Reunion (30 page)

She was a little tired, she finally said, and pulled herself straighter on the cushions.

‘But nothing serious?' Connie returned, aware too late that the phrasing of his question was far more effective in revealing his fears than anything it might elicit about her health.

Of course it wasn't serious, she said. And sitting there an arm's length away, still with that radiance which was uniquely hers, he was sure he could believe her.

‘So what's the latest on the TV series?' she asked. ‘And Sara – still thriving with her?' She hesitated before adding, ‘And Linda – are the two of you managing to sort things out?'

Connie held nothing back and Ava let him talk, prompting occasionally with a question or comment. He could not explain how Sara's differences nourished him but it was more than the easy pleasures of novelty. He was working steadily, although to be entirely honest it was without the same drive. Yes, he and Linda were managing the divorce quite amicably. And no, he didn't miss her, not really, although he did miss the way she challenged him.

‘Sara is of the generation that believes everyone's entitled to an opinion and that all opinions are equal.' He forced a grimace into a smile. ‘It's not an attitude to push the work along.'

He readily admitted to missing his boys. ‘I miss their stories, their confidences, their –
dailiness
.' He paused. ‘I miss their unconditional little-boy love.'

More difficult to acknowledge was how much he missed America. And, as if to excuse himself, he added, ‘The un-American part of America – Boston and the north-east.' He shrugged. ‘Embarrassing, isn't it?'

Ava understood exactly how he felt. She was happy to be back in Australia but it didn't stop her longing for Oxford. ‘Its age, its weather, the whole dynamic of the place, and of course its proximity to London and Europe.'

Connie, however, knew his absence from America was far more profound than this. ‘I feel like I've separated from my life.'

‘Despite Sara? Despite your new book? Despite the TV series?'

He nodded and told her about the rolling headaches, the subdued work, his general unease. ‘I feel disorientated, a rootlessness, even a sense of exile.' He hesitated. ‘I think America has become home in a way Australia no longer is.'

It was a reluctant admission from a member of the generation whose suspicion of America was so entrenched it would have endured without top-ups from more recent fiascos.

He rose from the couch and wandered the room. His trousers pooled from his buttocks, the wild hair was thinning, skin drooped on his neck and arms; youth seemed to be draining from him.

‘I can't believe it,' he said, turning to face her. ‘I'm suffering separation pains from the United States of America.'

‘Are you sure this new-found attachment to America mightn't be something more personal? Separation from your boys? Separation from Linda?'

Connie shook his head. ‘I love the immensity of America, I love its excesses, the too-tall buildings, the loud-mouthed people, their unabashed confidence. I love life itself turned up high.' He looked helpless. ‘I love the place.'

He felt himself to be America in miniature, but he did not admit this to Ava. In Australia and England he had experienced a sense of struggling against the current. But in America he
was
the current – he was the whole bloody river.

Connie talked through the morning, there was no stopping him. Ava ignored the phone and when the doorbell sounded she ignored that too. Around midday the phone rang again. As she had done earlier, she let the call pass to the answering machine, but a few words into the message – it was a man's
voice, as to anything else, Connie could not say – she was out of her chair and dashing to the phone.

And probably just as well, Connie decided, as he checked his watch. Already he felt so much better. Although this new sense of home was worrying. What if it were not intrinsic to America? What if he were to spend the next ten years in Canada or Mexico? Would Canada then become home? Would Mexico? Was it possible that given sufficient time the substance and sensibility of any place would seep into him in a type of cultural osmosis. He remembered reading an article about Daniel Barenboim, how Barenboim spoke five languages fluently, all with an accent – so many languages but at home in none.

He would have asked Ava her opinion but there was no opportunity. When she returned she explained that something had come up. She looked rattled and he assumed it was a work emergency. She apologised, she hoped he understood.

‘Of course I do,' he said from the doorstep, ‘of course. And thanks, Ava. If ever I can return the favour.' But the door was already shut.

1.

There was a specific moment following months of moments when Ava knew she was seriously ill. It was not during an interminable hour with a huge roaring machine scanning her head, nor later that week when the neurologist outlined the numerous cerebral dysfunctions that could be causing her symptoms. Nor after hours of testing by a neuropsychologist in which her language functions were shown to fall within the average range – no consolation whatsoever to a woman accustomed to a thriving language universe. The moment came months earlier when she was seated at her desk, a site she knew better than any specialist could know her brain. At her desk, that euphemism for mind, for thought, for her very self, sifting through pages riddled with crossings-out. She skirted around the gaps and blotches as she read the flabby sentences, and even though these afforded no pleasure neither were they cause for concern: all writers are far more familiar with sentences that fail to make the grade than those which do. It was the misspellings that shocked her. She saw the misspellings in her own hand and she was terrified.

Occasionally she was unable to begin a word, sometimes she would trip up part way through, other times she would complete a word only to suspect it was wrong. The familiar had turned strange and the more she picked at a word the stranger it became. Simple words like ‘pencil', ‘mountain' and ‘glue' were more susceptible to sabotage than more abstract ones. But then a pencil was simply a pencil and glue was only glue, while sadness could be loss, grief, bewilderment, failure, terror.

Her spelling had collapsed. And now she could no longer ignore all the other problems. Her speech would stagger and ultimately stop over words which flickered just out of reach. Thoughts would enter her mind clear and tantalising and a moment later dissolve. Other times the thoughts were solid enough but the words were occluded – like a stutterer, although unlike the stutterer she could not even hit on the first sound. Or she would begin an utterance and forget where she was planning to take it, and be left dangling mid-sentence, desperate to gather herself and her gaping mouth and flee the conversation, yet forced to remain exactly where she was, terrified at what was happening even while she tried to disguise it. She would intend to go to the shop but before she had reached the end of the street she would have forgotten where she was heading. Once she lost her way in the cemetery, a place she had walked hundreds of times, and one of the gardeners had to guide her to the exit.

For someone with a good memory, forgetting is simply not an issue. Ava had never kept a meticulous appointment diary and her shopping lists were unfinished affairs. But now she was hounded by forgetfulness, the threat of it most of all; for if you don't know the substance of your forgetting, the best you can
hope for is to know you have forgotten something. She found herself stepping around holes and cracks in memory: a name, a place, a book title, even her own book titles would suddenly drop into the darkness. She set herself memory tasks – names of flowers, the novels of Charles Dickens, but as likely as not would lose the thread before she had completed the task.

With the benefit of hindsight she realised the problems had started soon after she and Harry had returned to Australia. It had been easy back then to attribute them to the stresses of the move rather than some recurring cerebral nightmare. Yet as time passed and she realised how happy she was to be home, the move back to Australia failed as an explanation. As for the sludge on the slaughterhouse floor post-Fleur, after Fleur's flying visit to Australia she had been packed away surprisingly neatly.

Then there was the plodding novel. After six books Ava was well-acquainted with the adolescent unreliability of a work in progress, so it seemed reasonable to blame her work. She simply drove herself harder. While some days passed with only an occasional lapse, these became increasingly rare. Indeed, there were times when as soon as she commenced writing – hand-writing or computer it seemed to make no difference – the problems were so insistent she could not continue, and she would crouch at her desk dazed with terror waiting for the morning to finish.

Finally she had confided in Harry – the memory lapses, the word-finding problems, the stalled novel, she told him everything.

‘My mind is in ruins,' she said.

He insisted there was nothing wrong and reminded her she had always had an exaggerated fear of losing her mind. ‘Some people have spider phobias, others have rodent phobias, you
have a degenerative-brain-disease phobia. And besides,' he added, ‘if anything were seriously wrong, I'd be the first to notice.'

But he wouldn't, and Ava knew this. Despite their travels, their homes, their laughter and domestic talk, despite all the time spent together, never had he shared the workings of her mind – not because she had blocked him out, although in truth, the situation had suited her, but he seemed unable to enter. Her mind, he said, was a mystery to him. Whenever she produced the completed manuscript of her latest novel he always reacted with the same mixture of surprise and delight as to a conjuror's trick. And in fact he did regard her artistic creation rather like a magical process, as if her novels sprang fully formed from some fundamental but unreachable part of her. It was a surprising and endearing response, she had always thought, from a man whose commitment to the observable and the measurable was in all other respects watertight.

Her interaction with Jack, however, was very different and given the years of their correspondence, extravagantly verbal. So a few months earlier, at the height of the long summer, before the doctors, before the brain scans, before the neuropsychologist and her language tests, Ava had written to him. She knew he would have sat with her while she explained her problems, but she was scared and bewildered and flagrantly raw. A letter was by far the best option.

She wrote at length as she always had with Jack, and across a range of issues. She began with their friendship, how pleased she was that the uneasiness which had occurred when first he returned to Melbourne had dissipated; how there were so many possibilities to explore now they were living in the same city. She moved on to torture, which was then being discussed
in the media, what it meant that a society would be having such a discussion in the first place. Some commentators were citing the ‘lesser evil' argument and she knew Jack would oppose this as she did herself. She composed an argument against malleable ethics, or what certain people were touting with approval as ‘situational ethics', in which ethics were reduced to a form of pragmatism no different to that which coursed through commerce, politics and civic life. From there she moved on to capital punishment. Even her primary-school-aged self had argued against the notion of ‘lawful killing': if it is wrong for a murderer to take a life deliberately, she had said in a schoolroom debate, then it is wrong for the law to do the same. She wrote to Jack about the idiocy of ethicists and law-makers in the US who were currently discussing ‘the most humane means of execution'.
The killing itself is assumed to be acceptable and civilised,
she wrote,
but they must be sure to do it nicely – as if deliberately causing pain would be morally reprehensible in a way the actual killing is not.

From current social issues she moved on to a discussion of the novel she was currently reading – at that time, despite all the other problems, her reading was still relatively unspoiled – and followed with an analysis of a remarkably good film she had recently revisited, the name of which she could not initially remember, although it resurfaced while she was writing about it.
Memento
. She gossiped about Connie and his women, and followed a critical remark about Sara with what she hoped was a humorous and astute observation about Luke being the default setting for the next generation. She wrote the first half of the letter on her laptop and the second by hand just in case there was a difference. She finished by asking if he noticed any change in her writing style or language.

She received his reply, also by letter, two days later. He could detect no change, no change at all. And so great was her anxiety she decided to believe him. Yet practically anyone could have told her that Jack was not to be trusted when it came to judgments about her. For all the words she had written to him, all the ideas, thoughts, observations and musings, jokes, gossip, opinions on books and films, all these originating from her became something quite different when in Jack's court. Even when he was forging a life beyond the confines of his old obsession as he was now, so deeply entrenched was his habit that Ava could begin to write in Sanskrit and Jack would have made sense of it, not with any reference to her desires and intentions – obsession is stubbornly incompatible with empathy – but within the ever-accommodating coffers of his own love. At the time of Ava's letter, Jack was still more in thrall than he realised to a love entirely of his own creation.

Ava put her questions to a well-informed friend, and he, ever the lover, replied that he noticed no change. So the problem must be with her current novel. She knuckled down with even greater determination, but dead-ends multiplied, thin ice everywhere, characters and situations kept deserting her, the words themselves failed to materialise. She went for her customary walks, but rather than the usual clarification – it was Nietzsche who wrote that ‘all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking' – her own thoughts remained a scramble and she would return to her desk more defeated than ever.

The long summer lurched into a botched autumn. Oak trees were left with thick clusters of brown leaves clinging horribly to their branches and plane-tree leaves littered the ground like scraps of brown paper. Only the elms met the challenge with a
brighter than usual yellow. The weather cooled, the days grew shorter and Ava's problems hardened. This was, she finally acknowledged, no passing stress nor the anarchic squealing of a novel in progress, something was fundamentally wrong. Tossing between terror and disbelief she searched the cerebral dysfunction sites on the internet, the semantic dementias, the familial brain disorders,
CADASIL
and a clutch of other tidy acronyms for a brain turning to compost. She listened to Harry tell her that nothing was wrong. And finally she consulted a neurologist and a neuropsychologist who sent her for scans and administered tests.

The scans were inconclusive but according to the neurologist this was no cause for celebration because the smallest elements of the brain were still beyond the reach of the medical gaze. The neurologist concluded in his matter-of-fact way that her clinical signs together with the tests indicated a degenerative brain disorder, ‘probably some sort of dementia'. He did not hesitate over the dreadful word. As many degenerative brain disorders ran in families, he advised her to contact her brother and any other close relatives.

Numb and disbelieving she did as she was told, but her contact details for Tim were twenty years out of date and yielded no leads. She telephoned her mother's sister. Janet had neither seen nor heard from Tim in years.

A few days later she and her aunt met for lunch in a city café. Janet was so excited. She was a member of a book club, she said. ‘We read each of your novels as soon as they come out, even in hardcover.' She paused to take a mouthful of calzone. ‘Amazing what they can do with a pastie these days.' And returning to her book club, ‘I don't like it when they're critical of your books.'

Ava laughed. ‘If the author can take criticism from strangers in the media, then the author's aunt should manage to take it from friends in her book club.'

She had no intention of telling Janet she was sick. They chatted about old friends and relatives, they swapped tales of old times and at an opportune moment Ava asked about the family's health. There was little to learn.

‘Your mother was never sick when we were growing up,' Janet said. ‘And if she had taken better care of herself – I was always telling her to give up the fags – she would have lived to a ripe old age.'

Janet could provide even less information about her father. ‘You look a lot like him,' she said. ‘Such a handsome bloke, but a no-hoper as a father and husband.' There was a long thoughtful pause before she added, ‘He's probably still knocking around the outback.'

Her father in the outback? Her mother's version had him as a womaniser who had dumped the family for a worthless floozy, then drunk himself into an early grave.

‘It made your mother feel better to think that,' Janet said. ‘Some men just aren't made for family life.' She paused as if unsure whether to continue. ‘I expect your mother never told you he sent her money, regular as clockwork the first of every month.' Ava shook her head, she had not known. ‘Your mother used to complain like blazes when a 31-day month finished just before the weekend. She wanted a postal delivery on Saturday and every month to be February.'

When they said their farewells they promised they would keep in touch. ‘I have a mobile now,' Janet said. ‘The children gave it to me for my seventieth birthday.' She wrote out the number. ‘You ring me any time, dear.'

They hugged each other.

‘I should have done more for you when you were young,' she said, before turning away.

Ava didn't really want to know if her father had bequeathed her a brain condition and made only a half-hearted attempt to find him. Neither of them it seemed were made for family life. Although she far preferred an irresponsible, renegade, antisocial father to the cold, duty-bound, blameless mother of her childhood. And while she knew an absent parent could claim a certain mystique denied a single woman encumbered by children and a stream of bills, she still opted for the father.

 

Ava had always steered her own way through life and she was not about to change now. Whenever she considered the progression of this thing – ‘thing' rather than the neatly vague ‘condition' and certainly not the blowtorch blast of ‘dementia' – she would see a mechanical doll turning slower and slower as the motor wound down. It was not to be borne.