Everywhere I Look (14 page)

‘Did you lose your bracelet round here?' This printed sign, sticky-taped to a lamppost near the station, gives me the same citizenly pleasure that I get from reading, in the information section of my Filofax, ‘Glove sizes are the same in every country.'

At a local arts festival a man wants to stage an event called The Writers' Pyre. Writers would line up at a large bonfire to burn a document—a diary, a letter, or perhaps a failed draft—having first read it out loud and explained why they were burning it. I am thrilled by this proposal. Will they invite me to take part?

On the train to the city on Saturday night, a bunch of girls dressed in fantastical costumes are running about and shrieking. It must be a hens' night. A bedraggled street person sitting near us reports that they have been shouting out men's names—‘Anyone called Steve?'—and blokes of that name get up and have their photo taken with the girls. They must have risked an Ali or a Muhammad: a young Muslim man stands up for the camera. He is tall and handsome and rather shy. When a screaming girl in a bridal veil seizes him round the neck and presses her cheek to his, he submits with good humour, but his arm dangles limply between their torsos. At the next stop he gets off and walks past our window smiling faintly to himself, like a man after an ordeal that he feels he has negotiated successfully.

The kids and I watch a DVD of black-and-white Felix the Cat cartoons from the '20s. Their brilliance is primitive, hilarious—an army of sausages that marches, relentless and interminable, against the citadel of the rats. I am struck by the repeated theme of a male cat falling in love with a seductive female, then discovering that she already has scores of teeming offspring. One disillusioned suitor commits suicide by lying down outside a power station and plugging a gas pipe into his mouth. Another leaps into the arms of a butcher and says, in a crudely lettered speech balloon, ‘I had a lucky escape!' Weird male anxiety in these tales. I look for the artist's name. Pat Sullivan. An Irish Catholic?

Five shaven-headed Buddhist nuns in glasses and curry-coloured robes sit in a row at the airport, rubbing skin cream into their hands. Each nun has her own tube.

Martin in the Cellar Bar tells me that the cardiologist had to stop his heart—turn it off, turn it back on. At his bedside, before the procedure, the doctor said, ‘People say this is the most horrible experience of their lives. A sense of approaching doom. Just so you know. But I've done this many times. I'm very experienced—' At that instant his arm bumped the cannula in Martin's hand, and a spout of blood gushed out of it, soaking the front of the doctor's gown. We both crack up. Martin's medical experiences are beyond appalling—yet there he sits in his heavy spectacles, grinning at me with all his teeth. I've been laughing with him in the Cellar Bar for thirty years. There's no reason why we should ever stop.

Sally gives me a new Tom Jones CD which to my astonishment contains two songs of such funky splendour and huge horn sections that I dance wildly by myself in the kitchen. I wish there could be a club in a plain-looking suburb where you would walk through the door on a Friday night and find a funk paradise—everyone you've ever liked or loved or slept with or rejected or been rejected by, adorable people you've never met, strangers looking into each other's faces and bursting out laughing, detectives and journos in suits struttin' with their elbows out, gangs of Asian students, dignified old Jewish couples, backpackers from every land, lonely boys and bored teenage girls rushing out on to the floor. All crippling thoughts of cool would explode and vanish, and everything would be forgiven, everything redeemed.

2012

Dreams of Her Real Self

IT was always clear to me what would happen when my parents died.

Dad would pitch forward without warning into the grave he had dug with his knife and fork. The struggle that had shaped and distorted my character would be over. I would be elated to see the back of him. Then I would torture myself with guilt for the rest of my life.

Free of his domineering presence, my mother would creep out from under her stone. She would show herself at last. At last I would know her. Shyly she would befriend her five remaining children, maybe even come to live with one of us. She would take up her golf clubs again, pull on her flowery bathing cap and swim in the surf, simmer her modest vegetable soups, knit cardigans in quiet stripes with a lot of grey. In a few years she would fade, weaken and slip away. Surely, about her, I would feel only a mild sorrow that would pass in the manner that nature intended.

She went first.

She was in her early eighties when Dad dragged her to the last of the scores of dwellings he had imposed on her during their long marriage: a seventh-floor apartment in central Melbourne that in a fit of Schadenfreude he had bought from a member of her family whose finances had hit the wall. Isolated up there, with a view of St Patrick's cathedral and Parliament House, she sank into a stunned, resentful gloom shot through with bitter sarcasm. She would point at a gin and tonic on the table and say, in a grim, warning tone, ‘Mark my words. In a minute that ice is going to melt. Then the glass will overflow, and there'll be a
hell
of a mess to clean up.' She slumped into depression, then drifted away into dementia. She wandered at night. She fell and fractured a bone. Her body withered. In a nursing home she became savage, bestial. She snarled at us and lashed out with her claws. Lost to herself and to us, she died at last, by means of something I can only call chemical mercy. My youngest sister and I, strained and silent, chanced to be the only ones at her bedside when she exhaled her last hoarse breath.

People we had hardly seen since childhood, friends she had left behind in obedience to Dad's driven restlessness, came to her funeral. They spoke of her with tender faces.