Sex and Death Read online

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it might mean that later in life, when you go through menopause, and there are some hormonal changes, you are left partially incontinent.’

  ‘Sort of like it is now?’ she asked. She had made a map of all the public toilets on the coastal walk near her flat, marking them like pirate’s treasure with a large X, and timing the walk between them, just in case.

  ‘Probably worse,’ he said.

  ‘What exactly does partially incontinent mean?’

  ‘Ah – you know, skidmarks in your undies every now and again,’ he said, and grinned.

  As if ageing wasn’t going to be undignified enough.

  But she had decided, if it came to it, that she’d have the operation, take that chance, and hope that her menopausal self didn’t live to regret it, and hate the younger version of herself who had ruined her ability to enjoy her retirement.

  Selene had to return to the hospital a few days later, baby in tow, for the six-week post-birth appointment with the midwives. A nice little routine check-up, no need to discuss her problem, she hoped. The focus, for once, would be on her baby’s health. She was actually looking forward to it. She parked in the cavernous lot beneath the hospital and took the lift up to the birthing centre. It was the first time she’d been back since the birth, and she could hear somebody labouring in the same room where she’d had her son in the bath. She felt elated to think of the lukewarm water, the feel of the edges of the tub beneath her hands.

  The midwife was not from Eucalyptus Group. Selene had never met her before, and she seemed harried, uninterested in making chitchat about her water birth. Old-school Aussie, middle-aged, not one of the young women fresh from midwifery school sent out to face the onslaught of Sydney’s raging baby boom. The midwife handled Selene’s baby for his weighing and measuring as if he were a choice leg of lamb, expertly palpated his still slightly swollen ballsack to check if his testicles had descended, and then re-swaddled him so tightly it looked as if he’d spun his own cocoon.

  ‘Your turn. On your back, legs up,’ the midwife said without preamble, and next thing Selene was getting her stitches checked.

  ‘There’s a small polyp, I’ll have to burn it off.’ The midwife lit something that looked like a long silver sparkler.

  ‘Where, exactly?’ Selene said nervously.

  The midwife didn’t respond. She was frowning in concentration.

  It was quick, relatively painless, but still. Hot metal on raw flesh. She had the dizzy feeling once again that she had disintegrated into nothing but a collection of limbs held together by failing viscera. She looked at her son, who was transfixed by a black-and-white wall map, and repeated her mantra of sanity: He’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay. She was quietly fascinated by how much she could endure, but if anything had gone wrong with his body, she would have broken apart. She thought of something she’d read in one of the birthing books. It troubled her for being both true and not true. You have amazing reserves of self. You will bring these reserves to your birth experience just as you bring them to every challenging experience you have in your life. The ‘you’ who births your baby does not stand outside the ‘you’ of the rest of your history and present.

  ‘Okay, all done,’ the midwife said. Her name was Agatha, according to her nametag, for she hadn’t introduced herself.

  Selene pulled up her pants and moved to the chair beside Agatha, who was typing notes into a computer using her index finger.

  ‘Now, we need to discuss contraception. It’s mostly a myth about breastfeeding. You want me to prescribe the mini-pill?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Selene said. ‘I think I’ll be fine.’

  Agatha looked at her suspiciously. ‘Have you had intercourse since the birth?’

  Selene laughed a little too loudly, a sound verging on a guffaw.

  ‘You got to get back on the horse,’ Agatha said. ‘The longer you wait, the harder it gets.’

  ‘I’m not really planning on having sex ever again,’ Selene said, half-joking.

  But Agatha, it seemed, took this declaration very seriously. Her attitude changed immediately into one of bustling concern. She shuffled around in the drawer and held out a form and a pen. ‘I’d like you to fill this out based on how you’ve felt in the past week,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a questionnaire, the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. It will help me assess how you’re feeling.’

  Selene looked down at the piece of paper. The first statement was I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things and the choice of responses was: As much as I always could, Not quite so much now, Definitely not so much now and Not at all. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but you need to know that in the past seven days I’ve had a failed Botox injection to my sphincter, and every time I’ve had a bowel movement I’ve been in so much pain I’ve cried. It’s got nothing to do with adapting to life with my baby, or hormones. It’s just about being in physical pain. So I’ll answer this honestly, but it doesn’t mean I’m depressed if I’ve had sense of humour failure recently.’

  ‘I understand,’ Agatha said noncommittally. ‘Why don’t you fill it out and we can go from there.’

  Selene could see that Agatha was now on high alert, her postnatal depression radar quivering. She looked excited, as if she were about to bust Selene for theft, like she was anticipating a victory of sorts. Stupidly, she decided to trust Agatha, and she filled out the ten questions honestly. It felt good to tick Rather less than I used to in response to the statement I have looked forward with enjoyment to things. She was on a liquid diet for the sake of the fissure, no caffeine despite the sleeplessness, for it compounded the problem of being in semi-constant danger of shitting her pants, and she approached the bathroom each morning as she would a war zone, so yes, she believed it was safe to say that there wasn’t a huge amount she had to look forward to at the moment other than the feel of her infant son’s skin against her own, and his gummy, wondrous first smiles.

  Her mind wandered as she filled out the questionnaire. This was the other thing she had learned in the past few weeks of pain, she realised – when your body stops working the way it should, you start to see anything involving the body as absurd, especially sex. The less of it you’re having, the more bizarre it begins to seem, the more unthinkable it becomes as something anyone would choose to do. She was thinking about sex all the time, but not in a good way. She could not believe she’d ever had it, that anyone in the history of humankind had ever had any. She looked at women who were pregnant with a second child with utter incredulity: they’d actually chosen to have sex again! So it was possible! But when, how, why?

  This wasn’t prudery, it was genuine amazement. She had been placed on the outside of something and was gazing in, more perplexed by the human body than she had been as a child. Her father had once brought home a stack of blank examination booklets from his university for her when she was seven, knowing she liked to fill things in and catalogue them, and later she’d found him and her mother laughing together at the kitchen table, because opposite the box EXAMINING BODY she had written I DO THAT. She hadn’t understood at the time why it was funny – in fact, the question had bothered her, the presumption that anyone else would ever think they could examine her body.

  She handed her completed questionnaire to Agatha, who graded it using a mystical system of numbers.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ Agatha said gravely. ‘I’m afraid we have a problem. You’re in the danger zone for postnatal depression. You’ve got to come back in next week and take this test again.’

  Selene smiled passive-aggressively. ‘But it’s got nothing to do with postnatal anything. Anyone can get an anal fissure, at any stage of their lives. Men can get them. Women who’ve never had children can get them. It’s just unfortunate that mine is not getting better on its own.’

  Agatha’s eyes had taken on a beatific gleam. Selene stopped talking. She wondered ungenerously if the midwives were given a postnatal d
epression detection quota, and she’d just helped Agatha to meet hers.

  At the door, within earshot of several women in the waiting room in various pregnancy or post-birth states, Agatha said to Selene, ‘Now remember. You must have sex. It’s good for the scar tissue, too. Keeps it flexible.’

  Selene imagined announcing to her husband when he got home that evening that he needed to go to the late-night pharmacy to fill an urgent prescription she’d been given by the midwife. ‘A prescription for what?’ he would ask, concerned, already elbow deep in their baby’s yellow poo that smelled wonderful, like expensive French mustard.

  ‘For sex,’ she would deadpan.

  He was always hopeful that the miracle cure had been identified, the potion of potions to put her out of her pain. The first time he’d picked up on her behalf the tub of specially prepared 0.2% nitroglycerine ointment, the female chemist had given him a knowing look and said: ‘Rub a pea-sized amount around the rim of the anus twice a day. Partners shouldn’t share this product, just so you know,’ assuming he was gay. Unfazed, he’d returned a few days later to ask the same chemist if they sold sitz baths for relief from anal pain, and she’d said, ‘You mean the bucket you put over the toilet to immerse your buttocks in hot salty water?’ And he’d exclaimed, ‘Yes, that’s the one!’, glad that she might have one in stock.

  Selene knew that sex was the last thing on her husband’s mind too, that his libido had gone into hiding. He was as distracted and exhausted as she was, as engrossed by his adoration for their son. Sex had never seemed more irrelevant to their bond as a couple. He had been there beside her for every minute of the birth, mildly electrocuting himself setting up the TENS machine, dancing with her in their underwear in the lounge, holding her hair back while she puked through the later contractions, gently encouraging her as their baby peered up at him from underwater in the bath, waiting for the next push to free his shoulders. Sex was great, she remembered distantly, but surely its most important function was to re-establish and affirm intimacy between two people? In which case they no longer had need of that. They were more emotionally intimate than ever before as they cared for their son together. Their relationship had evolved beyond a need for sex.

  That weekend they drove out to Barrington Tops National Park for Christmas in July with three other couples. They’d kept the tradition for a few years, started by one of the husbands who was British and homesick, and who liked to experiment with different ways of cooking a turkey. It was their first road trip since the baby had been born, and Selene planned to read voraciously in the back seat beside his capsule.

  The trip started out well. The baby fell asleep, and Selene plunged into an issue of the London Review of Books that her mum had loaned her, and that she’d been working through for what felt like months, reading one dense column at a go before her attention was demanded elsewhere. According to the page crease, she was halfway through an article about the biography of the Buddha, but she had no memory of what had come before. She gave up and read the poem on the page instead. It was by Frederick Seidel, and it began:

  A man sits counting the floor tiles of the bathroom floor,

  Counts silently left to right, then right to left, while pressure mounts,

  And while, in urgently increasing amounts,

  His sphincter speaks up like a kazoo and starts to snore.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ she said, and her husband’s eyes shot to the rearview mirror to check she was okay. She didn’t explain; the wind was rushing through his window and it was difficult to communicate from the back seat.

  Some people might feel better about themselves on seeing life reflected in art or vice versa, but the poet’s snoring sphincter was the very last thing Selene wanted to read or think about right then. Early on in her own battle with that part of her anatomy, her mum had in sympathetic jest printed out a short poem called ‘Ars Poetica’ and suggested Selene stick it next to the toilet as a way to cheer herself up, or at least as a reminder that one day she would no longer have to be paying such close attention to her body’s workings. It went like this:

  The goose that laid the golden egg

  Died looking up its crotch

  To find out how its sphincter worked.

  Would you lay well? Don’t watch.

  Selene had read the poem with growing horror. Did her mum not realise that the goose had died trying to figure out how its sphincter worked?

  She threw the LRB to the car floor and opened up instead the biography of the doomed marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which she’d been dipping into during night feeds. It gave her a special frisson to read about their mutual unhappiness from within the warm security of her happy marriage. But the section she now turned to was describing Sylvia and Ted’s initial and wildly passionate love affair.

  He told her that the memory of exploring her naked body lingered ‘like brandy’ – in his bloodstream, in his brain, warming and enlivening him, as if that brandy he poured into her the night they met at Falcon Yard had saturated her skin, and he had tasted it a whole month later . . . They wrote to each other every day, and his long marvelous letters end with pulses of pure echolocation – lovelovelovelovelovelovelove. He longs to kiss, suck, lick, and bite her from head to heel . . . kish, ponk, puss, wife, I am here, where are you?

  Selene looked up from the book, at the afternoon light strobing through the gum trees. They’d turned off the major freeway north now, and the shape of the country road felt more a result of historical accident than planning – its curves paying tribute to old obstacles like lakes and streams and drovers’ paths. It was getting chilly. Her husband’s silhouette in the driver’s seat against the gold-hazed windscreen was so familiar, and filled her with tenderness. She remembered on one of their first encounters following him home in her car from a party, how she had fallen in love with the shape of his head and shoulders in the dark interior of his car and the way he had waited for her on the side of the road when she’d been delayed by a red light. It had always been a habit on road trips to put her hand on his thigh as he drove. Even if they stayed silent, each letting their thoughts unspool behind them, it meant they were connected. She missed him, she realised. I am here, where are you? This glancing winter light always made her nostalgic for things she hadn’t properly valued in the past. She leaned forward and squeezed his shoulder, and he immediately covered her hand with his own, as if he had been waiting for the gesture.

  Near the end of their four-hour journey, long after the sun had set, once the baby had fallen asleep again, Selene realised she needed the toilet. Her husband pulled over, keeping the headlights on, and gave her a grimace of condolence as she picked her way through the bush at the side of the road, looking for a tree to give cover. She squatted with her undies bunched around her knees, not thinking of snakes or spiders. They were the least of her troubles. She tried to do her deep breathing but it didn’t work, and she called out in torment.

  For the last half hour of the trip the post-spasm pain was too intense for her to sit down. She had to keep herself partly lifted above the seat by clinging onto the coat-hanger handle. At one point she swore at her husband that he was driving too slowly, knowing even as she did it that she was being unfair.

  Finally they pulled into the driveway of the historic building, an old schoolhouse converted into holiday accommodation. She could hear their friends chatting in the communal living room, and smell woodsmoke on the cold air. Without a word, understanding she needed to be alone, Selene’s husband took the baby in his capsule towards the lights and laughter. She slunk off towards the sleeping quarters, claimed a bedroom with an en-suite and ran herself the deepest, hottest bath in the history of bathing. The bath stood claw-footed in the very centre of the bathroom, steam rising from it like a cauldron. Beneath the water, her skin poached pink, then red. She went to bed without saying hello to the others.

  After the early morning feed, she went back to sleep, and woke later to find the house empty and a no
te from her husband: Gone bushwalking with bubba and the others. Don’t worry, I defrosted a bottle of breastmilk for him. Stay in bed all morning if you feel like it. A fire was still going in the lounge, and there were sausages and eggs covered with a plate, and a coffee pot half full. She had a teaspoon of coffee. It tasted unbelievably good. She took a bite of the stubby congealed end of a sausage. Then she mashed up berries with psyllium husk powder and water for her liquid breakfast. A trussed turkey was already roasting in the oven, and on the sideboard were the beginnings of various accompaniments: raw stuffing mixture, peeled potatoes and a resting batter for Yorkshire puddings. Somebody had made mulled wine the night before, and she simply could not resist. She reheated a cup of it in the microwave and drank very slowly. She knew that later it would anger her innards and she would pay for every drop. But it tasted like nectar on the tongue.

  The corridors were hung with a few sepia photographs of the schoolmaster and his family who had lived in these rooms beside the schoolhouse, now the dining room. Selene stared at the image of the wife, a woman living out her days here a hundred years ago, mother to eight children. Her thoughts turned gloomy: evidently even this woman had managed to have sex again. And again, and again, and again. Selene wished suddenly and recklessly that she had lived at a time when she would not have had a choice in the matter, and no luxury of overthinking. Her great-aunt had once described her younger son as a ‘punishment baby’, his conception the outcome of her not having dinner ready when her husband got home from work. Selene’s own mother had implied that it was Selene’s father who had decided when it was time to have intimate relations again after the birth of her babies. If she could just lower her expectations of sex, if she could think of it as something to be done to her, an act of endurance rather than communion, she might be okay. Her husband would never agree, though. Once previously in their relationship, long before the baby, she’d pretended for his sake that she was in the mood and he had recoiled, hurt that she could think that would please him.