Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: father

  • out of nowhere

    My dad trained me to be raped, by minor and persistent infringements which he would not withdraw or desist in, no matter how I protested. He taught me saying No had no importance. I had no sovereignty over my body. For he would still cup my butt in his hand, rove his eye over my breast and comment on it. This started when I went into puberty and in later years the family made the excuse that he had done it to all of us: but not my brothers, no. Or, they said, he had always done it, as a mark of his harmless affection. But I remembered. It started when I grew hair and curves. It never happened when we were children.

    I was – I am – spirited, and fought back. When I told him to stop he looked invariably surprised and injured. “Oh, but darling, it’s only a bit of fun.” He would say, “I’m only tormenting you, pet.” I tried carrying my breakfast into another room when he sprawled at the table with pubic hair showing through the loose fly of his pyjamas. I tried sewing up the fly of his pyjamas in a scarlet thread. Right into his seventies he used to call me and my mother “my two girlfriends.” No amount of rage on my part could ever get him to let this go. In my teens I tried again and again to talk to my mother, who kept insisting I had a ‘dirty mind.’

    Dad used to come in at night to ‘say goodnight’ – always to me, never to the boys – and would fall asleep on my bed. When a boy at university when I was 17 started raping me regularly, these attentions from my father, creepily, stopped. It was like he had handed me over. After nearly a year I found the courage when this boy’s violence intensified to overcome the shame and tell my mother. I begged her not to tell Dad. They broke through the flimsy lock I had begged for on my bedroom door and beat the crap out of me. Calling me a slut and a tart. They stripped the sheets off me while I cowered. In the bed where I’d passed out from sexual pain so many times one held me down while the other walloped. Next day a neighbour my own age crept round, she had waited til Mum went out. Was I ok? she asked. She described how she had listened in agony, thinking she ought to call the police. She said, very quietly, “I thought they were going to kill you.”

    For years afterwards every time my father visited he would bring with him stored up stories of women who, supposedly, had concocted malicious fictions about rape as a way of destroying the careers of blameless men.

  • heart attacked

    I just got a letter from my mother explaining she has been in hospital for five days with bronchial pneumonia. Mum is in Brisbane and I am in Berlin and no one told me.

    She’s 78 years old and had a hip and a knee replaced this year, since my father’s death. This is the sickest, ie closest to death, she’s ever been. It is hard to be the survivor of a 50-year marriage. People often die on the heels of their spouses.

    A few years back I rang my Dad on his birthday. I sang happy birthday to him over the phone. I was in Adelaide and they were all in Brisbane. He told me they had taken him out for a steak dinner. He described the wine, he loved sparkling shiraz. We chatted for perhaps twenty minutes. Then Dad said, “By the way.”

    Casually. “Your brother’s in hospital, we think he’s having a heart attack.”

    I have the feeling one of these bright days I might get an email. Mum died last Tuesday, she was cremated at Mount Ommaney, it was a lovely ceremony. On our first day back from the family holiday on the Gold Coast I got a phone call from the brother whose own heart would later be attacked, or is it attack him. It was the first day of the year ten years ago. “Dad’s had a stroke. He’s still alive.” My brothers and even their friends had all assembled at the hospital, they’d left it so late in the day to call me I could not get on a flight til the next day. I remind myself very many people have these stories that make painful experiences more painful. This morning my heart aches and I am questioning this old ache. I have the feeling by now I ought to be used to it. I always hope it will let me learn to dance more wisely and the creaks be a species of jazz.

  • buy for me

    Young, scruffy, insouciant Indian boy is walking by the greasy canal with his parents. Evidently he’s been showing them Berlin. Lifting his shapeless hand in a vague gesture towards the old, carved terraces he says:

    If I were ever rich –

    the slight rush of his r’s making it clear he quite expects this to happen, doesn’t expect it to be all that difficult –

    and they pass on, his parents well-heeled and looking rather bored as though Berlin in its filthy grey boilersuit does not impress them, barely glancing at the costly apartment houses he has chosen out for them to buy for him.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.