a bit too helpful

I went to my parents’ place to bring them a copy of my new book. Afterwards I left the house and drove uphill, as though I were coming up out of a valley, though my parents do in fact live on a hilltop. During the 2009 floods theirs was almost an island, floodwaters drowned the houses all round. Armies of volunteers descended afterwards with mops and brooms and buckets. My mother’s neighbour said, “They were a bit too helpful” ~ the Mud Army had thrown out some of her favourite possessions, things that though drowned in river sludge had essentially survived the flood: washable things, like the pyrex baking dish her own mother had given her on her wedding day. The feeling of having to guard oneself against the ill-spilling goodwill of people who don’t seem to mean to cause pain is one I felt familiar with.

My parents bought their copy of the new book online, which was sweet of them and supportive I think. I rang and said, I would have given you a copy. O, my mother said, well I wanted to go through the motions and just make sure everything was working ok. Everything worked ok. Her book was #43, I numbered it and signed it and set it aside. I slid it into a paper bag and wrote in pencil on the outside, From Tochter: from daughter. We arranged I would go round on Thursday morning when they would both be home and bring them their book. She said, Bring it, but I was thinking, Show it to them. This was unwise, and not in an unpredictable way.

My father was sitting at the computer when I came in. He turned his head to say hello. My mother advanced on me like a real estate agent ready to show the house, she looked immaculate, she was wearing a fringey necklace I’d not seen before. We hugged with the uppermost parts of our bodies like two woman at a premiere wearing the exact same dress. She made tea and set out the sticky gingerbread I’d brought, in a clockface on a large flowered plate. “It’s Nigella Lawson’s recipe,” I said, “only I put in twelve times the ginger and six times the cinnamon and also some black pepper.” “So,” said my mother. “Show me your book.”

I drew it out of its paper bag and handed it to her. Changing my mind about the bag’s inscription I folded the brown paper and stashed it in the upper pocket of my overalls. My mother took the book and opened it. Prominently on the end table lay another book, written by an ex lover of mine who treated me with breathtaking perfidy. I lifted the cover with the back of my thumbnail and read the inscription: To dearest Cathoel, love from. I let the cover drop. It wasn’t clear why this book, which must have been somewhere on their shelves for the last seven or eight years, suddenly had appeared next to the couch the day I was to visit.

I watched my mother encountering my new book. This book is only five days old, we found for it a sumptuous eggshell paper, it has all the decent poems I have written in the last fifteen years, since my first book, it has been a labour of decades and in the final drafts I found early copies of the illustrated layout, on my computer, going back to 2008. The poetry is as round and whole and nutty as I could make it. I had the sense, seeing it go into the press last week, of this work no longer belonging to me, as though the poems are intact worlds of their own in which I am only a familiar visitor. That’s how I know it’s done. The title, the yearning, the courage, the brimming pages: to me it is still the most beautiful book in the world, just as every baby once born is, however briefly, perhaps only for microseconds, momentarily the youngest person on earth.

My mother looked through the book for thirty seconds. She liked the colour of the cover (bright yellow). She remarked on a couple of photographs, neutrally, incidentally: “Oh there’s that photo of the beach that you took.” She didn’t read one word. The kettle boiled and she set the book down on the couch beside her and got up to make the tea. “Are there coffee shops round where you’re living now?” she wanted to know, “are there any that you like?”

My father left his enticing, absorbing online universe. He came struggling over to the couch, on his stick. He has a new hearing aid, his first. “I don’t notice the difference,” he was saying, as he reached me, and I said, “Perhaps it’s the other way round. Perhaps you weren’t noticing the difference beforehand, and we all were, because you just didn’t hear what you weren’t hearing.” His eyes gleamed suddenly, a kind of sleeping awakeness. “Yes,” he said, “that is probably true.”

He moved my book aside so he could sit down. He asked if there were any coffee shops round our new place for me to hang out in, any I liked. My throat filled with a hot, tight, swollen feeling like heated rocks. I was crying, but I wasn’t going to let them know that. My mother came over with the tea, a single mug for me alone, and we all sat down and gazed at the low polished table between the couches.

We talked about my father’s hearing aid and the new fabric on the chairs outside, their wide verandah. I admired some shelves my brother and father had built together. My mother picked up the book and set it on the low table. She must have felt she hadn’t somehow paid it enough attention because she started asking, Is it selling well? And Now that you’ve got the book out of the way, are you working on the CD? I brought forward by an imaginary hour the appointment I had made in the next suburb. When my mother got up to carry the tray of tea away I pilfered the book written by the ex lover and slid it into my bag. I left behind my parents in their house which is so strongly scented with cleaning products that I’d had to get up and open the outside door casually, which is how we came to be talking about the pretty covers on the lounge chairs overlooking the pool. The silverbeet fronds I had planted in January when I came back from Berlin stood proudly greenish yellow with their scarlet and purple spines, a border to the flowerbeds as I had intended them to be. I carried away the rocks in the throat, determined they would not come all the way home with me. I knew a comforting local coffee shop where I could leave them, had left them before, could leave them. I drove away from my uncle’s house, that is opposite theirs and where my uncle who has never married hoards all the china and silver intricacies once belonging to our grandmother and pets, presumably, his conviction now three years old and formed on a strange circumstance that I had been stealing from my own family ‘heirlooms’ (some old clocks, taken to pieces by our other uncle who never repaired them) and selling them, on eBay, for a profit. He will not back down from this insulting character assessment and I will not accept it, we no longer speak. My parents have him round for dinner but not when I am there. I left all that behind under the trees including the one with the spine of our old treehouse embedded in it like an ingrown tooth and the one that sweeps its skirts along the ground, dropping seedpods like earrings, the new house that stands next to the old house now sold, and took myself up to the coffee strip and into a dingy local bookshop playing, comfortingly, the plaintive tales of local boys the Bee Gees, and browsing along the racks I found several books I wanted to read including one written by a friend of mine whose work I’ve not yet explored, and I noticed the bad feeling ebbing away and this pleased me, I felt proud of myself, and I told myself paying for the books that this was an achievement, an improvement on the other times when pain arising from this household had lasted me all day, all year.

The pain lasted only an hour or so. Maybe a little nervousness beforehand and some despondency residual afterwards, but most of the negative part of the experience was confined to that one hour: the half hour in their house and then, in ebbing increments, the browsing half-hour afterwards, a dim fish nosing round a quiet tank. Later that afternoon I met up with a poet from Melbourne who is cycling in small sections round Australia as a fundraiser, he bought my book and cooed over it, loving the papers, loving the photographs, stroking his cyclist’s hand down the poem pages. He told me how awesome it was. I told him how awesome it was that he is making this huge trip, his own books sent on to the next town care of a performance poet friend, and I thought about how he will cycle home over the Nullarbor, west to east, planning his route so that every hundred kilometres or so he can fill up with water. You can’t bring enough water for your own journey, it’s too hard to carry. You have to rely on other people, strangers, sometimes, en route to fill you up with their water, because really all water is shared water anyway.