Memory is a testy beast

Three days before my mother died, I lost my watch, and not for the first time.  It is a watch I have worn for at least fifteen years.  When I could not find it in any of the likely places, I took this loss as an omen, a sign of change ahead and bought myself a new watch in honour of my mother. 

Three days after we buried her, I found my old watch again, this time in the freezer.  It must have slipped off in the action of lifting the freezer lid and it rested there on top of the puff pastry until I saw it again last night when my husband was making lamb pies for dinner.  

The watch was still ticking time, if not a little cold, as cold as my mother’s body when I had leaned over her coffin and touched her hand the night before her funeral. 

The funeral parlour people had laid my mother out for a viewing in a blouse and skirt my sisters had chosen for her.  My mother's hands were interlinked, as if in prayer, in a way they were not the day she died.  Then they were stretched out in front of her on the patch work quilt the hospital had provided in a bid to make her look as if she were in an ordinary bed at home.

My sister told me later that they massage people’s limbs after death when embalming them into more fitting shapes.  But the woman in the coffin was no longer my mother.  Her smile, stretched tight across her thin lips, looked too wide by half and her face had been compressed. The sight of her left me cold.  

I could not shed a tear for my mother then in the funeral parlour because the wax work figure in her place reminded me of someone I once knew, a colleague, whom I was not fond of, and so I chose not to stay too long with my mother’s body in the coffin, but to enjoy my memories of her as she had lived.

I last lost my watch a few years ago in Brighton, England, when I was there for a conference.  It seemed an omen then, too, to lose a watch among the brightly lit stalls along the Brighton pier or down among the pebbles on the beach, so different from our sand here in Australia. 

I found my watch again that time, too, this time in the bottom of my bag.  But I will never find my mother again and it takes some getting used to.  This sense that she will not return, that I can never again ask her questions about her life or mine. 

And memory is such a testy beast.  The week before my mother died I went to collect some items from the drycleaner, most of them were ready but a few had not been completed and so I said I’d collect them on my next visit, which I did. 

I now find my trousers are missing, loved trousers, black with an embossed check in the fabric.  They must still be at the drycleaners, but no, the drycleaner reckons today, I must have misplaced them at home.

I tell the drycleaner – I’m a long term customer and know him well, as well as anyone can know a drycleaner – my mother died and this past week has been unsettled. 

Then I regret the telling.  He might think I’m a bit unhinged.  It lets him off the hook.  No longer his responsibility to look for my trousers among the rows of plastic coated offerings, all attached to a number.  None attached to my number. 

I tell him, I’ll look again at home.  Maybe like my watch, but unlike my mother, my trousers will show up soon. 

A world without my mother

My mother died at ten to five on Saturday morning in Bethlehem Hospital in Caulfield.  For so long now I have anticipated this event, my words seem over-rehearsed, almost theatrical. 

Ever since my older sister rang, soon after the hospital had called her to report our mother’s death, I have been in a strange place of going-on-living in the usual sense of the word, and of floating about in a world of impossibility.  

A world without my mother. 

For so long now I have anticipated her death, from when I was a little girl of eight when it first occurred to me with any coherence that one day my mother would die. 

Then I could not bear the thought of her death, until three years ago when it became clear my mother’s actual death would happen sooner than later. 

My mother never made it to one hundred, as she so often told us she had wanted.  She could go on living as long as her body held out and she was comfortable and without pain, but these last three weeks have seen her stop eating, stop drinking and eventually lose all will to live.  But even then, she held on for as long as she could. 

I did not hear her spirit fly away across the sky like a comet.  Nor did I hear her tiptoe past my door in the still of the morning.  I woke only to the insistent ring of the telephone.  When I came to find my mother laid out in the day room at Bethlehem she was still warm to touch.  My older sister reckons our spirit stays with our bodies for some time after we die. 

I wanted to believe this.  I was first to arrive at the hospital and when I walked into the room and saw my mother on the bed I found myself like a small child pleading with her to wake up. 

‘Wake up, Mum.  You can’t stay asleep, not now, not forever.’ 

My mother to me is as timeless as the sun and she lives on in me, as traces of her exist in my children, and further traces exist in their children into the future. 

I did not spend much time alone with my mother before my older sister, who had further to travel, arrived and then my younger sister and two of our brothers – the five of us who still live in Melbourne – and together we sat around our mother’s cooling body and talked about her and us and all things significant and temporary in this quiet time. 

We made phone calls to the four others who live interstate or too far away to come in at that moment. 

I can see my mother now.  Her face was fuller than I remembered, her skin almost golden.  She always had olive skin, a throw back to some Spanish ancestry she liked to imagine.  Olive skin and her grey hair combed around her face pageboy style.  She wore a white hospital gown that did not show its strings or tags and looked as innocent as a christening gown and the people at Bethlehem had tied a flower and a sprig of leaves in a tidy bunch on the pillow near to her head. 

The flower at first glance looked almost artificial in its perfection, petals of dark pink in tight packed layers around a darker centre.  A peony rose tied to acanthus-shaped leaves. 

This peony would not have been my mother’s chosen flower I suspect but the staff had picked it from the hospital garden as a tribute to our now dead mother.

They had laid our mother out on her back with her arms visible over the pastel quilt on top of her bed.  It could have been an ordinary bed, not a hospital bed, white wood panelled bed ends and moulded frames. 

The nurse talked of putting on the air-conditioning after we had been there for a couple of hours for fear of the body’s slow decomposition. 

I did not realise this.  I should have known this, but my sister explained and one brother added information about the way all the fluids in the body begin to drain under the pull of gravity and slowly leak out. 

Even alive, my mother’s body has been leaking for several weeks now, on its way back to the earth. 

The colour of death

‘Is that a nun over there,’ my mother asks.  

I look in the direction of her pointed finger.  The empty bed in the four bed ward of the Dandenong Hospital is stripped of blankets in preparation for the next arrival.  There are gadgets and boxes set in the wall and metal bars from floor to ceiling to support the curtains.  The only thing that resembles a nun is the blood pressure monitor.  A round dial the size of a face with a dark border.  

Only in my imagination could I see it as a nun, and even then not without prompting.

  

‘Maybe you need your glasses,’ I say.

‘It looks like a nun,’ my mother says again, and that over there, in the oven.  What are they cooking?’

My mother’s mind flips into these vague disconnected thoughts.  I flip into my own.

Three weeks ago my mother fell.  A typical fall the doctors told us in a woman with a urinary tract infection.  She must have had the infection for a long time it would seem.  Infections make people unstable.   My mother fell flat on her face, twisting her arm in the process.

 

The staff at her retirement village bundled her onto a trolley and took her straight to hospital when she complained of pain in her arm.  

‘Broken’, the doctors declared and she may be bleeding internally.

My mother sits up in bed, her arm propped up in a foam sling.  She looks every bit like a photo I have of her own mother after she had died.  Grey, the colour of death, but my mother is like a cat with nine lives.  She survives.

My grandmother not long before she died.

My mother rallies.   The doctors catheterize here.  The infection clears with antibiotics and over the course of a week she can recognize that the nun across the room is not a nun.

She’s frightened of dying, one of my brothers says.  It happens to the deeply religious.  He saw it years ago when he was visiting the elderly clergy, bishops, priests, nuns all.  The most devout among us.

Atheists imagine death should come easily to the devout, it’s a comfort, but that’s not the case at all. Death for the religious is to be avoided because death is the moment of judgment and they’re about to be judged.

My mother slinks down in her bed.  She groans when the nurse tries to shift her.

I think about death.  It’s easy to say I’m not frightened.  I’m not worried about heaven or Hell.  My judgment will not come later.  My judgment is now.

Back in time I sit in the church of Our Lady of Good Counsel.  The priest at the altar raises the host to the hosanna chorus and we all bow our heads.  I go through the motions.  I kneel and hold my hands together in prayer; but my mind wanders.  

I watch the other people in their seats, on their knees.  The man in front with a bald head bangs his prayer book onto the head of a small boy who is chattering to his sister in the row in front of him.

The look on the boy’s face, red-faced with shame.  

I would not let myself get caught out so.  I keep my thoughts to myself.

 

I can see my grade three teacher three rows further in the front.  Her black hair tied in a tight bun.  Her beauty transparent.

Then I recite my mantra to myself:  my mother is the most beautiful woman in the world, second only to the blessed virgin Mary.  Then comes Miss Andersen, my teacher.  Everyday I watch Miss Andersen in class.  Her face like an angel.

My eyes scan the stations of the cross.  The thought hits me hard. 

Death.  What will I do if my mother dies?  I cannot live if my mother dies.  Surely I will die, too.

 

Back in the hospital my mother is asleep.  She snores.  

In my head I am calm.

My mother will die one day soon enough.  But I am calm.

The little girl in me lived so long ago I can hardly hear her fearful thoughts let alone remember her feelings.

Does my mother know?  Does she sense her children waiting, waiting for her to go.

And is it true, that she holds off because she is fearful of that final judgment?   

Sex and death

There’s a story doing the rounds in cyberspace about a father who wants to teach his adolescent daughter a lesson. In the family’s blog he is dressed in very short shorts and stands provocatively at a bar for the benefit of what I imagine to be someone’s iphone camera. 

Apparently, both the father and his wife do not enjoy the spectacle of their daughter dressed in her short shorts.  They consider it unseemly, obscene, inappropriate, disturbing, provocative – you name it.

 

Despite their protests, the daughter had insisted on wearing her short shorts to a family dinner and so her father took a pair of his shorts from his room, cut off a few inches from the legs, and wore them out to dinner, too.

 

Did the daughter learn her lesson?  I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to figure out what the lesson is.

Had the girl’s mother cut her own shorts down to size, the comparison might have been more telling.  

I ask myself why these things matter?  Why do we care so much about young women wearing their short shorts?  

 

Then there’s the Robin Thicke clip that’s also doing the rounds to the song Blurred Lines.  The lyrics are provocative, implying there are blurred lines to sexual consent. The men are in suits, the women naked.

 To counter this a group of Auckland University students created a spoof where the men, dressed only in white underpants, dance to the whims of the women who are fully clothed.  The lyrics are different, too.  An attack on misogyny.  

Not long after mini skirts came into vogue, women started to burn their bras in protests against patriarchal constraints.  At the same time not wearing a bra could be sexually provocative.

 

I cannot be sure what led me not to wear a bra on my wedding day.  Was it simply because my wedding dress could not sit well with the imprint of a bra beneath.  

My wedding dress was of a fabric that I believed could conceal the fact that I did not wear a bra. At least in my mind it was sufficiently modest, though I later heard rumours that people like my mother were horrified.  

I have the horrors myself when I look back on another time, a New Years Eve in the 1970s when I decided to go bra-less to a party at a friend's house in Ivanhoe.  

I had bought myself a blouse, a long floppy sleeved and cropped blouse, the type you see on a flamenco dancer.  It came together tied in a knot across my midriff.  The white cotton was as thin as a summer nightie, and almost as transparent. 

I wore it with pride.  But now I find myself cringing at my exhibitionism if indeed that is what it was.

 

That night people got drunk.  Someone pushed someone else into a swimming pool.  Fellows slipped off their clothes.  The men, I might add, not the women.  

The women wore bathing suits, but several of our young male companions took to skinny dipping. 

It was a night of arousal though nothing untoward happened as far as I can remember, though to look on it from the outside it might have looked like an orgy.

I wonder then about what is or is not appropriate in this life?  What determines our behaviour?  What do we decide is obscene and what not? 

Yesterday as family members stood around the grave side of an elderly aunt about to be buried I checked out the depth of the hole.   

‘It’s so deep,’ I said.

‘But look at that clay,’ one brother said.  ‘Oh to get my hands init.  To sculpt from it.’

‘It needs to be deep,’ someone else said, ‘so they can fit another body on top.’

 

I looked into the hole in the ground and wondered what it must be like for my uncle to see his eventual resting place.   

My husband and I have yet to choose a burial plot.  I think about it.  Preparations for death.     

My sister has made a family pall of white silk, embroidered in gold thread.  It has sections to represent all the members of our immediate family and in each section my sister has included both zirconium crystals to represent the boys in each family on the extended line and tiny pearl button to represent the girls.  

The pall symbolises the lives of our parents and their nine children, twenty three grandchildren and twelve great grandchildren with another two on the way.  My sister hopes that every member of our family will use this pall for their own funerals.  

I shrink a little inside whenever I see the pall.  It seems to me it will soak up so much grief and I cannot help but think of the pall draped over my own coffin when I die, or when my husband dies, my siblings, my mother and in time my children and then their children.   

There’s something ominous about a pall, so unlike a christening gown, which signals new life.  

‘When you’re dead you’re dead,’ my brother said.  ‘You won’t know.’  

'But there’s the build up to death.'  One my cousins nodded her head in recognition of my qualms but another sister insisted she does not think of these things. 

We chattered on about death until my oldest brother leaned over, ‘I’m not sure now is the time to be analyzing such matters.’

People stood at the side of the grave and waited for the funeral organisers to do their thing.  We fell silent, though a few chatterers further up the hill continued to talk.

 

When human silence prevailed I heard the birds twitter in the trees above and fell back to thinking not so much of my aunt whose body was about to be lowered into the ground but of the rest of us still alive who are left trying to make sense of how we might go on living in a world filled with rules and regulations about how we should behave.  

I still cringe at the sight of me in my see through blouse.  

My older self wonders how could she do it?  

My younger self says, who cares?  

The celebrant read out a poem.  Her words stay with me.  'Your bones are made of stars/ your blood is filled with oceans.'  

There's more to us all than our appearance or desires.  

The human heart in conflict with itself

There is a corner in my study which reminds me of Africa. Perhaps it is the mock African mask one of my daughters made when she was young. She took a plaster cast of her face and attached sparkles and feathers.

My bookcase, too. From time to time I look at it. My books are like disassembled islands from across the world. There in the top left hand corner I have collected my dictionaries, the French, the German, the Latin and Dutch. The words in these books take me elsewhere.

When I wake in the morning and look out through my window I see into the side of an English country garden. The roses over the side fence cascade down to the overgrown arum lilies that populate my garden beds.

The rug in my writing room is Turkish, not an authentic artefact, an imitation, a copy. I could not bear to have an original in my room. All that expense, but I duplicate the image. All those gnarled fingers weaving threads through looms to create symbols of their culture.

I have a book in my bookshelf, bought at half price from a second hand booksellers, Honour the Shadow. It tells the story of death in photographs. Dead bodies dressed up as though still alive.

When I look at the photo of my mother’s dead baby, I see her white skin, her dark hair, the line of her eyelashes over her cheeks like the fringe of a shawl, almost moving but still.

She is there, this dead baby sister, in my album, along my bookshelf and whenever I see her image afresh I travel once more in my mind to her grave in Heilo in Holland. They buried here there in this tiny village where she died at five months of age, far from home. The war, no food. My mother travelled on foot to the outlying towns to get milk but she was too late.

Why not me? Why not the rest of us, her babies? Why not now?
Endless questions I write as I travel through the rooms of my house on my journey of exploration through the world of my memory and imagination.

Forgive me. I am not geographically bounded. I slip from one country to another. In the kitchen I travel to Mexico in my cookbooks and to South America. China is my Buddha and the lucky money chain that hangs above the glass cabinet. I bought it in Warburton and hung it there ten years ago . I touch the red webbing that forms the lanyard holding it in place and wish for luck, luck and wealth and prosperity.

We keep a stone Ganesha on the mantel piece for the same reason. A gift from a friend who travels through Asia, he bought the elephant god to encourage success. I stroke the sandstone back of this statue in honour of my journey, and for luck.

Luck is everywhere. It lies in the droppings of a small bird that lands on you by accident. Did you know that? A piece of bird mess is an auspicious sign. A misfortune that becomes a sign of success. Of all the places in the world, of all the people in the world on which the bird might leave its trace, it choses you. You are the chosen one.

You are such a Pollyanna, always playing the glad game. But I do not know who I am. I will not know until I die when I will become a finality. All will be concluded then and I can get to the end of my journeying.

They say as you get older you become less acquisitive. You give things away. My friends talk of getting rid of their books. Books take up too much space. Besides you can read them online, keep them on memory sticks, on e-books. No need for all that paper.

But I am not ready to give up my books yet.

The jigsaw puzzle of my world the world through which I travel in my mind is fractured, lop sided, in pieces. I cannot hold a thought together. The smell of musk that rises through the cracked paint work in my house calls forth the ghosts of another time, of other times, other journeys. And mine becomes ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’, on journeys too open ended to frame.

A reminder of mortality

Only recently have I come to understand why in the Middle Ages, men - for it was then only men who wrote or transcribed books - kept a skull on the top of their desks.

It was a reminder of mortality.

This film reminds me of a state almost worse than mortality, a mind filled with holes. A body that functions without the assistance of a mind. A person devoid of memory.

I tried not to concern myself with the fact that my mother did not remember my birthday for the first time in my life.

She remembers many other things, including the identities of all her children, even if she now forgets our birthdays. I'm grateful for that.

Here is a happy birthday image, grandmother and grandson, taken on the day of my birthday to offset some of the pain of the following video clip, Julia.

http://neuropsychological.blogspot.com/2004/12/julia-1926-alzheimer-disease.html

To see this video, click on the Julia1926 website, wait a few seconds to download and continue to click each time you want to move on.

Patagonian Mummies

I’ve noticed my hands are aging. If I pull at the skin on the back of my hands, if I pinch it together with my thumb and finger and then let go, it stays there. A thin line, like an old woman’s wrinkle.

That’s okay I say. I want to age gracefully. When I was young I decided I wanted to die at sixty before I got too old and lost my sight and hearing, before arthritis set in and I began to hobble. Now that seems outrageously young. Too young.

Last night I dreamed my mother was dead and we, my brothers and sisters, cousins aunts and uncles lined the pews in the church of Our Lady of Good Counsel. The church on top of Whitehorse Road stands squat like an animal about to pounce. It is built from cream coloured bricks that give it a sense of solid form and old-fashioned modernity.

The church is surrounded by row upon row of perfect flowerbeds: petunias, pink and white and standard roses in lines alongside the green lawns that form hillocks beside the church.

We are inside the church looking up to the altar and my mother’s body lies in the middle of the centre aisle but not in a coffin. She rests on a stone slab and is covered by a swathe of cloth, orange silk or taffeta. She is covered completely, her body a small mound under the creased material.

A breeze runs through the church and lifts the cloth fractionally so I can see my mother’s toes. They are parched and dried out like the fingers of a mummy. I have seen them in picture books, Patagonian mummies. The figures of the dead in Patagonia are draped in cloth that is falling apart. Some have embroidered collars around their necks and one man’s throat is adorned in what looks like a dog’s collar.

In my dream I shiver to see my mother so emaciated, so far gone. She looks as though she has been roasted in an oven and all her juices have dried out.

Then I am in the pulpit, a thrust of anxiety running through my stomach, wanting to speak but dry-mouthed and fearful they will all yell me down. But they do not, they listen and in my mind I am rehearsing the thing I have spent years rehearsing, my mother’s eulogy.

I want to tell them: I love her, I loved her, but I also hate her. The little woman with the hooked nose and spindly fingers, the rounded belly in its tight corset.

We are outside and I am numb with loss when my mother appears, now in her fifties, my mother as I am today, full fleshed and sprightly, though fatter than me. She looks over at me with piercing blue eyes. No one else sees her, only me.

‘What are you doing here?’ I say. ‘You’re dead.’ She does not answer.

My father appears, also in his fifties. He is hunched over next to my mother’s body. His face is wet from crying. He rubs his big hands up and down his cheeks. His chest heaves. He has lost his wife. Only I know she is still here.

I wake from my dream and wonder, is this an omen? Will my mother die soon?

Doubt

I've written a piece on Doubt for anyone who's interested. It's based on earlier thoughts I've described here, a tad more 'academic' but hopefully still readable.

The MC journal is also worth checking out.

Haunted by Photos of the Dead 2

I am haunted by my memory of the picture of my dead baby sister.

As a child I took it to school one day. I had peeled out the photo from the corners of the grey family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind.

‘She’s dead,’ I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My grubby fingers had smeared the photo’s shiny surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one of them had seen a dead body before, and not one of them had been able to imagine the stillness of the photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground that spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old.

I did not show my teacher. Even at the time I thought there was something wrong in this method of gaining currency, this way of getting attention from my classmates, attention I would not normally receive. I hid it from my sisters and brothers, as well.

I have the photograoh still – my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep.

If this dead sister had lived then none of what happened to my older sister would have happened, or so I imagine. In that sense it would have been different for me too, the third rather than the second daughter. I would not have my mother’s name, the name given to the second daughter and my living sister would not have had her maternal grandmother’s name, the privilege of the first born girl. Everything would have been topsy-turvy. And my mother’s sad story of her ‘lost little angel’ would not be etched in my memory.

It started during the Honger winter of 1945; well after the Germans had invaded Holland and stopped supplies. The people in the cities were starving. My mother had two children by then, a son named after his paternal grandfather, Jan Christiaan and a daughter, named after her maternal grandmother, Gertrudis Maria.

The boy at eighteen months was healthy enough though thin, with a constant cough that bothered my mother but there was little she could do. The girl on the other hand was thin beyond belief. My mother’s milk had dried up along with her menstrual blood. There would be no more babies during this war.

At five months of age, the girl was the size of a newborn, with a head of wavy black hair, black like her mother’s, only finer. You could see through it to the pink of her scalp.

The baby had been listless all day long, my mother told me. She lay in her bassinet staring vacantly above her head, seeming not to notice the green of the trees when my mother took her out for a stroll, not to notice the blue of the sky, or the light from an overhead lamp, or the red of her mother’s lips.

The baby smiled feebly at times when my mother made a great show to rouse her from her lethargy but she could not sustain these smiles for long and then resumed a dull expression, as if something inside had switched off and she had moved over to the other side of life, the other side with the angels.

‘Take her to Heilo,’ the doctor had said to my mother after she told him that a cousin who lived there had asked a neighboring family in possession of a milking cow whether they might help this family from the city with their sickly baby.

The neighbors agreed and my mother traveled the 35 kilometers on foot, pushing her baby in the pram. By then the baby had lapsed into a coma.

The local doctor came in the morning and told my mother that the baby might come out of it and if she did then my mother was to offer a little warm boiled water, nothing more and call for him.

My mother was alone in the house – the children of the house were away at school, and their parents were away at work. My mother sat with her baby from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon, watching her. She had boiled water in readiness and had waited for it to cool. She tested it with the tip of her elbow, eased it in, that sensitive part, then tried it on the inside of her wrist, the place that people choose when life becomes too much and they want to hack their body open and drain out the blood.

The water’s temperature was perfect. My mother filled the bottle to the three quarter mark and waited for her baby to wake from the coma. Her baby stared at the ceiling, not in the direction of the light from the window, but directly up at the ceiling that was marked only by a bare bulb hanging there. Her eyes were fixed.

My mother half dozed, and saw the baby flutter her lashes and then lift her head from the pillow.
‘She recognised me, I’m sure of it,’ my mother told me later. ‘And I thought, oh now she comes out of it. But, no. She slumped back and I knew she was gone’.

My mother lifted her baby from the crib and took her into her arms. On her lap the baby felt light, like a feather pillow, only angular and sharp. She could feel the ridge of her baby’s backbone, the tiny elbows, almost without flesh, almost a skeleton. She knew she was dead but held out false hope in her baby's last flicker of recognition.

My mother has repeated this detail to me again and again. At the time, that sudden surge of life in her baby’s face almost discounted the possibility of her death. My mother told me that even as she knew her baby was dead, she could not believe it.

She swept up her daughter in her arms and ran next door to her cousin’s house.
Her cousin took one look.

‘The poor little one has gone,’ she said and then urged my mother to sit down while she washed the baby and dressed her in a white christening gown. My dead baby sister wears this gown today day – an infant Miss Haversham in photographic form.

The neighbours’ children came home from school at the end of the day and brought the flowers still visible in the photograph. They spread them around the baby. In the photo these flowers look almost translucent, their whiteness a match to the baby’s pale skin.

The undertaker headed the funeral procession. He walked with the small coffin under his arm. My father and mother followed. They walked slowly through the town of Heilo. There was no traffic and everywhere people stopped, the women with bowed heads. Men took off their caps.

In the church there were white flowers on the altar and a white cloth draped over the coffin. The schoolchildren sang the Mass of the Angels.

My mother cannot remember the burial and did not return home to Haarlem, immediately, though my father went back to the war.

'I had dysentery,' my mother said, 'and had to stay with my cousin and her husband.' After she had recovered, she walked home, she told me, 'all the way to Haarlem with an empty pram and an empty place in my heart.'

Life is plotless: Things Happen

Something in Truth and Lies's latest posting, on Amos Oz's Rhyming Life and Death has inspired me to include this short story here, to back up my view that life is plotless: I called it 'Things Happen'. It was published in Island Magazine

Things Happen

My friend invited us to dinner. It was hot. She had left the side doors open to catch the breeze. One of her rabbits hopped through and skittered across the carpet.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘My rabbits are toilet-trained.’
My friend served wild duck soaked in red wine and garnished with slivers of prosciutto. She had stuffed it with pine nuts and raisins.
Once again she argued with my husband over the meaning of life.
‘How can you say something’s meant to be as if someone’s in charge? Life’s not like that. Things just happen.’ He was glaring at her across the table. Her cheeks were flushed from too much wine.
‘It’s presumptuous to assume it all stops and starts with us,’ she said, sticking the carving knife into the side of her duck and sawing furiously as though the meat were tough. It fell away like crumbling cheese.

That last time I saw my friend I was still bleeding. When I went to the toilet, and saw the pad soaked through to my dress, I realised I must have been dripping through onto her seat cushion. The cushion was coloured a dark burgundy like my dress and the room was lit with candles. I hoped she would not notice.
I had lost the baby three days earlier. The doctor called it the lottery of pregnancy.
‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘You can try again’. He took me into his surgery to scrape out the left over bits but the bleeding went on.

My friend wrote poetry: long tortured pieces about the mad people she met through her work. She was a doctor, but I could not tell her about the baby or the bleeding that night. I was still picking over my grief.

One evening, months before my miscarriage, my friend came home and found two of her rabbits gone. She lived close to the city but her house was opposite parkland that ran all the way down to the Yarra River. Foxes lived by its banks in a maze of dens hidden among the ti-tree and gums.
My friend offered two of the surviving rabbits to me. She wanted them to breed. They would be safer in our house, away from the river and the park. But we never loved them enough. Not like my friend. We left them outside in the backyard in tight wire cages and their toenails grew long from never being able to dig or run free.

‘The pregnancy took but for some reason the egg and the sperm did not fit properly,’ the doctor had said, pointing to the empty sac on the ultrasound screen. ‘It’s just one of those things.’
I did not tell him how I had named the baby Horatio, after the Roman general who held the bridge. I did not tell him he was a boy. You’re not supposed to know those things, not at ten weeks. But I knew.

The rabbits mated. My friend showed me how to cordon off a section of the cage. When the mother rabbit was about ready to deliver her babies, my friend told me, I would notice her rip out lumps of fur from her body which she would use to line the cage.
‘Then you separate the male from the female. Male rabbits are likely to damage their young.’
There were five babies curled up together like pinky mice, their eyes covered with a thin shield of skin. My friend warned me not to touch the babies for several days, otherwise the mother might refuse to feed them.

Weeks before I miscarried, my friend came to our house for dinner. With each glass of wine her voice grew louder. She loved to argue, especially with men. We joked about the dangers of sitting beside her. She made her point by grabbing the nearest person at the table in a headlock and shaking him till he begged for release. She was strong, my friend, with long pointy fingers weighed down by silver rings.

My friend was born a twin but only she survived the birth. Her brother was born and died thirty minutes later. He became her shadow. She liked to think he was there with her all the time. At work meetings, as a laugh, she would insist on occupying two seats, one for herself, one for her twin.

My friend never had children of her own. She had wanted them, she told me, but they never happened.

In her fiftieth year, five years earlier, my friend had bought a red sports car, sleek, contoured and close to the ground. She drove it with the sun -roof down, her green scarf streaking behind in the wind. An Isadora Duncan scarf. My friend laughed when I told her how, in the 1920s at the height of her dancing career, the scarf on Isadora’s swan-like neck got caught up in the spokes of her car’s wheel and strangled her.

My friend wore glasses, with lenses thick like the bottom of milk bottles.
‘I couldn’t bear to go blind,’ she said, lifting her glasses to rub at her eyes. ‘I’d rather die first.’
At night she sat close to the computer screen composing letters of complaint to the editor, her last surviving rabbit, a barren female, hopping under her feet.
‘Silence is a crime,’ my friend said.

My friend bought tickets for a jazz concert the week after our dinner. ‘You’re sick. Go to bed,’ her husband said.
‘I’m not wasting my money.’ She closed her eyes, threw back her head and soaked in the music.

A bug crawled inside my friend and took over. It traveled along her blood stream letting off a poisonous gas. Within hours of the concert she went into a coma.
‘We need to make an oxygen chamber,’ the doctors said. ‘This bacteria hates oxygen.’ They hacked away at her dead flesh. Peeled off her right shoulder, part of her leg and stomach. My friend’s body swelled like a balloon as it struggled to defend her. The doctors spared her the pain by anesthetic and split her skin from shoulder to wrist to stop the constriction in her fingers and gangrene. Through it all she slept.
‘This hateful bug,’ her husband said, wiping my friend’s face with the back of his hand. ‘We must beat it.’

My bleeding stopped while my friend slept. I found a get-well card in a bookshop, a ‘bug’ card, depicting a green bug sitting up in bed, ill. But I did not buy it. It was too raw. I wrote her a letter instead: ‘What talks we’ll have when all this is over.’

The nurse came and washed my friend’s hair. Only her family could visit. Her husband was certain she enjoyed the water’s warmth, the touch. But the doctors insisted she was now brain dead and could feel nothing.
Without the machine, she breathed only three times a minute. She needed fourteen. She could not speak. She could not eat or shit. She was lonely and in despair, her husband said, but the doctors were certain she could feel nothing.

My friend died in the afternoon when the temperature in Melbourne reached 40.3, the hottest November day for 86 years. They turned off her life support. She did not tell me she was leaving. I did not hear a whisper.

We buried her and held a memorial. Tea and cucumber sandwiches. She would have preferred a glass of red.

Last night I saw my friend in a dream, sitting at her kitchen table, laughing, full bellied roars. She was wearing her green scarf, loosely draped around her neck. She sat, legs akimbo, as always, arms flying to right and left, as she remonstrated with us about the meaning of life, then grabbed hold of the nearest person at the table and pulled him to the ground.
‘Submit,’ she said. ‘On the count of five, I win.’