Naive Psychologist

Not Last Night, but the Night Before: The Esplanade

A summer storm is blowing in and now is the calm before. The air is heavy but not heaving, the wind is a whisper and the sea is not-quite calm. The water, the clouds, the sky are grades of grey and blue. They suit my mood which, at new year, is resolvant melancholy.

(no, you’re right, resolvant isn’t a word, but what then is a melancholic when she is resolved?)

In the houses of The Esplanade – town houses with sea views from front windows and neighbours’ clotheslines from the rest – BBQs are firing, sundowners are downed. I walk along the wide paved path between the houses and the sand. Around me, thin and sinewed runners take straight lines while children on their scooters turn and weave. Babies in prams, on hips, in slings. Men and women grown old together are walking hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm or three steps apart.

Below, in the sand and the sea, families and couples and tribes of young adults (through the eyes of middle age these last are grown up children, aren’t they, but don’t tell them I think that way – they’ll only roll their eyes). Mothers wrap first towels and then their arms around shivering children. There are rubber balls, tennis balls and frisbees. From here, there is no sound when they hit the sand, a splash when they hit the water and, when the throw is bad, the stinging slap against wet skin (ya fkn dkhd, what was that?).

A spotter plane (fixed wing, I know these things) flies close to the shore. This summer, sharks are spotted every second day (it’s the bogans on the jetty chucking the crab nets off the jetty down at Brighton; how shocking sharks in their own habitat what do u expect u moron – this is what I’ve learnt from facebook). I have heard the sirens sound and seen the water cleared while helicopters hover and rubber boats charge out from the shore. Cartilaginous beasts and their teeth are not welcome here.

Dogs, their owners walking in opposite directions, slow down, sniff, then chase. Their owners stand, facing each other, calling their dogs. The dogs run, first to one voice then the other, back and forth, splashing through the shallows and kicking up the sand. The human voices first are high, then as frustration grows they deepen. Who knows why but the dogs stop their frolic and part, running towards their owners.

I have been past the café, the storm water drain (a trickle now but it will gush when the storm blows in), the sculpture. I have turned and now I’m nearly back at the start. My children will be home from cricket and surf lifesaving and needing to be fed. But I’m not ready to go home, not ready to leave this place where the land meets the sea and we are, all of us – walking, swimming, running, calling our dogs, chasing our kids – together but apart.

I sit on an empty bench. It is dedicated by plaque to a man whose name I will never remember by a woman I’ll never know. Now that I have stopped I can hear the sea rolling in. The waves are breaking softly across the sand. That sound must have been there while I was walking but I guess I couldn’t hear it above my thoughts. At my feet are three cigarette butts that were pushed out of shape by smokers’ thumbs before they were flicked to the ground or flattened under shoes. I see smudges of black ash, chewing gum stains and ants on their well-trodden path.

Snatches of conversation sound behind me. I don’t know what she wants from me … I know and that’s the situation in Germany too … yeah but mate, who gives a fuck.

Another plane – a jet – taken off from the airport a few kilometres down, flies out, gaining altitude over the sea before it banks and flies back towards the shore. I have already told you that I love the sight and the sound of those jets, but every day I love them more. They take my love and then they bring him home to me. The goodbye is getting harder but it takes less time to find my equilibrium.

A woman and a man are together in the sea. They are facing the shore, and she is behind him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders while his cannot be seen. He turns his head. Her neck stretches forward.

They kiss.

I think, Who knows what goes on beneath the surface.

Perhaps their feet are buried in the sand and they are grounded.
Or maybe they are floating.
Weightless.

The laundry

When I was of an age that I now recognise as young, but then believed was old, I used, sometimes, when faced with an empty knicker drawer, to go to the supermarket and buy another six pack of cheap knickers rather than do a load of washing. On other occasions I would get a load of washing on and then forget it for a week by which time it was a rotting mess of fabric that would have to be washed and then forgotten all over again and in the meantime I’d have to go back to the supermarket to get another six pack of cheap knickers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

When the mister and I first moved in together, some twenty six years ago (WTF and does time not fly) the household chores were divided by that most well-established tradition of Domestic Attrition. Whoever gets into the shower, looks down at the grime that’s gathered in the corners and thinks, ‘Oh, god, that is going to crawl out of the corner and eat me in the night if I don’t disintegrate it with bleach,’ is the loser and spends the rest of the day in a frenzy of fevered cleaning.

Except the washing. The mister always did the washing. At first we used the laundromat and then we inherited a twin tub which suited our youthfully optimistic recycling ways as we hooked hoses from here to there and used the water more than once. Well, when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘he.’

I overheard a conversation between the mister and his mother not long after we had started co-habiting, the main focus of which centred on the question, ‘And what does Tracy do?’

‘Mostly she has ideas,’ he said. It is perhaps the best character summation he’s ever done.

Our division of tasks became more, erm, traditional over the years, particularly once we had children and he continued to leave the house to earn an income and I stayed home caring for the children and having ideas. I even, for a good number of years, began to take on the washing. Nappies every day (oh, god, what was I thinking) and dedicating Fridays to the bulk of the laundry declaring in tones worthy of my grandmothers’ time, ‘I always do the laundry of a Friday.’

Then things changed again, we moved to Abu Dhabi, my mental health collapsed under the weight of exhaustion and grief, I started full time work again, and things shifted a bit. I continued to do loads of washing, but increasingly often left them in the machine to fester. And the mister, who is more often gainfully employed than I am, has a more urgent need for clean clothes than I do. One thing led to another and it became his job again. As it happens, I think watching the mister walk around the house with baskets of laundry clean and dirty, wet and dry, stands as the best feminist teaching we’ve done. We all pull our domestic weight. The mister coordinated it all, the Floppy Adolescent had to do the towels and the Future Prime Minister was in charge of hanging the smalls. And I continued to leave all of my clothes in a pile on the chair. It was an excellent system.

Except that now, here I am, living in a different country to the mister and I seem to be doing all of the washing again.

In truth, there are parts of the washing I love. Well, one part. Getting it out of the machine and onto the line. Carrying the heavy basket on my hip, breathing in the smell of clean clothes The methodical rhythm of hanging it on the line. The sense of order. But then, after that…I have three laundry baskets and I’m thinking of getting a fourth to hold the overflow.

‘We need a system!’ The Floppy Adolescent declared after a particularly terse morning of, ‘Mum! Where’s my…’ and ‘Mum! Have you seen…’ And all of the clean clothes, many of them folded, being tipped from the basket onto the unwashed floor as the Floppy Adolescent searched for socks and the Future Prime Minister looked for shorts.

I did not drive him out to a forest and tell him to find his way home. See how restrained I am?

‘You know what, Mum?’ the Floppy Adolescent said a few days later. ‘I’ve noticed it’s all been left up to you and so I’ve got an idea.’

‘Well, maybe we should just share it out a bit more.’

‘No, I know exactly how it’s going to work.’

The morning passed and so did the afternoon.

‘So, Floppy Adolescent, the washing…’

‘Wot?’ he said looking up, bleary-eyed from six hours of watching you-tubers playing games (no, seriously, WTF young ones what is with that?)

‘The washing. I’m running out of knickers, and school uniforms need to be done.’

‘Wot? Did you think we were starting today? No, today I just had the idea.’

Genetic mirrors, hey?

Sunday

The argument in the car starts the same way that it always does. One brother’s arm around another’s shoulders, the two are wrestling, both are laughing, the Floppy Adolescent uses too much force, and the The Future Prime Minister screams. It is as if it has been scripted, except…

‘It’s different with you here,’ I say to the mister. ‘Usually The Floppy Adolescent sits in the front. They can argue, but they can’t wrestle.’

This is how it has been since he arrived. He doesn’t know where to sit or where to stand. I have to take dresses from coat hangers so he can hang his suit. In Abu Dhabi I slept on the left and here I sleep on the right. I have chosen the plates, the glasses, the sheets. And now we are in my car. I did the test drive, negotiated the price (remembered to ask for the tow bar and capped price servicing), arranged the money, drove it out of the showroom. I didn’t notice the missing backseat arguments until they returned.

‘Can you change these lightbulbs while you’re here?’ I asked when he arrived. ‘Can you hang the cork board? Can you buy a rake and a broom and deal with the leaves?’

I can do all these things, of course I can. I can change lightbulbs, drill holes, rake leaves. But spending too much money makes me anxious and going up ladders makes me heave.

‘Have you got your passport?’ I ask now.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I guess it’s in my bag.’

‘You haven’t checked? I would have checked.’

‘You would have double-checked.’ A voice from the back seat.

‘She would have triple-checked.’ His brother.

Even airports are more relaxed on Sunday mornings. The place is full, but no one is running across from the carpark or pushing their way to the front of the queue.

‘Wish I was getting on a plane and going to Spain,’ I say.

‘Well,’ the mister says, ‘Come through Abu Dhabi on the way and we can go to Spain.’

‘Oh, no, I want to go alone.’

He laughs. It is a proper laugh and I wonder how he does it. How he loves a person who is so often absent, who so often retreats. It seems never to injure his love for me, never to bruise his heart.

Anyway, it isn’t true. I don’t want to go to Spain. The thought of that takes me by surprise, although the truth of it does not. It is time for me to be still. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? That’s why I’ve moved back to Adelaide. To bury my roots in something more than sand.

‘Coffee?’ asks the mister.

‘Is there a Subway?’ asks the Floppy Adolescent.

They line up at Cibo I go to the newsagent. I think of the many nights ahead and buy The Saturday Paper, The New Scientist, The New Yorker, The Guardian Weekly, and Adam Spencer’s Big Book of Numbers. I know, right? As if.

‘Have a good journey,’ the woman behind the counter says to me.

‘Oh, I’m not…’ I stop, because I don’t have the energy to explain and because she isn’t interested in my explanations. ‘Thanks.’

I go back to Cibo’s. The hot chocolate is as good as it ever is, the cheese in the piadina is melted the perfect amount, but the cafe latte is more of a miss than a hit.

And then we are standing at the gate and the final passengers are boarding.

How did it happen? How did we come to this place where we would be spending our lives together but living apart?

‘It’s not the life I would have chosen.’ I have heard myself saying it over cups of coffee and glasses of wine. It’s true to say it’s not what we planned and that even two months ago we didn’t know we’d be living like this. But it’s not the life I would have chosen? I don’t know if that’s true, because what life would I choose? Which decisions would I make differently? Which fingers of fate would I pray to change direction?

We watch as the mister crosses the airbridge. He does not look back. I watch as he lifts his hand, rubs it across his forehead and over the back of his head.

I cannot catch my breath.

‘It’s all right, Mum.’

The lads close in around me. The Future Prime Minister starts to talk and The Floppy Adolescent rubs my back.

On our way out, we pass a man the mister used to know. He has put on weight, his hair has thinned, his corduroy jacket is brown. I think of going to see him, but forks in the road and paths not chosen. Too exhausting.

The Future Prime Minister is still talking, the Floppy Adolescent rubbing my back.

We get in the car and partly because we have to take care of each other now, but mostly because there is one in the front and one in the back, there are no sibling arguments.

I drive and soon we are home.

The key in the lock, the door is open.

The cork board has not been hung.

The lightbulbs have not been changed.

Leaves, blown by the wind, scrape across the verandah and into the foyer.

My love is flying and I am still.

Wandering

I’ve got a wee hangover today. Too much champagne yesterday and not enough water. I don’t mind hangovers. I had a kidney infection a couple of months ago and I didn’t like that. With a kidney infection you don’t know when it will stop. I mean, once the antibiotics kick in it should only be another day or so, but kidney infections can be persistent (that’s not what the doctor told me that’s what I learned from the internet). So if I had to choose between a kidney infection and a hangover, I’d choose the hangover. With a hangover, you know that it’s only a matter of time. A hydralyte, an icy pole, the leftover chips from the night before, lie on the couch and know that it will all be over soon.

Well, the physical side of it. But the regret. God that lingers, doesn’t it? It will be Thursday before I’ve recovered from that. I always talk too much. I tell myself I won’t, but then I always do. Not bad things. Not secrets. But indiscretions. Too much information. Things that the world doesn’t need to know.

I woke up at five this morning which is partly the jetlag and partly the champagne.

‘Mister,’ I said. He didn’t move. ‘Mister, did I say anything stupid yesterday?’

‘What?’

‘Did I say anything stupid?’

‘Why don’t you go back to sleep?’

‘I did, didn’t I? I talked too much and I embarrassed you.’

Snore. (That’s him, not me).

The only cure I’ve got for talking too much is writing. I’m not sure why that works. I mean writing is just another way of talking, isn’t it? And talking is what I’m trying to run away from. But I do want to write about my trek before it fades too far into the past and now is as good a time as any. The call to prayer has echoed its way from there to here and back again. The sun hasn’t quite come up, and the moon, almost full, hasn’t gone down. I’ve finished the chips and the icy pole and I’m halfway through the hydralyte. Time to write.

Let me tell you about my trek.

I’ll start with the worst, because they always make the best stories, the worst parts do, don’t they? So: the overnight train. I love overnight trains. The cabins, the white sheets on the beds, the rocking…the overpriced sandwiches, pulling in and out of stations…the Agatha Christie romance of it all. Yeah, nah. This wasn’t that. Overcrowded, ripped curtains instead of chunky doors, foul-smelling toilets. And barely an hour into the trip our guide told us that we had to wake up at 3 am because on the last trip he’d guided, ‘Something went wrong.’ This unspecified something happened at a station or series of stations that we would be passing through at 3 am.

‘What something?’ I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. I tried to explain that I have an excellent imagination and that anything he told me could not be worse than the things I was currently thinking. But his lips were sealed.

Not everyone woke up at 3 am, but I did. And at about 3.15, I saw a rat running down the corridor. Of the train. Maybe it was a mouse, but the train was dark and dirty and crowded and that was definitely a rodent. I don’t think that was the something the guide was warning us about, but oh god, a rat. On the train. I did not get a lot of sleep after that.

Actually, do you know what? I was going to tell you some more about that train, and what I did while I wasn’t sleeping, but the train wasn’t the worst part. Not by a long way.

We had a car accident. The accident itself wasn’t that bad, it was what went on in my head afterwards that was the worst.

We’d finished the trek and spent a night in the most beautiful beds in the world (no, seriously, they were beds like none of us had ever experienced before, the mattresses the perfect balance of soft and firm, the pillows and quilts like clouds, the sheets as smooth as a baby’s skin) and we were travelling in a small convoy of toyotas back to the train that would take us back to Delhi.

I was dreading it. Another night with the rats and the great unspoken something. It was Thursday afternoon, I wouldn’t get back to Adelaide until Sunday morning during which time I would not spend a single night in a hotel. Train, day in Delhi with a hotel booked until the plane, a sixteen hour layover in Changi, plane, Adelaide. So I was sitting in the car, making a joke of it with my newly-made friend because clichefully if you don’t laugh you’ll cry, when there was a solid thump on the roof of our car.

Thump.

A rock had fallen from the hill and hit our car. We pulled over to the side of the road and I thought we must have been stopping to check that everything with our car was okay. But we were stopping because the car behind us had also been hit by a rock, and that rock had smashed the windscreen of the car.

It was a bit shaky-making, but no one was hurt and even the car wasn’t too damaged, and with a bit of juggling luggage and people between the cars we were soon on our way again.

The woman who had been in the front seat of the damaged car got into the car that I was in.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked because it would give you a fright, wouldn’t it?

‘Yeah, I’m all right, I just feel like I might have got some glass in my hair.’ She scratched at the top of her scalp with her fingers. ‘Can you see anything?’

It was – and I know this is going to sound like a cliché, but truly this is how I felt – as if I’d been thumped in the chest.

And this is where things get a bit intense in my head.

Because that’s exactly what my dad did the night of his car accident. He sat at the kitchen table and scratched his fingers on his scalp and said, ‘I think there’s glass in my hair, can you see any glass in my hair?’ And when he wasn’t scratching his hands on his scalp he was holding them out in front of himself and looking at them as he turned them palms up, palms down and saying, ‘She died. Not even a scratch on me, and she died.’

He did have a scratch or two. When I looked, there were little flecks of glass in his hair. Tiny, tiny pieces of glass. Like grains of sand. It looked like it might have looked if he’d been to the beach on a windy day. And some of the pieces of glass had left tiny cuts in his scalp. Not even cuts. Little pin pricks of blood.

Most of the time – nearly all of the time – my grief for my parents is a selfish, self-centred emotion. It’s about the things that I miss and the things that I don’t have. When I see mothers and daughters shopping together for fabric, or the doctor says to me, It could be menopause, do you know when your mother started and I have to say no, or I see grandparents at music concerts…that’s a little bit about my mum, but mostly it’s about me, isn’t it? It’s about the things that I don’t have.

But in that moment, coming down from the Himalayas, my grief was all for Mum.

It’s been nearly twenty five years since she died. She’d be seventy by now. She might have died a dozen different ways. But here are the facts of her death: she was forty six years old and she died in a car accident before the ambulance could arrive.

Sitting in that car, watching rural India pass by, a world away from the dark and empty highway where my mother had died, I could think of nothing but my mother’s loss. I understood, in a visceral way, what it was that she lost that night. Her life. She lost her life and all that would have filled it. I could feel the enormity of it. Truly, deeply feel it. Like I’d breathed it in and I couldn’t breathe it out again.

If I’d been on my own I would have cried, but it didn’t seem fair to tell the people I was with what was going on in my mind. I managed to hold it together through the car trip and the horrible train and all the way to the hotel in Delhi where I could have a shower and wait for my plane to leave that night.

What a shower that was. I stood under the water and sobbed. Cried like I cried the night she died. I had to force myself to stop. It had such momentum that it might have gone on for hours. And when I finally stopped and got out of the shower I threw up. Not just retching, but throwing up over and over again.

Because by then I’d realised something more. Dad lived with this. He lived with this and much more besides. Because he was driving. He was there. He saw her die. What a thing to make sense of, to make your peace with.

Perhaps that’s why he was so gracious about his own death. Not that he didn’t sometimes question the justice of it. He didn’t want to die. He was a man of whom the larger-than-life cliché was true and when he died a light on Earth really did go out. But he was about as accepting of his death as any person could be. He raged, he fought to stay alive, but he did go gently too. In dignity and at peace.

tl/dr

Too long, didn’t read.

That’s what they say these days, isn’t it? When anything on the internet is more than 500 words. And this is far more than I thought I’d write and I didn’t know that I was going to tell you about the shattered windscreen and the pieces of glass in my father’s hair and the violence of my mother’s death. And not sure why I think writing things that I haven’t told anyone before is a cure for the regret of having talked too much the night before. But there you go.

‘Gee, this has gone to a dark place,’ I said to the mister just now (he’s up and about by now, and he doesn’t have a hangover because he always stops one drink before instead of one drink after and I tell myself I’m going to be more like him, but I never am). ‘I thought I was writing a light-hearted piece about the overnight train and look what’s happened.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, what a surprise.’

Reading this, listening to me talk too much you could be forgiven for thinking that I live in a dark state of unrelenting intensity. But I don’t. I do cry a bit, but I like laughing too. And it’s not always deep and meaningful. Sometimes I talk about things of no real consequence. Which chocolate is better, the Haigh’s cardamom or the Lindt sea salt. Boston Legal was James Spader’s best work. Discuss. If I had to choose between Richard Roxburgh or James Spader I’d choose Richard Roxburgh. No, James Spader. No, Richard Roxburgh. I’m not sure, but I do know I wouldn’t choose Johnny Depp. Not now. Johnny Depp’s gone to the dogs.

So I will end by telling you about the best moment of my trek.

Getting off the train. That was excellent. Leaving those rats and heading towards a hotel with hot water and clean toilets that was really, really good. But it wasn’t the best part. Not by a long way. The best part was our lunch break on the second day. Things were going well. My training had paid off and I was taking the physical part of the trek in my stride (see what I did there, LOL). I didn’t have any blisters. I’d shared a tent with someone and made a new friend. And look! Look where I am. Grass, snow, behind me a shrine.

The cooks served soup and sandwiches for lunch, followed by lentils and vegetables and rice. I had jelly snakes for dessert and lemon-flavoured hydralytes. Lunch finished, we would rest for another half an hour.

I had a little lie down. My head on a rock I’d softened with my coat. The grass was cool. The clouds were a blanket but every now and then the sun broke through and it was late-winter warm.

I missed the mister.

I wished that he were there lying next to me. If he were there, I would rest my head on his chest listening to him breathe with the sun warm on the back of my neck. His hand would stroke my arm and every now and then he would kiss the top of my head.

I missed him. Truly, madly, deeply, more than I ever have before – and that’s quite a bit given this whole living in different countries thing.

But I understood something it was great to understand.

‘This missing,’ I thought, ‘this is how much I love him.’

I turned on my side and pulled my hat over my eyes so that no one could see me cry. It was glorious.

Christmas Eve

It’s lovely in Abu Dhabi at this time of the year. Every day for a month it’s like South Australia on the morning after a cool change has rolled in to break the heatwave. We have the windows open and don’t even mind the dust. I can smell the mangroves and hear the sea birds. Each sunset is perfect. The light is soft but full and it glows against the lounge room wall. Up in my room, the light is reflected in the wardrobe mirror. As a wardrobe it’s not up to much – it’s old so the rods run from front-to-back instead of side-to-side. I can’t see anything except what’s hanging in front and it’s hard to hang things in any useful order. But it’s one third of my mother’s bedroom suite along with the dressing table and washstand and I love it. The wood is glossy dark and the washstand has a marble top that still hasn’t been screwed in place since we moved it here. The mirrors have black cracks in the corners and the dressing table has two enormous scratches made by a big, stray cat that used to steal its way into our house through my mother’s bedroom window.

Sometimes when I’m waiting for the mister to come home, the lads to come back from the park, and the night-in to begin, I lie on my bed and watch the sunset in the mirror. I think that the weather and the light that we grew up with live inside us, as much a part of us as our blood and our soul. It seems strange that I live so far from the place that I grew up in, and yet, the smell of the mangroves, the breeze that blows at this time of year and the orange glow of the sunset doesn’t stir feelings and emotions so much as it settles me, grounds me. Makes me feel that this is the time and the place where I am meant to be.

Who knew that an industrial Australian town nestled between a mangrove swamp and the outback would have so much in common with an oil-filled Arabian city nestled between a mangrove swamp and a desert?

None of that is what I came in here to say. I came in here to talk about Christmas, it being Christmas Eve and all that. It’s the nostalgia I guess. It made me talk about the breeze and the sunset.

It’s up and down, isn’t it? Christmas and all that goes with it. There’s all of the deadlines which, on many days, have to be faced with half a hangover and not enough sleep. There’s braving the shops and then going back to the shops because you’ve forgotten the thing you went there for in the first place. There’s New Year looming which is just another day but still somehow forces a person to account for herself and all of the things she didn’t achieve. And then, waiting underneath it all, there’s all the people and all of the relationships and all of their complexities.

My dad loved Christmas. He had a full head of hair and a bushy beard all of which went from fiery red to snow white long before he got to middle age. He worked in high schools for most of his teaching life, but ended his career at a regional South Australian area school which meant that he was the principal for the full range of ages. On the day of his retirement one of the youngest children came and said to him, ‘You’re not really Father Christmas, are you?’

My mum, for reasons many and varied, didn’t love it at all. We left my father’s family Christmas with my dad driving at blood alcohol levels far in excess of .08, my brother and I passive smoking my parents’ Marlboro reds, and my mother singing her Christmas refrain, ‘Merry Bloody Christmas.’

Our last Christmas Day before we moved to Abu Dhabi was terrible. We all knew that it would be Dad’s last, and my grandfather – 90 at the time – slipped on the pavement and cracked his ribs, forcing me to admit that I had to take on the guardian duties he’d trusted me with and face the consequences of his age. It was a rough year.

But this one is good. The four of us – me, the mister, youngest lad and the floppy adolescent – are, individually and collectively, in a good place right now and we’ve embraced the season like never before. We somewhat spontaneously put the decorations up together one evening, youngest lad and I suspending tinsel from every door- and window-frame in the house and the Floppy Adolescent moving behind us, neatening and straightening and symmetrifying it all. In a genius flourish, the Floppy Adolescent finished it off with red baubles hung on the antler’s ears to remind us of my dad who spent every Christmas Day that I knew him with cherries hooked over his ears. The mister never got used to cherry earrings, but I still get a thrill every time I find cherries still in a pair.

I’m making Christmas desserts today and tomorrow we’re taking them around to a lovely friend who has invited us for Christmas. It’s pretty nice being invited places for Christmas and I love making desserts. The last couple of days I’ve been in my happy place, in the kitchen, testing new recipes to share with friends while I alternate my music between my Christmas playlist and Double J. Really, is there a better way to spend time?

The first time I was in charge of Christmas dessert was at the mister’s mother’s house. ‘Can I do anything to help?’ I asked, expecting to grate carrots and peel potatoes. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Perhaps you could do this,’ and handed me a recipe for Bombe Alaska. Fark. It worked a treat, but I’m not doing it this year. I’ve probably got the ingredients for it – I think I’ve bought the ingredients for about twelve different things, plus extras because you never really know whether Spinneys is going to have cream so you have to buy extras when you see it. I’ve had a bit of trouble with my egg whites the last couple of days, and I thought I’d have masses of yolks leftover but I curdled the custard I was using as a base for the ice cream so that sorted that.

This is all a bit rambly, isn’t it? And you probably don’t have time to be reading blog posts. You’ve got ribbons to tangle, champagne to pop, tears to dry, memories to sift through. I don’t know, I started out trying to say something, but I haven’t got there. Some of my close friends are having a rough time of it at the moment, and I wanted to try and write something useful. Something that said, ‘Hang in there, it will be okay.’ But life is complex, isn’t it, and some years Christmas is fantastic and some years less so.

Well, since we’ve already popped the champagne up there in that last paragraph, let’s raise a glass and toast. To the people we love and the people who love us.

Happy Christmas, my friends.

PS Sorry for the typos, I’ve had to type in a rush and I don’t have time to go back because I have to make an uncurdled custard now. Also sorry for the quality of the photograph. I suggested getting my real camera and tripod out, but the Floppy Adolescent would only agree to a selfie taken on my phone.

Mind you, not looking forward to the geographical celibacy (if that’s a thing)

‘Would you really leave your husband here on his own?’

At the time she asked, we were sitting at the entrance of the school waiting for our children to come out, and I wasn’t even sure I knew her name. That’s how well I didn’t know her. I was wearing a denim skirt and a cotton shirt I’d pulled off the sewing machine earlier that day. I hadn’t finished it, not properly, and a loose thread was tickling the top of my arm. I was wearing the blue leather sandals I bought at Grundy’s on Rundle Street on a trip to Adelaide three, maybe four years, ago. I like those sandals. They are soft around my foot and easy to wear.

The polish on my toenails had started to disintegrate. I’ve never had an actual pedicure, I just slap a bit of colour on my nails from time to time, scratching whatever is left of the last coat off before I do. Standing in a crowd here I’m often embarrassed when I look down and see the state of my feet compared to everyone else’s. I think that will be different when I’ve moved back to Adelaide. I don’t remember ever being embarrassed by poorly polished toenails when I lived there.

Not that anyone has ever said anything. No one would be rude enough to comment on my ageing, drying feet, would they? But more than once, more than twice, people I barely even know have asked me about moving back to Australia and leaving my husband behind. I won’t say it isn’t something to worry about. I mean relationships do need nurturing if they are to flourish. But really? I wonder. Would you really ask an almost-stranger that?

It happened when we moved here too. People making comments about the dent we would put in our mortgage, about the cars we would drive, the early retirement we would take. I was astonished by it the first time that it happened. In my mind I had always seen myself leaving Adelaide. We had already moved a little bit and travelled a lot. Living overseas with my children was something I always wanted to do. But person after person after person made comment (passing or otherwise) about the financial motivations of our move. So weird.

Certainly, it’s not something I ever envisaged. That I would live in one country and the mister would live in another. But it’s just how things have panned out. Temporarily at least. The lads and I – for reasons various and multiple, individual and intertwined – are better off living in Australia, and the mister’s employment situation means he can’t leave here. Not yet. It will resolve itself. He will find a job. But all the same and nonetheless, we will live apart.

None of my friends, no one who knows me, seems to be concerned about the state of my marriage. Like I say, I’m not sure it’s the most fabulous way to nurture a relationship, live half a world apart. But it is what it is and we aren’t where we aren’t, and step by step it will work itself out. And in the meantime, I am off to have a pedicure. Find out what it is that I’ve been missing all these years.

On the Malcolms

Okay, look, I’ve got a bit too much time on my hands at the moment, but here’s the thing about the Prime Ministers, Malcolm.

Them, I do not trust.

It seems to me that we are all being seduced by Malcolm the Turnbull’s charms for reasons including, and pretty much limited to, the fact that he is not Tony Abbott.

Let me be clear: Tony Abbott is an odious man. Okay, I’ve never met him, I don’t know him personally. As a general principle-to-live-by I try to be generous of spirit and of kind and I try not to judge people and certainly not harshly. Maybe I should rephrase my clarity: Tony Abbott’s politics are odious to me. And I’m pretty sure that if I met him, he would be odious to me. The sense of elation I felt the night that he was defeated cannot be understated.

Let me be clear: Malcolm the Turnbull is a most attractive man. Handsome, elegant, smart and fun. He shows love and respect for his partner. His smile? Oh, my lord. Let us all be seduced by his charm. Where’s the harm? But let me be clear on this as well: Malcolm Turnbull’s politics are odious to me.

I have to remind myself to separate those things. The charming man. His odious politics. A vote for one is a vote for the other too.

I think perhaps there is something in the name. Malcolm. It’s an almost awkward name, the two syllables separated as they are by that click that’s not quite in your throat. Awkward, but perhaps it carries some enchantment, a bewitching. Casting a spell of which we are aware but happy to give in to.

I know I am increasingly alone in this, but Malcolm the Fraser I have not forgiven. I know that we all admire his recent (and not-so-recent, in fact, his altogether consistent) adherence to the principles of human rights. He talked the talk, but he walked the walk as well.

But here’s the thing: adherence to the principles of human rights is baseline. It’s the cake, it’s not the icing. It’s what our leaders should be doing. I mean good on him for standing firm and speaking out. But so he should have. He was just doing the right thing.

For me, what looms larger, his actual legacy, is the dismissal of Gough Whitlam. And this is not just some romantic nostalgia for Gough, though I’ll admit to some of that. I think we have to take seriously the disrespect that Malcolm the Fraser showed for our democracy. Such little respect for our democratic process. Such little respect for us. I have no scientific proof of course, but how can that Born to Rule mentality not be with us still?

I’m not saying that we should be hating on a man who isn’t here to defend himself. I’m not saying we should throw eggs at his headstone. He did a bad thing, but I don’t think he’s evil. Or even odious. I’m just saying that in our gratitude to people for not being Tony Abbott we should not kid ourselves that they are something greater than they are.

The Prime Ministers, Malcolm.

Our rage, it must be maintained.

On umbrellas (and other things)

I took the borrowed umbrellas out of the borrowed car and held them out to the Floppy Adolescent standing beside me. As he reached across his forehead and pulled his fringe into place, I drew my arm back.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll carry them.’

‘You don’t have to carry them all. We can carry our own.’

‘No thanks. That’s an argument waiting to happen.’

‘Mum, please. You can trust us. It’s just umbrellas.’

We have been together, the three of us, the two of them and me, for a week and they have been together longer, their extended Abu Dhabi summer break taken in a South Australian winter.

Brothers on holiday together.

Needle, bicker, hug, laugh.

Rinse, repeat.

Add umbrellas.

I handed the umbrellas to him (I know, right) then I locked the doors of borrowed car and the rented apartment and we began our walk towards the tram.

‘Oh God, look at you,’ I said to the lads. It is as if the outside light is somehow different and suddenly I could see them for what they were. Their jeans ripped at the knees, the sleeves of their jumpers too short, everything unwashed. How long has it been since anything saw the touch of an iron?

‘Mum, we look fine.’

‘Howcome you care so much about your fringe, but so little about your clothes?’

‘Mum. Please.’

‘At least tell me you thought to clean your teeth.’

The look! Teenage disdain perfected, but these days I am unaffected.

‘That’s the tree!’ The lads both pointed. They have been kicking the footy day after day for hours. At least once per session as far as I can tell the footy lands in the fork of one of the Norfolk Pines that line The Esplanade. This day, a police car had pulled up to watch them throwing rocks into the tree as they tried to dislodge the ball. ‘It’s all right,’ the lads reassured me when they recounted the story. ‘They were laughing. The had to watch us because there was nothing else for them to do. They’re bored. No one robs houses on Thursday morning.’

We arrived at the tram.

It used to be that when we came back on holidays I had an Australian SIM, an interwebby usb, a metrocard for the tram. Now too much time has passed and the SIM is too big for my phone, the telco has deactivated whatever it was that fired the usb, the metrocard is lost. I stood in front of the ticket machine and followed the steps, one by one, none of it in my memory now, everything being relearned. One dirham coins look like ten cent pieces to me, but not to the machine. We had gone two stops before I was holding our tickets. In the seats at the front of the tram umbrellas had turned into swords.

By the time the tram arrived at Victoria Square the darkness had started to fall. The lights were coming on, the street lights white, and a soft and buttery glow came from the office windows. When I am travelling, this is the time that I feel most alone, most not-at-home. My breaths grew shallow and caught in my throat. I swallowed to pop my ears.

Pirie Street. Rundle Mall. We got off the tram.

‘How far is it?’

‘Just down here.’

‘Yes, but how far? How long will it take us to get there?’

‘Not long.’

‘How long is not long?’

We crossed North Terrace, walked past Parliament House and the bleak, grey space of the Festival Plaza, stark and barren even in the soft light of the early night.

Inside the Festival Theatre it was how it had always been, but it was not what it used to be. Everyone used to be younger, the carpet used to be thicker, the stairs down to the bistro were steeper.

We looked at the bar snacks menu and I ordered. The cabernet sauvignon could have had more shades of marshmallow, the chicken wings could have had less sauce, the salt and pepper squid could not have been more like rubber. The chips were good, but there were not enough to go around. You never know with chips, do you? Sometimes too many, sometimes not enough, never just the right amount.

Bicker, needle, hug, laugh, bicker, needle, hug, laugh.

My boys looked shabby and they had umbrellas.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Do we have to be the loudest wherever we go?’

‘Mum.’ They spoke in unison. ‘It’s only jokes.’ They wrapped their arms around each other’s necks and walked back up the stairs.

We watched The Book Of Loco a play about a mother’s death, migration and displacement, the edge of madness. I know, right?

I felt my Floppy Adolescent sitting with me and I remembered. My father and I sitting in the Keith Michell Theatre watching a Harvest production of Equus. Or maybe it wasn’t Harvest, but it was certainly Equus. And I felt so grown up sitting with my father. And when, at the end, my Floppy Adolescent stood and clapped and said, ‘That was amazing,’ I could not stop myself.

‘Oh God, you’re crying, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Mum. Really?’

On the walk back to the tram it rained and we were happy to discover that our umbrellas were fit for purpose. At the tram stop it was cold and it was windy and there was no romance in public transport. The rain died down as we got on and by the time we reached our stop there was no more rain, the wind had stilled.

A few steps away from the tram and we could hear the sea, the waves rolling in. All week I have been falling asleep, waking up to this sound. Sometimes it soothes and other times it stirs, whistling through my veins like they are empty alleys in my soul.

A man on a strange reclining bike rode past and out onto the jetty.

‘Do you think he’s going fishing?’ That’s my youngest boy.

‘He hasn’t got a rod. Are you stupid?’ And that’s my oldest.

Bicker, needle, hug then laugh. They looped their arms around each other’s necks and walked, loped two steps ahead, elbows digging into ribs, knuckles ground against skulls. Bicker, needle, hug then laugh.

From behind us I heard the rumble, loudly, of a plane.

‘That’s the plane to Dubai. That’s the one we catch.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s nearly ten o’clock and this is Adelaide.’

I looked in the direction of the airport, but I could not see the plane. Too much cloud? Taken off in the other direction? I wanted to speak. I wanted my boys to know, I wanted them to understand that this is an Adelaide sound, that when I was their age and my parents brought me to Adelaide and we stayed in my grandfather’s house this was the noise that woke me. Planes just taking off or landing. This was the sound that reminded my body where I was, where I had woken. Somewhere safe that wasn’t home. I had no idea that those planes were flying to places I would one day see.

The lads ran on ahead. My heels clicked on the paving, the sea rolled in, the wind had started again.

There was no rain and the Norfolk Pines were silent.

Thank you Tuesday, you were perfect

Far less stressed than I used to be. Like so much less stressed I’m hardly stressed at all. Started the day at breakfast with my fabulous friend. Got quite a bit of work done on my thesis in the morning, took the lads to an excellent cafe for a late lunch, got more work done on my thesis, and then watched a cracker of a sunset while the lads kicked the footy in the background. It was a perfect Adelaide winter’s afternoon – deep blue sky, golden light in the eucalypts, turn your back to the sun and let it warm you through that kind of thing. To end the day I took advantage of this apartment’s uber-luxurious shower and then, to make a great day perfect, discovered that at least one of my children has learned how to replace an empty toilet roll on the holder. Okay, so he left the wrapper and the old roll on the floor, but let’s take our wins where we get them, eh?

Fortune cookies and the dentist

We had fortune cookies after dinner tonight. The Floppy Adolescent says they taste like styrofoam, but I’ve always been partial to a bit of fortune cookie action. I also like my bag of runes, but that’s a different thing, isn’t it? A different level of divining. Anyway I haven’t got my runes with me right now, so in the absence of better methods, these are my current fortunes.

In case you can’t read them they say
Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
Many a false step is made by standing still.

Probably you aren’t supposed to take two fortunes, but I did, because I like the biscuits.

The adversity seems a bit more 2009, but I guess the false step one is prescient. I can feel that paralysis creeping up, the one you get where you’ve got too much going on and so you do nothing not because that’s the best option but because it saves you from choosing the wrong thing to get started on.

I’ve been in Adelaide for a week, so that’s sort of one third through my time in Australia and halfway through my time in Adelaide or maybe slightly less than that so slightly more time remaining than I am thinking, but gah! Does time not fly?

This is the bit where I start getting stressed at all that I still want to do, knowing I won’t get it all done, but not quite at the place where I still pretend to myself like anything is possible. I know it’s stressing me because a few hours ago when the lads were wrestling on their bedroom floor and I said to them, ‘You need to stop, I’m feeling stressed right now,’ they did indeed stop. I guess I had my stress voice on.

There’s been quite a bit going on in the background the last month or so – you know the kinds of things that aren’t urgent or don’t affect you directly, but are big nonetheless so take a bit of (over)thinking. So there’s a bit more getting stuff sorted and arranging things and waiting for other things than I had planned for.

I much prefer the time later on (and this will be tomorrow or the next day) where a person can no longer pretend that everything will get done and starts to slash at the to-do as the priorities prioritise themselves. Actually, here’s something we can scrub off right now: dentist. I mean, am I really going to spend a precious day of my trip at the dentist when I could be having a coffee with a friend or another glass of sparkling burgundy with my cousin, or even just wandering from place to place and thinking, ‘this is winter, this is rain, how lovely does this feel’? And it’s not like there aren’t dentists in Abu Dhabi and after seven years of living there I should be able to not only make an appointment but get myself to it.

Scrub dentist from the list.

The stress, it has already lifted. That was easy.