The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  but no.

  This first.

  He rifles through the under-sink drawers until he finds what he’s looking for, drops his pants and his boxer briefs and sits on the toilet, lid closed, to look.

  The mirror is plastic, mottled, and brown, a cheap fake-tortoiseshell thing Elise bought at some stage, or stole from her aunt.

  He tries to manoeuvre it into place, to see these unmapped regions of his skin, his own fucking skin, but he struggles, has to pull his pants and boxer briefs off completely so that he is black-socked and bare-legged, knees up on the toilet, pushing aside his cold shrunk dick, ice nugget balls, to see a spot between his legs and his buttocks. A spot the size of his thumbnail with inflamed edges and a thick, black centre, bubbled up like lava, asymmetric, irregular. As horrifying as he’d imagined it, when she told him, when he felt it.

  Worse. Worse than that.

  Because now Hannah Wallace had seen the ugliest of him, this thing, and would never see him the same. Her mouth, her skin, she’d moved like water around his body, exploring it, filling it, knowing so much in so little time.

  Too much.

  He sets the mirror on the sink and the fucking seat is too cold whenever he moves, so he puts on his boxer briefs and pants and sits back down on it. The cold of Brisbane winters, he’s never prepared, doesn’t wear the right clothes or shoes, doesn’t have the right body for this place. Cold through the gaps in the floor, like mist into his bones, into a place he can’t fathom.

  He is displaced, out of home, even though he’s in it.

  Elise will be back soon, but what could he possibly say? That he’d tried to erase her, reinvent himself, be every after-school special he ever saw as a kid? A nerd bulked up over summer into something desirable. Desired.

  Valuable.

  How can he ask her to be there for this?

  Because he’s worried, humiliated at his repulsive body but worried, too, the worry so deep and aching in his groin it can only be—he sees now—cancer.

  He leaves the bathroom and, compelled to see light, he opens the curtains in the living room and turns on the little radiant heater to snip the chill. He sits on the couch with his laptop.

  How bad is melanoma?

  His fingers click, too loud, on the keys. It is the only sound in the house.

  Curable, fatal, spread, he reads.

  He opens a link called Survival Rates for Melanoma Skin Cancer, by Stage, though he doesn’t need to. He grew up with enough cancer around him to know that most people live and some people die and the numbers mean nothing. Caring means nothing. Promises, nothing.

  Yet, each number pricks him like a needle: ninety-five percent, eighty-six percent, sixty-seven percent, fifty-seven percent, forty percent, twenty-three percent, ten percent.

  And there is no knowing the stage, the prognosis, any of it, only that there is a chance he will die.

  He was always going to die.

  Just not this soon.

  He leans back against the grey cushions, feeling everything: the lumpy mole between his legs, the heaviness in his gut, the tightness of his throatneckchest, the ache in his feet, the cold, the cold, the cold, all of it surely a sign he will die, is already dying. Has lost everything before he ever had it,

  TessWilliamEliseHannah.

  Berlin. His mother.

  One way or another they’ve scooped out his life,

  until all that’s left is ghost.

  For an hour or so, he wanders the house, picking up photos and books, postcards, and turning them over and over in his hands. They mean everything and nothing, they are signs of a time long gone, irretrievable. Historical fiction. He resists their pull, sees them, at last, for what they are: paper and glass and steel and cloth, elemental, and it occurs to him that he is, too, made up of particles. Will become particles when he dies.

  The house is a museum to their life together, a collection of objects and—without the pulse of heart through it—the bedroom and spare room and kitchen and living room and patio seem two dimensional. I might label them, he thinks, one by one describe what they are and where they came from, and he imagines her surprise at coming home and finding their house, her house, transformed in that way, made two dimensional as he is, or soon will be.

  But he doesn’t write the labels or captions. What would he say on them? Instead he should tear out pages from a favourite book, and tape them across the walls, the shelves, the cabinetry. Significant pages, other men’s words, affix them loosely so they might flap as she opens the door, like feathers or hairs or leaves, something to remind her of dead things. Lost things.

  He will not do this to her.

  Will not make it harder for her.

  They have shared (now) the knowing, not-knowing,

  knowing.

  How could it be anything but cancer?

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ she had said, so long ago now, in the moment that changed everything. ‘I can’t feel him moving.’

  By the time he calls, he’s surprised he can get an appointment with his regular GP, a petite Fijian woman with cool hands who, he realises, has swabbed and pressed and injected Elise on many occasions but never really examined his body. Has never needed to.

  The only one waiting, Dan sits on the cream and teal lounge while the receptionist heats her lunch in the microwave and eats it behind the desk. Though he is grateful for the silence, it gives him too much space to think into. The thick smell of ground beef and tomato turns his stomach, and whatever else inside him.

  If Elise didn’t make him go to these places, for blood tests and fluoride treatments and flu jabs, he wouldn’t. A carryover from his growing-up days, when he’d still believed in Santa and in his own mother, and he didn’t need a shrink to tell him how she’d fucked him up. It wasn’t with kale or lemon or alkaline water. It was deeper, a persistent doubt in reality, in the capabilities of his own mind and body.

  He was only certain of one thing: his mother didn’t do this to him, whatever this turned out to be. If he had cancer, it was his own damn fault.

  Dr Singh calls him in, and he sits politely, schoolboyishly, in the plastic chair beside her desk. The blood pressure cuff seems to inch its way towards his arm.

  ‘How are you going, Dan?’ the doctor asks him.

  ‘How is Elise?

  ‘Would you like to talk to someone about the baby?’

  She is a kind woman, but efficient, and as she asks she is looking through his file on her computer. He hopes she won’t ask for a blood test, but then realises how stupid that is, given the circumstances.

  But he can’t show her.

  What if she asks how he found it?

  She barely knows him at all, and even that’s too much.

  He nods. ‘Yes,’ he lies. ‘That’s why I’m here. Can you recommend someone?’

  And so he takes the referral in the envelope and signs the form at the front and sits in the car outside the clinic watching women and men push their shopping trolleys up and down the ramp.

  Though he contemplates all the places he might go, in the end, he heads home. Elise is sitting on the patio with a soda water reading a thick hardcover that, at first, he assumes to be her work—an atlas of veterinary medicine or a text of human reproduction. But when he gets closer he sees that it’s one of his art books, heavy in the early work of Berlin Warne,

  and Hannah Wallace.

  ‘Where were you?’ she asks.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Hey, how was the retrospective? Did it go all right?’

  Dan flops into one of the deckchairs, wood faded grey from too much sun. He needs to re-stain them before summer. From where he sits, he can see the vulva on the page in Elise’s lap, and the juxtaposition of not-wife on wife shoots him through with guilt.

  ‘He’s a complete narcissist,’ he says, trying not to look. But he realises he hasn’t spoken of his conversation yet, with anyone, and he needs to. ‘Basically, he decided to meet me in the swimming pool, where he rante
d about my mother, and then ignored me at the launch.’

  ‘The swimming pool?’

  Dan nods. ‘It was weird. But the way he talked about my mother, that really surprised me. Like he hated her.’ He swallows the c-word.

  ‘I thought he hardly had time for her.’

  ‘Having met him, I wouldn’t doubt it,’ he says. Then, ‘So why are you home? Isn’t it the breeding season?’

  ‘Almost.’ She runs her forefinger over the image on the page distractedly. But her shoulders are tense, and he’s not sure she’s really distracted. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘That?’ The image is too familiar, he can hardly stand it. ‘It was there, I guess. There were others, newer ones, too. Kind of a capsule of his whole life.’

  ‘Lived in other people’s bodies.’

  ‘Mostly hers,’ he says, then wishes he hadn’t. Hannah Wallace is the last thing he wants to talk about. ‘Did everything go okay up north?’

  ‘I needed time,’ she says. ‘And some distance, and some hard work, maybe. I’ll never be that same person again, from before.’ She seems to want to say more, but doesn’t.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you out there today,’ he says. ‘But then I wasn’t surprised, either. Somehow. Even though you were still away, it felt important that we were both there.’

  She closes the book. Her skin is luminous in the evening light.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asks. ‘Should we make dinner?’

  ‘Just give me a minute,’ he says, and holds out his hand for the book. ‘I need to put some things away.’

  Though he hasn’t been into his office since Tasmania, the door is ajar, and his stomach twists. But there’s nothing to hide in the room itself, nothing to say what he’s done, what he might do.

  That’s all in him. Or on him.

  Dan pulls the leather chair aside and stands against his desk and pulls each photo off the wall behind it. He drops them into the bottom drawer, where they sit on top of Berlin’s cassettes. And then, when he moves the heavy stack of art books off the desk and onto the floor, he sees it.

  At the corner of his desk: the cairn. He’d forgotten it was there. Stones and shells and bones and feathers and seeds collected by Elise for him, little things found and compiled over so many years.

  They fit.

  They look as if they might all be part of the same scene, the same bit of forest floor or beach or tumbledown cottage, though they come from all over the world, places he and Elise went together, and places where she was alone and thought of him.

  Beside the cairn is a sparrow.

  chapter 21

  Elise is late to the staff meeting, and the lecture theatre is a small one, and old, with vintage wooden benches carved with decades of names. There are no seats at the back where she enters, so she walks quickly down the red-carpeted steps, wills everyone not to see her. Her too-tight white shirt, the empty

  (should be empty)

  curve of her belly.

  Meredith Percy stands like a crane at the lectern, discussing equity. The room smells of too many bodies in too confined a space, and the easiest place to slouch out of view is in the front, under the sharp nose of Percy, and next to Vair.

  ‘We are the top department in our faculty,’ Percy is saying, ‘because we are progressive. Because we push ourselves. We are the most cited researchers in the university, we pull in the most money. We are diverse and inclusive, and it shows.’

  Elise feels eyes, mostly male, on the back of her neck.

  Next to her, Vair mutters something Elise can’t quite hear.

  ‘But too many of you are using your grant money to buy open-access rights to your papers,’ says Percy, ‘and it’s a waste.’

  Vair leans across and whispers to Elise. ‘Can we grab a coffee after this?’

  Elise nods, almost laughs, but chokes back the sound. She’s so close to the edge. How little connection between her mind and body, how distant from what she ever was.

  She and Dan did yoga for a while back in California, sweat catching in the corners of their eyes, skin slick and muscles rubbery.

  Breathe deep, they said.

  Start again.

  The standing series primes the body for the floor, the upright work is necessary before the kneel, lie, curl, bend, they said.

  And she’d stood and leaned, did everything they told her to.

  More than once, someone had cried out during camel pose—chest pushed forward, back curved—as though they had cracked open their sternum. They lay down and sobbed and sobbed and the lithe instructor, a former opera singer, came and patted them gently and said good, this is important, and there is so much in there, as though yoga were a form of medication that could snap the hand right off a chest, split a person open.

  Slip a living, breathing baby into her arms.

  She and Vair sit at a large mango-wood table, the kind Elise has always dreamed of having in her house but has no space for. Today, the music is excruciating, a playlist from the fifties, sixties, simple, repetitive shit with boyfriends back and honey honey, and it’s too much like glee club, jazz hands and teased-up hair. Four years of high school working to lose her accent, blend in. Always defer to the soprano.

  But the coffee is great, and that’s why they come here.

  ‘So, what happened?’ asks Vair. ‘You’re so quiet. Caro told me you had a fall. Are you okay?’

  Elise is careful to keep her face blank. ‘I fell,’ she says. ‘I’m fine. I got some samples. I thought I might send up a student to get the rest. There’s so much to do around here.’

  Less, she thinks, than she’d expected.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ says Vair. ‘No one could tell me anything.’ Her phone buzzes loudly in her bag, but she ignores it. ‘Hey, I think I might have someone for you, to help out with stuff in the lab.’

  ‘I don’t need any help.’

  ‘Just hear me out, please? Let me introduce you. He’s up from Canberra at the moment, and I really like him, he’s very clever, but I just can’t take on another student at the moment.’

  ‘A student?’

  ‘It’s perfect, because this’ll help you push out some stuff this year, even with William.’ She blushes. ‘Fuck. That came out wrong.’

  Elise feels that strange laugh-cry bubble up inside her again, but will not let it out.

  ‘I don’t want a student, Vair.’

  ‘Well I haven’t promised him or anything,’ she says. Her phone buzzes again. This time, she pulls it out and looks at it. ‘Elise, I’m sorry, he’s here.’

  ‘He’s here?’

  And before she can say anything else, Vair stands, waves towards a twenty-something man with Einsteinian hair and thick glasses, bookish and slumped. When he comes closer, Elise sees that his computer bag is leather, well-made, European.

  ‘I’m Lars,’ he says,

  (of course, she thinks)

  and he shakes Elise’s hand and sits across from her, next to Vair.

  Rather close to Vair, Elise thinks.

  ‘He’s a doctor,’ says Vair, and a pink flush blooms from her neck upwards. ‘A medical doctor. He wants to improve sperm storage, and I told him you’ve done work with the antechinuses, on the storage crypts the females have.’

  ‘I’m so interested,’ he says, elbows on the table. ‘I want to know what it is about the females that keeps the sperm alive for so long. Vair says you have a whole colony in the lab. I’ve read your work and it’s so fascinating. I would love to do a project with you, a PhD.’ He glances at Vair. ‘Vair says my record is good enough for a scholarship. But I brought my CV just in case.’

  He shuffles through his bag and pulls out a handful of papers, slides them across the table towards Elise. They flicker in the breeze of the overhead fan.

  ‘I should leave you two to talk,’ says Vair abruptly, and stands. ‘Thank you, Elise. Really, this means a lot, and I’m sorry to spring Lars on you like this—’ she glances at Lars ‘—but I hope you
’ll consider the project. Give me a call later, if you want, to talk about it some more.’

  Elise and Lars watch Vair bustle out through the labyrinth of chairs and tables, and Elise feels kindly towards him then, and understands that she will not say no, that she will encourage him to apply for a scholarship. She’s curious. A man studying female anatomy, female physiology, female fluids to improve male sex.

  Not sex—fertilisation.

  A man who, maybe, wants the same answers she does.

  Elise doesn’t like the hospital, it reminds her of everything she’s ever wanted to forget, and remember, every person she ever said goodbye to, sometimes before she could say hello. But she needs the scans for reassurance, maybe even hope, though she’s not so sure she wants it. She ought to go to one of the smaller, private hospitals, but she believes in science, and current research, and doctors who are also teachers.

  They work at the private hospitals, too. But she’s drawn here to the Royal.

  She walks up the concrete steps beside the ramp where, before William, men and women used to stand and smoke—pregnant women, women rocking babies in prams, women with older faces than they should have, like they know something, like the smoke gives them something besides cancer. A philosophy. Elise used to loathe these women and their choices, their stupid certainty.

  But now, she sees, the hospital or the council has made a designated smoking area, and the smoking women are off to one side, hidden, as they should be.

  She doesn’t want to be here alone, but can’t yet tell Dan, just twelve weeks in and with no idea. Maybe the baby has a disease. Maybe the baby has a syndrome or a malformation or an incurable disorder. Maybe there should be no baby at all.

  The thought is a punch and a relief, at once.

  Through the sliding doors, she enters the atrium, a wide open space like the space in a heart, that pumps people through it into passages, hallways, lifts, rooms. Every cell of the body in motion at once; it is dizzying.