Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  For someone with a good memory, forgetting is simply not an issue. Ava had never kept a meticulous appointment diary and her shopping lists were unfinished affairs. But now she was hounded by forgetfulness, the threat of it most of all; for if you don’t know the substance of your forgetting, the best you can hope for is to know you have forgotten something. She found herself stepping around holes and cracks in memory: a name, a place, a book title, even her own book titles would suddenly drop into the darkness. She set herself memory tasks – names of flowers, the novels of Charles Dickens, but as likely as not would lose the thread before she had completed the task.

  With the benefit of hindsight she realised the problems had started soon after she and Harry had returned to Australia. It had been easy back then to attribute them to the stresses of the move rather than some recurring cerebral nightmare. Yet as time passed and she realised how happy she was to be home, the move back to Australia failed as an explanation. As for the sludge on the slaughterhouse floor post-Fleur, after Fleur’s flying visit to Australia she had been packed away surprisingly neatly.

  Then there was the plodding novel. After six books Ava was well-acquainted with the adolescent unreliability of a work in progress, so it seemed reasonable to blame her work. She simply drove herself harder. While some days passed with only an occasional lapse, these became increasingly rare. Indeed, there were times when as soon as she commenced writing – hand-writing or computer it seemed to make no difference – the problems were so insistent she could not continue, and she would crouch at her desk dazed with terror waiting for the morning to finish.

  Finally she had confided in Harry – the memory lapses, the word-finding problems, the stalled novel, she told him everything.

  ‘My mind is in ruins,’ she said.

  He insisted there was nothing wrong and reminded her she had always had an exaggerated fear of losing her mind. ‘Some people have spider phobias, others have rodent phobias, you have a degenerative-brain-disease phobia. And besides,’ he added, ‘if anything were seriously wrong, I’d be the first to notice.’

  But he wouldn’t, and Ava knew this. Despite their travels, their homes, their laughter and domestic talk, despite all the time spent together, never had he shared the workings of her mind – not because she had blocked him out, although in truth, the situation had suited her, but he seemed unable to enter. Her mind, he said, was a mystery to him. Whenever she produced the completed manuscript of her latest novel he always reacted with the same mixture of surprise and delight as to a conjuror’s trick. And in fact he did regard her artistic creation rather like a magical process, as if her novels sprang fully formed from some fundamental but unreachable part of her. It was a surprising and endearing response, she had always thought, from a man whose commitment to the observable and the measurable was in all other respects watertight.

  Her interaction with Jack, however, was very different and given the years of their correspondence, extravagantly verbal. So a few months earlier, at the height of the long summer, before the doctors, before the brain scans, before the neuropsychologist and her language tests, Ava had written to him. She knew he would have sat with her while she explained her problems, but she was scared and bewildered and flagrantly raw. A letter was by far the best option.

  She wrote at length as she always had with Jack, and across a range of issues. She began with their friendship, how pleased she was that the uneasiness which had occurred when first he returned to Melbourne had dissipated; how there were so many possibilities to explore now they were living in the same city. She moved on to torture, which was then being discussed in the media, what it meant that a society would be having such a discussion in the first place. Some commentators were citing the ‘lesser evil’ argument and she knew Jack would oppose this as she did herself. She composed an argument against malleable ethics, or what certain people were touting with approval as ‘situational ethics’, in which ethics were reduced to a form of pragmatism no different to that which coursed through commerce, politics and civic life. From there she moved on to capital punishment. Even her primary-school-aged self had argued against the notion of ‘lawful killing’: if it is wrong for a murderer to take a life deliberately, she had said in a schoolroom debate, then it is wrong for the law to do the same. She wrote to Jack about the idiocy of ethicists and law-makers in the US who were currently discussing ‘the most humane means of execution’. The killing itself is assumed to be acceptable and civilised, she wrote, but they must be sure to do it nicely – as if deliberately causing pain would be morally reprehensible in a way the actual killing is not.

  From current social issues she moved on to a discussion of the novel she was currently reading – at that time, despite all the other problems, her reading was still relatively unspoiled – and followed with an analysis of a remarkably good film she had recently revisited, the name of which she could not initially remember, although it resurfaced while she was writing about it. Memento. She gossiped about Connie and his women, and followed a critical remark about Sara with what she hoped was a humorous and astute observation about Luke being the default setting for the next generation. She wrote the first half of the letter on her laptop and the second by hand just in case there was a difference. She finished by asking if he noticed any change in her writing style or language.

  She received his reply, also by letter, two days later. He could detect no change, no change at all. And so great was her anxiety she decided to believe him. Yet practically anyone could have told her that Jack was not to be trusted when it came to judgments about her. For all the words she had written to him, all the ideas, thoughts, observations and musings, jokes, gossip, opinions on books and films, all these originating from her became something quite different when in Jack’s court. Even when he was forging a life beyond the confines of his old obsession as he was now, so deeply entrenched was his habit that Ava could begin to write in Sanskrit and Jack would have made sense of it, not with any reference to her desires and intentions – obsession is stubbornly incompatible with empathy – but within the ever-accommodating coffers of his own love. At the time of Ava’s letter, Jack was still more in thrall than he realised to a love entirely of his own creation.

  Ava put her questions to a well-informed friend, and he, ever the lover, replied that he noticed no change. So the problem must be with her current novel. She knuckled down with even greater determination, but dead-ends multiplied, thin ice everywhere, characters and situations kept deserting her, the words themselves failed to materialise. She went for her customary walks, but rather than the usual clarification – it was Nietzsche who wrote that ‘all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking’ – her own thoughts remained a scramble and she would return to her desk more defeated than ever.

  The long summer lurched into a botched autumn. Oak trees were left with thick clusters of brown leaves clinging horribly to their branches and plane-tree leaves littered the ground like scraps of brown paper. Only the elms met the challenge with a brighter than usual yellow. The weather cooled, the days grew shorter and Ava’s problems hardened. This was, she finally acknowledged, no passing stress nor the anarchic squealing of a novel in progress, something was fundamentally wrong. Tossing between terror and disbelief she searched the cerebral dysfunction sites on the internet, the semantic dementias, the familial brain disorders, CADASIL and a clutch of other tidy acronyms for a brain turning to compost. She listened to Harry tell her that nothing was wrong. And finally she consulted a neurologist and a neuropsychologist who sent her for scans and administered tests.

  The scans were inconclusive but according to the neurologist this was no cause for celebration because the smallest elements of the brain were still beyond the reach of the medical gaze. The neurologist concluded in his matter-of-fact way that her clinical signs together with the tests indicated a degenerative brain disorder, ‘probably some sort of dementia’. He did not hesitate over the dreadful word. As many degenerative brain disorders
ran in families, he advised her to contact her brother and any other close relatives.

  Numb and disbelieving she did as she was told, but her contact details for Tim were twenty years out of date and yielded no leads. She telephoned her mother’s sister. Janet had neither seen nor heard from Tim in years.

  A few days later she and her aunt met for lunch in a city café. Janet was so excited. She was a member of a book club, she said. ‘We read each of your novels as soon as they come out, even in hardcover.’ She paused to take a mouthful of calzone. ‘Amazing what they can do with a pastie these days.’ And returning to her book club, ‘I don’t like it when they’re critical of your books.’

  Ava laughed. ‘If the author can take criticism from strangers in the media, then the author’s aunt should manage to take it from friends in her book club.’

  She had no intention of telling Janet she was sick. They chatted about old friends and relatives, they swapped tales of old times and at an opportune moment Ava asked about the family’s health. There was little to learn.

  ‘Your mother was never sick when we were growing up,’ Janet said. ‘And if she had taken better care of herself – I was always telling her to give up the fags – she would have lived to a ripe old age.’

  Janet could provide even less information about her father. ‘You look a lot like him,’ she said. ‘Such a handsome bloke, but a no-hoper as a father and husband.’ There was a long thoughtful pause before she added, ‘He’s probably still knocking around the outback.’

  Her father in the outback? Her mother’s version had him as a womaniser who had dumped the family for a worthless floozy, then drunk himself into an early grave.

  ‘It made your mother feel better to think that,’ Janet said. ‘Some men just aren’t made for family life.’ She paused as if unsure whether to continue. ‘I expect your mother never told you he sent her money, regular as clockwork the first of every month.’ Ava shook her head, she had not known. ‘Your mother used to complain like blazes when a 31-day month finished just before the weekend. She wanted a postal delivery on Saturday and every month to be February.’

  When they said their farewells they promised they would keep in touch. ‘I have a mobile now,’ Janet said. ‘The children gave it to me for my seventieth birthday.’ She wrote out the number. ‘You ring me any time, dear.’

  They hugged each other.

  ‘I should have done more for you when you were young,’ she said, before turning away.

  Ava didn’t really want to know if her father had bequeathed her a brain condition and made only a half-hearted attempt to find him. Neither of them it seemed were made for family life. Although she far preferred an irresponsible, renegade, antisocial father to the cold, duty-bound, blameless mother of her childhood. And while she knew an absent parent could claim a certain mystique denied a single woman encumbered by children and a stream of bills, she still opted for the father.

  Ava had always steered her own way through life and she was not about to change now. Whenever she considered the progression of this thing – ‘thing’ rather than the neatly vague ‘condition’ and certainly not the blowtorch blast of ‘dementia’ – she would see a mechanical doll turning slower and slower as the motor wound down. It was not to be borne.

  Considerations of God and afterlife were irrelevant to a lifelong atheist, and while the feelings of those who loved her were not, she knew that Harry, her friends too, would not want a half-strength Ava. She had seen far too many elderly women with glazed stares led through public gardens by jolly smiling daughters or long-suffering husbands – ‘See the pretty flowers, dear. Aren’t they lovely?’ – or admiring the food at the market – ‘Smell the heavenly smells, dear’ – or oohing and aahing over a baby in a pram – ‘Look at the tiny baby, dear’ – or patting a dog in the street – ‘Feel the soft puppy, dear’ – demented women led by the arm, or worse, by the hand and always lagging a little behind, never quite sure where they were. For Ava the situation was glaringly simple: if she couldn’t work, if she couldn’t remember, if she couldn’t reason or imagine, if she couldn’t communicate, then she was in essence already dead.

  Her face looked just the same, the hair that Harry sweetly if prosaically called her golden fleece looked just the same, she saw herself as she had always been, yet beneath the unchanged exterior she was rotting. She hated what was happening to her and she hated that she could do nothing to stop it. Harry would hold her face between his hands, ‘My own lovely Davey,’ he would say, as if nothing had changed.

  If a disease were to attack only her face like this thing was destroying only her mind, she wondered if she’d be less terrified, less angry, less helpless, less not herself. She had always operated with the confidence of an attractive person and had carried herself through a multitude of publics knowingly supported by the benefits which accrue. So how would she cope if her face were to be wrecked? And she was sure, as sure as one can be with hypothetical disasters, that as much as she would despise the way she looked, as much as she would rage against the unfairness of it, as much as it would cause her to withdraw from public life, she, Ava Bryant, would still exist. She could still claim words and thoughts and imagination and memory sufficient enough to confirm her self as herself. She could still work, and she could still enjoy the company of her husband, her friends, film, music, even travel. And equally she was sure she would want to live.

  A degenerative brain condition, she concluded, was the worst that could happen to her. And there was no real respite. She might be reading or listening to music and for a brief time she would not be aware of her disintegration. But when the music finished or the book was closed, the loss together with what she was in the process of losing over-whelmed. The good moments only reminded her of what she was becoming.

  She knew exactly what she must do. But knowing did not stop her from resenting the situation, resenting the solution, resenting the loss of a future, resenting all that was left undone. If you know in advance you have only forty good years, then you live very differently than if you assume the usual eighty. She wasn’t ready but circumstances had given her no choice. She and Harry would face this illness and its management together – management, what a pliable euphemism that was; with her competence no longer to be trusted, she needed him more than ever.

  She waited for a Friday to broach the subject, giving them the whole weekend to make plans. She went to the market to buy food for a picnic dinner and was forced to take a taxi home when unsure of which tram to catch. She spread a picnic rug on the living-room floor, arranged cutlery and serviettes, put the food on platters and the platters on the rug. When Harry arrived home he found her dithering over the oysters and fresh prawns wondering whether she should put them back in the fridge. He off-loaded his work gear and came to admire the array. The cheese first, and such a delight to see his favourite ewe’s milk blue, then the seafood selection – the South Australian oysters really took his fancy as she hoped they would; the antipasto platter with olives and roasted capsicum and dolmades was worthy of a Cézanne, he said, and the baguette with a chewy rather than crusty texture could be straight from Paris.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a perfect picnic.’

  They settled on the floor. He poured the wine and they helped themselves to the food. Before he had tasted a thing Harry turned to her and hugged her close. She heard his muffled, ‘I’m so proud of you – although I’ve never doubted you. Never.’ And a pause: ‘We’ll manage.’

  That marked the end of the perfect picnic. She took his ‘we’ll manage’ as her starting point: how pleased she was he had raised the topic, how he had always understood her so well, how fortunate she had been in her marriage, how much happiness they had enjoyed. And while they had assumed there would be a good many years more, with her brain turning to mush they would do what needed to be done, and do it together, and –

  ‘Hush,’ he said, ‘hush. You’re wrong. It’s not over. Nothing’s over. For better or for worse, and I
meant it.’ He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her towards him. ‘I’ve stuck by you through some pretty bad times and I certainly don’t plan to stop now.’

  He surely couldn’t be referring to Fleur. She didn’t stop to ask, had to stay on the main track. But he fought all her arguments, he fielded all her objections. He was, and he could not have been more emphatic, utterly opposed to ending her life. And besides, he said, she was being precipitous. ‘We don’t even have a proper diagnosis yet.’

  According to the neurologist, a diagnosis often could not be made until post-mortem examination of the brain. She was about to remind him of this when she ordered herself yet again to stick to the point. She moved away from him and perched on the edge of an armchair.

  ‘Every week I’m worse.’

  To help end her life, he said, would be a betrayal of the very love she had always relied on.

  ‘But if you truly loved me then you’d want what’s best for me.’

  ‘I know what’s best for you.’ He was implacable. And before she could interrupt, he continued. ‘I’ve never been one of those fools who kills the thing he loves, and I’m not about to start now. And I mean kill,’ he spat the word out. ‘Such acts are entirely self-defeating.’

  ‘But this concerns me,’ her voice was very quiet, ‘not you.’ She stood up and moved even further away. The smell of the food was making her sick. Something was.

  He disagreed. ‘You and I have been married half our lives. I’ve loved you and cherished you and cared for you all that time. And I’ll continue to love you and cherish you and care for you. I don’t see that anything essentially has changed.’