Into My Arms (11 page)
Ben tried to imagine it. ‘How do you cope with that? Without burning out, I mean.’
Arran laughed. ‘Have a few drinks. Travel—we get decent holidays with the job, which makes up for the pay. Meaningless sex, if I can get it.’
This time Nell just rolled her eyes.
‘If you’re quite finished,’ Skye put in, ‘Zia’s much the same. No worse, but no better. Still hardly says anything. He had a nasty burn on his wrist a fortnight ago and no real dressing, so I got him a bandage and some cream.’ She glanced across at Ben. ‘I know where the first aid kit is now.’
‘He had some bruises this week, too,’ added Ben. ‘Did you notice that? On his shoulders and the top of his back. I only saw them because the class was doing a swimming lesson, and I went along to supervise.’
‘Did you ask him about them?’ said Arran.
‘Yeah. He said he didn’t know how he’d got them. Maybe he’s anaemic, or accident-prone.’
‘Maybe he’s being bashed,’ said Arran. ‘It happens. Dad gets fed up because he can’t work or someone calls him a queue jumper, and he takes it out on his wife and kids. Nobody says anything because that’s how it’s done in some of those countries.’
‘That’s a racist attitude,’ accused Skye.
‘No, it’s not,’ said Arran, unperturbed. ‘It’s realistic. In most of the cultures we deal with the man rules the family. It’s his right. Then, once the family’s here, how is anyone going to complain? They don’t have the language or the knowledge; they don’t trust the police. Plus they’re waiting to hear about their visa, and they don’t want to rock the boat. If the father isn’t allowed to stay, maybe none of them will be.’
‘Zia’s bruises weren’t that bad. Not enough for mandatory reporting,’ Ben said, somewhat defensively. He felt guilty now; naive and stupid in front of the world-weary Arran. ‘I know the rules. And the burn—I saw the bandage and assumed he’d been to a doctor.’
‘I should have told you,’ said Skye. ‘I meant to, but I forgot.’
‘Young love, eh? It drives everything else out of your mind.’ Arran said patronisingly, but Ben thought he caught a hint of envy in his tone. ‘Look, it might not be anything, but someone should probably check it out. Do you have a school social worker?’
Ben shook his head. ‘We’re too small for that.’
‘I’ll see if the family is on our books, then. What’s his surname?’
‘Vasseghi,’ Ben replied.
Arran reached into his jacket for a notebook and wrote it down. ‘That doesn’t ring a bell,’ he said. ‘I might have to get you to fill out a referral, OK? I’ll send one to the school.’
‘You can leave it here,’ Skye said. ‘I’ll pass it on.’
Zia liked Skye, Ben thought. Maybe she should try speaking with him again, though he knew it was hard when she only had the boy once a week. Still, she seemed to have made some sort of connection with him. Ben had been with Skye when Zia sought her out in the art room just a few afternoons ago, a crumpled piece of paper clutched in his hand. They’d been kissing, and Zia had backed away in embarrassment, knocking over a stool. Classes were over, all the other students long gone, but still Ben had felt bad. This thing with Skye was overpowering at times; it made him act without thinking, when usually he thought too much. He hadn’t handled it well, he recalled, annoyed with himself. He’d stopped Zia from dashing off, but he couldn’t resist cautioning the boy to keep what he’d seen to himself.
‘But who would I tell?’ Zia had responded, clearly hurt and confused. ‘And why should I tell them?’
Skye had been calmer. She’d ignored Ben and reached for the picture in Zia’s hand, smoothing it out before exclaiming over it. ‘Thank you, Zia,’ she’d said, smiling at him. ‘That’s the mosque you were telling me about, isn’t it? I was hoping you’d remember.’ Then they’d sat down together, her hand resting on his shoulder as they studied the image, Skye pointing out how triangular tiles had been used in the arches of the roof, hexagonal ones in the dome. Zia didn’t say much, but he was listening. He didn’t often listen like that to Ben. Oh, he worked hard enough in class—he wasn’t disruptive, and he certainly wasn’t stupid—but he rarely seemed to give anything his full attention, not his work or his classmates or his teacher. It was as if there was a thick pane of glass between Zia and the rest of the world, Ben thought. He kept his distance without letting anyone in; he watched without reacting. Except for that moment with Skye.
Coffee was offered and then cleared away; Skye yawned and announced that she had to go to bed. Ben knew she was taking one of Vanessa’s fitness classes at seven am, and he got up to leave. At the front door he kissed her self-consciously in front of Nell, then thanked the older woman for dinner.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll come over again soon.’ It sounded genuine, sounded warm and friendly and real, but Ben couldn’t help noticing the quizzical expression on her face, the way she clasped his fingers just a little too long when he held out his hand to shake hers. Maybe she was thinking of Hamish, he guessed, wondering how he was and if he was hurting. Ben wondered it too, felt guilty at times. This situation was uncomfortable for all of them. Still, he thought, daring a whistle as he walked to his car, Skye had made her choice. He might not understand it, but he was so glad she had.
It came to Nell two nights later, when she was working in her studio. Skye was staying over at Ben’s, as she so often did these days, and Nell had the house to herself. It was a good chance to get some painting done, but Nell hadn’t achieved as much as she’d hoped. She was distracted. Ever since that dinner with Skye and Ben she’d had a vague sense of disquiet. She’d put it down to feeling bad about Hamish, but was it something else? Now, as the thought flashed across her mind, her hand was automatically stilled, the brush frozen against the canvas. She put it down and nervously wiped her hands on her smock. She was being paranoid, fanciful. The idea was ludicrous.
Nell left the room—an old shed at the back of the house, the repository of their junk over two decades of family life—to wash up in the laundry. It was a stupid thought. Ridiculous. She shook her head, scrubbing vigorously at her brushes. Crimson paint dripped into the sink like blood. It must be because of Hamish, she told herself. Of course she felt sad for him. He’d been part of their family for the past two years; he’d sat at her table, held Skye at the funeral. Ben, in contrast, was still largely a stranger. He seemed nice, and he certainly made Skye light up, but she hoped Skye knew what she was doing, giving up a man like Hamish. Hamish had been a good influence on her: older, steadier. Skye could be so impulsive. They both were, her children. That was Charlie’s legacy, never staying in a job or with the same gig for more than a few months at a time, whisking them off travelling as the whim—or a new opportunity—took him.
Nell rinsed the brushes and left them to dry beside the sink. She’d enjoyed it though, hadn’t she? She’d been like that too—always with one eye out for the next adventure. Funny how that changed as you got older. It pained her to admit it, but the other reason she worried about Skye leaving Hamish was financial. Nell had never cared about money for herself, but she wanted it for her daughter. Not riches, just enough. Enough that Skye’s art could be a vocation, not an indulgence. Enough that she wouldn’t have to keep teaching gym as her body aged and set and rebelled. Enough for a proper studio, a real career—not like her, scratching away at her paintings around midnight because she had to earn a living the rest of the day working as an assistant at a child-care centre. Nell sighed. Charlie wasn’t supposed to have died before he’d even been eligible for the pension.
Now he’d never see Skye married, never walk her down the aisle. The realisation had occurred to Nell a number of times already, but each time it bubbled to the surface it hurt afresh. She wandered into her room and sat down on the bed. Charlie had been so proud of his children. He and Nell had both wanted to have kids, but it had been him that had kept her going through the eight long years it took before Arran and Skye arrived. He was the one who’d urged her to try herbs, acupuncture, a faith healer. When those didn’t work, he was the one who researched IVF and convinced her to give it a go.
It had been a big call for him, she remembered. Charlie didn’t believe in drugs, save for the recreational kind; he hadn’t even wanted her to go on the pill for fear of what the chemicals might be doing to her body. She’d acquiesced to him, though they both hated condoms. After a couple had broken they’d switched to a diaphragm. That had been better—she’d loved the sensation of skin on skin, of having nothing between them—but not without its problems. More often than not she left out the spermicide or forgot the rubber disc altogether; on one memorable occasion she’d inserted it upside down. The split condoms, the inverted diaphragm—she should have fallen pregnant. At the time they simply thought they’d been lucky. As a rule, Charlie was. He made a decent living as a sessional musician, supplementing his income by working as a chef. When the gigs dried up, the hotels would find him a place in the kitchen; whenever he got sick of cooking, it seemed someone would ring up magically looking for a drummer or a saxophonist. At the very least they never went hungry. Charlie always knew someone who’d ordered too much meat or had bread just past the use-by date. He always managed to get something out of nothing.
Only he couldn’t seem to get her pregnant. For two years they tried by themselves, Nell growing more despondent with each fresh flush of blood. The first doctor she consulted told her to relax and stop worrying; the second asked if she actually understood the mechanics of intercourse. She picked up her bag and left without bothering to answer him.
Next came the home remedies: lying with her legs in the air for fifteen minutes after sex, taking her temperature each morning so as to plot her cycle. A girlfriend told her that drinking cough medicine would thin her cervical mucus, which aided conception; another swore by pomegranates to enhance fertility. Still she bled every four weeks like clockwork. Charlie began accompanying Nell to her appointments, and was duly sent into the bathroom with a sample jar and some skin mags. His results were fine. The infuriating thing was that Nell’s were too. She was ovulating, she was healthy—there were no obvious reasons why she couldn’t conceive. A specialist suggested she have a hysterosalpingogram—her fallopian tubes flushed with dye—as a means of removing any debris that might be impeding Charlie’s sperm. Nell lay on the table trying to ignore the bite of the speculum between her legs, and concentrated instead on visualising what was happening to her. Little bulldozers, she imagined, determinedly ploughing away the piles of garbage that lined her reproductive tract, scraping and levelling until she was as clear as a construction site. The sting of the dye shot through her like heartbreak, but three weeks later the blood returned.
All her art from that time dripped red. Vermillion skies, scarlet trees, ruby and burgundy and rust. Red for anger, red for blood. The carmine canvases mocked her each time she stepped into her studio, but she couldn’t seem to paint in any other colours. Surprising her one day with a visit, Charlie looked around at her work, put his hands on her shoulders and told her they had to try IVF.
Nell didn’t even know what the three letters stood for. She was vaguely aware of having seen something in the paper a couple of years back, but that was it. Charlie, though, had done his research. He gently guided her away from the cerise-splashed studio and sat her at the kitchen table with a cup of sweet tea. In-vitro fertilisation, he explained. In glass, it meant, outside the body, but with all the normal building blocks: her eggs, his sperm, only not left to chance. The doctors would put them together. When Nell didn’t respond, Charlie went on, speaking quickly, leaning forward in his seat. A Melbourne clinic had produced the fourth IVF baby in the world, he told her, and twelve out of the first fifteen. They’d be mad not to take advantage of that sort of technology right on their doorstep. Nell almost laughed. Technology, from the man who didn’t own a car, and distrusted their blender. Think about it, he had said calmly, but she hadn’t had to. They’d been trying for six years already, and without even a miscarriage to hang her hopes on.
IVF wasn’t quite as straightforward as Charlie had made out. There were the needles, which terrified both of them. Nell suspected that Charlie had just shut his eyes and blindly stabbed at her thigh for the first few injections, so clumsy was his delivery, but then she couldn’t be sure because she couldn’t bear to look either. Next came the bruising and the mood swings—elation that this was bound to work plunging into tears whenever she passed a baby in the street. Everything began to swell. Nell’s breasts, then her feet; ovaries suddenly palpable, like a bag of marbles just beneath her skin. The doctor smiled as he examined her. ‘Plenty of follicles there,’ he told them, and Charlie had squeezed her hand and begun whistling ‘Baby Face’.
But it didn’t work, at least not the first time. There had been follicles, but only five of them had developed into eggs, and when Charlie called the clinic the next day it was to be told that just one of those had fertilised.
‘You’ve been a bit unlucky,’ the same doctor admitted. ‘We usually get better results than that.’
Nonetheless, the transfer had gone ahead, and for the next two weeks Nell walked around in a daze with her hands across her abdomen, mentally willing the solitary embryo inside to grow. When her pregnancy test was negative she cried for two hours, then went straight to her studio and picked up a brush. She was still there early the next morning when Charlie got home after a gig. By that time her period had begun in earnest, and there was blood on her legs and all over the floor. Charlie had told her later that for a moment he’d been scared she was actually painting with it, expressing her sorrow with the evidence of their loss.
Charlie had run her a bath and fetched a hot water bottle for the cramps, then rubbed her shoulders to make her drowsy. They’d gone to bed as the birds started singing. As she fell asleep, Nell had vowed to give up. She was clearly infertile; it was just too difficult, all this effort and emotion for nothing—for less than nothing, for pain upon pain and the ache of dashed dreams. Better to just resign herself to it and get on with her life. Yet when she woke again a few hours later she heard Charlie softly crying. He tried to hide it from her, rolled onto his side and mumbled something about getting a cold, but she wasn’t fooled. She kissed his back, then, before she could change her mind, climbed out of bed and rang the clinic to schedule their next attempt. His grief had undone her. It wasn’t only her decision to make.