In lieu of spending time with our own mothers (who are in Perth and Milan) Luciana and I decide to take Lucy out to brunch at the Big Bowl. Lucy’s become our Petersham Auntie. On Thursday, I swing past her place to leave a note in her letterbox. On Friday she rings me back, very excited: “Are you SURE you want to do that? Because, you know… no pressure!” But of course we want to, we wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise…
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Rain starts to fall in heavy drops. The cats slink back inside, fur plastered down. I put aside my coffee and stand in the doorway, smiling benificently at my lettuce seedlings.

Dear Mum,

you’d be pleased to hear I went to church last Sunday night. It wasn’t Catholic, though. It was a place called the Metropolitan Community Church. A gorgeous octagonal building on Crystal Street. Well, I don’t know if everyone would say it’s gorgeous. Certainly, from the outside, it’s a bit brown and blocky. It sort of hides its light under a bushel, to use a possibly biblical cliché. Inside is a lovely airy intimate octagonal hall, with wooden parquetry and very high ceilings and a strange fake plaster pipe organ.

Why would I go to church?
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AM
I call up Tully. For some reason he didn’t make it to the Jelly Wrestling on Wednesday night. I’d sent him a teasing text message from the pub, saying:

I can’t believe
you are missing
this…You of all
people

to which he replied:

What are you
kidding? I’ve got
jelly and a lack
of clothes at
home!

But given how it all panned out, I do wish he could have made it along. And now I want to debrief. We meet at Sweet Belem for coffee and chess, and I tell him the whole story. Phew, he sighs. Wow. I do wish I was there.

He has to scoot: more essays to procrastinate over. As we part at the lights, we make a tentative arrangement to meet again, to drive around Petersham scoping out photogenic sites. He’s a keen photographer, you see…

PM
After we visit Geoff at the church, Vanessa and I go for a coffee at Papa Cafe on Crystal Street. This place is famous for being a mecca for soccer fans around World Cup time. Apparently, hundreds of people come, they block off the whole street. And this year is no exception. Posters and news articles plastered all over the walls. A TV set pipes in an Italian talk show on cable, the topic is “New Haircut, New Man?”

We talk about our relationships with our parents. Vanessa has a book to show me, all about maps. One map, my favourite, shows the layout of the territory of the path to hell, including the Creek of Gambling, the Tributory of Sloth, and the Falls of Final Damnation. Another good one is the Map of a Woman’s Heart. I walk her home and she gives me some home made biscuits. “I can’t stop baking at the moment!” she says…

Here we go again. That’s what I was thinking. Yet another trip to the Oxford for jelly wrestling. Could I bear it? I certainly wasn’t carrying with me the “fresh anticipation” I’d felt just two weeks ago: the curiosity of trying out something new, the concrete experience of seeing something for yourself which is so locally famous. To run through the whole routine again? The strippers doing the same set of yogic maneuvers? The traipsing back and forth between main bar and back room? The fake cheering for the fake contest between fake opponents, narrated by the fake MC? How to experience this anew?

This trip was organised by the Sydney Ladies Artists Club, following Lisa’s gender-conscious ponderings after our last visit. Her idea was to get a significant posse of ladies together – just enough to tilt the mood of the room and slightly shift the event. We had observed, from our previous expedition, that the five girls who came along with our group had a positive impact on the enjoyment of some of the performers. I think the performers felt a certain solidarity when they saw women out in the audience cheering them on.

As it turned out, last night the mood certainly did tilt, but not at all due to our “intervention”…
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A deliberately quiet day. My health is improving, and I’m padding myself out in beanies and thermals just in case. At lunchtime, Luciana came around with some hot chocolate. I helped her with a database search for her essay on Cuban cinema. In the afternoon I rugged up and headed north of the tracks to get some vegies from Georgie. Quite by chance, on the corner of Brighton and Palace, right outside the Palace Pantry, I bumped into her. She was walking her kids home from school. I tagged along, the smallest girl dawdling all the way. She seemed to find fascinating details in every crack of the sidewalk. “If I just keep on walking, she eventually catches up,” Georgie said.

*

On the way home with my box of vegies, I bumped into Rohan. He was just returning from work. I’ve known Rohan since the late nineties, when he ran a gallery in Chippendale. Last year he moved in around the corner. But we’ve never really hung out in the ‘sham. We just spot each other by accident every now and again, and chat on the street corner. Usually, we have those kind of encounters which start out as “just a quick hello”, without any intention of lasting more than twenty seconds, and then evolve into a twenty minute yarn. Because the conversation is always on the verge of ending, I stand there, uncomfortably, with my heavy box. To put it down would be to shift mode, to begin “serious” conversation. To stand like this, halted in our separate trajectories, is to steal time. This is not a meeting. That’s what I like about it. He tells me about exterminating pigeons. The finer details of this occupation of his are fascinating and disturbing. Gradually my shoulders droop, my wrists begin to go numb. Fatigue sets in. “You should come over some time!” Rohan says, and we say goodbye.

The African couple that lived in the apartment across the street has moved out.

At least, I think they were African. I never actually met them. I always wanted to. We used to sit on our balcony, eating dinner in the summer, or more recently, drinking coffee in the orange afternoon light. The door to their balcony would swing open, presumably to let a little air into their small flat. The husband, if he spotted me, would wave his arm in a big arc and grin, and I’d do the same in return. Often, I saw them both, husband and wife, running off up the street, or returning home with a plastic bag of chicken from Silvas. We always waved and smiled. But we never actually met. Now, carpet cleaning men, and window repair men, come and go. Wooden wardrobes, a single blue innerspring mattress, and a floral armchair, sit outside the building, awaiting council pickup.

*

Saturday night games at Janine’s. (Janine lives downstairs from Alex). Bec and I make a batch of new friends. Most of them are hyper-literate bookworms, and they crush us at Boggle. I fare a little better at a crazy card game called EcoFluxx, even winning once or twice, but I must admit I have no idea why. It’s a game which changes its rules almost every round. I suppose this is meant to simulate “real life,” but I just find it bewildering, and it irritates me vaguely. I have the feeling that maybe I could follow what’s going on in EcoFluxx if only my attention span was better developed. Perhaps this feeling is exacerbated by the red wine, my oncoming cold, and the vast quantities of junk food we are consuming. It’s like a teenager’s dream: chips and jellybeans and nachos and pizza and a remarkable punch with watermelon liqueur, champagne, ginger ale, and lemonade. Games nights at Janine’s are really something. Sometimes, she says, they go on ’til four in the morning…

Janine tells me that on the evening of Easter Sunday, at the Opera House, she met someone called Perry. Perry had just come from a very strange lunch in Darling Point. Throughout this lunch a certain young man in attendance – in fact, the nephew of the host – had worn a blindfold. And he was from Petersham.

The strangely warm weather during the days lately has been followed by rather chilly nights, and it’s got me. I’ve come down with a cold. I’m going to spend today in bed nursing my fuzzy head.

This might be a good time for those of you who have a moment to tell stories about YOUR Petersham. What happened over the weekend?