Everywhere I Look

by Helen Garner

  But I am still grateful for certain observations that she keeps returning to, throughout her work, leitmotifs that resound like quietly struck chords. To me they have the calming power of prayers.

  ‘The strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child,’ she writes in My Father’s Moon, and again in that tiny, beautiful book The Orchard Thieves, ‘does not seem part of the child which can be given back to the parent.’

  ‘Water,’ she says, ‘is the last thing to get dark.’ And my favourite: ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.’

  Late in the 1990s, when I was living in Sydney, Elizabeth came to town for some literary event. We made a date to go out for dinner. I was to pick her up at her hotel, the swanky Hyde Park Hyatt where her publisher had installed her. I arrived in the lobby. No sign of a thin, tall, old lady in a loose cotton dress, with Roman sandals on her beautiful, bony feet. What was the polite thing? Should I go up to her room?

  I approached the twin banks of lifts. The one at the far end landed with a discreet ping. Its door hissed open. Nobody appeared. Then, in profile to me, a grey, bespectacled head poked out, like that of a rat cautiously preparing to leave its hole. It swung this way and that. Its eye caught mine. It was Elizabeth.

  I won’t try to describe what she would call our ‘endless laughing fit’, the way we staggered about the lobby on sagging legs. But from that evening on, she signed her letters ‘Lift-Rat’, and that’s how I addressed her.

  In 2000 and 2001 Elizabeth’s letters grew fewer, and odder. She wrote indignantly about Hitler, how as a sixteen-year-old on holiday in Nazi Germany she had only escaped by ‘being rushed to a small cargo ship’.

  She told me that, ‘like Ibsen and other writers’, she had started having trouble ‘remembering words and phrases’. Her spelling was shot. Her handwriting shrank to a scrawl.

  ‘Destruction,’ she wrote, ‘can’t go on forever.’ Soon the letters stopped. Her son wrote to tell me that she had been diagnosed with dementia and admitted to a nursing home.

  On a very hot February day in Perth, I was taken to Claremont to see her.

  ‘You might get a shock,’ they said. ‘She won’t know who you are.’

  The only patient in a four-bed ward, she lay under a crisp white sheet with her head back on the pillow, her mouth open, her eyes closed. The veranda outside gave on to a shaded courtyard full of big old trees and strongly flowering shrubbery.

  Pleasant airs came in through the open door. There was no airconditioning, and I was glad of this: she would hate to be shut away from the world of plants and grass that her work so quietly, so stoically praises.

  I had never touched her, and I didn’t touch her now. I stood at the end of the bed and looked at her. She was peaceful, cared for by people who loved and respected her. She didn’t seem to be suffering; and she certainly didn’t seem close to death.

  But it was too late for me to say goodbye, or to thank her for the last sentence of The Orchard Thieves, where an old woman points out comfortingly to her daughter that the difference between a bad haircut and a good one is only a week.

  2005

  PART THREE

  Dreams of Her Real Self

  While Not Writing a Book

  DIARY 1

  The grandchildren I mention are Olive, Ted and Ambrose, aged at the time eight, four and two; they and their parents live in the house next door.

  Early in the morning, after a heavy night of babysitting, I’m watering out the back when I hear a shuffling sound. Olive comes up behind me in her spotted dressing-gown and slippers, looking hunched and dramatic, and holding a sheet of paper in one hand. ‘Read this,’ she says. ‘Dear Nanny I feel really Embarrased about last night and Ted got all the Books he wanted, all the games, and all the things he wanted and I didn’t even get one single thing! And I would like you to acknowladge that. Lots of love Olive xxoo.’

  I acknowledge it (it’s true). She straightens her spine and runs off cheerfully. When I come inside I find her on the couch watching the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Together we gaze at those bizarre sequences: the tiny ‘scientists’ in shirtsleeves and ties swarming everywhere on the landing site; François Truffaut in his neat, pale-tan bomber jacket; the communication by music, the mysterious riff played on a keyboard by the young nerd; the advance guard of smaller vessels; then the shimmering into view of the colossal spacecraft. I’m leaning forward, holding my breath, with a lump in my throat. The shining object opens its maw and the abducted earthlings stagger out: the navy men in their World War II uniforms who state name, rank and serial number—then the children—then the dog.

  Jörg tells me that another translation of sayonara, the Japanese word for farewell, is ‘if it must be’. He shows me a photo he has taken from a high hospital window during his chemotherapy: two blank buildings, and between them a band of clouded sky into which a big hot air balloon is rising, powered by a vigorous burst of flame. He makes no interpretation, of course, but I take it for an image of hope and self-propulsion.

  Ted approaches me with a strange bashful smile and his eyes lowered. ‘Nanny, you said to me that you always like my face.’ ‘I do. When I see it coming towards me I feel very happy.’ He blushes, and can’t stop smiling, or meet my eye. Soon we are aiming his cowboy pistols out the kitchen window at the red bucket on the woodpile, and firing with deadly accuracy. But when I say ‘Peeeyow!’ he corrects me: apparently only he is allowed to say ‘Peeeyow’.

  The cool change runs smoothly through the house. Outside, a shower of dried plum-tree petals swirls for a moment and falls.

  On Radio National, constant talk of collapsing financial markets. Fran Kelly asks a politician what this will mean in pragmatic terms. ‘Fran,’ he says, ‘you’re going into the end of the world as we know it. I’m not going to follow you there.’ I start thinking I should withdraw my cash from the bank, wrap it in thick plastic, and stash it in the roof space or bury it in the yard. My son-in-law says patiently, ‘Everybody must want to do that. And that’s exactly what they don’t want you to do.’

  In a fashionable café, five men in shirts and ties sit near me at a circular table. First I think they are having a business meeting. Then I realise they are praying.

  I ride my bike to collect Ted from crèche. He emerges from the playground red-faced, in a lather of sweat. The teacher whispers that he has refused all day to take off his jacket because he didn’t want to get dirt on the rodeo shirt with pearl studs and blue piping that I brought him from Newcastle. He has sweated so much, under his regulation Foreign Legion sunhat, that his eyebrows are flattened and misshapen. He is lost in a cowboy fantasy. As we fly home across Royal Park he says, in a voice forlorn with longing, ‘Nanny. Do you know where they sell spurs?’ Later, on the couch, I make up a story about an old lady who finds a cowboy baby lying forgotten by the roadside. She takes it home and raises it—gives him spurs, chaps, a lasso, some guns, which he fires only responsibly, and bullets that he always takes out and keeps in a drawer. When he’s eighteen he gets a horse. He thanks the old lady, mounts the horse and clops away into the desert, looking for work rounding up cattle. She stands waving at the sliprail fence. He requests this story again and again, curled up in my lap with his thumb in his mouth.

  Rod is visiting from Spain. We sit outside a café in Bourke Street for an hour. The angle of the afternoon light shows that his skin is forming tiny parallel wrinkles, very delicate and beautiful, and somehow poignant. He tells me that his four-year-old grandson is greatly exercised by the whereabouts of the police. The family traces this to the fact that one day his kindergarten teacher found her bag had been rifled by an intruder; she called the police and, when they arrived, the little boy thought they had come because he had done poo in his pants.

  A conversation with the kids about the ubiquity of farts.

  Me: ‘I wonder if there’s anywhere in the world where farting is polite.’

  Olive: ‘Ma
ybe somewhere it could be a worship.’

  In the expensive shoe shop, a woman of mature years is slumped sideways in a chair with her head on its armrest, sound asleep. Beside her a slightly younger woman, attended by a shop assistant, busily continues to try on shoes. Her unembarrassed physical proximity to the sleeper seems to indicate that they’re companions, or even sisters. To let yourself go out like a light in a public place! How enviable! How free! I edge closer. Her upper lip, like mine, is an open fan of wrinkles. I would like to cover her gently with a cotton blanket.

  In the morning it rains. Ambrose has passed his whole two years of life in drought. He looks up at the ceiling and says in a surprised voice, ‘Noise!’

  Jacob’s funeral at Springvale. The building is very crowded. Two old women squeeze their way into the seats in front of ours. Another old lady murmurs to them, ‘Excuse me, I’m saving these two places for my friends.’ One of the interlopers, whose hair is dyed bright red, turns to her and snaps, ‘Look, this is a funeral, not a party.’ The service moves along with a brisk grandeur. Then we all file out, hundreds of us, and walk slowly along the cemetery roads to the open grave. Even at the back of the crowd we still flinch at the hollow thud when the first spadeful of earth strikes the coffin. I can’t believe Jacob’s body is really inside it. He had such bright eyes.

  Later Ambrose wants to stay the night at my house. He won’t go to sleep in the cot. I pick him up, wrap him in the blue rug, and hold him on my lap on the couch. Outside it’s still light, but cloudy, as if about to storm. I sing him ‘The Tennessee Waltz’. His eyes slide shut. His thumb slips out of his mouth and a few nerve tremors run through his left hand. He begins to breathe deeply, then to snore. Meanwhile, Jacob is out there at Springvale under all that dirt. A cool wind is blowing. I still think cremation is more bearable. The beloved one is only air, and some dry crumbs of inoffensive matter.

  I watch High Noon again on DVD. Gary Cooper solemn, dogged, pained. The white, dusty streets he strides along, ever more hopeless. The scene where he writes his will.

  At two in the morning, Ted, sleeping in the spare room, has a bad dream and creeps into my bed. He flings himself about diagonally for the rest of the night, cramming me into a tiny corner. God damn it, I think at 5 a.m., this is worse than being married.

  Psychoanalyst at conference: ‘Paradise has not only been lost, it never existed.’

  Am I imagining an unusual quiet over the city? A breathlessness? The world is waiting for the news: will the US elect a black president? I hardly dare turn on the TV. But when I do I sit there and sob out loud. Tears absolutely pop out of my eyes. Olive comes in the back door and gazes at me curiously. ‘I’m crying with happiness,’ I say, ‘because of Obama. Obama! OBAMA! To think I’m alive when this happened! It’s better than men walking on the moon!’ She puts down what she is carrying, approaches me with an ironical little smile, and gives me a mature hug, patting my shoulder. In this she is so like her mother that I cry even more.

  One young woman to another, walking along Bridport Street: ‘So I said to him, “If I wasn’t your girlfriend, I’d be really concerned about your sexuality.”’

  I bring home some chocolates shaped like pyramids. Ted comes in to ask me for one. He struggles to articulate their shape, and comes up with ‘a desert point’.

  At David and Jason’s in Newcastle, Jason makes me watch a few songs from Kylie’s Homecoming Tour. It’s a bloated spectacle of lights like a Nazi rally, the ‘dancing’ vulgar and clumsy, the songs a series of tiny ideas inflated beyond any possibility of meaning, and Kylie herself a minuscule creature with a very pretty profile and a surprisingly sweet smile. Now that she’s had breast cancer and lost her French boyfriend, she looks almost interesting, her face thinner, darker, shadowed perhaps by adult pain and loss. I find her endearing. David is bored by her. But Jason adores her and seems proud of her. He shows Olive a single sequin that flew off her costume and into his hand when he was in the front row. Together they examine it, reverently, like a religious relic.

  As the vodka kicks in I begin to make plans. I will go to my office and start work at eight every morning. I will stop drinking coffee and eating lollies. I will hire someone to pluck my eyebrows into shape once a week.

  Library Week at the local primary school and I am invited to give a talk one afternoon. A boy of nine or so, in a dark-brimmed hat, sits in the front row. He is fidgety at first, then sits stiller and stiller, with his eyes fixed on my face. At the end he comes up with his parents, addresses me by my full name: they have a copy of my book that they would like me to inscribe.

  Me: ‘Is it to somebody?’

  Boy: ‘To our whole family, actually.’

  Me: (pen poised) ‘Will I write “To the whole family”?’

  Parents: (shyly) ‘Yes, that would be fine.’

  Boy: (holds up one hand) ‘NO.’ (Looks from father to mother and back again, his eyebrows high. His voice goes up a few semitones.) ‘No—we agreed that Helen Garner should write each name individually.’

  Me: ‘Okay, what are the names?’

  Boy: ‘Right.’ (Takes deep breath.) ‘The names are: Ross. Julie. They’re my parents. Brady. Stuart. And Craig.’

  Me: ‘In that exact order?’

  Boy: (firmly) ‘In that exact order.’

  Me: ‘You’re Craig, right? The youngest?’

  Boy: (importantly) ‘Yes, I am.’

  I want to throw him across the back of my bike and speed away with him forever.

  A thunderstorm at dawn! Roar of rain, drops dancing on the shed roof, the pear tree leaves springing and bouncing on their twiggy branches!

  The family returns in the evening from three days at Wilsons Prom. Ted, exhausted from the long drive, dresses at once in cowboy gear, and comes through my back door in the dark with the rifle in one hand. ‘Is anybody home? Where are you, Nanny?’ He appears in the doorway of my workroom, very soft and peaceful. I sit him on my lap at the table. Long silences with the occasional remark. He has a need to dress as a cowboy. It calms something in him. I get out the photo album and we leaf through it, back and forth. He establishes a ritual response to every photo of his younger brother—a burst of unconvincing laughter.

  Peter Porter on The Book Show: ‘The purpose of form is to prevent you from putting down on the paper the first thing that comes into your head.’

  My old Montblanc shorthand pen, the kind that’s no longer made, disappears from my desk. It is my favourite fountain pen of all time. I search everywhere. Days later I have one last desolated look through the paper recycle bag beside my desk, and there it is. Calmly lying among the torn-up pages.

  At the playground with Ted and the boys from round the corner. Francis, at three, has loose blond curls and a face of such louche, wry, heavy-lidded Irishness that I can hardly look at him without laughing. I push him high on the swing. ‘Higher. Higher,’ he commands. In full flight he turns his head and calls to me over his shoulder in a seductive tone: ‘Hey, Ted’s nanny. Who’s your best boy? Is it me?’

  Barrie Kosky’s production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women. An ordeal of rape, blood, wailing and casual brutality. The moment that touches me most is when the little prince, in his suit and tie, is dragged into the cell where the Trojan women are imprisoned. Across the space he makes a tiny sign of recognition to his grandmother, the bruised and bloodstained queen, barelegged and barefooted in her fouled slip. The queen returns the gesture, the furtive showing of a flat palm. Soon after that, the child is hauled out to be thrown from the city walls.

  Ted has been sick, some sort of gastric thing, and dozes all day on the couch. At dinner he sits at the table with the rest of us, but without plate or appetite, and begs for someone to play a game with him. Everyone refuses; they want to eat. He lays his little white cheek on the table and weeps. So his father gets him an old bank pay-in book and a pen, and he ‘writes’ out ‘cheques’ and ‘plane tickets to America’, silently concentrating, shoulders bowed, like a chi
ld clerk in Dickens, breaking all our hearts.

  A tremendously famous and influential European critic lets my friend know that he admires his new novel. I’m thunderstruck. Imagine having the nerve to send the critic a copy! At whose feet would I lay my little tribute, if I dared? Janet Malcolm’s? She scorched The First Stone in the New Yorker but I was so thrilled by the idea of her having read me that I felt no pain. God, how infantile. While I’m standing in the hall thinking about this, Ambrose with his pants off starts to thunder tempestuously on the piano. He yells for me to come. I enter the room. He leans forward, beaming over his shoulder, to display a large soft lump of shit he has just deposited on the piano seat.

  At St Vincent’s rapid response skin clinic I am to have a little lesion on my top lip investigated. A young Sri Lankan doctor without confidence but with a very sweet smile runs her cool fingers up and down my arms, and this way and that on my torso. The lesion has retreated and cannot be seen, no matter how hard she presses the magnifying glass on to my lip. A handsome male professor, very Australian, bursts into the cubicle. He spots the thing at once and diagnoses a solar keratosis. She still can’t see it. He takes out his pen and draws a line round the keratosis, in ink that will not fade for hours. ‘Get the gun,’ he says. ‘I’ll come back in a minute and watch you do it.’ The young woman stands beside me, timidly holding the liquid nitrogen cylinder in both hands. I do not want her to shoot my mouth with it, but before I can nerve myself to say so, the professor rushes back in. He seizes the gun from her, explains clearly and pleasantly how she should use it, then does the job himself in one well-aimed icy blast. Peeeyow.