Three hours pass.
Just past two a doctor, stethoscope bouncing on his neck, comes over to shake the hand of another expectant father scouring a circuit into the linoleum. An Aussie with a hoodie, about my age. Who should be me.
‘Congratulations. Everyone’s come through.’
‘Can I see him?’
‘He’s in the humidicrib. Vital signs are all okay but with caesareans we take extra precautions. In twenty minutes or so, all being well, they’ll bring him out. Excuse me, next cab off the rank.’
It could be the best news I hear all night.
Driving has refined my catnapping skills. I go to a quiet corner and sprawl across three seats, hands for pillows.
Another hand rests on my shoulder. I spring up. A nurse, older, crumpled, like she has broken dire news twenty times already tonight. She is talking at me. Nothing she says makes sense. Words refuse to form sentences. My passive English is deader than my father and his hand-wired radio. Should I request an interpreter? Two lives are on the line.
‘Would you like to come with me?’
Belatedly my language switches on. Still I default to Slavic tradition barring men from birth rooms. Instinct prevails. I follow her down a corridor, past squalling newborns and softer parental exhalations. Hoodie off, the new father is clutching his infant to his tattooed chest. I must look as woebegone as I feel. His glance transmits sympathy.
The walk – I hear Anatoly’s footfall echoing down three decades – ends seven rooms down. Anna, sedated, intravenous drip dangling from her bare arm, lies on her back on a trolley with the steel sides drawn up. Just as I imagine her birth. Only the living and the dead have swapped places.
Nikolai is in a smaller crib. Purple pinpricked skin uncovered by the towel. Eyes sealed, lids protuberant. Mouth a drooping bow. Arms wrenched left, legs twisted right. Torso squashed, foreshortened, the most wounding reproach. Talk about a car crash. Hair blond, wavy. I’d got that little bit of the fantasy right.
The nurse touches my arm. ‘Would you like to pick him up? Say goodbye?’
She retreats to a tactful distance.
Just you and I, Nikolai the Perfect.
You’re not looking, or feeling, too perfect. Coated with cheesy-white afterbirth, green-black meconium blobs. But the aroma of your scalp is intoxicating, I can’t think of another word. I press my face to it.
Sometime later – five minutes, fifty – the nurse splints my shoulder blades with a meaty arm, centring my sobs. Gently she prises me loose from my son. She steers me along the corridor to the nurses’ station. I sign two copies of forms I don’t bother reading, take one. Some variety of death certificate.
‘We can call you a taxi.’
‘I am a taxi.’
She offers me a box of tissues. I snatch a palmful and hurry back to check on Anna. She hasn’t moved but her breathing is audible from the corridor. I go in. She has a windowless room to herself. It is filled with her blood-scented fug. Bulky bandaging swaddles her nether parts. A chart is hooked to the footrail, next to a white tube connecting an intravenous fluid cylinder to a vein in the crook of her elbow. Eyes closed tight as Nikolai’s, she does not stir as I approach the bedside. Or when I sit beside her and rest my palm on her cheek. My lips against her forehead elicit a statue’s response. If, instead of a wishy-washy apostate, I was a true Orthodox believer confronted with my loved one’s endless suffering, what should my gesture be? I’m no closer to knowing.
Drying my face I go outside. Even at eight o’clock the sunshine is every bit as blinding as my Sydney arrival. It reflects a sticky yellow square pasted to the Camry’s windscreen corner. The pertinent portion reads forty dollars payable for not displaying disabled sticker. If you wish to contest this infringement… Opaque bureaucratese. Fine print at the bottom explains how and where to appeal the fine. Subtext: you have the right to protest to no avail. I peel it off, leaving sticky curlicues and drive away.
Thanks to Saint Sergey jiggling like a teabag, a concentration aide, I make it home. I park the Camry at a careless angle, go inside to fetch our sharpest knife, scrape the sticker clean and deposit it together with Sergey into the garbage. The proxy did his job. A shame He went missing. So much for faith. Carlos the Jackal can have the space all to himself.
★
STILL BORN
★
Five days is apparently the standard post-natal stay in Victoria. Anna has no detectable complications but the obstetrician, concerned about her near-catatonic state, insists on a sixth.
According to Australian law (more precisely, Victorian jurisdiction), Nikolai Vassilevich Kurguzikov did not live and did not die. For he did not draw breath outside the womb. On the other hand, because he lasted in utero thirty-five weeks – twenty weeks being the legal threshold – the certificate from St Vincent’s Hospital deems him stillborn. By the same circuitous logic, misfortune constituting neither birth nor death does not warrant coronial investigation.
In law, the womb is a veritable Hilton for the presentient, but a cave is a cave and Nikolai got stuck. Umbilical cord strangulation in utero. Well, they couldn’t put foetal suicide (suspected genetic component), could they?
Stillborn. I put away the certificate, open my dictionary. Obsess over the word’s leaden cadence. I see it is a compound. Restoring the space renders it the defiant still born.
I retrieve the parking ticket from the bin, ring the number and, despite having not slept for three nights, cogently argue (perhaps I am after all a big-occasion English speaker) why, in the circumstances the forty-dollar fine is excessive, iniquitous. Upset and outraged on my behalf, the woman urges I put everything in writing. The fine will be waived, she’ll see to it personally. I thank her, consider the option seriously but instead take on an extra shift.
My first booking is North Melbourne, corner of Flemington Road and Abbotsford Street the nearest intersection. Oh no. Only when I see the orange and umber ziggurat skyline do I recognise the Royal Children’s Hospital. By then the passenger is at my window, too late to drive away.
Mike, a paramedic, is coming off shift. Which he recounts in graphic detail as we crest the West Gate – a roundabout route to Port Melbourne, all the better to debrief says Mike. Besides closure (Helen’s doing), debrief is the English word I hate most. Two other passengers in as many weeks, also health professionals have asked ‘Mind if I debrief?’ and went ahead anyway. I suppose this is the social service part of the job. Better me than the wife or the cat. I should apply a surcharge.
Mike’s last callout was to revive a toddler knocked off his balance bike by a truck. ‘Mate, take it from me, no one’s deader than a dead child. Because they have hardly lived, there’s no character marks. Broken dolls tossed into the gutter. That’s what stays with you. You all right?’
No. I’m not. I pull over, stagger to the rail and vomit at the fairy lights everything about Australia I can’t stomach in the end. I brush off some projectiles scattered down my shirt, gingerly wriggle back into the driver’s seat.
‘I will be fine. Just do not talk to me anymore about dead babies, okay? Or you will be walking home.’
‘Sure, boss. Sorry. Tail end of a tough week. Didn’t need to dump on you, did I?’
No you didn’t. I know I should say Mike isn’t at fault, offering himself too readily as a scapegoat. Personifying his country – its kindly incomprehension, verbal incontinence, spending emotion as hard currency. Where one eats chocolate cake every morning before breakfast. Which has everything except what I need most.