The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

tail-spreading to do, but then charmed into taking pity in the dark bush on the poor, lost, child marsupial. Even a cranky-then-kindly brown snake – somehow perching up like a rattlesnake in the illustration – hisses some advice. In the final scene the joey leaps across two pages into its mother’s waiting pouch.
    After hearing Ellen read it aloud Jocelyn remembers the lost-child rumours from the encyclopaedia, and the buried baby. Something about it makes her want to rip the book from her niece’s hands. She is worried about the ideas she has begun to plant in her, of being lost, of foreignness. ButSandra, glossy head bent, pores over the thing constantly in corners of the house and garden, murmuring the names of these alien animals quietly to herself.
    â€˜It’s only a book, Joss,’ Ellen soothes. ‘She loves it.’
    Jocelyn watches Ellen through the days, hears her sharp voice ordering Sandra about. Now and then Ellen puts two hands on her swelling belly. Jocelyn begins to feel consumed by anxiety for these new lost children, born and unborn.
    Martin helps Jocelyn in the vegetable garden, tying the slender stems of tomatoes to wooden stakes. It is two weeks since Ellen and Sandra arrived.
    Martin has something to say. He takes a breath: ‘I’m not sure about Ellen’s injuries.’
    It’s the first truly hot midday of summer, and there is no shade in this treeless part of the garden. Jocelyn looks up at him, still tying the string. ‘What do you mean?’
    He is holding a green bevelled stem to the stake while she knots the string. He doesn’t answer, standing there behind the plant, holding it like a line between himself and her.
    She straightens, brushes hair from her hot face.
    â€˜Are you saying you don’t believe her?’
    He breathes in, fingers still on the whetstone silk of the stem. ‘No, it’s completely possible that he’s hurt her. But I’m just not sure the particular things she’s told me arecompletely accurate. She’s emphasising things I just can’t see, that would be more evident. And –’ he pauses, watching her – ‘what she said to you about miscarriages. Injury during pregnancy, unless it’s late term and a really major blow, like a car accident, actually rarely results in miscarriage.’
    He waits, then says, ‘What I mean is, perhaps she’s just making things slightly more dramatic, that’s all. It’s understandable.’
    Jocelyn stares at him. This cool doctor’s voice she has never heard. Used like a scalpel: the slight, easy pressure, drawing a fine red incision into Ellen’s life. Melodramatic. Something violent in her flashes.
    â€˜You sound like Thomas.’ She spits the words.
    Martin closes his eyes. ‘Look –’
    â€˜And don’t you dare say to me, “that’s all”.’ Her rage stuns her.
    Martin says nothing now, only holds her gaze across the green lines.
    And then Sandra is walking down the path between the lettuces towards them. It is the first time she has come near the two of them alone, without her mother. They both stay silent, keep still, so as not to scare away this new small creature in the garden.
    Jocelyn breathes. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ she murmurs.
    Sandra stops, gapes at her as if at something fearful and ugly, and Jocelyn instantly regrets her familiarity.
    Sandra puts a fingernail between her teeth. Martin starts working again, lifting the bowed tomato vine. Jocelyn instinctively follows him, tying the plant where he holds it, each of them careful, quiet. The sun is high. Sandra stands watching them as they work. They hear the click of her teeth on the fingernail, and she takes the torn sliver from her tongue like a hair, examines it, her dark, fine head bent in the sun. Then her voice comes, high and English among the vegetables.
    â€˜Mummy says can you please come in for