Everywhere I Look (18 page)

Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

Hilary Mantel

The quietly mighty Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu tells story after story of adult children breaking away from their parents. His characters rarely cry, or raise their voices. Their emotions are expressed in tiny signs and changes of position. A father looks down at his glass. A mother folds her hands, or draws a handkerchief from her sleeve. These subtle movements call up in me surges of excruciating sympathy for my parents, for the hurt, helpless, angry love they must have felt as they watched me smash my way out of their protection.

In Dad's house I found a little photo of him and Mum in their twenties, sitting on the front step of their first house. Between them lay a long-eared black dog, a spaniel. Dad said his name was Ned. I did not remember our ever having had a pet. I asked if the dog had died before I was born. ‘Ah no. I had to get rid of him. Mum wouldn't let him inside. Because of her
brand-new mushroom-pink carpet
.' He laughed, and shrugged. ‘I put an ad in the paper. A lady came round and took him. She tied his lead to the carrier of her bike and pedalled away. I thought he might have looked back, but he never even turned his head.'

A crime novelist spoke at a conference about the unsuitability of his usual sardonic tone for the war story he was trying to write, ‘about young men with their stomachs torn open who cry all night for their mothers and then die'. An old man told me, after he had had open-heart surgery, that he and a ward full of other men his age woke in the dark from hideous nightmares, screaming for their mothers. I have never read or heard of a woman in extremis who called for her mother. It is not possible for me to imagine such a thing. Still, I did hear about a woman of my age who had died in a distant part of the country. Her parents did not go to her funeral. I asked my mother, ‘Would you go to my funeral, if I died far away?' She uttered a sharp pant of disbelief. ‘If you died in the Arctic
Circle
I'd make m' way there.'

On my pantry shelf stands a tall storage jar that I salvaged from Dad's kitchen when we sold his house. It survived the successive demolitions of my mother's households and, I suspect, of her mind. She has labelled it, in her large, clear hand:
Sultanas.
Then she has crossed out
Sultanas
and replaced it with
Currants.
Then she has crossed out
Currants
and restored
Sultanas
. The jar, when I found it, was empty.

Her ghost is in my body. I have her long narrow feet with low arches. I have her hollow bones, her hysterectomy, her fading eyebrows, her fine grey-brown hair that resists all attempts at drama. My movements are hers when, on a summer morning, I close up the house against the coming scorcher, or in the evening whisk the dry clothes off the line in weightless armfuls that conceal my face.

In the intermission at
Shane Warne: The Musical
two smiling strangers approached me. The man introduced himself and his wife. Aside from our parents' funerals, I had not seen him since we were children.

‘I knew you straightaway,' he said, ‘from the other side of the room. You stand exactly like your mother.'

In my forties, when I lived in Chippendale, I used to walk to work across the big gardens of Sydney University. I walked fast, thinking my thoughts. One morning a young woman passed me, going the other way. She was wearing an op-shop blouse from the 1940s, striped, with shoulder pads and tiny pearl buttons. At the sight of it a bolt of ecstasy went through me, an atavistic bliss so powerful that its roots could only have been in early childhood. I wrote my mother a letter. Did she ever have a stripy blouse, rather floppy, when I was little?

A week later came a curly edged black-and-white photo. The date pencilled on the back was 1943. A woman in her early twenties stands in a bare backyard, squinting in an unposed way that raises her cheeks and bares her teeth. Her hair is permed and pinned in a victory roll. On her flexed left arm sits a wide-browed, unsmiling baby. The child's right cheek and left hand lean against the stripes of the woman's rayon blouse.

The war is not yet over. Her brother is alive. I am six months old. I am still an only child. She is carrying me in her arms. She is strong enough to bear my weight with ease. I trust her. She is my mother, and I am content to rest my head upon her breast.

2013

Before Whatever Else Happens

DIARY 3

A MAN came to install a shutter on my kitchen window. While he worked, Ambrose wandered in to tell me about a disappointing experience with his schoolmate Hazel, a very spirited little girl, who had come over yesterday to play. ‘I tried to kiss her on the trampoline, I tried to hug her, and I tried to dance with her. But she didn't want to be kissed. She didn't want to be hugged. And she didn't want to be danced with.' The shutter bloke downed tools and listened with full attention. ‘What grade are you in?' ‘Grade two.' The man had a good look at Ambrose, paused, and said quietly, ‘Wait a while. That'll change.'

Out walking early I spotted a magpie's head over the parapet of a garage. Wind ruffled a feather. I thought, ‘That maggie's going to swoop me.' Three seconds later the air stirred above me and a force slashed past my left ear. I let out a screech and waved both arms. Again it came at me, from behind: the hiss of plumage, the cool rush of air past my cheek.

Every day I work on the edit of my book. I slog away, shifting chunks of material and moving them back, eating my salad in a daze, wondering if the linking passages I've written are leading me up a garden path, or are sentimental, or violate some unarticulated moral and technical code I've signed up to and feel trapped in or obliged to. The sheer bloody labour of writing. No one but another writer understands it—the heaving about of great boulders into a stable arrangement so that you can bound up them and plant your little flag at the very top.