The World Was Whole

by Fiona Wright

  SLIPSTONE, CLINGSTONE

  There’s a poem that I read once, years ago, that chants ‘slipstone, clingstone: everything we hold’, and I think about it every time I eat a nectarine or peach. I try to find it, one sticky, storm-heralding December afternoon, and discover that I’ve misremembered the line, although the poem is also more fragile, more momentary, and far more full of love than I recall.

  I’m trying to eat fruit every day because it’s been at least four years since I have eaten fruit at all, aside from the odd slice from a platter, the occasional strawberry garnish. This time last year, and almost to the day, I went to a Christmas brunch and took a piece of peach from a plate of tropical fruit – most of the other guests were piling slices of nectarine, mango, dark-skinned plum, on top of their pancakes – and I placed it on top of my plate: I bit into it and I was startled. There are peaches in this world, I thought. There are peaches in this world, and you won’t eat them.

  The peaches aren’t quite ready yet, still sharp, a little, in their centres. But I eat them anyway, on the way to yoga in the morning, the juice dribbling to the footpath from my hand. I imagine the insects that will be drawn there later, a line of ants, perhaps, or bees, maybe a small white moth, or spider.

  I leave the house at the very end of the afternoon on a day so humid that the air feels as though it’s pressing down upon my skin. I love this kind of weather, feel like its warmth soaks into me, that I too swell and grow bigger, fuller in the balmy mugginess when I’m so used to feeling taut and small and shrivelled. The storm breaks suddenly, with rolling cracks of thunder, fat and forceful drops of rain that leave the tarmac steaming. My feet are soaked within seconds, and I’m surprised by how warm the rain is, how pleasant, how like a shower. Three small girls run out onto the footpath in their checked school uniforms, throwing their arms out and spinning, their heads back and tongues out, licking at the sky. It is delicious weather. It is magnificent, and I feel vividly alive.

  I spend a Sunday morning walking the length of King Street and into Glebe, so I can pick up Christmas presents for my family – mostly books and shirts, and craft kits for my nieces. I want to buy a pair of shoes for Alex, because the summer sandals that he wears are truly heinous and blessedly close to wearing through, but all that I can find are boat shoes (I refuse to date someone who wears boat shoes) or thongs. In every shop this is the same, and I think, I actually think for a moment, it must suck to be a man, and then I realise the absurdity and laugh out loud.

  When I’m done I am fatigued, wonderfully so, and calm for the first time in two days. I sit in the front courtyard of a bar on Glebe Point Road and buy myself a drink as a reward, reading essays, all alone, in the thick sunlight. One of the essays contains so many unfamiliar words that I leave a post-it on its first page to come back to later: dictionary this whole thing. I don’t eat lunch, and I don’t care.

  A businessman, walking down Glebe Point Road, says into his phone, they need it back tomorrow so I hope it’s a good bedtime story?

  I walk along the coast near Tamarama with my friend Lou, who lives near the beach and loves walking, loves the water, the same way that I do. The last time I had seen her Lou was having trouble with insomnia, had been seeing a specialist, desperate and half-dazed. I remember her saying, if one more person tells me to put lavender oil on my pillow, or to avoid looking at my phone, I’m going to hit them, and I thought, yes, I understand that kind of thing entirely too well. I ask Lou how it’s going, and she says that it is excellent because she now gets five good nights in every seven, and I’m taken aback: I still get frustrated that my weekends are so hard, but five good days of every seven is another thing entirely, and excellent indeed.

  At yoga one morning the instructor puts her hands against my hip and shoulder, stretching me into a sideways pose. This is great, she says, I can use your hipbone as a handle, and I have to crunch my teeth together in order to stay silent.

  Chris Mansell writes, ‘the proof / of the peach is in the eating’ and ‘Your / teeth crack hard / on its wrinkled / stone.’

  I’m at a bar with Kate on a weeknight, when it’s quieter and we can talk properly and undisturbed; we sit upstairs, on a velveted chaise longue beneath the window. I walk down the steep staircase to order drinks, and the girl behind the bar – I want to say the woman, but she’s so painfully young – has a shaved head, a stretchy black plastic choker, badly fitting pale-blue jeans; she looks so much like my teenage self that I double-take, and stare. She stares right back at me, a direct fuck-you glare, and I just hope she’s not afraid, and aching wordlessly, like I was then.

  Louise Glück calls these fruits ‘the unimaginable / apricot and fragile peach’.

  I go to the movies with Alex and his housemates in Leichhardt, a part of the city which is out of my usual orbit. As we’re milling in the foyer, I run into two other poets and a journalist friend, each of whom had come here separately and by chance and it feels wonderful to be so rooted, so connected in this place. It’s an early screening of the film and the cinema is giving an Aperol spritz to every ticketholder, and I drink Alex’s as well as mine because he lets me. The film’s a romance, about two creative people trying to hold on to each other and their work at the same time and at its climax, I realise Alex is crying, quietly, beside me. (Later, months later, this will feel portentous.)

  Afterwards, Alex’s housemate takes us to a burger place a few shops away, one that serves avocado, zucchini or sweet potato – but not potato-potato – chips, and offers ‘superbuns’ instead of bread: less carbs, the flyer says, than a single roll of sushi. Alex tries to catch my eye as we place our orders at the counter, but I studiously avoid his because I know he wants to encourage me to find something I can eat. I order a glass of champagne instead and think, what exactly did you think was going to happen here, mate, and know that it’s unreasonable to be angry but I am.

  The superbun, when I ask to taste it, is made of coconut and egg white and is nothing short of a travesty.

  I walk through Victoria Park on the way to a book launch and the sun and the air and the movement are joyous, I can feel my chest expand and loosen, my shoulders uncoil. I’ve been asked to keep track of my walking again, to account for all the time I spend this way, because my weight isn’t improving, even though I’m eating more and better than I have in something close to two whole years. I know my walking is a problem, but cannot really understand how my walking can be a problem, when it brings me this: unmitigated joy.

  Another yoga class, and a different teacher says we’re going to focus on moon salutes, because there’s another full moon tomorrow, the last full moon of the year, and I think, automatically, oh no.

  Dan and Laura and I make awful cheese puns – Havarti a Gouda Christmas and a happy Gruyère – and share the terrible wine that Dan, a schoolteacher, is always gifted by his students, one long evening in Dan’s apartment. Dan’s boyfriend has invited his best friend, who says he can read palms, and he tells Dan he’ll have four children, and live a long and love-filled life. When he takes my hand he says, ooh, this is complicated, and then, you have been here many times before. I tell him people have been saying that about me since I was hours old and staring, big-eyed, at my surroundings; that it was almost a refrain across my childhood, whenever I said something precocious or left-of-field: this one’s been here before.

  I don’t know if this is supposed to be a blessing or a curse, this thing that makes me terrible and treacherous and ill at ease.

  In mid-December we have a house inspection – because our landlord, who lives overseas, has come to Sydney for the holidays, and wants to see the house while he’s in town. When the agent arrives, he introduces his assistant, a young woman who looks as glossy as an air hostess, then asks if there are any issues, if the air-conditioner – the last thing we had fixed – is working well. I say it is, and his assistant says, that’s lucky, the one in our office is always set to freezing. I say, you know what that is, that’s the patriarc
hy, all those men in suits who are overheating and so set the temperature too low, and the agent replies, oh no, the patriarch has his own office, with a brand new air-conditioner, it’s only us dogsbodies who have to deal with the dodgy one.

  The owner looks in all of the bedrooms, checks behind the mirror on my wall, and tells me that we need to clean beneath the roller door at the back lane.

  In the week before Christmas I’m so anxious about all of the events that are lined up in my calendar that I keep saying, I just want to go to sleep and wake up in mid-January, when everyone is back at work. I mention this to my psychologist, and she suggests we spend the session planning, figuring out my meals around or at each party, how long I’ll stay at each, and how I’ll get home quickly if I need to and I realise I’d been avoiding thinking about any of this at all because it still saddens and frustrates me that I can’t just bumble through these functions in the way that I imagine everybody else does. It helps, I know it helps with the anxiety, but as I walk home I feel furious that I had to spend $200 to figure out how to survive a bunch of fucking parties.

  I spend another hour that afternoon going through the Facebook pages of my regular cafés to make sure I know which ones are closed over which public holidays and this too is something I can’t wait to leave behind.

  I go to a dinner at Tom’s house, just off Parramatta Road in Ashfield. I try to catch a bus there from another party I’d stopped in at earlier, but none of them turn up, so I order an Uber instead. The driver tells me he’s a sushi chef, that his favourite thing to make is dragon roll, and I don’t mention that I’ve never eaten one of those; in the next weeks, I find myself looking at the window-menus of all the sushi restaurants I pass, trying to see what a dragon roll might be.

  When I get to the house, Tom is handing out small, fat glasses of Pimms; his dog is wearing a green felted elf-collar with red bells dangling noisily from its points and the poor thing can’t seem to understand where the sound that accompanies each of her movements is coming from. One of the guests is American, and has made miniature pavlovas for dessert because she read on the internet that this is what Australians eat at this time of year. She’s dressed them, with tiny translucent gems of Turkish delight and pistachios, whipped cream, hours before the party, and is heartbroken to discover that the cream has turned the meringue soft and sticky and sponge-like.

  Wandering around the Metro in the early afternoon, a bit distracted as I almost always am at this time of day, I walk past the centre’s toilets, almost bumping into a tall man in a Santa suit hurrying that way. I apologise, and he winks at me, says, ho ho ho, Santa’s gotta go.

  On Christmas Day, first thing in the morning, I am sick – though it’s been five days, a relatively long stretch, since this last happened. I order takeaway coffee from the café run by Israelis down the road and drive the forty-five minutes to my parents’ house, the roads eerily empty.

  My parents always, always make a platter of stone fruit for Christmas morning – peaches, nectarines, cherries, mangoes, plums, the apricots that were my favourites as a child, the lychees that my dad sucks from their skins. I eat a nectarine, half of a white peach, a handful of dark cherries, and don’t say anything, although I’m jubilant about the fact that I can do this, for once, this year.

  Louise Glück again: ‘A peach on the kitchen table. / A replica. It is the earth, / the same / disappearing sweetness / surrounding the stone end.’

  Alex takes me to a gathering of the Hungarian side of his family, almost none of whom I’ve met. Days before, he warns me that they’re probably going to try to feed me to death, that there’s no Hungarian word for I’m full, and I laugh, although I’m so scared that I’m actually shaking. Alex’s aunt writes our names on strips of masking tape and sticks them to our glasses so that, she says, she doesn’t have to keep washing up, and his uncle asks me questions to make conversation and I relax because they’re both so affable and comfortable and kind.

  Another uncle arrives just before the meal is served, alongside his two tall sons, both of whom work beside him in the bakery he owns. The bakery is old-fashioned and well known, and I’ve visited twice before with Alex – each time to pick up birthday cakes – and have never left without a slice or pastry pressed into my hands. Between them, the men are carrying five fruit boxes, the long, shallow kind that normally hold bananas or strawberries, each of them stuffed full of leftover stock – two dozen bagels, ten fat and glistening jam doughnuts, three cherry strudels with brown sugar crystallised across the top. Four poppy-seed rolls, two walnut rolls, a chocolate cake, and three of the enormous yeasted Kugelhopfs, cut through with dark ganache, which are their specialty. This, Alex says, is stock-standard for his family gatherings, though I’ve no idea how fourteen people are supposed to deal with so much cake.

  After lunch we walk to the beach that the house is built above; Jozsef, the baker, dons a pair of goggles and a cap to swim in the sea, Alex and his brother stand on the sand wearing jeans. It’s my first time in the ocean for this season, and the water is bracing and delicious – no longer cold enough to sting, but by no means warm. Alex’s aunt says, I love it when the sea is like this, it feels like swimming in stars, and I think, yes, it sparks against the skin.

  Michael Dransfield writes, ‘Anyway peaches taste better although they fade / like gods into gorgeous biliousness, like gods.’

  One of my university friends, who now lives in Melbourne, is visiting her family for the season, and organises a lunch to catch up with a bunch of friends at once. The venue that she chooses is on the same street as the Revesby station, the same street with the same suburban strip of shops, which I used to drive to on my way to university and my first full-time job, when I was miserable but couldn’t name it, when I was in the early stages of my illness but didn’t recognise it for what it was. I expect the food to be terrible, and I hate that I do so, it makes me feel snobbish and pretentious. I want so badly to be able to eat a meal that’s mediocre and not feel like it’s just a waste, I want so badly for the food to be far less important than the occasion.

  As I drive towards the café I chant out loud and to myself, functional food, functional food, functional food. I end up seated opposite a friend of my friend’s husband; we’ve never met before. He is a banker, of some kind. He mansplains my current research to me. I don’t get to speak to my friend. I’m exhausted by the time I climb back into my car.

  In the days after Christmas I walk a lot, alone, uncurling and unwinding, catch trains home from wherever I find myself. I keep seeing people carrying boxed-up flat-screen TVs, cumbersome and awkward: a couple holding one end each and staggering across an intersection, a man trying to hoist his onto a bus, a young woman with a trolley parked parallel to the boot of her car. The boxes are longer than I am tall, though that’s no great achievement.

  I don’t own a television. When I said this to a group of students last semester, one of them looked at me, incredulous, and said, what do you do at night?

  Two young women queue ahead of me in a café, and order a long black and a piccolo, respectively, as well as a muffin to share. One woman says, my god, it’s full of bad stuff, and the other adds, I know, I’m so ashamed, and I can’t breathe, momentarily.

  A different café, a different day, and a woman to my left is being interviewed by a market researcher and refuses the offer of breakfast: I’m on the 5:2 diet, she says, and today’s a fasting day, so I’ll just drink lots of coffee. An older woman to my right orders fruit salad and tells her daughter, I’m having fruit salad for breakfast and vegetable salad for lunch, but keep spoiling it all with hot cross buns for dinner, then chants, I just can’t shift the weight, I’m so disgusting. A blond man in an expensive shirt tells the woman he is sitting with that he’s trying to scale his cultural meditation business to the luxury market, because none of his friends can afford what he wants to charge.

  I love the day in January when everyone goes back to work. Each year it feels like an exhalation. />
  Alex and I spend a few evenings watching movies from our adolescence – American Beauty, Good Will Hunting, Ghost World – and in each case, one or both of us ends up in tears. For me, it’s because the films read so differently to me now – Ghost World broke my heart back then; and I’d remembered the scene in American Beauty where the plastic bag dances as beautiful, but now it’s tragic, the sad-eyed boy saying, it wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid, and, I feel like I can’t take it – I cannot help but think of the teenager I was, ardent and furious, but healthy still, unharmed. This grief still feels so useless. Alex doesn’t know what to say, I know, but he pulls me in to hug me and I tuck my head against his neck: my salty tears, his salty sweat.

  One humid afternoon my brain feels swarming and sticky as a beehive in my skull and I stare at the peach in my fruit bowl but I can’t bring myself to pick it up. I cook slices of zucchini in my oven instead, listen to its fan whirring, burn the skin inside my wrist on its racks when I check to see if it is ready. I know I should feel guilty for snacking on something so strange, so safe, so substanceless, but I’m swept through with relief and it is frightening.

  At my old housemate’s birthday, I drink quickly and I drink furiously, knocking back gin sours like a woman possessed. I feel possessed, and I’m frustrated and fed up, far too much to fight. It’s glorious on the balcony, that long, summer sun, a solid breeze, and I’m surrounded by women I love, but I realise, the next day, I have no idea what anybody talked about because I was so barely present.

  I find a nectarine so old that its skin is puckered like a scar, dented in bars at the bottom from the wires of my fridge shelf. It’s difficult to throw it out because I still hate waste. This happens on a forty-degree day, where I wait hours to turn the air conditioning on, because I still hate waste.