Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  Something dropped inside me, and kept falling. Something that might never reach its nadir.

  Death had crept in and taken my mother while she was sleeping. Perhaps it had come out of her dreams. She would have woken in her dark room, lying on her side, with death crouched beside the bed, a hand resting on the mattress beside her hand, like an old friend. She had been alone with it, maybe confused, wondering who it was that had come, so late and so quietly, into her room.

  I had wanted to finish the work – I had wanted our child to be born – before she went. Only when she was gone did I see how pointless either gift would have been. What could she take with her, after all, into death’s strange house? All her worldy goods? All her sorrows? All the things she knew, the phrases she had perfected and which she repeated, again and again, measuring out the movements of her life in a dogged pursuit of perfection. Nothing, after all. Endless nothing.

  *

  I put up my hand to knock at my mother’s door, already anticipating her footsteps on the other side, but then I recalled that the dead don’t require our politesse. The key was in my hand and the house, though filled with her, was empty.

  Suddenly, and with a vividness that hurt, I remembered my mother’s hands. How I took for granted their presence in my life. How they looked, at the end, lying flat on the sheets beside her body. Her nails perfectly trimmed, the bones showing through the skin, the skin mottled and bruised. They must have been beautiful once, but by the time I looked at them – really looked – they were the documents of her care for us. She had bathed her children, mended our torn clothes. I remembered how once when she was mending one of our shirts she’d pricked her finger and put her finger in her mouth to suck away the blood. How she’d done the same when I cut my own finger on a kitchen knife. She had washed dishes and made beds and glued together broken toys. She had strung Christmas lights outside our windows and planted vegetables and flowers in the garden. She had weeded paths and changed our bicycle tyres and cut our hair while we sat on a red stool in the garden, our curls falling on a plastic sheet. She had swept up our childhood curls and collected them in brown paper bags labelled with our names and age. She had kept these packets in a drawer with small cardboard boxes containing our baby teeth and report cards, the tiny plastic armbands we had worn in the hospital.

  I remembered the steady pressure of her hand on my shoulder as she had stood beside me at the door of my classroom on the first day of school, the cool lengths of her fingers against my crisply ironed white shirt, the almost imperceptible squeeze of reassurance before she released me.

  She had lifted us up, swinging us between herself and my father as we walked across the park; she had held our wrists and spun us until we were drunk with spinning, laughing when she released us and we staggered and fell on the green lawn. She had stood in the river, the water up around her shoulders. She had urged us to jump into the water. Her fingers wriggling. We jumped – together – and she caught us, one in each arm. She had taken our pulses when we were sick, cupped our chins and tilted our heads so that we had had to look into her eyes when we were faking. She had knelt and faced us, holding our shoulders, when we screamed in pain, calmly palmed the bones over our too fast hearts when we had woken from bad dreams. Late at night, returning home, she would carry us from the car, our warm bodies slumping over her shoulders. She had lifted us up and trod barefoot up the path to the house, carried us through the door, up the stairs to our room, laid us each in our beds, pulled up the sheets. I remembered her cool cheek pressed to ours. Then she was gone.

  I put the key in the door, heard the hollowness of the hallway before I felt its breath. The house was complete with emptiness – as it had seemed, sometimes, when we returned from trips away. It had fallen into the quiet of its own secret conversation. It had forgotten us, and the lives we had lived in its rooms, just as the wind forgets the trees through which it has blown.

  I went through to the kitchen, filled the kettle, threw open the windows to let in the early morning breeze. I turned on my mother’s AWA radio, still tuned to the ABC. Allegri’s Miserere Mei, Deus was playing: the Tallis Scholars’ live recording from the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, complete with the thick static I remembered from my mother’s beloved LP, the extraordinary voices of the sopranos soaring out of the resonant hush that is particular to a capella work.

  When we were fourteen my mother played the Miserere on our birthday, waking us by setting up her portable record player in our room and dropping the needle at precisely 3.00 am: the time when the service began in the Sistine Chapel in 1770. We woke to the scent of twenty-seven burning candles, and the soft, blended voices of the first choir. ‘At fourteen years old,’ she said, ‘Mozart was travelling through Italy with his father. Leopold was taking him to Bologna, to the music teacher Padre Martini. By Easter they were in Rome. Wednesday was the day of the Tenebrae: one of only two days of the year when the Miserere would be performed in the Sistine Chapel. The Miserere was considered so sacred, so precious a Roman secret, that the performers were threatened with excommunication if they smuggled a transcription of the music out of the church. Mozart listened carefully to the nine voices in two choirs: one with four and one with five parts, to their elaborate performance of an improvised counterpoint, the ancient but simple falsobordone style with its substrate of Gregorian plainsong. That evening, as he and his father sat in their hotel, Mozart transcribed the entire Miserere, from memory. On Good Friday, the boy and his father returned to the chapel. Mozart had his illegal manuscript rolled up in his hat; he had come to listen, and to make any corrections to his first transcription.’

  Our mother stood and opened the windows to let in the scent of the earth softening towards morning, and to turn up the music. As the choirs sang, she extinguished the candles as they had done in the chapel centuries ago, until only one remained, guttering in the window, set into a cupcake. ‘Happy birthday, little men,’ she said as the final words of the concluding Miserere were sung. ‘May your fourteenth year be as wicked and courageous as Mozart’s.’ She held the cupcake before us and we blew out the candle and then she leaned over it and kissed our foreheads. It was almost light. Almost day.

  *

  The more I age, the younger Morgan becomes. He is no longer the man of authority. The man of the world. Everything had started with that boy who set out from our shared childhood home before his sixteenth birthday, and it was to that childhood, and to the experience that sent him reeling out of childhood, that he returned in Motet. And it is to that boy – to his hunched shoulders, his dark eyes, his sleeplessness, his wandering, his sense of fear and possibility – to which our work eternally returns. Only after my mother’s death, reading that work, thinking back over all of the other work, could I see the pattern.

  His early works expose the vivid hunger of his engagement with – first – the natural world, and then the people, the cultures and countries, he encountered, but they are also, always, underscored by an experience of dying. Of ending. The movements, the vacillations, across languages in search of an ideal language with which to speak about the things he understood about dying demonstrate how difficult he found it to reconcile the world he had discovered the day our father died with the one he had imagined lay before him as a child: the world he had hoped to encounter. His struggles broke open the settled taxonomies of faith, politics, selfhood and community. The stamina with which he undertook those explorations is staggering: in body and later on the page and in his mind. It lends the lie to my assumption that he had settled into an ascetic, hermetic life.

  Despite all his efforts to depart, he was still in the world. He could not escape it. It turned inside him as he paced the rooms of his homes, and hiked through mountains and alongside rivers, his mind packed with the materiality of the world, sharpened by it. He harboured questions, and he was determined to engage with those questions, to have the courage to ask them every day.

  In one of his earliest letters he wrote to me abou
t our father’s death. Only that once, and never again. They had walked home, as was their custom, and before coming to the house they had gone to the shed to look at the boat our father was building, and to drink whisky from the bottle he kept there. Our father poured them a shot each and they sat in the doorway and watched the stars and didn’t speak. When their glasses were empty he went back inside, and Morgan heard him moving about. He thought he was trying to find the bottle. Morgan heard something fall and roll. Our father swore, softly. Damn.

  It was not dark inside the shed, Morgan said. Light came in through the broken window, and through the open doors, and between the slats of the timber. It was almost morning. He saw our grandfather’s old rifle in our father’s hands, and the box of ammunition spilled on the bench. The cartridges shone dully. He asked Morgan to go outside. Morgan shook his head. Our father ordered him to go. He told Morgan he wouldn’t be long. Morgan hesitated. He went outside. The light was starting to rise in the field. The wet ground shone. Morgan heard the rifle being loaded: a thick, quick thunk of sound. Then a loud slide and lock. He turned his head. Our father was holding the gun, awkwardly, with the muzzle pushed up into the soft flesh beneath his chin and two fingers of his right hand curled around the trigger.

  Morgan went into the shed. Our father was bigger and stronger than Morgan, but they were both determined. Morgan grabbed the gun and pulled it towards him. Our father swung it sideways, and back, cracking it against the side of Morgan’s face. Morgan punched our father in the shoulder, in the chest. He said it felt like a dream of fighting rather than something real. He wanted to get the gun, but he knew that it was one of our father’s most precious possessions. Our grandfather’s .303 Lee–Enfield; the weapon the old man had carried in the First World War, and which had been sent home to his family when he died. Our father had spent every weekend, as a boy, polishing the weapon, practising with it. He was proud of how well-preserved it was. Sometimes, he took it out and showed us how to fire it, getting us to time him while he shot ten, sometimes fifteen rounds in a minute.

  Morgan didn’t want to damage the weapon, and he knew it was cocked, ready to fire. He fought, therefore, like a dancer. Trying to be firm and thoughtful, each movement a conscious thing in which he concentrated on the exact arrangement of his body in relation to the weapon, his father, the world. He danced, trying to convince our father with his movements of something he barely understood.

  Perhaps it was this, he wrote, that failed him. Finally, our father pushed Morgan up against the boat and held him there with his forearm across Morgan’s chest. The gun was between them. Morgan felt our father’s fingers curl around the trigger. Our father’s breath was hot, and tasted of whisky, but it was steady. Morgan said that, with the gun between them and our father’s knuckles warm against his belly, he had not felt fear. He had been looking at our father’s face, but behind and around him he had seen the immense beauty of the shed, of the broken glass in the window, patched with tape, of the curve of the unfinished boat’s keel. He had put his hand on the barrel of the rifle, and felt the warmth and smoothness of the timber, the coolness of the metal. The whole world had seemed beautiful. Behind his father he saw the open door of the shed, and the light smoothing out the darkness, the same colour as the whisky. He could see his glass on the upturned milk crate in the doorway. He could smell the damp grass, and he could hear – faintly – our mother in the house. Or he thought he could. Our father stepped back, raised the rifle until he was aiming it at Morgan’s chest. This happened quickly. An action almost like a reflex. The muzzle was an inch from Morgan’s bare skin. He knew he was going to die. His bones were like twigs, his blood like water, ready to be spilled. He knew what our father felt: the certainty of his death. The fact of it, lodged inside him like a seed that had to be allowed to split open and grow. The relentless ache of it – of having a dead man’s heart screwed in under his ribs – he could no longer stand. Morgan twitched forward, so that he was standing with the muzzle pressing into his skin. He closed his eyes for a second, overwhelmed by the pain of our father’s sorrow, the world’s extraordinary beauty. Our father fired the first round.

  Morgan counted the seconds; he tried to count the shots that were fired, as though they were undertaking a test of his father’s skill. He felt nothing, he said, not for a long time, but he heard what seemed like the constant thwop of bullets pursuing their course through skin, heart, teeth, tongue, hair. Through tissue and bone. Through wood and earth.

  When it was over he knelt in the blood wallow. He lifted our father’s head into his lap and held it. In his letter he wrote that all he could think of was our parents’ game of quoting at each other, and of Ted Hughes’s line, which our father had so often misquoted, about the still-warm, stopped brain of a just-dead god.

  *

  When Ana came home it was almost three in the morning. I was rolled on my side, watching the moon, pretending to sleep. When she came into the room I tried to make my breathing steady. She didn’t turn on the light; she tried to move quietly, as though she really believed I was sleeping. She took off her clothes and laid them out, as she always did, in neat layers on the chair beside the door, before sliding into bed. Her body was cool. The moon of her belly pressed into my back. She leaned over and kissed the back of my neck, and then my shoulder.

  ‘What happened over there?’ I said ‘Why were you the one to bring him home?’

  There was a moment of hesitation, as if she were stirring herself from sleep, adjusting herself to the idea that all her quietness, all her steady movements in the dark so as not to disturb me, had been in vain. Perhaps she was angry that I had tricked her, lying in the dark like a spy, waiting till she was comfortable before offering my barbed question. I should have let her know I had heard her boots crunch on the path, then drop to the bricks at the door, the door creaking open and closed, her bare feet on the floorboards. She went into the kitchen first, and poured water from the jug in the fridge and drank it.

  The whole time I had lain there, letting her think I was sleeping. I had wanted to get up and ask her where she’d been, what she’d been doing, who she had been with, even though I knew where she’d been, and what she’d been doing. I wanted to shout at her, and make her tell me why she went there every night, what it was she thought about while she carved and polished and turned the wood in Morgan’s empty cabin. I had lain there for hours, furious and afraid, believing that going down there was a sign of something. I had lain in the dark, trying to sleep, certain she would not return. I dozed and woke and tried not to check the time. She would be back, I told myself. She was working, that was all.

  When she came home I should have got up, gone and stood behind her in the strange blue light before the open fridge and put my arms around her and her belly and kissed her. Perhaps the baby kept her up at night; perhaps the hormones swirling in her body, the cells dividing and multiplying, made her vibrate with energy.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered. ‘I am here now, with you, aren’t I?’

  I waited until her breathing deepened and her body grew heavy and slow with sleep, before I whispered, No, I don’t think you are.

  *

  I stopped the car and got out, and felt the water close in over my feet, trickle down the throats of my boots and collar. When I glanced up the road, towards the downed tree, I could see the rain spinning down through the glare of the headlights. The tree’s canopy was broad and leafy. Perhaps it would be easy to drag off the road. I could see the long, thick trunk blocking our way home. Half as wide as I am tall. Too thick to chainsaw, even if it wasn’t too wet and dark. I worked my way through the branches to the trunk and grabbed hold. The water ran in small streams down its smooth bark. I placed my hands flat on its surface and bent to take the weight. If only my brother were here, my father. One of us on each side in the driving rain. My father would count and then the three of us would push forward.

  I took the strain, heaved. The trunk rolled a little, but as so
on as I released it, it rolled back again. I put my shoulder against it, pushed with all my weight. It rolled almost a quarter-turn, and I was sure I felt it give a little, nudged a few degrees off the road, before my boots gave way and I slid down into the mud. The tree rocked back into place, almost pinning me.

  I tried again, and again. I was slick with mud and rain and sweat. I took off my shirt, which was torn anyway, and pressed my back to the tree, pushing backwards, scraping the skin from my ribs. I was looking into the headlights of the car where Ana waited; the hazard lights flickered off and on, off and on. My boots slipped and I went down again, the thick cold mud cushioning my landing.

  The headlights flicked off. There was a sudden, violent snap of lightning and I saw Ana standing behind the opened driver’s door, holding herself up.

  Another crack, and then a shot of lightning illuminating everything: the road, the trees, the thick ribbons of stormwater rushing along the road’s surface. Behind Ana I saw a figure moving, like a shadow, running towards her. Was it my brother, coming for her, come up out of the water, poured down from that other world like a man-headed fish? Was it my mother – my glorious, strong, young mother coming through the frayed light of the headlights to haul me home? I could smell the mud, smell the earth reasserting itself. One of the eucalypts near the side of the road was ribboned in white froth. Like a dryad bathing in the storm. The rain came down in waves.

  I was not going to be able to move the tree. I went back to the car. The rain was so loud I could not hear what Ana said, but I could see the look on her face, the way she gripped the car door to hold herself up, the way her other hand cupped her sodden belly. She fumbled for me, grasped my upper arms and held on, pressing her wet head into my chest as a contraction moved through her.