Sydney and me - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Lucy Lehmann
SO I FURTHER CONDENSED MY PERSONAL POSSESSIONS and boarded a plane to the northern hemisphere. I got to know other cities with water and hills. I could have started a life in any one of them; home was no longer a unique relationship that bonded me to a single place, but it was the book that I was reading, the album that I was listening to, my guitar, my diary, my writing. Home, like marriage, was just the chair you chanced to sit down in when the music stopped. We look back in wonder and gratitude, some time later, on all the apparently random steps that were incrementally leading us to our destiny, unwilling to consider that it was but one of a million scenarios which, had another eventuated instead, would have seemed equally fated. You could just as well be living, in a comparable state of happiness, irritation and loneliness, with your husband's brother, or his friend, or his Icelandic pen-pal from whom he hasn't heard since Fifth Class.
And so, arbitrarily, I didn't extend my stay in one of those European cities, but returned at the end of the year to Sydney, which I found, as I stepped off the plane, that I hated as much as ever.
My hatred was now compounded by the fact that, after living away from it for five years, I had only two remaining Sydney friends, had forgotten the names of all the streets, and didn't know anywhere, apart from the perennial chew-and-spew food courts in Dixon Street, that would provide a dinner for less than ten dollars. The footpaths that I had trodden for the first twenty-five years of my life were familiar in the most tedious way, yet barren of the fruits that such familiarity is supposed to bear – going to the right place without having to think about it, and finding your friends there without having to organise it.
I was unhappy in Sydney, so went as far away from it as I could – to Pittwater – and took to coming back only when my groceries and pleasure in my own unrelieved company were exhausted. Filling up my basket from the aisles of the Glebe IGA, I at least acknowledged that it was an improvement in my life that the only stressful moment of grocery shopping was waiting for approval of my EFTPOS transaction. Memories were still vivid of requiring food in locations such as the island of Rügen, and the mild trauma of first finding shops, second identifying the supermarket, third translating, with the aid of a dictionary, the words on the packets and, after ten or twelve other mini-crises, including avoiding any banter that would publicly uncloak my imbecilic grasp on the German language, attempting to distinguish fünfzehns from fünfzigs and responding in time with the appropriate Euro. I could see how taking things for granted, which is generally considered a crime – especially when that thing is the person with whom you're having a relationship – was actually an essential element of a productive life. Mental exertion that is not spent on figuring out whether you're looking at a packet of rolled oats or a packet of kitty litter can be directed at more lofty endeavours, such as writing novels.
In Sydney, I could speak the language, it was true. I could find water and hills all over the place. And having two friends to meet up with wasn't so bad after you've spent time in places where you have no friends. If, as I had concluded, home was just a matter of sitting down, then why didn't I sit down in the chair marked "Sydney"?
I felt incredibly depressed at the prospect, as though I had made the first major compromise of my life. I fled back to Pittwater, safely separated from the city by a two-hour bus ride and a ten-minute ferry trip. When I wasn't writing, I was applying for arts grants that would involve relocation, or falling precipitously in love with anyone who didn't live in Sydney. And yet there was another project which, without conscious intent, was beginning to take shape; a second body of evidence was slowly amassing – this one in Sydney's defence.
An aunt moved from the north-west to a flat in Glebe. I visited her with my family, and we admired the view from her balcony – in the foreground were gum trees, and across the low, former mangroves of Wentworth Park was a view of city buildings, their windows reflecting the late-afternoon sun. She pointed to the right: "You can see the clock-tower of Central Station."
"Oh, how nice!" I had always loved the country trains hall at Central, possibly because I associated it with journeys to places that weren't Sydney.
She realised that I had missed her point: "But, you know, our father had his office in the top-left-hand corner of the building there."
The view from her balcony altered. The city skyline was no longer dominated by the tall, glassy structures, but by the shorter buildings of brick or stone. When she turned to speak to her brother, she could have been addressing the boy with whom she had once shared the family home, rather than the sixty-year-old he had grown into. I thought of the house in Hereford Street, whose owners must see its heritage colours and low-maintenance, landscaped garden while I, walking past, see only a defunct pianola standing in an otherwise empty front room.
NOW, AT THE BEGINNING OF MY THIRTIES, I found myself in conversations with people who embraced Sydney rather than rejected it. After speaking to a historian, I saw Sydney in terms of its bridges and its five remaining functioning vehicular ferries. After meeting an elderly woman on a bus – perhaps, in my twenties, my face had worn on public transport a certain belligerent expression that repelled all friendly advances – and ending up with her at a Starbucks, selected by her for the outdoor tables which lent themselves to a cigarette, I caught a glimpse of Sydney as it was at a quarter of its present size, when it was possible to find a mutual acquaintance or a family connection with every member of a crowd. I talked to Glebeites who wouldn't live in any other suburb, and Bondi boys who rarely even stepped out of theirs. I saw Sydney in terms of its fishing spots, its surf, its potential for kayaks and for party-girls and graffitists. I saw Sydney from the top floor of the Four Seasons, and from the tunnels – now the domain of the light rail – bored through Glebe and Pyrmont. There are four and a half million inhabitants here; there are four and a half million different Sydneys, its meaning simply the result of what one inhabitant chooses to see and not see.
My set against Sydney had been dismantled. The city no longer exerted a force over me that I had to resist or succumb to; it was, at last, just another city, where every characteristic was negotiable except its topography.
If I were looking for a fixed truth, perhaps I didn't need to look further than water and hills. I was standing at the end of the wharf at Palm Beach, looking across Pittwater to the sharp, dark-green hills that were my destination. On the wharf with me were children burning their mouths on hot chips, adults strolling in casual clothes licking ice-creams, a family frantically unloading a week's worth of camping provisions, their disorganisation increasing as the wooden ferry approached.
There are so many changes in just one human day. The ice-cream is eaten, the children are rounded up, the mood turns from Edenic to quarrelsome as dinnertime is nigh sometime around the traffic jam at the Spit, the sun sets, the night is grey under streetlights, the children go to bed, the house is quiet, a book – enjoyable last night – is picked up, only for one page to be read in fits and starts, the mind unengaged, jerking instead between subjects that leave a melancholic emptiness, until the bed lamp is switched off and blinking eyes close at last.
After a decade, we have been through so much change that a few carefully selected memories are all we have left of who we used to be. But when I am standing at the end of the wharf, I know that time is an experience so different as to be an entirely other, unimaginable substance for the water and hills in front of me. A couple, holding hands, steps up to the white-painted rail at the end of the wharf and looks out across the water. The man licks his ice-cream then says, as though it is the first remark that he has made in the past hour, and possibly even his final word – why not? – on the whole afternoon, "This is a nice part of the world." ♦