I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  She said, ‘Trust me.’

  I said, ‘You been talking to Kat?’ I mean, that’s what made the most sense. Up until that point, Kat hadn’t seemed to have a ticking clock, but maybe it had kicked in? But Fat said, ‘Nope’ and she was smiling this strange smile, and I said, ‘What then?’ and she said, ‘It’s me.’

  Well, I was wary as hell. I said, ‘Course you are. And the court case is when?’

  She said, ‘Come on, Dad, will you let that go? It’s true this time.’

  I pushed back from the kitchen table and walked around to her side and looked her over and there was something of a bump there under her shirt. She smoothed the fabric down, to show it off a little more, and she said, ‘Come on, give it a pat.’

  I didn’t give it a pat. I was that scared it might be bullshit. But Fat said, ‘Come on, Dad. Let bygones be bygones. There’s a baby in here’.

  I said, ‘Well then, when are you due?’

  She said, ‘Christmas Day.’

  I said, ‘Christ!’ and she said, ‘We’re not calling him that!’ and then she said, ‘Can you at least be happy for me?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, Fat’ and she looked upset, so I said, ‘Well, are you eating right?’ and she said, ‘Day and night’ and I said, ‘Morning sickness?’ and she said, ‘All day sickness’ and I said, ‘And what does the father say about this?’ because it had got to the point where I could not say that bloke’s name, but Fat said, ‘Well, he wasn’t keen. He’s never been that keen. But now it’s on, he’s come around.’

  I said, ‘Well’ and then I said, ‘You got a preference, boy or girl?’ and she said, ‘We already know’ and I said, ‘Well, go on, then’ and she said, ‘Are you sure you want to know?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to find out eventually, aren’t I?’ and she said, ‘I thought you might like a surprise’ and I said, ‘So go on, surprise me’ and she said, ‘Okay’ and I said, ‘No, I mean, surprise me now’ and she said, ‘You sure?’ and I said, ‘I’m sure!’ and she said, ‘Okay, it’s a boy’ and I said, ‘A boy?’ and she said, ‘Yep’ and I said, ‘And what will you call this boy and for Christ’s sake don’t tell me Med, because I’ve had problems with that name all my life’ and she said, ‘No, it will be Seth’ and I said, ‘Seth? What the hell kind of name is that?’ and she said, ‘Paul thought of it’ and I thought, well, that would be right.

  So we had that cup of tea, and I gave Fat a bit of a hug when she went out the door, and I could feel the baby there, firm between us, and I was chuffed. I admit that. I was chuffed. I told Edna. I told everyone. I was going to be a grandpa. This time it was for real and not five minutes later, or that’s how it seemed to me, Fat had swelled up like a beer keg, and then it was December, and Fat was at Forster Hospital giving birth to Seth, and oh God, it’s so hard to talk about this. It’s so bloody hard. I couldn’t get to the hospital fast enough and then I found myself in the shop near the kiosk, buying balloons and a stuffed toy, the biggest one you’ve ever seen, and I was trying to get down the hall with it, and the thing was so bloody big I couldn’t see around it, and a nurse had to come and take me by the elbow and direct me into Fat’s room, and there she was, sitting up in bed, not under the covers, just bare legs, with swollen ankles on the sheets, her stomach still looking like there might be a baby inside it, except that right there, in the room, in the cot next to Fat, there was Seth.

  Fat said, ‘So what do you think?’ and what did I think? He was ugly as buggery, obviously – he had skin flaking off him and his face was wrinkled like a walnut and at the same time he was absolutely, 100 per cent, the most handsome little guy I’d seen in my life.

  Fat said, ‘You want to hold him?’

  Absolutely, I wanted to hold him but like most males, I didn’t think I was all that good with babies. They are so bloody small! So fragile. I said, ‘I’m all thumbs’ but Fat said, ‘Oh, go on’ so I lifted him out, keeping his little apple head in my paw, and for a second, he didn’t do anything, just stayed lying there, in that grip of mine, and then the cry came – he had this perfect little pink mouth, like a cat’s mouth – and quick as lightning, I had him over to his mum, just handed him like a parcel, and she popped a boob out, and he fixed on, and I tried to make like I was looking anywhere else, and then she was finished, and handing him back to me, and she said, ‘God, I’m tired’ and I said, ‘You sleep’ and soon as I said it, her eyes clapped shut, just folded shut, and she was gone, like she was exhausted, and I had this little guy in my hands, his head in the palm of my hand, and I didn’t dare move a muscle and I swear, I sat like that until I was all cramped up, until a nurse came by and said, ‘Here, let me’ and took the baby and lay him down, and that’s when Fat woke up, too.

  She said, ‘You still here?’ She was dreamy. I said, ‘Where have I got to go?’ and we sat a bit more, me not saying much because I was thinking that my voice might wake the baby, but Fat, she seemed to get that nothing would wake him, not after that feed, and she started chatting away, saying, ‘They make him stay in with me, you know’ and I said, ‘Oh, right’ and then she said, ‘Were you there when Mum had me?’ and I said, ‘You bet I was’ and then she said, ‘I wonder if Mum knows?’ and I thought, Gee, so that’s what’s on her mind. Her own Mum, and that made sense.

  I said, ‘I reckon she does, Fat.’ And Fat said, ‘Maybe I’ll get in touch, tell her she’s a grandma’ and as a joke, I said, ‘You do that, Fat. And you make sure you say hi from me!’ and that was it, Your Honour. That was it. It was 23 December 2005. My baby girl was 23, and still missing her mum, and her son, my grandson, wasn’t yet one day old, and how could I have known that I’d be able to count on the fingers of both hands the number of times I’d see him again?

  On Boxing Day Fat took Seth home, and set him up in the nursery I’d painted – the only clean room in that ramshackle house – and I shook hands with Haines and said congratulations and then I returned to work, and although there were times when I’d swing by after work, with a rattle or some other thing I’d picked up in town, Haines would often say, ‘They’re asleep, Med’ or else, ‘Rough night. Can you come back?’ and so I suppose I’d seen Seth only five, maybe six times, before I got that call, at 10 minutes past 11 one Saturday morning in March 2006 and it was Fat saying, ‘Dad, you’ve got to come quick, Seth’s in the hospital.’

  Chapter 6

  THEY HAVE THESE RUBBER DOORS AT Forster General, rubber doors that separate the people waiting from the ones that have gone through to emergency. By the time I got out there – it cannot have taken more than 15 minutes from the time I got Fat’s call for me to get out there – Seth had already gone through, and it was only Fat and Haines in the waiting room. Fat’s face was all screwed up. Her eyebrows kept coming together. She was chewing on the inside of her lip. I said, ‘Where is he?’ and ‘What happened?’ and Fat said, ‘We don’t know’ and I said, ‘You don’t know where he is?’ and Haines said, ‘They’ve taken him somewhere’ and Fat said, ‘He was limp, Dad. I went to wake him this morning, and he was limp. He was chucking up. I didn’t know what to do.’

  I said, ‘You’ve done the right thing. You’ve brought him to the right place.’ I went over to reception, where the nurse who does the admissions sits, and I said, ‘I’m Med Atley. I’m the little boy’s grandfather. His mother, that’s my daughter. Can you tell me what’s going on?’ but the nurse, she looked over my shoulder towards Fat, and she said, ‘Well, the baby’s gone into emergency’ and then Fat came over and put a hand on my shoulder and led me away, saying, ‘We’ve asked all those questions, Dad.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s ridiculous to have you out here. A baby needs his mother and what did the doctor say?’ and Fat said, ‘We didn’t see a doctor’ and Haines said, ‘They sent out a nurse’ and I thought, ‘That would be right. Public hospitals, can’t they even afford a doctor to see a baby anymore?’ and I said, ‘I’ll get a doctor’ and I started going towards the reception again but Fat said, ‘Sit down, Dad, you’re making a scene’ and so we sat
down, the three of us, and it was torture, listening to the clock tick and watching people around us going through the old magazines, and watching other kids going through old toys in the milk crate, and watching a bloke come in on crutches and put his leg up on a chair and get a weight off, and finally hearing a woman come out from behind the rubber door with a clipboard in her hands, saying, ‘Atley-Haines?’

  I thought, Atley-Haines? Who is that? It didn’t immediately register but Fat jumped straight up and the woman with the clipboard said, ‘You’re Seth’s mother?’ and Fat nodded, and the woman said, ‘Would you come with me?’ and Fat and Haines, they both started following, and I said, ‘I’m coming, too’ and the woman looked at Fat, and Fat nodded, so all three of us went through the rubber doors, and into a small room, with a table and plastic chairs. I said, ‘What’s this?’ and ‘Where’s Seth?’ and the woman said, ‘Seth’s in emergency’ and I said, ‘Well, let’s go straight there. Let’s do the paperwork later’ but the woman said, ‘Seth’s been stabilised. We need to talk to his mother’ and she walked back out the way she’d come.

  I pulled out a plastic chair – they had those ones with brown steel legs, like from Fat’s primary school – and I motioned for Fat to sit down, and Haines took a chair, too, and I couldn’t help thinking how stupid he looked, so bloody enormous, so tattooed, with that big forehead, those big hands, in that little chair.

  We didn’t have to wait long for the people who wanted to see Fat. They were two women – one young, maybe 20, or 22, and the other one older, like in her 50s – and straightaway, I thought, they aren’t doctors. Don’t ask me how I knew. It was something about the way they looked, too scruffy, and not with the right look of caring that you get with doctors.

  They introduced themselves. I don’t remember their names. I do remember they said they weren’t from Forster. They were from the John Hunter, the big hospital nearer Newcastle, and like I thought, they weren’t doctors. They were social workers. It wasn’t the first time I’d met one. We’d put on a few at the Shire, starting in the early 1980s. They were people who were supposed to dream up ideas for what local kids could do, or else be in charge of some graffiti project that made the town look worse. I couldn’t see the point of them.

  The older one, she spoke first. She said, ‘Donna-Faye, we’d like to talk to you about Seth, about what happened to Seth.’ I thought, Well, this is ridiculous. We haven’t even seen the doctor. What were we supposed to talk about? I said, ‘Where is Seth?’ and ‘When can we actually see Seth?’ and that’s when the younger one piped up, and said, ‘Seth’s going to be transferred to John Hunter’ and that made my blood run cold, because like everyone in Forster, I knew, if the local hospital couldn’t handle something, it was down to John Hunter, so if Seth was going to John Hunter, something was serious, and something was up.

  I said, ‘When can we see the doctor?’ but I might as well have been talking to myself, in terms of the answers I got. The younger woman, she was pulling sheets of paper out of a manila folder and passing them across the table to Fat, and saying they were the transfer papers, and could she sign them, so the hospital could get the ambulance on its way? Fat was signing and crying and signing and crying, and then when everything was signed, the younger lady pulled the paperwork together and shoved it back in the envelope and left the room and then came back and sat down, and that’s when the older one got down to what was really going on, which was basically that they were about to accuse my daughter of bashing her own son.

  They didn’t come out and say that. Not straightaway. What they tried to do instead was to trick Fat into admitting that was what she’d done, or else get her or Haines to dob the other one in. That was the name of the game, I can see that now.

  The older one, she said, ‘Ms Atley, how old is Seth?’ and I thought, come on, they know how old he is! They’ve just come up with a phone book’s worth of documents on him. But Fat said, ‘He was born December 23’ and the two women, they nodded, and they said, ‘So, about 14 weeks, then?’ and Fat nodded, and said, ‘He just got a three-month booster’ and they nodded and smiled, and the older one said, ‘And why did you bring Seth into the hospital today, Ms Atley?’ and Fat told her what she’d told me. ‘He was dozy, and he was chucking up, and we didn’t know what was wrong with him.’

  The older social worker said, ‘And was that last night he was vomiting, or was that this morning, or when?’ and Fat said, ‘Well, I worked the night shift last night’ and that seemed to surprise the two women, because they looked at each other, one of those looks that gives everything away, and then the older one said, ‘You’re working the night shift? You’ve got a 14-week-old baby!’ and Fat said yes, she was doing three nights a week to Woolies, stacking the shelves. Haines didn’t say anything, didn’t even look ashamed of himself, which surely he must have been, because what kind of man, what kind of father, sends a young mother out to the night shift with a baby not three months old? But from Fat’s point of view, what choice did she have? Haines might have had money for his V8 ute but nine times in 10, when I went around there, it was beer in the fridge and no milk, and I don’t think that would have changed just because there was suddenly a baby on the scene.

  But anyway, the older lady said, ‘What time did you get home last night?’ and Fat said, ‘I finished up around midnight’ and the older lady said, ‘And was Seth asleep?’ and Fat said, ‘Paul tried to put him down, but he wouldn’t go down, and in the end, he’d had to put him in the cot, but he was still crying a lot.’

  The older lady said, ‘Oh, you poor thing! It must have been exhausting for you, to come in after a long shift, and have to settle the baby’ and Fat said, ‘Paul said he was crying all night.’

  The younger lady said, ‘Does Seth cry often?’ but before Fat could answer, Haines jumped in and said, ‘He never bloody stops’ and the older lady, she lit up at that, she put on this fake smile, and she said, ‘Oh, that can be so difficult, can’t it? That can be so hard when the baby won’t settle’ and she smiled at Fat, and she smiled at Haines, and I thought, Hang on, what is going on here? Where is this heading? but the younger one had jumped in, and she was saying, ‘So frustrating! Some babies, they just won’t settle!’ and Haines, being the dickhead, couldn’t stop himself from agreeing with her, saying, ‘Yeah, this one’s a real bastard.’

  Fat said, ‘I tried to give him the bottle. Paul had been trying to give him the bottle but he’d been chucking it up everywhere’ and again, the older social worker jumped in and said, ‘And that must have been so frustrating! Did you find that frustrating?’ And again, there was this brightness in her voice, like she understood, like she was concerned, like she got that Haines and Fat were struggling with this baby and everybody knew how hard that could be, and there was no shame in saying they weren’t coping. Encouraged by her, Haines said, ‘The doctor said he’s got the colic’ and Fat said, ‘Not colic. He said reflux’ and Haines said, ‘Colic’ and Fat went mute.

  The older woman said, ‘Well, colic or reflux, that must make it more difficult to settle him’ and then she said, ‘So, did Seth settle at all last night? Did anyone get any sleep?’ and Fat said, no, it just got to the point where she just gave up and put the baby in the cot and let him cry it out and drop off, and then it was morning, and she’d gone in to check on him, and he was all floppy.

  The older woman, she was making clucking noises through all of this, sympathetic noises, nodding her head. She said, ‘Mmm, floppy, and anything else? He was vomiting, you said?’ and Fat said, ‘He’d chucked up all over the cot. There was chuck all over him’ and she’d peeled back his nappy and it was yellow poo, exploded out of his nappy, all over his back, and Haines said, ‘And it stunk like anything’ and the older woman, she was tut-tutting and nodding, and saying, ‘That’s got to be frustrating! Now you’ve got all that cleaning up to do!’ and Fat was saying, ‘I get more tired than anything’ and the younger social worker was saying, ‘I’m sure you do! You must!’ and then
, ‘And what about you, Dad?’ not meaning me, but meaning Haines. ‘You must find it frustrating, wanting to help and not really knowing what to do to help?’ and Haines, he snorted and said, ‘Doesn’t matter what I do. That kid pays no respect to me.’

  There was a bit of silence then, just half a second of silence, maybe only enough for me to pick up that the mood was changing, and then the younger social worker said, ‘You know, sometimes, parents, they try everything with a newborn baby, and it’s so, so hard. It seems like nothing you can do will solve the baby’s problems. The baby just cries and cries and cries.’ And I thought, What is she getting at? But of course, I knew. I knew what was coming. They were about to point the finger. I was ready for it but I’m not that sure Fat was ready for it.

  The older social worker, she said, ‘Sometimes, when you’re handling a baby, you can lose your grip and drop the baby when a baby is fussing or crying or screaming. You didn’t drop the baby, did you?’

  Fat shook her head, no. The older woman, she then said, ‘And he didn’t fall, did he? He didn’t roll off the table or anything, while you were trying to change him, did he? He didn’t fall?’