Knitting Read online

  “Don’t knock words,” said Sandra. “They’re the best form of communication we’ve got. Besides, I am doing it. I’m sitting right here with you, doing it.”

  “Not really,” said Martha. “You’re knitting something for yourself, not for the exhibition. And you don’t enjoy it. You just want to keep an eye on me.”

  Sandra was stung. Martha was watching her, beadily, still knitting fast.

  “Yes, I wanted to see you working. I like watching you. And I am worried you won’t finish in time, so I guess you’re right in a way. But it’s more than that, Martha. I enjoy your company. And I want to do something different, get better at knitting. It’s good to try to do something with my hands, even if I’m not good at it. But you didn’t really want me here tonight. I’m sorry for being in the way.” There was a genuine humility in her voice.

  That night in the bathroom, systematically cleaning her teeth, Martha looked in the mirror and saw that her reflection was hard and angry, with tears in its eyes. She was unraveling, and knitting herself into something else, something ugly, something miserable and nasty, something worse than a mistake.

  March

  MARTHA WAS NOT sleeping well. She kept waking up sweating, even with her little fan turned directly at the bed. She’d doze off, then suddenly jerk awake. Sandra’s list of requirements ran around inside her head like a nest of angry ants. When she finally slept, her work still tumbled about in her head. Patterns, numbers, needles. She was caught up in wool, winding around her softly and surely as cobweb. And here was Sandra coming toward her, hefting something almighty heavy, using both hands.

  Martha couldn’t make out what Sandra was dragging behind her. Then she saw that it was her own three bags, her three bags full of mistakes, the big stripy bag, the carpetbag, and the heavy brown suitcase. Sandra’s face was as stern as a law court. She stopped in front of Martha and opened the stripy bag and pulled out the first garment, the baby’s matinee jacket with the scalloped edge that had gone wrong in the middle of the left front. And then a little top she had been making for her niece, and after that another piece of big green knitting, and so they kept coming, all the errors Martha had ever made, starting with the matinee jacket, working back through the forty-plus years of her long knitting life. The unfinished hat for her cousin, the gloves with the holes where the fingers joined on, the puckered waist of a child’s dress, even a hot water bottle cover she had once started making for Manny. So many wrong things, more than Martha could count, more than she knew she had, a great pile growing and growing from the bottomless bag. Sandra and Martha were stepping and clambering over them like too much washing on the laundry floor. Martha tried to stop Sandra, tried to stuff everything back where it belonged, but Sandra laughed and skipped away to the top of another pile of rejects, where she hauled up the carpetbag and unclasped it with small, strong fingers. A great clump of knitting burst out, the yellowed cotton tablecloth Martha had started for Malcolm’s wife and in her anger had never finished, a series of ugly potholders for a charity sale, a tea cozy with no hole for the spout. No matter how many things Sandra pulled from the bags, there was always something more, another error of judgment, another bad feeling, everything bristling with needles and tape measures, stitch holders and thousands of wool ends never darned in, tangled knitting and crumpled bits of difficult pattern, scrappy bits of paper covered in Martha’s frantic writing trying to get the things right. Such a waste of wool and time and effort, such a waste, all her nastiness and inadequacy piled up for everyone to see. The unbearable shame of it, and nowhere to hide.

  No! Martha shouted out. No! No! Stop! But her voice was tiny and ineffectual, with no power against Sandra, who kept on, relentless and merciless, flicking open the rusty metal latches on the old brown suitcase that Martha hadn’t opened for years, dragging out dingy brown garments from a time in hospital, misshapen teenage attempts at clinging mohair cardigans, dirty little bits of knitting from childhood. And now Sandra was jeering and prancing about on it. Martha could hear the patterns tearing and the needles snapping as Sandra held up Martha’s miserable life, item by item, all the things that Martha had made to cover herself, to hide and please and pacify.

  It was hot. Martha was sweating, boiling with embarrassment, her face and hands slick with perspiration as she chased Sandra through piles of garments that reached up to tangle around her legs. Sandra, light as a feather, danced away, mean and accusing, and out of reach.

  Martha gave a great cry of pain and shame and fury, and woke herself up.

  She switched on the light. Around her everything was neat and orderly, her clothes folded on the chair, her slippers cheek to cheek like an old married couple, her glasses and watch side by side on the bedside table. All just as it should be, except the bed, which was a mess. The sheets were damp, her nightie was drenched. She could feel perspiration running sideways from her forehead to her pillow. She ached all over.

  She was sick, that was it. She was sick and she’d had a nightmare, just a nightmare, not real. Sandra wasn’t really like that, she wasn’t like that at all. But the bags and their contents were real, that was the trouble. Martha’s face flamed at the thought of them.

  The pain started then, vague at first, low in her belly and around in her back, a dragging feverish pain that wouldn’t localize and wouldn’t go away.

  For the rest of that troubled night Martha rocked with the pain. It didn’t occur to her that she could get help, that she could ring a doctor for advice or call an ambulance. She knew Mary Sherbet next door would jump at a chance to do something for her, but she didn’t have the energy to cope with Mary Sherbet fussing around in her pink pompom slippers. It never crossed her mind to let Sandra know that she was ill or to ring her brother, far away on the farm. Martha did what she always did in the face of bad trouble: she retreated deep down inside herself, where it was dark and warm, and waited till things improved up on the surface.

  She took a couple of painkillers, fished out from a pocket in a knitting bag, and though they soothed her a little, she began to alternate between heat and shivering. In the middle of the night she refilled her hot water bag and got the old baby blanket out of the camphor chest. She remade the bed, smoothed the sheets she had rucked with her tossing, and gave her pillow a couple of feeble bangs against the wall. Tucking herself back under the quilt, she shut her eyes and held a corner of the camphor-fragrant blanket close to her nose.

  The pain went on and on. She made it into shapes. Her guts were winding up like a ball of wool. A pair of knitting needles was stabbing at her soft insides. Scissors were going snippety snip at the back of her rib cage. Maybe she had rocks in her belly. She drew her knees up and lay face down in the pillow, leaning on her elbows, rocking to and fro. Was this what it was like having a baby? She got colder and colder, until her teeth rattled in her head like a tin box full of marbles. She was so hot she threw off all the blankets and lay sweating on the sheet.

  But behind the pain and confusion and semimadness was something else, a sensation just beyond her nerve ends, a kind of singing. The singing carried on, regardless of the heat and cold, deeper than the chills and the furnace, never loud or even insistent, simply there. It was a high, thin music pulling at the edge of consciousness, toothache sweet, a counterpoint melody to pain. Through the throbbing drumbeat of Martha’s misery it transposed itself, time and time again, in a thousand different variations.

  SANDRA looked at her watch and apologized to Kate.

  “Sorry, I’d better go, it’s getting late. I just want to pass by Martha’s. We didn’t part well last time, and I need to touch base. If her light’s off I won’t go in.”

  Sandra wasn’t sure about Martha’s sleeping habits, though she suspected Martha was an early riser. It was after ten, but the light was still on. Sandra knocked.

  Martha opened the door and Sandra took a step backward. Martha looked like a refugee from a war zone. Her hair was loose and stringy, she was wearing a dirty cardigan over a
nightie, there were hollow shadows under her eyes.

  “Martha! Are you all right?”

  “No. Excuse me.” Martha disappeared, leaving Sandra on the doorstep. Sandra stepped inside the door and heard retching from the bathroom.

  “Can I come in?”

  There was no reply. Sandra waited. Martha came back, steadying herself against the wall, almost falling into a chair.

  “How long have you been sick?”

  “Don’t know. Three days, maybe.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “How long have you been vomiting?”

  Martha tried to think. “Don’t know.”

  “Come on, I’m taking you to the hospital.” Martha stayed miserably hunched in the chair while Sandra got her slippers and a coat, but at the last minute Martha said feebly, “I need my bags.”

  “No you don’t,” said Sandra. “You’re sick. I’ve packed everything you need. Come on.”

  “I’ve got to have them.”

  “What for? What’s in them?”

  “Things I need.”

  “Look, Martha,” said Sandra gently, kneeling down next to her, “you’re sick. Whatever is in them will just have to wait. Come on.”

  “Not going without them.”

  Martha’s cheeks were pink with fever, her eyes glittered with determined tears. Sandra sighed.

  “Oh, all right. Come on, then. But one will do, surely.” The carpetbag, the smallest.

  “No. I need them all.” Martha was distressed and sick. Sandra didn’t have the heart to persist.

  By the time she got Martha to the emergency room at the big city hospital, it was after eleven-thirty. There were only fifteen-minute parking spaces available. Sandra, carrying Martha’s bags, walked her in to the bright lights of the ER and found her a seat. There was a line at the desk; she’d better find a park and help Martha with the paperwork later.

  Eventually she found a vacant parking space at the back of the hospital. Taking what she thought was a shortcut on her way back, she became disoriented and found herself at the junction of two long corridors. Which way? At one end she saw a man dressed in white and pushing a soft wide broom.

  “Lost?” he asked kindly as she hurried toward him.

  “Yes. Where’s the ER?”

  “Come with me. I’ll show you the way.”

  There were many twists and turns, more than Sandra would have thought possible. She glanced at her companion. He had a stillness about him that was comforting.

  “How do you ever find your way about?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’ve been here a long time,” he said. “Cleaner, guide, visitor—whatever. Here we are.”

  And there was Martha, still seated with her head against the pillar. Sandra turned to thank the man, but he had gone.

  After the quiet, cool walk through the hospital, Sandra suddenly felt she was entering some kind of surreal comedy. Martha hadn’t moved since Sandra had left her. People waited everywhere, propped on chairs, parked on beds, listlessly watching the TV blaring from a screen too high for anyone to comfortably see. Young interns in white coats looked tired and harried. Posters on the walls showed detailed pictures of the digestive system, melanomas, lung disease. Sandra’s heart sank. Oh, yes. Public hospitals. She suddenly remembered the rumors of long waits, though with her private health insurance she had not taken much notice.

  Martha was still wearing her overcoat and shivering, though the night was warm. Earlier, in the car, reaching for the hand brake, Sandra had brushed against Martha’s hand and felt the heat coiling off her, dry heat, like a hot Adelaide summer. But still Martha shivered, thrusting her hands deep in her pockets. It was obvious that she wanted to lie down. Only the straight, hard back of the waiting-room chair kept her upright.

  Sandra spoke briefly to her and went to the desk with Martha’s Medicare card to fill out the forms. She had not been inside a hospital since Jack died; everything in her wanted to retreat. She hoped that when the staff saw how sick Martha was they’d rush her through. Sandra had an early start the next day, with back-to-back commitments both morning and afternoon. She couldn’t afford to be here too long.

  “How long will we have to wait?” she asked the woman behind the counter.

  “Depends. You’ll be seen in order of priority, not arrival. We get accidents.”

  “She’s very feverish.”

  “Yes, I can see she’s miserable. We’ll do our best.”

  Sandra watched the woman checking the forms. She had a kind face, but she looked tired. The graveyard shift. She looked up, her finger halfway down the page.

  “Are you next of kin?”

  “No. Why?”

  “We need her next of kin. Are you a relative? Partner?”

  Sandra snorted a surprised laugh. “No. Just a friend.”

  “Well, we need all the details. Could you ask her, please?”

  Sandra went back to Martha.

  “You have to put next of kin on the form. What shall I write?”

  “Mal.”

  “Mal?”

  “My brother, the one that helped me buy the flat. The farmer.” Martha gave the address and phone number. Sandra wrote the phone number down for herself as well, handed the form back, and went to sit by Martha. It was going to be a long wait. She picked up a magazine.

  “JACQUI TEMPLE’S SECRET ABORTION” shouted a headline. Who was Jacqui Temple? Sandra kept on reading; Martha glanced at the article in Sandra’s lap and turned her head away. Sandra flicked through the pages. What did she know about Martha, really? Only what Martha chose to tell. Was she more fragile than she looked, as Kate had suggested? Was Martha’s version of herself true? Sandra had never bothered to probe further. It took energy to ask, to get to know someone, and Sandra had been too full of her work, too full of her own survival, to think about Martha.

  “I’m going to throw up.”

  Sandra looked around. She was no good at this. What did you do with an adult who wanted to vomit in a public place and who wasn’t well enough to make it to the toilet? The two potted plants looked totally inadequate. She approached the reception desk and stood in front of the same woman.

  “My friend is nauseous.”

  The woman glanced at Martha.

  “Come in here.”

  Sandra picked up the bags, and the nurse led them into a bay where half a dozen people were lying on beds. A student nurse half pulled the curtain around them, but the end was left open, and the old man opposite, with his plump little wife, stared straight back. The nurse handed Martha a stainless steel bowl, into which she promptly vomited. The nurse took it away and brought it back clean. Or was it a new one? Martha was holding a hankie to her mouth with her eyes screwed up.

  Sandra fought a rising agitation. Hospital memories jabbed. She didn’t want to be here: it was too soon. They had had their share of emergency admissions. Jack, too, had vomited, his skin yellow with jaundice; near the end, even the sheets had yellow smudges. She could hardly stand it.

  Get a grip on yourself, Sandra. She turned back to Martha, who retched again. Sandra turned her face away: it seemed rude to look at someone in such an intimate moment. The spasm passed.

  “Are you in pain?”

  Martha nodded and pointed to her back.

  “Here. It’s quite bad, really. But I’ve stopped feeling sick.” Her breathing was short and shallow, and her face was damp and shiny now. She had thrown off her jacket. She handed the bowl to Sandra, who stood holding it helplessly, then put it on the stainless steel trolley next to a pile of sealed syringes.

  “Do you want me to rub your back?”

  Martha shook her head vehemently.

  They would just have to wait.

  Martha was cold. Sandra took off her jacket and threw it over the hospital blanket for extra warmth.

  After an hour Sandra went back to the desk.

  “Just how long is this going to take?”

  “I’m so
rry. It’s order of priority. We’ve had a gunshot wound and a cardiac arrest.”

  “My friend is really sick. This just isn’t good enough. One minute she’s hot, and then she gets the chills.”

  “I’m sorry. We can’t do anything about it until she sees the registrar. If you want to be seen more quickly you’ll have to go to a private twenty-four-hour clinic.”

  Sandra went back to Martha and offered to take her somewhere else. She, Sandra, would be happy to pay. Martha wouldn’t go.

  “No, here now. Don’t want to move. You go home.”

  Sandra thought about the lecture she was to give in the morning. And then two meetings and a double tutorial. She could feel herself getting more and more agitated. She had to get out.

  “It’s just that I have to work tomorrow.”

  “I know. Kind of you to bring me. I’ll be fine.”

  Just then a nurse came in.

  “I’ll take your temperature.” She pressed the thermometer into Martha’s ear.

  “You’re a regular little tropical paradise.” She swept Sandra’s jacket away. “Who put this on you?”

  “I did. She was cold.”

  “I know you feel cold,” said the nurse to Martha, ignoring Sandra, but speaking for her benefit nonetheless. “But that’s because you’ve got a temperature. Your body is trying to cool you down. You mustn’t rug up, it will make you worse. Leave it off.”

  Martha’s teeth were chattering. She looked utterly miserable. For a second Sandra saw Jack’s face superimposed over Martha’s. She reached out a hand instinctively and placed it on Martha’s arm. Martha still radiated heat like an oven.

  “Are you really sure you don’t need me?”

  “No. Go.”

  Sandra left the cubicle where Martha lay in a shivering huddle on the bed. She gave her name and phone number to the woman at the counter and headed for the exit. She wanted to run. The big double doors slid open. A cold front had come through, and the night air slapped at her face. The car, covered in dew, was bleak and cold. Her panic began to subside. She wiped the back window with her bare hand.