wants to blame Alexander Otto, she wants to blame the blistering heat, but it was she who sucked the life out of her. Alexander has managed much better; no suffering, no fear, he knew what he wanted and tolerated no diversions.
‘He was always going to be a doctor,’ his mother said at their first interview. ‘He knew his mind from the beginning. It was one of the qualities that made him so special.’
Lorraine Otto, a youthful eighty-four-year-old, thrives on love for her son, gardening and bowls, in that order of preference. Every detail about Alexander’s life has been lovingly preserved, remarkable details from Lorraine Otto’s perspective, chronically numbing from anyone else’s. She has stockpiled her son’s life: school reports, scrapbooks, countless snapshots, university assignments, even a brace of home movies that take Alexander from his first day at school through annual prize-givings, holidays at the coast, visits to the zoo, weekends at the snow, birthdays, Christmases, parties, graduations. The peculiar feature of the movies is that their star, despite the passage of time and the changing backdrops, remains fundamentally the same. His gaze is always directed to the camera, he winks, he smiles, he cavorts, he always gives a perfect performance. And he was always going to be a doctor.
‘Alexander was fascinated by the body, even as a baby,’ Lorraine Otto said on a later occasion. ‘Blood, scars, nothing bothered him.’ She lowered her voice, ‘Not even faeces. He’d sit in his cot playing with it, as if it were clay.’
A modern-day Wolfman, Edwina found herself thinking. Excited by his excreta as a child, he becomes a bowel specialist and dedicates himself to the stuff. And must have smiled, for Lorraine continued, ‘It wasn’t so funny at the time. His beautiful wicker cot would be so badly soiled I’d have to drag it outside and hose it down.’ After a pause she added, ‘Of course, being such a clever child, it didn’t happen often. And when we learned he wanted to be a doctor, suddenly it all made sense. He was always a special child.’
A special child, this said over and over again, with a clarity of vision not found in other children. ‘Alexander noticed everything,’ Lorraine said, ‘and was always absolutely sure what he saw. I’d point out the shapes in the clouds, the bearded old west wind of the fairy story, the huge white-winged sailing ships, but he saw only what was in front of him. A cloud was always a cloud.’
‘Perhaps,’ Edwina suggested, ‘he was drawn to certainty because of his own uncertain beginnings.’
Mrs Otto dismissed this as she did anything that emphasised Alexander’s adoption. ‘We never made any secret of his birth. I’ve told you, he was a child who knew his own mind.’
‘But surely the mystery of his biological parents — ’
‘There never was any mystery, Alexander simply wasn’t interested.’
‘But not knowing, couldn’t that have had some effect on the person he became?’
‘It might in some children, but not Alexander.’
So Alexander Otto became what was ordained. His mind was medical, his vision was medical, he was a complete medical entity. As for anything else, the spirit, the soul, he has converted it to flesh and knows it as others might know the intricacies of tripe. And when he looks up at the sky he still sees only clouds. Just like Edwina, but unlike him, she struggles to ignore what else is up there. Edwina wants her life to be tidy, and a mind that infuses the sky with fantasy is not to be trusted. It is best to see only clouds so she does.
She walks up the beach and sits on the sand, leaning her back against the stone wall. The beach is dotted with workers on their lunch break; stretched out on the sand, their clothes discarded in neat piles, their skin reddens in the blazing sun. And more children playing truant, as carefree and defiant as Edwina always wanted to be but never had the courage.
From her earliest years Edwina acted as if she believed life made sense, that all she needed was a knowledge of the rules. By the time she finished kindergarten she was well-versed in kindergarten rules, but quite a different set was required at school. Everyone watching and waiting for her to make a mistake, and she determined not to give them satisfaction. Ever vigilant, she did not give herself much satisfaction either, although the basic rules, hiding her cleverness and listening to friends relate in extravagant detail the rhythms of family life, were easy enough. And she must have got most of it right because she was popular. The girl who policed every one of her actions with the cold eyes of a zealot was the first to be selected for teams, was always surrounded by a crowd at lunchtime, and was invited to all the birthday parties.
In fourth grade, another scholarship girl, Faye Gilling, started at the school. Faye, too, was different, but rather than stitch herself up with fear, Faye was outrageous. Loud-mouthed and flamboyant and always in trouble, she said she was a witch and perhaps she was; certainly she had courage, given the standing of the occult in Methodist schools. While Eddie sought acceptance in convention, Faye, flashy and brilliant and shunned by most of the other girls, didn’t seem to care. Such bravado for walking the edge and walking it alone. In fourth grade Faye was going to be a painter, by the ninth grade she was going to be a poet, when she left school she became a journalist with a drug habit, who’s still propelling herself with the same old swagger.
Faye wasn’t a friend, popular girls couldn’t afford to mix with outsiders, but secretly Eddie admired her. Faye had fun while Eddie shadowed herself; Faye was knowing while Eddie, refining her role for each situation, seemed to know less and less. But having decided on her path, Eddie seemed unable to change. Dreams don’t stand a chance against relentless knowledge of one’s shortcomings. In the end, Eddie’s desire for change became a paralysed limb she learned to work around.
Edwina still wants to believe that life makes sense, even though she knows that if it were true, a smart girl like her would have learned the rules long ago. And yet she remains guided by this belief in her biographies. She searches for patterns and she finds them. Every contradiction, every unpredictable act can be explained, and if not, is omitted from the biography, although may find a place in her private musings. To her prominent men she makes a gift of her own lifelong desire for order.
Alexander Otto has found order whether he wants it or not, but alerted by her own experience, Edwina is suspicious. She wishes she were not, she wants to close the shutters on her own curiosity and close the book on him. His life is turning the spotlight on to her and it makes her uncomfortable. And not why she chose this work. She wanted the mutterings of other lives to silence her own, other promises, other secrets, other flaws.
How can you work with such despicable people? her friends ask, all of them well-educated, well-employed and politically to the left of centre. And while she lies to them, she does not to herself: she has no desire for subjects who will point the finger at her own less-than-satisfactory life. So, good socialist that she is, she chose a capitalist for her first subject, and environmentalist that she is, a mining magnate for the second, and atheist that she is, a fundamentalist preacher for the third, and now Otto with his artificial intestine research and Edwina a long-time opponent of transplant medicine. It is their very difference that has kept them out of her hair. But not so Alexander Otto. An insidious merging is occurring. She focusses on his conservatism, and comes face to face with her own; she adds up his successes, and finds her own contemptuously short list. As for the pivotal events that are found in most lives, Otto could recite his without hesitation: the luck of the adoption draw, meeting mentor and friend Dr Faine, choosing this particular university and that particular hospital, marrying Cynthia, having daughters not sons. When Edwina searches for her own pivotal points, she might well be on the Nullabor plain.
Not that anyone would guess, for in all aspects of her life she provides the perfect performance for a well-educated person of stable background. She is offered more commissions than she can accept; Nigel, who considers himself
