by Helen Garner
I’ve never been so curious in my life. I want to stare and stare. As I look, squinting against the heat (they burn at between eight hundred and a thousand degrees Celsius) the end of the coffin goes pouf! and disintegrates. I can see two burning lumps. I gape. What I am looking at is a man’s feet. In the heat of their consumption they turn slightly, almost gracefully, as if he were moving to a more comfortable position in bed.
I don’t see them as pink human feet, you understand, with skin and heels and toes, but as two shimmering dark-centred objects of flame, which the context instructs me can only be feet. This is not the slightest bit horrible or disgusting. I am not aware of any smell.
Perhaps this wonder I am feeling is a very exaggerated version of that dreamy hypnosis that comes over us when we stare into a fire of wood, or coal. Why are we so drawn to fire? It’s the spectacle of matter being transformed. And that’s what I’m seeing here.
My guide glances at me. I’m struck dumb. All I can think to say is ‘Wow’. He nods again. The rest of the coffin loses form and collapses. What I can see now is a sort of humped, curved lump: it is his torso, the line of his spine, the bulky part of his body. ‘The feet take only a few minutes,’ says my guide. ‘The head goes last. The oil burner’s aimed at the head and the torso. They’re the hardest parts of the body to burn.’
He closes the door and leads me to the next furnace. Here a body has been consumed and a man is about to rake out the top section of the burning chamber to allow what they call the CRs, the cremated remains, to fall through a grille into a lower part, for collection. I can see a long bone, a femur, pale and dry-looking. ‘The thigh-bone’s connected to the kneebone,’ I foolishly think, but nothing’s connected to anything any more, all the links have been burned away and the furnace floor is covered with ordinary-looking ash in which the few bones, fragile and ready to be crushed, lie about as naturally as if they had been bleached not by fire but by a pure desert sun.
The man is raking and raking and the crumbly ash tumbles down into the under chamber.
Like a lot of people, I used to think that when the coffin disappeared behind the curtain in the chapel it was devoured instantly by flames, as if the chapel were built astride a hell where fire forever raged.
Of course, it’s not like that at all. My guide takes me up some steps to a concrete area like a garage, open at one end to the garden. Here we stand and wait. A red light on the wall goes off. This means that a service is over and a coffin is on its way out of the chapel. It heaves into view, thickly encrusted with flowers. A young man in jeans and runners tips the bouquets off into a wheelbarrow and briskly takes hold of the coffin. He straps it to a metal arrangement of rails, a kind of overhead conveyor belt. We go down the stairs again and I see the coffin go sliding smoothly above our heads on its elevated track. Down and round it goes to the furnace room, where it is unstrapped and put to wait its turn outside one of the furnace doors.
The burning goes on all day. Each one takes about two hours. One at a time they are consigned, burnt, raked and collected. It is possible that by the time you have driven home across town after the funeral, the coffin is already in the fire.
This is not, after all, the underworld. In one sense it is simply a place where people work. In the storage room behind the furnace section the radio is going softly on 3KZ. Someone has pinned to the bulletin board a caricature of a workmate, complete with rude message. The men in charge are obsessed with labelling, checking and checking again.
The walls are covered with shelves and on them are ranged scores of black plastic containers, each one about the size of a shoe box. These contain CRs waiting to be collected by their relatives.
‘Some people never collect,’ says my guide. ‘We scatter them by default. Oh, after three to six months.’
A young man is working at a bench with a big electric magnet shaped like a goose’s beak, or the mouth of a small dog. He plunges it into the container of CRs, works it round and round, and draws it out bristling with nails, screws and staples. ‘If we didn’t use the magnet,’ he says, ‘the metal’d break the blades of the grinder when we put the CRs through.’
My guide hands me a shallow metal container, like a tray with sides. ‘That’s what’s left of a person,’ he says. ‘Not much there, is there.’
No, there is not. About the equivalent of one and a half stale hi-top loaves if you crumbled them up. It’s a mixture of ash, bone and a honeycomb-like substance which I suppose is also bone, or its insides. It is a pale, greyish-fawnish-whitish colour. It looks dry, delicate, purified. ‘It’s completely sterile,’ says my guide. I put out one finger and lightly touch the honeycomb. It’s sharp. Good luck, spirit of these ashes, wherever you’re travelling.
One of the men gets a box like an old-fashioned biscuit tin down of a shelf and shows it to me. It is full of metal things, all the same dull burnt brown colour, and with the same crumbled surface, like a jam tin after a bonfire. I don’t know what they are, in their jumbled pile. My guide picks them up one by one and names them. ‘A horse shoe. A watch. A woman’s neck-chain. A war medal. The metal parts of a pocket knife. Toe caps off an old man’s boots. A bottle opener. A pacemaker out of somebody’s heart. A hip joint.’ These objects have come though the fire. He lays each one down with care.
On a special shelf by themselves are treasures which have survived the cremation of children: a metal piggy bank with the coins still in it; a little porcelain dish with a decorative knot of china flowers on its fitted lid, the kind of thing a young girl might have on her dressing table.
‘We get babies here too,’ says my guide. He reaches up to a high shelf and brings down one of the plastic containers, but a very small one. He opens it and draws out a sealed plastic bag, which he shakes so that its contents slide down to one end. He holds it out to me in his palm.
‘See? Hardly even a handful. The babies are stillbirths, mostly. We call ’em billies. I don’t know why. That’s what they called ’em when I first came to work here, and that’s what I call ’em too.’ We stand in silence looking at the tiny quantity of ash in the plastic bag. He handles it gently, and nothing he says about it is sentimental.
On our way to the door he says, ‘I reckon they ought to bring the gardeners in here, after they’ve been working here a while, and show ’em exactly what goes on. Because often you get people who come out here a few months later, when they’ve got over it a bit, and they ask the gardener to tell ’em what goes on and the gardener doesn’t know.’
I didn’t start shaking and crying till two days later.
And on my way home I had, for the first time in my life, a conviction—I mean not a thought but knowledge—that life can’t possibly end at death. I had the punctuation wrong. I thought it was a full stop, but it’s only a comma, or a dash—or better still, a colon: I don’t believe in heaven or hell, or punishment or reward, or the survival of the ego; but what about energy, spirit, soul, imagination, love? The force for which we have no word? How preposterous, to think that it could die!
Dry bones! Dry bones! I find my loving heart,
Illumination brought to such a pitch
I see the rubblestones begin to stretch
As if reality had split apart
And the whole motion of the soul lay bare:
I find that love, and I am everywhere.
‘The Renewal’, Theodore Roethke
1986
Labour Ward, Penrith
THE LOOK, ROUND the corridors of the maternity unit at Nepean Hospital, Penrith, in Sydney’s far west, is a perm on long hair. It’s tights or leggings, chunky white socks, boots or running shoes, a big loose cotton top. It’s a toddler plus a baby in a stroller before you’re out of your teens—and often before you’re married. It’s The Bold and the Beautiful, a packet of smokes, some chips, the odd bruise. Women out here are called ‘ladies’. So what? Only a fool would go to a maternity unit looking for sociology. What goes on here is elemental. Even time, behind these doo
rs, is a different substance. A story in maternity has no beginning and no end.
Mala isn’t in labour, but apparently she should be. Her blood pressure’s up, and she’s a fortnight overdue. It’s her first baby. She’s from Madras: dainty and dark and scared. Her husband is with her, backed into the curtain that’s drawn around her bed. The PA is pumping out easy-listening music and frequent reports of torrential, drought-breaking rains, strong winds, a bad smash on the motorway. The labour-room wall is papered with a huge colour blow-up, peeling at the corners, of a river rushing down its rocky bed.
A young woman doctor comes streaming in, a registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology. At twenty-nine, with fine cheekbones and bobbed fair hair, Linda wouldn’t look out of place in a Bloomsbury movie, but her accent and her directness are broad Australian. She whips back the sheet. Mala’s brown belly gleams in the dim light. ‘What did you grow such a big baby for?’ says Linda cheerfully. ‘Little people can hide big babies. Flop your knees. Loosen the muscles. Good.’ Her gaze, while she internally examines Mala, gets lost between bed and wall: her fingers are connecting directly with her mind.
Mala lets out a grunt and her husband steps in closer. Her tiny feet with their pale soles stretch and go crisp with pain. ‘Good girl,’ says Linda, stripping off her blood-specked glove out of sight. ‘We’ll put cream in to start your labour slowly. I’ll see you in six hours.’ Mala’s husband takes her hand. You can tell from the look they exchange that he’s a stayer.
Linda’s offsider is Nik, twenty-six, a freckled and bearded young resident with a strong Liverpool accent. They forge out together along the halls to theatre, where another first-time mother, Sharon, is booked for a caesarean.
‘Are you gonna cut or am I?’ says Nik.
‘You,’ says Linda. ‘You said you would.’
Nik looks nervous but resolute. ‘As long as you’re not hoping for any kind of speed.’
Sharon on her trolley sweeps in through the milky plastic door-flaps. The theatre hums with fanatical cleanliness and order. Faces vanish behind masks, leaving only eyes to carry expression and signals. A midwife stands ready by the table, her arms and hands swathed in green sterile cloth. Linda and Nik, scrubbed up and gloved in translucent rubber, step in and face each other across Sharon’s great belly, which is laid bare and swabbed with brown fluid.
‘Make it bold,’ says Linda.
Nik leans forward with the scalpel, obscuring Sharon’s body with his green-clad back. Five minutes of intense, working silence. ‘OK,’ announces Nik loudly. ‘I’m roopturing the membranes. Stand back.’ Everybody flinches and leans away. A ropy stream of cloudy yellow fluid shoots into the air on an angle and splatters the floor.
Again, the absorbed silence. ‘The cord’s round its neck,’ says someone. From the ruck of backs round Sharon the baby soars up in a pair of gloved hands: a tiny, lavender-tinged, cream-blotched, clenched-up boxer. The midwife seizes it in her draped hands and arms, and steps fast and smooth across the room to the resuscitation trolley, a breast-high, tilted little shrine, indented at its lower end to take the baby’s head.
The room has split in two.
They are clearing the baby’s airways. ‘Come on, kiddo,’ says a woman’s urgent voice. There’s a faint, muffled squall, a choke, a gurgle. Someone polishes the creature with a soft cloth. Deftly it is swaddled into an intricate white parcel, so stiff that the midwife can hold it up vertical. The baby’s minute face, eyes squinched shut, shows in the top corner of the triangle like that of a wee buddha. ‘See you later, guys,’ says the midwife in a squeaky baby’s voice. The plastic door flops shut behind her.
Meanwhile, Nik is suturing the cut in Sharon’s uterus, under the fiercely watchful eye of his teacher, Linda. Their faces are damp inside the perspex masks; Nik’s is fogged like a windscreen, large drops trickle down inside. He is wielding, with forceps, a mean-looking curved needle, forcing it into springy tissue and drawing it through, tying off and snipping each stitch separately. Linda guides his hand. Once she takes the needle from him and demonstrates, tugging a stitch firmly into a beautiful knot. Soon the interior incision looks as neat and tight as a shark’s mouth.
Between it and the outer cut there’s a layer of fat in globules; it looks like small creamy grapes, or corn on a cob. Linda checks the ovaries: two pale, glossy beans. ‘Let’s get up speed now, Nik,’ she says. He works his needle carefully along the border of the wound. Linda keeps pressing and steering his gloved, bloody hand with hers, teaching by touch. He’s got the knack of it now, though his hand still trembles slightly as he works. Two nurses count the swabs aloud in unison. Sharon’s body is already closed.
A nurse presses down on Sharon’s flaccid belly. Out between her legs oozes a little stream of bloody fluid. She twitches. She is coming to. They run a sucker round inside her mouth, clap an oxygen mask over her face, and wheel her away.
‘Linda’s a gweat teacher,’ says Nik earnestly, climbing out of his theatre gear. Linda laughs: ‘It’s hard to keep my hands off.’ Nik’s still a bit shaky, but by the time they get to the lobby where Sharon’s husband and extended family are gathered, he’s beaming. ‘It’s my twelfth grandchild!’ cries a grey-haired woman, grabbing his hand. The lift door opens and an old man in a pale-blue cardigan and battered bush hat joins the group. His brown face is alive with feeling, but restrained with a sort of irony. He doesn’t speak, but stands just outside the excited circle, chin on one fist, head cocked and eyebrows raised.
In neonatal intensive you can spot Sharon’s daughter without needing to read the label. She already looks like a person: her squarish head, her hair growing in flat curls. Her name is Zoe, and apart from low blood sugar, she’s doing fine.
Nik fills in forms as they walk to the kiosk for a coffee. Someone passes them, heading for the kids’ ward, carrying a wire cage with a great big fruit bat in it. ‘Must be a new way of taking blood,’ quips Nik, recovering his bounce.
Linda sprawls at the cafe table in her white gown, one foot up on a chair. ‘Phew,’ she says, ‘I’m slowing down. Trouble is, once you stop, you settle.’ Outside, the wind has dropped. The sky has cleared. Linda heaves a sigh. ‘You work these incredible hours,’ she says, ‘with the threat hanging over you that you’ll make a mistake. It’s such an intense world, in here. And then you stop and look out the window and see this…calm.’
Her beeper goes off. She drags herself to her feet. A young woman in casualty is miscarrying. Linda is on her way. The pace at which doctors travel! Not haste so much as a surging, forward motion, without pause or hesitation: on, on, on.
Mala is leaning back in an armchair now, her head tilted to one side, her eyes closed, one arm raised over her head in a dramatic gesture of abandon. Her husband is right by her. ‘She’s got the look,’ murmurs Linda. The PA is still raving, some terrible seventies guitar solo. Mala moans. Her voice is very soft and mild, even when it’s high with pain. ‘Good,’ says Linda. ‘Good strong pains. That’s what we want.’ Even from outside the labour room, from the nurses’ station, Mala’s voice can be heard, rising and falling, light, rapt, strained.
On the front porch of the maternity unit, half a dozen young women in hospital nighties are fagging away. One of them has a black eye. A sign listing the hospital’s interpreter services has been defaced: the languages most savagely scratched out are Macedonian, Serbian and Croat. Someone has sticky-taped to the glass door a message: PIZZA MAN WE WILL BE HERE AT 2.40 OK. WAIT FOR US WE ARE HUNGARY THANX. An old woman is tenderly helped down the steps by a scrawny, wild-looking girl with multiple skin-piercings. The old woman is saying to her, ‘It gets worse. It gets worse. The grief gets worse.’
In the canteen the doctors sit together. They eat sandwiches, fruit, yoghurt. Nik recites from memory a long comic poem he has composed, in severe classical metre and rhyme, about a hungover doctor trying to deliver a baby. Between stanzas his face adopts a special expression that discourages interruption. Linda and three male doctors laug
h and applaud. At a nearby table, a nurse opens up her sandwich and stuffs it with hot chips. Linda speaks with longing about her two-year-old son at home: her face, a striking mixture of delicacy and toughness, turns soft when she mentions her husband and her child. The others stare blankly out the window at the eucalypts while they chew. A beeper goes off. Five doctors dive for their belts, in curved, two-handed plunging gestures, as graceful as if they were dancing.
Midwives are the sort of people you’d be glad to see come striding through the door in an emergency. Doctors too, of course— but while doctors can seem driven and head-tripping, midwives have the relaxed physical confidence of sportswomen. With their slow, wide-swinging gait, they radiate capable calm. Their professional mode is unflappability.
In delivery suite they mill about their big station with its desks and computer and filing cabinets. They are forever drawing up rosters and equipment order lists: ‘Can we please please please please please get some smaller cannulas? I’ve rung and rung and rung.’ The fluorescent light is harsh and wearing. At times the foetal monitor in one of the rooms is turned up so loud, to reassure a labouring woman, that it thuds through the nurses’ station like a funky bass-line. Otherwise, the PA faithfully seeps out tired old hits. After a couple of days in here, you not only get used to the radio but start to like it—even to depend on it. It’s better than muzak. It’s an infusion of the outside world, which is in danger of being forgotten, in all this intensity. Day and night lose meaning, here. What land is this? You could be anywhere.
Midwife Sandy, square-set, short-haired, ironic, does a boppy dance-step between desk and shelf. Listening to an account of Nik’s triumphant caesar, she remarks dryly, ‘I was pleased to learn, in general training, that even thin women have globules of fat.’