A Bird on My Shoulder (25 page)

Word of our arrival must have spread around the mission station because Robert soon arrived.

‘Hello, hello, welcome,' he said, and shook hands with the children – not formally, like a Westerner, but fondly, enclosing their fingers in his large brown hands and continuing to hold them.

‘Are you from Australia?'

‘Yes.'

‘This is good, very good.' His smile was infectious.

I asked about the guesthouse and Robert's face suddenly clouded.

‘Oh, big problem,' he said. ‘It's empty, finished.' He gestured towards a long building. Then he smiled again. ‘I will talk to my brother.'

None the wiser as to what any of this might mean, we walked behind Robert towards the dilapidated guesthouse, where we were ushered into a seemingly abandoned kitchen and offered some warm cans of fizzy lemonade. Crowds of laughing children hung around outside the door, occasionally peeping in.

After a short while Robert excused himself and suggested we might like to look around. We put on our hats and walked towards the river, passing an old man sitting on the front steps
of a small house. His torso was covered in tattoos, neat scars which emulated the skin of a crocodile. He beckoned us over.

We sat down and started talking to him. He was interested in where we had come from and what we were doing in Ambunti.

‘And your husband, where is he?'

‘He died,' I replied.

Without another word, he pulled George towards him and held him in a tight embrace. This complete stranger, whose name I did not even know, began to speak to my son with the most genuine and loving kindness I had ever seen.

‘Oh,
sori
,' he crooned, stroking George's hair. ‘
Sori, sori, sori
.
Papa bilong yu em di pinis. Sori tru
. Your father has died, I am truly sorry.'

Not long after, Robert returned with a younger man and asked us to follow him. As we walked around the corner of the building, I could see that the path had been strewn with vivid petals – orange, purple, and the deepest pink. Nearby a small crowd had gathered around the open door of a small leaf house. It was built on sturdy poles and the surrounding lawn had been carefully clipped. A woman stepped forward out of the shade.

‘
Welkam
,' she said shyly and gestured for us to go inside.

Four woven sleeping mats had been arranged on the floor and there were more flowers where there should have been pillows.

Robert came in.

‘Whose house is this?' I asked him.

‘This is my house,' he said, with an enormous smile. ‘The new Ambunti guesthouse.'

•••

My new boss, Valia, was hard-working and disciplined. She soon dragged me, as she had with so many staff and students alike, into her vortex of energy, constantly encouraging us all to strive for the best we could achieve.

One evening I walked over her house and sat down while she brought me a cool drink.

‘It's lovely of you to have me over,' I said.

She looked at me hesitantly. ‘I don't want to alarm you,' she began, ‘but there is a very tall man with red hair who is kneeling on the floor beside your chair.'

I immediately felt a sensation of light breath near my face but could see nothing.

‘What's he doing?' I said.

‘He's looking at you with enormous love.'

I sat for a few minutes, basking in this unexpected, invisible gift.

I had already sensed that Valia was no ordinary academic. Even in her everyday remarks about the students she had a rare sensibility and insight that was very refreshing. Unlike other expatriates living in Papua New Guinea, she really did intuitively understand a lot more about the cultural realities
facing the students: the presence of sorcery, suspicion and the power of deep tribal connections. So her remark about Julian, while surprising, was not entirely a shock.

‘He's just asking if it would be alright for him to sit here for a while,' she said.

I hear your voice murmuring in the hollow of my shoulder, you say I must endure.

A few weeks later Valia invited the children and me for dinner. I went into the house ahead of the children, who were larking around in the garden. I said jokingly, ‘So, do you have my husband with you?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘he's sitting there in that armchair.'

When the children came inside, the most extraordinary thing happened. They all ran to the chair she had gestured to and fought and tussled with one another.

‘Hey, there are plenty of chairs to sit in,' I said, mildly embarrassed by their antics.

They ignored me. George, by far the biggest child, held his own for quite some time but eventually gave in to the more aggressive tactics of Charlotte and moved to sit on the arm of the chair, signalling his own private victory. Meg continued to wrestle with her sister for the coveted spot and, although stronger, gradually conceded defeat and sat on Charlotte's lap instead. I can see them even now. Gentle George, who marched to the beat of his own drum, thoughtful Meg, who preferred
to concede a hollow victory and Charlotte, always competitive and determined to win at any cost. They sat there grinning at me, all triumphant.

Dad's here
, I wanted to tell them.
He hasn't left us.

27

God staggered out of the pub holding a can of beer. ‘What can

I do for you, mate?' he asked. ‘I want the town and everyone

that's in it to be the same again, like it was before,' I told him.

So God drew a door with his finger and on it, it said REALITY.

George, aged 9

Not long after we returned to Australia from Madang, my dear friend Ros, who had introduced me to Julian, was diagnosed with breast cancer and became very ill for three gruelling years as the disease metastasized into her bones.

Ros had married Kent by this time and had two young children, April and Meri. Every time I thought of going to Brisbane to see her, I dreaded the emotional pain it would inevitably bring. I often felt confronted by my own inadequacies; to remain open and loving while witnessing her suffering was terribly hard but nowhere near as difficult as the path she was on.

Reflecting on my own somewhat cowardly reaction, I also began to understand the fears that had driven people from my side or prompted them to make the same inadequate and insensitive remarks that I was now undoubtedly repeating myself.

I should know better, I told myself.

I knew the importance of spending time with someone who did not have long to live, not chatting about inanities and avoiding difficult subjects, but being truly present. I knew what I had missed in my encounters with people, and yet, at times I struggled to offer that same gift to Ros and her family.

•••

Eventually, with her health deteriorating, I summoned the courage to get on the plane to Queensland with my friends Jo and Meg. We had been talking for some time about recording her life story. Ros, who had been a wonderful journalist, said that she felt she might have done ‘a few interesting things' that she would like her children to know about. She had wanted to write them a series of letters to open on their birthdays, but her physical pain due to the numerous lesions in her bones had made this task impossible.

The woman I saw before me that day bore little resemblance to the strong vibrant woman I had known and loved for more than twenty years. I sat on the floor at her feet, unable to speak.

‘It's okay, Luce,' she said, reaching out a pale hand to touch me. ‘I'm going to be alright.'

Our recording session was delayed by the arrival of two women who had come to shave Ros's head following what turned out to be her last session of chemotherapy.

As they waited in the kitchen, she whisked off her headscarf and said, with characteristic black humour, that she felt like something out of a horror movie. There were sprouts of dark hair sticking out of her shiny skull.

‘What do you think, Luce? Should I go for a number one?'

‘The hats were okay, but the tufts have to go,' I told her.

She laughed weakly and her eyes met mine. Despite everything, it amazed me that Ros could still find moments to savour the life she still had to live.

After the bright headscarf was back in place, we resumed our seats in the corner of her room. I could feel the tension in my heart until, with a sad smile, she finally spoke.

‘Well, come on, Luce,' she said with an ironic smile. ‘I haven't got forever.'

So I switched on the recorder and held the microphone near.

‘What are you going to ask me?' Ros said matter-of-factly.

‘Why don't we start with the children's births?' I suggested.

And so began her last letters to her children.

Over the next hour, Ros spoke directly to them, as if I was no longer there, but was simply a witness to her most honest
and sacred self. She told them some of the stories of her life, her passions, her regrets, her hopes for them.

Through tears, she told them, as only a dying mother could, how much she loved them.

I wept on the train to the airport.

It was not just Ros's eccentricities, her sense of fun, her serious, frustrating earnestness that I loved; it was her ability to tell the truth and, even at this most critical point in her life, to speak with such honesty to the people she loved most. Having cancer had given her permission to be more real than she had ever been and allowed those around her to set aside the usual inhibitions that can ruin so many potentially wonderful friendships.

I had watched her open up her heart as the illness progressed, and felt privileged to be a part of her warts-and-all journey. Her cancer was not pretty; it ravaged her. It was such an extraordinary journey through gratitude, shattered dreams, anger and then back to love.

‘I often think of Jules,' she said later that day.

‘What do you think about?'

‘I think of the moment you met at that party.'

‘Why?' I asked.

‘I felt such a strong sense of light between you,' she said. ‘I have never forgotten it.'

After she died, for many years I kept a photograph of her on my desk. Behind her, in the foothills of Madang, was a
blur of women dancing in a line, their bodies oiled, their hair festooned with feathers. She is looking back towards me over her shoulder, and in her eyes the same old Ros is always there, her gaze direct and full of kindness.

•••

A year after Ros died, my father also died from cancer.

George and I flew over to the UK and decided that we would go with Libby and her children, Hannah, Beatrice, Sam and Florence, to see his body at the funeral parlour, a modified terrace house in the backstreets of Kidderminster.

Bizarrely, he was clothed in a silky white outfit with a high winged collar, a waistcoat and a bow tie. He looked like a cross between Liberace and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was somehow fitting that this self-deprecating man with such a wonderful sense of humour would be clothed in something that was more akin to fancy dress. We laughed and held one another, none of us really knowing how to speak about the departure of such a complex man.

I could not cry for my father at his funeral, and I never have; it has always felt as though there was no unfinished business between us.

Before he died, I had flown to England to spend some time with him and to offer my mother whatever meagre support I could. He was already so weak and unsteady on his feet that I
could not imagine how he would survive the weeks of radiation that were planned.

One day, running late, I rang him from the side of the road. Our conversation was punctuated by long pauses as he gathered his breath to speak. After one long break he said, ‘I love you, I hope you know that.' The world seem to suddenly hover in the space around his words.

‘Yes, I do know that,' I told him, ‘and I love you too.'

The people I have loved who have left this physical life have become a part of me; I carry them, embody them.

Over the years I have discovered that death and grief are such inadequate terms to describe or evoke the mystery of what happens when someone dies. Even language itself shrinks in the face of the enormity of its mystery. ‘I'm sorry to hear that Julian passed over' or has gone ‘to his eternal rest'.

The only peace I have ever found is in the space beyond words.

Instead of asking questions or seeking answers, I prefer to sit and watch the trembling light as it falls through the open window on my lap, or to follow the cloud's shadows on the long, waving grass outside my window.

28

All love ends in loss, eventually.

Ten years ago, at Julian's funeral, I attempted to say something about him, something defining and memorable. I failed. I found it impossible to describe, in such turbulent days, the essence of who he was.

In this past decade, I have come to know Julian in a different way.

I retraced him through the meals he cooked, the books he read on the Spanish Civil War, the opera and jazz he loved and the long life he lived before we ever met, a life I could never possibly know.

The children and I developed little rituals to include Julian in our daily lives, often to do with his poorer choices in food. Dad's Worms – two crackers squashed together with butter bursting through the tiny holes. Dad's Pies – revolting meat
pies that he loved. Dad's Lollies – a tin of travel sweets covered in fine icing sugar.

We had old trunks into which we put some of his belongings – wallets, glasses, old credit cards, pens and – the perfect Harry Potter costume – his black lawyer's robes.

I carefully put aside a well-thumbed copy of
The Economist
that he was reading before he died into a box with his belongings – family photos, his MBE, his Independence medals from his years in Papua New Guinea.

He still has a life in me as he does in all the people who loved him.