The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood Page A

way that Jocelyn has seen Sandra sleeping. Jocelyn wants to turn and walk out of the room, out of this building, out of the town into the bush, climb a tree, hide in a cave.
    As she walks over she sees one of the other women is feeding her baby, its small head downy and snuffling at her breast. The woman cradles her child and looks carefully at her orange bedspread as Jocelyn passes.
    She walks around to the chair beside Ellen’s bed. Ellen is staring, eyes open and wet. Her face is grey, her hair damp. Jocelyn pulls out the chair and sits down.
    â€˜Where’s Martin?’ Ellen says. Jocelyn shrugs.
    She puts her hand out and Ellen takes it, pulls it to her and holds it under her head between her own two hands.
    Jocelyn remembers her childhood nightmares. Think of something nice .
    The baby at the next bed starts to wail, its mother shushing and shushing it. A nurse comes and draws a curtain around Ellen’s bed.
    Jocelyn sits there in the chair with her fingers in Ellen’s two praying hands under her face for a long time.
    The next-door baby settles. Beyond the streetlight the moon comes up outside.

Fifteen
    M ARTIN IS STANDING hunched over the fire, head touching the mantelpiece and arms up like someone sleeping on a desk, when she comes in. He straightens slowly.
    The air moves between them, into their separate bodies. Deathly as water.
    â€˜Where’s Sandra?’
    He points upwards to the bedroom, she nods.
    The hallway beyond the dining room is piled with the mess of their trip: the tent-bag, the swag, their bag of dirty clothes. It seems something from her childhood, when they drove up to the house this evening, a memory of years ago, not hours.
    He has a drink in his hand, pours her one. She takes it, seeing her own fingers move.
    She sits down, watches the vaporous brandy, its slow gold wave.
    â€˜Did you talk to George?’ she asks him. The air moves. He looks at her, her red eyes.
    â€˜Yes,’ he says. ‘He tried forceps, but it took too long. Died soon after he got him out. Just after seven. Just as I got to the delivery room.’
    He doesn’t say, Just in time to take in this memory I will never lose, that wet weight in my hands .
    He pauses, says instead, ‘George doesn’t know what exactly happened. He’s done it before …’
    Martin is very small in this room with its rushing air. She knows his answer before she asks him, the coral rosettes of the carpet swell.
    â€˜But you know. If we were here, you could have done it,’ she says. She knows it, but cannot stop the awful bloom of his one word:
    â€˜Yes.’
    Â 
    In the morning Jocelyn does not wake Sandra, but she comes into the kitchen anyway, hair unbrushed, and dressed for school. Jocelyn puts her arms around the girl. Sandra stays there, leaning against her body.
    Jocelyn says, ‘You don’t have to go to school today, sweetheart. Do you understand what’s happened?’
    Sandra stares back, says, ‘Yes. Is Mum in the hospital still?’
    Jocelyn nods, stroking her niece’s arm.
    â€˜I want to go to school then,’ Sandra says.
    They walk to the scrap yard, and Sandra moves to the crocodile, climbs and straddles its ridged back. Jocelyn follows, unsure of every movement.
    She sits down behind Sandra, sideways on the crocodile’s tail.
    Sandra says, ‘Where’s the baby?’
    Jocelyn breathes out. Takes another breath.
    Then Sandra says, ‘I know it’s dead, but where is it?’
    She turns and runs her finger over the bronze rises and dips of the crocodile’s back, and Jocelyn touches her own finger to the small hollow in the nape of Sandra’s neck. ‘I don’t know,’ she says.
    â€˜Was it a sister?’ says Sandra.
    Jocelyn begins to cry.

Sixteen
    T HE FLYSCREEN DOOR bangs through the night. Somehow he has come back here, driven through the afternoon into the evening, finally parked at the roadside near the