The Second Cure Read online

  She planned to go straight to the hospital from the airport and just thinking about it made her recall the smell of antiseptic. Her most vivid early memory was of a hospital when she had just turned six. The car accident had broken her kneecap and broken her life, taking away her parents and her little sister. How much of that she’d been aware of at the time she now had no idea. She remembered, though, being given a ragdoll, probably bought by a nurse who felt sorry for this poor orphaned child. It was handmade, the sort that was crafted by elderly aunts and sold at hospital auxiliary shops, and had thick, black woollen hair held in a topknot by a red ribbon. The recollection that stayed with her ever since was of pulling the hair out, dropping the strands on the white lino tiles beside her bed, and staring at the patterns it made. Now she avoided hospitals whenever she could.

  The passenger next to her was chatty and had tried to start up conversations throughout the flight. She was visiting her daughter and son-in-law in Palm Cove, about to become a grandmother for the first time. Charlie had briefly wondered if telling a sympathetic stranger all about Brigid, all about Richard, would help her anxiety, but she resisted. Anything she said would only lead to more questions, and she had no answers for far too many of them. The woman finally fell silent just as the other passengers started talking with each other. It was that magical point in a flight where being friendly wouldn’t entail too much intimacy. She noticed some of the other women donning their purity masks. Whether they were compromising in Capricornia by wearing them, or had been compromising in Australia by not wearing them, she didn’t know. She tried not to stare and reminded herself to buy one.

  Whatever it was that she’d imagined about arriving in Effenberg’s Capricornia – something like crossing over to East Berlin during the Cold War, perhaps – Cairns International Airport wasn’t it. The building was modern and shiny, the process efficient, and the staff were friendly. Everyone seemed to be happy. No, not quite everyone. There were CSSA guards, heavily armed and stern, throughout the airport. They didn’t look too cheery. The other passengers seemed to be ignoring them, so Charlie tried to as well. The DNA probe at Immigration was confronting, but not as disturbing as her imaginings had predicted. Soon she was through Customs and out into the main concourse.

  It looked like pretty much any international airport, and she realised she was almost disappointed. Same shops, same jet-lagged passengers, same overpriced coffees. No, not quite the same shops. No other airport she’d been in had stalls selling cheap purity masks or designer shops displaying their upmarket, overpriced versions in their windows. She settled for an inexpensive acrylic number with exposed elastic to hold it in place. She put it on. It felt as uncomfortable as it looked and made it hard to breathe. She took it off again and stuffed it in her pocket. She’d save it for when she needed it.

  As she was getting her bearings, working out where she’d be able to get a taxi, she was approached by a small girl, maybe seven or eight years old. She was dressed in a confection of white lace and taffeta tied at the waist with a white satin bow, the skirt billowing over a tulle petticoat. Her blonde hair was in ringlets, and across the bottom of her face she wore a diaphanous white mask that revealed rosebud lips. Her eyes were as blue as a Capricornian sky.

  ‘Hello,’ the girl said. Charlie looked around, worrying that the girl might be separated from her parents. But, no, there was a woman only a few metres away, also in white and wearing a lacy purity mask, watching with maternal pride.

  ‘Hello there,’ answered Charlie, feeling bemused.

  ‘Jesus wants me to give you this.’

  The child held out a glossy brochure and Charlie, conscious of the mother’s gaze, took it.

  ‘Welcome to Capricornia,’ said the child. ‘We are the Daughters of the Song of Light,’ she recited earnestly before fleeing back to her mother.

  ‘Oh, well done, sweetie!’ the woman told her. ‘What a good girl you are!’

  At that point, Charlie realised that the mother and daughter weren’t alone. Throughout the concourse were replicas of the couple, other masked women and their daughters. She was surrounded by them. The girls were all dressed in the same white gauzy outfits, were mostly blonde, all around the same age, and all approaching arrivals from the international flights.

  She looked at the pamphlet in her hand. In a font depicting flames, the heading read ‘THE WAGES OF SYN!’ She stared at it for a moment before it registered: it was about thetes. A screed against the ‘Unclean’, identifying T. pestis as the work of Satan. Literally, apparently. She realised with a chill that mother and daughter were still watching her, and the woman nodded at her benignly. She panicked, briefly, wondering how to respond. Was this being picked up by the security cameras? The airport seemed full of them, angled everywhere. Any disappointment she’d felt about Capricornia not feeling sufficiently exotic had gone. Charlie managed a smile and found a new urgency in seeking out a taxi. The automatic doors opened before her and a wave of humidity and heat hit her face. She saw the taxi stand and made her way across, pulling her luggage behind.

  When they’d first moved in together, Charlie and Richard had taken a holiday to Cuba. Richard had wanted to immerse himself in Cuban music, and the local food was a welcome bonus. It’d been one of the best trips they’d had together, especially after Richard persuaded her to take salsa classes with him. They’d been astounded by the cars driving around Havana. The Chevys, Buicks, Studebakers, held together by ingenuity, determination and duct tape, were entrancing.

  The cars in Capricornia struck her as similarly outmoded. Charlie’s taxi was an enormous old automatic Mitsubishi sedan. Not one of the cars she saw on the quick trip between the airport and the hospital was an Auto2, and she only spotted a couple of electric models. She’d have commented on it to her cabbie, but thought he might be offended if she criticised the local taste in vehicles.

  She was dropped off at the front of the hospital and she lugged her suitcase out of the boot. Across the road, she could see a slice of the Pacific, partly obscured by the sea wall. Soon enough it would need to be made higher and the panoramic views of Cairns harbour would be entirely lost. Adjacent to the hospital was an upscale hotel, but Charlie had decided to stay at Brigid’s so she could collect the mail and water the plants. Assuming Brigid had plants, which she doubted. Brigid’s flat was in Solomon Avenue, which Charlie’s vocomm had told her was half an hour by bus from the hospital.

  While she was being busy and practical, she didn’t need to brood too deeply on Brigid’s condition, or on her own fear. The efficiency abruptly ended when she was told at ICU that she wasn’t allowed access to Brigid. Family members only. She explained to the woman at the nurses’ station that she was the partner of Brigid’s brother, effectively Brigid’s sister-in-law.

  ‘Effectively?’ said the nurse. ‘Not actually married, then?’

  ‘No, not actually,’ she answered.

  ‘Have you any evidence of your de facto relationship?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. What sort of evidence would I have? If it comes to that, what sort of evidence would I have if I were married? Do people here carry their marriage certificates around with them?’ It seemed like the cars weren’t the only thing in Capricornia that belonged in the past.

  ‘If you give me your partner’s details, we will contact him to confirm that what you’re saying is true.’

  ‘You’ve got his details. Richard Bayliss. Sydney. You rang him last night to tell him about Brigid. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘One moment,’ the nurse sighed, annoyed at the waste of her time. She disappeared into the office beyond, apparently not wanting to have the phone conversation in public. Charlie joined her luggage in the waiting area and the sounds and smells of hospital engulfed her.

  The nurse returned half an hour later. ‘Your partner,’ she emphasised the word, ‘has formally given you permission to act in his stead, and you may have access to the patient’s personal belongings and control of her affai
rs until she is sufficiently recovered.’

  She found Brigid in ICU 4. She was swathed in bandages and what was visible of her face was a multi-coloured bruise, swollen and shiny. She was on a ventilator and wires poked out from under the sheets, attached to machines with digital readouts and slow, flashing lights. Charlie had to double-check the name above the bed. The person lying there didn’t look like Brigid. She didn’t look like anyone who was likely to survive. If the rest of her was as badly damaged as her face …

  Charlie found a seat, unable to look away from Brigid’s ruined features. She had known the injuries were serious, but the reality of them was shocking. An ICU nurse came in from a glassed-in alcove and adjusted the flow of the drip, giving a quick, sympathetic smile in response to the shock on Charlie’s face. ‘She’s sure been through the wars, hasn’t she?’

  With a tight nod, Charlie looked down, trying to control her tears. The floor beneath her feet was white. White lino tiles.

  Charlie soon fell into a routine. Every morning, she’d spend two hours with Brigid. She’d talk to her, read to her, play music to her, tell her jokes, and hope for a sign she was getting through. There was none. Then she’d go back to the Solomon Avenue flat, have lunch, phone Juliette and Richard, and, despite a resolution she’d made when she first arrived, clean. The exertion was soothing, clearing her mind of the fear and the stress. The flat became a refuge, away from the ubiquitous surveillance cameras and the wretched mask she was wearing whenever she was outside. Or, at least, whenever she remembered, which was probably less often than the locals would like.

  Brigid lived like a pig, Charlie had discovered. The bathroom hadn’t been done in months. The kitchen had dirty dishes in the sink. A cucumber in the fridge had grown furry mould, and when she picked it up it collapsed into liquid stench. There was a bunch of extremely dead gerberas in a vase by the window, sitting in an inch of putrid water. At first, she’d decided just to remove the filth that was actually life-threatening, but cleanse-creep rapidly took over. Soon she was tidying, dusting, vacuuming, washing and polishing. She invaded the larder and removed everything infested by pantry moths and bought traps to keep them away. Soon that wasn’t enough, and she threw away anything past its use-by date and replaced it. She bought new airtight containers and packed the fresh foodstuffs away in them. She changed the sheets on Brigid’s bed (she was sleeping in the guest room) and had the curtains dry-cleaned. At each escalation of her domestic assault, she fretted about how Brigid would react, but then, perversely, was spurred to do more. If Brigid were annoyed with her, it meant that Brigid would have to be well enough to be annoyed. Cleaning the flat started to take on an air of superstitious ritual. And it eased her frustration with Brigid’s slow, almost imperceptible recovery.

  Cooking wasn’t her forte, and so she began to resort to the local restaurants and cafes. Being outside at night made her feel uneasy, endlessly watched and inspected, so she usually settled for takeaway. She tried a Vietnamese restaurant whose menu she’d found stuck to the fridge and it became her regular. One night, chatting to the proprietor, a man called Vinh, she learnt that he knew Brigid, and had been worried about her absence. He’d missed the news reports of the attack and was visibly distressed when Charlie told him what had happened. Vinh joined the list of friends and colleagues she reported to regularly on what she knew of the prognosis.

  She also dealt with the CSSA officers who were investigating the attack. Richard gave them her number, and they’d promised to keep her updated with the investigation, but they told her there were no witnesses and no CCTV footage, so they had little to report. Charlie found that bizarre. She’d visited the spot where the attack had happened and there were at least three security cameras that would have had a clear view. When she mentioned this to one of the officers, his response was sheer impassivity. She wondered what Brigid would make of it. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been surprised at all. Thinking this made her decide not to push, not now.

  One day, a week and a half after she’d arrived, Charlie’s cleaning compulsion took her into a realm that made her feel really uncomfortable. She had decided to sort out Brigid’s wardrobe, and even as she began she knew this might be an intrusion too far. The floor of the cupboard was like an archaeological dig, with layers of shoes, dust and clothes that had fallen off their hangers. The plan was to empty it, vacuum the space out, wash the clothes and clean the shoes. It was a revelation to her that anyone could bear living this way.

  As she dug out the last crumpled work shirt and a slightly greasy pair of sandals, reaching the substrate she found a box. It was plain cardboard, the size that boots might be sold in, with no indication of what might be inside. She paused. She shouldn’t do this. Brigid wouldn’t have buried this so deeply unless it was private. Her curiosity nudged her. ‘Go on, Charlie.’

  It was Mr Darcy, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. She hadn’t seen him since shortly after Winnie’s funeral when Richard and Brigid had sorted through her belongings, keeping some but giving most to charity. She’d never thought to wonder what had become of him. She took him out of the box. She hadn’t actually touched the taxidermied version of Mr Darcy before and was surprised at how soft his thick fur still was, and how it yielded to her fingers. Winnie had doted on him, both in life and in death. Brigid had disliked both incarnations, yet she had kept him, and had looked after him better than most of the things in her flat.

  Charlie smoothed his fur and put him on a shelf in the living room. ‘There, that’s better than being stuck in a box,’ she told him, then smiled at herself. Talking to Mr Darcy, just as Winnie had done all those years earlier. The place felt less empty now. Less lonely. It occurred to her that Mr Darcy must have been one of the last connections she’d had to her late husband. He carried people’s baggage, that cat. Including Brigid’s, apparently. Charlie knew she couldn’t keep him out, but it felt like he was drawing her in, too.

  She found herself irrationally disturbed when, a couple of days later, Vinh told her that he was closing the restaurant for a week. He was going with his son on a trip back to his village just outside Hi An. It meant she’d have to go further afield to find good spring rolls. As she ventured at night beyond Brigid’s neighbourhood, she was struck anew by the sterility of the streets. No graffiti, no rubbish. No music coming from bars. Very few bars, for that matter. She wondered how the locals entertained themselves. In private, apparently. She found the place stultifying and lifeless.

  One night as she walked she saw something dark flit in front of her on the footpath and vanish into the shadows down a laneway. She peered behind a stack of wooden pallets and saw two green eyes glowing at her. It was a black cat. Seeing one alive, on the streets, made her catch her breath with delight. There were, of course, cats returning to Australia as the vaccine allowed more to be bred, but few people let them out at night and strays were unheard of. The cat mewed at her, sniffed her proffered hand, then wound itself sinuously around her calves. There might be many things wrong with Capricornia, but she envied them the casual appearance of a cat in the street.

  She moved on, and the mood was shattered by a shouted voice from a passing car.

  ‘Put your fucking mask on, you slut!’

  She recoiled as though slapped. The car was gone, but the threat hung in the air around her.

  Two days later, she got the call from the hospital.

  Voices. Sometimes, fading in and out.

  I’ve been dusting, mainly. Charlie’s voice? Can’t be.

  The world beyond, red through eyelids. What’s the propofol dosage? Cold, so cold. Snow and ice. She’s triggering breaths. Another voice, close. Really? The first. Yes, she’s spont venting.

  Time stopped or time racing? One two three lift. Movement, on a trolley. Silence. It’s so hot out there. I don’t know how you cope with the tropics.

  Sleeping awake, waking asleep. So many flowers … I’m not allowed to bring them in here. Humming in the night. Machines. A machine, sighing. O
r is that her own voice?

  Exploring … Coughing: god what is that thing?

  Richard and Juliette send their love.

  My hand. Someone’s holding my hand. Charlie. You’ll have to go outside for this, Charlie. We’ll come and get you.

  More people. More voices. ‘Brigid? Brigid, you’re in ICU. Intensive care. Squeeze my fingers if you understand.’

  Understand …

  ‘Brigid, I want you to squeeze my hand. Can you do that for me?’ Come on, hand! ‘Yes, good work! Now, a deep breath … Good, again?’

  It was an effort, but the air went deep into her lungs.

  ‘Now, cough.’ She coughed. It hurt.

  ‘You’re in intensive care, and there’s a breathing tube down your throat, Brigid, and we’re going to remove it. It’s going to sting and you might feel like vomiting. Don’t be scared. Squeeze my hand if you understand.’ Squeeze. She squeezed.

  ‘Okay. We’re taking it out now. Deep breath … and out.’ Oh shit oh jesus that hurts what the fuck they’re ripping my throat out –

  Brigid opened her eyes to another day. Or was it the same day? Blurry, as though she’d put on someone’s reading glasses. She registered that someone was sitting on a chair by the window. With an effort, she focussed. It was Charlie, reading. She hadn’t imagined her voice after all. As she stared at her, her friend looked up from her book. A smile. ‘Hello, Brigid.’