We both woke up late, and from then on I had the sensation of paddling frantically but going nowhere, like one of those dreams where you're wading through treacle, or quicksand, or like Fred Flintstone's blur of cartoon feet while he and Barney Rubble attempt to drive a stone car which is rooted to the spot. With the added drawback of a sawdust-filled head. After what felt like an interminable amount of time spent running around getting ready, I managed to penetrate the force-field that seemingly surrounded my front door, and eventually dropped my son off at school (late).
During this time, I'd received an SMS via my neighbour, from a mutual friend who had some sad news to pass on. While driving home after realizing I'd left my ukulele behind, instead of heading straight for Tuart Place, I also received a phone call from an old friend with the same news and a little more detail. And so it came to pass that, instead of heading to the beach or the gym for some mermaiding, I spent some time in Fremantle Hospital yesterday after work, saying goodbye to someone whose life is ending all too soon.
Memory is a funny thing. Mine is notoriously unreliable and relies on friends, songs, photographs and smells for detail. I suppose I first met N around 1987, when I'd returned to Perth to study at UWA after living in Melbourne, working in Sydney and travelling around Australia in a Kombi for a couple of years. I can't exactly remember how, but my early memories are of sitting around the kitchen table in our big old share house in High St Fremantle, with my other good friend J (an actress and singer now living in Sydney, she who some years later became my first comedy duo singing buddy), singing Triffids songs. Those were the days of early music and singing explorations. A time in my life when I was floundering a bit, having done none of the grieving or healing I needed to do, but was also struggling to give myself permission to do creative things again, after a long hiatus.
Later, after he had separated from his long-term partner, and I was living in a little gingerbread house in Cottesloe with a colleague from the Reid library where I worked while a student at UWA, N. and I were lovers, briefly and somewhat awkwardly, before reverting back to being 'just friends' again. I guess we needed to get that particular thing out of our system, as you do when you're a twenty-something, with the rest of your life ahead, and are largely unfazed by consequences!
As I lay on a massage table today, desperate to iron out the bumps and corrugations acquired of late, it came back to me how N was a regular client of mine, when I practiced various forms of bodywork mostly for friends and friends of friends. I worked from the living room of my flat, on the second floor of the famous, now long since bulldozed Myuna flats, with it's stunning vista over Rocky Bay and the river in North Fremantle. I recall how I'd set up my bed in what had originally been an open balcony, later transformed into an enclosed space by the windows that had been fitted. It was a divine place to sleep!
N, by co-incidence, later partnered up with someone I was at uni with and caught the bus with sometimes while living in the gingerbread house (she lived with her parents in Cottesloe). For the last several years, they have been living and working interstate and have a four year old daughter. Thanks heavens for Facebook. They invited me to stay with them some years ago, during a brief stopover in Brisbane, but it didn't work out and so I haven't seen them for what seems like ages. How terrible that their recent return to Perth, for the family support that is on offer here from both sides, has had such a difficult outcome. My heart goes out to little M.
At 1pm, I entered a darkened hospital ward after following B's directions, and sat with N for a spell. He was full of morphine, woozy with fleeting moments of lucidity. So I went in, let him know who I was, held his hand until it was uncomfortable for him, then let him drift in and out of sleep and awareness. I silently willed for his passage to be smooth and painless, and for his loved ones to find meaning and comfort in its aftermath.
It's funny the things that touch us and trigger memory. We were joined by several friends and family members, including N's mum who was delighted to be reminded that we used to go to her house to swim in the pool sometimes! Each brought something- photos to attach to a pin-up board that someone had assembled, vases of flowers.
The photos of N playing guitar are what made me weep and sigh. I cannot account for the years, nor can I have them back and I was engulfed by that strange sense of "if only I knew then what I know now, I would have made better use of my time". But life happens as it does, there are no time machines, and we have to stumble on, mistakes and all, with nothing but the memories and the present to sustain us.
The vases of wildflowers equally undid me. I recall the little house that N, who works in the field of environmental science, shared in downtown Fremantle: a tiny, white-painted, stone warders cottage near the old gaol and the police station, right behind the Fly-By-Night Musicians Club. There was always a vase of beautifully-arranged dried wildflowers: hakeas, banksias, wattle, and beautiful Margaret Preston prints adorned the walls with similar motif.
After I'd said my farewell and kissed N goodbye, possibly for the last time, I bumped into both my 'sad news messengers' on the pavement outside the hospital, on their return from lunch at a nearby cafe. I had a good old natter with both, especially B who had flown from Victoria at short notice, was returning that night, but who has invited me to catch up while in Melbourne in two weeks time. He may even bring his teenage daughter, apparently a keen player, to the ukulele festival.
We reminisced about clearing the pine plantations and noxious castor oil trees out at Piney Lakes, and rehabilitation of old mining waste lakes down in Australind, in the late 80s, while he was team leader for a conservation group, and I was a regular volunteer. I asked him if he was still a hoarder and he confessed that yes he still collects many useful objects! We laughed about all the bikes. I myself was the recipient of at least one such 'recycle'. Two other mates and I once borrowed a car from B to go walking down in Walpole-Nornalup national Park. We hit a roo and put a large dent in the fender, which B very graciously repaired in the face of our practical incompetence.
One of the friends, C, a former competitive runner who jogged through the bush to find us some water, had a terrible accident shortly after this and has been a quadriplegic in a wheelchair ever since. He gave me his classical guitar, which he could no longer play and which I had on loan, and which I still have. Such things we could not predict back then, such memories come flooding back when there is someone standing there in flesh and blood to remind me.
B and I, too, had a brief and passionate 'fling' back then, the outcome of an impulsive skinny-dipping detour to Leighton Beach one Summer's night, after we'd been on a date to see a movie at the Somerville. All water under the bridge, and all before he committed to the woman he is still with, the mother of his three now almost-adult children.
He, greyer and distinguishedly bearded but essentially the same, said "you haven't changed a bit", to which I jokingly replied that there was perhaps more of me than there used to be! We were both incredulous about how much time has passed since then. He said to me "I can't believe M (his oldest boy, aged twenty one, who has just completed three years of a degree at Melbourne uni) is older than we were when we first met each other and N!" I needed him to remind me when that was, in order for me to have these recollections, such a blur is my memory! I really look forward to more chats while in Melbourne, if at all possible.
I'm glad I had sung with gusto yesterday, just prior to the hospital visit. It fortified me. We had a particularly great session down at Tuart Place, including a spontaneous rendition of the Macarena, complete with choreography! But in my sleepless-night-tiredness, I struggled as I sang, conducted and played my uke, to remember exactly which songs N and I used to sing together. It was only later, talking to mutual friend and messenger S, who had brought her guitar to the hospital, that I remembered The Triffids, and the expeditions to pubs in the city to hear bands like The Black-eyed Susans. N was very much of that era in Australian music- indie-heading-towards-mainstream live acoustic. Ed Kuepper, David McCombe. Never much of a 'pub person' myself, and with acoustic folk and world music leanings, he and his friends were my introduction to some of those grungy places in the latter half of the eighties.
The afternoon offered very little time for reflection. I picked up my son, who wanted to know why I was a bit subdued, and then made a trip to my local music shop to pick up some things, as well as a brief detour for provisions (Turkish bread, hummous and bargain watermelon). Followed immediately by a productive rehearsal with Uke-Ooh-lala!, my French band, at home, and good news about various aspects of our forthcoming Melbourne trip falling into place. A hurried, improvised meal of bread and dips and fruit, before falling into bed and repeating the wee hours shock wake up phenomenon.
What am I too make of it all? Sweet Old Friend N's days are numbered, for the morphine alone will surely kill him; another Old Friend also has cancer and is reeling from the shock of invasive treatment for it, and yet another Significant Other from the same 'twenty and thirty something' epochs of my life ( also a lover but mostly a friend) died a few months ago from a sudden stroke, aged a little over fifty. Truth is, I hadn't see much of any of them in recent times. We all move on. Becoming a parent late in life has the effect of drifting you from Old Friends whose children are older, or who have none, or who end up living in different cities and precludes seeing them in terms of actual day-to-day sharing. Yet there remains a fondness and familiarity, despite time and distance.
Something has shifted in me, ever so imperceptibly. The world has turned, just a little, on its axis. Some butterflies wings have flapped in a far flung corner of the earth as my Old Friend N's spirit prepares to fly free. Life is taking him away, and there is nothing for it but to let go and say So Long. Onto the next leg of the journey, wherever that takes place. There truly is nothing like 'premature' death to make me take stock of the passage of time and to test my sense of how I feel about things like ageing and seizing the moment. Garfield, meanwhile, helps the tears to flow...
"So Long Old Friend"
The Triffids "Wide Open Road"
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