This freedom was infrequently discussed with Alex. Maybe it was his English blood to overlook what had not happened. At any rate, he seemed to take it much less to heart than she did. He treated her concerns in the manner of his sheepdog, as things to be herded and corralled. While Merridy fretted, Alex buried himself deeper into his patch of east coast soil, his hopes hinged on rain and an upturn in the wool price. Somehow they never got round to talking about adoption.
But Tildy talked. It irritated Alex, who once glumly observed, “Why does she have to keep two mouths open all the time?”
Now that she had started to discuss Ray, Tildy seemed unable to stop. Each visit or telephone call updated Merridy on Ray’s latest mood, their last fight.
“What is it about us that we want nothing so much as to be married, then, no sooner is the ring on our finger than it pops out through our nose? We’ve been fucked over, Merridy. I never yelled before I had kids. Now listen to me. I’ve become a screamer.” And lifted her head in the direction of the Oyster Bay pine where, in the elliptical shade beneath, two shapes stamped with glee on the oyster shells.
“Zac! Montana!” she brayed. “Here, now!”
The children slouched across the lawn towards them. Yes, Montana was her daughter, but sometimes Tildy felt no greater attachment to the girl than if she spouted through a blowhole. As for Zac, he could ignite in her an anger such as she had never imagined a human being capable of. “Ray says it’s like having a couple of blue-fin permanently on the line. Right until the last day of your life. If you ask me, they’re more aggressive than tuna. They’re like tumours. Or mutating viruses,” and watched Zac, all thread and chicken bone, try to push the crushed oyster shells down Montana’s knickers. But the virus, plainly, was catching. With a fondling look: “He only does that to girls he likes.”
In the next breath, Tildy was fierce in wanting Merridy to be a mother. Then she forgot about how her children diminished her, eager for the day when Merridy likewise would be clutched at by a monster with four outstretched arms and two yelling faces tarred with Vegemite. Or six arms and three faces, since, lo and behold, Tildy was pregnant again.
“Why don’t you get more tests. What’s the problem, Merridy? Why are you so passive? You were never passive before.”
“Tildy, we’re trying,” in a thick voice.
“Well, you’d better go about it in a different way. You could have IVF. I’ve read about this forty-four-year-old woman in Perth—”
“Listen, this is what we’ve been dealt. I have a marriage in which I’m happy; you have two lovely children.”
“You’re not unhappy, then?”
“I’m not unhappy, no, I can honestly say that.”
“So it’s worked out?”
“Yes,” she laughed sadly. “It has worked out.”
But for Tildy, who conceived so easily, it was not understandable. “You could always do it on your own, you know. You don’t need a man.”
“You speak as though it is Alex’s fault. It’s neither of our faults.”
“That is the biggest lorry-load of horse manure I ever heard, girl. You could spread it on your veggie garden for a year.”
“Oh, Tildy,” and wondered if in fact she did not prefer her cousin in the days when she was single.
Merridy knew that she had not covered all the ground. There were better doctors out there, someone who could tell her what to do, what was wrong. We are in the hinterland here, she thought, with not exactly the latest technology, assigned to a form of ignorance.
She booked another test, in Sydney this time, where Alex, through a medical friend of his godmother, now retired to the Blue Mountains, arranged for Merridy to meet a foetal–maternal specialist in King’s Cross. But neither could the doctors on the mainland find anything untoward. Two laparoscopies had revealed her tubes all in place, no past infection, no scarring.
“Sometimes there is no explanation,” relaying to Alex what the specialist had said. And yet it upset her to think that there was no obvious physiological reason. A certain sperm and egg had got together and biology had declared this combination was not to be. What did that say for the relationship? Perhaps it was nature’s way of saying: Not a good pairing. Perhaps as she had recently read somewhere, their DNA was too alike.
“The doctor did suggest IVF,” she said carefully.
Alex gave a groan.
She looked sharply up. “Why not, you do it for cows?”
“You’re not a cow.”
But the initials had been planted.
In the days ahead, Merridy found out all that she could about IVF. Through Dr Musgrove, she made an appointment with the director of the unit at the Royal Hobart and took Alex to meet him and they both underwent tests. The only sticking point was the fee. She would have to pay, but some of the cost could be reclaimed on Medicare.
Alex asked for a fortnight’s grace to raise the amount.
She felt guilty. “Listen, Alex, maybe we can’t afford it.”
“Don’t worry. I can take it out of the farm account.”
“There is my father’s legacy.”
“Absolutely not.”
It was another three weeks before he was able to send off the cheque. Within a few days she began her injections. They were self-administered–two in the morning, one at night, and no alcohol, coffee or tea. It all seemed to need precise timing, and Alex had to swallow vitamin pills.
A month later they drove down to St John’s in Cascade Road for the egg collection. The anaesthetist led Merridy into the operating theatre. She lay back in the stirrup chair in the most humiliating position she could remember and had her eggs removed–which was excruciatingly painful. As the needle passed through the vaginal walls and into the ovaries, Alex was despatched to provide sperm. Less of a novelty this time. A nurse supplied him with a paper bag and a plastic jar with a label on it that had his wife’s name and date of birth. She asked Alex to check to see if the details were correct and showed him where the staff toilet was. He thought, looking around: How am I going to do this? But there were magazines jammed in with the cleaning fluids underneath the sink. Ten minutes later, he popped the sample into the paper bag and wandered along the corridor until he found the nurse.
The pain from the needle was forgotten next morning when the embryologist telephoned to say that of the fifteen eggs collected eight had fertilised. He kept in touch over the next three days, ringing morning and night until the afternoon of the embryo transfer. Alex was allowed with her into the operating theatre. The embryologist brought in a dish containing two embryos and projected them onto a screen. At the sight of the cells splitting and dividing, Merridy looked at Alex and looked away. Then the embryos were put in a large test tube and given to the doctor who injected them into the wall of her womb.
“Take it easy for the next few days,” the doctor said afterwards.
“Is that it?” asked Alex.
“Pretty much, that’s it. We’ll know within a fortnight.”
Another two weeks. More injections. Suppositories. Blood-thinners twice a day and a powerful intramuscular in the evening. Another drive to Hobart. Another blood test. And two mornings later, Alex feeding the dog when he heard Merridy dragging her bare feet into the kitchen. Her hands fretted at the table and her eyes had begun to swell.
“I’ve started my period.”
Alex crushed her, sobbing and drivelling, to his chest. “Oh, my darling.”
So they tried again. Alex scraped the money together and off they went to Hobart.
Afterwards, she would liken the experience to a roller coaster that she had been on with her father and brother when the Royal Show came to Launceston. She could not get off.
The same result.
“It doesn’t matter,” through her phlegm and tears, “I never was much good with children. I don’t think I ever understood them. Not really.” Maybe it was another thing that was not meant to be resolved.
“We’ll try again. Of course,
we’ll try again. You’ll think differently in a month.”
But after the third occasion Alex could see that she was distressed and something in her eye incinerated. When the nurse telephoned to confirm, very gently, what they already knew–“Sorry, you haven’t been lucky this time. It’s a negative result”–Merridy could not face going through it all a fourth time. It was too disappointing. They stopped.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MANIFESTATION OF THEIR barrenness dawned more slowly on Alex. It had taken until now for him to understand how deep ran his desire to put something into the future. Imperceptibly but steadily, the thought had developed that he could replace his parents with a son or a daughter. Now, as his father would have put it, he looked forward to neither chick nor child.
Once he had absorbed it, the prospect of not having children attacked him at unexpected moments with the violence of a kidney blow.
He tried to keep it from her, but she noticed. How he hummed to himself as though nothing was amiss. How he walked fast past the spare bedroom. He was a long corridor of doors shut and locked.
And while he bowed to her moods and was tolerant and protective towards her, she was irked by his refusal to communicate. The deeper he burrowed into himself, the more snappish she became.
“Wouldn’t you prefer someone else?” she said in one sour moment in the wake of a trivial argument.
“Absolutely not,” he spluttered.
“I warned you I wouldn’t make you happy.”
“But you do!” exasperated.
“You could go off. I’d understand. You must feel free.”
“What are you talking about, Merridy?”
“You wanted a child. Lots of children. Mobs of them, as I remember.”
“Only because you did.”
But she noticed that he had not touched his ships for months.
Instead, it was she who went off.
One cloudless Thursday morning, while Alex was repairing a fence at the bottom of Barn Hill, she slipped out of the house wearing a yellow oilskin, walking down the drive, not once looking back until she reached the bus shelter in Wellington Point.
On the bus to Hobart she listened to a garrulous blonde talk of her bad experience with a guru, a French–Peruvian who called himself Pachamama.
“I met him at a night-class in Battery Point. He’d read a few New Age books and saw this as a way of seducing women, so he started a class in which he told us: ‘Your first choice is yourself.’ Certain women need to hear that. It gives them permission to be totally selfish. Me, I’m no exception. That’s why he was so attractive. ‘You should only do things you really want to do. In your heart.’ But it’s just a bunch of shit. Like his claim he could get it up four times a night. He dressed all in white because white was more–spiritually speaking–enlightening, and never wore sunglasses so that people could always see into the window of his soul. And white tennis shorts, winter through summer. I used to see him sunning his gut–ill-fitting dentures and long greasy hair in a tail. Immigration wouldn’t let him in because he’s such an old goat. If you bump into him and he asks to live with you, don’t. He’s only after a permanent visa.”
The girl was an ex-hippy from Byron Bay with dead eyes and scars on her wrists.
Merridy had not told Alex, but she had gone to Hobart for a last meeting with a last consultant. In the private clinic in West Hobart, the doctor went straight to the point: “I don’t think it’s going to work other than by sheer accident. Look, there’s not a thing wrong with either of you, but many people have come here and said: ‘You’re the last port of call; we have a completely clean bill of health, what can we do?’ and I say what I’m going to say to you: ‘Nothing. It’s in God’s hands. It’s in the lap of the gods.’”
It was a very rum fate being in the lap of the gods. But later that morning, Merridy walked through St David’s Park to Salamanca Place. And found herself hunting for a ponytail dressed in white.
The brilliant day drew her down to the sea. She thought: I’ll find somewhere to sit for an hour to watch the bay and then I shall buy myself a dress and go home.
The water rocking against the wharves infected her. She picked her way along the dockside, taking in the fishing trawlers and yachts, until she stood outside a chandler’s shop. Through the window, a boyish-looking man looked up, and she thought for a fleeting second that it was Alex as she had first seen him, coming out of the school yard with his plastic bag of ice-cream sticks, and her heart began to drum and she felt a surge of anxiety and excitement.
She walked in. Smell of pitch and glints of brass and in a back yard a boat being built.
He was locking up. He had his back to her and was sorting through keys.
“Hi,” in her emancipating laugh.
“Good day. How are you doing? How can I be of service?”
“I’m thinking of the sea.”
“The sea? What is it exactly you’re looking for?”
“I don’t know. I was just drawn to the sea.”
He looked around, a stranger in a chandler’s shop, smiling. “Let’s see what we can see.”
The young man was due to go out on a trial run, testing an outboard. “I’ll show you how it works.”
She remembered stepping into the sleek black-hulled boat, putting on the life jacket that he held up, the splutter and take of the engine.
He steered the boat into the Derwent and out of the mouth of the river and into Storm Bay. It had become a blazing hot day. They were halfway to Bruny when he cut the engine. A swell came up and she did not feel terribly good. She stood to take off her life jacket and then her oilskin.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Nothing a swim won’t cure.”
Stripped to her bra and underpants, she went overboard and swam around the boat as he watched. For the first time in her married life she was away from something, anything, that she recognised as her world. She was out in someone else’s world.
He helped her back in and the swell toppled them against one another.
She remembered the beat of her pulse and the sweat that oiled his hair and a sense she had that he may have been here before.
They undressed, she in a daze. He had a mole on his foreskin and a small hairless oasis on his scalp. To which she pressed her cheek as he rammed into her.
Afterwards, she said: “We will never see each other again, will we?”
When she came home she found a letter for her tucked under the bottle with the Otagoin it. In Alex’s educated, neat, upright hand. Without you I am so unhappy, I am. It was the first letter that he had written to Merridy and she had wondered if he had forgotten how to write, his words saved for sheep and cattle and creatures.
RAY’S SOLUTIONS. Why not settle for more? Phone now to be spoiled. Everything I touch turns to SOLD.
They settled back. Each day another drop of wet sand accumulating beneath her cupped hands into a rising tower from which she gazed out with tightening desperation.
Marriage had been a false passport to tranquillity. She was quite miserable. As was Alex. Neither of them had ever believed that they would find a companion in the storm; when they did find each other, they supposed that a child would be a way out of it, and into a region refreshed by what they had suffered. Instead, it was her father’s books that seemed so childish, the little group of six or seven verses which aroused her. In this way, she punished herself.
Silence invaded the house. She was the rustle of the paper, looking for crimes. A tightrope-walker in Zeehan had missed the net. An article on Southend Pier, the longest in the world, reprinted from an English newspaper: The hunger for piers is strictly nostalgic. An advertisement that featured a bland-looking man in a suit, staring out: “Is your memory a sieve?”
She did her best to forget about the chandler and their moment of frenzy on the bottom of his fast black boat.
While on its shelf on the kitchen dresser, the Otagosailed on. A consoling empty bottle with it
s ship and its obsolete coin. Through the curved glass of which she saw a murderer swimming in the sea look up at her.
Meanwhile, Alex was out on the farm somewhere. That was his achievement. He was off on his own; unwinding strands of wool from the fence, left there by rubbed necks; or painting slats of red cedar with Madison oil, or at a clearance sale, bargain-hunting for old farm machinery. Or counting sheep in Cumbrian: yan tan tethera methera funf aerter slaerter lowra dowra dick yandick tandick…
Like this, he subdued himself further into his land. He had his fields to sow that made it easier to accept his uselessness. He had his barley and his herd of cows. The grazing grass that brushed his legs into hives. The green-painted windmill that had taken on the shape of a mystery whose meaning stayed withheld. But now and again in the shape of a lost animal he caught a glimpse of the mob of children that he had not had, and it slayed him.
About Merridy, he felt a spent resignation. Where had she gone, the forthright girl? He thought of Samuel Johnson on marriage, meaningless to him until now: “The dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint and too numerous for removal.” Small acts of will kept him on her side and his love alive. But they were in a new stretch of life and the stubble began to show in their relationship. Their eyes tangled and looked away. Their lips rusted together. Before, they had conversations; now they had arguments. “Dumb stuff, as it usually is,” she confided to Tildy. Some comment made the wrong way that boiled up. Some cold exchange, its words worn so thin with repetition as to be transparent.
“Don’t put that there,” she fluctuated, angry, concerned: under it all, bored. Her husband was a good man. She knew well enough his gentle innocence, but his vision was unpolluted by their sterility; what it was doing to her. She felt her boredom dragging at the corner of her mouth. At the sight of an unwashed plate, she wanted to scream.
Alex, for his part, responded by not touching her, perhaps because he had touched her too much; he scratched his nose and looked at the saucepan heating their minestrone and moved his mug of tea off the neat, clean tablecloth and onto the bare blackwood. And thought of the letters that he kept receiving from the ANZ in Hobart, to advise him that interest rates had risen to 18 per cent, 19 per cent, 20 per cent…
Secrets of the Sea Page 18
