Don’t talk

As they get nearer, the mountain that emerges from the surrounding bushland reveals itself to be a cluster of tightly grouped stony hills. There is no apparent entrance but he has been here before and pulls off the dirt road that has taken them about two hundred kilometres from the coast.  Soon a rough track shows itself as two faint wheel ruts that appear and disappear up the side of the hills.  Large stones and ditches cause the vehicle to sway and dip as it climbs slowly upwards.

This is their first trip together and she has never been here before.  She doesn’t say anything but he senses her excitement.  The Toyota reaches a gap between two hills and they begin a steep decline through thick bushes and washed out waterways.  The spring sky is clear and the air already warm but in a thickly aromatic way that makes his head swim.  Gradually they emerge into a small valley nestled and hidden between the hills.  A fading bed of green cloaks the valley floor and gum trees grow out of empty creek beds.

“Oh God,” she says.  They park at the foot of a trickling waterfall and he takes her hand and helps her up the ragged red rocks towards the top.  “Look,” he says and there on a rock beside her she can make out a faded Aboriginal etching.  Then she notices that they are all around her. The two of them sit down on a boulder and the valley stretches east and west below them.  She doesn’t say anything and he is glad.  He hates the banality of language and how it pollutes beauty, how inadequate words hang over the indescribable and tarnish it with the prosaic.  He feels her hand on the small of his back.

Later they make their way back to the homestead. “You love all this, don’t you?” she says.

He nods.  “I do, I always have.” Then he adds, “It’s my country.” And she knows he doesn’t mean Australia, only this small part of it where he grew up and where she met him when they were still teenagers.  When the next question comes, he is not even surprised. “Did you used to bring your wife here?” she asks. It has become important to her this knowledge.  It insinuates itself into everything that is important to her and him; into everything that she wants to make her own.  She has a need for a new history with him, not one that is shared. He understands this even though they don’t talk about it.

“No,” he answers. There is a silence and he can feel her longing to know more but also that she is slightly afraid of spoiling this moment. “My wife loved beautiful things,” he says, “but she didn’t have time for beauty.”  He reaches out and touches her hand.  “You’re different.” She clasps his hand and looks out the window and says, “Don’t talk” and he senses emotion coursing through her like a tide that stops her speech.

He remembers that there is a flat ground in some low hills not far away where you can still make out the outline of strange lines of gathered stones.  A black stockman told him once that the Aboriginal people around here used to spend weeks making the intricate patterns and colours and then one day they would just dance all over them. He will take her there tomorrow.  She will understand how beauty is not always for keeping and how you can dance it away and how not holding it makes it grow more beautiful still.

He suddenly wants to tell her that he loves her but then he realises that he loves everything.

The neck of the sea

I grew up on a great river that flings its tail far back into the grey and green bushland of Australia.  Impotent tributaries spread unevenly from its snaking body like tentacles sucking at the dryness.  It is a wide river and long but for most of the year its sandy bed shimmers dry and hot under the indifferent sky. In summer the hot breath of the eastern deserts blows across the country around the river and stuns it into silence but for the ringing of cicadas. In the hot air, mirages float above the ancient water course and blur the image of gum trees and strange animals moving slowly through the glassy illusion of water.

But the summer also brings rain.  Wild cyclones that swing in from Asia, all noise and anger, grow calm and leaden as they are swallowed slowly into the endlessness of the land. Then they drop their rain and die and the river fills quickly and sends a brown frothing bounty rushing towards the West. And there, where the river opens into a wide and shallow mouth that forks around a scrubby, sandy island, the land spews its brown stain far out into the ocean.

Before my people came here, there was only the sound of the ocean and the birds and the wind, always the wind.  Sometimes it blew from over the waves for days and nights on end, pushing the cool salty air across the green fringes of the mangroves towards the country’s deep belly.  Sea birds pointed to the West and rode the moving air, hanging steadfast over the tidal plains of shallow water where stingrays and sawfish basked. Each day the tide made timid excursions around the toes of the river and each day retreated again towards the waves.

The Mandi people of the floodplain called this place the neck of the sea.  By the time I was born, the Mandi had long gone and their stories of the river are lost like the voices that told them or fading on red rock walls far from my town. The sickness of white men carried them away by the hundreds and for a long time their bodies would be found floating in the mangroves or lying under the wattles.  The old people simply walked away from their camps to die. They returned to the dust of a home turned strange by the feet of sheep and foxes.

Only the river dreams of the Mandi now.  And one day it will dream of me.

Sunday afternoon in Nebraska

On a late Sunday afternoon in Lincoln, Nebraska, I emerged from a movie theatre feeling like someone had just put a skewer through my life and slowly barbecued it for three hours. I was alone in this big, flat, corn-fielded state; there was a slight coolness in the air and colour was leeching from the denim fabric of the sky. The movie I’d just seen was American Beauty and I’d spent time in the darkness wincing at the truth about myself and my marriage that I had somehow submerged beneath the surface of work and achievement and dutifulness.

I stood uncertain in the street feeling a long way from home and with the need to do something welling in me like panic. And then it struck me that I didn’t know what to do or even what home was anymore.  Not really.  I could see the kids playing on the floor in front of the television, the furniture, the garden; the comfort of known things spread before me like a gift to which I could always return.  But then there was my wife with her sad eyes and observations stained with disappointment, her angry accumulation of lists and things and places for everything.   I remembered that before I came here I would escape from her and plan the study tour of America in fine detail so I could fee l some control over my life, so I could apply order to growing uncertainty of where I fit.

Now I was where I had planned to be and the only place that was left to go was home.  There were to be no more easy decisions about airline schedules or early morning pickups; no more hotel beds turned back at night or the respectful handshake of strangers. I was in the movie, I was returning to a place where there was no time to watch the miracle of leaves dancing.

Some Nebraskan college students walked ahead of me up the street.  They were laughing about something. Their heads were full of themselves and their cleverness and they had an air of immortality.  They were full of fries and philosophy and Friday nights and they thought that death comes only once.

I looked at my watch and made the now automatic calculation of Australian time. They are all still asleep, I thought, but in a few hours they will wake up.  It comforted me, the thought of my children dreaming.  And then I realised that I had just woken up too but that I could not go to sleep again.

All their own work

A few people have tagged me in the past to nominate some of my favourite blogs. So…here they are! And what an eclectic lot! I don’t have many criteria for those that I enjoy – I guess I like those that contain true things, that don’t hate or spread hate, that make me smile or make me think.  Anyway, here are just some and I’ll post some more at a later date.

Tim– Thoughtful, honest and often humorous appraisals of his life and beliefs.  A father, a Christian but most of all a seeker.

Kym– Her photographs are a celebration of daily life in a beautiful place. The kind of person you suspect of an interior landscape quite as startling as that around her.

Florescence  – The sort of writer that makes you understand that great writing is born of effort and commitment.  A gifted and generous blogger.

Max  – Few people can say so little and so much at the same time.  Quirky, enigmatic, clever and invariably Max.

Jane – Here is subtle writing that touches like a breath on your cheek suggesting so much more than you can actually see.

John  – John represents what is quintessentially the best of British. Consistently funny, slightly seditious (if you are a monarchist), unpretentious and the genuine product of a nation that brought the world Monty Python and Peter Sellers.

Ninglun  – Urbane and measured writing on a broad canvas from a  retired Australian teacher. Gentle but uncompromising social commentary.

In which I receive certain advice relating to the practice of medicine

 

I stand up to leave the meeting.  “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment,” I explain.  I am with one of the Managers, and he looks up at me with raised eyebrows.  For a moment I think he is questioning my excuse and I wait for his comment.

 

“I do hope you’re not going to tell him anything,” he says through pursed lips.

 

“Sorry, tell who what?” I answer, genuinely confused.

 

“The Doctor,” he says and then, since telling the Doctor everything was clearly my intention, he adds, “Never tell Doctors anything.”

 

I begin to pack my briefcase. As I do so, the Manager gives me the following advice:

 

When the Doctor asks, ‘Do you smoke?’ You must say No.”

 

I interrupt.  “But I do smoke.”

 

His eyebrows lift again, “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

 

“Well,” I explain, “I only smoke on Fridays.”

 

“Whatever for?”  Now his eyebrows are so high that I think they might disappear into his hairline.

 

“Harm minimization,” I explain.

 

His voice is slightly incredulous.  “But why bother at all?” he asks.

 

“That’s what my Doctor says,” I reply and this reminds him of his original treatise.

 

“Ah, well, doctors,! Never tell them anything!” And he continues with this explanation.

 

“After he has learned you don’t smoke, the doctor will ask if you drink and you must also answer ‘No.’ This will be followed by the question, ‘Do you exercise?’ And this time you must answer ‘Yes.’”

 

“After that there will be a considerable silence in the surgery,” my interlocutor adds.

 

“And then what should I do?” I ask.

 

“Then,” says the Manager with a dramatic flourish, “then you must say to him, ‘So now tell me what’s wrong with me!”

 

 

 

 

A Monsoon Storm

And then suddenly it is raining and it is monsoon rain and the sky becomes very dark but still the sweat dribbles down my temples as the driver pulls up at the orphanage.  He runs inside and I can see that he is soaked even before he reaches the curb.  Large puddles of water have already formed around our minibus and the rain feeds them and shatters them and feeds them and shatters them and the water streams down the windows and Cambodia blurs into browns and greens around us.

Then the door slides open and the driver stands there ushering us out one at a time and holding an umbrella above our heads.  Some Cambodian teenage girls are waiting on the veranda and they are smiling and saying Welcome Welcome and holding their hands together in the Khmer greeting that looks like praying and I smile at them and they giggle like children. There is a smell of incense and burnt wood and cooking and rotting fruit and faintly too the smell of excrement.  The girls follow us inside where it is dark but not cool and this lady is telling us about the orphans and how they find them after their parents die of AIDS and bring them here to safety and send them to school. I wonder who these people are and I think about my own children and who will care for them if I die and I am grateful for the love of strangers.  The rain is so hard that I can barely hear what this old lady is telling me as she stretches her head towards my ear and I smell her hair and hear her saying there is someone I want you to meet.

We go upstairs and there is this beautiful boy rising from a desk to greet us and his hands come together and then apart and then together again like silent clapping before he shakes my hand. He has dark skin and a Roman nose and pale palms and a smile that is uncertain at first but then grows like a candle. The old lady is telling him that I am an important man and I want to stop her and say I am not important and I am not even clever but I am just come from a land of accidental plenty. We think he is 15 or maybe 16 the old lady says but he came with no papers and then we found his sister and she is with us too but it was too late and she has AIDS. Her voice fades slightly and for a moment the boy looks at his feet.  And then he talks to me and I am surprised at his English, so good that he can even make jokes and soon we are laughing and for the first time in this trip I feel released from Babel, able to talk without care or thought.  He is smart I can see that but he stands so close that I step back instinctively and then blushing and then angry at myself when I see confusion flash across his eyes. 

Show him your pictures the lady says to the boy and he opens the desk and there is this red exercise book of water coloured mountains and aeroplanes and a river with cows on the bank.  I point to a picture of lady drawn in charcoal.  Who is that? She looks serious and sad but she is beautiful too, her hair neatly brushed so that she looks somehow elegant and old fashioned at the same time. It’s my mother he says and he pulls out this old photograph from which he has faithfully copied her image. And then he takes my hand and it feels incongruous like he is comforting me.

I push down the urge to release his hand because I know it is only the Khmer way and this revulsion washes over me, not for the act of holding a boy’s hand, but for this man beside him who is filled with such oceans of shit and phoney love and sometimes milk but mostly just rubbish and pretence and vanity.  He leads me towards the others and though I am blushing I squeeze his hand and everyone turns and some of them laugh saying to me It looks like you’ve been adopted but without irony or malice and I think we are all slightly sick with shame or guilt or something that is bitter like bile rising to our tongues.

It is still raining and the orphanage has grown darker in the late afternoon. Children’s voices come excitedly from the kitchen where they are preparing the evening meal.  While the others drink tea I pretend to go to the toilet but slip back up the stairs to the boy’s room and I take the ten American dollars in my pocket and I place them into his red exercise book.  Downstairs again and everyone is getting ready to go and the boy finds me but he only puts his arm around my waist and does not speak.  Then all the children are saying goodbye goodbye and we are huddling again on the curb and the driver says Run Run and we all dash through the rain and the water runs down our faces and necks.

Then we are in the mini bus with the windows still streaming and we are patting our clothes and shaking our wet hair as the vehicle pulls away from the boy looking at me with his hands together like a child praying. And then his image distorts and there is the street again and the motorbikes and the fruit stalls and the sudden breath of air-conditioning and still on my hands the touch of another life and the beauty and the horror of it all like a stain seeping through me and the rain will not  stop the rain will not stop.

Respectable

For a while I had a respectable job in this tiny town in the country surrounded by the farms and expectations of an all-seeing community. I was a younger man then and there were times when the weight of that town’s gaze caused me to look disconsolately down the bitumen road that would one day lead me back to anonymity.

 

Mostly though I survived by behaving myself and being a model of middle class propriety.  Of course, there was always a faint air of disappointment about me in the town; my predecessor had been player and coach of the previous year’s local football side. Just before he left, he led them to their first premiership.  But I tried to be what I could; on Sunday afternoon I would go down to the local clubhouse and drink beer with the team after their latest game.  One day, a stocky little farmer who played fullback and was famous for his niggling ability to unsettle opponents with a quick jab to the ribs when the umpire was otherwise engaged, said to me in a voice dripping with innuendo and beer, “So what have you been doin’ today?”  For a moment I flirted with a lie but then I heard myself saying quite truthfully, “Well, I made a beautiful chocolate cake this morning but I ran out of icing sugar.” Then I looked nervously around to see where the umpires were.

 

A year passed and I managed to keep my respectability in tact and even made some friends.  I knew that this delicate detente would be sorely tested, however, when my girlfriend arrived in the New Year to live with me.  Living in sin was not a passport to social acceptance in this little town of 11 houses and a wheat bin.  I decided to tell my regional manager so that, when the complaints came in, he at least would be prepared.

 

In December, I had my chance to discuss it with him in his office.  He was a serious man with impenetrable eyes.  As I began to explain my dilemma, it suddenly struck me that I may have misjudged his willingness to be complicit in my tawdry living arrangements.  But he heard me out and then assured me that de facto relationships were recognised by law and that he was sure that my reputation in the community was such as to sustain me through this perceived lapse of judgement.

 

I stood up relieved and grateful.  I thanked him for his understanding and support.  “It was my pleasure,” he smiled and then he bent back to some papers he was signing.  I walked towards the door and then I heard him say, “There is one thing though.”

 

I turned back, trying to think of which angle of the problem I had not considered.  “Yes?” I asked.

 

My boss paused and then, looking me directly in the eyes, said, “ You will be sleeping in different rooms, I presume.”

 

 

Tryst

Early this morning I opened the front door and threw the dregs of my coffee across the front lawn.  The air was still cold; darkness seemed to be hesitating before slipping off its cloak and scuttling towards the horizon.  A full moon sat staring at me low in the sky as if it too were just waiting to say goodbye.  I watched the still-warm coffee hit the grass and a little cloud of steam drift briefly above the ground.  Then I shut the door and went inside to ready myself for the day.  When I came out about half an hour later, the night and moon had gone.  A bird twittered somewhere in the bushes near the driveway.  The moon and the night were here, it seemed to say, but you missed them.  I could still feel their breath though.  Somehow it stays with me even now, even as this tiny day passes into its autumn, the memory of our little ménage; the night, the moon and I and how we met like strangers and lovers.

To a game

I didn’t know my neighbours well so I was kind of surprised when they offered to give me a lift to the garage where my car was waiting to be picked up.  This was on a Saturday morning and they could do it after dropping their son off at his hockey game.  I climbed in the back with him, a 13 year old kid called Luke.  His dad, Neil, was already in the car and he had his ipod running through the speakers.  It was Wilco singing Heavy Metal Drummer.  They were talking about the song when I climbed in and Neil introduced us.  “Hi,” said Luke but he seemed pretty shy and a little anxious.

 

Then the door was opening and his mum, Paula, was getting in.  She smelled nice and her hair was still a bit wet from washing.  She said, “Oh, I see everyone is waiting for me, as usual.” But it wasn’t quite light-hearted and no one said anything.  Neil put the car in reverse but his wife, looking over her shoulder down both sides of the street said, “Wait, there’s something coming.” A car passed and then she said, “OK, you can go now.” And then she got some lipstick out of her bag just after she reached over and turned down the music.

 

There was silence for a while and then she said over her shoulder to Luke, “Have you got everything, Lukey?” 

 

“Yep,” he said but she went through a list of stuff anyway; shin pads, mouth guard, water. Then she said to Neil, “Why are you going this way?” There was a pause and I heard her husband say, “Because it will take longer” but he said it more like a question.  If she noticed this, his wife didn’t acknowledge it.  “It’s just that there is a quicker way,” she said.

 

“Well, this is the way we usually go, isn’t it, Luke?” Luke nodded but he didn’t say anything.  We drove on for a few minutes and then I asked, “Do you like Hockey, Luke?”  He nodded again and his mother said “He loves it, don’t you, Lukey?” but before he could answer she went on, “The coach says he has to concentrate staying forward of the ball.” She turned again to Neil.  “Do you help him out with this stuff?”

 

“Sure,” Neil answered.

 

Then Paula turned to me as if I had asked a question, “Neil objects to all this sport on Saturday.  He thinks the kids are organised enough during the week. But I think it’s good for Luke; that’s what I did every weekend with my parents.”  Then she turned back adding, “Netball.”

 

Neil said over his shoulder, “I grew up in the country and lived out of town.  No organised sports there; we just played all day and swam and stuff.”

 

“It’s just what you’re used to, I suppose,” Paula said. “Being organised never hurt me.”

“And being free never hurt me,” I heard Neil say but this went unremarked and soon we were pulling into the hockey field. There were parents and kids everywhere. Neil pulled up near the change rooms and Paula said, “Are we parking here?”

 

There was another pause and Neil said, “Why?”

 

“Nothing, it’s just not very close to the game.” But she opened the door saying, “Not to worry.  Dad always parks in funny places, doesn’t he, Lukey.” Luke climbed out and Paula said, “I love you, darling.  Have a great game.” And she kissed him on the forehead.

 

Neil called out, “See you soon, Luke.”

 

I watched Luke run across the field that was split down the middle by a big white line. I could see his coach waiting to tell him what to do.

 

 

Looking for the sound of bells

When I was 24 I went to Europe for the first time with a friend that I lived and worked with up North.  Mazz and I landed in Amsterdam; he was keen to catch up with a girl he’d met in Bali the year before. This was just before Christmas and we left the Australian summer to arrive in a city that was white with snow and 18 degrees below zero.  We’d never seen snow before and we sat in the cab from Schiphol airport hardly able to blink or take the smiles from our faces.

 

We stayed at this little place called the Schmidt Hotel but before an hour was up we were in the streets of Amsterdam bracing against a freezing breeze down streets like we’d never known before.  We picked up the snow and threw it at each other, sent postcards home saying, “There is snow everywhere.”  We were like kids.

 

That night, in our small room, we lay on our beds and drank Heineken beer.  Even now, that taste takes me straight back to that night.  A church bell rang and we leapt up looking out the window as if we could see the sound of it.  Mazz explained how the cold air made the peeling so crystal clear.  I didn’t listen; I only knew that it was beautiful. “You’ll be telling me how Rembrandt made his paint next,” I said but only gently.

 

I read the words on my green Heineken can.  “It says this beer won the Grand Prix of 1886,” I say.  “Bullshit,” Mazz says, “Where the fuck would they put the wheels?” and we laughed, not because we were drunk on beer but because we were drunk on Europe already.

 

In the morning, while Mazz still slept, I crept out into the dark streets and watched the shopkeepers setting up.  I heard the unfamiliar sound of footsteps in snow.  There was a smell of coffee and cigarettes in the air.  I pushed my white breath before me and I realised that I had never seen my breath before. I was alive and for the first time I knew it.  There were chocolates in the windows and people smiled at me politely.  They had red cheeks and tufts of blond hair that escaped from under their woollen caps.  I am alive, I thought, and I will never forget it.

 

Years later I was in Amsterdam again but by now I had seen a lot of the world. Mazz was married; I hadn’t seen him since the wedding two years before. It was summer. I found myself in a non-descript part of the city in a non-descript street and there in front of me was the Schmidt Hotel.  I was tired from walking and stopped in the street as a picture of me and Mazz flooded back.  I looked up to the window where we had stood looking for the sound of bells.  Nothing was the same as I remembered. The hotel and the street had become mundane, its shops plain, its people now solemnly bent on lives of which I was not a part.  I walked quickly away.

 

This was all a long time ago. My life is different now.  I no longer search for the joy of the exotic or stand breathless in unfamiliar weather or long for views unseen. I search for pieces of the everyday – my daughter’s hand in mine as I cross a road, my son sleeping, and the old smell of a new book. I look for the minute signs of life now, for the big spaces between events, or maybe just for signs of me. Now I no longer need to go over there to find that I am here.  You know, once not far from where I live, I saw an orange train passing silently through a yellow field of canola.