Angel

Sunday,January 10th, 1960

I haven’t told them yet. Still getting up the courage. When I went to bed last night—Granny was snoring a treat—I was sure that when I woke up this morning, I would change my mind. But I haven’t. The first thing I saw was Granny squatting over Potty, and the iron entered my soul. That’s such a good phrase! I never realised until I started writing this that I seem to have picked up all sorts of good phrases from reading. They don’t surface in conversation, but they certainly do on paper. And though this is only a few days old, I’m already well into a fat exercise book, and I’m quite addicted. Maybe that’s because I can never sit still and think, I always have to be doing something, so now I’m killing two birds with the same stone. I get to think about what’s happening to me, yet I’m doing something at the same time. There’s a discipline about writing the stuff down, I see it better. Just like my work. I give it all my attention because I enjoy it.

I haven’t quite made up my mind about Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, though I do like her very much. She reminds me of some of my more memorable patients, those who manage to stay with me for as long as I’ve been doing X-rays, maybe are going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Like the dear old bloke from Lidcombe State Hospital who kept neatly pleating his blanket. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was folding sail, and then, when I settled to talk to him, he told me he’d been bosun on a windjammer, one of the wheat clippers used to scud home to England loaded to the gunwales with grain. His words, not mine. I learned a lot, then realised that very shortly he was going to die, and all those experiences would die with him because he’d never written them down. Well, Kings Cross is not a windjammer, and I’m no sailor, but if I write it all down, someone sometime in remote posterity might read it, and they’d know what sort of life I lived. Because I have a funny feeling that it isn’t going to be the boring old suburban life I was facing last New Year’s Day. I feel like a snake shedding its skin.

Tonight’s wish: That the parents don’t have a stroke.