They told her to be at the hospital by seven in the morning, so she set the alarm for five-thirty. Greg got up and dressed Annie, who was already awake and calling from her cot. While the two of them munched on toast she packed her bag and tried to ignore the feeling of dread.
They drove first to her mother’s house to drop off Annie, who sang all the way. Her mother was in the kitchen in her red Chinese dressing-gown, sipping from a mug of tea. As they left she put her weathered gardener’s hand on Toni’s arm and said: ‘Ring me as soon as you know anything.’
Greg dropped her at the entrance to the public wing of the big private hospital. ‘I’ll see you up there,’ he said, and went off to park. It was a hospital in the east of the city made up of a motley complex of buildings from different eras and built in different styles, some newer than others but none that was attractive. The public wing was an old building, ten storeys high, and uninviting. She made enquiries in the foyer with an elderly nun and then walked the length of the main corridor until she found the lifts.
The eighth floor was shabby. The air was stale. In the middle of the floor was a circular desk-station where three women sat at computer screens. Corridors and rooms led away from them in all directions. When she presented herself to a middle-aged woman whom she took to be a receptionist, the woman was offhand. ‘Sit over there,’ she said, ‘and someone will bring you the forms.’
She carried her bag over to the waiting area, which faced the reception desk. There were old vinyl chairs pressed against the walls and a small coffee table of scuffed wood. She had brought a book with her but was not yet in a mood to settle to it so she looked at the magazines on the coffee table and counted them. There were five: three yachting magazines that were four years out of date and two golfing magazines that were even older.
Greg emerged from the lift looking ill at ease and anxious. He sat beside her on a chair that had a rip in the vinyl and the stuffing let out a sigh of escaped air. He put his hand on her knee and rested it there. Neither of them felt like talking. There was an old portable TV perched high on a shelf and they could see the presenters of the breakfast show mouthing away but there was no sound. After a while Greg got up and went over to the reception desk.
‘Is it possible to adjust the sound on the TV?’ he asked.
The woman looked up. ‘Someone stole the remote,’ she said, and went back to her keyboarding.
Greg came back to his chair and they exchanged a look. He reached across and picked up a magazine, glanced at the cover and tossed it back on the table. ‘Nineteen ninety-eight,’ he said, almost wheezing in disgust. ‘Can’t they do better than that?’
She tried to make a joke of it. ‘I’m sure there are a lot of yachties in the public wards of hospitals. We’re an affluent country.’ It wasn’t helping that he was jittery.
After about forty minutes a young nurse presented herself with a clipboard and forms. ‘My, you’re here early,’ she said.
‘They told me to be here by seven.’
‘Oh, no, I don’t know why they would have said that. You needn’t have got here until nine-thirty. You’re not scheduled until noon.’
Noon. That was a five-hour wait.
‘Well, they told her seven,’ said Greg, with irritable emphasis, and she could tell he was beginning to burn a fuse.
An old man sitting opposite got up and shuffled over to the reception desk and they heard him ask for a toilet. With a curt gesture the woman pointed back to where he had come from and they realised that the toilet was a small room, like a broom cupboard, in the middle wall of the waiting area. My God, she thought, no privacy. The door of the toilet was only a metre away from where she was sitting and the smallness of the waiting room, and its drabness, seemed to enlarge the awkward intimacy of its nearness. The old man looked embarrassed and glanced at no-one as he opened the door. They could hear the sound of urine trickling into the bowl. Greg leaned back into his chair, folded his arms and sighed.
She realised that she didn’t want Greg to wait with her. Bad enough that she had to sit here all this time. She turned to him.
‘You go,’ she said.
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll be fine. I brought a book. And I’m tired. I might doze a bit.’ This was a lie. She had never in her life managed to sleep while sitting upright in a chair.
‘Will you be okay?’
‘Of course.’
He was reluctant to leave but she insisted, even if, as she watched him disappear into the lift, she felt a pang. He was so worried about her, she could tell, but she knew he hated hospitals and it didn’t help to have the place inflicted on them both.
At around ten-thirty a brisk young nurse appeared and told her she was to get up and go into an office across the way to see Dr. White. The doctor was a gangly young intern who rose from his seat, introduced himself and shook her hand. For the next ten minutes he proceeded to take her details and he was so polite, so considerate that he made her feel vaguely tearful. She had been in the building over three hours and he was the first person who had been nice to her. Perhaps, because he was new here, he had yet to take on the institutionalised brusqueness of the others, although she saw in his manners the kind of shy, well-brought-up young man, earnestly academic and well-intentioned, that she recognised from her days as a teacher.
Although it must all have been in her file, to her surprise he asked her to tell him why she was there. Perhaps it was a first-line precaution, a way of checking that they had the right person. She told him about the pain, and the slight breakthrough bleeding, and was as matter-of-fact as she could be. She did not say that she had gone to work on one of those radiant mornings that make her feel glad to be alive, a morning when the light glitters on the river and the birds warble beside the deck of her apartment and the young water dragons scamper insouciantly along the drive in a way that makes her laugh out loud. She had gone to work and gone to the loo and found the blood there, and thought, ‘Shit!’
Her doctor, Pamela Kerr, was thorough. Two years before, she’d had a patient die of ovarian cancer, diagnosed too late, and she wasn’t going to let it happen again. She had dispatched Toni, without delay, for an ultrasound and sure enough that ghostly picture had revealed some kind of growth inside her left ovary. The ultrasound specialist was perplexed. He had not seen one like that before. He could not say whether it meant trouble.
She did not have private health cover but she was busy at work and did not want to spend a long time waiting in the corridors of a public hospital so she booked into a specialist as a private patient just to get a quick diagnosis. She did not want it to be preying on her mind. She was thirty-nine, and while in her own mind she was still young she knew that she had moved now into that bracket where women begin to die. She did not want Death to be shadowing her every move; she did not want grey areas; she wanted clarity and results.
The gynaecologist’s name was Neil McCormack and he was a young man, she guessed around her own age. He said it would be best to open her up and have a look.
‘And then what?’ she asked.
Well, he said, he would begin with a laparoscopy. If the ovary looked ‘dodgy’ he’d snip it out and have it tested. Couldn’t he tell by looking? she asked. No, he said, only by taking it to the pathology lab. And if he found ‘something else’ in the abdomen, if it looked ‘ugly’, he might have to ‘remove the lot’, by which he meant a complete hysterectomy. If there were ‘other signs’ – if it had spread – he would call in an oncologist who would take over. ‘It’s impossible to say’, he said, while her mind reeled at the open-ended scenario he was constructing here. She knew doctors were nervous now, that they feared litigation, that they made no promises, offered no assurances; they must cover themselves against every eventuality. But the prospect of going into surgery where there might be nothing at all wrong, or there might be everything wrong, unnerved her. How do you prepare mentally for the unknown?
She thought of the second child she was desperate to have. There was nothing she wanted more. She even had dreams about this child, this child as yet unborn. She thought of what it might mean to die in early middle age, with Annie left behind. Who would look after her?
‘Aren’t ovarian cysts common?’ she asked. She had of course Googled them. ‘And I gather most are benign and you can’t take all of them out or thousands of women would be in surgery.’
He shrugged, and reached for a tissue to wipe his nose. He had a cold. She glanced across at the tissue box, which sat beside a photograph of three small children. His abundance, she thought, his own sweet fruit.
‘I don’t have private health insurance,’ she said. ‘I take it I’ll have to get a referral to see a surgeon at a public hospital.’
He mentioned the name of a big hospital. ‘I could see you there as an intermediate patient. In that category you pay just for the hospital facilities,’ he said, meaning he would bulk bill her for his own services.
‘How much?’ she asked.
‘Around three thousand dollars.’
They had cut to the chase quickly. It was a business. She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t manage that.’
‘I also do a public list there,’ he said, ‘and I could arrange for you to be put on it, but this is your choice, it’s up to you.’
It wasn’t until she got home that she realised he was offering to do her a favour, and she wondered why. It wasn’t as if she were manifestly poor. She wished she could like him more, but he was cold. He had pale skin, pale-blond hair and a wart on his forehead. He wore austere rimless glasses that made him look like a lab scientist.
After she had signed yet more forms for the intern, Dr. White, she returned to the waiting area and rummaged in her overnight bag for the book she had brought with her. But it was no good. It wasn’t that she read the same sentence over and over again – she managed to get through three pages – but that the words were transparent; meaning leached out of them, and the more she tried to concentrate the more they floated off the page.
‘Toni?’
She looked up and saw her friend Cathy leaning over her.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I had to deliver some parcels to Jackson’s and I thought I’d pop in and see how you were going.’
She smiled. Cathy worked nearby, but still, she was touched.
‘Won’t you get into trouble?’
‘It’s alright. I’ve got flex-time owing. It must be awful just sitting here.’
She knew that Cathy was referring to the uncertainty of the outcome, of not knowing what to expect, rather than the dullness of being in this shabby space. But she was relieved to see her. At a time like this it was good to have the company of another woman.
Cathy began to fossick among the magazines. ‘A new take on the winged hull,’ she read, and rolled her eyes. ‘These magazines are off.’
‘Tragic.’
‘Want me to get you some from the kiosk?’
‘I brought a book.’ She retrieved it from her bag and held it up like a flag.
They talked for a while, a little gossip, a new movie that Toni must see when she was – here Cathy hesitated. What was the right word? When she was out? When she was better? And the question hovered between them: what if she were not better?
After a while Cathy stood up and said, in the muted, confidential voice that people use in hospitals, ‘I’d better get back to work.’ They kissed lightly and for a moment the waterworks threatened to return. Cathy had been a welcome distraction, concerned for her but not stricken with anxiety like Greg. None of that angry masculine fuming that sent up smoke in an attempt to conceal the fear. It was bad enough dealing with her own dread. Did she have to read that article last week about a woman in Sydney, not much older, who had gone into surgery for a facelift only to die unexpectedly of a stroke on the operating table? When she was in her twenties the idea of a general anaesthetic hadn’t fazed her. Why now did she hate the idea of going under? She was older, that’s why, and her youthful sense of invincibility had been mislaid, somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five. Or was it thirty? These things crept up on you while you were busy filling in your diary and planning your next holiday. A week on the south coast in November? Sure. Oh, and by the way, suddenly I’m aware of being mortal, a body in decline.
She could smell Death in the corridors of this place. In this place, this big public institution, there was no attempt made to camouflage it. No vases of fresh flowers, no elegant artwork, no pastel drapery at the windows, no coffee and basket of muffins and latest Vogue, all of which were in the private wing across the way where she had visited a friend last year. Here there were only the bare essentials: a chair, a bed, a surgeon, a knife.
At their second consultation, McCormack had repeated to her that it was ‘her choice’. The blood samples he had sent off for cancer analysis had been ‘inconclusive’. The growth might be benign. It might be that it could sit there for years with no ill effects. ‘It’s your choice,’ he said again. She went away and thought about this, but once the idea is planted in your head, the idea of Death, it becomes impossible to rid yourself of it. It begins to stalk you like a shadow that has no body of its own and is seeking to attach itself to yours. In the weeks before her admission to hospital she was unable to shake free of it, and at night her dreams were lurid. There was one where she was lost in a series of dark alleys and searching, with sick terror, for a child in old-fashioned swaddling clothes, a child who ran ahead of her and disappeared into the crowd. She woke in a sweat, and groaned aloud so that Greg rolled over and put his arm around her. Then there was the dream where she was trapped in a damp, dark room with walls of spongy tissue that breathed and bled.
The brisk nurse came over again. ‘Sorry, but we’ve had an emergency admission and we’ve had to put you back until two-thirty.’ Two-thirty.
Nothing to eat, and only water to drink. I can’t stay here in this ghastly room, she said to herself, and got up suddenly and walked to the lifts, leaving her overnight bag behind on the vinyl chair.
For the next hour she walked around the industrial area that surrounded the hospital: warehouses, tyre depots, trucking companies. It was all grey and gritty. She went into a small shop that printed slogans onto T-shirts. Yes, they did one-offs, said the swarthy young man behind the counter. What did she have in mind? She thought of a souvenir shirt she might commission, some words of black humour, but her wits were dulled by fear and nothing came to mind.
‘I’ll get back to you,’ she said, and walked out.
Some time after she returned to the hospital a nurse appeared and guided her into a four-bed ward that was empty. The nurse handed her a worn surgical gown and ordered her to undress. She was hungry, her stomach was rumbling. She always did have a healthy appetite, even under duress. She folded her clothes neatly into her bag and sat with her legs crossed on the bed, waiting, a piece of meat ready for the abattoir. What a grim room it was, and the corridors so worn. The paint was scratched, the grey metal trolleys lined up in the corridor were old and creaked. She felt like a dumb cow corralled into a gate-room.
At last the orderly came and asked her to get up on the trolley. Bovine, she obeyed, thinking: why couldn’t she walk into the theatre, why did she have to be pushed? It only heightened her feeling of being powerless. The wheels of the trolley grated and stalled and there was a harsh echoing sound coming from somewhere at the end of the corridor. When they arrived the orderly turned and walked off without a word. She could see through the door of the theatre, a swinging door propped open with some heavy object. Nearby, a male doctor in a theatre-gown was standing in an untidy alcove and he asked her for her name. At first she didn’t hear him because she was looking past him, looking at the metallic surfaces within, shiny but worn, like an old kitchen in a former boys’ reformatory she had once visited. In her heightened state of anxiety even the floors looked metallic and there was the abrasive sound of a radio blaring out into the theatre.
She did not want to go into the abattoir in a conscious state, not just because she was afraid but because if it was like the rest of the building it would be an ugly room. She did not want to see its scratched and discoloured walls.
‘Do I get a knockout injection?’ she asked the young assistant.
‘Do you want one?’ he said, in mild surprise, as if this were unusual. She found him offensively casual. Surely he should have asked her first? While she gaped in frozen incredulity, he turned to the small steel trolley in the alcove, turned back and without preamble stuck a short needle into a vein on the back of her left hand. One, two, three, four …
When she woke she was back in the same room and the other beds were still empty. She was cold and shaking uncontrollably. She felt encased in ice, as if she were now a carcass and hanging in the cool room. She was shaking so violently that the young Filipina nurse ran to her with a pale-blue cotton blanket.
‘Do you have any more?’ she rasped.
Greg was there beside her bed, gazing down at her with a pained expression.
She was woozy, she couldn’t think, she was still shaking, but she managed to lift the covers awkwardly and look down at her abdomen. There were four puncture holes smeared with brown disinfectant, one directly on the navel and three just above the pubic line. Whatever had transpired in the cutting room, no big incision had been made. She took this as a sign that the oncologist had not been called in and thought she might remark on this to Greg. Instead she laid her head down on the pillow and closed her eyes.
When she woke, Greg was still there. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’ He was angry. ‘I can’t get any sense out of anyone. There’s no bloody doctor you can talk to here. That frigid woman at the reception desk treats me like I’m a potential terrorist and says I’ll have to wait for the registrar to come tomorrow on his rounds and he’ll tell us then.’
‘I’m hungry.’ She hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. No-one had offered her food or drink. Greg went off to see the charge nurse, who returned an hour later with a cheese sandwich.
Overnight her blood pressure plummeted and the night nurse kept coming in to wind the pump around her arm and check it again. She seemed worried. ‘It shouldn’t be this low,’ she kept saying, irritably. ‘It shouldn’t be this down.’ As if it were somehow the patient’s fault. She was brusque, like all of them. Only the young Filipina nurse who came on in the morning had anything resembling a bedside manner.
In the late morning the registrar turned up. He was short with a dark suntan and trim dark hair, handsome in a smarmy kind of way. Beside him was a young intern, a stolid girl with soft, pale features. The registrar stood at the end of her bed and looked at her chart.
‘What happened with my surgery?’ she asked him.
He gave an inane smile. ‘You had your left ovary removed.’
‘What was the outcome?’
‘I can’t say,’ he said.
‘When will I have a test result?’
‘Oh, you can go home today and then ring up in a month or six weeks and get the result.’
She was speechless. A month or six weeks! He couldn’t be serious.
Did she or did she not have a cancerous ovary? She opened her mouth to protest but already he was walking out the door, his assistant trailing behind him. He had not introduced himself, he had not addressed her by name, he had not extended even the most common courtesy. Why had he bothered to visit? So he could tick off the ward sheet? Oh, and to check if she was still breathing?
Meat, she told herself again. Piece of meat.
Her mother rang. ‘Annie is fine,’ she said. ‘She’s not fretting, don’t worry about her.’
After she put down the phone she hoisted herself onto the edge of the bed and reached gingerly for her dressing-gown. Then she walked painfully down the corridor to the central reception station. The woman looked up from her screen, looked at her as if she were a nuisance. ‘Yes?’
‘I’ve just seen the registrar and he says I can’t get a result for six weeks. This isn’t acceptable. It must be possible to get a test result before then.’
‘These services are in great demand,’ said the woman coldly. ‘There are long waiting times.’
‘Who can I talk to about this?’
‘You can ask the registrar.’
‘I’ve just seen the registrar and he said six weeks.’ They were going around in an endless, deadening circle.
When she got home she was sore. Overnight her four wounds opened up. They had not been stitched but smeared with some kind of gel that was meant to hold them together. It didn’t. She wondered if they would get infected. How should she dress them? She hadn’t a clue. She rang a friend who had once been a nurse. ‘They should have given you a discharge sheet,’ said the friend, ‘with instructions on how to care for them.’ They hadn’t. One more thing to add to the bitter letter of complaint that she was drafting in her head.
‘Ring your GP,’ said her friend.
‘I can’t. It’s the weekend.’
Around ten that morning her younger sister came in. ‘What’s the result?’ Jody asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ She almost yelped. She was incredulous.
‘Don’t they tell you?’
She no longer wanted to talk about it. ‘Put the radio on,’ she said. Somehow the bedside radio had become unplugged and it hurt to reach across. Jody knelt on the floor to find the power point and the cheerful banter of talk radio broke abruptly into the room. But after Jody had gone she realised that she didn’t feel like listening to that. Normally, yes, but she was not her normal self. She was her anxious, angry, humiliated and powerless self; her piece-of-meat self and I-have-had-to-think-about-Death self, and whatever she wanted to listen to, it wasn’t this. For a while she lay there in irritable passivity, and then, wearied by her own thoughts, she leaned over to the radio and a stabbing pain shot through her guts. She tried to ignore it. Greg had driven off to the shops so she persisted with the dial, fiddling blindly with the small tuning wheel. There was some race-caller with the usual nasal twang, then a programme about new car design, an interview with a politician and, finally, music. Not music she was accustomed to but classical piano music, a tumultuous wave of it, rippling across her bed, rippling across her body like a sonic tide, so powerful that she subsided again into her pillows and surrendered to it, allowing the tidal surge of notes to flow through her veins. It seemed to go on and on for a long time, and yet for no time at all, until after a while she became aware of how her body had gone loose and she was breathing more easily, more deeply.
‘What’s this?’ asked Greg when he came in with some tea in a mug.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but leave it on, I like it.’
‘It sounds romantic.’
It’s not, she thought, it’s more complicated than that, but she didn’t want to talk about it now, didn’t want to analyse anything, just wanted to let the sound wash over her. After a time it created a field, and she was in the field, and in the field nothing else mattered.
Later in the afternoon she learned that she was listening to the Sydney Piano Competition. The competition was held every two years and contested by thirty-six young virtuosos who auditioned from around the world. She had missed the first day but there were several days to come, and all of it broadcast live, every note. All she had to do was to keep the radio permanently tuned to Classic FM and lie there in her bed, or sit out on the deck with headphones, in a trance. It was a force, a whirlwind of notes that filled the abyss. She had come home to a pit of uncertainty: was she ill or was she not? Was she a woman who’d had a benign cyst removed – perhaps unnecessary surgery – or was she about to face up to the worst? And what if the right ovary did not work – had never worked, for all she knew – and she would now be unable to have another child? How could she brush and comb her responses? What was this absurd state of unknowing, this vacuum of meaning? It was an affront to the plans she had made for herself, an affront to her rational mind, and into this vacuum, to which she was unaccustomed and for which she was unprepared, stole the beauty of the piano music. Better still, it was a competition, a human drama. Players would lose, players would make mistakes, players would be hurt.
After the first day she found that she began to develop an ear. The austerity of her bedroom, its bare walls, seemed to hone the sensitivity of her hearing. There was nothing to look at – she still didn’t feel like reading – but there was this miraculous sound. At night she was restless, like a fragile barque on a sinister pantomime stage set, tossed on a sea of rope. She woke, and gasped, so that Greg rolled over, half-awake, and mumbled, ‘Pain?’
‘It’s okay,’ she said, because it wasn’t, at least not physical pain.
But in daylight the music was there to soothe her. When she woke she found that, before long, she was waiting impatiently for the broadcast of the recitals to begin. First there were the introductory remarks from the presenters and then a sequence of special category performances: sonatas and preludes today, Mozart concerti tomorrow. The entrants had already been refined into a long shortlist: Russian, Japanese, Chinese, American, Australian, Korean, French and Italian. They were young, they were forceful, they were single-minded. They practised seven hours a day. They were obsessed and their obsession fed her. She was hooked up to them, as if on a musical drip. They were her daily nourishment, her milk and honey.
On the Monday morning she rang her GP, Pamela, and found that Pamela was herself unwell and not in the surgery. She had hoped that Pamela could somehow find a way to expedite her test results and with this news she felt another implosion of powerlessness. But within an hour the music had drawn her again into its own benign dream. By the third day she found she was beginning to identify and respond to the different sensibilities of the performers. There were the two young Russians who were, according to the presenters, the popular favourites, but she preferred the Japanese woman who played with a rare irony, a kind of cool feminine candour (if only she had the musical literacy to describe this). And then there was the Chinese prodigy from Kuala Lumpur. Though only eighteen he had a magisterial quality. Unlike the romantic Russians with their tempestuous sentiment, he played with a kind of Apollonian detachment. He, especially, created a kind of sound balm for her body. She bathed in it.
Each day she swabbed her wounds and hoped for the best. One in particular kept opening up and seeping until it formed a crust, which would dislodge in the night and ooze again in the morning, but she did all that she needed to do, knowing that each day almost the entire air-time of Classic FM would be given over to the piano competition. She felt it as a gift, a gift of timing that her personal dilemma should coincide with this festival of lyrical power, and she taped over her oozing incisions, ate breakfast for the first time in days and sat out on the deck to listen to the Mozart concerti. It was in listening to Mozart that she began to hear even more acutely. One work seemed to suggest a bleak gaiety, another spoke of a hectic contentment, while the concerto that followed sounded like the most extravagant parody, a masterly joke. Passages were 183 vaguely familiar but she did not want to see a programme list. She did not want to see anything. She wanted to listen.
In the mornings and afternoons there were times when the responses of other listeners were broadcast: a farmer’s wife on a remote property in the north, an accountant in Sydney’s western suburbs, a piano teacher in Adelaide, a merchant seaman in Darwin; all conducting a proxy debate as to the merits of the performers but all united in their gratitude for the event. And this was not the least satisfying aspect of it; that here, prone on her back, or propped up on the deck, she was absorbed into a live community of listening. As she listened, so too did all these others. Mentally she argued with their responses, just as she hung on every word of the leading presenter, himself a piano virtuoso, a man she had never set eyes on but whose voice was inflected with such warmth, such judicious sympathy that she was already half in love with him. In his taste he seemed to lean ever so slightly towards the romantic, to the Russians, but this only made him seem a warmer and more appealing auditory presence. By now she was confirmed in her own favouritism and it was the young Chinese performer. With no trace of the romantic colouring so loved by the paying crowd and the presenters alike, he played like a young god, pulling it all together, the latent chaos of the notes, commanding it into order.
For a time she became so engrossed in the competition that she would no longer join Greg in front of the television at night or, if she did, she would sit with the headphones on, lost to the intensity, to the beauty of what she now thought of as ‘the comp’.
On the Wednesday morning she again rang the office of her GP and found her in. She told Pamela about the six-week wait for the results of the test on her ovary and, despite herself, said nothing more; no complaints, no whingeing. It was enough. ‘Leave it with me,’ said Pamela.
Later that day, around five in the evening, Pamela rang back.
‘I’ve spoken to the pathology unit at the hospital. They did that test on the ovary three days ago and the results are clear.’
‘Why did the registrar tell me I would have to wait six weeks?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ It was clear from Pamela’s tone that she was not impressed, but was not prepared to comment further, except to say, ‘If there had been something wrong, Neil McCormack would have come around and seen you himself.’ But how was I to know that? she thought. No-one, at any level, had communicated anything. She put down the phone and went back to the Sydney Piano Competition where there was enough communication going on to sustain a universe.
When Greg came home he was both drained and relieved. ‘Thank God,’ he kept saying, ‘Thank God.’ And then, ‘Why didn’t you ring me at the office and tell me straight away?’
Why hadn’t she? Well, it had been late, and she knew he might already have left the office and be on the freeway. But also, she wanted to listen to her favourite competitor play his Mozart concerto, and he was the last that afternoon to perform.
On the night of the final programme, at the end of which the winner was to be announced, Greg was at a meeting and she had the house to herself. Once again she entered into the familiar trance, and found herself in thrall again to the playing of the Chinese finalist. When at the end of the evening he was proclaimed the surprise winner she was so excited she hauled herself out of her chair and paced around the living room in a state of elation. She knew nothing about piano technique and she had picked the winner! How was this possible? Energised by a kind of electric current coursing through her, she continued for some time to pace around the room, around and around, almost hypnotically. When, finally, she came to a halt, something in her head and chest had shifted and there was clarity in her thought. She had emerged from the week-long coma of her self-absorption. Tomorrow her mother would bring Annie home. She walked into her daughter’s room and began to strip the cot.
The next afternoon, while Annie had her nap, she sat at the kitchen table and began to draft a letter of complaint to the hospital, but after the first few sentences she was inhibited by a sudden thought. The discharge sheet that they had neglected to give her, with instructions for surgical aftercare – this would most likely have been the responsibility of the young Filipina nurse, the only person in that awful place to show her any kindness. What if she lost her job? She screwed up the piece of paper. She would wait until she had her follow-up appointment with McCormack and complain then about the registrar. She would not mention the discharge sheet. She wondered if the registrar had operated on her under McCormack’s supervision. They had to learn, didn’t they, and how else but to practise on public patients?
Today, four weeks on, she has an appointment to see Neil McCormack in his little consulting room in the public wing of the hospital. This is well away from the waiting room where she sat, frozen, on the day of her surgery; the corridors here are even more narrow, crowded and stuffy. But now she is less absorbed in herself and thinks that it can’t be pleasant for him to work in this environment, or any of those doctors who haven’t yet abandoned the public system. Still, she has things to say; grievances to air. He is running late, and when at last she is called in, he looks tired. In her head she cuts back on her list of complaints but is determined to tell him about the registrar. She will wait until he asks her if she has any questions and then she will say, politely, ‘Well, I have a few suggestions.’ (She will try and phrase this as constructively as possible.)
‘Registrars vary a lot,’ he says. ‘I can’t comment on this one, it’s not my place.’ Then he adds, ‘He was a first-year registrar,’ and this, she knows, is a kind of coded apology.
‘But what about the test results?’
‘In a public hospital there is no way we can access a histology report at an early stage.’
She opens her mouth. She is about to say, ‘But my GP got her hands on it a week later,’ but changes her mind.
‘If it had looked serious I would have come around and seen you myself,’ he says.
‘Nobody told me that.’
He holds his hands open and gives an ever-so-slight shrug, a gesture that says, ‘That’s the way it is.’
‘Who operated on me?’
‘I did.’ He says it bluntly. And she is relieved.
She thanks him. She has had immense anxiety but not all that much pain. She is a piece of meat but she has been successfully processed. Somehow he got her onto his public list. She is in his debt. The system had in the end looked out for her, had checked up on her, had been vigilant. Unfeeling but efficient. The feeling part had come from another source; from the airwaves, from the piano comp. When all her other senses were dulled by anxiety, her ears had kept her sane.
She drives home from the hospital in a better frame of mind than she has been in for a long time. She has taken the morning off work and will eat an early lunch out on the balcony of her small apartment, which looks across to a line of full-grown lilly pilly trees and an ornamental pool where two water dragons are basking in the sun. She loves the way their heads rear up, the way they arch their backs, the long curve of their necks with the serrated ridges and the gloating, sardonic expression of their mouth and eyes.
She settles into a deck-chair with half an avocado and a spoon and looks across to the jutting branch of a spreading plane tree. There, only two metres away, is the biggest, fattest kookaburra she has ever seen. So close. So wily and composed. He is the steeliest of birds; a wolf with wings. Definitely not a whinger. She flicks her empty avocado skin at him. He turns his head sharply and looks at it with contempt, jerking his beak as if to say, ‘Bring on the meat.’ She laughs. ‘You’d make a good surgeon,’ she says out loud, and thinks of her lopped ovary, but it’s alright, she still has one good one. And she takes out her iPod and adjusts the headphones. She has gone back to her habit of listening to talk radio from podcasts and a man’s voice is droning across the airwaves, warning of the coming drought. She does not want to hear this. Instead she switches to the final night of the Sydney Piano Comp. Here it is, then, the first bars of Prokofiev’s ‘No. 3 in C Major’. The bright winter sun beams down onto her head.