Honk If You Are Jesus Read online

  A childish joke? They, too, were seeking ways of escape.

  My niche had seemed fine, fifteen years before: a Senior Lectureship in Obstetrics. These days Senior Clerk seemed a more accurate job description. Senior Process Worker. Pfitzner’s offer had touched a nerve: the public health system was dying. Funding had been shrinking for years; my research programme — in vitro fertilisations, embryo transfers — was run out of half an office. Partly this was politics: IVF had become ideologically unsound. Mostly it was cost-benefit: each rare successful pregnancy cost a small fortune.

  Administration now swallowed much of my time, but even the clinical work had become a grind: entire theatre lists of hysterectomies, entire lists of wedge resections. Entire lists of abortions. I had always loved this world: the world of the operating theatre. Inhuman describes it best, some claim, but it is the world I most trust: the sterile corridors, the scrubbed floors and walls, the stainless-steel trays and trolleys. It’s a world without feeling or ornament, a world stripped to a utilitarian minimum, where forms are matched perfectly to functions: wall clocks, overhead lighting, stainless-steel sinks, instruments arranged in gleaming, logical arrays.

  Yet even here, safely masked and gowned, I no longer felt content. That world had become contaminated by the demands of others.

  I drained my tea-dregs and retreated inside, but slept only fitfully. An early riser, farm-born and bred, my mother was awake and fussing about the house when I abandoned my bed at seven.

  ‘Running late this morning, dear?’

  I lied. ‘Things are quiet.’

  ‘It’s about time. You work far too hard.’

  ‘Don’t start, Mum.’

  She was immune to protests: ‘The Christmas trip will do you the world of good. I only wish you would stay more than a day. Surely the hospital can spare you for one weekend?’

  ‘You know I get wheezy on the farm. Especially at harvest time. I’m allergic to the place.’

  ‘I think it’s in your mind, dear. How can you be allergic to your home town?’

  A small, plump woman — ‘compact’ is her preferred self-description — she bustled about the room as she spoke, feeding her livestock: Mog, a plump tabby, and Chester, a caged bleached-yellow canary.

  We had never been close. After my father’s death she had moved to the city to ‘look after’ me. In fact, I seldom saw her. My days — and all too often, nights — were spent trapped in the hospital; hers were devoted to the simulacrum of country-town life she had recreated in the city: Church, Choir, Ladies Guild, Meals-On-Wheels. Golf Afternoons, Scrabble Nights.

  She filled a small jug at the tap and began to irrigate her crops: the collection of miniature potted cacti that lined every windowsill in the house. I sneaked away to my study, closed the door and phoned the hospital: phoning in sick, the first time in years, perhaps the first time ever.

  5

  Those who sign the cheques never want to believe that success in science is cash-dependent; that the quality of success is exactly proportionate to the quantity of cash. More romantic notions still hold sway: the Lonely Genius, the Lucky Breakthrough, the Inspired Dream. That it’s mostly a plod — a matter of placing one foot painstakingly in front of the other, heel and toe, each step fully funded — has no place in the myth.

  Nor has the notion of team-work, of endless, extended collaboration.

  After breakfast I drove across town to the Agricultural Institute, nestled in the southern foothills. I was looking for the other half of my erstwhile team: Tad Romanowicz. His small laboratory, a prefabricated building in a far corner of the grounds, was empty. I followed a sound-trail of an amplified soprano voice to find him sploshing about in the mud of a small cattle-pen, rubber-aproned, rubber-gloved, rubberbooted.

  I approached unnoticed. The music blared from a portable sound-system atop a fence-post; he could hear nothing else. For a time I watched, amused, as this short, plump man sheathed in rubber attempted to coax a giant red bull to mount a crude wooden trestle. This artificial love object, draped with cow-hide, held no interest for the bull: it stood leg-spraddled in the mud, an immovable object. Tad sprayed some sort of aerosol on the hide: hormonal love potions, presumably.

  ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ I shouted.

  He turned, and smiled: ‘Chérie!’

  I turned down the music as he waded through the mud. La donna a mobile, qual piu ma al vento … I still remembered the words from our house-sharing days: days that were, for me, a crash course in opera appreciation.

  ‘You look fulfilled,’ I said.

  In fact he looked bored, and gone to seed: plump, coarse-skinned, balding. Bits of his anatomy bulged through the rubber armour in various places. Like most bald men Tad had transferred his hopes to facial hair: a dark goatee which lent his round face a sleeker, cosmopolitan look. He looked much as his Polish ancestors must have looked at the turn of the century. A member of the Polish nobility, fallen on hard times.

  He shrugged. ‘I get to travel a lot. And meet a lot of cattle. But what brings you to these rustic parts?’

  ‘Christmas spirit?’

  He snorted. ‘I thought you avoided the event altogether. Went straight to the New Year. Did not pass gift shops.’

  I produced a crudely wrapped gift: Glenfiddich malt, his preferred poison, bought at a bottle-shop en route. I still remembered all of his preferences from those house-sharing days — perhaps too well. Of course there had been nothing sexual between us; we had lived together for convenience. Those were the golden days of IVF; Tad, Staff Embryologist, was a key member of my hospital team. No, I do him an injustice: Tad was my team. Whatever small successes I can claim from those years should be shared, fifty-fifty. No one could thread a human egg or wash clean a gobbet of sperm like Tad.

  We’d had high plans before the funding crunch: something beyond the tabloid test-tube-baby triumphs. Resetting the cell clock — the egg-timer — was the dream. Controlling the cell-division cycle.

  Then the funding ran dry and Tad had been forced out: from two-legged to four-legged bloodstock. Same principle, he had told me at the time, defensively. Different species. And more money, certainly. Plus a travel allowance: flying around the country with lumps of frozen bull-sperm packed on ice.

  I found the notion absurd. Tad was an inner-city person, a ‘confirmed bachelor’ addicted to good food, fine wine, antique furnishings, great opera, and (I knew firsthand) a few of the darker pleasures that the city could offer. Our house-sharing hadn’t lasted. He soon found my presence stifling: ‘a disapproving older sister’. His chief complaint: he couldn’t be himself. After a few months he packed his antiques into teachests and moved out into a run-down inner-city terrace row, the slices of which seemed to grow thinner towards one end, like a partly-squeezed accordion.

  Tad’s was the thinnest slice: a line of cracked, dilapidated rooms filled, absurdly, with those expensive antiques. The ceilings drooped, small landslides of plaster showered from the walls with every step, but in the midst of this squalor a collection of beautiful objects was displayed. Museum pieces: Georgian tables, Chippendale chairs, a passage lined with Hogarth prints. The names meant little to me: empty brand names. I reproduce them here by rote; a guided tour of new and past acquisitions was compulsory each time I visited.

  Behind him the bull finally clambered aboard the trestle and moaned.

  Tad turned and shook his head, amused: ‘A watched kettle never boils.’

  He skated back through the mud, bent beneath the bull, clamped the mouth of some sort of rubber collection bag, or pseudo-vagina, and tugged it loose. I followed him, stepping gingerly, to his laboratory.

  We left our muddy footwear on the doorstep, as if entering a place of worship.

  ‘I have a feeling you came about something else, chérie,’ he said.

  He uncorked the whisky and spilled a little into two glass beakers. I sipped in silence as he turned away to load a centrifuge. At length he turned back, waiting, kno
wing.

  My question was ready: ‘What do you know of Schultz University?’

  He laughed, a slight wobbling of neck rolls: ‘The Mickey Mouse School of Bible Studies. But why does the lady ask, methinks?’ He sipped at his own whisky. ‘Don’t tell me … you’ve been offered a job? Laying on hands, raising the dead, healing the halt and the lame?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘How much like that?’

  ‘A Chair in Reproductive Medicine.’

  ‘A Chair! But you’re not serious. You wouldn’t take it?’

  ‘They are throwing a lot of money at me. A million dollar research budget: please spend. Annually.’

  He whistled; two notes, one rising, one falling. ‘Further details, please.’

  A timer on the bench before him beeped, the spinning centrifuge slowed, then stopped. He lifted out a tube of separated semen: a band of thick cream at one end, transparent whey at the other.

  ‘I get to hire and fire my own staff,’ I told him.

  He glanced up, flattered, gratified. ‘The plot thickens. You want the old team back together.’

  ‘We did good work, Tad.’

  ‘Until the money ran out. Can you imagine me working there? A tragic deviant in a Bible College. They’d lynch me, chérie!’

  ‘We could share a house again. Darby and Joan.’

  ‘Live in sin?’

  ‘I can’t see much sin on the agenda.’

  He laughed; we had always been able to make each other laugh.

  ‘Where does all this alleged money come from?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘That depends. Mostly on whether strings are still attached.’

  He was repeating the same questions I had been putting to myself. Perhaps this was one reason I had sought his counsel — to see if I could adequately answer them.

  ‘I’ve been promised a free hand, Tad.’

  He snorted again, another wobbling of neck-rolls: ‘The fellow is a joke! Have you seen him preach? He has this delicious Sunday morning programme: The Hollis Schultz Hour of Prayer.’

  ‘I’ve been told he doesn’t interfere with the research side.’

  ‘Sweet innocent! The receivers will close the place down before the year is out. This is Australia, not California. Have they got any patients? I heard somewhere that the hospital was empty.’

  He fiddled for a time with his centrifuge tube, then cocked his head, smiling. ‘Of course that might appeal to you — a hospital without patients getting in the way.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  I found myself recycling Pfitzner’s glib answers to my own objections: ‘There are plenty of clients. The Infertility Programme has a waiting list already. Asia, the Pacific Rim …’

  He glanced up, knowingly: ‘So that’s where the money comes from. Honourable yen. Honourable Japanese infertiles.’

  ‘What would it take,’ I asked him, ‘to get you there? Hypothetically, of course. Nothing’s decided.’

  He named an absurdly high figure, testing the water, perhaps — or just joking.

  ‘Is that in yen?’ I said.

  ‘Aussie dollars. Plus relocation costs for my loved ones.’

  ‘What loved ones?’

  ‘You haven’t seen my new Chippendale.’

  I liked Tad as much as I liked anyone, but could only take so much. His mannered conversation didn’t bother me: the repertoire of chéries and amusing euphemisms. I think, finally, he was too much like me: too much the healthy sceptic.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I suppose there’s no harm in flying up. Just for a look around.’

  He turned back to his work. I watched for a time as he fussed with his glass tubes. The large things were beyond Tad — his house was falling down about his ears — but his attention to fine detail was meticulous, even obsessional. The exact positioning of a Hogarth print on a crumbling wall, the precise quantity of pepper to be freshly ground over smoked salmon, the finicky ins and outs of the latest hospital gossip — the same love he lavished on these small things he applied to his work. He had been invaluable: I had looked after the overall design, he had done the fine needle-point.

  More woman than man in many ways — and proud of it — did this explain his attraction to the field of embryology? I wasn’t the first to draw this conclusion; perhaps it was too glib: that lacking a womb, he made do with a test-tube.

  ‘Then you’ll think about it?’ I asked.

  His face grew solemn, confidential. He pursed his lips and leant forward and tapped me on the arm. For the first time he was speaking from the heart, but even his serious moments had an exaggerated quality.

  ‘Frankly, my dear,’ he said, ‘nothing can be much worse than this.’

  6

  On Christmas morning I drove my mother into the country: an annual two-hour pilgrimage to the family get-together on the Yorke Peninsula. The farm — her brother’s farm, formerly her father’s — is mid-Peninsula, within sight of the Barley Capital of the World, the small town where I grew up.

  En route we passed through the Blue Crab Capital of the World. There are a lot of World Capitals in those parts.

  The trip, as always, seemed interminable: endless fields of stubble and scraggy sheep, interrupted by the odd scrap of eucalypt. With nothing of interest outside the car to distract her, Mother concentrated her attentions inside.

  ‘Couldn’t you have done something more with your hair, dear?’

  It was probably the longest time we had spent together all year. Even my weekends were mostly spent at the hospital. I seemed to be forever on call, a pushover for every colleague — every male colleague — with a family life who needed cover. It’s not as if you have children, Mara. Just one Sunday — I won’t ask again for a month?

  I had lost the ability to differentiate weekdays from weekends. Or December from March, summer from winter. Or even night from day. The story of my week was the story of my day: any day, Saturday or Sunday included, duplicated seven times. A month was four identical weeks, seamlessly joined.

  I could have ripped a page from my desktop diary, any page, xeroxed a sheaf of copies — 365 copies — and published it: Mara Fox, the Authorised Biography.

  ‘Haven’t you anything nicer to wear, dear?’

  My clothes, also, were xeroxes. Even on Christmas morning I was wearing The Uniform: pleated skirt (occasionally tweed), plain blouse, too-sensible shoes.

  ‘Surely someone on your salary could afford to dress for the occasion, dear.’

  ‘I’ve been too busy.’

  I have forced myself to spend money on clothes. At times. I’ve shopped in brief bursts — colleagues’ wives take a charitable pleasure in recommending boutiques and labels to me — but always I find the process demoralising. Something seems wrong with my proportions. Clothes, whatever the price-tag, don’t seem to sit right. I prefer to settle, impatiently, for the first item off the rack.

  We passed through the Mutton Capital of the World; my mother, silent for some time, trying not to nag, remembered another grievance.

  ‘I hope you are going to unwrap your presents this year, dear. Please don’t leave them sitting on the floor. Your aunts go to a lot of trouble.’

  ‘I don’t have to open them. I always know what’s in them.’

  She turned towards me. Plumper than mine, less pinched, her face is still capable of the same feats of disapproval: ‘How do you know what’s in them?’

  A basket crammed with gifts for my various cousins sat on the back seat. Steering one-handed, I reached behind, groped for a parcel, and squeezed it once or twice. ‘Tennis socks.’

  I plucked another, heavier parcel from the basket, and shook it slightly: ‘One of those cute little packs of scented soaps.’

  She averted her face: ‘You always have to be so clever. Such a clever girl.’

  There was no more scathing nuance in her vocabulary.

  Should I have apologised? I find it impossible when backed into corners. Accus
ations push me into more extreme, more pig-headed positions.

  I chose my words carefully: ‘I’ll pretend to be grateful.’

  ‘And just what do you mean by that?’

  ‘It’s a kind of payment, isn’t it? They want me to pay for those wonderful pot-holders, or tea-cosies, or jars of rose-petal jam. They want something in return — gratitude, praise.’

  She was silent for a time. When she spoke again, her tone was tired: ‘Why are you so cynical?’

  ‘A bit of healthy scepticism never went astray.’

  Her voice trembled, she was close to tears: ‘You twist everything around. You make everything seem … ugly.’

  ‘Maybe things are ugly.’

  ‘What happened to you?’ she went on. ‘What happened to my little girl?’

  I quoted her own favourite refrain: ‘I was never quite like other little girls.’

  ‘You don’t have to remind me of that. But you weren’t against everything. You weren’t so … bitter.’

  We drove on in silence through the stubbled fields, through one World Capital after another, towards the waiting congregation of cousins and uncles and aunts. More wrapped tennis socks and cute soaps and pot-holders awaited me. A half-pig would be turning on a spit in the backyard, a big barbecue table would be covered with bright, rainbow-coloured salads. As I drove, in my xeroxed clothes, towards a xerox Christmas, my resolve was growing.

  It was time to take risks.

  7

  Seen from the air there is something dental about the Gold Coast, something that sets my own teeth a little on edge: miles of beaches lined with white, irregular high-rise columns. Squat molars, flat incisors, tall canines …

  Richard Pfitzner was waiting in the Arrival Lounge at Coolangatta. He hadn’t changed; except in proportion. Always a big man, a one-time athlete, middle-age had loosened the muscles, expanded the waist, fattened the head. He looked like an inflated version of his former self. His collar was tight, his cheeks red; he had the coarseness about him of too many long lunches, too much good living.