Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  It is that same fear of being called on to give more than I'm now capable of that makes me wonder if I should cancel the puppies. Can't look after myself properly at the moment. How can I cope with energetic young pups? Then the image, quick as a flash, of soft, warm bodies. Cold, wet noses. Unfettered exuberance. Companions. Love. Two little beings that are honestly my own. So I don't reach for the phone to cancel. Let it happen. For better. Only for better.

  I go to bed early feeling exhausted. Dinner (two lamb chops) sets off waves of nausea. Chemo makes me feel like I'm constantly seasick. Only lying down stops the rolling disorientation. Even reading gets hard.

  The phone rings when it is cold and dark. It's the breeder with the arrival time for the puppies. Ready for pick-up at two thirty the following day. I cut the conversation short. Too tired to be polite.

  Then suddenly a toe-tingling heat, pins and needles again, rises like a surging surf and swamps me. Sweat explodes all over my body. I throw off doonas. Unbutton my pyjamas. Sweat rolls down my back. I fight the urge to vomit.Then, in moments, I'm back to a teeth-chattering cold. I haul the bedclothes back on then, just as the cold seeps out of my body, another flush explodes. Fast and furious. Is this a new kind of hell?

  I sleep on and off,my mind in a drowsy half-reality, buzzing with people I've never seen, places I've never been. I have no idea where these blank faced beings in my subconscious come from, and I do not care. I let them chatter away in conversations that mean nothing until I fall into an uneasy sleep a couple of hours before dawn.

  I phone the oncologist in the morning. 'What's going on? I keep feeling like I'm going to explode with heat and the next minute, I'm freezing.'

  'Hot flushes. You're in menopause.'

  She is happy. Chemo has done its job. The estrogen has leached out of my body.

  'How long does it last?'

  'Couple of years. Often five. Sometimes a lifetime.'

  'I'd better be in the couple of years scenario.'

  'No way to tell.'

  'Is there anything I can do?'

  'Nope. Hormone replacement is not for you. So hang in with the flushes, ok? Just hang in,' she says.

  'Yeah. But this feels like the last straw.'

  'I know you don't think so now, but you'll get used to them and they'll start to lose their intensity in a couple of years. Roll with them, if you can.'

  I hang up in despair.

  Within a week, the last shreds of my ability to concentrate evaporate. Any close-fitting clothing makes me feel like someone is pulling a noose tight around my neck, choking off the air, suffocating me. I stand at bank tellers' windows and see wariness in their faces when I suddenly break into a drowning sweat. I know I look desperate because that's how I feel. Chemo has left me with very little control over my body. Now I have even less and I feel semi-hysterical most of the time. Panic attacks, which engulf me for no reason at all, hit me anywhere, but for some reason, mostly in supermarket parking lots. If I'm shocked by a loud noise – a car backfiring, a door slamming – I burst into tears.

  The flushes surge in at around twenty minute intervals, although there may only be a five minute respite. I spend a lot of time putting clothes on and then taking them off. Sometimes the desire to strip everything off is almost overwhelming, even in the middle of a busy street. Anything to cool down before I explode. It's a new hell. And I hate it. I hate the absolute bloody weakness of it all. But I will not – I abso-bloody-lutely will not – give in. I know forever more now that one gift cancer has given me is the knowledge that life, in just about any form, is utterly precious.

  I doubt I will ever be careless of it again. The new measure for everything from irritation to disappointment is simple. Is it life threatening? If not, don't worry about it.

  I call the water taxi when it's time to pick up the puppies. Outside, the cool air feels like stepping into a refrigerator in the middle of my own personal heatwave. I whack on my hat and say hi to the boys as I pass the boatshed. It is lunchtime. They sit on the cold concrete on a cold day, eating two-inch thick sandwiches, surrounded by the synthetic smell of instant coffee.

  Alongside the ferry wharf, on their own pontoon, Bob and Barbara's two tinnies rock with the swell in what looks like mute conversation. They are not the conventional open tin dinghies ordinarily found around the bays. The big one is squarish, with an aluminium cabin and three V-shaped hulls, The smaller one has a conventional dinghy body with a pointy nose and a rounded middle, but the same hard metal cabin as the bigger boat. They look a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine and as stable as tennis courts. I can't help thinking one of them might be a perfect commuter boat for a beginner driver like me. I could slap, bang and bash them up against docks and barely feel the bumps.

  Water taxi Bob is on duty today. When I first arrived at Towlers Bay in what already seems a time as distant as The Dreaming, I'd tried to get a herb and vegetable garden going at Stewart's house. The soil there is sandy and poor, and I hauled bags of fresh chicken and cow manure and bales of lucerne in an effort to build it up. Water taxi Bob didn't even hesitate to take on the cargo, which ponged like a poultry farm. He just reached for the bags and bales and loaded them onto his immaculate boat. Years later, he tells me he ripped the carpet from the floor of the boat and dragged it behind in the water for about three hours to kill the dung smell.

  I love water taxi Bob. He's a gentleman.

  'Off to another treatment?' he asks.

  'Nope.'

  I don't want to tell him about the puppies, want them to be a surprise.

  'What time does your shift end?' I ask.

  'Today? Three.'

  He'll be gone before I return, so I tell him: 'Picking up two little puppies. Jack Russells. Sisters. From the airport.'

  'Yours?'

  'Yep.'

  'Now there's trouble,' he says, laughing deep and so wide a shard of sun hits one of his silver fillings and creates lightning flashes.

  I wonder briefly why everyone keeps mentioning the word 'trouble'. Puppies can't be too hard to handle, can they?

  The traffic feels like playing dodge 'em cars. It's nearly two months since I drove through crowded city streets. Downturned mouths, tapping fingers on steering wheels, people who honk and hoot and then shake their hands in mock despair when I fail to accelerate fast enough for them. Everyone around me seems to be going at a ball-breaking, frantic speed. I recall a hundred cranky moments when I, too, ranted and raged at all those grey-haired drivers with fading eyesight and wavering concentration who moved too slowly. Now I am like them. Lovett Bay has changed my pace and I get a sudden glimpse of what it will be like to be old and left behind by youth and technology. But with Lovett Bay as the backdrop for aging, the prospect doesn't seem too awful. Neither does aging, now that there's a chance I may not get to experience it.

  I hear yapping from the moment I step out of the car at the cargo terminal of Sydney airport.Two sets of high pitched yelps, constant, ear-piercing, semi-hysterical. Completely furious. The clerk is pathetically grateful to hand them over in their doggy carrying case and wishes me a fervent 'Good luck'.

  I load them into the back of the car and open the cage door. The first puppy to poke out a velvety little nose I call, Vita. The second, shyer but bigger, with the gentlest face and roundest brown eyes, I call Dolce. I know it is corny but I don't care. Sweet life, gentle life.That's my goal. They will be constant reminders of all that is good.

  I lift them out of the cage, each small enough to fit in one hand, two warm, frightened little puppies that lean against my chest as hard as they can. Their hearts race and they smell like fresh bread. I inhale deeply and it drowns out the smell of chemo that comes up from my lungs with every breath.

  Vita's face is tan. Matching hindquarters lead into a tan tail. The rest of her starry white coat is short-haired, not curly like some terriers, and her legs are longer than conventional, which means she doesn't have the tummy dragging look of some Jack Russells. She is pure fema
le. Sexy. Knows her own beauty. She reminds me, don't ask me why, of Lana Turner.

  Dolce's face is also tan but with a little black through it. She has a white blaze, and fluffy mutton-chop whiskers. She has the same white through the body, but stained here and there with shadowy brown patches under her thin white fur. Her tail is tan but the tip looks like it's been dipped in white paint. When it wags, it's like a frantic flag of surrender. Her head is too small for the rest of her body and she gives the impression of being messy, lacking the aura Vita exudes. Her confidence is shaky. I hold her harder. Soothe her with more focus.Vita is already looking around, scoping the landscape.

  I put them in the doggy cage for the drive home. They are quiet in the back. Good puppies. They may not be perfect specimens of the breed but I like that. I feel we all match each other.

  I pull into the supermarket car park and lock them in the car. After a quick scoot around the aisles, stuffing the trolley with dog food, dog collars and leads, and doggy treats, I tiptoe back to the car. Listening for a racket caused by two frightened puppies.

  All quiet. Good puppies. Open the rear, throw in the grocery bags. They spring up and down, their little round pink tummies freckled with brown spots, pressed against the sides of their cage. Already so pleased to see me but I resist the desire to pick them up. They will settle in at home in a minute. Of course they will.

  Annette swings the pink water taxi in to dock, churning the water like a flamenco dancer's frilly skirt.

  I load the puppies on first.

  'Who are these?'

  'My new family.'

  'Oh . . .' She goes quiet. A cold wet nose pushes through the bars to get closer to her fingers.

  'They are . . .' she says. 'They are . . .'

  'Heaven!'

  'Yep.That's the word.'

  But she leaves me with the feeling she was going to say something else. A word that didn't have quite the same meaning as 'heaven'.

  Annette climbs back into her driver's seat, puts her feet on a raised, homemade step for comfort and balance, slowly guns the motor and swings away from the ferry wharf. Her hair is always perfect. Wonder how she does it in the wind and rain? Never seen her bad-tempered either. She always wears pink or navy or both with lots of white. She does a hard, often dirty job but she always looks clean, and serenely, effortlessly female.

  The puppies are frantic when the throttle moves forward and the boat, Little Bits, rises high before levelling. I try to soothe them but Dolce throws up. I feel for her. I get seasick too.

  At the Lovett Bay ferry wharf, Annette hands up the smelly cage. 'Happy families,' she says, screwing up her nose.

  Later in the afternoon, I put collars and leads on the puppies and take them up the hill to visit Barbara. Her wide smile erases the tiredness from her face, and she scoops them onto her lap, inhaling their wheaty puppy smell.

  'I haven't had time to read your document yet,' I explain, settling in for what is to become a ritual cup of tea.

  We sit on the verandah in the late afternoon light. The escarpment broods in shadow. Great swathes of towering eucalypts, backlit by the setting sun, roll like moss down the hillside.Near the house, the feathery foliage of wattle trees bleaches to gold and a border of agapanthus defines the edge of the lawn. The colours just before evening closes in are denser, richer, lusher, and the bay gleams like polished brass.

  'Read it when you're ready,' Barbara replies.

  Bob, again, brings slightly underfilled mugs of hot tea and slightly undersized slices of lemon cake. Then disappears back into his study. The tea has the same earthy smell that came from my grandmother's kitchen when tea was routinely brewed strong and black on a wood burning stove or in a sooty billy hanging from a hook over the gigantic, fifteen foot fireplace in the sitting room.

  Bob's tea always makes me think of my granny, whose name was Henrietta and who always wore a 'pinny' (apron) over her clothes, tied tight around a tiny waist. She used to buy Bex, a powdered painkiller, by the carton load, and every afternoon she'd disappear into her bedroom with a cup of tea and a Bex, to have a lie-down. My Uncle Frank says she used to take a Bex if she thought she might get a headache. She died at sixty-three. Probably from kidney failure, although no-one quite knows.

  She was a superstitious old girl, my granny, who believed she had second sight. She passed on her I told you so kind of magic to my mother, who wielded it indiscriminately. For years I believed that my mother had some kind of ability to see beyond the natural. As a result, my childhood was hostage to superstition.

  'Old Etty died,' my mother would tell me. 'Saw it coming.

  Picture fell off the wall last week.'

  I would wonder briefly why – if she saw it coming – she did nothing to warn the old girl. But my doubt always felt disloyal so I kept silent even though it seemed to me that she was usually wise after the event and never before it.

  My mother has her own long list of rules to obey to keep the spirits satisfied. Never put new shoes on the table (bad luck). No carnations or lilies in the house (death in the family). Never cut your fingernails on a Sunday or Friday (more bad luck). Never turn a mirror or painting to the wall (more death). Never give away a knife without getting a coin for it (cuts a friendship). Seeing crows (watch yourself, you could be in mortal danger). Picture falling from the wall (death). And on and on.

  As a child, though, I wondered if my mother also knew the thoughts that ran through my mind. She certainly let me believe she did. Which gave her a lot of power until I was old enough to toss off the hocus-pocus. She was a good guesser, though, I'll give her that. Although my brother told me my face was as easily read as a book. Still is, apparently.

  One day I plucked up enough courage to actually ask Mum why, if she'd foreseen a calamitous event, she hadn't done something to stop it.

  'You can't intervene in the natural course of life,' she replied.

  'Then what's the point of having second sight?'

  I got a pat on the hand and a sad little shake of the head, as if to say that one day, when I grew up, I would understand all. Maybe she had a point. Musical microwaves, little green satellites, my obsessive search for omens when I didn't want to make a decision . . . I wonder, though, whether omens were my scapegoat, a device that I conjured up to allow me to take actions I knew were intrinsically wrong. Cross two creeks in one day bearing the lover's name? It must mean the gods are smiling on the relationship, right? Of course not. But for me, in those cyclonic times, it was enough to make me feel the gods had pressed a waxed seal of approval on the liaison.

  I have not seen the lover since my dreadful birthday lunch, nearly two months ago, nor had a phone call from him to see how I'm doing. Have I been amputated from his mind or just quickly and cleanly filed away. I wonder if he ever gets a tingling, as I do from the empty space where I once had a breast, when he sees a tall woman in the street that could be me. Sometimes, I try to conjure his face. The deep brown eyes, so hard to read, and the long thin line of his mouth. Easy to read. I am surprised to find that his image is already blurred in my memory. Would I pass close by him in the street and not notice? All that anguish and pain and I cannot even recall the way the pieces of his face fit together.

  I sip my tea and wonder whether Barbara would like to hear about my granny and her tea, but before I can say anything she passes me a pamphlet covered in crude, ugly drawings of a fat little creature with a pointy head and eight legs.

  'What's this?'

  'Now you've got a couple of dogs, you'd better find out about ticks.'

  My face must have gone even whiter than usual. 'Ticks?'

  She points at the drawings. 'That's the life cycle of ticks. The ones that can kill a dog are the fully grown ones, the paralysis ticks.'

  'What do you mean, kill? They don't really kill a dog, do they?'

  'Oh yes they do.'

  'But there are dogs everywhere on Pittwater. How come they're not all dead?'

  Barbara smiles. 'I guess you ha
ven't been here for the tick season so you don't know much about them.'

  Barbara begins to shake with laughter and she looks at me and apologises. 'Sorry,' she says, almost hiccuping. 'The thing about ticks is that they attach themselves to you in very awkward spots. The first tick Bob ever got . . .'

  The story emerges slowly, through more laughter. They'd spent a morning walking a scrubby, bushy block of vacant land during their search for a place to set down new roots.

  'When we got home, Bob went to the toilet and felt an itch in his groin,' Barbara explains. 'He scratched for a couple of minutes but the itch didn't go away. So he sat on the toilet and took a closer look.'

  'Saw a whole lot of little black legs waving at me,' Bob says, walking in on the conversation. 'From the end of my dick!'

  Now they're both laughing.

  'Neither of us knew what to do because we'd never seen a tick before so we climbed in the car and went to the local medical centre,' Bob continues. 'There was an old bloke with shaky hands on duty. He came towards me with tweezers and this shockin' shake and I thought, hell, I hope his eyesight's better than his hand control or I could be damaged for life!' He drops down beside his wife, winds an arm around her waist. 'Barbara was laughing so hard I had to drive home. And I was the wounded one!'

  For a moment she tilts her head onto his shoulder and there are tears in her eyes that I mistake for sadness. But she's still laughing. Bob plants a loud, squishy kiss on her cheek.

  'Got work to do,' he says, getting up.

  The puppies are dozing peacefully on Barbara's lap. They're tiny and vulnerable and I can't bear the thought of anything happening to them. I take Dolce from Barbara and tuck her under my chin, snuggling into her fur.