The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  The American geneticist Hermann Muller — once a student of Thomas Hunt Morgan — was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1946 for the discovery that gene mutations can be induced by X-rays. For many years prior to 1946, Muller had been warning of the long-term danger of human exposure to radiation: since 1926 his experiments on Drosophila had shown a clear quantitative connection between radiation dose and lethal mutations. His Nobel Prize came the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when, in the days following the explosions, thousands of Japanese died of radiation sickness. The rate of childhood leukaemia in the region around those two cities has doubled in the last five years. The Japanese now call it atom-bomb sickness.

  Plants are being irradiated too, so as to bring about mutations that might confer better disease resistance and yield. A garden at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New Jersey, uses gamma rays to irradiate all manner of plants — peppermint, tomatoes, grapefruit — in the hope their progeny will be bigger, better, stronger. He finds an aerial photograph of the Brookhaven garden in Life magazine. The plants stand in concentric circles around the radiation source, a giant metal totem in the centre of the field. Is it simply coincidence that from the air the shape of the garden bears an uncanny resemblance to the radiation hazard symbol? Plants closest to the radiation source wither and die. Those a little further away are riddled with tumours. It’s the plants just distal to these cancerous ones — genetically altered, phenotypically normal — that hold the most interest. When workers need to enter the garden to water and weed, just as he does in the glasshouse, the radiation source is lowered into a lead-lined chamber below the ground. A series of fences and alarms keep curious passers-by from stumbling into a radiation zone.

  On a Tuesday evening in mid-January, during a week of scorching weather, he lies on his bed with the windows open wide. Cool air rises from Bert’s freshly watered grass. His shoulders are burned from an afternoon at the Baths: radiation from the sun, altering the cells of his skin. He should be more careful. Cicadas start up, first one and then several — an orchestra of male imagoes, vibrating with love. Hanna, his bright light, his own warmth and glow. He’s sick, but not from her presence; it’s the lack of her that makes him weak.

  And on the wireless, the voice of a Western Australian fisherman just back from the Montebello Islands: I saw hundreds of thousands of dead turtles on the beach. The place was just littered with dead turtles from one end to the other.

  ~

  At the insistence of his old man, Bob Cameron’s come back to Kyneton for his four-week country rotation. A stint in Bendigo or Mildura with his mates would have been a helluva lot more lively: a shitload more drinking and a few pretty nurses, a bloke can only hope. This place is a desert for pretty girls. Still, there are some advantages to coming home. He can skive off from the surgery when he’s sick of it, and miss the odd early morning hospital round. His own father’s hardly likely to give him a bad report. Of course, his mother makes a fuss of him, but that has its advantages, too. Better food than Ormond, for starters. And when it comes to sleeping in, she’ll always take his side.

  His father’s doing his lunchtime visits. By rights Bob should have gone with the old man, but he had wandered off down Mollison Street to buy cigarettes, and by the time he came back, his father had left. Alone in the surgery and time to kill: why not flick through the files of the people he knows? How many of them can he find who’ve had the clap? There’d be a few with alcoholic cirrhosis, especially the Micks.

  He strains to remember the names of his primary-school cohort — Fairless, Minogue, Corrigan, that pain-in-the-arse Moran girl — but his trailing fingers stop at the drawer marked Q. He pulls it open and flicks through the cards. Francis Quinn: there it is. A single card. He reads the final entry in his old man’s hand. April 1947. He reads it again. Fuck.

  19

  The snuffing out of first love: that sad, exquisite bruising. Mary doesn’t know it yet, but she’ll paint that feeling out.

  Robbie’s been away in Kyneton, working with his father for one whole month, and to welcome him back she’s laid a little table in her bedroom. A plate of lamingtons, his favourite, sits nicely by a jar filled with lavender, gathered last night from someone’s garden in Robe Street. ‘Who did you see in Kyneton?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘I don’t mean your patients. People in the street.’

  ‘I didn’t see your mother, if that’s what you mean.’ He puts his hand to her hair and ruffles it gently. ‘Why don’t you make it up with her, Mary? Go home, at least for a while?’

  She stands back and looks at him. He lowers his eyes. Something’s changed. Something’s happened. ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  He grabs her waist. ‘I missed you, that’s all.’

  Robbie’s always gone on about pregnancy and venereal disease: ‘syphilitic chancre’ is one of his favourite phrases. After they’ve made love — briefly, distractedly — he starts again on the subject, but this time there’s a touch of whimsy to his bossiness, as if his heart just isn’t in it. ‘I don’t know why you keep going on about it,’ she tells him as she wriggles back into her skirt. ‘I’m not one of your patients. I don’t want a baby — not yet, anyway. I want to keep painting instead.’

  A queer defeated look spreads over his face. He sits cross-legged, picking at a toenail, and stands up from the bed. He walks to the window. When he turns back he has his mask on: that irritated know-it-all lift of the brow.

  ‘Don’t use your doctor look on me,’ she says.

  The tea’s grown tepid. She pours it anyway and they sit on the bed to drink it. ‘I have to go downstairs in a moment,’ she says. ‘The kitchen needs cleaning.’ It’s not quite true: the kitchen can wait. She drags Robbie’s jacket from the foot of the bed, rifles through his pockets for a cigarette and matches, and smokes at the open window. The sight of the white-capped water only adds to her restlessness. She turns back to Robbie. ‘Are you ashamed of me because I work in a café?’

  ‘It’s not exactly something to be shouting from the rooftops,’ Robbie says through a mouthful of cake.

  ‘It’s for room and board, Robbie. It’s not who I am.’ She strides across the room, stopping to crush her cigarette into a saucer on the table. She’d hauled the table upstairs from the shed, hidden its shabbiness from Robbie with one of Molly’s tablecloths. The lavender jar taunts her. She pulls out one of the canvasses stacked against the wall. She didn’t know she would paint more roses — a series, Donald said — until after the first canvas was finished. Now she’s painted three, and still she’s not done with Robbie’s flowers of long ago. The secret, honeyed comfort she’d extracted from emptiness.

  He squints at the canvas. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘That it means something to you.’ She puts it down, picks up another. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘It looks pretty much the same.’

  ‘Are you trying to upset me?’

  He sighs. ‘Listen, we have fun together, don’t we? But we’re chalk and cheese, you and me. Outside of this,’ he takes in her tiny room with a sweep of his hand, ‘we don’t have much in common. Except where we once lived, and the fact that we’re both glad to be out of there.’

  He’s begging her to do it. He won’t do it himself: he doesn’t have the courage. She’ll do it for the love of him, for old sweet times. ‘Oh, Robbie,’ she begins with an aching heart. No more comfort to be had.

  ~

  Tibble and his Camberwell Grammar coterie can always be found at the Clyde on Friday afternoons. Today it’s Tibble’s birthday, so Dominic joins them. The plan is simple: get Tibble well and truly pissed. Tibble’s all for the idea.

  The third beer’s going down nicely — Tibble’s onto his fourth, but who’s counting? — when Dom sees Robbie Cameron weaving through the crowd towards him. He hasn’t seen him since he asked abou
t Mary, a year ago, perhaps more.

  ‘Quinn,’ Robbie says. ‘Dominic fucking Quinn. Of all people.’ It’s clear he’s pretty far gone.

  He beckons Dom closer. ‘You wanna know something about your sister? Is that what you want?’ He laughs and thrusts his hips back and forth, then teeters and slumps against Dom. ‘She’s a goer, old Mary.’

  ‘What? Stand up, you bastard,’ Dom says through his teeth. His heart is beating fit to explode. Two fistfuls of Cameron’s shirt. Has he known all this time?

  Then Tibble’s by his side, squaring up to Cameron. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Leave it,’ Dom warns Tibble, stepping between him and Robbie, who’s collapsed against the bar. ‘I’ll handle this.’

  But Tibble’s like a dog with a bone. ‘What’s it about, mate? You gonna fight him?’

  ‘My sister,’ Dom whispers in Tibble’s ear. ‘He’s going to tell me —’

  Tibble twigs. ‘This the bloke from your home town? Jesus Christ! Don’t you dare fight him without me.’ Tibble’s half-tanked. ‘I’m a Nasho vet, remember. I’m as ready for a fight as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘You’re the first on my list. Not yet though, all right?’ Dom swings back to Robbie. ‘You need some air.’ He takes Cameron by the shoulders and propels him through the bar and out into the street. ‘Where’s Mary?’

  ‘In a shack on St Kilda pier.’

  ‘You having me on?’

  ‘It’s fucking true.’ Robbie’s instantly morose. ‘She’s cut me loose, mate. Told me I didn’t think enough of her. No, let me get it right. She said I didn’t think enough of her art.’ He tugs on Dom’s sleeve. ‘She was sweet, you know? Always made me feel good. Never nagged. And a bloody good root.’ He puts his hand to his mouth in mock dismay. ‘Not that you want to hear that.’

  Dom manoeuvres Cameron into the alley next to the pub, where he props him against the wall and shakes him until his perfect teeth chatter in his skull. ‘You dirty lying bastard. You knew we were looking for her and you never let on. Four fucking years she’s been missing.’ Four years. Only now does the number seem incomprehensible, a fucking disgrace. ‘Thank Christ she’s finally realised what a scumbag you are.’ Dom lets Cameron go, and stands back as he sinks to his knees and vomits. ‘Feeling better now, mate?’ His boot nudges Robbie’s guts. Never kick a man when he’s down. He lifts his foot away. The soldier he never was.

  Robbie drags his sleeve across his mouth. ‘Think you’re so fucking righteous? That’s not all I know, Quinn.’ He takes Dominic’s proffered hand and rises slowly to his feet. He drops his head to Dom’s ear. ‘Your father.’

  Immediately Dom is back there: hands pressed against the cold hallway wall; red-darned socks on arched, narrow feet; a bare branch scraping against a window as he sat with his mother in the cold silence. The journey from Baynton to Mair Street — over and over he’s traced it in his head, these past five, almost six, years; every time a different route, fewer impediments, but above all the thought of him running faster, faster. Julius Cameron would know. So might his son.

  ‘Tell me.’ It’s a command, a plea. For old times’ sake, those train trips we took through the English countryside. Fyffe’s fucking bananas. You let me take the controls sometimes.

  ‘Forget it.’ Robbie shakes his head. ‘I don’t know anything.’ He makes to stagger back inside.

  Dom slides his fists into Cameron’s armpits and shoves him back against the wall. Robbie leans into him like a rag doll. ‘All right, all right. The diagnosis, mate. I saw it. Huntington’s chorea. You’re fucked. Your whole family’s fucked.’

  The words run together: harndindernskorea. Still, he understands. ‘Bullshit,’ he says. ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ How does he know what Robbie says isn’t true? Think, he exhorts himself. ‘My dad died suddenly. Huntington’s is a gradual disease.’ He’s heard about it in genetics lectures. Autosomal dominant, classic Mendelian inheritance — one gene from one parent and you’ve got the disease. A family curse. Decreasing concentration and motivation, memory decline, depressive symptoms, muscle weakness, tremor, involuntary jerking of the limbs. ‘Sounds like you on a Friday night,’ he’d whispered to Tibble in the lecture hall.

  ‘Not how he died. A heart attack, I know. I saw it written there. Anyhow, some might say better a quick end, you know?’ Robbie rallies, lifts his head. ‘But he had Huntington’s all right. It was there in his notes, in my old man’s handwriting. Saw it when I was home, helping out in the surgery. Medical student’s privilege, y’know?’ He rests his hands on Dom’s shoulders and leans into him. ‘It’s in your family. Fucking bad luck. Mary, I don’t like to think of her —’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ What else can he say? What other defence is open to him?

  ‘Fuck, mate.’ Robbie’s hands are around his neck, dragging him down — or perhaps holding him up. ‘Fuck, mate. I thought you knew.’

  Along Royal Parade, past the sandstone cloisters of the colleges and the regal spreading oaks, the cemetery on his right. On he walks, across the deserted ovals of Princes Park, the grass soft and wet against his shoes. Confidentiality, Robbie whined, crying snotty tears. Drunken fucking remorse. I shouldn’t have talked. Your sister, she was something. I didn’t breathe a word to her.

  Sydney Road. The first time Dom set eyes on it, his mother beside him on the tram; that great bloody book she’d lugged all the way from home. Melaleuca megacephala. He’d been a babe in the fucking woods back then.

  His guts lurch and tighten as he remembers Robbie’s face pressed against his shirt. Maybe neither of you’ll get it. He’d held him, his childhood friend, his own snot and tears mixing with Robbie’s.

  Cameron’s a fucking liar. Only time will tell, every truthful cell of his body knowing what his conscious mind denies. No arguing with science. No arguing with that fifty per cent chance, a fucking bob each way.

  Korea, chorea. His war, after all.

  He slumps against the sill of a butcher’s window, his face in his hands. His father dead; his mother faraway and silent; his only sister a pale phantom, her sketches and letters meant to be kind but really a cruelty, a taunt. Jesus fucking Christ, what lottery ticket has he drawn?

  He needs to speak to Hanna. He finds a telephone box on Sydney Road and calls her house. ‘She isn’t home,’ her mother says, in a voice like Hanna’s. ‘Are you Dominic?’

  ‘You know about me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pauses. ‘I know your name, and a few other things.’

  He presses on, determined not to be undone by the gentle reproach in her voice. That she could be so gentle. ‘Please,’ he begins. ‘Please, could you ask her to meet me tomorrow? The University Café at ten o’clock?’

  ‘You sound upset. Are you in trouble?’

  ‘No. Yes. I just need to see her.’

  20

  Whenever she sat against her father’s legs he’d keep them still for her, knowing, so it seemed, that she imagined him as the trunk of a tree, patient and solid, offering protection. She scribbled in her exercise book, listening to his breathing and the muted swish of the newspaper turning in his hands — that soft, steady rustling was the sound of her father’s contentment.

  She’d been shopping with Joan at Nuttall’s, sifting through trays of ribbon and cards of lace. Mrs Corrigan was making Joan a new winter dress. They’d drunk a milkshake at the Swallow tearooms: hers had caramel topping, vanilla ice cream and a pink-striped straw. She’d come home singing to herself, thinking about those shining ribbons, opening the front gate just as Dom rounded the back of the house. He took her inside, where her mother told her that her that her father had been dead for two hours. It seemed like news delivered on a postcard from a faraway place; something important, yet so distant that, when she and Dom were together in their room, all she could say was, ‘Did he say goodbye?’ Dom didn’t know, so she imagined he’d whispered
it while he was alone, before Dr Cameron came.

  Her mother hadn’t let her see him. She’d guarded the door to the front room like the Jarvis’ Alsatian, even locking it with a key that she carried around her neck until the undertakers came. Mary had been frightened by the black of her mother’s eyes, the circular flush of her cheeks, as if her mother had dipped a powder puff in rouge and slapped it, whack, whack, against her face. The cheeks and eyes of a china doll.

  The rest of the day took on a hazy, dream-like feel. She and Dom lay on their beds as the rain fell heavy on the roof, the sound at once commonplace and strange, just like death.

  ‘When did you last see him?’ she asked her brother.

  ‘This morning, when I brought him the paper. He let me keep the change.’

  ‘When I left the house this morning I kissed him and told him I loved him.’

  ‘You never did,’ Dom said. He was crying, just quietly. ‘That’s a lie.’

  She remembers the ordinariness of that day, despite the milkshake and the length of green satin ribbon she’d slipped into her pocket as Mrs Corrigan talked to Evelyn Kernihan about patterns. Pistachio green, it was. She knows there was something memorable in her last glimpse of him. If not a declaration of love then a look, and her hand, albeit briefly, in his, so that she felt it shaking, trembling like a leaf on a twig, like the faintest shock of an earthquake a thousand miles away.

  ~

  The benign touch of autumn sunlight, Saturday-morning shoppers, the smell of coffee and warm croissants at the University Café. Dom takes a seat at a corner table facing the door. She might not come. He closes his eyes, and there he is again, running from the house on Baynton Street, across Powlett and Ebden, the Hennessys’ dog panting at his heels, into the crowded footpath on Mollison. Dodging the arc of Fairless’ broom, turning right into Mair Street and into the waiting room. This time it’s for himself that he runs, the race of his life against lengthening odds. Run, Quinn, run like the blazes or your wish won’t come true. He runs so that Hanna will walk through that door before he, like his father, dies of a broken heart.