Unconditional Love

by Jocelyn Moorhouse

  Sitting by Mum’s side. My iPad on the pillow next to her playing ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’, one of her favourite songs. Mum once told me that she grew up hearing her grandfather Denis singing this song to her grandmother, because they had both fallen in love at sixteen. Mum’s breathing is getting slower. When she does breathe, it’s a heavy snore. Less heavy in the last hour.

  Now the iPad is playing Schuman’s Kinderszenen: ‘Child Falling Asleep’. Mum always loved hearing me practise it. The piano was against the lounge-room wall, their bedroom on the other side. They used to lie there listening when I practised at night. They never minded. Said they loved it.

  That morning, one of Mum’s nurses asked me if I would like Kerry, a local minister, to visit Mum. What should I say? Dad was an atheist, so he might insult the minister. Greg would think it was pointless. Kathy might not like it. I might find comfort in it, and so might Mum, if she was vaguely aware of the visit. What harm could it do?

  ‘Sure,’ I said. Then I forgot about it. I didn’t warn anyone. I had no idea the minister was going to turn up in full ceremonial regalia and perform the last rites.

  Dad was napping in his single bed when Kerry arrived in her robes, holding a Bible. Someone must have told her Mum was deaf in one ear, which would explain why she shouted at her. ‘Hello, Denice! I hear you are very, very sick!’ Visitors in the corridor, startled by the booming voice, peered in to see what was happening.

  Greg glared at me, assuming correctly that this was all my fault. I blurted out an explanation. Greg looked as if he wanted to kill me. Now Kerry turned her attention to Dad, who had been woken up by the noise.

  ‘Jack!’ shouted Kerry. ‘Would you like it if we all said a prayer for Denice?’

  To my great surprise, Dad smiled at her and said, ‘Yes, I would.’

  Next thing we knew, Dad, Greg and I were standing around Mum’s bed, Kerry at the foot of the bed. She led us all in a group recital of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. Greg kept giving me evil glances, but Dad seemed to be enjoying himself. Mum was not. She opened her eyes and stared furiously at Kerry. She tried to speak, but only an angry, bellowing noise emerged, the loudest sound I had heard from her in months. We all fell silent. Clearly Mum was trying to tell Kerry to piss off. But Kerry started up again, and we finished ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. Then she made a sign of the cross and anointed Mum with some holy oil while reciting ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’.

  As the ceremony finished, she whispered to us, ‘I think Denice was trying to join in the prayer. That’s why she made that sound.’ I wish I could believe that. I consoled myself with the thought that at least Mum now knew for sure that she was going to die soon. None of us had been able to say it to her.

  On the afternoon of 4 October, one of Mum’s closest friends, Wendy Richards, came to see her. She told Mum what a wonderful woman she was. I could see how sad Wendy was. I walked her out to her car. Before she opened the door she looked at me. ‘Are you going to stay the night tonight?’

  ‘I wasn’t…’

  ‘They can put a little bed in the room for you, between your Mum and Dad, so you can sleep when you’re tired, but you’ll still be by her side.’

  I examined Wendy’s face for clues. ‘Are you saying you think I should stay tonight?’

  ‘I would never tell you what you should or shouldn’t do,’ said Wendy. She got in her car and drove off.

  I was confused. Should I stay? Did Wendy know something I didn’t know? Yes, she did. Me? I had never seen anyone die. I didn’t have a clue.

  Around 7 p.m., I drove back to the cottage with the cows. Greg followed in his car. I lay on the couch eating heated-up pizza, and watching TV. I couldn’t get Wendy’s question (about staying with Mum) out of my mind. At 9 p.m. I called the nursing home to see how Mum was doing. They said she was still the same. I asked if they could set up a stretcher-bed for me. I felt like a powerful magnet was drawing me to my mother’s side.

  Greg had to be at work first thing in the morning and said he would see me the following evening. I drove fast along the dark and empty dirt roads. Now I knew in my heart that Mum was going to die that night. I was scared, and sang ‘Amazing Grace’ to myself all the way to the nursing home, to keep myself calm. It was like those nights, years earlier, when I had sung to myself, with Lily in my arms, afraid of what I had to face, but knowing I had to face it.

  I sat next to Mum all night. Around 4 a.m., I felt a little tug at the back of my shirt. It was Dad, awake in his bed, looking afraid.

  ‘You okay, Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said softly.

  ‘You feel sick?’ The room was dark. Lying there in his pyjamas, he looked like a little boy.

  ‘I feel very weak,’ he said. ‘Something is very wrong. I have never felt this weak.’

  I began to wonder if he could feel Mum slipping away, leaving him. I pressed the buzzer for the nurse. She came in and asked Dad if he would like to get up and have some cocoa by the fire in the common room. He said yes, and they left.

  Not long after that, Mum started coughing blood. I raised the bed so she could sit up. She looked at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum. I’m here. Joss is here,’ I said.

  I cleaned her up and called the nurses in again. They put a clean nightie on her. I went outside for a minute to sob quietly in the darkened corridor. Then I went back into the room and held Mum’s hand. It was still the same warm hand I had known all my life. Just before dawn, I sensed she had stopped breathing. I listened up close. I put my hand on her chest, trying to feel for a heartbeat. I wet my little finger and held it under her nose, the way I used to do with my babies. There was no breath on my finger. I tried to feel for a pulse. A nurse came in and listened with her stethoscope. No words between us. Just a look and a little nod. I began to cry.

  When they brought Dad back, they sat him on the other side of Mum. He saw my tears and started crying too. We held hands across Mum. It was 5 October, Dad’s eighty-eighth birthday. After a while, I called Kathy and Greg. Greg was on his way to work in Melbourne. He turned the car around and headed back. Kathy was already on her way.

  I sat on a plastic chair by the bathroom while the nurses cleaned and dressed Mum’s body. They talked to her as if she was still alive, as if they loved her. They took off her dirty nightie, and suddenly there she was in all her frail nakedness. I was shocked to see her naked for the first time since my childhood, when she’d come home from school and take off her bra and girdle while we girls sat on her bed and chatted away. But now her body was unrecognisable.

  The funeral people arrived and asked Kathy, Greg and me if we wanted to dress Mum in something special for her burial. Kathy went to the wardrobe and pulled out some clothes, including a beautiful jacket she had recently sewn for Mum. The fabric had a pattern of little birds. The nurses dressed her, then the funeral people gently put her in a red vinyl body bag. Before they zipped it closed, I placed a blue toy owl in with her. Maddy had given it to her on her last visit. It was silly, really. I just didn’t want her to be all alone in that bag.

  PJ arrived from Sydney that night, after arranging for emergency childcare. Spike would fly down for the funeral a few days later. PJ held me in his arms for hours as I told him every detail of Mum’s death. I needed to talk it all through.

  Dad’s dementia meant he was slipping in and out of reality. He knew he was grieving and sad, but couldn’t always remember why. Was it his mother who had died? We all met with the local funeral director. When Kathy brought up the subject of cremation, Dad refused.

  ‘She doesn’t get a say anymore. I’m not going to have the love of my life burned to a crisp.’ After a moment of stunned silence, Kathy said, ‘Okay, Dad,’ and we all agreed.

  At the funeral, we all read out our speeches. None of us knew what Dad was going to do. We had rented him a suit from a local menswear shop. Kathy had chosen a John Donne poem that he and Mum loved, and he agreed to read it. At the
lectern, in his suit, he suddenly looked like our powerful dad of old. As if he knew he looked the part, he folded up the poem he had begun to recite, and gave an off-the-cuff speech about Mum. It was articulate, funny, heartbreaking. ‘The wrong one is being buried today,’ he said. For a short while, Dad had overcome his dementia to give his wife a proper eulogy.

  The cemetery was surrounded by a fire-blackened forest. The graves were sprinkled with yellow dandelions. It looked like the sort of location I would have chosen for a movie. By the time we got there, the rain had started. In movies, the director often decides to make it rain for a funeral scene, because it adds to the sadness. In reality, it makes a mess of the grave, the people, and the ceremony.

  We had hoped the burial would be beautiful. I had bought some coloured paper and, with the help of Spike’s girlfriend Sage, made lots of origami cranes. For Kathy and me, paper cranes were a reoccurring motif in our lives. When Mum first had her stroke, Kathy had sent pretty squares of paper to all Mum’s friends and asked them to write messages of hope onto them. She then folded them into paper cranes and made a display in Mum’s hospital room. ‘These are messages of love from those who cherish you,’ she told Mum. At the funeral, we handed the paper cranes out to mourners to place in the grave. Each family member had a giant native flower. Speakers had been set up so we could play the Kinks’ choral version of ‘Days’ as the coffin was lowered into the ground. We were all soaking wet and freezing. Sentiment was replaced by the need to get warm. We threw clumps of dirt, soggy paper cranes and flowers on top of Mum’s coffin. I looked down at the casket, trying to absorb this final moment, but Mum was gone.

  Six months later, when I was giving a talk to some film students, one of them asked me what got me interested in becoming a filmmaker. I remembered the very first Super 8 film I had worked on. Mum’s high-school literature class was studying Karl Bruckner’s book The Day of the Bomb. Mum was directing a movie of it for her students, and I was her child assistant. A Japanese girl, Sadako, who had survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima, was told that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true. Her wish was to live. Sadako folded hundreds of paper cranes, and her friends helped her reach a thousand, but she died of leukemia, aged twelve. In Mum’s Super 8 film, the children were floating the paper cranes down a river.

  As I answered the film student’s question, it dawned on me why I was compelled to make so many paper cranes for Mum’s funeral. Paper cranes, hope, death, farewell.

  27

  The postmortem readjustment is one that many of us have had to make when our parents die. The parental door against which we have spent a lifetime pushing finally gives way, and we lurch forward, unprepared and disbelieving, into the rest of our lives.

  SALLY MANN

  In 2014 something miraculous happened. I found myself back in the director’s chair on the set of my film The Dressmaker, starring Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth and Hugo Weaving. It was the first movie I had directed since Lily’s diagnosis eighteen years earlier. I asked Judy Davis to play the role of Tilly’s mad old mother, Molly. Judy had always been my first choice to play Molly and I was terrified she would say no, but she loved Molly and was happy to work on the film.

  The investors insisted we find an Australian star to play the role of Teddy. Fortunately, Liam Hemsworth was looking to do an Australian film. He’s a lovely lad, around the same age as Spike, so I did feel a bit motherly towards him. He was happy to hear that we would be shooting in Victoria, where his parents lived. And I was finally working with Hugo Weaving again, almost twenty-five years after Proof.

  As the pre-production period grew closer, I had frequent meetings with the production designer, Roger Ford, and the cinematographer, Don McAlpine. The walls of our lounge room in Sydney were, by now, covered in images that PJ and I had glued onto display boards for inspiration. After a while, we started finding new pictures were being added to our display. A photo of a Jacques Fath dress would have a roaring lion glued to it. A cartoon monster would be stuck on a storyboard. We realised Jack was trying to share in our creative activity! Making collages would become a great joy to him.

  Roger Ford brought over a scale model of our imaginary township of Dungatar. There were cardboard buildings, plaster streets, tiny trees and even a silo. After lunch, we came back into the lounge room to find the main street of Dungatar had been populated by Jack’s African animal toys. Zebras, lions and hyenas were marching all the way from Molly’s hill down to the pub.

  Soon it was time for me to move down to Melbourne for pre-production, a twelve-week period of intensive planning before the first day of shooting. Locations have to be found, sets designed and built, props stockpiled, casting finalised, last-minute script changes made, and costumes created.

  We brought Lily and Jack to live with Maddy and me in Melbourne, but within a day they had both gone ballistic. Tantrums, weeping, diarrhoea attacks and no sleep. I decided they would be happier at home, and that I would fly back to Sydney on weekends. PJ took them home again and stayed with them. Spike stayed to help me on the film.

  It took us ages to find the perfect location. Spider McCart, a veteran location scout, offered to help. He remembered a patch of landscape near Little River, fifty kilometres south-west of Melbourne. Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly had been shot there, as well as the very first Mad Max film and some scenes from the Spike Jonze film Where the Wild Things Are. We drove down to look. As we came over the crest of a hill, I saw a magical landscape full of oversized boulders, dead trees and miles of grassy plains. There was Dungatar the way I imagined it. It was like something out of one of Sergio Leone’s westerns. Except there was no town. Roger announced we were going to have to build one.

  ‘Can we do that?’ I asked Roger.

  ‘We have to,’ he said in his calm, all-knowing-wizard way.

  ‘Now we’re talking,’ said Don. ‘Now we can make it look like a real movie.’

  The landscape is like a character in the film. Not only does it convey the type of town Dungatar is, but also the type of movie The Dressmaker is. I wanted The Dressmaker to seem like an event. A big movie. This was to be my first movie shot in widescreen format. Proof, How to Make an American Quilt and A Thousand Acres were all shot in a squarish, less extroverted ratio. So we needed the kind of heightened, theatrical look that Sergio Leone’s films often have. I wanted to tell the audience, as soon as the opening credits began to roll, that they were in for an unusual experience: ‘This is a weird tale, and you are entering a new world. It’s going to have suspense, violence, mystery. Leave your expectations behind.’

  Taking inspiration from the opening credits in the John Sturges film Bad Day at Black Rock, and Kubrick’s opening sequence in The Shining, the first few minutes of The Dressmaker are atmospheric and ominous, and then we play a little joke on the audience. Hugo Weaving breaks the tension by gasping at the outfit Kate Winslet is wearing. This always makes the audience laugh. The whole sequence was carefully storyboarded. As usual, PJ helped me with the storyboards. He was assisted by a really talented young man, Danny Youd, who drew nearly all the storyboards on the film.

  We also needed to trick the audience into thinking that the Little River location was actually near the dusty wheatfields of Horsham, where we also shot many scenes. The opening sequence shows endless wheatfields, suggesting that Dungatar and its surrounds are a strange, isolated place, full of foreboding. As the sun sets, the landscape grows creepier. (These shots were filmed in Horsham by my talented assistant, Martha Goddard, and a drone crew.) The camera follows an old bus into town. (This section was shot in Little River.) Again, no people to be seen until Kate Winslet, looking stunning in her 1950s glamour, steps off the bus and says, ‘I’m back, you bastards.’

  The costumes in The Dressmaker were an integral part of the storytelling. I have never been so obsessed with the wardrobe on a movie as I was with this one. I researched different haute couture designers from the 1950s. Rupert Everett pu
t me in touch with a friend, the designer Sophie Theallet, who became my fashion research advisor. I hired two costume designers, Marion Boyce and Margot Wilson, and stayed very involved with what each character, especially Tilly, was going to wear. I am sure I drove Marion and Margot mad, but an actor’s costume is the outer skin of the character they are creating. In the film, Gertrude, the ugly duckling who becomes a (bitchy) swan, is played by Sarah Snook, who is a brilliant chameleon—she can look as beautiful or as plain as the moment requires. Her costumes had to take her from the plain-Jane shop girl, who wears what look like potato sacks, all the way to a glittering glamourpuss.

  The day before the shoot, the crew and many of the cast were assembled at Docklands Studios in Melbourne. Shane Thomas, head of make-up and hair, approached me on the set of Molly’s house, where the art department crew were still nail-gunning fake wisteria to the walls. He took me by the hands. ‘Joss, I want you to see something,’ he said.

  We went into the make-up room, where Ivana Primorac, Kate’s amazing hair and make-up person, was grinning ear to ear. Kate and Judy were sitting in the make-up chairs, their backs to me.

  ‘Don’t look!’ said Shane. He made me close my eyes and stood me in front of Kate and Judy. ‘Open your eyes!’

  Kate and Judy turned around in their swivel chairs at exactly the same time. Tears filled my eyes.

  It was an extraordinary moment: Kate Winslet and Judy Davis, my absolute dream choices, were in my movie. We were actually going to make it. And I was looking at Tilly and Molly.

  Kate’s wig was honey-blonde in the classic 1950s style. She was wearing matt-red lipstick, and exquisite eye make-up. Judy, bless her, was wearing no make-up at all, apart from a little dirt on her face. She was unbelievably beautiful, and looked uncannily like my grandma, Mid. I wanted to give them both a hug, but I would have mussed up their wigs.

  I went back to the sound stage, where Don McAlpine was doing a pre-light on Molly’s house. He asked me what the first shot was going to be next morning. I told him it would be a dolly shot, where the camera moves through Molly’s door and into the hallway. No actors, just Tilly’s point of view. So Don and his lads put the camera on the dolly and practised the move a few times. They put up a video monitor and asked me to look. We agreed about how the shot should work. Then Don smiled at my first assistant director, Phil Jones.