The Attachment Read online

  I really experienced your love and support. It was strangely tangible. Thanks.

  What time do you leave for Bali?

  Much love,

  Tony

  Dear Tony,

  Thank you. I needed those stories.

  No reason in particular. Just a long day. I think, too, I was holding some weird tension about your meeting. ‘Carrying’ for you, though you had not asked it, and I had no right.

  I am bone weary so this will be short.

  I’m glad the letter arrived. Of course I forgot that the thing I rue about snail mail is that I can’t look back and see what I wrote. Letters are in and of their moment—unless you are a person who thinks to keep copies. That isn’t me. So you now have a piece of me that I will never get back.

  A couple of years ago I bundled up swags of letters and returned them as gifts. Friends were overwhelmed. They got back many moments of their lives that had been forgotten. So keep that little piece of me safe, please.

  Thank you for the story of your dad. Such hopes. All that wishing for you and your brother. All that work. You are the living legacy, and he would be proud, I’m sure. Also good to know there was happiness and friendship. Important to know it was not all loss or sadness.

  What was his name, your Da?

  And the meeting . . .

  I’m relieved for you. I hope all were able to go into the night feeling something like peace. You’re admirable for giving people the opportunity and for creating a safe space.

  We leave for Bali on Thursday morning at 9.30 am. At the airport by about 7. Leave home by 6.15 or so. Note to self. Book a cab!

  I have one more day in which to organise my life. I’m in need of the break, and looking forward, but I’m having pre-partum anxiety, I think.

  Compañero. How many words are there for gratitude? I send thanks and love. Also to your father’s memory, and to your brother and sister. Which is to say—to you. I hope you three living legacies hold each other tight in the coming days and weeks.

  A x

  Dear Ailsa,

  What did you mean when you said you ‘had no right’ to feel for me and the parishioners in the abuse meeting? Surely friendship gives you sufficient right to ‘carry’ for me. Your stated credo (in your book) speaks of the importance of taking responsibility for one another. That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it?

  And I’m grateful.

  You know, it’s not easy to cherry-pick the most important moments out of eight packed decades. But I realise that I have never told you this story, and it is one of the most important of my life.

  Settle back with your slippers, please . . .

  I was quite a latecomer to the passionate—and fashionable!—search for family roots. It had sort of passed me by. I never fantasised about being related to Hannibal or any of his elephants, nor had I grown up with any sense of Irishness. But once I joined the club there was no stopping me.

  First went to Ireland from the US in the summer of 1976. After exploring both the South and the North, and being totally seduced by a culture familiar beyond words, I came away with a deeper understanding of myself than I had ever before fathomed. But try as I may I couldn’t discover anything about my original family in Donegal.

  Eight years later, back home, a historian in Melbourne unveiled the saga you already know that brought my great-grandparents to Australia. He insisted that I return to Donegal, organise a service in memory of those evicted with my family, contact the press and the local universities, and make sure there was a Protestant minister with me to share the service. And as an afterthought to raise the money to fund the whole project! All this happened in the brevity of a telephone conversation. I was left stunned looking at the phone, wondering about the dimension of what I had said yes to.

  Unbelievably, it all came to pass.

  The memorial service for the Derryveagh refugees took place in a soft late summer twilight on the banks of a beautiful Donegal lough, 118 years after the scandalous eviction. We sang songs, told stories, listened to the music of the fiddle and piano accordian, recited the names of the 112 families made homeless, read poetry and prayed—and then retreated to McClafferty’s pub.

  A historian once said to me—‘Ireland is the land of your imagination.’

  I understood his words for the first time on the banks of that lough. The experience gave me a new sense of who I was.

  Tony

  My dear Tony,

  The fan blades are tick tick ticking over my head, but the air they are pushing down is hot. I’m in training for Bali. The gods are assisting me with my transition. This time tomorrow I’ll be under another fan, under another roof, under another sky. Or maybe I’ll be under the water of a pool, listening to gamalan and prayers drifting over the wall from the temple. There’ll be incense rising somewhere from a freshly placed offering—by a door, on a path, at an intersection. Intersections are important. The smells will be intense—that curious mixture of frangipani, smoke and sewage that is the tropics. Life and death. Ripening and rotting.

  I’ve done all my work, save for our annual Christmas card photo. I have not much heart for it, this year, but I will do it out of ritual, and because it’s a kept promise. So expect at least one more missive this evening. Other than that, my final blog post is written. I have prepped and photocopied my readings for the in-conversation I’m doing in Ubud—Books That Changed My Life. No surprises. Garner and Oliver. And Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong books. It was hard to pass up Kipling’s Just So Stories. His ‘best beloved’ with the ‘satiable curiosity’ was a passion. I thought he was writing all those yarns for me.

  For reading, I will raid our friends’ library and let myself go wherever their shelves lead. For writing I will buy exercise books at the supermarket.

  Oh, Tony. I’m so sorry.

  I just realised I should have responded to your Irish story at the beginning of this letter. You must be wondering if I read a word you said. Good grief, talk about self-obsessed. Really. Not good enough. So sorry.

  It is a very moving reflection, and I can almost smell the thick grass and hear the fiddle. Isn’t it intriguing that both of us have these profound experiences of ‘going back’ to a kind of mythic heartland of the ancestors? Yours, of course, had ritual around it and gave you re-connection to the community of your forebears. I can see how that might have remade you, or at least, shown you aspects of yourself that you had not examined previously. My recent return to the Gascoyne was rather more haphazard, and it is still too fresh to make a lot of sense, but there is something that resonates when I wonder what it might have been that drove my forebears to want to walk hundreds of miles to claim stretches of that desert. I guess maybe it was the thrill of having land. The possibilities must have seemed endless.

  But it’s more than that. I read a kind of restlessness from them into myself. That yearning to walk further, seek another view. I recognise that. Just as I recognise the fervour of that Piper ancestor of mine, the Bible Christian Pastor. Perhaps I’m a mix of evangelist and wanderer! Bit dangerous!

  Of course it’s way too soon to draw any conclusions or even understanding from my recent voyage and discoveries, but your story makes me see how such learnings, particularly when they involve seeing actual sites of family story, can re-form us.

  Anyway, a huge apology for prattling on about myself before mentioning your offering. My only excuse—a flabby one, as you would say—is that it has been quite a day. Not sure I can articulate it really. There is something strange going on inside me. Like a kind of apprehension about leaving my work at such an early stage. An odd sadness often comes upon me as Christmas looms—I use that word advisedly. It is such a swirl of commercial jingoism, and it makes me feel very much an outsider because I don’t want stuff in vast quantities, or piles of food, or to go to endless parties with people I barely know.

  Sorry. Such a curmudgeon. I will try to keep my grumpiness to myself, this being a time of year when you must be feeling jo
yous. I do recognise that the story that gives us all this season is a lovely one—that baby surrounded by silence and awe and soft-faced sheep. But I am rarely able to get to anything like that amid the lunacy of presents.

  I want presence.

  And time.

  Oh for heaven’s sake! I am going to bed. Should delete this message but am about to hit send, because the apology is necessary. I will never treat one of your stories that way again—certainly not a story about your father.

  Lo siento.

  The Spanish for ‘sorry’ translates to ‘I feel it’. And I do.

  Hope your head is on a pillow, and your eyes are closed.

  Ailsa

  My dear Ailsa,

  These are the six characteristics of a genuine compañera:

  1. A genuine compañera breaks open her life and her bread with another.

  2. A genuine compañera trusts her companion to hold her bread with the most delicate and sensitive hands.

  3. A genuine compañera entrusts her feelings in the good times and the bad times, in the thick and the thin—when she’s lonely, when she’s excited, when she is vulnerable, when her heart is full and when the tide begins to go out. Never trapped in the misgiving that too much has been said.

  4. A genuine compañera at her best never allows those demons of self-criticism to beat her up and leave her uncertain of her grace and beauty.

  5. A genuine compañera has a soul as free as the rolling waves of the ocean.

  6. A genuine compañera takes time to recognise the miracles of life, and break them open for others.

  Might I say, I have never met a more genuine and wholehearted compañera than this sunny spirit who arrived from the vast plains of the sheep-filled west of Oz.

  For the genuine compañeros of life—deo gratias.

  Antonio, the novice compañero.

  Tony!

  Too much, too much.

  Thank you. I think I will print that off and carry it in my wallet, along with other treasures that sustain me.

  I just realised it’s a great luxury to be typing this. My laptop will be delivered to my sister Amanda at around eleven tomorrow, and I’ll then be reduced to the hen-peck typing of the iPhone. I’m also prevaricating because for some silly reason I feel reluctant to ‘farewell’ you. And I’m not farewelling you! I will write—just that I will be restrained. You will write, and you will be extravagant with words and stories. Do you hear?

  Seriously, I know the coming days and weeks may be difficult for you with your Peter’s health, and I’m only joking about the instruction to write.

  I’m sorry this letter is so scatty.

  And I’m sorry for saying sorry again! Message received, compañero.

  With gratitude.

  Ailsa

  Good morning Ailsa!

  Just been listening to news of possible water restrictions on the Gascoyne River. Thought—nine months ago I would have ignored this news bulletin and got on with shaving. Now it’s like news about my family.

  How times change.

  Tony

  Hello Tony,

  Funny how our ears tune in to things. How our priorities shift based on who and what we know. How we come to care about such abstract or remote things through the experience of another. Lovely, somehow, but so serendipitous. All the other things we might care about. All that we might have missed had we not stopped to care for this person.

  Sliding doors.

  I’m glad we stopped for each other.

  A

  Tony!

  Me again. This time, bearing a gift.

  Christmas is, for me, a time of reflection and a time of reading. Peter and I always give each other Christmas books. That’s one of the reasons I’m so thrilled when people tell me they are giving Sinning as a gift.

  This year, though, time and space is the gift. So I’m making myself files to load onto that tiny iPhone screen, for reading and reflecting. And among them, I have a file called ‘PiperDoherty’. Our correspondence to date is a tome, Antonio!

  I’ve collected it all, without email addresses, dates, hyperlinks to cat jokes or any other such stuff, and I attach it here. I wanted to go back over our conversation, because much of it has been at such a pace. Frantic, almost. Trying to cram worlds of ideas in, to catch up on missed years. There are questions that went unanswered and stories that need deeper consideration. There are details that were skipped over, and delights that went unremarked. And so I thought I would take you with me to Ubud, and on the days when a dose of Doherty is required, I will just meander through an email.

  So here is a copy for you. This attachment is your Christmas gift. Please imagine it comes wrapped in stiff brown paper. I like that best. Always have. Then it’s tied with red silk ribbon. Not my favourite deep crimson blood red, but the hot poinsettia red of the season. There is a hand-cut card, and written on the underside is the word Compañero.

  Pull the ribbon. Enjoy the slippery satiny silkiness of it as it falls away. Rip the paper. It’s thick. Heavy. It’s lovely to tear it. Don’t wait.

  There is your gift. A scroll. Roll it down. You will need to hold it with both hands to keep it still—that’s a good reminder for anyone when dealing with me at any time.

  Inhale. Read. It’s the gift we’ve already given each other. To me it is a wonder, and as ever, I am grateful.

  Feliz Navidad. Buon Natale. Peace.

  At this time of year, a birth is celebrated, not a death.

  With love,

  Ailsa x

  DEAR READER ,

  There’s something I haven’t told you, and I must, to honour two good men.

  My husband Peter died on 18 May 2014. That was the reason for putting aside all my writing projects for more than a year. I was navigating grief. I was a widow. I suppose I still am. I’m trying to learn what it means to be without the person with whom I spent half my life, the person around whom I shaped my days.

  When Tony lost his brother Peter, I hope I was a support for him. I tried to write letters that would comfort, divert and amuse. Our friendship was only a year old then, and I was uncertain about how much I should ask or offer—particularly at a distance.

  After my Peter died, our friendship was not new. We had known each other for two years by then. Sometimes it seemed like two lifetimes! Tony was a stalwart. He was a quiet, reassuring presence on the day of Peter’s funeral. He wrote to me in the time that followed, of course. But he also spoke with me on the phone almost every day afterwards, sometimes waiting for minutes on end for me to be able to form words. Whether he heard sobs, fury or just sullen resentment, he stuck it out. He ministered to his friend. And he never once pressured me to return to writing—or to our project.

  When I did go back to our letters, I was reminded of what I had lost. All those days spent hiking the hills near our shack ended with the smell of wood-smoke from Peter’s fires, as I’d walk up the driveway. Behind the description of that day spent prepping for the dinner party, there was Peter—going out into the blasting heat to bring home a table for our feast, breaking up bags of ice, choosing music. Ordinary things. Our life, as it was . . .

  Of course we didn’t throw dinners like that often, but we did love to break bread with friends, whether in the bush or at home. He was nervous before guests arrived, which bemused me, because his stories were always engaging, his hosting attentive and his curiosity boundless. It would have been easy for people to look at Peter’s knees-up impersonation of the Irish dancer, Michael Flatley, and to believe he was a full-time extrovert party animal.

  But that wasn’t so. He was complex and a conundrum, as we all are, and I’m not going to be able to write anything that could approach the sum of that good man I loved for his decency and humour; admired for his talent and dedication to craft; and honoured for his constant striving to be better. Peter and I were together for over 27 years. I can barely remember who I was before him—I had been his ‘other half’ for more than half of my life when he died.


  It was sudden. A brain haemorrhage. He was in our bed in our home, learning lines for a role he was to film the following week. I was in Sydney. I’d gone north for a speaking job about my book. Routine stuff for both of us. We were often apart for work we loved. We had texted, sent photos and chatted in the preceding days, but on the Sunday, I couldn’t raise him. I told myself it was nothing, that he often didn’t hear his mobile or left it behind. But eventually, I panicked and asked our neighbour, a doctor, to go into the house and check. I will never forget what he said when he called me back.

  ‘Oh, Ailsa. I’m so sorry.’

  Five words to change your life.

  The crazy thing is that I never thought Peter would die before me, despite the fact that he was fifteen years older. I’ve been over-anxious about others I love—I’m even more so now—but I always thought of Peter as permanent. The rock. I thought I would go first. I was the one who made a will and took out insurance when we travelled. But there was no insuring against that loss.

  I still can’t fathom his death. The last time I looked into his eyes, when he dropped me at the airport, he shooed me off. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go quickly so you can come back quickly. You know I love you.’ All was on the up. We were making plans for changes to our lives. Our eyes were on the future in a way they hadn’t been for years. And then he was gone.

  He died alone. I can’t bear that.

  I know everyone dies alone, and I know there’s nothing I could have done. I know I don’t keep planes in the air, or hearts beating. Not even Pete’s. But still . . .

  I should have been there. I think of being with my mother and stroking her hair as she lay dying, and I’ve listened as Tony tells me how he massaged his brother’s feet, and I ache. I wish I could have stroked Peter’s forehead or whispered something to help him let go. But his was not that kind of death, I was told.