•••
A little whileafter the scan, there was a gentle tap at the door. Dr. Ainslie shuffled in. “And how’s Judith?”
Before Coralie could say she was asleep, a soft voice piped up from the bed. “I’m okay.”
“Had a bad night?”
“A bit.”
They were talking so quietly Coralie had to inch forward. “Scan looked good,” Dr. Ainslie murmured. “Less distended.”
He had said if it looked good, he’d do the op. Here he was, seeming to say it looked good. Coralie cleared her throat, a loud sound in the quiet room. “So that’s good?”
“It’s all doing what it’s meant to down there. Moving around. No, she’s doing well.”
“What does that mean for the surgery?”
“I’m inclined to leave it. Operation…Complex, isn’t it? Might work. Might be worse. Not saying we might not do it. But yes, no—not now.”
None of that made sense, but his watery-eyed frown made one thing crystal clear: Coralie had overstepped. A miasma of ambiguity swirled around her mother’s condition and care, and that was the way it had to be. It had been the height of bad manners for her to seek to bring in facts.
Dr. Ainslie shuffled out.
“Parking’s running low. I might just move the car.” Dan left too.
“Mum?” Coralie said. “Are you disappointed?” (In me?she might have added.)
Judith Bower turned her face to the wall and drew up her thin legs like a Pompeii victim. “I’m not thinking very much.”
It seemed to be the limit of her talking too.
Whenever it was that they were supposed to cry, to love, to say what they meant to say—that time had passed. It had probably been decades ago, maybe in childhood, maybe when Coralie had been born.
•••
In 2004,Coralie’s father had been posted to Iraq. It had been a fairly major role in operations to support the Coalition forces. There had been a few profiles of him in the right-wing newspapers, a source of keen embarrassment for her. It was a shock when, a year later, straight off the plane from Baghdad, he’d moved into a serviced apartment in Canberra, just as Mum and Dan were loyally waiting for him back home in Darwin, Dan with an elaborate homemade banner featuring a kangaroo fighting an upright crocodile, both in red boxing gloves, and a speech bubble sayingWelcome Back Dad. “Probably lucky he didn’t see it,” Dan said. “I was just asking to be called a homo.” (At seventeen, he wasn’t out at school, or to Roger, who greeted the rare same-sex couples in his orbit with a chilly “In some parts of Indonesia, you’d get a hundred lashes for that.”)
The mystery had been solved when Coralie had seen photos of Roger on Facebook with his younger (though not young) girlfriend, Jenny, a Chinese Australian single mother who was high up in Australia Post. Their mother stayed in the big family home in Fannie Bay until Dan finished Year 12. At that point, letters from Dad’ssolicitors forced her to move on. She could have gone anywhere—back to Hobart, where she’d grown up, or to any of the fourteen places and bases her husband had dragged her over the course of his career. But her mother had been in Jakarta and then Darwin since 1996. It would have been hard to get used to the tropics, harder still to leave them behind. She decamped ten minutes up the road to Nightcliff.
When, a decade ago, Coralie had first seen her mother’s new house, she’d thought it was nothing special. Now, after so long in London, she could easily grasp its appeal. Made of dark wood, it was up on stilts in case of flooding and so the Volvo could be parked underneath. The garden grew thick with tall trees and jungle. The scent of frangipani filled the air. Tiny finches flitted around, in and out of the louvered windows. Cockatoos strutted along the balcony, overlooking the eroding dingo-colored coastline and the light gray seas of Beagle Gulf. Deceptively calm on the surface, the waters teemed with deadly jellyfish and saltwater crocs.
But inside, her mother’s interiors had the charm of a suburban bookkeeper’s office or a law firm. The bottom shelf of her main bookcase held a row of files labeled, in her neat handwriting,Will and Legal, Warranties, Bank, Car, Identity, Bills.The top shelf was home to a plastic fern, two elephants carved from a smooth beige stone, and a plate of ceramic tropical fruit. The absence of utility or beauty in the ornaments was so poignant that Coralie had to despise them so they wouldn’t break her heart. Some of her mother’s personality, or at least personal history, was evident in the bamboo furnishings (cushions covered with batik fabric) and, on the wall, a trio of Balinese masks. The television was distressingly large, the choice of a lonely person.
It would have upset their mother to no end to see what her livingroom looked like after weeks of her children camping in it. When she’d first arrived, Dan had kindly given Coralie the “spare room” (his room) with its large single bed. Now that there was no hope of their mother returning home anytime soon, it seemed right to reconsider the arrangement. The afternoon of the unpleasantly ambiguous operation verdict, they opened the door to their mother’s bedroom and (with a visceral sense of trespass) went inside.
The room was “neat as a pin” (her mother had always been a very “neat as a pin” person). The bed was immaculate, with beautifully laundered sheets of white waffle cotton. On the bedside table was a Rosamunde Pilcher novel with a Nightcliff Public Library bookmark a quarter of the way in. It was two weeks overdue. The short-sleeve blouses she’d had tailored in Jakarta hung neatly pressed in her wardrobe. Her pearls and delicate gold watch lay in a dish on the dresser. Next to it was a picture of Dan and Mum in a rickshaw (rickshaws only carried two passengers). The en suite was scented with the lavender soap Judith Bower unaccountably hoarded. “I don’t think I can sleep in here.” Tears were streaming down Dan’s face.
“I will,” Coralie said. “You can move back into your room.”
They changed the sheets on both beds and moved their things around. Afterward, Dan went to the garden to smoke a cigarette. Coralie tackled the kitchen. In the fridge, the milk was off. Dirty dishes were piled up in the sink from the few ad hoc meals they’d managed. She eyed them with her mother’s critical gaze, then eyed herself with that gaze too. She’d had such a long break from it, that gaze. Being with Adam had been one long holiday from shame. Now she cringed, shriveled inside, and raised one shoulder as if warding off a blow. How interesting.
She filled one half of the stainless-steel sink with hot water andadded a toxic green squirt of Morning Fresh. She slipped her hands (her mother’s hands) into her mother’s yellow washing-up gloves. A perfect fit. She washed and rinsed every plate and would have dried them, too, but Dan joined her with a tea towel and stacked them all away.
Afterward, they took some beers down to the foreshore to check up on the Miracle Tree. Coralie remembered it from years ago. It was right on the edge of the slowly eroding cliff, its roots now fully exposed. “It’s really clinging on for dear life,” Dan said.
“For dear life,” Coralie repeated. “I’ve never paid attention to those words before.”
“To dear life.” He held out his beer, and they clinked.
