Nineveh by Trina Jackson All places are sacred. Some are obviously so because that’s where our ancestors release us into birth, or bring us home after death. But some are less obvious. These places are sacred because they carry an indelible memory of us. These types of places are a lot like the people who fill them. If we treat them with respect, they will open up and tell us their stories. And, just like people, some places awaken an uneasiness that we wish we could forget. The old Townsville hospital is like that for me. The first time I went there I was just a skinny kid. Dad was driving one handed, singing to Kenny Rogers on the tape deck. I could feel the ancestors all around us as we sped along the flat highway into town. The occasional waft of dead kangaroo circulating in the warm air interrupted the steady flow of blue smoke from Dad’s durry. Just outside the hospital’s entrance was a small park. A hedged archway and a tall bronze soldier announced the hospital’s entrance. The soldier stood on a short cement platform; a plaque embedded in its base told me the hospital was dedicated to men like him. His gun, habitually slung over one shoulder, made me wonder if he’d forgotten that he’d ever done anything else. I felt reluctant to be in debt to this man whose expression seemed unmoved by the war I imagined was going on around him. As I stood looking up at this bronzed hero a deep feeling of discomfort settled on me. The cloak of ancestral contact that I had worn my entire life fell away, and they withdrew from me. A palpable threshold, almost visible, rose up around the statue—they would not cross beyond the archway. I had never encountered a place the ancestors did not fill before. I looked to Dad and waited as he carefully put his durries away in his back pocket. I could see him shaking. We walked on in measured steps.
Entering the vast building should have felt like entering the Tower of Nineveh, for all the unalterable events that happened in there. But it felt all wrong. Like a chamber filled with a deep, echoing silence, where the air tasted like a wasted god and pressed down on the living. The cheap rubber soles of my shoes squeaked painfully on the polished black and white tiles as I turned a slow circle, trying to touch familiar spirits. The large rectangular room seemed dome-like and looming. I followed my shoes’ sound to an alcove near the stairs. The squeak I had made was trapped there—reverberating as if desperate to tell me something. It bounced and clung to the small semicircle of otherwise useless space that announced the winding stair rail. In this cloying space was a round table, a white lace tablecloth hanging in folds over its edges, stretching into its own reflection on the floor. From where I stood, a small distance away, I craned my neck, trying to smell the small purple flowers tightly bunched in a vase near the centre. I dared not take the one step needed to reach them properly—for the ghosts that huddled there. They stood, white skinned and pale in their khaki uniforms, looking at me with their hollowed out faces. The soldiers tried to seem tall, I thought. But somehow the weight of their uniforms smothered something unique and elemental. As if their burden rendered them into a kind of universally revered, but emptied soul. As we peered at one another, it occurred to me that the bronze statue at the entrance had been wearing the same uniform. And, while it served the same purpose, that particular form of emptying seemed less disturbing than it did on these who had been men. The ghosts continued to look at me impassively, my squeaky echo cutting through them unnoticed. I looked back, ignoring the shiver that ran through my scalp as one of them bent down to see me better with his once bloodshot eyes. He needn’t have opened his mouth at all; I could see his thoughts perfectly. In
them I read the pain of isolation that comes from being damaged by something celebrated. I know you, his eyes accused. I could feel Dad staring at me and turned away. I dared not ask if he knew what the man had said, and trotted after him. In unison, my still squeaking shoe reached the first step of the tightly wound staircase and my hand landed on the satin patina of its wooden rail. I imagined I could feel every kid like me who had been dragged up these stairs to confront whatever awaited them. My fingers moved in soft patterns over the patina that kept me company, feeding me snippets of stories as we climbed in tight gunbarrel movements. Memories had ensconced themselves into the fabric of this building, creating an intimacy in its emptiness. A mother’s determination to stay strong, an old man in brown pausing in the same place every day of the year it took his wife to die, ephemeral traces of newborns, the muted presence of staff. I followed Dad’s shadow as we climbed and turned in silence that seemed like forever. I could feel the men in khaki waiting at the bottom of the stairs—they pulled and pulled at me. They felt angry, but I wasn’t sure if that was because I knew they were there, or because I knew they were prisoners. Stretching onto my toes, I leaned over the railing, daring the khaki heroes to match my bravery. They could not, and cruelly, I knew that. But they did send a cold vertigo, hurled upward from the ground floor, to tug at me as I slid my stomach onto the patina, feet almost clearing the floor, my hair hanging into the space separating us. I gripped the rail hard, and inched my toes up just a smidge farther. I could feel them down there—taunting me with one of my own memories. For a second I could smell eucalyptus, and something just beyond reach. Maybe if I stood on the very ends of my toes I could make myself big enough to let the memory in, understand what they were trying to tell me.
Breathing in, I surrendered, let myself go limp, and there it was. The day was hot, burning into the bare skin of my thighs, the brown there coated in a layer of white dust. Three dead pigs lay at lazy angles to the sulphite edges of the hot spring. The mist rising from its yellow centre stank. Uncle was sharpening his knife on a leather strap against his massive leg and contemplating the hairs on the beast that now rested half submerged in the steam. I could hear the khaki men laughing at me, far below. I had thought Uncle my hero. How strong he had been. It was he who had taught me how to witness death. ‘Oy… sst!’ The low tone in Dad’s voice suggested I stop muckin’ about and get on. We had stopped climbing and were passing through a thickly plastered corridor with patient rooms running along both sides. Uncle’s room faced east—the afternoon sun filtered through the pale blue privacy curtains which were pinned back, making him look like a portrait of lost dignity. ‘Uncle,’ I whispered, looking down at my feet. ‘Shush,’ he said, his eyes holding me steady. I wanted to pull the curtain, hide his shame. His now gaunt frame was exposed to view, the long strip of ulcerated flesh running the length of his thigh too painful to dress. He half sat, half slumped, trying to find relief from the pain. His gown, partially open, revealed a bony chest that inhaled without rhythm. ‘It’s not right,’ I protested, my voice weak. Dad leant against the corridor wall, just beyond Uncle’s view, his face rigid, head bowed. Uncle looked hard at me, waiting for me to get past my embarrassment. When I eventually looked up, a soft chuckle escaped him. ‘They got to you eh?’ ‘Yes Uncle. Why do they stay—allow themselves to rot here?’
‘You have it wrongside up child. They carry the grief of the living. Not the guilt of the dead.’ ‘What does that mean Uncle? Where will I go to talk with you?’ Even as I fought to be free of them, his eyes held mine. In them I could see our people. Images of fighting, loving, losing, but always the ancestors embracing us back into their cyclical time. I knew then that they had never left us, that they waited outside for him to come. He would not be bound in one place like the khaki soldiers. ‘Let them have this, child,’ he said, his voice soft like steel. I cried that day, and I learned how to make myself big enough to hold it all.