Deborah Forster

Last night Maisy, our old dog, sat outside with the crickets singing along the fence line, just getting along with each other. It was warm and she lifted her head to watch the bone white moon while everyone else was in bed and silence dropped around her until even the crickets slept, so I got up to bring her in. Aging can be kind or cruel or maybe both. A’s mother who’s in a nursing home, is ninety six and has dementia. She still remembers her kids, but she gets stuck on a sentence with each of them. With me it’s ‘are you still writing?’ With A it’s, ‘are you still working.’ And these questions come constantly, up to twenty or thirty times in brief spells. I tried answering differently, saying ’yes, I had a best seller, so you don’t need to worry about me anymore’ or ‘no, now I’ve got a boat’ but she’s glued to her script whatever you say. Anxiety sticks around.

I’ve been setting the alarm to get up early. I’m an insomniac and I thought I should reset the clock within. I get up and go for a walk, this morning through the gloom of promised rain even the air seemed grey as the sky came down. I listen to books as I walk but this morning, I was the only one walking, everyone else was in cars surging down the road like fish in a stream; I passed a kid’s table outside someone’s house, left in the hope of being taken. All the useless things that gather in knots on footpaths.

Our new house  sits on a deceptively steep hill in a street with giant oaks and roots like feet so that’s what drives me to the relatively flat main road. Maybe I’ll get to the oaks later.

Today is our forty seventh anniversary and I spent some time last night thinking about it. The registry office in Exeter. The travelling. Coming home, having the kids. Working. If you’re going to do all those things, it’s good to have a partner but no doubt it could be done alone. Take a fair bit of guts though. Then I thought about A personally. It seems we’ve been married forever. Someone asked me what he looked like when we met and I replied that he was beautiful, that he had light in his eyes. Still, today his voice is identical and so are his hands. And yes the beauty part is true, although less true in photographs than in my memory. His beauty is something I believe in, that and his kindness. And these beliefs  allow me to know my children are beautiful, but I didn’t need  that to believe the children were beautiful, they just were. Some thoughts are just a reflex. This accident of love creates families, that enfold and hold us for years and that is a truth for the ages.

For our anniversary we went to our favourite French restaurant for lunch and  had oysters and pommes frite and steak and A had onion soup and rabbit. We pretended it was Paris, the waiters in their black waistcoats and trousers, white shirts and the bentwood chairs placed all  around and waiting for people. The theatre of it, from a waiter yelling: ‘STOP the salad Niçoise!’ and that being passed down the line of the restaurant, each waiter yelling the same.  I bent down to get my napkin, and the swinging door to the kitchen burst open and nearly slammed into my head and yet still once more the Niçoise was stopped. We were ready to go, and A said ‘L’addition’. And the waiter switched to English and said ‘Yes’ firmly. The best French waiters are always a little contrary with a touch of conspiracy about them. They treat you like you’re in the game, and knowledgeable. But they’re so young these days.

The second big anniversary this week is that it’s one hundred years since Footscray Football Club joined the AFL/VFL. The club very nearly was forcibly merged  in 1989 with Fitzroy, but the supporters stepped up and saved it.

I spent much time watching the Dogs when I was a kid. We lived in Footscray just across Mount Mistake; past the Rising Sun pub and down Willy Road and every home game we’d be at the ground in time for the ceremonial opening of the gates at three-quarter time. Entry was free then and it was the only entertainment going. We’d stand on beer cans to watch the action, balancing like little storks. They didn’t often win, but it taught me to enjoy the good bits anyway.

I used to go to the footy a lot but don’t go any more. It’s too loud. My neighbours took me to Collingwood home games, when I was a kid, and I was completely into them. Though I changed my mind in 1966 when I was eleven and we lost the grand final by a point to St. Kilda and found myself weeping, holding onto the picket fence of the MCG and, suddenly I thought, this is very silly. After that I just went down to watch the Dogs, where it was just a game, not life or death.

When I got older I played tennis behind Whitten Oval and when the spectators got bored, they’d turn around give use some words of wisdom like ‘come on, you can do it’ or ‘ good serve’ or ‘never mind love.’ Then, in a flash, they’d just drift away to concentrate on the footy. As a cadet I had a column in Inside Football under my crafty pseudonym Deborah Black.  I wrote for half a season and faded away like someone who’d done a hammy. I did get sent into the football changing rooms at North Melbourne when the ban on women reporters was lifted. It was all a bit staged. And I stood beside a footballer in his kit. We both looked mortified.