A Bird on My Shoulder Read online

  Lucy Palmer is an award-winning journalist and documentary maker, author and editor.

  Her most recent endeavour has been as the ghost writer of Playing the Game: Life and Politics in Papua New Guinea by Sir Julius Chan.

  Lucy lives in the Southern Highlands of NSW with her children, and is happily imperfect in every way.

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Lucy Palmer 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Arena Books, an imprint of

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781743311530

  eISBN 9781743433973

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Lisa White

  Cover illustration: Marisa Redondo

  For my children, George, Charlotte and Meg—

  May you live in your father’s light.

  Contents

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Part Two

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  part one

  COME TO BED

  Come to bed, you say,

  I love you.

  Across gloomy planets,

  Great caverns of loss,

  You strode towards me.

  Our hearts burst with hope.

  Your children love you and

  Light your way.

  Come to bed, you say,

  I adore you.

  Pale clouds are surging

  Over the pitted moon,

  The house sighs

  As I hear you roll over.

  While you sleep, your children dream

  Your forgotten dreams.

  Come to bed, you say,

  I need you.

  The news of your cancer

  Like gnarled, dirty fingers, has

  Snuffed out the sun

  Of our long life together.

  Sensing this emptiness

  Your children are afraid.

  Come to bed, you say,

  Just hold me.

  Those white pills I took

  To save some of my life,

  Have robbed me

  Of my spirit for a while.

  Your children love you

  And understand your fears.

  Come to bed, I say.

  I need to be near you.

  My life is yours.

  Let me pour blue water

  On your softest head,

  To heal you, honour you,

  My beloved husband.

  Your children meet your gaze

  And enfold you.

  Come to bed, I say,

  Comfort me.

  The arid desert winds,

  The great lonely spaces

  I wept as I walked this ravaged land.

  I prayed that you were coming

  To help me find my peace.

  Your gentleness and strength

  Have freed your children from bitterness.

  Come to bed, I say,

  Let us feast on every moment.

  Death may be roving,

  Seeking his prey. Let him.

  The life that you gave me

  Has lit me forever,

  Soothed my thirsting spirit.

  Strong from your loving,

  Your children walk the world.

  1

  The acacia pod in my hand is like a tiny sturdy boat;

  two split points of its prow taper into air. It offers

  itself, lies open like a raw, grieving heart.

  Ten years ago, my husband became a mystery.

  In a breath, a living man vanished and became ethereal, eternal.

  On the day of Julian’s funeral, I remember a bright sun splashing on a lawn and the faint hint of fading blossoms on tall trees. There were drinks and food on a long table, Julian’s four adult sons, Oliver, Charles, Henry and Edward, talked with family friends in small, animated groups. Our three young children scampered around the garden and swung in the hammock, innocent and seemingly free of anguish.

  To an outsider, it might have looked like a lovely party; it should have been another of the many celebrations we shared in our brief six years together.

  Later, when everyone had gone, I opened our wardrobe. There were Julian’s clothes, some still laden with his familiar scent, and row upon row of now utterly redundant medicines. In our bathroom was his partly worn toothbrush, his shoes neatly placed outside the door.

  Everything unchanged; yet everything transformed.

  Overnight, my marriage changed into a relationship more akin to a journey of faith. Trying to remain close to Julian, once so effortless, turned into the desolate reality of his uninhabited silence. Like a desperate appeal to an invisible God, I hoped that he could still hear me, that we were still loved. Surely he had not just abandoned us – it could not be.

  So I would listen for his voice and sometimes, I believed, I heard it. I would search for him in every crowded street, often convinced that I had just caught the flash of his old oilskin coat or the back of his head as he rounded a corner and disappeared out of sight.

  I would walk alone in our orchard at night and wail like a madwoman, feeling no separation between the empty, cavernous sky and my own soul. At other times I felt a sense of hope restored, momentary flashes of intuitive certainty that Julian was still here, helping me in ways that I simply could not see.

  Grief was the door that opened into a fathomless abyss, where the way was long, dark and lonely. It smashed so many certainties, and, for a while, severed me from myself: it was the crude cut between our old life and a brave new world without Julian. All the buried pain I had ever felt and tried to forget became tumbling rocks in an unstoppable torrent.

  Grief was also, eventually, the friend that quietly showed me all the illusions of my life and gave me the capacity to rebuild on stronger foundations.

  •••

  Today the auspicious anniversary of ten years has arrived. A manufactured milestone perhaps, but significant nonetheless. I stand in the kitchen stirring a pot of soup, thinking back over this long decade; a blur of memories has been smeared across the pages of so many indifferent days.

  The clock ticks soundlessly towards the hour of Julian’s death as our teenage children, George, Meg and Charlotte, mill around the kitchen.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ asks Char
lotte.

  ‘It’s either the soup or the chicken,’ I reply.

  ‘Smells a bit burned,’ she says.

  It’s a family joke that my cooking skills, kindly put, are rather basic.

  ‘It’s not burned,’ says Meg, coming to my rescue. ‘It’s caramelised!’

  The wood fire in the family room crackles and spits, emanating warmth and safety. Our old dog, Stig, lies in front of the fridge, happily oblivious to everyone stumbling around him.

  Have you seen my diary?

  I’m sure I put my iPod down here.

  Can I go to Sydney on Saturday?

  I had been wondering for several weeks how I might honour this day. Should I take flowers to Julian’s grave, share the day with special friends, or perform some kind of private ritual? But when the morning arrived and the children had gone to school, I sat outside with a bland sun resting on my face and realised I simply wanted to be left in peace, to look back in solitude across the years from the vantage point of time passed and emotions softened.

  I have said nothing to the children about this day. Rightly or wrongly, it seems a kinder legacy. Not having Dad in their lives has been devastating enough and I do not want to remind them.

  I continue to stir the pot and, in the quiet rhythm of our evening rituals, I think of Julian, the ever-present absence in our lives.

  A shadow moves briefly beside me, quiet and purposeful. For a fleeting moment, I feel a light weight like a familiar loving hand resting briefly on my shoulder. My heart fills and my breathing slows. Immediately a thought flies in – don’t be ridiculous.

  And yet the feeling lingers for a few seconds more. I knew Julian better than I knew anyone, and even after all these years, I still know what it feels like when he is near me though the moment passes, I allow myself to believe that something of his spirit is here. Still here.

  After a rather lacklustre dinner we play our favourite word game – a round of Bananagrams at the hastily cleared table. Despite my best efforts, George wins. He grins with quiet pride – he knows I never concede a victory. Meg and Charlotte run off to their bedrooms, giggling at a private joke, keen to escape the washing-up. George is not far behind.

  And so this day, which had for months loomed before me like a terrible wall, crumbles into another ordinary evening.

  I sit by the fire, Stig at my feet. The telephone rings but I have no desire to speak. The answering machine clicks into life and I hear the voice of Joan, the mother of my close friend Mary-Louise, calling from Melbourne.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she says. ‘Just wanting you to know that we are thinking of you tonight and sending our love. We’ll raise a glass to Julian over dinner. God bless.’

  •••

  Eventually I force myself to leave the comfort of the fire and settle into bed, looking out of the window to the east, where the moon is up. Occasionally, when there are storms at sea, I sit up and watch the slashes of unexpected light. Tonight it is bright and clear.

  Julian died here late at night on 28 September 2001.

  On my bedside table is a dried-out acacia pod which I picked up on a recent bushwalk with my friend Celeste. Walking with her is a balm to my soul as we fall into a simple and companionable rhythm, sometimes talking, sometimes not. Near the end, we always stop and sit by the river and eat while the churning water washes our ghosts away.

  I pick up the pod and hold it in my open hand – inside there is a shrivelled seed.

  Before it fell to earth, this pod’s purpose was hidden, inner work; it plucked life from the empty air, the shallow sun, the panting earth. Perhaps the seeds already knew what they would be, dreaming on those long soaking days, visions of a tree, wiry and taut. I, too, still dream of the woman I am becoming; here, tight down, where nothing, I hope, can break me.

  Turning the pod over, I see its shadow side. Dark stains of brackish water have pooled along its wavering ridge; it is damaged, blemished, altered from innocence.

  In these years I too have come to know my own darkness. For a long time my inner world became like furniture in an abandoned home, covered in dusty, grey sheets. There were times when I no longer had any certainty that the day would come or the night would follow, and nor did I care. I wondered how I would ever survive, care for our children, or find a moment’s happiness again.

  One of the dominant emotions I’ve wrestled with has been guilt that the children no longer had a father. Like all guilt it has an irrational component; I know I did everything within my power to save Julian’s life and to prolong it – as did he. But the regret remains.

  The fact that Julian was so much older than me had never been an issue between us when we were together; after he died it haunted me.

  ‘How old was he?’ was often the first question that strangers would ask.

  ‘He was sixty-three,’ I’d reply. I could see them making a quick mental calculation. Oh, but you’re so much younger. Interesting.

  ‘Oh, well, he’d had a good life then,’ they would say with a hastily processed smile.

  Yes, Julian had had an amazing life and no doubt people said such things to be consoling, or to assuage their own unspoken fears. But whatever his age, he was still the soul mate I had lost, the man I ached for. And surely the more salient point was that seven precious children were now without a father.

  •••

  The clock ticks steadily, punctuating my thoughts. Without my even noticing, the hands have moved past the hour. I sigh with relief – the tenth anniversary has come and gone. There has been no trauma, no tears.

  Next to my bedside lamp is a photograph of Julian with his arm around my shoulder, the warm glow of a late-summer afternoon falling on our faces.

  I look more closely at the image and try to conjure the wider remembrances of that day, of that life so long ago, but memories can be fickle. Over the years I have collected an amalgam of truths, of impressions, more like the colourful strokes of an urgent brush; sensory fragments, all distorted by time.

  Sometimes the recollections are more acute, but often as I strain to preserve the thought and hold it up to the light, the moment dissolves. So many good memories became all but obliterated when Julian died; perhaps the only way is to try to paint the past with my imperfect words.

  I settle back in bed with a clean pad of paper resting on my lap. It is time to be with him. I begin to write, edging quietly towards the familiar stillness of the night, overwhelmed by all I want to remember and everything I would rather forget.

  2

  Once upon a time I surrendered to love; my heart

  opened as the warm night enclosed me. I was young,

  willing to be shaken, to bear with fresh, open eyes

  all the truths that would, in time, unfold.

  It was 13 March 1995. I was lying on my bed under a creaking ceiling fan in my Port Moresby home, pale and weary from a mysterious stomach bug and trying to think of a way to get out of the evening’s party.

  ‘We have to go,’ said my friend Ros Nougher, cranking open the rusting louvred windows.

  I had first met Ros in Sydney six years earlier, after I had arrived from the UK and found my first job at Australian Associated Press. She took me on as a personal project and introduced me to everyone she knew; within months I had become part of her extended community.

  I sat up. ‘Do we really?’

  Ros held out a packet of painkillers, smiling at me. ‘Yes, we do. I’ve only got two more days here. And you’ve got to go – it’s your job.’

  I sighed and took the tablets from her hand.

  ‘Anyway, you never know who you might meet,’ she said, raising her eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ I shot back. ‘Not interested.’

  •••

  I had come to Papua New Guinea because of an inexplicable obsession that began when I was thirteen. It was 1976 – the year after the fledgling South Pacific democracy had gained independence from Australia – and I was sitting almost 20,000 k
ilometres away, with my back against a hot radiator, idly leafing through an encyclopaedia in my local library in Kidderminster, England. I loved going to the library. It had an appealing musty smell and carved mahogany balustrades and, in every corner, wrought-iron spiral staircases leading to a mezzanine level.

  Papua New Guinea. The description was brief and the photograph was grainy but it was enough: remote villages in tropical forests, men and women adorned in ceremonial feathered wigs, furs and grass skirts. It appeared a more natural world, free of manufactured ugliness, a world as far away from my own reality – an industrial town in middle England in the mid-1970s – as I could imagine.

  I was captivated by the idea of another life, in a world with a long, uninterrupted vista of the past. We had our own history, of course: so much of it. I caught the bus to high school from Chester Road, still as straight and purposeful as the Romans had intended. From our house I looked across long-established fields where the vast course of English history, from Viking invasions to medieval life, from despotic kings to the Industrial Revolution, had played out over centuries of turmoil and change.

  Perhaps it was the sense of a less fragmented, more traditional society which appealed so deeply to me. Perhaps it was the lure of an island paradise. I really cannot explain it. I only know that PNG became the place I most wanted to live. If, as Graham Greene said, there is ‘always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in’, then this was surely that moment for me.

  Shortly after I arrived home that day to our small two-bedroom house on the outskirts of town, I announced to my parents that I would be going to live in PNG one day.

  ‘Mmm, excellent,’ my father said from behind The Guardian.

  •••

  After a disastrous first attempt at passing my university entrance exams, in 1982 I finally won a place at the Polytechnic of Central London to study what was then one of the very few degrees in television and radio journalism in the UK.

  My older sister Libby, who was also studying in London, rang me one day to say she’d heard that the Commonwealth Institute had invited groups of dancers from the South Pacific to perform at a festival in Kensington. ‘There’s a group from Papua New Guinea,’ she told me. I decided to make a radio documentary about them as part of my degree.