If the world is senseless — things and events without end or meaning, as some like to claim — then the news has not yet reached the city limits of Adelaide.
Or so it appears to me here, now.
I’m scribbling these notes — this gospel, of sorts — in the study at my mother’s home: our home again, I suppose. I’ve been writing for most of the day. It’s late afternoon, the gulf glitters far to the west, the sun is slipping ponderously into the sea. Some hazy quality to the air — summer dust, or smoke — has rendered half the sky an incandescent blaze. The house and the surrounding hillside are flashed, reddened, sunburnt, but the suburbs on the plain between are already in shadow. Down there, the first streetlights are twinkling into line, pricking out the shapes of a familiar grid.
Adelaide was mapped out a little too perfectly, some claim. As if the aim were to prove a theory, or score some sort of amusing debating point, not plan a city.
Perhaps, but I find only reassurance in a city that resembles nothing so much as a page of geometry. It speaks to whatever remains of the scientist in me, persuades me that even the bizarre events of these last two years might be twisted, creaking, into some sort of shape, into some sort of geometry of the past.
The sun vanishes, the first stars gleam dimly in the sky; leaning forward, pressing my face to the windowpane I can pick out — with the eye of faith — the familiar constellations: the Cross, the Bear, the Saucepan.
If I lean back my own image appears in the window, reflected, superimposed on the darkness outside, pricked through with those distant lights: another familiar constellation. The Sign of which zodiac? The Ugly Duckling? The Spinster Professor? The Crone? The Bitter Heart?
My mother no longer thinks so. I might be unmarried, still, and a year or two from menopause, but I am no longer a lost cause. I am Changed.
A Love Child, she likes to call it — a term lifted from the women’s magazines she reads addictively. A magical term, those words have somehow come to permit what was once impermissible: single parenthood. Bastardry.
She shed the expected tears at first, but pride soon suppressed shame: the strength of that pride far greater for being so long thwarted.
In her eyes I have finally, if at last gasp, fulfilled the essential female function. Little does she realise how close her attitudes are to the dogma of biology texts: reproduction is the beginning of death. From there it’s all downhill.
And in my eyes? I refuse — doggedly — to romanticise my plight. Once I had half looked forward to menopause; at times, perhaps, even longed for it. This, I hoped, would be the final metamorphosis: the butterfly — or moth, at least — of the mind shucking off its animal husk. Reason shaking free of unreason — the sex hormones dying in the blood, and with them their absurd moods and demands.
The Change of Life, in which we are raised up, incorruptible.
Or at least a little wiser. And certainly more serene.
Of course I had also half dreaded menopause. Odd moments of panic overwhelmed me as the years passed. My birthdays were the worst time — and Christmas. I told myself, repeatedly, that I never wanted children — but the panic still came, especially in the sleepless small hours, in surges, like a ghost of morning sickness. At those times my mother’s naggings still had power over me: What If I Changed My Mind, And It Was Too Late? The smallest phrase in her rare letters could trigger that panic: Met Anyone Nice In Queensland?
As the early evening lights — streetlights, kitchen windows, the windows of family rooms — prick out, dot-to-dot, the outline of Adelaide, I feel a sudden rush of affection for its neat orderly streets, almost a parody of good sense.
Is it chemical, this sudden optimism? So my mother would tell me. Contentment goes with the condition, she would claim, smugly.
Contentment goes with an original scientific experiment, I might counter, performed under optimal conditions.
In the next room she is preparing our evening meal: some ancient, country, folk broth that even a firsttrimester stomach might keep down. She is singing to herself, softly, innocently, transformed already into the sweetest of grandmothers. Soon she will seek me out, clucking her tongue at the scribbled gospel pages scattered on the floor about me.
‘You must eat, dear. And rest. All this work — and you a doctor! If you aren’t going to think of yourself, think of it.’
We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.