The first time I saw the man who would become my husband was through the glass door that led into the foyer at work. I was late, my tooth was aching and I was trying to open the door without putting down the box of books I was carrying. He was standing with his back to me, a slim figure looking at the magazines on the mantelpiece, and our eyes met briefly and precisely in the large mirror that hangs there, before he turned and walked across to open the door. I thanked him and said that Emma, who was now my boss, must have popped out for a minute.

‘She’s getting coffee,’ he said. ‘I’m early.’

He was still holding a book on childhood asthma, one we had published the previous year. He was dark—hair, eyes, suit—and quietly spoken. His movements were small and efficient (he closed the book quietly without glancing at it again and placed it on the low table). All this I noticed through the pain in my jaw as he carried the box of books into my room, where I had directed him. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Later I realised that he rarely wore suits and must have been nervous, although it did not show. What I noticed was a sense of restraint that might or might not turn out to be shyness.

‘Are you the one doing the anaesthesia book?’ I asked.

‘So it seems.’ Oddly formal. ‘I’ve got an outline here.’

‘Good. I’ll be editing it. We’re always on the look-out for doctors who can write in English.’

He nodded.

‘As opposed to Latin and jargon,’ I explained, although he seemed not to get the joke, or not to find it funny.

He picked the asthma book up. ‘Can I borrow?’

‘Take it home and have a look. How’s the writing going?’

‘Good, I think, though it’s hard to know how much to put in, how much information to give.’

‘I told you, didn’t I, that my husband was once awake during an operation?’ said Em, who had just pushed open the door, balancing three coffees and a couple of muffins. ‘He couldn’t move or feel anything, but he heard everything. It was like he was stuck.’

Michael held the door for her and took a cup, which he handed to me.

‘No thanks, I’ve got a toothache.’

‘He could hear the surgeon,’ said Em, ‘or whoever it was, talking about the cricket score. Andrew was really annoyed. He’s a Pom and Australia was winning.’

‘Yes, that happens sometimes,’ said Michael. ‘Hearing’s the last sense to go.’ He turned to me. ‘Have you got a good dentist?’

I said I had an appointment for that afternoon, and he nodded and moved to follow Em into her office. Just as he entered he turned back to me. ‘Here,’ he said, and fumbled with his black leather satchel before passing me a sleeve of white tablets, ‘take two of these.’

After he went, I looked up the Oxford English Dictionary.

Anaesthetise, it said, render insensible.

Among the books on the shelf above my desk at work were the Macquarie Dictionary (of Australian English), the Oxford English, Roget’s Thesaurus of Synonyms and Antonyms, Strunk and White, and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Just looking at their solid spines above me made me feel calm. ‘If the answer’s not there,’ I used to tell writers, gesturing at the bookshelf, ‘I give up or make it up.’ But they always were there. They always are. Mixed metaphors, split infinitives. Dangling participles (Fowler prefers to call them unattached), in which the two parts of the sentence don’t match. ‘Surprised and pleased, her tooth seemed to ache less immediately.’ The surprised tooth. Confusion about the subject.

A week later he walked past me as I was waiting for my bus. He was on the way to his car. It was a casual exchange of pleasantries that created its own force field, neither of us implicated by more than circumstance, and kept us talking there, first standing, then leaning together against the bus shelter, for the ten minutes it took for the bus to come. He asked me about my work, not out of politeness, it seemed, but interest—not in the material published, but in the process of editing.

‘How do you decide what to take out and what to leave in?’

‘Well—’ slow at first, trying to gauge his level of interest, how much he really wanted to know. ‘You take out anything that is not necessary.’ I paused, and glanced at him quickly, aware that I had put more thought than must seem necessary into a statement so obvious. I waited for him to laugh or turn away. But he asked again, focused, insistent, ‘But how do you know what is necessary? How do you make that decision? How do you decide what it is that matters?’

‘It matters if it is interesting,’ I said at last. ‘That is the first thing. It matters that the information is of value.’

I stopped again, wondering when he would be sick of this, but he was nodding his head, small precise punctuations.

‘It matters that it is clear, that it is intelligible. It matters that it is to the point.’ I paused. ‘Though that can be open to negotiation. Sometimes something may not seem immediately relevant, but you feel that it’s important, so you try to work out where it fits and why.’

And now he smiled just slightly. ‘So there is some room for negotiation?’ And I smiled slightly back, and said, ‘A little. Not too much.’ From the corner of my eye I could see my bus further down the street and I knew that this was the natural place to end the conversation, the hint of gentle sparring, a small realignment, but I said quickly, because it was what had occurred to me and because the information seemed to me interesting, of value, ‘What is harder than knowing what to take out, is knowing what is missing. That is the hardest part.’

The bus was nearly here, he had heard it too, and we straightened together. I pulled my bag higher on my shoulder, the slight awkwardness of finishing. ‘I’d like to talk more about this,’ he said. I nodded vigorously, too vigorously probably, I thought later, but he did not seem uncomfortable, at least no more so than I, and he waited while the bus door shut and I found a seat—at least he was still there when I turned to look through the window—and raised his arm briefly before turning and walking off.

The next day at work I asked Em about his manuscript, casually, and when it might be ready for me to look at.

‘You can have a look at a draft now if you like,’ she said, passing it over. ‘He says he’ll get the final version to me in a fortnight or so— we’ve got another meeting—and after that he’s all yours.’

I wonder now how Emma is managing, if she has someone doing my job. She came to see me at the nursing home once after I woke up. She wore her red lipstick and her shiny black boots with zips up the sides. She brought magazines. Vogue, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Who. We were downstairs in the sitting room and her voice was too loud. Old people, even deaf people, turned to look at her. I could not hold a thought. I could not follow the trail of her thoughts. They flapped around like streamers, red and yellow and blue, and became tangled, until I stopped listening.

‘Look,’ I said, and I pointed out the window. ‘There are my birds.’ It was the first time I had seen them from any window but mine, and I thought how much I appreciated their greyness, grey shapes in a white sky, and how, up close, there would be mauve and soft brown and sedate creamy tips on some of the feathers. This is why I am here, I thought. I felt a wave of such tiredness that after another minute I excused myself. I did not ask her up to my room, and though we hugged at the door I knew that I had not given her what she wanted. Nor she me. I left the magazines downstairs on the table and did not look at them again. After that I told Viv I did not want visitors, except Hil. Emma rang a couple of times (I found the messages on my bed) but she did not try to visit, and I knew that she had got the message and that she would get on, for now, without me.

I took his manuscript home and read it in the bath, careful not to splash stray drops of water that might mark the paper or cause the print to run. ‘One hundred and fifty-four years after a Boston dentist called Thomas Morton gave the first successful public demonstration of what is now known as surgical anaesthesia,’ he wrote, ‘we still don’t know exactly how anaesthetics work. We know that a general anaesthetic acts on the central nervous system— reacting with the membranes of the nerve cells in the brain to shut down responses such as sight, touch and awareness—but the precise mechanisms and effects remain uncertain.’

Dr Michael Small, whose sentences had a steady forward momentum, and whose participles did not dangle.

It was two weeks or more before I saw him again—he was walking into Emma’s office as I was walking out of mine—by which time I was sick of thinking about him. In the days after the bus stop talk, I had run the conversation in a loop through my head. Replayed over and again the feeling of his earnest engagement; the smile when he had said, ‘So there is some room for negotiation?’; the image of him standing at the bus stop, hand raised in farewell. I knew it was not wise, I knew it was bad luck, but I’d allowed myself even to imagine, just briefly, what it would be like to kiss him, the soft pads of our lips, the subtle, moist negotiations. I’d replayed the images and imaginings until I had sapped the juice from them, until they were husks, and the thought of them produced only dissatisfaction, a slight nausea. So the first feeling I had, alongside the thud of excitement at finding myself standing in front of him in the office, was irritation, a sense that he had somehow let me down. And it was this feeling, or the fear that he would recognise this feeling, that kept me walking past him, barely pausing to snap him a sharp quick smile, eyebrows raised, before heading for the kitchen, where I closed my eyes and leaned my face against the side of the fridge in disgust.

I waited for a few minutes, dawdling over the tea, hoping that he might on a sudden impulse come in and find me there. But he didn’t and I spent the next hour at my desk fighting off sad, heavy feelings and toying distractedly with a manuscript that had arrived that day about Aboriginal health, or the lack of it.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered. It was not a book we would ever publish. There was a story at the start about a woman returning to the top-end community she had been taken from when she was nine. I read it more through inertia than anything else. It was a familiar enough tale: the government people arriving, the kids being rounded up and put on the truck, everybody crying. Em had left her door a little open and now and then I could catch a voice (his) or laughter (hers) from inside her office. One young mother had tried to make a bolt for it, but on being cornered had run back to the truck and thrust her baby into the arms of the nine-year-old, made her promise to look after it. No surprise to read that soon after they got to the children’s home near Darwin, a white couple came and took the baby away. Eventually I let myself realise that I was hungry and that the reason I was not eating was that I didn’t want to miss him leaving. And after that it was not so difficult to rise, take my jacket from the back of my door and head out of the office without lingering. As I paused at the bottom of the wooden steps to check in my bag for my wallet, Michael opened the door behind me and came down the steps.

‘Hello. Are you having lunch? Do you want to get something to eat?’

I said sure, which seemed easy, and we walked in a serviceable silence together down the street.

The cafe did not feel so easy. He had clearly defined, cherubic lips, and I could not remember where on a face to look to be natural. We sat at the only free table, too close to the door, so that people passing in and out brushed past us with their jackets and bags and a couple of times we both reached protectively for the bottle of water. The second time, Michael picked it up and moved it to the other side of the table and I thought, that is what I should have done. Now he will think I lack initiative.

A woman entered, dragging a small blond boy by the wrist. She leaned over the counter next to us and shouted queries at the man who was frothing milk for coffees in a jug.

‘I need a table for four. When will there be a table?’ The coffee man kept frothing the milk but pulled an enquiring look over the jug.

‘Hang on,’ he mouthed. The woman kept shouting.

‘How long will we have to wait for a table? When will it be quieter in here?’

I winced, slightly, comically, in her direction, but Michael, next to her, seemed not to notice.

He had soft, dark curls and deep set eyes which darted quickly around the room before stopping very still. I had the sense that he was waiting for something. I wondered if he was going to ask me about my work; if he had thought about me since the bus stop talk. We looked at the menu and made small talk while we waited to order. I said the toasted sandwiches were good. Michael said he knew, he had come here once with Emma, though not at lunchtime and now he knew why. I asked if he lived around there, and he said no, he lived in Bondi. ‘Me too,’ I said. Trying not to sound too pleased. Instead I started to tell him about the kitchen at Hil’s house; the bird table I had helped her build outside the window, and the rosellas that were now tame enough to eat from your hand. Some days, I said, I came home and the garden was full of kids and birds. I added that it was a small garden, mostly taken up by a fig tree, and that it only took a few kids to fill it. But that these kids had never known much tenderness, yet they sat so still there with Hil, husky voices lowered, arms outstretched, waiting.

I spoke without looking at him, and although everything I said was true I was aware that I was telling the story for my own purposes and that those purposes were obscure even to me. I spoke partly, I knew, in order not to look at him. In order not to have to keep wondering if I mattered to him. I told him a story about myself in order to hide from his scrutiny. But I chose to use that word tenderness—and the image of the waiting children. Then I stopped and there was nothing more to say and still I could not look at him, so I ran my gaze around the cafe’s blue and white interior and saw that the woman with the blond child had found a table and was sitting there with a blond man and the child and another, older, child, a girl.

I wondered if they were a family.

‘What do you do Jess,’ says Anna, ‘when you want something?’ After a while he asked how long I had been a copy editor. I said three or four years I supposed; it had sort of crept up on me. ‘It suits you,’ he said. ‘You look like a copy editor.’

I said it must be the glasses, which were round and dark. He said, yes, and the hair—which back then was short and white.

‘You look like a doctor,’ I said, ‘but I won’t hold it against you.’

I told him then about the manuscript I had been reading, and about how thirty years later she had gone back, the nine-year-old who had been taken away, to try and find her family. How she had arrived in the middle of the day and walked along the dirt road towards a group of Aboriginal people sitting in the shade of a tin-roofed shed; how suddenly a figure had detached itself from the group and started running towards her. It was an old woman and her arms were stretched out in front of her and when she reached the woman who had returned, she said, ‘You got my baby? Where my baby?’

As I talked, Michael watched me with his dark eyes and nodded slowly.

I asked him then if anaesthetics could be dangerous, and he gestured towards the knife with which I was buttering my roll, and said anything could be dangerous if it wasn’t used properly; they were powerful drugs. There was a bit of an art, he added, to knowing just how much of the drug to give. That was what made a good anaesthetist. There were guidelines of course, but every patient was different. Also, it depended how deep you wanted them to go. Sometimes, he said, if someone was terribly wounded, he might put them in a coma, an anaesthetic coma, to give the body a chance to heal. Sometimes the only way to save someone from death was to take them part of the way there.

Up here, the trees rise from a bed of rock, moulded basalt that follows the earth’s contours, creating lips and ledges where the soil has washed away beneath it. Even in the charred rock there is nourishment; lichens in pale greens and deep rust reds colonise the surface and in every gap and hollow, earth has formed from which grasses and other small plants reach out. Sometimes I come across small groups of trees or shrubs where there seems to be no life. But even here if I look close I find tiny green shoots, right at the base, beginning to push through.

I was fascinated by his hands, the long square-tipped fingers, which he moved as he talked, and the smooth splayed nails. Mine, which I bit, I kept folded beneath my palms on the table, two vague fists.

I wondered if he kept his like this for his patients. It seemed oddly flawed, I said at last, to need that amount of guesswork. Not like science. Not like grammar. More like sleep, I thought, which might come or might not. ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘I fantasise about snakes and squirrels and other animals that hibernate. I sometimes wish I could do that.’ And then I felt foolish because he did not answer and kept staring beyond me, as if I had not spoken.

Sometimes it seemed to me that the times I felt the most myself were at work, when I was editing: the fluid, formal arrangements of commas, full stops and semicolons, the precise unarguable shifts in meaning; sentences and paragraphs rearranged, ideas corralled, collated; excised.

‘That’s how I felt when I split up from my wife,’ he said suddenly. ‘I stopped sleeping. I’d sleep maybe two or three hours a night. It was weird. I wasn’t tired. In the morning I’d get up and go to work, and I was fine. I seemed fine. And as soon as I got home I’d just go to bed. I’d lie there for hours and hours and hours. I’d get tranquilisers from work, but I couldn’t sleep. I would have given anything to sleep.’

The subtle, unarguable adjustment of rhythm and flow.

At the end of the meal we ordered takeaway coffees and then walked back to the office where, instead of parting, we sat, as if it were already habit, on the concrete steps. I wanted to ask about his wife, and when she had left. ‘Do you think people can know anything,’ I asked, ‘when they’re unconscious? Emma’s mum, when Em was doing exams, she used to sit by her bed until she’d gone to sleep and then she’d read to her from her swot notes. Em’s convinced it was what got her through.’

‘No,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I don’t think so. Anaesthesia’s not sleep. People sometimes say they heard stuff, but mostly it’s dreams.’ Occasionally, though, he said, someone would start to wake before you wanted them to. The other day, he said, a bloke had tried to sit up while they were still stitching him and they’d had to give him more propofol to settle him down. ‘Although we might not mention that in the book,’ he said. And we both smiled.

What about the man, though, I asked: would he remember?

Michael said no; the drugs made you forget.

The backpack is pressing into my shoulders, sending lines of sensation up both sides of my neck each time I step. It is heavy, heavier than I had imagined at the shop. It takes more energy than I had expected just to walk. I stop and adjust the hip strap, tightening it properly so that it rests now on my hip bones, which I can feel taking the weight, releasing the pressure on my back. I think of the brown leather satchel Hil bought me as a present when I started school.

The silver buckles that she adjusted over my chest. My pencil case, my drink bottle, my lunch in a paper bag, sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. How I would wait out the front after school for her to come and get me, and how each day I would imagine that instead of Hil standing by the gate, it would be my mother waiting there in the old Holden. I tried not to think it, but I always did. And each time I thought it, I felt guilty.

‘But the body,’ I want to say to Michael. ‘What about the body? Does the body remember?’