Sign

by Colin Dray

  Colin Dray grew up in rural New South Wales, where he fell incurably in love with Shakespearean heroines. He holds a PhD in the Arts and teaches English literature and creative writing from time to time. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Meanjin, his criticism has appeared in Australian Literary Studies and Antipodes, and his poetry has been burned to ash for the sake of humanity. He now lives in the Illawarra region with two daughters who are the most delightful people he has ever met. Sign is his first novel.

  First published in 2018

  Copyright © Colin Dray 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 473 1

  eISBN 978 1 76063 537 4

  Set by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  Cover design: Christabella Designs

  Cover images: Mark Owen / Trevillion Images (main image); Shutterstock

  For Clara and Hannah

  ‘Batman, because he doesn’t have any super powers.’

  Contents

  HOME

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  ROAD

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  SIGN

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  PERTH

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  Acknowledgements

  HOME

  1

  The morning after his surgery, still wrapped, and giddy, and numb, Sam woke to find his mother sitting in the visitor’s chair beside him, a magazine splayed open across her lap. At first she was little more than a blur, a brown smudge undulating on a sea of orange. He had to blink several times, slowly, to clear the stickiness from his eyes, watching the smears resolve into a thin cotton dress, hair pulled back in a loose bun, and her face, drawn but smiling.

  His entire body felt somehow tender and deadened all at once, his lips cracked and dry, his neck throbbing beneath its bandages, his mouth tethered to a plastic tube. His nose itched. Right on the tip. But it was covered in tape, pinned by another, thinner hose, and his arms were still too heavy to lift. His hair was stuck to his forehead. His temples were pounding. His mother inched forward. Katie lay asleep on the floor, curled up under his mother’s jacket.

  ‘Oh, Sammy,’ his mother whispered. ‘You’re here. You’re with us. You’re home.’

  But he wasn’t home. He wasn’t sure why she’d said that. He was pinched beneath stiff sheets. His muscles were thick and soupy. He could feel the sheen of fluorescent lights above him on his flesh. Could hear how scrubbed clean the air was, voices echoing along concrete walls and lino. He blinked and lay in place. Feeling his nose itch. Already beginning to feel the pain that was to come rising in the back of his throat.

  It had started when he was nine years old, after his father moved to Perth. Sam was having trouble swallowing and kept getting a sharp pain in his ear. When he was ten, by the time his father stopped sending postcards, he was bald, silent and blistered. Every other day for two months he had treatments—chemotherapy that made him tired; radiation that gave him mouth ulcers, turned everything he ate into a tasteless mush and condensed his saliva into snot. Long before anyone began talking seriously about surgery, a doctor had explained his condition by showing him a goofy cartoon filled with sneering blue monsters and sword-fighting white blood cells. But as Sam sat in the consultation room, feeling the tremble of his mother’s hand as she rubbed his back and tried to smile through her tears, the animation became a jumble of colours dancing, and he forgot what all of it was supposed to mean.

  As the weeks passed, as his hair grew back, a little patchy at first, his mother joked about how important he must be to have so many specialists wanting to see him—and at times Sam did indeed feel tall in their waiting rooms when the nurses remembered his name and slipped him lollies as he said hello. After an upper endoscopy that made him gag, two CT scans that made him feel like he was in a submarine, four ultrasounds, blood tests and an oral surgeon who kept prodding his neck and dipping his grey-flecked eyebrows in disapproval, the doctors decided at last. He was stage two. It meant the cancer had spread and he would have to lose his voice.

  A week before the operation he’d almost won a class alphabet game by spelling the words ‘larynx’, ‘lymph nodes’, and ‘laryngectomy’, although Mrs Fletcher made him sit down when he began describing the procedure with a red marker and a diagram of where the incisions would go. The day before, his mother had taken him and his sister to Wonderland where he screamed as loud as he could on every ride. And on the morning of the procedure, before a gas mask slid over his face, Sam’s final words were, ‘Batman, because he doesn’t have any superpowers.’

  Now, on the other side of it all, as his mother talked gently about how well everything had gone, as the machines around him huffed and groaned, he had a strange realisation: he wasn’t breathing.

  He felt his chest rising and falling. There was air getting to his lungs. But he wasn’t breathing in and out. Not like usual. His mouth, his itchy nose, none of it was moving. There was no sensation of wind across his lips. The air wasn’t passing through them.

  It was his stoma—a word the surgeon had used that Sam had forgotten until that very moment. The stoma. The hole in his neck. A hole that he would breathe through now. Permanently cut into the bottom of his neck. That would never heal shut. That he’d once drawn for Miss Fletcher in red marker. A hole where his voice had once been.

  Batman, because he doesn’t have any superpowers.

  That was the last thing he’d ever said.

  His mother was still talking—Aunt Dettie would be by later, she was saying; the soccer coach sent his best wishes—and Katie, on the floor, was starting to stir, but all Sam could think about was his final li
ne. Batman. He found himself repeating it over and over again in his mind. Staring at the wall, struck by the stupidity of it. What a dumb thing to mention—let alone be the last sentence he’d ever speak. The surgeon had warned him. He wouldn’t have a voice anymore, he’d said. But somehow Sam hadn’t actually realised it until that moment.

  And all he wanted was to say something simple. To say, ‘Mum’, or ‘Hi’ to Katie, whose eyes were tracing fearfully along the tube that led from his throat to the machine helping him breathe.

  He felt cocooned in plastic and crisp cotton. Even his mother’s voice, soothingly familiar, became just a wordless hum. He closed his eyes, letting his nose itch, letting the drip in his wrist sting. The distant, smoky feeling in his head swept up and over him—through his shoulders, his head, his eyelids—and he slept.

  He was woken by a doctor and nurse, and the slow whir of the electric bed raising him up. Once he was adjusted gently into place with pillows, the doctor looked him over, listening to his chest and scratching around on his chart, while the nurse busied herself plugging in some new instrument to the wall. Katie was gone—she was with Aunt Dettie, his mother explained—and the room seemed smaller than it had before, less filled with light and sound. The doctor went about his examination, talking to no one in particular about the discomfort Sam would feel in the next few weeks. Sam’s mother sat on the edge of the same chair, twisting a clutch of tissues into a rope and nodding deeply, even though the doctor wasn’t saying anything that needed a reply. Eventually, he slipped on a glove and began opening the bandages around Sam’s neck.

  At first there was only a peculiar, faraway sensation as the latex-covered hand moved near his skin, like the anticipation before a tickle, but the moment the breathing tube was peeled aside a whip of pain scored Sam’s body. He jerked back, pinned in place, and failed to shout.

  ‘Oops. Yep. That’s all going to be sore for a while,’ the doctor said. ‘We’ll have to get a little something more to help with that.’ The nurse nodded and made her own note on a small piece of paper.

  Something was hissing. Something close. Ragged and deep and hollow near Sam’s ear.

  ‘Now, we’re going to clean this out a little,’ the doctor continued, ‘but we’re going to be very gentle, okay?’

  It was the stoma. The sound was his breath through the hole in his neck. A wet hiss, quivering at the sting. His mouth and his nose, still taped, weren’t breathing at all, but his chest was heaving and the stoma was letting it out.

  Sam stayed stiff as the nurse suctioned around his neck with a small tube. He felt his mother’s hand clutching his arm, and closed his eyes until it was over. The pain was not so bad as it had been at first, and faded to an ache that flared only when they rewrapped his hose. More than the pain, though, it was the silence that had shocked him. Not a shout. Not even a moan. Just his snuffling, hollow hiss as he shrank from the touch. He had felt his entire body flash, but couldn’t scream out.

  The nurse unplugged the machine with the hose and wheeled it off into another room, leaving the doctor to go on talking to nobody. Eventually, he was saying, Sam could get an electrolarynx. Or he could try mouthing some words, if he really needed to. The process involved taking a mouthful of air and letting it out in a special way. Taking a breath, shaping the sounds; one at a time, and slowly. It might make him a little lightheaded at first, he said, but it would become natural. They could pass on the names of a few people who could help him learn.

  ‘You’ll have to plan out what you’re going to say,’ he said. ‘But that, and a notepad, should see you through for a little while.’

  The nurse returned, fished from the pocket of her scrubs a selection of pamphlets that she spread out on his dinner tray, and began administering an injection into the drain on his wrist. There was a brochure on the daily cleaning of his stoma, one on post-operative physiotherapy, and even one on learning sign language titled ‘Your Voice, Your Choice’.

  Sam looked down at the pamphlets, feeling the tender cold on his throat, hearing his oxygen tube hum. His mouth, he realised, was open. Unable to speak, unable to breathe, his jaw hung slack. Pointless. With all the drips and cords he wasn’t even going to be using his mouth to eat for a while.

  With an effort, his lips crackling, he eased it shut.

  2

  Dettie’s operation had not gone as well as Sam’s, and she told him so. The next day, as he lay still limp in bed, his head cloudy, a peculiar gnawing pain in his jaw radiating through the medication, Aunt Dettie sat on the edge of his mattress, one hand cupping his knee, while she told him the whole of her story. Or at least, everything she remembered. She spoke slowly, her voice warm and measured, as if reading a fairytale. From the first pinch in her chest, to the searing down her arm; from the thunder and sway of the ambulance; through the stench of ammonia in the operating room; until she woke on the other side of the anaesthesia, bruised and sliced and nauseous, a burning sensation still eating down into her heart. Sam remained pinned in place, trying to nod when it seemed like Dettie wanted him to, thinking he saw the faintest smile creep into the corner of her mouth.

  She’d been lucky, she said. Blessed. She’d fought her way through. All the way back through the haze to that cold operating room slab. And so had he. And together, she said, they would both be stronger than they had been before. ‘See, people break sometimes, Sammy,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘Like a toy, or a car, or a bone. Things come apart. But that’s not the end of them. They can be put back together. Fixed up. And you know what? Afterwards, those things are stronger, always, in the broken places.’

  Perhaps she was right, he thought. Perhaps he would heal stronger. But he certainly didn’t feel stronger yet. What he felt instead was the tape tugging on the skin of his throat. He felt stitches underneath gauze pulling at his flesh. A hot, itchy throbbing. He could feel the other stitches that were still inside him, the ones that the doctor said would disappear over time. He already had the strange chalky taste of them dissolving at the back of his throat. That, and the taste of blood. And beneath all of it, beneath everything else, was a hollow he had never known before. The cold, empty ache of a place where his voice had once been.

  Dettie told him her story again. And again. And once more. It became a ritual. Once every day for a week. She would stride through the doorway, kissing him the same way once when she arrived and again when she left. A loose wet smack on each side of his face, fingers sprawled behind his neck, her thumbs burrowing into his temples. In her handbag she would always have a new piece of cotton square to give him, cross-stitched, pulled tight and embedded with the scent of her tobacco. She had made them herself—rustic scenes, with Sam himself stitched into every square. A tiny rendition with overly-long arms and feet, stomping in bright country landscapes and yelling from the hills. Each time she pressed one into his hands she would tell him about the quilt she was going to sew them all into when he got home. In one design he was surrounded by birds and flying through the air, over clouds that Dettie had shaped to spell out his name.

  But it was when his mother left them alone that she would inch closer, slightly hunched, stiff, clutching her handbag, to start telling her tale again. She would always begin with some new complaint about one of the other patients. Someone she felt wasn’t handling things the way she and Sam had done.

  ‘There’s a teenager in the next room,’ she whispered once. ‘Just had his appendix out. But the way he’s rolling around, making a fuss, you’d think he was shot through with a harpoon.’

  Dettie seemed to regard Sam’s silence not as a disability over which he had no choice, but rather a sign of stoic resolve. She could not abide fuss—or ‘carry-on’, as she called it. And there seemed to be a lot of it being indulged by the nurses as far as she was concerned. She’d huff and wave the thought away.

  ‘Not like us,’ she’d say, and start in again. With the spasm. With the stopped heart. With the complications that arose even once she’d made it to the �
�safety’ of hospital. Her nodding solemnly at every detail, Sam peering out into the hallway, unable to make a fuss even if he’d wanted to, wondering where in that cavernous building his own operation had occurred.

  ‘And I didn’t see any lights, or any tunnels leading off into the whatever,’ she would say, shuffling even closer, petting his arm. ‘There were no angel’s choirs, or the face of Jesus staring out at me from an armchair. None of the things you’re told to expect. All those things they tell you to believe in. That’s not what’s waiting.’ She always paused. ‘Instead, there’s just the quiet. That’s what I felt.’ Her fingers would lace together, clenched tight. ‘Can you imagine what that’s like, Sammy? The quiet? The silence? When that rhythm thumping away at the back of your ears just stops? And you’re cold. Set adrift.’

  Seven minutes later she lived again, two cracked ribs and a rope-shaped scar denting her chest where the doctors had massaged her back to life.

  ‘You see, it’s peaceful. Once you wander past all that fear and doubt and sadness. But that’s why you have to fight against it, Sammy.’ She would take his hand. ‘If ever you feel like slipping away, you have to hold on. Have to cling to the noise and the feeling. Because God’s out there, Sammy. He’s waiting to scoop you up. But not until you give in to him.’

  Dettie was God-fearing. That was the term she used. She talked about a creator who had forgiveness and grace, but her eyes flashed with excitement at his wrathful, old-testament ways. The God who punished to purify. Who lumped suffering on people to prove they were strong enough to survive. She never seemed to quote anything, though. Not like the school scripture teachers did. For Dettie it was all just a truth that you felt in your spirit, one that kept you prepared.

  Whenever she left, Sam would sink down into his pillow, feeling the tape around the bandages tugging at his throat. The sutures in his skin and the unseen deeper stitches pulled tight in his flesh, and he was unable to imagine getting stronger when he felt held together with string.

  3