by Susan Duncan
Around midnight, I pick up my glass from Gordon's ledge and wander through the house and down the steps to the water. It's a still, cold night. The air is tangy, seagrass flops limply in dark patches. On the other side of the bay, a single light blazes. Another insomniac? There's a wooden pontoon, only slightly dewy, and I sit on it, looking around properly for the first time. My own slip, left by Gordon, has an upturned little fibreglass dinghy tied to it. Not much bigger than a bathtub. Finally got a boat. Can't see myself rowing it to the commuter dock, though.
My forty-ninth birthday is looming. Not much to show for it. Have I found my place finally? I look up at my house. I can always sell. This doesn't have to be forever. But the thought of another move is crushing and somewhere in that swell of self-pity I decide to give this everything I've got.
In the early hours of the morning, when it is still quite dark, I am woken by the sound of the back door sliding open. I cannot believe it is an intruder, not here, but then I hear breathing, heavy and regular, and a grunt. There's a clicking sound on the floor, a huge sigh and then silence.
My heart hammers as I get up quietly and move to turn on the light. I know I can scream. There are people next door to help. The switch moves silently and light floods the room from Gordon's funny little halogen spotlights strung together with industrial wire.
I look around. There is nothing here.Then I hear another heavy sigh, and the whoosh of breath rushing out of a mouth in what sounds more like contentment than threat. I tiptoe to the sofa and look over the back of it. A huge, fat golden labrador with impossibly big brown eyes looks up at me sweetly, then flops down to sleep.
'Get off, you bloody great brute! Get out!'
He opens one eye, shakes his head and goes back to sleep. I try to pull him off the sofa and he licks my face until I give in and climb into my bed again.
In the morning, before the sun is up, I wake with a thumping headache and vow, again, to go on a health kick. The dog stirs and this time doesn't seem to mind being asked to leave. I make tea and toast, and take it onto the deck to wait for the dawn. It arrives in a blood red rush, turning the escarpment a fiery orange and bringing the bay to life. As if on cue, birds begin racketing around and a school of tiny fish speeds past in a froth of water, followed by bigger, jumping fish that rise and plop loudly.
Five kookaburras join me, one by one, and eye my toast greedily. The littlest one is tousled, like he was late getting up and didn't have time to brush his hair.
'Scruff Bucket.That's your name.'
He tilts his head, his eyes never leaving the toast in my hand.
'You don't like toast.You only like meat. Give it a rest.'
He is the last to fly away. I go inside intending to shower and unpack but instead return to bed. There's no need to hurry. It's Saturday, and I'm going to be here a long time. When I wake it is nearly noon.
I squeeze in a lunch at Towlers Bay, drinking too much as usual. At some blurry point, Stewart leans across the table to me: 'You're turning into a drunk, you know.'
His words shock me into sobriety. 'Stewart, I have often seen you in the same state but I have never, would never, say anything like that to you.'
The entire table is silent. Watching. Waiting. Everyone's wineglasses sit still, anchored.
'I apologise,' he says.
And chatter fires up as though someone's pulled the cord of an outboard motor.
But I know I'm drinking too much. And it scares me. As a kid, I hated alcohol. Watching my father negotiate life through a lurching haze put me off it for years. When I was nearly twenty years old, I'd go to parties and walk up to blokes with a beer in their hand and a sheen in their eyes and ask: 'Are you thirsty?'
'No,' they'd reply happily.
'Then you don't need this drink.'
I'd take their beer and tip it down the sink. I thought I was saving them from a future like my father's. But all I did was offend everyone and make them wary. I wonder now if I sensed early that alcohol might be dangerous for me.
Somewhere along the line I forgot all those fears and joined the drinking crowd. But a drunk? Me? All I'm doing is blurring the edges of a rather useless life, aren't I? I'm just having fun, aren't I? Filling in the holes when the lover leaves me and returns to his wife. Right?
On Sunday morning, I stay in my pyjamas and begin by cleaning the windows. At lunchtime, I sit on the back deck in the warm sun, a cup of tea in hand, the steam drifting lazily upwards. I have a ferocious hangover. Again. I vow to cut back on booze. Again. Not that it's a problem. It's a healthy move. Right?
A tall, grey-haired figure in navy blue trousers and a faded navy shirt, the kind you see tradesmen wear, picks his way down the hill from the Japanese inspired house that perches above the tall palm behind my house.He moves like a brolga, his legs impossibly long and skinny.
I wave my mug. 'Hi.'
'Hi. Love the two boys,' he responds.
'Oh.Yeah.' What two boys?
'I'm Jack. Welcome,' he says, coming across. He holds out a battered hand covered in scratches and grabs mine solidly but not painfully. Up close he looks as though he is part of the landscape. His fissured face matches the escarpment. His eyes reflect the blue of the bay. His skin is the reddish brown of the rocks. His roughly cut hair foams like white caps.
A horn sounds.
'Ferry's here. Gotta go. We'll get you up for a drink. Soon.'
He gallops down the goat track that leads from his house, trousers too short, bony ankles, lace-up shoes without socks.
By midnight the unpacking, as far as I can go within the space, is finished. The house sparkles except for the hole in the plaster and the big slab of white undercoat on the green wall. I have drunk gallons of tea. But no wine.
Monday evening, I get home early from work because I want to be at home as soon as I can.
Ken collars me in front of the boatshed: 'Listen, I'm quite happy to keep that fella on my land. Like him. What's he all about?'
'What fella?'
'The old Chinese bloke.'
Jesus. The bronzes. I suddenly realise my three Chinese statues, about a metre tall, Healthy, Wealthy and Wise, are missing.
'God, sorry, Ken, didn't know where the boys stashed them. Can you show me the spot?'
We walk around the edge of the shed. He points to a location below his deck. Wise, holding the pearl of wisdom, looks wistfully towards the bay through sprays of pink bougainvillea scrambling over a dead tree trunk.
'There are two others. Haven't seen them, have you?'
'You mean those blokes?'
I follow the line of his finger into my front yard. Healthy, holding a baby, and Wealthy, decked out in all his finery, stride across grass. Screened from the house by trees and in a gentle dip in the land.
'They're the ones. Thought I'd lost them.'
'Bit big to lose, aren't they?'
City dope, he's thinking.
'Leave him there as long as you want,' he adds. 'Swap him over for Wealthy, if you like. Could use a bit of that.'
'Couldn't we all?'
A week later, dusk rolls in from the east. It is mid-May and the air turns thin with cold as soon as the sun drops. The lover has finally found the time to come to Pittwater, his curiosity overriding his loathing of boats and water. But he leaves after a quick house tour.Now, it's too early to sleep, too late to make something of the next few hours.
I vow to eat a proper dinner. My body, when I run my hands down it, is papery thin. Outside it begins to rain heavily, banging on the tin roof like a thousand drumsticks. There are no leaks anywhere. The house is solid.
I dream of dolphins with happy faces and wonderful smiles. They swim around me, chattering in the way dolphins do, and make me laugh in my dreams.
The next morning, the waterfall across the bay is frothing white and magnificent. It roars and I find myself busting with joy at the sight of it. I reach for the phone and dial a local builder to make an appointment. I am glad I am here. I just
have to extend the house a bit and it will all be fine.
Two weeks later, I feel a lump in my right breast.
12
'CAN'T FEEL ANYTHING,' a local doctor tells me the next day when I stop by his office to get it checked out.
He is late middle-aged, dry skinned, smells faintly of tobacco. His eyes are kind and he is unhurried. I sit up from the cracked old leather examination bed as he pulls the screen so I can dress in private.
'Great.'
Yippee, is what I'm thinking. But he insists on a mammogram and I go confidently around the corner to the clinic. A South African woman, distant, methodical, resists my efforts at chat. She walks out with the plates and returns to do another set. Just the right side this time.
'Anything wrong?'
'They were a bit blurry.'
'Right.'
The mammograms go directly to the doctor and I forget to ring to make another appointment.
The receptionist calls me two days later. 'When would you like to come in?'
'How about next week? I've got a lot on right now.'
'Can you make it any sooner?'
'Why? I'm sure there's nothing to worry about.'
'How about tomorrow?' she suggests, and a worm of fear wriggles uncomfortably in my stomach.
'Is there anything wrong?'
'Doctor will explain.'
The next day I return to the same little cubicle of an office, sit on a tired old chair, while 'Doctor' reads the diagnosis. I have put my mind back into a field of golden pumpkins with Canadian geese flying overhead, as I always do when I feel I may not cope with what is happening. So I am detached. Tough. If I don't accept what he's saying, maybe it will go away.
He hands me a referral to a specialist, tells me to call him if I can't get a quick appointment.
'Do you understand what you have to do?'
'I know all about it,' I say. 'My husband died of a brain tumour, my brother died from thymoma.'
'Thymoma? Rare.'
'Doesn't matter how rare if it's attached itself to you.'
He is silent.
I pay the bill and walk to the car where I sit and cry. I cannot help believing I have done this to myself, that I am being punished for sins of the past and present. I think back to a moment, months earlier, when I returned from the assignment on the Queen Elizabeth 2, sick and nervous because I hadn't spoken to the lover for four days. Wondering who was filling his idle hours. 'This is the kind of behaviour that could give you cancer,' I told myself.
I still have a sliver of hope. Benign. Maybe it is benign, not malignant. I dial Fleury and ask her to find the best breast cancer specialist in Sydney.
'Who needs one?'
'Me.'
'Ah shit.'
I refuse her offer of comfort, refuse to go to town to stay with her. I want to be at home.
So much for happy dreams and good omens. I am a moron.
Only a genuinely deranged person would put their faith in flimsy superstition. Guided by the boys? Idiot.
All the old feelings of anger and despair come surging in. The more I turn to the lover for support, the more he withdraws.
'Of course I'll support you,' he says. But he doesn't return my phone calls. He is called away suddenly during lunch. I believe the excuses. Cannot grasp that nearly three intense years can mean nothing to him. I ignore the flashing hazard lights.
'Most men would walk away,' I say, testing his resolve.
'I wouldn't like to think I'm that kind of man.'
But he is, of course. He dallies around my edges a little longer, waiting for the final prognosis, before he finally, formally, quits.
There is never a moment when I think:'Why me?' Not even the morning three weeks later when I get out of my hospital bed to take a shower and look at my lopsided body for the first time.
Outside, through the hospital window, life scuttles on as usual, people hurrying to work, traffic clogging, the sun coming up and setting. And yet for me, life will never be the same.
Two weeks earlier, a soft-voiced technician, overflowing with kindness, stabbed me with a long, thick needle at the edge of my nipple. It hurt like hell and tears filled my eyes but I did not flinch.
'Sorry. It's terrible, isn't it?' she said.
I wondered if she'd ever been done to, instead of doing to. Pumpkins. Geese. Sunset. It was harder to pick up my mind and carry it to a beautiful place.
Then the wait in the specialist's office, high above the outside world, in a room where the windows do not open, the air is recycled.
Ahead of me are two other women who look like hunted animals. They do not read the pile of aged magazines on the coffee table. The one with a half-inch halo of grey before her hair bursts into jet black is weeping silently. I study the grey roots intently. What's the point of getting your hair dyed if you're going to die? Is that it? Or perhaps age has been transformed into a blessing instead of a curse.
A much younger woman is with her, dressed like a hippie. Her daughter, I guess. She talks like a tour leader. I want to tell her to shut up. There is no way to distract a woman who is waiting for a death sentence.
The other woman is with her husband. She looks old and beaten. He is short, his belly pushed into a too tight beige sweater, chins wobbling on his chest, patches of grey whiskers his razor has missed. He wears synthetic trousers and short socks that reveal milky blue legs. He does not look at his wife. I suspect he hasn't looked at her for years. Do I imagine his impatience and annoyance?
Does he blame his wife for being selfish, having the affrontery to get cancer and interrupt his day?
I pull a novel out of my handbag and tune out. I jump when my name is called and follow the specialist into his office. Benign? Malignant? One word, life. One word, death.
On my first visit here, a week earlier, to schedule the biopsy, I'd set the rules:
'I watched my brother go through chemotherapy so I don't want chemo. If things are that bad, I'd rather buy a ticket to Tuscany and sit out death with great food, good wine and Dean Martin belting out "Volare" on a bad sound system. OK?'
'Deal,' said the specialist, an affable, grey-haired man used to women placing their lives in the bowl of his hands.
Today, I sit still and silent,my back ramrod straight. I am dressed up. A simple soft, grey woollen dress,my best pearls, even earrings. Shiny black Italian leather boots. No armour, though, is going to change the outcome.
'So do I buy a ticket to Tuscany?' I ask when the silence begins to feel like I'm being smothered by a wet blanket.
He opens the folder, pulls out some papers clipped together. Looks at them. Takes a breath. Does not look at me.
'Yep. It's Tuscany,' he says, finally.
Someone lets off a thousand tiny birds in my stomach, all beating wildly to escape.
'Thought it might be like that.'
'I won't be able to save the breast.'
Already it is an anonymous appendage. The breast. Not my breast. Or save your breast. The breast.
'Oh well. I've got two.'
A lifetime of my mother's corny jokes, mostly inappropriate, swizzle in my head. I am appalled at my own words.Am I becoming my mother? A woman who makes light of other people's catastrophes and creates her own? I am outwardly stoic. Not a drama queen. Not like my mother. Or so I tell myself. But the feeble joke still rankles. Takes my mind off my verdict. The rotten punchline is quintessential Esther. And then, instantly: 'So what? I will be dead long before I fully develop her most irritating traits.'
'The tumour is directly underneath the nipple.'
Tumour. I absorb the word. Miss bits of what he's saying. Hear only that my right breast is scheduled for the trash can. I wonder if that is where it actually goes, tossed out like a piece of steak that's gone bad. Then vanity kicks in. My thinness has reduced my breasts by four sizes. To lose one will not be so noticeable. I become silently fixated on trivial detail. Because I cannot utter the one question I want to ask. 'What are my chanc
es?' It is a form of denial. And I am extremely good at that.
'Do you understand what I'm saying?' the specialist asks.
Worried my silence means I am about to faint or do something undignified like cry, he leans forward and adds a little more loudly: 'We also have to take out most of the lymph nodes under your right arm, to see whether any are affected.'
'Oh yes. Quite. Don't worry. I understand. I've been through all this before. First with my brother, then my husband. I know the routine.'
As I speak, I see doors stretching down an endless corridor like a long line of piano keys, slamming in my face.
House plans? Slam.
Holiday plans? Slam.
Work plans? Slam.
Get a dog? Slam.
Life? Slam.
In a wave of nausea, I confront my own mortality and wipe out, in an instant, the human instinct to look ahead. The waiting begins. Granules of hope are hesitantly pushed across the table. Then snatched back.
'We won't know how far it's gone until after the operation.'
Hope. 'Can you take a shot? Guess?'
'No. But I think you've had the tumor a long time.'
No hope. Long time equals time to travel through the body.
'What's the worst case scenario?'
'It's progressed to the bone marrow.'
'What happens then?'
'For most people, it's chemo.'
'What's the success rate?'
'Varied.'
'I told you. Chemo is not on.'
'Let's worry about that if the time comes. We won't know until after surgery, until we see if it's progressed to the lymph nodes.'
This is the moment, I believe, that I shut down. I do not ask any critical questions. My chances of survival? What kind of breast cancer? I do not want to know. Detail equals pessimism. No more questions, Susan.You are in control.You will take on the fight. You will win. Statistics don't apply to you.