Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  *

  We landed in Singapore in the middle of the night. I had a three-hour wait before I could board my connecting flight, not long enough to go out into the city. Families and couples sprawled throughout the airport. A woman and her husband sat side by side on the floor, each with a child’s head in their lap, one hand resting easily on a child’s hip or shoulder while they waited. A Frenchman and his wife stood fussing over their only child, pale with tiredness. My phone wouldn’t work. There were queues at most of the public phones. Every bar and café had an enormous television mounted on the wall, blaring music, news, soap operas. I found a map of the airport; I was determined to find an exit, fresh air, a place to sit where I wasn’t facing a widescreen television. I found a garden on the map, but when I got there it was a small, dead-leaved square filled with smokers. I walked and walked: the airport was a closed world, kilometres of duty-free stores filled with scotch and perfume and sunglasses, overpriced cafés, newsagents, internet booths.

  It was almost impossible to find the outer edge; it was like being in a shopping centre: the outside world was only an idea, a thing imagined and remote. I wondered whether the inescapability of the place was a deliberate strategy on the part of the architects and designers, whether there was some mercantile logic to the air-conditioned, electronic labyrinth. I had landed there on my way to somewhere else: despite the long delay between flights, I wouldn’t leave the terminal. Though I was walking around, though the space was enormous, I was still in transit. The airport was a non-space, a suspended reality of shopping and sleeping and eating and drinking. There was nothing to do but wait. I found a telephone and called Ana. I tried to imagine her waking in the dark house in the forest, the stars the only bright thing in her world. I tried to make the forest that surrounded her seem real: the timber floors, the opened windows, the summery night air lifting the curtains. I closed my eyes and leaned into the plastic booth that smelled of stale perfume and cleaning fluid.

  ‘Samuel?’ she said. ‘Sam?’

  ‘I’m in Changi airport,’ I said, ‘my flight’s been delayed. Three hours, they say …’ I pressed my forehead against the cold metal of the phone. ‘That’s not why I called. I wanted to tell you that I love you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And that we’re going to have a child together.’

  She hesitated, or there was a delay. I imagined I could hear the night outside her window.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Maybe she didn’t want to have the baby. Maybe she had already made an appointment to have something done about it. Maybe she was testing me: giving me the space to run if I needed to.

  ‘Of course I want us to have the baby. I love you. I can’t imagine anything more amazing. I’m sorry I didn’t say the right thing, at the airport. It was the shock. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what you wanted me to say.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to say anything.’

  ‘I was a bit overwhelmed.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you that way. As you were leaving. I wasn’t sure what you’d say, so I wanted the conversation over quickly, either way.’

  ‘We’re going to have a child! When is he due?’

  ‘August. Early August.’

  I did the maths, both ways, tried to imagine my mother still alive in six months’ time. ‘You’re three months’ pregnant.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure at first. And I wanted to be sure, before I said anything. Things go wrong sometimes.’

  I nodded, thinking of my mother’s exhausted face, of my father sitting on the front stairs in the early morning, nursing his tea while she rested on the lounge. Of each of my sisters, never born.

  ‘It will be okay,’ I said. ‘Everything will be okay. You can move up to the house; I’ll set up a studio for you, and we can convert the spare room into a nursery.’

  ‘I’m tired, Samuel. It’s the middle of the night. We can talk about all that later – when you come home.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I love you.’

  Behind me two young Japanese girls were sharing the earphones of an iPod, giggling and singing along to an Asian pop song. I could barely hear Ana’s voice. There was a long, static hiss on the line. I heard her say something, but I wasn’t sure what it was, then her voice came through, suddenly and clearly. ‘Fly safe,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’

  *

  Almost a year after my father’s death, I came out of the school gates one afternoon to find my mother parked opposite the school. She was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved blouse, her long hair tied back in a ponytail. Since a few weeks after my father’s death she had stopped coming to pick us up from school. She had been working longer hours at the private-school library over in the next town and couldn’t reach us in time. Morgan and I walked home, or caught the bus, arriving home before her most afternoons.

  She was leaning against the bonnet of the car, watching the boys and girls stream out of the gates, tearing off ties and hats, flirting nervously with each other as they waited at the bus stop. She waved to get my attention and then turned away, got into the driver’s seat without looking behind me to see if Morgan was coming. It had been months since Morgan had bothered with school. Occasionally, I saw him leaning against the back fence of the oval, near the big shade tree, talking with the Year Eleven girls who smoked and sunbathed out there during lunch. The teachers had given up asking after him.

  When I got in the car my mother smiled at me – the kind of smile I’d rarely seen – as though she were a girl with a secret too good to keep. ‘Seatbelt,’ she said, and looked in the rear-view mirror, pulled out into the slow sprawl of after-school traffic.

  ‘Did you finish work early?’ I asked.

  My mother shook her head. ‘I quit.’ She was looking away from me, watching for a break in the traffic before pulling out and turning left, towards town. ‘I bought the bookshop.’

  ‘Willow Books?’

  She nodded and bit her lip as she searched for a park near the shop, its windows papered over to conceal the changes going on inside. She leaned over me to open the glove box and extract a small envelope with a clank of keys sliding around inside it. ‘Coming?’ she said.

  The bookshop had been owned by a series of people over the years. First the Willows, who had opened it, but then decided they’d rather work with dogs than books. Albert became a vet; he and his wife still operated the pet store and veterinary surgery three doors down. Willows was closed for a while after that – one of the many blank-faced shops that were occasionally used for window displays of historical artefacts by the local council, or Christmas displays during the summer. My parents had ordered their books by post from the city, or had driven down to Brisbane to get what they needed, but then the Michaels family moved in across the river and re-opened the store. They grew huge pots of rosemary outside the shop, and were always playing chess there, when they weren’t serving customers or stocking the shelves.

  Alma and Noah Michaels had sold up their house in Sydney to move north, for the heat and the quiet. They had been doctors in their former lives down south – Alma an ophthalmologist and Noah a paediatrician. When this got out, as things will, people who didn’t consider themselves sick enough to make an appointment with Dr Beiderman would come in and cruise the new releases or the gardening books. They would buy a new book and, while making small talk at the cash register, would let slip that their back was aching, or that there was a strange ringing in their ears.

  Dr Noah bent down to peer at Morgan’s swollen belly one morning in the summer holidays, when we came in to pick up my mother’s special order of George Mackay Brown’s Selected Poems: 1954–1992. We had waited across the road until Dr Alma left, sipping cokes and watching the storefront. We had become quite suspicious about the purpling hardness near my brother’s belly button. At first we had suspected it was a bubo – the first swellings of the bubonic plague. The Black Death wa
s what we called Morgan’s swelling, half-jokingly, between ourselves, but we were convinced it was something far more sinister.

  We were almost thirteen that summer, and we had discovered masturbation. We had taken to this new discovery with the great enthusiasm and serious application we took to almost all new challenges, egging each other on to faster, more spectacular ejaculations, whispering across the space between our beds at night, racing each other beneath the sheets to muted, grunting finales. This, we were sure, was the real cause of Morgan’s affliction.

  Dr Noah took my brother into the back of the store, away from the windows, and asked him to raise his shirt, right there among the second-hand poetry and textbooks. He gently palpated Morgan’s belly, frowning and making that small sound adults sometimes make when they are considering things they aren’t yet ready to talk about. He made us sit in the chairs facing off across the chess table and wait for Alma. When she returned with two white paper bags of sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade, he called her into the shop. She nodded while he talked to her, and then she went quickly out into the storeroom. We thought she had gone into the back room to mix some medicine, to heat and sterilise her scalpel, or lift her favourite leeches from their dark soup. We imagined she would emerge with a broad-mouthed leather satchel within which were various glass jars, knives, needles and clamps. When she came out, empty-handed but for four glasses of lemonade and ice, we were disappointed as well as relieved.

  She put the glasses down near the chessboard, studying her husband’s last move before smiling at us. ‘Do you mind?’ she said, gesturing towards Morgan’s shirt. He lifted his shirt a little, and she pressed the flat of her palm to the area. ‘Does this hurt?’ she said. ‘Or this?’

  Morgan shook his head, mutely, but we’d all seen him flinch.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Dr Noah.

  Dr Alma handed Morgan a glass of lemonade and smiled as he tugged his shirt down over his stomach. ‘More fluids, some time spent quietly reading instead of running around terrorising the neighbourhood. These things should help temporarily.’

  ‘But what is it?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  Dr Alma shrugged. ‘How would I know? I am a bookseller, yes?’

  We drank our lemonade and waited while Dr Noah wrapped our mother’s book in green tissue paper and brown string. By the time we got home they had called to let her know that Morgan seemed to have a herniated belly button.

  The Michaels had had the store on the market for several years, ever since Alma’s stroke. Dr Noah struggled on, but the pots of rosemary died, and the chess game never progressed, though it was there on the table every day during business hours. People still shopped there out of loyalty, though Dr Noah didn’t keep the stock up-to-date, and the second-hand section at the back of the shop quickly turned into a landslide of unsorted donations. A man from out of town had made an offer once – my mother told me about it – but Dr Noah hadn’t liked the look of him. When asked what his favourite book was, the man couldn’t say, and then finally he talked about a film he’d seen that he thought was maybe based on a book. He made an offer, right there in the store, and Dr Noah turned him down flat, told him that the For Sale sign propped in the window was an old joke of his wife’s.

  After that, Noah took down the For Sale sign from the window every summer, as soon as the first of the tourists came. And if someone came at a different time of year, poking around the store with the stink of capitalism on them, as Dr Noah called it, he pretended he’d only just bought the place himself, and had forgotten to take it down.

  My mother told me she had got a good deal on the place. Dr Noah had thrown in the old table and chairs, and the chess set with its unicorn knights and Rapunzel rooks. She ordered a large, bright coffee machine from the city, and got a sidewalk dining permit from the council. With the money from the sale of our father’s boat she had the timber window surrounds refinished, and the carpet pulled out and replaced with black and white tiles.

  Over the next few weeks she picked me up from school every day. Sometimes she had concrete dust or paint in her hair, or the back seat was crammed with light fittings, book boxes, or paintbrushes. We drove to town and went into the store, where the dust and disorder slowly gave way to a cool, open space lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a sliding librarian’s ladder, a long, polished timber counter with a glass display-case top. The back wall of the store was knocked out and converted into a kind of glasshouse with white timber struts and green glass, within which sat ferns and potted palms and white cane chairs and tables. The garden, which had been used to store rubbish, was cleaned out and fenced. She planted lavender and rosemary around the edges, and had a floating deck built around the enormous old cotton tree. She bought an old brass cash register, and hired Docker’s daughter to work the coffee machine.

  Finally, the books came. Boxes and boxes of them. Art books and architecture books, gardening books and books about the sea. Tall, glossy picture books of lighthouses and boats and sailors. And novels, of course, and poetry and history. We spent a long weekend stocking the shelves and packing the empty boxes flat.

  Morgan showed up on the Saturday morning, like a visitor from out of town. He stood in the doorway and watched her laying the artists’ books out in the display case. ‘Can I help?’ he said, and we both turned, surprised, to see the tousled, barefoot, brown-armed boy at the door. His nose was sunburnt, and his hair had turned blond – almost white – at the tips.

  ‘We were just going to have a break,’ our mother said. ‘Perhaps you could get us all some coffee from Albert’s?’

  He nodded and came in a little closer, into the shade thrown by the newsprint taped to the front window. That far and no further. He stood scratching the shin of one leg with the foot of the other. Our mother got her purse from behind the counter and gave him twenty dollars. She asked him to get three coffees and some pastries for us to share. He shifted on his feet, squinted up at her and nodded before turning to go.

  I was in the back of the store, in the children’s section, arranging picture books on a display rack that was shaped like a mushroom. I glanced at the clock as he left. After twenty minutes I saw my mother cast a fleeting look at the door before slicing open another box to unpack. Albert’s was on the corner a block and a half away. On a Saturday morning it was often busy. Absently, I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Morgan; the last time he’d been home. All week he’d skipped school. It was almost exam time, so most afternoons I had set myself up at Dr Noah’s old chess table under the cotton tree to work on my revision. The carpenters and electricians would clock off around four, and my mother and I would clean up after they’d left as best we could before heading home.

  As far as I could recall, he hadn’t been home that week. And the week before only once – on Wednesday – when he’d come in our bedroom window smelling of the sea and rifled through his drawers for clean clothes. Enki had woken and loped off the bed to sniff at him. I lay watching Morgan, pretending to sleep. He threw his old clothes on the floor beneath his bed, put on clean socks and a clean shirt. When my mother turned on the light in her room down the hall he lifted his head and froze, like a deer sensing the hunter. After a few moments he turned away, went back to the window.

  ‘Morgan,’ I said.

  He hesitated, one leg slung over the windowsill, a hand gripping the frame. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘When are you coming home?’

  He shrugged and grinned. His teeth caught the light, as did the soft corners of his eyes, and then he was gone.

  After thirty minutes of waiting for him to return with morning tea my mother stepped down from her ladder and went over to the counter. ‘Coffee?’ she called out, her voice casually cheerful.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll go.’

  *

  Elizabeth met me at Schiphol airport and drove – in her small, crowded car that smelled of dogs and cigarette smoke – to the apartment where I would be staying.
She was a tall, blonde woman with a brisk manner who appeared disappointed with me from the moment we met. She had a luggage trolley but I had only my carry-on: a backpack and a laptop bag.

  ‘That is all?’ she said, looking behind me.

  She drove fast, frowning at the traffic, weaving in and out. Every time we stopped at a light she leaned forward and peered at it until it changed colour, darting forward an instant before it turned green. All the way from the airport to the city she talked about the conference: the other presenters, the venues, the catering, the typos in the conference booklet, the scheduling problems, the problems with technology and security. The man who had refused to speak before 10.00 am. The woman who had arrived without a hotel reservation. The postgraduate student who had forgotten to bring a copy of her paper. ‘At least your flight was on time,’ she said, as though I had intended to be late.

  In the apartment she twitched open the curtains, opened all the doors and looked into each room. She peered into the fridge and grunted. ‘No milk,’ she said. ‘You are tired, but you should not sleep yet. Wait until evening. Shower now, and then walk.’ She went to the window and looked down on the rain-slicked streets full of bicycles and umbrellas. There was very little traffic, and most of the umbrellas were brightly coloured: red, yellow, blue and orange. Occasionally, a child’s umbrella – frog green, polka-dotted pink – bobbed past. She took a small silver alarm clock out of her handbag and set it in the middle of the dining table, next to the conference proceedings and a lanyard with my name on it. She turned the lanyard over and showed me the list of phone numbers printed on the back. ‘Here is my number if you need anything. I will pick you up tomorrow at 8.00 am to take you to breakfast and then to the venue.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind. Too kind.’

  She nodded and smiled, the light suddenly reaching her eyes, and I realised that her briskness was not disappointment, not yet anyway, only the stress of a woman with too much to do, tangled up in a web of others who treated the whole thing as if it were about them. She glanced at my backpack, slumped near the door. ‘I always pack too much,’ she said and shrugged.