The third dog

I’m walking the third dog. I’ve walked these paths and bluestone lanes for three decades. I may have worn out two dogs—a dog per decade—but I’ll keep walking until one of us gives out. The sun is shining and plane tree leaves litter the streets. They look like clenched brown hands with curled up fingers. Leaves let go, but hands hold on and feet, too, cleave to place. It’s taken us five, more, maybe seven years to loosen our grip to the point where we are, now, walking towards the exit.

When I moved here, in my thirties, I was in pretty good nick. We were in love and I had a home, after being peripatetic for so long. We were two humans and a puppy from Vision Australia. I walked her around this patch for nearly a decade. By the time she died we’d acquired the second dog.

The second dog grew up beside other dogs and we knew them by name. We learnt which was Indy’s house and Johnny’s, the Alsatian, and Rosie’s, the Cairn terrier. Another decade and a half passed, daily walks our only constant. The suburb changed. A place where people were afraid at night became a place where couples raised kids, while we pink dollar households gave it a pink facelift that brought in realtors and bottle shops and nail spas. We made it hard for students leasing, but better for oldies, like the couple at Lethby.

Do you name houses in Indonesia, Maggie?

Always was, always will be Aboriginal land but for a while this suburb was also stock routes and a disused munitions factory. It was not odd to see foxes in daylight and there was wild fennel everywhere. Now our postie greets me. I watch my neighbours age and they watch me. So what is place but an accumulation in time? Or constant movement within soft boundaries and street signs. The Ridgeway. McCracken. Bangalore Street—exotic among Scottish and English names—Westgarth and Epsom, Macaulay and Bellair.

We’re walking Coghlan’s Way. Saplings planted where the wrong gingkos languished are bound in place by cable ties. The third dog leads me up the ramp that is meant to ease ageing knees and bear wheelchairs into our futures. Between a stone wall for leaning on and a metal rail for gripping tight and spiky grasses the council planted in memory of plants that were here before.

We pass the house where Val was born and lived and died, and the ambulance driver’s house and the house where the rescue whippet was walked by the two kids now at university, leaving Heather and Peter—about our age—in their empty nest. On we go, to be startled by a cat who is startling a blackbird. Past a house called GlenFare, at number 24, and number 18, whose name is WaiLana, and another house no longer called Lethby, surrounded by hoardings until the next version of its façade is unveiled by the BluePrint Construction Company.

We round the corner, past the sad house where the mother and daughter lived before it was sold to the Irish family with such very bad luck. She would die of cancer and he would lose his mind before the house was turned over to their two grown children. And here we are, the third dog and me. Home again. Out on the verge my partner is piling the first of the many piles of hard rubbish—an easier name for all the excess belongings we must discard and rehome as we ready ourselves to move on.
x

Space bound

There are brief and fleeting moments throughout the day when I find myself embroiled in a negotiation for space. Space for myself, for others, and perhaps for absolute nothingness. Funny how time then becomes the enemy: every second that passes is a lost opportunity, depriving me of choices I could have had, dreams I could have dreamed.

Someone told me space is an abstract concept. It exists but also does not exist. It contracts and is conceived—but not lived. Albert Einstein saw space and time as an intrinsically linked existence: how the passing of time is relative to the space we inhabit, which is to say, how we find meaning in our lives depends greatly on where we stand.

I used to be a very big girl. For years, my weight gravitated toward the edge of 100 kilograms and space always presented itself as unearned luxury. It was an inherited largeness, but also largeness that was built over decades. My life was defined by the inches my body occupies in the presence of others. You could draw it with a marker: the boundaries of my existence. And that space—that particular width and thickness—was non-negotiable.

Henri Lefebvre defined space as an entity produced entirely by social norms: perceived as one thing, conceived as another. Rabindranath Tagore saw space as a continually changing narrative, shaped by conflict and tension. More recently, Ashmita Khasnabish wrote about space in the language of otherness—a dance between the memory and the imagination—always moving in separate directions at the same time.

The space without and the space within are not always in line with one other. The tailor’s measuring tape wrapped around my waist and bosom spoke nothing of the diminishing mental space. Thus, I was forced to adapt and negotiate space in the context of my relationships, history and identity. The goal was to drive myself into oblivion. In time, however, my learnings taught me a new skill: how to blend into other people’s narratives and perfect the art of being unseen. Writing was the only way I would allow myself to be seen. I would put on a page what I could never admit: that I was losing myself, unable to separate my own narrative from that of the world around me.

In the past year, I have lost a quarter of my weight to salsa, merengue and bachata. It’s strange because I didn’t like dancing. But someone said, dance with me, and it was curious how the music moved me to a point of forgetting I was dancing at all. Even stranger is the fact I’m still dancing.

How do we negotiate space, Peta? If the idea of place is an accumulation in time, as you proposed, or movement within soft boundaries—would space then be the intangible distance between our mental states? Nothing lasts, this we know. The good life is a moving target without any particular trajectory. And if, like John Allen Paulos said, uncertainty is the only certainty there is, then perhaps we ought to embrace the abstract nature of space.

Nowadays, my negotiations for space feel less nauseating. The moment arrives like rolling waves—loud and thunderous—yet it disappears quickly before reaching shore. It’s true that my body no longer occupies the physical space it used to take up, but oddly I find myself constantly reaching for it. Perhaps this is the dance that matters most, an intricate linkage between memory and the present, which can only be understood through a stopgap—a reflection—where opportunities are not lost and rather: rediscovered, nurtured, reformed.

• Tags: Australia, fiction, Free to read, Issue 36, Maggie Tiojakin, Peta Murray