What Can I Bring With Me?

Originally published in Voiceworks Edition #133, "Loaf" (2024)

A lifetime of clutter, painted plates and teacups and free keychains from

Dementia is a word that

I mean it’s become a sort of joke when we’re in Australia, because my uncle finishes every story with “they’ve got dementia now”

“I know him from University, and he became a journalist and one of his kids got into drugs and went to jail, but he – the kid, I mean – was always a ratbag, anyway he’s got dementia now.”

And we would mouth that last part along with him.

When I talk to my partner on the phone, we don’t talk about too much that feels important. So I talk about the video games I’ve been playing, about how our new cat is doing.

(Brave girl has come out from under the couch)

(Chants of Sennaar is super good! No spoilers though, I promise)

Anyway, we don’t talk about much, not the important stuff-

Not about the nitty-gritty as to why I spent that money to come over in the first place, even though often I find myself hating it there, though Auckland itself is beautiful, just as beautiful as any other place in the world

I think maybe that at the bottom of this place, the soft earth

That drinks spectacular Pacific rain

Is melting into a microscopic shuffle of decay, and ferns the colour of Mountain Dew unravel from their furry trunks, and things are dying here that I thought would never die.

What can I bring with me? I read about it when we searched for a nursing home for Audrey.

Twenty teacups and saucers in the cupboard – and the fibreboard is melting, because nothing will stay dry.

She likes op shopping(me too)

and forgets what she has at home when she goes out (me too)

If I was five years older when she last came to Melbourne, I would’ve driven her to Cranbourne, where all my favourites are

So when does it become a problem? When do your children step in?

“You’ve got to go outside of the city. If you can’t access it by public transport all the better. Brunswick gays and Coburg girlies have picked the northside clean, but none of them can drive!”

And I would buy her an iced coffee and she would think that my outfit (jorts, an XXL Miami Dolphins t-shirt) was hideous, and I would’ve thought the same of hers (white Marilyn Monroe curls, paisley chinos, the rose-coloured cardigan).

I tried to write what she might’ve said to that, but I couldn’t imagine it. She might’ve laughed, and glanced at my mum, conspiratorially, with great amusement, as she does

even now

But now I hug her and

Now I open her front door and

Audrey is a glamorous name, and I think that soon everyone will be calling their children those names, those grandmother names, and

(writing reparative fanfiction about our relationship)

(as if I didn’t have good reason not to be close to her)

(photo by D- J-(my mum))

(You will circle Maungawhau on its reeling road

And you will see the remains of the pā, and the pits where Tāmaki Māori stored their produce

And you might find all the places my family walk their dogs

And the path that I rode my bike up three times a day to train for the Alps to Ocean

And the trees that the kererū crash into like downed pilots

When they gorge themselves on fermented berries)

She smells awful, acrid, a puncture in the drowsy damp of her home, when I put my arms around her

when I let her kiss my cheek

And in the two days in a row I visit her she’s wearing the same clothes.

Dementia is a word that – found it online

Does knowing that help?

And twenty teacups, all different, but each to her taste,

And three packets of bacon that have all grown a green, oily shine

She jokes about hosting twenty people at a time when we ask her why

Maybe not exactly knowing that the most they’ve ever had in that house was when my cousin and her mum arrived and the paramedics came soon after

But knowing that she is lonely

She doesn’t look and see another time or different reality. It is far more mundane.

Sorry.

There are no visions or aesthetics or interesting visuals to play with. The 1950s do not play out in front of her eyes in technicolour. She does not see herself as a young woman.

She just can’t remember things as they come to her.

Remember this address for me:

67 Church Street, Manukau, Auckland.

And she can’t

They ask her to

Draw a clock:

So, there you go

(And I said to Jamie, “but I probably wouldn’t remember that either”, and Jamie said, “it’s all on a spectrum” and then I said “true”, and then I said, “well also I don’t know Manukau, and if they’d said a Melbourne suburb I probably actually would remember it, like if they had said 67 Church Street, Glenferrie, I’d probably remember that better” and Jamie said “totally”)

(I always always forget the word kererū, though I know what it’s called in English)

What can you bring with you?

She has knick-knacks and baubles, and the house is like a time capsule, but air and soil have wormed their way inside, and so they are all covered with a layer of dust, and I dreamt before I arrived that I was cleaning those walls with a rag that came away black with fat and grime.

When I opened the door, I remembered the smell like a ball of compost and I remember when they left rotting meat in their bin and

And the earth sinks down further into the water table.

To box the tragedies that have happened into a month, or a week, or a year, feels like

like standing on the shore and naming it the Pacific.

Small word. Big ocean.