The disappointment - Page 3

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Danielle Wood

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ONCE UPON A time, Bonnie believed that something could be done, that her brokenness could be repaired. She thought it was just a matter of a thing that did not work which could be made to work, and this was a notion that Dr Allcock did little to dispel. Now she knows that life cannot be commanded, not even by Dr Allcock.

It wasn't as if she had left it too late. Heeding the warnings, she gave up her career, moved back to Australia and got married – all in plenty of time. But instead of trading the tours and rehearsals and roses and European-kissed cheeks for a child, she traded them for afternoons in her front room giving viola lessons to schoolgirls.

Her lessons are expensive because the mothers of private-school girls are prepared to pay for the classy femininity implied by Bonnie's uncluttered music room. They are impressed by the pale varnished floorboards and white-sashed windows and asymmetrical sprays of fresh flowers that Bonnie herself arranges. They are prepared to pay for Bonnie's prodigal years as the violist in a fashionable string quartet in a fashionable European capital, although they can never quite remember which one: city or quartet. And they are prepared to pay for Bonnie herself, who is something of a star turn when she fills in with the local symphony orchestra, shaking back a slender, waist-length ponytail before positioning her instrument under her chin with truly expensive grace.

‘Shoulders loose,' she gently reminded twelve-year-old Hannah one afternoon in the early, seasick days of this pregnancy.

Bonnie had been there before: poised on the low seat of her armless chair with Hannah before her and an embryonic child in her belly. On such occasions, Bonnie had smiled in her listening way and imagined that the girl standing in front of her was not poor, thickset, talentless Hannah, but a slender little girl with a long ponytail that she too shook back elegantly before playing a sweet and simple and pitch-perfect minuet. She imagined all the details, right down to her ruby-coloured patent-leather shoes set in perfect playing formation. This time, though, Bonnie pushed the little red-shoed girl back to Neverland and suf­fered attentively through Hannah's every ugly note.

OVER THE PAST few weeks, Bonnie has wondered whether it was just her imagination or whether in fact the queasiness and the hunger were worse this time. She thought that perhaps they were. And, if she had allowed herself, she might have imagined that this could signify something. But of course, she did not.

At a family party, with her secret passenger aboard, Bonnie stood by the special low table that had been set for the children and longed for the bright sprinkled foodstuffs. It was less the sticky-faced children, with their tears and squeals and fairy wings and ringlets, than the cupcakes thickly spread with hot-pink icing and the triangles of rainbowed bread that kindled a little hurtful hope in her. Stop it, stop it, stop it. With a sparse plate of grown-up food on her lap, she sat by a favourite cousin of hers, now a father. He appeared tired, fat and happy.

‘What about you, Bon-Bon? When can we expect your sproglets to spring forth?'

She was well practised, by now, at answering the variants of this question.

‘Oh, I'm not sure I'm much of a one for kids,' she said, smoothly forking a meagre morsel into her mouth.

Bonnie remembers that in the first weeks of her early pregnancies, she would lie in bed with Tom and press her stomach to his back and think messages to their children. We are your mother and your father. We will love you, I promise. But this time, she slept with her back to Tom and kept her thoughts to herself.

If she did have to think at all, on her way down into sleep, she thought of her last visit to the hospital and how the anaesthetist, a burly gent with a soporific baritone voice, turned out to be someone she knew. She'd been in the same year at school as the eldest of his fleet of clever children, and clearly it had brightened his day to have someone to tell about his offspring's latest overseas postings and university prizes. Although she had noticed that he stopped himself from talking at length about how his empire was expanding into a new generation. She wondered what he thought about while her feet were in stirrups and a vacuum cleaner was making its meticulous way over the floor of her uterus. She wondered, too, what words he and Dr Allcock had shared as her crimson contents dolloped into a hospital bucket; whether they had discussed opera, or golf. She wanted to know who'd had the job of ushering her embryo into the incinerator with the rest of the day's harvest of tumours, tonsils and appendices.

Last night she fell asleep remembering all of this, and dreamed of Dr Allcock and the anaesthetist standing above her rent body, stitching together her new womb from gores of chestnut-coloured leather. The leather was cured, as hard and creaking as that of a new softball glove. Each segment swelled slightly between the seams, so that the whole object came to resemble a compact pumpkin. She watched as it was slotted, uncollapsible, in among the soft pulp of her other organs. She knew that it was designed to hold forever, within its hard, smooth walls, a certain measure of emptiness.

BONNIE IS SO immaculately prepared for disappointment that she is not at all surprised when Dr Allcock begins to shake his head.

‘I'm just starting to feel a little concerned now that I can't seem to...'

She turns her face from the screen.

‘Now I'm really quite worried that I can't exactly...find...' he says.

Bonnie's hands, motionless on the paper, feel cool and disconnected.

‘No. Nup. I'm sorry,' Dr Allcock says. ‘There's nothing. We've lost this one.'

Under the green sheet, the probe slips out in a hot gush of lubricant. Bonnie half-hears Dr Allcock explain that she will need to present herself at the hospital in the morning. Dilation and curettage, he says. To remove the products of conception.

‘The next one will be the one. I just know it,' the nurse says brightly.

BONNIE DOE NOT cancel her afternoon's lessons. What would be the point?

‘Soft wrist,' she tells Hannah, taking hold of the girl's solid forearm and shaking it to loosen its stranglehold on the neck of the viola.

After Hannah blows her curly fringe off her forehead with a blast of bubblegum breath from her bottom lip and begins sawing away at a sonata, Bonnie lets her gaze stray out through her window into the street, where Hannah's mother waits in a car full of Hannah's siblings. The children resemble their mother and each other – the same strawberry-blonde hair; the same hot, pink, sweat-prone skin; the same thick, inflexible limbs. They share a dense, animal fleshliness. That Bonnie lacks. She knows herself to be described in terms such as willowy. In other words, she is wooden. As hollow as her viola. Her body a casket.

Now here it comes. An end to the numbness she has felt during the hours since she left Dr Allcock's surgery. As Hannah scrapes soulless Bach over the helpless strings of her instrument, Bonnie feels its approach. All the effort she has put into the manufacture of ersatz disappointment, and all for nothing, because here comes the real thing, thundering silently towards her, within her. She braces herself. When it hits her, it is a muddy, bloody avalanche of pain that punches the air from her lungs and fills her mouth with its rust-tasting thickness. It is in her throat, choking her. It is on top of her, holding her down. It is inside her, exploding outwards, detonating her organs in flabby shards of purple and red. Yet, when this first pass is over, she is somehow not dead.

Bonnie looks up to find Hannah, having finished her piece, standing with her bow by her side. The girl is pleased with herself, her face flushed, expectant.