Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  I enter the ICU each morning around eight. I make my way past the central nurses’ station to your bed. I want you to look more energised than yesterday. I want you to be using the nose-feeding oxygen tubes and not the full face mask. I want to see you rested and alert.

  So much longing as I walk the floor of intensive care.

  And there you are, propped on your pillows, wondrously familiar despite the oxygen and the tubes, despite the intensive-care bed with its white sheets and hydraulic pipes. It takes a moment before you see me and then you smile as you have a thousand times before, and that funny little wave of your hand.

  ‘I’m so pleased you’re here.’ Your first words every morning.

  You are exhausted, you say, knocked about by the chest X-ray. Every day the same rigmarole to position the plate behind your back, and such a toll it takes on your breathing. I lay my hand on the rapid rise and fall of your chest. I will your breathing to slow.

  I have brought you apricot nectar, rationed during normal times because it is so full of sugar, but with your body now melting away you could drink apricot nectar to your heart’s desire and eat buckets of ice-cream as well. If not for the flood of oxygen making you feel as if you will choke on solid food I would lavish you with chips and vanilla slices and blocks of chocolate and all those desserts which come with lashings of whipped cream. Lashings of whipped cream, and we laugh at our private nod to Enid Blyton.

  When life is normal I rise early, read for an hour, have my breakfast and a mug of coffee alone. Around eight I make a fresh pot of coffee. You hear me rummaging in the kitchen and by the time I walk upstairs and enter our room you are wide awake and waiting. I perch on the bed and we drink our coffee together and with your ‘What have you been doing?’ we start the talk of the day.

  Here in intensive care I pull a chair close to your bed and we begin with the morning medical round. Everyone is very positive, you say. Progress is still slow, but Bill, the chief intensivist, says you are heading in the right direction. The results of today’s X-ray have not yet arrived; I check the time—this is a hard waiting, although I mustn’t let you see my anxiety. You ask me for news and before I have uttered more than a dozen words you have interrupted me. I seize on this familiar and at other times infuriating behaviour as a sign you are feeling better. You tell me you think last night’s nurse was gay. A myopic religious fundamentalist at a hundred paces in poor light would pick that one, I say. You laugh, almost energetically, and then provide a potted history of today’s nurse while she is analysing your 8 am blood sample elsewhere in ICU. You already have your favourite nurses—but then we are both inclined to make favourites. Searching for detail, I say, and what else would you expect of a poet and a novelist? And there’s trust to be had in favourites, and a familiarity too. These nurses have become your friends, a new friend every eight or twelve hours.

  You have already eaten some yoghurt and jelly. I pour myself a second cup of coffee from a Thermos I’ve brought from home, and settle down to help you eat more breakfast. The nurse returns. She chats as she checks the paraphernalia around your bed and finishes by rearranging your pillows. You tell her she does ‘good pillows’.

  It is the small things that matter in intensive care.

  The nurse asks about the rock, as always clasped in your left hand. You turn to me with a smile. And I tell of the day long ago, of a wintry walk along a beach of the Southern Ocean, the cracking wind, the intermittent rain and the two of us wanting to be nowhere else but here. You are striding ahead, I’m strolling the sand searching for shells. And there it is, in a dimple of water, a rock shaped like a heart, and a perfect fit in the palm of a hand. The rock is scored with veins just like a human heart. I slip it into my pocket making sure you don’t see, you who are so strict about beach scavenging. Back home I wash and polish the rock and put it on my desk. Often I find the rock clasped in my hand when I have been away with my thoughts.

  In January 2004 when you were diagnosed with cancer I gave you my heart-shaped rock. It has accompanied you to every medical appointment, every hospital visit, every scan and blood test, and in between you keep it on your desk. A few days ago, when the ambulance people came to take you to hospital, you could hardly breathe, you could hardly talk, you couldn’t walk, but you asked for your rock.

  Breakfast is cleared away. And with you now relaxed and easy in your pillows it is time for poetry. I take your two amulet books, Bruce Beaver’s Charmed Lives and Judy Beveridge’s Wolf Notes. I choose from the ‘Tiresias sees’ section of Charmed Lives because it is your favourite, and read the mysterious ‘Visitation’ and the ironic ‘Rejection’. You smile as I read the last lines of ‘Rejection’, when the lady poet is asked if she could use the narrator in a poem and her reply is scatological.

  ‘Bruce could be so naughty,’ you murmur.

  From Judy’s book I choose ‘Tigers’, the poem which inspired your own ‘Smelling Tigers’. Your eyes are closed, the lines have disappeared from your face, the cheekbones and curve of your jaw are perfectly aligned. I tell you how beautiful you look, knowing that interruptions, even of poetry, are entirely justified when vanity is involved.

  You’re very pleased. ‘But it won’t last. It’s the oxygen. It smoothes out the wrinkles.’

  ‘So, if ever the words dry up, we could open an oxygen clinic, promise everlasting youth and charge a fortune. Although,’ I add, ‘your words will never dry up.’

  ‘Never take the Goddess’s gifts for granted,’ you say.

  I read you the poetry of your great and good friends; I read you juicy snippets from the newspaper; I ornament an article about the Liberal Party leadership stoushes and you add a few ornaments of your own. I have asked your old friends and family to send me stories of your childhood, and now I read to you about your high jinks at summer camp forty years ago; I read you through long walks in the Blue Mountains. The bells and alarms, the wheeze and sigh of oxygen, the voices of nurses and other patients, all the clamour of intensive care recedes, leaving us in a warm quiet world, just the two of us, with trees swaying in the breeze and parrots perched in the branches and wombats and echidnas meandering about. And as you sleep I keep my hand over yours, reading silently now through the passing time.

  On the bed-end, directly in your line of vision, I have stuck pictures of a rainbow lorikeet, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, and a hand-painted galah; there’s a postcard of Akhenaten, the renegade Pharaoh who inspired your first verse novel, and a photo of Wystan asleep on my lap—your blue-eyed Jew and your blue Burmese cat together in the one frame.

  ‘All my favourite creatures,’ you said when I put up the display.

  And now, awake again, you look at the pictures and point to the one of me and Wystan:

  ‘I like my two blues with me in intensive care.’ You’ll sleep some more later; for the moment you want to hear who has rung, who has not, who has e-mailed and who has not. We talk about your family and my family, we talk about friends, we crack jokes, we acknowledge disappointments. And we gossip as we always do. If people could hear us, we often say, they would be shocked at the banality. But they can’t hear us. This is our talk.

  So much to do in intensive care, each day passes quickly. Tubes are checked, blood is taken, temperature recorded, your oxygen saturation measured, the flow of oxygen adjusted. No matter what else is happening I watch the figures on the screen. Every time your oxygen saturation rises and your breathing rate drops I feel a private joy, a private relief. Better breathing and less need for pure oxygen means your lungs are recuperating.

  And so much to do to pass the time. I help you with food and drink, I read to you, I give you reassurance, we rake through literary gossip, most of it old, but plenty of pleasure in revisiting familiar entertainments. Some time during the morning I go outside to phone your family in Sydney and mine here in Melbourne to give them the daily update. Around lunch time I go for a walk in the Exhibition Gardens. You’re the Pagan not me, but as I stroll the paths I stop at
trees, lay my hands on the bark and offer up my clumsy prayers.

  I’m never gone for long but you are always pleased for my return. I relay news from the phone calls, but family and friends feel very distant here in intensive care. It is the present which occupies us: this room, the people in the other beds, their visitors, the doctors and nurses, the paramedics. It’s an island world here, I say, small and self-sufficient.

  You nod your agreement and then laugh: ‘More Gilligan’s Island than Lord of the Flies.’

  We embark on island one-upmanship—Treasure Island, Ithaca and Calypso’s island from The Odyssey, The Story of San Michele, The Magus—and would have continued if not for the arrival of the physio. She admires the frieze of pictures at the end of your bed.

  ‘Andy makes good home,’ you say.

  Late in the day when Bill makes his evening round, you are lively, you crack jokes, you tell him you’re feeling stronger. You are marvellous. And later still when the night nurse comes on, you’re so happy because he’s one of your favourites. We both feel secure in the night ahead.

  While the handover occurs you ask me for a last story before I leave.

  ‘Take me away,’ you say. ‘Take me somewhere special.’

  2. Antarctica

  Sailing south from Ushuaia, it is our first night at sea. It has been light since 4 am, although the roll of the ship woke me much earlier. Black-winged gulls swoop and circle about the vessel, their white breasts tinged rose from the narrow sun. Elsewhere is bleak and grey. The ship rises and falls in the treacherous waters of Drake’s Passage. Keeping my hands tight to the deck rail and my gaze streaming to the horizon, I let my body ride the ship’s movement; up and over and from side to side. Rain begins to fall and I pull a hood over my head. When the rain turns to hail, I step back from the torrent, shove my hands into gloves and watch the green decks disappear beneath a thick layer of white ice. A short time later come showers of sleet laced with flakes of snow. The ship tips and tosses, and as I sway with its sway and roll with its roll how very comforting it is. And then—as quickly as it began—the precipitation stops, the air clears and I can see all the way to the horizon.

  I am aware of the distant burr of the ship’s engine, the clash of waves, the raging wind, yet as I gaze over the ocean, even with the wind furious on my face, I feel swaddled in this wild chill. Huge petrels and albatrosses now fly with the ship, guiding and protecting us, it seems to me, as they soar through the roiling air. And suddenly I spot a fin whale, and then another, huge smooth creatures close enough to hear them blow, and a rush of excitement bursts through me in unison with their eerie explosions.

  I am standing at the ship’s rail when I see the first sea-ice, transparent pats floating with the swell. Soon, white pancake-like ice floes appear, and finally the first icebergs—smallish this far north, the size of a house or a rural bank, many weathered to ice sculptures. In the distance I imagine I see a man steering a white boat and, closer, a dinosaur nose to nose with a giant wombat. A wombat in Antarctica! By 11 pm on our second night there are huge floating masses of ice, other-worldly in the dusky light.

  And at last, the land mass of Antarctica. The mountains of snow and rock plunging to the water, glaciers filling the spaces between the peaks and sliding into the sea. We are sailing through the sublime, like surfing the notes of a Bach fugue, like sinking into the canvas of a Rothko painting. Just let yourself go, lean into this brashly inhuman, incomprehensibly beautiful place. Ah the seduction of it, pulling you down through layers of consciousness to the bottomless depths of pure imagination. This is no landscape for the ditherer; when you fall for Antarctica you fall hard and heavy. You’d die for its untamed and uncorrupted heart.

  Not even in your dreams is there such an absence of human breath. It is not simply the silence or the pure air or the lack of dirt, although these are persistently strange. More eerily poignant are the animals: they are not afraid of us. Fin whales cavort in the waters around the ship, and orcas too, so glamorous in their polished black and white. Birds fly close enough to look you in the eye. And the seals—the lethal leopard seals, the slender crabeaters and the cat-faced weddells lazing on land or sea ice—none of them stir as we pass, nor do the elephant seals humped on the ice like bags of blubber. And the gentoo penguins with their white eyebrow marking, and the little chinstraps, and my favourite, the Adelies, with their white necks and bellies and smooth black backs; when we land on Antarctica itself, penguins waddle around and past us not even bothering to be curious.

  When there is too much ice for landing on the continent we putt about in our Zodiac inflatables. Down here at sea level the ice-sculptures glisten wetly; they have intricate peepholes and elegant Barbara Hepworth curves and bulging Henry Moore bodies, and blues and greens so astonishing you think you can taste them. We move through a thin layer of ice; it breaks like toffee.

  Other times, the katabatic winds, the wild unpredictable blustering unique to these parts, keep us on board. There are one hundred and thirty of us on this expedition, but sometimes only five or six of us on deck. I pull my hood down low, I am wrapped into myself, a tiny breathing organism, a speck tossed around in the vast breathing organism of Antarctica.

  I think I have experienced the best imaginable, but as in the best year of one’s life, there is always better to come. The Lemaire Channel on the north-western side of the Antarctic Peninsula is a body of water about a mile across at its narrowest. The mountains slope down on both sides, the water itself is filled with ice floes and bergy bits. And the atmosphere is misty-magical: even while immersed in it, it is hard to fathom. I remain at the ship’s rail throughout the slow passage through the seven miles of Lemaire. With so much sea-ice the vessel requires a delicate manoeuvring. The air is brutally cold, there’s intermittent sleet and snow, yet I cannot drag myself away. The noise of the ship’s engine no longer impinges, nor do other people, even the cold recedes. And my own edges dissolve; the clamouring self is quiet as I nestle into this place.

  We anchor off Petermann Island and take the Zodiacs to shore. At the edge of the steep cliffs, deep crevasses slice through the ice; the deeper the fracture the bluer the aquamarine flush. In time, huge chunks will calve away and become new icebergs. High on the slopes of Petermann Island I look down the Lemaire Channel. I take in the water, the icebergs, the cliffs of ice scored with deep cracks, and I want to wait, days or weeks, to witness the moment when the cliff will calve off and fall into the sea. And the water will rise in a shock wave and the huge city-block-sized mass of ice will right itself and float off down the channel out to the open sea.

  The snow is deep and soft on Petermann Island. I sink to my thighs and have to be rescued. Chilled and wet, my face stinging with ice, my feet lumbering with cold, I am shamelessly happy.

  There are no human fingerprints here. Away from the tiny pinpoints of the stations, there are no pots or jewellery, neither bones nor ruins, and it occurs to me that archaeology could well be a form of colonisation. Lacking co-ordinates from history and cultural memory I resort to the imagination to embrace this landscape, to take it in. I slough off self-consciousness, I silence my narratives, and I know the world anew among all this ice. And perhaps it is not so remarkable that the vast majority of fiction and poetry that exists about Antarctica has been written by people who have never been here: Dante, Coleridge, Jules Verne, Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin—even the imaginary Ern Malley had a turn with Antarctica. Antarctica as a flight of the mind, the great imagined place. Indeed, there is no more precise metaphor for the imagination than Antarctica, and I find myself wondering if it is possible for the imagination to imagine itself. In the next moment I decide it doesn’t matter, not when I feel so drawn to this vast place. And suddenly, out of nowhere it comes to me: this sensation, this experience of Antarctica is incessant wonder. You cannot remain in the landscape as yourself, with your usual ways of seeing and hearing and moving and smelling and breathing. Everything that you have known yourself to be, and not j
ust your perceptions but your memories and language and the identity they support, all need to be cast aside when this great white land begins.

  I stand among ice and icebergs surrounded by icy mountains on all sides; I stand in the cold and shuffling silence. I recognise this place from dreams, from yearnings, from the punch of illusive passions. I feel as if I have come home.

  3. Between covers

  Your absence is always intolerable.

  You are where my home begins and ends.

  Bruce Beaver, ‘Heart and Home’, Charmed Lives, p76

  The Australian cricket team is playing South Africa and D is not on the couch watching the TV. Not there with her feet up on the coffee table, Wystan on her lap, an array of books around her, a mug of tea in reach. D is not on the couch, she’s not in the house. Wystan and I wander around alone.

  From room to room. The kitchen, the lounge, past her grandfather’s bookcase, into her study. Sit on her chair. Stare out her window. Touch her computer, her iPod, her glasses, the scatter of model animals on her desk. Sift through her papers, flip through her notebooks. Back to the kitchen—her mug on the bench, her shortbreads in their jar, her roasted almonds going stale. Outside to the garden, touch the apricot tree as if I might draw her from its leaves, gaze up at the sky as if I might pull her down from the clouds. Never still, nothing works, I’m trapped in a space I hate, a place that demands such effort, a place that could be Hell.

  I count the weeks since she died; each Wednesday, the day of her dying, brings a migraine. I wonder when one stops counting the weeks. Or is one tethered forever to a zero of a new era? Don’t know what to do and I always know what to do. I keep thinking there must be something, some strategy to bring her back, I just need to work it out.