Now we chat, our tiny community of 3, each morning to figure out what’s ahead. It gives a purpose to the days. The hope of renting a house for the cold months died with reports on the radio of strangers in country towns met with hostile reactions. Strangers are dangerous for what they may bring, even in towns where because of the bushfires, they were desperately needed a month ago. So what will we do in darkest winter?
The obvious becomes obvious: stay here. Make it warmer. GG texted N, our builder with the shock of golden hair and no immunity, now locked at home after his call. He texted back that our problem is not battery power, but solar panels. We have currently 8 x 250 watt panels which gives a total of 2000 watts- that translates to 2kw, at any one time. On a bright sunny day, that’s enough. But in the shivering baleful desolate quivering winter, beside the pot belly stove for all its ironbark wood, we’ll need a heater, even a low power one, for K’s strangely cold body, or she’ll get flu. But to run it for a night, say 6 hours, you’d use 3kwh.
If we have half as many panels again, he says, that might get us over the hump. We ask him to let us pay for him to pave our way with his contacts, and now we wait on him.
Then comes a blow.Our neighbours S and F ring to say they must go back to the city. I’d got to depend on her but it’s got too hard here- they love the landscape but their solar power keeps crashing their fridge, and crashing the sump pump that takes their grey water up behind the house to the new veggie garden they’ve just started. All the houses here use for our gardens grey water, the water just from baths and the basin, never the toilet, but ours runs downhill, so we have no pump problems. And they’ve got a self-composting toilet with a fan to take the smell away, but that depends on electricity, whereas because this is an old house, built originally in 1930 in the Depression and added to over the years and never completely renovated, we still have an old-fashioned septic tank that only occasionally gets smelly, but that’s easily cured by tossing into it a cup of milk. A woman neighbour from a downriver bay taught me that years ago, and many a time, I’ve wished I could hug her. Besides, F says, there’s a new rule: people have been asked to stay home over Easter, not to go to their holiday house. Unless they are already there, as we are. So they must take off before the roads are policed, so that they don’t get caught.
I hear their boat starting up, and rush too late to the door- they’ve been waving and are now turning away towards the future. My heart thumps and seems to draw away my breath with its sadness. We are alone in the bay.
Have we made a terrible mistake?
But we’re here, and none of us three want to go back to the city. So we must make it work.
Throw ourselves into the next job. Keep busy.
This has been such a holiday house, over all the years, we’ve never had a kitchen counter. All we ate was BBQs and salads, and the occasional frozen leftover from our freezer. So we’ve made do with two little butcher’s blocks from Aldi. In our new life, cooking’s serious. There’s no where to cut up vegetables, pile dirty dishes, ladle out food, make K’s flat bread, put your elbows on the counter and, weighed down at the state that the world’s got into and now your favourite neighbour’s gone, sob.
But – under the cabin, that treasure trove- why have we ever thrown anything out?-perhaps I should go through the bags of rubbish now blocking the jetty for Moxham’s barge still hasn’t come – we’ve long known there was a piece of pink marble, once a long piece, but when we bought the house it had been broken in two. We bought the house 2 decades ago for just over $100,000 from an fisherman who’d got too old and stiff to manage it. No one else wanted it- it’s the sort of place only artists and writers would want. He’d been trying to sell it for years, but he wept as he sailed away.
It’s that sort of place. You weep as you leave.
Anyway, the pin swirly marble was too pretty to throw out. There’s a metal stand under the house as well, which might hold it up.
GG conceives a plan to glue the two bits to a piece of plywood, fitting them together during the gluing, and somehow attach them to the top of the metal stand. Because it’ll be too heavy to lift, once it’s a whole piece, he’ll do that on the deck of the big house, on the table we eat at.
First we have to carry the two bits of marble up the 40 steps. Marble is very heavy. Now i say thank god it was broken! If it wasn’t, we’d have had to break it, to manage the weight! As it is, we giggle as we walk ponderously with the two separate pieces, one-armed GG backwards to set the pace, and me shuffling forward, saying that if we drop them, we’ll have a much shorter working board. Or maybe several.
“Do you mind doing this?” I ask him.
“It makes me feel useful,” he says, though he’s groaning in pain.
GG needs to take pain killers and lie down. Now the two bits of marble wait on the deck table for him. I do my last NIDA zoom lecture on the marble, (I discuss with the students how creative thinking feels different from ordinary thinking : it often begins with a vague, confused excitement, a hunch or a yearning, then it speaks back and resists the writer, imposing its own rules, tossing the writer into a sea of chaos, with only a tiny, transitory glimpse of the whole). After the lecture’s over, a student asks me to stay back, and I talk leaning on it. She wants my help for a paper tomorrow about the feminist answer to Freud and Lacan for she can’t accept that women have a fear of castration, as Freud claimed- it might ring true for men but not for her. I give her a potted version of Cixous and Irigaray and their refutation of this for women, especially Irigaray who pointed out that women have no such castration fear for we with labia have two lips, not one phallus, and furthermore, the whole of a women’s body is a phallus. She’s delighted.
“Why didn’t Freud realize this?”
“His time.”
She nods.
“He blindly assumed that in saying what was true for him, it was true for the other half of humanity. He had no experience of our half. But he didn’t realize that. I tried very hard to believe in Freud’s castration theory when I was young, even to the point of trying to be sad about the absence of a penis! But I was just making it up! Irigaray’s realization was one of the great realizations of the 20thcentury, don’t you think?”
On zoom, she can’t nod enough.
Back to the marble: we eat dinner on it- the turkey legs I found draughting when we were on the eve of running away – why was I ever daunted by insignificant turkey legs? – for we’re eating to the bottom of the freezer. And then I do an online shopping order on the marble, and on the phone, discover that Woolworths won’t deliver to Brooklyn, but all the way off at Berowra. And they’re almost as expensive as the marina shop, though it’s a wider choice. And we have to give Woolworths a window of 5 hours for them to arrive with our boxes, as if we were sitting at home, rather than in a car reading books, listening to the radio, arguing, napping; and worse, their only times of delivery that suit the tides are between 2pm and 7 pm on Saturday. Summer time is just ending, so if the delivery truck comes to Berowra at anything later than 6, we’ll be 45 minutes on the river in utter blackness. Once in the dark we found ourselves in an unknown bay, and had to find out way out in the dark: once we ran aground, not seeing where the ground was; once we ran out of petrol and had to wait for a passing boat and a tow; once the engine burst into flames and we needed the police rescue but that was at midday and by 8 at night, police rescue will be safe and cosy at home…..… We’ll text k to put on all the lights so we can see our way in, and once we’re in our bay, the lights will guide us home.
“Is it too hard?” I ask him.
“We’ll manage,” he says.
He’s a stoic. The perfect person for this adventure. As I am not, but must learn to be.
