The midday city streets smell of petrol and fumes and hold too many people. They are shoved into buses, queued out of stores and crammed onto streets – into me. They are close enough that I can smell their stale cigarette breath, and their earthy ripe sweat under heavy wool suits.
Their thoughts seem to seep out of their pores too – the angry, the sad, the depressed, the stuck – and hang in the air like mist. If you are unlucky enough to pass, in the next few seconds, you’ll be covered by it too.
The sprees of sun do little to soothe me, and the wind keeps roaring through the streets, sending everyone off balance.
At dusk, I join commuters jostling in lines for crammed buses and trains that stop at every station, taking over an hour to find mine. I am always home after dark, where I make dinner quickly and spend the rest of the night listening to the TV as I wash the dishes, elbows deep in suds. Too tired to read, I lie in bed watching the ceiling and listening to the far-off sounds of cars on the motorway, my alarm set for 5 am.
After months of this churning, I can’t tell whose thoughts I am bringing home when I worry about money, or bills, or the list of chores I have to do. On the weekend, I am too exhausted to do anything but sleep away the thoughts.
Family and friends smile at me over coffee. ‘You’ve finally settled down.’ Relieved comfort in their voices. ‘You used to be so wild. So crazy.’
They cluck and natter and laugh, as if I had been off piste and they had made every effort to bring me back.
‘So, are you going to buy a house now? Find a husband?’
I try to imagine the life they paint for me. It means sharing my tiny bathroom, trying to decide if we need two cars or one, the stress of deciding what to have for dinner, who gets to shower first as we both run late for the train. There would be double the amount of plates to wash at night.
On weekends we would tell ourselves we need to be independent. He’d golf. Or drink beer with his friends and stay out later than I liked. I’d go to yoga, and have coffee with the girls and then fret whether I should make the vegetable pie or lasagna for our dinner party and how many bottles of white to buy, which candles to put out?
On Sunday we’d end up staring at the million tints of paint at the hardware store struggling to find the perfect match for the bedroom walls whose shade never pleases us. We’d never get around to fixing the garage eaves that continue to rot before our eyes from the inside out.
DAYS OF to-do lists. Days of picking up dry cleaning, and three-hour meetings. Days of rushing to the supermarket for Nurofen or baby spinach leaves that haven’t wilted to mush, laying in my crisper too long. World Cup fever hits Sydney. Everywhere is offering jugs of beer and bowls of wedges and giant television screens are erected so we can cheer on Australia. There are words you cannot say as an Australian: I don’t like sport. I don’t watch rugby. I didn’t realise there was a game. But there is the offer of wine – the chance to see friends. In front of the giant televisions, we uncork champagne, give cheek kisses, hugs, talk about the weather. Our jobs. Their kids.
There is the announcement of a new baby girl. Drink. A celebration of ten years married. Drink. Someone has a new million-dollar mortgage, a small townhouse with a square of cement that is close to ‘good schools’. Drink. The champagne has run out. I queue at the bar, for what feels like hours, to order two more bottles. Standing in line, with the World Cup blaring in the background, I meet a man who is a sales trainer. Travels for work. No two days are the same. A man who seems just as mercurial as me. He slips me his number, and then thinks better of it. Asks for mine, and promises to call.
He calls.
We spend weekends finding good coffee. Strolling through markets. Afternoons comparing bikes, planning trips, choosing mountains to hike, finding museums to stroll through. He, from country stock, makes a garden bed for me out the back of my unit. Wood-panelled and high-rise. His large, earthy hands so assured. I wait with cucumber seeds to sow. Within a month, we are picking the small slender fingers. They don’t need anything – we could eat them alone – but we pour olive oil and salt on top and let them marinate. A month later, we have baby tomatoes that are full of sunshine, large-leafed basil, Italian mint and thyme and oregano too.
I remember how it feels to be close to someone: how delicate it is to fit into the grooves of their body, learning how their neck smells, knowing whose thumb will be on top when you hold hands, how they like their eggs, the way my heart pounds when they make a perfect morning coffee – black and strong and bitter – with a side pot of real cream. I think I know what our future looks like: walking around Paris in the rain at 2 am, taking a small leaky boat to an off-cut island, tucking inside ourselves, lying next to each other, reading books at night with our big toes touching. Everyone has another world, under their noisy world, that lays mostly forgotten. This is mine.
WE MOVE into a cold, ground floor flat, two train stops from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Our lives settle into the city rhythm. Work, Monday to Friday. At night I cook and he watches Ice Truckers. Sometimes he cooks and I watch re-runs of Friends, but early on he makes a pasta sauce with a bottle of rogan josh and some baked beans and too much salt, so we laugh and order pizza and decide he shouldn’t be allowed near the kitchen again.
Life is: glasses of shiraz and a slab of brie, then shower-scum fighters and half price carrots, Sunday morning cafe big breakfasts – eggs, thick-cut white toast, lashings of butter, a side of grilled tomatoes. Extra avocado.
Under the Harbour Bridge, we drink cups of hot chocolate from a French cafe, where we melt dark chips above a tea-light candle, in a small ceramic dish. Add splashes of full cream milk, stir it together, thick as honey, then sip it through a metal straw. He flies me to Melbourne, where we walk hand in hand around the wintery city, scarves and coats, gloves and boots, the sun a tiny pea-sized drop, doing little to warm the stone buildings. Here, we swallow as much art and coffee as the weekend will fit.
In Federation Square, I get a phone call – an old friend is engaged. She can’t wait for us to return. I put her on speakerphone. She is exuberant.
Can you believe it? We all keep saying. Congratulations. Her partner is laughing; he hid the ring in a box for weeks. Booked a hatted restaurant. A luxury suite. Wore a tux and got down on one knee. Champagne. Roses.
Do you want that too? He asks later.
I blink. I’m not sure if he is joking. It is a good thing that it begins to rain then, large fat, splatting rain. We dash for the first open door we can find. A church. Inside everyone is shivering and laughing, the gathering crowd presses in. Umbrellas are shaken. Coats appear from bags. Someone mops their head with a newspaper. I watch puddles of water grow large on slippery tiles. Someone keeps asking, ‘Has it stopped?’
At the airport, he holds my hand the whole flight, orders me a wine and another – knowing I can’t stand the feeling of whizzing through the air in a metal bird. The strangeness of it. I clutch the seat edge every time the engines switch gears. Someone’s light dings, because they want extra water. A blanket. I imagine a million things I’d never say: a fireball igniting the wings. Another plane flying into us. The engines giving up completely, everyone clawing at each other to get to the exits, the lights flickering and a dark descent into the open mouth of the ocean, before sinking to the very bottom. Would we die on impact? These are the thoughts that I have, while I am drinking a pinot noir and not tasting it. While I am peeling back the plastic on my cheddar cheese and crackers. I do not breathe properly until the Airbus wheels hit Sydney tarmac.
When we get home, I unpack and he orders butter chicken and extra rice. Garlic naan. Pappadums. He lays out a blanket on our chocolate suede couch, tucks us both into it.
I think, I should be happy.
THE SLOW, cold Saturdays entice me to stay in bed. I hear him shower and change and unlock the bike. I lie under the blankets for hours. I listen to the clock in the kitchen. To a fly that can’t find its way out of my living room as it hovers and
hits the window, its wings beating against the glass. Ten feet above me, our neighbours start yelling. Someone next door is moving furniture, like giants shoving steel bookcases against our wall.
I open the window an inch and try to shoo it out, but even though there is an exit, an escape, the fly stays where it is. I watch as it becomes quiet in the corner of the wood, then lies there defeated. I shower.
When I check an hour later, it has died. I cup the body in both hands and toss it gently out the open window, to the place it had been trying to find. The silence, marked only by the kitchen clock, grows like moss and vines, and fills each room. If I stay inside any longer, I’ll go mad.
I grab my keys and leave. Jeans and a loose t-shirt are not a smart choice in winter, but at least the chill makes me feel alive. For a second I breathe in the smog from the city, the smell of trees from the morning rain. I listen to the buses rattle up our street. I walk to the shops. Then find myself on a train, going north.
There are a group of older women who have been lunching in the city. They smell of heavy musk perfume and sauvignon blanc. A middle-aged couple discuss a job promotion in Singapore. Two teenage girls swap gold and black nail polish. I listen to their conversations – stock markets, weather, to tennis or not on Saturday, wines to try, silk tops to buy, who is dating, divorcing, desperate.
The train terminates at the end of the line. Hornsby. I think about continuing on to Newcastle, further up the east coast of NSW, and beyond. I think about not going in to work on Monday. I think about taking the train to the airport, and getting on the next flight.
But I don’t go anywhere. I sit on the empty platform with a bitter takeaway coffee warming my hands.
In the end, I get on a train towards our flat. The whole way back, I stare out the window at the world, as if through a telescope at stars.
At home I find myself staring into a malnourished fridge. An old rind of cheese. His JD and coke cans. Wilted lettuce. Old broccoli. Pasta from a few nights ago. I lift the lid, looking for the white fungus that always gathers when we leave things too long.
When he gets home at 7 pm he declares he is starving. So I scrape the white fungus off the pasta, reheat it and served it on a white plate and tell myself it doesn’t matter what he doesn’t know.
THE WINTER rain becomes incessant. It doesn’t give up for a full fortnight – gutters overflow. Shoes are soaked. Everything feels damp inside our flat, under our blankets. My pillow smells slightly of mildew. Our ceiling comes out in spots, and on further inspection while on a ladder, he determines the diagnosis: black mould. We purchase extra heaters for around the house. Plug gaps in our windows. We relent and buy a dryer – it’s either that or new clothes. Stock up on carpet doorstops to keep the rain and winter breath from finding a way inside.
Everything feels distant; we talk about a holiday to America but don’t book anything. We disagree on small things: how the sheets should be folded, how much to spend on birthday presents, whether we should drive four hours to see his parents for the weekend, which route to take, what songs to listen to.
We do laundry. Eat roast potatoes. I remember to buy biscuits when we are low. He sticks bills on the fridge with a little red magnet. We wash sheets and hang them out, and bring them in and fold them silently.
I think secretly about standing on the roof one night and letting them go into the wind. Where would they land?
I resign from my government communications job and take a corporate offer. He gets a promotion. We have more money and less time. We buy things we do not need: better shirts, designer pants, nicer bottles of wine. I spend nights scrolling through work emails that people send at 10 pm, 11 pm, midnight, each accompanied with the red-hot poker of an exclamation point: high importance.
I try to not want this life, but I watch my bank balance double. I think about all the places we can go. Six months in a French chalet. A villa in Tuscany. Watching the aurora borealis from an igloo.
Rather than feel comforted, I am somehow disappointed. It is the feeling I get when the alarm goes off at five. When I have to stay late at work. When I can’t seem to balance myself. It is the feeling of lethargy and decline, the kind that you feel when someone forgets your birthday, makes plans and doesn’t turn up, says they like you – then never calls.
More rain. I unpack my old boots I brought home from London. We waterproof our jackets. The toaster breaks. On Sunday he takes it apart, bit by bit. Fiddling with screwdrivers. Sighing into the grates. He fixes it, but leaves it with a limp. It will not balance anymore on our white kitchen countertop. I get annoyed every time I plunge a piece of bread into the gap, that I have to hold the toaster, otherwise it will tip. He keeps saying, I don’t know why it’s doing that; I’ll take another look at it.
Then, just when I least need it: Jason emails. I am sitting at my desk between meetings. The phone is blinking at me – eight missed calls. Messages lined up. My inbox shows forty-eight unread emails. And then forty-nine – his name appearing at the top. It is short and perfunctory. Hello. He does not address me, and I wonder if this is a group email, something he has copied and pasted and sent to everyone. My eyes catch on the words below. We are having a baby. My stomach twists. I feel dizzy. Is it the baby that disturbs me? Or the notion of a ‘we’?
I delete it without reading the rest. I grab my coat and bag. Leave work without telling anyone. On the way home I watch my pale, startled face reflected in the grubby train window. I go to bed at 3 pm, still wearing my white silk blouse. I cry into my pillow.
I worry that I have come back for nothing. That I have given everything up.
I worry about worrying.
He creeps in later, thinking I am asleep, and slowly slides between the sheets. He snores. I watch the stars. The moon moves across the window.
I hope I can pull myself out of this.
Me too, I say aloud.
WHEN MY birthday arrives, I don’t feel like celebrating. What have I done this past year? I want to stay in bed, but we drive to the Blue Mountains – a place of fir trees and cliff winds and knee-high piles of leaves. We eat dinner at a lovely restaurant – cheese and leek tarts, hand selected spinach and baby peas bathe in oil and parmesan. Before dessert, the chef takes us outside and points out the organic garden. We walk through it. Spinach grows up woven wire, waving in the wind and tickling our shoulders. New potatoes glow like moons in the ground. We share a lemon pie for dessert and lick our spoons clean. The coffee is locally ground – strong and black, exactly as I like it.
At night, when he snores, I go outside and listen to the wind come up the valley, roaring like a wave. I almost feel normal again.
Just before midnight, I fall asleep and have a series of consecutive nightmares; I am trapped at the bottom of the sea, drowning. A plane is burning and crashing. I am stuck in cement and birds are pecking at my hair, my eyes, whilst a red wind screams through the world.
I wake shivering. My head pounds. I am hot and then cold. I can’t get out of bed. He wraps me up in a bathrobe, as though he is scared if I touch anything I’ll break.
It’s just a cold, he says, searching through our toiletries for Panadol, Nurofen and cough elixir.
Is it? I lay in the bed, shivering below blankets, staring glumly at the ceiling. It is hard not to think of Paris. Of Greece. The sun lighting trees ablaze, a row of pines bending in late summer winds. The smell of salt on my skin. How all of it tasted like freedom.
What is the difference, I wonder, between people who grow deep roots into the soil, and the ones who ride the wind with outstretched wings? Could curiosity be just another way of bravely living?
In the afternoon, I sleep fitfully. After sunset, he brings my birthday to me – champagne and a berry tartelette. When I cut a slice, the berries bleed onto the knife. The knife chinks against the porcelain plate. My present is wrapped tight and well. A million bits of sticky tape to get through. A black wool jumper with a high neck. Wear it to dinner, he suggests. When I try it on,
the wool tightens around my throat and scratches my skin.
I feel an immediate panic. My heart forgets to beat. I pause, but can’t hear it. My lungs aren’t moving. Nothing is going in my nose.
I can’t breathe, I think frantically.
Oh. Dear. God.
I CAN’T BREATHE.
I lunge for the lamp and turn it on. Only when the light spills across the room do I finally take a big, wheezing gasp.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t breathe.’
‘If you can talk, you can breathe.’
I watch a spot then, on the carpet. Bite my lip. Wait. Make sure I can breathe, not just voluntarily, but that my brain can manage the involuntary notion of breathing while I am doing other things. Like sleeping. Eating.
I count. Six inhales. Six exhales. Seven. Eight.
‘Can you turn out the light now? Can we go to dinner?’
There’s something wrong, I think. I am too young to be having trouble breathing.
The restaurant is empty when we arrive. I don’t remember ordering risotto with tiny peas. Eating it. Drinking a glass of wine that could have been water. Later we put on coats. Scarves. Gloves. We take a walk. Leaves whip around us. I think the birds must have gone to sleep, roosted for the night. But if I look closely, there they are, wing tips, night flying, their eyes capturing the moon, gleaming.
When we get back I sit on the edge of the bath, staring at the white walls. I know I should go back out, but I don’t. I stay listening to myself, breathing, until he knocks on the door.
I run the bath and pretend to get into it. I make fluttery watery sounds every now and then, skimming my hands across the cooling water. I watch the walls. Stare at my pale reflection in the mirror. An hour later it sinks in: we don’t need to keep going. Keep struggling. Keep at something that isn’t meant to be kept.
Ways to Come Home Page 2
