Something heavy lies across my legs and I open my eyes.  A curtain, a beautiful velvet curtain! I stroke it with the grain, against the grain, and the two people sitting beside me watch my hands flicker through the air.

2.

I can see you.  Peeping around the curtain at me.  Standing behind my bed as I lie here.  I can see you.  I won’t be long.

3.

She holds up a finger, an antennae, like she’s trying to find a stronger signal.  ”You can’t hear that?” I can’t, and I ask what she’s listening to.  Smiling, humming, her mind becomes a scrapbook of forgotten and remembered tunes.

as though there were some obstacle in the way

and yet – as though, once it was overcome,

she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.

– Going Blind, Rainer Maria Rilke

Her: “You’ve never had any smears in the past that came back with any issues?”
Me: “No.” (As I take off my pants and drape them over the chair.)
Her: “Have you had any unprotected sex in the past two years?”
Me: “No.” (Suddenly struck, with my undies halfway down, by the complete falseness of this statement.) “Actually, yes. Just not in the past six weeks.”
Her: (gearing up for some form of sex based responsible behaviour talk) “Was this in a relationship or…”
Me: A relationship. (Placing my undies on top of my pants and standing awkwardly, so awkwardly, in the middle of the room.)
Her: But it’s ended?
Me: Yes. (Instantly I burst into tears)

Her face melts and her beautifully small hands flit around her face, through the air like she wants to hug me but isn’t sure if she should.

Her: “Oh god, oh god. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t even have asked”
Me: (sobbing, naked from the waist down and pulling my tank top down as far as it will go) “It’s ok, really, I never know how I’ll feel day to day. Don’t worry. It’s ok.” (I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.)
Her: “Did he end it?”
Me: “Yes”
Her: “Do you think you’ll get back together?”
Me: “No. He’s a stubborn mule.”

We stand and stare at each other. I’m so thankful I wore this long tank top. I have no dignity, but I can fool myself into thinking that I do.

Her: (face reddening, crumpling, falling) “Oh god. I’m going to cry too, cos the same thing happened to me.”

Tears fall down her face and we stand in this tiny room weeping into each others eyes.

Her: (sniffling) “Ok, lie on the edge of the table with your legs falling apart.”
Me: (voice shaking, flooded with tears, shifting my legs) “Like this?”

As she reaches inside me I brace myself for the usually present pain. She’s very good. I feel nothing. I hear nothing except for both of us weeping, sniffing, lost in our own worlds of disappointment and regret.

So you should go.  If you haven’t.  It is my spiritual homeland, I would like my children to be born there, I would like to grow old and die there.

My memory of To Her Door is this: packed in a car with all my cousins, driving down a dirt road after a day of extremely challenging hiking, and marvelling to myself at the quietness within the car.  Everyone’s ears and minds tuned into the song, my cousin Sam (who has recently moved from Karratha to Gladstone…I know…the dude don’t do things by halves…) mouthing the words to himself, ears open, eyes chasing the horizon.  Bodies happy.

This is my last Paul Kelly post!  I know!  Thank you, Mr Kelly.  You really are something else.  Every time I listen to you sing I am filled with hope, with a belief that people get by despite their fuck ups, in spite of their unavoidable        human-ness.  And I need that.  I am not a very brave lady, and your songs make me feel like I don’t have to pretend to be.  So….you know…..thanks and that.

BEFORE the 21st of December, when everything was normal, when everything was good, I had thought that I would spend the day baking, writing, getting ready for the Malteser and I to drive to Newcastle on Christmas Eve.  What I ended up doing on the 21st of December was wandering around my parents’ house in Tasmania in a daze, counting the number of days since I’d been made single.  The 21st of December – 10 days since I don’t know what, 10 days since my heart froze and shattered into dust.  Ten days since my slate was wiped.

How to Make Gravy is the best Christmas song written.  Apart from Silent Night, but that’s about Jeebus, and you know.  Jeebus.  Hmm.  I don’t know.  But How to Make Gravy aint about beautiful tiny peaceful babies, it’s about fucked up dudes who are feeling it.  About wanting to be somewhere where they can’t be.  And that’s more my speed.  Especially at the moment.  Especially when on the 18th of December I’m watching the Rockwiz Christmas special and I’m sending the Malteser an email with our recipe for Maltese bread pudding, the way we made it last year at Christmas, the way he’ll want to make it this year, and as soon as I send the email Paul Kelly walks out on stage and sings How to Make Gravy.

My Christmas ended up being quite good.  But what I wouldn’t have given for a piece of that rubbery, tasteless Maltese bread pudding.

With a little glace cherry on the top.

I don’t know what this means yet, but I know that it’s very beautiful.

It comes, eventually.

I wait again.

Where was I?  There was a LOT of punctuation in that last sentence and I totally lost my way.

Here.

At the start of the year I made a playlist that I could go running to.  That’s right, I run.  I also lift 20kg weights now, cos I’m a BADASS.  I am, I swear to you. So don’t fuck with me, cos I’ll fuck you right back.  And not in a fucked up John Cusack way.   So I made this playlist and then I was all “omigod I can’t run to this freakin playlist cos it’s all Josh Pyke and Paul Kelly with a bit of Beyonce thrown in and my legs keep wanting to slow down and then they get shocked when all of a sudden I’m being told to ‘pat my weave.’”  The playlist had to go.  In fact it had to go SO much that I ended up buying the Lady Gaga album.  I know.  I bought it online though, so no one will ever see the CD on my shelf.  The internet.  It’s so good for secret shame, isn’t it?  I love you, internet!  The one song I had to leave on though, nestled in beside black Barbie and her angry little Skipper, was From St Kilda To Kings Cross.  This is, for me, the song to end all songs.  Here are the places I’ve travelled to and listened to it this year.

• Sydney – walking through the back of The Rocks, down to Millers Point…sandstone and water reminding me of home, chisel marks and waves.  Beer and honky tonk piano.
• Brisbane – bubble headed geckos, The Wire, beautiful singers, wonderful director, lost childhoods.
• Dubbo – cheerleaders, screaming monkeys, two dollar pants…a gibbon welcoming us to his show.
• Mount Isa – riots in schools, loneliness and displacement by the river, truck drivers with easy horns…kittens and cats, cats and kittens, bedbugs and internet limits.
• Townsville – black cockatoos eating snacks on the Strand, Beavis and Butthead in the classroom, Mr Mudcrab, car cheese, the Malteser and I valiantly attempting to move through waves to coral reefs…sunlight bouncing off the ocean floor..greens, blues, red, violet.
• Moranbah – bingo, poker, survivor, I’m a totem, puppies, roadside ornaments, men with kind eyes…the keyboard provided to me is delivered by an old guy with a ute, has barely 4 octaves, no keyboard stand and no pedal.  But he made sure he got the headphones for me.  Dusty, scratchy.
• Dysart – sadness, bleakness, practising piano in a disused hall with an apricot sunset and cockatoo choir.  Frankenstein two keyboards together to make one that will do what I need it to do.  ”What the fuck is HE looking at?”
• Clermont – practising piano in a supremely loved hall, chocolate polished floorboards.  A lagoon where 150 years ago the local Indigenous population were jained to the trees.  An outside jail.  Sometimes fed, sometimes not.  An elder begins singing.  Wailing and patient, he sings in the floods and the town as it stood destroyed.  Paris Cafe.  Evil goose giving me the evil eye.  No one is brave when faced with the evil goose.  I try to avoid his eye for fear of turning into a pillar of salt.  Jack Russells.
• Adelaide – “You’re all kinds of wonderful, aren’t you?”…cha-CHA, dips and spins.
• Melbourne – books and friends.  Pizza, pilates and scones.
• Launceston – my heart soared as we touched down in my homeland.  This island buzzes inside me and even though I haven’t lived here since 1998, my insides buzz every time I come back.  It is my home, my Eden.  It always will be.  When I die, pack my ashes in fireworks and explode them over Spikey Beach.  There is nowhere else I’d rather spend my end days.
• Hobart – Home.  Quiet euphoria.  Friends, babies, music.
• Ballarat – lazy breakfasts, lazy dinners.  Isabelle Allende.
• Bendigo – llamas, family, long baths in giant tubs, childhood confessions, marvelling at the llama whisperer.  Textiles, textures, everything screaming to be touched.

• Sale – I look at this place through the Malteser’s eyes.  First as a married man and then as a man abandoned.  Bereft.  I cannot wait to leave.
• Shepparton – people with vision, kids with spunk.  Beer and movies and friendships emerging.
• Albury – family and markets.
• Cowra – windy streets, red brick houses.  Craft shops on every corner with ladies who know what they’re talking about.  Sausage dogs. I see my first proper water rat…marsupial and webbed, it looks like an evolutionary throwback.  The sausage goes bananas.
• Griffith – a vaulted grand piano.  Audition tedium.
• Orange – daphne floods the cold cold air…wine, coffee…it feels cold like home.  This is good.
• Armidale – my bed is a delicious mouse nest.
• Coffs Harbour – an apartment that smells like dozens of salty kidded families.  I’m working, but this place forces me to feel holiday-ish.  Night time beach bonfires, I find a log as thick as my leg.  I dig it out and drag it back, excited and expectant.  I am Jack Russell in human form.
• Grafton – lemon meringue, chocolate pots, lemon macadamias, trips to Byron, thesis corrections distracting me from essential rom-com viewing.
• Port Macquarie – coastal walks, political and theatrical scandals, and my search for whales continues.  Everyone sees them but me.  Maybe I want to see them too much.  They sense my almost-patheticness.
• Newcastle – family, living through my brother’s first night shift…lying awake wondering how he’s feeling.  I could never be paid to stay awake.  Never.  He is amazing.
• Wollongong – op shops, op shops, op shops…black capes and red onsies.  Toy guns and green short shorts.  Absinthe flaming down my throat.  More than middle aged drag queens.
• Wagga Wagga – family, shoes, lovingly weighted lunches.
• Narranderra – traviata pinata, car park cricket, bbqs, first edition novels, teenage football with teenage tears, family, debauchery, impromptu mardi gras at the pub, overloaded pink boats, pig sheds, performing Verdi while wrapped in a giant man’s dressing gown.  My Bulldogs lose.  Again.
• Canberra – friends, debauchery and tears.

All up, close to 35, 500 kms.  That’s right, that’s the right amount of numbers there.  As the tour went on, and more beer was drunk, and more opening night cheese eaten, and more sleep ins needed, my running playlists were more like sitting in the bus nursing hangovers and knitting toys for people playlists.  Still pretty good playlists.  But I probably didn’t need to get rid of Josh Pyke.  He so dreamy…..

I have been on tour for 228 days straight.  And now it’s done.

Dad said it about a dozen times as our heads found the surface.  ”It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok.”  I gasped air into my lungs and looked at him.  He was a mole, squinting and peering.  ”My glasses, I’ve lost my bloody glasses.  Get your mother.”  I screamed for her, a tiny dot at the end of the beach, a woman completely oblivious to what had just happened.  Upside down in the water, thunder in my ears, clawing for sand or sky or my Dad and with each swipe coming away empty handed.  Rolling, rolling, rolling.  I still stay away from surf.  I started crying as Mum came closer, both from adrenalin and from the excitement that now that Dad had lost his glasses maybe he would need a guide dog.

The rest of our holiday in St Helens was spent with me testing Dad’s vision…..what’s my mouth doing now? Fish lips, wide mouth, fish lips, wide mouth…..and choosing names for our guide dog.  And then we went home and I told people we were getting a dog and that my Dad was now officially blind and then Dad got new glasses and that was the end of my guide dog dreams.

Memory 2.

I really want to go in but the surf looks scary.  Every couple of waves I see him, my Malteser, sailing up and over a wave, arms glowing white and windmilling like he’s trying to hold his balance.  Even though he’s in the surf.  Even though he can’t touch the bottom.  A guy comes up to me: “Do you know that guy?”, pointing to the windmill….”cos he looks like he’s in trouble.  Is he in trouble?”  No, I say, he’s not in trouble.  That’s just the way he is.

The guy ambles off, all boardshorts and abs, and I look back out at my beacon.  He was so scared to start, so nervous about the water, but look at him now.  Look at him!  A wave slaps my thigh, and I retreat.

Talking in songs makes me shy.

So shy.

BUT – I have something to say about this song now, I have a place inside me that resonates with it.

Here are the first few lines of Paul Kelly’s song:

“Sydney, 1926, this is the story of a man, just a kid in from the sticks, just a kid with a plan.  St George took a gamble, played him in the first grade.  Pretty soon that young man showed them how to flash the blade.”

Last week I realised this happened in Petersham Park, not twenty metres from where I currently live.  The park itself is verdant, cool, home to kiddies, office types enjoying dappled sun on their lunch breaks, moreton bay figs, jacarandas, roses, clover, magpies, fruit bats, swallows, palm trees.  Petersham Park oval was opened in 1924, around the same time I think my small apartment block was built.  This morning I stepped out of my front door and imagined what it would have been like over 80 years ago.  Probably not much different.  On weekend mornings I lie in bed with the Malteser sound asleep behind me, his face buried in my neck, and I listen to the action on the oval.  As the morning moves on, the ages of the cricketers grow…voices change from alto squeals to baritonal bellows.  I try to imagine what it may have sounded like on the cricket pitch back then and decide it probably sounded exactly the same.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with books about girls travelling through time…Playing Beattie Bow, Eureka Street, Charlotte Sometimes…I occasionally still indulge these romantic thoughts when walking through the Rocks.  I’ve started indulging them here at home.  I imagine stepping out of my apartment in 1926, seeing the same trees that I see here in 2010, seeing the men gathering on the field in front of me and not knowing that the beginning of a remarkable career was about to take place.

Some photos for you:

We don’t do street signs in Petersham, we embed them into the sidewalk.

My little housie.

An avenue.

Another avenue.  We are crazy ape BONKERS for them in the ‘Sham!

Rotunda

Beautiful little rusted out birds.

Is it a rotunda, is it a cathedral?  Who can say.  Probably me.  But I won’t.

All palings lead to rotundas.

I think these are the cheap seats.

No, wait.  Those are the cheap seats.  Down near the fence.

Petersham Park A Reserve seating.

Petersham Park AA Reserve.  NOT ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS RESERVE.  Ploise.  We don’t do that here in Petersham.

The grandstand.  I need to come over here on a Saturday so I can get inside…

The walk.