In the year I turned five, my parents moved into a log cabin on Myers Creek Road in Healesville. It was home to six small children and our parents while also providing a front room with a wide window that long ago someone converted into a shop front.
They called the place Sunspot, even though nestled at the foot of Mount Donna Buang it rarely offered much by way of sunshine. It was magical all the same with its tall eucalypts and vast tree ferns whose tips clung in circular fronds like tiny foetuses. Ever green, especially in the depths of winter.
One day my siblings and I wandered down to the creek, which rippled along the base of the valley. A creek whose waters in my memory were always clear and dappled, in light and shade, over round pebbles the colour of desert sand and the dry split peas my mother used in her soups.
We had not walked long when one of my brothers complained of an itch in his eye.
‘Don’t rub it,’ my older brother said. He could see and we others could see, the thin tail of a black leech which had somehow slipped into the corner of my brother’s eye and nestled under an eyelid happily sucking away.
I knew enough about leeches even then to know you should never try to flick it off or squash it. Leeches, our big brothers told us, had suckers that dug into your skin and if you did not remove them with care they could leave bits of their fat black bodies behind and those bits could get infected and you might die.
Death was something I had heard about that year after my mother answered the phone one day. The telephone black as a leech and just as shiny was cradled in a nook on the wall close to the shop room of our house. My mother began to cry. I could scarcely hear her words, muffled and in Dutch, but soon after we learned her mother, my Oma, had died back home in the Netherlands, and my mother would never see her again.
She could not attend the funeral. Costs too great and time too short. She settled instead for a black and white photo of her mother, dead on her hospital bed, eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer position. A photo I studied often for signs of what death might look like. It came several weeks later in an envelope bordered all round in black. Such envelopes I soon learned carried news from Holland that another person had died.
I disliked it when these letters arrived. They always left my mother red eyed and weepy after she opened them and read about yet another uncle, aunt, or cousin who had passed onto Heaven.
She should be happy then, I reasoned, as heaven, she told us, was a happy place where we could get everything we wanted but could only arrive there if we were good.
I tried to be good, but it was not always easy. And in those days when I struggled to work out the trickiness of this thing called death, which took people away for good but also sent them to Heaven. It was a mixed blessing and I was anxious about my shortcomings. Not ready for death, especially not the idea that one day my mother, too, would die and leave us to fend for ourselves. Then what would we do? We still had our father, but he was not a person I wanted to look after me, as much as he knew what to do when a leech floated into your eye.
We did not tell our mother about the leech but went straight home to find him digging out a ball of ground which he promised would one day become a swimming pool for the summer days when everyone would visit us and the shop do its roaring trade.
Sadly, this never happened as my father and uncle who bought into this venture, which not only included the log cabin and shop, but also a series of holiday cottages further up the hill on one side of the mountain, overestimated their chances.
Visitors never came, the charm of Healesville as it once existed during the turn of the century was over and people preferred to holiday in the sunshine at the beach, not the dark gloomy bush of ferns and undergrowth in Healesville where leeches lurked and the possibility of snakes was ever present.
But I did not reflect on any of this as I watched my father take his lit cigarette to my brother’s eye as carefully as his trembling hands might allow. Under the glowing tip of the butt the leech wriggled away from the edge of my brother’s eye and fell to the ground where another brother stood on it. Blood oozed like a stain in the dirt.
The leech was dead and my brother lived and did not lose his eyesight or good health. But this memory, on the cusp of all memories to do with death, comes back to me now. The shiny black skin of a fat and full leech whose short time on earth had finally come to an end. While mine would go on for decades.