by Susan Duncan
She explains that most people feel guilty for being the one still living. She teaches me to focus on the great times, not the moments I let slip past unnoticed. She brings me to understand that grief goes on for a long time, perhaps forever, but it's possible to live with it. Not for it.
Then, one day not long after she says it is time for me to move on from her, I reach the real turning point. Tired of the stress, the chest pains, the feeling that until I can sort out my head I have no right to be behind a desk making big decisions, I decide that I hate my job and a big, fat salary can't paper over the cracks any more.
I can't remember the last time I sat in the bath with a glass of white wine and a plateful of cheese and biscuits and sang my lungs out. I can't remember the last time I approached a ringing phone without fearing what I'll be told. I can't remember the last time I woke up and looked at the day ahead with enthusiasm.
The concept of jumping from a career into nothing is frightening. All my life I've never leapt until I had somewhere to land. Always the job, then the life. That's how I've lived. Now I am turning all that around. Life first. How utterly terrifying. Because by taking the life option I am once again opening myself to feeling, to being vulnerable, to taking emotional risks, to hurting. But I understand the victory in realising that hurting is one way of knowing you are alive. And I, of all people, know that time does not stretch on forever.
I join the ranks of the unemployed a little less than two years after the boys die, selling the monster white house with its lacy gazebo overlooking the Nepean River in NSW where Paul and I based ourselves. Although we never spent much time there. We flitted off to Los Angeles for a while and when we returned, used it more as a weekender, renting space in the city because the each-way 90-minute car and train commute was exhausting.
Earlier in the year I bought an apartment in Melbourne as an investment, which will provide an adequate rental income, and I have enough money to live on, if I'm careful, for the rest of my life. My plan now is to search the countryside for a new, cheap house, in a new town, where I plan to make new friends and take up a worthy cause. I am going to reinvent myself and leave loss packed in a tightly shut corner of my mind.
I have three months before the new owners take possession of the big white house. It's not much time to find a new home and I begin the search immediately.
The company car with bucket seats and cruise control is back with the company. I now have a high-slung, big-wheeled, grunty second-hand ute that can claw through creek beds and scale mountains. Its name is Fearless Fred. My dog, Sweetie, too old to jump, puts her front paws on the edge of the truck tray and I heave her in. With a sniff and a scratch, she settles next to an icebox filled with cans of dog food, tea, milk and biscuits, as though she's been a ute dog all her life.
'Forward ho, huh, old girl?' I say, slamming the tailgate. Fred slips easily into gear and the countryside beckons like the pages of a good book. I point south, perhaps because it is familiar territory.
On our first night a motel refuses to allow my gentle Rottweiler to spend the night with me so I storm into a shop, buy a foam mattress and a sleeping bag and throw them in beside Sweetie. A few kilometres further along, I swing off the highway onto a dirt track. Just before sunset, I kill the engine under a few straggly gum trees near a dry creek bed and let the dog out for a wander. Sweetie and I picnic – me, on the meatloaf sandwich I meant to have for lunch and she on a can of dog food. When it is dark, I lift her into the tray and climb alongside her to sleep on my new mattress, like a tramp under the stars. She is warm and smells like freshly baked bread. I feel safe with her.
Halfway through the night her quiet breathing slips into a grinding snore and I wake to find myself pressed uncomfortably against the wheel hub while she stretches out luxuriously.
'Move over, you great big bloody dog!'
She opens an eye, sighs deeply and doesn't budge an inch.
That lovely, placid animal and I travel through towns too small to support a local bakery. Towns where the only restaurant is a laminated annexe off the rusty, local service station. Towns where every menu is either fried, deep-fried or canned. Bacon and eggs, hamburgers, steak sandwiches. Chips, calamari, potato scallops or chicken nuggets. Baked beans, spaghetti or tomatoes on toast. In bigger towns, where there are coffee shops and at least one chemist, fresh fruit gets piled into the icebox and I drift along, apple in hand, assuming my new home will suddenly appear to me in a flash of recognition. I imagine its discovery will be akin to an epiphany and I will march onwards knowing I have done what will turn out to be for the best.
After trudging around a few properties described glowingly in real estate advertisements, I break the property description code. 'Charming country cottage' means a white ant infested ruin with a sagging verandah. 'Acreage with beautiful views' means the soil is so poor you couldn't grow a weed. No photo of the house is just plain scary. Don't go there.
'Why are these people selling?' I ask one agent after another.
There is a tragic sameness to the answers: 'Couldn't make a go of it.'
It forces me, eventually, to think beyond the romantic notion of plunging starry-eyed and reckless into a new environment and to look, instead, at the details. Who will be my friends in this town where I know no-one? Who will I talk to? What will I fill my days with? How can I learn the history of a town and people before I buy? Can I tell, by watching faces or eavesdropping on conversations, whether this is a happy or desperate place? Whether I have anything in common with even a single person?
Pulling the plug on one life and launching another is, I am beginning to understand, fraught with risk. But I struggle on, hoping fate will lend a hand.That some tiny corner of a house or garden – an old fireplace, a bed of old-fashioned roses – will strike a chord and give me the courage to commit. I see mudbrick houses, pole houses, log houses, iron houses, stone houses and even a house with a thatched roof and a herb garden that nearly seduces me. But it is in a cold, cold valley where the sun only lingers for an hour or two through winter and I know eventually it will be depressing, not quaint. On all these forays, Sweetie, loyal, patient, soft-eyed and trusting, never strays from my side. She is the best dog.
The journey leads me to my cousin in Wangaratta where she and her husband, Edward, and her father, my Uncle Frank, grow luscious peaches and nectarines. Sweetie and I arrive late on a hot summer night, so I park the ute under a row of peach trees near the house and sleep there soundly. In the very early morning, Jayne, one month older than me, peers into the back, wondering what on earth has pitched up in her orchard. Some itinerant picker looking for work, she thinks.
'It's you!' she shrieks.
'Yeah. Got here late last night.'
'Why didn't you knock, you silly old cow? Could've slept under a roof like normal people.'
'Used to sleeping out now. Do it two nights out of three. Actually, I quite like it. It's sort of liberating.'
'Daft. You've gone daft. Well, you better get up and come in. We're having breakfast and we're busy. It's picking time.'
She marches off to the house. Turns back with a grin. 'And don't pinch any fruit off the trees!'
The branches around me bend with plump, golden peaches.
These are the family trees, where fruit is left to ripen on the boughs. I stretch and snap one off, pressing my nose to furry skin that smells like a lazy summer. I bite into it and juice trickles down my chin. When it's finished, I pick another.
As little kids, Jayne and I spent hours searching for delicate spider orchids in the bush around her house. If ever I wanted to pick one of the wonderful, bright green and red flowers, she would look me sternly in the eye and explain that they were rare and precious and had to be left alone to bloom again the following year.That land is now a suburb covered in houses with lots of glass windows and concrete driveways.
I'm not sure when I realise the tight band squeezing my chest isn't there any more. Perhaps it is on the second, absurdly m
agical, moonlit night at Jayne's home, when I sit on the porch in a tattered chair sipping a frigidly cold beer with my Uncle Frank. In the distance, peach trees – their lush, musky scent drifting on the warm night air – stretch like ghostly armies towards the magnificent Victorian Alps.
'How'd you cope, Frank, when Belle died?' I ask him.
'Didn't do too good at first.'
She was barely middle-aged, Frank's beautiful, busy wife, when her car ran off the road and smashed into a tree.
'Depressed?'
'Yep. So I'd have a few drinks, and that'd help for a minute. But after a while, booze just made it worse. Found that out.'
'What? So you stopped drinking?'
'Yeah, which wasn't that easy. Plays dirty tricks on you, your noodle. If you don't watch it. Always wants to push you down the wrong road. One drink, I'd think. It'll help. But it didn't. Biggest battle was getting my noodle sorted.'
'Frank?'
'Yes, love?'
'I can't seem to settle. Can't find my feet somehow.'
'Yeah. It's a bugger that. But you'll come good.'
We sit silently and my mind fills with memories of the boys. Instead of shutting them down, I let them swirl and take shape. How lucky I am to have known two such wonderful men. Odd, to call my husband wonderful, though. In reality, we fought, ploughed through hurts and angers and often went our separate ways. He was difficult, fascinating, volatile, infuriating, vibrant and never, ever dull. A blue-eyed bull of a man with tight, curly blonde hair who always had a dream that only he thought was possible. But somehow, through even the worst times, we never lost sight of the fact that we cared for each other.
After nearly a week trawling the area with real estate agents, Sweetie and I drive on, looking at a few more houses for sale as we make our way back to the white elephant on the Nepean River.Time is running out. The new owners of the house are due to move in and I have to move on. Desperate for somewhere to land while I search for the dream house, I decide to make the Melbourne apartment a temporary base. Temporary because I need the income from the rent if I am to avoid dipping into capital. Spending capital was my father's greatest no-no. It was a rule he drummed in to me from the day, as a five-year-old, I bought my first shares with the two pounds I'd reluctantly saved from the ten shillings my godmother sent every birthday and Christmas. The money always arrived by post wrapped in an embroidered white handkerchief and enclosed in a flowery, lavender-scented card.
From the apartment I will search, once again, for a piece of earth where I will plant a lemon tree and a herb garden. The lemon tree is for my father. To him, a house didn't become a home until there was a lemon tree. He wasn't strong on herbs. He liked parsley in rissoles or in a white sauce over lamb shanks but mostly stuck to salt and pepper. A herb garden fills me with contentment, though. All those flavours. All that healing. The thrill of picking and eating what you have grown. It is the most basic instinct.
Back at the sold house, the slow, sorry business of reducing two lives to one begins. Here, Paul and I dumped stuff accumulated from the last assignment so we could travel light to the next one. It was the home we kept intact and ready to flee to if all else fell apart.
It is crammed with the confetti of our irregular lives. Unwanted birthday presents. Acres of books. Clothes long out of date or in a size long gone. Thousands of unedited photographs. Newspaper clippings that might be worth following up in a year or two. Choosing what to keep and what to discard is an awful process.
Every so often, a stack of Paul's old notebooks, filled with his spidery writing, turns up. I read them at first, to feel close to him, but soon it is as though I am opening someone's mail, prying into a private part of a life. I put the notebooks aside, unable to bring myself to toss them in the bin. Later, I pick them up again and read on. I want to know whether, if I'd looked at him more closely instead of rushing back and forward to the office, I would have seen an early sign of the problems to come. His words, though, are clean, precise reminder notes, sensible and perfectly spelled. There is nothing that even hints at failing faculties. Not a suggestion of confusion.
At his clothes closet, I open and close the door quickly. Here, more than anywhere, Paul comes alive. Corduroy trousers in neutral colours, heavy cotton shirts, soft pink, baby blue and cream; shoes the size of canoes. A black leather jacket and a fine wool herringbone blazer, a navy blue double-breasted cardigan, and a cream, cable knit sweater. The clothes seem to wait for Paul to fill them and for a blinding moment I think he might walk out of the shower, still damp, with a towel around his waist, saying, as he always did: 'Baby, where's my . . .?' In the end, I pack the clothes and take them with me.To this day, I do not really understand why.
The removalists arrive with a semi-trailer big enough to live in.
Eighteen years of memories are crammed into the long dark space and the past is closed down. I take the ride-on mower because who knows where I may end up? Fred is loaded to bursting point with Sweetie, my old Burmese cat, Banana, brooms, mops, pot plants and suitcases. The house is clean and empty, ready to be infused with a new personality.
Dearest Pat, a friend of my mother's who looked after the house and animals for six years while Paul and I roamed, stands in the driveway. Next to her, my mother looks abandoned. She moved from Melbourne to the foot of the Blue Mountains in 1989, to be near me when her relationship with my brother's wife failed to thrive. Now her son is dead and her daughter on the move. Paul's death changed both our lives.
I climb behind the wheel. The cat is stuffed with Valium and sleeps on my lap, Sweetie is confused by all the gear in her space in the ute and it's a stinking, stinking hot day. The bitumen shimmers with heat and the smell of hot tar rises under our wheels. I do not look back. Cannot. By mid-afternoon we swing off local roads and onto the Hume Highway, with a long, numbing drive ahead. It will be the early hours of the morning before I put the key in the lock in Melbourne.
Around Tarcutta, halfway to Melbourne, the cat fights his way out of his Valium fog and pees in my lap, then staggers off me like a chronic drunk and scratches blearily in a pot plant on the floor beside the driver's seat. He pees again. By the time I stop for food and coffee, I smell like a public lavatory and the cat is wide awake.
I fill the tank and order cold sausages for the dog and a steak sandwich for me.
'Make that two steak sandwiches. One for the dog, too.'
The girl behind the counter looks out the window to where Sweetie sits straight and expectant, her eyes glued to the door through which I disappeared.
'Oh, and some raw steak. For the cat. He's inside the car.'
She nods and grins, and walks into a giant fridge. When she emerges, she's giggling uncontrollably, her chef 's hat quivering.
'What's up?'
'Now I know why I can smell cat pee!'
She wraps the raw meat and puts it in a white paper bag before passing it across the counter. 'There you go. On the house. Good luck.'
Do I look like I need luck? How wonderful, though, that kindness of strangers.
At 3 am we cruise into the outskirts of Seymour. The animals are frazzled and I'm almost sick with exhaustion. The cat is clawing at windows, mewling hysterically. He's only moved house once before and it took him four days to climb down from the highest shelf in the laundry. This is a nightmare for him. Sweetie looks at me accusingly. She wants a good long walk, time to sniff around, but we've still got three hours' driving ahead. She gets a pee stop and that's it.
I fill the tank with petrol and go to pay. A middle-aged woman is propped behind a cash register in a neon lit box. It's a time of night when only desperate travellers still roam the roads. She eyes me suspiciously for a moment then smiles.
'You look knackered, love.'
'Close to.'
'Behind you. Coffee. No need to pay for it.' Her compassion is easy, instinctive.
'Thanks. Thanks very much.'
I fly down the final stretch of highway, warmed once agai
n by the kindness of strangers, and pull into the driveway of my temporary home. Sweetie gets a walk around the block, the cat gets dinner. I make up a mattress on the floor and sleep until 10 am.
No matter where it might lead, I've made the leap. No job to give structure to the days. No-one to take into account. There's only me. Essentially, I can do what I damn well please. I thought it would feel like freedom but it feels more like entering a dark tunnel. It is just three months since I left the office behind.
4
THE APARTMENT IS ONE of two in a sombre, 1930s liver-brick building on a large block of land in a trendy suburb. The ground floor includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a long, open-plan room with areas for eating and sitting. French doors open from the bedroom and lounge room onto a small private courtyard with a low-maintenance garden. It is in perfect order. Luxurious. But it feels like a genteel prison. Because there is nowhere to go each morning after I've showered and dressed. No agenda to keep. The days loom vacantly.
After a month, the gloomy green pittosporums that block the afternoon sun are depressing so I dig them out. They are mature trees and it takes a long time but I am fueled by the energy of the righteous. I am making improvements! Improvements mean I can ask for higher rent! Clever girl! When they are gone, I order a truckload of chocolate soil that I barrow in from the nature strip over a three-day period. At night, physical exhaustion sends me to sleep and I dream of brightly coloured flowers and bountiful peach trees espaliered along the sunniest of the garden walls.
When the courtyard is planned and planted, which doesn't take long because it is small and I have plenty of time, I decide to paint the bedroom walls and get new curtains measured. Often, I move furniture here, there and everywhere. At whim. And then move it back to its original position. Decisions. Decisions.