Lucy Clarke - A Single Breath

She goes to turn away, but as she does, Saul looks up.

Eva’s lips part in surprise. His eyes are nothing like Jackson’s. They are dark and intense, not the pale blue of Jackson’s irises, which she’d always loved.

‘You’re Saul,’ she finds herself saying. She steps forward. ‘I’m Eva, Jackson’s wife.’

He stares, his dark gaze pinned to her face. She reads no warmth in his expression. Then he bends down and scoops another fish from the cool-box, slaps it on the bench, and continues gutting.

‘You’ve been fishing?’ she asks ludicrously.

‘Yeah.’

‘Catch much?’

‘Enough.’

She can feel herself sweating beneath her dress. She takes a deep breath. ‘I hoped we could talk.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘About Jackson.’

He glances at her through the corners of his eyes. Doesn’t say anything.

‘I’ve come a long way.’

He sighs, putting down the knife. ‘Look, I don’t wanna be rude, but Jackson and I hadn’t spoken in a while.’

‘I know that,’ she says, failing to hide the anger in her voice. ‘I just wanted to meet you. You’re his brother.’

He looks directly at her, but doesn’t speak.

‘I thought you might want to hear about his life in England. Know what he’s been doing since you last saw him.’

‘Then you thought wrong.’

She shakes her head, astounded. The heat of the sun pounds down and her entire body feels too hot. She should leave now, return to the car, and blast out the air conditioning. But she’s too angry to stop herself from saying, ‘He was your brother. And he’s dead. Is this conversation all he’s worth to you?’

She wants him to have to witness the horror of Jackson’s drowning, make him stand on that wind-stormed shoreline as she had, watching the lifeboat turn empty circles in the water, see the helicopter slicing the freezing sky.

When Saul says nothing, tears begin to sting beneath her eyelids. She will not cry in front of this man, so she turns and begins striding away. Her heart is racing and she finds herself struggling to catch her breath. Clouds seem to gather at the corners of her vision and her legs feel unsteady.

She hears a voice and it is so like Jackson’s that she wants to turn and see him on the beach calling to her. But the voice is so far away, and as she swivels to follow it, she finds her body is suddenly light and loose, but she isn’t turning, she’s fainting.

*

Saul sits with his hands spread over his bare knees. Smears of fish blood stain his fingers, and the undersides of his nails are dark with squid ink. He taps the heel of his boot against the linoleum floor as he waits.

The medical centre is sterile and white, and he feels conspicuous in his outdoor gear. He is sure the smell of fish clings to him. He takes his sunglasses from his head, cleans the salt from the lenses with the corner of his T-shirt, and then holds them on his lap, worrying the arms open and shut.

There is a poster on the wall ahead about alcoholism with a picture of a liver made to look like a ticking bomb. He shifts in the plastic seat, angling himself to face the clock.

Eva’s been in with the doctor for twenty-five minutes. He thinks about the fish he’s left on the gutting station in the early-evening sun. Gulls would’ve had them by now. There’s more in the cool-box and he can’t remember if he left the lid off. If he has, it won’t be long till they’re ruined. He hates to waste fish. He wishes the doctor would hurry the hell up.

He tries to hold onto his anger at the interruption to his day, but his thoughts keep getting back to Eva: the way she lifted her chin when she spoke to him, the clipped English accent, the flare of her nostrils before she strode away with her arms swinging at her sides. And then she had faltered. He saw her hand lifting as if searching for something to grab onto.

He had just stood there, watching as she fainted.

He feels bad about that. Bad for upsetting her. But what else could he say? He doesn’t want her here. Doesn’t want to be involved. Saul is barely holding himself together. Now she’s here wearing her heartbreak on her sleeve and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

The door opens and suddenly Eva is walking out. She looks so small, a fleck of a woman with her pixie-short hair and wide hazel eyes. She goes straight to the desk and pays.

He follows her outside. In her silence he asks, ‘So, what did the doc say?’

Immediately he regrets the casualness of the question.

Eva’s face is pale and her arms hang loose at her sides. She looks shell-shocked.

Her voice is a whisper. ‘I’m pregnant.’

She is ten weeks pregnant. Ten weeks a widow.

Her mind spins back through all the clues she had missed: the nausea she’d thought was a reaction to grief; the exhaustion she’d attributed to jet lag; the missed periods she hadn’t even registered in the blur of her loss. She thinks of the evening before Jackson’s death, when he’d turned to her in the narrow bed of her childhood room. He’d pressed his body against the curve of hers and they’d made love with a quiet intensity.

Eva feels the divots and juts of the road jarring through her spine as Saul drives her back to her car. Neither of them speaks. She grips the sides of the truck seat, careful not to put her hands anywhere near her stomach.

Saul cuts the engine.

She looks up, surprised to see they are back at the jetty already. The sun is sinking towards the sea, the heat fallen from the day.

‘I’m a midwife,’ she says quietly. ‘I didn’t even know I was pregnant and I’m a midwife.’

Saul doesn’t say anything.

Her hand moves to her forehead as she says, ‘I … I just can’t believe it.’

‘It’ll all work out,’ Saul says, and she hears the uncertainty in his voice.

They do not know each other, yet he is the only person apart from the doctor who knows she is pregnant.

After a moment, Saul asks, ‘Where are you staying?’

‘I’ll find a hotel.’

‘On Wattleboon? There aren’t any.’

‘Then I’ll go back to the mainland.’

He glances at the clock on the dashboard and sighs. ‘Last boat ran quarter of an hour ago.’

She’s unable to think about this problem; the one inside her is absorbing all her thought.

He grabs his mobile phone from the dashboard and climbs out of the truck, swinging the door shut. She watches through the windscreen as he calls someone, pacing up and down as he speaks into the phone.

Eva doesn’t move. She’s remembering the night she and Jackson spent at a B&B in Wales. They’d been showering, steam curling from their wet bodies. Jackson had run the bar of soap over Eva’s middle, telling her how much he wanted to have children with her. Two, he’d said. Two girls.

There is a strange, incredible irony that, as Jackson was being dragged down towards his death by freezing waves, a new life was being made inside her.

She muses on this idea until the truck door opens and Saul says, ‘You’ve got a place to stay. There’s a shack down my way you can have tonight. The owner’s outta town. We’ll get your car in the morning.’

‘Right.’ She doesn’t know if this is what she wants, but she doesn’t have any other option.

She fetches her bag from the hire car while Saul strides down the beach to collect the cool-box he’d left out.

The truck shifts as he clanks it in the back. Then he climbs in and guns the engine.

*

Saul knocks the truck into a lower gear as he turns onto the track leading to the bay. He sees Eva grab hold of the handhold as they bounce along, evening sun slanting through the thick branches of the gums. He’s supposed to be up at Duneback Point meeting a couple of friends for a barbecue. Saul was bringing the fish. He’ll have to call them, tell them he’s not going to make it.