The Lost Swimmer (38 page)

‘Australia needs to take more refugees, it's barbaric.'

I nodded, unable to speak. The wind roared, our Apple hut rocked violently, and the connection broke up. Mum was still talking as the call was lost. I sat back, staring at the photo. Kate leaned over, and reeled away in shock. ‘Wish I hadn't seen that,' she mumbled, quickly refocussing on her penguins. ‘Your mother's right, we should be taking more.'

‘She's always right on those things,' I said.
It's just everything else she's wrong about.
Like sending this terrible photo, already lodged in my mind, opening a portal into my memories that were pouring in, unstoppable. When Cameron and I had returned from Antarctica, I'd discovered I was pregnant. My mother heard the news of the marriage and pregnancy at the same time. I thought she'd be furious but she was ecstatic. In one swoop my family life improved – Mum had been increasingly vexatious, difficult and angry, even before Dad left, and argumentative ever since, but now she mellowed. Cam and I set up in a rented house in Elwood by the sea. We both had post docs at Melbourne University and our world was each other, our work and most centrally our ever-growing, cutely kicking, adorable soon-to-arrive baby boy. Mum started a second career purchasing baby clothes and all the trappings of prams and bassinets and toys imaginable.

The days grew closer to my full-term. I stopped working. Mum and Cam helped set up a cosy room filled with mobiles of penguins dangling from the ceiling, and colourful posters of whales of every species on the walls. We bought new furniture, and arranged the clothes in drawers from zero to twelve months. We were like blissfully nesting Adélies.

When my waters broke, Cam, Mum and I went to hospital as planned. Everything was going perfectly until intense pain exploded in me, and blood flowed like rain. Our baby was coming, clawing his way out in monstrous bursts, but something was terribly wrong. Specialists raced in and took over from the midwife. The contractions were fast. Too fast. I was rushed to the operating theatre. Mum held one hand, Cam the other as I was wheeled along, and then to my horror they had to leave. An oxygen mask was clamped on my face, I was given blood to replace the gush of red seeping out, and rapidly prepared for an emergency C-section. Doctors swarmed. An intravenous drip in my arm and a general anaesthetic were the last things I remembered. When I woke up my life had changed.

As I opened my eyes, the recovery room was silent. I looked around, waiting to hear for the first time the beautiful cry heralding my baby's arrival, expecting him to be close in a crib. I noticed my mother was nowhere to be seen. Cam, dark eyes sunken and bruised from tears, broke the news. Placental abruption. Sudden, unexpected. Starving our boy of oxygen. The doctors were unable to save him.

Stillborn.

Cam held me tight.

I asked to see my baby. The midwife was crying as she carried him in, swaddled in a hospital blanket, and placed him gently on my chest. Nothing made sense. He was beautiful, perfectly formed, with a head of black hair like Cam. Even in this miniature state I could see that he would take after his father – straight nose, narrow, pointed chin like an imp. I held his tiny crinkled hand and kissed him. My baby was limp, with no heartbeat. That wasn't possible. He'd been bucking playfully inside me for months, with a strong, healthy, throbbing heart.

He was white as snow. A white I'd never seen.

We called him Hamish. A Scottish name, like his father. The midwife offered to take photographs. Cam said no. Every instinct in me needed to bathe Hamish, dress him in his soft blue pyjamas and wrap him in his own new woollen blanket. A nurse carried a bowl filled with water to the bed. I was slow and careful as I washed his dark hair, my body numb and aching simultaneously. I tried to keep him warm, but he was as cold as ice. Cam stood shivering beside me, crying softly. He reached out his hand to touch Hamish; pulled it back, unable to.

After the funeral, with the pale coffin so small it looked like it housed a doll, we packed away the ultrasound scans of our growing boy, but we left his room furnished, with the mobiles of penguins and posters of whales. We kept his clothes. So many clothes. Cam and I couldn't talk about it. Milk still came, useless. I was fragile for weeks from the caesarean. I couldn't concentrate or care about my research. Mum tried to be supportive, but she was furious with the universe. It brought all the losses the Alva-rados had faced rushing in. I blamed myself, my mind churning. What had I done? I hadn't smoked, drunk alcohol, taken drugs; I didn't have high blood pressure, wasn't overweight. I'd had none of the risk factors. But I was certain it was my fault, and I knew my mother blamed me too. She said I was being irrational but I couldn't shake the feeling. I withdrew further and further.

Cameron and I tried for another child but nothing happened. I wanted a baby desperately, to raise a little boy or girl so differently to the way I'd been brought up. I'd not dominate; I'd make sure not to drive the father away. But Cam and I just weren't the same after the death of Hamish. Two miserable years later we separated. I felt so displaced I moved back in with Mum. A fatal mistake. We'd argue and make up and argue in a revolving psychodrama. And always, the face of my beautiful baby Hamish hovered. As soon as I closed my eyes. As soon as I woke.

I caught my breath, a hot flush burning my cheeks. In Antarctica ghosts could visit.

The blizzard was shrieking. I listened to the familiar roar, feeling the force of wind and ice and snow raging across the continent. It comforted me, even though it brought mortality knocking. Life could be so easily extinguished in extreme cold, if you were caught in the wrong place. Life was fragile. With sadness, I closed the image of the two drowned refugee girls, sickened by the injustice that they'd had to flee their homeland, only to meet death, rather than a future of hope, the shared migrant dream.

I lay back and kept listening to the wind, grateful to be warm and sheltered, and then I tapped open a journal:
Bio-Medicine International
. Mum had always hoped I'd study Spanish literature but there was something in my head that relaxed when I observed minute details with clean precision and recorded facts and figures, and I was addicted to collaboration, the teamwork that gave me an endless stream of tiny, tight-knit families.

As Antarctica howled, I scrolled to the long article by my father, Professor Michael Green, on the influenza virus and how susceptible the world was to a massive pandemic, greater than anything we'd ever seen. I kept abreast of Dad's research, even though I hadn't seen him since I first graduated from university, following in his footsteps with my science degree. When Hamish died, Dad had sent flowers and money, and written expressing his condolences – but he couldn't come to the funeral because he was overseas. Since then we'd had email contact, and left occasional messages on phones. For the past decade Dad had been either away or too busy when I tried to catch up with him in Sydney. It saddened me, but I knew it was Mum's fault. I looked so much like her, and she'd treated him so badly. That didn't stop me feeling angry with him on my own behalf, but I always found myself slipping back into admiration. Dad had become a pre-eminent scholar, the most respected microbiologist in his field in the Asia-Pacific region. At least I could enjoy reading his work. It couldn't hurt me.

Or so I thought.

Ann Turner is an award-winning screenwriter and director, avid reader and history lover. She is drawn to salt-sprayed coasts, luminous landscapes and the people who inhabit them all over the world. She is a passionate gardener. Her films include the historical feature
Celia
, starring Rebecca Smart – which
Time Out
listed as one of the fifty greatest directorial debuts of all time;
Hammers Over The Anvil
, starring Russell Crowe and Charlotte Rampling; and the psychological thriller
Irresistible
starring Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill and Emily Blunt. Ann has lectured in film at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Returning to her first love, the written word, in her debut novel
The Lost Swimmer
Ann explores themes of love, trust and the dark side of relationships. Her second novel,
Out of the Ice,
a mystery thriller set in Antarctica, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2016. Ann was born in Adelaide and lives in Victoria. Visit Ann's website at
www.annturnerauthor.com
.

Author photograph by Kristian Gehradte

SIMON & SCHUSTER

simonandschuster.com.au

authors.simonandschuster.com/Ann-Turner

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously.

THE LOST SWIMMER

First published in Australia in 2015 by

Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited

Suite 19A, Level 1, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062

This edition published in 2016.

A CBS Company

Sydney New York London Toronto New Delhi

Visit our website at
www.simonandschuster.com.au

© Ann Turner 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator:

Turner, Ann, 1960- author.

Title:

The lost swimmer/Ann Turner.

ISBN:

9781471153082 (paperback)

9781471153099 (ebook)

Subjects:

Disappeared persons – Fiction.

Interpersonal relations – Fiction.

Suspense fiction.

Psychological fiction.

Dewey Number:

A823.4

Cover design: Christabella Designs

Cover image: Igor Stevanovic/Shutterstock

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Two quotes of Pompeii graffiti are gratefully reproduced from Mary Beard's
Pompeii, The Life of a Roman Town
, Profile Books Ltd, London, 2008.