Category: Memories

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Hawaii – Part 1

With my father on morphine we leave for Hawaii. I know it looks bad. I know he is dying and, hence, I will not be there when it happens, but I choose to go all the same. I have many reasons, (or excuses), in my head and they all seem reasonable to me. I have a living family to think of. I have a nine year old boy who cannot go to Hawaii if I don’t, because without me there will be no one to bring him home. Graham is sailing from Hawaii to Samoa and so will not be accompanying us back to Australia. I have to go. There is no insurance to cover the loss of the fares. My father would want me to. My mother gives me permission-of-a-kind with the statement – It’s up to you and your conscience. If you can live with it, go.

Maybe I have no conscience. Of course she wants me to stay, but she would not say so outright. I tell her I feel bad about leaving her, on her own, as he dies. She tells me how when her own mother was dying, my sister and I were under five. Her mother’s two sisters were by her bed, day and night, and wanted her there also. But when it came to tea time, she said she needed to go home. She had young children to think about, a husband, a family to care for. Those were her priorities now and she went. Her mother died that night.

Tomorrow we fly out to Sydney and then Hawaii. Today I want to be with him as long as I can. Another mother has Jasper.

Mum goes to the dining room for dinner. I am pleased to have some time in the room with him on my own. There are things to say. I hold his hand. It is cold and bony, the skin is papery. “It’s okay to go Dad. Go now Dad. Please go.”

I wanted to say it. To give him permission to leave us. To tell him we’d be okay. Of course afterwards, long afterwards, even now as I write this, there are other things I wished I had said. People always say you should tell them you love them. I didn’t say that. I guess I took it as understood. I should have thanked him. I should of told him he’d done a good job, because that is what drove him the whole of his life. In my head I hear him saying. “If a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly.”

My last words to him as I put a hand on his stubbly chin and rubbed it was, “Goodbye Dad. You be good.” A perfunctory instructive.

It was something I used to say to him often as I left him under hospital care. Like leaving a dog in a kennel. A “No barking” type instruction.

If he could hear me I wanted him to be comforted that it was business as usual. That I would see him soon.

Of course I knew, or should have known, that that would be the last time.

And then there was the relief. Relief at knowing I would not have to sit and do a vigil. For watching dying is hard. Escaping overseas meant I would not have to do it. To be there at the end is gallant and brave and somehow considered the right thing to do. I had been watching him die for months. Being present at his actual last breath had lost its significance to me. I felt relieved to not have this final duty to do.

I think, with disdain, the emphasis people put on the moment of passing away. Like being there then will make some kind of difference. Dying, like birth, is something you do alone.

The Occupational therapists at the nursing home deliver Mum a “dying basket” containing a fancy tea cup and saucer, a battery operated candle, tea bags, a mini long life milk carton and a packet of Wagon Wheel biscuits. We don’t have a kettle in the room to make tea, so much of the basket is pointless. We look through it together vaguely bemused by its contents. Why Wagon Wheels over Tim Tams? Who made this choice and why?

My mother, despite Dad’s dying, was bewitched by Kate and William’s wedding. It was the best television she had ever seen.

We flew off.

It is raining heavily as we leave the Honolulu terminal to catch a cab to our hotel. It is tropical rain. Fat warm droplets. There is a queue of happy travellers waiting for taxis to Waikiki. At Hotel Renew our room is not ready and so we leave our bags and wander the strip. It is touristy, of course. Beach sand has been trucked in. But the waves still break in long foamy rides. Beneath a statue of a Hawaiian king homeless people congregate. A sign lists amongst the Do nots; No shopping trolleys, No horse shoe throwing.

Resort style hotels hug the beach, invading and overtaking it. Their bars and beach chairs own it. Gardens are lush and tropical with paths weaving through them. At the Moana Surfrider we are drawn to its old style colonial elegance. Its rocking chairs. Its white washed boards. Two men play guitar and ukulele, and sing while a woman dances the Hula. Jasper has a tropical drink with a cocktail umbrella and chunk of pineapple.

I ring my mother. She says dad has spoken to her and recognises the nurses. The fact that he is compos mentis enough to speak seems remarkable and I do wonder if she is lying to make me, or herself, feel better. Is Hawaii wonderful, dear? Oh yes, it’s wonderful. For how could you say otherwise? How could you say it’s okay. How my mother would have loved a hotel like this one, I think, while my father would have worried over the price of the drinks and not have let us sit down. I think she is asking, is it worth it? You better be having the time of your life over there whilst all this goes on over here without you.

We are up early the next day to go to Pearl Harbour. We get a private car, a limousine, because it is cheaper than a taxi. Jasper thinks this is what it might feel like to be famous. He sings,” I wanna be a billionaire so frickin bad”…But the car is old and worn and smells like air-freshener covering up yet older, staler smells.  Our driver reminds me of Graham’s brother with his discoloured teeth, his smell of smoke, his rake thinness. His name is K.C and he tells us how you are not allowed to take bags into Pearl Harbour. Only your wallet and a camera. There are lockers at the entrance or he will keep our stuff in his car as he will return to pick us up.

Not having a notebook bothers me. More than leaving my belongings with a man we just met. What if I want to write something down? Denuded of pen and paper, we enter.

Tora Tora Tora, came the call of the Japanese pilots as they realised they had succeeded in surprising the American fleet of ships. The radar that had detected the planes had been ignored because, as new technology, it was not believed possible that the planes arriving across the Pacific could belong to the enemy. The US aircraft were bombed and the torpedoes fired and the USS Arizona and others were sunk, entombing the naval seamen.

A ferry takes us out to the memorial that floats over the watery grave. Oil slicks shimmy the surface of the water and patriots tell how the oil droplets symbolise the tears of the lost sailors. People stand and reflect. I try and imagine the bombing, the chaos.  Sailors were burnt as they fled their sinking burning ships and swam through water alive with liquid fuel. Others wouldn’t have even known what hit them. Standing in sunlight waiting for our ferry to take us back across the water, tears are seen on the faces of burly men.

Today Japanese are common tourists to the site. There seems no animosity here towards them. Then, even more remarkably, for the 50th anniversary of the bombing, some of the surviving Japanese pilots, now simply old small men, returned to hold hands with American survivors of the attack. Embraced they did. That such ferocity and power is replaced with simple solicitude and forgiveness seems odd to me, even if it is admirable. That friends are made from arch enemies convinces me even more of the pointless stupidity of war.

These memorials to lost lives become to me, such powerful anti-war proponents. How could anyone come away from such a place and think it was worth it.

We are bussed to the battleship Missouri memorial. It is where the treaty to end the war was signed. It is hulking and we are ants crawling over and within her. The men that sailed on her love her like she is a home country. They speak of her like she is more than metal. She has a soul.

While Jasper and Graham explore the submarine, the USS Bowfin, I submerge myself in the museum. Headphoned and reflective, I listen to the tales told by survivors of the attack. Before we leave there is time for the shop. We buy replicated newspaper headlines from the day after the attack, as well as a war plane and a pack of cards.

K.C takes us back in the limo. Our stuff is returned to us. The traffic is bad because tonight is the Waikiki Spam Jam. Hawaii holds the record for its consumption of the tinned processed meat called Spam and love it they do. The reception staff at the hotel tell us how much fun is the Spam Jam – all the restaurants will be represented as their best chefs show what they can do with Spam. It does not look good or any more palatable than I had remembered. It is still just polony with goodness knows what in it. People dressed as Spam tins wander the streets. Every conceivable thing can be cooked with added SPAM or else improved by the adding of its flavour- for example – Macadamia nuts flavoured with Spam. Enormous people with oversized plates of rice atop Spam sit on the kerb and tuck in.

We have booked a table at Roys, with pork belly in mind. Pork belly was out and to make up for it they gave Jasper a free dessert – chocolate souffle.

On a small plane from Oahu to Kauai we see a couple who were staying at our hotel. From the moment we arrive on the  Garden Island we see free roaming chickens. Our first is in the airport carpark.

To get our hire car we take a bus to the rental office, equipped with a wheelchair lift. We have an hour’s drive to our Beach house in Hanalei Bay but cannot check in till after 4pm, so there is no hurry.

At the hire car we see the South Americans again. They too are heading for Hanalei. On the drive up we stop at a waterfall and then a small town for something to eat. We order fish tacos that neither Jasper or I like. The wraps are full of brown rice and overcooked Mahi Mahi fish. The coast line is battered and buffetted by strong winds and rough sea. The beaches are closed.

We pull off the road at Anini beach, where the people are rich enough to own polo ponies that graze the fields across the road, and the houses have secluded private gardens that fringe the beach. Jasper gets an Amercian version of a giant Sandwich from an icecream truck. We park under coastal pines with other cars, mainly American pick ups, where poorer locals have parked and congregate around the backs of, drinking soft drink and eating chips. I imagine Raymond Carver lives for them all.  On deck chairs some older fatter types sink into the sand while they read value for money fat fiction. A river meets the sea here and people amuse themselves on kayaks as well as surfing or swimming or stand up paddling. Dogs roam.

Finally at Hanalei we pull in at the beach. Again locals seem to have a section. They drive onto the beach, for what added purpose it isn’t really clear, since the beach is not wide or difficult to cross. Perhaps just because they can. They sit in the tray of the pick up rather than on the sand.

We come across the South American couple again, already checked into their apartment, they have made friends with a local and are sharing his BBq on the beach. A cement jetty with a covered end pokes out the southern part of the bay and I sit out there while Jasper and Graham swim in the Pacific. Others jump off the jetty despite the signs prohibiting it. A mother chastises a child who has dived off.  For what if it was too shallow and she hit her head? The mother no doubt is thinking of me, sitting there like a doomed omen of spinal damage. When the girl does it again, she has her arm yanked on and is marched off. The boys swim out to me and climb up the ladder to join me. A midget teenager, fishing on the jetty, gets his line caught by a surfcat and needs to get into the water on a board to go untangle the line from the boat….

To be continued……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

We want to thankyou for teaching us to dive beneath the big waves,

For taking us out on your back through the surf,

For carrying us asleep from the Holden to our beds,

For making us pull weeds, rake gum leaves, pick up bark, sweep the garage and clean the gutters.

Thankyou for showing us how to collect warm eggs from beneath chooks,

For crying at the sad moments on TV soaps,

For showing us how to swing a billy around our heads,

For teaching us to build a camp fire and to strip and paint a cupboard,

For bringing home day-old chickens – yellow and chirping to be raised under a heat lamp,

For bringing home trays of summer peaches,

For dinkying us down the driveway on the back of your motorcycle,

And for loving what you had, and not wanting for more than you attained

For this and more, we thank you.

 

We will miss you sweet Goong Goong.

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Finally…

Finally he is gone.

No more gauntness to contend with.

No more gripping claws.

The sigh is heavy, full of relief – for him and, oh yes, for myself.

I take pleasure in buying bones for the dog.

I love to watch him crunch through them. Chicken wings like twigs between his jaws.

So much life in a scruffy dog.

I have poems to look through – to find the right one – for the funeral.

I remember how he’d love the touch of a dog’s wet nose against the back of his hand

hung limply from a nursing home chair.

I hear him in my head say what a good dog.

The carer says I loved that man and it sets me weeping.

 

 

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Jasper and the Yellow Burley

Good Friday means there are no cars on the road. The pool is closed today like it is on Christmas day. There is no music blasting from aqua aerobics. No drone of leaf blowers across the cement. No whistles from the coach punishing the squads. Our neighbourhood is at its quietest. Someone will probably bake Nigella’s Norwegian Buns and invite the others around. Yeasty, buttery, sugary cinnamon buns. No ordinary Baker’s Delight Hot Cross Buns around here.

People go away for Easter, if they can, and this year the holiday is longer than most with ANZAC day thrown in. Families leave the city with car roof racks piled with surfboards, bikes clinging to bumpers, eskies full. This is when the weather changes in the West. Marshmallow clouds hold promise. It will rain, we hope.

Jasper has a new football. It is a yellow Burley. A Rover. For nine to eleven year olds. Snug in his mitts. Made in India,  Jasper tells me. He is surprised. Isn’t India a poor country? You’d think they would be wealthy from all the footballs. Pumped hard it stings the tops of his foot as he bombs it as far as he can.

We can’t go anywhere. On watch for frailty. My dad has had a suprapubic catheter put in. This means his bladder will drain into a bag, by-passing his urethra which is becoming narrowed and invaded by the cancer in his penis. Like a rocky gorge its insides have become craggy, spiky; a place of pain.

We wait for him to come back to the nursing home in an ambulance. We can hear him coming down the corridor. His familiar chant to any staff required to move him; No more No more.

But we do more. Always. Pushing and prodding.

He is slid over from the gurney to the bed. Not until there are no hands on him and he is in the bed does he settle.

The catheter means the staff will need to fuss less around the painful penis.There will be less changing of pads and beds, less sensation to urinate and no urine stinging its way through the diseased urethra. Now the urine is bloody, but this is supposed to be temporary.

But the RN on duty looks dubious as to the difference it might make to his pain. Still very painful, she says.

Can we leave him alone now, I wonder. Can we finally stop all the intervention? There is talk of radiation. The urologist thinks it might ease the pain. But it will not cure the cancer. It has gone beyond that. No one thinks they can do anything more but alleviate pain. But pain still exists. He is still irritable, asking to be left alone.  But then again can’t be left alone because he can do nothing for himself. His hands are like claws, grabbing at rails. Hanging on. The skin of his face is suctioned to his skull. His skin is yellowing, but stubble continues to grow. Like stubborn weeds his eyebrows sprout in mad directions off his brow.

Jasper wants to go and kick the Burley. The nursing home smells. Daisy Jones has lost her room again. We take her to room number seventeen, remind her again, that this is her room. How much do I need to pay for it? she asks. She shuffles in a wheelchair using her feet to propell herself, one arm across her chest, useless from a stroke. Her eyes begin to fill with tears as we talk to her. I don’t know where I am , she says. Walking through the dining room, on our way out, the oldies all look at the boy with the yellow ball spinning on his hand. He bounces it and catches it, because he can.

 

 

 

 

 

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Grace on the Park

Twenty thousand people on a park, jostling and moving together, swaying and gyrating to music is proof of the sociability of the human species. I am less sociable than most and sometimes a crowd like this is too much. But when Michael Franti is in the crowd you want to be part of it. Hands reach out to touch him. To steal a morsel of his sweat. I wanna see you jumping. And they jump. I wanna see your hands in the air and they raise and pump them. Anything you say and we will do it. His ropey hair hurls around his head, while his strides large and gazelle-like, see him leap across the stage. Barefoot. Real Freo Type. His shirt claims he loves Perth but you know he is really only talking Fremantle.

Under foot the grass is trampled flat. In front of the stage the dedicated fans push forward. To feel the bass. To feel the rhythm through their skin, not just their ears. You want your innards to vibrate. The earth shakes with the drum beat. Back on the rise the grass is spotted red with the cardboard seats like pizza boxes. Tents hug the perimeter no-climb fencing with their generic signs: Bar, food, toilets, ATM, tickets, First aid, recycling, water. Lines of people snake their way to buy a ticket to buy a drink. Little sachets of wine to be sucked on baby-like through a straw. But why leave the music? It is the music you are here for.

On a constructed platform for the viewing pleasure of the disabled, me and my eight year old are parked.  It is a logistical nightmare to get off the platform. It requires asking half a dozen other wheelchair bound people and their carers to move them and then risk losing your space. Queen to Bishop. So we don’t go. Don’t worry I have come armed with a box of  Shapes, a packet of peanuts, a water bottle. We are in for the long haul. This is festival survival.

Over the mosh pit crowd we have a clear view to the stage. When Bob Dylan comes on he is small. He has a cream wide brimmed hat. He faces side on playing the keyboard. Jasper says he can’t see his face. Neither can I. Nor the remaining thousands behind. And we are so close compared to most. There is no projection of him on the screens. We look back to the sea of people. Ones outside the perimeter too, up on the hill in front of the school tennis courts, take in the sound if not the sight for free. But Bob is moving. There is energy in his swagger. The music is still his, delivered by him, possessed of his spirit, even if his voice can no longer deliver.  Jasper has been drip fed Bob Dylan but the music is unfamiliar to him, the voice unrecognizable, as the man his father claims is the greatest, croaks through his songs. Jasper’s lids grow heavy. Next thing he is asleep. Mouth agape. As a hard rain is going fall. I cover him a shawl and he could be anyway.

A woman older than me, the carer for her disabled and non speaking husband, starts booing Bob as he sings. Boo Boo she goes right beside my ear. He can’t hear you I say, but I can. Please don’t boo.  It’s a travesty that he’s singing like that, she says. Like she believes he has the power to change the old, aching state of his voice. Maybe this is the best he can do. She takes her husband and leaves. Disappointed. How will they feel about Bob when they get home. Trash their collection? Will he no longer be a hero of the mute man?

It is mellow. The crowd wants more. Keeps praying he will look their way. Really look at them. Maybe say something too. How wild would they go if he said Hello Fremantle?  In the end he glimpses up only a few times. But when he does he seems happy to have seen us.

Grace Jones couldn’t be more opposite. You imagine her wishing to be devoured by the crowd of eyes. She wants you to see her all. Even the bits you’d rather not. She has a body of which to be proud and proud she is. In fish nets and a velvet corset she totters on heels. She nearly falls, swears and then makes fun of herself and her crew that she tortures. In her band is one of her sons and I wonder if he finds her antics excruciating. She is the original show girl able to effortlessly hula hoop through an entire song, proving her fitness. She knows how to make the audience adore her and she willingly gives them want they want. It is all artifice beautifully agreed to by both parties. Her severely short Afro and her sweat, every crevice and curve filmed and blown large on the screens beside the stage show her, transvestite-like and viper, trawling the stage like a street walker.The crowd both her pimp and her john. Pull up to the bumpa baby. Jasper is awake again and agog at her presence. He’s not sure if he likes her but he can’t take his eyes off her. Mesmorised.

We, the crowd, pour out like cattle. Slow moving through the narrow exit gates, churning sand beneath our feet. The Blind Boys are still playing and the crowd in the Big Top still hooping and hollering their love. Eight hours, nearly the equivalent of a soon to do plane journey to Hawaii, has passed. Not so long to sit and ponder perhaps. But stuffy plane air, not outdoors under moonlight with whiffs of spliffs, and clouds less entertaining than Grace on the Park.

 

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This Knife Ain’t Sharp Enough

My Dad is back in the hospital. His remaining penis is like a bloated poorly-cooked pork sausage.

I am reminded of a neighbour beyond the pickets whose favourite children’s party game was called pork sausage. The children would be in a line. No smiling, laughing, giggling allowed. He would go along the line and point and grope you on the body or the face and in a heavy Welsh accent say, What’s that there? And your answer had to be pork sausage but you weren’t allowed to laugh. Laugh and you were out. I was good at this game. It seemed the saying of pork sausage was hilarious to most small children. And when coupled with a big bellied man pointing and fondling your ear lobe, and asking you what it was, and having to say it was something it wasn’t, something as ridiculous as pork sausage, it was very nearly impossible. But I could do it every time. He could pinch my nose, my ears, grapple with a roll of tummy, fiddle my fingers and I could say it straight-faced. Pork sausage, Mr Elliot. Till I was the last kid standing. Grim-faced. Thinking, not funny Mr Elliot.

Winning this game did not endear you to adults. They wanted to see kids giggling uncontrollably. They loved to tickle you till tears were welling in your eyes. A kid that didn’t find pork sausage funny was a kid with no sense of humour.

This is what we are here for; to exam the pork sausage and decide its fate. No giggles. Not funny. The nursing home GP thinks an area of tumour recurrence can be seen near the urethral opening and he has organised Dad to go back to the private hospital to be seen by the surgeon who did the partial penectomy in the first place.

The ambulance is transporting him. I meet them at the doctor’s rooms but there has been a mix up. He is to be admitted and the consultant will see him on the ward when he has finished his appointments.

In the ward they have him down for 2pm. We have nine. But they find him a room. No 13. I sit talking to him but he has his head turned away and is not answering me. I go to the other side of the bed and then he realises it is me.

Oh Nicole, what a surprise. I explain he is in the hospital to have his penis looked at. Because it is sore isn’t it Dad? That’s why we are doing this.

He starts out just a little old man, a little confused. After six hours he no longer knows what he is, where he is and he’s as mad as a cut snake.

A nurse comes in and wants to take a peek downstairs. He is saying no more no more but she manages a look and with her ultrasound measures his bladder volume. It has 138mls in it and he has wet his pad in his pants. Reluctantly I call it a nappy.

He has bitten his lip or his tongue in the transport and has some blood in his mouth. I ask him about it but he doesn’t seem aware of it. I get him a choc milk and he drinks it with a straw.

He starts talking about leaving and all the things he must do to leave. He will need a bus on the highway. But where is he going to? What is his home address?

He is trying to swing his legs out of the bed and attempting to sit up. He is easy to push back down. And when I do he has to start his effort all over again. It weakens and tires him.

I wait till he is nearly up then down I push him. I think he probably doesn’t know I have done this to him half a dozen times. Each time I stop him getting up he is surprised I have stopped him.

When he is nearly upright I stop him again and he says, Oh no oh no. Exasperated. He leans back down in the bed. You have to stay Dad to see the doctor. Over and over again I say it.

I am driving myself nuts.

Oh I love you darling, but I have to go. I have so much to do at home.

He asks me why. Why must we stay for the doctor? I have him booked next week and he gives me a wink. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I have a lot to do at home. The dogs and cats need to be fed.

No time for yakkity yak.

He says I am trying to hoodwink him. He says the nurse is part of the secret service. Everyone is keeping stuff from him. Like information. Like addresses and where he is.

They move his bed from room 13 down the corridor close to the nurses’ station and he falls asleep. He has his glasses on. When I tried to take them off he objected. You want to hoodwink me. You know I can’t go without my glasses. Why have you taken my socks and shoes off? I can’t go without my socks.

When he wakes up he is gripping the side bar of the bed like he thinks he is moving or falling.

Dad. Dad you’re okay. I try and peel his fingers from the side bar. But he is hanging on.

No, he says. He has woken up different. More stubborn. Ready to fight.

He has woken up in another world. He starts talking about straw. You need to move the straw. Give me the pliers. You have to dig it there. When I try and move his fingers he gets  snarly with me.

Okay okay. But you don’t look comfortable.

Don’t take stuff without asking.

I can recognise the consultant’s voice outside. He’s on the ward. I feel relief to know Dad will be seen soon. He is slipping into further delusion and the longer it takes the harder it will be. I hear the consultant talking to nurses and then his voice fades as he heads into another room.

I poke my head out. Only nurses. A plate of cream cupcakes on their bench top.

I tell a nurse I am worried that I won’t see the urologist. Paranoia catching. Don’t let him skip us.

No no your Dad’s on the list.

The consultant’s voice wafts in and out of ear shot.

Dad is talking gibberish. Ellen on the TV.

The urologist enters the room smiling. He has beautiful teeth and a polished head.

Righto Alex. Do you remember me? I am your doctor who did your surgery. The nursing home wants me to have a look. They’re a bit worried about it. Despite Dad’s demented state the urologist talks to him like he is compose mentis.

I wonder why he bothers. Perhaps it is for my benefit. Maybe he thinks something might get through. When I tell him about the past month and how I am struggling with it all, he tells me how when his grandmother was dying he would gets calls from his mother all the time telling him today would be the day and how badly the grandmother was faring. In the end he said to his mother don’t call me till she’s dead. By the time she finally died he had done all his grieving, it was simply a relief. I think he is trying to empathise with me. But I am like his mother. I am the one who is doing it. I can’t say don’t tell me for there is no one else to do this.

Gloves snap on. He tries to move him in the bed; to get him to let go of the rails. But Dad is resistant and starts telling him to get off him.

You don’t ask, you just do.

Dad is shouting and the doctor pulls back. But Dad keeps on shouting. Swinging fists on skinny arms.

We might give him something to settle him before we look or else it’ll come to blows.

Two haloperidol, he tells the nurse.

I’ll be back. Gloves snap off.

Dad tells the nurse to go to. He is pointing at the door. Get out. Get out. You have no manners. Ask. You should ask.

Dad you need to take the tablets. She is proffering them close to his tongue and I am fearful she will get bitten. It’s feeling very veterinary. I am thinking of chemical restraint, muzzles. When faced with an aggressive dog we get the owner to help. Like the nurse is using me. Do you think you can get him to take them? I am like the client who stands back and drops the lead when the dog begins to growl. I don’t think I can do it, I say. But it is my dog. I am required to try.

When the owner gives up in the vet clinic the dog is put in a cage and the pole needle is used. As the dog is cornered the needle advances on it through the bars and a quick hard jab to the thigh muscles is attempted. Hopefully the needle doesn’t snap off. Hopefully the whole dose gets got. Victory is a dog that can’t curl its lip, can barely lift its head.

I suggest a needle for my Dad. The nurse thinks this might be just as hard. We persist with the little white tablets. Dad put your tongue out.

Don’t touch my nose, he shouts.

I try and give him the tablet so he can put it in his mouth himself. Perhaps it is control he wants. Trying to get him to take them from my fingers he is uncoordinated and we are not getting anywhere. Our fingers are like polar opposites on a magnet and he can’t take the tablet from me.

She gets a mini tub of ice-cream and I put the tablet in a teaspoon of vanilla. Here you go Dad. We get them down.

It has taken 30 minutes.

He is not very sedated when the doctor comes back. He is just as angry. He starts swearing. Fucking hell.

The nurse tells me not to worry. He’s not responsible. He’s not your Dad when he’s like this. Her being nice to me, tips me over and I am crying.

I am trying not to cry in front of Dad thinking this might upset him more but it doesn’t seems to effect him. He is oblivious of my noisy nose blows into paper towel. He has forgotten about me, who I am even. Why are you staring at me? he says.

The doctor tries to get him to pull down his pants but he can’t do it.

Okay Alex lift your bottom. Nothing. So in the end he yanks them. I am placating. Its Okay Dad.

You’re cruel to an old man.

Yes Dad I know.

He’s not that strong. You hold his wrists, can you? the doctor says to me. I am the client who digs in. Who says yes I can hold him, my writhing rabid dog, while you trim his nails.

Okay. I will. I grip them. They are thin. I push them down so the doctor can get a look. Dad is swearing and cursing me.

Get off me. Get off me. You brute.

The doctor is pawing down there.

He might as well be sawing it off for all the screaming Dad is doing. Is it really that sore I wonder? Is it just being restrained? Some dogs (think Cavalier King Charles Spaniel ) start to panic before a thing is done to them, screaming before anyone has touched them even. Is this Dad?

It’s thrombosed and woody but its not recurrence, the urologist says. I suspect the issue the staff is having is getting to it to clean him. But I don’t think there is benefit in doing more surgery. It might end up with a worse non-healing area. We could do some radiation for the pain. But he is still urinating. Actually if he stopped urinating it would be quick. It’s a good way to go. A potassium spike stops the heart.

We are talking about him across his woody penis while he rants and shouts. The urologist is pulling his nappy back up and we are telling him its over but he is still shouting abuse at us.

I want to hear the doctor Dad. Shh shh.

I think what we need to do is talk to the nursing home about what they see as the difficulties in managing the area. We can give him more pain relief but I think surgery is ill advised and he isn’t a good candidate. And he can’t have more clexane after the subdural bleed. We’re limited in what we can do.

I ask about a suprapubic catheter.

Hmm not necessary while he is urinating.

I just don’t want him to be in pain, I say. I don’t want him to have more intervention if it is likely to be bad for him. Tears are welling up again. I’ll be guided by you, I say. I am thinking what I want is for someone to take the responsibility out of my hands.

In my head I am thinking how crazy it is that we are talking about a urethral blockage causing a spike in blood potassium as a good way to go. Now we are imagining scenarios that are quick and painless. I think I know a quick and painless way – it’s called euthanasia and I do it to animals on a regular basis.

People don’t want to see their animals suffer and at the end of their lives they decide the time to bring them to the vet clinic. I give them a sedation that sinks their head to the table. They probably feel like they are floating. Then I clip a foreleg and put a tourniquet around the elbow. A vessel stands up. I slide the needle into the vein and a rush of blood comes into the hub, mixing with the green pentobarbitone, the red turns blue-black. I unclamp the rubber band and tell the owner I am going to inject now and they might sense their beloved pet slipping away. I inject slowly, as slowly as I can. By the time the ten mls is into the animal all breathing has stopped and the heart has slowed down. I change syringes for the next ten mls. By the end of this syringe the heart will have stopped. I say Nice and Peaceful like saying it will make it so and place a hand on the dog’s head or on the client’s hand if it is nearby. I check the heart. It is never beating but I take a minute to listen. Then I tell them their pet has passed away. Then they cry.

But my old Dad must hope for a quick and painless death some time in the future. We still don’t know how it’ll be. But this hospital business is not helping him.

We have been here six hours and the decision is made to do nothing. He can go home tomorrow. Endone might be a good thing. He’ll be more sedated.

The nurse brings me a cup of weak, luke-warm tea the colour of a muddy puddle. She had no teaspoon so she brings me a knife for which to stir. I am stirring my tea with a knife and Dad is asking me why I am staring at him.

I am thinking of how to kill you Dad, but this knife ain’t sharp enough.

 

 

 

 

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Making Cake

I feel like baking. I feel like creaming butter and sugar till the mixture is pale and fluffy. It is one of the wonders of the world that sugar and butter can turn to this. Of course it is easy to do in this in the Sunbeam. The butter is cubed; usually it is still too cold from the fridge and the sugar is measured into the glass bowl. The motor is switched on and at first the mixers have trouble because the butter is too hard and the bowl vibrates and it all feels like it will never come together. Like an old car starting on a cold morning. Another image hard to conjure these days when cars start no matter what the weather. I use a spatula to push the stuff down to the centre so the mixers can start churning the butter and really soften it. It starts to change colour to a paler yellow as the sugar is rubbed into it.  The granules of sugar, so clearly detectable before, are dissolving. It is turning to something other than butter and sugar.

I wonder who thought this could happen. Who was the first to discover that sugar and butter could do such a thing? And the end result of cake has no resemblance to its individual ingredients . When the people of France were starving during the French Revolution and there was no bread the French Queen was supposed to have said – Give them cake. She lost her head shortly after. My mother loved to tell us this whilst creaming.

When we were very little, before my mother had a mixer, and even after she had one, since she wasn’t very good at using machines, she made cakes by hand. This meant beating the sugar and butter together with a spoon. By forearm and wrist. It was aching stuff. Everyone got a turn at sitting with the bowl in their lap and having a good beat. Till their arm was so sore and it was handed over to someone else. You needed to sit down with a tea towel in your lap because you didn’t want to be the one to drop the bowl and you were too little to do it on the bench.

The necessary implement for this is a wooden spoon and the butter must be soft. The cake making must be known to be happening and the cake maker has had to get the butter out and put it on the sink well in advance of the need to use it. It cannot be a spur of the moment decision to make a cake where the butter and sugar must be creamed. And who would make a cake that didn’t need creaming. It is the only real cake after all. Easy quick cakes that just need melted butter and are whisked together are not cakes, proper cakes, my mother would say. And so later when she turned to the White Wings packet cakes this was what I thought. The thing did rise, it was still soft and cake-like, but it wasn’t a proper cake. After all the thing had come from a cardboard box and white sachets had been ripped open and poured into a bowl and a bit of milk or only water added. How did they turn eggs to powder. Mother didn’t know but she thought it was marvellous. Hardly any beating was required. Somehow all these dry powders made a cake that before had needed work, real work.

Back to the real cake; the arm is aching and the adversary – butter and sugar – seems unbeatable. Then it happens that the two have melded. Slowly they have transformed themselves from two things separate and different to one thing – magical and soft. Perhaps ten minutes has passed.

Then the eggs are added. One at a time. Some one might have to go down to the chook house for more. Cracked into the bowl and whisked into the beautifully smooth mixture. But oh the mixture looks ruined. It separates and yellows and curdles into bits. All that work creaming seems wasted by the adding of eggs. But a mother knows this is just a stage. It’ll be better when some flour is added. The sifted flour is sprinkled in. It binds and heals the curdled mixture. Another egg – more flour. Some milk too. Pale yellow and air light the mixture is scooped into a baking tin, already lined with parchment.

Then there are spoons to lick and a bowl too. One sibling gets the spoons and the other the bowl. Depends how fastidious a mother has been to get all the mixture into the bowl. Who will get the better deal?

Jasper shares the mixers with no one. Being a single child he has no siblings to squabble with over whose turn it is for the bowl. So sometimes the mixture is too much for him. I am left with the bowl. Pushing a finger around its rim. Like a child again I feel furtive, even though I am allowed. Something tells me it is greedy to keep licking. To keep poking a finger about till every morsel of mixture is gone. The bowl hardly needs washing.

But the mixture is so good. Almost better than the cake. Always.

 

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Minyon Falls

The boy in a blue raincoat, the father in a red. Both take a piss in the bushes side by side. A kookaburra is nearby. The boy skips every few steps as they walk , his joy irrepressible at being outside the car. They are walking to the water fall through the rain-forest.

Before this the parents have yelled, the both of them, at various times at the eight year old. They suggested he sit in the middle of the back seat to get a view out through the front windscreen. But would he listen? No. Stubborn to the point of car sickness again.

Then he started groaning, moaning, driving them nuts.

The boy doesn’t get what excites his parents about driving through the country side. The miles of small roads they choose to Ooh and Ahh at. Every for sale sign gets a new intake of breath and a scribbling of estate agent names and numbers.

But where are the shops? asks the boy. No shops.

Just wet roads, damp boggy earth. Tree canopies that meet over roads, like fingers interlocking,  making a tunnel of leaves. Wet. Ferns. No doubt full of leeches. Primitive plants. Everything here is dripping. The ground squelches, so water logged it oozes. It is like walking on foam. There is moss. Imagine that. Moss. She hasn’t seen moss for the longest time.

Because they live in Fremantle. Land void of moss. Flat, dry and hot.  Hot and windy. Windy and hot. Water is scarce. The Water Board recommends three minute showers. People have fake grass.  Roads don’t wind. They are straight and hot and baking. People’s suburban gardens have palms, yellow and crisp. Like they dream of an oasis. Grass turns yellow and then brown. Water sacrificed to sand slips off, repelled, afraid.

The parents long for rain, for moisture. They watch the falls, the way the water, in endless buckets, spill over the rocks. Mesmerised by gallons of the stuff. The spray comes off it and turns to mist and all the air about is liquid and cool.

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Inside the Chook House

Don’t go inside the chook house without your thongs. Chances are you will step on something squishy and it will make you wince, jerk, scream a little even. Because the floor of the chook house is dirt and chicken poop and bits of rotting vegetables. Your mum has asked you to empty the chook bin. It lives under the sink and all the scraps are thrown into it. The dog wishes he was so lucky. It is a soupy mix of rotting things that the chooks go nuts about.

You are before an awkward age. Maybe ten or eleven. You have no breasts. You haven’t even thought about that. You have yellow terry toweling shorts on with a string tie. They are super short and your legs are like two brown leather straps. When you stand your knees overextend so your legs bow a little and your mum tells you this is an ugly way to stand. But it feels right. If you bring your knees forward you feel like you will crumple.

You love that you can run fast. But your hair bothers you. It never does what you want it to.  So different from everyone else’s. Your mother said it went strange when the hair dresser used electric clippers on it and you believe her. In baby photos you have normal hair. Something happened after that. Each hair now like it has had the fright of its life.

You take the bucket down the back yard and the chooks see you coming. They pile up around the entrance to their yard like paper blown. Some cheeky chooks attempt to fly to get to the bucket scraps first but each has had one wing cut so they can only do a flutter. Like a stalling engine. Putt putt. Crash.

Dad does the wing cutting.  My sister and  I do the catching. Cornered they crouch in fear. Picked up they are light, filled with air. One at a time we hand them to him. As he takes each chook up he calls her darling. He holds a chook under his arm and extends one wing. With hand shears, freshly oiled,  he snips the wing feathers and they float off like snowflakes. One of us must rake them after the job is done.

You enter the yard pushing them away with your thong-clad foot. Even in thongs you feel something wet slide beneath it. Ooh. Like you are hard wired to worry over texture. Like the way you can’t eat gristle and scramble egg makes you gag.  Then you empty the bucket and their heads go down, their feet start scratching away madly. They’re in chook heaven. Even the ones in the boxes have clambered out and come running. They bust through. Look pumpkin seeds. The vegetable detritus can’t be eaten mostly and just turns old and grey on the soil. It decays. And then dad puts it back on the garden to make more vegies.

You duck your head to go inside their house and search the boxes for eggs. Some are still warm. They fit perfectly in your hand. One at a time. You steal them while they fossick.

 

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At My Father’s Bedside

While I wait at my father’s bedside I read Cormac McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965, the year after I was born.  It is a bit of a vigil. There is something peaceful about watching the shadows change as the day progresses.  A yellowish glow tints the scene as the day goes on. All the while in the background the wind whooshes and whirs about the building. We are on the seventh floor of the hospital, up under the roof, and there is a view of sail boats on the Swan, like folded paper napkins. Another woman waits and watches too. She has the title  of PSA but I don’t know what it stands for. Her job is to sit and watch the demented, the wanderers, the ones who might decide to get out of bed and fall. She reads a thick book but she is close to finishing. I can tell it’s a romance from its cover; a damsel in the arms of an officer. The thin waisted beauty leans back but he traps her in his strong arms, moves his rock jaw close to her cheek.

My father is asleep. He has had a subdural bleed. Sandwiched between skull and brain there is blood. Now we wait. They check his eyes for light responses, lifting his lids like raising the morning blinds. He sleeps on.

Over pages the character from McCarthy’s book, Sylder, is in a physical fight for his life with a man he has given a lift to. It is 1933. They are fighting by the stationary Ford car on a dirt road. The man has struck the first blow, striking him with the car jack. The killing takes pages. One paragraph I read over;

“He was jerking at the man’s head but the man had both hands over it and seemed lost in speculation upon the pebbles on the road. Sylder let his hand relax and wander through the folds of the neck until they arrived at the throat. The man took that for a few minutes, then suddenly twisted sideways, spat in Sylder’s face, and tried to wrench himself free. Sylder rolled with him and had him then flat backward in the road and astride him, still the one arm swinging from his broken shoulder like a rope. He crept forward and placed one leg behind the man’s head, elevating it slightly, looking like some hulking nurse administering to the wounded. He pushed the head back into the crook of his leg, straightened his arm, and bore down upon the man’s neck with all his weight and strength. The boneless looking face twitched a few times but other than that showed no change of expression, only the same rubbery look of fear, speechless and uncomprehending, which Sylder felt was not his doing either but the everyday look of the man. And the jaw kept coming down not on any detectable hinges but like a mass of offal, some obscene waste matter congealing and collapsing in slow folds over the web of his hand. It occurred to him then that the man was trying to bite him and this struck him as somehow so ludicrous that a snort of laughter wheezed in his nose. Finally the man’s hands came up to rest on his arm, the puffy fingers trailing over his own hand and wrist reminding him of baby possums he had seen once, blind and pink.”

But still the man is not dead. He takes another page to finally succumb to the brutal force of Sylder. Finally extinguished the man relaxed “his hand and the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider.”

How hard he fights to hang onto life. How hard is it to die? Even old Dad seems to struggle on inwardly. Inside is he at war, dueling in hand to hand combat to hang on and not die? To emerge the victor.

The vivid richness of McCarthy gets me thinking about murder. I imagine bringing the pillow down, like in so many movies. I think of Francis. So many teenage tears shed watching Jessica Lang turn vegetable. Maybe the guard is here to protect Dad from me and what I might do faced with the diagnosis just given; “he might be starting to pass away.”

Lying in his hospital bed the nurse comes to clean his teeth, no matter that he is sleeping, or at least mimics it. No matter that clean teeth no longer seem a priority.  She asks him to open his mouth and he obeys. He has three teeth that she cleans with a bicarb swab rotating it around his mouth. When he’s had enough he bites down on it and attempts to draw it away from her. I think of a dog at tug of way. Ok you’ve had enough of that I see, she says. Give it up. The toothless gums hold the brush and then he lets go. He has won this fight. She retreats.

He sleeps on.