When I got there the doctor said, “You know when we call you in at seven in the morning it’s not good.” She had called me in at 7.15am on Friday to give this news. I have cancer. She used words like ‘chemo’ and ‘metastasize’. She emphasised that these are words I may not need to learn. In my head there was only room for three words, the same three words recurring all weekend.
She gave me the name of a surgeon I’m to meet today, Monday, who will try to cut all the cancer out. She said, “You’ll be reassured to know that everyone’s going to be treating this as the utmost urgent priority.” I sort of half-laughed. “That is not reassuring,” I told her, wryly, and she made a comical face. I am proud of that wryness and that half laugh. Those are my courage.
She said she thought what they first found might have been inside me maybe a year. She said, best case scenario is I go into surgery this week and the new doctor, a man, cuts all of it out, he gets the lot, and after that I keep getting scanned and checked and tested for the next five years then for the rest of my life I will have to keep an eye on it and keep meeting from time to time with these doctors (“you’ll get sick of the sight of us, I promise you.”) Then there’s some spreadage and there is no cure so we irradiate it or poison it with chemo which doesn’t poison just the cancer but the host as well — me, in my body — and then at the far end is, the scans reveal it’s in your blood or lymph glands or your organs are riddled with it, we are sorry, there is nothing we can do, you have a few months, set your affairs in order.
Until the first tests come back there is no way of knowing how much cancer is in my body at this stage nor how far it may have spread.
The call from this doctor’s receptionist came as I walked out of the hospital from seeing Mum. That morning, Thursday four days back, I woke to texts from Mum at 4.30am saying hello I am very very sick and then from my brother at dawn, we are at the hospital with Mum, pneumonia and it’s not looking good. I went straight in to see her and I’ve never seen anyone so sick. She was shivering with fever and delirious and vomiting up coiling tubes of bright yellow foam like a pool noodle, like those batts you put into ceilings for insulation. We thought she was going to die. The doctors seemed to think so, too, and they told us, the family should come. When I came out of my own appointment next morning Mum had turned a sharp corner and by some miracle of resilience was sitting up in bed eating a sandwich. I was thinking what if she dies, what if she really does, what if she is dead already and she is gone and she’ll never know I have this. Instead, Mum seemed so much calmer and stronger and I visited again and made her comfortable in the too-short bed and listened to the doctors and my mother told me a story about her aunt, my great aunt, who died only two months back at 96. This great aunt had cancer, and I never knew. She had it cut out, and recovered to live this long life. Since returning from Africa at the end of 2022 I had been asking when could we drive up to see her. Instead, she died, and the day of her funeral I happened to phone and Mum said, Can’t talk now darling, we’re all in the car on the way to Warwick, and I said, Why, what’s happening in Warwick, and she said, “Auntie Berta’s funeral.” I said why — but why — how come I, and she said, smoothly, your brother put his foot down. He told us, if she goes, I’m not coming. And he’s a pallbearer.
I don’t know the source of this estrangement and no one can explain it to me. Soon it may be immortal, as far as anything human. I don’t know why my mother’s 84th birthday in November was held at this powerful brother’s house and I was not invited. I had been lured back from Ghana on the promise of the long-overdue reconciliation I had been asking for and working towards for more than a decade. That she let one of her last birthdays be celebrated without me, the whole family gathered just down the road, when I had been gone some twelve years and was actually living under her roof at that stage — I cried for days. And, in an aching gap in the crying I went to my first decent painting class and worked round the fire in my throat on my first decent painting. The boy’s name is Atta Bonye and his wry, thoughtful, sweet and spiced expression speaks to my heart. All I know is we are humans here together and life is turbulent and short. All Ghanaians know we cannot heal nor even address these painful things if the other party does not want them resolved. All we can do is cling to those things which bring life and give health, and try to distance ourselves from toxins, from cruelty in others and the impulse to cruelty if it should surface in ourselves, try to balance painful honesty with life giving kindness, try to be as real and as present as we possibly can, though it cost us everything, as they say in Accra, you have to “happy yourself.”
Tag: Australian homecoming
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wait what
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jet laggard
I wonder if anyone else has trouble adjusting after travel, it would be reassuring to me to hear about it if you have. It’s more than just jet lag. Arriving in Brisbane I was paralysed for days with a kind of deep-down soul sickness that made everything strange. The familiarity made things seem stranger. When I first got to Bangkok six weeks later, on my way back, I felt felled like a tree. Spent two days asking myself why on earth did I want so desperately to come here, where I am a stranger, where I speak only three words of the language, where I know nobody. Then when it came time to leave I cried all the way to the airport, my throat stinging. I had fallen in love with the dense tropical world in the rainy season that is familiar from Jakarta in the lost land of childhood. Berlin unfolds its sweet insouciant self, the guy in the topless gleaming car who drove by awfully slowly, his back-seat passenger a giant stuffed elephant, its velvet trunk resting familiarly on his shoulder. The man trundling past in a wheelchair by shuffling his feet rapidly forward on the ground, a beer stuck lewdly upright between his thighs, tattoos all up the sides of his neck and around under his ears and he was singing in a thick accent, absently to himself as he went past, “I did it… myyyy wayyyyy.” Yet the salty parks and shifting low green German trees hardly reach me, I feel estranged and alienated, the apartment in which no one has now slept for two whole months smells of masonry and dust and I can hardly leave my door, not even when the sun shines, not even when I know this won’t any longer be very often the case and that though a Brisbane winter is a winter in inverted commas I have actually by staying away so long let myself in for the nightmare that makes me want to lie down and cry: a year of continuous winter. My dislocated finger which was unattended two weeks while I was in the tropics has begun to sting so badly it wakes me out of my jet lagged sleep. I wonder if I’ll ever play guitar again. I wonder where I’ll live. I wonder what would have happened to a homebody like me if my folks hadn’t moved me from the town where I was born (Melbourne) to the desert on the far edge of Australia (Dampier) when I was eight months old. I learned to walk there, on the sand, and there is somewhere a picture of me and my Dad walking away from the camera side by side, my hand reaching right up and his reaching from his tall shoulder all the way down so we could hold hands. It was hard to leave him when I left. I felt the tearing in my chest as I stood up and walked away.
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better to have loved and won
The guy I adore has conversations with birds. These appear to be actual reciprocal chats, where the bird says something and he answers. After he has mimicked what the bird has to say, the bird often answers again. Again he responds, using a sound palette of his own devising: whistles, chirrups and chirps, clucks of the tongue, and little spoken fragments that remake in our alphabet what the bird’s liquidity of throat has offered out into the air. He has a dozen ways of answering and the bird has endless spurls of its own devil-may-care. To me the birds as I hear them relating to him out on our verandah of a morning often sound rather curious and questioning. They sound like they like being answered, albeit clunkily, in translation.
This is mostly magpies and butcher birds, sometimes a noisy mynah: though he is more wary of them after they chased onto the four-lane road a nestling we found, on Australia Day when we had been in the country only five weeks. He scooped up the fledgling in his long hands and carried it down to Kurilpa Hall, where John Pilger’s excoriating film was being shown.
Australia Day, Invasion Day. Utopia, Utopia.
He was so worried about his baby bird that he couldn’t concentrate on the film we’d come to see. I was mortified. What could be more important than the showing in this community of this film, why should two white people with their tiny adopted bird get to disrupt the long-awaited screening. I sent him outside with his orphan and sat alone through the shaming, ennobling, uplifting film. It was crowded, it was hot. I wasn’t the only one crying. Afterwards we all filed out in silence and I found the two of them sitting outside in a folding chair under a tarp, surrounded by elders who were sipping their cups of tea and offering advice. My long-legged monster had taken off his beanie and had filled it with tufts of grass for a little nest, and the bird was perched on his lap and he had worked out a way to feed it droplets of water by dipping a long grass stem into a paper cup. “I’m going to call him Harry,” he said.
We walked home after the barbecue, after dark, it was a long walk which took us nearly two hours of hill-climbing. The little bird rode on his outstretched finger and, unbelievably, snuggled down into its own self and grew drowsy. To see this Berliner, new to Australia, carrying home a tiny fig bird on his finger and to see the bird trust him enough to fall asleep and ride asleep, this wild creature, this orphaned unnested one, was incredible to me. I said, I think he seems more like a Clarence. I think you’re right, he said, lifting the bird very gently to peer at him as we turned down to walk home along the river.
He spent the next weeks reading up about fig birds and their habits and habitats, mixing up revolting pulps and stews which Clarence wolfed down avidly, talking to him in whistles and purrs, evading the cat. Whenever the bird really liked something he would trill his little scaly wings by instinct, as though keeping himself hovering in the air in front of a favourite fruit or flower. His eyes were big and round and his neck was moulted of its baby fluff and bare of feathers. He was the funniest little guy you could imagine. The two of them sat at the computer for hours, working, and Clarence rode about the house on his friend’s shoulder. After a while there were flying lessons in the leafy backyard, a long arm held up high and swooping suddenly downwards to give Clarence the idea that he could take off, he could fly. Unmistakeably they were two best buds. We hid our smiles. They were inseparable.
Heartache came when we called the wildlife rescue people and were told you’re not, ahem, allowed to keep a wild bird in your home. My soft-hearted Berliner shed tears. He had arrived from so many miles away, from the snow, and made himself a root to fasten down into the soil by falling helplessly in love with this little halfclad chirping cute and ugly barely airborne birdie. On the day the two of them were due to meet the wildlife carer and try to put Clarence back in the same tree he had fallen from – “They’re unusual,” she said, “they’ll actually take them back” – a pall hung over the house. And even now, 10 months on, sometimes a fig bird comes to visit our mango tree and sings its song and this Berliner always cranes his neck: “Maybe it’s Clarence!”
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the bouncer in his castle
Sat for half an hour watching this bouncer refusing entry to a drunken girl who had evidently no ID. She tried to show him all her tattoos, including one on the base of her ankle, talking earnestly, presumably explaining how could I possibly have so many tatts, and not new tatts, if I was underage? She pulled out a limp, folded ten-dollar note and tried to hand it to him. She leaned on him and cried. The bouncer was an Islander man with beautiful soul in his face. He held her upright and pretended not to see the ten-dollar note she waved at him. Every time she showed him a tattoo or pulled out her purse to try him with her ATM card he attended, patiently, to what she was saying, refusing to let her drag him into an embrace, smiled, seeming amused but not at her expense. A student of humanity. How I loved him. It was a solid half-hour before she gave up and wove off down the street on her patent white heels, and by that time the flaccid ten-dollar note had made several more appearances. Inside the club two rival brides were dancing with their bridal parties, not actual brides but brides-to-be, each wearing a white veil over a stripper dress and one of them dancing with an inflatable, naked, anatomically correct groom who gradually deflated as the night wore on. When we left I saw one of her bridesmaids clutching him, just half a man now, sitting dispiritedly in a corner nursing her umpteenth umbrella drink. I stopped on the way out to thank the bouncer. “Man, you and your colleague, you are really generous, kind, patient people. I saw how you dealt with that little girl who wanted to come in and was crying. You were really good to her. I was watching you.” His eyes were bright and he smiled hugely. He said, “You know, I was just talking today to Lifeline and I realised, my sister died four months ago today.” “Oh!” I said, touching his arm, “I’m so sorry.” “It’s ok,” he said, “she’s in a better place now, she was a heroin addict.” “Oh, god,” I said. “That’s really sad.” He kept smiling, his eyes liquid. He gestured up and down the street. “You love the people, you love the life…”
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bicycling on
Finally my bike! There have been various substitute treadlies in between but my own blue bike, bought in Alice Springs a decade back, is now out of storage and dusted and greased and today for the first time we hit the black road. Wahoo! The freedom and terror. Raced down the tumult of traffic to a sleepy golden markets, where under the trees people had laid out vegetables, sprouting herbs, tempting red circles of handmade saucisson. After a coffee and waxy croissant we sauntered out as the stallholders packed up. One was a big bloke with black beard and a huge smile who stopped packing, and straightened, when I said, “Can I take a photo of your red stuff and the red stuff behind? Would that bother you?”
He grinned. He looked at the bunch of marigolds and bouquet of red rubber gloves and turned to see that behind him, now that the intervening stalls had folded away, the scarlet florals of a fashion stall made another layer of colour. “The red stuff, and the red stuff behind,” he said. “Spoken like a true photographer.”
I was rummaging in my bag. “Yeah the professional terminology, eh?” I made a dozen photographs with people swiping by obligingly as my coloured-cotton, human scenery. Showed him the last and most successful shot. We wished each other a good week with enormous cordiality and I had the feeling we both would have liked to have given up a hug. On the narrow, shaded road outside the markets I wobbled and nearly fell as a car overtook me within an arm’s length. He accelerated to pass me, even though the standing traffic was banked at the traffic lights metres ahead. When he stopped I swooped round onto his driver’s side and stopped, and spoke to the guy through his unwound window. “Excuse me, Sir. There’s a new law, you have to stay a metre and a half away from the nearest bike, because it’s much safer. Thanks!” And I patted his windowsill familiarly, patronisingly, and pedalled off. It feels good to be back on the bike. But it wouldn’t feel good to be forever extinguished and flattened like a pizza on asphalt because some guy with “fat eggs” as they call it in German wanted to prove he could escape my hand-built speed.