Dying in the First Person Read online

  If I speak of him as dead, if I translate his words, how can I do anything other than betray him? Is that what translation is, in the end, not a carrying over of a living, breathing text from one shore of the river to another, but the bearing of a body – defeated and incomplete – from life to death? Morgan is becoming like the ancient Sybil: his body rots and falls away. His death is an orifice from which the words issue. I put my ear to the opening, my hand on the pages he wrote. His words are all around me – his letters, his books – a gigantic murmur: hot bees in my blood.

  *

  My mother composed a three-line newspaper ad to say that anyone who had known Morgan should contact her. She asked the ladies at the post office to reserve a separate post office box for any correspondence she might receive. She gave this address to the funeral director, not wanting anything to do with Morgan’s death to surprise her while she was standing at the mailbox outside her own house, where her neighbours might see her falter, or weep. I urged her to publish a simple obituary instead, but she said she had no idea who Morgan’s people were, and could not allow anyone who had cared for him to learn of his death from the newspaper. She disliked newspapers, and had been relieved, after my father’s death, not to have to have them in the house any longer, piling up next to his chair on the deck, sprawling across the kitchen table on Saturday mornings. Occasionally, she would pick up and read one in a café or a waiting room, but largely she despised what she called the short view. The hunger for information.

  ‘What if there was a war?’ I asked her.

  ‘There is a war,’ she said. ‘There is always a war.’

  She called the newspaper office and dictated the notice she had composed in her formal librarian’s voice. She asked the woman to read it back to her, crisply checked her spelling and punctuation, requested that an invoice be sent by post and ticked off ‘newspaper’ on her list of things to do now that her son was dead.

  The notice was brief and enigmatic. Three short lines giving Morgan’s date of birth, his city of origin, his name, and the contact address. I tried to insist that the notice was overly succinct, that those reading it might not realise its urgency, but my mother said there was nothing urgent about death. I suggested a photograph, but she shook her head. ‘How would you feel,’ she said, ‘if your brother’s picture was used to polish some old woman’s windows, to cushion wine glasses in a packing box, to wrap fish and chips?’

  On the weekend I walked down and got the papers, brought them home and spread them out on the table on the deck. When I found it, I clipped the notice from the paper. So small it seemed designed to place Morgan’s death at an ever greater distance. My mother had splashed out on a thick border around the words, plenty of white space within the bounded box. I wondered, looking at it, whether she had published a funeral notice when my father died. I couldn’t ask her. We hadn’t been at our father’s funeral, Morgan and I. One day our father was there, and then he was simply not.

  On Monday I went to the library and started trawling through old newspapers. Finally, I found a picture of our father standing near the remains of the old wharf on Australia Day weekend, 1974. The newspaper story was about a cyclone, which had come in on Thursday afternoon, sweeping down the coast. My father and his crew had already hauled in the nets of his trawler, preparing to head home, when they received a distress signal from another boat. When they arrived at the scene, the other boat was foundering. They had only minutes to save the crew. They hauled the men aboard their own craft as quickly as they could, but the boat went down with three of them still aboard. My father dived into the churning water, risking his own life to rescue the other sailors, one of whom was a young boy who’d never learned to swim.

  In the newspaper photograph my father and the boy he saved are both wet and smiling, shining with exhaustion and relief. My father’s lips are slightly parted, and he looks not at the camera but at the boy by his side. The boy he had pulled out of the water. One of the men had drowned; there was a blurry photograph of him embedded in the larger one of my father, the hero. My father’s expression seems to be one of astonishment and regret. The look he gives the boy is the same look he would give me as a boy, when I told him I didn’t know where Morgan was; when I had left my brother behind somewhere, or he had run off and left me to wander home alone. Our father would put his hand on my shoulder and drop his chin and sigh. ‘That boy,’ he’d say, and shake his head. ‘Drives your mother wild with worrying.’ Then he’d pack me off to do my chores while he settled on the top step of the verandah to wait.

  The day would settle into evening. The lights would come on in town and across the brow of the range. Finally, around the time my mother started dinner, he’d stand and put on his hat.

  ‘Just going into town,’ he’d call as he set out.

  Sometimes – but only rarely – I’d still be awake when he brought Morgan home. The two of them trudging up the road, my father holding the torch, their voices rising in a companionable murmur. They’d turn in at the gate, come up the stairs. I’d hear their boots drop on the timber, and the door creak as my father came inside. The sounds of our father going into the kitchen, making tea, our parents speaking quietly with each other before our mother headed up to bed. He’d take the tea out to Morgan and sit, no matter the hour, and talk with him. Sometimes I heard a word or two — an orphaned phrase lifting up to our bedroom window — more often there was just the indistinct rumble of my father’s voice and Morgan’s quieter, smaller one. No tone of urgency or anger. Once, I tried to sneak out and listen to them. I made it as far as the top of the stairs before I saw my mother sitting on the bottom step, her arms wrapped around her knees, listening to them in the dark.

  In bed, I dreamed that I was in the ocean and that when I looked up through the water I could see my father’s distorted face as he leaned out over the side of his boat. He was drawing up his net. His hands were coming down towards me, one after the other, grasping the wet net, twisting it as he drew it up over the gunwale. I was caught in the net, and being drawn towards him. The net closed in; I was pushed against a mass of writhing bodies – legs and hips and hands and arms – that shifted and quickened as they fought the net. We were all pushing at the bottom of the net, struggling to dive through the gaps, to snap the threads and release ourselves into the river. Deep in the dark water, my mother crouched, watching. Her pale fingers rippled towards us like weeds, picking at the net with her nails, reaching through to stroke our faces before we were wrenched up into the air.

  *

  Even before Ana arrived, my mother began to wonder how we might reward her for bringing him home. Morgan’s will did not mention her. This seemed strange to my mother: she couldn’t imagine that a woman who would accompany a man’s body home, who had lived with him for several years before he died, had not had a more intimate and ongoing relationship with him when he was alive.

  ‘Perhaps they weren’t as close as you think,’ I suggested.

  ‘How would you know what I think?’ she said.

  My brother had left no note, but it seemed to me that if he had, the note might have warned us about Ana, at least obliquely. Blame, forgiveness, regret would have coloured our sense of her, giving her character heft and weight. But we were grateful for his final silence. When we heard that he had died, we both longed for and feared the discovery of a letter. The words he might use to wound us as he went away. The secrets he might fail to keep. A note sealed into an envelope and laid on a table in a foreign city would have felt like a threat as much as a consolation. Without it, we were free to long for his words without ever expecting they would be written.

  I began to nurture a guilty hope that knowing Ana would bring me closer to knowing who Morgan had become in the years since he went away. She had lived with him, eaten with him. She would have listened to the same music he listened to, worn his shirts, fought with him, perhaps even loved him. I began to hope that some form of secondary reparation was possible. I began to imagine goi
ng out from the top step of my mother’s house with a torch and bringing her home. Sitting on the front verandah with her, drinking tea in the dark, watching the lights of the town wink on and off like fireflies.

  We sat in the kitchen of my mother’s home constructing an imaginary space in our lives for Ana. Carving out the dimensions of her place. She could be happy here, we told each other. It was a good place; there were good people in this town. We skirted gently around Morgan’s own refusal to come home and, though my mother believed that Ana had, until then, probably led a life as itinerant as his, we chose to characterise her wandering as adventurousness, a passion for travel and movement that we associated with youth, and rootlessness. We would give her a home, somewhere she could set down roots. My mother, too, had travelled when she was young – France, Italy, Sweden, America – before she met my father and settled down. ‘These days,’ she said, ‘it’s not marriage a woman needs to settle her, but a place of her own. Independence. Your father never understood women who didn’t want to marry the first man who offered,’ she said, pushing up from the table, the matter settled in her mind. ‘But I do.’

  *

  Sometimes, we touch strangers. Like clouds, we meet and part in silence, having shared something that has no place in the known world. We are like ghosts for each other: lovers we never loved, children we have never borne, strangers whose faces and tears tug at us.

  Fifteen years ago, at a train station in Brisbane, I stood at the top end of the platform, waiting to board the train. It was early afternoon. There had been some kind of festival on the river, and all along the platform there were clusters of teenagers and families with balloons and face paint and tired, satisfied smiles. A group of young boys nearby were singing, a capella, a song I didn’t know. Singing softly but confidently, they smiled as they snapped their fingers and clapped their thighs. A mother came up onto the platform with her pram. A baby was sprawled asleep inside it, a toddler holding fast to the side, and another child – a little girl – was dawdling up the stairs behind them. The mother glanced back several times, watching the little girl, urging her to hurry up. ‘I am hurrying,’ the child called back. ‘Hurrying as fast as my little legs can carry me.’ The mother smiled and checked on the baby, sat the toddler on the bench near the pram. The girl reached the top of the stairs. She had a balloon. A train pulled in on the other platform and, in the hot rush of air, the balloon tugged free, bobbed twice against the roof of the platform and then was blown free, floating towards the clouds. The girl began to run, her eyes on the balloon. Near the end of the platform, near where I was standing, she tripped and fell. Her hands shot out in front of her, as though she were a footballer lunging towards the try line, towards the ball – closing on nothing. Her chin crashed onto the tiles. She was howling. I could hear her mother calling her name. I knelt and put my hand on her back. Felt the hot, lurching screams taking hold of her body. The desperate gusts of air flooding in and out. She stood and turned and threw herself into my arms. Her wet face on my neck, her tears on my sleeve, her sweet-hot breath in my hair. Her chubby arms wrapped around my neck. She smelled clean, like grass and soap and milk.

  Ten years ago, as I walked along the foreshore at South Bank in November, a young woman ran towards me. The white blouse of her school uniform was untucked and scrawled with the signatures of her classmates, her hat flung back off her head. Her hair was spray-painted pink and yellow. She crashed into me, knocked me off my feet, and then smiled, laughing, as she helped me up. ‘Sorry!’ Her face round and pink and flushed. She scrunched up her nose and grinned. Kissed my cheek. Cigarette smoke and lemonade. Her toothy smile and tangled hair. Her friends screeching with laughter as they caught up with us, swarming around her, grasping her elbows and pulling her away.

  Then nothing: a long time during which I can barely remember the feel of another person’s body. Occasionally, I must have felt the tap of a stranger’s fingertips in my palm at the checkout. Shaking a man’s hand at a meeting, at a party. Holding an elderly woman’s elbow as she hoisted herself up the stairs at the post office. Until the airport that day, when I met Ana.

  She emerged from Customs and stood looking around at the people waiting. She had sent me a photograph so that I would recognise her at the gate. In the photograph – half a photograph – she is leaning forwards over her bare knees, her hands hanging casually from her wrists. A wide-brimmed hat shades her face without obscuring her features. Her long, dark hair hangs over one shoulder. She is looking to her left, at the person who has been cut out of the picture, and smiling.

  When I saw her in person, I realised that I hadn’t expected her to be so small and fragile-looking. Her hair was pulled back, but strands of it had escaped and she’d made no attempt – as my mother would have – to tidy herself up before leaving the plane. She looked tired. I guess all the passengers did. A woman in jeans and a long coat rushed past her, heels clacking, exclaiming, and was swept up in a man’s embrace. The people around them smiled.

  I raised my hand and waved at Ana.

  ‘Samuel,’ she said, and I nodded.

  ‘Can I take your bag?’ I said, but she was already in my arms. Her head against my chest, her arms wrapped tightly around me. I put my arms around her, gently, not sure what else to do with them. The doors opened and closed. People called out to their friends. Children squealed. People cried. Coffee machines hissed and luggage went wheeling and thumping across the tiles. Her hair tickled my nose; I put my hand up and smoothed it down. She turned her head to the side, as though to listen to my heart beating. I could feel the heat of her breath through my shirt, on my skin. The wet warmth of her tears. I let my head drop down onto hers and closed my eyes and waited. She didn’t let go. Not for a long, long time.

  *

  As children, Morgan and I had once spent a day by the creek. Our pants rolled up to our knees. Our shirts tied around our waists. Morgan’s hat was lost and the sun beat down on him, burning his skin as he crouched between his scabbed knees like a frog. We had been there for hours, lost in contemplation of the creek’s mysteries. We had become pulses of concentration set apart in some essential way from the needs of our bodies, from any sense of hunger, pain, heat or pleasure.

  A clutch of frog’s eggs floated like softened pearls among the weeds. One by one they split and spilled their wriggling tadpoles into the thickened jelly that held them together, which had been their only protection from storms and predators. Only the tadpoles did not spill, but were propelled through the skin of those seeds with violent force. As small as pins, but lithe and dark, the spawned tadpoles appeared to us like miniature mouthless tongues. Their swarming set up a vibration within us. We felt the swirl of the planets, the heat of the sun, the molecules of the stones and the water and the plants, their cells eating the green light, the massive chain of light and energy and life force converging on the milky spawn-froth moving on the surface of the water. It penetrated us: this wordless, shapeless wonder. It passed through us, setting every atom in our bodies into agitated, interior motion. We dissolved into essential matter, becoming cellular and diffuse. As formless as light. Unable to believe any more that we were here, that we began and ended, that we were separate creatures that could be named.

  Morgan put his hand in the water and scooped out a handful of them. We studied them churning in the waterless air. They squirmed and squalled as they fought their deaths. When they were all dead we buried them, in soldiers’ graves, beside the creek. Some we designated Vikings. For those we folded a paper boat. We placed it on the water and set it alight before pushing them out into the current.

  The last handful of the fallen we carried up to the house and entombed in matchbox mausoleums. We painted the matchboxes black, using paint we found in our father’s shed, and drew images of skulls and frogs on them with liquid paper. They, too, had died good deaths, and would be remembered, we promised them, whispering speeches as we slid the boxes into the secret spaces beneath our beds.

  Tuc
ked up beneath my sheets that night, with Morgan sleeping in his own bed on the other side of the room, I peered out the window at the stars, clutching the sheets, my heart hammering in my chest.

  Our mother came in to turn out the light, to pull the sheets up around us and kiss our foreheads, and found me awake. She smiled and cupped her hand around my cheek, smoothing my hair back from my forehead. ‘What is it, little man?’ she said, and I felt so terribly alone, knowing as I did that there was no way I could tell her what I had done, what we had done. No way to bridge the terrifying gap between what I now knew the world to be – how pointless life was and how quick and sudden and unimportant a single death was, how quick death was! How ordinary! How easy it was to murder not just one creature, but hundreds. Thousands. None of it could be said in words that she might understand. There was no way to let her know that words were such fragile, inadequate things. Words could not express one-millionth of the instantaneous and knee-knocking beauty and complexity of existence. Of her, too, I saw, as she leaned over me and kissed the tears from my temples, one by one, frowning a little and whispering my name as though I were one of the dead and she mourned me, trapped in that other world I could no longer reach. The world of cupcakes and Christmases. Of clean sheets and schoolbooks and mashed potatoes. Within her, whole universes burned and spun. Blood and cells and bones and seeds. I had been formed within her by the action of a creature as mute and desperate as the tadpoles we had murdered. And she had been formed in another woman by some other man’s blind swarm, long ago, and on and on it went, folding back into countless time, and they were all – my mother, my brother, my father – as vulnerable as frogspawn trembling at the water’s edge, rising and sinking on the swell of the stars’ breath.