Irukandji Death Syndrome – by Tabitha Laffernis
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I came up for air. And everything got worse.
The water was crystalline, warm and salty as sweat.
‘Happy honeymoon,’ the concierge had said when we arrived, smile pinging against a tan. His face took in nothing, betrayed nothing.
Perfect, that first spring into the ocean. So bloody perfect. He kicked lazily, then quickly, grabbing me by the waist and pushing me back in. I inhaled saltwater, coughing from the wrong tubes. He had done the same at the wedding, smashing cake against my painted mouth.
‘Let’s watch Jaws when we’re back at the room,’ he joked.
‘Too soon,’ I replied. ‘Remember that dentist who killed his wife around here? They should put a disclaimer on the resort website. And besides, there could be sharks anywhere. There are sharks back home.’
Yes, we opted for a resort. Yes, it was a little tacky, but we were so far north it felt like a mutiny. When the world stopped it was as far as we could go.
There was no alarm clock and no need: we woke to frogs, to the acid sunlight, the claggy air that stuck us to the sheets.
‘The world is your oyster,’ the waiter at the one restaurant on the island joked as he ushered us to the raw bar. My new husband laughed like he’d never heard it before. The waiter brought us the newlyweds’ complimentary bottle of prosecco, chilled in a bucket of ice. It cloyed on my hot tongue.
‘What did I do in a past life to deserve you?’ he asked as we slurped more than a dozen oysters each, one, two, three, pulping in our throats.
‘I’m just so in awe of you,’ he said later that night. He got repetitive when he drank. ‘What does it mean if I’ve done everything right?’
I didn’t tell him that doing everything right meant there was nothing left to do. I didn’t tell him that it didn’t matter. That the world had a funny way of bringing things into balance.
The scattered rose petals on the bed didn’t figure in my mind: up here there were no roses. We were surrounded by so many different types of wild: rainforest, red dirt, coral blanching like a pressed rash.
My new husband didn’t seem to mind as he swept them off the bed theatrically, play-tackling me into the sheets, flexing as I flexed, pushing my dress up with one hand, pulling my hair with the other. Already the days were suspending into each other, differentiated only by darker tans, worse clothes, more bathers hanging on the balcony railing, paradoxically drying in the heat and dampening in the humidity.
The next day started as the others had.
‘G’day,’ said the resort staff as we sat down for breakfast. The straps of today’s bikini crossed the lines of yesterday’s sunburn. ‘Where are you off to this morning?’
I had broken out in hives the night before the wedding. At the reception I pounded antihistamines and sipped tiny sips of champagne alternated with gulps of water, looking the part of a blushing bride. Under the tan I could have sworn I still had faint stencils where the hives had bloomed, on my temples, my chest, my back, my belly, all down my arms and legs. I hadn’t told my new husband. I wasn’t going to.
That day we joined a snorkel tour. ‘Why not?’ I’d said. We could go to places we wouldn’t be able to get to otherwise. He agreed. He could be agreeable.
‘Reckon we’ll see a croc today?’ he joked to the guide. Sounding like such a city kid.
‘No,’ the guide replied, brusque, American, flicking something off his company polo shirt. ‘Wrong part of the ocean.’ My new husband laughed it off, but I knew part of him had been serious.
‘It is stinger season, though,’ the guide said. ‘We’ve got wetsuits for you.’
‘I don’t want to wear a wetsuit. I look hot in my swimmers.’ I’d meant to whisper, but the guide heard.
‘Non-negotiable, I’m afraid, ma’am,’ but he smiled a little, and under his wraparound sunglasses I could see his eyes cheating downwards.
We suited up. My new husband pulled the zip all the way up my back, sweeping hair from my shoulders, a whispered grip around my neck. Each zipper tooth against my vertebrae. I reciprocated the gesture, fast. The safety briefing was imminent.
The usual: life jackets if you needed them (they looked emphatically at some of the European tourists as they said it), the boat team would be roaming in the water with bright red snorkels if you needed them, watch out for when they waved us back in to move to the next stop of the tour.
‘Off you go,’ one of the other guides motioned to the sacred blue.
I went in. It was beautiful, yes, but the wetsuit was like a raincoat.
Still, we swam. The coral twisted, riddled. Fish were ultraviolet. I saw a stingray. It was unreal. I surfaced.
‘Ah! What was that?’ I said through the snorkel.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I think so. I thought I felt something on my foot, it’s nothing.’
‘Bluebottle?’
‘No. Maybe a scrape on the coral.’ I hoped not. I suspended on top of the water expertly, no lazy feet dragging against the oceanic bones.
We kept swimming. We went back to the boat for drinks. I woke to the smell of vinegar, to bruises in my armpits from where I’d been dragged to a space cleared for privacy, the engine flicked on full throttle and the petrol making me gag. Polo shirts rushing in and out. Faces flashing like torchlight.
‘It’s too much,’ I cried, ‘it’s too much, get me out of here, end it now. I can’t do this.’ He held me tight. I needed air.
‘Not you. Not us. It can’t be you, I can’t do this, kill me now.’ I threw up on the deck. A cocktail of buffet eggs, tropical fruit and daytime beers. The intimate tang of my own stomach acid.
I stirred again in a hospital bed. Fentanyl, promethazine, glyceryl trinitrate, magnesium.
‘Fentanyl,’ I asked. ‘The one rappers OD on?’ My new husband laughed a little, relieved.
‘That’s just her sense of humour,’ he told the nurse.
‘It’s all over,’ I told him. ‘It has to be. It isn’t worth it, nothing’s worth it, get me out of here, I can’t be here, I can’t take a hospital bed from someone who still believes life is worth living. I don’t know why we got married. What’s the fucking point?’
‘This happens sometimes,’ the nurse assured my husband, who had stepped away. She moved from tube to chart to syringe.
My husband nodded, unconvinced. ‘Are they always this specific?’ The nurse gave him a pat on the arm.
‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned from 30 years in emergency, it’s different for everyone.’
I grabbed the nurse. ‘I can’t,’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t let him near me.’
It was smaller than a Lego cube. Smaller than a bullet. Smaller than a five-cent piece, bigger than an apple seed. Translucent. I sweated through the sheets so many times. My husband examined my chest closely, looking at the faded hives, more prominent now with the flush of venom.
‘Are these because of the sting?’ He asked the nurse.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ I said, still clutching her arm. ‘Don’t let him talk to me. Get him out of here. Don’t let him see me die. Let me die. Let him see me die. Make him kill me. I bet he won’t. I’ll kill him. This isn’t it.’
The world was an artery and I was a bubble of oxygen injected into it. Months later my husband would joke about it at dinner parties.
‘On our honeymoon,’ he’d chuckle, tonging dressed salad onto plates, ‘she threatened to kill me. She wanted to die. Full-on Armageddon, Ragnarok, acid flashback, apocalyptic shit. The world was ending.’
‘It wasn’t a threat,’ I’d say coyly, to peals of laughter. ‘It was an oath.’ ▼
Image: Yeji Yoo - Unsplash
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