KEEPING FAITH
ROGER AVERILL
First Published 2010
This e-book edition 2011
Transit Lounge Publishing
95 Stephen Street
Yarraville, Australia 3013
Copyright ©Roger Averill 2010
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission for excerpts reproduced in this publication. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.
Cover photograph by Mads Greve / photolibrary
Author photograph by Greg Field
Design by Peter Lo
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Averill, Roger.
Keeping faith / Roger Averill.
9781921924033 (e-book)
A823.4
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
6 TH APRIL 1994
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
25 TH APRIL 1994
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
3 RD MAY 1994
Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
5 TH MAY 1994
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
6 TH MAY 1994
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
7 TH MAY 1994
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
8 TH MAY 1994
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
9 TH MAY 1994
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
10 TH MAY 1994
Chapter 4
Acknoweldgements
When a baby dies at birth, is stillborn, a midwife takes it into the Pan Room and closes the door, pulls down the blind. It’s a signal, a code, like lighting a candle in a window, lowering a flag to half mast. That way, when I come to wash the instruments and sort the bloodied, soiled linen from the rest, I am warned and can prepare myself for what I am about to witness.
Working in a maternity hospital, I can’t avoid these things. The first dead baby I saw was lying curled up in a cold metal kidney dish. All the usual features were there, but ridiculously small; shrivelled and shrunk like a grotesque doll. I remember its hand, the miniature fingers splayed and extended as if trying to touch something just beyond reach.
Most stillborn babies are purple or blue, but those that have died at birth carry the colour of life. Looking at them, their eyes bulging behind tissue paper lids, toes curled, I can’t help but work quietly in case I wake them, start them crying.
Before dressing the dead baby in a simple shroud and taking it to the parents — encouraging them to put a face to their grief, to nurse it, name it — the midwife, for the sake of hospital records, has to take its photograph. Watching her perform this bizarre ritual, seeing her arrange the tiny corpse so as to best display some mark or feature of medical note, I always have to stop myself from smiling, crying.
A nurse once said to me, shaking the Polaroid print, waiting for it to develop, ‘We’ve got to be like that bench, Josh: stainless steel. Plenty of blood gets slopped on us, but at the end of the shift we’ve got to wipe ourselves clean.’
She has left now, that midwife, to have her own child. I often think of her, though, as I soak up the diluted pools of blood from the bench, spray metho onto the machined surface of the sink, as I make everything gleam, give the whole room that sweet, alcoholic smell. In a way she was right, an undertaker can’t mourn every death. But that doesn’t stop you wishing you could, doesn’t stop you feeling guilty that you don’t.
I can’t help thinking that if the saying is right, that only the good die young, then these ones, the ones born dead, must be angels.
I have often thought that if, as he had secretly hoped, my father had been called to be a minister rather than a layman who sometimes preached, I would now, looking back, recall much more of my childhood. If that had been his destiny the Church would have regularly moved him to a new parish, each time taking Mum and Gracie and me with him to a different manse, another suburb. We may even have fulfilled my boyhood dream and lived for a spell in the country. No matter where these moves may have taken us, each of them would have acted as a bookmark in my memory, something jutting out, jolting me back to selected passages of time.
As it is, I grew up in the one place — a flat, windswept suburb a long way north of Melbourne — and the only shift in my childhood I can remember occurred in 1975, when I was twelve and my mother