PIECES XIV

/ Vinyl Connection / 13 Comments

coat

Was that old winter coat still in the cupboard, or had it been donated during the great pre-renovation clean out? It worried him that he could not be sure, could not remember. That coat, bought from a charity shop for a few dollars back when he was a short-changed student. It was too big for him, made for a man in the spread of his fifties rather than a bean pole of two and twenty. There was a small stain, too, from some long forgotten dinner perhaps, though who would wear such a garment while eating? It was so heavy it pushed on his shoulders with the gravity of a bigger world, slowed his steps, thumped against his knees. Yet he loved that coat. Loved the secret history woven into the heavy black wool, the murmurs lurking in the pockets. What stories it could tell. When he wore it, he stood straighter; this was not a coat for slouching. When he walked, he thrust his hands into the pockets, deep and warm. Imagine the shock, the disdain of the original owner, taking in the shabby appearance of the coat’s current occupant. No smart wide-lapelled dinner jacket under this reprobate’s covering. No opera glasses in pocket, no fedora crowning the picture of under-stated smartness. Just a coloured sweater and a pair of threadbare corduroy trousers poking out under the hem. A shabby set spied behind a plush theatrical curtain.

Barkers of Kensington, “High Grade Clothes”. How did this garment from dazed post-war London find its way to an Opportunity Shop in Centre Road, Bentleigh, a two dimensional postcard of suburban Melbourne? He stared at the embroidered label. Where were the descendants of Mr Barker now? Kensington High Street was not Saville Row, though you could walk that route if you had an hour to spare, strolling past the palace, through Kensington Gardens to Mayfair. If you overshot and crossed Regent Street you’d be in Soho, an altogether different atmosphere.  Maybe a demobbed Captain, re-orientating to queues rather than ranks, scraped together the purchase price for this respectable garment, armour against creeping London fog and crawling wartime memories. There is nothing frivolous in this stern priest-black cloth. The twin rows of shilling sized black buttons pointing upwards towards shoulders reinforced to carry heavy memories from the wounded years. The black of responsibility, of service, of loss.

Sometimes he would sit at an outside cafe on a drizzly Melbourne winter’s day, cupping a coffee in gloved hands. It had to be really cold to invite the great coat, to slip into its sensual satin lining, always surprising after the uncompromising density of the felted wool. He imagined misty droplets soaking into the fabric, discovering memories of rainy London streets lurking between the threads. Echoes, too, of buses and taxicabs and dull cafeteria food or the bright lights and fleeting colour of a Music Hall show. He took it on his first UK winter visit, cabin luggage as it weighed so much, draped over his arm as if it was just another lightweight Australian jacket. It took up half the overhead compartment and was totally incongruent with his backpack but he wore it those winter weeks and was grateful. In Oxford Street, dodging scurrying workers on rain glazed footpaths. Went CD shopping in Soho and book shopping in Charing Cross Road. He took it walking on Hamstead Heath on a blustery day where it shrugged off bitter winds. He suffocated on the underground, the subterranean air heavy with a million sighs and stale industrial lubricants. Then he brought it home again, imbued with new memories, and hung it in the wardrobe.

 *

PIECES XIII

/ lonelykeyboards / 10 Comments

ill  2

No amount of promises or bribes could still the fear of the Blood Nurse. No special lunch, no new Matchbox car, no model airplane to glue together, not even an extended television allowance. Nothing could quell the anticipation of that weekly visit. His mother tried everything, even well-meaning lies. It won’t hurt like last time. But it did and they both knew it. Distraction was just as useless. Miss Jones might bring some more schoolwork this afternoon, said his mum. He knew she wouldn’t. It was only Tuesday. After two or three of these visits, he would start to quiver well in advance of the knock on the door. By the time the blood collector was in the lounge he would be whimpering. The unpacking of her kit was met with wailing, his mother’s attempts to soothe him utterly ineffectual. Everything focussed on that silver lance. Think of something nice, the nurse said. He cringed away from her approach, twisting and turning in the chair. Her hand was cold as it clamped his wrist, examining the seven year old’s arm for a suitable vein. His mother tried silencing him with her hand across his mouth. He struggled harder and screamed louder, panic and horror writhing together. We’ll have to wrap him, said the nurse. The chair-bed blanket became a shawl, became swaddling, became a straight jacket, became a binding that held him firm. The wails choked into defeated sobbing, the needle entered him, he left his body.

*

From the top of the big willow you could look down on the smaller one. A cloud of bright green, always in motion even in a light breeze. Compared to the sober gum tree in the corner of the yard, these were much more excitable leaves, always fidgeting and murmuring together. Clinging to a slender branch his own perch was in constant movement too, a dance of wind and rustle. He swayed with the lithe boughs, suspended between earth and sky. Cloaked in forest flakes, other slabs of colour were visible through the curtain. Clay-red house tiles, sun slicing off next door’s corrugated iron roof, overhead blue fluffed with cloud. Sounds were muted by the endless leaf dance, giving the wind a voice. His mum would stick her head out the back door and call, time for lunch! It was funny, she never looked up and wouldn’t have seen him anyway, deep in the canopy. He would wait until she went inside before descending, always. 

*

PIECES XII

/ lonelykeyboards / 5 Comments

work

He was massively ambivalent about the thirtieth anniversary school reunion. Was there anyone he actually hoped to see, three decades on? He went, wondering if he would even recognise people, let alone recall their names. As it turned out it was no more enjoyable than school itself had been. The cavernous Assembly Hall didn’t help, evoking shivery ghosts of PE classes and smelly socks. After an hour of brief, meaningless conversations and mediocre finger food he filled his plastic tumbler with red wine and slipped outside. Two former footy players leant agains the bricks, puffing cigarettes. The smoke floated like miniature clouds in the cool, still air. He chose a different wall to lean against. 

Two figures approached. Here we go again, he thought. What are you doing? (Working) How many children do you have? (None) Grandchildren? (See previous answer). There was nowhere to run. He stared at the men coming towards him and saw the boys inside. One was Amos who’d been at the same Primary School. He looked somehow smaller, folded in on himself. The other was small and pugnacious. Couldn’t recall his name—Steven Something?—but recognised the prickly energy of belligerence. 

“So,” said the Jack Russell, baring yellowed incisors, “What do you do for a crust?” 

Inside he sighed. Chose the slightly avoidant answer. 

“I work at La Trobe Uni.”

“Doing what? Gardener?”

He tried to smile but failed. “I work in Student Counselling. I’m a psychologist.”

“A shrink? Don’t people become one of those just to work out their own shit?”

“That’s right,” he smiled. “Good, isn’t it?”

*

The teaching gig at Swinburne Uni came along the same year his son. It fitted in with his other two jobs (both at LaTrobe) and the hourly “sessional” rate was excellent. It was odd returning the the campus where he’d spent two chunks of time, firstly doing the graduate course in Applied Psychology then later, working in the Counselling Service. Coming back as a teacher was a satisfying feeling. Teaching Foundations of Counselling. He recalled that old saw: “We teach best what we most need to learn.” Hopefully he had the basics sorted after more than fifteen years.

One of the core topics of Foundations of Counselling was introducing the concept of empathy. The goal was to help students appreciate how it differs from sympathy, from reassurance, from empty statements like “I understand.” Often there were frowns or uncertain looks. Someone asked, “Isn’t it good to understand the other person?”

He thought for a moment. “I only speak English,” he said. “Is there someone who speaks another language? Of course there always was, this being a country of migrants. “I’m from a Polish background,” a woman said. 

“Would you say something to me in Polish?”

She rattled off a couple of sentences. He leaned forward in his chair and looked at her intently. “Yes,” he nodded, “I understand.” There was a pause then some chuckles.

“Saying you understand doesn’t prove you understand. It doesn’t even prove you’re listening. You have to lean into the meaning—both literal and emotional—of what the speaker is saying and find a way of communicating back that you get it. The goal, then, is to enter into their experience as if it was your own… without ever forgetting the ‘as if’.”

Easy to say, harder to do. Exploring empathy—giving and receiving—took most of first semester. Reflection of content, reflection of feelings, combining the two. Lots of practice in triads. The felt sense of the other. Starting to explore your own emotional world. One of the exercises was building a lexicon of feeling words, a challenge for some. One of the men once said, “I really only have two feeling states. OK and A Bit Shit.”

Driving home after class he reflected on his own journey in therapy. You can learn emotional intelligence, but it’s a slow process.

*

PIECES XI

/ lonelykeyboards / 8 Comments

ill

He remembers the smell of the worksheets his Grade 2 teacher sent home. Every week there was a new batch for him to complete, if he could. Early on, it was too much to sit upright, even in bed, and the papers went untouched. He was sad a lot, stuck in the small bedroom with its single sash window. The view was limited; a paling fence, greyed by seasons, and the roof of the house next door. Sometimes he’d wake before dawn, hearing through sleeping ears the clop of the milkman’s horse, metal shoes tapping a slow, regular beat on the bitumen like a grandfather clock. He’d scramble out of bed and climb onto the chest-of-draws under the window. Kneeling between the toys and books he could glimpse the street and was rewarded by the sight of the patient workhorse plodding up a slight incline while the milkman loaded his hand-crate and jogged to the houses, depositing a pint or two on each doorstep. Running back with empties the pitch of the clinkmusic changed, a predawn magic spell. But that was before he got sick, before school ceased, before the bed became his pen and the small room his world.

Later, after pleading from the child and following parental consultation with Doctor Rosengarten, his mother would make up a chair-bed in the lounge/dining area. The two lounge chairs, broad and flat, with a matching ottoman in between. He liked that it was a different blanket to the one on his bed. More snuggly, more burrowundery. Sometimes, wrapped in his red dressing gown over flannelette pyjamas he would sit up and watch his mother as she stood at the sink or used the gas cooker. When he was tired or in pain he would lie down and drift into uneasy sleep. Sometimes the dreams were strange and scary. Sometimes it was hard to tell waking from dreaming as the days blurred together like tipping liquid onto a watercolour painting.

The arrival of the work sheets started a month or so after he became ill.  It was obvious he wouldn’t be returning to Bentleigh East Primary any time soon. How did they get to him, those sheets? Who brought them? He didn’t know but as he got a little stronger, they were welcome. A connection with the outside world. The purple script in her familiar hand, sniffing the pages to inhale methylated spirits fumes. It made him light-headed, a drug conjuring visions outside the home, of school desks and morning milk and words chalked on the blackboard and that time Amos Kamil brought a wooden club a foot-and-a-half long because he was going to fight another boy. The weapon had sharpened wooden spikes sticking out of it and he gaped at it in terror. The teacher took it from Amos and put it in her special cupboard. She didn’t say much. 

He’d watched his teacher make worksheets at school, marvelling at the magic of a unique hand-written stencil producing multiple pages with the turn of a handle, rather like the one on his mother’s washing machine, the one that turned the ringer. He loved the way one master sheet could produce thirty copies then, with a new stencil loaded on the drum, another thirty. Sometimes even three pages! Thwoop thwoop thwoop, the tray would fill. Sorting them into sets was a special job, a reward for finishing classroom tasks quickly. But with his special home worksheets there was just one copy of each. Some vocabulary, grammar, or a short piece to read with questions after. And arithmetic. Adding and subtracting. What were the other children doing? Going to school every day. His mum told him Julie Gill had nephritis too, and was sicker than him. Did she have a bed in the lounge? Were her worksheets the same? Sometimes the pages were a mauve blur and fell off the chair-bed while he slept.

When the fever was high, it was hard to tell what was real. He had no idea what this thing called nephritis was nor how unwell he was. Neither did his parents. He recalled his father complaining about the cost of going to see a special doctor in a posh suburb half an hour’s drive away. Nothing stayed with him about the consultation, just a soft, grey voice and a pipe in an ashtray. In the car going home he chatted to his father about the big desk the doctor sat behind. Pipes he knew about. His Grandfather was always surrounded by a rich bluegrey cloud of pipe smoke. But why, he asked, did the doctor have that huge frog sitting on the blotter? Or was it a toad, like Wind In The Willows? His father gave him a strange, piercing look but didn’t reply. When they got home he lifted the boy out of the back seat and carried him inside.

*