August 17
Chocolate arrived at dusk – the first time he’s been around for two months – so I fed him; and of course Bad Bart trotted down at the sound of the first mouthful of oats (he can hear a rolled-oat fall 200 metres away); and then Three-and-a-half turned up with Little Pink; and Pudge emerged, still half asleep (she’s more nocturnal than the others). So I fed them all, little heaps of oats and carrots on the paving, and left them munching while I went in to cook dinner.
Opened the last bottle of Golden Queens. You could almost taste the sunlight.
And then it rained.
We hadn’t expected it. The weather bureau hadn’t forecast it, and Roger the Ranger had claimed it’d be November – if we were lucky – before there’d be a decent storm (seventy-six per cent probability he’d said, over the froth of his cappuccino).
But it rained anyway. Good heavy rain so hard we couldn’t hear the radio, the world was black and the frogs began to yell in an ecstasy of celebration.
About 2 a.m. Bryan got up to have a pee in the bucket on the verandah. The grind of the creek filled the room with the almost sickly sweetness of rotting debris.
‘Leave the door open,’ I muttered.
He brought his cold knees back into bed. ‘The stars are out,’ he whispered, as he went back to sleep.
I lay listening to the crash of rocks and the slow hoot of the powerful owl hunting possums in the gully and a shriek from a wet possum annoyed by the rain.
I fell asleep about dawn. I could almost smell the sunlight somewhere behind the ridge. Or maybe it was springtime and the peaches and the year to come.
AFTERWORD
THE LUNCHTIME OF LIFE
July 10, 2009
Home at 5.30 p.m., the shadows thickening through the valley, Bryan driving, and me sitting alone in the backseat, like the Queen about to give a royal wave.
I am radioactive.
Not very radioactive, and only for a few days, just enough to zap a (benign) thyroid tumour. And curses on every doctor who refused to believe me when I said I ate sensibly, built my house, tended my garden, but still got fat. ‘What’s your weakness, dear?’ they’d ask cunningly. ‘Chocolate biscuits?’
Ha! It’s been three decades since I ate a chocolate biscuit. I was fat because my thyroid didn’t work.
Now, thyroid working again, thirty-six kilos lighter than I was five years ago, and not glowing in the dark yet. I waited till Bryan had gone up the steps to the house before following. The wildlife was waiting for us.
‘It’ll be good to get home, won’t it?’ said the nurse this afternoon. ‘Your animals must miss you.’
She hasn’t met our local wildlife.
Rosie and her joey, Emily, peered out from the rose bush they were chewing as though to say, ‘Bother. You’re back.’ Three lyrebirds flapped out of the loquat tree scattering feathers and alarm calls. ‘They’re back, damn it. They’re back.’
Over at the bird feeder the rosellas glared at us. There’s been no birdseed for the last two days. Another 24 hours and they’d start tearing at the window frames.
I almost made it to the front door before Mothball wombat smelled me. I jumped over her and made it inside before she bit me.
Mothball is the heroine of Diary of a Wombat. I stopped feeding her oats and carrots ten years ago when she officially became a wild wombat instead of a hand-reared one. The only wombat I feed now is a little one called Bruiser, small and round with great scars on his back.
I put on my ugg boots and an old ‘at home’ jumper while Mothball skulked back to munch the grass under the orange trees. I took Bruiser’s wombat nuts out to his feed dish. He gave me a polite Gnawwww!, showing his teeth, then crouched over his bowl to eat.
I sat on the chair under the apple tree as the first stars brightened, and tried to work out what I feel like. Is that a white-hot thread of radioactivity heading to my thyroid? Or just imagination? Nuclear medicine is incongruous, sitting here.
A shriek from Bruiser and over I padded in my ugg boots (Mothball can’t bite through ugg boots). And there was Mothball eating Bruiser’s dinner, while Bruiser cowered behind a pergola post. Bruiser is wide and the post narrow, but wombats don’t have much visual imagination. As long as he is behind something Bruiser feels safe. Safe-ish, anyhow.
I grabbed a second wombat dish – made of an old hubcap and a heavy block of wood so they can’t knock it over and poured out more food for Bruiser, a tactful distance from Mothball. She lifted up her nose to smell what was happening, tramped over to Bruiser’s dish and urinated in his rolled oats.
I watched her saunter off and removed the brown-stained gunge, then coaxed Bruiser back to his dinner. Mothball gave me a dirty look as I went inside.
Wombats don’t do nice. Especially Mothball.
I brewed myself some hot milk. (Weird. I hate hot milk.) Milk is the mammary secretions of cows, though come to think of it, honey is an even worse secretion from bees, and I love honey. But hot milk is exactly what I long for at the moment.
I checked my emails: Margaret, Elaine, Peg, Angela et al. asking how I am. Noël rang to check that we’d made it home okay.
‘Am I glowing?’ I asked Bryan.
He peered at me from a safe distance of two metres away. ‘No.’
Pity. I’ve always envied phosphorescent mushrooms.
I went to bed. A bed. Not Bryan’s.
July 12
My voice has vanished as has my appetite. I started on my morning walk up the mountain to check the wombat doings overnight – you learn a lot from scats and tracks – but my legs turned to the scrambled eggs I hadn’t felt like eating.
More hot milk.
I watched the rosellas scare off the king parrots from the bird feeder as I sipped my milk. When I took the scraps down to the chooks there was one small egg. Our chooks are geriatrics, over fourteen years old, so they lay when they feel like it. Only Dulcie has laid an egg each morning this winter. She is a true backyard chook, part Australorp Bantam, part Leghorn, Rhode Island Red, and maybe a bit of Light Sussex.
We need new chooks. Young ones. I doubt any of our eggs are fertile, Rodney rooster is a geriatric, too.
I put out food for Bruiser and Mothball. So much for being a wild wombat. Mothball puffed herself up into a furry sumo wrestler, then went to sleep carefully equidistant from both bowls. Bruiser tiptoed out of his hole and managed to eat half his dinner before a bower bird arrived to share it, and woke Mothball up.
Mothball snarled at both the bird and Bruiser, and at Rosie wallaby and her joey, who were lurking under the camellia bush, hoping for leftovers.
Later, the wind is punching the roof in great heavy gusts, it’s good to be inside.
July 13
I had just got off the phone from a segment on ABC radio Triple 6 Canberra when Bruiser yelled at me out the window. I scurried out to feed him. It’s not easy doing half hour of radio sans voice and brain, but it was on Jerusalem artichokes, so I didn’t have to scavenge far among the neurons.
I filled Bruiser’s bowl, though he had to wait till the bower birds and blue wrens had finished before he dared to eat any himself. The only person Bruiser can dominate is me. I’m officially at the bottom of the animal pecking order around here. No wonder the lyrebirds pay no attention when I try to shoo them off the strawberries.
Still only one egg today, but enough for Bryan’s breakfast. Mike, our neighbour up the mountain, needs new chooks too, so he’ll look at some Australorps at Moruya today.
Feel nauseous, not too bad, especially after more hot milk. I put on gloves to stop my radioactive sweat contaminating anything I touch, then headed out to the veggie garden to pick avocados, limes, navel oranges, chestnuts, chicory, chillies, parsley, spring onions, and a bunch of proteas. I won’t be eating any of them, especially the proteas, but just picking things revives the soul and body. My legs were scrambling again so came inside and sat on the sofa, watching the lyrebirds rip up the strawberry bed.
This has been a hard year, medically. Bryan has had four operations, of increasing urgency and severity. There were frantic trips up the mountain to get him to hospital; a hideous call at 2 a.m. to the 000 service, who refused to believe we had an ambulance service in Braidwood and wanted to send one from two and a half hours away while Bryan bled to death…
At times I felt like yelling to the Great Galactic Soap Opera Writer: time for a new theme. Mysterious strangers, inherited fortunes. Just not another medical drama today. But all through it the valley has been here, a richness and beauty when we return.
Now Bryan is clambering on the roof repairing the solar panels again. I’m recovering. The garden is still here, feeding us and delighting us, even though it’s had no work or water for more than eighteen months. It’s home and lunch to about 400 other species too – many of them microscopic – who share our world.
This is the lunchtime of life. The trees I planted twenty years ago are bearing; the perennial veggies are producing tucker whether I cosset them or not; the solar panels harvesting the sunlight, the tanks the water, the birds and other predators eating the pests so I needn’t bother.
Friends surround us, human and otherwise.
The phone rang as I came in. I dumped the veggies in the sink, washed gloves, grabbed a glass of water – I can manage a sort of throaty croak if I sip water – and snatched up the phone just before it went to message bank. It was Noël again, seeking a progress report.
Noël has guided me through the last year (and we’ve seen each other through decades of other dramas too). It was Noël and Geoff who arrived at the hospital after I called them hour after hour to say that Bryan wasn’t out of theatre yet, but it was fine, and I would drive over to their place when he came out. Five hours later Bryan arrived back in the ward, semiconscious, at the same time as Noël and Geoff appeared out of the lift. Noël held my hand while Geoff fetched us chai lattes from the machine by the nurses’ station.
Somehow five minutes later the nurses’ station was covered in latte foam and so was Geoff, while Noël and I were laughing so hard we had to hold each other up. I heard the senior nurse call, ‘Oh dear, she’s crying.’ I had to tell them they were tears of laughter. All right, tears for many reasons, mostly joy that Bryan was alive, but it is impossible to find words to describe a friendship that can help you laugh at a time like that.
Geoff asked Noël to get my bag from my car; ordered me to sit in his; fixed my seatbelt; and suddenly I realised this was the alpha male taking charge while Noël and I did what we were told. And we were grateful. Geoff may have lost the battle with a hospital tea dispenser, but I’d trust him to deal with a sabre-toothed tiger.
Now, half a year later, I held the phone a bit shakily to my ear and emitted a Darth Vader wheeze to Noël, assuring her I was fine, despite my voice.
I answered emails. Peg is in Alice Springs, which means she hasn’t been able to organise everyone else to feed us, as she did when Bryan was hospitalised, with great vats of meatballs and veg or Thai lime soup. This time we don’t need food deliveries. Sue and I cooked a week’s food before I left.
Another benefit of reaching the lunchtime of life: all your friends have at least three recipes they make very, very well, so when you need help you eat brilliantly. I have stopped going to restaurants. The food we eat at each other’s places is far better; plus we can laugh without others staring.
More emails. Virginia is back from Indonesia, or was it Washington? My brain is soup. Margaret is back from South Africa. She and I email each other most days, commiserating about everything from publishing schedules to creaky knees. She’s beginning another novel for adults. Elaine’s guide dog Rosie sends a get well woof. Lisa at HarperCollins says no hurry with the next book. Wait till I recover. Thank goodness I can’t irradiate anyone by email.
So many friendships are via email these days. Margaret and I would never be such close friends if we lived next door. She speeds through the universe like a loving cockatoo. I need most of the day with human silence, so I can hear the world around. By via email we’re closer than neighbours sharing cups of tea.
I don’t think I could have conceived when I first wrote this book how much love and shared lives can be carried across the ether. And even voiceless, I can speak online.
Email means the friendships I wrote about all those years ago remain, despite increasing distance. Angela has moved away. Sue Mac returns once a year, perhaps. She no longer cooks for shearers. Her jobs these days involve a regular salary, and preferably superannuation too.
And the little boy who played with wombats is now married and two metres tall. And happy and fulfilled. He’s coming home for a visit next week.
And then there’s Val. Val died a year ago.
I met Val in 1972, that heady time when we thought we could create a world of peace and self-sufficiency. Val was 15 years older than me. I had already read and been awed by her papers on environmental philosophy.
Both of us were married (neither marriage would last). We both longed for land to fall in love with, to build a house with our own hands, to grow our food, to live as we thought humans ought to be, with bodies as well as brains.
We talked through long greater glider watching nights about the best way to build a house. Both had read the Nearings’ 1950s book Living the Good Life. ‘It should really have been called Living the Good Life with 1001 Tons of Concrete,’ said Val. The Nearings outlined a simple way to build stone walls. Stone is free. Val’s house and mine were built from stones we gathered and from timber nearby, each of us helping the other.
We explored the rainforest, finding the lyrebird nests. I had been sharing my life with wombats for years when Val met Birubi, the first wombat she shared her home with. The early the phone calls began, ‘He’s chewing up the bed. What should I do now?’ Later, we simply shared our growing wonder of the ‘other intelligences’ in our lives.
I remember one phone call as both of us stared out our respective windows at male blue wrens fighting while the female looked on…And then in both cases, at exactly the same time, the female mated with the vanquished, not the victor. Who else can you have phone sex with, about blue wrens?
There was another side to Val, too.
When someone you admire dies – especially a public figure – people remake them to fit the image of what they’d like them to have been. Val and I often spoke about how our friend Judith Wright (with whom we spent one of the best Christmases, even when – or perhaps especially when – Judith burnt the pudding). Judith was called a ‘tireless activist’, when she was so often tired, her life interpreted by those who’d never met her or had only known the public person. The memory of the true Judith was subsumed. After her death the same thing happened with Val. Val wasn’t an easy friend.
The late-night calls became increasingly desperate over the years.
‘I’m asleep,’ I’d say.
‘Oh, I won’t keep you long then.’
The pump failed, the possums ate the apples, the wombat chewed the cupboards, the solar system had its problems. One night she called to tell me that the publishers were charging 420 pounds a copy for her book. ‘They’re trying to stop my ideas being heard!’
‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘They paid you an advance, sent out an editor to work with you.’
‘No’, said Val. ‘It’s censorship! No one will ever be able to afford to read my words…’
It took two hours to calm her down, to get her to read me the publisher’s letter. She read the first paragraph, and then the second…
‘Oh,’ said Val. ‘It’s a pound sign. I thought it was a four…’
Other times we’d talk for hours about bird language, or the concept of territory in human and other species.
I will never have a call like that again. There is no other Val who knows this territory – as a lover, a scientist and defender.
Val was there at every important moment of my l
ife: the day we bought the valley where I live, the day I brought my baby home, the lunch at Café Altenburg to celebrate my divorce, and the night I met the man to whom I am married. Yet the most significant things we shared were the journeys in the bush, the conversations, the vision of the real world and the possible, the cuckoo’s call at 4 a.m., the red goshawk dropping like a demon from the sky, the torn legs of one of Val’s chooks in its talons.
Val called me the day before she died. ‘We’re having lunch tomorrow, aren’t we?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s next Friday. See you then. Much love.’
She died the day after, alone in her house in the rainforest. It was a stroke, a single massive one. She died quickly, and as she would have wished, with all that she loved about her.
I wasn’t at her funeral. I told myself that it was for health reasons, and yes, the shock of her death caused problems for a while. But really it’s because I can’t bear to say goodbye.
July 15
Nauseous still. More hot milk. Two weeks ago you’d needed to strap me down like Frankenstein’s poor monster to administer hot milk. Now I sip it like an Agatha Christie spinster waiting to discover the body in my delphiniums.
Eighty-four emails. One from a child who’d emailed weeks before, asking how she could meet a wombat and apologising for bothering me. I’d replied, and now she emailed one last time to thank me: ‘Everyone says i have this little piece of magic cause u replyed back and so did Kevin Rudd but it’s just u reply back cause your so nice.’
I spend more and more time these days answering mail and emails, but that ‘thank you’ made me cry. My emotions have turned into scrambled eggs too. Wiped my eyes.
I walked down to the cottage in the sunlight. A lyrebird breezed over my head as I passed the cliff, yelling insults. No, I don’t speak lyrebird, but could tell that this was rude. I heard a ute drive in as I walked back, it was Mike delivering the new chooks. I stood a careful two metres away and explained I was radioactive but not very, so could make him tea and biscuits if I wore gloves, but for some reason he preferred to keep his distance.
Year in the Valley Page 26