On boredom

‘Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion’ Haruki Murakami

Boredom, pure and simple but Murakami refers to something else, meaningless exertion, day after day of doing the same thing without understanding its significance. 

There were days in my childhood when life took on a colourless tone, where every move felt laboured under the weight of not knowing what to do, days when my father forced us out of our house into the safety of my brother’s place, semi-detached in red brick in a side street that led through an alley way and countless other streets to the Auburn railway station. 

The house is still there, not far from where I live today, and when I walk past with dogs on their leads, as they sniff around the grass under lamp posts on the narrow nature strip, I check out its proportions against my memory. 

The way it sat there banged up against its identical partner, concrete pathway to the front door which was tucked to one side and invisible from the street. The square of lawn consisted of little more than a patch of green bordered by flower beds of begonia and geranium. The stock standard flowers of my childhood. They looked after themselves.

My brother lived in this house with his young wife, a woman who eclipsed us all with her foreign beauty. Her clean round face free of the blemishes that beset me as a soon-to-be teenager. She dressed in an elegance that spoke to serious care and she helped my brother to rise above the dishevelled state of his own youthful neglect into something better, while the rest of us, my sisters and his younger brothers languished behind layers of dirt and disinterest in all but our schoolwork. 

Schoolwork was all I enjoyed, but on one such day in my brother’s house even my schoolwork could not help me. We were bang smack in the middle of holidays and no one had homework then.

During holidays you were meant to play, have fun, go to new places, with your parents, take trips into the city with friends like some of the popular girls at my school, or make time for activities like ice skating at St Mauritz in St Kilda.

Such experiences needed money and parental supervision, none of which we had in those days when my mother took herself off to work to raise what little money she could, and my father floated at home on yet another bender. We four kids in the middle made do at my brother’s house trying to keep the place tidy in the same way my brother and his young bride left it once they too took themselves off to work. 

One of the younger brothers lost himself in books, another took himself into the garden to explore the insect life. My sisters were young enough to make up imaginary games with dolls or other pleasurable preoccupations while I looked out the window onto a rain-soaked street and nursed my boredom like a broken arm.

There’s a television series doing the rounds that features a sensory deprivation tent. The character in the movie who enters the tent then enters new worlds. What fun. 

When I was a kid in my own version of a sensory deprivation tent, I could not kick start my imagination into anything other than boredom eked out of every moment and stretched to kill time. 

I walked over to the kitchen sink and wiped it shiny clean so that it sparkled the way my sister in law left it in the morning before work. I marvelled that she could keep her kitchen so clean. Nothing left behind on the bench beyond the toaster. And bread bin. An empty bread bin which made my stomach rumble at the left-over smells as I lifted the lid and looked for crumbs. 

We ate the last slices toasted at breakfast and my brother said we’d need to wait till he came home with something for dinner. He did not want us to cook anything from the cupboard for fear of the mess we might make in his kitchen, his new wife’s domain and so that one obvious activity – the preparation of food – became another activity denied in my sensory deprivation tent.

At such times it’s hard to form memories. Memories come from events that are loaded with feelings. On this day I looked down on my knees and marvelled at the shape of bones as they turned the corner to the rest of my legs to my sandshoes below. 

I wore a woollen skirt, a hand me down from my elder sister. Tight now, it bunched around my hips, and I needed to straighten it so that it sat comfortably. Otherwise, the wool scratched. I wore long socks that covered my legs to the nape of my knees. The gap in between where the cold air grabbed was annoying, as if there was a draft in my deprivation tent where sensations could sneak through. I wanted to numb myself to all sensation so that time might pass, and the day end and I could be somewhere else that held meaning, some promise in this otherwise drab world in my brother’s house where I dared not imagine life.

In moments like these it was hard to locate myself. To feel the contours of my mind and body. To sense myself as a person who had reason for being and could go on being. I was as transparent and ephemeral as the daddy long legs that crawled across the carpet to its hole in the corner of the lounge. 

My sister-in-law would be displeased at the sight of such a creature, and I had the impulse to swat it, but I also had a sense that this creature carried a soul and heart. This creature should live. 

So, I let it be and watched the knobbles on its long legs, the place which I imagined were its knees. as it sidled along the wall to the darkest corner and a crack in the sideboard where it finally disappeared. 

When you’re young and bored, when life offers you no sense of amusement or purpose, when you are helpless to the endless ticking of the clock and the inertia that comes from having nothing to do and no one to tell you where to go or how to spend your hours, you enter a limbo state in which your arms become sludge. It gets hard to stir yourself, to engage with the world. 

I was in the in-between state of early childhood like my two younger sisters stooped over their dolls in one corner of the lounge room in contrast to my older brothers who made a point of action into books or the outside world, while even my imagination let me down, and I tried to enter my tent of sensory deprivation to create a numbness akin to how it feels when you’re dead.

Only I was not yet dead. 

Listening for ghosts

There was not much traffic as I stepped out into the middle of the road. I could not be bothered walking all the way to the traffic lights, which I saw some way in the distance and well out of my way.

I wove through this traffic easily but when I reached halfway, the cars that had moved through slowly like Brown’s cows, were now replaced by a convoy of fast paced motorbikes. The roar of the engines echoed from the underside of the metal roof tracks on the rooftop that formed a bridge for the trains above.

I managed to dodge them and laughed to myself when I saw one old bike driver spit out his phlegm into the gutter. The wind blew it back up at him and it landed on his coat. He almost veered off the road in an effort to wipe it off.

Serves him right, I thought. Disgusting habit. No sooner had I savoured this thought than a collection of bicycles streaked through, followed by a number of mounted horses.

The road was an obstacle course and I wondered would I ever get through, or would I inevitably be knocked over.

Such is the nature of my dreaming at the moment. I prepare to be knocked over by life. It seems too hard. Too much stuff creeping in at the seams, and too many memories invade my space.

Last week I went with two of my sisters on a tour of our old school with about twenty other women. My sisters and I were by far the oldest. None of our contemporaries from the sixties and seventies were there, only one from the eighties and the rest from the nineties, including one girl who went to Vaucluse the year the nuns decided to close down the school.

Vaucluse was a convent for ladies run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus and steeped in the traditions of this teaching order, a brave strong academic tradition, the female equivalent of the Jesuits. The school began in the early 1880s and for a time was the oldest girls school in the southern hemisphere, but they closed it down for want of students.

The school had always been the poor cousin of its sister school, Genezzano, in Kew. And we, my sisters and I, felt this deeply.

The sporty girls played in competition matches against Gen, and our younger but richer sister school invariably won. Our school attracted the poorer Catholic families of Melbourne, those who wanted a convent education for their daughters but could not afford the higher fees of the prestigious Genezzano.

I was struck by the disparity of our memories, not only those of my sisters and I, but also, the younger women.
‘This was where the Sacred Heart dormitory stood,’ I said when we passed upstairs and gathered on what was once a balcony but has since been closed in to form a few small classrooms.

I could tell the dormitory by its ceiling and its position near the stairs, just as I could tell the year twelve classroom, the room we then called Matriculation. The younger women remembered what I thought was the Sacred Heart dormitory as the secretarial room, the room which my generation once called Commercial. For me Commercial stood where the library and computer room still stands.

I tried to listen out for ghosts as we traipsed through the corridors that had once been off limits, the house in which the nuns’ small rooms stood, row after row, neat tiny cubicles and I shuddered at the thought of a life lived in so small a space, a single bed in a room the size of an en suite.

Yet I did not feel the shiver of fear I had thought I might have felt travelling over what to me was once almost sacred ground.

The nuns have long gone and now the Christian Brothers have taken over the school. They bought it from the nuns and use it as a year nine campus for the boys from Saint Kevin’s and as a central office for their order.

In place of the few pictures that once adorned the walls of our old school, throughout the main hall there are rows of images of boys who triumph in sporting events.

It was like going back to visit your childhood home now taken over by another family who have moved things to their tastes and wiped away most traces of you and yours.

And yesterday we went to the wedding of a friend’s daughter, a friend whom my husband has known for some forty years, well before the birth of the bride.

There is something in the wedding vows that stir up intense feelings. The ones whose marriages have survived the test of time, can feel triumph, confident in the success of their efforts, however strained. They have managed to get through for better and for worse, while those who have not survived their vows and whose marriages have not held fast must cringe internally.

A friend suggested they should remodel the legal and compulsory words of the marital vows into something like: We promise we will try to stick together, but if we wind up divorcing, we will do so with respect towards one another, despite our differences’.

I consider events at this friend’s house, which is where they held the reception to be a measure of the passage of time. I have been going to birthday parties, to wedding anniversaries and celebrations of all kinds for a number of years here, for over thirty years now.

My husband and I started as newly weds and then as parents of very young children. Our children once came to these functions, too but as they reached adolescence they chose to stay away.

The years roll by and we now attend these events alone, not yet quite elderly but almost.

Many among our generation have retired or are considering retirement. Their children are grown and married, in many cases with children of their own. There was a rush of new little ones at this wedding, the grandchildren of the bride’s relatives. She is the first to marry in her sibship of two.

And now today
‘Go back to your hovel,’ my daughter says when I offer to go out to buy the eggs that we have run out of. ‘And don’t be such a martyr.’

My husband is busy eating the last two eggs and I am trying to write, wracked by the requirement that I attend to my family despite my thoughts to the contrary and their knowledge that they are old enough to attend to themselves.

At this precise moment I hate being me. I hate the pressure I feel I am under to restore everything to order including, the state of my writing room. To make it look like the study I see on certain blogsites of famous writers who work to order, when I am a slob.

My room becomes a storage room for empty shoeboxes, which I stack to one side and the multiple overfilled filing cabinets, necessary for holding my collections.

‘A hovel my daughter calls it, not simply because of the mess I fear but more because she resents my preoccupation with taking myself off to write as I do.

There are not enough hours in the day to lead a writer’s life, but I can always dream.