Fairway to Heaven

by Lily Malone

  ‘Oh.’

  I’m sure she thinks I’m completely bonkers.

  ‘I asked the practice manager and she said we can slot you in for an appointment with Doctor Garner at three-thirty this afternoon.’

  Hallelujah. ‘Thank you. That’s brilliant. I’ll be there.’

  ***

  I get busy after that.

  I phone Nathan Blain’s secretary to make sure we’re booked to view his Scarborough house tomorrow, the one the vendors have been putting off listing while they’ve been on holiday.

  ‘Still on, Jenn. Eleven o’clock,’ she says, which is good. I don’t want to be in Perth for the next two days and miss it. If I’m going to juggle city writing with my ideas for country living, the logistics have to fall in line.

  I send Amber a text, saying I’ll drop Sebby at Jack’s at half-past ten tomorrow, and would she please let Jack know.

  I run about three loads of washing through the machine and peg them to dry. There are Emmy’s and Brayden’s sheets, and Seb’s, plus my own.

  The beach house needs a vacuum, plus the toilet and bathroom need a scrub. There are beds to remake, laundry to fold, bins to put on the street; a toddler to keep fed, watered, dry, and entertained.

  I roll up the portacot, pack a bag for Seb and myself, pack lunch for the trip to Perth, then stand for a moment in the whirl of detergent, bleach and washing powder, just looking round, trying to think what I’ve forgotten.

  Laptop. Laptop charger. Phone. Phone charger.

  Nappy bag.

  Oh, and my child.

  Some of the washing isn’t dry. It’ll have to stay on the line till we get back. I’m out of time.

  I buckle Seb — each fist wrapped around a half triangle of cheese and vegemite sandwich — in the car on the stroke of twelve, and we’re off.

  The beach house looks lonely without us.

  ***

  This time, I take the South West Highway, the inland route that goes through dairy country: Brunswick and Harvey, Waroona, Pinjarra. By three, I’m through the outskirts of Byford and Armadale, and the speedometer is stuck on the standard city sixty.

  Seb fell asleep outside Bunbury and woke up when we hit Perth. I think it was the change in traffic rhythm — lights to stop for instead of the open road.

  I lived in Vic Park when I studied media at uni. All through my university years and my pregnancy, I’ve stayed with these doctors even though Jack and I lived on the other side of Perth.

  The medical centre is in a red-brick building that used to be an old sprawling house. It sits one street back from Albany Highway alongside other sprawling houses that now raise accountants, dentists, and all kinds of therapists, instead of families, chickens, and a dog or two.

  Shirley, the practice manager, greets me by name and the receptionist looks at me from head to toe with a kind of ah, she’s the one, expression.

  Luckily, Seb is cute enough to make her smile.

  She asks for my Medicare card, checks it against the system, and asks if my permanent residence is still 30 O’Brien Street, Nedlands. I hesitate for the teensiest quarter of a second and decide it’s easier to lie. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please take a seat.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I carry Seb to the corner where the least amount of patients sit. It’s no coincidence that this happens to be the corner where the kids’ toy box is. I let him play with dinosaurs and blocks and scraggly-paged books while I flip through the most recent old magazines and try not to dwell on how many coughing, spluttering kids have picked up and chewed those very same toys.

  ‘Jennifer?’ Dr Cara Garner says, peering out into the waiting room and smiling when she sees me.

  I pick up my son, toss the magazine to the table, and follow Dr Garner into a hallway of worn floral carpet and cream-coloured paint, and then through the door she holds open for me.

  Cara is in her late thirties or early forties. She’s pregnant with what will be her third child — already has two boys — and when I ask her, tells me she knows the third is a boy too.

  ‘How can I help you, Jenn?’ she says, adjusting her baby bump as she sits.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘The last few times I’ve seen you, Cara, I mentioned I was having trouble having sex?’

  She nods, reviewing my notes on her computer screen. ‘You had a positive result for candida in September and we treated that. There’s a note from Joanne in November. You saw her last time. She thought it might be a urinary tract infection. She gave you antibiotics. I can’t see if she re-tested you after the course of antibiotics, so did they work?’

  I shrug. ‘I think so, I don’t know. We weren’t even sure I actually had a urinary infection. The last time I tried to have sex was New Year’s Eve. We couldn’t do the deed. It hurt too much.’

  ‘When you say hurt, what do you mean? Stinging? Burning?’

  ‘It’s like being a virgin all over again, but worse. It’s like I’m too small, and too tight, and there’s no flex in the skin and I’m going to split in half. It just feels wrong. It’s hard to describe. Even being touched isn’t particularly comfortable. Sometimes I used to think Jack had a torn nail or something, because it felt like I was being scratched.’

  Cara keeps her face appropriately doctorly — concerned and blank. ‘Well first thing we need to do is take a look at you.’

  I knew this would happen. I’ve been steeling myself against it on the drive up here. I can tell myself till I’m blue in the face that doctors see vaginas like mine (or maybe not exactly like mine) every single day of every single freaking year, but it doesn’t stop my stomach from sinking like a lead balloon.

  At least I wore a dress for the drive, which means I don’t have to shimmy out of my jeans. While I drop my knickers, sit on the examination table and pull the skirt up my tummy, Cara grabs a shaggy toy lion. She presses a button and hands him to Seb, and the lion sings Don’t Worry, Be Happy while Seb holds it by the tail, and swings it like a hammer at the floor.

  Cara puts on her surgical gloves.

  ‘I also found out Jack, my partner, was having an affair.’ My voice breaks a little and a couple of tears spill as I lay on the stiff table underneath a scratchy white cotton sheet. ‘It’s been going on a while and he said he didn’t use a condom, and now I’m worried he’s given me something that’s contributing to all this… this shit.’ Because I can’t think of any other word that properly sums it up.

  Cara pats my leg. ‘We’ll check everything out, Jenn. Now bring your knees up, and let them fall apart. I know it’s not much fun. Relax if you can. That’s the way.’

  ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ the lion sings.

  My right knee presses the hard bump of Cara’s pregnancy.

  Her gloved fingers pull at me gently. She adjusts a bright lamp on its moving hinge to get a better view, and makes a kind of sympathetic clucking sound.

  ‘It looks like you’ve had a cheese-grater down here, Jenn. You poor thing.’

  ‘I thought I might be imagining it.’

  ‘You’re not imagining anything. This looks really sore.’

  Her sympathy makes another tear float the length of my cheek, wetting my hair. It’s almost a tear of relief.

  The toy lion starts the whistling part of his overly damn cheerful song. I want to throw it out the window, but it keeps Seb entertained.

  Cara pulls and prods a bit more, then says she’s going to take a few swabs. ‘I’ll do a pap smear too even though it’s a couple of months before you’re due, but at least it gets it out of the way.’

  The device she inserts to take the smear isn’t exactly comfortable, but she’s gentle, and compared with other stiff objects I’ve had in the vicinity over the last year, it’s nothing.

  When she finishes with the smear test, she does an internal examination, too.

  ‘Okay, Jenn. You can hop up. There are some tissues if you need them.’

  She closes the curtain around the table to
give me some privacy and pulls at her gloves, which suction from her fingers with a smack.

  I wipe the lubricant off as best I can, put the scrunched tissues in the same bin as Cara dropped her gloves, then pull my knickers up my legs.

  Once I’m dressed, I feel better.

  When I sit, Cara is already in front of her computer, typing. Seb drops the lion — it’s finally silent — and clambers into my lap.

  ‘I’m worried about that skin. Healthy skin is pink, but yours is almost white. Dr Stanlake noted whitening in her notes when you saw her last, but I think it’s got worse. It’s time to refer you to a gynaecologist.’

  Hooray. Yet someone else gets to peer at my fanny. ‘I’ve been using olive oil. I think that’s helped. Sometimes I try a paw-paw gel.’

  ‘They’re relief options, Jenn, they’re not treatments. Dr Stanlake might have been trying to ward off a switch to the more aggressive treatments to see how you responded,’ she says. ‘You should have come back earlier when you still had the pain, not ignored it.’

  I don’t miss the reproach, but when you aren’t having much sex it’s hard to gauge whether things have improved or not. And let’s face it, my enthusiasm for getting my knickers off at a doctor’s is never particularly high.

  Her printer spits out a referral letter which she hands to me. It’s to a Dr Charmaine Whethers, and she has more letters and titles after her name than the Queen.

  ‘Call for an appointment as soon as you can. In the meantime, I want you to use this cream twice a day. It’s a low potency steroid. You don’t need a prescription for it.’ She writes a brand name on a piece of paper and hands it to me. ‘I think you’ll find Dr Whethers will prescribe high-potency topical corticosteroids, but I don’t want to prescribe anything stronger until you’ve seen her.’

  Topical corticowhata? I’ll Google it.

  Another form spurts from her printer.

  ‘This is for a blood test to check for HIV. You can have the test done at pathology here and I should get the results in a few days. I should get those swab tests back too. Okay? Then we’ll know if we’re dealing with anything else.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She thinks about it for a second then writes something else on the pathology form. ‘We’ll do a urine test too.’

  Great. Now I get to piddle in a plastic cup.

  We both stand.

  ‘Does someone want a sticker for being such a good boy?’ she says half to me, half with the big wide eyes and clownish smile adults save for little kids.

  I play along. ‘A sticker? Yes please.’

  Seb holds out his arm — we’ve been to enough nurses and doctors for him to know what sticker means — and Cara smooths the sticker flat. It’s a cartoon of a smiling steam train with two plasters crossed on his chimney.

  ‘I wish I was as easy to fix,’ I say.

  Cara pats my arm. I’m sure it’s not hard to see how close I am to breaking point. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of it for you, Jenn. Don’t worry.’

  ***

  It’s after half-past four by the time I’ve had the blood test and paid the bill, which means the city traffic as I leave the medical centre is getting thick as salt on a peanut.

  Vic Park to Cottesloe is a half-hour drive on a good day. It’s not a good day now. An accident has cut traffic to one lane on Stirling Highway. Seb could walk faster.

  Concentrating on my driving takes my mind off the doctor’s visit, and Seb is in a chatty, happy mood. If he’d been screaming, this last part of the trip would have been hell on wheels.

  It’s almost six by the time I pull into Emmy’s place. Her Mazda is in the driveway and she comes out as I’m unpacking Seb from the car, and takes him from me while I get our bags.

  When I walk in her front door I’m hit with the smell of bolognaise sauce simmering on the stove, Emmy’s special sauce, heavy on the basil and oregano.

  ‘Bless you, Em, for cooking.’

  She reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Seb while I unpack the things I need for the night.

  After dinner and Seb’s bath and his milk, I put him in the portacot in Emmy’s spare room, pat his back for a while and leave him to fall asleep on his own.

  In the kitchen, Emmy’s packing the dishwasher. There’s a bottle of red wine on the counter and two glasses, both half-filled. I can smell the wine halfway across the room.

  Picking up a glass, I inhale the rich scent.

  Emmy shuffles crockery into the dishwasher with increasing force. ‘Two damn cups to go and do you think they’ll fit?’

  ‘Why is it you’ll spend five minutes rearranging a dishwasher instead of twenty seconds to wash two cups?’ I ask.

  ‘Because I refuse to be defeated by my cutlery.’ She bangs the top tray closed, opens the bottom tray and finds a space for the two mugs under the stainless steel colander she used to drain the pasta. ‘Voila.’

  Emmy pulls a bar stool around to her side of the counter. I push a wineglass toward her and when she picks it up, we clink glass in a cheers.

  ‘What time are you meeting Nathan tomorrow?’ she asks me.

  ‘Eleven.’ I take a big mouthful. ‘In Scarborough.’

  ‘And is Amber looking after Seb?’

  ‘Yes. At Jack’s place.’

  ‘Will Jack be there?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Emmy shifts on her seat. ‘I guess Amber has a key to get in if he’s not there?’

  ‘I still have my key.’

  The slightest frown creases her brow. ‘I would have thought you’d have pretty much thrown it back at him.’

  ‘I kept it. No real reason, I just didn’t get around to giving it back.’

  ‘But it’s finished, isn’t it? The two of you were fairly intense on Saturday.’

  ‘He was being an arsehole, Em. That’s the only reason things got intense. He and I have been on life support a long time and now we’ve been put out of our misery.’ I take a sip of my wine. ‘Jack never liked me spending time with you. Not much time anyway. He thought you were a bad influence.’

  ‘Me?’ Her eyes widen. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Serious.’ I nod. ‘He thought I drank too much when I was with you, and you led me astray.’

  Emmy glances at the wine bottle. ‘Can’t think where he got that idea from.’

  We both chuckle.

  ‘I kept thinking I could change him — especially once we had Seb. I thought he’d be happy to stay home more, with me, with the baby. I thought it might make him grow up.’

  ‘Leopard, spots, and all that.’

  ‘I know.’

  We’re quiet for a beat, reflecting. Then Emmy says, ‘Did you know Brayden is selling his house?’

  ‘What?’ I sit straighter. ‘He mentioned it, but I thought he was joking.’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon he went to sign the paperwork. He wanted to get it done before he flew out for work.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything to me all weekend.’

  ‘Don’t read too much into it, Jenn. When we got there, you had Jack and Amber in your space. You had a lot on your mind.’ She smiles. ‘Brayden’s bought and sold a fair bit of real estate in the last few years. He probably didn’t give it a thought.’

  ‘Does he need the money to pay for a lawyer, do you think?’

  ‘Maybe.’ That frown returns, popping between her eyebrows. ‘He said it could cost him fifty thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees.’

  My glass clunks on Emmy’s counter. ‘Holy cow. I knew it would be a lot, but fifty thousand dollars?’

  ‘Lawyers sneeze, they charge you for the tissue.’

  We talk about it for a while, not getting far, and then Emmy says there’s a show on TV she wants to watch. We take our glasses and the bottle into the lounge and it helps me forget my problems — mine and Brayden’s — for a while.

  Chapter 23

  ‘I knew you’d like it,’ Nathan Blain says to me next morning, as I slide timber concertina doors and step out on to
the second-storey balcony of the most spectacular house with the most amazing view I’ve ever seen.

  The ocean swirls before me like an open Chinese fan, shades of green, white, and every blue.

  ‘Is that Rottnest Island?’ I point to a misty brown-green smudge, hazy in the distance.

  ‘Sure is,’ Nathan says. ‘Observation City, Trigg, Swanbourne,’ he points as he speaks.

  ‘Forget the house. I bet you priced the view at a million all on its own.’

  ‘You’re not far wrong.’

  The breeze curls around my face.

  Nathan’s vendors, Sid and Julia McKenzie, aren’t here. They’ve flown to Melbourne where they have men’s final seats for the Australian Open Tennis.

  Julia has left me some notes to the questions I emailed her weeks ago, when Nathan first got the listing. They’re all beautifully handwritten on a page of one of those recycled-paper notebooks you buy for twenty dollars in a gift shop.

  Her notes include anecdotes about where she takes her morning cup of tea (the balcony); and her afternoon glass of wine (the balcony); and where hubby studies the Financial Times (the den with the temperature-controlled wine cellar on the ground floor).

  ‘The architect cost fifty or sixty grand alone,’ Nathan says.

  ‘Fifty? Or sixty?’ I try to clarify.

  He shrugs. ‘They weren’t sure.’

  Imagine having so much money that you could be vague about ten grand. ‘Money was no object then?’

  ‘Apparently not.’ He opens his arm to guide me back inside so he can shut the balcony door.

  There’s no doubt it’s gorgeous. No expense has been spared. The bathroom tiles were flown in from Dubai, and two of the upstairs bathroom vanities apparently came from a decommissioned royal yacht. Still, even with all the sunshine pouring in, it leaves me cold. I’d take the wildflowers, the bush, the herb garden, of the Stewart’s property near Dunsborough every time. I’d even take the Culhane’s beach shack. It has soul.

  ‘Seen enough?’ Nathan asks.

  ‘Yes. I’m pretty sure I’ve got it.’

  He punches in the security code to re-arm the doors and points me out of the room with the view.

  ***

  Driving to Nedlands to pick up Seb, I stop at a supermarket. I’m low on some of the essentials, like bananas, and I need lunch for our trip to Busselton. I also want some heavy-duty cardboard boxes to fill with books, toys, clothes, and some of my kitchen things: soup bowls I bought at a pottery shop in Balingup years ago, and my food processor.