The intimacy that had carried us through earlier irritations stretched and strained. His house that had once pleased me with its English furniture and shelves overflowing with books became an irritant: dark, dusty, untended. Once I’d cleaned out the kitchen cupboards; now I couldn’t so much as look inside them, cockroaches everywhere. Jeremy didn’t believe in baits or sprays; he believed in coexistence. There’d been a time when I was amused by a cockroach in the salt, but now I wasn’t eating another meal off those plates. Every small thing, every plan disrupted, every extra meal needed, every deadline met, or not met, every night at my desk catching up, every call that took me from my desk – each one of little significance in itself – frayed not only those old bonds, but something of our selves.
Look what it’s doing to you, first one friend said, then another; and still, somehow – for reasons that I knew had to do with a distant past – the tie remained, less a bond than a strap.
By the end of August that year, I was worn down not only by the impasse with Jeremy but with the PNG book, which was still stalled on my desk. Nothing was happening. I was stuck in some sort of energy drain. Pity I’m not into cocaine, I’d grumble to friends. I needed a shot of energy, something to get me back to that part of myself that was once able to write, to act, to risk. Well, I got a shock, if not a shot. In fact, I got two in the space of two months.
The first came in September with a diagnosis of an early breast cancer after a routine, no-reason-to-worry mammogram. With it, the last remnants of my strength went. Gone. Stolen, maybe. But unlike Dapene, it’d take months, not hours, for it to return. While it was gone, the shock was such that I couldn’t even read the breast cancer book I’d been given at the clinic. I could see that it was informative and well presented, exactly what I should read, but when I tried, it was as if my eyes, or my brain, couldn’t lift the words from the page. Fortunately my friend Liz, whom I’d known since the house on the corner, was with me for the consultation in the surgeon’s rooms. She’d taken over the book – which that morning fluttered with her yellow stickers. While I sat dazed, she went through her notes and queries with the surgeon. It was her mind, not mine, that got me through that day. At pre-admissions, Liz had to tell them my address. It was as if I’d taken flight and vanished.72
In this crisis Jeremy was no help at all, and maybe under the circumstances I shouldn’t have expected him to be. And maybe it’s not fair to say that he wasn’t, as I stepped back from him as much as he did from me. He didn’t come to visit me at St Vincent’s; I didn’t visit him when depression next returned him to Concord Hospital. He said he couldn’t deal with me weak, and anyway he had enough to contend with. I said I needed a break, which I did, time to myself, and for myself, time to let my brain come back. I couldn’t remember what I’d done two days before and was unable to write even an email. In my diary, a blank. No, the oncology doctor said, I didn’t need testing for dementia. You’re in shock, she said. Stress hormones play havoc with your memory; they take a while to settle. So, no, I wasn’t cooking any more meals. I wasn’t listening to any more of it. I wasn’t doing any more research on depression for solutions that weren’t followed up. I backed right off and stayed at my house at the end of lane. He closed his door behind me, turned up the music, opened another bottle and rang round his old girlfriends. There was no generosity in either of us.
Generosity came in the form of the little boats, my women friends sailing alongside. Anne Deveson was with me before the operation, and afterwards Liz was by the bed, on the phone to England, to Jane, and to Sophie. When I was home again, Gail and Robyn brought food, and suggested movies which we saw and I promptly forgot. People rang from all over, sent books and messages. I never felt alone – afraid, yes; alone, no – and as my mind regained its capacities, it was these friends who helped me recover. And the women doctors who saw me through the aftermath of radiotherapy and medication. From them, I learned that 50 per cent of women diagnosed with breast cancer will, like me, be in the five years either side of sixty. We are likely to have had few children, or late children, or no children. We’ve had oestrogen surging through our systems for decades, which was not, in evolutionary terms, what breasts were designed for. You could say that for women like us, breast cancer is a predictable, physical event. But I don’t subscribe to the idea that the body is separate, unaffected by mind or emotion. And nor did the doctor who was in charge of my radiotherapy. She wasn’t saying that stress causes cancer; nothing so simple. But she knew – how could she not, she saw it every day – that those of us in that 50 per cent faced this diagnosis at a time when, as women, we become invisible, when children, if we have them, have left home, and the men in our lives, if there are any, do all the things that men our age do to avoid the spectre in the shaving mirror. For many of us, it can be a time of domestic turbulence. I told her about Jeremy, and the hard, stuck place we were in. She listened, brushing nothing away. She knew that the door onto our lives that is opened by the shock of the diagnosis doesn’t just close. You can try to shut it, give it a good slam, or you can use it as a spur, she said, to make some changes. It was a doctor I was talking to, not a therapist. I wasn’t back in the stone house, though I thought of it often enough. There were times I wanted to return, came close to picking up the phone, but I didn’t. Something had happened there, and even if I couldn’t say what it was exactly, I could feel it somewhere underneath, steadying me.
Through all this, the one man to whom I could, and did, stay close, was David. There was a lot to do in preparation for the NGV exhibition. There was reason to be in each other’s company, and until my brain began to regain its old capacities he was patient. Sometimes we sat quietly with his books, catalogues of Oceanic art dating back decades. Sometimes we just sat. There were stresses in his life too, and I was one of the few people outside his family who knew of them, though even to me he spoke tentatively. That he could at all, I think, was because I knew the hidden side of him, and to his credit he had not turned away, as men so often do, when a woman sees them weakened and afraid. And he knew, and saw, the situation I was in with Jeremy, though of that too we spoke tentatively. His response was to protect me, to save me, which he couldn’t, of course, and I saw the pain of that too, for him more than me. What I did try to emphasise to him was that living with long-term, unresolved stress is not good for us. Let what’s happened to me be a warning, I’d say. But he was not a man to speak of ailments, and certainly not to be slowed by them. When his gout played up and his leg was painful, when he took four codeine, or six, on the principle that if two were good, more were better, I’d tut and cajole, as women do, insisting that he went to a doctor. Don’t you start, he’d say, turning it into a joke. If he did go to a doctor he’d manage to find one who thought concern over high blood pressure was exaggerated. Did he say that, or did you hear that? I’d ask, exasperated. It became a game for him as it ceased being one for me. Teasing was one thing, a form of affection I could, and did, enjoy. But when he ran stupid risks and played dumb about his health, when he took my reaction as that perverse kind of affirmation men get when women worry about them, I became cross. He’d flex his arms and laugh. Look, he’d say, there was nothing wrong with him that codeine couldn’t fix. And indeed he was a large, strapping man, nothing frail about him. His mother was still in good shape at ninety; his father was in less good shape, but alive. He had their genes, he’d say, hopping from one foot to another, arms raised in mock fight. He’d live at least that long. I was the one with dodgy genes, both parents dead from cancer – not that David would have said that, even if he’d thought it which I doubt he did. But I did.
When I told him I was about to start radiotherapy, which would mean going to St Vincent’s, across town, every day for a month, he put a thick envelope on my desk. Don’t look at it now, he said, and I knew that inside would be a wad of cash. You might need to take taxis. Dear David. I felt cared for by him, and right then it meant a lot. Dear, maddening, self-sabotaging David.
>
The last time I saw him was on 31 October 2009, the day he flew to Vanuatu. As well as the Ömie exhibition, he was sponsoring and facilitating another – of art, this time, from North Ambrym where I’d been with him in 2006, so I knew its rigours, its steep hills. That alone was tiring, let alone the negotiations to be made with the community and at the Cultural Centre in Port Vila before any art could be taken out of the country. And then there were the practical arrangements to bring carvings, slit gongs taller than David, to Sydney; this was not barkcloth to be rolled up and posted.
It was the last day of October when he boarded the evening flight, as we had three years before, taking off into a night sky and landing in Port Vila while the bands were still playing. This time he’d be gone a week, and when he returned there’d be a week before Alban and the three Ömie new to Sydney – a man, a woman and a boy – would arrive. Then it’d be down to Melbourne for The Wisdom of the Mountain opening.
‘Rest well,’ David said as he left.
‘I wish you weren’t going,’ I said, not meaning I’d miss him, though I would, but that I thought it was too pressured, too tight. Couldn’t he have put this trip off until the New Year?
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.
But he wasn’t. What happened I don’t know, only that on the night he returned, he stayed up late working, and was found dead in his bed the next morning.
That afternoon I was driving from Balmain to Glebe, a route I often take, and though I don’t know why I was doing it that particular day, I remember the exact spot where I was when I heard the ping of a text come in on my phone. The lights changed to red. The message was from one of the curators in Melbourne. ‘How terrible about David,’ I read. ‘We’re all shocked, and thinking of you. He was a good man.’ That tell-tale past tense. No. The lights changed. I drove on. No. David couldn’t be dead. I’d spoken to him when he came off the plane. I drove into a side street and parked. I got out of the car, re-read the text and rang his house. No! Yes. The ambulance had been, the police, the undertaker. David was dead.
I’ve only been in an earthquake once, and that was long ago, in the Highlands of PNG, at Kopiago with Nick. Nothing fell over, houses built of materials from the forest bent with its force and righted themselves; there was a landslide up in one of the gardens, but no one was hurt. We all ran out of our houses, jumping around to keep our footing. People coming up the path lurched from one side to the other as if they were drunk. I sat down on the ground where at least I could feel it was the earth that was moving, not me who couldn’t stand straight. It was, to state the obvious, deeply unnerving to find the ground beneath us and the way our bodies move across it so profoundly disrupted.
I thought of that earthquake when David died, and in the aftermath when his sponsorship stopped, when it was me, not him, on the phone to Popondetta, listening to the alarm from the mountain. What had caused this death? What would become of the art? Of them? I thought of it again the next January when I was faced with forty children, more, in Ömie and in the fjord villages, waiting for their school fees to be paid. But it wasn’t an earthquake like that. The analogy was wrong. The ground under my feet had given way when Poppy died and I stepped into the arms of Ross, landing in freefall. That was an earthquake. This time, hard though it was, weep though I did, it wasn’t deep ground that was shaking. I had been stopped in my tracks; that’s what had happened. I was lurching, and had to find ways to walk differently – with Jeremy, with the book that would begin again in 2010 and become The Mountain.73
As to my connection to that beautiful, heartbreaking country that lies to Australia’s north, did I walk away from all that David – and I – had set in train now that he, and all that came with him to make it work, was no longer there? Of course I didn’t. But what to do, and how, was very far from clear.
Now
13
If a book can be said to have a now, a present moment that lasts for the time of its writing, then the now of this book has been as strange as its beginning. Every other book has come in the wake of events in the (once lived) now of my life, after a death, say, like Poppy, or after re-encountering the unlikeness of Papua New Guinea, a country that has turned the course of my life. This book, though it has the title of Second Half First, indicating that it, too, is written in the wake of events I could turn to as memoir, came uninvited, so to speak, without me setting out to write it, without a trigger more significant than a sleepless night at the end of 2013.
I was a third of the way into a novel at the time. The novel was – and maybe still is – called Vanity. It is the story of Hannah Frost, told in three parts: the year she turned forty, then fifty, then sixty. That was the now of my writing in 2013. Forty was fun to write, I had no trouble with it at all, and was full of cheerful confidence – always a mistake – telling everyone how in love with fiction I was. Hannah Frost’s story was not mine. She was a journalist on the arts pages of one of the big Sydney dailies, close but not too close, distant enough to ring Susan Wyndham, a friend who was literary editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, to ask her to take me through the working day, the working week, of my Hannah Frost. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is imagining one’s way into the lives of others; and the research you have to do for these practical aspects takes you to places you would otherwise not go, or if you went, as I have on occasion, into a newspaper office, all you see is the chaos (the seeming chaos). Susan made sense of it to me, making it possible for me to write Hannah at work – which is not to say there is anything of Susan in Hannah, or that Hannah works for the Herald. Nor is she me, and not only in the detail of me not being and never having been a journalist, or because by and large journalists don’t make themselves the story. Hannah does have a philandering man, called Adrian, but he doesn’t leave her as Ross did me. On the contrary, when she has an affair – a love affair, not a philander; an impossible love affair – Adrian gives up his infidelities and suggests they move in together. Wish fulfilment, you might say, an alternative version of what life might have been had I been Hannah Frost and not me. And if you’re wondering about Ben and his fugitive appearance in this book, well that’s where he is, transmuted into Isaac Meltone – Hannah’s all-too-possible, impossible love – an altogether different figure, suspended in a file now somewhere in my study. There are some stories you can’t tell direct, and in this case I have no desire to. What I remain interested in are the dilemmas, the emotional cross-currents, the love – intense and real, and also fractured – and these resonate far beyond the lived actualities I shared with Ben.
By the middle of 2013 Forty was finished, with both Hannah and Isaac’s wife pregnant. Fifty had made a hesitant start with Adrian and Hannah living in London, when, with the same cheerful confidence, I packed up my notebooks for three weeks on the Greek island of Skopelos with my friend Helen from up the road. She’d lived there, almost a neighbour, for as long as I’d lived in the house at the end of the lane – a good deal longer in fact. But the first I knew of her was at a Christmas party further along her street that awful year of 2009. I don’t know why I went, seeing as I was still fragile, fit only for the company of friends. But it was Christmas Eve; Jeremy was in good spirits and wanted to go, and though I couldn’t take much part in the festive cheer, it was okay being there, with enough people in the garden for me not to be noticed, standing back, observing. Over to one side of the garden there was a woman my age with pretty loose brown hair, no sign of grey. I chose a chair a few away from her; perhaps she was in the same frame of mind, and I didn’t want to intrude. So we sat there for a while, until one of us said to the other, So you’re not in party mode either. Not really, was the reply. It’s been a difficult year, one of us said. Yes, said the other, for me too. And before we knew it we were talking, one of those rare party events of a real conversation. Helen Mueller is a printmaker, an artist who works in black and white, the many shades between, and although her art practice with its heavy presses and etching tools is far from
the pen and paper that’s all I have to show for the making of my work, there was a lot we understood in common, and it now seems unimaginable that we had lived so near each other for so long without meeting. Since then barely a week has gone by when I haven’t seen her. That June of 2013, when I was writing Vanity, she was going to Skopelos to work in a print studio she’d been part of setting up with, among others, the master printer Basil Hall, and being in London that summer, I joined her. We rented a floor of a house at the top of the old town, and while Helen went to the print studio I sat at the courtyard table with a view over roofs to the harbour. Shaded by the vines, I returned to Fifty, or tried to – though, in fact, I was doodling more than writing. Something wasn’t right. I didn’t know what, but I didn’t worry that much. After all I was on a Greek island; maybe I should give myself a break and enjoy the dry hills and the water and the old churches with their icons, evenings in the tavernas with the people from the studio. It’d resolve when I was back in Sydney, I told myself.
But it didn’t. My time was fragmented; I was teaching a semester at the University of Sydney. The year rattled past, and then it was December, and Martha went back to England and I sank into the sorrowful decline that ended with that strange night of remembering. I hadn’t thought about Ross for years, or thought I hadn’t, though I suppose he was there somewhere in Hannah Frost’s Adrian. And I suppose my own very different forty was in there too. Though I felt I’d been riding the crest of a fictional life, the unconscious has a way of tripping us into exactly what we are enthusiastically rearranging. And so I woke that night, just before Christmas, when I looked up Ross on the internet and this book began. Some books come easily. The Mountain did not. It took years. This book, as if in recompense, was written in not much more than a year. But the really weird thing has turned out to be less how it started than how its writing has proved a time in which many strands of the stories, the recollections of my life since forty, have drawn themselves into strange concluding patterns of the sort you couldn’t get away with in fiction. It’s almost as if this book I never set out to write came in anticipation of events I could have known nothing of at the start.
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