by Kylie Ladd
13
It came to Nell two nights later, when she was working in her studio. Skye was staying over at Ben’s, as she so often did these days, and Nell had the house to herself. It was a good chance to get some painting done, but Nell hadn’t achieved as much as she’d hoped. She was distracted. Ever since that dinner with Skye and Ben she’d had a vague sense of disquiet. She’d put it down to feeling bad about Hamish, but was it something else? Now, as the thought flashed across her mind, her hand was automatically stilled, the brush frozen against the canvas. She put it down and nervously wiped her hands on her smock. She was being paranoid, fanciful. The idea was ludicrous.
Nell left the room—an old shed at the back of the house, the repository of their junk over two decades of family life—to wash up in the laundry. It was a stupid thought. Ridiculous. She shook her head, scrubbing vigorously at her brushes. Crimson paint dripped into the sink like blood. It must be because of Hamish, she told herself. Of course she felt sad for him. He’d been part of their family for the past two years; he’d sat at her table, held Skye at the funeral. Ben, in contrast, was still largely a stranger. He seemed nice, and he certainly made Skye light up, but she hoped Skye knew what she was doing, giving up a man like Hamish. Hamish had been a good influence on her: older, steadier. Skye could be so impulsive. They both were, her children. That was Charlie’s legacy, never staying in a job or with the same gig for more than a few months at a time, whisking them off travelling as the whim—or a new opportunity—took him.
Nell rinsed the brushes and left them to dry beside the sink. She’d enjoyed it though, hadn’t she? She’d been like that too—always with one eye out for the next adventure. Funny how that changed as you got older. It pained her to admit it, but the other reason she worried about Skye leaving Hamish was financial. Nell had never cared about money for herself, but she wanted it for her daughter. Not riches, just enough. Enough that Skye’s art could be a vocation, not an indulgence. Enough that she wouldn’t have to keep teaching gym as her body aged and set and rebelled. Enough for a proper studio, a real career—not like her, scratching away at her paintings around midnight because she had to earn a living the rest of the day working as an assistant at a child-care centre. Nell sighed. Charlie wasn’t supposed to have died before he’d even been eligible for the pension.
Now he’d never see Skye married, never walk her down the aisle. The realisation had occurred to Nell a number of times already, but each time it bubbled to the surface it hurt afresh. She wandered into her room and sat down on the bed. Charlie had been so proud of his children. He and Nell had both wanted to have kids, but it had been him that had kept her going through the eight long years it took before Arran and Skye arrived. He was the one who’d urged her to try herbs, acupuncture, a faith healer. When those didn’t work, he was the one who researched IVF and convinced her to give it a go.
It had been a big call for him, she remembered. Charlie didn’t believe in drugs, save for the recreational kind; he hadn’t even wanted her to go on the pill for fear of what the chemicals might be doing to her body. She’d acquiesced to him, though they both hated condoms. After a couple had broken they’d switched to a diaphragm. That had been better—she’d loved the sensation of skin on skin, of having nothing between them—but not without its problems. More often than not she left out the spermicide or forgot the rubber disc altogether; on one memorable occasion she’d inserted it upside down. The split condoms, the inverted diaphragm—she should have fallen pregnant. At the time they simply thought they’d been lucky. As a rule, Charlie was. He made a decent living as a sessional musician, supplementing his income by working as a chef. When the gigs dried up, the hotels would find him a place in the kitchen; whenever he got sick of cooking, it seemed someone would ring up magically looking for a drummer or a saxophonist. At the very least they never went hungry. Charlie always knew someone who’d ordered too much meat or had bread just past the use-by date. He always managed to get something out of nothing.
Only he couldn’t seem to get her pregnant. For two years they tried by themselves, Nell growing more despondent with each fresh flush of blood. The first doctor she consulted told her to relax and stop worrying; the second asked if she actually understood the mechanics of intercourse. She picked up her bag and left without bothering to answer him.
Next came the home remedies: lying with her legs in the air for fifteen minutes after sex, taking her temperature each morning so as to plot her cycle. A girlfriend told her that drinking cough medicine would thin her cervical mucus, which aided conception; another swore by pomegranates to enhance fertility. Still she bled every four weeks like clockwork. Charlie began accompanying Nell to her appointments, and was duly sent into the bathroom with a sample jar and some skin mags. His results were fine. The infuriating thing was that Nell’s were too. She was ovulating, she was healthy—there were no obvious reasons why she couldn’t conceive. A specialist suggested she have a hysterosalpingogram—her fallopian tubes flushed with dye—as a means of removing any debris that might be impeding Charlie’s sperm. Nell lay on the table trying to ignore the bite of the speculum between her legs, and concentrated instead on visualising what was happening to her. Little bulldozers, she imagined, determinedly ploughing away the piles of garbage that lined her reproductive tract, scraping and levelling until she was as clear as a construction site. The sting of the dye shot through her like heartbreak, but three weeks later the blood returned.
All her art from that time dripped red. Vermillion skies, scarlet trees, ruby and burgundy and rust. Red for anger, red for blood. The carmine canvases mocked her each time she stepped into her studio, but she couldn’t seem to paint in any other colours. Surprising her one day with a visit, Charlie looked around at her work, put his hands on her shoulders and told her they had to try IVF.
Nell didn’t even know what the three letters stood for. She was vaguely aware of having seen something in the paper a couple of years back, but that was it. Charlie, though, had done his research. He gently guided her away from the cerise-splashed studio and sat her at the kitchen table with a cup of sweet tea. In-vitro fertilisation, he explained. In glass, it meant, outside the body, but with all the normal building blocks: her eggs, his sperm, only not left to chance. The doctors would put them together. When Nell didn’t respond, Charlie went on, speaking quickly, leaning forward in his seat. A Melbourne clinic had produced the fourth IVF baby in the world, he told her, and twelve out of the first fifteen. They’d be mad not to take advantage of that sort of technology right on their doorstep. Nell almost laughed. Technology, from the man who didn’t own a car, and distrusted their blender. Think about it, he had said calmly, but she hadn’t had to. They’d been trying for six years already, and without even a miscarriage to hang her hopes on.
IVF wasn’t quite as straightforward as Charlie had made out. There were the needles, which terrified both of them. Nell suspected that Charlie had just shut his eyes and blindly stabbed at her thigh for the first few injections, so clumsy was his delivery, but then she couldn’t be sure because she couldn’t bear to look either. Next came the bruising and the mood swings—elation that this was bound to work plunging into tears whenever she passed a baby in the street. Everything began to swell. Nell’s breasts, then her feet; ovaries suddenly palpable, like a bag of marbles just beneath her skin. The doctor smiled as he examined her. ‘Plenty of follicles there,’ he told them, and Charlie had squeezed her hand and begun whistling ‘Baby Face’.
But it didn’t work, at least not the first time. There had been follicles, but only five of them had developed into eggs, and when Charlie called the clinic the next day it was to be told that just one of those had fertilised.
‘You’ve been a bit unlucky,’ the same doctor admitted. ‘We usually get better results than that.’
Nonetheless, the transfer had gone ahead, and for the next two weeks Nell walked around in a daze with her hands across her abdomen, mentally willing the solitary em
bryo inside to grow. When her pregnancy test was negative she cried for two hours, then went straight to her studio and picked up a brush. She was still there early the next morning when Charlie got home after a gig. By that time her period had begun in earnest, and there was blood on her legs and all over the floor. Charlie had told her later that for a moment he’d been scared she was actually painting with it, expressing her sorrow with the evidence of their loss.
Charlie had run her a bath and fetched a hot water bottle for the cramps, then rubbed her shoulders to make her drowsy. They’d gone to bed as the birds started singing. As she fell asleep, Nell had vowed to give up. She was clearly infertile; it was just too difficult, all this effort and emotion for nothing—for less than nothing, for pain upon pain and the ache of dashed dreams. Better to just resign herself to it and get on with her life. Yet when she woke again a few hours later she heard Charlie softly crying. He tried to hide it from her, rolled onto his side and mumbled something about getting a cold, but she wasn’t fooled. She kissed his back, then, before she could change her mind, climbed out of bed and rang the clinic to schedule their next attempt. His grief had undone her. It wasn’t only her decision to make.
And Charlie’s luck had returned. It must have been that, because everything else was the same. The injections still hurt, her body grew bloated, tears hovered at the edges of every conversation. This time, though, fifteen eggs were retrieved. Even more miraculously, seven of them fertilised. Their doctor asked how many they wanted transferred—four maybe? Three?
Charlie had glanced across at Nell and said, ‘Twins would be nice. Then we don’t have to do this again.’ She’d nodded.
The doctor peered down at her file. ‘In that case, you’d be best off putting back four or five embryos, to maximise your chances,’ he suggested.
‘Is that dangerous? Won’t they all just get in the way of each other?’ Nell asked.
‘There is a slightly increased risk of miscarriage with that number, yes,’ the doctor replied. ‘Against that, you’ve also got an increased chance that one or two will take. It’s your call.’
This time Charlie hadn’t even looked at her. ‘Two then. Just two. Two’s all we need.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Fine. We’ve been developing some interesting techniques with freezing embryos lately. If you like, we could transfer two and freeze the rest. Then, if you have to have another try, we just defrost those and off we go—there won’t be the ovum retrieval or nearly as many injections beforehand.’
It was Charlie’s turn to nod. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but we won’t be doing this again. I’m sure of it.’
Incredibly, he had been right. Both embryos survived the transfer; grew and kicked and pushed their tiny fists against Nell’s stomach. As he and Nell lay in bed together when she was thirty weeks pregnant, Charlie had put a paper clip on top of her distended belly then waited to see how long it took one of them to push it off. ‘Only forty seconds!’ he crowed. Nell had smiled and snuggled her face into his neck. It had been the best part of a decade, actually. Four weeks later, Arran and Skye were delivered. Two babies, just as Charlie had said, two perfect, healthy babies, a boy and a girl.
A year later the clinic had sent them a letter. She’d spotted the familiar logo on the envelope, and opened it standing at the letterbox, Skye on one hip, expecting a bill or a patient-satisfaction survey. Instead it had been a reminder that she and Charlie still had five embryos in storage. There were plans to begin charging for this service, so could they please inform the clinic as to what they wanted to do?
She’d brought it up with him as soon as he got home. Three options were given: keep the embryos for a future attempt, have them thawed and then discarded, or donate them to another couple on the IVF program.
‘We’re done, aren’t we?’ Charlie had asked her after reading the letter. ‘There doesn’t seem any point paying to keep them frozen if we’re not going to use them.’
Nell had agreed. Still, she found she didn’t like the idea of them being discarded either, simply tipped down the sink like a cold cup of coffee. Too much hope had gone into those cells; too many years of wait and want. They’d been wrought, it seemed, of nothing less than her tears and Charlie’s persistence.
‘I think we should donate them,’ she said.
Charlie looked surprised for a second, then nodded. ‘You’re right. Might as well give somebody else a chance, hey?’ Then Arran crawled into his lap, and that had been the end of the conversation.
Nell sighed now and began to undress. It was all so different back then—so relaxed, so innocent. Recently, a friend’s daughter had commenced IVF and Nell had been astonished by the changes in the protocol. Not just on the medical side, but the counselling and the consent forms. Everything was documented; every possible scenario discussed. By contrast, when Nell had rung the clinic to let them know that she and Charlie were donating their embryos they’d simply thanked her and said they’d make a note of it. If anything ever came of it she hadn’t been informed.
She’d wondered, but not often. Skye and Arran kept her too busy for that, and by the time they started school the whole thing had slipped from her mind. Besides, she thought, pulling her nightdress over her head, the science of freezing the embryos—cryopreservation, they’d called it—was in its infancy back then. It was unlikely they’d even survived.
Nell turned off the light and climbed into bed. She closed her eyes, but found she wasn’t at all sleepy. Just say they had survived? Just say they’d been frozen, then thawed, then donated to someone else? And just say that couple had got pregnant, and the baby had gone to term . . . Nell rolled over, thumping her pillow into place. It was a crazy thought. It was a dangerous thought, one surely born of grief or menopause or too much time on her hands. What were the odds? Tiny, infinitesimal. She rolled back into her original position, unable to get comfortable. It was senseless to even entertain it. She’d go to sleep, and think about it again in the morning. Things always looked better then.
Nell lay on her back and made a conscious effort to relax, working through a meditation she’d learned years ago. First she took the tension out of each toe, visualising it as a tangled black mass, a bit like used steel wool. Next came her ankles, then her feet. She moved up her body: legs, trunk, arms, the fingers on each hand. It was working. She could feel herself dropping off. Almost there . . . her neck, her face. His face. Ben’s face appeared before her, his deep brown eyes. She sat up in the dark and reached for the phone on her bedside table.
14
She loved it when he did this. Skye let her head fall back on the pillow as Ben’s tongue moved down her body, licking between her breasts, then travelling in a straight line to her navel. He paused there for a moment, lapping gently, his shoulders pushing her legs apart. She knew what came next. Her limbs felt heavy, sodden with desire; her speech was lost somewhere at the back of her throat. ‘Ben,’ was all she could murmur, and then the phone rang.
Skye tensed immediately. That stupid ringtone. She’d been meaning to change it for weeks. Every time she heard it it reminded her of Hamish, tarnished her deep delight with guilt. Thank God he’d taken time off for his exams and she hadn’t had to face him at the gym. Vanessa had mentioned recently that he’d said he might not return after he’d finished his degree, and Skye fervently hoped so. She didn’t want to have to see him. He’d only start asking again, just as he had in those frantic emails and phone calls the week after they’d first broken up: Why? Why? She felt terrible about what she’d done, but she had no answer to his question, no reason to give him. She’d been happy with Hamish. She was happier with Ben.
‘YMCA’ sounded out four more times, then cut off. Skye relaxed. She hoped Ben hadn’t heard it. Her fingers wound through his hair, pulled his mouth closer to her body. He’d moved lower while she’d been listening to the phone, his stubble now rasping the inside of her thighs. It wasn’t the sex, she thought. Or rather, it was, but not in the way Hamish would think. If
anything, he’d been the more technically proficient lover. He’d known exactly how to please her, and was conscientious about doing just that. Hamish had made love the way he ran his training sessions or completed his uni assignments: thoroughly, meticulously, always striving for the best possible outcome, and how could you possibly complain about that? Skye hadn’t, but it was lovely too, she realised, to be with someone whose desire trumped his control; who had no plan, only hunger. Then Ben’s tongue probed deeply between her legs and she stopped thinking anything at all.
They were falling asleep half an hour later when the phone rang again. Ben groaned and rolled over, pressing his hands to his ears.
‘Sorry,’ Skye muttered, switching on the light. ‘I’ll just go turn it off, OK?’ She climbed out of bed, still naked, and moved quickly to the opposite side of the room where she’d dumped her bag, bending over it in the gloom.
Ben sat up in bed behind her. ‘No hurry,’ he said. ‘I’m enjoying the view.’
Skye smiled to herself, located the phone and went to turn it off. As she did so the screen lit up, and she recognised the number of her two missed calls. Nell. Damn. She turned back to Ben. ‘It was Mum,’ she said helplessly. ‘She never calls me this late.’
‘Will you be able to sleep if you don’t ring her back?’ he asked.
Skye shook her head. A year ago, yes, but not now. She crossed to the bed clutching her phone. Ben pushed back the covers and gathered her in.
‘I just want to be sure she’s OK. Arran too. He seems better now, but you should have seen how depressed he was when Mark dumped him a few months ago. Back then I worried every time the phone rang.’
‘Shhh,’ said Ben, pulling her under his arm. He smelled of fresh sweat and recent sex. Skye knew his chest would taste salty if she licked him. Instead she began to dial.
