Air

The air is what I remember the most. It is always the air. The feel of it streaming through my hair, buffeting my open mouth or slapping my cheeks out of shape. We would stand behind the cab of the ute, my sister and I, while Dad took the straight stretches as fast as he could because on the bends he would slow, taking peeks in the rear vision mirror to be sure that his girls were safe.

It was eleven miles to the school each morning and that means it was eleven home again. I suppose there were times we were driven in the car, but it is the ute that I remember the best.

My father had the ute modified. Instead of a standard issue Toyota tray back, he had a timber tray with sides and tailgate that could be removed, and and tilt tray mechanism that would lift the tray at the front, so loads like firewood or gravel could simply slide off when the pulley was lifted. This meant we had a tall mast behind the ute cab, so we could stand full height, toes gripping the fixed front tray end, and our frozen fingers hanging on to the cold metal pulley frame for dear life.

If we wanted to speak to each other we would yell into the wind, but our words were ripped away and rarely heard. I imagined the letters that formed them trailing behind us like confetti, finally falling lost and forgotten on the loose dirt road.

We would come around those last few bends, past the rusty drum letterbox of one neighbour and the clean white painted one of another. Then Dad would slow carefully and pull up in front of the one room school building. We'd jump down before the dust settled, bare feet searching for a sandy landing on the dry dusty verge.

I'd watch wistfully then, as he pulled away and his dust trail shrunk down the road. It would be six long and boring hours until that air would blast my face again.

26

He didn't wake up, on this morning, 26 years ago.

26 years ago! That's more than half of my lifetime now, but on a beautiful morning like this, when I can almost hear his voice saying everyday things as I visualise him here in my house, it could have been yesterday. I have always imagined what it would have been like to have him come here to visit. In my heart this has always been his house. Though if he had not left us, I would never have been able to build it, so, somehow, it is as if he is this house. It is built on his blood, sweat and tears, on his dreams and aspirations, and on his hope and love for us children. I know my father loved me dearly because he told me so. Not everyday or in casual conversation but one night when he'd had too much to drink, and on those nights when I was twelve years old and terrified of the dark, when he came and slept in my room on the dreadfully uncomfortable trundle bed. I will never forget that he did that for me, it meant the world.

So, Dad, I just want you to know that I still miss you dreadfully, I still wish you could come fishing with us, play euchre (WD has just learned and loves it), sit on the deck having a cool ale in the afternoon, all of the things that we used to do, but here, in this beautiful house that 'you built'.

April 1973 - AM

Like in any home almost anywhere in the world the kitchen was the life of the house. In the centre of the narrow room, under the windows, was the ‘Everhot’ slow combustion stove. I can still hear the creak of the firebox door, and my memory can feel the emanating heat, in summer, in winter, early in the morning and late at night, the constant unwavering soul of our home.

Until I was about thirteen I was awoken every morning to the sound of my father chopping kindling to stoke up the fire. I didn’t have a bedroom; instead I slept in the ‘sleepout’, which was basically an enclosed verandah. It had a door that opened onto stairs leading into the side garden. Out there the lemon tree, the orange tree, the peach trees and the plum crowded against the louvered southern wall. The door was weathered though and rather than strain it against the torn green linoleum to force it to a shuddering close each night, it was just left open. As I woke each morning to the sharp splintering sounds of my father’s axe work the open door afforded me a view of the woodheap and the child’s timber and chain swing alongside it. Of the wattle trees and the ironbark silhouetted against the white early dawn of the western sky. I would lie there as my eyes gained focus gazing at those dancing leaves. I saw them filled with creatures and faces. Laughing dancing girls and stern pipe smoking grandfathers. Yapping excited fox terriers and proud contented cats. In centre, facing me, cross-legged I saw an aboriginal man, holding his didgeridoo and staring hard into my face as he made his silent tribute to the beginning of the day.

All this as I listened to the firebox-ready wood crash and tumble into the woodbox by the back door, then the squeak of the firebox door and the scrape of the stoking tool as my father searched for still-warm embers amongst the ash and then laid out a few torn sheets of newspaper with the splintery tinder over it. In moments I would hear the roar and crackle of flames followed by the decisive slam of the firebox door as my father deemed his task as complete, a job well done.

It was wise to wait for a moment until the kettle was boiled before throwing on the warmest clothes I could find. Scrabbling through my ‘lowboy’ for any ill-fitting hand-me-downs from my three siblings and five cousins, the legacy of being the youngest in the generation. It is well that I was not concerned with fashion then, as I must have looked quite lost and unkempt. I rarely wore shoes, so I would run to the warmth of the kitchen before my hardened little feet had time to feel the cold.

Up above the high cupboard was where the ‘Milo’ was kept and I was allowed two teaspoons of the malt chocolate mix in hot water, one sugar and milk if we had any. If not, I would top it with tablespoons of lumpy powdered milk that became a treat in itself, sweet chewy globs of milky goodness. I would have to hide to eat that though, sneak out to the cold front verandah where my mother could not snap at me for being wasteful and greedy. “When I was a child.” Her voice would drone on endlessly.

We lived in the same house that my mother had grown up in. She reminded us every single day how lucky we were to live in such comfort, in a house with running water and painted walls. With fresh bread delivered twice weekly instead of damper made on weevil infested flour, with an actual kerosene refrigerator instead of the air-cooled ‘meatsafe’. According to my mother, everything was better when she was a child. Living on corned beef and unsweetened cocoa, believing that cheese was a treat as wonderful as chocolate and teeth could only be cleaned properly with charcoal was some form of utopia that she seemed to be forever guilty of depriving her children of. Meanwhile I spent my every waking moment straining to hear the sound of a vehicle or an aeroplane, dreaming of what it would be like to have a neighbour that lived closer than 10 miles away or a shop that was closer than sixty miles away. Civilisation called to me like some shining beacon in the far distance, on those cold mornings around the stove in that tiny kitchen my utopia was a land of homogenised milk in a bottle instead of manure laced in a bucket; of electric lights and doors that closed; and most of all of other people. It seemed that even then, my mother’s idea and my idea of the way life should be was somewhat different.

After I had swallowed down the last sweet chocolaty drops of my morning Milo and my mother and father were leaning, smoking cigarettes over the stove and sipping their hot tea I would carefully pour a cup for my Grandmother. She had a favourite cup and saucer and she drank her tea white with none. My feet would feel their way across the wide worn cypress pine floorboards through the dining room across the gold linoleum in the sunroom and to her door.

“Good morning Sunshine” she would say as she unhooked her sliding door and let me in. I loved the mornings in my Grandmother’s room. The “His Master’s Voice” radio and her dressing table top drawer filled with exotic earrings and untouchable pills. My cousin took one once. I always imagine it was one of the little red ones. They bundled her into the car and rushed her to the hospital. An hour and a half of stressful dirt road driving all the way to town. I assume they pumped her stomach when they got her there because she lived to climb the rafters in the shed another day and swallow some strychnine so that the whole panicky process could be repeated. Another survival to add to the family story archive, told and retold until nobody can remember exactly how the original story transpired.

As she drank her tea my Grandmother would tell me stories. Answer my questions about her childhood in Scotland and traveling to Australia by ship to grow up in Brisbane. She would allow me to gaze at my reflection in her magnifying mirror so I could imagine what I might look like when I was all grown up. So there I would be, perched on my grandmother’s bed, with my mismatched hand-me-down clothes, my chocolate ringed mouth, excruciatingly painful screw on drop earrings reflected in that mirror into the future while I thought about Scotland, castle, cities and ships. A world away from the morning bellow of the cattle in the yards, waiting to be fed and milked and drafted in a ritual that comforted and infuriated me all at once.

Grandma would shoo me away while she got dressed for her day and I would race across to the yards with the others. Most mornings I rummaged through the old shoe box by the back stairs, hoping against hope that my feet may have grown enough during the night that one of the pairs of dusty old riding boots might fit me. My mother would snap at me in her panicked voice to check for red-back spiders before I put my feet into danger. So I would use my hand to check as she insisted. That logic still baffles me? I never found a red-back and those boots never did fit, so I would stay barefoot, running across the sharp spiky dry grass as fast as I could so it wouldn’t have the chance to hurt my feet.

The yards were warm with animal respiration and busy as we worked, mixing grains, filling troughs with water and feed drums with hay. Mucking out the bull stalls, milking, letting calves in and out and. It was all hands on deck and conversation was king as we performed our tasks by habit. An hour or so of teamwork every morning and evening without fail. Back at the house Grandma would have a cooked breakfast ready on the table when we returned. We always came into the house through the kitchen, leaving boots outside or scraping the manure from our feet. The kitchen would be warm and filled with the smells of cooking as we crowded through to the bathroom to wash our hands and feet then quickly dress in slightly better clothes for school.

I never remember having to rush yet even after that leisurely two-course breakfast every morning where we delved into the cornflakes for the hidden toy and argued over how many omelettes we each had eaten, we seemed to have time to burn. We helped Grandma clear the table and wash up. Four kids fighting over who was wiping and who was putting away and my brother gleefully flicking me on the bottom with the wet teatowel. The drive to school was eleven miles. We always drove seven but my parents took it in turns with another family to drive the last five. So we met at the “Black Gate”, a gate thus named after it began its life soaked in Linseed oil but had long since grayed in the weather and the sun. We played hopscotch in the sand there as we waited for the other family and then for our parents to stop talking about the weather and the government and the price of fuel.


Then it was time for another day of school.... I hope you have enjoyed waking up with me on some unremarkable day in 1973?

Dad

It is twenty years today since my father died. Well since I found out anyway, he died sometime during the early hours of the morning.

The last time I spoke to him I called him from a phone box somewhere on the Southern NSW or Northern Victorian coast. I don't remember where we were or how long before he died it was. Perhaps 3 weeks or a month. That might sound odd now, that I would speak to him so seldom but with communication not so readily available then, as it is now, that was just normal for our family.

I remember he told me he was giving up smoking and that he had had a cancerous spot cut out from near his eye. "Give up smoking Love" he implored. It took me another ten years but I did it in the end. So there is some symmetry for me in today isn't there? It's hard to believe I can measure these huge milestones in my life in decades now and in a strange way realising that it is 10 years since I stopped smoking makes it seem less time since I lost my father. Those first 10 years went mind numbingly slower than the second, such is the age induced speeding up of time I suppose?

My husband went fishing on a friend's boat last night. Boat fishing always makes me miss my father most keenly. He would have loved coming to visit us here on the coast and going out fishing with us. He always dreamt that in his retirement he would be able to do these things. In the end his retirement was only 1 year long. He died aged 61. I feel ripped off, my kids feel ripped off, I think he was ripped off....Dying sucks.

I haven't spoken to my mother or my siblings about my father yet today. I suppose I should and yet my relationship with him was different from theirs. So sometimes talking to them about him takes him away from me and I resent that. I am my father's daughter. As a way of abusing me my mother thinks she is putting me down when she reiterates about how much like him I am. She couldn't be any more wrong. My father was friendly and accepting, loving and generous. I couldn't be more proud than to be told I am like he was.

I miss you Dad.

Home on the land....my mother would be proud.

This trip has been exactly what I needed. Out here I am so completely at home, all the bits of me seem to fall into place and I feel truly happy. There are of course so many memories, happy and sad. I can feel my father in the un-renovated rooms, down by the shed where he fiddled with machinery or by the empty creek where we used to sit together and fish. My grandmother is in the air, in the crisp sheets that we carried in from the line together or in the garden where she traced the teddy bear rhyme around my palm. Four generations of my family have now called this home, have let their feet become caked with mud while catching huge lobster sized yabbies from the dams or let the harsh dry scrub scratch their arms as they trekked up the the aboriginal cave in the hills. I had been told the hand paintings were gone, but it wasn't true. They are still there and I felt like singing with joy when I found them. It was enormous fun to show them to my Japanese guest, sharing something often makes it better I think. Super Son has enjoyed it too, I can tell, as slowly the tension of keeping his 'cool' face on eased and he has relaxed. He ran over the rainbow coloured rocks, the sheets of dry gum bark cracking crisply under his converse. He's going to need a new pair after this trip. I feel like I haven't seen him so animated in months.

I also found an aboriginal axe on the first morning here. I have been looking for one all of my life, I had just shown Ink the grooves in the sandstone down by the water hole and tried to explain to him that these grooves were made as the stone axes they used were sharpened, as we walked back towards the house over the ridge where I played so much as a child and felt such peace as a teenager an axe just lay on the ground in my path. Perhaps a cow had kicked it out of the soil, anyway it almost feels as if I was meant to find it, as if the land finally accepts me as it's offspring. Ha, that sounds stupid but thats just how it is.

Today is our last full day out here. I hope to catch some more yabbies, maybe climb the highest mountain so we can see one hundred miles around us (almost), perhaps we will go and collect nuts from the huge Queensland nut tree in the 'park', right now I am taking the binoculars and checking the water tanks for my brother. He is happily on the coast with his family so perhaps for the first time in over twenty years, this place really does feel like my home. I feel lucky.

On the phone my daughter tells me that she is moving to Sydney very soon. She is going down in a few weeks to try and find a job, I feel a little sad but resigned that maybe this is something she feels she has to do. Maybe I will come to Sydney for a visit soon? I can't think of any greater contrast than this place and Sydney.

Sugar Flower

In the kitchen opposite the wood stove was a leadlight kitchen dresser painted white. It had panes of glass, green, burgundy and clear. On the centre door which curved outwards the glass was cracked and the design slumped inwards. I used the wonder if the heat from the stove opposite had melted the lead and imagine that one day the whole panel would drip to the floor.

I stood next to the dresser that day and the ledge where the key was kept was very high. If I stood on my tiptoes I could feel it there with the very tips of my fingers but unless I dragged the stool across, there was little chance I would ever reach it.

I considered the moving of the stool and the noise that it would make. My parents took their midday nap just behind the dresser in the other room. If they heard me I might get the "flapper", a piece of bamboo about 20 inches long, with a folded strap of leather bound with "catgut" to it's end. Mum and Dad would threaten me with it what seemed like every day, but perhaps it was only when I was naughty? It was kept on the front veranda high on the coat hooks above the rifles. All those terrifying items dwelt there at our front door. I wonder now what people thought when they called in, to be greeted by that armoury?

The stool was too heavy for me to lift quietly but I remembered there was another outside. I slowly opened the rattling back door knob, it was dented brass kept shiny from many hands and the sound of that doorknob is more keen in my memory than any other sound I have ever known.

The back stairs creaked slightly and the small yellow stool, made from an apple crate is there.

On the way back my hands are full, the door slams in the breeze and I freeze....
All stays quiet. I carefully place the stool and reach the key. My footsteps through the dining room are swift and sure. I sit down cross-legged in front of the china cabinet and the key moves easily in the lock.

I am not allowed in here. In the very back is a small tin, slightly rusted. Carefully I move the breakables aside, fine china teacups and antique figurines. I grasp my prize. The lid squeaks a little as I pry it loose.

The hard sugar melts slowly in my mouth. I close my eyes in bliss. They won't notice just one more wedding cake decoration disappearing, surely?

Remembering the milking yards

I can hear the Happy Families chattering as I hold my arms outstretched either side of me.
The timber beneath my toes feels almost shiny, small bumps where splinters used to be, worn smooth now from the hands and thighs of many bodies, sitting, waiting, watching the daily ritual of "doing the cows".
I look at the beam in front of me and let my feet find their way along with confidence. I am confident, I tell myself, I am I am....but always, as soon as I query my confidence I start to waver and I look at the ground below instead. I choose a spot to place my feet when I have to turn my fall into a jump. I look for a place deep with mud and manure; I know below that mud the gravel is sharp and cruel on my cold bare feet.
As I jump I think of myself as light like a bird and bend my knees quickly to break my fall and then spring up again before the soft skin in the arch of my foot can find the gravel. I am safe.
I hear an order barked from one of my parents.
'Let in that calf.'
The clunk and scrape of the timber gate latch then the squeak of the hinge, in need of oil again. I know every calf by name, they bunt their heads against me and their warm animal aroma is like a balm of contentment to me. I block the others and let the called-for calf in, to feed from it's mother. She lets out an appreciative bellow from above her finished grain bin. The calf knows the ritual and runs in behind the bail, behind the cow.
The cow begins to relax now, and she lets her milk down and we scramble for it. First the young bull then he is led away and I practice my knot tying to keep him aside until the next cow is brought through for him. Then my father sits on the three-legged stool. I watch the muscles in his chocolate brown arms flex and relax as he hand milks the cow, her teats slippery from the saliva of the young bull, I see him fight the calf for the best teat. The bucket fills quickly when my father milks. The deep foam on top, proof he milks well. Whenever I try, my arms get tired before the foam begins to build and I pass it on to him. Yet still now, thirty years later my hands are stronger than anyone's I know.
I pull myself up and sit on the rail where before I walked. In my memory now I can hear the rustle of the animals and the rumble and scrape as the cows lick their grain bins, the rip of milk as each stream hits the foam in the metal bucket. The meow of the yard cats, frantic for a taste of the hot frothy milk.
I can hear the sad desperate bleating bellow of the hungry calves still waiting, the deep bellow of the bulls in their stalls, my mother's voice, talking about this animal or that. I can hear the Happy Family's chattering together.
I can see my father's boots, caked in mud and manure and hay.
I can watch his lips move, but I cannot hear his voice.
In four days it will be seventeen years since anyone heard his voice.

Reposting again - First posted Mar 2004
In fact tonight it will be nineteen years since anyone heard his voice. And excuse that picture, I drew it with the mouse in Corel, and I am not that great at mouse control. Also excuse the slightly morose postings. I just miss my Dad and although I always promised myself I'd try to remember him more on his birthday than on the day he died, it's a hard thing to do, I rememeber him every day.

Sprint Training

In the mornings, after I would wake with that crisp cold air burning my cheeks and the sound of my father splitting tinder at the woodheap, we would crowd around the wood stove fighting for a turn to toast our thick slabs of white bread over the hot coals. My father would lean across the stove, his cup kept warm on the white enamel stove warmers and the ash from his cigarette sometimes landing in the ironstone thunder egg he used as an ashtray and sometimes landing on the floor where he would hurriedly spread it out on the mottled pink linoleum to hide his mistake before someone snapped at him.

The kitchen was crowded and stuffy, the yellow painted vj boards that lined the ceiling, black with grease and soot.

My parents voices starting softly, discussed what would be done that day; the fences to be checked, the cows to be preganancy tested and the performance of the new bull. It seems always that the volume would rise and my mother would begin to speak louder as she sensed my father was not agreeing with her, not bending to her will as she believed then and still believes is the only possible conclusion in all her conversations. Finally my father would dump his cup on the sink, stub out his cigarette and shuffle, sock footed, to the back stairs where his oldest heeled RMWilliams boots would slide over his boot shaped feet and his stained and holey second-best Akubra would land in its familiar groove upon his forehead.

Sometimes I would rush after my father, squeezing my backside onto the stair beside him, working my way through the box of old boots. Always hoping my feet may have grown enough to slide into them like his did but always, in the end, chasing after him my pattering feet wearing shoes of hard skin and painful cold.

His gentle silence and firm brown hands would guide me out past the woodheap, past the feedshed and the utes. Out there, just us in the front paddock, he would spring it on me suddenly. "Race you to the yards?" And I would run on my toes to avoid the sharp frostbitten grass, prancing like Bambi down the hill, reaching out in strides as long as I could make them.

My father never let me win though, he would stay just ahead. He made me try so very hard but when I held out my arms out to stop myself against the rattling hayshed gates he was always already there, slowing to a stop beside me, laughing and puffing and telling me how good I was and how hard it was for him to beat me now.

My athletics coach, my father: 24 January 1926 - 25 March 1987

Barefooted Brats

It started the night before my ninth birthday. Dean and I found the chrome plated cylindrical contraption in the sideboard drawer, all spinning notched disks and fluted brass rods. It had a hinged lid along one side and a scalloped end wheel, which when you turned it would set the fluted rods all spinning. "Here", Dad said, "You lick the cigarette paper and place it in the slot, then lay a measure of tobacco along the length, not too close to the ends or it ends up in my mouth, then you close the lid and turn the end."
So we sat on the floor at his feet, Dean and I and rolled him cigarettes with varying degrees of success, we laughed at our attempts and became loud enough that we were sent the the spare room where we were always allowed to sleep when we had friends to stay. I know it would have been Dean's idea, but there we were hidden by the wall with my father's pouch of drum tobacco and Dean, being the natural ratbag that he was; it was inevitable really.
"Let's roll some for ourselves." he said "We can take them to school and see what it is like to smoke."
I agreed, I always agreed with everything that Dean said, he was bigger than me. He was being nice to me. I would do anything for Dean to be nice to me.
At school the next day we whispered to the others at little lunch and Dean led us all to the chicken coop behind the hit-up board at the far end of the tennis court. We climbed through the wire netting gate into the little pen and found old feed tins and water containers to turn over and plant ourselves on, small relief from the dusty dried out chicken poop, still smelly even a year after all the chooks were gone. Kent demanded the best seat and set himself up as watch peeking between the boards to be sure the teacher was not coming. So we lit the small bent half squashed "rollie" passing it around we puffed clouds of smoke out from our faces.
"That's not really how you do it" Dean told us" You have to suck it right in."
We just looked at him dumbly and kept puffing. Ann held hers elegantly, legs crossed at the ankles. Evelyn swaggered provocatively at eleven years old, swore and spat the bitter tar from her pink perfect lips. I knew I looked stupid doing everything I did, so there seemed little point in trying to be anything other than an untidy little tomboy. At least I was good at that. Little Beth stood defiantly, threatening to tittle-tale to her parents, he carrot red hair stark against the shocked white of her freckled skin. She wouldn't dare, would she?
It became a ritual after that, every day we brought stolen cigarettes to school. We graduated to climbing the tree behind the coop, a better look-out we thought. As if the teacher couldn't see us out the small square window, those little puffs of smoke wafting from between the branches of the whistling pine athol trees.
I remember that time with a feeling of elation, six small children on top of the world. Untouchable.
I can still feel the dread as we watched from our perches that day when he finally stood up from his desk and walked that long 100 metres towards us. I wonder that he left it so long when in honesty he must have known that whole week. Perhaps he simply hoped that we would stop by ourselves. I think a school with six pupils was more than this first year teacher, posted to the back of beyond and an empty classroom of barefooted brats, had ever bargained on. Six defiant, strong minded rebels were harder to control than a normal class of twenty-five.
Watching his slow steady steps towards us that day, we knew that we were caught. I saw Beth's pale white cheeks flush red with fear and defiance, so, she had told on us.
His decided discipline was that we should tell our parents or he would tell them for us. It was the worst punishment of my life.
In time I forgot the punishemnt but I remembered that feeling of elation. The thrill of being naughty and more than any nicotine addiction. That memory took hold of me like a drug. The thirst for that elation has never really left me.
After all, we never inhaled. (Originally posted 27.8.04)

Posting and Reposting...Kitchens and Memories...Deleting the wrong files....

Last week I decided that I needed to clean out my laptop, delete files, programs etc. I did the full back-up first, of course, but did not realise that the toshiba "my safe" folder I kept all my writings in wasn't going to back up correctly. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have managed to lose most of my writings. Pretty stupid hey? I have been able to find some though and stumbled across this post, below, written for what would have been my father's 78th birthday a few years back. It is rather similar to the previous post but I thought I would share it again anyway.


Seventy-eight

In the evenings it seems now that it was always just Dad and me. We would sit up late and play cards in a wonderfully comfortable quiet. When I longed for home during long freezing winters at boarding school, I longed the most for those evenings with my father. There was something in me that he understood, a thing that set us apart from the others.

He taught me to play euchre so that wherever in the world I have travelled he is with me. I feel my hands holding the cards the way his did and I rest my finger on my chin to consider my chances, as he did.

He liked a whisky late at night over those cards. He never drank more than a tiny glass or two, so I could never think of my father as an alcoholic, as my mother claimed he was. He was more a binge drinker when the cattle sales were on in town and when you consider his binges were often many months apart, for the most part he was a calm, patient and hard working man.

Every morning he woke me as he chopped the wood for the fire. I would wait until I heard the thump and rumble of the wood, and tinkle of the tinder landing in the woodbox. I would wait for the splash and crackle and roar as he lit the kerosine splattered firewood. I would listen for the sounds of his sock covered feet shuffle to the taps and fill the kettle, the scrape and grating squeak as he removed the fire cover and set the water over the new hot flames to boil. These memories of sound are like gold to me. The kettle would not take long and I would hear him feed the fire with chunks of increasing size, the final hollow pressured thump as he became satisfied with the health of the fire and rammed the firedoor shut. I would wait for this, then stumble out to the kitchen, warm now and welcoming.

We would lean inside the oven door together and let our cold hands sit on the white enamel insulated (asbestos probably) stovetop covers. His first hand rolled drum cigarette would be sending spirals of blue smoke into his eyes, and he would gaze quietly over the back paddock. I wonder now what he was thinking about. I suppose we must have spent this time talking and it seems wrong that the sounds of that room are so acute in my memory but his words seem to have drifted away and dissipated into the black soot on that vj lined ceiling.

Dad would have been seventy-eight last week. I knew even then, I think, that he would not last that long. He often joked about his smoking, that we would see the smoke rising from his grave but I looked last time and there wasn't any. I imagine him laughing and reminding me that he did give up in the end but not until two weeks before he died. It annoys me now that the doctors didn't let him live his last few weeks with that small joy. Instead they pumped him full of nicotine to stave the cravings and his weakness for just one more cigarette placed too much stress on his poor heart.

His dear heart.

Cold call

When the phonecall came through I was standing in the kitchen, I can't remember the room well now, only that there was a breakfast bar and it was the kitchen that had been put in by the company who used a photo of my sister and her first husband in their catalogue.

My oldest sister was hugely pregnant and sitting on a breakfast stool. I think she was wearing her dressing gown, she was enormous; it was fairly early in the morning cool and crisp as it always was in that house and so very, very clean. My sister's houses are never anything like that anymore.

I think I had just woken up and she and I were drinking cups of too hot coffee. She always made it too hot for me, and then after a few sips she would put hers back in the microwave to heat it up again.


.......
I see her face as she listens to the words from the caller. "Yes, she says, Alice is here with me" Her voice strains at the end of the sentence. I can hear her fear.

I know that someone has died, when a call like that comes through there is never any doubt.

I sit down and I am prepared. Grandma would have been 85 then. I had been preparing myself all my life that one day she would have to go. I reach my hand out to my sister and ask if it is Grandma. My sister's face is grey, she is still on the phone, I cannot listen though, all I can hear is a rushing of blood in my head. "It's Dad", she croaks. She muttered into the phone some more and the chair beneath me seems to push up into my body. I want to have misheard her, I know that she is wrong. He is only 61, there is a mistake. I stand up and run into the bedroom where S is asleep. I wake him and tell him hurriedly then I hear the alarm in my sister's voice calling me back.

As I run back I am numb and I see her there, crumpling into herself. I hold her and she moans with fear and shock.

The phone is back in it's cradle. The sounds she is making feel remote, silly almost but I stand firmly and I comfort her. I am thinking about the baby due any minute. I am thinking that I need to go outside and run. I want air in my lungs. I am numb and I am suffocating and my sister needs me.
.......


I don't remember much after that, only more phonecalls and my father's sister saying he was better off now. I wanted to ask her how the fuck she came to that conclusion?

All I really felt is an overhwelming need to get out of that house and away. I wanted to be home on the property where I could run away into the paddocks for miles and scream and scream and scream. Instead I walked sedately down Wilson Street in Oakleigh to the train station. S is walking with me and he is saying the wrong things and I want him to shut up.


.......
We catch the train into the city, past the MCG and we climb out at Flinders street. We walk up to the mall and I am walking too fast but no walk is fast enough for me. Everywhere I look people are doing what they do every day and I am in a bubble and everything feels wrong. We reach the mall and go to the lebanese cafe around the corner. It is like the old cafes in my home town with booths down each side and chrome edging on the tables. We don't go inside to eat because I need to be in the open and I don't know why. We buy falafel rolls wrapped in white paper and we need to find a place to sit to eat, we go the the post office and sit on the stairs.

The juice from the roll drips down my chin and I don't care. I want to scream and cry but I can't. I am surprised that I can eat, that my hands look the same and the sky is still there, where it was yesterday.

We were supposed to meet our friends 4 weeks ago in Ulladulla, they never showed, so we have driven on to melbourne. To my sister, to other friends, to jobs. In that moment with the falafel juice on my chin, and reality smacking me in the face, a line of tall travel-weary surfers trudge up the stairs in search of mail from home.

It is good to see them. They say that Jim who I am scanning for, has gone to my sister's place looking for us. So they get their mail and we go to the closest pub. Which is what we usually do and this does seem right.

The pub we go to is a step or two down from the street. It is dark and there is dark timber and loud carpet. We stand at a round shelf built around a pillar. I have a VB. This is the worst beer in the world, after this week I will never drink it again. S talks happily with our friends. Bob asks me if I am alright and I nod. They don't know what to say to me and it is alright.

In this room I am having a beer with my dad. He would like it here, I turn my shoulder slightly to shut off the others. I picture him standing beside me and in my head we have a conversation and as always he cracks jokes and I laugh and I worry that the haircut I gave him isn't perfect but he is happy and he is smiling and I don't want to turn around when the others talk to me because when I do that, I will be back in the real world and I don't like it here anymore.
.......



Later on we went to meet Jim and when I saw him I looked at him pleadingly for understanding because I know he has lost his parents. Later I think how cruel that was of me, but at that moment I was so desperate for understanding that I did not see that. I don't remember what he said to me but suddenly I realised I had left my hugely pregnant sister all alone and I had to go to her.


.......
She tells me they have decided that the funeral will be the next day, because if they waited an extra day, they would be having it on my birthday. They want me to stay in Melbourne with her because she cannot fly and it is too far anyway. I agree but I will wish so much that I hadn't.
.......


What sort of daughter doesn't go to her own father's funeral?

I don't remember ever crying.

On my birthday I didn't want to go out but S insisted. When we got there I couldn't do it, instead I spent the evening on the side of the road in the back of Jim's truck with the dogs, while everybody partied on watching some band in some pub in some suburb in some city called Melbourne.