by Fiona Capp
She glances at her watch. He is due any time now. A breeze has sprung up. Down near the front gate, the branches of the silver birch are swinging like the arms of a happy child. How she would love to have that freedom, just to swing her arms without pain. Each day, pushing the chair gets harder. It’s got so bad that her carers have to feed her. If she wasn’t booked in for the operation next week, she doesn’t like to imagine what state of mind she’d be in.
She settles at her desk to wait. When Matthew arrives a few minutes later, there is nothing about his manner to indicate anything is amiss. He is wearing aftershave. His clothes are crisp and clean. She is pleased to see he’s looking after himself. He cheerfully remarks on the beautiful day.
As his eyes quickly rove the room, lingering on the furniture that used to be theirs – the boxy art deco armchairs, the antique lamp with its fringe of beads, the blue Venetian glass vase on the mantelpiece – Angela wonders how it feels to see fragments of your past in a place you no longer belong.
He offers her a crooked smile, his hair boyishly tousled. He is about to sit down when he asks if he could use the bathroom. She tells him where it is and he is gone for less than two minutes. On his way back to his chair, when he passes her, she finds herself sniffing the air. Whisky? Probably just the aftershave. He sits down, ready for business, his arms resting on the sides of the chair.
Angela studies him. He has made a remarkable recovery since his time in hospital. His features, which had become blurred and puffy from the drink, have sharpened again. His eyes are bright.
‘So,’ Angela says, ‘the good times.’
He grins, pleased with himself. ‘My memory isn’t as shot as I thought it was.’
‘Great.’ She waits. ‘Well?’
‘I want to hear what you’ve got to say first.’
This is not what she expected. She is used to asking the questions. But if she insists that he start, it will set things off on the wrong note. Well then, how to begin? The sex was good. Too bald. Too glib. How do you find words for a wordless connection? A physical understanding. The ease with which their bodies fitted together. No, she can’t talk about that.
‘I’ve been thinking about that football match,’ she says, recalling the way he took off from the pack and blazed across the ground, leaving everyone else for dead. And then the mark, the collision, the look on his face. How it spoke of his horror and dismay at what he had done to his opponent. And how moved she was when he ignored the howls of his team mates and helped the man up.
She smiles reassuringly, as if talking to one of her patients. ‘Everyone likes to think that when put to the test, they will rise to the occasion, but you never really know until the moment arrives.’
To her surprise, his expression darkens, his body goes stiff. ‘You call that a good memory? I kick a guy in the head and lose the match and you try to tell me I did something noble? I thought we were supposed to be talking about good times between us. All you can do is remind me of how I fuck things up. As if I need reminding.’ He falls back in the chair, incredulous.
Angela sits perfectly still. Of all the moments she could have recalled, why did she choose this one? Did she turn it into an uplifting tale to distract herself from the fact that she really did want to punish him? Remind him of the damage he’d inflicted? The way he let people down? Since she saw him in the hospital, she’d started to think that she might have it in her to let go of the anger she still nursed. She should’ve known it would be messy, that pain always clings. Forgiveness wasn’t something you just handed over like a gift and were done with. It was fickle, like any other emotion. It came and went.
She bites her lip. ‘I’m sorry, Matt. This isn’t going to work.’
His eyes have turned to slits. From the back pocket of his jeans, he pulls out a silver flask, takes a few swigs. He watches her as he swallows.
‘You promised me you wouldn’t drink,’ she says.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘God, listen to you! But you don’t, do you? You never listen. You sit behind your desk like the fucking Sphinx and dispense your hard pellets of wisdom and then you dismiss me, like I’m some kind of smudge you can wipe away.’
He takes another swig, his eyes bulging now. ‘Well, fuck you. This time, you’re going to listen and I’m not going anywhere until you have. In fact I’ve got something for you, Angie. A nice dream. You love dreams, don’t you? You’ll get a real kick out of this. First one I’ve remembered in years.’
‘Enough, Matthew. Please.’
He finishes off the last of whatever is in his flask. ‘Not until I’ve said what I want to say, Angel.’
He stands, shaky on his feet, and feels his way to the couch, almost falls onto it. He jerks his head around.
‘This is how it works, isn’t it? I lay myself bare and you fix me! Zap! Just like that. You’ll like this dream, Angel, it’s a juicy one. Never had one like it. Maybe I dreamed it just for you.’
Angela’s eyes scour the garden, willing Luisa, who’s on afternoon shift, to return from the shops. It was a mistake to ever imagine that they could part on good terms. They will only go on hurting each other; they can’t seem to help themselves.
His dream is about a cyclone, a woman and a man caught in the eye of the storm. A flattened landscape of roofless houses, felled powerlines, plastic bags flapping from branches, fields of horizontal cane, grey waves bashing a grey sea wall until it gives way and the water engulfs the land and everything in its path.
As he speaks, Angela is struck by his fluency, how rage has unlocked his tongue. He’s always been savagely articulate when drunk, and now the rage and the drink have come together in this perfect storm. If he was her patient, his dream would be a gift. Something to be marvelled over and held up to the light. But he isn’t her patient, he’s Matthew, and she doesn’t want to know.
He talks in a kind of trance, his body turned foetal on the couch, as he relives the dream of the raging flood wrenching the woman from the man, their arms groping for one another as they sink and surface and sink and then never surface again. He finishes and waits. But Angela can find no words.
‘Fuck!’ he finally barks. ‘Whaddya think? What’s it about? Wish fulfilment? Death drive? Or a birth dream – all that water. For God’s sake, speak.’
Angela stares at the top of his head, the whorls of his hair like a vortex. For the first time in her life, she is afraid of him. Her voice cracks as she speaks. ‘You’ve said what you wanted to say. And I’ve listened. Now leave.’
He rocks himself upright, swings his legs off the couch. Meets her eye. ‘Where’s your carer?’
‘In the kitchen.’
‘No she isn’t, I saw her leaving when I arrived.’
‘She went shopping. What are you getting at?’
‘Nothing at all. Just wondering.’ He looks around the room. ‘Nice furniture. Strangely familiar.’ He gets to his feet and reaches for a pillow on a nearby armchair. It was embroidered by Angela’s mother with Home Sweet Home. She can’t bring herself to throw it away but the platitude embarrasses her so she keeps it face down.
Matthew puts the pillow to his nose and inhales. He looks at her over the top of it, his eyes churning like the waves in his dream. She knows what’s going through his head. It would only take a few minutes and she would be unable to resist.
He weighs the pillow in his palms, staring at the embroidery. Then tosses it back on the armchair. ‘You really thought I might do it, didn’t you?’
Angela darts a glance at the phone on her desk, her heart firing like gunshot. ‘Go. Please. Don’t force me to call the police.’
He slowly approaches, his face ablaze. For what feels like forever, Angela holds his gaze. ‘So much for the good Matthew, eh?’ he mutters. Then he moans and squeezes his eyes shut, as if the sight of her torments him.
Out in the garden a bird is singing, Cheer up, cheer up.
He is about to speak again when the door opens. He spins aroun
d.
Luisa looks anxiously from Matthew to Angela. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Matthew is leaving,’ Angela hears herself say.
Without looking at either woman, he lurches for the door and slams it behind him. He reels down the front path, and a blackbird pecking at the lawn explodes into the air. They can hear him shouting and cursing as he staggers away down the street.
20.
At the revolving door – a massive, old, wooden-framed thing that endlessly turns and turns – Richard offers to guide her chair in.
‘No need,’ Angela says with a smile. The world might be an obstacle course but she will find her way through it. When a gap appears, she rolls her chair forward and waits for the opening on the other side. Richard steps out beside her into the softly lit deep-green interior. She’s never been to a restaurant like it. All these Roman columns and marble statues. Chandeliers. Heavy velvet drapes on the windows and tapestries on the walls. Tiffany lamps glowing in corners. And in the middle of the foyer, a massive floral arrangement of bird of paradise and some exotic pink-and-white waxy flowers that look like a flock of flamingos.
A suave young waiter with long narrow sideburns following the line of his jaw shows them to their table. He removes one of the chairs and stands back as Angela parks herself in the space. She collapses the arms of her chair and raises the seat to a comfortable height. No need to ask for help. Each movement is a small victory. When she is ready, the young waiter steps forward, shakes out the linen napkin and lays it over her lap. He smiles crisply and hands her the menu. Angela studies the dishes on offer, sizing up what she can eat without having to ask for help. Although she has brought her own cutlery, as she always does when dining out – each implement has a looped handle she can slip her fingers through – cutting anything is out of the question.
Richard watches her keenly. She is wearing a clinging, sleeveless dress the colour of sunset, her face lit up by its reflected glow. She catches him staring at her and smiles and then, on impulse, raises her right arm like a flamenco dancer, her gold and silver bracelets slipping to her elbow, and begins to twist her arm in little arabesques. She raises it higher, exposing the domed roof of her underarm and the curve of her breast.
‘Bravo! Wonderful,’ he cries, enchanted. ‘I told you my friend was good.’
She drops her arm and considers putting her hand on his to show her appreciation for what he has done for her. But that’s too much like flirting, and she’s never been one to flirt. Two months ago, she struggled to propel her chair or wipe her eyes, could barely feed herself. And now she can swim again, she can type, she can hold a glass to her lips. Best of all, she has almost no pain in her shoulders. The specialist warned her, though, not to get too cocky. If she overdoes it, she’ll be back where she started.
‘Thank you sounds so feeble. But I don’t know what else to say.’
‘No need to say anything.’
During the long wait for their entrées, as they consume a whole bottle of white wine, Angela hears herself trying to explain what happened at the meditation retreat: that moment of dissolution when her flesh became a fountain of molecules, endlessly flowing, and, with it, the dawning of knowledge that nothing was as solid or permanent as it seemed. The wonder and strangeness of it. And the thought that if her mind could do this, what else was it capable of? Could this mental exercise of self-dissection be reversed? If she concentrated hard and long enough, could these atoms be reconfigured, her spinal cord unsnapped?
Even as she speaks, she’s telling herself to shut up. In the morning, she will cringe over this halting, half-sloshed attempt to explain why she went back there, why she held such extravagant and misguided hopes. ‘I know it sounds deluded. I ought to have known better.’
The waiter finally reappears, places the seared scallops in front of her.
Richard can hardly contain himself. He is leaning forward, almost out of his chair as he strains towards her.
‘No, wait. Listen. This is not stupid at all.’ After her operation, he tells her, Jeremy called to tell him how it went. He said that very soon, operations like it would be obsolete. Already, in the United States, they were using sensors that could pick up brain signals and bypass the injured spine. Make once-paralysed muscles move again.
He doesn’t bother with his soup. He is too enraptured by his story. It is like a heart bypass, he goes on, only instead of redirecting blood, the brain’s electrical signals are being rerouted. Mind over body. There are quadriplegics who have recovered use of their arms. It is surely just a matter of time before the technology will see them walking again.
Angela smiles patiently. Of course she has heard about it. The technology has been around for some time. But it is far from helping anyone in her position to walk. The danger is you spend your life waiting. Waiting for the right gadget or medical breakthrough to come along. You could defer your whole life looking to a future that resembles the past. Since the retreat, she has made a pact with herself not to hold out for a miraculous recovery. It irks her that she ever did, that she, of all people, could delude herself so. Richard is trying to give her hope, she understands that. But such recoveries are, at present, the stuff of science fiction, or so rare an exception as to prove the rule.
If she has learned anything from the stories her patients tell her about their lives, it is that as much as reality hurts, denying it hurts even more. Transformation, true healing, can only be achieved by letting go of those childhood yearnings for the happy ever after. What she gives her patients is a second chance at growing up.
‘I’ve got my arm back. I’m happy.’ She makes her hand do another little dance.
Richard sees it again, the dome of her underarm with its golden hairs. He reaches out and grips her fingers. They might be arm wrestling mid-air or making some secret pact.
Now, he thinks, is the time to tell her what happened the other day when he was at the pub overlooking the main beach not far from his place. What used to be the main beach until the high tide swallowed most of it. He had been a supporter of the channel deepening because it meant bigger ships, more trade. Had pooh-poohed the Cassandras with their predictions of what it would do to marine life, to the coast itself. Until the beaches in his own backyard started to disappear. And not just the beaches. The publican was up in arms. His foreshore beer garden was being washed away. The council brought in sandbags eight deep and great grey icebergs of granite to halt the erosion. Not much help, though, to anyone who might want their beach.
He was sitting on the lawn having a beer, looking out over what was left of the beach, thinking about the rising tide and how it was eating at the cliff below his house and about the tides in the affairs of men. How sandbags and rocks were temporary measures. Stop-gaps. Evidence of failure. Of hubris. On such a full sea are we now afloat.
Back at the Anchorage, he got out of the car and, in this uncertain state of mind, stood like a stranger who had just stumbled upon the house and was seeing it for the first time. And through that stranger’s eyes, he saw it for what it was. Just a house. Just a big, old house made of blocks of limestone, which were themselves built from the skeletons of prehistoric animals and shells. And the window frames and floorboards from cut-down trees. Materials that had once been alive and now were dead. And in time, would crumble to nothing and be washed away.
It made him so light-headed he wondered if he was ill, if he had a fever perhaps, to entertain such heretical thoughts. As his eyes travelled over the house, he saw that his past was a story whose ending was not preordained, not as he’d always believed. It was a story which he had inherited and how it ended was up to him. The first step had been taken, the unthinkable had been thought.
He watched the builders erecting the scaffold and had to fight off the urge to tell them to stop, right then. To forget it. To pack up and go home.
The next morning, as he walked from room to room, he still felt the same way. Utterly detached, cauterised, as if he had fallen out of love. E
verything was searingly clear. All those memories, those intense childhood emotions he thought the place housed were not here in this vacant dwelling, this empty shell. Any meaning, any sentimental value, resided within the walls in his skull. He went up the staircase and opened the French doors onto the veranda and scanned the bay. The view would always be with him, no matter where he went. He could summon it up whenever he needed to. He was free to go, to walk away.
Sitting across from Angela, this is what he wants to tell her. That she has released him from the grip of the past. But he doesn’t know how to start, how to explain without sounding completely daft. She was right, of course, about his parents. Once she put it into words, it was blindingly obvious: how he’d clung to those irrational hopes. But it wasn’t just the words she spoke, wise as they were. It was the person who spoke them. She was the reason he could look at the Anchorage and feel happily unmoored, adrift on a strange new sea.
As they finish their main course, Angela asks if anything is bothering him. A number of times, he has opened his mouth to speak and then closed it, smiling blithely, and made some inconsequential remark, as if Richard the man and Richard the politician were at war, the politician maintaining the upper hand.
He pretends to be taken aback. ‘Nothing wrong at all. I couldn’t be happier. It’s been the most delightful night.’ After a pause he adds, ‘Actually, I’ve been worried about you. Your brother told me that your ex-husband has been threatening you. Is there anything I can do? A restraining order? I can help with that.’
She doesn’t want to talk about Matthew. ‘Nothing. I won’t see him again.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
She doesn’t blink. ‘He could have killed me. But he didn’t. I’m not afraid, not for myself.’
For days after his visit, she was in shock. She could not get his dream of the man and woman swept away by the flood waters out of her mind, its furious weather scouring her out. Scouring out the rage she still felt, leaving her blasted and hollow and spent.