by Gail Jones
Will hacked and shook. He gritted his teeth. He tried not to huddle in pain in her presence, but she saw it anyway, the spurt of agony that made him pale, the shine of sudden sweat when he could hardly bear it, his valiant waving her away when he found his own condition a humiliation. In spite of her resolve, he was separate and doomed. He took his medication and insisted sternly that all was okay, even as his head hung and his eyes rolled, and she could see the shrivel of his spirit. He wanted no more chemo or radiotherapy. There was a pleural catheter in his chest wall to allow the draining of fluid into a bottle. There was another in his abdomen. He slept half-upright, and drugged.
The day nurse, Liza, from South Africa, was particularly kind.
‘Let him visit America,’ she’d say. ‘No harm, at all. No harm.’
They liked each other, Liza and Will; and Frances knew then she’d been a snob, imagining that his end might come with a comfortable fading of the public world. She’d hoped that silence and finality would interlace, that what had befallen them might become tranquil and well-managed.
So Frances endured with him the chat shows, the reality shows, the stream of shiny commodities; she watched him struggle to follow the confected romance of soaps. By five the game shows started, and then the cooking contests. Will drifted in and out of medicated sleep but liked the persistence of images and the blur of sound. He was always awake to watch a quiz, his favourite, in which ordinary people competed against a super brain, a man or woman high on the TV stage as though atop a ziggurat, smarmy and smart-arsed as a comedy god. He groaned at reckless mistakes and liked to see the awarding of prizes, accompanied by the vehemence of high fives and a bank of flashing lights. The sums were not huge, but there was excessive jubilation. To win, to beat the brainy one, to conquer the egghead on the mountain. Then Will would watch the news, as if it was a duty, though by now he was indifferent to the stupidity of history, to global tragedy and generalised distress. There was no comment on politics or alarm at terrorism, nothing disturbed his contracted, dying view. ‘America’ was this, above all, a bright distraction, more or less unreal, and Frances had moments in which she felt grateful to be relieved of the burden of talk and response.
During the news, Frances left to make her own dinner. She prepared a paltry meal, not wanting to display appetite to a man who had none. She became thin too, her body fading to match his. Will struggled to swallow, so she fed him mush with a spoon. This was their slow ceremony, the offering, the sucking, the patient wiping. If he coughed in the process, she was sprayed with food, and he would smile and apologise, when both knew it made no difference.
One night she returned to the front room to see him watching the controlled demolition of a high-rise building. It collapsed almost slowly in a cloud, and with a certain grace.
‘Wow,’ Will said softly.
It was his first expression of surprise for a long time. With the demolition over, he fell asleep. Frances stayed for the weather (rain expected in Sydney, tropical temperatures, the usual), then with relief switched the television off. The building continued collapsing in her mind. She saw it as she closed her eyes, that folding away, the baroque plumage of fine dust, the satisfaction of ruin in a solitary containment. It was nothing sinister, like the twin towers, but a clearing away, a careful destruction. It seemed to include a quality of ennobled sorrow. There were many symbols of devastation: Will’s condition had filled up the world. But this slow dispersal into dust had a reassuring neutrality. Frances found it helped her to sleep, replaying it in serial motion, the televisual fall, the grandiloquent puff.
During this time it was the thinness of his body that brought her to tears. It was the dark blue of his ribcage and the knobble of his wrists. His ankles that looked as if they might snap like brittle sticks. He’d always been a sturdy man, proud of his strength; now he was embarrassed to be so weak, and with so much of him gone. At the beginning, she was able to lift and help. She could wreathe him with her arms—as Liza had shown her, standing behind—and lug him from the wheelchair and onto the bed. She remembered to brake the wheelchair, she remembered where to place her clasped hands. He fell against her and she pushed him sideways to release her own body; then she hoisted him to the bed, pulling his discoloured legs under the covers and away from sight. This was how their adult bodies came together. Her lifting and pulling, him submitting to being lifted and pulled, and then a flop, and exhaustion, as they lay for a while almost in peace, side by side on the bed. She would hear him pant, trying painfully to catch a mouthful of air. Then she would rig up the oxygen and give him the injection. She watched for a while, impassive, and left the standing lamp aglow.
16
In those last few weeks, adhering to a code of honour or shame, Will refused to see his workmates and friends, but allowed his older brother Mark to visit with his son, Luke. They were reserved in the presence of the dying man. Luke was just eleven, a lanky, beautiful boy, and he stood by his uncle’s bedside stilled by respect and fear.
There were times a response, not an action, made father and son look alike. It was their edgy composure that united them; the same posture, the same hands held protectively in front of their own bodies, as if lined at a soccer penalty, or before a casket at a funeral. Frances made tea and bade them sit, just to break this formal picture.
When he was able, when for whole moments he was lucid and aware, Will tried hard to make it easier, speaking through breathlessness about the football, or the past, trying to invoke a world beyond his sickbed. Mark mentioned scores and last-minute goals, some funny incident or other, a recollected prank. Frances saw that Luke was a boy with no interest in football or family history. It pained her to see him try to appear engaged.
But on their third visit Luke brought with him a book on fish: this was a breakthrough for all of them. Uncle Will asked Luke questions and enabled him to show off his knowledge. Luke responded with an almost playful desire to communicate. He leant close to his uncle and turned the pages. ‘And this is my favourite, the clownfish,’ Luke said proudly. ‘This is Amphiprion ocellaris.’
He pointed to an orange-and-white-striped fish with a dopey smile.
Frances thought it might have belonged in a movie cartoon, a predictable choice, but she loved her nephew, at that moment, for the image and the enthusiasm and the blithe novelty of his conversation.
‘They live on host anemones,’ he added. ‘See?’
Luke showed gaudy efflorescence, the frilled marvels of sea life, spotted with darting fishes. He wanted to be a marine biologist when he grew up. He would save the Great Barrier Reef and he would be an expert on clownfish.
The adults gazed upon the child with peculiar gratitude—to announce the future in this way, to speak with faith against all that was dying and lost. The illness had gradually worn each of them down.
Luke slid his finger to the next page. The male clownfish could transform to a female to keep up the breeding, he told them, sounding serious as a judge. Imagine that! He almost twitched with impatience to have such a scandal to impart.
Afterwards, Will said that he wished they’d had a child and it was an extra pain for Frances to carry. She looked down at his stricken body and stroked his arm. It was all she could do not to weep or express regret, when it would have been a further agony for them both. The years of trying and failing, never abandoning hope, as if the right attitude would aid their chances; and now all they shared was this illness and its forms of remorse.
Later, Will was barely awake enough to respond. There were fewer opportunities in which a visit might help or distract him. Each time Mark rang, Frances said, ‘No, not today.’ She may have been guarding herself. She may have been in simple denial.
Liza helped daily with the turning and the cleaning. Will was so much heavier when unconscious. She wore plastic gloves, as if at a kitchen chore, and took her time, worked slowly, and was sensitively efficient. In the movements of her hands there was an irreproachable pact of care.
&
nbsp; Frances remembered that it was a Monday morning. She and Liza were together, working in silence, washing Will’s limbs. Liza’s dark arms scooped his thin legs and wrapped them, as one would a bathed child, in a soft green towel. Both patted and rubbed at the bony shape beneath. Without looking at her directly, Liza said, ‘Maybe tell the brother he should come soon. And say his goodbye.’
It was a wisdom and a gift to have someone say it aloud.
Frances had not been able to move her planning to this point, or to imagine a cessation of this tedious, loving concern. But it helped, to hear it. To have Liza enjoin others. To have Liza instruct. Frances too would have to choose a time to say goodbye.
Mark arrived without Luke and had already been crying. His face was slack, oddly infantile, and his eyes were red. He admitted he’d sat in the car for half an hour, inert and distraught, before coming inside. He looked like he hadn’t slept, and Frances knew that she too must look a fright: skinny, dirty, with unwashed hair. She’d barely changed her clothes in a week. She was living on tea and biscuits. She was a wreck of a woman.
What could Frances say? The brothers’ father had also died of mesothelioma, and Mark believed, though out of sequence, that he would be next. That Luke would be left alone. And his dear wife, Sal. That he would have this pain too, and this crush of a mortal fist inside his chest, and this deplorable, premature and unworthy dying. It had been only six months since the diagnosis. Neither had had time to come to terms, or to assimilate their feelings. Now Will showed with his body how it would be—stuck with tubes, hopeless, captured by medical gadgets. Mark could do nothing but succumb to love.
Mark sat beside Frances near the bed. He could not look at his brother, or at her, but stared into space, to somewhere remote and vague. Outside, close by, birdsong rang. It was a beautiful day. Calm, concentrated, with the secular blessing of a warm breeze and bright, golden air. It would be a long, slow summer.
‘We played in the tailings,’ Mark said quietly. He covered his face with his hands. ‘Almost every day, we played in the tailings.’
17
Else liked to say that they met at the Saturday dance at the Y, but Fred remembered it differently. He’d seen her at the Y, but was too afraid to approach her, so watched from a distance as she stepped out with other men. She seemed even then, at sixteen, womanly and confident, and though he’d been down the mines and seen manly and difficult things, he almost trembled at the thought of reaching out to touch her. She wore a lemon-yellow dress of stiff rustling material and a floral spray, something red, pinned with tinfoil at her chest. He wondered if her fair hair was naturally curly. Between sets she rushed back to four or five girlfriends standing against the wall. They were in awe of her, as he was, deferring to her vigour, envious of her wild and immediate popularity.
When Fred saw her again, three months later, it was at a dance in the Kalgoorlie Town Hall. Once again, she moved in her own lively aura. Fred resolved to act and called on all his courage.
He would remember all his life taking her hand that first time, and then placing his own with tense care at the small of her back. She tilted her face to him and looked up with approval. He knew that he blushed and felt he might die of nerves. All dithery and awkward, he clasped and turned her, he heard himself count one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, and was pleased at least to be the lead and so much taller. He could not evade her brown-eyed stare or the brush of her dress. He saw her lashes and a tiny discolouration on her cheek. He saw the lights in her eyes. And when he led her from the floor, having only just managed the dance, she squeezed his hand slightly, as if to say ‘yes’.
It was July 1937 and Fred was already filled with underworld images, while Else’s mind was crammed with movies and tunes from the wireless. Else seemed to Fred alarmingly sophisticated. On their first date together, she suggested the Palace Pictures. They saw Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald star in San Francisco. It was only Fred’s second visit to the cinema, and it was another, leisured world, which he thought of as female. He listened to a tinny ‘God Save the King’—for which they all stood stiffly to attention—then watched the newsreel of a grey world in which only exclamatory events existed: slanted soldiers goose-stepping in a diagonal march, spectacular explosions, dubious triumphs. There was the Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War; there was the coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth; there was Donald Bradman lifting his bat after beating the Poms and retaining the Ashes. The world was a mess, he thought, except for the cricket.
The longest story was of the Hindenburg zeppelin. An airship remade as a lustrous bomb. It was this vision of explosion—actual footage—that almost undid him. The filming was rough and jumpy, but there it was, a silver tube, slow and elegant, then a burst of massing flames, a moment of pure astonishment, and a streaming, fiery fall from the sky. A voice cried, ‘Oh, the humanity!’ and the words appeared on a black inter-title, as if in a death notice.
Fred had to take a break, he said, and rushed out to the foyer, leaving Else alone, bathed in the sickly light of the newsreel. He’d found himself in the swoon of someone else’s tragedy. He’d seen the charisma of it—blurted flame and a particular beauty—and then the shape left behind in a twisted frame and charred outline, filmed the following day. It was as if he’d been a true witness, not just a bloke at the pictures.
Fred vomited in the toilet and splashed his face with cold water. In the mirror his face swam. He worried that he would stink of his unmanly response, that Else would sense what had happened and smell his queasy shame. Earlier, he’d almost boasted of his skill with gelignite, the flash of a charge and the boom of his explosions. He’d told her in foolish detail about the setting of the plugs, mentioned his responsibility and importance at the stope. And though this had nothing to do with him, a burning airship in New Jersey had hung on the screen as if in a direct address, showing Fred that his work included this unnerving attraction: to see bursting shapes and stuff falling lit in the air. This was a verification and a spark of truth. This was something he’d never allowed himself to consider.
Fred returned to his seat and said, yes, he’d just felt a little unwell, but was all right now. The main feature had begun and Else seemed not to notice his unease or the way he kept looking at her looking at the screen. There were songs, and more songs, and old-fashioned costumes, bedecked with feathers and fans and topped by extravagant hats. Clark Gable looked evil, Fred thought, and Jeanette MacDonald impossibly pretty. Towards the end of the movie the lovers were caught in the San Francisco earthquake. 1906. Buildings tumbled and people were crushed under pillars and bricks. A horse and cart were smashed. A concert hall collapsed. Fires started and there was frenzied searching among rubble to a screeching soundtrack.
Fred knew this was cinema, phony sensation, nothing like the real-life Hindenburg, sliding downwards in actual flame. He enjoyed the fakery. He was pleased to see Clark Gable, the cad, looking broken and lost. For Else, this was the super-reality of drama, and she’d held his hand tightly to help her stay fixed in her seat.
He saw how captivated she was, how little distance she imagined. How she believed in the insincere hero and the collapsing façades.
Afterwards, Fred knew. There was a flaw inside him, something ugly, that attracted him to the gelignite; and what was good in him, with the same intensity, had brought him to discover Else.
18
It was a rapid courtship, and they had to wait until Else was eighteen before they could marry. Her parents agreed to their betrothal, since Fred was stable, a good earner and, unusually for a miner, teetotal. When he went to the pub after short-shift Saturdays, it was only to drink lemonade. He was unperturbed by the jesting; better a man sober and with steady hands to be in charge of the gelignite. The others let him be. He was respected, a good bloke, reliable in a fix. He’d been the one, they said, who came to his senses to ring the bell underground to say ‘accident’, when the others were still gawking at that boy, young Neddie. H
e’d helped after the disaster with Luca, and walked from the cage covered in blood, but straight up and solid. He’d helped shovel the bodies, they said; he’d lifted old Nick’s severed arm and wrapped it in his shirt. Some men were sick at the sight of it. Puking and crying. These were the things you wouldn’t tell the missus.
Else spoke often of the movies—especially those with jaunty songs and sassy heroines—and could do the voices, to amuse. Her popularity was in part due to her skill at mimicking film stars. Else was good with words and liked reading books. She was a creature apart, mystifying and fun. That first year she introduced him to Marty Friedlander, World Solo Dancing Champion. Friedlander put out a challenge to any other solo dancer to waltz against him from Coolgardie to Kalgoorlie, a distance of 24 miles. There were no takers, so he declared himself ‘World Solo Dancing Champion’ in The Kalgoorlie Miner. Else took Fred to see the champion perform at St Mary’s Hall in Brookman Street. It was a bit of a lark. Friedlander wore a penguin suit with a celluloid dickie and a black bowtie. He did the Aeroplane Waltz, the Lambeth Walk, the Phar Lap Polka, the Stepless Foxtrot, the Motor Car Dance, the Cat Trot, the Kangaroo Hop and the Willie Wagtail Waltz. He was a genius at idiotic and silly movements, all allegedly dance. His legs flung out like a pinwheel and his arms flailed in style. Fred could see the attraction of one so wildly expansive, but otherwise thought the man a fool. When Friedlander parodied Pavlova’s dying swan, the audience was entranced until a pistol shot rang out and he fell flat on his back. A scream rang out, gasps and shrieks. Some in the hall thought he’d really been shot, but it was all part of the show. There was great applause and relief when the dead swan rose and bowed.