The Feel of Steel (8 page)

‘I protest I never was more surprized than when I awoke and beheld the light of dawn.' (W.M. Thackeray)

Before sunrise the low scoop of land between here and Dover Heights still holds a fine moisture for which the word
mist
would be too brutal. Out to sea a tiny point of pink appears on a band of grey cloud. I glance away for a second, then back, and boom! the flushed rim has become a blinding orange spot. It frees its shoulders, its muscled arms. Up it comes into the world again.

Life goes on
.

Two men at the bus stop, Bondi Junction, politely ask me how to get to Bondi Beach. Smallish, tough men in jeans and runners, with mullets and the reddish tan of outdoor workers. Their eyes are bright and wary.

‘And how much is a ticket?' asks the older one. ‘'Bout a dollar, or . . . ?'

I advise. They back into the pub doorway to wait, trying to conceal their eagerness. Westies? Country blokes? Suddenly I think, They've been in gaol. Some low-security country joint. The 380 is packed. We stand shoulder to shoulder, gripping the vertical chrome rails. The bus charges off down Bondi Road. As it swings, the men swing with it, looking out, always looking out, with a bright, shy curiosity. When I get off at the post office, they say goodbye to me. All day I keep thinking about them, how they'll swoop down the hill and round the corner, and that spectacular beach will open out before their eyes. How grand it is, how broad
and free! Their breath will catch, their hearts kick over and expand.

Raining. Sick in bed with a cold. News from Melbourne: today our mother, demented and with her hip newly pinned, was moved out of the Epworth Hospital to a nursing home. She had to go in an ambulance on her own, because Dad had woken up with a useless left hand. He thought he'd had a stroke and phoned Marie, who rushed in and took him to the Epworth – so while he was being assessed in Emergency, Mum was being shipped out of Orthopedic. Sally calls me, sobbing and incoherent, after a three-hour visit with Mum who didn't know who she was. Meanwhile I live here. I need to tell someone all this. I haven't got ‘a person to tell'.

To Bondi for a walk before breakfast. Charcoal clouds, a harsh silver streak along the horizon. Two old women pace towards me on the promenade, talking hard.

‘Anyway,' says one, ‘she remarried.'

‘Oh!' gasps the other. ‘I thought you were going to say she died!'

The loneliness of never being free to wallow with either of my first two husbands in the memories of our
marriages, of our years together. I have to carry these memories on my own, as, presumably, does each of them. Couldn't there be a room somewhere, where ex-couples might briefly meet from time to time, just to sit at a table and laugh together, or cry – to tell the small stories and the big, to remind each other of things they learnt together – without anyone's needing to be bored or jealous? I'm a writer. I can save these things from oblivion. But I'm still alone with them – alone, alone, alone.

Right now, out to sea, a bank of silver-grey clouds is backlit and made glorious along its edges by the rising sun. A solo crow lets out its coarse cries somewhere down in the valley. A valley full of air, in which birds live their busy, purposeful lives.

Last night after tea I walked along the top of Cooper Park in the dark to buy a Tropico at the video shop. As I turned the corner into Bellevue Road I caught a breath of sharp blossom. Is it spring? Could it
possibly
be spring? This morning I sidled over the low stone fence and looked for the blossoming tree. And there it was, a pittosporum. Tears rushed into my eyes. My sister teases me for loving this tree. She finds it gloomy, even ugly.
But it's so mysterious, so withholding. If you approach it directly, head on, even push your face into its foliage, it will not give you its scent. It prefers to take you unawares, to exude an aura into which you step on your way past, hurrying, your mind on something else. Nor can you pick the blossoms and take them home. The sap is sticky, the twigs tough, the perfume (electric, lemony, head-clearingly sweet) doesn't survive the plucking. The tree exists. Its blossoming is brief. You have to be ready for the moment and accept it as it's given.

Why aren't I writing fiction? Fear. Why don't I just sit down with a clue, a thread, an incident, and follow it, as I did when I wrote
The Children's Bach
? Back then it was natural. Now I'm stiff with self-consciousness.

It's raining. A hushing sound all over the landscape. Stillness. Birds working away as usual, with their busy twitterings and harsh cries.

At half past three in the morning high heels clack sharply across the bare floor in the flat overhead. A heavy piece of crockery smashes. A woman begins to sob and rage. A man's voice, softer, barely audible, replies; but she's away, in paroxysms of anger and pain. Loudly she weeps.
She drags metal, she flings china, she utters hoarse wordless cries. My heart is racing. I'm in her body. I've been there before. I don't ever want to be there again. At last they settle, but I can't get back to sleep. Long before dawn, a single bird gives out its cry, a limp wolf-whistle. Obstinate. Forlorn. Somewhere out in that large valley of leaves and air. In the dark.

To Michael Kieran Harvey's piano recital, at the Town Hall. In the first half he alternated Rachmaninov and Messiaen. Brilliant, dry music, brilliantly and drily played. When he bowed and walked off at interval, a blonde woman in the next seat, who'd been deeply absorbed in the music, turned to me and said with a sigh, ‘All that work! And it's over in –' (consults watch) ‘– forty-five minutes!'