Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: sorrow

  • walloped

    I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.

    Needless to say, I no longer love him.

    It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.

    The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?

    Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.

    Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.

    He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.

    We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.

    I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.

    I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.

    When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.

    This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.

    Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.

    The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?

    My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”

    You’re sweating.

    “Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”

    The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.

    There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”

    Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • the littlest love

    I lost a baby last year, after a long time trying to conceive. It died inside me early without my knowing about it, so I carried the tiny corpse in my womb a few days, and was its grave. We had chosen our names, for a boy, for a girl. Every child is a girl at this stage. The doctor made his seven-week scan. I strained over his head, trying to see on the dark screen the tiny bean-shaped body for the first time. There was no heartbeat, only my own. The doctor pulled out his dildo-shaped scanner and wiped the condom off it with one movement. The condom he flung over his shoulder into the trash. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be taking home a baby this time,” he said.

    Later in his office, when I was dressed, he said airily, “Oh yes – one in two pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Didn’t you know?” I didn’t know. It occurs to me now this is just another way we brush aside the sorrows which affect women. We don’t talk about the griefs women carry. Miscarry. Give stillbirth to. Find dead in the cot. Incest, rape, infertility, assault.

    We were so excited going in for the scan. The first glimpse of the most important person in our adult lives; her first communication with us, through the tiny pounding of her heart. I had been watching the daily progress of this infinite darling in the form of diagrams showing the little heart finding its way, the spine beginning to form. These drawings seemed to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen on paper. On the screen I could not see anything, however tiny; I looked and looked. My partner held my hand. A sickened feeling of confusion very faintly took hold. The gynaecologist put out both his hands to pull me upright, as though I were an invalid. In such ways do insensitive people convey their empathy. This doctor liked to tell salacious jokes during intimate examination: we were already looking for another doctor, a better doctor, a woman. Earlier he had said, as he reefed the condom over his scanner, “I’m a mountain man. I like mountain women.” I had only just worked out, with a dull, sick feeling, that this was a pun, when he thrust the machine inside me and the scan started and the quiet unmoving bad news came in to rest. It has thus rested ever since. We are still not parents and our child is still unborn. I had not known before this how many of my friends had also suffered miscarriage and the loss of a child. How many still grieved. I had even felt intolerant, judgmental of the seeming sentimentality of these remembrances when they did appear, the candles, the flowers, the bears. Now I found myself applying this same non-compassion to my own grief. This piercing loneliness seared me from the first: after all I am hollow, I am alone in here. Oh how can you mourn something so early, barely a child. With its whole life ahead of it, just growing spine. Meanwhile the little cardboard box with its clot of bloodied fragments that I knelt over on the floor of the shower and howled, that I scooped up and wrapped in tissue paper then could not bring myself to bury, all alone in the cold dark ground, sits on my desk untouched, more than a year later. I have not been ready to let go.