Still Here…..

You may be forgiven for thinking I’d left the blogosphere for good, and I wouldn’t blame you at all, but it’s been all on for young and old. So much has happened in the past month that the only way to tackle it is via the trusty bullet point. So here we go….

• We moved. It is a really nice house. Very quiet, lots of space and a bathroom each. Doesn’t that seem incredibly self-indulgent and almost like we are movie stars or something? Three bathrooms. I’m not used to such extravagance.
• I was very sad to leave my other house. I lived there for nearly six years and there were a lot of memories contained within the walls…both good and bad. You get used to things, don’t you? The way the floor in the living room creaks as you go to get a drink of water at night. The moon shining through the jacaranda tree. The noisy miner (Aussie bird) that used to look at me through my study window. I cried a bit when we left. It has been such a difficult year I just wanted it to end with a bit of peace and quiet and no more upheaval but it was not meant to be. Change is good for the soul…I keep telling myself that.
• We have opened a new shop in Glebe. It is a record shop, bar and grill and looks quite groovy. It is called The Record Crate. It will have it’s own blog and Facebook page and so on which I will let you know all about once I have it all up and running. We have high hopes for it. HIGH. It is our last chance to make some decent money in Sydney. I am crossing everything it is possible to cross and hoping like I always do.
• My Mum seems in better health although she may have to have a hysterectomy in March as a precautionary measure. It hasn’t been completely confirmed yet.
• I got my son an iPhone 5 and I have never seen anyone express such joy and gratitude over a gadget. I had no idea he would be so thrilled with it. I remain the only one in the family (the dinosaur) without a mobile phone and I am determined to keep it that way. I like the look on people’s faces when I say I don’t have a mobile. It’s as if I have just admitted to having leprosy or something.
• I am doing a lot of writing. A lot. My depression has been shocking with all these changes and the writing is really getting me through it. Hey, maybe something that is actually publishable might come out of it.
• Three of my most beloved goldfish died during our move. Sometimes they don’t survive the transition. It’s a bit of a shock for them. Farewell my dearest Lois, Marvin and Clancy. I will always love you.
• My sister is still with her husband and they have just bought a new house together. I don’t know what to think anymore. My attitude towards her is one of suspending judgement or even the slightest of opinions. It is probably the best way to keep my already precarious mental health intact.
• The guy who installed my Foxtel (cableTV) was the nicest guy. He was Muslim and we chatted for over an hour about Islam. He taught me a lot. He was so gracious and kind and family-oriented. So interesting to talk to. He didn’t charge me the full fee for the installation and I cried after he left. Unexpected kindnesses always make me boo-hoo.
• I’ve been thinking about those little kids killed in Connecticut and I just don’t know how their parents and families are coping with the grief. I just don’t know. How does one bear such sadness? It must almost be impossible.

Here are some photos from the new neighbourhood.

There is a nice seedy pub round the corner with topless barmaids. I thought that kind of thing went out in the ’80s. Shows how much I know. They have jelly wrestling on Tuesday nights. If it’s raspberry flavour I might sign up.

My neighbour has a garden full of hydrangeas. I know they are somewhat old-fashioned but I love a good hydrangea. I am enjoying watching her pottering about in the garden.

CHIMNEY POT!!! You know all is not lost if there is still a good chimney pot or two to check out. Chim chim cheree!

View from my balcony where the lorikeets roost at twilight. They are such dear little things with their twittering. Already I am looking forward to seeing them each day.

Captive Kangaroo. My neighbour has this kangaroo tied to a tree in his front garden. I don’t know if it’s because he really loves kangaroos or if it is some kind of special kangaroo deterrent like a guard dog. Either way, I laugh whenever I see it!

My new local park at night. It is very peaceful. People sit at the picnic tables at dusk eating the Portuguese chicken that is famous in the area. There is a nice sense of community.

And finally…this is the view from our new shop. You open the front doors and WHAM – there it is…… Centrepoint Tower. Makes you feel like you are a part of something.

Hope you are all well.

The Red Door

* This is a story for my dearest friend, Gina, who has found true love again after surviving what can only be described as a calamitous divorce. What Gina has taught me is that it is very important in life to never give up hope, especially when it comes to the big things like career, family and maybe the ultimate big one – love. This one’s for you, Gina.

It was when I started to do all the things I really wanted to do, had always wanted to do that everything changed. That starlight and shimmering moonlight and sunlight bright as the stories of childhood happened.

It all began with the red door.

When I was five years old Carmelita Del Santo moved into Mrs. Dawson’s house across the street. Mrs. Dawson liked things plain and simple, she had an old weatherboard house painted off white with a beige door that was only just beige; in fact, it was such a pale form of beige that it could have been mistaken for off white if you didn’t know better.

I liked Mrs. Dawson because she paid me five dollars to rake up all the leaves from the gum trees that stood astride her garden and gave me a lemonade and a Violet Crumble bar afterwards. I liked the smell of eucalyptus that rose like a perfume you would only find in Australia – a bit like orange zest and vinegar mixed together- as well as the crunch of the leaves as they were put into the compost bin. Mrs. Dawson composted before it was fashionable to. She knew so much about nitrogen-rich material, mulch and the different types of worms in her flower beds that the gardeners from the Council would come around pretending to check that her gums were a safe distance from the telephone wires while really trying to get a sample of her top-dressing.

I liked Mrs. Dawson even though she favoured the plain and simple look. She thought that people who painted their houses bright colours were posing off. When Sharon Monroe at Number 34 started to follow a tropical theme after her second honeymoon in the Fiji Islands and put curtains patterned with palm trees in her kitchen Mrs. Dawson believed it was the beginning of the end of sensible society. The downfall.

Mrs. Dawson went to live with her daughter because she began to lose her eyesight. I thought it was kind of a good thing that her eyesight was failing becsause if she had seen what Carmelita Del Santo had done to her front door she would have had a fit.

The first thing Carmelita Del Santo did when she moved into Mrs. Dawson’s old house was to paint the front door red. Bright red. Like a fire engine all polished and gleaming. I nearly had a fit on Mrs. Dawson’s behalf when I saw it. But at the same time I loved it. I couldn’t stop looking at that door or at Carmelita Del Santo.

She was so beautiful with her blue black hair and her peasant skirts and enormous hooped earrings. ‘Spanish,’ said the women in the street by way of explanation when Carmelita sunbaked on the front lawn as the men of the street tried to stop their jaws from dropping. She lay right on top of the leaves and gumnuts, not caring, her colourful blankets like a birthday party.

In addition to the red door Carmelita Del Santo put out turquoise garden furniture with a beautiful tiled wooden table I immediately fell in love with. ‘It’s a mosaic,’ Carmelita said in her husky voice. Mosaic. It sounded like something only people with bright red doors would know about.

‘I’m going to be just like you when I grow up,’ I said to Carmelita one day. ‘I’m going to have a red door and a table with a mosaic on it.’

‘Just be yourself, querida,’ Carmelita said. ‘You are beautiful as you are.’

I forgot about Carmelita and her red door as the years passed. I got married to a man who took Mrs. Dawson’s plain and simple living to a different level. John’s philosophy was if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Actually, it was more if it’s broke, don’t fix it. We lived in a rundown terrace house in the city with a brown door, a peeling paint brown door with a latch you had to twist three times to the right just to open.

When you live in a house where everything needs to be mended, when you stagger into the laundry in the dark banging your head on the dryer for the fifth time that week because the broken light fitting won’t hold a light bulb any longer, you start to get sick of things. Really sick. Excessive restriction is not good for the soul.

You start to realise that ignoring all the broken components of your life means you’re stuck, held in some kind of stasis by the windows that won’t open and the door that lets the rain in and the stove switch you have to bang with a hammer to stay on.

After a while the broken things acquire a power of their own and you begin to feel that you might be the next broken thing to join them and you know that if you do it will be all over for you because broken things that never get fixed can’t move forward or back, they just sit there chained and crumbling.

I left John. Too many broken things filling up the shadows in the house. I was glad to get out when I did. My spirit was fragile but not yet broken.

I got a bit of money from the divorce settlement – the broken house made a profit which just goes to show that if you get in the right street it doesn’t matter if your windows won’t open – and I bought a little two bedroom semi in a trendier part of town. I liked the cafes and the bookstores and the people in their hip, vintage clothing and even though my house was near the train line I didn’t mind; the swoosh of the trains was comforting compared to the sound I was used to – a house falling into fragments.

I suppose that buying my own house was the start of my doing what I really wanted to do but on the day it really kicked in I thought of Carmelita Del Santo for the first time in twenty years. I saw a house with a red door. It was the kind of red that makes you think of only good things like apples, ribbon on presents, lipstick from the 1940s and strawberries freshly picked. I saw that door and I wanted one too. I ordered one that day.

On the day my red door arrived a new shop opened round the corner. I saw it as I walked to work – full of cobalt glass, wrought iron chairs and tables with mosaics. It was as if the spirit of Carmelita Del Santo had ridden into town.

A wind arrived with the spirit of Carmelita Del Santo – a frivolous, frenetic wind – that stayed around the streets for days. I could smell the scent of it hovering in doorways like jasmine filling the night during summer.

That wind affected me. It’s quite possible it infected me because it made me feel not quite like myself. I started to do things some people might have thought were ill-considered, perhaps a little immature. I started, in earnest, to do the things I have always wanted to do.

On the day Robbie finally opened the door to his new shop around the corner he caught me running, running with the trains. The 10.15 from Petersham, to be exact. I thought of Carmelita Del Santo’s flowing peasant skirts as I ran and I almost beat that train, I almost outran it; but the sight of Robbie standing in the entrance to his shop holding a lovely piece of blue handblown glass distracted me and I lost my momentum. The 10.15 chugged off to victory.

‘So do you race the trains often?’ Robbie asked.

‘Not often enough,’ I said.

Robbie was a painter. He painted scapes, as he called them. Landscapes, city scapes, vision scapes, future scapes. Images full of colour and emotions like crying and joy.

He gave me a painting on our first date on a canvas as small as a kitchen tile depicting the train line near my house with a woman in the corner, coloured skirts gathered, poised for flight.

It made me cry, that little painting, because there I was caught in a moment the way someone else saw me, a moment full of passion and fun and enjoyment, a carefree moment, a moment of wanting something more and striving to get it.

I hoped that Robbie would always view me the way I was in that moment. I hoped he would see me as Carmelita Del Santo had – beautiful just as I was.

My red door casts a hue along the garden path, both celebratory and consoling. It stands like a talisman, an embodiment of zeal yet to be realised. It opens me up to the world but also protects me from it. And I know that no matter which way I walk through it, either out or in, it will bring me closer to myself, it will keep me running with the trains.

Right Hand Turn

Haven’t done a Magpie for a while but I couldn’t resist this picture. For more Magpie Tales click on the link.

It was the last time Hank touched her. They were standing at the intersection of Smith and Taylor streets, the one where the arrows to the city and away again were stencilled on the side of the bank. Someone had stolen the street signs.  Steel poles and all. Nona couldn’t believe it. It seemed so pointless. What the hell could you do with a ten foot high street sign? It’s not as if you could get it in your car or if you were a teenage prankster put it in your bedroom. All the houses around here were built in the 1970s. Their ceilings petered out at just over 6 feet. Whoever had stolen the sign couldn’t have been a local. The Smith Street sign wouldn’t even fit through the front door.

Hank had been agitated all morning. Nona watched him drinking his coffee in his singlet. He kept pulling at the neck of it where there was that thin line of grey that Nona couldn’t get out no matter how much she soaked it.  She hoped he hadn’t seen it because it was the type of thing that sent Hank off on a rant and this morning Nona just couldn’t cope with that. It wasn’t her fault that he sweated so much around the neckline. She sweated in strange places. Her right eyebrow was always wet like she’d just washed her face. Hank’s neckline was like that.  Even in cold weather. It was odd.

When they got to the intersection Nona couldn’t remember which one was Smith and which one was Taylor Street. It annoyed her that she was always the one who had to be aware of such things. Why couldn’t Hank figure out which one was which?

He had on his overcoat but he kept on picking at his neckline as if he could feel the grey line on the singlet right through it. It was cold on the corner and there was that deceptive kind of wind that settles around your feet so silently you can’t really be sure if there is a wind or not. But the chill, the chill is there.

How can you not know where Smith Street is? For the first time Nona noticed the rasp in Hank’s voice. As if he was shredding every word he said. As if he was forcing something out. Like ire. Or despair.

She felt the wind that might not be wind gather in her boots. The zippers had come loose where they met the ankles and when she walked little gusts of air rushed in. Sometimes she almost achieved a kind of buoyancy, like she was walking on air, but today her feet just felt shrivelled and cold.

She tried to remember. I think it’s the one on the right, she said. The one to the city. Yeah, that’s right. Turn right to the city.

You stupid bitch. Frank was shouting at her. A wheedling kind of shouting like someone does who is trying to hold themselves back because they know if they actually shout full pelt they might never stop. It’s Taylor Street that goes to the city. Tay-lor Street. We want to go the left. To the left.

Nona didn’t remember her head hitting the wall of the bank. Full brick. But she remembered the crunch as if her bones had splintered. And she remembered the close up view she obtained of the right hand arrow pointing to the city.

Six weeks later the arrow was still in her line of sight.

It’s a floater, the doctor said. Quite common in a head trauma. It’ll disappear soon enough.

Nona had read that floaters were spots or flashes. She had never heard of anyone seeing arrows, especially ones that always pointed right. But then most people with floaters hadn’t almost been blinded by a brick wall. Most people with floaters hadn’t thought the last thing they might ever see was an arrow pointing to the city.

Nona wasn’t supposed to drive but her sister, her old friend, told her of the winter birds gathering in the woodland that surrounded her house. Of their colours like the warmest of winter coats. Of their songs. Of their sheer, unshifting good natures amidst the cold and the ice.

You need to see them, her sister said. You need to get out of the city. You need to cross to the woodland and stand and feel them all around. You need to feel their joy in living in your heart.

Winter in the city was harsh. The trees were bare, stark as the initial markings in a sketchbook. It was easy to feel like an exile among all the white and grey. It was easy to feel pitiful. The snow slid down the sides of buildings, piling up at the edges, glossy and inert.

The arrow was as emphatic as hurt, directing her to nameless places. Turning right, ever right, so that all she did was walk in circles. She was a bird with one useless wing, lurching forward at obtuse angles.

The road to her sister’s house was smooth as fondant on wedding cake. The trees stood back from it, reverent, formal. The arrow loomed, an irritant, like a piece of tape stuck to the windscreen.

She drove straight all the way, along the fluid white road, the snow bunching, the trees everywhere, overlooking it all like the sadness in the world.

She saw the birds. Fluttering. Even in the bitter cold they fluttered. Creatures of the air had a certain kind of defiance that couldn’t be diminished.

Reds and blues.

Blacks and greys and splotches of yellow.

So unexpected in the subdued landscape.

The road took her all the way through, straight and true to her sister’s house.

They sat for hours after she arrived, wrapped in blankets smelling of primroses, drinking hot chocolate and watching the birds. They put on a show, there was no doubt in Nona’s mind, the little winged ones put on a show. As the snowflakes coated their feathers with sugar and the evening light turned the woods magic – they put on a show.

Nona knew that in days that had yet to come, when she spoke of the past, sections would be missing, but not this part. Love, money, fame, they didn’t matter when you could have moments of comfort like a woodland show. More comforting than the sight of moss on trees, or soft lamps in night windows. Or the winter twilight, blue and mauve.

The birds assembled, a cluster of headlights and coloured glass. Their gladness was greater than sadness, greater than anything that grew from the dark. They were poets, making sense of  disorder, pulling malaise back into the light.

Nona didn’t know it until night fell and she got up to go into her sister’s house but the arrow she thought would stay etched in her line of vision forever had grown perceptibly smaller.

Like a mark on a negative being rubbed out.