Prognosis Page 2

  Mac is galloping toward a fence. He leaps the fence. I have never jumped anything while riding a horse, and I have no clue what to do other than lean forward and hold on. He jumps another fence, and I feel alive for the first time in ages.

  Mac and I are flying. I have cantered on a horse once but never galloped. Mac is like a racehorse. He will have to stop sometime, I tell myself. We head down a hill; this is not good. Leaning forward, I clutch at the long hairs on Mac’s neck. Should I lean forward or backward? Gravity says backward. Shocked by the pace we are moving and the steep drop below me, I feel fear for the first time since Mac took flight. My fear is for Mac. The hill is rocky, and Mac is not watching his footing. He may slip and break a leg. A horse with a broken leg needs to be destroyed and it will be my fault. I should have left him alone in his paddock. I let go of his mane, grip the reins tightly, and tell him to stop. Or at least to slow down. He takes my words and actions as a sign to speed up. Then he stops. Suddenly. Digging his feet into the ground and bracing himself.

  I am flying. Alone, this time. I soar over Mac’s head and somersault through the air. The sensation is remarkable. Time is suspended. I savor the moment—I am a diver, with no water below me. In childhood dreams I flew, but this is different: I cannot control the speed, the direction, the altitude. I have no control at all. It’s almost more fun—except that I know I will land, and that is bound to hurt. I have no time to plan. I cannot extend my arms to protect my body. Gravity has taken over.

  I will almost certainly break an arm. That’s okay, although I won’t be able to drive home. Never mind; Tim will drive me. And I’ll get scratched. No way to avoid that. The earth is hard and covered with rocks, and between the rocks are thickets.

  Those are my last thoughts as a person with a healthy, normal, functioning brain.

  The sound my skull makes as it hits the rock is like no sound I have heard before. It’s an assault. One part crack, one part slosh, one part thump. My brain shudders inside my skull. I feel it move.3

  When I come to, Tim is leaning over me, speaking. I have no idea how long I have been unconscious. Who is he talking to? I wonder, before realizing he is talking to me. He is making sure I’m alive. Mac nuzzles my feet apologetically. I got a bit carried away, he seems to say, although it could just as easily be his way of saying, Fool! I know absolutely nothing about horses, I realize. They are not like dogs. I lie on my back and look at the sky. The clouds pass overhead like I’m watching a time-lapse film. It never occurs to me to test my legs to make sure they still move. I am in shock, but I seem to be okay.

  “You’ve got a scratch down your arm,” Tim says.

  I look at my arm, at the cut that runs from my elbow down to my wrist.

  “Take it easy. No rush to get up. Where did you land?” he asks.

  I point to the back-left side of my head. “Here,” I say.

  “Let me have a look,” he says. He peers at my scalp. “Not even a mark.”

  I stand up and walk slowly back to the house. As soon as I am upright, I develop a headache, the kind that feels like someone has split open my head from behind with an ax, and a lump begins to form there. I can feel it. It never occurs to me, not even for a moment, that life will be different from this moment on. I drive back to Sydney that afternoon. Three hours on the road in Sunday traffic. I’m fine, I tell myself as I tear along the freeway, darting in between semitrailers and cars driven by old people. And I believe it to be true.

  As soon as I am home, I ring my mother. I am not sure why. I have no one else to call.

  “I got thrown off a horse,” I tell her.

  “No, darling, you fell.”

  “I did not fall.”

  “Horses don’t throw people off, darling. People fall.”

  “No,” I insist. “This one threw me.” Catapulted me, in fact, although I can’t seem to find that word. Was she there? Does she know? How do mothers acquire these frightening powers of omniscience?

  “Look, it doesn’t matter. Pour yourself a strong gin and tonic. You’ll be fine. I fell off countless horses, countless times, and look at me!4 Anyway, Marjorie is here, so I can’t talk now.”

  I hang up, do as I’m told, and pour myself a strong drink.

  The next morning, I wake as usual to find George’s muzzle in my side, reminding me it is time for a walk. Home, after our walk, I feed the dogs. I open the fridge and am surprised to find the reading lamp from my study lying on its side beside a jar of goat cheese. I remove the reading lamp from the fridge and place it on the kitchen bench. Inside the sink I notice the remnants of a square of butter, a block of Parmesan cheese, a jar of jam, a tub of olives, and a pint of milk. Why are these things in the sink? I wonder. It dawns on me that they have been moved from the fridge to make way for the desk lamp. Confused, I notice the toaster is missing. Someone has broken into my home and stolen my toaster. I race upstairs and look in the top drawer of my dresser for my grandmother’s sapphire bracelet. It is sitting in its blue velvet box. I race downstairs and check the living room. The TV and video player are still there; all that appears to be missing is the toaster. I check the doors and the windows, but there is no sign that anyone has entered my house.

  I pack the things that were left out overnight back inside the fridge. I open the freezer and find the toaster, covered in frost and icicles. I look at George and Bess. “Did you do this?” I ask. They look at me guiltily. I’m not convinced. Bess is the kind of dog who would confess to anything for the sake of peace. I remove the toaster from the freezer and set it in the dish rack to thaw. I decide to buy myself breakfast at the ferry stop on the way to work rather than use the toaster, for fear of electrocuting myself.

  At work, I enter my office and set down my bag. It is 7:45 a.m., which means I am fifteen minutes late. I have a job with a fancy title: the Director of the Executive Office of State Administration in the Premier’s Department, the central agency in the government of New South Wales (NSW). I am the youngest person ever to have been appointed to the NSW senior executive service. I am a third of the way through my doctorate in public administration, and I believe that public administration is the most fascinating thing in the world. I take myself seriously and hope I am destined for big things.

  As I bend down beneath my desk and flick the switch that turns on my hard drive, my boss enters my office and plonks himself down in my visitor’s chair.

  “How was your weekend?” he asks.

  I sit up and start to answer, but I don’t get far before he interrupts.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I ask.

  He peers in and looks at me closely. “Your left eye has turned inward slightly. And it doesn’t seem to move.”

  “I got thrown off a horse,” I say. “Yesterday.”

  “You need to see an eye doctor. Now. I’ll find someone.”

  He gets up, and I go to the bathroom to inspect my eye. It looks fine to me. I cover my right eye to check that the left eye still works. It seems to. Back at my desk my boss has scribbled down the name and number of an ophthalmologist.

  “He’s just down the hill on George Street. Call at nine when they open and make an appointment right away.”

  The eye doctor tells me the problem lies with my brain rather than my eye. There is nothing he can do. He suggests I get myself to a hospital as soon as I can for a brain scan. As I leave his office and walk outside into the bright light of George Street, I have a brief realization: brain injuries can be serious.

  I ring my ex-boyfriend Edward and ask if he will take me to the hospital. He lives nearby and is happy to help in an emergency. I call my mother. Again, I am not sure why. She says she will meet us there.

  Little good comes from a head injury, but it does cut down the wait when you show up unannounced at the emergency room. Mentioning the words “horse,” “thrown,” and “head” pushes you right up to the front of the line, ahead of everyone apart from people who have stopped br
eathing, people whose hearts have given out, and people with severed limbs.

  My mother arrives, and we sit down on three scratched green plastic chairs at the back of the room.

  “What’s the matter with your eye?” she asks.

  I don’t have time to tell her before my name is called. I look at her, shrug, and follow the nurse into the emergency room. Neither she nor Edward get up to follow me. I go in alone. I am not fearful. In my mind, I am here to make sure that my brain is not bleeding. A hemorrhaging brain sounds serious. And painful. Frankly I have no clue why I’m here. I feel perfectly normal. I seem to have no problem at all with speech or movement. And I certainly don’t look as though I have anything wrong with my brain. Apart from my left eye, which, people are telling me, struggles to keep pace with my right.

  The nurse leads me to a small office where a tall man wearing beige trousers and a light-brown jumper tells me he is a neurologist.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “I was thrown from a bolting horse yesterday.” I point to the back-left side of my skull, where I can still feel a lump the size of a small kumquat.

  “I landed there,” I say.

  “Were you wearing a helmet?” he asks, his head tilted upward like he’s trying to show me the insides of his nostrils. He does not have even a veneer of kindness about him, and I feel like I’ve intruded upon his day.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There wasn’t one,” I say. It is the first time the idea of a helmet has even occurred to me.

  “Well that was very, very silly,” he says. “You could have been killed, do you realize that?”

  I kind of wish I had died, I think, although I don’t tell him this, for fear of spending the next fortnight strapped to a bed in a psych ward.

  “The first thing we need to do is get you a CT scan to make sure there’s no bleeding in your brain and you haven’t fractured anything. We’ll send you off to imaging and then you’ll come back here.”

  I do as he says and trundle off behind a nurse who leads me halfway to imaging and then directs me to take a left, then a right, then the second door to my left. “Just follow the signs. It’s all clearly marked,” she says, smiling. I nod. I have an excellent sense of direction, but I somehow end up in a room marked “Orthopedic Day Patients.” A nurse leads me out and walks me to imaging. I am the only person waiting for a brain scan. I lie down inside a long plastic shell and close my eyes. My mind is blank.

  Once the scan is over and after a few wrong turns, I find my way back to the waiting room, where my mother keeps clearing her throat and pushing her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose—the things she does when she is nervous. Edward is telling her about a new business idea he has, but I can tell she’s not listening. It has dawned on her, I think, that being here—in the hospital, me talking to a neurologist and having a brain scan—might be an indication of something serious. The waiting room seethes with sick, hurt people, and I have been seen straightaway. I sit down beside them and wait only moments before my name is called. I get up, alone again, and follow the nurse back to see the neurologist. He sits at his desk in his tiny room, looking at pictures of my brain on a light box. It looks, to me, like a series of black-and-white photos of an old moldy orange.

  “Another couple of centimeters to the right and you could have died. Can you see this?” he says without glancing at me, using a ballpoint pen to point at the screen. I lean closer.

  “Bruising. Can you see it?”

  “I have no idea what a normal brain looks like, so no, I can’t see it,” I answer.

  “A normal brain looks like this,” he says, and points at a different part of my brain. “That’s healthy brain tissue. See the difference?”

  I shrug. “No.”

  “Contusion, we call it. Often follows a concussion. It could have been avoided had you worn a helmet.”

  “I think you’ve made your point about the helmet,” I say. “What does it mean?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’ll get you an appointment at the Brain Injury Unit in Ryde. They’ll do some psychometric tests and show us what we can’t see from the scans. You were really silly not to wear a helmet,” he says.

  “Shut up about the fucking helmet!”

  My venom disarms me. It is the first time in my life I have sworn at a stranger. It is also the first time in my life I have exploded without warning. I sit back in my chair and watch a sneer spread across the doctor’s face. I have lost whatever scant respect he may have had for me.

  “The nurse will get you a slot at the Brain Injury Unit. Wait outside for a few minutes.”

  I find my way back to the waiting room.

  “What’s going on?” my mother asks.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I have to go to the brain place in Ryde for tests.”

  “Why? What did the scans show?” she asks.

  “Bruising.”

  A nurse comes out moments later with a slip of paper. “We’ve booked you in at the end of this week. Friday, at two o’clock. Is that okay? They have your details, so all you need to do is show up.”

  “What else do they need?” my mother asks.

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  “But there’s nothing wrong with you apart from your eye!” she says.

  “The doctor seems to think differently,” I say.

  “I’ll take you,” my mother says.

  “No. Edward can take me.” I don’t even ask him.

  “That’s fine,” he says. “I’ll take her.”

  I start to argue with my mother. She has done nothing at all to provoke me, but a sudden fear about my brain, indignation about the helmet, and a lifetime of resentment toward her conspire inside me like a bomb that has just been detonated. “Fuck off!” I shout at her in the middle of the parking lot. The words leave my mouth, and I turn my head slightly, wondering where they came from. Who said that? My mother and I have always fought, but I cannot recall an occasion when I have talked to her like this. What has happened to me?

  My mother takes me at my word. She gets into her car and drives away.

  I spend the rest of the week at home. I don’t hear from my mother. I don’t hear from anyone. I must have rung my boss to let him know I would take the rest of the week off, but I have no memory of doing so. Edward picks me up on Friday.

  “Your eye is back to normal,” he says, looking at me closely as soon as I open the door.

  “Oh, okay. I’m glad to hear it.” I had forgotten all about it.

  “I’m starving,” he says. “Do you mind if we take a detour past McDonald’s?”

  “That’s fine. Thanks for the lift.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he says, leaning in and slapping me on the knee.

  We arrive at McDonald’s and find an empty table next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Ronald McDonald, and I watch Edward eat two Happy Meals. He pretends he has no interest in the two plastic figurines that hide inside his Happy Meal boxes, but I see him slip them inside his trouser pocket. McDonald’s makes him happy.

  Edward is a nice man, but we ran out of things to say to one another long ago. I’m glad we broke up. He finishes his food, wipes his hands on a fresh pile of napkins, deposits his rubbish in the bin like a good McDonald’s citizen, and we walk back to the car. Inside, he reaches across me and slips the two plastic figurines inside the glove box. He looks at me and smiles.

  “Does Kate like McDonald’s?” Kate is his new, improved girlfriend, with whom he got together in the final months of his relationship with me.

  “Hates it,” he laughs, “even more than you.”

  We don’t speak at all in the twenty minutes it takes to drive to Ryde. I stare out the window and wish my father were here. He would know what to do. My father was an associate professor of geology, but he sprang to life in a crisis—an electrical failure, or a leaking roof, or a broken-down car. In matters that concerned me, he almost always took my side, providing a co
unterweight to my mother, who liked to blame me for anything she could. I watch the trees and telegraph poles rush by and realize I have lost the only person on earth who ever had my best interests at heart. I am completely on my own.

  A psychologist named Toby leads me into his office and sits me down. He has curly brown hair, thinning slightly on the top of his head, and gentle green eyes. He wears jeans, a corduroy jacket with suede patches on the elbows, and oval glasses with gold rims. Toby asks what I do and where I work. I tell him, and he nods encouragingly.

  “We’re going to do some simple tests,” he says.

  “Okay. No problem.” I do well on tests as a rule, apart from tests that involve numbers. I failed high school math. Not only did I fail, but I achieved a result of 8 percent when I was fifteen, before giving it up altogether. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried but that I seemed incapable of grasping anything that involved numbers.

  I tell Toby about my struggle with numbers so as not to alarm him.

  “That’s okay,” he says. “Let’s try some basic numeracy tests anyway.” I don’t get the answers wrong. I can’t answer his questions at all.

  “Let’s try something else,” Toby suggests. “Basic verbal reasoning.” I do my best to answer, but I feel a sharp pain inside my head each time I try to think. I can’t process his questions, and as soon as they leave his mouth, the words begin to scramble; I can’t grasp them long enough to make sense of anything. Summoning up the energy it takes to ponder ten simple questions exhausts me. They are not so simple after all. I slump back in my chair and wonder what is happening to me. Looking out the window, I notice the venetian blind is broken. Is there anything more forlorn than a broken plastic venetian blind? I stare at the blind and a tidal wave of hopelessness overwhelms me.

  “Let’s try this,” Toby says, reaching under his desk and pulling out a large plastic cylinder full of wooden shapes in primary colors. He empties the cylinder on his desk. “Find the blue shapes,” he says.

  I stare at the shapes, conscious that Toby is watching me intently.