Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (12 page)

There was a janitorial aspect to the work. In the twilight of dawn, when the owls began sidling away into cracks of privacy, the first light in all its cruelty exposed the ground under the nets. Time for … well, swabbing. Sometimes he felt like a deckhand, at other times like something more obscene. A death's head. One of those morbid curators of the machinery of human disposal – the man who wipes the axe blade, who sponges off the electric chair afterwards.

He had read somewhere that all human beings, even the bravest and most defiant, foul themselves at the point of execution. A very dirty joke, he thought. A petty and vengeful final catcall of body to soul.

He used a split bamboo rake and pulled it over the grass as gently as if he were furrowing ashes. For this also he had developed a kind of atavistic ritual, mounding the droppings at the west end of the nets, a fresh pile to mark each day, then covering the heaps with leaves. Decent burial. Little cairns to fright and impotence, to that which overwhelms. Sometimes, in spite of the routine nature of the task, he would feel sick. Occasionally he almost vomited.

One of the more lacerating memories that kept pestering him was a front-page photograph of himself, eyes darkly circled, lips pressed together a little too obviously, his own facial muscles betraying him. Caption:
A downcast Stewart leaving the scene of the coup.

Like holding up the fouled trousers after an execution.

In the beginning was mere embarrassment, he realised that now. What were people saying over whisky in the private clubs? A banal preoccupation, one he had quickly put behind him. More disorienting was the queasy awareness of loss of power. Not the loss
per se,
actually. The fact that such loss had been inconceivable to him. It was as though a rat with filthy slobbering teeth had gnawed through a sacramental wafer. A blasphemy of rightful order.

But this too had passed and he could no longer identify the nature of his disequilibrium. Each night the quivering owls spoke to his fingers, baffled as he.

He covered their droppings and shook the stray feathers from the nets and fled from morning.

Within the cabin he had two further retreats: sleep, and Josh's books, a motley shelf of leftovers from last summer. He had worked his way down to them after the crash course on owls. They were stacked just above floor level, a lowly adjunct to the official reference library: paperback thrillers (Agatha Christie and John le Carr
é
); also more unexpected volumes: Schumacher's
Small Is Beautiful,
a Complete Works of Shakespeare,
Seven Centuries of Poetry,
Buckminster Fuller. Josh was always like that: eclectic interests. He remembered the boy had taken some arts courses that were not going to count toward his science degree.

“On a cost-efficiency basis,” he had told his son at the time, “I'm not sure that makes sense. But you never know. These days some very good deals are made at after-opera parties. Cultural polish never hurts, I suppose.”

He could not now remember what Josh's response had been.

Working through that bottom bookshelf, he had the slightly furtive sense of reading a private diary.

He had never been aware, with only his memories of hating Julius Caesar in high school to guide him, of how addictive the reading of Shakespeare was. His former teachers must have expended considerable thought and effort to have made him dislike this stuff. He took to reading aloud, loving the sound of the declaimed lines rolling around the empty cabin. Especially such passages as the plaint of Richard II.
Come let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings
… He read
Hamlet
and grieved for his ambitious father and his own indecisiveness and for his brooding son, Nick. He roved through the poetry from Chaucer to Yeats. He understood the Romantics, who cried out like netted owls at the loss of faith.

On a midsummer night he lifted a banded owl from one of the nets. A shock of disbelief, of betrayal even, assailed him. Also a faint indecent ripple of excitement. The bird trembled violently against the bars of his fingers and made the sound of a very old man filing a saw without any hope of the strength to use it.

He tucked the owl inside his jacket to soothe it with his body, and returned to the cabin, his footsteps urgent and nervous as cat paws on the pine-needled ground. In the darkness he stumbled often, feeling his way between trees, and once he put his foot into the burrow of some underground creature and pitched forward. The saw-whet's claws and beak punctured him like stigmata and the gravelly cry emerged muffled, like the sound of his own heart.

Inside the cabin he lit a candle – he could not subject the bird to electricity – and by its glow he waited for the agitated body to grow calm so that he could read the aluminum tag.

“Steady, far traveller,”he murmured. “Easy now.”

Though the claws gripped his left hand like barbed pincers, the bird stilled itself and observed him sombrely. He examined the tag.

Date, location, the institution, the bander's initials.

The owl had been banded earlier in the summer, at these very nets, by himself.

He needed to sit down. He placed the owl on a chairback and pulled up a stool opposite it, the table and candle between them. What could it mean? Was the bird incapable of learning from its own history? Did it simply have no memory? Was its instinct for home territory even stronger than its fear of the nets?

Meaning.
That was the name of this new craving. Where is the place of understanding?

The owl stared back at him through its mask of inscrutable wisdom. What a sham, he thought. If he closed his hand around its breast feathers again, its panicked heart would give the lie to its face.

A sadness settled over him like a net. After some hesitation he snapped a new link to the existing band, another shackle on the brittle bone, walked out under the pines, and lofted the bird into the black and waiting air.

But when morning came he decided against returning to the cabin immediately. With no particular destination in mind he began to walk in the direction of the light. The pine needles gave off that musky smell of decay and germination.

Golden Girl

Now I notice colours much more than before. I think I used to let everything rush by my eyes in a heedless swirl, believing there would always be time for the particular. People too – always there, a blizzard of confetti, a festive out-of-focus backdrop to the event of me. It must have been that way.

It's hard to remember.

I look at photographs of myself taken before it happened and I try to enter the picture, to look out at the photographer. I can rarely recall who it was. It does not matter, I suppose. People liked to take my picture. It gave them pleasure and their pleasure pleased me.

Now that I have dwindled to my eyes, I record the world mercilessly and passionately, seeing it for the first time. I mark each wince and the way a face recomposes itself politely. I note the flash of green and gold in eyes smarting with sudden sun, the blue of winter fingertips, the mottled bloodlessness of a lip bitten with embarrassment. I don't recall noticing any of this before.

I do remember that I used to wake greedily each morning, gulping in the day like a glutton. The sun who adores me, who waits upon me hand and foot, what delectations has he prepared for me this day?

There is a heavy penalty for that sort of thing, of course, though I do not believe I was guilty of
hubris,
being only a child, wildly eager. Epiphanies rode on the clock hands; I breathed impatience. I loved the way words and ideas dropped into my mind like rapiers. And I did love being beautiful, I admit it. I exulted in it. Oh I realise it now, I had more than my fair share, I was heavily in arrears. The golden girl herself – a prime case for auditing.

I don't mean I was vain in the ordinary sense, though I was intolerant of slow thinkers. I never looked in mirrors, except surreptitiously. I didn't need to. It was the sighing of eyes, bending my way like grasses before a wind, that sustained me. I could have lived on admiration, growing slender and translucent, fragile as a moon flower, my pale hair swaying like corn silk.

She's brilliant too,
people whispered.

I would hoard the murmured comments like a lyre-bird lining its nest with forbidden objects.

I always knew my destiny would be extraordinary.

Shortly after it happened I had a curious vision.

There was fire everywhere, the earth crackling and blackening like a turkey forgotten in a hot oven, flames snaking along the ground, wrapping themselves like bracelets around the ankles, licking the walls of buildings, the bottoms of clouds.

The three of us were there – Christina, Wendy, and myself, flailing about and screaming.

And then there were the stairs that went both up and down. We had to choose. Christina ran up, and Wendy and I ran down, all of us mad for the absence of heat. It is hard to say who made the better choice. It is hard to be sure that Wendy and I are lucky to be alive.

They told me I was delirious most of the first few weeks, but I have had the dream again recently. Several times.

It must be Hallowe'en. I look like the bride of Tutankhamen, all wrapped in white and driving dead lovers crazy.

The mask itself is the artwork of a medical school famous for its research. For this I am supposed to consider myself lucky, I am supposed to meditate upon the fact that a mere two years ago a case like mine would have been fatal. I am, in a way, becoming fond of my unquestionably distinctive and traffic-stopping head- gear. Resting delicately on a neck brace, it encloses my entire head in a stylish arc of glistening plaster, white as a virgin's underwear.
(She hath no loyal knight and true
… No. That way madness lies.) Round black holes suggest the locations of my eyes, nose, and mouth; and radiating downwards in a dazzling display of pleats and folds and overlaps, the white bandages guard every nook and cranny.

Of course I am as curious as anyone to know what will hatch from this egg.

I have, you see, been rearranged in the most unexpected of ways. I am told that layers of skin like Kleenex tissues have been taken from my thighs and buttocks and stitched to my forehead, cheeks, ears, chin. I cannot imagine how this was done, nor what the end product will be, but I can vouch for the details. This is how I obtained them from the surgeons who reconstructed me like a jigsaw puzzle:

In the beginning there was only pain and nausea and hallucination. On the seventh or perhaps seven hundredth day, faces floated from the void.

“Let there be form,” I said to a recurrent pair of eyes. “And conversation.”

The eyes seemed startled and excited. “Who are you?” I asked them.

They were crying with that stupid happiness of people who are winning television game shows.

“Young lady, you are remarkable, quite remarkable. It makes one humble … to have saved the brain … It would have been such a waste, such criminal waste … Progressing very nicely, very nicely indeed. You will pull through.”

‘What shall I pull through, doctor?”

“I mean … you will pick up the threads of your life again. And Dr Norris also has done, I can assure you, an excellent job. The scarring will be minimal – I mean, given the extent of the damage.”

“I see. What damage is this?”

“Ah,” he said nervously, patting the bed. “Ah … I think you are ready to talk with Dr Simon.”

“And who is Dr Simon?”

“He will help you to handle these things. He will answer your questions. But thank God the mind is safe. That is the main thing. The rest … such a mind will cope with the rest.”

I don't let go so easily. I made all of them answer to me. How do you mean, repairing my face? What was it like without skin? How did you know what I looked like? Did you work from a photograph? How do I know if I am still me? What do my thighs look like, so gallantly doffing their cloak of flesh to cover my cheeks?

Did you put my dimples back?

Are my eyebrows there?

I think, when one has been singled out in this extraordinary fashion, one can only be analytical. I should, however, confess that I have irrational moments. The first time I saw myself in a mirror was one of these. It was the disproportion my new head- gear gave me that shocked me, the esthetic jarring. I mean, it is a natural law that the head should be only one-seventh of body size, and a human body which violates this principle can only be called treacherous.

I behaved very badly – so I am told – and had to be sedated, a pleasing experience. This is what happens: a warm wave, golden green, wells up like love from the floor and washes me right to the cave of safety. I slid back into my dreams.

Wendy came to visit one day. It is difficult to say when it was, time swimming about me the way it does now. After several weeks? A month? Three months? Longer than that? She was terribly nervous, unwilling to meet my eyes.

“You look good,” I said.

It seemed to embarrass her, and she turned away as though insulted or wounded. Apologetically she murmured: “It was mainly my hands and arms.”

“When do your bandages come off?”

“I don't know. I don't … I almost don't want them to come off.”

“I know what you mean. But we'll manage, Wen. We'll just have to make long sleeves the in thing. Remember when the three of us decided to wear shirts and men's ties and everyone copied us? And Christina wore that gaudy thing of her father's, four inches wide? I don't think you should have cut your hair so short, though.”

Her eyes leaped about the way I have seen rabbits buckle upward when boys are out with their pellet guns.

“So many things I never used to notice,” I told her. “Like your jack-rabbit eyes, Wen. And your hair. You know we liked it long. Why did you do that?”

“Cilla, my hair … my hair, too, you know. Don't you remember?”

A new thought occurred to me, and I reached upward with surprise, forgetting I would feel only the plaster cage.

“Oh, Wen! Mine too?”

And yet of course I must have known that. Somehow, seeing only the white egg, I hadn't pictured myself hairless within it. This is too much, too much.

“I wish you hadn't told me,” I said angrily, accusingly.

“Please, Cilla!” She waved her mummified arms in distress, turning away, mumbling, crying.

“Stop whining. I can't hear you.”

“Christina, Christina! Oh, what will we do?”

Always Christina. And Wendy the marionette, her adoring lap-dog. But I was, and am, and ever will be the leader, amen.

“Christina, Christina,” she moaned childishly.

Distress is a phenomenon in which I have become inordinately interested. It is fascinating, the sense of drama possessed by the tear ducts. First a moat rings the eyes, a meniscus forms, quivers, hesitates, spills over. In the large, slow-falling, pear-shaped drops trickling down Wendy's face, I could see myself, the chilling, unseeable seer.

“I had a dream about Christina and us,” I told her dispassionately. “The world was burning while we fiddled on a staircase …”

“Oh God, Cilla, please! Oh God, oh God …” It began as a moan, and then I watched her sobs curl upward in a plume of hysteria. A nurse had to come in and take her away.

“Poor girl,” the nurse said. “They shouldn't have let you two … It was too soon. She blames herself, of course.”

I do not know what she is talking about. Clearly we were all in some accident, though I cannot recall the details, and blame is, in any case, pointless. If Wendy is living with it, however, it will not go away with her bandages.

This is not entirely honest. How dare she claim Christina as her special private loss. Perhaps I am jealous because I cannot cry, I will not mourn.

I was deliberately vicious. After all, Wendy still has the use of her face. I wanted to even the score, to make her lose control. One: one.

I am trying to remember what happened. Fragments of event float by me in sleep, and waking too, like jetsam on a flooded river. I clutch at them, lifebelts, and swim against chaos.

Christina's face, whole for an instant, radiant as gold in a refiner's fire.

And yet, as I try to comprehend, to remember what happened before and after, as I concentrate on her face, seeing her there transfigured, she recedes into the past and I am racing, racing to catch her. We are running along staircases, up and down, feet flying … subway stairs, so many days of our lives … Here we are on a particular September morning, both of us late … running backwards, years into the past…

One could never keep up with Christina. Everything, the seconds and minutes themselves, lured her off into byways and tangents, waylaid her with pleasures, with concerns, with ministrations. The thing about her to be loved and hated was that, quite simply, she had only good impulses. She never stopped to think, never weighed things, never had to. Her actions came out pellmell and pure.

On the subway stairs that day, a furtive Italian widow, toothless and dressed in black and smelling of garlic, mumbling her rosary, half squatting against the wall, jabbered something at us. A curse perhaps. Careful, was my instant, wary thought. Not uncharitable exactly. Just unwilling to – ah yes, the sudden ripe smell of urine in a puddle below her. As one might have known.

I ran on to the turnstile.

“Quick!” I called. “There's one coming! If we get it, we can be on time after all.”

But there, inevitably, was Christina helping the old hag up to the street, hailing a taxi.

“Christina! Really! We
are
running late, you know!”

Pausing, telling the taxi to wait, here she comes breathless and trailing clouds of gorgeous selfconsciousness, as always when caught out doing good.

“Oh, Cilla, can you imagine? The poor thing. The embarrassment! And the discomfort! And she doesn't even speak English. Obviously I'll have to take her home.”

“Oh, obviously.”

Flushing again. (Was Christina beautiful? Probably not, though one always believed so. A matter of blushes and vivacity, of illusion.)

“But imagine how you'd feel. Cilla!”

“No. Frankly, I can't imagine. It simply isn't a possible situation, peeing in public places.”

“Oh, Cilla.” Her brows had a way of puckering, not reproachful really, more not quite believing me, not comprehending the less than totally generous.

Now, as I remember this, I hear horns and a shouting taxi driver and a stream of shrill Italian. Christina is off like a wraith of smoke, flames rising from her heels like streamers.

“Christina! Wait! We were at the lake, remember? What happened? I can't remember what happened!”

But she continues running up stairs, ascending in conflagration, transfigured.

Every day, Dr Simon asks me: “Do you want to talk about your night terror?”

“I don't have any night terrors,” I tell him. “Only that dream I've already told you about. The three of us on the stairs. There's a fire, but it's not frightening.”

“The fire doesn't frighten you?”

“No.”

“Something
frightens you every night.”

“No,” I he.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Yes.” I am lying again.

“You were very harsh with Wendy. She was deeply upset.”

“Wendy hasn't changed.”

“Ah. What does that mean, exactly?”

(So transparent, so glib, these counsellors. As if I don't know what he is trying to make me admit.)

“She was always like that. It was impossible not to hurt her feelings. Well, impossible for me not to. Christina of course … that's different … And Wendy is the kind of person who can never get enough friendship. Ruthless in her own way. Insatiable. Always tagging along, the third wheel, and Christina indulging her. Now I'll have her in tow forever.”

“I don't think so. Wendy is extremely ill.”

“Wendy? She was here. She hasn't changed at all.”

“She is extremely ill. She believes it was all her fault. She believes you blame her for what happened, though we both know that would be ridiculous.”