vicissitudes

The garden waste truck clanks and rumbles past the front gate around six. I drag my empty bin in off the street three minutes later. I summon the cat. The cat curfew demands he be inside from sunset to sunrise. Try telling that to a miniature panther who’s threatened to wreck the joint. I piff him out around midnight.

The JRT and I walk in the dawn chill. Don and Bluey are down the park. I haven’t seen them for ages. All Don’s dogs are called Bluey. The JRT chases, the heeler dodges and slaloms through the trees. Don laughs, thinks this is great sport, asks me what I’m doing up this early.

“I have no routine,” I tell him. “We’re out and about at any hour.”

Don’s got to be well into his seventies but he’s still got rogue written all over him. In recent years he’s grown a mane of grey hair, sometimes pulled back into a ponytail. He’s togged out in shorts and gumboots.

“Getting the hair cut off today,” he tells me. “Charity, cancer. Look at that.” The dogs are belting through the long grass, the JRT yapping and nipping the heeler’s face. “Good on ’im. That’ll teach ya, Blue.”

I get an SMS after breakfast from my sister, fiddling with her smartphone on the train to work at a swanky furniture place in Richmond. She and Tom have bought the place in Emerald. I text back my congratulations.

Then my mobile rings: Liz to tell me that Sandy has been contacted as one of my referees for the MindMatters job, just when I’ve abandoned hope.

I ring my parents, mainly to find out how my mother is. She’s had a second fall, a few days ago now, on steps when inspecting the house my sister has bought. She rings off: the cleaner has arrived. I send a message to my daughter somewhere in Tasmania that her grandmother is suffering.

She replies: “Nerri has a hand, foot and mouth disease—a mild virus and not as bad as it sounds. We’re on our way to New Norfolk Hospital for possible bacterial infection from a tick bite.” I email a link so she can look at the photos of Lynne’s new house.

Rock rings. He’s just off the phone to the national program manager of MindMatters. He says she sounded keen about me. Gemma sends another message: “Being tested for Lyme disease. Let you know when I get the results tomorrow.”

I clutch my mobile phone wherever I go for the rest of the day but no job offer comes through. I Google Lyme disease. Identified in 1975, it’s carried by ticks and not serious if diagnosed and treated early with antibiotics. But no father wants his daughter to have any disease.

I get back to my mother. She fell on her back. The doctor rules out a punctured lung but movement, coughing, anything like that is painful.

Today is a soap opera and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. 


Rock on.