Dying Read online

  The consequences, in this instance, were only good. I’ve been travelling back and forth to Japan now for more than thirty years. Being married to Shin has meant learning as much as possible about where he is from, not just for my sake, but for the sake of our children. It hasn’t been easy. Because we decided to educate the children in Australia I have not spent as much time in Japan as I would have wished, and I’m not as fluent in the language as I’d like to be. But what I have lacked in expertise I hope I have made up for in enthusiasm. There is a lot to love about Japan. If I have a home in that country it would have to be in Arita, the old porcelain town. There are dozens of places in Japan I would just as happily return to: Shirakawa, in Kyoto, where the spring cherry blossoms explode in a pink blizzard at the hint of a breeze; Yanaka, in Tokyo, where the megacity retreats and the old narrow streets are a warren of small-town traders and hip bars; Mount Aso where you can sit in an onsen outside and watch the snow fall on the cedars. In all of these places, and so many more, I have imagined I could happily end my days. If they are not my home, then they are places that have marked me, shaped my sensibilities, created affinities. Added together, they take up the space in my heart where my home would be, if I had one.

  Shin and I have lived in Brisbane since 1998. Our sons grew up and went to school here. My mother died and is buried here. I’ll die here myself. But Brisbane is not home to me. Not really. I’m a latecomer to this town. It still strikes me as an unlikely city, too raw and rough to take seriously. It does have its charms, however, and I do like the fact that on the streets of my neighbourhood I’m reminded all the time of my children when they were young, of my mother when she was still alive, of myself in a former life. So I’m attached to the place in that way, but not as attached as people I know who have lived here all their lives, and for whom the city is like a second skin. This is not the fault of Brisbane, it’s just that there is a level of belonging I can never aspire to and must live without.

  In Arita, where we have our other home, they make handsome porcelain funeral urns. I have asked Shin to decorate one for my ashes, with his trademark laughing skeletons, and told him to keep it with him until he is ready to toss me out. Where he should scatter me is still a topic for debate. We had always talked about going to Okinawa together, because it’s a part of Japan we have never seen.

  ‘Maybe take me there,’ I tell him. ‘You and the boys. You could find a pristine beach somewhere and throw me in the sea.’

  It’s just one idea among many, and not very practical. None of us has the slightest connection to Okinawa, so the gesture would probably be meaningless, if not downright offensive to the Okinawans, who take their homeland very seriously.

  Another idea we’ve had is to divide my ashes and throw half of them into the Brisbane River. Shin could then take the other half to Japan and scatter them in the stream that runs through the centre of Arita. What worries me is that Shin might well leave the town at some point, once he grows bored with it, and move to somewhere new, veteran nomad that he is. The best argument in favour of this plan is that it would satisfy a symbolic purpose, reflecting the way my life has been divided between Australia and Japan for three decades.

  If I’m honest, I don’t really care one way or another what becomes of me, so perhaps I’m not the right person to make the decision. The best thing might be for Shin and our sons to decide for themselves what to do. I’d prefer they make an arrangement that suits their needs and that brings them some comfort. I trust them to talk about it sensibly in a way that Sarah and Eliot and I could never discuss these matters. And I trust they’ll be together on the day they dispose of my remains, so they can offer each other support. I’d urge them to go off to a bar together afterwards and grieve for me over a couple of drinks, because I know that’s what I’d do, if I was in their situation.

  The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto explains his obsession with the sea as stemming from an early childhood memory. He is travelling on a train with his parents. The track hugs the coastline, entering a series of short tunnels—light, dark, light, dark, light, dark—then emerges to reveal the bright sea stretched out in front of him all the way to the horizon. At that point, he claims, he comes into consciousness. This is me, here, now, seeing this—the sea, the sky, the sun.

  Ever since I heard this story I’ve tried to remember my own moment of coming into consciousness. It’s not my earliest memory—an insignificant recollection of playing in mud—but the time I saw a kookaburra swoop down from a branch to spear a skink and gobble it down live. This is what dragged me out of unconsciousness. This is me here, I thought, and that is you there, and where there was a skink there is nothing. Sugimoto also claims that immediately following his awakening to his existence he experienced a premonition of his death, and I’m prepared to believe him, because it was certainly that way for me. The skink’s disappearance was explicit. Things live until they die. Consciousness begins and then it ends.

  How it ends I’m only now discovering. I can only speak for me, of course, and everyone is different, but dying slowly, as I’m doing, feels like a retreat from consciousness back to the oblivion that precedes it. This retreat is led by the body, which grows weaker and weaker, requiring less and less fuel and more and more rest, until a few trips to the bathroom and back are all the exertion you can manage in a day. I am no longer shocked by how feeble I am. My body is a dying animal. It is ugly and deformed, a burden I would like to lay down if only I could. But the body has its own schedule in the matter of dying, and its own methods, none of which I understand.

  What I do know is that my world has contracted to the size of two rooms, my bedroom and my living room, because these are the rooms where I spend all my time. I sleep in my bedroom, I write and read and watch television in my living room. I’m much like an infant now, with an infant’s dependence. My husband does all the shopping and cooking and takes care of all the chores. My son helps out with the driving, the banking, the running of the household, all of which I used to do when I was well. In the meantime, I lie around and dream. I most resemble a baby in the early mornings when I first hear the birdsong outside my window. It takes me right back to the time of the kookaburra and my earliest lesson in death. The more wakeful I become the more I yearn for the state of unknowing from which I emerged back then.

  The kookaburra belonged to the first garden I remember, next to a eucalypt forest. The house was in a clearing but a few tall gums grew at the back and front, so that it seemed to me as if we were in the forest rather than separated from it. And the forest seemed to be in the house, because the rooms were full of forest smells and sounds, and because I brought the forest in with me from my games, and dreamed of it when I slept.

  When I was on my own I played in the shadow of these giant trees, poking sticks around their roots to look for cicada skins, stabbing at the gobs of golden sap that oozed from the tree trunks, peering at the armies of ants that ran up the trunks towards the high branches. I stripped ragged lengths of bark and made houses for slaters and snails. When my brother and sister were home I went with them up into the bush, chasing after the dog. I regarded him as human, as human as I was, I thought, with the same feelings, the only difference being that I felt the cold and needed clothes. It fascinated me that he had eyes like mine, and a tongue the same colour, and feet divided into toes. I liked to watch his chest rise and fall while he slept. I liked to watch him eat dead things, and chase after birds, and shit in the forest. I even took to shitting in the forest myself, because it didn’t seem strange to me after seeing him. Human, animal, it was all the same to me.

  The point is that I never thought of my body at that time as something separate from the bodies of the dog or the kookaburra, or the skink, or the mother cat up in my sister’s sock drawer, who, one day, had somehow produced more bodies, tiny versions of herself. And I certainly didn’t think of my body as separate from my new consciousness. They were one and the same thing, consciousness being a bodily sensation, just lik
e sight, or touch, or hearing. So, if I had it, everything else must have it, too. I knew this, not from my reasoning, but because it was obvious. When a snail felt my touch, it curled up. When a bird saw me approach, it flew away. When I flipped my sister’s tortoise onto its back, it righted itself and lumbered on. It was all only consciousness at work as far as I was concerned.

  I enjoyed my body in the same way the animals enjoyed their bodies. I liked to lie in the warmth of the sun the same way the dog did. I liked my mother to clean my skin the same way the cat cleaned the skin of her tiny kittens. I loved to be fed the same way my sister’s horse loved to be fed. For me, the kitchen was the centre of the house. The food my mother made in there was the greatest pleasure of my life, particularly the cakes—the taste of the batter on my finger, the smell of the oven as the cakes came out, the hot sweetness of the first bite. Or if I’d been sick and off my food, my mother would bring me a soft-boiled egg with toasted soldiers and the salty butteriness would take me to the epicentre of pleasure. I was still half convinced that my mother’s body was made for this purpose, and for nothing else: to supply me with sustenance, to make me glow with health. And I did. I ran, I jumped, I swam at the beach, I learned to ride a bike and speed down the track at the side of the house. And I slept the deep sleep of the healthy and was undisturbed by forebodings or doubts. It was bliss to be alive.

  As childhoods go, mine was remarkably free of upset. I never thought it strange that we moved around so much. It was just what we did. And it never cost me either my appetite for pleasure or my rude good health, so I was lucky in that way, and fortunate to have a mother who never gave me any cause to doubt her love. My father was the one to be wary of, but he was often away. Even when he was home, it was his indifference I had to contend with, rather than any outright antagonism. I’m talking about a time before his anger was ever directed at me. Back then he aimed his attacks mostly at my sister, and of course at my mother, who always bore the brunt of his discontent.

  Dreamy would best describe me as a child. My early certainty that I was part of the animal kingdom resulted in a state of enchantment that stayed with me for years. No doubt this was in some part a defence mechanism, a way of insulating myself against my father’s increasingly troublesome nature, but it had other advantages as well. It meant that for a long time I experienced the world as an unfolding series of glorious discoveries, as if everything in it was only put there for my enjoyment. I was drunk with sensation, in love with the unaccountable abundance and variety of things. Imagine my delight then when I found myself suddenly transported to Fiji, a place of such lush and uncommon beauty it made me reel.

  For a child with my epicurean turn of mind, Fiji was as close to paradise as it is possible to get. Warm, sensual, full of smells and colours and sensations of extraordinary force. The light there was so pure it infused every object with an extra intensity, so that a flower was not just red, or a blade of grass just green, to be glanced at and then ignored. Flowers, grass, leaves, sky, sea, sand drew my gaze and made me stare, until I, too, was infused with red, green, blue, white, my body replete with brightness. For some weeks I lived in this state of dazed illumination, paying so much attention to light and colour that I became as entangled in them as I was in the beings of the dog and cat and the garden snails.

  During this time we were lodged in a bungalow in the garden of the Grand Pacific Hotel, set back from the harbour front. This was my second garden, so different from my first. The trees here were nothing like the hefty eucalypts in the forest garden. These were slim coconut palms, some of them growing straight up, others leaning precariously into the ocean breeze, their fronds constantly clacking overhead. Men from the hotel would sometimes shimmy up them to reach the coconuts. I used to hear the fat fruit slamming into the ground like medicine balls, and I would stay and watch as the men slashed the outer skins away and cracked open the shells. I sat on the grass with them and chewed the white flesh they handed me. And I stared at their perfect limbs, and their strong teeth, and their gleaming hair, because I’d never seen bodies like theirs before; they seemed flawless. I was fascinated, too, by the way they moved, so easeful and languid, the women the same as the men. I never saw them hurry. Out of respect, I slowed down myself, lazed in fact, spending my days in a state of semi-wakefulness, either swimming, or lounging, or staring at the water where it lapped against the sea wall. I was watching for snakes. The men had told me they were deadly, so I was drawn to them as a source of terror. The sight of one sliding through the oily harbour slick was enough to stop my heart.

  At some point the subject of school arose. But in Fiji even school turned out to be a source of delight. I had been unimpressed with my first school, a charmless establishment for infants through to Grade Three, with draughty classrooms and asphalt playgrounds that bruised your knees when you fell. There I’d been clothed in a scratchy grey tunic that seemed always to be damp, and a bulky grey jumper if it was cold. I thought the outfit an insult to the body inside it. Perhaps this was because I associated the uniform with the humiliations I suffered while wearing it, the playground squabbles that left me bleeding from the nose, my demotion from Grade One because I was weak at sums. Others suffered, too, sometimes worse than I did, like the boy from our street who shat in his pants on the way home from the bus stop, in full view of everyone, and walked home with the offending material running down his legs.

  Those kinds of accidents happened frequently at that school; it was a time of considerable bodily anxiety. My one pleasant memory is of a teacher running cool water over my wrists under a tap. I must have been out playing in the heat. She showed me where the veins ran close to my skin. ‘Your blood runs all through your body,’ she said. ‘So if you cool your blood down, that helps to cool the rest of you.’ It was the most important lesson any teacher had taught me thus far, and I loved her for it. I was immediately conscious of the blood pulsing in every part of me, and it was true that the cold water was drawing all the heat out of it.

  To dress for my Fijian school I first needed to be measured by a tailor. My mother took me to downtown Suva, always a treat: the sights and smells of the narrow streets were captivating. The market in particular lured you in with its promise of plenitude. Here was a sweet-smelling maze of fruit stalls and fishmongers and farmers’ stands selling things I didn’t know the names of and had never tasted. My mother took notes for the time when we moved into a house with a kitchen and a house girl who could teach her what to buy and how to cook it.

  ‘What fun this is!’ she said, rubbing her hands together. I’d never seen her so excited. Perhaps it was because she’d made a new friend that morning in the hotel lobby.

  ‘He’s asked us both to dinner,’ she told me. We were drinking milkshakes during a break from our shopping. ‘His treat.’

  My father was away flying at the time, which always improved my mother’s mood. She lit up when he was gone. Her skin seemed to glow and her eyes shone more brightly.

  At the tailor’s shop she showed me all the colours I was allowed to wear to school. On any given day I could choose between a tunic that was pink, mint-green, baby-blue or yellow. The tailor was an Indian, small, with coal-black eyes and stained teeth. He took my measurements, then pulled down a bolt of cloth so I could feel its weight and texture. I thrilled to the whole procedure, and understood that this new school must be an entirely different sort of place from the one I’d left behind. For a start my uniforms were to be made from this lightweight, open-weave cotton with its delicious sugary smell. While I inspected buttons and belt buckles and socks, the tailor turned his attention to my mother, persuading her to buy some blouses and a dress, exchanging banter and smiles with her as if they were old friends.

  ‘What a salesman,’ she said, when we were finally back out on the street. ‘I couldn’t say no.’

  Before we left town we stopped at a stationer’s shop to buy my new schoolbooks. Stationery had been one of my earliest glorious discoveries. I had loved
it since I could remember. I was a particular fan of coloured pencils in box sets or tins. There was a Derwent seventy-two collection that had reduced me to tears, probably because my mother had refused to buy it for me. But everything else appealed too, all the paraphernalia that went with making marks on paper: fresh exercise books full of lined pages just waiting to be filled, botany books with one page lined and one page blank, project books with blank pages throughout, sketchbooks for drawing, rulers, paste, scissors, fountain pens, nibs, ink, lead pencils, erasers. They were best when new, of course, when everything lay ahead of them, and before any mistakes and erasures had occurred. Which is no doubt why I loved them, because they were promise made manifest.

  On my first day in class, I was allocated a magnificent desk. Made of solid timber, its hinged lid opened up to reveal a spacious cavity, where all of my stationery could be arranged. It was a more serious piece of furniture than I was used to, and implied a more orderly approach to schoolwork than I had so far experienced. As it turned out, orderliness was what I had needed all along, the sort of quiet, steady progression through things, which builds understanding and confidence. Our classroom was on the first floor, an airy, light-filled space that looked out onto mango trees and sports fields, and caught the sea breezes coming in off the ocean. I remember sitting there, watching our teacher shape the letters of the alphabet in cursive script for us to copy from the board, and sensing a shift in my consciousness almost as powerful as my earlier awakening in the garden. It had to do with the act of writing, which suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world to practise and master, not for its meaning—that would come later—but for its mystery.

  At first my devotion to handwriting derived from the pleasure I took in forming the shapes on the page, but along with that came something else, a yearning to capture things—sounds, speech, what I saw out the window, what I felt when it rained, what the villages looked like along the bus route to school—and make them communicable to others. The letters of the alphabet had this power. If you learned to draw them well and order them in the right way, you could tell anybody anything you liked, make a picture for them out of words, make them see what you saw.