Acquiescence
Nadia sips her coffee and gazes out at the steely grey morning. She glances at her phone one last, depressing time.
‘Wildfires in Rhodes as well,’ she says. ‘Dubrovnik. Southern Italy. Northern Algeria. The whole Mediterranean is on fire.’
Across the table, Lloyd shakes his head, pushes the sleeves of his faded sweatshirt above his elbows. ‘And all we’re getting is more bloody rain.’ He crushes a cornflake with the back of his spoon, slides the bowl away. ‘Must be due some sunshine. God knows we deserve it after last year’s excuse for a summer.’
Nadia is not sure they do, and she’s tired of people joking about the rain, the floods, as though they were unexpected, as though it was a short-lived anomaly and everything will go back to normal. She’s tired of the way they address the effects of climate change so directly and the penny still doesn’t drop. She opens her mouth, but she isn’t sure what to say.
‘I know,’ he says for her, his voice teasing. ‘Global warming.’
‘They don’t really call it that anymore.’ It’s as if he has just woken from a long, ignorant slumber—he’s a couple of decades in the past, trying to catch up. Lloyd has been annoying her lately, more than he used to. His bowl, sitting there until the cereal cements. The chomp and slurp of his chewing. She’s sleep-deprived though, so sleep-deprived, and she puts it down to that. Lloyd doesn’t do the night-time wake ups. He sees her fatigue, he says he’ll help—he wants to help—but he sleeps right through it all. She’s tried kicking him, tried a sharp scratch with an untrimmed toenail, but he just snuffles, rolls over, resumes his rhythmic snores.
There’s a chirp from the baby monitor, scratchy with interference. Her heart jolts. Ears strain for another sound. She wills the baby not to wake up.
Lloyd is working from home today, which means bellowing phone calls from behind a closed door, sapping any chance she might have of falling asleep on the couch while the baby naps. He’ll pace across the creaking floorboards, bark obscenities at his computer. Elsie will wake any moment now and in the quiet minutes Nadia has managed to put a load of washing on, fold the dry washing hanging stale on the rack all week, and given the loo a quick scrub. It’s dull, but relentless. There’s still the groceries, and she asks Lloyd if she might pop out while Elsie sleeps, grab a quick couple of things. An escape. Unencumbered. Just for a few minutes. The baby won’t wake for another half hour, she tells Lloyd, and since he wouldn’t have a clue, he believes her.
She knots her hair into a low bun, scraping down the new shoots of grey sprouting in the middle of her forehead. More like a badger every day. Her jeans still won’t do up, so she secures them with a pregnancy belly belt and hides it under a long jumper. Just a couple of days ago at the petrol station, a stranger asked her when she was due. She told him November and turned away, her cheeks flaring with heat.
In the car, a Robin Thicke song finishes and an ad comes on telling her to ditch the razor and laser all her body hair off forever: the eternal, tacit quest to regress to prepubescence. Nadia is squeezing her second-hand Leaf into a tight space between two SUVs when a dizziness saunters across her vision like a dark, shimmering veil. She blinks it away, attempts to focus on the shapes pulsing around her. The bumper hits the curb. It must be the sleep deprivation. It must be getting worse. It is definitely getting worse.
She picks up a plastic basket with a broken handle and tries to remember what she came for. Her head prickles. The lights are too harsh, the bright white glare cracking the room open, seeping into every crevice. She scoops up a few Pink Lady apples, the ripest bunch of greenish bananas. The aisles are a convoluted sea of colour and plastic. A can of soup, a loaf of own brand bread. It feels as though her mind has left her body. She needs to get home.
The checkout queue is empty, and Nadia sets her basket in front of the blur of chewing gum, packets of ultra-soft women’s ear plugs, sachets of slimming shakes. The checkout operator’s glasses catch the light. She has tight grey curls and a toothy smile, and is making small talk; she’s glad it finally feels like spring. It’s barely August. Nadia smiles, hears herself replying, and she wonders what she is saying, whether she’s making any sense. The operator doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss.
Nadia hurries back to the car, wondering what the fuck, and by the time she climbs in, she is coming to. There is a headache ebbing at her temples, but her mind opens to a clearing, the dizziness dissipating to the edges. In the driver’s seat, she googles her symptoms. She’s not sure, but there’s a chance she’s having a stroke. She doesn’t want to overreact, but if it might be a stroke then she should get it checked out. She calls Lloyd. Elsie is awake. He sounds annoyed, but when she explains, his voice softens. ‘Go,’ he says. ‘Go.’ It crosses her mind that he wouldn’t know what to do without her. Nadia turns the key and the radio roars to life. Shell has made record profits of 5.1 billion dollars.
Even now, at 10 a.m. on a weekday, the A&E is crowded with coughs and fractured bones. With every second that passes, the guilt of being away from Elsie intensifies. Her feed is due. Lloyd is trying to work.
Nadia taps her foot. Checks the news. Solves the Wordle in five guesses. Tries the Worldle, which she never gets. Then the Quordle, which she leaves half-finished. She checks Facebook to find a ghost town of ads and a message from someone who thinks her profile picture is ravishing. She checks Instagram, to find a slew of holiday pictures from Paris. She checks Twitter, to find it’s called something else now and reads like the comments section on the worst news sites. She should read a book but her head still feels woolly, and she hasn’t managed to read more than a paragraph of a novel since Elsie was born, so she gives up on that without trying.
One by one, the waiting room clears, and then the doctor calls her in. The exam room is tiny, and a couple of degrees too cold. The blinds are tilted halfway down. The doctor is in his thirties, with a long pointed nose, smooth glassy skin, dark eyes that flit through the dimness. He gestures for her to sit, clasps his hands between his chinos, and asks what brings her in today. Nadia explains what happened at the supermarket, gives a muddled description of the strange sensation that came over her. The doctor listens over his shoulder, scanning through her history on his computer screen.
‘Baby is four months old?’ he asks, and she nods.
His eyes land back on her. ‘Are you still breastfeeding?’
‘Yes,’ she confirms. She tugs her sleeves down over her hands, closes her fists around the knitted fabric.
‘Have you got your period back yet?’ he asks next. He clasps his hands against his thighs again. His gaze feels heavy on her, and for a second she hesitates, assesses the atmosphere. He has asked about her breasts, and now her vagina, but she’s here about her brain.
‘Yes, I have,’ she tells him, pushing her concerns away. He is a doctor. This is probably okay.
He smiles to reassure her, tips his head to the side. ‘And how’s your sex drive?’
Nadia’s mouth goes dry. Her body tenses. But even now, even when this unknown man’s words are roaming her body without consent, she attempts to be peaceable.
‘It’s fine,’ she mutters. The baby ends up sharing their bed sometimes, usually, but that is none of his business.
‘Really? No issues with your libido?’ he probes.
It is now that Nadia loses patience. ‘Look, I mean, why do you need to know this?’ Her voice catches, fatigue and frustration breaking through.
‘I promise it’s all related,’ he assures her with a limp laugh. She knows this is a lie. But he backs off, changes tack. He instructs her to sit on the examination bed. Her arms are crossed in front of her, legs dangling off the side, and she feels like a child. Small, vulnerable, not in control.
He shines a small torch into her eyes, bright, piercing as a scalpel. Her pupils follow it, left to right.
‘Now close your eyes,’ he says. She doesn’t want to. This is unnecessary. He’s a creep, possibly perverse, but she doesn’t know what else to do. She can’t think straight.
There is nothing for a long minute. Her eyes are fused shut, her heart pounds in the silence. He could be doing anything, standing there in front of her, inches away. Then he tells her to open her eyes and strolls back to his desk. Gives no explanation. He picks up the phone and calls someone who knows more than him, relays what she told him earlier, back when they were on topic. He’s leaning back in his seat, the plump office chair teetering beneath his swagger. The person he’s called says it’s just a migraine—Nadia can hear them on the other end of the phone. They sound firm, almost bored. ‘Migraine,’ they say again. Not a stroke. The bill is $110.
Back at home, she sits in the car before going in. Lloyd doesn’t seem to think much of it, and turns back to his computer. He didn’t do anything to her; she’s fine. She is fine. Elsie releases a steady grizzle from her bouncer, wedged in the doorway of Lloyd’s office. Nadia picks her up, brings her close, takes in her warmth, her density, her milky scent.
The next time she goes back to the clinic, she hopes she won’t see the same doctor. But the time after that, she hopes she will, because she’s tired of holding space for other people. She’s tired of the constraints of inaction. She’s tired of apathy. She’s tired.
Clare Travaglia is a writer, editor, and reviewer living in Tāmaki Makaurau. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland.