It was autumn in Sydney, her favourite season when the blue was at its bluest and wrapped the sky in a shiny package like a Christmas present waiting under the tree. She’d always needed to experience things rather than know them. Hannah’s was not a cognitive awakening like the one she had read about in Doctor Copernicus when she was in her early thirties. In the novel, the 35-year-old protagonist Canon Nicolas Kopernick was about to make his gigantic discovery: that the Sun and not Earth was at the centre of the world. He would then go on to write a book: On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres that would change the way astronomers thought about the heavenly bodies: published just before he passed away at eighty-one. It was so simple, so ravishingly simple, that at first he did not recognise it for what it was.
(Doctor Copernicus: John Banville)
This was not the first time something similar had happened, Hannnah had told her aunt. Aunt Eliza on her mother’s side was doing poorly at the time and in need of a good story. The older woman had warned her niece, obliquely, from the hospice bed that it would be her turn next. Physical demise sets in as three score years and ten approaches, she’d warned, and increases with the flitting past of time. Hannah wondered if most people, as she herself did, continued to look and feel like thirty, at least on the inside, well into old age.
It was quite a good story, if a little strange and out of left field for one, like her aunt, aspiring to certainties and victim to the laws of medical science, including mercy doses of morphine at the time.
It was during the years of Covid in Sydney. Hannah’s cousin, the gerontologist, had secured the bed for his mother in this sterile hospital, where many ghost-like souls slumbered in cane chairs or wandered the wards as if looking for something they had lost. Even getting inside to visit her aunt had been a rigmarole in itself. Esteemed physician that he was, her cousin would say in response to Hannah’s “tall stories” that it was cognitive decline as one aged, showing signs of frontal lobe shrinkage. Foretelling a need, he’d add, to slow down as the 8th decade drew nearer and nearer. With the help of morphine, Aunt Eliza had died peacefully as her ninth decade struck. A text book “dying” if ever there were one!
The first sign had been the Willy Wagtail, little show-off in his black-and-white suit who had imprinted on her last winter. It would not have made such an impact if the bird had not spooked her by manifesting inside her closed apartment that evening. Hiding in the laundry closet before whistling to alert her of his presence. She had had to coax him out through the front balcony, usually shielded from the street by glass sliding doors. He had feathers, after all, she reasoned, to protect himself from the cold.
She had mimicked Willy’s call one day. It was nothing like “Sweet pretty creature” that Grandma on her mother’s side in the country had taught her to be the mating call of wagtails. Much more lyrical, at other times hissing and angry like an egotistical infant demanding to be noticed.
Hannah would not have given it another thought if it had not occurred at the time of a young relative’s passing: So soon at just eighteen… It made her angry to think of all these youths self harming and not enough mental health support to go around. Like an ugly virus spreading its tentacles, spraying the most vulnerable with invisible toxins. The poor mothers feeling helpless…
Driving along the Prince’s Highway from the city in mid autumn, she had become aware of the vault of the sky above for the very first time. She heard or imagined an exultant voice narrating lines from two quatrains of The Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam, which she’d loved and recited from when she’d first read them many years before. They evoked the mystery of Persia during the tenth and eleventh centuries when magical Sufism was still in practice and before worlds beyond the seas had been discovered.
AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Starts to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a voice within the Tavern cry,
Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liqor in its Cup be dry.
She had a sense from the rhyming cadence of the beloved quatrains that some Persian astronomers might have known about the heliocentric theory of astronomy at this early time leading up to and during the Religious Crusades.
But Hannah’s realisation was nothing like that of the good doctor: Copernicus. No, hers was a sudden and visceral experience. The blue so bright, almost opaque next to the contrasting white of the shape-shifting clouds. And more than this, she saw how the azure filled the full vault of what she’d simply called “the sky” up until this time. Now it was all around her as she travelled south towards her daughter’s place: to the east, the west, in front of her, above the car and, if she could look behind, it was there as well. ‘It’s all around you,’ the voice was saying: It’s here and everywhere you can turn, surrounded on all sides as we are by the mystery of infinite space.’
Was it Dr. Joe’s voice urging her to become a better version of herself, that ethereal quantum voice of his, wanting her to break out of the stuckness that occurs at 30 or so and to continue evolving? Or was it her own voice commanding it? The blue was now veering to cobalt. Her son had said when she mentioned it to him: ‘Most people only see what is in front of them.’
As autumn moved towards the greyness of winter near the beach, the green-and-white caps of the waves competed with the softening hues of the vault above. She had tried to swim up until the King’s Birthday weekend. It was becoming more and more difficult because of the rain and the bad weather. But she had managed once or twice and it was a rewarding experience when she did so. The temperature of the water was always warmer early on than that of the air outside air: 20 degrees to seventeen. A strange thing in itself. Like the way the off-shore island moved position in relation to her just as the moon at night was wont to do as she walked straight along the beachfront. And the way the curve of the horizon showed itself when ships were either just in front or just behind it out at sea.
One day she became so engrossed in watching dolphins, hundreds of metres out from the beach, jumping out of the water in carefree glee that she stayed watching until the weather had changed and it was too late to go in the ocean herself.
And now this. This was more than weird: Feeling water on the floor matting at night, as if her feet were walking in clear pools of liquid. And water under her feet when she got out of bed in the morning and placed her soles gingerly on the seagrass carpets. She had googled it for medical input: ‘The swelling of feet and ankles from fluid called edema especially in summer.’ But that was not the case for herself in mid winter now. The other solution was, as many had claimed, more esoteric. She’d read about how we were made up of eighty percent water. What was this water trying to tell her? Voicelessly? Was it the elements fighting back against climate change? Something more poetic? Deeply mysterious whatever it was…
As if he knew she was writing about him, he whistled just now outside her study door. She whistled nonchalantly back and peeped through the window at Willy Wagtail on the plastic stool attached to the wall. Always there when the weather turned cold and windy. He had left for a time each spring to breed but had come back afterwards and reclaimed his post. It was a comfort knowing he was there each night. Fluffed up on his perch, little head tucked in, just through the glass doors to their bedroom.
Perhaps her aunt who had recently passed and other ancestors, were waiting just through the veil, praying for her to show a sign to them — or respond to theirs so that they knew she was aware of them.
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