Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  Eventually, I asked for the bill and paid it, leaving a generous tip. I looked for the owner while my mother stood in the doorway, putting on her coat, and waved to him. He came out to say his farewell, carrying a small paper box, like an egg carton, into which he had placed two cupcake-sized brioches and a pair of speckled blue eggs. I left the restaurant with that sense of helpless regret, and its attendant fury, that had followed me since my mother’s first appointment at the surgeon’s office. Where had the cancer spread from, I wanted to know, from her bones, her kidney, her breasts?

  Driving home, I had vague fantasies of sitting down to eat with the restaurateur and the thoracic surgeon, of being guided through the menus of my parents’ anniversary dinners, with an accompanying patter outlining their various hidden illnesses. I was frustrated at the owner’s lack of engagement with me: as though he should have remembered me, as well as my mother, from photographs my mother had showed him, or stories she and my father had told over the years. Perhaps even recalled the year my mother came in heavy with child and ordered three desserts: one for herself, and one for each of her enwombed sons. But my parents’ life remained a mystery, a secret unavailable to me, as though I were once again the child huddled in a wardrobe, wondering why everyone else could cross into Narnia, while nursing a terrible certainty that it was some flaw in me – some essential lack of courage or wildness – that kept me here, in the small, ordinary world.

  *

  We were voracious and indiscriminate readers, as boys. We had no criteria by which to judge a book. How could we choose one novel over another? Non-fiction was easier, but we expected less from it: a few bold facts to store up like winter seeds, some pictures or maps we could study and compare to the author’s claims. (Though at that age we didn’t really consider that non-fiction had authors. Compilers, perhaps, servants to the long store of historical and contemporary fact, to the isness of the world.)

  We got our first library cards on the same day, at the library bus that parked near the hall on the first Tuesday of each month. Our library cards were lined yellow rectangles of cardboard with our names typed out across the top, a cartoon of an owl with reading glasses, and an ever-increasing list of the books we had borrowed beneath it, their due dates stamped beside them. The bus, a small satellite of the library proper, had creaking floors tiled with grey carpet, and four over-packed shelves of books. Our librarian was a bus driver, and had a bus driver’s aspect. We never imagined he had a home; on evenings and weekends we imagined he parked somewhere out of the way, set out a chair and a table, built a fire and made a billy of tea, and spent his time reading the books he chaperoned around the district. We believed he lived in the bus; that somewhere in that cramped space there was a secret hatch that revealed a bed, or the cavity where he stored his tent and camp stove. I’m not sure that some part of me doesn’t still believe it.

  Later, we discovered the well from which he replenished his store of books. The polished glass doors with gold lettering: Municipal Library. Beyond which was a vaulted hall filled with shelves and shelves of books. Old people dozed in the newspaper section; babies squealed and roared among the picture books, also home to over-sized, soft alphabet blocks periodically built into castles, forts, bridges and boats.

  When we were old enough to ride our bikes to the library on our own – a long, hot ride during the summer holidays – we were issued with adult library cards. These slightly darker cards were sparser, bearing only our names and a field of rows to be sown with books. With these cards, we could borrow books from the large, less colourful aisles of thick books, the long rows of biographies and natural history, and the small section of French and Latin books. French because there was a small community of French migrants in the area, and Latin because an old scholar who had retired here twenty years earlier had made a bequest of his collection.

  We raced each other to fill our library cards, stapling new ones to the front of them until they were too thick to be stapled any more and had to be replaced. We developed elaborate rules to make the competition fair: no book could be counted if it had not been read, or if it had more pictures than words. Our old cards were carefully stored in a box on our desk – a record of the things we had seen and knew. There was a great pleasure in being the first to take a book out of the library; the first to have our name inked onto the card that sat in the pocket glued into the front. We often revisited books we had once borrowed, and loved, checking to see who else had read them and imagining we shared some secret awareness with that unknown stranger. Sometimes we would sit in the journals section, reading newspapers and magazines and watching the other book borrowers, wondering if we would recognise them – our fellow readers – whether they would bear a mark, or know us, somehow, and invite us to step through some secret passage into the dark, secret worlds we shared.

  We collected the things people left behind in the books they borrowed before us: dry-cleaning stubs, photographs, shopping lists. We kept each item in a clear plastic bag, pinned to the noticeboard above our desk like evidence of some distant, unfamiliar civilisation.

  We considered the card catalogue, with its long, slim, densely packed drawers, a thing of infinite mystery and beauty. Each time we visited the library, we played a kind of blind man’s buff in which we closed our eyes, pulled open the first drawer our hand fell upon, reached in and fingered out a card. Whatever book it represented we would borrow and pore over: these books were our horoscope, our fortune teller’s stones.

  There were also, of course, our parents’ books, and the books bought for us as gifts at Christmas and birthdays. Even, once we started earning pocket money, the books we bought ourselves. Second-hand books with wrinkled and fading covers, yellowing pages, inscribed with love for Harold, or M, or bearing the bookplate of the 1978 tenth-grade English prize, or a birthday message from a copperplate grandparent.

  We particularly loved books with maps in them: maps of the real world, or of other worlds. We taped together sheets of paper our mother brought home from the butcher’s to form one large sheet, as long and wide as our kitchen table, and worked for hours – for days – on a map of our own imagined world. Our map could be folded or rolled like an antique map. We dipped it in bowls of coffee and burned its edges until they were deckled and frayed, then we drew the outline of the island nation of Nahum: its dreamed contours, its topology. Nahum was a nation of solitary men – island men. Each man lived alone on his island, since no island could bear the weight of more than one man’s heart. Between the islands there were wide stretches of water, but the men only crossed to each other’s islands once a year – during winter when the water froze over – to sit on the ice and trade, and talk, though they were not good at talking. The map grew dense with markings. We mapped the tides and the winds, the land and its creatures, the paths of its explorers, of the great ships that had sailed there and the ships that had been lost. The ruins of a lighthouse on the Island of Wyeth; the strange stones arranged in rows on the Island of Solitude.

  How long does it take to map the world? As long as you have, perhaps. Not an infinity, but two whole summers of rainy days, which seemed like an infinity to us then.

  The next summer, after reading Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, we began a book of natural observations. Our explorer’s name was Thomas Wolf, and his ship was named the Louisa, after a girl in our class we both considered as beautiful, remote and unassailable as the moon. We took turns making notes and drawing sketches of the birds and grasses and fish of Nahum, its seasons and clouds. The map and the book opened up a whole new layer of details to observe and create, distinctions to draw out, words to coin. A vocabulary of loss and evolution. Our people needed words to describe the cloud formations particular to their home, the shapes of islands sculpted by fierce winds, the creatures that lived there, the nests they made, the sounds they made in the night. Nahum’s creatures had evolved separately from those of the rest of the world, especially the land-bound cre
atures, and the fish who were restricted to the long, wide shallows between the islands. Like the creatures of the Galapagos, the creatures of Nahum were both familiar and strange: crows as tall as geese, which could not fly; ducks whose eggs were gold as yolks; foxes with fur as blue as steel, which swam and fished like bears. In the waters of our island, the monstrous bear Darwin imagined – the bear as great as a whale – swam and sang and dreamed. The men, too, bore the mark of their centuries of isolation. They were all tall, and dark-haired, and broad and strong. They had long hands, slightly webbed, as though they had evolved out of the sea, and their teeth were sharp.

  *

  I went to visit my mother on Saturday, as always. Sometimes we walked along the river or went to the crematorium to visit Morgan and my father. Sometimes I took her shopping or to the post office, but wherever we went, we usually ended up at the bookshop. We would sit in the café across the street to watch customers go in and out, examine the display in the window, or study the literary events calendar near the front door. We drank a pot of tea with Hannah, who had taken over managing the shop, at the small setting in the courtyard. My mother avoided talking business, saying that it was all Hannah’s responsibility now, and that she trusted her completely, but towards the end of the conversation, as she blotted her lips with her serviette, she would offer some small suggestion. Very politely. In a tone that brooked no opposition.

  Afterwards, I drove her home and got her settled. Made tea, or got the fire going. Took out the rubbish, screwed in a new light bulb. When I had exhausted my usefulness, or began to look awkward and empathetic, she clapped her hands and told me I must be wanting to get on. Every week she gave me a small pile of books to take with me; things she had ordered in through the bookshop but not taken a liking to. ‘I know it’s Saturday,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got things to do.’

  At home, the house was still warm, the fire I had lit that morning easy to rekindle. I went through the motions of living – preparing food, clearing the gutters, cutting wood and working on the Gedenkschrift commemorating Morgan’s passing, including a new translation of an essay he’d sent to me not long before he passed: a long letter, really, but an essay in intention. Things seemed ordinary, though I couldn’t shake the feeling that they shouldn’t. I still had that strange sense of living in a house where one wall, or the roof, had been torn away and I was living exposed, in a giant doll’s house or an architect’s model. A simulacra of a liveable abode: something not really designed for living. But I was living, and between bouts of terror, forgetfulness, exhaustion and hollowness I began to take short walks, not along the creek that recalled the cold green water out of which Morgan had been pulled, but along the unsealed road at the top of the drive, past the railway line and, eventually, up onto the ridge.

  Sometimes, I would take a blanket to sit on and a book and make myself a kind of nest, leaning against the old tree that stood there. On the way up to the ridge, in the early weeks after Morgan’s death, I would have to stop several times to catch my breath – I was not unfit, but grief had locked its iron bands around my chest and refused to release me. Why did mourning make me breathless? Why did I feel suffocated, buried, as if I had been overwhelmed by an avalanche of dirt and stones? His death was always imminent, always possible. He wrote often about how he was constantly opened out by a deep and subtle awareness of his own mortality – by the sense that his life was separated from death by a frail meniscus. To him, death was a beckoning abyss over which his life was stretched. He walked there, on life’s thin wire, always feeling death’s breath warm on his feet.

  After a few weeks I learned to hurl myself into the pain, working my way into it as though working my way into the centre of a storm. For moments at a time I believed I might be able to find the path towards death, hidden in this familiar bush, to discover Morgan sloping along it and gently turn him back towards home. When I finally reached the ridge and sat down beneath the tree I felt as if I was still hurtling into my body, into the world – though I wanted desperately for it to stop. Just stop.

  After I had sat for a while and caught my breath, once I had let the patience of the tree and the soil seep into me, and set out my books and translated a passage or two, the storm would slow. I would feel its urgent tugging soften and let me go so that I could feel – for a moment anyway – fixed in place again, as if I were a heavy stone around which the air bent and flowed. Some days it was all I could do to get out of bed and dress myself, make coffee, stand and stare out the kitchen window. I would travel outwards from that moment into a kind of absence: bodiless, thoughtless, a gap between particles of breath where I remained, suspended. I would come back to myself standing there, hours later, the coffee cup cold in my hand, the light having slid down and away from the house, my muscles stiff with age and disappointment.

  Ana stayed in the cabin I had built for my brother, and which he had never seen, let alone lived in. It was a long drive along potholed, unsealed roads to the place where his path met the road, and after that a long walk in to the cabin. The money he had sent me to pay for his block of land so long ago had come from an account he closed soon after, withdrawing everything that was left. After that, he lived an itinerant’s life, cashing his royalty cheques when he could, otherwise keeping them, unused, in a folder of papers Ana found in the apartment by the dyke in Haarlem.

  Morgan’s forty acres of bushland were downstream from my own block, further along the creek I no longer walked beside. Ana lived in Morgan’s cabin without electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, refrigeration or a telephone. When I spotted her on my brother’s land the first time, she was wearing a man’s shirt. For a minute I felt the stab of something like recognition, thinking it was him, knowing it couldn’t be. Later, I would go up to the ridge partly to watch her working. She was always intent on some chore. Hauling buckets of compost from the pile to the garden, feeding the chickens, working in the half-wild vegetable patch that sprawled out from the back deck, up on the roof clearing gutters or mending leaks. The ute she bought from an old man at the pub often broke down. I saw Ana on the road sometimes. Once I saw her pulled over on the side, hauling fallen timber, cut into what looked like equal lengths, into the ute’s tray for firewood.

  The sounds of work came up the valley towards me throughout the day, punctuated by the long ghost-notes of the train passing between us: the burr of the chainsaw, the regular thud of timber being chopped, the high whine of other motors I barely recognised. She was forever mending the run-down cabin I had built for my brother and, after leaving it empty for several years, rented out to Nicanor. She repaired the windows that had cracked and been replaced with offcuts, or covered up with sheets of black plastic. She hung a new door on the north-facing side, replaced the stairs on the back deck. Once, I saw her haul the old bath outside and stand over it, staring into its once-white bowl. A few weeks later she had set it up in the middle of a ramble of pumpkin and zucchini. Things were growing in the filled bath – tall, feathery grasses – and from the way she leant over it, as if to study something shifting beneath the surface, I thought maybe there were fish swimming there.

  In the winter mornings, she always lit the old wood stove. Coming up towards the ridge it was the first thing I’d see. The smoke from her chimney rising up and spreading out until it merged with the low grey clouds. At first I thought of a battlefield, or a routed village. Imagined cresting the ridge to look down on a ruined valley where the remains of my brother’s house were burned stumps, still smoking. Later I thought only of comfort and warmth. The smell of baking and the subtle heat of a stove in a cold house.

  On my walks up to the ridge late in winter, when the leaves had thinned out and the air was so clear it seemed to bring the view closer, there was a spot where I could almost see in at the window of my brother’s cabin.

  It had been a quiet place before she came. Every now and then I had seen Nicanor – a widower whose Australian wife had died childless – on the back deck and raised my
hand in greeting, but he had never looked up, never seen me. Nicanor had been a revolutionary, his halting English still littered with Spanish, but from a distance he could be made to take on the shape of my brother, working, living, sleeping in the cabin I had built for him. When he went back inside I climbed higher up the ridge, wondering at the man I had seen, what relation he bore to the brother I had known as a child.

  A few times I had seen him bathing in the creek, his distant body reduced to an abstract slash of paleness in all that green and rock. Before he started, he took two buckets and carried water from the creek to the cabin. Travelling back and forth, walking slowly. Every now and then he would stop, set the buckets down on a bit of flat ground and massage the palms of his hands. Sometimes he would swap the buckets from hand to hand: moving the blue one to his left hand, and the yellow one to his right, before moving on. Before heading back to the house on his last trip, he would take off all his clothes, light a cigar, and lower himself into the cold water of the creek. Sometimes he took a book with him and sat, smoking and reading, while the water moved around him.

  Ana, too, collected water from the creek, though when she bathed in it she always hung her clothes on a nearby branch, folding them carefully and placing her boots side by side beneath them as though in a dressing room. She would walk to the middle of the creek and stand, bathing herself, sometimes washing her hair. When she stepped out of the water her dark hair was like a flag slicked to her back, which she quickly twisted and squeezed before winding it around her head. She moved unhurriedly to her make-do wardrobe, walking erect as a queen; unlike Nicanor, she always dressed before taking up the buckets to return to the house.

  As she moved through the bush she passed in and out of my vision, passing behind the thicker boles of the trees. Sometimes I lost sight of her, but then she would reappear a little further along, stepping confidently through the scrub. She stopped less frequently than Nicanor had, and never to massage her palms, but sometimes to tilt her head back and look up into the canopy overhead, or to kneel and peer into the underbrush, watching quietly while some tiny creature – a bird, perhaps – went about its business.