Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  And a name? Stephen had that as well: Schoolmate, or Wanskul, to indicate that it is not a school – schools are the responsibility of the government – but a support for the school, a book house beside the school for all who want to learn, and to teach.

  We tried the concept out on our advisors, who’d said we would only succeed if we found a way of housing the resources that would be replicable, sustainable and transportable. Yes, came the response, quietly at first; another look; more questions. Stephen had diagrams on his laptop and soon there was an animation. Yes, we heard from one person after another; if you can get it to work so the box can be carried and the cost can be kept down, you’ll have done it. And then, after a pause, someone would say that while we were thinking of literacy and PNG, it was a design that could be adapted for other places, and for the delivery of other resources, medical aid, for instance.

  As Stephen said, when the design concept became smaller, the possibilities became larger.

  I’d have been grateful if we’d managed to get some sort of literacy support into the fjord villages; after years of talk and no action, my sights had shrunk. But in the second half of that year, 2014, with interest growing, and anthropologist friends saying, Yes, it would work well in the villages they knew, I was imagining again. And first among my imaginings was Ömie. The business was going well: the younger women were painting, the men were proud and busy. But there were few people on that mountain even with Grade 8, which is not surprising given there are only two primary schools for those widely separated villages. If children couldn’t stay with relatives within walking distance of one of the schools, there was no way they could attend. The schools in the fjords might be under-resourced, but the teachers are committed and the students are in the classroom each day. The schools in Ömie have almost literally nothing in them, and teachers rarely stay, absent for weeks at a time, sometimes returning, sometimes not. It’s a tough, isolated, unconducive posting. The art might be going well with Brennan to manage it, but in the long run, if it is to be sustainable into future generations, of course it was essential that the Ömie themselves had the education, the experience, the knowledge, to protect and manage their art, their business.

  In September we launched SEAM and Stephen’s Wanskul design in Melbourne. Martha came from Singapore. I met her at a café in a city lane not far from the gallery in Flinders Lane we’d been offered use of for the launch the next evening. It was the only moment we were able to talk of other things before Stephen arrived and we were swept into SEAM business, surrounded by the many people who were working to support this project. We had pro-bono design and construction of our website; we had invaluable pro bono accountancy. I don’t know that SEAM would exist if it weren’t for all this generosity, and the work of volunteers. But between us all, and with the support of writers and artists, with donations coming in, we raised enough to begin work on a prototype. For someone who’d been living a quiet life of writing, it was a radical shift of pace. Gone was that leisurely sense of days expanding. At first I managed to keep writing each morning – an insistent book this – limiting SEAM work to the afternoons and evenings. You need an uncluttered mind to push through to the end of a book, and as the days rushed by, uncluttered was not what my mind was.

  And then there was Jeremy. He was finding it hard living in his sister’s house on the outskirts of London, sorting out letters going back to their childhood, photos from earlier generations, stirring ghostly, unsettled memories. He’d ring to talk about his father, a figure I’d heard of over the years: a disapproving father, a tall man who cut a dashing figure on a motorbike, and who’d died in the car of his mistress of twenty years. No one in the family knew of her existence – what was her story? – until he died in this most awkward circumstance, a revelation made all the worse by the indignities that ensued when they had to get his large body out of a small car. Jeremy, who was still living in England then, was left to hold up his distraught mother, which proved an impossible task even for a beloved son. While his mother had pampered him – until he married and set sail for the other side of the world – he had always thought his father, a military man, had considered him weak, a bookish failure. That Jeremy wrote and published, that he was a well-regarded editor, was not – or Jeremy thought was not – enough for a man his father might have admired. Now that his sisters were both dead, there was no one to talk to about the past he was unearthing alone in that small, dark house. He had a young cousin in Wimbledon, and it was with this man’s children that Jeremy found comfort, but for the rest, depression closed around him. At night he couldn’t sleep, his body full of pain, his mind mired in dread. He’d ring me in the dark of his night and I picked up the phone in Sydney sunlight with a heavy heart. It was not easy listening, and there was nothing I could do, short of flying over, other than telling him to go to the hospital, which he did, but it turned out they couldn’t admit him as a psychiatric patient. So he returned to his sister’s house, alone with the past and a phone line to Australia. One night the pains were worse and he was more than usually frightened; the pain was too severe to ring, he said, it hurt to hold the phone. When, fortuitously, two friends of his sister came round the next morning to sort out her clothes, they took one look at him and called an ambulance. Jeremy was having a heart attack. The next call I received was from the hospital. Oliver had spoken to the doctor and I already knew that a stent was to be put in, that Jeremy had been told he must stop smoking and drinking, that the heart was damaged, but under the right conditions he should make a good recovery. Afterwards, he went to stay with the young cousin in Wimbledon, waiting to be well enough to come home. Home. After all those years away, England the lost ideal of home, when it came to the crunch it was Sydney where he wanted to be. Oliver arranged a flight; Jeremy had a panic attack on the way to the airport. Another flight was arranged. Jeremy was delivered into the care of the airline, and was taken in a wheelchair to board the plane.

  On 1 October, his seventy-fourth birthday, Jeremy was in the air. I was at meetings about SEAM: a lawyer in the morning, a possible volunteer in the afternoon.

  On the morning of 2 October, Jeremy arrived back in Sydney. The boys were to meet him at the airport. Stephen and I had a meeting that day with KTF, a small NGO run by ‘a group of passionate and innovative problem solvers in PNG’. Working outwards from the Kokoda Track, they remind Australians that the people of PNG ‘were there for us in our darkest hour … now it’s our turn to lend a hand’.86 As part of their education programme, KTF is developing an elementary and primary teacher-training curriculum, and it is in a community adjacent to their college not far from Kokoda that we are trialling our Wanskul prototype.

  I didn’t get home until late that afternoon. The anxiety I’d been holding at bay rushed in on me as I picked up the phone to dial Jeremy. It was not a good conversation. He was frightened, short of breath, and clearly very tired. He didn’t want to die. They put a stent in, I said, they cleared you to fly, you’re home. I wanted to be reassuring – for his sake, and also for mine. Instead I was short with him, anxiety turning into irritation at his stubborn, miserable insistence on gloom. He’d seen his GP that morning and she’d got him an appointment with a cardiologist for the next day. You’re home, I said. Safe. But nothing would calm him; his anxiety morphed and spread. He was afraid to go to sleep. He was cold. He didn’t know what to eat. The hospital in London had told him he must improve his diet. Would I help him? Tell him what was healthy?

  ‘Jeremy,’ I said, ‘you’ve eaten my food for nearly twenty years, you know perfectly well what a good diet looks like.’

  ‘Oh please. I need you. Be kind.’

  ‘Have you stopped smoking?’ I asked.

  He sighed and huffed, noises that weren’t an answer.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Well, no, but I’m smoking less.’

  ‘Did you buy tobacco at Heathrow?’

  ‘Well, um.’ More noises. ‘Well, yes. Just my allowance.’
/>   ‘I thought you were being wheeled in a wheelchair.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘So, how did you manage the tobacco?’

  ‘I persuaded them to push me there.’

  ‘Well, Jeremy,’ I said. ‘You stop smoking and we’ll talk about diet.’

  It was the last conversation we had.

  He slept that night in his own bed, home again. In the morning he got up, went downstairs, saw his younger son who had a new job and was getting ready for the bus. The 8.20 bus. Later that morning his ex-wife, the boys’ mother, came round to talk arrangements for their son, who was doing well, but would he remain stable with Jeremy returning in this bad state? Jeremy didn’t answer the door. He didn’t answer the phone. She found the spare key and let herself in. It was the middle of the day; she called out, walked upstairs and found Jeremy lying in his bed. She knew even before she entered the room that he was dead.

  An hour or so later Oliver walked round to tell me. I’d had a bad morning, worrying about Jeremy, reproaching myself for not having gone to see him after that phone call. Be kind. I’d tried ringing; he didn’t answer. I’d tried ringing Oliver and his phone was switched off. When I opened the door and saw him standing there on the step, sobbing, it took me a while to grasp what he was saying. And when I comprehended, there was numb disbelief, an emptying out of all feeling. Then shock: shock, with its attendant remorse, its deep, unquenchable sorrow. Oliver and I sat together, arms around each other. No, we kept saying. Not like this.

  At Jeremy’s house the officials had left, and Jeremy’s body was still in his bed. Oliver and I went upstairs. Jeremy was lying on his back with no sign of disturbance, his hands on his chest as they were when he woke in the mornings. He looked calm; all that anguish, that twisted expression, the lines, the flush – all gone. It was as if ten years had fallen away. His fingers still bent when I slipped my hand into his.

  I lay on the bed beside him. Oliver lay beside me. And it seemed to us both that the man we lay beside was the Jeremy of before: the Jeremy I’d slept beside for so many years; the father Oliver had got into bed with in the mornings when he was a boy. Peaceful. His right eye, the eye nearest to us as we lay beside him, kept opening – or rather the eyelid of that eye kept slipping up as if he were opening his eye to greet us. We sat up. Was he really dead? He didn’t look dead. Tears. Our tears. The doors onto the roof were closed. Outside, the trees were moving in the wind, the view he loved; over to the side, the palms he’d never succeeded in persuading the neighbours to remove were more than usually ragged.

  Heart disease was the verdict on the death certificate. The result of the stent going in? A clot from the flight? John, his friend and executor, a doctor, said it was probably the electrical system of the heart; it can short out and the heart just stops. A whopping heart attack, or a pulmonary embolism would probably have woken him, if only momentarily. From the way he lay undisturbed, he’d almost certainly have known nothing of it.

  By the time the undertakers came at dusk, he was, as the cliché goes, as stiff as a board. They put him in a body bag and carried him down the steep, narrow stairs without a stretcher. That was waiting to wheel him out to the street and their unmarked van. They opened the body bag for us to have one last look. The jaw had dropped open, the skin had turned that terrible colour that only the dead have. The skin was cold, without resistance. The hands that had folded around mine only hours before were rigid. Dead. Very dead.

  That is how I wrote of it in my diary: staccato, incomplete, minimal. Other than that, in the days that followed I was unable to write, even there. I’d try and the page closed, unwilling, resistant. Instead, I took out the photos that had accumulated over twenty years and made collages, cutting around the images, arranging and rearranging them, a tangible memorial, more immediate than words, more satisfying. Scissors and glue, discarded scraps piling up. It was a good way to mourn the man I’d loved for what he was, and could be, and became afraid to be. I backed the collages with stiff paper and pinned them beside the table, lit candles and invited friends who’d known him and me for a meal to mark the day Jeremy was cremated. A memorial was to be held later, but that night, when Jeremy had been reduced to ashes, I needed to mark the occasion. We ate lasagne, and Jeremy was present at that table as we remembered, and talked of him, and of other things, life going on. The irony of it, Murray said, was that Jeremy would have enjoyed the occasion; once, when he still could enjoy such evenings, he would have enjoyed it. You silly old bugger, I said to him as I cleared up, gone though he was, and there in my head was that image of him lying dead, looking more at peace than he had for years. What was the point of all that anguish, that fear? We end up dead anyway. A useless thought, I know, but still I had it.

  Death is strange in its absoluteness, its mystery, as if for all that we see it before us, we do not believe it. We see that eyelid move and we think he’s not dead. Even when he clearly is dead, in that body bag, still non-being makes no sense. Disbelief. Shock. It was the same incredulity I’d felt on seeing Poppy dead, and Patrick – and I remembered it from David’s dying, though I never saw his body. And when the shock abates, and the disbelief, then there is the mourning – and that is never straightforward. This mourning was, for me, as much about the man long lost as for the man who had died that day. I could weep at last for the lover and companion I couldn’t mourn while dealing with the man he became. With that man I had been on the narrow road of pity, a phrase that came to me after it was all over, and which I was sure came from George Eliot – from Middlemarch when Dorothea realises the mistake she’s made in her youthful marriage to Casaubon. I re-read the novel and couldn’t find it; I downloaded the e-book so I could do one of those searches, and even then I couldn’t find it. Still, it stayed with me, persistent. The narrow road of pity: a road that leads nowhere. Had Jeremy willed death in some strange way, getting himself back to Sydney, to his own bed? Or was I comforting myself from the stark reality of the depression that depleted the last years of his life? Can we ever accept that in the life of someone loved?

  A cousin in England sent me a volume of Rumi’s verse. ‘This night will pass,’ I read. ‘Then we have work to do.’ Rumi, I said to Martha on Skype from Singapore, and she reminded me of these lines:

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

  there is a field. I’ll meet you there.87

  That field is hard to reach, for any of us, and harder still from the long disablement of depression. What was it with Jeremy? Was it genetic? A brain chemical imbalance, that’s all, as some of his psychiatrists said, an explanation Jeremy favoured? Or was it the emotional damage of a cold father? Being sent away to school too early, which I am sure had a lot to do with it? An adoring but domineering mother he never found a replacement for? Divorce? The sorrow of his son’s illness? So many questions, and in their wake the harder question of my part in it. Would it have been different if I had gone round after that phone call? Could I have kept him alive if I’d fed him soup and slept beside him that night? And the darker, deeper question of whether it would have saved him had we separated as soon as it became clear that my life as a writer and his as a father were in some impossible collision? We did try to separate, several times, but we never managed it for long; there was love in the mix, not a lot by the end, but its traces remained, mixed in with habit, and those harsh patterns of dependence, guilt, exasperation. We moved further and further from that field, and if I’m left with regret, it is that in those final years we could so rarely reach again the grass of that field where ‘the world is too full to talk about’.

  For all of October and into November, I wrote nothing. I did not know – and still do not know – how to write of the recently dead when they are still too close for our entangled lives to have resolved into the past. Instead I read, and unlike the beginning of this book, which had taken me back to re-read the books of my youth, I read young writers, the ones who are starting out, finding a new voice for this disordered a
ge. I read Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Is she? Must she be, still? A thing? It is confronting for those of us in the affluent West with rooms of our own and the means to find our own shape to be reminded that even within our own societies, let alone beyond their borders, there are many who do not, and cannot, escape the deprivation of poverty, shame, abandonment. Eimear McBride’s unnamed girl is a shattered, disassociated being whose only release is in a self-punishing sexuality. This is not the pornography of degradation; there is nothing titillating in this novel. It is a tough read, for its brutal truth is that this girl is indeed a half-formed thing. Yet there is nothing half-formed about the novel with its strong voice and dense fractured language of short, incomplete sentences. While so many of her contemporaries write of the past, or with an eye to the increasingly demanding and globalised market, she is uncompromising in a style that picks up the echoes of an earlier modernism, and points a way to something becoming formed, which I hope I live long enough to see.

  In the meantime, there is work to do.

  Come November, I was drawn back towards life by SEAM. We had another fundraiser already scheduled, in Sydney this time; we had documents and agreements to be drawn up and signed in order to take us forward. It’s a complicated, highly regulated business working in this sector. I wrote what needed writing for SEAM, and was grateful for it; something to keep me from brooding. As to this book, which had been going so well, it stopped. Or rather, it was as if something inside, some resistant part of me, had stopped. Is this what happens when you insist on your writing life? People die and there you are, alone with it? Or was it a courtesy, this stopping, a last gesture of love made to a man I had all but ceased to love? Where did it all start, this unhappiness that had eclipsed so much of him? In childhood? School? Why can some people survive, and others not? Where had my own history of troubled love begun – for Jeremy and the lovers who had preceded him, for the troubled love, if that’s what it was, for Papua New Guinea? Had one replaced another as if I need the challenge of something I think I can control, but can’t? Or is it a reaction to growing up in a once-imperial country with great-uncles in the Indian Civil Service? Did everything derive from the contingency of birth: the ease with which I left England and barely a backwards glance? Was PNG that place between the pull of the tides, between north and south, England and Australia? These were questions that kept me from a book that had made its start at forty – as if that’s where anything starts, even if in my case a lot had.