A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  The river

  On the path down to the river, Elsie paused to watch a heron pick along the grass. It was so pretty here, with lush gardens planted by the water she still thought of as a creek—but then, she couldn’t really remember what it had looked like before.

  ‘It’s a drain, Mum, a stormwater drain,’ Elaine had said when they’d walked its length together the day before during a brief patch of sunshine. ‘Gerald says it will flood with all this rain.’

  Nicer to walk here alone. On her own, she didn’t have to take such care of what she said—no one was going to mind if she thought it was Friday or Sunday, 2010 or 1962. It seemed likely all these things were true.

  The knob of her walking stick—that good idea of Donny’s—felt as certain as the world against the palm of her hand as she paused to watch the bird take flight. It was an impossibly elegant creature, and although it looked too long and lanky to be able to manage lift-off, up it surged, folding itself into a thin, fine line, like the line of a drawing, and heading west towards the river.

  Sweet little one, her Donny, and now he was grown up himself and it was his boy—no, his grandson—with the loud guitar and the fancy word for echoes. She shook her head. You never knew how things would go.

  It was a nice walk, but it felt like a long one—wasn’t this the path that Gloria used to run in five minutes? Elsie felt she’d been walking for days.

  Once, when Gloria was tiny and having trouble settling to sleep, Elsie had taken her and Elaine in for the night, closing the door between mother and daughter and taking the baby out to walk through the pre-dawn light. At four thirty in the morning, all the pathways by the river had been thick with pedestrians making the most of the cooler air before the summer’s day came on. It was like a whole world, a whole network of intersections and exchanges, that most of the city’s population, fast asleep, knew nothing of.

  ‘Our secret,’ Elsie had whispered to the baby, lying back in her pushchair, her eyes wide at the blue sky and the soft trees. It had been hard, watching Elaine struggle—watching her hate her own mother whenever Elsie took the little one and settled her in a moment.

  ‘I’m clearly not cut out for this,’ Elaine would hiss against Elsie’s protests that any baby settled for anyone who hadn’t been trying to do it for an hour. ‘I don’t know why I even try.’

  Which words sounded almost like a foreign language, thought Elsie, because who didn’t want a baby of their own to hold and comfort? Who didn’t think that motherhood was the thing they might do best?

  The artist, she remembered, and it stopped her in her tracks. The memory of Ida Lewis in her messy room, the way the light came in through all the windows. Ida Lewis had once asked if Elsie regretted having her kids.

  What an awful thing to say.

  All the days she’d taken Gloria for Elaine—‘to give you a break, love,’ she’d said at first, and then: ‘to give you some time.’ And while Lainey traipsed into town and had her hair done, or met a friend in one of the tearooms, Elsie read with Gloria and played with Gloria and taught Gloria how to hold a crayon and hold a fork and pour her own milk from the bottle to the cup and tie up her shoelaces.

  ‘She’ll grow into it,’ she’d whispered to Clem, on the edge of sleep, after Elaine had collected the little girl and taken her home.

  And Clem would shake his head and say, ‘She’s a good girl, our Elaine; let her work it all out for herself.’

  But she never had, as far as Elsie could see, and she’d had no more children either. It was Carol who’d turned out to have such a knack for mothering.

  Things never work out quite the way you expect.

  She shook her head and made herself keep walking. Behind her, in the new apartment (Elaine used this grand word all the time, but Elsie preferred to say ‘flat’), everything had been unpacked, and no more boxes or belongings were to come from home. There was no doubt she’d arrived.

  The new place was so very spartan, all its surfaces white—walls, cupboards, ceilings, bench tops, drapes—and a sort of caramel carpet at her feet. Too bare, too spare, too silent. At home, she’d had the tonnage of conversations and decisions, all that laughter, living, life. She had only to sit there quietly to hear it, to remember. The new place was a clear and empty space.

  ‘This place isn’t friendly,’ she’d whispered to her daughter-in-law as she came and went with deliveries.

  ‘Ah, Mum, just give it some time.’ Carol had held her hand, patting it before she let it go.

  Her daughter-in-law and her daughter. The girls, as Elsie still thought of them. She couldn’t believe they were getting close to seventy, especially as they bustled to and fro with things for her. She was blessed, she thought, to have help to make this nasty, brutal move. Well, if Elaine could quite ever be helpful.

  ‘I wonder, were we ever friends?’

  Elsie had been sure she’d only thought these words but when her daughter stopped and turned from the box she was unpacking, she realised she’d said them aloud.

  ‘You’re my mother,’ Elaine said. She leaned back over the box, her head down, fussing with its contents. And then: ‘This carpet’s much more practical than your bright green stuff,’ nodding her approval at the thick caramel pile as if nothing else had been said. ‘I don’t know why you chose that colour in the first place. And I’d’ve gone mad with all that wallpaper. You could hang some nice paintings in here.’

  Clem’s wallpapers: he’d taken pride in the job every time he did it, carefully matching patterns across the strips. He’d papered every two or three years through the fifties, the sixties—‘freshen the place up, Else; make it nice and new’—so that she’d been secretly relieved that it had been changed only once more after he’d died. Donny had done it after the flood. She’d never heard him swear as much as he did at all that hanging—‘sorry, Mum,’ after every expletive. But he’d done it—a different pattern in every room, just as Clem would have chosen, and lining up the pictures across the joins.

  ‘You could have a bit of wallpaper if you wanted,’ Carol had whispered. ‘I’m sure Don’s recovered enough from the last time to give it a go—it’s nearly thirty-seven years now, after all.’

  Carol had been busy with a delivery of rugs—a green one she’d chosen specially—and plants, some of Elsie’s cushions, and a raft of family photos in matching frames.

  ‘I still think of your photographs lost in the flood,’ Carol had said as she fiddled with who would hang where. ‘I still remember Don coming home to tell me they were gone.’

  ‘And there was a painting too.’ Elsie frowned. ‘I don’t know how I’d find it now.’ All of it, washing away.

  ‘A painting?’ Carol shook her head. ‘I don’t remember. I can ask Don, if you like?’

  The flood; that terrible flood. The risk of a house around here. She’d thought of moving elsewhere after it happened. But it was her place—and Clem’s, more importantly. He had just passed away when it happened. If she’d moved, how would he have known where she was? In the week after he’d died, she’d slept in every room except the bathroom, trying to find a place where his going made more sense. She never did, but the shock of opening her eyes somewhere slightly unexpected offset for a second or two the shock of mourning him. And that had made her strange sleeps seem worthwhile.

  Losing Clem was the strangest part of the sadness of these weeks, nearly forty years later. She watched the sun sparkle on the creek’s surface and wiped at the edge of a tear. How on earth would he track her down now? She could remember the disproportionate grief she’d felt over the photos when she’d lost Clem to pneumonia just before. It had felt like losing everything at once.

  On the path, Elsie stepped aside to let a cyclist whoosh by. She thought of how lovely it was to have Carol call her ‘Mum’—and how little she liked it when Elaine’s Gerald did the same. Yet Clem had liked him. Clem had said he was a good man, and Elsie supposed he was. They hadn’t much in common, which seemed a queer thing to say
about your son-in-law. They had Elaine in common.

  Gerald could have made right whatever it was that Elaine had always deemed was wrong, Elsie thought then, strangely adamant. The problem she’d never resolved.

  ‘Elaine’s all right, Mum,’ was all Gerald said the only time she’d broached it. ‘You’re just such different people—that’s all.’

  As if she should just make her peace with that.

  She was by the river now, the round sound of casuarinas high above her and the water rushing by towards the bend. They’d built a bridge over to the university—Clem would have loved that; off to work and home again in no time—and Elsie gazed at its tall pylons. They looked like the magical spires from a fairy tale. She’d like to cross that bridge one day; Don said they let no cars on it, which seemed odd, but that you could walk or take a bicycle or a bus.

  Perhaps the latter; in the old days, she’d have set off on foot before breakfast, but it looked a way off now.

  She’d marked her life by the tides of this river from the first time she’d seen it, walking down from the train she’d caught into Roma Street and standing on the North Quay to watch it pass. She loved its tempers, its twists and turns. She kept pace with the way the tides moved through each twenty-four hours, high and low, pulling forward by about half an hour each time. A constant and a change.

  The water had been clearer back in the old days, but she quite liked the khaki it wore now. It looked durable, workmanlike. And its watercourse defined the landscape; there was no doubt about that.

  The sunlight moved and the surface of the water changed again.

  Olive. Cutch. Sap green—what were these words? The random nonsense of too many crossword clues, thought Elsie. She tipped her head one way and then the other, as if to dislodge them. She thought of brown carpet. Stripes of colour. Waiting for Elaine. Something more.

  She shook her head. The sun was too hot and the shadows had all but folded into noon. Who knew how long the walk back might take? She crossed the road, her stick-spiked footsteps steady on the path.

  Until she reached the point where the concrete pathways branched—the southern arm heading towards her new flat, the northern arm towards the hill, beyond which her old home sat. What was happening there? Donny said the family had a little one. Middle of the day—there’d be lunchtime, and some quiet time, and a sleep. She smiled. The rhythms of the beginning of life; she’d loved their order and their certainty.

  She set her feet south, and headed back to the new apartment. In the five minutes Gloria’s running legs took to cover this path, Elsie felt she’d barely moved at all. The heat thickened the air into something like molasses, and her feet dragged.

  Glory. Maybe she’d be home for Christmas. Elsie must ask Elaine if there was any news. And as if on cue, a car drove fast along the road that edged the parkland, a Christmas carol—something about joy? something faithful?—blaring as it went.

  ‘This is why we walked out in the evenings,’ she said to Clem. She often talked to Clem; he didn’t mind. Perhaps she and Clem could walk home together later tonight when the day cooled.

  She closed her eyes and saw herself in her kitchen, turning a pot of tea to steep in the first quiet moments of her children’s sleep. Elaine always asleep faster and for longer than her brother. Donny always somehow heartbroken when he woke—those hopeless cries.

  Clem had cried like that a little, at the end, in his sleep. He’d cried a little then, beyond her comfort.

  ‘But how lucky we were, Clem.’ With her eyes closed, he was there, just by her side. ‘I was taking a tram on through Adelaide Street, and I stepped down, and there you were.’

  It still frightened her, the idea that it might not have happened—if she had caught a later tram; if she had used another stop; if she had been the second, third or fourth to disembark.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she heard Clem say. ‘I’m here.’

  She held the sound of his voice at the centre of herself and kept walking towards her new place.

  11

  The intruder

  On a silvery summer morning when a fine film of cloud turned the sun’s light to glare, Lucy and Tom set off for the city, whose spires gleamed like a mirage at the end of their street. Santa was in the shops, and Lucy wanted Tom to have his picture taken. When she was little, she’d begged her mother every year to be taken to tell Santa what she’d like for Christmas. There was a direct correlation, she’d believed, between the fact that she was never taken and the fact that Santa never delivered the right thing. Lucy could see now what a wrangle it would have been for her mother, on her own, with four girls and a full working week. But when she got the Holly Hobbie doll instead of the Strawberry Shortcake (like her friend Astrid’s), and the bike with training wheels instead of the one with the white basket (like her friend Astrid’s), she felt that not seeing Santa was somehow to blame.

  Then, when Lucy was seven, Astrid’s mother, Linnea, took the two of them into a department store and sat one on each of Santa’s knees.

  ‘My girls,’ she said to the lady behind the camera. ‘Aren’t they just adorable?’ Lucy beamed at the deception; Astrid frowned.

  ‘When I grow up and have kids,’ Lucy had said to Linnea on the way home, ‘I’m taking them to see Santa every single year.’ She’d shown off the photo to her sisters, gleeful at their envy. Now, she half expected to see some shadow of her own small self in the picture with her son.

  In his pram, Tom leaned forward a little, one arm reaching out so that Lucy, pushing behind, saw its starburst of waving fingers. ‘Santa,’ he called towards his own shadow. ‘Going Santa.’

  And after Christmas, she should try to find a job in this new place, she thought vaguely as she set her shoulders to push the pram up another hill. She missed work sometimes—the work that wasn’t Tom; she missed its focus and its purpose, the sense of finishing something. But then there was the question of another child, and she never quite managed to think about that, let alone have a conversation about it with Ben. She pulled her shoulders back a little more and began the climb. Maybe take another calculated chance.

  The topography of this place still amazed her, the way it rose and fell so abruptly. Lucy had walked for hours, intrigued by its constant crescendos and falls. She’d walked pathways and roadways that cupped the edge of the river and she’d pushed the pram around their curves, trying to decipher its calligraphy and understand its ever-changing direction. Where she grew up, north of Sydney, the coast ran obediently north to south; you stood on its shore and looked directly east, out across the ocean. You knew where you were. Her sisters still lived on that coastline, suspicious of any place that had a river, not a beach. In their new house—Elsie’s house—the back door faced almost due east and Lucy loved that. One sure point in a floating world.

  Here were rises and ridges, dips and hollows, climbs so steep that stairways had been cut into hills and seemed to push straight to the sky. There were crests and corners that seemed sometimes to consume sound and sometimes to amplify it—the river could pass the CityCat’s siren along to her house, although she was well away from it, upstream.

  As they came in from the river at the old Customs House, she found herself on Queen Street at its famous corner, the Macarthur corner. Well, famous to Lucy, who’d read about the World War II general and almost expected to see him dashing into the handsome sandstone building for a meeting that would surely win the war. Standing behind Tom, she nudged the stroller back and forward as she nattered on to him.

  ‘Who else has been here, I wonder,’ she said as the cars passed. ‘Who else has waited on this corner? Maybe Dad’s mum? Maybe Dad when he was small? Maybe Elsie, with her twins?’

  This habit of calling up Elsie. She hardly noticed anymore that she did it—it had become automatic. She’d stood in Elsie’s kitchen conjuring conversations with the older woman. Of course, in your day the world had fewer things to worry you. And: It must have been simpler then. To which Elsie would repl
y with observations about clothes dryers or the boon of vaccines.

  It felt a friendly and comforting thing—‘an imaginary friend,’ said Ben, and Lucy smiled. That was how she’d thought of Tom before his birth. Now it made her feel a little more at home.

  ‘I don’t even know if there were traffic lights,’ said Lucy to her small son. ‘Isn’t that funny? I can imagine trams, and ladies in nice dresses and hats. But I don’t know how they crossed the road.’ She baulked at how little she knew of this place before that—who was here; where they lived.

  She felt her elbow bounce as someone nudged it, and imagined—horrific—the fast, rolling forward. But as she steadied herself and watched the man run on through the mall, she was sure it was Ben rushing by.

  ‘Hey!’ she called before she could stop herself. ‘What are you doing here?’ A quick pulse of shock and desire. But the man turned back, once, to look at her, and he was somebody altogether different. Of course he ran on and Lucy watched the sole of his left sneaker flap. Ben would never wear those.

  Still, she stood for several minutes in the Santa queue before her heartbeat settled down.

  •

  She was coming out of Tom’s bedroom that evening when she noticed the back door open wide and swinging at the other end of the house. It squeaked as she walked towards it, and when she leaned out to pull it to, there was a cold edge to the summer darkness. I mustn’t have snibbed it shut, she thought blankly. Although she knew, of course, that she had.

  It was eight or so at night. Tom had been asleep an hour already, and in America, Ben would not yet be awake. A few more hours, she thought, before he would call home, and she pottered about with the dishes and a broom, starting at the sudden crash of empty bottles from somewhere along the street. She needed to take out their bin.

  She pushed open the back door, flicked on the outside light and went down the stairs, looking for her gumboots. Through the first months of Tom’s life, Lucy had felt a gnawing anxiety if she went outside when he was inside, patting her pocket for keys and chocking the door with a plant, a shoe, a brick. Now, in the yard, pushing her feet into her boots, she looked up at the stars. Of course Tom was all right inside; what was nicer to think about was how much he would love being out here, looking at the night sky.