Back business

Our friend Peter rang this morning, looking for a coffee and a chat, both of which we can usually manage. Sydney swelters, but we press on with life’s essentials. However today was different, a bit special. Alex left early to see a neurosurgeon about his back. Peter registered the size of the shock correctly. “Is nothing in this world stable? Next you’ll be telling me he’s giving up the fags!” Then he congratulated me. Wrong. Alex doesn’t do anything until he’s ready, and that includes dealing with the lower back pain which frames everything he does, every day.

In the decade we’ve been together he’s managed (as they say) his unreliable spine with a mixture of stoicism and contempt and, when the pain is acute, with hard core painkillers and withdrawal into an inaccessible emotional space just big enough for him. That last bit drives me nuts. So his appointment with a neurosurgeon was a big deal, for both of us.  

For years now he has swatted off my helpful suggestions about how he could “fix” his back. Exercise, I’ve demanded. It works for other people – why not you? I’ve raged, I’ve pleaded. Do something. But Alex is a fatalist by inclination, and Eastern European by birth (the two are somewhat related). He doesn’t want pity. Nor does he want to be told what to do. In his situation, I couldn’t not do something, couldn’t not act to alter the odds. I don’t want to believe that things can’t get better. When he and Peter started walking and swimming together a year or so ago, and he began to feel fitter, it had nothing to do with me, which was the beauty of their arrangement. But of course I secretly took some credit for his physical improvement. That made it all the harder when, just before we were due to leave for the Pacific last May, his back went out. Something silly, something small. That’s all it takes. He took to his bed, did what he needed to do. I was the one who was devastated.

Alex had a back operation 20 years ago when the technology was much more primitive and the risk of coming out of the theatre unable to walk was very real, and very scary. Seeing a neurosurgeon today was a big move. It was about being ready to contemplate something radical, again. He’s 63, with oceans to cross and the time to do it. That’s why he went to see the doctor this morning. Where it goes from here is his business. My business is to keep him company, and when that’s not required, deal with it.

Time out

Believe it or not, there are still places in the developed world where you might as well not bother bringing your laptop or whatever gizmo you connect with. That's where we've been, one of those places. I’m not complaining. The day when we get good enough internet reception at our beach house in New Zealand will be a day to regret.

The house sits on the edge of a grey sandy beach, looking out towards Kawau Island. People don’t come to this benign sweep of coastline for the beach action per se. Occasionally (and this summer, when the weather systems seem to have lost all self-control, saw two such occasions) we get stung by the tail of a tropical cyclone which stirs up the sea and shifts about loose chunks of sandstone and mud. But mostly, when the barometer is steady, you can’t find a better place for boating or letting young children loose to play in the water or around the rocks.

My parents starting coming here with me, my sister and two brothers in 1965. Since then the trees they planted have grown huge and there’s a “new” bunkhouse, built 20 years ago when more babies demanded more beds. But not much else has changed. Photos from one decade are interchangeable with those taken in any other, if you discount the growing/aging cycle of the human players. See there the tanned bodies sprawled across the veranda, books in hand; the sailing dinghies and kayaks ready to roll down the ramp into the high tide; the fringing pohutakawas and agapanthus, and hydrangeas in bluest of bloom; the kids squashed together on divans, playing cards, or batting a shuttlecock and wearing out the grass in the same old places; the boys (usually) feeding wood into the barbecue and downing cold beers; the girls (usually) slicing and chopping, stripping husks off sweetcorn…memories which bind three generations now.

 

We’ve never had a television at the beach and there’s still no dishwasher because we’re on tank water (which is why until very recently there wasn’t a decent shower in the place). The dish-washing roster and narrowness of the kitchen manufacture family closeness - the kitchen is so ridiculously small that to be in it with one other person is an intimate act. My mother won't tolerate any loose talk of alterations (“over my dead body”, she says, and my architect brother-in-law bites his tongue, biding his time). Hence, by default, the house has become fashionably retro. A couple of years ago some slick creative boys came through, salivating, and said it was exactly the location they were looking for to shoot a television ad. They went ahead with the ad (for a car – eh?) and apparently it’s a big hit, but living in Australia as we do, I’ve never seen it.  

A friend whose family holidayed with us over several summers when our parents were young and shiny popped by at the end of January. He hadn’t been inside our beach house since his father died when he was a boy. After that happened, everything to do with his parents and mine seemed frozen in time, like Camelot. I walked Mike through the rooms (it didn’t take a minute) and watched his mouth drop. “It’s so small,” he said, quietly. Could it be that all we both remembered about those golden years had really happened in such a tiny place? I’ve often wondered about that myself. Yet the evidence suggests that legend-making is still strong at the beach house – in inverse proportion, perhaps, to the availability of mod cons.