by Tom Scott
When the North Americans headed out to the dormitory, Alan set up his camera and Mark interviewed Mingma about his friendship with Ed.
‘Burra Sahib, he old getting. Burra Sahib, he tired getting …’ said Mingma sadly.
Life at this altitude is harsh. Sherpas living in the shadow of Everest are tough, stoic people not given to displaying their emotions. They very seldom cry, but when Mark asked Mingma to describe what Hillary meant to the Sherpa people, tears started trickling down his weathered, dusty cheeks, leaving trails of clean skin in their wake. ‘The Burra Sahib, he is our mother … and our father …’ There can be no higher accolade than that.
I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning in the crowded dormitory with the taste of butterscotch in my mouth. I was puzzled at first, then realised my back pain had vanished. Weight loss and exercise had hounded and shepherded errant lumbar vertebrae back into position and they have remained there ever since.
The news about Ed was not so good. His condition had worsened overnight. He was as grey as the skies overhead and had difficulty speaking. He was shifted into a bare downstairs storeroom, where he was joined by his younger brother, Rex, who had got crook doing routine maintenance on the nearby Kunde hospital—the hospital he and Ed had built with others in 1996.
The hospital doctor paid a visit. She listened to Ed’s heart and clipped a digital pulse oximeter on one of his fingers. His pulse was too high and his blood-oxygen saturation was too low. He had altitude sickness. We were at 13,000 feet; he needed to go low immediately.
Dark clouds spilling over the rim of the Dudh Kosi valley blotted out the sun and made helicopter rescue impossible. He was put on oxygen and had another bad night. The cloud cover was no better the next day. Ed would have to wait out another night.
A gnawing anxiety infected the whole party. Professor Redpath decided he was critically ill as well. June, who is from the ‘run it under a cold tap’ school of nursing, asked him what his symptoms were. He described gnawing anxiety.
‘You’re fine,’ she snapped, heading back to attend to Ed.
‘This is me we’re talking about!’ shouted the professor, who was being neither logical nor positive.
The day dragged on. Late afternoon the doctor made a shocking admission—they were down to a handful of oxygen bottles and for some reason some of these were not compatible with the breathing mask. There was a chance Ed may not make it through the night. As darkness approached and Ed’s old friends became numb and incapacitated by the prospect of his impending death, Mark Sainsbury took charge, racing tirelessly back and forth to the hospital trying to find piping and valves that would render the rogue oxygen cylinders useful—with no luck.
Shortly after two in the morning, the gauge on the last oxygen cylinder read empty. The pulse oximeter reported that Ed’s oxygen saturation was 40 per cent and falling. If it fell below 30 per cent there would not be enough oxygen in his blood to keep his cardiac muscle working. We braced ourselves for the worst, but to our astonishment the gas kept bubbling—obviously, the gauge was faulty but we favoured the idea of miracles at this point.
Eventually the flow trickled to a halt and under his mask Ed’s face turned grey and his lips turned blue. Suppressed grief made the room claustrophobic. I stepped out into the icy night for some fresh air. The cloud cover had lifted, a good portent for the morning, and the highest peaks in the world were silhouetted like Halloween pumpkin teeth against the brightest stars—a zillion shimmering diamonds on a deep purple jeweller’s velvet.
As I was marvelling at this wondrous sight, the face of my best friend at vet school, Tom Quinlan, appeared in full colour and three-quarter profile. He was smiling his knowing smile and a celestial wind was ruffling his fine hair. Tom had died from cancer five years earlier.
I have no explanation for this. I knew it wasn’t oxygen deprivation. When the doctor clipped the oximeter on my finger my oxygen saturation was a very respectable 93 per cent. I headed back into the storeroom and blurted out something that again I have no explanation for: ‘My father has just died, but Ed will live!’
As the words came out of my mouth I was hearing them at the same time as everyone else and it occurred to me that I sounded mad. I told myself to keep quiet. Upstairs, Temba prayed at a beautiful and surprisingly elaborate Buddhist altar and thrashed away on cymbals, oblivious to the racket he was making. On the floor directly below him, at the foot of Ed’s bed, his father rocked back and forward, repeating a mantra in a trance-like state.
Ed’s old mate, the fearless climber Murray Jones, headed off to bed deeply distressed. Sheer exhaustion overtook June as well, leaving Mark and I doing a shift on our own with the two ailing Hillary brothers.
Ed suddenly decided to get out of bed, strictly against doctor’s orders. We didn’t know him very well then and were reduced to pleading politely, ‘Please, Sir Edmund. Sir Edmund, please, could you get back into bed, Sir Edmund.’ He ignored us.
‘I have to pack my bags for the chopper,’ he rasped, reaching for things. Even assuming it would arrive at first light, that was still hours away. Mark and I were getting desperate. Rex Hillary, who had barely said a word the past two days, suddenly sat up bolt upright and barked, ‘GET BACK INTO BED, YOU DAFT BUGGER!’ Ed meekly obeyed his younger brother, which was a huge relief because somehow he was as weak as a kitten but still strong as an ox.
At his best, Ed’s strength, stamina and iron will were almost super-human. In his terrific book on the 1953 expedition, Coronation Everest, the Times correspondent James Morris (who became the celebrated travel writer Jan Morris after a sex change) wrote clipped, economical pen-portraits of all twelve men in the climbing party, save for Ed; Morris devoted a full page to the New Zealander, waxing lyrical and effusive in a manner no one else could ever match. Here is a fragment:
[Hillary] worked in the half light, huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous, bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright burly diesel express pounding across America …
Twenty minutes later, Ed announced he needed to take a leak. It was snowing heavily outside; besides, he wasn’t supposed to move. Mark spotted an empty can of Edmonds ‘Sure to Rise’ baking powder on a ledge and grabbed it.
‘I’ll hold the tin if you do the honours with the plumbing.’ I did the honours and, with nary a second to spare, urine was soon drumming into the Edmonds tin. Ed and I both felt a little self-conscious. ‘Quick, get the camera for the blackmail photographs,’ joked Mark. Despite being desperately sick, Ed started laughing under his oxygen mask. I was confident then that he was going to make it.
Murray Jones returned, and it might have been him who suddenly remembered that the Hotel Everest View, several miles away on the ridge high above Khumjung village, had oxygen in every room for guests. Mingma and another son raced off down the valley in the pitch black through shin-deep snow to fetch some.
When the first rays of the new day hit the tops of the distant peaks I joined June in the courtyard.
‘Where are they?’ she whispered. ‘They should be back by now.’
Sherpas have great eyesight. Beside her Temba grinned excitedly, tugged her sleeve and pointed. Barely visible in the deep shadow, two specks were racing up between stone walls—his father and brother shouting and waving in triumph. June wept silently.
The colour returned to Ed’s cheeks within seconds of him being attached to fresh oxygen. Word came through from Kathmandu that the king’s Puma was on its way, but the good weather wouldn’t last.
Being the biggest, Mark and I took an arm each and propelled Ed to the landing spot marked in the snow. He was a dead weight and it took some effort. Then a respected Sherpa elder, the tall, handsome Kumbo Chumbi, resplendent in traditional Tibetan costume, took Ed lightly by one hand, like he was leading a debutante onto a dancefloor for a supper waltz, and somehow, without support, Ed glided with him.
Bl
ackening skies were closing in. Then we heard the clatter of the Puma’s rotors as it approached up the Dudh Kosi gorge under a ceiling of low cloud. It would be touch and go.
In the end it wasn’t even touch. The Puma didn’t land. It hovered above the snow with its doors open while we unceremoniously bundled Ed in and scrambled in after him. We wheeled away and dropped down to Lukla. The relief and release was intense. We all shed some tears.
At Lukla, wearing a mask and holding an oxygen cylinder in his lap, Ed sat on the runway in an olive-green plastic chair a safe distance from the Puma while it was refuelled. We formed a protective cordon from tourists and trekkers who pressed close to take pictures of the famous mountaineer laid low. Mark and I got aggressive with some Americans, telling them to fuck off when they tried to engage the still woozy Ed in conversation.
The weather was dicey, so as soon as we could we took off for Kathmandu. Ed improved dramatically as we descended through the hills and, by the time we reached the Kathmandu valley, at a pinch he could have run a half marathon. Jokes and banter started whizzing back and forth again.
In our taxi back to the Shangri-La, Mark remembered what I had said in the middle of the night. ‘So, your dad has died?’
For some reason I jutted my jaw stubbornly. ‘Yes. And the manager of the hotel will walk across the foyer and hand me a fax confirming that!’ I said this with uncharacteristic force. Mark and Alan exchanged looks and let it go. My vehemence took even me by surprise. It was time to shut up again.
We grabbed our packs from the boot and walked out of the heat, noise and smells of the busy street into the cool, incense-laden calm of the foyer. The manager in a tuxedo came dashing across, bowing apologetically. ‘So sorry, Mr Tom, so sorry …’ and he handed me a fax. The fax said that my father had died. Mark and Alan were stunned.
‘See! I told you!’ I hissed with the grace that is my hallmark.
‘Jesus, mate, what are you going to do?’ asked Mark quietly.
‘I dunno. I’ll go upstairs …’
They hugged me and I went to my room and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. I felt nothing. Nothing at all. There was no need for a weeping bowl. Every tear I had for my father had already been shed.
I shrugged and went downstairs to the bar in the beautiful garden, where Mark and Alan were enjoying a gin and tonic in the cool of the evening. They were surprised to see me, surprised to see me so dry-eyed.
‘Mind if I join you, gentlemen?’
ED AND JUNE HAD A beautiful bach right on the dunes at Waihi Beach. Averil and I rented baches nearby and spent a number of glorious summer holidays with them. On the morning of 5 January 1999, I rose early and got dressed, telling Averil I had to go into town to buy something. ‘It’s not even seven o’clock yet,’ she protested sleepily. ‘Nothing will be open.’ I could not be dissuaded; I suddenly had an urgent need to write to my friend Michael Hirschfeld. I ended up parked in our car for nearly an hour, waiting for a stationery shop to open so I could purchase a writing pad and some envelopes. Back in the car again, I scribbled Michael an affectionate note, and then had another wait for the post office to open.
When I got back to Waihi Beach, Averil and the kids were strolling along the sands. It was already building into another perfect day. I was strangely relieved I had got my letter away. Then my cell phone rang. It was Daniel Hirschfeld, Michael’s lovely son.
‘How is it going, Daniel?’ I asked jauntily.
‘Not very good,’ he replied quietly. ‘Dad died this morning …’ It was five days before Daniel’s wedding and two weeks before the scheduled heart bypass operation that had been hoped would make Michael strong enough for the kidney transplant he desperately needed.
I was one of the speakers at his funeral service, which filled Wellington’s Town Hall with a who’s who of political, cultural and media people. I said that his beautiful wife, Vivian, made the small decisions—like where they would live, what car they would drive, what schools the children would attend and what insurance they would have—and Michael made the big decisions—like should Israel return the Golan Heights to Syria. I described how whenever I did a cartoon critical of Israel Michael would indulge his enjoyment of silly voices and ring me up to say in a thick but poorly executed Middle Eastern accent, ‘This is the president of Hamas. Keep up the good work.’ I recounted how he once whipped out a syringe at a critical stage in a tight tennis match to inject himself with insulin, at which point I fainted at the sight of the needle and Michael served over my unconscious body to win the game, the set and the match. John Barnett in his eulogy said that Michael was an agnostic who was very proud of his Jewishness. Michael may have been without faith himself but he understood and respected the important role it played in lives of others. I loved and often repeat his definition of the doctrine that guided his behaviour: ‘The world is my church. To do good is my religion.’
AFTER MY FATHER DIED MY brother Michael rang Mum to discuss what to say in the death notice. She knew immediately what it had to be: a line from one of her favourite poems in one of her favourite selections of poems—the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
The bird is on the wing …
Such a delicate avian metaphor for the man who, when Mum announced at the dinner table one night that a little bird would eat more than her, responded acidly, ‘Yeah. A South American condor!’
The Scott clan gathered for a private funeral service in the chapel of a Feilding undertaker. I was still in Nepal but I’m told my father was wearing black-and-white pyjamas with wide stripes and looked like an escaped convict from a chain gang in America’s deep south. When Sal commented to Sue that she barely recognised him, the undertaker looked very pleased with himself and said proudly, ‘Yes, didn’t he scrub up well!’ It was Sue’s suggestion that they should try putting his horn-rimmed specs and his Panama hat on him to see if that made a difference. It just made him look like he was sunbathing.
From all accounts, Michael ad-libbed a wickedly funny, highly irreverent eulogy. Then people who my siblings barely knew rose and respectfully described a man they barely recognised—a man of infinite kindness, patience and jest. Sister Sue said it was a bittersweet, wistful moment. She was relieved and happy for our father that he’d had friends who loved him and who he loved in return. It was just a shame they didn’t include us.
When I came back from Nepal the Scotts assembled at Kowhai Park in Feilding to scatter his ashes. Someone was running late, so Rob suggested a game of touch footy using his wooden ashes urn as a ball. We ran up and down the park laughing helplessly, stopping when it became obvious that soon someone would drop the ball. Mum sat in the shade by the cricket pavilion, giggling and saying things like, ‘You’re wicked and awful the lot of ye!’ Rob assured her that the old bugger would have loved it—and he would have. He would have loved it even more if someone had dropped the ball and his ashes had sprayed across the grass. It would have been just like his topdressing days spreading slag and superphosphate. Not that he would have made very good fertiliser. His bones must have been saturated in weed-spraying toxins because every plant, flower and shrub within a huge radius subsequently wilted and died. Sue visited the site a year later and was quite shocked to find a near perfect circle of dead soil. I have never been back.
After the ceremony we retired to Michael and Jan’s place in Nelson Street for refreshments. There was a pile of our father’s books in a corner of the living room. I idly picked up a photograph album that I had never seen before. It had a heavy, dark yellow-green embossed cover. Michael tried to snatch it from me. ‘I wouldn’t look at that if I were you!’ He looked sick and apprehensive.
Curiosity aroused, I turned black pages filled with family photographs. Every picture of me, or every group picture with me in it, had been dealt to very carefully with a scalpel. My face was missing. I was absent. I was a small, round window on the blackness beneath. And he had taken such care. Two lines from The Beatles’ masterpiece ‘A Day in the Life’ swum
around my head. John Lennon just had to laugh. He saw the photograph.
I put it down. Michael grabbed it and I never saw it again. When Michael died it wasn’t among his effects. I think he destroyed it.
IN THE WAKE OF THESE events my relationship with Helen foundered once more, and she suggested I might like to temporarily move out of my house so the children wouldn’t be traumatised by yet another shift. A mutual woman friend and lawyer could see that I was demoralised, weary and about to consent to this and she told me in no uncertain terms that I had to stay put, so Helen moved with the children into her own home across town. This left just Shaun and me again—Oscar and Felix round two—and it was fine. It was better than fine. It was fun, especially when sister Sue’s boy Brendan came to live with us for a while. It was certainly less tense.
Helen and I had a final round of counselling, this time at the well-regarded Family Centre in Lower Hutt, where a Māori woman called Tui watched our interactions through a one-way mirror. Her insights were acute and chilling. I’m paraphrasing here, but she said the de facto marriage was stuffed and I was Norman Bates in Psycho keeping the preserved corpse in a rocking chair in a back room of my mind. Far smarter than me in many things, Helen had known for some time that it couldn’t be revived and had moved on, literally and emotionally. I was the person one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.
The only time I ever read my horoscope is on my birthday. The Dominion horoscope used to carry a prologue: Your Birthday Today. On my forty-fifth birthday it advised me as follows:
End a relationship that causes more pain than pleasure.
For some reason I cut this out and kept it in my wallet.
My counsellor, Charles Waldegrave, a truly wonderful, decent man, took me aside for some final words of advice. He said that I prided myself on explaining politics and complex issues for my readers in my cartoons and in print, I was good at it, and it was driving me crazy trying to figure out why things went wrong with Helen. Charles said there were many mysteries in life that we just had to accept. After what had recently unfolded in Kunde I was now in full agreement with the Bard when he wrote in Hamlet, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dream’t of in your philosophy.’