A Bird on My Shoulder (8 page)

Somehow, despite our differences, we managed to find a sense of harmony and oneness of purpose without a great deal of effort. We both valued our independence and it amazed me that we seemed to be able to accommodate each other's needs while still doing pretty much what we liked. The age gap between us seemed immaterial. I was clearly not his equal in either wealth or life experience and yet I never felt anything other than his true companion.

I moved into the family home overlooking Ela Beach, continuing to maintain my office just around the corner. Julian's
family home was a simple fibro building with wooden floors, large walls of louvred windows and glorious views. It was one of the very few remaining Queenslanders left in the city – most were being bulldozed to make way for high-rise apartments.

My new home had even less security than the AAP house. Even though there were bars on all the windows, there was no alarm, no guard, no security lights – there was not even a proper gate. For years, Julian and his family had simply parked in a rocky alcove in the street below and walked up a long, open flight of concrete steps to the house.

This was a complete throwback to the days when Port Moresby was a far safer place for everyone. It also helped that Julian had such a strong sense of confidence in the community of people around him; he simply did not register the same signals of potential aggression that other men appeared to feel.

Although I had become used to living behind barred windows at the AAP house, I knew that it would be even worse to continue to live as a prisoner in my mind as well. So I steeled myself against the frequently expressed fears of other expatriates, and went every day with Julian for a long walk after work. It felt better to be living something more akin to a normal life.

•••

The slow pace of life in Papua New Guinea had taken a while to get used to. When I first arrived, I could not believe
that what I would consider to be a simple daily task, such as going to the bank, could sometimes take two hours. Every transaction had to be checked and double-checked and then written out by hand.

Once I became accustomed to delays, however, I found it easier to surrender to the inevitability of waiting and instead embraced the freedom from the tyranny of the clock that the languid Melanesian pace of life offered. If time was not of great importance, people were. I saw that in Papua New Guinea so many people had time, real time, for one another. Everywhere I went, people were talking, engaging one another in a way I had never witnessed in a more formal Western culture, where people were so much more focused on getting things done. In this very open, tactile society I had felt the reserve of an English upbringing melt away and a greater sense of connection to everyone around me.

Daily life brought me into frequent contact with Nina, Julian's housekeeper, and her husband Maseus, who lived on the same block of land with their two adopted boys, Mok and Manu. They had begun working for Julian and Charmian many years before as a young married couple.

Every morning Maseus went off to work at a nearby apartment building. Nina arrived at the house to begin her morning tasks with quiet, methodical purpose. Everything went in a certain place and if I ever unthinkingly moved an object it
would not be long before she had put it back. I worried that she disliked me and was unhappy about my arrival – it took me a while to realise that beneath her natural reserve there was a loyal and loving person who accepted me completely.

•••

At first, it felt odd to be immersed in a new home belonging still to what I felt was another family. I remember walking into the house alone one day and being so struck – as I never had before – by the overwhelming sense of Charmian's presence; her spirit seemed to permeate every room, drape over every empty chair and hover around the salt-licked picture frames full of smiling faces. It was a benign presence, even strangely comforting.

As I gradually settled in, I frequently came across Charmian's belongings: old medicines in the fridge, tiny silver bells and pendants tucked away in a cutlery drawer. Once I was idly looking through the bookcases and discovered that not only did we have identical collections of poetry and literature but, as we were both writers and editors, had a similar habit of writing pencilled comments in the margins. I would take out these books and peruse her thoughts on and insights into poetry I also loved, carefully deciphering her handwriting which looped and curled with precision on every page.

Charmian was someone with whom I'd had no earthly relationship, yet I was living in the spaces and places, visible
and invisible, where she had lived, sharing in some strange way a very intimate part of her life.

One of Charmian's closest friends had summoned up the courage to speak to me after the wedding, saying how difficult the day had been; she had found it hard to accept that Julian had married again and felt conflicted about her loyalties.

‘The funny thing is,' she said as we meandered to the end of this rather surprising but not uncomfortable exchange, ‘that I think if you'd met you would have been friends. In many ways you are very alike.'

I drove home feeling slightly nonplussed by this conversation. How should I approach or understand this most unusual of relationships? There was no obvious rivalry here and yet irrationally I continued to feel a private unease, as though I had somehow been a heartless usurper. The effects of her absence were tangible.

One evening, when Julian was out, I went onto the veranda with my notebook and pen. Below, on the beach, I could see dark figures huddled at the water's edge and, beyond them, tiny ripples of foam. I lit a candle to repel the mosquitoes and began a letter to Charmian.

When I'd finished, I held the paper at the edge of the candle. There was a small wave of relief as my words slipped away in smoky fragments onto the rising wind above the rocky hillside and out into the fading sky. I could only have faith
that somewhere, somehow, my words would be heard and understood. As I sat lost in thought, a small particle of the letter, no bigger than a thumbnail and only slightly singed, came floating through the air and landed quietly on my arm.

•••

That Christmas we moved to Julian's family farm in the Hunter Valley to await the arrival of the baby. In February I was admitted to hospital in Newcastle, north of Sydney, after a rather exhausting pregnancy; I had contracted malaria again. I discovered I had it for the second time when I began to vomit rather dramatically in the middle of a supermarket.

The labour was life-changing for me, although Julian seemed to take it all in his stride. Of course, he had no real idea of the excruciating pain which was building hour after hour, wave after wave. There was one moment, however, just after midnight, when he had clearly decided a little sleep might be just what he needed and, without any discussion, lay down on the bed, leaving me on the edge of the birthing pool. I was staggered.

‘Get . . . out . . . of . . . that . . . bed . . . right . . . now,' I managed to hiss.

Julian must have heard my barely suppressed hysteria because he immediately came to my side.

I could not get comfortable and moved constantly, trying to follow ML's instructions, which had arrived by fax the previous
evening, to ‘just keep breathing'. There was a terrible moment in labour when I realised there was no going back. Whatever was happening, could not stop. For several hours my body took me on a journey I had never thought possible and while I struggled and cursed, I was also in awe.

I felt myself descend into a long, grey tunnel where all I could focus on was a faint light up ahead. I did not even ask for pain relief, which I had planned to do – I was so busy just getting through each intense second. I remember looking down at the top of Julian's head as he kneeled beside me on the floor and wiped the blood off my legs. In the midst of this extraordinary experience, this was the pinnacle of trust and intimacy between us; never before had I felt so vulnerable and yet so protected.

Finally, in the early morning, our baby boy was born.

A short while later I was lying, battered and pale under a green surgical sheet, when the doors burst open and the jubilant face of Charlie appeared.

‘Where is he? Where's my new brother?' He could not wait to hold him.

Julian was completely elated by the arrival of his fifth son. He shortly came back into the room with a smuggled bottle of champagne – it was 10 am – to let me know he'd called our family in Australia and the UK, and to announce that he had chosen several potential names.

‘I've marked them,' he said, gesturing to the baby name book we had bought the week before.

As Julian already had four sons with decidedly English names, I had been quietly toying with ideas about how we might maintain that tradition. Later, I flipped through the first few pages.

Alphonso, Godwin and Lysander had been given a firm tick.

‘They're quite splendid, aren't they?' Julian said with a confident grin when I asked him about his choices. He then proceeded to give me an explanation of why each name would be perfect.

‘Thirlwall's tough enough,' I replied. ‘You have to constantly explain to everyone how to spell it. You can't be serious about Lysander? That's a lifetime of teasing. There's no way we're going to do it.'

Reluctantly Julian agreed that these rather more florid names might turn out to be a terrible burden for a child. So we named our baby George. Gorgeous George.

10

We'll help you walk on fledgling feet, and laugh

away your tumbling tears, To meet life's dragons

face to face, and overcome your human fears.

Julian soon had to return to Papua New Guinea so I went to Sydney to stay with Jim and Elizabeth Hammond, the parents of two of my closest friends, Meg and Steph. With their quiet support and vast experience – they had six grown children and the first of their nineteen grandchildren – they guided me through the first days of motherhood, keeping me company, and nursing me through yet another bout of malaria.

Luckily for us all, George was a great first baby – contented and easy. Elizabeth advised me to try her time-honoured routine of two daytime sleeps – for the mother as well, when possible – and this became my blueprint for the future. George was so adaptable that even when other plans took over, he simply went back to sleep or lay awake smiling.

I was coping reasonably well, but I had moments of panic, particularly when I was on my own with him; there seemed to be so much to learn. It was overwhelming to realise, when I held George's tiny body in my arms, that after many years of pleasing myself, I was now responsible for another human life.

Julian had seemed quite unfazed by the arrival of a newborn child – this, after all, was his fifth son. But he was not a particularly hands-on carer, as he came from another era, and so when I returned to Port Moresby he decided that his contribution should be to take over the shopping and cooking – something I was quite happy about as he was a much better cook than me.

With a new baby in the house, Nina was transformed. She immediately fell in love with George and, because of him, the two of us grew closer. I observed how carefully she swaddled and carried him, how she soothed him to sleep. Sometimes I would watch from the window as she sat under our mango tree, quietly rocking George in her lap when he would not settle. And later, as she walked up into the sunlit house, I could see her stroking his hair and hear her humming to him.

Alongside ML, who I visited in the Solomon Islands two months after George was born, Nina became my main model of motherhood; my own family was really just too far away. She showed me through her actions how to care for a young baby. I tried to emulate her example and find within myself
the unique quality of deep tranquillity that so many mothers in Papua New Guinea seemed to possess. I never achieved it.

Nina had never been to school so could not read or write; her wisdom came from a much older, less fragmented place. For so many years she had brought order and consistency into Julian's family life and had looked after all of the older boys from a young age. Even many years after Charmian gave birth to their youngest son, Edward, in Port Moresby General Hospital, Nina would speak about him as if he were her own flesh and blood.

‘
Bebi bilong mi
. My baby,' she would say about Edward with shy pride. And now George, also ‘my baby'.

•••

When George was about six months old, we went to England. It was wonderful to take him home to see my parents, my sister Libby and her children and my ageing grandmother, Granberry, who was now in her nineties. Charlie was travelling through Europe and also came to stay with us. After about three weeks, the holiday ended and Julian went on to Brazil to see Henry, who was on a student exchange, while I stayed in the UK to spend more time with Libby and her three young children, Hannah, Beatrice and Samuel. Florence was to come later.

When Julian and I were reunited in Sydney a fortnight later, however, I was surprised to see him walking slowly with a slight stoop.

‘You're not going to believe this,' he said as we threw his bag into the back of the car. ‘I sneezed on the plane and I think I've cracked a rib.'

I laughed. That was ridiculous. ‘It's not like you to be a hypochondriac,' I teased.

I soon felt bad for making light of his injury as it became clear that he really was in a lot of discomfort. The next day he organised to see a doctor who confirmed his diagnosis. It was strange to think he had done such damage due to something so seemingly trivial.

After we returned to PNG and the pain had subsided, we both shrugged off the incident as one of those inexplicable events and, once Julian had fully recovered, I thought no more about it.