by Robert Drewe
Although he’d fail the outer age requirement he reasoned that his fitness should overcome it, and he thought himself a reasonable chance with everything else. After two years up here even the Greens were OK by him, except for their tardiness in mending potholes. If a question mark still hovered over the emotional-freight business, the right relationship would certainly drive it away. During the house purchase he and Sylvia had got on famously, he recalled, even sharing a joke over the risk for coastal homes in these days of rising sea levels.
‘You’re fine as long as high tide doesn’t reach the bedroom,’ she said, as Suzanne winced.
He didn’t need to bother with all Liaison’s protocols; he still had her phone number.
It was more than forty years since he’d phoned a female for a date. He might have been sixteen, the way his heart was thudding. ‘It’s Doug Casey, your client from Wategos. I don’t have any tattoos. What about coffee or a drink some time?’
Off duty, ArtLover45/Sylvia shed the businesslike high heels, wore summery linen and sandals and, after three days, two coffees, one lunch and one dinner, turned out to be surprisingly adventurous in bed. Doug immediately saw she wasn’t kidding about being ‘artistic’. As proof, she kept a replica human skull as the main feature of her bedroom decor. ‘I call him Graham, after my ex,’ Sylvia said.
Solar-powered and made of polyresin, the skull sat out on her back porch by day, its batteries absorbing the subtropical light and heat while it glared out over her garden patch of kale, rosemary, Thai basil and dog droppings, evidence of a fat old black labrador called Billy. That was a change: on the leafy North Shore, black labs were usually named Nelson, after Mandela.
In the dark, Graham lit up internally, and the luminous eyes and toothy grin surprised Doug when he rose groggily in the night to go to the bathroom.
Unmentioned in her dating profile was Sylvia’s taste in interior decoration. Even in daytime the bedroom’s heavy black curtains were always drawn and Graham sat centrally on a chest of drawers beneath a large barbed-wire Christian cross, a heart-revealing Virgin Mary, and a deer skull from whose antlers hung Sylvia’s chunky necklaces and bracelets and feathery Native American dreamcatchers.
What to make of this ornamentation, as far removed from real-estate saleswomanship as from Pymble’s Burberry tartans? Byron-Doug took it in his stride and welcomed the change.
He was proud of his new beachy bohemianism. This was the second chance he’d been desperate for: an exciting partner whose imaginative difference and novel sensuality stretched him intellectually as well as physically. It was a long way from the executive floor of the Commonwealth Bank and North Shore leafiness. He was determined to embrace it all, even the uneasy conjunction of Our Lady and perpetually grinning Graham.
And there was some more imaginative decor to come. Sylvia was a collector of eclectic tastes. Arranged on the dressing table was a growing selection of smaller skulls, real ones from local native animals (bandicoot, fruit bat, wallaby, quoll and carpet python). Then, one evening, lying aloofly together in an ancient veiled baby’s crib in the corner, just purchased from eBay: two 19th-century dolls, icy to the touch, cupid lips parted over pointy beige teeth, their faces expressionless, their porcelain cheeks covered in spider-web cracks.
‘What shall we call them?’ she asked him.
We? ‘I have no idea.’ One of the dolls had a lazy eye, he noticed.
‘I was very lucky to get them. I was thinking Isabella and Allegra.’
‘Fine by me.’
‘Two weeks’ wages, but what a bargain,’ Sylvia beamed.
Slightly unnerved, Doug felt he’d seen this movie before: behind a locked door in the run-down 19th-century country house they’ve just purchased at a bargain price, the naive new owners discover a previously unnoticed bedroom.
All Sylvia’s dark and humid bedroom lacked was the classic evil ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on a chair, and an old rocking horse rocking away mysteriously by itself in the corner. Oh, and frayed net curtains rustling in an inexplicable breeze.
But the gloomy bedroom was all part of her novelty and attraction. For one thing, her bedtime enthusiasm went overboard. (Apart from a disconcerting habit at the key moment of shrieking Mummy! Suzanne had always laboured away silently.) Of an operatic level new to him, Sylvia’s rising screeches were like those of the boss seagull in every beach flock. As they intensified, her shrieks set off worried howls from old Billy.
‘We’re upsetting the dog,’ he said, a little proudly, hardly put off at all. ‘And Allegra and Isabella probably. Though Allegra is turning a blind eye.’
‘That’s Isabella. Don’t be cruel.’
Graham grinned down on all this.
Doug found himself in a new role: the watcher, the listener, the detached seagull feeder, the benevolent scatterer of chips and sandwich crusts. In the dark bed, apart from spotting a vague outline and a moist eye-glint every now and then, he could barely see Sylvia. Strangely enough, he’d never felt more in sexual control.
A new man these days, a youngish, more relaxed and outdoorsy man, decidedly forty again, he was determined to accept her decorative taste as intriguing. The way it denied the local artistic fondness for rainbows, waves, sunsets, parrots, mountains, frangipanis – and dolphins – was even stimulating.
Although their slipperiness sometimes disadvantaged purchase, the black silk sheets made a change, too. So did the black curtains and black walls. On his 3 a.m. toilet visits, feeling his way in the dark, carefully stepping around the sleeping Billy, invisible in his own doggy duskiness, the glowing skull stood out in sharp relief.
One night when their relationship was established, he asked Sylvia, ‘OK with you if we leave a night-light on in the hall? I wouldn’t want to trip and smash something.’
‘Sorry, I can’t sleep if there’s the slightest chink of light,’ Sylvia said. ‘Apart from Graham.’
Indeed, on the rare occasions when she slept at his house she darkened the room and closed the door, too. So that was that. Meanwhile, in her bedroom, the solar-powered skull, unconstrained, continued to glare and grin down on them.
Into their third month, the North Coast real-estate boom began to wane with winter’s gales and he noticed Sylvia becoming moody and distracted. Coastal houses were staying on the market for nine, twelve, eighteen months. The capital-city rich were no longer buying five-million-dollar weekenders at Wategos and St Helena. Now she was even struggling for sales in the middle and bottom end of the market.
One night, after a mostly silent dinner interrupted by Sylvia worriedly taking several business calls on her phone, he was surprised to enter her bedroom to find two inflatable sex dolls – a black male and a white female – sitting side by side, legs akimbo, on the sofa in the corner.
‘Introduce me to your friends.’
‘Oh, them. I was doing a vacant house inspection at Suffolk Park and I found these two in the wardrobe. Luckily I spotted them before I showed clients through. You wouldn’t believe the things people have in their bedrooms.’
‘Oh, I believe it.’ He was surprised how prim and Pymble-ish he felt. ‘Shall I put the attractive couple in the garage? Or, better still, take them for a ride to the dump?’
‘They’re fine there for the moment.’
‘Do you have names for them, too?’
‘Obama and Marilyn, I think.’
Heading toilet-wards that night, trying to avoid Graham’s glowing grin and Billy’s massive slumped form, Doug accidentally lurched into the latex couple. Emitting raspy squeaks, they toppled off the sofa. In the dark, he made a muddle of picking them up. They couldn’t bend freely at the waist and kept falling over. More raspy squeaks: they seemed to be vigorously protesting. Eventually, exasperated, he piled them roughly back on to the sofa, one on top of the other.
Sylvia turned on the bed-light. ‘What are you doing?’
He was wide awake and cross by now. Obama and Marilyn had lurid genitalia and obscene plasti
c pubic hair. ‘Your friends and I are having an orgy.’
Three days passed before another evening at Sylvia’s house. After dinner, Doug was pleased to see the sex dolls had departed the bedroom. When he entered the bathroom, however, there they were in the bath, clinging together, vacant-eyed, as if fornicating while doped up. Obama was darker than his namesake and Marilyn was wearing a shower-cap. Her vacant blue eyes stared at the ceiling and her flabby red lips formed a capital O that tunnelled deep into her head.
Sylvia was sitting on the sofa with her arms around Isabella and Allegra, watching television.
‘You’re a funny one, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged. He could feel his bohemianism slipping away fast.
‘Do you want to hold Isabella? She’s the more affectionate one.’
The pointy beige teeth. The creepy cracked cheeks. The dud eye. Holding a doll. ‘You’re kidding of course.’
On his bathroom visit later that night he found the latex couple, in intimate proximity, sitting on the toilet together, Marilyn on top, and he had to lift them off. Their skin was of a sticky texture that clung to him. Marilyn came off Obama’s lap with a squelching pop. She still looked dazed but Obama seemed plastically excited.
Doug didn’t sleep well, and in the pre-dawn darkness he rose, dressed quietly, stepped over Billy and crept from the bedroom.
As he tiptoed out of the house it struck him that not once in the four months of their relationship had Sylvia suggested a long beach walk. Nor had they sipped red wine before an open fire while she played easy-listening blues and surf crashed in the distance, stuff that a former North Shore banker would have enjoyed.
For that matter, he hadn’t suggested them either. He and Suzanne had loved such things, years ago. Graham seemed to be grinning wider than ever as he left.
20
Thea needed to walk and she needed to smoke a cigar. After thirty-six hours spent treating a classroom of schoolgirl gang-rape victims in Burundi, she had taken up smoking a daily cigar one evening six years ago.
In the coffee tent that night, Gabriel Barranco, one of the sweet mulatto doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières’ sexual-violence treatment program, had handed around some Trinidad Fundadores cigars, named for Trinidad the Cuban town, not Trinidad the island, saying these were the 1998 vintage, the ones Fidel used to give visiting dignitaries, and the best cigars Cuba had to offer.
The evening of the schoolgirl rape victims was at the farthest remove from celebratory, but the young Cuban doctor told Thea it was important for that reason to ease the day from her mind, so she could sleep in order to help heal victims of violence again tomorrow, and that the cigar would help. So she had taken the Trinidad Fundadore and smoked it down to the stub, and, yes, it had helped. Once she’d stopped vomiting, she was so wiped out that she’d slept heavily and without dreaming.
The next night, Gabriel’s second generously offered cigar was better, and she could begin to detect and actually appreciate its claimed honey essence and its vanilla fragrance, and she dwelt for a moment on how attitudes and life itself could change so abruptly, and how such a preachy nonsmoker of ordinary cigarettes could come to be sucking on Cuban cigars, and this same person, a former Queensland GP whose normal task until then had been excising basal-cell carcinomas from surfers’ ears and noses came to be repairing the torn flesh of small girls in Africa.
Her attitudes and life itself had changed that afternoon in Neptune Waters six years ago when the world suddenly fell on her skull with the heaviest, sharpest and most surprising of pains, and a black tide rushed in. Seconds later – was it only seconds? – she’d found herself sitting on the hot asphalt outside Woolworths among rolling cans of lentils and Five-Bean Mix and Granny Smiths and an explosively fizzing bottle of mineral water.
She found it most peculiar to be sitting on the ground encircled and strangely plagued by spilled groceries. The mid-afternoon summer sun bore down on the car park and her head was throbbing to the beat of the traffic drumming on the highway, and with each pulse-beat blood streamed down her face, onto her chest and thighs and then the asphalt.
It was embarrassing that the bleeding wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t remember any patient’s head injury bleeding so much. Blood was running into her eyes and soaking her T-shirt and pooling on the ground. In her daze she couldn’t decide which was more important: staunching the blood or stopping bean cans and apples from rolling away under parked cars.
A decision was necessary. The asphalt’s heat on her bare thighs forced her to her knees. Pushing down on the back bumper she struggled to her feet and bent down to scrabble groceries back into their bags. Bending was a mistake, and she had to kneel again and hold on to the bumper for a minute. Blood still dripped down her chest and legs onto the ground.
Again she tried to open the back hatch of the station wagon in order to put the shopping bags inside. Was this how it had happened? That’s all she’d been doing, nothing extraordinary – just placing the groceries in the back hatch of the old Subaru Outback. So why was the door suddenly so impossibly weighty and belligerent? It was determinedly fighting back, almost too heavy to lift, and her head pounded even more painfully when she attempted it.
But she heaved, and the door lifted up slightly, then rose all the way fast, and then abruptly and heavily dropped again, this time on her forearms. More pain.
Thea stood in the car park and looked around for people, especially people who knew about cars. Men. There was no one nearby. What was amiss here? One of the back hatch’s pneumatic supporting struts had snapped, and this time the broken strut had speared down into the Subaru’s left tail-light, sprinkling shards of perspex and glass into the splatters of blood on the ground.
How hurt was she? She climbed into the front seat, out of the sun, and in the rear-vision mirror saw a dark horizontal crevice welling in the hair above her forehead. The blood still rose and trickled. She tried hard to focus. Sensibly. Should I drive? Concussion? The hatch wouldn’t close but it seemed vitally important to get out of the heat and far away from here. To get the groceries home had become an important mission.
On the seat was the towel from her daily dip in the sea, from a time when things were less complicated. How simple life had been in the surf an hour ago. She wiped her bloody face with the damp towel, then wrapped it around her head in a turban, gasping at the salty sting on the wound but appreciating the sharper focus it provided.
I would always absolutely advise anyone against doing this, she thought, as she edged the station wagon with its open hatch out of the car park into the highway traffic, concentrating deeply on staying in the slow lane, and in a flash of common sense drove to the surgery instead of directly home.
It was strange being on the other side of the medical divide. As he stitched up her scalp, the lone doctor on duty, Greg Van Der Hoek, the youngest partner in the practice, growled, ‘Jesus, Thea. You drove here? You’re kidding me.’
‘I’m fine now,’ she said. Greg was twenty years younger, a surfer himself, and she was surprised at his gentle needlework. She was in the nurse’s back room with the eye charts and scales and needle bins and drug cabinets and she was embarrassed to be sitting there in her swimming costume, her shirt encrusted with blood, her bare legs smeared. Embarrassed to be twenty years older than Dr Greg and be sitting there under his care with naked middle-aged thighs and a varicose vein blossoming in her right ankle.
‘Ask yourself the usual questions, Thea. The ones you’d ask a patient. Did you black out? Are you feeling dizzy? Drowsy? Headachy? Seeing stars? Any ringing in the ears? Do you remember what happened? Who’s the prime minister?’
‘Give me a break. Benjamin Disraeli.’
‘Ha ha. Your pupils look a bit dodgy. Now you’ll finally have to get rid of that old bomb.’
‘I’m OK, Greg.’
‘You’re having the tests anyway. I’m booking them now. And I’ll drive you home.’
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She could thank Dr Greg’s insistence and, above all, the Subaru’s faulty back hatch for the discovery by the EEG and MRI scans of the brain tumour, the size of a small plum, an apricot. It wasn’t malignant but would eventually have killed her. So most of the plum was removed and radiation therapy killed the tumour. And instead of a plum on her brain she now had a growth the size of a cherry.
The cherry was attached to the wall of her brain, unable to be eliminated for fear of damaging her sight and other brain functions. And now she had regular scans to check whether the cherry had turned nasty and was growing back into a plum or, worse, an orange.
But the cherry had to stay. The cherry lived with her, and its existence changed things. It altered Thea’s choices in life. And along the way, the various blood tests (she’d gone the whole hog) had revealed the haemochromatosis.
The cherry and the H-bomb reminded her of her own mortality, that her mother had died suddenly at fifty-six, of the speedy passage of time and its definite limits, of what was important, and of why she was a doctor. She signed up with Médecins Sans Frontières and between scans tried to put the brain cherry to the back of her mind. Working in the sickest, poorest and most brutalised countries in the world, this was easier than she’d imagined.
But amid all these relatives this weekend, among her own blood, and people with similar hair and eye colour and noses and iron deposits, she thought of the cherry that lived in her head and the power of genes to rust your organs. She considered how she and her father had the same-shaped fingers and toes, and how both hated to be late anywhere and so always turned up fifteen minutes early for appointments, how they even ate apples the same way, gnawed them right down to the pips. Perhaps there were even genes for punctuality and apple-eating.