Vital Signs

Nicola Redhouse

Imminent death came to Alice in an unexpected place: the freezer section of the supermarket, with a twelve-pack of toilet rolls pinioned to her shoulder and an alfoil tray clutched under her left arm.

It came in the form of the return of a headache that she now realised had been there for two weeks – since the last time she had been in the freezer section. It radiated a pain that filled her cranium and sharpened when she lay down, felt as though there was something inside her head trying to move everything else out of the way. She should probably see the doctor.

The toilet rolls were slipping. She wasn’t prone to hypochondria, but it seemed, there in front of the party pies, like a storm was drawing in around her. The bags of peas and cartons of ice-cream took on a grey pallor in the fluorescent light.

And then, at once, the headache dulled. Perhaps it wasn’t fatal after all, she thought. She dumped everything into a trolley and pushed on to the confectionary aisle. Liquorice Allsorts were down, two bags for a dollar.

*

Dr Kline shone a light. ‘Follow the beam,’ he said.

The headache pulsed along with her heartbeat. ‘It’s better today,’ she told him, fearful suddenly that the source of the pain knew it was in the presence of a doctor and would withdraw.

He was not a talker. She imagined he could see her thought like a tiny pinball rattling around her head.

The doctor felt her neck, took her blood pressure, prodded around her ears, taking a look inside each. He palpated her cheeks and forehead.

‘Does this hurt?’ he asked. He was breathing through his nose.

She felt she should say yes.

‘No.’

It seemed an interminable wait while he took apart the otoscope, washed his hands and returned to his desk.

‘I can’t find anything,’ he announced. ‘But I’d like you to have an MRI, just as a precaution.’

The clock ticked as he wrote out a referral.

*

It was quiet in the car park, nothing but leaves whipping around into whirligigs. The headache had lifted again and she absorbed the peace left in its wake. She was aware, too, of the pendulous nature of her mind; that she could swing it towards rapidly unfolding tragedy – a tumour, hospice, the selection of music for her funeral – or towards a clear scan.

And, ridiculously, she was bothered by the inconvenience of it all – having to leave work early again; becoming embroiled in a discussion about illness with her boss, Janice. She’d wanted to avoid mentioning the headaches.

She sat in the car and phoned Frank, who seemed to take the doctor’s non-verdict as good news. ‘You just need a good sleep.’ Twenty years out of France and he still pronounced it slip.

The irritable feeling expanded, prickled her skin; she felt it like a burr underfoot. She phoned the hospital and booked the scan, then sat back and closed her eyes.

*

She became conscious of the thing with colour later that week: a tint settled over her vision, as though she was looking through a sheet of cellophane, and dissolved as quickly as it came.

The first time, down the side of the house while she took the bins out, she thought it must be the evening light – a gentle blue, almost opalescent. But then it happened again at her desk, citron this time, and she saw that the colour did not behave as though it came from a light source. It was dense. Consistent.

She made another appointment with Dr Kline.

This time, he didn’t bother with the physical examination.

‘Are you feeling anything when you see this colour? Are you smelling anything? Eating?’ he asked. There was a hint of excitement to his tone, Alice noted.

She gave the questions close consideration. ‘With the blue, I was in a rush – I’d left a curry on the stove,’ she paused. ‘The yellow … I was eating a chicken sandwich.’

She pondered the memory further. ‘My shoes were hurting me.’

‘A chicken sandwich.’ he repeated. He was on the edge of his chair. His leg was jiggling up and down.

‘It was delicious,’ she ventured.

He looked up at her over the edge of his bifocals.

‘It had dill in it, too.’ She felt a little like she was giving a police statement, both hopeful and idiotic.

‘And you weren’t eating when the blue colour came?’

She tried to recall. Dr Kline had the air of a tortoise about him. In anticipation of her answer she saw his face had become more human. Still, her answer was no. She had not been eating.

He scribbled in his notebook for some minutes, and when he finally looked up she saw he was his ancient reptilian self again. ‘Come and see me after the MRI, and call if you notice anything else.’

Something about having disappointed Dr Kline made her feel peculiarly edgy and, driving on the freeway towards home, agitation bloomed – she ground her teeth, tried to loosen her jaw, tasted something like metal. She turned the corner off Brunswick Street, and it dawned on her that their cream weatherboard was slightly green. That everything was green.

*

She decided not to tell Frank, who had been out in the garage all morning sanding down a bureau he’d bought on eBay. He’d have too much to say about the psychology of it all; probably tell her she needed to see a shrink again. She wanted to turn this idea around on her own for a while.

She turned on the computer and opened a spreadsheet, typed date in the first column, sensation in the second, and emotion in the third.

The empty document, its promise of filling up, of accumulating to an answer, excited her. She knew this sensation – it was the pleasure of deliberate reflection; a luxurious curating of the self. It had come to her in her twenties when she had kept a diary. She had been religious about it, amassed a boxful of youthful optimism.

It had petered off, the record-keeping, the two years they tried to have a baby, and stopped altogether the day they had at last been told it would never happen. Not in her womb, in any case.

It was better to engage, she had decided. Better to appreciate each moment as it happened, than to feel, while it was happening, that it was going to become inscribed, immutable.

The room had become a deep mauve. The colour moved through her like the low bass note of a cello.

She entered her first record of data.

*

Frank pushed through the front door, holding his key-ring between his teeth, hands laden with Indian takeaway.

The whole car would smell tomorrow, she thought. She had become so attuned to her feelings since she’d started the spreadsheet; it was like having a detective inside her mind.

They settled down in front of the television – a documentary about Iceland – and ate, a habit she often worried was a sign of stagnancy in their relationship. But, this night, with the rain streaming down the windows, and the strange lilting narration, she felt a love for Frank so powerful it had the vulnerability of a wound. She feared if she moved she would open up entirely.

Frank was her home. They had made it through childlessness, which she’d seen destroy other couples, and had determined a new future for themselves. It was a future without school plays and tree houses – or chickenpox and unidentifiable rashes, for that matter. But it had, she felt, comparatively unconstrained time. There were only their own slow years to pass by; no lives counted in weeks, months, words, teeth, height, report cards or shoe size, graduations, the chaos of it all sending the days into freefall.

A clear white light had spilled in to the room, from the glaciers on TV, or from her mind – for once she didn’t care to know. She took his hand.

*

The scan was less frightening than she had anticipated. There was her initial claustrophobia – she had been unable to shake a memory of Janice, years ago, likening it to being buried alive. And for a while she felt slightly queasy, imagining radio frequencies invisibly searching out her body, the thought of what they might come upon.

But then she seemed to give way, to find the limitations of the capsule comforting. The blankets and the padding, the cocoon of white plastic that both contained her vision and offered an endless horizon. Only the intermittent buzzing and strange knocks filtering through the earplugs offered a distant reminder of the context of her reverie.

Lying in that strange empty space, she tried to remember back to when she had met Frank. She was three years in to a law degree and had taken a semester out to travel, feeling increasingly certain that she did not want to be a lawyer.

Her choice of study had been born of a romantic notion that the law was a high form of the arts – a realm of the classics in which she would be most deeply engaged with stories, tragedies. But she had found it to be deviously mathematical. Logic minus hope: a world in which intention was flawlessly calculable.

She spent hours in the library, lost in the detail of tort cases: the story of the men who had lured their victim to a hut, gotten him drunk and knocked him unconscious, then thrown him off a cliff, believing him dead – What had they drunk? What had they talked about? She’d wondered. But in the end all the tutor had wanted was the precise principal on which the case was decided. Ratio decidendi: the Latin turned the events into an object. It was an alchemy of joylessness, a puzzle whose un-coding reminded her of the childhood feeling of trying to discern if her father’s temper was connected to her.

She had much preferred her Arts classes: analysing literature, feeling that she had the power as a reader to make a story what she wished. It was a philosophy class that had nudged her over the edge about the law degree, made her see that it was ludicrous, punitive even, to ask for a single narrative truth from anything.

And it had been in Dahab, smoking shisha and drinking a lot of fresh pawpaw juice, that she found herself thinking about these things, and then discussing them, upon a swathe of pillows overlooking the sea, with a young Frenchman: François, as he called himself then.

*

Alice lay still and, at last, from far away, came a long beep, and then the sounds of the technician clomping around the room.

She dressed quickly in the small change cubicle, leaving her singlet straps twisted and not bothering to pin up her hair or put her rings back on, eager to get out into fresh air and away from the antiseptic smell of the room, which had begun to transmute into an uncomfortable sensation on her skin.

She walked down to the river, enjoying the wash of orange that had settled over the late-afternoon bay – tasting it at the back of her throat. She felt light, as though something had been excised from her; but she knew it was nothing more than the weight of waiting that had lifted, the familiar relief of an exam being over. The question of whether she would pass still remained.

*

When Dr Kline’s receptionist phoned she was in the supermarket again. She waited on hold for him while a tinny strain of James Taylor fought its way through the earpiece, a song she had loved as a child. It came to her then that time was capable of containing infinitely disparate experiences. This whole event – from her initial symptoms until this moment of diagnosis – had unfolded in precisely the lifespan of a twelve-pack of double-ply toilet paper.

The music cut off and she heard Dr Kline clear his throat. For the moment of silence that followed she wondered if he had forgotten she was on the other end of the line, but then she realised the pause bore an indefinable gravity.

‘Alice. I’ve got your scans,’ he began. Then a sound like laminate being shook out, a wobble board, the clang of metal.

‘Sorry, I’m trying to look at them as we speak,’ he continued. ‘There’s an area of concern. It makes sense, in terms of your symptoms – ’

She saw her hands on the trolley, the fine movement of her metatarsals slipping up and down under her skin like thread in a loom.

*

It was a growth. Shadow-grey, smaller than a pearl, burrowed in between her occipital and temporal lobes. They would need to do a biopsy, Dr Kline explained. He had booked her in with a neurologist for the next day.

She clung to those words, occipital, temporal, anchors to lower with assurance into this unseeable internal terrain. She had made her way into adulthood with a constant sense of unease, fuelled by stuff only of the imagination: impossibly slippery cliffs, aeroplanes that fell to earth like stones. Never death by illness; a tumour. In her wildest nightmares she would never have anticipated such a plausible ending for herself.

She asked Frank that night, ‘Do you think one day they will be able to send tiny drones in to the body to retrieve cells, through your ear or your mouth?’ She had begun to imagine her brain as the moon. And wasn’t it as treacherous, she decided, hanging brashly in its vast space, but all the while unknowable.

‘Non,’ Frank replied, sleepily. He squeezed her arm tightly where it lay beside him, the two of them staring into the thick black night of their bedroom. They lay like that for hours, the steady beat of Alice’s now certainly fatal headache carrying her out onto a plateau of half-sleep from which she felt herself wade into memories long discarded: Frank, smooth and pale and somehow exotic in his European swimming trunks, so different to the men in Australia in their fluoro boardies, salt-stung and red from the heat. In Toulouse when they went back to meet his family; at his university, his friends talking fast and raucously through wine-stained teeth at the student bar about their PhDs. They had smoked a few joints and she’d retreated happily into a stoned state of observation, making what she wished of their words even if she didn’t know their language. Their very difference, their Frenchness, excited her.

But François was Frank now, spoke almost like her, watched the footy and went for the Bombers, and, just as she dipped into sleep, she felt this realisation as a physical pain.

*

‘I’ll take you through it slowly.’ The neurologist had bright eyes, neatly clipped nails.

Alice’s scan hung, like a world map, behind her desk, and the doctor used a white pointer to direct her to the relevant anatomical areas.

‘The growth is a tumour,’ she explained, ‘but we don’t know if it is malignant. If it’s benign, it could well be left alone. There are other scans we can do to try to ascertain this, but a biopsy would tell us. The procedure, though, is tricky in your case.’

She drew two shapes resting on each other like a yin and yang, and then circled their shared curve.

‘The growth is located between two of the brain lobes. Those in-between areas are like computer cables. If they are damaged, we’re risking cognitive impairment. It’s a small risk, but we’re talking potential damage to your vision, to your capacity for emotion and memory.’

They left the hospital with a bag full of brochures, infrared brain images blooming like bouquets across shiny pages, medical insurance forms, staid and official in dull green. Alice noted colour all the time now; it was a code of sorts, she was sure.

*

They decided to go away for a few weeks. It was impulsive. Frank wanted to head to the Peninsula. She had always found the ocean soothing, but the water’s expanse, the illusion of its glinting surface – it was too symbolic. She insisted they drive inland, towards the mountains, find a town with a pub, a bed and breakfast.

She had scrapped the spreadsheet. Words couldn’t seem to touch on the depth of how she had begun to experience things. Feelings had become multidimensional, with texture, taste: shock was an ice shard of lime water in her mouth; deep sadness she felt as a slightly nervy tickle along a scar she had on her left arm.

The endless drive to Canberra, her wonder at the new trees budding from black where bushfire had swept through, a tinge of melancholy when a song came over the radio – she felt these things as a collage of senses, fluid and connected.

They stayed in a cabin one night, with a log fire and a bath out on a deck, then a caravan by a lake, waking to the caw caw of galahs. They were travellers again, thrifty and vulnerable to the world.

*

In the second week on the road, Alice woke up and it was not Frank with her in the bed. It looked like him, but she knew it wasn’t him. It was the body of Frank but another person inside. She saw his hands – yes, there was the small scar on his thumb from a fishhook – his arm, resting along his side, the fine sandy hairs. But when he turned and asked if she wanted her coffee yet she saw something of the essence of him was missing. It was like he was an avatar.

At first she was alarmed. He, whoever this man was, had roused her with the noise of his knuckles cracking. Frank did this too: stretched and limbered when waking.

She lay quietly with her eyes half closed, panic setting in, watching him move about, embody Frank’s habits: heat the milk for the coffee, flump back into bed, bend his book over at the spine, breath noisily through his nose.

Why would he do this? If anything about this replica gave away Frank, it was in the impeccable set-up of this scenario. He was nothing if not an auteur when it came to his work: always devising impossible research projects; always talking about his frustrations with the limitations of existing studies in identity, how we couldn’t study the mind because observing it could only be done from within. That had to be it: this was a body-double, some elaborate experiment. It didn’t seem ethical. Or perhaps it was: could it be designed to help her come to a decision? She couldn’t imagine how, but it was possible. Either way, it would be necessary, she realised, to not let on what she knew; she’d play along.

*

The next week was inevitably difficult for her. They made their way inland, back towards National Parkland, through towns small and barren, on roads so straight and new that it felt the car wasn’t moving at all.

A few times, not-Frank asked her if she was alright. ‘You seem – quiet,’ he said, and she smiled at how, just like Frank, he assumed her silence was anxiety.

They stopped for a day and a night at a camping area near the Snowy River, where she watched as not-Frank set up their tent and started a fire with the wood they had gathered earlier on their way through Jindabyne. This man insisted on placing a large tarp over the tent for extra measure. She marvelled at the pointillist detail of his imposturing, at the same time wondering where real Frank was by now – he must have had a lift waiting to take him back home; or perhaps he was still back at the hut where she had woken to find him replaced.

It was impossible not to be self-conscious; she was both aware of being with a stranger yet determined not to reveal what she knew. And it was a challenge to be intimate with this man, though strangely exciting, too: the knowledge that she was permitted to be with someone else.

And all the while her mind was ticking over and over, trying to work out what the purpose of this not-Frank was, and how he would help her know what to do.

*

On the last evening of their time away, they sat on the verandah of a homestead they had come upon, sharing a bottle of wine. She was reading the newspaper – an article about a court case that was raging over two young children whose Australian mother had taken them from their father in Spain. It was hard to choose sides; both parents were bereft. But the law would find a certain path, fall where it must.

And it was then that it came to her. It was not for Dr Kline or the neurologist or Frank – via not-Frank – to show her the way. Equations or risk-calculations would be of no help, nor would there be compensation delegated for the parts of her that were changing. And there could be no injunction on what was to come. What would happen to her was happening to her already.

Not-Frank shook wattle pollen from his deck chair, beat the underside of the fabric, unaware that the particles were flying into his wine glass. He would begin sneezing soon, Alice was certain, and she smiled now at the nuance of his act. She breathed in the sweet evening air, heard it as a call, a joyous bell-tinkle, felt the bristle of the sunset on her tongue.

She had to think about the real Frank in all this, of course. She would play it cool, wait till she was home and he had swapped places again with his double and collected his data and resolved whatever crazy hypothesis he had now gotten her involved in. There would probably be a questionnaire, no doubt a waiver; universities were so careful these days.

The important thing was that she didn’t want him to worry. She would tell him the doctors had reviewed the scans and deemed it benign. She might even say it had gone altogether. Shrunk.