Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: family

  • watching the sun set

    Mum’s just taken Dad on an outing & waving goodbye to them I began to cry. Soon it will be the long goodbye. My Dad seems so cheerful and excited, sitting up in his passenger seat having been hoisted up by two of us out of the wheeling chair. The carer said he woke up this morning saying, “I have to get up! and get dressed! because today we are going to Jacob’s Well!” I was pining to go too but there is too much intricate and painstaking one-handed assemblage packing to do, for shipping to Germany. In between packing and finger X-rays I have rejoiced in the opportunity to serve, to be here and offer freshly ground espressos and little nightly shoulder massages where my Mum has torn her ligaments by helping haul Dad in and out of chairs; last night Dad’s hand took hold of mine on the guard rail of his hired hospital bed and was making little stroking movements that suggested to me a brand new notion. “Dad, is there any part of your body which might like a massage, too?”

    “Oh,” he said, diffidently, “I suppose.”

    “Maybe your hand?” I said, turning it very gently to palpate the withered meat. When I was done with that hand, his good hand, I said, “Maybe your other hand would like a bit of a rub, too?” And when I drew the clenched stricken left hand out from under the blanket like a miracle it had relaxed in sympathy, all the fingers spread flat and the palm as large as it ever was. I massaged the sweet curling poll of his head where perhaps he has never been massaged before. Dad closed his eyes and let his face unfold. I wish I could be here forever just offering these tiny daily services, these mutual favours. It uncrumples me to relieve his suffering. It filled my heart with heat when he said, three days ago after our first outing which was also to the seaside, “Darling could I have a cup of tea with honey and lemon, please?” Two months back he had to be fed sips of water from a spoon because his swallowing was so bad. This was the first time he had asked outright for anything to eat or drink since we all thought he would die, that night in Emergency. My mother that evening fell and shattered her hip, and they were lying two beds apart in the Emergency room at the hospital. My father said that if he had a heart attack or something else like that he did not want to be revived. Now he has revived, to a certain extent, all by himself. Or, via company. The companionship of the three of us in the house with this wonderful carer who is never too tired to bring him a fresh glass of milk when he calls into the baby monitor at three a.m. has latched him back onto life. The night after the voluntary cup of tea he had a friend visit who had come all the way from Sydney just to see them. It was the first time in all Dad’s friends’ visits I have heard his voice as much as the visitors’ voices, they had a spirited chat and then as it began to grow dark we asked Dad didn’t he want to come inside in case he got cold. “No,” he said, lying on the striped foam mattress on the cane couch which came back from Indonesia when we first moved here. “I’d like to stay out here a while. I want to watch the sun set.”

  • 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.

  • good reef

    I spend a lot of time in this household running downstairs to close the door and just breathe. I duck out to coffee houses and get sane again. I spend time among the trees, or failing that, among the pot plants. This morning a friend of my father’s, a gracious fellow whom Dad first met when they were seated side by side in the first year of Norman Park State School, came to visit and I made him some coffee and offered a slice of the cake another of their friends had brought. I was thinking how lovely it is that my folks’ friends come to visit even though Dad falls asleep on them, how they have friendships stretching back decades from living thirty years in the same place. My father went to school and grew up here, and has friendships going back to childhood. I was thinking how this will not be the case when I am 77. We had a fascinating chat about Sir John Monash, whose biography this man has been reading, and about the anti-Semitism in Melbourne that kept Monash out of the Melbourne Club. Dad’s friend volunteered the view that Murdoch, an enemy of Monash, even back in those days acted like he ran the world. I said how this was in evidence every time we have an election. I was thinking of the photos of Tony Abbott clasping a puppy, etc, paired with a front page picture of his rival Kevin Rudd with mouth half open which was titled, “Does This Man Ever Shut Up?”

    This led very quickly to a lecture from my father’s friend about the errors of environmentalism, which he perceives as a kind of conspiracy theory. He has holidayed recently on Heron Island and says grandly, “Heron Island is just as good as it was in the 1960s.” Oh good, I said: so all those acres of coral bleaching must just be a bit of a furphy. Well, he said: 7000 years ago the whole Barrier Reef was above water. Now it’s not so bad as that, is it? “Oh no,” I agreed, picking up my cup of tea, my notebooks and my cat and standing up to go. I kissed him on the cheek. “All just a big natural cycle.”

    These natural cycles are all but overwhelming me at the moment. The slow sleepy death of my father, whose eyes are rarely open and who will take no nourishment but ice cream and milk. The frantic collisions of my mother with a series of administrative chores which she sets herself, needing to gain back some form of control over her life, and which subsume her grief and dread, I think, driving her into a frenzy of impatience and a series of spills of papers and pens onto the floor as she is kept waiting on the phone line by the bank, the electricity company, the phone people themselves. Our larger darker howling emotions. It’s hard to live in them. It’s harder to live alongside them… I feel.

  • of our elders

    I’m at my parents’ place spending some time with my dying father. He is frail as a leaf. This morning two Blue Care nurses turned up, funded by Australians’ taxes, and hauled him up the bed so hard they bashed his head against the headboard. When he is sleeping, which is much of the time, they sit with their hands folded. But today they tipped over from the useless to the dangerous.

    Two days back on July 11th we passed what would have been the 100th birthday of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who died in 2014. As Tanya Plibersek put it, he was a warrior for fairness. I was saddened to learn when he died that this elder statesman had spent the last months of his life living alone in a tiny room in an aged care facility, separated from his wife of nearly seventy years, Margaret. That even such respected and influential people are not allowed to live together once they are old and infirm shows us how urgently we need more compassion and common sense in this field of endeavour. Why is aged care so brutal and so lonely when it ought to be tender, humorous, concerted, and peopled with small children and teenagers, kittens and dogs? Elders, children, Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, and asylum seekers all have deep sources of insight the middle ground of our society has lost. You would think we would cherish them kindly out of sheer self interest, if we genuinely can’t muster the compassion to care about their wellbeing.

  • the family stones

    Caring for Dad is painful. I love him, naturally, and now he’s very frail and unwell; so it’s wrung from me like dark water out of soaked wood. But Dad tormented me with minor sexual attentions during my pubescence and twenties, and into my adulthood; he would never listen when I said No and always overrode my assertions of sovereignty: so it’s hard for me to get close to him, it’s hard for me to touch him.

    A tilting hospital bed has been hired for the house and made up with my mother’s pretty pink floral sheets. Dad lies curled like a prawn in the arms of this vast apparatus, holding on gamely to the triangle-shaped handle that dangles from the back of the bed. He is half-starved and so thin that his bones stand out. His strong hands have withered into spotted claws. I stand by the bed and stroke his face gingerly. A tube comes from under the quilt and I am so unkeen to know its details.

    A Greek woman has taken up residence with her husband, as Dad’s carer, and she hauls him higher in his bed so that he can be winched upright to face a mouthful of ice cream or a big fat glass of milk which is what seems to be keeping him alive. “Don’t worry,” the carer said yesterday, meeting me at the front door with groceries and holding out her arms, “I come from the village of Hercules.” I hear her coaxing him to swallow. Swallowing is painful and slow. Dad’s swallow reflex is now so weak that he can’t take anything solid, for fear of choking. If he inhaled a crumb it could lead to infection and another bout of pneumonia. Privately Mum said to me a few days back she rather wishes one of these would “carry him off” – “It’s no life.” Then she started to cry and I persuaded her instead of rushing away on her walker to come sit down beside me on the couch and we can talk about it. How she feels and what might happen. Carefully I introduce the idea of what her life might be once she is alone in this house, what she’ll do. Coughed out at the far end of a fifty-year relationship. Death is harsh.

    When I came home from the polling booths Saturday Mum and the carer were seated either side of Dad on the verandah couch, coaxing him to take another mouthful of the egg flip he has for his breakfast. They have to urge him to each mouthful and then, for long moments, sit concentrating with him til he swallows.

    My mother is tired out and molested by sadness, she has cared for him since he had the stroke and now, since he’s had cancer. “It’s not fair,” she says, and this is the thought that undoes her. At some point in the day every day she cries and I try to just listen, I try to offer what small comfort there is. I keep wondering who will listen to her and comfort her once I am gone. Their close friend, losing her marbles, shows up at the house every morning asking for errands so she can help out; she is not someone it’s easy to talk to, she never has been. My mother despatches her to the shopping centre to bring back the wrong kinds of milk or to lose her car. The Blue Care nurse shows up and says piously, “I’m not allowed to lift.” The whole household’s exhausting. My family have never said clearly how they feel and it is difficult for my mother to say, I want this, I need that. She prefers to hint. “We do need some shopping,” she’ll say, and then wait for me to ask, “Shall I go?” Dad used to say, Gee, some cheese and biscuits would be nice. Gosh, I wouldn’t mind a gin & tonic. And then someone would get up and go to the fridge.

    Now he can no longer have crackers or toast or steak or any of the immensely solid English comfort foods that are his core diet. He seems to have lost interest in eating, which when I contemplate the plastic vials of meal replacements and protein shakes in the fridge seems unsurprising. But the kindly carer gets called upstairs four times a night to haul him upright for big glasses of milk. Clearly he’s hungry.

    In the supermarket last week in my jet-lagged haze I tried to guess what might be the various clues which would trigger Dad into his appetite. In the deli aisle I worked out that if I bought him beef sausages he would be able to eat the inner mince, suitably mashed. First I served the sausage whole. He sat up a bit and said brightly, “Ooh!” Then I spooned the meat out of its casing and mashed it up small on the back of a fork. He ate two tablespoons of sausage meat, a triumph. Mum said, inspired, “Hey maybe he could have pâté!” So I brought back some pâté, soft smoked salmon in tenderly thin flakes, a crumbling vintage cheddar and a creamy blue cheese, prawns with their mulchy orange and white striped meat, and the makings of an egg custard. The next night, presented with a parfait glass of prawns, cluttered with a peculiar curry sauce for which Mum had given instructions, Dad turned his whole body to grab after the tray. He had to be restrained until he could be sat up safely to eat a bit. Then it all came up again and I ran away and my mother had to deal with it. By stimulating his appetite I had only put him through more misery.

    At the counter of our local all-night store I showed up toting two giant flasks of milk with one hand and balancing a stack of four boxes of tissues on the other. The Korean guy who runs the store said, “Are youse having a party?”

    “Yeah – a phlegm party. You wanna come?”

    “Oogh,” he said.

    “I mean, jeez,” I teased. “What the hell kind of parties have you been going to?”

    “Ahhh,” he said helplessly, having run out of banter. With some difficulty I prevented him from stuffing everything into bags, and took it home to the top of the hill. I try not to run away but to sit next to Dad while he produces his vibrant spume of coughs, yielding blizzards of soaked tissues discarded in florets over the side of the bed. I am painfully squeamish with splinters and injuries and when he coughs, I cough too. It feels like my body is trying to vomit, I cover my ears and retch when I hear his chest rattling and carving. “Just think, darling,” my mother used to say, “only five Tertiary Entrance points saved us all from you becoming the world’s worst doctor.”

    I certainly am a terrible nurse and would have made a woeful surgeon. However we laypersons can love, and we can serve. This morning Dad began to cry and his whole face crumpled. The carer was away in the kitchen. I asked him, but he could not explain what it was that was so sad. “Is it because you feel so miserable and sick?”

    He nodded hopelessly.

    “Ah, Dad.” I had been stroking his face and his bony shoulder. I feel inhibited by the memory of the times he would grab hold of a handful as I walked past, graspingly unable to grasp how a routine which was mere sport to him could be so distressing to me. Dad would often pinch or fondle my bottom or comment on my budding breasts and he always acted so surprised when I howled with outrage and pain. “Dad! Stop it!”

    “Oh, but darling,” in an injured, high-pitched, goofy voice, “it’s only a bit of fun.”

    Now he is reduced to this skeletal frame who produces industrial quantities of mucus. His tongue, which laved the palm of my hand eight years ago after his stroke when he lay stricken as a baby bird naked in the lifting hoist and all of the nurses were out of the room, is thick and useless in his mouth. His eyes, which bored into mine that afternoon as I recoiled and cried out and he held onto my hand with surprising strength, still have that mischievous expression that is, in his character, life itself. I remembered him gazing at me over our linked hands, letting me know he was being naughty. I remember the repulsion and chagrin that gripped me and how I felt the need to blame myself because, overcome by remorse and compassion at his collapsed post-stroke state, I had pressed his head against my shoulder to embrace him, though carefully keeping it well clear of the breasts. Now on a sudden instinct I curl forward and lie my head on the side of his chest. It is the closest we have been since they beat me in my bed, after I escaped the year of rapes, when I was eighteen. One held me down and the other yanked an arm right back to whale into me. Their mouths were filled with filthy words, slut, tart, the boys at Uni will be round you like flies round a honey pot once they find out you’re on the Pill. Next day the girl who lived next door crept round as soon as my mother had driven down to the shops. “Are you ok? I wanted to call the police. I thought they were going to kill you.” He could not hit me now. He could barely even kiss. I closed my eyes and let the feeling of his liquid loud breathing fill me. And a kind of rickety peace that has hovered round me nearby and more distant, never staying, never settling, came and perched in my heart like a dirty bird, for a few long minutes.

  • to meet my father

    I’m going into the difficult embrace of family life to say goodbye to my father. Our family relationships have been fraught with miscommunications, outbreaks of insanity, and violence. Now it’s all coming to an end and we will have to, I hope, focus on our common humanity.

    My mother says, you’ll find him much changed.

    I’ve barely spoken to Dad since his cancer swelled and got into his bones. It has taken him over only slowly. The oncologist gives him so and so many months still to live. Meanwhile the effects of the stroke a decade ago slow his walking and, sometimes, his concentration and that makes it harder for his body to cope with the disease. What will kill him, it seems, is one in the string of pneumonias and influenzas that have infested him since he’s been in and out of hospital. An iatrogenic death: caused by the healer.

    Dad is so generous and has faithfully tried to be a good father to us. In recent years he has taught himself, probably at my brother’s prompting, to say, awkwardly, “I’m very proud of you.” On the rare occasions when I speak to him over the phone he says, every time, “I love you, pet.” He never used to say this. If I said, “I love you,” he would say, “I love me, too.”

    I find these feats of compassion to be particularly moving as his own father leapt from a bridge when Dad was only twelve. His brother was ten and their baby brother three weeks old. Sometimes people’s opportunities to learn parenting skills are so cruelly limited.

    On Saturday I will fly out to Frankfurt, and then to Bangkok. This was an innovation we cooked up because I need to turn up healthy and strong and not be one more member of an unwell household ailing and needing care. When I first flew to Berlin the thirty hours’ travel left me trembling and unable to rest, I was swimming uphill, underwater, and though I was sick with hunger trying to eat made me vomit.

    The thought of leaving Berlin as the hot weather finally unfolds, and of flying in to Brisbane where winter arrives in inverted commas, fatigues me more than I can say. I have just gotten settled and it’s taken me 18 months. I’m so slow to adapt. Parts of me stay behind, or perhaps travel by the old seaways. I have looked up the forecast for Brisbane and it’s planning to be blue, beautiful one day, perfect the next. Mum says, “There’s a cold front coming, in Tenterfield they’re predicting snow.” The weather channels show rows of cheerful whole suns, and temperatures similar to Berlin in the Spring. So I guess I’ll be wearing the same clobber I’ve been wearing these last sweeter months.

    In Berlin now Spanish tourists are beginning to cycle past in the street bare-chested. Girls come out in their fluttering dresses, like pennants; there’s a fashion for unpleasant prints. All the tattoos are on display and we’ve seen the first way too stoned person of the season, sitting on a bench under an invisible sack of cement, their eyes so round and so sore it looked as though someone had drawn in cartoon rings.

    My father’s muscle tone is so deteriorated he finds it difficult to swallow. He has to eat sitting forward, with supervision and great care. So I have chosen out for him all the disgusting comestibles he loves, in the softest forms possible: raw meats, and potted intimate organs, all the indelible edibles with which shelves in a German deli seem to me literally to groan. I’m going to make him builders’ marmalade for breakfast, which is Metz – raw pig mince – mashed with raw onion and served on bread. I’m going to tempt him with Sülze, a kind of jelly quivering with the flesh of a pig’s head and sundry choppings of gherkin and carrot.

    As well as the pulverised raw meats in glass I have a light jumper, four fresh new blank notebooks and a jar of ink, six books to read, and my sunglasses for crying in public places. I have all my old familiar fears and they’re heavier than anything. I have visions of our plane catching fire in the engine and plummeting out of the sky, extinguishing in the giant ocean, coming to rest in the plastic-loamed sand. I pray that an accident won’t happen. I pray Dad will be there when I get to the house, for there is no one now well enough to come pick me up, and I’m planning to call him and tell him so. It’s hard to say goodbye but it would feel even worse never to say it at all. To say: fare thee well and thank you. I will honour your name. I will never waste the kindness you showed. I have loved all the love.

  • happens so fast

    Mum’s in hospital. Dad’s in hospital. Both in the same hospital and admitted on the same night. He has pneumonia, we think, and they’re waiting for the results of the PSA test on his prostate cancer this morning. If he has a heart attack, he told the doctor, he does not want to be revived. My mother ten minutes after Dad was carted off in the ambulance went downstairs to water the garden, tripped over her own pants leg, and broke her hip. My brother was trying to tend to both of them while they were two beds apart on the emergency ward and when Mum was wheeled off for her Xray, and Dad was wheeled up to the ward, he asked as they passed the doors of the Xray department, can’t we just open the door a crack? And let them say hello to each other.

    The door was opened. They got to see each other and wish each other good luck. Dad’s doctor was doubtful he would make it through the night. Describing my parents saying hello through the Xray department door my brother broke down and sobbed. He kept saying, We need to talk about this as a family, we’re not ready to say goodbye yet! I said, this is very hard what you are doing. I wish I could be there to support you, and them. I’ve been tormented since I heard by the thought of them both being in such pain, and under the same roof, but separated. I said, even though it hurts us, I think it’s Dad’s own decision. It is his life and no one can keep him here if he is suffering. I described my friend who died last month, of euthanasia, when her quality of life became unbearable. Yes, said my brother very slowly. I know it might be very hard for you to do I said, and it’s asking a lot. But if you were able to find it in yourself – when Dad is awake and alert – to provide him with a calm enough conversational space so that he can clearly, plainly express his own wishes for his fate: I think it would be a truly loving service you could offer him. My brother said, I think he’ll want to hang on, for Mum. May 28th will be their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We’d imagined that I was the only one who wouldn’t be there, for that.

  • 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.”

  • peeling back the years as trees

    Oh, I love my little desk in my little borrowed room. At night the night is all around and silent, absolutely silent unless you hear the unending majestic progress as if across tundra after tundra of the wind. This desk is surrounded on all sides by literal towers of the possessions of the host who’s put up with us for three weeks now but in its centre in the circle of the lamplight I find peace. Television quacking in German from the far end of the house. The book I am reading face down with its spine open to the pool of gold. Robinson Crusoe. Incredibly racially presumptive. He saves the savage from himself. I wish that I could do that for me. Tonight I took my bowl of “Eierschnee”, that is, meringue mix or as they call it “egg snow” across to the family household three doors away closer to the mouth of the woods. I stowed it in their lovely oven; ours was blooming with pizza. “See you soon!” she said, and an hour or two later stashed with pizza we were back, for a round-table game of Risk. The man next to me said, That’s not in the rules, and I stuck out my hand. “Wanna bet a million, billion, squazillion dollars?” I said in English. “I’ve been playing this game since I was ten.” We somehow were laughing all night. Presumably because nobody actually cared about winning the world – or, as it is calling in the German language rules (snicker), “freeing” the world country by country. I acted out the illustration I had seen in an article on the US today: photo of a bold swollen warcrafty flying boat, which dipping through the clouds was labelled: “This is a Freedom Machine. It seeks out people who have no freedom and gives them some.” So there we were five of us around the table, giving each other some freedom.

    I had a long bath this afternoon and as I let out the water and stood up a name, or idea, came to me. How profoundly refreshing it feels to think none of such ideas or insights for three hours while we visit and a sixth person comes home, no, I don’t want to play, I just don’t want to talk, been talking all day and now I will just sit here and give advice. I understood what he said and what everyone said and thought, how proud I am to play a whole game, whole evening, in German, hooray for me. I am a guest. It is such sweet and cloudy relief, I have almost no thoughts, it seems. So long as I cook, sometimes, and wash up a lot, and let out my bath water and bring in wood; so long as the dog gets walked and there is someone to photograph the forest and to notice the seams and quiet crickles in the water of the old winding river as wide as a small moat; so long as I stop at the crooked gate to talk to the brown family of fuzzy goats who all crowd curious yet abashed on their hillside in case you have brought them anything sweet; then I have no other job while I’m here, and that’s why we have stayed so long, sleeping 13 hours a day and eating like a caterpillar, book after book, salad after greens, and one vista on another of the quiet level countryside where so many long generations of tall Germans have settled back into themselves after the various empires including their own. Shame is sodden in the ground here as almost everywhere. Pride and shame. The candles flickering all night in the little cemetery, the tap hung with half a dozen green watering cans. The wreaths on doors. The fact that among Germans, a game of mock war brings these stinging and pungent jokes quoting the Führer and certain words, “Tomorrow from 8.45 we fight back” for example, can reduce them all to weeping and slapping themselves on the thigh with mirth.

    Laughter is the only weapon of sanity that insanity cannot corrupt. So I will keep mine high. We walked round the block, which is a brown mown long field, and passed no more than a half-dozen houses with their scratchings in chalk year after year where the Sternsinger, the star singers, dressed in robes and following a star to Bethlehem have passed; he pulled out his harmonica and the medium dog ran his own way among the rivets, and I told him our story: We are just a minstrel couple decamped from our last home, passing under moonlight and the two large mother-trees. These trees are merely a bunch of sticks, like witches’ ravelled hands. We’ve nothing but our little dog, our mouth organ, our magic bag of words. We pass under the windows of the village, they hear us in their sleep. The land is settling, for winter, folding itself under into its ice. I will be gone by then and the land won’t remember because this is not any of my ancestral home.