Creative Differences and Other Stories Read online

  But you are prepared for muscle pain. You have imagined it, not so early in the race, but visualised yourself running through it. Chest pain or a joint problem would be different: a heart attack or knee reconstruction is too high a price to pay for a tick in the marathon box. But muscles will recover.

  And so, as the pain steadily increases, you keep running, mind and body in conflict, but mind, as always, in the ascendancy, located three hours in the future, when you will inevitably cross the finish line and rest. But it is not so detached as to be oblivious to an unfamiliar combination of stiffness, cramp and the pain that comes from injury rather than exercise. Your legs hurt in a way that they have never hurt before—that no part of you has ever hurt before. But your mind keeps instructing them to keep moving until it is physically impossible.

  That point comes a few hundred metres past the thirty-kilometre drink station. Your quads seize. You are unable to move, not because the pain is too much of a deterrent, but because your legs refuse to obey instructions to continue. The last resort of walking the final kilometres, in order to at least finish, is not an option.

  You try stretching, the standard approach to muscle cramps, which are the nearest thing you have experienced to this problem. Your buddy, who has been trailing you, catches up, stops, offers commiserations and gives you his phone before setting off again at a pace you can now only envy. The minutes accumulate and, still calculating, even though your marathon is over, you note the goal of a sub-four-hour time disappearing as your stopped time passes ten minutes.

  In the absence of any immediate way of getting home, you try walking again and find you can manage some painful progress. You crank it up to a shuffling jog, and decide to run one kilometre and review. You are playing psychological games with your body, hoping it will be fooled into thinking you will stop after the first kilometre, then the next.

  Of course you keep running, keep using tricks to keep going. One kilometre from the finish line, the four-and-a-half-hour mark passes. They say you have not really run a marathon if you run slower than four-thirty, and the course is almost empty. There are only a few stragglers still running and marshals are clearing up. With a sign removed, you take a wrong turn. A volunteer points you back, but you have added an extra hundred metres to your ordeal.

  There is no satisfaction in crossing the line. You shrug off the congratulations for finishing. You are unable to climb the stairs into the stadium. Your piss is rusty with blood.

  The fluorescent lights stay on in the intensive-care unit. At 3 a.m. it is a spaceship, instruments blipping as it navigates through the long night. Nurses’ voices echo off the hard surfaces. A man who had been calling out in pain for several hours has been sedated. The marathon runner lies still, resisting sleep, resisting the possibility of death.

  In the morning, nine days after the marathon, he had given in to his wife’s insistence that he see a doctor, and only because she was a doctor too.

  ‘Get a blood test,’ she had said.

  ‘It’s just fatigue.’

  ‘You passed blood—’

  ‘Once—all the books say that happens sometimes—’

  ‘Do they say you sleep for fourteen hours every night and can’t eat?’

  He hadn’t told her about the nausea, about carrying a plastic bag in his pocket in case it gave way to vomiting at an inconvenient moment. He had been delivering a seminar, four full days of standing up in front of challenging MBA students, and had had no real time to recover. All he needed was a bit of rest.

  The doctor, new to the Melbourne city practice, agreed with him. ‘Fatigue—you’ve damaged your stomach lining.’

  He prescribed some medication. And, to settle the argument with the runner’s wife, ordered the blood tests.

  His wife took the phone call from his regular GP that evening while he was trying not to throw up the apple he had eaten for dinner. The drugs had not made any impact.

  ‘Pack a bag—you’ve got two minutes.’

  She was similarly efficient at the emergency department when the triage nurse gave them a form. ‘He’s in renal failure. His potassium was six point eight this morning.’

  His wife had explained on the way to the hospital that high potassium would put his heart into fibrillation. She was surprised that it hadn’t done so already.

  ‘All right—you can fill in the form for him.’

  ‘How long am I going to be here?’ he asked as the intravenous drip and catheter went in and a nurse prepared an injection the size of a tube of industrial sealant. He had the full attention of a team of four.

  ‘Bit early to ask that question,’ said one of the doctors. ‘Let’s work on making sure you’re here tomorrow.’

  ‘This is to buffer the insulin,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s going to hurt.’

  It seemed inevitable that an injection of that size would be painful, but the message that his survival was not guaranteed put it into perspective. In any event, pain had a new benchmark.

  ‘This is going to taste terrible, but it will absorb some of the potassium,’ said the nurse. ‘Try not to throw up.’

  The body that couldn’t keep down an apple an hour ago dutifully swallowed the mug of black liquid and kept it in place.

  The emergency treatment didn’t work, and the potassium kept rising. He asked questions: ‘What do you think is happening? What alternative treatments are there? Am I going to be okay?’

  He trusted the doctors’ expertise, but not their judgement. He knew too many stories of experts in his own field failing to communicate and make the right choices. So he talked and argued, and when he was transferred from emergency to the intensive-care unit, checked that information had been passed on correctly.

  ‘So you got dehydrated in the marathon.’

  ‘No. I told your colleague. I drank plenty of water. Far more than I would for a training run.’

  ‘So it was hot?’

  ‘It never got above ten degrees.’

  ‘Well, this doesn’t make a lot of sense then.’

  At the change of shift, the new doctor introduced himself. ‘This is why they tell you to keep hydrated…’

  The diagnosis was rhabdomyolysis: his muscles had melted down and his kidneys could not deal with the waste that they dumped into the bloodstream. The best guess at an underlying cause was a reaction to the carb loading. Assuming he survived, his kidneys might or might not recover some function. If they didn’t, he would require a transplant or dialysis for the rest of his life.

  There was a quick stretcher trip to Radiology to check for blockages. The speed at which they moved him along the corridors and ran the ultrasound head over his belly sent a message that they did not want him separated from the ICU resuscitation facilities for long.

  When they got back, he asked the new doctor, ‘Any reason we can’t do dialysis now?’

  ‘We will if we can’t get the potassium down.’

  ‘But it’s not going down.’

  ‘Oh, I think it is.’

  ‘Last reading was seven point six.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s not good. We need to do something about that.’

  ‘So let’s start the dialysis now. Is there any reason not to?’

  ‘Let’s see how you’re doing in the morning.’

  An hour later, he was snapped from half-sleep by an alarm. It took him a moment to realise that it was coming from the heart monitor beside him. There was an emergency team at his bedside within seconds. He saw the machine and the paddles. He waited for them to do what he’d seen on television.

  Then it dawned that he surely wouldn’t be conscious if he was in cardiac arrest. He felt the tension around him ease.

  ‘What’s your normal heart rate?’ said a male voice.

  ‘Low forties.’

  ‘Thirty-nine just then. The alarm goes off below forty.’

  He felt as much pride in having trained his heart rate so low as he did relief at the false alarm.

  He remembers a formula that a doctor friend told him years ago: count the number of tubes, multiply by eleven and subtract from one hundred to calculate the chances of survival. With three tubes in his body, he is at sixty-seven per cent, or would have been if the formula still applied. He guesses that the formula is well out of date.

  He reflects for a little while on death. Its proximity has given him no new insights. A long time ago he decided to conceptualise death as the state before he was born. It holds no special fear for him but he does not want to die, to bring sadness to those who care about him. He is doing all he can.

  He wonders if the experience will change him at all. The only surprise so far has been his tolerance of pain. One of the doctors has expressed amazement that he was able to run until his muscles melted: ‘This is something we generally see only in professional athletes. Normal people are stopped by the pain.’

  Not being a physical guy, he’d always considered himself a wimp when it came to pain. Maybe that was something for the life résumé.

  Finally, exhausted from arguing and analysing, he listens to the blip blip blip of his heartbeat on the monitor, an athlete’s forty-two-beats-per-minute heartbeat.

  And then, as though he has made an extraordinary connection, a deep insight, a scientist’s theoretical association of two hitherto-unrelated phenomena, he realises that he can feel the same rhythm, the same frequency, directly in his own chest, as his flesh-and-blood heart beats, despite the chemical imbalance that threatens to throw it into random palpitations, and continues beating steadily through the night. Trusting it, he falls asleep.

  I am leaving the print shop in Pitt Street, Sydney, carrying three copies of my novel manuscript to submit it to a competition. I have finished it far more quickly than I had expected.

  I weigh eight kilograms less than my stripped-down marathon weight, and need to rest every few hundred metres. My kidneys are working at ten per cent of what they were a month ago, and are unlikely to recover further, but I have been told that should suffice to get me through the rest of my life without further resort to dialysis. I can still drink alcohol.

  In the next year, I will walk two thousand kilometres from Cluny in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I will watch the New York marathon, and have to turn away, nauseated. I will have the same feeling when I try to eat pasta and the first time that I put on my running shoes again. The novel will win the competition and find a publisher. I will add the achievements to my résumé, to my bucket list.

  While I have been waiting in the print shop, the skies have opened. Even people with umbrellas are taking shelter until the worst is over. My manuscript copies are wrapped in plastic. I walk into the warm rain and let it run over me.

  Runner-up in the Age Short Story Award, 2013, and published in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 2013.

  The Perfect Gift

  Strangers swap shy smiles. He scrawls, then is gone. In his place, a paper swan. She turns it in her palm, every day. Still folded, perfect.

  Published in the Guardian Twitter Fiction, 8 June 2013.

  Like It Was Yesterday

  This is for you, Robert Smith.

  God knows what you have been able to make of your life, or if you are even still alive. But if you are, I have a fantasy that you will pick up a newspaper in a cafe or roadside stop or perhaps a prison library, read this story and know that someone has not forgotten.

  My memories of primary school have, for the most part, consolidated themselves into summaries, generalities no longer rooted in time or place. My friends Bryan and Murray, Cuisenaire rods, kids chanting Moriarty did a farty. Counting in Maori: tahi, rua, toru, wha. Our Standard Four teacher playing Beethoven’s Fifth while we worked. You were gone by then.

  If ever I had a charismatic teacher, it was Mr Greene. But I can no longer summon a specific image of him lowering the needle onto the record or demonstrating the Churchill salute to accompany the Morse-code vee that opens the symphony. I doubt I would recognise his face in a photograph.

  I came second in the public-speaking competition. I remember that. I had expected to win. There were surely other individual moments of achievement, enlightenment and joy in my time at Te Paka Primary, but I have lost them. It was more than fifty years ago.

  But I remember the day I met you. I remember the classroom I shared with you. I remember the teacher. I remember your trial and your punishment and your humiliation. I remember the injustice of it all.

  It was the first day back after the summer holidays. Before Standard One, we had been exempt from corporal punishment. But now, regardless of age, our academic level qualified us for the strap, and the discussion before the first assembly centred on who might find themselves in Miss Rutiti’s class. The diminutive Maori woman’s reputation for frequent and merciless dispensation of justice preceded her.

  Those of us who studied under threat of strap and cane can still cite the arcane regulations: only a female teacher could strap a girl; a student sentenced to a strapping on one hand could choose which hand; if a student was strapped on both hands, he or she could not be strapped again the following day. And from England to Australia to the Colony of Southern Rhodesia, the limit was six. One might receive six on each hand or on alternating hands for a week, they might be six of the very best, but nobody had ever been sentenced to seven. The laws of physical pain and public humiliation were more compelling than anything we might learn about music or mathematics.

  Miss Rutiti only strapped boys. Girls she sent to the headmistress, who often commuted their sentence to a verbal warning. The previous year, Sharon Levy and Tui Te Kamo had made regular journeys from her classroom to the head’s office. Tui was Maori, and it seemed odd to us that Miss Rutiti would pick on someone of her own race.

  That first school day of 1963 was all about names. When the classes were called out at assembly, there was no mention of Miss Rutiti. I was assigned to Mrs Crick’s class, and one of my new classmates disgraced himself by crying with relief. It was short-lived. Miss Rutiti had married during the holidays and taken her husband’s name.

  ‘Good morning, Standard One.’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Crick.’

  Where was the strap? It must be in the drawer. She didn’t carry it with her, like a gun in a holster, as the deputy headmaster did.

  ‘I need to know your names.’

  Did she feel our fear? Did she try to allay it? Or feed it? I have no idea. But even the simple business of identification triggered a crisis.

  Middle row, halfway down. Mrs Crick’s ruler pointed to a bespectacled boy with black curly hair.

  ‘Robert,’ he said.

  ‘Robert?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Crick.’

  ‘We already have a Robert.’

  Two Lindas had slipped by without comment. But apparently a class with more than one Robert was a problem.

  ‘What’s your surname, Robert?’

  ‘Moriarty, Mrs Crick.’

  ‘Good—we’ll call you Moriarty.’

  Except for the rhyming potential, which we discovered later, it was not too bad a name. Which was fortunate, as I knew Moriarty for six more years and never heard him called Robert again. But there was worse to come. Last kid. Back row. The ruler progressed inexorably towards him. He was the third man in a parable, the punchline in a three-part joke. The kid who had cried with relief.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Robert.’

  ‘Speak up.’

  ‘Robert.’

  ‘Robert what?’

  ‘Robert Smith.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘Robert, Mrs Crick.’

  ‘All right, Robert Smith.’ She paused for a moment, then: ‘You will be Smithy.’

  Smithy did not sound pretty, but it sounded right. A better fit than the Rob or Bob or Bobbie that a less creative soul than Mrs Crick might have settled for. Smithy was an undersized, snotty, shoeless kid without friends. Dickens couldn’t have named him better.

  As the year progressed, we learned that the reality of Mrs Crick was less frightening than her reputation. It was possible to stay on the right side of her, and I felt reasonably safe. She may or may not have been a good teacher; I have no recollection of what we studied that year.

  But Smithy became, literally, her whipping boy.

  ‘Smithy, you’re a thief. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Crick.’

  ‘Are you sorry?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Crick.’

  ‘Speak up, Smithy. What is the punishment for stealing?’

  ‘Six, Mrs Crick.’

  ‘Come out the front.’

  We would watch, with a mixture of horror and relief that we were not in his place, as Mrs Crick clinically reduced Smithy to a blubbering mess. I recall him wetting himself once but cannot remember whether it was before or during the punishment.

  He would pull back his hand and sometimes even collapse into a ball after a few blows, but he always got up. We never wondered why, though staying on the floor would have frustrated Mrs Crick’s efforts. I cannot imagine her hauling him to his feet, then trying to hold him in position with one hand while wielding the strap with the other. Teachers seldom took any physical action outside the formality of the strapping. No raps over the knuckles with rulers, no thrown blackboard dusters, no pulling by the ears. There was no need.

  I do not know how many occasions I am remembering. Perhaps Smithy was strapped twenty times, perhaps only three or four.

  Mrs Crick was right: Smithy was a thief. He stole packed lunches. In fact, the only stealing I can recall at the school was of lunches, and Smithy was not the sole offender. But the school rules made no fine distinctions. Neither did we. Smithy smelled and was stupid and attracted trouble. Eating the contents of someone else’s lunchbox was gross. We stayed away from him.