Gas Leak by Katherine Shaw

I walked home from yoga as usual that Saturday morning, still hungover but cleansed with sweat and chai, ready for a shower and a nap. It was what got me out of bed for 8am class (although I usually snuck in the back at about 8:20): the hot chai tea we ladled out of a vat on the stove after class, strong and spicy and not-too-sweet, infused with cinnamon and cloves and cardamom. Bombay style, said the studio guru, Carl, who had a long, white ponytail down to his knees and that morning had led us through a grueling series of inversions that seemed punishment for my hangover. He instructed us upside down, first against the wall and then each other and finally over the punishing wooden chairs, our heads dangling off our spines into the center of the room as if lined up for some chopping block. It was nearly noon – midday as they call it there – when I left the studio. Already the sun was merciless.

Summer in Perth, Australia. In Perth, unlike the rest of the country, they don’t believe in daylight savings, and so all summer the sun rises at 5am and scalds the earth until it sets. In Perth in the summer, you can really feel that the sun is a continuously detonating hydrogen bomb. It’s one-hundred-and-ten for weeks on end under no ozone layer. From the years I’d spend here, I would take with me the following markers, both of which I’d never heard before discovering them on my body and having them diagnosed: on each eye, a pinguecula; and on my forehead, a melasma, shaped not unlike the continent itself. Australia, sun-tattooed on my forehead.

Our apartment was three blocks from the studio, and as I turned up the staircase, I overheard the Polish guy up on the second floor talking to the old lady next door to him, with the cat. “Aren’t you right,” cat lady was saying. “I can smell it, too.”

“I smell it yesterday, also,” he said. “I ring them Monday.” When I reached the second floor landing, I saw that they were huddled around the gas main.

“Are you smelling gas?” I asked. They both nodded casually, so I leaned in and smelled it too. Sure enough, that distinct odor, like rotten cabbage. I remembered my Dad telling me as a kid that they add it in, the smell, that the gas itself is odorless and so a leak would never be detected. I remembered him telling me it was natural, the odor, that plants and our own bodies produced that smell.

                    “Yes, for few weeks now,” said the Polish guy. He had a round belly and seemed to always be in slippers. He was holding a beer. “I smell it in my apartment too, on and off.”

                    “For a few weeks?” I asked. Both of them seemed astonishingly unfazed. “We can’t wait until Monday,” I said. “I’ll ring them today.” (In Australia you don’t call, you ring.)

Finn was still in bed – his approach to hangovers being different than mine. I paused in the kitchen to inhale, couldn’t smell anything. Our bedroom was dark and the fan was rotating and Finn was a still, rumpled curve of blanket. “Finn, get up, quick,” I told him, shaking what I guessed was his hip. “There’s a gas leak. We gotta get out.”

“Crikey,” he said. With him this was a word that seemed to be reserved for the bedroom. He stumbled out of bed, flung his long legs into sweatpants. I’d met him backpacking in New Zealand, and then asked him to move to Australia with me, for a degree I would come to regret at the advent of the student loan payments. As a kiwi, he’d never had Australia on his list of places to visit, let alone live.

“Yeah,” I said, “Apparently the neighbors have been smelling it for weeks.”

“Weeks?”

“I know. Will you find the main to turn off and I’ll go door-to-door?”

Our apartment was a fifteen-unit building originally built as low-income housing in the 60s. ALBAN, announced the slanted letters on its street-facing side. It was that red brick ubiquitous in Australia, with only one high, small window in the bedroom, one in the bathroom, and one in the kitchen. If not for the balcony off the living room, just wide enough to fit two chairs if you placed them sideways facing each other, it would have seemed a bit like prison. But we had scored the best unit, in the top corner, “with a view,” we said. If you stood up on the end of the couch and craned your neck you could see a tiny square of ocean. Five minutes from the beach with rent we could afford. This was in Mosman Park, a swath of land between the Indian Ocean and the Swan River and one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city.

Once, at a party down the street, this girl asked where I lived and when I told her said, “Oh! I think I own a unit in that building.” I could tell she immediately regretted saying this.

“You think?” I asked, not letting her off the hook.

“I know, that’s so bad,” she apologized, blushing now. “My Dad bought it for me in high school,” she shrugged, helpless. “As an investment.”

                    At this stage my family and friends back home had become faces on a screen. And to them, I had become a floating head, a disembodied voice, a digital presence on weekends and at gatherings. Whenever I video chatted, I would always try to position my laptop camera to make the background in our apartment look less depressing, but even with some art and a plant and the best angle and lighting, there was no helping those brick walls. This was our fourth move in Perth, from Wanneroo to Northbridge to North Fremantle to Mosman Park, and it would be our final, we’d vowed. Because Perth was so far from anywhere, from everywhere, and it was so expensive to get by, and because we needed a visa to move to any other country together, we sort of got stuck there for a few years. Perth was hot, dry, flat, expensive, insular and isolated: the most isolated capitol city in the world, in fact. It was in the midst of a mining boom, people flocking to the city to dig up the iron ore and copper and nickel from the hills to the North and buy souped-up Holdens and build custom houses with their spoils. It made me feel flattened out and desiccated and poor. Even the Indian Ocean lapping its shores felt off: warm as bath water. To a girl who grew up in the chill of the Pacific, this felt somehow bereft. I longed for my home shores in Seattle, for Finn’s resplendent New Zealand.

I’d made my way door knocking down the third floor, back across the second, and back again across the ground floor, and was astounded to find that many people were just as unfazed as the polish guy and the cat lady. It was like this in Perth. A collective shoulder-shrugging was practiced, a filial sort of complacency. “She’ll be ’right, mate,” and “harden up,” were refrains that could be applied to bodily harm or heartbreak, to any manner of injury or loss really, from the age you could first fathom the meaning of the words.

I was just about to knock on the last door to the last apartment, where a Malaysian family lived, two young parents with their infant, when the door opened and the mother appeared on the other side of the screen, the baby nursing at her breast. To my eyes, she looked preposterously young to be a mom. Behind her, I saw a single mattress on the floor of the living room and no other furniture. Baby clothing and toys were strewn across the floor. Trying to convey to her what was happening, I eventually resorted to knocking on a pipe, and when she still shook her head I went ahead and mimicked an explosion. That got her attention, and from her I finally got the reaction I’d expected from everyone else: panic.

“Oh!” she said, kicking her shoes out the door and pulling it shut behind her.

“Oh no, I work,” said the young mom, pointing behind us. The baby had unlatched and her mom was buttoning up a shirt with the name of the supermarket just a block in that direction. I’d never seen her there before – maybe she’d just started. From what I managed to gather she was going to leave the baby until her husband got home twenty minutes later.

Four vans had pulled into our parking lot and about a dozen guys begun piling out. I was so relieved to see them – I hadn’t known what to expect from the apartment managers. It was a Saturday, and I’d never been in any kind of emergency situation in Perth. I was afraid I’d hear, “she’ll be right, mate,” and then I’d have to, what, call the police? Who might just say the same? I still had to remind myself what to dial: triple zero.

 “Do you want me to watch her?” I asked.

“Oh!” she said, “Oh you please? Please, yes very much.”

“What’s her name?” I asked, as she handed her over. I grasped her under her tiny arms and then transferred her to my side. I was surprised by how natural it felt.

“Amira,” she said, and then placed her hand at her own heart. “Noor.”

“She looks just like you,” I said, seeing it now, up close. The baby and the mother were both beautiful. “I’m Hannah.”

She gave me a carrier and a bottle and with that she was off to work and I was left in the blazing sun with a baby in my arms. I found a small section of shade on the lawn and strapped her onto me with the carrier, pulled her little feet through its sides. When Finn appeared and saw the baby, he smiled a half-smile and shook his head. “Crikey,” he said. “What happened here?”

“Can we keep her?” I asked back. But I already felt her agitation growing, her bodily separation from her mother. The three of us walked to a coffee shop on Glyde Street, Amira’s little feet bouncing against my thighs and my sweat beading and trickling between us. Finn took off his hat and held it above her like a halo, shading her. We sat in the air conditioning, a white lady and a white man with a brown baby. Amira began to whimper, and tense her body, and when I tried giving her the bottle she rejected it, puckering her whole mouth. I picked her up, made some long, drawn-out shhhhhh sounds, totally making it up. Feeling myself utterly not her mother. I ate a scone and drank my flat white while Finn bounced her on his knees, wishing I’d grabbed some ibuprofen on the way out the door. Now with Amira my hangover felt reckless and selfish, felt like a transgression. “We should head back soon,” I told Finn. “In case the Dad gets home.”

“The Dad?” he asked. “You didn’t get his name?”

“It was a pretty rushed hand-off.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. Dads are sort of the sideline to the show when it comes down to it.”

“Comes down to what?”

“To being parents.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, breastmilk, I guess.”

“No, no. During the breastmilk phase the Dad takes care of the Mom. And then as soon as that’s over and she’s an empty milk carton the Dad all the sudden becomes the worshipped one.” He nodded silently. (This is kiwi for satisfied.) And we sat there, two people who knew nothing about parenting. I lifted Amira from his arms to mine and thought what a strange and wondrous thing it would be, to lactate. To feed her with the milk of my own body.

“Leave it to you to end up with the baby of a couple strangers,” said Finn as I scooped Amira into the carrier again.

“They’re not strangers, they’re neighbors. And I’ll take that as a compliment.”

On our way back to the apartment, the sun had descended enough that we were able to cling to the stretch of shade on the West side of the streets. Amira quieted. Walking seemed to soothe her. I stopped at a rose bush, leaned in and inhaled the intoxicating sweetness, and then brushed Amira’s fingers against the petals, watched her face grow calm and watchful. Soon after that she was sleeping peacefully against my chest.

On the lawn of our building, the tenants sat like would-be ghosts. The cat lady stroked her tabby and the polish guy was swigging from a roadie. In the parking lot, one of the contractors with a gas mask dangling around his neck walked up to us. “You guys the tenants who called it in?” he asked. He held out his hand. “Mitchell.”

“Lucky you caught this when you did,” said Mitchell. He paused, shook his head, “To be honest, lucky it wasn’t too late already. Pipes haven’t been checked since the building went up.” He held out a pipe, solid red with rust, with huge holes eaten through, held together in one place by a thin strip of metal. More of it was gone than left. I had a distinct vision of turning on the stove, and being blown back, blown away, swift as a spark. I clutched Amira closer.

“You’ll be able to move back in by around 8 tonight, and we should have the gas going again by end of day tomorrow. Cute baby,” he said, and I could tell he was wondering.

“Isn’t she?” I answered.

We sat under the shade of a frangipani tree, waiting for the dad to come home. A temporary family of three. From under the white blossoms we watched the excavation of the pipes. Corroded pipes pulled out of the earth and the walls like the bowels of some prey. As the contractors stalked out the old pipe and marched it all down to the dumpster – the skip – Amira suckled from her bottle, drank it almost all down, spat up, wailed for awhile, and then, as we walked her around the block one last time, fell back asleep. She looked so peaceful in my arms. Beatific.

I couldn’t believe we’d all been living here all this time. What if choosing to live in this cheap apartment by the beach had turned out to be our last decision? What if we hadn’t chosen to live here, and nobody had reported the gas until Monday? To which Finn answered, “Why would you even think about that?” A great question. He was a judicious thinker, unlike me. For me it was, how could I not think it? For me, with thoughts, it was no censor, no holds barred! Amira, awake again, wriggling in my arms, had begun her life here. There we sat, under the frangipani tree, not blown into the sky.

When the dad came home, I handed over Amira and Finn and I met our friends at the pub for a drink, a hair-of-the-dog, we-survived-the-gas-leak drink. Without Amira I felt light and free and a little restless. My beer was cold and smooth and the pub was dim and cool.

After that I turned thirty and we eloped on the beach and Finn turned thirty-two and we quit our jobs, and on Christmas Eve we left Perth. On the way to our red-eye we went to a party, where we ate a dinner of Christmas cookies and drank champagne and said farewell to our friends. Everything seemed surreal and augmented, the way it does when you know you’re leaving for good. I wore my sequined skirt to the airport, and we whispered in the back row of the shuttle as outside Perth passed us by in the indigo summer night. “Think we’ll ever come back?” Finn asked. We were on our way to New Zealand for six weeks for our honeymoon and then on to the U.S., to Seattle and my family and a green card for Finn. Australia would remain terra incognita to me, home to Amira.

Later, I would think of that day when we could have been thrown into the sky, ripped into the incognita, and I would look up the old apartment. And see, pixelated, walking down the street outside, Noor and Amira, their faces blurred out on my screen, but undeniably them. Amira now up to her mother’s waist, a pink bow in her hair, pink sneakers on her feet. Noor holding a stroller and in it, a baby tilting a bottle to its lips.

© Katherine Shaw, 2019

Katherine Shaw has worked as a professional writer and research editor in conservation, cancer research, and global health. But her heart lies in fiction. She lives in Seattle and calls New Zealand her second home. www.katherinedshaw.com

Gas Leak was read by Rachel Brun on October 2nd 2019 for Accident & Emergency