Little by little, we made Rain the house we wanted it to be. We added pictures, ornaments, rugs. The pool was constructed and we admired its pale brilliance; Max employed the most expensive landscape gardener in Melbourne to encircle it in bright gardens and a tempting, shaded patio.
Summer came and we swam daily. I swam, too, though I’d never been much of a swimmer or a sun-worshipper; but I joined Max in relishing the whole experience: the clean cool splash of the water as we dived in, the ice-clinking drinks he made for us as we lounged on the long cedar chairs, the slow twilights.
It was rather like entering the heady ambience of an exotic travelogue, like seeing ourselves up on a wide and colourful screen across which privileged people, glistening like olives, gambolled expensively.
And during the short, warm summer nights we tumbled into bed and made love, Max’s long lean fingers travelling across my body sensitively, imaginatively, always with a planned and steady vision of my pleasure, of our pleasure. Sometimes it was intense and direct and shattering; at other times, a slow journey towards the concentrated passion of our delight. He laughed at me; he said I had never been awakened before.
It was true. I came to Max a virgin in everything relating to sex except its actual prosaic progenitive happening. I didn’t know about foreplay or afterplay. I didn’t know about play. I didn’t know about teasing, or timing, or waiting, or holding out, or submitting, or frenzy or peace or anything.
I had never understood the theatre of sex, its drama, the frisson preceding it or the harmony concluding it. Nobody had ever done these things with me before, and I was left astonished and breathless and disbelieving and grateful. All my life I’d been frigid, but nobody had told me; nobody had explained it to me. I’d mistaken the tepid enthusiasm Steve had sometimes managed to arouse in me for the real thing. And suddenly I had arrived in a new life, a life in which I was as new, as freshly awakened and untouched, as everything around me.
For a little while at least, life proceeded in this unbroken golden string of days, this peaceful meandering, isolated from the rest of the world. I remember we moved into Rain in December, just before Christmas. I remember it so clearly because Christmas was our goal, and we made it with only a few days to spare.
After Christmas, I recall it as if the months stretched out endlessly in the hedonistic vein I have described. It can only have been a matter of three or four weeks, however: we were all on holiday during January and it was January that gave us this magical spell. Then the spell was broken: there came a telephone call from Zoë, who had assiduously ignored me since I had left Steve.
‘It’s Mum,’ she said, without preamble.
‘Yes?’
‘She’s dying.’
‘We’ve been told that many times these last two years.’
I was suspicious. Zoë had already made a number of claims on me by invoking our dying mother. I loved her, too; I cared that she was dying, of course I did. But I was resentful of all the emotional blackmail Zoë had already tried, and I was wary of sudden claims of impending death. It was also true that we had been on a more-or-less permanent alert, she and I, like people on a platform expecting a train that never comes.
Five years earlier, the doctors had told us our mother had a maximum of three years to go; two years ago, that death was imminent. Yet she continued. My father, a big strong man who looked as if he would last forever, had died many years before with no warning and astonishing speed. Frail and small as she was, the more murderously the cancer raced through her body, the more stubbornly my mother clung to life. When this happens, people say admiringly of the ill person that he or she is a real fighter.
I’d never thought of my mother as a fighter. Where I was concerned, her mode of fighting seemed to be to burst into tears and tell me I was wrecking her life, which I didn’t really count as fighting so much as underhanded and manipulative tactics designed to wear me down through the unwelcome accumulation of guilt. They were successful tactics, too, in so far as guilt was certainly generated. But I had vowed that I wouldn’t change my life because of them. And I dreaded deathbed demands, weighted with all the unfair burdens of guilt and love and expectation.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ said Zoë, crossly. ‘Of course she’s dying. We know that. We know that, yet you haven’t visited her since before Christmas.’
‘Firstly, we know that she’s dying, but not that it’s about to happen. Secondly, when my family’s treating me like a bloody leper, why should I feel as if I have to visit them daily?’
‘She’s in hospital.’
‘She’s been in hospital before.’
‘This time it’s different.’
‘You said that last time.’
‘Well,’ said Zoë. ‘Ignore me, then. Take no notice. Go ahead and do exactly as you please. Just don’t blame me when I ring you to tell you she’s dead. When I ring and tell you our mother’s passed away, don’t tell me you couldn’t help it. Okay?’
That is the kind of vicious stab at which Zoë has always excelled.
When I visit the hospital (which I do the following day), I can see that Zoë is in fact right. There is a different look about my mother, a new look of being dragged down, rubbed away. Somehow her features seem blurrier, her face sunken. She lies in the narrow metal bed, apparatus snaking around her, up her nose, down her side. She looks tiny and apathetic. I bend over to kiss her and she turns her cheek, with slight impatience, as if to repel the caress. I feel hurt.
‘How are you?’ I say, searching around for a chair that isn’t piled high with books and Kleenex boxes and bedjackets. (Does anyone in the world apart from my mother still wear bedjackets? I wonder.)
‘How do I look?’
I know as well as the next person that to ask a dying person how she is mightn’t sound smart. But you have to say something, don’t you? It’s a formal expression designed to communicate interest and concern. It’s a way of saying: Here I am, and I care about you, and I’m not sure how to negotiate all of this. So I’m asking you how you are. I know it’s a dumb question, but you’re meant to answer it politely. If I know this, why doesn’t she?
I’ve brought some red roses, which I lay on the tray straddling her bed. I know that she loves red roses, and I’ve gone to some trouble to get these.
‘You’ll need to get a vase,’ she says, petulantly. ‘The nurses say they haven’t got time to be arranging flowers.’
‘Thank you for the beautiful flowers, Isabel,’ I murmur to myself, looking about for a vase. I know it’s rude of me, bad-tempered, but the provocation is great. A spasm passes over my mother’s face; I’m not sure whether she’s in sudden pain or whether she’s heard my resentful muttering. Heaven knows, when I actually want her to hear things, she’s always too deaf.
Why are there never any empty vases in hospital rooms?
‘There’s a room down the corridor,’ says my mother.
I glance out the door. The corridor stretches endlessly on both sides.
‘Which side?’
‘How would I know which side? Have I ever been there? Do I look as if I can jump out of bed and go wandering down the corridor?’
I grab the flowers, stomp out of the room and mooch down the corridor. I can’t find anything that looks remotely like a room where vases might live. Nobody shows any sign of wanting to help me.
God, I hate hospitals.
Predictably, the vase room when I eventually discover it is down the other end from the direction I’ve been travelling. As is always the case, none of the vases is the right size for my roses.
I take my time arranging them, in a vast receptacle clearly meant to accommodate small trees, and hope that by the time I get back someone else will be visiting my mother, so that I won’t have to talk to her and can leave early. This makes me feel ignoble and selfish and
therefore even guiltier.
When I return, I’m still the only visitor. I plonk the vase on the shelf, displace some jetsam from a chair, and sit down.
‘It’s too big,’ she whispers, in evident anguish. I decide to ignore this.
‘It’s not such a bad room,’ I say. ‘You’ve got quite a good view.’
‘Have I? It’s a pity I can’t sit high enough to see it, then.’
‘At least you’ve got a room to yourself.’
‘I get lonely.’
She and I both know perfectly well that, if some poor unfortunate were to be sharing the room with her, her complaints would lift the roof. So I disregard this play for sympathy and try another tack.
‘Is the food good?’
‘I can’t taste it.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘It’s the medication. It makes everything taste like cardboard.’
‘That’s a pity,’ I say, vaguely. Conversation lapses. I gaze out the window (she’s right, in fact; she can’t see it, and that’s a shame: it’s a pretty view, of big, old oaks and smart, cosy terrace houses) and wonder if grumpiness is an automatic by-product of the dying process.
‘So you’re living with him, then?’ says my mother.
I’m startled. ‘Sorry?’
‘With him. With that man. You’re living with him.’
‘Max. His name is Max. Yes. I’m living with Max.’
She folds her lips and another spasm jumps over her face.
‘Steve visited me this morning,’ she says.
‘Why tell me?’
‘He’s a good man, Isabel. I hope you don’t live to regret what you’ve done to him. I hope you don’t live to regret what you’ve done to your little family.’
‘What you mean is you’re damn sure I will and you’ll be pleased if I do.’
My mother closes her eyes and turns her head. ‘You never would be told. You never would be told anything, would you? You always had to do it all your own way, didn’t you? You always were a wilful, artful child. A cold, uncaring child, you were.’
For someone who’s dying, she spits the words out with extraordinary clarity and energy. Clearly, she doesn’t mind that they hurt me, that they’re unfair.
It’s not long before I leave, feeling under all the circumstances that my visit hasn’t been a great success. As I bend to kiss her I see a tear slipping down her papery old skin. This is clearly not something I can do anything about and I beat a rapid retreat, sighing in relief as I escape the hospital and find safety in the sunny day outside.
Zoë rings me that night.
‘Did you have to upset her like that?’ she asks, furiously.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Can’t you ever just be nice to her? She’s dying. How many times do I have to tell you that?’
‘I didn’t do a thing to her.’
‘She was crying when I came in.’
‘So it has to be my fault?’
‘It was your fault. She told me it was your fault.’
‘What did I do?’
‘You snapped at her. She said you bit her head off.’
‘I bit her head off? She didn’t happen to mention some of the remarks she made to me?’
‘She’s dying, Isabel.’
‘I have that message, actually. Loud and clear. I don’t see that dying gives you the right to say whatever you feel like saying. She always was a tactless cow and dying isn’t improving her.’
I don’t really mean to say anything like this: of course I don’t; but by this stage I’m seriously upset and I simply don’t see why everything is always and inevitably my fault.
‘What a bitch you are,’ says Zoë. ‘She’s in the most terrible pain. Why should she be thinking about your feelings?’
‘It’d certainly be a change for anyone to do that.’
‘Isabel, don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself?’
I slam the phone down. Most conversations with my family are finishing with the slammed phone these days.
The next few weeks are not much fun. Our holiday mood, abruptly shattered, returns only to mock us with its memory. Kate goes with Steve to visit her grandmother and creeps around the house with a stricken look for days afterward, glancing at me reproachfully every so often when she thinks I’m not looking.
Everyone in the world is against me. Except for Max. Max is delicate and considerate; he brings me bunches of flowers and small gifts; he drops gentle kisses on my head; he makes tender love to me until I tremble with the tense joy of it. He takes me out to dinner. He obviously thinks I endure a lot from my family, and puts himself out to compensate for this.
We all go back to work. Well, I go back to work. Max says he goes back to work, but it’s hard to tell the difference, so far as I can see. Kate spends hours in her bedroom and says she’s reading texts in preparation for the new school year. Maybe she is.
I go twice more to visit my mother. The first time Zoë is there, too, and monopolises the conversation to such an extent that I might just as well not be there.
The second time, she’s asleep. My relief is overpowering. I sit quietly, so if Zoë pesters me I can say I stayed for a decent time; and, after a little while, I find myself observing my mother’s face.
I hadn’t realised how old she has become — how old the cancer has made her. I do a couple of sums in my head and confirm that in fact she’s only sixty-three. It’s terrible, that she should look so old, that her face should have collapsed and that her bare arms are so skinny and crêpelike.
I remember when my father died, but that was a heart attack and it came out of the blue. Better to do that, I think: better to take everyone by surprise; far better than this apparently endless degeneration, this cruel, slow, deteriorative process that eats one up so. I’ve never watched anyone dying like this, bit by bit. Little by little.
Will I die like this? Will a cancer eat me like this, and will Max loyally visit me when I lie in hospital? Will he bring me roses? Will I snap at him and tell him to find a proper vase? Will Dominic visit me? Will Dominic sit by my bed and express penitence?
Perhaps Steve will come, and tell me he now appreciates the depth of his deficiencies, his perfidy, and comprehends finally why I had to leave him, why I had to escape from the hell our marriage had turned into.
I’m tired and depressed, and these are affecting pictures. I become aware that I’m crying and rummage in my bag for a tissue.
It’s at this point that the door opens and Zoë enters. Her belligerence on seeing me immediately dissolves when she realises that I am weeping: she drops to her knees beside me and envelops me in a hug, a massive hug, a benevolent, loving, forgiving, big-sisterly hug.
‘Oh, Minky!’ she says. ‘Oh, Minky, dearest Minky!’
So I am reinstated — temporarily, anyway — in Zoë’s good books, and we have a nice cry together. It doesn’t seem necessary to explain to her exactly why I’m crying; and I’m not sure that I could do this in any case. Perhaps it really is my mother I’m grieving for. In fact, I’m sure it is. Sorrow works on us in complex ways, after all; and my mother’s weakness, the corrosion of her body, its gradual decline, the knowledge that the end is on its inexorable way — these have all powerfully distressed me. Possibly I’ve even been rather brave, to withstand my grief so steadfastly thus far.
In any case, Zoë’s mollification is for the moment complete. We mop up our tears and sit silently for another ten minutes. My mother half wakes then, but she’s blurry and confused, and seems not to know with any certainty who we are, and soon drops off again. Softly we tiptoe out, and part in mutual sisterly amicability.
Zoë rings me the next day, and tells me our mother is dead. I know it sounds absurd, but it comes as a shock. I hadn’t expected it so soon.
For so long we had been reminded — frequently by my mother herself — that her end was approaching, momentous and inescapable, that it was hard to realise that the cataclysm was no longer imminent. Suddenly, swiftly, it had happened, and she had gone.
Zoë made most of the funeral arrangements: she consulted me about various details and indeed I accompanied her to the undertaker, but it was clear that she was in her organisational element and I was definitely superfluous. I didn’t mind.
I couldn’t think of worse things to do than choosing a coffin, deciding what sorts of flowers to decorate the coffin with, working out what music to play. Zoë enjoyed all of it and it obviously gave her solace. I let her fly solo. It was an efficient funeral and I was grateful to her for managing it so competently.
The goodwill between Zoë and me did not last, and it was not long before she returned to the same accusations and the same blistering diatribes. I figured in these alternately as Jezebel and Jill the Ripper, and either way they became tedious.
I was having enough difficulty in coping with my mother’s death. It wasn’t that I missed her. It was that I didn’t. I was depressed and upset, but not because I had lost a loved and loving mother. I suppose she did love me, and I suppose I did love her, but it was hard somehow to recover that love, to recall it fully and experience it again as part of what people like to call the grieving process.
I kept pushing away the knowledge of her death; I kept thinking that I would deal with it later, when I could accustom myself to it and think about it properly. But when I tried to think about it properly, I found I couldn’t.
Questions of death, questions of life. How they torment us. Dominic as a child was fascinated by the bad banksia men and adopted the term ‘deadybones’ until it drove us mad. He made it the subject of one of his rhymes, along with his old teddy bear Fred.
Ned the Red shot Fred the Ted
in the head
as he lay in bed.
Beddy-byes, Teddy dies;
Teddy bones all deadybones.
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