Reading Madame Bovary (11 page)

Tom did not return.

In the morning the kids were mute as they packed up their kits and went about cleaning the interior of the main cabin. Joel had been placed under Terry's watchful eye but for the moment he appeared okay; he had eaten some toast for breakfast and would nod when spoken to by Tom. Mostly the kids ignored him, deep in their own reluctance to leave the boat. They had the air of mourners in the wake of a funeral procession. As the barge glided and bumped into the mooring dock they gazed with blank, resigned faces at the big green bus that awaited them. Then, hoisting their packs over their shoulders, they lined up by the cabin door and awaited Tom's command to walk the plank.

Kirsten felt like death. Her head throbbed, her throat was raw, her limbs ached in every muscle and joint and she knew that some bug or virus had ambushed her in the night. All she wanted was to crawl under a blanket but she knew she must stand and say goodbye to the kids. She waved from the open door of the bat cave as Tom stood at the end of the plank and shook hands with each boy and girl as they trooped off, and she saw a gruff male courtliness in her lover that she hadn't seen before … but was too sick to hold this thought for long.

After they had waved the kids off on the bus she fell into Tom's car, aching in every bone. It was clear that Joel must travel back with them and Terry was delegated to the back seat to sit beside him and keep an eye out for sudden moves. Tom was afraid that the boy might open the door and attempt to leap out, but for most of the drive home he seemed almost normal, as if that nocturnal parabola of watery flight had purged him of his demon. At least for now. Kirsten was beyond caring. All the way back to London she drifted in and out of a painful sleep in which it felt as if her body were encased in a rotating drum of fire. Tom, exhausted, drove like a maniac.

She spent the next three days in bed.

It was the sickest she had ever been in her life. All day and all night she lay in her track pants and polar-fleece jacket under the thick doona and still she was cold. Her head felt as if it were being compressed by an iron weight while a current of raking pain tormented her back and joints. Her fever it seemed came and went, and came again, and with it a series of dreams so torrid that at times it was hard to tell whether she was dreaming or hallucinating. One late afternoon she dreamed that she was kneeling on top of the main cabin of the narrow boat and banging with her fist on the door, and the door was stuck so that she had to break in through the hatch. And there they all were, the children lying on their bunks like angels, their eyes closed beatifically while through the open hatch poured a torrent of milk so that in their sleep they were force-fed, their skin bathed in rivulets of cream, their eyelids glazed with a thick white coating. Not long after, Tom came home from school and sat by her bed, muttering about Joel who had gone berserk in the playground. Joel? Who was Joel? Then the doctor arrived; a shadowy figure, like an apparition in a cloud of warm pink fog.

On the third day, the fever broke. In the early morning she woke, feeling better. Instinctively she fumbled for the torch, but of course it wasn't there. The book was there,
Madame Bovary
, looking much the worse for wear, mottled and wavy from where hot tea had been spilled on the cover. Poor Emma, she thought, poor Emma. Too young to be the wife and mother of a plain man in a small village; too constrained too early. Thank God that she, Kirsten, wasn't married. She wouldn't marry Tom, and perhaps not anyone. And with that thought, suddenly into her head came the image of a narrow boat, not the boat they had just returned from, which had no name, but the photograph in the book; that strange picture of the
Gort
. There in the gloom she could see the young bargemaster's wife at the door of her dark hollow; could see the tightly wound ringlets that framed her head, the prim white collar, the neat cuffs and the wide serge skirt of dull grey, so wide it skimmed the sides of the doorway.
How on earth had she borne it?
And how solemnly she gazed back at her onlooker, though the seriousness in her eyes was an enigma. How steadily she held herself before the camera, because it took so long to make an exposure then, and it was impossible to hold a smile for long without feeling foolish. And perhaps, after all, she was not inclined. It was unbelievable that anyone could live in that dark, confined space, never mind make a home of it for a child. Day after day, on the drab water, so flat and oily in its man-made channels; so dense with the sense of enclosure, of brick and tar and charcoal and smoke. And in her arms, still, the white swaddled baby, its blank face all but erased save for those eyes like two sepia smudges, staring out in hope.

Kirsten sighed, and turned over onto her flank. Time to let the long night of water-sleep draw in on her, and burying her face she snuggled down deep into her padded cocoon. Now, once again, she could feel the buoyant curve of the narrow boat beneath her, rocking gently to the familiar slop, slop of water against the stern, while outside there hummed the deep stillness of the countryside. And all the while she was moving inwards, floating on a slow tide of surrender, floating towards the turning wheel of the lock. Sleep, she thought, savouring the word … sleep. And drifting off into the limp repose of the convalescent, she wondered if that baby had ever learned to swim.

Ground Zero

All his life he had been restless and discontented, haunted by a fear of boredom. There were various incidents that need not be recounted here, just the stuff of early manhood, but beneath them ran a powerful current of unfocused anger that never left him, even at the best of times. Much of that seemed to fall away once he was married; in the years following his marriage to Zoë it was as if he were on a roll and he experienced one of the most uncomplicated periods of his life. He felt at last that he was maturing, that he was settling equably into early middle age, that the worst of the devil had gone out of him. He had fallen into something called normality. He had grown up.

And then, in the '
80
s, he descended into hell. Everything at work began to jar, to shudder and crack under the pressure of the recession. Sometimes it was as if pieces of him and everyone else were strewn around the floor and they scarcely had enough energy to pick themselves up, like broken tin men, and put themselves back together again for the evening drive home.

Anger began to fester in him, slow and insidious. In his sleep he ground his teeth and would wake some mornings with his jaw clamped and aching. On the drive home, stuck in traffic, he would bang with a loose fist on the steering wheel of the car, robotically, over and over.

In his twenties he had thrown himself into his work in a gung-ho way and it had not been difficult to cover his tracks during the black periods. But now the future was no longer an ocean of possibility, more like a river where the waterline was lowering in the face of recurrent drought.

He was forty-three and he was stalled. Too often, mostly around three o'clock in the afternoon, he felt as if time was standing still for him. He wondered if he was having a mid-life crisis. For the first time ever he began to question the meaning of his work. He felt his mortgage like a leaky barge, creaking beneath him. There were mornings when he was fuggy; late afternoons when he was brittle. And then a strange thing happened: his ambition began to bore him. He saw that there was just work and more work, the next project and the next, and the one after that. His old ennui returned, only now the feeling was worse. There was no longer The Future to look forward to. He was in it. The Future had arrived, and it was no different, no more satisfying than the rest of his life. It was not the repository of some special meaning, some revelation that was the reward for stamina, for hard work and for being sharp.

The anger rose in him, anger seemingly about nothing.

He began to have night rages. He would wake in the dark with his fists clenched or with that aching jaw. Sometimes he wouldn't even get to sleep; he'd be over-tired and living on his nerves and a problem at work would have him lying awake, bug-eyed in the early morning. He became increasingly sensitive to noise and the least little thing would set him off into a hair-trigger tantrum. One night, he was disturbed at three in the morning by a shouting match below his window. In that area the streets were alive until sunrise and it was a rare night that he wasn't woken at least once – sometimes, depending on the state of his nerves, into a fury. That night he had thrown open the front door and shouted at two men and a woman who were arguing drunkenly beside the cast-iron fence. One of them had moved, threateningly, to open the gate and that gesture of transgression had sent him over the edge. Indifferent to the fact that he was naked, he'd moved instinctively towards the stranger, ready for whatever might be coming, and gashed his toe on the edge of the brass sweeper that had come away from the front door. He could feel the blood trickling over the nail as he kept his eyes on the man who at that moment was backing off, retreating in an aria of screamed obscenities to cover his loss of face.

Closing the door he turned back for the bedroom, only to find Zoë at the bottom of the stairs, furious. ‘You idiot!' she seethed, ‘they could have worked you over well and truly! You don't know what they're on or what they're carrying. Or if they'll come back!'

He said nothing. Bandaged his toe. Poured himself a whiskey, and went and sat in the darkness of the living room. The toe throbbed all night.

He knew he was taking it out on Zoë. He withdrew from her emotionally; he fought with her over money; he neglected his share of the chores; he started dropping into the eleven-o'clock sessions at the local movie house, although sometimes he would fall asleep after the movie began and have to be awakened by an usher. Then he would slink home and Zoë would be awake. She would lie on her side and say nothing.

They slept with their backs to one another.

Each day his anger began to bite into him corrosively, like an acid train, stopping at all stations: lungs, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, and the whole messy labyrinth of his guts.

He was in good health, he had a nice wife, a son he doted on and a good job. Why wasn't he happy?

And then the chest pains began. This is it, he thought, I'm going to be one of those men who drop dead at forty.

He went to his GP, David Wang. ‘It could just be stress, Rick,' David said, ‘although you do have a bit of a heart murmur. Did you know that?'

No, he didn't.

‘It could be nothing to worry about. But then again, you do have chest pain.'

That night in bed he thought: I'm not ready to die.

But what would ‘ready' mean?

He was over forty now, and any day death was a possibility. He might need to have a bypass, or a valve replaced. He had heard that any repairs to the heart could be more complicated than a transplant. Surely that couldn't be true? For one thing, the aftereffects would be fewer. And what did the murmur sound like? A whisper? A slight rumble in the orthodox rhythm? A click? A trill? Was it some kind of electrical fault? And he drifted into sleep, alive to the thought of that murmur, that whispering sound. What am I panicking about? he thought. All I have is a murmur.

One wet Saturday afternoon he went with his son, Luke, to the university's medical library, bent on doing his own research. But immediately he walked through the door of the Bosch building he was overcome by his old library claustrophobia with its memories of enforced tedium, of the brain in institutional harness. He had always felt an antipathy to books
en masse
; stolid, musty little rectangles of the arcane. Using the keyword ‘Murmur' on the medical library data base, he scrolled through a bewildering array of titles:
Clinical Disorders of the Heartbeat/The Disorders of Cardiac Rhythm,
Vols I and II
,
Interpretation of Complex Arrhythmias
,
Electrosystoles
and Allied Arrhythmias
,
Intraventricular Conduction Disturbances
,
Frontiers of Cardiac Electrophysiology
and
Ventricular Tachycardia
. Proceeding on the intuitive principle that the right book would jump out at him from the shelves, he strolled through the rows of cardiac books while Luke rode his scooter up and down the parapet outside. The books were more dryly technical than he had anticipated and there seemed to be two hundred varieties of heartbeat, each characteristic of a different syndrome and carrying a different name, not one of which spelled out Dream-disoriented Systems Analysts in Mid-life Panic. And he knew his coming was absurd. After only a few frustrated and increasingly half-hearted minutes his eye was caught by the title of a slim black volume,
Sudden
Death of Athletes
, written by a man with the improbable name of Jokl. Taking it from the shelf he slumped into a black vinyl reading chair and read a lurid chapter on ‘Collapse Syndromes': hypothermia, effort migraine, mountain sickness and cataplectic loss of muscle tone (athletes collapsing of shock when informed of their win), the Mexico Olympics in '
68
proving to be of special interest.