Anticipation (22 page)

I
t would be easy to think, sitting here in this steamy northern summer, so soft and palmy and blue, that I’ve come a long way from Otatara. Almost as far as I can, before I run out of road, out of earth and country. But really, I’m not so sure.

Some days, I think it’s come with me, a tin-can chain trailing all the way up SH1, jangling with every move I make. I should be grateful, I suppose, for the clank and scrape — for the reminder.

After all, I learned a lot in Otatara. For instance, I never understood, until I came to live in that hard-earned house, how a marriage could end in murder. That urge to destroy. It seemed to me, as a single girl, so unnecessary. Why kill someone, when you could just get a divorce? I thought you’d have to be crazy. A psycho looking for kicks. Mad or bad — or both, probably — long before a gold band ever hit your finger.

I’m not saying I was wrong — how could I, with my blood?

Just that maybe there’s more to it.

Because the trouble with walking away is that you leave so much of yourself behind. Bits of you cling to a marriage. Dead skin cells on the sheets, hair on the bathroom floor. A record of exactly what you’re made of. Proof, you might say, of who was there, and what was done. It’s not the sort of thing you want in the wrong hands.

And bits of marriage get stuck to you, too. You can’t escape by shutting the door. Walk out, and you’ll take evidence with you, under your fingernails, spatters and stains that you can’t even see in daylight. But they can still give you away. You don’t get away clean. Not unless you wipe the whole thing. Send the house up in flames. Consign your shed self to non-existence. Then, maybe, you can forget.
I was never.
I did not.

Did I say, earlier, that Greg loved me? That was a lie, I think. I’m pretty sure it was. (
He always. He never. He didn’t.
) Greg just wanted to marry someone. Get it over and done with, the messy part, cut straight to the pipe and slippers, to food in the fridge and never running out of clean socks. Some men are like that. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Which in my case was a pub in an alley off Liverpool Street on a Friday night in 1989. (The sort of place with bull’s-eye glass and old market signs and sawdust on the floor. A whiff of Dickens and last night’s sick. Very London, until the barman opened his mouth and those Kiwi vowels spilled out, until he poured my glass of dry white wine right up to the brim and served it to me with a Southland
rrr
.) Some time around Christmas, if I recall.

We went back to his place after last bell, and whatever it was Greg was looking for, I must have been a good enough fit, because the next day he called. That was that. We ran due diligence for a year or so, but the deal was done. No more distractions. We were on a fast track to Invercargill and the real stuff of life, the acquisition of cars and house, dining tables and matching chairs, throw pillows and rugs and duvet sets, all the things that make a home.

I’m not complaining. I love soft furnishings. And I’m good at making money. It’s my forte, really — my three-hundred-year-old gift, the other side of the Hardynge coin. There was a time, during my first few years in Auckland, when I made it in my sleep. Mind you, so did everyone, back then. The city made it for us. We sold, and bought, bought and sold. We went to bed rich, and woke up richer. The CBD climbing skywards, a little bigger, brighter, taller, every day.

But even in Invercargill, even in the down years, I was doing okay. By the time Greg and I built the house in Otatara, I was doing quite well, you might say. I did more than pick out carpet and drapes. At least half the Central Otago schist in the feature fireplace was mine. More than half, maybe, if we were counting. Which we weren’t, apparently.

The house wasn’t huge — it didn’t have pillars or Scarlett
O’Hara stairs — but it did have more space than we needed, Greg and I. Four bedrooms, two baths. I insisted on that.

‘It has to be a family home,’ I explained to Greg. ‘We need to plan ahead. Think about resale.’

Of course, making money takes time. In the car, on the phone, in and out of the office nine to five. And the golden hours, evenings and weekends, those times when couples sit down together and talk.
So, honey, what do you think? Do you really like it? I do, do you? How much shall we offer?

So I can’t blame Greg for finding other things to do. The indoor cricket. The golf. Even — God help me — the Rotary Club. Even Cheryl, in the end.

I remember a night, after cricket, when I watched him stand at our new granite bench, making toast and eating it straight off the breadboard, and he told me — in a casual way, just the odd glance over his shoulder — about Ross from the team who always went home to a plate waiting in the oven. Meat and three veg. Every night. And I laughed. We both did, I think. Because it was a joke, right? Such aproned, suburban love. What kind of man would want that?

Of course, Greg was busy too. He was clocking up the minutes, coaxing them into hours. And it wasn’t his fault, as he liked to point out, that his schedule was less flexible than mine. That he couldn’t just leave work early. That he had a Rotary meeting the night my phone didn’t ring, was already signed up to play golf on the Sunday my vendors called to cancel their open home. It wasn’t my fault either, of course. But maybe, looking back — if I squint just right — that’s why things turned out as they did. We didn’t synchronise, Greg and I. Not often enough, in those ten years. We didn’t make the time.

If we’d sat down to dinner together every night, stared into each other’s eyes, then — what? Things might have been different. They would have been. That’s what I believe. We would have played out our hands in half the time, left the table before the stakes got so high, before we had a whole decade to lose. We would have got it over and done with. Shaken hands and walked away.

No hard feelings. No Cheryl. No flames. I wouldn’t recognise a thing in the flick of Aunt May’s match. In any of it, maybe.

As it was, there was always at least one night a week — between, say, six-thirty and ten — when I was in and Greg was out, and I had my house to myself. Other things to look into. Whisky glasses, the fire and the dead. Eddie Harding, and Lester ‘Bodge’ Bodgewick. Whoever he might be. Some nights I took him to bed with me, that tender dead boy. Wrapped him up in the bliss of my empty rooms and fresh sheets.

One night a week. Is it really all that much time to fill? Could I not have eaten ice cream and watched
Friends
?

I would have found it hard to believe, before William died, that I could see any less of my mother. Not without leaving town. But after the funeral, I managed it somehow.

I suppose that’s why I didn’t see any early warning signs. Why the phone call I get, eight years later, catches me out. Why I fail to say and do the things I should. Sitting there, nine floors above trouble, my glass doors opened wide to the warmth of the Auckland night. Sipping chardonnay and thinking nothing could shock me about my blood. Not any more.

‘I’ve got ataxia,’ says Maggie, in my ear. ‘There’s something wrong with my central nervous system — the cells in my cerebellum and spinal cord are dying.’

This isn’t speculation. There are pictures. My mother has seen her shrinking brain for herself. Things have come a long way since Nanny Biggs’ day (not to mention the days of Joshua, Babs and Ted), and in 2004, when bodies don’t do as they should, they’re run through an MRI.

Of course, being Maggie, she had to look. That part of her isn’t dying. It’s just that she can’t walk straight any more, that her eyes twitch in the most annoying way, and sometimes she chokes on her morning coffee.

Ataxia. Dystonia. Dysphagia.

It’s all due, the doctors can see, to loss of neurons in her
hind-brain
. As for what’s killing them off — well, that’s still anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s just bad luck. All that lithium. Bad genes. A helix of cause and effect it would take more than medicine to unravel.

If Maggie’s afraid, she doesn’t sound it. Her voice on the phone is, if anything, quite chirpy. I suppose it’s not every day you get to see inside your own head. Her brain is full of itself, fascinated by its intricacies, every detail of its failings.

I’m starting to feel rather ill, myself. It’s all a bit dinner-
party-at
-Hannibal-Lecter’s — the contents of my mother’s head spilling down the line all over my parquet floor. I get up and close the doors. I’m not sure for whose sake. But I don’t want people to see this.

There could be another reason, of course, for Maggie’s cheer. Who doesn’t like to be proved right? Turns out there really is something wrong with her. Something she can’t fix no matter how hard she tries.

She is worried about one thing, though. The appointment the hospital is arranging for her with a specialist in Dunedin. Because how’s she going to get there? She can’t really drive any more, not far. And getting in and out of buses and taxis and planes, well, what if it’s all too much? There might be steps. What if she can’t manage?

I still feel sick, but now I’m a bit annoyed as well. Not so much that I have to drop everything, fly down there and sort it out, but that she can’t just ask me.
Janine, will you help me?
Is that so hard?
Yes, Mum, of course I will
. Invercargill, here I come.

Maybe I’m more than annoyed. It takes me three attempts, after she’s hung up, to get my cordless phone back in its cradle. I stare out at the park through the closed doors. It’s a lovely evening down there. The sun is just starting to set, and it’s all going soft, the writhing Moreton Bay figs and students and springy grass, the blondes in Juicy Couture and their sinning spoodles. My
million-dollar
view, give or take a bit of haggling. I think it might have shifted. It’s not quite where I left it an hour ago. Closer, or further away, I’m not sure, but I know the distance is wrong.

On my way to the wine fridge, I trip over the rug and bash my shin on the coffee table. For a split second, the world goes black. I think it’s rage. As I pour, my hands are shaking.
Ataxia. Dystonia
. I take a decent swig. Find, thank God, I can still swallow.

I take the bottle back to the sofa with me, and I go looking. I know I shouldn’t. No good can come of it. But I do it anyway.

Tap tap tap.
It’s so easy. Sitting there cross-legged, my bottle to hand, relishing the luxury of my freshly installed wireless modem. There’s a cold draught on the back of my neck — the air-con kicking in, no doubt. Or jealous Babs and Harry and Ted, crowding in for a closer view. Research is so exciting.

Neurological diseases fizz off the screen. Parkinsons, MS, CJD, Multiple Systems Atrophy, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. Most of the symptoms fit. But I have to be strict with my curious ghosts. Inherited ataxias. The spino-cerebellar kinds. SCAs. That’s what we’re looking for tonight. And there are enough of them, it would seem, to keep all of us busy.

It doesn’t take long to rule out types one and two — they don’t sound right.

Type three, on the other hand — ah yes! It’s like tripping over an old friend. As soon as I find out how it works, I know I can leave SCAs four to thirteen and beyond to the sticky-scalpelled ectosphere, that I don’t need to look any further. SCA3.
Machado-Joseph
Disease. That’s the Hardings all over.

It’s caused, I learn, by a faulty gene on chromosome fourteen. This particular gene, ATXN3, is in charge of building the enzyme Ataxin-3 — but it’s got hold of the wrong instructions. The pattern is simple enough. Make a C, then an A, then a G. Repeat. CAG, CAG, CAG. But someone’s forgotten to mention how many times. The gene doesn’t know when to stop. So the enzyme keeps on growing.

This matters, because Ataxin-3 has an important job to do — not glamorous, but essential. It’s in the resource recovery game. A precision machine. It recycles rubbish markers. You see, our cells put marker tags on all the stuff they want to throw out, but economical as they are, they want the tags back — so Ataxin-3
runs ahead of the trucks, locks onto the tags and twists them off just before the rubbish goes into the dumpster. And now it’s too big. The wrong shape. It can’t get the tags off very well. Sometimes it can’t even find them. And rubbish that still has a tag, well, you know how it goes — the garbage guys can’t touch that.

So the rubbish stays put, and it starts to pile up. And sometimes — though nobody knows exactly why — the whole environment dies. (Perhaps it’s the smell. The roaches and rats. Frustration. Maybe they run out of rubbish tags, and the universe implodes. Or the cells just give up. Is it possible to die of self-disgust? That would be a nifty mutation.)

It takes a while, though. There’s plenty of time for ATXN3 to pass its faulty information on to the next generation. Which does the best it can to fill in the gaps, but mistakes compound. And the longer this goes on, the bigger Ataxin-3 gets, and the quicker the streets fill up, and the cells die.