Eye of a Rook

by Josephine Taylor

“The mood continues to turn against Mr Baker Brown,” says Tom now. “Thompson tells me, of course, but it’s also becoming public. Letters to the British Medical Journal and such.”

  “What, complaints?”

  “Objections to Brown’s self-advertising and exaggeration, his lack of … sensitivity towards … regard for female sensibilities, the reckless and unproven practices and so on.” Tom pulls on his stout, wipes the froth from his moustache. “Who knows where it will all end, unless the man can rein himself in.”

  It is strangely satisfying, Arthur finds, a daydream in which he indulges: driving to the home of Isaac Baker Brown, lifting him by his snowy shirt front, punching him in his smug, self-satisfied face. It’s a blood-heat that swarms Arthur’s body, shooting out to his limbs and bringing memory with it: the day his foot rested on the throat of Rattlin Rowlands, and the moment he was almost overcome by the blind urge to destroy the youth—this almost-man who would use his power against the defenceless. And Tom next to him, calming him.

  “Are alternatives presented? In the case of such complaints?”

  “Not yet,” says Tom. “Most are voices of caution, and reports that several patients Brown described as cured actually received no benefit from the operation. And many of the women who present at consultations have diverse maladies of mood, just as much as physical ailments. But Thompson tells me the disorder, almost exactly as Emily described it, has been isolated before. Here.” He opens his jacket, pulls a folded piece of paper from the pocket.

  Arthur squints at Tom’s scrawl, sees the inky heading, Sims 1861, and, below it, a few scribbled quotations in words that jump out at him: severe suffering, knife, for all time. He shudders as he reads out loud,

  “Notwithstanding all these outward involuntary evidences of physical suffering, she had the moral fortitude to hold herself on the couch, and implored me not to desist from my efforts if there was the least hope of finding out anything about her inexplicable condition.”

  “Poor Emily. She was so brave, and I doubted her.”

  “Well, maybe … But so did I. You made the right decision in the end, remember.”

  “But what if I hadn’t?” And with these words fear rushes at Arthur in a mighty wave, swamping his buoyant mood. If he feels this frightened, with what terror must Emily have contended? Must even now contend?

  “There’s no reason she should deteriorate.”

  “There’s no reason it should have developed in the first place. No reason about any of it that I can tell.” Arthur looks away from his friend, wondering if he can share the rest. But if not with his knowledgeable, stalwart friend, then who? “It seems selfish to talk of my doubts, when my wife has been living through hell, and when I feel that I should only present her with conviction and …” He stops.

  “What is it, Arthur?”

  He thinks, tries to shape his fears into something he can describe.

  “In some ways,” he goes on, “it was very simple when Emmie’s pain was at its worst. I needed to look after her, protect her if I could, and natural … impulses were kept in check by this concern.” He hesitates, then the questions come in fits and starts: “How do we begin—start over? How will we express this feeling, this … I mean, our love for each other?” He lowers his voice. “How can I know that my … desire—our desire, if we can ever reclaim it—will not raise the pain again? That the natural passion and vigour of love-making will not hurt her? Was he right? Baker Brown? Was it true? Will my touch, my … my attention to that part of her body—my encouragement of her attention to it—set off the problem again? Do you know? I don’t know this, Tom. I can’t!”

  Tom glances at the men playing chess at the next table. Angles his chair so its back faces them. “I feel it unlikely,” he says, his voice slow, careful, “that it will happen again in Emily’s case, if you … tell … I mean, ask her if she has physical discomfort, then—any hint of a recurrence—at that time when … you two …”

  How he wishes they could find straighter words for such conversations! More than this language that only circles the nub of the problem: its causes, its manifestations—all the untidy, troubling, battling feelings that throb at its heart.

  CHAPTER 22

  PERTH, JANUARY 2010

  The world looked tougher the further north she drove. Wilder. White limestone irrupted at the crests that bordered the black road. Wattles and banksias riddled the bush with crazy angles, branches scarred by wind and sun and salt. Blackened stumps of grass trees were a memory of fire. Soon she would come across the stand of native Christmas trees, their incandescent orange like a celebration.

  The trail was becoming familiar to her – only her, not Duncan – a weekly journey that she covered with a lie: she was going to go shopping then on to a late appointment. What did he think when she returned as stars came out, that the acupuncturist worked into Friday evening? Would he even care that when she drove out of their street she immediately turned from the nearby shops, headed north to the acupuncturist in a new ‘city’ as empty and disconcerting as a display home and then after, instead of pointing the Toyota south, swung the car onto the coastal highway and, solitary, dreamed her way to her destination?

  That place in the sun.

  She turned off the air-conditioner and opened the window, propping her elbow on the frame and diving her fingers through waves of heat.

  The first time was a whim. Leaving the appointment, altered body and mind, she’d surprised herself by turning north at the highway entrance. Four or five turn-offs to the beach passed before she’d taken a left – who knew why? – at the sign, Wrigleys Point. Now it was a weekly fixture. Sometimes she came home to dark windows and hollowness.

  She shifted her bum sideways on the worn ‘special’ cushion. This time, madly perhaps, thinking what the hell, she’d pulled bathers on under the t-shirt dress, and their grip was less friendly than the usual soft cotton undies. It would be early evening by the time she got there, but still warm enough to swim, if she dared.

  Ah, the Christmas trees. About ten minutes to the turn-off now and her bum insisting she must stand up.

  It caught at her, this secret journey, being built, as it was, upon other secrets: Arthur and Emily and Isaac Baker Brown, her covert research and writing, the attempts to understand, to work out what motivated the women who assented to that terrible mutilation, what drove the man who carried it out.

  They’d tried, she and Duncan, even if it hadn’t gone well, that last conversation in the garden, face to face. Some kind of honesty, they’d said. An attempt to understand each other properly, they’d agreed. But when he’d complained that she hid herself away these days, never showing herself to him properly, and she’d replied, What choice do I have when you don’t like what I show you? she’d known this was only a partial truth, where once it had been the whole; understood that she doubted his ability to know the compass of who she now was; realised she might not want him to try anymore.

  She braked for the turn-off. Pulled down the visor to shield her eyes from the dipping sun.

  It was only that … sometimes, when she and Duncan smiled at each other, when his hand brushed hers as they passed in their hallway, when she was reminded of what they had been to each other, she wondered if she was making a terrible mistake. It was ridiculous; she loved him. Why couldn’t she continue to show herself fully to him, make him accept who she was now, try to make him change too? Why did it have to be this way? But then a quiet voice said, no – and she was torn again, as if parts of her were travelling in opposite directions, one into the future and the other clinging on stubbornly, desperately, to her love for her husband.

  She thought she’d known everything about grief. Thought when she’d wrestled with her body over dragging, agonising months that she would never know pain like it again. And it was true that this different kind of pain, this new form of grief, didn’t threaten her very survival, didn’t make every second of her life a feat of endurance. Still, though, her chest ach
ed as if a blistering rock split within it.

  Fragments of sun hit her eyes. She pressed her towel against her face with one hand, pulled on her sunglasses. But still the tears ran and still the ache grew, saying that something inside was lost forever.

  Over the brow of the hill and Wrigleys Point laid out beneath, a little coastal town shaped by dunes and feet into a maze of narrow roads. She threaded her way through bits-and-pieces fishing shacks and brick-and-tile houses, around the occasional new-Australian monolith, blurred by her tears.

  Then, the ocean.

  A family played in the small park that overlooked the shore: a man, a woman, two little girls. Last swimmers were clearing the beach. A couple of barefoot boys dragging sandy bodyboards. A woman yelling to her Jack Russell as he bit the frothing waves in high-pitched yaps. Two teenage girls, foreheads almost meeting as they climbed the steps, shorts slung hip-high, bellies and breasts sumptuous, light and water a glistening patina.

  The breeze cooled her damp face as she stepped from the car. The sun was heading towards the sea, growing as it approached the horizon. Nearer, waves formed choppy lines. Not too much swell for her – not for the swimmer she’d once been, anyway. She hesitated, remembering how long it had been: almost two and a half years since that holiday with Duncan, twining in the pool and the ocean, and the beginning of it all. But she was sick of her timid life, weary of having to refuse the world. She grabbed her towel, mobile and keys, popped her silk purse in the glove box and walked quickly down the steps before she could change her mind.

  The air was heavy with seaweed and the water bit like winter. She squatted into the remnant of a wave and breathed into her belly, allowing that nagging part of her body to adjust. The swell was bigger than she’d thought, but she stood and strode towards it, only quaking a little as her feet were buoyed from the sand. When she slid under the first wave it felt like the touch of grace, and when she came up for air she asked herself why she’d waited this long.

  She was upset before she even reached the door. As always, Ena seemed to understand before hearing a word.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said, and opened her arms. Alice leaned against the smaller woman for a moment. ‘I know you have to do it. And I know you don’t want to hurt me.’ She took Alice by the hand and led her into the house.

  How she would miss all this: the sweet, buttery aroma, the promise of cinnamon and nutmeg, the welcoming kitchen, and Ena’s limp drawing her on. The things that had never changed – and the things that had. Because she saw vividly now, bringing fresh tears to her eyes, Ena’s decline: the list evermore to the left, the hollowing below her cheekbones and clavicles, the jutting angles of the frame beneath the skin – a gradual withdrawal from the busyness of the world, the slow surrender to mortality. If ageing meant coming to terms with the finitude of possibility, she understood that she herself was still very young.

  ‘You know, he was always a particular child,’ Ena began without preamble, filling the kettle from the water-filter jug, lighting the stove, pulling a favourite coconut slice from the fridge and placing it on the table. ‘Jealous of toys, easily upset, that sort of thing.’ She sat down heavily on her chair and Alice stood her own raw body at her friend’s side, needing the closeness while avoiding sitting. Wanting no extra pain to mar this farewell. ‘I said to myself, he’s an only child and he’s lost his father. Always ready to excuse the behaviour, as mothers do!’ Ena smiled at the memory of her younger self. ‘He’s always been quick to blame others for … well, his own shortcomings and dissatisfactions. And I know that he believes he was abandoned as a child and that that somehow justifies this sort of … mean-spiritedness.’ She sighed deeply. ‘He’s a good man, Alice. And loving, to a point. It’s just that there is a limit to it, his love for others. An end point.’ Again the sigh, as if she were bone-tired; as if she needed to unload some of the burden of these thoughts, carried alone, Alice saw, for years. ‘I hoped his love for you might change that, might make him open his heart – properly, I mean. But I can see that when he was tested, he failed. And I can understand why this might not be enough for you, even when it might have been for someone else.’

  If she talked now, Alice knew, she would sob. She reached out and took Ena’s hand.

  ‘I’m from a generation that stuck with marriages where there were inequalities – even cruelties,’ Ena continued. ‘But I know things are different now: sometimes both of the people in a relationship must grow or it will fail.’

  Alice nodded. The concession brought the tears. ‘I’m sorry, Ena. I didn’t want to have to …’ She held her hands to her face.

  The older woman shook her head vehemently. ‘Alice, I do not blame you. I will never blame you.’ She hesitated, then, ‘I hoped that Duncan would be able to love you enough, but I feared that he would not. And I saw that one day I might lose you.’

  Ah, she knew. Understood that Alice couldn’t allow herself to be the wedge that drove mother and son further apart, couldn’t be that further reason for sourness – not when they only really had each other. If there was a time when he would need his mother, and the possibility that he would reach out to her, it was now.

  Jealousy shot through her, then faded.

  The heating kettle ticked.

  ‘Will you stay in the house?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said, though already she worried about where she would go. ‘It was his home before it was mine. And I need the change – I think without changing where I live, I’ll struggle with what I need to do.’

  ‘And what’s that, my dear?’

  ‘Oh, Ena,’ she laughed through the tears, ‘I don’t know exactly!’

  The kettle began its whistle.

  ‘Here, I’ll make it,’ Alice offered. She knew the way Ena liked it: the blue-wash teapot from the shelf, boiling water from the kettle to preheat pot and cups, the loose-leaf tea canister, a strainer and cosy. ‘I’ve been writing something longer. A novel, it seems to be.’

  ‘A novel, Alice. How exciting!’

  ‘Well, yes – yes, it is. But I really don’t know how it fits into the rest of my life. Whether it’s some kind of delusion, whether I’m even up to what it’s asking of me. And I’m only at the beginning, cos there’s a lot I don’t understand … about the characters, about what they need. Oh, Ena, I do love it, this writing, but there’s all these gaps I’m not sure how to fill – there’s so much work to do!’

  ‘You’ll manage it, Alice.’ Ena smiled warmly. ‘I see a strong future for you. I always have.’

  Tea streamed darkly into their cups, swirling the milk, and Alice thought for a moment about that future, which seemed so bleak sometimes, when – she’d discovered from her test of the ocean – she couldn’t swim. When she couldn’t sit without her cushion or wear tight pants or dance with abandon or pull Duncan onto her, into her, right when she felt like it, her skin and bones loose with desire, heart aching with need and sadness …

  Would she stay, forever, just like this?

  It was possible to recover: she’d seen it with her own eyes, Atikah’s ‘tickles’ dissolving slowly into nothingness; heard about it from Sally, group attendees coming once, twice, then putting the dark time behind them; read about it online, women quietly returning to their normal lives. It was possible.

  It was just … She wasn’t sure if it was possible for her. Wasn’t even sure, yet, if it would be possible for Emily.

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about the future,’ she said. ‘Wondering about the larger … I guess, patterns in life – wondering if there is even such a thing. Patterns, I mean.’ She topped up the teapot and drew on the snug cosy. ‘I guess because vulvodynia has brought me to a point I would never have reached without being forced – and, look, I’m fine with who I am now. I’m more assertive, more … incisive, I think. More satisfying – to me, anyway.’ She carried the cups to the kitchen table. ‘So, even though I have this crap pain, I wonder about the meaning – like I said, the patterns in a life, the them
es, why I am where I am. But then I feel like a callous idiot and like I’m … missing the point.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, you know, how I’m one of the privileged few who have food, water … shelter. It’s easier to see purpose in pain when your life isn’t under threat.’ A bracing tannin smell wafted from her cup. ‘And then I think,’ she went on, ‘if there is meaning in any of this, then the engine behind that work – whatever drives such patterns – is completely unresponsive to human suffering.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Ena. ‘And I know you and I have had the God conversation before.’

  Alice remembered the friendly arguments over crisp salads and robust casseroles, seasons skimming past. Duncan laughing, God is love, Mum? Is that the best you’ve got?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ena continued, ‘that I can speak for anyone else except myself, or even approach an idea of the kind of love I feel. Because if there is meaning and purpose behind life, if there is a love that holds us all, then it’s a love that’s bigger than any suffering or any evil we could possibly conceive.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I can see that – that I have the same understanding. I think love is tied up with being creative for me, but I’m not sure I even know what that means. I guess I’m still working it out … how that kind of love works. Maybe all I can do is find purpose in what has happened to me. How I can write meaning into my life, and hopefully help other women through that.’

  Ena smiled, then hugged Alice against her. ‘Isn’t that more than most, my dear friend?’

  For a moment Alice saw the baby of her imaginings, felt its mouth tugging at her, its head nestled in her hand.

  It caught her as she set off on the return drive to the city after a walk along the shore, swinging her car, for a change, through the puzzle-like streets: a homemade ‘for lease’ sign, the mobile number fading on cardboard. She braked, then pulled onto the verge. It was like many of the old beach shacks at Wrigleys Point: faded and stumpy, humble. Greying draperies laced each square window, listing verandah boards suggested neglect. But the curtains had been drawn neatly, and a brick-and-concrete garden bed abutting the side of the house told her this had been a home once. Our Place, declared a wooden placard hanging from one rusty nail head.