Yesterday I was at my friend’s place after a thunderstorm and she had a little curving highway of ants running up over her wall, so tiny they looked like caterpillar’s eyelashes, and I said look! at these teensy ants so busily there: my friend goes, ugh they are always in my kitchen and I can’t […]
For weeks after the diagnosis I was still having episodes of shock as deep as flashbacks, every single day. Every day at some point I went into a dazzled fugue of confusion and horror, while the same words whirled around me like three birds. I have cancer. Then the welter. Cancer? What? What do you […]
In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large […]
I woke up strapped to the bed by six different apparatus. The last thing I remember is the surgeon greeting me at the swing doors, ‘Welcome to Theatre,” and I said, “Oh! How gracious,’ then, “I’m scared.” Of the leashes pegging me out like a goatskin my favourite is the pair of disco moon boots […]
In my twenties I worked at the front desk of the Queensland Art Gallery for a while. It is huge and immaculate and rather hushed. One day an old man came in, wizened and bent. He approached the island of our desk across the marble floor. “This the art gallery?” Yes, I said. His hands […]
I just got a letter from my mother explaining she has been in hospital for five days with bronchial pneumonia. Mum is in Brisbane and I am in Berlin and no one told me. She’s 78 years old and had a hip and a knee replaced this year, since my father’s death. This is the […]
Alone in the house for the first time in days I feel a sadness descend and take me in its wings. I’m sad for Dad. It has come from pottering and tidying, I washed up a bowl and set it upside down on the board to drain, I folded a pair of his old pyjamas […]
I wonder if anyone else has trouble adjusting after travel, it would be reassuring to me to hear about it if you have. It’s more than just jet lag. Arriving in Brisbane I was paralysed for days with a kind of deep-down soul sickness that made everything strange. The familiarity made things seem stranger. When […]
The little cat puts her hand possessively on my arm. After a moment’s thought her other hand creeps up to join it and I remember the day I finally found her again, after she had been lost for a lifetime, five months at large in the laneways of inner Melbourne, and a man rang in […]
This week I’m going home to Berlin to find an apartment of my own, via a writing sabbatical in Thailand which I suspect I will sleep through. What was supposed to be two weeks has turned into a six week endeavour. I have worked from dawn til night, busted my finger, worn myself to a […]
Mum’s just taken Dad on an outing & waving goodbye to them I began to cry. Soon it will be the long goodbye. My Dad seems so cheerful and excited, sitting up in his passenger seat having been hoisted up by two of us out of the wheeling chair. The carer said he woke up […]
My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and […]
In this house of illness and pain I get lonely. Everyone is in bed by eight o’clock and the long night stretches ahead. Tonight I can hear the rain plinking on the skylight which reminds me of the sound of rain on a tin roof, the sound of my childhood. I am tired. My father […]
Caring for Dad is painful. I love him, naturally, and now he’s very frail and unwell; so it’s wrung from me like dark water out of soaked wood. But Dad tormented me with minor sexual attentions during my pubescence and twenties, and into my adulthood; he would never listen when I said No and always […]
I’m going into the difficult embrace of family life to say goodbye to my father. Our family relationships have been fraught with miscommunications, outbreaks of insanity, and violence. Now it’s all coming to an end and we will have to, I hope, focus on our common humanity. My mother says, you’ll find him much changed. […]
