Instead, just as with their perfect timing about technological issues, they will wait until I am busy with something else – mowing usually – before ringing back. I’ll feel the phone vibrating in my pocket, but by the time I turn off the mower and retrieve it, it will have stopped. Even if I call Mum right back, she won’t pick up. Wondering yet again how she could be away from her phone when she called me literally one second ago, I’ll assume it was an accidental dial, or she was desperate for the loo suddenly so will leave it, get back on the mower and keep trimming away.
I admit, in one instance of this happening, I had my own technological drama and managed to pocket dial Mum while mowing, and when she answered I wasn’t actually there. I also was not conscious of the vibrating in my pocket, again and again, as I missed not one or two return calls from Mum, but four in a row.
Mum’s questionable conclusion from my missing her calls was that I had fallen from a ladder, become paralysed and, while at first I was in reach of my phone, I had since thrown it at a menacing brown snake and was incapable of dragging myself to where it landed. I would die of either pain, blood loss, starvation or repeated snake bite, my body then removed from the scene (by person or persons unknown), leaving my phone behind and a mystery that will eventually become a documentary on Netflix. Jackie Weaver will play the role of Jude, Ray Meagher will play the role of Pete. Obviously no need for anyone to play the missing body of Todd (though if we do have to have flashback scenes I’ll settle for Jamie Dornan, thank you).
In that instance, while I continued mowing merrily oblivious – thinking up new hare-brained schemes to make our business money and more one-liners for the book I was working on – Mum placed a desperate call to Jeff, who was working offsite at a job with our friend Pete, who sometimes employs Jeff as the World’s Most Efficient Labourer on building sites.
Suddenly, Jeff was home early, trailed closely by Mum and Dad. I noticed them after a little while and, fearing this was an intervention for some behaviour of mine I hadn’t realised was destructive, turned off the cutting mechanism and drove the mower to greet them.
‘What’s up?’ I asked nonchalantly.
‘Check your phone,’ Jeff said flatly. ‘You really need to make sure you’re contactable.’
‘Do you know what a pocket dial is, Mum?’ I asked as calmly as I could.
‘No.’
‘Kind of like um . . .’ (I whisper the next bit so Dad cannot hear) ‘like you calling one of your lovers in Nigeria.’
‘But I didn’t! I don’t know anyone in Nigeria!’
‘I’m just trying to say that sometimes movement in your pocket or handbag can accidentally press the dial button.’
‘But you showed me how to make sure it was locked.’
I wasn’t sure if Mum thought I was again accusing her of making calls to bogus princes or whether she was unsubtly trying to teach the teacher. I chose to go with the former.
‘Anyway, look at me. Very un-dead! Not even a snake bite.’
‘You didn’t see a snake while you were mowing, did you?’ Her voice was panic-stricken, the blood still drained from her face.
‘It is so unlike you, Mum,’ I said later, as they were making their way back to their car, ‘to invent a highly unlikely worst-case scenario involving death or permanent disability.’ A tendency I have most certainly not inherited from her. Absolutely not.
‘I’m not usually one for drama,’ she said earnestly.
I could tell when I hugged her that her breathing, and her blood pressure, would not return to normal for a good few hours – not until after her first wine in front of today’s chosen poker machine.
* * *
I stop at the beginning of Lambs Valley Road to make a right hand turn back toward Branxton but loose gravel on the road makes the car slide an extra foot further than where I had intended to stop.
Mum draws in a sharp breath and places both hands on the dash. She is very experienced with the brace position. Both feet have pressed down hard on her imaginary driving instructor’s emergency brake.
‘Oh for god’s sake,’ I say and expel a very audible sigh. I wait for Dad to chime in but a glance in the rear-view mirror shows that he is taking a little white-bread sugar-high nap.
‘I thought we were going to keep sliding straight ahead to the creek!’
‘You can swim, can’t you?’ Jeff asks with a chuckle.
‘You mean that creek there? Fifteen metres in front of us?’
‘I just —’
‘Honestly Mum, sometimes . . .’
* * *
When my parents were younger, they didn’t seem to play out worst-case scenarios in their minds, and certainly never fretted aloud to stress out us kids. If someone wasn’t picking up the phone, they were probably – you know – not home! The natural conclusion was never that whomever failed to answer was immobilised by sudden stroke and it was up to our parents to break down their front door and carry their apparently lifeless body several kilometres to the nearest hospital.
I distinctly remember us laughing at my grandmother who, if she failed to get to her ringing phone in time, would call every single member of the family to find out who it was that she had narrowly missed. But then, our dear old Nan at Guildford did love a natter, so maybe this was just her excuse to reach out to all and sundry.
In fact, now that my parents are that age, they are more or less doing the same thing, because the sound of a mower is drowning out their call and I failed to pick up.
Nearing fifty myself, my own mind is capable of playing out elaborate but seconds-long scenes of magical (or fearful) thinking. If Jeff has been at the shops for longer than the time I have calculated it would take to buy the object he said he was going for (cushions, for example) then he’s certainly had a fatal car accident and, within ten seconds, my brain has already told me which house I will have to go ahead and build without his expertise. If Helga isn’t at her trough when I arrive in the morning to feed her, she won’t be napping, or her silhouette obscured by one of the larger goats: she must be dead in her sleeping quarters – there can be no other explanation for why she is not where I expect her to be at any precise moment in time. My mind works out that she will be buried next to my beloved goat Wesley Chesney and I’ll begin pondering what to put on her gravestone.
Few of us had dubious thoughts like that when we were in our invincible twenties or thirties, so when the hell did we become so fearful? Is it when we have children of our own or is it when our frail bodies make us feel more vulnerable ourselves so we project this onto others?
Surprisingly, we do not end up in the creek at the end of Lambs Valley Road so Mum’s hands have relaxed from the dash, for now.
She really does seem convinced that she is going to die at any moment. Six times at least during this trip alone and we’re not done yet. I’m reasonably confident in my driving abilities and estimate that my parents and partner will not perish on these roads today.
That is until in the rear vision mirror I notice a P-plater come surging up behind us and sit right on our tail, barely inches from the bumper. I glance down at my speedometer and note I am doing eighty-six, already a bookable six kilometres above the speed limit! There is only one thing for it.
I ease my foot off the accelerator and watch the speedo fall down to eighty, then seventy, then sixty, which I maintain leisurely. The P-plater is so close to us I can see the veins in his forehead bulging with frustration but, alas, as we are on double yellow lines he will not be able to overtake us legally. When he miraculously follows my cue and eases back a little, I detect the lesson has been learned and speed up again to eighty-two. The P-plater stays a few metres off my bumper. Tailgating has been curtailed (see what I did there?) for now.
Crazy drivers aren’t the only things to get on my goat as I get older. Metallic music or punk rock results in both Jeff and I immediately turning off the radio with a comment like: ‘How on earth does anyone actually enjoy that?’ And we have every mind to complain when our food is delivered anything less than piping hot.
I recall how cringeworthy it was when our parents complained about something or spent an hour on the phone pleading for some fifty-dollar refund, and yet here I find myself doing the same thing, as though by getting older I’ve earned the right to criticise service providers. And I don’t think I’m alone in now thinking an hour stuck on a customer support line to get that fifty-dollar refund cheque requiring a thirty-minute drive (each way) to deposit into a bank account is a reasonable use of time.
