Ghost Child (19 page)

I took a lover at the hospital. He was a married man. It was every bit as disastrous as you might expect, every bit as wrong, and yet in a sense it brought us – me and Harley – to where we are today, so I suppose I can’t say that I completely regret it.

I can’t say I hate him – my lover, I mean – because that wouldn’t quite be true, either.

I met him at the hospital. Where else would I meet him? I went nowhere else. He was different from the other guys I’d known. He was older, and from another walk of life. He was an obstetrician – a visiting specialist, not one of the regular staff. He kept rooms in a building on Macquarie Street and he brought private patients to the hospital, women who had signed up to give birth in peach-coloured suites in private hospitals,
but ended up needing emergency care on the Royal’s public wards. They were in their late thirties or even their forties, these women, and yet
primigravida
– pregnant for the first time.

I saw him in a corridor. I was pushing a trolley full of laundry and almost ran into him. It was like one of those scenes in a movie, each of us moving to get out of the other’s way. We ended up tangled and laughing, and then just standing there, looking at each other.

He held out his hand finally and said, ‘Hello.’

I said, ‘Hello.’

I put my hand in his and we kept looking at each other and then, when it occurred to me that I had been standing there too long, I tried to withdraw my hand but he wouldn’t let it go. He held it tighter.

I can still remember the softness of his touch. His hand was like a woman’s – smooth, gentle – and his gaze was reassuring. As corny as it sounds, I felt the floor slipping beneath me and I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘He’s
here
. Finally, here he is.’

His name was Stephen Bass. He was not a handsome man. He was tall, and too thin for his height, so he stooped when he walked. His hair was combed over a sun-damaged scalp. There was dandruff on the shoulders of his suit jacket. His ears were transparent in sunlight. But the way a man looks has nothing to do with whether they are attractive to you, and he soon became attractive to me.

Our second meeting took place in the hospital cafeteria. I was standing in the queue ahead of him, holding a plastic tray in front of me, waiting to be served. I felt somebody come up behind me, so close that I could feel their breath, and somehow I knew, I just knew, it was him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘what is that scent? I’ve been unable to strike it from my mind since the last time we met in the corridor.’

I was so startled I didn’t say anything.

He continued, ‘It’s Lauren, isn’t it? Lauren, the sweet cleaning lady, with the oh-so-seductive scent.’

I said, ‘I’m not a cleaning lady. I’m an
aide
.’

We paid for our sandwiches and he followed me to a table. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and found myself wishing that I’d chosen something other than a curried-egg sandwich that was going to make me smell bad.

He tried to make up for the mistake he’d made, calling me a cleaner. ‘The hospital would not run without aides,’ he said. ‘Forget doctors. We turn up, make a few notes. No, it is the aides that tend to patients. You should be paid much more than you are.’

His hands were flat against the table, next to his tray, and that was when I saw the wedding ring. It was studded across the top with four diamond chips. I guess we must have both known, even then, where we were headed, because I didn’t try to look away from it. In
fact, I put my hand out, and touched it, softly, with my finger.

He let my finger rest there and said, ‘Are you married, Lauren?’

I said, ‘No.’

‘Too young,’ he agreed. ‘Take my advice, and don’t accept the first proposal you’re offered.’

I said, ‘You’re married.’

He did not say yes, and he did not say no. Instead, after some silence, he said, ‘Do you want to talk about that?’

I shook my head.

‘No.’

‘Okay,’ he said.

He took my hands into both of his. I was conscious of people around us – the hospital visitors, the nurses and aides having lunch – but Stephen seemed not to care. I wish I could explain to you what it meant to me that he didn’t care, not one way or the other, who saw us together.

Looking back now, I can see the words he’d used –
Do you want to talk about that?
– were deliberately vague. I could read into them anything I wanted and, over time, I did. Alone at night when he was home with his wife, I would sit on the porch constructing stories about his marriage.

They were married, but unhappy.

They were married, but it had gone stale.

They were married, but she neglected him. They had never been in love.

They were married but he’d been lost for a long time. Now he’d found me, he felt as though he was alive again.

They were married, but he wished they weren’t. He found it hard to leave his wife after she’d delivered and raised five beautiful children for him.
He would never hurt her
.

It’s hard to imagine I believed any of that, but then, I was working from the heart and not the head. Had I worked from the head I would have been thinking something very different: he’s a married man and he’s happy to cheat on his wife.

The affair started slowly. For a while after that second meeting over the curried-egg sandwich, I allowed him only to kiss the top of my head and to touch my hands. Stephen seemed happy to take it slow. He was old-fashioned. He’d do things like enter the lift last, holding the door open for anybody else who wanted to ride. When we walked together on the street, he’d make a big production of getting on the side closest to the road. He told me it was an old tradition: gentlemen always walked near the gutter, he said, so any horse that came by wouldn’t splash a woman’s skirt.

‘There are no horses in Sydney, Stephen,’ I said, putting my hand in the crook of his arm.

‘It’s my way of saying that wild horses cannot keep me from you,’ he replied.

He was wealthy. Once, when I asked him about this, he said, ‘Wealthy compared to what? Compared to whom?’ I asked whether it was true that he charged $5000 a day for delivering a baby, and he said, ‘I charge what’s reasonable,’ and that alone made me think that he had money in a way that people I grew up with did not. He didn’t make a show of his wealth, but you could see it in the cut of his suit and the cuffs of his shirts. He lived in one of those suburbs that Sydney people call ‘leafy’, when they mean old, established money.

After a while we started to play games that will probably be familiar to cheating couples: we’d see each other in the corridor, avert our eyes, but gently brush past each other, or else I’d get in the lift where he was already a passenger and busy myself with the watch pinned to my uniform, while he would stare straight ahead and then, when we arrived at his floor, touch the back of my hand on his way out.

I wasn’t allowed to call him at home, or on his mobile phone, so I paged him pretty much constantly. Sometimes he answered immediately; other times, it would take hours, and then he would be tired, saying, ‘Complications,’ which I took to mean that the mother, or the infant, had struggled through a birth, although who knows what it really meant.

I asked him once about women and childbirth. I asked whether he understood the pain, and he snorted
and said, ‘Pain? There’s plenty of pain relief available, Lauren, even in the Catholic hospitals.’

There was a clue in that sentence, wasn’t there, about Stephen’s attitude toward women, and their status in his mind. But I didn’t notice it. I was too busy being entranced by his interest in me. For ten years, I’d been the girl on the ward who closed the drapes around patients; who wheeled barrels of laundry down the hallways; who threw out dead flowers. I got on well with the patients, but they were old people and sick people. Nobody on the staff had ever paid me much attention. I had no view of myself as an attractive person, although I knew that my hair was something unusual – maybe even special. I wore it tightly braided at work, with the braids themselves swirled into a bun at the back of my neck. I had to, those were the rules. But then, one night, when I was standing outside the hospital, I saw Stephen getting out of his car across the car park, and I found myself undoing the pins and letting it fall down past my shoulders like a gymnast’s ribbon. I wanted him to see it, and I know he did, because the next day, he came over to me at the nurses’ station and said, ‘I saw you with your hair down last evening, under an umbrella in the gathering rain.’

Then, very slowly, he added, ‘And. You. Are. Lovely.’

We didn’t talk about sex, not at first. Stephen was, I suppose, trying to decide whether I was the kind of woman who would sleep with a married man, and I
was trying to convince him that I definitely wasn’t, but might eventually be persuaded.

He seemed to like the idea that it had been a while since I’d last had sex. Pretty early on I told him that it had been ten years. I suppose I told him that because it, too, suited the game I was playing: I wasn’t somebody who did this easily, and often.

I put it to him fairly bluntly. I simply said, ‘Stephen, I don’t know where you think this is going, but I think you should know, I don’t have sex.’

‘Pardon?’ he said.

That was the kind of thing he always said: never ‘what’, but ‘pardon’, or perhaps, ‘I’m sorry?’

I said, ‘I don’t sleep with people. I used to, but I gave it up.’ And then I explained that I’d had some bitter experiences and that I’d come to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything about sex that made me think I’d want to do it again.

He looked absolutely delighted.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Might I suggest, Lauren, that it wasn’t the experience that was lacking, but the man?’

I knew he was right, but still, I let that point – my belief that sex was overrated – become part of the pantomime between us. We’d meet daily for lunch – sometimes at the hospital and sometimes off campus, and we’d flirt and snuggle and even kiss, but whenever things got too heavy, he’d pull away and say, ‘Now, Lauren, you mustn’t get excited. You know
you don’t have sex
.’

I’d say, ‘Oh please, come on, kiss me again,’ and he’d straighten himself and say, ‘No, let’s pull ourselves together. Let’s talk. Tell me more about you.’

He’d ask me questions about my upbringing. I was wary. I told him about the foster homes, the caravan parks, the motels. He seemed fascinated – I suppose it was so far from his secure upbringing. He asked about my mother. I changed the subject. He didn’t push.

Stephen was the first to challenge my view of myself as somebody with nothing at all to recommend me: no education, no skills or profession, nothing solid beneath my feet. He said things like, ‘Oh my, you are a sweet and determined girl, overcoming all they threw at you!’ He encouraged me to ‘own’ my past – that was the word he used – saying that my ‘gritty circumstances’ had been the making of the woman he loved.

He used those words:
the woman he loved
.

I told him about the men I’d slept with, in the tents, and in the front seat of cars. I remembered the boy who slaughtered the rabbit on the Barrett Estate. Stephen held me close and said, ‘If you were not a good person, none of this would hurt.’

He wanted to know why I was working as an aide, when I could easily have been … I thought he was going to say a ‘nurse’, but in fact he said a ‘medical specialist’. Then he said, ‘You’d run rings around the students who come here as interns. Believe me, you could do it.’

I believed it. I believed
him
.

Or did I? I mean, after all, in those weeks and months of courtship, before we became lovers, before his marriage and my secrets collided, I never talked to Stephen Bass about DeCastella Drive. I didn’t say to him, ‘My mother went to prison. My little brother died.’

I did give some thought to telling him. I knew I would have to tell him, eventually, because I believed that one day I’d win him over and make him mine. I had an idea that I’d show him the photograph of Jake that had been given to me when I’d left Melbourne, and go from there … but I never did.

We went to a hotel room in Sydney. That doesn’t sound very romantic now, but it seemed so to me at the time. It happened a few weeks after Stephen had said to me, ‘You understand, don’t you Lauren, that I don’t actually want to have sex with you?’

We’d been cuddling together and I’d felt him getting aroused. I thought he was kidding. I said, ‘Actually, I think you do.’

He said, ‘No, Lauren, what I want is to
make love
to you.’

Something in me shifted at that moment. Mentally, obviously, I gave up all reserve, but physically, too, I felt something give way. We began to talk about when it might happen.

‘Immediately,’ he said, picking up his tray after lunch one day. ‘Enough of this, Lauren. We must begin
immediately
and then continue, frequently.’

How carefully did he choose those words? They were, to me, a silent promise that Stephen Bass was after more than one night’s sex. He would be back – frequently – after the first time. This wasn’t a fling. It wasn’t an affair. It was love.

There was one thing I was still concerned about, though. I was frozen to the point of paralysis at the idea of getting naked with him. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t been naked with anyone for so long. Stephen worked with pregnant women – and he saw them intimately, in a way that a man in his position must. I kept thinking, ‘What if I’m different, and somehow
worse
than other women? Also, when did a man become ambivalent about the female form? Was it when he saw his first, his tenth, his hundredth, or his five-hundredth woman in stirrups?’

I said to Stephen, ‘You see so many women; how is it you are interested in seeing one more?’

He looked a bit puzzled and didn’t say anything immediately, but later that day, he sent me a note through the internal mail. I picked it up from my pigeon hole, and went into the ladies’ loo to open it. On a Botticelli greeting card, depicting the Birth of Venus, he had written the following lines, in his delicate copperplate:
‘There ought to be a law against a woman having a pussy as comely as yours.’