I imagine how this looks: my unsteady, naked body standing at the fridge licking the plastic lid of the taramasalata dip. One hundred and nineteen calories per serve, it says. Nine serves per packet. How many per lick, then? I wonder. I take a Lavosh to the pink, then another, then another until the pink is no longer. I tighten the bedspread by the corners, as if this will undo what we have just done.
The orange vinyl seat is cold against my bare legs. Below me is the large white double-sheet of my moleskin notebook. In its blankness I can see only our bodies wrapped up, as if they were never undone. He felt thinner, I write. It was only at the end he stopped trembling. How can something so bad feel so good, he said. All evening these words play with a cadence I cannot forget.
At six I decide to stop fighting awake-ness and pull back the blinds. There are hot air balloons low on the horizon. I pull a book, make a coffee and soon enough they are upon me. I struggle to get through two lines in a row without looking up at the growing balloons; fluffy, floating and magnificent as they are. The atmosphere is breezeless and I watch them drift to nowhere in particular. The parachutes are pinstriped, liquorice allsorts. Occasionally a higher up one casts another in shadow until I am made to see that hot air balloons are merely humans impersonating clouds.
A bird has lost its way and flown into my kitchen. For an hour I try and coax it out but it only advances into the small hallway. I am ravenous and due at work in eighteen minutes. Bird shit is everywhere, all over my new knife set and the gas burners I wish to light in order to boil some water. I try and remember what he did last time we were in this situation. I remember my head was buried in Bonnie’s brindle coat, my arms were locked around her as she fought to get out. How did he do it?
Have you read this, a customer asks holding up a copy of Troy. I shake my head. What about this, she asks placing her hand on Matthew Mcconaughey’s auto-biography. I shake my head. What are you reading, she asks me next. I think of the book in my bag, The State of Affairs. Then another on my dresser by Shelia Hati, How Should A Person Be. How should a person be? the ‘fictional’ protagonist of Hati’s novel wonders over and over. Sheila is punchy and unapologetic like the raw garlic I like to put in my salad dressings. I pick up a book, The Lying Life of Adults. This is supposed to be great, I say.
Jack and I spend all evening talking about other peoples problems. It turns out everyone has them. There is a bottle of wine and two long elegant pastas. Both sauces are of substance; the hearty kind that warrants a cigarette on the curb over there. In the end we run out of time. I’d stay for a cocktail, I say. The desire isn’t mutual and so, I am left to do it on my own at a keyboard, which rests on another piece of furniture that does not belong to me.
My living space smells of Dynamo. I shake the duvet into the clean cover and am made to see this was always his job. My arms scream in a pain that surges straight to my chest. I think to the personal trainers around the outskirts of the Botanical Gardens who are paid to yell politely at people to try and lift the rope off the ground. After several flaps the duvet hardly leaves the ground. The duvet feels made of lead. It’s around the wrong way, all bunched at one end. There is nobody else here.
Nico and I drive one hour and forty five minutes away from it all, away from the little theatre of hurt feelings. I feel the prang of possibility when the lighthouse appears in the distance. There is a person paragliding in what looks to be a sleeping bag. The whole structure is reminiscent of a dragonfly, the kind that dart across the pool’s surface in late spring, early summer. How do you do it the first time, I wonder. How does one find the courage to leap off the cliff. Then, how does one know how not to fall but float?
I’m on the leather couch gazing very west when he calls. He has news. The bad kind. It’s the probability of it all. Half-way through his second sorry, I hang up and breathe very quickly then very slowly until I the green felt mountains of the Otways start to wobble in the distance. The internet tells me it will take seven to ten days to regain control of the situation. A stiff drink will do you good, Nico says. And a shower, he says with his hands on his hips.
You’ll probably be fine, Daisy says into the receiver. It’s just like tonsillitis, she says. I long for her company, it is the rare kind in which one feels close enough to be mute and pathetic beside the other. By the end of the week, this will become Nico. In the shower the warm water falls onto my shoulders and down my body in tiny waterfalls. There are plummy bruises on my breasts. I run my hand over them, remembering how easily my nipple knotted beneath his touch. I exfoliate until I am red, raw, throbbing.
What do you write about, Dawn asks. Why do you do it, Phil adds. I swirl the wine in my hand so the yellow liquid climbs up the sides of the glass. It falls to reveal long lines, or ‘legs’, I now recall my sister’s partner telling me they’re called. The legs are an indication of sugar, I remember him explaining. I swallow the last of the anchovy toast in my mouth only to realise I have added too much raw garlic to the ricotta. Why do I do it?
I embark on a new book written by a woman who was from from this very stretch of coast. In A Body of Water, Beverly Farmer speaks about the white red-capped queen that is the Airey’s lighthouse. I stop at the lighthouse on my way to the appointment, turning over the idea of probably. Of having. And being had. Waves thrash against Eagle Rock.
The GP is old, white, a male. I explain the situation, specifically, my need for control, for definitve answers. This, he says, I can help you with. He tells me my options. And even though I want the most definitive answer possible, I won’t let the old, white, male swab me. I wee in the cup, wondering if Beverley Farmer ever went through any of this bullshit.
Nico and I talk about form, intention, process. I get stuck on intention, on narrative. The cocktail in my hand is dark pink. Those things don’t matter, he says. Just keep writing. Under the covers I feel the swirl of Rosita in my head. How many were there, I wonder. I slide my alarm on for 7.30 but wake at 4. I contemplate getting up. Outside is dark. No birds are awake.
To get to Sunnymead beach, one has to walk small distance from the carpark. There is a small cluster of teenage boys playing an odd game of cricket on the hard sand and a capable person surfing out the back. The surfer’s dog, a young red heeler, is darting about manically on the sand. There is a mother with a small child and a young woman absorbed in a book. At one point I let my head fall and see she is reading Jo Cinque’s Consolation.
I open A Body Of Water and immediately find myself comforted by the fact that Beverley probably sat on this beach and walked its low tide line once upon a time. There is a quote, the first of many from Virginia Woolf, Beverley has included. I underline it three times with the intention of showing Dawn and Phil over dark pink cocktails later,
And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by a desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow… it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me.
I circle this last line. It’s now Thursday evening. The old, white, male doctor – who was really very kind to me- said I would have my results come Saturday. I nodded and thanked him several times. It is in doing this I am allowed to organise and digest the information of my experience. Results or not, it is only by putting it into words that I make it whole, that I regain control of it all.
Yellow Days 