by Susan Duncan
I snorkel amongst the teeming coral reefs of Fiji with the son of Jacques Cousteau, touching a turtle for a cosmic moment before it shrugs me aside and wings on its way. I sleep on the ground at Palm Valley in Finke Gorge National Park and wake drenched with dew to find a kangaroo staring intently at me, as though he is deciding whether to tick me off for invading his patch. In the early morning light, the ancient fissured gorge is on fire. It is a privileged job and lifestyle but I move through it all like a sleepwalker. Some inner core is wearing out and I know it.
I have turned myself inside out to be all things to the lover,my mother's words ringing in my head: 'No-one will love you unless . . .' Words I heard her mother use one cold, rainy day when we warmed ourselves near the wood burning stove in the rammed earth kitchen of my grandparents' rough slab, bush house. Nan's kitchen always smelled of wood dust, baking scones, kerosene lamps and tea leaves, which she scattered on the dirt floor when she swept it.
'Now, Esther Jean,' Nan said, 'no-one will love you if you act like that . . .'
My mother, married with children of her own, fuming because the men were late home and would probably be tipsy when they arrived, turned away before she said something she might regret.
Nan gave my brother and me a Bible one Christmas and told us to read it because it contained a few useful tips on how to lead a good life. Nan always said that as you make your bed, you must sleep on it. For years, I had no idea what she meant.
I drive to the office towards the end of spring. In the traffic, people with mouths turned down or phones crammed to their ears rage silently. Looking at them, I wonder what the hell I think I am doing. I am back on the treadmill with an increasing leaning towards all the gods I know are ultimately unsatisfying. Ambition, success, material gratification. None of that made a squit of difference when the boys died. No need to think it will now.
On the car radio, the news is all bad, as it tends to be. And, to me, irrelevant. I could not listen to the news, not read a newspaper, not watch a television report for a year, I think, and nothing would change, I would not miss anything.
I quiz myself:'If I could do whatever I want, what would it be?'
The answer rockets back: 'Return to Pittwater.'
The idea swirls and eddies. There are many reasons not to go there, all practical. There's the commute to work by ferry and car.
And boats! What do I know about boats? If I buy one, how will it be to set off alone across dark waters when I come home late at night? There's the relentless schlepping of the groceries. Every package is handled five times before it lands inside the door. Shop to car to dock to boat to dock to house. At the end of a day when you are tired before you begin, it wears down even the most dedicated offshore residents and I am too weary to be thrilled by daily physical challenges.
And there is the lover, who would find it inconvenient. He neither enjoys nor understands the peace of Pittwater. Racetracks are more appealing to him.
The radio hammers on. Fast paced voices, fast paced news, in a rhythm that describes a fatal accident on the M4 in the same honeyed tones as the weather.New South Head Road is a stalled, sinuous queue of cars shitting exhaust and going nowhere. Doesn't matter if you're stuck in a BMW or a dented thirty-year-old Datsun, we're all marking time in the same foul air. Stuck is stuck.
Will moving unstick the lover? Maybe. Hopefully.
Our Sydney lease is due for renewal and we three women at Virgins' Perch, as Tony dubbed our home, are wondering whether to continue or go our separate ways. After two years, we have begun to grate on each other at odd moments and as this is not a marriage, we are not compelled to smooth over the rough bits. We are beginning to niggle over whose turn it is to vacuum, unload the dishwasher, sweep the backyard, when once we did it cheerfully because we felt like it.
When I finally get to the office, semi-dazed people are girding for another day of going through the motions. Or that's how I see it this morning. After a few giddays, I sit at my desk eating toasted banana bread and drinking a bucket of super strong coffee for the kick start. Even my bones feel worn out and brittle these days.
My contact book, filled with phone numbers collected during a lifetime in journalism, lies neatly on the desk. I idly flick the pages until I reach the Rs. The number for the real estate agent at Church Point is still there. Written in a red felt tip pen more than two years earlier. Before I have time to think about it, I punch in the numbers. The phone is picked up by a different agent, a woman I've never met.
'Do you know the area?' she asks.
'Yes. A little. I once spent a bit of time at Towlers Bay.'
'So you know the houses are all water access, that you have to take a ferry or use a boat?'
'Yeah.'
'I have to ask. Most people have no idea how life is lived here. They lob up all excited to see a waterfront house and then cancel when they find they'll need a boat to get to it. Wastes a lot of time.'
'That's ok. So what have you got?'
'A fabulous house came on the market this morning. Sounds like it could be what you're looking for.'
I don't get excited. They all say that.
'Waterfront?'
'Yep.'
'Deep waterfront?'
'Yep.'
'Where?'
'Scotland Island.'
'Oh.'
Deep waterfront is good, it means boat access during the lowest tides. But I don't want to live on Scotland Island. When I looked at houses there on my first attempt at Pittwater living a millennium ago, it seemed as crowded as suburbia. There were holiday shacks made from scraps glued together in the forties and fifties. Fading hippie houses with psychedelic walls and stained loos from the sixties and seventies. Basic family homes from the eighties when land was comparatively cheap because water access only was seen as a handicap, not an asset. There were comfortable family homes and grand and beautiful estates with manicured gardens and saltwater swimming pools but they rarely came on the rental market. Out of my price range anyway.
Back then, I decided great views couldn't compensate for the crowding and I was looking more for comfort than a community. But that was two years ago.
'Just come and look,' says the agent. 'If you don't like it, don't take it!'
It is impossible to guess what I will be seeing. I know, at least, that it isn't perched at the top of the island. Which is a good thing. At the rate I go through wine, the shorter the lugging distance, the better.
'I'll drive up this afternoon. See you around four thirty, ok?'
'Great.'
But I put down the phone, collect my bag, return to the car and drive immediately to Church Point, leaving work untouched, phone calls unreturned, telling no-one where I have gone. Forty-five minutes later, I stand in the scrappy little Church Point real estate office with its map of Pittwater pinned to the wall, still not quite sure what I am doing but in a rush anyway.
'I'm Susan. Come to see the house on Scotland Island.'
'You weren't supposed to be here until this afternoon!'
'Yeah, I know. Sorry. Does it matter?'
The real estate agent, casual in jeans and a white T-shirt with a faint coffee stain, flaps around making phone calls, checking the timing is ok with the owners, grabbing the file on the house.
'Keys?' I suggest, trying to be helpful.
'No. Don't need keys.'
'Doesn't the place lock up?'
'Oh yeah, but people around here don't bother. If anything goes missing, nearly everyone knows where it is and who's borrowed it.'
She calls the pink water taxi while I check out properties for sale on the noticeboard. I didn't use water taxis much when I lived at Towlers Bay. Made the walk to Halls Wharf to catch the ferry. Forgot the car keys once. You only ever do that once. But I always thought the colour of the water taxi boats was silly. Baby pink. For some reason, whenever I saw them dashing around the bays, I wanted to laugh. They looked ridiculously out of place. Girlish instead of tough.
'That's the house. Over there,' she says from the end of the Church Point ferry wharf.
It's a pleasant, low-slung wooden house that seems to overhang the shoreline. So far, so good.
'Gidday,' the driver says. 'Where to?'
'Mottles' house, thanks.'
'Right.'
No street numbers here.
The water taxi drops us at a jetty that leads straight to the front door. Level access, easy schlepping, a prize on Pittwater. It's the beginning of the seduction.
'Does the water wash inside at high tide?' I ask, not altogether jokingly.
The agent grins. 'You might want to roll up your rugs during a king tide.'
The house has the feel of a sprawling boatshed. It is shacky and casual but properly built. Not tacked together. The kitchen, which has a polished wooden bench with a stove in the corner, is part of a long,T-shaped room that includes a dining, sitting and entrance area. There's a study space with views to Church Point. The main bedroom, once a separate boatshed, is connected to the house by a back porch or French doors that open onto the front deck. I visualise rolling out of bed on a hot summer night when the heat feels like a fur-lined glove and splashing into the water. The house faces west, so there is afternoon sun. A plus in winter. A negative in summer. It will broil. But there are double doors everywhere so it opens up to let the sea breezes flow through. A positive.
There are angles and corners, lots of conjoining roof lines and an upstairs bedroom that is like a ship's cabin, high above the sea. On odd walls, the owner has papered beautiful bark drawings. When I meet him briefly a couple of weeks later to haggle over the rent and seal the deal, he tells me he collected them when he sailed in the Solomon Islands.
'Is everyone around here a sailor?' I ask him.
He looks at me as though I am dimwitted. 'Of course. Otherwise we wouldn't need the water.'
'Not even to look at?'
'Well, not for long.'
We settle on a date for me to move in, two weeks later.
'You won't regret it,' says the agent.
Friends have a different view. 'Don't!' they scream. 'It's ok for weekends, but don't live there if you want a life.'
I think of them running in and out of meetings, playing politics, looking harassed and stressed and complaining bitterly about the rat race.
'The deal is done, the lease signed. Cheques handed over,' I reply.
They shake their heads in concern, convinced I have been both reckless and stupid.That I will live to regret this latest, mad whim.
They do not see, perhaps, the courage it takes to walk away and embrace change. And yet without change, without taking risks, where is growth to come from? At this stage of my life, the growth I want has nothing to do with the material. I know that money in the bank may make you feel less vulnerable and open up choices, but it doesn't guarantee happiness. How I wish I'd known that years ago when chasing the dollar seemed worthy. Or perhaps time alters our perspective and what is compelling at one age becomes worthless at another?
I want to know about the mind and spirit now. I want to understand why some people wake up joyful each day and others struggle out of bed. Why some people see good in the most devastating situations and others see the bad in the best. Why do some people die too young? Why does success fall at someone's feet while others slog and get nowhere? Are there heroes – or are we all flawed? Is it luck? Is it timing? Why do some people get on a plane that is doomed to crash and others wait for the next flight? My friends might shake their heads but at least I am having a go, giving myself a chance, chasing life instead of hoping it will find me. I guess I am finally taking responsibility for my own happiness and not looking for it through anyone else.
Dismantling my city life is easy. A huge garage sale. Two-thirds of the furniture to auction, including the dreaded ride-on mower that's been in storage for years. Whatever is left I give to a bloke who says he's from the Maroubra Boy Scouts, but he's probably a dealer. He squishes the scrag ends of the sale into a dusty station wagon and drives away looking very pleased with himself.
By Sunday night, the rental house is empty except for Sweetie, a few pieces of furniture such as the bed, and stuff that evokes cherished memories. Pia and Lulu have already moved to separate inner city apartments. They say Scotland Island is too far and too hard. But I suspect they think I've lost the plot good and proper this time.
8
MOVING DAY IS BRIGHT AND sunny but I feel like shit. Can't rev up energy or enthusiasm. It seems like a hundred years since the prospect of change made me sparkly-eyed, since I believed new horizons led to growth and knowledge. Today I just feel shattered. I am aware I've frittered away the opportunities of so many new starts. It's hard to believe this move is going to be any different. The view is just better.
Everything that is small enough is packed into brown cardboard boxes with their contents neatly labelled on the sides. Instant necessities – teapot, kettle, milk, beer, wine, bread, butter and a selection of cold meats and cheese – are packed into two clothes baskets to take in the car. The rest will go in a truck with the removalists. I have become expert at moving.
In the backyard, Sweetie lingers in her kennel.
'Come on, old girl.Time to get up.'
Her pretty head is resting on her front paws, and she doesn't raise it when she lifts her eyes to look at me.
'Are you ok?'
I kneel and ruffle her fur.
'Come on, Sweetie. It's moving day. Let's go.'
She looks away and groans.
She is thirteen years old and, according to the vet, four years past her use-by date. I have a sickly feeling this is the end but I go to the kitchen and grab a piece of cold meat from the instant necessities basket, hoping she has an upset tummy and nothing more sinister.
I wave the food and her lovely brown eyes follow my hand. But she doesn't move. Then she looks at me as though I can save her. We're mates, right? I'll fix everything, right? Her once glossy black fur is faded into brown and grey and everything that is born must die. Right? Yeah. Bloody damn right.
When the removalists arrive they help me to pick her up and put her in the car to take to the vet, who explains she has a tumour that's ruptured her spleen.
'We can do some tests to verify it, if you like,' he says, kindly.
'Will it make a difference?'
'Not really. No.'
'Is there anything we can do?'
'Well, she'll probably live a couple more days but all we can do is dose her with painkillers. That's about it.'
'What would you do if it was your dog?'
'I'd put her down.'
I crouch on the floor with my faithful old dog, cradling her head in my lap, stroking her gently. She knows what is ahead, in the way animals always do, and struggles briefly when the needle goes into her thigh. But she doesn't take her eyes off me.
'Oh, Sweetie. What a great dog. What a good dog.'
And she is dead. Closed down and gone.
I have nowhere to bury her, no nearby friend with a farm, no plot of land in my own backyard.
'She's not going on any bloody garbage dump,' I tell the vet. 'I'll bury her some place great, even if I have to drive a hundred miles.'
'She can be cremated, if you like. Her ashes will come back here for you to pick up.'
I nod because I cannot speak and the vet lifts Sweetie and she is gone.
I make a vow to bury the box when I find a home where I will spend the rest of my life. Until then, the box will come with me. No matter how many times I move, no matter how long it takes to find somewhere to belong.
I write out a cheque and leave, anger quickly pushing aside grief. Another bloody loss. Everything that is born must die. The line spins in my head and I hate the truth of it.
I slam the car into gear, shout at a woman who takes too long to cross the road at the lights: 'What are you on? A bloody picnic!'
She gives me the fi
nger. I want to smash her face. The lights change and I move on. Driving recklessly.
At the house, the removal van is loaded, the boys waiting for directions. Another move, another house, another journey leading to what? I mentally add up my home bases over the past decade and stop when I reach seventeen. New houses, new jobs, new countries, new clothes. None of it seems very glamorous any more. More like sad.
The lover calls as we set off. I don't mention Sweetie. Fake breeziness.This is not a man who likes to share the downside.
'How's it going?'
'We're just heading to Pittwater now.'
'When can I see this fabulous house?'
Never! 'Whenever you like.'
And the one piece of baggage I should have dumped before all else slides effortlessly along with me.
Three young men and a dog wait at Cargo Wharf, where any large scale loading or unloading takes place in this part of Pittwater. Two are obviously brothers. Small boned, sinewy, dead straight jet black hair, tanned in the deep, even way of people who spend most of the day outdoors. It's the tail end of spring but they wear shorts, scruffy T-shirts and bare feet. The third man is taller, bulkier, with tightly curled black hair and a winter pallor. He is dressed in jeans. There's a T-shirt under a checked flannel shirt. He wears socks and boots on his feet. I suss already that he is newly a local.
The dog is a beautiful, glossy black labrador in his prime. Focus on the job, I quickly tell myself. Put Sweetie into a faraway corner of your head.
Cargo Wharf, a little beyond Church Point ferry wharf, is wide enough for a couple of trucks side by side so I drive right to the edge of the wharf. Wind down the window. 'Gidday.'
The boys straggle to their feet. Smiles everywhere. Jump off their rusted old barge onto solid ground.
'Yeah. You'd be Susan, then?'
'Yeah. Going to Scotland Island. Mottles' old house.'
'Oh, right. George's place. Know where you mean, now. Anyway, I'm Andrew. This is my brother Chris. And he's Paul.'
