Chapter Thirty Eight

 July 2003


I'm not free from Steve. His teeth are still in my neck. His voice is still in my head reminding me that I'm weak, fragile, scared.

   If I'm pregnant 

I'm not pregnant 

then I'll never be free of him.

I'm not pregnant I'm not pregnant ImnotpregnantimnotpregnantImnotpregnantimnotpregnant

   If I keep thinking it over and over it'll have to be true.


We visit a lake that mirrors the sky, the surrounding trees perfectly. I wonder what would happen if I walked into it. Would I fall into a different version of this world? A world where I never met Steve, a world where Adam and Nick never found me and I never went into that room in Sydney. A world where my life isn't disintegrating into dust.

   Someone asks the tour guide if the water is drinkable. It looks so pure and clean. The tour guide says lake water is never drinkable, it's stagnant.


I'm with Catriona and the English girls, Sarah and Lou. Lou talks about a colleague back home in England. 

   'She's pregnant and her husband's been made redundant.'

   I flinch at the word pregnant. I can't hide from it, it creeps in everywhere.

   'He's not even looking for a new job,' says Lou. 'He's just like, "Oh maybe I'll start my own business," but he doesn't know what, and she's like, "I'm going to have to get a second job," and she's out here.' She indicates with her hands the extent of her colleague's bulging pregnant stomach. Much bigger than mine.

   The unfairness of it, that men can hide from the practical realities of pregnancy makes me shudder.


We go to Cathedral Cove with it's giant arch of rock. I'm hoping for a miracle as I walk through it. With the clear sands and impossibly blue sea this must be the place where everything comes right again.

  It doesn't.


Steve emails. He's in Broome and it's even better than before, apart from me not being there, he says. It's not so humid. I tell him he'll be disappointed to know there are no nice boys on the Kiwi Experience bus so he won't be getting rid of me yet.


In Rotorua the stench of sulphur fills me with nausea. I don't know how people can live here. Do they become inured to it eventually?  The sickness fills my head, I feel it spreading through my body, into the tips of my fingers, into my toes. I'm as weak as Steve said I was.

   We walk through the redwood forest, these giant trees whose tops seem to disappear into the sky. They creak in the wind. I imagine them falling on me and that would be the end of all my fears. I wonder if Steve would be sad if a tree killed me and our baby.

There is no baby

Or would he be relieved?

   We visit the geysers in this strange unnatural looking landscape of layers of orangey rocks. Dusty looking water erupts from holes in the ground. I try to hold my breath because the smell of brimstone is so strong here it stifles me. 

   Perhaps I did die and I'm in hell.


Chapter Thirty Nine







   

   

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