Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Read online

  “Does she feel that? Does she know they’re shovelling dirt?” Joey asked.

  “No. It’s like when you’re asleep. Nothing. It’s just like being nothing.”

  “I have nightmares,” he said uncertainly.

  Ah, but in that sleep of death, what dreams may come!

  “Not when you’re dead. No dreams. Never. Nothing.”

  They were reassured.

  I have watched people since, carefully, with calculating assessing eye. The old people next door, they must feel it coming. Never a sign, never a tremor.

  “Another friend of mine passed away last week,” the old lady tells me. I watch like a hawk. “We were at school together.” She sighs and smiles. “Ah well, we’re all getting on.” She says it like a benediction.

  Perhaps it has unhinged me. Am I a coward, simply that? I admit nothing. No one admits anything. Perhaps after all everyone has a closet theology, a resurrection trump. Let them have their Grandfather’s castles, whatever helps.

  Nothing helps me. I feel the weight of damp black clay pressing on her, on me. These are my night thoughts, shameful. If I could only stop feeling Cassandra’s rage. Beside Laura, white, fragile, tented, machine-monitored, I think: she is raging with grief. By Melissa, lost and pensive, I think: she is straining against the bonds of her absence, furious.

  If I could only be certain it was nothingness. No knowledge. No dreams. I walk around with the taste of earth sour on my tongue, growing my cancer of fear, my terminal illness.

  After the Fall

  The day the amaryllis fell her husband was at a conference in another city. She was glad to be alone. Lately she had even been keeping the children out of the studio, having become uneasy and selfconscious in the plant’s extravagant presence.

  She clamped a large sheet of paper to the easel and did a quick preliminary sketch in charcoal. Tentative title: Hubris in the Vegetable Kingdom. It was the inexorability of self-destruction she was after, the heavy suddenness of those three trumpet flowers tumbling down under their own weight like a blasted carillon of bells. Ask not for whom the amaryllis tolls.

  She changed the paper and sketched a single detail in overblown scale, magnifying the bruised bending point of the stalk. Probing the wound for clues.

  The stricken flowers trailing across her work-table suddenly jangled like doomsday bells. She grabbed another sheet, clipped it up, drew the sound. Chiaroscuro of discord. The shrieking would not be laid to rest. She took a new sheet, drew it again feverishly, concentrating this time on the tormented mouth of a single flower.

  Silence.

  Relieved, she laid out the four drawings side by side on her work-table. Not too bad, but so much had been missed. The buckled stalk bleeding green opalescent sap. The murky bruise staining the red-streaked petals. She needed colour.

  Scooping up the finished sheets, she dropped them into the back of the amaryllis portfolio, a bulging record of three months’ worth of changes – changes not even suspected by heedless people who threw out their Christmas plants when the first blooms withered.

  The fallen flowers screamed again, strident with self-pity – an interminable wail like an alarm bell or a tintinnabulation of raw nerve ends. She snatched up a fresh sheet, dropped it, picked it up, clamped it, tore open her pastels. The sound was horribly trapped inside her head, insistent as a panicked mosquito caught in the ear. She drew the violent flowers but the ringing went on unabated. One might go mad from it.

  Was it the telephone, she wondered?

  She reached for it, hooking it under her chin, changing sheets.

  “I’ve been calling all morning,” he said. “I thought you must be out.”

  Him. His voice. And for months she had waited. Sweat trickled across her upper lip and she brushed it with the back of her hand, smearing her face with charcoal and pastel dust.

  “What are you doing?” As though he still had a right to know.

  “I’m drawing the amaryllis. The one you gave me for Christmas. It keeps changing.”

  Even now a translucent bruise, a wan greenness the colour of undersea moss, was seeping along the stalk in both directions from the breaking point. Pastels were inadequate. She reached for her watercolours.

  “My husband is out of town for a few days,” she said. Casually.

  There was a silence. She watched the pale stalk bleeding greenly.

  “Actually,” she said, “this is not a convenient time to talk. The gallery has commissioned five lithographs. I’m absorbed in the preliminary sketches. Other things seem, you know, extraneous.”

  She hung up. She was absorbed, in fact, in the essence of change. A momentous project. In the last few minutes the bruised underside of a petal had mutated infinitesimally toward colourlessness. She could only hope to capture it with watercolour washes, eventually with the lithograph washes.

  He might or might not come over of course. At least he knew she was alone if he wanted to make anything of it. Why had he called anyway, after all this time? Not that it mattered. Grief mutates and seeps away, changing ceaselessly.

  It would have to be a three-ink print. Red, green, brown. Brown for the parts already dead. She had been watching it die and go on living ever since Christmas. Four flowers now in advanced decay. They had gone one by one, had attained a transparent shrivelled sepia, wondrously veined. Three had fallen from the stalk like discarded clothing, one landing on the soil in the pot, the other two on the table. She left them where they fell and drew them there. The positions were inviolate. It was imperative to record the stages, to catalogue the minutiae of change. The fourth dead flower had never broken loose. It had trailed downwards from the new blooms like bedraggled underwear, falling with them in today’s clanging apocalypse.

  Three inks would not after all be sufficient for the lithographs. Five perhaps would do, two browns and two greens and a red. The browns were changing and the greens were changing and soon the children would be home from school. She would have to tell them to fix peanut-butter sandwiches for themselves. If she left the studio even for five minutes at this critical juncture she would miss colour mutations that might never be seen again.

  She painted the fallen cluster in watercolours, the three still living flowers in streaky red washing into pink washing into white washing into colourless bruise. She painted the dead flower still joined to them, trailing from them like a raffish brown ribbon from a tossed bouquet.

  She decided to try oils.

  She clipped up a small ready-stretched canvas, painted the cluster again, same relationship of forms, but as three chalices spilling wine and a fourth smashed chalice of brown shards.

  The green of the stalk was changing, she could not keep up. She painted the stolid stump as it burst green and erect from the protruding bulb, she rendered faithfully the crisis point, the many-greened brown-turning bruise, the limp and trailing shaft, the tip oozing sap and damaged flowers.

  She was distressed by her slowness and the slowness of the medium. She took fresh paper and charcoal again, drew once more the seasons of the changing stalk: its proud Christmas erection (fresh gift of her lover), energy bursting from the fibrous root ball half visible above the soil; its wintry wilting; its broken tip. She began to listen for the children. She would have to cover the amaryllis, shield them from it.

  They would be surprised that their father was not home. He had gone after they left for school, the conference having been called at short notice. Three or four days. They would accept it.

  Perhaps her lover would not come now. It was getting late. He would not want to risk being there when the children came. It was better this way, her husband being a good and kind man though not often present. She had decided to stay with him. It was odd that her lover should finally call when it no longer mattered.

  She painted the buckled stalk again as a diver with the bends, jack-knifing in agony thro
ugh aqueous regions far from the sun. She used many greens, the greens of growing and the greens of dying, the greens of dead scum on stagnant water, the green of the lower ocean where it begins to turn black and arctic, the green of mucous growths on forest floors. She invented greens with mixes and washes. Perhaps a hundred greens.

  She could not keep up with the changing amaryllis.

  One of the fallen flowers was bruising rapidly. She drew a fallen woman weeping. The woman was chalice-shaped, pale as a lily streaked with blood, hollow as a bell without its clapper. Slowly the flower collapsed. The woman moaned.

  She decided to begin the first lithograph: The Fall. The moment should be recorded now, before it became unrecoverable, obscured and distanced by changes cavorting and multiplying like cancer cells.

  She pegged up all the relevant sketches and paintings. They fluttered idly from the clothesline running round her studio. Laundry work, she thought. The day’s washes. She wheeled the trolley with its heavy limestone slab into position, she assembled her grease crayons, she began.

  She thought: if the children come now, bursting in with ragged energy and baseball bats and such, the print will be ruined. She could not tolerate interruption once she had begun work. She would have to grind the image off the stone and start again. She would have to cover the amaryllis. She would feel exposed, even to their innocent trusting eyes.

  The grease pencil made its soft and satisfying sound against the limestone. She would do a line drawing for a black ink first, before the colour washes went in. A black outline, thin and glossy on the ivory paper, as on a bereavement card. Then the faintest wash of green and sepia, dying colours.

  If the children came in now she would simply call out to them to make themselves a snack, to go outside and play. It was getting a little late, they should have been in. Really, she should not have begun until she had them settled on their homework. But perhaps they would not be home for an hour or so and she hated to waste time. Perhaps it was a music-lesson day, or a baseball practice. Which would delay them.

  It was fortunate that her lover had not after all come over. Certainly he should not think that she would be prepared to interrupt a complicated task just because he was available and she alone. He should realise, in fact, that she felt only indifference after all this silent time. The grease crayon made its soothing clicking sound, the black lines glossy on the grey stone. She did wish a little, perhaps, that he had come over – that he would come over – so that she could show that she was not to be interrupted so cavalierly. She would look just slightly irritated, mildly bemused – as though she could not quite remember who he was – and abstractedly send him away.

  She finished the drawing and took up a soft cloth and the etching solution, meticulously sponging the ungreased areas. It was exacting work. If her hand came in contact with the stone, if it so much as brushed it lightly, the clarity of the print would suffer, the sensitised surface would register her body oils, muddying the image. If the children arrived at this moment, everything would be ruined. She would have to start over.

  It was getting late. As soon as she finished applying the acid wash she would close up the studio and go looking for them. Perhaps they had gone to a friend’s house to play. If so, they should have called – although it would be disastrous if she had to stop and pick up the phone right now. It was growing dark. And cold too. Still wintry outside, with snow a distinct possibility. She tried to remember if they had taken their snow jackets that morning. It was a constant hassle in March and April, the children thumbing their noses at winter, getting bronchial infections from not staying warm enough. They should have been home.

  If her lover had come she could have sent him out looking for them in his car. Or if her husband were home, he would have taken care of things. A good and gentle man. She was relieved she had not been obliged to deceive him during his absence.

  She could not leave the studio until the image was protected from smudge and change, until the blank spaces were all carefully add-rubbed and the grease drawing erased with Varsol. Even then there was considerable risk in leaving it untended, but with young children what else could she do? The plate would be vulnerable to random impressions from blown dust, from any number of things. She could not afford to let it go dry. Really she should wait until she had inked it and pulled the first print. She might never recapture the exactness of the fall if she had to start over tomorrow. She wanted it safely pressed on paper.

  It would constitute the last print, the fifth in the commissioned series, when it was finished. She would have to work backwards, back through the hints of the weakening stalk and the flowers dying one by one. Eventually she would be able to return to the beginning, to things in their first bloom, the amaryllis in its Christmas cellophane. She would call the first print Creation. Or perhaps Nativity.

  He had come to dinner bearing gifts, whisky for his host, the potted amaryllis for his hostess. He was an associate of her husband’s.

  “My wife,” her husband had explained, introducing her, “dabbles in art. I’ve built her a studio in the basement. She putters around there. Good cook too, as you’ll see.”

  “I see,” he said, looking at her. “A painter?”

  “Print-maker mostly.”

  “Indeed?” His eyes were the colour of the rich brown earth that nourishes tropical flowers. “Do you have your own press?”

  “A small one. Yes.”

  “I’d love to see it sometime, if I may.”

  Certain forces, though they be blind and groping as roots or deep-sea currents, one is aware of instantly. She brushed his hand accidentally as she was passing the beef bourguignon. When she carried the heavy tureen of crab bisque back out to the kitchen, he reached up and touched her lightly under the elbow as though offering support, a solicitous gesture. During dessert, her husband went down to the cellar to bring up more wine and he leaned across the table and ran the tips of his fingers, lightly as a watercolour brush, across her eyebrows and down her nose. He traced the curved line of her lips. Then he cupped her face in his hands.

  She finished the acid wash and erased the black drawing with Varsol, invariably a fearful moment, a blank lurching spasm of terror, the stone slab empty and void, stripped of her ordering.

  She squeezed a ribbon of ink on to the glass roll-up slab. She always inked the roller as quickly as possible, her wrists snapping jerkily back and forth, her breathing tight. The blank stone always frightened her. Suppose the image never reappeared?

  Suppose something had happened to the children? Surely it was rather late, getting dark? As soon as she had pulled one print from the press she would go looking for them. She dampened the stone surface with a wet sponge, rolling the ink across it, breathing more freely as the amaryllis magically reappeared, form plucked from the void.

  Telephone.

  No doubt the children, but she could not possibly let the ink go dry before she had the slab in the press. If the children were calling then they must be safely at a friend’s house. If her lover was calling, it was too late. He could not come round once the children were home. They were old enough to notice these things, to tell.

  She wheeled the trolley across to the press, positioned the slab, laid the paper carefully over it, placed the tympan over the paper. She watched the scraper bar glide smoothly across the tympan. The paper received the fall of the amaryllis, the crisis given a safe and permanent shape. She felt strangely weightless, delivered of heavy matters.

  She hung the print up to dry and answered the importunate telephone.

  “Mother, are you all right? I’ve been calling and calling.”

  “I couldn’t answer it, Suzy. I was making a print. You should be home. I’ve been so worried. It’s getting dark.”

  “It’s daylight here.”

  Not as late as she had thought then. “Where are you?”

  “Are you all right. Mother
?”

  “Of course, dear. Where are you?”

  “I’m still in France. Summer school doesn’t finish for three weeks yet. Listen, are you sure you’re all right?”

  Summer school? Winter already gone, after all. Impossible to keep up with so many changes.

  “Is Robert with you, Suzy? Are you both at a friend’s house?”

  And did they have their warm jackets with them? Though if it was summer already…

  “Robert? No! Why should he be? Isn’t he still in Washington? Has something happened?”

  “You’re both terribly late. When are you coming home?”

  “That’s what I’m calling about. Mother. Daddy called to see if I would like to stay with him and Judy in their beach cottage during August. He said he’s been trying to check it out with you all week, but you never answer the phone. He said you finally answered this morning and sounded very strange. He thought I should know. Is something the matter?”

  “No, no. Just … so many changes you know. Like cancer in my breathing.”

  “Cancer!!”

  “A figure of speech, Suzy.”

  “I must say. Mother, you sound a little out of it. I think I should stay with you as planned. Why don’t you fly over here and join me for the last few weeks in Paris?”

  “No, no. Everything’s fine. You know how I lose track of things when I’m working on something. I’ve been doing an amaryllis and it keeps changing, you know. It’s difficult to keep up. Do have a nice summer, darling. Whatever you want to do is fine with me.

  She remembered, as she hung up, that it was not she who had a lover, but her husband. Her husband who had left her.

  She could not remember who had given her the amaryllis, though it scarcely mattered. She could see a tiny new green shoot, pale as the breath of fishes, thrusting up from the bulb beside the broken stalk. She would move her bed down into the studio, she thought, so that she would miss nothing.