Under the Purple Sky

FIRST PUBLISHED IN MINE. BY THE BOWEN ST PRESS, 2021.

1. Merewether

At home a warm breeze caresses a dusty table surface. It lifts and holds the front page of a two-month-old Saturday paper before dissipating, leaving it to saunter back to rest. A tap drips and a gentle acoustic tune drifts through the air. A bag of shopping sits on the kitchen bench waiting to be unpacked and outside, the lawn has already grown. We’re always mowing it, revelling in the instant gratification of its fresh, trimmed, neatness, only to watch with bitterness as it inevitably grows back. Never truly satisfied.

Something lingers. The smell of shampoo, a feeling.

A memory.

2. Fitzroy 

My phone rings. A friend.

She warns she can’t talk long; she’s going to have dinner with her sister, and she asks if red or white wine will pair better with dumplings but decides on white before I can answer. I’m putting my raincoat on to go for a walk, not for exercise per se, but because I like my neighbourhood around this dusky transitional period between day and night. Commuters spring up steps to front doors, revitalized by the energy of their shrieking children, the unconditional love transmitted in countless slobbery knee-licks from brown dogs. I like seeing the retired couple who live on the corner, silently observing the movement of the street from their cushioned white cane chairs, from behind a fence of Agapanthus. I like the onion and garlic fumes wafting from kitchen windows, and seeing houses light up from the inside out so you can see the paintings people have hanging in their hallways or what channel their TVs are on. Lives safely contained beyond panes of tempered glass scattered with raindrops that look like jewels as if to whisper, ‘We’re here, we’re warm, we’re together.’

The sky has shifted from hazy lilac to deep purple now, like the musty old curtains at the cinema.  Its colours lack permanence, just like everything else.

The church’s silhouette looms over the median strip.

3. Bushlands

Two days ago, we sat on the beach. It was 7:32 am and I’d forgotten a towel so my white shorts would inevitably discolour, but I’d always thought white garments were an inherently futile concept so I didn’t give it much thought. We sipped our coffee and watched seaweed loll about in the foam. Last night we’d made up a dance. It was stupid and alcohol-fuelled but it made us laugh and we practiced until sweat coated our foreheads.  Like little kids, we expended our last bouts of energy before squashing into bed and sleeping three-abreast. I felt my friends’ tiny, delicate arm hairs brushing against mine as the day drifted to a close behind my heavy eyelids.

A seagull loitered expectantly near us, while my friend looked at me with tired eyes, brushed a fallen eyelash from my cheek, and said, ‘What is a moment you’d live in? Forever.’

A moment to live in. Inescapably permanent.

Brackets stretched, fabric taut, struggling to contain something so intangible. So incalculable.

I picked up a stick, flicked pieces of cakey mud and grass off my feet and lazily drew figure eights in the sand.

‘I remember when I was young, my uncle took me to the beach. He’d push me onto waves and I’d rocket into shore. One time I went so fast my flippers came off and we could only find one of them in the whitewash. We stayed until my chest started to chafe under my rashie and when we left, we’d always stop at the corner store for a meat pie or a rainbow Paddle-pop. He always got banana ones. One time, we saw a blue-tongued lizard with its mouth open in the carpark. He told me that if I got too close it might bite me, and if it bit me, it would hurt every birthday for the rest of my life. I believed him for years.’

That childish innocence, that vivid, susceptible imagination. When did it fade? When was it replaced with logic, science, reason?

4. Pittwater

I remember how at school we used to sit in a circle on the concrete quadrangle-ground punctuated by big grey lumps of spat-out chewing gum. Well, no one really knew if it was chewing gum but that’s what the rumours were. It looked like it had been there forever, like it was part of the cement itself. We sat amongst it (whatever it was) every day and when we were lucky, we’d order chicken-strip rolls from the canteen. Two strips of crumbed chicken from the frozen foods section of Coles on a fluffy white roll coated with a scrape of margarine, all for $3.00—your choice of sauce. On some occasions I’d get a muesli-bar slice as well. They were always homemade by one of the canteen ladies, although I never knew which one, and some people mistook the sultanas for chocolate chips and were chronically disappointed, but I liked them better that way. We’d sit there on that quadrangle every day, the same time and same people, movements regimented, performed strictly in accordance with the sounding of the school bell.

The monotony of routine. A time structured by symbols.

When October came around, the air was always dense with the sweet scent of jasmine flowers. Sweat would drench our thick tartan skirts and we lived in fear of visible damp patches when we stood up from our plastic chairs. Sometimes the cicadas were so loud we wouldn’t hear the bell, and on those days the teachers seemed to have a little more patience when we walked into class late and asked them to repeat their instructions.

I left every day, made afternoon tea and walked my dog through the gum trees in blissful silence. Years and years passed this way while I quietly, slowly grew into me.

5. Treasury Gardens

At a point in my life characterised by an overactive mind generating endless worst-case scenarios, I have a memory of sitting cross-legged and alone in a city park. I had nowhere to live and nowhere to work and I was searching for both. Between house-viewings, I bought a punnet of raspberries and a brownie. I wore an emerald-green knitted shirt with a collar, blue jeans and a tan belt with a gold buckle; a very standard outfit of mine. If I dressed like me, could I feel like me too?

‘Patience while the dots connect.’ I repeated this phrase like an incantation through this period. If I waited long enough, surely my tears would dry up.

Oils from the brownie seeped into the paper bag staining it with a series of large waxy circles and in the distance a dog barked. Around me; normal life. Bliss amid the chaos. Promises held in the unknown, in anonymous passers-by who I might one-day meet, who I might one-day befriend, idolise, love.

Viscerally, I remember how I turned the pages of novels with shaking hands and how I’d sit silently in noisy pubs watching the condensation on pint glasses soak into coasters while everyone chatted around me. Deafening loneliness. In my bones I still feel that aching brain, I could still cry of that drained heart. And yet, I encounter frequently the bizarre appeal of a return to that time. The strange allure of revisiting that painful solitude, those days I would call my mum not to speak, but to sob.

Then, and now, life plays out in the periphery, a whisper of white noise tightly holding my hand. I’m not sure when I stopped crying.

6. Lighthouse Beach

A moment that feels like swimming.

Melting.

Like floating in a balmy, slippery ocean with no place else to be. Devoid of desire for anything that exists beyond that specific, fragile slab of time…

One August evening, I drove a silver, boxy car home from a friend’s house. I’d been to collect a box of avocados. They were much smaller than the avocados I was used to because they came directly from the farm my friends worked at for that season. Any avocados that fell before they could be picked were fair game amongst the workers.

The box sat on the backseat, next to the dog. The sky shone. It glistened mauve in that perfect twilight time of day, that perfect twilight time of year. The days had started to feel noticeably, delectably longer.

Maggie May played on the muffled, crackly car radio. I’ve often thought that might be my favourite song, even though Rod Stewart’s voice is too raspy. I like it though, because Heath Ledger sings it at the end of Lords of Dogtown, when you know his life is going to start getting better.

When I parked and ran up the sandstone stairs to the lighthouse, tiny pebbles lodged into my feet. The moon was rising; a huge, round potato chip emerging from the ocean in celebration of every single good and bad thing to ever have existed. The beam of light from the lighthouse intensified against the darkening sky and my shadow flashed rhythmically as it circulated. As the wind grew cooler, my hair was coaxed around my face so that part of me was always within sight.

When can one say a moment has begun? When could one say it is complete?

7. Merewether

It’s Sunday now and I walk home under that same mauve sky. The warmth of the day is trapped in the pavement, honey-soft, seeping into my bare feet like a hug. It is an ode to summer, I think, to everything that’s been and everything yet to come. In another hour the ground will be cool just like the air. In another hour it will feel like a new season. The warmth: fleeting just like everything else.

The street is studded intermittently by puddles of fluorescent light now and the clouds waft and wane too, dusty, dusky smudges rubbed into the sky. All I hear is a frog I can’t see. Leaves on a frangipani tree bustle timidly as a man pushes his wheelie bin onto the street for collection tomorrow. I’ll put mine out when I get home. Gentle, quiet. The perfect stillness of the suburbs. The nostalgia of a closed week. An end, a beginning.

We wade through time and we are engulfed by moments. Together and alone, spinning in the sea, holding hands, sinking, laughing, breathing.

We inhabit these moments. Don’t we?

We are these moments. Aren’t we?