She said, “Cherry! If you tell yourself you’re going to be unhappy, you will be! You can choose how to see your future!”
She sounded like a self-help guru rather than a fortune teller.
“It’s not like you’re moving to Antarctica,” said Auntie Pat.
“It’s certainly not,” said my mother. “It will be unbearably hot this time of year.”
“That’s helpful Mae,” sighed Auntie Pat. “I thought you wanted her to think positively.”
Her tone was mild, but my mother acted as if it was a terrible insult.
“Mind your own business!” This was a hurtful thing to say because I was just as much Auntie Pat’s business as I was hers.
Auntie Pat didn’t react. She lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke. We were at the kitchen table and Mum suddenly stood, walked to the refrigerator, opened the freezer, removed a bag of frozen peas, and squashed it over her face like she was suffocating herself with a pillow. She held it for longer than I would have thought possible, then threw the peas back in the freezer and left the room. We heard the slam of her bedroom door.
I thought I’d just witnessed an actual nervous breakdown, but Auntie Pat explained it was the Change of Life. She didn’t lower her voice when she said “Change of Life,” because she was Auntie Pat, but most people did at the time.
Mum was probably hungry the day of the frozen peas. She was still constantly on diets at this time. The Sexy Pineapple Diet I’ve already mentioned. The Grapefruit Diet. The Lemon Juice Diet. The Cottage Cheese Diet. The Cabbage Soup Diet.
She began to suffer terrible digestive issues.
“Well, of course you will feel sick if you eat nothing but cottage cheese!” Auntie Pat would cry when Mum was doubled over in pain: bloating, cramps. Awful.
It sometimes feels like she spent the last years of her life battling one dress size.
She won in the end, but the cost was unacceptable.
—
My mother-in-law was as upset about the move as me. Michelle wanted to move to Western Australia with us and continue to live across the road. She was ready to pack her bags right then and there, but my father-in-law said that was not the way life worked. They couldn’t just follow the children around the world.
“We have our own lives to live!” he said.
Michelle said, “No, we do not.”
But Stephen was just as adamant they should stay as his son was that we should go.
When we said goodbye to our families at the airport, a teary Michelle kept trying to stuff more foil-wrapped packets of food into my bag, while Mum nibbled on carrot sticks from a Tupperware container like a crazed Bugs Bunny.
“What do you see for us, Mum?” I asked, desperate for hope.
“I see your plane boarding.” Mum pointed a carrot stick at the screen.
Which was fair enough. I couldn’t dismiss Madame Mae’s professional abilities for all those years and then suddenly request a prediction.
—
We arrived in Perth in the middle of a heatwave.
“It’s a different heat, isn’t it?” said David. “Much better than Sydney’s humidity.”
It’s not that I’m a fan of Sydney’s humidity. I dislike Sydney in February. But when I walked off the plane in Perth I felt like I’d walked into a preheated oven. I could not seem to catch my breath. “I feel like I’m suffocating,” I said, and David rolled his eyes.
When one person in a couple wants to move somewhere and the other person has been dragged along unwillingly, you sometimes end up like fans rooting for rival sports teams.
David told me I wasn’t giving our life in Perth a chance.
We had rented a two-bedroom apartment that looked out on Scarborough Beach. It was in a block of six apartments called Beachside Blue. On the day we arrived we were met by a woman in a wetsuit rolled down to her waist with a surfboard under her arm. Her name was Stella, her skin was tanned, and her bikini top was white. She welcomed us warmly, and I tried to be equally warm although I found her breasts unnecessarily buoyant.
Stella told us that every Friday night Beachside Blue “went off” with an epic rooftop party. Every apartment took turns “hosting,” which meant you provided the alcohol and music. Most of the residents worked at the Royal Perth Hospital. She herself was training to be an obstetrician. Not only that, she was a scuba diver too! Wasn’t that good news? Such good news. She said David should join the Underwater Explorers Club of Western Australia. She said the diving in WA was epic. They did a lot of shipwreck exploration.
Just in case you have missed the most salient point of this anecdote: We had moved to an apartment block with a compulsory Friday-night party.
Instead of watching documentaries with my beautiful in-laws at the end of my working week, I would be attending an epic rooftop party.
“We’ll be there!” said David.
A solid wall of stifling heat greeted us in our new apartment. The walls were freshly painted a white so dazzling I felt I needed sunglasses. The apartment was fully furnished (so convenient!) with soft, sagging, faded couches, dingy cushions, and artificial bamboo plants in pots. Everything smelled faintly of ancient cigarette smoke. Normally I liked the smell of cigarette smoke because it made me think of Auntie Pat, but this furniture seemed to have come straight from a deceased estate, and I did not feel like it had been a happy home. I sensed bitterness.
“This is amazing!” David ignored the dazzling white walls and the unhappy furniture and went straight to the glass doors leading out onto the balcony.
“It is amazing,” I said. I was still processing the idea of a weekly party and taking shallow sips of hot air. When would it be our turn to host? How would we know what alcohol to provide? What would I wear?
David said, “Cherry, what is wrong with you? This is paradise. We are actually in paradise right now.”
It was an amazing view. Anyone would have thought so. Anyone who was not homesick already for the cool green canopies of Wahroonga. We looked out onto the Indian Ocean rimmed by white sand. The water was a tropical turquoise blue near the shore and became progressively darker as it reached the horizon.
“Feel that sea breeze,” said David.
