Eleven weeks ago today my husband walked out. I went to the park and when I came home, he was gone. When I closed the door behind me that morning there was no warning this would be our last night under the same roof, our last day as beloveds, the last time I would ever kiss him behind his little ear, or hear his voice under my cheek.
We weren’t actually married. But how he loved to call me his wife. Every taxi driver and all his friends: Mrs Him, my woman, my wife.
He had moved to Berlin to be with me, never having left Ghana before. His whole family came down eight hours from the village and he stepped bravely onto a plane all alone after his secondhand phone died suddenly overnight. Imagine walking away. You go through the passport control, take off your shoes. You leave the ground. And now – you’re in the air. Accra falls away like a toy, like safety. You fly nine hours across Africa, and across the white continent where everything costs five times as much. In your pocket, the phone is dead, no way of contacting her, or anyone.
It had taken us fifteen months to get him here, five lawyers, a serially declined student visa, a costly private college sponsored by my mother, who believed in our love. We moved in together to my artist’s apartment so joyously. The little cat fell in love. Then the winter came and then, corona: the twelve weeks’ isolation at home, at the end of winter’s grim five-month lockdown. We both got stressed, alongside everyone else on this earth; we had a fight, and spent the night in separate rooms. In the morning I went out to sit under the trees and read a little while to calm my mind. We had been six weeks in lockdown: I read Mary Beard, on women and power. Then I came home, and he was just gone.
Eleven weeks. I have seen him only about half a dozen times. I had only been gone about an hour. There was no note or sign but the door was deadlocked and his bicycle was gone; as I entered the house his absence quivered in the air like a guitar string. I had no way of knowing I would never kiss this sweet man all round the hinge of his jaw again, white people kisses he calls them, on the hairline, and he wondered aloud with his friend who has a German girlfriend, “What did I do to deserve all these kisses?”
For three days he didn’t answer my messages and I lay awake wondering was he ok, would a person breaking the curfew get arrested, was he sleeping in a park, where would he go? I tried not to imagine Berlin’s fearsome Neo Nazis having cornered him and pulped him, that he might be brought home in a wheelbarrow. Another Ghanaian man who lives in our street had been menaced right around the corner, a gang of seven spread out across the road, they toyed with him until they had made him afraid and then, he said, he all of a sudden just got so tired. He said in German, Ich will einfach nach Hause. I just wanna go home. And the leader told his gang: let him go home.
Let him come home. It’s been two and a half months and my throat thickens with sick tears every time I think of him and how we’ve parted. It’s so abrupt, sometimes my heart itself still feels quivering, like a guitar string dying into silence. That he will not give our sweet love a chance. That he believes I would move mountains to get him here and then on a whim in a rage tell him, get out, you have no place to go. That I said to him: Get out! Get out of my house. How could I, a white woman, say this to an African man. I cannot forgive myself and at the same time, I can’t understand like a dog locked outside this endless punishment. It feels like we were on a long journey together, we own a tiny property in Ghana, we have a business, we spoke of our longing to raise a child. His friends called me Mrs Him. She misses him. We were on our long road trip into our lives, two lives sustained by love and enhanced and emboldened by each other into great and wild adventure. He threw me out of the car, and drove off. He left me here standing at the roadside in a landscape I don’t recognise, and just drove off without me.
Everything in our world, as Europeans so comfortably call the place, must be so foreign and so strange. We went walking and he was wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt, with the tongue. “Are you a fan of the Rolling Stones?” I asked, and he said, “What rolling stones.”
When he wrote to my mother to thank her for her sponsorship, he signed the letter with his name and Cx. That’s how I always sign mine. I guess he just thought that’s how white people end their emails.
Can’t you be curious, I have said, about the miscommunications that evolved between us, for it was never a difference in our values, it was never a lack of love. When I put my hand round him in bed he yelped my name. The two of us were strong and open and free together. Don’t you want to be loved, I have asked him: don’t you want love and affection in your life. My love and affection. Don’t you even want to be curious about what might still be possible? Why would you move across the world to be with someone, that someone being me, and then… refuse to have the painful or uncomfortable conversations, including with yourself, that might have cleared up our enterprise and given us our free channel down through the mangroves and out into the lovely sea.
How life is transformed when love is present. How everyday living is sweetened by waking up with someone whose presence fills you with longing and desire, by taking our breakfast together, just coming home and hearing his voice. I had been living alone, and eating every meal alone it felt like, for a thousand years. Now I was outside my lonely castle and at large in the free and wild ransom of the garden.
It was two and a half years. Australian poet, Ghanaian athlete. Our conversation had a terrific ease right from the start. We met online and I went to Accra to meet him, for three weeks, stayed three months, cried at Kotoka Airport. We went from penpals to shacking up together on our first night, so ridiculous and it shouldn’t have worked – but did. I am a few months older than his mother. When he met me at the airport we’d had only a few satellite calls spaced by a bad line, hollering, What? Can you repeat that? He went to work our first morning and came home and I felt I was home at last; the second night when he texted to say, I am at our gate, I ran pelting down the alleyway my bare feet slapping on the concrete and flung myself against the steel gate and he grabbed me and dragged me against him and we pressed each other close between the curling bars and kissed passionately.
Why would you leave that. How could you leave.
No one ever crossed the world before to be with me. Then he fled as abruptly as a battered woman flees a violent man. Waiting for the moment of safety when he is out of the house. He fled carrying only his passport. He won’t tell even his mother where he is living. Do not call me, he said, and I tried and tried not to call. For eight weeks, very little contact, and I sent the most occasional possible messages. Yearning for him. Sleepless for the smell of his skin.
He said, nightmares, and not sleeping, and I kept thinking somehow maybe he would come home. I was angry, too. He didn’t listen, men don’t listen. He tried to tell me what I am. I could feel once he had gone how he was vibrating with fear and trauma and I longed so to comfort my young lover, just to hold him and calm him and be held and cosseted, without these elements of safety and love what is my life even for. My heart bleeds pain all day and night. I am so crushed and devastated, I’m unable to rise, and he writes me ‘I am trying to get up from this blow.’ He says he loves me, he tells all our friends, I love her. Then he says, no hope, please don’t hold out any hope. I come home to my rooms from the suddenly radiant day and have to hold the radiator while dizziness passes, I am trembling like an animal.
I cannot understand and that makes me not forget. My heart is a hot water bottle far too full. “I have something to live for now,” he said, casual
ly explanatory one day, months ago in Accra, “- and that’s you.” If all my love, and my devotion, and all that I am, was not worth fighting for – then what am I. What is this life, if we cannot get through to one another. “I love her,” he says to my mother, on the phone one night: “I love her.” “He said it over and over, maybe five or six times,” she tells me, and I bow forward on my couch where he lay around me with the tiny sickened cat in our arms a little family for those few sweet weeks or months or really – were they years – and we waited together the three of us for the vet to come.
One minute we were a little family, the three of us, two naked and one wearing her sweet lovely fur coat. The next minute unexpectedly she had died, horribly and in pain; he has simply vanished. I stay alone in the house with this long, slow, sharp pain. On the phone my mother starts up her familiar orchestra. Oh, so delicately. “I think maybe you were too much for him.”
We were living on separate continents, having grown up in different worlds. Every day I spoke to universities and read student forums and called lawyers. He was turned down for his visa and we had to appeal. A year went by. One afternoon the phone rang and his lawyer said, he’s got it! I said, “What? I’m crying!” and the lawyer said, “So am I.”
I booked him a ticket and went to Tegel to meet him. As I stood there waiting I had the feeling I had been standing waiting at the airport for eighteen months, to bring him home.
He won’t discuss it. “I have something to live for now, and that’s you.” When the Berlin bank gave him a debit card he handed it solemnly over. “You keep this, sweetheart, in case you need to spend it. Because I won’t be using it.” He told me, “We are one.” His friends say they have never seen him walking with a girl before. I weigh up his innocence with his responsibilities. His mother phones and tells me he’s not sleeping, he is ok, he’s having nightmares, he is fine. Her name is Patience, and she tells me, “We are all one family now.” We meet at last on the old abandoned meadows unkempt and flowering in the middle of Berlin, and I forfeit this chance to talk by breaking into hopeless tears and he lets me drop my head on his knee and cry until the denim is soaked through and when, ridiculous in grief, I howl, “Am I somehow unlovable? My mother keeps telling me there’s something wrong with me,” he is so angry he has to jump up and walk around, his voice breaks when he bursts out, “Well that’s just a big fat lie.”
The tawdry but beloved little honeymoon cottage in Accra, the mouse droppings in the cupboards. The three weeks become three months, and the tall steel gate. The flowers he sent me before we had even met, on his meagre salary, freely, beautifully, the casual sacrifice of such extravagance. The super-costly one way air ticket purchased at short notice at the height of summer in Europe and the feeling, as I prepared my house to receive him and told my cat, that now – I will be able to breathe again.
He texts me saying do I need anything, let me be there for you. He makes insightful suggestions about our business, which just as we paid off our loan totally stalled, the borders were closed and all our tiny guesthouse bookings were cancelled. He gets angry. Nearly every time we speak, he says, I love you.
Two years ago I took a screenshot of one of our video calls, to capture him, so far away, his soulful gaze and the interruption by satellite which ran an explanatory text across our screens, ‘Your connection is poor.’ “I disagree,” I told him, “I think our connection is rich and deep.” My sleep champion, my healthy role model of sleep, lying awake in some room whose address I must not know, sleeping on the couch of some friend he will not name, Europe looming on all sides of him like high white cliffs.
And me left behind, in the wrong kind of abandonment a lover dreads. I have rearranged my house; I’ve dragged furniture on rugs and hammered in pictures before it gets too late. I’ve asked him to redirect his mail. He has lied to me about money and told me the truth, today, about Tinder. He has told me: I don’t love you anymore.
Tag: grief
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for crying out quiet
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jarred honey
A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in town and he handed me a plastic bag with her rolled picture. Today in Ghana I got an email from another of her friends. She was a wonderful person and most beloved. This friend says she left a letter behind for me. Would I like it posted. I am so sorry my darling friend cannot know what she meant to us and did not survive long enough to have meant everything she was and had, to herself.
We met dancing. And at a certain point in the dance we sat down in pairs and she and I told each other the innermost stories of our lives and we both cried. That communion, when two foreign souls can grasp each other. When the self of this new person feels like paper or crumpled cloth or scatterings of cut grass on fine sand. I live for those times. She died, perhaps, for want of them. I will never forgive myself for having been too sad to reach back to her when she called out to me. I’ll never forget.
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our neighbour grief
Coming past the apartment below me I heard from the stairs the unmistakeable noises of grief.
Fresh, recent, still shocking grief. It was new, and she was pleading with him. I stood hesitating on the steps. He had just delivered some devastating blow and her voice rose and I heard how clearly everyone must have heard me, all this year while I’ve been grieving.
I could hear how it hadn’t quite sunk in, she still sounded like it might all go away, if she could reason with him – with death. With Fate. Oh, denial. Your friendly, obtuse embrace, like a bear hug from a family member we don’t quite know well enough and aren’t comfortable with.
It is autumn and I pass a tree which seems always to be filled with birds. This singing tree is in the street where my former lover lives and which I pass down every week on my way to life drawing. I showed him the tree one day, five years back when we were courting, and remarked what good fortune it made to have a pretty, mop-headed tree shaking its tresses in your own street. “I’ve just never seen it,” he said, looking blankly at the coffee shop beside it where he bought his coffee every morning on his walk.
That love is in the past now which is the natural goal of everything we have and are. I kept pedalling and a man with golden hair flopping over his face said, Careful there. Your skirt is in the spokes. “That is so love from you,” I said, using the German formulation and the Berlin-informal friendly ‘you’. And he went on with his guitar strapped to his back and then another man passed, riding with his hands folded in the pits under his shoulders and whistling.
That night I tidied til everything in my house was sweet and in its good order. I chased down the characteristic daddy long legs of my own hair which dance around the corner of any house I ever live in, collecting fragments of dust and leaves which have dropped from the ferns as they dry. I ran a bath, which entails literally running – back and forth with saucepans and kettles filled with hot water from the stovetop to fill the tub. I whipped by hand a stiff batch of Dutch peperkoek, a spiced pepper cake whose batter is so thick you have to drag it with pastry hooks, if you have them. I battered the cardamom pods, the peppercorns, the anise stars, the cloves and the ginger with my pestle and later when I’d subsided into the brimming bath, my legs disappearing in the steam, I rolled fingerwads of peperkoek mix in my mouth thoughtfully, the raw batter, and the spicy sharpness had such fire it stung the insides of my cheeks and my tongue. Outside, the griefs of the world carry on and roll over us as they inevitably will. I’ve had griefs of my own, this year and last year and other times, continuous at some times like the waves that slap the incoming water traffic of the tide as they recede. But in my bathtub there were only the gentlest and the smallest waves, as the world slowly sunk to salt and storms for miles all around.
For Alison Lambert and her son
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all for you
Alone in the house for the first time in days I feel a sadness descend and take me in its wings. I’m sad for Dad. It has come from pottering and tidying, I washed up a bowl and set it upside down on the board to drain, I folded a pair of his old pyjamas I had laundered and hung out on the little rickety rack which I found folded in the street one day. These pyjamas have a gayer, tartan pattern in reds and blues and I find them so pretty and cheering; but compared with the bigger, saggier, more worn out pair I’ve been wearing while writing at home they’re almost crunchy. I guess they’re newer and were bought towards the end of his life. Just a usual daytime fabric, not that special soft-flannel ear-fur homey plainness old flannelette pyjamas wear into.
I find I am wishing he had had more pairs of the ultra soft old worn ones, against his skin when he grew frail.
He had to be lifted in and out of bed. He could only swallow very soft foods. He had a little suction cup that attached to him to catch the urine. It led in a narrow flexing pipe over the edge of the hired hospital bed and down onto a flat pack on the floor which somehow reminded me of one of those foot-pumps for inflating a bed, or a half-deflated water bed itself, or sometimes the bladder out of a cask of wine which the two old men who lived in our old street used to let lie like a dog on the brick wall between them, companionably sharing as the afternoon passed away.
The euphemisms we use for death have enraged me since my father died. The sentimental poem chosen for the service while I was on a plane made me angry and sad:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there.
I do not sleep.This fatuous deceit is bearable only if we take it literally. He is nowhere. Not in the vase of ashes. Not sleeping, waiting. He is gone, dead and gone. This person whom I loved no longer exists.
But the pyjamas. I folded them to take to Morocco. We are escaping family life, into our love. We are escaping turgid Christianity into the fire and nobility of ancient Islam, which sang to me from every all but corner of our house, throughout childhood, on Java where we lived between three mosques, and I can still sing by heart and by body the peeling keening mesmerising tunes which rang out seven times a day.
The funeral poem, written on the back of a brown paper bag by someone inspired by her landlady’s loss, in the War, of her son, ended badly – or worse. “I did not die” it lied, unsuccessfully. Well, yeah, I thought: yeah, you did. That is why we’re all standing here with these sharp lumps in our throats all the time. That is why we are holding this service, so formal, so inevitably pompous and off-putting. Because you died and are dead now, and will be dead forever. You died and that is why I booked a ticket late one night, near midnight, and left for the airport at four the next morning. Don’t lie to us, poetry/You dishonour yourself.
I wanted to go to Marrakech, just so that on Christmas morning we could wish each other a Marrakechmas. The pun took hold of my heart. But we chose Fez, because it is the most intact medieval Islamic city anywhere; it is the old world, the New City was added outside the walled medina in the early twelve hundreds. I folded my pyjamas to wear in our room there at night. Compared to the pyjamas I had just taken off, after a drowsy day writing by lamplight, they weren’t particularly tender under my palm as I stroked them smooth and lay them on top of the suitcase I’ll pack tomorrow. And I thought: if only Dad had had these soft pyjamas to wear every day. I wish he had not died with a chronic headache. I’m glad he died at home. I’m more than glad I was able through my family’s generosity to get home to their house to be with him, for six weeks because every week Dad would say, “Can’t you just stay another week,” and I hadn’t the heart to turn him down, to turn away, to just board the plane and go back to my Berlin life and let him die there alone – or without me – I needed to be there, to see him, and the headache came from an incident that happened while I was standing by his bed – his hospital bed at home – my mother only told me about it after he had died. We didn’t have the money for me to get back a second time. We’d decided I would see him while he was still living. But now he was gone I felt an ache and like a satellite whose rope was cut, I was just floating in cold featureless space, in endless space, miles from any world I knew, and I had to go home, and be among my terrible people, and hope we would be good to one another.
So I obeyed the overpowering instinct that said find the money, get home, they are my family, after everything: be with them. The brother who would have preferred I stayed away gave up enough of his frequent flyer points that a ticket could be booked. I flew, awake the whole way, and landed in a dinner party of twenty people and afterwards slept for fifteen hours. Then I spent a month keeping Mum company as she took up her skirts and stepped down into the river of widowhood. That was how it seemed to me, what I was doing.
The four weeks turned to three because one night my mother frightened me so much with her anger that I ran out of the house, my heart pounding, crouching in my car outside a cafe ringing a friend, to say can I come stay with you, can I come right now.
In the last months of his life Dad had a carer who lived with them, and she loved him and he also loved her. Her husband would come home from work every evening and climb the stairs to shake Dad’s hand solemnly. Meanwhile the rest of the world talked over him. Every few days a nurse, or sometimes two nurses, came to give the carer time off after she’d been woken every night til four by Dad’s raging thirst and Mum’s call through the baby monitor: Tiiina. Tiiina.
These supplement nurses from a palliative care service run by the state were sometimes lovely. Two of them turned up at Dad’s funeral and one of these came up to me almost unrecognisable with grief, her face contorting, saying what a lovely man he had been, what a loss it was. Yes – often. True. He could be lovely, and had a fundamental sweetness that everybody saw, especially in his last years after the stroke. But some of the temporary nurses were careless and callous and half-awake. One I had to reprimand after she sat scrolling her phone until her hours were done, only rousing when he asked for something in particular. Find something to do, I said: the household’s overloaded. I had just arrived, then, from Berlin and it was really none of my business. But I saw all their systems and workloads from the outside and brought my fresh energy. One day two of these hearty nurses hauled him too fast up the bed from where he sank every day into a coil crushing his sore feet against the railed foot of the bed. The gas-lift bed. The single. And so they wrenched him higher onto his pillows and smashed his eggshell head against the headboard. I felt the shock go through me. I cried out Careful! He’s very frail! Take care!
My mother, trapped behind a lifetime’s politeness with strangers and staff, laughed with them. They said, Oops! and they actually laughed. But I said, it’s serious! It’s very serious! He is so fragile, can’t you see how frail he is. He’s so unwell. Be respectful. Don’t at least cause him any more pain than what he –
The cancer was eating him now almost visibly, from the inside as if he ought to grow more transparent. He died one night very slowly, and when my mother rang me after midnight our time she said my name and I knew. I heard the groping for self-conscious courage infecting her voice, the terrible curse of self-consciousness that makes life more death-like. Within a few days, in the tropics, I was there and we began our vigilant grief. When he’d been dead three weeks and burned away to ash, I mentioned the nurses one day and she said, yes: he always complained, after that, of headaches. Well, she said, he rarely complained. He was so sweet-natured. But he had – my heart swelled and my eyes blurred and stung – he had a headache for all the paltry rest of his life. Because of those women. Oh, Dad. The golden surfer boy, the strong man who stood on the steps in his grey suit at some University function and one woman, who came up at the wake to tell me this, had seen him there for the first time, she said, “I said to my girlfriend – who’s that? And she said, That’s Peter Jorss. Isn’t he delicious.”
He was. He had a pettable sweetness, a roguish painful humour, a terrifying temper. Dad. I don’t have a pet name sweet enough for a loved one frail and approaching death, approaching it shyly, unable to speak of it. He died in pain. He lived in pain. He ‘often complained of a headache,’ she said, as though it said something only about the slackness of the nurses and nothing about his overwhelming experience.
My mother can’t bear and sometimes torments herself with the fact that he could never get close enough – to her – they were in separate beds now side by side, and there was a gap which she with her recently replaced hip could not tolerate, they were both in such pain and she berates herself that she can never get close to him now, and all he wanted to was to be by her, and I tell her each time about the time he managed to get right up next to her and how his thin hand disappeared under the belly of her shirt, and he tucked himself into her like a koala or possum baby and was making tiny humming sounds of suckling satisfaction and good cheer. Dad. I wish I could have worked out that you needed softer clothing. I wish I had been able to prevent the injury to your skull, almost exposed still after the chemo that (it sometimes seemed) was really what killed him, what killed him and ate him. I wish I could be by you now, just be by you and be gentle with you, offer you something soft off a small spoon, be patient as you gathered your concentration, heroically to tackle another pulpy mouthful that took you three minutes of revolving. Just to sit with you, as far too few times I did, just watching and being there. So that when occasionally you opened sleepy blue eyes, “so blue!” my mother always said, and now consumed by fire, your lashes burned, your hands, your speckled skin, but when you saw me sitting there your loving and beatific smile overspread your face, every time, in a moment, though in repose it fell into suffering’s creases, and I smiled back, each time, and we both said, “Hello,” and maybe you said, sometimes, “Hello, darling,” or, “Hello, pet,” in your voice which is now not a sound in the world, in this far too crowded world from which some people are missing, we just smiled at each other, I wish we could, I wish you were.
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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.
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while he sleeps
Today I am sitting beside my father while he sleeps. It is the last time, probably ever. We are outdoors in the sunny Queensland day and I can hear all the birds. These birds are what I miss. I miss the little endearing coy breezes, the big leaves that rattle like jewels. My father has woken up several times and when he does I smile at him and he smiles at me back.
The last time he opened his eyes I was leaning forward looking at him and when our eyes met I started to cry. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said, and he said, “You’re leaving tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding helplessly, “I’m pretty sad about it.”
“That’s no good, pet,” he said, closing his eyes and drifting peacefully down into the sleep that is the love of his late life while I curled in the creaking cane chair and wept copiously. It’s not just Dad. It’s not just the exhausting and dispiritingly servile position I occupy in this household which I now choose consciously, for it is all the last times, that has worn me out. Why I’m crying is, the relationship I have been in through all its vicissitudes for the past four years has dissolved this morning, seemingly finally. We have reached this point before. There are certain intractable obstacles and our dear and passionate love and longing for each other keeps sweeping them aside and then they just rise up again. This man, this dear and loving, sweet and nonchalant, cool and long-legged tender and painstaking golden-eyed man has a dog, and the dog belongs to him and to his ex partner. She lives in the United States but still sees Felix as her dog. She once introduced my beloved, after she had moved to the US and was visiting Berlin for the summer, to an acquaintance as “the guy who’s babysitting my dog.”
It is like being unwilling stepmother to a ferociously dysfunctional, sometimes aggressive and sometimes sweet overgrown child who is never going to grow up and leave home, is never going to go out and get a job, is always at the end of the bed wanting to take part in all our exchanges. The dog when I first took my place in this man’s bed shimmied on his belly all the way up my legs and hips and onto my chest and put his face in my face, drew back his lip like Elvis, and growled at me. “I’m just letting you know,” he growled, “that this is my bed and you have no place in it.”
Just talking about him exhausts me. The little cat is crying at the glass verandah doors and I go and open them and lift her into my embrace. She is purring. She slept all night in the crook of my elbow, purring and opening her sleepy eyes from time to time to gaze at me. Dogs only live ten or fifteen years, I have pointed out. I’ve argued. I’ve told him, your ex can’t just move away – to another continent – for half the dog’s lifetime and still expect to share in his keeping. When I first came on the scene they were meeting up every fortnight in the park to swap the animal back and forth as though he were a child.
He has sprung stiff-legged from a standing position onto our legs as we fell asleep and had to be dragged screaming and threatening behind the only internal door in that tiny apartment, into the bathroom. He has threatened to rip our throats out whenever he feels cornered or defensive or scared. When my sweetheart wants to come stay the night with me he has to wait til the dog has been taken for his last late-night walk, then rush home before breakfast to walk him again, so that we can never spend an evening together unless he goes home at the end of it. The alternative is I allow the dog to visit too and this means an evening of perpetual negotiations as he tries to creep closer and closer and puts his paw suggestively up on the couch. I could handle all of this, I could handle the fortress we have to build on my couch before bedtime to keep the dog off it, I could handle the needy pleading pellmell greeting extraordinary in dogs which makes each morning such a big production, but I can’t and won’t handle the dog’s recurring aggression in my home, I need to have a home where I feel safe.
This house is not such a place. It took me courage to return. I was to stay only two weeks and a half and now six weeks have passed and the whole thing has worn me to the nerve. Things fell apart many years ago and since then my family are what I miss. All day I look after my parents and after they’ve gone to bed I have packed all my effects. I have so been looking forward to the night I would step off the airplane in Berlin and into the arms of the man I still love. He loves me too. Despite this love our story is wasteful and sad. I know that if we had been blessed with a child of our own or even if we had kept living in our little rented cottage in Brisbane where we were so happy this animal would have loosened his hold on that strong and intricate heart. I have begged him to make more room for our closeness. Even our physical closeness has been tyrannised to an extent by the presence of this needy animal, who clamours to climb into the bed and if banished to the bathroom emits rhythmic yearning pants that disgust me to the marrow. It’s too much and I cannot cope with it. I am tired of coping with the way the sanity and sweet nature of my man turns into defensive insobriety round this animal, this four-legged reason we are not living together. I have been away from Berlin a month longer than we planned and his closeness is what I have missed. I am gazing at the little grey cat with her ludicrous big ears who has curled on my father’s lap and fallen asleep. I love her dearly, passionately, she is my boon companion. But were she to growl and hiss and spit when people carried out ordinary transactions, had she bitten me so fiercely on both hands that I was left with nerve damage, if I found it difficult to find a place for her to stay when I was travelling because so few of my friends could trust her or enjoy her – I know what I’d choose. I would choose you. I’d choose you and love you. I’d fuck them all off my loyal loving long-legged superdarling and just love you.
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at boyfriend school
What bothers me most about getting older is losing that glorious, elastic authority which I used always to use to shame men out of behaving boorishly. This afternoon we came through the park and passed the boules courts along the riverside, ruled off with low fences like dust baths for human sparrows, and I was collecting blossoms from the various flowering trees, the Spring has waited so long. The park was full of drug dealers and pregnant women and dogs, everywhere dogs. It all seemed glorious and I collected eight different kinds of blossom. Finding a second bush with the same flowers as a sprig I had already collected, I went up to it to make my little sprig kiss a sister flower still attached and growing. Saying, “Sistah! Hey sis!” and making smoochy noises. Then at the next hollow where the table tennis tables are set up I found another bush with the same flowers and went over to it, making kissing sounds – my companion said, mildly, “Are we going to be doing this all the way home?”
Alongside the boules courts we passed a man unzipped with his back turned, right there among the people, women, children, men, dogs, he had barely bothered to shunt himself into the bushes and it seemed so arrogant, so rude. I stared at him, turning my head as we walked past until he looked up and then I could say, witheringly, “I can see you!” He stared back, a complex expression crossing his face. I believe I read him perfectly. I said to my companion as we walked on, “You know – this is perhaps the most galling part about getting older. I lose that natural kind of authority of gorgeousness. Ten years ago he would have gone, Oh my god, that beautiful woman! and I have disgusted her! I’ve lost status in her eyes.”
He murmured appreciatively and slung his arm around me. But I didn’t want his compassion, I wanted his incomprehension. After a few dozen more steps I nudged him. I was grumbling. “You do realise that now would be a great time for you to say something beginning with, wait but Cathoel you are a beautiful woman?” He laughed. “Jeez,” I said. “Didn’t they teach you anything in Boyfriend School?”
“Cathoel,” he said, “you are still a very beautiful ~”
“Nope!” I put up a hand. “Do not use the word ‘still’!” But he wasn’t done. Unperturbedly he carried on, “~ and you will probably be beautiful until the day you die.” “Ahh,” I said, my breath sailing out of me like a breeze, and then I felt my body relax and my face grow warm and I snuggled back under the crook of his arm, where I like to belong.
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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.
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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.