Everywhere I Look (10 page)

A thunderstorm at dawn! Roar of rain, drops dancing on the shed roof, the pear tree leaves springing and bouncing on their twiggy branches!

The family returns in the evening from three days at Wilsons Prom. Ted, exhausted from the long drive, dresses at once in cowboy gear, and comes through my back door in the dark with the rifle in one hand. ‘Is anybody home? Where are you, Nanny?' He appears in the doorway of my workroom, very soft and peaceful. I sit him on my lap at the table. Long silences with the occasional remark. He has a
need
to dress as a cowboy. It calms something in him. I get out the photo album and we leaf through it, back and forth. He establishes a ritual response to every photo of his younger brother—a burst of unconvincing laughter.

Peter Porter on
The Book Show
: ‘The purpose of form is to prevent you from putting down on the paper the first thing that comes into your head.'

My old Montblanc shorthand pen, the kind that's no longer made, disappears from my desk. It is my favourite fountain pen of all time. I search everywhere. Days later I have one last desolated look through the paper recycle bag beside my desk, and there it is. Calmly lying among the torn-up pages.

At the playground with Ted and the boys from round the corner. Francis, at three, has loose blond curls and a face of such louche, wry, heavy-lidded Irishness that I can hardly look at him without laughing. I push him high on the swing. ‘Higher. Higher,' he commands. In full flight he turns his head and calls to me over his shoulder in a seductive tone: ‘Hey, Ted's nanny. Who's your best boy? Is it me?'

Barrie Kosky's production of Euripides'
The Trojan Women
. An ordeal of rape, blood, wailing and casual brutality. The moment that touches me most is when the little prince, in his suit and tie, is dragged into the cell where the Trojan women are imprisoned. Across the space he makes a tiny sign of recognition to his grandmother, the bruised and bloodstained queen, barelegged and barefooted in her fouled slip. The queen returns the gesture, the furtive showing of a flat palm. Soon after that, the child is hauled out to be thrown from the city walls.

Ted has been sick, some sort of gastric thing, and dozes all day on the couch. At dinner he sits at the table with the rest of us, but without plate or appetite, and begs for someone to play a game with him. Everyone refuses; they want to eat. He lays his little white cheek on the table and weeps. So his father gets him an old bank pay-in book and a pen, and he ‘writes' out ‘cheques' and ‘plane tickets to America', silently concentrating, shoulders bowed, like a child clerk in Dickens, breaking all our hearts.

A tremendously famous and influential European critic lets my friend know that he admires his new novel. I'm thunderstruck. Imagine having the nerve to send the critic a copy! At whose feet would I lay my little tribute, if I dared? Janet Malcolm's? She scorched
The First Stone
in the
New Yorker
but I was so thrilled by the idea of her having read me that I felt no pain. God, how infantile. While I'm standing in the hall thinking about this, Ambrose with his pants off starts to thunder tempestuously on the piano. He yells for me to come. I enter the room. He leans forward, beaming over his shoulder, to display a large soft lump of shit he has just deposited on the piano seat.

At St Vincent's rapid response skin clinic I am to have a little lesion on my top lip investigated. A young Sri Lankan doctor without confidence but with a very sweet smile runs her cool fingers up and down my arms, and this way and that on my torso. The lesion has retreated and cannot be seen, no matter how hard she presses the magnifying glass on to my lip. A handsome male professor, very Australian, bursts into the cubicle. He spots the thing at once and diagnoses a solar keratosis. She still can't see it. He takes out his pen and draws a line round the keratosis, in ink that will not fade for hours. ‘Get the gun,' he says. ‘I'll come back in a minute and watch you do it.' The young woman stands beside me, timidly holding the liquid nitrogen cylinder in both hands. I do not want her to shoot my mouth with it, but before I can nerve myself to say so, the professor rushes back in. He seizes the gun from her, explains clearly and pleasantly how she should use it, then does the job himself in one well-aimed icy blast. Peeeyow.

In a Fitzroy pub on Sunday afternoon I become involved in a game of pinball with Ted. Two slightly bigger boys approach the machine. One looks at me narrowly, then says out of the corner of his mouth to his friend, ‘That old lady thinks she can play. I'm going upstairs.'