A Life On Pittwater

by Susan Duncan

  Witch makes strong, earthy-smelling pots of tea, over and over. Offers glasses of iced water. The sandwiches, thick with ham and turkey, are wrapped and waiting.

  When Bomber comes down from the roof, the two men test the pump. Bob starts the engine while Bomber holds the hose. We watch it swell until it suddenly kicks in his hands. Water sprays the bush for a hundred feet, drenching it. We are ready. And we wait.

  Late in the afternoon, the nun’s prayers are heard and a sea breeze kicks in. Our good fortune, someone else’s tragedy. Like my Uncle Frank always says: ‘If you’re doing it good, someone else is doing it bad. If you’re doing it bad, someone else is doing it good. Life’s a cycle.’

  ‘Worst Christmas ever,’ Bea said after they sold The Trump and retired to twenty-five acres on the Central Coast a few years later. ‘But really, really good, too.’ And we laughed. As you do when you come close to disaster and somehow escape.

  By February, the nation is still reeling from the worst bushfire season in history. The dry weather we thought would soon move on has become a permanent resident. It is officially a drought.

  Already, the towering spotted gum in the normally damp gully in the elbow of the back track where a fungi forest once reigned weeps a resinous brown fluid. The eucalyptus trees that tower above the house are parched and haggard, as though engulfed by a terrible sadness. It’s been more than two years since the waterfall in the south west corner of Lovett Bay flooded in foaming white torrents. Soon, we hope, the drought will break. It always does.

  Since I retired from full-time work, my mother calls me nearly every morning. She doesn’t often have anything new to say, but the connection, I think, makes her feel secure. Reminds her she is not alone.

  ‘I don’t want you to worry,’ she begins one late summer day.

  ‘Ok. I won’t,’ I reply calmly, squishing down anger at being manipulated. Because it is an old game – of course she wants me to worry.

  ‘I’ve had another fall. Broken the other wrist. But I’m alright. Nothing to worry about. Just wanted to tell you.’

  My irritation, so quick to flare with my mother for no reason I will ever really understand, subsides in a wave of shame. ‘Do you want to come and stay for a while?’

  ‘No. No. I’m managing beautifully.’

  ‘Might be time you moved out of that house.’

  ‘You’re not putting me in some home somewhere,’ she shoots back. ‘I may be old but I’m still capable.’

  So I do not ask how she will manage alone in a large house with steps, a house that is two hours away at the foot of the Blue Mountains. I do not offer to stay with her for a while. I do nothing except call her for a few days to make sure she is coping. I am not, I am aware, an ideal daughter, the kind she dreamed would nurse her through her old age. She may have hammered in her idea of family – ‘It is the one place where no matter what you’ve done, no matter how long you’ve been away, it must always open its door to you’ – but in the selfish way of children, I took that to mean I could always come home. Not that, one day, it might be the other way around.

  ‘Could find her a place around here,’ Bob says, after I indulge in another bout of guilt and still do nothing about it.

  ‘You don’t think that might be a bit close?’

  ‘Nah. There’s a moat.’ He looks up. ‘Not an Olympic swimmer or anything, is she?’ he adds.

  ‘Got a nice style in the water. Think the distance might be a handicap though.’

  ‘That’s alright then.’

  I begin quietly looking around for a place in a retirement home for her. But I say nothing. With my mother, timing is of the utmost importance.

  A year after we begin our tourist lunches at Tarrangaua, they are beginning to lose their novelty. I have learned there is a deep chasm between trained chefs and amateur cooks like myself. Budgets and too many clients wanting too much for too little are wearing out my enthusiasm. I am not helped, either, by my idiotic compulsion to over-cater.

  One day, when the wind is blowing cold and hard from the south and hitting the verandah full on, we set up the tables inside. Half an hour before the guests are due, Fleury calls to say the leader of the group insists they all dine outside. She is from Belgium, apparently, where she eats inside all the time.

  ‘There’s a gale!’ I tell Fleury.

  ‘I know, but she doesn’t care.’

  I put the phone down. We have moved sofas, tables and chairs to accommodate extra tables. Now we’re supposed to move them all again.

  ‘No way,’ I mutter darkly to Lisa, who sighs with relief. ‘There’s only one set of rules here and they’re mine.’

  Halfway up the steps with her group, Fleury phones again, her voice shaking with anger.

  ‘Now she wants to eat inside!’

  ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t move any tables. It would have been madness.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Fleury sighs.

  ‘What’s this dame like?’

  ‘A nightmare,’ she whispers.

  When the Belgian woman arrives, she rushes straight into the kitchen and tells us she wants lunch on the table in five minutes.

  ‘Madame,’ I say, barely able to remain polite, ‘you are here because Fleury is a friend. This is not a regular business. Lunch will be ready when it is ready.’

  She turns away from me and blasts off a fusilade of complaints in French to her friend.

  ‘Je parle français, madame,’ I say, although truthfully I’ve understood the gist of her conversation and not the specifics.

  She spins towards me in horror then bolts out of the kitchen. Half an hour later she insists on leaving in a water taxi.

  ‘Now I’ve got to find her a goddamn private car as well,’ Fleury groans, reaching for her mobile phone. ‘Jesus. I’d hate to be her husband.’

  The moment the Belgian woman leaves the room, the atmosphere switches from quiet gloom to relaxed chat. Guests stick their heads inside the kitchen to apologise for their colleague’s behaviour, to thank us for lunch. I smile, nod. But it is too late. I have reached the denouement.

  Bob and I look at each other after the last tipsy guest has piled into a water taxi in ridiculously high heels, and although he says nothing, I know what he’s thinking. Why on earth am I doing this? It’s taken a week to clean and do the food preparation and it will take two days to swizzle both houses back to normal. Cooking is my passion, the lunches my whim, but Bob cannot see me work without offering to help.

  ‘You were right, you know,’ I tell him. ‘The fun evaporates when you turn a hobby into a job. I don’t want to be around people like that mad Belgian woman. They steal your energy and shatter your peace.’

  He nods but stays silent.

  ‘The house needs people, though,’ I continue. ‘It will die if it’s left empty for years at a time.’

  A month later, around the same time as my mother calls to say the plaster has been removed from her wrist and the doctor reckons she’s healed as beautifully as a woman with young bones, Bob casually mentions finding tenants for Tarrangaua could be difficult.

  ‘They need to be fit enough to cop the steps,’ he says.

  ‘Never know unless we have a go,’ I reply.

  We ask the local real estate agent to put the house on her books. ‘It’s a difficult property,’ she tells us. ‘There’s a good market for low maintenance beach shacks. Houses like Tarrangaua … well … it might take a while for the right people to come along.’

  ‘Been empty for a couple of years now. A few more months won’t matter,’ Bob says.

  ‘By the way, I’ve looked at a couple of retirement villages that might be suitable for Esther,’ I tell him.

  ‘Have you told her anything about all this?’

  ‘Nope. She has a morbid fear of what she calls “old people’s homes”. I think it’s better if I talk to her face to face.’

  Over the next few months, though, she sounds so well and happy on the phone, the idea of moving her to a p
lace where she will manage more easily loses its urgency. Like my mother always says, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

  Towards the end of winter, the real estate agent says she has found tenants for Tarrangaua. Bob and I temporarily move up the hill to prepare the house. Cleaning furniture, emptying cupboards, repairing fly-screens, touching up paintwork and writing a list of anything that might flummox the uninitiated in the vagaries of Pittwater living. Such as the wise use of tank water and caring for a septic system so it stays happily in balance and neither pongs nor overflows.

  We camp like holiday-makers, turning out the lights and sitting on the floor with firelight dancing on the walls, playing music until late. I am not entirely at ease, but nor do I feel like a trespasser.

  Chip Chop, my trollopy little Jack Russell, is already familiar with the house. When I travelled, as I still do occasionally, on assignments for The Australian Women’s Weekly, Bob and Barbara took care of her, making sure she didn’t rampage through the bush as though it was her own private game park. On our first night up the hill, she leaps straight onto the sofa and falls asleep in a cushioned corner with a loud, ecstatic sigh.

  A few weeks after the new tenants, John and Therese, lug the last of their clothes and all of their computer equipment up the steps, they call to ask if we would like to join them for dinner. We have seen them on the water in their tinny, but aside from a quick nod or a wave at a smiley bald-headed bloke and a skinny little woman with laughing blue eyes, there’s been little contact.

  On the night we get together, John barbecues a whole duck to serve with pieces of lime and chili. When he unwraps it from the foil at the table, none of us says a word. It is cinder black, and shrivelled to the size of a large potato.

  ‘Wonderful,’ we all trill after a minute or two, trying to find small bits that are still edible. Because we do not know each other well enough yet to understand if the truth might offend or hurt.

  ‘Hottest blooming barbecue I’ve ever known,’ John says eventually.

  ‘What did you expect? Bob’s a combustion engineer!’ I explain.

  ‘Ah!’

  John is a shiny-headed … what? Renaissance man best describes him. Lawyer, writer, businessman, sailor and who knows what else? He came to Pittwater on holidays as a child and never forgot it. One day, he is not sure why, he decided he would like to return.

  Therese is deeply Irish even though she’s lived in Australia for more than thirty years. She is a social worker, unafraid of the seamier moments in people’s lives. Once, she brought down the wrath of her board of directors when she let a homeless man sleep on a bench in the garden of the community centre where she was boss. ‘It’s bridge day,’ they screamed at her, implying that the sight of a shambling alcoholic in need of a bath and clean trousers would be too confronting for the well-dressed women who played cards there every Wednesday.

  ‘This is a community centre,’ she replied, unmoved. She fetched him fresh clothes, made fifty phone calls until she found a place for him to sleep, then cleaned up the mess he had left behind. Her compassion should have shamed her colleagues, but all they felt was sullied.

  ‘Pound for weight, she’s stronger than any woman I’ve ever seen,’ says Bob with approval. He has watched her carry a case of wine up the hill, slim as a teenager, barely more than five feet tall. His tone is rich with respect.

  I am at ease that first time we return to Tarrangaua on the occasion that becomes known as ‘the night of the black duck’. I am a guest, which I am familiar with. But Bob feels strangely disoriented. ‘I keep wanting to check the oven and fill the wine glasses,’ he whispers. ‘And John’s sitting where I always sit!’

  And it is the moment I finally understand that the Tin Shed will never be home to him.

  A year later, Bob makes one of his endless trips along Lover’s Lane to get a tool from his shed at Tarrangaua and something inside me gives way.

  ‘Should we give your house a go for a while?’ I ask him. The rental lease is due to expire. We expect John and Therese to move on. Even though he has the chance to leap in with a loud yes, he holds back.

  ‘It wouldn’t bother you?’

  ‘No. Not anymore.’ And I hope it is true.

  We tell John and Therese our plans over a dinner of slow-roasted pork with crackling rubbed with preserved lemon, fennel seeds, garlic and sea salt.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ they say gaily, when we apologise if it’s going to cause any inconvenience. ‘We’ll just move into the Tin Shed.’ And we swap houses. It’s as easy as that.

  A week before moving day, I pile cookware, crockery, cutlery, serving dishes, glassware and bowls into the wheelbarrow and push each load along the rough bush path we call Lover’s Lane. It runs behind the Tin Shed to Tarrangaua. According to local legend a doctor who ran a home for mentally disabled men fell in love with Dorothea Mackellar and cut the path from his house to hers. It was an unrequited love, from all accounts. Only a single, isolated sandstone chimney remains of his dwelling, and the tangled residue of a once ordered cottage garden: wisteria, two magnolias, hydrangeas. Plants that survived the firestorm of 1994. Tougher, in the end, than the house.

  Bob cleared the pathway in the days not long after Barbara died and I began cooking for the two of us. Most evenings, he walked slowly along the track, bottle of wine in hand, shoulders hunched, his weathered face creased more deeply, it seemed to me, than just a year earlier.

  At first, our dinners were awkward. We were wary. Not of each other, but of saying something thoughtless. It took the passing of time to dull the raw edges and, oddly, the familiarity of routine – oddly because I used to loathe predictability and lived for excitement. I am old enough now, though, to look back regretfully at so much effort wasted on worthless pursuits. I cannot help wishing I’d directed my energy more profoundly and less recklessly when I had it in abundance.

  The wheelbarrow hits a gnarled and hard root of a spotted gum. I take a deep breath. Grunt. And bounce over it. Every day, stronger and stronger. Chemo is more like a bad dream from another lifetime.

  Bob’s shed is dusty, thick with spider webs and tools flung on benches. Bare floorboards, some of them sinking. Grimy windows and gaps between the timber. It is chaos.

  ‘Where’s all this stuff going to fit?’ he moans as I unload another wheelbarrow load of kitchen equipment.

  ‘What about the cupboards in the hallway? They’re huge.’

  ‘That’s where I keep my old business files.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It makes me suddenly unsure, forces me to question whether what we are doing will be for the best. We are not beginning in a new house, we are picking up the past. In a different way, of course, but it’s unshakable. There is the indelible print of another woman’s life and it will always be there.

  Barbara and Bob had the bed made for them in Australian cedar. They found the bedside tables on a jaunt through country Victoria. Bob and his son carried up the huge cedar chest of drawers from the boat on a stinking summer day. Eighty-eight steps. Will Bob drift back in time when he pulls a pair of socks from the drawers, when he lays a book down on the bedside table before turning out the light? Will I feel I have moved in with a ghost?

  My head spins. I have made so many moves in too few years. The Tin Shed is perfect. Why change the order of things? Because Bob needs his shed, I reply to myself silently. Because going up and down the hill five times a day will get more and more exhausting. Because home is where Bob is and the rest is just building material. Because to resent Bob’s past is childish and irrational. We all have pasts. My own is not particularly noble. And Barbara was a friend. To be reminded of her is a good thing. She was a fine woman with impeccable instincts. And because Tarrangaua is old and, like old people, it needs tenderness to keep sparkling.

  ‘I’ll only take half the hallway cupboards, then,’ I tell Bob firmly.

  Bob nods. A good relationship, he tells me from time to time, is built on many things. Trust is t
he baseline, with the ability to compromise not far behind. To win every round in a relationship can sometimes mean losing the marriage.

  We swap houses on a fine day in late spring 2003 with the help of Bob’s mates, six sunny-faced blokes from an engineering factory in Mona Vale.

  ‘Not the kind of move you need a barge for,’ Bob explains. ‘Next door, really.’

  Next door and up a mountain, I think to myself. But I say nothing. And there’s Bob’s old white ute, freckled with rust. No matter how heavy the load, it just gets gruntier. The blokes still have to carry sofas, beds, sideboards, tables and chairs down the steps from the Tin Shed, across the rutted slipway of the Lovett Bay boatshed and along a dirt waterside pathway to the bottom of the sandstone track. Nothing is light. My father always told me to buy stuff to last. ‘You buy it once,’ he advised, ‘and you have it forever.’

  But I was young then, and the idea of keeping something forever was unthinkable. What did forever mean, anyway? So I bought my share of new and trendy. Through the years, I’ve kept the timeless pieces and flicked the fashion fads. Should’ve listened to him when I had the chance. Although he was a realist about the usefulness of parental wisdom: ‘You’ve got to make your own mistakes. Only way anyone ever learns.’ His face, as he said it, was always full of sad resignation, as though he’d made a million of his own mistakes and wished he could save me from the ones he understood were ahead, but knew he couldn’t.

  At the waterfront, the blokes tightly strap the first load into the back of the ute. It’s a 35-degree incline and the track is rough as hell.

  ‘Would’ve been a cinch if we’d left all the furniture where it was,’ Bob says.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s your house. If I don’t have my own stuff around me, I will feel like a guest.’

  ‘Fair enough.’