Anyway, many of us are old and deaf.
Stella
The night before the burial, Captain Mertens addressed the ship over the PA. ‘Thank you for entrusting us with your dignified burial. Tomorrow your suffering will end. It is important that you know that despite our attempts to outrun her, the Life Warrior continues to follow us. I have been informed that she is approximately thirty nautical miles from us now, and gaining. By the time we begin the ceremony tomorrow, I expect she will be alongside us again. Unfortunately, we have no power to have her removed from international waters. She is within her rights to be here. As are you. I remind you that you are not breaking any laws. As passengers on the Final Destination in international waters you are subject only to the laws of Belgium. I ask you to remain strong, one final time, and trust that we will protect you and undertake your final request with dignity.’
At the conclusion of the Captain’s speech silence echoed through the ship. I imagined it to be like those moments as the Titanic sunk, as those clinging to her rails or scavenging from pockets of oxygen knew that a gulp of icy ocean was inevitable and they were powerless against it.
‘Stella, can you take me to the foredeck, please?’
I wheeled Graham to the bow of the ship, set his brakes and sat down next to him on the polished oak seat, resting my hand on the brass rail. The sky was cloudless but Graham watched the water of the North Atlantic, today as dark as Indian ink.
I took my husband’s hand. My weathered but pliable skin pressed against his fleshless bones. We sat on the foredeck long enough to see flying fish frolicking in the water below. The sun was starting to set and the air turning to chill when another boat appeared on the horizon.
‘Let’s go in,’ I said.
By morning, all preparations had been made. The crew were efficient and precise, professional and sombre. A few passengers had changed their minds, as had been expected. But Graham was ready, as was I.
At our final counselling session Claudine spoke very little. I missed the sound of her voice – her English, with its lovely French lilt, reminded me of being in Paris with Graham on our honeymoon – and I wanted to hear more of it. But Claudine left an empty space for us to fill.
In the adjoining chamber, which held a large bed facing a metre-wide porthole and a small array of medical equipment, the appointed doctor and nurse waited. We could have as much time with Claudine as we needed, but we were ready. We had said our long goodbyes and this morning there was not much we still needed to say. Throughout our married life we had been frank with each other and to both our amusement we discovered that the vast majority of the things we said over the years were positive.
‘Telling each other any final thoughts is an important part of the process,’ Claudine eventually advised.
Was there anything left to say? It seemed petty to drag up complaints now, but I trusted Claudine.
‘I should have worked less. We should have had more holidays, like this delightful cruise,’ Graham said.
Graham could always make me laugh, no matter how dire the situation.
We fell into silence.
After a while Claudine spoke. ‘I’m satisfied that you are ready. Are you both satisfied also?’
Holding hands, we nodded.
Claudine signed the consent form, acknowledging Graham’s fitness of mind and understanding of the consequences of the transaction. Graham and I signed our forms too, and I wheeled him into the adjoining room.
Graham
That she would do this for me, on top of everything else, is unimaginable. She will take me to the edge of life, holding my hand to ease my fears, leaving no room for her own fears to visit her. She will be brave. It is easy for me and so much harder for her, left with days, months and years to wonder and question and feel. I know she will ask herself if we did the right thing in the end. I look forward to not feeling a thing. My brain has been troubled by pain for so long that it is impossible to remember the lightness, the ease that comes with its absence. At the beginning of my disease I could blast myself into the background and be free enough, my eyeballs floating, my mind a jalopy and my body a jigsaw put back together by chemicals which took away my ability to finish sentences but locked away my pain. The soup of coloured capsules I swallowed day and night dissolved the infrastructure of my life and made it blissful enough for a while. Until they stopped working.
Afterwards, Stella will still have life to contend with, with no soup concoction to comfort her, not even my warm hand to hold.
Stella
I touched Graham’s arm as he swallowed the liquid that prepared his stomach. I held his hand after his body was arranged on the bed. I grimaced with him as the needles were inserted into his lax and abused veins. I lay with him on the wide bed as the fluid was injected into the IV line.
We looked out at the ocean and spoke in whispers to each other as we waited.
I stayed with Graham for an hour after it was done, holding his hand tightly. After the tears stopped I studied my mind to see if it had been changed by this experience. Had Graham’s passing, graceful and quiet in the end, proved anything? Had there been angels waiting who turned him away? Was there anything left of him in this physical body that should be preserved in some other way? I could find no reason to believe in any of these things. I had farewelled my husband, the love of my life. He was gone. I would bear witness when his body, an empty vessel sewn tightly into weighted canvas, was delivered to the sea.
The burials began on schedule at fifteen-hundred hours. The crew, on this their first mission, appeared to function beyond the sum of their parts. The Life Warrior lay at anchor at a disrespectful distance, silently judging us.
As the crew brought the bodies to the burial deck, where families and crew were assembled in tight and dignified lines, the protestors on the Life Warrior held hands in a silent vigil of prayer.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings played over the Final Destination’s PA.
I hugged my arms around my waist. The wind was shifting. The breeze had blown gently all morning, but now it was billowing in an unseasonal bluster from the north, blowing Barber’s music over the Final Destination and the Life Warrior alike. The canvas-cocooned bodies slipped gently into the sea as the strings wove a warm nest around me and the wind whipped my hair into my eyes in an act of exuberant defiance.
Four Forgotten Objects
Packing up a house, more than anything, is an exercise in dust and grime. I’ve had to enter all those nooks and crannies I’ve avoided for years, the places where I’ve put things in order to forget about them. This dust is mostly made up of particles of skin left behind by me and my family. Microscopic reminders, genetic markers, proof of life.
Secondary to the immediate, tactile demands of this dirt is the more reflective experiment in letting go. I quickly discover the things I am capable of leaving behind. The empty space I create is slowly filled with a seeping ache. Without it, this thing made of plastic or wood, I am not quite myself. Things remind me that forgetting is impossible.
Back then I told people my name was Sandra, and even the teachers entered into this lie. Towards the end of high school my life appeared remade, but Sandra was window dressing. Shellacked like the tables and pianos Dad restored for a living. Time after time I’d watched as Dad ground down ridges with pumice and filled gaps with bees’ wax before polishing over the top, but I polished over myself before the ridges and gaps had been filled. When I met Graham, all that changed. He wanted to know what was under the polish, what was in the valleys, the parts I had tried to pretend didn’t exist.
June 1964: The Beatles are in town. I stuff my mother’s work uniform and our best white towels into my school bag. Adelaide is powerless to defend itself against the mania. The police are taut, and my all-girls school is in the news: the gates are locked and there are threats of expulsion for any student who joins the mob in town. Headlines call it ‘Adelaide’s Prison School’.
I don’t care if I
get expelled. I’m in my leaving year so it makes no difference; my parents expect me to get a job in a shop. Jumping off the school bus, I wave goodbye to my friends and walk away from the school gates and into the city.
Pushing into the muscular knot of the crowd I am subsumed by bodies. The bracing and shoving, the firm hands of the police maintaining lines, the heels shaving ankles as girls and women jostle for position, the elbows and unladylike scowls, the enlarged, expectant eyes, the squeals and hysteria. I am indistinguishable amongst two hundred and fifty thousand people.
I get changed into my mother’s cleaner’s uniform in the John Martins dressing room and skulk around to the back entrance of the South Australian Hotel. No one notices me. I climb the service stairs and look into each hallway until I come to a busy and energised floor. I take the fresh white towels from my bag and make my way towards the room where the windows overlook the street.
‘Entschuldigen,’ I say, forgetting myself for a moment. ‘Excuse me, please.’
They part without seeing me.
‘Housekeeping!’ I say, knocking on the door.
A man opens it and strides back to the window.
Standing in the doorway, my arms full of white towels, I take in every detail. The floral upholstered club chairs, bulbous yellow and brown lamp shades, strewn suitcases, empty tea cups. Everything seen through a haze of cigarette smoke. The unBeatleness of it all is breathtaking. A couple of men are chatting and looking out the window onto the madness below. There are no Beatles, there isn’t even music playing. I don’t know why, but I expected to hear ‘Please Please Me’.
Finally, someone notices me.
‘Hey, love, can I help ya?’
‘I have fresh towels. Where should I leave them?’
‘I’ll take ‘em.’
He walks over to me and tries to take the towels, but I tighten my grip and he figures me out.
‘Alright, so, who’r you ‘ere for, then?’
‘What? I mean, pardon?’
‘Which one o’ them, eh? I can get you an autograph, if you don’t make a fuss.’
‘Fuss’ sounds like ‘fooss’ with his accent and I can no longer speak. I nod like a maniac, my head bouncing up and down like I am trying to shake it loose. As I reach into my pocket to get the notebook and pen, the mood in the room shifts and the noise lowers to a hum. I know what this means: it is John.
‘ ‘Ave you ever seen anything like it? Ever? It’s like we’re tossin’ tenners out the window at the track! It’s choss down there!’
Someone by the window, unaware of the holy presence in the room, has spoken loudly. A collective breath is drawn, as we all wait for John to respond. He doesn’t. He ambles past them all, towards the door, towards me. He has something in his hand.
He looks me in the eye and I remember the seasick feeling I had on the boat to Australia. He takes the towels from my hands and passes me the thing he is holding: a shellac-covered cufflink.
‘Can you see if they can fix this for me, love?’ he says in that sing-song way he has and turns and walks away, carrying the towels, back to the adjoining room.
I close my hand around it, shut my eyes and tip my head back to the ceiling, thanking the god of rock‘n’roll for this gift. With this one small thing I have solid proof of who I really am.
I am a Beatles fan.
Someone closes the door. I didn’t get my signature, but I have an item that belonged to John Lennon. I study it. There is a chip in the shellac finish.
I watch the news with my parents. I don’t tell them where I’ve been and when they ask about school I lie, making up stories about being one of the girls shaking my fists at the gate, demanding to be set free. My parents tut-tut and sigh, unable to understand having a fire in your belly for something so silly. When they were my age, their country was at war. I hope Mum doesn’t notice the missing towels.
After dinner, I go out to Dad’s workshop and turn on the light. I fiddle with his brushes and tins, smell the metho, benzyl and turps that he uses so frequently that they have become his aura – there is nothing of skin and sweat in his smell, it is all ethanol and turps, whether he is in the workshop or not. His fingers and the rims of his fingernails are the deep red brown of Australian Jarrah, so profoundly stained that the colour never comes out, no matter how much he scrubs.
I run my hand over the old, soft fabric of the drop sheets he uses to protect finished furniture. I slide my hand under the sheet and along the exquisite surface of a table top: the gloss is fine, feather-like: my hand is gliding on a warm film of ice.
I take the cufflink out of my pocket. Dad could make it good as new. Better.
There is a soft knock on the door.
‘Darf Ich hereinkommen?’ Dad asks, even though I am in his workshop.
‘Ja,’ I say.
He comes in and swaps to English, a sign that he is pleased with me.
‘Vat are you doing out here, Stella?’
‘Just thinking.’
He sees the cufflink in my hand and takes it, inspects it, turns it over, runs his fingertips over every surface. Somehow his fingertips are simultaneously coarse and smooth; veined with deep calloused cracks and polished with Jarrah.
‘Very bad vorkmanship. No vonder it’s kaputt. Who gave this to you?’
‘Oh, I just found it,’ I lie. Lies are so easy now.
‘I can fix it, you vant me to? It could look very nice. Ve can make the colour better, even. Do you have the other one?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t want it fixed, it’s okay.’
He gives it back.
‘I vould never make something so poor. They should be ashamed, selling such rubbish.’
He rolls the ‘r’ in rubbish to show his contempt.
I tighten my grip on the cufflink until I can feel its imprint in the fleshy part of my palm, and kiss Dad on the cheek.
‘Gute Nacht, Dad,’ I say as I walk back to the house.
In my room, I pull out a small box that I have secreted under my bed. It was one of the few things we brought from Germany, and like everything else we brought with us – accents, history and shame – I have hidden it. I wipe the dust away from the wooden carving on top: stained red, yellow and black, the flowers are absurdly nationalistic. Inside are the treasures I’d been unable to leave behind. A small doll with raggedy hair and a palm-sized leather money pouch with a few silver Reichsmark. The coins feel hot in my hand, like they hold the fire of evil right there on those embossed swastikas and eagles. I put the coins back in the pouch and lay the cufflink next to them. I pick up the doll; her tangled hair catches on my broken fingernail. I smooth her hair in long slow strokes.
The next day at school my friends want to know whether my crazy plan worked. I tell them about John Lennon taking the towels from my hands, from my very own hands. They don’t believe me, of course. Who would? But despite their accusations of bald-faced lies, I’m not tempted to tell them about the cufflink, not even for a moment.
Without Graham, the Plane Tree Drive house is too big and old. It’s taken weeks to pack up our lives. The only room left to tackle now is the storage room, where I find these things, forgotten for over fifty years. The small wooden box, the doll, the silver coins and John Lennon’s shellac cuff link.
I wonder at how, for so long, I needed these items, and then forgot them suddenly. But holding the Reichsmark I remember that keeping it was a kind of mental self-flagellation. By contrast, the doll confirmed that I was a child, I had not been responsible, I had not even been born. These two items – the coin and the doll – cancelled each other out. The wooden box, which was beautiful with its intricate carving and bold nationalistic flair, allowed me to see some good in my heritage, if I could just look past the shame. The box tipped the scale.
And the cuff link, well there was nothing complex about that: I was a Beatles fan.
I stopped stockpiling objects soon after that day I met Lennon, although I suppose this house is a collected thing,
as well as a repository of all the other collected things. Family, vases, sheets, coffee cups, photos, stains and cracks have all been collected inside these walls. And now I have to distil all these things down to three rooms’ worth so that I can fit in the unit. What would Lennon say, if he hadn’t been killed that day? Something about my attachment to possessions? Maybe. But I like to think he’d understand.
JENNIFER AND ALEXANDER
Tea Cups
I buy odd tea cups in second hand stores – lonely items, strays that have lost their kind. I specialise in cups that appear to have been made in pottery class and discarded. These odd items, almost always brown, are beautiful. I look at them and see learning and imperfection and the flaws that are left behind by these things, like lines on a face, scars on a forearm, mended hearts, bulging veins, grey hairs. These things are beautiful. When I see a young face that has not formed its character through imperfection, or a body that shows no signs of life I feel no envy because I know that those things are yet to be. The time will come that those young bodies, perfect and strong, will fade and scar and flop, and I hope that the people inside those bodies will never be happier than when they are old.
I’m alive now. I look in the mirror and I see a person who has been brave for the first time in ages. I came clean with Dan. The time will come when I have to come clean with Ava too, but for now she is content.
I replay my last meeting with Alexander in my mind, another of the many movies I have of him.
Act 3
Scene: A coffee shop – day, 2 days ago
Ava sleeps in her stroller. A cup of tea sits in front of Jennifer, going cold. Opposite sits Alexander, calmly sipping his espresso shot.
The two are leaning in, minimising the space between them. Fingers near to grazing.
Jennifer rallies herself with the speech she has been planning for weeks.
Plane Tree Drive Page 13
