Everywhere I Look (2 page)

Oh, my Kamaka. It was so beautiful that I hated to put it away in its case. Even the wind wanted to play it. One day when I'd left it lying on the back of the couch and gone into the next room, the faintest, airiest twangling sound reached me. I ran back and found that a breeze coming up the hill from Bondi was puffing over the windowsill and drawing the hem of the calico curtain back and forth over the open strings.

Fast forward. I'm a grandmother, back in Melbourne where I belong. I've owned a ukulele for thirty years and I'm still a beginner. A uke is humble. It inspires in me no ambition, no duty or guilt. It's so low in the hierarchy of things that the bullying superego can't touch it. I play it only when I feel like it. After a particularly introverted winter, I got to the point where I could play ‘All of Me', and ‘I Will' (very slowly). But everything I learn I soon forget. I have to keep starting again. I can't pick, I can only strum, and I don't care. Sometimes I hold the uke on my knee while I'm reading the paper or waiting for the kettle to boil. I love it as I would any harmless little creature. I love to hear it whisper and hum.

Once in a while the money-making musicians in my family kindly call me when they're playing in the kitchen after tea, or at somebody's birthday party, or in the back shed that my sister calls her ‘adobe hacienda'. There might be three or four ukes, a harmonica, a mandolin, a guitar. The chords aren't ones I know. The changes are too fast. Someone pushes the chart to me. I take a breath and throw myself into the river. No one can hear me, so it doesn't matter if I flounder. But if I don't panic, if I keep calmly swimming, sometimes I hit the current, and it carries me to the end of the song.

2015

Some Furniture

AT the turn of the millennium I reached the end of my masochism, and came home from Sydney with my tail between my legs. Single again. Tenants were still living in my Fitzroy house, and the one I rented for myself in Ascot Vale was too narrow for the table I'd had trucked down the Hume. I offered it to my niece. She turned up with a bloke in a ute and away they went. I stood in the bare room.

What can happen at the kitchen table when you haven't even got one?

A woman on her own can easily get into the habit of standing at the open fridge door and dining on a cold boiled potato. I was determined to be elegant in my solitude. But for lack of a table I had to eat off my knee, on the couch. The available space in the kitchen would take only a round table, and every round one I saw, in the crap shops I drifted through at Highpoint, had a hole drilled in the centre for an umbrella.

It chanced that a schoolfriend of my daughter's was married to a woodworker. He came over, measured the spot, and returned in a couple of weeks with a perfect little creation in pale timber. It was so beautiful and so expensive that in my demoralised state I felt unworthy to sit at it. But I forced myself. I learnt to eat dainty salads off it, to nibble at fillets of fish steamed in ginger. This would be my single life.

A year later I took back my old house from the tenants. The kitchen was a large room. The little round table floated on its expanse of floor like an autumn leaf on a lake. How could something so lovely look so silly, so out of place? I rolled it into one of the bedrooms and drove down to the fashionable recycled timber shops on Johnston Street.

There I found a rectangular dining table of a suitable size. Until I bought my tiny round one, now superseded, I wouldn't have paid four figures for a table in a fit. But the sign said it was made of jarrah that had been salvaged from a demolished warehouse. Its dimensions were pleasing. It had slightly tapered legs and a glossy top, on which I could imagine setting out white crockery, cloth napkins, perhaps a vase of flowers if anything pretty ever blossomed again in my garden. For a moment I was puzzled by certain dark nail punctures that randomly pitted its surface. All the furniture in the shop seemed to have them. Maybe this was how recycled timber was supposed to look. Was the very purpose of this noble endeavour to preserve the traces of proletarian toil? Who was I, a self-pitying bohemian, to question this?

It looked all right in the kitchen. Its top gave off a warm, dark glow. One day, when I trudged in from work and dumped my red backpack on it, the two colours united in a fiery moment that made my mouth water. I looked out into the grassy yard. Perhaps a bird might alight, and emit a musical phrase. Something moved behind the lemon tree. I stepped over to the window and a hawk beat up into the air with a bald corpse hanging from its beak. I rushed outside. The grass behind the tree was thickly strewn with feathers.

I knew that I was in despair. The house was empty, too big for me to fill. All I could bring to it was an enormous, slow, bleak loneliness.

In a junk shop I found a shabby but surprisingly comfortable old sofa covered in gold brocade that was bleached almost to silver. When it was delivered I saw only its dated gentility; but then I tossed an equally ancient pink silk cushion on to it, and the pink and the faded gold sang to each other in quiet, tired voices. I saw that, living alone, one must play out one's domestic dramas through inanimate objects. Suddenly this did not seem so terrible.

But the man who had made me the little round table called in one afternoon. He stopped at the kitchen door and contemplated the recycled jarrah table without expression. Then he clicked his tongue and said, in a tone of reproachful pity, ‘Oh,
Helen
.'

I supposed it was the nail holes. He refrained from a detailed critique and I brazened it out. After he left I got down on my haunches and had a look at the table's underside. I couldn't believe what I saw. The thing was cobbled together in the most shamelessly bodgie way. Random offcuts of raw pine, still sprouting ragged splinters, had been crudely jammed into its corners and stapled to brace it. No attempt had been made to hide the gross construction. It was blatant, insulting.

I tore off the jagged spikes with my bare hands, then pulled up a chair and sat at the table till the back garden got dark.

A married friend, whose house was notable for its quiet sophistication, came that week to visit me, bringing a bunch of flowers. She admired the table.

I said, ‘Have a look underneath.'

She crawled under it, crouched there for a moment, then scrambled out and took her seat.

‘Got vodka?'

I took the Absolut out of the freezer and found the shot glasses.

‘Let's drink to your table,' she said.

‘Don't tease me. I've been ripped off. I want revenge. I want a refund.'

‘Look at it this way,' she said. ‘It's stable, isn't it?'

It was.

‘Is it the size you wanted?'

Perfect size.

‘Fits the room?'

It did.

‘Think about it,' she said. ‘It's an image. Of you. Of all of us. It stands steady. It doesn't wobble. It's extremely serviceable. Okay, it's got those nail holes all over the top. But they're marks of experience. And when you look underneath, you see it's been pulled together out of whatever was to hand.'

Maybe it was the vodka, but after a moment's silence, I decided to take her analysis in the spirit in which it was meant. I arranged her flowers in a suitable vase, then we threw back another shot, leaned our elbows on the dark table's gleaming surface, and took up once more, at the point where we had left it last time, our endlessly interesting, fruitful and entertaining conversation.

2012

White Paint and Calico

THE night before I left my Fitzroy house forever, I sat down, exhausted after a day of packing and carrying, to watch
Supernanny
. I found myself consumed with disproportionate rage against the barbaric brothers she was trying to tame—three plain, fat-faced little slobs with prison haircuts and bare, flabby torsos. The parents were divided and ruled by these brats who swore, spat, sneered and smashed things, while their silent, obedient ten-year-old sister drifted about in the background, forgotten. I longed to spank the boys and slap their faces.

Any fool can see that at such a strained moment these characters were acting out aspects of myself, engaged in their eternal struggle for dominance or recognition. But at the time I thought I was only having a fit of the nameless emotion—testified to by everyone I've asked—that explodes in the heart and brain of a person who is about to move house.

‘Oh, I hate the sorting, before you even start to pack,' said the former wife of a clergyman and veteran of many a vicarage. ‘You're burrowing through cartons of stuff. You find something written on a piece of paper and suddenly you're on the floor in floods of tears, thinking about what you hoped for, and what you've lost. Every time you move you have to work through your whole
life
.'

A lawyer who has lived in more houses than there are years in her life said she held it all together by treasuring one small thing: her childhood teeth, in a matchbox. This year she turned forty, and threw them away.

A Japanese student told me that when she and her ex-husband were moved to Australia by his company, she opened the 200 boxes they had ‘shipped and aired' and found she had packed every single thing they owned—‘including a half-empty soy sauce bottle'.

In my storeroom, this time, I found half-a-dozen shoeboxes stuffed with photos I'd taken in the late 1980s, the ones that failed to make the cut for my album. I didn't chuck them out at the time because I was afraid if I did the people in them would die. The price I pay now for that superstition is having to endure how young we looked back then, my friends and I, though we were already in our late forties and thought ourselves ageing. Our faces were smaller, our skin fitted the skull more firmly, our heads were poised high on longer, more graceful necks. And, my God, is that Steve, when he was a Bible-bashing born-again? How could I have forgotten his lazy cowboy beauty? I ran out the back and crammed them into the bin, negs and all.

‘When I was in labour with my first child,' said a teacher, ‘I remember hearing myself yell: “I don't
want
this baby any more!” Moving house is like that—once you start, you have to keep going till it's done. And it doesn't matter how many people are there with you, all help is external, and beside the point. You're on your own.'

‘Things improve,' said a musician from Bondi, ‘once you stop expecting your friends to help you, and start paying people.'

‘The removalists I hired,' said a young journalist at the Gin Palace, ‘were strangers to the point of being comical. They bumped the walls and broke things and sexually harassed me. They wouldn't lift things.'

The two blokes who came last month to shift my furniture struck a bolshie note as soon as they walked in. First they informed me that, though their boss had inspected it and given me a quote, there was no way they'd be able to fit all my stuff into the vast pantechnicon they had parked in front of my gate. Then, having filled me with such panic that I made the tactical blunder of calling the boss to complain, they began, in an extravagantly relaxed manner and refusing eye contact, to carry things out and arrange them roomily in the cavernous vehicle. Everything fitted, with space to spare.

So they sank the knife when it came to collecting my dead father's kitchen table from his empty house next door: apparently it was ‘too heavy' and ‘wouldn't fit through the door'.

‘How do you think it got
in
here?' I said in a high-pitched voice.

‘Musta took it apart and then reassembled it,' said one of them, fixing his gaze on the peeling lino. They closed up the truck and drove away, leaving me and the table standing in Dad's bare kitchen.

A week later, two men from my family tossed the table on to their flatbed truck and flipped it into my new house. They laughed. ‘You were ripped off.'

Back in the big share houses of the '70s, when group dynamics were shaky and we were always having to split and start anew, people used to pride themselves on being able to polish off the move in a day. (
Bin all chutneys and mustards
.) The women, especially the single mothers, learnt how to set up a place at speed. You had to make things attractive and get the new household whirring along on its little rails so the kids could repose on a sense of order, and not be too sad about what they'd left behind.

Somebody told me that when Mother Teresa died all she left behind was a bucket and a pair of sandals.

I read in his obituary that in 1936, when the late Sir Ronald Wilson was fourteen, the bank foreclosed on his family's home. Before the house was sold, young Ronald had to help bury his father's law library in the backyard.

A journalist fell in love and left his wife. Months later he went back to their house to pick up some things she had dumped for him outside the back door. Looking at the house, he realised he felt married to
it
, that it was his security, his only anchor. The place looked wild and out of control without his care. He wanted to clean it. He was suddenly very frightened: he would never have another like it. ‘I started to whistle,' he told me, ‘in case she was in there. I drove away angry. I wanted to turn back and stand by my dog's grave for a bit, but I was worried she might look out and see me standing there all sentimental.'

How many pets, carriers of helpless and unquestioning love, lie rotting under the backyards of the world, as houses change hands and again change hands?

‘When you're a student,' said the teacher who had wanted her labour to stop, ‘you move into a primitive, clapped-out house quite happily. You fix it up—white paint and calico—and you get on with your life. But when you're middle-aged you have a feeling that you should move into something better.'

I'm embarrassed that my new house is less substantial than the old one. Its walls feel fragile, insecurely grounded, not quite vertical. If I stumble, my elbow might go through the plaster. I imagine that people will step in the front door, take a look around and start to pity me. ‘Well,' they say, trying to brighten me, ‘at least you won't have to move again.' What—stay here
till I die
? In their concern they are consigning me to old age, to death. Is this why I have always kept moving? Because to stay in one place is deathly?