Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  The Giving Tree was sad, and made me feel guilty and afraid. The plain, colourless drawings seemed to emphasise the tragedy of the tale. There was no frivolity in them. No sense of play. At night, after our mother read it to us, I would lie awake for hours, worrying about that tree in the forest, which had given too much for the boy it loved. And about the boy, who had grown into an old man and still did not know how to ask for less.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, rising, pulling her into my arms to hide the threat of tears. The terrible loneliness I felt, suddenly, and suspected I would always feel. ‘She’s right. I loved them. I love them.’

  Late in the afternoon, when the unseasonal heat had started to fade, we drove out to the memorial gardens to visit our father’s and Morgan’s graves. Ana sat in the back, behind my mother. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of her profile in the rear-view mirror. Her hair thicker and darker of late. A few threads loosening in the air-conditioning, floating around her throat. She sat with her eyes closed, leaning back, one hand resting on the top of her belly. She had eaten very little at lunch, picking at the lamb and declaring herself full, and tired. She helped my mother clear the table and wash the dishes, then dozed on the lounge while we played Scrabble at the table.

  My mother sat in the front seat with the tulips on her lap. Their heavy yellow heads almost the same colour as Ana’s dress. Their stems were bright and thick. ‘We’re here,’ I said, turning in at the gates. My mother took out her compact, patting powder over her face and applying a fresh coat of lipstick before flicking it closed.

  Ana helped my mother out of the car, took her arm, while I got the picnic blanket out of the boot. By the time we reached the two brass plaques, mounted on a pale stone amid ferns and roses, there was sweat on the back of her neck. A light film of it on her throat and forehead. I spread out the blanket in the shade.

  ‘They used to go fishing together, you know,’ my mother said.

  Ana nodded and smiled.

  ‘When they were small they’d go down to the creek and fish for tadpoles with empty jam jars. I always worried they would drown, or get lost, but Paul said it was foolish to worry. Boys will be boys and all that.’ She knelt. Her shadow was barely distinguishable from that of the gravestone.

  ‘One night, after they’d been down there, I went to tuck the boys in and Morgan was still awake, crying in the dark because he had murdered some tadpoles and packed them into a matchbox. He clung to me in the dark. Terrified by what he’d done.’

  ‘That wasn’t Morgan,’ I said. ‘That was me.’

  Ana knelt beside her, lowering herself awkwardly onto the grass, switching the dress out from under her knees at the last moment. My mother laid the tulips on the stone and shrugged.

  ‘Was it?’ she said. ‘Perhaps. It was dark, and you were so alike then, when you were small. You know, when you were born I tied ribbons around your wrists. Blue for you, green for Morgan. So that I could tell you apart. But the ribbons kept coming off; I kept getting you confused. I would come in to get you, and you’d be all tangled up together, the ribbons on the floor by your cot. Or I’d leave you lying on a blanket in the shade while I hung out the washing and come back to find them lost. I don’t think it really mattered; you were both healthy, both strong little boys. There was no need to separate you. And by the time you were old enough to be different, I could tell you apart easily.’ She smiled, leaned back and pressed her hands against her back, tilted her head up to feel the warmth of the sun.

  ‘Of course it matters!’ I said.

  ‘Samuel!’ snapped Ana.

  My mother laughed, shrugged. ‘Perhaps you are Morgan, after all, and he is you.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ I said. ‘Fucking hell!’

  ‘Samuel, please,’ said Ana. I hesitated. Her hair had started to come down and her face was flushed. Beside her, my mother seemed even paler, less substantial.

  They crouched side by side in the carefully mown grass. Not quite touching. The afternoon sun cast their long, parallel shadows across the path. The same length, lengthening further as the day declined. The same rough forms distended by the sun. Till at length one became more dense, its shadow more blue, while the other shuddered slightly in the breeze.

  If only she were a figment of my imagination. An old woman kneeling by her husband’s grave. Her son’s grave. Killed in a war – either or both – his body returned and interred far away from the place where he had died. If only she were merely a character in a story: a dying woman whose grief and cruelty and forgetfulness were merely metaphors for some larger, and lesser, pain. More terrible and more distinct, but remote and artificial, like a painting. A fiction in which the knife penetrates the body. The wounds open themselves, and weep. The old woman will die, but her dying will always be about to occur, and occurring; it will never be completed. The pages in which she is dying can be revisited again and again; they will always be in the present tense. Her dying will never slip into the past tense; she will never become a ghost or a memory. She will always be a dying woman, kneeling, her hand almost the same colour as the stone for which it reaches as she stands.

  *

  ‘I’m having trouble with the translation,’ I admitted to my mother, as we walked along the river on Friday. There was stiffness in her joints, and though she had wanted to come down to the river and walk after chemo, as we did every week, she was struggling. I could see that this would be one of the last walks along the river we shared.

  After so many months of treatment, her veins had collapsed, exhausted. The nurse had taken half an hour to find a viable vein while my mother, I imagined, looked away, ashamed of her body’s refusal to cooperate. While the nurse pressed and failed, my mother talked about literature, her eternal subject, hesitating every now and then when the needle entered her. During today’s long infusion – four hours – she sat upright in her pressed suit and discussed Housman, striding from anecdotes about his life to analyses of his works, and then on to long, carefully enunciated quotations from his work. The poems, of course, but also – because she is nothing if not a completist – the critical edition of Manilius’s Astronomica.

  She paused, looking out over the breadth of the river to the mangrove swamps on the other side. A pelican was perched on the end of a small pier. She pretended to be engrossed by it; to be pausing to view the world, rather than to say farewell to it. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘What is the problem?’

  ‘There are new symbols. Eighteen of them. I can’t work out what they mean, what they’re for. They’re not like the rest of the language: they’re ideograms, I think, not new syllables.’

  ‘Is this all that’s left of the work? Are you nearly done, then?’

  I shook my head. ‘They’re all on the tenth page.’

  ‘So leave them; come back to them later.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t work that way.’

  My mother smoothed her hands down the sides of her skirts and straightened, avoiding pressing at the pain in her back.

  ‘Did you talk to the nurse about that pain? Have it noted on your chart?’

  ‘Come on,’ she said, turning back towards the car, ‘it’s almost lunchtime. We should head home.’

  We turned back, the breeze blowing towards us now. My mother buttoned her jacket closed. ‘Are they borrowed from some other language?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but they seem familiar – as if I should recognise them.’

  ‘Have you asked Ana to look at them?’

  A cyclist approached us, ringing his bell to warn us to move out of the way. My mother kept walking along the path, as though she hadn’t noticed his approach. He rang his bell again, and she glanced up at him, caught his eye, and kept walking. ‘Christ!’ the rider mumbled, swerving onto the grass to move around us. I had a small, blunt urge to jab my fist into him as he passed.

  ‘She might know what he was working on. He might have discussed it with her,’ my mother said.

  I shook my head
. ‘He didn’t discuss his work with anyone.’

  ‘Perhaps he uses these new symbols later in the book. If you keep going, their context might give you an indication of their meaning.’

  Two days later she called to tell me – in her clipped and unadulterated way – that the ache in her back was, as it turned out, a quite large tumour in her spine.

  ‘Have you been working?’ she asked me. ‘Have you shown those ideograms to Ana?’

  I pressed my palm against my forehead, though I had no headache. A tumour in her spine. The page with its eighteen symbols was pinned up, in a plastic sleeve, on the corkboard in my study. I had been staring at it when she called, wondering again, in an idle way, what they meant. That morning, I had found another one of them in a passage that was otherwise fairly simple to translate:

  He dreams his brother’s dreams. Opens his fists and lets them come in because [—] is there, and he cannot bear not to see [its] terrible, lovely face.

  The door of the study was open whenever I wasn’t working. Ana could see the symbols there, pinned on the board opposite the door, whenever she walked past. Sometimes, she came into the room and spoke to me, brought tea or the phone, stuck her head in to ask about dinner or to tell me she was going down to the cabin to work. She had seen them at least a dozen times without saying anything, without appearing to mark their presence.

  I did not tell my mother that I had seen her in my study, looking at them, two days ago.

  I came home early and the house was pretending to be empty. I opened the door and stepped in, quietly, as the sense of secrecy required. I pushed in through the envelope of calm. Her cup sat, rinsed and dry, upended on the draining board by the sink. Each door along the hall was closed, except for the door to my study. I knew she was in there. I was standing in the hall and I could see her, or part of her at least, standing before the noticeboard, her hand stretched out as though to touch the marks suspended there. The phone began ringing and she didn’t come out to answer it. She turned her head to the side and listened. I leaned back a little, out of her line of sight. Four rings, five, before the phone fell silent.

  ‘I’ve been working on a different section,’ I said to my mother, shaking the memory away.

  She hesitated for a moment. ‘Samuel,’ she said. ‘Sam,’ her voice declining in the late day’s light. ‘For me, one flowery Maytime, / It went so ill that I / Designed to die.’

  I looked out the window. Ana was in the garden, kneeling down beside a bed filled with fishbone fern that she was tearing out by the roots. Her hair was knotted at the back of her head.

  She was wearing an old hat that had softened into shapelessness and a pair of my shorts – holey and covered in paint splashes. She tilted back onto her heels and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, saw me, standing there on the back deck watching her, and smiled and blew me a kiss. Her belly was round and pink and sheened with sweat.

  ‘Housman,’ I said into the phone.

  There is, of course, the silence of death. Absolute and final, it dissolves speech as it dissolves the body. Word by word, the speaker rots, until only her bones remain, and these bones – though clearly once part of her – bear no resemblance to the creature that lived and moved and spoke. We could imagine that this silence is obstinate: to us, stuck here in the shade of life, it seems that the dead refuse to speak. They hold their tongues, as the saying goes, between mossed and broken teeth. But this is mere fanciful imagination. Accusation and narcissism. Perhaps it would be truer to believe that the dead do speak, but not in a language we can understand. And not to us.

  *

  The year my first girlfriend, Fiona Bell, married someone else, I moved out of home, though I didn’t go far. Over the years we had slowly reclaimed the small flat above the bookshop, hauling out rubbish, putting in shelves, replacing the broken windows and the swollen, flaking chipboard cupboards of the kitchenette. There was a bathroom and an office, a single bedroom and a lounge room, with windows looking out onto the street in one direction, over the yard towards the river in the other.

  My mother gave me the key as a birthday present and though she didn’t say I had to go, we both knew it was time. I had stayed there before that, on and off, on weekends or during the Christmas period, when stock piled up on the stairs and we stayed open for longer hours. And in the first few years I would sometimes open the shop to find Morgan had been there. He had a key to the back door, which could be locked separately so that you didn’t have to go through the shop. And though we trusted him, we always locked the door from the flat into the shop at night.

  I had lost my virginity to Fiona there, on the old single bed beneath the uncurtained windows. The bedsprings had creaked and she had giggled each time they made one of their loud and surprisingly comical noises. It was the night of our high school graduation and she was wearing a long green dress and silver shoes. Her blond hair was stiffened and curled and threaded with silver ribbons. The dress had thin straps, one of which broke at some point. At three in the morning I had gone through all the boxes and drawers in my mother’s office until I found a sewing kit and, while Fiona sat almost naked in the rear window of the shop, smoking and watching the river, I had stitched the strap back in place and thought that this was love.

  I went to Fiona’s wedding and met the fellow: a nice enough guy, uncomfortable in his rented suit. I wished them well, kissed her on the cheek. She had been beautiful once, and she still was, but now her beauty was ordinary and womanish and settled. I could no longer imagine her naked in an open window, smoking and talking about leaving town, her small breasts exposed to the night air.

  As a wedding gift, I gave them a 1799 edition of Le Roman de la Rose. The five volumes were bound in full, straight-grain Moroccan leather, blind stamped and gilt edged. There was a smattering of foxing on the first and last blank leaves, and an inscription from Heloise to her Abelard – an antique affectation or an act of secrecy. In the centre of the third volume I found a lover’s note, folded flat, pressed in and left behind centuries earlier.

  The gift had not, of course, been on the endless catalogue of towels and forks and glassware on the bridal gift registry, but I had thought about it for a long time and decided that, more than matching plates and fish knives, what Fiona needed – what she and her husband needed – was a sense of the grandeur and complications of love and marriage. In the face of ordinary days, they would require poetry to refill their longing for each other: the allegorical dream of de Lorris’s poetry, and the satiric bite of de Meun’s tail. When I met her husband – when I saw them standing together at the altar, their backs to us and their heads bent – I realised how sentimental and foolish I had been to buy her such a gift, which was a reflection of my own romantic dreams about her – about us – far more than a gift celebrating what she had settled for. But it was done. I was the town bookseller; my mother’s son. It was what people expected.

  The afternoon of the wedding, in the small bathroom where I had first shaved, and where my brother had once put on my clothes, I stood buttoning up my white shirt and listening to people shuffling about downstairs. The door to the shop was open, as it usually was during business hours, and I could hear the steamy hiss of the coffee machine, the clatter of heels on the tiled floor, the sounds of conversation and cups. I closed up one button and then another, slipped my cufflinks into the cuffs. I left my tie and coat hanging on the back of the bathroom door and went out to the kitchenette to make tea, standing watching the cars in the street: pulling in, pulling out, driving up and down the wide familiar street.

  I could have married Fiona. We would have bought a little house on the river, and she would have worked – as she did at the time she married – at the counter of the chemist’s until our first child was born. Her father would have helped us renovate the baby’s room, painting the walls eggshell blue and building a wardrobe to house endless neat piles of pink and white blankets and singlets; her mother would have sewn little bonnets and dresses,
embroidered a long, white christening gown for the baby to wear while I held her with her crown tipped towards the font. We would have been friends with other couples. Had dinner parties and talked about life in a small town: the pleasures and comforts of knowing who was who and what was what. She would have worked in the tuckshop, and sent our children to the same school where we had met. She would have grown plump, stopped dyeing her hair, gone back to work part-time. At night, while the children slept, we would have sat on our back deck drinking wine, watching the light spooned out on the water. Though we were sitting together, our spirits would have been solitary, as if each of us was sitting alone in front of our own river.

  I hadn’t worn a suit since the day of my father’s funeral, when Morgan and I had carried his coffin from the church to the hearse, and from the hearse to his grave. We were too young and small to bear any of the real weight. We were positioned in the middle, on opposite sides of the brass-railed box, behind the tall, strong men who still smelled of the sea. The day before the funeral, the funeral director had showed us how to heave the coffin up to our shoulders, how to lay our hands on its side to keep it steady, how to keep pace with the men in front and behind. We practised lifting and carrying a casket in the front room of the funeral parlour, where the sample coffins were laid out on deep, softly lit shelves.

  Mr Ealing had offered to drive us down to the church on the morning of the service and, though my mother tried to refuse, he had insisted, saying it was what our father would have wanted. She got up early, cleaned the house, set out chairs for the mourners who would come back after the service. Before the sun was up she had baked a batch of cupcakes. Chocolate and bitter orange – our father’s favourite. She was standing at the window in the kitchen, washing dishes, dressed in black behind her faded pink and white apron, when she saw Mr Ealing park in the street and start walking up the path. Despite the apron, she had smeared batter on the side of her dress. Long handprints were smeared down both thighs.