False River, page 18
This may be one reason she was so acquisitive, and why she placed so much value on things. Perhaps she wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things, to know they were there. When she was a girl, new clothes were something you got at Easter. When she moved to London to work as a young woman, she had two skirts for work, and she had to hand-wash her slip each evening in the hostel where she lived, because coal-infused smog had coated the hem with grime.
Even when she was living in New Zealand, earning money and able to buy things, she saw new clothes as taonga, in a way, to be kept and treasured rather than used. This is why there were so many pristine items in her wardrobe when she died. When we got new things as kids, we were never allowed to wear them at once. They had to be kept for ages, for some future ‘good’ occasion, or for some distant trip. When I was about twelve, the girls across the road and I all got tiered floral skirts from the same dressmaker. Later that day both of the others were flouncing around their house in the floral skirts, but mine had been taken away for safekeeping. It had to remain new and untouched for as long as possible.
Because of my mother’s insistence on this, if my sister and I buy something new, or are given something second-hand, we put it on immediately — just because we can. We are both ruthless about clearing out our wardrobes and giving things away. In the lobby of my apartment building in Auckland, the long sideboard that houses our mail boxes also serves as a general swap-shop. Anything left there is up for grabs — light bulbs, books, wrapping paper, last week’s Listener, fabric off-cuts, picture frames, chocolates. Clothes I can’t fob off on someone I know get left on the lobby sideboard; they disappear within hours, sometimes minutes.
My mother told me, more than once, that my parents had made my sister the executor of their will because my brother and I couldn’t be trusted. He would sell everything or throw it out. I would give everything away.
Skagen is an important location for my novel; it’s where everything falls apart for my characters. The bonfire on St John’s Eve is a key scene.
We spent several days there, staying in a house owned by a Danish friend who lives in England. In lieu of rent, we did some gardening for her and washed windows, preparing the house for her family’s summer visit. I imagined my characters staying somewhere similar, not getting along. When people I know heard I was in Denmark, they sent along helpful tips of places to see there, but I wasn’t on holiday. In Skagen I was only interested in places my characters might go, and places they might argue; I needed to investigate where one would moor her boat, and where another might try to do something drastic. I gave my husband updates, referring to the characters by their first names, as though they were friends of ours.
I was thinking about my characters, and I was thinking about my mother — how much she would have liked the picket fences and yellow houses in Skagen, its beach-town profusion of small shops and cafés, its busy docks and its broad, pale beaches. I could envisage her there, unable to walk past a jewellery shop without calling me over and pointing out every single thing she liked. (She would have also translated every single price into New Zealand dollars, exclaiming in horror, and both the incessant calling-over and the price comparisons would have driven me crazy.)
With every day we stayed there, Skagen seemed increasingly unreal, peopled by my imaginary characters and the ghost of my mother. On the fifth day we finished up our gardening, took a last walk in the dunes, then drove, through the long, light evening, back to the Brecht House and Svendborg.
There was one thing we did in Skagen that wasn’t about my work at all. We went to the glossy shop that sells the Skagen brand of watches, bags and other pricey accessories. It’s the kind of place my mother would have found irresistible. We went in to look around, and I didn’t want to leave, even though most things were very expensive. My mother would have lingered here, so I had to as well, as though obsessive browsing made her feel close by, still alive and talking and shopping.
I tried on a number of glittering watches and then spent far too long touching, opening, examining and trying on practically every bag in the shop. I stroked suede and sniffed leather, and imagined which ones my mother would have liked, the long discussions she would have inflicted on me about which bag would go with what outfit, or be suitable for what occasion. She would have disrupted every careful in-store display and demanded the assistant fish things out of the window for closer scrutiny. She would have darted from one thing to the next, excited and restless as a child, eager to get her hands on everything.
I didn’t buy a bag that day, because they were expensive and I don’t need another one right now. I can admire beautiful things without having to own them. My collections are more idiosyncratic and low-value, like Merrill paper dolls, though I suppose my own urge to collect is a product of my childhood, too, that greedy desire for the things I coveted then.
Of course, when I buy paper dolls now it’s not the same as getting them as a child. Now I don’t cut them out or draw new clothes for them, let alone play with them. I look at them and admire them, the way my mother looked at the narrow Italian shoes nestled in their tissue paper, at the tailored woollen coats too heavy for the Auckland winter, at the clothes sent from England and never worn. Once, decades ago, she must have longed for beautiful things, for new things, for an excess of things rather than barely enough. I wonder how far out of reach they seemed to her when she was young.
My mother is dead, but she was alive that day in the shop in Skagen. For the time I was in there, touching and admiring everything, I knew how she would have felt. She would have wanted everything. She would have wanted it all.
Sick Notes
It’s March 2017 and the university year has begun: I find myself, once again, with way too much to do. I am teaching more than I’m paid to teach. I rush from place to place, always late, always in a hurry. My lower back spasms and clenches, so I have to rush back and forth to the chiropractor as well. He’s a young South African named Neil. He clambers over me like an ardent terrier, trying to make my body work again.
‘Are you the kind of person who rushes everywhere?’ he asks me, not waiting for an answer.
My weekends in March are packed as well. Overdue work piles up on our dining-room table and anxiety about it keeps me awake at night. Reader’s reports. Book reviews. Grant applications. Student marking. A couple of months earlier Renee Liang (playwright, poet, librettist, doctor) asked me if I’d teach again on one of her ‘New Kiwi Women Write’ workshops. I agreed without checking dates.
When the weekend in question looms, I’m double-booked. This year I’ve signed up for a certificate in Maori Arts at Te Wananga o Aotearoa in Mangere, learning how to weave flax. My grandmother was a weaver of kete and tukutuku panels, and although I have no natural talent — or time — I want to do something with my hands that doesn’t involve drinking or typing. We meet for one weekend a month: Friday evening, all day Saturday and most of Sunday. All meals are provided, and we can sleep overnight if we want to. (I never want to.) In order to teach for Renee, I’d need to skip out for about four hours on Saturday afternoon, and leave early on Sunday. The latter I can manage, but the former is impossible, given the amount of flax prep — stripping, softening, boiling and dyeing — that I need to do that day.
The first thing that pops into my head is a lie. I’ll tell Renee that I’m sick, and that’s why I can’t make it.
I am fifty-one years old, and still reaching for the excuse I used at primary and intermediate school: sickness. At least back then I believed it was true. I was ill all the time, always off school, or retreating to the sick bay to lie down and sleep. I was wheezy with endless bronchial conditions, ears and nose clogged. At night I slept on two mattresses, one on top of the other, like the Princess and the Pea, propped up with big pillows, my chest buttered with Vicks VapoRub.
In March 2017, however, I’m not sick. I’m just lying. I email Renee and tell her the truth: that I’m double-booked, only able to teach on Sunday afternoon. If I were truly sick, she’d be sympathetic: I would have been ‘poor you’. Instead I’m just someone who lets other people down. Victim versus Villain: I know which one I prefer.
Last year I asked my father: was I really sick a lot when I was a child? I remember being home a lot, and being too sick to go to school. But was it actual illness?
‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said, ‘whenever you started a new school, the first place you looked for was the sick bay.’
When we had that conversation, my father was sick himself. It was November 2016, and I was asking him questions because there was no time left. He was going to die very soon, and there were things I needed to know. Was he a printing apprentice before or after he was an ambulance driver? How long did he play hockey for Seddon Tech? What year in the 1950s did he sail to Europe?
Was I ever really sick at all, or was I just a spoiled and lazy little liar?
My father was diagnosed with cancer in October 2016. He’d been admitted to Waitakere Hospital because he was anaemic and kept falling over. A scan revealed the reason: colon cancer that had already spread to the liver. The doctor — Asian, slight, possibly a teenager — stood at the end of my father’s bed, curtains drawn around us, giving the bad news to me and my brother.
‘I’m supposed to be having a hip operation soon,’ my father said.
‘That’s the least of your problems,’ said the doctor.
Earlier that day my father’s long-time respiratory specialist, Martin Phillips, had been visiting the four-bed ward to see another patient; he’d spotted my father, asked why he was there, and checked on the scan himself. ‘Looks grim,’ he said.
We asked the young doctor how long my father had left. He didn’t know. Maybe a year. The oncologist at the hospital would know more.
My brother reached for my father’s hand and squeezed it. None of us cried. Maybe he’d have a year, maybe more. After my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she lived for four years.
On the way home I was already planning the things we’d do that summer. Drive my father up north to Pakiri, the place he was born. Maybe get him on a DOC boat to Hauturu, Little Barrier Island, if he felt up to it. We could take the ferry to Aotea, Great Barrier, and explore the places important in our family history.
‘We’ll have a really good Christmas,’ I told my brother, and he agreed.
My sister rang the hip specialist to cancel my father’s planned operation. I asked her if she remembered me being sick as a child and having a lot of time off school.
‘I don’t know about you, but I loved going to school,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and see all my friends. I was never sick.’
I asked my brother what he remembered.
‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. In the exercise book he uses as a notebook, perhaps because he can’t remember anything, he wrote down what the young doctor said: my father had one year to live.
This is what I remember of my childhood: being sick and hating school. Before I started school — Freyberg Memorial Primary, sometime in 1970 — I was an indoor cat, cloistered and quiet, unused to other children or playing outside. School was a zoo, screeching with feral creatures. They could stride up the concrete saddle in the playground and run on hot asphalt with bare feet. When I tried to twirl with the others on the maypole, it was too fast and frightening, and one of my shoes soared away. A boy ran up to me and took a greedy bite out of the scone I was eating. Another boy knocked over the blocks I was playing with in class. My mother walked up the road to the school to complain, and my teacher told her that the boy in question was a Maori boy, and therefore naturally naughty. Paula, she said, would have had no experience with Maori children and their boisterous ways.
‘I told her to look at your middle name,’ my mother reported afterwards. ‘I told her that you knew more Maoris than she’d had hot dinners.’
Teachers, I believed, favoured the outdoor cats. On a sunny winter’s day, my teacher sent us all out to run around the field, and wrenched my Aran sweater off in the classroom doorway. ‘You won’t need that,’ she said, though I was pleading with her to stop: I only had my vest on underneath, and to be seen in vest and kilt alone felt humiliating. Another day Miss Bridger — sturdy, ferocious, looming high in the school hierarchy — batted my hand away when I touched dangling pages of big print. ‘We’re not learning to read yet,’ she said. But I could already read, I wanted to tell her. I didn’t want to run around the field or clamber up the mountainous concrete saddle; I wanted to sit in a quiet corner, prim and unmolested in kilt and home-knitted Aran sweater, and read.
One day, during the morning tea or lunch break, I decided to leave. I walked down the slope to the school’s back gate, the one that led to the long loop of my street. I was home in about fifteen minutes. I remember how elated I felt at wriggling free from the rowdy affronts of school. I told my mother I was sick, and she thought the school had sent me home. I was curled up asleep before the school rang looking for me.
Another time I arrived home to find just my English nana; my mother and younger brother were out and Nana was on her way out as well. Nana lived with us for a year, and made no secret of her feeling that my brother and I were ‘funny’ children; she preferred my older sister, who she’d known as a baby back in England. I lay down on the settee in the lounge, and she covered me with an itchy blanket, leaving me to sleep off whatever illness I was feigning. I’d never been alone in the house before. It was scarily quiet, apart from the brash tick of the cuckoo clock. But anything was better than the racket of school.
High-level adult conversations must have taken place, because soon I knew that meal-time break-outs weren’t permitted. My only sanctuary was the sick bay, a sterile room with a doctor’s examining table and windows that stared back at the classroom block I’d escaped. I spent a lot of time in the sick bay, mostly sleeping. I’ve always liked an afternoon nap: it was one of the highlights of kindergarten. The supervising adult wasn’t a nurse, I don’t think. Whoever it was tended to be genial and quiet. One drew felt-tip pictures of me — in my pinafore dress and orange skivvy — and stuck them on the wall.
Miss Bridger didn’t approve of my sick-bay sojourns. One day she discovered me there and marched me back to class, ignoring my protests.
‘You’re not sick,’ she said, striding ahead across the playground. I moped along behind her, fuming and powerless. I was sick: I knew I was. Sick of school, anyway.
Between actual bronchial illnesses and devious attempts to avoid school, I was sick a lot. If I’d lived in a wealthy family during the Victorian era, I would have been confined to my bed. And that would have suited me just fine.
Early in November 2016 my father was summoned by his GP, Dr De Silva. She’s from Sri Lanka, a recent replacement for the much-loved Dr Islam from Malaysia who’d presided over my mother’s decline. The surgery’s in a converted bungalow on Te Atatu Road, almost impossible to reach because of a blockade of roadworks. It’s not far from the surgery — around the corner in Vera Road — we attended all my childhood, where Dr Madgwick, and later Drs Ho and Hing, harassed me with tongue depressors and stethoscopes, sent me off to have my tonsils and adenoids out, and finally, when I was in my teens, started calling my ‘wheezy bronchitis’ asthma and prescribed a Ventolin inhaler.
My father asked me and my husband to go with him to see Dr De Silva because my sister was working that day. Daddy and I ambled up the wheelchair ramp, propping each other up. I’d only been out of hospital a week or so myself, after a hysterectomy, and I was still tired and tender.
Dr De Silva’s office was decorated with family pictures in silver frames with heart cut-outs. She was warm, capable and no-nonsense, the ideal GP. (A few weeks later she sent my brother his blood-test results with the message DIET AND EXERCISE scrawled across the page.) She took one look at me and told me to lie on the bed. But it was hard to join in the conversation from a prone position, so I scuffled over to a plastic chair.
She sat tapping at her computer, filling in an ‘End of Life’ plan for my father. Some of it was information for carers, in case my father couldn’t speak for himself. He needed to sleep sitting up, we told her, because of his bronchiectasis. He liked watching crime shows and sport on TV. Would he like to be taken outside sometimes, in a wheelchair, for some fresh air? Yes, said my father, he would. If he lost consciousness during a medical procedure, would he like to be resuscitated? No, said my father, he would not.
I started crying and Dr De Silva handed me the box of tissues.
My father decided he had no spiritual needs and didn’t want a vicar to visit. All he wanted, he said, was his family around him.
When we stood up to leave, the doctor and I had a whispered conversation about my hysterectomy, the gory details of which we were keeping from my father. I asked her if it was normal to have numbness at the top of my legs a week after the surgery, and she said yes.
Dr De Silva told my father he could ring her any time, that she could drive to his place at lunch or after work. But this didn’t happen, because within days of this visit the hospice nurses had taken over his care. He wouldn’t go back to the doctor’s surgery again. He would only leave his apartment in a wheelchair, or in the vehicle he said the retirement-village residents jokingly called the big yellow taxi, an ambulance.
When I was young, many of the books I read were written in a distant era: What Katy Did (first published in 1872), Heidi (1881) and The Secret Garden (1911), all of which featured a sick child confined to a wheelchair. In every case the sufferer was cured, but in the interim they got to languish and be wheeled or carried around, something that seemed very appealing to me. I learned about the delights of Bath and sedan chairs, and longed for more civilised transportation than my father’s white work van.
