A year in review, part one: Family

My son was with me for the end of 2019. We walked down to the harbour and watched the fireworks. 

It was quite cool; at 8.30pm it was 20 degrees Celsius. At 8.40pm an inflatable dinghy motored eastward with two men on board and three minutes later they returned to pass by where the two of us stood on the boardwalk. They cruised up and down beyond the perimeter of the raised wooden deck – it sits on pylons driven into the harbour floor – on which people were standing while, out in the bay, a launch with the word “maritime” painted on its sides approached boats that had gathered in the strait, and people on board spoke to their occupants, presumably making sure they were operating safely and legally. 

Onshore a crew had put up a metal fence, in preparation for the fireworks, to stop people from getting too close to the deck’s edge. A security guard kept coming along and telling people not to lean on the barrier as, he said, it wasn’t fastened at this point (we were adjacent a set of wooden steps going down to the waterline), adding that the fence might give way if you leaned against it. He told my son not to lean on it and, later, he said a similar thing to a woman who’d sidled in to stand just in front of us.

At 9pm fireworks started in Darling Harbour and we could see them from where we stood. A PA system was pumping out music and someone announced that the main event would be delayed (I found out later this was due to high wind). People stood in small groups made up of families and/or friends and everyone held aloft their digital devices, capturing the display in the sky, and making a seer of J.G. Ballard who, in the 1970s, had anticipated that everyone would be editing the rushes of their lives each day although he had no idea that smartphones and social media would exist or how they would function. The show finished at 8.23pm.

I had spent the day with Vivian visiting my mother’s and my grandmother’s (his grandmother’s and his great-grandmother’s) place of interment or, at least, where their ashes had been placed after they died. The brick wall where this was done is at St Peter’s Anglican church in Watsons Bay, where I’d gone to kindergarten and where I’d been married. Having dutifully acknowledged memories of our ancestors we went in the car to Bondi Junction and shopped for clothes. We got a jacket, some windcheaters, a T-shirt, and some boxer shorts, then made our way outside in heavy traffic. 

Vivian is dreamy and, looking at things he might want to buy, will wander off in the store if you don’t monitor him. He tries on a lot of things on before making up his mind; I’d noticed this propensity when we’d gone shopping, on other occasions, in Japan. He doesn’t talk much and he likes cars and spectator sports. He goes to the gym a couple of times a week and plays tennis with colleagues and customers once a week. He also goes surfing from time to time. He is a good-natured young man who reminds me of my father. 

I had fun getting to know him again. He’s a bit self-centred but absent-mindedly so. On his last day he bought a Moncler down jacket and later I drove him to the airport so that he could go home. 

This year, my daughter had planned to come to spend an extended period of time in Australia – with her boyfriend, naturally – but the virus took the form of a spanner in the works, so in June she approached the consulate in Tokyo in order to find out what he would need in terms of a visa. She also approached a travel agent with questions.

In the end Adelaide and Ryo decided to get married. Vivian signed the application form as a witness and on 27 July they took the completed documents to the city council. When I asked her, once the decision had been made, if she was happy, she said, in a mixture of English and Japanese, that she was very happy: “sugoku happy yo.” When I told family members what had happened almost without exception they congratulated me, which I found puzzling as I’d had very little to do with it. I decided, however, to accept the wisdom of the crowd. Who was I to say it had not been a success if she was so much at ease?

The new house (see section four of this chronicle, ‘Furniture and fittings’) could also be a part-time home for my daughter and her husband. In October I started a process for him to get a partner visa, by asking Grant, a friend, to help with the legal side of things. Later the same month Adelaide asked me to set up an online domain for her, and to help with managing her art business; putting in place an email address would be the next step. We managed to do this and in the first half of November I helped her with communication required by an approach from a major music label that wanted to use her designs in some promotional material it planned to commission. Employees of the company had asked for Adelaide to be the person to do the work, and she got the job in early December with the first draft due in early January.

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At the end of the calendar year I was coming to terms with my personal demons. Even after mum died I still thought about the day, when I was 17 years old and I phoned my father after coming home from school – he was still in his office – to tell him I wanted to give up the study of French. The fact that I called him at this time on a weekday should have been an indication to him that I was worried about what his response would be and that, instead of confronting him at home, I preferred to pose the question to him when we were in separate rooms. 

Indeed, separate buildings and suburbs. The reason for the question being asked in the first place was due to something out of my control. At school my timetable offered a puzzle, since classes for art and French had been scheduled to take place on the same day at the same time. As it happened, I excelled at both and would have felt heartbroken to eliminate either from my schedule due to the pleasure they bequeathed to me in my adolescence, a time that is for everyone filled with what appear to be complex and pressing questions. Dad made it clear to me that he didn’t want me to give up French, so I didn’t, instead breaking a bond of trust with my art teacher who said to me, when I told him what dad had said, “You are crazy.” 

It might have been “That’s crazy”, I can’t precisely remember. Not remembering is, itself, a recurring source of disappointment lying on top of countless others that became my inheritance on the day I dutifully acceded to my father’s wishes. As it turned out, the decision my father made that day literally drove me mad (it should be water under the bridge by now, but is not), and while I’m more interested, these days, in what lies on this side of it – I don’t let bygones ruin my party – I did think about these things once I’d decided to move house to a place where I could paint.

Mum had also come back to haunt me, but this had been earlier in the year. At the end of May or the beginning of June I had occasion to view YouTube – my computer’s sound wasn’t working, the little icon in the task bar said, so I went to the website to check if it was true – and as an offshoot of this activity watched part of a video I’d made on Anzac Day 2016 using a phone app called Periscope. In those days I would sit with mum in the park near her nursing home and, on occasion, take out my phone in order to make a video of her talking. 

“Hello darling!” mum says as we sit on a bench in the park outside her nursing home. “How are you?” I ask. “Fine. It’s a beautiful day,” she enthuses. “Having a good time?” I ask rather prosaically, suspicious of her tone of voice. “Yes, I am.” “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” “It’s a lovely day,” she agrees, then segues immediately into this: “I think I’ll stay here till I cark.” I laugh woodenly, taken aback by her verbal sally.

Though not really: in truth I’d half expected an expression of despair. “Stay where?” I ask then, ready to catch her off-guard with a sally of my own. “Where I am now,” she replies, not remembering that it was a nursing home. “In the nursing home?” I offer, triumphant. “Yes,” she says with a downward lilt in her voice as though I had read her mind and what she harboured there was, if not depressing, then slightly regrettable or, even, shameful. “You always say that,” I reply, disturbed and dismayed by the sudden bout of honesty coming from the person sitting opposite me. “Do I?” she says, with an upward lilt to fit the question she’s asking; there’s no hint of malice, just puzzlement at learning, suddenly, something she hadn’t known before. “I must feel carky,” she deadpans ironically, with a flat delivery she used to use when she was making a joke that she was (characteristically) too modest to find funny herself. But there is, in her final delivery, recorded there, a worldliness equal to acceptance, as though her living in a nursing home was not surprising, given the circumstances – at the time the video was made she wouldn’t have remembered all the details – and, in any case, her voice also seemed to suggest, there was nothing to be done about it; life was sometimes like that.

She followed my lead. What would be the point of complaining?

But it had been my lead to follow, as she evidently remembered. The video filled me with dismay as she had passed away not long after it was made, in fact she would be dead just over three months later. By 2020, or even earlier, I’d begun sometimes to regret putting my mother in a nursing home. Would I, myself, want to go into one if I was as old as she had been when, in September 2014, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome (a blood disease similar to leukaemia, but less severe), a second diagnosis – on top of the one for dementia that had come to us in March 2014 – and a kind of existential punctuation mark, like a comma if not a full stop? 

When had her life ended? What role did I play in her death? Must I now chastise myself? Must I tell other people not to put their parents or grandparents into nursing homes? Must I atone? How? To what gods? What kinds of sacrifices could suffice for the purpose of expiating the loss of another’s life? 

It became clear to me that this sadness might not even end with my own death. Another thing that became clear, on the day before Christmas Eve, was that the betrayal I’d experienced would never cease to dog my footsteps but that it was of a type that you cannot evade. People, I came to realise, will always put their own priorities before your own. They will always feel sorry for themselves so that betrayal can appear to be natural. They will always privilege their stories at the expense of your own. The endless cycle of horror, pain, and suffering that threatens always to engulf us with its cloying web is actually the thing that liberates us from responsibility, so we live perpetually behind a mask and we steer a careful course among rocks, taking every opportunity given to us by the wind or the tides to stay clear of snarls. 

As drivers in traffic always seek out an empty space, and change lanes to avoid the guy turning right, we slip around obstacles in our quest for progress but our ultimate aim is to survive. In order to be more effective we deprecate the suffering of those around us, for whom a loss is our gain. 

For those unfortunate enough to be more fortunate than us, we reserve a special type of malice. If you give ground, in the hope of avoiding it, beware the backlash as your reticence is converted into hubris by those near you. There is no level low enough that allows you to avoid the claws of someone trying to drag you down to their level. As well, I thought about how I had done everything in my power, when I was living with my family as a child, to support my father and mother – but my father especially – and to give them all the honour and love that I felt was due to myself.

Thus, virtue became a form of selfishness (or selfishness a virtue).

I was changed by the transformation that resulted from evading the snares people put in my way, made more robust though my youth has escaped along with the intervening years. I am destined to wander the fields outside the walls of convention despite my brother’s accusations – he’d often called me “conservative” when we were both young – and those of people who called themselves friends. 

I’m also the survivor of terrible experiences, things I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. Always alone but searching for someone to be with, someone to share my strange enthusiasms, my dreams of spires and cities, or tall cliffs and flat rivers flowing, gentle, down the barest of inclines toward the hallowed resort of the boundless sea. For Christmas – in the absence of my mother’s appointments and ministrations – I managed with friends to escape too much melancholy, though it was still a trial to get through the day and its effects lasted well into Boxing Day.