Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  I discover old fireplaces concealed behind gyprock walls in nearly every room. Four in all. Which is exciting because the apartment has just a single gas heater and there is not enough room under the floor to install central heating. Time to get practical! I will have a fireplace in the bedroom and another in the sitting room and I will fill the old, asbestos-lined wood room out the back next to the communal storeroom with twisted mallee roots that will burn long and slow and keep me warm when winter comes. I am being constructive! By the time I organise a builder to install floor to ceiling bookcases on either side of both fireplaces, I have filled in three months. Busy! Busy! Busy!

  Now what? Back to perusing the real estate ads in the Saturday paper, making appointments and wandering the countryside. The dream house/life must exist somewhere.

  Retiring is not easy. A lifetime of strong work ethics, schedules and routines – the fabric of my daily existence – suddenly becomes meaningless. Even if you hate what your work has come to mean to you, as I have, it still provides a daily goal. Now there is nothing to focus on except myself. Which I thought would be a relief. Only it isn't. Depression switches on and off. Not the illness kind. The ordinary kind. When you feel worthless and just plain blue. I start to play silly little games. If I do the right thing (ring my mother, take Suzi to dinner, help an old lady) three times today, tomorrow will be better. If I see a sign that says Susan twice, the future is rosy. The blunt reality, though, is that I am forty-four years old, overweight, with a self-image that's shot to hell and that even regular hairdressing appointments can't fix.

  I develop an obsession with cleanliness. If even a speck of dirt appears on the white carpet, I bring in the cleaners. I polish kitchen counters until they glow, rearrange closets and iron sheets. I sponge light switches to shiny whiteness and wash skirting boards until the paint threatens to flake. I tell myself it is a luxury to be able to take the time to clean properly. But it is only while I scrub away that I am replete with the illusion of busyness.

  My Friday night dinners with my stepdaughter, Suzi, continue, and sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, I join her, her partner and friends at a gig in a pub somewhere, listening to music that seems to come from another planet. I end up drinking too much and getting home when most people are leaving for work. I am too old for this, I realise, and it makes me feel seedy. And yet I do not want to think I have begun the long slide into old age and oblivion with nothing to show for it except a bit of a career and a bit of money in the bank. There has to be more. There has to be some secret trapdoor waiting for me to find the key to open it. I will fall down the ladder and wake up in the rabbit hole where the jigsaw will finally fall into place and all the dreams and wishes of a lifetime will suddenly come true.

  But what are the dreams? What are the vague but nagging yearnings that invade my mind every evening as I sit in front of the fire, the dog at my feet, a glass of wine in my hand, a book face down on the coffee table, obsessing over whether a painting is hung too high or too low? Is it all over? How much of our self image is tied up with what we do and when we cease to do it, we wonder if we have somehow passed our use-by date and have nothing left to offer, personally or professionally? Five phone calls to become a volunteer worker for everyone and anyone result in rejection. Not even licking envelopes for the Cancer Foundation. The Foundation is overflowing with envelope lickers, apparently. My loose ends feel like they are trickling into infinity.

  I don't consider finding another partner. If my mind drifts in that direction for a moment, I yank it back: 'Too fat, too old, too independent . . . too hard!' Looking back, too scared is closer to the truth. After eighteen years in a rigorously faithful relationship, the idea of sex with anyone else is terrifying. Stripping in front of someone new is quite simply horrifying. I have no concept of how the rules are played any more. And also, if I'm being strictly honest, I don't trust my judgement. What if I end up taking an axe murderer home for the night, if you know what I mean?

  Then one morning the cat leaps out of his basket next to the heater and drops dead. He lies in a heap, like an old moth-eaten fur collar, and the sight wrecks me. After sitting next to him for an hour or two on the floor, the grief of the past few years eventually settles back into its closed niche and I call my brother's friend James, who is now like a brother to me, to ask in a thick voice if I can dig a hole somewhere on his property. There's no room in my little courtyard, and anyway, Banana always preferred wide open spaces.

  'Plenty of land here,' he says. 'We'll find a top spot for him.'

  'Thanks. I'll be there this afternoon.'

  'They get to you, don't they?'

  'Sorry. Don't mean to sound all sobby. How's Cliffy?' Cliffy is his ancient border collie, a dog as grand as Sweetie.

  'He's right. Now you just get in the car and bring Banana here. We'll sort it out.'

  All I can think as I drive along, glancing at the little body lying stiff-legged in his basket, is that it's another bloody death. Another empty compartment. I begin to wonder if I attract it.

  Two hours later James' partner, Polly, draws me into the house.

  'James is out on the tractor. Let's have a gin and tonic. Then we'll work out where to dig a hole.'

  After the second gin, I am maudlin drunk. By the time we've finished half a bottle, I've forgotten the cat and we're both laughing at stuff that, sober, would not have been the least bit funny. We spin around guiltily when we hear James come through the kitchen door.

  'So where'd you put Banana?' he asks, shuffling towards us in his socks and sinking into his favourite chair by the fire, the one where there's a photograph of my brother close by.

  Polly and I look at each other. Aghast.

  'Oh God! The cat! We forgot about him!'

  I stumble outside where he's baked in the sun through the car window all afternoon, apologising as though he can hear and understand every word. But he doesn't move. Dead is forever.

  'I've got a tree to put on top of him,' Polly says, holding a pot plant and a spade and looking over my shoulder at the body. She is unperturbed. Farmers are familiar with death.

  At the back door, James wriggles his gammy left ankle until his foot slips into his work boot. He pulls the second boot on easily and follows us up the path.

  'Give me that.'

  He grabs the shovel from Polly and ducks under the clothesline and around the outside laundry to the front lawn. We follow him in a line like little ducklings.

  'Where do you reckon, Polly?'

  After half an hour of putting the pot plant in twenty different positions, the decision is made. James sends me inside while he fetches Banana from the car and buries him three feet deep with a baby oak tree to mark his life.

  Not long after moving to Melbourne, the phone rings at about 10 pm. It's Pat. 'Your mother is in intensive care,' she explains in a quiet and calm voice.

  'What's wrong?'

  'Heart attack. An ambulance took her off about an hour ago.'

  Because it is Pat on the phone, I ask no questions. Just throw the bewildered dog in the back of the ute and drive all night to Sydney.

  I have always had an uneasy relationship with my mother. We love each other, of course, but sometimes I want to throttle her. And she,me. I wonder if her ambition for her only daughter was blighted early. Born with a lazy eye, a strawberry mark down my face and not enough chin, a glamorous marriage was out of the question.

  An operation fixed the lazy eye and the strawberry mark turned out to be from pressure in the womb and faded in a few months. But it was not enough to transform me into pretty. By then, anyway, my face had turned freckly and I was showing every sign of growing as tall as my father, who was six feet five inches. Hard to place a big woman in days when petite was considered an asset. No. There wouldn't be any successful marriage that would liberate my mother from her working class shackles and catapult her into the glittering social world she craved.

  There was also the problem of my disposition. As a teenager
, I was a judgemental little prig. And what I hated, above all, was alcohol. My attitude made life a bit strained, considering my parents bought a country pub after my father retired from his job in the public service at Bonegilla migrant camp, near the Albury–Wodonga border.

  Twelve hours later, when I reach the hospital where my mother is allegedly lying close to death, I circle the crowded car park three times, then yank the ute into a no standing zone in frustration. I'm as frazzled as the dog and seesawing between thinking 'She'll be right' and 'Oh, Jesus, don't let it be too terrible.'

  The front desk sits in an acre of empty space and when the receptionist cannot find my mother listed in intensive care, I think for a suffocating moment that she must be dead.

  'Ah, here she is.'

  Relief pounds through my body. 'What ward is that?'

  'Ward C, Room 14.'

  'I mean, is that the cardiac ward?'

  'Oh, no. It's where they put people with problems they can't identify.'

  A roaring red rage consumes me, driven by my mother's selfishness and my own stupidity.Not getting enough attention? Fake an illness. The more drastic the better. In the elevator the walls close in and the desire to smack my mother with a loud, crunching punch swims in my head for a few moments. After a lifetime of creative illnesses, mostly with the prospect of imminent death or, at the very least, paralysis, I should have known better.

  When I find her room, she sits in bed perky and pink, eating chocolates.

  'You seem well for a woman who had a heart attack yesterday,' I remark.

  She looks me in the eye without a tremor of unease. 'I've had three more this morning. Two mild, one big.'

  She is so convincing that for a second I believe her. But her pale blue nightie falls neatly from its embroidered yoke. No tubes or wires there. The only blemish on her wrist is an identity tag. She is snappy, alert and healthy. Then my anger at being manipulated deflates. She is my mother. The loss of my brother, her adored only son, made her mad with grief. Perhaps this is her way of focusing on a situation that hurts her less. I turn and walk out.

  The nurses say there is nothing wrong but my mother appears to be in pain. I tell them about the last heart attack and how, when I called the specialist, he told me her problem was depression. 'Not depression,' I replied. 'Lack of attention.' But it was probably both.

  A few years later my mother confesses her heart attack had, in fact, been hemorrhoids.

  'Why did you tell everyone it was a heart attack?'

  'Nobody mentions hemorrhoids!'

  'Why didn't you say you had the flu?'

  She's dismissive. 'They don't put you in hospital for the flu any more.'

  'So did you get your hemorrhoids fixed?'

  'I couldn't talk about them! I told you that!'

  'But I could have been killed driving all night. With no sleep.'

  'Rubbish! I didn't get a proper night's sleep for years after you and your brother were born.'

  I give up. My mother is who she is. In a way, her weakness has become my strength. I never expect sympathy, do not seek coddling. I learned very early that to look for sympathy from my mother was to invite a ticking off. 'Pull yourself together,' she'd say. 'Don't make a fool of yourself. Not in public.' Another era. A different generation. Mostly, she is just as tough with herself in a real crisis.

  When she is in her early eighties and falls, breaking a wrist, she shrugs off the discomfort and manages on her own at home. 'A nuisance, that's all it is,' she says when I ask if she wants to come and stay for a while. 'I'll be right. I'm like an old dog. Prefer to lie in a corner on my own until I'm better.'

  How did she fasten her bra, though? How did she open a can of baked beans? Button up her shirt? I didn't even think to ask.

  When she flies headfirst down some stone steps not long after her wrist heals, she laughs at the absurdity of her large breasts finally being useful. 'Might've broken a few ribs if they hadn't cushioned the fall,' she jokes. Not a single tear escapes as she waits to be lifted from her rocky landing. And it must've hurt like hell. Sometimes, it's impossible not to feel proud of her.

  Two weeks after we bury Banana, I teeter towards buying a rickety weatherboard house in the coldest part of Victoria. All because I like the look of the old, collapsed bluestone barn. But a couple with a new baby and the future scribbled all over their eager faces outbids me. Thank God. What would I do out there where I know no-one and I have no need of a barn anyway?

  5

  A PHONE CALL COMES mid-morning in early July as I'm wandering the Melbourne apartment looking for something to polish. My feet are freezing. The dog is groaning with arthritic pain. The cold is tangible and hateful. I want to lie in the tropical sun sipping daiquiris but I have rarely taken holidays. They always seemed a waste of money to someone who travelled everywhere and rarely had to pick up the bill.

  'It's Fleury's birthday. Come to Pittwater for the weekend.'

  'Stewart! How are you? What are you up to?'

  I have known Stewart for twenty-five years or more. We trekked the sidewalks of Manhattan at the same time, calling ourselves foreign correspondents. Our lives crisscrossed on assignments, in bars, at Australian functions. Stewart and my husband were great friends and I tagged along until the friendship became mine as well.

  'Good. I'm good. Can you make it?' he asks.

  'When?'

  'July twenty-three.'

  I hesitate.

  'Be great if you could help with the cooking. And Sophia needs a lift.'

  The clinchers. I'm needed. Can't say no to all that. Especially the cooking. I love it. Passionately. Have no idea why. Even alone, I cook dinner with the care of a chef. Set a polished table with silver and crystal. Have a cloth napkin. Always a glass of wine. Or two. My mother once told me that opening a cupboard full of glittering crystal made her feel rich. A civilised dinner does that for me. Alone, or with twenty guests – it doesn't matter.

  Stewart waits for an answer. Then adds: 'You're going to be the surprise guests. You and Sophia.'

  Part of me wants to stay safely at home. Another part says get a life. 'Great. I'll be there. Get Sophia to call me.'

  'Don't say a word to Fleury!'

  I have not met Sophia yet, know her only as Stewart's and Fleury's friend who writes a column for a Melbourne newspaper. She is a Buddhist, lots of fun apparently, and very clever.

  That night, I undress for bed. Look in the mirror. The sight is shocking. How long is it since I looked at myself without clothes?

  About a millennium. I ate everything as a teenager and stayed pencil slim. Thought I'd be one of those people who never gained weight. Dream on. Wonder if I can still cancel. Being a fat boss is fine. Being a single, unemployed, overweight woman in her midforties makes me want to hide in a closet.

  I pull on pyjamas quickly and slide into bed.Turn out the light. The fire blazes and orange gremlins leap all over the walls. Good idea resurrecting the fireplace in the bedroom. But I can't see the flames if I lie down. It's too early to sleep anyway. The light goes back on. I sit up and grab a book. Some mawkish instinct has made me put a couple of my husband's favourite poetry books on the bedside table. I put down my trashy novel and pick up Emily Dickinson. When the phone rings, I'm pathetically thrilled. I've never grocked poetry.

  'Susan?' Deep and drawn out.

  'Yeee-s,' I say tentatively, not recognising the voice.

  'It's So-fi-ah.'

  Rack my brains to think of someone called So-fi-ah. Come up blank.

  'Stewart tells me you're going to give me a lift to Pittwater.' Each word is carefully enunciated. As though my English, or my hearing, is dodgy.

  'Oh, Sophia. Yes. Glad you called.'

  'Does it suit you?'

  'Yes, of course. Great to have company on the drive. Hope you don't mind utes?'

  'Love 'em. Grew up on a property.' Tension drops out of her voice. 'What are you going to get Fleury for her birthday?' she asks.

  'Dunno
. She's got just about everything.'

  'Yeah. It's hard. If you come up with any bright ideas, yell out.'

  We meet for the first time on a cold, bleak morning two weeks later. Sophia parks her ancient orange Volvo off-street, behind the apartment. Locks the doors one by one, testing the handle each time.

  'We won't get there before dark,' I say, anxious about our late departure.

  Sophia is dismissive. 'Of course we will. We'll be in Sydney by lunchtime at the latest.'

  'It's an eleven-hour drive! It's nearly nine o'clock now!'

  'You weren't planning to do the trip in one day, were you?' Sophia, rugged up in a navy cashmere sweater, orange trousers, a windcheater, her white hair spronging in all directions, looks terrified.

  'I always do it in one day.'

  She seems stricken. 'It's not safe to drive for more than six hours in a day, even with ten minute breaks every two hours.' Her tone is schoolteacherish.

  'Who told you that?'

  'The driving safety manual.'

  'Driving safety manual! I've never even seen one of those.'

  'They're given to you when you sit for your driver's licence.'

  'Sophia, I got my licence nearly thirty years ago.'

  'Well, I got mine a year ago. I've read the book.'

  'Ok, we can stop somewhere if you're tired. But if we both feel ok, we'll go on. Yeah?'

  Air drizzles out of her in relief.

  I drop the apartment keys with the missionaries who live next door so they can feed Sweetie. I give the dog a hug. 'Be back in a couple of days, Sweetie. Stewart has a dog that doesn't like other dogs. Sorry.'

  She gives me a heartcracker of a look. Who says dogs can't speak?

  Sophia and I begin our drive under a leaden sky, feeling each other out. She is bright and funny, well-read, informed, articulate. And the first Buddhist I've met.

  'Why Buddhism?'

  'Only philosophy that makes sense to me.'

  'Were you Church of England?'

  'No. Catholic.'