MINISTERIO DE SALUD

I didn’t have the luxury of packing all the books. There simply wasn’t enough room, so I had tried to sort them into categories and then selected a few from each pile. The first pile consisted of works that were not from my university major, but from the electives. This pile was substantial. Early on I had been presented with a poem called ‘The shield of Achilles’. It was an unlikely title for something that evoked the

barrenness of modern life. But it served as an indicator that if I wanted to be serious about literature then Thetis and Haephestus were going to have to become part of my repertoire.

I could have done with Achilles’ shield, I thought as I waded through the Greek pile. Richard had covered himself in iron from head to foot, whereas every time I marched to the plain to face him I stood naked, unarmed and with my skin layer missing. I fingered my copies of Homer, Plato and the plays, and decided that I couldn’t relinquish any of them. I could identify with too many of the characters, I reflected cynically – Oedipus’s blindness in particular.

Moving over to the pile under the window, I was working with the books more closely related to my major. I took a leap forwards to the Middle Ages: to Mallory, his knights and his queen. I found an old poetry anthology that had lost its cover, with underlinings and pages folded over like a well-loved Bible. I rescued it.

I searched again. Perhaps there was an entire historical period that I could dispense with, seeing as there was no way that I could escape from my own. I thumbed my way through a few of the other piles – Romantic individualism, Augustan order and precision, Renaissance conceits and Victorian doubts. I took

satisfaction in the Victorian doubts. What was it that encapsulated their mood? Dear God, if there is a God, please save my soul, if I have one. And why shouldn’t they be doubtful? Still I felt no sympathy. Nothing in my world was secure either. I decided to keep some from each period, on the rationale that it all represented various tortuous parts of the human condition. I would squeeze them into a bookcase or keep them in boxes under the bed if I had to.

I moved onto the next pile containing a selection of soft covers – self-help and New Age.

‘What are you going to do with this lot, Mum?’ Rebecca knelt down to help with the sorting.

I scanned some of the titles. In retrospect I saw them in a totally different light. How could I not have been aware that they all focused on the needs and wants of other people: how to raise boys, how to develop the brighter child, how to

recognise stress, how to create twenty-five investment properties in three years. ‘Get rid of the lot.’

‘All of them?’ She looked incredulous.

‘Yep. They all depend on other people’s cooperation. I only want stuff that I can do on my own. Is there anything in your pile that could just be applied to me?’

‘It doesn’t seem like it.’ She looked at me quizzically.

‘So definitely get rid of them.’ I started to help her scoop them up and stuff them into plastic bags.

‘What about the philosophy stuff? It has its own separate pile?’ ‘Keep it. I’m probably going to need it.’

‘And the general fiction?’

‘It can go. I’ll get another plastic bag.’

I headed towards the kitchen, stepping over the piles. Zach was helping himself to everything left in the fridge.

‘Here’s one among the fiction that you might want to keep,’ Rebecca called out.

‘What’s it called?’ ‘The Power of One.’

‘It isn’t mine,’ I yelled back. ‘Somebody gave it to me to pass onto Zach.’ I turned to him. ‘Can you remember that woman’s name?’ I asked, but Zach had sat down and, using the table as a footrest, had begun shoving the food from his plate to his mouth, so all I got was an unintelligible mumble about not wanting to go in the first place. I silently agreed with him, but we were all a bit desperate at the time.

‘I can recall her face but not her name,’ I told Rebecca, as I brought another bag back into the room. ‘It was a kind face. She looked like an elderly hippy with grey hair tumbling around her shoulders.’

I had forgotten about her and her book until now. We had paid her a visit when we eventually had a holiday back in New Zealand.

Richard had stopped taking any kind of holidays at that point, including weekends, so the children and I had made the trip back on our own. We had never had a holiday away from Richard before, but after he returned from Dubai we

reached a number of agreements in which, as I tried to make more allowances for the job, Richard tried to pay the family more attention and be more emotionally

available.

The separation of the business trip had, this time, done us good. I had missed him desperately and he told me he had missed me just as much. When I was tucked into the familiar curve of his shoulder at night, he had reassured me that he was not in the least interested in Annie and I had believed him. We were not sure how it was going to work but we agreed that our love and long history made it worth giving it a try. We also agreed that my going back to New Zealand for the holidays would not do our relationship any harm and that the children would be relieved to free

On arrival in New Zealand, before rekindling our relationship with family and friends we had visited a friend of Marie’s – a wise elderly grey-headed lady. Her speciality was ‘guided imagery’ and Marie had recommended her when she had invited us to stay, after supporting me for weeks from afar as our family lurched from crisis to crisis. Marie had had a lot to do with this lady in the midwifery practice – she was good with children and young people, she had helped Marie’s daughter Sarah, and Marie thought that she might have something to offer Zach.

Zach had relinquished his role of ‘soldier’ designated by Richard and had even gone as far as saying that he wanted to desert the school altogether. ‘It has been given a good trial,’ he announced. Although he recognised that it was inconvenient to desert at midsemester, the place had a number of inadequacies that could no longer be tolerated.

The main problem was that the school was just for boys. Despite researching the origin of these schools and gaining an understanding of the Judeo-Christian background and the insistence on separation at puberty, Zach considered that such a system penalised the boys. Instead of receiving more egalitarian and moderate treatment for misdemeanours such as forgetting textbooks or failing to do

homework, the boys were required to do press-ups and suffer other punishments that Zachary believed were sexist. He had researched this by delving into one of my university courses on the education of women and using my own assignment

material as evidence.

Wealth was another issue – not the other parents’ abundance of it but our relative lack of it. This was a difficult one to fob off since, at a dinner that the school had provided to support the new parents when we arrived in Sydney, there had been a public announcement that tonight was the time to consider bequests or donating some land. I had been forced to agree with Zach that in this respect we were out of our depth.

The good thing about all of these complaints was that Zach had investigated other Sydney schools and found two that suited him. The first required him to speak fluent Hebrew upon entry and the second, which he conceded might also create a

few difficulties because it didn’t take boarders, required him to travel eighty kilometres to school a day – each way.

Reluctant to embark on either path, and tasked with finishing a wordy linguistics assignment and spending days in hot property areas with

overenthusiastic real-estate agents as we moved from renting into home ownership, I had settled for the more wacky option of guided imagery as a temporary solution that might allow us to limp on.

The grey-headed lady lived in a delightful part of Auckland’s North Shore. To get there we rented a car and wound our way out onto a peninsula on an unsealed road. We arrived a charming cottage tucked into a sheltered part of the valley and surrounded by an English-style country garden. Rebecca had come along because of her anxiety. She was highly impressed, even more so when we were served

gingerbread in the sunny timber kitchen.

The guided imagery itself, however, was less successful. The children were asked to lie down on the floor with cushions as they allowed music to take them on a journey, guided by the grey-headed lady. During the journey they could be anything they wanted to be, not necessarily a person. Rebecca went first, to encourage a

sceptical Zach, who thought he was too old for such nonsense. She had problems relaxing, but when she did, she went on a watery journey as a dolphin, gliding smoothly through the ocean and temporarily freeing herself from her fears. She also visualised a safe place where she could retreat whenever she felt overwhelmed by social expectations.

I was persuaded to have a turn, partly to convince Zach that this was a worthwhile experience and partly out of curiosity. Unfortunately, no relaxing journey was forthcoming. I visualised myself as a rubber ball being bounced on gravel in a game being played by three faceless people. The game went on for much longer than the grey-headed lady felt comfortable with but finally, after a

particularly heavy-handed bounce, I flew into the air, over their heads, and rolled away into a drain.

This left Zach, who visualised himself as a Kuwaiti oil fire. As the woman tried to guide him through his experience and introduce him to the healing notion of water, he kept sabotaging the process by telling her that he had the potential to burn for a hundred years and that water would never be enough to put him out.

‘You need an explosive to suck the oxygen away and starve the fire,’ he said, ‘or a tube to channel the fire away so you can get closer.’

Sensing that guiding Zach anywhere was not working, the lady thanked us for coming, terminated the session with another piece of gingerbread and presented Zach with The Power of One.

Later that evening, staying with Marie and Tim, I conveyed to them our limited experience. Marie was apologetic but I reminded her of the help it had been to Sarah and Rebecca and waved away any guilt that she was feeling.

‘We will feel better simply from being here,’ I reassured her. ‘Being back in a relaxed environment is tonic enough.’

The New Zealand landscape of bush and hills, along with cool evenings, immediately calmed me. I sat on the veranda, as the temperature dropped and the last rays of sun withdrew from the valley, and marvelled at the twilight air, so still and silent. And when I awoke in the early morning, the mist was still clinging to the trees, shrouding them in a healing gauze and shielding the dew, which sat on the leaves in suspended droplets.

Every day I was taken care of by Marie. I had forgotten how safe it felt to watch her bustling around the place, full of competence and nurturing graces.

Yet she had a large load herself. Frustrated with the hierarchical hospital system and determined to become more autonomous, she had taken on a job against Tim’s wishes with a new private clinic. She had her own clientele of women whose demands were high. They tended to be well-educated people who had made their choice after a great deal of deliberation and who wanted an optimal experience. Although she found the job intensely rewarding, her responsibilities and duties were immense.

On top of this Tim was out of work again, and sitting on the terrace in the long twilight, I listened to news of his family and his current plight. I learned that his brother Brian was still on the family farm and thriving. For his loyalty and effort, their ageing mother and father had sectioned off a parcel of land and Brian and Elaine had built on it. It was an ideal situation as his parents also helped out, looking after their first-born Madeline and later Jordan and Donovan when Elaine returned to work as a funeral director. Sadly, Marie and Tim felt that they still could not afford to have more than one child – disappointing as they had both wanted a large family.

‘I’ve been out of work more than I’ve been in it recently,’ Tim said

disgustedly. ‘And when I get anything it’s always casual. The country has gone to the dogs.’

In his last job, in the concrete industry, he had been employed for just over a year before being laid off. He blamed his situation on the Employment Contracts Act, which had replaced the national system of award coverage with individual and enterprise employment contracts. He had always been a strong supporter of trade unions and in his words was ‘thoroughly pissed off’ at the decentralisation of the collective bargaining process.

‘The last company wanted to extend my hours,’ he told me, ‘way beyond forty per week, with no penalty rates and with a whole new range of tasks that I was expected to perform. With Marie out delivering babies at nights someone has to be here for Sarah. When I wouldn’t sign up they put me off. If you ask me, all that talk about free trade was just an excuse to get rid of the unions. They’re stuffed.’

‘In what way?’

Marie began explaining patiently.

‘Well, now the trade unions have to get written authorisation from members in each workplace to negotiate on their behalf, which has placed them under strain. As well as that there has been an abolition of their tax-exempt status so that the unions have to pay taxes on the income derived from membership fees.’

‘So they’ve had to cut back on their services?’

‘That’s right. The employers no longer have to negotiate collective contracts with the unions and the unions have had to compete with each other, which has usually meant amalgamate or close. The other problem is that while the unions have been busy shoring up support, many of the workers have felt abandoned and have drifted away——’

‘Productivity may have improved but the wages and conditions of the workforce have turned to shit,’ Tim interrupted.

‘It’s been hard for both of us,’ Marie said, ‘but while I’ve been able to

negotiate myself an adequate individual contract, the system hasn’t worked for Tim.’ ‘That’s a bloody understatement.’ He stood up and began pacing. ‘I need to talk to Richard. Maybe he can get me a job in Australia.’

I was unsure of whether he was joking, but was pleased I hadn’t disclosed that, although things were looking good for us, they were a result of a great deal of risk and a fair bit of emotional pain. I didn’t want to destroy Tim’s faith in the ‘lucky country’.

I tried to discuss the matter with Richard when he phoned that evening. Despite his intentions to keep some distance between himself and his work, the phone calls varied in tone, depending on the stresses of his day. If the company had a hiccup at the same time as a Reserve Bank announcement of another interest rate rise it was bound to be a bad one, but such things had been happening so often that I was beginning to get used to the inconsistencies and was becoming more adept at dealing with them. On good days, I dealt with the old Richard and on bad days, I dealt with the new one.

This call began on a reasonable note. On a colour scale from yellow to black, I gave Richard’s mood a dark green. There was none of the new and frequent

irritability that would have given it a grey, just the indifference and the ‘we all have to do it hard’ persona. As I listened to Richard, I wondered if it was just because I

was back in home territory that I was so acutely aware of how far he had shifted from his former self. Probably not.

No longer the socially conscious young man I had married, or even the middle-aged fence sitter, Richard had firmly aligned himself on the unsympathetic Right. Tim needed to wake up to himself. The changes that he was bemoaning were necessary, couldn’t come soon enough and were welcomed by anyone with a brain in Richard’s company. They improved the flexibility and the efficiency of the labour market.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jane,’ (dark green still), ‘you must realise that employees need the means to respond flexibly to changes in the supply and demand for labour. You’re a fool if you can’t see that. There will always be unemployment, but the level is lowest if economic growth is sustained. What we need is for the impediments to the free operation of the labour market to be removed. Which is, of course… are you still there, Jane?’

I had lost concentration, dismayed at how far Richard was sliding down the rainbow. I must have said something.

On he went. ‘Which is of course the abolition of national-award fixing systems, government wage fixing and compulsory union membership. And as for giving Tim a job, tell him to stay right where he is. I’ve got nothing for him over here.’