by Alex Shearer
“No!”
“Eyedrops?”
“No!”
“That’s all, Louis. That’s all.”
“No, no, no. The bits and pieces!”
We found the blue cooler bag and upturned it. The blister packs fell out and the bottles and his cell phone and his will.
“It’s all here, Louis. Everything’s here. What is it?”
Once, some years back, he had tried to explain to me what he did when he worked in chemistry.
“I solve problems,” he’d said. “The sorts of problems most people wouldn’t even understand.”
“How about the problems that everyone does understand, Louis?” I’d asked him. “Can you solve those?”
“Nobody can solve those,” he’d said. “Or we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Louis had degrees and diplomas in things most people didn’t begin to understand, but now the words wouldn’t come, not even the simple ones.
“Let’s try again. From the beginning. What do you think you’ve lost?”
“The—damn it, I’m so stupid, so bloody stupid—”
“Louis, it’s just a bad day, that’s all. Sometimes you remember, sometimes you don’t.”
“It’s the—bits and pieces!”
“Is it the drugs?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Then what have we missed? Let me see the sheet.”
I took the drug sheet out of his bag and starting reading through it.
“Nausea, chemo, inflammatory, eyedrops—steroids?”
“Steroids!”
“Okay. They’re here. They’re in the bottle. There. They’re right here.”
He took the bottle and couldn’t unscrew the childproof cap.
“Damn it!”
“It’s all right. Here—”
“Damn it!”
“You want a glass of water?”
“Cuppa tea. Cuppa tea.”
“Okay. I’ll fill the kettle.”
“What are we doing?”
“Just sit down, Louis. I’ll make some tea.”
He took the steroids and drank the tea. I put on a DVD we’d bought at the supermarket. A moody and dark-lit spy thriller adapted from a famous novel. It was highly acclaimed, all about the British establishment and a spy service peopled by ex–public schoolboys and Oxbridge graduates, with whom it was hard to have much sympathy, though they anguished in their privilege.
When the film was over, Louis said, “I didn’t get a lot of that.”
“Me neither,” I said. “And I’m still supposed to have all my brains.”
He gave me a doubtful look.
“I’ll get a shoot-’em-up next time,” I said.
“Get Liam Neeson,” he said. “He did a good one about these guys who kidnap his daughter and he goes after them. But now there’s a sequel and they’re coming for him again, and this time it’s his wife and his daughter they get.”
“Maybe, if there’s another sequel, they’ll come and get his cat,” I suggested.
“Liam doesn’t take any crap,” Louis said.
“Okay. Let’s go to Blockbuster and rent it, if they’ve got it in.”
Sometimes it isn’t subtlety you want. It’s someone who sorts things out and doesn’t take any crap. We forgot about everything for more than a hundred minutes. It was money well spent.
* * *
They kept Louis’s fencing mask at the radiation department. When the radiotherapy course was finished, they gave it to him to take home as a souvenir, or in case it might be needed again.
It just looks like a fencing mask. It’s really a clamp. It’s tailor-made to fit the patient’s head and to hold it in place while the large radiation machine loops around and bombards the selected area of the brain with radiation. You don’t want to go radiating the good part of the brain—instead of fixing tumors, you’d be causing them.
You lie on a flat bed. The mask goes over your head. The nurse clamps it into place, and you’re held rigid. You wouldn’t get the mask off on your own. You’re imprisoned. It isn’t an experience for the claustrophobic. I asked a nurse how they dealt with those who were. “We talk to them,” she said.
Some masks are so large they don’t just cover the head, they come down over the neck and shoulders, and even the whole chest. They are made of some kind of rigid white plastic and mesh.
You see people wandering around the waiting room, carrying their masks with them, like bit-part actors from some strange Japanese play. And then they get called, and they’re on, and away they go to make their appearance.
There are all kinds of tumors and nobody wants any of them. But some are curable and some are not, and the purpose of the treatment is not to cure those, but to prolong remaining life. But whether the quality of that life prolonged is worth the struggle and the pain is an individual matter; it’s a decision you need to make for yourself.
The doctors will usually advise you to have the treatment. They don’t want to be sued. But their treatment is formulaic, and they dare not deviate from standard procedures, for fear of the lawyer’s writ again. It makes you think of old-time medical men, with their cupping and their leeches. The point isn’t necessarily whether the treatment does a whole lot of good; the point is that it is accepted by the medical profession. No one is going to criticize you for following the accepted medical path.
Tumors of the brain come in various sorts—some primary, some secondary. They can travel into the brain from other parts of the body, but do not go the other way. A primary brain tumor will not travel outward and cause trouble elsewhere. It could, eventually, given sufficient time, but it doesn’t get it.
Primary brain tumors come in four basic kinds and are graded accordingly. The most serious is a glioblastoma multiforme, a grade four. That was what Louis had. They are slightly more prevalent in men than women. No one knows what causes them, though there are indications that the causes could be genetic and/or environmental and could be due to exposure to certain chemicals, at some point in the past. Louis had worked in an asbestos mine and in other branches of the chemical industry. But who knows? People who’ve never even seen an asbestos mine still get them—the way people who’ve never smoked a cigarette in their lives still get lung cancer.
Why is it that we aren’t afraid of death all the time, but only when its imminence is announced? We know what’s going to happen. We know there is no choice. Yet when we hear it knocking it always comes as a terrifying surprise, a shock, an injustice. We all have to face it, but it’s hard to be brave. The only way to go on is to pretend it won’t happen.
* * *
Louis’s radiation mask was there on the bookcase. I didn’t want to keep it, but I didn’t feel it was right to throw it away. But I did. What else could I do? Take it home in my hand luggage? Hang it on the wall, like some voodoo mask?
I drove the ute to the public dump and threw everything over the barrier and into the pile. I thought, There goes a life. One day all my personal effects and papers and the things of no use or value that I have hoarded far too long, they’ll all go—things of little use and less beauty; books I kept without any intention of reading a second time.
We accumulate so much stuff, so many things, so many objects. There are so many items we just cannot seem to throw away, thinking that maybe they might come in handy, and sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. They’re just left there to bother our relatives and give them something to do to take their minds off things.
When our mother got old, Louis had her come and live with him—in which act he had my admiration, as she would have driven me insane in two days. She died of a stroke, four years later.
Louis had kept all her belongings in boxes in the basement. So there were two batches of personal effects to get rid of. All her plates and cutlery were there, her choco
late-box pictures and her black-and-white photographs of unspecified relations from decades ago; her rosary and her crucifix and her picture of Jesus with a crown of thorns on his head and blood dripping down into his eyes that I remembered from childhood. A lot of Catholic homes are places adorned with grim reminders. I can think of few other religions whose central, abiding, defining image is that of a man in agony.
So it wasn’t just Louis and his past I was throwing away, it was her too. Though I kept a little of each of them—some photographs, some small, personal possessions. It is strange to feel the potency of cheap material objects—things you wouldn’t look at twice in a charity shop, were they not impregnated with the scent and the memories of your own past.
Maybe my son would like to have this pen, I thought; perhaps this bracelet would suit my daughter. But I knew that, really, the things were too old-fashioned and of another era. The new generations must look forward. It is those who age and those who lose who look back.
In the end I got it all down to a suitcase to be checked and a small piece of hand luggage. It all fitted into that. Two lives. There they were. Put together, it was one hundred and forty-seven years of life. If I’d been a little more ruthless, I could have made do with the hand luggage alone.
The rest of it was all in my head—once-shared memories that I now shared with no one. I was the only one who survived now, who remembered the rented flats and the bed-and-breakfast places, who recalled the time Louis and I had to sleep in the bathroom, because we had no other space. All the cold and the making do and the mean poverty that was part of so many lives then and no doubt still is. All the love and all the flashes of laughter. A classmate once told me that we lived in a slum. I hadn’t known it until he said so. I’d thought we were fine.
There was nobody left to know. There was no other witness to all those ordinary, familiar, banal, dramatic, mundane, extraordinary, devastating events.
I remembered seeing my father in the back room of a pub into which children were allowed. There was a piano there. He sat down at it and began to play—fluently, easily. I’d never known he could play the piano and I never saw him do so again. But to whom is that even vaguely important now? Not Louis. Not anyone.
And so it must be with all lives, and all those who survive for a while longer. All our importances that mean so little to others—and all their recollections, so similar to our own, and yet which barely touch us, except in their evocation.
One and a half suitcases. I checked the large suitcase in at the bag-drop at the airport. The assistant asked me if I had packed the bag myself. Then she read out a list of prohibited articles, and I confirmed I did not have any of them in the case. The objects that it contained could do no harm to anyone.
24
Melon Claw
My career as a Louis substitute was starting to take off and I was getting regular offers coming in for personal appearances, while I spent my daytimes emptying his wardrobes, clearing his junk, boxing his books for the Salvation Army, and trying to dispose of the accumulated debris of half a lifetime.
Babs, Halley’s sister, called and said, “Derek is having a big birthday this weekend, and he’s rented a place up in the mountains, and he’s invited a load of people and he was going to ask Louis, but—”
I said I’d go.
It took three hours to get there. I went with Halley in Louis’s ute—which would soon be Halley’s ute, if the will copy ever got authorized—and he drove, since he knew the way. We sped along with the window falling down and the fan on perpetual maximum.
“How about I put the radio on to blot the fan out?” Halley said.
“The radio doesn’t work,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. For he seemed the philosophical sort. Then he glanced at me sideways and said, “She had a false plastic thumb then?”
“That’s how she did the trick. Removing the clothes was all distraction and sleight of hand.”
“Sleight of hand with a plastic thumb. It kind of takes the magic away.”
“But it’s nice to know how things are done.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or sometimes maybe not.”
“She was magic, anyway,” I reminded him, “just standing there with nothing on.”
We drove on up through dripping rainforests and roads with layers of mist lying on them. Eventually we caught sight of Derek and Babs and Babs and Halley’s mother in their car, and we tailed them.
Derek turned off up a track and we kept following. We drove another five miles or more and came to a farm.
“This is it,” Halley said. “I think.”
Next to the farm was a so-called homestead, with a couple of bunkrooms and a couple of doubles. There were others already there, people Derek had invited. He introduced me and said I was Louis’s brother, and they all seemed satisfied with that.
We had a barbecue that night. The women were mostly tough and heavy smokers. Like Liam Neeson, they took no crap. We sat outside and knocked back the cabernet sauvignon and the Little Creatures.
Derek got a campfire going, and some of us sat next to it, perched on stones, staring at the flames, wherein all mysteries were solved and all answers danced.
Halley’s brother Charles had turned up, and he too was an artist who lived in a shed. His gray hair was in a ponytail and he wore charity-shop clothes, for being an artist does not always pay. In fact mostly it doesn’t pay at all. It’s really a kind of charity work in its own right.
The breeze blew the fire smoke into Charlie’s eyes, but he didn’t shift to get away from it. He just licked his thumb and then held his thumb out in front of him, and the smoke got the message, and it turned away and wafted in another direction.
Halley was watching this.
“That is such bullshit,” he said.
But Charles just gave him a thin smile, for the evidence spoke for itself.
“Such bullshit,” Halley said again. “That is total crap.”
The wind turned again and this time the smoke blew into my eyes. I licked my thumb and held it up, but the smoke kept coming.
“What am I doing wrong, Charlie?”
“You’re not convinced,” he said. “You’ve got to believe in it or it won’t work.”
“He’s talking bullshit,” Halley said.
I was reassured to see that brothers are the same the world over, and have a tendency not to agree with each other, particularly on vital matters.
* * *
The next morning we had breakfast out on the big wooden table. The farmer’s dogs appeared and hopped up onto the barbecue grill and licked all the taste and grease of last night’s sausages from it.
“That is disgusting,” Babs said. “We’ll be cooking on that again later.”
“It’ll burn off,” Derek told her.
A friend of Derek’s had brought his boat and we were going to the lake to catch red claw, so I heard. Red claw being smallish freshwater crayfish. Derek had been on the Internet and had assured himself by consulting various websites that the best bait to use was melon.
The rest of us thought this was a hoax of some kind, but it was Derek’s birthday, so we went with it. We cut up melons and put them into crab pots, then went out to the lake and heaved them into the water.
Two hours later we returned to pull them up. Nothing. Just sliced melon. We moved the pots and came back another two hours later. Still no red claw but plenty of soggy melon. Same again another two hours after that. We were all feeling hungry by then, so we gave up on the red claw, reeled in the pots, and returned to the homestead for a cheese sandwich.
There was serious snoring in the bunkhouse that night, possibly due to the intake of alcohol, though the most serious snorer, another of Derek’s brothers-in-law, was a reformed drinker on the twelve-step plan, and all he’d had was Coca-Cola.
Halley and I went for a bi
ke ride early the next morning, past fields of startled wallabies, who froze, watched us a moment, and then ran, bouncing away into the mist. We passed ruined homesteads of hand-hewn timber and corrugated roofs, long since deserted, built on patches of scrub where some subsistence farmer and his family might once have eked out a hard living.
When you stopped pedaling, there was no sound of vehicles, not even from far away, only the sounds of the breeze and of birds and other living things.
Don’t tell me Louis would have liked this, I thought, because I already know.
“Louis would have liked it here,” Halley said.
“He would,” I agreed. “He would.”
“Want to cycle back now?”
We did. The wallabies were back in the field, but on seeing us, they ran away again. When we got to the homestead the women were still at the breakfast table, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. They were all substantial and in their middle years. If you’d asked them for a favor, they wouldn’t have let you down.
Victor, the snorer, was mechanically minded, so I asked him to have a look at the ute and see if he could stop the fan from constantly blowing on max, as I couldn’t locate the fuse. He took half the dashboard apart, but he fixed it.
Halley and I were able to drive back in relative peace.
I thanked Derek for the invitation, but he was lying on a sofa, looking hungover and morose, as if the passing of his significant birthday had brought intimations of mortality with it which he had hitherto managed to ignore.
We cleaned and tidied the place up and threw the melons into the compost bin. There were so many empty wine bottles we took some of them back with us from shame. Then we all drove away in our various directions.
It was a good weekend. I got back to Louis’s place quite late and it was cold and empty and the traces of him were going as, little by little, I was taking them away.
I found a Little Creature hiding in the fridge and I tried to pry the cap off with my thumb, as I had seen done. But I didn’t have the knack and so used an opener.
Up in the roof the possums were moving. Maybe they were rooting away, maybe they were just getting comfortable. After all, they’d have known each other some time now, and it can’t be passionate sex every night, not even for possums.
