With Every Step

by Cadigan, Neil;

  Wayne and Kim were hurting near the end, with Wayne’s Achilles tendon really tested, but there was no way in the world they were not going complete every step of the way to repay Cad for going through his pain barrier in honour of their son Chris.

  It was a special few hours; lots of banter – mostly aimed at Andrew, telling him to slow down – and just a heap of admiration for what we had, briefly, been allowed to be a part of (Chris’s sister Lynne joined for a short while as we went past her workplace at Gordon). It should remain such a happy memory for all of us, and those who were there to greet Cad at the finish and celebrate afterwards – and it is. But it is also bittersweet now.

  We stopped so I could take a group photo in the shadows of the bridge, at the bottom of the stairs that climb the northern pylon. Then we followed Cad to the finish – the red line he had fixed to the eastern walkway two days earlier – to the applause from friends, family and Leukaemia Foundation representatives and the only media contingent, Nick Lockyer from Channel Ten, which was disappointing considering how epic an event it was. A lovely touch was Lucy Dobbs meeting Cad and Kaine at the finish line with their six-month-old daughter Lyla, who was wearing an Oz On Foot T-shirt.

  Having the Leukaemia Foundation representatives there was fitting. Andrew’s cousins Luke and Megan, his aunty Alison and their friends Mark and Kim Ella were also there. Cad’s reaction at finishing his classic trek seemed to be a combination of being overawed and understated. He didn’t know how to feel, and relayed that to me next day, and it certainly hadn’t hit home that the life he’d had for almost a year and a half was about to change. He looked remarkably fresh, fit and happy, and very controlled emotionally.

  Some of us adjourned to the Australian Hotel in the Rocks, Cad refusing to accept an alcoholic drink to celebrate. I asked Josh to say a few words and he was brief but perfect, and then I spoke, which would have embarrassed Andrew. I mumbled about how no one in our family, in any generation, had ever done something as incredible as what Cad had just completed, and how in awe and very, very proud we all were of his extraordinary achievement.

  Chris and I left him with his mates, Cad drinking lemon squash so he was in the right condition for his breakfast interview on Sunrise the following morning. He was able to defy the encouragement of others to kick on (close mate Todd Bailey had also joined later), and he and Josh retired to their hotel about midnight. Josh joined him at the Channel Seven studios early the next morning.

  His mission was completed. Circumstances and distractions – injury in Tasmania, attending two weddings and spending a week longer than he’d planned in Perth – had added a month alone and contributed to him having to add a further two months sitting out the Top End’s wet in Thailand. But the job was done, his commitment met: Simmo had been honoured. Cad had walked 15j09 kilometres.

  He was home.

  Just not for long enough.

  After only three and a half more days in our presence, he was gone. To Thailand. I think he felt he just had to get away from the fanfare – he genuinely couldn’t handle being the centre of attention for too long – and he wanted to escape the temptation to party too much. He had a big network of friends and loved his close mates, many of whom had shared experiences and adventures with him home and abroad and were tight and loyal, but he was also a bit disappointed more friends had not taken an hour, or a day or half a day, from work to join him on his last few days of walking or be there at the finish line.

  In many ways, though, he seemed more settled, and more at ease with himself, than ever before when he’d always seemed to be searching for fulfilment. His trek ended up being, for him, as much about the miles he travelled in his mind as the miles he’d travelled on land, his brain too often in overdrive while looking boundlessly at his life past and present during all those hours he had to himself. Despite being seen among his peers as the one who had done so much and who would take on any challenge, no matter how hard or how stupid, Cad had come to think he’d wasted too much of his time and could have achieved more (which I think was unfair). And he’d finally realised how much he wanted to settle down and become a partner and father himself, although he laughed to us that week that he might soon be too old for that and might have to get a Thai wife!

  He had his next plan – to work at the mines at Karratha in a few months and stack away some cash, although he truly didn’t know, just then, how to handle what might come next – other than writing a book about the walk, which has become this book, as a means of closing that chapter of his life and moving on.

  I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t understand why he so urgently felt the need to escape. Then again, none of us could truly know how the previous 540 days had affected him.

  And so Cad and I were at Sydney Airport on the Monday, just the two of us, exchanging an embrace and sharing the last words we would speak face to face.

  ‘See you when I see you.’

  15

  THE SPLIT-SECOND THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

  14 JULY 2013, CHIANG MAI

  At the beginning of this book I touched on what happened next, just four weeks later, and the phone call I received from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The phone call every parent dreads but never expects to receive.

  The saying is so, so true: one split-second can change your life forever. But I had no idea how real and confronting that cliché could be until Chris and I arrived in Chiang Mai just over twenty-four hours after I had received that chilling telephone call notifying me that Andrew had been involved in a motor accident. I wrote this and the next chapter as I sat next to Cad’s bed in Thailand (the rest of the book followed after we’d returned home). How that split-second in the early hours of 14 July 2012 changed everything forever for Andrew, his family and closest friends still didn’t seem quite real.

  After dropping Andrew at Sydney Airport, my first contact from Thailand was an email four days after he’d arrived in Chiang Mai, telling me he had again (a repeat of his first week in Thailand earlier in the year) left his card in an ATM, and asking if I could get a new one organised from his bank and send him $1000 via Western Union to get him by.

  I didn’t hear from him much after that. Most of that time he was immersed in transcribing his diaries onto his laptop and emailing them progressively to me. I think I had just two brief phone conversations and a few emails from him in the twenty-four days after I dropped him at Sydney Airport. The last email I received from Cad, the last conversation we had, was when he informed me he wanted to get a tattoo of his grandmother, pictured in her younger days, to be done by Jaclyn Rehe, the tattooist in Melbourne whom he’d struck up a good relationship with. Cad’s email was typical of his sense of humour (if that’s what you call it!), and I shared it as part of my eulogy at his service:

  Hi

  Your daily annoying, pesky email has arrived!!

  I have commissioned my tattooist in Melbourne to do a painting for me of grandma’s wedding photo, and then she will tattoo it on me at a later date.

  She is a brilliant artist in high demand and has just finished some paintings so need to grab this opportunity while she is free.

  I need to send her a photo AØ for the painting, but obviously don’t want to send her some to choose one and have to send back in case it gets lost … SOOO … when you get time – ha! can you scan all the wedding photos you have of her and granddad. It doesn’t have to be their wedding photo, it just needs to be one of them together a bit dressed up.

  Grandma looked ugly in the wedding photo that she showed me, and while that is fine for a painting I don’t want a ugly chick tattooed on me – grandma or not.

  Jaclyn could easily make her hot but I want to keep it as realistic as possible.

  I know you are busy and lost a day taking Redge, thanks for that by the way. But whenever you can would be good.

  Something that might be good enough is just to take pics of the photos with your phone and email them straight from your phone. (I t
hink I remember you saying you had some there from the family tree thing, hopefully one of them will be cool.)

  Attached are some of her photos showing the style it will be in to give you an idea.

  Glad Redge was OK with a male husky!

  Grandma might like to have the painting up for a while until I settle again.

  Cheers

  I’d left home two days before receiving his email, to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast to join Chris, Nicole, Glenn and the grandkids for a week’s holiday (and go to Brisbane to watch State of Origin II while there). On the way I’d dropped Andrew’s dog Redge to his new home at Chris’s cousin Leonie’s home at Lismore; since Andrew was planning to be in Thailand and then Karratha, and with Chris and me temporarily without a house, he needed a new home. I was back only a day before heading to Port Macquarie to attend the national open schoolboys rugby league titles as part of my agent accreditation scheme manager’s job, then detouring for a day and a half to Grafton for the annual Grafton Cup and Ramornie Handicap carnival to join good mate Craig Brown.

  The next time I would set eyes on Andrew, days later, he was barely recognisable from the son I said goodbye to at Sydney Airport twenty-seven days earlier.

  As we entered his ward in Chiang Mai’s Maharaj Nakorn Hospital, Andrew’s bed was second on the right. He had the ventilator hooked up to his mouth and his head was severely swollen, with the scalp bandaged. Both his eyes were black and closed over, and there were stitches in his right eyelid. Chris let out a gasp and had to turn away.

  A doctor was there and he tried to explain to us the seriousness of the injuries, but we couldn’t understand him very well. He said until the swelling went down he could not fully determine how Andrew would end up, but it was not looking good. He said that if Andrew survived he could be unconscious for weeks, even months, and when he did awake he would have little brain function and would need ongoing care; he wouldn’t be able to walk or talk or do anything for himself for the rest of his life. Chris and I looked at each other and broke down.

  I asked the doctor if he had seen anyone recover from such a prognosis and have a better scenario than he had just explained, and he said no. I thought, ‘Well, you haven’t met anyone like Andrew Cadigan before.’ Also going through my mind was that perhaps the expertise wasn’t great here and they could be wrong; this was not a big Australian hospital or the Bumrungrad or other hospitals in Bangkok that had been recommended to us by DFAT, if we could eventually move Andrew. I immediately asked about transferring Andrew to Bangkok but the doctor said it was too risky; Andrew was not capable of being moved.

  We didn’t know if Andrew was on life support; when I asked the doctor that, he didn’t seem to understand me. I assumed that was the case as I think he said Andrew couldn’t breathe without the mechanical respirator. (I honestly didn’t know about these things at this point, and was in a state of shock anyway.)

  We went to the apartments where Andrew was staying and told them what had happened, asking for the keys to his room. It was surreal walking into his apartment; the first thing I saw was a small round table with his laptop on it and a single white chair, where he had obviously been typing out his diaries for the book. The apartment was quite large and had a small kitchen, separate bedroom and bathroom. Looking in the wardrobe and seeing his clothes, and the shelf where his iPod Nano and other things were, was hard. He had a Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia, which he was so looking forward to seeing more of, along with Burma and Laos; he’d been talking about this to Chris, who had gone to Cambodia in 2004. He was actually planning to cross the border within the next three days, and return to Chiang Mai, as his visa was only for thirty days. It broke my heart to know he would never get there now.

  Nicole arrived on the Tuesday evening, and we were so worried about how she would cope when introduced to the nightmare we had confronted. I’ll never forget her reaction, her shock and disbelief, when I led her to Andrew’s bed: here was her brother, unrecognisable with a swollen, distorted head and half his skull missing. She didn’t believe it was him at first, until she saw the tattoos on his legs, which were sticking out of the sheets. She showed such bravery in the forty-eight hours she was in Chiang Mai, but we insisted she return to Glenn and their two children, who she needed to be with. I thought it might be the last time she would see Andrew alive.

  In our first few days in Chiang Mai I became determined to find out how all this had happened – to put together the pieces of what would either be the last days of Cad’s life or the last days of his life as he knew it.

  With Chris’s brother Ken, who arrived four days after the accident after deciding without notice to head to Thailand to help out, I went to the gym where Andrew had been training. I contacted names listed on his Thai phone and checked his email and Facebook messages, desperately trying to contact someone who was with him that night. I found out he came back to the hotel after a big shop on the Friday morning, the evidence of which of which was in his fridge – chicken, bread, eggs and protein shakes. And he left to go out late that evening. That’s all I could fathom. After reading his emails and Facebook messages, I also learned that the previous Friday was the only time he’d gone out for the night during his month in Chiang Mai.

  I contacted the motor scooter hire company to advise them of the accident and that one of their bikes was obviously banged up. Within an hour I left the hotel for the hospital, and the proprietor of the hire company, without having advised me of his intentions, was in Andrew’s ward asking questions when I arrived; I found that very off-putting. But he ended up being quite helpful and told me he was going to the police station, and that I should follow him. There I was told details of where and how the accident had happened. I was taken to a rear yard and shown Andrew’s bike and the other vehicle he collided with. There was little damage to either.

  I had to return to the police station the next day; an Australian, Laurie Simmons, a volunteer ‘tourist police officer’, was there to assist (he also ran a motel/guesthouse). We went back to the yard, where investigators tried to piece together the impact point of the vehicles. What I gleaned is that Andrew was riding his scooter in the direction of his hotel when the driver of a motorbike with a sidecar full of vegetables, on his way to the markets just after 4 am, pulled across in front of Andrew to enter a street that was clearly marked ‘no entry’. It was purely the other driver’s fault. However, it appeared Andrew had not been wearing a helmet; in fact, the helmet was still clipped onto the bike under his knees.

  I visited the crash site many times, which was on one of the main roads that traverse the boundary of the old city of Chiang Mai in a square shape. There were two lanes going one way, two lanes the other way, and they were separated by a canal and, in some parts, the remains of the wall that had surrounded the old city. There were no right-hand turns allowed; drivers could only do U-turns at the designated breaks in the canal and merge into traffic going in the other direction. It was like many Thai road rules – as they were rarely policed, motorists were used to ignoring them. At this particular U-turn point, to enter the road a vehicle had to go slightly diagonally and into the path of the oncoming traffic to get into the street the other vehicle was entering.

  Of all the breaks in the roads that formed the square-shaped boundary of the inner city, this was the most dangerous, because drivers were obscured from the entering traffic on the right because the old ruins of the wall ran right up to the U-turn lanes. Also, the east-facing lanes in which Andrew was travelling took a slight left bend from behind the wall, making vision more difficult. If you wanted to pick a likely black spot for such a collision in Chiang Mai, this was it.

  On the Thursday after the accident, hours before Nicole was to return to Brisbane, Laurie arrived at our hotel and asked to see me. Gathered outside were the offending driver, his wife, his daughter and a family friend. Laurie said he had tried to contact me (but was getting the busy signal) to ask if we were prepared to see them, as the family insisted they
come to apologise and beg our forgiveness, which is extremely contrary to Thai culture, where people tend to walk away and not confront such issues or experiences. We agreed to meet them.

  Laurie opened by saying the father wanted to relay that he was entirely responsible for the accident, that he could not forgive himself and that he was not rich but would do anything he could to help. They said they had been to visit Andrew twice in hospital. I vaguely remembered seeing the man and his wife leaving the ward as I entered one day, but was unaware they had been there to see our son.

  It was little comfort that the wife confessed her husband’s eyesight was poor and that he shouldn’t have been driving. They obviously persevered with him steering the old bike and sidecar to the markets in the dark every morning in order to survive. She told us her husband would drive no more and they would rely on family or friends to get them there.

  Chris, Nicole and I did not know how to feel, beyond the shock that the family came to visit us without notice. But, strangely, I did not feel any anger. It was surreal to look directly at the man who had caused such pain although he could not make eye contact because of the shame and regret he felt, and most of the time had his head buried in his hands. Yet, in the haze of confusion and emotion, I had some appreciation that he had the courage to come to us to pass on his regret.

  As time went by in Thailand and the nightmare of waiting, waiting, waiting and feeling trapped and helpless continued, my thoughts on that elderly man swung erratically. My initial feeling was of resignation and acceptance that the accident was just inherent in the ignorance of road safety that plagues the country, but it swung to anger then just a nothingness to be honest.