A Bird on My Shoulder

by Lucy Palmer

  It pained me to so keenly feel this schism, the loneliness of the outcast. I tried to join in, even managing a tinkly laugh as one woman recounted how her husband drove their children all the way to the city to see a show, only to discover he had the wrong day. ‘Husbands,’ the woman said, as she beamed around the group. ‘Hopeless.’

  A champagne cork popped in the kitchen.

  The conversation weaved through the safe topics of the external world – renovations, school choices, the nights of broken sleep with small children. My mind drifted back to Burrawang, to the graveyard and the coffin, deep in the freshly wounded earth.

  The talk turned to family pets and then, unexpectedly, there were tears. A cluster of faces turned, like fluttering flowers towards the sun, to focus on a weeping woman. An arm was placed protectively around her shoulders. Someone offered tissues.

  I tried not to stare.

  ‘It’s our cat,’ the woman began. ‘He had to be put down last week, and I am so upset that I have not been able to tell the children. I just made a joke of it, and said he has probably found a girlfriend and when he’s bored, he’ll come home.’

  There was a muted chorus of sympathetic sighs.

  Someone began to clear the plates as the story was told in detail – the cancerous growth on its underbelly, the vomiting, the plaintive mewing in the night. The final decision.

  I remained as still as I could manage. My heart was forming into a scream, the sound in my ears like thick, black globules spilling over the white tablecloth.

  The crisis subsided seamlessly into dessert. Baked pears in a glutinous syrup.

  ‘It’s been a lovely lunch,’ I said as soon as I could, retrieving my coat. ‘I’m sorry I have to go, but I have to get back before the end of school.’

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ my friend said with a warm hug. ‘It’s good to see you out and about.’

  Faces turned towards me, a huddle of smiles. ‘Goodbye, see you again.’

  ‘It’s just awful,’ I heard a woman say as I left the room, her voice dense with exasperation. ‘It really is, I’m at my wits’ end. He’s hardly ever home before six.’

  •••

  It was confronting to feel so inhibited by the company of other people, yet suffocated by loneliness when I left them. It was as though the world had no space for me anymore, that as a single parent and widow I had been relegated to the shadows. It frequently pained me when people talked about ‘we’ in reference to their partner. I had no idea how to protect myself from being hurt by the ordinariness of other people’s lives.

  •••

  I felt safer at home with George, Meg and Charlotte, where there were no unpleasant surprises. There were many days when I managed well and enjoyed the fun they were creating. But there were other days when I withdrew from them, feeling guilty that I was failing them, unable to laugh with them and be fully present. There were times when they appeared like mirages, three tiny souls looking to me for love and comfort. I wished so desperately for their sake that they could have a mother who was serene and happy, someone who could fill and smooth this vast chasm, who could say that Dad would be coming home.

  How would I be able to raise our children alone? I wondered. How could I care for them and provide for them when I felt so adrift? Soothing their daily tears and reading them stories in bed at night was often my only comfort and the spur that kept me going. I drank in their innocent beauty and bathed in their affection. Holding them close always brought some relief from the dull aching weight that had become my life.

  In my darkest times, it no longer seemed to matter that I or the children had once been loved; the only reality I could comprehend was that I had not stopped loving Julian but that he, the source of so much care and support, the rock upon which our everyday life had been constructed, was no longer able to love us in return.

  •••

  It took me a while to organise a gravestone for Julian. I found a mason who could carve a beautiful old-fashioned slab of sandstone and work began. I had decided that underneath all our names should be written: Nothing is as gentle as strength. Nothing is as strong as true gentleness.

  Many years later, a friend visiting the grave with me asked about the first line as it seemed slightly odd.

  ‘Nothing is as gentle as strength,’ I read aloud, somewhat puzzled. At the time I thought I had known exactly what I wanted to say, but looking at it again something was definitely wrong.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I have absolutely no idea what that means.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh well, it’s rather like Julian then. Slightly mysterious.’

  •••

  After several months I felt drawn to return to Douglas Park for two days, hoping that the hours of contemplation and a chance to talk to Terry Naughton would give me once again, even for a moment, a place of peace and comfort.

  I told him how I felt, angry that Julian was no longer here.

  ‘I know it makes no sense but I feel abandoned by him,’ I said. ‘We never talked about the future, about what my life might be without him, caring for the children by myself. Perhaps it was just too painful or too hard. But I really don’t know how I’m going to do it.’

  ‘One thing you might consider is writing a letter to him in the evening to tell him about what has happened that day,’ he suggested.

  I raised an eyebrow – I had in mind a few choice phrases.

  ‘Let everything unfold gently,’ he said. ‘All of your losses will be felt during this time. Try to be still and hold in each hand the joy and the pain.’

  I found a book in the retreat library called The Desert: An anthology for Lent. Since my long walks from Birdsville to Alice Springs and then west of Alice to Broome, the desert had held a special place in my heart and imagination. It was in this apparently empty space that I found something essential within myself, a certainty about my own resilience that had eluded me for many years.

  I made notes in my journal and stole a quote from the book to reflect on. The way you must go is the way you already know. He has set it in your heart. The solitude will speak to you.

  Although I was drawn to the deeper truth of these words, I instinctively felt conflicted by their implication. I already felt banished from the ordinary world; to turn towards solitude even more meant the possibility of greater despair and disconnection. Yet if this was where I might find healing, what choice did I really have?

  That afternoon, I set off along the same track I had walked on my first visit to the monastery. Australia was in the grip of a deep drought by this time and the ground was cracked and parched, the grass a morose brown.

  The path wound around a series of hills while from the ravine below came the faint smell of water. Seeking some relief, I crashed my way through the bush to what had once clearly been a magnificent river, now a listless stream. Everything seemed to labour under the heavy heat of the day.

  I sat down under a spindly tree and rested, silently asking for the grace to be peaceful. It finally felt safe to stop. For a moment at least there was no need to keep running, to keep turning a shining face towards the world. Alone, I could simply feel the way I felt; shattered and lonely, ashamed of the smallness of my fearful heart that still cried out: Don’t go, don’t leave me.

  I stretched out on the dirt, my head propped up on one hand, and allowed my mind to wander back ten years to a rather desultory night shift in the AAP Sydney newsroom, when a story from Wollongong University had popped up on my screen.

  For twenty-five days in September six men will trek across the Simpson Desert in Central Australia. A female member is sought to balance the expedition. The start point is Poeppel Corner at the junction of South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. The expedition will trek 450 kilometres to Alice Springs. Camels will carry supplies and an Aboriginal guide is being actively sought.

  Up to this point, I had told very few people about another longstanding desire that I had – to one day venture into
one of the world’s great deserts. In my teens I had not only developed an inexplicable obsession with Papua New Guinea, I had also collected several books about expeditions into the deserts of Africa and the Middle East: Venture to the Interior, The Empty Quarter, Arabian Sands, Beyond the Last Oasis. And well before I left the UK I had read Tracks, Robyn Davidson’s account of her incredible solo camel expedition across Australia.

  None of these accounts painted a glamorous picture of desert life – far from it; the stories were riddled with disasters, physical suffering and near-death experiences. With their descriptions of the nomadic life and the rare beauty of the silent land, however, they also awoke in me a longing to venture into an apparent nowhere, to lose myself in emptiness.

  I had always known that a relatively easy life would never give me the sense of achievement I wanted; yet while I dreamed of transformation, so often, seduced by laziness, I took the easy way out. I also knew that in order to blossom from the anxious and insecure young woman that I was into a person of greater substance and purpose, I had to do something extraordinary, something I could never imagine myself doing. The possibility of a long walk in the desert seemed like an answer to my prayers.

  I did not offer any of these esoteric reasons to the team when I contacted them, of course. Instead, I spoke of my sense of adventure (limited), my fitness (exaggerated) and my willingness to undergo discomfort and hardship (also exaggerated). Striking a more pragmatic note, I suggested that as I was a working journalist, this might help garner publicity for the expedition which was relying partly on sponsorship funds to succeed.

  The organisers agreed that I should join them and thus several weeks later, after some panic-induced training, I found myself with a group of strangers – including two army officers, two sergeants, a builder, a doctor and another woman – and a herd of camels in Birdsville, south-west Queensland. The aim of the expedition had changed by then; we were now going to walk about 750 kilometres to Alice Springs and be the first people to reach the geographic centre of the Simpson Desert on foot.

  •••

  The walk took forty days and forty nights.

  Sometimes we would walk by the light of the full moon, taking advantage of the cooler hours; at other times we would press on through the heat and walk more than thirty kilometres a day so we could reach our next water supply. For weeks we saw no roads, no buildings and no cars, and we heard no news of the outside world. While we focused on the near horizon, battling along in stinging wind storms, around the world another life continued: wars broke out, political boundaries changed, elections were held and democracies fell. Blissfully, we knew nothing; this was a true break from the daily drip of doom-laden news.

  In that vast, open landscape, the wind soon destroyed all signs of our passing, and the vast and brilliant night skies mocked our insignificance. The only constant sounds during the day were the wind rattling the leaves of dried-out shrubs and our footsteps trudging over the baking ochre sand.

  While it was physically punishing, I had not expected such a deep level of mental struggle. There were times when another footstep seemed an impossibility; I wanted to give up, go home, anything but continue. And yet I had made a contract with myself that, unless I was too ill to do so, I would finish – and thereby change my perception of what else I might be able to achieve in life.

  When I did reach the end I felt an enormous sense of elation. On one level I had completed an arduous physical challenge. Privately, though, I knew it was more than that. I had wrestled my own demons and found some answers to some very old questions. The experience had been so profound that I volunteered again two years later, this time to walk 900 kilometres across the Great Sandy Desert from west of Alice Springs to Broome.

  Even though I left the desert when the expeditions finished, the desert never left me. My previous longing for solitude and abandoned beauty, far from being sated by the experiences, had only made me yearn for more.

  At the end of the second walk I declared that I would return to the desert when I was forty and complete another trek.

  •••

  Sitting by the river, I let my fingers rub through the dirt, conscious that this promise would now not be fulfilled or at least not in the way that I had planned.

  My life would now be a desert walk in another form.

  A WIDOW’S LAMENT

  Oh, fuck this bloody widow crap,

  I’m as lusty as a bath of smashed apples,

  Scented like dreaming days of summer,

  Wild like a storming ocean

  That lifts and roars, but cannot break.

  Oh, sod this mad widow bullshit,

  I’m not wearing black forever.

  I don’t need them now, these weeds,

  They have decayed, melted into me,

  I will never be free of this sorrow.

  Oh, bugger this lonely widow tale,

  I never felt more married to you,

  More loved, more understood.

  They don’t realise, these innocents,

  They don’t know what it is to be split open,

  Lost dreams pouring from me, unfettered.

  Oh, stuff this lonely widow crap,

  Can’t you see I’m more alive than ever?

  But today I’m not strong enough for pity,

  I can only feel the unspeakable anguish

  Of your absence, the unreachable

  Heaven of our love.

  Oh, forget this weeping widow nonsense.

  To walk that lighted journey with you

  Along the high road to your death, has

  Been the greatest blessing of my life.

  I gripped your hand tightly, and a part of me

  Went with you, never to return.

  23

  There’s a door ajar with promise but I am unable to

  move. The past looms over me like a great wall.

  Julian came to me in fragments of memory. I could still assemble glimpses of his face, his body, his voice; his particular way of blinking. In the mornings when I woke I sometimes could feel the heaviness of his warm, freckled hand on my shoulder, and I thought I could sometimes hear in the distance the faint but enthusiastic sound of his deep, discordant singing.

  Dealing with strangers who had never met Julian was especially hard. Some people did not even react when they learned he had died but asked instead how old he was. This was immediately followed by: ‘Oh! So he was quite a lot older than you?’ Walking away from these encounters I sometimes wondered if people would have been more sympathetic if it had been a real tragedy, if he’d been thirty-eight years old like me.

  It seemed that, for many people, it was far more interesting why I might have married Julian than the fact that he had died and as the conversation wilted I stumbled for the words to explain why I had indeed loved a man so much older than me. In these moments I felt I was being punished for stepping outside convention. The slightly pursed lips spelled it out: You broke the rules. What did you expect?.

  ‘That’s quite an age gap. Did that bother you?’

  ‘You’re young, you can marry again.’

  Naturally these comments troubled me, and made me think hard about my own motives. Was it because Julian was English that I felt so at home with him? Was it because I liked the lifestyle he offered me? Was I just odd? Or was this just who I was?

  During my teenage years I began to feel different to my peers, and instead felt drawn to the wisdom of those older than me. I even dressed quite conservatively if I bothered to pay attention to the way I dressed at all. It was not a conscious choice necessarily but I liked a wide circle of friends from a variety of backgrounds. I was instinctively more comfortable with those who had lived a life, who actually knew things I thought were worth knowing.

  I was very serious, far more so than perhaps I should have been, but I gradually accepted my own eccentricities and knew I would never be able to turn myself into somebody I was not. While many of my friends headed to weekend
parties across London, I was more likely to be found on a long train ride to Dorset for a weekend of walking alone and unexpected adventures, always more entranced by musty bookshops than glittering nightclubs. It was not that I was unsocial, not at all. I loved people. But I wanted to meet all kinds of people, not simply be limited to mixing with people my own age.

  It was one of the reasons that life with Julian suited me so well. Within our own extended family were people from every generation, and I was happy to talk to everyone.

  Now, however, with the reality and stigma of widowhood enveloping my life, I found it hard to relate to anyone closer to my age apart from Celeste who had not experienced the kind of grief that I was enduring.

  I was impatient with other people’s shallowness and complacency, angered that so few really understood what Julian’s death had done to his family.

  •••

  Often there was a colossal gap between the way I sensed a person was really feeling and the way they projected their life outwards. I was easily tired around those who were not authentic because social conventions meant I had to go along with their brightly told stories, even if I did not entirely believe them.

  ‘No, everything is great. We’re all really good, just planning the next holidays. Just busy, so busy.’

  ‘It would be lovely to see you, you must come over, we’ll drop by, sorry we haven’t been in touch, but we’ll call you . . .’

  ‘We must get together soon.’

  Sometimes I tried to convince myself that what some people said was true, even though I sensed through their awkwardness that it was not. I wanted to think the best of them and I hoped their offer or invitation would eventuate into something real. But I had no choice but to allow those who wanted to leave my life to do so.

  This was not easy. While a great deal of my emotional energy was absorbed in grief and caring for the children, I had not been blind to the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts that had taken place in our network of family, friends and acquaintances.