When Eve first started practising yoga, while Billy was in his teens, she concentrated on her breathing. She breathed out despair and fear and worry; resolve and daring and hope she breathed in. She felt her nerves, like her limbs, grow gradually more supple. Her ability to resist expand.
Now the blood of pride rose to her cheeks as she watched Billy plant his feet firmly in his mat. He looked away from her for an instant, to observe a nonverbal African American friend, who was warming up beside him. The three of them, Eve and Billy and his friend, would agree on every session’s poses beforehand on the Toughbook. Most often, like today, they started in mountain pose, drew down their shoulders, lifted their heads, engaged their thighs, and breathed easy.
Yoga was about progress, as Eve’s instructor had once said. Stretching a little further, breathing a little easier. Relinquishing, inch by inch, the false comfort of bad posture – and even worse habits of thought. It was about the union of mind and body. It most definitely was not about perfection. Hearing this, Eve had been reminded of a Bible verse, Matthew 5:48, she had often pondered: ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.’
And remembered, too, that the Koine Greek for ‘perfect’ could be translated differently: ‘Be whole … as your heavenly father is whole.’
Coming out of the mountain pose, Billy went straight into the tree: he shifted his weight to his right foot, lifted the left by degrees and brought it to his inner right thigh. The small movements were fluent and full of grace. Years of yoga had made him attentive to the language of bodies – how the cocking of a head, the pirouette of a wrist, the minutest shifts in posture can speak louder than words. He could follow what they said. Here in the barn he stood and stretched in his element. The shared air came warmly through his nose and out his mouth. His hips were square, his gaze steady. As he raised his arms skywards – the palms meeting above his head – he kept his balance.
His mother stood back to take in the scene. The way in which she was holding her body, he understood, said everything. Her smile blossomed on his lips.
Amanda
About the accident she would remember very little. Crowds of travelling elbows to dodge. The distraction of public announcements. The rush and rush and rush and then, bam, an unimaginable wall. And then nothing.
She came round to a high-pitched alarm wailing above her head – a remorseless flood of ugly, discordant sound pummelling her eardrums. She became irritated by the commotion it was making. What on earth could have kicked it off? she wanted to say to someone. In all her life she had never heard anything so horrendous.
What she had thought an alarm was in reality her own screams as they broadcast her shock and pain and confusion. She could feel the tiny tremors from feet running in her direction as she lay on the ground. She must have lost consciousness again, because the next thing she knew she was sitting who knew where and being talked to very slowly. She did not recognise the voice – a nurse? a doctor? – and then the realisation of where she was leapt into her mind. The thought flew her hand to her forehead – a long narrow gash above her left eyebrow had needed four stitches. That meant blood. Blood, whatever red looked like, mucking up her face, streaking her jacket. Strewth, she had to be a sight to behold.
And yet she felt unafraid on account of another person in the room, this one familiar. Ah, the sense of Bruce beside her, gentle, reassuring Bruce. She could tell as she listened carefully to his presence that no harm had come to him, as it had to her, though they had been together at the moment of impact.
She listened around, taking in her surroundings. It was a rectangular room with one table in the corner, a small compact table by the sound of it. No windows that she could hear.
Questions from the low, brusque voice – the same or a different one? – she answered incompletely. She could give her name when asked, Amanda Tink, but not her date of birth.
‘How old are you?’ the stranger asked her and she tried to recollect and said, ‘I don’t know.’ She was too big to be a girl, too smooth-skinned to be middle-aged.
Tears started down her cheeks.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the voice, ‘it’ll come back to you.’ The voice belonged to a man, a medic of some kind. He told her that the blow to her head had left her with a concussion. She’d want to take it easy for a time, put her legs up, lots of rest often being the best medicine. Words to that effect.
But Amanda’s attention remained elsewhere. She racked her brains until it came to her. Thirty-seven. She was thirty-seven. Of course she was. A postgrad student at WSU. One brother, a year older; parents, long divorced. Sydney, her home where she formed a couple with Bruce. She had moved to the city, oh, when was it? Her mind meandered between taller and shorter years, dates pictured in flittering dots of Braille: 2007? 2009? 2009.
She wanted to think some more, keep up the remembering, but a great weariness came over her and she let her head slump to her chest.
It was evening when Amanda and Bruce were led out of the hospital. No sun on their skin, a needling chill in the air, the chill you feel standing too long at an open fridge door, the chill of a late-day breeze in June. Midwinter in their part of the country.
She found the apartment as she had left it but not, in the weeks that followed, its environs. Not the nearby mall, where she had shopped a hundred maybe a thousand times before, and which seemed now to take a perverse pleasure in retreating its stores, withholding them from her – the deli, the chemist’s, the supermarket – shuffling them around. What had been a mile return trip became a marathon. To get her bearings, her confidence up, she resorted to playing back in her mind the steps gingerly trodden, the turns taken, the oddly placed poles that turned into people when she approached, men and women standing with their eyes glued to their phones. Once, feeling unequal to the trek, she tried calling a taxi and found it overwhelming. Bruce squeezed her hand extra tight when she told him. The whole intricate business of phoning and explaining and waiting, she said, had made her head swim.
Pills helped some, for the pounding headaches. Shame there were no pills for the piano that played fourth octave B over and over again, and that only she could hear – an unfortunate side-effect that would clear up fast, or else linger on and on, for all the neurologist knew. At the initial consultation the cross-sounding lady behind her keyboard had said, ‘Five nine zero three eight.’ She meant for Amanda to remember the numbers and recite them back to her.
‘Five,’ said Amanda. ‘Nine.’ She could hear the tone of doubtfulness creeping into her voice. ‘Zero,’ she continued, less and less persuasively. ‘No, eight.’ She rubbed her hand over her forehead and felt the Band-Aid above her eyebrow. ‘No, sorry, zero’. The right angle of raised dots that pulsed in her mind’s eye resembled a zero, she decided, more than it did an eight.
And as she hesitated and stammered, struggling now even to tell a zero from an eight, she thought how easily she would have repeated back all those numbers before. How securely she would have tucked them away in a fold of her mind, just as if she had been doing it all her life. Which, come to think of it, she pretty much had. Telephone numbers and details in books, flight schedules and train times, anniversaries and birthdays. Those of family and classmates and colleagues all coming to her as naturally as her own. Her powers of recall had long been commented on admiringly. The fruit of talent but also of necessity, for where would she have been without them? Someone might come up and greet her in the street and she would instantly put a name to the voice. A conference on disability advocacy might ask her to speak at a moment’s notice and she would have every fact and figure published in its pamphlet, and those not published in it, at her fingertips. And all thanks to the same powers that had long ago taken her out of Rochedale, a little suburb south of Brisbane, to study media at university, and from university into the office of People with Disability Australia, 750 kilometres away, in Sydney.
That had surprised precisely no one in her circle, knowing how she had always intended to go far. Distance had never held any fear for her, nor the ever-changing space around her body that her senses probed. Good as a guide dog when it came to finding her way around a park, out of a building or across a busy road. No longer. Now, such recollections of her past self were like the memories of some other person.
At least she was happy, more than happy, to lie down and rest just as she had been advised. Indeed, she slept like nobody’s business. Only after the first ten days had passed, in one immense blur, did she begin again to tell day from night. She slept at night with a warm blanket, slept soundly, but she did not dream. She would wake and feel lonely for her dreams, because they had always offered her good company. Then one night she had a dream that had often visited her. She dreamed she was going along the avenue that was close to her apartment. She was not walking, she was hovering or flying several storeys above the footpath. It was simple for her to sense and hear where the buildings stood as she glided near and past them, as simple as in her waking life, her walking life, each surface – glass and brick and concrete – disclosing its characteristic sound. No matter if people far below her impatiently shoved, or thoughtlessly blocked the path. No matter if she didn’t have her cane. The freedom. That was the feeling that stayed with her after waking, and which she would try each time to smuggle into the day ahead.
‘Sure you’re ready?’ Bruce said when she announced she had to be getting back to the university. She had wakened and felt by the Braille calendar on her desk that it was the beginning of winter semester 2015.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’ As a matter of fact, Amanda felt nowhere near ready. She was talking to him on the phone (their apartments were minutes away by foot). She couldn’t have got the words out in his presence.
‘It’s only been a month.’
She knew that. But there could be no question of letting her studies slide. Enrolling six months earlier for a Master of Research had been a huge decision; going back inside a classroom after nearly ten years. During her degree she would investigate the influence of disability on literary production.
‘I will figure this out.’
Day by day, she was gathering her strength, adapting – recovering was not a word she would use to describe the process her mind and body were embarking on. The apartment smelled of coffee. She made herself notes – prompts in Braille – for everything. How to compose an essay, how to send email, how to get a taxi to the university’s front steps.
‘Nothing is easy,’ she said to Bruce, in a subsequent call. ‘Everything takes twice as long as it used to do. But I’m learning. I’m learning so much.’
She had no idea then that she had a whole thesis inside her.
‘This work is only possible because of who the former Amanda was,’ she would write in a commentary on her first assignment after returning to class. ‘But she was always so hard on herself. I feel like she made me the one most likely to succeed with a brain injury. She always had a keen interest in how brains work; she was the most organised person in the world; and she acted on her passion in the nick of time.’
✲
The days were long and warm and welcoming. This was June, the first in Paris since the pandemic, and my American friends, John and Mary, had emailed to say they were in town. Spry and pushing seventy – age to them was only a number – they’d been sightseeing all day before reaching the bistro where we’d given each other rendezvous. They brought a gift – a set of illustrated postcards showing their native birds: chestnut-backed chickadees and dark-eyed juncos – as well as an acquaintance of theirs up from her home in southern France. She was a freshly retired Australian, spry herself, with whom conversation came easily. She had a connection with books, my friends reported, an occasional hand in literary festivals, which perhaps explained their bringing her along to meet me.
Halfway through our meal I finally asked the question I had been saving up for her from the start, one I always asked on the rare occasion that I met an Australian: ‘Have you read Les Murray?’ She put down her fork at the poet’s name. ‘Absolutely. He came to read at our international festival.’ That had been in Shanghai a few years before his death in 2019, at the age of eighty. ‘He came right over to me,’ she said. ‘He had something he wanted to tell me. Do you know the first thing he said? He said, “Michelle, I’m autistic.”’
So she had sensed the reason for my question which was a deeply personal one. Les Murray and I went back a long way. I had read him in my twenties, corresponded with him and translated his work for a French volume in my thirties, eulogised him on turning forty. He had been a mentor to me: an oft-cited contender for the Nobel Prize whose writing was transparently, gloriously neurodivergent.
Thinking this, I looked at Michelle and John and Mary and wondered how to continue. The word autistic had meanings other than the ones they understood. Not far from this bistro, I said, Murray and I had shared the stage at an international writers’ conference in 2015. We had sat gazing out at the hallsized dusk to which we took turns reading: Murray, his poems; I, my adaptation of them into French. This was our first – and as it proved our only – in-person encounter, and it goes without saying that I was somewhat awed. Yet I had no nerves, no stage fright. We shared an instant understanding. The years and kilometres that normally separated us disappeared. And all of this we put into words, shapely and savoury, delighting in them – Australian English and French ones. We read. We conversed. We rhymed.
The poet’s name, I told my friends at dinner, had given my Parisian publisher some trouble, or at least pause for thought. The publisher had wanted to put ‘Leslie Murray’ on the cover of my translation, fearing readers might get the wrong idea otherwise. And it was true, there were two ways of reading ‘Les Murray’ in French. It could also be read as ‘The Murrays’. Which, as it happened, seemed rather fitting for a poet so large, who contained multitudes.
