Everywhere I Look (8 page)

Jörg tells me that another translation of
sayonara
, the Japanese word for farewell, is ‘if it must be'. He shows me a photo he has taken from a high hospital window during his chemotherapy: two blank buildings, and between them a band of clouded sky into which a big hot air balloon is rising, powered by a vigorous burst of flame. He makes no interpretation, of course, but I take it for an image of hope and self-propulsion.

Ted approaches me with a strange bashful smile and his eyes lowered. ‘Nanny, you said to me that you always like my face.' ‘I do. When I see it coming towards me I feel very happy.' He blushes, and can't stop smiling, or meet my eye. Soon we are aiming his cowboy pistols out the kitchen window at the red bucket on the woodpile, and firing with deadly accuracy. But when I say ‘Peeeyow!' he corrects me: apparently only he is allowed to say ‘Peeeyow'.

The cool change runs smoothly through the house. Outside, a shower of dried plum-tree petals swirls for a moment and falls.

On Radio National, constant talk of collapsing financial markets. Fran Kelly asks a politician what this will mean in pragmatic terms. ‘Fran,' he says, ‘you're going into the end of the world as we know it. I'm not going to follow you there.' I start thinking I should withdraw my cash from the bank, wrap it in thick plastic, and stash it in the roof space or bury it in the yard. My son-in-law says patiently, ‘Everybody must want to do that. And that's exactly what they
don't
want you to do.'

In a fashionable café, five men in shirts and ties sit near me at a circular table. First I think they are having a business meeting. Then I realise they are praying.

I ride my bike to collect Ted from crèche. He emerges from the playground red-faced, in a lather of sweat. The teacher whispers that he has refused all day to take off his jacket because he didn't want to get dirt on the rodeo shirt with pearl studs and blue piping that I brought him from Newcastle. He has sweated so much, under his regulation Foreign Legion sunhat, that his eyebrows are flattened and misshapen. He is lost in a cowboy fantasy. As we fly home across Royal Park he says, in a voice forlorn with longing, ‘Nanny. Do you know where they sell spurs?' Later, on the couch, I make up a story about an old lady who finds a cowboy baby lying forgotten by the roadside. She takes it home and raises it—gives him spurs, chaps, a lasso, some guns, which he fires only responsibly, and bullets that he always takes out and keeps in a drawer. When he's eighteen he gets a horse. He thanks the old lady, mounts the horse and clops away into the desert, looking for work rounding up cattle. She stands waving at the sliprail fence. He requests this story again and again, curled up in my lap with his thumb in his mouth.

Rod is visiting from Spain. We sit outside a café in Bourke Street for an hour. The angle of the afternoon light shows that his skin is forming tiny parallel wrinkles, very delicate and beautiful, and somehow poignant. He tells me that his four-year-old grandson is greatly exercised by the whereabouts of the police. The family traces this to the fact that one day his kindergarten teacher found her bag had been rifled by an intruder; she called the police and, when they arrived, the little boy thought they had come because he had done poo in his pants.

A conversation with the kids about the ubiquity of farts.

Me: ‘I wonder if there's anywhere in the world where farting is polite.'

Olive: ‘Maybe somewhere it could be a worship.'

In the expensive shoe shop, a woman of mature years is slumped sideways in a chair with her head on its armrest, sound asleep. Beside her a slightly younger woman, attended by a shop assistant, busily continues to try on shoes. Her unembarrassed physical proximity to the sleeper seems to indicate that they're companions, or even sisters. To let yourself go out like a light in a public place! How enviable! How free! I edge closer. Her upper lip, like mine, is an open fan of wrinkles. I would like to cover her gently with a cotton blanket.

In the morning it rains. Ambrose has passed his whole two years of life in drought. He looks up at the ceiling and says in a surprised voice, ‘Noise!'