Tom Carment

So on a Tuesday morning Jacob left his breakfast half-eaten and went out in his school uniform and sat there in the red dirt giving the old dog a hug. Later that morning Geoff and I went in the truck to Whyalla to take Poco to the vet and to see his father Mr Mills, who was slowly dying of cancer at home. Poco sat beside me on my flannelette shirt, so happy at the privilege of riding in the front instead of on the back tray.

The lady standing next to us said we had ‘missed the excitement’. A young man had jumped down the Blowhole itself, just after it had blown up its spume, and emerged seemingly unscathed in the ocean below. And now he was encouraging his girlfriend to jump down to him from the cliff.

I had qualms also as to whether to write about the indignities of Robert’s failing body and mind when he had always been so fastidious about his presentation to the world. But then I thought, ‘This is life – it’s tough.’ Robert had no such qualms when writing poems about his parents, and, to me, they’re his most emotional and moving works.

In our circle of chairs, we read our books after eating: Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich for Varvara, and Chernobyl by Serhii Plokhy for me, P.D. James for Tanya, Jane Austen for Eloise. Maybe we should have swapped and learnt something, as Varvara, born in Ukraine, knew little detail about the nuclear catastrophe of 1986 and I knew little about twenty-first century capitalism.

My first pictures were done from inside the excavation, below street level, sitting amongst the muddy rubble, oils, brushes and turps on the ground around me. I’d never before painted anything that changed so quickly – it was like painting a landscape in flux, where not only did the shadows lengthen and the sun go in and out of the clouds, but the very trees and hills changed shape and disappeared before your eyes.