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Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 26. October 2 1978

Premonition

page 26

Premonition

At last, the moment at least seven people have been waiting for. Salient announces the winner of the Great Salient Short Story Competition, held to commemorate our 40th anniversary. The winning story is Premonition by Rennie Gould (your book voucher awaits you at the Victoria Book Centre). Our thanks to the judge, Bill Manhire of the English Department. Entrants who wish to retrive their scripts can do so at the Salient office.

Photo of a woman leaning against a wall

Sometimes I think the worst thing is not knowing whether to do something or not, even when it's just something little. Like this time I was going to tell you about.

I knew it was silly, all in a rush and just before we rode the bike into town. But you do things like that anyway, because its easier. And, I thought, Jane would like it. She'd only just arrived and there I was going out.

We were talking about riding on the backs of motorbikes, how you have no control, just get carried along. I don't think any of them thought it was quite as precarious as I do, though I like it a lot, too.

How, I asked, can you be sure you won't fall off?

Once in the rain I'd turned my face to the left bank of the motorway, my right cheek against Michael's oilskin, and dreamed my way there. But I was still riding that time, riding with him, because I was awake. What if you fall asleep? Couldn't you slump right over to one side and drift down, down to the hard gravel-spitting road road? In my head I felt its grit rip through me.

"I hate Ngauranga," I said, "It's so steep. Imagine, coming off. It's not that I think we will. It's only, but if we did how awful."

"Go the other way." Martin said, "The back road."

And I thought There are too many bends, you're always leaning out. But I didn't say that.

Michale hadn't been that way and it's a nice road to show someone. We turned off at the lights, and and I was happy about that except for the vague feeling I always have about choosing one out of several possible futures. It's better when you don't have to choose; when things just are.

I was feeling terrifically alive and free, calling out to him Whicker-style where the tip was and the pool and colleges and the new closed off sub divisions. Wide awake with sunshine and laughter. Like when you're a little drunk, but not too much.

We passed the wide sweep of bush. Now I talked less because I wanted to look at everything : busy swarming insects and a great rush of trees and flowers; gorse and flax and Kowhai creeping in golden ripples round the hills.

I started, to grow sleepy then, flet myself float off among the ferns and the soft stone houses. Telephone wires whirled above us, road below We stopped talking, no more words whirled round in the wind. I let my limbs lie about me, snuggled into his back.

A huge bolt of pain woke me, then shook me. Tort through me. Like a birth, I opened my eyes wide and howled to the world its assault on me.

"Michael!" I screamed, "My foot"

And then I felt him pulling us, pulling us both and the bike across to the roadside, far away, vast as a desert. And I felt spikey ferns and stones prick into me as I slid from the bike, and felt through the pain a creeping of horror; my foot hit, cut off perhaps, and then, but it would not be that; it was just this raging pain which wasn't real, not like anything I've ever known before.

My own foot being squeezed and crushed into tiny pieces. Still joined to me (I could see now) but cut almost right round the heel. I thouqht it must be broken to hurt that much.

I didn't seem to be still in the same place. I'd been hurled somehow across a boundary dividing safe warm city, which had vanished, from the cold hard curb where I lay. Michael standing a long way off, flagging down a car. A man standing over me, checking all my bones because he thought I'd come off the bike. Me wanting to say No, please, just my foot, my foot that got caught in the wheel while I was on the bike, nothing else. Only he wasn't listening, so I couldn't tell him right.

I saw the sky grow white, cloudy white, like China, and softly thick like a bed. My blood ran red on the stones and I knew then that I wasn't crushed, my foot not broken, only gashed. And I didn't know why my body felt so tortured, but couldn't they just get me out of this hard place to some place better, because I couldn't keep lying here any longer.

But then the man picked me up and carried me to his car and drove off towards the hospital. His wife sat in the back with me, letting me lie against her. Michael followed on the bike.

I could feel my blood beat up my side, rippling upward from my foot to the rest of me, as though my heart were down there, beating beating. I moaned on with my ridiculous pain which I didn't know how to contain, it was such an unknown thing, and thought What awful people they must be, keeping me here like this. Unilt suddenly rights by the Winter Show Building, it stopped feeling like that. My toes came tingling back and instead of the great clamour in my foot and the waves shooting up and down my leg fast as flashlights there was this nice ordinary pain, strong but real, so that I could sit up and laugh, and wave to Michael out there at the lights and think what nice people they were after after all, taking me with them and not minding the blood on their car rug and me carrying on.

I felt a little sheepish, now, about being hurried to hospital, when going slowly would have done just as well. There's an awful urgency about agony as opposed to mere pain.

In Casualty I can't stop laughing. I am so exhuberant no one can believe I am in any pain. It is actually throbbing strongly again, but I can almost enjoy it now. It's real. The first thing I can think of is to grab Michael and ask, Should I tell? He says No.

"When you're finally ready," the reception nurse cuts in. Coldly disapproving. But I can't get serious. I giggle all through the form filling. I think it's because I don't want to start crying or moaning again. I feel so extreme.

But it must seem awfully rude. I'm suprised she doesn't throw something at me. When she says Occupation?, I remember to say Writer, not Mother or Student or Beneficiary, all of which I am equally much, just to help get it seen as a valid occupation.

I feel my mind start to float off again so I concentrate on reading the posters stuck up on walls all round:

Your Home is Poisonous

Ordinary Household Products are Potential Killers

Keep Them Out Of Reach Of Children....

If you suspect poisoning:

Note the poison and how much

Keep the container

Call the doctor

It's Going Around

V.D. is Catching

Confidential Treament Is Available From Hospital Clinics......

Do you Know? (No. 36)

There have been 224 Tetanus cases reported in the last ten years.

19 of these have been fatal

You can be protected......

A plump nurse with a starched cap and face to match sweeps up and tells me off for taking up two wheel chairds (she'd told me to sit on one). But my leg is demanding to be stretched out.

I don't know where to put it. Why does she have to be so mean? She pushed me into a cubicle and tried to wash my foot but it keeps pulling away from her. She's trying to give it these tiny dabs, just to clean off all the blood and gunk, but it really is my foot not me that won't let her. I am as annoyed about it as she is.

She glares at me and demands to know why on earth it should be so sensitive (as if I think I'm the princess with fourteen mattresses) tough you can tell she believes it is. Slightly disgusted but a little astonished as well. She points out that a five-year-old in the next cubicle has a worse cut and isn't being helped by my loud laments. I can't even feel ashamed.

Now she is insisting I tell her if I've had a Tetanus injection within four years but I can't tell her, I can't even begin to remember things like that. She's exasperated and I'm puzzled. I want to tell her, can't she see? She just keeps saying they have to know.

Finally she asks, "Have you had any drugs today?

"Why'" I snap back, dimly aware of having just assented and trying to remember how confidential hospitals are supposed to be. "What sort do you mean?" I add.

"Oh, I don't know." Casually. "Anything really. Asprin, Cocaine......."

"Marijuana."

"That," she explodes, "explains everything."

And in a flurry of expertise she whisks me off the bed onto a chair and shoves my foot into a bowl of deliciously soothing stuff.

"Why on earth didn't you tell me before?" she goes on. "I was just about to sock you in the jaw for being so childish. I knew the minute I saw you anyway. You thought we were all being horrible, didn't you? You're always like that, you lot."

Now she was letting me be a baby and mothering me for it. No more scolding. In the hazy part of my brain, I wondered should I tell her I might be pregnant, too? It didn't seem to be relevant though.

"And that," she went on, "is why it's hurting so much, you nitwit."

"But-" I felt betrayed. "I would have thought it'd help." Isn't it supposed to be like alcohol? Euphoric and all that.

"Rubbish. It just trebles your awareness. What'd you want to do stupid things like that for, anyway? You're an attractive girl."

I wondered what that had to do with it, and whether it was the grass entirely that had made me fall asleep on the bike and let my foot get chewed and make so much fuss and feel so hostile towards people who were hepling me. I wished I could just go home to think about it.

The doctor was young and pretty. I couldn't help thinking, in spite of feeling semi-sheepish and something of a public nuisance, that I liked the idea of a female House Surgeon getting sewing practice on a female law student.

She explained what she was going to do and that the local would take a couple of minutes and would hurt quite a lot, so did I want my friend to come in? I nodded and they produced him from behind a screen. I held on to him and squirmed about with all the part of me that wasn't right foot. But I was really trying to cooperate now.

The doctor left us alone while the anaesthetic took effect, only it didn't. Not all over at any rate. She put some more in the wider part and started stitching at the narrow end. All that raw muscle and gristle being tidily tucked away like frayed edges.

I felt every stitch and there were eight of them. The last ones were the worst. Michael could feel it too as I dug my nails into him, and he had to watch as well. He finally fainted mid-stitch (Penultimate) and the doctor had to tend us both.

The fat nurse bowled back in, glaring at him. Presumably for leading a Nice Young Thing astray. Marijuana and motorbikes indeed.

I'd already decided not to mix them again, even to give up grass. It's depressing, stuff like that. Seeing the other side of something.

First making me sleep, then making it hurt and stopping the anaesthetic working. It reminded me of how the Eucalyptus dominates parts of Australia, causing fires with its oil, and then being the only fire-resistant plant around.

And I'll never go on a bike without boots again. That's really dumb.

I got the stitches wet a few days later and they came apart. The cut got infected. It wouldn't go back together properly so it just had to stay unknitted and now I have a split-level heel. Anyway I'm having this baby in a couple of months and I can't think of anything better to go with feeding at nights and the long Summer days looking after it than lots of lovely new books. I wanted to try and tell this story anywar, so when I saw the "Salient" Contest advertised I thought I'd do it for that. Hope I can explain it properly.