It may surprise you to hear me say – and I’ll thank you not to confuse me with masters of the paradox like Oscar Wilde and G. K. Chesterton – that I regard my comic writing as serious. For the past thirty-four years, I have been approached almost hourly by damp people with foreheads like Rocky Ford melons who urge me to knock off my frivolous career and get started on that novel I’m burning to write. I have no earthly intention of doing any such thing. I don’t believe in the importance of scale; to me the muralist is no more valid than the miniature painter. In this very large country, where size is all and where Thomas Wolfe outranks Robert Benchley, I am content to stitch away at my embroidery hoop. I think the form I work can have its own distinction, and I would like to surpass what I have done in it.
Perelman’s writing is not the kind you use to write a novel, which needs expansion, exposition, room to accommodate more than a single idea precisely followed. An entire novel maintaining the precision of a Perelman sentence – well, it’s hard, if not exhausting, to imagine. It only occurred to me as I was writing this piece that my relatively recent addiction to the short story comes directly from this addiction to Perelman’s work. I have a lot to say about the way people behave next to each other, but nothing that needs a hundred thousand words to say it in. I’ve sat down to the embroidery hoop and I’m not sure I’ll ever get up.
Still, let’s not pretend it’s always fun. I often find myself recalling a brilliant interview with the novelist Jessica Anderson, a contributor to Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe’s invaluable writing handbook Making Stories. Anderson, asked about what she does when she’s finished a book, describes feeling only relief. ‘I hate writing, don’t you?’ she says. ‘I hate it.’ I think this might apply to almost all the writers I know – it certainly applies to me, and to Perelman. From an early age I’ve been compelled to record things; I’ve still got my diaries from the time I began reading him, and I find that in them I’m writing out sentences over and over again, changing words to see which sounds best, which way the sentence tilts. But when it comes to the business of starting work on something, well, there’s pretty much anything else I’d rather do. And Perelman was no different. If he was paid well for an assignment – a script, a series of essays, a TV or radio show – he would take a break afterwards, writing nothing for months. Asked if there were any devices that he used to get himself going, he answered, ‘Just anguish.’ He went on to say:
Just sitting and staring at the typewriter and avoiding the issue as long as possible. Raymond Chandler and I discussed this once, and he admitted to the most bitter reluctance to commit anything to paper. He evolved the following scheme: he had a tape recorder into which he spoke the utmost nonsense – a stream of consciousness which was then transcribed by a secretary and which he then used as a basis for his first rough draft. Very laborious. He strongly advised me to do the same… in fact became so excited that he kept plying me with information for months about the machine that helped him.
This gives me the opportunity to showcase Perelman’s parody of Chandler, reportedly adored by the crime author. This is from ‘Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer’, first published in the mid-1940s.
I came down the sixth-floor corridor of the Arbogast Building, past the World Wide Noodle Corporation, Zwinger & Rumsey, Accountants, and the Ace Secretarial Service, Mimeographing our Specialty. The legend on the ground-glass panel next door said, ‘Atlas Detective Agency, Noonan and Driscoll,’ but Snapper Driscoll had retired two years before with a .38 slug between the shoulders, donated by a snowbird in Tacoma, and I owned what goodwill the firm had. I let myself into the crummy anteroom we kept to impress clients, growled good morning at Birdie Claflin.
‘Well, you certainly look like something the cat dragged in,’ she said. She had a quick tongue. She also had eyes like dusty lapis lazuli, taffy hair, and a figure that did things to me. I kicked open the bottom drawer of her desk, let two inches of rye trickle down my craw, kissed Birdie square on her lush, red mouth, and set fire to a cigarette.
‘I could go for you, sugar,’ I said slowly. Her face was veiled, watchful. I stared at her ears, liking the way they were joined to her head. There was something complete about them; you knew they were there for keeps. When you’re a private eye, you want things to stay put.
Well, this makes me very happy.
* * *
Once, in my late teens, I was introduced to Ike, the father of my friend Josh. I had been taught to be terrified of him by our other friends because he was important and busy, and in no way approachable. He was just Ike, and he wasn’t interested in us. Josh lived in an enormous house in Vaucluse, a house with wings and staircases and lookouts and a swimming pool. I’d been to the house several times without encountering Ike – he was always buried somewhere in the distant reaches of the building, or pulling up in his Porsche just as we were heading downstairs to Josh’s bedroom. But on this day he walked in before we could walk out and Josh, suddenly formal, said, ‘Dad, this is my friend, Tegan Bennett.’
Ike sniffed, eyes glinting behind his glasses, and said, ‘Tegan Bennett. That’s a good Jewish name.’
It was one of those moments when your brain actually assists you instead of snatching the rug out from under you. Without a beat I answered, ‘I do my best.’
Ike smiled. Then Josh seized me by the hand and dragged me downstairs, where he said, ‘That’s how to speak to my dad.’
It was one of the proudest moments of my life, and I have total recall of it. It was the words: getting them right.
Detail II
Every week, if we can manage it, I go for a long walk with my friend Vikki. We first met when our sons, now fourteen, were toddlers. We used to be pushing prams, but now it’s just us. The shape of Vikki’s life is quite different from mine: she’s had a third child, and she is that old-fashioned thing, a homemaker. She makes her own bread and yoghurt, she knits and sews, she doesn’t have a smartphone. This sounds intolerable, but she is one of the least smug, most capable, most alive and interesting people I have ever met. Her favourite book is Moby-Dick. She once resuscitated her son after he fell, during a seizure, into a pool.
What is the point of these meetings? It’s not just the reaffirming of our affection for each other – it’s the exchange of detail. What Vikki has to tell me and what I have to tell her is the small stuff about how we keep our boys on track at home and school, how we keep our girls upright through this medieval HSC year, what we do when we lose our temper with our children. We tell each other things as a kind of absolution. It’s an open and equal swap – here is my shit, in exchange for yours.
Two months before my mother died of lung disease, Vikki came over to my house. She sat down on the couch and said in an uncharacteristically flat, almost sarcastic voice, ‘Well, snap. My mother’s got lung cancer.’
This seemed unfair, and too coincidental. But life doesn’t care about coincidence or unfairness. Vikki’s mother died four months after mine.
* * *
I suppose my mother’s official dying began a week before the actual death. It was nearly three years since she had been diagnosed, and a year at least since she’d been attached permanently to an oxygen machine. When she left the house – which she didn’t, at all, in the last three months of her life, as it was too terrifying for her – she had to be pushed in a wheelchair with a little oxygen bottle between her knees, or we could pull one behind her on a trolley. But at home she was attached to a machine the size of a bar fridge, which sat in the long gallery that joined one end of the house to the other. It was an oxygen concentrator, a device that didn’t need to be refilled or replaced like the bottles; it compressed the air in the house into pure oxygen, which was what Mum needed to survive. Its motor had a timbre like an air-conditioner or an old gas heater – as though the house itself was breathing, humming. After Mum’s stay in hospital some months earlier, we’d brought home a humidifier, which warmed and dampened the oxygen running into the prongs in her nose. Previo
usly the air had been cold and dry. This makes the nasal passages dry out and become permanently sore. These side effects become torture over time.
All this meant that for more than a year Dad had slept beside someone whose repose, when it was repose, was permanently noisy. When it was not repose it was often panic – if Mum moved too quickly, her slowly closing lungs missed their chance to draw in air and she would find herself as though suddenly thrust underwater, and as frightened, every time, as though this had actually happened. Together Mum and Dad had lain awake in the nights with the lamp on my mother’s side of the bed switched on, making a little bell of golden light in their room. I’d seen them, from the dark lounge room at the other end of the gallery. Together they spent those wakeful hours talking about – well, I don’t know. This is a volume of exchanges owned only, now, by Dad.
When he called to ask my sister, my brother and me to come down together, we knew it would not be long. A week, perhaps two weeks. Please god no more. It is a condition of caring for the dying that you simultaneously cannot bear to have them die and cannot bear for them to live one day longer. I’d made the mistake, late in the piece, of going into an online forum on pulmonary fibrosis, Mum’s odd, incurable disease. It was an American forum, as the disease had not yet gained much attention in Australia. I was horrified to learn how long it took some people to die. One woman posted that her father had had ‘three last Christmases’. We’d just had a ‘last Christmas’ ourselves and it felt as though we had used up the store of optimism that brings any family together for special occasions. Funny how the spontaneous coming together of two or three of us was always easier. Funny how each family keeps plugging away at the organised fun. I simply could not imagine us doing it again.
I had wished for a long time that she would die. Not just because I loved her and didn’t wish her to suffer – which I did, and which I didn’t – but because I didn’t want to suffer.
Two things I remember about that day – my brother saying he would go first. I was so grateful to him. I seem to remember watching him pack, but I can’t have, as he was in his house and I was in mine. I have a vision of him thrusting things into a duffel bag and heading for the car.
I also remember standing in the back room of our house, a dark little room, the square of window glowing bluely at the edge of my vision, and saying to my husband that it was time, and that I had to go. He took my hands or my arms and said, ‘Do you want to wait? Do you want to see what Joss says when he gets down there?’ and I answered, ‘I can’t have this conversation.’ I knew that I’d reached a point where I could no longer make a decision for myself. Until then I’d thought carefully about every move, planned it around our weeks of teaching and writing and looking after the kids. Russell nodded, kissed me, and my own bag was packed.
We three siblings made an agreement, easily, which was not like us – our way of deciding something can often be an awkward dance of each of us giving way until no-one gets what they want. We decided that at least two of us would be in Sydney with Dad and Mum, while the other spent a night at home. We would take it in turns. All three of us live within ten minutes of each other in the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba. (This was not a decision either. Our six children have grown up near each other, and this has been good, but we didn’t do it on purpose. It fell out that way.)
Mum and Dad’s house is in a laneway, built on a narrow block. It is a long house, full of sliding panels and rooms as open as they can be to the Sydney air. You need to leave Sydney for a colder climate to discover just how subtropical a city it is. Climbing out of my car, I always notice the heavy scent of lantana, feel the weight of the air.
In those first few days people came and went, bringing food. Two or three of us would sit at the table in the kitchen, talking and sighing. Eventually one of us would heave themselves to their feet and head back up the gallery to Mum’s room, to relieve whoever had been sitting there with their knitting or their book. We didn’t like to leave Mum alone too much. We sometimes wished we could.
* * *
After a couple of days it was time to move Mum from the bed she shared with Dad into the bedroom next door, where we’d installed a hospital bed so that we and her nurses could reach her easily, could help in the very last stages of her life. First we had to arrange the paintings in the second bedroom, taking some down, hanging others. We brought painting after painting for her to choose from. She chose, amongst others, a painting she had done of a doorway through which you could see another doorway, looking into an obscured distance as though into a mirror. I’m not sure if she chose this one because it was comforting, because she saw something in the idea of looking out, through the doorways, to somewhere not yet reached, or whether she chose it because she hadn’t quite finished it and was still ‘reading’ it, looking for its solution. My nephew took photos of the walls in the second bedroom with Mum’s iPad, then brought it back to her so she could approve the set-up.
She was conscious then, of course, and talking to us, and sitting up against her pillows, but dazed, as though she’d just been woken up. Sometimes she would drift away, eyes closed, even while she held a teacup or your hand.
My brother took charge of the moving, which Mum had been terribly frightened of. Even shifting in bed made her gasp and choke. I can’t remember how she was moved – she must have been carried by two of us, arms crossed under her – but my brother invented a narrative to help her cross from one room to the other. It was exactly the kind of thing she would have done herself. He told her she was in the surf, and with each wave – each wave of not being able to breathe, which was now a natural result of any kind of movement – she was to think of herself ducking under that wave. It takes confidence, early earned by many fortunate children of this country, to crash headfirst into a wall of water. This confidence would be useful to Mum. As she was carried, my brother chanted, ‘And – under! And – under!’
* * *
People continued to visit. I went home for one night and felt perfectly safe, fenced about by my husband and two children, and then I went back. Two more nights passed in the long house and it was my time to go home again.
But things were looking different. I was sitting by the bed with Mum’s doctor, who had visited her every single evening for nearly six months. I had heard of gifted doctors, and I had met nurses – including Prue, who had been with us at home for the last few months – who could hold and move a patient as though they were a baby and the nurse a perfect parent: strong, unyielding, gentle. But this doctor did something I’d never seen before. When he came to see Mum he would sit down on the edge of her bed. He would take her hand, and then her whole arm, in his. He would run his fingers up and down her arm and look at her, talking to her. He was reading her as Mum might read a painting. His eyes travelled up her arm, looking at her veins. He put the back of a hand to her cheek. He listened to what she was saying, but also to the sound of her voice. I’ve never seen anyone so alive to another human being.
I said to him, ‘I can’t decide whether to go home.’ By this stage Mum had had her last moments of consciousness; now she was asleep, taking long, racking breaths.
This was an interesting moment. I don’t know what other doctors would have done, but this one had shown himself to be the kind of person who would not make your choices for you. He refused to offer certainty when there was none, even when his very presence induced such dependence on his opinion. I knew this – I’d begged him a few times over the previous months to tell me when Mum was going to die. He couldn’t – and so he wouldn’t. But we were somewhere different now.
He was holding Mum’s hand, stroking her arm, and he said, ‘What do you need to go home for?’
I shrugged, as a way of trying to halt a sudden onslaught of tears. ‘See my kids,’ I managed.
He nodded. He looked at me. I looked at him.
‘I think I’ll stay,’ I said.
He nodded again. ‘Might be a good idea.’
* * *
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It was terrible, feeling it get dark. All the friends and relatives – my cousin Lisa, my cousin Mandi – had retreated, leaving us with food. One of us put on a favourite film in the living room – Withnail and I. We decided we would drift back and forth to the film, taking breaks when we needed to. Over the next months our way of raising a fist at the world would be to shout at one another, ‘The fuckers will rue the day!’
Mum was dying in the room her sister Catherine had died in fifteen or more years earlier. We’d taken turns sitting with Cath just as we were with Mum now, although back then it was Mum who did most of the sitting. When, some months earlier, we’d had to decide where Mum would die, I was the one who volunteered to have the conversation with her. My father would have been able to find a place for Mum in a comfortable hospice; he could also afford to have her cared for at home. The choice was hers.
I sat on Mum’s bed and asked her to think about the fors and againsts of being here, in her own house. I knew already that that was what she wanted – I knew where we were headed. I think it is what I would have chosen myself, although it would not have been easy. Mum had liked being in hospital, where it seemed everything could be done, and done by people who did not drop bedpans, trip over oxygen tubing, or rush off to cry in the bathroom.
‘Here’s an against,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t want this to be the house of dead ladies.’
The Details Page 7