Text: one more small adventure

from Gretchen Miller, 22.09.08

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There's something about the blue twilight just before spring. It doesn't last for long, fades swiftly to darkness. But still there is a scent of flowers, hanging from thin vines, rickety little terrace house doors left open to catch the last of the day's warmth before the night chill returns. It's not yet spring, but there's a promise there, an expectation.



You and I step out of the house, look up at the deepening sky. The evening marks a shift, where we start to come out of our houses as the dark falls, look for reasons to breath in the warm air, after the interminable winter spent wishing for the sun.



A girlfriend has a painting in a local art competition. Opening night, tonight, a gallery down on south King Street. We wind our way down the hill, through the little streets of Erskineville and the cars parked up tight. I stroll, you trot a little, to keep up.



You ask me a question every five paces. They're drawn from many random conversations in previous weeks, and sometimes there's a corker, one coming from months ago, bubbling up out of the fresh spring of your mind, brought out by a sudden association, a moment of neural connection. I struggle to follow the lightening tracks you are laying down like a shimmering net in front of me. What's a question? What's lots of questions? What's a journalist, mummy? What's an architect? Did an architect build the street? What's a builder do? A change of tack – what's a tree made of? what's the atmosphere? is it day somewhere else now? Where is the sun? Are we going to the pub? A gallery? But there's drinks there? Is that a pub? My inner-city child, all of four, you love a good beer garden. Grown-ups all relaxed, not really watching. Walls to be balanced on, patches of dirt to dig in, rampant kids with whom to conjure up a long and rambly game.



Artist Kirsten's contemplating a tree change. A move to a Mullumbimby, where her daughter can run free in grassy paddocks and she can escape the confines of a small damp terrace. She muses on wooden doorways opening into light-filled rooms, where an easel awaits her oil paint dreams. She's never lived in the country. She doesn't know what awaits but it's got to be better than this, yeah. Til then though she's resolutely inner-city and she paints her people with thick daubs and slashes of colour; couples paused in a tender, tangled embrace, children, floating through forests with Baba Yaga in pursuit, and tonight, three pink ladies with generous breasts, chatting as they float naked in the sea at Bondi.



The gallery is narrow - another terrace. So many people, like moths to the flame of the warm spring evening. Each one has their own glow, tonight. No angst at all. We squeeze past each other, peer sideways at the art, overhear conversations, laugh at others jokes. Spring rolls in the back yard, wine being poured.



And I think, this is a moment out of time, an adventure made entirely out of strings of stars and sticky tape - of all your innocence and all your magical possibility.



You take my hand and ask about the work. The little rows of green cardboard cars – you spot the one someone's bumped out of alignment. I watch realisation grow on your face - that tangle of rubbish on the wall is actually an orange plastic bag goldfish in its clear plastic bag home. You're worried about the picture of a man holding a gun to his own head, a man with a knife at his throat, and I have to think fast about what to say. But you're so young, you understand life and death better than anyone, in a way. We live, we die. Others will take our place.



Kirsten, her fella Atilla, and your little mate Taylor come tumbling along the footpath, and you and Taylor gallop through forests of legs and forget about art. You sit on the pavement and tell really bad jokes you both think are hilarious. Kirst wants to sell the bosomed ladies so she surreptitiously crosses out the neat $300 price tag and writes 'make me an offer' in biro, nodding meaningfully at two women eying the canvas.



A police woman parks her car right in the middle of the back lane. The party has expanded outwards onto the street and is getting happier. She shakes her finger at us but says we look like we're having a good time, and then she takes over the prize-giving. No-one knows if it's planned, and she confounds us all when she starts beat-boxing. This company of Newtown strangers starts to laugh.



You're getting tired now, and the jokes are wearing thin. You ask me plaintively to go home, but you're not complaining. You stand on the bonnet of a car, put sweaty arms round my neck and stroke my hair. And so we extract ourselves from the crowd and head back up the hill in the dark. Your bed calls you. A child's refuge. Your place of the kind of sleep about which adults can only be wistful. Burying yourself down into the blankets, sweet limbs wrapped in soft flannel, you kiss me emphatically with the last of your energy, and you ask me one last question – was that an adventure, mummy?



So it was. You and me, kid.

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Tags

• Writing
• Performance
• Art
• children
• Erskineville
• feedback please
• love
• my street
• newtown

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