Chapter Ten

Chasser la joie

As I numbly returned to work in the winter dark, June became July. I found a pen the shape of the Eiffel Tower and placed it on my desk, wondering how I could write my way across the sea. My contract was ending and I didn’t want to seek another one. I was battling stronger urges to get to Paris, go back to freelance writing, move house to get away from my awful neighbour, perhaps drive to Canberra and read the Aldington letters.

But money, money …

In my last week at the government job, I sent out five pitches for stories and freelance writing work, getting three commissions quickly. It felt like a sign, like maybe I could trust myself to take some creative risks again.

I’d been thinking more and more about when I had made writing work, and how. When all my inner voices had told me that I’d come from ‘failure’ and there was no future in it, and how I’d fought to reverse that belief.

Because I couldn’t not write. It was the only thing that made me feel relevant to the world as the best version of myself — carving stories out of ideas, figuring things out on the page.

I remembered how I used to feel about dad as a writer, knowing he’d had one book published but thinking he’d left hundreds of other ideas unfinished and incomplete. Someone had written of dad that he was ‘amateur’, and so I’d always fought to be the complete opposite — to change that family story.

Yet by now I’d read many of dad’s short stories and essays — and they were really good. I found his writing lively and intelligent. He’d had so many essays and articles published. Once I started recording his list of published work — and knowing from experience just how difficult it can be to get published — I wondered how I could have ever believed the ‘amateur’ comment.

Perhaps dad was the one who had felt a failure? In one two-year block when he was working full-time as a teacher back in Melbourne, building a house in the country with Gisèle, and fruitlessly pitching stories about life in France to Australian publications, the word ‘failure’ recurred in his diaries again and again.

Coralie and Clém continued to keep up our correspondence, reporting career highs over in France from their creative pursuits. Coralie published her first book, Créer, jouer, rêver: toute une année créative en famille (Create, Play, Dream: a whole creative year with your family), which contained hundreds of DIY games to play with children under six, while Clém auditioned in New York and secured a lead role in Ron Howard’s epic series Mars, a huge coup that soon saw her flying to Morocco to shoot the series. I scanned their Instagram accounts daily for visual news, cheered by their successes.

It made me question what I was waiting for, because once upon a time it had always been me with news of wild creative pursuits and crazy new dreams. I felt I’d lost something, or forgotten an old part of myself, caught up in fear and restriction and the sadness of missing dad and dealing with my neighbour. Perhaps it was time to do what I always told friends to do when they were confused. To chase joy, follow the feeling that brings the most peace, however illogical it might seem to the ego or the bank balance.

Screw misery and martyrdom. What was money for, if not for freedom and happiness?

My neighbour’s shouts reached a higher decibel, and I found myself shallow-breathing, tiptoeing to see if her reflection in the window would show me what was going to happen next. As she jumped up and down screaming and swearing, I pulled the blinds shut and searched online for new apartment listings.

I remembered my friend Deanne from the lovely apartment I’d once rented where we shared a cat named Catty. Then two years after my mum died, Deanne and her partner had asked me to mind their big house in the country. They furnished a spare room just for me and gave me a reason to flee what had become a traumatic city full of reminders of sad events. For six weeks I fed their chickens and cats in quiet and peace, and walked on crunchy country paths until the kinks in my psyche began to unravel. The quiet of the country — how their house shaped like a boat had healed me.

In that house, I’d written so much until finally I had formed some kind of clear narrative around the destruction. It was winter when I stayed, and the trees grew silently in the dark beside my window, the fog always lifting, no matter how cold the morning.

The thought of their friendship made me smile, and I impulsively messaged Deanne:

I have to get out of here, my neighbour is really scaring me. I think she might be on ice …

Deanne replied at once:

Lou — grab your cat and come stay with us in the country. But also — your old apartment is available … It went up on Domain this morning …

I typed out my application on the spot. It was after one in the morning. My neighbour was, by then, bashing the roof with what sounded like a large hammer. I pressed send and went to bed, shallow-breathing until the sun came up.

Nine years, four interstate moves, numerous deaths, and a lot of life in between, and the only thing that gave me peace of mind was to think of returning to that sunny apartment with the communal garden. The place I’d made good, loyal friends, drafted my first book, and manifested freelance writing work with a lightness and ease I now found extraordinary.

In the morning, while Melbourne skies poured with rain, the real-estate agent called to say I could move back in straightaway.

I started packing.

When I ran out of boxes only three-quarters of the way into packing, I saw how much paperwork I’d accumulated in the last six months of research. Piles full of printouts of dad’s letters from the library, books I’d found that mentioned him, my own notes, a printed draft of a memoir dad had written about his childhood, and then my own diaries — A4 spiral-bound notebooks I’d been keeping every day since I was sixteen.

Just moving them from house to house was annoying — how had dad managed to keep his records preserved so well when he moved overseas? They would have come by ship. More money, more expense. How expensive reading, writing, and living in a world of letters would have been in his time.

Once I had the internet connected in my new (old) place, I would be able to write, send photos, even Skype without a second thought. But dad would have had to lug his typewriter, manually copy and bind drafts, and physically mail his writing to publishers and magazines, waiting months for replies. He’d have to send telegrams and pay by the character if a message was urgent. It was a luxury. One of his letters referred to how ‘squanderous’ he was, because he didn’t write over both sides of a sheet of paper.

But he didn’t waste money. The joy and peace he found in the printed word was not a waste. Anyway, if he’d written on both sides, I’d never have been able to read it. His letters were now my luxury, too.

I moved house in one day, letting my cat roam the empty apartment before the truck arrived with all our things. I looked outside to see the succulents mum had lovingly planted on one of her visits, nine long years earlier.

I started to unpack my things in the new space, feeling mum’s presence as real and loving and thriving as the garden outside. I felt her like relief, like she might be coming up the garden path sometime soon. And even if she didn’t, she was still there in the living garden she’d planted.

It was profound, returning to that apartment, like I’d returned to a family home. I thought of all the times, since mum’s death, that I’d wished there was a house to return to, somewhere to gain a palpable sense of her presence.

Moving back to that place felt like she’d returned, not me. I could even see her tiny form, bent over and rustling about in the dirt like it was one of her canvases and only she could see the finer points of how to make it bloom. The relief and happiness I felt at choosing something just because the thought made me smile confirmed that I needed to go to France.

Chasing joy isn’t extravagant, Lou. You only get one life.

Without a screaming neighbour, I could finally hear myself think.

A familiar shuffle hobbled up the garden path, and I recognised Mick, the elderly man who’d lived upstairs ten years earlier. My God — Mick was still alive? An eighty-something man with a giant hearing aid who’d been on dialysis for his liver, he’d seemed like every day might have been his last back then. But he’d even managed to outlive his ancient Siamese cat.

‘Mick!’ I waved from the kitchen, surprising myself with how happy I was to see him again. He waved back and stooped down to pat my cat with a smile before shuffling off to his waiting taxi.

I sat on the front step in the winter sunshine, staring at mum’s plants, marvelling at their blooming health and the ability to keep growing. They seemed somehow connected to Mick: a reminder that life is just as strong as death. Sometimes — stronger.

On Monday, I saw him stubbornly walking up and down three flights of stairs to drag his bins in and out of the street, reeking of beer as he passed me with a pink, smiling face after his dialysis appointment.

‘Whatever you do, don’t bring his bins in,’ whispered a visiting Ayala. ‘The weekly exercise might be keeping him alive.’

How strange it was, those who had staying power on this earth.