Sex and Death (5 page)

‘All right, so, I mean, you're rich, right? Like insanely so?'

Pattern nodded carefully.

‘You could, like, buy anything?'

‘My money is tied up in money,' Pattern said. ‘It's hard to explain. You get to a point where a big sadness and fatigue takes over.'

‘Not me,' said George. ‘I don't. Anyway, I mean, it wouldn't even make a dent for you to, you know, solve my life financially. Just fucking solve it. Right?'

Pattern smiled at him, a little too gently, he thought. It seemed like a bad news smile.

‘You know the studies, right?'

Dear god Jesus. ‘What studies?'

‘About what happens when people are given a lot of money. People like you, with the brain and appetites of an eleven-year-old.' ‘Tell me.' He'd let the rest of the comment go.

‘It's not good.'

‘Well I don't fucking want it to be
good
. I want it to be fun.'

‘I don't think it's very fun, either, I'm afraid.'

‘Don't be afraid, Pattern. Leave that to me. I will be very afraid, I will be afraid for two, and never have to worry about money again. Depraved, sordid, painful. I'll go for those. Let me worry about how it will feel.'

Pattern laughed into her drink.

‘Sweet, sweet Georgie,' she said.

It was getting late, and the whispering interruptions had increased, Pattern's harried staff scurrying around them, no doubt plotting the extraction. An older gentleman in a tuxedo came out to their couch and held up a piece of paper for Pattern, at eye level, which, to George, sitting right next to her, looked perfectly blank.

Pattern studied it, squinting, and sighed. She shifted in her seat.

‘Armageddon,' said George. ‘Time to wash my drones with my drone towel!'

Pattern didn't smile.

‘I hate to say it, little George, but I think I'm going to have to break this up.'

He didn't like this world, standing up, having to leave. Everything had seemed fine back on the couch.

‘Here,' Pattern said, giving him a card. ‘Send your bills to William.'

‘Ha ha.'

‘What?'

‘Your joke. That you obviously don't even know you just made.'

She was checking her phone, not listening.

On the street they hugged for a little while and tried to say goodbye. A blue light glowed from the back seat of Pattern's car. George had no idea who she was, what she really did, or when he would ever see her again.

‘Do you think I can be in your life?' George asked. ‘I'm not sure why but it feels scary to ask you that.'

He tried to laugh.

‘Oh, you are, George,' said Pattern. ‘Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.'

‘You know what I mean. How can I reach you?' He didn't particularly want to say goodbye to her.

‘I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.'

‘But I don't know that. I don't really feel that. It doesn't feel like you're even out there. When you're not here it's like you never were here at all.'

‘No, no,' she whispered. ‘I don't believe that. That's not true.'

‘Is something going to happen to you? I don't know what to believe.'

‘Well,' she said. ‘Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?'

‘Please don't make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can't stand it. There's nobody left but you. What if I don't see you again? What will I do?'

‘Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.'

*

George kept quiet about his sister in therapy. He talked about everything else. But sometimes he'd catch Dr Graco studying him, and he'd think that perhaps she knew. She didn't need to be told. She might not grasp the specific details, the bare facts – who and when and what and all those things that did not matter – but it seemed to George that she could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him. That someone really knew him and that, whatever else you could say about him, it was clear that he was no longer really alone.

At home George listened, and hoped, and waited, but his phone never made the strange tone again. He found nothing on his sister in the news, though he looked. Whoever had been calling for her blood had gone quiet. And here George couldn't decide if their silence meant that they'd lost interest, or that they had her, they got her, and Pattern was gone.

One night it was late and he'd let his uncertainty overpower him. It had been a year since he'd seen her. Where was she? How could she just disappear? He'd been saving up his idea for a moment just like this one, so he sat down at his desk and wrote his sister an email.

Elizabeth –

Is it just me now, or are you still out there? Don't write back. I cannot imagine how busy you must be! There is a lot that I cannot imagine. But that's okay, right? You're out there looking, I know. I am waving at you, wherever you are. I am down here saying hello. I love you very much.

Your brother,

George

As is the way of the body, when things are going right, we are allowed to remain blissfully unaware of the fact that we are housed in sheaths of flesh. When things go wrong, however, worse than the pain, worse even than the shame, is no longer being able to ignore the body's relentless systems of audit and account: things go in, things come out, things go in, things come out, over and over and over until we die. Selene lay awake at night between feeds, fantasising about how she was going to take her body for granted again when this was all over – she was going to abuse the hell out of it, eat trans fat galore, drink buckets of booze, show her body who was boss, that it had no right to hold her hostage like this.

It wasn't the baby – though of course that had been the ultimate proof of the nature of how things go in and then come out – nor was it the breastfeeding. These processes were celebrations of the body, or at least celebrations of the higher functions of the body.

The crude bodily problem keeping her awake most nights, and in agony at least once a day, was not directly related to birthing a baby, though nobody seemed to believe her when she said that the birth itself had been a piece of cake, relaxed, downright enjoyable, compared to this. She could no longer go to the toilet –
pass a bowel motion
, was how her GP liked to put it – without being in excruciating pain from the delightfully named anal fissure that had made its presence known when her baby was two weeks old.

If Selene had to summarise what she had learned so far from the experience of the fissure (as she and her husband referred to
it, so often that it was like the third partner in their marriage), it would be this. That the ultimate taboo, perhaps the only one still remaining in modern Australian culture, was to talk openly about your toilet life. Toilet humour was okay, in certain prescribed situations. But the moment Selene began to share the real, lived experience of her current toilet issues with close friends – helplessly, because she didn't really want to be sharing these details, yet she was so consumed by them that she felt inauthentic in her friendships if she didn't – she could see the desperate look in her friends' eyes as they pretended it was normal, while silently willing her to stop. It seemed to her no coincidence that it was Captain Cook who had introduced the word ‘taboo' into modern English usage, stealing it, along with much else, from the Tongans, whose word
tabu
had indicated something set apart, forbidden.

How could it be that this minuscule split in a fibre of her body to which she'd never given much thought could set her apart from the rest of the teeming human life on the planet? Even from her husband, who had been nothing but compassionate. She could not help resenting his carefree attitude, disappearing into the bathroom for five tranquil minutes before leaving for work, not paying any more heed to this act of emptying his bowels than to any of his other ablutions.

It was a new low point when she said to him one morning as he exited the bathroom, the flush audible, ‘I'm so jealous of you.' What on earth did she expect, for him to make the sacrificial offering of a live animal to the toilet each time in acknowledgement of his body's privilege in being free of pain?

He embraced her in sympathy, kissed the sleeping baby and left their flat to jog for the bus. Selene was left standing outside the bathroom looking with dread at the still warm toilet seat, knowing she had to face the day's first anguish. Time slowed. At least the baby was asleep, she counselled herself. Once before she had endured the agony with him strapped to her chest in the
Bjorn, her tears of pain – and every time, there were tears – dropping onto his pulsing fontanelle.

Afterwards, she sat in a hot bath, and then applied the battery of useless creams whose names left nothing to the imagination (Proctosedyl, Rectinol) that she was using in a last-ditch attempt to avoid some kind of surgical intervention. The day before, at her appointment with the specialist, after she had curled up on her side on the examining table, he'd announced apologetically that the Botox injection hadn't worked to release the muscle spasm. It was a pity about the taboo, which she was trying harder to observe after one too many pleading looks from interlocutors, because ever since she'd had the Botox injected she'd been coming up with great one-liners she couldn't use: ‘You think my
forehead
looks good? You should see my sphincter!' Thank the Pope the injection had been covered by the public hospital or it would have cost thousands to render her anus wrinkle-free. And it hadn't even done the trick.

The specialist had said she would need to have a lateral sphincterotomy under general anaesthetic within a few weeks if there was no improvement. She'd come home straight away and Googled it, and discovered that, for some bizarre reason, which not even medical professionals could explain, if you made a second cut in the internal sphincter – which had gone into spasm because of the fissure – it sometimes released, and solved the problem. In his consulting rooms, she had asked the specialist what the side effects of such an operation might be, and he'd paused and gazed out the windows at his view spreading all the way to the line of blue water at Bondi. There were helium balloons – ‘It's a girl!' – weighted down on his desk with a bag of fluorescent lollies. His own daughter had been born a few days previously, and he had enthusiastically told Selene that his wife wanted another baby ‘immediately'. This was right before he'd looked at the rack and ruin of her bum.

‘Well,' he said, ‘it might mean that later in life, when you go through menopause, and there are some hormonal changes, you are left partially incontinent.'

‘Sort of like it is now?' she asked. She had made a map of all the public toilets on the coastal walk near her flat, marking them like pirate's treasure with a large X, and timing the walk between them, just in case.

‘Probably worse,' he said.

‘What exactly does partially incontinent mean?'

‘Ah – you know, skidmarks in your undies every now and again,' he said, and grinned.

As if ageing wasn't going to be undignified enough.

But she had decided, if it came to it, that she'd have the operation, take that chance, and hope that her menopausal self didn't live to regret it, and hate the younger version of herself who had ruined her ability to enjoy her retirement.

Selene had to return to the hospital a few days later, baby in tow, for the six-week post-birth appointment with the midwives. A nice little routine check-up, no need to discuss her problem, she hoped. The focus, for once, would be on her baby's health. She was actually looking forward to it. She parked in the cavernous lot beneath the hospital and took the lift up to the birthing centre. It was the first time she'd been back since the birth, and she could hear somebody labouring in the same room where she'd had her son in the bath. She felt elated to think of the lukewarm water, the feel of the edges of the tub beneath her hands.

The midwife was not from Eucalyptus Group. Selene had never met her before, and she seemed harried, uninterested in making chitchat about her water birth. Old-school Aussie, middle-aged, not one of the young women fresh from midwifery school sent out to face the onslaught of Sydney's raging baby boom. The midwife handled Selene's baby for his weighing and measuring as if
he were a choice leg of lamb, expertly palpated his still slightly swollen ballsack to check if his testicles had descended, and then re-swaddled him so tightly it looked as if he'd spun his own cocoon.

‘Your turn. On your back, legs up,' the midwife said without preamble, and next thing Selene was getting her stitches checked.

‘There's a small polyp, I'll have to burn it off.' The midwife lit something that looked like a long silver sparkler.

‘Where, exactly?' Selene said nervously.

The midwife didn't respond. She was frowning in concentration.

It was quick, relatively painless, but still. Hot metal on raw flesh. She had the dizzy feeling once again that she had disintegrated into nothing but a collection of limbs held together by failing viscera. She looked at her son, who was transfixed by a black-and-white wall map, and repeated her mantra of sanity:
He's okay, he's okay, he's okay
. She was quietly fascinated by how much she could endure, but if anything had gone wrong with
his
body, she would have broken apart. She thought of something she'd read in one of the birthing books. It troubled her for being both true and not true.
You have amazing reserves of self
.
You will bring these reserves to your birth experience just as you bring them to every challenging experience you have in your life. The ‘you' who births your baby does not stand outside the ‘you' of the rest of your history and present.

‘Okay, all done,' the midwife said. Her name was Agatha, according to her nametag, for she hadn't introduced herself.

Selene pulled up her pants and moved to the chair beside Agatha, who was typing notes into a computer using her index finger.

‘Now, we need to discuss contraception. It's mostly a myth about breastfeeding. You want me to prescribe the mini-pill?'

‘No, thanks,' Selene said. ‘I think I'll be fine.'

Agatha looked at her suspiciously. ‘Have you had intercourse since the birth?'

Selene laughed a little too loudly, a sound verging on a guffaw.

‘You got to get back on the horse,' Agatha said. ‘The longer you wait, the harder it gets.'

‘I'm not really planning on having sex ever again,' Selene said, half-joking.

But Agatha, it seemed, took this declaration very seriously. Her attitude changed immediately into one of bustling concern. She shuffled around in the drawer and held out a form and a pen. ‘I'd like you to fill this out based on how you've felt in the past week,' she said.

‘What is it?'

‘It's a questionnaire, the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. It will help me assess how you're feeling.'

Selene looked down at the piece of paper. The first statement was
I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things
and the choice of responses was:
As much as I always could
,
Not quite so much now
,
Definitely not so much now
and
Not at all
. ‘Okay,' she said, ‘but you need to know that in the past seven days I've had a failed Botox injection to my sphincter, and every time I've had a bowel movement I've been in so much pain I've cried. It's got nothing to do with adapting to life with my baby, or hormones. It's just about being in physical pain. So I'll answer this honestly, but it doesn't mean I'm depressed if I've had sense of humour failure recently.'

‘I understand,' Agatha said noncommittally. ‘Why don't you fill it out and we can go from there.'

Selene could see that Agatha was now on high alert, her postnatal depression radar quivering. She looked excited, as if she were about to bust Selene for theft, like she was anticipating a victory of sorts. Stupidly, she decided to trust Agatha, and she filled out the ten questions honestly. It felt good to tick
Rather less than I used to
in response to the statement
I have looked forward with enjoyment to things
. She was on a liquid diet for the sake
of the fissure, no caffeine despite the sleeplessness, for it compounded the problem of being in semi-constant danger of shitting her pants, and she approached the bathroom each morning as she would a war zone, so yes, she believed it was safe to say that there wasn't a huge amount she had to look forward to at the moment other than the feel of her infant son's skin against her own, and his gummy, wondrous first smiles.

Her mind wandered as she filled out the questionnaire. This was the other thing she had learned in the past few weeks of pain, she realised – when your body stops working the way it should, you start to see anything involving the body as absurd, especially sex. The less of it you're having, the more bizarre it begins to seem, the more unthinkable it becomes as something anyone would choose to do. She was thinking about sex all the time, but not in a good way. She could not believe she'd ever had it, that anyone in the history of humankind had ever had any. She looked at women who were pregnant with a second child with utter incredulity: they'd actually chosen to have sex again! So it
was
possible! But when, how, why?

This wasn't prudery, it was genuine amazement. She had been placed on the outside of something and was gazing in, more perplexed by the human body than she had been as a child. Her father had once brought home a stack of blank examination booklets from his university for her when she was seven, knowing she liked to fill things in and catalogue them, and later she'd found him and her mother laughing together at the kitchen table, because opposite the box EXAMINING BODY she had written I DO THAT. She hadn't understood at the time why it was funny – in fact, the question had bothered her, the presumption that anyone else would ever think they could examine her body.

She handed her completed questionnaire to Agatha, who graded it using a mystical system of numbers.

‘Hmmmm,' Agatha said gravely. ‘I'm afraid we have a problem.
You're in the danger zone for postnatal depression. You've got to come back in next week and take this test again.'

Selene smiled passive-aggressively. ‘But it's got nothing to do with postnatal anything. Anyone can get an anal fissure, at any stage of their lives. Men can get them. Women who've never had children can get them. It's just unfortunate that mine is not getting better on its own.'

Agatha's eyes had taken on a beatific gleam. Selene stopped talking. She wondered ungenerously if the midwives were given a postnatal depression detection quota, and she'd just helped Agatha to meet hers.