Peeling the Onion (3 page)

Lying flat is being trapped like a rabbit in a snare.
Does the rabbit know it's going to die? Does it thrash legs and ears in its last desperate fight against immobility and death? I'll die if I fight. It's the same thing.

In my frame I'm freer. I fight the exhaustion as long as I can, sitting up in my cage till the pain makes me beg for mercy and rest. It's still the first full day, though; I have to give in right after lunch, and am nearly asleep when I hear Ruby say, 'Go on—she'll want to see you.'

Hayden. Wagging again. The grapevine told him this morning; he'd been sure it was wrong, a crazy grape of a lie, but hadn't been able to rest till he knew.

'It doesn't hurt more because I know it's broken—and the spasms are way better with the frame on.'

Maybe it wasn't the right moment to admit to muscle spasms. He slumps into the chair beside me, where I can't see him.

'You won't be able to do your black belt,' he says, hiding his face on the sheet; on my chest. 'I won't do my grading either.'

A flood of emotion surprises me, and I stroke his hair. He has thick, brown, wavy hair, very nice to touch.

'If you don't do it either,' I say, 'that bastard's beaten us. There'll be another grading in eight months—get your last brown belt stripe now, and we'll do our black belts together.' The feel of his breathing, warm against my breast, is melting me with tenderness.

'I want to kill him,' Hayden says. His voice is shaking and if I could see his eyes there would be tears. 'I keep on dreaming about it; I'm so afraid that if I see him I'll do it.'

He moves his face against the sheet, drying his eyes and rubbing against my nipple on the way. He flushes and jerks away from the bed. 'Anna, I didn't mean—'

'I know,' I say, and wish he'd kiss me.

'How come you didn't die?' Matt asks.

'Just lucky, I guess.'

'Will you die now?'

'Matthew!' groans Dad.

'Not if I can help it!'

'If you died, Bronny would be the oldest. Would I still be the youngest?'

There are two Annas. One joins in the chatter and surface of daily life, of being a friend, a daughter, a patient; this Anna knows that if you're strong and cheerful and fight fair you win the game and live happily ever after. That's the rule and she plays by the rule because that's the only way she knows how to fight—if you drop the rules the game is chaos, a street fight where you don't know who your opponents are.

The other Anna has no shape or role. She is an amorphous blob who just
is.
She is a black hole of pain and misery and terror, sucking the rays of friendship and politeness into oblivion. She floats above and around and behind the cheerful Anna, threatening to obliterate and swallow her down into that nothingness. And sometimes I think that she's the real me, but that can't be true, I won't let her, I've been the first Anna for so long, it's the only way I know how to be me.

It's morning tea time. The anaesthetist, masked and gowned, runs into my room. 'Anna,' she cries, 'I just heard! Thank God you didn't have a general anaesthetic!'

She runs out again.

'Why?' I ask Tablet Sister.

'They have to move your head a bit for a general—I guess it could have damaged the cord.'

Three times lucky. Three times my fragile spinal cord, no longer protected by its ring of bone, could have snapped and didn't.

When the car hit and my neck jerked so hard it broke.

When I screamed and stopped my rescuers from pulling me out of the car.

And then when I had the arm block instead of a general anaesthetic.

I
hate
my frame and bedpans and nurses washing me and everything about being in hospital. But they're better than the alternative.

C
HAPTER
3

P
ain is an animal, a shark, a crocodile, devouring me, crunching ravaged mouthfuls of my flesh. Pain is a noise, a siren's scream exploding through my body.

Mum wants to take some time off so she can be home with me when I leave here.
(If
I leave; the time has stretched so long already that sometimes I can't imagine living anywhere except this bed between Ruby and Mrs Hogan.) She's nearly crying as she tells me that Chris, who does weekends and the odd extra days, has just taken a full-time job in a pharmacy.

'She'll be able to give you things for sick plants.' (A dumb joke—but Mum standing by my bed sobbing is more than I can take.)

'I'll just close it.'

'Don't be silly, Mum! You've only just got it going—you can't close it now! I'll be okay on my own.'

'You won't,' says Dad. 'Not for a while. But with a million unemployed across the country, we should be able to find someone.'

'Do you want to see a social worker?' Alex asks. 'You've had a considerable trauma—it might be useful to talk to someone.'

But I can't see the point—pain goes away faster if you ignore it; no point sitting around thinking about it.

'It still mightn't be a bad idea,' Mum says when I tell her. 'You've had an emotional shock too, not just physical.'

'I may have broken bones, Mum, but there's nothing wrong with my mind!'

Ruby's been waiting all day for 'Sun and Surf'. By eight o'clock I realise she's not joking. It really is her favourite program.

The plot's fairly basic: Bronzed Hunk meets Big Boobs. One tries to drown, the other rescues. A bit of lust in the sand, action shots of surf and sea, boobs and rippling pecs everywhere.

Ruby is old enough to be the oldest hunk's grandmother—but she's obviously not thinking about knitting booties now.

'You know the worst thing about getting old?' she asks, when the last romantic clinch has faded from the screen and our lights are out. 'It's knowing that you've missed your chance at all those things you've never done.'

'You could always buy boobs like hers.'

'Maybe I'll do that. Tell the doctor to slip them on when he's doing the new hip.'

'And if you fall over,' Mrs Hogan points out, 'you'll bounce right back without hurting yourself.'

Ruby laughs. 'I still reckon I've missed my chances for rolling around on a beach with a handsome bloke.'

'You never know . . . there's life in the old girl yet. There might be someone out there waiting to meet you.'

'And little piggies might fly. Face it, Iris, I'm not going to meet Sean Connery now . . . Are you paying attention, young Anna? You've got that lovely boy; you get out of here and do whatever you want to. No point in lying in a lonely bed in sixty years time, wondering what it would have been like.'

'Stop corrupting the poor girl! You go to sleep, Anna, and don't listen to us wicked old women . . . Tell you what, Ruby, I'll lend you my husband.'

'Does he look like Sean Connery?'

'Close your eyes and you'd never know the difference.'

Last summer Caroline, Jenny and I deep-and-meaningfulled for most of one long night, wondering about everyone we know—who's still a virgin and who's not. Most of our friends are, we're pretty sure. Unfortunately, since none of us had a boyfriend at the moment, we couldn't decide on the really crucial question: which of the three of us would be first? But I never thought I'd be having a slumber party with eighty-year-olds and talking about the same thing.

It's not exactly a nightmare; there are no pictures, no story. Only feeling.

I'm sinking in woolly blackness, thick, choking blackness. I want to claw my way out but can't move, want to scream but don't know how. A strangled squeak. Another and another. Not loud enough to wake my roommates or bring scurrying nurses
—
but, finally, enough to wake me.

I'm alive, I'm okay.
But with the choking terror still stuck fast in my throat and my heart pounding so fast and hard it hurts, the blackness is more real than my bed.

Student nurse Fiona is back.

'You know how you had your accident on the corner of Woolshed Road and the highway?'

I know.

'We live down Woolshed Road, and people were ringing my mum all the next day, because they heard a girl had been hurt, and they thought it was me!'

'Wasn't it lucky it was me.'

I picture all those worried-about-Fiona people, queuing for a telephone, overcome with joy because thank God, it was only Anna Duncan. Fiona, lucky Fiona, was still bouncy and healthy and on the right side of a hospital bed.

Now she's telling me about the man who hit us. She uses his name, Trevor Jones—I hadn't thought of him as a person with a name like anyone else—and suddenly I'm swamped by shock, drowning in a flood of pure, burning hatred.

Fiona, with the sensitivity of a bulldozer in a rainforest, chatters on. He's her brother's best mate, a really good bloke.

That's supposed to make me feel better?
But the waves of hate are still crashing over me—if I open my mouth, I'll choke.

'He's really upset, couldn't even drive for a couple of days afterwards.'

'I couldn't either!'

She gives me a funny look and wanders off.

Jenny of course has told her mum who's told her best friend who happens to be a faith healer and has turned up here to heal me. Would I mind if she prays for me?

How do I say no?
She sits beside me, her hand on mine. She asks the Virgin Mary, Jesus and all 'my loved ones who have gone before' to intervene for me, and begins to pray.
This is so embarrassing, what if someone else comes in?
It's a long prayer, detailing the parts of my body that need healing, all the way down to corpuscles and capillaries. Her voice is gentle and deep, hypnotic, maybe—and in spite of myself I'm dropping into a warm sea of peace, floating on a vast lap of blue; strong arms cradle me lovingly, rock me tenderly. The peace seeps through my bones and blood, melting pain, healing hurt, dissolving muscles and will so deeply I can barely move my lips to thank her at the final Amen. Lying still and quiet, my eyes brimming with tears, my soul overflows with the exquisite certainty that I'll be well soon, quickly and completely.

Half the class have come with Jenny and Caroline tonight: a swarm of friends—a blur of faces, a hum of voices. They'd wanted to surprise me, but I surprise them instead, and the sight of me quiets them in a way teachers would die for.

My head aches as I try to follow the ball of conversation; Chris to Caroline, Josh to Emma, Thula to Brad, Caroline back to Mia. Only Jenny sits quietly, watching me, deflecting answers as if she sees that I can't snatch the words as they flit through the air, but it's more than that, the noise is building inside my brain—I can't tell who's speaking; the words are garbled like an untuned channel.

Busy Butt bustles in. Two visitors at a time, she says. A couple of you stay, the rest out to the hall, wait your turn or come back another day.

I groan with the rest, make faces behind her departing wobbly bum, and silently thank God for rules.

Jenny and Caroline stay; the others disappear. They'll come back another day in pairs, they say.

I don't mention to anyone that I had trouble understanding the conversation. Not Jenny or Caroline, or my mum or the doctor. It doesn't seem important. And at the back of my mind, I think that if it is important, I don't want to know.

Six weeks in this frame, Osman said, and four more in a foam collar, add a couple of months to get back into training after that . . . no matter how hard I work, I'm not going to make the state team this year. Winning one tournament doesn't take the place of the trials. I'll never be the under-eighteen title holder myself.
Never . . . impossible . . . too late
—
how can a dream be killed like that? Glowing within reach one minute, ripped out of me and out of sight the next.

Aunt Lynda, my father's sister, is a nurse in Melbourne; she loves shocking us with gross, funny stories about hospital life. Italian and Greek women aren't popular in hospitals, she claims. They cry too much and upset the ward routines. (She laughs when Mum calls herself a clog wog, and says they're okay, just as buttoned-up as Anglo-Saxons.) But I'm crying this morning, secretly and silently as a kid at school camp—and am caught by a nurse on early rounds. Is it the pain, he asks.

'No; I'm okay.'
Leave me alone.

'Are you
sure
you're not in pain?'

'I want to go back to school.' Not quite the truth, but as near as I can get it.

'Wish my kids would say that! All I can do to get them off some mornings.'

So I behave; I'm not going to be caught again. And the tears are bubbling so viciously now they'll drown me if I let them go—shove them back below the surface; if I wait long enough maybe they'll evaporate.

I wonder if I would have been re-X-rayed if I'd been Italian. It's something to think about, in the long white nights, when I'm afraid to move in my unsafe bed. For medico-legal reasons.

'I've got a sore throat,' Bronwyn announces, in case I hadn't noticed the subtle stink of VapoRub. 'Mum says I don't have to go to school.'

Mum gives her a quick hug. 'You're coming to work with me, aren't you? A couple of days off and you'll be fine.'

'Better not put her near your "scented garden" section,' I tease. 'She'll put the customers right off.'

Jenny, reassured that I'm going to live, quizzes me on more important matters. 'You really like Hayden? Really,
really
like?'

I really,
really
like him. My stomach churns at his name; my head floats at the sight of him. Even the sound of his voice leaves me breathless.

'Sounds like love to me,' Jenny agrees, nodding wisely. 'But it's funny. You sort of liked him before—but you weren't crazy about him. And now . . . you get all these injuries and the other driver and Hayden get nothing! I know he didn't do anything wrong, but I think I'd still blame him, if it were me.' Safe in my new cage, I'm allowed to move—wheeled ignominiously across the hall on a rolling toilet seat—but anything's better than bedpans. And a bath! Oh God, to be clean at last. Because that special BO of pain and sweat, never properly wiped away with a damp washer and deodorant, is strong enough to knock out a football change room. No wonder Hayden didn't kiss me.