Today you will return to this thing called your day job. You finish breakfast, put your plate and cup in the dishwasher, say goodbye to your husband (you even peck his cheek) and Edmund (is the man ever planning to go?), check your handbag, check your mobile, find your car keys, get into the car, and drive yourself to work. Koala extinction is an almost appealing prospect, with the relief from feeling that it promises.
But in the car park you cannot get out of your car. You forgot that work meant people. You forgot the open-plan office and your colleagues. You cannot unlock your fingers from the steering wheel. That grip and the diagonal pressure of the belt across your chest are the two things holding you together.
Meredith was right: you hadn’t thought this through.
She’s been dropping in most days and found you alone in the garden on Sunday morning. For the want of something to do, you were weeding, and she got down next to you and helped, and told you about the foundation she represented, where as far you understood, parents with dead children tried to help each other feel better. You’d sensed she wanted to tell you her own story, but you threw your hand up instinctively to stop her saying more.
‘Just know there’s support available,’ she’d said. ‘Emotional, legal, even some financial.’
‘Legal?’ you’d asked.
‘I could come with you to the coronial inquest when the time comes. Be with you for any further police interviews.’
‘They told us they were done.’
‘Well then, that’s good.’ She looked at you with sorrow on her face. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your work?’
You didn’t feel like talking, but you sighed and went ahead. For a decade you’d lectured in wildlife ecology at the University of Tasmania, and researched infectious diseases in native mammals. The catastrophe of Tasmania’s devils, ravaged by facial tumour disease, kept you awake at night for years, supplemented by general scientific concern about the demise of the world’s pollinators, the way the high latitudes were heating far faster than predicted, and the resulting tipping points of the global ecosystem. The same big pictures keeping most scientists awake at night. You used to wonder why the whole human race wasn’t lying awake worrying; why they couldn’t see beyond their individual lives. Now you know.
You told Meredith about the new job, the one that drew you up from Tasmania. A chance to get out of the tightening vice of twenty-first-century corporate academia, to do something small but real: assessing the scope and extent of the North Coast’s geographically and genetically distinct population of koalas, and writing a plan of action to increase their chances of survival.
‘A government job,’ she’d said thoughtfully. ‘That’s good.’
You didn’t know what she meant, but she explained: compassionate leave entitlements, flexibility, time in lieu.
‘You can probably have as much time off as you want,’ she said.
You’d stared at her in shock. ‘I’m going back tomorrow. What else am I going to do?’
She’d shook her head and hugged you, one of those long, warm hugs. A female hug, the kind you would have had from a mother, or an aunt, or a best friend, if you’d had any of those things. Finn, the extroverted, has his family ringing constantly. Your much smaller number of old friends have been scarcely brave enough to call you once in the face of this tragedy, and so returning to work is all you know to do.
Chen appears next to your car. He must have been watching for you. He opens the door and crouches so your faces are level.
‘Are you sure it’s not too soon?’
Eyes straight ahead, hands locked. ‘I can’t stay home.’
He exhales heavily. ‘I know. Walk in with you?’
Your knuckles relax and your hands slide from the wheel. You manage a nod and he holds the door while you unbuckle, gather your things, swivel, get out. You close the door and press the button to lock.
He takes hold of your arm. ‘Hug?’
Before what happened, you’d never hugged. Over the past week he’s hugged you without reservation, but one hug might bring you down this morning, and you decline.
Walking up the steps, your knees shake. Chen opens the door, lets you pass, follows you in. It’s too early for Christine to be in reception and you pass into the open-plan office ungreeted. Your desk is in a cubicle at the far end. You’re early, like always. Only four people are in. You can do this.
The pattern is the same as you pass each of them. Eyes meeting yours, confusion spreading across their faces, the visible battle as they decide what to do. One looks down again quickly, blushing. Two adjust their features and give you sympathetic nods, murmuring. The fourth goes to rise, but a gesture of some sort from Chen indicates no, not yet, and she reverses the move.
You make it to your desk relatively unscathed and Chen leaves you to make tea. You open your stubbornly retained paper diary and stare at the expanse of a week. There are things written there, matched against times. Meetings that might have been significant from the perspective of a week ago.
You place both hands flat on the desk to hold yourself steady. If you breathe, this will be possible. You will plan your day, and your week, find some structure to buttress you through the infinite hours, some sense of motion or meaning. Something.
When Chen returns with two steaming mugs you’re still clutching the desk and he winces at the sight of you.
‘Here, let me help.’ He wheels in a chair and squeezes it next to yours, starts up the computer and looks down at your diary. He puts a finger on the first meeting, checks the names, turns to the emails avalanching to your inbox, types a search query, finds four relevant messages, sends their attachments to print, collects a slender sheaf of papers.
‘Step by step,’ he says. ‘Read them. Agenda first. Use a highlighter pen, mark them up.’
‘Why will I be attending, again?’
He gestures at the spread of the week in your diary. ‘Because you need things to do. No one expects anything from you. If there’s anything you want to say, make a few notes.’
He continues, scrolling through emails, marking things in the diary, printing, putting messages that need responses to one side. You won’t be able to do any of it. Every appointment, every list, every pile of paper is another step away from the life that had Toby in it. Already you have turned into someone he wouldn’t know, someone you don’t recognise.
‘I’m just across the way,’ Chen says. ‘Text me and I’ll be here in fifteen seconds. And Bridget – no media, hey? Or social media. No Google.’
He’s been a friend this past week. Keeping you afloat when everything in you wanted to sink. Edmund must be doing the same for Finn. Who is helping Jarrah?
Your heart crumples under the weight of this, though you’ve tried, in the terrible week past, to reach for him. He’s been distant, unreachable, remote. He acts as though he’s fine, he doesn’t collapse into the sudden weeping that overtakes you and Finn. You can only cling to the thought that Jarrah’s a boy, not a parent, and normal life will at some time begin again for him. He’ll grow up and heal – he’ll be all right.
A chime alerts you to the meeting about to start. You collect your papers, a pen, a pink highlighter, and your mobile phone. Knowing now what life can serve up, you’ve become one of those people you used to despise, who need to carry it everywhere.
The office is now full of people, though unnaturally quiet, and quieter yet as you rise and walk towards the meeting room. Along the way, and as you enter, stilted expressions of sympathy. The hesitation of your co-workers as they murmur their sorrow. You appreciate that they want to acknowledge it while not going any further. You wouldn’t know what to say either. A few of them add ‘If there’s anything I can do…’ and you nod.
The meeting begins and you sit straight and stare at the agenda, and occasionally you refer to the notes, and mark something with the highlighter, but essentially you are far from the room. They are careful to ask you nothing, demand nothing, not look at you for too long. You are grateful.
On return, your desk is piled high with offerings for morning tea. The workplace equivalents of beef casseroles and chicken soups: muffins, cookies, chocolates. At least there are no flowers. But what will you do with the rest of the day?
‘File,’ Chen says. ‘Your desk has been a mess for months.’
You stare helplessly at the mound of paper on the desk, already defeated, but he reaches past you and plucks the first sheet from the stack. He reads the first few lines aloud. There is a date mentioned.
‘Last week,’ he says. ‘Too late.’ He lets it slip into the recycling bin. ‘Done. Next.’
The tsunami of paper is something that defeats you even in a normal week, and you’d have said, if anyone had asked, that you’d be utterly unable to cope with it today, this day, this Monday. But Chen prods you into a kind of momentum, and after he leaves, you work slowly down the pile, somehow falling into a state of mind in which pieces of paper and the order in which they should be stored are accessible to you, something like doing a jigsaw puzzle.
The problem is a stack of papers, each filled with a demand. The solution, as Chen showed you, is simple: take one more step. Any that are too demanding are put in the too-hard pile – he’s given you permission to create one – any that are intractable or unimportant are binned, the rest are filed.
You work through lunchtime. Especially through lunchtime, when people might feel they have to talk. At two pm, just as you’re slowing down to avoid the end of the filing, your phone rings. Your boss wants to see you.
In his office he stands to greet you and nods solemnly, waves you into a chair and goes through the usual expressions of sympathy. He’s awkward; this is not his forte. He’s visibly relieved when he can move on to business.
‘You want to get out of the office, Bridget?’
You feel a moment of panic. ‘What?’
‘Chen and I have discussed shifting the koala fieldwork forward. He can start it this week. You’d work with him in the field for a month or so, doing the grid analysis.’
Your mind turns slowly. This is menial, assigned to the most junior workers, the new graduates. ‘Um. I didn’t think I was doing the fieldwork.’
He leans forwards. ‘Chen thinks you need a straightforward task, and some fresh air. I agree – if that’s what you want.’
They’ll be glad to get you out of here, because no one knows how to speak to the devastatingly bereaved. After a month of office sympathy you’ll be heart-attack material, if today’s allocation of muffins and biscuits is anything to go by. That’s the kind of joke you once would have made. No one has mentioned death, or children, or unfortunate accidents. Many water-cooler topics to avoid. Yes, on the whole better to get you out. Bless the government and its flexible jobs and discretionary budgets. Chen has come up with a way to protect you.
You agree and shake Rob’s hand. A month’s reprieve. By the time it’s over, the shocking intrusion of your bereavement will have passed for the rest of them, and some kind of return to normal might be possible. For now, you are in quarantine.