Australia Day Read online

  As she dries herself with a towel, she keeps one eye on the threesome. The children laugh and play and splash in the water while the man leans back on his hands, his belly thrust before him. They could run, she thinks. It would be easy enough for them to get away from him. He is too fat, too wheezy to catch them, no matter how malnourished they may be. But there are invisible strings. She sees that now. The boy and girl are little more than marionettes, tied to the promise of a better life—at the very least, a hot meal.

  One day Brian had taken her to the rubbish dump. She had heard tales about the people who lived on top of the steaming mound, but to actually behold it was a shock. The air that rose from the knoll of garbage was hot and pungent in ways she could never have imagined, and she followed Brian’s lead and wrapped a kroma—the traditional Khmer scarf used as a sarong, towel, hat, blanket, sling—around her nose and mouth. They were with a Cambodian doctor who ran a mobile clinic at the dump once a month. Children gathered, grateful for the distraction from the boring task of collecting aluminium cans. A girl of twelve had infected scabies bites all over her bony shins. The doctor gave her a tube of cream and ten antibiotic tablets. He didn’t move from his seat behind the folding table. He barely looked the child in the eye. A French woman from the NGO that sponsored the doctor snapped photographs for their summer newsletter.

  That night, Melissa filled Hope with stories about her visit. But as she described her despair, Melissa heard something disturbing in her own voice—a childlike fascination or delight that came dangerously close to excitement. As if she were practising the tales she would tell her friends at the pub once she got back home to Australia.

  The fat man is in the water now. Puffed and bloated, he looks less like a monster and more like a dying elephant seal. The children duck between his legs, dolphin-like, their skin brown and smooth and slick. She looks around. Apart from the waiter, there is nobody else to bear witness. But to what exactly? Even if there were a security guard who spoke English, she has nothing concrete to report. Only this gnawing feeling that sits like a rat beneath the curved blade of her breastbone.

  The Australian man towels off. The girl helps him dry his back. The boy threads the thongs back onto his swollen feet. They pad across the blue tiles. Wet prints vanish in the heat. Melissa leans back, her mind awash with memories. Antoine, directing the clinic through a haze of typhoid fever, intravenous drip swinging from his arm. A tearful Hope, announcing, as if it were a revelation, that Khmer people grieve for their children too. The simultaneously pitying and satisfied look on Brian’s face as he reads the Bible to a room full of farmers.

  The sun is burning a hole through the teal arc of sky above her head. She feels it sting her legs, bite her crimson cheeks. The pool shimmers and beckons, but she will not return to its silent depths. Not today. Today she will sit with the pain.

  Things That Grow

  ‘This here’s your problem,’ he says, holding a tree root in his hands. ‘If there’s a leak, you can count on these thirsty buggers to find it.’

  The plumber, whose name is Rob or Craig, promises me a quote by the end of the week. He gives me his card and says it’s a big job, by way of a pre-emptive apology. I’m not surprised. When Paul and I moved in, there were mushrooms growing in the bathroom—shy things sprouting from the grout with bone-coloured bonnets. I remember joking about frying them up to eat with our steak and chips for dinner, but Paul said they were poisonous and threw them in the bin.

  I look at the plumber’s card. Turns out he is a Craig. I add it to the in-tray on Paul’s sprawling mahogany desk. The mail haunts me: every day there is another utility bill, another catalogue, another newsletter in his name. It’s not clean, our cleavage from this world. We leave bits of ourselves behind: a hair fossilised in a bar of soap, a toenail clipping in the sink, our smell imbued in the fabric of our clothes and towels and pillows.

  When the plumber leaves around ten am, I go to bed. I catch snippets of sleep. Mostly I stare at a patch of mildew on the ceiling that looks like the face of Jesus Christ. The night before the accident, Paul suggested we send a photo to A Current Affair. Or Today Tonight. We argued about which one. We spent two hours, some of the last we would ever spend together, debating the credibility of tabloid TV.

  My phone vibrates across the floorboards. Mum. Now that Paul has gone, she’s the only person—apart from my lawyer—who calls me.

  ‘Cora.’ She always sounds a little surprised when I answer, like she half-expected me to have topped myself in the night. ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘With a valium.’

  ‘You can’t take those things forever.’

  ‘It’s been four weeks,’ I say, rummaging for the bottle of tablets on the bedside table. ‘That’s hardly forever.’

  She makes a noise that means: I’m going to drop this now, but I know better. ‘Have you showered?’ she asks.

  ‘Can’t.’ I pop a tablet in my mouth and swallow it, dry, just to spite her. ‘Plumber says tree roots have invaded the bathroom.’

  She sighs. I imagine her rolling her eyes. ‘Why can’t you just talk like a normal person?’

  ‘I’m serious,’ I say. ‘Plants burrowing up through the grout, like a cancer.’

  ‘Well, I told you not to buy from an owner-builder.’ There it is again, that disappointment mixed with pleasure. Disappointment because I’m a failure, pleasure because it’s all so beautifully in keeping with her carefully constructed world view. ‘They never do the job properly. Aesthetics over quality.’

  ‘God forbid.’ My mother could never be accused of putting aesthetics over anything. ‘Were you calling for a particular reason?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m dropping off some dinner later. A chicken curry. Around four-thirty.’

  I don’t need more food. The freezer is full of it. The only thing I can stomach is the odd cup of tea and, maybe, a Scotch Finger. But it’s no use arguing with her.

  ‘And for Chrissake, have a shower.’

  Paul would be horrified by all this lazing around. He didn’t tolerate idleness, or tardiness. We almost split up once on account of a broken-down train. It was pathological. I blamed his mother. He blamed his Swiss heritage.

  Perhaps that’s why—even from within my cocoon of grief—I feel guilty. Certainly there’s some relief in allowing one day to bleed into the next, in not conforming to the social norms of breakfast, lunch and dinner, in guessing the hour from the way spears of light shoot through the venetian blinds. But ever since my nan passed away when I was sixteen, I’ve had the suspicion that the dead are watching our every move, that they see us standing naked before the bathroom mirror, plucking our hair and squeezing our pimples.

  Around midday I pass out and have my first dream since the accident. Paul is there. I know it is him, even though he has the face of the plumber. He is wearing the wounds the emergency doctor checked off like a shopping list on his fingers: the depressed skull fracture; the flail chest; the pelvis shattered into bony shrapnel. But he is smiling. We are in a field of mushrooms and he is gliding towards me. I wake up before we touch, but not before I see the sky—clear but for a patch of cloud in the shape of Jesus Christ.

  His mother insisted on burying him. She and I shared a chaise longue at the funeral parlour and f licked through wood swatches to an instrumental version of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. We settled on the Amity Rose, a walnut-coloured casket with a sapphire blue lining. Paul would like it, his mother said, as if she had a direct line to his spirit, and the parlour director—a large man with leathery skin and a gruff laugh—agreed. ‘Excellent choice,’ he said. ‘Very durable.’

  After my nap I force myself to get dressed. It is the first day of spring and I sit on the small patch of grass in the backyard. The weather bureau has predicted an electrical storm, but for now the air is still. I can smell jasmine and fallen lemons and hear the distant chug of a lawnmower. Paul had terrible hay fever. On a day like today he would be holed up in the bedroom with the window
s closed and the air conditioner on full blast. Nobody talked about that at the funeral, but these are the things I remember.

  I close my eyes. The sun warms my cheeks. The weeds form a green wall around me. Beyond the fence I hear a sudden rustle of leaves. Must be that mongrel from next door.

  Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

  Or a child.

  With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row.

  I don’t know my neighbours. Their bougainvillea has made a home of our fence, but we’ve barely exchanged a hello. I have vague memories of a woman with bushy eyebrows and two young kids—twins? I remember the dog better than the people: a yappy thing with the body of a Scottish terrier and a cheeky Jack Russell smile.

  I peer through a gap in the fence. A girl is sitting on a blanket beneath a small jacaranda tree. A doll with matted hair and cloudy eyeballs is propped up against the trunk. The girl, who looks about three, pours the doll a cup of imaginary tea.

  Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

  It feels dirty to be hiding like this, watching a child, but I can’t bring myself to look away. Something about the doll and the purple flowers feels familiar, like deja vu, or a dream.

  With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row.

  She stops. Suddenly she is looking straight at me with her big brown eyes, mouth open, on the verge of a scream.

  My period is late. Yesterday, a doctor friend told me this was a physical manifestation of my grief—something about stress upsetting the hypothalamus. He suggested doing a pregnancy test. ‘What’s the harm in checking?’ he said. I laughed, thinking he was joking, but his eyes were cold and serious.

  This afternoon I buy a home pregnancy test from the chemist. When I drive home, Beethoven’s fifth symphony is playing on the radio. My heart pounds along with the cymbals. If Paul were here, he would laugh at my melodrama. In the bathroom, I sit on the toilet, hold the wand between my legs and shower it with urine. Two minutes: the time it takes to make a cup of instant noodles or brush my teeth or freefall from an aeroplane. But I needn’t wait. The two lines appear straight away. Pink and undeniable.

  When Mum arrives at four-thirty, I run and hide in the master bedroom. I’m a teenager again, curled up in a ball with a blanket pulled over my head. She doesn’t have a key—I won that argument—so she jumps the back fence. But I’ve thought of that too: the laundry blind is drawn and there is a chain on the back door.

  ‘Cora? I know you’re in there!’ she shouts, but she doesn’t sound too convinced.

  She calls my phone five times and sends me three texts before finally leaving. It isn’t malicious, this hibernation—it’s a rite of passage. I need to feel the slow stretch of time, the unfurling of new limbs, the creaking of ancient roots.

  Death blinds us. Now, when I see Paul, it’s through a soft lens—the jerky product of a handheld camera, set to melancholic music. It seems almost blasphemous to recall the fight we had at Federation Square, the way pedestrians gave us a wide berth, the way they stared. Not to mention that adulterous text message I found but never mentioned, the awful banality of those blue, speech-bubbled words.

  I wonder what Paul would say if he was here, if he knew. Almost certainly there would be touching: his hand on my neck, my arm, my stomach. He would half-joke about the baby playing footy, like him and his father before him. Because that was Paul—always leaping into the future, projecting ahead to his son in a footy jersey. And now, thinking these things as I lie curled in a pocket of air beneath my doona, it’s not relief I feel at his absence, but it’s not longing either. I throw back the covers and stare at Jesus on the ceiling, his eyes looking straight at me, at everything, at nothing.

  The thing is, it’s not the first time. I’ve been here before with Paul, in a different millennium. I know how the early part feels: the insatiable hunger, the paralysing fatigue, the breast tenderness, the pimples. Once it was done, we never spoke of it again. We were good at that—burying things. But it got harder when our friends started having babies: harder for me to suppress my sorrow, harder for Paul to ignore it.

  On Friday, Craig the plumber calls.

  ‘Did you get my quote?’

  I had. It was outrageous.

  ‘I’m still reeling,’ I say and laugh. Craig the plumber doesn’t. In his silence, I hear cartoons and a hysterical child yelling for daddy.

  ‘You got kids?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lucky.’ I hear him broker a deal involving an iPad and chocolate ice-cream. ‘Well, if you do decide to go ahead, I can do next Monday or Tuesday.’

  I look at the empty blister packs and the furry mouths of the mugs on my bedside table. ‘I’ll have to check with my husband.’

  I listen to him negotiate with his children. Twenty minutes on the laptop. A double scoop with sprinkles.

  ‘No worries,’ he says before hanging up.

  I go to bed to dream of him, in Robin Hood gear, hacking his way through a forest to save me.

  For the first time in days, I take a shower. Standing beneath the water, I imagine tree roots exploding through the tiles and wrapping around my ankles. I think of my friend from high school who, after having her first baby, gave me a print of her placenta. I remember how Paul scrunched up his face and refused to touch it, as if it was contaminated, as if he could catch something. And I remember feeling queasy at the thought of the sac—still wet from the birth canal—being plopped like meat onto butcher’s paper. But I also remember that I couldn’t stop looking at it: the way the plaited cord wound its vine-like way up the white of the paper, the way the vessels splayed out to a billowing canopy of red.

  There are no clean towels in the bathroom, and I stand wet and naked before the mirror. My body is keeping its secret behind a flat belly and pink nipples. I trace a line with my finger across the fleshy spot above my pubic bone.

  Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

  Water pools at my feet, staining the grey tiles black. A mushroom peeks through the grout. As I wrap myself in a robe that still smells vaguely of Paul, I marvel at this tiny being in the middle of my bathroom floor—so fragile I could lop its head off with a nudge of my big toe, and at the same time so stubborn, so insistent. I walk to the bedroom window and tug on the cord for the venetian blinds. With a snap like breaking bone, the room is bathed in light.

  Fracture

  The poster was Tony’s grandson’s idea. The family had gathered for their weekly Sunday meal. As usual, Carla had cooked up a storm. Roast pork, roast chicken, three salads and two cakes. They were all nursing their bellies, the adults drinking moscato and licking the last of the cheesecake from their plates, the kids lounging on beanbags as they watched a movie in the second living room.

  Carla had been to mass in the morning, but Tony hadn’t joined her. Tony hadn’t seen the inside of a church since his wedding, forty years ago. He had given up on God when his father dropped dead from a heart attack the day he and Carla got back from their honeymoon. For Tony, it was the Sunday dinner that was the highlight of his week. To be flanked by family, and to have the old house resonating with noise, made Tony feel if not invincible then at least less vulnerable. Everybody listened as he told the story of the surgeon at the hospital. The family was outraged—Mario, his eldest son, the most so.

  ‘You tell me his name. I’ll make sure he gets what’s coming to him.’ Mario banged his fist on the table. The family knew it was an empty threat. In spite of his size—which, in recent years, was more fat than muscle—Mario was soft at heart. It was his late wife, Trudy, who had worn the pants in their little family, from the moment she gave birth to Luca in the back seat of a taxi to the moment she’d hit the ground in a tragic skydiving accident. The Ferraris missed her terribly. Now when they needed strength they looked to her ferocious son.

  Luca said nothing as he listened to his nonno’s story. When Tony had finished an
d the others had taken turns to voice their disbelief, Luca slunk away. About an hour later, when Carla had just started clearing everyone’s plates, he returned, wielding a piece of paper.

  ‘Is this the guy?’ he said, holding up the poster proudly, like a five-year-old. The family stopped talking. They looked at the grainy head shot and read the caption in huge capitals below it.

  * * *

  Below his face was one word: FUCKWIT. It was Anzac Day, and Deepak wondered if the timing was deliberate—the naming and shaming of an antihero, or something along those lines—but he didn’t think the perpetrator was capable of such sophistication. The poster was amateurish. His photo had been downloaded from the hospital website and then blown up to ten times its size. Fortunately he’d gone to work early that day—the registrar had called at seven am about a girl who had fractured her arm. When Deepak saw the poster near the main entrance, he immediately tore it down, but he felt dirty—as if he had something to hide—when he buried it in an infectious waste bin.

  Public holidays were always busy and Anzac Day was no different. A fractured femur, a supracondylar, two dislocated shoulders, in addition to the usual rubbish from the ward. By ten o’clock that night, as Deepak collapsed into Simone’s bed, the poster was a million miles from his mind. He only thought of it the next morning when he woke up, naked and sticky from sex.

  ‘Do you know who it was?’ Simone asked when he told her the story.

  He shook his head.

  ‘But do you have your suspicions?’

  Deepak thought of the hundreds of patients he’d operated on over the years. Some were disgruntled, of course—you could never please everyone—but nobody stood out to him.