A Bird on My Shoulder (21 page)

I had always known that a relatively easy life would never give me the sense of achievement I wanted; yet while I dreamed of transformation, so often, seduced by laziness, I took the easy way out. I also knew that in order to blossom from the anxious and insecure young woman that I was into a person of greater substance and purpose, I had to do something extraordinary, something I could never imagine myself doing. The possibility of a long walk in the desert seemed like an answer to my prayers.

I did not offer any of these esoteric reasons to the team when I contacted them, of course. Instead, I spoke of my sense of adventure (limited), my fitness (exaggerated) and my willingness to undergo discomfort and hardship (also exaggerated). Striking a more pragmatic note, I suggested that as I was a working journalist, this might help garner publicity for the expedition which was relying partly on sponsorship funds to succeed.

The organisers agreed that I should join them and thus several weeks later, after some panic-induced training, I found myself with a group of strangers – including two army officers, two sergeants, a builder, a doctor and another woman – and a herd of camels in Birdsville, south-west Queensland. The aim of the expedition had changed by then; we were now going to walk
about 750 kilometres to Alice Springs and be the first people to reach the geographic centre of the Simpson Desert on foot.

•••

The walk took forty days and forty nights.

Sometimes we would walk by the light of the full moon, taking advantage of the cooler hours; at other times we would press on through the heat and walk more than thirty kilometres a day so we could reach our next water supply. For weeks we saw no roads, no buildings and no cars, and we heard no news of the outside world. While we focused on the near horizon, battling along in stinging wind storms, around the world another life continued: wars broke out, political boundaries changed, elections were held and democracies fell. Blissfully, we knew nothing; this was a true break from the daily drip of doom-laden news.

In that vast, open landscape, the wind soon destroyed all signs of our passing, and the vast and brilliant night skies mocked our insignificance. The only constant sounds during the day were the wind rattling the leaves of dried-out shrubs and our footsteps trudging over the baking ochre sand.

While it was physically punishing, I had not expected such a deep level of mental struggle. There were times when another footstep seemed an impossibility; I wanted to give up, go home, anything but continue. And yet I had made a contract with
myself that, unless I was too ill to do so, I would finish – and thereby change my perception of what else I might be able to achieve in life.

When I did reach the end I felt an enormous sense of elation. On one level I had completed an arduous physical challenge. Privately, though, I knew it was more than that. I had wrestled my own demons and found some answers to some very old questions. The experience had been so profound that I volunteered again two years later, this time to walk 900 kilometres across the Great Sandy Desert from west of Alice Springs to Broome.

Even though I left the desert when the expeditions finished, the desert never left me. My previous longing for solitude and abandoned beauty, far from being sated by the experiences, had only made me yearn for more.

At the end of the second walk I declared that I would return to the desert when I was forty and complete another trek.

•••

Sitting by the river, I let my fingers rub through the dirt, conscious that this promise would now not be fulfilled or at least not in the way that I had planned.

My life would now be a desert walk in another form.

A WIDOW'S LAMENT

Oh, fuck this bloody widow crap,

I'm as lusty as a bath of smashed apples,

Scented like dreaming days of summer,

Wild like a storming ocean

That lifts and roars, but cannot break.

Oh, sod this mad widow bullshit,

I'm not wearing black forever.

I don't need them now, these weeds,

They have decayed, melted into me,

I will never be free of this sorrow.

Oh, bugger this lonely widow tale,

I never felt more married to you,

More loved, more understood.

They don't realise, these innocents,

They don't know what it is to be split open,

Lost dreams pouring from me, unfettered.

Oh, stuff this lonely widow crap,

Can't you see I'm more alive than ever?

But today I'm not strong enough for pity,

I can only feel the unspeakable anguish

Of your absence, the unreachable

Heaven of our love.

Oh, forget this weeping widow nonsense.

To walk that lighted journey with you

Along the high road to your death, has

Been the greatest blessing of my life.

I gripped your hand tightly, and a part of me

Went with you, never to return.

23

There's a door ajar with promise but I am unable to

move. The past looms over me like a great wall.

Julian came to me in fragments of memory. I could still assemble glimpses of his face, his body, his voice; his particular way of blinking. In the mornings when I woke I sometimes could feel the heaviness of his warm, freckled hand on my shoulder, and I thought I could sometimes hear in the distance the faint but enthusiastic sound of his deep, discordant singing.

Dealing with strangers who had never met Julian was especially hard. Some people did not even react when they learned he had died but asked instead how old he was. This was immediately followed by: ‘Oh! So he was quite a lot older than you?' Walking away from these encounters I sometimes wondered if people would have been more sympathetic if it had been a
real
tragedy, if he'd been thirty-eight years old like me.

It seemed that, for many people, it was far more interesting why I might have married Julian than the fact that he had died and as the conversation wilted I stumbled for the words to explain why I had indeed loved a man so much older than me. In these moments I felt I was being punished for stepping outside convention. The slightly pursed lips spelled it out: You broke the rules. What did you expect?.

‘That's quite an age gap. Did that bother you?'

‘You're young, you can marry again.'

Naturally these comments troubled me, and made me think hard about my own motives. Was it because Julian was English that I felt so at home with him? Was it because I liked the lifestyle he offered me? Was I just odd? Or was this just who I was?

During my teenage years I began to feel different to my peers, and instead felt drawn to the wisdom of those older than me. I even dressed quite conservatively if I bothered to pay attention to the way I dressed at all. It was not a conscious choice necessarily but I liked a wide circle of friends from a variety of backgrounds. I was instinctively more comfortable with those who had lived a life, who actually knew things I thought were worth knowing.

I was very serious, far more so than perhaps I should have been, but I gradually accepted my own eccentricities and knew I would never be able to turn myself into somebody I was not.
While many of my friends headed to weekend parties across London, I was more likely to be found on a long train ride to Dorset for a weekend of walking alone and unexpected adventures, always more entranced by musty bookshops than glittering nightclubs. It was not that I was unsocial, not at all. I loved people. But I wanted to meet all kinds of people, not simply be limited to mixing with people my own age.

It was one of the reasons that life with Julian suited me so well. Within our own extended family were people from every generation, and I was happy to talk to everyone.

Now, however, with the reality and stigma of widowhood enveloping my life, I found it hard to relate to anyone closer to my age apart from Celeste who had not experienced the kind of grief that I was enduring.

I was impatient with other people's shallowness and complacency, angered that so few really understood what Julian's death had done to his family.

•••

Often there was a colossal gap between the way I sensed a person was really feeling and the way they projected their life outwards. I was easily tired around those who were not authentic because social conventions meant I had to go along with their brightly told stories, even if I did not entirely believe them.

‘No, everything is great. We're all really good, just planning the next holidays. Just busy, so busy.'

‘It would be lovely to see you, you must come over, we'll drop by, sorry we haven't been in touch, but we'll call you . . .'

‘We must get together soon.'

Sometimes I tried to convince myself that what some people said was true, even though I sensed through their awkwardness that it was not. I wanted to think the best of them and I hoped their offer or invitation would eventuate into something real. But I had no choice but to allow those who wanted to leave my life to do so.

This was not easy. While a great deal of my emotional energy was absorbed in grief and caring for the children, I had not been blind to the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts that had taken place in our network of family, friends and acquaintances.

Losing Julian was not the only loss we had to face as a family. The first and most obvious casualty was my social life with other families, many of whom quietly regrouped without us.

Thankfully, with many of my closest friends I could feel their empathy and no reassuring words were necessary – they were there for the long haul, no matter what.

•••

One day our part-time housekeeper Mandy came to help me begin to pack up Julian's clothes. She had come into our lives
around the time of his death. I cannot remember exactly when, which probably had a great deal to do with her incredibly capacity to merge into our family life as if she had always been there.

She clearly sensed the enormity of the task for me and approached it with her usual calm, practical attitude.

It was awful. We took it very slowly, sitting on the floor surrounded by mounds of clothes and plastic bags. No, yes, no, no.

One of Julian's habits, which had always amused me, had been his propensity to buy clothes in bulk. He had more than two dozen matching white t-shirts for running in, some already worn, some not, and piles of interchangeable blue shorts. His clothes took up two-thirds of our wardrobe.

Mandy clearly found this as perplexing as I had.

‘Oh my god,' she said, as another pile of identical clothes appeared.

This habit also extended to his shoe collection. While living in the UK after he and Charmian were first married, Julian had found an old-fashioned shoemaker called Crockett & Jones in Northampton who made beautiful brogue leather shoes by hand. This must have been a particularly attractive option for Julian as they could make the same shoes in different sizes for each of his feet – one in nine and a half and the other in size ten.

Tropical heat and leather are not the best companions. When Julian decided a pair had passed their prime, he would give them
away and pull out a new one. One day, early in our marriage, an enormous box containing a dozen brown and black shoes arrived, each one satisfyingly encased in a green cotton pouch with a drawstring top and printed with a proud golden crest. Many of these still sat, unworn, in the bottom of the wardrobe.

‘I can't part with them,' I told Mandy.

So back they went, with all the other treasures I could not bear to give away. Not yet.

•••

The first anniversary of Julian's death was upon us, and a few close friends gathered at the farm. The children and I wrote letters and tied them to helium balloons, watching them float away until they disappeared into the sky.

That evening during dinner with Celeste and Stephen, the candelabra above the dining table began to slowly move of its own accord.

‘Perhaps it's Julian,' I said.

‘Of course,' said Stephen, gazing up. ‘Where else would he want to be?'

That night I had a vivid dream, a visitation so real that when I woke I could not be sure whether it had actually happened or not.

Julian had appeared, striding into the living room where I was sitting alone. He looked so well, so vital.

‘You're alive?' My words came out in a thickened whisper.

‘Yes,' he said with a smile, then added, ‘and I'm living in London again.'

A tall woman, almost the same height as Julian, entered. She leaned against him possessively confronting me with a poised and silent profile.

I stopped breathing. ‘But how did this happen? I thought you had died!'

‘No,' he said wearily. ‘I just got sick of you. This way was easier than divorce.'

‘But what about the children?'

‘Yes.' He shrugged. ‘Sorry about that.'

There was a roaring in my ears, and I woke up trembling with rage.

•••

Confusion, exhaustion, resentment and self-pity permeated my days. Some of my anger was directed at Julian, even though I knew how unreasonable this was. Every Thursday night I found myself cursing him as I dragged the stinking rubbish bin down the drive towards the road. It felt like the final indignity, even though we had never quibbled about the division of any household chores. ‘It's alright for you,' I muttered aloud as the bin bounced over the gravel, ‘floating around in a fucking cloud, leaving me to do everything.'

No-one else is here. No-one is coming.

Caring for the children largely alone, my vision of life was reduced to a few tiny square metres at a time. I was engulfed by a miniature world: tiny socks and shoes, tiny beds and plates, toys everywhere. I missed Julian, especially at the end of a long day. I missed our conversations and the person I used to be. Without another adult present, I found the separation between day and night or children and adults, which had been so effortless when Julian was alive, became more difficult.