by Kylie Ladd
Arran shook his head. ‘Nup. I tried to locate them through my contacts at a couple of aid agencies, but everything hit a dead end. Meanwhile, the mother’s so depressed she can’t get out of bed, and the father’s leaving Zia and his brother alone every night so he can stack shelves at Coles.’ Arran tugged at the label of his bottle, which was damp with condensation. ‘He’s got a master’s in finance,’ he added.
‘Shit,’ said Ben.
‘It gets worse. Dad won’t seek treatment for his wife because he’s scared any sort of diagnosis will affect their visa application—that it will give the government an excuse to turn them down.’
‘Will it?’
Arran shrugged. ‘Who knows? They’ve already been waiting almost four years. That would be enough to make you depressed by itself. Anyway, Dad can’t work and care for Mum, so he farms her out to friends—which leaves Zia to do all the cooking and housework and look after Farid, his younger brother. Did you ever meet him?’
Ben nodded.
‘A week ago I got this panicked call from Zia at about nine pm. Someone’s thumping on the door of their flat. Dad’s at work, and the boys are terrified.’ Arran took another swig while the beer was still cold. ‘I turn up and it’s just some kids playing soccer in the hallway, using the door as the goal. Zia was so upset, though, that I ended up staying the night.’
‘Shit,’ Ben repeated. ‘I had no idea. And the brothers?’
‘I figure that finding them—or at least finding out what’s happened to them—is the only way I can help the family. Zia and Farid need their mother back, but she won’t improve while she’s still waiting to hear from her older sons.’
Ben gave a low whistle. ‘Yeah. You’re right, but man . . . you’re just going to head off and start looking for them?’
‘I’ve got the leave,’ Arran said, enjoying Ben’s admiration. ‘And I know people working over there who can get me into the camps.’ He tapped at the ID badge hanging around his neck. ‘This opens a few doors.’ For a second he wondered if he’d gone too far, but Ben continued to appear somewhat awed. ‘What about you?’ he asked, feeling magnanimous. ‘Do you like the drop-in work?’
‘Yeah, I do,’ said Ben. ‘The kids are great. It’s nice to see them smiling.’ He smiled himself at the thought, and without meaning to Arran grinned back. What had he been so nervous about? Ben was just another bloke. A good bloke.
‘You’ve got it made not working full time,’ he said. ‘You’re from the country, right? Do you get away much, go back home?’
A shadow passed across Ben’s face. ‘Not really, no.’ He lifted his bottle to his lips, but put it down again without drinking. ‘I haven’t spoken to my parents since I found out about Skye—about the whole donor embryo thing.’
Arran was stunned. ‘You’re joking?’
‘That letter I got from the clinic was the first inkling I had that I wasn’t their child. I was furious. I’m still furious.’
‘God, Ben.’ Arran faltered. His mouth was dry despite the beer. ‘That’s tough. They should have told you.’ He paused for a moment, then ventured, ‘But shit, they’re still your parents. I suppose they did what they thought was best . . .’
‘Best for whom?’ Ben demanded, his voice rising. The three guys drinking at the table to Arran’s left glanced over. ‘Best for them, maybe. Not best for me. All those years they lied and lied.’ He stood up and went to the bar, returning with two more bottles.
‘Thanks,’ said Arran, though he was only halfway through his first and needed to go back to the office.
Ben dropped his head into his hands, then ran them back behind his head, looking up almost cautiously. ‘I’ve spoken her name now, so I might as well ask. How’s Skye?’
‘Pregnant,’ Arran said. No point pretending. ‘The baby’s due early April.’
‘She’s what? Really? Who . . . ?’
‘Hamish.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ Ben said, leaning back against the booth. His eyes were wet. Neither of them spoke. The second beer sat sweating on the table, but Arran didn’t want it. It had occurred to him that he could have been Ben. They must have all been lined up once, years ago, in a test tube or a petri dish: Skye, Ben, him, as well as the three or four other embryos that God knows what had happened to. Then a lab technician had come along with rubber gloves and a pipette, and picked out two of them to go to Nell, the rest to the freezer. Another millimetre, a different employee, and it might have been him sitting across the table, blinking back tears while he stared at the ceiling. It might have been him who’d cast off his parents and lost his lover.
Later, Arran wondered if it was guilt at his sheer luck at not being in Ben’s position that motivated him, or simply the fact that he liked Ben and wanted to get to know him better. Maybe, though, it was even more basic: here was a man who knew something about missing brothers.
‘Ben,’ he said, stretching his arm across the table to get his attention. ‘This trip I’m going on. To Syria. Do you want to come?’
23
Mary thought she had been coping fairly well with the day. She didn’t want to be there, but she knew it was important to Kirra; she’d thought she would just sit quietly in a corner of the concrete stands, watch her daughter race, and slip away again without having to talk to anyone. But then, Lila, the mother of one of Kirra’s classmates, had spotted her.
‘Hello!’ she’d exclaimed, the loose skin beneath her chin wobbling in excitement. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages! It must have been last year sometime. How are you? How’s Frank?’
Mary had swallowed and reluctantly moved over, her nylon dress snagging on the rough surface. She should have brought a cushion to sit on, but then she’d been hoping she wouldn’t be there long enough to need one.
‘This is fun, isn’t it?’ said Lila, her eyes scanning happily over the school swimming carnival. ‘Such a good idea to put it off until March. It was far too hot last year, in February. Do you remember?’
‘I wasn’t there,’ Mary replied, but Lila talked on, oblivious.
‘Everyone dropping like flies! I wanted to jump in myself, but Gabrielle would never have spoken to me again if I had. She didn’t even want me to come this year. Said she was only in one event and I shouldn’t bother, but it’s a day out, isn’t it? It wasn’t like I was going anywhere else.’
Mary glanced around the Benalla pool, at the blue water, the cracked tiles, children dressed in house colours cheering and screaming for their teammates. Beyond the cyclone fence on the outskirts of town, parched farms squatted against yellow land, awaiting the autumn rains.
‘Of course, Kirra’s such a good little swimmer, isn’t she?’ continued Lila without pausing. ‘How many races has she won so far? And how’s your boy—Ben? Is he still enjoying Melbourne? The big city gets them all, doesn’t it? I bet you hardly see him anymore!’
Mary wanted intensely to be home again, sitting on the couch and gazing out across the hills, the front door locked securely behind her. She looked at Kirra, who was waiting in the marshalling area for her next race; just then, Kirra glanced towards her and waved.
It was the first time she had left the house in weeks. Months, really. She had done some shopping before Christmas, a quick nervous dash into town that yielded inappropriate presents and a parking ticket, but she hadn’t ventured out since. There hadn’t been much need. Frank seemed happy to pick up the groceries or take Kirra wherever she needed to go; her own friends could phone if they wanted to speak with her. They had at first, though lately the calls had dropped off. That suited her too. She wanted to avoid questions like Lila’s; questions that lacked an answer. How was Ben? She had no idea.
Lila rose to her feet, rebuffed by Mary’s silence, and set off in search of other quarry. Mary shaded her eyes with the program and gazed resolutely towards the pool. Four girls bobbed like ducks in the water, awaiting the start of their backstroke race. But Mary no longer perceived the scene before her, her mind drifting into the past,
as it so often did these days, examining it, trying to work out where she had gone wrong. If Frank had had his way they would never have had Ben. Perhaps he’d been right after all, Mary thought, then immediately castigated herself. How could it be wrong to bring a child into the world? God understood, she was sure of it, even if her own husband didn’t. God had made Eve for a purpose—as a companion for Adam, but also to bear his sons; God had answered Rachel’s plea when she demanded of Him, ‘Give me children or I will die.’ After her own infertility was first diagnosed, Mary had sat with her bible and returned to Rachel’s story again and again. Mary’s fallopian tubes were badly scarred, possibly blocked, following years of endometriosis; Frank’s sperm count was so low the specialist had joked he could just about give them each names. For nine years they had tried to conceive without success—but so had Rachel, for longer, even, watching with the ache of empty arms as first her sister and then their servants fell pregnant by her husband. Ten. Ten sons that Jacob had sired while Rachel remained barren, but God had listened to her in the end. Sometimes at night Mary soothed herself to sleep by reciting the promise of Genesis 30:22—And God remembered Rachel. God heeded her and unclosed her womb. It comforted her too that when Rachel at last gave birth it was to Joseph, Jacob’s favourite child.
When their GP suggested IVF, Mary had agreed immediately. The technology was new, he had told them, but fairly successful; more to the point, it was probably the only way Mary’s eggs and Frank’s sperm could be brought together. To Mary, it seemed like an answer to prayer, but Frank wasn’t so sure. He had turned to their priest for guidance, only to learn that the Vatican condemned the practice as a ‘gravely evil act’.
Their ensuing arguments had been bitter and painful. Mary and Frank had met through church—the ironically titled St Joseph’s in Benalla—and shared a strong faith, but now it rose between them, uncompromising and austere. God said no, Frank avowed; God said to trust in Him and accept His will. God would understand, cried Mary. God hadn’t given her a womb for it to remain unfilled. Frank enquired about adoption, but there were already hundreds of couples on the list before them, and very few babies available. Mary’s insomnia grew worse and her doctor prescribed antidepressants.
Two years later, the GP rang and spoke to Mary. He told her that he’d been discussing another patient with the IVF clinic in Melbourne, and they’d mentioned something interesting. There were, it seemed, a limited number of donor embryos available for infertile couples like Frank and herself. Yes, they’d been created using the in-glass technology, but that was beside the point. What was more important, crucial even, was that they now existed. That they were just sitting there, alive but unwanted, and if no one used them they would most likely be discarded. ‘Talk to your husband,’ he urged Mary. ‘I’ve known Frank for years and he’s a good man, but he’s being pigheaded. I don’t know much about God, but I don’t think He wants you to keep suffering over this, not when there’s a chance of doing something about it. Tell Frank that it’s just like adoption, only earlier.’
For a minute she’d been tempted to go ahead without even mentioning it to Frank; to forge his signature, to concoct an excuse for a trip to the city, to plead, if necessary, a miraculous conception. But then she remembered Rachel, who had had no such option, who had had to trust in her God, and she mustered the courage to raise it with Frank. He hadn’t been encouraging, but finally he’d given in.
Maybe his own longing got the better of him; maybe he simply couldn’t bear to watch her wasting away with want. ‘Just one trial,’ he’d admonished. ‘If God wants it, it will work. And you’re to go to confession if it does, and tell Father that it was all your idea.’ Mary had agreed to the conditions, embracing him tearily, then rung their GP to arrange a referral to the clinic. Six weeks later she went to Melbourne for the day.
She had known it would work; had felt it in her bones. Before the procedure, her gynaecologist had called her over to a stainless-steel bench at the side of the operating theatre and invited her to view her unborn child.
‘What do you mean?’ she’d asked, confused.
‘Go on—look,’ he’d said, gesturing towards a microscope, gleeful in his powers. ‘That’s your embryo. I was just checking it before we start. It looks fantastic.’
Frank would have declined the invitation, she knew; he would not want to see for himself the ways that technology was usurping God’s role. She pressed her eye against the lens and peered through the darkness until the blastocyst swam into focus. A line of scripture came into her head and she murmured it, like a prayer, under her breath. ‘I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb; before you were born I set you apart.’
‘What’s that?’ asked the doctor.
‘Nothing,’ Mary said. ‘It looks like frog spawn, doesn’t it?’
He laughed. ‘More beautiful than that.’
But Mary thought frog spawn was beautiful. She saw it sometimes floating like tiny, intricate glasshouses on the edges of the dam in the top paddock at Tatong. Frog spawn meant that the dam was alive, that spring was coming. It caught the sunshine and sparkled like jewels.
When Ben was born she had wanted to name him Joseph, but Frank demurred. ‘A Mary and a Joseph? In one family?’ he’d said, rolling his eyes, but he accepted her next choice, Benjamin, after Rachel’s second and final child. And he’d doted on the boy from the minute he first held him. In those first few months Mary knew that Frank still felt guilty about how Ben had come to them, that they’d disobeyed the church, but as their son grew his remorse had receded. Ben was a loving, sunny child. How could you reproach yourself over a toddler who tried to help you with the milking, whose face lit up when he saw you each day? The end result that was Ben justified the means they had gone to. He made their lives over. He redeemed their sin.
And God must have agreed, Mary had thought thirteen years later, or why would he have given them Kirra? Their second miracle child was born when Mary, like Rachel, should have been past the possibility of conception; when Frank should have been contemplating retirement, not rattles. Kirra, said the GP, was a menopause baby. Mary’s ovaries were having a last frantic roll of the dice, throwing out so many eggs that one of them had made it through her damaged tubes. Mary nodded politely at her GP’s explanation, but inwardly scoffed. That still didn’t account for Frank’s depleted sperm count, or the fact that they’d probably only made love once in the previous four months. Could they have beaten so many odds? It seemed unlikely, particularly after two decades of infertility. No, Mary knew it wasn’t a fluke. God had granted them Kirra because He thought they’d done a good job with Ben; because He didn’t hold the IVF against them. They hadn’t been lucky, they’d been vindicated.
The loudspeaker crackled, startling Mary back to the present as it announced the final event of the carnival, the girls’ open four-hundred-metre freestyle. Kirra had done well in her other races, but this, Mary knew, was the one she really wanted to win, the one she had trained for. Eight long laps of the fifty-metre pool, up and back and up again while her lungs burned and her limbs fatigued. She watched while her daughter stretched behind the blocks, smaller and younger than all the other competitors. Kirra lowered her goggles, pressing them hard against the bridge of her nose to create a seal, then climbed onto her block, bent down and calmly waited for the gun.
She must miss Ben, Mary thought dully as Kirra arrowed neatly into the water. Of course she must, even if she didn’t talk about it. Because of the age gap, they’d never gone through any of the normal sibling rivalry or petty squabbles. Ben had finished school in the same year Kirra started it. He had always encouraged her, and she had always adored him.
Kirra turned second at the end of the first lap, right on the shoulder of a girl at least three years older than herself. It had been terrible telling her about Ben after that night before Christmas, fifteen months ago now. Frank had stayed away, and it had fallen to Mary to go over the same details she had just thrashed out with he
r son: the years of infertility, the hopelessness, the donor embryo. Kirra listened to her, mouth agape, becoming visibly more agitated, but rather than understanding how Mary had felt she appeared to be infected by Ben’s hysteria, his anger, and by a ridiculous terror—or so Mary had thought at the time—that she might never see him again. ‘But why?’ she’d kept screaming, so loudly that tiny Spud had run away and hidden under the bed. ‘Why didn’t you tell him? Tell us?’
And how Mary wished she had. She’d wished it every single day since Ben had walked out; every single hour. It had been fear that had stopped her, the ludicrous dread that Ben might think she was less his mother because he wasn’t her blood. And it was ludicrous, she understood that now—she had never loved him less because they didn’t share genes, so why should he in return? It was easy to see that in hindsight, yet every time she’d opened her mouth to tell him the truth she’d felt a sudden churning panic at the thought of his reaction, of the way he would look at her. After a while she consoled herself with the thought that it didn’t matter anyway. Ben was their child, hers and Frank’s, in all the ways that counted. She had carried him, nursed him; together, she and Frank had brought him up. Their names were on his birth certificate. Anything else was unimportant, so why even bother speaking about it? Mary thought occasionally about his donor parents, but really, she told herself, they were immaterial. They must have had enough children, she reasoned. They had given up the embryo; they were hardly going to come looking for a child, a boy, a man . . . Why, then, should she tell him?
But what she hadn’t anticipated was this chance in ten million, this bolt from the blue. Skye. It was an unusual name, and not easily forgotten. Mary remembered when Ben had first mentioned her, during one of their regular Sunday evening phone calls. Usually he was the first to hang up—there always seemed to be marking or lesson planning to be done—but that night he’d gone on and on: Skye this, Skye that. When she finally replaced the receiver she’d turned to Frank and exclaimed, ‘I think Ben’s met the one!’