Everywhere I Look (20 page)

Toni Morrison on what her children needed from her as a single mother: ‘One, they needed me to be competent. Two, they wanted me to have a sense of humour. And three, they wanted me to be an adult.'

I reckon I scored all right on one and two. Three, not so much. Back then. But there she goes across the yard, my daughter. With her light firm step.

A teenager on the 57 tram offers his mate some advice about women.

‘Don't give 'em too much attention! They take advantage! Just 'cause you root 'em they think you're gonna go out with 'em!'

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: ‘So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.'

Recovering from pneumonia I spend an afternoon on the couch with Ambrose, watching
Adventure Time
. We laugh, I doze, I wake and doze and laugh again. A cold, dark day. Towards evening I glance out the window at the sodden yard.

H: ‘Oh! The wind blew!'

A: (in a cynical tone) ‘What's so cool about wind blowing?'

H: ‘What's so NOT cool about wind blowing, smartarse?'

Home, sobered by the documentary about the wild life and early death of Amy Winehouse, we sit down to dinner. Before we can reach for our forks my granddaughter says in a low voice, ‘Could we have a moment's silence? For Amy?' Later, while I wash the pans and serving dishes, she and her mother sit on the couch to sort and fold a huge mound of dry laundry. They watch ‘100 Top Hits from the '90s', murmuring together about the bands. Once or twice they laugh. Their swift, neat movements, their easy companionship.

In the transit lounge at Dubai airport I share a café table with a bricklayer from Frankston: a small, tough, shyly smiling bloke of fifty or so, capable-looking and fit, with weather-beaten skin and faded, old-fashioned tatts. His thick grey hair is cut short and he has a husky, smoker's voice. There is something pained in his face, an openness. He's on his way to Edinburgh, he says, and from there up to the Shetland Islands: ‘My wife came from there.'

‘Came?'

‘Yeah. She…passed away. I don't like to say it.'

‘That's hard.'

‘We had a very happy marriage. That's why I'm taking the trip.'

‘How come you didn't do it together?'

‘We bought a holiday house to renovate, and it took up all our time and money. Then she got sick. So I'm going on my own, before whatever else happens.'

We take a walk around the huge bare terminal. In the carpeted aisles men are sound asleep on the floor, in rows, some on mats, some with shirts or scarves drawn over their mouths and noses. Half-a-dozen young men in starched white robes stroll about together. Their bearded faces have an otherworldly, purified look, their eyes are unfocused. One has a length of fine white cloth tossed casually over his head and shoulders. Perhaps they're coming home from Mecca. Every hour or so, during our long wait, a man's soft voice on the PA recites a prayer, or perhaps a blessing. Neither of us remarks on it, but my sad tradie, too, in his pure white T-shirt, is on a pilgrimage.

The old American woman sitting next to me on the plane watches me tear an article out of a
Times Literary Supplement
. ‘Are you a writer?'

‘How can you tell?'

‘I'm a psychologist.'

A caller on talkback radio says he was on the side of the striking teachers until they announced that they wouldn't write comments on the children's reports. ‘That was it,' he barks. ‘The minute it started to affect
me
, I was against them.' For a moment even the mouthy radio host is struck dumb.

The Trotskyist at the health resort, a pretty woman in her sixties with a cloud of curls, sat forward on the low couch after dinner, elbows across her thighs, and blazed on, unstoppable, about international politics. Her eyes seemed to move closer together and sink deeper into her skull; her lips twitched. She didn't want to hear what we thought. She knew everything. She had read ‘thousands of books'. When someone she had interrupted registered a mild protest, she flared up: ‘I only started talking about the Middle East because I was
asked questions
!' She contained the truth: she was a vessel filled to the brim with it; the lightest touch or tilt and out it poured—to her a precious nectar, to others a choking flood that drowned whatever frail proposition anyone else came up with.

A massage, by a silent young woman with long dark hair in a ponytail and large thoughtful eyes. Towards the end of the hour, while she worked on my right hand, I had a strange vision: that she was not touching me, but standing near me and transferring great armfuls of hydrangea-like flowers from one flat surface to another.