The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood Page B

jetty. Slept in his car waiting for the first-light ferry, climbed aboard in his slept-in clothes, said hello to the captain. Walked the jetty after the boat had trundled back across that small body of water, come into his house and fallen onto the bed, slept through into that night and the next day.
    He wakes like this three mornings in a row, blindly, as if drunk, knowing something terrible has happened. His blurred thoughts shift tectonically, the masses of his memory faltering, fault lines dividing. And then he is awake and he has always known this blood-red, rotting truth.
    He walks to the kitchen. Pulling out a chair takes all his strength; it is the heaviest thing he has ever touched. He does not eat. Feels the acid of vomit jerk upwards through his oesophagus, charges across the room to lean exhausted and spitting quietly into the kitchen sink. Feels the decaying film of his blood.
    There is only the webbed realisation. His thoughts spread in rivulets, but stop at the edge of it. Only the hospital, the green light of the corridor, a baby’s feet, Stop .

Seventeen
    E LLEN STAYS IN the hospital bed for a week, getting up only for the toilet. Nurses come and tidy up around her. After two days their movements are brisker when they draw back her curtain. Their voices are deliberately bright, and have grown louder, as though her time in bed has made her into a child.
    â€˜Perhaps they are right,’ she tells Jocelyn, taking the magazine from her and putting it on the cabinet with the others. It is the Australian Women’s Weekly . It has a photograph of the Queen on the front. She is pearly skinned; she has a crimson cloche hat and matching lips. Her hand is a white glove.
    â€˜They have told me to have another child.’
    Jocelyn nods. ‘They told me you should, too.’
    â€˜I didn’t tell them about Thomas.’
    â€˜Me neither.’
    They look at one another for a second, then at the things in the room. Green Jacquard bedspread with BLUE
    MOUNTAINS DISTRICT HOSPITAL printed down the middle of the bed. The bunch of late roses Jocelyn has brought, their bright heads too heavy for the stems. A few swollen rosehips.
    â€˜Where is Sandra?’
    Every day she asks Jocelyn this.
    â€˜At school. She’s all right. I took her there. I will pick her up this afternoon.’
    Ellen nods, slowly. She has not asked about Martin since the first day.
    â€˜Do you know what I thought last night?’ Ellen says. She’s looking at Jocelyn with glassy eyes. She does look like a child, Jocelyn thinks, with her pale face and her hair brushed by someone else – a nurse?
    â€˜I was thinking about the babies at the end of the corridor.’
    There is a room beyond the nursery, for the illegitimate children, waiting for the adoption people to collect them.
    â€˜I thought,’ Ellen’s eyes fill again, ‘I thought, I could just go and pick up one of those babies out of his cot, and we could all go home.’
    Jocelyn says nothing. Then, softly, ‘Yes.’
    From the hallway the crying of a baby is getting louder,and they hear through the curtain a nurse’s raised voice over the cries, bringing the baby in to its mother.
    â€˜Here you are, she’s a greedy little thing,’ the nurse calls over the shrieking breaths of the baby. The mother’s voice says something, and then the baby’s gasps stop suddenly, and there’s a sucking noise.
    Ellen’s curtain rips open. The metal rings make a scraping sound along the bar. A nurse stands there with a thermometer, and Jocelyn has to make room for her to move over next to Ellen. The nurse says nothing while Ellen opens her mouth for the thermometer and lifts her wrist to have her pulse taken. The nurse presses her fingers over the veins in Ellen’s wrist and cups in her other hand the small clock dangling from a chain at her breast. Ellen sits with her mouth pursed around the thermometer, staring at the