Claire Gardened

The worst thing that ever happened to Claire, as far as she told me, happened when she left that place where she should have stayed. I think it’s good for her to talk about it all. Sometimes I approach her from around the side of the kitchen, walking to her across the lawn. It’s a while since I visited her, I should go see how she is. Usually she’s standing still, not quite on the ground, as if your approach from the wrong angle, with the light falling in the wrong way, would render her invisible. But mostly I come to her from another direction, through the gate at the back and walk alongside her little grey shed and round the corner, and mostly when I see her she’s just staring. . .
She’s staring over the corrugated asbestos fence, over the neighbour’s tiled roof, over Station Street, Fairfield and Melbourne CBD, over Footscray and the western suburbs, the rest of Victoria, the Nullarbor, The Eastern Goldfields, The Wheat Belt, the Swan Valley, staring across the wide streets and sprawling Perth suburbs and jacarandas, to the western edge, Wembley Downs for Goff’s sake, along Something Street to 156, to the first floor of a two level block of about sixteen units, and into a two-bedroom flat. And she’s staring at one thing in that flat: a three-cup stainless steel espresso coffee maker, with a gold lid!
I don’t understand why she’s so stuck on that place and that coffee pot. Why doesn’t she just buy another one?
– It cost seventy dollars, she says, and it took weeks to choose. And it’s not just that…
What she longs for is to sit in one of the white-painted wooden armchairs with the floral cushions that she’d loved and treasured despite ripping off both her brother and Neddy’s mother to buy - or because, I’m not so sure. There was this big picture window where you saw into the thick mixture of dirty Cyprus pines, mixed natives and weedy things. Once a Butcher Bird brought a mouse, scared to death, and wedged its head into a V of two branches, then split it open from chin to arse and ate its guts. She wants to see that again and she wants to be drinking hot fragrant coffee when she does.
She longs to sit in that shady living room, watching and waiting or to go into the cool, dark bedroom.
The year that she longs to live in again is 1996 I think, she isn’t very clear, when it seems that she finally realized that she’d never be able to leave him, that this was it until the end of time. La-dah-dah, and she’d never ride through Paris with the warm wind in her hair, or fuck a guy who knew how to hold her when she came, never fuck a guy that knew what foreplay was or who liked her. Never fuck a guy who wasn’t pissed. So she was resigned to staying with Neddy and the thing that she decided she had no choice but to do was to Be Happy.
In February she had said to herself, If I can’t leave him I will make myself be happy.
So she did. It was part of her day, then, to walk him happily to the bus stop in the morning, and to welcome him home warmly in the evening. She happily cooked, gardened and painted: beautiful pictures in black ink with a long calligraphy brush like a Zen master. She said nice things to her useless lover, and tried in every way to be good and calm and nice. It is possible, from what I gather, to infer that he was nicer too. He shopped with her, they played games and they giggled a lot.
. . . . .
Before she moved into the flat, she’d burdened her brother with her unhappiness when she came back from Tasmania where she’d fled to get away from Neddy early in ’95. A beautiful girl with big hands and a floppy-eared goat had offered Claire a place to build her own house, but like a hard plastic toy on an elastic cord, she’d flung back to Neddy. He’d had a car accident, and she thought he couldn’t live without her. It was only a small crash. The police found him driving from the passenger seat. He blew an impressive .27, but was easily bested three days later by a guy who was only pulled over for a faulty light, but registered an impossible .35 blood/alcohol level.
– He needs me! and she went bolting home like a rabbit to its hole at the heavy noise of collision: one and a half days in a B-double from Port Augusta by thumb.
But that flying return strained and twisted her spine. She got to Perth, to her brother’s house and realised that she didn’t want to be with Neddy. So she stayed with her brother and her back dislocated. She got up one morning and couldn’t piss because of the spasms of pain. She could hardly stand. The pain came in ripples and waves. She was terrified to move and she couldn’t stand still.
Her brother drove her to the chiropractor three times a week for the next six months, until she could walk properly and was confident on public transport.
Then she thought, Well it’s time to do something, so she took the last unit left of her degree. That was a very odd experience and it’s when, she tells me, she really starts to sees evidence of the extent of her emotional disintegration. And that’s a good word because nothing fitted together any more, all her parts were falling away from the centre, ceasing to be integrated. Everything was operating separately within her, each part of her self with its own agenda. Sure she’d been depressed before, but now her disquiet began to manifest itself in frightening ways. She thought that everything in the environment including what was read and listened to and spoken all entered into her, all movement, sound and space. It became impossible to define her Self, because she was not only changing constantly, but was unbounded. The act of description and analysis itself seemed to be another form of destruction.
Images welled up inside her, sounds created huge endless plains of knowing outside and beyond. She became lost in these unfamiliar territories sometimes for days. Then she became really frightened. She reached a wall. Slowly and carefully she touched it and felt her way along it but she couldn’t find a way around it. Small pieces of her personality wanted to leave, yet other small bits were capable of actively absorbing the wall and passing through, shifting and relocating some of her and some of the particles of the wall. For a short time she had to become the wall to be replaced, reborn: from the youth would be born the mutant adult. As a mother eats food to nourish the physical birth and the infant abandons the placenta, her youth consumed ideas to nourish her spiritual adult which tore away from the flesh of the youth and gobbled it up. This birth would be the idea made flesh.
She would flare up into rages at the slightest provocation or perceived slight, and people attacked her everywhere. Her paranoia grew large and volatile. She would heat up, flame bright, and implode in rage and desperation. This conflagration was soon followed by embarrassed remorse, tears, and further isolation. Her disease was becoming obvious.
She must have thought she was going crazy. She wanted to crawl into a hole of silence and escape the crowd. Thoughts of suicide were a relief from this anxiety. She used death as a kind of trick: imagined piercing her throat with a thin sharp knife, the point pressing right into her neck makes me shiver to imagine. But her mind was somehow able to insert a question at that point: Why die when there is so much life I haven’t experienced? She imagined things could be better. And then somehow for a brief moment, in a quick bright high like a finger of sunlight breaking through on a rainy day, she’d become excited about some little thing she had witnessed or a texture under her finger tips. There enveloped her then a kind of luminosity. I still catch glimpses of bright filament floating at her edges when she speaks of those moments of bright simplicity.
And then it would all pass and she’d be alone again, like the time when Jesus sank beneath the water, his wavy hair all wet and floating and she was left bobbing in the bottomless black ocean, surprised. The edginess lasted hours, immobilizing her, shutting down her senses. She couldn’t think, hear, listen, or comprehend. She shut people out as if they weren’t happening to her. It sounds pretty bad. She wonders that she could stand it then.
As the months passed her anxiety got more intense and persistent, and even though it can’t render her so debilitated, she still feels it now. I thought she’d always been like that, but now I don’t think she was. She does. Once she told me, it was around that time she was raped.
She became obsessed with trying to understand the notion of unconditional faith in God. She was overwhelmed by the paradox of love through fear. When I press her for details she’s reluctant to recall how the argument was constructed, and how it came to pass that she observed the Hand of the Creator in the geometry of a flower. But I think it happened that walking home one day she had bent down to find solace for her pounding thoughts in the beauty of a tiny flower but was instead blinded by the complexity of its geometric progressions, which ate into her eyes and seared into her soul. She suffered the coldest, most fearful and distressing moment of her life. Sometimes she describes it as a triumph of Reason over Reality. That fear she discovered was the offspring of obsessive reason, of analysis beyond the Self, separating her from the soil she trod. There was no comfort in it. There was no love. I am most glad that it did not happen to me. It was a moment of ultimate madness – to feel that one can never again be alone. When she recognised the geometry that daisy possessed she knew that all flowers accord to a plan and extrapolated that everything in the entire universe acquiesced to ultimate reason, and therefore not only could she never be happily alone again, but chaos did not exist. For some of us it is the ultimate hell to live in a world without chaos.
Not long after that she moved into Neddy’s flat. She tried to avoid it but he was in Perth, she visited him, she needed company and sex no matter how bad, and she was afraid of being by herself, not surprisingly. Hadn’t she been alone when she was raped? But let’s not dwell on that. It happens to everyone. The time lines are confusing. Suffice it to say that she was falling apart. Her moods were erratic and volatile, extreme and unpredictable. She was frightened and paranoid, angry, sarcastic, and demented. She was either moody silence or volatile rage. She drew squares over and over and over. She had notebooks full of squares that she drew, on the bus, on the train, in cafes, travelling all over the city, trying to escape the heat in her head. It was a relief to her brother when she left. So she spun back to her twin. How often had she tried to leave Neddy, tried to escape – almost achieved it only to snap back? And yet, wasn’t it just three months earlier that he’d said he didn’t think he loved her any more? Didn’t he write a letter that said he no longer loved her, which she’d eaten? She needed him.
And as she couldn’t leave him, would never leave him, she learned to be happy with him. She learned to be happy and have no money when the dole cut her off after she’d done her back in again working at a nursery lifting trays of soil. She learned to be the house wife she’d always despised her mother for becoming. She’d hated the deal her mother had made. And yet her mother seems to have been in a much better position – she had her children, friends, and a house of her own…
Claire gardened. She dug out the compost pit at the back of the flats, she planted tomatoes and beans and lots of bitter leafy green things that came in shiny beautiful packets with all the instructions in Italian. She taught the kid in the other flats with the baby girl, the beautiful sister and brothers, and the mum who showed her toothless gums and laughed like the belly of the world, and played poker too well for Claire, to grow spinach. And her friend with the baby that never slept made the lightest, crispest damper she’d tasted, with wet fingers and plain flour.
I tell her that there were lots of good times then, that she’d managed to be happy and she’d even had fun. She answers that she knows, she knows, she knows, but more to herself than to me. Then she tells me that she used to wake up in the middle of the night in a blackness of despair. It was opaque, tasteless hopelessness. Once she dreamed a wedge-tailed eagle into the flat, so huge, it tore the place apart.
Neddy started drinking again like he used to. Poker games became more frequent with the neighbours, more chaotic, increasingly more frequently chaotic. Beer and red wine, curried sausages, meat, pasta and the stink of day after day of empties full of butts. . . He smoked more pot and their hatred swelled up like a, I don’t know, like hatred. They hated their lives, hated the city, started destroying the relationships they’d made, started destroying the people around them and their place, their study, their tenuous togetherness. Any freshness that remained was only in their youth. So they decided to leave the city, to live off the land, to become adherents of a small Australian myth. They decided to leave the bad place that was doing this to them. She wishes that she’d been strong enough to stay on alone. She should have let him go.
She took all her paintings to the skip bin. She threw her twenty seven journals into the skip bin. She tells me she stood on a crate fanning photos up into the air and watching them fall like dead leaves into the rubbish. She threw in the negatives. She felt the coldness in the centre of her heart spreading. She sold all her art books and poetry books. He took his favourites to his uncle’s house. She sold her dad’s 65mm bellows camera still in its leather case that he’d had at school which still took beautiful photos, which he’d used to take the first photos of the farm in 1957, to a camera shop for $25. She and Neddy had a garage sale,and a man at 7am, two hours before the advertised starting time, packed her grandmother’s hand painted bone china tea set and silver cutlery and lots of other things she’d loved that she can’t even remember now into a cardboard box, and, and her coffee pot. She watched him, impotent. He offered her fifteen bucks. She couldn’t believe it.
– You’re joking, she said. That’s worth at least twenty!
One man climbed into her garden as he was leaving and pulled out all her spinach plants for himself.
– If you’re leaving you won’t need these.
She stood and watched and could do nothing. Everything was pulled out of her.
She lost control of the essence of herself. She has nothing left with which to navigate. Her record collection, the soundtrack to her life, gone for thirty dollars, all one hundred and forty seven vinyl LPs, stuff she loved or was indifferent too but that reminded her of other times and greater happiness.
And now she stares and longs for her ex-coffee pot, with the cold still in her, packed around a hole of regret. In wishing she had not given it away so cheaply she wishes she hadn’t stuffed her life in it and given that away as well. So many of her creations she threw away and with them her self-possession. Maybe it’s good for her to talk about it all, remember and try to find a way out of it now that she’s here and so very far away. Mostly when I see her she’s just staring. . .
. . . . .
I stopped by briefly yesterday. I approached her from around the side of the kitchen, walking to her across the lawn. She was standing in the sunlight, sipping coffee. She was barefoot on the ground, quite solid. She saw me straight away and smiled. She told me that she’d bought a little coffee pot from the op shop for two-fifty, and it makes just one cup, for her. She infuses it with cardamom and cinnamon and she told me things aren’t so bad now.
I hope it’s a beautiful hot Melbourne summer this year.

Christine King
2nd August 2007


(This the story that won the Brimbank Short Story Competition, 2007.)