In the lift they said nothing. Kit’s closeness put everything else at a distance: the unambitious graffiti on the lift’s steel walls; the lift ticking down between the floors. Impossible that Kit had grown in just these past few days and yet Anna was startled by how grown up she looked, closed in her thoughts, staring straight ahead with her chin tucked in. To have her in reach…Anna kept her hands by her side, ashamed of her sudden feeling of elation, a feeling she and Kit had not so much left as escaped from that grey room. In a moment the lift doors would open. She and Kit would step out together.
In front of them was another windowless corridor. The nurse had said to follow an orange line painted along the wall. How like something in a dream it was, following that line along these silent corridors, past closed doors around corner after corner. Once they passed two orderlies pushing an old man on a trolley. Bare toes sticking up, the man was making a thin wailing sound through his closed lips. He was still attached to a fluid drip on its stick, which a second orderly was pulling along with them.
Around the next corner they saw a carpeted room that opened, surprisingly, onto a brick-paved courtyard. Hiss of a coffee machine, a clink of cutlery, the warm hush of people talking—the ordinary familiar noises brought home to Anna how strange she felt. There were three tables outside. At each of them someone sat smoking, talking into a phone and squinting in the light. Kit and Anna sat inside, by the window. Anna found her sunglasses. Four doctors sat at the next table. They were young, interns probably: one of them had acne flaring up his cheekbones. They had come from an operating theatre, still in their blue shower-cap hats. It seemed strange to Anna that they could sit down here, ordinary people drinking coffee and laughing competitively. For them this day was not worse than any other, it was not different. Casually they lived among other peoples’ disasters.
Anna lent across the table and touched Kit’s cheek. ‘I feel as though I haven’t seen you for weeks.’
‘Have you spoken to Dad?’
‘I tried. He’s turned his phone off.’
‘He said he might come back for Christmas.’
‘When did you speak to him?’
Kit shrugged. ‘Two days ago. Not about this—’
‘No.’ Anna looked at Kit’s hands clasped around her coffee. She had been biting her nails again. Nerves in Anna’s hand tightened. She thought: But I’m not allowed to hold her hand any more. She turned over the salt-cellar on the table, finding browning bits of rice among the salt. ‘You never called me back,’ she said. And then, ‘How is he?’
‘Alright. It was the middle of the night.’
Anna clasped hold of her elbows. He had called Kit, not her, in the middle of the night. She forced herself to look out into the courtyard. Close, just the other side of the glass, a man in his twenties sat frowning in concentration, his eyes fixed on the ashtray where he was stubbing out a cigarette. Yes, Anna thought, that’s what it’s like: you watch yourself doing ordinary things with a sort of amazement.
‘Has it been alright here?’ she asked. ‘What you expected?’
‘I didn’t expect this.’
‘No…’ How implacably Kit put her in the wrong again.
‘At least I got to meet him.’
‘Yes, I’m glad.’ Anna looked at her watch. Eleven o’clock. She gazed around at the walls of the café: dark pink, closing them in with each other. Her feeling of elation had drained away—through her pores, it seemed. How tired she was. Always, when she was tired like this, she felt her features warp and swell. It’s why they don’t have Picasso prints in a hospital, she thought. They need pictures that keep things outside, apart from thought.
Kit was staring down at the table. Anna thought: It’s my father up there. But Kit would never pity her. Looking at that sullen face, Anna felt, massed in her chest, those hours upon hours when she had pushed Kit on the swing, watching her face rise up with clouds behind it; hours when she had crouched in the sandpit turning out castles for her daughter to stomp on; hours on the side of the bed reading, yet again, the sticky-paged stories she knew off by heart. Breakfast mess, morning tea mess, lunch mess, afternoon-tea mess, dinner mess—all that organic mess she had got down on her hands and knees to clean off the floor. Dressing her, changing nappies while she kicked her legs and laughed, admiring her scribbled pictures: years that were nowhere except in her, years Kit would never remember.
‘Aren’t you going to call Dad?’
‘You call him. He’d rather hear from you.’
‘I’ll use your phone.’ Kit reached for Anna’s bag. ‘Why do you have that?’ she said. ‘You know I hate that picture.’
Anna’s screenshot was a photo Kit had sent from France: Kit in a straw hat grinning in front of Notre Dame.
‘Who’s Peter?’
Anna took her phone out of Kit’s hand. ‘A client.’
‘He’s called five times.’
‘I was supposed to be meeting him. Anyway, use your own phone. I pay for it.’
Kit shrugged, pulled out her phone, pressed it to her ear. They sat watching each other. Neither of them moved or spoke; a single instant transfixed while they waited for Matt to speak.
‘Still not answering.’ Kit put the phone down.
‘You didn’t want to leave a message?’
‘You said you had.’
There was a pause. Anna was stopped by the sight of Kit’s bare wrist on the table: narrow, and all the tendons of her arm showing under its pale skin. How young she was. At her age— And poor Miss Suitor died in a nursing home, she thought. Their neat girlish art teacher with a secret passion for Gauguin: she used to clasp her hands to her chest when she spoke of him; she wore a gold locket outside her buttoned shirt. For all their terrible snobbery, she and Scott had never laughed at her; not out of kindness, Anna thought now, but because the ambition that Miss Suitor had for them matched their secret ambition for themselves. Anna saw again the picture that Miss Suitor had paid to have framed and hung in the art room: Scott’s charcoal sketch of trees with Anna at the edge of it. Staring down at Kit’s wrist, Anna thought: But I can’t remember, not really, what it was like. In any silence, any solitude, there it had been: the giant stone face of the future, carved with a mocking smile. And Kit is living like that now, she thought, in that state of almost rapturous indecision: the stone future saying, ‘I will tell you what you are. Only not yet.’ But of that immense dreadful life of hers I see nothing. I am permitted to see nothing. She tells herself, ‘My mother would not understand’, which only means that for her the worst thing of all would be my understanding. Whatever her life will be, she tells herself, it will not be like mine. And that is why I sit here stupidly saying nothing, why I do not take her hand in my two hands.
Anna pushed her chair back. ‘Shall we walk?’ She could not bear to go back—give Kit back—to that hushed room, the body long on the bed. She thought: I should have kept Kit from it. An irrevocable thing—after this, death would look like that for her always.
‘There’s nowhere really to go,’ said Kit.
‘We’ll just go round the block,’ said Anna. ‘I need air.’
Slowly Kit got up. She never would walk beside her mother, only ever a step or two behind.
‘Red line to exit.’ Anna read the sign aloud and heard her own forlorn-sounding laugh. The idea that her father might die, go right out of the world, made her body feel weightless. It seemed odd to her that anything was where it was, or as it was, at all. These lines, for instance…She pictured the workmen painting them, at each corner poring over their maps; before that, a committee meeting in which a bureaucrat stood explaining the idea with PowerPoint slides. Not just these lines but everything Anna looked at seemed spurious, invented. The hospital itself—it had been someone’s house once. This passage where she and Kit were walking sliced right through that old house—morning room, drawing room, dining room, entrance hall. Someone had sat down to eat their breakfast, perhaps, in this place she and Kit were walking through now. Back then, they would have had a view over marsh flats and tea-tree. Land stolen from the start… Walking along the gleaming linoleum, Anna felt in her flesh that nothing belonged to her. Only Kit is mine, she thought, and stopped. ‘Have you eaten?’ she said. ‘We should have got you something.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Take some money, though. While I think of it. Get yourself some lunch.’
‘Are you going to the house with Treen?’
‘I said I would. It’d be nice if you came.’
‘I’d rather stay here.’
‘Well. We won’t be long.’
They started walking again. Some failure in their talk made Anna see her father’s face as she had not seen it for years—his timid, dismayed expression whenever she had looked directly at him. The morning she’d walked into the study and announced she’d got a scholarship to art school: ‘Oh yes,’ he’d said. ‘I used to do a little painting myself.’ Anna pictured herself in the scene: agitated, defiant. Now she wondered: what had she expected? Why had it mattered so much to her back then what he would say? She thought: if he dies the person I was at that moment will go out of existence… They came into the foyer. Across the room, a man in a dark suit stood up. The fold-down chair he’d been sitting on shut with a thud. Behind him, the glass was bright. With the light behind him he was a dark shape, which let her keep not believing it, though from the first jolt of disbelief she had known who it was. He took a step towards them, hesitated, and then started across with both hands out.
Anna halted out of arm’s reach. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I left messages.’
‘I’ve had my phone off.’
‘How is your father?’
‘He’s on life support,’ she said. His eyes slid past her to Kit. She took hold of Kit’s shoulder. ‘This is my daughter. Kit, Peter Harding.’
Kit said to him: ‘You’re the one who kept calling.’
Anna watched Kit’s eyes slide from his face down to his shoes and back to his face again. What did Peter look like, she asked herself, seeing him this instant through Kit’s eyes. A summer weekend and there he is in his pin-striped suit, his polished shoes. The hotel dry cleaner had been doing his shirt; its collar was stiff and intensely white. Anna’s eyes went up to his face: fastidious, pale, so tired the skin looked sore under his eyes.
He was watching Kit with an expression of wary patience. ‘I was worried about your mother,’ he said.
Anna had her hand on Kit’s shoulder still—touch, but what she discovered in it was their separateness. She saw the three of them facing each other in this desolate bright room, its row of empty chairs. She touched Kit’s cheek, its surprising warmth. It’s what they cannot imagine, she thought: there is an afterwards always. How tired she felt…
She said, ‘I’m just going with Treen to get Mum’s things. The hospital has some flat for us to stay in tonight.’
‘My flight’s not till Monday. So I thought—I’m booked at the motel.’
‘Mum, your phone’s ringing.’
‘That’s alright.’
‘It’ll be Dad calling back.’
Peter said, ‘You can answer it.’
Anna took the phone out of her bag. ‘It was Treen. Listen, I have to get back.’
With self-conscious formality he walked out into the sunlight. They watched him go between parked cars, head bent against the glare. Heat, and the glass, made the scene far off. At the edge of the footpath he stopped, looked away down the road. That road, Anna thought, and then the next, and then the freeway…She saw in thought what she had seen that morning: grey light widening over paddocks vacant under so much sky, something washed about the morning light. Saltbush edged the road. In one paddock a single dead tree stood stripped and bleached, its fallen branches cleared away. He’ll go back to his motel, she thought. She saw him in his suit on the bed, computer on his knees, working, impervious to the ugly room, the sea at the end of the street. She thought: he keeps his life.
‘Why did he come?’ said Kit.
‘He told you. He was worried about me.’
‘What? Is he in love with you or something?’ A neutral voice, behind which lay resources of contempt.
‘Oh! Probably.’
‘Does Dad know?’
‘Dad’s not worried.’
Kit said nothing. In the pause, Anna heard her own words again. Unexpectedly tears started in her eyes: shameful, self-pitying tears. He did this, she thought. That instant, she did not know whether she meant Matt, or Peter. With the back of her hand, she struck the tears off. Peter had come here. That was not love. He was relentless, insisting on himself. But she remembered how he had stood up, hesitating before he came towards them; she saw his tired, tentative, hopeful face.
The ding of the lift made Anna twist around. People were coming out: an old couple and their grandchild. The child’s balloon had ‘It’s a girl!’ on it. So children are born here too, thought Anna. Going through the glass doors, the grandmother bent to take the child’s hand. Something in that act struck at her. How far off it seemed, that simple tenderness.