by Lisa Gorton
The lift doors opened onto a pale corridor. On the wall facing the lift, a sign said: Intensive Care. A nurse in soft-soled white shoes stepped out from behind the desk. Around her like a dome of glass she carried an air of controlled and deliberate quietness. ‘Yes,’ she kept murmuring, ‘Yes,’ while Scott explained. ‘Yes, family only, I’m afraid. You’re very welcome to wait here.’ She pointed Scott to a low chair and took charge of Audrey’s wheelchair.
‘We’ll just wash our hands,’ she said, stopping by a sink set into the wall. ‘Your grandfather is it, dear?’ she said, looking at Kit, while she ran antiseptic soap around Audrey’s wrists and soft-pinched soap down the webbing of her fingers. ‘He’s going to look a bit different,’ she said, setting Audrey’s hands back on the armrests, giving the top of one hand a little pat.
Audrey’s lower lip was jutting. She had slid out her bottom teeth and was sucking on them. The nurse was expertly brisk. With a single movement, she got the wheelchair through an automatic door. For Kit the worst was that she felt nothing: at least, nothing adequate. Low windows opened onto the corridor. Through one of them Kit saw the back of Scott’s head. There was a nurse seated by each bed. On the beds alongside them bodies rested head to the wall, toes to the middle of the room. With their little heartbeat-like lights, the machines above each bed seemed the most living things in the room. To Kit, they seemed to be drawing their life from the bodies their lines came out of.
And there was her aunt, looming out of the dimness with outstretched arms; terrible, the smile on her face. She pressed Kit’s cheek into her shirt buttons. Kit thought of Scott, safely in the corridor outside. With her hands on Kit’s shoulders, she put her at arm’s length. ‘Not what we wanted for your time with us.’
‘I packed your things.’
Treen touched her cheek. ‘Thank you dear.’
A nurse, seated by another bed, lifted her head.
Treen, with a sad exalted smile, turned towards the bed. On the white sheet Patrick’s hands lay motionless. The skin, with its few white hairs, looked like wax. The fingers were curled in and had no tension in them. The nails were ridged and yellow. Kit thought how strange and even repellent fingers were: like tendrils, like sea plants, closing and opening.
Patrick’s head emerged hugely from the covering. There was something taped to his mouth. A machine was breathing for him, regular gasping breaths. The skin of his face had an odd sheen and was so pale that the veins at the sides of his cheeks showed. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth had stretched smooth. Only a fold of skin ran from the outside corner of his eyes down to his jaw. Impossible to imagine that head fallen in full sunlight onto the pavement by the ice-cream shop, alongside torn ice cream wrappers and children on plastic seats. He did not look in pain but as though he was concentrating on something far off—as though, with immense politeness, he had drawn back from the violence of that apparatus shoved into his mouth.
More tape on the side of his neck: a needle there, in the vein. He was not dressed. His scrawny shoulders showed over the top of the sheet, the cleft in his throat where a few long hairs survived his shaving. For Kit that nakedness was a shock, as though his body was dead already and only his head was alive, his face closed up in its expression of forbearance. His hair was perfect still, curving in white waves back from his forehead.
‘Dear…’ Treen brought her face around to Kit. Her eyebrows, raised, made her whole face startling. ‘The nurse says…She feels all Dad’s family should be here. I just wondered, if you did have your phone with you…’ She put her hand on Kit’s shoulder. ‘I know you’ll be needing your mother. I have to stay with Audrey, you see. The nurse wants a little chat.’
With dazed obedience, Kit produced her phone from her pocket.
‘Oh no, not here. No—the machines.’ She glanced out to the corridor. ‘Scott’s waiting, is he? Could he take you downstairs, do you think?’
Kit was released into the corridor. Scott, his face in profile, sat straight-backed on a low chair, his suit coat carefully draped over one knee. He was so still he could have been asleep, except that he was staring with strange fixity at the wall ahead of him. Something about Kit’s presence caught his attention. He jerked his head around. The expression on his face, before he brought her into focus, was frighteningly blank.
‘Alright?’ he said, with automatic liveliness, starting to his feet.
‘I have to call Mum.’ She looked around hopelessly. ‘Where should I…’ How strange it all was: the corridor’s stunned quiet, in which everything they said, all their gestures, echoed. They might have been underground. The corridor narrowed into the distance without showing any less light. Looking down, Kit saw that she had several faint shadows.
‘We’ll go downstairs. I’ll leave this with the nurse.’ He went across and dropped Kit’s bag, full of Treen’s things, by the desk.
‘So. This phone call.’ In the lift he stood with closed up thoughts, gazing down at his shoes. At the bottom, he held the lift doors open with one arm, smiling remotely. ‘Out,’ he ordered. ‘Let’s get some air.’
She was surprised that it was day still. Almost five in the afternoon and still the bitumen burned up through the soles of her shoes.
‘My parents died here,’ he said.
‘Here?’ she repeated stupidly, looking across the carpark at a line of gum trees, not thriving in the hard-packed dirt.
She caught him looking at her, amusement flickering across his face.
‘Not in the carpark. The hospital. Listen, do you mind if we get across to that milk bar before closing? I’ve given up smoking and I desperately need a cigarette. There’s a nasty little park the other side. We can call from there.’
He put his arm around her, shepherding her across the road, her shadow running along beside her like a short-legged dog. Patrick had collapsed on a footpath. The wrongness of it—Kit saw, as if from his eye-view, shoes hurrying past, the tyres of a car—a wrongness that distorted, like petrol haze, every ordinary view.
The door of the milk bar, swinging shut behind him, set off a bell. Even under the milk bar’s awning the air was dense with heat. Across the road, a wall of orange brick marked off a row of low, square, orange-brick houses. Silent under their tiled roofs, they looked as though nobody had ever gone in or out of them. Kit thought: If I screamed here it would go on and on and nothing would happen.
Set against the milk bar’s tiled wall, the front covers of newspapers and magazines were already yellowing in their metal cages. ‘Rapist Walks Free’, ‘Amazing Bikini Bodies’, ‘Stars Without Makeup’. Stacked cardboard boxes blocked the inside of the window: bottles of reef oil, shampoo, tomato sauce, packets of Arnott’s biscuits. She thought: But I can’t stay in the house by myself.
‘I got your sweets,’ said Scott, holding out a white paper bag. He lit up a cigarette, breathed out. With the tips of his fingers he touched the small of her back; the other hand, holding the cigarette, gestured towards the park.
Hardly a park: a patch of ground the size of four parked cars between the newsagent and a high wooden fence. One tree with a park bench under it: dank-looking ground scattered with cigarette butts. In a corner by the footpath the rubbish bin overflowed with icy pole wrappers and soft drink cans. Wasps groggily circled there. Along the fence dark green plants with fleshy stalks flourished in the shade. She sat beside him on the bench. The smell of his cigarette mixed strangely with the taste of her musk stick.
‘You do realise he’s dying?’ he said. ‘That will have to be got across. She’ll argue; people always do with bad news. You must tell her to come now, right away, at once.’
Chapter Fifteen
Anna sat forward over the steering wheel, cold in her summer dress. It had been dark when she set off: an hour driving at the same speed along the highway, its white painted lines rising towards the headlights. Now the long-shadowed early morning country poured past: dead trees, weatherboard houses with gardens the highway cut through. The pho
ne rang— Peter again. He had a reverence for grief. His messages this morning had been abashed, chivalric. Hearing them, she had thought first, how honourable he is. She had not liked herself for her next thought: that he would stop pressing her for a decision now. She had months more. How bloodless she felt. And yet last night, leaving a message on his phone, the nervous formality of her voice had surprised her: she had heard in it a level of feeling that she could not now discover in herself. Or was this feeling, she asked herself: this noticing so much she was shut off from, all that unmeaning country outside her car?
An oncoming car sent its headlights over a rise. It would have been better, she thought now, to have set off at once, that first quarter-hour after the phone call. There would have been something saving in rush, disorder. Last night, standing over the clothes set out on her bed, the first shock had frozen. Not grief, not sadness even, but only this dread, her thoughts skittering back from what might come, so that she had been unable to pack even. She had spent an hour picking things up and putting them down until in the end she had taken down her Samsonite suitcase and put all of it in…Yes, quickly, the black suit.
The phone had rung out in her mother-in-law’s house. Anna had rung again immediately. Sitting on the edge of the bed, three times she had rung until she had felt almost sorry for Verity’s phone ringing on and on from its table by the armchair in that room overlooking the tops of trees in the park. Those private London parks, she thought, with their wrought metal fences, their antique keys. Dialling Matt’s mobile number, all at once the back of her wrist had come up against her mouth. She had thought: I can’t speak to him now. Remembering, she felt frightened. If he had answered, she thought, if I had spoken to him then, I could not have stopped speaking. I would have told him everything.
There was the pine tree, the one she and Treen had always called the Christmas tree, marking the turn-off. It was astonishing to her, suddenly, that the town was still here—unthought of, actual; so that as the car came over the crest past the post office and she turned onto Main Street and saw the bay she felt that she was driving back into her own childhood: here it all was, around her still.
The buildings were bright, freshly painted. The new concrete roundabout struck her, that moment, as not new but wrong. Till that moment, she had not noticed that it was morning. She pulled over and turned off the headlights. She thought: it is not what people say. The town is not smaller. Memory had reduced it to three shops on a hill, to the sound of a screen door. In truth this town was pretty, charming even, with its striped awnings, bright flags outside the ice-cream shop. The sea opened out behind it an expanse of sky. No, the town itself could not serve any longer as a reason for how unbearable it had been…
She pressed the dry skin under her eyes, surprised by how normal her face looked in the rear-view mirror. Only, she had chewed all the lipstick off her lower lip. Painting more on, it was a relief to grimace. She realised how rigid her face had been. The hospital was another half-hour’s drive along the main road. She had an image of the road unrolling out from here as though it went through no country. I need a coffee, she thought, before I face them.
Only the bakery was open. The car door thudded back on her. Car doors always had done that here, she remembered; the gutters were too deep on the street, trapping anyone stepping out onto the road.
The sea was right there, at the end of the street, closer than she remembered, closer than it had looked from inside the car. Now it was all dazzle: the light struck off it was white and looked vertical. She could hear gulls. Involuntarily her hand came up to shield her cheek. Feeling swerved away from so much exposure.
On the footpath, with exaggerated care, she zipped the keys into the side pocket of her bag. She was in just that state, she knew, in which she would lose her keys. She straightened up. In that instant the town built itself around her: the way the path by the sea cut under low branches, sudden greeny dark…Out there, the wind that came in off the sea was cold, blew sand against her shins.
This was more than she had felt that time she came here with Matt when Kit was how old? When he had looked up at the town from where they stood by the bay, Kit playing in the dirty sand at their feet, and declared that what was wrong with the town was that there was nothing wrong with it. ‘It’s like a child’s toy,’ he had said, and touched her back: ‘Did you really grow up here?’ Kit must have been four years old, Anna thought. She had been making sandcastles though the bay sand had always been too coarse for them; they had crumbled.
The bakery was shut off behind tinted glass. Its uncirculated air was thick with the smell of stale biscuits. In the permanent half-light the drinks fridge glowed like a shrine. All three women behind the counter looked up as Anna came in, each adopting at once the same stubborn expression. Anna said to herself: But they’re the same women as before: the same closed-up faces that don’t move when they speak, the same sour assessing look out from under their caps of brown frizzed hair. She never had been able to feel indifferent to their contempt. Now here she was again parodying herself, ordering a strong three-quarter latte with an overdone, conciliatory charm, which would only antagonise them more. She took herself over to the freezer full of birthday cakes: immense, garish, coated with acrylic-coloured frosting. How long had they been in there; how long would they last? From the coffee machine, there came the smell of burning milk.
The coffee was terrible. Stepping out into the street’s glare she seemed to step as suddenly into a longing for Kit: a feeling as physical as hunger. Stopped there, on the footpath, she looked straight into the light vibrating off the sea and felt that Kit would step right out of it, out of one of those wavering blotches of dark onto the footpath. Because where was Kit? Typical of her not to be answering her phone. Anna heard again that thin voice: ‘Patrick’s had a heart attack.’ That abruptness had made Anna feel that Kit was not anywhere. Shock happened nowhere, and had no place. Now Anna looked at the glassy shops, the town’s closed front, and it was suddenly the worst thing of all, unbearable, not to know where her daughter was.
Who did step from a door onto the footpath, that instant, was Scott. She recognised him at once, and with a flaring annoyance. She had not seen him since she left for England. She had not once thought of him. He had been shut up with all this, what she had left behind. He had belonged there; so that now, as he came down the street towards her with his hands extended, his face set in an expression of delighted surprise, it was her own past he broke open.
‘Anna,’ he cried.
‘You’re still here.’
‘I’m contemplating escape, actually.’ He raised his eyebrows, smiled archly. ‘Maybe even Melbourne.’
‘Why not,’ she said, and looked at her coffee cup. ‘I can’t drink this.’
‘From the bakery? They use instant.’
‘In their espresso machine?’
He had always come too close, she remembered: had always stood in what she called breathing distance. Now it was a relief to turn away, to dump the almost full cup in the bin and hear it spill. After more than twenty years she recognised his manner, his instant assumption of confidentiality, his way of smirking as he talked as though the two of them understood each other quite apart from all they said: the usual things which, in a concession to public manners, they had agreed to say, as though the concession itself was a source of sly amusement to them. She felt a sort of remote pity for the person she had been back then. All the eye makeup, the white face powder, those sagging op-shop fifties dresses…Never friendship, exactly, but the two of them holding court for each other, making something theatrical out of their loneliness and isolation. Once, she remembered, they had stolen a bottle of Stone’s ginger wine and drunk it out in the sand dunes: swigging from the bottle, seagulls tilting over the waves. They had only done it once. Still, the nausea of that afternoon tinged all she remembered of her time with him. Those subdued relentless parents, that ugly brick house, his mother on her knees cleaning the linoleum every morning�
�the mother who had once confided that she didn’t like going on holiday because of how the dust would build up on her ornaments. The father—nicknamed Skip—had been self-consciously practical, forever fixing the car himself, his bluff manner mesmerising because of a bewilderment in his eyes—the expression of someone laughing at a joke he hadn’t understood.
Scott said: ‘There’s a bike track now. And the Coles is new. They knocked down the corner shop…’ She frowned. ‘Old Izzie!’ he cried out. ‘You remember! Used to kick you out for reading all her magazines.’
She shook her head, smiled ruefully. ‘Sorry.’
Except that of course she did remember: at her back, a stand of books, the pages yellowed and split with damp; sand underfoot; over there, elbows on the counter, Izzie sucking at her gums, never bothering to put her teeth in when there were only kids in the store. The hair along her upper lip had been white like a milk stain. ‘Not a bloody library,’ she had burst out, slapping her hand on the countertop.
‘Listen, I should go,’ Anna said. ‘Dad’s in hospital.’
Scott’s expression changed. He always had done that, she remembered: matched his face to other people’s faces. ‘I saw him yesterday.’
‘You saw him?’
‘I took Kit in.’
‘You?’ she repeated stupidly. ‘Where was Treen?’
He pushed his lips out. ‘Poor Treen,’ he said piously. ‘Right beside him when it happened.’
Anna stared past him, not trusting herself to speak. She could feel him watching, eager to be comforting, to take her hand or touch her back. She would not ask him where Kit was. She would not let him tell her anything about her own daughter. Out there a sailing boat was inching across the bay. Deliberately she fixed her eyes on it: the sail, impasto white, the sea forming around it into a landscape. ‘I should thank you,’ she said at last. She collected her keys from her bag. ‘I need to go.’
