Читать книгу Ricochet - Robyn Neilson - Страница 5

Australia: November 1998 until December 2008.

“Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds” William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

“Love is…going back to something very old knit in the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.” Louise Erdrich, ‘The Antelope Wife’.

The ten intervening years defy eloquent retelling. And much is best left unsaid. A chaotic decade: indicated by reductive headings, or through memories as undisciplined, as the years were themselves. Like the place names on maps enticing us toward ‘Cape Adieu’ or ‘Mount Disappointment’, Loup and I were ready to risk déception. Not in the English version of romantic betrayal, although that of course was part of the hazard, but in the French meaning of disillusion or a grand disappointment. We would be lured by anything that, like the scatter of gleaming caravans clutching a crescent of white sand beside the sea of Esperance, could conjure up hope, or daring.

On the map of France, the villages of ‘Joyeuse’ and ‘Tristesse’ are separated by 401 kilometres. They follow roughly the Chemin de Compsostelle. In the end, it had been deceptively easy to journey from joy to sadness; and blindingly obvious that Loup was the only one who could bring me back. Or so I believed. Believed badly, like my obstinate belief in divinity. And like a repentant prodigal, I put Loup up on that pedestal of deity.

He liked to say, ‘Just call me Jesus.’

And I did not resist.

Some events can be described in detail along that ten-year path of believing. They have no more importance than other things, apart from the fact that I remember them well. And they remember me, reminding me of how lucky I am. They fall under three headings.

Tilia x vulgaris, Wild Lime .

Today is already yesterday. Seventeen years of yesterdays collide with the present. I crave for my grown-up daughters. Ironically, it is the first-town-on-the-map daughter who now inhabits that same distant place. As if the distance between Europe and Australia was not enough, we must now inhabit far-flung states.

I picture her twelve-week old baby; struggle to comprehend that he is vivid, imbued with exquisite design, about the size of a lime. His heart has now learned to beat. His fingers and toes have now learned to uncurl and reach out. His eyes have moved to claim their spellbinding dominance in his noble head. His bladder has learned to pee. But then without warning, he stops performing. Just stops. The exquisite design ruptured.

Now, inside my grown-up daughter, lies a dead son. Curled up, still attached. Like a dead leaf folded in on itself, still clinging to the tree.

Just as years before inside me, lay a former dead baby. Just as, inside every tenth woman waits a baby, waiting to die, waiting to be expelled. I invoke these reckonings to ease the pain of my daughter, to make her grief seem commonplace. Shared stories, to quell the memory of my loss with Loup, which refuses erasure. Some women are lucky, as I was, and their body chases the old new life out. Purging as quickly as possible. Some women suffer the cruellest injustice, carrying that un-beating heart until it is safe to push it out and bury it in its miniature coffin, plant a rose garden or a lime tree. And weep for a new baby.

‘Yes, Freya, the size of a small lime.’ Is what she said, Dr Dunmead, years ago in that insignificant Gippsland town, when I lay in her meagre room out the back of the Kindergarten, her scheduled day in the week having finally arrived. I prayed for someone to contradict what she then announced, but they did not.

‘That is probably what you saw in the toilet’, said my no-nonsense herself childless Doctor, when I described the mucus-membrane shrouded lump floating there: the culmination of two days of searing contractions. Nothing like the magnificent bloody euphoric pain of pushing a new life out into the world. Expelling a foetus is just a wretched wrench.

Dr Dunmead pressed and probed, just as she had twelve weeks ago when I first noticed a change. But this time her hands detected no fluttering; told me nothing I wanted to hear. ‘We will do another blood test Freya, just to be sure, but I believe you have miscarried. It may be for the best.’

If another person used that phrase, I would bite their head off. Of course, several times those words were repeated to me until I was shamed into acceptance. Not daring to bite. Of course, everyone must have known that Loup and I would be terrible parents. Of course, they knew.

It was for the best.