Sometimes I drank just to have the sheer pleasure of weeping without apology, the luxurious, snotty weeping of childhood that can only be indulged, once you’re grown up, in the most solemn states of privacy. I lay back on my mother’s bed and wept briefly for the voices on the phones. And then a deeper, more expansive weeping for all my former selves in all the photographs splayed across the paisley bedspread. The baby with the father whose nature and temperament she couldn’t comprehend. Then, for the child who wanted more than anything to touch whatever creature would allow her touching. Then, the teenage girl who believed in the romance of all the poems she read, a girl too shy to ever talk about them with another flesh-and-blood person who could have helped make her happy. And then finally, with perverse pleasure, for the woman of the year before. For the events that had ushered in this splendid conflagration of emergency.
Six months earlier.
It began the way it always does. I pulled my underwear down and there was no blood.
But there were cramps, and that was what caused me confusion. The cramps gave me conviction in the logical outcome. During a break before a meeting with my thesis advisor I walked to the other side of campus where I bought extra-strength ibuprofen from the university chemist, and for four nights in a row I took the pills before I went to sleep. Because I had cramps, and I was certain that the bleeding was imminent, and that the pain would come in the middle of the night. I was being “responsible,” and taking steps to manage the pain. But in the mornings nothing had changed. The cramps were still there but the blood didn’t come.
I looked up the symptoms of pregnancy on my laptop on a Tuesday morning. I felt queasy. That was a sign. So was the pain. Cramps indicate that the uterus is contracting to accommodate a fetus. Many of the early symptoms of pregnancy were also symptoms of period pain. I took painkillers and waited.
But the blood didn’t come.
When you buy a pregnancy test the box comes with a set of two, just to make sure, and so it happened that in the bottom of my bedside table, I had a spare. I had been through this before. And it had been nothing. Just a hormonal reaction to stress. What could be more reasonable? I sat on my bed focusing on the absence beneath the fireplace until I felt quite dissociated from my body. Only then did I take the box downstairs to the bathroom.
I peed on the stick and laid it flat and results-down on the bathroom tiles as instructed. The intractable orange mold was climbing the edges of the bathtub. The sound of the buses accelerating leaked through the open window, a dog barking, the theme music to Buffy the Vampire Slayer playing in somebody’s living room. I flipped over the test. To the two pink lines. I noticed that the breeze through the open window was quite cold. No, I told the two pink lines of the test in my lap. No.
And then I called the office of the university medical services.
On the morning of the appointment I woke to the blue wash of dawn in a bed not my own. Lachlan was asleep, snoring softly with his back to me. I watched his flesh rise. And fall. The books on the shelves. Outside I could hear the early din of birds waking up in the paperbark tree. The voices of construction workers arriving at the house under renovation next door and slamming the doors of a van. I looked at his back, and I thought about what it might be like to skip the appointment, and stay with him, naked, all day. It was so tempting. We could stay with each other forever in that bed, and we would be safe.
I put a hand to my stomach then. The skin and softness of it. And the dark knot inside me with which I had been communing all week. This fulcrum that decided whole futures. This thing that had narrowed and sharpened every moment since I’d learned of it. This thing that was mine. And he was sleeping through it.
I watched his back rise and fall.
I peeled away the blankets and stepped into the freezing cold of his bedroom, as quiet as I could be. I didn’t want him to see me leave. I was afraid that if he woke up he would say goodbye, and roll over to check his phone. I was afraid that he wouldn’t offer to come with me. I wanted my mother.
I watched my blue reflection in the mirror of his wardrobe door as I dressed. The framed photograph of Patrick White glowered down from the wall. I wrote Lachlan a note on a piece of paper and left it beside him, in bed, in the space where my body had been. I shut the door and descended the stairs. My head hurt, and I was thirsty. But I wasn’t meant to eat or drink anything beforehand.
I walked to the station under a canopy of magpies screeching at me from the trees. I took the train home to change. The carriages were quiet and unpeopled. Rush hour hadn’t yet begun. At home, I showered him off me. I was thirsty.
The clinic to which the doctor at the university health service had referred me was unmarked and halfway up Devonshire Street, not far from Central Station. An entryway screened by ferns and opaque windows shielded the door of the clinic from view of the street. It was painted a pale green, and I wondered whether they had painted it that way because they believed that pale green was a soothing color. I had walked past the building a hundred times and never noticed it before.
The receptionist was British, and that seemed reassuring. I handed her my Medicare card and my credit card through the gap beneath the bulletproof glass. She told me to have a seat in the waiting room. The chairs along the walls were lined with thick purple upholstery, more office decor than medical. A television mounted on the wall close to the ceiling played an episode of 30 Rock. On the other side of the room two men sat waiting alone. There was only one other woman, a scrawny girl in a purple velour tracksuit accompanied by a heavyset Filipino man with acne-pitted cheeks. I looked at their faces but I couldn’t detect any emotions. For a moment I could believe the waiting room was the kind of place with no particular purpose. It was simply a space to sit alone on purple chairs, watching 30 Rock.
I sat focusing on the television ahead of me but focus was not a state I could achieve. I thought about the book my mother had given me when I was a child. Safety First. Beware of open flames, do not approach the floodwaters, don’t struggle in the event that somebody tries to prevent your drowning. It was a book full of all the ways to protect yourself. But I supposed I had neglected most of the warnings, because I was not very good, on reflection, at keeping myself safe.
The receptionist behind the bulletproof glass had told me I would not be able to get home on my own after the procedure, and I had told her I would manage. I typed out a message. I’m scared, it said. I clutched my phone in my fist, just waiting for it to illuminate itself with his name. But he did not reply.
The receptionist called my last name. I was led through two heavy doors and down a corridor to a room where I was instructed to sit across the desk from the doctor. The walls were the same pale green as the exterior of the building. I could not look the doctor in the eye, and she seemed comfortable with that. She was plump. Her curly hair was turning white. She read from a piece of paper clamped to a manila folder.
Eight weeks, I told her. The father knows, I told her. I’m twenty-two, I can’t do it. She filled out the paperwork, ticking the boxes and signing off at the bottom of the page.
She asked me if I was sure, and I said yes, because I was. There was nothing else to say.
A nurse led me into the belly of the building. She left me in a room to take my tights off and gave me a medical gown to cover the rest of me. It was cold in the small green room. No windows. I would not need to take my sweater off, the nurse had said. I pulled my tights down and laid them on a chair. The skin of my legs was pale, resistless. I observed thumb-shaped bruises on my thighs. I held myself very tense and very still, sitting on the chair, in the silence.