by Nike Sulway
I was young, and furious. My father had died before I had time to forgive him for all the ordinary things a father does to disappoint his child. I had wanted independence – had sought it out – and found only loneliness. I was young enough to believe that my father should have warned me that I would find what I sought, and prepared me for the realities of the world as well as its immense possibility.
I had been in love with someone who left me, and I was still angry about that, too. I had tried to force change the easy way, the moderate way, the way my father had taught me to – through petitions and marching – and it had all come to nothing. I wanted something greater to believe in. I wanted to make a greater mark on the world. Something bigger and purer. I believed – I wanted to believe – that it was possible to change the world through clear speaking and non-violent action, and love. These were the things my father had taught me. But he had died surrounded by failed projects, failed attempts to nurture peace, hope, love and joy. He had made glass windows, and written letters. He had joined groups that petitioned ministers, and travelled the world during his annual holidays building schools and orphanages. He had been a bumper sticker in a world where cars were weapons, still shoving daisies in the ends of assault rifles and believing that love and patience could cure humanity of its heartlessness. I admired and despised him both, and could forgive myself for neither.
Morgan had never loved a woman, and he told me that he believed he had burned clean that portion of his heart. I admired Morgan, and wanted to prove him wrong. He was everything my father had not been: absolute, ruthless, controlling. He put boundaries around me to keep me safe, and to deny himself my loss. When I told him about my father’s rules for wandering, Morgan heard the limits that were set, imagining me as something like a tethered dog, but I remembered the sense of freedom, of being let go. I remembered all the secret places where I went, the adventures I had, the enormousness of the world I was loosed into, and the freedom of being allowed to wander alone within it. When I told him about the dreams I had of Sint Janskerk after I left home, I thought of the beauty of those stained-glass windows, of the light flooding through them, illuminating the familiar faces, the long robes, the jewel-like colours falling over my face and hands. The end of war, the end of death.
When I told him about my father and St Vincent, he thought of Vincent’s dark accoutrements – the fire and the hook and the raven – as markers of threat, but I thought of St Vincent’s kind face, and of the ravens’ loyalty, and of the feeling I had had, entering the church after so long away and seeing him again, of coming home.
Morgan put his fingertip on the scar where the ravens had pecked at me and thought of the burn across his own body – his father’s fury, his terrible death – while I recalled the feeling of release, the feeling of rightness. The sense that the raven had pecked open the wound only to let the dark canker of grief flow out of me, finally. I told him my stories, but he heard his own.
It is true, however, that I wanted to make Morgan love me. Make him feel. Make him see that feeling had a part in politics. I was tired of all those male prophets who denied that love was necessary or important to the future we were working towards. The intimate nature of the emotions Morgan and I exchanged – as lovers, as friends – made us wound each other. Our disagreements were knives and needles, piercing each other’s skin.
I said that love was what we were, in the end, fighting to protect. The possibility of love between people; their ability to trust in that, and hold to it. The right to love another person, and live with them, was the most fundamental of human rights.
He said I was being naïve and romantic, that we were fighting for basics, for the needs of the body, not the abstract and therefore illusionary desires of the soul. We were fighting to provide food, clean water, religious freedom, cultural freedom, the right to education, the right to speak, the right to own property.
He said that there was no need to fight for the right to love, because love was neither necessary to human existence nor, in the end, desirable. Love, he said, led more often to oppression and harm than liberation. Surely I understood this: as a woman, particularly, surely I was aware that the rhetoric of love had been used as an instrument to oppress women for centuries.
Morgan – the Morgan I knew – was comfortable with the love he had for strangers, and for tribes of endangered people. Anonymous masses so distant and so unfamiliar that they were almost abstractions. He was comfortable expressing love for the land being eaten up by industry, love for trees, and for mountains being torn down to build freeways and housing estates, love for the clouds and glaciers of the north. Their implacability – their coldness – comforted him. My indifference to these things – as he saw it – my preference for focusing on the emotional needs of people, he both admired, and suffered.
After several months of living together, I flew to London. The truth was that I had discovered I was pregnant, and I went there to rid my body of the child neither of us was ready for. We were no longer lovers, and though I had considered telling him about my decision, I had no desire to involve him in it. I knew, by then, how frail he was, how haunted. I had no desire to populate his imagination with more ghosts, and so I went alone. I told him I was visiting a friend – I don’t remember her name – someone he had met a couple of times.
I stayed in a cheap hotel, not far from the clinic. The procedure took a few hours, after which I returned to my room to find him there, waiting. He told me he had called my friend two days before I was due to visit her. ‘I thought at first that you had taken a lover,’ he said. ‘but I knew you would have told me if that was what you were doing. Then I thought perhaps you had decided to leave me, and I would have let you go.’ He sat on the toilet while I showered, smoking and talking in his quiet way. Muttering, shambling through the ideas in his head.
‘I thought you had gone back to sculpting. To art. And were having an exhibition, or had rented a studio space to work in. I was furious, thinking you would spend money like that. On yourself. On those stupid fucking sculptures.’ I heard him cough, and lift up the toilet seat to flush his cigarette butt. ‘In the end, I wasn’t sure, so I checked your credit card and found out where you were staying and decided to follow you. Did you think you could hide from me? Did you think you needed to? It’s your body, your choice. That’s what they say, isn’t it? That’s what I’m supposed to believe.’
I stepped out of the shower, my skin burning, and he held out a towel, wrapped it around me as though I were a child, and rubbed my arms. He made me sit on the edge of the bath while he towelled my hair dry and put on the cheap slippers provided by the hotel.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, as we shuffled up the hall, his arm around me as though I were a hundred years old and he was my antique nurse. He watched my feet, and held my elbow, and opened the door to our room so that I could shuffle past him and collapse, unable even to weep, onto the rumpled, ugly bed.
The bed, the room, was so cold that after a while we huddled under the blankets. The hallway, down which I had to stumble again to go to the bathroom and throw up what little warmth I had in my body, was overheated, humid almost, but I didn’t want to feel any warmth. I wanted the wind to whistle through me. Night to fall. Darkness and a black wind. Instead, we were assaulted by all the comforts of an English hotel. Tea and flowered wallpaper. The blown roses and peonies that sat in vases in the reception room looked to me like green-stemmed clots of blood. A vase full of tuberoses sat in our room, their stink sweating in the stifling air. My soft belly repulsed me inside my soft clothes.
Morgan tucked me into the blankets and got in beside me; he sat up reading with my head in his lap. I could hear his voice issuing as much from his chest as through his mouth. The faint smell of wrack and seaweed that seemed always attached to him, as though he were a mythic sailor, a merman or a god of the sea.
Later, exhausted with the effort of not being furious, he fell asleep and I left him there, in that too-sweet room, to
go and walk along the river in the dark, in the cold, in my bare feet. My feet hurt on the stones and I valued that pain as a counterweight to the dragging pain in my womb. The wind whipped my face clean. I clambered down onto some rocks beneath a bridge and examined the whelks and limpets clinging there. In climbing over a large rock I cut my hand on something and put my hand to my mouth to suck away the blood. I felt tears on my face again at the innocence of the clean, thin blood that flowed there. So light, so harmless. I remembered the prints in the dining room of the hotel where Morgan lay sleeping – women on cliffs watching for ships. Storms whipping their long hair and skirts away. Their heads high and proud. I was not pure, as they were, their milk-white skin flayed by the storms as their lovers’ ships were wrecked on the rocks at the base of the cliff. Instead, I stood on the low, polluted rocks and recalled Lady Macbeth’s speech. Stood and looked up at the moon and recited what I could remember: Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. I longed for the dark magic that would tear the remaining seeds from my womb before they would ever bear fruit; the hot, unearthly wind that would salt and cure me.
I should have been satisfied by my ability to hurt Morgan, to move him after all, but it was horrifying. I had enacted my revenge on a man who had been damaged by his love for his father, and who, despite his protestations, was wounded every day by his love for other people. He lived every day with the fear that anyone he loved could step off a sidewalk into the path of a car, be struck dead by a stray bullet. When I got to know him better, I realised that he was consumed by an excess of love, and by his fear of losing those he loved. He found it heartbreaking to watch men kiss their daughters goodbye at the school gate. They could so easily be swept out of each other’s reach, by winds we don’t recognise as threats – mistaking them for breezes – by storms that rise up suddenly and fade away to reveal destruction, by wounds that fester and diseases that eat away the heart. The sense of loss, the weight of grief, and the feeling of being vulnerable to a threat he could not name were impossible for him to disentangle from each other.
He had identified his enemies; he loved them. They were the men and women – the citizens – of his own inconstant heart. You, Samuel, were his greatest love, his greatest enemy, his greatest fear.
The fear of unexpected loss made him suspicious. He put his hooks through my skin, determined not to lose me, in the same way a man ties himself to the mast of a ship in a storm. He was certain of his destruction, but determined not to be separated from the only thing that bore him up. We were not lovers – that had lasted only a few weeks – but we shared a home, worked alongside each other, travelled together. We were friends, at times, but we were also each other’s cilice. Our commitment to each other a form of penance and of mortification.
Morgan did talk, in the last months of his life, about coming back to Australia – coming home. I liked to believe that living closer to his family would heal and soften him; that he would finally let go of the fury and fear that consumed his poor, thin body. Surely, I thought, within sight of his own Sint Janskerk, his heart would finally rest. He would find his true bearings again, recover the paths, the secret places that could restore his faith in the world. He would look up and see the old forms silhouetted against a familiar sky, and follow them home.
I wanted to believe that although I did not love him – and he seemed incapable of the kind of love other men required – I could be kind to him. It was hard not to revert to the old myths, laid down deep, compacted and seemingly permanent. Hard not to believe in some more intimate version of my father’s world, in which the act of love was enough to heal. I imagined myself as Morgan’s sister, his aunt. A woman into whose lap he could pour his sorrows. I was arrogant, too. I wanted to believe that what I did for him – caring for him, giving him a home, tolerating all his strange cruelties – was part of some greater purpose. That what we shared was something beyond the ordinary, sanctified by its markers of denial and self-sacrifice. I believed that I could rescue him, restore him to himself, simply by being patient and kind. I think I believed that if I could do so, my father might forgive me.
Or that I might finally forgive myself.
After he died, I travelled back to you on my own, completing the journey he had never begun. I have been reformed here, though not in the way Morgan wanted me to be reformed. This is my new life – a fifth or sixth incarnation – one built on a bedrock of quiet, of unfamiliar trees and books and music and gentle, constant love.
Of course, it’s all a lie. When I look up at the stars they are all strangers. When I walk the roads and paths and get lost, and look up for the tower – to get my bearings – I see only unfamiliar things. But this life I’m living feels like the last one I’ll have so I have to hold on to it; I have to make it true.
Sometimes I feel as though I am finally reaching the surface, the present, and perhaps even the brink of the future. When I look at your face, I almost see it, hovering there like the ghost of a hummingbird. A shade of a shade of a shade. Other times I feel myself drawn back and down, through the soft compost of soil and air and worms, into the rock, into the earth. Into the solid grip of the dead and their restless fury.
I dream that I am a house made of rammed earth and that the summer rains come and soften me, loosen my walls and doors. I fall away, become mud and blood-red slurry. I flood the streets. I run. Sometimes I am running towards the future, towards you and our child, but mostly I am only running from the past, those old selves I have tried to shuck off like cicada skins. The old stories, the old dreams. It’s hard to stay focused. Hard to believe in what’s to come.
16 Weeks: Quickening
After Morgan came to live with me I gave up the work I had been doing. I had made a living as a sculptor. It wasn’t much of a living, but with what my father had left me and so few needs it had always been enough. Still, Morgan never liked the smell of wood being cured, or the sound of it being chiselled. He believed that the practice of art was an indulgence. A kind of political sin it was important for me to abjure. But since I came here, I have gone back to sculpture. I have been carving birds and unborn babies out of fallen wood. Mostly, the forms merge and I produce bird-headed babies, babies with claws and feathers and hollow bones. Babies with round eyes and sharp beaks. The wood comes from fallen trees, hollowed logs, sometimes from our own land, sometimes pieces cleared from our neighbours’ blocks. Once or twice, I’ve worked with timber from the mill, but it seems dishonest to do so. Part of the value of the work I do lies in finding the timber: hauling it up through the bush to the ute. Gallery owners pay for the story – the history – of the wood as much as what I make from it. Prices are high: the galleries that carry my work are impatient for more, but I work slowly.
The first thing I notice about a piece of wood is its age. I don’t mean the size of the block; all the pieces I use are roughly the same size to begin with. They need to be big enough that I can put my arms all the way around them, and about half a metre long. A length I can measure off without thinking. I can see a fallen tree and know how many lengths it contains. I see the flaws and count out the lengths between the flaws, the lengths that I can work with. Sometimes, I see the rest of the world in those same 50 cm lengths. If I ever need a job, I sometimes think, I could work at a fabric store, measuring and cutting lengths of cloth without the need for a ruler.
The pieces of wood start off seeming the same; the same size, anyway. But as soon as I lift a piece of wood onto the ute’s tray, or run my hand over the fresh-cut grain, I start to sense its difference. Each piece has a unique weight and density, depending on whether it grew fast or slowly, whether there was a lot of rain or heat when it was young. The first cut will give me a glimpse of this history. Some pieces are eighty, ninety, perhaps even one hundred years old when they fall. Some of the slimmer pieces are heavy and dark: the ones that have grown in a light-starved place, overshadowed by older trees with thick canopies. Other pieces, though roughly the same size, are only
a couple of decades old. Newborns with growth rings several centimetres wide. Trees composed mostly of light and air, greedy children who’ve shot up and out, gobbling up light without building core strength. Trees that have come down in a summer storm because their roots are shallow and their ankles weak.
I load them into the ute – the young and the old, rolling together. I feel tired when I lift those young pieces. I feel filled with sorrow. They seem light as clouds compared to the old trees and I can’t help thinking of a child’s coffin. How terrible it is to see young things die. Still, some small part of me is glad for the lightness of those young lengths: glad for the fact that back in my workroom, it is the young trees that’ll be easiest to work with. Easy to flense. Their heartwood shining with light when it’s revealed. They are easy to form, but don’t contain any hard-won truths. I feel guilty thinking of some gallery owner down south – Sydney, perhaps, or Melbourne – admiring the seeming softness revealed in the young wood, selling it on to some fashionable couple who’ll put it near a window where the poor child will roughen and split.
The gallery owner will have to answer the buyer’s questions when they bring in their parched and split-skinned bird, wrapped in a wool blanket. His curses will leap back towards me, towards the earth in which that tree took root, the sunlight that poured into it so generously, the deep, sudden rain. He’ll have the piece refinished, pay someone to spend hours rubbing wax into the round limbs, fill the gaps with putty, and move on.
Really, I prefer the old wood. Dense and stubborn and hard. Wood that has its own sense of the future, and of the past. Wood that forces me to work with it, on its own terms, in its own time. More and more I am trying not to think about what I want to make, or who I am, or what I want to express, but to pay attention to the wood itself. I am trying to let the trees tell me who and what they are and will become – trying to let the land I live in shape us all.