Detours

by Tim Rogers

  Mary Margaret came into my life in 1990. As with so many things I cherish, she was introduced via reading a recommendation of someone I’ve never met – in this instance Michael Stipe of REM. I bought Miss America and the album enchanted as much as it bedevilled me – the anxious electric band tracks jarred against the sparser, deeply romantic torch songs. For a kid obsessed with amplified rock’n’roll, I didn’t quite understand the gasping funk of ‘Year in Song’ or ‘Body’s in Trouble’, but felt I needed to stand by them until I could collapse like a thrown quilt with ‘When You Know Why You’re Happy’ or ‘You Will Be Loved Again’. Many of the sounds felt overtreated instrumentally, but through it all was Mary, who could be as delicate as gossamer or heavy as burlap, often within the one song. I cried with her, laughed with her; I was worried for her.

  There was only one photo of her on the back cover, her head turned as if in a hurry (to meet a lover?) – it’s very sensual despite its urgency – and I’d stare at it for the full forty-five and a half minutes.

  These days I can readily find more about her through the internet rabbit warren, yet none of her original allure has waned.

  I’m not immune to fandom in any way, and it gets tested when in the company of people I admire. When my sister and I were teenagers, we would sit on the kerb opposite Dogwoods, the house in Castle Hill where Patrick White once lived, and look patiently for imagined spirits and muses. Or Manoly. We wanted to crawl underneath White’s misanthropic public image and cling to him as if he were the devoted loving grandfather we dreamed of. I have talked with paintings by Sidney Nolan, wanting to trick the voice in the brushstrokes to reply. Last year The Hurricane and I passed Rickie Lee Jones in the street before a show in Germany. We scuttled like roaches into a vestibule attached to the theatre: ‘What do we do? Should we . . . approach her?’ Instead we left her with the small clutch of autograph hunters. We saw her smile, that was enough. One night Lloyd Cole was sitting quietly alone in a bar close to home. Betraying my admiring heart, I bought him a neat whiskey and wished him good golfing. When he thanked me and asked if I wanted a seat, I had to say ‘I like you too much’ and bolt. When introduced to Brazilian maestro Caetano Veloso in Madrid, I could only kiss his hand and clasp my hands together in a gesture of beatitude before exiting. When the band played with my heroes The Replacements in London last year, I gave singer Paul Westerberg a hug and through a little hoarseness quietly said, ‘Thank you for giving me a life.’ As I left, blushing, he asked Davey if I was alright.

  So I wouldn’t know quite what to do with Mary. I think it would be enough just to see her perform from a distance. To see her smile. Her stage performances are often talked about as ‘unnerving’ and ‘arrhythmic’. She keeps a syncopated relationship with the beat, almost as if she is suffering some kind of palsy. Only through the blessings of technology have I been able to see her onstage but I see her performing with brutal honesty only. Who acts with metric grace when in the thralls of love and anguish?

  As Anne in Museum Hours, her performance never seems like ‘acting’. The rhythms of her speech are often hurried and then distracted. She responds to Johann’s question before he’s finished with it, trilling her response as he goes deeper into her affections, as if she is nervous of a rash declaration of his affection. Or maybe it’s just that her thoughts need to be expressed as they appear. Like leaves from a tree, never to land at the expected moment. Late in the film, a gift from the director to Mary’s adoring devotees, she sings just a little, a cappella, alone from her hotel room in a dream-like scene in a film that hums with solitude. Off camera, a mournful dog’s howl accompanies her, and I feel pebbles tumbling down the tunnel of my chest into the pit of my stomach and my eyes moisten, again. It is only when she stops singing that I realise it’s not a dog’s howl but a child crying, and I really can’t tell if it’s from the film or somewhere in my apartment block. I’m lost in a reverie.

  Invisible

  Youth it is not wasted on the young

  But it’s wasted on me, still I get my fun but

  My daydreams are shattered by personal trainers

  Barking like dogs to circus entertainers

  Every crack upon my skin is a sin worth lived in

  Whether it’s my route or an increased awareness in middle age, my mornings have lost their solitariness. They are now awash with cyclists who insist on shouting conversations while on their way to sprawl like seals on ocean rocks outside cafés, and joggers grimacing in pain as if they were being disembowelled. I’m frightfully happy for the health and wellbeing of them all, but there is no longer the silence around 6.30 am that I used to wander around in, aimless as an autumnal leaf on the breeze, and possibly primped in a complementary colour scheme. So now I purposefully stroll out later in the morning with a head full of loose thoughts and a heart full of coffee. Around this time of day, my fellow walkers are older women, or maybe I just notice them because they are the last sliver of the pie chart of humanity who don’t walk with their heads magnetically drawn to telephones or gripped in headlocks by ear buds. More often than not they are looking around them, or adrift in thought, and our eyes will often meet through the natural airspace. I will smile, as I do, and more often than not they will look away and not respond, which is understandable.

  Though she is only in her early fifties, a friend of mine commented to me after the recent break-up of her long-term relationship that she feared she had become ‘resistible’. I disagreed with her – a beautiful woman she certainly is – but she said she no longer felt under the male gaze and was mourning the time when her entry into a building would turn heads. Coincidentally I had recently read a piece by Helen Garner who writes about women close to her age, in their early seventies, as being ‘invisible’ in public spaces once ‘the famous erotic gaze is withdrawn’. (Ironically, if I were within cooee of Helen, whom I have heard sometimes dines at a restaurant nearby, I would spy on her, peering from behind a menu on another table, craning my neck to see if she had a pen in her hand and – bloody hell! – a notebook!)

  Invisibility, resistibility, where’s the justice in that? A full life lived, stories to share, opinions, but they walk on, silent and unnoticed by a scurrying culture under the spell cast by the unrelenting barrage of hasty judgements and conjectures.

  Once an acquaintance of mine, who at the time was twenty-eight, snapped at me, ‘When will this nightmare ever end?’ as I again bemoaned the distance between myself and my daughter. ‘Some nightmares never end,’ I snapped back.

  I think about that wasted exchange this morning as I pass a few women who are also meandering through the spring air. I don’t doubt that at twenty-eight I had also thought that sorrows could be tossed away like a coat when the weather changed. And some can. But others burrow into you. The faces this morning hold traces of some nightmares, as if there was a gnarled bristle in the brush used for their portrait, or sorrow was a pigment in the paint. Maybe from a fractured relationship with a once dearly close daughter, a husband in the malicious grip of dementia, a sick grandchild or a simple loneliness.

  People are often lauded for their survival and ascribed monuments and statues, but these mornings I see the endgame of survival is often to be mocked by it. The life endured earns you no plaudits – it scars your face with its nasty little claws, stiffens your joints and slows your walk.

  Further down towards the canals, three teenage boys pass by, and I get an icy thrill to hear them excitedly discussing the merits of Violent Soho and Black Sabbath, their long, lank hair flapping like giant wings. Their enthusiasm is as anomalous as their vis-à-vis communication. Go slay ’em, ya punks. I’ll buy yer records.

  ‘Bo-bo’ the beloved Bengalese cat is still missing, according to the information below his mug shot, taped with great care to a telephone pole, and two ladies in exercise gear, sporting sunglasses and caps pulled tightly down on their pony-tailed heads, stride past talking of ‘telephone etiquette’. They are almost in uniform, younger than me
by ten years maybe, and their talk is as no-nonsense as their walking style. Those brief few seconds as they pass is on the clock. If they have kids, that means they are notoriously time-poor and I daren’t be in their way.

  I’m idly noticing houses for the first time, street names too, even though I’ve done variances of this circuit hundreds of times. Are all the streets named after poets? An older woman in a sun visor and a pale, oversized shirt approaches, and we smile at each other in recognition from a distance of thirty metres, then she flinches a little as she gets closer and moves slightly to her left, closer to the shallow canal and further from my path. I’ve been absent-mindedly throwing a cricket ball from one hand to the other, and the fleshy thwack that yaps when the ball is transferred must sound unreasonably aggressive for this dozy mid-morning.

  My grandma Mary Phelan ticked off my cousins and me for being too aggressive playing cricket in her backyard in Ferntree Gully. I adored Mary and would apologise – ‘It’s just what the big guys do, Nana’ – as she’d ask me to pour her another vermouth and soda and light her cigarette. She would hold court in her kitchen from around six at night, crossed legs on a high stool, toking away and sharing stories from the neighbourhood and her lawn bowls club. The stories were buoyant, never malicious – but as the night meandered on, there would be concern expressed for the ‘way things were going’. More to do with the small bureaucracies of the club than affairs of the nation.

  Depending on which sister was in the kitchen, and which grandkid, she would liberally dispense her wisdom and opinions. It was less what she said that stuck with me than the manner in which she would assert a benevolent authority. On her barstool, sitting higher than everyone, she faced the rest of us – seated lower than her or leaning against bench-tops like peasants – and the kitchen door, ready to accept fresh news from the colonies. Her cigarette and drink held with august distinction as if a sceptre and orb.

  We kids would pinch cigarettes and stash them behind ornaments in the living room, saving them for later when the aunts and uncles would be a bit pissy and not notice us slinking off to the garage under the house to smoke and turn blue.

  When Mary would ask one of us to fix her a drink, she’d hold her middle and pointing fingers up horizontally. ‘Just two fingers of vermouth, son, the rest soda.’ As the cruel manipulations of arthritis dug in, her two gnarled fingers spread into a very healthy measurement indeed. ‘Just two fingers, Nan, sure thing.’

  If Mum’s sisters were around, it was an extra treat. Descending in age from Rowena, two years older than Denise, two years older than Mum, who was equidistant again from the youngest, Colleen. So consistent in birthdates, so vastly different in character. Yet when sharing a cask of dry white, their accents converged with so many stretched vowels they didn’t so much talk as exclaim.

  Aunty Ro was a teacher. She would consider her answers and opinions as if they were for the historical record. She would stare hard at her interlocutor as if they were under cross-examination. As a wonderful juxtaposition, she was also drolly funny and would break her scrutiny by sticking out her tongue. I watched her closely.

  Denise was steadfast and affectionate. I believe she always had a keen eye out for anyone in discomfort or possessed of worry. She listened with an attentiveness often perhaps unwarranted. When I was eight, I wrote her eldest daughter, Amanda, a letter. Amanda worked with horses and I was, in the way kids are, fascinated with them in some fleeting cowboy fantasy. In my letter I asked after Amanda’s own horse, Honey. Denise reminds me of it every time I see her, thirty-nine years later.

  Colleen was brassy. The life of the party. The first to demand music; the last to leave, heels in her hand, taking her glass with her out the door. She showed me a photo of herself once in fancy dress, as a flapper from the Roaring Twenties. That’s the way I’ll always remember her, dear Colleen.

  If I hit the jackpot and they were all together at Nan’s, I could play cricket with the uncles until they got jack of it and retreated to the patio and talked man-talk, which I impatiently tried to steer towards footy stories. Then I’d duck into the kitchen for Nan’s stories about the farm in Casterton, and unknown uncles, aunties, scraps and scrapes that were as good as Sunday movies to me. I invented my own version of Lake Wobegon about Nan’s farm, about her past. I could have sat there for hours. The chatter mesmerised me – there was so much going on in adult lives.

  Fuck, I couldn’t wait to grow up.

  Mum was always told that I looked like her, which I never really saw. She and her sisters all had strong country chins and cheekbones. I was all nose. My brother looked like Dad; my sister looked like a doll – the pretty, blonde one that was the pick of the Christmas presents.

  I was, from quite young, very attuned to Mum’s moods in a way that I sense my daughter is with mine. Although Mum could be thoroughly easy company and good fun, she was also shackled with three young kids and a husband who was away a lot, and whom we all hero-worshipped. I learned to tip-toe around her a bit, keen to keep the peace. When I walked into our kitchen one day at about ten years old, in Adelaide by then, and ‘Part-Time Love’ by Elton John was on the radio and Mum was crying, I didn’t comfort her. I’m sure I was as selfish as any kid, but as I was skulking away, careful not to interrupt her, I thought, Is Mum sad because she doesn’t have a part-time love too?

  The years surrounding Mum and Dad’s divorce were, of course, messy, and from this vantage I can only recall absence: empty houses, and us kids learning how to do things for ourselves without much adult presence as, I guess, our parents tried to build new lives for themselves.

  Over time, as Mum’s relationship with her new partner, Beate, settled and the bewilderment of finding love in a new realm fell away to routines, holidays and box sets of The Golden Girls, plus a tactful way of presenting their relationship to curious neighbours and Beate’s mother in Germany, a tension evaporated from between her shoulders. Her new job working for ACON – an organisation focusing primarily on promoting prevention and support services for people living with HIV/AIDS – immersed her in a new community in the tropical vibrancy of Surry Hills, a stunning contrast with the grim tundra of the suburbs. Her phone calls to me at nightfall became full of the tales of the ‘lovely young men’ she worked with who would join her for cocktails, all of whom sounded like fountains of mirth and energy. I, in turn, would churlishly and regularly apologise for not being homosexual, young or lovely.

  These days, in between her morning iced coffee (after which she’s ‘everybody’s friend’ joked one of her co-workers years back) and a glass of white wine at dusk, there is her garden, which is tended to as per the script. But there are also projects that are off-piste. On a recent visit to the girls’ new home in Milton on the south coast of New South Wales, I woke late to see her bent over an electric keyboard with headphones on, hands working in concert with her furrowed brow as she stared at the sheet music.

  ‘Sorry, lovey, I didn’t wake you, did I? That’s why I’m wearing the ’phones, you see.’

  ‘When the bloody hell did you start playing piano?’

  ‘Well, there’s this lovely man down the road . . .’

  As Mum’s renaissance continues, learning musical instruments and languages, joining choirs and book clubs, I wish the same for the women her age who I pass on my walks.

  That I’m six foot three, with exaggerated features that outweigh any D-List celebrity allure, means I’m not often invisible. I’ve done nothing to earn the visibility, of course. It’s all genetics and luck, and with similar fortune I could be strolling through a museum or a gallery, such is the way I poke about dreamily on my perambulations. The peripatetic work–life makes me yearn for this time. (And the irony is not lost on me that others may dream of playing music for a living.) Each day’s mid-morning and dusk is another opportunity to go foraging. Houses and apartment blocks on my route offer little still lifes: a man in his white business shirt stirring a pot with his right hand while reading a text messa
ge with the other; kids’ faces, blue with the glow of an iPad ‘educational’ game; a woman folding linen while watching a TV screen.

  As I pass a pastry shop, slowing my pace to savour the waft of its sticky temptations, I see an older woman at a table outside, her short hair just a little wet at the edges of her face. She sits there relishing what looks like a hot chocolate the way I savour a first beer, something lip-smackingly good. Those treasured minutes of gratification. A reward. And I remember being at a bar in the Arts Centre a few weeks earlier – how I had sat and watched a similarly aged woman eating hot chips with a quiet joy. Then, as a flight of young student ballerinas had whooshed by, her expression changed and the hydraulic motion of her serving hand stopped. I had thought she may have been a relative of one of the dancers or a former dancer herself, now invisible too. I turned away, feeling suddenly like I was invading her privacy. I resolved to offer her a drink, but when I turned back a minute later she was gone.