Dark Roots (2 page)

I sit and feel the spell overtake me, my head jerking backwards, awake and stricken.

‘You should go home,' says a nurse, carrying bedding in. ‘You need ...'

She is going to say some sleep, but under the circumstances, amends it to rest.

At home I will listen at last to the string of messages David will have left on the machine.

‘Hate to do this to you,' he'll start, ‘but one of us has to make petit fours, believe it or not, for the Professional Women's Network tomorrow. Rebecca, the last time I saw a petit four I was the only boy in Home Economics class. I'm … well, ring me. Will you?'

I would have said once that I am a person who revels in the time-consuming. I used to do things like stuff mushrooms, make all the stocks from scratch, rub sugar cubes into orange peel while watching TV because I don't think you can get that zest flavour any other way.

The day Beth had the accident, I was doing something which just had to have black sesame seeds, and I called out to her, busy planing down a new back step, and asked her if she'd run down to Nicholson Street and get me some. I had to lift the headphones away from her ears to ask again, and I remember the glossy slip of her hair between my fingers, her nod, her tucking money into her jeans and going out on that foolish chore. Black sesame seeds, as if the world would stop if I didn't have them. And the sun in the kitchen, listening to PBS, and the time lengthening and lengthening. Sharpening into fear. And the phone ringing.

The sequence of events locking into place around that phone call, what came before and what came after, has dislocated something in me.

Because now I am another person. I am someone who drags her feet like she was underwater down to the 24-hour Safeway, for blocks of plain, commercial yellow cake and home-brand cocoa powder, and I stand at the same kitchen table at midnight constructing counterfeit petit fours that fool nobody, that taste like nothing, that sit there like stage props.

I watch my hands make them with a distant fascination that something like this ever engaged me. I marvel that the human brain can be bothered to store the knowledge of how to do it, the brain that can know how to select a bolt to secure a step, listen to music, remember poetry and, with enough impact and under enough duress, be switched off as suddenly as a current.

I am a person, now, who sits and holds a wrist and tries to inhale a scent that's been leached out from skin that tastes of antibiotic and somehow, impossibly, of that yellow, cottony cake.

Do I want to climb into that bed and take my turn forgetting, to look inwards into the hazy darkness of that cave? I do. Yes, I do.

It pumps out of me, my will. I lift Beth a little in her bed and feel her flesh move across her glutinous bones like fabric, her muscles dissolved away. I know she is using up stored energy now, that as she respires she is converting all those past meals eaten. I have plenty of time to consider this, breathing the sweet cellared-apple smell of her breath. This whole room reeks of hibernation. My exhaustion pours into the void, chatters to itself, bends towards that thick pure silence of disengagement. It is almost spring now, and I have brought some jonquils into this room. Their cut stems ooze viscous fluid like plasma, their scent wafts in tiny measured exhalations, like the invisible ticking of a clock.

At home I cook her favourite soup and relive the last time I made it. She had sat at the kitchen table, reading bits out of the paper. I see her hand reach over and take a pear, and that wicked smile.

‘There's something so sensuous,' she had sighed, draping herself mockingly over the table, ‘about a woman eating a pear.' Those teeth, sliding into brown skin.

Now I put the soup into the blender, garnish and all, and pour it into a plastic jug — a smooth, pale puree that disguises every ingredient. This is the thing about cooking: its labour is invisible. It's a gift you absorb without noticing, storing it away for when the winter finally hits.

I have what I want to say worked out, but when the charge sister finally pushes open the door I can only turn the jug on the laminex table and stutter something.

‘I'm afraid it's not possible,' she says. She's not unkind. On this floor there are thirty-three people like Beth, and she must weigh and measure her compassion out, like medication.

‘It's only soup,' I say. ‘Almost exactly like what you already give her. Just vegetables. I'm a cook.'

‘What we give the patient,' she says, ‘is perfectly nutritionally balanced.'

Beth's hand lies in mine like an empty glove just discarded by someone warm.

‘Sister,' I begin, and she shakes her head regretfully. I am not being constructive. I am being unhelpful. The young nurse accompanying her rubs slowly at the sink with a spotless towel, and, when the charge sister leaves, comes over and sits on the bed.

‘Sorry,' she says. ‘It smells great, whatever it is.'

Beth's lips are parted like someone in an opium dream. Under her bluish lids I see eye movement.
If ever any beauty I did see
, she had said that day,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
I had given her an old edition of a collection of John Donne's, last year, our paper anniversary. I was expecting a cookbook from her, a lush edition I had seen and told her about, but her gift to me was a page in an envelope, and I had that page now in my bag, folded among the other documents and bills and residential-care stipulations, because what she had given me was a new will naming me, among other things, as her medical power of attorney. Beth, Beth. Headfirst into the riddle.

‘How old are you?' I say to the nurse.

‘Nineteen.'

‘What time do you finish this shift?'

‘Five in the morning,' she answers, and I'm opening my mouth to tell her that she'd better have the soup, when a ribbon of sound emerges from Beth's lips, her breathing jerks and a little grunt of effort starts it up again.

I lean down. ‘Tell me again,' I whisper. ‘I missed it.'

The noise drifts again from her throat: four vowels lifted from the air, the mouth wadded with loss. The young nurse's face lights up.

‘Did you hear that?' she says.

‘Yeah.'

‘Can you work out what she said?'

I hesitate. I am so tired, Beth. I want my own oblivion from this savage procession of images; of a bag of shopping untouched while you lie ruined, of some ambulance officer prising your fingers one by one from the bunch of lilies you'd bought (for me, for me), of that step I have left just as it was, so that each time I go outside I stumble, my ankle jarring, tripping over the black hole of something inexplicably seized.

‘What do you think she said?' I answer at last.

The nurse blinks. ‘She said, “I love you.” Didn't she?'

‘Yes,' I say. ‘Take that soup with you. Please. Help yourself.'

So I am left alone with you again, out of visiting hours, three days until our deadline, as you slumber in this cave, this room that is an everywhere. What did we do, till we loved, Beth, and what will we do now? Maybe when I was nineteen I would have believed that if the power of speech could be mustered with such effort, it could be squandered on declarations of love, but I know you, and so I know better now.

Take out this tube
is what you said to me.
Take out this tube
.

How is it that I can want to sleep, as I walk through my kitchen at 2.00 a.m? Here is the wreckage of preparation, of dishes piled and unwashed, of a red light flashing on an answering machine like an abandoned satellite signalling for re-entry somewhere, anywhere. Here are debts in unopened envelopes, the slow drifting swansong of resignation. And here is a plane and a set of drill bits, a piece of timber leaning against the back door, a small pile of wood shavings I scoop into my hand before stepping carefully over that dark gap and sitting down.

I raise them to my face and inhale as I sit there, smelling forest which is gone now, a breathing tree turned mute and felled and unrecognisable, nothing but lumber.

A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear

If I signed off at 4.50 I could take the 5.00 p.m. bus and be home in time to help Matthew with his maths and peel the potatoes while Vicki moved around the kitchen doing everything else. We'd turn the TV round on its console, like one of those things in a Chinese restaurant, and watch the six o'clock news together, hardly ever commenting on it. Baths and a story. Another beer at 9.00 and I'd already be thinking of tomorrow. It was that kind of tiredness you get from doing nothing all day, the exhaustion of sitting. When I married I was a fairly handy forward with the Cougars — B Grade, scored 174 baskets one season. Now I drove my kids to sports, stood on windy sidelines hearing parents scream at their eight-year-olds to get in and kill him. Sometimes I'd still be awake at 3.00 a.m. or so, usually Sunday nights, lying there unstretched, cramped up and watching the smooth outline of my wife dreaming something else nearby.

This is how you slide from a bed: move your foot out and over the edge, find the floor, slide sideways supporting yourself on the bedside table, your fingers touching the fake antique lamp your parents gave you a pair of for a wedding present. Haul out from under the doona. Carry your runners and put them on outside the back door, with your dog already leaping at the thought of what's ahead, way down at the gate. You can just see, in the moonlight, that strange red-gold glint, like road reflectors, from the dog's eyes. Ecstatic to be out, to be marauding, to be running.

When I was in training, before I was married, I used to run four or five kilometres a night sometimes, around the deserted cul-de-sacs in the suburbs when they were so new there were no streetlights. I'd learned to drive in the same streets, reverse parking down battleaxe driveways of barely finished houses, doing hill starts up in the high parts of the new residential zone. Look out beyond the landscaping of roads then, and there were paddocks full of agisted horses. Now the shrubs were higher than your head, there were cars in every drive, ten buses a day, a new health centre. Five kilometres then, with a sense I could have kept going out past the cleared blocks and sewer trenches and run straight into the hills. Now I was flagging after three, barely making it to the service station on the corner of the expressway, looking at the yellow neon of the 24-hour drive-through McDonalds where the horses used to be. Fourteen years — what's that? Two kids, a wedding photo where you can't believe the suit you wore, and the golden arches.

We'd got Kelly when he was two years old from a workmate who said he needed a lot of exercise, whose relief I could feel as he brushed dog hair off his car's upholstery and declined a beer.

He was a sucker for the dead-of-night runs, Kelly. Heeler-cross, and I never saw him tire. On Sunday nights when
Disneyland
was on, Kelly would be pressing himself to the back door, staring inside with such longing that Louise and Matthew would beg Vicki until she'd relent, and they'd slide open the glass door and Kelly would be allowed to come in, so abject and grateful he'd be practically crawling, licking our hands, cramming himself between the kids, and Vicki saying,
Look just leave him alone and he'll calm down, kids, just relax and stop mucking round with him
, but finally something would be overturned and Kelly would be outside again, and it would be,
Okay now, time for bed, school tomorrow
, the dog staring in through the glass with desperate remorse. You could hear him, sometimes, this barely audible high whine, still as a statue, only a muscle in his throat giving him away.

Half past three in the morning, though, and Kelly was beautiful to watch, down across the footy oval and up the hill, turning around to recover the ground back to me, a long shape in the moonlight. He'd streak past me, and out of the darkness I'd feel him nudge my hand in passing as he came forward again; he could have gone all night, barrelling into the sleeping suburbs. I'd pound up those streets with my chest hurting, my feet feeling like sinkers, knowing I'd never score 174 again. Catching my breath at the servo, Kelly would go round behind the 7–11 and root through the weekend garbage, and nobody was there to give a shit.

Here's how you get into a bed without waking the other person: flush the toilet and come back in as if you're practically sleepwalking, fold back the sheet so that it doesn't disturb them, slowly straighten out your legs under it, and watch the red digital numbers change from 5.15 to 5.16, to 5.17. They're so silent they're eerie, digital clocks — it's as if time is not passing after all, just kind of rolling.

Why don't we talk more, after the kids are in bed?
is what Vicki used to say. Then it became
why don't you talk more
, then
oh, Andrew, he never talks. Don't bother
, Vicki would say at the barbecues we went to, to other women drinking wine on the folding chairs.
I married a non-talker.

When she stopped talking, though, when she got so jack of it she closed up and just worked silently in the kitchen like a black cloud, I could hardly stand it. I would rather have her filling in the blank spots, even complaining, even shouting, than silent. Spreading butter on bread, on the eighteen rows of sandwiches she was going to put in the freezer so that you'd know for a week it was going to be devon and tomato sauce, then cheese and ham, things that froze well, so careful with placing the squares against the crust of the bread, saying,
Andrew this is just crazy, I'm going to have to do a night course or something to get out of the house
. Tucking the corners back on the sandwich bags, wiping the back of her hand against her eyes like she thought the kids wouldn't notice. Watching her, a hundred things came into my mind to say that I discarded, everything staying unsaid — like when Matt was born and we just sat there looking at each other. The difference was then it didn't seem to matter, me being something that she used to call inarticulate and she now called withholding.