by Jenni Ogden
I’m far too inward looking these days. Too much time on my hands, I suppose. It’s all mixed up with being fifty and these annoying night sweats—the end of my childbearing years. I’ve had the nightmare a few times recently, the one I used to have, eons ago, over and over, after the abortion. Am I grieving for that lost child? A little late for that. It’s not as if I didn’t grieve when it happened—when I organized it to happen—I was a wreck for weeks. My depression back then was so mixed up with my anger and hurt over being dumped by him—I still can’t even think his name without spitting—that perhaps my grief didn’t get its proper due. How dare he patronize me like that. I was so naïve, so trusting. It was such a cliché and I couldn’t see it—PhD supervisor, older, attractive, powerful, married—and the sweet little student, desperate to be loved.
“Pregnant? Are you sure it is mine? How could you be so careless? If you want to get your PhD you’d better keep your mouth shut. If anyone finds out you’ll be in as much trouble as me. Get it aborted and we won’t say any more. Our little dalliance was over anyway. My wife and I are having another baby of our own and I can’t afford to take any more risks.”
He didn’t actually use those words but that’s what it felt like. I wonder if it were a boy or a girl? I’ve never allowed myself to think of it as a person before. Thank goodness for young women like Kirsty with the confidence and courage to hold tight to their child and thumb their noses at the lowlifes who use and abuse and leave them. I never had that choice. I’d probably have had an abortion in the end; the last thing I needed was a baby. But it should have been my choice, not his.
I felt better after my little catharsis. My Life would need a fair amount of editing before being published as an account of my experiences as a research scientist.
TOM APPEARED AROUND FIVE WITH A SIX-PACK OF COLD beer. “Thought you might be ready for a cold one. Want to sit on the beach?”
We sat in silence for a while, and my throat got tighter and tighter.
“That was a rough goodbye,” Tom said.
“Yes. I knew it would be hard, but this is ridiculous.” I stared down at my fingers, sifting through the sand, and swallowed as Tom’s hand closed over mine. I forced myself to look at him. “On the bright side, I have my privacy back.”
“Just what I was thinking. How about I cook you some dinner and then we’ll have a quiet night in?” He did his sneer imitation. I felt the warmth creeping back.
Half an hour later—it was not dark enough yet for us to feel hidden in my open cabin—Tom placed two enormous bowls of seafood risotto on the table and poured me another glass of wine. I was starving. I hadn’t eaten all day.
“Aha, hawksbill turtles. Have you read this?” Having cleaned his bowl, Tom had picked up an article from the haphazard pile of papers and magazines on the end of the table.
“Yes. I borrowed it from your house. I was wondering why we get so few hawksbills nesting here.”
“They prefer the warmer waters farther north.” He picked up another article. “What’s this?” His voice had changed.
“What? What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a research paper on Huntington’s disease.” He sounded cold.
I looked at him, but he was concentrating on the reprint he held in his hand.
“Oh, that. It’s the last article I wrote,” I said, grinning as I remembered Kirsty hamming it up, reading the title out loud. It looked like a foreign language—“polymerase,” “microglial,” “direct mutation analysis.” “Huntington’s” and “disease” were about the only plain English words. “Good title, huh?”
Tom was silent.
A sliver of apprehension fluttered in my chest. I tried again. “I brought a few articles with me just in case I felt motivated enough to write a new grant proposal. But I haven’t. It seems light years away, all that.”
“You write grant proposals for Huntington’s research?”
I was beginning to feel irritated. “I’m not completely washed up, you know. Is that what you thought? That I’d never do any research of my own again?”
“You told me you did laboratory analysis of neurological changes in the aging brain.”
“Yes, I do. I did. But we mainly used Huntington’s patients to test our theories. I told you that.”
“No, you didn’t. You never mentioned Huntington’s disease.”
“Perhaps you weren’t listening. Does it matter?”
“Not to you, apparently. I suppose if the Huntington’s patients are just convenient guinea pigs, it mightn’t occur to you to mention them.”
“That’s unfair. We have enormous respect for our research participants. My research assistants spend hours with the families. They were never treated like guinea pigs.” Anger—or shame—was burning my face.
“I’m simply surprised that you never talked about your work to me.”
“Well, I’m very sorry. I’ve had other things to think about. It’s not as if you share your life story with me. I know almost nothing about your past.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I talk to you about my research.”
“That’s because I’m interested in it, and I’m helping you with it. I’m trying to have a break from mine.”
Tom pushed his chair back and stood up. He placed the article carefully on the table. “It’s been a long day. I’ll do the turtle patrol later; no need for you to help. The nesting season’s about finished anyway. You’ll be able to get on with your grant writing.”
“And of course you’ve got Collette to help you now.” I heard the hurt in my voice.
“Sarcasm is not your most attractive characteristic. I’ll see you around.”
I was shaking as I cleared away the plates and banged them in the sink. If that’s the way he feels, he can go jump.
THIRTEEN
A letter from Mum had also arrived with Jack. Amidst the previous day’s emotional turmoil I’d completely forgotten about it, but in the morning it was waiting for me on the table when I sat down to my bowl of muesli.
I’d had a hellish night. I missed being woken by Hamish mewling for his night feeds, and my mind wouldn’t let me alone. It endlessly replayed and rescripted the previous night’s scene between Tom and me. I still couldn’t make sense of what had happened. One minute we were savoring dinner under the stars, anticipating being naked in that deliciously narrow bunk after so long apart, and the next minute Tom was freezing me out.
I swallowed, but the aching tightness in my throat didn’t go away, and I shoved my muesli aside. How could he say those things to me? If he’d shown any interest in my research I would have talked to him about it. It had just never come up. I swiped at the damn article and it slid off the table, taking with it the whole tottering pile of papers.
Pushing away my chair, I went over to the stove to boil some water for a long strong coffee. Huntington’s disease and everything to do with neuroscience could go to hell. I was here to get away from all that. I wanted us to talk about turtle research and the reef and the birds. Kicking the article as I passed, I took my coffee and Mum’s letter out to the deck. Not that it would cheer me up. She wrote every month, wherever I was, and it was all pretty much more of the same. Her life, at seventy-three, was hardly riveting in spite of being married to a man thirteen years younger than her and living in a fisherman’s stone croft at the coldest-most tip of the UK. Perhaps I’d write to her this morning. It would be better than thinking about Tom. I could tell her about Hamish. Poor Mum, denied even a grandchild.
There was a photo in the envelope with her letter. The colors were faded but I could still remember the cute red-and-white-checked sundress I was wearing. I must have been about six. The Yorkshire Moors stretched into the distance, and Mum and Dad were standing behind me looking ridiculously young—twenty years younger than I am now. They looked happy. I supposed they must have loved each other in the beginning. I opened the carefully folded letter and felt a bizarre yearning to see Mum again as I imagined her writi
ng this in her small, neat way, black fountain pen on fine, almost transparent airmail-light paper. She’d never succumb to e-mail. Reading her letter was like reading a beautiful book after flicking through a Kindle.
Dear Anna,
The weather is at last becoming a little less cold. The winters here are hard on my aging bones. To keep myself warm I’ve been going through boxes of old photos and letters, and putting them into some sort of order in a scrap book. You might be interested some day, when you’re my age. I had it in the back of my mind that there might be an address for your father’s relatives somewhere. It seems a good opportunity to try and make contact while you’re in Australia. I always felt it was wrong of Harry to leave like he did. I don’t know if he ever got in touch with them after he left. Whatever happened to him there can’t have been so bad that everyone in his family deserved that. He once told me that he would try and find Mary, his sister, someday.
I stopped reading and got up to make some more coffee. I needed it. I hadn’t expected this from Mum. I knew bits and pieces of Dad’s story—it had seemed exciting to a nine-year-old. He’d run away from home, a farm in Victoria, when he was eighteen. When I asked him why, he told me that he had a bad fight with his father, and as his older sister had already left home, there was nothing to stay for. And he hated farming. He wanted to see the world. Of course I asked him about his mother. She’d died when he was seventeen; what of, I never discovered. Cancer, I supposed. Mum had told me that Dad’s father was an alcoholic, and had abused Dad’s mother, as well as both him and his sister. Dad had cut them out of his life as if they had never existed.
I returned to Mum’s letter.
When Harry died, you were his only next of kin, and although we were divorced, it was up to me to contact everyone. I had no way of finding his family, and none of his work colleagues knew anything about them, so I suppose the family never found out he was dead. I should have gone through his possessions as soon as I got them to try and find his sister’s address, but I couldn’t face it. I was very depressed for a long time, and I had you to think about. Apart from clothes, all that he left were boxes of work papers and books, which I finally went through before I shifted to Shetland. I threw most of it away, apart from a few books I thought you might like to have. There was nothing much personal. No letters, a few photos, including this one of the three of us, and an old Australian passport with his photo as a teenager. I’ll keep it here for you. I don’t trust the post. Your father was an unusual man, so extroverted yet so solitary and homeless, somehow.
The address of the farm where he lived as a boy was written in the back of the passport. It’s Dry Acres Farm, Thomson’s Road, Healesville, Victoria. I looked up Healesville in the atlas, and it’s not far from Melbourne. I know it’s a long way from where you are but wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could find it? Perhaps the farm was left to Mary. She would be in her late seventies by now if she were still alive. Even if she’s not, whoever lives there now might know something about the Fergusson family. I don’t even know if Mary married and changed her name.
Mum was losing it. The chance of Mary being at that ancient address was remote, especially as she fled from the farm before Dad did. I counted back; it was over sixty years ago. I felt my sigh before I heard it. The need to connect with the past—another sign of aging. Okay for Mum, but I was still a bit young.
How strange that Mum saw Dad as solitary. He seemed to me to fill every space he entered. But she was probably right; in some sense, he kept himself apart.
Like Tom. My breath caught. Perhaps that was why I was so attracted to him. They didn’t look alike, but there was something. I closed my eyes and saw my father, smiling at me as he always did. I could hear his lovely voice. “Anna my Anna,” he said. “Anna my Anna.” I opened my eyes and blinked in the bright sun. Dad’s unusual accent came from his seventeen years in Australia and then his years of hobnobbing with English journalists—most of whom were Cambridge and Oxford graduates. And that was it, their likeness. When I’d teased Tom about his ever-so-slightly Queen’s English vowels, he’d blamed them on his school—a private grammar school in Sydney.
I needed to clear my head. My letter to Mum could wait.
Stuffing a packed lunch and my swimming things into my daypack, I set off along the beach to Shark Bay, hoping I wouldn’t meet anyone, especially Tom. I still felt too raw. The hot, humid weather had given way to what passed for autumn here, a balmy 25 degrees. At Shark Bay I floated about over the lagoon for an hour before feeling chilled, and, as always, it worked its magic. I was feeling optimistic by the time I’d scoffed my sardine and onion sandwiches. We’d sort it out. It was just a lovers’ spat. I shivered in the warm sun at the thought of even being entitled to a lover’s spat. I decided to wander across the end of the island, through the trees, towards Tom’s house. If he was there I bet he’d act as if last night never happened. That was fine by me. I was too old for these roller coaster feelings.
I almost missed her, caught upside down between two thick branches protruding from a half-buried Casuarina tree. It was the very end of the laying season and over the last few nights no more than one or two turtles had come up. I had heard that turtles occasionally got caught up in branches if they ventured too far up the beach to find a spot to dig their nest. Bill had informed me of the research ethics: if a turtle got trapped during nesting, the researchers had to leave her there. Rescuing her would be meddling with nature. Bill obviously thought it was bollocks.
The big mamma looked at me from her awkward position, her watering eyes opening blearily before closing again. God knows how she had managed to end up in this position. She must have flipped right over on her way down the beach and been caught up in the partially buried tree limbs.
It was already two in the afternoon, and her underside had been exposed to the sun for far too long. She flapped her front flippers weakly, and I saw the glint of a tag. It was too sad; this was surely her last nesting of the season, and she didn’t deserve to die. Anyway, who would know if I managed to get her right side up and point her down towards the sea? The tide was still well up and she’d have no trouble swimming off if she was uninjured, and I couldn’t see any obvious signs of damage.
But she was caught fast, and no matter how I pushed and pulled I couldn’t budge her. She was clearly weakening, and her flapping had almost stopped. As giant tears dripped from her closed eyes and dropped, shimmering onto the sand beneath her, I felt like crying with her. Surely this wasn’t right? Tom would help get her out if he found her here, research rules and Madam Collette be damned. I pulled my towel from my daypack and rushed down to the sea to soak it. I draped it over her great body, carefully covering her head and trying not to think how like a corpse this made her look.
“What are you doing?”
I jumped a foot in the air and turned around. Tom was standing there, frowning.
“I can’t get her free. She’s dying.” My words rushed out, and I could feel myself preparing for battle.
“Poor thing.” Tom pulled the towel back from her head and I saw her eyes open and wearily close. “We’re not meant to interfere if it’s an act of nature.” He said the last three words as if they were in inverted commas.
“But that’s crazy. The purpose of all your research is to save them, stop them going extinct. What’s the point in letting her die?”
“The research bosses have their reasons. I’ll give you the manual to read later. In a word, if we interfere, it will bias our research results.”
“And bloody tagging them and disturbing them when they’re laying, and jumping on the males from bloody boats when they’re mating isn’t interfering?” I was screeching like a fishwife.
“Calm down, Anna. You’ll have Collette here and then we really will have to leave her stuck.” He was yanking on one of the tree limbs as he spoke. “You pull her back while I try and pull this branch away from her.”
She wouldn’t budge, and after another five minute
s of concentrated effort, Tom decided to go back to his house and get a saw. While he was gone I talked to her—soothingly, I hoped.
Even cutting her out was tricky, as there was not much room to maneuver between the tree limb and her shell, and it took another fifteen minutes or so for Tom to saw the branch off. But at last she was free and we heaved her up the right way and pointed her towards the sea. She lay there, not moving, her eyes closed.
“It’s too late. She’s dead.” I sat beside her and stroked her glistening shell.
Tom had taken the towel back to the sea, and was now squeezing it over her head. “Give her time, Anna. She’s exhausted and dehydrated. But Eve’s a trouper. She’ll be right in a while.” Tom was standing behind me and I could feel his hand on my head and sliding down my plait.
“Eve? Is it really Eve?” “Yes. I’d know her barnacles anywhere. And I checked her tag just to be sure. I even know her number by heart.”
I swallowed, trying to act my age. “Can’t we do something? How do you know she’s still alive? She doesn’t look it.”
“Patience. Why don’t you soak the towel again, so we can keep her head cool?”
I got up and ran to the sea, knowing full well that Tom was trying to keep me busy to stop me blubbering like a child. It was bad enough losing a turtle in this cruel way, but to lose Eve would be terrible. She was a touchstone, a symbol of everything that this place had come to mean to me. I squeezed another towel-load of water over her head, and I saw her reptilian eyelids move. “Oh, Tom, she’s not dead. Thank you, thank you.”