Being good at delaying gratification, Julia always took the largest capsule first, followed by the two smaller, easier-to-swallow ones. On this day, the largest capsule caught just a little more painfully than usual at the back of her throat, but it was not until she looked over and saw her usual trio of vitamin tablets still resting by the base of her beside lamp that she realised that what she had swallowed was not a vitamin tablet, but the red heart-shaped rock.
Because of her belief that there was nothing to be gained from panic or haste, Julia did not act immediately. She decided that unless something symptomatic happened in the meantime, she would not go to see her GP before the following morning. Twenty-four hours seemed to her a nice sensible stretch of time. By then, the crisis may simply have, well,
passed
.
But when Julia visited her GP the following morning, the matronly Indian doctor was cross with her.
‘You should have come in straightaway,’ she scolded with a pointed finger.
‘I didn’t think it could be too serious. It went down easily enough.’
‘The oesophagus is insensible after a certain point,’ the GP said, and Julia felt that this was a criticism being levelled at her in her entirety and not only her swallowing apparatus.
Julia was sent for an X-ray, which revealed the rock to be settled on the floor of her stomach. The next day she presented herself at the hospital where she was shown an endoscope loaded up with fibre-optic cabling and a small claw of the hopeful type you might see in an arcade game.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor told her, after the procedure. ‘It’s passed on from your stomach. We’ll have to go at it from the other direction.’
After two days of emptying her body of solid matter and taking her nourishment from transparent things like consommé and jelly, Julia presented herself at the hospital again. She waited, a sheet over her undressed lower half, for another doctor and another probe.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor told her when she woke from a light anaesthetic with a slightly stretched-feeling sphincter. ‘Too high for us, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh for God’s sake. What now?’
The doctor squiggled a mouth, a stomach and a bowel onto his drug company desk pad.
‘Your little friend is most likely at the ileocaecal junction,’ he said, making emphatic circles with his ballpoint. ‘The obvious risk is that it will block movement through your bowel altogether. But the other risk is that it will push through and do some damage to the tissue on the way. You could even end up with a bowel perforation and, trust me, you don’t want to go there. You’ve heard the term peritonitis? Rather common on death certificates early last century.’
Perforation. Julia thought of the dotted line above a payment slip: tear here.
‘I’m in court tomorrow,’ she said, aware of both her petulant tone and its misplacement. ‘It’s not a case I can pass over.’
‘Well, we can’t take the risk of waiting until Monday, so I’d be pushing to get you to the surgeon by Friday at the latest. That’s the fourteenth.’
Thought Julia:
Well, Happy Valentine’s Day to me.
CHRISTINE
Christine’s predecessor had liked the fact that it was called a theatre. It hadn’t mattered to him that the curtains were green instead of black. He’d had a handful of nurses to serve as both audience and supporting cast and he’d played it like a comedy, turning up the symphonies on Classic FM and conducting the orchestras with mischievous inflections of his bootbrush-bristle eyebrows. Christine preferred to concentrate in silence and she knew that the nurses found her conscientiously dull by comparison.
In theatre this particular Friday, the scout to the scrubbed nurse was Sister Luke Boyles. Christine was physically aware of his proximity as she stood at the operating table making her opening incision.
‘This is the one with the rock?’ he asked.
No one can say she doesn’t swallow
, she thought. And then she flushed:
Oh God, I belong on the
Benny Hill Show.
She hooked out a segment of ropey bowel and felt along it for the obstruction. Then she made a small slice down the length of tubular tissue and squeezed a small hard lump out into her hand. Fingering away a light coating of greeny-yellow bile, she found a little heart lying blood red in her palm. She fancied that she saw it pulse.
‘Got ’im,’ said Luke. ‘Good darts, doctor.’
Christine looked up and tried to identify his expression judging by the rectangle of face between his mop hat and surgical mask. It was impossible to be certain, but she had a strong feeling that there was a wolfish grin going on behind the pleated gauze. She flushed again, hotter and brighter this time, as he closed one eye in a slow, deliberate wink.
For just a heartbeat, she considered flicking the stone to him across the torso of her anaethetised patient, and watching him catch it in a swift, latex grip. ‘Happy Valentine’s Day,’ she would say flippantly. Ironically. Just a bit of medical humour. The intent of which could be easily denied.
Then she remembered the image of an old man’s unwelcome fingers on a young woman’s firm-fleshed tush. And thought of Snow White in her prison cell, who would remember only with her own searching fingers the pleasures of her seven young playmates. She gestured briskly to Luke to pass her the specimen jar that sat, its yellow lid already removed, on the instrument table. And very deliberately, she did not meet his eye as the rock hit the bottom of it with a small, disappointed
tink
.
I
K
ate, says Faye, ‘is a mezzosoprano. For which I am grateful, actually.’
There is opera playing, and it seems to Tamsin ‘ to occupy Faye’s apartment as if it were part of the décor, the rich voice echoing the timber of the furniture, rippling over near-white carpet as soft as the fleece of a newborn lamb.
‘I suspect sopranos are flightier, altogether more given to tantrums and putting on airs and graces. I don’t see how it can possibly be good for your equilibrium, spending all that time in the upper registers. Also, sopranos are invariably blonde.’
Tamsin smiles. It is the morning of her first day and already she thinks that she will like Faye. She does not,however, think that she will like Kate. Tamsin suspects her to be the sort of daughter who will leave it until the very end. Then she will jet in, all European couture and big sunglasses, just in time to perform a day or two of lower-register histrionics and take the starring role at the funeral. Most likely, she will be the type to treat her mother’s nurses like so many hired hands, dispatching them to the kitchen for more tea, or to the bathroom for more tissues. Kate, Tamsin can already tell, will be the sort of woman to make her feel, keenly, the girlishness of her plain brown ponytail.
It hardly matters, since it is more or less everywhere now, where it began. But when Tamsin undresses Faye for her sponge bath, the origin is clear. Beneath the bodice of her nightgown Faye’s chest, without its breasts, is as profoundly nude as an unfeathered baby bird. Tamsin sponges over the buckled scarring, gently, apologising to the skin for the indignities it has already suffered.
‘They were rather nice, you know. I didn’t know that, of course, when I had them,’ Faye says as Tamsin buttons up the front of a clean gown. ‘Still, at least I passed on their likeness to Kate.’
Tamsin draws up a vial of morphia and stretches out the bone and fine hide of Faye’s arm. A brisk slap to the arm’s crook and the needle slips unnoticed into the still-stinging skin.
‘That barely hurt at all,’ Faye says and Tamsin cannot prevent the corners of her mouth from turning up, just a little.
‘There is a bit of an art to it,’ she admits.
In the afternoon Faye sleeps, opera turned down low. Her bed is in the front room now, along with all of her paintings. The rest of the apartment has a ransacked look, picture hooks hanging bare on cream walls marked by faint rectangles of absence. Cluttered together on two large windowless walls, the paintings make a jigsaw puzzle gallery, just inches between their frames. When Tamsin looks closely, she finds that she knows them already. Almost. She knows their shapes and colours, but not their precise configurations. She looks until she understands that they are painters’
other
works; the equivalent, perhaps, of photographs taken a few moments before or after the perfect shot. Tamsin stands for a long time before a melon-breasted, tangle-limbed nude who reclines by a window filled with the ultramarine of Sydney Harbour, and decides that Faye has taste, as well as money.
She thinks that she will like this job. As always, she doesn’t know how long it will last, but it is better paid than most. If she is disciplined about setting some of her wages aside, perhaps it will not be so much of a struggle next time to make it through the weeks or months before someone else begins in earnest to die, and can afford the luxury of doing it in their own home. She had tried not to look pleasantly surprised when Faye’s nephew, who had interviewed her for the job, named his price. Impressed by her references, he had brought her into this room to meet Faye, and she remembers now how all the while that they talked his eyes caressed the walls.
At the end of the day Tamsin leaves Faye in the care of the night nurse and rides home on her bike. There is a quicker way but Tamsin does not take it. Even here, out on the far edge of the arcing route she follows, she can feel the pull of the place she is avoiding. It has become a gaping hole in the outskirts of her city, a swirling plughole of orange bricks, which threatens to suck in first the neighbouring buildings, then the architecture of the surrounding blocks, then the suburbs in concentric rings until the spiralling devastation reaches out as far as the small weatherboard house where Tamsin lives, not happily anymore, with Michael.
II
‘Kate,’ says Faye, ‘has true auburn hair. The sort of hair I would rather have liked for myself, I confess.’
Tamsin can imagine this true auburn hair — long, loosely curling, sweeping back from Kate’s dramatic face. She pictures Kate with the square, capacious jaw of a diva and a chin perpetually upthrust. In her publicity photos she would wear deep green velvet, a portrait neckline gesturing down to the healthy flesh of her breasts.
‘She was a wonderful Cenerentola, when she was younger. She does Rosina well, too, but it’s Orfeo that she’s known for.’
‘Orfeo?’
‘As in Orpheus. Pants role. The soprano plays Euridice.’
‘Tragic ending, I assume.’
‘Actually Gluck has Amor, the god of love, take pity on Orfeo and bring Euridice back to life in the final act.’
‘That was generous of him.’
‘I suspect he felt it was only fair to finish with a big chorus and some swooning,’ she says. And then she giggles. ‘I must bear that in mind myself.’
Faye’s giggle is one of the things Tamsin likes most about her. It is a delighted, girlish giggle, and far from being at odds with her old woman’s face, it gives purpose to every crease. When Faye giggles, Tamsin does too. She has never known anyone to approach death so cheerfully, as if it were just a thing she had never got around to doing before.
By the end of her first week with Faye, Tamsin is riding home by a still-longer route, widening her circle of avoidance. It leads her through a suburb she has never before had reason to visit, down a short street with cafés and shops full of inessential and expensive things. Women whom she suspects are doctors’ wives return to glossy cars with armloads of flowers.
She stands by the window of a small boutique, guilty and furtive. She looks in and sees, browsing through racks of tiny clothes, women whose peculiarly shaped bodies show that they have nothing to hide. Tamsin thinks of the babies inside them, plump as broad beans, securely attached to their vines. If these women looked at her, Tamsin wonders, would they know? Could they tell? Is there a mark? Does it show? She waits until the shop is empty of customers before she enters. She buys a hat, in the very smallest size. It is white. She does not know enough to choose something pink or blue.
Wits about her, Tamsin rides through fumy, traffic-thick streets. She thinks of her house, which will already be occupied by Michael; his university books open on the kitchen table, his cooking in the pot. She takes a detour and cycles twice around a lake whose still surface reflects the darkening sky.
III
‘Kate,’ says Faye, ‘married well. She took my advice on that matter. I told her to look not for an adversary, but for a rock.’
Tamsin supposes that when Kate does appear, it will be with this husband-of-Gibraltar in obedient tow. She makes a mental note to check whether or not his jumper is the same colour as his wife’s ensemble of suitcases.
‘And I told her that it would be best if he were tone deaf, too. That way he could only ever admire her, and never be tempted to criticise.’
Tamsin doesn’t know whether Faye’s advice to her daughter on the subject of husbands was the result of Faye having herself married an adversary or a rock, someone who was tone deaf or someone who had a tendency to criticise. She would like to know, but it is not her way to ask questions of her patients. In part this is because she is a nurse whose task it is to bring ease, not to prod at what might turn out to be invisible bruises. But it is also because she finds it less interesting to engage in the anxious, hasty excavation of inquiry than to wait and see which fragments of a life — here at life’s end — are the ones her patients consider important enough to share.
At the end of her first month, Tamsin knows only that Faye’s husband was a surgeon. Called Keith. She does not yet know how long ago, or from what, he died. But she does think it makes sense that Faye was a doctor’s wife. She has the well-preserved look of a woman with the twin luxuries of money and time. Tamsin has leafed through the petite and pristine outfits hanging in Faye’s wardrobe, and slipped her hand up inside a sheath of drycleaner’s plastic to touch the as-new red velvet of a hooded opera cape. She has seen, nesting in the compartments of a complex timber grid beneath the hanging clothes, a large (but not obscenely large) number of shoes. Their soles are only lightly scratched, and the silks, satins, leathers and suedes of their uppers are creased only as much as would indicate careful wear. The same might be said of Faye’s complexion.