The Coral Bones, page 25
I felt the deterioration as a personal affront. My judgement had failed me. I had lost the connection that made these papers so special. I had lost the one thing that was keeping me afloat, even for a short time. When I finished reading that final article I shouted aloud in disbelief, I wanted to screw up the pamphlet and burn the lot. How could it end there? How could Pooke let me down like this?
›•‹
I saw you on the news, Tess. It was the day after I’d finished reading the Pooke papers and I’d just got home from the lab, poured myself a gin and tonic, was fixing some tofu. I turned on the TV, as has become a habit, to drown out the noise of your absence. And there you were, standing on the steps outside court, next to your client, Grace Mackenzie.
The shock of seeing you initially overrode the magnitude of the news. After a three-month battle, the verdict was in. You had won. The newsreader lauded your victory as a landmark case, a triumph of the #MeToo movement. I watched, frozen, as you and Grace descended the steps behind the growing media circus, you in the same plain black pumps, black suit and white shirt, your protruding belly impossible to disguise. You held your head high, but beneath the suit I could see the tension in your shoulders and neck, I knew the toll the case would have taken. You spoke briefly. It was the right outcome, you said, the only possible outcome to see justice served. Camera and questions turned to the complainant, Grace Mackenzie, but you remained in shot until the interviews concluded and you were hustled towards a waiting car.
The newsreader moved to the next item. I realised I had left the oil heating, and smoke was pouring from the wok. I took the wok off the hob and ran to open the back door before the fire alarm went off. When the oil had cooled sufficiently I continued cooking, mechanically adding garlic, ginger, shallots. I was consumed by the irrational terror that you would now appear in person to hold me to account, as though your digital presence was a summoning for your physical self. I was not afraid of seeing you, but of seeing in your face what I was: a coward. I was and always would be the mother who left.
I imagined the car pulling away from the kerb after the cameras stopped rolling, you in the back seat, your body rigid as the streets slipped by, as you answered the driver’s jovial enquiries, even as you walked the short distance from the car to your apartment block. Only when you have stepped inside your apartment and the door closes behind you do your muscles give. You slump against the wall, and sink slowly to the floor. Your feet must ache terribly. I used to massage them. Now you are carrying extra weight. You kick the shoes away, your legs sticking straight out in front of you, the pressure of the baby squashing kidneys, liver, bladder. Is your heart rate still elevated from adrenaline? Do your eyes have that manic edge that always followed a win? Or are you merely weary, and nauseous, and desperate to pee. Perhaps you wish I was there. Perhaps, despite everything, you wish I would call. Or this whole scenario is a fabrication, and before you even reached the door it opened, another woman standing there, arms wide to receive you in your triumph. She removes your shoes, massages your feet. Pops open the alcohol-free fizz which you receive with a grateful hand. You raise a glass to one another, and to yourself, because you have dreamed of this day for months, and were not convinced, this time, that you would get the justice you craved.
My phone was on the work surface. I thought about messaging you to say congratulations. I thought about calling. I did. The prospect of your voice was like water after drought, even if you screamed at me, even if you cried. But that was a selfish reason to call. I had to consider whether you would want to hear from me, to have wounds reopened on a day of celebration.
It didn’t take long to come to a conclusion. Amnesia often surrounds trauma, but I remember the day I broke your heart with perfect clarity. You will have your memories of that day. It’s time I gave you mine.
Two weeks before, we had received the news. The sixth IUI cycle had been successful. After nine months of hope and despair, you were pregnant. That night we celebrated. I drank prosecco, you drank Sicilian lemonade. I cooked us a feast, using every utensil in the kitchen. The news had not quite sunk in. At every sound we jumped, expecting a call or a knock at the door that would confirm it was a mistake. Your face was aglow. You kept bringing your hands to your abdomen, your fingers resting there like butterflies. We laughed, we held each other, we cried with elation. I placed my hands on top of yours. I said all the right things.
Did you detect, in my frenetic cookery, my gabbled speech, a hint of something off key? With hindsight you may have reviewed that night and found moments of note. At the time, you gave no indication that you had. You were, for once, fully absorbed in yourself. I didn’t tell you that earlier that day I had closeted myself in the toilets at work for forty minutes, pressing tissues under my eyes so my mascara wouldn’t betray me. Cleaning up after dinner, I realised I had finished the prosecco.
Over the next fortnight we began buying all the things we had banned ourselves from buying until now. We tried to be cautious. We censured our own lapses, but couldn’t bring ourselves to do the same with each other. In a whirl of excitement you would come home brandishing the latest addition: a mobile to hang above the cot, a baby’s first book in black-and-white contrast. It was the animals that broke me, Tess. A plush clownfish sat next to a cuddly whale shark, an octopus linked tentacles with a cheerfully smiling dolphin. Within a week we had an aquatic menagerie on the shelf above the cot. After you’d gone to bed I would stand looking at them, wondering if our baby would ever see a whale shark, or for that matter an echidna, or a wombat, or a quoll. At what point would we have to confess the catastrophe we had brought her into, and how could we possibly explain?
I enacted my part as best I could. Every day was a grouper day. All of my resource went into pretending I was well. I could barely get out of bed, and only the terror that you would find me and know the truth forced me to swing my legs over the edge, plant both feet on the floor, and push myself to standing. I kept the fits of crying to outside the house, and when I knew you were working late. Sometimes I took the car to the coast, sitting alone and unobserved, seeing nothing in front of me.
My mind was a mess, but one thing was becoming clear: I was useless to you. You were in the midst of the greatest biological transformation of the human body, and I could barely manage to hold back your hair during the bouts of morning sickness. The mere act of holding your hair made me want to bawl. What help was I going to be when you gave birth? In the early days, when your hormones were in turmoil, adjusting to breastfeeding, to sleepless nights, requiring constant, selfless support? What kind of parenting could I offer to our child, when I could muster no enthusiasm for the world they would inherit, or even the collective we liked to call humanity? In the evenings you perused books, trawled the internet for advice, read out snippets from Mumsnet threads that amused or horrified you. I mumbled replies. I was paralysed with fear, the knowledge that there would be tasks to perform, now and forever more, and that each one of them would be impossible. I could fake it for you, I thought. I could not fake it for our child.
Already, your body was beginning to change, as though you were accelerating away from me. Where my senses were dulled, yours were heightened. You complained about your breasts, the uncomfortable tenderness, a tingling. Your nipples had darkened, the blue of your veins was a map traceable beneath your skin. You could not escape a strange taste in your mouth. Bloody, metallic. The smell of frying shallots caused you to retch. You cried unexpectedly, your tears always followed by a frown and a dissembling laugh. The loss of control offended you; you were not used to surrender.
I imagined your womb swelling with the tiny being curled within, so much a part of you that chimera cells would pass through the placenta and into your body, persisting there for decades to come. I saw our future stretching out. I saw, with absolute clarity, how my failures would accumulate over the months as I lost the capacity to pretend. I saw the arguments, your rising anger, my retreat. The creeping resentment. Grouper days eking into grouper months, a destructive grey force which left nothing untarnished, not even memory. Our child growing up in a rotting relationship in a rotten world. I thought I could live with your disgust for my cowardice. I couldn’t survive your hate.
In the end it was simple. You were better off without me. You, the love of my life, and our child. To save you, I would break all our hearts.
It was the last gift I could offer you.
›•‹
I finished the meal I’d saved from burning and drank several beers. After the news there was a film playing on the television. I watched without seeing. It could have been anything. I desperately needed sleep but knew it wouldn’t come, knew also that nothing I was doing – the alcohol, the blue light, the dredging of memories – would help my cause. Around midnight I gave up on the prospect and called a cab.
The security officer on duty greeted me and we exchanged a few words of banter – I was known to turn up at odd hours. The indoor lab was dark. I took a red headlamp to avoid bumping into the tanks or pipes, although I knew the layout of the place intimately. I stood listening to the rumble of the water system, breathing in the scent of salt and chemicals. I visited each of the tanks in turn, performing the checks that the lab technicians completed each day. There was a rhythm to it, a straightforwardness to the procedure which lulled me. I stood for a long time by the deep water simulation, watching the corals fluoresce in brilliant reds and oranges, each specimen a glowing beacon in the darkness of the lab. It wasn’t my research, but I was fascinated by it: these species were the luminaries of the coral world. They had evolved to survive at depths over a hundred metres by making a fluorescent protein that captured blue light and reemitted it as orange-red. I wondered how many more mysteries these extraordinary animals retained, mysteries we couldn’t begin to imagine, and soon enough might no longer have the opportunity to uncover. The fossil record showed that corals had evolved and declined several times since the inception of life on Earth. It was inconceivable to me that this time their extinction might be permanent, and yet I knew that many people simply did not care. What was a coral? Why did it matter? What was its use to people, this peculiar holobiont which resisted classification and could, given time and the right conditions, live forever?
When I had checked each of the tanks, I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and my hands resting on my abdomen. The pipes gurgled. When I closed my eyes I saw fluorescing corals, their polyps swaying in the water current. I must have fallen asleep, because when I next became aware of my surroundings, a pale light was seeping through the windows; it was just before dawn. In my pocket I felt my phone vibrate. That was probably what had woken me.
I was aware of thirst, a sour taste in my mouth, a cloying fogginess. I needed to get home, clean my teeth and have a shower. If my colleagues found out I’d started sleeping here, questions would be asked. I had to avoid questions.
I checked my phone, assuming the alert would be Aaron or a colleague, or an email from Faye Marshall. Instead, I had five missed calls from my mother. My heart sped up in anticipation of bad news, then contracted as I read the follow-up text. Tess is pregnant?!! When were you going to tell us? In a rush, the night before came back to me: Tess had been on the news. I was not the only one who had seen her. My parents had seen her, doubtless some of my colleagues too. The lab, a place I had always belonged, was no longer safe. Despite the early summer heat, I felt cold and sick; I began to shake. It was all over, I realised. The defences I had built around myself were about to come crashing down.
My phone vibrated again as I left the building. Assuming it was Mum again, I didn’t look at it until I got home. When I saw the notification I felt brittle with shock. I couldn’t remember the last time Tess would have sent me a text rather than instant messaging, but I understood immediately why she had done it: to spare us both the pain of those two little blue ticks, to negate the need for a response. As always, she was one step ahead of me.
The message was brief.
It’s going to be a girl. I thought you should know.
Judith
A Plague of Heat – Death in the Surf – Storm and Fever – Reef’s Edge – Naturgemälde – The Walking Fish – A Proposal – Discussions with Father – Booby Island
November 23, 1839
The days are become a fool’s choice between the searing heat of the sun on deck, or the sweltering humidity of the cabin. I can no longer walk barefoot on the wooden boards, but must force my feet back into their shoes, where they swell and chafe. I have a renewed respect for the crew, who have no respite from their duties: even through the scourge of midday, they must clamber about the rigging to adjust the sails, and the topmen roast in their lookouts. The men’s eyes seem to disappear into their faces, burrowing back from the glare of the light, and their skin is darkened to a gumnut.
I wonder how I, too, am altered. My arms and neck have turned brown despite Belinda’s best endeavours to save my complexion. There are freckles across my nose and cheeks where none were seen before, and I find myself habitually squinting like my fellow sailors. Perhaps I am become ugly enough that no man shall wish to marry me, however Mother may work her persuasions. Yet the change is greater than the sum of my appearance, even if I cannot divine its source.
The heat alone might be endured were it not for the swarms of mosquitoes and sandflies that plague the coast. Any expedition ashore results in a thousand bites from these devils. My arms have suffered a dozen such bloodlettings, and between the heat and the itching I lay awake at night, unable to snatch more than an hour’s sleep before I wake again, scratching at my arms like a woman deranged.
Belinda, who has a horror of mosquitoes, refuses to leave the ship. She is not alone. The two botanists ventured into the coastal mangroves and returned with the appearance of measles, so frequently had they been bitten. With such conditions it is little surprise that the crew are grown fractious. They grumble about the coast, the same endless vegetation with no cool vista of a river to break the monotony of its passing. There are fewer games of cards, and where there are, these often end in disputes and accusations. Lieutenant Talbot has his hands full in soothing tempers. This suits me well enough, for whilst the man remains civil, his dislike of me shows no sign of lessening.
Only Mr Pooke seems strangely immune to the discomforts. Indeed, since our discovery of the mysterious pink algae, I venture to say he has been cheerful. I cannot think what has brought about this change, but certainly it is an improvement on his previous demeanour. And it serves also as a reminder to myself: those who would be explorers must be stalwart, and meet their trials with a valiant heart.
November 25, 1839
I fear my rallying words have tempted the fates, for the heat is relentless, the air without a hint of breeze; the sea lies flat and sullen, the colour of beaten copper. Worse than all these woes, the spectre of death has visited our good crew.
Two days hence we replenished our water supplies from a large river, where we sighted the back of at least one crocodile in the water and another watched us intently from the shore. They are fearsome creatures, and when their scaled bodies submerge they become like shadows, undetectable by any human eye. Further upriver, the men reported they had found fish traps and nets of exceedingly good workmanship. Mr Pooke posited this to be evidence of natives, but the other men of science say it cannot be so, and that another European expedition must have left the equipment behind – the French, perhaps. We are now anchored off the coast on the approach to Cape Melville, with no hope of progress until the winds return. Beyond the sands is a great forest which I yearn to explore, yet the heat saps all energy and even the botanists are too lethargic to go ashore for any length of time. The shore itself is a stretch of sublime beauty, but it conceals horrors.
Yesterday one of the crew, in pushing the longboat ashore, slipped and was stung by a creature in the surf. I have never heard such screams from a man, not even under a hundred lashes. At first we did not discern the nature of his affliction, for we had no sighting of the creature and could only observe O’Rourke screaming and thrashing about in the waves. He was dragged ashore and lay upon the beach writhing in agonies. The sound of his cries raised the hairs of my arms and neck. Lieutenant Talbot was instantly on the alert, terrified that the commotion would bring a hundred natives rushing from the forest to murder us all. Mr Kimball, having a better inkling than the rest of us, crouched near the surf, whilst maintaining a good distance from the water’s reach, scanning the waves until he spotted what we guessed to be the culprit. It was a jellyfish with trailing tentacles, its bell a cuboid shape smaller than my fist, and drifting almost transparent amidst the surf. I heard the botanists whispering darkly to one another.
Nothing could calm poor O’Rourke. He screamed that his skin was on fire, that he was going to die, and we could not save him. I was ordered to look away, and heard the impact of a musket stock meeting a skull, and when I looked back the man had been struck unconscious, which was doubtless a mercy. Even in such a state, it seemed that some part of him remained aware of the pain, and his body continued to twitch in a manner distressing to observe. The men lifted him back into the boat, taking care to avoid touching his skin. Next was I, then Mr Kimball, and then the boat must be pushed back into waves, and the men took running leaps to clear the water. The faces around me were a picture of horror as we rowed for the Kittiwake with as much haste as the men could muster under the burning sun.
O’Rourke regained consciousness later that day and his screams commenced anew. There was no escaping the sound, on deck or below. The surgeon tried to sedate him with liquor and precious supplies of laudanum, but neither substance was potent enough to bring the man relief. All through the night we listened to his cries, alternating between the harrowing screams and a dreadful moaning. There came a moment before dawn when silence fell. By morning the surgeon had pronounced O’Rourke dead. His heart had given out in the night.
