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  ‘Kaz?’ It comes from afar, like my voice has retreated into my solar plexus, there to hide from the raw confrontations of now.

  Tears have gathered in the corners of her eyes.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she whispers desperately. And I think, This is the truth of the matter, isn’t it? We learn to accept pain and accidents, mistakes, malice, evil synergies, action and consequence — but to be left out of all understanding … surely there is nothing worse. To be randomly selected … stick your God, I silently tell all Christians. Where’s His benevolence now? When my wife lies as she lies and suffers as she suffers — where’s the Saviour touch, proof that those who warrant it are indeed blessed?

  * *

  Not Kaz. Never Kaz. Damn me, damn those who deserve it. But not Kaz.

  I lift her good fingers to my lips.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ I tell her, once, twice, maybe several times. ‘It’ll be okay. There’ll be an operation then in a few days we’ll be home again … it’ll be okay. Home again, doing the things we always do, snipping flowers from the garden, sharing stuff … it’ll be okay.’

  A monitor beeps. Outside the wind picks up fallen leaves and tosses them randomly onto the perfection of the lawn.

  ‘Maybe,’ I tell her, ‘maybe we can go home and you can write an article about the over-burdened public health system, and I can write a story about Dr Garten and his long floppy ears.’

  A sudden squall of rain pelts against the window, diffuses the light that tumbles into her room.

  ‘Imagine that,’ I continue. ‘Imagine …’

  But the gurgling is loud and pronounced, like a choking madness. I look across: a pink foam of blood bubbles from her mouth and her eyes are suddenly wide with panic. As she begins to thresh and cry out, I break from my reverie, reach forward and punch the red button above her bed. Instantly it seems Garten is there, other people are there, nurses and doctors, orderlies, everybody in the hospital, all bent over Kaz, wiping and shouting and wheeling plastic bags on stands, shunting a trolley towards her, swabbing, patting, cajoling — and ushering me out, pushing me into the anonymity of a corridor where three blue plastic seats await me, as well as a picture of the parched treeless outback, a water cooler and the notion that we are skidding hard down a slope, too fast, unable to stop, unable to fathom why.

  Five

  Kaz is somewhere else, Garten tells me. He doesn’t mean down a different hallway or in a different room, he means that she is somewhere outside our world, floating in a place where her past and future must collide and her gorgeous mind will lift and dart like a bird in a storm as she renegotiates her destiny.

  ‘I’ve set up a video-conference,’ he tells me, ‘with the PA. in Brisbane. Doctor Lee Kouw Wang is an expert in this type of thing.’

  I lift my head wearily. One-forty — Stu must have found the ice-creams. And hot dogs, McDonald’s, the ambience of a tucked-away beach — anything was possible.

  The blue chair, I notice, is smeared with my leg-sweat.

  ‘What type of thing?’

  He looks at me, sighs, folds his angular frame into the chair next to me, links his hands and rotates his thumbs in the manner of a story-teller who has just reached the difficult part, the prelude to the climax.

  ‘Take the hand off,’ I tell him flatly. ‘Amputate if you have to. If it’s that serious …’

  ‘Oh it’s serious,’ he assures me. There is a crack in his voice; he sounds like he has just gargled sea-water.

  ‘Then take her hand,’ I insist. ‘Please.’

  ‘There are other problems,’ he says. ‘Her blood pressure, for one thing’

  ‘She’s always been hypertensive —’

  ‘No, no. It’s too low, dangerously so. Pulse is weak and fast, and she’s drifting, hallucinating. We’re doing some more blood tests; liver this time, probably kidneys too. And we need to keep her fluids up — she’s losing too much, too quickly’

  We stare at each other.

  ‘What is it?’ I whisper eventually. There is a fear stalking me; it chisels each word that I hear, each dreadful vision that swims before my eyes.

  Garten strokes his long face, chooses his words carefully.

  ‘It’s quite possible,’ he says, ‘that your wife has contracted STSS’.

  An acronym — at a time like this! A bloody acronym! It is with some difficulty that I keep my temper.

  ‘STSS. Which is?’

  ‘Sorry. STSS stands for Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome’

  ‘Toxic shock? What — tampons?’

  ‘No, that’s TSS, the partner in crime. Quite rare, but STSS is even rarer — about one case in every hundred thousand people. It’s known as an emerging illness’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning, we’re still learning the best ways of treating it’

  I tighten my cheeks, eyeball him.

  ‘So, you don’t know what to do? Is that it? You don’t know what to do?’

  Garten takes my shoulders, massages gently.

  ‘We’re doing all that we can,’ he tells me, and even though his choice of words seems glib, I can see that he is sincere. ‘STSS is a syndrome caused by the streptococcal bacteria. It releases toxins into a wound, thus causing infection and shock. We’re trying to combat the infection with antibiotics and yes, we will have to perform surgery on your wife’s hand, as soon as her condition — in particular her blood pressure — has stabilised. Meantime, I am in regular contact with Dr Wang to gauge his expert opinion and take advice. Okay?’

  ‘No, it’s not bloody okay!’

  ‘Mr Daley …’

  ‘It’s not bloody okay! Savvy? It’s not — bloody — okay!’

  Another silence. A tap dripping somewhere, like a clock, relentless, unceasing.

  ‘We’re doing our best, Mr Daley,’ says Garten placidly.

  I nod, shrug, feel an overwhelming surge of tiredness.

  ‘Okay’

  He leaves. I sit in the hiatus, stare dumbly at the walls, wonder why this nation needs so many parched-outback paintings with their withered trees and burnished plains, why so many poems and stories are written about what is essentially an unoccupied wasteland, as if we need constant confirmation of our own immature mythologies.

  I decide that I should make some phone-calls.

  The mobile sits heavily in my palm like a smooth dead rat.

  ‘Bernice? It’s Vince.’

  Bernice Deane is Kaz’s nutty mother. Short, squat, heavily powdered, smells too strongly of perfume. In possession of small lips that are, whenever I am present, bunched into a disapproving O, granite eyes, a hot-potch of bandaids and dressings that hold her arid, crinkly skin together. Hypochondriac, gossip-monger and red-neck, all rolled into one sweet little package. Think Bernice and you think frocks, accessories and sensible tan brogues, as well as a deep and malicious suspicion of:

  a) people from other countries (everyone from the Middle East is ‘mad! Who cares if they shoot each other? Vincent? Who really cares?’)

  b) people from Sydney, especially Cabramatta (‘the root of our national disgrace!’)

  c) people with ‘more education than they deserve’ (i.e. me)

  d) girls who get pregnant to increase their welfare entitlement (‘and they’re everywhere, the minxes!’)

  e) her odd-ball son-in-law (enough said).

  Kaz and I were twenty, maybe older. We were lying at funny tangents in bed, warmed by the after-glow of morning sex. Tousled sheets wrapped our hips, there was a salty bouquet in the air, the fan whiffling above us, our moisture still gluing us together.

  Kaz rolled away, lit a cigarette.

  ‘You probably should meet my mother,’ she said.

  A guillotine of silence fell between us. I wanted to sleep, be a baby elf snuggled beneath a toadstool. But this was obviously important.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling,’ I asked, ‘that this is a transcendental moment?’

  ‘Vince …’

&nbs
p; ‘Why do I get the feeling that meeting your mother ranks as an international event of significance, somewhere between an audience with the Pope and the possibility of peace in the Balkans?’

  She sighed, dragged hard at the cigarette.

  ‘She wants me to bring you for lunch on Sunday,’ she told me. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. Free feed, a few laughs —’

  ‘Laughter is not encouraged.’

  ‘I see. Can I burp?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Swear? Tell dirty jokes? Touch the tip of my nose — or yours — with my tongue?’

  ‘None of the above. Do nothing but eat. Masticate silently and listen politely’

  ‘Compliment her twin-set and pearls?’

  ‘If you must. Vince, my mother has the emotional subtlety of road-kill. She will openly appraise you; clothes, build, hairstyle, intelligence, right down to the cuticles on your little finger’

  ‘Ah! Exhibit A — the boyfriend. Does she know we’re sleeping together?’

  ‘My mother and I have never discussed sex. She gave me a book; thereafter I did my own washing.’

  ‘So she’s a lights-out I’m-in-denial type?’

  ‘Absolutely. Sorry.’

  ‘Stop apologising. Remember — I’m witty, gregarious, charming, sensual. She’ll love me’

  She didn’t.

  ‘Oh Lord!’ says Bernice after a few moments of my stumbling explanations. Then: ‘My poor child … I’m on my way. I’ll pack a bag. Vincent? I’ll be there as soon as I can. Oh Lord, Lord Almighty!’

  I want to say: Forget Him. He won’t help.

  ‘How did it … how? Oh poor Katherine! My poor little girl!’

  ‘Drive carefully,’ I tell her, a sense of duty welling briefly within.

  ‘Of course I will. Shall I … do you want me to bring anything?’

  I should resist, but I don’t.

  ‘Just your buoyant, bonny self,’ I tell her churlishly.

  She snorts like a horse running the track at dawn.

  ‘Three hours,’ she says coldly. ‘Tell Katherine, please.’

  Actually, I think as I press the END button, the horse image is quite apt. The day Kaz announced our engagement, I was floating past Bernice’s precise-and-polished kitchen, on my way to the downstairs cellar to see if the rumours were true that the old curmudgeon had a hoard of aged shiraz. I was feeling pretty awful, having given Bacchus a decent nudge the night before. A glass or two of a nice peppery red would, I thought, be decidedly therapeutic.

  Kaz was trapped inside the kitchen with her mother. I sensed cooling coffee, crossed arms, words crackling like radio static across the laminex.

  ‘Your father would turn in his grave!’

  A pause-inducing cliché. I stopped, snuck my body against the door jamb like a cat.

  ‘Listening to you — yes, he would!’

  ‘I’m going to ignore that, Katherine. You’re obviously upset —’

  ‘Of course I’m upset! Mum, I love him.’

  ‘Love him? Love! How can you?’

  An intake of breath.

  ‘Mum, he’s warm. Funny, sort of … unpredictable —’

  ‘You love unpredictability?’

  ‘You’re not listening to me! Vince has … there’s this lovely honesty, and his stories —’

  ‘Are just that — mere stories. A relationship — a good relationship — is based on much more than that, let me tell you!’

  ‘Why do you have to make things so difficult?’

  ‘I’m not —’

  ‘You are!’ I heard a new shrillness, the unmistakeable slide away from self-control. ‘I love him! He loves me! What more do we need?’

  The bang of a cup, a swish of tap-water.

  ‘Prospects, for one thing!’ I couldn’t see it but I could imagine The Face Of Bernice: eyes popping like distended marbles, lips gathered in righteousness, a Machiavellian plot furrowing her brow. ‘The chance for a decent future, for both of you. Katherine, you haven’t thought this through. Vincent, well, he’s a little too unusual for this family —’

  ‘You are unbelievable, you know that? Unbelievable!’

  ‘Love can — well, it’s not always what it seems, is it? We think we love someone but it’s a mask. The truth is somewhere else —’

  ‘That’s it. I’m going. I’m not putting up with this — I’m going!’

  A newspaper being folded, dishes plonked disdainfully into the drainer.

  ‘Huffing and puffing and carrying on like a spoiled brat doesn’t change a thing. Darling, all I’m asking is that you consider this a little more carefully. Your father and I —’

  ‘Leave Dad out of it!’

  ‘You talk of love; it’s love that drives me to say these things. Katherine, your father and I always wanted the best for you. I just … I don’t think Vincent fits into that category’

  The deep, resonant silence of two strong minds unwilling to compromise. Beyond my gaze I sensed the same stretch and tension as cat-gut.

  Kaz broke it first with a harsh and desperate whisper.

  ‘What’s wrong with him? Eh? What’s wrong?’

  It remains an indelible moment in the coalition of our lives.

  Bernice, I imagine, must have half-smiled, hung a tea-towel on the oven-rail to dry and then swivelled with the same portentous menace as a returning cyclone.

  ‘I don’t think he’s all there,’ she hissed, and I could hear Kaz catch each breath sharply. ‘I mean, do you honestly think he’s … stable?’

  There is an actor submerged within all of us, this trembling desire to turn life into a vast echoing stage, shadowy wings and a transfixed audience. I took my cue and stuck my silly, mad head around the corner.

  ‘It’s true, Bernice,’ I rasped. ‘I’m not stable. But I am a little hoarse.’

  Even today — fourteen years on — we laugh about it. But not Bernice. Never Bernice.

  I punch more numbers into the mobile.

  ‘Frannie? Vince.’

  More coolness. Speaking to Francesca, Kaz’s elder sister, is like walking into a fernery; there are fronds that dip and threaten, biting insects hidden in moist places. More than anything, she detests being called Frannie — which is, of course, precisely why we all persist.

  A quick summary: Francesca is amidships of her third marriage. This time, the lucky vessel is a stolid and dependable type named Terrence. Terrence does clerical work, adroitly enough to pull a hundred Gs per annum. They have one daughter, Amelia, who was ostensibly sired by hubby number one, an old windjammer called Leo. Blithe, insane and obscenely moneyed, Leo departed this earth weeks after Francesca had given birth. The chap in between I can barely remember. I think his name was Pedro, or maybe Pietro; she met him overseas on a Contiki Tour and he picked his toe-nails with a Swiss army knife.

  Amelia seems a pleasant enough girl, given her mother-Gorgon and the fact that she’s a teenager. Kaz likes her a lot.

  ‘You have to respect someone,’ she once said acidly, ‘who was obviously conceived immaculatus. One thing about Frannie, she never liked getting dirty. So, history recognises Jesus of Nazareth and now Amelia of Peregian Waters. This family … we don’t know how lucky we are’

  Details, details. Francesca clucks, mentions Terrence’s Rotary function tomorrow evening, wants to speak to ‘someone in charge’. I can feel her blame for Kaz’s condition seeping down the phone-beams into my brain. Eventually she says, ‘I’ll get there as soon as is practical,’ shouts something about the dog to Amelia and clicks off.

  I am alone again.

  Thereafter, it all seems to spiral, like a fusion of colours — sad colours, angry, wild, unheralded, unrecognisable colours coming from places I do not know, all spinning through a vortex.

  Garten is at my elbow, muttering darkly about ‘deterioration’ and ‘liver failure’, kidneys that refuse to work. There is an anxiety etched into his eyes like the whorls of old tribal paintings. I see people hurrying, walls sli
ding up and down. Suddenly the air feels green, like bile.

  ‘A helicopter is coming,’ he says in a curiously blank voice. ‘We’re flying to Brisbane. We need specialists, Vince; it’s a matter of saving her now.’

  Saving her? And specialists? But Doctor, they make me mad. They make me mad because they’re so functional and here, now, I’m feeling helpless and totally non-functional. I’m grey and I’m beige, wallowing between real colours.

  Jesus, colours … I’m remembering Brisbane, jacarandas in full purple bloom and that soft shitty river twinkling each afternoon as sunlight fractured the smog. We took a ride across the river then walked home in spangled moonlight, made love in a hotel room on snow-white sheets so crisp they smashed when we fell on them, called room service and ate a fruit platter at two in the morning: grapes, strawberries cut into flowers, a wedge of golden rockmelon. The juices mingled and ran over our skin.

  Garten taps my shoulder.

  ‘Mr Daley,’ he urges. ‘Your children? Where are your children?’

  But I am thinking: Doctor, people don’t fall apart. Not people. Does our skin peel away, sloughing like the skin of a snake? Are our flaky scales left to rot in the undergrowth, there to feed the earth, nourish the seeds, decompose and slide quietly into soil? Do plants suck our nutrients and grow? Do our limbs fall off too? Pieces of our faces, soft pink flesh?

  ‘Kaz … where is she?’ I ask, then I can hear the helicopter, a thrubbing sound, deep and ominous. But Garten is still holding me, talking insistently, being functional with his ugly words, words that I would never use, like ‘brain damage’, words that are too clinical, too final. No, I tell him, you don’t contract brain damage from sheep shears. You don’t go into a barn, trip and contract brain damage.

  ‘Mr Daley — stop!’ calls Garten but I am well past him, past him because I want to hold her and her hands, hold her hands, say to her, ‘Oh my love, oh hello my love, oh look at you … so grey … oh my love.’

  * *

  Now they’re everywhere, holding and shouting, filling her with electricity then someone is stroking her eyes and this room is too bright, like staring into the centre pinpoint of a twisting twirling kaleidoscope. I want to shake the crimson energy back into her (oh my love, your hands) or cry at Garten: ‘Ever seen the air go out of bellows? Ever seen the tide sink into sand?’ but I don’t because they have stopped and withdrawn into a small despondent circle and I need to know what’s going on.