by Susan Duncan
Occasionally, Paul would suddenly become lucid again, in a way that was as cruel as it could be because it made me think – hope – that the experts were wrong and he would beat the odds: 'What's on the cover of the magazine this week?'
Halfway through my answer, he'd drift off again into a strange world where thoughts were tangled and friends, many long dead, flickered in and out of his mind: 'Must look up Don in Hong Kong next time.'
'Yes. Great idea.' But Don had succumbed to alcoholism a decade earlier.
My brother died as the sun came up on a Wednesday morning. His flame-haired, sharp-tongued wife, Jan, whom we call Dolly, steadfastly by his side as she had been throughout their lives together. I set aside Saturday morning to write his eulogy so when the phone rang, I flew into a rage at the interruption.
'What!'
'It's the hospice. Can you come and see Paul?'
I wanted to scream 'No!' Wanted to yell at everyone to leave me alone, to give me a break, just a tiny break, so I could write my brother's life in a way that did him justice.
'What's the matter?'
'Nothing. Nothing. Well, he's had a bit of a fall. Can you get here? Quickly? He's asking for you.'
In his room with its views across monochrome Melbourne suburbs, Paul lay on a mattress on the floor. Another, empty mattress had been placed next to him. So I knew he was dying. The empty mattress was for me. Late one night when I was sitting with him, a nurse had told me that when death approached, a second bed appeared for families to lie close and hold tightly for the last time.
I crawled onto the mattress beside him and cradled his head in my arms. 'I love you more than anyone in the world,' I whispered.
He lifted his hand with its beautiful long fingers – like a surgeon's, his mother used to say proudly – and pointed to where his heart was fading away.
'More,' he said. He smiled wonderfully.
The fall, I discovered, had been caused by a heart attack. And that's what killed him. Not the tumour at all. So we had two funerals in a week. My brother's in Melbourne. Paul's in Sydney, his hometown.
A few days after Paul's funeral, when it was Monday again, I zipped on my work face, climbed into my high heels and returned to my office to sit behind my desk. I locked loss in a hollow space and, fortified with my good old Melbourne public school upbringing that hammered home the maxim that the best way to get over a problem was to get on with it, I goose-stepped onwards.
Until the day I couldn't get out of bed.
2
I LAY UNDER THE DOONA in my manky blue-checked cotton pyjamas, staring at those mustard walls, confusing day and night, for five days. I suppose I must have fed the dog and I have a vague memory of the phone ringing. I also recall opening a can of tomato soup and eating it with buttered toast. Which is what my mother gave me when I was a little girl and my tummy felt bad. Tomato soup or rice pudding. But I didn't have any rice pudding.
On the sixth day I finally get up, walk the dog, shower, dress, turn the key in the ignition and swing carefully into peak-hour traffic. I pick up coffee from the corner shop. Hang my coat behind the office door. I sit behind my huge, ugly desk with its desolate views of West Melbourne and wish every celebrity to hell, every whining bad luck story to the same place.
When colleagues look enquiringly at me, I smile. 'Better?' they ask.
'Yup. Virus or something. Fill me in.'
Covers to choose. Stories to chase. Staff to manage. Crying often, but pretending it's over a reader's heartbreaking story. I alone know I don't really give a stuff about the readers any more.
Sometimes, when the cover lines won't gel, I daydream about being dead. Escaping the whole shit bundle of grief in a single bound.
But then I hear my brother's words: 'All those people who kill themselves and I lie here fighting to live another minute.'
Paul's words: 'Live for the quicksilver moments of happiness. Recognise and absorb them. They are rare and precious.'
I have long given up the search for happiness, though. What I want now is peace. No Friday morning envelope with disappointing circulation figures. No shrinking budgets, no being beaten by the opposition. No stress. No responsibility beyond my front door. Work, a career, the media – it is all a silly game, anyway, when death is inevitable and it's simply a question of when.
During those awful first months after the boys die, a routine begins with my stepdaughter, Suzi. We meet on Friday nights for dinner at a casual pub restaurant in St Kilda. Suzi, the actor. Big eyed and skinny in her fashionably frayed op shop clothes. Suzi, who was there when her father died. Who sat with him each afternoon.
Who loved him unconditionally. Which was the only way with Paul. I tell myself I am helping her to talk through the loss of a parent at our regular dinners. But she gives me far more than I am able to give her. She listens and listens and is the only one who lets me drop the façade of coping.
I call her around six thirty every Friday night. 'Let's meet early. I'm buggered.'
'Great. I'll catch the tram now. See ya there.' Her actress-trained voice carries far beyond the phone.
We never alter the routine. I order the same main course every week. So does Suzi. Lamb for me, steak for her. And the same wine. I ask for the same table, and when it's not available, I feel a sudden lurch of fear, as though I am plunging unprepared into the unknown. Death has snatched away any illusion of control and only dogged routine gives me a semblance of stability.
White napkins are swished into our laps, wine ordered, the buttery smell of baking pastry fills the room. Waiters, black clad stick figures balancing plates and human nature with equal skill, take our orders and give us respite from our everyday world. When Suzi and I cry, as we often do, they look the other way, those waiters. Or bring a glass of water and no words. Or a sinful pastry. The kindness of strangers. It is overwhelming.
One night, when it is nearly midnight and I've drunk too much, and the world has shrunk to the table where we sit, wine blots out my last vestige of emotional reserve.
'You know, you're a gift, Suzi. A gift in my life. If I'd had a child I would have wished for you.'
She shrugs as though it's no big deal. 'You have me,' she says.
And for a moment I feel as though I belong somewhere. But it has been a habit, for most of my life, to need others to tell me where I fit. So I back away from the impulse to make Suzi an anchor. Anchors, anyway, if they do not come from within yourself, can die on you. Or move on. Or turn out to be just plain unreliable.
There are moments, though, when my breath comes in short gasps and a single word or sound, such as my brother's name or an ambulance siren, can trigger waves of panic that make me want to jump up and flee. Or lean over and vomit. Just the sight of an ambulance leaves me shaky and distraught, unable to continue on my way for a small passage of time.
I discover quickly that there is no such thing as an ordinary moment any more. Too many ordinary moments have ended in disaster. Like going to bed one nondescript night and waking up to a husband with a brain tumour. Like listening to my brother's light cough and then getting a phone call to say it's a rare kind of cancer. I begin to assume the worst outcomes from the most trivial events. If Suzi is late for our dinner, it's a crash, not heavy traffic. If the phone rings late at night, it's a death, not a friend touching base. No. Nothing can be trusted to be ordinary any more.
At the office, I sometimes find myself sitting and staring at nothing, playing little mind games. I ask myself one question after another, but they are all the same in the end. What I ask myself in a dozen different forms is, if I die tomorrow, who will miss me? Will there be any regrets?
Answering the regrets part is easy. I've danced at the White House with tall, handsome young soldiers in crisp dress uniform. Driven around Somalia with men carrying machine guns perched on the roof of the car. Talked to Demi Moore about sex over a cup of coffee and watched her push a half-eaten chocolate petit four around her plate, too disciplined to swallow the
final, tiny mouthful. I've jumped icefloes in Newfoundland to photograph helpless baby harp seals being clubbed to death while nearby their mothers wailed pitifully as the floating, white wastelands turned red with the blood of their young.
I've been blasted by the foul stench of a polar bear's breath while he was being airlifted from a tiny town called Churchill, in Canada, to an isolated, snowy place where there were no humans to feel threatened, no rubbish bins to ransack. I've wandered through Imelda Marcos's vast, stuffed closets in Malacanang Palace, in the Philippines, counting her shoes and fur coats. Hitchhiked from Cape Town to Windhoek, sleeping by the side of roads so isolated only a car a day passed by. Spent an afternoon with a sober Richard Burton in his movie set trailer, lulled by his seductive voice and charmed by his earthy humour. Heaps of assignments, miles of travel, mostly at someone else's expense. An interesting, privileged, capricious journalist's life.
No. No regrets. I'll die without feeling there is still much to do.
But the other question, the one about who will miss me, I find difficult to confront. Because no-one will, not for long anyway. Transitory lives like mine touch many surfaces but rarely leave a mark. So when an old skin cancer on my top lip returns, I merely shrug.
'How much of the lip will go?' I ask the doctor.
'Nearly all of it.'
He reaches for my hand but I move it away, pretend I don't see his gesture of compassion.
'That's ok. I'm ok with that. It's not like I'm a young girl with her life ahead of her.'
But what I mean is that if death is the final outcome of life, what does it matter whether you have a top lip or not?
'When do you want to do this?' I ask.
He is struggling with my off-handedness and looks puzzled, as though there's some part of an equation that's missing.
'I can book you into a hospital or you can have it done at the clinic,' he says.
'What do you suggest?'
'Well, if we do it at the clinic, I'll do the lip reconstruction myself. In hospital, you can use a plastic surgeon of your choice. Do you want to think about –?'
'The clinic will be fine. Thanks.'
That night I call in, as I do at least twice a week, to have dinner with my brother's wife, Dolly. Of the fire engine red hair. The routine suits us. She cooks, I eat. For her, the routine of two at dinner continues and she doesn't have to wrestle with what quantities to cook for one. The following morning, she does the dishes while I grind my way to the office.
She's chopping onions when I mention I need to have a little surgery on my lip.
'I'll drive you to the clinic,' she says.
'Nah, I'll take a cab. It's no big deal.'
She looks at me sharply. Then changes the subject. 'They call us the Black Widows, you know,' she says.
'You're kidding!'
'Sounds a bit glamorous, doesn't it.'
We are both flippant about death in those early days after the boys are buried. Flippant in a way that shocks some friends, relieves others, but ultimately allows us to publicly acknowledge their absence without being shattered by it.
'Jesus, Dolly. Remember Paul's funeral? Remember dear old Keith, coming up to us? We were standing in the middle of the room like a couple of crows in a paddock. "Don't stand too close, you said. We're on a roll!" '
Dolly laughs, throws the onions into a frying pan, and wipes tears from her eyes. Onion tears? We fill our glasses with more wine.
'The poor bastard took off like a rabbit. Come to think of it, he didn't look too flash himself, did he?'
'What about Taronga Zoo?' she asks, still laughing.
It was the day after Paul's funeral. I'd drunk a barrel of wine at the wake and, later, even more at dinner. I had a drilling headache. Burning, roiling stomach. A paralysing hangover. All I wanted to do was lie still.
Dolly and my brother's best friend, James, were taking the ferry from Circular Quay to Taronga Zoo to fill in time before our flight to Melbourne. She insisted I join them.
Somehow, I controlled my churning, poisoned stomach on the ferry trip. From the wharf, we climbed a narrow, dizzying spiral walkway to catch a cable car to the zoo. At the summit, I turned to look at the hordes of cheerful, chatting families in a snaking line behind us, waiting their turn. Just as we were about to climb into the cable car, I felt nausea rise in a sudden, dreadful, uncontrollable wave. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
I leaned over the fence and, in front of hundreds of people, vomited copiously.
'Had the cable car all to ourselves. Three empty seats!' Dolly says, giggling.
Wine flows again. Dolly brings our plates to the table. Huge steaks with a mushroom and onion sauce, a fresh green salad with lots of chopped parsley, the same as her mother makes. Mashed potatoes whipped with more butter than milk.
'So do you want me to drive you to the clinic on Monday?' she asks again, sitting down to eat.
'No thanks. It's easier to grab a cab.'
'Right. Well. Do you want me to pick you up?'
'Nope. I'll grab a cab.'
Dolly looks at me hard.Torn between respect and concern.
'I'll be fine. Prefer to go alone, then I don't have to worry about keeping anyone waiting.'
'Should we open another bottle?' she asks.
We are still drinking from my brother's cellar which he made sure was stocked for Dolly's future. Along with the wine, he left a detailed letter telling her when to sell certain wines at auction, when to make sure the whites were drunk. Taking care of her from the grave.
'Yeah, why not? It's Saturday.'
3
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, I call a cab to take me to the clinic. I arrive on schedule to find a yellow room full of anxious, mostly middle-aged people. There will be a long wait, the receptionist tells me. One by one, as names are called, people disappear and return a while later with red-rimmed eyes and thick bandages over ears, arms, noses, foreheads. They look hangdog, like casualties of war, as they sit and wait for pathology results and permission to go home.
Then it's my turn. I lie in a chair like a dentist's and place my mind in another world. I am in Maine. It is autumn. There's a field full of pumpkins, golden in the evening light. The trees are red, orange and yellow and the purple sky is filled with Canadian geese flying in perfect formation, going south for the winter.
I count pumpkins in my imaginary field, a field I once saw driving back from Newport, Rhode Island, when, too sleepy to continue, I pulled off the highway onto a narrow dirt track. It was after reporting the America's Cup. Not the time Alan Bond won it and made Australians proud. The time before, in 1980. The pumpkin field was so quietly exquisite, I have never forgotten it and I conjure the image often, when I need to escape moments that might otherwise be unbearable. Like losing most of your top lip to a sneaky little cancer.
The knife cut feels like a gentle tug and most of my top lip is flicked into a shiny kidney-shaped stainless steel dish. Wads of white bandages are pressed hard on the wound and the tinny scent of blood fills the room. After a while, when the blood flow eases and the pathology results confirm all the cancerous skin has been cut away, the specialist begins to rebuild my lip, taking flesh from inside my mouth and pulling it forward to drag it up over the missing bit. He hums through his work and the nurses chat casually about their holiday plans as they hand him instruments.
Then he leans across me and it is the first time I've felt a body closely since I crawled onto the mattress beside my dying husband. It is strange how I can lose a lip, deny pain, smell my own blood and remain detached.Yet the casual touch of another human being almost brings me undone.
After eight hours, I leave the clinic with a brick of bandage balanced on a tender new lip like some kind of primitive tribal decoration. I am told to avoid hot food, drink through a straw, stay quiet.
At the house, my mother waits with every kind of liquid food lined up on the kitchen bench. I'd tried to stop her coming from her home at the foot of the
Blue Mountains but seeing her face is unexpectedly comforting. She hands me a drink with a straw and sends me to bed like a little girl. She resists turning it into her own tragedy. At least for a while.
I am supposed to spend a week convalescing, but two days later I drive to the office and tiptoe up the back stairs to my desk to avoid having to explain what's happened. I look bizarre, but the office offers routine and I grab it like a lifeline. At home, there's too much time to think. There is a tight band of pain around my chest, though, and I begin to wonder if I am on the edge of a heart attack or just slowly going mad. I do not care much, either way.
Suzi senses my detachment from my own welfare and insists on making an appointment with a shrink. I keep the date although I am ashamed Suzi thinks I need psychiatric help. In the shrink's dimly lit office, I act weird, as though we're chatting informally at a cocktail party. I interview her, push away a loathsome box of tissues on the table next to my slippery leather chair and try to give the impression that all is well and I am tough. Shrinks, I think as I sit there, are for wimps.
'Thought you'd have a couch or something. Not just a chair.'
'That's only in movies.'
'Right.'
'So tell me why you're here.'
'Well, my brother and husband died within three days of each other. About nineteen months ago. And I still feel a bit sad sometimes. So I need some tools. To cope with grief.Give me the tools. I'll do the rest.'
She looks at me over her glasses, that kind and clever shrink, and suggests I start right back at the beginning, before the boys were even ill, and that we worry about grief coping skills a little later.
I tell her in a flat, off-hand way about my brother and my husband, trying to rush her to the bit where she gives me the key to escaping sorrow. But she slows the narrative down with questions and forces me to backtrack when I try to skip over the worst parts. By the third session, when I arrive with my own box of tissues, there is very little she doesn't know.