The quiet of this blog

I feel I should write something.

Something about my days, how one falls into to another. How they seem to flick past, like cards expertly dealt in a game of chance. How each day travels with its own startling velocity, and I am a passenger of time, being travelled. How I don't mind it, the brisk pace, the whirlwind, the clear breathless days.

Time is a contradiction. Its relativity is relative: an eccentric uncle, a distant grandmother, the child of your cousin, strange intimacy, the intimacy of strangers.

I go to parties and it's nice to see people but I feel like I am pretending to be someone else. I feel like I'm pretending to be myself. I talk, I laugh, I drive home so tired that inky shadows begin to take shape at the corner of my vision and I have to pull over and rest my eyes.

I count up the words I've written this year, the stories I've completed, and I realise I've actually been quite productive, all things considered, though I feel like I haven't been working at all.

I think in novels but I don't write them. I dream in stories. But I'm not writing. Inside I blog, I journal, I diarise. I write nothing down.

It's left me, the compulsion. I am adrift from words. When I try to force them out, they sit on the page and go nowhere. Sentences clatter. There's no music.

So I read instead. I wait. I try not to panic. I'm not writing right now. I'm not righting write now. The days go on, the hours slip by with ease, and I'm comforted by that, because if the hours were eternal, I'd be lonely inside them without the words.

Halloween, it's unAustrayan

And yet...

In St Andrews, as in many suburbs and towns all over Australia, kids go trick or treating on Halloween. My kids went last year as part of a group, up the main street with a couple of plucky parents. They asked to go again this year, this time just with me. I angsted about it. It's not part of our cultural tradition and it felt wrong to let my girls go round knocking on doors caging lollies off the neighbours (though I know that wasn't the main appeal - they just wanted to dress up and parade around the area). I said yes with all sorts of caveats, with a plan that I would email our immediate surrounding neighbours to forewarn them or that I would send the kids out with treats to deliver rather than simply to receive.

The reason I said yes (apart from the fact that an expectation had been created from last year and also because from the year we moved in) was because I more than understood that desire to go knocking on people's doors. My childhood bestie Zoe and I as kids would take any excuse to go rapping on people's doors. We had gone Christmas caroling one year for instance, another thing that is not really a tradition in Australia. And I like the idea of the kids being out and about. They have a good relationship with all the immediate neighbours, so the idea of extending this to the wider area is appealing.

Apparently in other Australian suburbs there are letter box drops and sticker systems to alert people that you're okay with them knocking on your door. But we don't have letter boxes in St Andrews (you have to go to the General Store to get your mail). And there was no point putting signs up at the Store since it wouldn't apply to most of the area - it's such a far flung suburb. And for the same reason we couldn't just include families from the school, as we have only 20 families and they live many kilometers apart.

Anyway in the end the same mum from last year rang and said she was happy to take the girls again and so, loving a cop out, that's what we did, drove the girls down to their place (opposite the school) and left them with that brave mum and a small gang of zombies and witches. They made it as far as our place and back again. I drove down to pick them up, but I was too early, they were still walking along the main road. So I ducked into the access road where they couldn't see me and watched them walk along, carrying their bags of spoils. Una lagged a little behind, tiring perhaps. She stopped to look at something on the road. Fred broke away from the group and tugged Una along. They caught up. There was something deeply satisfying about secretly watching them out in the world.

There were other gangs of kids out too, four of five small clutches, all dressed up. I drove up to the house where Fred and Una were headed. There were still a few houses for them to try so I waited with some of the mums out the front. One was spectacularly dressed up herself. We admired her soft brown curly wig. She said 'It even looks good without make up.' The girls came running back, wired on sugar, thrusting their stuffed, disintegrating paper bags into my hands. They had cups of jelly with them that someone had made, with lolly snakes crawling out. So. Much. Sugar. And just before dinner too.

Anyway, in the end I had totally changed my mind about the tradition. Instead of bothering the neighbours, I realised the girls were bringing joy to people who didn't get to see kids all that often, either because theirs had grown or they didn't have any. People had dressed up, had bowls of lollies, were waiting for people to come and knock on their door and would have been disappointed if no one had come knocking. I remembered from the year we went caroling (1986), one woman who was so overcome with joy and nostalgia and homesickness for England that she thrust a five dollar note into our hands despite our repeated protestations that we didn't want money.

Watching kids milling around, most unaccompanied by adults, reminded me of my own childhood, growing up in a bushy suburb. We door knocked for all sorts of reasons - sponsorship for walkathons and readathons, our Christmas caroling adventure, offering to do odd jobs, looking for my dog who ran away on a regular basis and a menagerie of imaginary pets and even just mooching house to house looking for someone to 'come out and play'. In a world where this doesn't happen anymore, partly because of a societal fear of some shadowy stranger who wants to do unnameable things to our children, there is a particular pleasure in seeing them dress up as the things that scare them and march up to a door to ask in a clear singsong voice "trick or treat?"

Though Una as a mouse didn't engender much fear. 'NO ONE was afraid of me,' she said at the end of it all, mystified, because isn't everyone afraid of mice?

a game in a game

The girls are playing. Una is a dog. She has bunches in her hair for ears, and a scarf stuffed into the back of her tights. Fred wants to join the game. She gets the stethoscope from the dress ups. She's the vet.

But Fred the vet is bossy and interventionist, and it was Una's game. Una comes to us. "I don't want Fred to be the vet, I just want her to be normal." By normal she means she wants Fred to be a dog too. 'I'll play my own game,' Fred says. Una wants Fred to play, she just doesn't want Fred to be a vet. This is an ongoing daily drama. Fred running from every disagreement with a quick and cutting 'I'm not playing!' and Una's copious tears. Martin starts to intervene. That way madness lies. He gives up. Fred goes down to the bedroom and comes back with an armful of stuffed toys which she dumps on the ground.

'I know!' Una offers. 'Fred could be a dog playing a game that she's the doctor. It could be a game in a game.'

Her words give me a shiver. A game within a game. A story within a story. A girl within a girl. Are metatexts are as primal as stories themselves - peeling back layers and layers of reality and illusion? Or is this trickery learned? Putting one Russian doll inside another, another doll already concealed inside the first.

10 Quick Questions*

What was your earliest inspiration to write?

I was born with an ear for stories. Composing (music, songs, poetry, plays) seemed a natural thing to do, rearranging found objects into new structures.

Who is your favourite book character (any book) and why?

I’m going to be cheeky here and pick one of my own – I don’t think you ever really love a book character as much as one you have created. At the moment it’s Clara from Only Ever Always. She is brave and stern and fierce, but so vulnerable and has an enormous capacity for love. Her very existence is a philosophical conundrum, and I like that in a girl.

What is the best feedback a reader has ever given you?

Before my first novel Undine was published, Random House sent the manuscript out to teen readers for feedback. One girl answered the form questions in a positive but fairly perfunctory manner, but then added a note at the end saying she couldn’t put into words how the book had made her feel and how it was unlike anything she’d ever read. Her speechlessness was very touching.

What was your favourite picture book as a child?

John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat. I find it impossible to put into words how that book makes me feel, and I suspect it's more in the pictures than the words. So I'll tell you about another book, an odd little number called The Little Slipper Man. It’s a German picture book, quite nihilistic, about a miniature invisible man who no one can see. One day he steals a pair of psychedelic slippers (his little stalk legs slipping around inside each one) and runs down the street and feels very special and important until he realises everyone is looking at the slippers and not him. So he goes back into the meadow, disappears into the long grass and continues his insignificant, inconsequential existence. Not sure, now I have recounted the tale, why it appealed so much. I must try and track it down.

What are you reading right now?
Reading has been a challenge this year. I've wanted desperately to do it, but I am short on space. Avery sleeps in our room during the day and we only have one living area so in winter when the girls are home I have nowhere to go. Still, I am managing to find some reading spaces. This year I've been reading books concurrently, frustrated by how long it takes me to get through a book. I always have one or two collections of short stories on the go because I am enjoying them so much and sometimes I can even manage a whole one in a sitting before the baby cries or the television fires up or a child wants a snack.

I am reading quite diversely in terms of genre, though looking through this list I see that nearly everything is Australian, except for The Lottery. I had a deep craving about a month ago for Australian writing, which is what led me to seek out Patrick White. I am hooked, and plan to read another after this one. The only other I've read was The Vivisector in my early twenties. I am keen for recommendations.

Novel: Patrick White The Aunt's Story
Non-fiction: Melbourne by Sophie Cunningham and Kinglake 350 by Adrian Hyland
YA: Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith
Audiobook: The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Short Stories: Little White Slips by Karen Hitchcock and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

If you could set a story in any time or place, where would it be?

44 rue des Écoles, on 25 February 1980.

If there is one book you wish you’d written, what is it?

The Gruffalo. I greatly admire those effortless rhymes. How gloriously smug Julia Donaldson must feel, and so she should.

If you could sit next to any historical figure on a plane, who would it be and why?

An ordinary person with a tale to tell from any period in history (which is why I like Malouf’s Ransom so much).

If you could give one sentence of writing advice what would it be?

Interrogate reality.

Which literary quote best defines you?

“There is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.”
C.S. Lewis, Time and Tide, 16 June 1945

*Originally answered for the Ballarat Writers and Illustrators Festival, though I've updated my reading list.

Walnut and nutmeg cake

The recipe for this cake has a curious method, where you rub the butter into the flour, spice and sugar and then pat half of this flour mix into the cake tin. You then mix the rest with the wet ingredients and chopped walnuts to make the rest of the cake. It means you end up with what is almost a pastry base, very thin, which gives the cake an excellent textural dimension: a crunchy, bitey, buttery, sugary bottom. The rest of the cake is soft and fluffy, a little caramelly from the brown sugar, balanced by the earthiness of the walnuts. The original recipe called for pecans but I had walnuts and I suspect this was an improvement - pecans would be sweeter but they're a little prissier, don't you think? We had this cake for morning tea and it was lovely as it was: unadorned, washed down with tea or coffee. But if you wanted to serve this for dessert (and I really think you could), then I think a thick sweetened yoghurt would be a perfect accompaniment. If you really wanted to go the whole hog and ice it, then a cream cheese or sour cream frosting (like you'd use on a carrot cake) would be the best match. The recipe suggested dusting with icing sugar. The cake is VERY nutmeggy. (I grated my own. First time. I liked it.) Una loved it, Fred not so much.

I did my "rubbing in" in the food processor so it ended up quite fine and I thought it was way too dry to stick together, but once baked the base was perfectly firm and solid, I suspect I could have done a lap of the house with it in my hands and it would have held together. I guess some of the moisture from the rest of the cake mix seeps in.

Ingredients

2 cups (250g/8oz) SR flour

2 tsp ground nutmeg

125g (4oz) butter

1.5 cups (345g/11oz) brown sugar

.5 tsp bicarb

1 cup (250ml/8 fl oz) milk

1 egg

.75 cup (90g/3oz) chopped walnuts (pecans, almonds...I don't see why you couldn't use any nut)

1/ Preheat oven to 180ºc (350ºF/Gas 4). Grease and line a 20m springform tin. Sift SR flour and nutmeg int a bowl (I never sift) and add the chopped butter and brown sugar. Using your finger tips, rub the butter into flour mixture until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. (I did this in food processor).

2/ Place half this flour mix into the cake tin and press it down until base of tin is evenly covered. Press it down smoothly (using back of spoon or hands).

3/ Combine egg, bicarb, milk, nuts and add to the remaining flour mix. Stir till mixture is just smooth (except it won't be smooth because you have chunks of nuts in there, stupid recipe)

4/Pour this walnut mixture over the crumb base of the prepared tin and smooth surface with spatula. Back 35-40 minutes or until skewer comes out clean. (In my whizzbang fan forced oven I needed the full 40.) Set cake aside for at least 10 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cook.

Recipe from Family Circle Quick Mix Cakes circa 1996

Lines written to amuse Una on holidays

Under a figtree,

never seen by waking eyes,

a fairy girl creeps.

Petunias and daisies grow wild in her

eyes, she is

all flowers and cobwebs.

Remember her name? It’s on your

lips, like a half kiss.

You are 10 months and 10 days old

A month ago you would get yourself up on all fours, rock back and forth and then collapse onto your tummy with your arms and legs elevated, balancing on your torso, as if you were trying to fly or swim, kicking your legs behind you. Though I also wondered if that was your impersonation of walking, from a horizontal perspective. A few weeks ago you began the labourious art of synchronising your arms and legs, and a sort of plodding on all fours began. Now you are an expert, speeding around the loungeroom. With crawling came the ability to sit yourself up on your own and it is surprising how much more human this makes you. In the last few days you have learnt to pull yourself up onto your feet at the couch, but once up your locked knees are stuck, and you can't sit yourself down again.

When you crawl sometimes you stop and press your ear against the floor, listening.

In the last few days you have sprouted your first tooth.

Your language is all music: repetition and intonation and emphasis. 'Na na na na na?' you ask me, with rising intonation. You punctuate our conversations with "yeah" or "oh?" The only word, used regularly and in context, is 'boowa' for a breastfeed. But there is also a recognisable greeting: 'Aiii!' or 'Ai Deh'.

You feed yourself, and eat all sorts of things - avocado, tuna sandwiches, pasta.

You are fascinated by your hands, more so than any of the other babies we have known. Sometimes you carry on whole conversations with gestures. You have three different waves.

You have discovered your pointing finger. You like to touch things - prod prod. You like to touch your pointing finger to my pointing finger. 'ET phone home?' I ask you.

You smile and smile. You are happy to be carried around by your sisters, held under the arms and hauled about the house or the park or the garden. Your brown eyes crinkle with amusement.

Watching your eyes turn from blue to brown has been a fascinating display of colour. For some time your eyes were both blue and brown, an impossible colour, but after many months they darkened to a convincing brown. Your brown eyes are a connection that only we share - mother, son.

You sleep pretty well during the day, except when you don't. You wake often at night. I don't mind. I look to the girls and know somewhere along the line they learned as you will learn. When you wake around midnight, I bring you into bed with me.

You are the child you will become but you are still a little unfamiliar. I wake in the night with you beside me. It dawns on me in the timelessness of dark night - slowly, then with a jolt of memory - that the baby beside me is a boy baby. A moment later I remember: it's you.