by Jayne Tuttle
‘Maybe you can work with French-speaking criminals,’ says Dad.
‘Thanks, Dad.’
One morning, flipping through the jobs section, I see an ad for someone with two specific qualifications: a degree in a foreign language and a degree in law or criminology. The job? Intelligence Officer for ASIO – the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In other words: spy.
This is very cool. I set about preparing my application, to my sister’s laughter:
‘You don’t want to be a spy. You just want to wear the outfits.’
I’m offended. Then I realise it’s true. If I close my eyes I see myself as La Femme Nikita, rolling across floors with a gun, in a miniskirt. Then and there, I commit myself to the pursuit of acting. I audition for drama school and am accepted. For the next three years I study Shakespeare and Tchekhov and the contemporary greats, learning vocal technique and improvisation. I graduate with flying colours, secure an agent, and am full of hope and excitement about my impending career. I will act in the theatre, in television, be popular, successful; I’ll appear on the front cover of magazines with my hand on my chin.
Nothing could have prepared me for the post-school silence. Waiting for the phone to ring, going from audition to audition only to be told I’m too this and not enough that. Gabriella, my best friend from drama school and a similar ‘type’ to me, gets called for the same auditions, leading to a weird, competitive dynamic between us. I don’t like the feeling of scrabbling for roles and I don’t like the cameras in cold rooms with people in suits. I begin to dream about taking off to Paris again, to attend Lecoq, the theatre school I’d read about where they teach you not just to act, but to make your own work. Acting is fun, but if you’re not cast you can’t just do it anyway, unlike playing a guitar or writing a book or painting a canvas.
I want to make my own work, but I have no idea how. The Lecoq school costs more for a term than I make from my part-time jobs in a year, and that’s without considering flights and living costs. My only choice is to consider a second career, and take whatever acting jobs I can get on the side.
In university I played old Miss Prism in a French production of The Importance of Being Earnest. As fewer actors spoke French, I had more chance of getting fun roles, even if they didn’t suit my age or type at all. That company is holding auditions for the role of Elvire, the wife in Molière’s Dom Juan. I get the part.
I’m Sorry, We Still Have Time
ONE DAY IN dress rehearsal for the Molière production, I’m having my bodice stitched up when my phone rings. It’s Dad. ‘Can you come home please?’ he says. His voice is strange.
‘Sure, I’ll see you after rehearsal.’
‘No, I need you to come now.’
‘I can’t, Dad, it’s dress.’
‘Sorry, but you have to come now. It’s important.’
I don’t ask what’s wrong. I hang up and tell the director I have to leave, and go straight to the car. My hands tremble on the wheel. I light a cigarette. Norma, my 1960s Cortina, is too old to go on the tollway and I don’t have one of those electric passes but I rattle along it anyway, eyes blankly monitoring the temperature gauge. The trip out to the suburbs lasts hours and a split second at the same time. I flash back to the hospital, the tests; my mother sitting on the bed with the tape across her voice box, the redheaded male doctor.
‘It’s just an annoying condition I’ll have to take medication for,’ she said. ‘It’s called sarcoidosis. Nothing to worry about.’ The word sounded so awful, all I could think of were hot coils in her throat, but she assured me it really was nothing.
When I pull up outside the house it looks as it always does. The curtains are open. A kid whooshes by on a skateboard. I mount the steps to the only home our family has had.
Dad is in the kitchen making tea, his back turned. The kitchen looks the same, the cork floor, the fridge covered in stickers and magnets, the hum of the dishwasher. Mum’s handbag on the kitchen counter, with all its mystery. Dad keeps jiggling his teabag. ‘We’re just waiting on Kate.’ He leaves the room without me seeing his face.
There are no biscuits in the pantry and no chocolate in the cupboard above the microwave. I’m not hungry anyway. I stand at the window and watch my brothers shoot hoops. The dog runs around their ankles. The strong smell of the gardenia in a vase above the sink infiltrates my nose, tightening my stomach.
Kate walks in, banging the back door. Beautiful Kate, so dark, like Mum. The opposite of the boys, me and Dad, all honorary Swedes. She and I share an apartment now, in the city. When the boys finish school, we joke, they can live there too.
Kate raises her eyebrows at me. I shrug. She puts her bag down. The boys come in, puffing. Ben says, ‘What do you think’s going on?’ Kate says no idea. Alex slumps in a chair. My stomach churns.
Dad comes back. His face is frightening. ‘Come into the living room,’ he says in a small, tight voice. He pulls the couches closer together, into a weird sort of circle. We sit down and Mum enters. Her eyes are red and she looks pale.
‘Hi guys.’ She smiles and scratches her head. She doesn’t hug us. She can’t quite look at us. The little piece of blue tape is still on her neck.
She sits down in the armchair she and Dad recently had reupholstered in a contemporary floral pattern. She seems dwarfed by both the chair and the design. Why couldn’t they have just kept the green velvet? Dad sits down on his knees, placing his hands on each thigh. He looks like a little boy. He goes to speak, then begins to cry.
I feel like vomiting. We wriggle, it’s unbearable, he takes forever to speak. Finally, he manages to spurt, ‘We asked you to come because. Basically. Your mother’s not well at all. They were wrong.’
My hands are tight between my knees. Dad cries more. Then he breathes. As if he’s been winded he says, ‘It’s not sarcoidosis. It’s cancer.’
I look at him, waiting for him to say something that will annul what he’s just said. His shoulders are hunched and tears drip onto his hands.
I look at Mum. She is even smaller in her chair. It’s like she’s on trial. I look back at Dad. Go on, I plead silently, go on. Make it go away.
But he doesn’t say anything. Kate leans her face into her hands. Ben curls in on himself. Alex sits rod-still. Dad tries to slow his breath in order to speak.
‘Lung cancer. And … it’s not possible. To operate.’
Our cardboard house falls gently down on us. Dad cries on the carpet. Mum shrinks still further into the chair. Had I really grown up in this house? Did I used to play in that sandpit outside, make Barbie homes inside that cubbyhouse? Who are these people? That is not my dad sitting there, I have never seen this person before. He is a little boy who got lost on his way to the shopping centre. Why won’t the little boy stop crying?
Mum’s hand is on the arm of the chair. I am close to her but I don’t know how to reach out and touch her.
I want to go back. I want to reverse out of the house, go back up Eastleigh Drive, back to rehearsals and do my Act II monologue. I want it to be yesterday, I want to be back in the Greek restaurant, on the funny date with the actor guy, Jack. I want to be in the apartment with Kate, watching her make me a sandwich as I tell her about the date. I want today not to come, I want it not to be now; I want to be a kid again, a snot-nosed toddler, a baby, in her arms, on her chest. I want to crawl back inside her and never be born.
Time has a new texture. Space too. We are far from each other and far from the rest of the world. This tight-knit family, exploded. Mum feels guilty, I can see it. She is leaving us. We don’t want her to leave. We would rather anyone else leave. Not her. Why her? She does nothing but help other people. She brings babies into the world! Looks after mothers. Researches how to make their lives better. Looks after us. Looks after everyone. It can’t be her. It can’t be real.
At some indefinable point she turns to us and says, ‘I’m sorry. We still have time.’
We have thirteen months.
&
nbsp; I never thought she would actually die, though the redheaded doctor said, point-blank, ‘Six months to two years.’ Little grief by little grief, you get lulled into a new reality. First, the news. Grieve that. But she’s still there, still looks so well, you’d never know anything was wrong. So you stop grieving. You stay in the present. Chemo. Tubes and needles. Grieve that. But she laughs, her hair stays in, maybe a cure will come. She gets tired. Sleeps until afternoon. Grieve that. But she still laughs, still hugs, still asks all kinds of questions about your new boyfriend Jack. She’s still right here. How can there be any grief?
Then the hospital. The I-don’t-think-she-can-go-on-like-this-much-longers. The wheezing and gasping, the sprawling red bruise across her back, like two big red wings. Morphine. Palliative care. She sees portals in insipid hospital prints of country England. Talks to her dad in the portals. But she is still warm, still beautiful, still speaks small sentences. And so the plateaux go on, deeper and deeper, until she is in a bed, pillow covered in hair, in and out of consciousness, people shaking their heads a lot. Her eyes open a crack, for you. She squeezes your hand. She is still alive. Your mother. She is right there.
Kate and I are eating ice-creams outside our apartment one hot night with Jack. Our windows are open upstairs and we hear our landline ring. Nobody ever calls the landline. Kate goes up and answers it. Jack and I wait in silence. She comes running back down the stairs. Without speaking, Jack drives us to the hospital. Kate and I sit in the back holding hands like children.
We leave Jack’s car. The sliding doors open. A lady is there waiting for us.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘You’ve just missed her.’
Like she’s left on a train.
When I was little I would stand by my parents’ bed in the deep of night whispering, ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’ Eventually she would wake and let me in. ‘Five minutes, then back to bed.’ I would lie there, stiff as a board, as far away from her as I could get, hoping she would forget I was there. But I could still feel her warmth.
Now I whisper, ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’
She will wake any moment and say, ‘What is it, Jaynie?’
My French professor went missing once; there was a newspaper article saying he had disparu. Disappeared. I kept waiting for him to come back. I learnt much later that the word actually means ‘dead’. The meaning of this was not fully apparent to me until the days and weeks after that strange and silent night. I kept looking for her, expecting to feel her, smell her. But she had disappeared. No matter how hard I tried, how good I was, I would never see her or hear her or smell her again. Her absence was tangible, a hole, sucking all the warmth from the planet.
Months pass. The world feels warped – everything is familiar and yet not. I’m angry at it for being the same, when nothing is, or ever will be again. How can the streets have the gall to look as they did before, the houses, the faces, my front door?
You are Going to Paris
MY HAIR IS done, my clothes are neat, and when my heart slows down a bit I’ll put on eyeliner and ride to the audition for the insurance commercial. If I get it, that’s three months’ rent, maybe more. But my heart won’t slow down, it keeps speeding up, until it’s beating so hard I have to throw myself on the bed before I faint.
This has happened before, and lying flat always helps, but not this time. The thought of fainting while lying down fills me with a new level of dread. My body sinks lower and lower into the bed until it seems to fall right through, down through the floor and the apartment below, into the foundations and dirt, to a cold, cold place. Here in its silent grave my body stops fighting. I relax into the peace of nothingness, relieved, dead. God, it feels good to be dead.
I stay like that for a long time, until air begins to creep back into my nostrils and out of my mouth and I gradually rematerialise on my bed. Still here. I kick off my shoes and crawl under the covers, arms stiff at my sides. Tears spill down my cheeks, though I’m not crying – they do that now of their own volition, like incontinence. Face incontinence. I have no idea how much time passes: all I know is I’m now very late for the audition, and the thought sends me into another state of panic so intense I have to put my knees up and my wrists over my eyes and order myself to breathe, breathe, breathe. The suffocating feeling eventually subsides enough for me to roll over and pick up my phone.
My agent’s assistant, Robin, answers. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘I’ll let them know.’
Robin took me for a cup of tea when an episode like this, but milder, happened in her office. Her mother died too, she told me, when Robin was in her late forties. She told me age makes no difference, but that twenty-eight was young to lose your mother. ‘It doesn’t go away, but it does get better,’ she said. She also said she’d found a sort of new mother figure in the warmth and wisdom of other women around her. The last thing she said had stuck in my mind: having a mother is like being a balloon tied to the earth. Once she is gone, the string is cut, leaving you to roam untethered forever. ‘Which isn’t always bad,’ she said, patting my arm. ‘You’ll see.’
I hang up and fall into a heavy sleep. When I wake, it feels past lunchtime, judging by the sun on the palm tree outside. Two birds are chatting on a wire. Of course it’s a beautiful day. Australia never has any empathy for your mood.
When will things feel normal again? How to proceed when I don’t even have the ability to perform basic tasks like getting out my front door? I need to call Mum to ask her advice on how to get over the death of herself. She would know what to say. ‘Eat something. Go for a jog. Come on, Jaynie.’
The image of her drawing murky broth through a straw in a desperate bid to cling to a few more minutes of life wills me into the kitchen. What she’d have done for one more day. One more hour.
Kate has left two crusts of a loaf in a plastic bag and there’s an open jar of peanut butter on the bench. She dreams of Mum. For me, her absence is as cold as concrete, even in my sleep. I smear peanut butter on the crusts when they shimmy out of the toaster and sit looking at them. The window is open but the world outside is silent. Everyone’s at work, going about their day, smiling, chatting, eating stuff. All I want to do is stop. Forever. Disappear. I know how I’d do it. But the thought of standing is too much, let alone finding my keys. Too lazy even to suicide.
On the table is a scrap of paper with the words Reiki John written on it, and a number, which I must have absent-mindedly transcribed when someone said, yet again, with concern, ‘I know this guy. He can help.’ Who can help with something like this? It’s normal. People die. It happens every day.
What right have I to be helped anyway? I don’t deserve help. I’m a grown woman with a whole life ahead to look forward to. What about Dad? What about people whose parents die when they’re little? What about the stolen generations? What about kids in Africa?
Besides, I’ve already tried two people for help – a trainee counsellor who checked his manual and told me that this kind of grief takes six to twelve months to recover from, and Mum’s reiki lady, Magdalena. Mum was a pragmatist and didn’t go for hippie stuff, but a friend had recommended Magdalena to her when she fell ill, and she told me the reiki sessions made her feel so calm and well. The Christmas before she died, Mum gave me a voucher to see Magdalena – ‘It’s your kind of thing, Jaynie!’ – and a week after she died I remembered the voucher and went to see Magdalena, thinking it might uncover some secret to Mum I didn’t know. The idea of her private world fascinated me: she had never really shown us any of her vulnerability, cancer or otherwise. Had she told Magdalena if she was scared of dying?
Magdalena was just as I imagined: long wavy hair, long dress, beads. She took my rigid body in her arms; she loved my mother dearly, she said. And after lying on the table and having her warm hands hovering near me, I did feel slightly calmer. But that calm disappeared when Magdalena insisted that Mum had come in while I had my eyes shut, and had given me a kiss on the forehead. I wanted to shatter every crystal in her zen d
en. Even if I believed in anything like that, Mum had left the most tangible stillness I had ever known. Even if she could, she wouldn’t have hung around to give kisses on foreheads. She was gone; nothing, no one, had ever been so gone.
But reiki is all the rage right now, and in my circle of friends it’s the go-to solution for all life’s woes.
On this day, it doesn’t matter anymore whether I see Reiki John or not, nothing could make me feel worse, so I decide to call him. Besides, if one more person tells me to see him, I actually will kill myself.
The receptionist says he’s had a cancellation and I can come at three. The feeling of having an appointment makes me feel something that is neither good nor bad. Just something.
Reiki John works from a room in a little place built into the stone bridge that goes over the railway tracks to the Ripponlea railway station. The station is at the end of my street, and I must have passed his place a thousand times but I’ve never noticed it. It’s like a troll’s home, a cobbled brick wall with tiny windows in it, utterly out of place and yet perfectly belonging. Inside are four practitioners – an osteopath, a masseuse, a counsellor, and John, a ‘reiki and spiritual healing practitioner’, according to his signage. I sit for ten minutes in the waiting room, staring at an ad for water purifiers, trying to ignore the fact that an actor who graduated from my drama school the year before me (and got a big part in a hit TV series) is sitting opposite, trying also to ignore that she has noticed me.
‘Jayne?’ The portly receptionist directs me to the end of the hallway, into a warm, darkened room. Reiki John is seated on a comfortable-looking chair next to a small desk. His hands are clasped and he smiles at me, gesturing for me to sit down. He seems ageless – he could be my age, with his waxy skin and fair curls, but his eyes and body have an unwavering quality that makes him seem older. The quietness in his body unsettles me, and I would fidget and chew at the inside of my mouth were I not in such a rock-bottom state.
