New Australian Stories 2 (21 page)

When he was stronger, I introduced Phuong to him. My father took to her straightaway, and Phuong was fascinated by his swearing, especially the infinite uses he made of
fuck
, a word that could be traced back to the eighth century.

‘Och, I don't give a fuck!' he would say when he disagreed, or ‘Get to fuck!'

When she heard him, my mother would cry from wherever she was in the house, ‘Oh, Jimmy! Can you please mind your language!' She had returned to look after my father. I don't think he ever realised that she had left him: my mother never mentioned it to him.

After the stroke, he never smoked or drank again. His speech gradually became more coherent, but no less filthy. When I visited him he would stand up and say, ‘Come here, you daft bastard!' and then embrace me. Then he would turn to my wife and, kissing her cheek, say, ‘I don't know how he was smart enough to get someone like you, hen. He never had any common sense. As thick as pigshit, unstirred and undiluted. Except for his words. I'll give him that, the bastard.'

In my father's curses was his blessing.

Damn

My father came to live with us after my mother died. She was killed by an aggressive form of cancer that, up to the end, she was unable to pronounce. My father stayed at her side the entire time in the two months she was dying. When she was asleep, he would pray to God, unconscious of his blasphemies.

‘Our father who art in heaven,' he would plead, ‘for fuck's sake, help my wife.'

One afternoon my father began to tell, once more, the story of the cock.

‘Oh, Jimmy,' my mother said feebly. ‘Not that again.'

‘Just listen,' he said. His recollection of the story was remarkable, although he had to stop half-a-dozen times when he couldn't find the word he wanted, and then my mother would help him.

‘Greenhouse,' she would say softly. ‘You were fixing the greenhouse.'

As he neared the end of the story, I straightened up as — for the first time — he deviated from the well-rehearsed script of decades.

‘Well,' he said, ‘your mother went away to get a … What is it? Damn! Ah, a handkerchief because of my nose. And I thought … And I thought to myself, Jimmy, you've got to see this lassie again. So I took a whatdoyoucallit … a rock. And I put a fucking crack in the lounge-room window!' He laughed. ‘I cracked it, and I showed it to your mother so she would have me back again to fix it. So she would have me back …'

He looked down at her, and my mother took his hand.

‘You never told me that part,' she said, smiling.

She died the next day.

My father was silent at the funeral, perhaps afraid of swearing in front of my mother's friends and relatives, and making her ashamed of him once more. So he didn't say a word throughout the service, or in the car, or at the cemetery where he stood holding my son's hand as his wife was laid to rest.

I drove my father back to the house to pack his things. When we got home, my father sat on the back deck as I shifted boxes into a truck. It was after sundown by the time I had finished, and my father was still sitting there, in the dark. I went out and sat beside him.

‘Damn,' he said.

‘What is it?'

‘That's the only time your mother ever fucking swore at me,' my father said quietly. ‘Just the once. She said, “Damn.”'

I didn't tell my father that
damn
came from the Middle English
dampen
, itself derived from the Latin
damnare
, to condemn, to inflict loss. He already knew exactly what it meant.

For a moment I could think of no word to comfort him. Then I cried out ‘when!', and without a second's pause my father farted, loudly, enormously.

And he threw back his head and roared his laughter at the darkness.

The Sixth Cycle

JACINTA HALLORAN

From her chair in the day ward, Teresa looked out over the elm trees in the park across the road. The first time she'd been there the trees were bare. By her third chemo cycle there were new leaves budding, like little tumours, on every twig on every tree. Now it was mid December, and the leaves were thick and lush, and the trees threw dense circles of shade onto the grass. This afternoon, if she felt well enough, she'd say goodbye to everyone then cross the road and stand under one of those trees for a minute. Her little farewell ceremony. ‘All finished before Christmas,' the oncologist had said the last time she'd seen him. ‘That's nice timing.' As if she'd somehow planned it.

Lucia, her yoga teacher, had suggested a mantra for chemo days.
It is what it is, no more and no less.
When, at the end of a Wednesday-night class, Lucia had first whispered it to her, Teresa had felt drowsy and warm, but perhaps it had been the heat in the room, or the way Lucia had said it: all brimming with confidence, her soft Scottish brogue so soothing, her hands lightly resting on Teresa's temples.
It is
what it is, no more and no less.
Lucia wasn't young, but she seemed it. She'd travelled the world: South America and India, years of her life spent in places that weren't home. She was open to everything. Now, as the nurse — Joanne it was today — wheeled the IV towards her, Teresa wished for Lucia's flexibility of outlook. A flexible body and a flexible mind: six months' worth of salutes-to-the-sun and breathing —
so
much breathing — yet, still, she didn't have either.

‘Your last day,' Joanne said, tightening the tourniquet on Teresa's arm. Joanne had round cheeks, a Cupid's bow of a mouth, and a blunt, brown bob that swung like a curtain. ‘You must be happy.'

Happy? Was she happy? Was that what it was; this strange anticipation that sat, like a bubble of air, just under her sternum? But she was being too literal: an English teacher's habit. ‘Yes,' she said with a smile. ‘Very happy. Though you've all been wonderful here.'

‘We do our best,' Joanne replied, tapping confidently at a vein on Teresa's left forearm. She picked up the IV cannula and steadied it against Teresa's skin. ‘Okay, here goes. Lucky last needle.'

From time to time during the morning, Joanne walked past and asked Teresa how she was feeling.

‘As well as can be expected,' she'd reply, or ‘Pretty good, thanks.' The nausea was manageable, so long as she didn't think about it.

She'd learned that trick during her first cycle, on her way back from the bathroom, where she'd been vomiting her heart out. She'd stopped to fix a twist in her IV tubing when a man in the chair nearby had spoken to her.

‘Keep your thoughts above your stomach,' he'd said. Just like that.

‘Are you offering me advice?' she'd countered irritably. Her hands were tingling uncomfortably — the nurses had warned her they might — and she was still feeling sick.

‘Yes.' He looked at her over the top of his reading glasses. ‘I've found it's best to think abstractly, or to look out the window, or read something you love.' The book on his lap was
A Passage to India
. ‘Just don't let your thoughts drift down to' — he patted his stomach — ‘you know where.'

She smiled at the familiar tone of his voice. ‘Let me guess. You're a teacher.'

‘More or less. University academic. Botany. And now a self-proclaimed expert in chemotherapy. Last dose today of my second course.' He was thin, and as bald as a billiard ball, but he had a kind face.

‘
A Passage to India
is one of my favourites, too,' she'd said.

‘What are you doing for Christmas?' Joanne asked as she changed the IV bag.

‘Having lunch with my brother and his family.' Teresa smiled so that Joanne could see she was looking forward to it. ‘He has four teenage sons: can you believe it? The youngest are twins. All lovely boys.' She was gilding the lily: Callum, the fifteen-year-old, had been a handful all year, and lately the twins were at each other's throats. Just last month their mother, Meredith, had talked to Teresa about it. Should they change schools? The all-boys thing had worked well for the oldest one, but perhaps the others would do better to mix with girls. What did Teresa think? ‘The best thing you can do for boys is to integrate them socially,' she'd told her sister-in-law. ‘Some of the most positive friendships I've seen at school have been between boys and girls.' She'd been surprised at her directness, but Meredith had taken it well. Her diagnosis had made her more forthright, and Meredith less so.

Joanne flicked at a bubble in the IV tubing. She had lovely nails, Teresa noticed; all the same length, perfectly shaped and lacquered with shiny clear polish. ‘What about you?' Teresa asked. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?'

Joanne raised her eyebrows. ‘We wanted to go to Thailand on the twenty-second, me and my boyfriend. You know, just forget about the whole thing. But my mother had a fit when I told her. So we're flying out Boxing Day instead.'

The night before, Meredith had dropped by Teresa's house with a plastic container of chicken-and-sweetcorn soup. ‘It's light,' Meredith said. ‘Good for summer.' She'd also brought two magazines:
Vogue Living
and
Marie Claire
.

‘You really shouldn't have,' Teresa told her, as she put the soup in the fridge. ‘You have enough to do as it is, and with Christmas coming.'

Meredith was dismissive. ‘It's no trouble. I have to cook anyway, so I just make a little more. Six or seven: what's the difference?'

So Teresa had her magazines, and she always brought a book or two along with her. Today it was two of the texts for next year's literature class: D.H. Lawrence's short stories and
A Passage to India
. Last month, when she saw the Forster novel on the Year 12 reading list, she remembered the man who was reading it the day she'd felt so ill. The botany professor, she called him. She hoped he'd got back to work, to his plants and his students. She imagined him in a glasshouse, whistling while he worked, with dirt under his fingernails.

She read quickly through one of the Lawrence stories: the imagery was all well and good, but his attitude to women! The girls at school would hate it. She could just imagine the arguments in class: the girls articulate and indignant; the boys stirring them up for a laugh, yet secretly enthralled. And she, their teacher, trying to keep the peace, to get them to focus on themes and characterisation, all the while a little in love with them all; with their energy and youth, their possibility.

She picked up
A Passage to India
and began to read.

‘So it really is a favourite of yours.'

She looked up to see the botany professor, dressed in khaki shorts and a checked short-sleeve shirt. He was no longer bald: instead a hopeful white fuzz, as fine as fairy floss, crowned his head like a halo. He pointed to the book in her hand, and she felt dizzy, unmoored, as if the two of them had suddenly changed places. ‘It's a Year 12 literature text for next year,' she said. ‘I'm just refreshing my memory.'

‘Then I hope your students enjoy it as much as we both do.'

He hadn't asked if she was a teacher. She liked that he didn't seem to bother with redundancies. He simply put two and two together and got on with it.

‘Are you here for a check-up?' she asked.

‘Preliminary blood tests,' he said, sitting down next to her. ‘I'm back for another course of the best stuff next week.'

‘Another full course?' He'd barely been away. Just five short months.

‘Yes, the works. So long as I can manage it. Which I will.'

He stayed to have a cup of tea with her. There was a plate of fruit too, brought by Joanne; thin cantaloupe slices and cubes of watermelon and grapes, cold from the fridge. The professor ate steadily while they talked about books. He was a fan of the modernists, he told her, reaching for another slice of cantaloupe. His appetite seemed infectious, so much so that she surprised herself by eating a whole bunch of grapes.

When the fruit was all gone, and she was afraid he might at any moment get up and leave, she found herself saying, ‘I don't know what to think about it: having cancer, that is. I don't think it's given me any wider perspective, any great insights. I don't feel particularly spiritual.' She stopped. Had she upset him? He didn't look upset. He wasn't squirming in his chair. ‘But there's one thing,' she went on. ‘It sounds ridiculous really.'

‘I don't mind ridiculous.'

‘It's something I've been thinking about lately. Not analysing in any way, but I often find the thought has drifted into my mind. It's about these two men.'

‘Ah! Sordid confessions.'

‘No, quite the opposite. Terribly mundane.'

‘But still you keep thinking about them, so that's interesting in itself.'

Teresa hesitated. What could she tell him? She didn't have a story in mind: rather a ragbag full of memories. No, less than memories: hazy recollections and vague interpretations of things that had happened so long ago that she sometimes felt they'd happened to someone else. He was looking at her, waiting. It was her move. She took a deep breath.