Anticipation

by Tanya Moir

  We went back to his place after last bell, and whatever it was Greg was looking for, I must have been a good enough fit, because the next day he called. That was that. We ran due diligence for a year or so, but the deal was done. No more distractions. We were on a fast track to Invercargill and the real stuff of life, the acquisition of cars and house, dining tables and matching chairs, throw pillows and rugs and duvet sets, all the things that make a home.

  I’m not complaining. I love soft furnishings. And I’m good at making money. It’s my forte, really — my three-hundred-year-old gift, the other side of the Hardynge coin. There was a time, during my first few years in Auckland, when I made it in my sleep. Mind you, so did everyone, back then. The city made it for us. We sold, and bought, bought and sold. We went to bed rich, and woke up richer. The CBD climbing skywards, a little bigger, brighter, taller, every day.

  But even in Invercargill, even in the down years, I was doing okay. By the time Greg and I built the house in Otatara, I was doing quite well, you might say. I did more than pick out carpet and drapes. At least half the Central Otago schist in the feature fireplace was mine. More than half, maybe, if we were counting. Which we weren’t, apparently.

  The house wasn’t huge — it didn’t have pillars or Scarlett O’Hara stairs — but it did have more space than we needed, Greg and I. Four bedrooms, two baths. I insisted on that.

  ‘It has to be a family home,’ I explained to Greg. ‘We need to plan ahead. Think about resale.’

  Of course, making money takes time. In the car, on the phone, in and out of the office nine to five. And the golden hours, evenings and weekends, those times when couples sit down together and talk. So, honey, what do you think? Do you really like it? I do, do you? How much shall we offer?

  So I can’t blame Greg for finding other things to do. The indoor cricket. The golf. Even — God help me — the Rotary Club. Even Cheryl, in the end.

  I remember a night, after cricket, when I watched him stand at our new granite bench, making toast and eating it straight off the breadboard, and he told me — in a casual way, just the odd glance over his shoulder — about Ross from the team who always went home to a plate waiting in the oven. Meat and three veg. Every night. And I laughed. We both did, I think. Because it was a joke, right? Such aproned, suburban love. What kind of man would want that?

  Of course, Greg was busy too. He was clocking up the minutes, coaxing them into hours. And it wasn’t his fault, as he liked to point out, that his schedule was less flexible than mine. That he couldn’t just leave work early. That he had a Rotary meeting the night my phone didn’t ring, was already signed up to play golf on the Sunday my vendors called to cancel their open home. It wasn’t my fault either, of course. But maybe, looking back — if I squint just right — that’s why things turned out as they did. We didn’t synchronise, Greg and I. Not often enough, in those ten years. We didn’t make the time.

  If we’d sat down to dinner together every night, stared into each other’s eyes, then — what? Things might have been different. They would have been. That’s what I believe. We would have played out our hands in half the time, left the table before the stakes got so high, before we had a whole decade to lose. We would have got it over and done with. Shaken hands and walked away.

  No hard feelings. No Cheryl. No flames. I wouldn’t recognise a thing in the flick of Aunt May’s match. In any of it, maybe.

  As it was, there was always at least one night a week — between, say, six-thirty and ten — when I was in and Greg was out, and I had my house to myself. Other things to look into. Whisky glasses, the fire and the dead. Eddie Harding, and Lester ‘Bodge’ Bodgewick. Whoever he might be. Some nights I took him to bed with me, that tender dead boy. Wrapped him up in the bliss of my empty rooms and fresh sheets.

  One night a week. Is it really all that much time to fill? Could I not have eaten ice cream and watched Friends?

  I would have found it hard to believe, before William died, that I could see any less of my mother. Not without leaving town. But after the funeral, I managed it somehow.

  I suppose that’s why I didn’t see any early warning signs. Why the phone call I get, eight years later, catches me out. Why I fail to say and do the things I should. Sitting there, nine floors above trouble, my glass doors opened wide to the warmth of the Auckland night. Sipping chardonnay and thinking nothing could shock me about my blood. Not any more.

  ‘I’ve got ataxia,’ says Maggie, in my ear. ‘There’s something wrong with my central nervous system — the cells in my cerebellum and spinal cord are dying.’

  This isn’t speculation. There are pictures. My mother has seen her shrinking brain for herself. Things have come a long way since Nanny Biggs’ day (not to mention the days of Joshua, Babs and Ted), and in 2004, when bodies don’t do as they should, they’re run through an MRI.

  Of course, being Maggie, she had to look. That part of her isn’t dying. It’s just that she can’t walk straight any more, that her eyes twitch in the most annoying way, and sometimes she chokes on her morning coffee.

  Ataxia. Dystonia. Dysphagia.

  It’s all due, the doctors can see, to loss of neurons in her hind-brain. As for what’s killing them off — well, that’s still anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s just bad luck. All that lithium. Bad genes. A helix of cause and effect it would take more than medicine to unravel.

  If Maggie’s afraid, she doesn’t sound it. Her voice on the phone is, if anything, quite chirpy. I suppose it’s not every day you get to see inside your own head. Her brain is full of itself, fascinated by its intricacies, every detail of its failings.

  I’m starting to feel rather ill, myself. It’s all a bit dinner-party-at-Hannibal-Lecter’s — the contents of my mother’s head spilling down the line all over my parquet floor. I get up and close the doors. I’m not sure for whose sake. But I don’t want people to see this.

  There could be another reason, of course, for Maggie’s cheer. Who doesn’t like to be proved right? Turns out there really is something wrong with her. Something she can’t fix no matter how hard she tries.

  She is worried about one thing, though. The appointment the hospital is arranging for her with a specialist in Dunedin. Because how’s she going to get there? She can’t really drive any more, not far. And getting in and out of buses and taxis and planes, well, what if it’s all too much? There might be steps. What if she can’t manage?

  I still feel sick, but now I’m a bit annoyed as well. Not so much that I have to drop everything, fly down there and sort it out, but that she can’t just ask me. Janine, will you help me? Is that so hard? Yes, Mum, of course I will. Invercargill, here I come.

  Maybe I’m more than annoyed. It takes me three attempts, after she’s hung up, to get my cordless phone back in its cradle. I stare out at the park through the closed doors. It’s a lovely evening down there. The sun is just starting to set, and it’s all going soft, the writhing Moreton Bay figs and students and springy grass, the blondes in Juicy Couture and their sinning spoodles. My million-dollar view, give or take a bit of haggling. I think it might have shifted. It’s not quite where I left it an hour ago. Closer, or further away, I’m not sure, but I know the distance is wrong.

  On my way to the wine fridge, I trip over the rug and bash my shin on the coffee table. For a split second, the world goes black. I think it’s rage. As I pour, my hands are shaking. Ataxia. Dystonia. I take a decent swig. Find, thank God, I can still swallow.

  I take the bottle back to the sofa with me, and I go looking. I know I shouldn’t. No good can come of it. But I do it anyway.

  Tap tap tap. It’s so easy. Sitting there cross-legged, my bottle to hand, relishing the luxury of my freshly installed wireless modem. There’s a cold draught on the back of my neck — the air-con kicking in, no doubt. Or jealous Babs and Harry and Ted, crowding in for a closer view. Research is so exciting.

  Neurological diseases fizz off the screen. Parkinsons, MS, CJD, Multiple Systems Atrop
hy, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. Most of the symptoms fit. But I have to be strict with my curious ghosts. Inherited ataxias. The spino-cerebellar kinds. SCAs. That’s what we’re looking for tonight. And there are enough of them, it would seem, to keep all of us busy.

  It doesn’t take long to rule out types one and two — they don’t sound right.

  Type three, on the other hand — ah yes! It’s like tripping over an old friend. As soon as I find out how it works, I know I can leave SCAs four to thirteen and beyond to the sticky-scalpelled ectosphere, that I don’t need to look any further. SCA3. Machado-Joseph Disease. That’s the Hardings all over.

  It’s caused, I learn, by a faulty gene on chromosome fourteen. This particular gene, ATXN3, is in charge of building the enzyme Ataxin-3 — but it’s got hold of the wrong instructions. The pattern is simple enough. Make a C, then an A, then a G. Repeat. CAG, CAG, CAG. But someone’s forgotten to mention how many times. The gene doesn’t know when to stop. So the enzyme keeps on growing.

  This matters, because Ataxin-3 has an important job to do — not glamorous, but essential. It’s in the resource recovery game. A precision machine. It recycles rubbish markers. You see, our cells put marker tags on all the stuff they want to throw out, but economical as they are, they want the tags back — so Ataxin-3 runs ahead of the trucks, locks onto the tags and twists them off just before the rubbish goes into the dumpster. And now it’s too big. The wrong shape. It can’t get the tags off very well. Sometimes it can’t even find them. And rubbish that still has a tag, well, you know how it goes — the garbage guys can’t touch that.

  So the rubbish stays put, and it starts to pile up. And sometimes — though nobody knows exactly why — the whole environment dies. (Perhaps it’s the smell. The roaches and rats. Frustration. Maybe they run out of rubbish tags, and the universe implodes. Or the cells just give up. Is it possible to die of self-disgust? That would be a nifty mutation.)

  It takes a while, though. There’s plenty of time for ATXN3 to pass its faulty information on to the next generation. Which does the best it can to fill in the gaps, but mistakes compound. And the longer this goes on, the bigger Ataxin-3 gets, and the quicker the streets fill up, and the cells die.

  So Joshua Harding’s brain calls it quits at the respectable age of seventy-two, lucky Harry makes it to eighty-nine with nothing more than shaky hands and a tic in his eye, but Ted is bedridden at sixty-seven and Sarah can’t stand at sixty-two, and my mother — my mother is only fifty-eight years old.

  Twenty-three years older than me.

  Suddenly, twenty-three years doesn’t seem like a long time. I can feel them rising, time and acronyms lapping against my plate glass. I can feel myself going under. It’s not that I’m afraid of death — spontaneous non-existence has its charm. But this is a long ride down. Waiting for the water to find its way in. Around the sills or up through the floor. Watching it mount to ankle and knee. My chest. My chin. Unable, by then, to move at all. Wedged in by garbage. The Hardings’ genetic inability to get rid of their old rubbish.

  It’s a sobering thought. And I’m so busy with it — with Wikipedia, with my emptying bottle and sceptical ghosts — that I don’t have much time to consider what Maggie might be doing right now. What’s going through her dying mind tonight, sixteen hundred kilometres away. How quiet it is there in Bradbury Street, for my mother, alone in her bed.

  I do see Maggie. Of course I do. When I still live a fifteen-minute drive away from her, I mean. After William’s death, I pop round there every few months — when I want something, usually. One of my old books. A Swiss roll tin or a bain-marie or pickled onion forks or a clear conscience. On a winter’s day in ’96, it’s Lester Bodgewick I want. Which makes this visit tricky.

  Six months have passed since we saw them, but Grandpa William’s photographs still offend my mother — which, in its turn, still offends me. Their content, of course, is enough to upset anyone. But that isn’t Maggie’s problem.

  ‘I just don’t see,’ she’ll repeat, if I give her the chance, ‘why he had to keep it all bottled up. Why he didn’t tell anyone.’

  Of course she doesn’t. How could she, my problem-halving mother, generous to a fault with all kinds of discomfiting information?

  I know that by ‘anyone’, she really means her. And the last time we got into this, I was forced to point out — only half in spite — that he might have talked about it all the time to the blokes at the RSA. For all we knew.

  I almost hope he did.

  But for my mother, that would only make it so much worse. Because already she feels betrayed. Poor little Maggie whose real Daddy hid in a suitcase all his life and never came out to play.

  I, on the other hand, feel — what, exactly? Precious. Exalted, even. Are those the right words? Like an American TV child, or the leading lady in an old film. Casablanca, maybe. Whatever you call it, I like the view from up here, on Grandpa’s pedestal of silence.

  I won’t have Maggie run him down. I’ll be grateful enough for both of us, because, to tell the truth, I’m a little in love with William Biggs. Not that I can’t see there are things he might be blamed for. (Sarah, that forgotten heel of a stone wearing down to nothing in his pocket. Not marrying Nurse Maura, and having happy, chubby grandbabies, free of Harding blood, to gurgle in front of Dublin Bay.) But not his silence. Never for all those things he knew, and didn’t say.

  My backstage grandfather, who knew there was no magic. But still he came out and took his seat, and let us enjoy the show. And if he did spoil it for me, in the end, with his left-over suitcase of proofs, it was only by accident. He did his very best not to give the trick away. He really tried.

  My hero, William Biggs. That quarter of my blood. It’s too late, of course, to love him now. But I’m grateful — not just for his silence, but for what he wasn’t, all the things he didn’t do. For his lack of prejudice. His utter belief in the democracy of evil. (And maybe I’m wrong about Sarah. Maybe Will Biggs was the perfect man to marry a Harding, after all. What could the sins of one bloodline be to a man convinced that it’s cruelty and need, not sugars and phosphates, that form the backbone of all human DNA?)

  All of which, if I’m not careful, could take my mother and me a long way from Lester Bodgewick. Or at least that’s what I think, on a winter’s day in 1996, as I knock on Maggie’s door.

  She’s looking well. Even and neat. Though her hands shake a bit as she puts the kettle on, and when I go to the toilet, I look in the bathroom cabinet, just to see. I try to keep up. It helps to know which drugs you’re talking to, sometimes.

  ‘You know,’ I say, when I get back to the lounge, ‘I came across this thing on the internet the other day.’ Very casually, as if I hadn’t been looking. ‘About reading soldiers’ service records from World War Two. It sounded really interesting.’ I sip my coffee, nibble a gingernut. ‘I was wondering about sending away for Uncle Eddie’s.’

  Sharp-nosed Maggie rises above her chemical calm. ‘I don’t think we can do that.’

  She’s half right. I can’t. She can, though.

  ‘We should be able to,’ I say. ‘They’re released to the serviceman’s closest living relatives. That’s us, now, right? We just have to sign a form.’

  And there it is, laid out on the table between us — the real reason I’m here. I’m my mother’s daughter. Curious. And I can’t wait until Maggie dies. You see, I’m presuming, back in ’96, that it will be a long time.

  ‘It gets worse,’ I say, eight years later, to Maggie’s Dunedin specialist, ‘with every generation. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘We don’t know what type of cerebellar degeneration we’re dealing with yet,’ he admonishes me. ‘It may not be genetic.’

  Really? Just five generations of bad luck?

  ‘But yes,’ he continues, carefully, ‘I’m afraid inherited polyglutamine diseases do tend to become more severe as they’re passed down. It’s a phenomenon we call anticipation.’

  I tell him
I can wait. He doesn’t laugh. But then, maybe he’s heard that one before.

  ‘I really don’t think you should worry too much. Those diseases are very rare — SCA3 is usually only seen in people from the Azores.’ And then he makes his own little joke. ‘I take it Galbraith’s not a Portuguese name?’

  (Ah, Marialuisa. But the tests will show what they show, and the Portuguese Widow’s Dosshouse seems too long and strange a story for a sceptical man with a foot of files on his desk and his back to a harbour view.)

  He looks, as busy doctors must, at his watch. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?’

  Maggie has already gone off to wait for her blood test. I’ve a contract on a six-bed listing in Parnell due to confirm today, and I should be calling solicitors, checking clauses, making sure my new PA remembers to send flowers and champagne.

  ‘When will you get the results?’

  ‘We’ll be in touch when they come through.’

  With some difficulty I make my way out, back down to the ground, through an obstacle course of the variously ill, the lost and nervous. Students in scrubs learning that it’s harder than it sounds to do no harm. If they’re more than a year past doodling on pencil-cases, I’d be surprised. Janine 4 Greg 4 Eva. God, I hate being back down here.

  Outside, there’s a cold wind blowing up from the port. And somewhere, above the motorway noise, a bell — an actual fucking bell, for Christ’s sake — is ringing. I stand there, breathing in other people’s cigarette smoke, surrounded by concrete. My phone is in my hand, but I can’t seem to make my calls.

  Maggie and I drive home, the setting sun in our eyes. Skirting the swan-black lake in silence, breathing in as we cross the Balclutha Bridge. White-knuckled, not looking down.