The Doula, By Linda Atikins

The telephone first rang at sunrise, a time of beating wings and wild ringing calls, bookended by the stuttering catcalls of the kookaburras who had set up a township in the hollow tree at the middle of the roundabout. The kookaburra family ignored the sparse predawn traffic of the village street, casually thrashing small snakes into boneless sausages of scales and limply draped tongues. Sunrise was a good time, not perhaps as sacred to the Goddess as moonrise, but propitious, nonetheless. The tea leaves, however, forecasted doubt. Important, she thought, to pay attention to omens, tasseography and dawn-light, a red horizon and the eucalypt leaves quivering in absent, oiled whispers.

A time to stay at home, to flow along with circumstance, draw out the day's nastiness and stitch it into her latest quilt, six months' work of the needle so far, disasters averted and sewn into patterns of sea and sky. It was strange that you could do this, she thought, you would have expected that bad omens would taint the work, render unsafe any body that slept, unguarded, snuggled into the karmic enclosure which grew beneath her sutures, but in fact, the opposite seemed to be true. Such a quilt would gently extract the bad luck from the owner, absorb it like a soft and scented sponge, direct and squeeze and mould it into shape, and then the luck could emerge refreshed, alchemically translated into goodness.

The doula's quilts were justifiably famous and in high demand, especially after one lucky owner had left on an unexpected holiday a day before her house was engulfed by flames, the quilt in her car tucked securely around the flesh of her wild, blonde toddler daughter. To top it off, that very same owner won Lotto, cashed in from a ticket she found fluttering across the caravan park to which they moved whilst arguing with intransigent insurance assessors, with her daughter and her pink gumboots, the quilt and a few blackened spoons.

Nobody seemed to know who had bought the ticket, and when her new house arose, she returned the quilt to the doula, for she knew that luck ought to be shared, especially in a town as poor as this. ‘Ceridwen sees you,' the doula had said. ‘She will remember.’

She could hear the phone, a shrill burping from the kitchen as the cool verandah-wood creaked beneath her bare feet, and the last of the dawn mosquitos fled the early insect-catching birds. Her toes with their claw-like nails, the bunions of late middle age and the cracks in the skin of their pads, gripped the decking firmly, three generations of children having smoothed the planks beneath the thickened skin of her soles, woman-wood-earth in synchrony. So, not all the omens were bad. Today would be a day for caution, rather, presided over by a god of Small Catastrophes, the spilled tea, the broken glass, the near miss of her neighbor's pet cat on the poinsettia-fringed street, the ants in the sugar, the birdshit on the washing, droppings dyed fresh purple from the mulberry tree next door.

There wasn't a lot that could be done about days of Small Catastrophes, one just had to hunch one's shoulders and endure. Eventually, the lesser god would move on and plague someone else, if she didn't provoke the nameless and invisible deity with resistance. If the call came however, she would need to light a candle, offer some dense white frangipani blossom, kneel before her shrine, and risk it. You couldn't justifiably let karma get in the way of a woman’s duty.

‘A doula,' she said to her apprentice- ‘A doula means a woman who assists a birth. In Greece, the term specifically referred to a female slave who helped birthing mothers. I suppose that description still fits us, if we really consider it. To be enslaved in this way is to be constricted, it is to have no other course, than to be only and exactly who we are. There is no other way for us and we must be open to it, subject to it, we are the door through which the spirit passes, do you understand? A door has no choice, and it doesn't need thanks.’

‘But you love what you do.’

‘Yes. We are the female manifestation of Janus, the threshold keepers. We are vestal, shameless and without fear.’

She could see that her apprentice did not yet understand, and she smiled to herself over the cracked rim of her steaming cup. We all learn sorrow in the end, she thought. It gets us no matter how hard we try. Pointless, almost, any attempt to train a young person to be a doula, in the word’s truest sense. At her apprentice's age, how much had she learned?

The phone burbled again, from its perch on the wall beside the kitchen door, a square push-button monstrosity, splotched with the grease of a thousand fingertips. Down between the buttons brown hillocks, wedges of sweat and discarded cells. A second call, and at dawn, too.

The linoleum squeaked beneath her feet, two deep breaths, a scented inlet of air streaming from her nostrils to her chest, to her abdomen. The third breath for luck, down her crinkled thighs to her knees, a heat-free twinge of discomfort.

She palmed the receiver and breathed. ‘Today?’ she asked.

‘Yes, today. Soon.’

‘I’ll be there. Can I have some breakfast first, do you think?’

‘I don’t know what to expect, but I think there’s time.’

‘I won't be long. Do you need me to bring anything?’

‘Maybe just a candle.’

The doula eased her car down the dusty rural roads, head full of uncomfortable thoughts as black beef cattle with small udders and half-grown calves grazed, head down in the early autumn's first morning dampness. The tips of the remnant yellow summer grasses glistened behind the barbed wire curlicues of the wobbling roadside fences. There hadn't been a lot of money for extras any time in the last decade, she knew. She couldn't see the hipbones of the blocky black cows, so hopefully a good sign this year. Some money coming in at last. Maybe even less of a need for luck.

Celia greeted her at the door, battered car in the gravel driveway, Celia’s belly pushed forward against her clothing like the spine and blowhole of a humpback whale. A flowered dress, with fluttering hems and a single cotton thread, dangling.

‘The baby?’ the doula asked.

‘Fine. Kicking. Making my ankles swell, in this heat.’

‘It’s false summer. There will be leaves blowing down the roads before you know it. You’ll be sorry the warmth is gone, once you have to wrap up again. The little one, too.’

‘Better on the breast than in the belly.’

The doula smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. Hard not to admire the strength, the naivety of first-time mothers. There they were, three strides from the beginning, thinking they were on top of it all, and then came the baby, a veritable explosion of randomness and chaos into the most careful of plans. The doula did not intend to share this knowledge with Celia yet, better to wait until she was both blinded and paralyzed by her love, the other side of the coin as it flew, spinning before the fall.

So we stride, the doula thought, a procession, unending, generations of shining life, ancestors and descendants, and what feels like a minute of frenzy in the middle.

‘Take me to him,’ she said.

The room smelt of fever and discomfort, the bedding rumpled, the curtains half- pulled to and the gloom of the early autumn garden outside. A superb blue wren, about to lose his glittering blue summer wear, exchanging his magnificent Christmas plumage for the prosaic muddled blacks and browns of winter, twittered to his family from the mulch which edged the lawn.

The doula opened the curtains all the way, allowing the early morning sunlight to pitter patter onto the faded rug beneath the bed. She paused for a moment of silent respect, Eos in pink-cheeked ascendance, before she turned to Old Joe, ensconced in the sweat-stained sheets of his deathbed.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, as she rummaged in her basket for the candle.

‘Thirsty,’ Joe replied, rheumed eyes and cracked lips, the white patina of dehydration on his tongue.

‘Can you drink?’

‘Only sips.’

‘We can work with that. Do you feel today is the day?’

‘Who can be sure, really? I think so. I’ve stopped pissing. I don’t think I can stay awake for long.’

‘Fair enough.’ The doula called to Celia, puttering around in the kitchen, feeding her unborn child with toast and rosehip tea. “Celia. Celia! Do you have any juice in the fridge?’

‘A little. Apple juice, will that do?’

‘That would be perfect. Can you dilute it by half, please, and bring it to me with a spoon?’

Celia entered the room, clutching a tumbler filled to the brim with yellowish, diluted juice, tears dripping unheeded onto the carpet.

‘There you go old man,’ she said. ‘Oh crap, I forgot the spoon.’

‘Language!’ Old Joe roused himself enough to say. ‘I might be dying today, but that does not give you permission to swear.’

‘You swear like a trouper yourself,’ the doula told him.

‘But I’m a man. It’s different. Foul speech mars fair mouth.’

‘Oh, Joe, you are a genuine crackup. What are we going to do when you’re gone?’

‘You’ll be fine. The baby will be born soon, that’ll be a good distraction, Celia can turn this room into a nursery, everyone can just- get on with it.’

‘I’m sure. Now, I’m going to give you a small spoon of this juice. It’s not too sugary, you won’t need to drink much for it to help with your dry mouth.’

The doula fed Old Joe some juice and he slurped and mumbled at the spoon, but after only a few mouthfuls, he held up his hand, enough, please stop. She wiped his chin gently.

‘There. That feels good, huh?’ She pulled a large cotton-tip from her basket and moistened it with a clear viscous substance she kept in a small, screw-topped and unlabeled jar.

‘Here Joe, here’s some glycerin. It will help with dry lips, now you’ve had a bit of fluid.’

Joe mumbled his thanks as she straightened his sheets and lit her scented candle on the dresser to drive away the odours.

‘How long do you think it will be?’ Joe asked, concern and fear in his eyes, his face. ‘Today? Do you really think today?’

‘I don’t know, Joe. It will happen I guess, whenever?’

‘Will you stay?’

‘Yes.’

‘If someone else needs you more, you go, alright? Don’t stay here if that happens.’

‘Let me deal with that. You know how much I like you. It would be an honour to stay.’

The doula meant it. She was closer to the end of her own life now, than the beginning. Her menses had ceased, her joints ached in the morning, her grey hair curled wildly around a nut-wrinkled face. Her eyes were hooded, white rings around the green- arcus senilis, the bands not of wisdom but of age. Hopefully wisdom, the doula thought, but one thing she had noticed in herself and in her peers- wisdom was best assessed and measured in retrospect. Looking in the forward direction, one was forced merely to muddle on as best one could. Sitting with Old Joe would be in no way a waste of time.

Joe’s eyes drifted closed for a moment, and then he awoke with a startled grunt.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that,’ Joe said. ‘Was I out long?’

‘Just moments. Would you like me to massage your hands?’

Joe nodded. ‘That would be nice,’ he said.

The doula rummaged in her basket a second time and extracted a pot of ointment. Her fingers slid across Joe’s palms, feeling the slender bones under the wasted thenar musculature, rolling in their nest of skin. Brittle, like the feet of a chicken or the arms of a newborn, fingers curling like a shed spider skin upside down on the floor, what had been inside before going on, going away.

The gentle scents of beeswax and vanilla crept across the room, and Joe drifted off again, the doula’s fingers caressing his fingers and palms. Yellow nails in their beds, ancient nicotine stains, the knobbed joints and tendon contractures marking the hands of a man who had worked manually, every day of his life. What these hands have achieved, the doula thought. We gain in birth, but every payment for new life, a loss.

‘Is he asleep?’ Celia asked from the door.

The doula nodded.

‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘That would be lovely, thanks,’ and she laid Joe’s hand on the coverlet as he twitched and grunted.

They sat in the kitchen, a diagonal slice of the room, the bed, and Old Joe’s recumbent form, light on the carpet and green shrubs nodding over the lawn outside, in the distance fences and cows and a single silvery water tank with glistening horizontal ribs.

‘Not long now for you,’ the doula said. She watched the fetus wriggle restlessly in Celia’s womb, dress curling in gravid wrinkles beneath Celia’s ribs. A few weeks, maybe. Celia clutched her abdomen.

‘I’ve got the birthing kit, everything you said, the midwife is happy so far with my condition, hopefully it won’t be long before you’re back here-’ A flash of pain on her face, as Celia remembered, forcibly, that the occasion for this visit had not yet found its way to completion.

She nodded to the other bedroom, with its white sheets and drowsing occupant, his long arms draped over the quilt, dotted with their red thrombotic stigmata, small skin cancers and broad, blotched freckles.

‘I’m going to miss him,’ Celia said. ‘When he’s gone. I know it’s a good thing for him to rest. But he’s been around my whole life, and the one thing I wished for most was for him to see his first grandchild. I’m so fucking sad.’

There was always a moment, the doula found, where temptation arose to exit the silent communion of compassion and speak aloud. She allowed Celia time to recognize this, to calm herself, to breathe from the heart, and to let the impulse pass unacknowledged. The doula took Celia’s hand and stroked its dorsum, staying with her between the utterances which would only serve to create distance. Celia sighed, and the doula watched Celia’s muscles unspooling, lengthening into relaxation. She sipped her coffee.

‘Do you think it will be long?’ Celia asked. ‘Will there be pain?’

‘No, to both. He’ll be fine. I’ll stay with him until the end.’

‘Will you want something to eat?’

The doula shrugged- ‘Do you need something to do?’

‘I think so.’

‘Then, yes. I would appreciate it if you baked a cake, something with cinnamon. We could share a slice later in the day.’

The doula knew from her skein of experience, years strung like the bright glass beads she once wore around her neck, dangling from a leather thong; she knew that of Joe’s senses, smell would be the last to go. How restful, she thought, to slide from this world wrapped in cinnamon and vanilla, a beeswax rub and warm sun between his fingers. A child besides a grandchild to be, there was nothing more a man could ask for than to die on his own property, surrounded by his generations and embraced by the sweet moist scent of cooking.

Old Joe snored, a deep bullroar of a moan rattling the counterpane as he slipped deeper into sleep. She doubted he would wake.

‘Why don’t you start up?’ the doula said. ‘I’ll sit with him.’

The doula sewed on her quilt while she waited by old Joe’s side as he drifted downwards. She was glad to be working on the quilt here, the passing of an honourable man would now be sewn into its lining, and maybe converted to luck for another woman in another life. She thought that Old Joe would have been happy at the notion as she embroidered a small house in cross stitch onto the sunny surface of the ocean, an almost invisible reminder of a life’s work, blue stitch on blue water and a spume of foam beside. The house became part of the quilt’s shape, its texture, the whole greater than the sum of the parts, an almost audible click as Joe’s luck settled into place between the stitches.

Celia bustled and clattered in the kitchen, popping in from time to time, her palm between her teeth as she watched Joe slipping away.

‘Try not to be uncomfortable,’ the doula told her. ‘He’s not feeling anything at the moment. He’s sleeping peacefully.’

Oh, Joe, she thought. I knew you when you were a farmhand, a carpenter, building decks and fences and laughing at everyone’s unfunny jokes, tall and thin and sensible, balding head and bright blue eyes on the job. I remember you with a beer in your hand at barbeques, smoke in your mouth and a hat on your head. I’m sorry to see you go, too, more than I can say.

You were the best thing about both of us.

‘How’s he going?’ Celia asked from just behind her left shoulder. The doula started in surprise.

‘As well as can be expected, I think. He’s no longer conscious.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Experience. Don’t let the cake burn.’

The doula stitched carefully, as the day passed slowly from morning's washed-out skies to the bright blue and gold of afternoon. She paused at lunchtime and ate a slice of Celia’s cake, still warm and daubed with melting cream. Cinnamon and sugar; scented and sweet, and the rich thick slick of the cream for balance.

‘This is delicious,’ she told Celia.

They sat together in silence for a while as Joe’s breathing began to become more laboured, mouth open and fissured tongue on view, eyes squinched shut.

‘What’s that noise?’ Celia asked. ‘That gurgling? Is he in any pain? The morphine pump should still be ok, there would be at least half left, still.’

‘He can’t feel it, Celia. He’s forgotten how to swallow, that’s all.’

The doula mused as they sat, wondering how many people knew a fact she had learned long ago; that birth and death were exactly the same, heads and tails of the same coin, sunrise and sunset all at once in the same sky.

‘Do you?’ Celia asked- ‘Do you have children?’

‘Yes, I have two. A son and a daughter.’

‘Are they up here?’

‘No. My son’s a university lecturer down in Melbourne. My daughter died.’

Celia gasped-’Oh no. Oh, I’m so sorry.’

The doula shook her head gently, not now, she seemed to be saying. 'It was a long time ago.’ she said. They sat and listened for a while to Old Joe’s gasping breaths, longer pauses, a tense and ticking silence and then a heaving grunt. ‘It won’t be long,’ she said to Celia.

She could see the quilt from the corner of her eye, crumpled into her wicker basket, sea and sky and a stitched blue house, invisible in the folds. The quilting needle glinted in the slanting afternoon sun from the window on the other side of the bed.

She should stitch her daughter into the quilt, the doula thought, let her rest with old Joe, a blue fish beneath the cream-stitched froth, a fish and a house and a quilt stuffed with tranquil spirits.

I should, she thought, I should but I can’t. How could I let her go, sew her into this quilt, send her from my side to be somebody else's luck?

Joe’s eyes opened, wide blue irises and dilated pupils as he stared, seemingly upwards, into the corner of the room.

‘Squeeze his hand,’ the doula told Celia. ‘Joe, it's your time. You can leave us now. We’ll be alright. You go.’

Joe’s eyelids fluttered as he slipped backward onto his pillow. There were a few more gasps, but they both knew he was gone. Celia wailed at his side, wild tears on her dress, on the pillow, on his face. The doula let her cry, gave her the time she needed.

Celia turned her tear-stained and swollen face to the doula.

‘What’s next?’ she asked.

‘Do you have the linen, the basin and the cloths?’ Celia nodded. ‘Then we wash him.’

Together they performed the historical duty of women, the Washing of the Body, a prayer to the liminal deities, gentle caresses of thankfulness for Joe’s life and deeds. The doula tied his chin with fine linen cloth, and they washed his chest, his arms and his back, working together. He was heavy, as they were in death, even though she could see all his ribs and his sunken sternum, the wasting of his flesh from the final fight. His hands were scarred from the intravenous drips, and she washed his fingers with care, sponging gently between each digit.

‘You go now. Call the funeral director,’ she told Celia. ‘I will wash his lower body.’

Alone with him, she sponged his flaccid genitals with their sparse white hair, the inside of his thighs and the crease behind his testicles, the soles of his feet. Her fingertips lingered for a moment over the circular scar just above his left knee, the residue of a cycling accident, when Joe was young and had more courage than sense. Her eyes watered.

When she was finished, she covered his body with the shroud, his arms at his side and his feet splayed slightly, and he became anonymous again, just another body, she told herself. Clean and ready. Celia leaned against the doorjamb, all of her energy spent, as if simply being upright was a burden. Her eyes were dull and glazed.

'They said they'll be half an hour,' she said. ‘Do you fancy another cup of coffee?’

'No, it's fine. Thank you, Celia, it was a very peaceful passing.’

‘Yes. You need to leave now, I think?’

‘I do. But you can take it from here. Have you listed the calls you need to make?’ Celia nodded. There had been plenty of time to make the necessary arrangements, many of which had been supervised by Old Joe himself. He had never been the type of man to leave it all to chance; indeed, she could hear him now, telling her to measure twice, always twice, before every cut. Of the pair of them, she had been the dreamer, the observer of omens, the puller of threads from the cloth.

‘It's nearly sunset,’ Celia said. ‘It was always his favorite time of day.’

‘Mine too.’ There were tears in her eyes, as she gathered up her basket, with its unguents and the new quilt. She met Celia in the doorway and hugged her, a curling arch around Celia's swollen belly, the boy within rolling restlessly, a sea swell beneath the doula's breasts. The basket banged on her hip. She imagined for a moment that she could still see the quilting needle, a secretive sparkle from within the folds of the quilt. A few stitches were all that would be needed.

‘Celia, the quilt is nearly finished. I'll bring it for you, when your time comes. In a month. It can be for you, and for the baby.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I think Old Joe would have wanted you to have something like it. The quilt will be ready when you need it.’

‘Thank you. I don't know how I would have managed without you.’

The doula kissed each of Celia's cheeks, lips lingering.

‘In a month,’ the doula said.