‘You’re leaving me, that’s all I understand at this moment. You’re leaving me…’ she gasped around the great hollow sobs that kept betraying her.
There was silence then the click of the receiver.
A sharp contraction toppled her—she fell back on the bed, clutching at herself. By the time she crawled on her hands and knees to the bathroom, her thighs were streaming with blood.
19
JULIA LAY IN THE HOSPITAL BED, floating on an analgesic balloon. It hovered, shiny, fleshy-pink and obscene, like a profane zeppelin, its great billowing circumference pushing everything of the outside world into irrelevance.
‘Hey Julia, I know you’re awake.’
Naomi’s voice echoed faintly in Julia’s mind, each consonant falling upon the skin of the zeppelin and causing it to ripple like the surface of a pond. Regardless, Julia drifted along, her limbs deliciously leaden by a drug-induced torpor. A fruity scent reminiscent of oranges and violets floated across the bed.
‘Julia?’
She opened her eyes reluctantly. Naomi was holding a vase crowded with lilies and freesias, waiting for Julia to catch the perfume. Satisfied her friend was now fully awake, Naomi placed the flowers onto the bedside table.
‘So, you’re back in the land of the living.’ Naomi studied the geneticist. She looked truly dreadful: her eyes were puffy from crying; stress had etched a rigidity into the lower half of her face, giving the impression that she was perpetually clenching her jaw; her hair was unwashed and straggly; and she looked as if she’d lost at least seven pounds. But what was most devastating was the intense vulnerability that radiated from her. The layers Julia had carefully constructed over the years—irony, wariness, humour, curiosity—appeared to have been erased overnight, and the energetic professional had been replaced by an emaciated parody. It was as if Julia had relinquished her body entirely and now a wax effigy lay in her place, with huge rabbit eyes staring up out of a shrunken face.
‘I lost the baby.’ Julia’s voice was a monotone stripped of emotion.
‘I’m so sorry, sweetie.’
‘I can’t imagine life without Klaus. There is such a level of unreality about this.’
‘I’ll take you away. We’ll rent a house in Mexico and make voodoo dolls out of his clothes. I have the perfect hatpin. You’ll recover. It doesn’t feel like it now, but you will. It’s not the end of the world.’
‘It is the end of the world. It’s the end of my world. I love him, do you understand? I want him back. I want my child back, my life…’ Her voice broke into harsh dry sobbing.
Undone by such grief, Naomi felt helpless. She stroked Julia’s arm. ‘He’s probably not coming back, Julia.’
Julia swung back to her, suddenly frenetic. ‘You’ve seen him?’
‘I’ve spoken to him.’
‘Does he know about the baby?’
Naomi nodded, then, finding it too painful to look into Julia’s eyes, averted her gaze to the temperature chart pinned above the bed. ‘My ex-husband knows a great hit man,’ she joked. Again, the inappropriate comment rattled down to the floor.
‘You know, I felt the baby move inside of me before…’ her voice faltered again, ‘he was so real, so alive…They’ve taken all these tests; it could have been my uterus, my cervix, they just don’t know. But I do. It was shock, Naomi. How could he? How could they?’ Julia whispered.
A nurse passed by, wheeling an old woman whose drip preceded her like a victorious trident. As she caught sight of Julia and Naomi, she broke into a Yiddish lullaby in the clear childish voice of an eight year old. The two silently watched the old woman’s progress, Julia with her eyes, Naomi with her smile stuttering brilliantly like a faulty fluorescent, both secretly interpreting her appearance as a bad omen.
‘The ironic thing is that they’ve put me on antidepressants but they take ten days to kick in. I could die of grief in that time.’
She struggled to sit up. Naomi squeezed her hand, but Julia’s unhappiness continued to ooze out of her like a slow poison.
‘But think of the benefits,’ Naomi replied. ‘A guilt-free medically justified selfishness during which you can indulge yourself outrageously and your friends will be expected to support you…’
Encouraged by what she thought was a faint gleam in Julia’s eyes, she continued. ‘Seriously, though, they will help you prioritise what’s really important.’
Julia stared blankly at the wall, then suddenly her voice emerged, urgent, frantic. ‘He won’t stay with her, you’ll see, it’s just a temporary thing. Fear maybe—or maybe the pressure was simply too much. He’ll come to his senses.’ ‘Julia, it was Klaus who rang to tell me what had happened. Sweetheart, I don’t think he’s coming back.’ Julia’s skin seemed to grey visibly. She leant across and grasped Naomi’s arm, her nails digging into her skin.
‘It was a boy, tiny but perfectly formed. I’m going to fight. Do you understand? I’m going to fight to get my husband back.’
20
Mayfair, 1861