Everywhere I Look

by Helen Garner

  In a Fitzroy pub on Sunday afternoon I become involved in a game of pinball with Ted. Two slightly bigger boys approach the machine. One looks at me narrowly, then says out of the corner of his mouth to his friend, ‘That old lady thinks she can play. I’m going upstairs.’

  A hot evening. I go to the gym on Racecourse Road for an ‘assessment’. I don’t belong in such a place. I feel a failure, someone labouring under a deluded idea of herself. In the harsh mirrors I look ugly and old, my hair cut too short, my lips held in an expression of contemptuous, defensive primness. I am put through my paces on the treadmill by one of those hulking young men with unblinking eyes who seem to become personal trainers. Then, as I begin to run and sweat, the irritating noises of the gym—horrible music, grunts of effort, shrill moronic laughter—fade into an oceanic roar. It dawns on me that this whole thing is about going into a dream state. My defences collapse.

  The unnerving silence of Christmas morning. No sound of traffic. Sun lies fresh on everything. Birds sing with unnatural sharpness. The air is still.

  At the health farm, fasting. I must be hallucinating: when I walk past a pile of folded towels I see them as a huge club sandwich. I present myself for a reiki treatment. The woman announces that she is going to massage my aura. I submit with a sigh. I don’t have any trouble at all believing that people have auras: you only need to have seen a dying and then a dead body to know this. But I wanted the massage to be about my gross earthly body.

  Ted marches in my back door. ‘I’m a cowboy. You can be my wife. I want something to eat. Will you cook this cattle meat I brought in?’

  ‘Sure. How would you like it cooked, cowboy?’

  ‘Toasted, please, with butter.’

  A picnic with a friend at the Botanic Gardens. Hot, clear day. We lie on rugs under a huge oak. I am wearing a faded pink linen shirt that I’ve always privately thought was rather becoming. She studies me in silence, and says, ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, Hel, but that colour doesn’t suit you. It makes your face look flushed. It makes you look older. This doesn’t upset you, does it?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I do feel a bit devastated.’ She makes no response to this, and in a few moments our conversation turns to less fraught matters.

  Ted on the swing: ‘Come on! We need some attacking here! We need to explode some battleships!’

  Two women of my age on the Craigieburn train are talking about how to make scones. I’m sitting right behind them, in an almost empty carriage. ‘Your board’s full of flour?’ says the dark-haired one. ‘And your hands are full of flour?’ Her blonde friend, who has gold bangles on each wrist and very cared-for hands with big polished nails, expresses her utter helplessness in the face of dough. She reaches the point of confessing that she finds it repulsive to put her hands in it. They burst into a fit of laughter. The dark one keeps urging her friend not to give up. ‘You don’t have to handle it all that much.’ She makes flat-palmed, downward gestures. The manicured one shudders extravagantly. As we pull into Southern Cross Station I get to my feet and stop beside them. ‘Excuse me. I can’t make scones either. First lot I made was perfect. Since then—disaster every time.’ They welcome me into their paroxysms. The fair one touches my arm. ‘Don’t give up!’ says the dark one. ‘Try again!’ From the platform, as I pass their window, I can see their teeth still flashing.

  Ted: ‘Nanny, Buzz told me that when people die they turn into gazombies.’

  Me: ‘Gazombies? That’s not true. I’m quite old and a lot of people I know have died but not a single one of them turned into a gazombie.’

  At a tram stop near Southern Cross a lovely Asian girl, perhaps still a teenager, with a fall of silky hair right down her back, is standing among the waiting passengers. A man in a T-shirt and jeans approaches her and tries with a dull, unsmiling belligerence to engage her in conversation. His questions strike a discordant note: ‘Where are you going? How old are you?’ I can’t hear her replies, or even if she’s making any. Two young women in business suits and heels, who have been chatting and laughing at the stop, step forward to the platform’s edge and without breaking their flow of talk simply interpose their bodies between the importunate bloke and the girl. He moves off, sullen and confused. The women don’t address the girl. In fact I’m not even sure that they noticed her predicament, but I choose to believe that they performed a spontaneous act of sisterly protectiveness.

  Jörg and his wife, Keiko, sit with me in Marios. His skull is softly furred, his face purified, refined. The chemo appears to have worked. Nobody mentions elation, but the table our elbows are on is hovering a few inches above the floor.

  Joan Acocella on the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov: ‘If there is a point in classical art where aesthetics meets morals—where beauty, by appearing plain and natural, gives us hope that we, too, can be beautiful…’

  I resolve to spend the rest of my life searching for that point.

  2011

  Red Dog: A Mutiny

  IN January my family next door went down the coast and left me in charge of our vegetable garden and their dog. Excellent. I would spend the summer reading novels on my bed, and every morning and evening I would take the red heeler to the park and make him run his furry arse off.

  When Dozer first arrived from a rescue shelter in the Mallee, he flinched at sudden hand movements, and cowered if you came round the corner carrying the hose; but under a benevolent regime he soon became confident and calm. He was very, very good-looking, with large pointed ears, Amy Winehouse eye makeup, and leaf-shaped patterns of dark brown along his spine.

  My son-in-law had once been the master of a legendary blue heeler called Tess, whose death in old age had prostrated him with grief for a fortnight. He and my daughter worked hard to train the red pup right. He would sit, lie down, stop, stay. He was an outside dog. The family drove away. I moved his gear from their back veranda to mine.

  The summer was hot. At the park each morning, as the sun rose, he stepped out of the car and on to the grass with an unhysterical tread, and raised his face handsomely to the dry air. I hurled the ball into the blue, and away he flew.

  He was so smart: he knew to stay off the bike path when the helmeted warriors came streaming through from the north, scattering curses. He was so obedient: a faint whistle between my teeth and he was at my side. He was so sociable, so sweet natured: one day a svelte young whippet took a shine to him; flowing alongside him as they raced, she got a grip on the loose skin of his cheek and hung on. I quailed against a tree trunk, but he remained nonchalant, grinning down at the weightless parasite. They sped in tandem to the far end and returned at a canter, all smiles.

  He was a heavy-chested, square-set dog. Neither of us liked a leash. Of course I always had one on my person. But it was only a token. The dog and I understood each other. He was at my back door at six every morning, not whining or barking, just breathing with his mouth open. He knew not to barge between the car’s front seats as I drove. With the Chuckit I bought at the pet shop my throws became magnificent. While he tore about after the ball, I stood in the park’s centre, cracking jokes with a loose group of humans. Perhaps they even accepted me. The breeze skimmed across the mown grass and rustled the coloured plastic shit-bags we had tied to the curved handles of our launchers.

  One morning, after a night of rain, it struck me that our routine had become rigid. Was there nothing in a dog’s life but work? I left the ball and the launcher in the laundry. I clipped the leash round my waist and we set out for the park on foot.

  At first he kept looking back over his shoulder, waiting for me to produce the ball. When I made it clear I hadn’t brought it he accepted my ruling, and trotted down the sloping streets in the dark, running and swerving at random, sniffing posts and pissing on them, following trails the way dogs are supposed to. We skirted the park and, as it started to get light, headed up the steep lane towards home. Behind the high school I saw the first cars zip through the roundabout. I unwound the leash from my overalls and called
him. He propped. He gave me a stare I couldn’t read. And when I grabbed his collar and clipped the leash on to the ring, he burst into a rage.

  He got the leash between his jaws and dragged, dragged at it, growling and panting. He hauled it behind me, whirled it this way and that so I was spun around. He yanked it, threw his weight back on his haunches so the woven fabric stretched tight between us. I shouted his name. His teeth were bared to the ears, his brow lowered over the savage shine of his black eyes.

  Astonished, I fought him for the leash. Close to me in our twisting struggle he bit me, twice on the left forearm, twice on the right, bang, bang, not skin-breaking bites but blunt blows, like punches. I cried out. I held my ground beside him, gripping the leash, and rapped out the only command left to me: ‘Sit! Sit!’

  He sat. It held, the fragile structure of his training, though his eyes burned fiercely up at me from the level of my thigh. My heart was going like mad. I let him off the leash. He scampered across the road and I followed like a supplicant.

  We had another two blocks to go. He ran ahead of me, co-operating at corners. Once he grabbed the dangling sleeve of my raincoat and gave it a sharp wrench. Several times he dawdled till I caught up, then threw himself heavily against my legs, jostling me with the full weight of an angry cattle dog. We crossed the railway bridge and he gave up on me, ran on ahead in scorn, tail high, head in noble position. I limped behind, shaking and sweating, still holding the leash.

  Early next morning, with embarrassing bruises on each arm that would keep my sleeves rolled down for a week, I returned to the exact custom that I had first established and then flouted. Since that day, at home and out in the world, he has behaved towards me with impeccable grace and affection. But we both know that the compact between us has been broken. He senses that, beneath my crisp commands, I have lost my nerve. He likes me. He needs me. He humours me. But I am afraid that somewhere in his wild dog’s heart, he secretly despises me.

  2012

  Funk Paradise

  DIARY 2

  The kids are now twelve, eight and six.

  On Friday night I have a ticket to a Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert. On my way out the door I say to my son-in-law, ‘I’m going to hear The Rite of Spring.’ Pulling on his Western Bulldogs beanie he retorts, ‘I’m going down to Docklands to see The Rite of Winter.’

  At the bakery Anita serves me. She hasn’t been at work for a while. I ask if she has been ill. She glances left and right. I am the only customer. She says in a low voice, ‘I’ve been at home for two weeks. I had breast reduction surgery.’ I withstand the urge to drop my eyes to her chest. ‘Wow! Are you pleased?’ She lowers her great heavy lids, and across her goddess’s face, beautiful in a tremendous, mythological way, passes a wave of relief and pleasure. ‘Helen, I couldn’t go on any more—my shoulders.’ I gaze at her in wonder. ‘I look,’ she says, ‘like I did when I was sixteen!’ I permit myself to glance down. Two lovely firm round globes ride at a youthful level under her pastel uniform. ‘You look gorgeous,’ I say with a sigh. Kirsty, meanwhile, is busy further along the counter, eyes on her work, smiling with secret benevolence.

  At lunchtime I go over the road to the hospital cafeteria for a sandwich, and get talking to an Indian volunteer called Harjinder. He looks about fifty, with wavy grey hair, very warm-faced and appealing. He’s a small-scale builder by trade, self-employed, and volunteers one day a week. He hopes that when he’s known and trusted he will get into ‘more interesting parts of the hospital, like Emergency’. He tells me he gets on well with ‘women of all ages’ because, when he and his Australian wife first got together, she said, ‘The only way to have a happy marriage is for you to have women friends. Talk with them, listen to them. That’s how you’ll learn what women are like, and what they need.’

  I pedal over to Kensington just after dark. As I roll along the lane towards the railway underpass, a young Asian woman on her way home from the station walks out of the tunnel towards me. After she passes there’s a stillness, a moment of silent freshness that feels like spring.

  Conversation with grandson. ‘You’ve got beautiful hair, Teddy. It’s really beautiful.’ ‘I know dat.’ ‘How do you know?’ Long pause. ‘I look in de mirror.’

  Reading Shostakovich, the savage distortions of the way he had to live and work under Stalin. A formidable voice—a voice one would dread to hear. It provokes shudders of fear, a sort of revulsion. But one reads on, ashamed to put it down. ‘I don’t want to deny that I went through a bad period. Perhaps the careful reader will understand that, or perhaps he’ll just skip all this rubbish and think, munching a chocolate, “Whatever made me read this book? It’s just upsetting me before bedtime.”’ At times he is weirdly funny. ‘Composing by tape recorder is a special taste, like licking rubber boots.’ A joke about a king who, hearing that a famously tedious person is travelling to see him, abdicates.

  My niece brings me her baby to mind for two hours. All serene until the final thirty minutes, when she gets thirsty. Because she is totally breastfed, nothing I offer is acceptable. Only her mother will do. She screams for twenty minutes without stopping. Her little dark head keeps swivelling on its neck, searching, searching. If I carry her into a different room she swings her gaze around it and bursts into fresh cries of despair.

  A dark sky, striped low down with bands of translucent pearly grey and the faintest, driest yellow. Bare plane tree branches disposed against it, as in a painting.

  On the couch I watch ep after ep of Mad Men. Don Draper goes to California and falls in with some Eurotrash layabouts who on the DVD case are described as ‘exciting new friends’ but are in fact shallow bores. Roger dumps his wife and goes off with a secretary who is vain about her looks and fancies herself as a poet: languorous sensuality and all the rest. I lie here, a batty old nanna, shouting at the screen: ‘Do NOT get into that car.’ ‘Oh, shut up, you stupid idiot.’ But when it’s over I set up the board and, in the spirit of Betty Draper, iron the pillowcases.

  At a conference I meet a Supreme Court Judge who tells me he lives in what is now known in real estate advertisements as ‘the Monkey Grip house’, where many important events of my life took place. He is renovating it. I ask him about the rooms. He lists them: ‘And there’s a room behind the big front one, that’s too small to be used for anything but a bathroom. My daughter used to have her desk in there.’

  Me: ‘You mean the one with the wooden shutter on the window?’

  Judge: ‘Yes.’

  Me: (in the low, falsely humble tone of the former hippie) ‘That used to be my bedroom.’

  After the summer of the terrible bushfires, the kids at the crèche became deeply interested in death. They got into their heads the belief that if a dead body burned, it would go on burning forever.

  Respected Radio National reporter: ‘I see myself as a worker bee at the coalface of journalism.’

  Tom and his brother Phil get mugged in Lygon Street, around midnight, by a man in a balaclava. Tom hands over his money and his phone, and turns to run away. That’s when the robber stabs him. Sticks a knife into his back, just below his left shoulderblade. Later, the robber makes calls to the girls whose numbers are in the phone.

  My friend’s ten-year-old son reports, with severe disapproval, that a boy in his grade has suddenly ‘got a girlfriend’.

  Father: ‘Oh, it’s probably pretty nice for him, though, isn’t it?’

  Son: ‘But Dad, everyone knows that grade-four relationships have got very little going for them, in terms of meaning.’

  In the café with Tony, I notice at a nearby table a young woman, barely out of her teens, and her remarkably plain boyfriend (in a suit). She has a perfect oval face, hazel eyes, and one of those exquisite European mouths that in my youth did not exist on Australian women: soft, fleshy, petal-like, almost circular. I admire her, dreamily. Then she leans forward to her boyfriend and says in a vain, nasal, flirtatious voice, ‘Do you think about me when you’re at work?�
�� Tony blanches and mutters, ‘Run, mate! Run now! Run a thousand miles!’

  Someone has published a biography of Muriel Spark. God, what a miserable piece of work she sounds, and yet whenever the reviewer quotes a line of her writing, the room lights up. Apparently her letters make no reference whatsoever to current events. So?

  My sister stays with me while she’s on jury duty in a three-day trial. I am mad with envy: I’ve never even been called. She is made foreperson: ‘You’re a musician,’ they say to her. ‘You’re used to standing up in front of strangers.’ She cries on the train home, tired and anxious. ‘There’s so much riding on it, but they don’t give us enough information.’ She is honourable and won’t tell me about the case, but speaks with astonishment of the laziness and stupidity of one of the jurors. Before they start to deliberate, the woman says, ‘Let’s make a pact. Let’s make a fast decision, so we can get out of here.’ The others look at her in silent contempt.

  ‘Did you lose your bracelet round here?’ This printed sign, sticky-taped to a lamppost near the station, gives me the same citizenly pleasure that I get from reading, in the information section of my Filofax, ‘Glove sizes are the same in every country.’

  At a local arts festival a man wants to stage an event called The Writers’ Pyre. Writers would line up at a large bonfire to burn a document—a diary, a letter, or perhaps a failed draft—having first read it out loud and explained why they were burning it. I am thrilled by this proposal. Will they invite me to take part?