Everywhere I Look Read Free Page B

to the one I’ve left, so I set up my bed correspondingly, in the north-west corner. When I get into it I know where I am, and fall asleep at once. ‘Bed is mother,’ as a psychoanalyst suggested. And bed, if we’re lucky enough to have one, is the centre of our personal universe, the safe point from which we let ourselves down into the shadow universe of sleep.
    But now, when I wake each morning, though I’m horizontal and comfortable, though my feet are pointing the right way, I have at the same time a peculiar sensation that my shoulders are jammed up against the wall, that only the pressure of my back is keeping the house from sliding back to where a part of me still is, or thinks it should be: three kilometres closer to the city. I am holding the house westward of my former life by nothing but brute will. I can’t even get my hand around the name of my new suburb when I fill in a form or write my address on a letter. It starts out dashingly then sags in the middle like a failed cake. And on a purely pragmatic level, I don’t know how to get to anywhere else from here. Where do I find a decent coffee? Which way’s the post office? What route do I take to cross the river? Where the hell am I?
    This must be what it’s like to be old. I feel flustered all the time. I can’t seem to grasp things, or understand them, or concentrate. I need to be told ordinary facts over and over. I can’t make decisions, or plan anything. Cooking is out of the question. The kitchen is full of unfamiliar outcrops: I can’t move across it without hurting myself. Between the sink and the cutlery drawer, I smash my knee against a cupboard front and stand there snivelling with self-pity.
    Anthropologists say that the house is an extension of the person, like an extra skin, or a shell: house, body and mind are in continuous interaction. A singer I know who loves to cook expressed it more gracefully. It took him months to find his ease in a new kitchen. ‘What you have to re-establish,’ he said, throwing out his arms and swinging his hips, ‘is the dance of it.’
    I’ve brought all the paintings and prints from my old house, but they’re stacked on the floor with their faces to the wall. When I tip one or two of them back, to remind myself of what they are, I’m surprised and annoyed to find how many of them are full of darkness. A night road. A huge, gloomy cypress. A ferry moored at a night wharf. A moon shining on some black, rhythmic waves. And what daylight there is shows a paddock with one solitary gum standing forlornly in the middle. I don’t want to bring that old darkness into this house.
    But there’s something shaming about undecorated walls and half-furnished rooms. Visitors go silent, then start offering advice: ‘This hall’s awfully bare. You need wall-hangings.’ Wall-hangings ? As if!
    Now, a month later, I know where the return chute is at the library, the video shop. The stern Filipinos who run the post office have started to smile at me. I know the op shop doesn’t open till eleven on Saturdays, that the motor that roars and roars at 10 p.m. at the bottom of the street is not some crazed hoon but the railway men mending the line. When the moon is full it blazes through my laundry window at bedtime, and into the bathroom at 4 a.m. I know that the café I like best is quieter at the end of the day than the library. Music plays there, but very low, and at each table sits a single person with a book or a newspaper or a mobile: absorbed, contained, content, with bowed head and motionless shoulders.
    A solemn and very sensitive little boy moved with his family to Echuca. His parents had worked in advance to reproduce as exactly as they could the arrangements of his old bedroom in Melbourne. On moving day, when he first approached it, they held their breaths. He stood at the door in silence. Then he said in a soft, calm voice, ‘ Yes ,’ and stepped forward into his room.
    2005

Suburbia
    IN the late 1970s I