Remember Me, page 13
An orchestral suite was playing on the radio, which suited me because I work best when listening to music without words. From time to time I stepped back from the table to conduct an imaginary orchestra with both arms, using my sketching pencil as a baton. At times like this I forgot where I was; I almost forgot who I was. It was like a trance. I’d slipped into a state of complete immersion when unearthly howls from the study had me pelting down the corridor.
Dad was bent double, his expression like nothing I’d ever seen on any human being. His mouth was open in a scream, strings of spit between his lips. Tears coursed down his face. I thought he was in agony.
‘It’s my writing!’ He was winded, gasping for breath. ‘My writing, my writing, my … God help me! It was on my noticeboard. Why the heck would I write this?’
He had some sheets of paper in his hand. The top one was covered in red sharpie pen.
FELIX, YOU HAVE ALZHEIMER’S
THIS IS TRUE
Read the attached report
‘Come with me,’ I ordered, taking the awful thing from him and hiding it under a pile of medical journals. ‘Into the garden. C’mon. I’d like to see the roses! Please can you show me?’
He didn’t protest as I grabbed his arm and steered him out of the room. He stumbled along the corridor, still sobbing, out through the kitchen doors and into the sunshine. I was acting on instinct, but to my relief the strategy seemed to work. After a few minutes in the autumnal brightness and birdsong, he began to forget his terror. Short-term memory loss isn’t all bad.
We pottered at a snail’s pace across the lawn, heading for the roses he’d planted and lovingly tended for years. The drought had taken a toll. Leaves were curled, suffering from some kind of fungus, but there were still some healthy blooms.
Dad leaned down, taking a flower in one hand as he inhaled its scent. ‘A damask,’ he said.
‘Heavenly.’
‘Do you like roses? I’ll cut this one for you later, to take home with you.’
As we walked on, he began to make polite conversation.
‘I grow a number of varieties. It’s a foolish hobby, with this climate. We have frosts in winter, dry summers which stress them. I think you’re from Britain? Mm.’ Nodding. ‘I can tell from your accent. So am I! A Yorkshire lad, though you might not guess. See this here?’ He’d stopped beside the pergola, where a bush had managed to produce a spray of yellow blooms. ‘I planted this banksia in the year we arrived in Tawanui. My wife, Lillian, wanted a pergola with a seat and a view of the ranges. And she got one, as you can see. But I’m afraid it wasn’t enough to make her happy.’
‘I’m sure she was happy sometimes.’
‘She didn’t want to be here. Went back to Yorkshire in the end, and I quite understood. I was a lousy husband, I’m afraid. I’d wasted enough of her life. We were fundamentally unsuited.’
‘You think so?’
‘Oh yes! Fundamentally. Nothing in common. We married far, far too young, at a time when I was grieving for my sister.’ He glanced at me. ‘My sister Helen. She died at the age of eighteen, did you know? Lillian was a sunny, laughing girl back then. She kept my grief at bay—that was the attraction. I was a medical student, and Lillian thought she was getting a dashing young doctor. Oh dear, she was terribly disappointed. She used to complain that I had no warmth, I’m robotic. She said I had frozen her happiness. She was a good-time girl.’
‘Oi!’ I cried, with mock indignation. ‘That’s my mother you’re talking about!’
‘Your mother? No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think …’
He sank onto the wooden seat in the shade of the pergola. I sat beside him.
‘I wish I were a robot,’ he whispered. ‘I have tried to be.’
‘Why?’
‘Better all round.’
I crushed a leggy sprig of lavender in my hand, holding the crumpled flowers to my face. It smelled of childhood, of croquet on the lawn, playing in a rubber-tyre swing with Ira, swimming trips to the river—Dad with a towel over one shoulder, wearing his sunhat. Yells of laughter, diamonds of flashing sunlight, that euphoric shock of cold as we hurled ourselves into the current.
These were false memories, or at least heavily censored. Lavender-scented, with undernotes that weren’t so sweet: my mother’s loneliness, my father’s remoteness, Manu’s inexorable deterioration. What else was hidden beneath the surface?
Before we jumped into the deeper pools, Ira and I always made sure to splash loudly, so that any freshwater eels would take the hint and disappear. It was best not to startle them. When we were eleven or so, we befriended a massive blue-grey creature, whose snout would break the surface as she accepted our offerings of dog food. We made a pet of her—or she of us, I was never quite sure which. She was at least a metre long, and spent her days in a dark spot under the overhang of the bank. Ira named her Kikorangi, which he said means Sky Blue. I protested that she wasn’t sky blue at all, but he didn’t care.
One day, we invited Leah to come and meet our eel. She always showed an interest in the bugs and butterflies we found. She strode beside us across the farm in her denim shorts, carrying a bag of leftovers from the Judo Club sausage sizzle fundraiser. Even then, at sixteen, she was a walking encyclopedia when it came to natural history. We three lay on our stomachs on the edge of the bank above Kikorangi’s pool, hand-feeding sausages to a sinuous shadow. I remember how chuffed Ira and I both were, because his clever sister seemed fascinated by our pet.
‘A longfin eel. Your beautiful tuna will have been born way, way out in the Pacific, maybe as far as Tonga. Nobody knows for sure,’ she told us. ‘She was tiny then, but she floated on the ocean currents, thousands of kilometres, all the way to the coast of New Zealand. Then she became a little glass eel, and she somehow swam up the rivers until she came to this spot and made it her home. It’s a privilege to have her—and she has enough dangers to worry about, so don’t you let your friends trap and kill her.’
Leah dangled a sausage under the water, laughing with real delight as the eel took it from her hand.
‘One day, maybe when you two have jobs and kids of your own, Kikorangi will leave here.’
‘Why?’ Ira looked a bit hurt. ‘She should stay.’
‘She’ll change again. Her eyes will turn blue, like her name, and her body will get ready, and then she’ll set out. This time she’ll be going the other way—back down the rivers, across the ocean, all the way to the place she was born. It’ll be her last journey. She’ll spawn way out there, in the Pacific, and then she’ll die. Her life’s work will have been done. By then she might be sixty, even a hundred years old.’
‘So she’ll live longer than Dad,’ said Ira.
Leah touched his cheek with her knuckle. ‘I think so, bud. Sorry.’
‘How will she know when it’s time to set off?’ I asked. ‘How will she know the way back to Tonga, or wherever it is she goes?’
‘That,’ said Leah, ‘is one of those mysteries that not even David Attenborough understands. But she will know, and she will go. Nature’s full of secrets. I want to find some of the answers. That will be my life’s work.’
•
‘You know, I have this awful feeling,’ Dad said quietly, as we sat in the pergola. ‘This awful feeling. I think something terrible has just happened. I’m appallingly frightened of something.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘Something in the study. I feel sure there’s a monster in my study. Should we go and look?’
Reaching for his hand, I tipped the crushed lavender flowers into the palm. I hoped the scent might lighten his mood.
‘Something evil,’ he whispered, pressing his nose into the lavender.
The dogs wandered out of the house and came to lie on the prickly grass at our feet. A breeze stirred, brushing against my face and lifting Dad’s hair. The weather was changing, a cloud tsunami rearing over the mountains. I could feel the dropping pressure.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Dad.
‘Why would you be sorry?’
‘I didn’t bring her home. Broke her mother’s heart.’
I knew who he was talking about.
‘You searched and searched,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t have done more.’
No answer. Soon he was asleep, a frown creasing his forehead, head lolling against the back of the seat. It reminded me of times when two-year-old Nathan dropped off in mid-tantrum, curled up on the sofa with tears drying on his cheeks. I stood up noiselessly and tiptoed back into the house.
Dad’s notice was stapled onto another document: a report from a geriatrician at the hospital, addressed to Marcia Ellis. I skimmed through four paragraphs describing the consultation: Dad’s confident presentation and physical fitness set against his poor score on cognitive, language and memory tests; his failure to know the date or even the year. The consultant felt that concussion, thyroid dysfunction and various other conditions could be excluded as potential causes. He mentioned the results of a scan indicating the build-up of plaques in Dad’s brain, and felt confident in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. He commented that Dr Kirkland’s active lifestyle and coping mechanisms may have masked the developing symptoms for some years. He gave advice about managing the condition, drugs that might slow its progression.
Marcia would have given Dad the news. I doubted it came as a surprise to him. He understood what it meant and where it would take him. He must have wanted to remind himself of the ghastly truth.
FELIX, YOU HAVE ALZHEIMER’S
I sat down in his armchair, paralysed by indecision, the papers trembling in my hand. My instinct was to get rid of them—otherwise he’d have to relive today’s terror over and over again. Surely I should spare him that?
In the end, though, it wasn’t my choice. I pinned everything back onto the noticeboard and left the room.
Truth mattered to my father.
EIGHTEEN
It was a sound to gladden the heart of every farmer in the district: thundering on the tin roof. Sustained, glorious April rain. I snuggled into my pillow, imagining water soaking into the thirsty landscape.
How many times had I listened to this drumming, lying in this same bed? Sometimes it brought me joy, because it meant the school cross-country would be cancelled. Oh, how I dreaded the cross-country. Whippet-fast kids like Leah and Ira would romp in well ahead of the pack. My siblings might come somewhere in the top ten. And all those smug bastards would be tucking into the sausage sizzle by the time I stumbled red-faced up to the finish line, humiliated by the patronising applause of other people’s parents.
The downpour stopped at dawn. The sun blazed, steam rose from the paddocks and a vivid rainbow arched across the foothills. I took a photo for Nathan. He replied immediately: Get out there and find that pot of gold! The same afternoon the heavens opened again.
Nathan was right: there was a pot of gold. Rain and sunshine had a magical effect on both landscape and people. The air tasted sweet. Paddocks greened up overnight—you could almost hear the plants and trees growing. Taciturn farmers wore grins, locals greeted one another on Tawanui’s main street with talk of the lovely rain.
‘That’s farming for you,’ declared Ira, a week or so later. He was putting up electric tape in the paddock bordering our garden. ‘We’ll all be stressing about something else next month. Facial eczema, or too much grass.’
He seemed unusually chirpy today. He’d even had a haircut.
‘Hey, Ira,’ I said. ‘Are you still seeing that … whoever it was you were dating?’
I caught the flash of a grin—swiftly suppressed, but not fast enough.
‘I knew it!’ I cried. ‘Who is she? Anyone I know?’
He rolled his eyes, muttering about nosy friends. ‘Nobody you know,’ he said, when he realised I wasn’t going to give up. ‘She’s from Dunedin. One of the vets.’
With very little prompting, he proceeded to tell me about her children: Alex and Sean, aged eight and six, who were ‘neat little guys’. Alex was already a keen reader, Sean was mad on soccer. He also had Down’s syndrome, but neither he nor his mother let that get in the way of anything.
I listened with a growing sense of wonder. Ira’s life was changing. This woman, and her children, were taking up residence in his world.
‘What’s her name?’ I asked.
‘Cathy.’
‘With a C or a K? Why’d she come up from Dunedin? Where does she live?’
Ira scowled. He wasn’t fooling me, though; I knew him far too well. I could tell he was happy.
‘With a C. Came up to be near the boys’ grandparents, who live in Hastings. Their dad died in a cycling accident. For Pete’s sake, don’t breathe a word to Mum. She’ll be planning the wedding.’
‘Raewyn knows there’s someone,’ I told him. ‘She is all-seeing, all-knowing.’
He laughed as he stooped to unhook a connection on the perimeter fence. Rain began to speckle the wooden rails and posts. I had a moment of nostalgia, remembering the pair of us prancing around on the woolshed roof with our mouths wide open and our heads back, catching raindrops. That was back in the days when I just knew that Ira and I would get married.
‘Thinking about having that test,’ he said, so tonelessly and casually that I didn’t understand what he meant. My mind was on the rain. I assumed he meant some kind of soil test for the farm.
‘Test?’ I blinked stupidly, and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh! To find out if you’re carrying …?’
‘Yep. That.’ He began laying the tape, stepping backwards as he unrolled it from the spool. ‘Not my idea of fun, to sit there and have a total stranger tell me whether I’m a walking time bomb or not. I’m not saying I’m definitely going to do it. Just thinking about it.’
‘Is this because of Cathy?’
He kept on walking backwards.
‘D’you remember,’ he said, ‘what mealtimes were like at our place, when my dad couldn’t use a knife anymore? Mum had to cut things up for him, so he only needed a fork. But he held it funny.’
I nodded. I remembered Manu’s clawed hand.
‘He used to drop it,’ said Ira. ‘We’d take it in turns to pick it up for him. In the end, Mum started giving him finger food, but he’d drop that too. He’d miss his mouth, or he’d put it in and forget how to swallow. I used to sit with my eyes shut and my hands over my ears. I came round to your place for meals whenever I could. Your parents were kind to me and Leah. I’ll always be grateful for that.’
He turned away, picking up a pile of plastic fence posts from his quad bike.
‘I don’t want any child sitting with his eyes shut so he doesn’t have to see me missing my mouth. And Cathy has kids. So maybe I have to get tested.’
I had a deluge of questions. When might he take it, and what would he do if it was negative—or positive? And how did he feel about—
‘Would you care to give me a hand,’ he suggested, interrupting me, ‘instead of the third degree?’
I dropped down from the stile and swished my way through the wet grass, poking posts into the ground at intervals along the tape.
‘Gyp and Gloria need to go to the vet,’ I said. ‘Urgently.’
‘That’s a coincidence.’
‘No, but they do! They’re due for their jabs.’
‘You’ll be sadly disappointed. Cathy doesn’t work with small animals if she can help it. Mind you, last week she did emergency surgery on a guinea pig.’
I stopped teasing him and got on with the job. We worked quite efficiently together, until the temporary fence was up and young Friesian bulls were tearing away at the new grass as though they’d not had a mouthful in weeks.
‘Is our eel still living in the river?’ I asked.
‘Kikorangi.’ He chuckled. ‘Old girl left years ago. She must have set off on her last journey, home to Tonga or wherever. Hope she made it.’
‘Perhaps her children have come back.’
‘It’s possible. There’s a couple of eels living in her pool now. Might be her kids.’
Afterwards, he dropped into the house for coffee. He left his boots on the porch, sat at the table and had an in-depth conversation with Dad about water purity regulations for the Tukituki catchment.
If you closed one eye and squinted a bit, life looked almost normal.
Until it wasn’t.
NINETEEN
The dogs and I were home from our morning expedition to the letterbox. Mum called while we were walking back, and was still on the line as I clumped up the porch steps. It’s amazing how much we found to gossip about.
‘Is Nathan still with that girl?’ she asked.
‘Yup.’ I was shuffling through the post, the phone jammed under my chin. Nothing interesting.
‘He sent me a postcard from a beautiful beach,’ she said. ‘Oh, to be young and in love again!’
Gloria and Gyp had bustled down to Dad’s bedroom, leaving damp paw marks every step of the way. I heard his voice: ‘Hello! You two been for a walk, hey? You’re wet!’ It was getting on for coffee time: that happy hour, both of us at our best. Once Mum had rung off, I put the kettle on before going in search of him.
I found him dressed in his usual collared shirt, jersey and canvas trousers, kneeling beside the neatly made bed, looking into his green steel trunk. It had belonged to his great-uncle Bert, a regular soldier who made it through both world wars, and had the letters A.W.K.—for Albert William Kirkland—stencilled above the latch.
‘Morning, Dad. Sleep well?’
‘I think so.’ He was stacking three box files in a pile. They looked worn, their edges buckling. ‘Now … these are your boxes. I keep them in Bert’s army chest, so they’re always there to remind me.’
