You couldn’t decide what to do while the baby slept and the power was off, so you lay down in the late winter sun with a glass of red wine and a big fat book about Chinese food.
At nine past two, a full two hours earlier than expected, electronic devices all over the house chirrup their alertness.
She wore a grey raincoat and carried her walking stick about a third of the way down the shaft, with the handle arching away from her elbow. I got the feeling it was only for chasing away whippersnappers.
1.
We find ourselves the beneficiaries of a raffle; my parents don’t fancy a week in the MUA cottage at Umina. We book for the week before the school holidays. It‘s an old wharfie’s holiday joint in a tough bit of town. The decoration consists of a picture of him, a picture of a container ship and a commemorative plaque in masonite. It’s ten minutes walk from the beach and there’s a constant breeze on the little verandah.
There’s a six year old girl next door and she immediately makes friends with our five year old. Her name’s Natalia, and she’s very beautiful. She shouts “Don’t you dare!” in her bogan accent during the endless games of chasing in which she is always the prey.
2.
She’s the most beautiful girl at Dickson pool today, by miles. She’s in her late teens and she’s wearing a Bond Girl white bikini that has belted pants and a square clasp between her breasts. I see her striding up the side of the big pool, calling over her shoulder to her brother. He’s carrying a very long piece of elastic and his head is tilted in a way that makes me think he might have an autism spectrum disorder. Well, that’s what it’s called, I can’t help the ungainliness of medical descriptions. It’s not what they’re for anyway.
Later, they’re both in the pool and he still has his tape. I wonder if she spends a lot of time as his carer. Probably. I wonder if his presence spares her a lot of teenage boy attention.
3.
We go to the café just after breakfast because it’s too hot to walk there with the pram at any other time of day. We’re outside and at the next café a young mum sits down with her three or four year old son. I notice a very beautiful green and black tattoo of a woman’s face on her arm. She’s got dyed black hair, lots of facial piercings and heaps more tattoos. I wonder why emo/Goth mothers have such square bear kids. (He’s wearing a plaid shirt and a monkey backpack.) The tattoo on her left shoulder is of a kneeling angel looking back. She has weird pointy boobs and her amputated wings are dripping blood. What’s she going to tell him when he asks about that one?
Even though she’d tucked away the fancy ones herself, it could still suprise her to see unrelieved ranks of nana pants in the drawer.
There are masses of toys and equipment around the beds at the back of the ward. Eventually I realise that the kids staying the longest are the ones furthest from the door. I know the clutter is probably because there’s no storage for all the things you need to entertain sick children, but I can’t help seeing rows of little nests.
Mostly the kids have their mums with them. The dads tend to be there for an episode of surgery; for the long haul, it’s the mothers. In our ward there is a girl of about five who has to wear a helmet when she’s out of bed. I hear a doctor talking about her lovely nature - “the seizures haven’t knocked that out of her!” There are other siblings at home, and her mother leaves late every night and arrives early every morning.
There is quite a lot of laughter, and I catch two giggling women ogling a hunky doctor. One is the mother of the little girl opposite us. I talk to her for three days but we never find out each other’s names. Her daughter is Alexis. The second woman I meet as she is trying to josh her son out of his anxiety and embarrassment at the loss of his hair. They’re walking past Owen, and she smiles cheekily and says “He’s got no hair and he looks alright!” Later I see her talking to a man in the corridor, tight faced, bad news.
I talk quite a bit to the parents of a boy in our ward who’s had the same surgery as Jethro. It didn’t fix him and he’s still having surgery to fix his hips at four and a half. Painful surgery, by the sounds of it. I tell my mother in law when she visits and she looks at me intensely and says “Was it the same surgeon?” It wasn’t, and we smile at each other.
I spend three nights on a recliner chair while Jethro’s on a morphine drip. It shits me that every time Owen sits on the chair he tells me how comfortable it is. It is a comfortable chair, but it is a shit bed. The back doesn’t lock into position when it’s reclined, so it starts to swallow you when you roll over. The night we get home Owen goes to bed before me. I climb into our beautiful warm bed, with its lovely sheets and big fat pillows and sigh.
Here he is just before the surgery, which seems to have worked. People have been very sympathetic and helpful, dropping ’round dinners, spoiling Sage. We are so very lucky.
There’s a photo set of the trip at flickr.
The bus driver says “Not your bag love?” as I climb the steps. There’s a bulging green shopping bag behind the bus stop seat. I tell him I think it must belong to one of those terrorists. He looks at me funny. I watch him to see if he’s calling up the hotline.
A freshly lit cigarette smells fantastic to me, but the man behind me on the bus smells vilely of old ashtrays. I have to stop reading my Helen Garner book because he’s making me queasy, just when it was getting really exciting.
I walk past the ex-junkies outside the methadone clinic. One, just arriving, is complimented on how well he looks. He does, and he smiles and thanks the other guy before going up the stairs behind the blank door. Good on them both.
The slim assistant in the patisserie tells me she has started the Atkins Diet today. I tell her she is an idiot. She has dark honey coloured skin - really, it’s honey coloured - and green eyes. She speaks in French to the squat lady who runs the joint. She thinks bread is fine, but alcohol is tehibol. She stares at my swollen stomach as she says “Au revoir, madame!” I guess six months pregnant makes you a “madame”.
There’s a nearly toothless man in the middle of the pedestrian crossing. He’s not old, though. He starts talking to a woman with long dark loose hair and white clothes in front of me. Imagine being able to wear white clothes to work! The man’s angry because the cars he’s daring to run him over won’t do him the fucken favour.
I look at the big cranes and count six concrete trucks. Just up the hill and along the path now. I look in through the gap in the fence and see the crane’s wheels are off the ground and it’s balanced on little poles. I know they have a name, but I can’t remember that bit of my son’s excavator book. I drift off during the excavator book, but my voice is still expressive and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t notice. I think I would prefer it if the wheels were on the ground.
