‘MS sufferers tend to be particularly affected by the heat,’ I explained.
I tightened my grip on Stuart’s forearm, fearing he might recoil at the sight of my father’s physical devastation.
We approached my father’s bedside; he lay on his side, legs pulled up in a foetal position. His thin white arms lay across his chest, hands curled inwards with spasticity. A bag of fluid, suspended above his head, was being fed directly through his abdominal wall.
‘He’s had trouble swallowing lately,’ I explained to Stuart weakly. ‘He can’t consume liquids orally now, so they inserted a stomach peg.’
A catheter drained dark urine into a bag strung discreetly at the foot of my father’s bed. He had lost the capacity to regulate his bowels long ago. Flakes of skin had fallen from his scalp and forehead onto his neck and shoulders; a symptom, perhaps, of rarely being wheeled outside to feel the sun’s rays. His nostrils flared as he sucked in air with a regular, snuffling grunt. His lips had peeled away into painful red cracks; a nurse had recently smeared zinc cream over these sores. It was a confronting scene for anyone.
My eyes filled with tears, as they always did, and I reached for my father’s hand. A proud man, a successful chartered accountant, reduced to this. Dad stirred at my touch and gnashed his teeth; his breathing became regular again and he continued sleeping. Almost 40 years had passed since Dad had been diagnosed with MS; the past ten had been marked by rapid physical and mental deterioration. In that period, he’d moved from a walking frame to a wheelchair to a bed, his cognitive function had declined and his verbal communication had all but ceased. It had been eighteen months since Dad had said a word to me; during my recent visits, he’d lain in a permanent half-sleep as I made inane conversation. It was clear he no longer recognised me. I came away from such visits despondent, powerless to help my father escape the limbo land of half-life.
‘Dad,’ I called quietly, stroking his forehead, ‘Dad, I’ve brought someone to meet you.’ I choked, struggling to articulate the words. How could I introduce a man I thought I might love, to the father I never really knew? Dad opened one eye and stared blankly at the wall. I cleared my throat.
‘Um, Dad,’ I said self-consciously, ‘I’d like to introduce you to Stuart Higgins.’ Stuart leant across the bed, picked up my father’s limp hand and grasped it, shaking it firmly.
‘Hello, Mr Collins,’ he said in a deferential tone that was appropriate for meeting a prospective father-in-law. ‘I’m Stuart Higgins. It’s a pleasure knowing your daughter.’
Tears began to slide down my cheeks. When was the last time someone shook Dad’s hand like a man? And spoke so respectfully to him?
As Stuart replaced Dad’s hand on the bed, I heard my father utter softly, ‘Stuart Higgins’. Shocked and unbelieving, I leant towards his face.
‘What did you say, Dad?’ I asked loudly, wondering if I had merely wished the words.
‘Stuart Higgins,’ he repeated. I turned to Stuart and crumbled.
‘He’s not spoken …’ I pressed my chest with my hands, my breath constricted. ‘You don’t understand what that …’ I buried my face in his shoulder.
‘Shhhh,’ Stuart soothed, stroking my hair. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and gently dabbed at my wet face. ‘I’ve brought something for your dad,’ he said. Retrieving a plastic bag from his backpack, he placed it on my father’s bed.
‘This is for you, Mr Collins,’ he announced, waving the item in front of my father’s line of vision. ‘I’m a cotton farmer from Jandowae in Queensland. That’s a small township on the Darling Downs.’ He tugged the item free of its wrapping. ‘I asked a friend of mine to sew this cushion cover for you. She’s good at that sort of thing, like most rural ladies.’ He held up the cushion, pointing to the cover on which the name ‘Ian Collins’ had been hand-stitched. ‘After my friend had finished embroidering it, I had to find something to stuff it with.’ He unbuttoned the cushion cover and removed a handful of ivory fluff. ‘These are cotton bolls,’ he explained, ‘the ripe seed pods of the cotton plant.’
The raw bolls in Stuart’s hand were unlike the cotton balls I routinely purchased from the supermarket. They were unprocessed, more natural than the bleached white ones I used to remove my makeup. Straight from the field, they appeared more fibrous, with small quantities of leaf litter caught among their lint. They exuded a sweet, earthy aroma that was entirely unfamiliar to me.
‘So, here’s a pillow stuffed with last season’s cotton from my farm, Mr Collins,’ Stuart said, pushing the bolls back into their cover. ‘I hope it’s comfortable for you.’ He gently propped the cushion under my father’s elbow. Dad shifted slightly, closed his eyes and exhaled deeply.
I’d always been sceptical of the notion of ‘The One’. But at that moment, my cynicism began to unravel.
So what the hell am I now doing in the Katherine Gorge, in the pouring rain, embarking on a personal journey of discovery without him? I reached out in the black wetness for my boots. Grasping them, I recalled Stuart’s parting words to me at the airport: ‘Whatever you do, look after your boots.’
I’d thrown my arms around him and said, ‘Of course I will. And I love you, Stu.’
It was the first time I’d told him that I loved him, just as I was leaving.
My companion Megan stirred briefly in her sleeping bag and whimpered. I’d need to do more than care for my boots, I reflected, to get through this journey intact.
A fortnight later, in a further phase of the program, I was posted to an aluminium refinery in Arnhem Land. I was joined by two others in my leadership group – Bernie, a policeman, and Hugh, a funds manager. We were an unlikely trio. Bernie was everything I’d ever imagined about the police force; a no-nonsense, straight-talking, bloke’s bloke. To Bernie, I was the caricature of a typical Humanities graduate; feisty, left-leaning and interested in the journey rather than the destination. Hugh, by contrast, seemed antithetical to the world of funds management in which he worked. A gentle, dreamy character with a passion for poetry and an incisive wit, Hugh delighted me with his sensitive observations about the world.
Together, we were charged with analysing the degree to which the mine was meeting its ethical obligations to its staff. As we went about interviewing a cross-section of mine workers, Bernie and I frequently disagreed.
‘You’re too touchy-feely with your interview technique,’ Bernie observed at the end of our first day. ‘I’ve interrogated hundreds of people in my time and I can tell you, trying to be their friend gets you nowhere.’ His tone was authoritative; I felt instantly diminished.
‘I’m trying to build trust,’ I ventured. Bernie rolled his eyes.
‘Building trust? That’s upstairs in the Bullshit Department, just above Haberdashery,’ he said.
In my verbal stoushes with Bernie, Hugh frequently came to my defence. One day over lunch, Bernie challenged me on the relevance of my undergraduate training.
‘Religious Studies might be interesting and all, but it won’t get you a job,’ he goaded, swigging his coffee. ‘And what the hell is “Women’s Studies”, anyway?’
I sighed. ‘It’s an interdisciplinary field that explores social definitions of femininity and masculinity, and how they shape identity, culture and institutions.’
Bernie sniggered and, eyebrows raised, appealed to Hugh.
‘Look, Bernie,’ Hugh said, glancing up from his sandwich, ‘the day the police force fixes its sexual harassment issues is the day we don’t need Women’s Studies.’
Hugh threw me a conspiratorial wink. I smiled back in gratitude.
My sense of time passing became distorted as we grappled with the ethical complexities of mining in ecologically and culturally sensitive territory. One moment we were interviewing bauxite miners about their environmental footprint, the next we were wandering barefoot with a group of Aboriginal children, finding bush tucker along the edge of the Arafura Sea. During this period, my contact with Stuart was limited to brief
conversations on a public telephone adjacent to the miners’ mess hall. Six days into our assignment, unseasonably heavy rain delayed our schedule and I stole away to telephone Stuart once again. I cupped the mouthpiece and turned my back on the passing throng of miners, in an effort to preserve some privacy.
‘It’s really dry out here, Fi,’ Stuart said in an uncharacteristically monotone voice. ‘Bone dry. Dead.’ His flatness was detectable across the thousands of kilometres separating us. The clatter of breakfast dishes being cleared behind me was disconcerting.
‘I’m sorry,’ I began, apologising for the clamour.
‘Not your fault,’ he said, mistaking my meaning. ‘You can’t make it rain.’ Stuart’s low mood concerned me, but I didn’t know how to comfort him.
‘How’s the cotton looking?’ I asked.
‘Bad,’ replied Stuart. ‘I’m running out of water. It’s probably not going to make it.’
Just as he’d predicted at our dinner party in Adelaide four months previously, Stuart had planted a limited area of cotton, a mere one-fifth of his production capacity. With just enough water to plant, he’d gambled on receiving at least a small amount of rainfall over summer. But the rain he’d hoped for simply hadn’t materialised.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I offered again, troubled by Stuart’s silence. Our wordless pause became a yawning chasm.
‘I’m sorry too, Fi,’ he said finally. ‘And I miss you.’
‘I miss you too,’ I responded for the umpteenth time, one year later, sitting in a hotel room in Port Dickson, Malaysia.
An enormous bunch of roses had arrived for me at lunchtime, and this was my first opportunity to call Stuart to thank him. The telephone line crackled with interference, and I had no more than five minutes before my room companion would return.
‘Shared hotel rooms are for the dogs,’ I complained. ‘No bloody privacy.’
I had just spent three weeks in India as part of the Asia component of the ethical leadership program. During that time I’d researched corporate social responsibility practices at the Tata Group of companies, based in Mumbai. It had been an intense series of meetings and fieldwork and there had been little chance to make contact with Stuart. During this final week in Malaysia, I’d joined my program colleagues at a regional ethics conference. A tight timetable of activities saw us fraternising with well-known political commentators, journalists and government representatives from all over South-East Asia. While I enjoyed the exposure to new places and people, I was tired. The whirlwind of the past year hadn’t delivered any new answers to life’s big questions. The program’s activity was frenetic and I was struggling to make sense of it all.
‘Had any rain?’ I asked, wondering about the health of this year’s cotton crop.
‘A bit,’ replied Stu. ‘Nothing to write home about. It’s almost as bad as last year.’
The disconsolate tone in Stuart’s voice was something I’d grown accustomed to over the past twelve months. Although he was struggling valiantly against a deepening drought, it was affecting his mood; the self-assured Stuart Higgins I’d first met had lost his buoyancy.
While he worked hard to conserve every last drop of water, most of his arable land lay fallow in the heat. He staunchly refused, on environmental grounds, to use his entire bore allocation. But I was starting to question the wisdom of that choice. The financial burden of the drought was increasing and, from the photos he emailed me, I could see that a Jandowae summer was merciless. I imagined him out in the parched paddocks, sweat dripping down his nose and onto the thirsty earth.
‘But I’m keeping busy,’ Stuart continued. ‘I’m adding the finishing touches to my Uzbekistan report.’
In the month prior to my departure for India, Stuart had been offered a short-term consultancy opportunity in Central Asia. It took him to Uzbekistan to evaluate the efficiency of an irrigation system in Tashkent; he’d done similar work previously in South-East Asia. Even though it meant he was away for Christmas and for my departure to India, we both agreed that it was an opportunity he couldn’t refuse, given the relentless drought in Australia.
I admired his gumption for continuing to farm during the drought, and for attempting to generate off-farm income through work overseas.
‘Send me the report when you’ve finished,’ I said, ‘I’d love to read it.’ The telephone line beeped and dropped out temporarily.
‘I can hardly hear you,’ called Stuart. ‘Let’s leave it for another time.’
The line went dead. I replaced the handset and stared at it uneasily, until my room companion tapped on the door.
Several hours later, lying in the darkness as my colleague slept nearby, I fought an internal maelstrom. Stuart and I had been ‘together’ now for eighteen months, but we’d spent most of that time apart. While the long-distance nature of our relationship suited me exceptionally well for the first six months, at the eighteen-month mark, I was feeling disconnected.
Firstly, the logistics of the relationship were proving challenging. For Stuart, the process of travelling the 1,500 kilometres to Sydney was arduous – a three and a half hour drive, followed by a one and a half hour plane flight, and several hours of waiting in between. While he was valiant in his efforts to visit me, I was unable to reciprocate. With little flexibility in my job, I couldn’t just pop up to rural Queensland. In fact, I’d only managed to visit the farm once during the past eighteen months and even then, it was for the briefest of weekend visits. So Stuart traversed thousands of air miles to stay for extended periods in my apartment, often only seeing me between 6.30 pm and 6.30 am.
And then there was Hugh. I groaned and threw back the bedcovers in the Malay heat. Hugh, the financier-cum-philosopher with a beautiful mind and a mischievous smile. After our posting to Arnhem Land, our friendship had deepened. We shared a love of literature, an interest in microfinance, a passion for the outdoors and a sense of the ridiculous. As my sense of disconnection from Stuart deepened, Hugh began to fill the void with long walks, deep conversation and all-too-close encounters on the dance floor. My attraction to Hugh occurred by stealth, seamlessly. There was no physical infidelity, but enough emotional intimacy to signal danger. Inexplicably, I didn’t stop it – I could have avoided Hugh, but I didn’t want to. In fact, during our time in Malaysia, I actively sought to spend more time with him. What the hell was I doing?
I rolled over and gazed through slatted blinds out the window. The beach was dotted with a hundred small kerosene lamps. Within a few metres of my window, a woman selling roasted corn fanned the flames of her small grill, while a group of teenagers clustered around a guitar, singing Malay love songs. The neon lights of Port Dickson blinked in the distance. I knew exactly where Hugh was right now, reading the works of a Sufi mystic in bungalow 307. I imagined him turning the pages by torchlight. But where was Stuart? In a tiny rural town on the Darling Downs, engaged in an activity I knew nothing about. In many ways, I had more in common with Hugh. Like me, he was a city-dweller, who lived and worked in high-rise buildings and dreamed of making a difference.
But I love Stuart, don’t I? I tapped my feet restlessly beneath the sheets. There was nothing for it – I was wide awake and my mind ablaze. I reached for my torch, seized my diary and tore out a wad of double-sided sheets. I resolved to write two letters – one to Stuart and one to Hugh – neither of which I’d ever send. It was an old psychotherapy technique I’d used while attempting to overcome my fear of flying: write a letter, detail your dilemma, but never send it. Simply tear it up, burn it or otherwise dispose of it, thereby releasing all toxic emotions, so the theory went. Page after page poured from my pen, until I stopped, purged, after midnight. I carefully folded my letters and placed them in my diary. Exhausted, I slept soundly for the first time in weeks.
CHAPTER 5
Five months later in Sydney, returning home by ferry after a long day in the office, I dialled Stuart’s number on my mobile. His phone rang out. I was due to arrive at the wharf at 7.00 pm
and, with Stuart staying at my apartment, I hoped he might drive down and collect me. He’d been in Sydney for almost a week with his ABC radio work; I knew he’d had a busy morning pre-recording a studio interview. I also knew that he’d planned to transform my concrete balcony into a leafy sanctuary of pot plants that afternoon.
‘We’ve got to get you some green out there,’ he’d said, inspecting the balcony’s bare tiling. ‘I’ll organise some shrubs and creepers, maybe even a few herbs. You won’t know yourself.’ Smiling at his zeal, I’d shaken my head. ‘But Stu,’ I’d protested, ‘I’m a black thumb. Being on my balcony is a death sentence for any plant. I just forget to water them.’ Stuart had taken my hands and smiled, ‘Well, this’ll be a good chance for you to turn over a new leaf.’
As the ferry chugged towards Manly, I redialled Stuart’s mobile number twice, to no avail. Unusual, I thought to myself, he must still be working on the balcony. I recalled our previous weekend together and smiled; Stuart had flown down to watch me graduate from the ethics program. The celebratory dinner had followed the format of those I’d attended in previous years, but this time I was one of those on the podium. I’d spoken with conviction about the benefits of the program; a lifelong network of trusted peers, a new framework for solving professional and personal dilemmas, and exposure to places and people I would never have otherwise encountered.
‘And perhaps most importantly,’ I’d declared to the audience in my concluding remarks, ‘my experiences on the program have highlighted that ethical failures often occur through simple acts of omission. Like turning a blind eye to social inequity, or failing to face issues that seem too complex.’ I gazed around the room. ‘In the Katherine Gorge, in Arnhem Land, Mumbai and Malaysia, I’ve learnt that sometimes, all it takes to be unethical is to just do nothing.’
Love in the Age of Drought Page 5