The real thing
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Catherine Harris
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Catherine Harris' biography and other articles by this writer
Our family's never been very good at ‘family'. When my nephew was conceived my sister and I weren't even speaking, some silly argument about my Northwestern Wildcats T-shirt she'd borrowed when she was sixteen which came back filthy weeks later, torn with a smudge across its logo. At the time she said it was an accident, that I was making too much of it, that the stain would probably come right out if I took it to the drycleaners, their chemicals able to dissolve almost anything (though it never did), besides which, what right did I have to be upset when decades earlier I'd borrowed her copy of The Snow Queen without even asking and then lost it and hadn't even apologised?
That was the same year that Mum chucked out our Fair Isle jumpers, just after we got back from Chicago, eight months into our eighteen-month stay, departing from the bitter chill of the northern winter into the morass of a scorching summer daze, jetlagged and distraught, the searing heat of a Melbourne February no place for woollen cable knits even if they had been hand-made by our grandmother. Days later Mum said she wished she hadn't done it, that they might have made nice keepsakes she'd realised, but by then Dad was well and truly dead, his lithe body rigormortised into its own semi-rigid phase, and it was too late to change her mind: the rubbish had been collected that morning.
My nephew cries intermittently; it starts as a gentle squeak but rapidly intensifies until my sister puts him on her breast. If her breast isn't available he can be temporarily bought off with a little finger to suck (he hasn't been graduated to dummies yet), but that only lasts so long. If he's really hungry, he'll soon want the real thing. I wash my hands extra thoroughly before inserting my pinkie upside-down into his mouth, not wanting to overwhelm his small newborn-baby senses with the aroma of chopped garlic or to spoil his pristine palate with the flavour of spaghetti bolognese or whatever else I have prepared for dinner that evening, shocked that this can even be allowed to happen: ‘Why have they let you out of the hospital?' I ask him as his determined tongue works at my unyielding fingertip. ‘You're way too young to be left alone with the likes of us.' His tiny body rallies around my finger, minute fists clenched against my fist, his head cradled in the palm of my other hand, fiercely latched on the way we all fiercely latch on, grasping for nourishment, ever grateful for those hands. And then, even though his stomach is apparently full of gas, his pained writhing attesting to the fact, he pulls his head away as though in complete agreement and projectile vomits right across my shirt.
I think that's what Dad would have called a definite phase transition. For him everything was molecules and combinations of molecules, the ability of matter to shift from gas or liquid to solid form, and then sometimes back again, holding particular fascination. ‘In some instances you can't even tell which state is which,' I remember him saying. Glaciers being his favourite example, the way they could slip down a mountainside like slow-moving treacle, looking for all the world as solid as brass.
LIKE DAD, THE BABY was touch-and-go for a while. First he took forever to move into the right position and then he got stuck. They waited for him to unstick himself, but he didn't and then his heartbeat faltered. I felt like I was twelve years old again as I watched the heart-rate monitor, staring into the dark, waiting for my father to re-emerge, the sounds of screaming audible off in the distance, then a nurse slamming the emergency button with the flat of her hand, saying we can't guarantee a good outcome here.
This is what happens when you're not paying attention, when the desire to please overtakes natural caution and suddenly you're pregnant or fat or skating on thin ice, the cheap satisfaction of immediate gratification outweighing your ability to see straight, to make sensible decisions, because it's all so new or delicious or your daughters are pleading with you please, one last time, so that even though it's late in the season you know you won't get a chance to do it again for a while (and besides, you're sick of them always saying you're no fun), the tremendous consequences masked by the urgent flurry of it all like vapour lifting off a roiling sea.
Sometimes I still dream about Chicago: we might be carving pumpkins for Halloween, Dad showing us how to find the grain of the vegetable, using his pocket knife to dissect the eyes and teeth, explaining how everything has a natural direction or tendency (even fifteen-pound jack-o'-lanterns); or it might be evening, the four of us sitting around on the couch sipping hot chocolates with marshmallows, Dad saying ain't life grand as candlelight flickers from the jack-o'-lantern, casting great toothy shadows on the living room walls. Other times I might even dream about the duck pond. The snow will have dusted the park fantasy-white and we'll be gliding around in our thick parkas practising skating backwards or performing our newly mastered half turns, laughing about how we'd never be able to do this in Australia, the weather never getting sufficiently cold, and I'll forget all about the softened ice (a freak accident, they said), how it was just waiting to break, that awful cracking sound, and then the sudden hole and Dad falling down in it.