SMALLS

I need to buy some new undies. Several pairs reveal a parting of ways between the elastic and the cotton fabric and, as my mother used to say, what if you were taken to hospital and were wearing those? As a child I had no real idea what she meant. Like when I had my appendix out? Is there special hospital underwear? But like a puppy I picked up on the tone of voice. Shame. It would be shameful to have decrepit underpants viewed by… well, by anyone. I remember her repairing her own nylon undergarments, sitting by the window where the light was best, bending over the needle and thread. It was a necessity;  she had no income of her own and the only way to purchase personal items was by putting a few pence aside from the weekly housekeeping. That scrimping and saving was preferable to the stressful, yet ultimately inevitable, conversation with my father about increasing the housekeeping money. Though conversation isn’t the right word. Inquisition. Interrogation. Ritual humiliation. Any and all of those. 

Last week I threw a pair in the bin. It felt odd, uncomfortable, profligate. A kind of betrayal. There was even some annoyance that I couldn’t think of an alternative. Who, nowadays, has a bag of cleaning cloths behind the laundry door? No way I’d be offering my discarded underwear to the cleaning lady who visits once a fortnight. Mum, I wish you could see the look of distaste, repugnance even, as I reveal we have a cleaner. Once a fortnight, I plead in explanation of this bourgeois indulgence. But back to the smalls. (British vernacular, commonly referring to undergarments, in case you were wondering.) They are easily purchased at the supermarket, and are periodically on special just like sausages or cucumbers. It feels odd creating a new item on the shopping app I use each week. Undies—male, large. I like to group the list into sections that match my route through the supermarket but where does underwear sit? Is it near the food containers? Or next to the batteries? Maybe I’ll put it at the end, so searching for them will be like a victory lap before heading to the finish line of the checkout. 

They probably have socks as well, and I need those too. That’s much more annoying because not long ago I bought half a dozen pairs in two packs of three, or a six sock bundle if you are following the arithmetic. Twelve new items of sockery just a few months old. But already several have developed holes in the vicinity of the big toe. How can that be? Didn’t socks used to last until you grew out of them? Clearly not any more. Already a couple of pairs have been binned, with all the furtive guilt that entails. In a faded snapshot I see my mother sitting in the lounge room, next to the standard lamp. On an occasional table sits her battered sewing basket, in her lap a ball of wool. She holds a pock-marked wooden darning tool. Just this pair, Allan? she asks. My father’s head appears briefly from behind the newspaper. Yes, he nods, but also one of my business shirts. The top pocket seam has torn. She mumbles assent, and inserts the darning mushroom into the sock. I’ll do the shirt tomorrow, she says, when the light is better.

GAME

The boy was very excited when we got him the PS3 for Christmas, or perhaps birthday. Secondhand, but not yet redundant. Its successor, greater and grander by a whole integer, was still relatively new. People were selling old consoles as they sprang for the new improved model. Like cars, like hi-fi gear, like bicycles or food processors or any desirable apparatus. The need for new.

Games were purchased, at the on-line marketplace or from the trade-in bins at the shop in the big centre. He worked it all out remarkably quickly. This is what it means to be a digital native, I thought. I remembered the first video game I ever saw. Fittingly, for it was built to resemble a coffee table, it sat amongst the abused vinyl armchairs in the Student Union’s second floor coffee lounge. Imitation woodgrain with a coin slot on the side, a button to start the game, and a couple of knobs. Glass topped, the upper surface was pure coffee table around the edges, but had a cathode ray screen the size of an 10″ record cover in the centre. On this miniature television the game flickered into monochrome life. For one player, a one inch rectangle about the size of a slim cigarette butt moved side to side to block a small white square from passing the bat and entering oblivion. If you got the bat in the right place to block it, away it bounced to the other side of the screen where it cannoned into an invisible wall and returned. So it went, backwards and forwards, bouncing off invisible walls like a game of ghost squash. There was a two-player version where your opponent also had a bat. For a while people would stand and watch this novelty. Good players achieved some level of fame, or at least recognition. Eventually, everyone realised it was as exciting as watching traffic lights but less colourful. Cups and saucers began accumulating, leaving brown circles on the glass. When Space Invaders arrived downstairs, it became just another coffee table covered in cigarette ash and lunch crumbs.

Watching the boy on the couch, concentrating on the bouncing scenes of Lego Star Wars, I felt a pang of guilt about him being a single child. This is what siblings are for, shared play. So I tried to join in. Mastering the controller did nor come naturally, nor did working out what the game required. Frustration was intense. A refrain emerged. Which one am I? What’s happening? I’m dead. It would have been funny except I was grinding my teeth so hard I couldn’t smile. Despite my contribution he enjoyed playing, finding a child’s capacity for being immersed in the moment. I withdrew from lounge room gaming but later, in the era of more sophisticated worlds, would pause behind the couch as he sat under headphones, tapping the controller like a mad typist. I’d watch the images on the big TV. Assassin’s Creed captivated me… renaissance Florence never looked better. My favourite bit was when the main character climbed high on a parapet or spire to gain and eagle’s eye view of the city. To return to street level he would launch himself into space, hurtling earthwards to land in a cart full of hay. The boy said it was called ‘The Leap of Faith’. Would you do that? Probably not, I said. Hay is quite spiky. 

He’s at the same uni now, though the Union Building is fenced off, awaiting demolition. I feel sad about that. The Undergrad lounge where I first witnessed Dungeons and Dragons being played, the cafeteria where you could get a cup of almost drinkable coffee for twenty cents, the fourth floor snooker club with its intimidatingly large tables and hushed atmosphere. Now the cream brick edifice looks pale and anxious, expecting the wreckers any day. A bit like retirement. Cracks, wear and tear, pointless memories; life shrinking, structured only by medical appointments and the activities of others. Waiting for the inevitable. The most exciting part of the day is when he shares some of a history or literature lecture over dinner. Life has shrivelled, though I’m not altogether sad about that. What’s out there now? To find out would take a leap of faith.

HALFLIFE

A couple of days ago I pulled Malone Dies from the fiction shelf. Penguin books, 1962 printing; orange cover, nicotine stained pages, price five shillings and sixpence. Translated from the French by the author, Samuel Beckett. Glanced at the paperback in profile, surprised to see how far into the slim volume the bookmark had progressed. Had I really read half of it? Page seventy-four of one hundred and forty-four. More than half. Astonishing. When did I first open it, gazing at the stern thumbnail photograph of the author on the inside cover before carefully turning the title page to the beginning of the text? Gingerly, because the pages seem somehow frail, parchment like, friable like dry earth that falls from the shovel in a puff of dust. “I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.” Not a particularly shocking opening, given the title of the work. He had two copies, my friend. Offered me one, a winter Friday evening almost ten years ago. We could both read it, he said. See who finishes first. Always, with him, a dash of competition. It was the same with our endless and often circular conversations about music. But a deep respect for the enigmatic Irish playwright and novelist was a point of agreement. He’d taught Godot; I’d performed Krapp’s Last Tape. One all. Sure, I said, why not? I even started it the next day, some kind of momentum from the conversation propelling me through the first few… chapters? Not a bit of it! Pages? Only just. Oh, it is hard work, this drifting on the jumbled reminisce of an aged man. Yearning for a chapter break, or even a centre-justified asterisk. Something to mark the passage of time, to permit, encourage even, the satisfaction of partial achievement; to draw breath. Eventually it disappeared under the TV guide, a music magazine and some memoir by a middle-aged rock star. During a tidy up of the coffee table, it was returned to the bookshelf. But it must have been retrieved at some point, because the bookmark is halfway through. Half way! Several years ago I asked my friend how he was progressing. He pulled a face. Pretty hard work, isn’t it? Boasting, surely, I revealed my arrival at the mid-point. Eyebrows were raised. Good effort, he said. Pause. Will one of us finish before one of us dies, I asked? You’re well in the lead, he said. A couple of days ago I pulled Malone Dies from the shelf once more. Still page seventy-four. But only one of us has the chance to finish it now.

WALK

I parked under the shade of a drowsing gum tree. It was warm, not yet hot. Not hot like it would be in a month or two. Still, even a Spring break encourages some shade seeking, especially when you’ll be hot when you get back to the car. There were two choices for the bushwalk. The shorter one was to a man-made lake with an odd name, OT Dam. The other was a circuit through the bush. Which one, I asked. You choose, she said. We both knew the boy wouldn’t care. It’s no longer correct to call him ‘the boy’ but I don’t know what other label to use; he’s still our boy. I said, let’s decide at the point where the routes diverge. So a few hundred metres later we stopped at a fork in the dirt track. Fire tracks; unsealed dirt roads about a truck width, usually scarred by rain channels that have hardened solid as concrete. Fire trucks use them if there’s a bushfire; walkers can use them too.

At the beginning the dam walk went uphill and the circuit walk gently down hill. Which one, I asked. You decide, she said, you’re… Her voice trailed off but I heard the end of the sentence. The oldest, the most unfit. Dam, I said, thinking the other two expected that as it was a shorter walk, scarcely a hike at all. We turned up the right arm of the ‘Y’ and my internal list continued up the first incline. The least enthusiastic about bushwalking, the dodgiest knees, the most likely to need a rest, the first to start puffing… 

An explosion of red and green startled me out of this grey reverie; three rosellas bursting into flight with parakeet screeches. I smiled. Rosellas in the wild, such unlikely vibrancy in the olive-tan bush. I took a breath, focussed on the surroundings, the sun filtering through the canopy, the family up ahead. Go at your own pace, I called. Just wait for me at some point. Pride or frustration would have silenced that request a while back but now it just seemed like stating the obvious. And OK. I’m here doing this, we’re together, it’s a terrific late Spring morning. 

A mountain biker passed us, moving fast uphill. Jeez, I thought, that’s fitness. There was a sign indicating a prepared mountain bike track. I stood on the launch platform and gazed down an almost vertical descent; boulders, gullies, sawn-off tree trunks, it was impossible to even detect a path down. The sign at the top warning of mortal danger did not seem far-fetched. As you age, you forget what it is to be intrepid; a heightened sense of risk is shadowed by a reduction in self-belief and the young are labelled foolhardy to cover creeping caution. Maybe it’s only older people who read the warning signs. Like the one by the lake that cautioned about deep, cold water. Not to mention the hazards of downed trees and other entanglements. Danger every direction. 

We found a boardwalk and ambled along it to enjoy the sun glinting off the water and the gentle murmurings of the bush. At the far end the earthen bank was covered with untidy foliage; much more like a natural lake than a dam. Another daring cyclist wove across the embankment wearing what looked like a motorcycle helmet; Darth Vader on a mountain bike. We took a family selfie with the water in the background. I said we should do the other walk as well, perhaps my voice caring more enthusiasm than I actually felt. Still, it was good to find enough in the legs to want more.

A shipping container plonked by the side of the track had a sign, ‘Peninsula Mountain Biking Club’. That explained the tyre marks, I guess. But what did they keep in the container? Not those fancy two-wheelers with their shock absorber forks and forty-eight gears, surely. Perhaps it was a mini-hospital for treating cuts and lacerations, sprains and bruises. Ride fast over such terrain, you’re going to come to grief at some point. Later we saw a lizard lying in the middle of the track. I wonder if it knows it’s on a bike track, son mused. Might end up as two lizards. We chuckled, the lizard didn’t move. There’s danger even in lying motionless in one place, I thought. 

I wondered how far it was back to the car.