The disease had invaded her like termites; she touched, tasted and smelled the useless dust of decaying cortex. And while she was more scared than she had ever been in her life, scared of killing herself, scared she might bungle it, she was adamantly not afraid of death itself. She had always believed that death was as fundamental to being human as birth and maturation. It should have made the act of killing herself easier, but nothing made it any easier.
She sat down at her desk and checked her last list. All the items were ticked off, she tore the paper up and threw it in the bin. She had been nagged by those common sayings, the need ‘to settle your affairs’, ‘to put your house in order’; she expected she had used such expressions herself. But death fills the whole screen, or rather the act of ending life does. Such intervention into the natural course of things demands all your logic, all your attention; suddenly she was required to sky-dive, she who had never cared for heights. It was too much to expect she would put her affairs in order as well.
She cleared a space on her desk and lined up her three pens parallel but not touching, her three fountain pens marking the three major journeys of her life. On the left, the full-bodied, red-orange Parker Duofold from Stephen, nearly eighty years old and still her favourite – a graduation gift, Harry believed, from one of her high school teachers; in the middle, the silver modernity of Fleur’s Lamy; and on the right, the elegant black and gold Waterman from Harry.
He had been so happy when she asked him for a fountain pen. It was her first birthday back in Australia, Fleur was in England; the past, so he believed, had finally been relegated to the past. And how hard she had tried to work with his pen. But despite its elegance it was never as smooth nor as comfortable as Stephen’s Big Red. As for Fleur’s Lamy, like Fleur herself, it had never been a good fit. Eventually she returned to Stephen’s pen, although she kept the truth from Harry.
Gifts come bursting with attachments. Harry’s Waterman was bigger with hopes and expectations than ever could be squeezed inside the cap and barrel of a pen. Yet when she settled on Stephen’s pen she was choosing an object not a person. A writer’s tools are few, you use whatever helps the work. With Stephen’s pen there was an ease of flow, a lovely stretch of sinew as she wrote, the wrist seamless with hand and arm and not the stiffened pivot it became with Harry’s pen. And there was the weight of history in Stephen’s Duofold, the engraving on the barrel, JES 1928, in Old English lettering and a queer privilege to use this pen that had belonged to John Edgar Smith or Jane Elizabeth Scott or the more exotic Jacqueline Eve Slonim. A writer uses whatever works best and it is quite separate from the character of the giver. For Stephen was never more comfortable than Harry, although, like the pen, his advantages had endured. Her life would have been very different without him.
Ms Bryant could put passion into growing potatoes.
The sentence fell into her mind. A reviewer? A publisher’s grab? Where on earth had it come from? And why now?
Ava put the Lamy in a drawer. Stephen’s pen she slipped into its felt pouch and placed on the shelf containing her favourite books. She took a sheet of paper and using his Waterman she wrote to Harry. It took just a moment – no noble world-worn insights, no humorous asides putting death in its place; she had finished her deliberations long ago and now just wanted it over.
She shuffled through the stack of envelopes she and Harry had collected from hotels around the world and settled on one from Paris, the small family-owned hotel on the Left Bank where they had spent their honeymoon and to which they had returned many times since. One of their special places, it was off the tourist track but so perfectly located that with a precarious leaning from the tiny wrought-iron balcony of their room they could see the flying buttresses of Notre Dame.
She propped the letter against her computer where Harry couldn’t miss it. She had cleaned out her email and computer files weeks ago just in case she lost the ability. As it happened it had not been necessary, but the disease was so sly, so well-armed with dirty tricks, she felt she had to be prepared. She had always rejected anthropomorphism but it didn’t matter now. This disease was a terrorist, a monster, a psychopath. This disease was a murderer.
She checked her watch, half past ten, still plenty of time for a leisurely amble to the end and no possibility Harry would return early. He had a day of meetings following his ten o’clock session with the therapist – the same man who had been assigned to them when the disease had first been recognised. ‘To help you get through this,’ he had said at the first and only session Ava attended.
‘Seems to me the disease will take me through with or without your help,’ Ava had remarked.
The counsellor had countered with a speech about adjustment issues. But Ava was still functioning well enough to argue that adjustment to a degenerative condition seemed to be an exercise in futility. ‘You make your adjustment only to discover the horse has bolted, or the drama has shifted, or the whole bloody landscape has changed.’ She paused to swallow her distress before adding, ‘Choose your own metaphor.’
The counsellor had then moved on to grief and anger issues, but Ava had never unpicked herself in front of a stranger and was not about to start. In fact she didn’t want to unburden herself to anyone, all she wanted at that particular time was knowledge. So after the first meeting she opted for the library and the internet and left the counsellor to Harry.
After she was gone, Ava suspected Harry would continue his sessions, he and the therapist passing a weekly hour together in the rich swirl of life’s offerings. And how it irked her. The future was like fiction, so she had always thought, a ream of blank pages waiting to be filled. The books changed, the scenery changed, the characters in life and fiction changed, but whether teetering on the brink of a new novel or a new city or a new relationship she would experience wonder. Not to have a future. It was the greatest of her resentments.
She left her study and crossed the courtyard to the house. She tucked her hair into a clasp, applied fresh lipstick and went to the toilet. For the last wash of her hands she used a small tablet of pure lavender soap, there was no point in saving it any longer. Finally she dabbed on some Je Reviens, not out of any macabre irony but because she liked the scent. Then she took a last walk through the house.
For weeks she had been rehearsing this last hour, for not knowing what else the disease would destroy she had to be sure she could do what was required. And again she was struck by how unfair it was that of all the wounds to shut her down this disease had fed on her words. If there was a God, he was a cruel bastard, or given the play of her life, a vengeful one. But then happiness is always part angel and part debt-collector.
Had she faced death courageously? Not particularly, although courage did not really figure in this. But anger did, and an envy sharp as thorns, and a sense of deprivation that caught like a vice. And she would find herself arguing with something or someone: What have I done, to deserve this? What right have you to mete this out to me? Bloody death and far too soon, bloody disease without a cure. For if the lesions, now quite clear on the scans, had occurred in her breast or uterus or lung or liver, if they had occurred practically anywhere but in her brain, she would have fought and won and lived for years to come.
She was told by one expert, who seemed to know everything except how to cure her, that anger was bad for her. These doctors with all their advice were useless. And the one thing they can do they refuse. ‘I’m trained to save lives,’ the neurologist said when she asked him to save her from a long and protracted dying. And how could she lecture him about the invisible seam connecting life to death, how life is more than a simple drawing of breath, how life without the capacity to remember is no life at all? How could she explain this with her language in tatters and the doctor so self-righteous in all his damned ignorance?
She collects Valium, water, a glass and her favourite single malt and returns to the study. She takes from the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet a plastic bag with an elastic colla
r – not her choice, but what else is available when barbiturates are not? She positions herself on the carpet near the window and swallows fifty milligrams of Valium with a glass of well-diluted Cardhu, enough of both to put her out but not so much to make her sick. She takes in a last view of her garden. It shimmers through the glass. Her head is light her whole body is levitating. She opens her collected Eliot to Prufrock and reads or recites or remembers – whatever she is doing it is sweetly comforting – and nestles into the yellow fog. What will her life be measured in? Why did Eliot choose coffee spoons not teaspoons? And pulls the plastic bag over her head. She checks the pillow – no time, eyelids closing, impossible to stay awake, such relief to sink back, the sound of her own breathing, and rustling, a rustling of trees, trees in her study and sinking into the pillow down and down.
And suddenly she’s awake. She’s tearing at the plastic, she’s tearing it from her face. She defies the Valium, she defies the scotch, she defies the desire to die. She’s tearing at the plastic. Can’t help herself. Her body rears up, it’s fighting carbon dioxide. The bag is in her hands, she shoves it in the drawer, she grabs the note and shoves that in the drawer too. No one must know, no one must suspect. She drags herself to her feet, she drags herself down the stairs, she drags herself across the courtyard into the house. She staggers past the couch, she staggers past Harry’s room, at last she reaches her own bedroom. And even as she is falling asleep she is furious at being reduced to a plastic bag over her head, furious at her failure to bring it off, furious at having to cover her tracks. There’s no privacy when you’re ill. And there’s no bloody justice.
2.
There’s a mysterious, not-quite-conscious dynamic that develops between people in a close and long marriage. Exaggerated gestures, twitchy eye contact, a particular choice of words that would be irrelevant to other people are significant to a partner. And there was something about Ava this morning that is haunting Harry, just a scraping at the edge of consciousness while he was at his counselling session but far stronger now.
He tries to shake it off with a cup of peppermint tea and the morning papers, but it will not be ignored. A shuffling of guilt for leaving Ava alone all day? General anxiety about her diminishing abilities? And suddenly he neither knows nor cares but he has to go home, he has to see she is safe, the phone will not do. He grabs his coat, gives instructions to his secretary and rushes out of the office. The way Ava looked at him this morning, her farewell hug, he cannot put his finger on it but something was not right.
Both lifts are at the ground floor. He pounds the call button. At last they begin to climb. Come on, he says through gritted teeth, come on. The lifts are rising in tandem. They stop, they start, they stop, they start. Closer they come to the twenty-seventh floor, closer and closer then both soar past. Both of them are heading to the penthouse suite. How many people could possibly be up there? At last one descends. The doors open, the lift is empty. Express to the ground, and he keeps his finger pressed on the ‘door closed’ button. But the system overrides him. The lift stops at nine different floors. The screeching inside him threatens to burst. When the lift reaches the ground he pushes out first, dashes across the lobby and into the street. There’s a line of cabs. The fellow in the first car looks like he just got off the boat, but the driver behind has the appearance of a man who hasn’t left his cab for a couple of decades.
The driver protests: Ya gotta take the first one, mate.
Harry ignores him and jumps into the passenger seat. He gives the address.
The cabby shrugs and pulls into the traffic.
It’s a quagmire.
Harry is desperate. ‘I need to get home.’ He raises his voice. ‘Matter of life and death.’
And suddenly the cabby perks up. He pulls down on the steering wheel, whips out of the traffic, clips a wedge of footpath, enters a narrow lane. A right turn into a bluestone alley and the car jolts and rocks over the clotted stone. He dashes up slender alleys, he cuts across a vacant lot, he weaves through a building site, he negotiates lanes built for bikes and hand-carts. No danger, he says, everyone will get out of the way. No worries, he says, he’ll have Harry home in a jiffy. He runs a set of lights. He overtakes a car on the inside. What about the police? Harry asks. Better things to do, says the cabby. He turns into Lygon Street at the southern end of the cemetery. He plants his foot. They’re doing eighty kilometres an hour along the tram tracks.
Ten minutes later the cab pulls up outside his house. Harry shoves a fifty at the driver and is out of the car, calling Ava’s name even before he opens the front door. Down the hall and into the living room. Ava, Ava, where are you? Then to the kitchen – where is she? He opens the back door, is about to cross to her study when he stops and turns back into the house. He enters her bedroom.
And there she is. She’s slung across the bed on her back, a pillow under her head. From the doorway he notices the rise and fall of her breathing. She’s asleep – odd for her to be sleeping on her back – but undoubtedly asleep. Her colour is good, she’s breathing normally, she’s all right. And hasn’t he told her to rest? Take naps during the day, he has said to her, conserve your energy.
He sits gently on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake her. He watches the rise and fall of her chest; her breaths draw slow and deep. She’s wearing the cashmere jumper he gave her for her thirty-first birthday. He reaches out and lays his hand over her heart. Her chest rises and falls, his hand rises and falls. If only he were able to channel his life into her. Down his arm out of his hand into her skin through her ribcage into her heart into her blood, his life pumping life into her body and making her well. He focuses on his arm and hand, wills something – heat? energy? life? – to flow from him to her. But it won’t work, the exercise is far too contrived for a man like him. But he wants to believe, he wants to believe he can save her.
She snuffles in her sleep, her eyes move behind the lids, there are her usual purrings and murmurings. He catches a whiff of alcohol, her perfume or cleanser. His girl, his Davey, still so beautiful. He will never be ready to lose her.
He sits on the edge of her bed. His hand rises and falls on her breast, while she sleeps on.
CHAPTER 15: The Ghost of Youth
1.
There were several trams lined up in the street outside Flinders Street Station. Ava boarded one with a number more familiar than the others on the assumption she must have taken this route as a girl. In the late morning lull the tram was almost empty yet she was still vacillating in the aisle when it started to move. This is not a major life decision, she told herself, and took the nearest seat. She jammed herself against the window and stared through the glass.
The tram passed Federation Square and crossed over the Yarra River into St Kilda Road. This broad boulevard lined with great knobbly plane trees had been known as the golden mile back in the 1970s, an allusion, Ava had believed with youthful idealism, to the art and beauty of the period homes and not the prime real estate. At that time most of the mansions had already been converted into offices, but the original bluestone and red-brick façades had been preserved along with the wrought-iron lacework and the leisurely English gardens. Entrances were via tessellated tile verandahs and heavy timber doors, and there was a plethora of brilliant leadlight windows.
Art and beauty had now succumbed. The plane trees remained, but the splendid old places and their glorious gardens had all disappeared. And while the Botanic Gardens and the Shrine of Remembrance had postponed the glass-clad towers on the eastern side of the boulevard, a kilometre or two beyond the city centre, the road was wedged between skyscrapers on both sides.
Ava was sorry for the loss. Place supplies the scaffolding to memory, and given her memory’s wear and tear it needed all the support it could get. She travelled down this boulevard and looked out on a landscape that was largely foreign. She knew she had walked here many times by herself, also with Stephen. And Helen too, a vague memory, early one morning – had they been up
all night studying? – the two of them leaving the city after breakfast with the night workers and crossing the river into the Botanic Gardens. Dew on the grass, the new blue sky and she and Helen dancing over the lawns.
The days of dancing at dawn with Helen in the Botanic Gardens might have happened in another life. And while she expected friendships to change, to stroke with the current of the times as her friendship with Jack had done, these days the familiar Helen was almost entirely absent. Ava understood the time-consuming passions for a son, and she had always understood work passions, but the allegiances Helen’s science now required were in a different league altogether. Her old friend Helen would sell her soul out of misguided loyalty and a warped integrity, but she would not help her best friend.
It was in the wake of Helen’s refusal that the surprising idea had started to form. At first she shoved it aside along with all the other bizarre thoughts this illness threw at her. But it kept nudging her. Finally she took it on and considered it properly. Stephen Webb. The only person who had never refused her.
The block of flats where they used to meet was located further down St Kilda Road. Twenty-five years ago it had been a building with neither style nor distinction and always a disappointment in this grand thoroughfare; it would, she was sure, have been ripped down. As the tram glided through the Toorak Road intersection she kept a close watch. Closer and closer they came to where she thought the block had been. And there it was! Brinsley Close. She recognised it immediately. Brinsley Close, still standing. She could not believe her luck.
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