Eating the Underworld (31 page)

So I stay. Life on the ward is chatty. The woman opposite me is in for some routine gynaecological surgery. She's enjoying the rest and is in high spirits. Across from her is an older woman, also in for relatively minor surgery. They share a disdain for hospital food, making snide comments about breakfast, lunch and tea, as they heartily crunch into them. This goes down wonderfully well with me, starving in my corner on nil orally and ready to consider buttered shoe leather, if only I could remember where I put my shoes.

On my left is an empty bed, soon to be filled with a lot of hustle and bustle. When we meet her, the occupant seems bright and intelligent, with a smart sense of humour. She's come down from the country for some non-urgent surgery. Her family surrounds her—a pleasant-looking husband and the four best-behaved children I have ever seen. The older daughter,
about fourteen I imagine, fusses quietly over the younger three. Not that there's anything to fuss over. The younger three are as impeccably behaved as the older one. The four of them look as if they have just stepped out of the
Stepford Gazette
. The rest of us gaze with awe on these paragons of juvenile perfection.

While his wife is in surgery, the husband takes the three younger ones downstairs. The oldest girl sits on her mother's bed doing homework. I look over at it and notice that she is working on a poem. She asks if I'd like to read it and we start chatting. She's obviously an extremely bright child. She's being schooled at home by her mother, she says. They all are. Her parents don't believe in the public system. ‘Do you miss the interaction with other school kids?' I ask her. ‘Oh no,' she says, ‘learning at home just makes our family closer. That's what's important.'

We chat for a while. ‘What do you want to do when you're grown up?' I ask. She's not sure. She thinks she'd like to be a writer. Does she plan to study English at university? She recoils as if I had spat in her face. Clearly her mother is an anti-Leavis-ite, I think. But no. There are reasons that the English department hasn't even thought of.

‘Satan is at university,' she tells me. I gulp slightly. And then there is no stopping her as she expounds for twenty minutes on the root cause of all the world's problems. ‘All you have to do is cast Satan aside, keep your thoughts pure and nothing can ever go wrong,' she says. I file this away for future reference. She adds that this is not always easy. Satan is cunning and temptation is
everywhere. Damn, I think, there's always a catch.

I arrive home, weak, but relieved. The fact that the obstruction resolved itself means that the cause is much more likely to be adhesions than a recurrence. John has organised a CT scan for me in a couple of days, to make quite sure.

For the last two days, I've been allowed to eat (be still, my heart) jelly and chicken broth. I'm supposed to slowly work up to more solid food. It's a regime that combines all the worst parts of being an infant without any of the fun, responsibility-free parts. In a few days, I have to deliver the oral part of a postgraduate dissertation and the week after that, I'll be in Alice Springs, chairing symposiums and running workshops.

CT Scan

A
S THE PLANE TAKES OFF
from Adelaide, it is hard to believe that exactly fourteen days ago I was in a hospital bed, pumped full of morphine and attached to a drip. I've recovered seamlessly, apart from developing a strong aversion to jelly. I am in the window seat, enjoying looking down at the passing landscape. After a while, I start to doze.

I awake about an hour from Alice Springs. I open my eyes sleepily, look out of the window and am jolted through with what feels like an electric touch to the heart. We are flying over the great, red desert of Central Australia and I have fallen in love.

I have never reacted to a landscape in this way in my life. I have flown over and appreciated many beautiful and striking vistas, but never has anything moved me like this. I push, mesmerised, into the cold glass of the window pane. I want to see as far as I possibly can. I want to swallow it all in.

I have always imagined deserts to be stark and empty places; striking, but barren. The land that stretches beneath me is clearly desert. The red sand is marked only by the tough semi-spirals of spinifex; nothing else for as far as the eye can see.

And yet, despite the absence of any other visible life, this is the most un-empty landscape I have ever encountered. Something emanates from it; a force or spirit so powerful and unexpected that it takes me utterly by surprise. The land is alive, I am sure of it. Alive and watching.

I am still dazed and exhilarated as we drive into Alice Springs. From our hotel, the West MacDonnell
Ranges rear into the blue sky in an arc that makes me want to weep every time I see it. Everywhere I go, I feel I am in the presence of a great, ancient energy. It is a presence beyond words. It is allowing me to visit, to be a guest, and I am grateful.

The conference has a packed schedule, but there's time to roam around Alice Springs, take camel trips and coach tours to Standley Chasm and the Ranges. I feel wonderful, energised. I've always considered myself to be a city person, but everywhere I go here, I find myself thinking, ‘I could live here.' It is as strange as travelling to Mars and discovering that it contains your home.

On the last day of the conference, Martin and I take a tour of the Alice Springs Desert Park. We wander through the different terrains and arrive back at the gate with time to spare before our coach departs. I respond to the radar signals generated by my shopping gene and motion Martin in the direction of the souvenir shop.

It's full of all the usual suspects—toy kangaroos, koalas, emus—all in assorted shapes and sizes, lining the shelves. Along the side of the shop are rows of glass-covered counters containing white, diamante jewellery versions of the same. And there, in among all this dazzle of white is a lone bright red brooch. It seizes my attention immediately. I strive to make out its shape, disbelieving my eyes at first, because what they are telling me doesn't fit with this cornucopia of Australiana. And then I catch my breath. The brooch is a pair of red sparkly shoes—Dorothy's shoes, whose
magic she learned about from the Wizard of Oz, in Emerald City; the shoes which took her home to Kansas.

‘Excuse me,' I say to the shop assistant, ‘could I have a look at that red brooch over there?'

‘Oh, you mean Dorothy's shoes,' she says airily. And she hands them over.

And so here I am, in the centre of the country and the unexpected country of my heart, holding Dorothy's shoes and remembering my dream from all that time ago.

It was the dream that came to me as I waited to have my recurrence confirmed, where I found myself in the centre of the country which was also the country of my heart; the country that felt like Kansas, from the
Wizard of Oz
, where I went to recuperate and heal.

The dream that came during days of acute anxiety and fear and filled me with extraordinary and mysterious peace; the dream that left me with the calm certainty that whatever happened next was supposed to happen; that there was a pattern to the universe, a meaning that I could feel without needing to understand. The dream that I have lost touch with, denied, felt cheated by, for so many months.

And yet here it is, tapping me on the shoulder again, as if it has been here all the time, merely waiting for me to arrive.

And so I stand in a small shop in Alice Springs spellbound, as Dorothy's shoes sparkle fabulously, incongruously, in the middle of the great, red Australian
desert and I recall the words from
The Wizard of Oz
:

‘Is your name Dorothy, my dear?'

‘Yes,' answered the child, looking up and drying her tears.

‘Then, you must go to the City of Emeralds …'

‘Where is this city?' asked Dorothy.

‘It is exactly in the centre of the country …'

‘How can I get there?' asked Dorothy.

‘You must walk. It is a long journey, through a country that is sometimes pleasant and sometimes dark and terrible …'

I come back from Alice Springs, Uluru and Kata Tjuta feeling as if I have visited a different planet. I have only been away for a week and have worked for a fair amount of that time, but I feel as refreshed and renewed as if I have been away for months. I am carrying Dorothy's shoes with me in a small velvet box. I wonder sometimes if a second pair of the shoes will be laid out among the glittering animals and for whom that brooch will be waiting.

As I flip back through my journal, I remember that as well as the Northern Territory, Perth was the other place I associated with the beginning of my recurrence. By coincidence, three weeks after I return home from Alice Springs, I am due to fly to Perth to run some more workshops.

I get off the plane at Perth and find a taxi. ‘The Mount Street Inn,' I say to the taxi driver. This is the hotel where the Perth organisation always puts me up.

He nods. ‘You know it's changed its name,' he says casually.

‘What is it?' I am only half listening. I'm trying to find something in my overstuffed luggage.

‘It's the Emerald Hotel.'

Three days later when I come home, I am still amazed. Einstein once said that the most beautiful thing in the universe is the mysterious. I feel enveloped in that eerie wonder, as if I have been touched by a state of grace.

A couple of days after getting back from Perth, I am in my car, on my way to give an early morning lecture. I turn the corner past my house to discover a buzzing nest of police activity. It is so incongruous in this quiet suburban neighbourhood that at first I think it is a film set. While I am wondering about the cause of the commotion, the news comes on the radio. A gangster has been found shot dead outside his home.

I have heard other news reports over the years of criminals murdered. Why is this one so startling? You don't expect it to happen around the corner from home, of course. But it is more than that. It is the juxtaposition of the two jarring realities—the cosy suburban group of houses and the darkness that one of them has hidden inside. How we think we know where we are and then, with one quick twist, we discover that we never really knew at all.

As I drive home after the lecture, I am still thinking about this. The answering machine blinks at me as I enter the house. Several messages are waiting. I play them through, listening with one ear while I open my
mail. And then suddenly, I drop the envelopes. The voice on the phone is telling me that I have won one of the country's major literary awards, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

It is like being in a country where the drought has finally broken. A disbelief, and then elation, mixed with an extraordinary relief. And permeating it all, an exquisite and lovely sense of strangeness that plays around this odd timing—the letter, the red shoes and the hotel with the name of the Emerald City, all following so closely on each other's heels.

Five days after that, I am again opening the mail. There is a letter from the organisers of the Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize, another of Australia's top poetry awards. I scan it, thinking it's just a form letter, telling me that I haven't won. But something doesn't seem right. They've used the wrong words. I read it again. This time I realise they're telling me that I've been given an honourable mention. But still my brain is registering something wrong. I shake my head and try again. And this time I really read it. I have won! They are telling me that I've won. I've won two of the country's most prestigious poetry awards in five days.

Welcome to the land of Oz. And yes Dorothy, I think we may have been in Kansas all along.

Autumn Again