The Best Australian Essays 2014 (4 page)

It takes me forty minutes to persuade him to come back inside. He seems oblivious to the cold although he is only wearing pyjamas and a light dressing gown. He does not shiver, whereas I cannot stop my teeth from chattering. I make us both tea, lead my father by the hand back to bed (he has slept apart from my mother for years, snoring being the official excuse for a much deeper estrangement), lock the door and hide his keys.

In the morning it's as if the episode never happened. My father seems more alert and lucid, scans the newspaper, seems able to focus on his breakfast and announces that he will go to the barber. I remind him that he can't drive and offer to take him.

‘It would be better if I drove,' he insists.

Once he is dressed we go downstairs. When we reach the car he says, ‘I cannot let you drive.'

It takes half an hour to persuade him to get into the passenger seat. Once there, he settles down, gives clear, precise directions, knows where to find free parking.

‘How do you like the new car?' he asks genially, back to his old self.

We discuss its silence and other special merits in the way of trainspotters or bird fanciers.

We walk to the barber, my father's brisk step and unfailing sense of direction intact.

I am the only woman there. The barber, a young Lebanese man in his thirties, greets my father, a regular customer, with courtly reverence as he goes about his lathering and shaving with a blade. I savour the atmosphere of testosterone, as generations come and go to be trimmed and clipped. My father smiles benignly into the mirror, surrendering to the trusted ministrations like a grandee favouring a servant. It must feel good to have the bristles he grew in hospital disappear, to have hot towels applied, to feel the caress of the badger-hair shaving brush and the precision of the razor expertly handled.

I think of the car wash, of these rare moments of peace that we have shared, of how cleaning is common to them. When I was a little girl and had inherited his habit of biting my nails to the quick, he used to soak my hands on Sunday mornings in soapy hot water before inspecting each finger individually, admonishing me and then slathering them with hand cream. It was probably the most peculiar ritual of our relationship and never cured me of the habit.

When my father is done, the barber helps him on with his coat. His dignity and fastidious care about his appearance have been restored, and with them a new vigour has returned, a slightly sprightlier step, a shinier eye. My father seems able to take in more of his surroundings with each passing hour; I can sense his condition improving as if mist is lifting from a landscape.

‘Let's go next door, I want to show you their pastries,' says my father in the conspiratorial tone of my childhood when we would egg each other on in exploits of gluttony – I rarely won the contest of who could eat the most mountains in a block of Toblerone.

We buy meringues that look like the Alps and Florentines the size of small pizzas. The outing is a success. He does not argue about who is driving when we reach the car, compliments me on retracting the car mirrors (one of those typical extras he loves to indulge in) to handle a narrow stretch of road.

My mother is so delighted she opens a half-bottle of champagne and we all toast my father's recovery, he with a sip, we with the rest. He eats lunch and for the first time since my arrival, my mother laughs and pinches his arm affectionately, pleased to have him back.

Afterwards he goes to bed for a nap. As I tuck him in, he smiles up at me, his face lopsided and crooked. It reminds me of a photograph I have of him before he left Vienna in 1938. He must've been nine years old. The smile he gives the photographer is a mixture of charm and shyness. I see this on my father's face for a fleeting moment and then it is gone. And with it, so is my father. He will never utter a lucid sentence again.

*

‘We have to sell the car,' says my mother.

We are on the number 19 bus riding home from the hospital where she has just been given the diagnosis that makes sense of the previous week's nightmare.

My father has vascular dementia. There is no cure.

We do not know how we will care for him or where. Desperate for certainty, my mother finds only one: he will not be driving again.

My parents never had a wide circle of friends; the few they were close to have mostly died. They do not socialise or entertain and retirement has not brought new people into their lives. Now what remains is a handful of my father's former colleagues and business associates. Their Christmas card list has diminished to a dozen, including Nomi, the tall Japanese owner of a prestige car showroom where my father has been a client for more than twenty years. He has sold my father each of his recent Jaguars, and now the Prius.

At home the air is leaden. Unable to focus on any useful task, I thumb through the latest edition of my father's innovation catalogue, noticing that he has marked up an invention preventing speed cameras from photographing your number plate. Incorrigible, even at eighty.

There are other people my mother could call first – one surviving member of her family, a woman friend she rarely sees but speaks to every week – but instead she calls Nomi. He agrees to take the car back.

*

After I have organised my father's care, I am not prepared for the wash of anger that pushes me under like a rogue wave out of nowhere. It is so completely unexpected, unpredictable and violent that it frightens me in its opportunistic, random attacks. I did not love my father with this kind of ferocity, so why am I lashing out so fiercely?

I call a part-time counsellor friend for advice. Grief is not her field, and she has limited time, but offers to listen if I can meet her outside her workplace.

A cafe is not private enough. ‘Perhaps we could talk in the car?' she suggests.

The very space that defined so much of how my father and I related: it feels right, familiar, safe. There is comfort, too, in sitting facing forward, not having to make eye contact, but it's intimate enough to feel confessional.

Soon I am sobbing, sitting at the wheel, nose running, choking and spluttering fury. Oncoming twilight conceals my distress from passers-by.

After an hour of listening, my friend hugs me across the handbrake and I drive home, exhausted by my outburst, but also calmer, like a volcano reverting to dormancy after an eruption. The muscle memory of each gesture, braking, accelerating, indicating, offers some consolation with its mechanical repetition and achievable mastery.

I wonder if my father's muscles, atrophied as they now are, retain any patterns of the gestures of steering or changing gear now that everything else in his brain is bombed, blasted, derailed. I replay in my mind, over and over, like picking at a scab, our last drive together, the utter banality of it, the lack of portent or significance in our mundane exchanges.

If I had known we would never be able to have a normal conversation again, what would I have said?

*

When my father is diagnosed, my mother comes to a grinding halt. Like a car with a flat battery she simply refuses to start. Shock has stalled her engine. Her body smells sour: I recognise fear wafting from room to room with her like the smell of curdled yoghurt.

My father paces the ward, shouting for his briefcase. Having tormented the nurses with Chinese rope burns, he calls at midnight, shrill with distress, demanding his passport and car keys. He gets into bed with strangers, steals items from bedside cabinets, disrupts meal times, chews his bedding, tears up the newspaper, makes lewd suggestions to orderlies and escapes with an unsuspecting group of visitors. The police are called to find him.

Psychiatrists interview my father to assess the severity of his condition and determine where he should be placed. My mother and I are invited to be present. To their questions about where he lives and his interests, he delivers an uninterrupted monologue about the build-up of traffic in the neighbourhood, detailing his frustrations with lights that have no right-turn filter, causing crossroads to clog up. Cars, too many cars, fill his consciousness, together with battles with the council over parking restrictions, one-way streets, speed bumps and the absence of zebra crossings. He responds as someone literally driven mad.

Weeks after my father is institutionalised my body is traversed with aches. They begin at my ankles, travel up my legs to my buttocks and into my neck and shoulders, moving like a weather pattern from site to site, waking me at night like storms. The pain becomes more and more acute, combined with a deadening fatigue that leaves me breathless and bedridden for days. I feel as if I have battery acid in my veins.

‘If I did not know better, I would think you were poisoning me,' I tell my husband. Blood tests and X-rays reveal nothing.

The pain is corrosive. I give up exercising because it makes me feel worse. I lose three or four days of the week lying prostrate, dozing. I have occasional good days when my energy returns, but the pain always comes back like a punishment, as if my body were saying, ‘How dare you think you could cheat me?' Eventually a doctor agrees with my internet diagnosis of chronic fatigue combined with chronic pain – something called fibromyalgia.

‘It's a dustbin diagnosis,' he says breezily, ‘which means we just chuck all the symptoms into a bin that we can't explain and give it that name.'

The illness affects me for two years.

Then one day, I realise I have had five, maybe six days in a row symptom-free. I feel stronger, have more stamina, the pain is less sharp, less persistent, less frequent. I start making bolder plans, attempting half days and then full days in the city, reclaiming parts of my life.

*

I've spent the day in Sydney, back in the saddle professionally, attending meetings, going to interviews. No ambushing by a sudden rush of tears, no power surges of rage. A day of smooth, unremarkable transitions.

I drive home feeling elated: my life is back in gear.

I can't wait to tell my husband how well the day has gone, how promising some conversations have been about potential work.

I park at the top of our driveway. Those last few metres always give me a sense of satisfaction, as if I were scaling a small mountain instead of just revving the engine to get up a very steep incline. Through the drawn curtains I can see David's silhouette on the sofa, about to watch the seven o'clock news, which marks a sort of unofficial cut-off point for our working day. I know the wine is already opened. I have a small window in which to debrief him before the headlines begin. I hurry inside.

As I begin my account of the day both of us become aware of an unfamiliar sound, just on the other side of the curtains. Something scraping, with the rhythm of a ricochet, like a tin can being kicked repeatedly along a wall. Metal, tearing. Puzzled, we draw the curtains back.

Where we should see the bonnet of the car, there is a void.

A void.

Where the car—

We run outside. The car is at the bottom of the driveway at a peculiar angle, jack-knifed against a concrete retaining wall. It has come to an abrupt halt, the wing mirrors tearing away fence posts on the descent. The undercarriage has fallen out like the spilled guts of roadkill.

Neighbours, brought out by the noise, look on in disbelief as we hug and do a little dance, punching the air and laughing. The enormity of what could have happened makes us both lightheaded with relief. The car has not rolled down onto the main road or gathered speed and propelled itself across the street into another house. It could have been much, much worse.

When I tell friends what happened, they nod wisely. Clearly, according to them, the episode demonstrates that I am still in shock, still dealing with the aftermath of my father's decline. For months, I buy that interpretation. I am not myself, not ready to venture into the outside world, not self-possessed enough to regain control.

But today I am not so sure. Couldn't it just be that in an absent-minded moment of eagerness to share the news of my successful day, I had forgotten one small gesture of precaution and left the handbrake off? Just how symptomatic and symbolic was that one error?

What would my father have said? Sometimes he overreacted with stinging criticism and sometimes he'd surprise me with a philosophical shrug. I can hear him making a joke of it: ‘At least it was only a Holden, not a Mercedes 280 SL, baby.'

*

I delay taking the Prius back to Nomi until the day before my own departure, dreading the burial-like finality of it. I tell myself it is just another chore on a to-do list that never seems to get any shorter, no matter how many items I tick off.

When it can be put off no longer, I empty the car of the last evidence of my father's ownership and disconnect the GPS he argued with so vehemently, shouting at its implacably calm voice to ‘shut up, you silly cow' whenever she urged him to ‘make a U-turn where possible' after he disregarded her instructions.

Unplugging that cable feels like switching off life support.

I drive to the showroom in Chiswick, taking back roads, lingering behind the wheel, wondering how often my father used the special feature that warmed the driver's seat on winter mornings and that I now switch on for myself, to give me that cosy electric-blanket feeling of comfort. But nothing can stop me shivering as I approach my destination.

I ask for Nomi at reception. Before I know it, a tall man is standing behind me, all stillness and solemnity. He bows. There is an awkward moment before I stretch out my hand for him to shake. He takes it with his head still lowered.

‘We have not met before, but of course I know all about you,' Nomi says, showing me to his desk.

‘The Mercedes 280 SL, still your favourite car, yes?' he asks, attempting to lighten the mood.

‘The Prius was your idea, yes? Very good choice. Your father, he like this car more than he expect after Jaguar, no?'

Choking, I can only nod.

‘Perhaps he will make good recovery?'