Everywhere I Look (9 page)

Jacob's funeral at Springvale. The building is very crowded. Two old women squeeze their way into the seats in front of ours. Another old lady murmurs to them, ‘Excuse me, I'm saving these two places for my friends.' One of the interlopers, whose hair is dyed bright red, turns to her and snaps, ‘Look, this is a funeral, not a party.' The service moves along with a brisk grandeur. Then we all file out, hundreds of us, and walk slowly along the cemetery roads to the open grave. Even at the back of the crowd we still flinch at the hollow thud when the first spadeful of earth strikes the coffin. I can't believe Jacob's body is really inside it. He had such bright eyes.

Later Ambrose wants to stay the night at my house. He won't go to sleep in the cot. I pick him up, wrap him in the blue rug, and hold him on my lap on the couch. Outside it's still light, but cloudy, as if about to storm. I sing him ‘The Tennessee Waltz'. His eyes slide shut. His thumb slips out of his mouth and a few nerve tremors run through his left hand. He begins to breathe deeply, then to snore. Meanwhile, Jacob is out there at Springvale under all that dirt. A cool wind is blowing. I still think cremation is more bearable. The beloved one is only air, and some dry crumbs of inoffensive matter.

I watch
High Noon
again on DVD. Gary Cooper solemn, dogged, pained. The white, dusty streets he strides along, ever more hopeless. The scene where he writes his will.

At two in the morning, Ted, sleeping in the spare room, has a bad dream and creeps into my bed. He flings himself about diagonally for the rest of the night, cramming me into a tiny corner. God damn it, I think at 5 a.m., this is worse than being married.

Psychoanalyst at conference: ‘Paradise has not only been lost, it never existed.'

Am I imagining an unusual quiet over the city? A breathlessness? The world is waiting for the news: will the US elect a black president? I hardly dare turn on the TV. But when I do I sit there and sob out loud. Tears absolutely pop out of my eyes. Olive comes in the back door and gazes at me curiously. ‘I'm crying with happiness,' I say, ‘because of Obama. Obama! OBAMA! To think I'm alive when this happened! It's better than men walking on the moon!' She puts down what she is carrying, approaches me with an ironical little smile, and gives me a mature hug, patting my shoulder. In this she is so like her mother that I cry even more.

One young woman to another, walking along Bridport Street: ‘So I said to him, “If I wasn't your girlfriend, I'd be really concerned about your sexuality.”'

I bring home some chocolates shaped like pyramids. Ted comes in to ask me for one. He struggles to articulate their shape, and comes up with ‘a desert point'.

At David and Jason's in Newcastle, Jason makes me watch a few songs from Kylie's Homecoming Tour. It's a bloated spectacle of lights like a Nazi rally, the ‘dancing' vulgar and clumsy, the songs a series of tiny ideas inflated beyond any possibility of meaning, and Kylie herself a minuscule creature with a very pretty profile and a surprisingly sweet smile. Now that she's had breast cancer and lost her French boyfriend, she looks almost interesting, her face thinner, darker, shadowed perhaps by adult pain and loss. I find her endearing. David is bored by her. But Jason adores her and seems proud of her. He shows Olive a single sequin that flew off her costume and into his hand when he was in the front row. Together they examine it, reverently, like a religious relic.

As the vodka kicks in I begin to make plans. I will go to my office and start work at eight every morning. I will stop drinking coffee and eating lollies. I will hire someone to pluck my eyebrows into shape once a week.

Library Week at the local primary school and I am invited to give a talk one afternoon. A boy of nine or so, in a dark-brimmed hat, sits in the front row. He is fidgety at first, then sits stiller and stiller, with his eyes fixed on my face. At the end he comes up with his parents, addresses me by my full name: they have a copy of my book that they would like me to inscribe.

Me: ‘Is it
to
somebody?'

Boy: ‘To our whole family, actually.'

Me: (pen poised) ‘Will I write “To the whole family”?'

Parents: (shyly) ‘Yes, that would be fine.'

Boy: (holds up one hand) ‘NO.' (Looks from father to mother and back again, his eyebrows high. His voice goes up a few semitones.) ‘No—we
agreed
that Helen Garner should write each name
individually
.'

Me: ‘Okay, what are the names?'

Boy: ‘Right.' (Takes deep breath.) ‘The names are: Ross. Julie. They're my parents. Brady. Stuart. And Craig.'

Me: ‘In that exact order?'

Boy: (firmly) ‘In that exact order.'

Me: ‘You're Craig, right? The youngest?'

Boy: (importantly) ‘Yes, I am.'

I want to throw him across the back of my bike and speed away with him forever.