Leaving Merrimba

What a sad story I have to write. Somehow or other I had struck root in Merrimba and I had never imagined that I would ever leave. Until I left feet first, as the saying goes, via the hospital in Wingate, or perhaps dropping, like a stone down a well, out in the paddock. Then I would be placed into the earth in the cemetery in Perceval, because there was no way the cemetery in Merrimba would have come “on line” by the time my life span had run its course. There it was on the map, a lovely stand of bush, and when the cemetery in Perceval filled, it would become what it was designated to be. But people just don’t want to buried these days. I would look at the death notices in the local rag and only a few, a small handful, had opted for the spacious peace available in Perceval.

I did hope I wouldn’t exit via a smash up out on the Hume, as so many souls did, our car edged past so many wagon trains of ambulances and cop cars and fire trucks circled around a wreck.

I may have somewhere, in the back of my mind, jumped to the conclusion that I would leave in much the same way as Fred Gedge. This is one of my precious memories, actually. A story of birth and death.

I was almost nine months pregnant, with Alice, as it turned out. Martin was up in the city, working all hours before he took time off to do the run-the-labouring-woman-to-the-hospital thing. And of course we had Stephen to think of this time round. He was fast asleep in his cot. And I had that deep, impossible insomnia that you can get when you are as big as a whale and if you lie down to sleep you can’t breathe. So I was sitting up, where at least I could get my breath, until I was so tired that sleep would just take me. Or maybe insomnia is a symptom of the alertness that comes upon you as you approach birth. A restless sort of qui vive, all part of the nesting instinct.

So, I was awake in the small hours. The village was drowsing all around me in the dark. Nothing stirred. I couldn’t even hear the sound of the cars up on the highway, because there was no wind blowing the thrum of wheels down my way. And then I heard a vehicle nosing its way down our road. Most unusual. At that time of night. Then it stopped outside our gate. What the—! And it had a flashing blue light that strangely illuminated our hedge as I glanced out the window. I heard our gate click and thought—Oh no, they are going to bang on the door and wake up Stephen. So I nipped out onto our path to head them off. Whoever they were.

Well, they were two paramedics who broke into wide smiles when they saw the woman the size of a whale, and they seized me, one on each arm and started hustling me towards their ambulance with the flashing blue light.

“No, no,” I was saying. “Not me. It’s not me.”

And then I twigged. It must be Fred Gedge, three houses further on. I’d heard he was not so hot these days. The way we had no street numbers made pick ups and deliveries so difficult.

“Not you?” they said, unhanding me.

“No. Not me,” I replied. “It must be Fred Gedge. Three houses down.”

And I pointed down the road.

“Oh, sorry,” they said. “We saw your light on.”

And away they went, and half an hour later I heard them drive Fred past my house, taking him away from Merrimba for the last time. I would have gone to his funeral, but I was otherwise occupied at the time. It was the day after Alice was born.

Fred was the first local we had met. He had been keeping his cows in the paddock and hadn’t been told that there were new people. And when he came round to check on them he was mortified to find us sitting on the verandah, in residence. He kept apologising, and lifting his hat to the lady. Mind you, it was hot so I was just wearing a leotard, so that could account for some of the confusion. But Martin and I were cool about the trespass, so when we saw each other around the place there was always a friendly nod and smile and a lift of the hat. If he was in his car he would try to raise his hat to me but it would hit the roof. Most amusing. He was of the old school, with lovely, gentle, old-fashioned ways.

Because of Martin being away in the city so often, many many people, it seemed as if it was the whole village, had offered to run me to the hospital, if it became necessary. But it wasn’t going to be necessary. No way. We had got ourselves organised, our dates were all put into place, and Martin would be here. Ready for the prod in the ribs as my waters broke and the bed turned into a warm river of amniotic fluid. One of the girls next door who babysat for Stephen would run up and take over at this end and away we would go, driving the forty k to the hospital in Wingate. We had plenty of time, because Stephen had taken twenty hours and then he had had to be dragged out of me. I ignored all the old wives tales about how quickly the second baby can arrive. One of the joys of being pregnant, I found, was a free-floating aura of confidence, a hormone-induced miasma of it-will-be-all-right-on-the-night.

But it didn’t happen that way. On the very last night Martin spent in town I was doing my insomnia thing, but with a difference. I had got an unquenchable urge to wash all my hand-crocheted floor rugs and I was swilling them in the bathtub and the laundry tub, I was on fire with the impulse to get everything clean and sorted.

Oh dear. That is a sure sign, the very apotheosis and climax of the nesting instinct. I remember a friend of mine, quivering with yearning, in spite of a belly as vast as a continent, to get her ladder out and wash down all the dining room walls tomorrow. She didn’t actually get around to doing it because the next day she was in the labour ward pushing out her second son.

Being inside a pregnancy is all blind urge, with minimal insight. Cravings, irrational, rampaging instincts.

That night, as I bustled about cleaning and sorting, I saw a piece of paper on the floor and I bent over to pick it up, and with a pop like a balloon bursting, my waters broke and Alice was on her way.

I rang Martin and said, “It’s time to run me to the hospital.” And laughed, as he broke free from his sleep and went into overdrive. He turned up at the hospital soon after me, so I know he must have driven like a maniac all the way from the city. He told me he ran every red light, it was three in the morning, and there wasn’t a cop car to be seen, although he was hoping he would be stopped and then given the siren escort once they heard his excuse. I think it must have been the only time in his life Martin had done anything illegal.

Anyway, at home in Merrimba, with contractions beating down on me thick and fast, I got into a dither about who to ring and ask for a lift. I opted for the guy whose wife had had three babies as the one most likely to be unfazed. But, as it turned out, as I found out as we drove the foggy back roads, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, his wife was one of those who never went into labour, and had to be delivered at a normal hour like a normal person to be induced. So he had never actually driven a labouring woman to hospital in the dead of night, along foggy roads. So I tried not to squeak too much as the contractions bit hard. And often. Goodness, this baby was coming quickly.

And Alice did dive into the world quickly, hardly waiting for the doctor to walk across the park to get there to catch her. The nurse, nervously sterilising instruments with a clash and a bang, asked me if I felt like pushing.

“Yes, I do,” I said. Which was surprising because I had never got to the pushing stage with Stephen and it was all new to me. “But something is holding me back.”

“That’s me!” said the nurse, throwing a wild eye at the door, hoping for the doctor.

And in he came. He looked so exhausted. Who would be a baby doctor? He had just finished a difficult delivery and walked across the park to his home, and he had had to turn around and come back to catch Alice. Bing bang bong. There we are, another baby. A girl one this time.

Ah, what pleasant memories these are.

Leaving Merrimba.

The children left home. They scattered, one went north, one went south. And they weren’t coming back. The place felt desolate, and we felt desolate.

Martin said, “Children take everything. They suck you dry and when you are a husk, they leave.”

That is what it felt like and, I suppose, that is the way it should be.

And Merrimba was no longer the place it had been. For over twenty years it had been lost in a kind of dreaming, and then, maybe it was because of the new highway, or the new zoning laws, but Merrimba woke up. There was traffic, so much traffic, there was building, so much building. There were new people. Then they left and there were more new people. They came and they went. I couldn’t keep track of them.

The overgrown right-of-way that pottered down our fence line and ended abruptly at a wire gate turned out to be a road marked on the map. It was called Hermione Street. And our neighbour, who was subdividing his back paddock, put in a sealed road. It couldn’t be a dirt road, like the developer across from us had put in any more, no, it had to be a sealed road. We had a sealed road on our fence line. And he put in concrete electricity poles. They had to be concrete. They couldn’t be wooden poles any more.

We had new neighbours across the road. One lot parked a caravan to camp in at weekends while they waited to build. They mowed their half acre paddock every Saturday. They left an alarm clock set and it went off and rang for several days. I thought I had developed tinnitus. The people next door to them had built a little palace with a double garage and a walk in pantry and all the necessities of modern life. A friend of theirs visited with a horse in a float, who went off his head and injured himself, so they left it next door in the caravan paddock. When I observed this I knew the whatsit was going to hit the thingo. Because when a pony from down the road had got loose and wandered into the caravan place because they had left their gate open, they had stamped across the road and accused me of letting my livestock wander. I told them the people who owned the pony would be home soon and suggested they shut their gate to keep the pony safe and give them a ring in an hour or two. But no. No livestock, no way, no how, not on. What a suggestion! Look after someone else’s pony. Be neighbourly. What next? So I put the pony in my paddock until I heard the owner’s car go up the road. No point putting her back into her own paddock. If she could get out once she could get out twice. And an animal on the road was dangerous.

I knew this injured horse was going to be trouble. And it was. It got worse and worse. It couldn’t walk, it couldn’t eat. It lay down to die. I wore a path over to the little palace knocking on the door, moving from suggestions of getting a vet, to asking when the promised vet was likely to arrive, to threats of ringing the RSPCA. The guy finally told me—‘‘It’s not my horse.” He was standing in his hallway, on his mushroom coloured carpet, smoking a cigar when he told me this. I went home and rang the RSPCA. It had been nearly a week. The horse was dying by inches. It was hideous. It was a nightmare. An hour before the RSPCA arrived the friend turned up with a gun and a horse float. He shot the horse and dragged the carcase onto the float and drove away.

The next day the caravan people came and stamped across to my house.

“There has been a horse on our land. Look at all that manure. Look at all the damage. Did you put a horse on our paddock?”

I said not a word and pointed at the little palace. They stamped away to engage forces.

The people in the little palace left their outside light on all the time. When I lay in bed at night, with the curtains open so I could see the stars, I could see this light. There it was. I could never forget them.

It occurred to me, a brand new thought, that I could leave. I could leave the scribbly bark in the far corner of the paddock, with its smooth ashen, cream and pistachio limbs. I could leave the tobacco tin lid tacked over a hole on the skirting board in our bedroom. I could leave my knowledge of the weather, the winds in August, the barren storms in March, the deep hard frosts of June. I could leave Merrimba. I could leave. I could allow myself to be swept away from this place. I could live somewhere else. I could be new. I had left other places, I had left plenty of other places. Why had I thought this would be my last place? This didn’t have to be my last place.

We could sell up. We could leave.

I spoke to Martin.

He had, of course, his own special and precious things. He had his own reasons and apprehensions. We spoke together, over weeks and months, with a most parsimonious use of words. A phrase, an intimation, that hovered into our usual daily silence. And was silently contemplated.

“I wouldn’t miss chopping wood.”

“Art galleries. Theatres. Cinemas. Book shops.”

“But not on the coast.”

We groped our way slowly towards the next big adventure of our married life.

The For Sale sign went up outside our front gate. Once the For Sale sign is up outside your gate, and the whole village knows, then you have already left. And the rest is just a nuisance of waiting, an impatient grief, and the outrage of strangers mooching through your living room.

The way it worked out, some interested parties were ringing with increasingly possible offers the day before I had to leave for New Zealand for six months. They rang twice. Then the phone rang again, but it was someone trying to sell us raffle tickets.

I sat up most of the night, my suitcase parked by the door. I knew I was leaving for the last time. The conditions weren’t right for me to hear that strange effect of the echo from the highway. As cars pulled up from the bridge over Bellfields River, up to the white house on the corner of Merrimba Road, if conditions were right, it sounded as if traffic was racing down our road, from where Fred Gedge had used to live, and, as it reached our front gate, it vanished. It was most disconcerting and rather magical. I would have liked to have heard it one more time. A stream of ghost-like traffic, pulling hard towards our house, and disappearing, as if into a tunnel or a black hole or down a wombat burrow.

Dawn came and it was time for me to catch my train so I could catch my plane. I kissed Martin goodbye and walked through the fruit trees, past the greengage and the damson and the satsuma, and out our side gate, and I dragged my suitcase down our road to the station.

I was hardly settled into my residence in New Zealand when Martin rang with the news that the interested parties had made a possible offer and he had accepted it. Our days in Merrimba were over. He, of course, had to bear the brunt. Those endless details, the fine tuning of dates, electricity, phone, redirection of mail. The packing. We had so much stuff. We had arrived in Australia from New Zealand in the early ’70s on a ship with two cabin trunks, and now we had seven crowded acres. Where had all this stuff come from? Since the For Sale sign had gone up I had been prowling around, making piles for St Vinnie’s, making piles to burn, stuffing our garbage bin to the brim every fortnight. But I couldn’t get on top of all the stuff. Some of it I had no recollection of. It seemed as if we had been having reverse burglaries. People had been breaking in and leaving stuff.

Martin packed everything we owned with his usual finesse. One china plate was broken and one metal button box was crushed. That was it. Everything was going to our daughter’s place down south to be stored in her big shed while we, or rather Martin, looked for a new place for us to live. I had to trust him with everything. I did trust him. I returned from my sojourn to our new address and caught an unfamiliar train out to where I now lived. How strange to walk into a strange house and see my kitchen dresser, hung with familiar cups, to see everything I knew in a different configuration. It is a continuing, but diminishing, shock to my system.

While I was in New Zealand I learned to access Street View on Google Earth. So I could check on houses that Martin thought might work out. Something went awry when I checked on the house we are now living in. What came up was a completely different house. That I liked the look of very much. So I emailed—YES YES YES. But it wasn’t that house at all. It was this house. How very odd. But this house is fine. I sleep well here. I can work here. But I don’t think it will be our last house. We haven’t found that house yet.

I did check to see if our road in Merrimba was on Street View. And yes, it was. Some sunny morning a car with a camera had driven up our road filming as it went. I can roughly place when it was. Because the For Sale sign is up. According to Street View we are still living in Merrimba. It’s a sunny morning and a car is driving past. We don’t notice it, or the camera, because Martin has biked down to the shop to pick up the mail and the paper and has settled on the verandah with a cup of coffee, and I am drifting about in the garden doing a little desultory weeding. But we both know we are leaving Merrimba. In three months, six months, we will be gone. It’s all over, our days here are done.