Piece of history gone.

She’s been gone what, seven, eight months? It seems only weeks since the disembodied voice of the nurse came through the loudspeaker in the car as I crossed a darkening ridge between Daylesford and Hepburn Springs in early spring last year. ‘She’s not here, again,’ she had announced, tired. I could only repeat that my 96-year-old mother’s normal pattern - did I say normal? - was to trundle her walker to Keilor Road, day or night, the clock can say what it likes, and then return. She always had. However, if absent at medication time, the attending nurse was obliged to find her or put in a missing report. That night had been in the middle of my three-day intermission in the long-running tragi-comedy of my mother’s last act, which had stretched out longer than I could have imagined into a kind of medieval tapestry, its frayed threads portraying faded memories; pale horses with flaring nostrils rearing at nothing; messenger angels posing as infants past; small figures with indecipherable faces;  children, running; dogs, cats, birds in sunset-silhouetted trees. The end, of course, would come suddenly, without clichéd musical fanfare, and the end-titles would roll, like tombstones.

   I had turned the car around and pointed it back to the hotel, resigned to return to Melbourne to join the search when the second call came through: she’d been found sitting at a bus stop in Keilor Road. She had been indignant: ‘I am perfectly capable of returning home, thank you’.

   She died two days later, four days before the grand final. The Melbourne Cup and Christmas galloped past like runaway brumbies. The clearance began.

   You have to be patient. I received a telephone call a week or so ago. The caller, a relative, had asked, ‘Where is the polisher?’ 

   The question, straight to the point as it was, sounded a little querulous, given that the house is now almost completely empty except for some furniture items left to convey a token lived-in look to an unlived-in house. (The real estate agents call it styling and charge $7000.) The clearance had seen several thousand items sucked out of the picture in a slow-moving vortex involving multiple trips to the charity shop, or the rubbish tip in the case of anything not good enough for recycling or resale. Prior notices had, of course, been sent to family members inviting them to extract anything, for sentimental reasons, they might want to keep from the hoard.

   The polisher, a machine, not a human, was a 1950s Electrolux upright that she had partnered in a kind of Viennese waltz for decades around the kitchen. The machine had burnished the linoleum’s optimistic Rothkoesque pastels while the sun streamed in the windows in angular shafts, pooling on the floor like old photographs of grand city railway terminals. The Electrolux accompanied the dance with a high-pitched whirr, like a flying saucer in a sci-fi movie. It occurred to me, the half-grown child, that film studios must have used the same polisher to record the sound effect, so uncannily UFO-like was its metallic hum. Then, in the wreckage of the 1970s when everyone was ‘renovating’ or ‘extending’, as if the rambling old place wasn’t large enough already, an extra room was built on, partially blocking light into the kitchen. No longer bathed by daily sunshine, the modernist linoleum pattern ceased to be a dazzling showpiece, and eventually the polisher was exchanged for a mere broom, and relegated to a closet where it stood, falling into the disrepair of disuse.

*

   You have to be patient. Yes, the polisher was long gone, I told the caller. It was mildly disquieting to hear the momentary pause before the single-word reply, ‘oh’. Later, he took a door instead, brought his own screwdriver.

*

   Footnote: the original linoleum still lines the kitchen floor, impervious to the fads of interior decoration, although its Rothkoesque pastel patterns are darkened now by the passing of time, and one section has deteriorated - understandably - in a perfectly neat square, directly below seventy years of vibrating refrigerator.