The Submerged Cathedral (8 page)

This flat silver water moves over her body like a blade, and she sinks slowly to her knees with the tight thread of the waterline moving across her skin. Martin floats on his back. For an instant she sees them, two naked and new-made beings, lying baptised in a silver garden.

And then the water ripples, the air cools.

‘Thank God,' Martin moans, then upends ducklike, kicking a splash for the breeze. Jocelyn stands to cool herself in it, hand over her eye into the sun, water at her thighs.

‘Do you think it's a storm?'

Martin looks. And it is true, a huge, dark wall of sharp-edged cloud to the north. He groans, ‘That would be bloody right.'

The breeze is stronger, the water is gooseflesh now. They scurry back over the sand, clothes bunched in their
arms, he slaps her bottom and they screech as he scrambles to overtake her. The absurdity of a storm, biblical in its sudden looming. And now it's a wind, not a breeze, and they shimmy their wet bodies into the dry clothes that stick to their skin.

The cloud breaks before they have a chance to eat, so they shove things from the car inside the opening of the tent, and clamber in to sit on their piled blankets with a bottle of sherry and a lantern and an ashtray. They dig channels with a spoon in the sand floor to direct the rivulets of water away, and then perch on their blankets, a packet of biscuits between them. As the rain beats down through the night they get drunk, and became hysterical when a little channel overflows or one of them touches the canvas to send the water pouring in. Eventually one or other of them dozes, the lamp still lit, clutching suddenly at the noise of a thunderbolt and the snapping and dripping of the canvas through the night.

In the morning the storm is gone and the sky is cloudless. Jocelyn leaves Martin snoring in the tent and walks along the waterline, watches another pelican's wavering landing.

She finds a few bits of miraculously dry kindling beneath the truck and manages to light a fire for the billy. Sits on an upturned bucket and closes her eyes, listening to the quiet and the birds and the riffling water.

They travel many miles like this. On the last night, at the campfire, their conversation takes turns, resting and murmuring, and with a stick Jocelyn shifts and nudges at the small caves of light within the fire. They sit with one another beneath the trees in the ball of the night. The earth imperceptibly turns.

‘Ah, Christ, tomorrow.' Martin sighs, reaches out a hand to receive hers and she sees his skin in the red firelight, as though he is from another land. They are beautifully tired, have travelled so far just to sit here together on this sandy soil, this place where it is darkest and most alone.

She moves to lie against him, feeling his pulse through her own skin, and they watch the flames. Around them the high lacy walls of the bush, the trees' quiet shifts and cracks, the starred sky.

T
HE TOWN'S OUTSKIRTS
come as a flat relief; the haggard bowling green, the new industrial buildings soft in the evening light. Both their backs ache, they have driven many hours today, eating sandwiches as they travelled, stopping only minutes for petrol.

Through the afternoon they have begun, separately, to think about the days to come; Ellen's moods, Sandra's tantrums. Jocelyn has been rehearsing in her head the guilty conversation, Ellen's taut face and curt replies. Jocelyn will cook them a nice dinner, will insist on Ellen's going early to bed, will play with Sandra, will let Ellen be right. Will finally finish the baby's room, smooth a white newborn's quilt over the cot. The baby will soon be here; it will have perfect lips and be rocked to sleep.

There are no lights on at the house when they drive in at a quarter to seven. At the front door Jocelyn takes down a note, written in a neighbour's hand.

Please come and collect Sandra.

I
N THE HOSPITAL
corridor the air goes meaty, whistles. Martin is not there behind his words. The baby. She is feeling the down of hair on her own face. Her brain coils, slithers. He is standing there like a piece of something. Glass? Her heart understands something, begins juddering in her chest. She tries to make him out, in the corridor, in a hospital.

Died. Is dead.

 

Breath comes in and goes out.

Her voice says, ‘Where?' It is not her voice.

The piece of glass says, ‘She's in there, I've told her.'

Hospital light greenish over them in the hallway. Martin is pointing an arm back at a door. He wants her to walk through it. She moves her legs.

He turns and walks down the corridor, away from her.

 

Through the door is a room with six beds, six women. Jocelyn has to look around for a minute before she finds Ellen, at the far end of the room. Outside the window glows the pale ball of a streetlight, as though this is any ordinary night.

Ellen is lying on her side, knees slightly bent, her hands together under her head in the way that Jocelyn has seen Sandra sleeping. Jocelyn wants to turn and walk out of the room, out of this building, out of the town into the bush, climb a tree, hide in a cave.

As she walks over she sees one of the other women is feeding her baby, its small head downy and snuffling at her breast. The woman cradles her child and looks carefully at her orange bedspread as Jocelyn passes.

She walks around to the chair beside Ellen's bed. Ellen is staring, eyes open and wet. Her face is grey, her hair damp. Jocelyn pulls out the chair and sits down.

‘Where's Martin?' Ellen says. Jocelyn shrugs.

She puts her hand out and Ellen takes it, pulls it to her and holds it under her head between her own two hands.

Jocelyn remembers her childhood nightmares.
Think of something nice
.

The baby at the next bed starts to wail, its mother shushing and shushing it. A nurse comes and draws a curtain around Ellen's bed.

Jocelyn sits there in the chair with her fingers in Ellen's two praying hands under her face for a long time.

The next-door baby settles. Beyond the streetlight the moon comes up outside.

M
ARTIN IS STANDING
hunched over the fire, head touching the mantelpiece and arms up like someone sleeping on a desk, when she comes in. He straightens slowly.

The air moves between them, into their separate bodies. Deathly as water.

‘Where's Sandra?'

He points upwards to the bedroom, she nods.

The hallway beyond the dining room is piled with the mess of their trip: the tent-bag, the swag, their bag of dirty clothes. It seems something from her childhood, when they drove up to the house this evening, a memory of years ago, not hours.

He has a drink in his hand, pours her one. She takes it, seeing her own fingers move.

She sits down, watches the vaporous brandy, its slow gold wave.

‘Did you talk to George?' she asks him. The air moves. He looks at her, her red eyes.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘He tried forceps, but it took too long. Died soon after he got him out. Just after seven. Just as I got to the delivery room.'

He doesn't say,
Just in time to take in this memory I will never lose, that wet weight in my hands
.

He pauses, says instead, ‘George doesn't know what exactly happened. He's done it before …'

Martin is very small in this room with its rushing air. She knows his answer before she asks him, the coral rosettes of the carpet swell.

‘But you know. If we were here, you could have done it,' she says. She knows it, but cannot stop the awful bloom of his one word:

‘Yes.'

 

In the morning Jocelyn does not wake Sandra, but she comes into the kitchen anyway, hair unbrushed, and dressed for school. Jocelyn puts her arms around the girl. Sandra stays there, leaning against her body.

Jocelyn says, ‘You don't have to go to school today, sweetheart. Do you understand what's happened?'

Sandra stares back, says, ‘Yes. Is Mum in the hospital still?'

Jocelyn nods, stroking her niece's arm.

‘I want to go to school then,' Sandra says.

They walk to the scrap yard, and Sandra moves to the crocodile, climbs and straddles its ridged back. Jocelyn follows, unsure of every movement.

She sits down behind Sandra, sideways on the crocodile's tail.

Sandra says, ‘Where's the baby?'

Jocelyn breathes out. Takes another breath.

Then Sandra says, ‘I know it's dead, but where is it?'

She turns and runs her finger over the bronze rises and dips of the crocodile's back, and Jocelyn touches her own finger to the small hollow in the nape of Sandra's neck. ‘I don't know,' she says.

‘Was it a sister?' says Sandra.

Jocelyn begins to cry.

T
HE FLYSCREEN DOOR
bangs through the night. Somehow he has come back here, driven through the afternoon into the evening, finally parked at the roadside near the jetty. Slept in his car waiting for the first-light ferry, climbed aboard in his slept-in clothes, said hello to the captain. Walked the jetty after the boat had trundled back across that small body of water, come into his house and fallen onto the bed, slept through into that night and the next day.

He wakes like this three mornings in a row, blindly, as if drunk, knowing something terrible has happened. His blurred thoughts shift tectonically, the masses of his memory faltering, fault lines dividing. And then he is awake and he has always known this blood-red, rotting truth.

He walks to the kitchen. Pulling out a chair takes all his strength; it is the heaviest thing he has ever touched. He does not eat. Feels the acid of vomit jerk upwards through his oesophagus, charges across the room to lean exhausted and spitting quietly into the kitchen sink. Feels the decaying film of his blood.

There is only the webbed realisation. His thoughts spread in rivulets, but stop at the edge of it. Only the hospital, the green light of the corridor, a baby's feet,
Stop
.

E
LLEN STAYS IN
the hospital bed for a week, getting up only for the toilet. Nurses come and tidy up around her. After two days their movements are brisker when they draw back her curtain. Their voices are deliberately bright, and have grown louder, as though her time in bed has made her into a child.

‘Perhaps they are right,' she tells Jocelyn, taking the magazine from her and putting it on the cabinet with the others. It is the
Australian Women's Weekly
. It has a photograph of the Queen on the front. She is pearly skinned; she has a crimson cloche hat and matching lips. Her hand is a white glove.

‘They have told me to have another child.'

Jocelyn nods. ‘They told me you should, too.'

‘I didn't tell them about Thomas.'

‘Me neither.'

They look at one another for a second, then at the things in the room. Green Jacquard bedspread with BLUE

MOUNTAINS DISTRICT HOSPITAL printed down the middle of the bed. The bunch of late roses Jocelyn has brought, their bright heads too heavy for the stems. A few swollen rosehips.

‘Where is Sandra?'

Every day she asks Jocelyn this.

‘At school. She's all right. I took her there. I will pick her up this afternoon.'

Ellen nods, slowly. She has not asked about Martin since the first day.

‘Do you know what I thought last night?' Ellen says. She's looking at Jocelyn with glassy eyes. She does look like a child, Jocelyn thinks, with her pale face and her hair brushed by someone else – a nurse?

‘I was thinking about the babies at the end of the corridor.'

There is a room beyond the nursery, for the illegitimate children, waiting for the adoption people to collect them.

‘I thought,' Ellen's eyes fill again, ‘I thought, I could just go and pick up one of those babies out of his cot, and we could all go home.'

Jocelyn says nothing. Then, softly, ‘Yes.'

From the hallway the crying of a baby is getting louder,
and they hear through the curtain a nurse's raised voice over the cries, bringing the baby in to its mother.

‘Here you are, she's a greedy little thing,' the nurse calls over the shrieking breaths of the baby. The mother's voice says something, and then the baby's gasps stop suddenly, and there's a sucking noise.

Ellen's curtain rips open. The metal rings make a scraping sound along the bar. A nurse stands there with a thermometer, and Jocelyn has to make room for her to move over next to Ellen. The nurse says nothing while Ellen opens her mouth for the thermometer and lifts her wrist to have her pulse taken. The nurse presses her fingers over the veins in Ellen's wrist and cups in her other hand the small clock dangling from a chain at her breast. Ellen sits with her mouth pursed around the thermometer, staring at the cream-painted iron bar of the bedstead.

Jocelyn does not know how much longer she can stand to come here.

The nurse looks across at her, the sister. Says nothing, but moves to the bottom of the bed and writes something on a chart, then bustles past Jocelyn again to begin tidying the magazines and pushing the vase of flowers to the back of the cabinet. A rose softly collapses, scattering petals across the floor. The nurse sighs loudly and bends to gather them up. She looks at Jocelyn as she rises.

‘Hello,' says Jocelyn evenly.

‘She'll be going home tomorrow. She's perfectly all right,' the nurse says, and tosses the red petals into the paper bag taped to the side of Ellen's cabinet.

After she has gone Jocelyn stares into the bag, at the red glow of the petals against the white paper.

Ellen says, quietly, ‘It seems you're to be punished as well.'

The next morning, as they leave the ward, a nurse hands Ellen an envelope. She does not open it until she is in the car, sitting beside Jocelyn while they ease backwards, out from the parking space. She reads the piece of paper, then folds it back into its envelope as they drive out along the town's streets with the autumn trees red against the sky, the closed fibro houses white behind their brick fences. ‘It's a bill,' she says. She stares ahead at the road. ‘For the burial.'

 

When they get home the red roses are bright against the house. Ellen, moving slowly, pushes past them into the hallway, walks up the stairs to her bedroom and shuts the door behind her.

Sandra is at school, Martin in Sydney. Jocelyn lights a match to the newspaper and kindling bundle in the living-room fireplace, but it won't catch. The air is damp,
and the house is cold. When she thinks of Martin, she can only picture him as if in a reduced photograph, very small and far away. The damp newspaper curls at its cindered edge, but won't flame. Jocelyn stands up to go into the kitchen for drier paper, and to light the oven. But when she stands she is overcome by the weight of her own limbs, and she sits down in the old red armchair. Ellen's small overnight suitcase is by the living-room door. Jocelyn knows it is full of baby clothes.

Each day she wakes, afraid of the length of the day ahead. She sees it as a broad, greyish mass. Pushes it from her mind and focuses on the immediate tasks. Get up, get Sandra up, shower, make the coffee. Make the bed. She falls back to sleep and dreams of walking in a vast desert, there is an undertow of fear but all around her the pinks and blues and oranges of porous stone hold her vision. She is alone.

Sandra begins to wet the bed, so each morning Jocelyn's ritual now is to wake her, send her to her bath, and then bend and straighten over the bed, gathering up the damp sheets and Sandra's nightie, to carry them downstairs to the laundry. The nightie still faintly warm with the smell of her urine and her sleeping body.

Ellen wakes earlier than any of them, despite the sedatives. Jocelyn's other job is to go into her sister's room and draw her curtains. When she opens the door Ellen is
always alert, her head still on her pillow, her expression taut for bad news. Jocelyn's unspoken duty is the ritual of letting her sister know with routine and silence that Sandra has not also died in the night. With the opening of the curtains, every morning Ellen's face relaxes back into emptiness, and she closes her eyes. They exchange no words until later in the morning.

When Martin comes up from the city Jocelyn watches him pull himself out of the car, and stand for a moment facing the garden. If someone else saw him they would think here was a man returning from the city, stepping into the cool release of his home. But she sees him from behind the window glass, delaying his walk up the drive, observes him wishing he could disappear, wishing he did not have to arrive at their front door. She feels it every day herself.

On this first evening she tries not to notice his slowness, tries to wind up some goodwill towards him, staying an instant longer when she kisses him.

They eat at the dining table with Ellen. Jocelyn heaves the conversation along, asks Martin about the drive here, about work, tells them about something funny Sandra said on a walk to school, asks Ellen about some memory when they were children. They answer in monosyllables, and shortly Jocelyn too falls silent, pushing the food across her plate.

After the dinner dishes are cleared Jocelyn makes her way through the garden to the glasshouse, sits and rolls a marijuana cigarette. Twenty minutes later, Martin opens the door. The glasshouse hangs with the drug's pungence.

The air tenses but nothing is said. He stands at the table next to her, looking over the encyclopaedia manuscript and its ragged edges, using his hand to wipe the dust from its pages. She leans back in her chair, puts a foot on the trestle and gently rocks the kitchen chair on its back legs while she takes her time unfolding the second tobacco paper, creasing it, sprinkling the leaf and tobacco shreds.

He walks along beside the table, finds her old garden drawings and scraps, pulls them out and leafs through them, slowly. She can think of absolutely nothing to say. She trills the rolled cigarette in her mouth, lights it, offers it to him. He walks out.

They spend these few evenings in separate misery. He does not go to Jocelyn's bed in the night, and he leaves before any of the others are awake.

 

Back at the Pittwater house he sits on the verandah, pushing his glass and ashtray from the previous week to the end of the table. He watches the waves and thinks of the tide, and wishes for something to save them all.

The Chinese man who gave Martin the mud crab does not have bronchitis. Months after that first visit he had returned to the surgery, thin and still coughing, and now cancer of the lung has been confirmed in a brief letter from the respiratory specialist.

In the surgery, Mr Ho had sat neatly on the chair, waiting. The surgery was hot, the whirring portable fan on the filing cabinet in the corner doing little to cool the room.

Martin spent half an hour with him, trying to explain, drawing pictures of his body. He drew the torso too large, the lungs wobbly, and afterwards the drawing was covered in small specks of pen where he had tried to explain the disease to the man.

‘Sick, here. Very sick.'

‘Ah,' Mr Ho said. He smiled politely. He coughed again, waiting.

‘You need special medicine, from the hospital. To make you better. You need to go back to Doctor Bennett.'

Mr Ho understood ‘hospital'. He smiled again, unhappily, and shook his head. ‘No hospital.'

The room was unbearably hot. Martin stood and went to the door, called to Susan, asking for two glasses of water. He closed the door again. Mr Ho was sitting very straight in his chair. Martin cast around in his mind for a way to communicate.

He knew nothing of China. He had a friend who went to Bangkok once, on his way back from Europe. A man from the hotel hired a boat and they travelled for an hour along the coffee-brown river, beside the houses curving and tilting on their stilts. Most houses had at least one room collapsing into the water, Martin's friend had said, the floors curling down like paper. Martin has been to Chinatown in Sydney several times, has walked along the streets looking through the butchers' windows at the bright red carcasses dangling. None of this was useful here.

‘Can you bring a friend who speaks English? Your daughter?' he asked. He was aware of his voice becoming louder.

‘No,' said Mr Ho, politely.

Martin decided to try to find someone who spoke Chinese.

‘Come back to see me in one week, all right? Yes? You come back on Monday? Bring your daughter?'

Mr Ho coughed, brightened. ‘Yes! Goodbye, Doctor.' At the door he turned suddenly. ‘You like crab?'

‘Yes! Yes!' Martin had forgotten about the mud crab. ‘Yes! Bad cook, but yes!'

They laughed and shook hands, and then Mr Ho walked away. He turned out through the glass door and stepped down, delicately, into the city.

Martin knew he would not see Mr Ho again. He wished the Chinese doctors in their shops with the walls of jars good luck.

He went back to his office, sat for a minute with his hands in his lap. He could still, he imagined, feel the warmth of Mr Ho's hand in his. He stared at his own hands, but they were only creased skin and veiny ridges, only flesh and cartilage and bone.