Serenade for a Small Family
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Jones CD.
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I climbed into the chair. ‘She’s creating a romantic
atmosphere,’ I whispered to Benny. ‘Like we’re about to
conceive. That’s so funny.’
When we stood up to leave, she addressed us gently:
‘Here’s a photo.’ She held a polaroid of a cluster of cells
on a pink background. ‘There’s nothing more you can
do now. In two weeks you’ll either get a period or you
won’t. No amount of pineapple, or lying with your legs
in the air, or avoiding hot baths, can make a difference.
Good luck.’
Back in Alice that photo sat on the desk in Ben’s office.
I picked it up often and stared at it, running my fingers
over it until, on day four, I shoved it into a drawer.
‘We only had lunch half an hour ago and I’m hungry
already!’ I said.
Benny looked doubtful. ‘Ingrid.’ His voice dropped deep
for the second syllable.
‘What?! I am!’
‘Stop it.’ The neighbours’ rooster let out a raucous guffaw.
‘I am! I want beetroot. Yeah . . . I really feel like beetroot.’
Benny hammered a nail into the plywood cover he was
making to keep mozzies out of the stock trough. ‘And this
morning I was nauseous . . . and I’m really tired!’ I squeezed
my breasts, one hand on each. ‘And my boobs are sore.’
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‘That’s because you keep squeezing them.’
Dad and Bec had been through IVF, so I rang Bec.
‘I’m going crazy, I’m never not thinking about it,’ I said,
swallowing hard over the lump in my throat. ‘And I hate
the pain-in-the-arse person I’ve become.’
‘I completely understand . . . it’s terrible. Hang in there.
I’ve got a good feeling—your father and I both have a really
good feeling.’
‘Thanks, Bec. It’s a bit out of control. I’m obsessed.
I mean . . . this morning I tried to smell my wee—to see
if it smelt different, you know? It’s a pregnancy symptom.
I mean—I lowered my nose into the toilet bowl! It’s too
much. This is the longest two weeks of my life.’ Tears
cascaded down my cheeks. ‘I’m so sick of all this. I wish I
could just drop it. I want my life back.’
On day seven, I sat on the toilet staring at a home
pregnancy test stick for six minutes, but no second line
appeared and I plummeted.
I rang Bec again. ‘That result could be wrong, right?’ I
slid my back down the wall to slump onto the floor. ‘I mean,
it’s such early days—there’s probably not enough HCG yet.’
‘Yes, it could be wrong. Get a blood test.’
‘Yep. Oh, god.’
The following morning I tried to get the blood test results
directly from the lab by telling them Dad was a radiologist,
but no luck. I clicked the phone down, rubbed my forehead
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and paced the house, picking things up, putting them down
again. Waiting for the call. Waiting, waiting. Two rings.
‘Hello?’
‘Ingrid . . . it’s Hillary.’ Her tone was ominous. Fuck.
‘Hi.’
‘I’m sorry, but the result was negative.’ Thud.
‘Oh . . . really . . . okay. Thanks for ringing.’
‘I know this is hard for you. It might be tough for the
next few days . . . for the next week. We have a counsellor
you can . . .’
‘I’m going now, Hillary.’
In between IVF cycles Benny took two weeks to walk the
Larapinta Trail, all the way from the Telegraph Station in
Alice Springs to Mount Sonder in the West MacDonnell
Ranges. On day one I dropped him off at dawn—happy, his
thumbs straining behind the straps of his massive backpack.
A week later, my girlfriend Nay and I sang country out
loud as we drove out to Redbank Gorge to spend a couple
of days with him, a stack of his pre-made beef curry packs
in tow. As we drove, the ranges grew into giant, dormant
beasts alongside us and the rear vision mirror filled with
our wake of dust.
We parked Kelly high above the gorge. I switched off
the engine and we sat in silence for a few beats, until I
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whacked Nay on the thigh: ‘Wow! Isn’t this the most
amazing camping spot?!’
‘Oh my lordy, it is,’ said Nay, pulling an exaggerated
expression of glee. ‘Let’s explore.’
When Benny appeared an hour or so later, he was a
darker shade of brown all over. His bush hat looked worn
and his scuffed brown boots looked permanent.
‘Wow, it’s Alby Mangels,’ I said, kissing his prickly face,
breathing in his smell of dirt and sweat. We lit a fire and the
three of us squeezed onto Benny’s green couch to drink beer
and eat curry as a wild red and orange sunset flared across
clouds behind us. By the time our eyelids were heavy, the
sky around us was thick with stars and Benny smelt more
like Carlton Draught than dirt and sweat.
‘I missed you,’ said Benny.
‘I missed you too. It’s good to be here,’ I said. ‘Beer
breath ’n’ all.’
The following day we did a full day’s walk. At the end
of it, with sore feet and ruddy faces, we trekked over thigh-
high rocks to the brown ravine water overshadowed by the
gorge. Nay and I swam out to a lone boulder, and I tried
not to think about water snakes.
Ben stood on the shore, pointing the camera our way.
‘Oy!’ he called. I throttled Nay and she cooperatively held
up her palms in surrender.
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It was July 2005 by the time I hooked up with Mum in
Darwin again. I had a gut full of eggs and a dragging
headache, ever hopeful. Again, Benny joined us a few days
later. This time we stayed at the hospital accommodation—a
simple weatherboard house surrounded by tall palms and
just a short walk from the hospital. The saggy couch was
scattered with frilly mismatched old-lady pillows, and
a handful of grubby books sat on a bookshelf beside a
handwritten note: ‘These books are available for loan.’
‘Gee. They shouldn’t have,’ I said flatly.
I had brought Mum a jar of my nutty, roasted homemade
muesli to take home to Alan. ‘He poured it onto the kitchen
bench and sifted through it to work out the ingredients,
so he could make it himself,’ Mum told me later. ‘That’s
so Alan.’
Mum drew and drew, using fine black pens. She drew in
the car while I drove, in cafés, over breakfast and between
Scrabble turns. She ate the office woman’s speculaas biscuits
and started two Scrabble games with seven-letter words,
though I pretended not to care. I had my guitar with me
and we sang ‘Orphan Girl’ in harmony. I leant my guitar
in a corner of the room.
‘God, I love my choir,’ said Mum, drawing a fis
h in
the beak of a giant, fat bird. ‘It’s the one thing I hate to be
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away from.’ We went to an outdoor pool on the edge of
a cliff overlooking the water, and she read while I swam a
few slow laps.
Another general anaesthetic for another egg collection,
and three heart-stopping days later we had three surviving
embryos. Mum came with me to meet with a nurse, who
asked: ‘How many embryos do you want to put back this
time?’ Her face was plain and her mouth was a no-frills
straight line.
‘What? Can I put back more than one?’ I leant eagerly
towards her.
‘You can. This is your third cycle and you’re thirty-
five. You just need to sign this form.’ She handed me a
pen and laid a sheet of paper on the desk in front of me. I
scanned the form, sought out the signature line and eagerly
squiggled my name.
Later, Ben and I sat on our bed back at the house. I
pointed to the empty space beside my signature: ‘We can
put back two this time! You just need to sign here . . .’
Ben read the form; I waited, poised with a pen within
his easy reach. ‘This says that a doctor has fully explained
the health risks,’ he said. I lowered the pen-holding hand
and risked a flicker of an eye roll. ‘Did that happen?’
‘Yeah . . . Oh well . . . no . . . they weren’t explained . . .
But, I mean, they’re listed there somewhere.’ I indicated the
bottom of the sheet.
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‘I want to speak to someone about the risks before I
sign,’ said Benny.
‘But you don’t need to . . . I mean . . . They have to
cover themselves, there’s always a big fat list of risks. It’s
just standard—there are risks with twins. Those risks are
worth it! Putting two back has to increase our chances!
I’ll get Bec on the phone—she knows all about this stuff.’
‘Okay,’ said Ben.
I pulled the phone over to the bed, called Bec and gave
Ben the handset, leaning closer to hear her muffled words
of encouragement: ‘It’s fine to put two back . . .’ she said
with enthusiasm. ‘ Everyone does it. In some countries they
put three or four back . . . Two’s nothing!’
Ben signed and I whooped.
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Five days after the two embryos were put back into my
uterus, I rang the nurse at IVF in Darwin. ‘I’m really not
feeling well,’ I said, sitting miserably on the couch with a
plastic bucket at my feet. ‘My abdomen’s horribly bloated
and I feel sick . . . I’m so puffed. Just walking from the
bedroom to the dining room is hard.’ From the kitchen
came the sizzle of Benny frying onion. The warm caramel
smell was catching in my nose and throat.
‘Keep up your fluids and go for a blood test,’ she said
briskly. ‘The results will come to the doctor here tomorrow.’
I hung up the phone and threw up noisily into the bucket.
Early the following morning I lay down to have my blood
taken in a cold room with an ugly medical smell, while
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Benny perused a trashy newspaper in the waiting room.
‘I just don’t want to see the needle or the blood, okay?’
Gossipy tones and the word ‘weekend’ came from the
women at reception on the other side of the stained brown
curtain.
‘No worries, love.’ The needle stung as it was pushed
into my vein. ‘Oh, sweetie . . . you’re not well. I can’t take
your blood . . . it’s too thick . . . dehydrated. You need to
go straight to a doctor. Hey, Miriam!’ she called out with
urgency. ‘Call the doctors’ rooms across the road! Tell them
there’s a young lady coming over and that she needs to see
someone straight away.’ She removed the needle and released
the strap from my arm.
I hooked my arm into Benny’s and took small steps,
breathing shallowly, as we crossed the road. He went to
press the lift button.
‘I can’t,’ I said.
I was sitting on a ledge against the wall. ‘You’re pale,’
he said.
‘I’m fainting,’ I said weakly. ‘I have to lie down.’ I reached
my hands down towards the floor.
Ben crouched beside me and lightly patted my cheek
with the back of his hand. A woman offered to go up to
the doctors’ rooms, and disappeared anxiously into the lift.
‘Stay with me, darling,’ said Ben.
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Minutes later, a nurse hurried towards us with a click
click click of her heels against the tiles. ‘You should call an
ambulance and go straight to emergency,’ she said, against
an ironic background of seamless elevator music.
Two ambulance men arrived. One of them felt for my
pulse: ‘It’s slow . . . I can hardly feel it.’ He put an oxygen
mask over my nose and mouth, and sat beside my stretcher
in the back of the ambulance while the other drove.
‘How long have you been living in Alice?’ he asked.
‘Umm . . . three and a half years.’ My words were muffled
by the mask.
‘It’s a pretty good place to live, isn’t it?’ He was probably
trying to keep me talking and conscious, but I just thought
it was a funny time to be making small talk.
In Emergency, a man took my blood, dragging slowly
on the needle.
‘I think it’s ovarian hyperstimulation,’ I told him.
‘What?’
I held the oxygen mask away from my mouth so that he
could hear me. ‘Ovarian hyperstimulation . . . from IVF.’
He looked at me blankly. ‘Hmm.’
He put me on a drip and wheeled me into the corner
of a busy area where well worn curtains separated waiting
patients. A wide-eyed man in a trolley bed careered past;
straggling barefooted Aboriginal people passed by in twos
and threes; nurses rushed. Eventually, a woman with a scarf
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covering her head and a name that sounded Middle Eastern
told us I was to be monitored overnight. She lowered her
eyes as she spoke: ‘And your blood test has come back,
showing HCG,’ she said.
I looked at Benny and gasped: ‘HCG! I’m pregnant?’
‘The presence of HCG does indicate a pregnancy . . .
yes,’ she replied. ‘But we need to be clear about what IVF
drugs you’ve been given, as they may be influencing the test
results.’ I gasped with excitement and my eyes opened wide.
Two kids bolted past, hotly pursued by a woman with a
wide bum in a tight pink t-shirt and the words ‘MARRIED
BUT LOOKING’ stretched across her chest. ‘That’s it!’ she
hollered. ‘You can wait in the bloody car!’
I looked at Benny. ‘I’m pregnant!’
After the chaos of Emergency, my own room was a haven.
On the wall at the end of my bed, a poster promot
ed
breastfeeding, showing two circles with dots in the middle.
Benny stood with his back to me looking out the window.
‘I’m in the maternity ward with the real pregnant people!’
I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Benny, distracted. ‘I need a cup of tea.’
In the days that followed, my abdomen swelled painfully
and I stayed in hospital. I looked as if I were six months
pregnant and I could barely sit up. It was bizarre.
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‘Fluid’s leaving your blood and going into the area around
your stomach,’ said a doctor. ‘Your blood’s dehydrating.
You’ve got severe ovarian hyperstimulation.’ A cleaner
scuffled in the bathroom behind him.
‘What? That sounds scary.’ I lay with one hand on my
distended stomach and the other holding the steel handle
above me. ‘I can’t take proper breaths . . . I can’t get enough
air. It feels claustrophobic.’
‘The x-ray showed fluid in your lungs.’ The doctor stood
by my bed, grey hair neatly parted and arms folded over
his chest. ‘But you wil start to feel better. Your blood test
came back with improved results—it’s just a matter of your
body catching up. Hang in there, Ingrid.’
‘Okay. Thanks, Michael.’
That afternoon a midwife leant over me with hot
cafeteria-lunch breath to wrap a tape measure around my
stomach: ‘One hundred point five centimetres,’ she said.
I felt like crying, but cursed instead. ‘Damn! It’s not
going down.’
Alice had a tradition whereby the captain and crew of
a particular navy ship had ‘freedom of entry’ into town
whenever they were in port in Darwin. In the previous
few weeks, as part of my council job, I had coordinated the
visit by the crew of the HMAS Arunta. Now their captain
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took it upon himself to visit me in hospital and thank me
in person.
There was a knock on the open door to my room. ‘Yeah!’
I expected a nurse or cleaner or lunch.
‘Hello!’ A tall and impressive man, dressed in full navy
captain’s attire, stepped into my room and I nearly died.
He took off his hat and dipped his head: ‘Aah . . . hello.
Captain Andrew Myers,’ he said, standing awkwardly just
inside the door.
‘Oh, hi . . .’ I wasn’t wearing undies under my hospital