Category: Novel excerpt

 When he was seventeen my brother Sam got lost up the mountain. That year winter came late and all at once, like it had been bunching up behind them hills before it arrived. That’s what trapped Sam. The storm surrounded him. Owens went up to look for Sam and he got lost, too. It was a long time for them to be gone. Almost two weeks. And the snow was deep. We could see it from down where we was in the valley. 

Mama, she said they was dead. But I thought Mama was wrong. I imagined I could feel Owens up there wading around in the deep snow, foggy breath coming from his mouth. Staying in one of them little huts. I liked to think he was alive. I thought maybe Sam wasn’t, but I felt Owens was. 

Where we was the valley swooped right up the mountain, and the winter would bring mists what rolled down, cold and thick, and they turned and hovered like clouds, and them trees and everything changed colour to dark and glistening from them mists. I’m sure it spooked the animals: Becky, our dog, and them two horses, Cotton and Domonique. Then there was the colder nights what came with them mists, and the snow. Little Sasha (Sam’s twin brother), three years older than me (and called little because he was so tall); anyway, he promised he would take me up there so we could have a look. But it was a hollow promise. The winter was too big. Every day for a week Sasha and me went up to the edge of them trees. But each time we came back. We could see it had closed out past the escarpment. I pestered Sasha to go farther, and once he took me up with him, when Mama was in town. We knew she wouldn’t allow it, us going up them mountain paths. Too dangerous, she said – the mountain in a freak winter. No use losing good people after dead ones is what Mama said. But we went up, slipping on leaves what was almost mud, past the tree-line and into the damp shadows as far as the broken gravestones and the edges of the thick snow. We went up till we thought we could hear the stream. But most times it started raining and Little Sasha and me turned back. 

So, I kept my hope by remembering the times when Owens was at home. Him cooking fried eggs with dark beans. Him at the table, with his hands out in front of him. His missing finger, from the war. I thought of him once showing me a blister on his heel the size of a coin. I thought of the sun in his eyes and his squint, and him sitting waiting on the bench outside the back door, then standing and shielding his eyes and scuffing the dirt on the path with his boots. I thought of him walking back to the blossom grove – he would usually pull ahead and I’d watch his limping and think again of the war. It was Sam who told me Owens had been a soldier. But I never believed that, cause Owens never told me about it, neither did Mama. 

It was also Sam I thought about at that time. I didn’t understand why he’d gone up the mountain. There was something to it, is what Sasha said. But he never talked to me about it. He said something about Mama and the outlaw Wallace. But that’s all he said. I had to figure the rest out for myself. And to be honest with you I wished I never had. Cause that’s what took me into the end of winter all twisted and angry. That’s what made me think I would kill the outlaw Wallace if ever I got the chance. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I couldn’t do that until he took things from me. I don’t want to talk about it, so let’s just leave it at that.   

A Cold Season can be found here.

I woke early the following morning, took my tablet like a good girl, and began work on Ken’s obituary. I could have left it to someone else, but this final act of rendering Ken’s art into words seemed naturally to belong to me. The ninth wave. The one that purportedly reaches the farthest on to the shore. 

The morning has always been my best writing time, and the words were waiting for me. I was summoning terms like ‘career-defining’ and ‘important conceptual turn’, but I had always mapped Ken’s early career using the private co-ordinates of our relationship, so by the time I poured my third cup of coffee I was also thinking about — no, feeling — the first time we met. It was at a mutual friend’s place, at one of those house parties that went on forever, and where you either had to keep an eye on the bottle that you brought or find a better one. Same with partners. I looked up from the ice-filled sink when my friend introduced ‘Ken Black, Painter’ to ‘Leila Whittaker, Novelist’, with the almost-satirical capitalisation implied, and I added ‘barely’, about myself, while holding a dripping beer bottle aloft. On learning my name, Ken started to sing the Eric Clapton song, which many people did, but I always pretended that it had never happened before. Besides, Ken was famous. More well-known than me, anyway. He had been exhibited. And he was sexy. It was during that brief period in the early ’90s when men wore their hair long, and his looked cleaner than most, so I left the boy with whom I had arrived in the backyard, sitting at the base of the Hills Hoist and smoking a joint and crapping on about Kierkegaard, and went home with Ken Black. 

I had not really known much about oral sex until I met Ken. I mean, I knew that people did it, and, indeed, a few of my boyfriends at university had done it to me, but not so … flamboyantly is the word that I’m looking for, I think. And with such immediate effect. After my orgasm, I lay back in some sort of triumph (his or mine, I’m not sure) and commented that he’d really delivered on the ‘got me on my knees’ part of the song. 

‘Let me paint you like that,’ he had answered.  

Not a request, but a directive, as I remember it. 

I pressed my legs together, feeling suddenly exposed, while I thought about it. I was hardly the origin of the world, and he was no Courbet, even though he was in his realist phase. Of course, we didn’t know, then, that it was a phase. We thought it was his style. Representational, with a skew, something to make the viewer feel as if they had been tipped a little off-balance, like the sight of a crooked frame against a white wall. 

And then, in the way of young people, I just never really left. I went back to my share house in Brunswick a few days later and already felt like a visitor. I carried books — beginning with my Virginia Woolfs, of course — and clothes between the two places in Ken’s old Volkswagen, and then only in one direction, and then I gave notice to the people who had, up until that time, been my closest friends. I barely saw them after that — and we haven’t been in touch for years — but in my callow youthfulness I didn’t care. I was suddenly in Ken’s crowd, among his friends from art school, including slender, languid, mysterious Anita, and a much younger and thinner and cleanly shaven Giorgio, looking like he’d stepped from an advertisement for Italian motorbikes, and cronies from their posh private school on the Peninsula, all alcohol and cocaine and sprawled-out vowels. And I was having great sex, so much of it and so varied. I was also discovering that marijuana did not produce the hammering hangovers of cheap red wine. I was with an artist, who promised to become a name. We were living in a posh apartment that looked out over the Parliament buildings and the city gardens, and was paid for, miraculously and uncomplainingly, by Ken’s parents. His moments of anger, of sullenness, seemed a small price to pay. Negligible, really. How easily I seemed to slip into that world of parties and money and ease, even before Ken’s art had any commercial success, although, behind my usually drunken or drug-fucked gaiety, I feared that they could all smell that I had more than a whiff of the suburbs about me.  

But I had my small claims, too. My first novel had been published the previous year, to no one’s notice at all, but I had loved the sight of it in the window of the bookshop across the laneway from Pellegrini’s, with all the other books, asserting its miraculous existence. Veins like Rivers, I had called it. I hated the cover, but was powerless to say so. 

At my desk in the house that Ken built, I wondered if I should trace his sudden plunge into the abstract back to the influence of these early days of our relationship, when we were having sex and laughing and talking so much. To my ascendance in his life. Ken had never been keen to articulate any hypotheses about his creative trajectory, but at least he could support my theories when he was alive. Now that he was dead, I only had my failing memory, and failed understanding, and the corroborating evidence of other equally fragile and partial sensibilities to fall back on. It added to my responsibilities, and I already had so many of those.  

All I knew, as I flicked through the Manifesto, looking for a citation to include in the word-limited space of the obituary, is that, almost overnight, Ken was all about form. He painted Melbourne Morning, the work from which I have always dated his abstract turn, feverishly, day and night, at the window overlooking the intersection. The screech of trams turning from Collins Street onto Spring Street punctuated our days in that apartment, but Ken was an almost entirely visual man. He would remember the sight of those trams, not the sound, if he were still capable of memory. He painted them from the top, from our view, as rectangles, but freed from their tracks and overhead cables. 

Any observer of my obituary-writing that day would have quickly tired of watching me typing, and then deleting, and then typing again. But thankfully, I laboured alone and unseen. I walked about the room, picking up objects that might trigger a memory, rifling through stacks of papers. I found an envelope containing a press photograph of Ken and me, which was curling and ripped at its softening edges. Why is that yellowing so depressing? It makes it seem that anyone depicted in that fading frame is already passé — that they have had their time, and probably didn’t use it well enough. I feel the same dispiriting way about my ageing paperbacks. My hair is very short in the photo, so it must have been taken when Otis was a baby. We are sitting together in the backseat of Giorgio’s vintage Holden sedan. It always was such a comfortable, and in some ways, comforting car. The smell of the leather as it heated up brought back the cars of my childhood, and rare days at the beach, Marian and I jiggling our legs on the hot leather seats, our sunburn already blistering on the drive home, David on Mum’s lap in the front seat.  

Ken is smiling at the photographer, a cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth. I am staring straight ahead, my jaw squared by my gritted teeth. It is the profile of a deeply unhappy woman, and perhaps the journalist wondered if my mood was the product of a moment or a general condition, because the caption read ‘Melbourne art world’s smiling assassin, and his literary accomplice’. That is one of the most insightful things that has ever been written about us. 

— 

Even as I wrote, I knew that the obituary would be folded into the canon, and that it would be assessed as authoritative because of our relationship, the long marriage that had survived against all odds. I wanted to capture the man, the husband, and the father who spent hours drawing with his sons, taking their art seriously, and who, when they were babies, would look at them with a tenderness close to longing when they fell asleep at my breast. Who would tell me sometimes that he had chosen well for them, that I was their light. I was looking for this Ken, that he kept hidden, that perhaps only I saw, and intermittently, but I kept encountering the trickster, the artist, the descender to the underworld of his unfathomable unconscious. And the smell of oil paint and turpentine, although I would never include a detail so hackneyed in a public account. And the more elusive traces of Ken himself. The strange, decaying smell of his studio, like something was rotting in there, and the way his canvases always smelt like stale cigarette smoke. As if his very breath had settled on them. 

Diving, Falling can be found here.

Where one dream ended, another began; when the ship emptied onto Appleton Dock, Maha clung to her father’s shoulder and stared across Port Melbourne to the silhouette of the city. A queue of burly factory workers waited beside the barge, counting and measuring the barrels of petroleum, and as her father limped across the planks with his hand outstretched, the salty air made her weep, a rolling howl that echoed between the trucks and startled the plump men with their clipboards and upturned eyebrows. Her father hobbled across the docks, scowling, shaking her with both hands. ‘Just please shut it up,’ he said. They passed sheds, piles of timber and a red and white radio tower flashing in the fog. They walked along the Yarra under the purple sunrise. The shops were still closed, the cobblestoned laneways clear and the offices shut. Her father collapsed under the clocks at Flinders Street Station, dragging clods of dirt out of his shaggy hair, rubbing his sunken eyes, staring for hours at the happy drunks outside the Young and Jackson Hotel, like a man who had fallen through the bottom of his grave. ‘Alive, but not well,’ he said. ‘Awake, but out of place.’ They climbed the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and Maha’s eyes widened at the echo of the priest’s voice. ‘Let all these poor migrants never forget,’ he said, ‘that at heart we are a good Christian nation.’ Then the organs boomed, the choir wailed and Maha bawled against her father’s shoulder blades. He pulled her down to his chest and she wriggled over his singlet, searching for his nipples, but when she tried to feed not a drop of milk eked over her lips. ‘Please, little one,’ he said, as the parishioners shifted in the candlelit pews. ‘Why so many tears all of a sudden?’ Her father hung her under his singlet and they bounded across town to Queen Victoria Market. ‘Come in off a flight, have you, boy-o?’ said a man who was cleaning his clippers on his apron. ‘Just looking,’ said her father, leaving Maha on a wooden table and trudging into the crowd. ‘Gee, looks like big brother’s not in a good way,’ said the man, tickling Maha’s tummy. ‘Youse are Indian? Paki? No worries, bub. Welcome to Melbourne. Hope she treats you alright.’ The man slid a bottle of milk across the table, the glass cold against Maha’s cheek, and the shock set her face in a smile. Her father returned with some bread and a few biscuits. ‘Best you stay away from this child,’ he said to the man. ‘She is some kind of divine disappointment.’ He swept up Maha, thrust the bottle of milk under his arm and hurried through the market. ‘On the house, my gift to youse,’ said the man. ‘Kids are the future, mate. She could be the next Mahatma Gandhi, you never know. Can’t write off anyone in this town.’  

They squatted in a flat on Swan Street and ate brown bread with white sugar. Every morning, her father covered Maha in tartan sheets, hid her in the cupboard, then disappeared down the street. She cooed in the dark, yearning to be with him, to nestle against his chest. He would return each night with his face knotted, his fingers kneading his crotch. ‘Not one doctor,’ he said, ‘not a single surgeon. No one has any alternative. No solution, none.’ Not once did he want to play; he was only in need, it seemed, of the echoes of his lone voice. Soon he started murmuring about finding work, returning each evening with his hands smeared with oil. ‘So much of loss, little one,’ he said. ‘My sadness, so much for them to handle. One day they will see I am not like them, not another Aussie, not another top bloke. From the bottom, then, I tell you. Without home or family or trust in god. But from the bottom comes patience, see, and cunning.’ He poured her shots of milk, broke bread crusts for himself and limped in circles around the flat. Sometimes she woke to see him crying, or biting his lip as he hovered by the cupboard, or circling his hands over his belly. After two months, her father returned from working on the streets, pulled Maha from the cupboard, hefted her over his shoulder and hurried into the night. They walked back to Swanston Street, down by the arcades along Flinders Street and stopped before a boarded-up garage. ‘Garagewallah says owner of the best chop shop has skipped town. Melbourne needs a new coolie to carry the flame,’ he said, ‘and no police would ever suspect me, na, this young man so fresh off his boat.’ Her father opened the chop shop there and then, in the middle of the night. He coiled the cord of the shop vac into a makeshift cradle, placing her inside, then tightened the pneumatic lines and sealed the rubber leaks. Over the next few weeks, he took hundreds of discarded books from Cash Converters and piled them around the basement for insulation. Encyclopaedias and atlases lined the brick walls. Physics textbooks and world histories towered around her bed. With her body heat trapped under the cement ceiling, Maha rocked from side-to-side, squinting at the spines of the novels. Every Saturday for two years, her father took her on his rounds of the city, passing cash and papers to men in black leather coats, their faces lit by the embers of Pall Mall cigarettes as they warbled in their avian accents. Sometimes they met the clients at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where the city folk gathered to watch the footy, a rough-and-tumble, free-for-all game seemingly without rules, played by men with the torsos of weightlifters and the long limbs of marathon runners. The sport was brutal, like a gladiator contest, and as they roared from the stands, the locals’ faces reddened and their weekday nonchalance faded. Oblivious to her father’s wheeling and dealing, Maha left the stadium with ringing ears, her fingertips splitting as she clapped to the rhythms of the footy fans, those lifelong devotees in scarfs and beanies. At home, she curled in the shop vac cord or crawled between the repaired motorcycles, while her father ran the garage, eighteen hours a day, through migraine headaches, winter viruses and blisters on his toes. He poisoned the mice that hid in the walls, crushed the spiders with his broom and beat the possums out of her bed with his bare hands. ‘It is no wonder this place is full of brutish animals,’ he said. ‘In a country of such degenerate men, their reincarnate forms could be no better.’ In spite of all his scorn for the locals, word of this subcontinental workaholic spread in cafes and bars. First came the amateurs, in need of honest repairs for their Nortons or Triumphs. Then came the clandestine gangs, who needed to disassemble their outlawed rides and pawn the parts, who gave her father extra to break the steering lock and grind the VIN off the forks. They always paid in cash. Trust was established and her father’s reputation grew.Each night, after locking the roller door and swaddling Maha in her sheets, he sat against his sacks of cash, plumping them like pillows. Then he opened his newest magazine, ignoring Maha’s murmurs for attention, and followed those faraway sentences further into silence.  

Maha spent the next few years pressing her face to the window, staring past her round cheeks and curly hair at the silhouettes on the street. Women clasped their daughters’ hands as they crossed the road. Men bounced their little girls on their shoulders as they walked. She crept upstairs to the garage and tied her arms around her father’s waist, but he only huffed and shook her off to focus on his chores. She felt sad that she was not a normal daughter, that she had no mother who would listen to her, but she didn’t want to bother her father, so she kept her sorrows to herself. One day, enchanted by the city beyond the basement, she took a ten-dollar note from one of her father’s sacks and snuck outside, wandering for hours between the crowds of businessmen, their faces hidden in broadsheet newspapers, and past salons where women dyed their hair pink and red and peroxide blonde. She watched the girls in their lessons at the outdoor swimming pools, their sun-drenched bodies shivering in one-piece suits, and followed them to choir recitals, and picnics, and to a cafe where their mothers waited with desserts on shining plates. She waited in line and bought the treats for herself: pavlovas, lamingtons, chocolate biscuits, vanilla scrolls, hot jam doughnuts. She liked to close her eyes and let the sugar ooze over her tongue and settle on the ridges of her teeth. ‘But, darling,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘where’s your mum? You can’t be loitering in here.’ Maha opened her eyes; of course, she was alone in the cafe. Trudging back to the chop shop, she wondered where her own mother was waiting. When would she arrive, after all this time, and guide Maha home? Away, she thought, far away from the loneliness that lined these streets and darkened the four corners of the basement. That evening, she scrambled out of bed and wailed until the walls shook. ‘Where is she?’ she said. ‘Mother, when will she come?’ ‘Please quiet,’ said her father, wiping his thumb across her wet cheeks. ‘Just wait. Let me show you. Here, your mother’s love.’ He leafed through a Yamaha manual, tracing her fingers over the letters and pronouncing their sounds, and as she copied him, the words held her in a state of grace, a kind of knowing she had never had before. Her tears dried. She opened an atlas, tracing her fingers over the borders of the continents, the curves of the tectonic plates, the shores of the widest oceans. ‘Good,’ he said, opening a pulp story magazine, ‘better than expected. All natural ability, and more.’ Over the next sleepless weeks, she sang poems, mulling each syllable over her tongue, revering every stanza she uttered. She read ancient scriptures from every corner of the Earth, the histories of divinities, of those who destroyed cities, or spread enlightenment, or faced only ridicule and torture. She learned that all beings came and went out of this form and into the next. And yet she found that books held infinite worlds within their pages, that writers were gods who wrote other humans into being, that every creator would find her readers, her true believers amid the loneliness of her life. Soon she brought her favourite sweets back from the cafes and read for hours in the dark, embraced by this presence she could not see. She munched her pastries with glee, ignoring the lives of the other Melburnians, of the other daughters she would never be. 

The Degenerates can be found here.

I came to as if cracking through ice, gasping, a fish with a hook down its throat. Ice, fish, throat: sounds dragging concepts, a lag, but also a cellular knowing. Lines of sticky sensors circled my head and ran down my chest and across my back, faintly itchy where they adhered like octopus suckers, trailing red and white and blue wires, as if my arteries and veins were external to my body. 

I wish I could say the first thought I had was of my children, but what came to mind was Wolfie’s favourite cereal. Sometimes I ate it late at night when the kids were with Jean-Paul. I didn’t always bother to do the shopping when the children were gone – and wouldn’t do it until they were due to come home, to save money. I was probably depressed then, ferociously spooning up the little wheat squares into my mouth by the light of the open fridge, feeling I had set a detonation off under my life and now had to live in its aftershocks as a kind of punishment. 

A voice, soft and high and urgent – Grace, though I didn’t know it then. ‘Esther?’ 

The name was mine. I knew that I was an I. A self. Myself. The taste of wheat and jam and full cream milk were there on my tongue, as tangible as if I had a mouthful I needed to swallow. 

The voice said, ‘Try to stay calm. You’re okay. I’m looking after you.’ Clatter of metal on metal. Movement: the soft snare of fabric, synthetic thighs brushing. A brisk walk. Warm hands working over skin, rubbing. My skin. I burned with cold, as if being set alight.  

There was only one voice, hushed and urgent, muttering. A bathroom smell: antiseptic, lemon, cool white tiles. Shhh, shhh, the voice went, tsking and clucking in time with the hands, making the same soothing noises I had made in the nursery in the dead of night, rocking newborn Clare while Jean-Paul slept on, wearing earplugs so he could wake in a decent state for work. We thought that was a reasonable arrangement then. It had been my idea – altruistic on the surface, belying the limits of my capacity underneath. 

By the time Wolfie was born two years later, Jean-Paul was sleeping in the guest room, and I was going mad. This seems ironic now, given I was in that state to protect Jean-Paul’s job, which as a psychiatrist revolved around caring for other crazy people. What of my experience fell within the normal experience of early motherhood and what was pathological? I didn’t know the answer and couldn’t ask him, terrified of being deemed unequal to the task of mothering Clare and Wolfie by some invisible judge. Jean-Paul seemed to think everything was in order and, as I had made him the arbiter of my reality, I accepted his diagnosis hook, line and sinker. 

~ 

I was electric with pain as Grace tended me in the dark. I smelled something cool and coppery, like a coin laid on the tongue. Her hands on my skin made bursts of blistering lava break over me, the way fingers through darkened water will trigger blooms of phosphorescence. I couldn’t quite tell which was the dream: what was happening in the room or my thoughts and memories. I had seen phosphorescence once, travelling in Thailand with Zoey. We were nineteen and high on magic mushrooms, drinking cheap Thai whisky out of a bucket with eight straws stuck in the ice. After sunset, I stayed on the sand, but she staggered into the water. The cove was almost glassy in its stillness. Behind us, music from the guesthouse bar came beating down the beach and I turned to watch the dancers in silhouette against the jungle rising sharply behind us.  

‘Holy fuck!’ Zoey screamed, half laughing to cover her terror, and I turned so fast to see what had happened that a ribbon of whisky flew out of the bucket onto my skirt. Zoey stood wearing a look of fear and wonder I’ve only seen one other time: on Jean-Paul’s face, as our babies were being born.  

‘The sky’s fallen into the water, Esther.’ Her voice was reverential. It did look that way. We swam in the phosphorescence every night for as long as we stayed on that island, and I knew then that the world was just a strange repetition of shapes and meanings, the macro and micro repeating and repeating. Patterns of milk ducts in breasts and veins in lungs with the roots of trees. Tree rings with human fingerprints. Constellations of stars with bioluminescence.  

Grace’s touch brought my body further into focus, her hands cartographic. Black space lit up under the pressure of contact: elbow, forearm, hands. Mine. But the pain of it. My muscles contracted, writhing. The sound in the room: an animal dying.  

‘I’m so sorry,’ Grace said. ‘I’ve got to rub you down hard like this to get things going.’ At my lips: cloying tape, sticky and strong. I jerked my hands to remove it and found they were tied down. A prick in my arm and the pain submerged back into itself, darkness retreating from torchlight. Screams became moans. Then I lay quiet.  

With eyes rolled back in my skull, I saw something. A newborn baby caked in cheese-like vernix, blue lipped, squalling. The tiny purple-pink hands, nails like pearly flecks of shell, fingers curled with the effort of crying. The baby’s eyes clenched shut, mouth open, the wail so forceful no sound came. Latex-fingered midwife; a towel, white and blood-streaked. She rubbed the infant harshly to make it draw breath. Soon its skin was pinking, vernix wiped clean. A blanket drew the flayed arms in. Swaddled, the baby was lifted, passed. Those were my arms. Looking down at the child, that was my wedding ring glinting there on the left hand as it touched the infant’s cheek.  

I tried to say, ‘Where is he?’ A word, that critical word, was missing. My voice had rusted over, machinery long out of use. Snake’s skeleton hung down my throat, sharp-boned and choking. Even so, the name was clotting there, unsayable. I heard it in my skull, resounding like a bell. Wolfie. Wolfie. Wolfie!  

Grace was talking as she worked. I heard her say, ‘Shh, you’re safe now, Esther.’ I vaguely registered the note of anxiety in her voice, discordant with the words. But I was too exhausted to indicate that I was listening.  

The effort it was taking just to order my thoughts was like nothing I’d experienced before. 

I lay bogged in mud for a time, until fingers encircled my wrist. The woman clucked anxiously, murmuring to herself. 

‘Your blood pressure’s still too low.’ Her voice grew faint as she retreated across the space, then louder again: ‘Now, where are those bloody blankets?’ 

I wanted to say ‘Don’t go,’ but the words were only a longing. I was trapped in honey, in amber, voiceless but preserved. 

Soon she was back. ‘I’m going to take this tape off your eyelids slowly, so that you can see.’  

I felt it then, a graze across both lids and the lids themselves heavy, gummed as if with hardened wax. The sweet, high voice, close to my ear. ‘Now, try to open your eyes, Esther. Don’t fight me. I need you to be nice and calm before I can try to take the breathing tube out.’ Low murmuring: words I couldn’t make out. ‘I’ll turn down the lamp for you, there. Open your eyes slowly. Take your time about it.’ 

Dim light, a hot blade. I blinked, blinked, blinked, and felt like retching. Later, I will think that describing a room as swimming into focus had always seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but that’s what it was like. Flat on my back, blinking at the ceiling, the face peering down at me. I felt I was looking up from the bottom of a lake. 

‘Oh dear, your heart rate,’ the woman said quietly, her voice coming small and pinched as if she was trying to keep her thoughts from spilling out. ‘Try to stay calm!’ She squeezed my hand where it lay flat, bound against the rails. Her face was just a spectrum of tones, like a watercolour painting. She said, ‘You’re in shock. I know you’ll have a lot of questions. I can help you. But I can’t take that tube out of your throat until you’re stable.’ 

I heard what she said, but the words did not penetrate; they slid off like oil on water. Another name was surfacing inside me, painful as a contraction and more urgent than anything the voice in the room might articulate. Clare. I heard myself choking on the sound of the name, the gurgle and spit of my vocal cords against the breathing tube. 

‘Shh,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t try to talk just yet. You hear what I’m saying?’ 

The body was just a hunk of something, a creature strapped down, a weight. I was somewhere inside, clawing to get out. My limbs trembled, all the hinges and sockets and joints of my body alive with the friction of shifting tectonic plates. Fingers cuffed my ankles, gripping my legs to stop them shivering off the bed. The balls of my eyes rolled. My head turned side to side on its neck as if looking for an exit.  

‘You’re clammy,’ Grace said, trying for matter-of-fact. An alarm sounded, sharp and urgent, or maybe it was something inside me. ‘Can you hear me, Esther?’ The cacophony of the room, all those screeching electronic noises, the urgent human voice, blurred together to form a single high-pitched flatlining note.  

‘Your blood pressure’s going berserk.’ The woman seemed to be swaying as she spoke, her voice rising and receding as if it were a wave breaking and drawing back. ‘All right, but listen: you’re going to be okay. Okay? I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.’ She sounded on the verge of tears. I had the urge to reach out and offer her comfort but at that moment all the blood in my body roiled up towards my head, like a pot of pasta boiling over.  

The woman screamed, as if to prevent me from stepping into oncoming traffic. ‘No, Esther! Stay with me here. Please.’ 

But I was already falling backwards into a deepening shaft. Far above, the real world, a disc of light, receded to a prick. 

This excerpt is from the novel If You Go, which can be found here.