Reunion (34 page)

During the last two years of high school she and Stephen met every couple of weeks. However, once she started university they saw each other far more frequently. She would leave her friends at the pub or a café to meet him, mostly at his flat but also at galleries and theatres and interesting restaurants. He taught her about art from Rubens to Rothko and music from Bach to Glass; he told her about the absurdists and modern minimalism in the theatre, and he guided her through
the European film classics. He took her to Canberra – it was the first time she had travelled in a plane; they visited Sydney several times, and Adelaide and Brisbane too. They always stayed in good hotels; she checked in as his daughter and no one ever questioned it.

One time in Adelaide she quipped that Humbert Humbert would have fared better if he had stayed in posher places. Stephen was appalled. This, he said, you and me, can't possibly be compared with Humbert and Lolita.

Ava was convinced he would have been less affronted if there had been less truth to her words.

And when she asked whether he had other girls like her: ‘Why is it so hard for you to understand,' he said. ‘I love you.'

‘But will you still love me when I'm twenty-one? When I'm twenty-five?'

 

Stephen had said he would always love her. But would he love a woman in her middle years with a rare form of dementia? She looked up at the flat that had once been his and down at the woman she had become. He might not even recognise her. She hardly recognised herself.

She walked back into St Kilda Road and, lacking the energy to get herself on to the right tram, she hailed a taxi. With the prospect of an afternoon alone suddenly intolerable, she gave the address of NOGA. Thirty minutes later she was sitting with Harry in his office, sharing his sandwiches. He was so pleased with her surprise visit that after lunch he collected his things and together they left the building. They made their way across the river to the aquarium, and once inside went immediately to their favourite area, an open space surrounded on all sides by floor-to-ceiling pools full of flamboyant, floating sea
creatures. There were fish large and small here, even sharks and stingrays, and swaying underwater plants among vast rocky shelves. They sat on a bench in the centre of the space holding hands, she leaning lightly against him.

‘We should come here more often,' Harry said.

And even as she agreed, she ticked off yet another experience she would never have again.

2.

It was not so difficult to find Stephen via the web, even for Ava who had clung to the dust and clamour of the real world long after most people had migrated to cyberspace.

‘The web's no different from libraries,' Harry had insisted years ago, ‘and far more convenient.'

Ava had disagreed and still did. For a start, there was that plural – libraries – each with its own distinctions, its own delights. And the issue of cataloguing, finite and reliable for libraries, but liable to propel you in entirely the wrong direction on the web. While writing her last novel, Ava had done a search on hermaphrodites and afterwards had been inundated with email advertisements about ‘shemales'. It was all very interesting at first, but soon she realised that having entered the world of cybersex nothing short of changing her cyber-identity would stop the web's fetishists and erotomaniacs from pestering her. As she pointed out to Harry, no librarian had ever stalked her because of catalogues she had browsed or books she had borrowed. And there was the surprise of libraries. You're wandering the stacks, a book
catches your eye, a must-read book which no amount of refined searching could have led you to.

Ava far preferred libraries – unless she knew exactly what she wanted. And what she wanted now was to find Stephen Webb.

The afternoon stretched ahead with at least four hours before Harry returned from work. But with nothing easy or routine any more, a task that might once have taken thirty minutes could now occupy a whole day. You have to manage it, she told herself as she collected the thermos of coffee Harry had left for her and crossed the courtyard into her study. You have to manage.

It was not simply that Harry was spending more time at home, she had no privacy any more. She would leave the bathroom and he would be waiting for her in the hall; she would be reading in the courtyard and look up to see him watching from the living room; and worst of all he would slip into her study without her noticing and stand behind her, the computer screen in clear view. There was no malice in his actions, he loved her far too much for that. He was determined to watch over her and guard her from all harm.

‘But it won't be me,' she had protested over and over again. ‘It's not me already.'

From the moment he knew she was seriously ill, his love kicked into overdrive. And while it appeared as if it were devoted to her, it was, as love so often is, primarily in service to his own interests. She quite clearly wanted to die, he quite clearly did not want her to. His hovering, his thermos of coffee, his neat luncheon sandwiches, his neck rubs served his desires far more than hers.

Several weeks ago he had arrived home to find one of the elements on the stove alight. Ava could not say how long it had
been burning, she could not even remember turning it on. Within twenty-four hours Harry had fitted the stove with a childproof safety feature, he had emptied the spa tub of water and he had organised a weekly care schedule.

‘I don't want you to be alone,' he said, sticking the schedule on the door of the fridge.

She glanced at it. ‘No shortage of people to baby-sit me.' And then reaching in deep and pulling hard on the person she used to be, she waved her hand at the timetable. ‘I don't want these people.' And pointing to Jack's name, ‘Even Jack's no attraction if he's just one of the guards.'

‘Do it for me,' Harry said, knowing how hard it would be for her to refuse him. ‘Otherwise I'll worry. I'll feel unable to go to the office.'

She would not give in. ‘You're leaving home late most mornings, and Jack's already here three mornings a week. So give me the remainder of the mornings.'

She argued, she pleaded and in the end he gave her the mornings.

Then she asked for the afternoons, she begged for the afternoons. She challenged Harry's exclusive provenance over emotional persuasion by arguing she was tired after lunch and more likely to rest if there was no one around.

It took all her ingenuity, but Harry finally gave her a part of each afternoon.

Helen insisted on being involved. ‘Put me down for the late-afternoon shift,' she said to Harry.

‘How late?' asked Ava, for having fought so hard for her afternoon hours she was loath to give up a minute, and would not have considered it for anyone other than one of her old friends. And no, she did not forgive Helen, she did not forgive
any of them. But she had always believed too much is made of forgiveness, that one unforgivable act is rarely enough to toss away an essential relationship.

It was in the spirit of the friendship they used to have that Helen asked for three late-afternoon slots and it was in the same spirit that Ava agreed to Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from four to six. But the friendship which was now theirs meant that three times a week quickly became two, twice a week became once, and the last two weeks had seen Helen cancelling altogether.

‘You do understand?' she said to Ava over the phone. ‘It's my work.'

Ava let her off lightly, not because she believed her cancelling to be slight – she didn't – but she did not want Helen to know that seeing her mattered, and that not seeing her mattered even more. She already felt worthless and Helen's actions merely added to the dust.

She had always thought that to refer to death in the present continuous was an oxymoron. I am dying. You are dying. He, she or it is dying. There was life and there was the winding down of life that would eventually lead to the split-second finality of death. But she had been wrong. This gradual erosion of ability, this slow-motion wreckage of everything that made her life worth living – she was dying, no doubt about it, this disease with its sinister navigations was killing her.

She had no intention of going gently into the dark night. Although she had discovered how punishingly difficult it was to kill yourself. Heroin was a possibility but injecting it posed a problem. She had considered hiring a car and driving it over a cliff but was afraid of being left alive and physically disabled. Her courage failed at the hair-dryer-in-the-bath method, if
indeed it still worked with modern electrical circuitry. She had never been able to tie a good knot so hanging was out of the question, and the logistics of robbing a vet's surgery for Nembutal, the drug of choice, defeated her. Without a garage, carbon monoxide was not an option; paracetamol was too inexact; household cleansers were painfully cruel, and having failed once on the Valium-plus-plastic-bag approach, even with the addition of helium which she had learned would neutralise the carbon dioxide build-up, she was not inclined to try it again. She discounted option after option – the situation was laughable in a tragic sort of way – before settling on drugs. Barbiturates. Fast-acting and one hundred per cent lethal. And Nembutal the best drug of all. The only problem: where to get it.

One afternoon when Helen had cancelled, Ava slipped out to an internet café to investigate pharmacies on the web. There were many online pharmacies but none had a listing for Nembutal. There were pages on Nembutal but not how to buy it. A search on barbiturates yielded abundant results, but despite reading the side-effects, precautions and overdose information for several of them, it was not clear which would reliably lead to death. She suspected there was something wrong with her search technique, but when you're looking for a drug to end your life you are not inclined to ask for assistance.

The future stretched before her as unremitting horror. Ava Bryant would disappear and demented Ava would take her place, demented Ava who couldn't read or write or speak or understand, who needed to be bathed, toileted, dressed and fed. Demented Ava at home in the passive voice, a despoiled creature in a despoiled existence. Ava could not understand how people in her situation would see it to the end – not that
there was anything wrong with the actual end, blessed relief as they say, it was the getting there that was so horrible. In the absence of depraved predilections – and given the more shocking outposts of human desire Ava assumed there were dementia fetishists – there were no winners in this game.

She needed someone to do the research she could no longer do. And she needed someone to obtain the drugs for her.

Ava sat in front of her computer staring at the still-familiar screen with its screensaver of a snowy owl in flight.

‘You,' she now said to the bird, ‘be my guiding angel.'

It seemed she would be sliding around in her fraying atheism right to the end. Although it occurred to her that dementia might just be the non-believer's trump card, that dementia, incontrovertible proof of human fallibility, might provide sufficient proof against an infallible deity. For if there were a God, she reasoned, he would allow dementia only as the worst of punishments. Yet an appraisal of her own life, although it revealed many actions of which she was not proud, produced none so reprehensible to justify dementia.

Dementia, the ultimate proof against God. Yes, she liked that. And yet she longed for faith. Faith would mean that instead of plumbing the depths of her crumbling mind to organise her death, she could pass without anxiety into passive voice oblivion, confident of leaving everything to a capable, all-loving God with an eternity plan for her. But without faith and saddled with diminishing faculties, it was up to her.

Stephen Webb had saved her once, to satisfy his own desires to be sure; now she wanted him to do it again – this time for her benefit alone. She had never harboured ill-will against him, how could she when he had provided her with her life? It would, however, have been different for him. He had been in
his forties, she had been a teenager; that sort of imbalance makes for a hefty debt.

She clicked onto the internet and googled Stephen Webb. There were nearly two hundred thousand matches from which to choose. She read the top twenty before linking her search with fountain pens: she had no doubt that if he were alive he'd still be collecting. Still more than ten thousand matches, so she limited her search to Parker pens, and finally to the Parker Duofold. Forty minutes later she was left with four possibilities. She allowed herself a sweet moment of triumph: she was not immobilised in the passive voice yet.

She emailed all four with an innocuous but nonetheless painfully difficult to compose ‘If you are the collector whom I knew years ago in Melbourne, Australia, please contact your old friend Ava.' And set about to erase her search tracks as best she knew how.

That afternoon while she waited for replies she took up smoking again. Not in the way of a restrained indulgence, but a cigarette whenever the fancy took her, and a second unopened pack in the drawer. She lit up and embraced the light-headedness, the familiar foul taste, the slow leisurely waft of time. Such a pity smoking wouldn't kill her, yet so much pleasure in guilt-free smoking. When Harry returned home, he saw the cigarettes and watched her light up but made no comment.

After dinner he had work to do, a dozen phone calls, he said, from Tokyo to London. And while he would far prefer to spend an unbroken evening with her, it shouldn't take too long. He left the room and soon afterwards she followed him across the courtyard. She could hear his telephone voice rising through the floor of her study; when it stopped, so must she.

She settled at her desk and opened her email. She couldn't
believe it! There were three replies and her email sent only a few hours ago. She forced herself to calm down, for with her brain silting up, she'd learned that any heightened emotion made it harder to think.