This Is the Life

by Alex Shearer

  Who would not do that if they could? Who would not wipe clean the slate and reset the clocks and let the runners run again after their unintentional false start? But nobody can. The bad things are done, and may even be forgiven up to a point, but they can’t be written out; nobody can pretend they did not happen. And you can never, never, never go back.

  * * *

  When we went out on the boat that day to scatter Louis’s ashes, Kirstin told me how much she had missed him, and had thought of going back to him, but never had. She didn’t know that I knew what had happened, she just referred to an incident and talked in general terms.

  There was no one else for either of them. The older you get, maybe the harder it is to find that compatible soul. And the years that could have been spent otherwise go by in isolation and even loneliness. And that’s how it is for people. That’s how it often is. And you can sit on the train and read your magazine or go home and watch the TV show, but it doesn’t make one iota of difference. Because that’s just the paint and decorations. And that’s just how it is. That’s how we are. That’s how it is for us. That’s how we live.

  19

  Phascogale

  Louis said you had to keep the lids on the jars and the fridge door shut tight, because there was a creature that came into the house called a phascogale. He said it was carnivorous, but that wouldn’t stop it climbing in with the vegetables or gnawing on the cornflakes to see if it liked them.

  “A what-go-gale?”

  “Phascogale.”

  “Fast?”

  “Why don’t you look it up in the bits and pieces?” he said.

  So I did, and got a picture of it. It was small—a small marsupial, quite nice and amiable-looking in its way, with rather large eyes. It was about the size of a squirrel. I saw it once or twice, hiding under the eaves, but mostly it kept its distance and didn’t bother us much.

  I started to get interested in its private life, and read up a little more about it.

  “Louis,” I said, “did you know that the male phascogale dies after it has sex?”

  “No,” Louis said. “I didn’t know that. You think I’m some kind of pervert voyeur who stalks small creatures?”

  “Don’t you think that’s interesting, though, Louis?”

  “It’s interesting for the phascogale,” he said. “But then, being a phascogale, it doesn’t know what it’s got coming to it. Whereas, if it were human . . .”

  And he was right, of course. We know what we’ve got coming to us. That’s what distinguishes us from the other and so-called lesser creatures. It isn’t that we walk upright or have developed languages of extensive vocabulary capable of expressing fine shades of meaning. Nor is it that we have prehensile fingers and thumbs.

  No, the main thing is that we know what we’ve got coming. And maybe, if we didn’t know that, we too might be happily chewing the grass in the fields, or plucking the plums off the branches, or drinking water from a pool—not worrying about the cholera, typhoid, parasites, and worms that might be in there. That’s the trouble—we don’t know enough and we don’t know all we need to know, but we still know too much.

  “Don’t you think that’s weird, Louis, that the male has sex with the female and then dies?”

  “You mean she kills him? It wouldn’t surprise me. Like a black widow spider. They mate, and she does for him. Or ants. They mate, and same thing, they’re left to die.”

  “But getting back to the phascogale, Louis, where is the evolutionary advantage in the male phascogale not being around?”

  “He doesn’t have to listen to the nagging?” Louis said.

  “What about his genes?”

  “Well, he’s reproduced, hasn’t he?” Louis said. “His genes are safe. He no longer has a function or purpose. So he dies.”

  “But isn’t that true of a lot of mammals?”

  “He’s a marsupial. They see things differently. They’ve got pockets. At least the women have.”

  “So have kangaroos. But the males don’t die after they’ve mated.”

  “Maybe he hops off before she can get him.”

  “But the female doesn’t kill the male, that’s what I’m saying. He just dies.”

  “Then at least he goes out on a high.”

  “Would you have sex the once if you knew it was going to kill you?”

  “There are worse ways of committing suicide,” Louis said.

  “I really do not see the Darwin in it,” I said. “I do not see the evolutionary logic behind it at all. If he lived, he could help provide.”

  “Maybe he’s a lazy bastard,” Louis said. “Maybe all these male phascogales are lazy bastards who’d live on benefits if you let them.”

  “You know what it means, though, Louis? It means that every phascogale family is a single-parent family. The phascogales are brought up by the mothers and the father is not around.”

  “Having died of fornicating?”

  “Exactly. You look at Mum, Louis. Now, she was left a single parent and brought us both up, right?”

  “She wasn’t a phascogale, though.”

  “Louis, I know that. You think I don’t know that our own mother was a woman and not a phascogale?”

  “Why do you take everything so seriously?”

  “I thought that was you who did that.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “They’re all single-parent families, Louis. That’s my point. None of the little phascogales ever has a father. No growing phascogale ever knows its dad. Do you know the correlation between being brought up in a family without a father and juvenile delinquency and the incidence of depression?”

  “So what are you saying now? You’re saying that phascogales are juvenile delinquents, suffering from bipolar disorder?”

  “For Chrissake, Louis.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying, where is the evolutionary advantage in forcing children to grow up psychologically damaged?”

  “You think phascogales are psychologically damaged? You think that’s why they’ve been coming into the kitchen and getting the tops off my jars?”

  “No, not necessarily. But possibly—if animals can feel emotions the way we do—they might look around and not see their fathers and feel kind of sad.”

  “No. Definitely not, no.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you only feel deprived by comparison. If you look around and see all the other phascogales don’t have fathers either, then you won’t feel deprived.”

  “You might notice that other animals have fathers.”

  “No. They wouldn’t. They’d only be interested in their own species. You’re just being anthropomorphic.”

  “So are you.”

  “No. I’m being logical.”

  “Yeah, you’re Mr. Spock, Louis.”

  “What?”

  “Louis—don’t you think not having a father is damaging?”

  “It’s all too late now. What difference does it make? We can’t bring him back. And if he’d lived, he’d be an old, old man now, if he was still here. And we’d be saying what a pain he was that he’d lost his marbles. Or maybe we’d have fallen out. You got away with murder when you were a teenager. If you’d had a father there you wouldn’t have had it so easy.”

  “Easy? Louis, look at yourself. These jobs you do, all this working with your hands—when you’re capable of—”

  “That’s what I missed, that he wasn’t there to show us how to do things, how to use tools, how to—”

  “Louis, he didn’t want you to work using tools. He wanted you to get educated.”

  “Those people that you have to work with in those white-collar places, these labs, these universities, they’ve got no authenticity. It’s all ass-licking and politics.”

  “Do you seriousl
y believe that? You think there’s no ass-licking and politics on the factory floor? You really think that sawing wood and bending steel and unblocking drains is some kind of noble calling that, say, being a chemist isn’t? We wouldn’t have anything if it wasn’t for people using their brains. If using your hands is so noble, why isn’t using your head?”

  “I thought we were talking about phascogales.”

  “Yeah, well—as an illustration.”

  “Of what?”

  “I just don’t see any evolutionary advantage, Louis, in not having a father.”

  He looked at me from under the beanie hat.

  “Well, we’re not going to know now, are we?” he said. “It’s done. We’re the same as the phascogale.”

  “Our dad died, yeah.”

  “No. We’re screwed.”

  “Don’t start that again, Louis. We are going to get through all this.”

  “You were there. You heard the consultant. You know the chances.”

  “I heard what he had to say. Five, six, seven years, and by that time they may have found—”

  “No. Five to ten percent survive five years. Nearer five. Five percent. Twenty percent are alive after two years. The rest—a year to eighteen months. Eighty percent chance, almost, of not lasting eighteen months.”

  “Louis, we have to think positive.”

  “No, we have to think practical. I’m tired. I’m going to lie down.”

  I left food out that night for the phascogale. But she never came and took it. I threw it in the garbage in the morning before Louis would notice it, and then we drove to the hospital for Louis’s radiotherapy again. We had time for Starbucks, so he shouted me a flat white. I said I’d get him a danish. He said he didn’t want one. We went to the radiotherapy department. While he was in treatment, I went back to Starbucks and bought him a danish and returned to the waiting area. When he came out of treatment he said he was starving, so I gave him the danish and made him a cup of tea at the sink-and-kettle unit for the use of patients and their relatives.

  Louis drank his tea and ate his danish and I said, “What shall we do now?”

  He said, “I’ll show you the city.”

  So we drove down to the river and he showed me around and I thought what a splendid city it was, and I liked the wide streets and the flowing water and the speeding ferries and the feel of the place. I thought that maybe I could have lived there, and had a different life. And who would I have been then?

  We caught a tourist boat and went on a trip downriver and back. It was cool but sunny and we sat up on the top deck and ordered a couple of flat whites and drank them as we sailed along, and Louis pointed out the sights to me, and said, “See there, that’s where they have the Sunday market, that’s where I met Kirstin and used to have my jewelry stall.” And he was smiling under his beanie hat, and the milky eyes were sparkling.

  “What did she sell?”

  “She was an artist.”

  We returned to the embarkation point and strolled on along the walkway, until we came to a café there.

  “Shall we get some lunch, Louis?”

  “Looks pricey,” he said.

  But what the hell, we had some anyway, and we sat and lingered over the meal and the drinks and we talked of yesterday, and before we knew it, it was late afternoon.

  “I’m whacked,” he said. “You want to go?”

  We walked back to the ute and drove home. Louis went straight to his room and crashed out cold.

  It was, in its way, a perfect day, like in the Lou Reed song. All the small unexpected things that line up just as you want them, and there isn’t a blemish on the cloth.

  “That was a good day, wasn’t it, Louis?” I called to him, as he headed for his bed.

  “It was all right,” he said. A short while later I heard him snoring.

  He didn’t wake up until five the next morning, when he took his anti-nausea and then his chemo an hour later.

  We drove to the hospital.

  We got there early, so we went to Starbucks and he insisted on shouting me a flat white.

  “Your money’s no good here,” he said.

  “Louis,” I said, “let me get you a danish for later.”

  “I don’t want one,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”

  You know how the rest of it goes.

  You know how it goes on from there.

  That’s how it was, every radiotherapy morning, back when Louis was still alive.

  I did feel sorry for those phascogales for a while. But then I realized I was being ridiculous. It wasn’t the phascogales who were worrying. They were just getting on with looking for food, and mating, and then dying afterward. Maybe they were happy with that. Maybe they didn’t expect anything else—or, more likely, anything at all.

  It’s in the matter of expectations—that’s where we go so wrong.

  20

  Observer

  You get worried sometimes that people might go wandering—go wandering and not come back, and then somebody might ask you what happened to them, and say, “Weren’t you responsible?” And, “Weren’t you looking out for them?” which you can’t be, not all the time.

  The operation is called “debulking.” It is not removal. It is a matter of reducing the mass. A tumor in the brain cannot be fully excised because to do so would mean to remove good tissue along with the bad—and the possible consequent loss of many things: vision, hearing, balance, ­personality, cognition, thought processes, motor skills. The edges of the tumor are not clearly defined. Often they are tentacle- and ­thread-like. As much of the tumor as can be safely removed is, then the remaining cells are bombarded with radiation and chemicals. Few people have part of the brain removed and remain just as they were. There is usually something lost.

  We were in the supermarket, and I looked up from the frozen foods to discover that Louis was no longer beside me. I took the cart and went looking for him. I found him by the yogurts.

  “Louis—”

  “Yeah?”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I thought you were with me, Louis.”

  “In what sense?”

  “I thought you were right behind me.”

  “Ah.”

  “I thought we were getting the groceries.”

  “We are.”

  “What are you doing, Louis? Why are you just standing here?”

  The beanie hat was pulled down low. The beard was getting wild again. There was paint and oil on Louis’s old shirt, and some holes in it too. He was wearing his work shorts—but then, all his shorts were work shorts, even the ones he slept in. Or maybe they were his sleeping shorts and I just couldn’t tell the difference.

  At the end of the aisle a security man was keeping an eye on us. Maybe he was bored and hoping for excitement. Even so, why look for the obvious? Why wouldn’t the shoplifter be smartly and soberly dressed, so as to attract little attention? Wouldn’t that make more sense?

  “Louis—Louis—are you coming? You want to get a pizza tonight? Louis, what are you doing?”

  “I’m looking.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Everyone.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m trying to see who’s got a brain tumor.”

  “Louis, how are you going to know that?”

  “I’ll know.”

  “Louis, a tumor is on the inside, not the outside. How are you going to tell?”

  “I’ll know. I do it all the time. I look at people and I think, Have you got a brain tumor too?”

  “So . . .”

  He showed no signs of moving, so I stood with him and watched the cart pushers go by. The security man was slowly but surely coming up the aisle toward us.

 
“Have you seen any yet?”

  “Not yet. I had a possible earlier.”

  “Where?”

  “But he’s gone. I decided it wasn’t a tumor. It was just learning difficulties.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “You see that woman there, and the man with her?”

  “They look all right to me.”

  “I think he’s got a tumor in its early stages but it hasn’t been diagnosed yet. You see the way he’s acting? That’s a tumor way of behaving.”

  I watched the man, but he looked all right to me; he behaved no differently from anyone else.

  “What’s the tumor way? He seems fine.”

  “He looks a little confused, and slow. You see the way he’s staring at the prices. He’s trying to make sense of them and he can’t. He’s having trouble processing the information and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t want to worry the woman and he doesn’t want to worry himself. But he is worried and he knows something’s wrong. And he doesn’t want to go to the doctor and get the bad news. But he’ll have to.”

  “Louis, I don’t think you can tell that from—”

  “It’s an affinity. Like with gays.”

  “What about them?”

  “They can spot each other. Gaydar.”

  “And you’ve got tumor-dar?”

  “You don’t believe me, you go and ask him.”

  “Sure, Louis, I’m going to ask a total stranger in a supermarket if he thinks he might have a brain tumor.”

  The security guard was almost upon us now.