Drive
Tomorrow morning my alarm will go off at 5am. According to the Bureau of Meteorology app on my iPhone it will be 5ºC until 7am in here in Bowral; 4ºC warmer than it had been on my traditional overnight camp at Jugiong (population 222 as of the 2016 census) last weekend. Jugiong sits on the Murrumbidgee, three quarters of the way from Melbourne to Bowral. I only ever pull into Jugiong after having driven six hours — or rather, I always stay the night at the sleepy little down on my way north to visit Mas in Bowral. Without wanting to rob it of its charm, I cannot help but wonder if my long-standing affinity for the town might have something to do with its repeated association in my head as a place of quiet respite. It sits alone and in between two realities, two sets of obligations: home, and family.
After a long day spent with my right hand on the wheel and my left hand swapping between the dog and the gearstick, I pull off the freeway, past the Sir George pub, and hook right across the main drag and into the free and forever-sparsely-populated Jugiong Camping Grounds. Lacey and I have the routine down. I attach her night-collar — the old blue one with a head-torch strapped and superglued to it — and we wander across the bridge and up through the hills as the sun sets. And before the sun has completely vanished we return to start a fire that I fuel with wood I’ve chopped and chucked in the ute from one of the thousands of twisted and grey tree husks that pop up along the edges of the Hume. In the morning I scrape ice from the outside of the tent while Lacey’s head-torch disappears off into the dark in pursuit of a possum or a water rat. I confuse memories of the various nights and mornings in Jugiong with each other. The town stands as still and as constant as the comma in this sentence, three-quarters of the way to Mas’s.
Bowral (population 10,775) is a much larger country town. It has both a Coles and a Woolworths. I have spent the week here, which I do as often as I can. A few times a year. This time I had the internet fixed (2 hours on the phone to Telstra, 2 hours shorter than the 4 hours it took when I was last here in April), cleaned out the garage and wiped years upon years of grime from windowsills. I fixed a door-handle which has been broken ‘since Pa died’ (7 years).
It feels like not enough. To leave her here again, alone, feels wrong in my gut. It feels like the spaces between my stays here demarcate an accelerating rate of erosion. That those spaces are just opportunities for Noushka the thirteen-year-old dachshund to get even more incontinent; for more dust and grime to gather between furniture and appliances so infrequently brisked by the stirring of more mobile life; for Mas and her dog’s bodies to slip further from basic mechanical functionality.
One afternoon I discovered her stuck on the floor, grasping at the kitchen counter in a vain attempt to wrestle herself back upward. I left her there for an amount of time that would have looked cruel on CCTV. From a camera in he corner, had it been there, you’d be watching me stare at my unaware grandmother, watching her struggle and taking notes. Every muscle in my body wanted to pull me forth and rescue her.
I had to watch her trouble-shoot the various ways in which she might be able to get back up: swapping knees, alternating from gripping the edge of the kitchen counter to the edge of the sink, and taking brief rests on her hands and knees before having another go.
And so as my beloved grandmother, my closest confidante, grunted and panted on the floor, I held my breath. I had to know what it would look like should I not have been there. In between years of constant assurances that she was coping just fine on her own, I had my first opportunity to see how true that might or might not be. I allowed the horrible moment stretch past the corners of reasonableness and into the realm of terrible truth. I allowed for the unfolding of a hopeless situation to take place well within the scope of my own ability to interject.
She had tried to fill the dishwasher with dishwashing detergent. She had bent down to do so. And she had found herself unable to get back up. That was all. As I moved across the room and pulled her from the floor she looked up at me smiling.
“I got stuck!”
“But what if I wasn’t here?”
“Oh, I’d have found a way up eventually.”
Tomorrow I will drive straight past Jugiong. I will bee-line to Melbourne, and after 8 or 9 hours behind the wheel I will unload the ute, sleep in my own bed, wake up in the morning and go and kiss Ines on the cheek, carrying on with my own life. I will, as do we all, consign the horror and the guilt that accompanies leaving an elderly family member alone in their home to an area of my brain that I will engage with only between other tasks. On some days I will forget to consider her at all.
