by Susan Duncan
There is a man on the pontoon. Middle-aged, with dark, wavy hair and eyes so brown they seem black. He's helping one of the boatshed boys carry a mast.
'Do you need another pair of hands?' I ask. 'I'm really strong.'
'We'll be right,' says the stranger.
When the mast is laid on the jetty, the stranger stands and looks across the bay. Shoulders hunched. Bright white T-shirt ringing his neck under a navy windcheater. Worn working boots below his jeans.
'Hello,' I add.
'Uh-huh.' His face is weary but deeply tanned, though summer is well over.
'I'm Susan. I bought Gordon's place.'
'I know.'
'Oh.'
Silence. Then he remembers the normal protocol. 'Oh, I'm Bob.'
'Do you live around here?'
'Yeah.'
He spins and points up the winding sandstone path to the pale yellow house with the graceful columns. Says nothing.
'Oh, so that's your house. I've wondered who lives there,' I say.
And then it registers. His wife is ill. Cancer. I'd heard about it sometime. But wallowing in my own fog, I'd pushed the information to one side.
'Come and have dinner tonight,' I babble, trying to fill the ballooning silence.
'I don't know,' he says. 'My wife . . .'
'Yeah, I know. Cancer. Me too.'
I hold out my hand for him to see the little patch of cotton wool.
'Then you understand,' he replies. 'But I'll ask her. Let you know.'
He moves off along the jetty, one shoulder lower than the other, walking crookedly. Head bent low.
'Seven o'clock, if you can make it,' I call out.
He stops and turns, head hunkered deep into his shoulders like a turtle. 'Might be too late for her, she gets tired. Thanks anyway,' he says.
'How about six?'
'I'll ask her.'
'Ok.'
I watch him walk towards the pathway that climbs to his house. At the dock next to the ferry wharf, his dock, I now realise, he bends and picks up a coil of shiny green hose and a bag full of groceries.
About half an hour later, the phone rings.
'Thanks but we won't come to dinner,' Bob says.
'Oh. Everything ok?'
'Barbara's a bit tired, that's all.'
'Ok.'
Intrusive. I've been intrusive and pushy. Feel I've overstepped some fragile line. I back off.
'She says lunch would be good sometime,' he adds.
'Oh! That's terrific. When would you like to come? This Saturday?'
'I'll talk to Barbara and let you know.'
I put the phone down, vaguely exasperated. I'm used to instant results and Bob, I think, is hard to get a lot of words out of.
Some nights, the moon is so bright through the bedroom window I have no need of a light. Not even to read a book. I plunge into master food writer Stephanie Alexander's odyssey into south west France. Reading about food is endlessly reassuring.
There's a predictable outcome, a vicarious pleasure and no-one is ever threatened. Her mouth-watering account of making a traditional peasant dish called Poule avec sa mique (chicken with a dumpling) is inspiring. First, you bone a chicken and make a rich stock from the bones, and then the flesh is stuffed with a blend of tarragon, chopped ham, pork mince and breadcrumbs. The boned, stuffed bird is then wrapped in muslin and poached – along with a large, tasty, juicy dumpling – in the stock heavily laden with vegetables.
Its difficulty fascinated me. First the boning, then the stock, then the stuffing, then the dumpling, then the grand finale, when it all comes together in a slow simmer until it is ready to be sliced and served in bowls with plenty of broth and slices of the dumpling. I read it over and over for a while, tempted by its complexities. I vow to make it one day. Which becomes a tiny rub on a steamy window to take a tentative glimpse at a future.
In the cool hours before dawn, as I sip endless glasses of water, the idea of spending a whole day cooking a 'simple' meal is incredibly tempting. So much easier than the racking business of sitting at an office desk. My concentration at work, after the second treatment, is scatty. I scramble around my head trying to link thoughts and words. When I read them back, they are disjointed, jumbled, frighteningly inept. Frightening because this has been my livelihood and I am losing the skills. It's not just that I can't concentrate, it's that I cannot stop my mind from shooting off in a thousand different directions.
My childhood. Was my path, even then, mapped out? My relationship with my mother. Is it my fault? What has made me what I am, and what has brought me to where I am? Would a turn left or right instead of ripping up the middle have changed the outcome of my life? How can I recognise the defining moments? Would I have done it differently if I knew then what I know now? And the biggest question of all. When weighing up the balance, have I managed to live my life with more honesty than prevarication, more compassion than cold-hearted judgement?
It is a chilling mental game because a million failures, some bigger than others, rear up and the memory of a few leave me reeling. Is everyone's life like that? Or just mine? Am I more flawed than most? Or am I again falling into that viper pit the shrink warned me about so long ago, the one in which I think only of what I didn't do (for the boys, when I had the chance) instead of what I did do? Is dwelling on the negative a strong personal characteristic – and if it is, should I reprogram my mind?
Easier by far, I decide, to follow the directions in a recipe than to try to fill a glaring white page with words. Best of all, there are results in a short time. And there's no-one to tell you to do it again because they'd like it presented a different way. So it isn't that hard when I step into one of the grey carpeted cubicles one morning soon after the second treatment and withdraw (again) from my career. I have heard, anyway, that they're looking for a replacement for me.
I wear a mid-calf, beige, knitted skirt. A matching polo-necked sweater. Tan boots of the softest leather. Underneath all this, knitted leggings, a white skivvy. And I am still cold. Even in the fan-forced oven of the office.
I sit in the straight-backed chair opposite the business manager (the blonde is on holidays) and take control. It is wonderful, the freedom of having nothing to lose.
'I've heard you're looking for a replacement for me,' I tell her flatly.
She swallows and looks at the file – my file – on her desk. She is not a bad woman but trapped in the age-old dilemma of doing what's been asked of her or doing what she feels is morally right.
'Where did you hear that?' she asks.
'All over town. I even know who's been offered my job. I can't work out, though, whether you're lining someone up to replace me now – or because you think I'm going to drop off the twig shortly?'
'Oh,' is all she can manage. My bluntness has shocked her.
'It's ok,' I relent. 'Let's just be adults, admit what's going on and come to some kind of arrangement.'
Her face stains with red but she smiles. I've taken away the need for lies and deception and she is, at heart, a kind and honest woman.
'That'd be wonderful,' she says.
'What I'd like to do is to walk out of here today and not come back.'
'I'll see what I can do for you. I'll do my best.'
And I know she will.
By lunchtime, I finish my goodbyes, climb into my car and vacate my parking space for the last time. If I didn't feel so absolutely wrecked with tiredness, I would have sung out loud. What matters now is living. Not existing.
As I round the bend where the dinghies play their concert in time with the waves, I wind down the window and let the cold air rush through the car, just so I can breathe in the salty air. No more office deadlines. My only goal now is to get well and survive. And to make Poule avec sa mique. It's the kind of dish you have to make at least once in your life.
A few days after quitting my job, the phone rings in the middle of a silent morning and I jump with fright.
'Hello?'
>
'It's Bob.'
'Hello. How are you? How's Barbara?'
'She's . . . ah . . . lunch. We can make lunch on Friday. She'd love it.'
'Great. It will just be us. No-one else.'
'That's good.'
'Is there anything she can't eat?'
Since chemo, all fish, except canned tuna, tastes like wet cement to me. Lamb is fine. The thick, sweet smell of beef sends me fleeing from the kitchen.
'No. Anything is fine,' he says.
The phone goes down abruptly. Not a great talker, this Bob. After growing up in a family that equated charm with glibness, his reticence is disorienting. A whole bunch of polite little asides go unuttered, like I've been cut off midstream. But it feels clean. There's no bullshit.
I've spent a lifetime listening to people use other people's needs as an excuse to get what they want (and doing it myself). Don't want to go to a dinner party? Use the kids as an excuse. Don't want to tell someone his work is bad? Use the editor as an excuse. Don't want to face the truth about yourself? Blame other people. Want something badly? Manipulate until you get it. In the end, it's all dishonesty of one kind or another, born out of a lack of personal courage. How often I've said something untrue because I convinced myself it was kinder. Only it wasn't really. It was just easier for me. Cancer, it seems, has already given greater clarity to my view of the world.
I put the phone back in the cradle after talking to Bob and rub my prickling head. Hair drifts down in a sunbeam of light and lands on the floor like snipped threads. My hair. This morning, the pillow looked like a moulting dog's bed. Soon I'll be bald. Hat gets added to the shopping list. Make an appointment to get my hair trimmed – that's the hair that's holding on defiantly, mostly on the top of my head. But it is thinner. Noticeably thinner when, forever, I've had a thatch thicker than a bear's winter coat.
I plan Bob and Barbara's lunch with the care of a christening. Food, which I've shovelled down with abandon for so long, is newly holy, the stuff of life. Each meal is one less to experience, ticked off, like days on a calendar.
At the hairdresser's, Simon, who would rather be an actor, takes a close look.
'See this' he says. The hair around each temple is rubbed to almost nothing. I look, but not too hard. No time for mirrors.
'It's a sign of what's to come,' he says.
He is kind. But I know what is to come. 'Just do what you have to,' I tell him.
He reaches for clippers in his industrial grey salon next to the chicken shop in Mona Vale and starts at the back, perhaps to ease the shock. I bury my head in a book until he tells me I have to look up so he can level the sides. It's a close-cropped shave that reveals the shape of my head in detail. I expect to be horrified but I like it. Which is great. When you don't have a choice you might as well accept the status quo.
'I reckon you've got a couple of weeks before it all falls out,' he says.
'Ok.'
'Sorry.'
I feel a swell of loyalty to him. So many are appalled by the merest whiff of illness.
He holds up the clippers. 'I've given you a number one. When it starts to grow back, we'll increase the numbers. When we're shaving at number six, you'll be able to let it grow.'
'Right.'
I cruise Mona Vale searching for a hat but it's winter and stocks of summer hats are nonexistent. On one side of the main street there's a serendipitous collection of shops aimed at middle-class women who like natural fibres in their casual wear and a touch of glitter in dress-up clothes. On the other side, the takeaway food shops layer the smell of deep fried chicken heavily in the air. Along with the exhaust of idling cars waiting for someone to pull out of too few parking spaces, the atmosphere is rank.
My stomach flip flops. A burning taste of chemicals rises up and my legs suddenly feel like balloons filled with concrete. I drag myself into a coffee shop to sit for a while. To stop the Persian carpet patterns behind my eyes.To adjust to the unfamiliar sensation of weakness. It's not just unpleasant, it's downright scary.The desire to lie down immediately in the café and sleep like a hobo on a park bench, oblivious to the world, is overwhelming. I close my eyes for a moment.
'Would you like to see a menu?'
The waitress wears a T-shirt that fails to stretch low enough to meet the top of her jeans. Her tanned stomach is flat. A silver ring winks from her navel. It is impossible to look anywhere else.
'Coffee. Flat white.That will do.'
She flicks the menu away cheerfully. My eyes clang shut again. Just a few moments.That's all it will take. It is the kind of drowsiness that kills long distance drivers.
Coffee arrives with a deliberately loud clunk. They are not used to seeing people doze at café tables in Mona Vale and they find it disturbing. I drink up quickly and leave. The caffeine acts like a hit of adrenaline.
Outside, the hat search begins again but I hesitate to try on the few I find. When a saleswoman insists I try on a hat that costs more than a week's grocery budget and is better suited to the Melbourne Cup than tinny travelling, I turn on her. Angry.
'My hair,' I explain forcefully, 'is falling out. I will leave a great handful of it in your tizzy, clean hat if I try it on.'
She backs off. Silent. But I have noticed the recoil in her heavily made-up eyes, recoil not at my anger but at what she suddenly realises is not a punk haircut but a sign of illness.
Two shops further along, I pick up a white cotton summer hat with a small brim that I can pull low. It costs twenty dollars, wraps into a small ball, washes easily and will keep off the sun. I pull it on, pay and leave.
Over the next few weeks, when I am finally completely bald, I encounter great swathes of compassion from most people. Men stand to give me a seat on the bus, old women pat me on the arm in silent sympathy as they pass, salesgirls lift heavy items into my supermarket trolley. It is a deep, enveloping kindness that is completely new to me. In turn, it makes me able to be kinder than I have ever been before. Occasionally, though, I see retreat and fear in the eyes of strangers, as though to come near might risk infection. Their reaction is not offensive. It is fear of their own mortality that they cannot face, not my bald head, grey face and dark-circled eyes.
Back at Church Point, the water taxi nudges into the ferry wharf and I pass over the shopping, bag after bag. Plastic. Must do something about that. Save the world then save myself. Or should it be the other way around? It's low tide. Extremely low. The step into the taxi with its chipped pink paint is a long way down. A month ago I could have jumped in, holding bags in both hands, balancing easily. Now I hesitate. Weakness. Feeling leaden legged and lightheaded at the same time. Bob is driving (is everyone called Bob?) and without a word he puts out a hand. I grab it and step down safely.
'How you doing?'
'Great.'
'Yeah. I can see. Got someone at the other end?'
'Just drop me at Ken's dock. It'll work out.'
He cruises slowly from The Point towards Lovett Bay, staying within the eight knot speed limit until we pass the marker.Then he revs Pink Lady. The bow lifts high until only the sky is visible, then the taxi slowly settles on the water like a broody hen. The landscape rushes back into position. Spotted gums like sentries, blue water sliding into deep green in the bay. Coastlines like broken honeycomb. White cockatoos. Always white cockatoos. Sulphur-crested, big, loud, incredibly clumsy. Wonderful.
Fine salt spray dusts my face, soothing and cool. My heart lifts as urban life gets further away. I am strong and my body is strong.
We speak no words over the growl of one hundred and fifty horses.Too beautiful to speak.Too tired to speak.
When we reach Ken's dock, Water taxi Bob passes out the grocery bags and asks again if I'll be ok.
'I'll help you get them to the house,' he offers.
'It's good exercise. Keeps me fit,' I reply.
He shakes his head, eases Pink Lady away from the dock, does a U-turn and takes off with a wave. It will take about four trips to get
everything into the house. I grab a handful and head off. I am strong and my body is strong.
Ken is in the boatshed, sanding a wooden mast to satin smoothness with a buzzing machine when I walk past with my new haircut. He pulls off his breathing mask.
'Gunna join a rock band, are you?'
'I'll be bald soon anyway.'
Ken looks stricken. I have not mentioned my illness to many people.
'Jeez, mate. What's going on?'
'Bit of treatment, Ken. Nothing to worry about.'
And because he has always been a private, self-sufficient man, he asks no more questions.
'Boys! Help Susan with the shopping!'
The boys, spiky haired, ragged and billowing with health, leap to grab bags. In minutes, everything is piled at the front door and they have scampered back to the boatshed, barefoot even in the winter cold.
Cinnamon, the German pointer owned by Ken and his wife, Jan, lifts an affectionate muzzle when I walk by, ready for a pat. She is sweet and docile – until Ken pushes the button to send a cradled yacht sliding down the tram lines into the water. Then she goes berserk, barking hysterically and chasing the boat. Nothing stops her, not even Ken's loud, threatening yells. She is also extremely territorial. When any passing dogs venture onto boatshed land, she rounds them up like sheep and sees them off.
'She thinks she's a queen,' Jan tells me one day. She tells me, too, that when Cinny was a puppy, she refused to come in at night.To lure her, Ken would have to start the engine on the tinny. 'She loved a boat ride,' Jan says indulgently. 'And she came every time. But Ken had to take her for a spin when all he really wanted to do after a hard day's work was have a cleansing ale!'
By four thirty, the groceries are packed away and the sun is a sinking orb. The bay shimmers like a copper tray. From the deck I can see the boys, showered, wet-haired, squeaky clean in only slightly less ragged clothes, hovering in the frail warmth of the last rays. They are still barefoot.