Dying by Cory Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

worry too
much about how or why. My grandmother on my mother’s side died before I got to know
her. But I remember her as a talented woman with literary aspirations, who died too
young to fulfil her potential—because that’s what I heard so often from my mother.
The point of the story was not lost on me. It was a cautionary tale, and it haunted
me, as it haunted Mum. But to my mind it was also a romantic story, especially in
the detail. My grandmother was a country girl from Longreach, in outback Queensland.
When she was scarcely out of school, she married a grazier twelve years her senior.
She wrote bush poetry that was published in the Bulletin , but her real wish was to
escape to the city, to meet with other writers and be part of a literary scene. Her
chance didn’t come until she was sixty. Newlywidowed, she bought herself an apartment
at the Macleay Regis in Kings Cross, in the heart of bohemian Sydney. A week or so
after moving in she died in her sleep. A sad end, of course, but what impressed me
was the strength of her ambition—she had nursed it for so long and against such odds.
And I admired the fact that she took writing seriously, which gave me permission
to do the same, to protect my own little flame of ambition as soon as it flared up
in high school.
    Without my grandmother’s example, who knows what might have become of me? I might
have dismissed poetry as a waste of time and concentrated on my science classes.
As it was, a part of me always believed that I was honouring my grandmother’s memory
by choosing writing as a profession, that I was finishing something she had started,
or at least taking up the baton. I know she is not aware of it, but I’m still persuaded
she would be pleased to think that this is how she is remembered. In that way, too,
she is a pioneer, gone ahead of me into the great bohemia in the ether.



I am the youngest of three children. My sister Sarah is six years older than I am,
and my brother Eliot four years older. I have the impression that I was a surprise,
if not a mistake. According to my mother, when she announced that she was pregnant
for the third time, my grandmother shook her head in disbelief. ‘You stupid girl,’
she said, rightly worried about the state of my parents’ marriage. For some reason,
this story always made my mother laugh. I couldn’t see the joke; maybe you had to
have been there.
    From time to time as we were growing up my mother would take Sarah and Eliot and
me out to the place where she was born. We went in the winter school holidays, from
Sydney, and later from Canberra. It was two or three days by car, up through New
South Wales, and across the border into Queensland, the towns growing sparser anddustier the further we drove, the horizon flattening, the sky overhead broadening
until there was so much of it your eyes ached from staring.
    The pattern of our visits was always the same. We stayed with my mother’s youngest
sister Jenny and her husband Ranald. They lived on North Delta, a sheep and cattle
property near Barcaldine that had belonged to my grandfather Norman Murray. The country
there was ochre, scrubby, and we approached it along a rutted road that my mother
navigated gingerly because of the bull dust. I could tell she was scared as soon
as she turned off the bitumen. She gripped the wheel and narrowed her gaze to a few
feet ahead, expecting us to strike disaster at any moment. The bush wasn’t her natural
element. She might have been born there, but after years of exile she had become
suburban and cautious.
    At the end of such a long journey the homestead was always a joyous sight, set in
a clearing surrounded by rough-hewn fences. We drove in from the back, passing the
machinery shed and the chicken coops and the pigsty and the tethered dogs along the
way. The verandahs were pitched wide and low, so from a distance the house appeared
to be all red roof. Once you had come in through the kitchen door, you immediately
saw the point