Forecast (14 page)

Midnight. It is now official: New Year's Day 2008. The sky is fretted with glitter trails and the soft pop of slow-falling balls of burning gold, but I am fixated on a gilded arc of the Brisbane River. Though the moon is waning, one week past full, the water looks like the bullion-sluice at the Mt Morgan mine, a Midas-flow I saw once and will never forget. Gold Rushes – Kalgoorlie, Mt Morgan – figure in family history on both sides, and at times like this memories tumble as from an overstuffed drawer, colliding and merging. Not much of the river is visible in the space between the new construction (iron-spiked and rising daily), the elegant roofline of Moorlands House, and
the tree line on Coronation Drive, but from the glass-enclosed elevated walkway that links the main entrance of Wesley Hospital with its Moorlands Wing, I can see the City Cat cutting its sleek swift way through the liquid gold. The Cat is bound for the wharf at the Regatta. In other circumstances I might have been joining the revels, but I am badly jetlagged, having barely arrived in Australia, and my flight was grabbed at short notice. Behind me, hospital gurneys pass silently back and forth. Visitors – their faces drawn, some of them weeping – carry flowers. The flowers give off a sad and desperate smell.

Nose pressed against the glass of the walkway, I stare at the river. This tangled ribbon, brown and muddy by day, gilded by night, is the thread that ties my childhood to my now, my beginnings to the ending bearing down like a watercourse in flood. If it were not for so many high-rise buildings I could see upstream to the university, I could see the Coronation Drive buses that I used to ride daily from North Quay to my classes in the old Arts building.

I could see downriver too, were it not for those shimmering glass towers. I could see past all the bridges to where Breakfast Creek flows into the Brisbane. I could follow the creek upstream to the muddy loop in Finsbury Park, our neighbourhood,
where two of my brothers and I were catching tadpoles while our youngest brother was being born.

And were it not for the ingrained modes of Western thinking – so radically different, as I was to discover, from ways of seeing in the village in South India where we lived – where time lines are as palpable and as present as railway lines – I might see all the way back to 1823 when John Oxley weighed anchor at the confluence of river and creek, when he named the tributary for the meal that the crew ate on deck. I might see Oxley with sextant and calipers surveying his way upstream to that first landing at North Quay, to that spot where the obelisk now stands, and from which, in childhood, I embarked more times than I can count for family outings to Lone Pine Sanctuary, to that wharf where the Alsatian with the koala on its back would greet us. In drawers choked to overflowing with black-and-white Kodak prints, I am much recorded cuddling the koala, though never, never once, with the carpet snake around my neck.

What I do see, because I have pictured it so often, and have witnessed the encounter in dreams, and have written about it in a short story, is my Grandfather Turner, aged seventeen, who had shipped out from England at age eleven
and had come, via New Zealand and Sydney, to Brisbane in September 1892. He was in search of his father, Charles Henry Turner, barrister, who had absconded some fifteen years earlier, abandoning a wife and infant son. The family has never known the reason for this sudden defection (crushing debt? sexual scandal? embezzlement?) though money was sent back from Australia for my grandfather's grammar-school education. He was, by then, under the guardianship of an aunt, his abandoned mother having died when he was four years old. My grandfather grew up with the burning intention of finding his missing parent, and he did. His father was practising drunken law in Brisbane. I always picture their meeting on the river embankment. I fancy I can see the very spot from the Wesley catwalk that runs from the hospital lobby to the orthopedic wing.

My great-grandfather was much disconcerted to be found. He rejected my grandfather a second time and my grandfather never again visited Brisbane. A mere six months after that fateful meeting, the Brisbane was in violent flood, the worst of numerous recorded inundations in its history. The Botanic Gardens bore strange fruit. Ships nested in trees. There were multiple deaths by drowning. My Grandfather Turner, devastated and doubly orphaned, had nightmares in Sydney and later in
Adelaide and then in the rural Victorian schools where he was headmaster. His father's bloated corpse would wash up against the wharf of his sleep. Sometimes the corpse would open its eyes and fix its gaze upon Grandpa Turner and say:
I'm sorry. I didn't mean things to turn out like this.

At other times it would say:
Look at what you unleashed. You should have let sleeping dogs lie.

Not Brisbane,
my grandfather pleaded with my father nearly sixty years later, as we set out from Melbourne in an old Bedford van.
Of all places, why Brisbane?

But he knew the answer. It was inevitable.

Buy far from the river,
he made my father promise.
Buy on high ground.

It was family lore that my great-grandfather had drowned in the flood of 1893, but this may not have been true. In 1974, when the Brisbane inundated so many city buildings and suburbs, my father, who pitched in as a volunteer for the cleanup, felt the prick of ancestral memory. He searched city archives and found in those of the Toowong Cemetery a record of the burial of a Charles Henry Turner on 10 September 1899.

Decades earlier, a certain Charles Henry Turner had been admitted to the bar at the Inns of Court, had married, had engendered a son, and had fled to the underside of the world.

Sic transit gloria
.

Thus, also, do stories ebb and flow.

Thus does the Brisbane, my Huckleberry friend, my personal sacred river, flow from the pleasure dome of the Regatta through caverns almost but not quite measureless to dream, past Oxley's Landing, past Breakfast Creek and Newstead House, past Hamilton Wharf and the Gateway Bridge, down to a sunless … But no. In the Sunshine State, we resist shadow. We don't believe in darkness.

Behind me, on the hospital walkway, gurneys and orderlies and anxious relatives move to and fro, not speaking of what they fear. Here and there, in rooms at either end of the corridor, nurses close doors, and sheets are gently pulled across faces that are still turned toward the river that flows down to a sunless sea.

 

From the hospital walkway, because of the great southward loop of the river below New Farm Park, I can almost see – I convince myself I can see – the swirling outflow from Breakfast Creek where so much of my story begins. Oxley named it, but my brothers and I are its intimates. It was only three blocks from our house, which was on Newmarket Road across from the railway line. There were two
ways to get to the creek: we could ride our bikes down Finsbury Street, or we could cut across the paddock behind our back fence, and then across the tussocked stretch that was known to us as Finsbury Park, to reach the mud and mangroves of the creek. We raced leaves and paper boats. We fished for tadpoles and kept them in jars. We plotted adventures: I and my three brothers and the boys next door.

During this period, all my books were boys' books, from my father's and from Grandpa Turner's libraries, and my favourite was
Coral Island
. The muddy bank of Breakfast Creek was that fabulous place. It was also Treasure Island and Neverland. I was the oldest, the stage director, the strategist, the sole girl, the Wendy of our Neverland, the bossy one according to my subjects, an unruly and seditious bunch. We knew that the creek eventually reached the river and then the ocean and then the world. We drew up elaborate plans for a houseboat that would take us to who knew where. (
We?
queried my brothers and the boys next door, rolling their eyes at the gathering that followed the funeral.
You were the one who came up with those harebrained schemes.)
The houseboat plans were much modified by the realists and the rabble. Eventually a downscaled canoe was built. It was made of a sheet of galvanised roofing material,
folded in half, crimped in at each end, nailed shut. Much hoopla attended its launching, with one of the boys-next-door and myself as Cook and Banks, as Oxley and Cunningham. As Peter Pan and Wendy, I had suggested, a proposal that was scorned with deleterious effect on the magic. Our craft sank within minutes and within several feet of shore. We emerged mud-covered and mosquito-bitten, but I considered the voyage an honourable failure.

 

In December 2007 my father fell and broke his hip, and during his hospitalisation, because my mother was no longer strong enough to manage on her own, she was taken into Respite Care. Both my parents were in their nineties, and I spoke to them every Sunday by trans-Pacific telephone call. My mother had already survived two cancers and was exceedingly frail, but both my parents were mentally sharp. My mother did a crossword every day; my father, newly cyber-competent, sent emails with commentary on his wide-ranging reading.

Christmas is a very bad time for medical emergencies or for reliance on Social Services. Most systems more or less shut down. Doctors take
their annual holidays. Social support personnel are away at the beach. Respite beds are hard to come by and are reserved far in advance. My mother was moved from pillar to post and was frightened and utterly bewildered.

Every day that December I called Dad in his hospital ward and Mum in her Respite Care room. Whenever I spoke to my mother, I knew that something had suddenly and catastrophically gone wrong. She always recognised my voice, she always expressed joy at making contact, but after that nothing made sense. In alarm I took the first available flight and arrived on New Year's Eve.

Every day, for the two weeks before my classes began again in mid-January, I took my mother to visit my father. Every day she would greet me with astonishment. ‘What a lovely surprise! Have you just arrived from America?' The journey from the Wesley Hospital lobby to the Moorlands wing was painfully slow. My mother inched along in her wheeled walker but often needed to stop and rest. We always paused in the elevated walkway to gaze at the river.

‘Do you remember, Mum, when I took you and Dad on the Sunday lunch cruise in the
Kookaburra Queen
?'

No, she did not remember that, though it had been only months before my father's fall.

She did not remember the house on Newmarket Road where we had lived for twenty years. She did not remember the house in Chermside, with its gorgeous garden (all her work and Dad's work) where she had lived for thirty-five years after that, where she had lived until the move into Assisted Living just two years back.

I had to lean on my mother's walker. I felt as though my past had been amputated. I felt unsteady. I felt pain in the missing phantom years. Remember when …? we used to muse for pleasurable hours on end, telling family stories like beads on a rosary. All had seeped away like a river through sand, but you can never step into the same memory twice.

My mother did, however, remember my dad, though not what had happened to part them. When we reached his ward and his room – and it was as though, like Cunningham, she had come to a gap in the range and was seeing a brand-new vista each time – her face would turn radiant. ‘Adrian!' she would say, reaching for him in laughter and tears. ‘It's been
ages!
I'm going to stay here. I'm not going to leave you.'

 

Finally, after nearly three months, my father graduated from rehab and was discharged. He
and my mother were back together in their cosy unit. Side by side, safely caged in their walkers, at midday and at 5.30 p.m., they made their stately way down the hall to the dining room. My mother did crosswords again and flecks of her memory returned like iron filings in slow and erratic motion toward a magnet. In phone calls, my father invariably expressed anxiety: that my mother would be re-classified as ‘high care'; that they would be separated; that they would be ‘expelled' from their community home. My mother, in pain most of the time, invariably expressed tranquillity: ‘I've got so much to be thankful for. God has been gracious and Adrian takes such loving care of me.'

In April my mother fell and her hip crumbled like dried-out toast. She was admitted to Wesley, to the same orthopedic ward where my father had so recently been.

We had planned to fly out as soon as classes ended and were ticketed on Qantas for mid-May, but my cousin Rhys Morgan, an anaesthetist at Wesley, jolted me awake at dawn. ‘I think you should come immediately,' he said. ‘I think it's possible that Aunty only has forty-eight hours.'

In fact, however, when we all rushed to her bedside (my brothers from assorted Australian cities, I from South Carolina), my mother was so happy, so absolutely delighted to see us all at one
time, so energised, that she lived for another twenty days purely on joy and adrenalin. We crowded into her room: children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Beaming, she cradled Zach, her newest great-grandchild, weeks old. She recognised everyone. She turned to my father, radiant. ‘Isn't this wonderful? This is
family
.'

The family was moved to spontaneous song, a boisterous round of old favourites from ‘My Grandfather's Clock' to ‘Daisy, Daisy' on her bicycle built for two. My mother sang lustily, words and melody alighting on her like a flock of doves from the top hat of a magician. Nurses and doctors gathered in amused wonder at the door. And then, in a sudden weird access of lucidity, my mother announced that she would recite ‘The Man from Snowy River' and proceeded to do so, recalling the long Banjo Paterson saga in its entirety.

What an amazing, complicated, unpredictable, enduring and fragile thing is memory. It is like a river. It can silt up and need dredging, it can flood and destroy, it can lose its way. It is like a river of moonlight, evanescent. When it goes dark, navigation is treacherous. The journey from source to final sea loses meaning. The failure of memory seems to me a far more devastating loss than death. I would have found my mother's death unbearable if she had no longer known who I was.