Author: Elisabeth

What news today?

The beginning of the year and the newspapers are at it already. The headlines read: ‘Retail splurges put heat on rates.’ So now again we must panic. The news sensationalises. If the retail sector had been slow over Christmas, the headlines would read something like, ‘Confidence low as retail takes a nose dive.’

Panic. We must all panic. Every day we become overwrought that doom and gloom is just around the corner. The newspapers feed on misadventure, despair, and anxiety or on the occasional report of treacly sweet goodness: ‘Child rescues baby sister from house fire’.

Years ago when I joined a class on non-fiction writing where the emphasis was on techniques of journalism, I found the simplicity of it all ‘under-whelming’. The philosophy held we must report the salient features of an event first and run down the peripheral details point by point in an ever decreasing spiral of significance so that it mattered not whether the first sentence alone were published. Only the first and maybe second sentences mattered. They provided the bald facts. Thereafter all details became mere embellishments and the editor would use his/her discretion as to whether they remained in the published report.

This discretion it seemed was based on competing news reports. The value of news was rated for its sensational qualities and also on the pressure to advertise. If someone paid more for their advertisement of course it would be given pride of place against the news of the day, which did not pay in itself. The news however was intended as a money spinner in that it was reported in such a way as to draw in readers, and more readers encouraged more advertisers. Those who bought advertising space wanted as many of their advertisements read and acted upon, so the news itself became a saleable commodity. I imagine all of this still applies today, even perhaps more so.

Generally, I read only the front page every morning first thing after I have picked up the plastic covered newspaper from the driveway and brought it inside. I unwrap it from its Gladwrap as I walk down the corridor, that is when I can. Sometimes the Gladwrap refuses to unstick and I must take to it with a knife. It is a morning ritual akin to the business of making that first cup of tea or coffee. It is the business of waking up.

Once, not so many years ago, I read the newspaper in a cursory sort of way. I peeled the pages one from the other and scanned each article. Some I read through from beginning to end, most I only skimmed.

I have never been a newspaper reader, except on weekends when I like to pore over The Age and The Australian’s Review of books. Here I find something of interest. My husband on the other hand, even as he might complain about the thin quality of newspaper reporting, will read the newspaper from beginning to end every day.

‘What news today?’ I might ask and sometimes he will oblige me with an answer. Other times he will tell me that if I want to know I should read it for myself. My husband hates to have his brain ‘picked over’. Fair enough, I say. Lazy people like me who cannot be bothered trawling through the so-called news of the day might look for shortcuts, and ask their partners for a summary, but should they be so indulged?

Our children tend to read the news on line, as does my husband, more and more. This is particularly useful for updates on events as they happen. Even I have taken to reading the news on line. This time last year when the bushfire season had begun, I focused on the areas in Healesville, in Badger and Chum Creeks where my husband’s family live.

The selfishness of my newspaper reading is obvious. I will always read if it pertains to me and mine. But I cannot abide the sensationalising of news, particularly on such massive events as the economy, which is not simply driven by local events but by global events. More often than not it feels completely outside of my control. I am not a frugal person.

I am one of the wastrels. I should be more careful, but I cannot be bothered to get into penny-pinching and miserliness. Life is too short, I tell myself, to worry too long about the debt we will be left with in our old age. As long as we can work and earn enough money on which to survive, we will survive.

It is a blinkered view I know, but if I allowed myself to worry about all the things I could worry about daily, I doubt that I could go on. I doubt that I could allow myself to spend the few precious hours I use each weekend on my reading and writing. I doubt that I could allow myself to celebrate my children’s birthdays. I doubt that I could allow myself to enjoy good food and wine. I doubt that I could have allowed myself my recent trip to the Writers House for a week of reading, walking, writing and writerly conversation. I doubt that I could allow myself to tend to all the things in this house that currently need repair.

The list goes on. The list is endless. And finally to my list of all the things I would not do were I to allow myself to indulge in thoughts of not wasting a thing in this life, of not indulging myself in any excesses, and instead worrying about all the things that are wrong, I doubt that I would be able to blog as I do.

Blogging swallows time. It is almost purely self indulgent and although I can claim that I learn many things on line through other people’s blogs and that I have met many wonderful and fascinating people in this virtual world, which has its underpinnings in the real world – most of the bloggers with whom I communicate are real, however well concealed their identities – I cannot claim that the activity of blogging is essential to survival. Though it does assist the quality of my internal life, I am not sure it helps much else.

I have talked myself into the hole of non-existence when I allow myself to speculate like this. After a while it gets me nowhere and so I must stop before I persecute myself further. My guts begin to ache, the well of anxiety in my hips – that’s where I feel it most – rises to the base of my stomach and eventually reaches my mid sternum, by which time I must take a deep breath and change topics.

Life is plotless: Things Happen

Something in Truth and Lies’s latest posting, on Amos Oz’s Rhyming Life and Death has inspired me to include this short story here, to back up my view that life is plotless: I called it ‘Things Happen’. It was published in Island Magazine

Things Happen

My friend invited us to dinner. It was hot. She had left the side doors open to catch the breeze. One of her rabbits hopped through and skittered across the carpet.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘My rabbits are toilet-trained.’
My friend served wild duck soaked in red wine and garnished with slivers of prosciutto. She had stuffed it with pine nuts and raisins.
Once again she argued with my husband over the meaning of life.
‘How can you say something’s meant to be as if someone’s in charge? Life’s not like that. Things just happen.’ He was glaring at her across the table. Her cheeks were flushed from too much wine.
‘It’s presumptuous to assume it all stops and starts with us,’ she said, sticking the carving knife into the side of her duck and sawing furiously as though the meat were tough. It fell away like crumbling cheese.

That last time I saw my friend I was still bleeding. When I went to the toilet, and saw the pad soaked through to my dress, I realised I must have been dripping through onto her seat cushion. The cushion was coloured a dark burgundy like my dress and the room was lit with candles. I hoped she would not notice.
I had lost the baby three days earlier. The doctor called it the lottery of pregnancy.
‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘You can try again’. He took me into his surgery to scrape out the left over bits but the bleeding went on.

My friend wrote poetry: long tortured pieces about the mad people she met through her work. She was a doctor, but I could not tell her about the baby or the bleeding that night. I was still picking over my grief.

One evening, months before my miscarriage, my friend came home and found two of her rabbits gone. She lived close to the city but her house was opposite parkland that ran all the way down to the Yarra River. Foxes lived by its banks in a maze of dens hidden among the ti-tree and gums.
My friend offered two of the surviving rabbits to me. She wanted them to breed. They would be safer in our house, away from the river and the park. But we never loved them enough. Not like my friend. We left them outside in the backyard in tight wire cages and their toenails grew long from never being able to dig or run free.

‘The pregnancy took but for some reason the egg and the sperm did not fit properly,’ the doctor had said, pointing to the empty sac on the ultrasound screen. ‘It’s just one of those things.’
I did not tell him how I had named the baby Horatio, after the Roman general who held the bridge. I did not tell him he was a boy. You’re not supposed to know those things, not at ten weeks. But I knew.

The rabbits mated. My friend showed me how to cordon off a section of the cage. When the mother rabbit was about ready to deliver her babies, my friend told me, I would notice her rip out lumps of fur from her body which she would use to line the cage.
‘Then you separate the male from the female. Male rabbits are likely to damage their young.’
There were five babies curled up together like pinky mice, their eyes covered with a thin shield of skin. My friend warned me not to touch the babies for several days, otherwise the mother might refuse to feed them.

Weeks before I miscarried, my friend came to our house for dinner. With each glass of wine her voice grew louder. She loved to argue, especially with men. We joked about the dangers of sitting beside her. She made her point by grabbing the nearest person at the table in a headlock and shaking him till he begged for release. She was strong, my friend, with long pointy fingers weighed down by silver rings.

My friend was born a twin but only she survived the birth. Her brother was born and died thirty minutes later. He became her shadow. She liked to think he was there with her all the time. At work meetings, as a laugh, she would insist on occupying two seats, one for herself, one for her twin.

My friend never had children of her own. She had wanted them, she told me, but they never happened.

In her fiftieth year, five years earlier, my friend had bought a red sports car, sleek, contoured and close to the ground. She drove it with the sun -roof down, her green scarf streaking behind in the wind. An Isadora Duncan scarf. My friend laughed when I told her how, in the 1920s at the height of her dancing career, the scarf on Isadora’s swan-like neck got caught up in the spokes of her car’s wheel and strangled her.

My friend wore glasses, with lenses thick like the bottom of milk bottles.
‘I couldn’t bear to go blind,’ she said, lifting her glasses to rub at her eyes. ‘I’d rather die first.’
At night she sat close to the computer screen composing letters of complaint to the editor, her last surviving rabbit, a barren female, hopping under her feet.
‘Silence is a crime,’ my friend said.

My friend bought tickets for a jazz concert the week after our dinner. ‘You’re sick. Go to bed,’ her husband said.
‘I’m not wasting my money.’ She closed her eyes, threw back her head and soaked in the music.

A bug crawled inside my friend and took over. It traveled along her blood stream letting off a poisonous gas. Within hours of the concert she went into a coma.
‘We need to make an oxygen chamber,’ the doctors said. ‘This bacteria hates oxygen.’ They hacked away at her dead flesh. Peeled off her right shoulder, part of her leg and stomach. My friend’s body swelled like a balloon as it struggled to defend her. The doctors spared her the pain by anesthetic and split her skin from shoulder to wrist to stop the constriction in her fingers and gangrene. Through it all she slept.
‘This hateful bug,’ her husband said, wiping my friend’s face with the back of his hand. ‘We must beat it.’

My bleeding stopped while my friend slept. I found a get-well card in a bookshop, a ‘bug’ card, depicting a green bug sitting up in bed, ill. But I did not buy it. It was too raw. I wrote her a letter instead: ‘What talks we’ll have when all this is over.’

The nurse came and washed my friend’s hair. Only her family could visit. Her husband was certain she enjoyed the water’s warmth, the touch. But the doctors insisted she was now brain dead and could feel nothing.
Without the machine, she breathed only three times a minute. She needed fourteen. She could not speak. She could not eat or shit. She was lonely and in despair, her husband said, but the doctors were certain she could feel nothing.

My friend died in the afternoon when the temperature in Melbourne reached 40.3, the hottest November day for 86 years. They turned off her life support. She did not tell me she was leaving. I did not hear a whisper.

We buried her and held a memorial. Tea and cucumber sandwiches. She would have preferred a glass of red.

Last night I saw my friend in a dream, sitting at her kitchen table, laughing, full bellied roars. She was wearing her green scarf, loosely draped around her neck. She sat, legs akimbo, as always, arms flying to right and left, as she remonstrated with us about the meaning of life, then grabbed hold of the nearest person at the table and pulled him to the ground.
‘Submit,’ she said. ‘On the count of five, I win.’