by Kylie Ladd
‘You didn’t tell us you were coming,’ his mother rebuked him delightedly. ‘Have you eaten? Let me get you a plate.’
‘I don’t want to eat,’ said Ben. ‘I came to talk to you. Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s out with a sick cow, waiting for the vet. It’s one of the milkers—’
‘We got a new puppy, Ben!’ Kirra interrupted, still holding him tightly. ‘His name’s Spud and he sleeps on my bed. He’s a cross between a Jack Russell and a pug. Dad says he looks like someone stepped on his face, but he’s so cute. Come and see him!’ She started tugging him by the hand and Ben could feel himself losing control of the situation.
‘Not now,’ he said, louder than he had intended. ‘Kirra, go to your room. I need to speak with Mum. I’ll come and see Spud later.’
‘But I want to show you him now,’ Kirra whined.
‘GO!’ Ben shouted, and she fled without looking back. He’d never yelled at her before.
‘That’s no way to talk to your sister,’ his mother began, moving towards him, but Ben cut her off.
‘Is she? Is she my sister?’
Her step faltered, and he knew everything he needed to know. ‘Of course she’s your sister,’ she replied, but so quietly he could barely hear her.
‘Is she?’ Ben repeated. ‘Are you sure you didn’t get her thrown in from wherever you picked me up from? Kind of a two-for-one deal, maybe?’
Mary swallowed, the cross at the base of her throat bobbing briefly up and down. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. Ben took a step closer. A clock ticked between them.
‘What can you tell me?’ he asked.
‘What do you know?’ she countered, hands locked around the chair she stood behind, as if she might suddenly have to pick it up and use it to defend herself.
He forced himself to speak evenly. He set out, in the baldest terms, what had happened. Mary’s face grew paler as she listened.
‘Do you know for sure?’ Mary whispered.
‘We each had a blood test. I got the results today.’ He pulled the crumpled piece of paper from his jeans and held it out.
Mary waved it away and sat down in her chair. ‘I just wanted a baby,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have a baby.’
‘Fine.’ Ben thrust the results back into his pocket. ‘But why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?’ He was going to cry, he realised. He could feel the tears gathering, the snot already collecting at the back of his throat.
Mary had already begun weeping herself. ‘Your father wanted to, but I was scared,’ she sobbed. ‘I couldn’t work up the courage.’ She reached for a potholder lying on the table and buried her face in it, rocking back and forth. ‘I didn’t know how to explain it,’ she gulped from behind the floral fabric. ‘I was terrified you’d think that I wasn’t your mother, that you weren’t my child.’
‘So you lied to me?’ Ben asked, astounded. ‘You made Dad tell me about the birds and the bees, but you wouldn’t let him say where I really came from?’ He closed his eyes, trying to take it all in. ‘What a joke, what an absolute joke. You spent half of my childhood saying the rosary or going to church, yet somehow it was OK not to tell me the truth?’
Mary rocked and sobbed, rocked and sobbed. ‘I meant to,’ she gasped, ‘when you were eighteen, or twenty-one, but then I just couldn’t do it. I was so afraid of losing you.’
‘You should have told me when I was ten!’ Ben shouted, furious. ‘Eight, even. Seven. Whenever I could have understood. Were you going to keep it from me all my life?’ The betrayal was too enormous to comprehend. ‘What about Kirra?’ he asked. ‘Was she donated too?’
His mother shook her head, her face still hidden. ‘She was just lucky.’ Then she finally looked up, cheeks streaked with tears. ‘But you weren’t lucky. You were a miracle.’
Ben knew the words were meant to soothe him, to reaffirm how much he’d been wanted, but for some reason they only made him angrier. ‘Such a miracle that you couldn’t talk about it? Such a fucking miracle that you didn’t even tell me?’ Deep within he knew that his rage wasn’t just at his mother but at the whole terrible situation, and came from his pain at what he’d lost, yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He reached around blindly for something on the kitchen bench, found a clay figure he had made when he was still at school and threw it hard at the wall behind her. Mary screamed and covered her head with her arms; the ornament shattered into tiny pieces that rained down onto the floor. Kirra appeared briefly in the hallway, took one look at him and raced back to her room.
He was almost halfway back to Melbourne when the nausea hit. The tears had stopped, but this was something new—something oily and alive, uncurling in his belly. For a kilometre or two he drove on, trying to fight it, buttocks drenched in sweat and clamped tightly together. He thought again of his mother’s deceit, trying to distract himself with his pain, but by the time he saw the Allen’s sign near the turn-off for Broadford he knew he was beaten. He pulled in beside it, wrenched the car door open and stumbled out into the dark. The creature in his stomach reared up and spat venom. Ben fumbled with his pants but wasn’t quite quick enough, his bowels erupting before he’d pushed them past his hips. He sank onto all fours just metres from the highway, retching and heaving, his legs smeared in shit. Later, when he tried to wipe himself clean, he found that the only thing he had was the results from his blood test.
January 2011
18
Skye shifted on her stool, trying without success to get comfortable. Fewer positions were these days. She put down her tile cutters and stood up to lean across her workbench instead, but the minute her stomach made contact with its edge she felt the baby kick.
‘Didn’t you like that?’ she asked, stepping back. Now, though, she was too far away to see what she was doing, so she bent over again. Another kick.
‘You don’t want me to work, huh?’ Skye straightened up and sat back on her stool. ‘Good. Neither do I.’
She toyed listlessly with the glass squares in front of her, pushing them into different combinations. Maybe some indigo to offset the carmine? That should make both colours deeper, more textured. When she put them together, though, they simply looked red and blue, as predictable as a child’s painting. She dropped her hands to her stomach. The baby was still now. She imagined it floating inside her, curled nose to tail. How big would it be? The size of an orange, maybe even a grapefruit? She sighed. At six months pregnant she should know that sort of thing, should know whether it had fingernails yet or could recognise her voice. Hamish had bought her a book about it all, but every time she picked it up and tried to read, the words slid off the page and onto the floor.
‘Hey, baby,’ she said softly, palms on her belly, caressing her bulge. ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know your mummy?’
Jess looked up from under the bench and thumped her tail. The baby didn’t move.
Skye turned her back on the glass and moved her stool along the bench to her laptop. She clicked on the screen with a faint sense of guilt. She shouldn’t be coming here again. She should turn it off, she should be working, but she just wanted to see if there’d been any updates. It wouldn’t take long. Black text appeared against a turquoise background and she began to read the introductory paragraph, though she knew it by heart. The material was comforting somehow, its words and rhythms both an absolution and a liturgy.
Genetic sexual attraction (GSA) is a sexual attraction between close relatives, such as siblings, first and second cousins or a parent and offspring, who meet for the first time as adults. The syndrome was initially recognised after the relaxation of adoption laws in the late 1970s gave adopted children easier access to their records and led to an increase in the number of reunions between adoptees and their blood relatives. An unexpectedly high number of both men and women reported struggling with sudden and terrifying emotions after such reunions, including feelings of romantic love and overwhelming lust towards their biological sibling, parent, aunt/uncle
, nephew/niece, or, in at least one documented instance, grandmother. In many, but not all, cases the attraction was reciprocated, leading to the break-up of marriages and families and the formation of new, technically illegal and incestuous, relationships.
It was Nell who had found the website, sitting hunched over her old computer at the kitchen table while Skye recuperated after her stay in hospital and lay staring at the ceiling in her bedroom, thoughts circling like sharks. Ben was her brother . . . but she loved him, and he loved her . . . but he was her brother. Her brother! Every morning when she woke up and remembered what had happened the pain hit her again, renewed and relentless. She’d whimper, close her eyes and burrow back under the covers, but there was no escaping the situation. She missed him, she ached for him, but he was her brother. She couldn’t love him, not like this, yet she couldn’t seem to stop.
In that sense the website had been a relief. Nell had got her up when she discovered it and helped her to the kitchen so they could read it through together. Skye had been mesmerised: she wasn’t alone or deranged; there was a name for what had happened to her and Ben. ‘Listen to this,’ Nell had said, and quoted from an article linked to the site: . . . “Genetic sexual attraction associated with IVF births is a time bomb waiting to go off . . . more commonplace than supposed.”’ She turned to Skye and reached for her hand. ‘I’m sorry. If we’d had any idea that this might have happened we’d never have donated those embryos. You’ve just been unlucky. You have to put it behind you now.’ Skye had burst into tears and Nell had taken her back to bed. Put it behind her? She was still waiting for him to call.
Since that time she’d continued to visit the site, daily at first, then at least two or three times each week. The general information displayed was occasionally added to, but what she really found fascinating were the forums, where members chatted, left questions or related their own stories. Recently, she’d become riveted by anything written by J, a woman whose older brother had been put up for adoption years before she herself was born. They had met for the first time just five months ago and fallen in love, then moved in together despite both already being married to other people. It wasn’t as if she was addicted to this stuff, Skye told herself now as she scanned the message board. She only read it so she could understand what she’d been through, and thus move forward. It was therapy. She clicked to open J’s latest post.
I still love my husband, J had written to a member who’d asked if she ever thought about him. I do love him, and I miss him, but this is different. I’ve never felt this way before. I don’t just love Josh, I feel as if I belong to him, that we were made to be together—there’s just this overwhelming sense of being preordained, fated, destined to be together. I know that sounds corny, but it’s how it is.
Skye found herself nodding. That was it, exactly. She loved Hamish, but it was as if she had chosen to fall in love with him, had recognised his goodness and his other positive qualities and made her decision, not just this time, but originally too. There had been no such decision with Ben. From almost the first moment she had seen him she had known him, somehow; she had had to be with him. It wasn’t a judgement of the mind, or even the heart, but the bones, Skye thought. It must be how a mother felt when she was first handed her baby.
The baby. Hamish’s baby. Skye closed the laptop with a snap, her heart thumping. It was one thing to try and make sense of the fate that had befallen her; it was another to keep dwelling on it, to keep thinking of Ben. She pushed the computer away from her and turned back to the mosaic she was trying to create. When Hamish had bought the house, just before they got married, he’d been thrilled that it came with a studio. A real one, at that, not a shed out the back, which was all Nell had—something that had housed Charlie’s tools and was too hot in summer, too cold the rest of the year. No, Skye thought, Hamish had looked after her. He’d been house-hunting anyway, granted, but he didn’t have to go to the trouble of finding something like this. She remembered his excitement on their way back to Nell’s after the open-for-inspection.
‘The agent told me it was owned by a potter. He built the studio all by himself, so he could get it exactly the way he wanted—lots of natural light, and facing the right direction. I suppose that matters, doesn’t it?’ He’d glanced over, and she’d nodded in confirmation. ‘Plus those beautiful high ceilings and all that glass . . . It’s got a kitchenette and a day bed too, did you see? I guess he must have stayed out there overnight when inspiration struck.’ He’d reached over and taken her hand. ‘It’s perfect, isn’t it? Now that you’ve left the gym and won’t be teaching for a while.’
Skye had nodded back, moved by the hope in his eyes. ‘It’s perfect,’ she’d agreed, then was hit by another wave of nausea and started to retch. Used to it by now, Hamish had pulled over and rubbed her back while she threw up her lunch on the side of the road.
The morning sickness had taken months to abate, lasting right through her first two trimesters, almost up till the week they got married and moved into the house. Maybe that was why she hadn’t used the studio as much as she’d expected, Skye thought—she was too exhausted after half a year of vomiting, and the stress of a wedding. But both those things were now over, and still she felt creatively barren, blocked. Despite the lovely studio, despite the hours of quiet with Hamish at work and Jess at her feet, she hadn’t produced a thing. Not a mosaic, which was all she was working in now, not a design that she was happy with, not even a drawing. Nell would be ashamed of her. All her mother had ever wanted to do was paint, the desire so ferocious she’d sat cramped in the kombi, a canvas on her lap, or sketched ideas on envelopes during Skye and Arran’s swimming lessons. There had never been enough time or money or space for her mother, yet here was Skye with a beautiful echoing studio, a husband who loved and supported her, nothing to do but create—and all she had to show for it was coloured tiles scattered across her workbench like confetti.
Skye stood up abruptly and called for Jess to follow her. She needed to get out. The studio made her feel trapped, beholden. It expected too much of her; it was waiting to see if she measured up. Some days she almost wished she was back at the gym, but that was stupid. The morning sickness had forced her to resign almost as soon as she’d fallen pregnant, no longer able to stomach the sight of a cartwheel, never mind perform one. Plus, she thought, looking around the room for Jess’s ball, there was no future in teaching gym. Hamish had always told her that. She had to trust him, didn’t she? He was her future now.
So why, she chastised herself as they reached the park, did she keep thinking of Ben? He was haunting her—there was no other word for it. It was finished, over, all best forgotten, yet he kept showing up in dreams, in her thoughts, in every story she devoured on the GSA forums. Ridiculous, when she was married and pregnant with someone else’s child; when she hadn’t even seen him since the day they’d received the results.
Skye dropped heavily onto a bench. The results. It had been over a year, yet she felt ill every time she thought of them. It was still all so clear: arriving home to find the letter waiting for her, opening the envelope, quickly reading through the sheet of paper inside . . . and then nothing, nothing, until she woke up a day later in hospital with Nell sitting beside her, stroking her hair. A breakdown, the doctor had said it was, and Skye knew immediately what had broken: her heart. Nell had been right, they were brother and sister, they couldn’t marry, have children, it was a crime for them to even love each other . . . Jess deposited the ball at her feet and looked up at her expectantly, tail wagging. Skye leaned down to retrieve it, the baby inside her squirming as she did. That was what she had to concentrate on now, she told herself, that was what mattered. The baby, who needed her. Ben clearly hadn’t. Hadn’t called, hadn’t said goodbye; he hadn’t even returned to his job, she found out later from the other grade five teacher, had simply phoned in his resignation and disappeared. She picked up Jess’s ball and hurled it as far as she could.
All that summer sh
e’d missed Ben; all summer she’d waited for his voice on the phone, his knock at the door. But there had been nothing. When Skye couldn’t sleep Nell lay next to her and told her that it was better this way, that clean cuts healed quicker. Skye had nodded, but the minute her mother left the room she’d picked up her phone and tried ringing him again. He never answered; he must have changed his number. The school had no forwarding address, and when she drove past his unit there was a different car in the parking space.
And then, just a few weeks later, she’d walked into the gym and bumped into Hamish. It was the first time they’d seen each other in the four months since they’d broken up. Initially, Hamish had altered his shifts so that they didn’t have to be there together; a month on, as he’d always planned, he’d finished his exams and resigned altogether. Skye had been surprised and grateful at how easily she’d been let off. She hadn’t had to face him at work, and there’d been no difficult questions from any of their colleagues.
Jess returned with the ball, panting, and Skye threw it again. It should have been awkward to see Hamish again, but somehow it wasn’t. She’d forgotten how little he demanded from her. They’d talked in the corridor before her class began. Hamish had smiled and told her that she looked good; he’d explained that he was looking after Dan’s clients for a few weeks because Dan had injured his knee. He didn’t mind, no—even though the new job was going well it was kind of nice to be back at the Y again. The sessions were keeping him fit, and the extra money would come in handy. He was looking at buying a house—at finally getting out of his flat.
‘That’s great,’ she’d stuttered.
‘And what about you?’ he’d asked. ‘Are you still doing the grant work? How’s Ben?’