The telephone rang and interrupted my first fitful efforts at sleeping.
‘You fucking bitch,’ he said. ‘You fucking bitch.’ His voice trailed off. Time slowed down. Is this a dream, I wondered? Is this a phone call in my sleep? In a minute I’ll wake up.
‘Everyone knows what you’ve been up to. Everyone knows but me. I’m the last to know.’
I found my voice, but the words were croaky.
‘What are you talking about?’ I knew what he was talking about but I wanted to deny it even as I knew it was true. I wanted to think it did not matter. I wanted him to think it did not matter that I had betrayed him.
I had slept with someone else. Slept with, such a euphemism. Had sex with, fucked, shagged, you name it in biblical terms. That I had gone off with another man while he was away for weeks on end.
Somehow he expected me to sit at home, the good and loving girlfriend, the good and loving partner, always faithful, irrespective of how he behaved.
‘I’m coming over now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got your stuff. You can have it back. I never want to see you again.’
The dial tone buzzed in my ear. I kept the phone close. I could not believe he had rung off. Soon he would be here. I dragged on my dressing gown. Good, I thought. He’ll be here soon. I’ll settle him down. I’ll soothe him. A few gentle words.
I heard his car pull up in the carport below. I looked through the blinds. He opened the car door and flung the books and clothes that I had left behind at his house as a mark of our relationship.
When we had separated three months earlier, we agreed on an amicable split. We agreed to go our separate ways, that we would each be free now to explore new relationships.
I pulled up the blinds and swung open the window. ‘Come up,’ I said. ‘Don’t just throw stuff. Come up and talk.’ He continued to throw more books, my old grey cardigan, my CD case, my sunglasses onto the pile. I kept my voice low. I did not want to wake the neighbours.
‘Please talk,’ I said again to the silent man whose arm moved up and down like a piston as he threw the last of my shoes onto the pile. He slammed his car door shut. He had not cut the engine. He reversed without looking up to see me.
That was how we left it. The end of the scene. The death of a relationship. Silence is the best revenge.
I have no trouble with the word 'hate' these days. It rolls off my tongue easily. I can tell someone that I hate someone else; even that I hate them as long as I also feel a fondness, a love for the one to whom I might direct the word hate, otherwise I can only talk about such hateful feelings behind someone’s back.
I can try to qualify my comments, when I am angry with my husband for instance, to say to him, I really hate it when you do that, not, I hate you when you do that, but the truth is, in that moment, I hate him.
I know well enough that it is a sign of confidence in her mother’s love when a child is able to say to her mother directly, 'I hate you'. To know that her mother will tolerate such an expression and not retaliate or go under into shock and horror, or be destroyed by it because this mother recognises that her child says these words out of hurt or disappointment in the mother whom the child also loves.
It is not unusual to hear such utterances from three and four year olds, but as we get older it seems we learn to modify such outbursts. We learn, if we have gone to the right behavioural schools, to criticise the behaviour, not the person.
‘It’s not 'you' I hate, it's what you do...when you get drunk, when you refuse to tidy your room, when you don’t pull your weight, when you carry on like that, when you're slack, when you give up on yourself, when you stop caring about others, about me.’ It's okay to hate these things, these behaviours, but to hate the person who does these things becomes a no-no.
It is important to distinguish the person from the behaviour and yet, the satisfaction that comes from really being able to say to someone or of someone, ‘I hate you’ knows no bounds. It gives great satisfaction, and yet almost immediately there is a wish to qualify it. I hate you when...
We throw around the word ‘love’ with such ease, but the word 'hate' we are wary of, for good reasons – all those wars, all that bloodshed.
Hatred is not something to spread, but it can be spread in subtle and secret ways and often even by people who purport to love and to care.
When I was at the Writer’s House, Peter Bishop urged me to write into my rage. Write into your rage he said, vomit onto the page.
Peter Bishop also says to write out of ‘doubts and loves’. Where do we put the hate? I wondered. Is not hate on a continuum with the love? The ones we love are the ones we hate, beginning with our parents.
When I first read William Gaddis’s words quote in the Sunday Age in an article by Don Watson I knew that these words were important for me.
‘The best writing worth reading comes like suicide from outrage or revenge.’
It is not the first time I have been in a creative hole as deep as this. It is not the first time that I have sat alone at my writing desk wishing for something to come to me, some thread, some thought, some feeling or image that I might follow, but it is no less painful. I ache all over with the refusal. My mind will not give it up. My mind will not let the words flow, will not let me arrive at some point where I can think, ah ha I have it. I know now what I am writing about. I know now what this book is about. I can proceed. I start again and again, so many false starts so many attempts to move beyond this desperate feeling of not knowing what I am doing.
And the audience whom I tried to send away only five minutes ago is back again, my parents and siblings in the front row alongside my conscience. They say to me again, in a chorus, what are you on about? We don’t want to know this. Tell us a story instead and make it good. Make it interesting.
But if I start to tell a story, I fear I will be in trouble with someone. That someone will tap me on the shoulder and say ‘What gives you the right?'
Showing posts with label Varuna writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Varuna writing. Show all posts
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Leaving Home
We think of leaving home as a single event, the one day in our life when we finally take the world onto our shoulders and close the door on home. In the future, trips back home will be visits only and we will enter the place of our birth, our parental homes as guests only. We might still hold a key to the door, we might have visitors’ rights but that is all they are: the rights of a visitor not of an inhabitant.
When I think of leaving home I think of the day towards the end of the summer holidays after my first year at university when I decided along with my younger sister and a school friend to move out of home and share a house together. I cashed in my Commonwealth scholarship for a cadetship that bound me for two years to the Health department at the completion of my degree. My sister and her friend from school were both on studentships and bound to the Education department to work as teachers for two years at the completion of their degrees. When we pooled our resources we had enough money to pay the rent, to pay for other expenses and transport. We would survive.
‘You must leave during the daytime,’ my mother said. ‘When your father is not around.’
I had seen it before, my father’s rage when my older brothers left home, when my older sister left home, that they should dare to take their beds with them.
‘It’s my furniture,’ my father said. ‘It belongs in this house.'
The ten kilometers or so that spanned our two homes, the old and the new, may not seem such a distance to others who have left home by traveling overseas or through interstate travel, but for me it marked a void, the void between myself and my father. We did not say goodbye to him as we stood on the nature strip watching the small rental truck we had hired to carry our few possessions, including our two single beds, away.
We sneaked off in the middle of the day while he was away at work. He could not have suspected that his second and third daughters had finally decided to take themselves away. We were no longer within our father’s grip. He could no longer threaten or hurt us anymore.
Perhaps it is this failure to say goodbye that has left me with the odd feeling of never leaving home. Besides it was not the first time we had taken off without my father’s knowledge. There had been other flights from home, both day and night. The times when we went with our mother to stay with relatives, aunts and uncles for only for a few days, when our father was lost on a bender and dangerous. And there were times when we stayed with our older now married brother who had children of his own and a wife who resented our presence. What else could we do? We were homeless.
Then there was the time when my oldest brother had issued an edict to my mother that we younger children should be removed from her care so that she and my father could 'sort things out'. It is easy to say that the arrangement my brother made to have us stay with a Dutch foster family in Camberwell broke down, as if it all happened in the blink of an eye. It did not. It took time, three months of mutual misunderstandings.
I was turning sixteen at the time. We moved from foster care with the Dutch family to live with the nuns and our fellow students at Boarding school. We moved from day scholars into boarders overnight and like other boarders in convent schools we made many trips to and from home.
Why do I lose momentum here? What happens to my mind such that I cannot keep to one train of thought, such that I find myself distracted, wanting to give up, wanting to move elsewhere, anywhere but here at this keyboard at the computer struggling to put down words on the page that might tell a story of leaving home.
Now I have left home on the page and I do not know where to go. Lynn Freed says that when you are writing you must not think. You must listen. Listen. I do not listen so much as I see. I trawl my mind for images for memories, pictures come to me and people occupy these pictures and they say things to one another but I can scarcely hear them. Their words fade in much the way the Dutch language of my mother tongue has faded from my memory.
Listen. The wind is howling through the trees. It is hot and a storm is brewing. You can see a hint of it in the build up of clouds, white and clean, with crisp outlines. They hang low to the ground, so low that from the second storey of this Writer’s House I can almost reach out to touch them. Were I to touch them would they burst?
Listen. There are birds chortling in the distance and insects chittering. The wind has dropped and for a moment I can believe the storm has passed. It is like this writing, these storms of emotion that well up in me as I type, but as Lynn Freed argues, emotions as honest and real as they may be, do not translate into truth on the page.
I am caught between two voices, as much as I am caught between two activities, as much as I am caught between two worlds. One voice tells me to go into a scene with all the sensuous detail, write from your eye, paint a picture, get into the picture, get into the life of that picture now in the here and now. The other voice says, no, write as a reflection about a past moment. Do not look into your mind, but listen.
Can I hear my father calling to me? I cannot remember the sound of his voice, only as an idea, not an experience. What am I doing back here again, always back here. My father/myself. Why?
It is not fair. I must leave home. I must find another home, another place where he does not feature. Is it his voice in my head that tells me over and over again that I am worthless? Stop this now. Write. Write into the pain. Write into the memories. Write into the rage.
Forget your audience. Forget that anyone is ever going to read this stuff. Forget that you are writing for anyone but yourself. If you want to spend page after page pondering the nature of your relationship with you father then do it. If you want to write in the present tense about memories that feel as alive today as they did then, do it. If you want to write about the past, about your mother, about your family, about anyone or anything, then do it.
Stop this voice in your head that is forever telling you off, that is forever comparing you to the person nearby who is bound to be a better writer or a worse one. It matters not. Forget the others, forget them all, these brothers and sisters in your head who are forever demonstrating to you simply by their presence that you are no good relative to them; that your claims for space are invalid; that you have no right to be heard; to speak; to say the things you say.
If you want your fingers to fly across the keyboard in this manic and mad way, writing words again and again that have no reader in their sights; that in no way consider the needs of your reader, then do it.
You are free. You are like a bird. Fly. You have left home. You can write. Stop telling yourself what to do, what not to do. Stop looking for others to do the same. Stop this chorus of demands.
Exhaust yourself, throw yourself into the well of memory and imagination and find some point of entry from where you can get some comfort.
This writing is no comfort; fingers clicking on the keyboard are no comfort. You must have something to say. Say it.
Peter Bishop from Varuna says to write out of ‘doubts and loves’. Where do we put the hate? Is not hate on a continuum with the love? The ones we love are the ones we hate, beginning with our parents.
When I first read William Gaddis’s words quote in the Sunday Age in an article by Don Watson I knew that these words were important for me.
‘The best writing worth reading comes like suicide from outrage or revenge.’
It is not the first time I have been in a creative hole as deep as this. It is not the first time that I have sat alone at my writing desk wishing for something to come to me, some thread, some thought, some feeling or image that I might follow, but it is no less painful.
I ache all over with the refusal. My mind will not give it up. My mind will not let the words flow, will not let me arrive at some point where I can think, ah ha I have it. I know now what I am writing about. I know now what this book is about. I can proceed.
I start again and again, so many false starts so many attempts to move beyond this desperate feeling of not knowing what I am doing.
And the audience whom I tried to send away only five minutes ago is back again, my parents and siblings in the front row alongside my conscience. They say to me again, in a chorus, what are you on about? We don’t want to know this. Tell us a story instead and make it good. Make it interesting.
But if I start to tell a story, I am sure I will be in trouble with someone. That someone will tap me on the shoulder and say ‘what gives you the right?’
Enough, already we know this. Any writer worth her salt knows this, so why go on and on.
When I think of leaving home I think of the day towards the end of the summer holidays after my first year at university when I decided along with my younger sister and a school friend to move out of home and share a house together. I cashed in my Commonwealth scholarship for a cadetship that bound me for two years to the Health department at the completion of my degree. My sister and her friend from school were both on studentships and bound to the Education department to work as teachers for two years at the completion of their degrees. When we pooled our resources we had enough money to pay the rent, to pay for other expenses and transport. We would survive.
‘You must leave during the daytime,’ my mother said. ‘When your father is not around.’
I had seen it before, my father’s rage when my older brothers left home, when my older sister left home, that they should dare to take their beds with them.
‘It’s my furniture,’ my father said. ‘It belongs in this house.'
The ten kilometers or so that spanned our two homes, the old and the new, may not seem such a distance to others who have left home by traveling overseas or through interstate travel, but for me it marked a void, the void between myself and my father. We did not say goodbye to him as we stood on the nature strip watching the small rental truck we had hired to carry our few possessions, including our two single beds, away.
We sneaked off in the middle of the day while he was away at work. He could not have suspected that his second and third daughters had finally decided to take themselves away. We were no longer within our father’s grip. He could no longer threaten or hurt us anymore.
Perhaps it is this failure to say goodbye that has left me with the odd feeling of never leaving home. Besides it was not the first time we had taken off without my father’s knowledge. There had been other flights from home, both day and night. The times when we went with our mother to stay with relatives, aunts and uncles for only for a few days, when our father was lost on a bender and dangerous. And there were times when we stayed with our older now married brother who had children of his own and a wife who resented our presence. What else could we do? We were homeless.
Then there was the time when my oldest brother had issued an edict to my mother that we younger children should be removed from her care so that she and my father could 'sort things out'. It is easy to say that the arrangement my brother made to have us stay with a Dutch foster family in Camberwell broke down, as if it all happened in the blink of an eye. It did not. It took time, three months of mutual misunderstandings.
I was turning sixteen at the time. We moved from foster care with the Dutch family to live with the nuns and our fellow students at Boarding school. We moved from day scholars into boarders overnight and like other boarders in convent schools we made many trips to and from home.
Why do I lose momentum here? What happens to my mind such that I cannot keep to one train of thought, such that I find myself distracted, wanting to give up, wanting to move elsewhere, anywhere but here at this keyboard at the computer struggling to put down words on the page that might tell a story of leaving home.
Now I have left home on the page and I do not know where to go. Lynn Freed says that when you are writing you must not think. You must listen. Listen. I do not listen so much as I see. I trawl my mind for images for memories, pictures come to me and people occupy these pictures and they say things to one another but I can scarcely hear them. Their words fade in much the way the Dutch language of my mother tongue has faded from my memory.
Listen. The wind is howling through the trees. It is hot and a storm is brewing. You can see a hint of it in the build up of clouds, white and clean, with crisp outlines. They hang low to the ground, so low that from the second storey of this Writer’s House I can almost reach out to touch them. Were I to touch them would they burst?
Listen. There are birds chortling in the distance and insects chittering. The wind has dropped and for a moment I can believe the storm has passed. It is like this writing, these storms of emotion that well up in me as I type, but as Lynn Freed argues, emotions as honest and real as they may be, do not translate into truth on the page.
I am caught between two voices, as much as I am caught between two activities, as much as I am caught between two worlds. One voice tells me to go into a scene with all the sensuous detail, write from your eye, paint a picture, get into the picture, get into the life of that picture now in the here and now. The other voice says, no, write as a reflection about a past moment. Do not look into your mind, but listen.
Can I hear my father calling to me? I cannot remember the sound of his voice, only as an idea, not an experience. What am I doing back here again, always back here. My father/myself. Why?
It is not fair. I must leave home. I must find another home, another place where he does not feature. Is it his voice in my head that tells me over and over again that I am worthless? Stop this now. Write. Write into the pain. Write into the memories. Write into the rage.
Forget your audience. Forget that anyone is ever going to read this stuff. Forget that you are writing for anyone but yourself. If you want to spend page after page pondering the nature of your relationship with you father then do it. If you want to write in the present tense about memories that feel as alive today as they did then, do it. If you want to write about the past, about your mother, about your family, about anyone or anything, then do it.
Stop this voice in your head that is forever telling you off, that is forever comparing you to the person nearby who is bound to be a better writer or a worse one. It matters not. Forget the others, forget them all, these brothers and sisters in your head who are forever demonstrating to you simply by their presence that you are no good relative to them; that your claims for space are invalid; that you have no right to be heard; to speak; to say the things you say.
If you want your fingers to fly across the keyboard in this manic and mad way, writing words again and again that have no reader in their sights; that in no way consider the needs of your reader, then do it.
You are free. You are like a bird. Fly. You have left home. You can write. Stop telling yourself what to do, what not to do. Stop looking for others to do the same. Stop this chorus of demands.
Exhaust yourself, throw yourself into the well of memory and imagination and find some point of entry from where you can get some comfort.
This writing is no comfort; fingers clicking on the keyboard are no comfort. You must have something to say. Say it.
Peter Bishop from Varuna says to write out of ‘doubts and loves’. Where do we put the hate? Is not hate on a continuum with the love? The ones we love are the ones we hate, beginning with our parents.
When I first read William Gaddis’s words quote in the Sunday Age in an article by Don Watson I knew that these words were important for me.
‘The best writing worth reading comes like suicide from outrage or revenge.’
It is not the first time I have been in a creative hole as deep as this. It is not the first time that I have sat alone at my writing desk wishing for something to come to me, some thread, some thought, some feeling or image that I might follow, but it is no less painful.
I ache all over with the refusal. My mind will not give it up. My mind will not let the words flow, will not let me arrive at some point where I can think, ah ha I have it. I know now what I am writing about. I know now what this book is about. I can proceed.
I start again and again, so many false starts so many attempts to move beyond this desperate feeling of not knowing what I am doing.
And the audience whom I tried to send away only five minutes ago is back again, my parents and siblings in the front row alongside my conscience. They say to me again, in a chorus, what are you on about? We don’t want to know this. Tell us a story instead and make it good. Make it interesting.
But if I start to tell a story, I am sure I will be in trouble with someone. That someone will tap me on the shoulder and say ‘what gives you the right?’
Enough, already we know this. Any writer worth her salt knows this, so why go on and on.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Travel without a ticket
During my seven days at The Writer's House, Varuna, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, I felt at times overwhelmed by a sense of my inability as a writer, by my fraudulence. The experience led me into memories.
I travel without a ticket. My concession card has long expired but I keep it tucked inside my blazer pocket in the hope that every time I flash it past the stationmaster at the gate, he will not notice and will wave me through.
For a year we travel like this, my sister and I. From Parkdale railway station beside the sea to Richmond and its factories in the middle of which, in a green oasis of garden and trees, sits our school.
It has become something of an art this business of concealment, with many different strands and possibilities. Every day as we stand on the platform waiting for the train we look to the ground for cast off tickets. There are some, which are useless. They have a pink stripe or a bold print declaration that marks them as tickets once used by someone in a special category, different from ours. We need tickets that belong to concession-eligible students and there are plenty of these around if only we are lucky.
I also have a store of these tickets in my blazer pocket. I use them at the other end of my journey. I have become adept at walking past the station man with a cool air. I toss the ticket into his open hand along side all the other people who do likewise. It is important to get into the middle of a large bunch of people. This way the station man does not have time to look too closely at out tickets, my sister and I, when they fall into his hand. Concealment comes in numbers.
Anxiety is at its height at these times. That climactic moment, as if in a movie when the ticket man looks down at your ticket, drags it out from the pile in his hand and looks at its past-its-use-by date and sees that it is a ticket for a journey that stopped four stations before in Malvern, or sees that it is a ticket that should have been used last year, and recognises that you are a fraud. He calls for you to stop within the crowd of strangers, selects you out as a non person, a person who is not worthy of such travel. It gets worse.
In my imagination my sister and I are held hostage in the station master’s office until the police arrive. I am not so young and foolish these days as to imagine that we will be sent to prison for our crime, nor am I worried about what our mother will say. She does not have money to give us to buy our tickets. She must know that we travel on imaginary ones. She never says a word about this to us and we know not to tell. She has worries enough about finding money for food.
Nor do I worry about what the nuns might say. The nuns are more tolerant of poverty than many, and since we have started to travel to school from Parkdale, since our parents have separated and the nuns know the story from my older sister - who once planned to be a nun herself but they would not take her on the grounds of insanity - since then, the nuns have been kind.
They turn a blind eye to my partial uniform, to the fact that my indoor shoes are worn out and should be replaced, to the fact that I hold my pinafore together with a safety pin. They turn a blind eye. But I wear these things badly in my mind and it is my fellow students who torment me with their stares, like the anonymous throng of people scurrying from the train. I see them in my mind’s eye when the ticket man calls to us to stop – ‘that’s not a proper ticket’ – when he grabs me by the wrist as if he imagines I will attempt a quick get away. Then it becomes the single eye of the anonymous crowd like a giant eye blinking down from the sky that stares with accusation and criticism. It is a look I have seen in my mother’s eyes when she disapproves. It is a deadly look, the look of the curse - the curser looks upon the cursed, and the cursed one is damned forever.
Can you imagine? A year of this? A year of traveling on trains twice a day, of sitting in the middle carriage, hands on our laps, our bags at our feet, sharing the bag of lollies a school friend and her sister who live in Bentleigh buy at the shop in the tunnel of the Richmond railway station on our way home.
I wonder that they do not resent us. We do not reciprocate. We do not buy lollies. We do not have money to share. We sit together in a huddle, white gloves in summer, brown in winter, demure schoolgirls chattering about the day’s events. Four of us travel together but two of us are frauds. Two of us do not have a ticket.
I watch the doors at every platform when the train comes to a halt. I watch for the men in grey – the ticket inspectors. I have a plan laid out in my mind. The ticket men will prepare to walk into our carriage. We will see them as the train pulls into the station. As soon as we see them we will stand up, make a sudden excuse to our friends, grab our school bags and leave. Then we will take ourselves to the toilets in the middle of the platform, well away from the exit gate and the stationmaster and wait for the next train, but we will not take the next train or the train after that. We know that ticket inspectors get on and off from one station to the next. It will take at least five or six more trains before the ticket inspectors have exhausted the stations and we will be able to complete our journey without detection.
After a year of traveling in this way I have an entrenched sense of guilt, the danger of being caught.
I struggled with this throughout my seven days of writing at Varuna, the writer's lament. In time I shook the monkey from my shoulder and wrote like a train, but it only came after the pain of remembering.
I travel without a ticket. My concession card has long expired but I keep it tucked inside my blazer pocket in the hope that every time I flash it past the stationmaster at the gate, he will not notice and will wave me through.
For a year we travel like this, my sister and I. From Parkdale railway station beside the sea to Richmond and its factories in the middle of which, in a green oasis of garden and trees, sits our school.
It has become something of an art this business of concealment, with many different strands and possibilities. Every day as we stand on the platform waiting for the train we look to the ground for cast off tickets. There are some, which are useless. They have a pink stripe or a bold print declaration that marks them as tickets once used by someone in a special category, different from ours. We need tickets that belong to concession-eligible students and there are plenty of these around if only we are lucky.
I also have a store of these tickets in my blazer pocket. I use them at the other end of my journey. I have become adept at walking past the station man with a cool air. I toss the ticket into his open hand along side all the other people who do likewise. It is important to get into the middle of a large bunch of people. This way the station man does not have time to look too closely at out tickets, my sister and I, when they fall into his hand. Concealment comes in numbers.
Anxiety is at its height at these times. That climactic moment, as if in a movie when the ticket man looks down at your ticket, drags it out from the pile in his hand and looks at its past-its-use-by date and sees that it is a ticket for a journey that stopped four stations before in Malvern, or sees that it is a ticket that should have been used last year, and recognises that you are a fraud. He calls for you to stop within the crowd of strangers, selects you out as a non person, a person who is not worthy of such travel. It gets worse.
In my imagination my sister and I are held hostage in the station master’s office until the police arrive. I am not so young and foolish these days as to imagine that we will be sent to prison for our crime, nor am I worried about what our mother will say. She does not have money to give us to buy our tickets. She must know that we travel on imaginary ones. She never says a word about this to us and we know not to tell. She has worries enough about finding money for food.
Nor do I worry about what the nuns might say. The nuns are more tolerant of poverty than many, and since we have started to travel to school from Parkdale, since our parents have separated and the nuns know the story from my older sister - who once planned to be a nun herself but they would not take her on the grounds of insanity - since then, the nuns have been kind.
They turn a blind eye to my partial uniform, to the fact that my indoor shoes are worn out and should be replaced, to the fact that I hold my pinafore together with a safety pin. They turn a blind eye. But I wear these things badly in my mind and it is my fellow students who torment me with their stares, like the anonymous throng of people scurrying from the train. I see them in my mind’s eye when the ticket man calls to us to stop – ‘that’s not a proper ticket’ – when he grabs me by the wrist as if he imagines I will attempt a quick get away. Then it becomes the single eye of the anonymous crowd like a giant eye blinking down from the sky that stares with accusation and criticism. It is a look I have seen in my mother’s eyes when she disapproves. It is a deadly look, the look of the curse - the curser looks upon the cursed, and the cursed one is damned forever.
Can you imagine? A year of this? A year of traveling on trains twice a day, of sitting in the middle carriage, hands on our laps, our bags at our feet, sharing the bag of lollies a school friend and her sister who live in Bentleigh buy at the shop in the tunnel of the Richmond railway station on our way home.
I wonder that they do not resent us. We do not reciprocate. We do not buy lollies. We do not have money to share. We sit together in a huddle, white gloves in summer, brown in winter, demure schoolgirls chattering about the day’s events. Four of us travel together but two of us are frauds. Two of us do not have a ticket.
I watch the doors at every platform when the train comes to a halt. I watch for the men in grey – the ticket inspectors. I have a plan laid out in my mind. The ticket men will prepare to walk into our carriage. We will see them as the train pulls into the station. As soon as we see them we will stand up, make a sudden excuse to our friends, grab our school bags and leave. Then we will take ourselves to the toilets in the middle of the platform, well away from the exit gate and the stationmaster and wait for the next train, but we will not take the next train or the train after that. We know that ticket inspectors get on and off from one station to the next. It will take at least five or six more trains before the ticket inspectors have exhausted the stations and we will be able to complete our journey without detection.
After a year of traveling in this way I have an entrenched sense of guilt, the danger of being caught.
I struggled with this throughout my seven days of writing at Varuna, the writer's lament. In time I shook the monkey from my shoulder and wrote like a train, but it only came after the pain of remembering.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
The mid point of the wheel
Tomorrow I leave for the Blue Mountains. For five days solid I hope to write. I hope to lose myself so deeply in my writing that for this short time I will transcend the usual humdrum of my daily writing and get to somewhere I have not been before, ‘wheeled and soared and swung through footless halls air’. These words come to me from a poem I met as a child , ‘High Flying’ by Walter Magee. It begins, ‘Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter silvered wings, Sunwards I’ve climbed and chased the sunless mirth of sun split clouds and done a thousand things you have not dreamed of, wheeled and soared and swung my eager craft through footless falls of air...
and while with silent trembling heart, I've trod...put out my hand and touched the face of God’. (I have muddled these words. If I were a worthy soul I would Google them for you and correct them, but it's late and I must be away early, so if you are interested, you will need to search for yourself, or accept them as they are here, a muddle from my memory.)
I have started to pack, at least in my mind. It’s an easy thing to pack for one. After all the years when the girls were little and I needed to pack for them as well. I need also to put out five shirts for Bill who is colour blind and cannot select his own shirts and ties without disastrous consequences, at least he will worry that the consequences will be disastrous. He lacks confidence in his own taste, at least in colour. For the rest he is artistic, with excellent sense of shape and texture. Sometimes he gets to work in non-matching socks.
Tomorrow morning I will get up at 4 am and leave the house fifteen minutes later. I will drive my own car and leave it in long-term car parking to the airport. The cost of a weeks parking is the equivalent of one taxi fare, so I save money this way. Although I have discussed the matter of my getting to the airport with various members of my family and all express the wish to drive me to the airport, it seems to me, it’s too ridiculous a time, Monday morning at 4.15 am to inflict on any of them. Therefore I should be the only one inconvenienced by this trip – I should drive myself there and back seven days later.
I am a nervous traveler. Whenever I rehearse the experience in my mind I panic a little. I can see myself getting lost, or misreading signs and missing my plane or in this instance my train, first from Sydney airport where I will arrive at 7.00am during peak hour and then on to Central station. From Central station I need to make a three-hour train trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. I look forward to this leg of the journey. Three hours on a rocking train, three hours where I will still be on land but moving swiftly through space, three hours during which I can doze, read, or look out through the window at a new landscape.
I feel the need to write a brief farewell blog, a farewell for one week only. A bit like the dinner my husband wants to share tonight to mark my absence for a week. Not too special a dinner – I’m not going away for long – but to mark the occasion nevertheless.
We mark absences and returns in our household with fervour. No one can sneak away unnoticed, not like one of my brothers did on his eighteenth birthday many years ago, or Maggie May’s sister. She writes about this in a blog that eats at you with its poignancy. No, we mark our farewells and hellos.
It’s worse when I go because I am the ‘mother’, and mothers, not always but perhaps more often than not, are the mid point of the wheel around which all the spokes circle.
I wear the weight of my responsibility seriously and I am troubled at this end by my planned absence.
Someone needs to worry incessantly about the dog, as there will be a man here to help install a new gate and the gate will inevitably be left ajar from time to time. Someone will need to keep the dog in mind for the times when the gate man is here. The under pinners are also coming on Monday to help us to rectify the enormous cracks that have erupted in the front walls of our house.
They will work outside but one day at least my husband will need to take time off work to watch as they hoist the house up on jacks before they pour concrete into the huge holes they will have dug beneath the perimeter of the house to force it back in place. Hopefully this will help to rejoin the cracks.
I can put five shirts and ties for my colour blind husband in advance, one for each working day of the week I am away. I can make sure there is enough milk in the fridge to last the week and enough toilet paper. For the rest, my children, the ones living at home are old enough by far to look after themselves, as is my husband. Still I worry about them.
I worry about all the little things that they can take for granted, though taking people for granted is a dangerous pastime and one none of us should ever indulge in for too long, myself included. When we take others for granted, as Art Durkee has written elsewhere in relation to the business of expectation, we will inevitably trip up, not to mention the pain we cause the other person who is taken for granted.
So my absence shall be a good thing, painful for those at home to some extent only. The days will pass quickly enough and apart from my youngest who needs me more for transport and a general holding in mind function, the others will do just fine. And so will I.
and while with silent trembling heart, I've trod...put out my hand and touched the face of God’. (I have muddled these words. If I were a worthy soul I would Google them for you and correct them, but it's late and I must be away early, so if you are interested, you will need to search for yourself, or accept them as they are here, a muddle from my memory.)
I have started to pack, at least in my mind. It’s an easy thing to pack for one. After all the years when the girls were little and I needed to pack for them as well. I need also to put out five shirts for Bill who is colour blind and cannot select his own shirts and ties without disastrous consequences, at least he will worry that the consequences will be disastrous. He lacks confidence in his own taste, at least in colour. For the rest he is artistic, with excellent sense of shape and texture. Sometimes he gets to work in non-matching socks.
Tomorrow morning I will get up at 4 am and leave the house fifteen minutes later. I will drive my own car and leave it in long-term car parking to the airport. The cost of a weeks parking is the equivalent of one taxi fare, so I save money this way. Although I have discussed the matter of my getting to the airport with various members of my family and all express the wish to drive me to the airport, it seems to me, it’s too ridiculous a time, Monday morning at 4.15 am to inflict on any of them. Therefore I should be the only one inconvenienced by this trip – I should drive myself there and back seven days later.
I am a nervous traveler. Whenever I rehearse the experience in my mind I panic a little. I can see myself getting lost, or misreading signs and missing my plane or in this instance my train, first from Sydney airport where I will arrive at 7.00am during peak hour and then on to Central station. From Central station I need to make a three-hour train trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. I look forward to this leg of the journey. Three hours on a rocking train, three hours where I will still be on land but moving swiftly through space, three hours during which I can doze, read, or look out through the window at a new landscape.
I feel the need to write a brief farewell blog, a farewell for one week only. A bit like the dinner my husband wants to share tonight to mark my absence for a week. Not too special a dinner – I’m not going away for long – but to mark the occasion nevertheless.
We mark absences and returns in our household with fervour. No one can sneak away unnoticed, not like one of my brothers did on his eighteenth birthday many years ago, or Maggie May’s sister. She writes about this in a blog that eats at you with its poignancy. No, we mark our farewells and hellos.
It’s worse when I go because I am the ‘mother’, and mothers, not always but perhaps more often than not, are the mid point of the wheel around which all the spokes circle.
I wear the weight of my responsibility seriously and I am troubled at this end by my planned absence.
Someone needs to worry incessantly about the dog, as there will be a man here to help install a new gate and the gate will inevitably be left ajar from time to time. Someone will need to keep the dog in mind for the times when the gate man is here. The under pinners are also coming on Monday to help us to rectify the enormous cracks that have erupted in the front walls of our house.
They will work outside but one day at least my husband will need to take time off work to watch as they hoist the house up on jacks before they pour concrete into the huge holes they will have dug beneath the perimeter of the house to force it back in place. Hopefully this will help to rejoin the cracks.
I can put five shirts and ties for my colour blind husband in advance, one for each working day of the week I am away. I can make sure there is enough milk in the fridge to last the week and enough toilet paper. For the rest, my children, the ones living at home are old enough by far to look after themselves, as is my husband. Still I worry about them.
I worry about all the little things that they can take for granted, though taking people for granted is a dangerous pastime and one none of us should ever indulge in for too long, myself included. When we take others for granted, as Art Durkee has written elsewhere in relation to the business of expectation, we will inevitably trip up, not to mention the pain we cause the other person who is taken for granted.
So my absence shall be a good thing, painful for those at home to some extent only. The days will pass quickly enough and apart from my youngest who needs me more for transport and a general holding in mind function, the others will do just fine. And so will I.
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