I remember with clarity the last time I saw my grandmother. As I recall, I stood on her doorstep, staring through the stained-glass door as her small frame moved inside. She was smaller, greyer, glassier in the eye, and as I also saw, annoyed by my arrival. She opened the door and glared.
“Where have you been?”
Where had I been? I didn’t know. I’d been lost somewhere between dusk and dawn, drunk and hungover, and couldn’t remember what it was like to have a normal conversation, a feeling that still disturbs me now.
It didn’t matter.
My grandmother pursed her lips and shuffled back inside. I couldn’t remember much about her house except the dog antiques, tiny porcelain figures with black eyes that followed you around the room, and the bleached kitchen tiles that left a sting in the air. But there was something else. I hadn’t been inside her house for ten years, yet there’s a smell, one that’s particular to addiction, I recognised in a moment. I’d smelt it beer-soaked bar carpets and on the breath of staggering men. I’d smelt it on myself at 10am at the casino, desperate for a last drink counting my coins on the bar. And more importantly, I’d smelt it as a child, drinking wine with my grandmother, the kind she got into at midday and kept on until she went to sleep. At that moment, standing in her living room, I was a child again smelling the alcohol leaking from her pores, and I wondered why.
It’s easy to say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, that genetics and a little bad luck cause apple rot, but our lives are intertwined more organically than I’d thought. Less an apple tree and more a river meandering over the landscape. Over time the soil erodes, flooding the river’s bends. Our joining bends are the decisions we didn’t make, the men who defined us, and the events we couldn’t control once learned and passed down, and in these dead rivers, algae, and bacteria bloom.
As we spoke, she held her wine glass in her left hand and a tissue with the other and kept her eyes on me, glossy in the afternoon light as she talked about my grandfather. He’d passed a few months before, and my grandmother had suddenly found herself alone with hundreds of black-eyed figurines in cabinets and china closets. In a small back room, she showed me his final resting place. “Here he is, the bastard,” she said, slapping the top of a cardboard box. “He couldn’t even wait a few more months.” The cardboard box was white and small, the kind to keep knick-knacks and all sorts, rather than the ashes of the dearly departed. I wondered if this was where he imagined his end.
See for a moment, the wider river and upper course.
It’s fifty-two years earlier, and my grandmother stands in a church in Manchester, marrying my grandfather. She wears a pink dress and shoes in a modest ceremony paid for by her family, rather than her mother’s new husband, a beater and a drinker. There are stories and rumours. He’s a heavy man with a heavy fist. It’s not strange for a sixteen-year-old girl to marry in 1965. It’s also not strange to encounter violence either; in a marriage we can assume is of mutual benefit. Soon, my grandmother is pregnant.
Now see me.
At 16, I’m pregnant too. My memory skips; to sitting on the toilet with my underwear at my feet, to my friend asking me when my period was, to my boyfriend calling me a slut for doing the right thing. I don’t understand sex. I don’t understand how relationships work. Even with a partner, I don’t understand consent – that no isn’t just an interjection but a definite noun with no wiggle room. He’s not a beater or a drinker but only deaf when it comes to that one word. A word that becomes slippery in my own mind. I have a choice that’s easy to make but hard to understand. There are warning signs outside the clinic talking of protesters and violence. And it’s only years later I realise the difference between 1965 and now.
But for my grandmother, now is the 80s. They have three kids, and a house on Sydney’s northern beaches since moving from the UK. My grandmother works in the production line of a makeup factory, and my grandfather works in a decorating business. Their lives are busy and, according to my mother, focused on friends and family. But the kids are almost 20, and the house is getting crowded, and it’s at this time, with five years left on the mortgage, that my grandfather decides to move from the beaches to the mountains. He’s not a beater or a drinker, though there are rumours. Stories move around. There’s a strange juxtaposition of the mentionable and unmentionable, of what’s decent. There’s no discussion of the move. No is an adjective here, something to describe my grandmother’s state of mind, an implied meaning of want.
Depending on who you ask, a tree change revitalises the spirit, injecting a sense of simplicity to life, an ideal plan for anyone reaching middle age. Also, depending on who you ask, it’s a spiritual death. There’s a sense of rejection from a cold climate, from the landscape itself. More than winter’s dregs made desolate, the frozen soil lingers well into spring while the eucalypts harden against the wind. But places embody something different for each person. The northern beaches represented the start of my grandmother’s life, the place she raised her children, worked hard, and made friends, and moving meant the loss of that indefinable feeling, the feeling of coming home.
The family moves, and my grandmother never works or entertains again.
Now see the middle course and the winding loops.
It’s the 90s. I’m eight years old, and it’s around eight o’clock at night with the wind howling through the eucalyptus. A wine glass perches on my grandmother’s kitchen bench with a soft and sharp smell. I’m not sure if this is her third or fourth, but her words are slow and hard to follow, and my mother mentions going upstairs to find my grandfather. I know the upper floor is his. I also know he sleeps in a different room, the one right at the end of the hall crammed with a single bed. It’s been that way for a while, at least from what I know. Every time my grandmother and grandfather stand in a room together, a rubber band pulls taut in the air, each word loosening the elastic.
There’s talk of a problem, but my family has problems too. Depending on the night, my mother and brother are unsteady on their feet. Depending on the night, everyone disappears to the back bedroom to do ‘something’ while the TV hums into the late hours. In a hypocritical play, my mother talks to my grandmother about her daily wines, and I talk to no one because none of my friends have the signs. Their recycling bins aren’t full by Wednesday. Their fridges have food and leftovers because a cask of wine doesn’t occupy most of the second shelf. And around eight o’clock at their houses, The Bill plays on TV. At my grandmother’s house, there are stilted silences and talk of ‘it’s late’ because everyone’s had just about enough. It’s a routine well-worn, and by the time I’m eighteen, my own routine has started to wear thin. I drink a lot. Smirnoff, Bacardi, Passion Pop, whatever’s available. I’m at a friend’s birthday, and the atmosphere is stiff. The cake has been cut, and the room is slowly clearing out. Two friends ask if I want to go to the pub. I have a vodka or a few, and I’m teleported scene to scene, from the bar to the bathroom, to a house, to a cold tiled floor. My throat burns with sour cheese. I’m not sure where I am, and I don’t know how I get home.
Then, my mother leaves. The mountain air has brittled her bones. I can’t afford to stay, and I can’t afford to leave. Depending on who you ask, a cold climate does more than eat the warmth from your skin. Depending on who you ask, there’s another warmth, the warmth of the familiar, and it’s this loss that chills the most.
Now see the lower course, the place where the river run dries or greets the ocean.
Out in a bar one night, an acquaintance offers me a vodka soda. “Do you want to party later?” they ask. I sip my drink and look around. The bar’s almost empty. The neon lights kaleidoscope across the mirrored walls, and somewhere within, I see our silhouettes standing at the bar.
Now we’re in a cab, driving through the inner city to the party. I imagine people standing in the kitchen pouring drinks into plastic cups with the laid-back host watching. You have to be laid back to have a party on a Thursday, I think.
Now we’re standing on a dark street. I don’t hear music or see lights, but a man starts towards us from an apartment block.
“This is my boyfriend,” my acquaintance says. I stare at his face. It looks corroded and pocked with cheekbones straining against the skin. I don’t know how old he is, but he looks a lot older than my friend.
We head into the apartment block to the third floor. I listen for music, voices, people, anything and soon I know why. Inside the apartment, three men sit around a coffee table. On the table are tobacco, water bottles, lighters, and a glass pipe. This last item I’ve seen before but never what goes inside. “You keep holding the lighter too close,” one says, cleaning the pipe’s burnt bulb. The others keep talking. Someone hands the pipe to me.
Two days later, I feel sick. I haven’t slept. I’m still at the apartment, and by this time, some people have left, others sleep, and there’s an emptiness I can’t shake.
“I have a good idea to wake Ben,” one says. It’s Ben’s apartment, and this is the first time he’s slept in two days, even pulling a shift at work high before coming home to sleep. An hour later, a tall Asian woman knocks on the door. I realise she doesn’t speak much English but understands well enough when one of the men points to the back bedroom. Half an hour later, she emerges.
“She’s really friendly,” one says.
“Worth the 150.”
“Mind if I have a go before she leaves?”
It’s at this time I realise I have to go home.
Way back, on a weekday, my mother picks me up from school and takes me to my grandmother’s house. She tells me not to look at my grandmother’s face, but I already have an idea. The unmentionable was mentioned on the phone last night from family to family about what had happened. I promise not to look, though, as soon as I walk into the living room, I can’t help scanning around. The chairs are empty. I look down the hall. It has a strange darkness, with the walls swallowing the sun, but even with this, I see the purple. My grandmother stands in the hall, cheek turned to me. A purple stain inks her face. Thousands of capillaries have burst, reddening her jaw. I see images of her skull colliding with the pavement with a sound like cracking glass. She lies in different positions with her face upturned to the night, with her nose deep in the gutter, and my grandfather walks down the sidewalk with a sad look on his face. For all their fighting, not even he wanted to see her without her dignity.
The lowest point is always realised with distance and time, sometimes with a strange symmetry. It’s not the first time she’s fallen after too many drinks, and it’s not the first time I’ve gone too far in precarious situations.
Today, after two drinks, the same sensations come over me in an awesome wave. My brain gets foggy, and things slide out of place. I don’t like the taste, but I like the feeling. I start to say no to anything pain relieving. Similarly, I realise what my grandmother wants is to relieve the pain, and retroactively I make the links.
I learned addiction from my grandmother, but there were other lessons, deeper in the undertow, which kept me from drowning. Oxbow lakes form from water pressure and sediment eroding the shoreline until all that’s left is a dead river. But the water stays longer, and a diverse ecosystem grows in the standing water, from water lilies, pondweed, water chestnut, to aquatic caterpillars and arrowhead, giving life where there was none before.
On the last day of my trip, my grandmother and I sat under the back veranda, and she asked for another drink. Her wine glass was empty on the table. I hesitated and took the glass. In her fridge was a basket of eggs, a carton of milk, and a carton of wine on the middle rack. Just like when I was a child, I placed the glass beneath the nozzle and listened as the wine hit the bottom with a swishing, glugging sound. I reasoned if what I was doing was right and what would happen if I said no. But I didn’t. What were her family’s joining bends? Did she have a chance to foresee the blooming lilies as the river overflowed?
As I left, she walked out to the car and even followed down the drive as I pulled into the street. She stood at the gate, and through the window, I saw her crying. Her eyes were wet, but she was still smiling.
