We stand side by side in the kitchen. It's not really a kitchen, more a galley. We stand side by side in pyjama bottoms. She turns to me and asks how long it has been since we have done this? I don't answer but I start doing the calculation. Forty years, possibly more.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
I do this calculation because I can. Because I am the sister without the broken brain.The broken brain has brought me to this foreign city.
We are both disorientated by our surroundings but I have the upper hand. I can use Google maps and book an Uber and it makes me in charge.
We seek out green refuges in the city in the early hours of the morning. We sit and watch a couple wake up on their yacht. They pull back the awning to let in the light.
They drink a cup of tea. They load their dinghy and slowly disappear out of sight down the river toward the city. We speculate about where they are going. What are their commitments today? A yoga class for her perhaps. A dole form needs to be taken to Centrelink. A grocery shop. Drinking water.
The yacht reminds us of our lives as the daughters of a fisherman. We start talking of things from our childhood. Most of it is joyous. Horses and the ocean and watching whales from the kitchen table.
Then the conversation turns to Dad's drinking and the smashed screen doors and it is time to turn back. We walk over the bridge back towards the hospital.
I stop to get a coffee. I leave my sister to find a place to sit. When I return she is sitting at a table with strangers. She hasn't seen them. She has no peripheral vision on her right side. They are friendly, Lycra-clad bike riders, but she is embarrassed now and I guide her to another row of free stools. I am her right eye.
The unit is white. White walls, white tiles, white appliances, white sheets, but there is the blackness of grief that seeps in around the corners. I watch while she sleeps beside me. Two grown women in young girls' single beds, side by side. I glance down and see we have both freed one foot from the bedclothes. An identical act inches away from each other. Connected but not connected.
We open the window wide and are grateful that we can. We see the city lights and watch the motion of trains outside and let the air of the city wash in and over us to mask the black grief. We talk of the family pets we used to have and where they are buried. There is a horse buried in the paddock at the old farm with a tree planted on top of him.
She asks about my cat that died not long ago. She asks if he was an old dog. This makes us laugh for a long time.
That night we sit in the street and order Lebanese food for dinner. We ask if we can have the rice dish without the meat, but the meal comes laden with succulent pieces of marinated lamb. We eat it hungrily, sucking the meat from its bones. Dog. Cat. Meat. No meat. It doesn't matter anymore.
Every day we go to the hospital for treatment, and every day as we leave the apartment my sister goes the wrong way down the hallway. In an act of defiance she insists on pushing the buttons on the lift, making that broken brain work for her.
I hold her hand as we walk the short distance along the street.
She wonders if the strangers we pass think we are lovers.
We wait to cross but she doesn't see the red man turn green. I guide her up the hill.
We pass people wearing hospital uniforms and lanyards. A man on crutches. A woman in a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle beside her.
There is no proper path to the oncology ward so we cut through the garden and jump the guard rail. I make sure I don't watch while my sister does this manoeuvre, but I do keep my eye on the road for any oncoming traffic.
I wonder if the hospital didn't expect anyone to walk to oncology and that's why they didn't put in a footpath.
We walk through to the waiting room and her son is there unexpected. She doesn't recognise him at first but had noticed a truck similar to his parked close by. They cling to each other. We cry and laugh, then they call her name.
She takes off her earrings and passes them to me for safe keeping and disappears into the room where I am not allowed.
She takes off her earrings and passes them to me for safe keeping and disappears into the room where I am not allowed.
I imagine her lying there with her mask on and the radiation in a fine beam drilling into her broken brain. Fixing her broken brain. Her son is broken too.
I hold onto him and let my grief flow into his and just for a brief moment let the blackness take control.
Then it is back to the managing of the day. The son walks outside. I stay holding the earrings. It has been a good day.
Cecily Hankin is a writer, photographer and sister.