Everywhere I Look (13 page)

My niece brings me her baby to mind for two hours. All serene until the final thirty minutes, when she gets thirsty. Because she is totally breastfed, nothing I offer is acceptable. Only her mother will do. She screams for twenty minutes without stopping. Her little dark head keeps swivelling on its neck, searching, searching. If I carry her into a different room she swings her gaze around it and bursts into fresh cries of despair.

A dark sky, striped low down with bands of translucent pearly grey and the faintest, driest yellow. Bare plane tree branches disposed against it, as in a painting.

On the couch I watch ep after ep of
Mad Men
. Don Draper goes to California and falls in with some Eurotrash layabouts who on the DVD case are described as ‘exciting new friends' but are in fact shallow bores. Roger dumps his wife and goes off with a secretary who is vain about her looks and fancies herself as a poet: languorous sensuality and all the rest. I lie here, a batty old nanna, shouting at the screen: ‘Do NOT get into that car.' ‘Oh, shut up, you stupid idiot.' But when it's over I set up the board and, in the spirit of Betty Draper, iron the pillowcases.

At a conference I meet a Supreme Court Judge who tells me he lives in what is now known in real estate advertisements as ‘the
Monkey Grip
house', where many important events of my life took place. He is renovating it. I ask him about the rooms. He lists them: ‘And there's a room behind the big front one, that's too small to be used for anything but a bathroom. My daughter used to have her desk in there.'

Me: ‘You mean the one with the wooden shutter on the window?'

Judge: ‘Yes.'

Me: (in the low, falsely humble tone of the former hippie) ‘That used to be my bedroom.'

After the summer of the terrible bushfires, the kids at the crèche became deeply interested in death. They got into their heads the belief that if a dead body burned, it would go on burning forever.

Respected Radio National reporter: ‘I see myself as a worker bee at the coalface of journalism.'

Tom and his brother Phil get mugged in Lygon Street, around midnight, by a man in a balaclava. Tom hands over his money and his phone, and turns to run away. That's when the robber stabs him. Sticks a knife into his back, just below his left shoulderblade. Later, the robber makes calls to the girls whose numbers are in the phone.

My friend's ten-year-old son reports, with severe disapproval, that a boy in his grade has suddenly ‘got a girlfriend'.

Father: ‘Oh, it's probably pretty nice for him, though, isn't it?'

Son: ‘But Dad, everyone knows that grade-four relationships have got very little going for them, in terms of meaning.'

In the café with Tony, I notice at a nearby table a young woman, barely out of her teens, and her remarkably plain boyfriend (in a suit). She has a perfect oval face, hazel eyes, and one of those exquisite European mouths that in my youth did not exist on Australian women: soft, fleshy, petal-like, almost circular. I admire her, dreamily. Then she leans forward to her boyfriend and says in a vain, nasal, flirtatious voice, ‘Do you think about me when you're at work?' Tony blanches and mutters, ‘Run, mate! Run now! Run a thousand miles!'

Someone has published a biography of Muriel Spark. God, what a miserable piece of work she sounds, and yet whenever the reviewer quotes a line of her writing, the room lights up. Apparently her letters make no reference whatsoever to current events. So?

My sister stays with me while she's on jury duty in a three-day trial. I am mad with envy: I've never even been called. She is made foreperson: ‘You're a musician,' they say to her. ‘You're used to standing up in front of strangers.' She cries on the train home, tired and anxious. ‘There's so much riding on it, but they don't give us enough information.' She is honourable and won't tell me about the case, but speaks with astonishment of the laziness and stupidity of one of the jurors. Before they start to deliberate, the woman says, ‘Let's make a pact. Let's make a fast decision, so we can get out of here.' The others look at her in silent contempt.