page 373

Susanna Gendall

Bacteria

‘Don’t answer it,’ I said.

You picked up.

You lasted seven rings at least this time. Someone might see progress in seven. You talked a lot about how you weren’t going to answer the phone anymore. Your speeches were very convincing with those great puffs of air you ended on, the way you threw things around the room while you talked as if to illustrate how much you meant it. It was like watching performance poetry and I always felt very moved, especially when you cried. But there was something in the effect of the phone ringing that you seemed to have no control over, that drowned out the sound of your emphatic proclamations. I assumed it was similar to the hormonal reflex you had to pick up Francis when we were trying to make him sleep, and had agreed that we would leave him to cry for five minutes before moving on to ten minutes. Your face had been all stiff with conviction and those bruises tiredness had left under your eyes. But there you were, one minute into the sleep program with his little head nuzzling against your shoulder, patting his bottom and whispering mother-noises.

‘What?’ you said, when I looked at you, suffering from some form of maternal amnesia, as if you weren’t responsible for the reactions you had, not understanding what you had done wrong—until the next morning when you woke up grumpy and indignant, mumbling something about ‘that being it’ through your morning breath that was still sweet with lack of sleep.

Maybe there was some other guy. I almost wished there was so I could understand what gravity pushed your hand towards that dirty, white, cordless instrument. Desire would make sense.

Sometimes I felt like you were a sort of child. That you didn’t understand telephones, that you thought pushing the button to make the ringing stop would make the person on the other end stop too, page 374 that it was a quick way to get the problem to be quiet.

Of course it was your mother. I could hear it in your voice, the way you said ‘good’ too quickly and then, reluctantly, talking too fast, returned the question, waiting for the pause in which you could hang up. Who did you think it was going to be? None of your friends called you on the landline anymore. Maybe there’s always the hope that it’s going to be someone else—that person you don’t know yet, the one you really want to talk to, that it was just a matter of getting your correct phone number.

I looked at the list we were in the middle of. Pasta was the last thing we’d written. I crossed it out. Pasta meant Parmesan and olive oil and anchovies and mascarpone. I was learning to see through things. It was the first time in our relationship we’d had to budget— not that we’d been extravagant before—we just hadn’t thought about anything. Neither of us was exactly sure what had happened. You’d always worked part time at the library and I was still at Internal Affairs. But suddenly we didn’t have enough money. There was Francis, but he was still only four and ate about half a peanut-butter sandwich and ten of those little boxes of raisins every day. We weren’t very good at it—we’d start off the week with things like minestrone and potato omelettes, but by about Thursday, boredom had set in and one of us would turn up with one of those brown paper bags from the cheese shop or a tub of vanilla-bean buffalo yoghurt from the Italian place. Which made us smile, as if giving in was what we were supposed to do. That was the lesson television was trying to teach us. And it was funny and nice until we looked at what was happening to our bank account and thought about how far backwards it could go.

‘Sorry,’ you said after you hung up. That was one of your favourite words.

‘You don’t have to be so nice, you know.’

‘She’s hurt her shoulder.’

‘Maybe she should call a doctor, then.’

‘You don’t have to be such an arsehole, you know.’

‘I know.’

That was about as far as we got now. We knew what came next and didn’t bother. Our ‘conversations’ had a horrible choreographed quality to them which, no matter what we said or tried to say, always page 375 made them sound the same, as if someone else had written them. And we, reluctantly, with those bored expressions on our faces, had to recite them.

‘What’s wrong with pasta?’ You took the pen off me and circled the crossed-out word and added a question mark—not so much in defiance but as a kind of visual translation of your question. You had this theory that I was a ‘word-guy’, that I didn’t understand things properly unless they were written down. ‘That explains how we first got together—all those emails. It would never have happened in a bar,’ you said. ‘We would have hated each other.’

‘Pasta’s a trick food,’ I replied.

‘It doesn’t have to be.’

I looked around our kitchen for inspiration, opened up the pantry. The dinner dishes were all piled up on the bench in that intimidating way.

‘What about pilaf? Isn’t that just rice?’

‘If we leave out the saffron this time.’

Your mother must have always been there. I wasn’t sure exactly when her presence began to be something that hung around our living room for hours after she’d gone, that elbowed its way between us at the kitchen table, when the saltless meals she dropped off became so irritating, when the phone calls and the irrelevant questions she asked you were no longer funny background noises, but like that guy next door with his lawnmower on Sunday morning, penetrating our sleep until our eyes were pushed open and we had to lie there and listen to his noise in our bedroom. It was as if our immune systems were down and suddenly all these things—the phone, your mother, our budget— all those normal relationship bacteria, were able to hurt us.

‘I’m an only child,’ you said. ‘She doesn’t have anyone else.’

‘Your dad doesn’t feel the need to call you three times a day.’

‘He’s got that dumb bitch he married.’

Again, that’s where we stopped—before you started in with your budget psychoanalysis about my dead mother and me turning thirty- five triggering some jealousy reflex dormant in my life until now— possibly related to my becoming a father. It’s such a strange sensation, trying to talk to one another through an argument about nothing, trying to get closer to one another by making less and less sense.

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‘Can you hear yourself?’ you sometimes yelled at me, and I repeated the question back to you (emphasising different syllables), and there was that moment where we were quiet, trying to hear ourselves.

The pen was back in your hand.

‘Cheddar?’ I asked, reading your curly upside-down letters.

‘Chickpeas.’

‘With what?’

‘Rice.’

‘Kind of bland.’

‘We’ll add chilli.’

You looked out the window at the night. You always looked in a different direction to where a noise was coming from. You thought you could hear it better if you didn’t look directly at it.

‘Was that Francis?’

‘I’ll go.’

It was quiet in his bedroom. His eyes were closed and he was half off the bed. I lifted him back on. Francis was always trying to fall off his bed and woke up in the morning in twisted diagonal positions. It must be something you learn, sleeping straight, like walking.

I sat on his bed and looked at the plastic animals on the drawers standing in their fake-life positions he had carefully arranged them in, how they looked like they knew him. I put my hand on his forehead.

You were still sitting at the kitchen table but the list had turned into a drawing of somebody’s face.

‘All okay?’

‘He’s sort of hot.’

You didn’t like this kind of news, but it was good for our relationship and kept our voices at a nice ambient level while we talked about whether or not we should take his temperature or give him Panadol, or just go to bed and wait and see. The nineteen-year-old daughter of some people down the road had contracted a strain of meningitis the previous year, which had caused some level of brain damage. She had been studying physics at university and now worked at Pak’n’Save as a checkout operator. It was the kind of thing you read about in the Dominion but it had put a small dent in our liberal parenting page 377 approach with those little coloured bottles of homeopathic pills that went with it.

You yawned and said you were going to bed.

‘You know, it’s got nothing to do with my mother,’ you said, shutting the door before I could answer back.

It was a high-pitched moan. His temperature was 38.8. His hair was wet with sweat.

‘I think we should go to A and E,’ you said.

I enjoyed the sensation of agreeing with you. You sat with him in the back and I drove, and it reminded me of those holidays we used to go on when I was a kid, how we used to leave at five in the morning because the idea was that my sister and I would sleep until we stopped for breakfast, by which time we would already be half-way there. But I was always wide-awake and excited, and watched the moon following us through my window and those trees doing the fingers at us.

‘We should go on a holiday,’ I said.

‘What?’

You were trying to get Francis to drink out of the water bottle but his lips were tight in the rear-view mirror, releasing just that moan.

There were others before us in the A and E waiting room and the receptionist was undisturbed by our hot son and us who kept telling her we thought this might be a medical emergency, that we needed to see someone straight away because he was very, very sick.

‘Just take a seat,’ she said, reciting her banal lines through her neutral make-up. ‘The doctor will be with you as soon as he can.’ She was one of those people who have been explicitly trained not to listen.

A fat man hunched over his stomach told us he thought his appendix was going to burst. An old lady still in her dressing gown said she was having palpitations. There were so many people, just about to die.

‘I’m sorry,’ you said, but you were looking at Francis, feeling his forehead again for some perceptible change in temperature.

‘Actually, I think it is about your mother. If she wasn’t trying to completely invade our life, and treating you like you were still nine and needed her, I think things would be very different.’

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You looked at me like I was the biggest prick in the universe.

‘And responding to her neediness by doing things like answering the telephone when you know it’s her is just feeding that.’

I didn’t usually believe in arguing when Francis could hear us, but he had fallen back to sleep in your arms, and something about sitting there in those uncomfortable chairs with too much light and that indefinite amount of time before us had given me some kind of second wind. It stopped me from thinking about what was heating Francis’s body up, about how hot hot could go, about what came after hot. I wasn’t yelling. I was talking in a very civilised waiting-room voice.

‘Can’t you see that? If you could at least see that, if you could resist your reflex to be the infant of your mother, then we could get somewhere.’

You were now ignoring me altogether. Your shoulder was hunched up as a sort of barrier against me attacking your left-hand-side. All your energy was going into the child in your lap, as if you could bring his temperature down just by concentrating on him.

We watched the man and his appendix go in. There was the sensation of being at a railway station, of not knowing which people were getting on trains that we would not see again and which people we would pretend not to recognise in the carpark five minutes later. There was the noise of the radio and the kind of songs it plays to people who didn’t know they were going to be listening. I got up and looked at the fish in the fish tank.

At some point Francis held open his eyes against the sleep trying to close them, which we both felt very excited about. You held the drink bottle to his lips, whispering about water.

‘Juice,’ he said.

This was even better, and I went to the drinks machine and came back with orange juice, apple juice and two chocolate bars. He had gone back to sleep. The woman with her palpitations waved goodbye to us as a nurse escorted her into the corridor.

‘What about you stop answering the phone and I’ll stop talking about it?’

You wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

Shut up, it said.

It’s strange how hard it is to give up, how your side of the argument page 379 is like a little God you truly believe holds the key to salvation, that if you just got to the other side all would be divinely resolved.

‘Greta and Gareth Miller-Sampson?’ a nurse in a sick-green uniform called out.

‘No, it’s our son, Francis,’ I told her. She smiled at me in that way nurses do—it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know anything about my body and how sick I really was.

The doctor looked tired. He took Francis’s temperature, looked in his ears, held down his tongue with that stick and shone a torch down his throat, felt his lymph nodes, and then wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to us.

‘Keep him hydrated. Give him paracetamol as required.’

‘Are you sure it’s not meningitis?’ you asked.

The doctor nodded and showed us to the door of the office we were trying to spend just a little more time in. You took a long time to put your jacket on. There was something devastating about the fact he was just going to let us go home, back to our beds, that there was nothing he could do to help us. We paid the fifty-dollar bill.

‘That’s a relief,’ you said in the car. Your voice was trying hard but it was weak without sleep. The sky was turning that grey colour of the early morning, before you can tell whether it’s going to be blue or white. You pulled the seatbelt around Francis’s limp body and we listened to the quiet noise in the car. ‘Quiet always sounds like a phone ringing in my head,’ you told me sometime back before Francis, before your mother, when we still had conversations in bed.

We listened and neither of us answered it.