Like a House on Fire (21 page)

These days he gently woke her and got her sorted before driving down to Oceanworld to break shards of packed dead fish out of the freezer and get them into buckets, and wipe away the wriggling lines the catfish made as they sucked their way through algae on the insides of the big glass tanks.

Sometimes at night he'd feel Liz's hand land uncertainly on him and graze back and forth. Like seagrass on a current, it felt to him, and just as random. He'd take her hand and imagine silvery bubbles escaping from their mouths, floating up towards the ceiling fan, him keeping his breaths measured and even.

A party, that's where the accident had happened. Friends celebrating the installing of a jacuzzi. Except that the day was colder than expected, and people weren't getting into the jacuzzi, and so had wandered, in that way groups of people unthinkingly do, out to the decking on the other side of the house, presently unfinished. They'd stepped through the sliding doors barred pointlessly with two chairs because the thing had no railing, and his lovely, witty wife, looking for a way to help out, had taken a heavy platter out there to pass around and, turning round to answer someone's stupid question, had stepped straight off the edge of the deck, falling to the ground below. Only a metre and a half, but her head struck a rock, one of three artfully arranged boulders placed there for landscaping. He recalled the strange frozen look his friends who owned the house had when the ambulance arrived, as if they were rehearsing stories they would be telling their lawyers very soon. ‘Nobody's fault,' Roley kept saying, breathing fast through his mouth, panting, he couldn't help it. ‘It's barely a metre and a half,' his host kept repeating, a friend of eighteen years, while his wife picked assorted marinated olives off the grass, and the ambos immobilised Liz in a hard plastic body brace, buckling it tight, folding her arms across her chest like it was a sarcophagus, as Roley gasped oxygen, and every time he circled the stunned minute of what had happened, it hit him afresh, obliterating everything else so he had to learn it again, piece by piece.

Roley was thinking about this — he couldn't help thinking about it — as he opened the coolroom doors and made his way to the pallet inside. He crouched down to rest his hand on Samson's round, perfectly evolved head, and stroked his fingers across the blowhole that, if Samson were alive, would be too sensitive to touch.

With a jerk the doors were hauled open and Declan stood there. ‘I told you to freeze it and cut it up,' he said, as Roley looked at Samson's grey flank, noticing the nicks and cuts on it, the marks and old scars. He thought, sick with grief, about the way his wife's fingers sought out the small secret place under her hair where there was a tiny dent, still. He laid his hand on that flank, feeling its muscle, and he heard the moment waiting, and said into it, ‘You fucking do it.'

There was a short, boiling silence.

‘I'm going to pay you till the end of the week,' spat Declan, ‘and then you're out of here.'

‘No problem. I'm going now,' and he stood up and shouldered his way back out into the sunshine. He'd write a card to Kaz, he thought, as he collected his jacket and headed through the kiosk and souvenir shop, a few tourists watching him blankly as he scooped up a bunch of made-in-China key rings and pens on his way through.

‘What do you think you're doing?' called Declan, who'd followed him in, and Roley called cheerfully, ‘Severance pay,' smiling at Declan's wife standing mouth-open at the register as he added more worthless junk to the brimming fistful he'd shoved into his pockets and clutched in the crook of his arm — a t-shirt, a stuffed toy seal, a dolphin bath toy, a couple of snowdomes filled with penguins and igloos. Seeing Samson's merry eye (‘Dolphins are intelligent and playful!'), busting with some private joy as he slid himself onto the platform and expelled a hard breath through his blowhole, that eye holding Roley's own before moving to his hand in the bucket, full of such understanding, and such forgiveness.

Liz turned her head from the window as he entered.

‘I'm home early,' he said.

‘Are you?' she replied.

‘Can I get you anything?' he said, emptying his pockets onto the dining-room table, watching her stop and consider, slow as a tide turning.

‘No,' she said finally, ‘there's nothing I want,' and Roley thought, that's right, there's nothing: want was what they had taken out of her, back when they were assuring him nothing was removed.

She looked at him, the scar across her forehead giving her a permanently quizzical expression, as if she was raising her eyebrows knowingly, ironically; a look long gone.

‘Here,' he said cheerfully, ‘I got you this.' He gave her one of the snowdomes, and as she held it he realised she was the first person he'd ever seen cradling one and not shaking it. She just held it obediently with that emptied, passive face, gazing at the plastic penguins inside.

What they should put in them, thought Roley, is a little brain, something to knock around uselessly in that bubble of fluid as snow swirled down ceaselessly and never stopped, while some big hand somewhere just kept on shaking.

Waiting

The horoscope page lying limp in my hands tells me everything will align for me at a time I least expect it, so I flip it over to the page that's about cakes and slices ideal for school lunches, then back again, riffling through a whole chunk of pages, to the blurry photos of some celebrity's thigh. She splashes in a shallow ocean and the world, apparently, speculates on whether or not that shadow there is cellulite. You can see how much they've blown up the photo, how far away they must have been, snapping the light and shade on her leg, the distant shifting shadows as she steps into the waves. There's another magazine beside me on the table in the pile, a month or two after this one, where the same celebrity's on the cover, still in a bikini, looking momentarily nonplussed.
Give us some privacy
,
says the caption, and I think,
Lady, if you want privacy, stop cashing the cheques. Stop posing there with your manicured hand on your skinny hip. If you sincerely want the world to leave you alone until it forgets all about you, come and live at my place
.

They're not going to call my number for a while, which is why I'm leafing through these magazines. Here's the only place I ever read them. These ones are all over a year old, which isn't surprising in a public hospital department. What is surprising is that people have taken the time to painstakingly fill out the Find-a-Words and grade-four-level Celebrity Crosswords, people sitting right here, maybe with a lot preying on their minds, their eyes searching over a grid of letters, forwards, backwards, diagonally, hunting those letters, waiting for a sequence to jump out at them and make sense and turn into a recognisable word. They feel grimy, these magazines. Read and re-read and nervously read again with sweaty hands.

They'll call my name and I'll know then if I've got the woman instead of one of the men — there's four of them working here — and if I have I will feel ridiculous gratitude as I walk in there, that small mercy. Here's what the men do: they put the gel on and apologise that it's cold and then run the transducer over, looking only at the screen, which they don't turn around to you, because they've glanced at your ultrasound request form and they've read the doctor's code and they know what you're here to find out. No matter how hard you look at them, they hardly ever meet your eye, just move that mouse back and forth, clicking now and then with it. And if you break and say,
Please, is it still alive
, they say what they've been trained to say, so you can't blame them, but still. They clear their throat and reply,
Your doctor will discuss these results with you.
This while they're looking inside you, that's the ironic part. This careful professional detachment while they're gazing at the human map of you, the intimate, failed, faltering misstep, in ghostly black and white. White cloud coursing grainily over a black landmass, some cyclone gathering its bleary force offshore.

But one time I had the woman, and I didn't even have to ask her. She moved the transducer and gazed at the screen and then her hand came out and squeezed my leg and she looked at me and said,
I'm so sorry, I can't see a heartbeat
.

Her hand there for comfort. Warmth and pulse flowing between us, skin to skin.

She let me lie there for a little while too, and pull myself together. Maybe that's why she doesn't seem to be here anymore, maybe she let each appointment run too long. Maybe with more and more patients waiting outside, her efficient male colleagues started to get resentful that they were working through the queues so much faster than she was.

Anyway, it's been men the last three times. I'm a veteran at this now.

Lie there and have your fears confirmed, verbally or with that courteous, revealing brush-off. Get yourself back out into the waiting room to wait for the report to be printed, go up to the counter, pay for it all. After you get your Medicare refund up the street, the whole thing costs you seventy-five dollars. They don't bother giving you the actual ultrasound films now. Well, they don't bother giving them to me, anyhow.
Nothing to see
, one of them told me once, dismissively.
It's so tiny in these early stages
. Once, though, the girl at the counter handed me a disc along with my receipt. She hadn't read the report, obviously, just saw the
Gynaecological Ultrasound
printed there and burned it off for me. Thinking I'd be going home to excitedly push it into a DVD player and watch my baby jumping on the screen, healthy, identifiable. Viable.

I'll have to tell them, today, I don't want a DVD. I know what's coming. I reached ten weeks last Tuesday, day seventy, and I was standing in the kitchen chewing on a piece of toast, Pete long up and gone, feeding out the last of the hay to the cattle in the top block. I stood there rubbing at a spot on the bench wondering why the dread under the surface was pushing at me more insistently, just scratching at the cork of my bottled-up terror, and it dawned on me.

No nausea. Dull anguish like a bitter taste in my mouth, heart like a shallow dish of water I was desperate not to tip, filling my chest. That estuarine feeling of something ebbing away; those symptoms that had kept me so stupidly hopeful. Evaporating like a rainless cloud. Giving up the ghost. The spot I was rubbing slid from the bench to the back of my hand and I realised it was light, a spot of light reflected off a bottle on the windowsill. Everything was so quiet.

They won't find a heartbeat.

My doctor just fills out a request form for me now. I don't have to make an appointment to get it, so I told Pete I was coming up here to do some shopping. Pete's got enough on his plate. It's funny, in the pamphlets they hand you they talk about giving yourself permission to grieve and taking time for yourself, but they never talk much about your partner. I'm not pretending I know what it's like for him, but I look at his face and I can see that he's worn down as it is, almost to the point of slippage, like a stripped screw. Turned and turned again, straining to hold things together. He put in a crop of wheat this year, gambling on a spring break which hasn't come, and I know he's thinking of doing what all the farmers around here are slowly resigning themselves to, which is giving up on the idea and letting the cattle in to eat it down. I've watched him out there some mornings, stooping down, looking at the stalks, wondering where the point of non-recovery is, where it comes and what you do once you've decided. So this time I spared him. Kept the news of those two blue lines on the test to myself. I look at the calendar and think of him out there on the tractor sowing that wheat, ten weeks ago to the day.

Understand, I'm not a martyr. When we got married my mother gave me my grandmother's wedding ring, and I looked at the back of it worn thin from years of distracted rubbing with her thumb as she waited for my grandfather to come home, every shift out of the mines. Those years of wearing away. I do the same with it now, myself. Then, last March, when we got all the way to fourteen weeks and Pete's face had lost a little of its tightness, I was loading the washing machine and felt that tide ebbing again, the way a sharp wall of sand will collapse into the flow, and I was no more able to stop it happening than I was to turn a real tide. The soak of blood, that wall caving, impossible to ever rebuild.

In the hospital afterwards Pete stood by my bed, hesitating, as they announced visiting hours were over, and I thought he was gathering his thoughts to say something, and I closed my eyes. Instead I heard him taking off his boots and jeans and shirt, leaving them in a neat pile on the chair. He lifted the stiff white sheet and just climbed in beside me. My husband is an undemonstrative man and that gesture, as he fitted his warm arms and legs around me in the narrow bed, made me see how much he understood. I woke up in the night and felt his thumb, as he slept, absently rubbing the skin on my own arm. Oh, it wears us thin, marriage. It knocks the edges off us.

But I'm not a martyr, just someone who can see what needs doing, and does it. I've learned this from him.

The magazine's telling me there are ten steps to a new me. I turn to the page showing a rail-thin actress with a chalky-white arrow directed at her abdomen.
Baby bump?
asks the caption. I go back to the horoscopes. After I get out of here I will get the Medicare refund and put it back in the bank and then spend some time in the op-shop searching for something I could conceivably claim cost me seventy-five dollars.
Do you want a D&C
, my doctor will say, putting down the ultrasound results with a sigh,
or do you want to wait and let things take their natural course?
It's harder to explain away a day procedure in hospital so I'll take the natural course.