“I don’t,” Dan said. “But I wouldn’t put it past them…frogs.”
•••
As they approachedthe hospital, she could feel herself regressing to a childish state, laughing hysterically at what her brother had said in earnest. “I wouldn’t put it past them…frogs,” she kept saying. They got out of the car and began to cross the lawn to the big glass front doors. “I wouldn’t put it past them…frogs.” Suddenly she was on the ground, laughing so much she was crying. She’d fallen in a shallow hole. “I’m not drunk, I swear.”
Dan reached out to help her up. “You might be, but don’t worry, I’m not.” As Coralie brushed cut grass off her knees, he put his hand up to shield his eyes. “Hang on—is that Mum?”
On a large concrete terrace there was a lean gray stick in a nightie, waving.
•••
Coralie’s family hadbeen based in Darwin from 1999. Before then, they’d been in Jakarta, where her father was a brigadier in the army. For both those far-distant tropical postings, the Australian taxpayer subsidized her school fees and paid for her travel home. She experienced these breaks as an achingly long period of exile from her real life. It was too hot to leave the house after 8 a.m., and she could be drenched in seconds by fierce monsoonal rain the exact same temperature as blood. Bush stone-curlews curdled the air with frankly terrifying shrieks. Overripe mangoes dropped from the trees and stank to high heaven in the blazing sun. Three days a week she caught the bus to an air-conditioned mall to work at a women’s shoe shop. The rest of the time, she read books. How fortunate she’d had so much practice as a teen, biding her time in the tropics at one careful remove from reality. How did people who actually existed in the world cope with the dramatic enfeeblement of their mothers?
In her private room, Judith Bower held the sheet up over her nose. Her sweet brown eyes peeped marsupially over the top. Coralie gave her cool forehead a kiss.
“Flight must have cost you a fortune,” Judith whispered.
“How are you feeling?” Coralie ventured.
“Better than you look.”
•••
For the firstcouple of days, Coralie was so jet-lagged and so shocked by her mother’s condition that she couldn’t tell up from down or what was real and what was not. There existed a constant low-level fever of expectation around the next operation: if it would happen, when, and how soon afterward their mother could reasonably go home. They all three spent most of their time waiting forDr. Ainslie to “pop in.” He did this once a day. It was painful to observe their waiting mother’s eagerness. It was a glimpse of what she’d been like as a child.
In the evenings, after a long day in the hospital, brother and sister dined at Asian Gateway or Taj Curry Indian. Later, Dan went for a long late-night run along Casuarina Beach, and Coralie sat on her mother’s balcony to look out over the dark sea, composing sprawling, mordant emails to Adam about her macabre and otherworldly hospital-based life. He replied in the same exact vein about the campaign. Ed Miliband had unveiled a three-meter-tall stone tablet upon which Labour’s key election pledges had been carved. The idea was that, if Labour won, the stone tablet would be placed in the Downing Street rose garden. There it would remind Miliband daily of the solemn duty he owed the British people. In theTelegraph, Boris Johnson called it “some weird Commie slab.” Someone called it “the heaviest suicide note in history.” Everyone else called it the EdStone. It seemed Coralie’s mother was not the only one dying a slow death.
I wish I was with you, I miss you so much, I love you so much, CYK, Adam’s emails ended.
Consider yourself kissed. That was a blast from the past.
CYK, she wrote back.CYK!
But Adam always sent the finalCYK, one more than she’d think to expect, and that made her feel glad and safe.
•••
One day,Dr.Ainslie popped in very early, before ten. This was unfortunate, as there was still a lot of the day to get through, and now there’d be nothing to look forward to.
There was a long pause as doctor and patient stared at each other. It was as though Dan and Coralie were not in the room. “Well now, Judith,” Dr. Ainslie said. “Eating?”
“Oh yes, white toast.” A lie—she’d had a mouthful.
“And the nights?”
Their mum had been routinely ill and in distress every night from seven onward. She called it her “witching hour.”
“Still the same.”
“Not worse?”
Hopeful face: “No?”
“Very good. Well, Judith. Got to get going. Got a few sick people to see.” (His inveterate farewell. Satire? Helping Mum feel others had it worse? Simply a statement of his to-do list?)
This time, Coralie pursued Dr. Ainslie down the corridor. He couldn’t be further from her idea of a venerated, superhuman cancer surgeon. With his strange orthopedic loafers or slippers and tufty gray hair sticking out of his ears, he looked like an old-age pensioner off to place a few bets on the dogs. “How will you decide if you’ll do the operation? Are you waiting for her to get stronger?”
“Every day she’s getting weaker,” Dr. Ainslie said. “If it happens, it’ll be soon.”
