Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  Ethan was stirring in the bed beside us, crying a little but you didn’t wake. I felt the milk prick in my breasts and rolled away, got out of bed. I stood in the doorway and watched as you turned over in your sleep and drew him near, murmuring to him, comforting him. He settled back to sleep. I drew the sheets up over you, kissed your hot faces as though I am just going to the bathroom and will be back in a moment.

  I have kept Solange’s letters, and the letters she sent to Morgan – the letters she and her lover exchanged – tucked inside a hollow in one of the first bird-headed babies I made after I came here. It is a surprisingly small and ordinary-looking packet. Twelve letters from her long-dead lover, plus the letter to Morgan. No red ribbons, no romantically faded paper. No waft of perfume as I took them out of their hiding place. Instead, they have taken on the scent of wood, and earth, and blood and bone.

  There is even, still, the scent of the greenhouse and the terracotta pots where Solange kept them hidden until Paul found them. There were more letters then: a hundred, at least, she told me. Your father destroyed most of them. He dug them out of their hiding places and tore them up, drowned them, burned them, ate them. Anything. Anything to be rid of them. Raging like a crazy man, after all those years, letting his frustration and unequalled love roar out over her. Not because she had once loved someone else – after all, he had known all along that he was not your or your brother’s father – but because she had kept the letters. Because she had held on to the past, and had never come fully into his arms, as she had once promised him she would.

  ‘I thought you were mine,’ he roared. ‘You promised you would be mine.’

  Pounding walls, smashing plates, tearing the back door from its hinges as he stormed out, down to the harbour, out into the dark to find you and Morgan. The beautiful, beloved boys who were not his sons.

  I read her lover’s letters over and over again after she died. The words are familiar. A dying man’s fury at having to leave her behind. His words hurled onto the page, stinking, angry, ungrammatical, rattling the bars of his shrinking cage. Even now, it is hard to reconcile the woman I know with the Solange he writes to. He must have known some other woman, I think, or torn something vital out of her and taken it with him into the grave. He must have eaten her heart before he died. How else could he write these words?

  Would you rather not die reeling – alive – with all the cannons roaring in your ear? Writhing in the heat that muscles up through your body when we fuck. So, at least, would I. I may not be here tonight, tomorrow morning, next week, but while I am here I want to live. I want to dance and sing and fuck and breathe. I don’t want to lie in a hospital bed waiting for death to take me in the night. I want to go out and meet him on the road. I want to lie naked under the stars and put my hands in the earth and feel the worms turn and see the garden we planted roll out its leaves and suck light from the air. I want to put my head on your belly and feel the child kick, and feed you fruit from my garden and lick the juice from your chin.

  Come, and suck my mangoes from their seeds. Come, and eat my fruit before it falls and rots. Come, and eat my flesh before it putrefies. Come, and loose your fury on me. Beat my bones like a drum. Swallow my spit and sweat. Let me be your holy sacrament: my body, my blood, my flesh. Take it, and eat. Let me feed you. Let me feel the child we’ve made churn inside you, his heart beating fast as a bird’s. Let me feel him working his way through you into the world.

  I am also giving you Solange’s letter to Morgan, telling him everything she knew about your real father – long-dead, silently mourned – and asking him to forgive her for her years of silence. She writes that all her life she has felt like a prison in which a prisoner dwells and that it is time, finally, to let that prisoner go. She asks him to keep your father’s letters safe – tells him she can’t bear to destroy them but that she doesn’t want you to find them among her papers when she dies. Well, he kept that promise, at least.

  She begs him to try to understand how much they all loved you – she and Paul and Michael – and how tangled and incoherent were those days between when Michael died and you were born, and how they had each made the best of what life had given to them. Or tried to.

  She quotes Beckett, at the end, still playing that old game, begging Morgan to forgive her and Paul, and Michael, and even if he can’t forgive her to leave them be, those old hurts, not to nurture them but to let them go: Light off and let him be, she quotes, on the stool, talking to himself in the last person.

  It is almost morning. Soon, I will fold the letters away, bind the packet with string and add my own letter to you: the final outer shell. My letter to you, Solange’s letter to Morgan, your father’s letters to Solange. They sit nested inside each other like matryoshka dolls, all their secrets ready to be exposed once more to the unforgiving air. I will place the whole untidy packet on the mantelpiece above the fire and turn away.

  Outside, I will sit on the step, pull on my boots. (You see how bad it is with me: I cannot seem to stop telling you stories). I will go out to the shed and take my backpack out of the ute’s tray. It is already packed with everything I need. I will shrug it up over my shoulders. Stand and take the weight. Silence, like a chorus, will swell as I walk away, up over the rise that leads to the valley, to the house you built for your brother; the house where I will wait for you. When I reach the end of the road I will pause. The eucalypts will stand tall beside me and, as the night bleeds away, I will feel the temperature of this strange new day breathe through me.

  Suddenly, I won’t be able to comprehend, only to watch as the valley opens in the earth before me and houses appear, a town scrawled like braille on the flanks of the mountain. The trees will slowly wake and open their branches like hands that cup the light. Birds will mount the sky. I will almost see – will see – the breath of the birds and the earth shouldered by the worms. Death, too, working its way through the forest. Its head bent. Its basket full, heavy. In the shade of the eucalypts, death will wait a moment, tip back its head and feel the sunlight pour down over its face. War is near. Discovery. The end of things. But for now there is an instant of hope. Not forgiveness or certainty, but nothing. Gentle nothing.

  Thank you

  To my students and colleagues at the University of Southern Queensland, who offer me inspiration and insight on a daily basis; who tolerate my eccentricities and help me to celebrate the small triumphs. This book would not exist without your support.

  To my family. Mum, Dad, Shane, Aaraon, Asha, Rami, Tabatha, Fin, Candice, Rhys, Jade, Braden, IndyaRose, Aanika, Imogen, Ema-Lea and tiny Liam. You are the earth from which anything I grow arises.

  To the incredibly diverse and widespread community of writers who offer me courage, laughter, wisdom, honesty and inspiration. I tried making a list of all of your names, but the acknowledgments threatened to become longer than the novel.

  To my readers. I don’t know who (all of) you are, but I cannot thank you enough for making it possible for me to keep writing.

  To Barry Scott and Penelope Goodes, who saw the glimmer in the tangle of words I sent them, and did all they could to make the manuscript shine. All the beauty is yours; any ugliness that remains entirely my own.

  To my amazing Literary Lovelies, who are so much more than just a book club. Who have saved my life on numerous occasions by offering me a home, a meal, a bottle of wine, a cake, a shriek of laughter, a book. Maria Arena, Lee Kemp, Sarah Wright (all the Wrights!), Helen McKenna, Bek Jean. And the (very occasional) interloper from NZ, Megan Gordon.

  And finally, and most emphatically, for Rebecca Jessen, who shines.

  Nike Sulway’s first novel, The Bone Flute, was the winner of the QLD Premier’s Literary Award for an Emerging Author and was subsequently published by UQP. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Award (Asia Pacific Region). Her subsequent works have won and been shortlisted for several awards. Her previous novel, Rupetta, is a work of speculative fiction. It won the James Tiptree, Jr Award (
US) and the Norma K Hemming Award, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards and the Crawford Award (UK). She works at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba.