Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  On Friday evenings, my mother started hosting Wine and Words evenings at the shop. We would spend the afternoon making platters of finger food, arranging chairs in curved rows, ducking across to the bottle-o for wine and beer, and setting up a temporary bar in the garden. At sunset, she would turn on the fairy lights that hung in the cotton tree and along the fences. The visiting writer would arrive, publicist in tow. During the evening I would carry platters around, drag out more chairs when they were needed, direct people to the bathroom, make coffee, keep things flowing while my mother sold books and talked to people.

  A few times Morgan came. The first time we weren’t expecting him. I came straight to the shop from school and he was there, wearing the clean clothes I had hung in the back of the car that morning, sitting out the back at a table with my mother, drinking coffee and eating the cupcakes we had baked together: chocolate and chilli. They both looked up when I came in – the bell over the door tinkling to announce my arrival. Morgan seemed older and thinner. His hair was still wet from showering in the bathroom upstairs. He was clean-shaven. There was a spot of blood on his chin where he had nicked himself. We were still the same height, but he looked strange in my clothes. I remember feeling a stab of irritation, thinking that when he walked away he would take the shirt – one of my favourites – and the jeans that were only just beginning to soften into comfort. I waved hello and went upstairs to stash my schoolbag and use the bathroom. When I came back down, the writer had arrived and was sitting with Morgan while my mother showed his publicist the display of his books in the window, and the signing table.

  ‘Can I get you something?’ I asked the writer. ‘Coffee?’

  Morgan smiled at me in my schoolboy’s uniform. My grey knee-high socks and polished black shoes. The stink of chalk still breathing through my white cotton shirt.

  The writer glanced up at me. Squinted. ‘Got anything stronger?’

  ‘Wine,’ I said. ‘White or red?’

  ‘I’m a red drinker myself. What about you, Morgan?’

  ‘Red.’ Morgan was flicking through one of the writer’s books. He would not meet my eye.

  ‘Two glasses of red,’ the writer said.

  I glanced over at my mother. She and the publicist were standing behind the counter, looking at the computer screen together. The publicist was smiling. The little bell rang and two women came into the store. Morgan stretched out in his chair. His uncut hair hung in a knotted, bleached curtain over his forehead. There was a shallow cut on the side of his throat. When he reached up to scratch it the collar of my shirt gaped and I could see, faintly, the scar where the bullet from our grandfather’s gun had grazed his skin. It still looked fresh, as though he had been keeping the wound open. ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Morgan stood leaning against a bookshelf during the reading, a wine glass in his hand, his head tipped forward, listening intently. During question time he drifted away, raising an eyebrow and smiling derisively when Mrs Thomson asked about the author’s sources of inspiration.

  After my mother and I let the last of the guests out, we began stacking away the folding chairs, rinsing wine glasses, sweeping up the crumbs of cake and crackers. Morgan left with the writer. The publicist helped us close up the shop, chattering with my mother about how many books they had sold, how many people had come, other writers she had worked with, other towns and bookshops. They drank the last of an open bottle of red wine, sitting barefoot under the cotton tree. The street outside was empty, the streetlights illuminating a wide, blank expanse. When the bottle was empty and I had finished restoring the shop to order, we drove the publicist back to her hotel. There were no other cars in the hotel car park, but the lights were on in one of the other rooms, and as we sat and watched the publicist walk barefoot to her room, we heard a loud crash and a broad, deep peal of familiar laughter from the room where the writer was staying.

  That night my mother clanked the pans in the kitchen, banging the sifter on the sink, swearing when she smashed an egg on the floor. I came down, began sopping up the slop with a handful of paper towels. ‘He was drunk,’ she said, kneeling beside me, still dressed in black linen and stockings.

  I nodded, formed a ring of crumpled paper towel around the egg on the tiled floor. The yolk, miraculously, was unbroken. I scooped it up with a soup spoon. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She tilted back on her heels, pushed her hair back off her forehead with the back of her wrist. ‘Why?’ she said. Her eyes were red. The blue of her irises smudged.

  I blushed and bent over the egg, sopping it up. ‘I gave him a glass of wine,’ I said.

  She snorted and tore off sheets of paper towel, laid them down in a layer over the spilled egg. ‘You’re not responsible for him,’ she said. ‘Any more than I am. He’s making his own decisions. His own life.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  She was standing at the sink, rinsing the cloth, watching her reflection in the window. ‘More or less,’ she said.

  There are silences that are like thefts. A word stolen from the mouth before it is spoken. Deep in the cave of the body, past the glottis and the epiglottis, sinking further, down past the larynx. It waits for the dark opening and plunges deep into the chest, the lungs, burrowing in, taking root in that silk-wet darkness. A black seed, wintering in the body.

  There are obstinate silences. A phone that does not ring. A letter that is never sent. A note left on a doorstep that blows away before you come home. A page that cannot be translated. There are whole languages we cannot translate. They fall into two distinct categories: languages for which we have some text – some scraps of poetry or history – but no lexicon to translate the meanings of those marks; and there are the unwritten languages whose last speaker fell silent before their words were recorded.

  Twice more I was certain I saw Morgan. Once at a distance, moving through the bush on the other side of the river. And once in the street in Brisbane, walking a little ahead of me. He was carrying an old Adidas bag with a broken handle. He had to carry it front of him, gripping it closed. He was barefoot and filthy. People moved aside to let him pass. A notebook fell from his bag. It fell open on the pavement and I could see the close, tight scrawl of Nahum on the page. I rushed forward, picked it up and handed it to him. He did not look at me, or speak, but took the book and turned away.

  There were other sightings, though they became rarer, less distinct. Once I saw a boy on a boat I was sure could be him. Another time I saw a shadow crouching beside a sleeping bag beneath the shade of a bridge as I drove past. Years later there was a man in a crowd – before I knew he had left the country. A blurred face in a newspaper photograph; a man’s back ascending a flight of stairs. I looked for him everywhere. I waited for him. I slept with the window of our bedroom open every night, but he never came.

  There is the silence of the sleeping woman, woken by a noise in her house. Perhaps it was a dream. The sound is gone – faded – before she truly wakes. She does not turn on the light, which will only chase away the fragile certainty she feels. She belongs to the dream, and to the voice she heard there, to the possibility of hearing the dead speak, of recovering the lost and holding them again.

  She rises stiffly from the bed, pulls on her dressing gown, moves to stand at the window, at the top of the stairs. She waits for the darkness to speak again, for his voice, his face – his beloved, almost forgotten face – to emerge out of the dark.

  *

  At dusk, the fruit bats’ low flight shuffled the shadows. Trees went black against the sky. I tried to call my mother at home just after sunset, and again after dinner. When Ana came out of the shower, the towel held out a little by the swell of her belly, her hair wet and twisted on top of her head, I barely looked at her. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ I said.

  ‘Solange?’

  I fought down the irritation that came when she used my mother’s first name. As though they were friends. As though they shared some intimacy I was oblivious to. ‘Y
es, my mother.’

  ‘Could she have gone out somewhere? To a movie? To see a friend?’

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t find Rachel’s mobile number.’

  ‘Maybe she’s asleep. She gets very tired these days.’

  ‘I know she gets fucking tired,’ I snapped.

  ‘Okay. Do you want to go over there?’

  She was pulling a dress on over her head: brown and long, it hugged her breasts and belly.

  ‘Maybe if I just swung by. Said I’d left something there.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the point.’

  ‘My umbrella,’ she said, lowering herself into her chair. ‘I left it there on Tuesday.’

  For a moment, I hesitated. Had it rained on Tuesday? Was it ridiculous to worry about my mother? A grown woman, after all. A woman who had raised us on her own after our father died. Who had run a business, and a house, without needing help from me or anybody else. Probably Ana was right; probably she was sleeping and Rachel had gone out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m being foolish. I’m sure she’s fine.’

  Ana shrugged and stroked the tight curve of her belly. ‘Did you leave a message on her machine?’

  ‘I should have paid more attention when I spoke to her yesterday. She seemed fine, though.’

  ‘She probably is fine, but if you want to go over there, I’m sure that’d be okay. She’d like to see you. She always likes to see you.’

  ‘It’s late,’ I said, glancing at the clock, irritated again by Ana’s smug sense of intimacy. Since when did Ana know what my mother wanted? ‘I’m being ridiculous. Going over there would be silly.’

  ‘Better to be silly than to pace around and keep yourself up all night worrying. She doesn’t sleep well, anyway. Rachel says she often gets up in the middle of the night and wants to talk. Sometimes they go for a drive up to the lookout and watch the stars and drink hot chocolate. It’s the pain, Rachel says. But also her age. She’s restless.’

  ‘Rachel says? For fuck’s sake – when did you become the expert on my mother?’

  Ana started and turned towards me, put her hands protectively over her belly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She stood and stepped towards me, put her hand flat on my chest, not hard, not to hold me at a distance, but to steady me. To give me balance. Her eyes were wide and dark and suddenly distant. There was nothing soft or green there for me to gather. There were tides and weeds and long-dead secrets, rattling like river stones in the dark.

  ‘Ana …’ I said. She lifted her mouth to mine, taking her name from my tongue as if it all – her name, my tongue, my lips – belonged to her. Between us, separating us, was the firm strangeness of her belly. Of our child. Her hands moved over me. One of them snaked under my shirt, warm against the small of my back as the other travelled down over my belly to my cock. Her long fingers cool and forgiving.

  I let her lead me into the bedroom, let her kiss me, let her hands move over my skin and hair and face and crotch, milking me into hardness. Let her lay me down and straddle me in the dark, lifting her dark robe over her head and letting it drop to the floor. Her hand flat on my chest again, holding me still, feeling my heart thump against its heel. Her body rising and sinking over me like a too-near, too-smooth moon. She closed her eyes. Her head tilted forward as though concentrating deeply.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ I said. ‘Please, Ana. Look at me.’

  She rose, sank. Biting her lip. Working. I felt the clutch of pleasure and regret tighten in my groin. Grabbed hold of her thighs and held on, rising up to face her, my stomach tight with fear.

  Before I die I want to see the world behind her eyes. I promised nobody – I promised the night – that I would not stare too deeply into that world, or try to draw her back through it towards me. I would not destroy what I loved for the sake of what I loved, but I wanted her love before it grew dark. Not in the heavenly hereafter, but now. Here.

  *

  Ana had got up in the night, rolling out of bed and peering through the curtains before slipping out of the room. Hours later she returned, her skin cool and smelling of rain. She slid in under the sheets and put the flat of her hand on my chest. I steadied my breathing, let her think I hadn’t known she was gone, or for how long. The soles of her feet were cold, not quite damp. She had been out walking in the misty rain. Wandering alone in the dark. When her hand slid away and her breathing deepened I opened my eyes. Pale shadows fell through the window onto her skin, illuminating the outline of her body, but leaving her face in shadow. She looked like a dark woodland queen, her hair cobwebbed with dew. Her skin pale and fine as flensed bark. I fell asleep watching her breathe.

  When I woke she had become herself again. Beautiful, but ordinary. Or human, at least. She had pushed the sheets down below the swell of her belly and lay with her arms crossed over her face, as though bracing herself against something, or playing hide-and-seek.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ I said, my voice barely a whisper, though in the pre-dawn warmth of the bedroom it seemed louder.

  ‘Mmmm.’

  I wanted to ask her where she’d been, but to do so would break something, some silent pact we had made. We lay down together in the evenings and woke together – like this – sharing the warmth of each other’s bodies. Every night since I returned from Europe she had risen from our bed. The pregnancy made her restless. Her skin itched, her bones ached. She didn’t want to disturb me, she had said, I needed my rest. She was tired during the day, but at night her body twitched and burned. The forest called her out: the creek, the stars, the winking stones.

  ‘The baby’s moving,’ I said.

  She pulled her arms down, cupped the queer swell of her belly. ‘Little fish,’ she murmured.

  ‘Happy Easter, Poisson d’Avril.’

  Ana’s belly swelled and subsided as our child moved inside her. A mysterious tumbling up near her ribs, then a smaller bump rolling beneath her belly button – like a tiny elbow or knee. I leaned down and sang to Ana’s belly, watching the baby tumble in response to my voice. ‘Cloches de Pâques, cloches de Pâques, Bon voyage à Rome, Revenez et m’apportez, Des ouefs et des bonbons.’

  ‘What time is your mother expecting us?’

  ‘Late morning.’ I rolled over to check the time on the bedside clock and to retrieve Ana’s gift from the drawer. The small box was wrapped in brown paper, tied with plain kitchen string. Every year when we were boys my mother would wrap our Easter gifts in plain brown paper. Other children had bright, foil-wrapped eggs and bunnies in fluorescent baskets filled with cellophane straw, or cartoon-decorated boxes with pictures of rabbits in vests and top hats, but our mother made us traditional French Easter chocolates: fish and flying bells. Each chocolate handmade while we were at school, or sleeping.

  She had a knack for wrapping things. The boxes she made to hold the chocolates, and the paper she wrapped them in, were plain, but perfect. Her gifts elegant objects in their own right, well-made and well-proportioned. Our plain Easter boxes smelled of fresh, rich chocolate. The redolent parcels suggestive of both luxury and secrecy, as if the miraculous and magical were not ready to submit fully to the rational, and had to be coaxed into the subterfuge of plain packaging.

  Ana loosed the ribbon and opened the box, and we lay in bed for an hour, perhaps longer, licking chocolate from each other’s fingers and singing songs to the baby, watching it roll beneath her flesh like a bird sealed into an unbaked pie.

  While she showered I made breakfast: coffee and poached eggs. My mother called to remind us to pick up the tulips she had ordered. The sky warmed to a pale, pearlescent sheen. Ana wore a new dress: her first maternity dress. Something my mother had bought for her. Pale yellow, long, with a high waist and low, boxed neckline. My brother’s owl, hung on the shorter chain I had bought her, visible against the flushed skin of her chest. Yellow and pink and silver, her dark hair – blue-blac
k in the late morning light – piled up on her head like a crown.

  ‘I have something for you, too,’ she said, and placed a flat, rectangular parcel on the table.

  I pushed my empty plate aside and smiled at her, standing with her hands flattened against her back, her belly pushing forward through the fabric of her dress.

  ‘It’s nothing, really,’ she said. ‘Your mother helped me choose them.’

  I peeled back the paper. Inside were three children’s picture books. The Giving Tree, Curious George Learns the Alphabet, and Green Eggs and Ham. The books were old but in good condition, wrapped in protective plastic sleeves. I opened The Giving Tree, which was lying on top. I flipped to the last page, and looked again, after so many years, at the familiar tragic figure of the boy – now an old man – sitting alone on the stump of the tree that had loved him so long, and so well. I turned to the back dust jacket with its picture of the author leaning away from the camera. His unsmiling face and dark beard. The striped shirt and braces. I had looked at these two pictures for hours as a child, searching for similarities between the illustrated old man’s hooked nose, in his beardless face, and the face of the younger, bearded man in the photograph.

  ‘She said these were your favourites. When you were little.’ Ana rubbed her hands down over her belly, pulling her dress in beneath it.

  The Giving Tree had been Morgan’s favourite book, not mine. I had preferred the rhyming nonsense of Dr Seuss, Curious George’s far less sentimental Man in the Yellow Hat. I liked bold colours and simple shapes. The strange, uncatlike Cat in the Hat; the wobble-sided houses. Boys who fell from great heights and landed safely on their feet. Fish that flew through the air but did not die. A room could flood, a house fall down, a child could ruin everything, but it could all be reversed again in a single turn of the page.