NIGHT IS SO QUIET HERE at the farm that sometimes I can hear the wilder ocean on the Tallow Beach side of the lighthouse, heard first by the hill on the other side of the dam and then relayed to me. This morning, though, I cannot hear the ocean.
Last night I dreamed a man dressed in a rabbit suit came into our house in Brisbane and shot everyone but me. I don’t remember who was there but I’m sure it wasn’t David or Otis. They are still sleeping in the other room.
I half woke at first, my back locking up, a winch running through me from my heart to my hand. I couldn’t breathe; the air would not go into my lungs. The man in the rabbit suit will kill me. That’s what he has come for.
I had to wake myself up completely so I could breathe. I have been sitting on the veranda since then, waiting for the dawn.
When I was in Canada on a writing residency some years back, I had a lunchtime conversation with one of my colleagues, a poet whose sister had been murdered years before. We were at the Banff Centre for the Arts and our dining room window looked out to the Rocky Mountains I had always wanted to see. I looked at those mountains as my poet colleague told her story.
The poet was writing about her sister’s death. She was worried that when her book came out, people would ask her questions she didn’t want to answer. You can tell them it’s fiction, I said—blithely, I realise now. For she could no more call her sister’s brutal murder fiction than I can call what happened in my life fiction. You don’t have to talk about the book, another colleague said. The fact you wrote it is enough.
I left the lunch table, blithe still, wondering why on earth my poet colleague was writing about what happened to her and her family around her sister’s death. I thought she was too close to her experience, wouldn’t do it justice. The writing will be terrible, self-conscious, I said to myself, shaking my smug head. At least I’ve got the sense to stick to novels. She was a wonderful poet, spare and breathing. I wondered why she would do what she was doing.
We all read from our work in progress in Banff. My poet colleague read a piece from her memoir. It remains for me the most powerful writing I have ever experienced. It was a piece about the city of Toronto, the map grid, and how the search for her sister’s body proceeded along the gridlines. It left me breathless, like I had been punched.
When her book came out, my colleague sent me a copy. I had emailed her out of the blue to tell her what her reading had meant for me, how I’d been trying to write about my own experience but had struggled to find my voice. She sent me a quote from the American poet Louise Bogan. ‘No woman should be shamefaced about giving back to the world, through her art, a portion of its lost heart.’
I do not know how my poet colleague managed interviews about her book. Her sister’s death could bring tears to her eyes over lunch, could bring tears to all our eyes when she read from her work. When she sent me a copy of her book, I wrote her saying what I’d thought that day after lunch, how hopeless her project seemed to me, and that when I heard her read I knew how I’d misjudged her power, how her writing was a gift to the world.
I understand now my colleague’s fear and compulsion. This happened, this was done, she was saying in her work. I must honour my sister, honour myself.
I sometimes wish my life had been another life, that I’d followed the trajectory that fierce ten-year-old girl at the pool was on. She might have looked at my teacher and her husband and screwed up her nose and laughed and run away. She might never have gone where I have been.
I wonder too what my teacher and her husband will make of this story, if it finds them. Will they see what harm we did, what harm they did, or will they be furious, call me on the phone and say, How dare you, after all we did for you? Or dress up in a rabbit suit and come and shoot me.