On Rest

Through the kitchen window cutout, I watch my parents adjust to the day. Their faces look different, dare I say older, than when I last looked at them twelve hours ago. They used to be paused in this sort of forever age, the same with my siblings. For a long time they were immune to further alterations. It is only lately I have noticed this forever-age changing. Time manifests on their bodies, mostly in the skin around their eyes and the hairs on their head, which seem to have receded and faded a little further each time I lay my eyes on them. On top of this, I have noticed Mum, as well as sleeping far longer, is also shrinking.

I’m getting up later and later, she exclaims this morning. Her pyjamas are flannelette polka dot ones I’ve never seen before. The time is nine-thirty. She’s mucked up the alignment of her top, so I can see the beginning of her bosom. The creases around her chest remind me of the ones I sometimes wake up with when I’ve been extra foetal on my side overnight. Though, hers are not so superficial, they do not disappear when she stands up straight to address the day.

And I’m getting up later than that, Dad says. He is in a three-quarter olive robe, which I decide in this moment he could have gone for a larger version of. He slaps the coffee machine on while she drops a Berocca in a tall glass of cold water. I have been up for several hours and achieved really very little. This is okay though. It is a pleasure just to be able to think about things, any one thing I want, in the comfort of this chair all day.

I pinch my nose and apply pressure to the inside of my head by way of holding my breath. The room appears to me with a temporary clarity. I feel stuffy from sleeping with a tight long sleeve, at two I had to slide wool socks on my feet. Winter is always a challenge for those of us who run a little cold. I am pleased to have left my laptop in Melbourne and to not have to work, not have to hear the slog and sorrow of other people’s back stories. Not today.

Anne should arrive soon, any moment now. For some reason I can’t imagine her driving all this way in her car on her own. When I think of Anne, I think of rosewater, drippy cheese, champagne, tea cake, ceramic. Self regarding as it is, ever since I sat through a lecture on synaesthesia, I can’t help but wonder what I myself might command in someone’s mind. Synaesthesia, I recently learnt, is a complex neurological trait, which involves a merging of senses by way of association. The experience is involuntary and, like many neurological traits, it exists on a spectrum.

Mum says she can’t believe this weather, which will be the fifth time she has made this observation today. There is a broom in her grip. Between meetings, usually while the kettle boils, she has made it her business to fervently sweep the living room and kitchen. She never actually finishes the job though, never goes as far as to collect the pile into the pan and discard it into the bin. Each time she returns to her meetings in the next room, a strong gust of wind fills the room via the small flap cutout for the dog and her pile of detritus scatters. Sometimes it seems like the pile has an agenda, it is as if as soon as she closes the door behind her, it leaps back to the place she removed it from.

At four, Anne arrives. At five I watch her drape smoked trout on a large white plate as well as a salami her neighbours made. It’s a thick, coarse one that doesn’t fold at all. The solid discs remind me of hockey puffs; the fat circles are full moons and melt in the heat of my mouth, which reminds me just how alive and working this body is. My mind wonders to the consumption and release of energy, and how this equation looks today. I smother this thought. Instead, I place a cold sheet of trout on a wafer as well as one caper and one cornishon and slide the ensemble into my mouth.

It’s so still, Anne observes. It’s true, the contents of the window could be a painting. It’s marvellous, she says placing a cornishon on her tongue. I watch her face adjust to its tartness. I can’t stand the wind, she says. Stillness after all that wind, I think, is like the absence of an ailment. We ascend the steep Wombat Hill each with a flute in hand to watch the sun touch down ablaze in the west. The rain clouds have cleared leaving only a handful of wispy empty ones around. Above the furry green landscape, they remind me of the kinds I saw hanging at the National Gallery yesterday morning.

The evening before yesterday morning, when a man suggested we visit the French Impressionists together, I was hesitant. I did my yes-no smile, which is the smile I use when I want to be flirtatious and remote at the same time. It seemed like a strenuous effort, almost an ordeal, in my mind. Though it wasn’t at all. In fact, sitting here thinking about it, I am looking forward to doing it a second time over. He left me mostly to my own and didn’t once try and tell me what to see. He purchased one postcard while I deliberated between two only to buy them both. Now they’re on my bedside table. Throughout the day when I pull on some socks or another layer and my eyes land on them, I experience a small surge of pleasure.

Mum and Dad are sitting up at the table with two accounts of the world’s problems spread before them. I stand up from the couch, refill my mug and sink into a different chair this time. ‘Understand the news’ has been at the top of my list of things to achieve for years now, below this is ‘Stretch regularly’ and ‘Cook out of each cookbook’. There is a tangled headphone hanging out of one of Dad’s ears. Every now again he will chime up with another reason our contact tracing in incompetent compared to that of New South Wales. He has a milky English Breakfast tea while Mum drinks a coffee. They have halved a frangipani tart I regret passing up.

They read the papers front to back while I embark on a new book. Today is not the day for understanding the news, No. Anne is in the kitchen making an Impossible Pie from leeks and butter. I would like to write about the mood of this patch of the world in the same way Jean-Francois Millet sought to capture the small town of Grunchy, Normandy. Next to the canvas at the gallery hung a quote in which Millet said of the place he grew up: ‘My goal was to show the habitual peacefulness of the place, where each act, which would be nothing anywhere else, here becomes an event’.

Dad drives to their empty block of land to watch the kangaroos bounce down the valley and across the river. When he returns, he is in a fit of rage. Nobody understands. It’s the kind of furious rage where even his body temperature has skyrocketed. He can’t sit still and part of me wonders if he might cry, which would be a spectacle I wouldn’t know how to react to. We are able to ascertain that the woman who neighbours their block of land has made a series of speculative objections to the build they have proposed. Two years ago, when they acquired the block of land, they were warned about she who shall not be named. I read the email over Dad’s shoulder and am aware of the ground beneath us moving from the shuffling of his leg. Reading the objection, a level of irony reveals itself to me and by this I mean how language, the thing I so love, can be used so destructively.

When I wake up, it is to the emptiest slate, blank for as far as I can see. I send the kettle to the boil and attack last night’s dishes. I spend time scrubbing the stubborn red lip stick stains we have left on the flutes. Among the dishes lie some capers and herbal tea bags as well as half a liquorice bullet. There are wedges of orange whose flesh has been pried from them so all that remains are thin crescents. Remnants of dried dip come away from the porcelain in flakes. Ocean Vuong says there is an autobiography in the detritus we leave behind. I tend to agree. The others are still asleep. I tiptoe back to my room, careful not to let the doors settle loudly in their frames.

I’m up to page fifty five of Deborah’s new book, Real Estate. From what I can gather, she would like it here. I share her desires entirely. I too want a humble house of my own, one in close proximity to a large body of water. I want it all and soon, sooner than reality affords. The passage I have just read has got me thinking about breakfast. This is something on my slate, I suppose. In the passage, Deborah describes the scale of the elements of the Bloody Mary in front of her. She compares the stick of celery poking out of the viscous red drink to a baby’s arm. There is a place at the bottom of main street Daylesford that makes a terrific one and now my body wants nothing else. They even go as far as to pickle their baby’s arms.

Mum asks for more tap water. This will be her third potato rosti of the week from the cafe at the bottom of the main street. We left the others at home because the others are no fuss people who are content eating simple toast on top of which they lather simple spreads. The Bloody Mary is exactly how I remember it: salty, spicy and savoury with a hint of something I can’t put my finger on. The waiter with the kind eyes, who hovers a moment too long each time he approaches our table, refills my coffee. When I tell him I didn’t order another he tells me the refills are free and I look up at him in disbelief. What is it about the water here, Mum says gulping it back. We spend the rest of the time trying to describe the water only to arrive at round, then, heavy.

I like to flirt (remotely) with the idea of taking up residence in the countryside. It has only just occurred to me that I might be really very happy here. Dad has been flirting with this bucolic landscape all his life. It is for this reason he looks so dejected right now. We try to animate him with a meat pie, a frangipani tart, a tap beer. The crowns of the gums in the distance look like ants traversing a hill. They wave goodbye to me at Malmesbury station. The train is scheduled to arrive in seven minutes. Don’t wait, I say. There are several chimneys emitting smoke. I sit down in a small clean shelter opposite a big bluestone structure and feel glad to be alone.

If Daylesford is a luscious, bucolic sanctuary then Southern Cross is its abrasive, urban counterpart. At Southern Cross Station, I feel the pull of mystical thinking against the push of pragmatic thought. Back in the city one has to wear a mask over her face. Waiting for a train to take me to Richmond, standing among all these people, I feel the most alone I’ve felt in days. I left my living space in good order. The bin bag is clean and empty, the kettle is set and the clean bed spread is pulled tightly in such a way it looks like someone else has done it for me.

There are thirty-five minutes until I have to be at dinner and so, I sit at the circle table to attempt to translate the images still fresh from the days spent resting. The blonde wood is speckled with pen marks and I am confronted by the image of my late grandmother who sat at this very table with a crossword and plunger of coffee. Nothing becomes of this exercise, the images are flat. I can’t work here like I could there, here feels as though I am in a museum of myself. I open Deborah and the time passes quickly this way. To be in the city, Deborah writes, is to be forever flinching.