‘The machine looks like the Tardis,’ Leslie tries to explain to the side of her husband’s face as they drive west out of Brisbane. ‘Except that it looks futuristic, you know, grey plastic, smooth, and it has this giant phone handset thing attached to it.’

‘So it’s actually nothing like the time machine,’ he says, cocking his eyebrow at her.

‘But it feels like the time machine, you know, when you see it across the room.  You feel like something momentous is about to happen, that you are going to be transported somewhere.  Somewhere exciting.’

‘Bloody hell,’ he says, twisting his shoulders to the right, trying to merge onto the Motorway. ‘Bloody traffic.’  Then they’re in the slipstream, he relaxes, and she pretends to look around at the traffic so she can gauge his body language to see whether she should continue her story.

Maybe the Tardis story isn’t one you can tell out loud, she thinks.  Maybe an email to her sisters would be better. They might indulge her fantasies.  Herself as young heroine, on a quest, entering the chamber of the high priestess, looking for transformation, healing. Met at the entrance by the handmaidens, who wrap her in a toga, and lead her to the altar. She disrobes, lies down.  The maidens position her body, move her arm above her head, then drift quietly out of the room.  The enormous handset glides over her body from right to left, stopping over her chest, a metre above her.  She stares up at long black metal prongs, like teeth in a metallic mouth, sliding back into a grimace, leaving a gap the shape of her breast.  The high-pitched beep means the machine is emitting radiation, at carefully calculated angles, to radiate as little of her lungs and oesophagus as possible.  She stays still as instructed, feels nothing.  The handset moves like a slow spaceship around to her right, curving around her side, smiles again and radiates her breast from below.

The handmaidens say that her skin will probably burn and peel by the fifth or sixth week, but for now it is fine.  It’s her first week.  She applies her specially purchased aqueous cream every day, in her neat, spare motel room by the hospital.  The radiation only takes an hour out of each day.  She spends the rest of her time exploring: the Museum, the Art Gallery, anything free.  She discovers lectures at the State Library, the Science Centre, at the universities. The more obscure the better.  “Sei Shōnagon vs. Lady Murasaki – Sensibility vs. Artifice in 11th Century Japanese Literature” was her favourite.  Apparently, the court ladies amused themselves making lists of things about men that irritated them.  “A man you’ve had to conceal in some unsatisfactory hiding place, who then begins to snore.”  Leslie smiles.

She reaches over, turns the heater up, looks at her husband with what she hopes is a conciliatory expression.
‘I could take the bus down on Monday and back on Friday if that would make things easier for you,’ she offers. ‘It was good of you to drive me to all my chemo sessions, but that was only one day every three weeks.  I’d be happy to take the bus.”
He raises his eyebrow into its don’t-give-me-that-crap configuration, but doesn’t say anything.

‘It would be good for me to learn to get down here on my own,’ she tries again. ‘Just in case I decided to, I don’t know, study maybe.’

‘Study?’ he says. ‘What would you need to do that for? You’ve got a job. And you’ve got me and the kids to look after.’

‘The kids don’t need me as much now,’ she says. ‘It’s just, you know, that thing where you ask yourself what you will regret not doing, you know, on your deathbed.’

‘You’re nowhere near your bloody deathbed,’ he shouts. ‘Stop bunging it on.  The doctor said you are fine, they’re just doing the radiotherapy as an extra precaution. When it’s finished, we’ll get back to our lives exactly as they were before.’

‘But we have to make a few changes, healthier food, meditation–,’she sees his expression, quickly adds: ‘not for you, for me, inner peace, all that stuff.’

‘Crap. We’ll just get through this, then back to normal.’

She shuts her eyes, adjusts her turban, leans back on the headrest and mentally composes another email, this time about the chemo sessions.

It’s like being embalmed, she begins, imagining her sisters, one in Perth, one in Sydney, reading her words, deletes, casts about in her mind for a better visual. She starts again.

It’s like being a mannequin. You know, the ones you see in shop windows before they are dressed.  You are not just bald, you are completely hairless, everywhere.  No hair on your legs, no pubes, no armpit hair, no nostril hairs, no eyebrows. You have no idea how a lack of eyebrows impacts on your facial expressiveness.  You can’t indicate surprise, disdain, hurt, bewilderment, scepticism. Your bald steroid-plumped face emits a bland acceptance of everything – your treatments, your advisors, your husband.

It’s sort of cool, though, she continues.  You don’t sweat, you have no mucus in your nose, no bodily fluids at all.  You smell like plastic. You feel like plastic, like a Barbie Goes-To-Chemo Doll.  In a way, you like it – this stripping back to the essentials, this alien pre-pubescent pre-human non-you. Your husband likes the look of your doll-body, but not the feel of it.  He wants the old you back, the one who liked sex.  You watch for sprouts of hair, on your head, your ankles.  Signs of new life.

She shifts in her seat.  Her head is itchy. She would have shown him the baby fuzz that emerged this week on her scalp, but he was in such a rush.  He didn’t even come into her motel room, just picked her and her suitcase up from the curb.  

‘Want a coffee?’ he asks.

‘Really?’ She opens her eyes, startled. He never wants to stop for coffee.  He is the quintessential drive-straight-home let’s-not-waste-any-time man.  He must be trying to make up. She feels a surge of tenderness in her chest. Maybe this is it. Maybe he is going to show me how much he cares and that will melt my plastic heart and I will metamorphose into a human woman and love him once again. 

They pull off the highway into a carpark bordered by a row of shops.  She hops out of the car, girlish with excitement, bats her eyes at him, deliberately, flirtatiously.  Lucky she still has an eyelash or two.

The bakery doesn’t sell coffee or tea so they go to the café. She walks in, is assaulted by a fog of deep-fried odours, clanging noises, cold.  She is suddenly freezing, feels nausea welling up. She steps back, bumping into him.

‘I can’t stay in here,’ she says, panicky. ‘Can you get me a cup of tea and meet me at the bakery?’

‘You can’t drink your tea in the bakery when you didn’t buy it there,’ he hisses.  He is rigid with embarrassment.

‘There are tables outside in the sun,’ she whispers.  ‘It’ll be okay.’ She pats his arm. ‘I’ll buy you a cream bun and you can meet me there.’ She holds her breath until she is safely outside.

No other customers are sitting outside the bakery.  She starts to warm up, sitting in a pool of late-afternoon sunshine. She watches the door to the café, waiting for her husband, her prince.  She knows she is being fanciful, but she feels that when he walks out that door, and brings her the cup of tea, and maybe kisses her cheek, that she, like Sleeping Beauty, will wake from her hundred years of sleep, ready to be his partner in every sense.  They will rush home and make rollicking, tender love and he will say, We haven’t done that for yonks, and she will say, I know, I know, let’s do it again, and he will say, Yes, love of my life, but first, let’s talk about what we can do to help you to achieve your dreams, the way that you helped me to achieve mine.  And she will know that she has died and gone to heaven.

She looks up and sees her husband come out of the café and put the two take-away paper cups on a table in the shade at the side of the building.  He goes back into the café.  He must have forgotten the serviettes, she thinks.  Sure enough, he returns with serviettes, sugar packets and stirring sticks.  Then he sits down at the shaded table, and opens his drink, adds sugar and stirs.  He doesn’t look her way.  He sips his coffee.

Maybe he didn’t hear me, she thinks.  Maybe he thinks I’ve gone to the loo.  She rises and walks towards his hunched back.  She stops at the other side of the table.

‘Honey?’ she says. ‘Didn’t you hear me?  I got a table for us at the bakery.’

‘I heard you,’ he snarls at the air near her shoulder. His heavy eyebrows pull his fine features into a black scowl. “I am not sitting at the bakery.  You always have to have your own way.  Take your bloody tea and don’t tell me what to do. I’ll sit where I bloody well want to sit.’ He looks at her directly, with a blast of black rage that thumps her on the chest, leaving her unable to breathe.

In the car, they travel silently, not even music to mask the anger that radiates from him.  Where did she go wrong?  Was it too much for him, being kind?  Was there a limit she transgressed?  There is no point in questioning him, in protesting, or even apologising.  She has tried it all a thousand times before.  She huddles in the corner, drawing an invisible cloak around herself.  What would Sei Shōnagon have done, she wondered.  Made more lists, probably. Like her list of dispiriting things.  “A very ordinary woman looking after lots of children.  The way a man feels when his wife, whom he’s not very fond of, is ill for a long time.”

Leslie would like to make a list of things she could do if he left her.  Or she left him.  Instead, her mind produces another image – her skin peeling away from the gash below her heart where his glare hit her.  She is a snake shedding its skin.  You don’t want to leave the skin, she imagines telling her sisters.  You love that shimmery scaly translucent skin, the way it protects you and enhances your every muscular move. But once it starts peeling, the itchiness drives you crazy.  You are in a frenzy, vigorously pushing, writhing, scraping your body between sharp rocks. Your skin detaches, painful relief, like a bandaid being pulled off, like a giant full-body patch of excema drying and crumpling away from the baby skin underneath. You wriggle out, all cold and vulnerable and bald.  Scared.  No eyebrows. You’ve lost that itchy, constricted feeling. But you shiver, unable to move away from the dull old skin. Your life, your home, your identity.

You try to crawl back into the skin.  It is dry and crackly.  You are uncomfortable but you try to fit into its stiff shape.  You are too big for the old skin. It breaks into pieces.  You sit there, exposed and lonesome.  Bereft. You want to die.

The handmaidens appear.  They remind you to put your aqueous cream on your skin.  They reassure you that the new skin will be just as beautiful as the old.  You just have to be brave, they say.  You cannot take the old skin with you, they chuckle.
It is time to move on.  You take a deep breath, lift your head, squint at all the pathways, choose a direction and push off into your new life.  After a while, you stop and turn to have one last glimpse of your old skin.  You cannot see it.  Instead, you see your new skin, not yet as magnificent as the old, but getting there.  What next, you think, pleased with yourself.  Eyebrows?

***

About the Author

Marlyn MacDonald is currently doing a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing at QUT.  She commutes to classes from Toowoomba, where she lives with her youngest child and works as a Community Economic Development consultant focusing on multicultural, Sudanese and Indigenous groups. Originally from Canada, Marlyn raised her three children on a property in southwestern Queensland.  Watch for her upcoming blog at pinktanked.blogspot.com, scheduled to go online any day now!

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