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  My mobile is shuddering in my pocket.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Vince! Glad to finally catch you. You’re a hard man to pin down.’

  ‘Like a butterfly, Stu.’ My voice sounds hoarse, strangely distant. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just checking in. Anything on the boil?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing?’ His disappointment is palpable.

  We are briefly silent. Around me machines buzz quietly. People stride past, whispering, organising. Milo and Otis are sitting on the floor, munching chocolate bars. Slowly, insidiously, the smell of hospital antiseptic smothers us all.

  I glance at a clock. It says 10.18. We have been here for over two hours. Kaz is still ‘under observation’. A doctor told me at 9.49 that she was ‘being stabilised’. I have never felt more helpless in my life. I am sitting contoured to a chair because my body has nothing left inside; it is as if someone sauntered inside and systematically pulled out every bone, every glistening sinew, every snaking vein.

  ‘Vince?’

  Then I tell him, suddenly, in a harsh cry that blasts out between gusts of wind and fear. I tell him that I’m in a hospital waiting-room, my wife is hovering unintelligibly in some sort of life-threatening limbo nearby, my children are smeared with congealing chocolate, the smell and the sounds and the clinical cleanliness of it all is making me bilious. And I tell him that I am scared, shit-scared, so scared that I can’t even stand without the fear of falling, of cracking my head open on a magazine table and spilling my rich red brain-blood all over the shiny linoleum.

  ‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ he splutters. ‘Don’t move.’

  But where would I go, I think as the phone beeps off. Where could I go without her? The idea of finding a place in the world by myself, alone and Kaz-emptied, is anathema. When everything we say and do and think and dream of is so enmeshed, there is nowhere else to go.

  A doctor walks briskly towards me.

  ‘Mr Daley?’ he asks, holding out a limp, freshly soaped hand. ‘I’m Dr Garten. I’ve taken over your wife’s treatment.’

  Milo and Otis sidle towards us, anxious to listen.

  ‘It might be better if we discuss this in private,’ Garten says, after a moment. He is looking critically at my children, doubtless seeing their hair like dumped straw, brown-streaked cheeks and chins, yesterday’s clothes hastily rearranged on today’s bodies.

  ‘She’s their mother,’ I tell him simply. ‘They want her home too.’

  He nods. He’s curious-looking, I think: long doggy ears, aquiline nose which descends to flanged nostrils, mouth that turns down and in. The whole effect is sad and droopy, like a mourning Cocker Spaniel.

  ‘Come into my office,’ he says.

  It is bland; white walls, cleared desk, dust-coated rubber plant, various qualifications arranged perfectly along one wall. Garten ushers us into a collection of seats.

  ‘Infections,’ he says, drawing his fingers into a vee, ‘are a bit of a speciality of mine. I’ve seen a lot of them over the years. And your wife’s is particularly nasty. What caused it?’

  ‘Old shears,’ I tell him. ‘We were cleaning the barn.’

  He nods, walks behind his desk, taps a pen on a pad.

  ‘Mr Daley, there’s no easy way to say this. We … we believe that we are now controlling the infection, the toxins that have invaded your wife’s system. However, the hand is still very problematic. Her flesh is severely damaged and quite resistant to antibiotics. It’s as if — I don’t know — as if it is operating independently of her. There are also major internal problems that are directly consequential to the infection.’

  I stare at him, not fully comprehending.

  ‘It’s like a fire, Mr Daley. We can control the outer burn-off but if we don’t eliminate the source, the flames will continue to spread and eventually destroy all that lies in their path.’

  ‘Eliminate? Destroy?’

  Suddenly he sits on the desk, directly in front of me. I am acutely aware of his mint-breath, his too-blue eyes and stained fingers, the bequest of a smoker — and I am thinking: This is serious. Really, really serious. This man, this specialist, is about to change my life forever.

  The children squirm towards me. Their intense heat and unspoken concerns press me to the chair.

  ‘It is my reluctant recommendation,’ Garten says slowly, ‘that we amputate your wife’s hand.’

  Four

  Our hands measure us. By the shaping and sculpting of our hands, we define who we are.

  I am sitting in Garten’s office, head between my knees, children clutching my arms, body, any part of me they can. I am thinking about actors. Actors speak lovingly of their leading centres: leading on-stage with the heart, or leading with the head if you are playing the role of the intellectually disposed. Leading with the groin if you happen to be like me. It’s the first thing the world of audience sees; their initial impression, your anticipatory set.

  Kaz leads with her hands.

  There are a zillion-and-one things to love about this woman — her idealistic vigour, the sharpness of her bite, the sexual conflagration that scorches from her — but her hands remain very high on the list.

  It was her hands that first drew me in.

  I was sitting in the University refectory, trying to forge a connection between a just-completed tutorial on Aristotle and yet-to-be-completed sausage roll. Eventually I had it: Aristotle died in 322 BC. A month or so later this particular sausage roll was made.

  I ate it in three too-quick-to-taste bites. Then, in uncommonly good humour, I stared around, looked past a group of baby-faced Existentialists arguing earnestly about whether or not they were really there, and saw her — or her hands, to be exact.

  Lord, they were wonderful! Slim, as white as new blooms of jasmine, smoother than glazed china. They crept up from tiny fragile wrists then fanned out into fingers that seemed as if they must break. I stared at her fingers, saw the faint blush of cerise around each knuckle, remembered the legs of the flamingo as it plucked through winter lakes. She was holding a cigarette; I watched, fascinated, as two fingers flicked ash delicately then propelled the cigarette forwards with a dexterity that was almost electronic.

  She sucked softly then whistled a thin plume of smoke towards the ceiling. I sat transfixed, immersed within that awful moment when you realise that that which you desperately desire is almost certainly unattainable. I felt like a drowning sailor, wide-eyed and gasping as he reaches in vain towards his singing mermaid.

  She was, I discovered, in her second year of Journalism. Katherine Deane, former top-notch student of St Christabel’s College For Ladies in Brisbane, newly elected President of the University branch of Amnesty International, had already published several pertinent Leftist articles in the bi-monthly student rag. I canvassed for opinions on this waif-like creature with the serendipitous hands, only to be thwarted by the usual plethora of knuckle-headed responses.

  ‘Ice-maiden,’ the editor of Agora told me. ‘Fascinating to look at but has a strict, no-touch policy. Like an exotic bug — a scorpion or a tarantula.’

  ‘Great hands,’ I enthused.

  He looked at me hard, critically.

  ‘Great tits,’ he corrected, slowly. ‘Who gives a fuck about her hands?’

  I do, I thought. Christ, I do.

  ‘Katie’s lovely.’ The girl’s name was Brianna, also ex-St Chrissy’s. We were in the bar, one-thirty on a balmy Tuesday afternoon. I was plying her guiltlessly with Midori.

  ‘Could’ve been School Captain, but she told one of the nuns to jam it. Some stuff-up with a late Chemistry assignment. So Katie got black-listed. Sister Mary, I think it was. Silly old bitch. You know, she used to masturbate each morning behind the Chapel. Half-past ten on the dot … so to speak.’

  ‘Katie did that?’

  ‘No — Mary, you idiot! Actually, it was Katie who caught the old cow. Flat on her back she was, habit over her head, shamelessly indulging
.’

  It was a particularly bilious image — some ancient crone, face split with ecstasy and dribble while the eyes of God drilled Their gaze towards her frantic flickering.

  But Brianna’s story had an effect: I knew then that I was utterly committed. I had to meet her, had to woo this nunstalking bug-like lass with the translucent fingers that reminded me of Mercutio’s Queen Mab and her ‘moonshine’s wat’ry beams ’.

  I could’ve walked straight up and said hello. Asked her the time, complimented her hands, ravished her with the electrodazzle of my wit. Could’ve initiated any number of greeting rituals, all dignified, all worthy.

  Instead, I chose to break her ankle.

  We were in the bar — I seemed to reside there during my latter University days. Yet another has-been band was playing support act to yet another up-and-coming bunch of nihilistic junkies with screaming electronics and songs called Erogenous and Shit On The World.

  I was pissed, eyes spinning about my skull like pinballs, beer sloshing my shirt and soaking into my Hush Puppies. So pissed that my world had slowed and magnified; people hovered and swayed like Thunderbirds and the music was nothing more than a sluggish repetitive bass.

  Kaz appeared next to me, bought a drink, made my insides slither.

  Without thinking, I turned to her and slurred, ‘Yer so bewful. Yer so bewful I wanna take you ou’side ’n make love ’neath the staaaars.’

  She actually smiled, tight, neat.

  ‘Maybe you should zip your fly before we leave,’ she said.

  I looked down. I’d been to the toilet some time ago. My penis was poking through my Bugs Bunny boxers like a small pink mushroom, alone and vulnerable in a paddock of Disney.

  ‘Oopsh. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I like a man who’s prepared to openly advertise. It speaks volumes for your self-assurance.’

  ‘No … sorry ’bout the, um, dimensions.’ I held my thumb and forefinger close together. ‘I don’ have a cock, I have a bantam fowl.’

  That was the first time she laughed at one of my jokes. I loved that sound, still do. If laughter could be coloured, hers would be the same as the cherry-blossom, a shower of soft bright petals carried on the breeze.

  So it happened that I zipped up and we lurched out together, just two schooners, fifteen one-liners and a packet of pretzels later. She was still laughing but, best of all, one of her lovely hands had slipped delicately into mine. The warmth surprised me; any beauty that is so ethereal, so fragile, is rarely warm. But Kaz’s hands have always felt wonderfully cosy, like curling up in front of a fire with someone else’s good book.

  ‘Come back to my flat,’ she whispered as we weaved up the road towards a taxi-rank. ‘I make great coffee.’

  ‘Don’ wan’ coffee. Wan’ make love .. ’

  She admonished me with the lightest touch.

  ‘Tonight — coffee,’ she commanded. Then, in a growl that was soft enough to drive me crazy: ‘Tomorrow — sex.’

  I wanted to kiss her as we walked. Wanted to lose myself in smoke-scented hair and skin like alabaster. Trouble was, my body couldn’t co-ordinate. I leaned across, swayed towards her chest then stumbled, pirouetted to the footpath in agonising slow-mo, wondered why her leg was trapped beneath me. ‘Fuck it,’ I said. It had started to rain.

  ‘I think you’ve broken my ankle,’ she told me with remarkable civility.

  We stared at each other for a moment, then the rain got heavier and we began to laugh madly, out of control. We clutched each other, connected, giggled and hooted, watched the raindrops form lines down our cheeks and necks, shoved our faces gloriously towards the blackness above.

  ‘But yer hands’re okay,’ I slurred eventually. ‘Thank God — yer hands’re okay.’

  It was Bruce Dawe, I remember later. Why, at a time like that, did my ridiculous mind flicker to a Bruce Dawe poem?

  Blink, blink. HOSPITAL. SILENCE.

  Garten has left the office. His beeper called him away, this lantern-jawed reaper.

  ‘Who’s going to peel the vegies?’ asks Otis quietly.

  I stare at her, not comprehending.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Milo, ‘they’ll give Mum a claw. Like Captain Hook. Except hers won’t be for sword-fighting. Hers will be for holding potatoes and sprinkling Milo on ice-cream.’

  ‘They’re not taking her hand,’ I tell them forcibly. ‘I won’t let them.’

  ‘We could keep it in a jar,’ Otis suggests. ‘Mum could look after it.’

  ‘Imagine picking your nose with a claw. That would be so cool.’

  ‘They’re not taking her hand, all right? All right?’

  There is a knock at the door. It opens a crack and Stu shoves his bovine face through.

  ‘Vince. What’s happening?’

  Part of me, I suppose, is glad he’s arrived. He’s stupid and too boisterous sometimes, but beneath it all I know that he cares for me. So many things about Stu are BIG — he’s BIG-hearted, BIG-headed, a BIG spender, who desperately seeks the BIG-time. All of his movements are BIG too: he crushes people in eponymous hugs, shakes hands like he’s strangling a boa constrictor. Alone he still looks like a crowd, with people he’s a BIG luxury cruiser in a harbour full of half-cabins.

  But BIGness can occasionally provide a welcome perspective. When Stu wants to help someone, he does so with a wholeness and conviction that is as warming as it is irritating.

  I tell him details.

  ‘Be buggered,’ he says eventually. Then: ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Bow down and tug my forelock to specialist opinion, I suppose. Not much else I can do.’

  ‘Have you seen her yet?’

  ‘No.’

  He grabs my shoulders, clamps me in a BIG but endearing embrace.

  ‘Why not? For Chrissakes, Vince — she’s your wife!’

  ‘I know that, but —’

  ‘But nothing! No excuses — you have to see her!’

  ‘I know, I know … ’

  He lets me go then, steps back, levels me with his gaze.

  ‘You’re scared — is that it? Scared of what you might find? Vince? Is that it?’

  I can say nothing. Stu nods slowly, thinks for a moment then leans forward, whispers into my face.

  ‘Vince, this is Kaz. Love of your life, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, all that stuff. You have to go and see her. Be together, then make a decision.’

  I notice that he is trembling and there are sweat patches leaking from his armpits and his breath smells — but there is a sincerity and strength in him that makes my brain pop with gratitude.

  ‘Go and see her,’ he insists.

  So that is what I do.

  Stu takes Milo and Otis for ice-creams. It is 11.23 — they’re glad for a diversion. Stu drives a red Mazda MX-5. When they zoom away from the front entrance of the hospital, I can almost smile at his BIG florid head, waggling furiously as he regales my children with tales of the world-famous gut-busting triple-cone double-decker banana-split surprise.

  I creep down corridors that stink of chemicals and pain.

  In Ward 14C,Kaz lies still. I see drips, tubes, buttons, swaddles of bandaging, a machine that clicks and puffs — this is a smorgasbord of stainless-steel efficiency.

  ‘Kaz?’

  Her head stays still but I can feel her eyes, nearly closed and yellowed by disbelief, slide towards me.

  ‘Vin …’ she murmurs.

  I close the space between us. Near the bed, the heat rises from her like steam. The hand remains mercifully hidden.

  A sliver of spittle snakes from her lips. I wipe it carefully with a convenient tissue.

  ‘Kids?’ she asks.

  ‘With Stu.’ I find a seat, drop into it, grasp her good fingers. ‘On a sacred quest for the world’s BIGGEST ice-creams.’

  Her smiles flickers, sends a TV-special of lost memories channelling into my mind.

  ‘So let’s talk about cheerful things,’
I tell her, or maybe I’m just telling myself. ‘Make you feel better before we go home to the drudge and the sludge and the home-made fudge.’

  Beyond us, there is the steady tick of machinery that I can never hope to understand.

  Monitors gasp, neon displays show red numbers. Somewhere I can hear a rattle of discarded metal.

  Outside, through the window, I can see a young melaleuca bending in deference to the freshening wind.

  Kaz turns her head.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she murmurs. ‘What … what are they doing to me?’

  I look at her good fingers, rotate the tiny silver ring that I gave her when she was pregnant with the boy. The ring has a tiny Yin and Yang cut neatly into her birthstone.

  ‘Cheerful things,’ I tell her quickly. ‘It’s always good to remember cheerful things. I know — Otis … Sara and the snow holiday! Remember? We were packing up to go and you said — ‘‘Okay, go try your gloves and beanie on ’cause that’s what skiers wear. Let’s make sure they fit.—’ So next thing we know she’s back in the kitchen, naked, absolutely nothing on — but the gloves and the beanie! Do you remember?’

  No reaction, or maybe I’m not searching her face properly.

  I love that face, love its roundness and simplicity, tiny flaws like the cicatrix on her upper lip, the truth that flows from her eyes.

  Normally.

  ‘Or — what about that time we stayed at your mother’s, and the kids got excited because she had carpet rather than good old vinyl. And Milo, um Alex, liked it because he found out it tickled his nose so he spent the day on all fours, sniffing the carpet like a bloodhound. Ended up with a burned chin and asthma. Kaz?’

  But the echo of my voice sounds hollow and unconvincing, and our subsequent silence — long, taut, heavier than storm-clouds — is worse than anything I have ever experienced.