‘So, if you are too tired, sit next to me, for I too, am fluent in silence.’ R Arnold.
In my nineteenth year there came a day when I walked alone through the city surrounded by people. The peak hour homeward rush and every person hell bent on a destination, be it tram stop or Flinders Street station. They brushed past me with one intention alone, to leave this place.
I did not want to leave. Not yet. In every face I imagined the round-faced sweetness of the man I had come to regard as my one true love. He had disappeared from our workplace that afternoon before my shift ended without a goodbye.
Why leave me in limbo? Why leave me waiting, hankering, caught in the not knowing when I might see him again.
Over a decade later, the first time I met Mrs Milanova, I did not tell her about this episode in the city when I thought my heart might break with longing for this man who re-materialised sometime later but not before the damage was done.
I did not tell her of a time when I was small, but not so small I could not remember. The house was filled with visitors. My mother’s family from the Netherlands.
The house suffused with the smell of cigarettes and port wine glasses passed around. Coffee and cake. Smoked oysters from oily tin cans, on round crackers and my mother in her element.
I had watched her prepare earlier. Saw the pleasure she found in visits from her loved ones. But we younger children were ushered off to bed without so much as a good night cuddle.
Did I call out to her when I heard her footsteps pad past my room? Not sure. But after a while, long enough for my younger sisters to drop into sleep, my mother pushed through my door.
I asked if I, too, might have a cup of tea like all her guests. She was busy, she said, but would bring me one in a minute.
The minute never came. It went beyond several minutes and I fell asleep waiting.
Early in 1986 when I met Mrs Milanova for the first time and offered her a potted version of my life up to my thirty-third year, she did not blink. It was only when I told her I was thinking of having an analysis and could wait till she had space that she questioned me. Should I really wait?
Her use of the word ‘wait’ and memories flooded in.
My sister and I at the East Camberwell railway station waiting as train after train arrived empty of our mother. Desperate for her to return from her work. Our bare legs in shorts sticking to the hot green paint of the slatted platform seats.
Life in our house without our mother in the company of our drunk and unpredictable father was unbearable.
Waiting for the face of my beloved boyfriend to materialise in the crowd. Waiting, the unbearable state of being when you cannot see that something you hope for will happen.
In all likelihood it might not, but still you hope.
I usher in my mantra. ‘Something good will happen.’ Knowing well one day good things will stop happening, for me at least, even as so many good things are punctuated these days by the not so good and the downright bad.
We all need to find ways of coping. My way to cope with waiting has been to fill the waiting time with a useful activity. A distraction.
When Mrs Milanova questioned my capacity to wait, and all my tears, she was right. I should not wait.
Such an odd expression. I cannot wait. Even when we know we must. I cannot wait for the next good thing.
When I was a young person I imagined good things would happen in my life such that eventually, before I died, everything would be put right.
Such a self-satisfied notion, as if all good things congeal around me.
I have been through enough political cycles now to see the ebb and flow. The way we move a few steps forward towards greater equality and bat off oppression, then slide into the cruelty of our unequal world where the rich get richer and the poor poorer.
When the revolution?
When the change of heart. And all the time the waiting. I have yet to find the silence Arnold describes. Even as I say I, too, know about the longing for it.
As I sat beside my dying brothers-in-law in recent years and watched their faces slowly shift out of this life and into wherever they might have gone, into death, I began to think about the peace of passing. Even as neither man passed so peacefully, there came a time when it was over. And we, their family sat around these two who were dying, a decade apart, and felt the ache of longing their mother might have felt had she herself not left this earth decades earlier.
When someone dies, we latch onto our own, especially when we get past an age where youth is no longer on our side.
After my mother died I saw instantly that I, along with my siblings, was next in line. And when my own brother died, I could not feel as much as I felt when I was ten years old, and he left home for the first time and a couple of decades later when he moved with his young family to another state far away.
I grieved then in a way I could not grieve at his funeral, distanced from the pain his own children felt. Distanced from the pain I imagined I might have felt when one of my siblings died.
Death is final. The waiting is over. But the waiting. It has no finality. It goes on and on and on.
And in this moment, while I am waiting for a good outcome to a painful situation that in itself seems interminable, I can find no way of settling my troubled mind.
I am back in my small bed waiting for my mother to bring me a sweet and milky cup of tea so that I might feel remembered and less alone.
I am stalking the streets of the city searching for his face, the round glow around his bright eyes that might light up at the sight of me as mine would light up at his.
In this waiting I do not find the comfort of silence but the ache of a heart that’s breaking. And the words of a song rattle through my brain: The Proclaimers:
My heart was broken. But the singers at least have the benefit of past tense while for me the heart break repeats again and again with every new disappointment, every new disappearance, every new failed hope.
Every step closer to death.
