Category: Life

Bridges, trolls and that fear of falling

I have long held a fascination with trolls, those strange non-human creatures that live under bridges and come out when you least expect.

They come out either as you approach the bridge or demand you answer impossible questions before they will let you cross or else they sneak out when you’re half way across the bridge and threaten to toss you over the side.

IMG_0054 copyA Gargoyle, not a troll but almost as hideous.

I dislike bridges almost as much as I dislike trolls, especially those bridges that are held in suspension over deep rivers or gullies. Bridges that sway with your every step and even worse still, bridges whose slats do not run evenly together such that you can see between them to the swirling waters below.

I look between those cracks and can sense myself crashing to the bottom, engulfed in ice-cold waters even on the hottest of days, ready to drown.

We went to the Maroondah Dam when I was a child and walked up the hundreds of stone steps to the top where the dam wall plunged down into gardens below on one side and on the other side held back the force of tons of water from the dam itself.

I sat beside my sister on the stonewall overlooking the slide to the bottom, and imagined my shoes – slip on shoes, which in Australia we call thongs – and imagined my shoes falling to the bottom.

And somehow this forms my first memory when being high up left me fearful.

Since then it is nothing for me to feel the sick jelly like roiling in my gut whenever I go to the museums in Melbourne and last year in Edinburgh, where there are floors that jut out on high and look down to the floors below.

I steer away from these balconies and walk close to the walls. I avoid looking down for fear of falling.

Always that fear of falling.

Even when I am in a plane and the ground beneath my feet feels solid, I must stop my imagination from scraping away the floor at my feet, from scraping away the luggage hold, which I imagine to be one step below, from scraping away the thin layer of metal that protects the contents of the plane from the outside and imagine us without this casing, not floating in space, but ready to plummet down to the ground.

This too shall pass

In a bid to save my lowest incisor from falling out, the periodontist recommended a third skin graft. A third, I say, and the worst one of all.

This time the good doctor needed to wrench out my lower lip and press hard against my jaw to hold the small flap of skin he’d taken from the roof of my mouth and attached at the gum line.

Not a pretty procedure.

Every time I tell people about it I see them wince.

Bodies are such fragile things and when it comes to our own we take comfort from giving all the grisly details to anyone willing to hear. That way we share some of the discomfort.

In every grimace and groan there is a sense of the unspoken: ‘You poor thing, how awful. I’m not sure I could have tolerated that.’

And now the only discomfort left is the gathering of stitches at my lower jaw, still holding the slip of skin in place, though hopefully no longer necessary, assuming the graft has taken.

It’s been ten days now and there are no signs to the contrary but these stitches, the non-dissolving type – presumably because they’re in my mouth and saliva might have eaten away too soon at the dissolving type – remind me of a fish caught on a hook, the same stinging sensation every time I move my mouth around to talk and to eat.

If I write long enough I will forget the insides of my mouth and move up to the insides of my mind.

I have a photograph on my desk of my siblings, all nine of us, posed together for the camera in 2009, the last time we ever came together as a complete group.

nine_02

We meet in snatches, one or two sisters, brothers, a brother and sister here and there. A large family fractures simply because of its size, I wrote many years ago. Ours did. We could not sustain our mother’s wish that we be together in harmony forever more.

It may well be that we never come together as a group again. We are reaching the stage where one or another of us is likely to die soon, given we range in age from the mid fifties to the mid seventies.

For almost twenty years – no longer – my mother gave birth to babies. She started at twenty-three years of age and her last baby, conceived in her forty third year, was still born. I was ten. Her first daughter died too, as a five month old during the war. My mother had eleven children all up and nine of us survived.

I write about these numbers often. They are a testament to something. My mother’s greatest achievement, my father’s greatest burden, at least he argued that way.  All those children, he complained. ‘I should have taken the pill’.

There was no way known my mother would take the pill.  Good Catholic she was, contraception was out of the question. And so it was my parents had many children and my mother relished every new arrival, mourned the lost ones and my father’s resentment multiplied.

The rough end of the stitch cut close to the wound points out and scrapes against the inside of my mouth. Not painful but irritating. And I must wait another week before the doctor will remove them.

I can only imagine the relief now but it’s a comfort to think that soon enough it will come.