White Light

by Mark O'Flynn

  ‘If I passed you in a screwdriver, do you think you could unscrew the hinges?’

  ‘I don’t think I could reach the top ones. Anyway it looks like it needs a special tool.’

  ‘I thought that might be the case.’

  ‘I wish I was fucking dead.’

  ‘You’re only saying that.’

  ‘I fucking mean it.’

  ‘I’m trying my best, Dorothy.’

  He passes his hand in through the crack. It’s a familiar hand with its great thick fingers and calluses from a lifetime of heavy work.

  ‘Have you seen the desert yet?’

  ‘No, Dorothy. It’s night.’

  ‘Night? How long have I been in here?’

  He wafts his hand about blindly until he finds my face.

  ‘That’s my nose.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He strokes my hair and my jowls. He says, ‘There, there. Death gives life its shape.’

  ‘What shape?’

  ‘Its meaningless shape.’

  It is a great comfort to me, his hand and his words, but it still does not alter the greater fact that I just want to die.

  After a while, the rattling of the wheels is no longer like music but more like screaming. I try to sleep. I try to die, propped up by all the cushions Merv has purloined from somewhere. I listen to him snoring. I piss at will, without the inconvenience of having to ask someone to help me up. I’ve become a baby again. The light burns all night. In the morning he passes in my medicines and food and water and pen and paper in case, he says, you feel inspired.

  ‘Get fucked. I’ll give you fucking inspiration.’

  I wonder if I have the strength to jab his hand with the biro.

  ‘Do you want your red shoes?’

  ‘No. Fuck off.’

  ‘I can see the desert.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Flat.’

  Strangely, I do try to write. There is nothing else to do, even if it is all delusional. My handwriting is sloppier than usual. Hours pass, and then, presumably, days.

  Memories, or perhaps hallucinations, come to me in my fluorescent crypt. Memories of the house at Lambton Downs, of dancing in my red shoes down Darlinghurst Road, of crusty old nuns cursing me to hell. Oh, I was a beauty then. I was a mermaid. I was the embodiment of everything an evil nun should envy. Looks. Lads. Lust. Look at them in their silly wimples and Jesus-shrouds, so ugly they’d make a camel spit. Well, maybe their curses worked. Look at me now. Hell is being stuck in a railway carriage dunny crossing the Nullarbor with only your husband’s cracked, familiar hand squeezed in through the door for comfort. All the fluid rushing to your feet making them puff up and burst out of your slippers. Christ, my legs hurt. Tell me again the story of the fox, Merv. Merv, are you there? I wish I could lie down. My arse hurts. Wish I could put my feet up on my lovely couch in my own home, surrounded by my books. Why did we ever leave? I miss the mist and the currawongs. I miss the rowers on the Nepean, even though you only ever glimpse them for a second as you cross the river. If they gave me an honorary doctorate now, in here, I’d bloody well know what to do with it. No, cut the crap. I don’t wish for comfort. Not anymore. I only want it to stop. Stop all the camels and flies and heat. Merv, take me home, I wish I was dead, I wish I was fucking dead. There, there, he’ll say, strong as an ox, you don’t really mean that. Yes, I bloody well do. When I die, Merv, when I finally fucking well die you’ve got to keep God out of the service. It’ll be just like receiving a doctorate. Promise me, no mention of God. Just bury me with some poems and some wattle. I’d like it to be hot. And my red shoes, Merv. Make sure you toss in my red shoes, too. No one wants to see them anymore.

  DRIP, DRIP, DRIP

  Etoposide, as is well known, interferes with the function of the unwinding enzyme, preventing the rejoining of DNA. Both single and double strand breaks in DNA can result. Cell death is in proportion to drug concentration and exposure period.

  He’s lying there like a strange memory of all this. A time before. Like my childhood recollections of him… look, he’s lost too much weight, my papa, his skin pale as off milk. Lying there in his bed, wrapped in the crisp concrete of his sheets. I ask him how he’s going?

  Fine, darl, fine, he says, how’s school?

  School? I hate his bravery. Do you hear that? I hate how strong you feel you need to be for me. The tea trolley clatters in, then clatters out, as if it is the will of a higher god. He wants nothing. Even the water, he says, tastes like rubber. I look at him. His hair. Even his hair hurts… Alopecia is universal with etoposide…

  I have my father’s hair. Everybody says so.

  Our tyres crunch on hospital gravel. The boom-gate is stuck at a forty-five-degree angle like a salute. Mum hisses we’ll never find a park, though I believe we will. Be positive. And we do. Miles away from the door but it’s good for you to walk. I count the steps up. I count the passing days. I count the weeks. As the sliding doors part you can smell the smell of cleaning fluids. It’s supposed to be a hygienic smell, a nice smell a dry, non-productive cough progressing to shortness of breath with fine (or coarse, in severe cases) basal rates and infiltrates are classical symptoms. Pathologically, a gradual fibrosis of the alveoli occurs, with a decrease of collagen observed in a proportion of the alveolar septae. There is also the smell of sandwiches. I have my father’s nose. Everybody says so. In the lift, going up to Oncology, we have to squeeze to one side to make room for a lady lying on a trolley. Her skin, like my daddy’s, smells of chemicals.

  I am four years old. We are beside a murmuring beach. There are seagulls. I am a little scared of seagulls. The screeching, the colour of their eyes. Chop fat is sizzling on a gas hot plate. Although it’s hard being four, it’s also good. Dad throws a chop bone and the seagulls pounce on it with a noise like they’re murdering each other. One flies off. But I can see that in its greed the bone is sticking sideways in its throat. The gull flaps with the energy of victory. As I watch, it quickly grows tired, up there in the air. Soon its wings give up and it flops like a broken kite down, down into the water where, after it floats for a while like a rag, we forget about it.

  Bluebottles are scattered about on the wet sand. Dad nudges one with a stick and warns us never to touch the thin, bright tentacles. Immediately, I want to touch them and when I do I scream, and am given ice-cream for my mouth and vinegar for my fingers.

  I’m sitting on my dad’s shoulders looking down on his bald patch. The leucocyte nadir occurs five to fifteen days after the dose. His whiskers scratch my thighs. How, oh how did you lose your hair, my dad? It blew, oh it blew off chasing after your mother, he says.

  I try to imagine his hair, whether it flies off in a single clump over the waves or whether strands of it float up into the sky’s random sewing.

  Oh Dad, I’m telling you now, now that even your eyebrows have gone, that was a real dumb joke.

  What did you say, darl? I didn’t catch that.

  Ototoxicity due to cisplatin is well known with tinnitus occurring in nine per cent of patients and symptomatic hearing loss in six per cent. The movements of his head, the slight adjustments of his eyes towards the corners of the ceiling, remind me of a dog cringing at a siren before anyone else has heard. An accident with people dead already, the whole wide mesh of the world carrying on. One lone witness scared of his knowledge.

  Etoposide may lower the number of white cells and platelets and as a result the patient should be aware that they will have reduced resistance to infection.

  I’ll close the window.

  I’ll pull the curtains.

  I’ll put up barricades.

  I’ll block out the sun.

  Ah-tchoo!

  Any sign of infection, fever, chills, sore throat—any unusual bleeding or bruising—black tarry motions, blood in the urine etcetera, must be report
ed immediately.

  That bag, dripping its clear stuff into him. Up on the stand like the bladder of some poisonous fish they’ve killed and held aloft. Drip, drip, drip. The stand like a rattle of silver bones; a mannequin in a bridal shop.

  My waltzing partner, Dad calls it. Another dumb joke. It even follows him to the dunny. So do the nurses, to examine the infected nugget he struggles to expel. But that’s enough. There is the privacy of the old man in the next bed with a tube disappearing into his pyjama pants, trying to rip it out, a nurse holding him down, blood on her tunic. When Dad returns he’s stonkered.

  Exercise is unnecessary for the healthy and unwise for the sick, he says.

  Come on, Dad, this is me. What book did you get that from? But in that short walk from the toilet something has faded from his eyes, and he mutters, Fetch the nurse.

  She is too slow and I hate her. When she comes she is as happy as an electric shock.

  Cisplatin induces vomiting and nausea in ninety to ninety-five per cent of patients. Poor control of vomiting on previous cycles of therapy increases the incidence and severity of nausea on subsequent cycles.

  The nurse is wearing white, and, like the dog at the sound of a bell when he sees the white, he vomits again. It’s the white that puts the poison in the bag. Drip, drip, drip. There, there, says nurse, I’ll fetch a bowl… That’s my father retching, trying to expel a squid from his throat, hiding his face from me.

  Sorry, he groans, sorry. Don’t Dad, don’t protect me anymore. I want to tear the cannula out of his wrist, chuck that silver stand out the window. The nurse gives me a look that says, You’d best go, dear.

  A string of squid drools from his lips. He is trying to hide this pale thread from me, as if it is more than the clear core of all this. I would do anything. To help him, I would lick the puke from his chin, like a cow cleaning her calf of the birth slime. If that would help I’d do it. No one will believe that I would do anything. Anything for that chance to help. But I can’t. I’m helpless. I’m stuck in the doorway like a whittled stick. The nurse whisks away the kidney dish, studying its contents. The man in the next bed, with the catheter, continues to watch television.

  Even that chance to say goodbye is denied me. It’s all very complicated. They send for me from school one day, during History, and by the time I get to the ward, every step numbered and frozen in my stone brain, the windows open, the sun shining brightly in, well, everything smells nice and clean and antiseptic… The TV next door is off. Look. I look. I scream get your hands off me. Look. There he is. No one else. It’s just as if he’s asleep.

  TALES OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE

  We’re throwing a small dinner to welcome my wife’s old friend, Russell, back from his long trek around the globe. The kids are sleeping over so we think we might be able to get in some adult conversation for once. I am cooking. Russell Stanley is Shona’s first boyfriend. Someone she has known since high school. His postcards, from various parts of the world, are pinned to the notice board beside the fridge. They have arrived with enviable regularity, adorned with vistas of colourful stamps. Grace, our daughter, is too young or too cool to be interested in stamps, or her mother’s old boyfriends.

  Shona talks about Russell frequently, relating his news from whatever new part of the planet the latest cards have issued. I can’t keep up. Now that I come to think of it, I have never heard Shona say a bad word about Russell. I have heard her say plenty of bad words about other men from her past, but not Russell. It’s almost like she still loves him, but that couldn’t be correct, because that was years ago and she married me, right? Right? I recall her saying that Russell was distantly related to Stanley, intrepid explorer of Stanley and Dr Livingstone fame. That may be true, but the test of a man’s character is relative. We shall see. I have always thought it quaint the way she has managed to maintain friendships from her school days—that sense of shared history. It must be nice. I know no one from my past. They’re all ghosts. The past is a haunted place for me. Shona thinks the most intimate knowledge one can have of another person is if you knew them when they wore braces. Shona has perfect teeth now, although she once used to wear braces. I have studied the photos. And there is Russell, right beside her, with braces of his own.

  I confess a part of me has been a little jealous of Russell. Of his physique. Of his hair. Of the last seven or eight years when, more often than not, he has been travelling overseas. Lucky beggar. I wonder how he has been able to afford it? It can’t have been cheap. Another way of looking at it might be that in the last seven or eight years, he has been out of work more often than not. Alternatively, to claim some solidarity, perhaps Shona is attracted to the outdoorsy, adventurous type, like us.

  I am still setting the table when the doorbell rings. Suddenly I am struck by the banality of the sound. Shona is still getting ready. I open the deadlock. Russell is early. The Prodigal boyfriend. There is nothing else for it but to shake his hand.

  ‘Welcome home.’

  ‘Home?’ he says, philosophically. I can hear the question mark in his voice: ‘Home?’

  ‘Come in. Would you like a beer?’

  Russell gives a little shrug.

  ‘No? Wine, then? Or juice?’

  ‘Juice.’

  I go into the kitchen, open the fridge, pour a flute of orange juice. The fridge is full of alcohol, but all he wants is juice. When I return Russell is still standing by the front door.

  ‘Would you like me to take my shoes off?’

  ‘No, no. That’s fine. Come in. Make yourself at home.’

  Russell wipes his feet, then shuffles in and takes off his coat, which I hang by the tall mirror in the hallway. He still cuts a strapping figure. There, that’s a sentence from a tale of action and adventure. A strapping figure—despite the tinge of salt and pepper at his temples. He stands at the entrance to the dining room and watches me finish setting the table. The doilies in place. The serviettes. I notice that he peers into his orange juice, examining it closely. A toilet flushes in the distance. In a moment there is a squeal from the far end of the hallway and I take this to mean that Shona has at last spotted her long lost friend. She throws herself into his arms and I find myself counting the seconds of their kiss. She has reverted to a schoolgirl. I think about candles, then dismiss the idea. Candles are too intimate. There are only a few little birthday candles anyway.

  I have met Russell before, of course. I couldn’t have married Shona without knowing something of her past dalliances, just as she knows mine. Russell’s name has always cropped up at her history’s most significant moments. I don’t know exactly how I feel about this. Once, before I met her, Russell drove Shona to an abortion clinic. Afterwards he took her home and listened to her sob in the shower and made her a cup of tea even though he was not the father. He came to our wedding, of course, and after our daughter was born, a few years later, he gradually faded from our lives. Then, once he had disappeared overseas, the postcards began to arrive. I think it is good for a woman to have male friends, friendships of a platonic, non-threatening nature. Friendships that would be perfectly fine for me to have too.

  I have mashed an avocado, mixed with garlic and tomatoes to make guacamole. I have crushed chickpeas and garlic to make my own hummus. I have julienned carrots and celery as instruments to dip and dig into these concoctions. Russell looks at them and sighs. He explains that the jetlag is still catching up with him. He hopes he’ll be able to stay awake. Shona seems to find this inordinately funny and giggles. I pour some wine for Shona and, as Russell doesn’t appear to be drinking, another juice which again he examines with forensic attention. During this momentary silence the whine of a mosquito is clearly audible. Shona flaps her hand. She hates mosquitoes. I don’t mind them because they always bite her and leave me alone. I jump up to put on some music so as to camouflage any future intrusion I fear silence may make into proceedings. Shona apologises for the
mosquitoes.

  ‘That’s all right,’ says Russell. ‘Mosquitoes are nothing. In Honduras, near Tegucigalpa, I was bitten by a vampire bat.’

  ‘A vampire bat?’

  ‘I was camping in the jungle and there was a hole in my sock. It bit me on the toe. There was blood everywhere.’

  ‘Weren’t you in a tent?’

  ‘There was a hole in that, too.’

  ‘Don’t they give you rabies, those things?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ says Shona.

  ‘Not really. They’re very common.’

  He takes a celery stick, digs and dips, and pops it into his mouth.

  I say, ‘I hope you don’t mind the garlic in the guacamole, then.’

  ‘No. It’s very nice.’

  We listen to the music for a moment.

  Ambience.

  ‘Shona didn’t tell me if you still eat meat or not. We’re having lamb, but there’s plenty of vegetables as well.’

  ‘Yes, I eat everything,’ Russell says. ‘In fact, in Brazil I ate a Howler monkey.’

  ‘A Howler monkey?’ says Shona, not quite sure if she has heard right.

  ‘Yes, we were travelling overland from Imperatriz and got disoriented in the jungle. We had no food and after a few days my companion, Jacques, shot a monkey.’

  ‘Aren’t those things jumping with parasites?’ I ask.

  ‘Are they? I don’t know.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We cooked it first. It was very tough.’

  ‘Did you get sick?’

  ‘No. My friend got sick. But I was fine.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He got better.’

  I excuse myself. Duty calls. With industrial strength oven-mitts I fetch hot plates out of the oven. I carve the leg. I serve the slivers. I bring out the main course, garnished with rosemary and mint. Pumpkin. Sweet potato. Lots of spuds in a ceramic bowl that Shona made during her pottery phase. A clichéd Australian meal to welcome back the lonely traveller.