Prognosis

by Vallance, Sarah

  The vet took one look at Scout and decided to take a blood sample for tick fever. I sat in the waiting room, Scout asleep in my arms. Half an hour later, the vet appeared to tell me Scout had tick fever and ringworm. Her platelets were dangerously low, and she needed to begin treatment immediately. “It’s very expensive, I’m afraid.”

  “Of course it is!” I laughed.

  “It’s the same treatment they use for malaria in humans,” he said. “But it’s her only chance of pulling through.”

  I watched him prepare the medication she needed for the next two weeks.

  “Could she die?” I asked as he handed over a large plastic bag full of pills and a small bottle of fluorescent-yellow liquid.

  “Let’s see how she responds to the medication. Hopefully we have got to it in time. But it’s babesiosis, and that can be fatal. Bring her back in two days’ time and we’ll repeat the blood tests.”

  I paid the enormous bill and carried my floppy puppy home. “Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, little one. I really need you to live,” I whispered as the taxi took us home. Scout rested her head on my shoulder, and I stroked the top of her head.

  Two days later the blood tests showed that Scout was improving.

  “She’s doing really well!” the vet said. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with her?”

  “I’ll try to find her a home. When she’s better.” I have no idea where those words came from. I had zero intention of ever letting this puppy out of my sight.

  Scout had made a full recovery by the time I trundled off to the hospital for my final rabies shot.

  “If you feel unwell, come back right away,” the nurse said as she flicked at the needle and jammed it into the muscle in my shoulder.

  I started feeling dreadful by the time I found my car in the hospital parking lot, but I remembered from the course of shots I had had in Singapore, the last one was the worst. Verorab is very potent. I drove home and put myself to bed. I ached all over, and my body throbbed. Scout, now big enough to hop onto the bed unassisted, walked up and down me like a Thai massage therapist, spreading the vaccine through every last inch of my body. Once done, she curled herself up inside my arm and fell asleep.

  I leaned over and kissed her head. “It’s a big question for a tiny pup, but will you fill the hole in my heart?” She turned her head to face mine and held my gaze with her dark-brown eyes.

  It took a few days before I started to feel better. I was no longer at risk of dying from rabies.

  In a matter of weeks, Scout had changed my life. I had discovered the joy of waking each morning to a wriggling puppy whose tail refused to stop wagging, who licked my face, whimpered excitedly, and left me in no doubt that I was her favorite person in the world. Giulia had never once done any of those things. For the first time in three years, I stopped worrying about dementia. I was thinking about Scout, Sofia, Ambrose, Luca, and Toby, and about what our future might hold.

  I knew that part of the reason I had made the decision to keep Scout was because she was a puppy—a puppy who would likely live for at least ten or eleven years. Which meant that I, as her person, would need to also live for ten or eleven years. Scout had not only given me a reason to get out of bed in the morning but, perhaps more important, also robbed me of a reason for dying.

  I entered my study for the first time in months and inspected my father’s 1527 edition of the Decameron, marveling at the ornateness of the print, the robustness of the hand-carved leather spine, the intricacy of the gold lettering. This book had endured nearly five hundred years. I thought about my father and what he would have made of Scout and the life that had unraveled before me. He would pop open his mouth, shake his head, and say, “Not another bloody dog!” He would also, I hoped, be proud of my grit. My mother was fond of saying, “Well, what you lack in talent, Sarah, you certainly make up for in determination.” Perhaps she was right. I returned the original Boccaccio to its shelf and picked up the Penguin Classics version I kept on a shelf below. Boccaccio believed that to be noble, a man had to embrace life as it was, to face adversity without bitterness, and to accept the consequences of his actions. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

  The time had come for me to regain control over my life. I had no choice but to move back to Australia. To leave Giulia. It was the only way I would ever get over her. I loved Hong Kong and my closest friends were there, but it was time to leave. It was also time for me to make one last attempt to reconcile with my mother. She had suffered a number of small strokes during the past two years and was experiencing problems with her memory. Whatever her future held, I wanted us to try to make peace while we were both still able.

  Giulia agreed with my suggestion that I should take Sofia, Ambrose, Scout, Luca, and Toby. She would keep our two elderly dogs who were not fit to fly and one cat. I consulted the vet about the process required to move pets from Hong Kong to Sydney and discovered that it would take at least six and a half months, maybe longer. They could live normally in my apartment for that time, but they weren’t allowed to fly until six months had passed from the date they tested negative to the rabies virus. Upon arriving in Australia, they would spend ten days in quarantine. Then we would be reunited. The whole rigmarole would cost about the same as a small German car, but there was no alternative. We were a family, and no one was going to be left behind.

  13

  NEXT OF KIN

  Pearl Beach is a pristine strip of coast nestled beside thick bushland a ninety-minute drive north of Sydney. There is nothing there but a café, a general store, an upmarket restaurant with limited hours, and a community hall that offers seniors yoga, stretching, and Pilates, depending on the day. The neighboring beach towns offer little in the way of attractions, but each has a shop selling motorized scooters. Then there are the funeral parlors, each with slight variations on the same shop front display: a vase of white flowers standing on a wooden coffin, set behind a wispy white curtain. I didn’t go to Pearl Beach to die, but being there certainly encouraged me to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

  Like most introverts, I have few social needs, and if I cannot enjoy the company of the small handful of people I love, I would rather be alone. One of my many contradictions is that I don’t like people much, but I find comfort in having them around. I prefer sprawling, crowded cities like Bangkok, Manila, or Mexico City, where I can wander the streets without anyone noticing me. Not so in Pearl Beach, where the sight of a stranger aroused alarm. “What is she doing here?” I heard an elderly woman ask her companion as we passed each other in the street days after I arrived. It was a good question.

  Twelve years earlier I had bought a house in Pearl Beach over the internet. I rented it out while I was away and had paid down the mortgage. It was the only place where I could live rent-free.

  No one came to meet me at the airport when I landed in Sydney. I had told my mother and brother my arrival date, but I didn’t expect to see them. Three weeks earlier, I had received an email from my brother telling me my mother had just been diagnosed with vascular dementia. The news was devastating.

  Walking out into the arrivals hall into the jaws of a city that was no longer my home made me want to spin around, march back inside the airport, and buy a ticket for the next flight out.

  Instead I caught a taxi to a serviced apartment in Zetland, a dingy suburb on the outskirts of the airport, and checked myself in for the night. Dinner was a squashed piece of almond cake I had wrapped in a napkin on the plane and a bottle of water bought from a hallway vending machine outside my room. I called my mother, and she was understandably distressed. She was about to live out my own nightmare, and I promised I would do anything I could to help her. It was a strange homecoming. The next morning I picked up a car and drove to Pearl Beach.

  I had visited Pearl Beach three times in my life before deciding to buy a house on a street one block back from the beach. It had not been much of an investment.

  “I’d be lucky to get
my money back, wouldn’t I?” I asked the real estate agent when I went to collect the keys.

  “It’s been a bit flat here,” he said.

  I didn’t recognize my house. I had only been inside it once and had no memory of the layout or its size. I thought the garden was bigger, the house smaller. It was a ridiculous size for one person, or one person with three big dogs, one large cat, and one normal-sized one. There were four bedrooms. Too much space. I had spent years purging myself of belongings so I could live in Hong Kong, where space was at a premium. Now I needed clutter to fill the void.

  I had started renovations from Hong Kong, and by the time I arrived, builders had installed half a new kitchen and a third of a new bathroom. The pink carpet that had smothered the house had been pulled up to reveal pristine pine floorboards that needed nothing more than a sand and a polish. The house was dirty and covered in sawdust. It was uninhabitable, so I bought a mattress, some sheets, a pillow, and a towel, and I took up residency in the cabin at the back of the garden.

  In the absence of a better use of my time, I decided to wake each morning at six and paint the inside of my house. It would be another six weeks before the first batch of pets arrived from Hong Kong, and at least another eight weeks before my furniture would be delivered. I had nothing else to do.

  Every morning at eight o’clock when the café opened, I wandered across the road dressed in the same pair of paint-splattered jeans and the same soiled T-shirt, and I ordered muesli and two caffe lattes. For lunch I had ice cream and chocolate. Each evening I visited an Indian restaurant in a nearby suburb and ordered takeaway. I ate vegetable curry from a plastic box with a plastic fork, propped up on my bed inside the cabin, under the glare of a long strip of fluorescent lighting. I felt like a squatter, not someone who had just moved home after years abroad.

  The house hadn’t been painted in decades. The walls soaked up four coats of paint, and the woodwork was scabby so I had to scale, sand, patch, sand again, add a coat of primer, and apply three coats of paint. My task seemed endless. Then one day, after almost finishing the living room ceiling, I decided to put my mental health first and stop. Could I live in a house that was almost painted? Of course I could. Painting taught me two important things: First, I was lazy by nature, and despite a fondness for grandiose plans, I wasn’t a great “finisher.” I knew this already. Second, it’s always a good idea to use drop sheets to cover your freshly polished floorboards.

  A couple of weeks after my arrival, I visited the local pharmacy to buy an oral contraceptive. Not because I had been entertaining prospects of sex, although I wasn’t without options. One gentleman in his late seventies had already asked me if I wanted to go for a bushwalk with him, as he winked and squeezed my forearm, and another older gentleman I met in the vegetable section at Woolworths had invited me home with him to help make tomato sauce. As tempting as those offers were, I was looking for the pill because I had reached an age where I needed a dose of hormones each day to keep me balanced, and without them, my moods swung with a ferocity that frightened even me.

  The pharmacist looked at me like I had fallen from another planet and said, “You need a prescription for that.”

  “Not in Hong Kong, you don’t,” I said, and he stared at me without speaking.

  Luckily the building next door had a sign outside that read “Surgery.”

  The receptionist, who looked to be in her sixties, snapped at me and told me I needed an appointment. I was happy to wait, I told her. All I needed was a prescription.

  “It doesn’t matter what you need,” she hissed. “You still have to see a doctor.”

  She glowered at me and asked how I liked to be addressed. Ms.? Mrs.?

  “Doctor, thank you,” I said. I couldn’t recall the last time I had used the doctor honorific, or even the last time I had told anyone I had a PhD. But at that moment, I wanted that woman to call me doctor. As soon as the word left my mouth, I realized my pettiness, but her tone changed instantly.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said.

  And still I wanted to lean across the counter and hiss, “You should be, you rude bitch,” because it had been five days since I had run out of my hormone pills and I was at risk of doing something rash.

  “Doctor,” she said, smiling, “can I ask for your next of kin?”

  I looked at her as my mouth fell open. Could I tell her Sofia was my next of kin? Or Scout? I told her I would get back to her, and she passed my new file to a doctor who saw me almost instantly and gave me a script for my hormone pills.

  I left the surgery in a daze. The fact was, I had no human next of kin, or at least none with whom I had any kind of relationship. My brother and I didn’t speak, and I’d seen my mother only five times in the last twelve years. I had never thought of her as my next of kin. I had driven down to Sydney a few times to meet her. I would pick her up from her apartment and take her to lunch, but our meetings were always strained and uncomfortable, my mother tight-lipped and me doing my best to avoid saying anything that might inflame her.

  I had no kin at all except my cousin, who lived an eleven-hour drive away on the Sunshine Coast. We had seen each other once in twenty years. At the age of fifty-one, I had three dogs, two cats, and an ex-girlfriend in Hong Kong I still loved who didn’t love me back. In Australia I was completely alone.

  Moving three dogs and two cats from Hong Kong to Australia proved more stressful than I had hoped. Scout failed her rabies antibody test twice, and it looked like she would never leave Hong Kong. The next challenge, which the vet handling our relocation had neglected to mention, was Australia’s requirement that dogs test negative to ehrlichiosis, a type of tick fever, within twenty-one days of travel. A dog that failed that test is forbidden from ever entering Australia. Scout had tested positive to babesiosis, a different type of tick fever, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that one of those sixty ticks may have exposed her to ehrlichiosis. If Scout was refused entry to Australia, I would have no choice but to move back to Hong Kong and rethink my plans. Fortunately, after an agonizing wait I got the news that she’d passed, and everyone was cleared for travel.

  Scout and Sofia arrived first, and Ambrose and the two cats followed a fortnight later. For dogs who had never known the sensation of grass underfoot, much less had their own backyard, their new home was a paradise. On their first visit to the beach, they stepped gingerly through the sand, sniffing it and looking at one another with surprise. What is it? they seemed to ask. Moments later they were charging up and down the shoreline, dodging the waves, and chasing after each other in huge loops. I had never seen them so happy. The cats were delighted with their new home. It was vast and offered two large balconies from which they could observe, but not touch, the native birds. And for the next two months, their joy became my joy. Until one evening I assembled all five pets around me on the sofa and took up a pen and a piece of paper.

  “I need to show you something,” I said. I drew a large X and pointed to the line that ascended sharply. “That’s your happiness here,” I said as they shuffled around me, yawning and trying to get comfortable. “And that,” I said, pointing to the line that descended sharply, “is mine.”

  They looked dumbfounded.

  I went ten days without having a single conversation with a human other than Brian, the checkout boy at Woolworth’s with the unusually small head.

  “How are you doing? Alright?” he asked as he scanned my tins of cat food and placed them into plastic bags.

  “Good, thanks,” I said. “And you?”

  “I’m good,” he answered.

  Can people die from being alone? I wondered as I drove back to the house with my car full of pet food.

  At night, unable to sleep, I wondered what would happen if I dropped dead in my home or fell down the stairs and broke my neck. How long would it take before anyone found me? No one knew I was there, except for my friends overseas, and they weren’t going to be much help. In my darker moments, I thought abo
ut which of my dogs would lie beside me and die of heartbreak and which would eat me. In the end it was Luca, the street cat I had rescued as a kitten in Sai Ying Pun, who had the shrewdest instincts for survival. He would make a meal of me until someone discovered us and opened up a couple of tins of cat food.

  I found a good friend, Sue, who had grown up with James, my gay friend from Parliament House. Sue happened to live one beach away and worked in Sydney. The travel time back and forth took three hours a day, so her weekdays were long. But a couple of months after I moved to Pearl Beach, we started meeting for dinner each Saturday night at a tiny Japanese restaurant not far from her place. Sue suffered from depression, and for the first time in a long time, I felt I could finally talk about mine. My friendship with Sue stopped me from losing my mind.

  In July 2015 my mother was admitted to the hospital with heart problems. She knew the warning signs of a stroke—the nausea, the dizziness, the headache—and had the number of an ambulance on speed dial.

  I drove down to Sydney, and found her propped up in bed in a public ward. A frizzy-haired stranger in her seventies, dressed in a white hospital gown, was standing at the foot of my mother’s bed.

  “Oh, it’s you,” my mother said softly when she saw me. She looked at the frizzy-haired woman who, it turned out, was the patient occupying the bed opposite hers. “I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your name.”

  The woman glanced up at the ceiling. “Me too,” she said. “I think it’s Heather.”

  “Heather, this is my daughter, Sarah.” I shook Heather’s hand, and she made herself comfortable on the end of my mother’s bed. I was grateful, because as long as she sat there, it was unlikely my mother would say something unpleasant. The three of us talked about the news and the loathsome American dentist who had killed Cecil the lion.