Explanation Waiting

“What do you think about death?” my friend Colin asked. Colin has Multiple Sclerosis. He says it focuses the mind.

We were half way up the steep drive. I was doubled over, hands on my knees, blowing like a killer whale (thank you long Covid) when Colin asked me about death.

“I can’t wait,” I gasped.

We both laughed, though I’d surprised Colin. I’d surprised myself.

I was just back from a snow-covered winter in the north of Finland, where the living is harder (all those outdoor clothes, on off, on off) but the breathing is easier. Easier than in Sydney mid-summer, where humidity cling-wraps you in a miasma of damp and despair. 

When I’d looked around the Arctic Circle tour group at the Introductory Get- together I thought again about Robert Dessaix writing “It’s odd the patterns that appear in hindsight, though they mean nothing.” There was, as usual, the overblown American, effusive, using (and frequently losing) a designer walking stick, and an acolyte (and walking stick tracker) silent in her shadow; a tiny Indian couple, delicately carved and delighted with their arranged marriage ; an unravelling Australian on her last tour, with her husband teetering on the brink of dementia; a prickly Londoner and her pleasant husband who swallowed his words, so the pleasantness could only be assumed. But at first sight no obvious Tour Leper to frustrate everyone else (unless of course it’s us). There is, naturally, a doppelganger – there is always at least one. (“Look over there … see… the dead spit of …”)

This tour it was Suzy Wallis. 

Scientists (vide Google) speculate that each person in the world has six doppelgangers. There are (of course) web sites that will put you in touch with your doppelgangers, though another web site warns that if you meet a doppelganger, you will die. Which is after all nothing but the truth, doppelganger or no.

There’s a photo taken later in the tour, not of the Suzy Wallis look-alike, but of me. I’ve come into a communal yurt after an adventure in the bosomy pillows of snow. Logs blaze in a metal fire pit though I’ve yet to peel off my weather-proof onesie, my kangaroo-skin gloves, my wellington boots. But the bobble cap is gone, and the balaclava that makes you itch to rob a bank. I’m sitting half profile. My face is flayed by the cold, scarified, stripped back to essentials: intensely glaring eyes, grim lips, a sunken chin. There’s no denying it, I am my mother’s doppelganger. I delete the photo from my mobile’s memory, but not from my own. I resolve to do better, be a better person, not replicate my mother’s bitterness and disappointment and anger that no-one would give her back youth and health. I try to remember, Not my fault. 

The Suzy Wallis look-alike is called Barbara. Barb. Her husband is called Alan. Al. Al speaks in the language of quips. “Yes, look at me,” he says at dinner, spooning up the last of his cloudberry cream dessert, “I’m fading away to an elephant.” We all laugh. Barb gives a little flick of her head, she’s heard them all a thousand times before but she knows that the easy path to social acceptance is paved with Al’s quips.

Suzy Wallis and I were besties for four years, at first in Adelaide and then in Sydney, where we frequented the Manly ferry, sniggering like schoolgirls (like the schoolgirl I’d never been) at the peccadilloes of authority and its various human examples. Then as I clawed my way up the bureaucracy to management level, I became Suzy’s boss. She never forgave me – to her, I’d gone over to the dark side. Reverted to, in reality, rather than gone over to.

Australia is not, as it fondly sees itself, classless. Most people are middle class, many of those who aren’t, either wish they were, or pretend. Suzy Wallis’s father was a pyromaniac, Suzy’s mother died less than a year before Suzy had managed to track her down, her brother was a grifter, his eye always on the unlocked door. Suzy had escaped – and not escaped. I heard her say to her daughter Mandy, on Mandy’s wedding day, “You don’t have to like him, just marry him, divorce him, and take the money and run.”

After Sydney, Suzy disappeared. Fifteen years later, via social media, she reappeared, cynicism and self-hatred intact. I fobbed her off, politely (a particularly offensive cruelty, as I knew at the time).

And now here she is, in Norway, in the guise of Barb. The flick of the head, the head itself: blonded, with a quiff that arches up before looping down onto her forehead, and wings curling around each ear. The eyes of that particularly vibrant blue seen in church stained glass windows. The walk, self conscious, awkward, a twisting shrug of the shoulders at each step, like a teenager being laughed at by her enemies – former friends – as she crosses the schoolyard. Her resting expression is shrewd, layered over anger, like an open sandwich. What she most fears is being found wanting and her protective strategy is to talk and talk, leaving no space for diversions into other people’s possible successes. I remember empathizing in the past with a particular Tom Wolfe rumination: “Right now I could live without other people’s spectacular arrivals. Today one of my ships didn’t come in. I forget which one. Fame, Love, Last Week’s Rent, one of them sank without a bubble.”

Barb’s husband Al alternates his quips with gallant actions that feel more patronizing than chivalrous (I can wheel my own cases). Al made his fortune as a FIFO on oil rigs, two weeks on, two weeks off, then a year off on a compo claim. Together he and Barb ploughed that fortune into turning a down-at-heel BnB into a national leader in its field. It took 20 years of hard graft and very tough management of staff, who loved them (or left). Al and Barb boil at different rates, Barb slow and simmering, Al speedy. He told us with pride of a BnB experience: “These drongos woke me at midnight to ask how to get the key to their room. The notice was right in front of their noses. I told them they were idiots and to sod off and annoy someone else in the middle of the night.” We all nod – way to go Al – but warily, an interesting new facet to the hail-fellow-well-met persona. 

Al and Barb are retired now but the success of the BnB was, and remains, their identity. They joined the Arctic Circle tour to move beyond the BnB but of course the BnB came with them.

The tour started in Helsinki, where a light fall of snow turned the world into a flickering black and white pre-talkies movie. In the distance a single file of people on their way to work, all dressed top-to-toe in black, marched along like upright cockroaches. At the transport hub, bus tires cleared parallel strips, leaving vanilla-slices of snow in the gaps.

And then, across the Arctic Circle to the very northern village of Ivalo, a strip of well-spaced igloo domes, with walls of curved glass facing north: where the Northern Lights scoop back-lit cream from some mysterious source beyond the horizon and smear it across the black night sky, folding in on itself, touched at times with swirls of raspberry or angelica. 

The whole of north Finland is a vast Wendy Corner being prepared as a Christmas scene for a department store window. Each snow-snuggled gingerbread house has a muted golden light glowing behind a square window. Everywhere, snow crunches under cleated boots. Tracks are cleared by giant mobile blowers with elephantine trunks. Naïve tourists from more temperate climes step off the tracks and wallow and flail helplessly in thigh-deep snow, as giving as talcum powder. Reindeer snuffle at gloved hands offering wiry bundles of winter-food lichen. Sled dogs yelp and howl with excitement as lines and harnesses are prepared. Pick me. Pick ME. Snow mobiles slide at warp speed through forests of skinny black- trunked birch trees and Christmas-tree aspens, where chunky snow climbs along the top side of branches like albino sloths on a mission. On a frozen lake, a square of thick ice is hinged back so a cage of king crabs, ferals now, intruders years ago from nearby Russia, can be hauled up. Each crab body is as big and solid as a discus, with claws the length of a child’s arm.

And then west to Norway, and all aboard a postal/cargo/passenger boat for a five day journey down the coast from Kirkenes to Bergen. First night out of port the Barents Sea buffets, pummels and corkscrews the boat. The dining room empties out. Barb succumbs, her digestion delicate after stomach banding (“lost a third of my body weight”). For Suzy it had been a breast reduction (“I just wanted men to look me in the face.”)

The next days we sail on water the colour of jade with an aubergine underlay, in and out of fjords flanked by black jagged mountains of perma-frost peaks and valleys, and waterfalls frozen in mid air. Clouds split apart now and then to reveal a mother-of-pearl light, a baffling emanation.

At one port while cargo is being discharged there is time for a guided tour into the polar night, with Dorcy head lamps (rechargable, Norway is environmentally sound) and ski poles. Spiked cleats clamped onto boots like galoshes defy black ice at a lake’s edge where we’re told that Norway was “founded on dried cod.” Nowadays oil and gas deposits play their part, but still strings of dried cod hang in markets and restaurants, the colour and apparent texture of strips shed from paperbark trees.

On the boat I’m startled, confronted, haunted when at every turn, day after day, Suzy appears, a memory made flesh.

Half way through the five days we sail past a distant rocky promontory on which a sole yellow light marks the border of the Arctic Circle. Genuine photographers - cameras instead of mobile phones - turn away disappointed, a sole yellow light hardly providing sufficient record of such a momentous occasion. Back inside though we gather to toast the passing in caraway-flavoured Aquavit. A large and jolly crew member, spectacles perched on the deep horizontal furrows in his forehead, tells us the oak casks carrying the spirit go to Australia and back to Norway by boat. The constant movement and temperature changes during the double crossing of the Equator enhance the flavour, says the large and jolly crew member. Like so many true stories, it sounds unlikely, but fun for the telling. As we laugh and sip, my mobile phone pings with a text. I check it later. It says:

“Hello, I’m sorry to have to tell you that mum died today at 2.10pm at Laurel Hospice at Flinders Medical Centre. She had stage 4 colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver. She chose to decline treatment. She was 74 years old and told me she felt she had ‘lived a big life.’ Thank you for being her friend over the years. Mandy.”

I’m sad, and surprised, but no longer shocked when my contemporaries die. You come to accept – when your parents die – that you are next in line. It promotes a glum fatalism that with good luck and a fair wind you can mostly set aside. Though sometimes there’s a sulphur-whiff of survivor guilt when a duty of care has been unfulfilled. Could colon cancer be my fault?

On the boat, I watch Barb with a different interest. She seems unwell as the North Sea shudders the hull, but other than that the loss of one of her six doppelgangers seems to have left her unchanged. I ponder the tangle of coincidences which do indeed seem to form a pattern but provide no meaning. I depend, as so often, on wise women to offer me solace:

Shirley Hazzard: “There is balance in life, but not fairness. The seasons, the universe, give the impression of concord, but it is order, not harmony,”

Kate Atkinson: “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”