Dying (14 page)

In the end, I opted for the operation, half hoping I wouldn't wake up at the end
of it. You would know what
that feels like, Mum, I thought, given how you died. How
many nights must you have lain awake, praying that the Lord would take you in the
night.
If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.
But he showed
you no mercy, and he is unlikely to show any to me. This was the tenor of my silent
nighttime ravings. I was a child again, a little feverish and confused, unable to
tell the difference between real and phantom, fact and fiction, and I wanted a cool
hand on my forehead, a boiled egg with buttered soldiers, any sign at all that I
was not abandoned.

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 jobs 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.