disability – the chook house

April 3, 2016

Noosa – from Beach to Light House (almost)…

The sick are not on the path –

not the dying,

the undiagnosed illness saunters past,

the diseased gene.

The path is for the healthy, or the fat.

The families. Fathers with babies in back packs.

Mothers in slouchy hats.

Out come the SAKATAS –

because toddlers are always hungry when there is no shop nearby.

Fluorescent Nike, Campagnolo cyclist cap.

A family of four each with a different coloured shoe.

Things go on beneath the skin, in the innards.

Under cloth.

Breathable cloth hides ulcers, bruises, marks.

Absorbent dressings soak up fluid, discharge.

Bow legged men.

A dropped credit card found on the path. A collective What to do?

November 14, 2014

Akbar

Swan taxi to the airport. Wagon.

No need to dismantle the chair.

First question before reaching the end of the street.

“That man – he was your husband? And the boy your son?”

“Yes.”

“What is happened to you?”

I explain. Paralysed. Long time. No need for you to feel sad.

“He must be a good man. Where I come from a man would not be with a woman such as you.”

He is an original refugee from Afghanistan after 9/11. He came by leaky boat to Christmas Island 14 years ago. Thirty hours at sea. Once a school teacher. Now a taxi driver.

He tells me how good men are in Australia. He tells me the story of how his small son must spend a night in hospital and in the same hospital room is another child. The parents of this other child are a strong and handsome man ( more handsome than himself, he says) and a woman who has, how do you say? He makes a chopping motion at the elbows and knees as he drives.

“A dwarf?” I offer.

“Yes. This would never happened in Afghanistan,” he says.

“She would be discarded there. But here she has a handsome man. Remarkable.”

Then he tells me of going to the desert with his mother when he is young man. They are visiting ancestral lands. They travel on the back of an open truck. Struggling along the side of the road is a woman astride a donkey with a man on either side supporting her. He bangs on the truck window and gets the driver to pull over. He sends his mother over to the woman to find out what is wrong and if they can offer assistance. The mother returns to the truck and says it is no use. The woman has been in labor for over a day. The baby is half in and half out. His mother has had many children and he trusts her knowledge when she says nothing can be done. He says the woman has the most terrible look on her face. His mother tells him the infant is already dead and the woman will soon join her child. He asks the truck driver if they can take the woman, but he refuses saying she will bleed and mess on his truck. The men with the woman do not want any help either. They want to press on, despite the futility. Akbar argues with the men – urging them to let them take her with them to get her to a doctor. He asks them if they had land or belongings that they did not think of selling in order to help her. But she is dying. They travel on, away from the truck. Barely fifty metres on she slumps over and dies. Akbar tries again to get the truck driver to take them back to their village. But the truck driver does not want to make his journey longer.

In Melbourne. In the taxi queue.

A sedan.

I ask him to pop the boot so I can show him, how once inside the taxi, I can dismantle the chair for him to load it inside. But he won’t take me.

“I can’t take you if you want to bring the chair,” he says.

“Yes, I want to bring the chair. Yes, you can take me.”

“No,” he says – crossing his hands in front of his chest. Shaking his head. He drives away to the next customer and I am abandoned on the sidewalk.

“He won’t take me! He refuses!” I am yelling up the street to the taxi controller. I point at his cab. “He won’t take me!”

I hear my mother’s voice.

The taxi controller begins her argument with the taxi driver. He gets out of his cab, gesticulating. She is photographing his licence plate and writing in her note-book.

I am negotiating with the next sedan driver. “You have to take me! I can dismantle the chair.”

February 8, 2014

The Giant, the Cook and the Cripple.

Pat Metheny plays. I stare at the knots in the wood of the orange pine ceiling. On my single bed. I remember studying ceilings; a past time of the spinal patient.

I think of yesterday.

On a quad bike. Held between the thighs of the Giant. Meanwhile the Cook roasts the chickens and tomatoes with fennel. Roasted sweet potato encrusted by macadamia crumble. Stone fruit tarts for after. Her kitchen is her castle. Stainless steel. Plywood. His is the scrub. The glades. The sandhills.

But after all what will I remember?

Freedom. Air rushing past. Being without my chair. The spray from the ocean waves as we hurtle along the wet shoreline. Hubert, tan galloping, keeps pace 38,39,40km/hr. His ribs showing. Tongue lolling. Eyes of an athlete. Hound. Rescued, he must think he is the luckiest dog alive.

After us comes the eleven-year-old on a tinier bike and then my Small Good Man. The eleven-year-old wears a motorcycle helmet that makes his head look like a pumpkin. He putters. But he’s getting the hang of the lean. Always into the hill. Faster too. He hits a bush. He learns to reverse. The Giant tells him whatever happens don’t let the handlebars hit the ground.

It is another lifetime ago since I straddled a machine. European pine forest roads, mountain switchbacks and black ice. A tasselled leather jacket because I could. Thighs that clenched. Now, I don’t feel the seat. Mine is a flaccid lower half – legs like the stick insect the boys later find. When he lifts me my limbs dangle like laundry off a line. This is a different kind of pillion. Think disfigured damsel. Wedged. With my right hand I link his forearm and he grips me around the middle. His brachium is like a leg about me. He is my seat belt. My saddle. After he says, some embrace.

There is a grove of peppermints and a fairy forest; a place for taking children and singing lullabies to the chugalug of an engine. The black trunks and the feathery green leaves. The Giant and the Cripple hum along. There are reeds and rushes and swarms of small midgies. The ground water is close and the mud gluey. There are gouges raked into the earth where a tractor bogged. But on the bike it is all just a surface on which to ride. A platform to view the rear of a big roo bounce away. Hubert takes chase. He’s called back by the hoot of the horn. Lean forward, scoot. Lean. Fly.

A dragonfly hitches a ride to a giant’s woodshed. A dead snake twisted into dried leather hangs from the wire fence.

He lifts me from the bike like I am a sleeping child to place me back in my wheelchair. Like laying a toddler in a pram. I am lofted high. A memory of being plucked from a pony ride floods back. Being placed on your feet by a large man. A momentary lapse between you and the earth. Like stepping from the rollercoaster.

Later at the table we talk of surviving house fires and losing stuff, of book edges turning sooty but not burning right through. Of losing to fire the exact same George Haynes’ etching of a naked woman under the dappled light and shade of a south Fremantle tree. Of waking to the sound of picture glass cracking. The Cook once found an unexpected photograph of me in the rubble of another house fire in a whole other place. She picked the photo from the detritus and placed it safely in the elbow of a tree. The man and I had long since parted but somehow the image of me was there for her to see. And rescue.

Pat Metheny plays the theme for Cinema Paradiso. Guitar strings squeak. Hearts break. A child hits a tennis ball against the wall of a mud brick house. A dog lies on a three-dollar charcoal wool blanket from an Op shop in Albany where white-haired women helped a homeless man clothe himself. A Small Good Man says the best reception for the phone is in the toilet.

He works outside on a large jarrah table, in this pocket of still bush. He has postcard sized images that he shuffles about. They are photographs of another forest place. He worked long hours, from dawn till dusk, but it is the crepuscular shots that form the ballad. A place of mountains and the people that are drawn there. More treacherous than here. Beauty turns to tinder. He stops and looks again. He moves them like someone arranging cards for a magic show. Eventually they settle where they will hang on a gallery wall to speak a narrative of place.

Assassin flies make roads in the air three inches off the ground as if involved in a grand prix circuit across the grass. Sometimes a magpie picks one out of the air. Teaching its baby, who squawks beside it.

A large karri stands near the house, orange spirals about its trunk. Some branches are dead and grey. It is bigger than all the other trees. It spreads itself wide in ownership. Beneath the karri are peppermints and kangaroo paws and smaller gums. Closer to the water the chalky white of the Paper Barks can be seen. The karri’s rusty skin catches the sun and shines. It is windless but still there is the sound of bark falling. Like footsteps in the forest.

Sometimes a distant cow can be heard, baying morosely, as if for a lost calf. At dusk the waders from the mud flats take to the skies. The sound of their flight suggests air is not nothing. They go to their place to sleep high in the trees. Tomorrow they will stalk the mud once more.

November 26, 2013

A Finnish Sock Knitter and The Marine Mammal Researchers

Rottnest.

This year we have new comers. Old friends have new partners. But even though couples have split, friendships are secure. They’re those thirty year friendships that, like good wine, age and mature. They become deeper, richer, more satisfying. There is the familiar laugh. There are the remembered stories. The retold jokes. Almost like siblings. Maybe better – because you choose them. You live separated by oceans and deserts. The world could be cleaved in two. You could have lost contact, but you didn’t.

Sam. A boy – his skin the pale blush of an apricot – is a natural enemy of the sun. He is plastered, covered, drilled into a cap. The older boy needs less instruction regarding the sun. By eleven, the routine is second-nature. School has taught them something life-saving. No hat. No play. Sam has natural exuberance. He is a born story-teller. He amazes his own father with his natural right-fit. How did I end up with a kid so bold? He is the kind of kid who trusts himself, already. He can belly laugh. He can still be fooled by stories of pirates and sea caves. Up the beach he has made friends already with kids from another chalet and is involved in building a castle.

The first day brings wind. So much that a woman on the beach in front of us merely play-fights with a sun shade like a washer woman with the sheets at a Hill’s hoist. She speaks to the balcony where her husband sits watching – Who bought this one? Where are the sand bags to keep it anchored to the sand? Instead it billows and becomes parachute, threatens to carry her, Mary Poppins-like down the beach. But it is Rottnest and even an husband’s failed purchase can’t make you stay cross.

Jasper. The first ocean swim of the season. Forced to cross into the weeds to collect the skim ball has him balking. A year ago he would have refused to swim and have the feathery weeds finger his skin. A father prepares to go after the ball, heading towards the shore to take off his shirt. But then the boy dives in and crosses the weeds. Done it. Tick that fear off.

Friends. Despite staying in Bathurst, they meet us at the Big Blue of Longreach. Tania has bought Exit Mould to clean her accommodation’s bathroom – saying the fungi on her bathroom tiles is so bad that it has turned to moss. That they even sell Exit Mould in the General Store says something. Back to our chalet for bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches on toasted white bread. After lunch on the Longreach balcony perhaps they are thinking of a change in accommodation next year. Move from the ghetto. The kids are sent to the shops for a lolly treat so peace can be extended on the balcony. They return with deodorant style sticks that deliver sugared corn syrup and additives to your tongue via the rollerball. It is all about the delivery. The BrainLicker is examined and declared an evil sweet. Made in Spain. Who would have thought? Only at Rottnest.

Professor of Parenting. Five-year-olds are on the beach in front of us. A small powered boat is anchored in the shallows. It is the only thing to target. They throw bombs of sand toward it. The wet sand sticks to the boat’s side and lands in it too. The failed husband calls from the balcony to the kids and asks them to refrain from throwing sand at his boat. They don’t stop. We all watch from our vantage as he heads down the stairs to the beach. He squats on the sand and motions with his hand for the kids to come speak to him. He speaks too softly for us to hear but we can see him pointing to his boat and explaining perhaps why he would rather they didn’t continue to pelt it with wet sand. His body language is soft, kind, gentle. The small tribe of boys runs off down the shore. After all a pelican is in the shallows fishing. He turns and walks back to his balcony. We want to applaud. We nickname him Father of the Year. We imagine what he might have said. We expected a telling off. We imagine what we might have said, had the boat been ours. We admire the man who has chosen to make himself small in front of little children rather than wave his fist, point a finger and shout.

On the index finger of my right hand I have an infection in the nail bed. A cut hair from a canine patient somehow made its way down the side of the nail and festered there. Eventually the body repelled it. I was driving the car, when I noticed a black hair poking from the nail bed and I worked it out. A long hair emerged. For several weeks since the nail has still not been right. It has a scar to its surface as it grows, and the skin is still sore around the base of the nail. The nail grows furrowed, like it keeps a memory of the hair in its surface.What else will work its way out from beneath the skin? I paint the cuticle with betadine. It reminds me of doing the same thing for my mother shortly before she died. She had an infected nail too. She needed some one to look after it for her because it was hard to look after your right hand with your left when you are right-handed and nearly ninety. I took her hand in mine and tended the nails. Her hands are so familiar to me. I can still see them in my mind. They are almost easier to recall than anything. Of course they aged over time, but their essence was always the same. Long fine fingers.

Marine Mammal Researchers. She is exactly how you might imagine a marine scientist to be. She is beer bottle brown. Her tan is so deep it can’t fade, not even in a Scottish winter. They live by the beach in the Bahamas so the sound of the water on the shore is their traffic noise. They have mongrel dogs who share their house. One was killed by a stingray barb to the chest as it chased the fish in the shallows. On their first morning Charlotte goes out running and decides to cross-country. Why you may ask. Because she is Charlotte. She has head phones and music, maybe a podcast of This American Life, as she lopes out. Fearful suddenly of snakes in the knee-deep shrub, she turns her music off and takes to the bushes with a stick. She comes across a fence with a sign that says trespassers face a $1000 fine. She wavers. But the way back is two hours. She scales the fence and finds herself on the runway and the sound of aircraft above. She runs the airstrip to find the airport closed and another fence barring her escape. She tests this one with a stick, incase it is electric, before over she goes. Back on the road she meets some other tourists, but they are lost too and can’t give her directions to “Long Bay.” Despite the three-hour run she still has the energy to ride to the West End and see the seal colony. That night many bottles of wine are drunk. Charlotte = Excess. We hear how the marine scientists fell for one another. How Charlotte didn’t know what was coming over her when she was compelled to drop things just to reach down to retrieve them and somehow find her body closer to that of the other woman. Being in love is like that. Genderless.

Perri. When she wakes in my house she tells me her dream of killing a man with a dart. She has a white towel around her, like she has stepped from a sauna. The man wouldn’t die. He needed slashing. Not just prodding. In dreams the killing is always protracted. Then we talked about knitting. Knitting needles can’t be brought in your hand luggage, not unless they are made of bamboo. Too weapon-like. I must go to work but I can direct her to the wool shop where she can buy the double-ended needles she needs to make the Finnish socks. She has three to make for a friend going somewhere cold – where a Dutch heel is needed and the love of a hand-made sock can do more for your health than most things.

When Jasper is sulking Perri suggests I try asking; “What do you need to feel better?” Charlotte says that is therapist speak for “So who’s grumpy now?” He cannot be jollied from his hump. He stands back at the beach. He won’t join in the cricket. Watching him is hurting my brain and my heart. I want him to pull himself out of his mood. I think of my father and his favourite line, “buck up” to a child with a sullen face. But wanting it doesn’t make it so. Asking him what is his mood about does not receive an answer. The more you pry with Jasper the deeper he sinks into himself. A touched snail. I wish I could learn to stop asking. I try Perri’s line. Nothing is his response.

We are about to have coffee at the Geordie Cafe when my phone rings. The phone says it is Jasper but it is not him. Instead a woman says – is this Jasper’s mother? He’s had an accident and asked me to ring you. He’s fallen from his bike. He’s grazed his face. I ask the woman where he is and tell her to tell Jasper that his Dad is on his way. Graham wants to know how bad the injury is? It’s his face, I say. Gravel rash is always painful but especially so as it crosses your lip and cheek and eyebrow. Luckily the teeth are intact. We never discover what was the cause of the bike accident. There were no Quokkas to blame. No other cyclists or random sticks or potholes. Just over the handlebars he flew, seeing the road as he came down hard to meet it. At the nurses station they cleaned the wounds and trimmed the flap of skin hanging over his lip with a scalpel blade.

Confined to the chalet for the afternoon with three new Simpsons comics. His good mate stays with him. Later Charlotte describes his scabs perfectly – fried egg and creme caramel.

Just Graham and I go together to The Big Blue. It is rare to be together, alone on the beach. I swim and then once back on shore Graham goes to the far end of the beach to snorkel the reef. I am alone on the beach in the sun. I can’t really manoeuvre far but can position myself towards the sun and close my eyes like a cat sun-baking in a windowsill. I am alone. On the beach.

If you are able-bodied this might not seem significant. But to someone dependent on the propulsion of others, this is deeply gratifying. To be that person who wakes up before the rest of the chalet and strides out with nothing but their bathers and a sarong and then dives into the ocean for a morning swim and then takes a leisurely walk home along the shoreline – this is the thing I yearn for most.

At Magnetic Island there are times of the year when you are unable to swim in the ocean because of the Irukandji jelly fish and their deadly stings. For me the ocean will always be full of the Irukandji – a thing to look at and long for.

A family pass by. Perhaps they wonder how it is that I have come to be plonked here on the sand. Like a forgotten something. I pretend not to notice them as they dawdle by.

I make do with being on my low slung beach chair sitting in the sun. The ocean is endlessly comforting. Like watching a fire, the shore line is movable and beautiful. The wetness receding. The dryness taking over. Beach sand like blotting paper. Sand as lip, wave as tongue. Over and over the lap and constant sweep of the water. It is company that is perfect. I reach down into wet sand. I feel it slip through my fingers. I plunge my hand deep. Bury me. Water laps about my wrist.

April 24, 2013

Mad Mother

In my attempt to not embarrass him, I keep my cool.

There are stairs at the entrance to the sign-in area for the GATE visual arts testing all-day workshop. Deliver me from evil. This is not supposed to be a test of a parent’s resolve, or a parent’s coolness under pressure. We have already waited as a herd of uninformed, uninstructed parents with our stressed and unenthusiastic eleven-year olds – asked to do a whole day of testing during the holidays to get into an arts program at the public school of their choosing. Everyone would rather be somewhere else (like still in bed) as opposed to at this seventies High school that resembles more a detention centre than a place of learning.

They have an arts program here too, but amongst the grey shoddy brick and the moth-eaten grass, I feel distinctly unartistic.

We follow the mistaken directions of a janitor in a fluoro vest. By luck we find a ramp that allows us access to the sign-in area where the two women are perplexed we had issues. A pin-striped suited man says he wasn’t informed someone would be attending in a wheelchair. I am a parent, I say. I need to drop my child off and pick him up. I presumed the school would be accessible. It is a government school, is it not? In the year 2013. As a community we are interested in equal opportunity and access, aren’t we? Isn’t it your job to check things are equal for all? I am speaking to people who have never encountered a problem with stairs. It never crossed their minds. Legs like racehorses. And when I suggest maybe some better signage for the other souls who stood about with us wondering where to go, she says, yes we had the same issue last year. I feel Jasper at my side willing me to shut up.

I don’t want to shut up. I want to tell pin-stripes how it is. Blonde bob too. I have the urge to push my point. To be understood. Be in my seat for a moment, looking up at you from the height of a ten-year old, and feel my rage, my frustration, my sadness, my awkwardness. Jealousy. In the end my voice a quiver. Just to get my son to the test.

He is there now. Breathe. And I am in the State Library that I still call the Alexander library – where around tables bunches of students work in groups of four or five. Through thinking doors. Entering a vacuum. Ahh books. Students are plugged into music, others have their phones by them to keep an eye on their social networks. During their short interludes of study they are silent, but mostly time is spent idly chatting, files open, pens down. Denim-clad legs all a jiggle. From the mezzanine level there is the shrill cry of toddlers and babies. Libraries are not silent spaces anymore and it seems nobody expects them to be. A dirty homeless man makes use of the nice surrounds and finds himself a comfy chair to settle down in. He carries on a conversation to himself.

I am in the medical section – pouring over neurology texts trying to make sense of the limbic system and the brain. I draw it, as best I can. I wish for coloured pencils like the ones Jasper might be using. I remember anatomy and the feared neuroanatomy lectures. How is it that something as squidgey as jelly, as unctuous as mucous, be so complex? I read about the primitive brain. The one we share with other mammals. A rat in a cage. A red light flashes and then the rat receives a shock through the floor. Next time the red light flashes the rat anticipates the shock and so now simply the appearance of the flash results in fear from the rat. You know how when you smell the antiseptic in a doctor’s surgery? This is how I feel about the sight of stairs when my child needs to be at the top of them and we are at the bottom. It is primitive. It is amygdala-based. It sets physiological events rolling and I have to rein them in with the cognitive powers from my higher brain. In the end we are all just brain chemistry.

I head out on the street to find lunch. I am not hungry, just conditioned to seek food at this time. If I were Graham I might wait till I had an appetite and it was the inconvenient time of three o’clock. The bain-maries would be empty or else diseased. I eat half the sandwich and leave the rest beneath the paper napkin. I should have asked them to remove the cheese. I’m not really fond of seeded mustard. I go back to the library past some book shops. I am drawn inside to their smell. I pick them up, finger the covers, read their opening lines, think about purchasing because I love the way that word follows that one, the perfect sentence, but think of my house and the way it risks being subsumed by tomes.

On the incline heading back to the library a woman wants to push me. She offers help. I decline it. She says, “it looks hard – the pushing.” It is. Shrug. But. I can do it. We hang on, at least I do, to the things we can do. Having her push me would be worse than she realizes. A stranger on the handles of my chair, her breath behind me. Like looking at a flight of steps. Only Jasper, and Graham, take the handles of the chair and push on an ascent. They sense the need. There is no call for them to ask, for me to accept. To some a marathon is the street. The pole vault a six inch kerb. A steep driveway is my Alpe d’Huez. I shuffle to the front of the chair to get an inch taller to reach a neurology text from the top shelf. I could ask some one. Instead I stretch. How long my arms have become.

Two girls sit opposite each other – grilling the other on the epidermis. Do you know what a mast cell does? She takes her red plastic sandals off – they are jellybeans like the ones we wanted in the seventies. Her feet could be sweaty. She folds her legs beneath her on the chair. Her heels in her buttocks. Her brain makes them do it. Her spinal cord too. Effortless beauty. I watch them. Leg envy. Maybe we don’t need to know all the fancy stuff, she says. Who cares that mast cells release histamine? Somehow I think she will need to know. Next question. Name the two stages of wound healing? To think there are only two.