It was her job to make their meals and tend to their other domestic needs, her husband’s job to accompany them out, take and send messages, make introductions and meet with important men. Once Mr Phillips came home with new frockcoats, breeches and shirts for them and she helped tie their neck scarves, standing first behind Mr Bennelong and then Yemmerrawanne, seated in a chair before the cheval mirror, tying and retying the white silk until they took over for themselves. They would rarely look directly at her, but that day she held the gaze of Yemmerrawanne in the mirror and noted the flat dullness of his eyes. She knew then that he would not recover.
Scoundrel. Savage. Traitor. This is what the men of the town call him. He has read what they write about him, heard the talk. He understands now the mighty price of that long voyage to England and back, with its banquets and parties. The outings to the theatre, the galleries. The audience with the King. He will not repay all that with his clan’s land, life, blood. He will not. All my friends alive and well. He welcomes the company of sailors and ex-convicts, with their demijohns of rum and their pipe tobacco. Mr Squire comes to him one day and persuades him to return home to Wangal country. You need your clan, not all this, Mr Squire tells him, waving his arm around at his drunken companions in the tavern. And they need you. He understands this, that he will die without them, as he nearly did in England.
Back up the river, embraced by his people again, he finds his tastebuds sharpened, his eyesight clearer. He hears so much more: the call of magpie geese, the sly plop of burra at the riverbank, leaves talking in the breeze.
They buried Yemmerrawanne in the Eltham churchyard, in a plot reserved by Mr Kent next to the wife and baby he had lost years before. Mr Bennelong would not be comforted, wailing and crying for days and nights to follow. He scraped a knife against his head, he scratched his fingernails down his face until his cheeks bled. Penny whined and trembled and ran away from him to hide under the bed and, even when he became calm again, regarded him with caution. He lost weight and his face became dry and dull, and when Mrs Phillips heard the first gurgling in his cough she went and spoke to her husband and then to Mr Kent. He would die soon if he did not return to his own home, she knew it. There, she had learned, it did not snow in winter, and for months and months on end people could walk around wearing little or no clothing, so mild was the weather.
You very good madam. She went to him one morning like this, some weeks after Yemmerrawanne died. He was sitting with his face upturned, eyes shut, his chest bared to the sun. Her shadow fell over him and he flinched before opening his eyes, and drew the cords of his shirt together. He knew she did not like to see his cicatrices. Mr Bennelong, she said to him, your cough worsens. I fear you will not recover, like your friend. By then he was eager to leave. By then there were no more excursions to the theatre, the galleries, the cathedral. Here on the edge of the city he toured gardens and went boating on the river with the men. The suits made for court, and not worn since a formal dinner some months back, now hung in the wardrobe. One morning when she took them out for airing, he stopped her and said, I will wear this when I return. I shall live at the governor’s house. Shall you, indeed, Mr Bennelong? she said with mock formality, and that was the first time he smiled in weeks.
He departed on the Reliance, on a cool bright day, the sky scrubbed clean of clouds. At the quay Mr Kent introduced him to a tall young man. Here is Mr Bass, he said. He will take pleasure in your company on the voyage. And he is the ship’s doctor, he will look after you. He took his hand and shook it with the usual courtesy he applied in such circumstances, but Mr Bass took his hand in both and held it with warmth. This is a genuine pleasure, Mr Bennelong, he said. I hope you and I might find much to talk about over the next few months. Then he introduced his friend the midshipman. Mr Flinders is to chart the coast of your country, he said.
Country, he repeated. My country. The words tasted like lilly pilly, sour and sweet.
Something has shifted in her. It is the tide of grief, receding. Whole days at a time pass when she does not think of the little ones, all five of them dead before the age of three. And she is able to walk to the churchyard and lay flowers on their graves, her husband’s only a year old, and feel that her grief is slowly being laid to rest too, underneath the same soft grass that waves in a breeze and in spring produces tiny daisies. She is able to rise and drink her morning tea and go about her day as if there is something approaching purpose in it. She has resumed attending church and on other days will venture out, visiting the Wednesday markets, or just walking in the parkland beside the river. One day a week she attends the poorhouse with knitted socks or mittens, or bowls of puddings and soup.
But even as his senses seem to sharpen and gain focus, his bones and joints begin to soften. He is not an old man but has the body of one. After yet another fall from a leg that buckles without warning, he is persuaded to move into the room set up for him in Mr Squire’s house on the river. With its feather mattress bed and bowl of flowers on the pine dresser, it is more than comfortable, but he insists the French windows to the verandah remain open day and night. Now he comes and goes as he likes, resting alone when he needs to. Often the orchard workers arrive in the morning to see him sitting on the verandah, wrapped in the white counterpane from the bed, a blue wisp rising from his pipe.
Mr Bennelong never asked for shirts, rather for shoes and stockings and handkerchiefs, but she takes the shirts from the oakwood chest anyway. They only need their cords inserted and some final hemming on the neckline. There is no one else to give them to and besides she is glad to send them to him: she enjoyed helping her visitors with their attire, correcting the tilt of their hats and adjusting their neckties. It intrigued her that Mr Bennelong still had trouble with his buttons, and yet had such deft fingers he could conjure lengths of string from out of a few strands of hair or wisps of rag, or fashion a musical instrument from a leaf pressed to his lips. Once he took dough in the kitchen and with a clean stick made tiny faces on each scone, every one amusing and different. Her husband’s shoes are still fine, they should fit him well.
Three days into the new year, Mr Squire is aroused before dawn by a sound he knows and dreads – voices joined in such deep and penetrating song it seems the very sky itself should crack apart. He finds Bennelong lying on the verandah, one hand still curled around his pipe. The singing reaches a height, now accompanied by the slow clap of stick against stick and the beginning of a ritual wailing that is so powerful it creates a long shiver up and down his back. In the stillness of the early morning the river catches the anthem, throwing it back from the opposite shore. He turns, embraced in an amphitheatre of sound, an opera of grief. As the light grows he sees row upon row of people standing at the garden fence, the song now melding with their cries, the dogs howling with their throats exposed, their snouts pointing to the grey sky. He reaches down and lifts up the body of his friend and turns and slowly walks towards them. I am at home now.
It has been eighteen years since he sailed away, back to his home. The journey still takes eight months. She wraps the shoes and clothing in a piece of calico and then in brown paper, two layers, tying it with string. Tomorrow she will take it to the carrier who comes daily for parcels, and can be trusted to ensure it reaches the depot, to be forwarded to Portsmouth. She has checked the weekly shipping report and knows that the convict transport Archduke Charles is leaving for Cork in two weeks, en route to Port Jackson. She addresses the parcel to Mr Bennelong, care of the governor’s house.1
* * *
1Note: In about 1796 Woollarawarre Bennelong wrote a letter to Mr Phillips, with whom he had stayed in England; in this letter he thanked Mrs Phillips for caring for him, and asked for some items of clothing.
No Hot Drinks in the Ward
By the end of the second day she decided there was perhaps no need to appear to be so pathetically grateful. She had been saying thank you an awful lot. We will come again in another
hour. Thank you. Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any more questions. Thank you. Let the ward manager know if you need anything else. Thank you. You can sleep here in the pull-out bed. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
She had stepped through too many sets of electronic glass doors. She was in a spaceship, a Tardis. Time collapsed and space expanded. Had a day passed, or a week? A purple bubble-shaped monster lurked in a corner somewhere. All the children looked like freaks, moon-faced, trailing machines on wheels that beeped and flashed. Perhaps she had landed on another planet. The language was alien, the lights eerie, fed along the corridors from the floor. Even her son noticed it, the one who was ill. All the kids here are bald, he said, suspiciously, tugging on her arm when they first entered.
A lifetime of crying, down there in the emergency ward. A crying child slows down time, and there was a dozen of them downstairs, children, babies, watching TV in between their wails, arching their backs and thumping their grim-faced parents. They had a private examination room, where a series of doctors and nurses trailed in and out, asking the same questions over and over, which she answered again and again, between tears, and with thanks. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I’m sorry for crying so much. A nurse handed her son a handlebar thing attached by wires to a box and a TV screen.
PlayStation! he cried. I’ve always wanted one.
She would buy him one, just as soon as they got out of here. Already she was making elaborate deals in an economy of illness and recovery. If he makes it, she would buy not only the PlayStation but every other toy, she would forsake every principle that was opposed to mindless electronic games, if it meant he would survive.
More doctors trailed in and out. More questions. Forms. Tears. The weariness. She could sleep for a year. She would never sleep again. She answered questions and ticked boxes on forms. Is your child lactose intolerant? No. Is your child prone to nosebleeds? No. Does your child bruise easily? No. Is your child asthmatic? No, no, no, no, he is the healthiest child I have ever had, she wanted to scream.
Maybe she did scream it, and the warm mellow surfaces of the hospital absorbed those words along with all the other bacteria floating around. Maybe an orderly with a mop and bucket of antiseptic took those words and flushed them away in a scrubbing room. As she answered questions the child played on, his thumbs and fingers instantly aligning with the buttons of the console as if he had been doing this since the womb.
Oh, that, the womb. The wicked, wicked womb. Maybe it was her fault. Wasn’t it always the mother’s fault? Between doctors and their questions she raked through her pregnancy. Did she scrape lead paint off walls? Visit nuclear power stations, live near a waste dump, breathe in toxic fumes, eat soft French cheese? Maybe it was the freeway nearby, the weedkiller she sprayed on the path, the microwaves. That was it. She must have used the microwave oven too much, pressing her belly close to the bench as she heated her other kids’ noodles, oatmeal, warmed milk for her coffee. She would never forgive herself. The coffee, that must have been it. She should have bought organic. Fair-trade. Given it up altogether. Now that she thought about it she recalled reading an article about carcinogens and caffeine. It was definitely the coffee.
That didn’t stop her drinking endless cups of it, that first day, night, weekend, week. Instant, from the patient kitchen, where ripped sachets and packets of sugar littered the bench amid a sticky sprinkling of brown, where there were never enough cups but a fridge full of milk.
And the tears, how much could she weep! Would that she would dry up, but no, it was the reverse, as if inside all her cells were bailing water, preparatory to jumping ship themselves. Tears and drinks of water and visits to the toilet, twice, five times in the hours that passed, she lost count. All the tissues in her pocket turned to crumpled sog, and still she kept them in her hand. A handful of her tears that flowed for hours, like summer rain, unpredictable, violent, that stopped as suddenly as they began, and then commenced again, flowing into her hands, through her fingers, down her shirt. There were plenty of tissues, plain boxes parked on the desk. Nurses and doctors silently handing them over; at least she supposed they were all medical professionals, though it occurred to her at some point she could have been weeping to the cleaner. An army of doctors and nurses. She didn’t know who was who. Whom, whom, she repeated to herself, don’t let your grip of language slip as well.
In their democratic outfits, casual, monochrome, even ungendered, they all looked the same. They could all have been orderlies and cleaners. She did not know which of these doctors were more senior, she did not know there was even a hierarchy, until the final appearance late into the first night, a short man in normal clothes, with a gentle voice and a loud tie.
The first thing you need to know is that your son has every chance of a full recovery, he said. Now we won’t know yet what type of leukaemia it is – there were varieties? – that will be determined through a biopsy. But it’s more than likely it is acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
His voice was like a balm, even as he uttered the words that announced disease of such grave proportions. His demeanour was reassuring.
We have an eighty per cent success rate of curing ALL here, he said.
She began crying again. But then there wasn’t time for crying; he was telling her it was called acute for a good reason: the cancer cells were multiplying as they spoke. They were wasting time down here off the emergency department. The cancer cells were, right this second, huddling in corridors having meetings on the run, hitting the phones and securing support. Within an hour they would have consolidated their numbers, by midnight doubled in size. Tripled. Before they counted the ballot and announced victory, the team had to get her son up to the ward and initiate tests, start treatment.
Could she not even take him home for the weekend? Think it through? They looked at her, pitying but resolute. Once, if she had ever thought about it – as if you ever did, oh, I wonder what it would be like if my six-year-old got leukaemia, and what’s the fare to Bali this time of year – she would have thought they’d get a second opinion. It would have gone something like this: Yes, he does seem rather tired and listless, and that’s certainly an odd bruise. Keep him quiet and rested for the next few days, and we’ll run a few tests after the long weekend. Make sure you keep his fluids up and, yes, cordial is okay. Now the blood does seem abnormal. Let’s send you off to the McDonald Clinic, they have a lot of facilities there. And then we’ll get Dr Spry in, he’s a specialist in paediatric haematology, and then we might have a chat to Dr Kind. And/or Dr Queen.
But there was no time for second opinions, not with those cancer cells caucusing in corners and calling in favours right now. Besides, this doctor, their new doctor, emanated calm. From the moment he spoke she trusted him. He’d been at his family dinner when called by the hospital to return and assess her son, his new patient. A paper napkin was still tucked into his pocket. She would do whatever he said.
This doctor was a kind of deity, a king amongst deities. Zeus, surrounded by Hera, Poseidon and Gaia, in this whole new panoply of divine medical staff. He reappeared the next morning, and that afternoon, and again on the Sunday morning. On the Monday morning when he appeared again, she asked him if he didn’t have any time off. He explained that the doctors worked four weeks straight, to ensure continuity for the patients and their families. She felt guilty for this, as if she’d overused her quota of care, swallowed over the weekend in one greedy gulp. The whole family should never come to hospital again, never present at an emergency ward with a broken limb. None of them, ever, have appendicitis, or incur a burn, or be injured in a road accident. She could not afford that; she would fry chips and slice beans with extra care, or not at all. She should give up driving.
Meanwhile, each visit he had remained calm, patient. It was as if her son was his only patient, as if his only concern in the world was the care and recovery of this child. She wanted to embrace him, but she would stop saying
thank you.
By then she must have met fifty people. Information, reassurance, kindness, help. She was overloaded with it, each morsel of information, each new piece of advice, representing a little wrapped gift on the way to her son’s recovery. The treatment was delivered via a team, so she met systematically every doctor, resident, registrar, nurse, social worker, play therapist on the oncology ward.
The day after the boy was admitted came further blood tests, a biopsy, yet more blood tests – were there actually enough litres in that little body? – and a steroid drug that was already starting to flush cancer cells from his system like a benign dose of Drano. One of the oncology nurses took her on a tour of the ward. She showed her the parents’ room and balcony, the bathroom, the laundry, the kitchen, explained about the roast dinner offered every Saturday, the protocol for use of the fridge and the freezer. She could keep food for herself and her son here in a marked container; she could wash and dry their clothes there. She was shown the children’s playroom, for mobile patients and their siblings and friends. She learned about the hospital school, the play therapists, the music therapists, the volunteers. The otherworldliness of it all was enhanced by the eerie lighting of the green and purple decor, and that alien game machine that lurked in every ward, which the kids all begged to play. She politely inspected it all, somewhat bemused. Why all the showing-off of these facilities? She had been told that her son would be in hospital for a few days to commence treatment, to have a portacath implanted in his chest, for the giving of chemotherapy and the taking of blood. What possible use might a laundry be for her, what interest might she have in keeping food in their fridge? Her son was to be treated as an outpatient; she was not going to need all these facilities.
Zebra Page 11