memories – the chook house

February 21, 2024

Rottnest 2024

It is the last day of a two week stay.

This is a luxury that few can/do indulge in. We have seen the chalets next to us empty over and over again; the fresh sheets deposited, the cleaners come in, play loud music and bang around indoors. Slam doors. Clean?

Most people seem to only have a few days, and the lucky ones an entire week but we have 14 impossible days. Fourteen! So long, that when the holiday begins there is no counting down. This really does make the unwinding easy.

It is hot, sure here, but worse on the mainland. A plume of heavy smoke rises from the mainland then drifts and fades across the horizon, and a bush fire is presumed. It is a long way away. Fire is frequent. Perth is a tinder box. No longer is it a surprise to hear the radio give a warning to “leave now or be prepared to defend your home”. “It is no longer safe to leave, choose a room with two exits and running water.” Good grief.

Our tenant in Fremantle has a broken air-conditioner. No air conditioner at Longreach and fans with cut off arms that blow mere wisps of warm air. But we have the sea a few metres from our door. From here organising a new Daikin is a challenge. G has Telstra, check the reviews. In this heat the quotes go through the roof. Ten grand! “It’s brutal” writes the tenant:, the heat, even in Freo. We can plonk ourselves in when the heat overtakes us. We can get a fancy Campari drink with a slice of orange and lots of ice and carry it to the beach and sit in the water whilst wearing prescription sunnies and a hat!

If Rottnest were to burn I imagine sitting here in the safety of the blue water, delivered here swiftly through the muscles of others, safe all the same. Different if a plane were to go down I sometimes think. Would I be abandoned by the rush of people to get away from the burning craft and down the inflatable slide. I am amused and thankful the way airline staff instruct me that in an emergency they will assist me, but really? I might succumb. I am ready to go down with the plane.

The water has been clear and the reeds wave underneath as I swim. Languid. Me in slow motion. Mike says it is good swim with me. Slow. No pressure. Sometimes there are silver fish near the surface and bigger blotchy well-disguised ones in the seagrass. The snorkelers know their names. There are rays too. The bird watchers spot a black shoulder kite and a kingfisher.

Something happens around middle age when men (and some women, although decidedly less I think) become fascinated by birds of the feathered kind; seeing them, hearing them, pointing them out, offering the binoculars to the less fascinated. There are binoculars that you can get that tell you the name of the bird you are looking at. Does that spoil the not knowing? There is an app that can identify them by the sound they make. It confuses the hell out of the birds too as they hear some other non existent bird chirping back at them. There is an app that you can point to the stars in the night sky and be told what is the star you are looking at. Jupiter! There is an app that tells you what the ship sliding across the horizon is called and where’s its home port and what cargo it carries. (We keep track of the jilted sheep carrier that has drifted back and forth for over a month now while no one with authority knows what should be done. And the sheep are just fine, far away enough from shore not to pique any nostrils.)There’s an app that Jane uses to teach herself Spanish (it dings and pings) and a word game that Liz plays. G has several to work through each morning and the list is growing

G has a manuscript to read. I have read mine. But first he has worldle and wordle and quordle and squaredle and…

My phone is only receiving SOS and hence I have no apps. App-less. This is a welcomed unburdening. At least I will know about The Fire if it hits.

A misty rain has fallen on the last day and I wonder if the chalk has been wiped from the road. “Henry and Charlie Stop” with a solid line and repeated a few hundred metres further on. Is this a parent’s instruction to small children to not go further or is this part of a game, a race between small boys that marks a beginning and an end? Is this a worried mother who does not realise that there is no need for barriers and rules at Rottnest. As long as the kid can swim.

Tourists get unbearably close to the quokkas. So close they are almost kissing the comatosed marsupial, down on their hands and knees with their phone in the face of the small unmoving critter. We have Federer to blame for this phenomenon. Despite the signage there is still petting and poking, allowing sips of water from takeaway cups, bowls put out beside chalets.

G hates a cabana. He especially hates the blue and white stripes. An almost identical structure, but of a solid colour does not get the same derision as the blue and white cabana.

A bird has pooed on our bedsheet. It must have made its way through the open window to see what goodies could be had. It is a big poo with sand in it and we presume it is a seagull till the raven shows itself as a thief on other persons balconies. Smart not scared, ballsy birds. King of birds. Argh Argh.

On the shore line, a baby seagull, although as big as his mother, beeps continuously at the nurturing bird. It follows and squeaks at her. It bothers her about her bill. She moves her head away and sometimes steps away from him but the baby is always there, right behind or beside her. Clamped on. Mum, Mum. Sometimes she flies off and then the baby is immediately silent as if the cry would tell other birds he was vulnerable and alone. He is only annoying and a cry baby when his mother is right there. Sound familiar?

There was a time when I could climb the hills with the power of my own shoulders but now like others I have lithium. All sorts zoom by on all sorts of powered mobiles and I wonder when as a species we will give up legs entirely. G makes the effort still and despite a back pack the weight of a coke drinking toddler he is determined to make every hill, not rising from the saddle, like Lance’s great rival. No one recalls his name.

Mother to small school age girls at the stairs that lead to the beach:

“Look where you are?”

“Your friends are back in Perth on the oval, the oval!”

“You are by the ocean!”

She pleads with them not to splash her, she’s exhausted.

She gets up from a cross-legged position effortlessly, no hands.

This is one of the things I am looking for. How easily do people get up and down from the sand? Do you have to roll over onto your hands and knees and push up? Do you ask your partner to give you their outstretched hand? This skill might save you from an old person’s home. Practice now. Get up off the floor and keep doing it. Whatever way you can. On your own.

Instead the older people stand on the beach. They contemplate getting down. You can see it cross their mind. But then wonder if they will ever get up again. It is along way down and even a longer way up. Instead stand around for a short while, make like you want to dry off, that you don’t like the sand, then go back to the chalet. Or buy a chair.

Small child to other small child on balcony:

“Josh, if there is a fire on the balcony, what would you rather? Burn or Jump off?”

For two days I have pain. So much pain that I could hardly roll over in the bed. I lay there and wondered if I should go home early. But that would mean busting in on J and his lemon tart party. G is at the golf course while the fog still hangs across the greens. Why be here in pain? Like the school children. Look where you are. If you can rise from the bed? Can you see the ocean from the bed? A swim helps, stretches, pain killers. Swimming. The ocean the great healer. Each stroke. A balm for more than muscle.

We talk about swimming. Always how? How to continuously stay afloat without pain, with breath, without exhaustion, with ease. Imagine swimming the Rotto Swim? He has filmed me. Really am I that slow? Did you take it in slow motion? No. I film G and later we look at the film. It is a blurred pink thumb of mine across the lens. His stroke is there, somewhere, behind my thumb. Ha. We laugh. Really laugh, deep down in the belly. That is good for your swimming. Laughing.

Tonight the sea breeze is in. We haven’t had it for days and mostly the bay has been a hazy blue and purple. It has been slick and smooth. Cataract blue. There is the slap of the waves on the shore line and the incessant thwack of flyscreen doors that cannot close properly. We have new neighbours and their children freely roam the beach and paddle out to a boat a father has motored over in. There was some early tension over the getting of the key and the usual palaver over credentials not sighted but all is recovered now, tinnies of Swan draught collect about the legs of the chairs. The oyster catcher is the only lone creature on the beach; his red bill deftly pokes the sand as he carefully places one foot down followed by the other.

May 25, 2019

Story #1

for Jane

1987. It’s the year when Scott and Charlene get married on Neighbours. The year of the Hoddle street massacre. Bob Hawke is Prime minister and QLD premier Bjelke Peterson is losing his grip on the state. In November MacGyver is to be released on Channel 7. It is the start of summer. We listen to the Bangles Walk like an Egyptian. It is the start of the long dry.

I have just completed a University degree that has consumed my life and I am about to start a career. I imagine mud and striding through fields. I imagine pulling calves in khaki coveralls and scrapping cow dung from the soles of my boots. I dream of soaking in a tub when muscles are sore from physical work. This will be the fulfilment of a childhood dream.

Life changes in an instant. How is it that one back bone can be so brittle and another allow the cord to bungee? Who chooses which spinal cord you have and which way it will bend? Is it soft like liquorice or able to fracture into shards like candy?

Loss of sensation is instantaneous. The swiftness of it disallows any savouring. Round and round the garden like a teddy bear. A mother’s finger tip makes spirals on the sole of chubby foot. One step, two step, tickle you under there. The touch creeps up the calf to beneath the knee. Movement and sensation here one minute. Gone, when the tin can strikes ancient wood. Such a banal way to lose what you have taken for granted since birth.

Moments before shoe-less feet had etched soles on squeaky sand by an ocean. The surf had thrown my body like a buoy and my heart had surged as my feet had lost contact with the sea floor. A bear of a man had surfed a long board and we had all traipsed sand into the little alfoil car. How long can skin recall the sensation of toes curling in yellow beach sand? Only the night before feet had found the cool patch on the sheets, and then cradled each other, before sleep. How long can a mind hold on to what is no longer possible?

An anatomy teacher visits the hospital and brings with him a bone. It is perfectly sculpted, as if it is made from polished pearl. He says it might be nice to hold, and he is right. It is snug in my palm. My fingers trace the valley of the bone, lie gloved by the trochlear groove. The fact that it is the talus of a horse, an animal I will never treat nor sit astride again, brings tears I let fall, after he has gone. I picture myself running a confident palm down the side of a mare’s leg and cupping her hoof. I feel the warmth from her nostrils as she turns to inspect the back of my neck with a snort. I smell the pasture on her breath.

A country vet, across the continent, is the first to take me on. He has no sense of what I can and can’t do and that is likely a blessing. He is the type to give someone a go because someone he trusted has said I can do it, and that someone is Jane. A blonde bob, brown eyes, strong thighs and tanned muscled arms. She has a kind of bolshie. She believes in me. She, too, has no idea. We are three people, inexperienced in paraplegia, and how that transects with being a veterinarian. We know little of what it means to a life either. When I arrive she collects me from the airport and drives me to her home, where she carries me, like a new bride, into the house and then leaves me for the weekend trapped hopelessly by the three meagre steps to the outside.

Before heading across the country a surgery teacher says I should come in and do a bitch spay in the Uni lab – just to check I can. After scrubbing up, betadine dripping from my elbows, I sit at the sink unable to move forward – someone will need to propel me from here. We discover some things are more difficult seated. The surgery table is hard to get under and besides it won’t go low enough. It can never go lower than my lap. I do surgery with my elbows out, like an ill-mannered child seated at the big persons’ table. It is the beginning of becoming a dependant again, in the eyes of others. My chest feels perilously close to the incision and I am, maybe, leaning and breathing into the surgery site more than someone would standing. But doing it is all we are checking for here. It can be done, and so it will. Rick says I can.

In the country the surgery table is difficult to get under too, with its large circular base – so I do my surgeries with the animals as close to sliding over the edge as possible, legs draped across the side, like shirt sleeves off an ironing board. Sometimes the single nurse and I are not able to move a heavy patient, so we time the surgery with the approach of the postman, and ask him to assist with the transfer. I am doing operations partially blind, as an incision in a big dog’s belly is level with my chest. But having done it no other way means I judge it is no harder than it should be. It is just what it is.

Jane and I are both new graduates, but she has six months of veterinary experience on me. I have six months experience of paraplegia and the internal walls of a spinal unit. I have learnt a lot about ceilings and how interesting they can be. I have counted the perforations in ceiling tiles and watched spiders spin webs. I have stared at nothing till nothing becomes something and then turns to nothing again. From a blue cloudless sky I have made poems on hue. From overheard conversations and inhaled smells I have constructed lives. I look differently at the small things and hear whole novels when only a word was whispered.

As vets, Jane and I are learning together, and she is my teacher. We both make mistakes – we are often alone, making them without knowing we are making them. Only later do they slip out from their mirage and reveal themselves – late at night mostly, alone and in a single bed. Sometimes we see the error before it is too late, and other times we are saved by the experience of the boss or the equally experienced vet nurse, Edna. Returning from lunch, I see my boss is doing the pyometra surgery I had placed on a drip without diagnosing.

At the end of a day I wheel the hundred yards home to my single bedroom flat on the same street as the clinic. Often I am swooped by magpies who distrust me, like they do stone throwing children. The flat has orange carpet tiles, the type to prickle beneath a bare foot. I toast bread under the grill and spread it thickly with peanut paste. On call, I answer queries about farm animals I have no experience of, other than as an undergraduate, and offer a disgruntled farmer advice to get him through till morning. I flip through Blood and Henderson for a respectable answer. I watch one-day-cricket. I wheel to the laundromat with a bag of washing on my lap. Weekly I slide across the red vinyl bench seat of the EH and drive along the Murray to the big town, The Smiths wailing from the tape cassette. Girlfriend in a coma. I buy myself a cappuccino and a piece of over-iced carrot cake.

The red-headed lad, who has never had a girlfriend, is consigned to me by Jane. We go to a Divinyls gig in a nearby town. He secures me a space at the side of the stage so I can see Chrissie Amphlett astride and thrusting her pelvis into her microphone stand. He stands just behind me and places a hand on the chair like it is any other bit of furniture. But it is not a chair. It is becoming part of me and I will him to unhand it. I view the crowd. I hate that people are able to dance, to crush up against each other and feel another person’s moving hips, sweating against them.

I stay in the country for nine months till the pain of the metal in my spine becomes too much. It wants out. I return west to my port town to have it removed, as the bone has repaired itself to a gnarly fist, and the metal is no longer functional. Who knows what the cord within the bone is doing. Perhaps it has hunkered down in its den of bone and sleeps on. I keep the shiny stainless steel nuts and screws, like spare buttons, in a cracked porcelain cup.

I apply for a job at the Uni I studied at, thinking that equal opportunity means what it says. The job is the pathology internship and will require that I post mortem animals of all sorts. Three middle aged men, tweed jackets with patches on their elbows, invite me in to see if I can complete a post mortem, unaided. They walk away and leave me with the corpse of a horse, stiff on the slab. I feel so small. I cannot physically complete the task and I can feel the tears, the heat in my face, the crack in my voice. They stand watching, rocking back and forth on the balls of their feet, waiting till I withdraw my application. They say it is better you see for yourself that you can’t do it.

1992. Apartheid is ending in South Africa. Charles and Diana are separating. Native title is recognised in Australia and Paul Keating is Prime Minister.

Alone, I am listening to Nirvana’s NeverMind. I decide I will learn to walk with callipers, as it is something that can be done. It is hard, takes physical and emotional strength, to keep trying to do it, day after day. I rupture all the ligaments in my ankle learning to fall. The tarsal bones slip over each other, like pebbles in a sock. I practice for six months with a young, enthused dark-haired physio and in the end can make about fifty metres. I see that walking with callipers is not walking. It is not freedom. It is lumbering and more disabling even than the wheelchair. Being upright is not giving me anything back. It is precarious and pointless, and I give it away.

In a house with polished jarrah boards and freshly painted white walls Smells Like Teen Spirit is loud and I can sway my upper body, with my arms above my head and with my eyes closed, I am dancing, as I was before. My chair is spinning, silent and fast leaving my hands free. It can dance. It can take me back there, where the memories still synapse.

2019. From my kitchen window I view the neighbour’s child swinging, upside down on the stair rails that lead to the oval. Her legs and feet monkey the hand rail. Her hair gravitates to the earth. A smaller brother kicks his footy into the canopy of a tree and the flimsy branches nestle the ball. She runs over and leaps towards the branch, grabbing it and swinging on the bough. Her weight causes the ball to dislodge and fall to the ground. They run off.

March 6, 2017

Rottnest 2017

It’s all about the silence. Although it isn’t silent when you listen. There is the slap of the sea – constant, background. There is the screech of children. Sometimes a meltdown from the chalet behind. And always the bang of screen doors. There is the latch on the gate, the diesel hum of boat motors, the flip flop of thongs on bitumen. There is the crash of glass bottles entering the recycling bins, the whistle of a boatie to the landlubbers on shore. A father chastises a son for talking back and a mother attempts to smear sunscreen on a wriggling, moaning child. But there are only a few cars. There is a rubbish truck. There are no horns or sirens. There are bicycle bells. There are few telephones ringing, except for those timing the cooking of the pasta.

Rottnest.

The Cairns – they come every second year. They wish for yearly. They are Sydney-siders. Big city people, but lovers of the simplicity of Rottnest. We will always have Rottnest. Rottnest has seen new partners, seen pregnancies and babies added. Beds have been upgraded with bed runners and better mattresses. New tiles, new lights (still too bright), a change in couches (too hard) and outdoor balcony seating. We no longer can move a couch from the chalet onto the balcony, so instead order a foldaway bed and install it out there. The Cairns have a three-bedder and so an expanse of balcony and extra large kitchen and fridge. The three-bedder is looking very good. Another Perth mother arrives with a lanky girl child. She makes wonderful curry and goes to Mass. She talks about her street where she has moved from the wealthy to the poor side, since splitting with her husband, and how wonderfully refreshing the poor side is. They have a gifting shelf in their laneway where people exchange all manner of books and knick knacks. Since separating she has brought back inside a beloved Jarrah table, a family treasure, which was relegated to life on the porch in the home she shared with her husband. A teenager has not come this year – but two small boys are now two older boys, only inches apart. Still boys. Still lovers of cricket and riding their bikes.

Day One Monte stacks it in front of the Visitor centre and requires fixomull to a scraped knee. His diabetes is no longer new. His pump gives him and his parents freedom from needles, but still requires the input of calculations and knowledge of what has been eaten and of how much carbohydrate it contains. It is second nature to Monte to count everything that goes into his mouth. Every chip, every BBQ Shape. “26 Shapes Mumma.” He has a record low of 1.8 one day on the balcony, appearing to the adults unlike himself, a callow meek Monte declares, “I am Low.” Low he is. He is told to sit. Troy gets juice from the fridge and two glasses are downed. In minutes he is back to over 6. We, the diabetes rookies, are nervous and ill-equipped. The parents and the child have it all down pat. No one panics. Juice and jubes and the blood glucose is back on track.

Monte, diabetes or not, is determined to do well. He is competitive with everything. He aims to be the best. He is sore at losing and when things don’t appear fair. He is like a wind-up toy with an Ever Ready battery. He keeps going despite being red-faced and hot. Sometimes his face folds and he hides himself under a Turkish towel on the beach. Sometimes he won’t swim. “Chop Chop young son,” is called to Troy as he stand up paddle boards towards the shore, after-all another man is required on the cricket pitch.

Raff is a harder nut to crack. Brilliant light blue eyes and wry smile. Tells it like it is. He says he is bored, but also that he is having the best time. He rejects the application of sunscreen or the wearing of a hat. He plays cricket but won’t watch it on the telly. He loves school and can’t wait for the holidays to end so he can go back. Both boys love Jasper and he plays with them well, with a patience he does not have for his parents. On the last night they play a game where they must search for each other while trying to get home to the base without being caught. Raff: “The most intense game ever.”

Nostalgic treat – original Tim Tams and Neapolitan Ice-cream.

Middle aged couple pre dinner and lunch time cocktail – Aperol Spritz.

Typical discussion – ailments, need to reduce alcohol consumption, difficulty with reducing alcohol consumption, lack of interest and desire in decreasing alcohol consumption, how lack of alcohol just makes them cranky.

Milly’s laugh – “howabouthoseeagles”

Troy’s story – Snoopy (said with a lisp) and Mr Michaels.

My lip is burnt and it makes me touch it. I worry it with my front teeth.

Like the teenagers. They too have burnt lips. Mothers give them cream, similar to what used to be applied to nappy rash. We swim at Little Parakeet and are joined by other old friends. They too chaperone teenagers. We reminisce briefly at what Rotto was like when our children were babies. When at nighttime they slept and we barbecued attached to baby monitors. They have a teen girl who has taken to “Fuck you” and giving them the finger. We have a sullen, string bean boy. More broody and somber. Disdainful of questions. Irked by any attempt of mine at humour or dance. Even if it will only be seen by him. My mere swaying with the beat can send him into a frenzy of STOP MUM. Strangely it only makes me want to dance more.

So. Two middle-aged couples on the beach while our teens roam about the beach, without energy, without vim. Sapped. Arms flop about their bodies like lifeless limbs. A French couple squabbles with a small boy having a tantrum on the sand. An open hand strikes the boy. Leave him be, we all think. It is easy to parent from afar, when you are not in the thick of it. Perspective is clear, a way forward, so easy to see. But when you are amongst it, not so much. What should you do when they unleash the “fuck you” we ask, but never seem to get an answer. Perhaps they too, don’t know. I guess we will muddle through, like we have with all the previous parenting woes, only to find out later that, despite trying our best, there was indeed a less painful way. Later we joke we don’t know which we would prefer – the fuck you or the silent moping. They tell the story of threatening to remove teen girl’s bedroom door if it was slammed one more time. Slammed hard. Makita comes out. Door hinges unscrewed. Later, on opening their own bedroom door it nearly falls off as teen girl has loosened its screws with a Stanley knife. Touché, thinks Dad. A valid response to authority.

Then comes Australia day.

I love Australia, but not when it’s shoved in my face. I don’t like balconies festooned with triangles of Australian flags. I don’t like boats with massive billowing flags fit for a parliamentary flagpole. Boats anchor – A Salt Weapon, Reel Xtreme. I don’t like Aussie Crawl played over and over again, or Men at Work, whilst middle-aged men in Australian flag hats and boardies sit with a beer and sing the chorus and play air drums. Later said man will wander from the beach to the shops and take a piss on the brick stairs between the chalets. Choice. When two blondes, fresh from their shower, with large glasses of white wine pass under our balcony to join the Men at Work boat, I ask politely if they might relay the message to turn their music down. The glare – long and hard eyed, the clenching of their teeth somewhere behind their closed lips, the lack of a verbal response, the cackle when they reach their friends, their pointing me out as “that lady on the balcony” was all a tacit agreement that we do no longer (if we ever did) like each other. It makes me think of dogs and their mostly excellent reading of each other’s body language. As humans – we think we rely on verbal cues – but we are just as much influenced by a look, a small movement of the lip or eyebrow. So in dog language we gave each other the “look away.” Don’t mess with me.

On the mainland it is sweltering. A seaplane, supposed to be part of the sky show ahead of the fireworks, turns without enough speed for a hot windless day, a wing dips, a motor stalls, and it plunges like a poorly made paper plane, into the river, killing pilot and passenger. We think of Big Steve (back in the US) and of his job sorting out the cause of any similar “fatal.” G says he would hate the way a passenger died, because of a pilot’s inexperience.

The sky did its thing tonight. After a hot day the storm clouds have arrived and made a sunset of rose and mauve. The wind, which was playing havoc with the Big Bash TV reception, decided to fade and allow some uninterrupted viewing. It must be hot on the mainland. Cricketers are sweating. The distant lighthouse stood solid and beige while the sky all around changed and morphed. A big white voluminous cloud puffed itself up and all around it other darker clouds swirled and spread. The sea turned from soft mohair blue to beaten pewter. My raised stinger welt begins to itch. The fan ticks.

I dream that I am entering a lift as someone with a thin whippet style dog is exiting. Some how there is a cavernous gap between the landing and the lift and of course, as it always is in dreamland, this is not abnormal or a surprise. What is shocking is that as the man leaps across the dark and endless gap but the dog does not. He, then at one side and the dog still in the lift, urges the skinny thing to jump across to him and as it does so he pulls on its leash and its head slips loosely from the collar and the flimsy dog disappears into the dark. A thump is heard as it hits the bottom and then nothing. It is somehow my fault, in my heart, that this dog was afraid to jump, failed to jump, didn’t leave with the man. I wake up, annoyed and made itchy by the stinger welt across my chest. I itch it. Stop. Itch some more. Think of John Turturro in The Night Of.. and wish for a pointed knitting needle. Itch some more.

April 30, 2013

Red Hen

Jasper is cleaning out his bedroom. He is decluttering. He is exhuming the detritus of a ten-year old because soon he will be eleven and eleven-year olds have moved on from Little Golden Books, and Dr Seuss.

Anything you don’t want just put in a pile because I will go through it, is my plea.

Because to me books are treasures. They are more than words on paper. Of course. A story, a sentence. It worms inside, to the heart of you. There are books that he loved, and then there are books that I loved, and hence read endlessly to a toddler who cared little about what was being told as long as he could turn the pages.

There is something special about a loved book – one you’ve read out loud to a child so many times that its words have worn a track through your brain. Like a single lane walking path through a wooded forest. Grass woven flat, as hard as concrete. Pine needles beneath your feet. Your mouth shapes the words before your eyes have read them. The pictures are so familiar. Like old photographs etched in your memory. The smell of a winter stew cooking as the sun goes down. The rumbling sound of a Kombi pulling into the drive. The tilt and flow of language.

Will you help me plant this grain of wheat?

Not I! said the duck…

Then I will plant it myself, said the Little Red Hen. And she did.

The industriousness of the Little Red Hen was always remarked upon. All that planting, reaping, carrying, turning flour into dough and baking was done without any help from the duck, the cat, the goose or the pig.

The selfishness of the “Not I’s” saw that they ended up with no bread. How right things were in the world of the Golden Book.

So I keep the Golden Book. First published 1954. I keep it for myself. Maybe one day I will read it to another small child. Maybe one day Jasper will unearth it in my old possessions and find himself on the forest path.

Cleaning out my parents house I find similar kept treasures from my childhood. Dolls’ clothes. Hand made babies’ dresses. Christmas decorations made in kindergarten from toilet rolls and cotton wool balls. My mother kept a book I had loved as a child. It was tucked away in camphor and would not have been looked at for years. Probably it had been forgotten about it many years previously. But there would have been a time when she held it over the garbage bag for Good Sammies and hesitated before dropping it in. She would have looked through it and remembered my delight in it. It would have brought a smile to her face. She had kept it as I am keeping the Little Red Hen now. It was so familiar when I found it, like I had looked at it only the day before, but it had not been seen or thought of for forty years. I turned the pages and found the favourite picture I had puzzled over. It was the story of a princess, but the pictures were not drawings, but photographs of dolls dressed in real fabric and with doll house sets. In one picture they sat at a table eating a royal meal and the food in the pictures must have been life-sized, since on a plate is a single pea that seems the size of an apple for the princess. This wrongness appealed to me. Everything else miniature and perfect, but the food. And I would wonder at the people who made the book. Did they run out of ideas? How did they imagine the princess would eat such a pea? What would an apple-sized pea taste like? How would I make the princess a meal?

With Jasper’s mountains of work and drawing there is always the question of what to throw away and what to keep. How many pages of scribbling can you really want? For a whole term at Montessori Jasper would bring home cardboard boxes glued together into towers and present them as if they were sculptures. We kept none. I squirrelled away a favourite blanket, a pair of booties, his wrist band from the hospital where he was delivered. I have not kept teeth or hair. And yet the book feels more powerful than some of these other treasured things because I can hear its magical song. Reading it aloud is a meditation back to mothering a toddler. When reading aloud at the end of the day signalled the respite that would soon be yours when he was in bed. There is a sighing to the reading of the story. It is short. It is complete. The tale needs no explanation. The little Red Hen; she had no help, she did it herself.

January 12, 2013

Rottnest 2012

Every year we go to Rottnest in November. It is our family tradition. We have done it since Jasper was in utero and before he was even thought of. In those days we had an imaginary child called Pee Wee. Somehow she skipped childhood and we never envisioned her at Rottnest. She was a gamine who grew up to be a singer in a jazz band and who lived a groovy loft on Manhattan. In our musings we were aging grey-headed parents who visited her there. But that’s another story. Instead we got a blue-eyed boy, who, like the real boy he is, comes with us on holiday, a forty minute ferry ride from home.

Arriving at Rottnest is like going home. You have stepped out of your Fremantle cottage to shortly enter your more primitive but better abode. This home has no messy desk, no laundry, no bills and, most of the time, no telephone coverage.

So much of every part of the holiday is soaked in familiarity. Do you remember the year I nearly fell off my chair onto the Dugite? What about the time Vinnie cracked his helmet smashing into the wall as he stacked his bike? And when Jasper caught his finger in the flywire door? Each year melds with the former so it can no longer be recalled what year it was and who was there. That time we stayed in the back row, with Troy and Jo and the boys were babies. Remember when we showed the Nordic Anja the flickering of the orbiting satellites. She had never seen a sky so black, so unaffected by city light. There is the routine of arriving at the ferry terminal early enough for someone to unload the plastic containers full of belongings and beach gear and still have time enough to drive home again and return riding their push bike, into the head wind, with the semis roaring by. This year Jasper is old enough to do the bike run too.

There must be enough time to sweet talk the ferry men into the delivery of the-above-allowable-safe-lifting-weight beach wheelchair in its bag. They have not denied me thus far.

Once arrived at the island there is the picking up of the key from the accommodation office. Invariably the unit is not ready, but they have taken to texting you when it is, and so we just go to the bakery to wait. Here donuts are bought. Not because they are especially good. It’s just what we do. Energy for the hill. Is the peacock that frightened Jasper as a baby still alive doing its dance? The seagulls that live around the settlement are the most brazen and will snatch a chip right out of your hand just as you are about to put it in your mouth. But this year I have learnt that seagulls mate for life, and some how knowing this makes me feel kinder towards them. Somehow I notice that they are in pairs when I have never seen this before. Before I thought of them as flying rats. Me; older, softer.

There is the ascent to climb on the way to the Longreach. The kids race off, well ahead on their geared bikes. No one is pushing a pram, or hauling a trolley with little ones. The way is known to the boys. Past the Police station, the nursing post, the oval, the Basin. This year I am walking alone to the chalet. I have a heavy load of extras under the chair and a bag on my lap. But it is not super hot and who is in a hurry anyway. The odd moth-balled quokka is about attracting the odd tourist who squats in front with a camera. To the boys the sight of a quokka is no more interesting than that of a seagull. The new attraction is freedom. Ahead of the parents. Gone.

The oval is dry, the grass cracking, and the sign still says the water used to reticulate the grass is unsuitable for drinking. The potholes in the bitumen remain.

The hill to Longreach is my test. One day I will falter here. One day I will not have the steam to make it up unaided. For now it is doable. Tough if it is hot and the chair is loaded. But still. Flies make a nuisance of themselves when my hands are too busy pushing to shoo them away. At least the glasses keep them from the corners of my eyes. I am slow enough to look up and see the windmill and marvel that its spinning is providing the island with its energy. A large black skink, like an expensive sunglass case, slithers through the scrub. I love the whoosh whoosh of the giant windmill blades as they rotate. They give the wind muscle. Cyclists whizz past going down hill, wind-smiles on their faces. I look at the bitumen as they pass, think about how sweet it might be to stroll up the hill, taking step after step in soft leather sandals, then put my head down and keep pushing.

Then the familiar Longreach Bay comes into view. It has a large section of light blue water where there is no weed. We call it the Big Blue. Yachts are anchored to moorings around the edge of the blue, but it is mid-week and there are only a few. The moorings are familiar too. There are ones that we swim out to as a test. There are ones that we have swum to and then whilst treading water in the deep we have gasped as beneath us the dark shadow of a stingray swims by. There is a descent now to the front row of Longreach chalets. I can get some speed up. I get my own wind-grin. Still the others will have been there a good fifteen minutes already. They will have brought the luggage inside. They will have chosen their beds, checked the fridge is filled with the groceries delivered by the shop and rearranged the kitchen table. Graham will have disconnected the tv and faced it, like a naughty child, into the corner. Single-handedly he will have manoeuvred the couch out onto the verandah and faced it towards the Big Blue. We always strung a hammock, but since a child died when a pillar collapsed, the authority that runs the island has banned this. On this holiday a worker erects a sign on the balcony saying maximum capacity of nine persons. Graham will have set up the sound system and might even be flopped on the couch with his feet up.

When I arrive the boys will have their shoes off. They will be jumping on the bed, climbing the door jambs Spiderman-style and exiting through the windows of the front bedroom. They will have scattered the cork tile floor with their belongings. Already Hot Wheels will be lost in the far reaches under the beds. It will have taken only a moment for them to turn feral. From now on they will sleep in beds full of sand, with black feet and salt-encrusted hair. They will wear the same boardies and t-shirts for days. They will reluctantly put on sun-screen and a hat. They will joyously travel to the shop several times a day for whatever it is the adults need, just in case they can wing an ice-cream or a sweet lolly.

Sometimes there will be a surprise in the chalet like a new coat of paint. This year there is a photograph of a sunset at The Basin adorning the wall.

Otherwise it is like returning to your own home. Few things are different. They have decided to give you more dishwashing liquid, but anyway I bring my own. The scrubber is still crap. Don’t worry I bring that too. The single tea towel is still inadequate. I have several. They have dispensed with the enormous stainless steel pot big enough to boil a whole crayfish. Shame. They still only give you one roll of toilet paper. Tight. Over the years the beds and pillows have improved but we still bring our own foam eggshell and our latex pillows. Because that’s the thing about Rottnest. It is a little bit of home. For the people who go there regularly, it is just an extension of chez-moi. We have friends who take their own elaborate coffee makers and their Thermomix. They make sure everything is just so. Someone might have the ritual of tying a red ribbon to their gate latch for the littlies to know which is their chalet. Someone else might set up a table for cards or scrabble or jigsaw puzzles. Someone might set up a sun shade on the beach and leave it flapping there all week, like they own a bit of Longreach.

You know it so well that you recognise the sound of the closing of the yard gate. It has made a groove in the sound memory of your mind. You know that at night the bathroom door will bang softly, but loudly and consistently enough to keep you awake if you don’t stopper it with folded cardboard. You know the sound of the metal latch on the front door, designed to stop it slamming shut in the afternoon gusts. You know which bay will be most sheltered for the direction the wind is blowing. You know one day one kid will be sunburnt and another will fall off his bike. You know that ice cream will make it better and it will come from the freezer so cold that you can’t scoop it out with a spoon unless you boil the kettle and warm the spoon first. Note to self – next year bring the Zyliss ice cream scoop. When one boy has forgotten a toothbrush and he is sent to the shop to buy one he returns with a toothbrush so old-fashioned that it reminds you of your own childhood. It has a handle of a single colour. It has no grip for your thumb. No knobs to scrape your tongue. It has no fancy bristles of different lengths or fading colours to massage your gums. It reminds you of when the Colgate toothpaste tubes were metal and to squeeze them in the centre got your Dad riled. It reminds you of communal bathrooms in caravan parks where your mother made you wear your thongs in the shower incase you caught something off the concrete. It is the simplest of brushes. He tells you that that is all the shop had in the way of tooth brushes. Nothing fancy.

May 4, 2012

An Old Diary…Part 2

One of the sisters has flown home across the continent. They can’t be much further apart and still on the same land mass. Still. The sisters are sisters. She stayed for the garage sale. Perhaps they made enough to cover the price of the skip. But it wasn’t about the money. It was just to get rid of the stuff. Lots remains. Funny how fussy the charities are. They don’t want chipped crockery. Bacteria live there. The sofa can’t have lost its spring. Someone might sue them if, by sitting on it, they injure themselves. Virtually no one will come out and look at the bed. Even after assurances that there are no stains. Not a one. Someone suggests a charity that helps the refugees. But they decline. Paraquad, a charity for wheelchair users, says they will come out. A time is arranged.

The sister, the one in a wheelchair herself, is waiting. She is there on time. She has made sure of it. She is watering the garden to prepare the house for sale. The lawn is crunchy brown in parts. But maybe it can be revived. Green. Buyers like green. It is a long time since she lay on grass. Tyres on turf is not the same thing. Always above and distant. Not really connected. As a child she lay on the lawn. Her midriff showing and the grass spiking her belly. Her fingers delved the dirt and she found the small black beetles that scurried amongst the blades. She called them tickle beetles, because held in the closed fist they squirmed across the skin and tickled the palm. Eventually she let them go. On the grass of the back yard she learnt to do a forward roll. Her head down on the grass, palms pricked by the spikes of buffalo blades, tree bark crunching down the back of your top.

The scheduled time comes and goes. She rings them. They came, apparently, before the allotted time and finding the house empty drove away.

“But I am here now and waiting,” she says. “I have been waiting for you in a house I can no longer bear the sight of. I have been scrubbing skirting boards and vacuuming and I am over it now and I just want you to collect the bed so I can finish the cleaning and go.”

“Well the bed is supposed to be out of the house, you know.”

“No I did not know that,” she answers. “No one told me that. I can’t get it out of the house. I am in a wheelchair!”

“Well the workers can’t enter a house,” she sounds aghast. “Someone should have told you that. Occupational health and safety,” she parrots.

It appears they can only collect the bed, if they deem it collectable at all, from the verge.

The sister is livid. She puts the mobile phone down on her lap and lets the small voice of the woman speak to the air. The woman is asking if she is still there and perhaps they can arrange another time but the sister refuses to hang up the phone or put it to her ear. Like a fly at a sore a small buzz comes from the phone. The woman, she hopes, is exasperated. Suffer, she thinks, suffer.

Suddenly overwhelmed by all that she still has to do and the fact that she has wasted her time and still the bed is sitting in the front room, she is crying in the front garden of the old house. She is screaming obscenities at no one – just the grass and the wilting rose bushes. But a lawnmower man from the neighbouring house is a witness to the woman’s meltdown and is brave enough to cross into the yard and ask if he can help her. She is snotty and bleary-eyed and very unattractive. She probably looks like a crazy.

“It’s okay,” she manages to say, “it’s just someone has let me down, and I am very angry about it.”

***

June 15th 1964; Alex to Esperance. Left his pipe in car ash tray. Cripple attacked by dog over the road and feathers pulled out galore.

I picture my mother discovering the injured chicken, already a charity case. Cripple. Too slow to escape like the other hens into the safety of the chicken coop. Red on white. A stressed bird. Open beaked. The grass scattered with the bloodied feathers. Does she chase the mongrel dog up the driveway?

June 30th 1964; 10 st 5lbs put on 7lbs – disgraceful

That’s me – the cause of the swelling. The one turning her ashamed of her weight gain.

July 6th 1964; Fay sick. Slight loss liquor. Stay in bed for 2-3 days. Dr Anderson. I sponged her.

Then for the following days she visits the neighbour, three houses down and across the road, a woman she nursed with … Sponged Fay.Sponged Fay. Fay Depressed. Lisa very grizzly. Fay to Devonleigh. ? Miscarriage.

Years later this is the woman who house we go to while our parents go to the movies. She lets us watch her cook, a cigarette always in her hand. She has a piano in the front room and we play on it. She has a teenage son who chases us around the house. We hide under the queen bed in the parents’ room. We watch his feet from beneath the bed. We are in the dark, lying on carpet, breathing hard. He says, “I wonder where those little girls could be?” We are squirming with excitement and fear. I can’t recall him catching us. Richie. We sleep over, top to tail, two to a bed. The sleepout has louvred windows and brown chenille bedspreads. Breakfast is different from home.

July 13th 1964; No word re Fay yet and then two days later Fay lost babe. 8.30pm. Boy. Lived 1/4 hour.

August 1st 1964; Alex bought new Rotary lawn mower. Cut lawn. Cut hedge. Fence made for Lisa side drive.

August 14th 1964; Mama Pulmonary Oedema Fremantle Hospital.

I am about to be born and my mother is losing her mother.

August 18th 1964; Mama clot! very ill. Her writing is clogged with fear. She writes that she visits everyday and she shows slight improvement but that the old woman is very irritable. After another two weeks in Fremantle Hospital her mother’s sister Jean is left to arrange convalescence home.

September 7th 1964; caesarean Nicole born 12.45pm

September 19th 1964; Returned home. Feel jolly weak but will soon recover. 8st 12lbs. And then the diary goes blank. Not another entry all year.

I know her mother doesn’t die till I am about 18 months old. She lingers on with her heart failing in the nursing home. My mother must visit her on the bus with two small children in tow. Fay remains my mother’s friend to this day. She survived a melanoma and a heavy smoking habit. For the remainder of 1964 my mother is too busy to even make her notes. She has a toddler and a baby and a dying mother…

April 19, 2012

An Old Diary…Part 1

Two women in their forties are in the house of their childhood. Once they shared a bedroom. They made a cubby between the Jacarandas with jarrah pickets and hessian wheat sacks. They are sorting for a garage sale. Already so much has been dumped in a skip and thrown on the verge. They are hoping gold bars may be unearthed. Instead they find dried apricots, turned black. Neither of them wears much makeup. Both need glasses to read. One chews her nails. One has the start of grey streaking her brown hair. They both have wrinkles, but they have congratulated each other on their flawless necks.

They find old school reports. They find christmas decorations, made in kindergarten, when children were still permitted to use toilet rolls for craft activity. Of course the house feels shrunken, or else they feel giant-sized. So much of it is unchanged. The smell of their parents bedroom…

***

I hear my sister walking up the hallway, taking the steps in an easy stride. She is wearing corduroys. We are both practical, sensible people. Or so we like to think. Neither of us is too sentimental. We don’t wear high heels. We are going to sell the house. The one thing we hope is that they keep the tree. A hundred foot tall Lemon Scented Gum in the backyard. She is enormous and gracious. Her trunk is grey and smooth with muscular branches stretching out from her sides. She can been seen from streets away. She is scary during storms when she hurls her canopy like a mad woman shaking out her long locks. Both my father and mother loved the tree. After all it was living.

I am in the front of the house. We sisters can call to one another. Oh God look at this! My mother has kept her wedding dress. The once white lace is yellowing. We find hand embroidered baby dresses wrapped in tissue paper. Who would have thought our mother had the patience and skill for smocking? On high shelves, where they could no longer reach or see, we bring down all sorts of decaying and rotten matter. Moths have gone to work. The remnants just paper away. We come across the diaries of my mother. She is still living. It is wrong to read someone’s diary, right? Not until they are dead. But my mother is not a detailer of emotions. It is not a journal. It is more a list of what happened when. She would not have written down something she wanted hidden. She is also the type who stops herself thinking, to make it not so. I think she believes that pain and death can be erased by the not speaking of them; a child only seeing a smidgen between the fence of fingers that hide a face.

She read aloud from her diary at night, to my father – trying to get him to remember their holidays; in an attempt to will away his dementia. On finding the box of diaries neither of us hesitate to open them. We don’t ask her, perhaps believing we know she won’t mind. Or else feeling some kind of ownership over them. We think they are about us, after all. We are interested most in the oldest diaries. The ones from when she was more our age. When perhaps we shared the same fears and anxieties. What did she think as a mother with toddlers? We look for a version of ourselves in her. Will we end up the same? What’s in store? Perhaps an understanding of the past will make her more knowable to us…

My sister takes ownership of the one from the year of her birth and I have the one from mine, 1964. So much of it is blank. I have to make up my own imaginings of her daily life. She tells so little in it. She plants ranunculi. Her mother is ill. That much I can tell.

January 13, 1964: 28 days since last period. 2nd babe on the way. How do I tell if she was happy? I know she miscarried many times. Perhaps she doesn’t expect the baby to stick. Why write that you are excited when it could be swept away from you all too soon? Growing up we heard the stories of her driving herself to the hospital, blood running down her inside thighs, a boy baby delivered, formed enough to have a sex, but never given a name.

Then about my sister, who is about 15 months old, she writes; January 31st 1964: Lisa’s eye teeth at last through. Will be 14 teeth. Trying to stand.

Then on February 25th she writes again about her pregnancy with me – told Mama and Aunt. Again I will never know what they thought. Maybe they thought it was too soon. Maybe they feared the pregnancy would slip away.

On March 5th 1964 she writes; Leila killed accident-road. Alice F died. Nothing more. I think about my own accident. In a diary somewhere has a sister written; Nicole car accident – paralysed. A mother written; Nicole accident-road – might die. What tears are hidden beneath the blue fountain pen scrawl? Who was Leila?

March is a bad month. On the 12th and 13th there are entries; Alex heard bad news re job. Gone to see Spencer re job. Alex lost job. Terrible blow – but may get one with Dept Agriculture. Alex v.brave. Terrible blow – it means more because it says so little. Dad struck like the pin belted by a bowling ball. Topple. Fall.

On Easter Sunday March 29th Lisa walked by herself.

9th April 1964 she writes; To Safety Bay, one week’s holiday. Yummee! Lovely cottage all mod cons and we are v happy. Is yummee a code to herself? A word she reads and knows the true meaning of.

On Friday 24th of April they saw Lawrence of Arabia. Wonderful! Peter O’Toole really memorable. And then on Anzac day Baby’s movements, felt quickening. Lisa walking well. But she must have been concerned about my sister’s walking since the next day she visits her doctor at the nurse’s suggestion and she writes; Dr thinks she is alright but she would have to be xrayed for surety. He will see her later.

The following day there is lunch with her mother; Mama lunch. She seemed tired and hectic, to say the least. To say the most, did she argue with her mother?

April 29th 1964; Lisa walking a lot more and going down steps by herself. Looks like rain.

May 5th 1964; 9st 6lbs, 2lbs gain. Dr Pixley, all clear, no wait at all. Fundus correct position. Lisa walking v.well. Seedlings planted. Sweet peas by garage. So in a time before ultrasound a simple measurement of the uterine fundus height suggests the baby was in a normal position. A mother is relieved enough to spend time on her knees in the garden.

May 7th 1964; Alex has job Agriculture Dept. Starts 25th May South Perth. It is a relief. Salary 1011 pounds per annum. He stayed in this job till he retired. His superannuation still funds my mother’s nursing home fees.

June 10th 1964; Dr Linton Lisa eye appoint. Lisa’s eye good. Hooray!

I imagine my mother, pregnant with me, worrying about her toddler who has a funny eye and is slow to walk. Her husband has been out of work and he is earning money doing odd jobs for neighbours, like cement edging for Mrs Elliott. She writes when they receive a hundred pounds from a Dutch relative, Aunty Zus. She visits her mother and her Aunt and plants annuals in the garden. She takes the toddler to the doctor and waits for me to arrive…..

1964 To be continued….

March 29, 2012

Doing Tax…

My tax return is late. Horrendously so. And so the later it gets the more I want to put it off. My desk is a mountain of papers and receipts. Looking through the bank statements that I have printed off the computer I am seeing entries that remind me of a year ago. In my head I have trouble trying to recall whether my father was alive before or after the end of the financial year. And does it matter? I have my father’s deceased estate stuff to consider too. I have a file of his papers where he made notations in a demented way on bills. Squiggly question marks near amounts owing. PAID writ-large with a flourish beneath it. Success at the post office. Everything paid through the post office. The old person’s only way to pay.

I imagine him in the queue, socks to his knees, pants too high. He is an impatient man and the queue bothers him. Waiting has never been easy for him. Like Blackboard in Mr squiggle. Muttering beneath his breath Hurry up. Not that he has other errands to run on a shopping day. This is the big one. The paying of bills. Finally at the counter, he softens because he needs the assistant’s help. He could easily be screwed. But they know him. He has been coming since the post office became the place where old people pay their bills. When they no longer sent cheques.

He forgets to pay the HBF bill and the health insurance is unpaid. This means that when my mother ends up in hospital because of a turn (she simply sank to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut in the very same Post Office) and she is asked whether she has private insurance and she answers yes and they divert her to the private hospital, she is turned around again because they are Not Financial. When I attempt to sort this fiasco out, over the phone, the insurance company will not tell me how much they owe because of privacy concerns. When I tell the I am a day away, down South on holidays, they are unmoved. I just want to pay their bill with my credit card over the phone but they cannot release the information I need.

My father is driving to the wrong hospital to visit my mother. He is eating pan-fried fish with sliced banana for dinner. The neighbours are looking in on him. He is still in the garden till the sun is going down.

My mother yo-yos between the hospitals till her insurance is sorted out. The private hospital won’t take her if she’s not insured and the public hospital wants her to go to the private hospital if she has insurance as she claims to have. Daddy’s been a member for fifty years, she says.

I hate the insurance company and tell them so when they inquire at the end of our heated phone conversation as to how well they have helped me today. They promise to pass on my complaint but I never hear from them. I hate you, do you hear me. Hate you.

Back in the city, I realise it is time to be their nominee and take in the form to prove I am their enduring power of attorney. Child becomes Parent.

While my mother is in the hospital the neighbours begin a roster system whereby the evening meals are delivered to my father. He is eating well and loves the attention. Evey afternoon he drives to see her. On one of these occasions he rams another car in the hospital car park but ignores it. A bystander sees the white Subaru Forrester crawl away and takes his number down. He gives it to the owner of the damaged car. Later Dad gets a summons about the accident and it becomes clear that he no longer even has a current licence. It too has been unpaid.

Sometimes he stood in the queue and then when he neared the front of it he turned around and walked out.

Now I am doing his tax. In the blue folder with all its pockets I push out the rectangles of paper with his handwriting on them and replace them with my own headings. I notice the poor spelling. The new labels make more sense to me. The last folder has a pocket I label Death. In it I put his funeral bill and wonder if he can tax deduct it. I think of the more expensive Enviro coffin we got him, knowing he was a believer in recycling. But a tax deduction; now that would really please him.

December 1, 2011

Operating Theatre

I am in holding zone awaiting my surgical procedure. My surgeon comes past to tell me there is a slight delay. There is a back log in recovery. We women in our forties are lined up to be spread apart and peered into. There is a dairy cow feel to it. But no elbow length gloves. We pretend it is dignified, but really we are just another biological system that needs to be understood.

I watch the ceiling as I am wheeled in my bed and now I lie looking up. The white cotton blanket has the smell of a large commercial laundry. I am good at being in hospital. I know what will be done here. There is nothing to surprise me. The delay is not unwelcome. It is not unexpected. In hospital everything is wonderfully out of your control and to surrender to that feeling is strangely comforting.

The theatre is gleaming in every way. Spanking white white walls. The operating lights are a dark shiny blue. In the corner, on a stool, my surgeon waits while I shuffle across to the table. The operating table. He has his head in his phone. His down time between patients. Perhaps he is signalling his late arrival home. His legs are crossed and I notice his knee high white wellingtons. It gives him the look of an abattoir worker. Someone expecting to be splashed upon.

For now I am in the hands of the anaesthetist. Equally attired. Everyone is costumed up, including me, but, I suspect I am the only one without my undies. Like the courtroom with its wigs and robes, the operating theatre has its look too. Scrub tops and pants, hair caps and shoe covers. Even the word theatre; what role, what performance will be on today. How will we all play our parts?

Who is the villain, the hero? I have the bit part. Non speaking role. Who else converses with people as they lie on a slab. Leaning over. No wonder there is a power play between doctor and patient. No one else sees you like this. In a ridiculous gown that has no buttons. Splayed.

We only have a few moments, the anaesthetist and I. Soon I will be away from them all. In a space that is a void. He talks jovially about the Jackson Juice he is delivering. First he tells me there will be a short sharp pain. Indeed he is pushing hard as he delivers the anaesthetic. The theatre nurse is placing a mask across my face.

November 23, 2011

Rottnest Recollections

Jasper – skinny, ribby, already sun burnt by the weakened sun on the first day. Out under cloudy skies there is beach cricket. Wobbly driftwood for stumps. Rashies stretched to knee length dresses. Then a strange rain shower. Never before in November. Short, fast, but wet all the same. A hurried retreat to the chalets. Rain pock-marks the ocean. The children take turns to have a meltdown. Bolognese is being cooked all along the lane. Disobedient children have the law laid down; No quokka hunting for them. Evan asks if we intend shooting the quokkas we find. Smell the frying onions. Men playing twelve bar blues on the ukes.

***

Young boys go past on the shore with brand new bikes. In the salt water. Their wheels make a delicious noise on the hard, wet sand. They leave a trail as if pushed through setting cement. We raise our eyebrows. We all know it will be bad. Minutes later a clothed woman is chasing them down the beach. Next comes a father. Marching the boys back, wheeling their bikes now, one still manages to get it in the sea. Lap lap splash – a wave on the wheel. Then the father – “I told you to fricking keep it out of the fricking water.” – using all his will power not to swear as he passes us. Other adults. He has used it all up. He yanks on an upper arm, jerking the boy and bike further from the water’s edge, and then slaps the boy hard across the back of his legs. The boy is felled. An axe to a tree. To his knees he drops on the sand, buckling over. Wincing with pain perhaps, but with humiliation more.

***

Sam is five. He has cherub cheeks. His eyelashes are pale tipped. He loves Star Wars. On the nightly Quokka hunt he tells onlookers sipping wine on their balcony – “Jedi Business. Go back to your drinks.” Tim buys him a soft quokka toy, instantly disliked by White Ted, but friends with the more amenable Blue Ted. White Ted is grounded for 14 days for trying to kill quokka ( Sam explains – bears eat meat and quokkas are meat ), but the bad bear won’t stay in his bag. White Ted keeps undoing the zippers and needs to be given to Tim in order to remain grounded.

***

White caps signal the increasing wind. The once peaceful, calm ocean turns to dirty rough water. On the horizon grey clouds stamp down like stained feet. Sam, pale face, stays back in the chalet with me while the others take on the head wind on their bikes. He is entrenched in war fare on Graham’s iphone, using his thumbs, dexterously, straw bale hair and strawberry blushed cheeks. He is pouting while he works; “what the hell”, his expletive when war doesn’t go his way. Outside I can hear a father say, “keep swimming, keep swimming,” urging children, stick-like and freezing to continue on.