PERFECT

I was conceived in grief. My tiny body formed within the whirl of hormones that mixed with anguish and made me. Three months after my brother died, I was created from a desperate and lonely love that was already unthreading.

No one can continue along the same path of domestic casualness after the death of a son. That’s what happened to my family. They were thrust into the middle of an unknown narrative. The set was removed, the backdrops changed and an understudy came in to take over the action. I was that understudy.

When I was seventeen, I painted a gravestone with a dove, wings spread, above its anthropomorphic shape. It was the same gravestone I remembered from Dongara in the winter of 1977; a year since our father had left. I wonder if the Agave, grey-green and smooth with enormous pointed spikes, is still there. The flowering part of the cactus would grow heavy as it leaned over the graves, as if bearing the weight of their occupants’ stories. That same Agave Americanus runs rampant through the coastal bushland 500 kms south of Dongara where our family home used to stand. Each tall spire hangs over the site like a tired sentinel where everything happened.

The cacti were my mother’s peculiarity and they became the stuff of family folklore and bitter grievance. The time our dentist sat on an Echinocactus Grusonii was, as all good stories, part truth, part myth. The time my hands and tongue were riddled with the microscopic needles of the fruit of the Opuntia Ficus-Indica is, unfortunately only truth. I was five when my father sat with tweezers and a magnifying glass trying to pluck each individual prickle from my mouth and palms. And I was ten when the government came and evicted us off our land and from our pink asbestos house with the massive front windows that used to face the sea.

Many years later I lay on the bed in the dark of my own son’s bedroom, holding him and talking nonsense. He was five, the same age as my brother when he died. We watched the phosphorescent solar system on the ceiling of his room and he said to me, from within the half-circle of my arms, “I love you Mummy, and tomorrow I’ll even love you more.”

I squeezed him and said, “You know you’re the best boy in all the world.”

“What about the other one?” he asked.

“What other one?”

“The one you feel sad about.”

How did he know what lay on my chest, even when it was unspoken between us?

“Yes, he was the other best boy,” I said and then added, “He was your age.”

There was another silence I wasn’t sure if I could fill.

“Why did he die?”

“He was born with a sick heart,” I said.

Another pause, only much longer.

“Was I born with a sick heart?” my son asked.

“No,” I replied. “You were perfect.”