Category: Memories

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Feathers Fly

It is Tuesday and the gruelling day that was yesterday has left me with my Tuesday headache; a result of too much stress and not enough water.

I am in recovery mode. I walk the dog on the oval outside my house. The lawn mower man in his air-conditioned hub smiles. Thumbs up to the dog walker as he trails his lawn mower and green grass clippings fly behind him. He permeates my world with the smell of my childhood; freshly cut grass. Murphy bunny hops in excitement at seeing his mate the red standard poodle with Tigger for a name. His owner has red hair too.

In the grass Murphy snuffles and emerges with a white feather stuck to his wet nose.

It is a remnant of the weekend.

On Saturday night for the PIAF festival opening the sky was snowing feathers. Below people sat on the warm bitumen of the closed off main city street. They took over the city. The cars were gone. A French troupe, Les Studios de Cirque, soared from the blue and pink glowing council chambers to Saint George’s cathedral. From sky scraper to sky scraper they sped, super-hero style, trawling white silk. Then others, dressed all in white, slowly trundled the wire with suitcases, umbrellas and buckets laden with feathers, emptying them onto the street below. Large clumps, as big as bricks, fell from the sky. But bricks of feathers are just pillows. Sack after sack of feathers came showering down on the crowd below. People stood with arms outstretched reaching for the falling feathers.

Children are running and collecting the booty in bags, or stuffing them into shirts and pockets, if they have come ill-prepared.

People’s hair is covered in down. Feathers are drifting and swirling in the breeze, taken way by it, dropped down by it, pushed into gutters, piled into baby strollers. Tickling their way into shirts and down between cleavages. A helium-filled white angel, the size of a small truck, is led through the crowd. Bending and bowing. Bobbing.

For the finale the feathers fly upwards from machines in the centre of the street, so it is raining feathers and eventually the road is snow-covered, at least ankle deep in down. People are drunk on feathers. They take strangers by the hand and twirl them. They take up huge armfuls and fling them in the air. Feathers are falling all about, snow of the softest kind. In the warm Perth air snow-like-anything is out of place. Caught in the spot-light the feathers are like a blizzard. The t-shirt and sandal wearing crowd, so used to the sand and the sun, are turned child-like by the storm of feathers. Permission to play. A huge Perth pillow fight.

On the train home strangers talk to one another because they too have feathers in their hair. Like the fox that has raided the chicken coop the passengers have the tell-tale marks of a night on the town, playing under falling feathers. Soon the carriage floor is littered with the white fluff. A woman beside me shows me inside her top to her bra that is overflowing with feathers. A child stretching to reach the hand hold on the carriage roof reveals a pair of shorts whose pockets are bulging. A t-shirt rides up and a waist band with feathers poking out is seen. Mothers, like brazen shoplifters, have their handbags crammed.

For those who have not been at the performance, but at the rugby instead, the sight of the feather-clad passengers is eye goggling. What have you people been up to? Playing beneath the falling feathers, why of course.

We leave a Hansel and Gretel trail of feathers from the station to our house. Then we set free our stash. We release them in our street under the glow of the street light, far from where they have come.

The next day, driving to work, I spot a lonesome feather swirling its way down the street. Fly feather fly.

 

check out this film by local artists Tunnel Vision

Tunnel Vision

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No More Montessori

When people who have never sent their kids to a Montessori school tell you Montesorri kids are weird, or how much they love Montessori despite never being part of a school with that system, it makes you want to…

Everyone’s an expert on what a child needs.

A child should know what’s it like in the real world, someone says, expounding the virtues of a competitive environment.

The pros and cons rattle about in my head, that feels empty of all else but the two opposing views; one suggesting kids should follow their own path, blazoning it themselves, and one saying children need their path illuminated for them.

Some mothers get my angst. Especially Montessori mothers. They too wish for the control experiment child. The I-dream-of-Jeannie style child suddenly blinked into two. One raised this way; one the other. See which turns out best. A test tube baby in the purest sense.

But short of this there is just giving the other system a go.

We walk the long hill. It is at the point of impossibility for me in my wheelchair. It is long and steep. A limestone wall, deteriorating, is on our right. Convict built. Already Graham has constructed a story how the hole chiseled in its mortar was made by the bushranger Moondyne Joe. Arm muscles are burning. I can do it. If I have to. Two crossings. Lollipop men – mid sixties – swarthy Portuguese? Dogs are tethered to the fence. Blue Heeler. Schnauzer. Chocolate Labradoodle. Murphy joins the mutts that wait.

Jasper asks me not to come into the classroom. But I want to meet the teacher. Please, I won’t embarrass you, I promise.

Just being me is enough. I have to excuse myself past a group of young boys. The corridor is not wide enough for them and me. Is Jasper hoping they think I am with someone else? Please believe she belongs to someone else. The boys are maybe 10 years old. In their huddle they are tanned, even more so because of their gleaming white shirts. February white.

At the desk sits the teacher. She has a gaggle of young girls around her. All leaning in close. Taking in the smell of her. Girls love their teacher. One girl wears her art shirt; a man’s old business shirt, oversized with sleeves rolled up, ready to get dirty. The teacher and I handshake. We smile widely, warmly at one another and I say I will catch up with her later, when she has time. I don’t want to seem demanding, strange, a Montessori mother. I notice her lines about her mouth – like she smiles a lot and I think this is a good sign.

The room is jammed with desks. I would not get around them they are so close. I imagine people squeezing their way through the maze of tables and pencils falling to the floor as one is bumped. On the uneven boards the pencils will roll and keep rolling. Excuse me. Under the desks I hunt for the pencils, but they are gone. The sound of rolling lead. Desks are upending, papers are falling to the floor. A domino effect of tipping tables. Pencils on the loose. Sliding between the boards. Gone. For it is a small, small desk. No spreading out. No room for loose pencils. Elbows almost touching. Nit city. Close enough for cheating. Close enough for note passing.

Breathe.

Outside again and a trip to reception to hand in a form about Jasper’s asthma plan and order more uniform and a wide brimmed hat. Magpies sitting high in ancient gums warble. Wait till we are nesting, they say. In the distance the back of another former Montessori mother can be seen crossing the grass with a child in a brand new uniform two sizes too big. I want to yell out. Here, over here. Come tell me it is okay. Parents cross the bitumen and mill about. Prams galore. A siren sounds to signal the start of the day. It is a sound bursting with urgency. Fire station-loud. Let the day Begin.

 

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Changing Schools

Yesterday was the first day of the school year and Jasper had gone off in the car with his father to his school where he has gone since he was three years old. At three he was blonder and rounder in the face. His shorts went past his knees. His back pack was almost as big as he was. It is a Montessori school. It is by the beach. It has children speaking in hushed voices. It has teachers called by their first name. It sets no homework. He can wear his board shorts. It has no races and no tests. And yet.

The phone rings and the principle of a close (but out of area) local government school tells me she has a place for Jasper available in grade five. This morning she got an email to say someone is not returning to the school. There is a place if we want and it is okay for him to come in late. But he has gone to school.

I ring Graham and tell him. We will tell Jasper together after school.

I feel sick in the guts.

I am not good at change.

When we tell him the news he looks shocked but quickly his face changes to excitement. He is keen to be moving on. He says he has been at Montessori a long time – in fact as long as most children are in primary school – and is ready for a change. He wants to be in a team. He would like the independence of walking to and from school. He already plays cricket and football with boys that attend the school.

During the day Graham and I go to enrol in the new school and I ask to see the classroom he will be in. The school is a hundred years old. The building is limestone, no doubt quarried from the ground down the hill. In the hallway sepia toned photos of old footballers adorn the walls. The secretary leads us through the corridor, its walls covered by back packs hanging from hooks. On either side are classrooms choc-full of desks in rows. A white board up the front. Children in uniforms; blue shorts, white polo shirts. In one classroom each desk has a helium filled balloon tied to it. I see a male teacher wearing a tie.

I feel as if I am stepping back into my own childhood. This school is not dissimilar to the primary school I attended. With its jarrah boards and it large sash windows, open hoping to catch the breeze. The air is not moving today and it is still and close in the classrooms. I feel a prick of fear. A deer in the headlights kind of panic.

What if I am wrong?

This is my parenting fear. Perennial. What if I am making the wrong decision for him? Graham seems not to have all this anxiety flooding through him. I thank God we are not both the same. Some one is calm and rational. I cannot speak to anyone about Jasper leaving the school without crying. I blubber about it throughout the day.

 

 

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Will We Survive?

from sea breezeAs Perth suffers a record heat wave we hunker in our stone cottage. The sun is beating down on its walls and its tin roof would most definitely fry an egg. In the morning, before it has reached 35, we go to the dog beach. All shapes run up and down the black sand track that is the the wet shore line. Some have ridiculously short legs so their chests make contact with sand. Others have long slender stiletto legs, tiptoeing through the foam. The ocean is delicious. Salty and cool. We stay in till we have chilled right through. A bikini clad woman, rakishly thin but with fake bososms like soft balls, walks up and down the beach.

Then back home to a dark house. The blinds are down and all the rooms darkened the way my mother taught me to. Graham has hung a shade cloth out the back and even covered the east facing lounge window with a blue beach towel to stop the assault of the morning sun. But when the nights offer no relief it is hard to keep the house cool. Slowly the thermometer climbs so that indoors, at its worse, it is 32 degrees. Overhead fans stay on day and night. No cooking can be done. Even boiling the kettle seems foolish. I sit in a wet shirt by the fan.

The dog knows the coolest spot in the house; choosing to lie in the hallway on the jarrah boards. He barely moves all day.

It is Australia Day and people in other parts of the country are having outdoor BBQs and picnics. But Perth people are hiding in doors, out of the sun, if they have any sense. Some drunks persist under the heavy shade of the peppermints on the park, their beer as hot and yellow as horse piss.

The tennis and the cricket are on. Sharapova is making her characteristic high pitched I’m-having-an-orgasm wooooh as she hits each ball. Unbearable. Back to the cricket.

We are once again contemplating air conditioning. We had it when Jasper was a baby and I was seriously addicted. It made the heat outside so much worse. I became trapped in the range of my air conditioner. Unable to leave its side. I might as well have been tethered to it. Since it died a few years ago it is just an ugly non functional thing on the wall. A reminder of the once refrigerated air that flowed from it. It’s motor outside is the base from which wasps have built a nest.

So we hold off. We want to be able to go without. We want to do our bit to conserve energy. There is always the movies where I know I will be cold, be forced to slide on the cardigan I have brought with me for just this chilly feeling.

 

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Summer in the Seventies

The summer holiday of our childhood is bursting with the beach.

An easterly blowing. The blue, flat and calm. The sand already blistering. White hot.

We arrive when a car park in the shade of the Norfolks is easy to find. We leave before the sea breeze roughens the ocean’s surface.

My mother is under a beach umbrella, expertly secured in the sand by my father. There she is, as if skewered to the beach in a one piece black and white polka dot swimming costume.  A Big Floppy hat. The butter white muscles of her thighs portray her low energy and her equally spongy tummy a cause for chiding from my father.

She barely goes in. Just a dip, to cool off. Never a stroke. Her hair stays dry; only the curls at the back of her neck are moistened by the salty water. Then back to the towel, the shade, the David Niven.

My father swims. He lifts and throws us into the water. He lurks beneath us; a deep sea monster. His body garden-hard. We swim beneath him, through the arch of his legs. He carries us. All without sunscreen. Brown as nuts. Taut like children ought to be. Able to peel off skin like dried Clag glue. There is the endless digging of holes in sand. The collapsing of castles. The making of moats. Buckets of fan shells, as ordinary as snails, collected and taken home. Loved. Kept. Eventually thrown away as they become chipped and faded.

The walk to the Holden is longer and hotter because of the shaded park. Accompanied by the slap slap of thongs. Shake the towels. No sand in the car. Blue vinyl seats are melting. A still damp towel is laid down to stop the scorching of bare thighs. Still skin sticks to car seats. Windows down. An ice-cream from the deli on the drive home. Mum – Hazelnut Roll, Dad – Peter’s Drumstick. Us – Giant Sandwich. Perfect for the child unable to bite into cold ice-cream.

We rinse off under the hose on the back lawn. We must let it run cold first or else get burnt by the hot water that shoots from the soft as snake rubber. We let the run-off water douse the lawn. We strip off to reveal lobster white skin. Bathers are hung out to dry on the Hills Hoist ready for the next day, their lycra thinning to mesh. Someone is harassed to turn off the tap and stop wasting water. The day is too hot for bird song. Nothing moves. The chooks, open beaked, camp in the shade of the lemon tree. Gum leaves limply dangle.

We have lunch on trays on laps while the cricket plays on the telly. Richie Benaud. Caught Marsh bowled Lillee. Cricketers without helmets. Fielding in white toweling hats. Big Moustaches. A flair to their pants. The house is cool and dark. Corn fritters with tomato sauce. All the bamboo blinds are down on the outside. The whir of a fan inside. Too hot for outside. Lie on linoleum then. Shorty shorts and cotton tops. Lemon cordial with ice blocks. Never too hot for Dad. Always something to do in his garage or garden, whatever the weather. Despite Mum’s pleading to rest awhile and read his Day of The Jackal Christmas present. Gardening clothes on. Not seen again till tea time.

Three females inside, watching Mum’s soaps or else drawing with textas and using the Husqvarna to make pot holders and place mats. Unjamming the bobbin of a wodge of twisted thread. Writing aerograms to grandparents overseas and sorting through postage stamps to put in the new album.

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The smell of paper yellowing in Classic Orange Penguins

It is the week between Christmas and the New Year and it feels like all of Perth is deserting the city to go South. We get meat pies wrapped in cellophane from a service station and listen to the Boxing Day test on the drive.

In the Kombi pace is slow. It is noisy. Like being rolled down the road in a tin can. The speakers are making an unbearable buzz. The louvres are held open with an elastic tie, allowing the warm air to rush in. A hair dryer on your face.

Jasper has got his pillows with him. It could be the same drive we did as kids. A mid seventies car. No air-conditioning. No decent music. Just the braile of the road. A father shouting back the cricket score. The sweet smell of jubes and the not pretty sound of my mother sucking them.

Jasper and I have a packet of orange flavoured Tic Tacs. To pass the time one is the prisoner and one is the guard. The inmate must conceal the Tic Tac (tablet given to subdue) within his/her mouth and pretend to swallow, open and show tongue, just like in the movies, but instead hide the Tic Tac within the mouth, usually between upper lip and gum. This amuses us endlessly.

Then there is always “I spy”. In response to my “Something beginning with H” Jasper says “Hope”. No, of course not, I say. I am thinking “Hat”. Next guess, “Happy?”

We stay in a borrowed house in a coastal town. Just yards away lives the man who hammered it. He has a wife and four cats. We are high on a hill with a view out to the ocean and the inlet. On the distant fields black Angus cattle graze. First slowly moving one way, then the other. They are so far away that they are like cracked pepper over pizza.

The house has been moved from its original location in Napier Street, Nedlands, to rest on Myer Mountain. In Perth it may have been knocked down to make way for a new home or else slowly crumbled and died. I imagine it on the flat green suburban street, surrounded by heavy gums, sloppy gutters filled with leaves and bark, spongy floorboards sagging towards the dirt. Slowly returning itself to the earth.

Then it is reborn.

A mid life crisis. New boobs. Chin lift. Tummy tuck. New Man. Sea change.

Every weatherboard is numbered, every bit of pressed tin marked and then reconstructed by two brothers. She is sturdy and strong. Her floorboards wonderfully level and smooth. Her verandahs have been widened to make ample space for swags to be laid down. Her encircling shade sweeps around her like a ballooning skirt. Now on the hillside the wind whips through and around her. She is remade. All straight. What does she think of her new home?

At night frogs are loud and incessant, starting as the sun goes down and continuing on through the night. In bed Graham and Jasper see clearly the Southern Cross in the black sky through a triangular window in the attic.

The dawn arrives insanely early. The light is blaring. No window is spared.

Double hung sash windows, which open from all the rooms like doors, move slowly with their lead weights. The glass in the windows is old and rippled turning the fields to green ocean. The corners of each sash holds a myriad of spider webs, their pantries overflowing with the husks of insects. Flies find no peace here. Jasper counts the Daddy Longlegs in the toilet. Twelve. Big ones, mum.

In one room lives Mr Ginger. He is a fighter and cannot be out when the other cats are loose. A paw pokes out from under his door. A plaintive meow to be released. Later Mr Ginger, it will be your turn. Freed, he roams the rooms tail high and stiff as fencing wire. He loves the sound of the ukulele and takes up position on the chair arm beside Graham while he plays. Petting delights him and sets him dribbling.

The mother of the brothers keeps her books in this remade house. Beloved. They are in shelves in every room and in boxes in the hallway and in the lounge. Mr Ginger has marked the boxes with his claws. Mine. Mine. Books are this mother’s weakness. Note to self – stop collecting. Consider a kindle. She has old cookery books (ones with the most unappetising photography), novels, many classics, world books, non fiction and an impressive collection of How To books. So many skills to acquire, not enough time – Want to Make a Kite, How to make a Rocking Horse, Soft Toys, Craft from Wind in the Willows, Natural Dyes, Making Masks, Sleeve Puppets, Just Bears, Silkscreen, Pottery, Furniture Upholstery, Crafts of China, Quilting and Patchwork, Joys of Spinning.

Feeling like I am in a Tim Winton story. Sea and jarrah boards. The smell of paper yellowing in Classic Orange Penguins. The sound of a boy and a father playing ping pong in the garage.

 

 

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A Nursing Home Christmas

They call it an Aged Care facility these days but in my mind it is still a nursing home. It is nicer than the homes my mother took us to when, as children, we were visiting elderly relatives. Two of the old ladies we saw were called Wink and Tess. Now I drag my own boy. I can’t remember being as unpleased as he is at this. I think I was in awe of the wizened. The smells, that so bother him, did not me. He races past the cloth bins of soiled laundry in the corridors, their colour coding signalling their degree of foulness. He instructs me, “Quick Mum, don’t breathe.”

I remember a woman who used to cry, while asking repeatedly, “Are you my mother? Are you my mother?” To us children this seemed particularly strange. Comical and sad at the same time. We would poke one another in the ribs as we passed her and say, “Are you her mother?”

We peeked into rooms as we followed my mother through the hallways. She strode ahead, her stockinged legs and half inch heeled shoes, marching matron like down the cloppity clop corridors, looking for Wink’s room. I could see the shape of thin people under blankets. People who no longer ate, who barely took a sip of fluid. Sinking into their beds. Like the mattress was some kind of quick sand determined to engulf them. Returning them to the earth.

Now at my mother’s home they hold a Christmas party where children from the catholic primary school next door come to sing carols. The OT’s are particularly enthusiastic; they trim a huge tree and a stuffed, but still thin, Santa sits on a couch at the front door like a resident waiting for a taxi. They even have an Elvis impersonator after everyone has pulled their bons bons. Vol au vents with prawns. Nurses wear Santa hats and have tinsel in their hair. Some hang christmas baubles from their ear lobes.

But still.

The corridors are carpeted, not squeaky vinyl like the Home Of Peace where we visited as children. Residents have their own rooms with bathrooms and flat screen TVs. The rooms are personalised with pictures and paintings from home. Some have brought with them a favourite armchair. My mother piles hers with New Ideas and Woman’s Days. She has her writing desk, although she no longer sits at it.

At my mother’s nursing home the demented are the same as when we were children. Asking strangers, “Have you came to take me home?” “Where am I?” “Are you my mother?”

She gets cards from well wishers, some who have not caught up on the news that her husband has passed away, even though it was six months ago. Happy Christmas June and Alex. Always June and Alex, for all those years. Now it is only June. Last Christmas he was in hospital, the first of a series of trips there. He had lost sense of time and it mattered not that it was Christmas to him. The surgeon said at least they will give you a glass of wine with your meal.

We have a Christmas ornament that makes me think of him – three candles that when lit make three angels spin and chime two bells. The ornament only ever came out on Christmas and was lit for a short time during lunch because the reality of the chiming bells was not as peaceful or beautiful as the thought of them. Still.

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Nearly Christmas

When it is nearly Christmas and you are in the centre of town, shopping, you can feel the tension in the streets. There is a terrible need to buy crap. You want to get something nice for someone nice but everything nice is too expensive and everything reasonably affordable is crap. You are in a Hitch 22 type scenario. One no doubt he never found himself in. Just gave copies of his books. Worthy gifts. Now Christopher is dead you can’t find one of his books. No Hitch 22, No Arguably. Somehow hearing him speak of his cancer as a blind unemotional being, of his deportation into the land of malady, has made me want to read what he has written on other subjects. I hear people requesting copies of the Steve Jobs book. Sold out. Fifty copies in three days. All the dead guys. Sought after.

The sailing has finished. The Worlds, as those in the know called them. But no world in Fremantle. Sad streets carpeted green with rows of unused porta loos. Asking to be peed in. Hoping. Security guards, gleeful, saying how quiet it was. Money for doing nothing. Sitting in a huddle on white plastic chairs with orange wind breakers with SECURITY labelling their backs.

A bar on the beach is the only happening thing. The same white plastic chairs but this time embedded in imported white beach sand. A green flash sunset seen by a handful.

In the square the Moreton Bay Fig has itself been strangled with fairy lights. Twisting and spiralling up her thick trunk and branches she has become a sparkling triumphant tree. Giant red baubles hang like enormous cherries. Normally she is a beacon for the homeless and the spent. But she is too festive to be puked under. Too glittery. Too happy to attract the down and outs. Instead she sits choked with blazoning lights.

Jasper needs new volleys for the three month old pair have worn through. On the tennis court he felt the heat on his foot and wondered why. A hole in his sole. We are in Target. Home of crap. This time we buy black volleys. A sign of the teenager he is to become? We leave the old shoes in a shop bin and wave goodbye to them as we enter the lift. Goodbye sweet faithful shoes that have served me well. For they have gone beyond the Good Sammi’s bin. In socks we head for the counter and bumping into one another static electricity shocks us both. Ow. Socks and vinyl, rubber wheels and friction. Ow. We follow a mullet out into the sunshine and to Culley’s. For a curry pie and a pastie and a pastel green spearmint milkshake in a tall metallic cup. Beside us a retired couple order pies with mash and peas and deep brown gravy but one gets chips as the kitchen has run out of mash. Run out. Can you believe it? No mash. An extra pile of army green peas?

 

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Not Perth Weather

It hardly ever rains in the summer in Perth. We are accustomed to the hot and the dry. Suburbs turn slowly more brown. More crisp. Lawns are left to die. The two day watering roster will not sustain them. Ukuleles need humidifying. So when it rains in December it feels like a different place. Perhaps we are in Northern NSW. Perhaps we are in the Kimberley. No, not humid enough. Thunder is grumbling and growling in the distance and then a thwack overhead, like a heavy eucalyptus bough breaking. Solid rain now. Fat juicy droplets. Like a Sydney thunderstorm. The branches of the trees outside are wet black, lacquered. The leaves are more green. The sky is a solid gun metal grey. There is the tick tack of the rain on the corrugated iron roof. Birds have stopped singing, sheltering somewhere. Where?

I have made a tea cake for the last tennis lesson. But it will be cancelled. The courts will be wet and it will be too dangerous to run around on them. We can eat it inside. Still hot, with cinnamon and butter. Listening to the cracking sky. The peeling rolling rumble. Then thunder like someone is dragging an all too heavy wooden box down the hallway.

So many noises, amplified and clarified by the wet air. Even the rattle of the train. Carried to me on the moist air. A car horn. In my ear.

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Operating Theatre

I am in holding zone awaiting my surgical procedure. My surgeon comes past to tell me there is a slight delay. There is a back log in recovery. We women in our forties are lined up to be spread apart and peered into. There is a dairy cow feel to it. But no elbow length gloves. We pretend it is dignified, but really we are just another biological system that needs to be understood.

I watch the ceiling as I am wheeled in my bed and now I lie looking up. The white cotton blanket has the smell of a large commercial laundry. I am good at being in hospital. I know what will be done here. There is nothing to surprise me. The delay is not unwelcome. It is not unexpected. In hospital everything is wonderfully out of your control and to surrender to that feeling is strangely comforting.

The theatre is gleaming in every way. Spanking white white walls. The operating lights are a dark shiny blue. In the corner, on a stool, my surgeon waits while I shuffle across to the table. The operating table. He has his head in his phone. His down time between patients. Perhaps he is signalling his late arrival home. His legs are crossed and I notice his knee high white wellingtons. It gives him the look of an abattoir worker. Someone expecting to be splashed upon.

For now I am in the hands of the anaesthetist. Equally attired. Everyone is costumed up, including me, but, I suspect I am the only one without my undies. Like the courtroom with its wigs and robes, the operating theatre has its look too. Scrub tops and pants, hair caps and shoe covers. Even the word theatre; what role, what performance will be on today. How will we all play our parts?

Who is the villain, the hero? I have the bit part. Non speaking role. Who else converses with people as they lie on a slab. Leaning over. No wonder there is a power play between doctor and patient. No one else sees you like this. In a ridiculous gown that has no buttons. Splayed.

We only have a few moments, the anaesthetist and I. Soon I will be away from them all. In a space that is a void. He talks jovially about the Jackson Juice he is delivering. First he tells me there will be a short sharp pain. Indeed he is pushing hard as he delivers the anaesthetic. The theatre nurse is placing a mask across my face.