Blog 17 - Tuesday 16th of January - To Anne Curtis

My job this morning is to wake Mum up, as the air-conditioning men are coming to fix the rusty old air conditioning unit in the storeroom. When I go down the hall she is popping into the laundry.

“Oh Mum, I was going to bring you a cup of tea.”

“I have a built-in alarm clock.”

“Shall I make you a cup of tea?”

“No darling, I will have my shower and prepare myself for the air-conditioning men.”

I go and get the paper, and the sun is shining for the second time this year. I think of my best friend from school, Anne Curtis, who was killed in a motorbike accident when she was 30. Her mother said to me, “Ash, every day the sun is shining, I think how Anne would have loved this day.” I look at this big yellow hot-water bottle in the sky comforting us all, and I miss Anne, as she took all the good bits of my school days with her when she died.

Our porridge this morning is spoiled by a scary man on the front page of the Herald, who is pointing his fist at us with “Your next” tattooed on his knuckles.

I cheer Mum up by telling her all children must read Janet Frame’s book about an ant called Mona Minim, so they stop squashing ants who really are too busy being model citizens to take time off for tattoos. I fell in love with ants when I watched them all day long in the Peruvian rainforest on an ayahuasca retreat where we couldn’t talk , read or use soap. I was there taking the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca in the misguided belief that a bitter rainforest plant used by the Shipibo Indigenous people for thousands of years might cure my first-world self-pity, encouraged by a misguided belief that I am more worthy than Mona Minim.

Frankie rings and confirms that Charley has been impersonating me; he mimics my hunching over when visitors come around and then straightening up when no one is looking. I send him a text: “Darling, I bend over because all my stomach muscles have been cut and they are repairing. It’s not because I am pretending or want to be feeble.”

I know absolutely—after hours spent watching ants, the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, and the Serenity Prayer—that I cannot change Charley or anyone else for that matter. But, as always, I give it a go. I console myself that my funeral will be a bunch of laughs.

The air-conditioning man does not turn up at 8, and Mum does not know how to get hold of him. We sit in a desultory way, lost without the air-conditioning men, until Mum announces, “I shall continue with my self-inflicted tasks and see you for coffee at 10.”

When I arrive in the kitchen for coffee, Mum is testing a day-old cheese scone that Moley brought. “Ash,” she says, “I cannot throw out food when people in the world are going hungry.”

I am going to show Mum a video of a mother I know who has had a baby with a form of dwarfism. Mum goes off to get her concise medical dictionary.

We sit at the table and watch the mother explain that she learned at 21 weeks’ gestation that her baby would have dwarfism, and made the decision to continue with the pregnancy, as she and her husband felt they had been chosen to be this child’s parents. She says, “You can have people of above-average height or intelligence who are below-average people.”

This mother’s predicament makes me think of my daughter Frankie and how perfect she is with her wonky heart. Her paediatrician, Tosh Stanley, told us she would die in hospital, and I hated him for telling me that. He is not God. There was another woman in the hospital when Frankie was born who had a big, bouncy 9-pound baby boy who died hours after being born for no reason at all. This woman stood in the doorway of my hospital room and said, “I would rather my baby died now before I grew to know him and love him too much.”

I tell Mum how we christened Frankie in the hospital, and I say, “You don’t believe in God, do you Mum?” and she says, “Don’t I? I had communion and learnt my catechism, and you girls went to Sunday school and church schools but chose not to pursue religion.”

Looking back on my life, I am very pleased to have known about God, because in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me and I go to church like the spiritual repair shop, and I find comfort—but then, when I am strong again, I forsake God.

Mum says I must get rid of some clothes as she worries if the rail in my wardrobe is ever fixed it will break again. I say I do regularly clear out my clothes—which, weirdly, is true. Mum sighs, as if surprised at my constantly pretending to be grown up.

The phone rings and it is the air-conditioning men saying they are outside. We all go down to the storeroom, and they take the rusty old unit away, and one of the men uses the loo and leaves the seat up. Mum says she doesn’t know how all the niceties have gone and we must get out more.

We go to a dress shop where Nancy bought the dress she said she wouldn’t buy, and on to a café where my friend Anne with an E is looking after Ann without an E, who has dementia. We all have curried-egg sandwiches and a lovely plum cake.

At 3 o’clock, Anne comes back again to take me for an outing. “Driving Miss Ashleigh,” she calls it.

We sit on the grass under a tree in Cornwall Park, and Anne gets the cups and thermos out of a basket lined with Johnny Fay’s tea towel. Then she starts hitting her head because she has forgotten the milk, which she had decanted into a glass jar in the fridge. I accept this as normal behaviour for someone who has only ever lost one sock in her life, which blew off a balcony railing. I sit on the grass under the tree eating Anzac biscuits and drinking tea without milk, and Anne tells me she can’t sleep, as like most of us non-Librans, all the things we could have done differently in our lives rise from our stagnant minds like mosquitoes. She tells me she knew a woman who left her family for another man and the kids never talked to her again. I admire loyalty like that. She says Panadol is good for a broken heart, and she won’t go out with a man if he says brought instead of bought or somethink instead of something. We see some guinea fowl and I think what a marvellous thing it is to be alive, drinking tea without milk but with Anne.