Everywhere I Look (21 page)

‘She's one of those women,' says my friend, ‘who put on perfume by spraying a cloud and walking into it.'

Three scorchers in a row. I went to pick up the boys from school. The sky was clouding over and the air was irritable. I waited at a table in the breezeway. Suddenly, above the asphalt of the big playground came a mighty rushing, counterclockwise, as if the air were being stirred by a spoon in a huge bowl. A blast of dirt hit me side-on. I sprang to my feet and ran to shelter in a stairwell. Grit poured past, heading north. The temperature plummeted and a superb, refreshing cool exploded all around. Raindrops struck the asphalt, stopped, then began in earnest. A teacher ran past. ‘
I
think it's
great
!' she cried, as if someone had complained. She let out a yell: ‘Waaa hoooo!' The bell rang, and hundreds of kids burst out on to the playground, shouting, running, veering wildly and shrieking with laughter, arms extended, bags thumping on their backs. ‘The change! The change! The cool change is here!'

The nurse took the needle out of my arm and carried away a big flat dark red bag of my blood. I went to a table in the recovery area and prepared to read
Woman's Day
for the regulation fifteen minutes, but soon I broke out in a sweat. My eyes weren't working. Everything was going dotted and speckled. Oh God. I would have to draw attention to myself. I cried out feebly to the world at large, ‘Help! I'm going to faint!' Two nurses ran from the other end of the room and grabbed me by the shoulders: ‘On to the floor. Get on to the floor.' They laid me out on the lino tiles and fanned me with magazines. They kept asking if I felt better. ‘No. Gonna be sick.' One of them put to my mouth a soft little plastic container shaped like a windsock. ‘Turn on your side.' I obeyed. Nothing came up, just empty spasms. Loud pop music was playing, songs from the '70s and '80s. Faces came and went above my head, looking down at me without curiosity. The nurses flattened out a padded chair and got me on to it with my head lower than my heart. Water, salty pretzels, rest. In twenty minutes they gave me a cab voucher and someone walked me down the stairs to the Bourke Street cab rank. The driver scowled over his shoulder when I told him my inner-suburban destination: he rudely made it clear that it was not far enough. I bit his head off and told him to get going. A woman who has just sprawled retching on the floor of the Blood Bank is not to be trifled with.

‘Get crossways of me, LaBoeuf, and you will think a thousand of brick has fell on you.'

Charles Portis,
True Grit

At an Australian literature conference in Armidale a dozen of us were taken by bus to visit the birthplace of the poet Judith Wright. In a homestead of deep, flowery verandas we were welcomed by female relatives with the long legs and quiet authority of horsewomen, not to mention the ability to knock up an airy sponge cake. While we were standing in the bedroom in which the poet had first seen the light of day, one of the academics murmured, ‘I once went into the room where Thomas Hardy was born. They didn't think he'd survive. They threw him into a corner.'

She walks in my front door at dinnertime. I've made up the bed and turned on the lamps in her room, put some nasturtiums in a glass, laid out clean towels. Everything is pleasant and welcoming, but she doesn't seem to notice. In the kitchen, where the air is perfumed by the soup I've got warming on the stove, I make the mistake of saying, ‘You've got a choice. Chicken and leek soup here, or turkey next door.' Her tired face lights up: ‘Turkey?' I suppose my kitchen bench does look a bit spartan, with its one small handful of broccoli on the chopping board.

After the public interview a woman came up to me and said without preliminary, in an accusing tone, ‘You were nervous.'

H: (surprised) ‘No, I wasn't nervous.'

Woman: ‘You were
nervous
.'

H: ‘I always twitch and jump around in my seat, if that's what you mean.'

Woman: (irritably) ‘I didn't mean that.
You—were—nervous
.'

Luckily someone came up and interrupted us before I was obliged to punch her lights out.

One wigged and robed barrister to another, barging along William Street: ‘And as for this sleazebag fuckin' spinmeister I work for—'

A middle-sized bird fell from the sky into our backyard. It was still alive when the boys found it, but one of the chickens, which had recently sprouted shiny purple tail feathers and was on death row, rushed at it and began to maul it. ‘Its back was broken,' Ambrose told me, the tears still drying on his cheeks. ‘And David got the spade, and he hit it and hit it and hit it, and it went Er, er, er, er, er, er, and then it was dead.' He wanted to write an epitaph. I gave him pencil and paper and he toiled over a draft: ‘This is a bird who went into our rooster's territory. With a broken back, the rooster attacked it and then my dad took out his shovel and whacked it to death.' Rather than correct his misattached modifier, I suggested we edit it down to a single sentence. He printed it with thick red texta on a piece of board: ‘Here lies a young bird.' We pounded the stake into the grave, and away he ran, singing.

‘I'd love it,' says the tired wife to the husband, ‘if you made me a really nice little martini.' He goes out to the kitchen. We hear the sharp metallic rattle of the shaker. Soon he returns bearing an expert little creation in a dainty glass. He hands it to her in a forward-leaning posture of gentle formality, and she accepts it with a smile. The quality of enchanted light that a martini emits in a lamplit room: icy, misty, strangely and coldly white—she might have been receiving a star, or an atomic particle, and raising it to her lips.