Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  When it had passed, I turned on the hazard lights and helped her into the back seat. Her pupils were wide and confused as a child’s, but she seemed otherwise calm and determined. There wasn’t enough room for both of us in the back seat, so she sat with her back against the baby’s car seat, and I positioned myself in the doorway. ‘There’s a tarp in the boot,’ she said.

  I got the tarp, as well as my fishing kit with its knives and coils of ten-pound line, and the picnic blanket we’d never used. Between contractions, I rigged the tarp as best I could to cover the gap between the roof of the car and the open door. It would have to do.

  The hazard lights blinked and clicked. The rain pounded on the car roof and the tarp and the road. Running in thick streams over the windows. Every now and then lightning flashed – less often after a while, and further off. Ana clenched her body like a fist, her face slick with sweat, gripping the seats, making strange, soft sounds like an animal and then letting go. Falling back. Her hands loose by her sides. Her unfocused gaze watching the sky through the rear window.

  I could feel all the words steadily draining from me, washed off my skin into the thick rivulets of mud. All the languages I had forgotten, all the promises I had made and broken. I could feel all the sentences I had written breaking apart like ice on a river, softening into thin scales and finally melting into the rush of spring. The long strings separated into words, momentarily, and then merely sounds. Flowing back to where I had last known what I needed to do or say; to the place where I had last believed I knew the words to make the world seem real.

  Ana rocked forward, grasped her shins, held her breath with the strain of pushing, pushing. I saw the child’s head, like the furred skin of a walnut, and reached out to catch him. His head first, eyes squeezed shut, features flattened and raw, and then his body, sliding almost easily towards me. Slippery and hot. Steaming in the cold night air.

  *

  Whatever evaluation we finally make of a work of art, or a human being, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. A stranger, a lover, a work of art, retains an identity of their own, deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation towards them, then, is simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of their expression – the weather of their heart – to intend, from the outset, to preserve some of the mystery within them as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for the openings, for the moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane.

  The philosophers say that beginning includes the intention to continue. That that moment – an opening sentence, a child’s first breath – is like a seed placed in fecund earth, covered over with a little soil. Watered in. But beginnings are never so simple, and do not always lead to the endings we imagine.

  I planted two hundred trees on our land the first year I lived there. Banksias, grevilleas, bloodwoods, callistemons, acacias, lilly pillies; fruit trees and shade trees; trees to attract birds and to feed native wildlife. They were small saplings when I planted them: most of them no more than a handspan tall. I dug deep holes for them, bucketed water up to them, mulched them, fertilised them, surrounded them with cloches and tree guards. I walked over the land almost every day, bucketing up water, pulling weeds, clawing back the mulch the bush turkeys had dragged away for their mounded nests.

  Most of the saplings survived, but some did not.

  Some failed to thrive for reasons I have never understood, while others shot up overnight, wavering on their thin stems in the summer storms. Some were eaten or uprooted by the turkeys, or some other wild creature. Some were beaten down by sudden, torrential rain they were too fragile to survive. Before I put tree guards around them, a few were crushed by horse riders passing through, or motorcyclists. But many of them failed for no reason; the ones beside and around them flourished while they faltered. When I returned to the nursery for more saplings, to plant out the final paddock, I checked each one carefully, examining the visible roots, the thready stems and the pale leaves for any signs of frailty or blight. I sought advice, bought books, spent a week digging, planting, mulching.

  Still, I lost some.

  Vigilance and care are not enough to ensure a good outcome. Which beginnings suggest good endings? How could I know, watching my son sleep, listening to his snuffling and his wails, how to begin? I looked at his small, crushed face, felt the weight of a great footstep in the forecourt of my heart, and opened the door. What else could I do? The wind rushed in. The sea with all its storms and terrors. The light that gleamed. The earth that turned.

  The house was dark, and Ana was sleeping. I drew back the curtains and let the moonlight in so that I could watch Ethan sleeping. Out there, in the sky-rivered dark, creatures moved. A bird rowed through the air – I heard its wings beating, felt the slap of cold air on my face – a bird so dark and strange it seemed made of darkness. It was midnight: he was three hours old.

  I peered at his fists, curled like leaf buds. Which endings were contained in these beginnings? Which endings could I change, which could I ward against? I lifted the sheet over his shoulder. The storm had settled into a steady downpour: the rain fell heavily on the roof but we were safe and warm inside the house. I leant over him; watching him sleep was a kind of prayer. I praised him by remaining awake. I praised him by waiting, watching.

  One in the morning. ‘You are four hours old. Your name is Ethan,’ I told him, ‘and I am your father, Samuel.’

  Two o’clock. ‘You are five hours old, Ethan.’ He stirred slightly, made a face and squirmed. I lifted him from the bed, took him out into the lounge room and stood by the glass doors. Rain overflowed the gutters, ran in streams across the paths, in sudsy rivers down the trunks of trees.

  ‘This is your home,’ I said. Three o’clock. He snuffled and mewled, suckled the blanket. I took him to Ana, put my hand on her warm arm. ‘He’s hungry,’ I whispered, and lay him down next to her. She pulled back the sheet and offered him her breast. I lay beside them. The rain fell on the roof: muffled like distant applause, like the sound of a distant war.

  She watched him. Her eyes were dark, like those of a deer or some other wild animal. Her thoughts slipped past within their depths, like fish too small and quick to be caught. If only I were not there, perhaps those fish would have slowed and risen to the surface. Drink to me only with thine eyes, Ben Jonson wrote, knowing nothing about love, about happiness. Though young lovers gaze into each other’s eyes – as we did – for long moments, there is nothing written there that does not, eventually, require interpretation. That does not require a touch, or a word. A word! A poem, a song, a story that reveals the shape and substance of her mind. What did those dark shadows in her eyes reveal? What I would have given for a long, glib, slavering sentence to supplement the mystery of her beauty. For a dictionary, a syllabary, that would have helped me shape her silences into words, which would have helped me understand the darkness that moved within her.

  If only I could have seen her as she was when I was not there. Seen her with Ethan in one of those rare, undefended moments when she was completely herself. But I was in that place, and broke the silence into which she might have offered herself with the beating of my heart.

  She drifted to sleep while he fed, his hand on her breast. He suckled and dozed, suckled again. Fell asleep and dropped away from her nipple like a drunk, his pink mouth wet with milk.

  Four o’clock. Light brimmed in the wet forest. Dripped musically from the eaves. ‘You are seven hours old,’ I whispered to my son, watching the light come through the trees. He had come free from his blankets and lay sprawled between us. It was only then, seeing him lying there, that I could admit how much I had hoped he would be a seal and a salve, bringing Ana and I closer, but also soothing the wound where my brother had been torn away.

  Of course, no child is an apothecary’s balm. Though we had formed him from our two bodies, he was himself: a thing a
part. We could not ask anything of him, expect anything. He would grow his own way. Seeking light and warmth. We couldn’t load him up with our unresolved sorrows, or set him between us like a bridge, sending messages across his fine, green bones until he grew grey and worn. All my life I had wanted things ordered and known. Now I had to embrace an unravelling, unknowable drift.

  We had arrived in the dark forest where there was no path. No map. We might forget why we came. We might lose sight of the edge, of the river and the sky, of the house and all it contains. We might wander in search of a home and find a king, or a tower, an old friend, or a lost girl with a dagger glittering between her teeth. We might discover a long field, soft earth, a shaft of unadulterated light falling just so, and decide it was the place to begin. We must kneel down and dig with our hands, set him out in the field where there is light and air and rain, and give him what he needs. And wait. And hope. We must tend him without expectation.

  At eight o’clock I woke to a quiet house. Ethan was sleeping beside me, clean and freshly bound in a white blanket. The storm had passed. The house was preternaturally calm: as though the lintels and timbers had subtly loosened in their joints. The curtains drifted slowly on the damp air. I rose from the bed and went into the lounge room, knowing she wouldn’t be there. The room looked the same. The fire had burned low; the bricks were warm. There was wood piled up ready. I stirred the coals and put a piece of wood on to burn. The doorway and walls, ceiling and floors were all in their places, all perfectly aligned. The bricks of the fireplace, the books and stones and glass were heavy with their precise and unexalted weight. The colours of things were the same. The way the windows admitted light. And yet, the whole house, the whole world, was entirely other. The room had gone mad. There was an envelope propped up on the mantle over the fireplace; its blank face stared. The silent walls echoed nothingness back and forth between them until it was as thick and actual as air. She is gone, they whispered, over and over. She is gone.

  I picked up the envelope and turned it over. It was thick, more like a parcel than a letter. The paper was cool, and the package light despite its size. I had expected heat and weight. Inside the envelope was an envelope containing a letter from Ana, and another, smaller envelope – creased and rubbed with age – addressed to my brother in my mother’s hand. Behind these was a bundle of letters in an unfamiliar hand, each of them addressed to my mother.

  Nine o’clock. Ethan was twelve hours old.

  ANA

  Sometimes, letters unexpectedly arrive at their destination.

  6 Weeks: Start of the Embryonic Period

  Solange’s letter to your brother arrived in Haarlem towards the end of April. As Queen’s Day approached the store windows were filled with orange – bright banners of crepe and cloth. Orange umbrellas and balloons, flags and paper crowns festooned the streets. Crowds of tourists had started to arrive in Amsterdam, sometimes spilling over into the old city, where Morgan and I were living. While the city bloomed and bustled, Morgan stayed inside, working. The only sign that he was aware of the festival was the boxes of goods piled up near the front door. While everyone else would set up a stall to sell off their old shoes, hats, coats and toasters, Morgan planned to give away whatever he didn’t need to survive. Every morning, while he slept, I went through the boxes he had filled up during the night, removing those things of my own I could not bear to part with. Every night, while I slept, he rummaged through the house, emptying cupboards and drawers, flinging almost everything into boxes for what he called his ‘true’ vrijmarkt – a free market where everything was free. I tried to reason with him – tried to tell him that at best he’d provide a new pair of shoes for a wealthy backpacker slumming it between semesters – but he was, as always, determined to resist seeing things the way others did. Determined not to join in with the celebration of both monarchy and capitalism. Manifestations of greed, he said, in two of its most virulent and violent forms.

  I woke early, padded out to the front door in my bare feet, navigating past the teetering city of boxes, and found your mother’s letter – a small parcel, really – wedged between two bulging paper bags Morgan had filled with my clothes. She didn’t write often. Once a year, perhaps twice, she sent a short letter. On his birthday and at Christmas she would send a card. Sometimes a gift of some kind. The first few times she had written to him I left her letters on the table in the dining room, propped up on top of whatever Morgan was working on. The first letter from his mother was my first – and last – gift for him. I had listened carefully to everything he said about your family: his twin brother, his lost father, his mother. I had heard the sorrow, the sense of separation, the aching gap that had opened up between where he had been, where he was now and where he longed to be. Finally, I had tracked down Solange and written to her, letting her know that he was safe and suggesting she write to him.

  The morning he woke and found her letter waiting for him, I had expected – I don’t know what I had expected. Some kind of softening and opening up. A step towards home. Gratitude, perhaps, or something like it. The Morgan I knew was like a wounded, furious animal. His separation from his family like an open wound in which the tip of an arrow had broken off; whenever I came close, reached out to try to clean or dress the wound, he would snarl and draw away. And yet, I was determined to calm him, and to remove the arrow’s poisonous tip, so that he might begin to heal himself.

  He came to the table and saw the letter, lying face up. For several minutes he stood staring down at it. Finally, I reached out and put the flat of my palm on his back. He flinched and grabbed the letter, as though my touch had woken him from a trance, and scrunched it up in his fist. He crossed the room to the fire and threw it into the flames.

  I tried again with the second letter, and the third, but by the time Solange’s fourth letter came I knew he would never read them. At first I steamed them open, eating the words like secrets, before sealing them up again and placing them in a shoebox I kept in the laundry cupboard. But after a while I gave up on the pretence that he would ever ask for them and began the ritual of leaving the house to read them. Walking to St Bavo’s, buying coffee, tearing them open, reading them over and again, swallowing whole the stories she told and, finally, writing back.

  When you started writing to your brother, it seemed only natural not to show Morgan your letters, and to write back to you, though I never stopped feeling that twinge of sadness – alongside the ever present fear of discovery – when I signed Morgan’s name.

  For a long time, writing to you both had seemed an act of kindness, of reparation. Solange was an old woman, filled with regrets, keen to forge a renewed connection with her prodigal son. She wrote about her garden, and her work, the food she cooked and ate and the changes in the weather, but every letter ended with a plea for reconciliation and forgiveness. After a while, I couldn’t bear to withhold what she asked for. Sometimes I even convinced myself that, were Morgan to discover my actions and see them objectively, he would see that my writing to her was in keeping with his politics. She had suffered and was suffering still. I could offer her what she most needed to relieve that suffering – doing so cost me very little at the time – and so I gave her what she required.

  With you, things were more complicated, of course. The letters were only the beginning.

  The morning Solange’s final package came I left Morgan sleeping in the apartment and walked to St Bavo’s to open and read it, as usual. I was curious about why it was so thick – it felt like a paperback, or a box of fabric. I had it in my pocket – they were deep, wide pockets – and I kept exploring its shape, testing its thickness and density. It was so cold my coat was soon stiff but inside it I was warm. I liked the feel of my hands in the pockets: the way the red silk lining gloved my skin. It was early in the morning, and the sidewalks were wet with last night’s rain. I bought a coffee at Brinkman’s and sat watching the tourists go in and out of the church. The letter from Solange and the other letters it had been
wrapped around were strewn open on the table in front of me.

  I had walked the same way almost every morning for ten years, bought the papers, sat and drank my coffee while I did the crossword, read letters from you or Solange, or worked on my writing, enjoying the sun on my face. Sometimes I paused and watched people walk past in their beautiful coats and boots, talking, laughing. I liked the sounds of their singsong voices, the familiar pattern of their chatter about relatives and friends and weather and trees. The way the inconsequential linked us all together. I liked the clean shapes of the tulips in their buckets – their long, thick stalks and straplike leaves – the way their heavy heads bobbed together like tiny balloons. I loved the buckets filled with daffodils and yellow narcissi, with gladioli and hyacinths and crocuses. I liked the shops filled with books and clothes and kitchenware; the window displays of polished glasses and orange cakes, gleaming stainless steel and shining copper and strings of orange flags. I loved the warm gold light that spilled out of the toy shop, with its Queen’s Day display of felt and paper crowns, a white and orange tea set laid out in front of Lego kings and queens, and a tiny tricycle with enormous paper flowers in its basket.

  Morgan believed that such pleasures were indulgent, bourgeois. We were not allowed to be idle, or to celebrate Christmas or birthdays, or anything else that involved excess, or pleasure, or the exchange of gifts. He approved of fasting, of restraint and humility, but not the celebration that ended it. Lent, but not Easter. Ramadan without the new clothes or feasting of Eid ul-Fitr. ‘Those who prepare food for their selfish ends eat but only sin,’ he would quote at me as I dipped a sweet biscuit into my second coffee of the day, or baked a cake, the smell filling our tiny apartment. Once, I had dabbed cake batter onto the end of his nose before I poured the dark, sweet chocolate mix into a tin and slid it into the hot oven. I smiled and kissed him, licking the batter from his cheek, refusing to give in to the fury I could see simmering in his face. I was in the lounge room when he pulled the cake from the oven and began to pour the batter down the sink. When I came in to see what he was doing – what all the noise was about – he was using his fingers to try to force the batter down the plughole. The tap was running, the water so hot steam rose from his poached skin. His face was red. His breath coming in sharp, nasal snorts. I put my hand on his arm, gently, but he shrugged me off.