CHAPTER TWO

THE LIGHT THE DEAD SEE

If my third reconstructed memory had a colour, it would be Van Gogh yellow. I was three years old, lying on my stomach, ‘floating’ in the middle of nowhere—a bed suspended in an abyss.

I was in a closed room, the light around me frozen and lifeless. My jaw and mouth were locked shut, my neck bloated, my body, rigid. I couldn’t move a muscle—arms, hands, legs, toes—I was a dried shell, neither living nor dead and I knew nothing.

Adults would have said I was paralysed.

Somehow, I think I separated my eyes and ears from the rest of my body—if that makes any sense. My eyes floated outward into the sea of yellow surrounding me, weightless. Yellow eyes adrift in a glassy stream of gold. In that state, I could see myself, my body, as if it no longer belonged to me. I had become a kind of twin, a sibling to myself.

A door with a small square window stood in the room. Adults appeared on the other side of the glass, peering in sideways. They would push the door open and glide toward me in their stiff, white coats and face masks, their hands sheathed in what I would describe as corpse-coloured rubber.

They were there, moving their hands, though I had no idea what they were doing. They said nothing—pale speechless balloons.

As I mentioned, I’d detached from my body, hovering near the ceiling like a moth or a small bird. Up there, I felt a strange calm.

It turns out that I was in a room at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital with diphtheria. I must have been close to death until the adults pumped the poison out and replaced it with horse-derived diphtheria antitoxin. I didn’t see my parents or my sisters for several weeks, not until the treatment had succeeded.

The year was 1945. I was three years old. The diphtheria toxoid vaccine had been introduced only months earlier, and community immunisation programs were beginning to be implemented. But my mother opposed vaccination, believing it interfered with God’s will, and that true protection came through prayer. As a resul