Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  He suggests I learned early to suppress unbearable truths, to compartmentalise.

  'Men seem to be born with that facility,' I tell him, thinking of the lover.

  The shrink looks at me sharply. 'Some of them are experts,' he says.

  I let the subject drop.

  The Point shimmers in the wet. Tinnies joggle and clunk in the faint swell, tied side by side like Turkish slippers. The rain strobes through streetlights and textures the night, heavy enough to frost the water.

  People in mustard, red, white and blue wet weather gear huddle under shelter, beers in their hands, unworried by the weather.This is Friday, the end of the working week, always a big night at The Point.

  I scan the hooded faces. Who will help? Boxes to unload and an arm still tender where the lymph nodes have been removed, a chest where the scar is still a ruby slash. And my mother, nearly eighty. With swollen ankles and a bottom lip shaking from exhaustion and fear for her daughter.

  'Matty,' I scream from the car, 'can you look after my mother?'

  Matty is the man you call for any job too big to do yourself – rubbish removal, sandstone paving, bobcat work, new fireplace, even a sculpture installation. He is nowhere near forty but looks older, a once handsome face blurred by years of hell-raising. 'Matty's boys', as they are known, hover around him, a ragged collection. The core is Big Jack, the muscle, Scotty, the doer, and Bob, the fisherman. Others flitter on the periphery, slippery eyed, coming and going.

  'Yeah, mate,' he says, his long thin legs blue with cold. A cigarette hanging from his purple fingers, a stubbie in his other hand. It would take a blizzard, I think, or a court case, to get Matty into long trousers.

  He takes a last lung-busting drag on his smoke, sculls the dregs of beer from the bottle. With the style of the ritziest doorman, he ushers my mother into the Church Point world: 'C' mon on then, mate,' he says, holding out a work-stained hand.

  My mother feathers up like a happy chook, smiles flirtatiously, flutters her eyelashes, slides her taloned hand across as though she's waiting for Matty to slip a ring on her finger. It's the kind of attention she loves. She whisks her fears into the bottom drawer of her mind and becomes, for a moment, a beautiful young woman again. The kind men fawned over and whose hearts she ruthlessly sliced to bits. Matty glides her down the jetty as though she's a fragile, ancient duchess.

  Matty's boys, almost synchronised, finish their beers and come over to me like unsteady soldier crabs. Without a word, they take the boxes of wine and the shopping, two at a time, and in minutes the water taxi is ready for take-off. There will be a parking ticket, but does that matter? Money, once so carefully hoarded, has become a tool instead of a master. Might not have a future to save for.

  'Will you be all right, mate, at the other end?' Matty asks.

  He has seen my swollen face. No questions, though, that might intrude. The Pittwater way.

  'Yeah. Thanks, Matty. Owe you a beer.'

  'Yeah, mate.'

  His long skinny legs pick their way back to the bottle shop.His boys close in around him halfway up the jetty, like a dark cloak.

  The rain has stopped and the water is a black satin sheet. I watch the fantail of the water taxi's wake and think about swimming to the great big Pacific Ocean and sinking deeper and deeper until I disappear. And then a sliver of relief slips in. After the dozen or so half-hearted attempts to end the affair over the years, he has finally severed the cord. No more worrying about where he is, what he is doing, why he isn't returning calls. He loves me. He loves me not. It's a big fat not.

  The wine and shopping are piled onto Ken's dock and I leave it all there. I'll deal with it in the morning. If it rains again, too bad. I'll get every guest at my birthday party – a quickly thrown together celebration – to carry a couple of bottles on their arrival.

  That night, even my mother's snoring does not wake me. But the relief is turning back into anger. And, ever so cunningly, I slip away from the fear of cancer into the rage of the wronged.

  The next morning there are questions in my mother's narrowed eyes as we sit over tea and toast at the kitchen table. I have the post-binge blues, a drilling headache. Red eyes, smeared mascara and, under the mascara, the old, dark shadows of self-abuse. Get through today. Tomorrow will be better. But tomorrow is the party. A final fling before treatment. I curse the stupid impulse.And the next day? Chemo. I feel shaky and out of control. Blame the alcohol. But there is no-one to call, no matter how unreliable, with news. No sharing. Even the illusion of a relationship is gone.

  My mother tells me firmly that she prefers coffee to tea, so I reboil the kettle and make her a pot.

  'Instant,' she says, 'will do in future.'

  'I had an affair, you know.' As though saying it out loud will somehow give it substance.

  'Had?'

  'He ended it. Yesterday.'

  'Oh, is that all it was,' she says lightly. 'I thought it was about something serious, you know, like dying or something.' She adds a casual aside:'Anyway, men don't like mutilation.'

  I scrabble for her meaning. Is she saying they are weak and can't cope with illness? Or that I am no longer desirable in any way?

  She gets up and goes to her suitcase to get me my birthday present. It's a lace and satin teddy with matching knickers. Fragile. Feminine. Sexy. The style of top that will hang flatly and therefore emphasise where there is no longer any breast.

  I say thank you and wrap it up again. A few months later I throw it in the St Vinnie's clothing bin. Now I know where I get my appalling ability to choose the wrong gifts.

  Six days later, I wander around the rabbit warren corridors of Royal North Shore Hospital, searching for the right room for chemo treatment.

  'It's an omen,' I tell Pia when I call her on the mobile, panicked, lost, afraid of what I am about to begin.

  'What do you mean, an omen?'

  'I'm not meant to have this treatment.'

  'What do you mean, "meant"?'

  'I just don't know what to do. What's right, what's wrong.'

  'Well, why don't you ask someone for directions and make up your mind when you find the place?' Pragmatic as ever.

  'Yeah, ok. I'll do that.'

  'Do you want me to drive over and come with you?'

  Of course I do. I'm looking for comfort. A gentle hand to hold on to mine and tell me all will be well.That there is life everlasting no matter what. But there are no fairy godmothers. No magic wands. None that work, anyway.

  'Nah. I'll be ok.'

  At the main desk I query a harassed receptionist. She directs me through grey, glossy painted labyrinths signed well enough for me to find the way.

  At another desk, another receptionist hands me forms to complete. Once again, the actor in me has kicked in. I am bright, look controlled. But the staff here have seen every kind of behaviour, every frail defence. I don't think they are fooled.

  There's an illusion of normality in the chemo ward. A tea room, with sandwiches and biscuits. Even cake. The more terrible the treatment, the better the goodies? I eat insatiably. Cheese and tomato on white bread, biscuits I haven't seen since childhood. Scotch Fingers. Milk Coffee. And then a chubby faced nurse calls my name.

  I step from earth to a strange new planet where people sit around grey-faced and silent in large vinyl armchairs that hiss with every wriggle. Violently coloured drips hang from steel poles. Thin wires of life? Or delaying death a little longer?

  No-one reads. Heads are dropped weakly on chests or turned to look out grey tinted windows over even greyer rooftops. Doing a silent stock take of the past, perhaps? Not daring to dream of the future?

  I do not talk to anyone. Look covertly at who has hair, who wears a scarf to disguise baldness, who looks well and is therefore just starting treatment. Who looks ill and frail and already half dead.

  'Do I really need to do this?'

  The nurse looks at me. Straight in the eyes. There is compassion and patience. How many times has she heard th
e same question? Unfair to ask. Impossible not to.

  'No-one is forcing you to do this.Take a while. Think about it.'

  'Would you have it, if you were me?'

  She looks at my chart. 'Yes,' she says.

  And I let go. 'Get through the hard stuff now,' I tell myself, 'so there will be no more in the future.'

  I hold out my hand, palm facing the floor, and she slips the needle into the big vein just below my wrist. When the drip is flowing smoothly, the nurse walks away. I sit there, trapped, committed, flooded inside and out with tears.

  I've chosen a chair at the back of the room, where the outside world is a distant smudge.To one side, almost behind me, there is a stretcher with an old, wispy haired man lying on it, with grey skin stretched tight across his cheekbones. Grey pants, checked shirt and an old, hand-knitted cable sweater. He is stick thin under his everyday clothes. Except for a tight, swollen tummy that points straight up.

  The old man groans. Not loudly. More in anguish than pain. His wife, who reads a women's magazine by his bedside, pats the hand without the needle in it. But she does not look up from the pages of gossip where she is, no doubt, cavorting in a glamorous, healthy world.

  I watch the clock through blurry eyes, willing the allotted two hours to fly past. Hurry up, drips, hurry up! Fluorescent red. Clear saline. Slip down the plastic tube and into my body and let me get out of here! But they don't hurry and I cannot move until the needle is pulled from my hand. I cannot even scream. In death's counting house, we are all polite.

  When I walk out of that first session filled with my new, toxic blood I feel like a bug-eyed alien. In my pocket is a little bottle of pills. For post-treatment nausea.

  'Drink lots of water. All day. Flush it out. Keep flushing it out.'

  The nursing shift changed while the drip was flowing into my body. This new nurse is tall and dark and anxious.

  'How much water?'

  'As much as you can stand.'

  'At night, too?'

  'If you can.'

  I walk to the car park, focus inwardly to assess any differences. Dizziness? Illness? Lightness? All I feel, though, is disconnected. Made up from a different recipe to the people around me. I check my hair in the rear-view mirror. Still firmly attached. I have been told I can expect it to start falling out before the second treatment. I dread losing eyelashes more than being bald.

  For some reason I cannot explain, every time I stop at a red traffic light, I want to wind down the window and scream out to drivers sitting in their isolated bubbles. 'I started chemo today!' I want to yell. 'I'm not one of you guys any more.' But, of course, I do nothing.

  My mind fizzes silently. If only I could turn back the clock. I do not want to be this person filled with stomach-churning fear and leaden despair. For a moment, I yearn for toujours gai. But it is toujours gai, I suspect, that's caused my problems.

  I stay with Pia that first night, in her apartment in the city. We eat spaghetti for dinner at an el cheapo around the corner. I eat a mountain, and half of hers. That night, hookers and druggies scream abuse up and down the street. Cars slam on brakes, a truck grinds up the hill. City music.

  When I finally sleep, it is to wake up drenched in sweat.The sheets are sodden. I feel like I'm on fire, or in a sauna. I have no idea what is happening. I shower, crawl back to bed. I don't need a sheet or blanket. And it is a cold, July night.

  By morning, the night is a distant memory and I feel almost normal. I shower, dress and go to work. By the end of the day, though, I am mush. I want to go home. My home. I call Pia and tell her not to expect me.

  'Call me if you need anything,' she says. 'Or do you want me to come with you?'

  'Nah. I just want to be alone.'

  And it's true. Because the kind of alone I'm talking about at Lovett Bay is the kind that feels like a haven.

  At Mona Vale I pull in to the fruit market. Carrots. Apples. Celery. Garlic. Anything to restore what chemo has zapped. The woman working the cash register watches as I reach into my bag for cash. The little needle spot on my hand purple now, with bruising.

  'Chemo?' she asks.

  She has pale skin and faded dyed blonde hair. Looks worn out.

  'Yes?' I turn the word into a question.

  'I had it ten years ago. You'll be right.'

  I want to grab her and kiss her. For a moment, I am not flying alone in an unknown vortex. She's had it and survived. I will too.

  At home, I reach for the phone, planning to join a cancer support group, the kind I rejected when I received a follow-up call after surgery. But I stop before I dial. The idea of sitting around talking about cancer is abhorrent. I want only to think about living.

  That night, I look at the anti-nausea pills and reject them again. I do not feel ill. On the bedside table I line up a jug of water, a glass, a stack of books. The arsenal, as I come to call it.

  For dinner, I eat tuna out of a can. Standing up. In the kitchen. Then I walk onto the deck, just to sniff the air, like an animal searching for the familiar scents of home territory. It is damp and cold and clean. When the metallic thread of chemo rises up in my mouth, I breathe deeply. Briny. Sweet smell of composting leaves. Of earth. Unbidden, an image of death, of lying under the earth, rushes in. Bury the thought. Bury? Anyway, I think, it's Lovett Bay for my ashes. Here, and only here.

  At 3 am with a full moon blasting through the bedroom window, I sit bolt upright. Before I can get up, I have vomited all over the floor. I should have taken the pills. I am too exhausted to move and leave the vomit there. I am absurdly thrilled that I don't have carpet or even a rug in the bedroom. Less to clean up. Drink some water and go back to sleep.

  At work the next day, I cannot get warm, cannot think straight. The screen blurs, the phone jangles. Mental or physical? Does it matter? I am still debilitated, pushing to go on when all I want to do is lie down and close my eyes. I thought I understood the meaning of 'bone tired', but I didn't. Not until now. But I refuse to give in. I keep going to work. Day after day. Perhaps because it seems so ordinary. It's the contact with other people that allows me to check whether my mind is spiralling into a kind of madness or whether I'm still seeing the world rationally. Long, silent conversations with yourself have a way of sending you nutty.

  A week after my first treatment, I'm back in the waiting room with the beautiful paintings. I hear the oncologist behind her closed door talking to a crying patient. A low murmur, nothing defined except the sobs.

  Then it's my turn. We trade standard lines.

  'I'm fine. How are you?' she asks.

  'Fine.'

  I have told myself to think of the treatments as a four-part series. I have had one, so I am one-quarter of the way through. After the next dose, I will be halfway through. When you're halfway through, it's nearly over. Once it's over, everything is level again.

  'Feel all right after treatment?'

  'Yep.' I forget to tell her about the sauna sweat on the first night.

  'Any nausea?'

  'Oh, yeah. Threw up on the second night.'

  She looks shocked. 'That shouldn't have happened.'

  Why did I feel like I'd blundered? 'Well, it did.'

  'Did you take the pills?'

  'No.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because I didn't feel sick until I suddenly threw up.'

  'You're supposed to take the pills for the first three nights after treatment.'

  'I thought you only took them if you felt sick.' I've never been good at understanding instructions.

  She sighs.'No.Take them next time, ok?'

  'Ok.'

  She gives me a referral to a nearby blood testing clinic. Tells me to arrange a test one week before my next treatment, which is scheduled in three weeks, to make sure I've remade enough white blood cells to replace the ones that have been nuked.

  The vein in my left arm is in for a pounding. My right arm is off limits for even a blood pressure test. Lymphoedema is the big bogeyman. Swellin
g that will not retreat, leaving one limb much bigger than its partner. Without the full quota of lymph nodes,my arm is no longer as efficient at cleaning out bacteria. An infection of any kind is a danger – from a knife-cut while peeling the potatoes, to a mosquito bite. Do not even take a long flight without wearing a pressure bandage, I'm told.

  It takes a few scares until I accept that a small tube of antiseptic is my new constant companion. But I instantly reject babying my right arm. Not practical in an environment where everything is carried in and out. I understood, from the moment I met Gordon, that to lose your strength signals the end of life on the boat-access-only shores of Pittwater. That is not an option for me. I tell my arm, like a separate sentient being, that it has to perform.

  During the second treatment, I endure but do not cry, although I want to flee and be gone from that room of last resorts as quickly as I can. I hate the thin, dead smell of chemo. Hate that falsely cheery cocoon where we sit around in those hissing chairs. Strung up to chemicals so deadly, when the old boy's pee bottle spills, men arrive in white boiler suits and contamination masks to clean up.

  I did it, I think now, because to walk away would have been the easy option. Another possibly life-threatening stab at denial. No more easy options.

  After that second treatment, I behave quite bizarrely when I leave the clinic. I sing out loud in the car and arrive back at Church Point almost euphoric, adrenaline running hard, my heart racing towards some invisible finishing line. I wait for the water taxi, toe tapping, humming a silly tune about a song and a señorita. Glance every now and then at the little speck of pure white cotton wool taped over the puncture in my hand. As I wait, I invite almost total strangers (no-one who lives in this part of the Pittwater community is a total stranger) home to dinner. All they have to do to get an invite is catch my eye. I am manic and a little mad. Am I trying to fill the long empty hours of the evening before crashing into uneasy sleep?

  I know I am worn out but invitations to one and all come tumbling out of my mouth before I even think about them.

  Perhaps it's desperation, wanting to be centred in normality.To be around people who have dreams, who talk about kids and cooking and boats and fishing . . . and holiday plans. Who plant gardens to enjoy in twenty years' time because they have no idea, yet, what it's like to have the curtains drawn on dreams. As I am dropped off at Ken's dock at the Lovett Bay boatshed, I add up the number of people who have said yes to dinner. About eight, I think. Easy.