After wishing me happy birthday Lenka went into the bathroom and undressed. There was something truly shocking about it – the monumentality of that shape, the act her body would soon have to perform to get out our daughter. Wiping away ‘33’ she picked up an eyeliner pencil and wrote the number ‘34’ onto our bathroom mirror – the number of weeks she’d been pregnant – before stepping into the shower.
I grabbed my phone and opened Google maps. A blue dot located me; when I zoomed out a little the dot began dilating and contracting and I could see the other three addresses: studio, birth place, art gallery. I looked at the four points relating to my life and work, evenly placed along the same line, before throwing my phone into the sheets. It was a coincidence of course, and yet it was hard to resist reading some kind of meaning into it all, particularly on my birthday.
37.
The Natural Birthing classes were held in the main part of the hospital, in a room with a dozen or so chairs facing a whiteboard, a pot plant, a silver-rimmed clock and a CD player sitting on a chair beside the teacher’s. On the board, around the teacher’s bullet points and illustrated suggestions for relaxing the body when giving birth, were tiny red, green and black marks that had escaped the wiper. They had me imagining other events held in the room, what might have been lessons in first aid or how to hold a baby.
Behind us, a pile of beanbags folded over each other like lumps and masses of flesh. The teacher had encouraged us to use them but the class was shy in their uptake, the first week seeing everyone sitting stiffly on their plastic chairs during the meditation, me with my head bobbing and saliva collecting at the front of my mouth as I entered into micro sleeps.
In the second week four out of eight people, including Lenka and me, chose to lie on a beanbag, my body having responded surprisingly well to the malleable object, the way I could mould the Styrofoam beans into a shape that supported my lower back. By the third week, everybody was lying on a beanbag.
The class ran for three hours with a short break, when the couples would mingle in the corridor around a trolley with a hot water urn, jars with in-stant coffee, teabags and biscuits and a basket with single serve pots of milk, before getting out the beanbags and listening to the ‘rainbow meditation’. The step by step guide to relaxing our minds and bodies started with the releasing of tension in the jaw and around the eyes. When our entire bodies were floppy, our minds calm, we would be encouraged to visualise and enter into the colours of a rainbow.
People would sometimes snigger during the recording but for me it was like being in heaven: every time I listened to the woman, whose accent I picked to be Californian, the date of the recording possibly from the 1970s, I became deeply relaxed before falling asleep. After receiving a copy of the meditation – which Lenka was supposed to practise with – I started listening to it before going to bed each night.
38.
It seemed fitting that so many of the items remaining on my father’s desk should relate to numbers. There was a death certificate in a plastic sheath, two calculators, a stack of credit cards with a rubber band holding them together, a hole-in-one golfing trophy, a Filofax, a list of bookmakers’ phone numbers written on the back of a creased business card, and a gold Rolex wrist-watch.
There were also two glass paperweights, a leather wallet and my father’s ashes. The ashes were housed in a container roughly the size of a brick with rounded edges, its speckled plastic the same blue as his oncology ward, the gold plaque at its centre much like that on the trophy. The container wasn’t big but every time I picked up the ashes to make space on the desk, I was surprised by how heavy they were.
After a lot of thought my mother decided that the ashes would be buried at the school where my father spent his later years teaching. The caretaker at the school, the same man who was working there when I was a kindergarten student, offered to dig a small hole and leave a shovel out for us.
That would take care of the ashes but what would my mother do with the other objects? During our weekly dinners, when I stayed with her between my days of teaching at the university, it was normal for this subject to come up. My mother was very efficient when it came to throwing away stuff, including my father’s personal possessions, but these last things signalled an impasse in the process of letting go. I would offer to put some of them in a box and walk them down to the rubbish bins but even though my mother seemed keen on this idea it never eventuated.
I slept in the room that had been my father’s study, on a bed directly beside his desk. Before getting undressed I would empty my pockets, placing my wallet, coins, keys and phone on the desk, sometimes comparing the worn edges of his wallet’s brown leather to the greenish tinge in mine, at other times reflecting on how things similar to these would come to represent me one day, their contents referred to for any necessary arrangements before eventually being disposed of.
The phone I use was previously my father’s. Now it was a bridge between our two piles. I adopted it when he was admitted to hospital, from that moment becoming his secretary and the presenter of bad news. A year on I was still getting the occasional call, most recently from one of his students who phoned from the US to tell my father about his start-up business, an online pet-minding service. I was standing in a line at the supermarket at the time, my foot nudging a basket of groceries along the floor as I introduced myself, then broke the news of his favourite teacher’s death. The phone went completely silent.
I began loading my groceries onto the conveyer belt, offering an apologetic smile to the woman scanning and carefully placing everything into two bags. I tapped the machine with my card, smiled again then walked out, the automatic doors opening and shutting behind me as the student described my father as ‘kind of a mentor’.
Before stepping off the kerb I waited for a car to reverse into its bay, my eyes finding the tree in our backyard, rising above everything like some kind of surveillance tower. As I walked the familiar two-minute route home – across the car park, down the alley running between houses, turning into our street and circling back towards our front door – I listened to the man tell me about the soon to be launched business. Placing my shopping on the table I said that my father would have been very pleased by this news, wishing him all the best as I collapsed into an armchair.
While getting undressed beside the desk in the spare room at my mother’s house, I would remember things when seeing the objects: the way my father marked the race guide, always using a blue felt-tip pen that seeped through to the other side of the page; the way he would shake his wrist to stop the watch from sliding up his arm; the social contract and thing of torture golf became for him; the way he had placed his bets, greeting the bookmaker like a long-lost friend before delivering his bet in code and ringing off without saying goodbye.
So as not to face the wall, I tended to lie on my right side in this bed, the desk and objects glimpsed beyond the pages of the book I was reading. After a couple of pages my eyelids became heavy, my mind flickering between sleep and the words on my page before dropping one last time. Perhaps due to the narrowness of the bed, or its being next to the wall, or the fact of my sleeping alone in it, I was consistently awoken by the thud of my book hitting the ground, my hand at that moment reaching blindly for the lamp switch, sometimes knocking the lamp or a glass of water over, before tidying up and repeating the ritual.
39.
In the council pick-up pile ahead of me I could see the way the wardrobe’s chipboard panels were swelling from having been in the rain. It was a sight that always filled me with sadness. On the ground below, a bunch of table legs wrapped with clear packing tape poked out, beside them a couple of buckets inside each other, cracked and covered in dried cement. It was only when I was thirty or so metres from the pile that I noticed the painted fibreboard panel, the delicacy and lightness in its surface forcing me to stop and pay attention.
I hadn’t allowed myself to do this over recent weeks, my life and walks to the studio having become e
xercises in discipline when it came to the urge to stop and inspect items of interest. I’d even stopped taking photos, feeling a need, as the weeks leading up to the birth ticked by, as those unborn feet rubbed and kicked against Lenka’s belly and my ear with increasing strength, to clear the decks.
I dragged the panel out into the sunshine and stood back; with a rush of excitement filling my body, I rocked it from side to side to see how heavy it was, lifted it up onto my forearm and walked the remaining three hundred metres to my studio with the weight of the large object resting against my head.
Besides a few boxes and bubble-wrapped paintings the studio was more or less empty, my days there spent researching cots and prams and baby seats, chatting in the corridor with artists from neighbouring studios, sweeping the floor and patching the walls, talking to Lenka on the phone, drinking tea and looking out the window. It felt good to be at the studio when it was empty and clean, the smell of paint and turpentine lingering while all the mess, all the back and forth, the success and failure and, above all else, uncertainty were gone.
I hammered a few nails around the sides and top to stop the panel from falling forwards, its roughly cut bottom sitting a bit unevenly against the floor.
In the paintwork I found an image of a headland separating some water and the sky, each passage a slightly different tone and temperature. This made the edges, where no paint had been applied to the fibreboard, seem like sand.
Finally there was the detail which seemed to balance everything and provide the only real clue to the past life of this object – the ghost of a hinge in the top right corner. The more I looked at the makeshift door the more epic and sublime it became. Its space was both clear and incalculable; I was standing on a shore, one moment looking out – beckoned by the distant land – the next moment feeling the pull and warmth of returning home.
A week later, Elise would be born.
Gazebo Books
PO Box 375
Summer Hill
New South Wales 2130
Australia
gazebobooks.com.au
First published 2019
Copyright © Patrick Hartigan 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Hartigan, Patrick, 1977-
Offcuts
First edition
ISBN 978 0 9876191 5 0
Cover and interior design by Mountains Brown Press
Offcuts Page 5