The World Was Whole

by Fiona Wright

  Another airlessly hot day darkens into a breathlessly hot night, the temperature still in the mid-thirties well after 9 p.m. I don’t mind and still feel comfortable, but Laura tells me the next day that she was suffering – she stripped down to her bra and gym shorts and kept circulating tea towels into the freezer and then against the nape of her neck, splashed cold water on her bedsheets before climbing beneath them to sleep. None of the homes that she has rented have ever had air-conditioning. None of mine have ever had heating. I had to turn off my fan in the middle of the night, though, because I got too cold.

  I meet Sophie on a Sunday afternoon for a drink; she has two children, one a very new and colicky baby, and she’s excited to be having rare time away from them. Even still, we can’t help but talk politics, our shock and sadness, and our fear. The world has shifted. We drink beer. We don’t know what to do.

  Alex takes me to an outdoor production of The Wind in the Willows, because his best friend is playing Otter, dressed entirely in lycra and with rubber flippers on his feet. It’s in the Botanic Gardens, and I realise as the play starts, and a tall man wearing ornate rabbit ears and furry pants starts talking to the toddlers in the audience, that I saw a production just like this when I was a child. We go to the dressing room afterwards – it’s the last night of the season, and so the actors are already getting rowdy as we approach – and the director tells me, yes, they’ve been doing this show for thirty years; I can’t quite wrap my head around this continuity. The dressing room reeks of sweat and pancake make-up, and there’s a storage tub full of ice and beers and ciders underneath the clothes rack where the costumes hang to air. The director brings out trays of cheese and salami, dips and bread; I eat a sliver of a nectarine and think, oh, this shock again.

  Thomas Shapcott writes, ‘Those who have seen visions do not smile. / They speak. They take a ripe peach and bite’.

  THE WORLD WAS WHOLE, ALWAYS

  In the evening of the day we move, I go to a birthday party, in Mieke’s new house in Summer Hill. It’s an ice-cream party, which means Mieke has filled tiny bowls with berries, crushed nuts, pretzels, sprinkles, caramel sauce, and asked her guests to bring their favourite ice-cream so that everyone can make elaborate sundaes for their dinner. I’d forgotten this not-insignificant detail until I arrived and realised I’d be conspicuously doing without; instead I flit about and drink too quickly, too conspicuously; I’m almost immediately exhausted. I order an Uber just as everyone is settling in to play a card game and I know Mieke is disappointed, although she tries to hide it. The driver asks me what I do, and when I say I am a writer he says, I don’t get many of them in here, mostly I just get drunks, and I reply, I can’t say I’m not one of those as well. He tells me he works in security – he’s still wearing his uniform – and mostly for an agency, that he was yesterday assigned to guard a high-end escort while she worked. She was pretty, he says, but not as pretty as you, and my heart drops to the pit of my stomach. I can’t remember which of my new keys fits the lock of my front door and I fumble there for long and awful minutes, the whole time aware that this man’s car hasn’t driven away.

  My new housemate has a cat, a beautifully glossy tortoiseshell, and she brings her home from her parents’ house in a carrier a few days after we have moved. My dog, still a puppy, is sitting on my lap when they arrive, and she is desperately excited to play with this new animal; the cat is distinctly, and cattily, nonplussed. The dog keeps bounding up, the cat keeps meowling, and my housemate and I are in stitches watching them try to figure each other out. (We’re still figuring each other out.)

  Three days in, and I have a drink with Tom. Whenever I move house, he says, I live off takeaways for, like, a week, because there’s just no time to shop for groceries. I laugh, and he adds, you know, you make your tea with long-life milk and hit up UberEats until you’ve unpacked the kitchen and stocked the fridge. I laugh, but my fridge shelves were never less than full, of vegetables, of cans of Diet Pepsi, the soft cheese I eat for supper and still feel guilty about. My pantry: sauces and vinegars, unopened packets of muesli bars and rice cakes and crackers that I still think I might eat one day, when things are going better, when I am closer to well. I unpack my kitchen before my bedroom. I’ve never used UberEats.

  Les Murray writes, ‘Home is the first / and final poem.’

  Two weeks before we move, and the week before we find the house we’ll eventually move into, I have an appointment with my psychologist where I’m so tired and anxious and angry that I can’t order my thoughts, and every song that cycles through my earphones as I walk there has me fighting back the tears. When I step onto her scales my weight is down 200 grams and I lose it, I lose it entirely, start shaking and choking on my sentences. I’m sick of fighting – and I say this – sick of trying treatment after treatment with them all to no avail, and all I want is to rest awhile. The psychologist isn’t fazed by this, she says, of course you can, and I feel suddenly like Dorothy, who always had the power to go home.

  I unpack the boxes I’ve labelled OFFICE (even though my office is just a corner of my bedroom) and find the stack of notebooks in which I have been keeping records of my meals each day since I was first asked to do this. They date back six and a half years, unfathomable time, and I realise that if anybody asked me what I had for morning tea on any date of any month in late 2010, I could tell them and so easily. I’m so saddened by this knowledge that I sit on the floor and cry, messily and wrackingly, for the first time in a long while. I leave the notebooks in a pile beside the door for weeks, unsure of where to put them, unable to throw them out.

  Grace Paley writes, ‘as you reside in the house so / it must be a home in your mind.’

  The month we move, it rains every day, every single day bar one, and a newspaper headline reads, WETTEST MARCH SINCE 1983: my entire life. My washing piles and piles in the corner of the room, and I end up wearing my ugliest, rattiest underpants, the old ones I usually reserve for the occasional unpredictable month when my period actually arrives, the shirts I avoid because they’re still too big for me. There’s a leak in the laundry roof, we realise, and we don’t yet own a bucket, so we catch the water in the Tupperware container that I usually reserve to carry birthday cakes for friends to their parties or pubs or picnics; it is the largest container we own.

  One afternoon the weather breaks, and I take my dog to Sydney Park for the first time. She runs laps of the old smokestacks, grinning in that wonderful and stupid way that only dogs do, then follows a kelpie into a puddle of mud. She’s never sat in mud before – almost every backyard I’ve been in, in this suburb, is paved over, concreted, tiled – and she flops about in it, even muddying her ears, and when we get back to the house she cannot understand why I won’t let her come inside.

  A poster taped to a pole on our new street: KASPAR IS A GINGER AND STUPID CAT WHO GOT LOST ON MONDAY NIGHT. HE IS WEARING A BLUE COLLAR AND IS A STUPID, STUPID CAT.

  The weekend after we move, Dan and I go to a friend’s wedding in an enormous church in Haberfield and the pastor tells his bride her role is to ‘complement’ her husband, who will be making the decisions from this point on. Dan keeps stealing glances at me, trying not to laugh, and I know my indignation must be written on my face, even as I try to stay controlled. Dan and I swap pieces of our meals onto each other’s plates – my pastry for his mushroom, my potato for his broccoli – and I’m uncomfortable at how automatically we do this. After the wedding, he drops me home, holding up the traffic through my street, and I kick off my shoes and sit in the silence of the house, exhausted and bewildered and unsettled, still, by these reminders of everything I’m not and will not be.

  I have a drink with a friend who has recently become single, after a relationship of eleven years. He tells me that he’s installed Tinder, that it’s so much fun, and surprisingly easy: all you have to do, he says, is not be a dick and the women think you’re wonderful and the only thing that shocks me about this is that I know that he is rig
ht.

  I walk to the Marrickville markets with my two housemates because we want to fill the house, its strange little shelves high up in the corners of the living room, with succulents, cyclamens and ferns. We pass through the Metro to get cash and by a parkside café too; I buy a beautiful begonia for my balcony, its leaves frilly and blood-red and juicy-looking, a bag of persimmons, even though I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat them. Because it isn’t wet (at last!) we wander slowly, soaking up the sun. My new housemate stops to buy an ice block made of fruit puree, and the woman ahead in the queue keeps asking the vendor which of the flavours she can have now that she isn’t eating sugar. I think that trying to buy an ice block when you’re not eating sugar is like trying to eat at a rib house as a vegetarian and I don’t say anything, although it’s so hard to stay quiet. By the time we’re walking home I am exhausted, so much so that I feel like a film has fallen in front of my eyes and I can’t quite reach the world and I remember this vagued and greyed-out feeling all too well.

  It’s one day short of two whole weeks before I pack my books back onto their shelves. The dishwasher is still broken, the laundry ceiling leak’s still not repaired and I haven’t finished hanging up the pictures in my room; the house is echoey, without enough soft furnishings, but I suddenly feel more settled in the space. I sit beneath the bookshelves and a window in my square armchair and I read about loneliness, but the evening is gentle and the muggy air is close and it’s okay.

  Louise Glück writes, ‘A room with a chair, a window. / A small window, filled with the patterns light makes…the world // was whole always’.

  The persimmons ripen more quickly than I’d expected and I watch them turn translucent, their skins thin, until they look bloated, like corpses. I can’t quite bring myself to throw them out.

  On the Saturday of Mardi Gras I go for lunch in the southern suburbs with my school friends, and when I get to the café – all smooth grey stone and rose-gold fittings – I realise I’ve misremembered the time that we were meeting and arrived half an hour early. I have a book with me, but I still panic – I’ve been holding back this feeling, barely, brutally, already all day – and I end up bawling in the toilet, bent almost double, clinging to the sink. I cannot bring myself to eat and barely touch my coffee, and I leave before anyone has finished because I just can’t stay.

  I’m supposed to go to a party this evening, that Dan and his boyfriend are holding in their apartment, and that I’ve been looking forward to for weeks because it’s sure to be outrageous, but I ring Alex instead and ask him if I can come over; he lets me sob into his shoulder, once again. Later, he takes me to the cinema on George Street and we see a superhero film and I tell him that watching a superhero film on Mardi Gras night with a boyfriend is the grossest, straightest thing I’ve ever done and I can tell he is relieved to see me cracking jokes again, to be the butt of them, again.

  I buy a soap dispenser for our new bathroom, and the box it comes in reads LAUGHTER IS TO THE SOUL AS SOAP IS TO THE BODY. I’ve no idea what this is supposed to mean.

  I go away for a few weeks on a residency, and stay by myself in a house by a beach, I walk along the shore every morning, when I can, and again early in the afternoon. This is the Southern Ocean, early autumn, and the water is so cold that my feet purple almost instantly each time a high wave washes over them; some mornings my eyes and nose turn liquid in the wind. On the first afternoon, I round a headland and see the bright white bum of a young man who’s surfing in the nude, and though he hurries to his towel, there’s still his unconcern, his habitation of his body. I gather a handful of bright white shells, small and smooth and round and whorled like ears; they are the tiny skeletons of sea-creatures, there in my hand.

  A few days later, there’s a dark mass of clouds over the water and it’s beautiful, the way they peel back towards the horizon and ribbon down. I’m halfway along the beach when the wind starts whipping, the sand stinging against my bare legs, and within minutes it is hailing. I’m soaked to the skin and icy too, and when I stand under the shower in the house, I can’t register the hot water for several seconds, but then it feels like an unravelling.

  I stop at a pharmacy to fill one of my scripts, and an old woman with a walking stick queues behind me, and murmurs something I don’t quite hear. When I turn around she says, don’t worry dear, I’m just talking to myself; I do that too, I tell her, and she adds, sometimes I even answer back. She says, I’ve been a weirdo for thirty-three years and I laugh and say, me too! It’s only as I walk away I realise I’d misheard, and that this woman has been widowed for as long as I have been alive.

  The scrubland here looks like the bushland thick behind the house where I grew up, but squatter, scratchier, clinging closer to the ground. There are more flowers too, all of them tiny: some with three white petals shaped like propellers that I can’t help but imagine taking flight, some bright yellow and bobbing on long stalks, some simple and white, like tiny daisies, but super-abundant on their bushes; when it rains, they close their faces from the sky. One afternoon, a pale white deer stands by my window, but bolts away so quickly that I can’t be sure I really saw it, but then I glimpse it again, the next day, and the day after, always fleet, always fleeing, but definitely, momentarily there.

  There’s a thunderstorm so blustery that the windows shake in the walls and I sleep under two doonas to keep warm. I know I’m lonely here, although I love being alone. The press of their weight against my body, the blackened sky. In the morning, there are strips of bark and gum leaves stuck where they’ve been flung against the windows, whole branches spilt across the roads, and trees still tossing as though they were animal.

  Walking on the sand again I try to step where it is barely firm, where there’s a crust that breaks, just slightly, underneath my tread. I remember, suddenly, doing this as a child: walking high along the shoreline and stepping lightly, trying not a leave a print at all, trying, already, to leave no trace, to be insubstantial enough to not register on the world.

  I write in a local café, metres from a beach, and it amazes me how fully bodied all the locals seem, their Blundstones and their khaki jeans. There are surfers, men with shoulder-length wavy hair or dreadlocks, and tradies in square jackets, national park officers in fleeces and hiking boots; they all wear proper, functional hats and sunglasses perched on top of their heads, and they lean into their bodies, smiling, generously; it is so different from my home. I order toast, and am given four slices on my plate, four rounds of butter the size of biscuits. I can’t imagine, for a moment, who might need a breakfast so big (it’s four times what I will eat) and then remember: these bodies that work with their own physicality, these bodies that labour.

  I stop to pat a dog that one man, silver-haired but trim and tanned, is holding on a rope beside his table; we end up talking for twenty minutes about poetry.

  My new housemate, out of curiosity, walks through the open inspection of the house next door, where a FOR LEASE sign has been planted since the week after we moved. She texts to say the agent is asking $1500 per week and we both think that this is nothing short of criminal.

  A few weekends before, we’d stood on our front porch and watched an auction for a townhouse, a few doors closer to the main road. Our street is narrow, ridiculously so: before we’d even moved in properly, I’d scraped the side of my car on a bull-bar, and almost every time I go to drive, someone has folded back its mirror on the street side. The auctioneer had to keep pausing the proceedings and stepping back onto the footpath to let vehicles sidle through; he’d said, this is a quiet street, and we’d laughed loudly, he’d started tossing around numbers too large for me to even comprehend. When the auction was over, we walked onto the street to greet the couple (middle-aged, boomers) who would soon be our new neighbours, and many of our current neighbours did the same. The one who lives directly opposite us said, I’m glad the house went to locals, there are too many young people moving in around here, and I stroked her giant dog and held
my tongue.

  This woman’s house has a turret, square and solid-looking, perched on the back corner of its third storey, and it’s so strange and beautiful that I’d been wondering about it since we moved. She told me it was built by the same man who built the brickworks at St Peters, that he added the turret so that he could watch over the fires burning there across the night. Every time I look there now, from my high balcony, I can’t help but imagine him standing there, always in the dark, always alone, observant, silent.

  It has turned cold suddenly on the coast, so suddenly the temperature dropped twenty degrees in one short day. The house, though, has a huge, stone fireplace and an even bigger pile of wood, and so I build a fire so large and loud that I can hear it from the bedroom. I love fire, love feeding it, more than is probably necessary, and more things than just wood – the cardboard packaging from my crackers, scrap papers I’ve scrawled on, the odd teabag. I wish, suddenly, that I’d brought my food diaries along because I know I want to see those fuckers burn.

  Driving on the coast road, I pass streets named Rip View, Toadhall, Bloodwood, Redrock, Bones; the surf breaks are called Bird Rock, Winkipop, Baldy, Crumpets, Vera Lynn, Boobs, Flume. The beaches, though, are Front Beach, Main Beach, Back Beach, Town Beach, and Danger Point.

  On Good Friday I drive past a huge paddock, and there are parachutists floating slowly down towards its flat expanse, silent and strange against the sky. There are sheep here too, mostly gnawing on the grass, but when they glance skywards they are distinctly, sheepishly, nonplussed.

  By the time I leave the house beside the beach I feel my readiness to return home sharply, a quiet buzzing in my chest, and I’m not used to this at all. I miss my friends. I miss them, and I miss my housemates and my dog, I miss my family, and it’s so strange to feel myself beholden. Weak, I cannot help but think. Weak, this makes you weak, even though I know the very opposite is true.