Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

‘I have no further questions,’ I said coldly, suddenly, as if he were a maid, in the middle of one of his bungling sentences. He reddened still further, nodded and left.

The room was painted a soothing peach which made me think of baby clothes. It was horribly quiet; Chris had gone to the shop. He returned with chocolates, perfume, orchids, a single perfect pearl-coloured orchid, coiled and curled like an elaborate shell, but in its tall glass on the bedside table it suddenly reminded me of a foetus, an aborted foetus hanging in a test-tube, I reached out my hand to touch it or stroke it and brought the whole thing crashing to the ground.

The worst thing was not knowing what to grieve for. I called it ‘the baby’ with a breaking heart, taking deep breaths before I said it, and all of them seemed to avoid my eyes.

The anaesthetist was tall and unreally handsome, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, bursting with life, like an actor in a TV drama in his bright turquoise cap and gown. He chatted to me as we waited for theatre. I liked him; I like good-looking people; he didn’t preach, or bore me to death; he asked me if my hair colour was natural, and complimented me on it. He said this was quite a routine operation, they did several of these every week. Since he hadn’t examined me I didn’t mind; somehow it didn’t seem personal; I smiled and said I was glad I was routine, it was dangerous to be exotic in hospitals. When I told him I’d been out of the country he listened entranced, or apparently entranced, to my casually boastful itinerary, and we made each other laugh about foreign doctors, and I almost forgot, for the briefest moment, as he held my hand, why he was holding it, why I was here, why everything was… — he was holding my hand to give me the injection.

‘Now you’ll feel a little prick on the back of your hand…’

And I knew with absolute urgency that I had one split second to correct a great wrong, to explain what everyone had misunderstood. ‘Wait,’ I said, and his eyes above the mask registered dismay, for this was not procedure; ‘I just want to say one thing. I know I’ve been laughing and joking with you. But I really wanted this baby. I didn’t want to lose this baby.’ He nodded; his eyes were unreadable; the needle slipped into the back of my hand; I woke up in what they said was the recovery room, and the nurses were surprised by how clearheaded I was.

‘Is it all gone?’ I asked them.

The nurse held my hand and smiled vaguely. ‘Yes, it’s all over, no problems. In a minute you can have a nice cup of tea.’

‘But what will they do with it? Will they examine it to find out what was wrong?’ Why did they all evade my questions? I wanted to shake her, make her answer me.

‘You’ll have to ask your consultant.’

I asked my consultant next day.

He was a sensitive man, and I was paying him well to understand what I wanted of him. I could see he was sorry that he couldn’t help me.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Court. I’m truly sorry. But we couldn’t analyse… the products of conception. Whatever had been there… how can I explain… it is likely to have happened very early on… and then — the material — gets broken up… there really wasn’t anything there to examine.’

I lay there silent, turned to stone, but the stone was a lump breaking out of my chest, breaking out of my throat, a stone, a sob, I turned to a single, terrible sob, a harsh inhuman croaking sound.

There was nothing there.

It never developed.

I was pregnant, but there was never a baby. There was nothing to lose; nothing to mourn. Only pure loss, pure emptiness.

Later I started to hate my body, I who had always loved my body. It went on leaking old brown blood, a miserable daily reminder of failure. I hated it for its stupid inability to do what women’s bodies were made to do. It was weak and useless; I hated it. I hated Chris, I hated life, I hated death for dirtying me.

But I didn’t hate Isaac. That was curious. I began to feel I needed to see him. I’d never been physical with those kids; their hands had always been messy and sticky; they didn’t cuddle, they pawed at me, so naturally I pushed them away; but now I wanted to be close to Isaac. Now I had a positive urge to be close. I found myself wanting to hold his hand, I who was always horrified by illness, I wanted to hold him in my arms, I didn’t do it but I wanted to.

Naturally Isaac was hostile and suspicious when I first began to visit alone. ‘What’s the matter with you, Alex? You’re not after my money, so what is it, are you turning into a ghoul? You’re a fucking ghoul! Fuck you, fuck you!’

He needed Christopher, not me. But Christopher couldn’t bear it. Christopher would sit there, wrung with misery, making everyone feel worse, whereas I could go along and chat and smile if that was what Isaac wanted to do… More often, he needed to talk about dying. I could do that without flinching away, indeed the topic had some horrible attraction…

As if he were dying in my place, and I was more alive because he was dying; as if that ensured it wasn’t my turn yet.

But it wasn’t just that. I wanted to protect him. I wanted to hold him, and — mother him. I know it was too late, but it wasn’t too late, as long as I let him rage at me. ‘Don’t try and pretend you understand, you bitch. You’re a woman, you’re smug, you’re repulsively healthy. You think you’re going to live forever. You won’t, you know. That’s what life means. It’s not all bad, having a death sentence. I know more about life than an airhead like you…’

But he was too weak to be angry for long. He needed company, even me. And I needed him, I don’t know why. I’m many things, but not a ghoul.

I know it was somehow connected to the baby; connected to the babies, all my lost babies, the adopted one, the aborted one, the one that they tell me hardly existed, the ones my body missed each month…

But don’t ever think that Isaac was a substitute. Don’t ever think that that thin, stiff body with its terrible purplish strawberry marks in any way replaced the small body I craved. There isn’t a pattern, is there? That is the horror and the mercy of it all, that there isn’t pattern, things just happen, you make them happen or suffer them.

We kept on trying to make dates with Isaac, though he always sounded on the verge of sneering; an implicit ‘What, you want to see me? ’ Yes, we wanted to see him. Soon. We would meet him anywhere, within reason. In retrospect those were the easier days; he was still able to travel then. Everything got harder, slowly, faster.

Seeing him was tough, but not seeing him was worse. Seeing him often lessened the shock, for nearly every time he was visibly weaker. Once when he’d been working very hard and then in the South Seas with Gus — (we had never met Gus; he kept saying we must meet him; we met others of his friends, painters, ex-boyfriends, but never the most important one; they had been together for nearly three years; we expressed enthusiasm, dutifully, but the promised meetings melted away) — we didn’t see Isaac for over four months. We chased him from answerphone to answerphone and finally tracked him down in Sydney. Gus had gone home; Isaac had stayed; he was willing to see us, or not unwilling.

We met in a pub in The Rocks, just west of Sydney Cove, called The Hero of Waterloo; the hotel receptionist had recommended it. It was a Victorian simulacrum, with candleless candlesticks and pointless imitation fires. By the time we got there we were almost past caring, for the most notable thing about The Hero, which Chris’s informant had neglected to mention, was its situation right at the top of a very steep hill. Chris and I were quite fit — I was very fit — but we had to rest halfway up. Isaac wasn’t there. We ordered beers. Our silence was more nervous than usual.