42: some notes
You thought you might become one of those Manicure Women, the ones with unfailingly smooth, shiny nails – pink, or plum, or pearly white. Ever since your mother’s 70th birthday party – for which you chose a glittery gold polish and sat through lunch bleeding into a maxi pad – you’ve returned to the salon every month, your wrists propped up on a rolled handtowel, pop songs drifting through the air-conditioned chill. The masked worker before you leans in close to trim your cuticles, swirl the brush, massage scented cream into your palms, your fingers, your knuckles. But you sense you don’t belong there. You slouch in the chair, think of so much else you’d rather spend your money on. The other women loll in leather recliners, scrolling their phones, fluorescent downlights yellowing their bottle-bleached hair. ‘Can you please just take it off?’ you ask one day, pausing outside a brightly lit shopfront, hundreds of little nail-varnish bottles lining the walls. Your head is thumping with too many thoughts, a migraine that approaches then recedes like fizzing waves against a damp shore. Once the polish has been soaked then buffed off, in so many layers, your nails are brittle, mottled, flaky underneath. The tips keep chipping, and you cut them shorter and shorter. But they’re your hands again. They look like your hands.
At night, you lie against the mattress with a hot water bottle resting in the curve of your neck, the small of your back. A warmth that feels almost primal. You fall asleep to the rise and fall of your husband’s chest, his leaking breath. You are two parentheses, opening then closing, with nothing between you.
It was when they were this age that you first began to notice your parents as people, sometimes strangers. On your mother’s 40th birthday – you remember it distinctly – you gathered for photos outside the mission flats in Lae, just up the road from the Lae War Cemetery, where thousands of Australian soldiers (some named and some unknown) lay buried. You stood on the gravel, smiling broadly for the camera, though you hated aeroplanes and were dreading the flight ahead, to a home that no longer felt like home. You couldn’t stop thinking about your beloved blue cattle dog, named Dog, whom you’d raised from a puppy and dressed in doll’s clothes. On that day – 21 December 1995, the summer solstice – your mother had braided your hair. You were brave, so brave. You often still wonder about Dog. Was he loved?
There’s a hardness that descends sometimes, a fibrous sort of resistance: you feel so capable of leaving, of taking yourself away at the first nip of hurt, and you want to. Often. Women are difficult; this you know. Always vying and trying. You’d prefer to be alone, unseen, unknown. That’s safer.
You heard a proverb once, which you’ve kept tucked away in the dark folds of your mind, for no particular reason: ‘Everyone wants to live a long life, but nobody wants to be old.’ And on a podcast, Andrew Solomon: ‘Everyone wants to be better, but nobody wants to change.’
People say you’re just like your mother, the spitting image, and it comes as a shock every time. Aren’t you more like your father? It’s him you think of when you draw those little horizontal lines through the stems of your 7s, just like he does, or when you riffle furtively through the newspaper at work to steal the crossword pages, when you make soup and tidy the kitchen as you go.
A thought comes to you often now, vanity inflected with grief: you will never know what it’s like to be truly beautiful.
It’s possible you have too many shoes. Sneakers in every colour, a pair of old Doc Martens, a pair of new Doc Martens, and – perhaps most surprising of all – several pairs of Crocs. You gave your niece some iridescent orange clogs for her last birthday, with dinky floral Jibbitz to press into the holes. She wears them everywhere.
One of your high school classmates has become a moderately successful Hollywood actor. You used to sit together on the huff-puffing schoolbus. He’d read your poetry, written neatly on foolscap paper, and call you – tongue in cheek – our Little Brooklyn Writer. You’ve never been to New York City, not even once, but you’d like to go, if only to see the squirrels.
Forty-two. Forty-two. The number seems unreal – an abstract concept. Digits. An integer. Something we made up. (What the fuck is an integer anyway?) You’re older now than some friends who never made it. Not past thirty: suicide. Not past forty: bone cancer. What does it mean to be dead? Ecclesiastes 9:5 says: ‘For the living know that they will die, but the dead don't know anything.’ You remember these things. Forty-two. Forty-two! Bible verses aside, if Douglas Adams was right, 42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Out the back, in your poky, over-populated courtyard, a maple tree with yellowing leaves judders in the autumn breeze. Beneath it, a dream lies buried. Somebody else will live here one day, maybe even soon, but you don’t like to think about it. Perhaps they’ll drink their coffee on the tiled patio as you do, wince at the screech of sulphur-crested cockatoos, watch the creeping fig spread out and out and out. And that piece of you – your blood, your tissue, a kernel of hope that was there and then gone – will remain always out of sight beneath the soil.
Your Google search history: Can you relocate a Japanese maple?
If you get a dog, you’ll call it Joan.
For some reason, you still dream of an ex. In these dreams, you cannot work out who you are… or whom you’re meant to be with. Always, always there’s a sense of guilt or shame that plagues you long after you’ve woken up. His name was Nicholas, and he’s caught like a burr somewhere deep in your subconscious, an enduring symbol of your failure. You failed him. You never said sorry. You’d like to.
Sometimes you wonder how much you actually remember. What if you were to line up all your memories one after the other? And what if each memory were a book, say, or a cassette? How vast would this library be? How many memories, now, are real memories – grainy and raw – and not merely the impression of a memory, a copy of a copy of a copy?
One of the earliest: walking home at night, grasping your mother’s cool, dry hand. You’re scared to step on a toad.
One, more recent: you stand before a mirror in a Melbourne hotel, angling the arc of your belly beneath the soft orange lighting. Today you are pregnant, you repeat to yourself. You’d seen it on a reddit thread about dealing with the anxiety of subsequent miscarriages. Today you are pregnant. The memory scalds.
Isn’t it funny how you still go through phases? Right now, it’s Dutch pancakes, shades of plum and burgundy, Adidas trainers, dirty coffee – where the barista drips espresso over frozen milk. Last year, you really got into green, and on your nights home alone, you’d whip up okonomiyaki for one, watch travel vlogs on YouTube.
Daydreaming keeps you going, keeps you alive. You need to have something to look forward to: a trip to Hobart, a haircut, a box on the doorstep to tear open.
You’d never, in the past, have described yourself as a jealous person, and the word – even know – feels somehow askew, not quite right. Yet there it is, a bolus of something bitter that flares then settles, flares then settles. You envy others the time and opportunity to write, the inconvenience of small children, bodies that can endure the gym, that don’t scream and stiffen with subtle movement. You used to be thin. You used to walk everywhere, eat whatever you wanted.
Once a fortnight, you remove a pre-filled syringe from the fridge and wait for it to warm to room temperature. Then you pinch a section of your belly fat, tilt the syringe at just the right pitch, and plunge it deep beneath the skin. Its contents spread, painfully, like sheet lightning in the night sky, but the sensation lasts only seconds. You recap the syringe and place the bundle of used plastic in the kitchen bin. ‘Are you alright with needles?’ the collector at Sullivan Nicolaides always asks, a different one each time. ‘Yep!’ you reply brightly. ‘I’m used to them.’ You watch her cannula descend into a scarred vein. You watch the blood rush into the vial so fast that it froths.
When you were children, on a seaside holiday in Madang, your mother let you look after some hermit crabs, plucked from a nearby beach. On the last day, she made you put them back.
Another memory, of the bad time: you take a tablet and then another tablet and another and another. All you wanted was to sleep.
Only a few weeks ago, as you were getting dressed in your bedroom, you noticed a neighbour watching you from their own window across the street. You dropped to the floor, pulled on some clothes while crouching, then yanked the blinds closed with a violent tug of the chain. You’ve decided you wouldn’t mind moving house.
What you dream of is a cabin in the woods – it’s silly, you know. In some ways, you’ve become a City Person. You despise capitalism but love browsing shops. You like to write on your laptop in cafés, sit drowsily on a bus or train and watch the world whoosh by outside the window. It’s oddly invigorating, being part of the sprawl, just one person out of millions with your husband and two cats. One day, though, you’d prefer to be surrounded by trees, by quiet. You could have more than one dog. Get a sourdough starter. Make bread by hand. Ha. A cliché.
Friendship has grown hard, and you didn’t see it coming. You tolerated so much when you were younger that you no longer have the energy for. You didn’t even see things that way, back then. It was the natural order of the world: to listen, to absorb, to laugh in all the right places. Now you wish to be more than an ear, more than a shoulder. You want more. More can be lonely.
If there’s another thing you regret, aside from grappling with your fertility so late in the picture, it’s living all this time in Australia. You wish you’d lived abroad again, like you planned to when you finished high school. Instead, you did the safe thing. You worked as a checkout chick, which was a trip in itself, but not the kind you’d been hoping for. Your best friend went on without you. She moved to the UK. After that, your friendship was never the same. Always this distance.
Is maintaining a blog solipsistic? It’s hardly a question that keeps you up at night. But still.
Before she died, your nanna used to tell you she didn’t feel old – not on the inside, anyway. It came as a cruel surprise every time she saw herself in the mirror: the loose, fragile skin; the diaphanous white hair; the knuckles gnarled with arthritis. ‘I still feel like a girl in my head,’ she’d say, ‘about seventeen years old.’
On the day she died, you held your nanna’s hand, told her she was a good girl, told her she was doing a good job. She took her last faltering breath not long after you left, but your mother called you later. ‘Can I see her?’ you asked, and your mother lifted her phone so Nanna’s resting figure became visible on the bed behind her. She could have been asleep, so peaceful she looked. Your mother stroked her hair. You cried, and it sounded gutteral, foreign. Now you wear her wedding band on your ring finger, a little piece of Nanna to carry with you everywhere.
You remember a moment from that time – perhaps you could call them your lost years – when you visited your grandparents in their little retirement village in the rural town you grew to hate, and your nanna smiled and said: ‘I hope you’ll be OK. You’re too beautiful not to be.’
You’re close to your grandmas and grateful to know them – to have been loved by them. Your poppy, too. The one you knew. There’s something special about the affection of a grandparent. At times, you’re sad your nanna never saw you married, that you never brought a plump baby to nestle into the crook of her elbow. ‘It’s about time you settled down,’ your other grandma used to say, as if you were a loose woman, wild and untamed. She loves your husband. He fixed a photo frame for her once last year. When you visit, she asks where he is. ‘He’s a nice man,’ she says. It’s true.
Wilbur is the most beautiful cat you’ve ever owned, but the fur… My goodness. You imagine – not seriously, but as a joke more than anything – being cut apart during a postmortem, only to be full of fluff. When the cats play spiritedly (at 10.00 pm on the dot, always), you call it Mortal TomKat, reminding Wilbur to be gentle with Ogden, who is an old boy now. Grey-muzzled and cranky. In the morning, tufts of fur scatter the carpet as if it’s snowed.
Another indelible memory: watching The English Patient with your dog, resting your toes in her black fur, feeding her chocolate biscuits from the plastic packet. Because it was her last day. Your father wept as he carried her over the threshold to the vet clinic. Your uncle had to bury her.
Sometimes, the sadness is too much, too heavy: a cumulonimbus slung low in your heart.
Once upon a time, Dad took you places in his rusted grey Cortina, the one with the lacy holes in the footwell through which you’d watch the bitumen blur past between your toes. He used to drive so fast, much too fast; your stomach would pull and lurch as the car sailed over bumps, careened around kinks in the road.
You still get motion sickness. Even at the movies. You’ve never grown out of it.
Mum gives you The Look™ when you visit, comments on your ‘interesting trousers’. You’re the heaviest and biggest now you’ve ever been, a number on the scale you scarcely believe even when the needle quivers to its definitive halt. You feel lumbering, awkward. Your old clothes don’t fit. You don’t recognise yourself in photos. The planes of your body seem clumsily large; when you move, they seem to collide.
Maybe your nanna was right. Maybe we all eventually become strange, even to ourselves.
One thing you secretly like: your lashes, which are dark, almost black. And your lips, though the peaks are uneven. When you wear lipstick, people say you look well.
You try to visit your grandma as often as you can. You rub lotion into her hands and bring her strawberries and mango cut up into bite-sized pieces, tiny jars of Vegemite and jam, a trashy magazine with crossword puzzles in the back. All she wants it something to call her own. She’s growing her hair long just because she can. You ask if she has favourites, and she laughs in such a way that can only mean yes.
Your first-years call you ‘miss’. That’s why you did a PhD, you want to tell them: so nobody would call you Miss Anything ever again. But you forgive them. When you remind your class to fill out their teaching evaluations for the semester, they say, ‘Don’t worry, miss. We got you.’
