Twelve

We stand on the Indira Gandhi Bridge, which is some two kilometres long and connects Rameshwaram to India’s mainland. We are both subdued. I’m exhausted by the intensity of our recent discussions. Ever since our argument after the temple I’ve remembered more of what happened to me with Laura’s dad and more of the shit I took from Michael. More of the terrible distress I felt when my first father, then my dad, left me. The low-level grief I’ve felt for years has been washed away by the rage that is swamping me. I’m feeling things the way everyone has always said I should, and I do not like it. I don’t like it at all.

I wonder if it would be best if Ruby and I part. I don’t want to fight with her, and I don’t want to dump this on her either. But I’m shying away from the thought of not being with her. I am starting to understand what this might mean and am becoming frightened.

Ruby is pointing at Adam’s Bridge, the scattering of tiny islands and boulders that stretch from here to Sri Lanka, twenty-two kilometres away. It is very beautiful where blue sea meets a blue sky striped with streaky white clouds, the sand and green of Rameshwaram directly below.

‘The Tamil Tigers want to build a real bridge across Adam’s Bridge between Jaffna and here,’ I say. ‘There are lots of Tamil refugees living on this island and back on the mainland—they want to hook up.’

‘It shouldn’t be called Adam’s Bridge,’ Ruby says. ‘That’s Christian colonisation talking. It’s Hanuman’s Bridge if it’s anyone’s. In the Ramayana Hanuman, Rama’s faithful helper, ran over these stones searching for Rama’s wife, Sita. She had been kidnapped by Ravana, demon-king of Ceylon. It was a battle of two of life’s great forces: Ravana is a devotee of Siva the Destroyer and Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, the Preserver.

‘And you may laugh, Catherine,’ Ruby goes on, school-marmish. If she wore spectacles she’d be looking at me over the top of them. ‘But I think you have lived in the thrall of Siva, with your fixation on catastrophe, sex and disasters. I’d recommend a stint of Brahma worship—even Vishnu is too in-the-head for you, with all that emphasis on dreams.’

I smile at her, but, as happens so often with Ruby at the moment, I don’t know what to say. It is hot, she is sweating and I run a hand over her head, where there is now enough hair to show a hint of curl.

We get back in the hire car and drive to the main village, about ten kilometres further along. When we arrive we find a strange and sandy place. People come here to worship Vishnu but the Ramalingeshwara Temple is closed when we get there, leaving us with only the famous colonnades to walk through. Their length—205 metres—is impressive but the columns themselves are concrete copies of what was once there. It is only when we walk past the ruins of the original columns, looking like so many fallen giants, that we understand what this place must once have been.

We walk through the heat to the water, past the shops that sell objects made of shells, strings of shells, macramé and shells.

‘What will you do when you get back to Melbourne?’ I ask.

‘I’m still interested in aid organisations,’ she says. ‘I’d like to make a career of it but I’m not sure if that means going back to uni to do development studies or applying for every job going. Probably both. You?’

‘Well, I think I’m back in Melbourne for good now. I figured I couldn’t base a whole life on good weather patterns and surf. I’ve gone back to writing, do a bit of consulting for extra cash. So I guess I’ll just keep going along the same—new—track.’ you are back among your old—emphasis on old—friends?’

‘You will keep in touch, won’t you?’ Ruby asks, anxious. ‘I know we’ve been fighting. I know it has been a bit difficult. You won’t suddenly decide I’m too young once

I put my arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. ‘We won’t lose touch,’ I say. ‘You are my new and most favourite friend.’

We walk past the sadhus; wild dreadlocked men with orange cloths round their waists. One of them looks at us lustfully, pointedly. Then we see a naked sadhu, covered from head to foot in white ash, supposedly from funeral pyres, Ruby tells me.

This place is lighter than Land’s End and Kanniya-kumari. The atmosphere is less commercial, more fun. We sit and watch the women in their colourful saris, the businessmen who strip down to their underpants before wading in, the priests picnicking on the ghats that lead down to the water. Cows wander, down there by the sea, sniffing gently at people’s food. Everyone is hanging out, killing time until the temple reopens at five p.m. and they can go and get their blessing.

‘Have you read All’s Well that Ends Well?’ Ruby asks me as we sit on the ghats and watch the sun go down. I am bemused.

‘No,’ I say.

‘There is this quote from it,’ she says. ‘I am undone: there is no living, none, / If Bertram be away. ’Twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star / And think to wed it, he is so above me: / In his bright radiance and collateral light / Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. / The ambition in my love thus plagues itself.

‘That’s you,’ she goes on. ‘It was the ambition in your love that plagued you.’

I look at her, surprised. ‘That’s it exactly,’ I say. ‘When I was at my lowest I felt undone.’

Tony was home for a Sunday of domestic duties. I missed him now that he was hardly here and it was good to see him, despite the fact that on this particular day he was so scratchy and irritable.

‘It’s the full moon,’ I laughed. ‘My period’s due. Perhaps we’re cycling.’

‘Well, how come you’re in such a good mood?’

‘I’m through the monthly suicidal days. The happy hormones have started.’ And it was true. I was full of joy, light-headed with it. As madly up as I had been down.

That night I woke up nauseous, back aching, and tried to walk to the bathroom. Dizziness hit me halfway so I dropped to my knees and crawled. By the time I got to the bathroom I was sweating and all I wanted to do was lie on the cold, smooth tiles, feel the cool of them against my cheek. I lay like that for two hours, half conscious, until Tony found me at six a.m.

‘Jesus,’ he said, helping me up. A few minutes later he was sitting by me in bed, wiping my brow with a washer. ‘Go to the doctor, all right? Today.’

‘Lots of women have bad periods.’

‘This is beyond bad. That’s the problem with you women, you’re natural masochists. You lose all sense of what is reasonable pain.’

I went to my GP. She booked me in for an ultrasound and the next thing I knew I was in stirrups while a woman in a twin set and pearls inserted a large camera-tipped phallus into me. This was not how I’d imagined being here, in this place that pregnant women come to see their unborn babies for the first time, in this place where the receptionist asked, ‘How many months?’ before she realised I was ill, not with child. Fairly quickly the ultrasound found a growth the size of a grapefruit. Then a second one.

My stomach bloats. My bladder feels full, I piss all the time. I am nauseous, I am in pain, I am mad—a hormonal punching bag, out of control. The object in my stomach grows larger by the week. I cannot roll on my stomach because it hurts. I am giving birth to a deformity, a growth, a shadow: a shadow child to my shadow lover.

The doctor said that after the operation I might be infertile. For years I have been dreaming my little girl. She is not born yet, but I know her. She is a wild child with curls and a sticky-out tummy. She is full of bad behaviour. She is waiting for me, waiting for me to be ready to let her be born. I am scared that if I do not have a child of my own, I will never grow up, that I will die gazing at myself in the water’s reflection.

I cannot sleep. Instead of counting sheep, I chant the names of the football clubs, the twelve that were around when I was growing up: Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Essendon, North Melbourne, South Melbourne, Hawthorn, Footscray, Fitzroy, Geelong, St Kilda, Melbourne. If I’m not asleep by then I move on to the new list: Port Adelaide, the Crows, West Coast Eagles, Bulldogs, Fremantle Dockers, Sydney Swans, Brisbane Lions, Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Essendon, Kangaroos, Hawthorn, Geelong, St Kilda, Melbourne. This second list is harder. The names have less to do with places; I don’t know where these teams are from. Melbourne is slipping away from me. In this, and other things. The summers have been hot since I left; the city is in drought. It is true, I think, the rain does follow me. This thought jolts me awake and I brood on the weather, how I no longer live where it is hot, how where I am is always cold.

A month later I was lying in surgery while an anaesthetist placed a drip in my arm. ‘Think of a nice place,’ he said. ‘Of somewhere that makes you happy.’ I panicked. Where would that nice place be, what nice place?

Then I was waking and calling out to my mother who had flown from Adelaide to be with me, who was sitting beside me, holding my hand and telling me she loved me. I began calling for Michael, even though we had not been in contact for a year, even though I could barely remember what he looked like any more. Calling out his name, over and over.

The morphine made me drowsy and floaty. I left the television on and dozed on and off against a background of footage of emergency workers digging bodies from the mudslide at Thredbo. Resorts and apartments had slipped forward and crumpled, piling house upon house and leaving a gash across the landscape. Drugged as I was, it truly seemed a miracle to me when Stuart Diver was pulled out of the earth some 68 hours later, his tortured face blinking at the light.

When I couldn’t focus on the screen I would lie for hours listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue, her songs of travel and love and blood. I could drink a case of you, darling / And I would still be on my feet.

I was not on my feet. After days of not getting better the doctor decided I was anaemic because of the blood I had lost in surgery. I had painfully, slowly, given litres of my own blood in the weeks before the operation. Now they slowly dripped it back into me.

The day I got home I stood in the mirror and looked at myself. The scar red, raw and not yet joined, the shaving rash, the uneven mix of stubble and pubic hair, and the blisters caused by an allergic reaction to the surgical tape. There were bruises on my belly, on my pubis. All that had been lush now devastated. It was impossible to imagine the regrowth. It was impossible to imagine that anyone would love me in my ugliness.

Tony made sure I had meals cooked for me when I got out of hospital, but he always went back to his girlfriend’s to sleep. It was a lonely time. I’d been out of hospital three weeks when Michael called. ‘I’m in town for ten days or so. I didn’t know whether you would want me to call. Are you up to visitors? I heard you’ve been sick.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Come over.’

I was nervous and when I answered the door I could see he was too. He looked old. Not sexy old, but old old. That made sense, I realised, he was well into his fifties now, but this was the first time he had struck me that way. Even his eyes had lost their intensity and seemed a paler blue. The lines on his face were drooping into folds. It looked like his confidence had evaporated, leaving him deflated. He looked like a man who had given up. I suppose I looked pretty much like a woman who had given up as well.

‘You look great in pyjamas,’ he kissed me, handing over some flowers. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in nightwear before. There was never the need.’ He smiled at me. ‘Have you lost weight?’

We talked, and were polite to each other, and after an hour I asked him to leave because I was tired. A few days later he came by again. He cooked me a meal while I lay on the couch watching the coverage of Princess Diana’s death. I could not turn off the TV and the stories of shattered bodies dripped into me, like the stories of the dead at Thredbo, like the blood I had needed. I was like Gollum, feeding off the misery of others, shrinking, twisting into deformity. Trevor Rees-Jones, Diana’s bodyguard, had a smashed up face and had bitten off part of his tongue. I kept thinking about that. The fact that he bit off his own tongue.

‘Since when did you become a royalist?’ Michael asked, coming in to sit beside me on the couch.

‘I’m not one,’ I said. ‘But no one expects a princess to have such a grisly end. Sleeping Beauty was my favourite fairytale when I was a kid. She was meant to be woken from a long slumber when a prince kissed her. She was meant to get married and live happily ever after.’

‘She’d already divorced Charles, been bulimic and had lovers while she was still with Charles, who was on with Camilla Parker-Bowles. You call that a fairy tale?’ Then he stopped himself launching into a lecture and tried to soften. He put his arm around me and hugged me. ‘Actually, I’m upset, too,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know why, either.’

As I sat watching the television that night, cuddled up to Michael, I realised it was true. I had believed in fairy tales. Yet here I was, watching the flowers pile up outside Kensington Palace with a man who couldn’t love me on the couch beside me.

That night I dreamt that it was my chest that had been cut open, not my abdomen, my heart was ripped and bleeding, just as Diana’s had been. I woke with a start, pain pulling my chest tight, unable to breathe.

‘Where’s your flatmate?’ Michael asked when he came around again the next night. ‘He never seems to be here.’

‘At his girlfriend’s.’

‘I thought he was your boyfriend. I get some of the gossip over in Los Angeles, you know.’

‘He was a kind of boyfriend, but now he’s just a good friend. Anyway, he’s started seeing someone else.’

‘Are you jealous?’

‘Yes, actually.’

‘Have you been seeing anyone?’ he asked.

‘Do I look like I could be dating anyone?’ I gestured down.

The conversation was stilted and awkward. I didn’t want to talk about these things with him. I did not want to tell Michael that I had had lovers but that things always ended because whenever they touched me I thought of him. I didn’t tell him that I had known he was in town because I had dreamt he was here and then a friend had rung me up the very next morning to tell me. I didn’t say that I dreamt of him often. That I always felt I knew where in the world he was, and whether he was with someone else. When people would tell me what he was up to, it would seem I had been right, that my dreams were prophetic. I didn’t talk to anyone about any of this any more. I knew it was mad. I couldn’t even see what it was I had found attractive in him. I treated him like some kind of altar upon which I was compelled to sacrifice myself.

‘I leave in two days.’ He stroked my face. ‘I can’t stop thinking about you. Please? Can you? Can we?’ He dropped his face to my belly, kissing it gently all over. Undoing the drawstring of my pyjamas, kissing my scar in all its ugliness, tracing my bruising with his tongue. I was afraid.

‘The doctor said I should wait at least six weeks,’ I whispered.

‘We can’t wait. I’ll be gone by then.’ Michael moaned into my ear. Despite, or because of, the danger of unhealed wounds, of lost blood, of pain, I let him inside me. He moved cautiously at first, ‘Is this okay?’ he murmured, ‘I’ll take the weight with my arms,’ and within a second I came. The intensity of my orgasm was frightening, it racked me, it hurt me, but I couldn’t stop moving against him and had to bite my tongue to stop myself saying ‘I love you.’ Even though I didn’t, even though I didn’t love him. I did not stop him when he seemed to forget I was ill and pushed into me too hard, bit me. In one place he drew blood and all over I could feel the bruises bloom.

Afterwards, as we lay together he stroked my hair. He was tense. There were a few silent minutes then he said, ‘You should know something. That woman I was seeing in Los Angeles last year. We broke up but then got together again three months ago. I’m serious about her.’

In old-fashioned novels I’d have had the vapours or maybe a seizure. Perhaps, like Mademoiselle Tourvel, I’d simply have lain down and died. But in the ungainly jargon of the nineties, it seemed I was having an anxiety attack. I struggled for air while my limbs twitched uncontrollably. I was a dying animal. I was road kill. Michael had never seen me like this before, and glanced anxiously at the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘My timing could have been better.’ He tried to kiss me, but I was not there to be kissed. I was nowhere.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, leaning down to touch my face before he left. But I moved slightly to avoid him—it wasn’t hard—and then he was gone.

As awful as that night was, I had seen it coming. I had behaved out of habit. ‘Stage four,’ I told Tony when I saw him next. ‘I know the hole is there. I’m thinking that soon now, I might be able walk around it.’

As I recovered I began to walk around the cliffs again each morning. No matter how I felt, the walk always sustained me. One morning as I stepped outside my flat I saw a little boy from one of the tourist buses run across the road in front of me and trip in front of an oncoming car. The jolt of adrenalin that surged through my body was electrifying and I moved faster than I ever had before, despite the surgery. I didn’t feel any pain. Out of the corner of my eye—my peripheral vision seemed to have increased supernaturally—I saw the pavement full of coffee drinkers rise as if they were part of an action replay. Colours were intense.

I swooped on the boy, pulling him out of the way, half expecting him to push me away in angry fright, but he collapsed into my arms, sobbing in terror, and I carried him to the side of the road. Even though my doctors had said not to lift anything, even though I had been too weak to lift anything for months. The mother came running out of the café, yelling at him in her fear. I left them and walked down to the sea as the adrenalin flood ebbed away. For days I was jittery with the chemicals pumping through my system.

And finally it was chemicals that saved me. There were the ones the doctor gave me which at first made me sleepless and manic but, over the weeks, less anxious and more relaxed. Then there were the ones my body made when I swam and walked each day.

Bad chemistry, I used to think, had taken me to Michael and convinced me he was the one. Now it was chemistry that gave me the strength to loosen my grip, begin to let go.