His Other House Read online

  Three weeks ago Quinn had stood beside Marianna where she lay on Andrew’s examination table. As Andrew pressed the ultrasound wand deeper and tried another angle, Quinn squeezed her hand and watched sweat spring out on Andrew’s forehead. There was no heartbeat, again.

  Jim wheeled the sphygmomanometer across the carpet to Quinn. ‘This one will need to bounce back and forth today. We used to have a spare but it disappeared.’

  The old woman was sitting patiently, her head bowed, hands curled in her lap.

  ‘Mrs Anderson, I’m back. Let’s try that again.’

  She smiled brightly up at him.

  •

  Four patients later, he was in the kitchenette searching the cupboards for a mug when Jim came in and took a plastic container from the fridge. ‘You’ve settled in all right at Bill’s, then?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. It’s very comfortable.’

  ‘How’s he going in Moresby? It’s the Wild West up there.’ The older doctor opened the lid of his container and peered in.

  ‘He’s not there yet. He’s in Melbourne, visiting his dad before he leaves. And I think he’s going to Lae, actually.’

  ‘Oh, even worse. I reckon he’ll do one term with that mob and want his old job back.’

  Quinn smiled. ‘Fifty bucks he lasts more than a year.’

  ‘Make it a hundred and you’re on.’ Jim’s handshake was almost too firm.

  Quinn found a white Combantrin cup under the sink. ‘Alice Mobray came in earlier. How long’s she been your patient?’

  ‘From birth.’ Jim put his plastic container in the microwave.

  ‘I get a funny feeling from her.’ As soon as Quinn spoke, he wished he hadn’t come out with something so woolly.

  ‘Oh yeah? What kind of funny feeling?’ The buttons on the microwave beeped tinnily.

  ‘Well . . . you’d have to agree she has a fairly unusual affect. Has she ever been seen by a psychiatrist?’ Quinn recalled the young woman’s fixed smile and flat voice. She’d sat very straight in the chair, her red t-shirt too tight across her broad shoulders.

  ‘She’s not mentally ill, Quinn.’

  ‘Has she always presented this way?’

  ‘Yeah. Her mum is socially awkward too.’ Jim crossed his beefy arms. ‘Alice has trouble with new people and you’re new.’

  ‘So you delivered her?’

  ‘Yeah. I delivered half the people in town under forty. But not anymore, thank God.’ He picked up a plastic bag from the bench and offered it to Quinn. ‘Penny’s Anzacs. Want one?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Quinn took a biscuit and poured boiling water over his teabag. He wondered if Jim Stanton could go to the supermarket or pub without running into someone whose birth he’d attended. And he thought of his father, who had made it his business to know everything going on around the island where Quinn had grown up. Quinn’s mother used to refer to him as the feudal lord, but never to his face.

  Quinn slotted the milk carton back in the fridge door. ‘And Emily Gordon . . . Her daughter seems to be looking after her well.’

  ‘I’m sure. But Rachel will be gone the instant Emily dies. She’ll sell up and you’ll have a new neighbour. Rachel couldn’t get out of town fast enough when she finished high school.’ He bent to look in the door of the microwave. ‘She was one of my first babies.’ The microwave hummed away and his voice was quiet. ‘A nightmare for a young doctor: triple nuchal cord, respiratory distress, retained placenta, post-partum haemorrhage . . .’ He straightened up and grimaced. ‘A bloody nightmare. Literally.’

  ‘It sounds like Rachel didn’t realise how sick her mother is.’

  Jim cocked his head as if assessing something about Quinn. Quinn was used to the older doctors who always saw him as a junior.

  ‘There was no shortage of people to tell her, Quinn. If her mother and her aunts wouldn’t tell her, then it wasn’t my place to.’

  ‘I wonder why her mum didn’t want her to know?’

  ‘She didn’t want to bother her. You know how it is.’ The kitchenette filled with the smell of something meaty heating up. Jim said, ‘Has Rachel been complaining about me?’

  Quinn shook his head and thought of the first look he’d got of her that morning, barefoot in her green dressing gown, arms crossed, surveying the roofless shed with a smile. ‘No, I think she just wishes she’d come sooner.’

  ‘In a small town, you have to be crystal clear on confidentiality.’ Jim shook his head. ‘No. Rachel feels guilty for neglecting her mother for the last twenty-odd years, that’s all.’ He opened the microwave and pulled out the container. ‘And Alice does not have psychiatric issues, Quinn. She’s perfectly happy. For God’s sake, don’t stir things up. Just manage her thyroid.’

  ‘Okay, okay. But I still wonder if there’d be value in you referring her for a quiet consultation with a good shrink.’ Quinn spooned sugar into his tea.

  ‘Let me think about it.’ Jim Stanton headed up the hallway then turned back. ‘And I’m looking forward to relieving you of a hundred bucks in a year’s time.’

  •

  Thunder rumbled as Quinn walked through the car park and up the wide main street. The rain started – warm, heavy drops. A woman hurried past, plastic bags of shopping in each hand, two girls in school uniforms trailing behind her.

  He passed through a waft of cool beer air from the pub but knew if he sat down for a schooner he might not be able to get up again. All his patients were new and he enjoyed sifting through possible diagnoses, but he was exhausted.

  He walked out from under the pub awning, into the rain, and turned onto a side street where parrots bickered in the palm trees and a very pregnant woman holding an umbrella steered her toddler up the front path of a house. Quinn watched her negotiate the front steps, as if his gaze could get her inside safely.

  When he and Marianna had started trying to conceive four years earlier – before IVF – he’d sometimes seen a dark-haired little girl in his mind’s eye. She was about two or three years old, bright-eyed like Marianna. He’d told Marianna and they used to smilingly refer to their brown-haired girl. But after the second miscarriage they’d stopped mentioning her and it had been a year since he’d seen the girl.

  The pregnant woman called across to him, ‘Can I help you with something?’ He hadn’t realised that he’d stopped and was staring at her.

  He lifted his hand. ‘Sorry. I’m fine.’

  She shepherded her child inside and Quinn continued up the street, the rain heavy now and plastering his shirt to his skin. Back when he was an intern, he’d imagined illness everywhere, not just on the ward, but in people he passed on the street, and he would have to press his hand to his chest and remind himself that the heart will keep beating against enormous odds, its electrical impulse firing again and again and again. It had been the only way to keep his anxiety at bay, to think of all those billions of hearts around the world, resilient, robust and pumping away.

  Now, though, he had no way to manage his dread of telling Marianna he wanted to stop IVF; there was no easy, reassuring image to bring to mind. He stepped over a puddle, his heart skittering around as he imagined telling his wife that he simply couldn’t endure another miscarriage and he wanted to stop trying for a baby.

  Chapter Three

  Marianna woke to the front door snicking shut and his quiet tread up the hallway. She heard him drop his bag in the study and hoped he’d come straight to the bedroom, but he continued past the open door.

  She turned onto her side and the sadness rinsed through her. It infected everything. Even ordinary sounds had a hollow, forlorn note: the car driving up the street, the dripping trees, Quinn running water in the bathroom sink. Sometimes it was a small and hard thing wedged in her throat; sometimes it was bile flooding her, turning everything sour, altering her chemistry, until she drove to work knowing she was all out of whack and that she’d forgotten how to relate to people normally.

  Finally Quinn climbed into bed, smelling of toothpaste an
d soap, his chest warm against her back. He kissed her shoulder and reached around to cup a breast. ‘Hello. Sorry I’m so late.’

  She rolled to face him and hooked a leg over his hip.

  His breath was warm and minty and he gently kneaded her thigh. ‘You didn’t get much wind up here by the look of it?’

  ‘Not much,’ she whispered.

  ‘After we talked, there was another tree over the road, just before the highway on-ramp.’ He stroked his thumb down her leg.

  She wanted him to say something about the lost baby. Their lost baby.

  ‘These poor SES guys were out in the rain with chainsaws . . .’

  She reached for his warm cock. It swelled into her hand and he pressed against her.

  He kissed her and then pulled back. ‘Do you feel like this? I mean . . .’

  She kissed him hard until he swung over her and the familiar weight and length of him pressed her into the mattress. With him bearing down on her like that, she could finally feel the outline of her own body.

  The sound of their fucking was violent, the sound of a punch or slap. Later, she lay under him, his heart thumping against her, and she imagined millions of his sperm swimming frenetically inside her, swimming against gravity, swimming blind through her unwelcoming womb.

  Chapter Four

  Quinn watched her sleep. She lay on her side, one hand under the pillow, facing him with that symmetrical arrangement of features that somehow, miraculously, made her so beautiful. When he focused on just her nose or her mouth, she didn’t seem familiar at all. Regarded in isolation, those cushiony, pale lips could have been a stranger’s.

  He’d been lying awake for more than an hour, trying to will himself back to sleep, but now that the sun was rising he thought he might as well get up. He reached out and brushed a few strands of hair from her face. She didn’t stir.

  He would tell her this morning, over breakfast.

  He crossed to the window and looked down at the leafy front garden where a hose lay tangled on the lawn. To the south, sun glinted off glassy skyscrapers where, four months earlier, some white-coated embryologist with a pipette had, yet again, sucked up one of Quinn’s sperm then injected it into an egg from Marianna. How did the embryologist decide which of the thousands of wriggling sperm to pick? It was almost as random as natural conception.

  The randomness of life and death was reassuring to Quinn. So much was beyond human control. Shit just happened. And sometimes it happened again and again. But patients wanted Quinn to know why. They didn’t want to pay him to find out that he wasn’t entirely sure why their body ached or why they’d ended up with some non-specific condition.

  He pulled on a pair of shorts and retrieved his old camera from the study. From the damp cane chair on the verandah, he watched a woman stride up their tree-lined street, a small dog on a lead trotting beside her.

  For weeks Quinn had been imagining this last baby growing and developing when it was already dead. He closed his eyes against a flash of memory: driving over to a baby shop in Stafford one sunny Saturday morning, his heart lifting, to pick up a white timber cot. Marianna had finally entered the second trimester, so she was ready to start collecting baby things. But even as Quinn and the saleswoman cheerfully loaded the flat pack into the back of the Subaru, their dead baby was breaking down, cell by cell. He hadn’t looked at the ultrasound films in the envelope on his desk. It was not the indistinct blob of their dead baby that he feared seeing. It was her uterus. The perfect, hopeful shape of it.

  Her familiar tread came up the hall and she appeared in the doorway, wearing only underpants, her long, dark hair mussed. She leaned a shoulder against the doorframe and smiled. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Hello.’ His voice was croaky and he cleared his throat. ‘Hello.’

  She crossed to where he sat and kissed the top of his head. Her skin was warm and she carried the faint smell of sex. She stretched up her arms, her breasts pale and heavy. ‘Sun,’ she yawned. ‘A washing day.’

  He put the camera in his lap and pulled her to him and pressed his face against her warm belly. His heart raced at the thought of how she’d respond when he told her he wanted to stop trying for a baby. She rubbed his hair and stepped back. ‘I’ll put a load on. Got any dirties in your bag?’

  ‘I’ll get them for you.’

  The labrador clicked her way around the verandah and flopped at their feet, tail beating on the boards. Marianna stretched out a foot to flick a small branch into the garden. ‘You were talking in your sleep,’ she said.

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘I couldn’t understand it. I thought it might have been Gilbertese.’

  He couldn’t remember a dream. He only remembered half-waking sometime in the night as she disentangled her legs from his.

  ‘I tried asking you a question.’ She smiled. ‘But you rolled away from me as if you were pissed off.’ She turned to head back into the house.

  ‘What question did you ask?’

  She smiled again. ‘What are you taking pictures of?’

  He lifted the camera, his father’s old Leica. ‘Nothing yet. I’ll take one of you there.’

  ‘Okay.’ She paused in the doorway, half in shadow. ‘Quick. I need my cup of tea.’

  She never posed for photos. He took the shot but knew it would be blurry. Even as the shutter clicked she was moving into the gloom of the hallway.

  His father had carried the Leica everywhere, slung around his neck. Quinn often woke to find his dad, camera in hand, leaning against the wall of his bedroom. Quinn had loved it that his father thought small moments of Quinn’s day were important enough to send to Australia to be printed up as photos. Then he discovered how few of the photos his father kept. Quinn would rummage in the incinerator down the back, looking for the torn-up scraps of his own face. His calm sleeping cheeks. Dark tufts of hair. Fragments of him on the shiny skin of the photo. He used to spread the pieces out on the cement beside the incinerator, scrappy jigsaws of the three of them: Quinn, his mother and brother.

  •

  ‘Sounds like the local GPs are referring patients to you, then?’ Marianna chopped onion at the kitchen bench, the sleeves of her dressing gown rolled up.

  He kissed her shoulder and reached past her for the coffee pot. ‘Ah, there’s nothing like the smell of raw onion first thing in the morning.’

  ‘You’ll like it well enough this evening when there’s a curry waiting for you, buster.’ She turned to kiss him, a quick, open-mouthed kiss that tasted of milky tea.

  ‘I’ll have to take a decent coffee pot up to Bill’s. Where’s the old one?’

  ‘Bottom of the pantry. So are Jim and Whatsername . . . Michelle referring most of your patients?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, for now. I think other GPs will soon. And in the meantime I can catch up on my mountain of paperwork.’ He measured out the coffee grounds. ‘One old guy, who can barely stay on his feet, has been driving himself to the Gold Coast to see someone for his diabetes. I walked him out to his car and it was an ancient Datsun like my grandmother used to drive around Lane Cove. Do you remember that mustard colour they came in? The duco is all that’s holding this guy’s car together.’ He knew he was blathering. Delaying. He pressed the grounds into the basket.

  ‘Uh-huh. Can you take my egg off the stove?’

  He ran cold water into the pan and picked up the hot egg, heavy and smooth. He slid it into an eggcup then stepped behind Marianna and fitted himself against her. She dropped her head forward and curved her back into him.

  ‘Should he be driving?’ she said.

  ‘The old guy?’ He touched his nose to the back of her neck and breathed in the scent of her shampoo.

  She nodded.

  ‘Amazingly, he seemed to be an okay driver. But I’ll talk to Jim.’ He slid his hand through the opening in her dressing gown and fitted it to the curve of her belly. ‘Hey,’ he whispered, and moved his head to her shoulder so he could see her face. ‘Can I talk t
o you about something?’

  She put the knife down, turned and reached her arms around his neck. She rested her face against his shoulder. ‘Tell me, how did that woman who had seven miscarriages survive?’

  His heart leaped. ‘What woman?’

  ‘The one I told you about.’ Her cheek was warm through his t-shirt. ‘Maybe she was just tougher than me.’

  ‘Oh, I remember. She had a baby in the end.’

  ‘But seven miscarriages. Maybe the only way to keep going is to go a bit mad?’

  ‘Is that how you feel?’ It’s how I feel.

  Her voice was quiet. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘How about a break, then?’

  She stiffened. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How about we take a break from IVF?’ He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. ‘What I mean is, I really need a break.’

  She leaned away from him, her eyes wide, a strand of hair caught on her bottom lip.

  He said, ‘I just feel like I’ve reached some . . . threshold of what I can endure . . .’ His heart thumped. He simply couldn’t tell her that he wanted to stop altogether. She seemed struck dumb, her eyes searching his face. He said, ‘I have to take a pause, sweetheart.’

  She stepped to one side, her chin trembling. ‘Don’t do this to me, Quinn.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know this is not what you want to hear.’

  He laid his hand on her arm but she moved away and dropped into a chair. Her voice was muted. ‘Is this what you wanted to talk about?’

  He nodded.

  ‘How long a break?’

  He looked out the window at the mass of orangey-red poinciana blossoms. ‘Oh. Six months.’ Even as he said it, it didn’t feel like long enough.

  ‘You don’t honestly think if we stop trying that everything will suddenly be okay? You make it sound like it’s the trying that’s the problem.’ She sounded exhausted. ‘Do I get no say in this decision of yours?’