Page 57 of Queenslander
“Gift shop opens at ten. I’ll buy trousers.” Chuck these in the bin. Outside the window it was raining. It had rained in Kigali and Kibeho, too. April rain. Cold rain. Good for crops. Good for the grass. Autumn rain was not good for sheep. They got worms here when it rained too much in the fall.
“When do you cry?” Reg asked.
Good question. The ceiling tiles in the room were off-white, square, made of some kind of speckled Styrofoam.
“You don’t?” he sounded concerned.
She didn’t look at him. “Nah,” she said. “Not about little stuff like this.”
“You cry at movies?”
She nodded. “All the time. When I’m happy. If I cried when I was sad it would make me happy, which would be confusing. She’ll be right.”I want her to wake up and be herself again…
“Have you ever been pregnant?” Reg asked.
Nev looked down at her blood-stained lap. What an intrusive question. She wasn’t sure how to answer.
Blaise was childless. Nev counted backwards in her head, trying to calculate how old Blaise must have been when Reg married her. Reg and Blaise might have lost pregnancies. She wouldn’t ask. Had to be gentle with him just in case.
“You never can tell by looking at someone,” she said.
“You would have raised this one on the farm.”
She didn’t have a response to that. “I’m not trying to steal your grandchildren, mate.” She laughed.
Reg shook his head. “Relax. Listen. You don’t need to… We’re on the same team, mate. You know I consider you a part of the family.”
She swallowed, studied the floor. He was only being generous with her because he was that kind of person, so it didn’t surprise her, but it still hurt. No one since her dad died had found it necessary to say miserable bloody shit to her like, “I consider you a part of the family.” It was probably the nicest thing anyone had said to her in ten years, and she hated Reg for it.
She licked her lips, rubbed the edge of the white sheet between her fingers, wanting, feeling guilty for wanting. She needed Ron to wake up and Reg to disappear.
If he knew what she wanted to do to his daughter he wouldn’t look at her like that…
“It’s okay,” Reg muttered. “I promise. We love you, and we trust you. I wish you would trust yourself. You don’t have to be so uptight all the time. We’re all a bunch of weirdos, mate. You know it?”
Nev didn’t know what to say. Eventually she whispered what she was thinking. “I’m more weird than you.”
Reg sighed. “Change out of those trousers before someone gets the wrong idea.”
Nev didn’t need to be told a third time.
21
HOSPITAL
The walls were white, sterile, meaningless. A hospital room, clinical, institutional. Ronnie was too weak to ask what had happened.
The bed bent like the letter N. The head of the bed was tilted up, the middle down, her knees pointed at the ceiling. She was folded up like an inchworm, trapped with pillows, on her back.
Reg brought her water, which she sipped through a straw. She had forgotten how much waking up from anesthesia sucked.
Nausea.
At least she was high on painkillers now.
Reg stroked her forehead while a nurse fiddled with one of her IVs. “There you are, Brum, all better. We thought we lost you. You bled out for a while. They took four liters of blood from your belly. We’re lucky you’re alive.”
He appeared and disappeared when she opened and closed her eyes. She wondered who he was talking to. She was clearly still asleep. He carried on like a man talking to himself. Maybe there were other people in the room, sitting where she couldn’t see.
