Canberra has the audacity to have turned on one of its peerless autumn days for this experience. The crunch of red and brown leaves, the soft breeze and twinkling sunbursts through the trees want to trick me into believing the high-tech environment of machines and alarms and tubes and cords that we’ve just exited does not exist.
‘What about some soup?’ Hugh suggests when we reach a small cafe in the private hospital across the road. It’s populated by staff in scrubs, and shadow families – gaunt, pale humans, living a half-life while a loved-one suffers. Are these my people now?
‘Really can’t eat,’ I tell Hugh.
‘Come on. You don’t know how long you’ll be in here with him. Keep your strength up.’
‘I don’t want to talk about Cam, or my strength. The two are not currently compatible.’
‘Two bowls of soup, please, and bread rolls on the side.’ He pulls out a credit card from his wallet and says, ‘You’re stronger than you think, Whittaker.’
‘You’ve known me all of, what, nine weeks?’
‘And what a fascinating nine weeks that has been.’
When he smiles, it lights up the whole cafe. My body absorbs the light, desperate for the flicker of warmth.
‘Listen. I’m not going to tell you everything is going to be okay,’ he says as we find a table outside. ‘I do know Cam is in the best possible hands. You’re not alone.’
I’m not alone, but I’m also not overwhelmed with Canberra friends. Most of my friends are back in Melbourne or scattered around the world. Between them, Cam and Grace tick so many boxes for me, I haven’t worked too hard on expanding my circle further here, particularly when I spent most of the first two years struggling through pregnancy and new motherhood. A local mums’ group has been nice, but it’s been a bit fractured since some of us returned to work and others haven’t.
‘Apart from Grace, who you met at the gym, and who’s on her way home from Sydney, most of my friends are interstate,’ I admit. ‘Or overseas.’
‘Well, you’ve got your colleagues,’ he states calmly.
‘Who’ve known me five minutes and definitely have somewhere better to be than a hospital bistro.’
Saying that makes my heart race. I want him to stay. The idea that Cam is right now having tests that could upturn our entire future, and that I will have to handle this alone, utterly unnerves me. Being the only adult, caring for Cam if he slips further from Charlie and the baby and me, is a waking nightmare I simply cannot entertain.
‘Can we change the subject?’ I ask, taking a sip of the soup. Its hearty tomato flavour is as out of place in my mouth as the autumn trees had been in my hospital reality.
‘As long as we don’t talk about work,’ Hugh says, pulling a small white bread roll apart and dunking it in the soup. ‘Such a bore.’
I force a smile.
Hugh and I have had several coffee meetings in the last few weeks, but we haven’t shared so much as a sandwich in the work kitchen yet. Everything about having a meal with a relatively unfamiliar man amplifies all the ways in which he is not Cam. Cam doesn’t dunk bread. Unlike my husband, Hugh scoops his spoon away from him in the bowl like you’re supposed to. I watch as he lifts the spoon to the line of unfamiliar lips. Dark stubble on his neck that he’s missed in his morning shave, where I’m used to seeing blond . . .
Stop this, Kate. You’ll go mad.
I need spoken words to drown my internal chatter. One of those buoying, distracting conversations people dance through in waiting rooms when they’re really miles away, worried as hell.
‘What do you do in your spare time, Hugh, apart from picking up strange women at the gym?’ I’m referring, of course, to myself, and the fact that he picked me up from the floor after I was discharged from the treadmill.
‘You’re technically the only woman who’s thrown herself at my feet lately,’ he replies and takes another sip of soup. And a bite of his bread roll.
Looking at him, I find that very hard to believe. ‘You know that woman in the purple gym gear chased after you.’
‘Yep,’ he explains. Full stop. He takes a convenient glance at his lock screen, checking for missed messages.
I see.
‘Did she ever get the tea on your relationship status?’
His spoon hovers in mid air.
‘The tea? What’s that? Some sort of millennial slang you’ve appropriated?’ He knows exactly what I’m asking. He’s just refusing to engage.
I push my bowl of soup aside. ‘Can’t you just play along, if only to take my mind off Cam for a few minutes?’ Setting Hugh up, like some off-camera, real-life love project, could be exactly the distraction I need. ‘I know people,’ I tell him. ‘In case you’re looking for . . . you know.’
I don’t mean sex! I sound like my boss’s pimp.
‘I mean in case you’re looking for a love story,’ I clarify. ‘Like I have with Cam.’
The comparison slips out before I can edit it and rips me straight back into a world of pain. I imagine Cam, right now, being fed brain first into a CT machine, even more frightened than I am about what’s happening to him—
‘She’d have to be all-in,’ Hugh says steadily. ‘I want that “two of us against the world” thing. She needs to be funny. Unpretentious. What you see is what you get . . .’
He checks he’s got my attention back. ‘I’m telling you this purely because I know you’re feeling sick about Cam right now and want to be distracted, okay? Not as permission to go rogue and start matchmaking.’
I sit up straight. ‘Do I seem like the kind of person to go rogue?’
‘Yes, frankly.’
I pretend to look offended. And think of Grace. She’s funny. And also recently single, now she’s turfed Max.
‘I want someone caring,’ he continues. ‘Generous.’
Check. Check.
‘Do you want kids?’ I ask bluntly. Because if he doesn’t, Grace is a ‘no’。
He looks more uncomfortable than I did in the job interview. ‘With the right person,’ he says. ‘That would be wonderful.’
Hugh and Grace and their future babies are as happy in my head as I am bereft, on my own, with my two. I’ve never been so envious of two people in all my life.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Kate,’ he says. ‘You all right?’
No. I’m not. It’s hard to explain why, but I feel like I’ve lost my husband and my best friend and my boss, all in one fell swoop.
My phone rings.
‘Kate? I’m Doctor Wilson. I’m a registrar in the neurology department, just taking a look at your husband’s preliminary test results. Are you still in the area? I’d like to speak with you.’
This is the call. Our lives are about to implode. I look at Hugh, watching me, concerned, and I have to restrain my hand from moving itself across the table to grasp his.
‘I’m coming now,’ I tell the doctor.
14
Cam is in the bed, looking as concerned as I feel. Doctor Wilson drags an extra chair into the cubicle and asks me to sit down. I do not want the kind of news that I can’t receive standing up. I take Cam’s hand nervously.