Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  I followed Ruda through glorious scenery, and up incredible numbers of steps—800, I discovered later, to one site—and I started to flag. Calf muscles screaming, right knee creaking in a place it never had before, heart pumping like mad. At one resting point, a black Bedu tent with carpets on the floor and long benches, a Russian woman with a bright red face asked in broken English how old I was. I told her and she laughed. She was the same age and looked as close to death as I must have. ‘We are both very crazy women,’ she said and gave me a sweaty hug.

  Ruda told me about bits of her life as we went. Born on the mountains, she’d grown up in a tent near the caves; no school, and marriage not permitted before her two older sisters were wed. The whole family had now been moved into modern housing in Little Petra, but worked in the mountains every day. Her brothers drove donkeys and horses, and she told me I should be riding one. But I hated the way the animals were beaten as they lumbered up the steps, carrying fat, joking tourists shouting and photographing each other.

  When she offered to carry my rucksack, I let her, with great relief, as every kilo counted by now—and watched as my passport, a few hundred dinars, plus my credit cards, camera, phone and phone numbers, my identity disappeared up the mountain as she raced ahead. No matter. My fatalism was driving me. I’d pause for a rest in the shade, stagger on, climbing ever higher, then turn a bend and there Ruda would be, waiting for me on a boulder off the path, chatting or texting on her phone.

  By about midday, we made it to the Monastery, a huge dark cavern with a pillared exterior, and a formidable lip of jutting rock about 2 metres up preventing entry. But then Ruda called out, and a young man she clearly knew came from the back of the chamber and hauled me up too, and then he and the woman he was with sat in the cool, playing the oud and singing sad Arab songs that reverberated around the stone walls and out across the plains. They were playing for no one’s benefit but mine, and Ruda joined them, swaying and laughing. I could see panting tourists on the track below us reach the Monastery, and pause and listen. I was up there above their heads, as if I were inside the oud itself.

  How to get down, with a drop onto rocks below, was my next concern. But when we’d had more tea, Ruda jumped down and made her back into a step for me, and on we went, to another cousin, and another Bedu tent, where I sat on carpets and cushions, was given bottled water and Turkish coffee, and welcomed many times by the family. My decrepit Russian friend joined me for a while, then decided to stay for a nap on one of the benches.

  Ruda insisted we went on—this time, even higher, up and around the edges of cliffs to the Place of Sacrifice at the very top. ‘Where the Prophets said to jump,’ said Ruda, and perched on the edge with her feet swinging. The Nabateans had sacrificed people from this rock into the luminous abyss, and I stood imagining it, desiring it for a few long moments. The beating drums, the pulsing heart, the pause, the whoosh of air and light. Then two gasping Japanese men, festooned in cameras, arrived.

  The climb back down took an hour and a half; worse, if anything, than going up. By now it was mid-afternoon, and the stall holders, their faces wrapped in black scarves, were lying asleep beside their wares. The donkeys and mules kept on coming up and down the path, as Ruda, with her stream of greetings and phone calls, leaped ahead of me.

  I paid her at the bottom, with lots of notes, which she grabbed without arguing. She then shook my hand, gave me my pack, and pointed to a café still open at the foot of the mountain, where I could buy water, and bread rolls with falafel. Then, for another hour and a half, I trudged back past the Treasury, through the deep shade of the Siq to the start of the track.

  Ruda, I discovered later, had given me a tour that is usually spread across two days. The next morning, I stayed by the pool, nursing my aching muscles and blisters, and reading van Geldermalsen’s book about her life in Petra. An intrepid backpacking Dutch–New Zealander, she had met her Bedouin husband, Mohammad Abdullah, in 1978. She lived with him in one of Petra’s many caves, raising three children, and accepted by the tribe she was among for twenty years. She learned their rituals and dialect, and worked as a nurse in the community clinic, where royal visitors and celebrities were brought to meet her, and marvel at the life she led in the midst of the spectacular Nabatean ruins and caves.

  For me, over the next few years, there would be many of these excursions—to Madaba, to the Byzantine mosaics; to the streets and Amphitheatre of Jerash; to the Dead Sea, to Palmyra; to Damascus and Aleppo. All in good time, as the work on the book stopped and started, and it changed into a much better project. Sometimes I travelled with my Australian friend, the PA; sometimes alone, with drivers who sped along the highways, answering my stilted questions about desert castles and ruins, and the anonymous new buildings set well back from the road. They looked to me like the jails built for rendition, which Al Jazeera had been reporting Jordan had signed up for, but were always described firmly as business universities. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life and there was some small triumph in it.

  3

  Invisible under a foreign sky

  A MONTH LATER, BACK home to pack up the house for the young family who were renting it, I needed to renew some prescriptions, and visited Gillian, my Scottish doctor. I hesitated before mentioning blood on my pillow that morning in Amman, as I’d heard she was having her own bad time. Gillian reacted immediately.

  X-rays and mammograms, and I was rushed into surgery with all the urgency of private medicine. This would be another episode in a year of facing the music. Friends visited with jokes and tales of survival rates. At night, opiates kicking in, I was mesmerised by European soccer matches and an interview with Swiss football administrator Sepp Blatter. Blatter declared his ambition to arrange an international match for the Palestinian territories. The best players are in Gaza, he said, where they must traverse a no man’s land via an illegal tunnel into Egypt in order to train. Sometimes they don’t make it.

  Then, late one afternoon, I was underground in the basement of the Mercy Hospital, in the nuclear medicine department, lined up with others against the wall in the passage. Human beings, but only just, in our gaping white gowns, our bare legs. No one spoke and the staff passed by in their protective clothes. It was very cold.

  I was there for a lymphoscintigraphy, which I was told would allow the visualisation of the exact location of the sentinel node in my right armpit—or I think that was it. My notes and memories are blurred with terror and humiliation. But I know there was a radiologist called Joy, and an injecting doctor called Jeff. Joy showed me the machine, a long cream tunnel with a high table, a flat pillow and steps up to it. She explained the need for absolute stillness, but agreed that I could listen to music through headphones, and then told me that there would be a bit of a wait out in the passage until the injecting doctor arrived.

  I was without my medical history. A kind volunteer had rushed me, in a wheelchair draped in a cotton blanket, down from the ward when the call came that they had a spot for me—my file left on the bed.

  So, the injector, Dr Jeff, got off to a bad start by asking me what I’d had done. I had to tell him myself or I couldn’t be fitted in that day. I heard a harsh voice, mine, say, I’ve had a nipple off and two carcinomas out of my milk duct and a virulent small cancer removed from the breast tissue at the same time. Five days ago. Next thing—I am to have lymph node surgery. That is why I am here.

  There was an appalled silence, or so I imagined. Joy was brisk. Jeff, I didn’t look at. This was the first time since my vigilant GP fast-tracked me into hospital that I had spoken to a medical man, or to any kind of man who wasn’t on the phone; or had bared my scar. My surgeon was a clever young Englishwoman, whose parade of glorious suits and shoes amazed my friends. She and the nurses had praised her work as beautiful. But it was not. My breast was mutilated, hideous, covered in bruises and stitches.

  I apologised to Dr Jeff.

  Miss B, the surgeon, had seen me daily since the first opera
tion, and drawn me little pictures with black dots and arrows on them that I pretended to understand. She was diligent. She wanted me to know. When she told me more surgery was needed, but that first would come a long stint in the nuclear medicine department in the basement, she patted my shoulder, and suggested I take a music player and earplugs. I wouldn’t be able to move for the ninety minutes or more the procedure would take.

  A child’s mobile dangled over the nuclear medicine machine, and there was a window out to the courtyard of the old hospital, where I could see new birch trees, and the shapes of other people staring out of other windows. Now it was Joy who patted my shaking arm and offered me a second blanket. I couldn’t stop shivering.

  I conjured up my mother’s face for comfort and started making connections I hadn’t consciously made before. This was the hospital where I was born during World War II. I could see my mother lying flat and heavily anaesthetised, and me, red and wrinkled, being held aloft then handed to the sister in charge. I would be washed, and whisked off to a nursery behind glass. My mother would wake twenty-four hours later, to be told she had a healthy baby girl.

  Now it was I who had to climb up, and lie flat and still, and hold my right arm rigid in positions that would be adjusted every fifteen minutes.

  I gripped the iPod as the dark, rich voice of Maria Callas poured into my head, and my ears were full of tears I couldn’t reach. Then the Melos started playing Schubert’s last string quartets. Then Renata Tebaldi and Callas again. My iPod was a mishmash of music downloaded for travelling six months before, and I feared Billie Holiday would be next and unhinge me.

  The next day, friends who had experienced similar horrors, including radiotherapy, rang with advice and good cheer. Still here after ten, five, three years. I want thirty. I want to see what happens next. There are books being written I want to read. Composers composing I want to hear. Children not yet born to my youngest son or to my stepdaughter. There’s a granddaughter I want to see grow up. There’s a husband who is now emptying out our old house by the sea, so he can rent it and head for the bush to write about his American journeys.

  He called in at the hospital late that first night, with cheese and wine and not a lot to say, grimly going through the motions. It was hard for him. This must have felt like the final straw.

  Already, the PA has advised me not to return to my exotic-sounding new job in Jordan until I am strong—and to be sure not to mention cancer. There is a lot of cancer in a country next to a war zone, and a great deal of untreated breast cancer in the old Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. The poor use Panadol when they can get it. The rich get their cancers dealt with in London, or in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The word cancer is tabu and carries much shame. I understood. I too was ashamed. I had somehow brought all this upon myself in the middle of the night.

  After that was another round of emails to and from the PA, who told me firmly The Book could easily wait a few more months while I had the radiotherapy sessions. And also that Their Royal Highnesses would be in London and travelling for some of the summer—so it seemed that my timing was most fortunate. And better still, if I were to come back in September, it would be Ramadan, when there would be more time for interviews with Sidi Hassan.

  Like a revelation, it occurred to me in the middle of the night in hospital that I didn’t have to return to Australia until the project in Jordan was finished. The deal included being flown back to where I came from. Which need not be Australia. It could be Italy, where I’d been before. My friend Carmen Callil rang from London, and offered to put the word out to friends who might have places in Italy to rent long term, outside the tourist season. This was where I thought I wanted to learn to live alone, with a spare room so friends could visit me; a place to which I could sometimes bring family over to stay. I had never in my life really lived alone, with no partner or husband or child to consider—a thought that shocks me.

  During this time of waiting, radiotherapy and unreality, I sometimes had friends to dinner. I drank a good deal of wine but drunkenness eluded me. I watched many films late at night, and messaged back and forth with Carmen, whose North Kensington attic I’d soon be in again. Alone, I’d set the table and make an omelette, and find myself standing at the stove, eating a few mouthfuls from the pan. It was as if I did not know how to function, how to swallow, once a shared domestic life was no longer required. The cycle of preparing food and eating it was still coupled to a beloved husband, and to sociability, and to our children: my three, his one. His life was no longer coupled to me. This simple fact reduced me to ashes; my bones began to show.

  When we were first lovers, I once visited unannounced and found him, an excellent cook, eating an osso bucco he had made for himself—a dish that takes careful preparation and long, slow cooking—with a gremolata of lemon zest, parsley and garlic. Something I would make only if it were to be shared. At the time, we joked about the ruthless single-mindedness of writers. He was working on his book about the massacres of the Kurnai people having been concealed and denied by Scots pastoralists and dairy farmers down through the generations. Together, we visited cemeteries throughout Gippsland and stayed in ugly motels, and his research became part of me.

  Portents from more than twenty-four years rained down on me. But that is surely the nature of them—to be happening on the edge of happiness. There were also warnings from friends and family. Had I heeded them, I would have missed a good deal.

  The night before I flew out of Melbourne to London, taxi booked for a dawn start, bags and laptop piled by the front door, I was taken out to a crowded local bar by a few friends who’d been keeping an eye on me. We sat at the back on stools and milk crates and ordered martinis, and I was quizzed about what I might be heading back into. I didn’t know myself, apart from a month in London in Carmen’s attic; then to Amman, to rework my draft chapters for the family’s approval; then to Italy, with Helen Wire, to check out houses and apartments to rent.

  Communication with Jordan since I’d returned home had been patchy. I had undertaken to sound out publishers and agents I knew in London, to seek advice from them about possible publishers in Beirut, the centre of Arabic publishing. This would mean, of course, much talking about the project as it unfolded and, when the manuscript was almost completed, sending samples and outlines.

  Someone in the little Fitzroy bar made a bad joke about exchanging war zones—but that wasn’t what I was doing. I had done what I was good at: had an idea in the middle of the night, swerved sidewards, distracted by a new plan; exhilarated, even. I was yet to find a way to think clearly about the failure of my marriage. Reassurances had been exchanged about salvaging something fine from the wreckage. The distance would surely help. A modest place to write in Italy would also. And a different life would be waiting for me at the end of the project, when I planned to return.

  That I should live in the Northern Hemisphere for a few years suited Carmen very well, she said. I could stay in her pretty attic in London, as an occasional lodger, setting up a desk, checking out publishers and getting to the British Library without changing tubes, and forward her mail and water her garden when she was in France for the summer.

  I needed somewhere for family and friends to visit in the Australian school holidays, somewhere with easy access to airports, where I could write without interruption, and where I could leave heavy coats and boots. The remainder of the year I would be in Amman, interviewing, researching and redrafting. Amman to Arezzo, a region I was familiar with, was a mere twelve hours door to door; Amman to Melbourne, a gruelling thirty-eight, if the connections worked.

  Carmen was not a fan of Islam or of the Hashemites. Born and educated in Australia by nuns, she had left when she was in her early twenties. She returned often, following our politics and test cricket with a passion. A fierce republican and libertarian, she loathed the English class system, preferred France, and hated the hijab—fully approving the recent French burka ban, which we argued furiously about.<
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  Carmen had changed the face of British publishing, with the Virago list and then heading Chatto, and was now writing her own books. She made it clear she thought I should be doing the same. When Carmen discovered that her friend Dame Helena Kennedy thought highly of Prince Hassan, she modified her criticism somewhat, and Kennedy’s brilliant book, Just Law: The Changing Face of Justice—and Why It Matters to Us All appeared in the pile by my bed one day. Kennedy’s analysis of how the boundaries between the state and the individual had eroded civil liberties was often quoted by Prince Hassan. Unsurprising now, but rather unexpected then, how the two worlds kept overlapping.

  The evening I arrived from Melbourne to take up residence in Carmen’s attic, its walls lined with green-covered Virago paperbacks, I was given written instructions on how to work the house. She would be in France for a month. I would be alone, recuperating, although her gardener, another Hilary, would come occasionally, as would her ‘help’.

  Delfina was definitely not a servant; nor her Cleaner, as we would say at home, giving it a capital letter, and sometimes adding a flattering adjective, splendid, hard-working, kind. Delfina went to Carmen’s often and had done so for years, with a handy husband who would climb ladders and check the spouting. Delfina loved Carmen and Carmen’s border terriers; and Carmen, I felt sure, loved Delfina, who was to keep coming during my month there if I needed her.

  Carmen’s list had details about the heating, the windows, the wi-fi, the supplies of green food bags with their airtight seals, and of wine and the pasta, and the television on which I would be watching the selection of films and documentaries she had recorded for me. The next day, I was given directions to two classes of drycleaner, to a posh delicatessen and a Moroccan general store, a good bookshop and a chemist, as well as a London A–Z, and separate instructions for the washing machine and dryer. Everything was geared to minimising interruptions while my friend checked her footnotes in the original French for her forthcoming book, Bad Faith, and to ensuring I could look after the house, her car and myself when she left.