Ordinary Matter, page 17
Even the good stuff weighs you down before it hollows you out. Our entire planet – every thought that’s ever been had, every deed – is determined, controlled and organised by the brain, by what we cannot see. Trillions upon trillions of messages back and forth, if old age is where you find yourself. Well, our brains began to misfire and all the old faces, and the doorways and hallways in our homes, and streets and patterns in the outside world, they became a puzzle. And, for us, it was a puzzle we had no great desire to complete. Like: why were we so intent on solving it when we could just wander and be with one another? Find clarity. We got lost when we couldn’t find our way to the end.
We hear there’s going to be a meeting in town. Some of us crowd around one another, burying our feet in the sand, and we’re able to see the meeting.
— Okay, Eleanor starts. Let me—
— Yes, Lupita says, this part is hard to explain.
— The vision, Don says. The town turning over while we are not there.
— Somehow it is visible to us, Lupita says. The brain is a wonderful thing. That’s what they told us at our Freedom Villas. And now we believe it.
— It’s marvellous fun!
— Even though sometimes it fizzles in and out, like a wireless.
So, you see, we cannot explain it. But we can see it.
Frida, who runs the bar at the RSL on weekends, is taking around platters of eggplant dip and haloumi skewers. Ursula from the newsagent is there, Toni from the fish and chip shop, Cameron and his four rib-eye sons who have a monopoly on all domestic and civic garden maintenance. A few of the local teachers are there. Rick the electrician, who always takes up two parking spaces at Freedom Villas instead of one.
— But he’s always fair. As honest as the day is long, Brian says.
We watch the part of the meeting when Bob stands, clears his throat and says, ‘It’s all very strange, yes. But ... Marilyn, my mother-in-law, has been missing for almost a week ... what I’m saying is: maybe we should let sleeping dogs lie.’
‘Bob!’ His wife, Cindy, is a tall and powerful woman who strikes him on the thick of his back, right above the rump. Bob sits down. We look over at Marilyn. She is lying on her belly beneath a casuarina, reading an old copy of Frankenstein that somebody else – maybe Ken – brought along. We feel bad for her. She frowns at something in the book, licks her thumb and turns the page.
— King of the mother-in-law jokes, Marilyn says, without looking up. What a genius he is.
— Cindy got stuck with him, Sarah says, didn’t she? But she could have gotten out. There was still time. Nothing is set in stone, even after you have children.
We return to the vision. Marilyn flips a page of her book.
‘It all boils down to this,’ Frida says. ‘How do we keep our goddamn parents alive?’
‘We must make this town safe,’ Niamh the kindergarten teacher says. ‘They could wander down to the ocean like that.’ She clicks her fingers.
Cameron shakes his head. ‘They must be absolutely terrified.’
‘Cameron, some of them fought in Korea,’ Janey the high-school teacher says drily. We know that she refused to pay Cameron to do her yard. ‘I reckon they’ll be all right.’
— Oh, bless that sensible Janey, Eleanor says.
We all know the story of a colleague of Janey’s who drove his mother to a cottage in the Tablelands and locked the door so she couldn’t escape. The son turned up at the house the next morning to find she’d hitched back to town.
— Never mind that he could have stayed with her all night, Lupita says. Spent time with her?
— I have something to add, Denise says.
She is weaving palm fronds, making a bowl.
— Yes, go on, Denise. Please do.
— When Andrew was nine months old, I couldn’t leave him, not for a minute, could not walk out that door because if I did he held his breath till he passed out. Talk about inner positioning. That baby knew where I was every second of the day. It was like he watched me through the nursery walls, lying there behind the bars of his cot, just plotting my movements around the house.
— Oh, Denise, you poor thing.
At the meeting, we watch Andrew slide a cube of haloumi from the skewer into his mouth. We feel sorry for Denise, who for many years was caught up in disputes with neighbours about recalcitrant dogs, and fences, and garbage bins, and parking along the yellow line outside her driveway, right up until she got lost, to be with us here. Oliver squeezes Denise’s elbow. She drops the palm frond bowl, reaches for a green plastic bucket and lays the foundation of a sandcastle between her feet. Beside her, Ken and Lupita hold tree branches in their laps. They sharpen the ends with their small red knives.
— So, my son can just give me a minute now, Denise says. He can give me a mile. No-one’s passing out. I’m sure as hell not. It’s a very sinister sort of captivity to be in your nice home that you’ve designed and kitted out with appliances and soft cushions. You’re trapped. You’d claw your way out of there if you could. And I couldn’t, not for about three years. And all of this would be fine if there was an end to the worry parents feel. But there isn’t. It doesn’t let up. Not for your whole life.
— Oh, Andrew, we all say, though he cannot hear us.
Ken and Lupita put down their knives, and pat Denise on the leg, one each.
Marshall has done some eggs for our tea, Mabel has done the chops. We hear rumblings that they’re coming for us. That the end is nigh. But that could be a false feeling our brains are feeding us. Ken hands around the plates and offers to slice the meat for those who need it. Mabel garnishes the chops with tufts of pigface and we spread across the sand, easing down to sit and eat.
Look, we all had disparate experiences in our earlier lives. We mentioned Denise’s difficulties with her neighbours. Sarah lost a son to a terrible fight with a stranger on a foreign beach. Don founded a company that he later sold for $120 million. Lupita adopted dogs that nobody else wanted, and one even saved her life. We’ve had first children and second children and lost children and final babies that turned out to be our last (many of us have agreed this was like settling into a body of water that initially shocked us, frightened us, but turned out to give us great pleasure and joy). The things going on in our brains that make us wander are difficult to explain, but look! Look how happy we are, now that we don’t know where we are going.
The next day starts off normal enough, but by dusk we can all feel it. Something’s not quite right. Vito loses his footing on a tree root. Marilyn eats a mandarin and pith gets caught in her throat, almost choking her. Denise wakes from her afternoon nap to realise she has lost her voice. Looking at one another, we think but do not say: Is this the end? Is someone coming for us?
We are lying in the sand. The sun is sending up great big swathes of colour into the sky. A sharp breeze sluices through the air. When those of us who like to observe boats and ships see them out on the water, we wave the others over. Watching a ship, even with the naked eye, is telescopic. It acts to minuscule us even further. Who is at the controls of that ship right now? What do they see when they gaze back across the seal-grey ocean that laps upon our beach? Do they imagine we are a ‘lost tribe’ that might show up on the evening news?
Lupita and Brian are propped up on their sides, facing each other. They have their feet in the water. Oliver wears a wreath of pigface and gum leaves twisted around his head. Marilyn sits back on her heels with a pile of sand heaped in front of her. Sarah joins her and they drag their hands through the wet sand. They build a moat. We agree how lovely the grit of sand is in the webbing of our fingers.
— Someone told me once, Eleanor says, that there are more atoms in a grain of sand than there are stars in the universe.
— Oooh, Ken says, I think you’ve got that a bit wobbly.
— But who’s going to know? Marshall asks.
— There’s no way to prove any of that, Denise says.
— Lovely thought, though, Vito adds.
We agree it’s a lovely thought. Ideas like this keep us watered and fed.
We hear a shout, then twigs snapping.
The woman is young. Gorgeous round hips. Lovely smile, curly dark hair. The man is short. Small flat nose. His eyes are generous and sooty-dark. He wears a footy jersey and black socks and sneakers; she is in jeans turned up at the ankles and a rain mac. The two of them come round the edge of the beach where the island’s sand dips away towards the forest. We watch them. They are both wet to the knees. Our breathing syncs up: that part we know.
‘We found you,’ the man says.
They have found us.
‘Whoa, there are a lot of you, aren’t there!’
‘You’re safe now,’ the woman says, slowly. ‘I’m Paula. This is Jason.’
‘We’ll show you the way home,’ Jason says. ‘You must be freezing.’
‘Here.’ Paula holds out a hand.
Mabel rolls onto her back. She resembles a pale, uncooked pastry dusted in sugar. She looks up at the sky. She raises her arms above her head and makes a snow angel in the sand.
‘Let’s get you home,’ Jason says.
— No, thank you, Mabel tells him, then to the woman: I know you. I used to clean your mother’s house.
‘Mrs Jeffrey,’ Paula says, reaching for her. ‘If they find you, it won’t be pretty. Please let us help you.’
— Okay, Mabel says, making great sweeping swirls with her arms.
We watch Jason and Paula watching her. ‘Please,’ Paula urges. ‘Better to come with us. Jason and I are the good guys.’
‘We can sort everything out once we’re off the island, hey? Once we’re back?’ Jason says.
— There’s nothing to sort, Vito says. We’ve made our goodbyes.
— Thanks, love, but this is it for us, Eleanor says.
Jason doesn’t seem to have heard. ‘But another day or so and the Freedom Villas people will find you.’
— They won’t find us.
Vito is forceful.
— That is a promise, my dear, Lupita tells her.
Paula opens and closes her mouth. She takes a step back. Jason scratches his head. Sarah has removed her coat and slippers. Her blouse with the delicate blue stripes, made sheer by the water, sticks to her chest. The young ones don’t know where to look. But we are entirely comfortable. This is yet another experience that will become a layer in our brains.
Out to sea a container ship eases through the water, along the line of the horizon. It looks like a toy being pulled by a child.
The waves rock and suck around Ken’s ankles. Lupita moves to his side and they crouch in the shallows, their temples together. We watch them whispering. Lupita leans down and dips her knife into the water, swirls it round.
Little Fly
2015 | Tu Youyou | Physiology or Medicine
Prize motivation: ‘for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria’
see her there, the baby girl on the sand. Above her, her brother sits on a rock with his toes pointed towards the sea. Their parents are nearby. Watch as the woman, her mother, lifts the baby to her face and breathes and kisses, and smiles happiness, and the infant reflects it back, this joy, this love. The man, her father, scoops his hands around her on the sand. He picks up a shell and brings it to his nose then rolls it in his palm.
The baby has a secret.
Just yesterday the baby learnt her name, but today she cannot remember it. She hopes someone (her mother is her favourite) will say it again. She will listen closely and single it out among all the other sounds her mother makes, and try to hold on to it the way her father holds that shell. Her hands are behaving marvellously today – very wriggly and clenchy – and she can almost get them to do what she wants.
Her mother is a beautiful apparition, glinting in and out of her vision. She glows. They watch each other for as much time as the boy, her always-moving brother, will allow. Sometimes the mother appears very suddenly in the baby’s face with a Dooooh! or an Eyaaaah! and that’s fun, especially if she lifts her up and they squish cheeks together. When that happens, the baby never wants her feet to return to the earth. At night, the baby sleeps alone, a little sad to be away from her mother and father, instead tucked up in her own bed tightly. There she dreams of strips of colour that peel away and stream downwards, meaning everything. Like the small breakaway flap on the wallpaper in their kitchen where her parents park her in a bouncer. The baby loves to spend time watching the flap, hoping to rip at it one day, hoping no-one else gets to it first. But neither the bouncer nor the torn paper exists here in this new place. They are on holiday. She hopes the paper is not gone forever.
~
This morning the family sits on one of the resort’s lawns beneath palm trees and eats breakfast from a basket. Across the lawn another boy appears, this one with beautiful brown eyes and black hair neat on his scalp like a cap. He comes to them and bows at the baby’s mother and father, then lays beaded necklaces around each of their necks. Her brother has his fingers on his father’s beads. He wants to follow this unknown child back into the resort. The mother supposes his family works here. The brother unwraps himself from his father’s hand. His father tries to explain that the other boy is working, but that sounds silly. The brother slips off the picnic rug and moves towards the kitchen. He is five, and he wants to play. All the days on holiday where he has played with just his mother and father and his baby sister, which so far had seemed fine, now feel so tedious. A kid his own age is what he needs.
~
Sometimes the baby’s mother opens her mouth and words come out, and the baby replies, giving her opinion, or changing the subject if she wants to point out something that’s been overlooked. Once, the mother wore a ribbon in her hair, tied high in a bow. They must have spoken about it for at least two minutes, the baby sharing her affection and delight at its floppiness and the way it shimmered in the light. Sometimes the baby’s father’s lips part and words come out quickly, but to a tune, which is called a song. The baby has come to recognise her favourites: the ones about lambs, about cake, about apples. She follows these along – coming as they can out of nowhere, her father busy doing something else entirely when he decides a song is what they need. They are all quite lovely – the baby swims and gurgles in their currents.
Often at home, when she knows her brother is playing and lurking about, the baby will stay quiet a little longer in her cot, pretending to be asleep. Make no mistake: she loves him. But the baby must preserve her energy, and her brother likes to jump out from the doorway to yell Bah! when she’s lying on her back on the floor of the kitchen, having a good kick on the rug. A very vulnerable position. Her bedroom is safer: dim with four walls the colour of the sky. The small square window above the rocking chair looks out over a lake in the house that is their real home. In the chair where she drinks milk, she clasps her mother’s breast or her mother’s finger. This is for her mother’s sake, to anchor her to the chair. A grip that says Stay, something the baby can convey with her fingers, and her mother seems to understand.
~
In the morning, after breakfast, the two boys see each other. One has a Coke and offers the other a sip. They kick a ball between them on the gravel behind the boat shed.
‘My name is Oskar,’ her brother says. ‘I’m five.’
‘Arif,’ the other boy says. ‘I’m eight.’
~
At noon the baby and her mother sit by the swimming pool on a sun lounger. Neither is quite ready for a nap yet, although the baby is full and happy, satisfied and sleepy. Above them, the sun disappears behind grey clouds. There is something brewing that the baby does not yet know, a grand and wonderful discovery that will emerge out of chaos.
Quickly. A story.
One that her mother is reading right now in a magazine, while a waiter brings her a glass of beer the colour of honey. A story about another baby, and about the writer Mary Shelley. When Shelley was sixteen she kept a diary. She became pregnant. For three days after she gave birth, she wrote about her baby’s sleeping patterns and how often it fed. What it smelt like (the baby herself notices how hungrily her parents like to smell the top of her head). Then less than two weeks later Shelley wrote: Find my baby dead.
At this line, the mother marks her place in the magazine and lays it down. She rubs the toes of her daughter, who is propped between her legs on the sun lounger, examining the ears of a cloth bunny with her gums. Her mother runs a hand across her warm and fuzzy head. The sun reappears. A tall brown body dives into the water with a splash.
The baby girl does not know this Mary Shelley story yet, of course, but it will be one that she returns to time and again when she is older, having found a book in the library of the first university she attends – a reproduction of Shelley’s diary where she logged her ideas, keeping her thoughts under control while she created chaos on the page. The simplicity of that final line will hit her hard: I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. The next morning she wrote: Find my baby dead. The thundering horror, surely. So quietly.
And years later – many years even after the baby has rubbed her own mother’s toes beneath a hospice blanket and years after her father’s final bony embrace sends her wheeling with thickening panic out to her car to cry – when they read her name, when she collects her medal from the stage of the Stockholm Concert Hall, when the brother who loves her is in the audience, she will recall Mary Shelley’s grief. She will recall the statistics and numbers set against the life she has lived and the research work she herself set out to do. One in four million. One in six thousand. One in eight hundred. One in twelve.
