Everywhere I Look (11 page)

A hot evening. I go to the gym on Racecourse Road for an ‘assessment'. I don't belong in such a place. I feel a failure, someone labouring under a deluded idea of herself. In the harsh mirrors I look ugly and old, my hair cut too short, my lips held in an expression of contemptuous, defensive primness. I am put through my paces on the treadmill by one of those hulking young men with unblinking eyes who seem to become personal trainers. Then, as I begin to run and sweat, the irritating noises of the gym—horrible music, grunts of effort, shrill moronic laughter—fade into an oceanic roar. It dawns on me that this whole thing is about
going into a dream state
. My defences collapse.

The unnerving silence of Christmas morning. No sound of traffic. Sun lies fresh on everything. Birds sing with unnatural sharpness. The air is still.

At the health farm, fasting. I must be hallucinating: when I walk past a pile of folded towels I see them as a huge club sandwich. I present myself for a reiki treatment. The woman announces that she is going to massage my aura. I submit with a sigh. I don't have any trouble at all believing that people have auras: you only need to have seen a dying and then a dead body to know this. But I wanted the massage to be about my
gross earthly body
.

Ted marches in my back door. ‘I'm a cowboy. You can be my wife. I want something to eat. Will you cook this cattle meat I brought in?'

‘Sure. How would you like it cooked, cowboy?'

‘Toasted, please, with butter.'

A picnic with a friend at the Botanic Gardens. Hot, clear day. We lie on rugs under a huge oak. I am wearing a faded pink linen shirt that I've always privately thought was rather becoming. She studies me in silence, and says, ‘I'm sorry to tell you this, Hel, but that colour doesn't suit you. It makes your face look flushed. It makes you look older. This doesn't upset you, does it?' ‘Well,' I say, ‘I do feel a bit devastated.' She makes no response to this, and in a few moments our conversation turns to less fraught matters.

Ted on the swing: ‘Come on! We need some attacking here! We need to explode some battleships!'

Two women of my age on the Craigieburn train are talking about how to make scones. I'm sitting right behind them, in an almost empty carriage. ‘Your board's full of flour?' says the dark-haired one. ‘And your hands are full of flour?' Her blonde friend, who has gold bangles on each wrist and very cared-for hands with big polished nails, expresses her utter helplessness in the face of
dough
. She reaches the point of confessing that she finds it repulsive to put her hands in it. They burst into a fit of laughter. The dark one keeps urging her friend not to give up. ‘You don't have to handle it all
that
much.' She makes flat-palmed, downward gestures. The manicured one shudders extravagantly. As we pull into Southern Cross Station I get to my feet and stop beside them. ‘Excuse me. I can't make scones either. First lot I made was perfect. Since then—disaster every time.' They welcome me into their paroxysms. The fair one touches my arm. ‘Don't give up!' says the dark one. ‘Try again!' From the platform, as I pass their window, I can see their teeth still flashing.

Ted: ‘Nanny, Buzz told me that when people die they turn into gazombies.'

Me: ‘Gazombies? That's not true. I'm quite old and a lot of people I know have died but not a single one of them turned into a gazombie.'

At a tram stop near Southern Cross a lovely Asian girl, perhaps still a teenager, with a fall of silky hair right down her back, is standing among the waiting passengers. A man in a T-shirt and jeans approaches her and tries with a dull, unsmiling belligerence to engage her in conversation. His questions strike a discordant note: ‘Where are you going? How old are you?' I can't hear her replies, or even if she's making any. Two young women in business suits and heels, who have been chatting and laughing at the stop, step forward to the platform's edge and without breaking their flow of talk simply interpose their bodies between the importunate bloke and the girl. He moves off, sullen and confused. The women don't address the girl. In fact I'm not even sure that they noticed her predicament, but I choose to believe that they performed a spontaneous act of sisterly protectiveness.

Jörg and his wife, Keiko, sit with me in Marios. His skull is softly furred, his face purified, refined. The chemo appears to have worked. Nobody mentions elation, but the table our elbows are on is hovering a few inches above the floor.