Month: August 2023

‘I cannot live without my soul’

‘Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. But don’t leave me here alone in this abyss where I cannot find you. Oh God! It is unutterable. I can live without my life, but I cannot live without my soul.’ Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights.

Scene one: My parents kept only one photo of me as a baby, one my older sister reckons must be of me given the fact in this photo my mother wears a summer dress, and I was born in November.

My brothers closest to me were born in the March and April when the weather would have precluded such a dress.

My mother could not remember which of her babies she carried in her arms in this photograph, but I like to think of it was me.

It’s an uneasy certainty given it’s not certain. Despite my conviction when I was a baby, my mother loved me. 

To prove it, I asked one day if I could buy a butterscotch bar from the shop. Just one, for me, and she said,

‘No’.

I asked again. 

Her brow was furrowed. She stooped over a basket of washing, overloaded with stuff our family of eleven wore.

She had her latest baby to consider. He, cradled in the room next door asleep. Still she had no will power against an older insistent child who wanted only sweetness.

And although she had no money, the tension fell in my direction and she relented. 

The butterscotch was soon mine. The memory of its smooth buttery sweetness on my tongue a reminder of her love. 

In those days love was simple. You felt it, especially when things went your way.

I could not say the same of my father. To him I was invisible. Just one of the many children who scrambled at his feet or scattered at the thud of his footfall in the hallway each evening when he returned from work.

Scene two

Boarding school. A fifteen-year-old girl falls in love with her Latin teacher, a nun. The schoolgirl sits in the chapel morning and evening and does not pray to God.

Instead, her heart flutters with thoughts of when she might next see the nun; of when she might next slip into the sacristy where the nun arranges flowers for Mass. When she might offer her favourite nun a chance to share her company on the pretext of being a good girl who likes to help. 

Does her favourite nun hear the beating of the girl’s heart? Does she detect any of the passion running through those young veins? A passion that has nowhere to go other than through the girl’s body, already hot with a desire for which she has no release.

All she can do is write in her green journal in the boarder’s study each evening after she has rote learned her Latin declensions. 

Oh mea Lesbia. 

But to be a lesbian is a terror that confuses her. She has not yet directed such feelings towards anyone other than her mother.

Scene three. 

She met him at the bookstore where she worked through the summer holidays. He downstairs, in fiction. She upstairs, in second-hand books. She, with the many of her contemporaries who took on such summer jobs to get by before university began.

He downstairs, a university drop out and full-time employee, who preferred the company of his fellow permanently employed book sellers, who were years older than the girl upstairs. 

Yet one day he noticed her. He called her Frenchy for reasons she could not fathom. He asked her out for reasons she could not fathom. He held her hand on the way to the movie house for reasons she could not fathom. But his affections could sometimes cool towards her and it was nothing for him to disappear for days on end. 

She hoped one Friday after work that they might meet but by the time she had grabbed her handbag and was downstairs in fiction, he was gone.

She walked down Elizabeth Street to the station, bound for home. Unbearable longing caked her every step. She saw the people around her; busy office workers clattering on low stilettos or in the leather soled shoes of professional men in suits, all of them bound home.

She too bound for home but so heavy of heart, she could not bear to go on living inside this mind that ached with loneliness. 

Scene four

All these accumulated longings piled high in her heart. Despite them, she married, held babies in her arms one after another. Took photos and loved those babies and the man she married. But the longings remained. 

Her analyst was different from all those who had come before. Her analyst listened to her. Took her inside, gave an impression of singular devotion, even if it lasted only fifty minutes of every day during the working weeks, year after year. Her analyst showed her what it was to love and be loved. 

Still the longings remained. 

There was once a man, illicit as the sweets she stole as a child from the milk bar owner. Illicit as the pages she plagiarised as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl desperate to sound erudite in her European history essays. Illicit as the betrayal of all others she knew and loved. 

And this love, too, went unrequited. 

A writer is someone who pays attention to the world. Susan Sontag.

My analyst’s room was a sunroom, separated from her double storey home by a wooden veranda. She lived in a suburban side street, walking distance from the beach. It was surrounded by windows and took in the sun. Cosy even in winter.

At the end of the bed she used as her analytic couch, she placed a vase of flowers, fresh each week. Gerberas on long stalks held up by green florist wire. Shop bought roses and stately bunches of lilies. Whatever was in season. 

I visited this room almost daily for twelve years, apart from during the long breaks over Christmas and Easter and when she took time off mid-year for two weeks at a stretch.

I rarely looked around her room, or at her, too embarrassed by my physical presence to manage the assaults of shame that came upon me, especially during the early years. I never asked to use her toilet which was outside the sunroom in the garden. I could not bear she should see my body move.

We talked about this fear and my decision to visit toilets in the nearby shopping centre rather than use hers, as a throwback to the days when the nuns gave an impression of never eating and of not needing toilets, a sign of virtue. To have a body that visited a toilet was to feel shame. 

It’s hard to see myself as I was then, from the outside.

I scurried like a possum into sessions and looked only in the direction in which I headed. I rarely glanced at Mrs Milanova and dived onto her couch for safety, free from her gaze.

I craved her attention and sensed I had it all the time I was there. I felt her presence and her interest with an intensity I have never known before or since. She gave me all her time and energy.

Thirty years have passed and I view the world through different eyes. Now I dare to look around me and see others, including Mrs Milanova whom I rarely meet these days, but hold in mind. 

This day then is the culmination of what I describe as a bad week.

It began on the Monday with a police person arriving at my door to examine a car I had reported the day before.

This car a 1996 Corolla, had clocked just over 100,000 kilometres but was well past its use by date for energy efficiency and safety, but proved useful when we needed an extra car. So, we kept it parked in a side street near to our house. An embarrassment.

Years before our daughters were grown and first learning to drive, my husband feared we might wind up with a line of wrecks in the side street belonging to our children who could not afford decent cars at the time. 

The only wreck that remains is this once white corolla, now so stained, the police could not detect fingerprints on the outside or inside the window.

Would be thieves had ripped apart the front console in a bid to get the wires fixed to start the car, without success, and so the car remains, an eye sore on the street and one we must deal with soon.

The police knocked at my door, and I answered while mid-way through my bank transaction. I had rung my daughter earlier, the one in whose name the broken-into car remains, to let her know. 

She did not answer, so I left a text telling her about the car.

Minutes later I received a message from someone whom I assumed was this daughter, though in retrospect the sender did not use my daughter’s name, and only said something about having a new number as her old phone was waterlogged.

I made the mistake of texting said number and asking if it was her permanent number. The person purporting to be my daughter, whom I believed was my daughter, messaged back to say it was permanent and ‘she’ was having a hard time getting a couple of bills that needed payment that day.

Foolish me, I messaged back to ask if I could help. Perhaps cover the accounts and she could later reimburse me.

That’d be helpful, my pseudo daughter texted back. I’ll send details.

Then I proceeded to go through the transaction, even as my pseudo daughter asked for $1950.00 in one payment to a strange name with an odd reference number.

The police interrupted at my door before I had a chance to press send. I returned five minutes later, after the police confirmed there was nothing they could do about the car. No CCTV footage and no fingerprints, the incomplete transaction was almost ready to go. The transaction was still in place.

The bank sent a security code then and I named my daughter as remitter.

I pressed send when my account froze. A message popped up from the bank saying there was suspicious activity, and I needed to ring the bank to clarify.

First up, I called my son in law, to ask if his wife’s phone was broken. Not at all, he said, and I knew I’d been scammed.

The rest is history, as in the long phone call to the fraud people at the bank and my sadness at the fact money had left my account. I had been tricked.

The bank person said they’d do their best to recover the money, but it might take thirty days.

As it was, the money was back in my account within three days

The scammers wiped all calls from my phone, but I’m grateful the bank was onto this activity, as much as I felt foolish for falling for the trick of the ‘Hey Mum’ text message. 

The day deteriorated further, or at least the next day. The next day my younger daughter who lives with us had noticed the cat, who has lived with us for twenty years, was poorly.

The cat had been thin and emaciated for some time but always ate well and continued to live a cat-like life of sleep and occasional demands for cuddles. After my daughter noticed the cat move to the garden and curl into a ball to sleep outside in the freezing cold, she reckoned it had gone off to die.

My daughter decided then to take the cat to the vet who agreed it was time to put the cat down, a gentle euthanasia rather than a slow cold death in the garden.

This cat had started its life as a feral, born in the bushes surrounding a car park and rescued from children who threatened its nest, by hitting it with sticks. My elder daughter rescued the cat and four others kitten, including their mother.

All cats were rehomed after visits to a vet for treatment and de-sexing and this one lived with her cat sister here for many years.

Mollie cat died during covid, and the other cat, Nousha (below) hung on till this end.

It was sad but also a relief. Noush was tired of living.

It was also a relief when the money returned to my bank account. It will be a relief when we sort out the damaged car and then hopefully this week will be over.

Just now I spent fifteen minutes in the kitchen with my younger daughter and her boyfriend. My husband was buried in the newspaper but he too participated as we tried to answer the 25 questions on The Age Quiz. 

To my mind we did not do well, getting 16 out of 25 correct, but that’s the way of it. You need to practise such quizzes and over time you improve. Still it was fun pitching our minds together to answer questions like how often the Eiffel tower gets painted. 

Trivia of life but nothing compared to our recent trials which are also trivial compared to the trauma of childhood everywhere and the pain that can lead some people into therapy or analysis. And that first led me up the footpath to Mrs Milanova’s house in 1986.