Rose Leopard by Richard Yaxley

randomly onto the perfection of the lawn.
    â€˜Maybe,’ I tell her, ‘maybe we can go home and you can write an article about the over-burdened public health system, and I can write a story about Dr Garten and his long floppy ears.’
    A sudden squall of rain pelts against the window, diffuses the light that tumbles into her room.
    â€˜Imagine that,’ I continue. ‘Imagine …’
    But the gurgling is loud and pronounced, like a choking madness. I look across: a pink foam of blood bubbles from her mouth and her eyes are suddenly wide with panic. As she begins to thresh and cry out, I break from my reverie, reach forward and punch the red button above her bed. Instantly it seems Garten is there, other people are there, nurses and doctors, orderlies, everybody in the hospital, all bent over Kaz, wiping and shouting and wheeling plastic bags on stands, shunting a trolley towards her, swabbing, patting, cajoling — and ushering me out, pushing me into the anonymity of a corridor where three blue plastic seats await me, as well as a picture of the parched treeless outback, a water cooler and the notion that we are skidding hard down a slope, too fast, unable to stop, unable to fathom why.

Five
    K az is somewhere else, Garten tells me. He doesn’t mean down a different hallway or in a different room, he means that she is somewhere outside our world, floating in a place where her past and future must collide and her gorgeous mind will lift and dart like a bird in a storm as she renegotiates her destiny.
    â€˜I’ve set up a video-conference,’ he tells me, ‘with the PA. in Brisbane. Doctor Lee Kouw Wang is an expert in this type of thing.’
    I lift my head wearily. One-forty — Stu must have found the ice-creams. And hot dogs, McDonald’s, the ambience of a tucked-away beach — anything was possible.
    The blue chair, I notice, is smeared with my leg-sweat.
    â€˜What type of thing?’
    He looks at me, sighs, folds his angular frame into the chair next to me, links his hands and rotates his thumbs in the manner of a story-teller who has just reached the difficult part, the prelude to the climax.
    â€˜Take the hand off,’ I tell him flatly. ‘Amputate if you have to. If it’s that serious …’
    â€˜Oh it’s serious,’ he assures me. There is a crack in his voice; he sounds like he has just gargled sea-water.
    â€˜Then take her hand,’ I insist. ‘Please.’
    â€˜There are other problems,’ he says. ‘Her blood pressure, for one thing’
    â€˜She’s always been hypertensive —’
    â€˜No, no. It’s too low, dangerously so. Pulse is weak and fast, and she’s drifting, hallucinating. We’re doing some more blood tests; liver this time, probably kidneys too. And we need to keep her fluids up — she’s losing too much, too quickly’
    We stare at each other.
    â€˜What is it?’ I whisper eventually. There is a fear stalking me; it chisels each word that I hear, each dreadful vision that swims before my eyes.
    Garten strokes his long face, chooses his words carefully.
    â€˜It’s quite possible,’ he says, ‘that your wife has contracted STSS’.
    An acronym — at a time like this! A bloody acronym! It is with some difficulty that I keep my temper.
    â€˜STSS. Which is?’
    â€˜Sorry. STSS stands for Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome’
    â€˜Toxic shock? What — tampons?’
    â€˜No, that’s TSS, the partner in crime. Quite rare, but STSS is even rarer — about one case in every hundred thousand people. It’s known as an emerging illness’
    â€˜Meaning?’
    â€˜Meaning, we’re still learning the best ways of treating it’
    I tighten my cheeks, eyeball him.
    â€˜So, you don’t know what to do? Is that it? You don’t know what to do?’
    Garten takes my shoulders, massages