After Cleo (9 page)

A rush of brisk night air. The door clicked shut. She was gone.

Roaring with tears, I ran to the bedroom, slammed the door and flung myself on the bed.

Lydia loved orphans. Her devotion to people in wheelchairs was beyond comprehension. She'd drop everything to attend a fundraiser for refugees. Eggs from caged hens were repulsive to her. She loved the environment so much she preferred riding my old bike to driving and wanted me to start a compost heap. Possibly she loved Ned, Buddha and her monk as well. Lydia's heart was so huge the whole world basked in the shimmer of her loving compassion.

How come she found it so hard to be kind to me?

Rage

Life's too short to eat spotty bananas

Once my chest stopped heaving, I turned the pillow over. It was wet. I had no energy to change the pillowcase.

Philip opened the door a crack. I told him to go away. There was nothing he could do. Besides, someone needed to be with Katharine.

I popped a sleeping pill out of its plastic bubble, swallowed it and waited for the chemicals to kick in. The bedside light gleamed harshly on books I'd started reading in my pre-cancer life. The American War of Independence wasn't so riveting any more. Our wedding photo beamed across the room. Philip had more hair then. I had less fat.

Next to the photo sat a small cat statue Philip had brought back from Egypt, and a miniature plate Mum had loved. On the plate was a painting of a wild beach in mauves and blues. The scene resembled New Zealand, but the plate was made in Denmark.

According to magazine editors bereft of ideas, a woman's personality is revealed by the contents of her handbag. They should try investigating the lower drawer of her bedside cabinet.

My top drawer held the usual run of spare earplugs, crosswords, sore throat lozenges, pens, scraps of paper, a magnifying mirror to pluck rogue moustache hairs, a tube of hand cream I was never going to finish, lavender oil to sprinkle over our pillows.

The lower drawer was a Pharaoh's tomb of priceless worldly goods. A plastic tiki pendant Sam bought for me at a fair months before he died; handmade Mother's Day cards covered in wobbly writing and glitter. Among them was a more adult card from a couple of years earlier. It had a picture of two flamingos, one large bending protectively over a smaller one: ‘Dear Helen, Happy Mother's Day. You raised me well. I love you. Love Lydia.'

I'd hoovered up the ‘I love you' and stored it under my ribs.

Under the cards was an ancient tape recording of Mum singing for national radio in 1953. She'd chosen a maudlin song and the accompanist dragged along too slowly, but underneath the hisses and cracks of time her contralto voice was richer than burgundy.

I wished Mum was still here. She'd have sorted Lydia and told the surgeon she was imagining things. On the other hand, perhaps Mum had been watching over me all along, giving me a heads up at the wellness retreat just before things turned to custard.

If good comes from good, maybe cancer really
is
the angry disease some say it is. Years of pent-up rage could wreak havoc on the immune system. I had plenty to be mad about.

Pouring everything out on paper might help. Reaching for the top drawer, I grabbed a pen and scribbled a list of people I had ‘issues' with: provincial editors who'd rejected my column; those who'd frozen me out of their lives, let me down or decided to become Buddhist nuns. Plus a list of resentments, some admittedly petty.

I am sick of :

• Changing toilet rolls.

• Being the only one who does any cleaning around here.

•
And
being a one-woman laundromat.

• Always choosing the spotty banana, so the others can have perfect fruit.

• Letting them hog the most comfortable chair.

• People saying, ‘What's for dinner?'

• Then saying, ‘Spaghetti bolognaise
again
?'

• People checking best-before dates. Like I'm trying to poison them.

• When someone finally touches the vacuum cleaner having to praise them as if they've spun sink-hole hair into gold.

• People rolling their eyes when I ask for help with technology.

• Never-ending deadlines for columns, and now the book.

• Saying yes, I'd love to attend the tennis luncheon/Tupperware night when it's a lie. I don't even play tennis.

• The garden. It's the only thing I don't look after, so it's the Gobi desert.

• Spending too many hours waiting for Philip to get home at night and then snarling when he does because dinner's burnt.

• Trying and failing to be a good corporate wife.

• Forgetting what fun was.

• Feeling tired. For weeks and years, infinitely worn out.

I belonged to the generation of females who aimed to Have it All. Instead of learning from Mum's mistakes, I'd tried to squeeze more in and made things worse. No wonder almost every middle-aged woman I knew pleaded exhaustion.

Not only had I shouldered the domestic roles Mum railed against, I'd striven for a ‘successful career'. During the solo mother years, I'd been too tired after a day at the newspaper to give the kids the attention they deserved. Parenthood and work were frantically woven together in a safety net that was continually collapsing under me.

My efforts to be a good corporate wife for Philip were laughable. At one memorable function, imagining I was entertaining a lawyer from Sydney with my wit, I was startled when he glared and said, ‘I haven't been lectured at like this since I was at university.' Then there was the Qantas Business Class debacle. Accompanying Philip on one of his trips, I followed him on a leg-stretching stroll through Economy. At the stop of the stairs on the way back to our seats I was apprehended by a hostess who snapped, ‘You do realise this IS the Business Class section, madam?'

And now to top it off, my daughter was dumping me for a Buddhist monk.

Still, it's impossible to believe that cancer is really caused by anger. I'd known plenty of angry people who died of heart attacks, and easy-going types without a shred of rage in them who'd succumbed to the disease.

Not that I'd gone out of my way to get the lousy thing. At fifty-four I didn't smoke or take HRT. I seldom drank more than a couple of glasses of wine (red for antioxidant qualities). Yoga and Pete the trainer were a regular part of my life and I was no stranger to organic produce.

But I had no control over genetics. Or the lingering impact of Sam's death, divorce, remarriage and shifting countries. The menopausal hormone tornado wouldn't have helped, either.

Environment, too. I remembered the evenings our parents took us to play on Paritutu Beach in New Plymouth back in the 1960s. Nobody had known back then that a nearby factory was pumping out Agent Orange for the war in Vietnam.

At least, they weren't supposed to. A bright orange stream gushed from the cliffs into the sea, creating the perfect lure for kids raised on
The Wizard of Oz
. Our city wasn't emerald. It was orange! I remember the alarm in Dad's voice when he called us back. Too late. Mary and I had already run barefoot through the magic river. He told us to wash our feet in the sea.

Then there was the night we were sitting at the dining room table when someone noticed red clouds outside the window. We hurried outside to take a look. The entire sky glowed redder than a sunset. Awe-inspiring and freakish. Dad said it was because of the atomic testing going on in the Pacific. He thought maybe we should shelter inside.

For all the theories, there was only one I could rely on: getting cancer is bad luck. With breast cancer the plague of the female species it wasn't a case of ‘Why me?' but ‘Why
not
me?'

If it was too late and I was dying – well, everyone has to die of something.

I reached for a fresh sheet of paper.

Things I want to see/do before I die:

• Revisit Paris and the Loire Valley. See Monet's garden at Giverny and the palace at Versailles.

• A Northern European cruise. Yes, we
are
that old!

• San Francisco, and the North American Fall.

• Visit Chicago for the art galleries and New York for Broadway and more galleries.

• Las Vegas. Why not? I'd always wanted to see Western Civilisation taken to its logical conclusion.

Clichés, admittedly. But things become clichés for good reason. On a third piece of paper I wrote

All I really want is:
(my pen hovered over the paper)
A friend.

I had fabulous friends, but their lives were overflowing with family and work commitments. I didn't want to add to their worries. There were other friends, too. People I listened to with a view to helping them piece their lives together, not the other way round. I'd always shouldered the role of the strong Earth Mother for them. Perhaps I was afraid of my own vulnerability.

What I needed now was someone who understood suffering, but padded lightly over heartache. Who didn't continually twist the subject around to their own problems. Who'd be there for me night and day without it being a chore. A friend who knew when to wrap arms around me, and when to quietly leave the room. Someone who could make me laugh.

I smiled when I read my list of friend requirements. Understanding on that level was almost beyond human. It sounded more like a cat.

Climbing down on my knees, I felt under the bed for a silver cardboard box full of wedding paraphernalia. Sliding it out from under the mattress base, I removed the lid and turned it upside down. Photos of glamorous brides and opulent venues fluttered to the floor. My pages of complaints and dreams fitted neatly inside in the silver box. I closed the lid.

Philip's anxious face appeared around the bedroom door. Darling man. He placed a glass of water on the bedside table and helped me into bed.

‘Where do you think she'll be now?' I asked.

‘Lydia?' he said, pulling the sheet up to my chin and kissing me gently. ‘Up in the air still.'

I imagined her picking through her vegetarian dinner on a plastic tray while her plane inched across the Indian Ocean.

And dropped gratefully into a hole of unconsciousness.

Amazons

A circle of women – many who have just one breast

I woke in better spirits. Morning light filtered through the blind. Philip lay beside me. We rose early and headed across the road for coffee and still-warm bread.

Whatever today's outcome, things would be fine. I knew that from a programme I'd seen about Stephen Hawking's view of the universe. The fact we're all made from stars was profoundly comforting. Our bodies are literally composed from the stuff of heavenly explosions. We never die. We revert to star dust. Dust to dust.

I hoped I could be as brave as Mum had been. When she was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer, she'd treated it lightly. ‘I'm floating out to my island,' she said with a dreamy smile. ‘It's so beautiful over there. I can almost see it now. I'm going to Bali Ha'i.' What was it with women in our family and islands?

I wondered how much of it had been an act for our benefit. Probably more than we realised. As the cancer distended her abdomen and turned her skin the colour of candle wax, Mum spent her days comforting visitors and phone callers who couldn't disguise their grief.

When she wasn't in pain, she was a beacon of happiness, claiming these were some of the best days of her life. Alone in her room with me one afternoon, she raised a bony finger and said, ‘Learn from this. Watch me.'

The local vicar visited her town house to find out if she had any sins to offload. I ushered him into her bedroom and closed the door. Mum wasn't an official churchgoer, but she'd sung in the choir. Singing was her form of worship, she'd always said. The vicar emerged a few minutes later looking flustered. He said he'd never met someone with such a spiritual approach to dying. Checkmate. Part actress, part guru, Mum bedazzled us all.

I'd perched on her bed and taken notes while she choreographed her funeral. She didn't want things starting on a downer, so chose ‘Morning Has Broken' for the opening number. After that she wanted her friends from choir to line up in front of the altar and sing ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace', which had become one of her favourite songs. The words attributed to St Francis of Assisi were a neat summation of mother love – ‘Grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love with all my soul.'

‘I'm so excited,' she said about the funeral. ‘How many people do you think will show up?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' I said, trying to think of a huge number. ‘A hundred and fifty?'

‘Is that
all
?' Mum looked devastated.

‘Well, no. Probably double that.'

Settling into her pillows, whose whiteness matched her chiselled face, Mum looked satisfied.

‘When they're carrying my coffin out, someone will have to sing Bali Ha'i,' she instructed.

Mum had been famous in town for her role as Bloody Mary in the 1963 Operatic Society production of
South Pacific
. I asked if she knew of a local whose voice was good enough to match hers. Her response was firm. A decent international recording would be required. Sarah Vaughan, perhaps.

‘It'll be a great do,' she sighed. ‘I wish I could be there.Though I suppose I will be in some way.'

I doubted I could ever be that strong for my children. Compared to her, I was a coward, an amateur.

Even though we'd had our conflicts, largely about sex and marriage, Mum and I had been close. When we fought it was only with mirrors. I still sometimes dialled her phone number just to feel a connection with her.

As journalist herself, Mum had pointed me at a typewriter from an early age. I'd rebelled of course, and ended up exactly where she'd wanted me. When we knew she was dying I'd experienced a guilty surge of freedom. At last I'd be free to smash to mould she'd squeezed me into. But it was too late. She'd carved me in her own image.