The Visitor

The Visitor

The sunlight through the venetian blinds reveals the most brilliant greens from my Sunday garden. It’s windy, in fact squally. Little shower bursts rinse the washing every time it is just about to dry.
It is only a small space around the house but it feels like mine and I’m wondering how many others who lived here before me felt the same way.
It is strange how we get so attached to miniscule pockets of the world no matter how humble they may be.
If I use my imagination, my garden feels like a private park. It’s a little unkempt but I like it that way...flowing with leaves and fallen blossom, a few weeds sprouting here and there, agapanthus, a mass of sword ferns and a pond that sustains some very hardy goldfish.
The birds like it here too and I consider that a recommendation.
Today I feel settled for the first time in ages. 
There is a sense of calm that has eluded me for weeks...maybe months.
It is probably because I won’t be going in to work next week.
It is a sublime relief. Christmas is just six days away and there is a lot to do but there is no structure to that and I’m kind of eager to engage in the randomness of little non-cerebral chores. No deadline imminent, no phone, no email popping up insistently on my screen.
It is like breathing normally again.
We’re having a mild lead in to summer. But the extended daylight is a gift.
I heard from my daughter, Julia, yesterday. She sounded well but her plans to come home for Christmas have been foiled by a blown head gasket. She’s been quoted more than $1000 for the repairs and because it is Christmas they can’t do the job until the New Year.
I half expected something like that would happen so the disappointment is a ripple. She is a great girl - smart, keen, hardworking and I know she’ll be spending the day with her boyfriend’s family. They’re good people.  She’ll be fine.
I am still baking a Christmas cake for her because there is enough time to post it and it will remind her of home and happy days.
There have been some very happy days here. Parties in the garden, picnics on the lounge room floor when she was a baby, birthdays, and more than 20 Christmases.
I won’t be seeing Luke for Christmas.
He says he would rather be alone. It hurts a little really, that he would prefer isolation to being with me.
I never believed that I would feel anything for anyone again until I met Luke. That I would feel this intensity of love for him is completely inexplicable.
But it has been so very unsustaining. To suddenly feel so much and have so little in return. You can’t make someone care for you – no matter how you might try.
It is a truth I have been studiously ignoring, but it is like trying to un-know something. Impossible.
The acute pain of it settled on me some months ago. It feels so very physical, this emotion. Sediment at the bottom of my heart. It’s a grainy pain in my chest that occasionally steals its way up to my throat threatening to cut off all air supply. If I didn’t know better, I would have seen a doctor about it.
The years I spent so self-contained, competent, unflurried by emotion – many years - have evaporated.
This emotion, as though it were a being all of its own – a dark visitor - has invaded every space. Brooding, vibrant, complex and with an intelligence and logic of its own, it clutches at me like a needy child. Antimatter sucking every balanced, calm happy thought that buds in my brain.
Luke believes he is inviolate to emotion.  He defines passion as a banal weakness, would rather not confront the connectedness of pairing. Sex is just another body function to him – one he can take or leave.
Yet on the rare occasions when we have made love – and they play in my mind like an exquisite foreign film, tragic but beautiful – I feel his shadow self, vulnerable, sweet, sensual lapping up all tenderness. Yes, Luke is present but it is his shadow that lingers over every touch in every puff of breath. 
It is as though Luke and this darkness are in cahoots, seeking every sadness I have ever known, finding every bruise and pressing down on them. I am powerless and they use a magnifying glass to intensify the light and sear the burn deeper. 
My longing for connection is a kind of torture not only because of the intrinsic pain of it but because I understand now that it is self-inflicted. The dark visitor is in control and I have no courage to stop him.
Luke believes he is still young. Unlike me, he is quick to point out.  It’s true; he has not breeched the other side of the middle age hill. He hasn’t gone over the top and seen the abyss. But he is closer than he thinks. There are lines on his face, his own sorrows, threatening to slice deeper.
Sometimes I think we are an incredible puzzle that has been cut inaccurately.
The colours are wild and deep, the shapes intricate and intense, like Luke’s drawings. There are the most impossible purples, like starfish freshly washed up by the ocean.  The clearest polished turquoise and that startling orange only found in India. And red - a red that beats and flows. The blue is royal and rich, found only in the finest velvet – the sky at midnight on a moonless summer night. It is all there  – the promise of something so beautiful and sustaining, something that melds mind and body to deliver utter delight, but the pieces are a mere point of a millimetre off being perfect, so it is never assembled. Ultimate beauty and peace revealed but out of my reach.
I can see sparrows now, flitting about together outside. Their freeform joy would be inspirational if not for my dark visitor.
The pair fly in unison, turn in opposition and then come together again.
I have to get moving. I need to get to the post office before it closes.
The place is crowded in a last minute drive to reach out across plains and oceans to loved ones at Christmas.
I join the queue behind a jolly grandmother with white hair, a floral dress and swollen feet forced into orthopaedic sandals. Kathleen Jacobs, she informs me. The clouds have cleared and her cheeks are flushed pink from too long in the heat outside. There are droplets of sweat on the back of her neck crawling slowing down her freckled saggy skin.
She has six brightly wrapped packages for six grandchildren she tells me. 
“Three in the US and two in Paris, France,” she crows with a measure of pride.
She chatters on about her successful children – one a banker and one married to a French obstetrics specialist.
She has bought the children clothes and books.
I am reflecting on the fact that the last thing I want in the world right now is to be a grandmother. Thank God, Julia is a traveller. Her wanderlust is a blessing for me. I often wish I had been the same – just travelled, not planting any roots at all.
The grey granny may as well be talking to herself.  She is oblivious to my introspection and just keeps going on – like a little striney tune in the background – Waltzing Matilda sticks in my head.
I hear vaguely that she has never been to Paris even though her daughter had offered to buy her a ticket...something about “why travel if you already live in the best country on earth”.
I cringe a smile. Paris is sublime and she will never know.  She approaches the counter and begins the whole story again telling the infinitely patient post office worker about her children and grandchildren as though she were an ambassador for the family Jacobs.
Me next. I pass over the boxed Christmas cake and pay the postage.
There is a sense of relief – one more little task complete. I have already deposited $300 in Julia’s account as a Christmas present – the cake is just a sentimental gift.
I stop at the supermarket to restock on cleaning supplies.
On the way back home the beach calls me – a shoreline of invisible sirens beckoning me to swim and soak up the colour turquoise – my favourite. I stop.  I’m wearing my swimmers underneath my shirt and shorts. But I take them off too and head in.
The water is cool and clear and calm and I dive under - the first shock of it like an alarm clock for the body. But then it is a divine cradling. Naked but embalmed in watery cloth. 
I am roused to a deeper level of consciousness and as I lie back into the blue I feel the weight of the sediment. Sandbags full of graininess dragging me under the water. I thought I had thrown him off but the dark visitor has followed me even to my favourite place – bringing nothing with him.
When I break the surface looking for air, the sunlight is like lightning.
I’m at the car and my face is wet with tears. I am naked in the afternoon at a suburban beach and I can't stop crying.

***************

She drives home, born again.
She has a shirt on and I notice the buttons are in the wrong holes.  A butterfly hovers over her head.
We go inside and I feel happier in the quiet cool of her kitchen.  I open the oven and turn it on while she cleans the house.
She feeds the canary and it chirps for a bit.
She wraps Luke’s present in golden embossed paper with red and purple ribbon. I was with her when she picked the full set of expensive paints and brushes. I picked the colours – she wrote a cheque for $1500 and tucked it in the box.
She has a shower. Uses my favourite soap and shampoo and shaves herself smooth.
Her hair glows golden under the stroke of the brush. It whips around her face.
She is doing her eyes and putting on favourite red lipstick. I anoint her with Caleche breathing in its sweet muskiness.
She takes a small handful of sleeping pills, fluffs up the pillows and lies down.
She looks beautiful.
I lie down beside her and hold her tight.