Zigzag Street (13 page)

On Wednesday evening the
Westside Chronicle
calls.

Kevin Butt has nominated me for their Neighbour of the Month Award.

I'm no sure thing, but this month's Neighbour will be decided on Monday and I'm a definite contender. The journalist asks for a work phone number so I can be contacted to organise a story, if necessary.

And who said living in the late twentieth century was easy?

Thursday it rains. I take the car to work.

I almost tell Hillary about the letter. I want to tell someone, but I also want to keep it to myself. Instead I tell her what she wants to hear. Things are okay for our Sydney meeting next week. And she says this'll be her first night away from Daniel and she even misses him sometimes when she's at work.

So if there are any times when I don't seem the best you have to make allowances. Of course, I'd miss work if I wasn't here, so I can't win really. It is the impossible balancing act people say it is, but what do you do? At least he's onto formula now
.

She then moves into a discussion of her early feeding problems, her use of a breast pump.
And, you know, I'd be bringing it into work and milking myself like some bloody cow if it hadn't dried up. How would that be if two or three times a day my door was shut for half an
hour while I milked myself and then I ran out to the fridge with a bottle? Imagine if people started putting it in their coffee
.

Does it taste the same?

And it seems to be this basic, practical question that brings us down. That makes us both realise that we're standing here talking about Hillary's breasts and a pump. And we've never talked about her breasts before, let alone milking them, and I think, although it's just biology, we both fear we have crossed a line.

No
, she says.
It doesn't really. But maybe that's just because I don't have the diet of a cow. I'll get Deb to sort out our flights. We'll go first thing Tuesday morning. Okay
?

Yeah.

When I'm back in my room I think of Hillary and her baby and how good they've looked when I've seen them together. And I think of Hillary and the breast pump and I try not to.

She was nauseated most of the pregnancy but she became quite calm about it. This was fine if you knew her and you were prepared for vomiting at any moment, but I think she forgot that other people might not be. She would regularly interrupt our conversations in her office with a polite,
Excuse me
, and a lift of the eyebrows before sticking her head in her bin and bringing up lunch. At first I found this really stressful and I didn't know what to do, but after a while we both relaxed. Hillary learned that if she was talking it was okay to regard such incidents merely as punctuation, and I worked out that if I was mid-sentence she expected me to pause for no longer than the vomiting noise, which echoes loudly in a bin, and then resume.

We were only reminded that this might not be conventional when the two of us were at a whiteboard giving a presentation and she did the eyebrow thing. We both instinctively looked for a bin, but there wasn't one, so she said her polite,
Excuse me
, and threw up in a large
pot plant. She dabbed her mouth with a tissue, held up her hand to make everyone quiet, and went on with the sentence …
and really it gets back to whether this should be thought of as legitimate hedging, or speculation
. And the crowd of men in dark suits, I'm sure, had lost all awareness of the dilemma she was posing as they stared in some kind of fear at this small woman with a giant cue ball under her white dress and the neat glistening pool of vomit in the tan bark.

I must admit I thought it was great. It was one of the most powerful things I've ever seen, and she didn't even know it. And afterwards she said to me,
They had no questions. They sat there like a bunch of fucking stunned mullets and they had no questions at all. I'm the only person today who got no questions. I hate having to bore people by talking about such tedious topics. Was there a problem with what I said
?

All I could do was tell her that her talk was fine, and that her only problem was to find the right collective noun for stunned mullets.

She ate almost all the time, and seemed to vomit for the rest of it, leading her to declare that she was in danger of suffering RSI of the oesophagus. She slept badly and said,
Look at these eyes, I look like a raccoon
. She took her shoes off and then couldn't put them back on again because of swelling. And she worked efficiently until about thirty-seven weeks, when she went home and fitted out the nursery. Then she kept calling me on her cordless phone while she was weeding the garden or building the cot, and she'd ask me to check something and call her back.
It's not that I don't trust you Rick, I just had an idea that's all, and could you …

Then one morning at work I picked up the phone and she said,
Hey Rick, I've had the kid
. And she gave me the stats, the way people with babies always seem to. Boy, seven pounds nine, two-twelve am.

So when was that? I asked her.

Two-twelve am. I just told you
.

Yeah, but what day?

Today. This morning
.

But it's only eight-thirty now. Shouldn't you be sleeping or something?

Are you kidding? On these beds? I've got him just next to me in a see-through plastic box thing. He's sleeping. He's great. He looks just like a baby
.

And she asked me how I was going with the trashing, I think. It was all quite recent then. The only real difference at work was that at that stage it was her job I was handling in a cavalier and arbitrary fashion, rather than just my own.

She seemed so unimaginably happy. She still does. And sometimes I feel very separate from this happiness.

On the way home, driving through rain, I see a woman with a cello, struggling along, getting wet. She's wearing a grey plastic raincoat and it's flapping around, doing nothing.

I turn off Waterworks Road and circle back, but the traffic's not easy and when I get there she's gone. Maybe she caught a bus or a cab, maybe someone else stopped to pick her up, maybe she lives somewhere on this stretch of the road. I drive on home.

I can picture her in my car, wet in the passenger seat, her black cello case wet in the back. Water running from the strands of her dark hair and down her cheeks. She flops back in the seat with the relief of being out of the rain. And we might have had a few minutes of conversation before we reached her house. And she might have said,
Hey, do you want to come in for coffee
? But maybe not.

I should concentrate on the driving, get my head back into the real world. The last thing I need in my day is to go up the rear of the car in front, and to have to say that my mind was on a wet cellist I've never met.

Why couldn't she wait until the rain died down?

There was no way she should have been out there with that cello, even if she's sure the case is waterproof. Perhaps it's straightforward. Perhaps I turned up just after the bus had pulled away and she was only a few doors from home. But she looked too wet for that. So why didn't she catch a cab? Didn't she have any money? Why didn't she wait?

Friday on the way home she is not on my bus, she is not walking along Waterworks Road. I've never seen her before, and perhaps I won't see her again.

Around me people talk about weekends, and this weekend I'm actually doing something. Well, Saturday night anyway. Veny is going to live in a studio in Paris for six months, so he's having a party.

Mid-afternoon on Saturday I venture into a room of boxes to select an appropriate bottle of wine. Red I think.

I can't find red.

I find one box full of my winter clothes and another with paperwork, receipts and warranties and old tax returns on top of a folder with phone bills, gas bills, power bills from my time in the flat with Anna. Her neat writing when she's paid them at the bank, my scrawl when I've made a note about the cheque I've mailed, whatever.

How could you make so many calls? I remember
asking her, hassling her, now so needlessly. Why can't you phone people when you're at work like everyone else?

Because I'm working
, I think she said.

But I can find no red wine.

The next box is my grandmother's. Cards from her ninetieth birthday, with a rubber band round them. This is unlike her. She didn't keep things, didn't keep cards. She didn't even want to be ninety, the way she told it.
Ninety's just too damn old
, she said to me.
Your knees go and your hearing goes. You start to fall apart and you end up reading these flaming large print books where you spend all your time turning pages. People should be knocked on the head at about eighty
.

She said the last thing she wanted was to live to a hundred and get her telegram from the queen.
I'd send it back and tell her to get herself a blinking job
.

But here are the cards from her ninetieth, bundled and kept, even though she said it was ten years past the last birthday anyone could want. I find the card from me, and then I see it's from Anna too. Anna, writing her own greeting, sending her own love. And it reads like she's part of the family.

Under the cards is the nearly-finished front of the black jumper my grandmother was knitting for me last year. I'd forgotten all about it. It's wrapped around a large ball of wool that has two knitting needles crossed through it, the whole lot rolled up and put away, probably only when she died. I last saw her knitting two days before that, and it's a strange mixture of neat rows and horrendous dropped stitches. I'm sure she'd hate anyone to think it was hers.

I take the box into the lounge room and I put on the radio.

Below the knitting are two Entertainment Centre programmes that I think used to sit on the bottom shelf of the phone stand. Torville and Dean, whose show, she told me, was the best thing she'd seen for at least thirty
years, and the World Junior Snooker Championship, from which she was ejected for giving loud and unsolicited advice. She'd been a fan of snooker since at least the days of ‘Pot Black', but in snooker, as in anything else, she wouldn't stand for rubbish. So when my mother took her to the World Junior titles for her birthday, she treated it the way she treated snooker on TV. She shouted at it, mainly detailed advice about shot selection.
Go for the blue. Why isn't he going for the blue
? Until the officials spoke to my mother and explained that it would really have to stop. It didn't, and by the middle of the next frame they were out, my grandmother complaining that it didn't look anywhere near over to her.

Beneath these is an assortment of pens and notepads and the several close-typed sheets of airmail paper of her Christmas card list. She sent only the overseas cards last year, early and surface mail, with calendars. But still some cards arrived from people closer to home who didn't know she'd died. My mother told me the Christmas card list must be somewhere, and when she found it she'd write to the people and tell them.

The Christmas before last, my grandmother, working her way down the long list, said to me,
You'd think by ninety you wouldn't have to send so many. Some of these people, I'm sure they're just hanging on to give me more work to do at Christmas. You get nothing back from them. Just a card. And I type every last one of them a blasted letter
.

I should call my mother and tell her I've found the list. I'm counting the names when I realise the sheet is ruled up some way ahead, names and addresses on the left and a grid on the right with columns for the years, with ticks for all living card recipients until 1993, and some for 1994. And enough columns ruled to take her to her hundred and second year. I'm beginning to wonder if she would have complained about the telegram after all.

For now I'll keep the list, and maybe I'll write the letters to these people.

This box must be one of my grandmother's last, packed by my mother in her haste to tidy things when my grandmother died. And we just let her go to it, even though it all looked pointless. This anguished, flurried, unstoppable woman, boxing up her mother's things and moving them aside, achieving nothing.

Then, some time later, leaving the boxes to me. Telling me it's easy, all you have to do is take it one box at a time.

It's eleven o'clock. I realise I've forgotten to go to the party.