Refuge

by Richard Rossiter

‘You’re not seeing things straight. It’s your imagination. You can’t leave. You’ll have to stay here, until you’re better. We’ll find a bed for you, on a ward. Okay?’

  ‘Yeah, mate. For sure. Okay.’

  He looked down and spied his shoes, tucked neatly under the bed. His face brightened. There was, after all, light at the end of the tunnel. Whether you had to walk or swim made no difference.

  ‘That will be fine,’ he said. ‘Everything will be fine.’

  Later, they put a camera up his bum, then did a biopsy and discovered his cancer—which had nothing to do with his fit.

  Forty

  Prue had decided it was time for some changes in her life. One was that she needed to tell Alex that, after careful consideration, she did not want to buy a house with him, or live together. She liked things as they were and feared that taking another step towards suburban, domestic bliss might be the undoing of them as a couple. They would see too much of each other, become one of those couples you see in restaurants where the man stares out of the window and the woman looks around at other people, wondering what it is they’re talking about and how it is that she’s reached this point where she and her husband have absolutely nothing to say to each other. They had exhausted the formal chit-chat over family members, the day at work, what the weather was going to do. Now there was nothing. If they’d been at home, there would be no sense of embarrassment, but here, in public, one or other of them would feel the need to break the silence with some pointless question or comment for the sake of appearances. Prue did not want to be that woman and she was sure that, if he thought about it, Alex would not want to be that man.

  After the visit of Rock and Skel she’d been to see her counsellor again—something she had not done for the best part of a year. She had been surprised at the feelings the boys aroused in her. She supposed it was something like motherly concern, an arousal of the maternal. She was wary of the word love, but knew she wanted to look after them, to protect them—from what she wasn’t sure. When she looked at them her heart filled and her eyes brimmed. How could she ever have left them, when they were little more than babies? She knew that, for herself, she was desperate to leave the suffocation of life in a tin shed, but she could no longer understand, really, the person who could leave her children behind. Tinny—that was different. As she talked to her counsellor, she could feel the woman’s judgement.

  Selfish. You were/are a selfish, vain woman. Now that your children no longer need the same level of care, now that they’ve become young adults, you decide you have feelings for them. You want them to know you as an adult—and for you to watch them grow into the men they should be. You want them to be your friends, companions, without having done any of the hard work when they were young. Well.

  But it wasn’t like that. She didn’t decide to be one thing or the other. Then, for whatever reason, she was a different person. Now, perhaps, she had grown up, become an adult herself and was therefore ready to be a mother. Was this so wrong? She certainly didn’t want to take the children from their father—not that she could, anyway; what she wanted was to be part of their lives. Surely this would be good for them, too. She was, after all, their mother.

  The counsellor listened—feigning interest, thought Prue— as she told her about Rock and Skel, Tinny, and Alex. The woman made a steeple with her fingers and Prudence almost told her to stop. Not that.

  The woman said: ‘Do you think there is some connection between seeing your children again and your decision not to move in with Alex?’

  ‘Yes, probably.’

  ‘Would you care to elaborate?’

  ‘I suppose there is some truth in the obvious. I’m thinking about the family I used to be part of, and now is not the time to break that shaky connection with another move. Apart from the reality of living with someone, the shared ownership of a home, or a house, is a form of commitment—more than economic, I mean. It might make it more difficult to see Rock and Skel, my sons. And who knows how Tinny would react?’

  ‘Does that mean your former husband still has feelings for you?’

  ‘Well, yes, he is former, but we didn’t ever get married, so we can’t get divorced. As for feelings, I’d say he has feelings about me, but not feelings for. Possibly.’

  ‘And do you have feelings for him?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can answer that—which I know you’ll be inclined to take as a yes. It’s more that I have feelings about the past, before I got the overwhelming urge to leave. I imagine a happy family—which we were, some of the time. And that’s what I fantasise about. I know it didn’t last; I know it can’t be remade, rediscovered, at this time. But emotionally I am connected to that image. Does that mean I’m out of touch with reality?’

  ‘Not at all. You can see it for what it is. To find that time attractive, something you would like to experience again, makes perfect sense. If you were to act as if it will happen—a certainty—and that other people involved felt the same way, that would be different.’

  The counsellor paused, and waited. Prudence decided she would not break the silence.

  ‘Tell me, why did you and your husband—sorry, partner—separate?’

  ‘Oh, dear. I suppose the short answer is I got sick of living in a tin shed, with no one to talk to. I was dying.’

  ‘Why were you living in a tin shed?’

  ‘That was Tinny’s dream. And I was inside it. Not so much the shed, but to live where you could at least hear the ocean, and be surrounded by bush. When he saw the block of land, and it was for sale, he had to have it, no matter the cost. Nearly half a million dollars. We had some money saved up, but not all of it. So we got a loan—at that time banks were throwing money at you. The shed—even a shed—we could scarcely afford. But we did have a block, a nice block. And bush all around.’

  ‘Did you want a better house?’

  ‘Not really, although it might have made some difference, but it was the whole situation. Isolated, no desire on Tinny’s part to think anything or do anything other than what he already knew. He was old before his time. I couldn’t stand it.’

  The counsellor said next time they should talk about her father, Dick Browne, that blurry figure—except for the sharpness of his presence in a photograph. In the end, she’d come away feeling reassured, which of course is what counsellors are supposed to make you feel—not that they always do—and that her decision about Alex was, for now, the right one. What she could do about being a Prudence-mother to Rock and Skel was not so clear. She had an instinctive antipathy to ‘working at it’, as if it were a maths problem whose solution would be obtained by repeated and sustained attempts. But maybe that was one of her problems. Long-haul anything—but especially to do with relationships—had little appeal. Deferred goals or pleasures were a risk. When you eventually got there, maybe the pleasure had vanished and you wondered why you bothered.

  And now another problem had emerged. Tinny and cancer. She would have to step into that gap created by his absence from the boys. She was happy to do that, happy to see herself needed by her sons—and Tinny.

  Forty-one

  Following his seizure, and surgery, Tinny was placed in a ward with five other people. Next to him was an old woman he’d seen before, in Emergency. He remembered her fingers scrabbling at the edge of her blanket. She talked to people that he couldn’t see, or hear, but they were nearby. Tinny knew he wasn’t quite right. The more Emily muttered, day and night, the more he began to think he might be Emily, that he could see and hear what was in her mind, and that he could escape into the air they breathed within the confines of the ward. He looked forward to the nights, when the lights were low and the sounds muted; he felt like a child who’d been put to bed and should go to sleep, but instead goes adventuring out the door, along the corridor, out the window where he could meet Roger or Christopher, thoughtful boys, always, who loved their mum. Of course they weren’t too happy to see her like this, with a drip in her arm (when they finally found
a vein they could use), and down below a catheter and another bottle somewhere—a drain, they said. The doctors and nurses called her Emily, or sometimes Mrs Wilson, but she told him she didn’t feel like either of those people.

  ‘Pinny,’ she said, ‘I don’t know who I am. Do you know who you are?’

  He had to admit he didn’t.

  She didn’t think she was anyone at the moment. Not that Roger—or Christopher—commented on any changes in her; they treated her just the same as always. You had to give them that—they weren’t ones for appearances.

  ‘Mrs Wilson, I said can I check your blood pressure?’

  Tinny swam to the surface. Where had she come from? No, not for him. It was Emily.

  ‘Of course, dear. Of course you can. It’s very nice of you to ask.’ She held out her arm and the nurse wrapped it and then stuck a thermometer into her ear. A bit too vigorously, she later told Tinny. That ear was beginning to hurt. She would ask her to start using the other one, but then the nurse would have to go to the other side of the bed. Maybe she wouldn’t.

  The curtain around his bed was flung open and a pleasant, moon-faced girl plopped a tray on the bedside table and pivoted his lunch across the bed. He heard Emily say that Roger and Christopher had been to visit, but the girl didn’t seem to hear. Instead she said to him, ‘Lucky you, you’ve progressed from nil by mouth to clear fluids. Enjoy!’ He could see the girl staring at the mix of jelly and soup and the container of apple juice, and smiled. She wasn’t as silly as she looked. He unwrapped the spoon from the paper serviette and tried the soup called vegetable broth.

  ‘It isn’t so bad,’ he said. ‘It’s very salty, so there’s something to taste.’

  This was the last place he expected to be, at his age. Death he had no problem with. In the abstract. When they explained to him that if he didn’t have surgery to remove the cancer from his bowel—or, really, his colon—he would die a slow and painful death as it spread to other organs, if it hadn’t already, he realised that it was the process of dying that bothered him. They said there was always a chance that they could remove it all; they wouldn’t know until they ‘went in’. When he heard this, he thought of the rescue teams he’d seen on television trying to find live people under the rubble of collapsed buildings. The earth had quaked and no one knew how many people might still be alive, how many could be saved. They had to dig their way in to find out.

  At moments his mind looked at his body that had quaked and caused the tumour. His body, so dependable, was not something he ever thought about, and certainly was not something separate from his notion of who he was. His mind and body, a seamless package—until the body had secrets that the mind knew nothing about. Nasty, destructive secrets that had to be rooted out by the investigating surgeon. He felt it would be a long time before he felt whole again. It was the same for the city in ruins. No one thought of it as being separate from the earth on which it stood, until the two parted company in a violent underground tremor that cracked open the surface. There were secrets that not even the seismologists knew of. Cancer was like that. Of course you knew of its existence, but not the where and the when of it. Now he was suspicious of his body—and now the inhabitants of the city were suspicious of the earth. Trust had been broken.

  Emily, in the bed next to him, said she knew what would happen to her when she died. Even though she’d read every account she could find of the death experience, including such titles like Dying with Dignity, as if death were a matter of politeness, she knew that, come the moment, it would take her by surprise, and that anyone could tell by looking at her eyes. She also knew she was running neither towards death nor away from it.

  ‘Mr Thompson, Pinny,’ she said, ‘it’s like the sun coming up, or going down. You have to be there to experience it, but there’s nothing, nothing at all, that you can do that makes one jot of difference to its arrival, or departure. It’s the same with my boys, Christopher and Roger: they arrive, they depart.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know about boys.’

  Then there was a gentle knock on the door. A visitor. ‘Come in,’ she called, but her voice was not strong. ‘Come in.’

  Tinny was frightened by that knock. He wouldn’t add his voice to that of the old woman—not yet. You had to be careful about who you invited in. It was safer, he thought, to remain silent. He didn’t trust his thoughts about anything very much because he didn’t know who was thinking them. He suspected he was thinking himself into being a person he did not recognise.

  The doctors worried about him. He wasn’t recovering as they’d expected. At times he seemed to be hallucinating. He stayed there an extra week while they kept an eye on him. That’s what the nurse said: ‘We need to keep an eye on you.’ He wondered if that meant they had a hidden camera in the room. Or peeped at him through the keyhole if the door was closed. One large eye. Green, he thought. They certainly kept an eye on him during the night, always interrupting his sleeping, or thinking, to check his blood pressure, or his temperature. To ask about pain. ‘It’s a four,’ said Tinny. ‘A four. Or maybe it’s a two, or a six. I don’t know.’

  Then one morning a new nurse entered his room, dressed differently from the others. She threw back the curtains and light streamed through the window. ‘My name’s Kylie,’ she said. ‘I’m in training.’ She turned to straighten his bed.

  Tinny regarded the broad, efficient back of the nurse, not registered. ‘He who sleeps cannot catch fish.’ She looked up at him and he smiled.

  ‘Are you feeling a bit better?’ she said, hesitantly. ‘The doctor will be here soon. I think you can go home today, if you’re lucky.’

  Forty-two

  By the time the plane dropped down in jerky increments over the placid river and the tired foothills, Greta’s mind was a blank. She struggled, along with other exhausted passengers, through customs, stood aimlessly watching the circuit of baggage, waiting for her one large bag, staring as if constantly surprised at everything around her. None of it meant anything. Coming back to Australia was more about a decision to leave rather than to arrive, and now she had no idea where she was. Her body, she knew, had moved through space and time, but her mind was fixed in a realm without parameters. She felt like a machine registering data that could not be translated into meaningful statements.

  The next day she arrived back at her tin shed. Perhaps this was home, after all. It was unseasonably wet and cold, but the fire was set and soon the room began to glow. That evening her headache eased and her blurred senses sharpened, her mind began the process of restructuring bits and pieces of information into something like coherence. Her eyesight itself changed; objects in the middle distance were now in focus.

  Skyler called around with a bottle of wine. She’d sent him a postcard. ‘To welcome you back to the real world,’ he said. He could see she was tired and he didn’t stay long. He was visiting, he said, because he was about to go away up north for a month and didn’t want her to think he was ignoring her.

  ‘I would never think that,’ she said, pleased to see him. He, at least, had some coherence about him.

  Early the next morning she struggled out of a deep, dreamless sleep in response to a loud banging noise, maybe a fist hitting the tin walls. She jerked the door open and immediately a figure launched itself at her. She was too slow and tired to do anything to stop him. She was facedown on the cement, her nose squashed, with the noisy panting of the man in her ear. She could not understand what he was saying, or even be certain that what she was hearing were words. A mixture of sounds, little yelps, groans, emanated from him as he tied her hands behind her. Then he turned around, still sitting on her lower back, and began lashing her feet together. Her own breath was in gasps, the weight of him, and she felt faint. He jerked her to her feet.

  ‘I told you,’ he gasped. ‘I told you. This is your fault—this is what I have to do. You gave me no choice.’ He was spitting the words out, his face bright red. ‘Don’t move,’ he said, and went into the bed
room.

  The track in was eroded by wind and rain, the hump in the middle high enough to force cars off to the sides, or to scrape their mufflers. There were five caravans dotted around the sloping site—twenty-five acres, he told her. Sometimes he rented them out, but not now. So no close neighbours. She would stay in one furthest away from unlikely visitors. The gate, now locked, had a large, handpainted sign. No Trespassers. No Shooting. Her hands and feet were cuffed, with a length of chain allowing hobbled movement. He took the handkerchief out of her mouth. She stared at him, silent, and he looked away. Inside the van was a toilet, but no shower. There was a green laminex table and a small sink. She sat down on the bunk bed, waiting for him to leave. He threw a plastic bag stuffed with some of her clothes beside her.

  ‘I’ll free your hands when you need to use them,’ he said.

  She ignored him.

  ‘You went to the police,’ he said. ‘But you can’t prove a thing and nor can they. Johnston knows that.’

  ‘I did not go to the police.’

  He shook his head and would not answer when she asked him what he was going to do with her. She could feel the panic rising, an acid feeling in her throat; she took some deep breaths.

  Just on dusk, he brought her a bowl of instant noodles with cheese grated on top. He undid the ties on her hands. ‘I’ll leave some food here, in the van, and you can feed yourself from now on. Might be a bit difficult, but you’ll manage. The bathroom’s down the hill there. Let me know when you want a shower.’ Clive was almost polite and no longer seemed angry. From the way he spoke, he didn’t appear to have any immediate plans for her, but his controlled manner was cold, emotionless. It worried her more than his anger.

  Forty-three

  It was early evening and as soon as the sun disappeared, the temperature dropped. Greta moved up and down the narrow aisle of the van, cold, angry and frightened. She stood by the tiny sink and looked out through the smudged window. At times she felt alright, for some hours, almost forgetting the reality of her situation, but then it would come upon her, flow through her entire body, and she would begin to shake. Like now.