Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  Max’s grief at his separation from his parents was awful but I do remember the day he recovered. We had gone out, leaving him slumped in position in his chosen room. On our return, he came racing up from the garden and greeted us like his family. He was restored to himself and I believe to his happy childhood through returning to the garden; a sense of his past happiness was his again.

  Max was my consolation for the loss of Lily and was now a constant companion on my rovings at the witching hour in the Carrington grounds. Near the end of October, when the evenings were longer, I would walk around Carrington with Max after dinner. I can in my imagination do this anytime. Down Farm Road, the road that leads to Oakley and Carrington, then down the hill, to my left a massive paddock, a swamp with pukeko and ducks flourishing in the grasses and reeds. On my right the black and white heifers sport in the green paddock in bright sunshine. At the bottom of the hill, there is the little bridge crossing the creek. At the creek beside the road live two Muscovy ducks.

  I bring them bread and as I come down the hill those two lovely ducks would rise up out of the creek, performing their welcoming dance, swooping with ecstatic twists, entrancing. The female duck is so absorbed in her creativity she is hit by the hospital laundry truck and killed. Muscovy ducks mate for life – the drake’s grief upset the devastated truck driver as much as it upset me. He was taken to Western Springs but he returned to the creek, to mope and to wander about in a desolate fashion until he died. On the periphery of my vision, the two Muscovy ducks are still there, rising to their welcoming flight.

  Next is a grand old house, isn’t that the Whare Paia? Once it was the governor-general’s residence. The huge magnolia tree is always in bloom and the lilac tree, a mass of flowers. We veer off down the muddy road to Oakley Hospital, through an old Victorian arbour covered in bougainvillea intertwined with a grapevine. Then along the terrace, smothered in lots of wisteria, muddled in with white roses, and suddenly looming above us, that mythical building, the ogre’s castle: Oakley. Lots of small barred windows constantly being smashed – and for what reason? So a scream can be heard? To let fresh air get in – or just plain desperation? Or perhaps for some handy glass for cutting oneself, or someone else?

  Back down Oakley Road and to my left is a side track, a slippery hill, to the roar of the waterfall and the Oakley Creek. The next stop is always the old farm buildings in a massive paddock. Quail carry out their territorial wars here (and my heart still melts hearing quails call in the mating season, seductive on a warm summer evening, irresistible). And opposite the road to Carrington Hospital, my horses – well, not mine really, but truly loved by me. There are three of them and I bring them an apple each.

  It was here, turning reluctantly away from my horses, that I first encountered the Black Power gang. Max heard them first and hurried from whatever he was doing to place himself in front of me. In the pink dusk of a fading sunset, the four motorbike riders surrounded us. I had time to slip on Max’s lead and kept a tight grip. Top gun asked the questions, ‘You should not be here. Who are you?’

  With my convoluted socialist stance, I was not going to allow myself to play it safe and pull rank. I said, ‘You may not be aware of this but all of the footpaths in Carrington are a public thoroughfare. In other words, I have the right to be here – have you? You are not walking on the footpaths, you are on motorbikes.’ I was, however, distracted by the tattoos on his huge golden arms. Such a subtle purple, so lovely. I wanted to paint them. He kept focused. ‘What’s your name? Do you live here?’ He had to yell above Max’s furious barking. One of the henchmen took a sort of halfhearted kick at his head. The horses leapt about neighing. I said, ‘I am not going to tell you my name.’ But then I laughed as I realised that I was telling them my name but in code. One of the translations of Fahey, from the Irish, is: ‘I will not tell you my name’. I remembered that the people I came from once fought the same fight as the gang members were now fighting. Now I was, to them, a remnant of empire. I smiled – this twist of fate had me playing a part I certainly had never auditioned for.

  The rather glamorous four zoomed off into the dusk and Max and I continued our walk, up the hill to the Carrington Hospital, round the front and down the side where all the beautiful ancient trees, I suppose planted by the governor-general, were flowering.

  Was I being deliberately provocative doing my rounds? I did know what was going on. The Black Power had closed off the hospital. The police formed a second cordon. The general understanding in the hospital seemed to be that Titewhai, having problems, had called upon Black Power to protect the Whare Pai. How did they close off the hospital? By stopping anyone from coming in. What were the police doing? God knows, putting a stop to any violence that might erupt? What the Whare Pai was to be protected from depended largely on how you viewed the situation. Rumours proliferated and catching a glimpse of the truth was hard to come by. With the two groups around the hospital it was difficult to get in or out, or in. And all this went on with a bizarre sense of unreality, as if whoever was meant to be directing this scenario didn’t have any idea of the plot. Fraser, by this time, had no control over the situation as the hospital board had taken over.

  While writing this chapter, I went to bed one night and, by happy chance, read in an old Times Lit Sup a rather thrilling statement by a John Updike character, Martin Fairchild, that fitted Fraser’s and my mood of the time. It goes like this: ‘We are riding an aimless explosion to nowhere.’ Well, good on Martin Fairchild. He’s really onto something. This statement is for Fairchild/Updike apropos of the accelerating expansion of the universe, but Fraser, I believe, came to understand Carrington as his own personal aimless explosion to nowhere.

  During these years I usually got up at 6 a.m.; Fraser earlier at 5 a.m. One morning he wasn’t in the kitchen reading the paper and drinking his coffee. The back door was unlocked but he wasn’t in the garden; the car had gone. I wasn’t alarmed, I thought he was attending some emergency in the hospital, and that he hadn’t felt he should wake me. He came home at 8 a.m. looking pretty crook, as he would have described it.

  At two in the morning Fraser had had appalling pain in his arm, then his chest. He was convinced it was the real thing. No time to hang around while he woke me, he thought as he got dressed. He was sure he had to get to the hospital immediately. The doctors there said it was stress, possibly acute indigestion – Fraser wanted to believe this but in his damaged heart he couldn’t. And he was right: he had had his first coronary.

  We realised this only after his second. The evidence had been disguised, hidden from detection. The extensive scarring from his surgery during his long incarceration with tuberculosis was not evident and the new techniques did not detect it. God knows, second time around, I kept trying to tell this to the specialists at Auckland Hospital. They dismissed the idea as loopy; their modern machinery was superb and superior to the personal skills of diagnosis of the physicians of the past. When at last, after the second massive coronary, they worked it out for themselves, it was much too late. The matron who rang me said, ‘Do you realise your husband is a very sick man?’ And I replied, ‘Now you are telling me?’

  Fraser’s second coronary did him in. When he was released from intensive care and due to come home, I asked if I might speak to his specialist. His specialist rambled on for a while about how now was the time to stand and stare, something to do with watching cows in the paddock; he then talked about smelling roses. The general drift being that Fraser must take it very easy indeed.

  I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me that he has not long to live?’

  He said, ‘Should I be telling you?’

  I said, ‘Who else are you going to tell?’

  Staring out the window, he said, ‘I would give him maybe a year.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Titirangi

  Fraser’s coronaries were followed by the painful wrench of leaving Carrington. Our move to Titirangi meant starting life in the outside world as civil
ians. This was a difficult time for both Fraser and me. Fraser was devastated by the damage to his nervous system, to his memory, and by simply not being himself.

  Moving house is disorientating. With many of the old visuals no longer there, it’s very much a start-again scenario. Titirangi allowed me a bigger stage set: a wide deck running around the house, thrusting its way into the bush, suggesting the ancient world. It was another consciousness, an extension for the imagination.

  My children were now young women and starting out in their own separate stories. They’d come home to rest up, and to talk things over, more with each other rather than with Fraser or me. Of the paintings I was doing at this time, I believe Augusta Talks to Emily succeeds. Augusta displays a compassionate concern for Emily’s heartbreak. This all happens against a wild scenario from the dawn of time. The drama is set out on the deck in the evening, among ancient forests; there is wine and cheese on the table. In another painting, Funeral Feast, the food appears in another context as the last meal. My sister Barbara’s son Matthew has died young and my mother, Barbara and Johnny, the grieving brother, form an in-memoriam group. At the time, these paintings did not sell well, though later they did. They were not easily comprehended with their references to the past and the present.

  I am eighty now, ten years younger than my mother was when I started suffering guilt about her living alone. Mum had managed pretty well up until then. She had always enjoyed her gin and tonic, but by the age of ninety she was doing a bit of tripping and falling when the gin took hold.

  When I moved to Titirangi it dawned on me, at last, that I should not have bothered with the guilt. For, like me, Mum would not have fancied living in one of her daughters’ households. She did not wish to put her relationship with any of her daughters under that sort of strain. She did not want any unwelcome revelations, about their relationships with their husbands, or with their sisters, or with their children; she simply chose not to know. She realised how dangerous this could be.

  Fortunately, we found an excellent nursing home close to us. Curiously enough some of the nurses were those whom Fraser had trained at Carrington. They were the same nurses who Muldoon implied were bludgers on the community, and could not survive in the outside world. Oh how wrong they were proving him. The training they had at Carrington prepared them very well indeed for survival in any system. That couple running that nursing home must be millionaires by now but, idealists as so many of them were, they would have stayed on at Carrington for very little money if things had evolved differently.

  Mum decided the nursing home was her very own establishment, a happy delusion. The staff were her personal servants. Sometimes she was obliged to dismiss one of them and this would cause her much distress. ‘But no, Jack,’ she would mutter. ‘She must go, I am afraid she will never learn.’ Unreal happenings began to increase.

  Mum often had dinner with Fraser and me at Titirangi. After a decent gin and a good dinner I would then take her back to the nursing home. One evening I was guiding her to the car when she stopped and turned to look at me. With a puzzled and rather haughty expression she said, ‘And who are you?’

  I said, ‘Well, Mum, I am your daughter Jack.’

  She delivered me a pitying look and then, clambering into the car, gave a short and rather contemptuous laugh.

  As I negotiated the steep hill out of French Bay, Mum, doing her Queen Mother imitation, declared, ‘You know my beautiful husband, he died young. It happened at Marchwiel. It was all very sad, tragic.’

  And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t know.’

  And she replied, ‘Why ever would you know?’

  And I stupidly shot back before I had time for caution: ‘For Christ’s bloody sake, Mum, because he was my father.’

  I had gone too far. I could gather from her demeanour that she knew she was trapped in a car with a totally mad person. A complete stranger claiming to be her beautiful husband’s daughter. I delivered her back to her retirement village, or whatever you care to call it, while she maintained a dignified silence.

  Luckily, these episodes did not happen very often – and for heaven’s sake she was now in her nineties. A bit of escapism was surely understandable. One episode was very happy. I had cooked Mum a good dinner for her birthday and after taking her back to the nursing home, I prepared her for bed. I had given her the prettiest white nightgown you ever saw, with lots of French lace. She looked really lovely in it. A whole transformation took place, and she bounced up and down on her bed, laughing and chattering like a ten-year-old. She was transposed back to the Domincan convent in Dunedin, and had just had a most exciting birthday. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘this nightgown, it was from Mummy for my birthday present!’ It was from her darling mummy, yes, Mummy in Timaru had sent it. Her nightdress had come down the coast on the boat and she had seen it, the boat, coming into the harbour. She knew her birthday present was in the hold.

  Mum had stayed with us for some months at Carrington after a fall once, and I had done a lot of drawings of her. Back in Carrington then I’d had a lot to do looking after her and I didn’t want to stress myself out, so I had stopped painting. But I could not control my looking and seeing and took to drawing again, often random and on-the-hoof stuff. Now in Titirangi, seeing more of Mum, those drawings came back to me.

  Out of that messy collection came something consistent: a sort of Greek tragedy-cum-King Lear rendering of my mother’s decline. Her handmaidens in her travails were my daughter Emily and my sister Barbara. They were placating, soothing, and distressed in themselves. A grieving Greek chorus. Now in Titirangi I was able to resolve the compositions and carry these ideas to fruition. In The Irish Trinity I painted Mum as part of that Irish deity that James K. Baxter so adored. The maiden, the mature woman and the hag. A female holy trinity, an eternal cycle. Her shrines had been established at waterfalls in Ireland. Later the new priests of Christianity replaced her with the Virgin Mary.

  Funeral Feast was also one of these paintings, I think the best one of them. The Metamorphosis of Margaret Fahey also belongs to this period. I loved these paintings, but like others from the Titirangi years they were not immediately comprehensible to others.

  Meantime the fragmenting of Carrington continued with just a small piece left, I think, as an alcoholism ward. From the mid-’80s on, dismantlement of the hospital had been under way. Its dissolution was inevitable. At the opening of the institution that superseded the old one it was explained that raving lunatics in straitjackets had been replaced by the shining, smiling faces of young, clever people. It would seem, somehow, that the raving lunatics had meanwhile been zapped up to heaven. How this had been done was not explained. What was once Carrington was now Unitec.

  Carrington was moving on and I was moving on. I had two years painting at Titirangi; and then found some smiling clever young people of my own when I began lecturing in the painting department at Elam.

  Why Are You Doing This? and You’re Not a Kiwi, both 1999. In my first K Road paintings in the 1980s, I did lots of drawings of the stage set. They came very much from observation, but I then added overlays of imagined inhabitants. In my second K Road series in 1999 I was already familiar with the participants – a young woman designer, sex workers, shop attendants, me and Emily. Although simplified, we were, in a sense, cartoon characters. It was important to me that the words in these paintings were part of the composition; not imposed on the painting but fitting into it.

  In You’re Not a Kiwi my protagonist is well used to this particular insult and has her reply on the tip of her tongue. Emily and the gay guy are more concerned with their own affairs. I like the way Emily’s apron stripes, the stripes behind the striptease woman and the thug’s Brit T-shirt all carry the same theme, suggestive of the flag and empire.

  Funeral Feast, 1993.

  My beautiful nephew Matthew has died tragically. Johnny, Matthew’s brother, is in the foreground; my mother and my sister Barbara, Matthew’s mother, grieve together. The cheeses for
the funeral feast are already on the table. As is inevitable with New Zealand light this is also a study in dark against light.

  Augusta Talks to Emily, 1989.

  When the girls came home to Titirangi they were more interested in confiding in each other than in Fraser and me. Here Emily has broken up with her boyfriend and is comforted by Augusta. I have imagined this scene as a flashback to ancient Crete, where older sisters comfort younger sisters, attempting to give their siblings some idea of how to protect themselves from the slings and arrows of scary fate. This I don’t doubt happened as often in ancient Crete as it does now in Auckland, New Zealand.

  My Mothers Birthday Party, 1992. This is a chaotic scene. In Titirangi, Fraser and I were moving into a period where his coming death informed everything we did. Emily’s distress in the face of Fraser’s and my mother’s disintegration is obvious. Mum, as she would put it, is repairing the damage, giving her face another coat of powder.

  In 1988, when Alex and her partner Simon went to England they left their dog Ben with us. He was a great leaper in his youth, a circus dog, and coming as he does from the left he balances the painting, pulling it back to the centre.

  Me Teaching, 1992.

  Clytemnestra, assisted by her black nurse, murders Agamemnon in the bath. As an indicator I have a lot to say here, backing up what I raved on about in the life class about the very ancient history of women’s struggle for recognition.

  Emily Protests at the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, 2003.