Anita's Bar

One I’m feeling disoriented, at an unfamiliar angle to my life, careened. Look at me: the blue velvet jacket I picked up in Barcelona – double-breasted, reaching almost to the knee – worn for years without a second thought, suddenly here an affectation. At the bakery I can’t decide between Danish pastries, croissants, or anaemic baguettes. Last week, a world away, I would have ordered without thinking; now, uncertain of choice, I lamely say, ‘Give me one of each, please.’ Across the road at the newsagency I buy all the daily papers. The streetscape is familiar, but the shops have changed. The menswear store is a juice bar; the bank sells takeaway chicken, the butcher and greengrocer both restaurants now. The footpath has been dug up and replaced with concrete pavers and spindly olive trees wrapped in metal straightjackets. Pink banners promoting breast cancer awareness dangle from tall poles. Still too fragile to cope with recognition, I slide my gaze around passing, off-to-work-in-the-city faces. The morning is cold, near enough a frost. Wan sunlight trickles from an ice blue sky. At the fishmongers I put my nose to the window before turning right and taking the shortcut through the skate park. There’s no need to rush things, I should still be in bed. I only arrived last night. I’m on holiday. I’m taking some belated bereavement leave. I’ve travelled on a one-way ticket, after disposing of a third of my life in a garage sale, not knowing which way this turning point of my life is turning. Deep inside me a small voice counts – 166, 165, 164 – and my stride adjusts on cue, stretching and shrinking to a pattern welling up from childhood. By the time I reach Patrick Street I’m shuffling – my legs must have grown – and recalibrate the home stretch. Another thirty-five paces to the rosemary bush poking through a green picket fence, where as a teenager I’d pause and rub the spikes across my face and hands to conceal the tobacco smell, before counting down the final forty to where a neglected apricot tree once dropped spotted fruit on the concrete steps of number eighty-seven. What is the lifespan of a rosemary bush, or the paint on a fence? The apricot has gone. I doubt my parents noticed they had a garden. My mother died. My mother is dead. I’m still adjusting to the taste of the words. Three months ago, on her way to meet with the staff of a feeder primary school to the high school where she was Principal, her car missed a bend and rolled twice before hitting a tree. It was the day before my birthday, and I’d been on a bit of a bender and mislaid my phone; by the time I responded to my father’s calls I’d missed the funeral. The first time we spoke was surreal – me struggling to absorb the simple fact of her death while simultaneously fighting an overwhelming urge to console my father; him going on about the funeral and how it was all for show, with the Education Minister turning up just to get her photo in the newspaper. ‘The fucking right-wing bitch tried to shake my hand,’ he swore – he never swears – while I was still trying to form an image of my mother in my mind. I’d only seen her once in all the years I’d been away, and that had been in London and so out of context that the woman I remembered from that visit was hardly my mother at all. I told my father I’d fly straight back to Hobart. ‘Not yet, don’t rush, come when you’re ready, I’ll let you know when is a good time,’ his voice so abrupt he might have been warning me away. Perhaps he was still in shock. My hurt at being rebuffed was tempered by relief, so perhaps neither of us was ready to face the other. The one time my parents visited I was still living with Ange. They met Sandra and Tommy and made a brave stab at being step-grandparents for a day before our planned week of touring the north of England in a hire car. With all the sights and catching up we were never short of talk, but I got tangled up in trying and failing to come to terms with them as individuals in their own right, as Ruth and Gordon instead of Mum and Dad. In the rare moments of being alone with either of them I made a start, then we’d regroup and I was back to being a child again. Mum criticised Dad’s driving, he her sense of direction. They mocked each other’s choices at dinner, argued over the significance of this or that miners’ or factory strike, disputed the awfulness of slum clearance projects and model towns, split over the sight of nuclear power stations rising from fields of wheat. Forget the ancient monuments and crumbling castles: for my parents history began with the industrial revolution, yet despite this bond they bickered incessantly. The back and forth of tiny insults, provocations and fake apologies was like static breaking up a radio signal I craved to hear. All I could do was remain alert – a thirty-four-year-old going on ten – and try to anticipate their moves and weigh in on behalf of whichever I perceived to be at a disadvantage. It was an experience I found both disturbing and oddly soothing, as though I’d caught myself cuddling a long-forgotten teddy bear. The last touch I received from my mother was a rushed kiss on the cheek at Heathrow airport. Now there’s just Gordon and me. When he picked me up last night I was taken aback by how youthful he looked. After a stiff hug we shook hands energetically, eyes smiling, trying hard to forge a connection. In the car I talked about my flight, and Gordon pointed out the sights as though I was a first-time visitor. Entering the house in which I’d grown up provoked an eerie sense of my mother’s absence. The door still scraped the frame as it closed. I beat Gordon to the light switch. Fifteen years away, and nothing and everything had changed.