Staying
About the Book
As children, Jessie Cole and her brother Jake ran wild, free to roam their rainforest home as they pleased. They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays. But when Jessie was on the cusp of adolescence, tragedy struck, and her happy, loving family fell apart.
This heartbreaking memoir asks what happens to those who are left behind when someone takes their own life. It’s about the importance of home, family and forgiveness—and finding peace in a place of pain.
By the critically acclaimed author of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water.
‘Staying aches and pulses with life…Cole is a writer.‘ Anna Krien
For all those left behind
Contents
Cover Page
About the Book
Dedication
Threshold
Home
Cataclysm
Refuge
Emergence
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright page
The car hums. It is parked in the garage. The forest ticks around it—the cracking of branches, the buzz of crickets, the light swish of leaves as they fall down from the trees. The spiders scuttle about repairing their webs. A possum shrieks off in the distance. The stray ginger cat haunts the periphery.
But inside the car my father is breathless.
In a few hours my mother will find him. He won’t answer his phone and she will know, and she will drive out from the yellow beach shack to check. She will find him, dead, and go inside and call the ambulance and our friends from down the road. Then she will wait with my father, listening to the sounds of the forest. Our friends will arrive first, because they aren’t far away, and they will clean the blood from the bathroom, from where my father tried to slit his wrists, so my mother doesn’t have to. The police and ambulance will come, and they will take his body away. Later, we will receive an ambulance bill, addressed to my father, though he was dead when the paramedics arrived and they could not revive him. His name on that envelope will hit us like a punch to the solar plexus.
But let’s go back. To the humming car in the garage. To my father’s last thoughts.
He is lying across the back seat, his eyes closed, blocking out the world. The pressure of his tortured grief is slowly lessening in his chest. There is the faintest hint of relief. But he knows that he has failed us, and that must weigh upon him too. Scratched out beside him lies a note.
Billie, Jessie, Jakey—I’m sorry. Janny—I love you.
And it is all there, in those words. The life we had and the life we lost.
Since my father’s suicide, the word ‘trust’ has gotten under my skin. If someone should utter it as a way to soothe me, I will go someplace quiet and cry. The very word has become broken. I hear in it only the echoes of its opposite. Hints of leavings, endings, goodbyes. Whispers of risk, hurt, harm. But it was not this way from the outset. I was born four weeks early—a premmie baby—delicate and clingy like a nursling possum. My mother tells me I barely slept. She says that in the middle of the night my father brought me up onto his chest, his strong heartbeat banging there beneath my tiny ear. And I would slip straight into sleep, because there was no safer place.
≈
My earliest memories all involve the nourishment I found in my parents’ bodies. A feeling of being held, of skin settling against skin. I remember no tussles over privacy or space, more a surrender of their bodies to mine. You are welcome here, their touch seemed to say. Come, make yourself at home. I slept between them, rolling from one pair of arms to the next. They each had their own smell, distinct and animal. My father had a tiny thatch of hair in the middle of his chest, no more than twenty strands, and pressed up against him in the early mornings I petted it like a pelt. My mother let me play a game, a womb-game, though I didn’t call it that. She curled up on her side and I snuggled into the triangle between her knees and chest. ‘Cubbies,’ I murmured, ‘let’s play cubbies,’ and she never refused. My brother was born when I was twenty months old. My parents’ friends, who lived next door, came over to babysit me while my mother gave birth, and I woke in the night to their unfamiliar bodies. The woman whispered, ‘Mummy will be home soon, Mummy will be home soon,’ and I could feel the anxiety seeping out around her. She seemed concerned I might not believe her, but there was nothing I was more certain of.
≈
I was born in the late 1970s, when—in northern New South Wales at least—everything was up for grabs. Right and wrong were social constructs, conventionality was spurned, conformity worth escaping and money-making passé. Polyamory was the new frontier. Drugs and alcohol, dreaming and philosophy. Anything could happen and probably did.
In among this jumble of living experiments, my parents decided to test the hypothesis that children were born pure—that the less you interfered with their natural goodness, the less damage you did. They were not the first to propose such a radical theory. D. H. Lawrence once set out three rules of childcare: How to begin to educate a child. First rule, leave him alone. Second rule, leave him alone. Third rule, leave him alone. That is the whole beginning. My parents did little to actively socialise us. I can only assume they believed my brother, Jake, and I would learn by example. We watched my mother’s brow carefully for signs of displeasure, and it was a fairly reliable indicator, but there were few rules and few explanations. We weren’t required to use words like ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Clothes were optional. We ate all our food with spoons. We didn’t have a bedtime. Sometimes when we were rowdy or wild our father would yell, and we’d stand by, quietly ashamed, but our mother would swoop down and say, ‘Oh, they’re not naughty—they’re just tired.’ And we would smile, all our goodness restored.
We lived far outside of town, nestled in green hills, on a winding dead-end road in a tiny town called Burringbar. Filled with hopes for a new start, a tree-change—another world—my parents had packed up their busy Sydney lives for the freedom of the country. They had bought a few acres of pasture and set about planting out a magnificent garden. A forest. When I was little the trees were little too, saplings, and we all grew together, from nothing much to something. Maybe all children believe their parents create the world, but in my case it appeared to be true. In the first year my parents lived at Burringbar they oversaw the building of a house. It was experimental too, all its rooms separated by the quick-growing forest. Our home sprang up around me, as the garden had before it, my parents’ vision becoming quickly manifest.
Running down the centre was a long, open walkway paved with bricks. From the edges of the walkway the rooms spread like islands. The garden was the deep green sea, the bedrooms private cloistered worlds. The walkway led to a highset pavilion with a sloping wooden-shingled roof. Temple-like, it presided over the house. Palms and bromeliads grew thick between the rooms, and through the large sliding glass doors all that could be seen was a multitude of dense greens with an occasional stripe of colour, a bromeliad in flower. Walking through the doors into the garden there was no drop, no step—it was just a slow, indefinite drift outside.
Back then, the world seemed a welcoming place. The bushland surrounding us was full of creatures: lizards, birds, snakes, frogs, toads, ants, beetles, bees. We had a dog and two cats and a pet magpie, Georgie, who with a little coaxing would perch on my mother’s arm. Once a giant goanna came out from the forest and plodded, dinosaur-like, down the open walkway. We stood to watch it, letting it pass. Eventually it scurried under a cushioned bench. ‘I’ll get it!’ I cried, clambering beneath the bench, hands outstretched. The goanna scratched me, bloody lines all up my arms. I screamed in outrage, my panicking mother wrenching me out by my
feet. I was bewildered—why didn’t it want to play?
I once caught a bush-mouse with my bare hands. In that moment I loved it fiercely, its little grey body trembling in my palms, but it bit me, hard, until I let it go. I collected ants, gently pinching them between my tiny fingertips—even the big biting ones. I manhandled the skinks, the frogs, the beetles. A snail was an exciting find, since we didn’t really have them. I even enjoyed the leeches, the way they wanted to hang around. Everything seemed right in the world—and if I loved these creatures, why wouldn’t they love me back? That, I believe, was my thinking. Even so, it was hard to get the captured bush-mouse to give me much affection.
≈
My father was a psychiatrist, but he only worked three days a week. On his days off he toiled in the garden. He began fantastical tasks and finished them in a single day. Covered in sweat and dirt, with an aching back and a tired body, he came in and told my mother of his progress. A Japanese garden, with a real slated pond and giant boulders and bamboo. An orchard with rows of citrus that buzzed merrily with bees. A rainforest, shady and ancient-seeming, strewn with fallen coloured leaves.
Coming in one night, dirt-speckled and sour-smelling, my father showed us a vividly white ball, smaller than one of our marbles. Jake and I sat steaming in the bath, naked and easy, the leaves of the growing forest outside whispering wordless secrets in our ears. The bathroom rested among the trees, the sliding glass doors open to the green.
With a delicate tug he pulled this small sphere apart and thousands of tiny spiders fell, sprinkling down upon us. Minuscule, they spread across the water, floating towards the edges, their legs braced against the sway of our careful movements. Hurriedly, the masses of baby spiders climbed out and along the top of the old enamel bathtub. With concentrated joy, we scooped out the stragglers and flicked them gently from our fingers and out the open doorway into the forest. I stared in wonder that so many had come from such a small, seamless pouch. Where would they all go when they were grown?
I understood that my father had held the power of their lives—and deaths—within his gentle hands, and felt in a subtle way that he had created them. I searched his face for signs of meaning, but he was unreadable and unexpectedly quiet. My mother came in from the kitchen to see what had caused our squeals, and I checked to see how deep the crease between her brows became when she saw the tiny wafting spiders.
‘They’re not biting ones, Mum.’
My mother’s face broke into a smile.
‘They’re amazing.’ Her words were soft. ‘Where did you find them?’
He motioned out towards the garden, and my parents wandered off together in search of the very spot.
≈
When my father was at work, my mother took us down to the waterhole. Right at the edge there was a rock—a boulder—with dips and curves that fit my mother’s naked body precisely. We called the boulder ‘the rock’, but in my head it was my mother’s rock. I believed the rock had been shaped by her, that those dips and hollows were a tangible response to who my mother was.
We spent whole days down at the waterhole, my mother settling into the curves of her rock, drinking up the sun. Sometimes she let us inspect her. We examined her breasts, lifted her arms to look at her armpits, opened her legs to peer into the place we knew we’d come from. My mother sighed, not exasperated, just, perhaps, resigned. She’d say, ‘You can look, but don’t touch,’ and we would look and look and look.
Besides my mother’s body, there were many things of interest at the waterhole: eels, catfish, turtles, guppies, waterspiders, tadpoles, frogs, ducks, speedy-bugs, ochre painting-rocks, skimming-rocks, the occasional spot of clay or the much sought-after growth of soft, floating luminescent slime. Hours would pass where we barely looked up, the world around us so utterly absorbing.
Years later, when I had children of my own, I lay down on my mother’s rock, believing I’d have grown into the hollows and dips, thinking that maybe now it was my rock, but it never did fit my curves. All my childhood I assumed it to be the most comfortable place, if only I was big enough to fit it. A mould—shaped by my mother—that I would one day grow into, but I never did.
≈
Some things were solid, unchanging. The sun rose in the sky, it was colder by night than by day, the ants swarmed inside the house before it rained—but very little was truly the same from day to day.
Swimming in the creek that surrounded our home, I was aware of every rock beneath my feet—the particularity of its placement—and where to rest my soles below the shadowy surface of the water. Everything was familiar, every random fern, every small palm, but daily new things would arise. Any number of seeds falling from above, inexplicable sudden leaf drops, branches cleaving from trees, holes dug in the banks by unseen mysterious animals, the sudden booming whoosh of flock pigeons taking off into the sky. The smallest of shifts and the land was new.
Most years the creeks flooded and everything shifted. Giant deposits of stones filled in sections that were once deep. Streams snaked sideways, taking different paths. Enormous tree trunks arrived from upstream where once there had been none. The whole world had to be relearned from scratch, and with each flood it all happened again and again. A paradoxical knowledge slowly grew inside me: things were unchanging but simultaneously in flux. And with this knowledge, the subtle awareness that I was part of the process. The house and garden—the land—an extension of me, or I an extension of it? Growing and changing, evolving, like one giant organism. As the years went by, the garden, the natural world, began slowly taking over the house. I was—we all were—just inhabitants in this moving symphony of nature, part of the ecosystem at large.
Growing up, the connectedness I felt to my homeplace was as intrinsic to my sense of self as my connectedness to family. In fact, it felt very similar. I believed all the animals around me were kin, as many children do, but it was more than that. I sensed a sort of receptivity from the plants, from the water, from the soil. Wind and storms were life forces—even the rain had character. The garden itself reached out and caressed me as I passed. Nature wasn’t static or non-involved; it was present, tender. As children, Jake and I didn’t pick the flowers, because they belonged with the trees. We loved them, with their bright, beaming faces, and they seemed to love us in return.
≈
In life, my father was tallish but not too tall. He was generally dark of feature: dark-eyed, dark-haired, darkish skin, big bushy dark brows. Looking at photos, I can see he had been quite handsome as a young man, though I never thought of him that way. He was corporal, flesh and blood, and I experienced him largely through touch.
On the weekends my parents got up early and drove us to the beach. My father’s smile was wide as he faced the waves. When I ran to him, he scooped me up with one hand as though I weighed nothing. He loved the sea, and I loved it too.
‘Take me out, Dad—take me out past the waves.’
‘You want to go all the way out there?’ His voice was serious, but his eyes were light and shining.
‘Yeah, with you.’
‘Okay, but we’ll have to go under them.’
Holding me, he waved to my mother and Jake, motioning with his spare hand that he was going out. We ignored the subtle crease of my mother’s brow.
My father strode at first, the waves surging against his legs and crashing about my feet, and when the water reached his waist he nodded that it was time to go under.
The waves were roaring and white, deep and swelling.
Salt and sand.
Surfacing, we spluttered and shook our heads and I wiped my tangled, matted hair from my eyes.
‘Dumpers,’ he whispered, close to my ear.
I clung on strongly, and when the next wave came my father dived beneath it. We could feel its power churning above us and we stayed down deep until I thought my chest would burst. Each wave was bigger than the next, until getting out to the open water was a serious business, and then finally we were clear. Th
e green expanse of ocean lay before us. I swam about, my father floating there beside me, and when I was tired I slung my arms around his neck to rest. My father smelled of salt, and I snuffled my nose against his prickly jaw and touched a trickle of water on his throat with my tongue.
≈
When I was a child my father drew pictures that he always signed with a mandala. A circle with an ‘x’ inside. I never asked him what the mandala meant, though he seemed to use it as a kind of symbol for himself. In many ways these drawings were more like diaries. A remarkable number of them were about fathering. Portraits of us kids, mixed in with poems and musings. Sometimes he would let me help him. He’d give over a section of the paper for me to colour with oil pastels while he sketched. The drawings were important to him. He had each one professionally framed, and they hung, scattered about, on all our walls. Visual representations, sometimes alarming, of what was in his head. As a young man, he’d wanted to be an artist, but—pressured by his father—he’d trained as a doctor instead. Psychiatry, where he’d ended up, seemed a specialty well suited to his embracing of the unusual.
≈
My brother and I had our own language, a kind of unspoken exchange filled with intricate nuance. Born not quite two years apart, we fitted together like the intertwined fingers of clasping hands, and then, dovetailed, grew in opposite directions. I was all authority and plans, urgent, and brimming with bubbling words. Quiet and watchful, Jake was tirelessly gentle. Our play was a simple arrangement: I provided the structure—the game—and Jake filled in all the missing parts. My brother spoke very little, but he chose his words well. Silence crept about him like a low mist. Jake stepped back from the world, but he didn’t step back from me. Sure and unf linching, I told my brother where I wanted him to be, and why, and he stayed close, holding my gaze to check that all was still right. Peering into my brother’s face, I saw the questions he asked. I heard his voice in my head, though he only said a word here and there. I listened to the sound of his gaze and I answered him in speech.