I wake this morning with Andy Gibb’s “Thicker than Water” playing a personal broadcast in my head. Fifty-odd years since I last heard the damn thing, and maybe I only ever heard it a couple of times back then anyway, and yet it rings clear and distinguished as a pulsar’s hammering — every note, every corny line. I never even liked the Gibb brothers. I used to call them “those bloody long hairs” and I’d roll my eyes at the kids visiting from the university physics department who tried to look just like them. God, I was such a dick back then. I mean, who cares how bloody long someone’s hair is, really?

But Andy Gibb will give me something to talk about with Bonnie when I drop in for our lunch. A nice old memory to hang a chat upon, nothing contentious or upsetting. She won’t remember who Andy Gibb was anyway; I barely do. But it will allow us a semblance of “personal exchange” while making sure nothing anxiety-inducing gets stirred up. Actually, I could base a few days of lunches on the Gibb brothers and then maybe disco as a general topic — a week’s worth of risk free “conversations”.

She’ll nod away as I go on about whichever Gibb and interject with “Oh, yes” and “Oh, really?” and “Well, that won’t do, will it?” and we’ll smile at each other and hold hands, briefly, so she doesn’t feel confronted, and she’ll recall that thing we shared for sixty-three years — our life together, not the details of course but the sentiment, the comfort. She’ll remember the warm, turquoise waters that lapped at the shores of our life’s memories and, hopefully, steep in them for the remainder of the day.

And then it’ll be home again, to the yawning wasteland of the afternoon, when the dust-filled shafts of summer sun beam through the loungeroom window and inch themselves across the linoleum like sluggards. I may choose to turn my mind to a 1500-piece jigsaw, or to the cleaning of the bathrooms, so as not to allow my thoughts to become ensnared by the excruciating crawl of time. Sometimes, I admit, I am increasingly limiting my world to ever-tightening concentric circles, dragging my existence into a smaller and smaller range of experiences and spiralling towards a singularity that looks much like the place Bonnie will soon inhabit — a place without definition.

*

I try not to finish her sentences for her but the dithering is driving me nuts and she’ll yell at me either way, so I just do it, to keep the appointment moving along.

“Oh! You see? He keeps me from finding the right words, all the time. Just, fucking, shut up and let me finish, Martin!”

“Yes, dear. I’m sorry, dear.” My standard response. Take the hit and move forward. Don’t stop to dwell on the irrationality of it.

It’s not the words themselves that wound but what the language reveals of her decline. She barely swore for sixty years, and remained judicial and sober under any duress, but now she swears like a sailor on furlough at the slightest provocation, real or imagined. She’s still in there, my Bonnie, still demanding to be seen and heard and known. But she is waging a war now, against an indefatigable enemy, one that devours relentlessly. Her outbursts are desperate scrambles, clawing for traction against the gravity of her decline.

“The tests do confirm that the plaques are spreading more rapidly than we had expected.” The doctor is directing his gaze at Bonnie, out of respect, but continues to glance at me at every opportunity, checking in, as it were — I’m the one who bears the practical consequences.

And I find myself drifting into an orbit of thought I’ve been holding myself back from for many months now — wondering if there is, within this horrendous, ungodly decay, a veiled benevolence. Bonnie will, in short course, forget the miscarriages, the stillbirths. She’ll no longer be haunted by the yearning solitude of childlessness and the sense of finality that she might otherwise have faced at the end of her life.

Am I wrong to think of this as a gift? Am I a poor husband, a bad man?

As we leave, the doctor passes me a list of nursing homes to consider — “the sooner the better.” It’s not the suggestion of my inadequacy as a carer that hitches in my throat — it’s the incontestable nature of the doctor’s motive. The choice is an illusion.

I put the list in my pocket and try to ignore it.

At night, I wake to a muffled rummage coming from near the front door, a sound exploratory and desperate. I am chilled, despite the tepid night air. The drug addicts from the local park never come up here — our little cul-de-sac is too tucked away from the main drag and that level of desperation seeks the shortest possible route.

I roll to the side to see if Bonnie has been disturbed by the ruckus but then hear her quiet protests from the front of the house. “Fuck. Would you move this fucking bench for Christ’s sake, I’ve been saying for years.” It was a gentle exclamation — surprising, considering its sense of urgency — and spoken as if to someone standing beside her in the hall.

I struggle out of bed, wiping the sleep from my eyes. I am adrift for a moment, unable to fix myself in time and space, not quite sure if I am lurching through a cruel dream or waking to a reality I can’t yet fathom. It occurs to me, when I reach my beloved by the front door, dressed in her nightgown and ugg boots and wrestling with her walker by the hall side-table, that she must feel the same.

She has put on tracksuit pants and done up her nightgown tightly around her broad waist against some expected cold, and even arrested the wild tantrum of her night-hair with the prudent use of hair clips. She has readied herself for the world — at four in the morning. My understanding begins to emerge into the darkness of a sombre truth.

“Bonnie. Darling. It’s late and you need to come back to …”

“I have told you, Martin, we need to get ready.” She is stern now but stiffens her jaw so that it barely moves as she speaks, as if stifling a tremendous rage that, once released, will tear down the world.

“Yes. Yes, you’re right, we do need to get ready,” I placate. “But we must get some proper sleep first, okay?”

“I do not want to sleep!” She is fierce. “I have got so much to get ready for, Martin, you have no idea! You are always undermining me! You have dug and dug and dug and dug, and you keep pulling me down, all the time! Just think, would you, about my needs for once, you selfish fuck …”

And then she stops abruptly, gasping and contrite. A moment of clarity has pierced the delusions, like a narrow shaft of dazzling sunlight breaking through storm clouds, and she is confronted by the briefest glimpse of her reality — she hears her voice and it frightens her. This is the nightmare. Not the confusion, not the disconnect, but the reality, when it hunts her down and slaps her about.

Bonnie collapses and I catch her in my arms. She sobs uncontrollably for a minute or two, then retreats. We are both crying quietly now, as I hold her to my breast, in her nightgown and ugg boots, by the front door, at four in the morning.

This is not a gift.

*

Black Hole Explosions? is extraordinary. This Stephen Hawking fellow knows his stuff and still only in his twenties! I had had a niggling ache since my PhD that the view of black holes as relentless, gorging automatons was too simplistic, too “mathematically sterile”. And here are the proofs that suggest these monsters don’t simply destroy matter — they spit and gag and choke on it as it goes down, coughing and spewing jets of radiation into space. They are not mere killing machines — they agitate and redefine matter along the way.

The new kid, Trevor, has Marvin Gaye cranked up on the radio and is reading the Hawking paper while chewing gum and tapping his foot to the rhythm. This is a lab, not a discotheque — bloody long-hair!

“I think we should call Black Holes ‘Hawking Zombies’,” says the new kid. “They’re like a George A. Romero fucking double-feature, man.”

Man?

I’ve got to leave.

I need to get home and share the Hawking paper with Bonnie. She doesn’t understand particle physics but she respects it and my passion for it. She listens. I’ll tell her about how this opens up a post-doc opportunity for me, how we might be able to find a real black hole by looking for the matter ejected from it. She’ll nod and say how much she loves to see me so excited. And when I’m not looking, she’ll grin that little introspective grin she does, like when she sees a newborn baby, or when she reads some pearl of literary wisdom at night as I’m drifting off and she is up seeking romance between the pages of a book. It will be just the acknowledgement I will need.

I arrive home that evening, already pre-loaded with my conversation, primed to manoeuvre any topic she brings up when I walk through the door towards a dissection of the Hawking paper.

But I am defused by the stillness of her face.

“I’m pregnant again. And I don’t think I can do it.”

It is as if she has been struck by an avalanche, buried beneath its weight. She is frozen, in a fugue. She has borne the full heft of the losses we have suffered on this path several times before, of the false hopes and cavernous regret. And yet Bonnie has remained, diminished but still searching.

I hear the initial call to rise to the occasion, the sound of trumpets heralding men of my age to step in and deal when others cannot, that seems to echo from some pre-war mnemonic charge. But I have nothing. I can’t calculate the risks, the potential joys — the doctor had said it was impossible now, yet here we are.

I walk slowly to the kitchen and put the kettle on. All I have to offer is the embrace of a warm cuppa.

“Are you alright, Martin?”

And with that, I am resolved. The risk is too great.

We spend the evening enfolded on the couch, drinking weak tea and talking through the options. But there really aren’t any. There is too much risk. And I will never see her life as less than that of a new one, it is not a transaction I can make, even if she can.

And in her eyes, I see a quiet light fade.

*

I experience a rarity at the nursing home; a disabled car park is right next to the front door, and I swing in, gently.

I’ve been trying to memorise certain lines from that Andy Gibb song to recall with Bonnie, but honestly, I find most of it doesn’t make sense, so I’m not sure if this is going to be the right tack. What does he mean by Heaven’s angel, devil’s daughter anyway? Is that meant to be a good thing? Does he want to spend time with this woman or not? She sounds a little conflicted. I suspect dear Andy is almost as confused by his song as I am. Bonnie has no hope.

I hear some of the nurses on a smoko, listening to a song as I approach the door, one I’ve heard before on the wireless, “Bad Guy” by that Billie Eilish. Not my cup of tea. But I do appreciate the bald-faced self-assuredness of the lyric. It’s something I’ve noticed in modern youth culture: boldness. It was never me but I appreciate it, a non-intersecting orbital body in the same solar system. I do wonder if the kids notice me drifting by at all these days.

My phone pings as I enter the revolving doors — a news alert. And there it is, so nondescript and innocuous but like a jewel to the initiated: the Event Horizon Array’s photograph of a black hole, the first ever — a behemoth at the centre of Messier 87, and it is all over the news. I’d read about preparations for the image in Scientific American. And what a gift — the direct observation of billions of worlds being consumed, a glowing, glaring ring of super-heated plasma enveloping an eye of inscrutable darkness. I never thought I would see it. It is a miracle.

I am immobilised in the foyer, phone in hand, by a desperate exhilaration I haven’t felt for decades and I don’t know what to do with it. But I have my conversation topic for Bonnie now. Bonnie will appreciate my enthusiasm for this extraordinary moment, the way she used to, not understanding but finding joy in the relating of it. It is a deep, visceral connection that ties us together well beyond any daily routines. An invisible tether still remains, despite the bloody plaques.

As I enter her room, a nurse struggles to smile politely and pitches an uneasy glance at Bonnie sitting on the edge of the bed. “She’s not her best today.” And then the nurse hurries away.

Bonnie stares dimly at her window with its curtains drawn. She seems to be watching the dust dance in the bright light streaming through the gap. She looks puzzled at the display, as though unfamiliar with it, but her expression, I realise, lacks focus. It is movement that binds her gaze, nothing more.

I hesitate … breathless.

She must be aware of me. I am sitting on the edge of the lowboy, well within her peripheral vision, but she is not swayed to my presence. I cough.

When she finally draws her gaze to me, it remains desolate, as if she is still staring at the dust by the curtains.

Her eyes do not identify or investigate, they simply see. And they do not see into me, nor do I see into them. She is gone from view, my Bonnie, moved into the void where nothing escapes. Her final protests have been cast and now spurned.

I stay with her for the afternoon, holding her hand and feeling her warmth. In the distance, from somewhere out on the front lawn, a Beatles song rises dimly through the summer haze. I can’t remember what the song is called but I could probably sing it.

Who knows, maybe I’ll get a smile out of her.