Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  I lived in a flat on the edge of the South Bondi cliff tops. At the bottom of a long steep path overgrown with oleander, each window looked out over the vast rolling blue ocean. In those first months together, Andrew and I would sit out on the back steps, drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes, the air salty, and the slow thud of the sea as the waves broke against the rocks below a constant rhythm to our conversations. We got to know each other, telling stories about ourselves, our families, our friends, books we’d loved, places we had been. He was in his final year at film school, and often did not get to my flat until late at night. He would park his rusted orange Datsun up on the street and hurry down that long path to my front door with presents in his hands – a card, a story I would like, oranges, a photo; idiosyncratic gifts I treasured – and I wanted it to stay like this forever. This was the romantic love I’d heard about. This was the bliss, the joy and the perfection. When I was with him, I could hardly believe my luck.

  But, as romantic love, it was, of course, doomed to end. The very state carries within itself the elements of its own destruction: pure unadulterated happiness cannot remain as such. Without the threat of loss it has no other against which to define itself. It ceases to exist. And so it did not take long for me to start searching. I was looking for the flaw, the thread that I could pull, wondering just how much of the entire fabric would unravel in my hands.

  It wasn’t hard to find. My own confidence was still shaky and Andrew had a restlessness that made me anxious. I watched him warily. Sometimes it was on a small level, an inability to make a decision, a regret for the choice he had not made, an anxiety about getting to the next place or a worry about the place he had just left. Sometimes it was larger. He would talk longingly about countries he had been to – Russia, China – and I would be convinced that he was going to leave, that everything would disintegrate and that I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I became certain this was because he was dissatisfied with me, failing to see this longing for a time other than now as a condition that can affect us all.

  ‘You should come with me to Janet Brougham,’ my mother said to me one morning. ‘I will pay for you. It can be a gift.’

  Janet Brougham called herself a futures consultant. She didn’t advise on bonds, shares or other forms of financial transactions; she was a clairvoyant. My mother had been seeing her, not regularly, but every so often, for as long as I could remember. Her last visit had been many years earlier, just prior to our family’s move to Adelaide. ‘If you think the road has been long and hard and stormy, it’s only going to get worse,’ Janet had warned her at the beginning of my brother’s illness, and it did.

  On the morning of our appointment, we drove for miles along the main arterial road to the outer north-western suburbs of Sydney, trucks shuddering to a halt next to us as we pulled up at each traffic light. My mother was certain she could find Janet’s street without a map, my attempts to correct her with the Sydways only making me car sick. Eventually we turned into a small cul-de-sac, with new brick mansions pressed up against each other on either side of the street.

  Janet had been doing well. When my mother first met her more than twenty years earlier, she lived with her husband and children in a modest suburban house. The husband was now gone, the children had grown and the house had been upgraded, complete with a letterbox that was a miniature version of the three-storey home she’d built on her earnings.

  We rang the doorbell and a chimed version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was punctuated by the yapping of dogs. With three Maltese terriers at her ankles, Janet appeared in a long cotton dress patterned with bright coloured flowers, a seventies style I was partial to myself. Her hair was in a high bun, her eye shadow was green, and her earrings were large and gold. She hugged my mother, and welcomed us both in to a hall that smelt of Pine O Cleen.

  ‘Now who shall I do first?’ she asked as she led us through a dimly lit lounge, carpeted in mushroom pink and furnished with reproduction antiques, to a more modest sunroom out the back.

  I offered to wait.

  She sat me in a cane chair with a cup of tea and a pile of old magazines. I could hear the occasional murmur of her voice from the room next to me as I flipped through the pages, occasionally pausing to look out across the neat square of lawn bordered by shrubs that resembled perfect green boxes.

  Every so often the phone rang and the pitch of Janet’s voice would change, her words would become distinct as she confirmed or cancelled a social arrangement. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she would say to my mother and then the murmuring would begin again.

  Half an hour later, they emerged, and I was ushered into a small office off the sunroom.

  ‘Now, darling,’ she said, ‘I need something of yours, something personal. Something you wear most days. Something you have had for a while.’

  I looked at my rings: a gold saucer with a pearl, and a red enamel square, also set in gold. They had both belonged to my mother. My watch was second-hand.

  ‘The watch is probably best,’ she said, ‘although it’s not ideal.’

  She held it tight in her hands, sat back, closed her eyes and began to speak, her voice the same high-pitched murmur I had heard from the sunroom, her body rocking gently to the rhythm of her words. Most of what she said didn’t appear to have much relevance to my life; there was someone called Sam who was going to do me a good turn, a job in Hong Kong and an archaeologist who was waiting for me in Edinburgh. As I listened, I found myself wondering who had owned the watch before me and what other life force she was channelling. It was only towards the end of the session that I sat forward, interested.

  ‘You have met someone,’ she told me. ‘Someone special.’

  I nodded.

  ‘He is an Aquarian.’

  That was true.

  ‘He’s a ditherer, darling. Lovely man but a ditherer.’

  I wouldn’t have used the word, but now that she’d uttered it, I wished she hadn’t.

  ‘He will dither and dither and dither. You will be waiting for him in the boat and he just can’t get in. And if you wait too long, you’ll end up stuck there, alone in that boat, only to find that when he does get in, it’s another boat with someone else.’ She leant forward and took my hand. ‘I know this is not what you want to hear, but it’s there, darling, and I can only warn you.’

  On the way home, my mother and I exchanged notes. I made light of Janet’s words but they had disturbed me. I’d wanted a vision of my future with Andrew and she’d picked at the small hole, the imperfection, tearing it just that little bit too wide, pulling it apart before my eyes.

  ‘I am not a ditherer,’ Andrew said when I eventually told him about the appointment with Janet.

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘You don’t really think I am, do you?’

  I shrugged my shoulders and looked away. We were having a drink together. I had waited for him in the pub where we often met, the rain pouring down outside, making it impossible for me to sit in the beer garden we usually chose as a meeting place. In the damp heat of the crowded bar, I had smoked, my wet jeans sticking to my legs, the hole in my boots leaving my feet cold. I didn’t want to look at my watch. I was angry that he was late again. When he finally arrived, I had not pretended it was all right. I hadn’t lied and told him I had only just got there myself. I had told him he was never on time and I was sick of it.

  He was irritated. ‘How could you think that about me?’

  I asked him how he couldn’t see it for himself. Surely it was as clear as day. And it wasn’t just the fact that he was late. I recalled the previous weekend, when we had gone away, and he had spent most of the first day prevaricating about whether to catch the ferry back to the city to go to a wake for someone he had known vaguely years before. His inability to make the decision had ruined hours of time we could have enjoyed together.

  ‘Well I take offence,’ he said, ‘that you would listen to a fortune-teller and let it shape how you see me. And I was torn,’ he add
ed, referring to the weekend. ‘I wanted to stay with you.’

  Behind him, a crowd shouted at the television screen. There was a football game on. I looked down at the sticky ring of drink on the table and rubbed at it, tracing a pattern into the scratched laminex. Ash smeared the tip of my finger grey, and I tried to wipe it off on the coaster. Andrew reached across and stilled my hand, bending his head down low so that I was forced to look at him.

  Did I want another drink?

  I shook my head.

  He would get it quickly. To the bar and back in less than two minutes.

  There were several people waiting, money held out as they leant forward to get the barman’s attention. Another goal was kicked, and the cheer went up again, the cluster of people turning momentarily to look at the screen. Andrew was up and gone. I could see him, reaching over the counter, shouting his order into the barman’s ear, while I checked my watch and waited.

  After two years, Andrew and I moved in together. We had a small flat on a busy corner. Our bedroom was at the front, the windows marked by a stained-glass cross. A lush garden surrounded the building, avocados, mangos and frangipanis, protecting us from the sound of the traffic. Three years later, we began to talk about having a child. In my mid thirties, I didn’t want to wait. Without the pressure of time, Andrew was more hesitant. But we did finally agree, and at thirty-four I became pregnant with our daughter, Odessa.

  I look back now and find it hard to recall when the change occurred, from the thrill of falling in love, with its risk of loss, to becoming parents. As we moved towards this permanent entanglement, we had, inevitably, found familiarity, a state that brought with it a new kind of joy, but also disagreements. It didn’t happen suddenly. It crept in, and when I was first aware that it had its foot in the door (even before Odessa was born), I knew I could either welcome it, or try to push it out in shock. Like most people we probably alternated between both these responses. And when it was Andrew with his back against the door, arms folded as he tried to hold it closed, I would pull out the old ditherer accusation.

  ‘Not the boat,’ he would say, bored with its resurfacing because in the early days it had bobbed up quite often. So much so that I had, at times, looked back on that meeting with Janet Brougham with some wariness. She had planted a canker. Or this was what I told friends whenever they mentioned going to see a clairvoyant. The truth was a little more complex. The canker was already there. Her words had just increased its magnitude, and I swore I would never seek out my future again.

  But eight years into my relationship with Andrew, I found myself considering the idea once more. As we’d moved away from idealising each other, and our differences had become less endearing, I often tried to find solace in a time other than the present, wanting to remember when I’d been terrified of losing him. ‘Remember,’ I would say, and I would soak in the headiness of the past, sweetly sad and dangerously seductive. But in the hardest times, when Odessa was young and we struggled with the enormous change in our lives, our initial love seemed so foreign, even I couldn’t recall the place we had left. So, with limited refuge to be found in remembering, I wanted reassurance about the future.

  Friends had told me about Samantha. She lived in a Spanish Mission flat next to the first place Andrew and I had rented together. ‘She is amazing,’ they said. ‘Scarily accurate.’

  Samantha had chalk-white skin and long black hair scraped into a ponytail. She was tall and thin, her cheekbones severe, her eyes sharply defined with kohl, and her clothes black. I introduced myself as she opened the door. She didn’t smile, she simply showed me into the front room. There was a desk and two chairs only. I sat on one side and she sat on the other. All the blinds were drawn, slivers of yellow light sickly in the gloom. She outlined the price structure and, after I chose the cheapest option (a reading, followed by the crystal ball), she told me she believed in the truth.

  ‘If I see something bad, I’ll tell you. I’m not going to shelter you.’

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and kept my eyes focused on her silver rings as she dealt out the cards.

  Fortunately there seemed to be no impending deaths or disasters. In fact, most of what she told me was, once again, extraordinarily banal. She gathered the pack together and asked me if anything had rung any bells for me. I shook my head and she didn’t seem perturbed. Moving the crystal ball across the desk to the space between us, she began to speak of a house move, a high public profile, numerous speaking engagements and then, just as I was wondering whether I should stop her and ask some direct questions, my second warning came.

  ‘You live with someone,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘A man. He has been having health problems, stomach trouble.’

  This was true.

  ‘He’s your flatmate.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s my partner.’

  She shook her head. ‘That worries me. He seems like a flatmate. Like someone you just put up with.’

  She was right.

  ‘He is a good man. A truly good man.’

  I knew that.

  ‘The spark has gone. It’s not good. In fact, you’ve even contemplated leaving.’

  Again I nodded, feeling more uncomfortable.

  ‘I can only give you a warning. It may not be what you want to hear, but I’m compelled to tell you.’ She looked directly at me. ‘If you do leave, you’ll be on your own. You will never have another relationship.’

  I had to stifle a nervous laugh and so I coughed, a dry awkward sound that seemed to scrape from the back of my throat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but it’s there, and you came for the truth.’

  I paid her the agreed amount and she gave me her card, asking me if I wanted to make another appointment in a year’s time. I told her I didn’t. ‘Who knows what will happen in a year?’ I said. ‘Who knows where I’ll be?’ I was aware of the strangeness of my words in the current context, and I attempted to smile, but she didn’t smile back.

  Outside, the afternoon was still. I sat for a moment on the front steps that led up to our old flat, the first place Andrew and I had lived in together. I looked up at what had once been our bedroom window, the cross a deep red against the glass. We drove past this building often and I would remember the excitement of first living together, choosing to see this as a place where we’d been happy. But there had been hard times here, too. Andrew’s father had died when we’d lived in this flat, and it hadn’t been easy. In fact, there’d been a period when we’d fought frequently, a time when I had often sat out on these front steps, uncertain as to how we could continue.

  I looked back on my early doubts, my lack of confidence and my certainty that he would leave me. Those fears seemed so simple now. As we’d had to encounter the ordinary demands of life together, there often had been friction and it had been far more complex than I’d first envisaged. I loved him. I always knew that, but it seemed that we frequently failed to live up to the promise we’d held out for each other. It was gone, that early time. This was the land without a guide. I have to find my way through this, I would think; there is no one who can show me. And it is, still, a realisation that hits me, sharp and harsh, each time we stumble. It’s an awareness that I am here now, an adult who has the choice. I can either deal with this problem as a grown-up, or I can run and hide. And there are many times when I don’t do the right thing.

  I stood up to walk home through the back streets of Bondi. It was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliant blue and the breeze gentle. In the distance the ocean was aquamarine, flat and still. Being the middle of the week, there weren’t a large number of people about. The few that I passed strolled leisurely, peacefully, enjoying the perfection of the afternoon.

  As I made my way down the hill from the south of Bondi to the flat dustiness of the northern end where we now lived, I thought about being on my own. Recently there had been times when I’d contemplated it with longing. But I’d never supposed that it coul
d stretch out indefinitely, I’d never imagined beyond a short period of solitude and peace.

  I opened the door to our flat, wanting to return to a place that was good. I would ask Andrew if he remembered how we used to spend Sunday nights at his place, before we lived together. We would swim until late and then he would cook for me, the lounge room windows open to the sound of people leaving the beach, heading home to start the working week. I was happy and sad on those nights. I loved being with him, and I hated the end of the weekend, knowing that we’d have to get up early in the morning and that it would perhaps be one or two days before we would see each other again. It was heightened bliss, the sense of togetherness mingled with an inevitable but safe loss, because we would be reunited after all.

  He was on the phone.

  I signalled for him to wind it up, unaware of anything other than this urgent need I had to reminisce, to use this remembering as a step towards something better. He just looked at me with irritation.

  I went to the kitchen to wait. He had made his lunch and the dishes were still there, the chopping board still covered in food, scraps spread across the benches. I began to clean up. ‘Are you finished?’ I mouthed to him as I looked out into the lounge room where he continued his phone conversation. He waved his hand at me, signalling to leave him alone.

  I began to put the food away, slamming the fridge door loudly, clattering the pots and plates as I moved them.

  Eventually he hung up. ‘Do you have to make such a racket?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you have to leave such a mess?’ I retorted.

  ‘I was trying to speak to someone about a job.’

  ‘You weren’t,’ I said. ‘You were talking to a friend.’

  ‘He may be a friend, but he’d also heard of some work. I really don’t appreciate you telling me when I can and can’t use the phone.’

  I told him that I’d wanted to talk to him, that it was important.

  ‘Well speak to me,’ he said, arms folded.