Deborah Forster

You take the same way most days, through the park to let the dog inhale the world and roll in the grass. You notice people with dogs that look like themselves, one called Yogi was shaved, large and white and its owner also large, white and shaved. Two fat galahs in the grass watching the dogs without concern, barely raising a glance at them.

And then you go past the remains of inner-city industry around here. Factories nestle into new apartment developments, a small cheese factory, another that makes Hi-Viz vests, a whole lot of open-mouthed buildings waiting for cars, one workshop owned by someone named Bruno Finks, who when checked, had long passed away. And issuing out of the lungs of a lot of these little workplaces is the smell of oil. The train line across the road is hardly constrained by fences that are slackly held with padlocks. Scrubby trees hug the gravel beside the train lines. Shade has always been a premium in Lynch Street, the long skinny street squeezed in beside the railway tracks. The dog likes everything better in cool weather especially the footpath. In summer it’s a searing strip.

Not far from this street I remember a man whose three dogs slept every night in an old campervan parked outside his tiny house. he got them up each day to come in and hang with him. At least one was a greyhound. Sometimes the dogs would fight, and the campervan got wild. In the end, the neighbours were over the whole dog hotel idea. As the dogs got old, they were not replaced.

Back in Lynch Street, a dumped office chair sits beside the gutter today. The skin of its fake leather flaps like a flag in the wind and I’m thinking it will all soon end up in the railway verge.

Regiments of parked cars line the street. Rust ebbs down the old footy ground stand like slow tears. If you take the shortcut under the rail lines, you emerge into the ground with swarms of young people playing soccer and shouting as if they were lost and now are found. The church bells ring sometimes to remind you of something. Lynch Street is always hard to leave.

She remembered her third child had just been born. He was peaceful and round. She thought maybe she had finally got hold of this thing that ruled her life, the mothering thing, organised the feeding, the sleeping, though she would never jinx that with such wild statements. The problems were never with loving the children, that was well supplied. There were other problems. If she was going to be a mother, she thought, it was time to run it herself.

The new baby was so much like his sister, who was a brown and sunny baby from Coogee beach where they used to go to the sea baths, the Ladies’ or Wylie’s baths. Alice was four and the world was all blue because the sea was at our door, and one day we were at the baths, and she was stung by a bluebottle. Vinegar was applied. Such shocking pain. We were coming back to Melbourne anyway soon. Phoebe was six, and anxiously glad to be back in Melbourne with the family. We had come back because the husband had another job and because it seemed safer, a concept she would always be forced to examine. Safe, she thought were the streets she knew, a long way from threat. Safe was this place she moved to at eighteen away from her father. But safe is not a simple thing. Safe is an open guess. Often the thing that tells you it’s not safe, is intuition. It’s when you are walking that these thoughts arise, just to keep you company.

It was nearly a full moon, the air a quiet breath, some fog still hovering and warm for the time of year. It was still only five thirty or so. We’d been sitting in the garden surrounded by the benevolent afternoon and after my daughter left, it suddenly occurred to me in a spurt of possibility, daring and foolishness, to pull a large potted topiary fig from one side of the porch to the next. The plant had niggled at me for a while. It needed something from me that I couldn’t give at the time: attention. And now here it was, full on demanding it. All went well, and I was weirdly satisfied. Age gives you some dimension on what you can do, though it’s probably still off and skewed, like all the other insights in every other age.

Woke up at 2.30am with someone driving an axe into my shoulder. Turned the light on with left hand and was most relieved to find no one in the room with an axe. Got up, heated a wheat bag, took painkillers and tried to sleep on the couch went back to bed and fell asleep with arm up. Big slow raindrops fell on the roof with the wind rising like a serpent. Pain worse. I know I shouldn’t heave/slide/nudge things around. That time is coming to an end, but it feels that to learn this is to abandon youth and its glorious strength. How I loved shoving furniture around as if it weighed nothing. How I still love all that. You get old, you don’t stop being you. Still, the fig looks good in its new spot and that day pain was just a tame ghost.

Deborah Forster is the Melbourne journalist and author behind the Sunday Age column ‘This Life’. This is a revisiting of that column.