A Bird on My Shoulder (12 page)

We debated about when this should happen. Julian naturally wanted to be around for the birth of the twins, and the extended family – including Nina – were coming to the farm for Christmas. We settled on mid-January and I began an earnest search for a live-in nanny to help me while he was away.

•••

On 16 December 1998, I went into an induced labour in Bowral hospital. Unlike George's birth, which was natural and drug-free, this time I opted for every legal opiate available. An epidural, pethidine, gas, any barricade against pain was lined up and ready to go. I wanted the experience to be as stress-free and as devoid of unpleasant surprises as possible. It had already been a long year.

As the labour slowly gathered pace, Julian sat by the side of the bed, occasionally telling me to remain calm and reading aloud what he thought were interesting snippets from
The Economist
.

Having an epidural was like experiencing pain from a distance. I could certainly sense that my body was in increasingly intense labour, but I could only feel a fraction of the pain I had felt with George. Or at least I did until the drugs began to wear off.

Once again, my body took on a life of its own. However, this time I could not stand up or move around on the bed a great deal. Due to the numbing effects of the drugs, and despite the fact that I was pushing as hard as I could, it was time for some medical intervention and out came the suction pad. I was frankly beyond caring at this point.

The first baby's head began to crown. I kept breathing as deeply as possible. And then I heard a sharp intake of breath and a strangled cry. I thought it was the baby but it was Julian.

‘It's a . . . girl.'

He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. He could not believe what he was seeing.

‘Well done, darling, well done.' He kissed me several times and squeezed my hand.

The baby was whisked away for testing and soon the second labour was upon me. It seemed this baby was in far more of a hurry. I grabbed the gas mask, wondering what state my body would be in after going through another labour so soon.

‘This one's coming feet first,' said a voice at the end of the bed.

There was another gasp from Julian. ‘I don't believe it.' It was another girl.

Swaddled in blankets, their wizened little faces peered out, pink and delicious. I began to cry. The babies I had dreamed of, Meg and Charlotte, had arrived.

14

In our newly planted orchard, the trembling plants

struggle not to wither and die under this summer's

unforgiving sun. Enclosed by the night, I walk outside

barefoot with a watering can, and will them to survive.

Julian went to hospital in January, four weeks after the girls were born. The time passed in a smear of anxiety, sleep-deprivation and crying babies. The nights were the hardest. Fear sprinted, without obstacle, through every pathway of my mind, obliterating contentment; at night I gripped a stone from a river bed, torn and tossed to perfectly fit in my hand, to earth me.

I was only able to visit Julian twice during that long month as the logistics of getting to Sydney while breastfeeding twins, coupled with the fear of passing on any kind of infection from the children, were just too difficult.

‘Don't come tomorrow,' he would say, his lovely voice now
fractured by the ravages of chemo. ‘It's enough for me to talk to you and know you're there.'

Fortunately, the boys visited him frequently and kept me up to date with how he was. This relieved the pressure and gave me more time to recuperate from the birth of Meg and Charlotte. As Julian's main carer, I also needed to gather my energy for when he returned.

•••

Achingly thin, completely bald, pale and more brittle than I could ever have imagined, a semblance of Julian returned home. Such high-dose chemotherapy seemed akin to having smashed a peach with a hammer and I privately questioned whether this had been the right course to take.

Gone were Julian's normally colossal appetite and energetic zeal, gone were his enthusiasm and strength; I found it hard to recognise the shadow of the man he had become. The side-effects of the treatment were harrowing – he was nauseous, weak and exhausted. It broke my heart to watch him, normally so fastidious and dignified, shuffle around the house in a pair of sheepskin slippers, hollowed out and grim-faced.

I read the hospital notes carefully, made sure he had his daily medications and focused on finding foods he could tolerate. He also seemed confused at times and uncharacteristically
down – he struggled to find the energy for reading or watching films he would normally have enjoyed.

Caring for him was enormously draining. Even when I was not with him, I thought about him constantly, wondering what more I could do to ease his suffering. I also found myself impatient and frustrated by him at times – exhausted by his needs, resentful that my life had been reduced to such petty details and overwhelmed by the enormity of all my responsibilities.

By this time, I had given up any idea of continuing my life as a journalist. I had once tried to record a radio interview for the BBC at midnight, but I'd been forced to hide in a spare room with pillows stuffed around the door to shut out the sound of the children crying.

Deadlines, babies and a sick husband were clearly not a happy mix. It was obvious that my career would have to go.

•••

Within a few weeks, Julian became bored with the life of an invalid, and began planning what he would do when he was fully better – the horses he would ride, the friends he would visit, the tree planting he would undertake.

Gradually, he got stronger and we were able to christen Meg and Charlotte in May. It was a lovely celebration and many of our family and friends said they had been deeply moved by the
day; bittersweet hours of joy and anguish. ‘Love and longing, deep and abiding, summoned you forth to light our world,' one friend wrote.

Buoyed by his improving health, Julian suggested we should head up to Byron Bay for a holiday during the winter. I had not really anticipated the challenge of driving for several hours with three tiny children, but we eventually limped into the north coast town and collapsed into a rented apartment.

The next day the children and I woke up with heavy colds. I was very concerned that Julian should not get sick as well so I encouraged him to leave us alone as much as possible. Julian was improving and I thought a few leisurely bushwalks and the fresh sea air would do him the world of good.

After lunch one day he came back to the apartment looking very excited.

‘I'll just have a bite to eat and then I'm off,' he said.

‘Are you going for another walk?'

‘No,' he said, sitting down to pull on some running shoes. ‘I'm going hang-gliding. Do you want to come?'

•••

For several months, life settled into a period of relative normalcy.

We made the most of what we believed was Julian's long-term reprieve from cancer. He embarked on a massive tree-planting exercise at the farm, cleaned out the dams, repaired fences and
agisted horses for breeding. Julian and my father, who came over from the UK for a month, created an orchard of peaches, pears and apples. We also found a lovely old weatherboard cottage which the owners wanted to knock down – so we had it cut in half and relocated to the farm to be used as an office.

Many years later I sorted through boxes of photographs of these peaceful days: Julian and George flying a paper plane; Julian tickling Meg's chin with a piece of long grass; Charlotte sitting on his lap with a commanding smile.

Even though these images resonate, there are so many empty rooms in my memory of this time. I'm confused as to why this particular period of my life, more than any other, is now so obscure. It was as though all those days had simply melted together, and become indistinct and unrecognisable.

•••

Cracks in our apparently stable world began to develop the following year. They began as small fissures: an irritating cough, strange aches and pains, unexplained tiredness.

I believe we both had a sense of what might be coming as we drove up to Sydney. Julian had recently undergone more blood tests – today was the day of the results. Living with such uncertainty was hard to manage as I found myself oscillating between occasional despair and giddy hope. Julian was far more philosophical, at least outwardly.

The news was bad – the bone marrow transplant had effectively failed. It had been our best hope; in fact, our only hope.

It appeared that there were a few remaining options – all unpalatable and all incapable of permanently halting the progress of the myeloma. The best that any additional treatment could achieve would be to hold off the illness, but there was no way of knowing for how long. More chemotherapy was inevitable but Julian could also try thalidomide, the controversial anti-nausea medication that had caused so many birth defects in the late 1950s.

‘It will probably make you quite tired and you might get some nerve damage,' the doctor told us. ‘But it can be quite effective and could be worth a go.'

The proposed treatments would not have the impact that the transplant had promised, he warned us. Their effectiveness would now be measured in months, not years.

We walked out into a tired, grey day, stepping out, once again, to an uncertain future.

•••

Julian and I had often gone to church in Port Moresby, largely because we had friends who went and because the services, with their sea of warm embracing smiles, were such a heartening contrast to Port Moresby's daily diet of crime, curfews and corruption.

On moving back to Australia we had found our local Anglican church empty and flat and, to my mind, revoltingly right wing at times. It was as though the move to allow women priests had not impacted on the rigidity of the institution where the Sydney diocese had any influence. After one service I walked out in disgust when one rector clumsily tried to argue homosexuality was a sin and that AIDS was its bitter reward. Our new neighbours, dairy farmers Greg and Trish, invited us one Sunday to the Catholic church in the nearby village of Robertson, which is where we stumbled upon a Vietnamese priest called Father Francis Tran.

Relaxed, sincere and urbane, Francis was a breath of fresh air. His sermon was direct, inclusive and uplifting. He chatted after the service and invited us to his home the following morning, promising the best coffee in town. Any spiritual curiosity aside, that was incentive enough.

The coffee was good but the conversation was even better. Francis wore the mantle of priesthood so lightly it was easy to forget it was there. He told us stories of growing up under communism, about his imprisonment and eventual flight from Vietnam, and his gradual entry into the church. In turn we talked to him about our lives in Papua New Guinea, how we had come to the Southern Highlands, and Julian's illness.

It was quite a surprise to me when, on standing at the door
to say goodbye, Julian asked him, ‘So how do you become a Catholic?'

Francis put his hand on Julian's arm and gave him an open, almost mischievous smile.

‘You have to live your life with a sense of awe,' he said.

•••

This became our private mantra, one that we sometimes repeated to each other when it seemed that we were losing our way. Although we agreed to receive ‘instruction', we ignored the more regressive and institutional aspects of the Catholic faith, concentrating only on what held meaning for us.

This new path led us both towards a more contemplative marriage. I never could speak for Julian, so I cannot explain from his point of view why he decided to become a Catholic. It was something very special to us both yet we rarely talked about it.