Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  The best haematological unit in Australia was on hand to deal with the problem. They worked in the hospital across the road, the Royal Prince Alfred. They were friendly and efficient. They were not at all like I had imagined big hospital specialists to be. They took blood samples, but the blood did not tell them enough. They returned to take marrow from your mother’s bones. They brought a big needle with them that would give you the horrors if you could see the size of it.

  The doctor’s speciality was leukaemia, but he said to us: “We don’t think it’s anything really nasty.” Thus “nasty” became a code for cancer.

  They diagnosed megaloblastic anaemia which, although we did not realize it, is the condition of the blood and not the disease itself.

  Walking through the streets in Shimbashi in Tokyo, your mother once told me that a fortune-teller had told her she would die young. At the time she told me this, we had not known each other very long. It was July. We had fallen in love in May. We were still stumbling over each other’s feelings in the dark. I took this secret of your mother’s lightly, not thinking about the weight it must carry, what it might mean to talk about it. I hurt her; we fought, in the street by the Shimbashi railway station, in a street with shop windows advertising cosmetic surgery, in the Dai-Ichi Hotel in the Ginza district of Tokyo, Japan.

  When they took the bone marrow from your mother’s spine, I held her hand. The needle had a cruel diameter, was less a needle than an instrument for removing a plug. She was very brave. Her wrists seemed too thin, her skin too white and shiny, her eyes too big and bright. She held my hand because of pain. I held hers because I loved her, because I could not think of living if I did not have her. I thought of what she had told me in Tokyo. I wished there was a God I could pray to.

  I flew to Canberra on 7 May 1984. It was my forty-first birthday. I had injured my back and should have been lying flat on a board. I had come from a life with a woman which had reached, for both of us, a state of chronic unhappiness. I will tell you the truth: I was on that aeroplane to Canberra because I hoped I might fall in love. This made me a dangerous person.

  There was a playwrights’ conference in Canberra. I hoped there would be a woman there who would love me as I would love her. This was a fantasy I had had before, getting on aeroplanes to foreign cities, riding in taxis towards hotels in Melbourne, in Adelaide, in Brisbane. I do not mean that I was thinking about sex, or an affair, but that I was looking for someone to spend my life with. Also — and I swear I have not invented this after the fact — I had a vision of your mother’s neck.

  I hardly knew her. I met her once at a dinner when I hardly noticed her. I met her a second time when I saw, in a meeting room, the back of her neck. We spoke that time, but I was argumentative and I did not think of her in what I can only call “that way”.

  And yet as the aeroplane came down to land in Canberra, I saw your mother’s neck, and thought: maybe Alison Summers will be there. She was the dramaturge at the Nimrod Theatre. It was a playwrights’ conference. She should be there.

  And she was. And we fell in love. And we stayed up till four in the morning every morning talking. And there were other men, everywhere, in love with her. I didn’t know about the other men. I knew only that I was in love as I had not been since I was eighteen years old. I wanted to marry Alison Summers, and at the end of the first night we had been out together when I walked her to the door of her room, and we had, for the first time, ever so lightly, kissed on the lips — and also, I must tell you, for it was delectable and wonderful, I kissed your mother on her long, beautiful neck — and when we had kissed and patted the air between us and said “all right” a number of times, and I had walked back to my room where I had, because of my back injury, a thin mattress lying flat on the floor, and when I was in this bed, I said, aloud, to the empty room: “I am going to live with Alison.”

  And I went to sleep so happy I must have been smiling.

  She did not know what I told the room. And it was three or four days before I could see her again, three or four days before we could go out together, spend time alone, and I could tell her what I thought.

  I had come to Canberra wanting to fall in love. Now I was in love. Who was I in love with? I hardly knew, and yet I knew exactly. I did not even realize how beautiful she was. I found that out later. At the beginning I recognized something more potent than beauty: it was a force, a life, an energy. She had such life in her face, in her eyes — those eyes which you inherited — most of all. It was this I loved, this which I recognized so that I could say — having kissed her so lightly — I will live with Alison. And know that I was right.

  It was a conference. We were behaving like men and women do at conferences, having affairs. We would not be so sleazy. After four nights staying up talking till 4 a.m. we had still not made love. I would creep back to my room, to my mattress on the floor. We talked about everything. Your mother liked me, but I cannot tell you how long it took her to fall in love with me. But I know we were discussing marriages and babies when we had not even been to bed together. That came early one morning when I returned to her room after three hours’ sleep. There we were, lying on the bed, kissing, and then we were making love, and you were not conceived then, of course, and yet from that time we never ceased thinking of you and when, later in Sydney, we had to learn to adjust to each other’s needs, and when we argued, which we did often then, it was you more than anything that kept us together. We wanted you so badly. We loved you before we saw you. We loved you as we made you, in bed in another room, at Lovett Bay.

  When your mother came to the eleventh floor of the King George V Hospital, you were almost ready to be born. Every day the sisters came and smeared jelly on your mother’s tight, bulging stomach and then stuck a flat little octopus-type sucker to it and listened to the noises you made.

  You sounded like soldiers marching on a bridge.

  You sounded like short-wave radio.

  You sounded like the inside of the sea.

  We did not know if you were a boy or a girl, but we called you Sam anyway. When you kicked or turned we said, “Sam’s doing his exercises.” We said silly things.

  When we heard how low Alison’s blood-count was, I phoned the obstetrician to see if you were OK. She said there was no need to worry. She said you had your own blood-supply. She said that as long as the mother’s count was above 6 there was no need to worry.

  Your mother’s count was 6.2. This was very close. I kept worrying that you had been hurt in some way. I could not share this worry for to share it would only be to make it worse. Also I recognize that I have made a whole career out of making my anxieties get up and walk around, not only in my own mind, but in the minds of readers. I went to see a naturopath once. We talked about negative emotions — fear and anger. I said to him, “But I use my anger and my fear.” I talked about these emotions as if they were chisels and hammers.

  This alarmed him considerably.

  Your mother is not like this. When the haematologists saw how she looked, they said: “Our feeling is that you don’t have anything nasty.” They topped her up with blood until her count was 12 and, although they had not located the source of her anaemia, they sent her home.

  A few days later her count was down to just over 6.

  It seemed as if there was a silent civil war inside her veins and arteries. The number of casualties was appalling.

  I think we both got frightened then. I remember coming home to Louisa Road. I remember worrying that I would cry. I remember embracing your mother — and you too, for you were a great bulge between us. I must not cry. I must support her.

  I made a meal. It was salade niçoise. The electric lights, in memory, were all ten watts, sapped by misery. I could barely eat. I think we may have watched a funny film on videotape. We repacked the bag that had been unpacked so short a time before. It now seemed likely that your birth was to be induced. If your mother was sick she could not be looked after properly with you inside her. She
would be given one more blood transfusion, and then the induction would begin. And that is how your birthday would be on 13 September.

  Two nights before your birthday I sat with Alison in the four-bed ward, the one facing west, towards Missenden Road. The curtains were drawn around us. I sat on the bed and held her hand. The blood continued its slow viscous drip from the plum-red bag along the clear plastic tube and into her arm. The obstetrician was with us. She stood at the head of the bed, a kind, intelligent woman in her early thirties. We talked about Alison’s blood. We asked her what she thought this mystery could be. Really what we wanted was to be told that everything was OK. There was a look on Alison’s face when she asked. I cannot describe it, but it was not a face seeking medical “facts”.

  The obstetrician went through all the things that were not wrong with your mother’s blood. She did not have a vitamin B deficiency. She did not have a folic acid deficiency. There was no iron deficiency. She did not have any of the common (and easily fixable) anaemias of pregnancy. So what could it be? we asked, really only wishing to be assured it was nothing “nasty”.

  “Well,” said the obstetrician, “at this stage you cannot rule out cancer.”

  I watched your mother’s face. Nothing in her expression showed what she must feel. There was a slight colouring of her cheeks. She nodded. She asked a question or two. She held my hand, but there was no tight squeezing.

  The obstetrician asked Alison if she was going to be “all right”. Alison said she would be “all right”. But when the obstetrician left she left the curtains drawn.

  The obstetrician’s statement was not of course categorical and not everyone who has cancer dies, but Alison was, at that instant, confronting the thing that we fear most. When the doctor said those words, it was like a dream or a nightmare. I heard them said. And yet they were not said. They could not be said. And when we hugged each other — when the doctor had gone — we pressed our bodies together as we always had before, and if there were tears on our cheeks, there had been tears on our cheeks before. I kissed your mother’s eyes. Her hair was wet with her tears. I smoothed her hair on her forehead. My own eyes were swimming. She said: “All right, how are we going to get through all this?”

  Now you know her, you know how much like her that is. She is not going to be a victim of anything.

  “We’ll decide it’s going to be OK,” she said, “that’s all.”

  And we dried our eyes.

  But that night, when she was alone in her bed, waiting for the sleeping pill to work, she thought: If I die, I’ll at least have made this little baby.

  When I left your mother I appeared dry-eyed and positive, but my disguise was a frail shell of a thing and it cracked on the stairs and my grief and rage came spilling out in gulps. The halls of the hospital gleamed with polish and vinyl and fluorescent light. The flower-seller on the ground floor had locked up his shop. The foyer was empty. The whisker-shadowed man in admissions was watching television. In Missenden Road two boys in jeans and sand-shoes conducted separate conversations in separate phone booths. Death was not touching them. They turned their backs to each other. One of them — a redhead with a tattoo on his forearm — laughed.

  In Missenden Road there were taxis NOT FOR HIRE speeding towards other destinations.

  In Missenden Road the bright white lights above the zebra crossings became a luminous sea inside my eyes. Car lights turned into necklaces and ribbons. I was crying, thinking it is not for me to cry: crying is a poison, a negative force; everything will be all right; but I was weeping as if huge balloons of air had to be released from inside my guts. I walked normally. My grief was invisible. A man rushed past me, carrying roses wrapped in cellophane. I got into my car. The floor was littered with car-park tickets from all the previous days of blood transfusions, tests, test results, admission etc. I drove out of the car park. I talked aloud.

  I told the night I loved Alison Summers. I love you, I love you, you will not die. There were red lights at the Parramatta Road. I sat there, howling, unroadworthy. I love you.

  The day after tomorrow there will be a baby. Will the baby have a mother? What would we do if we knew Alison was dying? What would we do so Sam would know his mother? Would we make a videotape? Would we hire a camera? Would we set it up and act for you? Would we talk to you with smiling faces, showing you how we were together, how we loved each other? How could we? How could we think of these things?

  I was a prisoner in a nightmare driving down Ross Street in Glebe. I passed the Afrikan restaurant where your mother and I ate after first coming to live in Balmain.

  All my life I have waited for this woman. This cannot happen.

  I thought: Why would it not happen? Every day people are tortured, killed, bombed. Every day babies starve. Every day there is pain and grief, enough to make you howl to the moon for ever. Why should we be exempt, I thought, from the pain of life?

  What would I do with a baby? How would I look after it? Day after day, minute after minute, by myself. I would be a sad man, for ever, marked by the loss of this woman. I would love the baby. I would care for it. I would see, in its features, every day, the face of the woman I had loved more than any other.

  When I think of this time, it seems as if it’s two in the morning, but it was not. It was ten o’clock at night. I drove home through a landscape of grotesque imaginings.

  The house was empty and echoing.

  In the nursery everything was waiting for you, all the things we had got for “the baby”. We had read so many books about babies, been to classes where we learned about how babies are born, but we still did not understand the purpose of all the little clothes we had folded in the drawers. We did not know which was a swaddle and which was a sheet. We could not have selected the clothes to dress you in.

  I drank coffee. I drank wine. I set out to telephone Kathy Lette, Alison’s best friend, so she would have this “news” before she spoke to your mother the next day. I say “set out” because each time I began to dial, I thought: I am not going to do this properly. I hung up. I did deep breathing. I calmed myself. I telephoned. Kim Williams, Kathy’s husband, answered and said Kathy was not home yet. I thought: She must know. I told Kim, and as I told him the weeping came with it. I could hear myself. I could imagine Kim listening to me. I would sound frightening, grotesque, and less in control than I was. When I had finished frightening him, I went to bed and slept.

  I do not remember the next day, only that we were bright and determined. Kathy hugged Alison and wept. I hugged Kathy and wept. There were isolated incidents. We were “handling it”. And, besides, you were coming on the next day. You were life, getting stronger and stronger.

  I had practical things to worry about. For instance: the bag. The bag was to hold all the things we had been told would be essential in the labour ward. There was a list for the contents of the bag and these contents were all purchased and ready, but still I must bring them to the hospital early the next morning. I checked the bag. I placed things where I would not forget them. You wouldn’t believe the things we had. We had a cassette-player and a tape with soothing music. We had rosemary and lavender oil so I could massage your mother and relax her between contractions. I had a Thermos to fill with blocks of frozen orange juice. There were special cold packs to relieve the pain of a backache labour. There were paper pants — your arrival, after all, was not to happen without a great deal of mess. There were socks, because your mother’s feet would almost certainly get very cold. I packed all these things, and there was something in the process of this packing which helped overcome my fears and made me concentrate on you, our little baby, already so loved although we did not know your face, had seen no more of you than the ghostly blue image thrown up by the ultrasound in the midst of whose shifting perspectives we had seen your little hand move. (“He waved to us.”)

  On the morning of the day of your birth I woke early. It was only just light. I had notes stuck on the fridge and laid out on the table. I ma
de coffee and poured it into a Thermos. I made the bagel sandwiches your mother and I had planned months before — my lunch. I filled the bagels with a fiery Polish sausage and cheese and gherkins. For your mother, I filled a spray-bottle with Evian water.

  It was a Saturday morning and bright and sunny and I knew you would be born but I did not know what it would be like. I drove along Ross Street in Glebe ignorant of the important things I would know that night. I wore grey stretchy trousers and a black shirt which would later be marked by the white juices of your birth. I was excited, but less than you might imagine. I parked at the hospital as I had parked on all those other occasions. I carried the bags up to the eleventh floor. They were heavy.

  Alison was in her bed. She looked calm and beautiful. When we kissed, her lips were soft and tender. She said: “This time tomorrow we’ll have a little baby.”

  In our conversation, we used the diminutive a lot. You were always spoken of as “little”, as indeed you must really have been, but we would say “little” hand, “little” feet, “little” baby, and thus evoked all our powerful feelings about you.

  This term (“little”) is so loaded that writers are wary of using it. It is cute, sentimental, “easy”. All of sentient life seems programmed to respond to “little”. If you watch grown dogs with a pup, a pup they have never seen, they are immediately patient and gentle, even solicitous, with it. If you had watched your mother and father holding up a tiny terry-towelling jump-suit in a department store, you would have seen their faces change as they celebrated your “littleness” while, at the same time, making fun of their own responses — they were aware of acting in a way they would have previously thought of as saccharine.

  And yet we were not aware of the torrents of emotion your “littleness” would unleash in us, and by the end of 13 September we would think it was nothing other than the meaning of life itself.