friday on my mind

Friday’s on my mind after five days without a minute from my job, The gods smile, cancel the nine o’clock meeting I’m attending in North Melbourne.

I wake at five fifteen—damn cat licking the back of my head, can’t find the will to rise till nearly eight. Dog tired. I set up the work laptop on the dining-room table, inbox pinging the moment I turn it on, four days’ worth of messages to respond to or delete.

I ring my parents just after nine. No answer. I read The Age on the iPad. The week’s footy drama centres on my club’s “ruthless” dismissal of its “embattled” coach. This morning’s fodder is his “dignified” farewell press conference. Where is this eloquence over the past five years?

Carol rings. I have a small fruit knife I’ve promised her. We arrange the hand-over. She’s a just-walking medical conference: lupus. She has a rheumatologist, cardiologist, needs a hip replacement, is about to have a pacemaker fitted to go with the artificial valve that whooshes in her chest. What a wonderful chest it was.

She’s 60 in January, fears death with every operation. I take the chance to thank her for 22 years of on-off relationship, buoyed by our mutual appreciation of each other’s sexuality. I tell her I consider myself extremely lucky to have enjoyed her for so long, so hard, so often. She agrees. It’s good to be able to say it.

The emails keep coming, personal and professional. I ring my parents again. No answer.

I shop: oranges, lunch, cat litter, a swivelling fluoro for above the desk.

After lunch phone calls. Finally I speak to my mother. She’s not at her best, has a painful back, been unable to walk for a few days. I speak ever so briefly to my daughter, tell her my train times for Monday. It’s Nerri’s second birthday and I’ll be with them in Bendigo for two hours.

I ring my sister: yes, I’ll come to lunch for my father on Sunday. I don’t ‘do’ father’s day; never have. Commercial crapola. I can’t help but feel that this might be my father’s last.

I tell my sister I’m meeting my good woman tomorrow, to talk. In telling her this I realise I have nothing much to say, no idea what outcome, if any, I want from the conversation.

“She’s a such a nice person,” my sister says, meaning make it up with her.

“I know. It’s not about nice people. It’s about a relationship that isn’t working. Nice people isn’t enough.”

I’ve sorted it in my head, dragged my heart along for the party. I know now why it stopped working; I’m not sure if I can see it working again. The sadness I’ve not felt for a week descends like a fog around me again.

Rock on. 

hard yakka

My big week starts Sunday:  packing in the morning, travel to the office in the early afternoon to assemble all the goodies for Monday’s PD. Comrade C and I drive to Gippsland in the late afternoon, check in, eat, run through notes, check slides.

I’m awake at five, get up after six, breakfast in town at seven, set up at eight, run two sessions till three, drive back to Melbourne, across town at peak, drop Comrade C at the airport, ditch the hire car, taxi to the office in Collingwood to deposit the boxes, arrive home well after seven. The animals jump out of their skins to see me.

Next day, Tuesday, up early, deal with the email, start organising for Mildura: dog, cat, bag, laptop and cables for phones, peripherals. Bus, train and tram to the office, laptop lop-siding me, wheelie-bag on the other arm for balance. Hit the office at three. Comrade S and I pack 29kgs of resource materials in a huge suitcase. The taxi loads us up at 4:30, takes us well out of our way to Tulla.

I fork out $20 overweight fee on the big suitcase, unpack my bag to extract my laptop to plop in the plastic tray through security. We have time to burn. Comrade S is famished, savage, needs food, NOW. We eat Asian, laksa, noodles. A wise decision. Our next chance to eat is after nine, too late.

Comrade S is not well pleased to be in 38-seater prop jet, calls it tiny. We lift off around seven, touch deck just after eight, wait outside the dark, deserted terminal for a taxi to make the half-hour round trip to and from Mildura.

I’m up till one trying to quell my mounting terror about the material. I’m carrying the burden for our first day, Comrade S for day two. The laptop shares our breakfast table with poached eggs and rubbery toast. We set up at eight, welcome participants at half past, start a couple of minutes early.

When they leave at 3:30 we debrief, check the following day’s slides and activities. Around five we head to our rooms. I have a bath for the first time in years. We both eat Thai: Comrade S manages several takeaway boxes; I eat at the restaurant. Back in my room, I devote hours to revamping thirty PowerPoint slides, adding graphics, fixing alignments, rewording ambiguities. 

I hand Comrade S the flash drive with my evening’s work after breakfast, pop round the corner to meet Ken, a colleague from last year’s job. He has a coffee and several conversations, some with me. It’s good to see him; he’s about to lead his fifth group of young people and mentors to Kokoda.

For two day’s we work our intellectual arses off running a PD we don’t like, haven’t done before. We pack the big suitcase, stand on the kerb, knackered, waiting for a taxi back to the airport. Comrade S sleeps before take-off. She still has a dance class to run this evening.

I guide a Pakistani taxi driver from Tulla to Croydon. It’s his third day in the job, third month in the country; he doesn’t know how to get out of the airport. More work for me, guiding us from A to B and beyond. This is my job: this is what I do.

Rock on. 

greasies

The only ethnic takeaway in the 50s is Chinese. Perhaps Italian reffoes eat pizza at home but none opens a parlour yet. Fish’n’chips have never been ethnic, but plenty of Greeks run fish-and-chipperies in the 50s. And they make hamburgers—authentic meat slabs grilled in front of your eyes with eggs, bacon and tomato.

The epidemic of obesity coincides with the availability of McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, pizza chains, KFC, Red Rooster, Subway, Fasta Pasta, Noodle Boxes, ribs on the run—what are they?—and every other fat food outlet imaginable.

Enterprising immigrants run restaurants in every suburb. We have Thai, Indian and Vietnamese cuisine. Why no Pakistani, Lao or Afghani restaurants? French restaurants seem to represent all of Europe. Where are the Norwegian restaurants, the German, the Slovenian?

Well, to me it matters not. If I’m sitting down to eat, it’s a green curry or samosas and malai kofta every time. But takeaway means fish’n’chips. They’re the mandatory takeaway anywhere near the sea or a beach or seagulls.

Newsprint is a key ingredient of good fish’n’chips, but no one wraps greasies in broadsheet these days. They come in pre-assembled cardboard boxes or slightly glossy butcher’s paper. And for heaven’s sake don’t be thinking that ‘fries’ in ‘buckets’ are chips. A good chip has substance, consists identifiably of potato.

A particular smell comes out of Subway; pizza places too. But there’s nothing like the smell of rancid boiling fat from a good fish’n’chippery.

Salt is what it’s all about. Fish’n’chips without salt? Forget it. Tomato sauce on the chips? Bring it on. 

presentation

I stand in front of 32 teachers, no idea what word might come out of my mouth first. It won’t be welcome. They’re already in the room. Some table groups with initiative work their way through a sheet of thirty word puzzles. Other groups wait obediently for the command to begin.

I’m running a morning session in the year 7 centre for two and a half hours, no breaks, about each teacher looking after their personal health and well-being. Comrade C from Adelaide is preaching collegiality to 42 teachers in the year 8 centre.

Twice the principal leaves to rustle up tardy teachers: the worst place to run PD is the workplace. Better to hold the event in a pub or a field, away from phones, desks, those small important duties someone in their workplace can’t ignore or resist.

I knock off my opening spiel, pair people up using pairing cards, allow them to find a space of their own to talk to each other about personal happiness. I have trouble reassembling them, regrouping them, keeping them on task. A lesson for me.

Ten minutes to run through some slides before setting up the next activity. The words, the illustrating anecdotes, come out nicely. I’m on song but wonder if I sound too preachy, too personal with some stories.

This is what MM presenters call a captive audience, prisoners: they’ve not volunteered to be here. It’s a student-free day, but not a day out of school, not self-directed, but directed by me. Teachers hate taking directions, won’t sit near the front, do anything they would expect of their students.

One woman looks like she’d rather be having the butt-end of a horse-whip inserted sideways up her fundament, another is all but horizontal. The principal nods, answers questions when no one else volunteers a response.

We wrap up on the dot of 11:15 for morning tea. After the break I repeat the first session with the group Comrade C had before morning tea. Again the struggle to get them into the room, make a start. I pair this group up as a carousal, inner and outer circles, run the conversations, feedback to the group, tie the responses together, get a lots of good laughs. Lesson learnt.

This two and a half hour session is split by lunch, a ghastly affair of soggy, meaty pastas and cheesecakes made of saccharine-infused industrial waste. The session reconvenes and chugs along till I run out of puff with ten minutes to go.

It’s a tough gig. Carol, the school’s PD liaison person, reckons we did well; no negative responses from staff. I’ll take it.

Not much debrief as we motor back and through Melbourne. I drop Comrade C at the airport. Day One of a tough week: tick.

Rock on. 

moe

Sunday afternoon I drive to MM’s Collingwood office, snug the Jazz in the basement car park, ascend the empty building to the second floor. I set up a trolley, load it with materials for tomorrow’s professional learning workshops in Moe.

Comrade C’s hire car arrives at the front door. We drive round to the rear of the building, load up in the basement. I take the wheel, pilot us through the grey afternoon to Moe, arriving at dusk. We check in, ask about the best place to eat. Comrade C is ravenous, missing the lunch that didn’t eventuate on her Q flight from Adelaide.

We sign up as temporary members of Moe RSL for a couple of hours, slide into a booth, examine the menu. Comrade C order the meals, exercises the corporate credit card. She returns with a lemon, lime and bitters, looks dubiously at her glass.

The waitress calls everyone darlin’ or lovey, delivers four substantial pieces of garlic bread with cheese as thick as the bread underneath, the garlic not evident. Comrade C’s chicken parmi is submerged under a glutinous lake of bright yellow cheese.

My plate overflows with not one, not two, but three large pieces of snapper. The batter is both crisp and oily, the side vegetables rubbery. I lean on the cauliflower with my knife, leave no impression.

Only one light in my room works back at the DisComfort Motor Inn. In the gloom I try to find the satellite TV station with the soccer, work for hours on my presentation while The Arsenal play another nil-all draw, this time away to Stoke City. Some time after one I sleep.

A swollen bladder disturbs me at five and sleep fails me. I lie in the dark, rehearse the coming day’s lines over the truck noise. The DisComfort Inn lies in a natural amphitheatre, the truck roar from the highway half a kilometre away funnels straight into my room. I empty my unhappy bowels into the pan soon after and again an hour later.

It’s one degree outside at seven when Comrade C enter Moe’s Coff Central café for breakfast. She chats to the English proprietor about his coffee while a girl with multiple facial piercings and red dreadlocks conjures up scrambled eggs and mushrooms in the galley.

Breakfast is the highlight of my 24 hours here. Moe always had a crap reputation. The Jaidyn Leskie murder 15 years ago buried the town. It remains a drab place.

  

Rock on. 

motorbike

I am brought up to believe that motorbikes and the men who ride them are dangerous, perhaps evil. It’s an age between. From the 20s to the 40s cars are not affordable for many people: the motorbike is Everyman’s means of getting around quickly.

A new accountant in Warrnambool in 1949, my father buys a Velocette from Dicky Spetch, to replace his bicycles. The frame disintegrates under him and his pillion, the overweight Brockie Rogers, as they come down the Liebig Street hill. He goes back to Dicky Spetch, buys a car.

In the 50s and 60s Everyman is expected to drive a motorcar. The motorbike is now reserved for outlaws and desperadoes. Hell’s Angels strike fear into respectable communities. Brando’s The wild one unveils the anarchist inside every bikie. As a growing boy I encounter no bikies; the thought frightens me; the thought of a bike moll frightens and excites me.

Although I befriend a biker, fellow student Robré, at teachers’ college in the early 70s, I never ride pillion. He visits me when I’m a new teacher in Gippsland, offers me a ride in the Strzeleckis—just for fun. I am terified: the blind corners, the loose gravel, the impossible angles leaning into curves. Never again.

In 1980 with a partner (who has been a motorbike rider herself), child, job and no second car, I buy a Honda CB250T in Wangaratta. I practise in the paddock next to our house, getting the hang of flicking through the gears with my left foot, finding neutral. It starts to come naturally.

With my mandatory 12 months on a 250cc bike behind me, I step up to a CX500, the Shadow, a quiet, reliable tourer, a beautiful machine. Robré has one, Bishy too. We ride to Mildura together, my first ride with others. Bish leaves us at Mildura; Robré and I head up through Broken Hill, Tibooburra and Innamincka to Birdsville. It’s a grand adventure.

I am 29 when I start riding, and 49 when I sell the Honda NTV650 Revere to my daughter’s boyfriend. I love all five Hondas—that first 250T, two Shadows, a CX 650 and finally the Revere—when I own and ride them. I’d have another tomorrow but can’t justify one man owning two motors.

Straddling a motorbike is inherently sexual. For years former partner Carol and I ride back roads to anywhere to straddle each other when we get off the bike. Even on the bike we grope each other. Oh, yeah.   

Rock on. 

lymington

I arrive in Tasmania with the scent of a lover still in my nostrils. She gives me a book of haiku as I quit Eldorado and a hand-made card inscribed with this verse:

Oh , insects, cease your cries that pierce the heart!

Lovers, even among the stars, must part.

I see stars, leaning on the rail as the ferry crosses the strait, wonder if I can forget the past month, rediscover a planned future with my wife and children on Mount Cygnet. At Devonport the Honda Shadow emerges from the murky guts of the ferry and I ride south, foolish enough to think my affair will help mend a faltering relationship with the mother of my children.

Lymington is a ragged collection of houses and a telephone box on the western shore of Port Cygnet near where the Huon River estuary flows into the d’Entrecasteaux Channel, an hour’s ride south of Hobart. Marilyn and the kids occupy the chapel in an old convent. A young couple we never see live in the attached rooms at the southern end; we share the kitchen.

The place is chocolate-box picturesque but I am blind to everything but my inner turmoil. I consult a wise friend from the phone-box. He tells me there is nothing I should do, just what I have to do. And I know what I have to do. I confess my affair; she confesses hers.

After four days I tell Marilyn I can’t stay with her and the children. I book a ferry ticket back to Victoria. In the week before I leave we make constant, desperate, frantic love. Why? Thirty years later I still have no explanation.

I tell my lover nothing of my return. I want to see surprised joy on her face. She and her children are staying with her best friend, her marriage over. I drive fearlessly through the night, rest the ticking Honda in her drive, deep dark all around. Her face falls when I enter the kitchen.

Next day I return to the empty house at Eldorado. My lover has to go away for a few days. I wait for her return alone in an echoing room, in agony, no mobile phones, no contact, no message. When finally she returns, she tells me she is glad to be rid of her marriage, but wants no relationship with me.

It is late November 1982. I am without a lover, a partner and children. I have no job and nowhere to go. 

Marilyn calls, asks me to look after the children in Tasmania while she goes to NSW to spend Christmas with her family.  

Rock on. 

lyrics

Before I first ask my good woman for ‘a date’ I don’t really know her. I see her pass my window at work. I ask a work colleague from her team what she’s like. She’s all class, he says. I thank him for confirming what I think I see in her from a distance.

Later, when my good woman and I have established a relationship, he asks if song lyrics have assumed deep significance for me. It’s his test of how smitten a man might be. He decrees me far gone. Not so long ago I send him an SMS, tell him song lyrics still get me.

Music’s not my thing. I’m listening and singing along now as I type these words, but music isn’t front and central to my existence; it’s background. At a gig in Adelaide recently I grizzle like an old man that I can’t hear the lyrics for the music. I care about the stories.

Paul Kelly, master wordsmith, tells eloquent stories with the fewest words. Musician to some, he’s a poet and storyteller to me. Kelly himself knows better: the words and music are inseparable, he says. The music is kinder to some lines than is the page alone, obscuring the weak ones and charging the good ones. Oh so many good ones.

No song touches my soul like Deeper water; it stands the hairs up on my neck, tears my eyes, every time. I have no spouse who died, but the image of a man gently carrying a child over the breakers to where the water is calm is of me bringing up my kids. I want them one day to listen to that song and know what it means to me. 

A difficult woman, Kelly sings, needs a special kind of man. Is my good woman a difficult woman, who doesn’t know how to trust herself so it’s hard for her to trust at all?

Yes, she is. Am I special enough to deal with her? 

Not right now.

goodish

At work Comrade R asks how I am. It’s a genuine enquiry, not rhetorical. On the basis that when I ask I like an honest answer, I always answer honesty, even when I know the asker couldn't care less how I really am. This practice unnerves check-out chicks, confuses colleagues.

Great satisfaction can be had by telling some bouncy thing who asks how your day has been that in fact it’s been crap. With an exclamation mark.

It’s too easy to go with stock answers like good, fit as a fiddle, not so good, so-so, sick as a dog: routine responses, clichéd, without nuance or subtlety, or without respect for a genuine enquiry. Some feelings demand a bit of clout. If I’m fan-fucking-tastic, I’m inclined to say so. But some days it’s hard to define just how one feels.

So this morning when Comrade R asks how I am, I go with good, then qualify it with, “…well, goodish.” I feel sort of drained and empty without contact with my good woman for nine days. I feel dazed and confused, despite hours of earnest inner conversation about how we managed to stuff up what seemed so good.

But I can’t say this to a colleague who has no idea what my personal situation is, or was. So goodish is what he gets. I think it means OK under the circumstances, or my body’s fine but my heart aches, or I’m here at work but I’d rather be elsewhere.

Comrade R isn’t sure what to make of goodish, prompts for more, isn’t getting any. A couple of hours later he draws a chair up near mine, solicitous, but he still not getting any.

I’m not moping, complaining, mean or silent. I whistle while I work, joke around, although not with the usual zest. I don’t much feel like writing. I’m going through the motions.

Rock on, sort of. 

anthem

An anthem stirs the emotions and celebrates solidarity with a particular group, period or cause.  Other variations on the theme carry religious and nationalist overtones; indeed, anthem usually has the adjective national before it.

The playing of national anthems brings tears to the eyes of athletes standing on podia and the worst out of jingoists everywhere. Some are odes to monarchies, the greatest travesty foist on a sovereign people.

In my final years at school I attend an evening excursion to a film at the Rivoli. I am already a republican of long-standing. Before the feature a drum roll rolls; shot of a monarch astride a horse; God save the queen forces the meagre audience to its feet. Except for four of my schoolmates.

I know my duty is not to sully the reputation and honour of my school. I half stoop, my bum definitely not touching the seat. And so I avoid the ignominy of the summons to the headmaster’s office next day. To this day I regret that decision. I determine never to stand again for any national anthem, whether it be an ode to a queen, a swagman or a continent girt by sea.

Through twenty plus VFL and AFL grand finals the backs of my legs stick resolutely to the plastic seat while 100,000 folk get up on their back legs. I have the tact not to disturb their silence or their noses by letting rip with a poisonous stentorian fart. 

Flags are the other accepted symbol of the nation, bits of coloured rag fluttering in the breeze. Ours has never stirred me, only partly because it has another nation’s flag occupying a corner. Our other great contribution to flagdom is a boxing kangaroo. Fie!

Samuel Johnson had it right way back in 1775: patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrel; scoundrels like the IRA; the various scoundrels of the Balkans; the scoundrel politicians who sanction every war; the scoundrels who can’t wait to fight them.

Up there, Cazaly is the only anthem I endorse and enjoy.

Rock on. 

report card

Good things pass all too soon, the bad drag on forever. Eight months ago I set out to plot my year in a blog and find myself two thirds of a year from that first post. It’s gone neither fast nor slow, but certainly nowhere I ever expected.

As a father I find myself wishing I could see more of my daughter and my grand-daughter. I see a little more of my son and feel a closer than I have for maybe ten years. In both I see fine people I am proud to have brought up.

As a son I inch closer to caring for parents, although my sister is placing herself, geographically and  in semi-retirement, to bear most of that burden. Neither of us sees much joy in the task ahead, but perhaps we will find unexpected joys there.

As a brother nothing much changes; I get on fine with my sister but we don’t share a great deal or do anything together beyond the usual family occasions.

As a worker my situation is completely off my January radar. I have a job that pays more and expects more of me than I could have anticipated. I am glad to have it but it is forcing other changes in my life, changes I’m not so sure about.

As a resident I’ve become the chair of a small owners corporation, not something I set out to be. Being a long way from my principal workplace I find myself contemplating moving much closer to that workplace, living in an apartment or flat, something entirely new to me.

I also find myself earning a decent wage for the first time in over a decade and wondering how best to deploy or invest that income. This is foreign territory for someone who lived from one fortnight’s pay to the next.

As a lover I suddenly find myself not a lover at all when a month ago I still wondered when and how I would live with my good woman some time in the future.

As a man looking for meaning after 60 I find all too much that I can’t make sense of, but why should I? I have, after all, argued forever and a day that life is meaningless. That’s life generally, of course. An individual life can’t be without meaning. The quest continues.

Rock on. 

eldorado

It’s Good Friday eve 1977. I hop in the Kombi after my last drama class for the day at Trafalgar High and drive north. I don’t have an address, just the name of a town. Long after dark I pass the Eldorado town sign, turn up the first side street on a hunch, stop at the first house on the left. I haven’t told my mate Will I’m coming; who doesn’t like a surprise visit?

Doctor Will’ his first job out of medical school is at Wangaratta Base Hospital. He buys a clapped-out weatherboard circled by 138 almond trees at Eldorado. Nothing much happens at Eldorado: it has a general store and a waterhole filled with a humungous rusting dredge.

Through the flywire front door I peer into a darkened room, see a kitchen beyond at the back of the house. A young woman in a loose cheese-cloth shirt, breasts swinging, crosses the lighted doorway. Less than two years later she and I return with our baby boy to live in Will’s house. He’s doctoring at Casey Base in the Antarctic.

I work with unemployed kids in Wang, Marilyn cooks macrobiotic meals and massages Mo. I buy a motorbike so she has the car. I ride to town with frozen hands on bitter winter mornings. In the winter we cut cords of wood to feed the fire, Marilyn and me at the ends of the cross-cut saw, rocking back and forth for hours, sawdust piling under the sawhorse.

We build a chook-house in the orchard, lay tarps under the almond trees and beat them off with sticks. We husk wheelbarrow-loads of our harvest. Johnny the black sheep joins us and Marilyn spins the black wool, knits jumpers for Mo. Every night we cart water to a huge vegie garden on the north side of the house.

We save every penny we can, hoping to buy land in Tasmania when Will returns. Life is simple; simple enough, until Mo starts to walk and my ‘earth goddess’ no longer copes with being a mother. She wants me to quit work to look after our son. There’s more to this than meets the eye; I don’t see it yet, not for a long time. We conceive another child.

On 5 November 1980 we get married in the vegie garden, a celebrant and two witnesses for company, then go inside to watch Doctor Who.

The locals think we’re hippies, but that’s never how I think of myself. I work, play footy, try to be a good father. I am a good father. One morning I become the father of two children. A bat flapping around the bedroom wakes us at five in the morning. Marilyn tells me she feels contractions. This labour is shorter than the first. Gemma is born around midday on a brilliant autumn day.

    

In September Marilyn, kids and Kingswood embark the ferry for Tasmania; she can’t wait till my contract as senior project officer with the unemployment program ends two months later. I already know that it’s unlikely I can live with Marilyn much longer. Before joining her in Tassie I dally with a co-worker. It ends her marriage, and mine, though I don’t know it yet.

Four days after my arrival south of Hobart to join my children and their mother, it’s over.

doubt

Doubt is a potent seed; once planted it takes root and tenacious tendrils climb out of the dark earth. It needs but a few drops of moisture to flourish.

For three and half years I have no doubt about my relationship and feelings for my good woman. She is the love of my life. Searching for a photo this past week, I stumble into our holidays together—Hobart, Darwin, Warrnambool, Noosa, the Prom—and the sheer delight of each other. The sense of loss is a chasm.

I cannot pinpoint the seeding of my doubt. We never fight or argue: I understand her logic though it is sometimes not my logic. Twice I fuck up big time, admit the error of my ways, avoid the terror of being without her. But the second time, a year ago, the seed of doubt is sewn.

The tendrils take many forms. I wonder if the cultural gap might get us in the end, the subtleties of language a second-language speaker can never divine, nor ever express in their first language to one who has but five words of that language.

We underestimate the impact of my return to Melbourne from Bendigo.

The frustration I feel sleeping on her lounge room floor instead of in her bed when I come down to town from the country—at least she joins me late at night and at dawn before her kids arise—gives way to the frustration of not sleeping in her house at all now I live a few suburbs away. The removal of the mortar of good sex loosens the bricks of us.

Weekend visits full of talk and walks become scrappy midweek evenings or hours filched from the duties of our weekends—birthday parties and saints’ days, kids’ sport, the gym, housework. I resent that it is always me driving to her place. I resent that I don’t ride my bike so often. The doubts fester.

Slowly they spread, the doubts, like capillaries under the skin, unseen, a silent network transporting the toxin of uncertainty. The rupture, when it comes, is a surprise, but not so surprising when the searchlights of realisation and hindsight meet in blinding glare.

Doubt undoes me, as it has before, always the sceptic. 

rivals

If Carlton can’t win the premiership, the next best thing is to beat Essendon during the season. The Blues have beaten Essendon in one grand final—1968—and I am there. On the other side of the ledger the Bombers carve up my team in the 1993 Grand Final.

One Saturday afternoon at Princes Park, back at a time when all games are played on Saturday afternoon, Neale Daniher steals a certain Carlton win by kicking four goals in the final quarter. I am horrified.

In the era of Tim Watson and Roger Merrett Essendon win a long string of games against the Blues. When the Blues finally break through, we string together a similarly improbable winning sequence, including a couple without our brightest stars against insurmountable odds. They are the sweetest victories.

The sweetest of all for Carlton supporters, and the most devastating for our arch-enemy, is the 1999 preliminary final. Essendon are dead-set certainties, the best team of the year by far. Carlton get away to a good start and lead by 24 points at half-time although having less scoring shots.

Nine minutes after half-time Essendon take the lead and move away as expected, but Carlton hang tough. I know nothing of this because I’m running a polling booth in the 1999 Victorian election. Jeff Kennett is considered a shoo-in to be returned as state premier. It’s three-quarter time when I finally turn on the radio.

The polling booth is now all but empty. I delegate all duties to my staff. Carlton are 17 points down into the last quarter but kick the next four goals. Essendon attack relentlessly and desperately for the last ten minutes but Anthony Koutoufides plays the quarter of his life and the Blues hang on by one point.

The other odds-on favourite goes down as well, beaten by a point, although it takes weeks of negotiations before Kennett is dismissed. That Saturday is one of the great days of my life.

This afternoon the Blues pummel the Bombers by 96 points. I watch on television, strangely unmoved. Essendon are so abjectly out of form that the game has no meaning. A shame.

Rock on. 

biscuits

I love biscuits. Biscuit comes from the French, means twice baked.  

When I’m six years old and lucky enough to find sixpence I go to the corner grocery in East Warrnambool for a bag of broken biscuits. Biscuits don’t come in packets, but live on a shelf behind the grocer in square tins. Housewives ask for half a pound of Milk Arrowroots or Nice.

The grocer flips the lid on the tin, scoops the biscuits into a silver dish mounted on the scales, deposits them in a brown paper bag. The broken biscuits at the bottom of the tin are put in sixpenny or shilling bags. The best thing is to find bits of broken Cresta biscuits in the bag, long oval shapes, sugar crystals on top.

  

As a slightly older kid I come home from school and eat two sweet biscuits before saying hello. Every afternoon, no variation. I’m not greedy; I can probably get away with a couple more but always have two. Any more might interfere with my bowl of Weeties.

The biscuit tin could fit a bowler hat inside, has a glass of pink Condy’s  crystals screwed into the lid. The tin never empties, but the contents are never fancy. We have cream biscuits only on special occasions. Sometimes my mother makes biscuits, jam fancies or coconut macaroons.

I’m in my early twenties I hike the Tasmanian wilderness with friends. On the tenth day, starving, we ask each other what’s the first thing we’ll eat back in civilisation. They opt for lavish me; I crave Butternut Snaps.

Always wanting to ride a little lighter I try to avoid biscuits, but it’s impossible. The supermarket has aisles full of them. Every work meeting has a plate of biscuits on the table. Every cup of tea needs a biscuit. Or two, or three.

My favourites are not the expected Tim Tams. They’re fine, but plain old Malt’o’milks take the cake. They’re dark brown, thin, crunchy, need to be sucked off the teeth. The Monte Carlo always tempts but disappoints. Shortbreads are pretty good—all that butter. The Lemon Crisp straddles the cracker sweet biscuit divide with lemon cream and salt on top.

The only biscuits I cook are Anzacs—oats, sugar, coconut, flour, golden syrup, butter—slightly chewy, golden, crunchy at the edges. One day I’ll make a perfect batch.

Rock on. 

keys

On Monday I give Joyce a box of chocolates for looking after the cat while I’m in Adelaide. She returns my keys. On Tuesday my good woman returns my other set of keys. Yesterday I remember that I have no spare keys stashed outside for that rare occasion when I lock myself out. It happens.

This morning I make sure I have my keys in my briefcase, pick up the keys to the hire car, motor off to a meeting in Gippsland. On my way back I stop and have lunch with my mother. She is less shocked that I imagine at the news that my good woman and I have fallen apart.

I drop the hire car off, arrive home in a taxi at 3:15. I have 15 minutes for a cuppa before another meeting, this one in Lilydale. I can’t find my keys. I remember putting them in a small outside pocket of the briefcase, taking them out again; too lumpy.

Now I put the briefcase on a table next to the front door, empty all four external pockets, two internal pockets, four sleeved compartments. No keys. I go to the back shed, look everywhere for spares. No go.

The dog paces and cat howls at the back door, wait for me to let them in. I apologise, unpack the briefcase, again no keys. Twice I hurl myself at the door, hope the lock, the jamb, the hinges, the striker gives way before I do. The door bends but holds.

I hook out the laptop, set it up on the cat bench on the back porch. I enter emergency locksmiths eastern suburbs Melbourne in the search engine, ring the first. He asks what suburb. Nah, he says, too far away. I ring a second. Too busy, no chance. Sorry. I call a third. What suburb? Be there in an hour. He wants an assurance I won’t call anyone else. You’re the man, I tell him.

I find a gardening glove, weed the front garden, bin hundreds of soggy camellia heads. I find an old stool in the shed, wheel it to the carport, plonk my arse on the hard seat, lean back against the car, nod off, cold wind swirling round my ankles.

The mobile rings at twenty to six. The locksmith is in my street, can’t find my house. He asks for the nearest cross street, tells me his GPS doesn’t have it. He’s on the corner of Ranger Road. I twig. I tell him I’m in Melbourne. He tells me he’s in Sydney.

I’m over locksmiths, hurl myself at the door one last time. I fetch a hammer from the shed; two swift swipes just below the lock rip through the flimsy plywood. I stick a hand through, turn the handle. The dog and cat bolt through the splinters all over the floor.

I pull off the smashed ply, find a handy offcut from a shelf, drill a hole in each corner, screw it on over the ragged cavity, sweep up the debris.

I don’t get pissed off, just philosophical. It’s par for the course in a shit week.

Rock on. 

insufficient

Mostly I’m happy enough, but when I stop moving, working, an emptiness rushes in to fill the void. Thoughts of my good woman, where to from here? On the tram, when I look up from my book, walking along the street by myself.

Thoughts swirl: the things I might have said, didn’t get much chance. My good woman has her spiel together, the evidence, mostly symbolic, of our failures to connect. She’s too smart by half, sees some things where there’s nothing to see, but mostly gets it right.

The haste seems unseemly: what chance is there to chew things over, try to make sense where there is none? Now, after, pieces fall into place, slowly, like the coloured shapes of a computer game as the battery goes down.

There’ll be little chance of going back for either of us. We are not like that. I can’t go back to Bendigo; it worked when I was in another town. We won’t return to the ragged garden, untended, neglected for lack of time, lack of opportunity to just be us.

Anything seems possible, as it unfolds. In hindsight everything seems inevitable, from the moment it began. Time held us green and dying: Dylan Thomas.

The day it all ‘gets wrong’, my birthday, on the couch in her lounge room, I spy a purple-spined book in her bookcase, author Bruno Bettelheim. The name rings a bell. I ask if he’s a psychologist, a philosopher? She crosses the floor, brings the book to the couch. The title on the cover is in Serbian. She translates for me: Love is never enough.

Rock on. 

numb

Six nights ago in Adelaide I write this.

A balled paper napkin bounces off my scone. Tracy feigns innocence. She offers a penny for my thoughts. Fact is, my thoughts and I have, like Elvis, left the building. I have no coherent thought; I’m at a loss. I am numb, sadly, dumbly numb.

All around is noise, clinking wine glasses, teeth chomping salt and pepper squid, risotto, gnocchi, penne. Voices scream to be heard over the hubbub, my own soon sore, my ears deaf with the strain to hear people leaning across the table.

This is us, the MM and KM teams in Adelaide for our quarterly gabfests, three days of endless meeting, sifting the minutiae of what we do. We fly in from all across the continent, gather in a 13-storey Glenelg hotel, talk our way to exhaustion, then jet home on Friday afternoon.

Tonight is our first night, the night we eat together; tomorrow night we will go our own ways. In the lift to the lobby I feel reluctant to go out. I chat with my Darwin colleague as we stroll up Jetty Road. Inside this Italian restaurant I sit at a vacant table, wait for the seats around me to fill.

Two and a half days after my good woman and I talk about the strange disjunct in our relationship on Sunday night into Monday I feel a wave of sadness. I put it away in the restaurant, do pre-dinner chat, relive the day’s funny moments, then the sad mist descends and I’m gone, staring blankly. And Tracy’s balled napkin hits me.

Not long after I quit the place, the first to go, no dessert. The walk back seems shorter, the footpath brighter. In my room overlooking the ocean I close the ochre curtains, prepare to write. For days I’ve struggled to write, as if I know what is coming, then when it comes, I don’t know just what it is.

Six nights later, tonight, in Melbourne, I write this.

I despair of ever making sense of people who love each other figuring out what to do with that love.

From the very start my good woman says I am her soul mate. Me too. She also talks of how we idealise the other in those first weeks, maybe years, of being together. We both know it, know we are doing it, can’t stop ourselves. This time I think it will endure.

She tells me that if it ‘gets wrong’, even if that’s tomorrow, she will go on, no regrets, no tears. Me too. She knows everything I’m thinking, feeling. We understand each other implicitly.

She likes our autistic little world together, doesn’t want to complicate it with friends, hers, mine or mutual. But in the end it isn’t enough and our worlds don’t coalesce.

suddenly

Suddenly. Silence.

My good woman has been. And gone. Really gone.

I always know that when it happens it will be like a band-aid coming off.

So the world goes quiet; my heart and mind are empty. I pace the house, nowhere to go. I have nothing to say and no one to say it to. There will be no lingering friendship; she’s not like that.

She explained it all, the gradual disappearance of us since I came back to Melbourne, the reality sinking in and the glorious fantasy seeping away. I see it but I don’t; I feel it but I don’t.

Her bike accident seals it. She has tried to enter my world but can’t. I have wanted to enter her world but haven’t really tried. It’s nobody’s fault, but I can’t help but think I am to blame.

I get her keys from my car, hand them to her at the top of the drive. We hug, we separate, she drives away into the night. Tomorrow when I am at work she will bring back the mountain bike I lent her kids, pop my keys in the key bowl.

I can’t believe I won’t sit in her kitchen again, talk and laugh together. I can’t believe I won’t feel that familiar body against me. I can’t believe anything at all just now. But I must.

The silence roars in my head.

sycamore

The driveway is long, slanted across the property, steep, the bitumen patched. Treacherous stone stairs from the letterbox cross the drive half way up to the house. My sister’s new house. Off a muddy lane hidden in the bush not far from the Emerald golf course.

The house is magnificent, architect-designed, built in the thirties, genteel. The drive curls around to the back door under what the floor plan calls the port cochere, the coachman’s entrance. I enter the vestibule, get hit by a musty reek. The place has been unoccupied, unheated, for a week.

The passageway runs the width of the place, not the length, to the right the kitchen, maid’s room, to the left the bedrooms. Straight ahead is the huge living room, French doors to a pillored verandah looking across the valley. Behind the house, separate, up wooden stairs, is the studio, a large, dark-panelled room, two huge windows with the best view on the property, northeast.

My sister and brother-in-law are inside, my niece and her partner too. My son and his partner arrive, then my nephew’s partner. The ducted heating drives out the must. We open doors, cupboards, everything oddly angled; this is its charm—it’s no box.

My sister will turn the house into a masterpiece, as it once was. But I know from the tremor in her voice the garden frightens her.

I wander down a garden path. The previous occupants have let the garden go; more likely it overwhelmed them. New vegie boxes in the back corner attest to an attempt to make a go of it. Hidden paths dense with moss disappear under azalea hedges. English ivy, the scourge of native flora, insinuates itself across every surface. A team of gardeners would need a year to tame it.

My nephew’s partner encounters a neighbour on her ramble through the wilderness. He says the house has changed hands four times in eight years, twice owned by gay couples. I suspect the garden got the better of them all. Or the damp.

This will be my sister and brother-in-law’s greatest challenge. I wish them luck.

Rock on. 

abode

I hang a u-turn, pull up behind my son’s work vehicle, twin-cab VW full of tools, canopied with ladders. He’s laying grey pavers from the deck to the clothesline at the side of my sister’s house in East Brighton. He levels dirt and brickie’s sand between the formwork he set up the previous weekend, his eye as meticulous as a taut string.

My second brother-in-law Tom, though I never think of him in this formal way, touches up new paths in the front yard. My sister paints picture rails in the storage room. Renovating houses is the thing they do best, the architect and the interior decorator. He has the grand designs, she paints and furnishes.

They are moving house, tidying and cleaning before tenants move in. I ring her between porridge and toast, just back from three days in Adelaide, no time to think about their move. I ask if I can help in any way, hope for a grateful refusal. Can I come down and acid wash the deck for them? Sounds like fun.

I mix a litre of concentrated oxalic acid with four parts water in a plastic bin. Thin pink latex gloves protect me from the acid. I sweep the dark, dirty boards, hose, brush off the excess, sweep on the acid, go down on my knees and scrub with a hand brush, section by section. It’s a shit job by anyone’s reckoning.

After the hosing off a smidge of the original cedar colour up comes through.

About two we shuffle through empty bookcases, cabinets and pulled-down furnishings to eat soup and toasted sandwiches from odd bowls, a plastic container and a mug; everything is in the Rubik’s cube of boxes snarling the living-room, the big move still two days away. Like all abodes, my sister’s house looks in need of renovation when empty.

After lunch my sister and I confabulate about our parents. I tell her about my good woman’s conversation with our mother, her admission that she bullies my father to keep him alive. My sister comments that he’s joined the queue. Tom nods at the things my sister disagrees with; my son in the prime of his life must wonder what he’s in for if I get to 87.

On Monday my sister moves from the bayside to the mountains, to a celebrated 1930s architectural masterpiece. In 90 days my son will move to a neat house in Somerville he signed the papers for two days ago. The excitement of owning a house is growing on him.

Moving house is hell on earth even when the reward is great. I’m wondering why I live in the outer suburbs and work a long tedious commute away. I plan to stick at this job for four years. Could I endure a move somewhere closer?   

Rock on. 

olympics

The Olympics are on and I could care less. It’s cynicism—been there, seen that. (Of course, I haven’t really been there.) Personal bests against the best in the world should be the measure of any athlete’s effort, but all too often only medals count. Medal counts and nation ranking have no place in my Olympic hierarchy.

My first awareness of the Olympics is Abebe Bikila winning the marathon in Rome in 1960. I’m nine years old, just able to grasp the significance of running 26 miles. More than that, he runs barefoot because that is how he trains and the sponsor’s shoes do not fit. He is a last minute inclusion in the Ethiopian team, the first to win an event. He wins again in Tokyo.

A rare few performances in my lifetime capture the imagination: Keiran Perkins’s 1996 win from lane eight after qualifying for the final by 0.24 seconds; Bob Beamon’s 1968 bolt from the blue bettering the old long jump record by 55 cms; and Ralph Doubell winning the 800 metres at the same Games. No Australian has run the 800 faster in 44 years since.

Athletes’ bodies are beautiful; a shame they don’t compete naked as in ancient Greece. I’m happy to leave weightlifters out of that.

There are sports that don’t sit right at the Olympics: tennis, beach volleyball, synchronised swimming and diving, anything on horses. Swimming is dead boring and always has been. Gymnasts flouncing around with hoops and ribbons and clubs are nice, but is it sport?

Cricket and netball are played only by former British colonies, so no Olympic guernsey. European handball is only played in Europe, so … ? BMX bikes? Next time we’ll see freestyle skateboarding, fencing with light-sabres, silly walks, though it would be hard to compete with the real thing.

My final reason not to care is the crass television coverage from the free-to-air rights holder. I do watch a small amount on Foxtel: nine dedicated channels, no ads during events, and occasionally no commentary. What a joy!

Rock on.