook his head; I slewed the car into the kerb, climbed out and followed him into a smallish supermarket. He shopped at pace, manhandling a resistant trolley through the gleaming aisles, tossing in items of food which seemed randomly chosen: cans of soup, TV dinners, frozen pizza. I was reminded of the scholar food I had eaten in my first years alone in the city: cheap takeaways, the contents of unspeakable cans. I managed to sneak some fresh fruit into the trolley b
ehind his back, and a carton of orange juice.
‘What about a change of clothes?’ I said as we loaded the provisions into the car. ‘It’s no trouble to run you home first.’
‘We won’t need clothes.’
He said nothing again for some time; neither did I. Neither could I. The sun glared into my eyes as I steered west towards the hills; the car felt suddenly hot, or perhaps it was me. Burning thoughts, burning cheeks. I switched on the air-conditioner.
Scanlon unclicked his seat belt and reclined his seat into near-horizontal position:
‘Tired?’
‘Long week.’
I let him sleep; turning from time to time to watch him, secretly. He was not a handsome man; his charm was mostly in the clear, quick eyes. Sleeping, lids closed, life left the face, it became ordinary, inert. Just another nose and beard. But I felt a small surge of pleasure each time I turned and found him still there, sleeping: this man years younger than me, this quick mind that had chosen me.
Of course each time I looked away a deeper voice was whispering: where’s your self respect? Your dignity? How old are you? Where, above all, is this leading?
The cabin furnishings were sparse: a stained mattress on the floor, roughly folded sleeping bags, bare cupboards. We made love on the mattress as soon as we arrived. I tried — with some success — to slow Scanlon’s passion, to temper his speed with ceremony. I had read much on these matters, listened to innumerable disaster stories, counselled any number of women. Less urgency, more ritual was needed: a series of formal steps, like Japanese tea making.
I enjoyed it more than our first time. But I still wasn’t sure where the primary seat of that pleasure was: head, heart, or loins? I was still, in certain senses, a virgin.
‘Let go, Mara,’ Scanlon whispered as our sweating bodies pushed together. ‘I want you to let yourself go.’
Sound advice, perhaps — but how? Afterwards he rose abruptly and stepped outside, naked, still dripping. The sound of urine splashing among leaves came to me, then his voice: ‘Come out.’
I poked my head through the door, tentatively, covering myself in bashful-woman fashion: two protective arms at two different levels.
‘Time for a walk,’ he said.
He stood drenched in sunlight: naked, varnished with sweat, comprehensively tanned. No pale clothing-protected patches could be seen. He clearly came here every week.
‘Queensland has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world,’ I warned.
‘Then we’ll walk in the forest. In the shade.’
He reached for my hand and tugged me off the verandah into the heat of the sun: ‘Don’t be ashamed of your body. Relax.’
Rare trips to the beach as a child came back to me: my father splashing bare chested among the waves, my mother huddled on the beach, her child-ruined body swaddled in thick clothes. We urged her to join us in the water, she always refused. And I always despised her for it: how vain.
‘I think you’re beautiful,’ Scanlon said, a significant modification of his earlier compliment: meaning, roughly translated, that I wasn’t, but it didn’t matter.
In a few steps we were among trees; I felt less exposed. A few steps more and the cabin was out of sight, the entire world was green and wet and cool. Bird noises surrounded us: liquid trills, musical whistles, tuneless cackles. Huge tree ferns, moss-encrusted rocks, thick trunks hung with creepers pressed about.
‘What about snakes?’
‘I’ve never trodden on one.’
Somehow I forced a laugh: ‘Have you ever seen one?’
He smiled; I stepped gingerly after him, the small twigs and bracken sharp edged on the soft underbellies of my feet.
‘I come here to think,’ he said. ‘No — to unthink. To decontaminate my thinking.’
The rainforest closed more darkly about us, enfolding us in its green densities. The path grew easier on my bare feet as we descended: moss now, mostly, and half-slippery rocks, a well-worn track descending further into the green darkness. A small creek frothed and gurgled somewhere parallel for a time, then veered away into silence.
I watched carefully for snakes.
After some minutes a new sound could be heard: a rushing of water, faint at first, but growing with every bend in the path and every downwards step. We arrived suddenly: stepping out of the forest twilight into a dazzle of sunlight. A pool of water, perhaps thirty feet across, glittered in the light, a small waterfall cascaded from a ledge above. High creepers and tangled forest walled the grotto in on every side. The sun was directly above, its heat funnelled down between the walls of green on to us, somehow concentrated and magnified, as if through a lens of air.
‘Last one in,’ Scanlon shouted, and leapt and vanished in a cloud of spray below the surface. I removed my glasses, hung them on a stiff fern frond, and stepped cautiously down a series of slippery rock steps. The water was surprisingly cold, ice cold: I lowered my floating breasts below the surface and felt the sudden shock, the momentary paralysis of breathing muscles.
Scanlon was treading water metres off: ‘What do you think? Paradise?’
‘Near enough. But I keep wondering where the snakes are.’
‘I know where one is.’
I would have squirmed at such banalities a few days before; new rules now seemed to operate. He moved against me, I felt something bump at my thighs, hard and warm in the cold water. Lust flamed in me for the first time, an unfamiliar force, but instantly recognisable.
Later, climbing back through the forest, the faint bleating of a phone carried down to us.
Scanlon was incredulous: ‘You brought your personal?’
‘I have a patient on the backburner. I need to keep in touch.’
The phone, baked in the oven of a locked car, was too hot to handle. I knelt in the open door and bent to listen as it rested on the seat. Tad was at the other end of the line, a smirk-tinged tone of voice: ‘I hate to interrupt the honeymoon.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I have my sources. I’ve been ringing for hours.’
‘Is this a social call?’
‘Business. Your number one customer’s serum levels are on the rise.’
‘Which specimen?’
‘Midnight last night.’
A quick calculation: ‘Book a theatre for midnight tonight.’
‘Been there, done that. I’m way ahead of you, chérie.’
His self-satisfaction irked me: ‘On second thoughts change the booking to 9 p.m. I want to go earlier than usual.’
‘That’s very early.’
‘I don’t want fully ripe eggs. The fresher the better. They might not put up such a fight.’
‘They might put up more of a fight.’
‘It’s on my head. Just do it … Please.’
Scanlon was toying with his basketball on the verandah, bouncing it, spinning it on the tip of a finger. I snapped shut the phone.
‘Mary-Beth?’ he said.
I nodded: ‘Harvest time.’
He followed me inside the cabin: ‘You have to go?’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll need a few hours to prepare.’
‘Mind if I sit in?’
I pulled on my knickers: unfashionable balloons. I was still facing him, bare breasted, unabashed: ‘I’d love to have you there.’
In fact I needed him to punch entry holes in the cell membrane with his laser; I had not yet found the time to familiarise myself with his equipment. But this was not what I meant.
‘I’d love to be there,’ he said.
His words, like mine, seemed a declaration: the first time the word love had passed between us, if obliquely. But there was nothing oblique in the kiss, at least on my side. I knew exactly what I meant. I was a girl again. No, not even again. I had largely, precociously, bypassed girlhood the first time around.
11
Scanlon claimed to feel most at home, naked, in the mountains. I feel most at home in an operating theatre, thickly ro
bed. It’s a special place, subject to special laws. The lighting is artificial; no windows open to the outside world; time zones, the rhythms of night and day, spring or autumn, have no meaning. Those rhythms are left behind each time I hang my clothes in the locker room — my own decontamination chamber — and pass through, anonymously gowned and masked. The past is also left behind; the important clock — the only clock that matters now — is the wall clock that measures Time Elapsed, the distance travelled from Day One, Hour One: the beginning of each procedure. Routines are crucial: the ceremonies of washing and robing, the green vestments, the careful scrubbing, the strict taboos of touch and no-touch. The sounds are subdued, even churchy: hushed voices, the rustle of sterile cloths being laid out, the occasional jostle and clink of hard metal instruments in their proper trays. Also the regular pulse bleeps — real-time — of the heart monitors, the hiss and shoosh of the respirators. Music is heard sometimes in the background; Mozart usually, the optimal milk-giving music in dairies. Conversations take place, certainly, but I find them somehow dreamlike: the restaurant discussions, the sport chat or wine chat if more than two men are present are a kind of music themselves, belonging to the outside dream world.
The theatre was packed that night: a dozen men and women wearing identical masks and caps and gowns, scrubbed clean with the same antiseptic soaps, their individual scents washed away. Tad’s bulk was unmistakable, squatting at a gleaming side table with his microscope and centrifuge. Scanlon sat across the table. His earlier nakedness had shrunk to this: a pair of quick eyes in the narrow gap between cap and face mask.
I had nothing new to show him — to show any of them — surgically. I had been experimenting with new techniques of egg collection, attempting to use my favourite toy, the fibre-optic scope, to tap ovaries (usually my own) painlessly, via Fallopian tube. The advantage was clear: no need for the hazards of anaesthesia. No actual cutting. No bleeding. But the technique was not quite perfected: gremlins in the technical side, mainly to do with the size and flexibility of the teflon suction tubes. Which meant that Mary-Beth had no choice: I performed a standard laporoscopic egg pick up, under full anaesthesia.
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