Be concerned but not alarmed

One of our cats has gone missing,
the grey one, the boy.  The one who
is most persistent in his hunger and calls for attention.  My husband tells me this morning, in that combined serious
but also light hearted way of his that says ‘be concerned but not alarmed’, ‘the
cat has not been around for two days’. 
We both know that our cats have a
tendency, each one of them to stray from time to time, for days on end.  And usually they reappear.  But I have no memory of the boy disappearing.  Besides, I’ve been away myself for the
past four days at a conference and I wonder if the two are connected.
I am not the chief carer of the
cats.  I share responsibility with
my husband and with whichever of our daughters are around, but the cat might
have resented the disruption to our house hold routine and taken himself off somewhere.
Forgive me for
anthropomorphising.  At this
conference among other things a few people talked about the notion of ‘post
human lives’.  I won’t go all
theoretical on you other than to say, the notion of post human lives has
something to do with the idea that human beings and animals, and machines, as
well as cyber creatures, all organisms, have more in common than we like to
think.  We tend to create
artificial divides here.  That’s a
crude rendering of this idea of the post human which I continually have the
impulse to call ‘subhuman’.
I relish these conferences, the
ones on autobiography and biography, and on what is roughly called life writing
studies, because there are all these people – in Canberra three hundred of them
– who come together from all over the world to talk about the way people think, paint, photograph, sing and write about their own lives and the lives of
others.  And increasingly, there are
people like me who write and theorise more explicitly about their own lives. 
At the conference in a paper on
digital lives, I talked about my blog. 
The hazards, the pitfalls the exquisite joys of blogging, all dressed up
in a skimpy frock of what gets called ‘blogging theory’. 
And now after all the pleasures of
meeting new people, and of crawling around in my head with new ideas and notions, I
find myself fretting for the cat. 
You might recognise him if you saw
him, a grey cat, a large cat, a boy cat, who has been neutered and who perhaps
resents this because sometimes he looks as though he’s scowling.  But he is a loyal cat.  A gift to one of our daughters from one
of her boyfriends several years ago. 
That daughter has since left
home.  That relationship between
boyfriend and girlfriend  is over
but the cat remains in our care, as many animals do after children leave
home.  They might even be considered
to take the place of the children who leave home. 
And there are other dramas and
sadness afoot – too complex, too personal, to on-the-boil to mention here now, but
the cat’s absence stands as a reminder of the temporality of life, and it frightens me.

The stink of summer

A woman fell over in Ikea yesterday, a Moslem woman in a
scarf with a long skirt and wide coat. She had been pushing one of those stub
Ikea trolleys and must have lost her grip on it because there she was on the
floor below the first flight of stairs on the mezzanine crying out in
pain.  She had hurt her leg.  I offered to help, my son in law
offered to lift her but no, she had hurt her ankle and did not want to move. 
An Ikea attendant dressed from top to toe in butter yellow
came to her rescue and we moved on. ‘These stairs are a health hazard,’ I
said.  ‘It’s a wonder people don’t
fall all the time.  The banisters
are too short.’  
Last night at dinner with a small group of old friends we
talked about installing a banister along the walkway into the garden of one of
our friends, who is ill, seriously ill, soon to die.   
But the banister was not so much for
him, he said, as for other friends who visit, some elderly, some unwell, but all
of whom are vulnerable to falling when they walk onto the uneven footpath that
gives access to his house.
Memories return:
The banister that leads down the five or six short steps
onto the concrete path that takes you to the change rooms of the swimming pool
in Camberwell is made of steel, round and cold to touch. It bends to accommodate the slope of
the ground as it moves down the hill beside the pool onto the entrance to the
change rooms. 
The change rooms themselves are underneath the pool.  In the corners of the shower recess
there are long green slimy marks from the constant dripping which I imagine is
the swimming pool slowly leaking into the earth beneath.  The change rooms also stink of
chlorine.  Chlorine is the smell of
summer.
The water at the swimming pool is the bluest of blues.  I do not realise until adulthood that
its colour arises from the colour of the tiles that line its surface.  I had thought as a child it must come
from the stuff that is added to the water, the stuff that gives the water its
peculiar stink, a stink that stays on my skin long after I have returned home
from the pool.   The stink of
summer.
Summer is also the freedom of swimming, an escape from my
father.  He does not swim.  He has diabetes and must take care of
his feet.  He will not go to the
beach for the same reason. 
There could be strange things in the sand, broken bits of
glass, the sharp edge of an abandoned tin can that could cut his feet and if
his feet get cut, he bleeds and if he bleeds from his feet something happens to
his circulation and he could wind up with gangrene and they might chop off his legs. 
How I wish they would chop off his legs, then he would not
be able to walk.  In a wheelchair
he could not visit us in the night. 
My sickly friend from the dinner party last night talked
about death, the need to pay attention. 
He has gone from a round corpulent fellow to a grey shadow
of himself, thin and wan.  He
spends eighteen hours a week on dialysis and cannot drink liquid except in the
form of ice to go with his whiskey. He does not pee anymore he tells me and I
wonder about this.   
Not to pee any
more, not to feel the trickle pass from inside and out into the toilet or for
him against the urinal wall, a strange loss, a loss greater even than the loss
of blood through menopause.
In the change rooms of the swimming pool I notice my first
pubic hairs sprouting there below the V bone above my legs and I fear that
something terrible is happening to me. 
I have not taken in the sight of my mother’s naked body if I have ever seen
it or of my older sister’s and have no idea that such things might happen to me.
My childhood fantasy is that death belongs only to the elderly, those older than me, but not to me.  At the swimming pool I use the silver
steel of the banister as a monkey bar and hang upside down to see the earth
underneath my head.  I do this
repeatedly until my hand slips and I am on the ground with a crash. 
I feel it in my shoulder, the sharp pain that signifies a
broken bone or some other internal damage but I do not tell the pool
people.  Not until I get home do I
complain of the pain to my mother. 
This is a mistake. 
My mother tells my father.  My father goes to examine me.  We do not use doctors in our
house.  Our father sees himself as
the resident medical expert. The worst of it is when he bandages my chest round
and round like a mummy. 
I am ten years old without breasts to speak of but I know
that soon they will be here and my body feels taboo.  Yet
like a parcel handler, my father bandages me up, ready for postage.  
And the woman from Ikea, how is she now?