An Astronaut's Life Read online

  ‘Doctors,’ she sniffs, as if either one of you would still be alive without them.

  ‘Doctors,’ you say back.

  ‘They don’t know everything.’

  ‘No. They don’t.’

  ‘Neither do you.’ She’s satisfied.

  ‘Mum?’ you begin. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been different.’

  ‘You’ve changed. Totally different from before.’

  ‘I know. I have. I’m sorry I have, but I want you to know I really appreciate all you did. The reading. Sitting by my bed.’

  ‘I’m not dying, am I?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘No. Not with any urgency. I’m just trying to do the right thing. Get us back to normal.’

  ‘You used to be so—’

  ‘No, Mum, I am. I’m back. Okay?’

  She starts to cry, and it’s as though you’ve woken up from the coma all over again. You feel guilty for hurting her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ you say again.

  ‘I’m sorry, too.’

  ‘You’ve no need to be.’

  ‘That’s true. It was Melinda who thought you’d never wake up. I knew. I never gave up hope.’ She reaches out to hug you and knocks the tray of tablets. They spill out onto the table and you have to separate them. White ones from yellow ones.

  ‘Melinda never stopped hoping, Mum. Look what she did—all the books, the reading.’

  ‘I did that, too.’

  ‘I know. You both did. You both saved me.’

  ‘For a few weeks it was. The reading was both of us. The other thing? That was her.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘The thing with the baby.’

  ‘What about the baby, Mum? It’s mine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course yes. What do you think?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I watched the door,’ she says. ‘I didn’t look in. She said you weren’t coming back, and I knew you wanted a baby; you’d want it if you were awake. So she got it out of you. While you were sleeping.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep. I was in a coma.’

  ‘Exactly. A coma.’

  All the tablets are in their little boxes, but you can’t slide the lid on. You force it too hard. The edge snaps off and you curse—Fuck—which makes your mother cry again. She hates bad language.

  On your last morning together, Francis was at your door before eight.

  ‘Wake up, my friend.’

  You climbed out of bed, even though you’d slept three hours, at most.

  By the time you came downstairs to the pool, Francis had finished his breakfast.

  ‘Not too much sleep, then?’ he said.

  You tightened your robe, took a seat. A plane passed overhead, a distant scrape. ‘We’re running out of time,’ he said.

  Your eyes met over the table.

  ‘Tea?’

  He poured. Francis was already dressed, his silver hair combed. The notes you’d typed the previous evening were on the table beside him, his comments added in red. It was good to be there, his co-conspirator, his confidant—yet you so often felt powerless to lighten his load.

  ‘This sense of urgency,’ you offered, ‘this feeling, like all feelings, it’s the result of an assembly of nerve cells. That’s all, right?’

  You were trying to think like Francis: inputs, nerve cells, conscious sensations.

  He smoothed his jacket, smiling. ‘My dear chap,’ he said. ‘There’s so much to discuss.’

  You decide not to tell Melinda what your mother has said. Instead, you stay late at work. Everyone else leaves and they shoot you little glances of concern as they flick off the lights at each end of the building. Soon there’s only you at your desk, the printer flashing because someone else’s print job is jammed.

  You’ve avoided reminiscing. Lately, you’ve focused on the present: the baby, making up for lost time. It’s always in your lowest moments you think about the way it used to be. At your desk, you Google Francis Crick:

  There was a time when that wry smile met yours each morning over a glass with a tiny umbrella in it—his reply to something witty or insightful. ‘Wake up, my friend.’ His voice.

  Francis H.C. Crick, 88, best known for his contribution to one of the major scientific findings of the twentieth century, the recognition of the double helix structure of DNA as the blueprint of life, died Wednesday at San Diego’s Thornton Hospital. He had colon cancer.

  Before you leave, you open the printer and drag out the jammed page. Paper shuffles and shunts through the machine as you walk out the door and onto the street.

  Francis died in 2004, so it’s impossible—all of this.

  He had colon cancer.

  You plan, again, to make amends. There’s time, on the way home, to figure out a way to talk to Melinda. You’ll start over.

  When you arrive the house is dark and there’s this note on the kitchen table:

  Water broke. Check your phone. This is it. Hospital.

  ‘The potential for consciousness,’ Francis began. ‘Is it present in even the smallest particle?’

  You sipped your tea. The flavour was sharp, the porcelain smooth.

  ‘It feels like it must be,’ you said, although you’d never thought about it before. You strained to keep alert to every detail, as if a second level of consciousness, being aware of being aware, might somehow reveal the mechanisms underlying the conscious state, but you couldn’t keep it up and your focus divided into a third level, before the layers of it all collapsed. Your mind wandered. A plane overhead.

  You turned to him.

  ‘In some ways, consciousness is a function of interaction,’ you said.

  Francis smiled. He settled his teacup into its saucer. You could hear the sound of his thumb and forefinger rubbing together as he thought things over, but you couldn’t tell anything from the look on his face. His impressions remained unreachable.

  ‘Go on, my friend,’ he said.

  ‘Francis, I don’t remember anything before you.’

  He stood, knocking his teacup to the ground. Although it seemed delicate it did not break, and you reached down to set it right. You ran a finger inside the rim; it had not even cracked. You put it on the table.

  ‘Never mind,’ Francis said and indicated you should stand, too. He rested his hands on your shoulders as you faced one another, then he slid his arms all the way around you. His embrace was firm, despite everything. You let him hold you.

  You can’t remember a moment when you’ve ever felt so safe.

  By the time you arrive it’s under control. Melinda’s having contractions, but they say there’s still a way to go.

  ‘Just sit tight,’ the midwife orders, and you smile back until she’s gone and you can only hear her shoes and a jangling pocket of keys receding along the hall.

  Left alone, you realise this isn’t the best time to talk. ‘Can I
get you anything?’ you say instead.

  ‘I’m fine. My back hurts a bit, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll rub it for you?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Melinda tugs up her nightgown and you sit on the bed.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ you ask.

  ‘The contractions?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It was like, I thought it was indigestion. Since I got here they’re worse, like cramps.’

  ‘Tell me when it’s coming.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll know.’

  You run your hands over the back of her hips, in circles. You’re not sure where it hurts.

  ‘Melinda?’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I need you to tell me about the baby.’

  ‘We haven’t even talked about the baby,’ she says.

  ‘We’ll talk about it now,’ you say, but then she lets out a whimper and curls forwards. You tell her to breathe, because it seems like the thing to say. She’s calm soon, but drained.

  ‘You’ve never asked,’ she says. ‘I thought, “Why the hell isn’t he asking? He can add up.” What did you think?’

  ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t want to ask.’

  ‘Did you think it’s someone else’s?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know. My mother said—’

  ‘God. What did she tell you?’

  ‘She didn’t exactly. You tell me. I don’t want to have to ask.’

  Melinda sighs and you think it’s another contraction, but it isn’t—not yet. You think of Francis in hospital. Lying there with machines beeping and monitoring. The oxygen buzzing cold across his nostrils, disturbing his eyebrows. That was you for seven months. And all they could think of was to read to you, which is nothing, but also everything, really.

  ‘Okay,’ Melinda begins. ‘You have to remember: we thought you were dying. We looked at you lying there and we were pretty sure. Day after day, just nothing. Not one movement. We begged you—just a sign. Move one muscle. Nothing. Like you were dead.’

  She punctuates this with a grunt and drops her head forward again. You hold her shoulders.

  ‘Just breathe through it.’

  When it’s over she lies back on her pillow.

  ‘So I just decided I only had a short time. You could die any day, they’d take you away and that would be it. I’d have nothing.’

  She looks at you meaningfully, a look that accuses you of being hardly more than the ‘nothing’ she feared, despite all she’s done.

  ‘I’m here though,’ you say.

  ‘But it’s not about that. It’s what I thought. All I had was your mother for advice and she told me every day you looked more like a corpse. I made up the reading to keep her quiet, then it was all we had. And then, I don’t know, I guess I fixed on the idea that if I had a baby, had your baby, it wouldn’t be so unfair.’

  ‘I don’t think we’d even agreed we wanted children.’

  ‘I know. But it changed me. Sitting there day after day.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I just, by hand.’

  ‘You wanked me? What, into a cup?’

  ‘Don’t say it like that.’

  ‘While I was unconscious?’

  ‘Don’t. It wasn’t dirty like that.’

  ‘While my mother watched the door?’

  ‘Shut up. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘It’s the conception of our child you’re talking about. It was the saddest thing. But I did it for you, too. I did it to keep you.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say this before.’

  ‘How is it even possible, in a coma?’

  ‘I didn’t know. You were on the catheter, so.’

  You’d rather not think about it. She grits her teeth.

  ‘Is it another contraction?’

  It’s only been two minutes; you check on your watch. Melinda grunts and it seems to take longer this time, or maybe this one hurts more.

  When it’s over she says she’d like to see a nurse.

  ‘You’ve got a button around here, right?’ You start looking for it.

  ‘But I feel bad ordering them around.’

  ‘It’s what the button’s for.’

  ‘I know, but could you find someone?’

  You stand up. ‘I’ll go down to the nurses’ station. I’ll be back in two minutes, I promise.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Don’t go far.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I hated it when you were gone. I hated that coma. I hate it now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. It’s a coma. I just get a feeling sometimes, like, wherever you were, you liked it more than coming back.’

  You head to the door.

  ‘I’ve only got a minute until the next contraction,’ you say. Then you sprint along the hall towards the nurses’ station, your feet thump against the linoleum. Your body, still lacking the power you took for granted in the days before all of this, feels your efforts sharply. It’s good though—all those muscles.

  In a moment you’ll reach the desk.

  ‘My dear chap,’ Francis once said, ‘there’s no point tackling trivial problems while the fundamental questions of life are there for the taking.’

  The claustrum, Francis’s examinations have taught you, is a thin sheet of brain matter that receives input from multiple areas of the brain. It may be involved in integrating information and therefore plays a role in generating self-awareness, or consciousness.

  ‘Will you come see my wife?’ you say to the young nurse at the desk. ‘Her contractions.’ You’re out of breath already. ‘She’s frightened and maybe it’s time for something for the pain?’

  ‘Of course,’ the nurse says.

  The lights are stark. Your legs shaky. The nurse trails behind, you can hear his soft shoes. Melinda is panting, her face red. Her eyes meet yours and you smile.

  ‘I’m here now,’ you whisper. ‘Right here.’

  It all happens at once. Melinda grits her teeth as the pain comes again. The privacy of conscious sensation: there’s nothing you can do. She grips you hard and it hurts.

  ‘I’m back,’ you say.

  The nurse explains about medication. You’re sweating. Melinda’s crying.

  ‘I’m back now,’ you tell her. You say it again, close to her ear, but you’re still not sure she can hear you.

  THE RACE

  There are people in the water tonight.

  We heard it on the radio and now Jean won’t stop talking about it.

  Mum says we should get on with making dinner—chop carrots and fry butter a little faster, be glad we’re us and not them—but Jean says the opposite is true. She looks up reports online; one hundred and twelve people, mostly men, some children.<
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  Jean likes to blanket herself in details as an insurance against worst-case scenarios. Less than half of the people would have life jackets, she says.

  Mum opens a can of tomatoes. How silly would you be, to get on a boat like that without a life jacket, she says.

  But Jean says, It’s not really like that.

  Rolf’s coming around later. Mum calls him my big Estonian boyfriend or she just calls him Ralph.

  Rolf says the way we all talk about people coming here by boat says a lot about the national psyche. He’s just finished a degree in history, so he likes to take a broader perspective. Mum can’t stand it; she usually says something like, Can’t we just eat without you indoctrinating my daughters? And she shakes her head. Jesus, Ralph.

  He won’t be here before nine, at the earliest, and Mum will be in bed. She’s in bed early these days, then she’s up again at six to drop Jean at swimming, then straight to work because she has to start on the phones first thing.

  It’s 9.45pm when he comes up the drive. I see the light on the front of his bike through our curtains, then I hear him get off, and I wait on the sofa until I hear his knock on the door.

  Tap-tap, tap-tap.

  He’s got ice-cream and Twisties and his hair’s all pushed up from his helmet so he looks crazy.

  Have you had dinner? I say.

  He has, but I heat up leftover casserole and put some bread in the toaster. While the microwave hums we have two minutes to kiss and when it dings we pull back and I scratch my fingers across his stubble.

  This can’t be aerodynamic.

  Good point, he says. So maybe it wasn’t my thoughts weighing me down all day.

  What thoughts? I say, but I’m thinking, Maybe it’s me. Maybe I am weighing him down.

  You heard it, on the news, he says.

  The people in the water.

  Yeah. A hundred and something, I say.

  I won’t remember the numbers, one hundred and fifty, or ninety, or three hundred and fifty-three, because they’re coming every day now, asylum seekers in boats. Day after day, in sinking boats, and the navy is always fishing them out.