Honk If You Are Jesus Read online

  for Helen

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  PART FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Maestro

  Wish

  Also by Peter Goldsworthy

  Copyright

  About The Publisher

  PART

  ONE

  The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

  Corinthians 1, 15:26

  1

  I was once invited — once only — to deliver the after-dinner speech at the annual Christmas Dinner of the College.

  The College: the Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. My College.

  I accepted immediately; later came the doubts. It was the first time the podium had been offered to a woman, there were bound to be mutterings among the older Fellows. Women were still thin in the ranks of the College — still thin in the ranks of medical practice everywhere. This was some years ago, more years ago than I care to remember: the early seventies, or perhaps late sixties. The era of First Times For Women. First Woman in Space. First Woman Cabinet Minister. First Woman to Float a Combine Harvester across the English Channel.

  All these — and worse — made headlines at the time.

  In fact the invitation had nothing to do with affirmative action. It had to do with my notoriety — with the notoriety of my work. I spent weeks mulling over what to say. In the end I decided to let my work speak for itself. Christmas was closing fast, I wasn’t about to talk shop. Something light-hearted, even irreverent, was called for. Colleagues could follow my work in the journals; with a slice of turkey breast or roast pork crackling they wanted nothing more than entertainment.

  A few words on the most famous Birth of all seemed an amusing notion — a speech exploring the actual obstetrics of it.

  The idea wasn’t new, or not to me. At times I’d idly wondered, imagining that scene in a stable, two thousand years ago: what if something had gone wrong?

  Of course such thoughts come naturally to me — as a woman, yes, but more so as a physician. The work habits of a lifetime, the thinking patterns of a lifetime — even my middle-sized lifetime, so far — are not easily shed. The nativity scenes that fill shop windows and church porches every Christmas beg for closer scrutiny. Lists of Risk Factors spring to mind, probable complications.

  One: the patient was primigravid — a first-time mother.

  Two: she was malnourished, surely, and infested with the usual Third World zoo of protozoans, worms, parasites.

  Three: she was attended by … a carpenter!

  And the surrounds? Don’t give me Quaint, Humble, Picturesque. There would have been rats: Rattus rattus, black rat, plague carrier. There would have been roaches. Lice. Hay, filth, dung …

  I’m not saying the subject obsesses me. It belongs more in the realm of idle speculation. Small-talk for the Silly Season.

  I spent a rare free night trawling through the New Testament, searching for clues, for actual clinical details, but came up with nothing. Only two of the four gospels mention the Birth at all. Even Luke, most objective of the four (except when talking of himself; I can still recite those smug words by heart: having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first), offers nothing. A physician himself (who else would have written these words?), he must have wondered. What were the odds of … transverse arrest? Foetal distress? Haemorrhage? Sepsis?

  I put these questions — and more — to the College Fellows across their turkey that night. Bleepers chirped from time to time, colleagues rose from their tables and hurried away to phones or to urgent deliveries, but there was a mood of generosity in the air, a camaraderie that no interruption could disturb; a willingness to laugh at anything I said.

  What if something had gone wrong, I asked amid that easy laughter. Would a gleaming pair of Kieland forceps have materialised? Plasma expanders and humidicribs descended out of heaven?

  It went well. The speech, yes, but also the Birth itself. As far as I can tell. But if it hadn’t, what use the gifts of spices, perfume, gold? I’ve never been one for homebirth, I told my colleagues. Give me a modern labour ward any day. And a team of experts: kings — and the odd queen — of medical hi-tech, clad in sterile robes. And bearing far more useful gifts: ultrasound probes, foetal monitors, heavy canisters of oxygen.

  Smug laughter filled the dining room: I was preaching to the converted.

  2

  Mine was an imperfect understanding from the first; even now I have trouble making sense of it all. No star led me from Adelaide to the Gold Coast that year; the summons came via bleeper, on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of hospital rounds. Christmas was a matter of days away; outside a hot north wind was tickling across the suburbs, ruffling trees, bumping window-panes. Half the topsoil of the mid-North seemed to be hanging in the air, suspended above the city. Hay fever weather, wheezy asthma weather. Inside I was working on autopilot only, going through the motions, dragging a flock of bored students from bed to bed.

  Too many positive ions, my mother — always abreast of the latest crank health fashions — would tell me.

  My bleeper insisted, again; I picked up the nearest phone and was connected to a distant, half-familiar voice.

  ‘Mara? Mara Fox?’

  I was firm: ‘This is Doctor Fox.’

  ‘Mara — this is Richard Pfitzner. I’m ringing from Queensland. Season’s greetings.’

  It took a moment to place the name. It was probably the longest sentence the man had spoken to me, ever; more words, certainly, than he had sent my way in our six years together in medical school.

  ‘You’ve made quite a reputation for yourself, Mara.’

  I remembered how much I had disliked him: the silver spoon wedged firmly in his mouth, the over-loud voice, the nurses always in tow. I was not worth a glance in those days: too skinny, too dowdy. Too clever. And — above all — too, forthright. A woman who spoke her mind.

  ‘We always knew you would succeed, Mara. Even as a student there was something special about you.’

  ‘Are you trying to sell me something, Richard?’

  He laughed, collusively: ‘Still the same Mara.’

  Behind me the students waited, shuffling feet.

  ‘Can you get to the point, Richard? I’m in the middle of something.’

  A small throat-clearing: ‘You had heard of my appointment up here? Dean of Studies at Schultz Medical School?’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘In short, Mara, I’m headhunting. We’re headhunting.’

  I almost laughed out loud; he was offering me a job.

  ‘Mara, don’t say a word. I know what you’re thinking: Schultz Bible College. Soap-boxes, sermons. Tabloid headlines. But I want you to keep an open mind — can you do that? I want you
to hear me out.’

  It seemed a practised speech; he allowed me no time to answer.

  ‘Of course the salary package is only one of our advantages. Freedom of inquiry is what we offer: guaranteed, hands-off research funding. And I mean funding.’

  Pfitzner murmured on — butter-voiced, muzak-voiced — sketching out the rough draft of an offer which even I, a financial naif, sensed was still no more than an opening bid. My own Chair, he purred. In my own Department: Reproductive Medicine. Research duties only. A team I could handpick.

  ‘I don’t think it would be immodest to claim that Schultz can offer facilities unmatched anywhere. And I don’t just mean in this country.’

  Part of me wanted to shout ‘No!’, then and there, but somewhere a deeper, less cynical self was urging tolerance. Or was it a more cynical self: a more self-interested self? Third-rate Bible College or not, his offer had the dimensions of a lottery win, and therefore had to be heard.

  ‘Mara,’ Pfitzner murmured on, ‘all we’re asking is this: fly up. Look around. You look at us, we look at you. We wouldn’t want you to rush any decisions.’

  ‘I never rush decisions.’

  ‘Speaking for myself, I’m looking forward to catching up with you again. I’ve followed your work closely. You’ve become quite a celebrity.’

  He halted the flow of flattery momentarily, as if allowing me a little basking time.

  ‘How does the New Year sound? Sometime after Christmas? My secretary can fax yours an itinerary. And arrange the tickets.’

  ‘I only have half a secretary. And no fax.’

  He laughed, playfully. ‘That’s the public health system for you. Get out, Mara. Before it’s too late. If not here, overseas. They don’t know how to use people of your quality. First class suit you?’

  He suddenly seemed a world away from my economy-class lif. The Ward Sister was nagging gently at my side: ‘You were due in theatre half an hour ago, Doctor Fox. The afternoon list.’

  3

  The first victim was already asleep as I scrubbed: another sweet-and-sour sixteen year old, flaccid with pentothal, her dimpled legs dead weights as the scrub-nurse lifted them into stirrups.

  The anaesthetist, Max Henning, raised his head to nod: ‘Start whenever.’

  I swabbed the shaven vulva, slipped a drain into the bladder, covered the dimpled thighs with green drapes: deft autopilot routines.

  ‘Anything but scrapes on the list, Max?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘If it’s good news.’

  ‘Seven in a row.’

  Thursday’s theatre-list — curettes, TOPs, terminations, pick a euphemism — was the worst of the week. Even a ligation or two — gynaecology’s bread and butter — would have made for a little variety. I could have done the work blindfolded.

  ‘Spin me three times, Sister. And aim me towards the patient.’

  ‘Sorry, Doctor Fox?’

  ‘A joke, Sister. A small joke. You must be new.’

  Her eye-corners crinkled; a smile or frown beneath the face-mask?

  ‘Sim’s speculum,’ I told her.

  A frown: the instrument slapped my palm too firmly.

  Max Henning sat at the head of the patient — the wrong end, in labour ward dialect, the boring end — a small, white-masked man rhythmically squeezing a bag.

  ‘Discovered a new restaurant the other night,’ he was murmuring. ‘Down on Unley Road. Vietnamese cuisine.’

  Max had been my favourite among the staff anaesthetists for years. And not just for his clinical competence, his skill with the gas. His voice also was a potent anaesthetic. Soothing, gossipy, diffuse — a kind of background music.

  ‘You should try it, Mara. Take your mother.’

  ‘My mother has probably tried it,’ I said. ‘I don’t get out much.’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘They have this hot fish soup. Makes your eyeballs bleed.’

  Today I didn’t want to be soothed: I allowed him to get no further than the soup du jour.

  ‘When I was a student, Max,’ I interrupted. ‘Back in the dim past …’

  ‘Hagar’s dilator or Fenton’s, doctor?’

  ‘Fenton’s, Sister … As I was saying, Max. Back when I was a student I had a weekend job in a winery. Labelling bottles.’

  ‘Nice work if you can get it.’

  ‘Nice isn’t the word. The word is … boring. Piecework, they called it. The more labels I plastered on those bottles the more I was paid. But Max, it wasn’t as boring as this.’

  He laughed, trying to humour me. ‘Maybe they’d take you back.’

  ‘Don’t laugh — I’ve thought about it. One factory or another: what’s the difference?’

  He sensed the seriousness behind the joke. ‘Bit hard to run your research project.’

  ‘What research project? There’s no money.’

  I had never aired these grievances publicly before. Things previously left unsaid, even to some extent unthought, or only partly thought, had grown suddenly clearer, a crystal forming around the right-shaped piece of grit: a Chair of my own, in Queensland.

  ‘Size four knitting needle, Sister,’ I said.

  She scrabbled noisily among the instruments in her tray.

  Max apologised on my behalf: ‘Another joke, Sister. You’ll get used to Mara’s sense of humour — warped at the best of times.’

  How long would I have lasted without it? It wasn’t the long list of abortions that bothered me that afternoon. Quite the contrary. Every woman’s right, I’ve always believed — and backed the belief with action. Back in medical school I joined any number of Women’s Action Groups, any number of Concerned Doctors For This or Against That. The principle still stood: abortion on demand.

  Although I’ve yet to see one of those scared teenagers who creep sideways into Family Planning, eyes down, or up, or anywhere except in contact with my own, demand anything. Abortion on request, describes it better. Abortion on humble petition, on supplication, on terrified entreaty.

  I wiped the curette on a piece of gauze. ‘Send that down to pathology, Sister.’

  My objection was simple: why was I aborting them? Midwives were trained to deliver babies; why not some sort of anti-midwife to prevent them? It would cost infinitely less, and allow me to get back to more exciting things. My in vitro programme, for one. And two, for that matter — and three. My in vitro programme, above all! Six years of medical school, two more interned in the wards, another five of postgrad work — to find myself stuck doing this. It was suddenly, overwhelmingly too much. I felt a tight knot in my chest.

  ‘Suction, Sister,’ I wheezed. ‘Come on, show a bit of enthusiasm.’

  ‘I’m doing my best.’

  ‘Do better. Or we’ll be here all day.’

  Max looked up from squeezing his bag.

  ‘Easy, Doctor,’ he said, still in the same smooth monotone. ‘No need to bite her head off. What’s eating you today?’

  ‘The same thing that eats me every day.’

  I taped a pad between the thighs, peeled off my gloves and mask, forced myself to turn to the sister.

  ‘Thanks for your help. And please excuse my lack of manners. I’m not feeling particularly terrific today.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Will you be wanting afternoon tea, Dr Fox?’ one of the students asked.

  Max tried to intervene: ‘I don’t think there’s time.’

  I insisted. ‘There’s time.’

  The silver service, as always, stood steaming in the surgeon’s tearoom: one last luxury that had not been cut by the bureaucrats. Yet. I sucked hard at my asthma puffer, twice, gulped a hot mouthful of tea and sat breathing more easily until Max came searching.

  ‘We’re ready to roll again.’

  ‘I’m not. Have a cuppa.’

  He hesitated, then sat, disapprovingly, and mixed himself a cool milky cup. ‘Bit rough on the nursing staff in there, Mara.’

  ‘That’s the way
they learn. Christmas cake?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  I bit into a slice of rich cake, and chewed, slowly, teasing him, but also wanting to talk.

  ‘I had a call from Richard Pfitzner this morning, Max. Remember Pfitzner?’

  He snorted. ‘Pain in the arse.’

  ‘He’s in Queensland. Dean of Schultz University.’

  Another snort: ‘Always landed on his feet.’

  ‘Do you know anything about the place?’

  ‘The medical school has everything that opens and shuts — except patients. Why? Thinking of moving?’

  ‘What, and leave all this?’

  He forced a smile, drained the rest of his tea and rose, meaningfully: ‘Back to the coal-face, Mara.’

  I followed him out of my sanctuary, reluctantly. More victims waited in the passage outside: a freighttrain of beds, stretching around the corner, end-to-end.

  ‘Come over for drinks on Christmas morning,’ Max said. ‘Bring your mother.’

  I shook my head. ‘Family get-together on the farm.’

  4

  I arrived home on the brink of midnight. The house was in darkness, my mother asleep. I should have rung; she no doubt assumed I was spending another night at the hospital.

  I wasn’t ready for bed myself: that piece of grit had lodged somewhere in my brain, and was still itching. Richard Pfitzner, the unlikeliest source, had flung it all the way from Queensland. Layers were forming themselves around it: old grievances, new frustrations. I stewed a small pot of green tea and carried it outside on to the terrace. The night air was balmy; the bricks of the house still glowed with the late afternoon heat, retained and magnified. The house — my mother’s house, our house — is perched on a small ridge above the eastern suburbs of the city. I stood for a time at the balustrade, sipping tea, gazing absently at the lights of Adelaide below: a matrix of squares and right-angles stretching north and south as far as the eye could see. Among their various familiar constellations — the small-wattage stars of my personal zodiac — I could clearly pick the lights of the Hospital, miles to the west: the great punch-card facade of the east wing rising above the surrounding suburbs.

  Some of the windows were darkened, some lit — a random distribution. I remembered a recent night when the students, equipped with walkie-talkies, and directed by some boy-genius in the streets below, ran from floor to floor and ward to ward, switching lights on and off until the entire face of the building spelt out the word, in letters eight floors high: FUCK.