Author: Elisabeth

Last morning in Black Rock

We ripped out the orange shag pile, a relic of my brother’s generosity when he owned a carpet store and urged us to cover the bare boards for our comfort.

I shall not miss this place. The circular shower rose over the bath, another relic from by gone days, its gas heater overhead. You needed to feed the machine twenty cent coins in a constant stream to ensure enough hot water for every wash.

Always the fear it might explode if you failed to get enough coins inside its greedy mouth. Its long blue pilot flame shone bright whenever you turned the switch and then the roar of ignition. 

Every morning, I stood under the thin stream of water and quaked at the warning in capitals overhead: DO NOT TURN ON GAS UNLESS FLAME IS PRESENT. DO NOT LET GAS RUN WITHOUT COINS OR FLAME.

The invisible gas with its sickly-sweet smell, a trap for the unwary. Left free to coil its way around our bathroom. It might seep under doors and some unwitting person might light a cigarette and blow us all up.

You’d have thought it a pleasure to live over the road from the ocean. It was not. Beach Road ran in front of this place beyond the Clock Tower and roared daily with its surfeit of cars. In summer it was hazardous to cross unless you walked several houses beyond to the traffic lights. Then a long wait for the green man. 

I had imagined living over the road from a beach for years. How it might offer a view of blue ocean and sky but all we were offered in this low-lying shack, ready for demolition, was a clump of tea trees and scrub behind a thin wire fence. You could not enter the beach from the section that fronted our place. 

I cannot say why it bothered me, but we lived in this house over the winter months and in those days Beach Road Black Rock was not inhabited by rich holiday makers. It was merely a down and out suburb for the poor of pocket. 

My life is equally constrained. At night I dreamed of attending to an elderly couple. Friend of a friend’s. An old man who was once a medical doctor who was losing his ability to contain feelings and would at times, and unpredictably, hit out at his wife. And the wife, frail and intelligent, was no longer able to maintain a tidy house. They needed my help. 

Are these reflections of me, of my struggle, or representative of the last boxing class I attended yesterday where I talked of my sense of being the disabled one, not because I could not box, the jab, double cross and hook, but because I lack the power of folks twenty years younger, whose rage you could hear in their thumping on leather.

My rage still sits below my collar bone, behind my rib cage. A bundle of nerves rather like the gas from the heater in Black Rock that needs an offering to show itself.

If you have no coins you shower in the cold. If you run out of coins before you’ve rinsed the soap from your body, you suffer the sticky consequences or the cold.

On the radio the other day when they talked about the human propensity to tell lies, how necessary it is to lie for the harmony of our communities, I relished the idea that lies can come in colours.

A rainbow of colours. The white lies with which we are all familiar. So essential to survival. To be polite and spare people’s feelings. A watering down of the truth to spare ourselves and others some type of discomfort and pain.

Grey lies to cover our mistakes. Blue lies to preserve the interests of a collective or group. Red lies told out of spite and a desire for revenge. Purple lies out of humility and a wish to stay modest and less visible.

So, it seems, we might lie for personal gain, or to avoid punishment, or because we get some pleasure out of deceiving people. All sorts of reasons to lie. 

And if, as the BBC program discusses, Dutch people are less prone to tell lies and also, or so a would-be comedian from Britain reported, less likely to laugh at other people’s jokes, then what does this say about my ancestrally based propensities?

I can lie with the best of them. Say the right things when the situation demands. But I also feel this profound urge much of the time to say what I think. Not in my work, that’s far more thoughtful and constrained, but among friends. Equally, from what people in this BBC program argue, I, like all people, am not even aware of the frequency with which I lie, or keep things to myself. 

Look to the skies

‘I talk to God, but the sky is empty.’ Sylvia Plath

I share Plath’s view. The sky is empty of God, but there are other objects flying around, intentional, and otherwise. Planes, birds, bats, and further upwards, there’s space junk, the detritus of human ingenuity gone wrong.

Call in the gleaners, those who collect abandoned objects, but space junk might serve little purpose other than as the term suggests, as junk.

On the day of my father’s funeral, his coffin rested in the central aisle of the Church of Our Lady of Assumption in Cheltenham. He had reformed in his last years, not drinking, and attending bible study classes with my mother. He even studied Hebrew. He was back to his fascination with religion which he held as a young man on arrival in Australia before he abandoned it for a type of atheism, or at best agnosticism, when life became too difficult. 

Like Sylvia Plath, I like to imagine my father could not reconcile the idea of God in the sky with the rigours of his life. Father of nine children in a foreign country where people decried his accent and he needed to work ten times harder than the locals, to get anywhere. 

Not indigenous folks. He never paid them attention. But my father’s ancestors from centuries ago were no doubt colonists. In turn his arrival in this country in search of a better life, a voluntary refugee, was a colonisation of sorts. 

It took only a short time before he had earned enough money working as a carpenter in his early days to buy the block of land on which he built his first Australian home, using hand tools only. A house which remains today in Nepean Street in Greensborough. It still holds its niche, a rectangular recess in the side wall near the front door where he once propped a statue of Our Lady. 

One of my brothers tells the story of how our father bought the statue from Pellegrini Religious Supplies in the city and asked the shop assistant to prise off the halo, in my imagination a wire sequence of tiny metal stars. Whether it was because he thought her less than holy or whether to help her fit her cast inside his alcove, I cannot say. I have no memory of the event still a toddler, but I can see him do this on his way to a renunciation of the faith he entered to marry my mother who would not countenance marriage to a non-Catholic. 

It helped us sidestep the ignominy of what priests called a mixed marriage. A most serious event in the eyes of the church which, like so many tribes, seeks to keep its own together.

The fact that the man I came to marry was once a Catholic appealed to me such that I have often wondered whether the expectation of my tribe carried in my blood still lingered in my choice of life partner. I cannot say this for sure. If he had been practising as a catholic, I would have turned right off. 

His lapsed state appealed and my sense we shared an ancestry of ideas and might understand one another better for it.

The early impulses to pray to God for all the things I want, need, or hope for, linger. Muttering under my breath, I find I cannot stop myself, ‘Please God,’ even when the sky is empty. 

Please God, in whom I disbelieve, help us out here. Give us the thing we most need or want or value. Please don’t let us down. 

Whenever I make a birthday wish over candles on a cake and draw in breath to blow them out in one gust, the desire hits me. 

One breath, one blow and all the candles out at once to make my secret wish. It has more chance of succeeding if I keep it secret. One breath and one complete snuffling out of those pin pricks of flame. 

I love birthday cakes for this reason. The promise of a wish more likely to succeed in the superstition of my childhood’s mind. These days my two loudest wishes are the same and although they are yet to come to fruition, and I still cannot tell you here what they are or it would ruin any chance of their fulfilment. 

Part of the myth of blowing out candles at birthdays and making wishes, they must be held in secret. Rather like the idea the person who forms an idea for writing a book does well to keep the idea to themselves, at least for some time while it flourishes into some workable piece of writing. Otherwise it will lead to nothing.

Something of these treasured wishes held firm in my mind keep me confident. One day now. And whether the God of my disbelief allows it, or fate or the random chaotic nature of life, I cannot say, but I strive anyway.

Look to the skies for this is where we locate the God of our imaginings, up high, mid cloud or ahead of the clouds. 

An accidental click on my mouse and my writing disappeared briefly and in its place a picture of my mother, and her sister and five brothers when they were in their later years on one of their rare get togethers pops up. Company my mother loved with a passion. Her beloved siblings. 

You can see how much they cared for one another. If I compare this to a photo of my siblings altogether on one of our rare get togethers, I wonder about our mutual affection. 

Too many children make it harder to connect. Or so is my experience. I’m dubious when I read stories of large happy families in the newspaper. Large families are a breeding ground for jealousy and deprivation. One lot of parents cannot manage all those babies in turn and still attend to the toddlers ahead and the older ones. 

Something must give. Someone feels left out. But the message might be akin to the words the priest intoned at church: ‘the family that prays together stays together’. As if the invisible God in the sky or the statue of Mary with her halo removed could hold us altogether. 

It could not. We have grown into separate worlds. Unlike my mother’s family. All of them dead now, but in their lifetimes, even though many of them on opposite sides of the world, they all came together with joy and longing. 

My father’s family not. They were raised in multiple religions, religions that changed like the fashion. My father might well have been confused.

Better no religion, I say, even as my mother’s words pop into my brain. How can a child develop any sense of morality without religion to guide them? And I think of the wars that run throughout time, especially now, and at their root some form of religion. 

Like the story of Gulliver’s Big-Endians in Lilliput who believed the big end of the egg should be cracked. Unlike their counterparts, the Little Endians, who believed the other end should be the way in. 

Human beings find some way of seeking division. Even as, like porcupines we cling together for warmth, just as we pull apart when the prickles are too intense.

Still, we hope to find God in the sky. And we hope the sky is not empty, not only a God of our choice, but of birds who fly overhead unimpeded. A reminder that the earth spins on its axis for generations to come and that we in our tawdry lifetimes have not added too much to the damage of our ancestors.

A future for our children whatever Gods might inhabit the skies.