The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  Inside, she begins to yawn.

  I raise the tadpoles, each in its own sawed-off soda bottle filled with filtered water. The bottles are grouped by temperature – hot or cool or cycling between the two – and twice a day, I drop a pinch of frozen spinach into each container. It floats on the surface of the water, and the tadpole swims up, nibbles it, piece by piece, until it is gone. Vegetation becomes flesh and faeces, tadpoles become small striped frogs, and though reared apart, animals in the same treatment emerge much the same. The environment is everything.

  When Lane-Claypon married in her fifties, she retired due to restrictions on the employment of married women.

  Inside my breasts, multi-potent stem cells create new capacities. Ducts extend and multiply; fat pads expand with epithelial tissue; alveolar bulbs enlarge and become secretory – as in secrete, not secret. (Should not be secret.) I buy practical, rose-shaded bras with front clips for feeding.

  On Friday, I must print out my thesis and carry it across campus to the Research Office, where they will stamp the time on it and prepare to send it to the reviewers. I have written the chapters, inserted the figures, formulated the conclusions; all that’s left is to format, fit the words to the template.

  But then she is here. Fifteen days early. On Thursday.

  The day before Friday.

  I want to be an academic, a scientist, a woman, a mother, her mother. But I don’t know how to do this, all of it, at once. This push off from land into water, where I can’t see the bottom. I have to swim; I can’t swim. I’m ready, not ready.

  Parity, or childbirth, is associated with cancer risk. Women having their first child at an ‘advanced age’ are significantly more likely to develop hormone-receptive breast cancer, which grows more rapidly in response to oestrogen or progesterone. In most studies, advanced age is defined as twenty-four years.

  When she is born: I am thirty-one.

  Part II

  Dear Amanda, Please be aware that the last day to submit your thesis so you are not incurring any fee penalty is tomorrow. If this is not possible, then the only way to avoid paying fees is to take an interruption to your candidature. This will need to be done URGENTLY. Could you please advise whether you will submit by tomorrow? Kind regards.

  Human breastmilk contains 400 different proteins and 200 different lipids; numerous factors that reduce inflammation and promote antibody production, protecting the developing infant; bacteria from the more than 200 genera that colonise the intestine; and pluripotent stem cells, which are thought to move throughout the infant’s body, boosting growth and development.

  When she is hungry: her face flushes, clenches; she screams and twists; she grapples for my nipple but does not latch, will not seal, cannot be filled by what I give her. She is too much and

  I am not enough.

  Social psychology tells us there are four ways to respond to philosophical contradictions in the formation or maintenance of relationships: (a) select one option, and ignore or deny the other; (b) separate options into discrete contexts; (c) attempt both options but without full realisation of either; (d) construct a reality where the options are no longer perceived as contradictory.

  Reality (n): the true situation as it exists, rather than how it is imagined or appears to be.

  I am not going to give her a dummy, a pacifier, a silicone plastic plug. She is not that kind of child; I am not that kind of mother. But my choices are no longer mine to make, and when my skin and nerves are raw and I press the thing into her mouth, she eases.

  Parity, or functional equality, remains an issue in the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, mathematics – where women are paid less, promoted more slowly, and awarded fewer honours and leadership roles than male colleagues. Though 50 per cent of Australian undergraduates, PhD students and Level A academics in the sciences are women, only 10 to 15 per cent of Level E (professorial) academics are. Marriage and childbirth account for the greatest losses of women in academia after obtaining their PhD.

  In Australia, 91.5 per cent of surgeons are male.

  I used to jut into the world. Jut. Now I slump, gape, sag; my belly hangs, does not return to what it was before, could not – even if I wanted it to.

  Even if I didn’t.

  In 1811, novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney was given a wine cordial, a stack of old mattresses to lie upon, and a mastectomy. Anaesthesia had not yet been invented. ‘You must expect to suffer,’ the doctor said. ‘I do not want to deceive you.’ He removed her breast and scraped her clean, and she survived.

  Every chapter of my thesis begins the same way, with heterogeneity, variation, change. And yet, I am not ready when change comes.

  When she is seven months old: a hard ball in my upper chest, near the armpit. I run my hand over it in the shower. I run. My hand. I pause. The physician says lactation, blocked duct, come back in a couple of weeks, have a scan in seven. Nothing to worry about.

  I don’t believe her.

  I picture it black, bulbous, dense. I want to feel it outside my body – hold it, consider then crush it in my hands, through my fingers. But I am given a general anaesthetic. I do not see when the surgeon cuts it out and sets it on a steel tray or plops it into a specimen container to be examined by the pathologist, who will characterise it and set out my life before me, however much is left.

  I wake; I gasp for words.

  Gregor Samsa wakes, and he is a beetle.

  I graduate in July. I have a PhD. I have a prognosis, a surgeon (male), an oncologist (female). I have a dip in my breast, a long puckered scar. I have no hair. My daughter wears pink for the photos.

  When it is over: it is never over.

  Part III

  One cell, two cells, cells in the lining of the lobule; cells transform, cells become immortal, cells become more cells, acidify adjacent cells, spread, invade, overcome; cells amass, vascularisze; cells pass into the lymph or the blood; cells move, cluster; cells colonise distal tissues; cells replicate again and again and again and again.

  My cancer is confined to the breast. The right breast.

  There is never a right breast.

  But I survive.

  In 1940, scientist and philosopher C.H. Waddington described embryonic development as an ‘epigenetic landscape’, later represented as a ball (cell) perched at the top of a ridged slope, ready to roll down, specialise, differentiate, slip into one gully or another, become this or that kind of tissue, nudged onto a trajectory by genes and communication among cells. To a point, each cell can be anything.

  When I was a girl: I wanted to be Miss America. A detective. An otter. A writer. I ran through the yard with invisible wolves, weaving between the apple tree and the cherry, the metal swing set, the pill-shaped propane tank, under the clothesline. Sometimes, they cornered me; sometimes, I escaped. Inside the house, I pressed stories through black ink ribbons and scrawled them in notebooks with spiral bindings – stories about fairies and unicorns, ponies, children, getting lost, finding the way back.

  A dead heart can be erased, washed with special detergents to remove cardiac cells, leaving behind only the structure, the matrix of proteins and fibres and vessels that held the cells in place. The heart becomes translucent.

  And then it can be remade. Pluripotent stem cells, embryonic or induced, are cultured and seeded into the empty organ, and they repopulate it, grow into its scaffolding, mature. Begin to function and communicate.

  No, she is the only one. The one. And only. No brothers or sisters. I will never have another child. But she is beautiful; she is enough. She has to be enough. I couldn’t want for anything more.

  Could I?

  When she starts school: I make carrot muffins, or zucchini, or sweet potato (no nuts), and tuck them into the steel lunchbox in the insulated bag in her too-big backpack. Her uniform is blue and white plaid, leaf-crisp. I walk her up the stairs to her classroom, and she sets her bag outside the door and says, I love you, Mummy, and kisses me and gives me a hug and
another kiss and another hug and turns to go in. I stand and watch because I can’t leave, not yet, in case she needs me.

  According to the website, the objectives of the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme are to: support excellent basic and applied research by early career researchers, advance promising early career researchers and promote enhanced opportunities for diverse career pathways, enable research and research training in high-quality and supportive environments, expand Australia’s knowledge base and research capability, and enhance the scale and focus of research in the Science and Research Priorities.

  I win the award, study sex and death. And I write.

  The body’s stem cells maintain their ability to regenerate; differentiate; accumulate mutations over time; become cancer; evade the immune system; resist chemotherapy and radiation; move through the body; persist.

  I watch, on television, a tumour being taken from a woman’s breast, and it shocks me: the mass is enclosed in adipose flesh, fatty meat. I cannot make out the darkness inside.

  And if I only have five years left?

  Evocation, according to Waddington, is ‘[the adoption] of one or the other of the alternative paths of development open to it.’

  House of Flowers

  Jennifer Rutherford

  Florence and I are packing her bags when Dad calls to say my mother collapsed and has been admitted to hospital. I have been looking for a diversion, trying to hold off the moment of Florence’s departure for Paris. She is sloughing off school shoes, uniform and me, running for all her life out into the dizzying world. I can see her scenting freedom on the breeze and it doesn’t smell of mother, of nights chatting by the fire, of home cooking. But the packing stalls and instead we fly together to Sydney, and drive up the Pacific Highway, getting to the hospital just before closing time.

  My mother has been ill for months from an infection she caught looking after Dad when he was in hospital recovering from heart surgery. Nothing stops him, not even a heart attack. Before long he was tapping out tunes with his stick as he walked the streets whistling Ode to Joy as jubilantly as he had all through my childhood. But the staphylococcus hooked mum and was drawing her in, cutting a channel through the soft folds of her flesh.

  Dad has always been bigger than life but these days he says life is an ever-increasing diminishment and, sure enough, we find Mum diminished. The hospital room is loud with flowers. Roses and tulips boxing for attention, sunflowers slapping the day, and Mum, a solitary storm-drenched snowdrop barely able to raise her head from the pillow. They have injected her with so much cortisone that even the shower has tracked its path on her like rain falling on glass.

  The next morning Florence and I are sitting in my brother’s garden sipping tea – attempting to comfort each other with small pats – when B. phones to say that the chooks have been killed in the night. He has found them strewn across the garden. Floraville, lying at the doorway of the henhouse, has had her head bitten off. Not far off, Henrietta’s guts are spewing out of her stomach. Lucy’s red petalled crown is lying on its own, some way from what is left of her. All that is left of Milly is a trail of feathers stretching across the garden, under the fence, and into the neighbour’s meadow. The fox has stopped several times to pluck out snatches of feathers, and whole clumps of them are drifting across the grass. This is what B. says, on the phone, as Florence pats me, and we sip tea, trying not to think of Mum lying in that bleak room overrun with flowers.

  ‘Devastated’ is a word Mum overuses. There are many things in her life that are devastating – hard days, heatwaves, minor injuries – but, as I drive Florence back home from the airport, I think the word has found its proper place.

  *

  We called them Lucy, Mildred, Henrietta Pennyworth and Floraville, each of us naming and claiming one of them as our own. I can see now that, from the beginning, I was making Floraville something beyond herself, something that belonged more to me than to herself. Call it foolish anthropomorphism, call it what you will, but from the beginning Floraville was a chook in a floral dress bound for misadventure.

  Long ago I had named a French doll Floraville, although back then we named her in the language of her native tongue, Fleurville, the slight purr on the r, the pause between syllables – so much more evocative than the harsh conjunctive a. It was when my husband and I were living in Paris before Florence was born, when we hadn’t yet arrived at any of the events that would tear us apart. Before the death of his parents, and before I was found guilty of a crime I have never quite been able to put my finger on. Before she died, his mother charged me with them all. I was the wrong age, the wrong nation, the wrong religion and, intractably, wrongly mannered. But my crime was all of this, and something more. Some blemish of joy rusting out the iron in him – in them. Something that got in, as he said, when he left. But long before all this, there had been Fleurville, a doll I found in pieces in a shoebox at the puce. Even disassembled, horsehair spilling from the tears in her cloth body, her face mired in a century’s grime – I knew her as mine. Even broken she was too dear for us, but books were sold and the week’s food money whittled into.

  I wonder if I hadn’t been so impetuous, so taken up with passing fancies, he might not have left, but who would that girl have been? Not me. Some other, more habitable person? Maybe the word I’m looking for is decorous, maybe I might have been more decorous.

  Warm water, soap, and a needle and thread were all it took to stitch her back into life. There were small holes in her legs and arms so that her body could be stuffed into porcelain limbs and stitched back into place. I patched. I stitched. I washed. I knew she would be finely boned and beautiful, but the quizzical expression that came up out of the muddy water – a look of such perplexed intelligence – made the thrift she cost us a small penance for the joy of her sitting on the mantelpiece and being a part of our lives. She was waiting there when I brought Florence home from the hospital. Fleurville, our Sadeian heroine, ravaged by misadventure, but still bearing up. But then, the shipping company we’d entrusted with transporting all our possessions back to Australia went bust and she disappeared without a trace along with everything we owned. Perhaps she was sold off in a job lot along with our books, our china, our linen. Perhaps she ended up back in a box at the puce. Recomposed as she was, she might have sold for a pretty penny and started out on a new adventure. How many owners, how many mantelpieces, how many bedrooms has that glass-eyed girl seen as she moved from hand to hand for over a century? Still, I prefer to think of her in the trunk where I carefully packed her, floating down into the bottomless ocean depths, lost at sea. I often imagine her there. I can see her gently bobbing among the dishes, still puzzled, still gently questioning this new twist of fate.

  Floraville the Australorp was quizzical and curious too, but far more robust in the way she leaned into life. She came into our life loudly. Chattering, vociferous, bossy, and relentlessly curious about everything human. People who know nothing about chooks imagine that there is some rightness in the fate allotted to them, as if a chook’s Being is fully realised in its use value. Chooks stuff cushions, lay eggs, eat food scraps, reconstitute garden soil, fuel fast-food industries, grace tables with soups, salads, pies, dumplings and, ultimately, are fully realised stuffed with lemon and thyme, wings upturned for the roast. Clever chooks. Constantly in service at table while syllabising away at us from the sidelines. Stop. Go back. Wrong way. One is never far from a chook running amok without its head. A dumb chook, an old chook – they are the negative form of us. I can’t imagine a woman buoyed up by the thought of becoming chook. Compliments never come in the form of a chook (chickens, yes; chooks, no), but, despite all the warnings chooks give us of how not to be, most of us, slowly, inevitably, become chook – ending lives of service as plucked, silenced and trussed as a chook en route to the oven.

  Cheer up, I tell myself. You are not the good woman, the little red hen, doing the doing – all the way to the pot.

  No
r was Floraville. She was never going to be anyone’s breakfast, or at least that is what I had read in a fairy story about chooks and flowers – long before she lost her head. If she’d had a mind for such things, Floraville would have sided with that version of her story. Within days of her arrival in the garden she had left the caged bird behind and was running with her sisters through the dark tunnels of the garden, romancing the day with secret egg hoards and mysteries we could only guess at. Roaming with her sisters further and further afield, she crossed the creek bed and entered the thickets of briar along the fence line, and there, on the far side of a hen allowed her freedom, we would catch glimpses of her becoming chook. Unleashed from duty, amok with desire, perfumed with dust, she gambolled, played, discoursed, and discovered herself: a chook acquiring the lost art of becoming.

  Chookness belongs to the undergrowth. It takes long days, long grass, hawks overhead, the neighbouring cat, rivalry, hierarchy, and the passing of seasons. There are vocabularies to learn, grammars to accomplish. These chatterers of the under-garden arrive at rhetoricity like we do, babbling first, then endlessly repeating plosives until finally they arrive at chook song, a carolling to and fro announcing bounty, the cooings of guarded moments, the rhythmic silences, the triumphant cry of a new egg seizing the day.

  Strangely, Floraville’s becoming didn’t preclude us. Lining up at the door every morning, she and her sisters would stand in a row peering into the kitchen, waiting for B. and I to make our first appearance of the day. Head down, tail up, eyes pinned for a sign of movement, and then the announcement: humans afoot. Floraville ran a commentary on all the goings-on of house and garden, announcing everything we did to her sisters, and then running tales to us. Bossing us along until we’d come and see, an egg dropped, food scattered.