Visiting Chats

It’s been a quite a long time since I last visited her. Too bloody long, actually.

When I blink and think of her, she is frozen in place at high shutter speed, a tiny firecracker of a woman who would stride in to Camp Hill Primary School, clasping my little hand, and demand to read to my class (to the bemusement of my Prep teacher, who very wisely allowed this elderly dynamo to entrance our class for half an hour).

Now, as I struggle with the spring on the low gate, it feels like someone else's life. Other children’s sun-faded drawings are stuck to the sunroom glass. The pencil scratch marking my height has long ago rubbed off the front yard lamp post.

My mother is by my side, pleaded along for the visit, just in case. In case of what? If I'm honest, I've asked to her to come with me in case the woman I am visiting has finally grown old.

I push the black plastic button on the wall and a startling string of clangs bursts from inside the house. I’d forgotten the assault of that doorbell.

“Darling girl!” A familiar silhouette, dwarfed by the doorway. Heather Chatfield, or Chats, as I quickly dubbed her as a 6 year old.

She was my mother’s English lecturer, and my childhood provider of endless Tim-Tams and endless aggressive enthusiasm. She is now seventy-eight. Her faded blonde hair is arranged in vague curls around her head, and her open mouth reveals worn down bottom teeth.

“It’s our girl! And mother!” trills her deep theatrical tone. She has the voice of everyone's Aunty Beryl who smokes ten packs a day and sounds like a bloke, crossed with Bob Downe.

“Now give me a hug.” she orders, and I bend almost double to embrace her tiny figure. She holds me at arms length and purses her lips. “Let me look at you, aren’t you a beautiful girl - isn’t she beautiful, mother? Come in, now - will you have a cup of tea?” She bustles into the house and we follow. The darkness inside feels familiar; a stillness of decades in every ornament and stagnant piece of furniture.

The grandfather clock still blocks half the passage, and my Year 7 pottery sculptures (including an incredibly un-lifelike replica of an icecream sundae) still adorn the television. Chats steams through the lounge into the piano room and perches on an embroidered chair. I wonder if the piano’s Middle C still plays two notes at once. For those of you playing at home, neither of the notes are actually Middle C.

“Every time I get one of your letters,” she begins, “I go down to the Bendigo library and search for those books you tell me about. Those librarians must be saying to each other - ” she tilts her head in the air and flares her nostrils “ - ‘Who is this old trrrrollop who knows all about these new books and keeps pestering us about them?” She breaks into the throaty laugh that always threatens to turn into a cough. Sometimes it does, and I remember her emphysema. “It’s all those cigarettes I smoked, dear girl, I’ve had to give them up now.” When I was in Prep I used to hide her fags and she would chase me all over the house with a fly swat, me giggling hysterically. There were a couple of packets that she never found. I think I even flushed some of them down the bog.

Chats presses her hands into her lap. “I don’t regret a single smoke, if they told me I was going to die tomorrow I’d buy a huge pile of them -” she throws her arms wide, “ - and smoke myself to death!”

“I don’t understand all these people clinging desperrrrately to life,” she continues, “Half the ladies down at the Red Cross are grumbling about getting old and how their medicines are prolonging this and that - I think every day after seventy is a bonus, darling, and I won’t be claiming I didn’t get enough time.”

As we finish our cups of tea she presents me with a flat, green book. “This is the latest one darling, I thought you might like a copy before you go.” Chats writes English text books for primary and secondary schools, and now, as she approaches her eightieth year, she has finished another. “Because you’re off to university this year, aren’t you? Oh, you are a clever girl.” Her lips draw back in a sneer. “Not like those girls who think they’re intellectual giants because they can say -” she bursts into a whirlwind of quotation; arms sweeping, r’s rolling, ' - ‘O wearrrry night, O long and tedious night, abate thy hours! Shine comforts from the east! That I may back to Athens by daylight, from these that my poor company detest: and sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye, steal me awhile from mine own company.' " She pauses, and her expression sharpens. "And not like those people who are lazy with their language, either.”

Chats detests ‘lazy language’. God help me if I ever ended a sentence with 'with' (unless I really couldn't think of any other word to end it with). Once, aged seven, I was vigorously told off for starting two consecutive sentences with the word “Then”.

Then it’s time to leave. Then it’s hard to leave, too. But there are relatives who hold polite conversations about school to be visited, relatives who, unlike Chats, will probably not announce things like: “I’ve given up wearing a bra now, darling. I don’t see the point any more.”

We stand at the gate, and her gently trembling hands wrap around my wrists. Her blue eyes shine a bit too brightly from her pink face. “You’re a dear, clever girl, and you must visit again soon. Not very many people like me, darling, so the ones who do I drag close to me. Kicking and scrrrreaming!”

She huffs a laugh and leans closer towards me. “Don’t you let anyone stop you from doing what you want to do.” She wiggles my arms up and down. As I smile and turn to leave she pulls my face down to hers and cups her hands against my cheeks. I swallow, it feels like her eyes are pressing against my own. She square her small shoulders.

“People might try, you know. They might try to stop you doing whatever it is you want to do. Remember darling girl, if one door closes - beat it down.”

The Trojan Bra

It will not surprise you to learn that my grandfather ran a pub, and my great-grandfather ran a pub.

There's something about this publican history that passes with the amniotic fluid in our family. While I am decidedly of Librarian Stadium Status, I often think my library will be the most perfect place on earth on that day where I can pull you a mean pint as I loan you a copy of At Swim Two Birds. Or, if you're that way inclined, mix you up a Mint Julep to go with your Great Gatsby. I can pour you a delicate liqueur to go with your Poirot (sirop de cassis, ou creme de menthe?). If you're borrowing anything by Bukowski, however, I might duck after I heave the four jugs of of vinegar-masquerading-as-red-wine over the counter.

Anyway.

I'm in a very small country town, sitting in the front bar of the pub my grandfather used to run. It's a local bar, for local people, and I'm wearing way too much black (actually, only my socks are black; it's still too much). But I have special dispensation to sit here at ease, as the blood of this pub runs in my veins.

There's a lot of yellow pine paneling and the ceiling feels lower than it actually is. It's 1pm, and the regulars lean against the bar like old tree trunks, curved over their beer mats and occasional exchange of words. There's a comforting smell of stale ale and stubbed-out hot chips. A wishing-well's worth of foreign currency is blu-tacked to the wall next to the register, and beside that is a small picture of a kitten hanging onto a tree branch, captioned: "Lord, help me to hang in there!"

I recall that one of the previous barmen here refused to serve anything except beer, regardless of what you asked for.

"What can I get you?"

"White wine, please."

You get lager.

"What'll it be?"

"Scotch and coke."

You get lager.

"Another round, boys?"

"Yep. 6 tequila shots mate."

You get lager.

"And for the lady?"

"Where are the toilets, please?"

You get lager.

"What's your poison?"

"A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat."

You get thrown out.

There are limits.

Zero tolerance for Simpsons references round these here parts.

The weekly Tinna Shit raffle will come around later. These are so-named because the prize may as well be a tin of shit, that's not the point. You don't weigh up whether you really want a meat-tray or free entry to the footy-tipping, you just buy the bloody ticket. If you're stupid enough to actually ask what the prize is, the reply will come swiftly from the Greek chorus: "Tinna shit."

I'm perched on the cracked leather of a bar stool, attempting not to knock back my beer in one giant mouthful. These days, I only seem to venture into country towns for funerals, and the pub becomes vital because apparently it is a universal law that only chardonnay may be served at wakes. For me, chardonnay has a tang of corpses.

In between 'sensible' sips, for I glance upwards. I'm not sure why. Probably because ever since I got here I've had the distinct impression that the distance between my head and the ceiling is ever-so-gradually diminishing.

Directly above me, fiercely secured with yellow stick-pins, is the biggest bra I have ever seen.

It's tacked to the pine boards in four places. It's very, very beige. The cups hang low: plumped, pendulous, emptily sensuous. There's a kind of drag against the elastic that isn't the result of polyester and gravity alone. The straps have torn a little against the rusted spikes that trap them against the ceiling.

There's something in that bra. I really, really hope it's not a pair of boobs.

The barwoman places an elbow conversationally next to my own. "Punch girl?" she asks. It's not really a question. We Punch girls look alike.

"Yep," I reply. "Mick's grand-daughter." I glace upward at the bra again. The barwoman smiles and her eyes crease into fans at the edges. Her lipstick is immaculate.

"Lady left it behind upstairs in the rooms. It's a double G-cup. The fellas been throwing coins up in it."

I look up at the bra again, and can just make out half-moon edges of coins pressing against the cups. It must be pretty filled out.

The barwoman nods and her verandah of hair bobs stiffly. "Brings them in, of a weekend," she says. "Their bloody aim gets worse as the night goes on of course. Number of times I've had dollar coins bounce off my nut."

I look back at the ceiling, and the men at the bar tilt their heads to match my upward gaze. Does the elastic tear a little further against the stick-pins, or is that the sensible sips of beer talking?

The barwoman speaks again. Her voice is firm and confident. She is in charge here, proud and comfortable.

"When it comes down, all that money's going to the Children's Hospital."

Every pair of eyes is fixed upon the Trojan Bra. Necks crane and chins tilt.

The leather men at the bar lean sideways and fumble in their pockets for change.

I'm turning the world into birds

The last 1.5 hours of my library shift last approximately 5.4 hours (5.9 if Daylight Savings has ended).

10am-7pm is hardly an epic work day, but that dingy hour-and-a-half after everyone else goes home appears to turn my brain into some kind of weary meat soup, and my only intellectual ability is to create more misunderstandings than that time I went to the supermarket and only bought a packet of AA batteries and a carrot.

Typical exchange #1:

Borrower: "Can I borrow these please?"
Me: "Sure." I scan their student card, hand it back and then attempt to check out the dvds. The student card hasn't scanned.
Me, enunciating badly: "Sorry, can I have your card again?"
Borrower, looking down at their cardigan: "Sorry?"

Typical exchange #2:

Borrower: "Sorry, these are a few days overdue. Is there a fine?"
Me: "No, that's fine."
Borrower, frowning: "What's the fine?"
Me: "No, it's fine, no fine."
Borrower: "Can I pay it here?"

etc. I'm tired.

At 6:55pm I wander around the library using my best Mum-voice to break through to the iPod-deaf students in the Science Fiction collection, and the stellar examples of young love that lie entertwined and lust-deaf in the bean bag room.

"THE LIBRARY IS CLOSING IN FIVE MINUTES!"

The iPod kids nod vaguely at me and re-prop their George R. R. Martins back against the door. The young lovers spring apart like I'm their dad and I've just walked in on a particularly practical homework session.

I turn off the music (I've recently discovered that playing the Labyrinth soundtrack just before closing is a good way to get rid of everyone, for some reason), click the bolts across the doors and turn off the lights. There's a muffled shriek and some mad rustling from the other room as someone who has fallen asleep both on and under a bean bag realises they're about to be locked in. They shuffle to the exit and I let them out.

The fluorescent tubes flicker out and I stand alone for a few minutes. Have you ever hung out in a closed library? It's really nice. Warm and dark and booky. Given that I start work again at 8:30am tomorrow, sometimes I consider just making myself a nest of bean bags and sleeping over. Pretend I'm Lynda Day sleeping at the Junior Gazette headquarters. But even without the frizzy perm, it might scare the cleaners to find a bleary-eyed, flannel-pyjamaed librarian where there should really only be empty bean bags and the occasional mouse.

So I wander through the deserted Union House, with its permanent aroma of sushi and feet, across campus to my bus stop. I put on my headphones, partly to listen to music but mostly as a kind of hipster head-band to keep my hair out of my face.

In the peripherest of my peripheral vision, I see two sparrows flitting confidently along the ground towards me. I like a small brown bird as much as the next librarian, but I don’t often, well, hang out with them. I turn my head as slowly as I can so as not to scare them and discover that my new feathered friends are in fact scrunched-up-brown-paper-friends, probably originating from Baker’s Delight, that have blown along the steps towards me.

I’m vaguely disappointed at this dissolution of my prospectively Hitchcockian moment. But only briefly because at that point my bus turns up. One minute early! I wonder why everyone else looks so bloody grumpy about this, but after a few travelers ask the driver “Are you the 6:42?” I realise that this bus is not in fact 1 minute early but 29 minutes late.

The bus skittles towards Clifton Hill and past the tennis courts. I’ve let shuffle choose the tunes and it’s chosen Dolly Parton. While ‘9 to 5’ isn’t entirely accurate for my day, I’m the first to admit that ‘10 to 7’ doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais ménage à trois. (I may have done 1^st year uni statistics, but I only did French to year 10.) And at least it's not 'His Eye is on the Sparrow'.

I gaze into the middle distance as we pull up at Clifton Hill station. My gaze scans lazily along the bottom of the tennis court fence.

At the base of it I see a pair of seagulls. They are waltzing.

Their white bodies shuffle back and forth in perfect three-quarter time, like little pale boats cresting the same wave.

I blink, and lean forward in my seat. The feathered flamencos gradually resolve, and I realise the mesh that covers the fence all except the bottom 30cm is obscuring the very human, tennis-playing legs that are connected to the seagulls that are, in fact, a pair white sneakers. As the player dances back and forth, my eyes still catch a bird-like echo in his feet.

So at this point I'm seriously considering either taking up twitching or getting my contact lens prescription checked.

As the bus flings itself up along towards Alphington, I let shuffle take over again and am pleasantly rewarded by a corny rendition of 'Two Hearts Swing in Three-Quarter Time' by Michael Feinstein.

The bus lurches to a halt outside a shop whose signage simply proclaims "TOOLS!" and I try not to take it personally.

I lean my head against the bus window. An enormous raven whizzes right past my head and I instinctively jerk away from the glass in shock.

"Fuck me dead!" I exclaim under my breath. At least, I think it's under my breath but the looks from my fellow passengers suggest it is more 'under my breath while I have headphones on' than 'under my breath when I can hear the volume of my own voice'.

I peer out the window down the road, trying to catch the flight-path of this over-sized cousin of the writing desk.

I can't see any birds, but there is a cyclist waiting up at the red light ahead. His head is at about the height of my bus window, and he's wearing a large, black, aerodynamic helmet. It doesn't look much like a writing desk, but I think I've located my giant Quoth.*

I'm turning the world into birds. What am I going to ornithologically Rorschach next? Does Rorschach** even work as a verb?

My bus purrs on towards Ivanhoe, and the evening light clicks over to that syrupy golden haze that singles out each tree and tells every leaf it's a miracle. As the bus reaches the top of a hill, a large tree rears into view. It's been pruned vigorously to allow the power lines to run through the middle.

Large leafy limbs curve up on either side, straddling the electric tightropes. The evening gilt fades in an instant and the tree arcs in flightless silhouette. I briefly hold my breath at this clipped delusion. The bus drives on.

My iPod shuffles and the first notes of The Leisure Society's 'Love's Enormous Wings' curl around my ears.

__________________________________________________________

* Apologies to Terry Pratchett.

** Autocorrect suggested 'cornstarch' in place of Rorschach. I expect the next gelatinous mass I see will look like a pigeon.

Not a rooster

It’s 5am. I get up early, but the small Tim Brooke-Taylor impersonater in my life gets up earlier. This morning, his blond locks hang over me in a similar fashion to my hangover. It’s draped gently over my brow, not a very bad hangover, more like having your gumline carefully stroked with a chisel made out of Wil Anderson.

“I want some Rice Bubbles,” says mini-T.

“I just need to have a cup of tea, and then I’ll get you some Rice Bubbles, okay?” I say. It’s safe to say at this point, I’m lying. I just need to have a cup of tea, 2 Codral Cold and Flu tablets (Original Formula), Vegemite toast, maybe four pieces, 1.5 litres of soda water, a text from my mother asking if I’ve sent my grandmother a birthday card, a funny ache in my leg that may or may not turn out to be middle-to-upper-calf cancer, a Lego brick embedded in the arch of my foot, another cup of tea, a scribbled note to myself from last night that reads “if you stand on the table you can touch the ceiling!!!”, and a small child patting my face with his tiny soft hand.

I turn my head towards him and he grins. Little shark teeth. Then his expression changes, he looks amused but somehow admonishing.

“You’re not a rooster,” he says.

My eyes dart about briefly, but the lounge room appears to be in its usual state: ie. mainly held together by fossilised Rice Bubbles and granola-type clumps of hair and cous-cous.

“Sorry?” I say.

He turns his small face up to mine. It’s still lightly flushed with sleep, and I brush his blond curls out of his eyes. He reaches out a hand and cups my cheek. It’s such an adult gesture, I almost blush.

He smiles and shakes his head. “You’re not a rooster.”

Kids say the darndest etc and out of the mouths of etc and never look a gift horse in the etc unless you fancy an equine-spit facial. But having a two-year-old cradle your face in his hands and gently inform you, apropos of nothing, that you do not belong to gallus domesticus, is unnerving.

I assume it’s from book he’s read, or a daycare song, or something. We don’t take it any further. I go get the Rice Bubbles, and douse my hangover.

A few weeks later, we get home from daycare one evening and embark on the dinner/bath/tantrum/fine/whatever/I don’t give a shit/no bath then/straight into pjs routine. We curl up on the couch and he picks out every single book on the shelf that features a digger. The heavy-machinery epic tale is prepared. He opens the first book, and as I draw breath, he turns his little face up to mine and rolls his eyes. He looks amused.

“You’re not a rooster,” he says. He turns back to the book. “It’s the yellow digger!”

At this point, I need more information.

“Hey, buddy,” I say, then pause. How to ask a 2 year old to explain this? “I’m not a rooster?” I ask.

“Nah,” he says. “You’re not a rooster.”
I struggle to form my queries. “Why am I not a rooster?” I ask. He looks confused. I try again. “I’m not a rooster?” He confirms this, and pats my hand consolingly. “What am I?” I ask.

“It’s the yellow digger!” he says, and points at the book.

I try again. “I’m not a rooster – is that from a book too?”

“Yeah,” he says. The problem is, he says ‘yeah’ to pretty much everything. “Are you just saying yeah because you don’t understand the question?” I say.

“Yeah!” he says.

“Is it from a song?” I ask.

“Yeah!” he says.

“How does the song go?” I say.

“Goes,” he says.

Once he goes to bed, I Google the phrase ‘you’re not a rooster’, hoping it’s a song from some show featuring a genital-free chap in an orange lycra jumpsuit whose name I would know if I ever turned on the tv. The top twenty Google results instruct me in rooster management. Which would be very helpful, but I’ve already been informed that I am not, in fact, a rooster.

A few days later, I bring up the subject myself. “Hey Luka,” I say.

“Hey Ma,” he answers.

“I’m not a rooster, am I,” I say.

“Nah,” he flashes his little sharky teeth. “You’re not a rooster.”

“Are you a rooster?” I ask.

“Nah. I’m a boy,” he says proudly.

“What am I?” I try.

“You a mother,” he says.

“Yeah, I am,” I say. I reach out and take his little hand. He closes his hand over mine. He’s two years old, and even now his grasp can barely encompass two of my fingers.

“You’re Ma,” he adds.

“That’s right,” I say. “I’m your Ma.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m gonna get my digger truck.”

“Okay,” I say.

He jumps off the couch and trots to the toy box. He turns back to me, grins, and the shine in his eyes just floors me. “You’re not a rooster,” he says lovingly.

“No, honey,” I say. “I’m not a rooster.”

Late that night, when everyone else is in bed, I think about what he’s told me. I’m a mother. I made a boy that I learned to love. I’m almost certainly not a rooster. But at only two years old, how does he know what I am, and what I’m not? And why does he tell me about it with such joy in his voice?

My Day on a Plate

Every weekend in The Age Sunday Life magazine, I read the ‘My Day on a Plate’ section. I read it first, and I make self-conscious scoffing noises every week. Apparently, every human being on the planet follows this daily routine:

1. We start the day with lemon juice in hot water. (I look forward to future columns about our dentist bills)
2. We adore untoasted muesli with natural yoghurt and ($8 a punnet) blueberries. Go you antioxidants go
3. Occasionally (we should capitalise that, really) OCCASIONALLY we indulge in a skim-milk latte mid-morning.
4. Somehow we have lunch prepared for us by a professional chef because it’s always lightly seared tuna steak with quinoa, raw grated beetroot and and light dusting of fear. Dressing on the side.
5. Whereas most people I know have four dim sims from downstairs and three chocolate coated teddy bear biscuits and fifteen tomato salsa rice crackers and some of that slice from Emma’s going-away-afternoon-tea last week and a bottle of Diet Coke.
6. Sorry about that. Ignore point 5. We’re back on track for afternoon tea, where we have a cup of sencha tea and a handful of raw almonds. No more than ten almonds. Usually five or six. No more than ten. Definitely not the whole bag. Because raw almonds aren’t very nice so why would we eat the whole bag anyway? Unless we were a bit bored.
7. Right. So, at 7pm, when we were supposed to finish work at 6, we catch a train and get home by 8 and instantly prepare a perky combination of grilled chicken, more fucking quinoa, and some kind of colourful combo of vegetables (steamed) and a delightful squeeze of lemon if we’re feeling crazy. After all, it’ll be in our morning teeth-eroding drink so we may as well kick on.
8. In no way after this virtuous day will we crack open the block of Fruit ‘n’ Nut our in-laws left behind and nip down to the bottle-o for another bottle-o.

***

So I wrote the above based on what I think normal people might be like. I don’t eat like ‘My day on a plate’, but I don’t eat like the above version either. I eat like a person who has an eating disorder. And I wanted to write a version of it based on me, at my worst, though I suspect it’s at the blacker end of black.

But what the fuck. My day on a plate has just as much right to be out in the world as green tea and quinoa.

First, a disclaimer: I do eat at relatively sustaining levels at the moment. However, this was my average day back in January.

4am: I wake up early because I’m pretty hungry; I haven’t eaten for 24 hours. I set my tea to brew and take off all my clothes (including my watch, rings and glasses), go to the toilet and then weigh myself naked. I note the number, but also note that I haven’t taken a dump yet today, so I am probably 200-300 grams heavier that I would be otherwise. Having an eating disorder means you know the weight of everything, including your average shit.

6am: I inhale a litre of tea while reading. My child wakes up and demands Rice Bubbles followed by Vegemite toast. Afterwards I stare at his buttery crusts and milky cereal. I place a single piece of bread in the toaster, look at it for a bit, and then abandon it to have a shower.

7am-12pm: 1.5 litres of water. I do a lot of shelving and counter work. I try to be as active as I can in the morning, because I’m less likely to pass out at that time of day, and it stimulates my metabolism.

12pm: I’ve been at work since 8:30am and when I stand up things are starting to swirl a bit. I chuck back four Tic-Tacs to attempt to kick up my blood sugar levels while I get the pickled cucumbers out of the work fridge. Pickled cucumbers contain 15kj per 30 gram serve. A piece of bread (also 30 grams) by comparison contains 305kj. If there was an anorexic supermarket it would have entire aisles devoted to pickled cucumbers, mustard and salt. Somewhere between the laxative aisle and the toothbrush aisle.

12:30pm: I’ve finished my allotted amount of pickled cucumbers. I usually have to sit down as much as I can for the rest of the day.

1pm-5pm: 1.5 litres of water. Everything gets a bit blurry. I won’t remember if you come to see me at the library or if I see that cat that looks like the cat I sort of adopted when we lived in Carlton that you hated because he woke you up at night howling outside your window and annoyed you and I didn’t know. Oh right, sorry, you’re not my old housemate, you just want to borrow a book.

5:30pm: End of the day. I’m tired and dizzy and I have to double-check before I cross roads. I take the train home, plough up the hills toward home. At some point I lurch sideways into a fence and it’s just another bruise.

7:30pm: My child is asleep. I don’t want dinner. I never want dinner. I have four glasses of wine (because alcohol doesn’t count as calories) and I type words onto a screen until my fingers hit all the wrong places and all the songs I listen to are too meaningful.

11pm: I fall asleep on the couch, wake around 2am and drag myself to bed.

***

I’ve struggled about how to end this. Flippant, caustic, matter of fact?

Matter of fact wins.

4am: I wake up. My limbs feel like they’re filled with sand. My heart is beating like a hammer inside my chest. I have to sit up slowly, stand up even slower. I hold onto the door frame. And the whole day, the same as every single day, begins again. I feel like I’ve been alive forever.

You have to be able to handle a lot of pressure.

There’s a large, plush Winnie-the-Pooh in the tree outside my bedroom window. I close the venetian blinds and open them again. It’s still there, propped in the fork of the tree. It’s got the NQR proportions of a skill-tester prize but enlarged x 30 (which, interestingly, increases the weirdyness by a factor of 1000).

And it’s looking at me. I pretend I haven’t seen all the Chucky movies.

While I’m still standing there debating whether to A) see if its eyes follow me around the room or B) put my pants on because I’m standing half naked in full view of the communal backyard, the decision is made for me by C)elia, my elderly neighbour. She shuffles into view in her bright yellow dressing gown and I snap the venetians shut again to rectify the pants situation. When I slowly draw the blinds open again, Celia has removed the toy from the tree and is scolding it in no uncertain terms. There’s finger-pointing, and eventually a bottom-smack. (Just to be clear, Celia smacks the toy, not the other way around.)

I’ve only lived in this flat for a month but it’s already become clear that Celia is a bit of an Interesting Person. She follows my cat around the yard and brings him back up to the house if she feels he’s getting too close to the road. (He’s been an outside cat for 6 years so he’s pretty much sorted out not to go near cars by now but whatevs.) She told me I should take him outside on a lead, and I informed her that if I had the time to be walking my cat he would be a dog. Once she turned up at our front door with him in her arms:

“He’s just done a poo on my bed, but it’s okay,” she said. That wasn’t entirely what I was expecting.

I took my cat from her. Her story seemed pretty unlikely as Tolly doesn’t even have a litter-tray inside my flat, he lets you know in no uncertain terms if he needs to go outside to take a dump (to the point of running across your head, claws out, if you’re asleep at the time). You’d actually have to shut him in and ignore him for a long time. But my initial question was: “Uh, why was he on your bed?”

“Oh, he likes to come in sometimes,” she said, “and play with my cat.”

This also seemed unlikely. A territorial male ‘plays’ with another male cat, on his home turf? But I apologised uneasily for the possibly non-existant poo, and suggested that she not let him into her house any more, ‘in case of more accidents’. Mainly I suggested this because I was starting to wonder if he might come back shaved or tie-dyed after his next visit.

The next morning I go down to check the mail and am startled to find NQR-the-Pooh nestled into the front hedge. I glace around, but there’s no sign of Celia. I wonder briefly if the toy escapes on his own each night and that’s why she was scolding him. I eye Houdini-the-Pooh for a minute. He looks back at me, as if to say ‘I’m a stuffed toy, for Christ’s sake, stop ascribing human powers to me like movement and speech.’ I tell him he’s probably right, but he doesn’t reply.

Celia ups the ante for a few weeks after that. She starts to make little window displays on her lounge sill, pulling up the venetians so everyone can see. They usually involve some combination of stuffed toys, her cat, and pictures cut from the Herald Sun. One time there’s a packet of Tim Tams and a carrot involved. Cousteau-the-Pooh continues to roam the garden, and I begin to think he might be related to that garden gnome in Amelie. Sometimes a large white teddy is sat out in the sun in a doll’s pram, which is gently tied to the wrought-iron balustrade with a blue ribbon. And Celia herself, shuffles about the gardens in her yellow dressing gown.

One morning I hear a funny metallic banging noise. I’m on my way to work so I’ve already waddled back into the house three times (umbrella, pre-natal vitamins, brain). As I approach the mail boxes, I see Celia, dressing-gowned as usual, gently lifting the iron flap of each of the 24 mail boxes one at a time and letting them fall back down with a clang. I try to scuttle past but I’m well into my non-scuttling trimester and she spots me.

“You have to be able to handle a lot of pressure,” she says. I excel at this sort of small talk. Throw me a curveball like “How are you?” and I’m stumped, but mailbox xylophone plus ‘you have to be able to handle a lot of pressure’ and I’m on fire.

“Um, yeah,” I say.

That’s the last time I see Celia.

Our communal backyard sports no less than eight Hills Hoists. It’s like someone was only allowed to pick one iconic Australian symbol for the development, but they could have as many of that one thing as they wanted. When the wind blows and they all creak around at night, it’s equal parts unsettling and soothing, like someone chanting ‘Bhagavad Gita’ over and over but in a Roots Manuva voice and every now and then replacing it with the word ‘Ryvita’. So you’re quite relaxed but you keep letting out nervous giggles.

A few days after I witness Celia Suggs performing Lady of Spain on her mailbox-phone, I open the venetians (this time with pants on because I am a fast learner. Also I’m really quite pregnant and if I can’t see my legs, no one else should have to). I gaze out the window.

There is a toaster tied to one of the Hills Hoists by its cord.

It swings in the light wind, secured by a simple under-over knot at the plug end.

I stand quite still and watch the gently revolving heater of bread. I wonder if you wash toasters on the normal or delicate cycle, and if you chuck in a scoop of breadcrumbs in place of detergent. By the time I get home from work that day the toaster is gone. A week goes by before I realise that unlike the toaster, Winnie-the-Pooh hasn’t popped up for a while. And Celia’s venetians are shut, which is also strange. Usually the cat gets a sunning and there’s at least some form of vegetable-and-tabloid-based window display. I start to worry that maybe she’s keeled over indoors and is being gradually devoured by her cat. I figure that cat would have some issues by now and might not be averse to some ex-Celia if it was attractively plated up on a yellow dressing gown.

I start to sidle up to her lounge room window, realise I’m wider in profile these days, and change my gait to frontle. One of the venetian blind blades has a broken piece, and I carefully put my face to it, half-expecting to find Celia’s bloodshot eyeball peering back at me. Or Winnie-the-Pooh. Or a cat’s bloody maw.

The flat is empty. All the furniture is gone, and the carpets are striped like freshly-steam-cleaned tigers. I remember a removalist van was around a little while ago, though I never saw anyone going in and out of Celia’s front door.

I step back from the window. I wonder about the toaster, and what she meant by it. I wonder if the toaster needed to be able to handle a lot of pressure too.

A week later, a young Filipino couple move in. The woman’s belly is almost as big with baby as mine, and in January we will come out of our flats holding the same orange government folder we got at the hospital.

We will smile, she will ask “How are you?” and I won’t know what to say.

Curled and cat and calm

“I want MAAAAAAA!”

It must be 6am already. My tiny blonde alarm clock has gone off in the next room and I’ve got approximately 56 seconds to have a quick piss and then get to him before he reaches critical mass.

I execute a well-trained bladder manouvre and open his bedroom door. He’s been in that room since he was 7 months old but we still call it ‘the study’.

“Hey buddy.”

“Hey Ma. I want to wake up.”

“Okay. Should I turn on the light so we can get you out of your sleeping bag?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you ready for the bright?”

“Okay.”

I switch on the light and he is standing at the end of his cot, head bowed in a gold rush of curls against the not-very-bright bulb.

“Shall we get you ready for Rainbow, and wake up your Da?”

“Okay.”

Ten minutes later I have sloughed my child into an orange-and-red-and-pink outfit worthy of a ‘dressing in the dark’ scouting badge, and his father is standing at the door, dressed but possibly not awake.

“Bye!” my two year old yells. “See you soon! Good luck!”

The front door closes and I have just enough time for a mashup of two of the following:

Shower

Makeup

Pack my lunch

Clean my teeth

I go with options B and D because A I am vain, and B I talk to people all day and no one wants a waft of that pizza from twelve hours ago.

I slam the front door, then check that I have my keys. This is not the ideal order of proceedings, but I do have my keys, today. I trot down the hill and up the hill to the train, avoiding the fresh brown dog poo, the rehydrated grey dog poo and the poo that looks suspiciously familiar but definitely isn’t mine because I had an early night on Saturday.

I make the train with heart-pounding seconds to spare. I flop down on a seat and remove ten thousand layers of clothing. I pull out my headphones and clap them over my ears, fighting the usual battle with my hair. The early morning sunlight changes colour as music floods through my ears and I have a small moment of glory as bass guitar and a blistering female vocal assaults my joy.

Music transforms public transport. The carriage of suits sways in time to the beats in my ears, at least twenty people bob their heads as Bingethinkers blare “Can I get an answer/can I get a yes – YES”

The train plunges though Westgarth and then slows, waiting for another train to pass. In the pause, I curve my head to look out the window. Directly opposite my window is a high brown fence, tagged and faded. I recognise a few of the common Melbourne tags.

Suddenly, a pair of disembodied hands appear above the fenceline, holding a perfectly white cat. The cat is curled into a sitting position, his bottom resting comfortably in one of the hands while the other supports his chest.

The cat gazes along our train carriages, his furry triangle head swerving slowly. I am reminded of The Exorcist and relieved when his neck only stretches along 180 degrees.

I twitch my head around my own carriage, desperately looking for a pair of eyes that have seen this periscope feline trainspotter. Everyone is looking at their iPhones or books or asleep although there’s that guy who’s fondling himself but I’m happy not to meet his gaze.

My train jerks into life, and I look back to the fence. The cat is still there, curled and calm in those mysterious hands. He tilts his head and gives one front paw a cursory lick.

As the train moves off, the hands gradually lower and the cat disappears. I jerk my head around the carriage, searching for a pair of eyes that have seen, suddenly desperate – someone must have seen?

All eyes are down or closed.

The train sways off towards Clifton Hill.