The allergist was a middle-aged man named Dr O’Breen, bald on top but with grey-blond hair falling down around the back and sides. His suit needed cleaning, there was a fake flower in his lapel. Hello Elena, come in, he said, nice to meet you. That was funny him saying that, she thought, like their meeting was somehow a surprise and not just another prearranged consultation like the dozen she’d already had. He gestured to the chair. On the desk was a black cardboard box with a band of packing tape reinforcing it all the way around the top. The box had begun to split from overuse. It was the kind of packing tape her mother used to patch the old atlas she kept on the top shelf in her bedroom cupboard. A thick rubber band held the lid of the box in place.
Well, said the allergist, I hear you’ve not been well—do you want to tell me about it? Elena mechanically went through the story, starting from when she had first felt ill at school, including the doctors and specialists she’d seen. O’Breen made a few notes. And you just don’t feel well, he said. Is there anywhere in particular? Headaches? An upset stomach? Any rashes or itches? Elena sketched a general picture of how she felt, which in a sense was a combination of all of the above and more, bound together by a constant tiredness that even now made her wish she was out in the waiting room again, her music on, her face hidden in the magazine, her eyes drooping and her mind drifting away into sleep. I see, said the allergist. Well. He moved the black cardboard box in front of him and began to take off the rubber band, something he had obviously done so many times that Elena couldn’t help being mesmerised. O’Breen stretched it in and out between his finger and thumb then let it snap onto his wrist. He lifted the lid off the box.
Inside was a wooden tray holding, at a quick glance, about fifty little vials. All these vials had labels; from where Elena was sitting she could see Wool, Latex, Paint, Rayon. Now Elena, said the allergist, we are going to do a few little tests to see if there is something in your daily life that might be making you unwell: to do this I will need you to roll up your sleeve. O’Breen was gesturing with a flat hand at the left sleeve of Elena’s cotton top; again it felt like a gesture rehearsed and performed a thousand times. As soon as the sleeve was up he came around beside her and, scribbling with a black biro on her forearm, explained the procedure. In each spot, he said, I’m going to put a little drop.
There were about a dozen biro marks on Elena’s forearm now: strange symbols, numbers, letters, each designating the thing to go there. One by one O’Breen took from the wooden tray a vial corresponding to the marks and put down a tiny drop. Elena read some of the labels as the allergist moved quickly through them: Dog, Cat, Mouse, Dust, Pollen. He deposited the last drop and took a sterilised needle saying, quickly, like it barely needed mentioning: You will feel a little scratch. Then he ran the needle through each drop, scratching the skin as he went. When he’d finished he put the needle into a yellow tub, arranged the vials back in their tray with the labels up, put the lid on the box, slid the rubber band off his wrist, stretched it around and let it go with a snap. O’Breen pushed the box aside. All right, he said, leave your sleeve up, pop out into the waiting room, and after fifteen minutes we’ll see what we’ve got. I’ll call you back when we’re ready. The allergist had already turned his back on Elena as he went around the desk to his chair. Elena took this as her cue.
Out in the waiting room the receptionist smiled like she must have done a thousand times to a thousand other patients who now had to wait the obligatory fifteen minutes with their sleeves up. Elena smiled in return and sat in a chair next to the disused fireplace.
At one end of the mantelpiece was a small plastic stand displaying brochures about allergy and at the other end, incongruously, a child’s rattle. Two chairs down from Elena was a low table with magazines; she picked one up and sat down again. Against the wall beside the receptionist’s high counter—sitting down you could only see the top of her head—was a tank with tropical fish swimming lazily around inside, the water bubbling softly through the filter. On a chair against the other wall was the only other person in the room, an old man with his sleeve up like her. He smiled when she glanced at him, and looked down at the arm he was cradling like it was broken, as if to say: You have one too. Elena gave him a brief smile, then to avoid having any more to do with him, she started flicking through her magazine.
The fifteen minutes seemed to go on forever. There was a clock above the receptionist’s head and for the first five minutes Elena kept glancing at it, then down at her forearm, trying to make in her own way some connection between the sweeping second hand and the click-click of the minute hand and the slower, more subtle, changes going on under her skin. But it soon became a pointless game: the seconds swept by and the scratches on her arm above the black writing describing all those things in nature that might make your life a misery registered no change at all. She flicked again through the magazine until she found something to look at, creased the spine and gave all her attention to the pictures.
It was a design magazine, and the article was about houses built in exotic locations: in a rainforest with a living area built into the canopy, on the side of a hill overlooking the sea with a roof covered by sand and dune grass, and, finally, a house blended into the rock of Sydney Harbour to the extent of actually having a boulder in the living room and a deck built into a craggy outcrop over the water. The owners, said the article, loved food and wine, and the dining-room table at which they entertained was long and curved ‘like the beach below’, set with baskets of fruit and mini pumpkins and gourds. A sculpture hung above it, a crayfish basket holding seafood carved out of driftwood. Elena was so absorbed with the pictures of this house and the people who must have lived in it that for a moment she didn’t notice the receptionist calling her or, for that matter, O’Breen himself, waiting at the door to his room. The doctor is ready, said the receptionist. You can come in now, said O’Breen.
Back in the consulting room Elena sat down while O’Breen brought his chair from around the other side of his desk, settled himself next to her and took her arm in his hands. He had red, flaky patches on his scalp. He was looking at the scratches, first from a distance then up close with a magnifying thing that he put over his eye. It took him a long time to say: No. Elena wasn’t sure what he meant. She kept looking at his bald patch while he looked at her arm. No, he said, again, lifting his head and taking off the magnifying thing, nothing there at all. You are at one with Nature, Elena, he said, in a funny, pompous voice, and he pushed himself away.
The little drops I put on your arm, Elena, contained distilled quantities of the substance you see on the label. For example, Mouse. I get them from Spokane, Washington. No-one else does them here. If you were allergic to, say, Mouse, said O’Breen, your skin would come up in a little welt, like a mosquito bite, where I scratched it. The marks in black pen tell me what I have put where and in this case all of them describe common allergens, things we find in the natural world: animals, plants and so on. You’d be surprised how many people are allergic to Mother Nature. He did that smile again. But not you, as you see. So. O’Breen pushed off with his chair and sort of pedalled his way back around behind his desk and in one smooth movement pulled the box in front of him, slid the rubber band from it onto his wrist and took off the lid. Let me see your other arm, he said.
On Elena’s left forearm this time O’Breen scratched a drop each of Formaldehyde, Isocyanate, Sulphur Dioxide and Epoxy Resin and sent her out
into the waiting room again. This time while waiting she started to think about what O’Breen had said, how he seemed to be making a distinction for her between a natural and an artificial thing and how, yes, especially over the last couple of years, she had become impatient with the artificial in a general sense, be it the cheap Asian-made but fashionable clothes her schoolmates wore or the stupid, superficial things they said. Elena had just started to go a little further with this thought when she realised that fifteen minutes had passed and O’Breen was calling her back.
The diagnosis this time was also straightforward. On each scratch on her other arm the welts were up, an angry red already spreading out beyond the wound itself. O’Breen examined each of these marks, pushing back the skin on either side with his thumbs and leaning down with his magnifying thing. He said nothing, a specialist utterly absorbed in his work; it was only as he drew back and pulled a plastic bottle of cortisone cream across the desk towards him, flicking the cap and offering it to Elena, that he finally said: Yes.
Elena was allergic to everything we might call ‘modern’. O’Breen explained how there are, on the one hand, substances we find naturally, in nature, and, on the other, manufactured or artificial substances that we have created molecularly from the ground up. It was the second category, exclusively, that Elena was allergic to and sadly these substances were everywhere.
After that first assessment Elena regularly went back during the following weeks to the house behind the low brick fence with the sign in the yard to be tested for yet another suite of substances. She was allergic to them all. One day O’Breen stood her in her underwear in the centre of the room and ran a wand emitting electromagnetic waves over her body: this too brought her out in a rash and left her with a headache and a queasy feeling that lasted for days. O’Breen prescribed various drugs and creams and started to make up with her what he called an ‘action plan’, so that she might eliminate these allergens from her life. After the fourth visit the receptionist gave Elena an envelope to take home and on the bus she carefully prised it open. Addressed to her mother, it was the bill so far. Elena hid it in her underwear drawer and never mentioned it again.
She became increasingly withdrawn and strange. She stopped going to school, or went for a few hours only when it suited her. The principal contacted her mother who said Elena was sick, then as she always did her mother went straight to her room and yelled at her to get better.
Elena lived in her bedroom, a spartan space now bereft of the usual teenage clutter. She took her tablets and rubbed the creams into her skin and bought her own organic food which she ate in there, mostly raw. Without any modern gadgetry to rely on she quickly lost contact with the few friends she’d had—including me, said Hannah.
Then one day, after the usual visit to O’Breen, outside the shopping centre where she habitually changed buses, she let her usual bus go, waited at the stop for a while, and caught the bus to the city instead. She got off at the depot near the station, bought a ticket and boarded another bus that would drop her seven hours later in the tiny coastal town where her uncle owned a small timber cottage where, when they were young, she and Ty would spend the holidays, collecting shells on the beach and fishing in their uncle’s boat at dawn on the vast, mirror-smooth lake. She knew where the key was, under the rock, and let herself in.
The cottage smelled shut up and musty—her uncle had been sick in hospital lately and had let the property go—but Elena soon threw open the windows and doors to let the sea breeze in. She spent that first evening eating the woody carrots she’d pulled out of the garden (they must have self-seeded, as had an ad hoc mix of potatoes, pumpkins and spinach), sitting on a kitchen chair outside the front door looking at the pelicans skimming the lake and listening to the surf on the other side of the bar. The sunset was beautiful. She slept that night a peaceful sleep and woke for the first time in months without a headache.
The cottage sat on a small hill above the lake that fed through a narrow channel into the sea. The upper reaches of the lake branched out into rivers and creeks, poking their way up, narrower and narrower, into the high mountains behind. (She and her brother had gone with her uncle one day up one of these rivers, paddling and then dragging their canoes until, high up, they reached the source.) There was a grassy slope below the house with a few tea-tree bushes on it and a clump of denser tea-tree where the land met the water. The nearest house was half a kilometre away. At night you could hear the seagulls squawking and the possums scratching in the roof, and beneath all that, like a low drone, the sea. Aside from the occasional sound of a car gearing down to get up the hill on the far side of the point, there was nothing human out there.
The house was built in the eighties from scavenged timber and tin, and the furniture and fittings all dated from that time. The next morning, after curling up on the couch in a sleeping-bag she found rolled up in the top cupboard, Elena set to work cleaning the house and getting rid of anything she might be allergic to: the clock radio beside the double bed, the portable radio on top of the fridge, the microwave oven, the television, all the old soaps and shampoos and other toiletries from the bathroom; the synthetic curtains, cushions and bed linen. She put all this stuff out in the shed where her uncle kept his boat, the junk he had collected and the timbers and windows left over from when the house was built. She left the fridge in the kitchen—it was too heavy to move—but she didn’t turn it on. Last of all she gave the house a clean from top to bottom, but with warm water only, heated on the old wood stove, using a cotton singlet. There was a packet of beeswax candles in the bottom drawer in the kitchen and one by one she set these candles around the house.
That afternoon she went into the garden, wearing the old straw hat she found in the shed, and started pulling out weeds. It felt good out there. It was one thing, she thought, to be told you can’t tolerate anything new and artificial and that you must be among only natural things, but it was another to live it. She felt an energy, a vigour, she’d not felt in ages. Even her mood had changed; she was no longer grumpy, pissed off with everyone, disillusioned about who she was; she just was, here, now, out in the garden, under the sun, pulling weeds on this bright day. And always, above, behind, beyond all this was the soothing sound of the sea, so unlike the things in the box with the rubber band around it (Without me how will you wash your hair? Without me how will you drive your car? Without me how will you be entertained?) that to think of it swelled her soul to twice its normal size.
She spent a good while out in the garden, she seemed to have slipped through a hole in time and come out at a place where clocks didn’t count; the day stretched out in front of her; she felt vibrant, alive. When she was tired she’d sit down on the step; when she felt like digging, she’d dig. The soil was sandy loam and the spade cut it easily; before she knew it she had, as well as weeding the five beds already there, dug out the grass and mounded up another five, moulding the furrows between them.
At around four o’clock that afternoon she stopped, stood back to admire her handiwork, then washed herself at the garden tap. She took off her top and bra, unafraid, splashed water under her arms and breasts, turned the tap up full and let the water hammer at the nape of her neck. She dried off, pulled on one of her uncle’s old collared shirts from the cupboard—pure cotton, lemon yellow, green buttons and green stitching on the cuffs—and set off around the point into town.
Can I ask you so
mething? said Lauren, quietly. Sure, said Hannah. How old is she now? She’s just turned eighteen, said Hannah. Everyone waited. Hannah went on.
The town was small, she said, a main street with a parking island, a pub, a shopfront supermarket, a little restaurant-café, a real estate agent, a takeaway, a gift shop, a tackle shop, and that was about it. It was after five o’clock now, and the town was actually pretty lively, with the sound of voices and horse-racing coming out of the open door of the pub and people walking in and out of the supermarket. A few others were sitting at the tables outside the café; a tanned man in a suit outside the real estate office gave Elena a smile as she passed.
She had enough money to stock up on basic supplies, after that ran out she wasn’t sure what she’d do. Already, as she approached the supermarket, she could smell the exhaust fumes and that vague smell—what was it?—of towns and cities: concrete, asphalt, steel, plastic. It sat right up the back behind her temples and she could already feel the headache coming on. She turned into the supermarket, intent on getting what she needed as quickly as she could. She bought bread, milk, butter, unbleached toilet paper, a cigarette lighter (she couldn’t use matches because of the sulphur), more candles, vegetables from the little organic section in the fridge at the back and a dozen organic eggs. At the counter a young man served her, he must have been about her age, and Elena couldn’t help being conscious of her wet, uncombed hair, her uncle’s shirt and the red rash she could already feel coming up around her neck. As he packed Elena’s things into the box he kept his eyes down but when he looked up to give it to her she could see he was blushing. Maybe he had allergies too? Thanks, come again, he said, stupidly. Elena nodded and smiled.
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