by Luke Davies
Crossword.
1.40 Me: Knight of the Long Afternoon…
Cryptic crossword.
2.05 Pino Alzado. Soccer training—ankle. Swelling. Pain. Bound—crepe bandage. Refer Westmead Hosp—X-ray; prescr. Panadeine Forte.
If time stood still, and we could choose the time, the best time, then love without pain would be all I know. Tess on the beach, Tess changing the station on the car radio. Swinging Isabelle around and around in the backyard. Isabelle grinning at the Easter Show, the fairy floss bigger than her head.
Dizzy with love and regret.
She’s an adult now. She’s a busy girl.
2.30 Mrs Dekker cancels. No more appointments today. Call Tess.
It is hard to be positive.
He was slipping away, but slowly. Only the Parramatta patients were happy. The rest of us, I guess, were making do. For my father, the hours of work were squeezed in tight by the endless time outside of them. Each morning from Monday to Friday his mind rearranged itself to face the task at hand, and each evening he disarranged it. At the point when the Davi family moved away to Adelaide after two and a half years in Sydney, Tom felt that the hollowness, gathered together in a raggedy bundle and placed on a scale, was heavier at last than all the substance that made up his life. His image, not mine.
He reduced his working week to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. No point in fighting the numbers any more. ‘It’s only for a while,’ he told Tess. ‘I can’t stand the traffic snarls. I’ll just take it easy.’
In the diary I find something that astounds me. At fifty-one years old, alone in his room on a Thursday afternoon after surgery has closed, he injects himself with morphine for the first and, so far as I can make out, only time. It must have been that vistas of unparalleled beauty opened up behind his eyes. This page, the morphine page, stands out because it is an entry in which his writing suggests a kind of peace. His body is warm, he says, and the world is warm, and everything fits together, as once before it did. But when might that have been? he ponders. For four hours he nods at his desk, immobile and filled with the light of tranquillity. I imagine the phone ringing and Tom Airly waking slowly from his deep nod. It’s Tess, worried.
My father composes himself. ‘Sorry, pet. I fell asleep. Paperwork.’
But somewhere in the distant background, behind this golden man whose blood was filled with eternity for a few hours, somewhere even in the middle of the morphine, was the man who knew that the peace was a peace that had not been earned. On the next Tuesday, after the interminable length of his long weekend, I picture him taking out the vial of morphine and weighing up the odds. Morphine, he surmises, will repair his mind at the cost of his life. A beautiful swap: perfect, noble. Restitution to completeness. He must have been thinking of Tess and me. He must have taken stock: he would have an oceanful of the desire to keep using the morphine, an egg-cup full of the desire to stop, a thimbleful of the belief that he could. He would certainly have had access, until medical records and accountability caught up: therein, no doubt, would lie the race between a second deregistration and death.
And here is a supreme moment. Surely it must have been like this. He puts the morphine back—there it is, just like that. It is back in the safe. He resigns himself to the loss of his mind instead.
The diary entries ended soon after this. The episodes began to roll into his life, like lumbering breakers in the winter storms at Ulladulla beach. Help me Isabelle, help me Tess, he cried out at night, deep in the middle of his troubled dreams.
Love Calls You By Your Name
WE ARE ALL, I REALISE, EVEN AS I WRITE THIS, MERELY moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It’s relentless. It’s a savage thing. And yet for a long time I’ve carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it’s some kind of protective illusion.
Certainly this sense was rarely more vivid than in those first years of buoyancy after I had obtained my gloriously useless Fine Arts degree. It is easy to look backwards and see my father moving inexorably towards his darkening horizon. But when I think of myself at twenty-two, I remember only that feeling of growing lighter and younger, and how it seemed that the opaque weight of the world was dissolving.
Caroline, my friend through so many years at school, had long disappeared from my life. It had been as if suddenly, after the Year Twelve formal, a switch was flicked and the walls of school dissolved and those who had been intimate friends through the bizarre eternity of childhood were teleported into an unreachable dimension. When school finished I went straight to art college, as I’ve said, and she backpacked around the world, working and travelling for a year and a half. We saw each other a little when she came back but already the gulf seemed vast. She knew what she wanted to do and I didn’t have a clue. She got a job with a merchant bank and moved to Melbourne, enrolled part-time in Business Studies courtesy of the firm. She told me her aim in life was to one day have at least nineteen million dollars, nineteen being her lucky number. God knows she is halfway there by now.
I had grown into new circles of friends, from art college, and from the bands that emerged out of it as harder evidence of the college’s existence than any oil hung in an exhibition, and from the pubs where we gathered to drink and watch these bands play. It was during this time that I met Louise, the flamboyant centre of a circle of young women whose carefree solidarity I secretly yearned to be a part of at the same time as I kept my distance. I admired her greatly and perhaps also was a little jealous, with that haughty suspicion that the solitary have of the social. But one day we wound up talking at the college cafeteria, and we simply fell into each other’s lives without any other preliminaries. It seemed we had been friends forever. She had black hair and dark eyes that sparkled. She welcomed me into the dynamism of her warmth. Over the years we became inseparable, shared everything, all trials and tribulations, all dreams and fears.
And so a year after university had finished, when we’d been doing nothing much more than working in bars and staying up all night and playing musical chairs with the boys in our scene, we took off, just the two of us, on a whim, right across the continent, by bus, to the empty west coast. I can’t even remember what sparked the idea, or who thought of it first, or what we expected to find there. I’d heard about the dolphins at Monkey Mia: maybe that was it. There was both a sense of the exotic and of the absurd in operation—that there could even be a place with a name like that, in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Indian Ocean somewhere between Perth and Broome; and that it could be a tiny town famous for only one thing: the dolphins who gathered each day in the shallow water by the jetty, among whom the tourists could stand, patting and feeding them. I was a little bit more of a cosmic cowgirl then than I am now, with a 22-year-old’s wish for all mysteries to be true, so it wasn’t too hard to imagine some kind of ‘special connection’ making itself apparent over there, thigh-deep in the lukewarm water with my oceanic soul-brothers and sisters.
We got our first taste of western hospitality when a Perth taxi driver agreed to drive us the ten hours north to Monkey Mia for $250; he wouldn’t mind fishing for a couple of days, he said, and then he’d drive himself home. Monkey Mia was nice—it was beautiful, standing in the water as the dolphins nudged your legs, running your hands along their streamlined musculature—but it was slightly less, I thought, than a mystical experience, waiting in line with all the other tourists beside the baking carpark crammed with campervans.
A family we met in the Monkey Mia caravan park gave us a lift the few hours back down to Geraldton, a fishing town of some twenty thousand inhabitants. By now we’d heard about the Abrolhos Islands, the coral islands a few hours by boat from the mainland: austere, serene, deserted, with only small settlements of fishermen’s huts. It was in search of some derangement of the senses, in landscape so unlike the east coast, that we decided upon the Abrolhos as our next destination.
We met some of the local yo
ung fishermen. It wasn’t hard; they flocked to us. They all had names like Skeeter and Pablo and Mad Dog and Hoots. Louise and I took the cue, delved back into the S. E. Hinton novels we’d both loved as teenagers, The Outsiders and That Was Then, This Is Now, and began to introduce ourselves as Ponygirl and M&M.
It was a big money year for the cray industry. The boys would throw wild parties, thick with a mist of sweet ganja smoke, overflowing with bottles of whisky and vodka and kegs of beer. Then at four in the morning they would stagger off to make it somehow to their boats, to begin the day’s work. In the early afternoon they would return home, sleep for a few hours, then party all over again.
I was sleeping with a guy called Blitzer, Louise with Skeeter. Or maybe it was the other way around. He had a lovely body. He told me guiltily he had a girlfriend in Perth. I said I wasn’t jealous.
It was a mad couple of weeks. I’d never been a big pot smoker, but in Geraldton, at a time when my life was suspended between possible directions, it seemed to make sense, and after a morning joint the day was fluid and comic and the immense hard sky became less menacing. I got an afternoon shift in the pub. My Blitzer boy’s guilt got worse, not better. I ended his misery by suggesting, ‘Let’s just be friends.’ Louise rang home to find that her application for a job in a graphic design studio had been successful. She would have to drop out of the Abrolhos plan. I decided to stay on for a while.
The first time I went on a cray boat, Blitzer’s skipper picked me up at 4 a.m. on the night of a full moon. I stood on the deck as we headed out to sea from the Geraldton docks, marvelling at the way I only needed to tighten my calves to keep my balance up and down through the soft roll of the waves. I breathed deeply in the salt breeze. The fat yellow moon was setting out over the ocean, and then the sun began to rise back east above the mainland. For about ten minutes the two discs were aligned, each just above its respective horizon. I felt for a moment that I was truly in an inverted world where all experiences would be new.
Then the moon was gone and the sun grew smaller as it climbed and the morning began to take on colour. The water all around us turned from dark grey to silver to a luminescent green. I was delighted to see the flying fish erupt from the water, amazed at the distance they covered in air as they whirred like wind-up toys. I watched over the railing as a dolphin tracked us for a minute or two, cutting through the water with immense power. It seemed I had left behind a complex world—Sydney and art college and all the scatterings of my past and fragments of my present—and come here to a land of propulsion.
And then I met Terry Breen—it was nice to come across someone who didn’t have a nickname—and his wife Emily and their three beautiful children, Charlie, Jack, and Laura; and through Terry I would come to meet Matthew Smith— ah, we’ve arrived there at last, almost—who for a time would become the love of my life. Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion.
I met Emily and Terry at a party one night. I was attracted to their quiet presence. We got on well. They invited me to stay in the spare room in their house. I was sick of my caravan already and it sounded like a great idea. Terry was always gone hours before sunrise. On the mornings when Emily worked in the library I took the kids to school. On her days off we drank tea and she told me all the wild west sea stories and I helped her paint the renovations. She was thirty-six, tiny and blonde with a bright wide smile on her pixie face. She seemed no older than me. It was a shock to conceive of her as a mother. She might have been the kids’ older sister.
The house was rambling and cool. Emily had orchestrated the renovations so that walls and ceilings had been knocked out and a high cathedral ceiling exposed. On days when the stifling dry easterlies blew, the house was always an oasis of pleasant breezes.
In the few weeks I stayed with them I came to love this family, its gentle warmth, the absolute devotion of each member for the other. Terry was reserved at first, softly spoken, but as I came to know him he came out of himself, and there flowed from him quietly and smoothly an endless procession of sea tales. I was hypnotised. The kids, who had heard them all before, still sat around him rapt, as interested in their father’s retelling as they were in the reactions of a new visitor. We played Monopoly and watched bad television as the long evenings darkened. The local ads were all for four-wheel drives.
Somewhere between the first couple of weeks of parties and the next couple with the Breen family, I slowed down a little. In the space and the stillness I took stock of my desires. In the presence of their love I sensed my loneliness, and I understood for a moment, clearly, that deep and basic human desire for companionship at depth. I was twenty-two and had been with perhaps nine or ten boys in the past five years. I suppose I was thinking it was time for something more.
I had enjoyed my day on the boat with Blitzer and his skipper. So when Terry Breen asked if I would like to come out, I jumped at the chance. In the pre-dawn light at the dock where the Storm Cove was moored, as Terry and I climbed down onto the boat, Matthew Smith appeared from the darkness of the wheelhouse unravelling a coil of rope. I could make out nothing but the barest outline of his hulking form.
‘Matt the deckhand,’ said Terry, ‘Isabelle the babysitter. She’s here to keep an eye on things.’
‘Hey,’ he said softly, reaching out his hand and shaking mine. The first thing I ever liked about him was the sweet sound of his voice.
As the light came up I stood out of the way, watching the skipper and his decky at work and enjoying the soft undulations of our journey out to the first cluster of cray pots. Terry steered the boat, keeping an eye on the global positioning satellite navigation screen, where the location of each pot was marked with an ‘x’. Matt prepared the bait on the deck, cramming the cowhide and the rancid-smelling herring and scalies and kangaroo meat into small plastic bait-traps inside the heavy wooden cray pots. I watched him, fascinated. Barefoot, legs spread for balance, head bowed in concentration, he worked methodically, cutting off chunks of the compacted cow skin, mixing it in with the oily fish heads.
I thought I saw whiskers, possibly eyelashes. ‘That’s not…’ I said. ‘That’s not…shit, that’s not a cow’s face, is it?’
He glanced at me. ‘Usually it’s just the skins. Every now and then we get a box full of faces. It’s the way they come from the abattoir.’
‘Yech! It reminds me of something bad. The Silence of the Lambs.’
He unfolded one of the faces fully, held it up with his hand inside it like a glove puppet. The cow’s face hung from the end of his arm wearing that same ridiculous look of incomprehension that they carry with them in life.
‘The silence of the bulls,’ he said, straight-faced.
‘Aww, put it away!’ I laughed.
‘Gross, isn’t it?’ he said, scrunching it onto the bench and slicing off its snout. Then he looked up at me and smiled. His heavy plastic apron was smeared with the stains of fishguts.
It is just that moment that is hard to think of, to write of. In the photo album of memory there are snapshots that pierce the heart and from whose sudden jolt I am left bewildered and exhausted in my despair. In that smile I saw his warmth and shyness and loyalty, the whole courteous depth and range of his goodwill and calm grace. Or maybe that is just what I see now, in the uselessness of memory, which reaches only ever to where we cannot be. It is all such a fog. Trapped inside the windowless walls of the present, I cannot reclaim that moment on the deck.
He was tall and lean from his time on the boats. Later, in Sydney, when he fleshed out a little, he would remind me of a giant teddy bear. He was square-jawed like an actor. His unruly black hair was always falling in the way of his eyes. From a distance you wo
uld expect him, somehow, to have black eyes, but in fact they were crystal blue, with that extraordinary transparency you see in the brittle winter skies over the Blue Mountains, and in them, indeed, it seemed that tiny birds might be soaring forever on the rising corkscrew currents of air. There was a dimple on his chin. All this description is only love. Well, that is the way that he was, that I saw him. Not a word in this book is untrue. Everything happened just as it happened.
He didn’t speak again for hours. I watched them work all day in the blistering heat. Terry leaned over the railing and hooked with a steel grapple the orange-and-white foam floats that marked his pots, then wound the rope onto the automatic winch. The huge pots lumbered up out of the water, sometimes empty and dripping, sometimes filled with the rustling and clicking of the lobsters all crowded together. I was enlisted for the day to move the cursor on the global positioning screen, erasing the ‘x’ where the pot had been pulled and inserting a new one at the next drop point. Matt tipped out the crays into the cakka box—cakka was the name for undersized crays—and measured them quickly one at a time. The cakkas would go back into the sea; the others were tossed into the steel-mesh tanks that rested in salt water beneath trapdoors on the deck. Now Terry would steer for the next ‘x’ while Matt picked up another baited pot, staggered under its weight to the railing and waited for Terry, checking the echo-sounder for likely good spots, to give the shout ‘Go!’, at which point Matt dropped the pot over the side.
At the end of the day we drew up at the dock of the fishermen’s co-op. A forklift delivered the next day’s boxes of bait and cowhide at the same time as a conveyor belt, lowered over the deck, took up the day’s catch in orange plastic trays. Terry signed the clipboard passed down to him by the forklift driver. Then we moored further in at the Storm Cove’s berth and walked along the network of gangways until we reached the carpark. The ground seemed to sway. I went with Terry in the ute. Matt waved and we parted with little more than a ‘Nice to meet you!’ But I knew we would be seeing each other again.