by Susan Duncan
Bob's eyes start to spin wildly. He sips more quickly. The great circumnavigation is starting to look wobbly. A woman with flyaway red hair and Cleopatra eye makeup rocks up.
'This is Annette,' Big Dave says happily.
'Signed on for the big adventure then?' I ask.
'Yep. Always wanted to go to Tassie on a boat. Looking forward to it. I'll fly home from Hobart, though. Don't want to go around the island and one way to Tassie is enough.'
Bob gets a hunted look on his face again. His forehead is tight, his mouth stretches into a thin line.
'What I reckon,' Big Dave says, 'is that we should all get together for dinner at home. Work out what each of us can do on the boat.'
'I can do food,' I offer.
'No way!' Big Dave says.
'What do you mean?' I splutter. Everyone lets me cook. Then I remember. He and Jackie came to dinner a few months ago. I gave Bob a container of marinated lamb chops to barbecue. Garlic, rosemary, preserved lemon. A hint of fresh oregano. When he lifted the lid it smelled like Greece. I thought he'd cook enough for four of us but he cooked every one of the thirty-two. Even I thought it was excessive.
'I can do the food,' Annette offers. 'I'll cook up a few meals and freeze them in packs. Easy.'
Big Dave, who loves a bargain and always buys everything really cheap, says he'll do the shopping for staples such as pasta, biscuits, bottles of water, cereal, tea and coffee.
'We'll organise tea!' Bob and I say simultaneously. For us, tea is lifeblood.
'No, no, I'll get teabags. I can get 'em cheap,' Big Dave insists.
'Dave,' I say, slipping my arm through his, 'if there's only teabags you'll never get Bob on board. Let me organise the tea, ok?'
'Jackie will get proper tea. It'll be fine.'
'Jackie will get jasmine tea. We like stuff that sticks to your ribs.' But I can feel it's an issue that could escalate. 'You get what you want,' I suggest, 'and we'll buy what we want. And we'll bring a proper teapot. Stainless steel so it won't break.'
We found a design we liked a couple of years ago. It edged out the china teapot overnight. Makes a stunning cuppa every time. He thought so much of this honest little pot that Bob bought one for all his kids – even his son who lives in Pittsburgh and doesn't drink tea.
'It's for us!' Bob confessed when I tackled him. 'For when we visit. We'll buy leaf tea at home and take it with us. That ratty floor dust they call tea in America isn't fit for humans.'
I laughed but I wondered when the thought of a crummy cuppa became intolerable. Is it age, or the pursuit of excellence?
Big Dave looks at Bob. His putty face beguiles and there's the beginning of a wheedle in his tone. 'Need at least another bloke on board for the Sydney to Hobart leg and I'd be happier with two more,' he says.
Bob is silent, takes more quick sips of his beer. The ugly tin ferry blasts its horn. Five minutes to departure. The blokes who are regular last-minute dashers land smooth and light. The Grey Ghost reverses from the pontoon, churning the waters. Bob shuffles. He knows he's snookered. He's going to be crew all the way. He has one last go, running a few names past Big Dave, who shakes his head.
'Wrong time of the year for their holidays,' Big Dave explains. 'Not long enough after Christmas.'
Bob drains his beer, blows into the empty bottle like it's a whistle. 'Ok, I guess I can find the time. I'll do the whole trip.'
Big Dave's face wrinkles with gratitude. He wraps a beefy arm around Bob's shoulders. They look like Jack and the Giant. Bob gazes at the ground, his mouth lifting into a smile.
***
Rain. Steady, soaking rain. We laugh and joke and the weariness of the endless dry fades away. The waterfall gushes as a grey film coats Pittwater for three gloriously muted days. Then blue sky returns and brings a heat so fetid it's as though someone's lit a campfire under the earth. Once again, the festive season will be like sitting on a tinderbox with a flaming match in your hand.
My Uncle Frank says they will have to plough all but six rows of peach trees into the ground at the orchard at Wangaratta. If there's another year without rain, even those rows will have to go. A lifetime of work bulldozed into mulch. No more ghostly armies of trees reaching towards the Victorian Alps in the light of a full moon.
'What then, Frank?'
'We'll wait for rain and plant new trees,' he says. 'Or maybe sell. Doctors are buying up land for wood duck money.' But his voice doesn't lift at the prospect of slippers and sleeping cosily late on icy winter mornings. It's the challenge of each season that makes him thrive and he knows it.
Once, on an assignment for The Australian Women's Weekly, I crossed the border from Peru into Bolivia and stood amongst the massive granite stones of an ancient temple from the Tiahuanaco civilisation of 400 BC. The culture collapsed after a seventy-year drought. Seventy years! And we are only entering year four.
This year, I'm under orders from my mother to lift the standard of Christmas decorations. 'No more of that minimalist rubbish,' she says. 'I'll make silver swans for the table, like the ones I made when I was nursing in Darwin during the war. You couldn't buy even a yard of tinsel so we nurses created Christmas out of nothing. And it was beautiful enough to make you cry.'
To please her (and to be honest, to make a childish point) I go overboard. Burrawang and cabbage palm fronds are cut and sprayed with gold paint. For two days, fumble-fingered and indelicate, I sit on the verandah threading gold sequins onto thin wire to wind around the fallen dead branch of a spotted gum I've spray-painted white. This is the designated Christmas tree. Yards of cut-price ribbon are tied into glittering bows and stuck everywhere from door handles to table legs. And still the house looks moderate. I cut and paint more burrawang fronds until every corner glows. It looks like Palm Sunday. Then the sitting room is festooned with gold beads. On bookshelves, around the edge of tables, draped around picture frames. By the time it's finished, it's blinding.
'Think this will make her happy?' I ask Bob at the end of a long day of draping and festooning.
'Christmas is about family. That's all she should care about.'
'You tell her that. I wouldn't dare.'
The day before Christmas, I walk in her front door to collect her for the boat ride across the water and then a few days with us.
'All ready?'
'Yes,' she says. Not moving.
'Got your pills? Got your toothbrush? Got a sweater in case it gets cold?'
'Yes.'
'Shall we go?'
'Yes.' But she doesn't attempt to get up.
'Is there something I've forgotten?' I ask.
'It would be nice if you gave me a hug,' she replies. Her expression is deliberately casual, as though her request is of no real consequence either way.
'You'll have to stand up. I can't lean over without bringing on a hot flush,' I say, making a joke to lessen the moment, as she so often does.
I wrap my arms around her. When did she get so small? When did the stocky little body with muscly legs and tennis player arms turn into empty flesh? My mother is old. I expect too much of her. Let this be a year of softening and compassion, I tell myself. I help her into the car with uncharacteristic tenderness, steady her in the boat and tuck her in the seat.
'There's a bit of a strong wind. Water might be a bit choppy,' I say. 'Think you'll be ok?'
'Of course I will.'
Her chair has swivelled a little, so she's sitting skew-whiff. When the boat rises before settling into a plane, she'll tip out sideways.
'Can you straighten up?'
She makes a feeble effort. I rotate the seat like she's a helpless child. I feel as though a piece of my heart is being chiselled away. Out on the open water, a swell rolls in from Broken Bay. We rock and roll and I hold her arm to steady her. It is all too much. Too hard.
'Sorry about this,' I say, turning to her and slowing the boat so we surf the waves instead of bouncing over them.
'Don't slow down,' she shouts, grabbing the
front of the boat to hold on tight. 'It's better than a roller-coaster!' Her face is ecstatic. We both laugh. I gun the motor, until she nearly falls out of her chair. For a second, we both forget age.
At the pontoon, I tie up alongside the big Tin Can. 'Can you step over two boats?' I ask.
'I can do anything!' she replies. And she steps easily from one to the other and then onto the pontoon where Bob is waiting with one hand out and the other holding the Tin Can steady. Does a hug make you stronger? Or does it make you try harder?
She climbs into The Pug, a grunty, beetle-orange truck that looks like a golf buggy on steroids, which we bought to replace the old ute because I never mastered driving up the hill frontwards and never even tried to reverse blind.
'Let's go, kid,' she says, grabbing a handle on the dashboard.
I fling her half-zipped suitcase and six plastic bags filled with God-knows-what into the back. Bob drives her up the hill and I dash up the steps. I want to be there when she walks inside the house and sees the decorations.
At the back door, she stops. 'Where's the wreath? Every door has to have a wreath at Christmas.'
'Wreaths remind me of Anzac Day and funerals,' I mutter darkly. 'Loathe 'em.'
I dump her stuff in her bedroom, waiting for her to notice the golden hallway. But there's not a word.
'How about a cuppa? Why don't you sit on the sofa and I'll bring you one?' I suggest.
She shuffles, playing the weak old lady again, tapping the floor in front of her with her foot as if she's blind. If I hadn't just seen her leap across two boats I might have fallen for it. It makes my heart harden. A lifetime of my mother's Sarah Bernhardt moments comes racing back.
'Hurry up,' I snap, opening the door. The room glitters.
Esther looks around. 'I thought you said you'd put up decorations,'
she says.
Bob sees I'm about to explode. He grabs my arm, steers me into the kitchen. Then he goes back to my mother, who is already lying on the couch. I am absolutely seething. She's done it to me again.
'Look around, Esther,' says Bob. 'Susan's spent days creating this.'
And she realises she's gone too far and back-pedals. She reaches in her handbag for her glasses, puts them on slowly and carefully. And her face fills with fake delight. 'Oh-h-h!' she says. 'Now I can see. I'm as blind as a bat. Oh yes, it's lovely.'
'Keep her away from me,' I whisper to Bob in the kitchen. 'I need a cool-off period.'
'You never learn, Susan,' he says. 'It's a game. If you play, your mother will always win. Don't play and you'll both be much happier.'
I think back. As a kid, I never tried hard enough unless I was pushed. My mother knew – and still knows – that about me. She learned how to force me to do my best and she's never lost the habit. Or perhaps I still need pushing.
18
THE DAYS SLITHER BY, fat and glossy. Boats. Weather. Seasons. Food and friends. A community that staggers here and there but never loses its heart. Family, too, of course. Although we lob up less and less at Bob's children's front doors, with grins and suitcases, the dog bed, and an empty picnic basket from the long drive. I am selfish with my time, I know I am. Or perhaps my energy doesn't stretch as lavishly as it once did.
Bob is my wider world, now. I am also aware that I sometimes spit out advice when it is least sought. If there is any real curse that comes with age, it is the sneaking certitude – misplaced, I hasten to add – of wisdom. Words tumble out of my mouth before I think to swallow them and I occasionally trample over good hearts unwittingly. Anyway, this world is so different from the one that first bent me into shape. What do I know? Not much. Well, I do know that.
Chip Chop is aging. She is nearly eight years old and the energetic independence of her youth has drifted into quiet steadfastness. Once she grabbed my trouser legs in her teeth and dragged me to the door each morning for her walk. Now she lies at my feet under the desk – or on a sheepskin on the daybed in the study – waiting patiently for when I turn to her and say: 'Shall we go? What do you think?' Then she instantly snaps out of somnolence. Oh, how I wish I could do that! Her tail thumps. She eyeballs me with what I firmly believe is complete knowledge and understanding. Let's go!
How I love this little dog who lay beside me in the thick days and nights of chemo, like a living hot water bottle. She stilled the shivers of illness, lightened the bleakness of moments that roared back unbidden from the past and threatened to flatten me. A touch, that's all it took. Silken white fur, the sigh of another living being close by. The deliciously earthy smell of a healthy body, a scent so wholesome it deadened the burning stench of treatment. Her sister, Vita, always at a distance. Even at night, she slept lightly curled at the foot of the bed, facing the doorway. Ready to bat back the demons, I liked to think in those demon-filled days.
When another winter is gone and I count, as I do every spring, these bonus years, I call in to see Jeanne for no other reason except that I have come to love her and she inspires me. When we're drinking tea on her porch, she reaches for a pamphlet at the far end of the table and shoves it across to me.
'You and Bob might want to come along to this. A fellow called John Pearman is talking about Hardy Wilson.'
I flick open the brochure for the Australian Garden History Society. Pearman's talk, titled 'The Road to Kurrajong', is on Sunday morning at the Hawkesbury Heritage Landscape Seminar at the Hawkesbury campus of the University of Western Sydney. There's a short biography on the back page where all the speakers are listed in alphabetical order. It tells me: 'John Pearman is a retired academic with an interest in the life and work of architect Hardy Wilson, a designer best known for "Eryldene" in Gordon. John will talk on Hardy Wilson's little known but eccentric plans for a new town at Kurrajong.'
I hesitate. Sunday. Bob and I treasure Sundays. Probably out of habit because, really, every day is a Sunday when you've leapt off the mouse wheel. But it's the day we fizzle around doing fiddly chores we've been putting off all week. If the weather is warm enough, we have a slow lunch on the verandah. Nothing fancy – a sandwich or maybe an omelet if the egg supply is overpowering – but I set the table properly, perhaps because Sunday lunch – always a roast – was a ritual of my childhood.
'It would be great if you came,' Jeanne adds. 'John is one of those eco-warriors who doesn't own a car and we need someone to pick him up and drive him to the campus. I'd hitch a lift with you, too.'
Could say no, but there's no real reason. And anyway, I can see by the barely suppressed grin on her face that she knows she's got me.
'Ok, I'll be there. Bob might not come, though.'
'Of course I'll come,' he says, later that night. 'Like to hear what he's got to say.'
***
'How you doing? Ready to rock and roll?' I ask when Jeanne opens her door (only a crack so the cats don't escape) a few days later. She looks frazzled and fraught.
'I feel like I'm running a soup kitchen,' she mutters. 'There's the cats, the brush turkeys, the kookaburras, the pigeons, the finches and Horace, the peacock, who's more demanding than them all. And now a bloody great goanna turns up every day, bold as anything, like he's waiting for me to cook him a chicken. And Lilly's missing,' she replies, her voice full of anxiety. She clutches her bag, her keys, a jacket. Closes and locks the door behind her.
'She'll be fine, Jeanne. Cats are tough.'
'Not Lilly.'
Bob jumps out of the front seat to make room for Jeanne but she stops him. 'I love being driven. It's luxury. And it's always more comfortable in the back.' She pushes him out of the way and plants her backside down firmly, holding a printout of a map.
'Thought there'd be more peace and quiet in the back,' Bob mutters.
'We're going towards St Ives,' she instructs. Bob reaches for the street directory.
'No, no, I've got a map,' Jeanne says, waving an internet printout behind his head. But Bob asks for the address anyway, and looks it up. 'He who trusts busts,' he often says.
<
br /> John Pearman's house, Moonview, is a concrete bunker at the end of a cul-de-sac that backs onto a nature reserve. Gum trees soar above a roof that – impossibly – appears to be growing grass. It is an alien amongst the decorative redbrick classics. Every angle is sharp and straight and the house is so colourless, it fades into the monochrome landscape of the Australian bush. At first glance, it could be a small factory in the middle of nowhere.
Jeanne gets out and tramps down a pathway overhung by blady grass, and disappears around a corner. In a few moments, a tall, thin man with a tweed cap and a long sallow face follows her back to the car. Jeanne introduces us. He nods and touches the peak of his cap.
'Hello. It's very kind of you to take the trouble to come and get me,' he says in a rich, formal voice. Or perhaps he is so accustomed to lecturing, the casual lightness of everyday conversation is foreign to him.
It turns out that Pearman had a twenty-year friendship with Professor Waterhouse, Hardy Wilson's closest friend.
'How did you meet the professor?' Bob asks.
'When I was twenty-one years old I was asked to give a lecture on the diseases of camellias to the Camellia Society,' he explains as we drive along. 'After my talk, Gowrie's wife, Janet, asked me to morning tea at Eryldene. Gowrie was an expert on camellias. A fascinating man, charming, amusing, erudite. He spoke half a dozen languages and interviewed Mussolini in Italian in the thirties. Later he interviewed Hitler in German.'
'He must have been much older than you,' Jeanne says.
'Yes, well there may have been a fifty-year age gap but we were kindred spirits from the moment we met. Often, he asked me to drive with him around the countryside to look at houses designed by Wilson. That's how I became interested in Wilson's work.'
Twice a week, if he could manage it, Pearman helped the aging professor water more than one thousand camellias growing in tubs in the garden.
'It gave us a lot of time to talk,' he says, smiling.
Pearman is a great raconteur who weaves colour and atmosphere into his words. Gossip, too. The kind that goes on desultorily between people and only later comes back as glorious little insights.