Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: cancer

  • disembowelled

    For weeks after the diagnosis I was still having episodes of shock as deep as flashbacks, every single day. Every day at some point I went into a dazzled fugue of confusion and horror, while the same words whirled around me like three birds. I have cancer.

    Then the welter. Cancer? What? What do you mean, cancer? How could — No. That can’t be.

    Meanwhile I had been through a colonoscopy, and then an interior tattooing to guide the surgeon’s hand, I’d met with the surgeon who made breezy mention of maybe ‘whipping out the uterus’ in order to ‘have a look’ — been driven to hospital before dawn and woken up disembowelled. I woke up pegged out like a goatskin with six tubes leading into or out of me, and five holes in my sweet and private belly. I had not let that breezy surgeon get his knife into me, naturally: found a second, younger, doctor who did not say, ‘Don’t worry, I can do these in my sleep.’ I asked myself, which is going to cut me — in my sleep. The older white guy from an establishment family with photos of his kids in ski suits framed behind the desk? Or the young Asian Australian woman who’s had to work twice as hard to establish the same career. I had persevered when the referring doctor’s receptionists tried to shame me out of ‘wasting time’ with a second opinion and when one of them told me, it seems crazy to delay surgery at this point, I told her, round the knot in my throat, what seems crazy to me is: committing to this major surgery without getting a second opinion.

    This adventure turned out hilarious as well as just devastating. It felt overwhelming, colonizing, and grim. I did not lose myself. I told the gastroenterologist she ought to call herself “a colonoscopologist, cos it just has such great mouthfeel. It’s fun to say.” “It is!” she said, though her smile was wry.

    “And when you reach that point, which surely must arrive at some point in every day, where you find yourself climbing out the bathroom window at the back of the building going No more! I cannot stick anything else inside anyone else’s bottom! — why, then — you’re a colonescapologist.” In the hinterground of all these panda escapades the daily panic ran on and on. Ten minutes a day, utter annihilating shock: in which I woke up right back at the start like a terrible dream, unable to receive and to process the news. Meanwhile I had already been given an enema at six one morning, my first, and the nurse explained to me, very kindly as I lay naked on her table, “You must roll on your side and draw your knees up to your chest” and at the prospect of imminent anal penetration and the rapey feeling of being pierced against my will, thus losing this only form of virginity or intactitude or control remaining to me I started to shudder and shake and sob before I knew what I was doing, and I had to take hold of myself, as she was approaching with the implement. I told myself you need to really deeply relax and you only have a few seconds to do that — or this is gonna hurt.

    I somehow found the calm inside myself and took hold. I took a deep slow breath in and very slowly let it out and I did not turn away my mind, but paid attention where attention must be paid, breathing out slowly, letting it in. The nurse was gentle. I had told her my history, which came bubbling out in sheer terror as the moment of intrusion approached. Her name was Lisa and the other nurse was Lisa too and my gastroenterologist was called Leisa and they stood around me cheerfully as I began to cry and they all wore the same expression, it was a kind of puzzled helpfulness, and I wondered out loud, what is the collective noun for Lisas? My valour was in tatters but I flew it wide and high.

    After the ensuing procedure I woke up in a hospital, sporting my first and only tattoo. I’ve never pierced my ears and feel strongly protective of the body’s entirety. Three years are leaving that chaotic punker city I was finally a Berliner, sleekest of them all, submitting to this marking that was so far inside me no one ever would see it beyond the surgeon who would guide her blade by that mark, and then cut it out. “Make no mistake,” she said. “This is a very major operation. It’s going to take you some three months to recover.”

    10 days later, discharged from the hospital and sleeping in a friend’s bed while he slept on his foldout couch I was even still descending into the same panicked fugue at some point every afternoon. What, cancer? Who, me? Whaddaya mean… cancer. I had been into hospital, with the friend who drove all the way across town to pick me up at 5 in the morning, and sat with me until they checked me in, and then the surgeon greeted me at the theatre doors and they asked me would I get up and walk in, and I’d woken up in a beeping bed with five different tubes at various orifices some of them new coming out and going in, unable to move, too afraid to cough, with part of my bowel and one entire artery cut away forever. I finally had the caesarian scar I’d never found through childbirth of the baby who never came covered over close to my pubic bone, my belly was seeded with holes, one two three four five of them, one had a drainage tube spooling out to hang over the bed and the nurses came in to empty it. I learned all of their names, one of them the first night tried to drag me from my bed after I vomited violently right across the bed and I lay shivering with terror and pleading, please, it’s mostly water, I have eaten nothing in five days, can you just… mop me up a little and let me sleep, please don’t make me get up, I’ve just had surgery. This nurse said, “You’re going to have to pull your weight, my girl,” and I phoned my girlfriend and made her stay with me on the line by way of witness so nurse could not tug the painful umbilical line filled with yellowish and reddish fluid which after her too rough ministrations began to hang and the bandage holding it in filled up with blood, like a sac, and the stitch the surgeon had made to keep the drainage tube in place was nearly out. Even at this point, I was still reeling with the unreal, and though this news and its attendant traumas had progressed so very sharply that I had now left hospital and was creeping around my friend’s house learning to manage painkillers, a technology nearly entirely unfamiliar in my life — still at some point in every exhausted afternoon, panic descended with its highly focused sense of confusion and my mind flapped its big wings. Oh my god, I have — what? How can this be? In my own sweet and healthy body.

    On the last day in the hospital a kinder nurse arrived and told me, we are going to take that drain out now. She explained it does not end just under the skin, oh, no! of course, it goes clear down across my body to the bowel. I began to shake. And then — somehow, and I’ll never know how, at the end of everything, I found a strength that in my life I had never known. I who am unable to gouge a splinter of glass from my mother’s horned sole said, I will watch. And I decided to film it. And though I had to ask her to stop so I would not black out, after a few moments I could go on again, and let me tell you there is nothing on earth like the sensation of a thick tube being dragged out of one’s own body, it is a foreign object and feels so wrong and at the same time it resembles the feeling of a part of the self being dragged away, inch after inch, vomitous and painful. I watched and I listened and I asked her questions, and then it was gone.

    The collective noun for a Lisa is, it turns out, a decency. The decency of Lisas ensured that while I was under, which I had been so frightened for, there were only females in the room. Between the tattooing and the surgery I went back to painting class one last time. I made a self-portrait, in honour of my diagnosis. I told people. I published a story about it. People began to flock around the C-word, relieved and marveling. (There, but for her, go I!) I was carrying it for them and we could feel it. Every time somebody said, You got this, you are strong, what I wished they would say instead was, What do you need? I am thinking of you. Do you have someone to hug? How can I help?

  • neither warmth nor depth

    I woke up strapped to the bed by six different apparatus. The last thing I remember is the surgeon greeting me at the swing doors, ‘Welcome to Theatre,” and I said, “Oh! How gracious,’ then, “I’m scared.”

    Of the leashes pegging me out like a goatskin my favourite is the pair of disco moon boots that wrap, white and puffy, loosely around my calves and plug in to a noisy apparatus to inflate and deflate, compressing the muscles as through walking. Getting out of bed is painful. I’ve several holes in my belly and one of them has a tube of blood coming out of it which is there to drain the wound.

    The last time I ate was Wednesday, it’s now Sunday. However we discovered I can still vomit copiously. Had a visit from my mother who sat down beside the bed and said, “Well I’ve been having a very difficult week.” She wanted advice on something uncomfortable in her household arrangements and I gave it. The next day my whole family visited at once, as I thought it would be less stressful to get it over with in the one lump. Mum reached over to hug me and managed to gouge her elbow right into the principle wound on my belly, the first time anyone had touched it. It was so painful I actually screamed. I thought I would black out. When I opened my eyes I found my brother and her two sisters gathered round her patting and soothing, while she cried, because she felt so very terrible about hurting me. When I said, rather bitterly I suppose, ‘Oh, please. Focus on Carol!’ in a bravely wobbling martyred voice Mum said, ‘I’m alright! I’m ok. Focus on Cathoel.’ And my aunt came over on pretext of straightening a blanket to lean in and tell me in a stern undertone, ‘Stop it.’

    I’m thinking of climbing out of bed (takes me a while) and going over to the whiteboard on my wall which has daily updated details for the nurses: I’m going to erase ‘liquid diet’ and put in its place ‘strawberries and champagne cocktails.’ I’m in bed 27, the age rock stars overdose, and I am alive and have survived. I’m on ward number 3D and indeed life is all technicolour this week and in three dimensions.

  • wait what

    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.”


  • possessive hand

    The little cat puts her hand possessively on my arm. After a moment’s thought her other hand creeps up to join it and I remember the day I finally found her again, after she had been lost for a lifetime, five months at large in the laneways of inner Melbourne, and a man rang in response to one of my incessant posters saying, I think your cat is living in our backyard, and I went there and she came out warily from among the ferns, panting with thirst and telling me all about it, Mwowl, wowl, wowow, and she wrapped her forearms around my thigh and pressed her length along the length of me, ferocious with love.

    Today I am going away again forever and she knows something is up. She doesn’t like it. She has slept in the private cave between my knees, purring. She comes along after her night walks and nudges the blankets with her little nose, so that I half-wake and raise the covers up for her, and she slides in. Our physical intimacy has always been a most remarkable element, to me. When I found her it was through a cattery out at St Kilda, the other St Kilda, a coastal hamlet miles out of Adelaide. The lady who ran it was dotty about cats and had simply bred too many. The local council told her, you have to get rid of some, or cull. She’d put a notice up in the papers saying, free purebred kittens. I went out to her farm and there were four large sheds brimming with yowls. In the middle one a concrete floor writhed with kittens. I sat down to watch and find the cutest one, the prettiest. I liked the golden baby with caramel points. I liked the dark brown. I looked down and a skinny, ugly, funny-looking teenage cat with a smudge on its nose had crept up onto the table silently and crouched in against my hip. She laid her sharp pointed head in the hinge of my thigh and closed her eyes.

    I didn’t want her. I wanted the pretty ones, ones who still had all their growing to do. The next week I visited again and the same thing happened. It was summer and my bare toes in their sandals were rimmed with little kittens who chewed softly at the salt. Oh, they were all adorable. But this freakish, peculiar, not particularly attractive animal stretched to the length of her growth had chosen me. With ill grace I packed her in a banana box and stowed her on the seat of my ute. She had never been away from her extended family before, never been alone or in a car. She gave out rhythmic little bleats. I was driving and could only fit the crook of one knuckle in the narrow slot by which banana packers lift bananas. I felt her soft face come up against the tip of the knuckle and she sat down right away and stopped crying.

    It is twenty past seven and everyone is sleeping. I leave Brisbane in a few hours. I was sitting up in bed writing with my early morning cup of tea and I glanced up and met the eye of a big muscular Maori man I had never seen before. He was creeping round the side of the house, wearing a hi viz vest. When I went to open the door he boomed, Hello! But when he heard me answer far more quietly, he glanced up at the house quickly, and said far more softly, “Aw sorry, don’t want to wake everyone up.”

    This was Robbie, lifting all my precious things into a truck to drive them out to the ship. He took especial care of my guitars. These guitars have been in storage in Melbourne for three years and my cat has been in storage here. My mother calls her the grey nurse. When Dad is sleeping, which he mostly does, she curls in him and sleeps too. He’s her perfect companion: warm and available and never standing upright so he always has a lap. When the constantly changing rota of Blue Care nurses visits she sits on the side of his bed and keeps guard mistrustfully. I would so love to take her to Berlin with me but it would be cruel to all of them. My father would be bereft. And Tisch is a little wild animal with her afternoon frolics in the bamboo, her insouciant saunters under the old house next door to taunt their verandah-caged dog and to leave her scat. During the day I hear my father talking to her. She is his grave, watchful, lazy companion.

    There was another cat here who was dying when Tisch first arrived, four years ago when I went to Berlin, for a week, and ended by staying for three months. I met a man and stayed on and now our future is uncertain – just in the last 24 hours. I had parked Tisch in a cat hotel in Richmond and when I went in to pick her up the girl on the desk said, in a bored tone, “Name?”

    I said, “Tisch. T, I, S, C – ”

    “Oh!” she cried. “Tisch! Oh, does she have to go? Can’t she stay?”

    She brought me my cat and I couldn’t help noticing Tisch had grown substantially rounder. “We take her out whenever it’s quiet,” the girl confessed. “We play with her round the desk and give her biscuits.”

    The year before, Tisch had been lost for so long that my friends were telling me, You’ve got to give her up. She is dead, or she’s found another family. I walked the streets calling and calling. I collected sightings. I rang a cat retrieval specialist who suggested a poster saying, This Cat Has a Serious Illness. “But she’s healthy!” I protested. “She’s a sweet little healthy girl.”

    The retrieval specialist said darkly, “You’ve got to appeal to people’s lowest common denominator.” I said, “No. I’m going to appeal to the love.”

    My poster had photographs of Tisch curled in my lap and on the rug and it said, This is Tisch. She is lost. I miss her like sleep. A flood of text messages followed. Can I put up your poster at our school, I have copied your posters for our office, don’t lose hope, “this is our dog Wendy. She is watching tv. I thought a picture of her might cheer you.” A neighbour wrote, “I know how you feel. I lost my little while dog eight years ago and I still stop every little white dog in the street, just in case it might be him.”

    So now my guitars are on their way to the sea and will be freighted like so many piles of t shirts. I have only a temporary home in Berlin and the reason I couldn’t come to visit Dad sooner was my offensive landlord had taken me to court. We have a contract but he seems to think he can bully me into leaving, for his friends to use the apartment, by dint of phoning and shouting at me, screaming at the door. The loving relationship I was going back to, the person who has kept me sane in our whispered late-night conversations, has turned his back and folded his arms. It’s all hard. I leave my father and my cat wrapped in each other’s skinny arms. I salute death, the enchantress who makes life possible, as ably and courteously as I can. I remember my uncle’s cat Putschen, after the uncle had died in a scurf of urine stained cushions and skittering letters to the government about his fears of his various neighbours; Putschen was big and wild and I had to coax him into the car. Years later after Tisch had also moved in, Putschen had cancer. The cancer ate him away from inside and I was visiting and for some reason the spot he wanted to curl in all day and all night was the wardrobe in my room. He had become transcendent with pain and was skinny and hollow and purring so loudly all night that I finally had to move him, into the next room, through whose wall I could still hear him. The other cat, Tisch, would come in of an evening and the two of them touched noses, “Still the cancer?” “Yup, it’s ok.” I began to call him the Dalai Putschen. My father has not reached this state and the death which seemed imminent now perhaps may be more uncertain. We can’t know. My father says to me every day, Can’t you stay one or two more weeks? and I have. But now it is time and I am heading out into the wilderness, a country whose language I don’t speak, a blessed breather of solitude that now with my relationship on ice seems more like a lonely sojourn in foreign parts. I will get to Berlin in eleven days and don’t know if he will be there to meet me, or not. I leave my cat behind and she is the worst possible correspondent. She doesn’t phone, she never writes – not a postcard – but my mother has said, when I telephone and she hears my voice, sometimes she comes and writhes around the implement. A hollow love long distance. A house of bamboo grief. I don’t even know what I am saying any longer and the plane is waiting, opening up its maw.

  • house mousse

    This week I’m going home to Berlin to find an apartment of my own, via a writing sabbatical in Thailand which I suspect I will sleep through. What was supposed to be two weeks has turned into a six week endeavour. I have worked from dawn til night, busted my finger, worn myself to a shred, and these are my small victories: Dad sat up and asked if he could have a cup of tea with lemon and honey. Dad wanted to sit out on the verandah and watch the sunset. Dad went on his first outing since the hospital and scoffed fish and chips and a giant fresh iced coffee laced with cream. Mum had someone to cry to. Mum went to a really good physio to whom I practically drove her with a stick and in a single visit was able to raise her damaged arm upright, from months of being stuck at a horizontal maximum. They learned how to use their iPad. The living room looks warm and congenial and less like a hospital. The garage has been cleared out and has one of Mum’s paintings hung to greet her when she gets in, as she starts now very cautiously to drive herself about now and again. The garden is healthy and the verandah brimming with fresh plants. The cat has been taught not to wash herself when she’s on the bed, which she was raised (by me) not to do but had forgotten in the local recent spoiling. In between I have packed up 11 cartons of painstakingly sorted and delicately couched feathers, crumples of fabric and shell, shards of perfectly worn wood, and partially assembled assemblages for shipping to Berlin. I feel replete.

    This afternoon I made this for Dad, and he ate two teaspoons of it – victory! It’s velvety and rich. You can replace the honey with maple syrup if you are vegan.

    FREAKY CHOCOLATE AVOCADO MOUSSE

    1 frozen banana
    3 tbsp cacao powder
    1 refrigerated avocado
    3 tsbp cocoa powder
    2 tbsp honey, or maple syrup if you’re vegan
    1 tsp lemon juice
    1 tsp vanilla extract
    2 tbsp iced water
    A tiny pinch of salt

    INSTRUCTIONS

    Blend.

  • dead man sleepwalking

    In this house of illness and pain I get lonely. Everyone is in bed by eight o’clock and the long night stretches ahead. Tonight I can hear the rain plinking on the skylight which reminds me of the sound of rain on a tin roof, the sound of my childhood. I am tired. My father can only take soft, resistless things. His swallowing or as the Greek carer calls it “his slow” is very deteriorated. Every day there are two sets of meals to make. I’ve been searching out the kinds of foods he can slow and which my mother and I can also eat with him, not so much to save the work as to include him and to try and beckon him somewhat out of the twilight in which he is living.

    When you’re in hospital, or in my father’s case living in a hospital bed in his own bedroom and then in a padded hospital lounge chair all day, meals are the highlight of the day. The clinking of the trays along the corridor, the slowly approaching voices. If you can’t look forward to that, what is there to look forward to? pain and dosings, people who pull you about and speak in a singsong tone, and death.

    There is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning up afterwards. It’s like having children but sadly, I have been spared that joy. I have become preoccupied with brewing everything from scratch and am making rich bone broths on beef neck and chicken frames, slow-cooked casseroles in which the meat dissolves into tenderness, a rich bolognese which simmered on the stovetop for three hours until it was silken and plump. I offer little trays: clumps of his favourite soft cheeses and soft smoked oysters, and Dad might manage a teaspoonful before he turns his face away. The next day he will have more energy, he seems brighter, so the effort feels worth it.

    The carer has told me, “I cannot help my mother, I cannot help my father – but I can do this.” She looks after my father as though she loves him, standing ready with the clotted tissues for the food that he has held in his mouth for a quarter of an hour, refusing to swallow. She says, “You want to slow? Try to slow it. You can’t slow? Ok, then split it. Split!” And my father spits and she wipes his mouth for the four hundredth time.

    I had to do this today and I did it as well as I could. My brother had entered the bedroom and stood covering his eyes while I held out the tissue to Dad and then, behind Dad’s back so as not to hurt him, indulged the paroxysm which instinctively clutched my whole body. It’s not his fault and I’m not at all disgusted with him, I love him. It’s just a bodily reflex. The sensation of hot liquid coming out of my father’s mouth is too much for me. My mother lying up against her pillows announced, again, “Oh! you would have made a terrible nurse.” I have no doubt this is true. She gestured towards my brother, standing just inside the doorway so as not to infect Dad with his cold. She asked the invisible audience who accompanied our childhoods, “How did I end up producing two such lily-livered cowards?”

    My brother’s late appearance, two weeks into my short visit, is on account of the feud he and his wife have had with me, kept up for more than six years now; I threw a plate and they cannot forgive me. This was in May 2010. We had a family dinner at which my brother was tired and so stressed that he roared at his kid. The boy was two and I have seen him four times since. My brother is huge and his roar made us all jump. I said, “You know – I’m not sure you need to use quite that much volume.”

    There is dispute over what happened next. Brother says he said, We’re not interested in your parenting advice. My memory of it is: You don’t have kids so we’re not interested in your opinion. The cruelty of this when he knew, they all knew, they’ve all known, how desperately, dearly, deeply, strongly I yearned and tried to have children of my own, cut me like a clamshell across the throat. I can feel its ache now, as I write about it.

    The feeling of having been excluded, after a lifetime of being told by this family and this same brother I was over-emotional and over-sensitive, that I had “such an imagination” and thus had constructed most of the abusive events which dotted our historical landscape like felled trees, of being told that my opinion didn’t matter and my experiences had never existed, created a pain that felt intolerable in my body. I grabbed my plate of Thai takeaway and hurled it to the floor. As it left my hands all of the anger left my body and I thought with great distinctness, “Oh, you idiot. You are never going to hear the end of this.” And as so rarely, I was right.

    Plategate, a friend called it over dinner this week. She was joking that if I ever see my estranged sister-in-law again I should monitor our conversation for imagined slights. I should say, in a dark, gormless brute’s voice, “Oi, wotchit. Don’t you be sayin’ that, or I’ll killya. I’ll killya with this… plate!” She mimed drawing a tiny side plate out of her breast pocket and we folded up with laughter. Plategate changed our whole terrain and I have not been forgiven by my brother and his wife. She still keeps herself and her children apart from me on the grounds that I am dangerous, terrifying, violent. This accusation wounds me because it sits next to the hidden violence of my mother, who suffers some kind of condition that leads her to build towering rages which moments later in the wreckage she is unable to remember. All my life I have had a bone-loosening fear of that terrorising rage. The destructive, the lasting bolts she hurls. The silence afterwards, broken by my father saying, “Well, I was sitting right here, and I didn’t hear her say anything like that.” There have been times when I found no one looking back out of her eyes, they were avid like a bird’s, there was no one to reason or plead with. Very few people outside the family have witnessed this phenomenon and it was a great relief to me each time when someone did.

    My brother meanwhile has an explanation that ties everything in a bundle. There must be something wrong with me. In our twenties he told me there was something “wrong with your basic personality” and that was why I kept choosing unkind men. “You cling to these imaginary or exaggerated events because they give you an explanation for why your life hasn’t been all it could have been.” He has told me that as a child I was so irritating that our mother had no choice but to get angry with me. And once, perhaps a decade back, in a gentler mood he said, “I think you’ve just never experienced unconditional love. I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you.” This struck me as a shaft of light between the trees and I bounded upstairs to ask Dad. This was after Dad’s stroke but before the cancer and he was lying in his daytime cane lounge chair, gazing out into the trees. “Dad,” I said, “Dad!”

    My father turned his head slowly. “What?”

    I was so excited I was hopping from foot to foot. “Dad, would you say your love for me was… unconditional?”

    “Oh, yes, pet,” he said. “Largely.” He looked startled when I started to laugh merrily.

    To be difficult to love is the fate of some of us. Of most of us, maybe, when we really get close to one another. Mopping up after another meagre meal which my father has picked at and spat out, passing the carer on the stairs as she carries him his fourth glass of cold milk for the night to make up for all the meals he wasn’t able to manage, I think about this. To love one another in all our difficultness is perhaps the most exacting grace of all: it is the fur in our mange, it’s the comfort in our cave; that’s just nature of love, it’s the manner of the beast.

  • for you, now that you no longer need it

    My friend has died. She was very courageous and had cancer. She was a photographer, a maker of exquisite works. She was Dutch and chose euthanasia when the pain she was suffering became, after months, too unbearable. Now her partner is left alone to garden.

    She was wise and quiet in her mind, an insightful, shrewd, kind, passionate person. I just adored her. The world since I’ve known her has felt illuminated by her presence. The sense of her presence among us: you know, those so rare people.

    Tonight we are making a chicken curry very slowly and brewing up a panful of chai masala and my kitchen, where my friend and her partner once sat with me, smells of spices. My throat aches for her. I am crossing to the machinery in the next room to play Gurrumul Yunupingu’s song Bapa four times over; finally my companion without a word gets up and sets it to continuous loop. Thinking of the songwriter, who also could have died this week. Thinking on his experience in the Royal Darwin Hospital and of my friend, can she really be gone utterly, and of how we treat each other, can she really just – be gone, thinking of the Aboriginal belief that our soul goes into the soil, into the stones and trees, into the earth where we got born. Sometimes a mother rubs her newborn child in the red dirt, or in the ashes from the fire, to teach its soul – I think – where to come home to. It seems to me a woman who lived all her life in the one civil, intelligently run, beautiful city might be a beneficiary of this cool, loving, compassionate, scientifically realistic and empathic prophecy.

    The dead. Now we outnumber them for the first time it seems to me we must be particularly tender and respectful of the world they have left us, which their bodies have built, which their bones and blood constitute. I miss you, I miss you, I am crying out over the sink for you and you’re gone now and I miss you, I miss your company, your voice and your eyes, your dear creatureliness.

  • Dad and Ian

    Dad’s number is 0412 195 957. Mum’s number, obtained in a different year and from a different phone company, is separated from his by only two digits. For years their numbers were almost the same and then Mum put Dad’s mobile through the wash and now Dad has cancer in his blood. The doctor’s stopped the chemotherapy because it wasn’t working, but not before it turned their home life medieval. He had radiation, hormone treatment, then the magic pill. He will be dead before I ever get home.

    Dad has a close friend from childhood called Ian, not the Ian in this picture. They were lifesavers together on the Gold Coast. Tonight I heard that Ian has inoperable cancer in his lungs. My brother sent me a photo of Ian coming out of the water at Little Burleigh looking hale and strong: he sent a photo of the four dozen young men lined up in their wrestle suits. This is how men were built in those days, I thought: before McDonalds. As I lay down and closed my eyes a strange calming image flooded me. I was thinking about the two friends who now have known each other longer than they’ve either of them known anybody else, just about; so many people have died. Their generation is at the wall. Their bodies are crumbling. I knew Ian was in town for a while to spend time with his children, our playmates on the long summer holidays at the beach, and I thought: what if someone could bring the two of them together, if they both wanted; and then discreetly disappear; so they could have a beer or a cup of tea with no one fussing around them and being social; and face the horizon as it approaches. Dad told me once years ago how when they were lifesavers they were both out on their boards beyond the breakers, where the water is green and tilts; a huge shark went cruising past his feet. He said he wasn’t scared. It was just a part of being in the water.

    I always thought once you step into the ocean, you are in their territory. They know the places we cannot map and can eat the things we are. They have no mercy, so far as we can understand it. They maybe don’t even have fear. But once you leave the sloping beach and paddle out past the breakers you are out of the reach of land and you have stepped into the wild.

    .

    My father was born during World War Two. It’s hard to imagine he minds being deprived of his mobile phone, the constant connectivity that keeps us bobbing on the surface of our minds like so much trash.

    For the first time now the living outnumber the dead, things will only get worse; it is a strange and insecure world we have made, top heavy and crumbling fast, like a breaker. We are a web on the surface of a world we have ruined and let ebb, and filled its clear salt waters with our junk and emptied them of all life using nets the size of dead cities. We are a glinting and reflecting shifting roof of plastic bottles for the endless ocean which needs no roof.

    When I went to buy a futon in 1996, my father had the only mobile phone I’d ever seen. He lent it to me, so that he could call me later to come and pick up his car. I shoved the phone in my bag and forgot it was there.

    The futon I chose was so comfortable after I lay down on it I fell into a sound sleep. A strange blaring noise woke me, repeated and insistent like a tiny tugboat. People around the shop were stirring and saying to one another, I think your mobile phone is ringing. That’s what we called them in those days, two words. I said when asked, loftily, Oh no – I don’t have a mobile phone. Then, mortified, recollected that I had, and this was my father, ringing me on it. His phone and his car were in my custody.

    I bought this week a German sim card, after a year and three months here without one. I am wary of giving anyone the number. I think of the life I had, once I had slipped its leash, as like telling the household I’m just going out for a walk. Unless you take your phone along – no one can know where you are. No one can call to say Stop for milk or You are late, and so you can browse and forage and glean and sift through your thoughts like hot sand that sparkles neverendingly and forever through your fingers which are dry and brown. It makes me sad that my father doesn’t have a phone now and that it seems hardly worth replacing it. It makes me proud for him, and happy, to think of him slipping the leash, gazing at the sky, listening to the birds.

    On his verandah with his afternoons all to himself he can see the horizon from his long cane chair which curves like a Malibu board. But the chair is so low and Dad struggles to get out of it. He cannot make it to the landline in time if I call him from my strange time zone in another season; efforts to reach him seem futile. From his supine position the verandah rail is his horizon. It has snuck closer in his sleep.

    On the far side of the world where the water is cold I stare and stare towards the south but it’s slipped round the curve. I hear nothing, and I see nothing, and I get these occasional emails. My father who then was the love of my life with his fearless innovations and his steady carpenter’s hand has stepped off the coastal shelf now, he is out for a walk and he may be some time, he is going where we none of us can follow and I don’t believe he will ever meet us there; he’ll be gone; he has stepped into the wild.

  • spine

    My dad has cancer. They thought he had got rid of it but now, it’s back. It’s in his spine.

    My mother habitually announces things with enormous flourish. A printer jam, a forgotten shopping list: “We’ve got a major disaster on our hands.” This time she wrote an understated letter. “Not good news, my darling.”

  • the other C word

    My dad has cancer. Our relationship has been so peculiar and, at times, so intolerably painful that my reaction to this news since we heard it a week ago has been mere confusion. He was told on Saturday that he had a “small, operable” prostate cancer. Today he had another barrage of tests and the surgeon called it “aggressive.” Another doctor has suggested it may have spread to the bone at the base of his spine. I feel strangely ashamed to be thinking of my own experience in this context. It feels like I can’t help it. My father’s own father died of suicide when Dad was only twelve. Dad never learned how to dad. A decade ago my brother, who mines coal, in a moment of unexpected empathy suddenly said, I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you; I think you’ve never experienced unconditional love. I was so relieved by this clear explanation of just about everything I burst into giggles. It was here at their house that this conversation took place. I remember running up the stairs to check out this new theory, calling, Dad, Dad! What? he said, from his chair on the verandah overlooking the river trees. Dad I said, would you say your love for me was unconditional? Oh, yes, pet, said my father. Largely.