Red Dirt Odyssey - Kath Engebretson

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Red Dirt Odyssey - book excerpt

Chapter One

If you had been in Smith Street, Collingwood during the lunch time rush on a certain wet Friday in May, and if you had glanced through the window of one of the cafés that line that street, you may have seen me at a back table. I was the sixtyish, bookish-looking woman with reading glasses propped on her nose, laptop open and a cold cup of coffee at her elbow. As you dodged prams swathed in plastic and sauntering youths on school excursions, you might have briefly reflected on the incongruity of such a person sitting at the back of a bohemian café called ‘Howl at the Moon.’

The truth is that I was hiding. I was doing a lot of hiding at that time of my life.

I had taken to hiding in cafés for an hour or so in the middle of every working day. I was a professor at a nearby university, specialising in the history and philosophy of religions, but after almost twenty years in that career, I now mostly wanted to hide.

I hid from the university, where education had become a purchasable commodity, resulting is such a sense of entitlement on the part of students that every academic’s time was now public property.

I hid from the relentless need to publish. There had been a time when I seemed to pour out academic papers and books. Words tumbled and fell glistening on to the page. Whole arguments formed in my mind, so I had to type in a frenzy to get them down. Now my academic writing was like tearing out small chunks of hair or being stuck in a mire of squelchy mud.

I hid from the escalation of the workload, from too many doctoral students, from the dissatisfaction and cares of colleagues, and from the horrible annual performance review where every second of one’s academic life was on trial.

On this particular Friday, it was time to pack up my laptop, pay for my coffee, and make the five-minute trip back to my office, but I lingered. In the small, anonymous community of this scruffy café, I felt secluded and safe. I wanted to sit with the hippie couple and their curly-haired little girl who were sharing alfalfa and spinach wraps at a table to my left. I wanted to interrupt the conversation of the gay couple at another table and ask them their plans for the afternoon. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to.

Returning to work, I found the usual twenty or so emails and phone messages more urgently delivered than required. I took part in a teleconference about new ethics guidelines for research and reviewed a paper that had been sent to me for assessment by an academic journal. As I read and made notes about the paper, it occurred to me—not for the first time—that the world would not change, even microscopically, with the publication of this and similar papers. The papers I had written that sat pompously on my CV had not improved anyone’s life even for a second. I longed for someone to read something I had written and to breathe out saying ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s how it is.’ Then they would record my words in a diary and return to them a few days or a week later with the same glint of recognition.

At five p.m., I sent a text to my husband, Will, to tell him I was leaving. I locked my office and, still hiding, made my way to the car park without having to stop for a conversation with a colleague or student. After twenty minutes on the Tullamarine freeway, windscreen wipers losing their battle with the rain, I pulled into our driveway and slumped back against the seat. Another week was over. Will had put the veranda light on and it pierced through the rain, a promise of welcome and warmth.

Locking the car, I stepped up onto the veranda and went into the house, calling out to Will. There was no answer—perhaps he was in the garden, but why, in this rain? I could smell a curry simmering on the stove, and I saw that, as usual, Will had cleaned the kitchen after cooking so it was immaculate. The gas fire made a realistic show of logs in the family room, the blinds were drawn, and the evening news was quietly stirring the silence.

‘Will, where are you?’

He was sprawled across the kitchen floor, corpse-white, eyes staring in death.

***

I didn’t scream or sob, not then. I sat with Will’s body on the cold floor, holding his hand, stroking his face. Time stopped. Sometimes, I spoke quiet words of love to him, but mostly, I was silent. I wanted this last time alone with him without intrusion. Finally, I rose stiffly and reached for my phone.

We had known about Will’s enlarged heart since it had showed in a routine angiogram upon his retirement, eight years before. We had become complacent, because in every other way, he was healthy and active, mentally and physically. He played golf daily, was a member of a chess club, had a wide circle of friends, and loved to tell improbable stories about his childhood to his wide-eyed grandsons. Now, on that wet Friday, the heart of my beloved husband of almost forty years had stopped.

The events of the next few weeks became a series of half-remembered, ghostly images flitting across my mind, bringing butterfly flutters of nausea. There was the image of paramedics bending over Will’s lifeless body; the shallow stain of blood on the floor from where his head had hit the corner of the kitchen bench; the bulk of the stretcher that carried him to the ambulance; the frightened faces of our adult children when they met me at the hospital; the endless telephone calls, the funeral arrangements, and unanswerable questions from well-meaning family and friends about my future plans.

But plans had to be made, and some order brought to Will’s idiosyncratic accounting. A visit to the bank allowed me to consolidate Will’s accounts and to have his remaining superannuation funds merged with mine. Finally, I rang our solicitor.

‘It’s quite straightforward, Alice. Will’s whole estate goes to you, and after your death, to the children and grandchildren.’

That was it, then. I put down my phone, feeling lost and empty. With a cup of coffee, I wandered out to the veranda to stare at the wet garden. Winter in Melbourne had always depressed me. I was alone. As if to mock me, the sleek new campervan that Will and I had bought with such hope and excitement two months before sat under its cover in the shed. We had planned a trip across the Nullarbor and into Western Australia at the end of the year. People would advise me to sell it now, but like many other decisions, that one could wait.

***

I didn’t return to work. I took accumulated leave and finally resigned when there was no leave left. With relief, I closed my work email account, donated my academic books to the university library, and, carrying a small box of personal items, closed my office door for the last time.

For the first three months, grief was like a tidal wave. It flooded every moment, bringing its flotsam of memories and regrets. It made me scream and howl and beat my hands against surfaces as if to blame them for my loss. It made me bloated with anger, hating everyone who went on living, talking, laughing, reading, oblivious to my pain. I was amazed that the people I brushed against—the postman, the post office worker, the woman at the check-out at the supermarket—couldn’t see that my heart had been squeezed dry. I stopped answering my phone, throwing it away from me when it rang. I hid again, this time in my home. Food was eaten standing at the open refrigerator door: a stale slice of bread; a piece of cheese; cold, greasy take-away. My freezer was stuffed with gifts of pies and stews, but I couldn’t touch any of it. To sit down and eat would have been to admit that life was going on without him.

Of course, as it does, the grief subsided until it was background noise. Sometimes, when I forgot, it would catch me in the belly with a visceral pain, as if my entrails were being tied in knots. Then the present moment would intrude, and I would be back doing a mundane task, in a conversation with one of our children, or caring for a grandchild.

***

During the six months after Will’s death, the dismal Melbourne weather turned to spring and then to summer. Light poured into the big family room windows of my home, and the garden, covered now in weeds, cried out for attention. I have always loved summer and the sun seemed to permeate the ache in my bones. I could weep quietly for Will now without howling with pain and rage, wallowing in hurt. I was sixty-four, healthy and energetic, and there were perhaps twenty or even thirty years ahead for me. The campervan still called to me from its place in the shed.

Slowly, people and events began to pull me back. Our son and daughter, both also grieving, needed me, as did our small grandchildren. Some faithful friends kept calling and asking to meet, and although I hated those dinners and coffees without Will, I didn’t want to hurt the people who offered their friendship despite my withdrawal. I made wooden conversation, and when they asked how I was, I didn’t know what to say. I wasn't anything—I was empty. At least I was sitting across a table, my hair was brushed, and I had even begun to wear a little make-up again. I tried to pretend that I cared whether the restaurant was Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, or any of Melbourne’s other ethnic varieties. I tried to show interest in our friends’ lives, work, and travels, and I tried not to cry when they mentioned Will’s name.

I sat through dinner parties where holidays were planned or raked over. I pretended to show interest in caravan versus motorhome, versus tent, train, or overseas travel. I admired the photographs with the appropriate noises, but my heart wasn’t in it. I remembered the plans Will and I had made to travel in our campervan. I supposed I would have to put those plans aside now.

Yet, something in me longed to run away, perhaps to find a new Alice, one who could be comfortable with her aloneness, one who might again find buried dimensions of her interior life. I began thinking about the childhood camping trips with Mum and Dad and my brother and sister. There was the trip around the coast into South Australia, the three of us side by side in a tent, talking softly while Mum and Dad slept in their home-built caravan. There was the winter trip through the Snowy Mountains, where my sister and I discovered the local boys, and where I had my first teenage romance. There were the many trips into the dry Victorian Mallee region, where our parents had family and friends. The images fell through my mind like an old-fashioned slide show.

Soon, my day-dreaming became more focused and I found myself often sitting in the motorhome, admiring its compact design, reading the instruction manual, imagining myself driving it out of my street and neighbourhood onto the highway. We had bought it for the two of us, but really, it was the perfect size for one. As I trawled through websites that advertised camping sites and caravan parks, I imagined myself living in the van. It was shiny, clean, and solid; only six metres long and just high enough to stand in. It had a compact kitchen, a tiny shower and chemical toilet, lots of storage space for such a small vehicle, a collapsible table and chairs, a couch, and a bed that could be used as a single or double. It was a diminutive home, designed with genius.