The waterweed churns at my feet. There remains an unease in my stomach; something I can’t place. Have I eaten too much? I slip off my shoes and stand on the banks of the black sand. The moon reflects off the lake like it’s a glistening black hump of a whale, surfacing.
As the waves chop and clap against each other, the lunar pull creates a tide and memories of the past seem to churn again.
I watch the night sky, the moon, and wonder how many times I have watched this same sky from another place across the world.
A Tuesday night, just a few months ago, in Sydney. I was home after dark, boiling water for peas. I flicked on my phone, trawled the latest news, checked my inbox, Facebook. At the top of my feed an old friend had posted some news. Cancer.
This was not I hope I’m okay, could be out of the woods, remission, some chemo. No, let’s be clear – she was dying.
Comments ensued. Stay strong, be positive, we love you. After I read her news, I felt an urge to go outside. I lay on the bare concrete of my backyard, before the grass starts, where the garden table should be. But the table was propped against the garage wall, the caramel glaze drying, waiting for another lick of veneer. I wondered how many more skies she would see, how many more stars, before she didn’t.
Before I came to Africa, so many people had lost their grip on the world. There was a particular time, two months, that were steeped in death – friends of friends, slipping away. And then a very close friend of mine, Trevor.
He died in the way you hope everyone goes, and then no-one at all. Three years was long enough – you had time to say a million goodbyes. But because it was that long, and we were wishing otherwise, no-one ever really said goodbye at all.
He was sick. And then better for a while. Then sick again. Give him a few weeks, I thought, another round of chemo, he’ll feel better. I’ll pop by just like I always do, and he’ll be sitting on the couch, the fifty-inch plasma on mute playing silent video clips, and we’ll pull out the nerf guns. His wife Polly will be making us coffee, and we’ll be laughing like idiots, all three of us, at life, at each other. I’ll only mean to stay an hour, but it always ends up being two or three. Beers would be served just past midday. Whiskey by 2 pm.
When I heard he was sick again, I prayed for miracles, but even as I did, I realised I’d known all along that he was slipping away.
Days later I received a text from Polly in the early ashy dawn of a Tuesday: His breathing is short. He doesn’t have long. Come now.
I raced around the house trying to find clothes and throw them on in a fury. I caught a taxi by the station then screamed at the cab driver who was in the slow lane.
‘DRIVE FASTER! GOD DAMN IT, HURRY UP!’
I remember seeing the sun rise a soft pink over the Lane Cove river and thinking, it is too lovely a day to be someone’s last.
At the hospital, I ran to the lift, pressing the button to level 7, telling myself to Breathe, breathe. The lift was empty, but if anyone had been listening they would have heard me whisper, Please let me keep it together. And then, just in case, I pressed my hands together like a prayer, trying to squeeze the sadness between my hands, trying to keep it contained. But it oozed out through the gaps in my fingers, and my eyes were filled with tears before I even reached his room.
Give me gloves, I thought. A blanket, cover me, layer upon layer. I no longer want to feel.
When I saw him in the room his body wasn’t his, his face wasn’t his. Instead a baby’s body lay before me, skeletal and fragile. His head was a skull with a stretch of white skin, the raspiness of chest wheeze. He slept the entire time, with his eyes open. I don’t think he was there anymore.
Polly sat on one side, and I on the other, holding his hands, so warm to touch. I said nothing, but in my mind I told him, I love you. I know you’d hate that I was being so soppy. But then I know you’d secretively love it too.
When I said those words silently I watched his face. I felt to see if his hand grabbed at mine. But nothing registered that he had heard anything at all; perhaps he had already drifted somewhere else.
I said goodbye and as I left I cried like a baby. I couldn’t be seen like that so I stopped in the disabled toilet and put make-up over the mascara smudges. And when I looked in the mirror I couldn’t find myself.
Some hours later, just after midday, he stopped breathing.
On the day of his funeral I wept quietly at the back. The music played and photos of him, flashed on the TV in front of an audience so big we didn’t fit inside the chapel. People were sprawled outside some twenty steps away, maybe more.
At the end of the service the curtains pulled together, cloaking the coffin. Although he was already long gone, this act seemed so final.
The sun shined all day, and afterwards, everyone said, ‘What a lovely service.’
I kept repeating to myself words from The lost hotels of Paris by Jack Gilbert; two lines in particular:
But it’s the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
For weeks afterward I kept staring at the night sky and asking, Where are you?
When I saw traffic and blue skies at lunchtime during my walks around the city, I often went in circles. I asked, Can you still see us? I wanted to ask people, do you think he can see? But it was a different kind of question. One that you weren’t supposed to admit you thought about. You stuck to the safe topics, like how funny he was, how caring.
Most of the time I thought about things I couldn’t talk about. Did he have time before he slipped away to think about his life? And if he did, was it what he wanted? How did he know if it was a good life, how could it be measured? In love? Smiles? Months? Hours?
They kept me up at night; the questions. I’d stare at the ceiling and ask silently, What did it mean to be not here? In this world, on this earth? Which made way for other questions, What did it mean to be here?
At that vague time of night, answers were never ready and waiting. They stayed in the shadows, cool and damp. They preferred it there. So, of course, lying there desperate, my head full of questions, I couldn’t answer any of them.
Some nights I thought I was going mad.
It made me think of Virginia Woolf, who wrote most of her life – when she wasn’t stashed away in an asylum for being mad – before finding her end at a river. After several major breakdowns, she feared she had begun to hear voices. I wonder if she suddenly thought, yes, dear life, that is all. Because shortly after she began to hear those voices, she simply stopped eating. By the time she took herself to the edge of the river Ouse to die, she was but a boned woman, with a hanging of skin.
Did she take any last-minute thoughts with her, unwritten ones? Did she count the last seconds of her life in her head – one, two, three. Or did she count backwards, as she stepped deeper, knowing we can only last underwater for two minutes at most, before the water rushes in.
Did Sylvia Plath consider it too, those questions? Perhaps while chopping onions, or organising herb stems in deep troughs of water and letting them drink. Did she read something? Or realise something? Or did she just long for black silence before deciding that all the thoughts she had ever had – would ever have – had already tumbled from her head onto the page and there couldn’t possibly be another.
Perhaps she just couldn’t bare the strange idylls of life, the crests, the troughs, and out there was an idyllic place where she could rest, if only for a little while. So she plunged her head, whole, into an oven. She didn’t light the fire, but instead inhaled the gas and let it balloon her lungs and float her above the world, far, far away from any place that looked like a kitchen.
Did these women sense there was an ending? Did they plan it for weeks, quietly wondering how, or when? Or on a whim of desire, did they both just think now, now, NOW. I must go. And out they left, just like one slips out the back door, before anyone can notice.
My friend Justin decided not to wait out the years, and ravage of nature, that would slowly undo hi
s wide country shoulders, his brazen physique, his large smile.
Just days before he left for a New York summer he told me, ‘You got to do it, Kate. Get out there, into life. You gotta do it.’
He was laughing when he said it, and there was a sense of wonder that surrounded him. A desire to experience it all.
A few weeks later, Justin flung himself from an open window, three stories up, onto a Manhattan pavement.
For many months he lay in a hospital bed with dim eyes, repairing broken bones, crushed femurs and shattered wrists. Everyone wanted to know afterwards if, during his many days in rehabilitation, he’d had a moment of insight, a vision, which they hoped would make him want to stay in the world.
But he didn’t want to stay. He had stepped into a foggy land and over there felt very distant. He was alone, and no matter what he did, he kept saying he couldn’t find his way back. I sometimes wonder if he already had one foot in this world and the other in the next.
Five years later he didn’t die of a disease where we had time to whisper, ‘I love you,’ or watch him dissolve in front of us. Is that better or worse? I don’t know.
He left suddenly. Yanked from this life, not by God or anyone else’s hand, but by his own. With care, he wrapped the sheets of his hospital bed into a circle that looked rather like the twisted colours – blue and white – of an inflatable life buoy. And then, just as if he was lost in the water, he reached out and slipped his head through the float. And he was pulled swiftly into another world.
After he left, I spent night after night staring at the sky. I couldn’t fathom the thought that my friend had simply vanished. We were no longer lit by the same moon. His sky wasn’t mine. He was no longer here. And no matter where I went, or how long I searched, I would not find him.
There is some mysterious process at work here, the continuous chime of life, the bell tower counting out our life – how many rings are left? Did Justin use up all his rings? Or did he just climb that bell tower and cut the ropes and stop the world measuring another moment.
Oh time, there you are, marking us – beginnings, middles, ends – a sly little measurement that builds parentheses around our life, and we must live within it.
Do you know that in some places, Lake Bunyonyi is said to be over 900 metres deep? So deep, no-one actually knows how far it goes. I think about getting in. Just swimming out. There are no sharks. No snakes. Possibly an eel. Just water and depths of it. There is really nothing to be afraid of.
Except dying.
I keep wondering what it feels like to die. To leave. Do we know it when it’s happening? Do we have a sense of it? Does it make us feel sick and woozy, losing a body? Or light and floaty, like gaining feathers? The thought makes me a little dizzy. I try my mantra. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.
But when I breathe, when I stop thinking about how fine I am, something dark rushes in. I try not to think it, but I can’t stop. I wonder if everyone has a longing for a place that isn’t here. I wonder if, like me, they understand Justin and Sylvia and Virginia – just a little too well.
THE SUN rises slowly over the coconut plantations of Rwanda. Banana trees. Empty lots and vacant houses. Fields of palms. Our minivan has been climbing since before dawn. We are up but our faces are still smeared with sleep, eyes that opened before they needed to, faces puffy.
The locals have risen early too. There seem to be hundreds of them, all heading in the same direction – to the plantations. Each carrying small crumpled paper brown bags with lunch. Plain ugali. A piece of coconut. A soft brown banana.
A lucky few have bicycles. They meander carefully in-between the walkers. Our van slows to a crawl. A light mist hangs in the cool morning air. Fog billows.
At first light, we begin our walk. Rudi, our guide, does a sharp right, leading us between a line of irregular mud huts. We step carefully, taking care to avoid a line of baby-green cabbages. Budded heads poke through the soil.
Someone has gathered new potatoes from the ground, perhaps only this morning, and they sit in a wicker basket under a clothes line, white like luminous eggs, with a light dusting of dirt.
Just beyond the last cabbage head, chickens are squawking and strutting under a line of wet washing hung on string. The closer we get to the hens the louder they crescendo. Are they welcoming us? Or protecting their yard? Either way, African chickens are loud. The noise they make is astounding.
Beyond the chickens and washing, someone had taken the time to lay the earth in perfect rows. Overturned with precision, the soil heaved and turned, black and damp, waiting for seeds. Worms wriggle with translucent pink skins. Digging holes back into the black earth so their nude skin won’t be scorched by the sun.
We are all so busy peering down and watching the worms that we don’t realise Rudi has stopped. A man of little words, he merely puts up a hand, no words, asking us to pause. And when we do, we look up, and get our first real look at the Sabyinyo mountain.
She is as overgrown and beautiful as I imagine that garden in the Bible. So tall, she crescendos from the earth, accompanied, I imagine, by an orchestra. The clash of cymbals, the deep boomed tuba, the peal of a French horn, the triumphant streams of many trumpets. The top of her is completely obscured by cloud and mist. (An eerie oboe hangs on long after the brass instruments have ceased.)
Behind the mist, instead of a peak at her head like most volcanoes, she has a cone, shaped over many years, heaving lava at the sky. Sabyinyo means tooth, and on days the clouds part, the top of her is said to resemble the retracted gums of an old man, smiling upon Rwanda.
Crossing the fields the farmland ends suddenly, giving way to a long stone wall. At one end – you could easily miss it – a small archway formed entirely of plants and wildflowers. The opening, bordered by tiny pink flowers and thick vines is narrow, like a machete has cleaved an entrance weeks ago and it has grown back steadily since. We have to duck to enter the Sabyinyo, like one does when entering a cave.
Plants, vines, thorns, twigs, trunks so large three of us joining hands can’t wrap our arms around it. The sun is not allowed in here. Gallium vines have climbed the trunks, skyward, like a race to the sun. Those that did not hitch rides have spread sideways instead, layering the ground like knotted hair. Beneath the latticework, the soil is as dark and syrupy as molasses or a morning brew of roasted coffee.
There is a strange springy feel to the ground below our feet. Ant and I jump. Once. Twice. Laughing – it feels like we’re bouncing on a trampoline. Below our feet lie ancient rotting tree trunks, covered in lime and jade moss. Together they pad the ground, softer than any mattress I know. The other guide Jonste notices us and says the flooring means we can fall without hurting ourselves. Thank goodness, I think. Then I wonder, Where would I fall from?
I bend down and feel the exposed roots of a eucalypt. Cool to touch. So different to the heat of their trunks in Australia. Moving my hand up the root, pressing again as though I were checking a leg for a bone break. The moss and soil, soft and spongy, I kneel without any discomfort, and stay there looking up at the tree as though I have come to pray at this cathedral of cover. When the breeze blows, green and gold leaf litter flitters from branches like soft-bodied moths, coming to rest on the ground.
A scent of dampness rises when we move and a sweet rotting; ancient jungle soil. There are no paths. Plants have grown across every inch of light and space. Matted nests of vines and prickles. We stand silently in a group staring at the tapestry of leaves and trunks. Life has covered everything in sight. Where do we begin?
Rudi pulls at a small hole in the vines that crisscross at eye level like thick, sinewy spider webs. Drawing his machete, he warns us with a quick flick of his left hand: stay back. He swings once, twice, slashing at air first then finding plants. Vines melt to the ground. Small trees waver.
We follow Rudi along the narrow path, so tiny we must walk with our hips and shoulders turned sideways. Twisting our bodies to fit through. Prickly plants reach for us
, waiting to sting. One swipe, even a touch and the skin burns like a thousand mosquito bites. When I forget to twist or lose my balance – which happens several times – I’m stung fiercely. Tiny red bumps appear immediately. I don’t know if I’m meant to be scratching the poison tips out, or licking them with the mild anesthetic hidden in my saliva. The bumps rise in angry welts. I’m even stung through my jacket.
A break appears in the canopy and the sun pours down, making everything golden. Flowers flourish, tiny white bud heads. Fragrance fills the whole hillside. Rudi continues to sway his machete like he’s conducting an orchestra.
Deeper into the heart of the jungle, flowers disappear into different shades of green – olive, bottle green, mossy, lime, deep sea green. Vines so matted they cling to rocky walls, creating thick latticework. Ledges and platforms made entirely of vine.
One type of vine looks like a thin green tree python. Winding itself around the tall forest tree trunks, it seems intent on strangling them. The other, brown and long like a stick, sinewy to the touch, could bend and bend and never break. It hangs off the trees, a loopy tentacle catching in our hair and grazing our faces like alien fingers.
Rudi stops, hand up, and we pause behind him. He flicks his hand towards the vine, and again points up. We are going to climb it.
It’s just vine attached to rock. It has been there for hundreds of years, and offers footholds and finger reaches. From down here, it seems more like one of those childhood nets you’d climb in the playground. Except if I fell from them, the drop was only ever a metre and into the soft grass or chipped bark plentifully dropped below. Here, we will have to climb to the first ledge, which is at least double my height. And if you fall, there are a lot of things that will catch you – the ragged ends of trunks, and tall bamboo stems waiting to impale. If you avoid these, there’s nowhere to go but the bottom of the cliff, below us, covered in smooth grey rock.
The way to climb plants is an art form, unquestionably settled deep in the genes of Rudi and Jonste. Rudi lifts himself up the vine with ease, as though going up stairs. Ant and Candy and Bazz follow one by one with a little more effort, groaning slightly as they pull their body weight up, tufts of slippy vine in their hands. Still they work it like able rock climbers.
Ways to Come Home Page 9
