Elise’s head spins and she clutches for a seat by the door, pretends to look fine so she doesn’t attract the attention of a cheerful greeter or information giver. The place is full of coughs and sneezes, flushed faces, sweat, is too physical, and here, where she can be a body, she does not want to be.
She doesn’t want to be here alone and, really, she’s not. She is here with the memory of William and the wisp of a fetus, and that will have to be enough. Emergency, over there. Obstetrics, over there. She knows the layout much too well. She knows what can happen. It is her own philosophy.
And Elise is watching the escalators up and down when she hears something beside her. A young woman lurches through the front door, and Elise’s first thought, a too-movie thought, is ebola. The repulsion is physical. She leans back into the window, as though a few millimetres might save her from the splatter, necrosis and death.
But then she sees the belly.
The tears.
The woman’s so young, Elise thinks, too young for this, and she rushes over and puts her hand on her shoulder and says, ‘Are you okay?’
And the woman, girl almost, looks into Elise’s face and bursts. Thin, yellow-flecked water floods the tiled floor.
Elise hears the gasp and sigh of the sliding doors behind them, feels every face turn to look. The moment is a spectacle, a mess,
the way it’s meant to go.
‘Oh, sweetie,’ says Elise, and puts her arm around the woman, braces her against her own body. She motions for the greeter to bring one of the wheelchairs beside the desk.
‘Here you are,’ says Elise, and lowers the woman into the chair, and watches her wheeled away, entirely alone, no time for names or good lucks or gratitude.
The atrium returns to motion. A cleaner sets to work. Elise’s shoes are wet.
I hope he lives, she thinks.
chapter 22
A few days later, he forces himself to go to another doctor, a random doctor at a shopping centre clinic he’s never been to. He doesn’t want to lie on the bed on the blue sheet, with another, folded blue sheet over his belly, knees in the air, genitals exposed to all the world. To the woman with the local anaesthetic in a fine-tipped needle and the latex gloves and metal tray. He doesn’t want to feel the open air over his testicles, the breath of concentration, doesn’t want to feel trained eyes on a part of himself he can’t even see. So close. Too close. Doesn’t want to harden at her strange, smooth touch.
Doesn’t want to be abnormal, yet that’s why he’s here, isn’t it?
‘This is going to pinch,’ says the doctor, and it does. As though with fingernails. She stands back, sets the needle on a steel tray. ‘I’ll just give it a minute to start working, make sure you won’t feel anything.’
Dan stares at the ceiling tiles. Wonders if all the holes in them are for acoustics.
‘You don’t remember me,’ she says.
‘Sorry?’
‘I was in your writing class at the library. It was great—I love body prompts.’
Dan stifles a cough. Does not want to look at her face, or remember her.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘Knees apart for me.’ She leans one of his knees against the wall.
‘You shouldn’t feel this,’ she says. ‘Can you feel this?’
Dan shakes his head.
‘I’ll just take a bit, here, and … done.’
He does not watch, does not want to imagine.
‘Oh dear, a bit of a bleeder.’
The pressure of her hand.
‘I’m writing a novel,’she says. ‘How long did it take you to write yours? Did you work while you wrote, or just write? Because I’m wondering if I should take some holiday time and just head down to the Blue Mountains, a little cabin in the woods or something, and finish it.’
She replaces the soiled cotton with fresh.
‘This part of the body is so highly vascularised,’ she says. ‘Once it stops, I’ll bandage you up and you’ll be good to go.’
Dan notices a stain on one of the ceiling panels, slightly darker than the rest, a greyish tinge on the cream. A place where rain or water has at some point leaked through.
‘It’ll probably ache a bit later on—just take some paracetamol.’
She tapes another bit of cotton in place.
‘All good. You can sit up.’
Dan closes his knees, but doesn’t move until she pulls the curtain around him, on the bed on the blue sheet. His groin aches from the stretch.
With the cotton ball taped to his skin, he feels he has grown a third testicle.
‘I’ll call you when the results come in,’ she says. ‘But I’ll be honest with you, I don’t like the look of it. There’s some depth to it when I squeezed, though it’s hard to get a good look at it, where it is. If it’s anything serious, we’ll want to get it removed as soon as possible. So be prepared for that, just in case.’
‘Thanks,’ says Dan, and, now dressed, opens the door to go.
‘I hope you do another class,’ says the doctor. ‘That one was so good. And I think I will take some leave. Seize the day, right?’
She swivels in her chair and begins typing. ‘Fingers crossed for good results. Head out front and James will get you sorted. You can leave the door open.’
A strange car is parked outside the house when Dan gets home, a strange dark car with a man sitting inside it, in the driver’s seat, as though he’s just pulled up and is waiting. Watching. Dan looks hard at him, but gets nothing back. The man makes no move to roll down his window or get out.
Elise is home, the front door is open wide and Ella Fitzgerald is on the bluetooth. Dan hears her voice.
Another voice.
A man’s voice, low and gravelly.
Elise comes out into the hall to meet him. Her hair pulled back into a low ponytail, a smudge of milk foam across her jawline. He wipes it with his hand, and it disappears into his skin. She has taken on a golden hue lately, a warmth she lacked for so long after William, and he feels a momentary surge of hope, a lifting in his chest.
He will not tell her where he’s been.
‘Your uncle’s here,’ she whispers. ‘He wanted to wait.’ Her eyes are wide, mouth curves up.
Dan follows her into the living room and there he is, on the couch, Berlin Warne, a parody in black trousers and a tight black turtleneck sweater, legs spread wide, capacious, in a position of explanation or discomfort.
‘What happened to you?’ he asks Dan.
‘I needed to get home.’
‘Not that. The party was big enough without you, though Hannah was pretty upset you left.’ He shrugs. ‘No. I mean, you’re walking funny.’ He nods towards Dan’s groin.
‘I pulled something,’ says Dan. ‘Running.’
‘Can you walk? Let’s go somewhere. I need some space.’
And he stands and strides over to Elise, who is still standing beside Dan, and cups her chin in his large, gnarled hands and kisses her full on the mouth. ‘Thank you for the company, my dear,’ he says, and continues up the hall to the front door, where he turns. ‘Are you coming?’
Dan glances at his wife but does not register the look on her face, not properly. He follows sheep-like into the car out front. The seats are leather, and cool. His uncle sits in the back with him, leans forward over the front seat.
‘Let’s go to the city,’ he says to the driver, then glances at Dan. ‘If that’s what you call it. Maybe if you had David up here to build a real museum.’
Dan doesn’t feel like arguing.
‘I’d like to go on that wheel,’ Berlin continues. ‘I like the view from those things.’
‘The Wheel of Brisbane?’
Berlin laughs. It is not a friendly laugh. It reminds Dan of scalpels.
‘So, why did you leave? Was Hannah too much for you? Not everyone can handle her. Or,’ he says, ‘are you upset because you want to be famous, like me?’
‘Wow.’
‘Look, I was serious about S
ibyl. There’s a story there, and maybe it will make you famous.’
‘Why did you want me to write your book in the first place?’
‘I didn’t.’
The car edges forward along Coronation Drive.
Berlin leans across Dan to look out at the river. ‘What is with this traffic?’ he asks. ‘This time of day. We need a boat. Can you drive a boat, Allen?’
The driver turns and smiles, his grin wide and bright. ‘I certainly can,’ he says.
‘Where do we get a boat around here?’ Berlin looks back at Dan, eyes gleaming.
‘What do you mean you didn’t want me to write it?’ Dan asks.
‘Wait till the wheel.’
‘Well, I want to talk about it now. I want to know why I’m writing this fucking book, because it isn’t a game. It’s not funny. Things are pretty fucked up for me right now, and this is not helping.’
‘What a mood,’ says Berlin, and sighs dramatically.
Dan shakes his head and looks out the window. The car rises up the bridge, the river curves away.
They don’t speak again until the driver pulls the car to a halt.
‘Here we are,’ Berlin says. ‘The great wheel of fortune.’ He does not wait for Dan but bounds out of the car and strides ahead to the ticket booth.
Dan emerges from the car slowly, takes his time, studies the tall buildings across the river. So many windows of so many places he has never lived or worked, silvery windows that wink with shifts in the light.
His uncle is leaving the counter when Dan catches him.
‘I got all of them,’ he says to Dan, waving a handful of tickets.
‘What?’
‘All the capsules. Compartments. Whatever they call them. I wanted privacy, you see.’
They walk to the front of the line, past a frowning woman and toddler, and into the next carriage that swings down.
Dan feels nauseous and overwhelmed. The wheel moves like an ache, slow and painful.
It is ten long, silent minutes before they reach the top, and the wheel stops, and their carriage swings slightly with motion and breeze. The view is remarkable, but already Dan has braced himself for whatever his uncle will spring. The man has been brooding since they sat down. But now, suddenly, he reanimates.
‘You want to know everything, of course you do,’ he says. His chin juts, mouth smirks. ‘I’d say, ask my sister, but then the cunt went and killed herself, didn’t she?’
Dan chokes down whatever is rising in his throat.
Berlin goes on. ‘You see, she was never supposed to keep you, just look after you while I got things started. And maybe it took me longer than I hoped to get going, you know, and of course she grew attached to you. That was what she always did: attach herself to people, like a fucking parasite.’ He pauses. ‘There’s a painting in that, actually. I should write that down.’
The carriage starts moving again, slowly crests the top and tips down the other side.
‘What are you talking about?’ asks Dan, though he has a terrible feeling he already knows.
Berlin reaches across and clasps both of Dan’s clammy hands in his own warm, dry ones. ‘That you’re mine,’ he says. ‘You’ve never been hers at all. You were mine, and she took you, and if I could make her pay for it, I would. But I can’t. You did part of that work for me.’ He laughs. ‘Your father’s son, you are.’
Dan jerks his hands out of the other man’s grasp, has the urge to wipe them clean on his shirt but doesn’t. On the wall, a flyer suggests he might like a cheese platter, a glass of wine, with his next ride, make a date of it. Confinement as romance, as no-turning-back. A promised ideal for ring-on-the-finger, forever kind of moments.
Dan feels that his uncle,
father,
is waiting for him to say something, show excitement or gratitude.
‘So?’ prompts Berlin, finally. ‘What do you have to say?’
‘Who’s my mother, then?’
If she’s not my mother.
It’s almost too much.
‘She’s gone,’ says Berlin. ‘But you’ve got me. We’ve got each other.’
‘Gone, just like that.’
‘Poof!’ says Berlin, and flicks his hand at Dan.
A game. All a game.
And it occurs to Dan that the ride could malfunction, could trap them inside the capsule like rats, no air, no escape.
He focuses on the faint movement of the wheel, the approach of the earth, a pinch in his lung that threatens to fill him like water, suffocate him from inside himself.
chapter 23
Elise stands for a few minutes in the doorway after they have gone, after Dan and his uncle have disappeared into the car and the car itself has disappeared down the street. She stands, in those moments, feeling for her prairie roots, every stolid woman in a flower-print dress, every one of them standing in a doorway at once, staring out across the terrible, flat plain. She feels for the change in pressure, the greengrey clouds that rumble up and over one another at the horizon, eager to get to where she is.
She senses it, all of it at once. But she has no prairie roots. She has no roots at all.
A trio of rainbow lorikeets chatter to each other in the bottlebrush, lick nectar from the last of June’s blossoms, now paled. Elise closes her eyes and listens to the birds. She does not hear the woman approach.
‘They’ve started eating meat now,’ the voice says. One of the neighbour women stands at the foot of Elise’s front stairs.
‘All over Brisbane, and other places, too. Isn’t it strange?’ Her voice is lyrical, with a filmy, translucent quality. ‘They think it’s for the protein, for their eggs.’
Elise feels she should know this already.
‘Anyway, I’m Lara,’ the woman goes on. ‘I’m happy you’re back. We wanted to invite you and Dan to a party.’
Elise feels suddenly very tired. The house sways beside her. She sits down on the top step.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s been a long day.’
Lara holds up a finger and says to hold on a second, and dashes back across the street, brown hair bouncing. When she returns, it’s with a slim foil rectangle. She comes up the steps and hands it to Elise and then sits a few steps below her, angled towards the side.
‘Take this,’ she says, and hands the bar to Elise. ‘Nature’s best medicine. Besides wine.’
Elise breaks off a segment of the chocolate and sets it on her tongue. Like a kiss, a Hershey’s Kiss, she lets it melt there, lets her mouth absorb it directly, as though she is only a head, with a mouth and a bit of chocolate.
Lara waits, but does not seem to.
Elise likes this about the moment.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I feel much better.’
‘I hope you’ll come,’ says Lara. ‘I know it’s late notice, but we didn’t have your number or Dan’s.’
‘When is it?’
Lara scrunches her nose. ‘Tomorrow. Sorry. But it’s BunyaFest, it’s so much fun. We do it every year, a dinner based on bunya nuts. Everybody brings something with bunya nuts in it—a vegie loaf, a tiramisu, or ravioli or whatever—and then we all eat till we explode. You don’t have to bring anything at all, or just a drink to share, if you like. It’s so last minute.’
Elise rubs her thumb over a snag in her pants, considers the offer. She’s intensely, surprisingly intrigued. She likes this woman, she likes that they’re neighbours, feels potential between them.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I have no idea what bunya nuts are, but we’d love to come.’
‘Excellent! You’ll love them. They’re a Queensland secret.’ Lara stands. Her smile is infectious. ‘I have to get back to help with Kylie, but come over around four or five. We’re early people.’
She nods towards the bar of chocolate in Elise’s hand. ‘Keep it close,’ she says, ‘like magic.’
Dan doesn’t come home, won’t answer his phone, and Elise imagines that his uncle has kidnapped him, has flow
n him away in a private jet to an island of art
(and women).
The idea is ridiculous, of course, but she needs to see him. She had it wrong, so terribly wrong. She needs his smell and his skin and those moments between words, when whatever they are together takes its own soft form. Breathing through each of them.
She needs him. And he’s gone.
So although Elise doesn’t really want to talk to strangers, meet strangers, eat strange food, it is either that or the loneliness. She brushes her hair and puts on a dress and mascara, lip gloss.
She hopes it’s not too late.
BunyaFest has already started, and the living dining verandah is dotted with people in soft flannel shirts, long cotton skirts, scarves like old sweaters, jeans with frayed bottoms, mugs of hot cider, mulled wine or beer. Lara emerges from the kitchen with a white tray full of what resembles, at a glance, bits of chestnuts or potatoes. She slides the tray onto a table and comes over, wraps her arm around Elise and guides her through the room.
‘Everybody, this is Elise!’ she says loudly, and the room smiles nods waves says hello. Though she doesn’t recognise anyone, many of the faces seem familiar, and she wonders if she’s seen them coming and going from this house across the street, so close all this time to where she was.
And the house and the people, the music and food, are so warm, so distant from how Elise feels, that she feels she might well up with tears, and she pinches her hand to stop herself.
In the bright, open kitchen, Sofia stands at the stove, shuffles creamy nut meats through a frying pan. Elise has seen her from across the street, and though they have not met, the woman sets the pan to the side and hugs her hello.
‘Sit down and keep me company,’ she says, and pulls out a stool at the bench, slides a plate of nuts across. ‘And eat, please.’
The sautéed nuts are buttery, flaked with salt. They do not crack or crunch between her teeth but seem to dissolve there. Like muscle.
She wonders if the lorikeets pause with the meat between their beaks and on their narrow tongues, if they marvel at the feel of it.
Outside, Elise hears squeals of laughter, and it is like a carnival game, people take turns pounding at rough parchment-coloured nutshells with a rubber mallet. Sometimes, the oval nutshell cracks. Sometimes it is propelled across the verandah, or, in this instance, through the wooden slats into the back garden. The successes are piled in a little dish. The nuts are not easy, but they give up their flesh.
The Breeding Season Page 17
