After

by Nikki Gemmell

  *

  Elayn’s childhood world: a deeply masculine landscape of rodeos and country pubs, bushfire alerts and floods. A place pockmarked by coalmines and coated in black dust but a place where nature nonetheless pressed close. Yet my mother wanted a bigger world than the small mining towns of the Hunter Valley, hamlets of sullen tranquillity. She wanted to suck the marrow out of life. Men who were different. People who lived by the book rather than the earth. And a country town of narrowed eyes and neighbourly sourness wasn’t for Elayn; the energy between the community and her felt wrong. She left school at sixteen because that’s what girls from towns like that did. They weren’t meant for education, nor the la-di-dah world of the Big Smoke. Neither were the men. They were expected to go down the pit from their mid-teens. As my grandfather did at fourteen, and my father at sixteen. Only the truly exceptional got out.

  *

  But then there was her beauty. It was Elayn’s calling card into another life. In her late teens she was crowned Miss Hunter Valley and swiftly noticed beyond her tiny world. She became a model. Was sent off to the longed-for Big Smoke. Photographed by some of Australia’s most iconic photographers, Max Dupain and Laurence Le Guay, for some of the nation’s biggest companies. Her modelling diary records the jobs in a beautiful, adolescent hand. Rothmans, Remington, Frigidaire, and the department stores David Jones and Hordern Bros. Elayn had a fierce determination to shake off whatever was holding her back. To get Somewhere Else.

  Yet a young coalminer from the same high school was after the Cessnock ‘looker’. He won. And Elaine disappeared because that was what was expected of girls from that world. And because her husband, my father, demanded it. Bob never knew much of his wife’s modelling life. After she died I showed him the iconic ads she’d been in. It was the first time he’d seen them. Elayn was adept at secret lives, hidden pockets, that people close to her were forbidden access to. A pattern in life, and in death.

  The beautiful coalminer’s wife stopped modelling. Had kids. The family moved to Wollongong, four hours south of the Hunter Valley, to begin a new life on new coalfields. Bob bought his wife the Great Australian Dream, a house with a verandah. Then a bigger one. In the suburbs. Which closed over her. For decades.

  *

  But Elayn didn’t want to be the supporting player in someone else’s life. A restlessness propelled her. Her mind was hungry, sharp. She grew out of wanting shag-pile carpet in the lounge room and a cabana by the swimming pool. When I began school Elayn started exploring the world of work; not something that suburban housewives of the seventies necessarily did. Pre-children, she’d been a hotel receptionist. She landed a job at the national telecommunications company of the time, Telecom, in Wollongong. Lift off. Elayn suddenly had her own money again. Glamour and independence. It was an exhilarating unfurling. After twenty years of marriage Bob and Elayn divorced. I was ten. Mum and I moved to the Big Smoke, Sydney; the court ordered the boys stay with their father. Elayn had finally found her ‘great good place’ in life. Henry James coined the term – it means a special place of calm and retreat that’s just for you, no one else, a place where your eye rests. Where upon arrival you exhale. The prospect of it: a renovation of your serenity.

  *

  So, to the Great Affirming. The Great Acceleration. She set about turning herself into who she really wanted to be – the woman she’d kept under wraps for so long. The pronunciation of words like piano became pi-arn-o in a rigorous scrubbing of the past. Elayn wanted to be seen as sophisticated, to fit in to the big city life. Thought her new words made her sound cultured. To me, they did the opposite. To me, Elayn never completely shook off the coalmining dust that shaped her early years. She hated me for thinking that; hated the fact I was proud of my coalmining origins when she wanted to bury them. So the dance began.

  *

  Elayn was determined her daughter would transcend the claustrophobic world of her childhood. Have the opportunities she never had. She took me to ballet matinees, plays, gallery openings, music recitals. She followed every diet fad of the era: our kitchen cupboards were full of spirulina and slippery elm and the most stolid of mueslis; at one stage, for years, we weren’t eating eggs because of the scare campaign over cholesterol. She sent me to elocution lessons. Pushed me to sit for a scholarship for Kincoppal, a prestigious Catholic girls’ school. She needed to blot out the stain of our former world. The pit, the uncouth voices, meat-and-three-veg dinners, the inarticulate, clogged men. The white bread and chips as opposed to pasta. The World Book Encyclopedia as opposed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The tabloid newspapers as opposed to broadsheets. And commercial TV stations as opposed to the ABC, for the national broadcaster was full of voices that didn’t sound like Wollongong. Like us. Both of us acquired new voices in our new lives. There was the endless push into talking proper – ‘nothing, not nothink, Nicole,’ ‘just not jist,’ ‘yes not yeah,’ ‘you not youse,’ ‘something not somethink.’

  *

  I remember the mortification that on my scholarship application, Elayn used as a referee a Wollongong gentleman who ran a bottle shop. ‘How could you?’ My wail of embarrassment, aged eleven.

  But Mum knew no one of standing, no doctor or lawyer as a friend. She explained that, ‘You have to be responsible, to hold a position like that.’ I won the scholarship, the path to my transformation set. By Elayn. By her determination to spare me the world of her own youth. And because I didn’t have the looks that had rescued her. ‘Can you just try and make yourself a little less ugly?’ she’d cry in despair when I first put on reading glasses in my teens.

  *

  Elayn had not been to university, had not completed high school. She was appalled that after school I chose to do Arts after getting the marks to do Medicine. Mortified when I swapped from the University of Sydney to the Institute of Technology to complete my degree. As brittle as an old bone at my graduation, uncomfortable and angry. Years later she’d whisper to those close, ‘She doesn’t even have a university degree,’ failing to note that the institute had become a university while I was still at it. It was just part of the great embarrassment of how I’d squandered my life. How I never got into television. Never did the prestigious degree. Never made her truly proud within the narrow parameters she had set for herself. At least, that’s what she conveyed to me. She left me hanging for my own good. To toughen me up no doubt. I never did.

  *

  Elayn fought her entire adult life for a voice. A say in her own circumstances. She instructed me continually on the necessity of independence: not to rely on a man financially, not to end up with a controlling male. She was often turtled by bitterness over her past, it was a carapace over her life she could not completely shake. Women who are free spirits often lose the one thing that’s special about them when they marry, and Elayn was determined to never make that same mistake twice. Post-divorce, various boyfriends asked her to get married but she always declined, explaining to me, ‘Men. They’re so boring. All they do is talk about themselves. And want sex.’ Increasingly, as Elayn aged, she turned to her female friends for joy.

  *

  Finally, in her late thirties, my mother became the architect of her own life. The magnificence of the transformation. With her divorce settlement she bought a flat in Sydney’s trendy Eastern Suburbs and a sports car. Carved out a living for herself in the corporate sector as an office manager for Telecom’s videoconferencing centre. Worked in a skyscraper in Australia’s most dynamic city. She’d come a long way, all by herself. Had finally found her place in the world. Was steeped in belonging, for the first time in her life.

  Elayn’s narrative from childhood to old age was characterised by audacious disruption. Erasures of a younger, more pliant self. Her existence was never quietly clearing its throat but banging on the table, roaring to be heard. It was a life of reinvention and transformation, of moving on and breaking free, and it ended as she was sailing into insignificance, in a flat in Sydney, with great determinat
ion and grit and enormous, bloody-minded loneliness. And I will never recover from it.

  *

  Death was Elayn’s last magnificent act of breaking free. Right until the end she did it her way. Yet her final act left me ‘exposed on a high ledge in full light’, as Virginia Woolf wrote. But so be it. Because in the Grand Ballroom of Destiny Reversal, beautiful, vivacious, enigmatic Elayn Gemmell reigned supreme.

  9

  Elayn was careful. She had done her research. When police officers came to the house and informed me that my mother had died they also pulled out a pad and took notes. Now I know why. Her children could have been the subject of a police investigation if we’d had anything to do with the circumstances; we could have been facing a charge of accessory after the fact. I did not know this at the time. Police officers, their faces clamped by solemnity, had never been to my house. But I knew what their presence signified.

  *

  ‘Nicole?’

  Instantly, the chest is clutched in a cliché of dread. Something is calamitously wrong. Instantly, an internal buckling. These faces can only mean one thing. ‘The children?’

  ‘No.’ The officers are quick with reassurance. They have done this before. But their faces are not letting me off. ‘Can we come inside?’ The young female officer doesn’t want spectacle, at this too-public front gate.

  ‘My husband?’ A quick shaking of heads, no, thank God no, as the three of us are enveloped by the house’s embrace. ‘It’s your mother.’ As soon as the door is shut. I know in that instant that Elayn is dead. How she’s done it. And why.

  *

  The world shifts in an instant. I become an adult, in an instant. My mother as a woman – an autonomous, thinking woman – reveals herself to me, just like that. Yet I keen to the heavens in shock; she did it, actually did it. Without telling any of us. And if I’d written of her slipping from this earth in a novel in these circumstances no one would believe it, yet here it is, the police, in front of me, with their hard truth.

  I need a wall, a floor, something solid to prop me up. I am reeling. Slumping on the bottom step of the stairs in the kitchen, leaning against the wall, held by it, needing the earth and its grounding. The police officers crouching beside me. ‘We will not leave you, Nicole.’

  In that moment my entire perception of a police officer and what they stand for has veered. Whoever puts police officer, and tenderness, in the same sentence? I do now. Well, well.

  *

  The body’s discovery, a few hours beforehand. A crime scene because that is what you do with situations like this, situations of oddity and the unknown within a home. My mother was in front of the telly. The Bachelorette finale had aired the previous night and I hope she had got a good old giggle out of it. Yet I do not ask the police what channel was on, it feels like an intrusion too far. The officers went through my mother’s flat. They questioned the builders who had called them. The men were told to pack their tools and leave. The police took items from Elayn’s apartment. Evidence. Oh.

  *

  I ask the two young officers if I can make them a cup of tea; they both decline. They are working. Of course. We’re all studiously careful and gentle. They ask if they can ring someone for me. I’m incapable of ringing my husband myself. I stumble out Andrew’s phone number. The male officer, Constable R, goes into the lounge room and rings him, man to man, and reports back that Andrew will come home immediately. It will take about an hour for him to extricate himself from work. ‘We won’t leave you,’ Constable B, the police woman, repeats.

  These young officers of lowered voice and careful tone stay by me the entire ocean of time of lurching and motherless alone, as I weep, and wail, and recall and try to work out; as I run to the bathroom and blow my nose on toilet paper because the tissues have all been used up; and as I try to raise various relatives but none of them are picking up – too many answering machines, too many messages left. Where is everyone on this sunny Friday lunchtime; at the café, the pub, revelling in normal pre-weekend life; the zoom of it, too much, everywhere else.

  *

  Can’t make it. To a chair. To sit on. Constable B stays on the floor with me, refusing a chair herself, a drink, a vegemite sandwich. I have to say something, am babbling, talking too fast amid a sloppy dissolving. ‘Our priority is you,’ they keep saying, the drum beat through the conversation. Because of what Mum has done, perhaps, because of a fear of a copycat response. So. Right. I am that broken in front of them that they fear for me. ‘This must be so hard for you, to always have to do this,’ I say.

  ‘Our priority is you.’

  *

  In the thick of it all, yowling loneliness. Grand Canyon vast. At this new way of being, already. How long will it last? Till the end of my days, perhaps, the end of days.

  *

  Trying to recall, explain. An older woman’s desire to be noticed. Heard. Taken seriously. When all around her was a world brushing her off. Prioritising other people and other jobs. That rendered her invisible. The builders, the bloody builders. Myself.

  Darling Nikki and Andrew,

  Firstly, a big apology for imposing on your busy lives . . .

  The guilt. I know I am trying to explain too much.

  *

  Several months earlier, Elayn had told me she would give me warning about any euthanasia situation; she would never spring it upon me. She had said this with a fervour that made me believe her and trust her and there was solace in that. I had felt that if she was ever reaching some kind of endgame with all this, she’d let me know. Prepare me however she could.

  Now, disbelief. And an ice-cold drenching of knowing. Of course she did it. This is Elayn.

  For ten years she had been saying on and off that she wanted to kill herself, at the time of her choosing; that she was a great supporter of the euthanasia movement. The offhand comments had been triggered by invasive surgery to eradicate thyroid cancer a decade ago. She suspected almost a lifetime of dyeing her hair had caused it – Elayn had started going grey at nineteen. After her thyroid was removed a thin scar ran along her neck as if her throat had been slashed. She told me she never wanted to go through such a procedure again; that next time, she’d ‘just go’. Without medical intervention.

  For several years prior to her thyroid operation Elayn’s blood cancer levels had been raised but doctors couldn’t find where a tumour was; for several gruelling years my mother had submitted to all kinds of proddings and probings to find the sickness locked within her. Finally the thyroid was pinpointed. She had learnt her lesson from an ordeal that dragged out over several years of endless waiting in endless specialists’ surgeries. For Elayn, in her final decade, quality of life was everything. And empowerment, and control, and choice.

  *

  ‘Was it an accident?’ I stumble to the two police officers. Needing it to be so. Some terrible slippage from the administering of pain relief, a muddle of pills; would we ever know for sure? Constable B says an empty bottle of pills was found next to Elayn. Oxycodone, otherwise known as OxyContin. I’ve never heard of either of those. I stammer out my ignorance. Constable R takes out his notepad and asks more detailed questions as I explain through tears what I know and do not. Look at him closely. The intent way he’s writing. The situation is shifting into something else here. ‘Has Mum done something wrong?’

  ‘We just need to work out what’s happened.’

  Have I done something wrong? The dawning. That this being here for me might, actually, also be something else. An investigation.

  *

  Brain, racing. What have the police been told? Has something illegal happened here? Have I implicated myself? Mum? Talk, suddenly, rationed. No idea what I could have done wrong – or Mum. Just an overwhelming need to suddenly protect both of us. There’ll be no mention of drugs from Mexico; she had talked about importing an enabling drug like Nembutal and no one in the family quite believed it. Yet, yet. The police have seized Elayn’s copy of The Peaceful Pill Handbook, t
he bible of the Australian euthanasia movement. I didn’t know she had it. Of course she did.

  *

  The constables reassure repeatedly that Elayn looked peaceful, that her passing would have been serene. They explain that as well as the Handbook they have my mother’s keys and handbag. I have no idea what else they were looking for, what they took. Except for my mother’s body. Yes, the ambulance took that.

  *

  Neither constable has heard of Dr Philip Nitschke, the contentious doctor at the forefront of Australia’s euthanasia movement and author of The Peaceful Pill Handbook. Their lives, despite being police officers, seem innocent of old people and their wearisome concerns: of dying with dignity and empowerment, a dread of nursing homes and the cruelty of chronic pain.

  Constable B seems so youthful, so un-hardened by life; she could be my daughter. Her brow is furrowed with concern as my nose runs freely and my eyes weep with rawness. I hope my own daughter grows up to be someone like this. So decent, empathetic, and at such a young age. ‘This must be hard for you too,’ I repeat, motherly, barely knowing what I’m saying anymore.

  ‘It’s my job.’

  Constable R is more pragmatic. He has a job to do. He needs to know Elayn’s movements the previous week.

  *

  Right. Elayn had asked me to drive her to an Automatic Teller Machine. It was the Sunday night before she died. She was going out to dinner with us. When I picked her up from her flat the first thing she wanted to do was get cash, $2000. I was shocked. The amount was so much. We would be paying for her dinner, and no one in my world carries that much around in their handbag. ‘What’s it for, Mum?’

  ‘Things. Life.’

  ‘The builders?’

  ‘No, I pay them by direct debit. I just need it.’ Elayn was irritated. Didn’t want to talk about it. Clutched her purse tighter as she sat in the passenger seat. I let it lie. Annoyed she wasn’t being straight with me; thinking ‘funny, batty old woman’, well and truly a member of that odd and ancient species now; addled by distrust and keeping her money in the proverbial shoebox under the bed.