The Slip, page 9
Jane had chosen her to be her doula based on recommendations from a couple of her friends, whose natural births had been, in their words, the most visceral and ecstatic moments of their lives. Personality-wise, Sundi was eccentric though knowledgeable and basically likeable, even if she was an oversharer. Maybe that’s what made her likeable – despite her quirks you couldn’t help but feel affection for her, knowing all you did about her life.
That they shared a birthday sealed it: coincidence, especially in times of adjustment, can often look like fate.
On their birthday, Sundi called to ask if she could come around. ‘It’s a big deal, your first birthday as a life-giving mother. We should celebrate.’
Jane hesitated a moment before agreeing, but the prospect of spending her birthday alone was depressing and Sundi’s company was better than none. There was a part of her, too, that wondered which details of her life Sundi would impart on such a special occasion, and whether they might resonate with Jane’s own situation. Now that she was in her second trimester, the reality of her condition was impossible to deny. She felt the precarity pressing down upon her and could do with some advice.
These were the facts: she was pregnant and she hadn’t said a word about it to Romil.
Oh, Romil!
In her mind lately he was partying with a group of stylish, arrogant Danes who were definitely fucking him. She had lain in bed this morning picturing him in Copenhagen, where he had gone to learn how to make petit fours under the tutelage of a world-class pastry chef, walking by a still canal on his way back from the kitchen, linked in with an icy blonde, wearing the scarf she’d given him as a going-away present right before he said he couldn’t see long-distance working for them, after all.
That he was capable of cruelty, she knew – there had been glimpses of it during their relationship. She could hear it in the way he spoke about people, even their closest friends. He was uncompromising, and he did not believe he should explain himself to anyone. He did what he wanted and he didn’t tell you why.
In the weeks after their break-up, Jane had tried to talk to him. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘But you don’t care.’
Romil was still, as still as a monument. He was standing in the doorframe and she was hunched up on the floor, her back to their bed, crying. There was nothing in his face – no feeling. She couldn’t read him. All he said was, ‘I don’t have anything to say.’
The last time she messaged him was to ask why he had called her in the middle of the night.
Sorry, pocket call, Romil replied.
It hurt her all over and she cried.
It didn’t seem to bother Sundi that Jane never talked about the father, it being her belief that dads were secondary and in fact dispensable where babies were concerned. Jane thought she must agree with this to some extent, otherwise she wouldn’t be here, but she’d decided long ago that she would do it with Romil, an idea that proved hard to relinquish. It had been almost five months. She was going to tell him, honestly; she was waiting for a good time.
When Sundi arrived, she slapped her bag down on the table and then placed her hands directly on Jane’s belly. ‘Hello, sweet Energy,’ she said, which was what she called the baby. ‘How are you growing today?’
‘Okay, I think,’ said Jane.
‘And what about you, Mumma? How are you feeling?’
She winced and turned away so Sundi wouldn’t see her face. At first it had bothered her – Mumma – but Jane had given up trying to resist it. This was one of her biggest problems: she had no energy for anything. She was neither passionate nor ambivalent, the maintenance of which she found too hard. Instead she let things happen to her, and it was only later, carried by the current of what was already in motion, that she questioned her decisions knowing that the opportunity to change things had definitely passed.
‘Will you have tea?’ she asked now.
‘I’ve got something better,’ said Sundi, drawing from her bag a four-pack of brightly coloured cans. ‘Martinis,’ she explained. ‘They’re actually not bad. Let’s have one.’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Jane.
‘Oh, they’re fine; they’re organic and non-alcoholic.’
Jane got a glass out of the cupboard, which Sundi filled halfway. It was fizzy and tasted a bit like burger pickles, but it was alright. She thought about Romil again and how martinis were tradition on her birthday. Sundi had known this somehow. It was all so strange.
‘What am I going to do?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Soon enough that baby is going to decide for you,’ said Sundi matter-of-factly. ‘So it doesn’t really matter what you do. Anyway, you might surprise yourself. You might do something completely unexpected.’
Sundi drifted toward the couch, where lozenges of sunlight fell upon her and dissolved. It was one of those calm, fresh spring days. Jane, sitting on the other couch, sensed Sundi gearing up for some great revelation and she waited attentively, willing to find meaning in whatever she described, a family holiday where she and her sisters joined their father at a tiny island on the Great Barrier Reef. Neil – that was his name – had planned the trip and paid for all their tickets, but it was not without trepidation that they boarded the ferry that day.
It was a while ago now, said Sundi, when she and her sisters were all in their twenties; her youngest sister Sunny must have been very young, barely out of her teens. It was preternaturally bright and chilly in the sun, the first of that day’s jarring qualities. Sunny had a migraine and was lying in the ferry terminal with a hat over her eyes. Samira, the middle child, was hungover and coming down from a festival in Byron Bay. There had been an issue with their tickets and they missed the ferry connection, which was non-refundable; they’d had to pay a premium and had been waiting hours for the next one. Sitting in the bright, cold sunlight, Sundi went to put her sunglasses on and realised she had left them on the plane. It was one of those mornings, she observed, in which every small failure is a prelude to disaster.
Neil had flown up earlier from his house in Adelaide, which meant they could expect to find him at the resort when they arrived. As the ferry charged through choppy waters on its way toward the island, Sundi’s apprehension mounted. She felt seasick and went inside. Sunny was hunched over by a window.
‘Why are we doing this?’ she asked.
‘Because,’ said Sundi.
And they both knew it would be the last of these trips before he died.
Neil was a difficult man to be around, said Sundi, even before he started dying. He was depressive and unstable, married to a bitterness he let spill over and spoil different parts of his life. Even so, he did not want it to end. ‘I didn’t understand him. He complained incessantly – since I was a kid I’d been hearing him talk about how easy it would be to kill himself, how he would like to die. He could be so bitter and resentful, I thought he hated life.’ But now she thought that Neil’s resentment showed how passionate he was about living, and it was only with his diagnosis, which he often referred to as a ‘death sentence,’ that life became significant. ‘Maybe it’s like that old saying: we hate what we love most.’
Jane, who had finished her small taste of the martini, got up to make some tea. It seemed to startle Sundi and she leapt up, holding her can in front of her like she’d been caught. ‘Is this too much? Let me know if I’m oversharing.’
‘No,’ said Jane, ‘keep going.’ She was beginning to feel that gentle, soothing indifference she always got when someone else took control of a situation. ‘I’m listening,’ she said, lying back on the other couch as Sundi continued with her story.
The island had its place in family mythology. Back in the sixties, Neil had wound up there on his way to the Whitsundays, where he scuba dived with some Torres Strait Islanders, camped on the beach and got washed out by a storm. Wanting to relive the romance of his first encounter, he took them there when they were kids, right before their parents’ separation. As the harbour came into view, Sundi was awash with memories of crystal water, dripping vegetation, the reef shark’s black-tipped tail. Making friends with a girl at the pool, retirees on the day beds, a skinny guy who played jazz standards in the restaurant every night. Her dad accused her mum of looking at him. Yes – another thing – the silences. The way her parents fought without saying much at all.
It was a radical place, she told Jane, small enough to circumnavigate in an hour and incredibly biodiverse, home to thousands of species of marine invertebrates, fish, mammals, plants, nesting turtles, and in the summer months, over two hundred thousand seabirds. It was the shearwaters she remembered, nesting in their thousands all over the island. Everything was covered in their shit, and the dense briny smell of them was second only to the incessant noise which woke her family early in the morning and kept them up at night. During the long hours before sunrise she would hear her parents’ ugly whispers, and knew that in the morning they would not look each other in the eye.
One day while roaming around the forest near their villa, Sundi came upon a pair of shearwaters guarding a large, broken egg. The birds looked distraught, she said, protecting their egg with weary vigilance, as though they were in mourning. She turned and ran and after that avoided going back there; it was not until years later that she read that shearwaters are monogamous and will only divorce if a breeding season fails. Her fear of them was, she realised, an early intimation of her parents’ separation – which she intuited for the first time on seeing those grieving birds.
‘You don’t need a degree in psychology to see how it affected me,’ Sundi laughed, self-deprecatingly. ‘I’m still trying to save that fucking egg.’
‘I have a degree in psychology,’ said Jane. ‘And now I work at a supermarket.’
‘Checks out,’ Sundi said.
Jane couldn’t bring herself to laugh.
‘Anyway,’ went Sundi, ‘as we got off the ferry I got a spooky sense of déjà vu. I knew that just like last time, something bad was going to happen.’
‘Why did you go? I mean, besides the obvious, why go there in the first place if you knew it was going to be awful?’
‘That’s just what we did with him. We answered when he called.’
All those times that Neil had threatened to kill himself had made them vigilant, she explained. ‘He would break down and cry and then he would be happy again, playing guitar and dancing, telling us these crazy stories after school.’ It was confusing. They stopped believing he would really do it, but they still felt responsible for him in ways that children ought not to feel. When he was given a prognosis it was momentarily relieving; her father’s life, she said, was not her responsibility anymore.
They left the pier and got directions to their room. Immediately it started raining, an intense tropical downpour which soaked their clothes as Sundi and her sisters dragged their luggage through the rainforest. She thought about her dad and how he’d start complaining just as soon as they arrived; he had always been vocal about his problems without ever doing the slightest thing about them. Her apprehension gave way to something more dispiriting. His cancer had been long and painful, going on for many years, and now that he had a real reason to complain Sundi found herself resenting it even more, his suffering and whatever obliged her to keep witnessing.
‘After all he’d put us through as kids, I was pissed off with him for rubbing it in my face. I bet that sounds terrible.’
‘I don’t know,’ murmured Jane.
Sundi barely heard her. ‘When he opened the door,’ she continued, ‘the first thing I thought was that he looked insane. He had always been a little mad but now he looked different, as if the scales had finally tipped. His hair was all crazy and white, longer than I’d ever seen it, and his expression was turned inward. It’s hard to explain, but it seemed like he was seeing something very different to what was real for us. I think the right word is uncanny. His face was like a haunted house.’
For the first few days it poured with rain; they rarely left the villa. Sundi and her sisters played cards and read, trying to ignore Neil’s ceaseless chatter, which seemed to echo round the villa like the nattering, squawking, shrilling noises of the seabirds. After a while the two streams of sound became indistinguishable, and Sundi had the impression that her dad had lost some of his human qualities: an impression that was heightened by the fact that with his fluffy white hair, large nose and prominent black monobrow, Neil intensely resembled an albatross.
‘The place got really messy. Dad put a picture of his Indian guru on top of the stereo, like that was going to calm things down. He started talking to us in this crazy way; I would ask if we should go down to breakfast,’ she explained, ‘and he would say, Why does the bee drink from the flower?’
‘Why does the bee drink from the flower?’
‘Yeah. I don’t fucking know.’
Just as it had been before, he kept them all awake at night, ranting about nonsensical things or repeating lines of poetry, and if they begged for quiet he would look at them, his eyes gleaming in the darkness, a gleam she did not see so much as sense, and reply, You ask me how to find peace. I ask you, what is peace?
This was kind of normal, this manner of speaking – something he had learned as a disciple of the guru – so it was hard to tell whether it was really unusual, a new eccentricity to worry over, or just another of Neil’s strange ways of loving and teaching them lessons. ‘It is my responsibility as a father,’ he kept saying, ‘to show you the way before I die.’
After days of this the women left the room to walk the length of the island. The unceasing rain had soaked the white sand to a fine clay and the whole reef was obscured beneath reflected cloud. Sundi thought of Neil’s continued dominion over her and her sisters, all of them now adults, and decided it depended precisely on his speaking this way. That is, his tyranny relied on his never making sense.
Jane was becoming excited. The way Sundi described her dad was reminiscent of a paper she had read by D.W. Winnicott, right before she abandoned her PhD, which offered for analysis the case of a mother who kept her children in a state of organised chaos. Eagerly, she explained to Sundi how the mother broke everything into fragments, their whole life, battering her children with a constant stream of argument and entertainment, all of it designed to distract from the real trouble, the mother’s sense that she was coming loose from herself.
Sundi, who was becoming agitated too, said, ‘At one point he was singing songs from an old musical and it dawned on me that he was not singing the lyrics I knew. I suddenly doubted whether the lyrics I knew were the real lyrics, or if it was actually me who had been singing them wrong all along.’ She felt severely dislocated from her sense of the facts; he tended to have this effect.
After five days the rain stopped. The island dried out slowly, releasing the perfume of tropical flowers, the tang of salt water and the oily white stink of guano. When they went outside everything seemed surreal, too fresh and sparkling and bright. Neil slept for fifteen hours, she said, and woke again restored.
‘But this was even more disturbing than the madness,’ she explained. They had no idea how long it would last and if the return of his faculties was legitimate or just another phase of his delirium. They kept vigilant, watching for changes in his mood.
In the meantime, he wanted to scuba dive. It was the last opportunity he’d have before he died. There’s nothing like gliding high above the sea floor in the current, Neil said; the quiet, the view, the total weightlessness. It was the closest man came to flying. The way he described it sounded beautiful, but not trusting him to go alone, between themselves the sisters elected Sundi to do the refresher course with him, which ran for three days in the tepid green expanse of the resort’s saltwater pool.
Sundi was apprehensive, but during their hours in the pool Neil behaved wonderfully, listening to the instructor quietly and telling, where appropriate, genial stories of his forays underwater. He got the knack of it quickly, his muscle memory returning, and the instructor permitted him to scull around the pool freely while the others struggled with masks and tanks and hand signals, which were numerous and somehow the hardest part for her to grasp.
In the pool, said Sundi, it was hard not to think of herself as acting among the sunbathing retirees and honeymooning couples and the kids jumping in and out. When she tried to imagine what it would be like to actually leave the pool and dive beyond the safety of the reef, she drew a blank. It was all darkness. She was frightened of the unknown. The closer they got to the assessment, the more she found herself wishing the course would never end.
Neil, on the other hand, knew everything. When the instructor explained the risks of surfacing too fast he nodded his head vigorously. The bends, he said – I saw it happen to a friend. When the instructor told them that descending below sixty metres could amount to feeling drunk, nitrogen working on the body’s cells like a narcotic, Neil’s hand shot up like a kid in class. They call it rapture of the deep, he told his course-mates – also known as the Martini Effect.
As the course progressed toward the final assessment, Sundi started freaking out. She knew that Neil would do something erratic and she didn’t feel capable of keeping them safe. Her sisters told her to pay attention to the training so if something happened, she would know how to respond.
