Deborah Forster

I hear cars buzzing through the dark night going somewhere, maybe heading for the midnight traffic jam or just home to bed. Still, noise swells on the tide of the night and reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Boogie Street’.

‘I’m wanted at the traffic-jam
They’re saving me a seat.’

My car battery had just gone flat again, so I wasn’t going far because it’d been sitting in the street while I was in the hospital.  We got that fixed on Friday. On Saturday in the silky night, someone smashed the driver’s side window. The alarm went for hours, but I didn’t hear it. The lout (as mum would say) smashed several others in the street. The police said to touch nothing, so we didn’t. They were friendly but utterly defeated. The thief had stolen garage remotes. From the fingerprints, it seemed he/she had worn a glove. The friendly neighbours offered tape and plastic for the broken window. So maybe it was a bonding experience.

I’d got out of hospital the day before, (they save me a seat) but, strangely, I was already missing the hospital’s ruby red jelly and tiny spoons. In hospital, treats seem more special. Getting home is like being suspended. You see things fast; things you like, the grass, the freshness, then the other stuff, the washing piles, the plate littered with brownie crumbs from days ago, the couch cushions jumbled and untended. The garden shifts a lot too, you remember to notice because you tell yourself things are slowing for winter, but then we haven’t even had enough rain or coolness for May.

One afternoon when I got back, two little boys knocked on the door to say their footy had gone over the fence. One was about nine and the other sevenish, and the little one stayed close to his brother. They told me their names and we had a look for the footy behind the barbeque. They have one of those busy complaining small dogs. I asked why it made some much noise, and they laughed, ‘That’s just Dom and he’s been put outside for being naughty again.’ They liked his naughtiness.

After six months and a lot of changes, this house is slowly becoming home. We’re digging up the clay in the back and mixing it with compost like some giant garden cake. We want a garden. There’s mud everywhere. Over the years we’ve squirreled ourselves away in some in strange houses; one that looked like an old storm water drain, some like boxes.  One with a pond made from a swimming pool, its fence a green line. The world was at bay there for a while. When the pond went green, snails arrived, and I fed lizards on strawberries. There were fish, yabbies and frogs. White waterlilies dipped into the water like crowns and bees skimmed the deck. Once a rat drowned in it and Alan scooped it out with a garden hoe. ‘Hasn’t he got lovely pink feet?’ the four-year-old Alfie said, trotting along beside his grandfather as they set off to bury it. Alfie’s kindness always bubbles through, and I like to think he’ll remember this man he was named after when we are gone, but memory is its own master.

The city churns and I recall when it was quieter. The machine of it has prospered like some alien thing strangling us but where would we be without plants? They are the silent secrets growing towards the sun. In ‘After the Goldrush’ Neil Young wrote. ‘Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s.’  She’s still running.

In the morning, I see a man walking with fingers splayed across his stomach to cover his unravelling jumper. Maybe he drinks tea all day, and gets things delivered. Maybe he walks the great distances. Is he a recluse? Why not? Doves in the afternoon sunlight are soothing and thoughts of perhaps being a waitress are rejected because it’s too much like housework. On the radio, a man rings in to speak about grief (the man with the fraying jumper?) and asks: ‘Is it all right if I mourn for myself?’  The incremental sadness of that.

Iced tea leads you away from these thoughts and then there are accidents that take you back. Time is a trapdoor you step through, but then you must haul yourself out. I remember early one morning in Footscray.  A drunk smashed three cars outside mum’s shop. The only write-off belonged to my sister. Inside the house, our mother was into her third month of chemo due to stage 4 lung cancer. Her life was almost over, and her sadness had kissed her goodbye. My sister, the car owner, was getting divorced after having a baby. She rescued a stray dog that morning while waiting for the towie. You can make so many choices, and this was another. Life moves on. I think she bought the purple ute.