This Is the Life (16 page)

29

Wildlife

Going along on Louis's bike, I got punched in the ear. Just like that. Out of nowhere and painful too.

“What the—?”

I stopped and looked around the street. No one. It was deserted. But a bedroom window was open and some curtains were flapping. Some sonofabitch bastard must have thrown something and he was hiding under the sill chortling to himself now and wondering when it might be safe to look up and take a peek. If I just waited long enough . . .

“Ignorant sons-of—”

Then another punch. It happened again. My ear was ringing and there was blood on my neck.

“What the—?”

I saw the culprit fly away. It was a territorially minded magpie that had swooped down from a tree and had attacked, to get me out of its neighborhood, and now it was making doubly sure that I went.

I swiped at it and it cleared off, leaving me free to make a
getaway. I stopped at a drugstore and bought some bandages and antiseptic wipes.

After that I started noticing cyclists with cable ties attached to the ribs of their cycle helmets, sticking up like the spines on angry porcupines. I made inquiries and found that this would deter and repel magpie attacks, so I got some and decorated my bike hat with them.

The magpies left me alone then, but the price was that I had to cycle around looking like an alien. But it's a small price to pay for peace of mind. And nothing's really that weird—it's all just ordinary stuff that you haven't quite got used to yet.

People told me that small children had had their eyes pecked out by those aggressive magpies. I didn't know whether to believe them or not, but I kept on my sunglasses.

I got to the hospice and went up to Louis's room and told him that a magpie had attacked me, though he was in a deep coma by now, and probably couldn't hear.

It's an interesting question: What do you talk to the dying about? Do you tell them you love them, do you discuss deep philosophical matters, or do you stick to the everyday, the banal, the benign, the small change and the small coin? Maybe the latter. For surely, even when dying, we still wish to be treated as part of life. We want to know what's going on. Because we're still here, we're not dead yet, and there's time enough for fine speeches and deep thoughts. Maybe we prefer to be included, and not stuck out in some special room, where only hushed-tone matters are discussed.

The hospice café opened at nine, but I would be awake and hungry by five, having spent the night in Louis's room. At seven a café up at Kangaroo Point opened its shutters. This was only half a mile away, so I'd go there for breakfast.
The café had tables outside, on the top of the cliff, overlooking the city skyscrapers and the Brisbane River.

The place was always busy, for the runners, the personal trainers, the bikers, the walkers, the tai chi types, they would all be there. They exercised together or alone, clad in bright colors and in expanding Lycra, with expensive sports shoes on their feet. The men were mostly bronzed and muscular, the women lean and tanned. They jogged, did push-ups, skipped ropes, jumped hoops.

I don't suppose any of them knew or thought or realized that a short walk away lay those to whom all this health and vigor was irrelevant. Life just seems like a big party sometimes, at which we all gradually get edged to the door, and then we are out in the cold. But the party continues without us, and our absence is barely noticed, and no one wants to look out of the window, at the sight of those departing. For to do so would spoil the fun and destroy the bright, Lycra illusion that this vitality will go on forever and that age can be postponed indefinitely, and if we just keep running and moving, we'll be all right, and some slow-moving old man with a scythe and hourglass will never be able to catch us.

After breakfast, I'd go back and sit with Louis again. The nurses would come and go. Sometimes a visitor might drop by. I'd change the CD. I'd read, do a crossword, get some coffee, sit in the TV room, go back to Louis's bedside. You don't want life to end but you wonder when it will.

The nurse recommended the Old Bridge Hotel to me for lunch, so I walked down there and got a drink and a sandwich. When I bit into the sandwich, I broke a tooth.

When I got back to Louis's room, his friend Michael Meere was there. Michael was Louis's only collar-and-tie friend, with a good job and good money and a company car.
They'd met through Bella, many years since, and Michael's wife had had leukemia, and Louis had helped him out, and now he was returning the favor. He had power of attorney and I liked and trusted him. He was all right.

“I went to the Old Bridge Hotel down the road for lunch,” I said, “or I'd have been here when you arrived.” It felt strange only having half a back tooth.

“The Old Bridge Hotel?” Michael said. “Louis used to work there. As a maintenance man.”

“It was there, was it? Well, well.”

“He told me the place is all right for a drink, but whatever you do, don't eat there.”

“Right. I see.”

“How is he?” Michael said. “Doesn't look like any change here.”

“No,” I said. “Just the same.”

“I'll call in again,” Michael said. “I've got to go back to work.”

The days just passed, long and slow. At night, at two or three in the morning, I'd find myself awake, sitting in the now-dark TV room, or wandering the corridors. I'd meet people—nurses, visitors like me, keeping vigil, patients, young and old.

A woman in a T-shirt and a big diaper came into Louis's room. She looked eighty.

“Why have they turned the lights off outside?” she said.

“It's nighttime,” I told her. “Where's your room?”

She didn't know, so I rang for a nurse.

“Are you a doctor?” the old lady said, as the nurse came.

“No,” I said. “I'm not.”

I went to the visitors' room and made some tea, then
became aware of company, a young woman in a dressing gown, there on the sofa.

“You like some tea?”

“Thank you.”

I made her some and we talked awhile. She wasn't even thirty yet and probably wasn't going to see it. She'd been suffering with cancer for more than seven years. After a while she went back to her room to try to sleep.

You meet people and afterward you say to yourself, I don't know what bad luck is, and what do I have to complain about? And yet even then, it's hard to keep smiling, for some reason or another.

The small hours of the morning are like the sea at low ebb, as it moves slowly, restfully, rhythmically—the tide lapping on the beach, the sound of the undertow sucking at the pebbles, the sight of water disappearing into sand.

You see how weird life is, how huge and small, you feel you might even finally get a grasp on it, but then there is the sound of the morning cart, and the new nurses come in for the change of shift, and the room lights will soon no longer be needed, for you can open the blinds and admit the dawn.

And all those answers you almost had your hand on have fled again from your grasp. But maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe one of these days soon, when the world is quiet again, you might understand what it is you need to understand.

But really, you know you never will. And you'll be baffled until the day you die. And even then, you might never find out. You're like an ant crawling over a manuscript. You aren't even aware the words are there, let alone able to read them.

* * *

One morning I cycled back from the hospice to Louis's house, to pick up his mail. As I went, I saw that some people had put a stack of papers outside their house for collection by the recycling truck, but the wind had taken them and blown them away.

They were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of letter-size pages, scattered all over the neighborhood. The couple were going about retrieving them. By the look of it, it would be several hours' work. They were both dressed in office clothes. Maybe they had called in to say they would be late that day.

The wind was still taking the papers too, and spreading them out over a wider and wider area. But the man and the woman just went on gathering them, patiently, diligently, without apparent anger or irritation, just with acceptance. Not even with resignation—which was too negative a word to apply to how they seemed.

I felt maybe I should stop and help, but I had things to do, so I kept going.

The papers were over the gardens and on the lawns; they were in the hedges and the trees. They paved the sidewalk and lined the gutters. White pages, with the odd line of print upon them. The couple gathered them into bundles and piles, and secured them properly this time, so there would be no more blowing away.

The next day, the papers were all gone, like snow melted from a spring landscape, leaving greenery and not a trace of winter. And you'd never have known they had been there, so clean and tidy were the streets.

30

Flat White

“I'm just a duffer,” Louis said.

We were heading for the library to renew his membership card. Not that he could read anymore, but I couldn't see much point in reminding him of that.

“Who isn't?” I said.

He didn't answer me.

He had trouble getting his library card out of his wallet and I had to do it for him. People on the other sides of counters always know there's something wrong, but they never ask, or want to know necessarily; they may even prefer not to.

“Come here every Sunday afternoon,” Louis said. “Cycle over and read the boat magazines.”

“Want to look at some now?”

“Maybe later.”

He renewed his membership for another year and we left. He was moving more slowly now, and with an air of distraction, like a man behind glass, peering out.

“I just want to call in here,” he said, as we passed the
frontage of a small accountancy office. The frosted glass door was jammed open, to let the air circulate, and inside the room, at the far end of it, a woman at a desk looked up. Perplexed at first, she then stood and came over.

“Louis?”

“This is Pearl,” he said. “She and her husband bought one of my boats.”

“We lived on it,” she said. “But David's gone now. How are you, Louis? Are you okay?”

Louis couldn't speak. His eyes filled with tears.

“I'm Louis's brother,” I said. “He hasn't been well.”

“I'm so sorry,” Pearl said. “I'm so sorry, Louis. So sorry.”

He went on standing there, misty-eyed, dumb and inarticulate, seeing the past reappear, seeing old times return and as quickly vanish—turned pages, briefly glimpsed, of a snapshot album.

Pearl embraced him, and Louis stood there in her arms, grizzled beard, beanie hat low over his eyes, paint-splattered shorts, scars on his legs and a peculiar disfigurement on the skin of his knees, which I assumed was the result of his roofing days, from kneeling on hot, sun-scorched metal and tiles. Louis wouldn't have bothered with knee protectors. He was tough.

“You take care now, Louis. Keep in touch.”

“How's the boat?” he managed to ask.

“Still good,” she told him. “Still good. I've got it moored out on the creek. Not supposed to be there. They've moved everyone else on into the marinas. But I sneaked back. I mean, why pay rental when you can moor for free?”

“Good to see you,” Louis said. “We have to go now.”

“Take care, Louis. And nice to meet you too,” she said.

And we went.

* * *

Later that day we were back in the hospital. Louis had an appointment with the consultant. The consultant was in his early thirties and he did what he had to as best he could. He was neither patronizing nor indifferent; he told you the truth, yet he left a little hope. He did a difficult job well. But then, he did it every day.

“You know the probabilities, Louis?” he asked.

Louis reeled them off. That much he was able to remember easily. The consultant nodded.

“So we just need to wait and see how it will respond to the treatment. In the meantime, if I were in your situation, I'd maybe make contact with the palliative care unit. Just as a safeguard, that's all. Just so that you'll have been in touch if it comes to the point that they're needed in any way.”

After he had gone, we sat in the wheelchairs where we had parked ourselves for the interview.

“I'll shout you a flat white,” Louis said. So we went to the café, and then later we went up to meet the people who ran the palliative care. They were easygoing and pleasant to talk to. It was like you'd gone around to some travel agent's to book a vacation.

“Do you remember Mum's gravy?” Louis asked me afterward. “And the soup with all the fat congealing? I used to look across the table at you, thinking, Is this as bad for you as it is for me?”

“You certainly needed to eat that soup quickly,” I said. “Before it solidified. I suppose if you'd left it long enough, you could have used a knife and fork.”

Louis groaned.

“It's the same for everyone, Louis,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You think so?”

“In different ways, but in principle. They're all walking down the road, wincing about the past.”

“No,” Louis said. “They can't be.”

“Let's get some food.”

We tried somewhere new. Louis looked at the menu but didn't say it was pricey, though it was. We sat outside on wicker chairs, lounging back, watching the street life. The waitress brought us food and coffee. The sun was warming. We stayed nearly two hours.

I nearly said, “This is the life, Louis.” But didn't feel it was the right thing to say.

“This is the life,” he said. “What do you think?”

“It's certainly nice out here, Louis.”

“Let's get the bill.”

We went back to the house and he slept. The word that kept coming to me was “uncontainable”—though I was not a hundred percent sure what it meant, nor, perhaps more importantly, what I meant by it.

But that is what it was and what it is. Life is uncontainable. Our past was uncontainable. The situation we were in was the same. I could not encircle it. It was a thing I could see, but it was like a landscape, I could never put my arms around it, or hold it to me, the way you could hold a baby, a loved one, a child. It was all too immense and too amorphous. All I could do was fetch DVDs from Blockbuster and make more tea. There was no big red button I could press, to bring salvation running. And even when you have received a death sentence, you still have to live.

Louis collapsed the next day while he was on the phone to the oncology nurse. I was out getting groceries. She sent
an ambulance and they took him in. I found him back up on the ward.

“Hi, Louis, how are you?”

“We're screwed,” he said.

And I thought this time he was probably right.

* * *

Some things go wrong dramatically and catastrophically, others take the dripping-tap and the stalactite and glacier route—slow accretions of imperfection eventually amounting to disaster.

Louis and Bella the sun-kissed blonde washed up in Sydney and things were fine for a while. Louis had a high-paying job with company car and accommodation on the beachfront. He worked as a chemical engineer for a water treatment company. Bella worked as a bookkeeper. There were barbecues, boats, friends coming around, weekends away. Bella kept horses at the livery stables and rode twice a week. Money, as the saying goes, was no object. And yet it usually is.

But Louis got to not liking the job anymore, as was his way.

“It's the arse-licking and the politics,” he told me when he called. “I hate the damn politics and I'm not licking any arses to get ahead. And the management are halfwits who don't know what they're doing.”

Only this, I felt, was a refrain heard before.

“I'm thinking of striking out on my own,” he said. “I don't like working for other people.”

Bella had faith in him back then. All the stars pointed in a propitious direction. She and Louis were still young. He was bright, intelligent, possessed of skills.

“I'm going into stained glass,” Louis said, “and opening a shop.”

I still have one of his stained-glass pieces hanging on my wall. It was and is beautifully made. But it took Louis a week to make a piece, when he needed to be selling one a day.

The shop did badly and he could not renew the lease.

The company car had gone and the house had gone. They moved up the coast and lived in a small trailer now, in a mobile home park. An awning at the front of the trailer gave them an extra room. In summer the place was stifling. Louis took some stopgap jobs, laboring and in factories and repairing roofs. Bella still worked as a bookkeeper and her regular wage kept things ticking over. She decided to study for accountancy qualifications as her long-term aim. She still had faith in Louis and was supportive of all his schemes. She'd tell her friends what he was doing, and what plans he had.

“Louis is going into boatbuilding.”

And he built it. But it took six years and much angst and dark nights of souls and black dogs at the heels. He also went into jewelry, and eked out a living that way. But it was only ticking over and they were still living in the tiny trailer. The only way to get a mortgage was to get a regular job. So he went to work in a factory.

They bought the Queenslander. But Bella was losing confidence. Twelve years had gone by and they were in their forties now, and Louis was so long dropped out, he'd have trouble dropping in again. You go and turn your back on the world, it turns its back on you.

Then they split. She lived in the front unit of the house, Louis in the back. She had a vacuum cleaner and a dustpan and brush. Louis did too, but he wasn't one for using them much, as his mind was on other things.

And then there comes a time when you realize it isn't going to be—the things you hoped for and worked toward, they aren't going to come, and life is what it is, and you have to settle for that and resign yourself to it, or sink deeper, and go crazy.

Bella met someone else. So did Louis. Bella moved away and rented her part of the house out. Louis's new relationships endured awhile and then floundered. The place got dustier, his beard got longer, his eyebrows bushier, the water heater broke down, he didn't get around to fixing it, the years went by, the handle came off his kettle, but he didn't get a new one, rust began to eat the fridge, the washing machine didn't work as it should, drops of paint fell on his clothes, car oil dripped onto his T-shirts, marine defouling solvent spattered his shoes, the beanie hat sank lower on his forehead and began to cover his eyes.

Then one day he called me and said, “I don't know what's going on here. But I'm having trouble reading.”

Such is life. A lot of people say that, but they don't really mean it, except in a jokey and wry way. But such it is.

* * *

I met Bella and her new partner, Ted, to discuss the property. I hadn't seen her in thirty years, and didn't recognize her, though she recognized me, not necessarily because I had aged any better, but because I'd always looked this way.

We sat out with our coats on, at a benched table outside the bowls club. We couldn't go inside as some big match was on the TV, and the place was packed with noisy fans.

“I just want to let you know,” I said, “that Louis is changing the nature of the house ownership so he can leave his share as he pleases in his will. Otherwise, the way things are
right now, the whole place would go to you, Bella, and since you've not been together in more than twenty years—”

She looked at me with hostility, like I was a swindler.

“And, of course, the same would apply to you. If you got knocked down or something, your share of the house would go to Louis. You wouldn't be able to leave it to whoever you wanted to.”

“And what if I don't agree to this?”

“It doesn't make any difference. Louis can do it anyway. Same as you can. You don't need the other person's consent. You just make a declaration. Anyway, that's what he's going to do, and he wanted me to tell you. You'll get a letter from the lawyer, but he wanted you to know.”

It was an awkward evening. Bella seemed to be nursing some old bitterness.

“I don't see why this has to be done now,” she said.

“Louis has a brain tumor,” I said.

“I knew a guy, diagnosed with cancer, lived another twenty-five years,” Ted said.

“Not with a brain tumor he didn't, Ted.”

“Knew another guy, diagnosed with leukemia, lived an­­other fourteen years.”

“Louis doesn't have leukemia, Ted.”

“Tell me,” Ted said. “You like books?”

“Some books,” I said.

“Ted likes books,” Bella said. “He's an avid reader.”

“You know a book called
Mein Kampf—
written by Adolf Hitler?”

“I know of it, of course.”

“You read it?”

“No.”

“Well, I have,” Ted said. He was, incidentally, a builder by
trade. “I have read it, and though it's kind of turgid and heavy going in places, well—he talks quite a lot of sense in there.”

I was going to ask Ted about the six million Jews, but the night had got so chilly I was shivering, and so I said I had to leave and see how Louis was.

Bella didn't visit him in the hospital, nor come to the funeral. Louis left her 60 percent of the property.

The phone rang one morning. An angry woman shouted down it before I could even say hello.

“You're screwing me,” Bella screamed. “You're screwing me. Your brother screwed me and now you're screwing me too.”

A copy of the will had arrived for her.

“Bella, what's the problem? Louis has left you sixty percent of the house.”

“And what about the rest? What about my contribution?”

“Bella, you and Louis split up twenty years ago.”

“What about when I came around to pick up the property taxes check? Once every couple of months. I'd spend half an hour in there every couple of months, hearing about your brother's problems. Where's my recognition?”

“Bella, I'm sorry, but I don't see why—”

“You screwed up my life! You and your brother, you screwed up my life.”

But none of us really needs any help in that department. We can usually do all that quite easily ourselves with no extraneous assistance whatsoever.