#5: What Thou and I Did, Till We Loved by Cate Kennedy

Released: 2006

This is one hell of a story. For those who haven't read Cate Kennedy, she is an Australian poet, author, and short story writer. She has just written her first novel, The World Beneath, which Jo Case described as "a thought-provoking journey into contemporary Australia". Cate Kennedy is also the only person I know of that has won The Age Short Story Competition twice (!),  and in reading What Thou and I Did, Till We Loved, it's not hard to see how she pulled it off.

The Story

A woman visits her comatose lover Beth in rehab. She talks and talks, hoping for the day that Beth talks back. In the meantime, she revisits their memories and the fateful day Beth was taken from her. Against all other evidence, she tries to stay positive, hoping that slow blinks and elongated vowels are more than just bodily reflexes from a brain no longer under Beth's control.

Towards the end of the story, Beth speaks "four vowels lifted from the air". The nurse seems excited, and asks the narrator if she heard it. She says yes and the nurse asks if she can work out what was said.

The nurse is sure that despite her difficulty in hearing the noise, Beth said "I love you"; the narrator, despite herself, knows all too well that wasn't what Beth said. We leave the narrator grasping for what has already been lost, her days resigned to silent visits, her nights left wandering the life left behind.

Why It Sticks

Hospital stories, when done badly, can harden even the most sentimental of hearts. One only needs to have seen a recent episode of Grey's Anatomy to realise that moving but poorly handled topics can sometimes send you to undesirable places, like a sick bag or the off-switch on the television.

Cate Kennedy knows her craft, and hers is not a world of overwraught finales or tawdry sentiment. What Thou and I Did, Till We Loved  works because it dares to go a little deeper. Beth's condition is not only heartbreaking to the narrator, but infuriating as well, and instead of emotional platitudes we are given the very real anger of a woman who has put her life on hold indefinitely.

For fans of literary craft, the denouement is near perfect, and despite the static subject matter, the tension builds throughout in the life a character who has just about stopped living.