His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  He closed his eyes. ‘I just can’t do it. It’s so fucking hard.’ Saying the words sent a rush of heat to his face. The hardest thing had been knowing that they had created a child, their child, their baby, only for it to slip away. He remembered the blood on her hands the night of the first miscarriage when she woke him and he’d turned on the light to see her standing by the bed, shaking. ‘Marianna, I can’t cope with another miscarriage. I can’t cope with watching you go through another miscarriage.’

  ‘Don’t say that! Don’t jinx us.’ She glared at him.

  ‘Jesus, Marianna. Jinxing doesn’t come into this.’

  ‘Maybe you just don’t get it. Holding my baby in my arms is the only thing that matters to me, the only thing I want.’ She slumped back in the chair and her dressing gown gaped, revealing a full, pale breast.

  He kneeled beside her and reached a hand to cup the side of her head, her hair sliding between his fingers. ‘I’m sorry.’ Each of the four times they’d got pregnant he’d felt himself opening into the new future – the infinite, mysterious possibilities of the person in her womb – then he’d had to somehow find a way to shut all that down.

  Her eyes brimmed. ‘I’m sorry I can’t hang on to our babies. I’m so sorry.’ She covered her face with her hands.

  He kept stroking her hair and spoke quietly. ‘I just have a sense it may not happen. That we may not end up parents.’

  Her nostrils flared and she brushed tears from her cheeks. ‘And you’re an expert on fertility suddenly?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s just my gut instinct.’

  ‘And what if my gut instinct is that we will be parents, as long as we keep trying?’

  The front door banged. ‘Helloo? Marianna.’

  It was her mother. Marianna wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands and stood up as her mother’s trainers squelched up the hallway.

  •

  They’d first met at a birthday party for an intern he knew from the hospital. Marianna had come to the door of the Potts Point apartment when he knocked. Her hair was short and a bit spiky and she wore a long, tight, black dress. She had opened the door and stood there, unashamedly appraising him.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. She was gorgeous.

  ‘Hello.’ From behind her came laughter and the chink of glasses and a sudden burst of reggae music. ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ she said.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Surely he’d remember those green eyes and that too-generous mouth.

  She smiled. ‘You’re Simon’s brother.’

  He smiled back, shaking his head. ‘No, sorry, I’m not. But can I come in anyway?’ He waggled his bottle of wine at her. He had just left the ward and was wondering if prednisone was the right call for the old guy who’d come in. He should have called the consultant. He should probably leave and call him now.

  She stepped to one side to let him in. ‘So why do you think no one ever meets their doppelganger? Considering how often we’re told that there’s someone out there who looks like us.’

  He turned to face her in the dim hall. ‘Maybe we look differently than we imagine. Maybe we don’t recognise our doppelganger.’

  She laughed with that big mouth and leaned towards him. ‘So how do you imagine you look, not-Simon’s-brother?’

  ‘Tired.’

  ‘Come on. Seriously.’

  A burst of laughter came from the kitchen and the smell of something garlicky. God, he was so hungry. ‘How do I look? Messy. Exhausted. Probably a bit of a serious insect.’

  She smiled and nodded, as if waiting for him to say more.

  ‘I’m told I look boyish,’ he said. ‘But the way people say it, I’m pretty sure it’s not a compliment.’ He knew he should say something witty and flattering but he was too tired to be out talking to slightly odd, very beautiful women.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not very good at this. Do you want some wine? I think it’s quite good. My dad gave it to me.’ Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask her to describe herself.

  She tilted her head to look at the label and took the bottle from him. ‘Come with me. I’ll find us some proper wineglasses.’ She touched his arm and led the way down the hall.

  Later he had watched her dance on the rooftop terrace. She moved sinuously in her long dress, pale arms in the air, eyes closed. He wasn’t the only one watching her. After a few songs she came up and asked him for a cigarette. She’d laughed when he said he didn’t smoke. ‘I thought all med students smoked.’

  She rolled some tobacco she’d cadged off someone and they leaned on the terrace railing and looked over to the dark of the harbour and the lights of a late-night ferry. She blew a slow stream of smoke. ‘Does it make you see the body differently, you know, having cut one up? Do you see someone’s arm and imagine how their tendons and muscles look?’ She extended her pale, slender arm before her. ‘Not that you’d imagine many muscles in mine.’

  ‘Maybe if I wanted to be a surgeon I’d think more like that.’ He reached out and circled his hand around her upper arm and gently squeezed. ‘I can feel a few muscles in there.’

  Smoke curled from her smiling lips. He smelled her sweat and perfume and imagined leading her into one of the bedrooms in the strange flat.

  Looking back, he could see that she had always felt uncomfortable with him knowing things about how her body worked, as if he could magically see under her skin and into her organs. And while it was true that he sometimes imagined her snaking blood vessels and particularly her womb, it was purely technical, nothing magical. If he knew anything now, it was that the body was designed to constantly seek balance, to right itself second by second. And mostly it did.

  At the party, someone had called from the dance floor, ‘Marianna! Your song!’

  She’d tossed the rollie into a pot plant. ‘Do you dance?’

  ‘Not very well.’

  She crossed to the knot of dancers and he leaned back on the railing and watched her. He left sometime after one and she gave him a cursory farewell from the other side of the room, lifting her chin and briefly waggling her fingers in his direction. At home he phoned the ward and learned that the consultant had been called in for another patient and had looked over Quinn’s old guy and okayed the prednisone. He lay in bed looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the ceiling by the last tenant and thought of the way Marianna’s hips moved as she danced. He cupped his cock but before he got even the hint of a hard-on, he fell asleep.

  He saw her a couple of weeks later on Abercrombie Street. She was waiting at the lights in a yellow sundress and high heels. He approached her. ‘Marianna?’

  She turned. ‘Oh hello. It’s the tired doctor with warm hands.’ She smiled, her lipstick glossy red. ‘You know what they say . . . warm hands, cold heart. Let me buy you a coffee.’ She took his arm and they had walked in step along the footpath, the day’s heat rising around them.

  Chapter Five

  Marianna lay on the examination table and watched as Andrew squirted gel onto the ultrasound probe. The receptionist had said he’d just come from doing an emergency Caesar. Marianna wondered how many live babies he saw for each miscarriage or stillbirth.

  He smiled at her. ‘Okay for me to put it in?’ Without waiting for a reply, he parted her labia. The slide of the probe was always so like a penis: that brief resistance and then opening. She thought of Quinn and panic swelled in her chest at the memory of his sad, determined face in the kitchen that morning. When her mother turned up, Marianna had been about to beg him: Please, please, please. She understood prostration now, the urge to humble yourself before someone.

  Andrew said, ‘We got everything. It all looks fine.’ He turned the screen so she could see. In fuzzy black and white there was the oval of her womb, where eight weeks earlier, on the very same monitor, they had seen a small white shape and its flickering heartbeat. She had let herself imagine that heart beating away for the next eighty or ninety years. Now she was afraid that those few sec
onds of gazing upon her baby on a doctor’s screen was the closest to motherhood she would ever get.

  ‘Okay. All done.’ Andrew passed her a couple of tissues and washed his hands at the sink. She wiped herself and sat on the edge of the examination table to pull on her underpants.

  In a frame on Andrew’s desk was a 3D ultrasound image of a smiling baby in utero and in the waiting room were five or six babies curled in their mothers’ bellies, and more in the rooms of the doctors down the hall and God knows how many in the process of being born in the hospital up the road, their bodies emerging plump and slick. Each time she’d fallen pregnant, Marianna had crossed some line, some fence, to the side where the pregnant women and mothers lived. Now she was back on the barren side, where it was too familiar.

  She buttoned her skirt. ‘Remember that doctor in Sydney I mentioned? I want to go and see him.’

  Andrew stood behind his desk, bending to write something in her file. He didn’t look up. ‘Quinn’s idea?’

  ‘No. Mine. I wanted to say that I feel bad about . . . you know, going to another doctor.’ Andrew had been so intimate with her babies; he’d seen them when they were just a cluster of cells and had handled their tiny lifeless bodies. He’d seen them in a way that even she had not. ‘But . . . I’m feeling desperate.’ She laughed thinly. ‘In case you hadn’t guessed.’

  He half-smiled. He didn’t need to be so inscrutable. She was sure Quinn wasn’t like that with his patients.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s your perfect right to get another opinion.’ He sat down and leaned back in his big leather chair. ‘But as I’ve said before, there’s no real evidence that NK cells are implicated in recurrent miscarriage . . .’ He was treading so carefully. ‘It’s a contentious area.’

  ‘I’ve read plenty that suggests they’re important and there has to be some reason it keeps happening, doesn’t there? This is more than bad luck.’ She’d added it up. Over the four pregnancies, she’d been pregnant for a total of forty weeks. A full-term baby.

  He sighed and pushed his glasses back up onto his head. She saw how grey he’d become. That’s how long it was since she’d first come to him; he’d bloody well gone grey.

  ‘I’ve done every test I can think of,’ he said. ‘Every evidence-based test. I don’t think changing protocol will help us. Let’s wait for the chromosomal tests on the foetus to come back. That’s where our answer may lie for this last miscarriage, because it was different, it lasted longer. It showed you can carry a pregnancy.’ He crossed his arms. ‘Sometimes it can be as simple as waiting for the right egg.’

  ‘And what if the one good egg slips past while we’re faffing around?’ It wouldn’t make any difference to Andrew’s life if Marianna had a baby or not. Andrew would carry on with his wife and four boys and his stream of pregnant women.

  ‘I don’t think there’s only one good egg,’ he said. His mobile beeped on the desk. ‘How are you feeling?’ He watched her closely.

  ‘What will happen to the baby’s body?’ she said. ‘After the testing?’

  ‘Oh, well . . . the remains are disposed of.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the lab. You know, it was very small.’ He held his fingers a few centimetres apart. ‘It’s not really a body, as such.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He hesitated. ‘The foetus’s remains are broken up in the process of removing it.’

  Her heart thumped. ‘Oh shit . . . I see.’ He hadn’t told her that at the time. But why would he? Had Quinn known? She looked out the high window on the opposite wall, trying not to think of what broken up meant. She focused on a small cloud and conjured an image of her baby’s tiny body, unformed but intact, its crumb-sized heart stilled.

  ‘And Quinn?’ Andrew said. ‘How’s he going with it all?’

  ‘He’s okay. He’s working down south a couple of days a week.’

  ‘I heard he was doing that.’ He nodded. ‘Okay.’ He cleared his throat. Her time was up. ‘I’m here if you want to do another cycle.’ He leaned forward over his desk. ‘Take care of yourself. Rest. Why don’t you meet with one of our counsellors and talk things through? And I’ll call you when I get those results.’ His voice was warm. ‘I’m hopeful you will end up with a baby, Marianna. And whether you see the Sydney doctor or not, I’ll be here. I’ll hang in with you. We all need to hang in.’ His phone beeped again and he picked it up. ‘I better take this.’

  She walked back through the waiting room and her eyes slid away from the women there. Andrew saw blooming fertility all day long. It must skew his perception. One of the swollen-bellied women looked up from her magazine and smiled at Marianna. She probably thought Marianna was pregnant. Marianna kept her face neutral; she didn’t know what might happen if she smiled back.

  •

  The traffic slowed to a standstill along Wickham Terrace. Marianna pulled on the handbrake and looked over the Parkland to a distant row of palm trees. How verdant and exuberant she’d found Brisbane when they first moved here and how full of hope she’d been when they started their first IVF cycle. She and Quinn had driven back from Andrew’s rooms, along this very road, and she’d felt like the very definition of buoyant.

  On the footpath, a fluorescent-vested road worker spoke urgently into a phone. A magpie flapped down onto the fence and tilted its head as if assessing the man. Marianna felt foolish and frail, locked in her refrigerated car while the bird flapped up and away through the warm, fresh air. She kept her eyes on it until it became a black speck. She didn’t force herself to look away anymore. Superstitions gave her something to hang on to, like she imagined praying five times a day did or making the sign of the crucifix on your body. It was about anchoring yourself to something greater.

  She opened the car door and stepped out into the humid heat. What if Quinn’s prediction was right, that she’d simply carry another baby to death in her body and they’d never be parents? Panic fluttered in her throat. She’d never seen his face tight with pain like that. Why hadn’t he talked about it earlier?

  She didn’t like the melodrama of religious language and she didn’t believe in God but the word forsaken kept coming to her. And who had they been forsaken by if not God?

  Narti had once taken her to a mosque in Jakarta. Marianna had been about seven and they were on their way home from the market, carrying bags of vegetables and a whole fish wrapped in newspaper. Narti had walked up the steps of the local mosque and indicated where Marianna should put her shoes. Inside, the empty, high-ceilinged room was dim and quiet, and Marianna had thought she might hear a message from this Allah of Narti’s. She imagined herself the object of beneficence from all gods. A white child in a poor city, she was reminded daily of her good fortune and she had pictured this good luck like a blessed wave beneath her, carrying her into her future.

  When she’d met Quinn, she’d been drawn to his decency; it shone from him. He’d seemed so uncomplicated compared to other men. But she saw now that part of that uncomplicated nature was just to accept what life threw at him. His way of dealing with the pain of the miscarriages was to give up, to avoid them; hers was to keep trying, because she had learned that you made your own good luck. And that quality in her had attracted him, she knew. Now he clearly thought she had lost the knack.

  Chapter Six

  Rachel left the house as soon as her mother was asleep. Her old bike rattled down the potholed back lane and she imagined the warm night air parting for her.

  Even as a kid she’d found the dark comforting. She and Scotty would sit on the back steps to brush their teeth, the trees and bushes dark shapes around them. And once in their beds, they’d talk, the dark a solid bridge, making his voice seem so close that he might have been lying right beside her, murmuring up against her ear.

  As she leaned her bike against the pool fence, she saw someone squatting on the cement near the grandstand. A man, wearing black swimmers. The hole she’d cut in the wire fence gaped open.

 
She stepped through the fence onto the grass and called out, ‘Ahoy there.’ Shit. Could it be Sean McGilvray, home to visit his mother? It was completely possible he’d come to the pool at night. Her step faltered.

  The man turned. ‘Oh, hello.’ A friendly voice and not Sean, thank God. She peered. It was her mother’s doctor. What the hell was he doing here?

  ‘I’m just about to go for a swim,’ he said and waved the flipper in his hand. ‘Unless you’d rather swim on your own . . . I don’t want to intrude.’

  Headlights travelled along the line of big figs outside the pool and lit up his pale, lean torso.

  ‘No. That’s fine. Have you just arrived in town?’

  ‘Yeah. I have an early start in the morning.’

  ‘How did you find the hole in the fence?’ She dropped her towel on the bottom step of the grandstand.

  ‘I saw someone swimming in here one night and . . . um, came looking in the daytime to figure out how they got in.’ He crossed to the pool and kneeled to swish his hand in the water.

  ‘It must have been me you saw,’ she said.

  He turned to look up at her. ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Right.’ There was nowhere in this bloody town to escape people. They could see you or hear you wherever you went.

  He shook the water from his hand. ‘Do you want me to go?’

  She wondered which night he’d seen her. ‘Nah. There’s plenty of water for two.’ She sat on the step and unbuckled her sandals. In the city, people didn’t watch you; they looked away. How she had loved it when she first got to Sydney.

  The doctor stood and stretched his arms over his head. He was broader in the shoulders than she’d imagined. She unlooped the towel from her neck and wondered what kind of lover he’d be. It wasn’t a particularly sexual thought, more a curiosity. She wondered this about most men she met. What shape would their shoulders make over her? Would they look at her as they fucked? Would their touch be confident or tentative?