Isabelle the Navigator

by Luke Davies

  I was trembling as the doctor led me into the coolroom. Again, I was so entirely prepared for this event: everything was exactly as I’d seen it in the movies. Matt lay on a metal trolley in the middle of the room. A grey sheet covered his body. The doctor pulled it back and stood aside. There lay a whole huge swathe of my future, babies and travel and dreams and a long life together.

  Matt was as handsome as always but the life that was him was not there. His lips were a pale purple and his face a deathly talcum-white, as if made up for a party joke. I touched his cheeks softly with my fingertips, the lightest of grazes already weighed down by the nostalgia of years ahead. He had never made it to work that morning. The image of his face disappeared behind the tears I couldn’t blink out of my eyes, so endlessly and soundlessly were they falling. I felt a sense of desperation; it was the last time I would ever see Matt, and he was distorted, like I was looking at him from behind a waterfall. I stepped aside, blew my nose and wiped my eyes, and tried to force myself to stop crying. ‘Later,’ I said to myself. ‘There’ll be enough time to cry.’ The doctor moved a half-step, ready to pull the sheet back across.

  Wait, I motioned with my hand. ‘Can you pull the sheet down further, please?’

  He undraped the sheet to Matt’s waist. Matt had taken the full force of the truck’s fender side-on and in the torso, I would learn later. Though welts could be seen where his arm had been broken in several places, the skin was not marked but for slight contusions and abrasions. He died from massive internal haemorrhaging, and the faint bands of purple on his chest and stomach were no more than the surface residue of the profound catastrophe that had mangled his insides and ended his life. It is simply terrible, the frailty of the human body.

  I looked at his face for one last time. I looked at the doctor: a clear, clean face, young and strong, that I would always remember.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

  He pulled the sheet up and Matt was gone.

  I walked back outside to Mr and Mrs Smith in the waiting room. They stood up expectantly and before I could reach them I fainted. My mind tries to hold the scene together. That is pretty much all I remember from that day.

  News in Brief

  FOR A LONG TIME I CARRIED THIS CLIPPING IN MY PURSE, as if it were the thing that made Matt’s memory immortal. When I realised the folly of such a bearing, as I read it for the umpteenth time, perhaps on the Paris metro, perhaps in the Jardin du Luxembourg, I crumpled it and threw it away. It was a decisive moment in establishing forward momentum. But I see no reason—at any rate, it’s on the microfiche forever—not to record it here.

  Sydney Telegraph-Mirror, 11 April 1997

  MOTORCYCLIST DIES

  A motorcyclist was killed on King Street, Newtown yesterday morning when his bike and a truck collided. West-bound traffic was delayed for more than an hour.

  The dead man is Matthew Anthony Smith, 31, of Bondi. Police have interviewed a 45-year-old truck driver from Picton. A police spokesperson said last night it was likely that charges of negligent driving and failing to stop at a give-way sign would be laid against the driver.

  After Matt

  AFTER MATT DIES THERE ARE BRIEF MOMENTS IN THE long haul of months when I feel that there might come a time when everything will fit into place and I will accept Matt’s death as a part of my life. That he’s out of my life, for some bizarre reason ordained by the greater forces, so that the way can unfold and the life can truly begin. Death makes you think that cosmic stuff. Loss makes you focus on it, maybe too much. I watch the shadows on the terrace creep through the afternoon. Matt is like a ghost and for a moment all the pain is gone. Imperceptibly, more time passes when I’m not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, reimagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.

  My consciousness of these moments of relief from the thought of Matt comes to me as a shock. I will think, with some delight, I’ve just spent four minutes enjoying myself. How did that happen?

  Two weeks after the funeral I call Matt’s mother and say, ‘It’s just too painful, Anne. So many of his things are everywhere. This is hard, but I think it’s a good idea if we pack some stuff away or give it away. If you and Harvey came and got some stuff. Or maybe the boys might want to take some things.’

  The whole family, Anne and Harvey and Matt’s three brothers, come over one sad Saturday. Matt’s life is divided into throw-away piles and ‘put in the van’ piles. Peter takes the surfboard. I keep the stereo. The two older brothers manage some feeble laughs at Matt’s CDs—‘I don’t know who any of these bands are,’ says David, ‘but I can tell by the covers that it’s not my kind of music.’

  ‘We can divide them,’ I say to Peter.

  I keep most of Matt’s small collection of books. Lots of poetry, some that I’d bought him. Matt always claimed Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse was the greatest poetry ever written. Who am I to argue? It’s a profoundly beautiful book. I’d found it in a junk shop, a turn-of-the-century copy for a dollar. ‘To Matt—in the garden, the thicket, the jungle—wherever! Happy birthday and love always, Isabelle’. The boys divide the clothes they like and the rest are marked for the Salvation Army collection bin.

  Mrs Smith stands looking out the window and begins to cry. David and Peter try to comfort her. She points to the pile of clothes on the floor.

  ‘It’s just,’ she says, ‘it’s just…It seems such a silly little bundle of things to show for a life.’

  I remember the dirty washing that has remained in the laundry, untouched since the funeral. I go in and stare at the glum grey pile for a moment, then force myself to bend down and sift out Matt’s clothes. I pick from the pile his favourite T-shirt: blue, with the NASA logo. I press it to my face, breathe deep. A hot flush courses through me. I throw the T-shirt into the corner.

  I gather up the rest of his clothes and take them back out to the living room. As opposed to the dead room. When Anne and Harvey and the boys all drive away in their separate cars, I know there will be less and less reason to see them and that eventually, it is possible, there will be little or no contact.

  One night, a month or two later, a black thunderstorm rages through Sydney: normally a reason for the skin to tingle with excitement. But tonight the whipping of raindrops on the windowpane frightens and depresses me and I feel a shivering in my bones. I see a vision of myself as a ghost; as a great white canvas sail on a four-master ship. It is frayed and tattered as the gale lashes it. Finally it disintegrates into shreds carried off into the night on Force 10 winds.

  It’s ten o’clock. I ring Father Sheehy, the priest who officiated at the funeral and who had said, and meant it, ‘Ring me any time you need to talk. It’s good to talk sometimes.’

  ‘My dear darling Isabelle,’ he says. ‘No, of course it’s not too late. I’ve thought about you a lot. Above all, your courage.’

  But I don’t feel I have any. It’s just that a decent priest can know the right words. And know how to listen. I talk and talk and barely have a clue what I’m saying. I talk, it seems, for months—to my mother, to my friends, to Louise in particular. And everything, I know, is a part of some great outpouring of Matt, all of the Matt that had gone into me over four years and rested there as part of me, just as part of me had gone into Matt and had left with him, wrenched away from my own self, when he died. I know that for months I have been like a vast cup pouring itself out, a steady flow of Mattness that is not, viewed logically, endless, but certainly feels so in the heart.

  I believe the old saying, ‘If it’s not practical, it’s not spiritual.’ But what I want to hear tonight is impractical advice of the highest order.

  Father Sheehy, a down-to-earth man, says many kind things. Finally I blow my nose and say, ‘Father, I know it’s late. I’m going to go now.’

  ‘Remember,’ he says, ‘it’s written in the Bible—goodness gracious me, I’ve forgotten exactly where!—well, never mind. Somewhere in t
he Bible, it says that God is in the hearts of those who suffer and who hope. Think about it, Isabelle. It’s extraordinary. It’s beautiful. God is in the hearts of those who suffer and who hope.’

  God can go to hell, I think. Where was He for Matt?

  ‘So through all this,’ Father Sheehy continues, ‘God, how ever you choose to conceive of God, is in your heart too. That’s all that faith is, Isabelle. The knowledge that the greater thing is with you. That’s all the faith you need. The knowledge that you are not the greater thing.’

  When the storm has abated the next day I walk down to the beach. I take a long stroll along the path that leads around the rocks and south towards Coogee. I walk as far as the cemetery at Bronte. Down to my left the ocean swell lumbers in and explodes upon the rocks. Above me to the right, the hill is jam-packed with the headstones that have the best ocean views in Sydney. The salt-swept cemetery is a beautiful place. Today it is simply bleak.

  I walk back the way I came, through Bronte Beach and the rocks at McKenzies Bay. On a flat rock just off the path is an Aboriginal carving of a whale, rarely noticed by the passers-by. It is thousands of years old. And yet all I want is the hot breath of Matt on my neck, in my ear, the urgency of my fumbling at the buttons of his shirt.

  The sky swirls with fast-moving dirty grey clouds, the remnants of the storm. There is a chill in the air. I come to the Bondi promenade and walk down the ramp onto the beach. I take off my shoes and the sand is cold. The high tide line is littered with piles of kelp. A brown stain of foam marks the flat hard sand near the water. The sea is dirty with debris and the small waves bunch, choppy and angry. Nobody is swimming or surfing.

  I idle my way along the length of the beach and climb the steps at the north end, back onto the promenade. It’s a quiet day for Bondi: mid-week, blustery weather. I sit on one of the benches facing south, the way I have just come. The afternoon sun, when it appears through the scudding clouds, warms my face.

  In the distance I notice an elderly woman walk down the ramp in front of the surf-lifesaving building and across the sand towards the children’s bathing pool. The woman wears no shoes and I imagine she has left them in her car. She hitches her dress a little and steps knee-deep into the edge of the ocean. Then she moves towards the bathing pool and disappears momentarily, out of view beneath the ledge and the wooden railings against which a jogger stretches.

  I doze with my eyes open, lulled into the trance that Bondi, empty of crowds and open to ocean and sky, can induce. The clouds race low across the sky and disappear towards Rose Bay as if late for an appointment. They are thin clouds now, becoming sparser; sitting sheltered at the sunny end of the promenade, my skin warms and I take off my coat.

  I watch a man come down the ramp with his daughter, a tiny hyperactive girl. He’s laden down with a plastic bucket and spade and towels and a carry bag. It’s obvious from a distance who’s the boss and who’s organised the trip to the beach, despite the weather and against all odds. I smile. The little girl’s thin voice carries broken and fragmented on the wind, ordering her father to hurry up. Then they too disappear from view, in the direction of the children’s pool.

  Always, everywhere, the world is filled with collisions.

  I let the sounds flow through me. The squawking of seagulls approaches and recedes as they make their squabbling rounds. Fragments of conversation reach me from the occasional couple walking past. ‘I know, I know. It’s dreadful,’ I hear. And later, from two women pushing prams: ‘I could have rung Malcolm, but it was meant to be a surprise.’ A car horn blares on Ramsgate Avenue. Further along the beach two men begin hitting a squash ball to each other with paddle bats; the pock of ball on bat is a sharp clear sound through the swishing of the wind and reaches me out of sync with the movements of their arms.

  Behind all the other sounds is the one I love the most: the endless echoing of the ocean. It is as if the cells inside my body recognise the breaking of the waves and their hissing onto the sand from some time long ago.

  I hear a woman’s rough and raucous shouting, but as always at North Bondi, it’s difficult to tell from which direction the noise is coming. Then the words become clear as I strain my ears.

  ‘You keep away from her!’ the voice is screaming.

  There is a lower voice in reply, the voice of a man, but the words are indistinct.

  ‘Don’t you touch her! You keep away from her! I saw what you were doing!’

  And again, the indistinct voice replies, more aggressive this time.

  I realise it’s coming from the children’s pool. Curiosity being far stronger than discretion, I walk over to the railing and look down. It’s the barefoot woman and the man with his daughter. The woman is standing at the far side of the pool in its deepest part, up to her thighs. Her hitched-up dress is wet where it has dipped into the water; her thighs are dimpled. The man is standing below me. The daughter, with spade in hand, is beginning to cry.

  ‘Who is she, Daddy?’ She cowers behind her father’s leg. He tries to stroke her hair and maintain a threatening attitude to the woman at the same time. ‘She’s just a silly old lady, darling. You’re a stupid old woman!’

  Impervious, the woman points. ‘You leave her alone! You leave her alone!’

  The father steps into the wading pool. Unbelievably, the woman steps towards him.

  ‘You stupid old woman, you’re scaring my daughter. How dare you!’

  She points again, arm outstretched, and continues to wade towards him. ‘You leave her alone! I saw what you did!’

  Crouching on the sand, the little girl starts to tremble and blubber. The man retreats and starts gathering their things. ‘Don’t you worry about her,’ he says to his daughter. ‘She’s just a stupid old woman. Come on, we’ll go find somewhere else to play.’

  The woman stands where the man had been a moment before. ‘You leave her alone!’ she screams.

  ‘Look, this is beyond a joke, woman. Look at what you’re doing to my daughter. Now go away!’ He flings his arm towards her.

  She takes another step closer. ‘Leave her alone!’

  The man steps out into the water and gives the woman a hard shove. ‘Get out of here!’ he shouts.

  She loses her balance and falls backwards into a squat. Her dress billows out from her. The man turns and goes to his daughter. The things he had arrived with, so neatly packed, are in disarray. He tries to gather everything up in a hurry but the plastic bucket or one of his sandals or a towel keeps falling to the sand. He leaves them where they fall.

  The woman changes tack. ‘Come and play with me, little girl!’ She keeps abreast of them as they move up the sand. I am trying to move through the months after Matt by finding positive things to focus on, but it seems that I am drawn to this ugliness that lurks beneath the surface of everything, ready to erupt.

  ‘Come and play with me, little girl! Come and play with me, little girl!’ The woman’s voice is hoarse from shouting, manic. There on the sand on the wind-blown day, she truly seems the hag with the gingerbread cottage, the witch who boils children’s heads into soup. The little girl is hysterical. Everybody’s breathless. It’s primal. ‘Come and play with me, little girl!’

  ‘Right, I’m calling the police,’ the father shouts as he moves up the ramp.

  The woman stands in the sand. ‘Daddy loves you!’ she’s shouting, her voice hysterical. ‘Daddy loves you, little girl! Daddy loves you! Daddy loves you!’

  The father and daughter drive away, the daughter sobbing. It’s all over; nobody else seems to have noticed. The woman wanders back to the water, muttering to herself. Everybody is locked in their own agony and palpitations and the hot flush of blood that courses faster than events.

  She enters the water. For a moment I wonder about her intentions, whether I’ll be forced to dive in after her. It is high tide so the waves are breaking where the sand is steep and the old woman is waist-deep only a few steps in. Her dress floats around her like the soft translucent hood
of a jellyfish. She seems happy now. She splashes around, her movements childlike. She never submerges herself but follows the line of the shore as she moves towards the southern end. She is frolicking, splashing, pirouetting. It’s a little bit unusual, a woman in a dress moving along like that a few metres offshore, but it’s not, at Bondi, radically unusual. In the reflected glare and the salt haze, you can barely make her out.

  She takes her time. In half an hour she has not even travelled half the length of the beach. I wonder where she lives, where she came from today, why she is at Bondi, how often she gets hospitalised. The whole event is gone, just like that, and leaves only a trace of its sadness, and after a while she shimmers and disappears altogether into the glare of the setting sun.

  Matthew himself is nothing if not an evaporation. If we could love more fully, knowing that all is going away, we would indeed be lucky. But the wind is howling and clutters our thoughts. Immobile on the bench, I wish for my own tender heart to cease to beat. What in the world is it that makes everything continue?

  The other phrase that comes to mind is more obscure. It is the Latin motto from the title banner of the North Georgia Gazette: per freta hactenus negata, meaning to have negotiated a strait the very existence of which has been denied. But it also suggests a continuing movement through unknown waters.

  BARRY LOPEZ

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  AFTER MATT’S DEATH, THE BLANKNESS OF IT ALL, THE dividing of the worldly goods, the awful sadness of the old lady on the beach, there is for many months the feeling of wading through treacle. I remove myself from family and friends. I take time off from the photo lab. I watch daytime television. There is Days of our Lives, which will keep screening long after the sun exhausts its fuel and fries the planets in its death throes. There is newer American fare, the hypnotically bad, confessional talk shows. On The Ricki Lake Show a red-faced audience member stabs the air with her finger and shouts at a guest: ‘You’re stuck on stupid, Victor, waiting to get dumber!’