A Bird on My Shoulder

by Lucy Palmer

  Losing Julian was not the only loss we had to face as a family. The first and most obvious casualty was my social life with other families, many of whom quietly regrouped without us.

  Thankfully, with many of my closest friends I could feel their empathy and no reassuring words were necessary – they were there for the long haul, no matter what.

  •••

  One day our part-time housekeeper Mandy came to help me begin to pack up Julian’s clothes. She had come into our lives around the time of his death. I cannot remember exactly when, which probably had a great deal to do with her incredibly capacity to merge into our family life as if she had always been there.

  She clearly sensed the enormity of the task for me and approached it with her usual calm, practical attitude.

  It was awful. We took it very slowly, sitting on the floor surrounded by mounds of clothes and plastic bags. No, yes, no, no.

  One of Julian’s habits, which had always amused me, had been his propensity to buy clothes in bulk. He had more than two dozen matching white t-shirts for running in, some already worn, some not, and piles of interchangeable blue shorts. His clothes took up two-thirds of our wardrobe.

  Mandy clearly found this as perplexing as I had.

  ‘Oh my god,’ she said, as another pile of identical clothes appeared.

  This habit also extended to his shoe collection. While living in the UK after he and Charmian were first married, Julian had found an old-fashioned shoemaker called Crockett & Jones in Northampton who made beautiful brogue leather shoes by hand. This must have been a particularly attractive option for Julian as they could make the same shoes in different sizes for each of his feet – one in nine and a half and the other in size ten.

  Tropical heat and leather are not the best companions. When Julian decided a pair had passed their prime, he would give them away and pull out a new one. One day, early in our marriage, an enormous box containing a dozen brown and black shoes arrived, each one satisfyingly encased in a green cotton pouch with a drawstring top and printed with a proud golden crest. Many of these still sat, unworn, in the bottom of the wardrobe.

  ‘I can’t part with them,’ I told Mandy.

  So back they went, with all the other treasures I could not bear to give away. Not yet.

  •••

  The first anniversary of Julian’s death was upon us, and a few close friends gathered at the farm. The children and I wrote letters and tied them to helium balloons, watching them float away until they disappeared into the sky.

  That evening during dinner with Celeste and Stephen, the candelabra above the dining table began to slowly move of its own accord.

  ‘Perhaps it’s Julian,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Stephen, gazing up. ‘Where else would he want to be?’

  That night I had a vivid dream, a visitation so real that when I woke I could not be sure whether it had actually happened or not.

  Julian had appeared, striding into the living room where I was sitting alone. He looked so well, so vital.

  ‘You’re alive?’ My words came out in a thickened whisper.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a smile, then added, ‘and I’m living in London again.’

  A tall woman, almost the same height as Julian, entered. She leaned against him possessively confronting me with a poised and silent profile.

  I stopped breathing. ‘But how did this happen? I thought you had died!’

  ‘No,’ he said wearily. ‘I just got sick of you. This way was easier than divorce.’

  ‘But what about the children?’

  ‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry about that.’

  There was a roaring in my ears, and I woke up trembling with rage.

  •••

  Confusion, exhaustion, resentment and self-pity permeated my days. Some of my anger was directed at Julian, even though I knew how unreasonable this was. Every Thursday night I found myself cursing him as I dragged the stinking rubbish bin down the drive towards the road. It felt like the final indignity, even though we had never quibbled about the division of any household chores. ‘It’s alright for you,’ I muttered aloud as the bin bounced over the gravel, ‘floating around in a fucking cloud, leaving me to do everything.’

  No-one else is here. No-one is coming.

  Caring for the children largely alone, my vision of life was reduced to a few tiny square metres at a time. I was engulfed by a miniature world: tiny socks and shoes, tiny beds and plates, toys everywhere. I missed Julian, especially at the end of a long day. I missed our conversations and the person I used to be. Without another adult present, I found the separation between day and night or children and adults, which had been so effortless when Julian was alive, became more difficult.

  During the day I seemed to manage because there was always something to do, and my tasks played out against the noise and activity that nature provided – sunshine, birds, movement. But after the children had gone to bed, this was replaced by silence and darkness. Someone recommended reading the classics, like Tolstoy, as a way of remembering the bigger picture of life, the sweeping chaos of political and emotional upheaval. But I didn’t have the brain power for it.

  Television worked for a while, and so did wine. These socially acceptable anaesthetics were enough to blunt my senses until exhaustion overtook and I crawled off to bed. After several months, however, I woke up to the horrible realisation that this limited existence was now my life. It was bad enough that Julian had died, but I had now replaced him with a new nightly companion, a demanding idiot sitting in the corner of our family room that talked loudly and constantly with no regard for me. Much to the children’s dismay the television soon ‘broke down’ and was not replaced for years. It may have only been a small victory over apathy but, as I was beginning to discover, it was better than doing nothing at all.

  •••

  About a year after Julian died, a new family member came into our lives.

  Stig was a present from fate. A few weeks earlier he had wandered into a bakery one Sunday morning when George and I had were having a warm drink, feasting on the smells of hot crusty bread. Next door to the bakery was a pet shop, closed for the day. I watched as a small puppy, white with a comical black patch over one eye, came through the door with no collar, lead or owner in sight.

  I stopped the waitress as she passed by the table. ‘Does the dog belong to the bakery?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ said the woman, glancing down. There were three empty holes pricked into the lobe of her ear. ‘They often drop them around here; they think the pet shop will take them. Another Christmas present gone wrong.’

  A short while later we found him tied up in the back alley next to a bowl of water.

  ‘He’s a lovely dog, Mum,’ said George.

  My heart sank. Not a dog, not now. Not another responsibility. They both looked at me with wide eyes.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ I began, but he was already on the ground, lovingly stroking the puppy.

  We called him Stig after a favourite children’s book. Stig became my partner in care, another pair of loving eyes that followed the children everywhere as they meandered around their worlds of trees, ropes, paint pots and power struggles. He helped to repair the void that we all felt, soothed our sorrows and quietly assumed the role of our protector and guardian.

  •••

  The reality of being a migrant added another layer of isolation. While I had always missed my family in the UK, the lure of returning was never strong enough, and once Julian had died, the thought of beginning a new life again was just too daunting. But I felt deeply saddened by the fact that I did not have my own family around to support me. While Julian’s boys were around, they were mostly living overseas so we only saw them from time to time.

  In Australian terms, the farm was not that remote – I knew that other people were coping with isolation much more valiantly than I was. But the village shop in Robertson was still a ten-minute drive away and meant I had t
o strap the children into their car seats and make a half-hour round trip just to get milk.

  So many times, perhaps after visiting friends after school, I would gather up the children and start the drive along the long, winding country roads back to the farm, while in my rear-view mirror the soft homely lights and smoking chimneys of town gradually disappeared from view.

  One evening, driving home at sunset, we reached the top of the hill which marked the border between Robertson and East Kangaloon; the landscape of the sky was so arresting that I stopped the car. Thick bulbous clouds hung over the horizon, while perfect rays of late-afternoon light shone through them, touching the patchwork fields below.

  ‘A lot of people call those the fingers of God,’ I told George.

  He stared through the open window, seemingly unimpressed.

  ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘I do not think they are his fingers.’

  ‘Really? What do you think they are?’

  ‘I think they are the roads to his face.’

  24

  There are days for picking flowers, days to enfold a

  moment in my arms and have the courage to remember.

  I walk outside to see the drooping garden heavy with

  rain; a petalled head falls on its own chest, crucified.

  An element of coming to terms with grief, people told me, was to learn to care for myself. When I first heard this advice I immediately pictured a series of predictable monuments to womanhood, like a portrait from a glossy magazine: luxurious underwear, pots of expensive facial creams and plumped up cushions on a gorgeous bed. Was that the kind of self-love I needed?

  Instead, my treasured belongings included an old cedar box with three compartments given to me by my paternal grandmother. Grandma Palmer had an endearing habit of continuing to talk to me from the toilet, where she would go every morning after breakfast to inject her slabby thighs with insulin, sending a hot sharp sniff of surgical spirit wafting through her tiny flat.

  I also had a bowl made from a sycamore tree to remind me of my childhood garden, containing snake skins, leathery leaves, intricate woven pods. On the windowsill of my room there were smooth stones from the beach, and a pair of stiff leather hobbles that I used on my camel in my desert days.

  My capacity for self-love was limited, I had always known that. I felt more comfortable giving to others than receiving myself, so when a kind friend bought me a session of reflexology, it seemed fitting that I should begin caring for myself from the bottom, with my feet.

  •••

  Even at almost forty, my feet looked like a child’s. They were not the slender, elegant woman’s feet that I had always dreamed of; they betrayed me, the part of me that was standing still, stunted.

  The reflexologist, Jenny, inspected them. Middle-aged, she had gel-spiked her hair and had wrapped it up in a bright orange headscarf. Her voice was soft.

  ‘We’re all damaged,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it shows in the feet.’

  She began to prod at my feet with a small stick. There was a smell of peppermint cream and the muted sound of a busy highway.

  ‘Baby feet,’ she added admiringly. ‘Whatever’s happened to you, it hasn’t really got to you at all.’

  She began to massage the bottom of my feet and, within seconds, I was drifting away, drugged by the sensation of her touch.

  •••

  Once they were tiny toes in a row, neat and soft. Papery nails, deep rose, a fading sunset, wriggling and wavering like petals in a breeze.

  I thought of my first steps, tottering through the small carpeted English bungalow with its square of suburban lawn. There were long, light summer evenings with children on the streets, the sound of a football slamming into a brick wall. An ice-cream van with its wavering tune of sunny beachside happiness. Please can I have a double cone with a chocolate flake and strawberry sauce?

  At five, my feet were forced into tights, then black party shoes with a shine. I had a band in my hair and I didn’t like dresses.

  ‘Keep your foot still, push down, push.’

  Then, after the party and home, the shoes were discarded and I was delighted to feel the earth once again and scramble up the smooth bark into our old sycamore tree, where I could watch its helicopter seeds spinning madly down to the ground. My feet crushed autumn leaves and dangled defiantly over the corner of my tree house, my fortress of twining boughs and dancing light. Feet with punch in soccer boots, streaming down the right wing to turn and strike that flying ball to forever.

  •••

  Jenny rubbed the cream into the top of my foot and I could feel the bones, their lightness, and intricacy. Then down to the underside, the soft animal pads of heel and ball, yellowing and roughened. Her fingers press down into my instep, into the slightly arching valley. I felt a strange pain.

  I realised that in all these years I had neglected my feet, pushing them into ridiculous shoes, forcing them to move at improbable angles. I had asked too much and given so little in return.

  I wondered, as I sat there in that quiet suburban home, how many other parts of me had survived such indifference.

  •••

  Another suggestion for my improved wellbeing was to become a volunteer for the Red Cross, visiting old people in their homes. It seemed like a reasonable idea. The children were at school every day and it would be my first independent foray back into the outside world.

  ‘Mrs Bennett is ninety and lives alone,’ the organiser had told me. ‘Other volunteers say she’s a bit difficult and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I’m not sure how you’ll go but good luck.’

  I arrived at a mock Tudor home high on a hill outside Bowral, full of precarious bonhomie. A tiny woman, beautifully dressed, opened the door and ushered me into a formal sitting room where morning tea was already waiting.

  We sat by the long French windows; a faint fog hung over the house like a shroud. Looking at Mrs Bennett, upright and dainty in her chair, I felt I should have been more feminine, more fittingly dressed for the visit. I was wearing my widow’s weeds: black jumper, brown jeans, and scuffed leather working boots.

  Mrs Bennett, by contrast, was a picture of elegance. She wore a cream dress with a wishbone belt around her tiny waist, pale stockings and shiny beige shoes. Her fine grey hair, still wavy, was beautifully coiffed.

  ‘The secret to a long life,’ she said, ‘is chocolate.’ She gestured to the open box on the table. The beautifully wrapped chocolates gleamed with indulgence. ‘Take one,’ she commanded.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You don’t want one?’ Mrs Bennett stared at me with surprise. ‘Oh dear. I do hope you’re not one of those silly girls who worry about their bodies.’

  I was lost for words. My fixed smile felt strange, as though it had perched on my face unexpectedly, like a bright bird alighting on a dirt heap.

  I looked around. There was a low glass cabinet in the corner of the room, filled with lustrous green tea cups and a gleaming coffee pot that appeared never to have been used.

  Mrs Bennett leaned forward a little in her chair.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘If you don’t eat chocolate, how do you live?’

  And then, having delivered this casual hand grenade, she turned away to look through the window, chewing politely.

  I continued to visit Mrs Bennett for several months and gradually absorbed her simple and unaffected philosophy. I was in awe of her stoicism, the fixedness of her beliefs and routines; my life felt so chaotic by comparison. Listening to her, I felt quietly encouraged to try a little harder and perhaps to emulate her brisk matter-of-factness as part of my necessary armour to repel the apparent helpfulness of others. Even after several visits, Mrs Bennett showed no interest in my life, something which did not worry me at all. I found it soothing knowing I would not be ambushed by the questions that others often asked. How are you? No, but how are you really?

  ‘I live by a strict routine,’ she told me one day. ‘
I take a tot of sherry before lunch. I take an inch, only an inch, of brandy before dinner at six sharp. I go to bed at seven and listen to the radio.

  ‘I then wake, without fail, at two am precisely. I eat a piece of toast, drink a cup of tea and then I return to bed.’

  By contrast, the only order I succumbed to was imposed from the outside: the children’s sleeping habits, the beginning and ending of the school day, the necessities of shopping and cooking, and the demands of simple survival.

  I found Mrs Bennett slightly intimidating, and I was careful not to overstep any boundaries, nor to make enquiries of a personal nature. She had made it very clear that she had no interest in divulging anything at all. Instead, I made harmless remarks and encouraged her to repeat previous observations about the state of the world or its unpredictable weather. It seemed to comfort her. She, on the other hand, could be far more direct.

  ‘And your husband?’ she had once asked.

  ‘He died,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ She sniffed and looked away. ‘They have a habit of doing that.’

  If Mrs Bennett ever complained about her lot, she did so indirectly by describing not her internal state but the external world that continued without her. I could sometimes tell by the intensity and colour of the slash of lipstick Mrs Bennett had hastily applied before opening the screen door how low she was feeling that day.

  ‘Nobody comes here,’ Mrs Bennett said one morning, in obvious contradiction to my presence.

  ‘People are so busy, but of course I don’t want just anyone coming. Not like the old nuisance from over there.’ She gestured to a house just visible through the dark pine trees. ‘She complained about next door to me when they started building, said the new garage would block her view. I knew she wanted to get me on her side, but I refused.’ Mrs Bennett beamed with malicious satisfaction.

  I came to understand that Mrs Bennett could make pronouncements that were as firm in her mind as she believed they were in the world. To her, it was not due to any fault of her own that other people were unfriendly, only an indication of their lack of generosity or kindness, only a sign that the world had changed for the worse, that the spirit of community and solicitude she had once known were now gone. Mrs Bennett, marooned in this unfeeling world, was determined to denounce it at every opportunity.