by Liz Byrski
Judy wanted to hang on to their company a little a longer; they were both a lot older than her and there was something comforting about them. ‘I haven’t knitted for years,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t mind trying again.’
So she’d gone with them, bought several pairs of needles, wool and a pattern book. I’d be willing to knit my way through the whole book if it means I can spend some time with them, she thought as she drove home. And that’s just what she did. Soon she was knitting blankets, beanies, socks, and jumpers, cushion covers and tea cosies for the CWA. Every fortnight she and Edna would meet for lunch on shopping day, sometimes with Val but more often just the two of them. And for Judy the tedious ninety-minute each-way trek was transformed from a burden to the highlight of her week. With Donna at the farm, and now with Edna’s friendship, she began to feel she might yet make it as an Australian farmer’s wife. Then the following year she fell pregnant, and baby clothes, blankets, knitted toys and shawls were on her needles. She knitted with almost manic energy and would often finish the last few rows of whatever she was working on long after Ted was asleep. But one night, as she got up from the sofa, she was gripped by spasms of pain that bent her double and she began to bleed. Three weeks later, she was released from hospital, struggling to come to terms with the death of her baby and the knowledge that there was going to be no second chance at motherhood.
From then on each day was a challenge. Donna did everything in her power to help keep Judy’s spirits up. Ted’s mother – who, although essentially kind and fond of Judy, lacked warmth or empathy – made her special cakes and administered tense, awkward hugs. Edna came to visit her and stayed a couple of nights. Slowly, life returned to apparent normality. Except that it wasn’t normal, because every time Judy thought about the future all she wanted was to run away. The following year there was another blow. Edna had a massive heart attack and a few days later, as Judy was packing an overnight bag to go and visit her, Edna’s husband called to tell her that his wife had died that morning.
With Edna gone Judy knew in her heart that her days in the Wheatbelt were numbered. Even so she managed to last another year, until one morning she got up, packed her needles, her wool, her cotton yarn and her patterns into a huge crocheted bag and everything else she owned into a suitcase.
‘Will you be coming back?’ Ted had asked as he stood in the bedroom watching her stuff things into her case.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll come and visit if you if want me to. I do still love you, Ted, I probably always will, but I can’t live here, and you can’t live anywhere else.’
They clung together in their bedroom in the sweltering heat, and Judy felt her heart was breaking. ‘I’m sorry, really I am,’ she sobbed.
In the first couple of years she had gone back to stay with him sometimes and he came to Perth to see her. But distance meant that their lives drifted apart, and they were both just trying to make the best of it. The visits became more infrequent and then, almost three years after she had left, Ted wrote to tell her that Donna had moved in with him. Judy felt an unexpected stab of something like jealousy. Donna was her only real friend in Australia, almost like a sister. She had supported her through the miscarriage and its aftermath, and Judy had grown to love her, and she still loved Ted. So what, she had wondered, was the nature of this jealousy? Did she feel she was losing a part of Ted, or a part of Donna, or both? It troubled her for a while, but these were the two people she loved most in the world and they loved her and each other. They loved life on the land and she hated it. She, on the other hand, had her independence, and a great job in a dress shop in Perth.
Her father had died during her first year in Australia, and when some years later, her mother, still back in that Suffolk town, also died, Judy and her brother Robert inherited the house. He bought her out of the property and thanks to a very favourable exchange rate Judy had been able to buy a townhouse near the waterfront in Mandurah, an hour’s drive south of Perth. It was a small town back then, and she had liked the feel of it. It was a neighbourly sort of place on the glittering banks of a beautiful inlet, where families went hunting for crabs on hot summer evenings, and there was an old wooden jetty where the pelicans often gathered. Best of all there was a sign in the window of the rather nice wool shop advertising a vacancy for a salesperson. She had walked in hopeful and out an hour-and-a-half later with a new job, and when she had worked out her two weeks’ notice in Perth she began her new life in Mandurah.
‘We’re an odd sort of threesome, aren’t we?’ Judy said to Donna one time when she’d driven down to stay with Donna and Ted. And that’s what they have remained. Now, when Judy visits, as she does two or three times a year, she sleeps in the bedroom she had once planned as a nursery.
This morning, as Maddie waits at the front door, Judy rummages through the stack of papers on her desk, looking for the bills that are due this week. There are five she knows she needs to pay, but by the time she has located two it’s time to open the shop.
‘Right on time,’ Maddie says to her with a big smile, unfazed by the wait, and holding out the plastic carrier bag. ‘I’ve brought some scarves, and I need more wool.’
Judy pulls out five very long strips of knitting in various colour mixes – in uneven garter stitch. All have scattered holes from dropped stitches, or knots where Maddie has decided to change wool colour in the middle of a row.
‘These are lovely, Maddie,’ Judy says. ‘I’ll pop out the back and get you some more wool.’ She carries them out to the stockroom, returning with a bag of tightly rolled balls of used wool from Maddie’s previous deliveries. In the early days of this strange friendship Judy had recognised that Maddie had little or no money and she began to supply her with new wool. But Maddie knitted very fast and very often, and what she knitted was always unusable. Judy had tried various ways to help her improve her knitting, but Maddie’s only interest was in doing the knitting, not in knitting well or in what happened to it when it was done. So Judy began unravelling them and returning the wool to her in tightly wound balls, along with any other odd balls left over in the shop, ends of lines or dye lots. And now there is a ritual: Maddie delivers the scarves, Judy hands over some recycled wool and makes a cup of tea, and Maddie stands around for about twenty minutes regaling her with stories of life in the supervised share house where she lives, and then leaves. But today is different.
‘Can’t stop,’ Maddie says. ‘I’ve got to get back.’
‘Really? You don’t want a cup of tea?’
Maddie shakes her head and leans closer to whisper. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend. He moved in last week and I can tell that he likes me, because I showed him my scarves and he said he’d like me to knit one especially for him.’
‘Well that’s very good news,’ Judy says. ‘You’d better hurry back and get started on it then.’ She stands watching as Maddie heads out of the shop and down the street. This unexpected defection from a long-established, if irritating, ritual is strangely disconcerting. Judy checks the shelves and switches on the computer. A couple of regulars wander in and her heart sinks at the prospect of having to listen to their stories of awkward husbands, difficult neighbours, ungrateful children, or the plumber who didn’t turn up; and that’s before they even get around to telling her about their knitting problems, and asking for advice on patterns. Some days, she thinks, I feel more like an agony aunt than a shopkeeper. But she puts on her best smile. ‘Jane, Brenda,’ she says, ‘lovely to see you, what can I do for you today?’
It’s another hour before she actually has time to perch on the stool behind the counter and check the personal email on her phone.
There are several new messages, some junk and a short message from Ted about some obscure tractor part he thinks she might be able to pick up locally and mail to him. And then there is one from Adele.
Judy reads it, then reads it again.
Quickly she crosses to th
e door, locks it, replaces the Open sign with one that says Back in 10 Minutes and goes through to the office. Panic swells up inside her. She tugs at the poloneck of her jumper, stretching it frantically with her hands until it loosens. I can’t bear this anymore, I just can’t, she tells herself, overwhelmed by the need to escape, to find some way out of all that she has built.
In the past her response to feeling trapped has been to run away. But this time she can’t just run. She has created a really good business but has let it get out of hand, and failed to build an exit strategy. You’re mad, she tells herself, calm down. You need a holiday. Yes, that’s it, a holiday, and that’s what Adele’s message is about – a holiday. She lets go of her poloneck and hits ‘Reply all’.
Yes, yes, yes, please, she types. I’d love to do this. Just what I need, as soon as possible, so count me in. Thanks so much Adele. Will email again later. Can’t believe we’re going to meet at last.
Simone in Hobart, Tasmania
Simone stretches her arms above her head, holds the stretch, releases it gently and sits up, crosses her legs and looks out over the three rows of bodies lying still and silent in front of her.
‘Right, everyone,’ she says softly. ‘Sitting up slowly, take your time, deep breaths.’ As the class shifts to sit up she stands, and when everyone is upright she folds her hands in front of her and bows, and the class returns the namaste from a sitting position. ‘Thank you. Now – standing up carefully when you’re ready.’
There is a shuffle of shifting bodies and Simone watches as they cautiously get to their feet.
The seniors classes are a joy to teach; everyone in this particular beginners group has come to yoga late in life, some of them desperate for a route out of stiffness and bodily discomfort, and they are now also discovering how it calms and focuses them, helps them to concentrate more and forget less.
Simone herself started to practise yoga more than fifteen years ago when she hit her fifties. She had sought something different from the morning runs that had always been a source of discipline and refreshment for mind and body. It was a colleague who had recommended yoga and she had been in the mood to try something new.
‘You got me at exactly the right time,’ she’d told the instructor later. ‘I’m notoriously resistant to changing my habits.’ But from yoga she had never looked back. She noticed the calm that descended on her in the first couple of weeks. She was never going to be one of those types who attend two classes a week and do nothing in between. She practised every day so that a few weeks into her first course it became a regular habit. She was still teaching high school then and she began to feel calmer and more confident in the classroom.
‘I’m loving it,’ she’d told her daughter-in law when the classes ended over Christmas that year. ‘I’ll be back there again the first week in January.’
‘Well it obviously suits you, Simone,’ Stacey said. ‘You’re looking wonderful.’
‘But you’re not going to go all weird, are you, Mum?’ Adam asked. ‘Not going to start o-mming and chanting and stuff?’
Simone rolled her eyes. ‘Quite possibly,’ she said. ‘I’ll be taking it one day at a time and incorporating anything that works for me.’
Adam sighed. ‘So I suppose you’ll be moving the furniture around and worrying about energy flows next –’
‘That’s feng shui,’ Simone cut in, ‘but who knows? I’m open to anything.’
Since then she has changed her diet, learned to meditate and adopted spiritual practices that support her and have helped to rid her of the tension with which she had lived since her childhood. It changed her mind and her body and several years later she took a course that would enable her to teach yoga. When she was taking her first cautious steps towards retirement, the idea of running a class for older people a couple of times a week was top of her list of possibilities. Fortunately it had coincided with the opening of a new leisure and fitness centre, and she had submitted a ‘Yoga for Seniors’ proposal. It had been snapped up.
‘I thought you were giving up work,’ Adam had said a few weeks before she officially retired from the rather posh school where she had taught French for years. ‘But now you’re taking this on.’
‘I’ll need something when I retire,’ Simone said, watching as he mended the lock on her back door. ‘I’ll only be sixty-five. I want it to be something worthwhile and satisfying and I think it would be wonderful to see some people get what I’ve got from it.’
‘I imagine that if I ever get to retire I will find doing nothing pretty satisfying,’ Adam said over the scream of his electric drill.
Stacey had grinned at Simone from her seat at the bench top. ‘Remind me to leave home the day he retires,’ she said, and the two women had laughed as Adam continued to struggle with the lock.
Simone looks around the room again. ‘That’s all for today, thank you,’ she says. ‘Take care and I’ll see you again on Friday.’
A few people help her to roll up the mats, collect the pillows and stack them in the storeroom, and Simone is soon making her way out of the hall to the main entrance and into the street, where she sees Adam leaning against his car in the parking bay. She walks towards him, raising her eyebrows. ‘This is a surprise. Is something wrong?’
‘Not at all,’ Adam says, opening the passenger door for her. He takes a large manila envelope from the front seat and hands it to her. ‘This arrived this morning so I thought I’d bring it for you and take you to lunch to celebrate.’
‘The contract? Really?’ Simone says. ‘I thought it might be a couple of weeks.’
Adam shakes his head. ‘All done, signed, sealed, delivered.’
Simone hugs him. ‘Thank you so much, that’s wonderful. I’m so pleased, after all this time. Honestly that place had come to feel like a ball and chain.’
‘Well you’ve done it now,’ Adam says, ‘and done it at a good time, both in terms of the market and in helping you do what you want to do. Congratulations, Mum. The money will be in your account on settlement.’
Simone slides into the front seat of the car, opens the contract and flicks through the pages. ‘A celebratory lunch, definitely,’ she says. ‘What about Stacey, is she coming too?’
‘She’ll meet us there,’ Adam says, starting the engine.
Later, as they toast the sale of her parents’ old property in Queensland, Simone feels a sudden and unexpected twinge of nostalgia. It had been her first home in Australia: a small weatherboard worker’s cottage, on a citrus growing property where her father had been sent to work when they had arrived from Italy in the fifties. It was owned by the Marshalls, a once wealthy family, by then in disarray and struggling to keep afloat financially. Malcolm Marshall had been paralysed in a car accident that had also killed his son, Graham, a couple of years earlier. Malcolm was confined to a wheelchair and was now descending into dementia. His wife, Dorothy, and daughter-in-law, Claire, were struggling to manage the business along with caring for him and for Claire’s seven-year-old twin sons, Geoffrey and Douglas.
Carlo and his French wife Suzette were energetic and hardworking and Carlo proved able to turn his hand to seemingly anything. He was soon sorting out the business, and also doing some repairs to the main house, which had been built fifty years earlier. And Suzette was helping out with the cooking, the housework and the care of the twins.
Simone was just five when they’d arrived in Australia and her first impression of those early days was of a small, rather bleak little house surrounded by citrus trees, and two identical boys, older than her, pulling faces at her from behind the water tank. By the time the boys were despatched to boarding school four years later, the three of them had grown close and Simone, who had attended the tiny local school with them, missed them dreadfully. When they were home for the holidays Geoff and Doug would briefly flaunt their seniority before once again including her in their games. On her
eleventh birthday Simone was horrified when her parents told her that she too was going to boarding school. The prospect of going away to live with nuns and other girls in a small Catholic convent was frightening, but to her own surprise she didn’t take long to adjust. The nuns were kind and she became a devout, model pupil. Years later when she read of the terrible treatment of some children in Catholic schools, Simone would reflect on her own good fortune.
Each time she returned home for the holidays something in the little house would have changed: once there was a shiny new bathroom with an inside toilet, another time, a shady front verandah, and later two more bedrooms and a dining room. But other things began to change too, becoming more and more noticeable on each visit. Her parents barely spoke to each other, and the house was filled with strained and awkward silence. Simone spent more and more time with the Marshalls and the questions she might once have asked her mother she began to ask Claire instead. Eventually Carlo bought the cottage and some of the citrus orchards from Claire, who had inherited the estate after Malcolm and then Dorothy died, and continued to manage Claire’s property as well as his own smaller one.
‘I have to admit to feeling a little bit sad,’ Simone says as Adam refills their glasses. ‘Mama and Papa loved it so much in the early days, but by the time I was in my teens things had changed. And I really missed Doug and Geoff when they went away to uni, they’d been like brothers to me. By the time I left school I just wanted to get away. I was so thankful to have the chance to go to France to stay with Mama’s sister. I couldn’t get away fast enough.’
Back from Paris almost three years later, Simone was shocked to discover that the Marshalls had all gone, their house had been sold, and there was no forwarding address. Her parents had made no mention of this in their letters, and now they simply stonewalled all her attempts to find out why they had left. The previous year Geoff and Doug had visited her in Paris as part of an extended holiday. She thinks of that now, the walks by the Seine, the visits to the Louvre, Notre Dame, Place du Tertre and Sacre Coeur. How she had loved the weeks they had spent together then. For the first time in their friendship she was the one with the knowledge and the language, the one they turned to for advice and translation. There were postcards after they left, including one sent from a stopover in Hong Kong on the way home, and then nothing. She was disappointed, but assumed they were busy applying for jobs as well as helping with the work in the orchards.
