by Naomi Booth
These reports kept on coming for a while, and the most hard-hitting were the ones where the symptoms were caught on camera. I’ve archived footage of a Sri Lankan woman whose mouth was lost in folds of crinkled skin, filmed just before her surgery; of two Bolivian children, brothers, whose ears were muffled in a new epidermis. And the horror stories of ad-hoc surgeries, of hideous mishaps and infections, I’ve saved those too. Gradually the stories stopped coming. And people in the city seemed to forget all about it. And people are still forgetting, people like Pete who might have seen symptoms just this morning. Is it mad to think about cutis all the time, to document its effects, to think about the people it’s claimed, the people it’s sealing in right now? Or is it madness to sleep soundly, forgetting all about the very thing that might seal you into your own dreams?
My mother’s the last thing I think about, she’s the last thing I try to shut out, before I finally drift into a fitful sleep.
V
WHEN I wake up, Pete’s already downstairs, banging about in the kitchen. It takes a while for the feeling of my dreams to clear; the details have already melted away again, but there’s a bad atmosphere left behind, like a colour filter across my thinking. I try to shake it off. I sit up in bed and bend my legs, attempting to get comfortable around the bump. The window’s still wide open and I can feel a breeze. It’s blissful. I lean my head backwards, letting my neck stretch.
‘Sleeping Beauty,’ Pete’s voice says. He’s at the bedroom door, holding a tray.
‘What time is it?’ I ask.
‘It’s nearly midday. I didn’t want to wake you. You must’ve needed the rest.’ He places the tray down on the bed next to me. ‘Toast? Protected juice?’
I don’t feel hungry, but I’m so thirsty that I grab the juice and gulp it down. Too quickly, it’s too quickly, and it won’t go down properly and I can practically feel the heartburn already, but I need so badly to drink it. I finish the glass and then lean my head backwards again.
‘It rained,’ Pete says, with such earnestness that I can’t help but smile. It’s as though it’s the first time he’s seen precipitation; he might as well have said it snowed for all the incredulity in his voice.
‘Really?’ I say and I pat the bed for him to sit down beside me.
‘Yep, first thing this morning. Well, it was almost rain. Drizzle, really. I watched it from the verandah. Babe, it was beautiful. The mountains got even bluer and then they disappeared completely. It lasted about half-an-hour. And now everything smells different. It’s so fresh out there.’ He leans back against the headboard too, taking his Greek coffee, sipping it so that the foam briefly collects on his upper lip then melts away. ‘I knew it was the right thing,’ he says. ‘Coming out here. I knew it.’ He reaches out with one hand and rests it on my belly. ‘I can’t wait to show this one the bush.’
We sit like that for a while and I look out at the sky: it’s a strange colour, a kind of mottled violet-yellow, like a fading bruise. I put my hand up to my fringe: I can feel the frizz in my hair, and there’s a kind of soft fizz on the air too, a prickle of electricity.
‘What are you going to do today?’ Pete asks.
‘I’m going to get us some curtains,’ I say, deciding it there and then.
‘Yeah?’ Pete says. ‘Top idea. Do you want me to come?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’ll be good for me to get out on my own. I can’t sleep with all this light.’
‘You seemed to sleep fine this morning,’ he says. ‘You were snoring like a pregnant buffalo.’ He pushes his face into my hair and nuzzles my neck. ‘I love you, Ali,’ he whispers.
‘Yeah, alright,’ I say.
* * *
I make my adjustments to the car seat again and get into my strange new driving position. Everything looks different today, now that the sky is full of this sharp, changeable light. The little houses on the edge of town look more desolate, the yellow-cast making them less picturesque and more jaundiced. There are gardenias in and amongst the wild flowers at the edge of the road and all of the heavy orange flowers are shivering in the breeze. The sky’s darker over towards the mountains. This might be the moment before the storm: that moment when the world seems tender, everything drawn together, everything flinching at once, before the sky opens.
I find a parking spot in town. I’ve no idea where to get curtains: there aren’t any of the big shops from the city out here. I wander up the main street, peering in windows. There’s an old grocery store that’s selling second-hand mobile phones and games consoles; there are a few vacant properties; there’s a discount frozen-goods store, with water pooling in one aisle and a strong smell of rotting fish drifting out the door. At the top of the street there’s a small dry-cleaners shop. The peeling paint on the window says that they also do alterations, repairs and ‘curtains made’. I step inside. There’s a strong smell of cleaning chemicals, sweet and sickly like marker pens; the air is circulated around the place by a fan, which turns slowly, this way and that, on the counter-top. I don’t want to spend long in here, not without my face-mask. I try to breathe as little as possible. There’s no air-con and the two heavily made-up women who sit at sewing machines behind the counter look like they’re in a chemical stupor. They’re both older than me, one in her late fifties, maybe, hair scooped back in a net, fat red lips, her orange face interrupted with tiny blisters of sweat. The other looks older; she’s thick around the middle, with a short, blonde helmet of curls. She stares at me, and at my belly, then gets up with evident reluctance.
‘Yeah?’ she says. ‘What can I do you for?’ She leans on the counter. Her skin is dark brown, over-tanned, and on her shoulders the sun-spots are seared together. Some of them are speckled with black.
‘I’d like to get some curtains made up,’ I say.
‘Yeah?’ she says. ‘What fabric?’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I don’t have any fabric. Can I buy fabric here?’
‘Nope,’ the woman says. ‘We can’t make you curtains without any fabric. We’re not magicians.’
‘Stop busting her balls!’ the other woman shouts from the back. She gets up from behind her machine and comes to the front, barging the older woman out of the way.
‘You can see she’s in some trouble,’ the orange woman says. ‘You’re carrying nice and high. How far along are you, darl?’
‘Um, thirty-six weeks,’ I say. ‘Almost thirty-seven.’
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Little one’s almost here.’ Little one? My stomach twists. I start to gag on the chemicals.
‘And you’ve just moved out here? To this backwater? Christ, what was you thinking?’
‘I’m just trying to get some curtains,’ I say. ‘Can’t sleep for the light.’
‘Yeah, she looks tired, don’t she, Jules?’
Jules has returned to the back of the shop. She grunts and then leans down to fiddle with the peddle of her machine.
‘Well, we can’t do much without fabric. The old haberdashery shut down last year. You might have some luck with the bric-a-brac store down the end of the street. You know the one? Right at the bottom? No telling exactly what they’ll have, but they sometimes get a load of cotton in. So long as you’re not fussy about the pattern.’
‘I’m not fussy,’ I say.
‘Good girl,’ she says. ‘You come back with some fabric and we’ll fix you up a treat.’
A bell rings as I leave the shop and both machines whir back into life.
‘They’re thick as shit, coming out here,’ I hear Jules say, just as the door swings closed, ‘Last thing we need is bloody wogs from the city.’
* * *
I go back to the bottom of the street, to the store I think the woman described. It’s the old fish market, now stocked-up with piles of miscellaneous merchandise: a wall full of tinned spam, a pile of netted bags with flimsy-looking, miniature tennis rackets inside, t-shirts in day-glo colours with fake plastic logos. I can’t see anyone else in the store and I’m about to giv
e up when I spot a high shelf with some long rolls of fabric. I reach up, and there’s a sharp tearing sensation through the skin of my stomach. I lean over and pant for a while, wrapping my stomach in my arms. I look back up at the fabric. None of it looks right anyway. There’s a fluffy fake-fur in bright orange. A violet gauze with a gold pattern running through it. And a thick blue cotton, with white, embossed flowers. I can practically smell the toxicity from here. God knows what it’s printed with; the whole shop stinks like new trainers, plastic and poisonous.
When I leave the shop, I can’t stop myself. I’m so close by that I have to check on the doctors’ surgery, just to see if the queues are still as bad, just to see if there’s an obvious pattern to the symptoms down here. I turn the corner and the street is quiet. The sky is darker overhead now, and something shifts in the breeze: a paper bag cartwheeling in the gutter. There’s no queue at all. In fact there’s no one on the street at all. I walk right up to the surgery door. All of the handwritten signs have been removed; just the drawing pins have been left behind, little tears of paper tacked under the brass circles. Perhaps the rush of symptoms is over? Perhaps there’ll be a midwife who’s able to see me now? I turn the door handle, carefully, just wanting to peek inside. It doesn’t budge.
‘They’ve gone.’ The voice is far off. I turn around and I can’t see anyone on the street. ‘They’ve relocated,’ the voice calls again, ‘to the camp. Over in the next territory.’ It takes me a while to spot him. Everything on the street seems to be sliding, the shadows lengthening quickly as the sky moves in ripples of light. He’s sitting on the pavement, a few yards away from me, under the awning of an empty shop. It’s the man without shoes. The blackfella with the ambiguous toes. I step closer to him.
‘Gone?’ I say. ‘What do you mean gone?’ I take another step closer. I want to get close enough to see his feet.
‘Not enough of ’em left,’ he says. ‘To deal with all the sick.’
I’m close to him now. He shifts suddenly, folding his feet away underneath him.
‘What do you mean? Sick with what? Sick with cutis? Are you ok?’ I ask. ‘Are your feet ok? Were you trying to get treated?’
‘I don’t need your help,’ he says. ‘Pfff.’ He looks up at me. He makes his eyes small and he studies my face, and then my stomach. He laughs. ‘You’re the one that needs help, little melon.’
* * *
I’ve almost got my key in the car-door when the first fat, warm drops of rain begin to fall. They spatter on the ground, like little bleeds across the dusty tarmac. I don’t rush at first. I just stand there, letting the wetness soak into the back of my t-shirt. It’s good to feel it, something cool against my skin. The rain is getting heavier, so I let myself into the driver’s seat and fall back behind the wheel. By the time I get to the edge of town it’s falling so hard that it’s difficult to see the road. The rain is bouncing off the street and there are foamy rivers beginning to gush at the edges of the pavement. I drive extra slowly. Every so often something appears through the deluge: a pair of girls, rushing across the road, clutching a disintegrating newspaper over their heads; a woman pushing a sodden baby in a pram, its big mouth hinging into a red squall. When I turn onto our road I’m driving so slowly that I’m barely moving. I can just about make out the outline of the old man’s house, old Prendergast, as I crawl alongside it, and a fork of lightning momentarily illumines the scene: the sky is violet, a dense, sickly hue; the house beneath it is being lashed, the white wood re-cast in dark grey, the roof and verandah running with grey water. The long grass is completely flattened in places and I see that mangy old cat, bent low, frozen; and then there’s the thunder clap and everything fades back into milky obscurity.
In the dash from the car to the front-door, I get completely soaked. Even my shoes are filled with water. Pete comes through from the kitchen to see me shaking-off; he laughs out-loud, then coos.
‘Poor bub,’ he says. ‘Bad timing.’
‘We’re not getting curtains,’ I say.
‘That right?’ he says.
‘I’ve heard that natural light is better for your sleep-patterns, anyhow. Something to do with the circadian rhythm.’
‘Whatever you say, babe.’
‘I’m going to get cleaned up,’ I say.
Upstairs I peel my wet clothes off, hanging them out in the bathroom to dry. My legs and feet are all gritty, so I step into the shower. Who knows what’s in the rainwater: aluminium, barium, magnesium, at the very least. I scrub at my skin with a brush. I pick up the protected shower oil and squeeze a large amount into my hands, so that it runs through my fingers. I rub it all over my skin, as far down my legs as I can reach. And then I massage it over my stomach. I feel something hard at the bottom right-hand side, just below the surface, a small elbow, perhaps, or the front of a tiny skull. I try, I really do try to think of a baby inside me, a little one. It’s so implausible: instead, I picture fossils, the strange, curved bones of ancient reptiles, patterned inside soft mudstone. I stay in the shower until I’ve drained the hot-water tank and the water runs cold.
When I get downstairs, Pete’s opened a beer and is pacing up and down in front of the open window.
‘Come look,’ he says. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘’Suppose you’ve finished work for the day, then?’ I say.
‘I reckon.’
It’s still raining outside, a soft gauze over the garden, but the centre of the storm has moved off. We watch lightning flash over the mountains, and then – one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three – the clap of thunder. When the sky lights up the mountains look especially blue: an unreal, smoky cobalt under the greenish-purple storm-sky.
Pete is excited. ‘I haven’t seen a storm like this in yonks,’ he says. ‘Do you remember, Ali, that night when we were kids when we stole out and took the monorail around the city, and the heavens opened and you thought we were going to be electrocuted?’ Pete laughs and puts his arm around me. I remember the night he’s talking about. We must have been about sixteen. Pete had nicked a bottle of red wine from his dad, and we ran down the street and jumped on the train together, no clear idea of where we would go. As the train rose up on the overhead track we could see the sky, dark as ink, on the other side of the city. We got closer and closer, the train and the sky moving inexorably towards one another, and then the storm broke above us, shuddering down rain, convulsing with green light. The lightning flashed up bits of the city I’d never seen before: the massive factories and refineries to the north, the surrounding scrubland, a ragged family of red foxes cowering in a swathe of bottle-brush. We didn’t get off the train. Pete opened the bottle of wine with his Swiss Army knife and we glugged it back until our lips and teeth were black. It was driverless, the monorail, on a loop around the same corner of the city. We sat right at the front, as though it was a roller-coaster, and I squealed, grabbing Pete every time the thunder rolled. At each stop, bedraggled folk got on, wiping their faces and shaking-off their umbrellas. And when it was their stop they hunched against the storm, dashing out and running for cover.
I used to like being a little bit frightened with Pete, I guess. It was part of my and Pete’s friendship. He’d introduce me to things that were beyond my ken; I had no extended family, no older siblings or cousins, to open up the world for me. I’d always protest about where he was taking me, but I loved the places in the city that he knew about, and the things we used to do together. Pete had brothers and cousins and an endless supply of secret, terrifying locations that they’d introduced him to. The abandoned sugar refinery at the edge of town, where he’d go to play guitar and smoke dope. The underground car-park in the centre of the city that turned into a sleazy party zone at night. The old abattoir, its yard a mess of broken glass and weeds, in the ruins of which we’d build fires, the boys daring one another to break in, to run through the metal hooks and reappear from the other end of the building. We’d all scream outside like stuck pigs whenever anyone took the challe
nge, whinnying and snorting, acting out being slaughtered. I guess we all liked playing at being frightened, back then, trying out fear like an exotic accent. And after the fear had passed, we’d bunch together again, jittery but safe.
Pete and me, we messed around when we were kids, all adrenaline and furious pashing. Things didn’t get serious until later on. It was the year after college. I’d just started in the Department of Housing and had moved back in with Mum for a few months, to save for a deposit so that I could rent a room in the city. I hated being home: Mum’s cooking, her TV habits, the way she had things laid out in the bathroom, everything about her annoyed me at close quarters. Her generosity (‘I can do that for you; let me…’), her gentle enquiries about where I’d be on a given evening, her sweet voice-messages on my work line about the garden, all of it I hated. One night I was sitting out back, in an ungrateful sulk, drinking wine, and I saw a man laughing in the lit-up flat next door, drinking beer with a beautiful girl. What’s that man doing in Eleni and John’s flat, I wondered? And before I could answer the question he turned to look out of the window, saw me, paused. It was Pete. He didn’t smile, exactly; it was something more guarded. He acknowledged me, looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to acknowledge him. And then he came out back. The girl in the kitchen turned and stared at the open door.
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘It’s been an age.’ He looked different. He held himself differently; he’d grown up, late in the day, his pudgy face toughening, his body broadening. He was handsome and proud of himself. ‘What you doing back?’ he asked.
‘Staying with my mum for a bit,’ I said. It was strange seeing him again. I was pleased to see him, sure I was, yet I felt a little shiver of hostility towards him too, and I realised that even though we were friends, even though we’d been more than friends, I’d always envied him. That was it. I felt a little stab of envy, because, even though they slept two to a bed next-door and fought over food, he had always had his siblings and his family full of cousins and uncles and aunties, and a mother and a father who adored him. I was envious of his chubby cheeks, and the way he knew how to receive love from my mother and everyone else around him: greedily, without guilt. And now, I was envious of the way he was at home again, looking so easy in his parents’ kitchen as someone new adored him. There would always be someone staring at a doorway Pete had just walked through, hoping he’d return. The woman in the kitchen looked out as us still.
