Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  I drew in my bottom lip, clutched her tightly, felt her breath in my hair, moving the threads there in some secret, meaningful way I might never understand. Her body speaking to mine and me so small and blind and urgently afraid of things I could barely name that I could not speak. She towered over me, crooning some wordless song. I could feel the heat of her body, but when she pulled away her eyes gazed into mine from an unfathomable distance. I felt my heart break, though I was only small. And I knew that it would never be mended.

  *

  Morgan’s funeral was held in a small room at the crematorium where my father was buried. I had considered not having a service at all, but it seemed disrespectful, and there was our mother to consider. And Ana. A woman who would fly halfway around the world to accompany a stranger’s dead body home deserved to see that stranger decently interred. The loss in her face that day left an imprint. As though the weight of my brother’s death had pushed into her flesh and bone and taken refuge there. Some nights, coming across her on the deck, even now, I felt certain I have caught, again, the way she seemed to peer into a limitless darkness, waiting for him to come into the light. His pale body, still tangled with weed, rimed with salt, parting the waves of grass in our garden as he moves towards her. I stand in the shadows, watching him, his urgent ghost burning with force. His terrible beauty revealed now, like the beauty of saints and martyrs. I see her lips move, though she makes no sound, and he raises his great, heavy head, like a soldier, or a hunter’s dog, who hears the horns calling him home. He comes closer. His bare feet leave wet marks on the stairs. He comes, and brushes rain from her face. The long, dark rope of her hair lifts in his hand as though a wind moves it. He is standing over her, leaning close, his love – his death – a gift he can barely bring himself to withhold. She does not look up at him. Her hands make some secret gesture in the air, moving to grasp at the shadows of birds, and he is gone. A taste of hot snow lingers in my mouth.

  It seemed wasteful to acquire anything more elaborate to have him cremated in than a plain pine box. Like a wedding dress, or a funeral suit, the clothes I buried him in would be on view for only a few hours before being incinerated, and I knew he would have railed against the extravagance, the ceremonial waste, of new clothes for a dead man’s body.

  I bought more flowers than was necessary, however, and arrived with my mother to see the florist departing and a woman – young and practical-looking, like a groundskeeper – arranging them around the room. There were a couple of arrangements I hadn’t ordered: a laurel wreath sent by his landlady, a small posy of sea poppies, and a potted cactus – a curious object that bore no card or greeting but which, the young woman assured me, had been sent in memory of my brother’s passing. ‘Morgan Walker,’ she said to my mother, as if she were not quite sure whose service she was attending, as if we might be in the wrong room. ‘He was a writer.’ I nodded, and asked if she had read any of his books.

  She shook her head and grimaced. ‘I tried to read one of them,’ she said, ‘the one with the boat on the cover? But I couldn’t really get into it.’

  ‘The History of Cardenio,’ my mother said.

  ‘You read it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I am his mother,’ and turned away to find a seat at the far left of the second row, folding her hands in her lap and looking forward, at the slight gap between the curtains through which her son’s body would soon pass.

  My publisher – my brother’s publisher – arrived late, and stood awkwardly towards the back of the room. There was no crowd for her to mingle with, or stand behind. She wore black, but then she always wore black. The young woman who had arranged the flowers stayed for the service; perhaps it was part of her job. We sang a hymn, Ana’s reedy, delicate voice silent at first, then soaring gently over my own, and I read a passage from one of my translations of his earlier work – The Box of Beautiful Things – in which he writes about the relationship between death and memory. My mother said nothing. Merely sat and observed. At the last moment, before the coffin slid on its mechanical track through the curtains into the furnace, she stood and went to it. She had a plain white envelope, which she placed on top of the casket. Then she turned and left. Her face like a pale, smooth portrait of a woman. I found her waiting near the car, smoking a cigarette. Something I had not seen her do for many years.

  I was wearing the suit I had bought when Nicanor’s wife died. It fit well, which was a relief. I have no real need for suits and had been anxious at the idea of having to purchase a new one. I was irritated at my brother’s death for making such things necessary: flowers, coffins, suits, the pomp and unfamiliar ritual. And at the same time I was ashamed of the irritation I felt. Surely, nothing should seem too much for Morgan. As I had looked through the wardrobe for a shirt and shoes to wear, I had felt the itch of a dull fury. It was just like him, leaving like this, with things still unresolved between us. There was anger, too, at the time of his going. As though it had been a race he had won, though I had not even been aware it had started. One more way in which he had shown me up, proving himself more capable. Not capable in the sense that stockbrokers and accountants, or parents, mean, but in that far more problematic way brothers understand.

  I had written to him, about ten years after he left, asking him to meet with me. I had told him I was coming to Paris for a conference, and would happily meet him at a café or a park: somewhere neutral where he could appear out of the crowd and fade back into it whenever he needed to. It was my first overt attempt to see him, after years of subtle attempts to draw him out into the open, to draw him home, at least for a visit. The conference in Paris was a lie; I had no reason to go there except to find him. In my fantasies I followed him back to his home – a box beneath a bridge, an apartment, a room in a cheap hotel – bundled him up and bore him home. I had given up asking him to come home of his own free will.

  I waited eight months for a reply. I had almost given up expecting anything when it came: a small note on thin blue notepaper. He had been in Paris not so long ago, he said. He was reading a book he had bought there, at one of the bouquinistes’ stalls that line the River Seine. It is a squat, thick paperback with an ugly cover. In fact, he wrote, I try not to look at the cover when I open the book. It is perfect bound with cheap glue. By the end of the first day of reading, the spine was broken and the pages had started to come loose. I lost several of them in a café at Saint-Sulpice, and almost another ten in the park across from where I was staying. Only then did I notice the pages were unnumbered.

  You ask if we shall meet in Paris, and though I wish it could be otherwise, I know you understand that it is impossible for us to meet. Kierkegaard insisted that the only way to be in the world is to withdraw from it. I have had to put a great distance between myself and the world in order to apprehend it as I did that day. Is it ten years now since I experienced the exquisite joy of being almost dead? I knew, then, that the future without my self in it is calm and beautiful. I will be relieved of all my regrets. I will forget myself, dissolve into mud and gases. I will become friends with wordless things. Of course, as I am almost you, I will also go out of myself and into you. Worn out by walking the path of words, I will enter into the gaps, the silence hidden in words, disguising itself as meaning.

  He had lived more completely than I had. He had travelled, recklessly and for long periods of time, into out-of-the-way places. He had camped in foreign countries, lived on the streets of foreign cities, ridden a motorbike through deserts and mountains, and spoken with people so remote he was the only traveller they had ever met. He had taken lovers who did not speak his language. He had risked himself. He had hurled himself into the world, even while he refused it.

  The whole time I had stayed here, bounded by my work, my responsibilities. Even his dying was evidence of his greater courage. As if I were too timid to die, to risk anything. As if I were still the careful one, the cramped and cleaned and ironed and dusted boy who kept notes on his friends’ lives in his address bo
ok, spent his pocket money on birthday and Christmas cards and did his homework.

  The translator, with his dictionaries and grammars, and not the writer. Not Morgan.

  I was furious. Not at him, I saw suddenly, but at myself. At the small thing I had made of my life, at its boxed-in comforts, and the way it had floated so pathetically in the wake of his life and work. What would I do, now that he was gone? Whose stories would I bring over into this world?

  There was no sudden release of this fury, or its companion sorrow. I did not weep at my brother’s funeral, or suffer an epiphany. I did not come away transformed. There was no moment out of which I emerged, skin fresh and pink and raw, into the light. I was still myself, standing in that small, ugly room with the soundproofed walls, and the thick carpet and dark timber. The feelings swelled and sank, after a while, into a thickness, like the heaviness of a head cold or a chest infection. An uncomfortable self-awareness accompanied by a certainty that nothing would change.

  *

  On Monday, my mother called. She never calls. Or, rather, she calls but she has some special skill for calling when I am away from the phone, and leaving brisk, cheerful but clearly aggrieved messages.

  ‘Samuel? Samuel?’ A pause, during which my answering machine records the sound of her breathing, and of the radio playing in her kitchen, and the subtle but definite conviction she exudes that I am there, listening, evading her. ‘I suppose you’re out somewhere having a nice time. Dinner with friends, perhaps.’

  That Monday, she called in the morning, early. I was sitting on the back deck with a coffee and a copy of The Monthly.

  ‘How are you?’ I said, trying to sound cheerful rather than faintly irritated and expecting to hear her voice echo back, as it had for the last forty years or more, with that brittle, forced cheerfulness she always affected on the phone.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m not so great.’ Calm, quiet. A hot thrum of fear vibrating beneath each word. I waited for her to talk about Morgan, and perhaps even about our father, about loss and her fear of old age and the distance that seemed to widen between us as our family shrank. For her to be different, I suppose.

  Instead, she was brief and blunt. She spoke as though reciting words from a script, as she often did in difficult situations. She had had X-rays. Her doctor had found a shadow on her chest. She had an appointment with a thoracic surgeon the next morning.

  ‘So soon?’ I said.

  The radio in the background: Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin: Menuet, tinnily echoing around her kitchen. ‘You’re very busy,’ she said. ‘And it’s not very much notice, I know.’

  *

  The thoracic surgeon’s office was high up in a building that looked more like a high-rise full of offices than doctors’ rooms. The surgeon pinned the X-rays up on her wall-mounted light box. The faint shadow of my mother’s breasts and belly framed a rib cage blooming with mist.

  ‘You’ve been cancer-free for how long? Six years?’

  My mother nodded, and I tried not to seem alarmed. Appalled. Tried to listen to what the surgeon was saying while simultaneously counting back six years. Was that when she had had the cold that lingered through autumn and into spring? Was it the summer she lost weight, and I took to taking her out for dinner once a week just to see her eat?

  The surgeon looked at the mist on the X-rays, floating across and through my mother’s rib cage. ‘I think it’s probably the cancer, metastasised from the original site to the pneuma.’ She pointed at the films with her pen without touching them. Her finger outlining the two faint sacs of my mother’s lungs. ‘We can’t operate; we can’t get it out if what I suspect is correct. I’ll have to get in and have a look, but … I’m sorry.’

  The next day, they performed a biopsy: a short, sharp excursion to remove tissue from my mother’s lungs. We sat together in the surgeon’s waiting room to receive the results. My mother read from an old copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. Upright and seemingly undaunted. The surgeon was right, of course. I couldn’t imagine someone who would be so cruel as to suggest an inoperable cancer without being fairly certain they were right.

  ‘Inoperable,’ she said to my mother, back in her office overlooking the river. And then, more gently, as though speaking with a child she loved but for whom she had forgotten to bring a gift. ‘Incurable.’ The surgeon outlined available treatments: chemotherapy and pain management, palliative care options.

  When we were boys, and we said something she didn’t agree with, or which she thought was foolish, she would frown a little, and nod as though we had offered up a momentous and intelligent idea, worthy of debate. ‘Oh, really?’ she would say, pulling out a kitchen chair and sitting down, folding her hands in front of her on the table. She loved these debates. Loved to challenge us to defend our positions, loved to make us turn, or not, so long as we were made to think. From the time we were old enough to assert our own minds she expected us to do so. To defend whatever positions we maintained with the clarity and care of a Platonist. She took this approach with our father too. Never contradicting him so much as asking questions he could not answer. She never took, as far as I can remember, the easy path, or accepted another person’s truth at face value. She was a calm, concentrated opponent. Never flaring into emotion, always listening to everything we said, no matter how dull, and seeming to weigh it up before taking it apart, piece by piece, with the same studied care she took in slicing cake or ironing our shirts. Nothing was too small, too inconsequential, to avoid her attention. By the same token, nothing was so enormous as to ruffle the calm surface she presented to the world.

  When the surgeon delivered her diagnosis, my mother asked questions and nodded as she listened to the answers, as though the surgeon had proposed that the Labor government’s health reforms were justified, or the latest exhibition at the art gallery was poorly hung. She listened in that way that made you certain you were being a fool, though nothing in her manner or the questions she asked indicated such a thing. When we stood to leave, she shook the surgeon’s hand and thanked her for her time.

  We got in the car and drove across town to Vue du Jardin. She had made a reservation for lunch. ‘We have to eat somewhere,’ she said. The owner was in the garden kneeling by the herbs with an apprentice, but he came out when he saw my mother. ‘Mrs Walker!’ he said, beaming. ‘You look beautiful, as always. And who is this, a new beau?’

  ‘My son. Samuel.’

  The owner smiled and congratulated her on my height. He twitched menus out from behind the maître d’s desk and gestured for us to follow him to our table.

  He bent and switched the serviette over my mother’s lap. A waiter approached with a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut. The owner nodded and took custody of the bottle, poured glasses for my mother and me. He invited us to eat, to drink, to celebrate again the love of so many years.

  I was ashamed, then. My parents wedding anniversary. I hadn’t registered the date, and my mother had said nothing. She had not, I realised, made a reservation to coincide with her appointment at the hospital. Or perhaps she had made her doctor’s appointment on the day of her reservation, consolidating her trip to the city, killing two birds with one stone, as my father would have said. My mother ordered for us both, quickly, in her sprightly, formal French.

  I had the roasted marron with celery and sorrel, which came served on a hot river stone, the deep yellows, saffron and white of the marron flesh made warmer by contrast with the smooth, dark stone, but all of it simple and pure. The taste of the sea, the flakes of white flesh thick and soft as butter. The celery and sorrel, which I had watched the kitchen hand pluck from the garden while we grazed the amuse-bouches and talked about anything other than her diagnosis, were fresh and crisp.

  My mother had the ocean trout with baby beetroot and horseradish, smoked beneath a bell jar, which the waiter lifted from her plate at the table, releasing a cloud of perfumed air. She waited for the steam to disperse around her, a goddess emerging from a c
loud, before nodding to the waiter.

  When the plates were cleared she asked the waiter if the chef would make chaud-froid d’oeuf. It was no longer on the menu, she observed, with that wilting note of mild disapproval, but perhaps she might be indulged: her son had never had the pleasure.

  The eggs came in fine silver eggcups and their shells were filled with what looked like meringue. The deep yellow silk of the yolk was buried beneath the froth, cream and maple syrup.

  ‘Now that I am dying,’ she said, ‘I do not have to worry about my figure or my future. I can eat chaud-froid d’oeuf every day. I can forget about all those ridiculous, important things that have taken up so much of my life.’ She hesitated, placed her long-handled spoon down on the plate. ‘I have decided to sell the bookshop, or to stop working there,’ she said. ‘I am going to concentrate on reading, and food – on pleasure – while I can.’

  I smiled down at my plate. The alarmed public smile my brother and I both wore in our annual photographs with Santa Claus, or the ones taken of us at Disneyland and Dreamworld, embraced by enormous, brightly coloured cartoon suits of foam and synthetic fur, aware we should be pleased, secretly terrified and ashamed. ‘I think,’ I said. ‘I think that’s a good idea.’

  She clasped her hands together in front of her and tipped her head to the side. ‘Oh, really?’ she said. The rising inflection like a warning bell, quietly rung. ‘Why do you think so?’