Chapter 20
MATILDA-JANE
CAIRNS HOSPITAL
Morning in the trauma hospital in Cairns smelled like coffee, bleach, and formaldehyde.
The last one was strange. Slouched in the stuffed chair, Nev ruminated on it over a paper cup of piss-weak coffee.
Her underwear felt stiff, stuck to her legs and faded jeans.
A burgundy stain like a cow’s kidney covered her lap from pocket to pocket.
She would have bet her last dime it was a ruptured spleen, but no.
Reg had guessed appendix. They had both been wrong.
An ectopic pregnancy lodged in a fallopian tube had burst like a frangible bullet.
Last night the emergency laparotomy, open abdominal surgery, had taken over two hours.
The surgeon said the salpingectomy, removal of the fallopian tube, had been “complicated” and “a success.”
Reg hadn’t met Nev’s eyes since nurses wheeled Ron away at sunrise for X-rays and an MRI of her spinal cord.
Nev was less concerned on that front since she had felt Ron writhe around before the ambulance arrived, something quadriplegics generally don’t do.
Nev was, however, worried she might have cracked some of Ron’s ribs doing chest compressions after Ron stopped breathing.
Nev was still shocked that it had worked.
After morning rounds, nurses moved Ron from the windowless post-surgical intensive care unit to a recovery room with a window. Ron lay drugged in the bed, tubes in and out, hooked up to machines, going nowhere fast. Pale and still, blue fingers and mouth, looked dead, but the dead don’t shiver.
Ron had a line between her brows in the middle of her forehead. Was that new? Nev couldn’t remember. She had a headache, needed a drink.
When Ron appeared to be snoring, Reg stepped out to make a call. That was when Nev oozed into the bedside chair like a guilty ghost, filling the void he had left.
She was careful not to disturb the other patients.
She had been awake all night and was running on fumes.
Adrenaline long gone. Stale sweat button-down shirt and dried blood jeans.
That was the kind of person she was, she reckoned—she saved people by soaking up their blood like a sponge—that was her super power.
Of course, that was nonsense. That was the exhaustion talking. Ron’s wound had been on the inside. Nev couldn’t have stopped it. The blood on Nev’s jeans was period blood, miscarriage blood.
Nev wondered where the blood on the inside had gone.
When the surgeon had vacuumed it out of Ron’s abdominal cavity, where had it gone?
Was there a blood vacuum somewhere in the hospital with a blood vacuum bag in a closet somewhere?
Did it clot, once exposed to air? Did it stink?
Was that the sour formaldehyde scent she was smelling?
The coagulating blood of all of these patients combined together?
Reg returned looking broken. His clothes were still immaculate. Green polo shirt and beige cargo shorts. Rolex watch and leather thongs. He sniffed. “Tilda-Jane is in the hall.”
“You call her?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have the heart to run her off.”
“I can,” Nev said, impulsively. It would be easy. If she could do what she did last night, she could do anything. God loved her.
Reg perked up. “Would you really?”
Nev nodded, stood. Reg squeezed her shoulder in thanks.
She opened the door.
Ron’s mum waited on the other side, thumbs in belt.
Matilda-Jane had given Ron her remarkable height, broad shoulders, narrow hips and long legs, but in everything else Ron must have been the clone of her unknown bio dad the way Mattie was Reg’s clone.
Neither of the Madonna kids looked like this woman.
With a frown, Matilda-Jane gave Nev a bored once-over, sizing her up, granting Nev permission to do the same.
Pale blue eyes—Scandinavian, scary—long straight yellow hair, wide-brimmed leather hat, tanned, freckles, big tits, built like an Olympic rower if they were also a builder, an army commando and a bikini model.
“Who are you?” asked Outback Barbie.
“You know who I am.”
“I’m here to see my daughter.”
“Not a good time, love.”
Matilda-Jane sneered. “Says who?”
“Says I, and Common Sense.”
“I drove five hours to see her. You’re a rando; they let you in.”
Nev swallowed. Across from this paragon of posture it was painfully obvious that she slouched.
She had inherited that unflattering habit from her parents as a trick to pass gently through the world.
Strangers called her “sir” when she slouched, and treated her like she didn’t need help, which she usually didn’t.
This irrational urge to pull her shoulders back and puff out her chest, but then what? What was the end-game of swagger? Nev knew she couldn’t maintain it. Courage had always been available to her in short flashes under pressure, like a combustion engine. “I’m not a random person.”
Ron and Mattie’s mother finally glanced down and noticed the dried blood on Nev’s jeans. Her glare softened.
Pissing contest over, it felt appropriate to hug. They pulled each other into a rib-crunching embrace, not one of those loose back-patting deals Reg was guilty of forcing on strangers during rugby season. Matilda-Jane smelled like patchouli, cigarettes and dogs.
“How is she?”
Nev didn’t say, because she didn’t know.
“My mate at the station reckoned it was bad.” Matilda-Jane rubbed Nev’s arms. “How’d you know to go over there?”
“Lucky guess.”
“An energetic thing?” Matilda-Jane nodded approvingly. “I’m intuitive, too. Thank god you went over there when you did. You saved her life. Did they say if she had organ failure? How’s her brain? Did she have seizures? A stroke?”
Nev shook her head. “Not as I know. Seems she’ll pull through.”
“I had a mate who bled out. Late-stage shock. Lack of oxygen killed him. It’s like drowning.”
Nev winced. “I’m aware.”
“Crushed under his own ute. Another mate bled out after a fall. Ruptured spleen. Fell asleep, never woke up.”
Matilda Jane began to push open the door to Ron’s room. Nev stopped the door with her boot.
“Sit down, poppet,” Matilda-Jane said. “Don’t mess with mama bear.”
Nev frowned, crossed her arms. Matilda-Jane tried again to open the door. The door hit Nev’s boot again. Matilda-Jane laughed and reached out with both hands.
“If you touch me, you will regret it.”
“I’m only moving you off to the side, poppet.”
“No, you’re not.” Nev regretted her empty stomach. She was too old and dignified to fight this voluptuous Viking like a school kid at recess. Surely. “If you manhandle me, I’ll scream, and you’ll be kicked out.”
“Oh, I don’t have to manhandle you,” Matilda-Jane said cheerfully. “I only have to ask nicely.”
“You’re not listening.”
“You’re not in charge here, Neville. You may be god on your little dollhouse farm, but here you’re out of your jurisdiction.
You’re only a bogan like me with bad teeth and too many dogs.
I didn’t drive five hours to be turned away.
What are you afraid of? Afraid I’d hurt her in her sleep?
How do you figure that? I don’t know what she’s told you, but I’ve never done anything illegal to her. ”
“Where have you been?” The question came out harsher than Nev intended.
How come I’ve never met you before? How come you haven’t been doing your job?
“You created a vacuum when you left that no one can fill! I don’t want to be your kid’s mum!
I want to be my fucking self, and live my fucking life, not be the solution to your lack of responsibility! ”
“I’ve been trying to get back in with her for years! She doesn’t talk to me.”
Nev raised her eyebrows. Whose fault is that? “You should have had Ron’s back. Kids need their mothers. They need to be able to trust them. You messed with her head. That fucked my life in ways you will never understand.”
Matilda-Jane relented. “Let me see her while she’s asleep.”
Nev shook her head.
Matilda-Jane jerked the door again.
Nev kept her foot in front of the door. “Take a walk. I need a smoke.”
Outside, lighting up together in the car park, Nev felt generous.
“She hates me,” Matilda-Jane complained.
“Whose fault is that?”
Matilda-Jane perched on the edge of the curb with her heels hanging in mid-air, then proceeded to do calf raises on the balls of her feet. “Don’t judge me.”
It was oddly familiar, talking to this older version of Ron.
This lesser version. It was sad, really.
She wondered what Matilda-Jane’s childhood had been like.
She had been a teen mother, a single mum, below the poverty line.
Homeless, jobless, living out of a van. How the hell would she have learned emotional intelligence?
From one of her redneck boyfriends? From the man who worked at the petrol station?
Matilda-Jane was smiling to herself at some private joke, for all appearances enjoying the weather and the day.
She had snakeskin boots and a homemade wallet attached to a dog chain hanging out of a back pocket of her leather pants.
It was like looking at a character out of a Mad Max film.
Matilda-Jane was larger than life—not in a good way.
Nev took a drag from her cigarette, blew out smoke. She needed to quit, would quit this year. Matilda-Jane probably had a handle of Bundy in her van and wouldn’t blink an eye if Nev suggested shots. Nev considered it, decided she would rather die. “You’re exactly like they said you were.”
Matilda-Jane snorted. “Did they say Crocodile Dundee?”
Nev nodded.
The woman tossed her cigarette stub in the bushes. “You’re smaller than I thought you would be.”
“That’s what I hear.”
Matilda-Jane ran her fingers through Nev’s short hair. “This your natural color? It’s nice. Like sand in Valencia.”
“You go for the bullfights?” Nev asked.
“How’d you guess?”
“I’ve been,” Nev admitted.
“Two types of people: those who like killing things and those who don’t.”