Dying Read online

  Probably the lowest point in my mother’s life was the year we spent in Africa. My father took a job flying for East African Airways, and my mother and I followed him. We left Sarah behind at teacher’s college and Eliot in his first year of a cadetship at the ABC. It would be another adventure, Dad told us, and my mother must have believed him. Either that, or she was unable to deny him this last roll of the dice. Dad was getting on by then. Younger pilots were coming through the ranks and work was getting harder to find, especially the old-school style of flying that Dad favoured.

  I didn’t mind. I was in high school by then, and bored witless. Canberra felt like a desert to me, so devoid of life, you wondered some days if half the population had died in the night. I figured anywhere must be better. And Nairobi was better in many ways, at least for me. I went to a better school, I made brighter friends, I stopped hiding my love of learning. But in other ways it was a backward step. My father was unhappy almost from the start. In what was by now a familiar scenario, he started out with high hopes.

  ‘This is the dream job,’ he said, puffing on a celebratory cigar. ‘The planes are the planes I love to fly, the routes are challenging, I get paid to travel. What’s not to like?’

  And then everything started to unravel. I never knew exactly why, although inept management was often mentioned as the chief culprit. It seemed as if the politics of race complicated everything: were the white pilots ever going to train black Africans to fly planes, if that meant putting themselves out of a job?

  ‘It’s mayhem,’ my father said. ‘There are fist fights in the cockpit.’

  His mood deteriorated rapidly. His temper flared. Home became a battleground, not that it was much of a home to begin with—a little, grey stone pile built to resemble a castle gatehouse. I helped Mum lock us in there each night, with our rented furniture and our handful of plates and saucepans, and hoped the thieves would leave us alone, because according to the neighbours they were everywhere.

  To be honest, I feared Dad more than I feared the robbers. He appeared to be spinning out of control. He would go away for a couple of days and come back exhausted, irascible, liable to strike out at the slightest provocation. Sometimes he would be sulking at home for a week at a time, which seemed odd to Mum.

  ‘Are you in any trouble?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing I can’t handle, thank you very much.’

  Mum suggested to him that he quit his job and take us home.

  ‘That’s so typical of you,’ he said. ‘Cut and run.’

  ‘But you’re so unhappy.’

  ‘What you mean is that you’re unhappy.’ He made it sound like a criminal offence.

  At night I would hear him shouting at her, trotting out all the old accusations. He had a list of grievances against her that went back to the day they were married, or so it seemed to me.

  ‘I’m sorry I ever met you,’ he told her. ‘It’s been downhill ever since.’

  ‘Perhaps we should end it then.’

  ‘What do you mean, end it?’

  ‘Divorce,’ said Mum. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  I knew then that things had hit rock bottom. Divorce wasn’t something my mother had ever talked about. This was before it became common, when divorced women still seemed lewd and disreputable. And Mum had yet to read that electrifying call to arms, The Female Eunuch.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my father.

  Eventually my mother could take no more.

  ‘We’re going,’ she told my father. ‘You come later when you’ve sorted things out here.’

  He took us on a farewell trip to the safari park outside Nairobi. We drove around for a few hours spotting giraffes and zebras. A troop of baboons held us up, demanding food, climbing onto the bonnet and staring us down through the windscreen, until they grew bored and loped away, casting contemptuous backward glances. As we returned to the park’s entrance we stopped to walk around the enclosures where they kept injured or sick animals. I’d never seen a rhinoceros at close quarters before. I stood staring at the animal’s enormous bulk, impressed by how harmless it appeared, for a creature so heavily armoured.

  ‘Don’t be fooled,’ said my father. ‘You’re seeing him on a good day.’

  He might have been talking about himself.

  He was on his best behaviour after that, helping Mum to pack and make arrangements, checking that all our flight connections were confirmed. At the airport he turned sentimental.

  ‘So it won’t be the Three Musketeers anymore,’ he said, hugging first Mum and then me. ‘All for one and one for all.’

  ‘You don’t have to stay,’ said Mum.

  ‘I was thinking I might go to England after I finish up here,’ he said. ‘See if I can find something there.’

  ‘Well, you always know where to find me.’

  Dry-eyed, she kissed him on the cheek and picked up her bags to go.

  ‘I’ll write,’ I said, suddenly feeling sorry for him. He had brought so much trouble down on his head for so many years. He looked broken, bowed, worn out. His eyes were full of tears.

  ‘I should bloody well hope so.’

  It was a long flight home. The first stop was Karachi, where we had a lengthy wait, and the second Bangkok, where we arrived in a state beyond exhaustion, to discover that our Qantas connection to Sydney had not been booked and we were not on the flight. I’d never seen Mum in such a state of rage. She demanded to speak to the Qantas supervisor. When he arrived, all teeth and smiles, she launched into a history of Qantas, how her father had been a founding investor, how her uncle Frank had been the company’s first booking agent in Longreach.

  ‘Look him up,’ she said. ‘Frank Cory. Stock and station agent and editor of the Longreach Leader.’

  The Qantas man listened with feigned interest, then took our tickets and passports and scurried away to see what favours he could call in.

  ‘I’m begging you,’ Mum called after his retreating figure. She didn’t care who heard. ‘We have tickets, for Christ’s sake. We paid thousands for them.’

  ‘You’re shouting,’ I told her.

  ‘I don’t care. We have to get home.’

  She was right. We did have to get home. Not getting home was inconceivable.

  An hour later, the supervisor reappeared and gave us the thumbs up. My mother fell at his feet.

  ‘You’re my saviour,’ she said, laughing and crying at the same time.

  On the plane, she recovered enough to waylay a steward and order champagne.

  ‘We’ll be serving complimentary drinks straight after takeoff,’ he told her in his Australian twang.

  My mother gazed at his boyish bronzed mask of a face. ‘Would you just say that again,’ she said.

  He did as she asked.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She turned to me and smiled. ‘We made it,’ she said.

  Mum changed after that. Something had been resolved. There would be no more uprootings, no more abrupt departures. She had reached the end of the line. Now all she wanted to do was settle down. She counted herself lucky to still have her teaching job and her house. She too was getting older, starting to see her options shrinking, beginning to regret how much she’d squandered in her efforts to placate my father for so many years.

  He came home, of course, as she knew he would—jobless, angry, spent—and notched up Africa as another grand adventure gone terribly wrong. He moved into the back room, the smallest room in the house, the one we called the guest room, while my mother stayed in the main bedroom and slept in the double bed alone. Back in Fiji, when I’d first seen what desire looks like, I had never imagined it could so easily mutate into its opposite, which in my parents’ case was a sort of barely contained contempt. I had imagined desire to be unquenchable, but now I realised that it began and ended just like everything else.

  My father’s room was a tomb to desire. I used to go in there to deliver his folded washing and vacuum the floor. I suspect I took on these jo
bs to save my mother from doing them. I didn’t think she would want to see the unmade bed, the dusty bookcase, the hairbrush, the comb, the nail clippers, the razor, the shirts and ties hanging forlornly in the wardrobe. For me the sight of Dad’s scant belongings was melancholy enough, but for her it might have been close to unbearable.

  ‘This can’t go on,’ she told my father.

  They were arguing again, about the usual things, after which my father refused to speak to Mum for a couple of days, except to ask for more sauce for his sausages, or more cream for his coffee.

  ‘Get it yourself,’ I told him, tired of his surliness, so he refused to speak to me as well.

  ‘What do you propose?’ he said, deciding to confront her.

  ‘A separation,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve spoken to a lawyer and I’ve been to the bank. I can borrow enough to buy you out.’

  This wasn’t news to me. Mum had already told me her plans. But Dad could not have been more shocked if she had produced a gun and threatened to kill him.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  She went to the study and brought back the papers. As she laid them out in front of him her hands trembled violently.

  ‘Take your time,’ she said.

  It was two more years before he signed. Some of that time he spent in Indonesia flying political prisoners from Java to a prison island called Biak. But mostly he spent it at home idling, growing more and more despondent, more and more enraged that a man of his talents and ability could have sunk so low. What’s more, none of it was his fault. Fate and circumstance had conspired against him, in league with his wife, who should have been his loyal helpmate, but instead had made it her mission in life to sabotage him.

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ she told him.

  ‘You would say that.’

  He moved out one winter’s day, taking just a couple of suitcases.

  ‘I’ll come back for the rest once I’m settled,’ he said.

  ‘Where will you stay?’ said Mum.

  ‘What do you care?’

  He was headed for Sydney, where he claimed to have some old friends.

  ‘We’ll keep your things in the garage,’ said Mum.

  ‘That’s big of you.’

  And then he drove away up the street with his fog lights on.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Mum, ‘what have I done.’ It was a statement not a question. It meant she had just crossed a line that would stay crossed forever.

  My mother’s first love was a lawyer, killed in the war. He was on a reconnaissance flight over a beach somewhere in the Solomons when the plane slammed into a tree and crashed in a ball of flames. By sheer coincidence her brother Peter was on a ship not far off shore and saw the whole thing, but he didn’t tell my mother that until years later. The truth was, my mother’s parents were relieved when Mum’s paramour was killed, because he was from Melbourne and half-Chinese and therefore unsavoury on two counts.

  Growing up, I was haunted by this story. It might have turned out so differently. The lawyer might have come back from the war and married my mother. And they might have had children, who were not my sister, my brother, and me, but entirely different people. In which case, my sister and brother and I would not have existed, ever, anywhere. We would have been nothing. It was only because an accident intervened that we were here, the replacements, the lucky ones.

  The accident of birth is just that. And so is everything that happens afterwards, or so it seems to me. How many times I could have died before now, and in how many different ways. And yet I came close only once: a speeding sedan ran a red light, hit three other vehicles, and jack-knifed into my rear wheel a split second after I’d stepped out of my parked car. A bystander described the scene to me later.

  ‘You were a millimetre away from losing your legs,’ he said.

  I hadn’t seen a thing, only turning as the sedan came to a halt and the teenage driver emerged unhurt.

  ‘My brakes failed,’ he said, shaken and apologetic. ‘I couldn’t stop.’

  So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I’d just been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I’d be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road are our lives made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it. The Hagakure is a samurai manifesto, written in 1716, to remind its readers of this incontrovertible fact. ‘It is silly,’ writes the book’s author, Tsunetomo Yamamoto, ‘to spend an entire lifetime struggling and worrying and doing things we don’t want to do; after all this life is like a dream, so short and fleeting.’ It’s a good piece of advice even now.

  And of course I wonder why I was not more vigilant about checking my skin, because, if I had been, I would have picked up that first melanoma before it turned bad, and saved myself a lot of heartache. When I was first diagnosed, I was angry with myself for being too lazy and stupid to bother with anything but the occasional quick examination. But then I decided that kind of thinking was a waste of my time, because we start dying the moment we are born. I know that now, not in the child’s way I knew it when I saw the skink disappear down the kookaburra’s gullet, but in a dying person’s way. The knowledge has changed from that first illuminating but soon forgotten premonition into an undeniable lived reality.

  I imagine at the very end I might feel a little like my mother felt when her marriage finally died. Oh God, what have I done. I’ve crossed the line. What started out so well, and seemed so full of promise, has come down to this, a big zero. But that presumes that I will be lucid to the last moment and able to think this final thought. If I’m being realistic, that isn’t the most likely scenario. As far as I can tell, I’ll either succumb to some opportunistic infection, for which I’ve refused antibiotics in advance, or, having similarly declined forced feeding, I’ll starve to death. Every day, my body demands less and less fuel and, although I still enjoy food, I eat like a bird, much to Shin’s despair. He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that will be what they remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.

  And all the while my Chinese drug offers an alternative way to go. I’m grateful to have it. It helps me to feel that my autonomy is still intact, that I might yet be able to influence my fate. Even if I never use the drug, it will still have served to banish the feeling of utter helplessness that threatens so often to overwhelm me. I have heard it said that modern dying means dying more, dying over longer periods, enduring more uncertainty, subjecting ourselves and our families to more disappointments and despair. As we are enabled to live longer, we are also condemned to die longer. In that case, it should come as no surprise that some of us seek out the means to bring a dignified end to the ordeal, while we are still capable of deciding matters for ourselves. Where is the crime in that? A sorrowful goodbye, a chance to kiss each beloved face for the last time before sleep descends, pain retreats, dread dissolves, and death is defeated by death itself.

  I’ve come to the edge of words now, to the place where they falter and strain in the face of dying’s terrifying finality. The reason I was always such a fan of film is that films are about showing not telling. If I were writing my death scene for a film my very last moments would go something like this. A montage. Shaky, over-exposed home-movie footage of a girl with a dog in dappled sunshine, a car speeding down a dusty road, the same girl on a beach with palm trees, arm in arm with her mother in some outback moonscape, crossing the tarmac at an airport with a silver jet in the background. The jet takes off. A kookaburra sits on a branch laughing. A skin
k slinks away under cover.

  Fade to black.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have happened without Penny Hueston, my editor at Text, who gave me the idea and cheered me along throughout. For all their love and kindness along the way I’d like to thank Yuriko Nagata, Terry Martin, Alfreda Stadlin, Peter Dodd, Kaoru Kikuchi and John Slee. To Barbara Masel, who for so many years has been my first reader, my friend, my adviser, I owe too much to ever express or repay.

  I’m also deeply indebted to the nurses and staff at Karuna, who have provided me with the peace of mind to work on this project despite my failing health. I could not have wished for more compassionate care and counselling over these past months. And my thanks to the late Susan Addison.

  And of course I thank Shin, for everything he is and does.