High tea

‘She started to get a bit funny in the head for a while there. She had central locking, but she still went around and checked every door, and the boot. Every time she left the car,’ says my cousin. I think she's talking about her best friend.

We’re having high tea in Collingwood for Nan’s 83rd birthday. Three tiers of West Heidelberg-bred women with three tiers of sugar at lunch on Friday, a time that makes it hard for the blokes to come too. 

‘If she couldn’t remember checking the car she’d go out and do it again no matter where she was. She only realised it was a problem when she got together with Ben and he was like, what’s that about? I think her grandparents were dying or something, there was a bit of stress anyway. A lot of stress.’ 

My cousin emphasises the lot of stress. Her mum directs a quiet Nanny dearest, toward the other end of the table, have another scone. Do you want more tea? She wants a say in what’s happening, wants to take the heat off the grandparents-dying part of the story. The tea’s a bit cold, says Nan. I’ll try a coffee instead when the girl comes back. She usually drinks six cups of Liptons before dawn: I thought she’d lose her tiny mind over high tea, but it's not scalding enough for her.

‘Anyway then she woke up at Ben's in the middle of the night and she didn’t have a zit stick beside her bed. You know a zit stick, for pimples. She usually always had one beside her bed but she woke up and it wasn’t there. And instead of going oh well and going back to sleep she got up and checked the car, then went to the supermarket and bought a new zit stick. They medicated her after that.'

‘I count while I’m walking,’ my auntie says. ‘It started out after the operation and it was hard to walk around the block. Now I just do it in the background while I’m talking to Lee on our walks. In in time with my steps.’ 

‘I make pie charts in my head before I go to bed,’ says my cousin. ‘If I’ve got four things to do in the morning I make a pie chart breaking down the time it’ll take to do each thing.’  

'I'm too forgetful to be obsessive, that's the only thing that saves me,' says my other auntie, the one who speaks so soft you must lean in to hear what she says. 

‘Pa had the spot where he’d sit in the kitchen and nobody else sat there,’ I say, bringing him into the room. It's uncomfortable for a second, but then he's there with us.

‘I look at number plates and try to match them to the driver,’ says Mum. 

Numbers don't give me any peace, but I locked down over food for a while there. Does that count?

brushtail

sunglasses in flight

what the family needed

‘Every once in a while, Ruth felt the necessary pull of destiny. When she’d eloped, when she finally took the kids and left, when she’d switched to night duty, when she’d bought this apartment. In each case, she couldn’t have done otherwise. Her decisions had been inevitable.’
– What the Family Needed, Steven Amsterdam, page 137

For me, a big decision feels more like the moment after Wile E Coyote runs into the air over the canyon, just before he realises he’s about to fall. It feels like the intake of breath as I put my head underwater in the early summer ocean. Or the flattening out that happens before orgasm.

Pete and I talk in the kitchen about friends who are deciding whether to hold onto a relationship or let it go. 

‘They’re at the pointy bit,’ I say, making my hands into an apex. 

‘They’re at the bit that goes like that,’ says Pete, pointing his hand to the floor with his fingers fanning out in five directions. 

Occasionally Mum mentions a chap she dated in high school who moved up north to be a prawn farmer. She could have married him, the story half goes. Her eyes get humid when she takes herself there: a maybe-rich fishwife living in a house on stilts, raising burly blond children who run to their father as he comes through the laundry door with the evening breeze, smelling of crustaceans. Would he be kind to them? Would she be happy, with her ankles swollen in the heat?

It’s hard to see. Steven Amsterdam’s character gets off lightly, with destiny dragging her in one direction.