The Mole Doctor makes eye contact.
This is weird as I am in my underwear, but I hold his gaze; I’m a doctor too. If he’s found a melanoma I need to see the whites of his eyes to gauge how bad it is.
You have the skin of a younger man, he says. It says here you were born in UK. When did you come here?
He wants to know how many years under the Australian sun I’ve avoided.
When I was nearly seven, I say.
In the Eighties? He says, incredulous. What, you never go outside? Allergic to grass or something?
Nah, we just wore a…lot of sunscreen I guess.
Ah! Your mum early adopter of Slip Slop Slap?
It was my dad actually. He was a pathologist.
The eyes widen just a bit behind the glasses.
Ah! He see melanoma down microscope all day, he come home and protect you. You so lucky. You know that?
*
I do. Dad was protective of us like that. He didn’t just see melanoma down the microscope, he saw it in the mortuary too.
Pathologists are medical detectives. They deal in the closest thing to answers medicine has. They can tell you if a spot you had cut off is cancerous or not. They can also tell if the surgeon who cut the cancer out of you got all of it at the site where it began.
But more confrontingly, they come in at the end, to examine your body and tell the story of how the cancer took you.
Dad protected us from this grim side of his work. I actually didn’t see a dead body until the second day of medical school, under a sheet in the anatomy department, donated for us to dissect.
And I didn’t see a post-mortem of the kind Dad did hundreds of over decades for all kinds of unexpected death in our region, until I was an intern in his hospital.
The trainee pathologist working for Dad had bright white gumboots on. He moved nimbly around the basement space showing me and my team the remains of the patient we had done CPR together on the night before.
Being a quirky character, the path reg rattled through the stats on our patient like it was a cooking show. The weight of his heart. The size of his liver. His liver in slices – see the tumours! The brain still on the scales.
I’d had to call this frail old man’s distraught family. He was 90. I was 24. And feeling older by the minute.
So this is why Dad didn’t tell us about this part of his job.
*
He didn’t want us having to grow up too fast I guess. We kids used normal black gumboots for repelling more ordinary fluids like rain and mud, running around the bush out the back of our country town. That Dad saw the worst of everything that happened there and still let us go outside at all is remarkable to me.
But he made us wear sunscreen from the moment we arrived off the plane in 1984. And zinc! And T-shirts and hats! Long before it was normal. We are talking Western Australia in the mid-Eighties. Have you seen the cricket footage from the WACA? More skin on display than turf.
Dad told us why sunscreen mattered, in a G-rated way. He didn’t tell us how many dead yellow men and women in their 30s and 40s he’d had to cut open for answers. We just knew we’d live longer and healthier if we prevented skin cancer.
Alas, G-rated explanations don’t stop the violence and horror of kids’ M-rated imaginations. In particular I worried about my friends, made at schools and caravan parks. They were so brown of skin and bleached of hair.
They were going to die! I didn’t know exactly how, but my imagination was ready to fill the gaps with its budget horror movie crew. The pictures on the empty covers at the video shop had nothing on the special effects my young mind could create.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell my glowing golden friends. I was in awe of their risk-loving wildness. The lightness of the streaks through salty sandy hair, the way bronzed limbs and torsos seemed to weigh less. To fly almost. Over the sand and through the water. Why disturb that sun-drenched universe?
Because we have a cultural problem, Dad would say. Tanning is thought beautiful and healthy, like smoking was. But it’s like smoking for your skin.
He was so right. Yet he was also Dad. As we grew, it got harder to put up with him being right about things.
*
One day, not long after we’d been naturalised as Australian citizens, I forgot the sunscreen. Some kids playing cricket had their shirts off and I joined them. I got so sunburnt they suspended play to peer at me, sucking their teeth and recommending the afternoon off. Don’t worry though, they said, you’ll tan great when the skin peels off.
The next day went forever; I’d heard grown-ups talk about hangovers and I was sure this was like that. I’d got drunk on belonging to the shirtless sunkissed cricketers. They had even said my bowling was ok! Was that worth dying sooner for?
I now wonder, in kindness to my younger self, if I really forgot the sunscreen. Maybe I just wanted to see what it was like to risk something like that. Maybe I wasn’t the hot fool I felt slinking home. I now see I’d behaved like a normal growing kid, desperate to belong among the Australians, needing to defy my Pommy medical parents.
I can’t remember what they made of their red and miserable firstborn. Maybe I didn’t let them see the extent of it. They wouldn’t have shouted, but then their quiet disappointment would have been worse.
Memory serves me correctly there I think. Best forgotten.
But I remember the fever dream of sunburn recovery. I remember the self-reproach more than the pain and nausea. Grow up you dickhead, I told myself.
When the dead skin peeled away, I had tanned. Smoking for the skin.
I will never let this happen again, I told myself.
And I haven’t. That was my last sunburn.
*
We moved one last time, across the desert, becoming Victorians and staying put.
After a few years in a lax culture on sun safety, we had moved into a terrifyingly effective culture shift in road safety, with Transport Accident Commission ads scaring and scarring us kids long before we could drive.
It was working though – the road toll was tumbling from a late 1980s peak. Was that enough for my old man, with all he still had to put gumboots on to see at work, and all he had to protect from that fate at home?
No. Love and worry say no to that. Sunscreen is not enough, they say.
Love and worry can etch the weirdest things into you to keep you safe.
Like…That Armchair.
We were taking it to the tip when I was home from boarding school. It was a mess, ancient torn stained veloure, frame snapped, bent and sagging, its seat ruptured, springs and foam poking through.
See that, said Dad. That’s what car accidents do to people’s bodies.
He didn’t have to say any more. That was the M-rated version. I knew he didn’t want to scare me too much. Just…enough.
But how much is enough when it comes to love and worry?
*
I still put my first car in a bush at the side of our gravel road after trying to fishtail out of the main road.
That was when I was about twenty. It’s said the male brain is still doing a lot of maturing well into the twenties. But parts of me were old – burned then tanned – long before that. Child of children of war. Migration. Moving across the desert. 5 primary schools. Boarding school.
Smoking for the soul. What does that do to your life expectancy?
At twenty-four, having been a medical doctor myself for half a year or so, I was driving a much more powerful Holden Commodore around a bend in my parents’ driveway when I was hit by an urge to floor it and spin the wheels all the way up the hill to the main road.
As with the sunburn, looking back I can be kinder to myself.
Intern year was stressful, most of my waking hours immersed in illness and death and fear of failure. I could feel what was left of my youth draining into tubes to keep old people alive; after 14 hour days I’d feel a hundred years old.
Tanned inside, like animal hide; made tough, useful, unfeeling. Another leather doctor lining the wards.
So I had a moment of wanting to run again with the sunkissed golden children of the West, among all that bleached hair flying in the wind.
I bloody floored it. Bluestone flew out behind me, a cloud of Millennium Drought dust rising like a salute.
I felt the thrill of a younger man, risking his skin to feel free. To feel anything.
Until I came over the crest of the hill and saw my old man getting back from his run.
I hit the brakes and wound down the window as I pulled up alongside him. The dust cloud wafted ridiculously past.
I did not make eye contact.
Do I really have to say anything? He said
No, I mumbled to to the steering wheel.
He did not appear to have heard that.
How old are you? He asked
Twenty four, I said.
Dad sighed.
I better get to work, I said
As a doctor, Dad said
Yes, I said.
Well off you go then, Dad said.
And off I went. Very slowly. I saw him in the mirror, in my dust. He disappeared in it soon, but I felt watched – love and worry – all the way to the main road.
*
You don’t need to come back here for ages, says the Mole Doctor. Your skin beautiful. Your daddy smart man. Ahead of his time! Love you lots.
Yeah, I say.
And then he leaves the room and I put my clothes back on. I am suddenly aware of my skin, and so thankful for it I could weep.
Not here though. Not even in the (very safe) car afterwards. British kid, you see. Medical parents. Soul tan.
But if this skin of mine can still feel something, telling Mole Doctors of my youth, middle-aged doctor of love and worry that I have become…
…then maybe there is hope that I won’t get too old too fast.
(Intergenerational love and worry = Slip Slop Slap Slide, north of the tropic of Capricorn, 2009)
The Normal Grown-Up 