Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  She knew why he was there, though for a moment she had forgotten. She put the kettle on, wiped the benches clean, scooped tea into the pot and went upstairs to change, sending me down to let him in and ask him to wait. When the kettle boiled I took it off the stove, poured the tea, and went to find her.

  She was standing in front of the dresser in her bedroom – their bedroom – half-buttoned into a dark blue linen shirt. She was working slowly and watching herself in the mirror as though trying to remember how to do it. How to slip a small, flat, round piece of plastic through a tiny slot. Her face was loose on her bones, as though she’d had a stroke. As though the flood tide of blood in her husband’s brain had brimmed into her own. She had buttoned the shirt wrong, so that it was longer on one side than the other, and the collar sat skewed around her too thin shoulders.

  Enki was curled up at her feet, his head on his paws. When I came in he looked up at me reproachfully and I saw suddenly how old he was. Our dog, who died a few years later, and who all his long life carried about in his head my father’s brown eyes: wilful, loving, reproachful, amused. I stepped over him and he sloped off to the other side of the room, flumped down onto the floor there and watched us uncertainly. Our mother sat and stared out the window while I undid each button and rebuttoned it into its proper slot.

  The coffins we had practised with in the funeral parlour were empty and though they had been heavy, theirs was a hollow, solid weight. When we lifted my father’s coffin, despite all our efforts, we did it with a small lurch and he shifted inside it. His weight like that of a great dead fish rolling on the ship’s deck. Mr Ealing, in front of me, steadied us and nodded. Letting us know it was time to step forward. Our ears were pressed against the box in which our father lay. On the other side of the casket I could sense Morgan listening, as I was, for the sound of his drumbeat heart to begin.

  *

  I was still in the study when I heard Ana pull up, the ute’s tyres crunching over the gravel. I went out to help her carry in the groceries and newspapers and books.

  ‘I dropped in on Solange on the way home,’ Ana said.

  ‘Solange?’

  ‘Your mother. She rang before I left and I said I’d bring her some things. Books, mostly.’

  ‘I didn’t hear the phone ring.’

  ‘You were working.’

  ‘How is she?’

  Ana shrugged, colour rising in her cheeks.

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you saw her.’

  ‘She invited us for dinner tomorrow night,’ Ana said, arranging oranges in a bowl on the table, removing the blue sticky labels and sticking them on the back of her hand, stacking the fruit in a pyramid.

  I opened the fridge and starting putting away the cold things: milk, cream, cheese. ‘I don’t like the idea of her cooking for us. It’s a lot of effort. She needs to rest.’

  ‘She’d like to see you. She’s been doing quite well lately, and she likes to cook for you.’ Ana cupped her belly with both hands, as though taking the weight of the baby. ‘Are you afraid to go, Samuel?’

  I closed my eyes and tried not to picture my mother’s thin body cut open, the cancer blackening and filling her lungs, the cancer flooding up in the curved bowl of her ribs like swelling foam as I knelt and bailed her out like a boat. Her face pinched with pain. I tried to forget the conversations about nothing. About everything but death. The endless hours sitting with her, listening to her talk about the past, the smell of her body’s pain and rot wafting out beneath the smells of antiseptic and morphine. ‘Scared shitless,’ I said.

  Winter

  I visited my mother late on a Friday afternoon, in the last week of June. It was cold. When I entered the house, I was grateful for the fug of warmth, for the familiar smells of home, however occluded by the new smells of plastic and disinfectant and illness. She was in the lounge room, propped up in her old chair with a quilt tucked over her legs. The home-care nurse – Rachel – let me in. She was friendly enough, made coffee for us both, and served cake. These weren’t her responsibilities, but she seemed to have grown fond of my mother, and to be performing these duties out of a sense of pity, because she had no daughter to sit with her. Only me.

  I wanted to tell my mother about the dream I had had, in which I was a baby, and she came in and lay me in a cradle next to Morgan, who was already sleeping. In the dream it was dark, and she had snuck into the room like a wraith. Her face was white. She was barefoot and young, and her hair was loose and long and dark. The house was sleeping, along with everyone in it. My father turned in his sleep and made a noise, soft as a child’s noise, in his sleep. It was so quiet that I could hear my mother’s heart beating in her chest. She lay me down beside my brother and settled the blanket over us, kissed our foreheads. Behind her I could see the stars, pinpricks of light shining vividly through the open window. A handful of them fell into her hair. Morgan and I curled up together; his milk-plump flesh was soft and new. I heard the door closing and smelled the fading scent of her perfume. Morgan lay beside me, but there was something unfamiliar about him. His smell, his shape. Morgan’s eyes opened, his hand curled around one of the bars of the cradle. I reached out a hand and grasped Morgan’s foot. I suckled on it, tasting my brother’s skin, but the taste was unfamiliar: bitter and cool, where once it had been dark and warm as turned soil.

  Of course, I didn’t tell her anything about the dream, or ask her whether Morgan and I had shared a cradle when we were small. Instead, we talked about the weather: rain and floods and droughts out west, insurance and roof repairs. Then she began to talk about my father – about her husband – in a way I’d never heard her speak of him before. She kept going over and over a memory she had of him swimming laps in the sea pool at Bermagui.

  ‘It was not long before he died. He had been unwell, and he had always loved the ocean baths, even when he was a little boy. You know how he hated to be indoors for too long. He had been down there all morning, since before I woke, speaking with the lifesavers and the early walkers. He had stripped down to his swimmers and dived in. He still looked young in the water. So strong. And he swam with firm, even strokes, back and forth for hours. I knew his illness was terminal, but that was not the worst of it, not really. He had had episodes of confusion and poor balance. He had not been able to recall, in the specialist’s office in Sydney the day before, the date of his birth, or of his sons’ births. Or even my name.’ She smiled. ‘Of course, he had never been very good at remembering dates. Still, there he was, swimming back and forth in the cold water.’

  It had become dark. We could hear Rachel in the kitchen, bustling about with pots and cutlery. My mother got up and turned on the lights: they were low and dim. She moved towards the fire and put another log on, with some difficulty, before returning to her chair as though returned from some long journey. Had my father been ill before he died? Was she revealing some truth, or confusing the past, muddling her own illness with his? I watched her moving stiffly around the room, touching things as though they were unfamiliar but deeply loved, before she returned to her chair and leaned back, closing her eyes to let the memories come in, like a tide, like a dream.

  ‘It was the last summer we spent down south. He had insisted we make the trip, even though he had been unwell and it was such a long drive. You know how he was. And all he did was swim. Every morning.’ She looked around the room as though he might be hovering somewhere nearby, ready to challenge her, or to explain himself. The framed photographs, the magazines, the shelves packed with books. There had never seemed to be a great deal of my father in these rooms, but what there had been when he was alive was still here, in the images of boats, in the subscription to the Journal of the National Maritime Historical Society that kept coming and coming after he died and for which, I presumed, my mother continued to pay.

  ‘He walked down to the blue pool every day. It was a long walk. And cold. And the steps down to the pool are steep. Not so bad going down, but coming up again … I
would sit at the top, in the car park, with a thermos of coffee and a book, but I wouldn’t read. I would watch him swimming back and forth. He was so beautiful in the water, so confident and strong. Like a god.’ She smiled at this, apologetic, but sure of the rightness of the simile. Her gaze wandered to the fire and she was lost to me for a moment. The image of my father’s tall, bronzed body, beaded with water, hovered before her in the darkened room. Regaining herself, she smiled and shook her head.

  ‘So, Morgan,’ she said, trying to drag us both into the uncertain present. I did not correct her; she had often confused my brother’s and my names when we were boys. ‘So, you see, your father …’ I had to force myself not to lean forward, not to move closer or reach for her and so break the spell of her confidence. Not to grab her and shake her: force her to know me, and to know the past, and to help us to meet, finally. Instead I sat barely breathing, letting her strange spell hover over us. I was Morgan, and she was young again, and my father stood, curious, in the shadows outside the room. Here, at last, I thought she would tell me the truth about my father, about what had shaped her sorrow and my own strangled life. She stirred, leaned forward over her thin knees, as if trying to force her body into some long-forgotten vigour. ‘Your father was a good man,’ she said quietly.

  And then Rachel came in to tell us dinner was ready. My mother leaned back into her chair again, looking exhausted, and an hour later, with a kiss on her cheek and twenty dollars folded into my palm as though I were a child going to the movies with friends, I left.

  I left the house furious. I tried to be sympathetic and forgiving: to remember how old she was, and that she didn’t owe me any confidences, and that her memory, her grasp of reality, was bound to fail along with her body. I tried to recollect the thousand kindnesses she had afforded me over the years. I tried to focus on how much I would miss her when she was gone. The expense of all the phone calls I had made when I was away, and the extra hours Rachel had spent caring for her.

  But I couldn’t. Or, rather, the more I thought about these things the more enraged I became.

  That was it, I thought. That was all she had to say, after all these years: he was a good man.

  I went home – a long drive – the whole way I felt an urge to swerve into the oncoming traffic, to shatter something, to break something so irrefutably that the pain would be like a solid object. Something to anchor me in the wash of imprecision and anger.

  My own house was dark and cold. I brought in wood, lit the fire, opened a bottle of wine. The whole time anger seethed in me. All these years. All this time I had stayed, and cared for her. Living and working and loving within a limited circle in order to be there for her – for what? For the revelation that my father had been a good man? I could have walked away ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Instead, I had waited like a penitent at the mouth of the Sybil’s cave until finally she spoke.

  A good man. Was there any more banal, more pointless, more dishonest conclusion she could have drawn? Now, it is more deeply engraved in me than anything else she said about him. My father was a good man. Not extraordinary, not brave or strong or even admirable, but good. The Proto-Indo-European root word for good means ‘fit, suitable’. That is, ‘good’ refers to something that has been assembled or put together in a proper way. Something that is ideally suited to the purpose for which it is intended. My father was a good man: a man fit for the purposes to which he had been put. Is this really how my mother saw him, as someone who had been good at being a man: a model of masculinity? Or perhaps she believed he was good in one of those other senses: beneficial, dependable, or morally admirable. Analogous with something which is so apt that its function goes unnoticed: like good shoes, or a good roof. Did she believe he was good as the saints and philosophers are good: faithful and decent, having the kind of nobility that comes from putting the needs of others above their own?

  Perhaps she believed he was like a good translation: faithful, clear, true.

  I stayed away for a week. Longer, almost two weeks, before I relented and returned, unable to leave her to suffer alone. (Was I, then, a good son, or only the semblance of one, going through the motions, performing goodness because, perhaps, there was someone up in the car park above me, watching me swim back and forth, back and forth?) I knew my mother’s health had deteriorated, because I had called Rachel every day – twice a day sometimes – to hear about her incremental decline. I knew I would find her changed, and that she would never change in the ways I wanted her to, but she was still my mother.

  I was still a child, I realised. I had expected her to take as long declining as I had taken to grow. I had expected time to talk, to unknot the past, to reconcile whatever cankers lay in our hearts. When I reached the house and went inside, she was lying in a hospital bed: the kind that can be raised or lowered, at one end or another, arranging the patient without any need to touch them.

  Her skin was pale and holy, with a secret sheen I associated with death. Her breath, when I leaned in to kiss her cheek, smelled excessively sweet: a dark, thickly layered perfume of rot and apples. The radio was still on, turned low and tuned to the same channel. They were playing Isabelle Faust’s thoughtful and balanced performance of Bach’s D minor Chaconne.

  She struggled to drag breath up through the stones in her chest to speak.

  She told me, very precisely, and in a way that made me think that before I arrived she had memorised what she would say – had, in fact, been rehearsing her sentences while I was travelling towards her – what she had thought of my latest translation. A small piece – an essay – completed between bouts of grappling with Morgan’s work. It took great effort for us both to attend to the particulars. She told me again the story of Flaubert’s eighty-year-old niece, Caroline Commanville, quoting the last line of his Herodias to Willa Cather: Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient al-ter-na-tive-ment. How that final adverb staggers on the tongue, and in the mouth, like the hurried footsteps of John’s disciples bearing away their prophet’s severed head. ‘Flaubert,’ she said, closing her eyes momentarily to encounter and turn back the pain that assailed her, ‘he understood la mélodie de la phrase. As you, it seems, do not.’

  Two days later, driving through town on my way home from the market, I decided to drop in and try again. I parked on the street and watched the house for a while. My childhood home. The lights were on in my mother’s bedroom – dim, as if someone had thrown a yellow shawl over a lamp – but the rest of the house was dark. I pictured my mother and Rachel sitting in her room, listening to the radio again. My mother smiling a little as the music lifted and swelled and softened against the night air. Rachel reading from a book she had picked up in another room, perhaps. For a while, I had the sense that I should go in and sit with them, but it soon faded. My mother’s house would no longer accommodate me.

  *

  When my father died, Morgan spent a week in the hospital, though his wound was superficial. A narrow burn across the top of his left shoulder. My mother brought him home on a Wednesday. She drove off to collect him early. When the two of them returned I had made tea, and laid the kitchen table for lunch. Morgan stood in the doorway of the kitchen, his face almost unfamiliar – pale, thin, his eyes wider than they had been before – and said nothing. My mother came in, smiled, thanked me for laying the table. Straightened a serviette and filled the jug with milk. When she turned back to the table he had gone. Neither of us saw him go. She looked out the window and saw him walking away from the house, towards the road where we had once hidden, throwing rocks at the cars that passed.

  In the weeks that followed, the house grew quiet and dark. There were storms out at sea, and my father’s friends kept coming up to the house to sit with my mother and drink tea and talk. Occasionally, they would talk about our father. The man with whom they had traded observations about the sea and the tides. In some sense, they came not to comfort my mother, but to share with her the talk they could no longer share with him.


  For years, after the work of cleaning and packing away the nets was done, my father and his friends would head off to the pub together. Perched on stools at the bar, or – on fine days – hunched around a table out the back, their talk would lengthen like the late afternoon light. They would talk about their wives and their children, and tell stories about the storms they had survived. I imagined them becoming grand and verbose as the afternoon wore on, even philosophical, spinning yarns about Odysseus and Orion, the old hunter and fisher gods with their heavy heads, wall-eyed and solemn. But probably this is all my own romantic folly. Probably they spoke largely about the weather.

  Finally, on a Saturday afternoon when Mr Ealing came to call, my mother closed her eyes, tipped her head forward, and sighed. Mr Ealing didn’t know that this was a sure sign he had done something to disappoint her. Not something terrible, something ordinary, like forgetting to do your chores, or leaving your bike out in the rain, but something that necessitated her taking things into her own hands. She had been out in the yard, pegging clothes on the line, when Mr Ealing arrived. She finished what she was doing while he stood uncertainly on the path from the house to the line.

  ‘Can I help you with that, Solange?’ he said.

  She raised one perfect eyebrow and shook her head. ‘I’ll only be a moment,’ she said.

  When she’d finished, she took the empty basket into the laundry and then invited him into the kitchen. She offered him a seat, and he sat and watched her fine, strong back while she made tea. There was something terrible about the efficient, capable way she measured the leaves into the pot. He started to say something, perhaps in an attempt to soften her, when she turned and smiled and put a hand on his shoulder.