Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  For my poor, uneducated ancestors, tenacity was a necessity. Survival depended on it. You endured things so that the next generation might have a little more, know a little more, understand a little more. My grandmother bought her houses, the ones that became our homes, in swamps and wasteland, in the hope they would eventually be worth something.

  Music was the balm for these women. Something spiritual. To teach music was to pass on this balm. For Mum, teaching was also a kind of frontier activity; it was not bequeathed to her as a profession by her working-class parents or poor rural ancestors. She came across it like a vast brown land, full of secrets and possibilities, if she could only find the courage to voyage through it and discover its riches.

  Dad had his own way of keeping his spirits up. His love of the water was a kind of leitmotif in his life. On Mum and Dad’s honeymoon they sailed up the Hawkesbury River and stayed for a week in a houseboat near Gosford. Thirty-five years later Dad fell over and died while taking a shower at home. He’d had what my country relatives might have referred to as ‘a good innings’. According to his doctors, the massive stroke, the first of three, that he had had a few years before would have killed a man who was less fit, who hadn’t been churning up and down the pool every day as Dad had. It certainly would have struck down a man who did not love to swim, who did not love the water as much as my father did.

  ‘My back’s killing me today’, he wrote in a letter to Cathie in 1985. ‘But I’ve been in great form up till now and tomorrow I’ll be fit again because I churned through many laps of the swimming pool for therapeutic reasons. I’ve been swimming twice a day trying to keep fit and well in spite of enormous obstacles. I remember swimming in tiled pools in England. I must have been swimming since the cradle.’

  My father’s words seem rich with clues. I detect in the word ‘churned’ the effort he makes daily to aid his own recovery. I wonder at the choice of the phrase ‘therapeutic reasons’. Does he mean this in just the physical sense? Or are there other issues at stake here? And the enormous obstacles of which he writes – could these just be about his sciatic nerves or other kind of nerves as well, the ones that determine his peace of mind, the ones that give him courage? Are there mental obstacles as well as bodily ones? Are there other things killing him besides his back?

  Recovering from his second stroke he swam a kilometre a day up at the university pool while Mum walked around the river road saying her prayers and watching the tiny chug-a-lug ferries crisscross the river. It is also part of our family folklore that swimming was how Dad cured himself of the sciatica that had him bedridden for months after he retired. Numerous medical professionals pronounced his condition incurable and advised a complicated spine operation that did not have a hundred percent success rate, but which was his only hope of ever moving freely again. Dad decided to risk the chance of complete immobility (though perhaps, after a lifetime of hard work, his body just wanted a long rest) and chose not to have the operation. Instead he stayed in bed or walked with a stick for months, waiting out his recovery, waiting, perhaps, for a miracle, a miracle that eventually arrived in the form of a young female physiotherapist who suggested Dad go to the pool and do what he really loved to do; when he began to swim again, he slowly began to walk again.

  Dad’s inability to move without suffering became a kind of collective wound in the whole family. His stoicism was our shared blessing too, though it was not unexpected. He was, after all, a religious man who loved poetry and therefore understood the usefulness of metaphor. Perhaps he knew that wounds, especially to the hip – as God in the guise of an angel gave to Jacob in the Old Testament – were also spiritual gifts. He swam his way to recovery with humour and only a rare word of complaint. His acceptance of pain gave all of us a sense of the possibility of life and its random and hopeful miracles.

  Mum spends the next five months in and out of hospital, which I still call her ‘second home’. Unable to carry her own weight, she collapses regularly now and prepares herself for a life of immobility. A test reveals that she is deficient in salt. I assume it is because I have not used enough salt in her meals, but it turns out that the salt deficiency has been induced by a blood pressure tablet which her physician prescribed for her months earlier.

  The tablet is removed from her medication and suddenly Mum is mobile again. An interlude of joy ensues. Each moment is like a celebration. She attempts things she could hardly manage when she was well and begins to walk every day up and down the steep hill outside the hospital, swinging her arms in wide arcs until she literally falls into bed with fatigue. This falling, though, is a gift to us as well, especially after the dread of the previous months, and when her medication is stable she is discharged once again into my care.

  She arrives home like a newborn. I watch her wander around the house as if she is from another planet, touching things, fingering walls, sniffing the air, unsettled, lost, trying to get her bearings not just of the physical environment but of the sensory one as well.

  Joan: The joy of that short time that I could play the piano again was a rich experience, and it went on for a few weeks and then I couldn’t do it again. It was very sad.

  Linda: What about the singing? I hear that you sing up and down the corridors, Mum.

  Joan: They’re all telling me now, someone just said today to me, about me singing, now what was it she said? She said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a beautiful voice.’ At dinnertime. She said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful voice. Why don’t you let us have more of it? Sing out. Loud.’

  SEPTEMBER SONGS

  From the time I arrive back home in 1998, Mum and I are regularly approached by estate agents who want to ‘help in any way we can’ to make our ‘burden’ easier. The ‘burden’, apparently, is the ownership of a large house in a prime location for townhouse development. During the first few years of the new century it often feels as if estate agents in the area are like circling sharks, waiting for aging and often exhausted homeowners to finally give in, surrender their ‘burden’, sell up and move on.

  To encourage this process, cards are left in letterboxes, notes stuck on car windscreens, and leaflets pushed under front and back doors. Any hint on our part that we are thinking of selling ‘sometime in the future’ accelerates the wooing process. Meetings are arranged and preliminary offers made. I am unfamiliar with these bartering rituals and treat the visits like social occasions. Mum is gracious too. When agents drop by ‘just for a chat’, I serve fruit buns on our best china plates and Mum makes cups of tea. We are polite, amenable and promise to ‘think about’ any offers, but when we decide not to accept what we are told are ‘extremely reasonable tenders that might not be made again’, we begin to sense a hint of intimidation. My response to subsequent approaches becomes increasingly frosty, especially after friends and relatives tell us to bide our time and that we are ‘sitting on a gold mine’.

  Mum’s frequent stays in hospital cause only brief pauses in the process. When I inform one agent that we cannot discuss selling while Mum is sick, he arrives at the front door late one night with flowers and a gift basket ‘as a sign of my respect’. I refuse his gifts, but the crusade to acquire our property continues. It is, we discover, the blessing and the curse of having a home in an area that Grandma once described as ‘swampland’ but is now referred to as an ‘upmarket, rapidly-appreciating, investment-friendly developers’ dream locale’. Mum is sanguine about the need to sell. She knows the energy she requires to maintain her home is slowly slipping away from her. After an initial burst of packing up bags of old clothes, taking them to second-hand shops and selling off many of the old books that are no longer read or needed, I also become exhausted by the sheer size and effort of maintaining things. I was never much good at housekeeping either, and regularly hire cleaners to help keep some order in the place. I know also that as I commit more to my connection to Mum I am also growing less capable of moving out and moving on as easily as I used to. We ha
ve a relationship now, as mother and daughter, two women, two people going through something together, for better or for worse.

  In early September 2001, I see Raphael at an organic fruit and vegetable market in West End. He is picking out mangoes at a stall and I am at another stall selecting oranges and mandarins. He is a lot thinner and browner than when I last saw him; he looks as if he has been fasting and working a lot in the sun. I remember then how we used to laugh about his colouring; how he used to take pride in suggesting he might have some Indigenous blood, or some Greek perhaps, as a way of explaining the way he went dark so quickly in the sun. We must have looked a peculiar sight when we were at the beach: me with my sun-damaged white skin, huge hat, big black sunglasses and long-sleeved shirt, him with his broad brown chest and long body. He’d liked the contrast, thought we looked good together. But I’d always found the heat too fierce at the beach, where he loved to be, and shied away from the sun.

  He looks like a long, brown stick insect, as if the solid man I knew had been hollowed out and scraped clean. He’s probably been on a juice fast. Detoxing. I think back suddenly on our days together by the sea as if they were a dream.

  I just wasn’t ready for it, I had told him. ‘Not ready for love?’ he had queried. ‘I don’t understand. When it comes to you all you need to do is to hold out your arms and receive it.’

  I don’t approach him, ashamed that I left him so thoughtlessly to return to Brisbane, especially after he had welcomed me into his life when I had arrived exhausted in Byron Bay after five years plugged into amplifiers in Sydney. He shared more than a home with me as I began to explore more acoustic music in Byron: if love and music go together he was as robust as the sound of my un-electrified violin. I recall our intimacy, his love for the nature around us and the nature in me. Embarrassed by the rush of remembered physicality, I turn away, hoping to avoid an encounter with him, but he sees me. He calls across, holding a ripe golden mango in each of his large brown hands. How are you?

  Ok … Ok. I stutter. And you?

  Just then, as a kind of answer to my question, an equally long stick insect of a young woman steps out from behind him, carrying on her hip a tiny version of herself.

  We’re all doing fine, he calls out.

  He squints at me quizzically as the young woman rocks her child on her hip. He’s not wearing sunglasses, as usual; and, as usual, I am. I am glad he cannot see my eyes. Cannot see the sudden burn of loss well up and trickle down onto my cheeks.

  It’s not as if I am shocked to see him with someone. He has been considerate enough to tell me during the intermittent phone calls he made to me during the last few years. I know that he moved in with someone young, a single mother, but seeing him in the flesh makes me ‘know’ it in a different, more visceral way.

  Mum met Raphael just once when he visited us both in Brisbane; she thought we were completely unsuited.

  ‘He wasn’t smart enough for you,’ she said after he had left. I didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to be boxed as the ‘clever girl’ I’d been at school when I’d thought that I would be alone forever. She was wrong though. Raphael was smarter about some things than either Mum or me. I didn’t want to defend him, not in my mother’s lounge room. I didn’t want to tie the threads of my old life to this new life.

  But it was obvious when I saw him standing in Mum’s house that we were just too different – that I was, despite my rebellion and drive, still my parents’ daughter. Raphael had seemed too large then, too full of life. In front of this glowing, sensual man, I’d been ashamed of the sickness around me. But I hadn’t turned away from him for the sake of my sick mother, although perhaps he thought that I had. It was not a sacrifice I was making for my mother, to turn away from this beautiful man. It was something less obvious than that, more internal. Sometimes you find what you need in the most unexpected places; not on beaches, or in beds with beautiful lovers, but somewhere nondescript and ordinary.

  ‘You don’t have to do this. You can choose happiness over this if you really want to,’ Raphael said to me at the Roma Street bus station where I had driven him at the end of his visit. I had been deliberately obtuse then and avoided the real implication of his statement. I resisted the temptation to ask him exactly what he meant by that word, happiness. Instead, I chatted casually as we walked together to the bus which would take him back to Byron Bay.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind driving you. Seeing you off. After everything you did for me. And it’s been so good to see you.’

  Raphael didn’t push me; didn’t hold me to him or make me remember our intimacy, although I could feel he wanted to. He gave me my freedom right up until the end, just as he had always promised he would. I didn’t even cry, not once, when we parted. I’d held those tears for this moment, surrounded by toxin-free fruit opposite a toxin-free man under an old fig tree at West End, the suburb where my mother had grown up, across the river from the suburb where I had grown up.

  You look good, he calls out then over the dusty space across which neither of us will walk to greet each other, while the young woman and child wrap themselves around him. I wonder if I do.

  So do you. Just great. He smiles at me, and even though he hasn’t walked across the space to greet me, I can feel his smile as if it has broken across my own face. I can feel his smile enter me through the pores of my skin. I watch him turn and walk away, his arm around the pair of beautiful girls, and I suddenly wonder why, when love comes to some of us, we still think it is a puzzle that needs to be solved. To Raphael, love was a reason to rejoice and celebrate, while to me it was a reason to ponder and question. It isn’t that I want Raphael with me now; I know I would grieve to pass on to him the suffering of my mother’s suffering. He would grieve for my struggle and my struggle needs to find its own nature, its own reason and its own ending.

  I feel the soft shadows of the fig tree quiver above me as the late morning crowds suddenly seem to converge at that moment. As I watch him disappear from view I don’t know whether to cry or to smile. I waver on that in-between point that seems to fill you up from deep inside, when everything seems absolutely right and absolutely wrong with the world at exactly the same time.

  Mum’s second grandchild, Kel Neil, isn’t even one month old when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapse on 11 September 2001. We have welcomed him into the world with much ado, a blond, beautiful and precious boy who looks a lot like Mum did as a child. So Paul now has two children: one dark, one light; Finn like Dad, Kel like Mum. Mum is less involved with this birth than Finn’s, yet the new baby enters our lives again like the arrival of new possibilities. Although we are giddy with joy, I regret that I don’t write songs to celebrate this new life as I did with Finn. The business of Mum’s illness has taken up more and more of my life – and hers as well – and songs do not come as easily now as they once did.

  On 12 September, I scrape my car on a concrete pillar while backing out of a parking space at Toowong Village Shopping Centre. Mum is back in the psych ward of Westminster Hospital again and I have gone to Kmart to buy her some new nighties. She is unaware of the events which have taken place in New York and phoned early in the morning with a list of things she needed me to get for her.

  Mum’s hospital room is full of light that day; early spring is usually beautiful in Brisbane, but perhaps also, after a night of horror, I am looking especially hard for pockets of brightness. I remember staring at two butcherbirds singing outside and then trying to open the window to let their music fill the room. I also spend a longer than usual amount of time holding Mum’s hand.

  Mum is vague about the attacks in New York. I tell her what has happened and she mentions she has seen a newspaper headline that morning. But I know that the events of the world have become further and further removed from her concerns as the terror explodes in her inner world. We speak a little about the city of New York, which she had visited just befor
e she first became ill.

  What I remember most about New York, she tells me, was all those beautiful black people everywhere. And so polite and well dressed. Put a lot of us back home to shame. Now, they truly look like God’s creatures to me. And the magnificent singing! Jessie Norman singing Mozart’s ‘Hallelujah’. What a highlight that was!

  THE KEYS OF HEAVEN

  In 1989 my father wrote:

  I went to the pool for a swim yesterday morning. It was 17 degrees. So with a pain under my scapula I pondered on (1) would a swim relieve my pain or (2) would a swim exacerbate it? So I sat in the car and listened to Furlonger on the International Situation, Dr Hackett on the Body Programme and a pleasant exchange of messages and music between England and Australia. I can listen well still, even with all my pain, with attention and discrimination and pleasure.

  There is a picture of Dad in a swimming pool taken when he was nearly eighty. He is smiling in the photograph and wears tiny dark blue Speedos and a red swimming cap on his head. As Dad beams up at the camera, his eyes are lit by the sun on the water. The impression is one of overwhelming light – in the pale blue water around him and in his face; he seems as vital and energised as a boy. He had such a healthy body for a man of his age, Kym tells me. And then I think of him when he was sick after the strokes when Paul was looking after him. He was so frail, but such a good patient. His incapacity opened him up and made him more vulnerable. He couldn’t get enough hugs and he was always crying at something he’d seen on the television. I think the fact that he had kids later meant he didn’t have the drive, the ego or ambitions of a younger man. Paul’s like that too: just interested in his kids.