by Neil, Linda;
Mary is moved the next day – no one says where – but we are told that this sort of thing cannot continue in a hospital where people come to rest.
There is a hush and a hum in a hospital, a mechanical rumble so low sometimes it gives the impression it is coming from deep within the earth. It is not coming from the earth, but from machinery, from life support machines and dialysis machines, and televisions, and fridges, and microwaves and lifts. Everything is turned down low so that sounds do not become specific, so that, in the end, all these low sounds amalgamate into one low rumble that sometimes whooshes but mostly hums.
There is no earth in a hospital and the air is conditioned. There is no rain or excessive sunlight. You cannot drown in a hospital, although you can fall and break your hip in the shower. You can pick up infections in hospital that are unheard of outside. There are bacteria so virulent that they can, literally, make your blood curdle. You can go in for a routine operation and end up dead. That’s the way things are in a hospital.
After Mary’s departure, Mum spends so many hours walking and singing around the corridors of the ward that complaints are received from the other patients and she is asked to stop. There is a kind of surrender after this stay, as if she – or we – do not have the power anymore to withstand the machinery of the institution which seems unable to see the potential in this gift of my mother to sing along its corridors; that thinks she is as mad as mad Ophelia, unravelling in sound bites in front of them; that sees illness and decline instead of life, wisdom and possibility.
She is eventually discharged and sent home. She is quieter now, more subdued. The effort of surviving these hospital stays depletes us both. I find myself speaking incessantly to whoever will listen about everything that has happened. I babble, I groan, I question, I cry. And when everyone is tired of listening I take myself away, to walk alone along the beach or down stony paths in the bush, and speak to no one. Or, more precisely, I speak to the wind, to the sea, to the trees, and to the air. It doesn’t matter now whether there is any response, or even if anyone hears me. I just know I need to use my voice, to speak, to sigh, to whisper, and to sing. To use my voice in different ways and, in doing so, find a new voice, one that speaks of unspeakable things: my shame, my regret, my loss, my wounds, a woman’s voice, the voice of a daughter finally learning to love – and lose – her mother.
LEARNING HOW TO BREATHE
Dad taught all his kids to swim at an early age. He thought being balanced in the water had a soothing effect on the brain. Just as classical music was supposed to produce in children a more harmonious frontal cortex, or so it later became fashionable to think, swimming served the same function – to bring about equilibrium in both mind and body.
For a while he took me to swimming training in the mornings. I can’t remember exactly when during my primary school years he did this, but I know it was before I started menstruating. I know this because when I began to bleed Mum would only buy me pads, not tampons, because she and Grandma still believed that swimming during your period – impossible anyway while wearing your ‘protection on the outside’ – would ‘ruin your womb’. I do remember that the training entailed getting up before six am, even in the cold winter months, and driving from St Lucia to Jindalee to do laps of the fifty-metre pool there.
Dad was thrilled when I won a swimming trophy in Grade Three for a twenty-five metre freestyle race at the school swimming carnival held every year at the Valley pool. I was good at freestyle, enjoyed breaststroke, was terrible at backstroke, and didn’t have enough upper body strength to roll my arms over in the butterfly. But I did enjoy the thrill of winning that one race. For a while afterwards we persisted with our training, and with our early morning trips to Jindalee. Perhaps Dad thought he had a future winner on his hands, or perhaps he just didn’t want me to think that I could go on winning trophies and blue ribbons without hard work and effort. I began to resist him for the right to stay in bed, for the right not to shiver and dive into the freezing water, for the right to swim for leisure and not for victories. Even though the Jindalee pool had as its most famous alumni the shy Olympian Shane Gould, I had no desire to emulate her or any of the sleek-bodied athletes who kicked and breathed their way up and down the pool every morning, guided by mostly professional coaches and not by their fathers.
I don’t know exactly what Dad expected of me, whether he thought I might turn out to be a good competitive swimmer, or whether he just wanted to give me the chance to become the kind of dedicated daily swimmer he was, to become a member of that serene aquatic group of ‘lappers’ who found the business of swimming up and down a single lane of the pool soothing and elevating for the mind. He did, however, think that if any of his children had aptitude for something he would do his best to instil the work ethic and discipline necessary to see it develop.
I never really enjoyed those early morning training sessions. They are, on the other hand, recalled fondly by Cathie, who remembers Dad buying one ice-cream between the three of us, Janice, me and her, then taking a big bite out of it himself just for fun. I can’t recollect wearing goggles and so I particularly hated the sting of chlorine in my eyes and nose. I also disliked being damp and cold and shivering on the wet cement. Years later a Chinese doctor whom I consult about hormonal problems confirms that getting this cold and wet on a regular basis as a prepubescent could cause a ‘damp and cold womb’.
I am sure Dad would have had no clue that our early morning drives through the sometimes crisp light of a Brisbane morning could result years later in a damp and cold womb. I doubt he thought about any of those ‘women’s things’ in relation to me or any of his daughters. He was good with the business of educating and training boys and when daughters were involved I imagine that, in his equitable way, he thought what was good for his sons might also be good for his daughters.
There was one thing, though, that I loved about swimming, which, probably not coincidentally, was also the problem that Dad was least equipped to help me with: breathing. Not just breathing on one side, the right side, the male side, the usual side one first learns to breathe on – the side my father taught me to breathe on. Not even just on the other side, the left side, the female side. No. My quest was to learn to breathe equally well on both sides, to develop in my left shoulder the same ease of movement I had developed in my right shoulder, which allowed me to turn my head up towards the sky and gulp in air as my right arm came over in the second half of the basic freestyle stroke. I wanted to develop symmetry in my physicality. I bugged Dad about it constantly and he did his best to teach me. But I don’t think he ever mastered this skill himself – breathing on the left side – so he could never help me become what I referred to as an ambidextrous swimmer.
In order to find solutions to my desire to learn how to breathe this way, he took me to a swimming teacher at the Gold Coast, a man called Kevin Dean – pronounced, I later dramatically reminded myself, to rhyme with the word ‘mean’ which Kevvie most decidedly was. Although Dad initially intended to sign me up for a whole term of lessons with the well-credentialled Mr Dean, I only lasted one short lesson as his pupil. This lesson began with Mr Dean picking me up and throwing me into the centre of his swimming pool, after which he stood on the side of the pool and yelled at me: So!!! You think you can swim, do you?
After a few more moments of verbal taunting, he then lifted from the side of the pool what I heard later was his most infamous teaching tool – a long pole with a hook at the end of it with which he would theatrically fish his struggling charges out of the deeper water. That day at the Gold Coast, while Mum and Dad watched from the side of the pool, I was one of those flailing pupils about to be submerged in what I had always found to be the benign water of a professional swimming pool. As the hook came down and found the back of my swimming costume, I was pinned like a captured mermaid by the tripod of Poseidon, who was screaming at me now in what I do recall as a particularly broad, blokey Austra
lian accent: Swim to me! Come on. If you think you’re so bloody smart, swim to me!
Dad had taught me to swim when I was a baby. Later he had tried as hard as he could to teach me to breathe on both sides, but under the long metal pole and hook of Mr Dean I could not keep myself afloat. In fact I could hardly breathe at all. At the time I truly believed that it was only because there were witnesses that he didn’t let me drown, there and then. It wasn’t over, though. Not quite. After waiting a few moments during which I struggled for air, he then fished me up out of the water before submerging me again.
At the end of my first swimming lesson with Mr Dean, Mum and Dad scurried out of there, me huddled and numb between them, promising the coach – untruthfully – to return the following week. For the rest of our Gold Coast holiday that summer, though, neither Mum nor Dad mentioned him to me again. Occasionally, he was referred to by all of us in later years, in a laughing, embarrassed kind of way, as the reason why I gave up swimming.
I never did learn how to breathe on both sides. For a while after my encounter with Mr Dean I could hardly breathe on the right side and even now I struggle to turn my face up to the left when I swim up and down the university pool at St Lucia, just as my father did.
Although Mum couldn’t swim at all, she did spend many years of her life studying the techniques of breathing. She always described herself as a simple woman who liked to break complicated things down to their clearest, most discrete elements. Despite the hundreds of books she had studied and the thousands of notes she had sung, she worked very hard to explain in simple everyday language the mechanics of breathing to those who did not understand about the body and what it went through to make enough breath for a song.
Mum also had a collection of inspirational quotes. Here is one she wrote in one of her last articles for the Queensland Music Teachers’ Association newsletters: ‘The fine singer amazes. As the voice soars up we ask how this technique, this artistry, is possible. But the great singer shows us only beauty. We accept it as a gift.’
Mum was never much interested in finery. She didn’t like tricks, vocal or otherwise. Fine foods held little appeal for her. She ate simply and frugally. Riches did not attract her either – she often told me money wasn’t everything – although I know she adored the richness of a beautiful thought or word. But she felt the beauty of a great singer deep in her heart where words do not spring from. She felt it in her body; she longed for it with her own breath, and dedicated her life to celebrating, understanding and dreaming of such a gift.
Gifts come in unexpected forms. They sometimes come as a surprise or a shock. Sorrow and loss can be both beautiful and a gift. Falling comes as a gift too, to move us from one place to another. I have to fall and break before things can change for Mum and me, just as my mother falling brought me home again, moving me from one place to another: from the underworld to the outside world, from the darkness to the light, from anger to love.
* * *
I fall at about five in the morning in the bathroom, probably around the exact spot where my father fell out of the shower and died. Despite the cocktail of drugs she has ingested during the past few years to control her anxiety and depression as well as her various physical ailments – medication that includes Rivotril, Madopar, Celebrex, Avanza, Diazepam, Mogadon and Xanax – Mum is now waking up in terror at around three or four in the morning, unable to breathe. Her habit now is to come into my room while I am sleeping – as she does this particular night – and tell me, gasping, that she thinks she is going to die.
I haul myself out of bed, lead her back into the kitchen of her house and offer to make her a cup of tea.
Mum trails me like a shadow, calling out to me repeatedly: I need to go to the hospital.
I don’t look at her for the moment, busying myself instead with the business of waking up and making the tea; the clanging of the cups and kettle are a welcome distraction.
Mum, I can’t keep taking you to the hospital, I tell her without looking at her. I just end up bringing you straight home again.
Her voice then is a yelp, a cry of pain. I think as I hold my hands around the warming kettle that it is, at this moment, unbearable to hear.
But I can’t breathe, she whimpers. Listen to me, I can’t breathe.
I listen closer and it is awful to hear the breath locked inside her body. I turn around to look at her ashen face while I wait for the kettle to boil, her wide, scared eyes, her rigid mouth. I hear the rasping, wheezing sound of the breath forcing itself into the closed throat.
I move towards her. I know you’re frightened, Mum, I say, standing close enough to touch her if I need to, if she needs me to.
I never thought I’d end up like this, she answers, looking around as if there are ghosts standing with us. Your grandmother would turn over in her grave if she saw the way we’ve ended up. Not to mention your father.
I look closely at her face. I don’t know exactly what I am looking for: signs of her future, perhaps? I don’t know whether she will be able to adjust her mind, whether there is anything ahead except broken sleep and terrible dreams.
The world seems suddenly altered. I feel winded, as if I have been running for centuries to arrive at this moment. I remember then, as if I am dreaming, how she once tried to teach me to breathe, how she tried to put her hands on my waist, how I struggled with her, thinking I already knew how to breathe properly, thinking that there was nothing I could possibly learn from her about what I needed to know.
‘Breathe from here,’ she said, pointing at my stomach, ‘not from up here,’ she added, pointing at my throat.
I see myself pushing her away, not wanting her to teach me anything. ‘Too stubborn for her own good,’ I hear my grandma call after me as I turn and run from her. ‘Too stubborn to learn anything. She just has to learn to get over herself.’
She was right. It took me a long time to stop resisting Mum teaching me anything. Until I realised, after starting to write and sing my own songs, that perhaps I was born her daughter so she could teach me how to use my voice.
I reach out and rub my hand across her back.
Think of all those students you taught how to breathe, I remind her, pressing myself into her, willing out my energy towards her. You’ve got to remember that now, Mum.
Oh, it’s no use, Linda. My chest is so tight I can’t get the breath up. Nothing I do makes any difference.
I rub in a circular motion, recalling the soothing hands, somewhere in my deepest memory, of a mother reassuring her child. Think of your voice, I almost coo in her ear. Remember your singing.
Her reply is abrupt, resistant. She is in no mood for nostalgia of any kind. There’s no time for singing now. I need to go to emergency.
She collapses her weight and sags into a chair, her shoulders hunched over her chest. Her hands clutch at mine as I try to extricate myself from her panic. I run to the library shelves in the lounge room and pull out books at random. Even though I’ve cleaned out a lot of volumes from Dad’s old library and sold the old editions of encyclopaedias, our house is still full of books. We have books on psychology, on French pronunciation; German phrasebooks, books of Japanese haiku, old detective stories, and Readers Digest condensed classics. Behind the rows of dusty books, I find what I am looking for: a thin old hardback, still in good condition. Inside the front cover the publication date says 1904 and the title engraved in gold on its blue cover reads The Science of Breath.
I lead Mum into the lounge room and settle her on the sofa. Nestled in, I stroke her hair and begin to read in a voice a mother would use to read a bedtime story.
Breath is life, I begin. Life is absolutely dependent on the act of breathing. From the first faint breath of the infant to the last gasp of the dying woman, it is one long story of continued breathing.
Sounds like your grandmother’s book, Mum sighs. She was no singer, but she understood abou
t breathing.
As I read on, I can feel Mum relax; our breath eases and expands outwards with each moment.
The yogi knows that by rhythmical breathing one may bring oneself into harmonious vibration with nature and aid in the unfoldment of his latent powers. I can feel myself sinking further into my own body, as Mum sinks down against mine. He knows that by controlled breathing he may not only cure disease in himself and others but also do away with fear and worry and other negative emotions.
Can I tell you something, Linda? Mum asks. Her voice is softer now. Breathing properly has taken the edge off her panic.
I lay the book beside us and move my ear close to her mouth so she does not have to expend much energy to speak. Yes, Mum.
Perhaps I’ve never been really mature, she continues, her voice so soft that every word is like an exhalation of breath. I mean, just because you get to a certain age doesn’t mean you really grow up. I always tried to do the right thing. Go to church, look after my children. But perhaps you don’t really grow up until things go wrong. The tone of her voice is unfamiliar to me; I have never heard Mum speak like this before.
I always thought it was possible to take control of things, she confesses. But some things you can’t control at all. Or, if you can, you just don’t know how to.
I hold her lightly, as if she is suddenly the most fragile thing in the world.
I know, Mum. It’s ok.
I just have to learn to take it. I mean, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Trying somehow to find a way to take things when they come. Life is hard enough just the way it is, but when you get sick, you just have to find a way to take it. I know she doesn’t really need an answer from me, so I say nothing as we both gather breath.