Barbara Flowers

'In Bed'

2012-01-02T11:09:00.005-12:00

Since he’d seen her at the gallery he’d struggled to stop obsessing about her. Usually, after a good breakfast and faced with the day’s first trade, he’d stand at the glass wall of his office and allow his mind to sink into contemplation of the tiny landscape below. Such distant flow of movement – the river rising and falling, toy cars travelling back and forth across the long span of the bridge and the sun shadowing the high rise landscape of Kangaroo Point – all helped to lull his mind into a meditative state. Experience (and an expensive guru) had taught him that this signalled his intuition to take charge. And that was when his best decisions came about.
His intuition however now had other plans. Instead of mulling over a short sell, those contemplative brown eyes danced at the edges of his thought. And instead of putting his attention to the exact moment for a buy or sell he found himself daydreaming over the unspoken, even unspeakable, thing that lay fixed at the end of her gaze. As she lay unmoving on her enormous bed (at least 22 feet in length), her enormous eyes looking forever into the middle distance, he could almost persuade himself she was thinking about him as much as he thought about her.
In the meantime there were millions of dollars to turn over for the day, and the urgency of stock-holders, investors, partners, wives (ex and present), and children – all needing money (not that he minded, their dependence giving him a powerful sense of control). As he watched the catamarans below racing from pontoon to pontoon, their constant movement seemed to mimic his life, but instead of trailing boats and yachts as the ‘City Cat’ did, wives and children bobbed about in the unhappy currents of his presence or departure.
After several unsuccessful marriages, and more discussion with the guru, he now recognised he had a road map for domestic failure. In the beginning there were the generalised expressions of dissatisfaction (What had happened to all the sex? Why did they never go anywhere together? Did he have to be forever shut away in his study or at the office?). Then there came the greater complaint of loneliness. And after that the silence as she (whichever wife he looked back on) slowly checked out until there was no-one there to answer the question that if they were a couple why didn’t it ever feel that way? Each wife gave her own reasons, but if he were honest with himself as the guru required, he’d have to admit none of his marriages had ever felt real to him, and that was probably where it ultimately started.
In his unexpressed history he knew that his true life began when the car arrived at 6:00 am. Within the tinted windows of the cavernous back seat the day’s newspapers awaited – in print or downloaded onto his iPad, and his driver waited too, primed to ask the same question every morning (‘Slept well?’) nodding in anticipation at the response (‘Very well thank you, and you?’). Here was his haven of unchanging familiarity. The rest of the morning preparations unfolded in their sublimely routine way – barbered by Stan on Stanley at 6:25; breakfast at the Club 6:50-7:25 (at 6:45 sharp the chef began preparing his daily poached egg and spinach on organic sourdough). And the Rwandan Mayaguez coffee was timed to finish brewing just as he walked into his office, after a stroll along the river’s edge (7:50-8:10), smiling as his receptionist handed him the coffee cup on a silver salver.
High in his office, in the bright sparkle of the morning, a subtle touch of Domenico Caracene on his freshly shaven face and filled with the happy contentment of his digestion as it dealt with the eggs, the spinach, the sourdough and the coffee, he could almost forget that morning’s parting, and the cry of:
‘Couldn’t you at least have breakfast with us?’
Fourteen months had gone by since the birth of his latest son and it was now becoming clear that wife number four (Elise) had discovered the road map too. Only yesterday she’d asked about some ballet tickets he’d passed on to her – wanting to know why they couldn’t both go, just this once. Last week she’d gone out without telling him where, leaving Mrs Colvington, the house-keeper, with the child (his fourth son). He supposed the boy had slept downstairs in her apartment. That seemed to be the usual arrangement.
Mrs Colvington, a scrawny woman with the unreconstructed personality of a spinster, had stayed on through all the weddings and divorces. Having noted the signs, she commented to her taciturn husband:
‘You might need to take the nursery apart soon.’
And he just nodded his head in his speechless way, raking the gravel drive-way with a wide metal rake. Mrs Colvington usually took charge once the end processes were underway. She made sure the good china didn’t find itself packed into removal boxes. And she listened to the tearful cries of how much they regretted it was over, sobbing into their expensive lingerie. All that was left her employer to do was set up the trust fund for school fees, household expenses, that kind of thing (his children usually found themselves in expensive boarding-schools quite quickly). The wife would nominally get a house, under a long leasing arrangement.
The times were edgy around then, the market thin and trading scant; unlike the ‘shorts’ most traders were selling down. Traders were by nature risk averse, but not men like him (his hedge fund was called Iron Duke Velocity Fund). By lunch-time he was confident he’d outgunned the buyers and avoided a potential (and illegal) naked short sell. And he’d made a lot more money. He liked to say, when questioned by the young up and comers, there was always a time and always a true price, and that was the only knowledge he could give them.
He stood at the wash-basin in his ensuite, patting his face with a damp towel, and looking at himself with approval. Bull-dog jaw, dark hair greying at the temples (no baldness apparent, but not knowing his real parents this may or may not have been a ‘family’ characteristic) clear blue eyes and lightly tanned skin. He was a handsome fellow, there was no denying it.
When his driver called around to take him to the Club, he was in such good spirits he requested instead that they go straight ahead, onto the James Cook Bridge, and then westward towards the Gallery. It wasn’t the first time he’d taken this route, nor was it the first time that instead of closing off communication in order to work, he sat in the passenger seat so he could talk.
‘As you probably guessed,’ he said, ‘I’m off to see her again.’
The driver, an Asian man of his own age, nodded.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Thought that’s what it’d be.’
They sped expertly along the carriageway, the car flicking away from tail-gating tradies and gossiping Samoans in their people movers.
‘Traffic’s smooth today,’ the driver said. ‘Like the parting of the Red Sea.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘not to mention you’re a bloody good driver.’
‘Could be,’ the driver said comfortably. He was another old faithful, like the Colvingtons.
They drove most of the way in silence, he in his hand-stitched, cashmere blend charcoal suit (three buttons, ‘working sleeves’) and Zhi Peng in his olive polyester pants and button down collar. Zhi didn’t believe in ‘quality’, he liked his money in the bank, not on his back.
At the Gallery entrance where Zhi dropped him (‘Pick me up at 2’) he paused before the wide glass doors to straighten his tie (a glorious pink silk creation Elise had given him – it went splendidly with his charcoal suit and greying hair). He suddenly felt nervous and began smoothing his temples. It was the thought of seeing her again up close, after so long spent day-dreaming. Then he pushed open the doors and turned right, nodding to the girl on the information desk.
‘Off for another look before she goes?’ she called cheerily.
‘In Bed’, the great sculpture, would soon be heading north to its next location.
‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘Can’t waste a day while she’s here.’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to fall for her love,’ she said.
Had he ‘fallen’ for her? If asked by the guru, he might have admitted to infatuation.
He took the few stairs up to the room, turned right and there she was, resting on her bed, her huge brown eyes gazing slightly to his right, her enormous fingers shyly hiding the corner of her mouth. She might have been contemplating him, except she wasn’t. She was looking past, at something inward. Her thoughtful gaze made him want to interrupt it – by putting out a squarely manicured hand to touch her, or even to re-arrange the old-fashioned cotton petticoat that slid off her shoulder. Except she was untouchable, in every sense.
Zhi came in.
‘Two o’clock,’ he said. ‘On the dot.’
He had a meeting at 3, so that was that. He hadn’t even remembered to have lunch.
‘Magnificent isn’t she Zhi?’ he said on the way out. ‘Those eyes, the expression, even the way she lies with her knees up and her elbow propped. Makes you wonder why she’s in bed when it’s the middle of the day!’
He laughed at his own joke, there being no ‘middle of the day’ in her life. She was eternally in the moment of her thought – day or night, rain or shine, winter or summer. On the drive back Zhi had advice to offer, something he was never averse from giving. They were like two old friends really, he thought, not quite accurately.
‘You got room in that big house,’ Zhi said. ‘Why don’t you buy her and keep her there.’
The car was now caught in the Story Bridge traffic, waiting to turn left down towards Eagle Street.
He looked across at Zhi.
‘She’d make some money for you,’ Zhi said. ‘A beautiful thing like that.’
‘Excellent advice as usual,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’
He did have the room to house her, enormous though she was. And if, as he was ready to guess, Elise and the boy would soon move out, he’d take over the whole top level for her. This was a place Elise liked to entertain (there was a terrazzo outside) – and this eyrie, like his own office, would make a wonderful space for ‘her’ to look over the city, out through the sky.
Although they’d now almost reached the underground carpark he phoned his secretary. He had his own parking space of course, number plate painted onto the wall. In fact he owned the parking for the entire building, renting it out at a comfortable rate of return.
‘Get me Mr Ron Mueck,’ he said. ‘Sculptor. Don’t know where he lives. I want to have a chat with him.’
By the time he was back in his office the deal was done. She was his.
He didn’t tell Elise about his purchase, wanting to wait for the right moment but she found out anyway, probably through Mrs Colvington telling stories out of turn. Mrs Colvington had a sense of ownership of him that his wives didn’t wish to share so the women of the household didn’t get along.
‘Where am I supposed to have my friends when you take away everything I love,’ Elise said as she watched the disassembled figure carried in, up the long flights of steps, to be stored on the polished floor until the new ‘gallery’ was ready.
‘I refuse to share my house with that,’ she said.
Strictly speaking it wasn’t ‘her’ house at all (a discretionary trust had settled that issue two wives ago), but he let that go.
Having a wife made him respectable. And she was pretty, with blonded hair cut into a fashionable bob and a nice gym-tautened body. But he knew she’d leave. In fact, assuming she’d married him for his money, he couldn’t help but see the child as her ‘capital outlay’ – a good investment, looked at objectively, which would yield excellent results for her for the good part of twenty five years. Having just the one child was what they’d all done. This way they’d escaped their ‘careers’ as ‘personal shoppers’ or ‘event co-ordinators’, or whatever it was he’d plucked them from, and they’d secured a very good future for themselves. They usually re-married – some ordinary type of fellow where they were able to have the life they really wanted, one where husband and wife did everything together, eventually, he surmised, becoming colour co-ordinated.
‘You don’t need to see her if you don’t want to,’ he said, half-heartedly offering a space for Elise if she wanted to stay. ‘We could extend the side verandah.’
Mrs Colvington over-saw the installation upstairs, on the deck of the house, as he liked to think of it. His house was like a ship, with holds and engine rooms and galleys and a perfect access to the sky above. And without the need for a nursery there was room to expand properly, to make a suitable space. This was where she would be, on her enormous bed, her eyes turned apparently towards the river and the sky, but in reality to her own inner yearning.
On the big night he came home to one of Mrs Colvington’s game pies (he loved rabbit), and then took the long outside steps up to the terrazzo where he stood outside gazing through the plate glass as she lay there, fully installed. In the great spare space of the glass walls she lay with nothing but bare boards and glass, her bare arm raised to her unadorned face. In contemplation as she always was, she was in no sense a presence that asked anything of others.
After that he started coming home early, not lingering at the office or meeting clients at his club as he had done so often in the past; he came home to ‘her’, as he thought of it. Mrs Colvington, an excellent old-fashioned cook, was happy to put his meals onto a tray, in fact she was happy to make her husband to carry it all upstairs if that was her employer’s wish. But it wasn’t. He wanted to do that himself, sharing the intimacy of his meal with just the woman in her bed, her ruminating eyes and the rumpled bed-clothes so familiar he could almost smell sleep still on them. And yet, unable to share the enclosure of her thoughts, he was forever, frustratingly, ‘outside’.
Winter arrived and it became too cold to sit upstairs, even with the sliding glass doors closed, and with a warming glass of Drambuie. The plate glass room did not stop the whipping cold of the winds and the bitter night air. And they didn’t stop the unearthly ‘wuthering’ that the winds brought from the west. So he spent his nights instead downstairs in the library, toasty in front of a fire (maintained by Mr Colvington) alone in a leather chair arranged by the windows. Knowing she was up there at night, her contemplative gaze directed out into the darkness, his thoughts turned to unhappiness, but not because he thought she was ‘lonely’. He knew that unlike him, she could not be affected be yowling winds or the nipping air or isolation.
Mrs Colvington didn’t understand.
‘See if you can make the room warmer,’ she said to her husband. ‘So he can start going upstairs again to visit. That seems to keep him happy.’
She didn’t like it when he was restless – that could lead to unnecessary household re-arrangements, or even, heaven forbid, some new girl he might invite in to ‘re-design’ his house (and accidentally marry). As ever Mr Colvington did as he was told, getting in help to duct the bedroom air-conditioning further up into the ‘gallery’, to keep it at a modest temperature, about 24’.
‘Should I have more bedding made for her?’ Mrs Colvington said, taking the outside steps with her employer. She wanted to show him what she’d done to help. ‘To fend off the cold.’
‘Are you mad?’ he snapped. ‘How can she need bedding?’
When he opened the door of the gallery, and stepped into the balmy mid-tropical warmth he was enraged.
‘Who organised this,’ he demanded, standing in front of the enormous silent figure, now a little flushed in the cheeks, although that might have been the pink of his own infuriated face, reflected on her skin.
He turned to go back downstairs, throwing just the one comment over his shoulder that everything had better be returned to normal by tomorrow. He wanted her to stay the way she was, motionless, thoughtful, unreachable. That was his only requirement.
A season or two later, sipping a glass of spritzer in the clammy night air of summer, his mobile phone rang. It was windy on the terrazzo and hard to hear, but he guessed it was the same dealer as before. He was from a major gallery in Berlin, offering ever more money ‘for the Mueck’.
‘New offer,’ said the accented English voice. ‘Double the money.’
‘No,’ he said simply, as he had to all the other offers, ‘I’m afraid she’s not for sale.’

Butch and Bitch

2011-10-24T10:24:00.005-12:00

It was early summer when Butch spotted the empty warehouse, right at the edge of town past the airport and the sewage depot, encroached by mangroves as they inched landwards from the sea.
‘This’ll do us won’t it girl,’ she said.
She roughed Bitch’s head, and soothed her pointy ears. Bitch sniffed at the air with her long snout. In the bright night her profile was that of a wolf. Butch’s shadow beside her was heavy as a granite outcrop.
Butch sniffed at the air too. There was the malodorous note of the sewage plant they’d passed and overlying that the smell of dead eugaries, rotting fish, seaweed and the insistent stench of old tyres.
‘Lots of good smells girl,’ she said.
Bitch wagged her tail and smiled.
The warehouse was one of a group, but ‘hers’ was the smallest – just an ordinary looking spec-built shed with a big roller door at the front and no windows to break the façade. Round the side was a set of little steps and an office door. Butch shone her torch through the side window. It was as she thought – couple of jerry-built internal walls – dusty waiting room, cobwebbed store-room, bathroom, set of steps leading down into the cavernous space of the warehouse. Inside it would be mostly the shed – perfect for all her gym equipment. She walked back towards the road where her dusty ute was parked, grabbing the ‘For Sale’ picket as she went.
‘In,’ she said opening the passenger door for Bitch, and throwing the sign in the tray before the two of them headed off, fish-tailing along the gravelly road with a roar of tyres and a trail of smoke.
There wasn’t much to becoming a local of Boggy Creek – the town’s few streets didn’t exactly form a community, more an assortment of the disengaged. Those inhabiting the rundown houses were about as hungry for purpose as the streets themselves, all of which began robustly from the pub, but quickly tailed off into the swamps all around. So if Butch had a past, no-one was interested. And if the town had secrets Butch didn’t want to know. She may have been a feared ‘corrections’ officer at Wacol but what happened in the jail stayed in the jail.
‘Doncha get lonely living by yourself out on the blasted heath?’ a couple of old blokes asked, in spite of the signals of her buzz-cut and bulked up biceps. They were the sort of chancers willing to try their luck.
‘Nah,’ she said. She hawked and spat into the spittoon/ash tray on the concrete floor. ‘I got Bitch. She’s a girl, see.’
On cue Bitch growled low in the back of her throat and let her hackles rise, just enough to be noticed. And Butch winked at the old blokes so they’d get the hint quickly and leave them both alone. She and Bitch had the routine down pat. Bitch was a one woman dog anyway.
At night, after the pub shut, the two of them often roamed the wastelands in the dark, ‘wilding’ Butch called it. She knew how Bitch loved to let loose, plunging into the sea or chasing a cat or a possum or sometimes even a snake. Occasionally Butch came across a couple making a bit of a racket in a car. The area was a good place for adultery, or for a bloke who might like another bloke as a change from the missus. People drove all the way out from the city just to get it on around the sewage stench and primordial mangroves.
‘Hey Bitch,’ it was always fun to yell in disturbance of some moment of intimacy. ‘Git over ere.’
Or sometimes Butch shone her torch through a windscreen, not for a perve, just she liked to unnerve the occupants. They were people already scared of being followed.
Mostly when she wasn’t at work Butch was in her gym. After putting down exercise mats, and getting resistance bars installed, Butch’s stuff arrived in crates and boxes. A couple of big blokes brought the heavy equipment in through the roller doors and arranged it for her. The warehouse had plenty of room for her 25 kg flywheel rowing machine with 5 tension levels; elliptical cross trainer with heavy duty magnetic flywheel; the 22km 6.5 hp treadmill with 20 incline levels and the spin-bike with 3 piece crank and 14kg fly wheel. To one side were the Olympic weight plates and barbells/dumbbells she trained with every second day, and the beautiful Cervelo racing bike she used on the others, with Bitch in high speed pursuit.
Soon Butch was what she wanted to be, just another one of ‘the boys’. She joined their all night poker games, shot ducks and pigs, and helped out if one of the trucks got bogged or a two-stroke wouldn’t start. Of course Bitch always came along too. The boys loved the joke, the same way Butch did.
‘Yo Bitch, back inside,’ they’d yell. Or ‘Bring us another tinny Bitch’ - things like that.
One thing she didn’t join was the fishing trips. A couple of the blokes had got together and stumped up for an old 4 berth trawler. She was a 44 footer with a 1.6 metre draft and a wheelhouse draped in old sheets to keep the glare out. After a bit of a paint job and a name change (Carpe Diem) they fished the bay most summer weekends for mackerel, snapper and sweetlip, bringing the spoils home to grill at the tiny park barbeque next to the pub.
Butch and Bitch joined the revelry but they never went out on the water. And it wasn’t because Butch couldn’t swim or had no sea legs, or was modest before the guys, as the others variously speculated. It was because boating was the thing that she and Sandy had always done together, out on the water at night, trade winds blowing a steady 5 knots and the occasional squally shower cooling the night as they lay together, sighing under a blanket and a waning moon. That was when Butch had been Maureen and her dreams had been of other things.
There were pictures of Maureen and Sandy together, some of them on the winged ‘Duchess’ in Butch’s bedroom but no-one ever went in there except Butch. And no-one imagined her room to be anything other than the khaki, concrete and iron arrangement the rest of them favoured. Most people slept in their sheds, leaving the ute out the front with a dog tied in the tray for protection. They kept the roller doors up to catch the onshore breezes (never mind the various smells that came in as well) and because, well, by the time they got back from the pub it was all they could do to fall into bed of a night.
In Boggy Creek household furniture came with wheels. Anything needing a good clean was pushed into the yard and hosed down. By contrast Butch’s bedroom was a haven of duck egg blue. The king-size bed had a padded suede headboard and ruffled bedcover in broderie anglaise, the corners gathered together with a little navy bow. There was also a comfy seat at the ‘Duchess’, a seat so curved and ornate it looked like a miniature gondola with its blue padding and carved oak frame. This was the furniture Maureen had bought for her future with Sandy, the future that had never happened.
One of the blokes, seeing a picture of Maureen in Butch’s wallet had once shyly asked, ‘That one of your girlfriends love?’
And she had shaken her head without explaining that it was actually her. Mostly the only comment allowed about Butch was ‘good luck to her’, and even when Butch wasn’t around, ‘lez’ jokes had become taboo. That was because Butch, with her high intensity interval training, and the nose piercings, and the studded wrist bands, not to mention her life in ‘security’, added considerably to Boggy Creek’s amenity. The blokes could lurch home with a skinful and pass out on their old shearer’s beds knowing Butch and Bitch would come by on a nightly patrol. Butch made everyone feel safe.
As a young girl Maureen had dreamt of a conventional life, one with children in it and a settled partnership with someone who loved her. She also had an un-spoken urge to give other people orders, something she didn’t enunciate to herself until much later, when she went into ‘corrections’. At the beginning she’d trained as a teacher. A large framed photograph recorded the moment, of herself standing proudly with Dad, diploma on display. Maureen’s fair hair was fine and long, her figure slim in its light blue cotton dress. That was the day before her very first class and her face shone with pride.
‘Yes, I’ll take the Gold Coast,’ she’d said, not understanding that this might mean classes filled with kids living out the scrag ends of their parents’ broken dreams. There were families for whom a rented caravan was all that lay between them and a home in the family Valiant. And there were children who slept on the beach, peddling their bodies for a feed and swiping car keys from the bundled towels on the sand. They stole whatever they could flog off from the big SUVs that lined the foreshore.
Maureen’s notions of family had been shaped by her father’s steady clerkship in the Transport Department, and even more by her mother’s tyrannical rule as a lollipop lady. Family life for Maureen had meant discipline, and she along with her class-mates had watched, year after year, as Mum strode out into the traffic, ‘lollipop’ aloft, cowing even the noisiest of hoons into an orderly queue of V8s. Mum was a woman of substance, whose yellow safety vest kept order from blocks away, until one awful day the worst happened and the lollipop didn’t protect her.
After that it was just Maureen and Dad, sadly avoiding one another in what had once been Mum’s warm and noisy house but was now an empty shell. Maureen studied hard, making a worthy if unimaginative student, and getting by with Credits and just the occasional conceded pass. Without siblings her view of life came to be like her father’s – one of service and reliability. It was this future she had imagined as sharing with Sandy.
The two of them were teachers, although Sandy, with so many more years in the business was no longer the optimist Maureen still was. Sandy’s class-room was ‘managed’ so the kids were scared into staying away, or if they came, sitting still and listening. Such discipline and control reminded Maureen powerfully of her mother. It was something she admired and aspired to. Sandy had a stout mesomorphic body enhanced by body-building and with short black hair that looked dyed but wasn’t.
Outside the well-disciplined class-room Sandy led quite a different life, one that was about being on the Gold Coast and having fun. It was on Sandy’s houseboat (moored on the Nerang River) that Maureen learned about sex and its many variants. She also learned a lot about drugs. Sandy mixed ‘recreational’ drugs (coke and mushrooms) (ecstacy and alcohol) heightening the sex apparently, not that Maureen knew enough to tell.
‘Christ you’re a babe in the woods Maureen,’ Sandy said then. ‘I must be your guardian angel.’
And it was true. Maureen really was very innocent and Sandy protected her by being so strong and disciplined.
Although Maureen was old-fashioned and didn’t approve of drugs she did approve of Sandy and Sandy seemed to approve of her. They went to the gym together and Maureen began her weight training. And Sandy talked about how to control a class just with disdain and how to hurt kids, just a little, without leaving a mark. Maureen was Sandy’s disciple in everything, until it all changed on the day Maureen’s class made her cry. It was in a ‘shared class-room situation’ and for the first time Sandy saw the whole shameful debacle Maureen had kept hidden.
The shared class had been Sandy’s cynical idea.
‘Let’s combine music one afternoon – we can laugh as the kiddies try to freaken express themselves.’
To Sandy the kids were all losers.
‘They all reckon they’re the next Guns n Roses. Ha!’
The two of them sniggered at the idea any kid in that place would ever amount to anything. But Maureen still hankered to be a ‘seize the day’ kind of teacher whose kids remembered her til the day they died. That wasn’t the way it was though. She’d let the kids get to her, suffering their sotto voce taunts with a weak smile on the very first afternoon she’d gone back to her car. By the next day they’d let the tyres down. And by the end of the week her room was mayhem. The kids yelled to one another. They even rang each other on their mobiles and talked loudly about her while she struggled to maintain order. Sometimes they strolled right out of the room to sit in the sun and gossip together. Boys showed each other phone porn in the back of the room and got the girls to pose for more pictures. Maureen prayed they’d take pity on her for just the one afternoon, just while Sandy was there.
As the senior of the two, Sandy did a stint at the beginning, staring down a few rough boys and getting them all to sit still and pay attention. That was for the talk about self-control, how music comes from the discipline of timing and harmony, and that good team work and good practice make for good music. The kids seemed to like that, hardly plucking at their guitar strings and not whispering to one another at all. Once Maureen took to the podium with her baton however, they changed. There was the usual insolent snickering from the girls as Maureen spoke in her high girlish voice. Boys began strumming off-key chords and even un-tuning their strings to worsen the cacophony.
‘Hey you! Quiet!’ Sandy yelled a couple of times. ‘Sit up and listen to your teacher.’
But the quiet that followed was ominous, like the eye of a cyclone, and after a short while the din began again. Sandy soon stopped trying and just talked on uselessly, into the storm of noise.
Towards the end of the lesson a paper plane curved into a long glorious arc through the draught of the doorway, landing gently at the back of the room. Soon the air was a ballet of paper planes. No matter how Maureen tapped her baton and raised her arms and called for attention, the music trickled to a stop. Then a plane bearing a sharp weighted tip was thrown directly at Maureen striking the wall behind her with a ping. This was followed by a barrage of others. Maureen covered her head with her arms and elbows and hunched down, trying to avoid being hit and begging the class to stop. She didn’t start crying until something struck the side of her face, just below the eye. And that was when Sandy brought her nightmare to an end.
‘All those in my class get back to your form room and wait for me. The rest of you kids – go to the library.’
Maureen sobbed at her desk, a trickle of bright blood moving slowly down her cheek like a tear. That day she left her job, moved back home to her father and began her project fulltime, of not being Maureen. The only bit of her that was left now, aside from the Duchess and blue ‘gondola’, was her voice. Butch’s voice was high and girly, no matter how she tried to deepen it.
So when a bit of pressure was needed to urge a stray ‘visitor’ out of Boggy Creek, it was not Butch’s commanding tones that induced a change of mind. In fact her threats often prompted an opposite response:
‘Tell you what love. Give us a good go at ya, then we’ll leave.’
The sarcasm stopped the minute Butch and Bitch loomed beside them in the darkness. There’d be a hasty turning of ignition keys and slamming of doors as cars took off, heading back towards the twinkling lights of the oil refinery and the ship repairers, back to civilisation.
One night Butch was woken by a racket just outside the high wire gates that closed off her ‘compound’. Bitch was running the perimeter, barking and snarling. A ute had parked where the street petered into the mangroves, and in the headlights an ugly scene was illuminated – several male persons (Butch automatically thought in ‘police speak’) had set upon another male person, now on the ground. There were shouts, guffaws, yells and a lot of kicking and swearing.
‘Poofter bastard.’
‘Eat a vegemite sandwich next time.’
Butch took a long torch from the door, and strapped a webbing belt over the black sweat pants and singlet she slept in. Then she clipped Bitch to her lead, adjusted the belt with its weight of ‘tools’ (can of mace, hand-cuffs, rubber truncheon and fake Glock) and slipped through the gate out into the darkness.
A man lay on the ground, arms curved over his head, knees drawn upwards as he wailed piteously for mercy. She watched as the kicks and punches rained down, listening to the cries for help and the ugly crowing voices. How well she remembered her own moment of ignominy and the pathetic bleating of her own pleas for mercy. Just as a steel capped boot was poised to stomp the victim’s head, and a petrol can brought from the tray of the ute, Butch stepped forward, one hand poised to unclip Bitch from her leash, the other hovering above the receiver of her ‘Glock’.
‘Fucken cowards – let him go,’ she said.
Before they looked round one of the lads laughed.
‘You and what army,’ he mimicked in a high voice.
‘Meet the army’ Butch said, unclipping Bitch then firing the ‘Glock’ into the air. It didn’t sound real but these twerps were raised on Hollywood special effects. They were like the loser kids in her old class – they knew diddley squat. As Bitch, teeth bared and hackles on high alert, positioned herself to leap, there were screams of fear.
‘Give em a few of your love bites Bitch,’ she said, laughing at the pleasant sound of bullies begging for mercy.
‘You’re a fucken lunatic,’ the driver of the ute screamed while turning the key so hard the engine screamed too.
‘You better believe it,’ Butch said. The ute accelerated away, leaving a straggler in its wake.
As Bitch gained ground there was a panted yell of ‘Cunts’ floating on the fresh sea breeze, and the disappearing roar of an engine.
‘Back here Bitch,’ Butch called, leaving the idiot to get out of the place anyway he could. There was no moon to speak of. Any luck and he’d wind up in a swamp.
She returned to the man on the ground, prodding him gently with her boot.
‘Come on mate,’ she said. ‘You can get up now.’
‘Christ almighty,’ he said, shutting his eyes against the dazzling 3500 lumen flashlight. ‘Who the hell are you?’
Butch smiled.
‘Let’s just say I might be your guardian angel,’ she said, her hand out to help him up.
‘Maureen?’
She’d recognised Sandy even sooner, and her heart had begun beating just as fast as it always had, even though Sandy’s tough muscular body was looser, and his face softened. It was also bloodied and torn. She put a hand to the torn skin.
‘Come on, I’ll fix you up,’ she said, leading him to her inner sanctum, to the padded blue gondola, where she tweezed the dirt and asphalt out of his skin and wiped it with .
Sandy put a hand on her thigh, testing the muscle.
‘I’ve often wondered how you were,’ he said.
Butch held her arms wide, proud of the cut torso and chunky arms and thighs and Sandy let his eyes roam over her thick body, the army pants and lace-up docs and the muscular biceps bulging from her Jackie Howe singlet. Then he put a hand up to stroke her cropped hair and massive neck.
‘And now I know,’ he said.

Underground

2011-09-04T13:14:00.001-12:00

She insisted on going with him the next time he headed north.
‘I want to see what it’s like.’
‘What?’ he said. ‘The donga?’
He was being sarcastic. His living arrangements were spartan, and anyway she’d stayed in the boxy little huts before, with other men. He knew that. But if he was trying to put her off it didn’t work.
‘I want to see that you’re comfortable.’
She wouldn’t say it but she felt he was slipping away from her.
‘They’re all the same,’ he said. ‘There’s a bathroom, a bench, a fridge, a microwave, a bed and a verandah. That’s it.’
Whole townships of dongas were often to be seen on the backs of ‘two dog’ semis, moving from some rundown dump in the middle of nowhere to another, to places lucky enough to find themselves at the heart of a newly discovered gas field. They were townships of men and yet, she mused once, these places were like women past their prime. They knew how to keep secrets. When she’d thought this she looked sideways into a mirror to examine her throat.
So as he prepared to leave again, stowing his rusty Landcruiser with boxes of dry goods, hangers of navy shirts and trousers and his extra steel-capped boots for the trip north, her cotton dresses and Chacos sandals went in the back too. For the first time, she noticed, his business suit wasn’t in its plastic envelope alongside his other clothes. She remembered then that he hadn’t brought it home with him either.
They drove mostly in silence. When they’d first met, he’d been animated, talking about the ancient striations of basalt and sandstone that lay beneath the surface of the earth. His favourite ‘building’, if you could call it that, was the underground Serbian church in Coober Pedy.
‘The walls have circular patterns,’ he explained, ‘where the tunnelling machines have gone through.’
‘Lovely,’ she’d said, admiring his neat ears. They’d met on an online dating site. She couldn’t believe her luck when she saw him – he was good looking, with big dark eyes and a slightly sharp face, like a goat. He dressed well. She could see he earned a lot. He was going to make a good father.
‘Where I am now,’ he’d explained, ‘there are underground springs that have carved huge cavernous spaces. When you’re inside it’s like a cathedral.’
He didn’t talk to her like that any more.
Finally they were in Queensland again, pulling in beside one of the identical boxes that made a streetscape on the white concrete of the caravan park. No-one came out to peer as he stumped up the two front steps, tugged open the sliding glass door and put her case inside. He never bothered packing or unpacking, just used the Landcruiser as a mobile wardrobe, his shirts and pants hanging from a rail rigged across the passenger window until he was ready to wear them. Everything about his life made it easy for him to move on.
She went for a walk to get her bearings. ‘Rundown dump’ was probably too kind a description of the gun-barrel main street which interrupted what was essentially the business of the highway. There wasn’t really a town as such, just a strip development of motels and hotels and a few timber houses. And there were the donga settlements of course, laid out in their miniature streets like graves. Lorry loads of cattle and timber thumped along the road, roaring east and slowing only for the railway crossing at the back. The din of so much braking and revving was extreme.
‘At least we can have a drink without getting breathalysed,’ she said as she came back inside. She put her hands to his smooth jaw, trying not to notice as he flinched away. ‘Everything’s nice and close.’
‘Hmmm,’ he said, sitting down to his laptop.
At home in Adelaide he’d mentioned an eatery he liked and she’d pictured a romantic stroll back together, back to their cosy accommodation. On her walk she’d noticed a café called Deb’s.
‘Is Deb’s the place you meant?’ she said.
He stared straight through her, his mind elsewhere. She’d been hoping he might think of sex, some time.
‘Think so,’ he said.
It was a town for men, and as Deb’s was a pub café she guessed it would be fluorescently bright (so unflattering to the skin) with a menu of fried stodge and a ‘wine’ list of rum or beer. As for the acoustics – apart from non-stop cowpoke songs about your girl haven’t left ya for another fella, there’d be the roar of male laughter crescendo-ing from the public bar, not one of them unhappy to be amongst his mates. She didn’t like that about men.
Deb’s was crowded when they got there and it wasn’t as she’d imagined. The lighting was dim, and the little tables circular, like those at a Parisian bistro. Even the music was interesting – Diana Krall, someone like that. People greeted him and he paused to chat, but he didn’t introduce her and they sat separately from the others. He took a table by the wall.
‘My shout,’ he said standing above her. ‘What’ll it be?’
She settled on grilled fish and a Perrier. She was a bit older than him; she had to think of her figure. He ordered the roast beef and vegetables and a fourex. Deb brought it to their table herself.
‘How are ya Pete,’ she said. ‘Brung the missus?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, adopting her rough speech, ‘the ball and chain.’
Deb winked her crow’s feet at him, cackling as though she’d never heard it before, when it was the sort of thing men said all the time. Once she’d gone the fellow at the next table leaned over.
‘I have a good Voyager Red that needs sharing,’ he said to them both, lifting the bottle lengthways to display it with both hands, like an auctioneer. ‘Would you like to try it?’
‘No thanks mate,’ Pete said, without asking her. ‘Haven’t got wine glasses.’
The man stood. He was tall in his slim black suit. Tall and dapper and old-fashioned looking with a bland oval face and well-tailored brown hair showing his flat ears. She always noticed ears. Her own were over-large and hidden under blonde curls which she now tossed having thought of them. Men loved her hair.
‘That’s easily fixed,’ he said smiling at her. He went through a small door in the wall behind them.
‘Do you know him?’ she asked. The man’s attentions had given her quite a glow.
‘Seen him around,’ was all he said.
The table next to them was set for one. The finished plate was pushed to one side, with two uneaten pieces of roast pumpkin and a fish head still attached to its empty spine. She eyed the flat eyes of the flat-head.
‘Caught locally,’ he said. ‘You could take up fishing.’
‘No thanks.’
She hated the hook, and the writhing worms.
Beside the wine bottle was a bulging black bound book.
‘Maybe it’s a bible?’ she whispered looking at the book. ‘And he wants to consecrate us with the wine?’
‘Try not to be too silly,’ Pete said. ‘People can hear you.’
She put her hand over his, stroking the bony knuckles and fine hairs that sprouted across the first joints of his fingers. His skin was pale and his hair black. There was a bit of the gypsy in him that turned her on. She leaned over and nuzzled his ear but he pushed her away just as the man returned with two wine-glasses for their table.
‘I won’t have any,’ she said, hoping they’d persuade her against her will. The two men finished off the bottle between them without offering again. When Pete tried to order another the man stood and yawned.
‘Big day tomorrow,’ he said picking up a wide brimmed felt hat. ‘I’ll leave you two love birds to it.’
It turned out the night traffic was far worse than during the day, lorries and trucks barrelling down the darkened street, their rigs lit up like shop fronts. So all night the howls of tyres and hydraulic brakes penetrated the quiet, and no matter how she tried she couldn’t sleep. By day-break when the traffic finally stopped for a while (the trucks faced due east, straight into the sun) and had paused at Deb’s for fried eggs and sausage, the birds started up and she abandoned all hope of sleep. She went outside to sit on the tiny verandah while Pete snored on undisturbed.
‘Breakfast?’ she said watching him towel down later, then shave and dress in his tough gaberdine shirt and trousers. He smelt nice, of shaving soap and damp skin.
‘I’ll grab some down the road,’ he said kissing her chastely on the top of her head and scooping keys from the bench at the same time.
‘Wait,’ she said, already dressed, ‘I’ll come too.’
She’d selected a mauve skirt with ripples of pink flowing out in flamenco tiers.
‘No time,’ he said, shaking his head and jumping down the little front steps and into the car before she could protest. She watched as he backed out and headed towards the temporary office building he shared.
Behind the caravan park, on the other side of the railway line, two immense sheds had been erected, one with a grain silo looming over the line, the other with a sign on it advertising itself as a game meat slaughter-house. This was the other big street in the town. It ran parallel to the main road and she set off along it later in the day when the heat was already rising, walking the empty asphalt to the clang of machinery and the feeling of eyes watching. Her skin and hair were dry from lack of sleep. In the distance a car approached drifting above the road surface like a duck on a lake.
Across the town she could see where the men had gathered for the day, identical boxy 4WDs nuzzled into a parking lot like piglets around a sow. The noise of their laughter seemed physical, like a wall which excluded her. Pete stood with one foot on the running board he’d made out of steel piping, talking to a few men. Most of them wore navy shirts with orange logos on the single breast pocket, and khaki pants. Only Pete and one other man were in dark trousers. They were the career miners, not the Johnny come latelys, in it for the ready money.
There was nothing to do in the donga, not even sleep or sex, apparently. After Pete had left each day to share breakfast at the truck stop she sat on the tiny verandah with a slow coffee and contemplated the hours ahead unfilled by access to a phone or internet (the connection was at best intermittent). She wasn’t a reader. The Chinese contractors had all sorts of businesses going with laundry and cleaning so there was no house-work, no cooking and no shopping or washing to be done. During the day she roamed, umbrella up, sunglasses firmly in place, taking the short distance from the tiny bridge at one end of town, to the edge of nothing at the other. Each day seemed more and more like an abyss she could fall into any minute.
At night if they ate out together she had a proper meal, if not she stayed home and drank whiskey. Not eating was the way she kept her slim figure. If they went anywhere together he bought the food, chatted to people he knew and along with everyone else ignored her. Out on her walks she sensed them ignoring her too but the broken nights meant that she was too tired to care. As for the whispering there was no end to it, and no use heeding it, any more than she could make sense of the upended roos dangling in the back of trucks, their bodies fat as overcoats; or the dark green house with painted windows where men forever came and went, ceaseless as ants.
One day she asked Pete if they could have a meal with the man who’d offered them his wine.
‘He was nice to me,’ she said. ‘Not like everyone else in this God-awful hole.’
He was the last other person who’d actually spoken to her. Even the Chinese contractors didn’t acknowledging she was there.
‘No,’ Pete said. ‘I have other dealings with him. I don’t want to be mixing my interests.’
A couple of times she’d seen them standing outside the dark house, both of them in dark suits. Pete was the older, but it was the younger man whose authority commanded the scene.
Her inability to sleep affected everything.
‘When you get up and read you wake me too,’ he said. ‘And I’m studying.’
That was the first she knew.
‘Studying what?’
‘It’s not something I can discuss with you,’ he said.
That upset her. She wanted to be close to him. But the longer she stayed the further from him she felt.
‘Find me somewhere else then,’ she said. Then she paused with a pretense of thought. ‘No wait. Go and stay with your poofter mate. Then I can’t disturb you.’
Accommodation was hard to come by. She knew there was nowhere else to go.
‘Why do you say those horrible things?’ he said. At least she’d made him angry.
She didn’t answer. Wasn’t it obvious? He was avoiding her so much he even showered at the truck-stop before breakfasting there.
‘And do you have to roam around all day with that ridiculous umbrella?’
‘I don’t want to turn into a wrinkled prune,’ she said. ‘Like that Deb you’re so fond of.’
‘She’s a good woman,’ he said. ‘She looks after us all.’
‘I bet she does,’ she shouted in his face. ‘Especially you.’
‘Watch what you say,’ he shouted back. ‘A woman with your history.’
If he didn’t want her roaming around with an umbrella during the day she would go out late at night when she didn’t need it. It was eerie in the empty streets. The town dogs were shut inside. Only the sound of her own breathing and foot-steps went with her. Everything was dark, even the pub lights were out except for a dim sign winking its name. She passed the slaughter-shed and reached the house with its green windows. It was dark and silent too but with just a tiny fence to step over, voila, she was on the prickly lawn and in front of the front door. There was an embossed metal sign over the doorway, like a pair of dancing legs, and something else she couldn’t see properly without her glasses. Round the back were tools – long-handled picks, hoes, shovels, barrows – all leaned against a hillock of earth, almost as high as a shed. These were not the tools of mining any more – but they were the tools of burial.
After that she stayed home more. She would change tack. Her focus would be on Pete. Things had to work between them, she would just have to try hard enough for them both. Every day she rinsed her hair in an oil which gave off the fragrance of Berlin and the Lindenstrasse (as advertised). Even Pete noticed and commented favourably. The next time they went to Deb’s she insisted on getting dinner.
‘It’s my treat,’ she said. ‘To show how happy I am to be with you.’
She led him to the table where they had first sat, where by coincidence the man in the hat was again seated beside them.
‘I’m Doug,’ he said holding out a hand to her. ‘And you’re Minnie, I know.’
She nodded and smiled, her hair releasing its heavy scent and her low-cut dress gaping a glimpse of her breasts, as intended. This time it was Minnie who bought the Voyager Red while Pete sat quietly, not joining the usual joshing and banter of the little café at night. This time Deb didn’t bring the food to the table, sending one of the kitchen staff with Pete’s usual (roast lamb) and Minnie’s fish. Minnie was determined to be happy.
‘To us,’ she said, raising her glass after pouring one each for the men. Pete returned half the wine from his glass to hers.
‘Beer for me,’ he said, getting up for a fourex.
By the end of the evening Minnie had finished off the bottle and got another.
‘That’s probably enough,’ Pete said, standing. ‘I’ll walk you home, and then I have work to do.’
She picked up the bottle and stumbling slightly at the front steps almost fell. The bottle broke on the lintel of the door, sending the red wine in a cascade onto her cut feet. Wine and blood mingled in her bright pink sandals.
‘I’ll look after her,’ Doug said, stepping forward. ‘You go and finish your studies.’
And he took her arm and steered her to a bench outside the pub. His hands had a quiet thoughtfulness all their own. With water and a cloth he cleaned the blood and checked each square of skin for broken glass, and the hairs on her skin began to crawl involuntarily under his fingers.
‘Can I walk you home?’ he said.
She stood up, swishing her skirt and curls.
‘Of course,’ she said.
She leaned into him as they walked along, enclosing him in the Linden blossom.
‘Pete is a good man,’ he said. ‘A serious man.’
‘Yes,’ she said, hoping the lace of her Fifi Chachnil bra was visible just above her neckline.
‘Studying,’ she said. She pretended to know what.
‘Soon he’ll be a Master,’ he said. ‘And the Lodge is almost finished.’
As they reached the donga she put a hand to the back of his head and another on his chest. He stepped out of her grasp to open the door.
‘Sweet dreams,’ he said, giving her quick kiss on the cheek.
Pete didn’t come back that night. In the morning when she was sober again she saw the file of photographs on his laptop. They were of the green house, its front doors opening into an empty shell. Every picture told of progress. The rooms, and then the floor changing: at first a stairway entrance appeared in the middle, then a set of descending stairs emerging from the carved rock below. Electric wires were strung down into the cavern below, then coach-lamps began to replace the bare bulbs that lit the way. Finally a polished oak banister appeared and the stairs themselves were complete.
And below, as the sequence of pictures showed, the big cavernous space had also been transformed, V shaped seating appearing on the polished stone floor, and around the vault of the ceiling timber architraves inserted, with coach lamps set into the stone walls. At the very centre of the space the letter G dangled above a mosaic of the sign she had noticed outside but hadn’t been able to discern properly: a square with compass opened across it.
Outside a car door slammed and she heard Doug’s voice.
‘Are you decent?’
‘Yes,’ she said, sliding the glass open. ‘But Pete isn’t here.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I advised him his studies should come first. He had somewhere else he could stay.’
She had made her coffee for the morning.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ she said. She felt flirtatious in his presence after the intimacy of his hands on her last night. ‘Or something else?’
‘I’m leaving for Adelaide in an hour,’ he said. ‘You might like to come with me?’
She felt her face flush with excitement. Here was a way forward.
‘Yes,’ she said.
An hour later they were already out of town, driving through the gidgee and coolabah woodlands that crossed the New South Wales border.
‘I left a note for Pete,’ she said.
‘He knows you won’t be back,’ he said. ‘I’ve told him.’
‘I hope he won’t miss me,’ she said.
‘He’s completing the Third Degree,’ he said. ‘He’s a very ambitious man.’
That was something Doug admired, she could tell.
‘And you?’ she said.
‘Oh I’ve been a Master for years,’ he said. ‘As my father was before me.’
Doug was a chatty man. Mostly he talked some masculine gobbledygook she could feign an interest in. It was hard to believe anyone cared about stuff like freemasonry, but apparently Pete and Doug did. The memory of his attentive fingers interested her much more.
‘Pete’s done a wonderful job with the Lodge,’ he was saying. ‘The whole structure’s underground, but so beautifully crafted. He’ll be a Worshipful Master in no time.’
She pulled the sunshade down to check her lips in its pocket mirror. The Chanel Glossimer was lasting well. And Wild Rose had been a good colour choice for her complexion.
‘You can’t see the Lodge of course.’
‘Why not?’
‘Women aren’t allowed.’
He talked on about God, about the infinite nature of everything. About the sky at night, the mystery of the galaxies. His ears were long and fleshy, like her own. He wasn’t sexy like Pete, in fact he seemed staid, the sort to wear a wedding ring. And there wasn’t one. She put a hand on his arm.

The fat ladies of Chookoo

2011-09-01T13:08:00.000-12:00

The usual fund-raisers hadn’t worked - not the emu races, nor the Running of the Goats which the Mayor had dreamed up after he and the wife returned from their Woman’s Weekly Tour of Spain. His fabulist notions of ‘vision’ on the 6 o’clock Toowoomba news had materialised as a Grey Nomad impaled on a billy-goat’s horn. After that the Public Liability went through the roof and the Goat Rush didn’t get off the ground.
The little town of Chookoo was doing it tough. Beef and wool had long gone the way of prospecting, i.e. down the gurgler. The only thing the town had left to flog off was itself. First its citizens migrated east. Then the houses began to follow. Cottages and grand old homesteads alike took a slow beach-ward trundle on the back of a prime-mover, moving steadily down the Warrego Highway to new lives as sea-side ‘shacks’ for the descendants of judges. If nothing was done the little streets of Chookoo would soon consist only of stones, mango trees and the memory of plumbing.
A Regional Queensland Grant was available that year and as part of his drive to get re-elected the Mayor had encouraged the locals to come up with ideas. They needed to attract the tourist dollars. Chookoo was so far off the beaten track it was on it and the town was dead certain its eccentric charms could be parlayed into a caravan park filled with Winnebagos. One bloke was going to launch a turbo charged boomerang. Another wanted to hunt Min Min lights with a pack of dingos.
The Three Fat Ladies Café put in a presentation too – a more lady-like affair of ‘fillum’ evenings. They proposed screen ‘European’ (code for erotic) films on the side wall of the café, accompanied by platters of Maleny smoked cheddar and a Ravens Croft Pinotage. This was the kind of thing a Grey Nomad would be into Wen thought. She was the fattest of the fat ladies and their leader. She wasn’t hopeful though.
‘Bloody Wayne’ll put a stop to it,’ she said. ‘He’s so up himself you can practically see his wrinkle.’
‘Don’t you mean freckle?’ Tess said.
The three ladies laughed so hard their chins inflated briefly like a pelican’s nosebag.
‘You catch more flies with honey love,’ said Margot, caressing her own ample thighs.
The Mayor and Hospital Superintendent took their places on the platform and the hall shushed. Although Wen ran most things in the town, there was an annoying impediment to Wen’s rise to higher power and influence - the Mayor swanning around town in his fake ermine and chains of office. And she wasn’t alone in her views.
‘Look at that prick,’ someone muttered from the back. ‘Never done a day’s hard yakka.’
‘He’s weary mate, gettin frocked up every mornin takes it out of a man.’
The three ‘ladies’ were there early so they could line up in the front row and eyeball the Regional Fund Committee (actually the Mayor and the Hospital Superintendent).
‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen etc etc,’ the Mayor said, his chains trembling across a well upholstered belly.
‘The committee would like to say how happy we are to welcome you all here tonight. And let me just say...’
‘Come on Wayne,’ Wendy said. ‘Get on with it.’
The Mayor glared down at his sister.
‘As I was saying,’ he continued. ‘We’ve looked over the presentations and while I congratulate you all on the ingenuity of so many of your suggestions…’
‘We thought that as there’s a big dunny at Dunedoo,’ the Superintendent interrupted. ‘Chookoo could have a Big Chook.’
Wen gave a mock yawn. It was always going to be a no-contest and everyone knew it.
‘Foregone conclusion Wayne,’ she heckled. ‘Looks like it’s just jobs for the boys as per usual.’
The Mayor raised his voice over hers and continued.
‘A name like ours lends itself,’ he said, smiling down at his sister in what she knew was a gloat of triumph.
‘And it won’t do your business any harm either,’ she said loudly, to a ripple of laughter from the auditorium.
Brother and sister had been at each other’s throats for years, at least since the two year old Wendy had acquired a baby brother. The older people still laughed about her efforts to leave Wayne at the town dump. But there was truth in Wendy’s remarks and everyone there knew it. And how did he keep getting elected when every last one of them declared they’d voted for Wen, not Wayne.
‘About as useless as pockets in a singlet,’ the bar-flies muttered about him, and more than once.
Wayne was a builder by trade with a line in making fibre-glass ute covers. So he was just the man to build a king-sized Black Orpington. The chook was built in situ, right next to the ‘Welcome to Chookoo’ sign, her glossy plumage so lacquered it became a traffic hazard at sunset. ‘Chookoo’- as she became known - had a trapdoor in her chest feathers and an internal ladder so the passing Grey Nomads could climb through her gizzard and peer at the town that bore her name. Wayne had personally built the viewing platform on the inside of her beak holes, and lacquered the bright red comb which flopped winsomely over one eye.
Plenty of nomads stopped for a gander at the chook, but in quite a short time her plumage faded to off-black, her comb turned orange and the photographs of nomads standing next to the disintegrating fowl became too ‘ironic’ for comfort. Soon ‘Chookoo’ was as sun-blasted and heat-beaten as the other remaining residents.
‘Typical,’ Wendy said to anyone who listened. ‘Bodgy work by a bunch of crooks. Wouldn’t of happened on my watch.’
Every morning, bright and early, the three fat ladies opened the doors to their café, kettle on the hob of the old wood stove and fresh cakes in the oven. Their CWA notions of hospitality thrived within the converted saddlery they’d furnished with wool presses, sorting tables and sets of scales that stood next to more conventional tables and chairs. Every known piece of machinery in the district had made its way to the ‘Fat Ladies’, and even some unrelated artefacts such as rusted dingo traps and a harness for skinning a roo.
People loved the Ladies café where portions were as ample as the ladies themselves. And their café was where everything happened. Truckies stopped in for one of Marg’s home-made bagels (with friend onion rings, newly slaughtered rump steak and a slathering of English mustard). And there were other things on offer too, things not exactly available on the shelves of the general store (dope, sly grog, even a bit of a trade in dingo pups). But the ladies had the legitimate stuff too– the taxi, the real estate, the post office, the bank. They even ran a bingo night alongside their weight loss program (weigh-ins were held weekly on the wool scales).
‘Twenty bucks a day for lettuce and boiled eggs,’ Marg chortled. She had no such plans for herself. ‘You’d have to be having a lend to charge twenty bucks for a feed like that.’
Although they hadn’t got RQ funding for it the ladies decided to put on their ‘fillum’ nights anyway, selecting movies with a dark story and a bit of an ‘edge’ (code for full frontal nudity) when there were nomads in town. Although the locals were happy enough with their internet porn, the woeful download speed sometimes put them off their stride. So the rows of old cinema chairs facing the shed wall (it was painted white to double as a screen) always filled on movie nights, the nomads uncomfortable in flip-up seats, but charmed by the night sky and the ‘refreshments’ available from the hatch at the back. The ‘ladies’, being wives and mothers, and fat and old, never attracted much attention even when the sweet smoke of weed wafted across what look like a man in conjugation with a blow-up doll.
But Wen was restless. Wayne was forever in her path, blocking her with his gloating smile and taking what was rightfully hers.
‘If anyone in the family should be Mayor it’s me,’ she said, and in the café there were posters of Wen stating just that: ‘Get the right member of the family – vote 1 for Wen.’
She peered up and down the empty street. No-one! There wasn’t a single motor home on the long flat highway, visible from both directions.
‘That bloody chook was always going to be a dead duck,’ she said. ‘Like most of Wayne’s hair-brained schemes.’
The sun was shining (when didn’t it?) and Margot’s latest culinary creation was just out of the oven – a ricotta cake with poached bush apple dusted in mango icing sugar.
‘About as useful as a chocolate teapot,’ Wen said.
‘Speaking of which,’ Tess said heaving the huge enamel pot off the hob, her child-bearing biceps straining with effort. ‘Time for a cuppa girls.’
The three fat ladies sat in a row, lined up along the pressed metal table top and facing the footpath so they could suss out any passing trade. Another semi had left the town overnight, carrying what had once been the Magistrate’s house lashed to its tray. But there was no magistrate any more, or even a member of the police, and that had left a huge gap in the social fabric of the town, not to mention right opposite the Information Kiosk (basically a cardboard sign pointing to the Three Fat Ladies café).
’Nothing wrong with your bush cake Marg,’ Wen commented, her tongue savouring the pungent contrast of tart fruit and creamy ricotta and fingers straying to collect the crumbs clustered on her shelf of a bosom.
‘I never thought Wayne would come to the party anyway,’ Tess said.
‘Nah,’ Wen agreed. ‘Wouldn’t take an Einstein to figure that out.’
‘Lacking in foresight,’ Margot said. ‘Not like you darl.’
She patted Wen’s freckly hand.
‘Or even foreskin,’ Wen said, giving Tess the giggles.
There weren’t many family secrets Wen wasn’t willing to share. And although her efforts to leave her brother at the dump had been unsuccessful it still seemed like a top idea.
‘Moving to plan B?’ Margot said with a hopeful expression. She settled back in her comfy old cane chair.
Wendy smiled at her two friends. It was remarkable how close they’d grown over the years, in spite of husbands and children and the occasional problem with the in-laws. They’d all ended up being related one way or another.
It was also remarkable how alike the brother and sister had become. Wen had the same broad face and thickset body as her brother, as well as the sandy eyebrows and shortage of neck. But that was where the resemblance ended. Wen had a full head of dyed red hair. And she had surprisingly good legs, considering.
‘Yep,’ Wen said. ‘Time for the curtain to go up.’
‘The leopard skin curtain,’ Tessa said, high-fiving Margot with her chubby palm.
At the edge of town, in the shadow of ‘Chookoo’, there was a house where the former owner had carked it. Unlike the majestic timber constructions forever shipping out to Noosa and Perigian, this house was red brick and going nowhere. A high besser-block fence surrounded it, access being through a remote-controlled gate at the front. As its owner had managed to die in it undetected for a month the house had gone at a knock down price, to the ladies of course, always first to know Chookoo’s business. This house was Wen’s new dream – the triple 8 (named after the ‘fat ladies’ of course and their love of bingo).
There were three bedrooms each decorated to a theme. The carmine room came furnished with gilt and mirrors, and (reproduction) Louis 18th furniture. The magenta was ‘underwater’ with an equatorial feel (rain forests and bamboo). And the black room had faux leopard curtains and African masks lit from inside. Tessa thought the African room would be everyone’s favourite; as soon as the drumming started she felt a hot flush coming on, and it wasn’t the return of the menopause. A walk-in pantry had been converted into a viewing room (for the voyeurs).
‘We’ll need to get a coupla girls in,’ Wen said. ‘Other than that she’s a goer.’
The 888 Loyalty Card was Tessa’s idea.
‘How about a freebie every fifth stopover at the Caff,’ she suggested, ‘one on the House?’
‘The Maison,’ Wen corrected.
‘I’ll get used to it,’ Tessa said.
She’d wanted to call it ‘House of the Rising Son’ in honour of the Animals song which had brought her firstborn (Eric) into being on the back seat of an FJ. But the others had other ideas. It was to be the ‘888 Maison’.
‘And why do the blokes get the rewards?’ she wanted to know.
‘Strictly business,’ Wen said. ‘The men seem to do the driving and we want them to drive right back here to Chookoo don’t we?’
‘We’re gonna make sure of that aren’t we girls,’ Margot said winking and smiling.
‘The wives might be glad of a night off,’ Tess said darkly. There were times when her conjugal arrangements felt a little samey after 42 years of ‘woman on top’.
One thing the three did agree on was that the ‘888’ was for out-of-towners only. They didn’t want Chookoo mixing its business and pleasures.
Once the Loyalty Cards began doing their work the population swelled, just as Wen had predicted. And lots of ‘likes’ were recorded on the Facebook page ‘Maison 888’, by people with names like ‘GreyGonad’ and even ‘StudleyManor’.
‘Pretty keen on the Jungle Room Tess,’ Margot said, reading some of the comments. Not all of them could be read aloud.
‘They like the ‘Versaille’ too.’ This was the name they’d given the room with the red and gold wall paper.
‘Let’s face it,’ Wen said. ‘They’re pretty keen on all the rooms the dirty boys. And they love the ‘Voyeurs’.’
The caravan parks overflowed. And people didn’t stay just the one night, eat Marg’s special breakfast of fried toast soaked in eggs and cheese and shoot through. No, the caravans and Winnebagos lingered, as did the truckies, roo shooters and hitch-hikers. They wanted to use their loyalty card one way or another.
‘This is going to piss Wayne off good and proper,’ said Tess. She laughed nervously. They’d been married for 43 years. He could get a bit narky if he thought she was colluding with his sister.
But pissing Wayne off was an outcome welcomed by Wen.
‘I live in hope,’ she said.
Around that time ‘Chookoo’s’ ladder fell out with a nomad on it and the 6 o’clock news ran an ironic story about Chookoo’s Big Chook. It was a filler, taking the viewer from the weather to the usual stories about neighbour disputes, family feuds and the overweight, so everyone in Chookoo was tuned in.
‘That’ll be the end of the photo-ops,’ Wayne said gloomily down at the pub after they’d all watched it.
A huge election poster of his smiling face beamed over the bar.
‘Never was that great an idea if you ask me,’ a man growled at the back of the room.
‘Couldn't organise a dog fuck in a paper bag,’ someone else muttered into his beer.
Wayne looked around trying to catch a hint of laughter but every face was staring intently at the TV where an overweight woman chased her neighbour’s cat with a tin of curry powder.
‘Looks like the sister got all the nous,’ someone else said. ‘You know. The sister we voted for.’
If there was one thing everyone in Chookoo knew it was how sensitive the Mayor was to jibes about his sister.
‘Wouldn’t that blow the fork outa your nightie,’ another voice muttered to smothered laughter.
Wayne put his empty glass down and headed for the door. There were things he felt entitled to like a bit of respect – and knowing what the hell his sister was up to.
‘Ah,’ he rumbled. ‘What the hell would you mob know?’
‘Don’t get your his tits in a tangle,’ someone yelled through the slamming door.
A man like Wayne always had favours he could call in. There was a visiting trapper whose load of dead dogs had ended up in the river. He’d bragged about his new loyalty card. And there was another bloke from Sydney, a rabbitoh’s support, hiding from his missus. The chicks at the Maison weren’t going to know Wayne from a bar of soap when he strolled in decked out in his rabbitoh’s red and green and carrying the spanking new triple 8 card.
Things in the bedroom had got a little dull for Wayne over the years even though Tess complained she had to do all the work. To tell the truth he’d only married her after he’d duffed her up and her old man paid a visit. Wayne was looking forward to a bit of a change, all in the interests of research of course.
‘What’s your preference?’ the reception asked, pointing at the chalked menu (the ladies still applied café thinking).

This week’s specials: Customer ratings:
Jungle drums 888888
Asian dreams 8888
Courtesan drama 88888

Jungle Drums sounded right up his street. He could feel the throbbing beat of the music right down to the soles of his feet, not to mention other parts of his anatomy. And there were some very encouraging moans of ecstasy, although these came (unbeknownst to him) from a voyeur in the converted pantry. After a buzz on the intercom and a bit of throaty chat the reception chick handed him a leopard patterned plastic key.
‘Go through now sir,’ she said. ‘Queen Ntwala is ready for you.’
Wayne opened the door. The room was dimly lit, and the African drumming generated an electrifying pulse. A woman’s voice called from the ensuite ‘Ready yourself for the umhlanga.’
This was the dance an African king’s wife performed for him apparently. Wayne had read about it while waiting in the waiting room. The voice was hoarse and throaty as you’d expect from a dusky sex queen. Wayne looked around the dimly lit room.
‘Put on the robe,’ she called. ‘On the chair.’
So he donned the green and gold man-dress and with arms akimbo admired himself in the full-length mirror eyes. The King of Swaziland he said to himself, adjusting his feathered head-gear, his ‘other half’ ready for at least seventy wives.
There weren’t many things that happened in Chookoo that the ladies didn’t know. In fact sometimes they knew a thing before it happened, Wayne’s trip to the triple 8 being a case in point. The dog trapper, not happy at the loss of his hard-won loyalty card, put a complaint through to the Maison888 and before Wayne had even got the rabbitoh’s jersey over his head and the duck feathers on it, Wen was liberating the mayoral robes of office. Decked out in the gold chains and ermine cloak she swept into the back bar with Wayne’s campaign megaphone and showing a fair bit of leg.
‘Free look at the Triple 8,’ she spruiked. ‘Just one night.’
A festival air descended on the bar. No-one was going to turn down a free perve.
‘Wen for Mayor,’ someone shouted, before providing Wayne’s campaign poster with a lipsticked head of hair.
The roar of utes and motorbikes drowned out everything else.
‘Get ready,’ Wen called through to the receptionist. ‘There’s a free night in the voyeurs’ room.’
‘Looks like the hair treatment’s working Waynie,’ one smart Alec yelled to Wen, before gunning his Harley and heading to the Maison.
It was hot and crowded with so many voyeurs in one small space but no-one complained. Everyone enjoyed a barney between Wayne and Wen and this one was shaping up as a corker. It seemed like Wayne was a bit on the nose with the general populace.
‘Bastard’s always got some sorta ripoff going,’ someone said (although that may have been Wen).
The mayor entered the ensuite - belly first, ankle beads next and the ceremonial ‘umhlanga’ (in this case a knob headed nulla nulla) after – and a hush fell over the crowd. They loved the look on Wayne’s face when he recognised his wife. And they loved, even more, the sight of Tess in her x plus black teddy.
Unknown to him Wayne’s voice was splendidly audible through the low-miked speakers specially installed.
‘What the bloody hell do you reckon you’re up to?’
He struggled to get back on the front foot but Tess was having none of that.
‘What about you ya mongrel, cheating on your long-suffering wife.’
It didn’t take many jibes at the next election rally before Wayne understood his mayoral days were over.
Weeks later the three fat ladies sat together in their café, bottle of bubbly on ice and a plate of warm borek (pastry stuffed with mutton and parsley) on the pressed metal surface. Margot was going through a Turkish phase.
“Mmmm. Mmm,’ Tess said, smacking her lips at the spicy scent.
‘To our new mayor,’ Margot said clinking Tessa’s glass.
Wen adjusted the gold chains and ermine cloak.
‘And to no more girls on top,’ Tess said. She and Wayne had come to a new arrangement involving the plus size teddy and a bit more leeway all round.
‘Long live the new Chookoo,’ Wen said, watching as a house from further down the track slowly backed into the space the Magistrate’s house had left.
‘And us,’ they said to one another clinking flutes,’ the eight eight eights.’

The watcher

2010-12-31T08:37:00.017-12:00

The Big Wet put my little business on the map, big time. When the lake began to fill again after so many years of drought, the punters blew in around my kiosk like flies around a rubbish tip. Apparently what they’d all been hankering for was the forgotten sensation of staring at a body of grey water and eating salty chips. But these punters were the transients who came, ate their burnt sausages, slapped a few kids, dropped an icecream in the dirt and left. It was the Eateries that kept me interested, not the pissy little kiosk that went with it. Get into high end food and you can kiss the tax office ta ta, if you know what you’re doing.
Lake Wivenhoe Fine Eateries is a bit of a naff name, I grant you, but that’s what it came with. I had the sign re-done in a script so Ye Olde Gothik you’d have to guess it was ‘ironic’. My food is like that too. I serve good old-fashioned (if ironic) Mum’s roasts and casseroles. No fancy Mediterranean foods or Asian/fusions at the Eateries. Instead your beast will be slaughtered down the road at Fernvale, your bass or trout caught in the Lake, and your root vegetable grown in the Lockyer Valley. All the condiments are made from locally grown mustard or radish or mint, prepared by yours truly. Not bad for a bloke who started out as a shearer’s ‘cookie’.
So tucker at the Eateries is ‘organic’, fresh-killed, bursting with flavour and not exactly cheap as chips. My Eateries customers are a breed of people for whom a good old British feed of roast beef and bread pudding is a fetish. Everything they do seems like it’s a fetish. In the northern summer they holiday in Brittany or Tuscany in a little Grenier or Villa. The men buy their suits on Saville Row. The women get their shoes in Firenze (they never say ‘Florence’). They also drive European cars (SAABs, Citroens, BMWs – the sorts of cars that come tax-friendly on a company ‘lease’). My preference is for the high end British classics though. At present I own an MG TF, built 2003, colour Midnight Blue. She’s a little beauty. I’ve got another MG too, but that one’s just for me. She’s not for show. But back to my customers.

I get along pretty well with them mostly, I’m not rubbish at the ‘mein host’ stuff if I say so myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m over-doing the jaded bachelor cliché and even if you had cataracts over both eyes you could pick it. But apparently they don’t. One old fellow, the one the cops found floating in the lake, was a regular for years. I’ll call him Dr Jones. He and his lovely wife would drive from Toowoomba and weekend at the chalets nearby. Sometimes he’d bring his mates along and they’d enjoy the fishing (tame as), and the after service which of course included cooking the catch and bringing it to the table. Dr Jones expected and got some sort of discount for his recruitment efforts, I forget how much.
The Joneses rented the chalet furthest from the park in an area of scrub alive with insects and birds. Mostly the two of them came alone however, and at night on my patrols I’d listen as they pleasured one another amidst the evening whirr of insects and delicate slapping of waves. But as international travel got cheaper and the chalets dearer, the chalets finally ceased to function, just like Mrs Jones, dead of a brain tumour at the age of sixty three.
For a time after his wife’s death Dr Jones visited the Eateries a lot. It seemed I’d made a home away from home for him. He’d wait until the Eateries had closed for the night, and then join me for a chat on the restaurant verandah. Gazing across the reach of the lake at night is an enchanting experience, especially when a wind blows up and there’s a mighty rush of energy blowing through the trees. But if the truth be known, I’m a solitary sort of a fellow. By the end of a long day I’m keen for a bit of down time.
But Max Jones was Superintendent of the Toowoomba Hospital and was used to getting what he wanted. So I sat with him on the verandah, and played the required part, that is I was a witness to his life. The Eateries (me) picked up the tab of course. The man was a widower in need of consolation. How could I put all those double malt whiskeys on his bill?
The lake attracts another kind of human visitor, a breed of kid I call the scavengers. I had a pair of them living under my restaurant (on and off) through the Wet season. They were there the day Max Jones was found dead. These kids are indeterminate. They’re a bit Abo and a bit Anglo, a bit young and a bit old. And from a distance you can’t tell which one is the girl and which the boy, though I manage to get a clear enough look at them when they get out of their flannel shirts and baggy sweat pants. It’s not hard to tell a boy from a girl when they’re naked in clear water, even if it is late at night. Of course it helps if you’re carrying an SLR with a Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM. That ‘zoom’ is an item of glorious perfection.
To me these two kids were a template of the human form. They had long fine limbs and delicate shapely heads. The girl was smooth as wild honey, slender-hipped and small-breasted, with the pale green eyes you get in a particular type of cross-breed. The boy gleamed with long skeletal muscle, the observer’s eye being led to that natural focal point – the fat bud between his legs. Most of the time I knew they were around because I could smell them. They reeked of unwashed bodies and sweated chemicals; leftover stubbies and wine bottles, and sniffed petrol. They ate what they could find - stale cake and dropped sausage. Sometimes they broke into the kiosk and pinched stuff.
When they were in the mood they terrorised the park-goers like a pair of juvenile crows. There was a flurry of long-distance car locking whenever those two approached. Did my pair know I watched them? Did they watch me? We’ve never so much as spoken. In fact if ever I approach they retreat like a mirage. But I have certain respect for the guerrilla. We’re not so different, them and me.
So my scavengers and I accommodate one other. One thing I don’t think my pair know is just how much I had figured on them. I know their names – Jinxy and Briff. And I know their scam. It’s pretty basic. They pinch cars for a bloke up in the backblocks. The stolen vehicles are stripped and repainted and voila, your beloved silver Landcruiser is now dark blue and available for a knock down price in the Trading Post. They like motorcycles particularly your Honda or Kawasaki. Jinxy drives the big SUVs; the boy, Briff, loves the bikes. Their ‘wheels’ are always temporary of course. Once they’ve snatched a vehicle they take off in it. Then we don’t see them for a while. Then they suddenly show up again.
One night I saw a ute pull up by the boom gate. The two kids slid out of the tray like shadows, and disappeared into the scrub. The ute bloke was your typical prize dick-head – did a donut on the gravel and roared off with a squeal of tyres. Not like those kids. They headed off quietly into the scrub where a couple of old water pipes kept their swag dry. They could both get around without making a sound. That’d be their Abo blood I guess.
When I can’t sleep at night, and that’s often enough, I walk the foreshore with my gun. That tends to give anyone else around a bit of a message. And it gives voice to something in me too, something a bit primitive. I’d like to have a worthy canine like a big Shepherd or a Doberman with me. Then we’d really look like we meant business. But it’s a national park - so no dogs.
The last time Dr Jones (Max) came to the Eateries was a Friday. He drove up in his two-seater and parked where he had long ago used to park, when he and Mrs Jones stayed at the chalet. Max had a little beauty of a car, a 1950s Morgan ‘flat’ radiator 4+, in British racing green. This was a beast more beautiful than Hitler’s Mercedes-Benz and I envied him that car far more than I ever envied him his lovely wife. I’ve had eType Jags, Aston-Martins, Morgans, MGs. You name it I’ve owned it. But Dr Jones’s car was the kind that I knew would keep me faithful. He crossed the green spaces of the park, with his wide-legged old man walk and I put on my ‘mein host’ face and went out to greet him like we were long lost friends.
When he’d booked his table, the week before, he made sure it was his ‘usual’ place - by the water, where he and Mrs Jones had liked to sit, away from prying eyes. He’d asked for a late lunch so I could join him for a final meal, and I didn’t have much option but to agree.
‘What’s this about your last supper,’ I said as I put my hands above his elbows to settle him into his seat.
The raw skeleton of his humerus felt hard and close beneath my fingertips. And his pants hung from his hips like heavy drapes. He gestured with his left hand, not bothering to speak. In fact I noticed he was breathing through his mouth, as old people often do, as though the nostrils are no longer up to funnelling something so dense as air. I’d asked the chef, and one of the staff to stay back and look after us. That made for overtime for them. They were happy enough to get the money.
‘I thought it might be nice to celebrate our long friendship,’ he said, raising his glass. As he held it up his hands shook so much the whiskey slopped over the sides. I looked ruefully at the puddle. Glenfiddich. The tab would be on me of course.
I’d already organised the dishes. I knew what he liked.
‘We’ll eat a couple of those trout we caught this morning,’ I said to the girl. I forget her name. She was good looking but in that country way that turns solid by the time they hit forty.
‘Tell cookie to bake them separately. Use a couple of the blue Creuset dishes, the oval ones, and bring them to the table when they’re done. We want sliced lime across the flesh, and shallots in the pan. Tell him to shove a bit of garlic and butter into the flesh.’
Dr Jones listened with one hand cupped to his ear. He nodded at the garlic and butter.
‘I think we should eat some of the King Edwards,’ I said looking at him. ‘They’re fresh in this morning.’
He was a bit of a potato connoisseur.
‘Use the small ones, don’t peel them but cook them a little first. Then they can simmer in the juices.’
A slight amount of drool had collected in the corners of my guest’s mouth, that white stuff old people seem to have instead of saliva.
‘And we’ll have a side dish of Brussels,’ I said. ‘Make sure cookie soaks them for about 5 minutes, then tell him to cut the stems with a little vee, so they cook right through. Steamed please.’
‘Unsalted butter,’ Max added, wheezing the words out. I guessed he meant on the sprouts.
‘That’s on the table,’ I said, pointing to the dish.
‘Sprouts have to be hot,’ he said. His voice whistled as he spoke.
‘I’ve got it in hand’ I said.
It was a funny sort of occasion. I had to cut the potatoes for him, as he had so little strength left, yet how easily he seemed to wade into the lake later that afternoon, pushing into the weight of water until he was completely under it. You might wonder what kind of conversation we had when something like that lay in wait between us. Well we talked about cars.
‘Where’d you get your moggie?’ I asked.
I noticed I’d nodded in the direction where the precious beast was parked.
‘Bought her in Melbourne,’ he said. His sentences were broken into chunks of syllables, maybe about three or four at a time. ‘From a bookie’s wife.’
‘In good nick?’ I asked.
‘Had to ship it up by train,’ he said. ‘Crankshaft was stuffed.’
‘Thought you might have imported it,’ I said. ‘She’s in perfect nick, looks like a one-owner kind of a vehicle.’
‘Interior was good. Stone leather seats. Oak dash. Mrs Jones loved her.’
‘Bookie must have loved her too. What happened?’
‘Bloke took on one big plunge too many. Race was supposed to be rigged, so his missus said. Somebody two-timed.’
‘So he had to get rid of the car?’ I asked.
‘Got rid of himself first,’ Dr Jones said.
‘Pudding,’ I said after that.
He considered.
‘Hasty pudding,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way. Somewhere else.’
‘We put sultanas in it here,’ I said. ‘A bit of a variation, but it tastes even better than your grandma made it.’
He snorted at that.
‘That woman. Couldn’t boil an egg in hell’ he said. ‘Your place. Made sense of her food. For me.’
So we ate the hasty pudding, and drank one commemorative glass of drambuie each.
‘The car,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t think of selling her?’
‘She stays with me. Until I die.’
‘Right,’ I said.
We followed the meal with a good strong coffee (locally grown ‘Black Mountain’, roasted in my own ovens). I was ready for a bit of a lie-down after that. Too much food. For an old bloke he could certainly put it away.
He started struggling to get up.
‘Going for a stroll,’ he said, ‘along the shore.’
So I helped him to his tottery feet and saw him off. He turned in the direction of the causeway.
‘Probably take that path,’ he said, making an old man gesture, the right hand bent and index finger curved separately, the wrist flicked with just the smallest expenditure of energy. He seemed to mean the low lying waters, where a sandy beach had formed in an inlet in the shallows.
I have my camera set up just inside my office, which of course overlooks the lake. Rangy gums circle the shore line, but they’re slender enough not to present much impediment to the view. With my f/4L IS USM trained out onto the water there’s not much I can’t see. I didn’t really want to have a nap. I wanted a bit of time to myself before the evening shift started. So I relaxed into the armchair/cum/sofa I have in my office and stared out.
It was fairly clear watching the old man what Dr Jones’s intention was. And he set about it directly he reached the lapping waters. Under his woollen jacket he was wearing a hand-knitted cardigan, not that it was cold. And his trousers were a heavy wool and gabardine blend. My guess was that he intended the wet weight of it all to keep him under when the involuntary struggle began. I watched as he waded further and further out. With my zoon lens trained on him I could clearly see the expression on his face. He showed effort, quite intense effort. I didn’t detect sadness or regret, just a determination to keep going. And that was how it turned out. He drowned. I watched. Then someone reported it.
The first thing the cops asked when they arrived was how he’d got there.
‘In his car of course,’ I said, turning to where he’d parked the Morgan.
It was gone. The scavengers had got to it.
‘It was there,’ I pointed. ‘and now it isn’t.’
They both watched my face as I spoke. Coppers always do that. They never really buy ‘the story’, a state of suspended belief I have some sympathy for.
‘What kind of car?’ one of them said, making notes in her little book.
‘A Morgan four plus,’ I said, ‘British racing green. Flat radiator. Separated engine and gear box. Antique chassis.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Bit of a British roadster buff,’ I said. ‘I never got in his car though. We weren’t friends.’
‘But he came here to have his last meal with you,’ she said.
‘That kind of thing happens when you’re a hospitality professional,’ I said.
I leaned on the last phrase so it sounded like it was in quotes. But she didn’t crack a smile. Not a bad looking bird, even with her pulled back and the blue trousers that didn’t fit her nice arse as well as they could have. After a few more questions she left me alone, but not without noticing the camera.
‘You like photography?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I wasn’t going to tell her the zoom was my real reason for keeping it there. That might make me sound like the local pervert.
‘You could see a bit with a focal length like that’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed.
They went off to search the area where Max had left his car, found out about the comings and goings of my scavengers and then after a bit of a hunt around discovered the emptied wallet.. I’ve never understood how the kids got hold of this, unless he left it on the shore as some sort of identifier. He left his watch too, apparently. But they were stupid enough to discard what they didn’t want nearby. Probably didn’t even realize the old man was dead in the water right next to them. Anyway they got the key to his car that way and took off. I thought how it would be, climbing into that baby. I imagined turning the key and listening to the music of her purr. Then I imagine her clutch opening and her gears clicking into place, and then how I would hold that vibrating beast to the road and take her to the end of the line.
As soon as the cops had gone, maybe after five, ten hours – I got myself into negotiations with the prize dick-head up the back-blocks. He had that little moggie tucked away under a canvas sheet, removed from the prying eye. After some chat we found our way towards a suitable price for a change of engine number and a coat of Saratoga. That would make her into the kind of girl who knew her obligations after a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a four star meal.
There was an inquest later in the year, the kids were persons of interest, but in the end nothing was concluded. They come and go. I know when they’re around – it’s the smell of the petrol fumes they inhale and the reek of unwashed hair. I put food out for them – they’re fond of chips, will always go a broccoli floret (must be iron deficient), and they like a lamb shank from time to time. The coroner called me in but what could I say except that the guy was old, his wife was dead, he’d just decided to top himself.
Once it was over I took the car out, opened her up and took that throbbing beauty up the Brisbane Valley Highway on a bright crisp Autumn morning, and she was everything I knew she’d be. And business boomed. People love my story about the old bloke who drowned himself after a perfect lunch with yours truly. I guess I’m still dining out on it.

Down in the valley

2010-07-16T17:55:00.006-12:00

Perlie was afraid of the dark. So she liked to sleep close enough that Stel’s ears caught her breath all night long. It was like sleeping next to a waterfall. After the old mother died, they reached a compromise. Stel moved herself into the master bedroom and Perlie slept on a cot at the foot of the bed. But Stel was fed up of being nanny to her older sister. Now that the mother was gone, she often wished Perlie would disappear too. Then she could have her own life. Stel didn’t feel that way the night the man arrived but.
Perlie could be a bit slow, so Stel explained things slowly.
‘The man will live out here with us,’ Stel said. ‘On the property.’
‘The man will live on the property,’ Perlie repeated, baring her stove-in mouth. ‘In the shed.’
She had the habit of repeating her little sister’s words exactly, just like she’d thought of them herself. In all the time since the accident, Perlie had refused to wear her dentures. Now after many toothless years she had an apple face, like a bit of old fruit going off in the fridge. Stel on the other hand was a handsome woman with a slab neck and strong tubular hands. The sisters weren’t old, but after all that time alone together in the valley they seemed it.
Stel had found the man while she was out walking. He was curled into an old hatch-back parked near a barbed-wire fence. Seeing his bare arms and legs bent into their foetal huddle was disturbing. Stel had seen birth and she’d seen death and often it looked the same: the limbs folded neatly, the head curved inward. She watched for a full minute to see if the body was still breathing, and then became absorbed by the untroubled rhythm of the torso as it inhaled, exhaled, inhaled. Then she knocked on the windowand he opened his dark eyes and stared straight into her. It was like lightning bolt. She’d never felt anything like it.
Now he was waiting outside in the garden.
‘We need a roustabout,’ she said to Perlie. ‘Someone to help with the heavy lifting.’
Perlie wasn’t up to much, apart from scrubbing things down. Cleaning was what she liked best. She couldn’t cook.
‘Help us lift,’ Perlie echoed.
What Stel didn’t say even to herself was that the roustabout might be an escape from her chaste sisterly life. Stel and Perlie were good Christian women with due respect for sanctified fornication. But that didn’t mean the unsanctified variety didn’t cross Stel’s mind.
‘We need a man,’ Perlie agreed, as though she could hear Stel’s thoughts.
So Stel gave the man some blankets for the iron bed on the verandah and showed him a room he could make his own in the back of the shed once he’d had a meal and a good sleep. The house was a timber ‘Queenslander’ with a gabled front bedroom and verandahs on two sides. It was set low on the ground, with windows and doors that no longer met. On that first night, as the man’s snores rumbled from the side verandah, Stel couldn’t sleep. She was glad then of Perlie’s little snorts and whimpers. Who was this fellow she’d let into their lives, with his skinny jeans and ‘bum freezer’?
In the morning when they woke and Stel found they had not been murdered in their beds, the man asked to use the bathroom so he could shave.
‘Bruce,’ he said extending his hand again to remind them. ‘The name is Bruce.’
And Perlie took his hand and held it quietly in her own.
‘Brucie,’ she said with her slight lisp. Her industrial strength gums gleamed. ‘Brucie.’
Perlie’s gums were up to chewing on a burnt steak, they were that good.
‘That’s enough Perlie,’ Stel said. ‘Bruce will be busy today helping me.’
‘Helping,’ Perlie agreed.
Perlie hardly remember the accident that had robbed her of her teeth but that was because she never remembered anything much. Stel did. Her mother’s anger had been one of those moments which stayed with her.
‘Couldn’t you just watch whatcha doing Stel? Just once?’
‘I was only five,’ she wanted to shriek. But her mother had a temper. And why couldn’t Perlie have stayed out of her way when she was on the swing? So at the same moment Stel knocked into Perlie she also knocked out any chance of a future away from her sister. And when Perlie, the first born, inherited the farm Stel was bitter. Perlie couldn’t do a thing by herself. Stel was going to have to do everything, as per usual.
Bruce had just the one day to ready his quarters and he set about scrubbing the walls, then dragging his iron bed and an old chest of drawers into the little room. The shed contained a few wheeled things: a battered Massey-Ferguson, an old blue Hilux with one white wheel arch and an ancient iron-wheeled sulky with leather fittings slowly retiring from lack of oil. Bruce looked out into the paddocks where fences were down and trees toppled, and then off to the distant Border ranges on one side and the Dividing ranges on the other. He breathed in the freedom that came with the lonely spot. He hadn’t had a whiff off that in the two by three metre cell he’d occupied only a month before.
On Sunday when the time came for Church, the sisters put on their hats and called on Bruce. Did he follow the God-breathed word? Yes, but for want of good trousers he said, he could not be with them that week. So Stel brought him the double-breasted striped suit their father had used to wear. She couldn’t remember her father but she did remember his suit. Now Bruce put it on. Perlie clapped her hands when she saw him.
‘Better than Mel,’ she said. She was keen on Mad Max.
Bruce put a hand to his hair and leaned down to the hall mirror to push a cow-lick into place. In this getup a man looked a bit of alright, they all considered.
He strode to the ute and called for the keys.
‘Come on girls,’ he called, testing a more commanding tone.
‘Sorry Bruce,’ Stel said running daintily at the Hilux.
Perlie headed straight for the middle of the bench seat so she could sit beside the man.
‘That’s enough Perlie,’ Stel said as Perlie’s fingers trailed onto Bruce’s leg. ‘You have the window seat.’
‘Your hair is nice Brucie,’ Perlie said, leaning across her sister to admire him.
He’d brushed his hair with a middle part, just like the picture the sisters kept of their father on the piano.
At church there was some dispute. Was Bruce the famous murderer only just out on parole after killing his sister in a jealous rage? Or was he the Westpac Bandit, caught after a shoot-out in Alice Springs and the manslaughter of a service station attendant?
‘And how are you liking our little town?’ the Pastor inquired at the door, his voice almost drowned by the distancing coughs behind him. Unlike the Pastor, many parishioners found redemption quite uncomfortable in practice.
‘You’re amongst God’s people now, my friend,’ the Pastor said, putting one hand one just above Bruce’s elbow.
After that Bruce and the two sisters drove home to a Sunday roast. Stel had slaughtered the chook as Bruce hadn’t the stomach for that kind of killing.
‘A man can’t be perfect,’ she explained to Perlie.
‘Perfect,’ Perlie agreed.

The digestion of the entire chook and a great many roast potatoes and quite a lot of McWilliams sweet sherry led to a general view that all of them could do with a bit of a lie-down. Bruce fell face first onto the rough blankets of his mattress, almost asleep before his body thumped onto the mattress. He didn’t hear Stel’s voice whispering to Perlie through a crack in the wall.
‘Sssh, go home now Perlie. You’ll disturb Bruce. You go and have your rest.’
And he pretended not to notice as she climbed into the little bed beside him. Stel was no sylph. But she was strong and sure. She put her arm around and massaged him into life and it wasn’t long before Bruce was grunting over her as her body thumped the wall.
The old mother had complained of husbandly attentions in the master bedroom but Stel found otherwise. In fact, as soon as it was over she’d have had another go but by then Bruce was snoring. And when he awoke and the same thought came to him, it was Perlie who was there to oblige while Stel’s voice could be heard singing ‘God of mercy and compassion’ as she scraped the frying pan.
‘Bubble and squeak,’ she called from the kitchen, while Perlie crept round the side and Bruce slapped water onto his face from the outside tank.
‘Coming.’
He strode into the little kitchen and sat at the head of the table.
‘Black tea. No sugar,’ he commanded. And Stel brought it to him.
Unlike Stel, Perlie was not big. So week by week as her baby grew, the changes in her body became visible.
‘Perlie seems to be putting on condition,’ the Pastor’s wife said to Stel across the tea urn.
The comment hung in the air. Stel looked at her sister in profile and there was the telltale swelling under her ribs. She was furious. Was there nothing she could have as her own?
‘That jailbird has took advantage of the poor simple thing,’ the women said to one another.
Stel followed all their gazes to where Bruce stood in front of the ute with the bonnet up. A couple of men leaned into the engine.
‘Men!’ the women crowed, ‘only interested in the one thing.’
‘Where will the baby go?’ the Pastor’s wife asked.
She was childless and in need of a baby.
‘They’ll have to marry,’ Stel said grimly. She’d been hoping for that herself.
But this did not stop her from sharing Bruce’s bed. He might be a bit limited in other departments she thought, but not in this one. One afternoon he said there was something he wanted to try, something he’d never done but that she was the right person.
‘What?’
He picked up the tie he had discarded from church that morning.
‘Tie me throat,’ he said, ‘like this.’
He tied it into a hang-man’s noose. Then he put it over his head and pulled it upwards against his chin.
‘What’s that do?’
He explained. ‘Pull it real tight when I’m fully up like. That cuts off me air supply.’
She put her hand to her mouth.
‘I’m scared I’ll kill ya.’
‘Nah love,’ he said. ‘You got to loose it. You know. Just before.’
She was dubious.
‘Mate. You wanna try it. It’s like heaven.’
She was dubious.
‘How do you know if you never done it?’
‘On me own,’ he said. ‘Tried it on me own.’
They were lying in bed together and she could feel his excitement.
‘When do you wanna do it then?’
He looked shy.
‘Now?’
Stel remembered the morning when she found him curled into his car hatch, wondering then if he was alive or one of them lonely suicides in cars she’d read about in the Gatton Chronicle.
‘Righteo,’ she agreed.
She observed as his face bulged above her own and his breathing grew more and more strained. And she did as he asked. She held onto the necktie and watched as he went into his death ecstasy. Then at just the right moment she released the knot.
‘You are my dream girl Stel,’ he said, still groaning.
‘Am I Bruce?’ she whispered. ‘Am I?’
‘The best,’ he said. ‘I wanna do it again some time.’
‘You will,’ she assured him.
She supposed Perlie was watching. Perlie watched everything.
‘You’re not to do that thing with Brucie,’ Stel instructed her sister later. ‘Not while your baby is due.’
The wedding went ahead with Stel acting as best man and matron of honour.
‘Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?’ the Pastor inquired.
‘Lawful wedded Brucie,’ Perlie responded, to much laughter in the church.
Then there was the bridal march, and Perlie changing into her other clothes that Stel had sewn for her. But it wasn’t that Bruce and Perlie were going anywhere in particular. All that happened was that Stel moved out of the master bedroom and Bruce moved in. There were other rooms in the house, but Stel decided to go out to Bruce’s old quarters. She had come to a few conclusions of her own and didn’t plan being there too long, especially after over-hearing Bruce’s arrangements for her while they were all at church.
‘Now we’re man and wife, I’ll be doing the running,’ he boasted.
‘What about Stel?’ someone asked.
‘She can look after the baby like,’ he said. ‘Or if she don’t like that she can find some other place of employment.’
At home he shouted at Perlie.
‘Move your fat arse,’ he commanded, giving her a kick for good measure as she struggled to fetch and carry for him.
‘Prune face,’ he muttered under his breath when Perlie put her arms around him for a hug. ‘Makes me sick looken at ya.’
‘Looken at ya,’ Perlie said. But her little old face looked pained. He’d hurt her.
Sometimes at night Bruce made his way to Stel’s quarters.
‘Come on Stel,’ he whined through the timber slats, ‘for old time’s sake.’
But Stel kept quiet in her bed until he staggered away. And Perlie grew quiet too without Stel to follow everywhere and copy.
‘Cat got your tongue again?’ Bruce would yell at her silent presence as she cleaned and tidied.
‘Tongue again,’ Perlie would mimic, not understanding how this habit enraged her husband.
‘For Christ’s sake shut your yap.’
‘Your yap,’ Perlie agreed.
Just before the baby was due, Bruce shot through one night and without explanation. He left Perlie sporting a black eye and a bruised belly. She hung back when Stel saw her, not wanting to explain what had happened. But Stel had heard it all. Bruce had kicked his pregnant wife. That’s what had happened. He’d kicked her and then he’d gone outside and peed in an angry stream on the dirt.
‘Cow,’ he yelled at the unflinching sky. ‘Think you’re worth fucking. I can do better than you any day.’
There was no sound from either the house or the shed.
‘I got news for the two a youse,’ he yelled. ‘No more Brucie runnin around after youse. Not now, not ever. And that’s a promise.’
He roared the ute into action and took off in a vapour of burnt tyres, dust and rubber smoke. Stel listened as the ute whined into the distance, then she crossed to the house to find Perlie.
‘Brucie,’ Perlie sobbed. ‘He hurt me.’
But she was clutching her back.
‘I think it’s the baby,’ Stel said. She was gentle as she could be. She wanted Perlie to calm down. ‘Brucie didn’t mean ta hurt ya.’
‘Hurt my feelings Stel,’ Perlie sobbed.
‘I know love,’ Stel said. ‘But he’s gorn away now.’
‘Want Brucie,’ Perlie sobbed all the way through the birth. ‘Where’s my Brucie.’
So Bruce missed the birth of his son, and the warm sunlit mornings which followed, when Perlie lay recovering in the master bedroom and the baby curled up in his bassinet and sucked his fist. And Stel took care of the little boy washing his tiny clothes and keeping the bedroom clean. Once Stel had wished her sister would disappear. And then she had wanted Bruce to be hers. But these things hadn’t happened. Instead Stel had delivered her sister of Bruce’s baby son and it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
‘Looks just like his Dad,’ Stel said as they took him in to church for the baptism.
Without the ute they’d gone back to using the old sulky. Bruce had done a good job of fixing it, oiling the wheels and replacing the thoroughbraces. He’d even re-upholstered the leather seats. So at least he’d done two good things in his time with them. As the two women and the baby went in and out of town Stel basked in the quietness, listening to the wind blowing through the grass and the rhythmic clops of the horse. The baby smiled and the sun shone and they were all happy as anything whatever time they arrived.
When the baby started to crawl and was calling out half words, and could even get to his shaky feet, Bruce came back. But he didn’t come back in the old ute. He came back in a brand new Pajero with a white racing stripe on its blue body.
‘Whad ya think girls?’ he called as he pulled alongside the house and leaned down through the car window to the two sisters sitting on the side verandah. ‘She’s a beauty ain’t she?’
Stel picked up the baby in his blue dungarees and dangling bare feet and walked towards the car.
‘Where’d ya get the car Bruce?’ she asked. But she already knew. The bank statements had come in and there was the amount drawn from the farm’s line of credit. Bruce stared at the baby boy.
‘My son?’ His voice was lowered reverentially.
‘Yeah,’ Stel said. ‘We named him Donald, after our father.’
The expression on Bruce’s face changed. Here was the Bruce who kicked and insulted his wife.
‘He better not,’ he said angrily. ‘He’s Bruce. Like this old man.’
When he took the baby, the little boy screamed and bit with his tiny front teeth.
‘Fuck!’ Bruce yelled, massaging his hand where the teeth had sunk in. ‘Little bastard.’
Stel moved back out to her quarters in the shed and Bruce rejoined his family in the master bedroom. When the baby cried at night and disturbed his father, Stel offered to take him in with her so that Bruce could have a proper sleep. When Bruce decreed that Perlie’s tits were for him the baby was weaned. Most things returned to the way they had been except that Stel was now mother to the little boy. And she was happy with that.
And Perlie was happy too, now that Brucie was back.
‘Brucie says … ,’ was the phrase that preceded all of her conversation.
On Sundays, Bruce ferried his wife and son and his sister-in-law to church in the new Pajero. But he no longer attended himself, disappearing somewhere else and then returning the women in time for his lunch. Instead of the baby being paramount it was keeping Bruce happy that exercised the little family most. Then Bruce started taking the baby away. They’d been seen in Toowoomba. They’d been seen in Brisbane. Stel was worried sick.
One Sunday the two of them, father and child, went off and didn’t come back for days. Stel was beside herself. Bruce drank. His ‘anger management issues’ weren’t over, or so the parole officer put it.
After three days she phoned the police. The baby had gone missing. She feared for his safety. But the child was with its father? Stel had to agree that this was so. ‘What would she like the police to do about it?’ a voice asked on the end of the line.
‘He needs his mother,’ Stel wailed, meaning herself.
Early the next morning, and before dawn, the cops drove in with Bruce’s Pajero.
‘We brought the car back for you love,’ they said to Stel. People in the district knew about Bruce’s spending sprees. They tut-tutted over his exploitation of the two women.
Bruce was in the back of the police wagon away from the screaming baby who lay in a box at the front. He was hungry and dirty and he cried like a child abandoned.
‘Drink driving,’ they said to Stel, handing the baby to her. ‘But we never charged him. Hadn’t turned on the ignition.’
Then the younger one turned to Bruce with a warning.
‘You better watch yourself mate,’ he said. ‘You’re still on parole.’
Bruce stumbled into the house without saying a word in front of them. But Stel knew from the look on his face that he was just waiting for the cops to go.
‘You’ll get yours sister,’ he hissed at Stel as the police car backed up the driveway. He went straight into the bedroom to flake across the covers.
‘You know that thing Brucie likes?’ Stel said to her sister after she knew he’d gone to sleep.
Perlie looked at her sister, tilting her head like an interested bird.
‘With the tie?’ Stel explained. She picked up Bruce’s tie and looped it into a hangman’s noose. ‘Remember this?’
She put the noose over her own head and tugged it into place.
‘Yes,’ Perlie lisped. ‘That thing Brucie likes.’
‘That’s it,’ Stel said. ‘Well when he wakes up that would put him in a good mood.’
The next morning Stel mashed banana and oats and put the baby into his high-chair. Perlie came in for breakfast.
‘Where’s Brucie?’ Stel asked, dishing up the food and watching as the baby dripped porridge from his bowl onto the tray of his chair.
‘Sleeping,’ Perlie said.
She sat down and began to eat. Stel had cooked a special breakfast: fresh ham, fried eggs and toast fried in ham fat. They ate steadily. Perlie asked for more toast. Stel opened a new tin of marmalade. Then Stel got up and picked up the baby to put inside his playpen. She sat in the old rocking chair on the verandah. A slight morning breeze blew across the onion fields, carrying their slight scent of lilly.
‘You clean up,’ she said to Perlie. Perlie was good at washing dishes. And she was good at polishing the furniture. Perlie did everything exactly as she was taught. She was good that way.
Stel stayed out of the bedroom until mid morning. Then she looked around the bedroom door to check. Bruce was there, with his head bowed forward over the tie which was still at his neck. His limbs were folded inwards.
‘Something’s happened to Brucie,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ Perlie said. ‘Something happened.’
And she went on wiping the surface of the laminex table until it shone, just the way she had been taught.

Form Ic

2010-04-23T17:25:00.011-12:00

Form IC

Whenever Dad finds a dead friend in the paper he coughs twice to let me know he’s going to read aloud.
‘Theresa Maria Quisp. Died after a short illness. Burial at Brookfield Cemetery. No flowers.’
‘Tess, Tess, the murderess?’
I said that to make him laugh and he gave one of those high-pitched yelps that get me going too. He laughed so hard I thought he’d choke on his toast.
‘You girls,’ he said. ‘What an eye opener when a bloke has a daughter.’
He says that stuff because Mum died and he raised me by himself.
‘Do you reckon it’s her?’
‘Looks like it’s your ill-famed chemistry teacher,’ he said, scrutinising the fine print like the detective he once was.
‘Why?’
‘Well she lived around that way … Kenmore … Brookfield. And the age is about right..’
That was a surprise. He always knows things you don’t expect.
‘A woman not unknown to yours truly,’ he said, touching his heart with his bendy old fingers.

Every morning after breakfast Dad sits at his table with the Courier Mail spread out. He’s an old-fashioned kind of man, claims he never exceeded the speed limit, packed me off to an expensive girls’ school in Toowoomba. I always thought Mum was the love of his life but some time after l’affaire Quisp other information came to light. Turns out Dad had a colourful past.
‘I think I’ll go to the service,’ he said. ‘Tess was a good catholic you know. Odd when you think about her life-style, as people like to say these days.’
‘Should I come with you?’
I didn’t ask how he knew about the ‘good catholic’ thing. Or the ‘lifestyle’.
‘Only if you want to,’ he said.

As a kid I detested chemistry and Miss Quisp equally. But everything about her and St Hildegarde’s still fascinated me, even thirty years later. This may have been because of the death of Miss Quisp’s lover—our boarding-mistress, Miss Kurtz. And this, I wrongly thought, was the reason Dad wanted to go to the funeral. I had my own reasons to be interested, in particular the part I played in her downfall. When Miss Kurtz died I was thirteen and a boarder in her House. Dad lived in Brisbane. But he was Deputy Commissioner of Police so I wasn’t exactly keen to tell him what I knew.

Miss Kurtz was a chunky woman with sturdy brown arms and hooded eyes like a snake. She was our boarding-mistress. Her rooms were slightly above our dormitory and from this elevation she seemed omniscient, like God. Like God Miss Kurtz could appear soundlessly amongst us and make alarming predictions, and as she decided on and enforced the House rules, most of her predictions came true. She ran her House on a cocktail of forced confessions, favours and fear and this hotbed of shifting alliances and intrigues was my world for years. Dad wasn’t exactly a hands-on father in those days.

When Miss Quisp took up her position, she was a welcome change. Miss Quisp was young where most of the other mistresses were old. And she was tall, with a handsome face and long hands. She coached and played netball with the school team, and held reading evenings in the old music room. Many girls transferred their worn out crushes from a whey-faced sixth-former called ‘Bertie’ to the vibrant Miss Quisp.
But even at thirteen I liked to think I had my father’s cool eye and assessing mind. There were elements of Miss Quisp’s appearance I found disturbing—her red pointed nails for one, and the clanging laugh which displayed her over-large mouth for another. And there was that stilettoed walk which seemed to detonate along the upper verandah.

Rather than having a crush on Miss Quisp I thought her boring, although that could have been to do with her voice droning interminably on the Periodic Table: H, He, Li, Be. Hydrogen -1,1. Helium. Lithium 1. Beryllium 2; then orbitals, isotopes, allotropes, crystals. But I did like her experiments. These took place in the school lab, a place with a heat source (Bunsen burners) and cooking containers (beakers). Miss Quisp encouraged us to create soda volcanoes and stalactites and other glories of the chemical kitchen. It didn’t take much for us to transfer our skills to the creation of toffees and caramels from the butter and sugar we stole from the kitchens. For someone like me without a mother, late afternoons at St Hildegarde’s had a special melancholy. But once I had wriggled through the back window of the lab and begun a batch of honey kisses, happiness descended.

The funeral service at Our Lady of the Rosary was at 10:30 sharp. I took the morning off work to drive Dad to Kenmore. You can forget public transport in Brisbane if you’re old. Too much chance you’ll break a hip as the bus swipes a corner at break-neck speed. When I called to pick him up, he was standing in the street, under the poinciana. He wore his navy suit with a striped red shirt and his hair brylcreamed into place.
‘You look sexy,’ I said, once he was buckled in. He brushed the back of his knuckles against his newly shaven chin.
‘Well ….’ He looked slyly at me. ‘Tessa was an old girl-friend of mine. Gotta look my best to say goodbye.’
I was surprised at the anger I felt.
‘You kept that bloody dark,’ I said, speeding through a roundabout and slamming on the brakes outside the church. That was to let him know.
‘So why tell me now?’
‘Because she’s dead.’

At the wake Dad found himself at the productive end of a few chats. I did my best to eavesdrop, especially when I heard the words ‘formic acid’. This had to mean some discussion of Miss Kurtz. In Brisbane, a man like Dad knows everyone who matters: politicians, judges, journos, writers, actors. And they all want the inside dirt, the stuff they think only he knows. But Dad doesn’t disclose too much. I’m a cop too, these days. I get the way he thinks.
‘OK. So why did you tell me today?’ I said, once we were going home again.
‘Because I thought you’d do what you just did,’ he said.
‘Eavesdrop?’
‘Get interested again. It’s time I heard the rest of it.’
I did a bit of fast lane-changing to get him off the scent but he probably expected that. He knew I’d talk, but not when it was sprung on me by a wily oldster. Old people have a particular type of attention span. They focus deep. But they’re easy to distract. Soon I’d got him grizzling about the way the traffic banked up at an annoying turning lane.
‘All these hostile corners,’ he growled. ‘Every road in Brisbane is a glorified goat track.’
I knew Dad was puzzled by my indifference to Miss Kurtz’s death. But I was equally puzzled by his desire to know more. I wrongly put that down to his urge to understand me better. Of course, he also had the usual male fascination with ‘V on V’ sex. Whenever I mention my old school to anyone I get the same two questions: ‘Were they lovers?’ and ‘Who killed Miss Kurtz?’

In my first years at boarding-school, Miss Kurtz treated me neutrally. Looking back, I see this was to do with my father’s position in the world, his connections extending everywhere, even to having a cousin on the school administering board. Once Miss Quisp arrived however, she lost her cool.
From the beginning, it was clear Miss Kurtz was enraptured by Miss Quisp. Whenever her beloved appeared, Miss Kurtz was like a bush turkey watching itself in a glass door. We spied on her as she adorned herself with pearl ear-rings and bracelets. Later the plunging black numbers arrived to show off her décolletage. Miss Kurtz’s bras were the subject of many jokes whenever we saw them in the washing.

One night over a tub in the boarding-mistress’s bathroom, we heard Miss Quisp helping Miss Kurtz dye her hair. We shamelessly enjoyed what followed that night, which we declared was their first … um … kiss. But during the day there were still the hated chemistry classes. My father had been tough about my subject choice that year: chemistry was non-negotiable. My plan was to fail so badly I’d be allowed to drop it.

In the meantime, there were Miss Quisp’s instructive poison classes to enjoy. The poisons classes began with a declaration.
‘Every one of you,’ she said looking at each of us in turn, ‘is capable of murder.’
This really got us in.
‘But what we all admire,’ she dropped her voice, ‘is the perfect murder. And it’s surprising just how many household objects can be put to good use.’
Holding up a green almond and a red apple, she roamed the room.
‘The seeds of each of these,’ she said, ‘contain cyanides.’
Even the word sounded thrilling. She paused theatrically.
‘Given in sufficient quantities they can cause cardiac arrest. Then death.’
“How many would you need?’ one kid asked.
Miss Kurtz stood on the dais and laughed, opening her mouth so wide her uvula went on the record.
‘Too many to be a useful method,’ she said, setting aside her weapons.
Without much pressing she recommended formic acid, a poison even the humble ant possesses. Of course, ants needed distillation to produce adequate toxicity, and she wasn’t about to explain that to us. But she did point to a jar of the stuff locked behind the glass door of the poisons cupboard.
‘Next term we’ll be killing a frog with formic acid,’ she said smiling at the thought. ‘You can watch the death throes.’
I hoped I’d be gone long before that horror.

My father began weekending in Toowoomba that year. Every Sunday he took me and my friends to Weis’ restaurant for lunch. This was a glorious time for us, free of Miss Kurtz for the afternoon and stuffed weekly with third and fourth helpings of Rum Ball Custard. In our collective Form IC life this satisfied our twin aims.
It was also around this time that Miss Kurtz fired her first salvo in my direction. It began humbly enough when she brought her slippers into our dormitory, holding them so close to my nose I could smell her feet.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Cut with a razor.’
‘So what?’
I had the default attitudes of any self-respecting thirteen year old.
She ran a stubby finger along the blue seams. ‘Cut,’ she said. ‘Here. And here.’
‘Yeah?’
I knew it wasn’t me. But in our world that was no defence. Miss Kurtz picked up the blunted razor I used on my hair. Shreds of blue cloth were caught amongst the strands of chopped off peroxide. She fixed her snake’s eyes on mine.
‘Guilty as charged,’ she said.
‘I’ve been framed Miss Kurtz,’ I said, but it was useless.
There were times when her eyes became so hooded they disappeared, and this was one of them.
I wanted to say that she’d probably cut the slippers herself, it was the kind of thing she did. But my counter-attack must be concealed. We’d learned that from her.

There was something Miss Kurtz didn’t know and that was just how much we could hear through the walls of her bathroom. And there was another thing we knew too, —the madness of her love for Miss Quisp. For weeks we listened at the bathroom wall. Then finally we heard words which made sense to me thirty years later, after I learned of my father’s affair with Tess Quisp.
Public humiliation was a special weapon Miss Kurtz used in the house with her commanding voice. Now she unwittingly turned it on herself. Everything she said came booming through the thin bathroom walls.
‘He won’t stick with you Tess,’ she pleaded. ‘I will.’
We couldn’t hear Miss Quisp’s reply but the slamming door and howl of her lover were eloquent. It was disturbing to find that Miss Kurtz had feelings.

Dad can’t live alone any more, he’s too old. So he lives with me. Our Sunday arrangement goes like this: he gets the roast ready with an excellent stuffing of his invention and I make the pudding. Then I clean up while he has an afternoon snooze under the Sunday Mail. We usually put away a good bottle of merlot in the process. And we talk.
I opened the bidding.
‘Did you ever wish things had worked out with Tessa?’
It was hard to read his face. He looked wistful.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I wanted to marry her.’
I was glad he hadn’t.
‘You didn’t mind that she played for the other side?’
‘I didn’t know,’ he said. We were sitting with our elbows on the table, picking grapes turn by turn from a dish in the centre.
‘Turns out my thirteen year old daughter knew more than I did.’
‘We knew everything about Miss Quisp and Miss Kurtz,’ I bragged. ‘We got into their rooms and looked at their photos.’
Suddenly I remembered a letter we’d found half written in Miss Kurtz’s room. One of us had read it aloud in imitation of Miss Kurtz’s clipped accent. It began ‘Dear Robert’ and contained information about her beloved, Tess Quisp. On the chest of drawers stood a flattering photograph of Tess, but in the letter were accusations and disclosures. My father’s name was Robert. I made a leap of judgment.
‘Did you ever get a nasty letter about Miss Quisp,’ I asked.
He looked surprised.
‘I did,’ he said.
I told him about the letter we’d discovered Miss Kurtz was writing to ‘Robert’.
‘That must have been you,’ I said, trying to read his face. ‘Did you tell Tess?’
He nodded. I wondered whether he was thinking about the autopsy report and the chemicals found in Miss Kurtz’ body. He’d started to look downcast. I did my best to cheer him up by telling him about our revenge.

After my conviction for GBH of her slippers Miss Kurtz gated me. Looking down the perspective of thirty years, I can admire her deftness. Being gated meant I had to stay inside the school grounds, which also meant my father had no reason to visit Toowoomba. But she overlooked something important. My friends were affected as well. No more Rum Ball Custard for them, or me. With this one gesture, Miss Kurtz unleashed an army of ill-will against herself, especially as we all knew her to be the true slipper slasher.
Guidance came in the form of a séance, one of the dark arts we practised to defend ourselves.
‘How can we stop Kurtz?’ we asked. The glass tumbled over itself to produce an answer: ‘D-I-X-O-N'.
‘The Dixon spoon?’

This spoon, the orphaned remnant of an earlier cutlery set, was shaped like a tiny silver shovel. School tradition dictated its power, that whoever got the Dixon spoon at mealtimes also got a wish. The glass continued its instruction: ‘D-I-E-K-U-R-T-Z-D-I-E’. This was what we should wish when we got the spoon? Even to us it sounded extreme.
‘Let me get this right,’ Dad said. ‘If you got the Dixon spoon, you had to wish Miss Kurtz would die?’
He looked relieved. So it was all just schoolgirl hocus-pocus after all.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why couldn’t you just wish her to go somewhere else?’ he asked, reasonably enough.
The answer was obvious. Miss Kurtz would never leave St Hildegarde’s while Miss Quisp was there. Even the Dixon lacked such power. I could see Dad was ready for his afternoon nap, and vulnerable.
‘So how did you and Tess come to meet in Toowoomba?’ I asked.
He looked a little shame-faced at this.
‘Actually I knew her before she went to St Hildegarde’s,’ he said. ‘Met her at a trial actually. The year before she turned up at your place.’
He’d kept that bloody dark too.
‘What trial?’
‘A minor matter,’ he said. ‘She was questioned about the death of a cat. Magistrate’s court matter. Nothing serious.’
I pressed on. ‘How did she get a job with us then?’
‘Erm …,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember.’
He yawned extravagantly. Then he flexed his shoulders and rotated his head a bit like: I’m tired. It’s long ago. Get over it.
‘Come on Dad.’ I wasn’t going to give up now, we were so close. ‘Come clean.’
He sighed.
‘OK. I helped her.’
I told him about Miss Quisp’s comment that all of us harboured a perfect murder in our hearts. He drew his mouth down. It was not something he wanted to hear.
‘You weren’t nervous of her?’ I asked.
‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘that aspect of Tess added a certain piquancy to her other attractions.’
‘Eeeoouu,’ I said.
So he’d got her the job in Toowoomba. How that changed everything.
‘You sent her to spy on me?’
‘Actually, it was the other way round,’ he said. ‘I was getting on and Tess was young and sexy. She wasn’t built for monogamy. By then I was.’
Perhaps that was why I had disliked Miss Quisp all those years ago, but without knowing it; her vampiric hold on my dear old Dad.
There’s a snell I always associate with that time, and that is the stench of crushed ants. Of course we made what we could of the Dixon spoon command, getting the whole school behind us so that every meal was one more nail in Miss Kurtz’s coffin. But she stepped up the pressure too. My mail was censored and my conversations reported. In fact, she did to us what we did to her.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying is. We were in the lab one afternoon, cooking an opportunistic batch of fudge when someone noticed the locked doors of the poisons cabinet standing ajar. The skull and crossbones labels shrieked from their bottles within.
It could have been me who said ‘What about formic acid?’
That was when we began collecting ants. Maybe we couldn’t distil them but we knew how to get Miss Kurtz to eat them.

In the dining-room, Miss Kurtz kept a jar of Vegemite which she spread on her toast for breakfast. Each morning the jar was brought to her, loaded with our latest harvest of crushed ants. As vegemite smells of anchovies and tastes like mangroves the addition of dead ants wasn’t that noticeable. We brooded over our prety with the tenderness of clucky hens but apart from some obvious signs of thwarted passion – her panda bear eyes, and loss of weight - there were no changes to observe. But we all agreed—the Dixon spoon and Vegemite jar would do their work. Miss Kurtz was a goner. Even so, after the holidays and back in the Assembly Hall for the first time, we were surprised at the Head’s announcement. Miss Kurtz had died unexpectedly, and her funeral had been held in the school chapel. The head apologised that we couldn’t be there, but there was police interest in the case. She didn’t say it but the school wanted it all hushed up. It was strangely anti-climactic. I was pleased to learn however, that Miss Quisp had left the school.

The following Sunday after our garlic pork, I asked my father a little more, after all, I never wanted to learn what Miss Kurtz died of exactly. I hoped that I could trick him into a few more divulgences.
‘She died of a cardiac arrest,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘And she had formic acid in her gut.’
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Wonder how she got that?’
‘We thought it was probably from a commercial formula.’
There was the poisons cupboard with its unlocked doors, accessible to us all, even Miss Kurtz.
‘A suspicious death do you think?’
He nodded then jumped in an unexpected direction.
‘Tessa had something on you all,’ he said. ‘I was backing off by then. She thought she could get me to marry her, with a little pressure.’
‘But you didn’t cave.’
He looked a little embarrassed.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘But not in the way she expected.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked. I was a little nervous. Dad had been a very good detective in his day.

Some of my friends are now judges and doctors. With all the spying going on Miss Quisp could well have learned a few things none of us would want in the public arena. And I was learning a bit too. One thing I hadn’t known was my father’s desire to marry Miss Quisp.
‘I lost a couple of things that could have been telling,’ he said. ‘She had me over a barrel.’
‘But you didn’t marry her?’
‘There was evidence on a number of fronts,’ he said. ‘I pointed that out to her.’
His words hung in the air like the smell of roasting pork.

Ridding myself of Miss Quisp had been a lucky break.
‘She did fit the wicked step-mother image rather well,’ I joked, ‘with that huge mouth.’
‘A man-eater,’ Dad agreed.
‘Do you think she really wanted to marry you?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Dad said. ‘She wanted to be a Commissioner’s wife. That was for sure.’
I came and stood behind him so I could lean down and put my arms around his skinny shoulders.
‘Miss Quisp wouldn’t have suited us at all,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said wistfully. ‘I don’t suppose she would have.’

Cabestana waterhousei

2010-04-12T19:18:00.001-12:00

Pieter’s love affair with his neighbour Charlotte was no secret. In fact most people in the district knew, including Pieter’s wife Patricia.
Pieter was tall and slim with coppery skin and strong white teeth. His handsome face made quite a contrast with that of his wife, who, when she looked in the bathroom mirror, saw only freckles and raw-bones.
Sometimes in the bathroom as she watched him shave, she would catch his eyes assessing her face. She guessed he was thinking the things her father Patrick always said: ‘Plain as a pikestaff Pattie’ usually finishing this thought by hoping some man would marry her one day. He was worried his ‘line’ would not continue. When her three boys grew to look like their handsome father, Patricia felt that she had successfully improved the breed. Unlike her father.
Pieter was a sailor by inclination and a boat-builder by trade but when he married Patricia he came ashore. Now he lived in the midst of vast plains of beef, towers of ant hills and forests of stunted gidgee. And all of it belonged to his wife. Patricia was born to the cattle, as the saying goes.
Every year the family went south on an annual jaunt to the coast, after school had finished but before the Wet began. Stock were moved off the flood plains and extra provisions brought in. Everyone helped with the muster, even Pieter and the boys. It wasn’t until after all this was done that the family could leave for their house at Burleigh Heads.
That year, the last year they ever went, there was something different. Instead of the station manager from Dalgetys taking charge, Patricia put young Mr Scott, the overseer, in to the job.
‘Scotty’s been with us since Daddy died,’ she said. ‘He knows every aspect of the business.’
Pieter knew nothing about Herefords or Brahmins. Nor did he have any say in Patricia’s business. But Scotty, like his boss, was born to the cattle. In fact, he rarely left the Gulf except to travel Patricia’s estates with her. He wanted nothing more than the life he had alongside Patricia, that of being a cattle man.
On the day they were to fly to the coast, everyone stood waiting at the side gate. They were ready to go except Charlotte had not arrived. Patricia chatted with Mr Scott and Pieter got the three children wedged into the ute’s tray with their boogie boards, flippers and goggles piled all around them. This year the boys had a project from their School of the Air teacher: to investigate a sea creature. One of the boys had even brought a magnifying glass.
‘Too much stuff,’ Pieter protested.
But he laughed. He was excited too. The sea was his domain and he missed it out here in the red dust of the northern plains. He would teach his boys more about the ocean, as his father had taught him. The dogs panted and barked by the ute, waiting to chase it down the track to where the Cessna stood ready.
‘Finally,’ Patricia said. She was not one to be kept waiting.
A coil of dust could be seen billowing through the casuarinas where the home cemetery was. Here were the family graves, one for Patricia’s father and another for the first of his two wives. The first wife, Patricia’s mother, had drowned so it was said, and in the middle of a drought. The district thought this strange. His second wife had refused a burial in such a place and her site remained empty of her.
‘I am sorry,’ Pieter said to Patricia. He had a slight Danish accent. ‘I am sorry it is always Charlotte who keeps us waiting.’
But he didn’t look sorry; he looked elated. He was lucky to have such an understanding wife. And such a gorgeous mistress. The incoming car juddered over the cattle grid and into the yard.
‘She is a little spoilt,’ Pieter said, explaining something that his wife knew without explanation. ‘It is because she is pretty.’
Charlotte leaned across to smile at Pieter while her husband talked through the window.
‘Late again,’ he called cheerily. ‘But this time you can blame me not her. I had to fix one of the gates on the way out. The bull was trying to get through to his girls.’
The two women greeted one another without expression.
‘Patricia.’
‘Charlotte.’
Male adoration was Charlotte’s element. When she spoke, it was in a low quiet voice that took some effort to hear. Not that anyone made the effort to listen. The district thought Charlotte showed ‘side’ because of her marriage to a wealthy grazier. Patricia was practically royalty around the place she owned so much, yet she never made others uncomfortable, unless that was her intention.
Charlotte’s appearance fascinated most people. Her face was a perfect oval with large dark eyes and full unsmiling lips. She wore her black hair coiled into a spiral at the back of her head, in a chignon. Instead of the functional outfits the women mostly wore around the yards, or for riding, Charlotte dressed in close-cut linen which showed her excellent figure. Her enigmatic presence drew men to her, like blowies to a cowpat, Patricia thought.
‘Well you’re here,’ Patricia said. She had the voice of someone used to command. ‘So now perhaps we might head off.’ She pronounced it ‘orff’.
She and Pieter drove carefully with the kids shoving one another in the back of the ute while the dogs raced them across the open ground. She breathed in the home smell of eucalyptus and dust, as familiar to her as the freckles on her hands. It was already close to midday. They were starting late because of Charlotte.
The cars pulled up by Patricia’s aircraft, a twin-engined Cessna.
‘Hope you picked up any kids that fell out on the way,’ Pieter laughed as he got out. He was so proud of his three handsome sons. Charlotte had no children.
The men opened the clam shell doors of the plane, hoisted the children in and stowed the family luggage all around them. Charlotte kept her vellum carry-all by her feet. From long practice, it was settled that Patricia sat in the back with the children in case they got airsick. Charlotte took the passenger seat next to Pieter.
‘Goodbye Scotty,’ Patricia said. ‘Let me know if anything floods or burns or starves.’
Then she did something new. Instead of the usual handshake, Patricia leaned forward and kissed her overseer on the cheek. Scotty blushed beneath his battered Akubra.
‘Come back safely,’ he said.
‘Steady on old girl,’ Pieter joked. ‘Hop in before you embarrass the young chap.’
Within minutes they were airborne, with just an aerial view of the landing strip and miniature house below and the two toy cars heading back along the track to the homestead. This time the dogs were in the ute tray where the kids had been, barking into the wind. Up in the air there was no sound but the drone of the engine, and Pieter’s voice as he explained the altimeter reading to Charlotte. She listened with her trademark smile, gazing at her handsome lover.
Patricia’s newly married parents had built their house at Burleigh Heads years before Patricia was born. It was a long box shaped structure, cantilevered at the front so that the house echoed the promontory of the Heads it stood alongside. Its construction was of timber and glass with huge glass windows facing onto the ocean like an observatory. When the weather was bad, the sea misted and fogged the glass, giving the overhanging front a kind of underwater light. In fine weather, the rocky protrusion of the Heads seemed like a fortress alongside the scraggly windblown plants of their garden.
Patricia loved this house, and she loved the intertidal strip of rock pools next to it at the base of the Heads. With her speckled skin and pale blue eyes, she was not good at the beach. The salt stung her eyes and the whipping winds made her ears ache. But every afternoon at low tide, with her head wrapped in a scarf and glasses to protect her eyes, she joined the children in the rock pools. Like their father, the boys were robust sea-going creatures. With their buckets and strainers, they splashed around in water left by the torrential force of the waves, crouching over limpets and barnacles and whelk capsules, and reciting the names they had got from books left at the house: arthropod and crustacean, mollusc and spirobranchus.
The family ate crab most nights, boiled alive in an unseen café on the tourist strip. Pieter usually went out to get them in the late afternoon. All six of them ate together in the open kitchen as soon as he returned.
The children’s table talk was of their school project. They had decided upon the predatory whelk and in their playroom already had a collection of shells from these huge sea snails. They’d found some of its empty egg masses and even a live whelk which they were keeping in a bucket. This they fed on worms and bits of crab smuggled from the kitchen. The boys liked describing the cruel practices of the whelk, the drilling of the mollusc shell and then insertion of its proboscis. And then how it drew out the hapless flesh while the poor creature inside was still alive.
‘Cabestana waterhousei,’ the eldest child intoned in his best baritone, holding up a whelk shell like a microphone. ‘It kills the thing it loves.’
‘They like corpses the most,’ said the middle one, hoping to offend. ‘Dead seagulls. Squashed jellyfish.’
‘Squids with flies eyes.’
The children got the giggles at this.
‘We’re going to put a dead prawn on our chart,’ one of them said.
‘Oh no you’re not,’ their parents said together.
‘Sometimes the whelk jams its foot in the barnacle valve,’ the eldest went on. ‘Then it just smothers it and eats it.’
‘Enough. Enough,’ Charlotte said at the thought of the squashed and the dead. She clapped her hands to her ears.
The children had seen men die from careless guns and run away horses. They had watched animals killed in the slaughter house. They knew that animals lived and died cruelly, just as humans did.
‘But they like eating things alive,’ the littlest boy persisted with delight. ‘The taste is better.’
‘Not listening,’ Charlotte trilled, bending forward to dig the meaty flesh out of a claw.
Patricia looked at Charlotte’s hair, coiling upwards from the back of her head, just like a whelk’s cone. ‘Charlie-whirley’ the boys called her behind her back, after her spiral of hair.
‘You cannot stop them Charlotte,’ Pieter laughed. ‘They are boys.’ He beamed at his handsome children.
‘They see their prey with their tentacles,’ one of the boys explained to Charlotte. He circled a finger in the air, like a probing limb and aimed it at her hair.
‘They smell with them too,’ the middle child said, putting a hand towards Charlotte’s bottom and pretending to smell.
‘Enough,’ Pieter said. But his eyes showed merriment.
Charlotte was a child of the coast, and a fine surfer. She could read the tidal movements of the bay as easily as Patricia could assess a stud bull or Pieter a yacht. But when she was with Pieter, she kept her coil of hair tucked into a tight bathing cap and wore goggles to keep the salt out of her eyes. Her lover was not to see her with eyes and nose sluiced by salt water and hair stiff with salt.
People in the district wondered aloud how the affair was conducted.
‘Where does she sleep?’ they asked one another.
By ‘she’ they meant Charlotte. If asked, Patricia would have said. Charlotte took the guest suite at the back of the house. Pieter and Patricia were in the main suite at the front. The three boys slept together in a ‘sleepout’. People wondered at Patricia’s acceptance of the affair not understanding that keeping Pieter busy suited her purposes.
‘So plain,’ they mouthed towards one another. ‘Took after the father.’
As though that were good reason for her husband’s treatment of her.
Patricia was not a good swimmer but in the afternoons when the tide was low, she ventured in with the children. This was often the time of day that Pieter and Charlotte pursued their affair. If they were not on the beach then no-one returned to the house until after four, something understood by them all.
‘Charlie-whirley’s got Dad in her fang,’ they laughed naughtily. The boys loved the natural world in all its ferocity. ‘Like a funnel web.’
‘More like a whelk,’ Patricia thought. ‘A great big blood-sucking blob.’
The bay where they paddled was beside the promontory of the Heads, an inlet which was unsafe because of the rips and currents that formed there. But it looked deceptively calm. The children played in the shallows, mostly lying on the sandy bottom of the water with their snorkels or drifting on their little boards.
One afternoon, a strong rip began dragging them out to sea. The biggest boy got back to shore, and the smallest was close enough for Patricia to hold onto. But the middle one was towed further and further out. Patricia was beside herself. If she went to his rescue she could drown them both. It was early afternoon. The children knew that Daddy was ‘busy’ with Charlotte. Patricia could think of nothing but her drowning child.
‘Somebody help.’
She began running mindlessly to and fro, attracting a surfer at the Heads waiting for his next break. He quickly coasted in to grab the struggling boy.
‘Come on mate,’ he said, dragging the child onto his board where he lay flat, resting his face on the cool watery surface. Eventually the two came gliding onto the sand on one long wave. In his mother’s arm again, and inside her huge beach towel, her son clung to her. Patricia, feeling the trembles of his butterfly bones, wept with relief.
That night at dinner the children could think of nothing but this adventure.
‘He towed my boogie board Dad,’ the rescued one said. ‘And he put me on his board and we caught the biggest wave in.’
He demonstrated with his little arms.
‘Big as a windmill. It was awesome.’
‘Come off it,’ said his big brother, jealous of the attention not coming his way. ‘You were just scared about nothing.’
‘Fraidy cat,’ the youngest said.
‘That’s enough,’ Pieter roared. No-one had ever heard him yell this way, not even to the dogs.
He turned to his wife.
‘Some stranger rescued my son?’
‘A surfer,’ Patricia said.
From his tone she knew he was taking the high moral ground. This infuriated her. But she spoke calmly.
‘We were lucky he was there.’
She wouldn’t say much in front of Charlotte. But Pieter was not so reluctant.
‘What were you doing letting them get into trouble in the ocean?’
Even the boys saw this was unfair.
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ they said. ‘Mummy always keeps us safe.’
‘Always?’ Pieter was too angry to listen. ‘Apparently not.’
‘You know I am careful Pieter,’ Patricia said. ‘And the water was shallow. It looked calm.’
‘There are rips Patricia,’ Pieter said. ‘Rips and currents. You have been warned so many times.’
How dare her chastise her in front of his mistress.
‘I can’t help it if you’re not free to watch over your own children,’ she said.
There. Now the words were out.
They didn’t normally quarrel, and never like this. Something had changed. Charlotte gazed at her plate. She and Pieter had brought their sex life to some new height this summer. Now this. The child had been rescued, wasn’t that what mattered? Outside in the darkness the ocean crashed remorselessly onto the sand.
‘Why didn’t you send one of the boys to get me?’ Pieter demanded.
‘We didn’t because the two of you were obviously ... busy.’ Patricia spoke in a cold level voice, staring straight at her husband. She ignored Charlotte entirely.
Pieter stood up. Although he was a slender man, he seemed to loom over the table.
‘It is always my children who come first,’ he said. ‘Always.’
He glared at Patricia. The boys were upset.
‘He is angry with me and with himself,’ Patricia whispered to them. ‘Not with you.’
Pieter took up his windcheater and began putting it on.
‘There won’t be any more swimming without my supervision,’ he said. ‘And that is final.’
He crossed to the front door. ‘Now I am out for a walk. Alone.’
There was enough noise from the wind and ocean to drown the awkward silence which followed. Charlotte toyed with the long fork she used for eating crab. But she had lost her appetite. By the time the table was cleared away and the dishwasher stacked, she was in her room.
Every week, Patricia rang Mr Scott. He was a man of the bush and used to his own company. But he was a good listener. At first Patricia’s confidence in him had been overwhelming. Her family were great patrons of the area. They kept whole townships employed. Scotty, while also a child of the land, came from a far more modest background. It took him some time even to address Patricia by her first name. Now, they went everywhere together. They were so close that and people in the district joshed him about being sweet on the boss. At this he blushed but said nothing.
That week Patricia told him of the near drowning. Where was their father, he wanted to know.
Patricia cleared her throat. It was delicate. ‘In the house Scotty. With Charlotte.’
‘The girlfriend shouldn’t be there mate,’ was his advice.
Scotty called everyone ‘mate’. Patricia found it comforting and friendly.
‘Are you supposed to do everything?’ Scotty asked. ‘Jeez, a man should keep a lookout for his own family.’
He was always direct like this. It was why she liked his company.
Although Patricia agreed with his view, she had never said it out loud. She put food on the table and provided shelter and work for Pieter. The least he could do was watch over his sons and not blame her when he didn’t.
‘If I was there I’d look after you all,’ Scotty said.
‘I know you would,’ Patricia said.
After the rescue, Pieter no longer spent much time with Charlotte. Instead, he surfed and played with his children, while his mistress sunned herself on a straw mat. Every day Charlotte dressed in one of her spotted bikinis and carefully selected beach coat and hat. With toenails painted to match her sandals and her perfect tanned legs and flat stomach, she turned heads as she crossed the sand to her spot. But not Pieter’s.
Even Patricia noted the difference and with some satisfaction. Charlotte looked wonderful, as she always did, but Pieter’s focus was upon his children.
‘I am changing my ways darling,’ he said to his wife. They lay in bed that night after sex she had acceded to, but not much enjoyed.
‘I will be a better husband and father.’
When Patricia had first learned of her husband’s infidelity the pain had been intense. But she had accommodated it, at first because he was important to the boys, but later for other reasons. Patricia had her businesses to run, and the welfare of a great many people to consider. Looking perfect, keeping her man interested—that was for women like Charlotte who advanced themselves through men. Later again, at least for the last year, Patricia realized she was no longer in love with her husband and that for her the marriage was over.
‘The boys are fine Pieter,’ Patricia said. It was strange to find him turning back to her, when it was too late.
‘But they did not turn to me,’ he whispered. This had upset him greatly. ‘When I am their father.’
There were only two days left before their holiday finished and they flew back to the Gulf. Pieter spent most of this time in Coolangatta preparing for the flight home. The boys were excited to be getting back. They missed their dogs and horses and the orphaned calves they raised to sell. The whelk was still alive in its salty prison. They planned on taking it home with them.
Pieter planned on leaving Coolangatta early. He wanted to get home while it was still light. He was glad their holiday was coming to an end. Charlotte was not to come with them any more. The boys were making jokes about her.
‘One last swim,’ he promised everyone on the day before they left. ‘As soon as I am back from the airport.’
But traffic and paperwork delayed him and the tide had already turned before Pieter returned to the beach. The sea was climbing steadily up the sand to where the women and children sat, Charlotte with her knees up and her chin resting on them, the boys digging underground tunnels. Charlotte assessed the ocean. She had a plan. There was a telltale streak of sand marking the water as it streamed back past the promontory. This was a rip and it was flowing strongly out to sea at that point. She waited calmly for the signal they could all go in. Conditions were perfect.
Pieter stood on the beach as Patricia and the boys took to the shallows. He still had the physique for speedos.
‘My God,’ Charlotte thought, admiring him. The two of them were made for one other. She turned and began to swim slowly out into the deeper water. She allowed her body to float into a cool patch where the sandy floor dropped, and there she waited. The waves rolled through. She was sorry to be going west again. It was only Pieter who kept her there.
‘Patricia,’ Charlotte called. “It’s wonderful out here, so refreshing. And quite safe.’
She stood to show that the water was lapping at her ribs and not deep. But right behind her, she knew, was the gulley which had altered the water temperature. Anyone who understood waves would know there was a trough just behind her.
‘Plant your feet into the sand, like this,’ she called. ‘It’s so cool. And the last day. You must come and enjoy it.’
‘I will watch over you,’ Pieter yelled to his wife. He would be responsible, and he’d make amends. ‘Enjoy the water you two. One last time.’
So that was how Patricia got caught in a rip, by dropping into the deep gulley and then being towed out to sea by a powerful current. In a rip it is best to swim with the flow, gradually moving to the edge until out of its pull. Charlotte knew this. But the natural instinct is to swim straight for land and Charlotte knew this too. As the power of the water drew Patricia out to sea, her struggles to get back to land slowly drained her energy away. Then all Charlotte needed to do, she planned, was feign her own difficulties and Pieter would then rescue her over his wife. This way he could have the woman she knew he really wanted. Herself.
But Pieter ran straight into the surf and struck out towards Patricia.
‘Stay together,’ he yelled over his shoulder to the boys. ‘Get out of the water.’
He swam powerfully, his head above the water and his eyes fixed on the spot where he had seen last seen Patricia.
‘Help,’ Charlotte called. ‘Over here.’
But even if Pieter had wanted to rescue Charlotte, he was now caught by the current himself. Pieter was a good swimmer but had learned in the more placid waters of Europe. The tempestuous Pacific was a different matter.
By the time he reached Patricia he was spent. She threw herself at him, hanging on so hard they both went under. Then as if possessed, she began to fight. Exhausted and struggling he held her aloft but the more she felt his strong hands on her body the greater her strength seemed to be against him. Finally a surfboat roared alongside and he pushed her towards it. She grabbed the gunwale, clutching the slippery edge while kicking out wildly with her feet. Pieter’s energy was gone, sapped in his last efforts to save his wife. A wave took him under as he approached the boat again, and Patricia’s flailing foot struck his chest. When another kick smacked his face he gave up his struggle and just as Patricia was pulled onto the surfboat he began his long descent to the ocean floor. Getting to him was impossible. The boat was in danger of being dashed against the Heads. So it was left for his body to roll in and out with the currents and tides until two days later he came ashore for the last time. They found him wedged back among the rocks, his handsome face cut and bruised and his body unrecognisable.
After the funeral, Scotty prepared to fly them home in the Cessna. He had arrived quickly to be with Patricia in the awful days that followed. It was Scotty who organised the service and cremation. And it was Scotty who spoke to Charlotte about the return journey. The aircraft would not be available for Charlotte’s use.
As the children waited on the driveway, Scotty packed up the hire car they would leave at the airport at departure. They stood close together with their luggage, pillows and teddies, boogie boards and shells. The oldest boy sweated in his father’s windcheater. As soon as Patricia spied the bucket with its whelk, she banned it at once.
‘Ugh. I’m throwing that awful thing out,’ she said. ‘Foul creature.’
She took the bucket and emptied it on the sand in front of the house.
‘Don’t Mum. It’ll die,’ the eldest said. He was trying not to cry.
‘It’s not coming back with us,’ she said. She hated it.
They left Coolangatta Airport at dawn, this time with Patricia in the passenger seat, the children in the back, and Scotty at the controls. As the plane soared up and out over the sea, and the enormous rim of the sun was showing across the horizon, she turned towards him and said in a low voice ‘Thank you. For everything.’
She picked up his large knobbly hand and felt the calluses he’d got from years of fixing fences and taming stock. She and Scotty were like the beasts they worked with. Some day they too would decay back into the soil they came from—tough and weathered and of the land.
‘We’ll talk tonight,’ he said, patting her hand, ‘when we’re all safely home’.

The Jaguar and the bicycle

2010-03-15T14:06:00.005-12:00

Silas was calm and considered each of the Coroner’s questions carefully. The dead man, Martin, had slipped on the stairs and hit his head. The two of them were drunk. When Silas had told his friend to get up, Martin had not responded.
‘Why did it take so long to call an ambulance?’ the coroner asked.
‘I thought he’d passed out,’ Silas explained. ‘He was pissed.’
When asked how long he and Martin had known one another, Silas couldn’t say.
‘I done a bit a weed Your Honour,’ he said. ‘Me memory’s shot.’
When asked was the relationship between them sexual Silas baulked.
‘Isn’t that my business?’
‘You were the beneficiary of his estate weren’t you?’ the coroner asked.
‘Yeah,’ Silas agreed.
‘Well it’s the business of this court now,’ the coroner said.

Earlier witnesses had said that Martin planned to change his will.
‘Did you know anything of that?’ the coroner asked Silas.
‘Yeah,’ Silas said. ‘He got angry sometimes. Doesn’t everyone?’
The coroner gave him a look.
‘I ask the questions,’ he said. ‘Not you. Now was it because he didn’t approve of things you were doing?’
Silas mumbled something, then said, ‘It was the other way around, Your Honour.’
The Coroner made a note, and reminded Silas that he was on oath.
‘So the under-age boys you brought home were for him?’
‘Yeah,’ Silas said, to a gasp from Martin’s family. ‘He was old. He shoulda stopped.’
‘Did the possibility of disinheritance trouble you?’ the Coroner asked, ‘when you had no assets of your own?’
‘Yeah,’ Silas answered. ‘Wouldn’t it trouble you?’
He leaned on the word ‘trouble’ with sardonic emphasis.
‘But I couldn’t do nothing about it. Could I?’
His answer hung there in the court room, all but answering itself.

After that, the coroner explored Silas’ past, his mother’s boyfriends, the beatings, the sexual approaches he received as a child.
‘You took to the streets when you were thirteen. Is that right?’
‘Yeah,’ Silas said. ‘Til Martin took me in and give me a home.’
‘Albeit at a price?’ the coroner asked.
Silas didn’t answer straight away but after some prompting agreed that he supposed so.
‘And where are you living now?’ the coroner asked.
‘The park, sometimes,’ Silas said.
‘You have no address?’
‘I got a room up on the Terrace,’ he said.
‘Gregory Terrace?’
‘Yeah,’ Silas said.
‘You don’t live in the house you shared with Martin?’
This was a house that was in dispute with Martin’s family.
‘Nah,’ Silas said. ‘Don’t like to be there do I?’

Harry Brand was there as Martin’s lawyer, but he was also there as a friend. He watched Silas as closely as Silas observed him. Harry was a man of certain years, a slender dandy with a gift for making money. He drove expensive cars, ate at the best restaurants and enjoyed a wide circle of friends, Martin once being among them. While the coroner went over the same things again and again, Silas remembered he had seen Harry many times before. He had a mental picture of Harry in the park, offering soup and bread to the homeless. In fact Harry and he had once had a chat. At the time Silas had proposed something more, but Harry had side-stepped him, moving on to the next blanketed form. Silas had excellent recall of events when he chose; it was a hallmark of his illiteracy.

On the final day of the inquest, Silas left his bicycle chained to the rails at the top of Wickham Terrace and walked downhill into the park. He was planning to sleep there that night, in an old rug he’d found in the back of Martin’s laundry cupboard. It smelt of dog and was eaten with moth holes and it made the perfect disguise. Wrapped inside it, Silas was able to see the lighted pathway where Harry usually walked at night. He lay with his eyes almost closed and waited until Harry came close. By then it was about 10 pm. He stretched his arms from inside the blanket and began levering himself into position against the tree, wrapped like a chrysalis in the tube of Martin’s old blanket. Harry squatted on his haunches.
‘Something to drink?’
When Silas turned towards the light, Harry recognised him at once, as Silas had planned.
‘Martin’s friend,’ he said. ‘Silas.’
‘Yeah,’ Silas said. ‘And you was in the court today.’
‘I’m an old friend of Martin’s,’ Harry said. ‘And his lawyer.’
He wiped his hand and then extended it to introduce himself. ‘Harry Brand.’
Silas took the flat dry palm and shook it.
‘Silas,’ he said.
Then Harry did something unexpected. He opened the smaller hamper and inside were china plates and cups, silver spoons and ivory knives, and a cake.
‘Tea?’ he asked, offering a thermos.
‘Uh. Yes,’ Silas said, eyeing the passionfruit sponge.
‘And cak e?’
Silas nodded.
‘My housekeeper baked it this afternoon. Anya.’ Harry said. ‘But I need your help. I can’t eat it all myself.’
‘D’you always bring this stuff?’ Silas asked.
‘I was hoping to come across you,’ Harry said.

They propped themselves against a tree-trunk surrounded by bushes and shrubs. A few men engaged in a bit of blow nearby. Possums and snakes moved in the tree-tops. Some people slept.
‘More?’ Harry asked, lifting the thermos.
‘Yes please,’ Silas said, holding out his cup, remembering the manners Martin had started to teach him. ‘Thank you very much sir.’
‘Please,’ Harry said. ‘Just call me Harry.’
And Harry went home that night none the wiser about Silas.

The inquest had ended but as there was no immediate family, the coroner found that Martin had been free to dispose of his property as he wished. So Silas kept the house that was left him. But he continued his life in the park as though he had nowhere else to sleep. He was interested in Harry. And Harry began to rely on his meetings with the strange young man. The two of them ate and chatted together in the shadows, sometimes for hours.
‘I hope you look forward to our meetings,’ he said to Silas one night, ‘because I do.’
But he never asked Silas anything about his daily life. Harry wasn’t a man who trusted anyone much. He never spoke of Martin.

After these visits Harry often returned to his office to work; occasionally he went home to his apartment further along Wickham Terrace. Some nights Silas amused himself by spying on Harry and this was how he rescued his friend from a beating. They were only kids, rolling a ‘fag’ for a bit of fun and money. But Harry was frail. Even his cries for help were feeble. When Silas saw the attack begin he ran at them with all the energy of his wiry body.
‘Fuck off ya little cunts.’
And ripping a plank from a bench he clubbed heads and elbows, jabbing the kids and their knives away with the skill of a fencing master. His glowering stare was a scary sight. As the smallest of the kids stumbled off, Silas gave him a kick to help him on his way.
‘This man has my personal protection.’
The two ‘p’ sounds pursed his lips outwards like a kiss. Then he began to laugh, exultant after the fight.
‘Mate,’ he said to Harry. ‘That was fun. Stupid little pricks.’
Harry was upright again, dusting himself prissily with his long fingers and picking off the twigs and stones now caught in his clothing. Silas stood behind him and moved close, touching Harry for the first time.
‘Let me help,’ he said, putting his arms around the man’s thin torso.
He began to brush his hands across Harry’s chest from behind, moving them slower downwards to Harry’s hips and further. Under these probing fingertips Harry trembled but he didn’t move.
‘I’ve been attacked before,’ he said. ‘But by men. Not kids.’
Silas turned him around and holding Harry’s face kissed him hard.

Harry didn’t tell Silas his story that night; instead they went back to his apartment and for the first time, Silas saw Harry’s interior world. Everything in the apartment was cared for and old. Lamps glowed peacefully beside fat armchairs. Side tables were polished to a mirror surface and rugs deepened the room with Turkish reds and blues.
‘My housekeeper,’ Harry said. ‘She cooks, cleans and runs everything for me. Her name is Anya.’
‘Yeah,’ Silas said.
‘A Russian émigré,’ Harry explained. He’d gone to the drinks tray and was setting up two glasses with ice cubes. ‘Smokes non-stop. Voice like a smoked cod.’
He imitated her baritone.
‘Mr Brand. I mus goo out for Zobrrrani.’
Silas gazed around. He didn’t understand Harry’s story. But he understood what was in front of him.
‘You really know how to live,’ he said.
Harry laughed.
‘I suppose that’s true,’ he said. ‘Except Anya is a tyrant. Ivana the Terrible.’
‘I’ve never met a Russian,’ Silas said.
‘Well when you meet her you’ll be meeting a true Soviet style Russki. Trusts no-one and hates everyone.’
‘Yeah?’ Silas said without much interest. He leaned back into the depth of his chair and caught a whiff of his own armpits.
‘Phew,’ he said ‘Stinkin the place up. Sorry about the..’ And he indicated his faded t-shirt and worn tracksuit pants.
‘Nonsense,’ Harry said. He smiled. ‘Go to a good barber. Put on a suit and tie. I could take you to Tattersalls.’
It was an entertaining thought. Tattersalls didn’t allow women in Silas wouldn’t be a problem.
‘Now there’s a challenge,’ Harry said. ‘Could I get a rent boy into Tatts?’
‘Is that what you think of me?” Silas asked. He wasn’t offended.
‘No, no,’ Harry said. ‘It was just a scenario that seemed, well, interesting because of your … um …,’ he looked for a polite way to say it, ‘… upbringing.’
‘I was dragged up,’ Silas said humbly. He pronounced it drayged.
Harry poured whiskeys, using the heavy-bottomed crystal glasses that stood alongside the whiskey decanter.
‘Maybe it isn’t too late,’ he said. ‘Take a bath. I’ll find you something better to wear.’
Silas’s shirt had been ripped in the fray. He stripped off, displaying a perfect vee of male torso, the square line of his shoulders tapering into a scoop of waist and long narrow hips. Harry swallowed his drink in one gulp as Silas stepped towards him.

That night Harry dreamed of an attack which had changed his life. In his dream, he followed the path again into the underpass of Breakfast Creek bridge, a rat’s alley reeking of urine and misery. And again as it had during the real event, his heart began to pound with the approach of voices. A group of thugs blocked his way.
‘Come on faggot,’ one of them called, beckoning with both hands, like a coax. In his dream, Harry was transfixed by fear, just as he had in reality. He was near the water and could escape by diving into the blackness. But it was murky. He was terrified. He would surely drown.
A rock caught him in the eye and Harry went down at once. Boots stomped his face, grinding it into the mud and gravel. His ribs were kicked. His groin was booted. Each blow fell on him an instant at a time and throughout it all Harry’s tongue had become an indigestible gristle in his mouth. And then, just as had happened in reality, a sense of intense love and peace came over him and he surrendered himself to that, lying perfectly still in the mud and blood. This numinous moment was something he understood as a rent veil, a glimpse of some other place thing so wonderful that Harry no longer cared what was happening to him.
‘That’s enough,’ a voice said. There was the stinging warmth of urine spraying over his face.
‘Turd packer.’
‘Stinkin faggot.’
‘Let’s get outa here.’
And they were gone.
Harry woke to Silas shaking him.
‘Mate. Mate.’
‘Wha?’
‘You’re having a bad dream.’
‘No. No.’ Harry said, clinging to the intensity of the moment but it was too late; he had left both the fear and the pleasure. His body trembled and Silas took the older man in his arms holding the thin bones with his own strong ones. He became Harry’s comforter and protector, even though Harry knew that Silas was also the kind who could dish out a belting himself, in fact had probably killed his old friend Martin.

Harry’s apartment was the converted top floor of a small hotel. Standing at the peak of Wickham Terrace it was like living in the sky. Birds wheeled past. Thunder storms rolled in from the West. The high winds of the city knocked at the windows like spirits. Silas’ presence there every day was not something Anya enjoyed
‘Lucifer,’ she muttered in Russian when he came near her. ‘Chert!’
Harry had taken charge of Martin’s estate and set up an income stream for Silas. He knew that Silas would fritter away his money until it was all gone. And in the process of thinking about Silas he’d begun to consider his own wishes. He wanted to create a legacy of his work in the parks. To that end he placed the sale of his apartment inside a charitable trust; so that other claims could not be made on his estate. In fact the trust would absorb most of Harry’s assets, although he’d set aside nominated sums for Anya and Silas.

Harry did other things for Silas too. He made him his next of kin. And he began to teach Silas the manners of social eating: how to set a table, what glasses to use for what, how to converse. Harry invited friends around for Silas to practice his skills. Silas’ language was clumsy and he discussed things that were gauche but that just amused Harry’s friends. There was no attempt to alter Silas’ look. He wore leather jackets, skinny jeans, and hand-made boots just like the ones Harry ordered from his Hong Kong boot maker. He combed his hair straight back without a part and kept his sideburns. Harry liked him to maintain his louche appearance. In fact Harry liked driving the two of them around in his expensive car, Silas slouching in the passenger seat, his intense gaze observing the world without expression.

At night Harry continued his ministrations among the city’s homeless, taking Silas with him. Silas knew a lot about the sleeping places of those who live rough. He showed Harry all the little culverts and safe places where homeless women and children might be found. And he steered him clear of areas which were too dangerous. Harry’s experience of violence had added something to his life, but it wasn’t something he sought out.
I been beat up too,’ Silas said. ‘Once it was real bad.’
He showed Harry a broken elbow that hadn’t been reset properly and a mended eye socket. There were scars on his jaw line where his five o’clock shadow wouldn’t grow. Harry suspected his protégée of having been in prison at least once.
‘Now if I fight,’ Silas said, ‘I go in real hard. Cruel the other guy first.’
His eyes gleamed. Knowing Silas was like knowing your much loved Labrador could chase down and dismember a cat.

Anya detested Silas, but that was something that came easily to her. Growing up in a Moscow tenement had made her unforgiving and untrusting. Her father described people as hogs, an expression she had taken to herself. Having the house to herself all day was one of Anya’s pleasures. She loved Harry’s apartment, his music collection and beautiful china, his rugs and rosewood furniture. But Silas loafed around in Harry’s sitting-room listening to the Sex Pistols turned up loud, drowning out Rachmaninov or Prokofiev.

Silas did worse things. He messed up the bathroom and brought home men when he thought Anya had gone for the day. She’d see him coming up the escalators at Central Station with some dissolute character and report it to Harry. Superficially Harry was not bothered by Anya’s disclosures.
‘Silas is free to do what he wants,’ he would say in response.
‘He’s a bit of a rough diamond I know, but we don’t live in a police state. He needs someone to watch over him.’
‘Watch over that one?’ Anya muttered into the sink. ‘Someone needs to watch over Mr Brand.’
It didn’t matter that Silas made coffee for her and carried her shopping. The coffee grains clogged the sink and he dumped the shopping on the floor for her to put away.
One day he really upset her. It wasn’t enough that Silas himself had come off the streets, one lunch time he brought home a street boy who was obviously under-age, smuggling him into the apartment then going to the kitchen to greet Anya with his usual insouciance. She was slicing aubergine for the evening meal. Mr Brand loved them baked, parmigiana style. He was a delicate eater.
‘You take the rest of the day off love,’ Silas said. ‘I’ll get dinner for Mr Brand.’
Silas was dumb but Anya was not. His artless offers to help made her suspicious.
‘Humph,’ Anya said, changing her shoes and picking up her scarf. Her street shoes strapped onto her feet like a ballroom dancer’s. Clearly Silas was up to something.
‘Go on love,’ he insisted. ‘Take the rest of the day off.’
‘Is Mr Brand tell me what to do. Not you.’
Silas put his arm around her waist. ‘He’d want you to.’
So Anya left, but a few minutes later she returned for a shopping trolley she had ‘forgotten’. That was when she heard the voices. What was going on was plain enough. And it was definitely against the law. Mr Brand needed to know what his ‘rough diamond’ was up to. She hurried away to ring from a payphone.
‘Mr Brand. That devil with a young boy,’ she said. ‘Maybe only twelve, thirteen.’
There was a long silence from Harry’s end of the phone. He was furious.
‘Thank you Anya,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to him about it.’
In the car that night, they drove in silence until Harry reached his usual spot on the Terrace. It was raining heavily.
‘Apparently you had a kid with you this afternoon,’ he said.
There was a hard anger in his voice.
‘Yeah.’ Silas was gazing into the rain, not much interested in the conversation.
‘How old was he?’
‘Dunno,’ Silas said. ’15, 16.’
Harry turned from peering out through the windscreen wipers and looked at Silas.
‘That’s not good enough Silas, and you know it,’ he said. ‘If he was fifteen you’ve broken the law.’
It was wrong. And it was disloyal.
‘How old do you reckon I was when Martin took me in?’ Silas asked.
‘What difference does that make?’
‘Didn’t think you’d care anyway.’
Harry considered. Anya was right. She called people hogs for good reason. Harry was a fastidious man who used the highest thread cotton sheets. His bed was a Rosenstengel inherited from his mother. It might be wrong of him to think the way he did, but he found it disgusting to picture Silas and some grubby kid romping around in his inner sanctum.
‘You could ruin my good name around town,’ Harry said. ‘People talk.’
This didn’t make sense to Silas who already went everywhere with Harry and provoked ‘talk’. In fact, they had even been to Tattersalls together.

They got out of the car and Harry opened the boot to collect the food they would carry between them into the park. The rain was heavy. Harry wore a short fishing coat which was for all weathers. Silas was in his hoody. He never complained about the food deliveries no matter how bad the weather.
‘Poor buggers,’ he said, not really to anyone.
Harry turned towards him. He looked grave.
‘You‘ll be joining them soon enough if things don’t change,’ he said. ‘You don’t hide what you do from Anya. And she lets me know.’
Silas stared.
‘Anya dobs on me?’
‘I didn’t get into this game to service paedophiles,’ Harry said. ‘I’m trying to help people who would otherwise have no chance. Just like I helped you.’
He wondered fleetingly if he might be jealous.
‘But it’s OK to get sucked by me?’ Silas said.

They went about their work in silence. It was cold and slippery in the wet conditions and Silas was shivering by the time they trudged back up the hill now with their hampers emptied.
‘What a life,’ he muttered.
‘Yes.’ Harry was terse.
‘Would you really throw me out?’
‘Yes.’ Harry turned to look at Silas. ‘Buggering kids is beyond the pale.’
Silas thought about the sorry men they’d just seen sheltering under bits of plastic or inside pipes or under rocks or cardboard. Of course there was the money he had in trust. But he knew Harry had set up this up so it came to him once a year. And it was not a lot. Silas would get through it in the first month and then be rejoining the fringe dwellers they’d just seen.
‘Aren’t I your next of kin?’
‘At the moment, yes.’
To Silas, this had made Harry his substitute father. Fathers took care of their children apparently, although his own had not. What did it mean if Harry changed this status?
Harry strode up the pathway ahead of Silas, heading for his car.
‘Can I trust you Silas? That’s what I want to know.’
The rain had worn away much of the understratum of pebbles and roots and the slope of the park was slippery. As he walked, head hunched into the high collar of his rain slick, Harry felt Silas lurch into him. It was unexpected. He half fell then began to slide, and with nothing around him for purchase began to tumble down the slope they had just trudged up. Silas stood on the pathway and watched. He watched as Harry’s body gathered mud and leaves and his slick jacket tobogganed him downwards. After finding a safer route Silas walked carefully down the sloep too, to find that Harry was still breathing.

Silas visited Harry’s hospital bed each day, taking Anya’s food. Harry’s prognosis was poor, the doctors said, because of his underlying myelofibrosis. Didn’t Silas know about that? No. All he had known was that Harry was getting on and was sometimes unwell. Well the outlook wasn’t good. There were grave looks around the bedside. One of Harry’s friends went through his papers and explained Silas’s role as next of kin in the event of Harry’s death. This was when Silas learned of Harry’s charitable trust and the sale of assets which would be triggered once his life came to an end. The trust had been settled some time ago it seemed. There was little provision for any person apart from a couple of disbursements to specific people. Silas didn’t know if he was one of them.

Everyone commented on Silas’s devotion to Harry, how he sat at his bedside day after day feeding him. People marvelled that such a ruffian should show such tenderness. And Harry now in a twilit consciousness, was closing in on the moment he had sensed once before, of something wonderful he might soon reach. He was back at the Breakfast Creek Bridge.

Poker night

2010-02-15T16:46:00.007-12:00

Of the four school-mates who came to Warren’s poker nights Mitzi rated Hugo as the best in bed. And she thought of him as The Jack. He was a scoundrel, and ugly as an old sock, with short bandy legs and eyes that bulged like someone on the wrong end of a hangman’s noose. But he was also inventive and up for anything. She leaned over and kissed the tip of his penis. Even that was short and bandy. In his post-coital stupor he smiled without opening his eyes, still dressed in the gorilla costume she’d got him into for the occasion.

The branches of a huge Moreton Bay Fig swept against the iron roof of her studio, oozing a smell of humus from the primordial mulch of the river nearby. Mitzi lay on the daybed, thinking about a drawing she had started. Hugo’s chest moved gently up and down. His penis stirred. What a surprise he’d turned out to be.
‘You’re the best,’ she whispered, using the phrase Warren loved to hear.

Although she painted and drew Mitzi’s real love was for found objects which she liked to arrange on the flagstones of her studio floor. She had towers of dried branches and pyramids of seed pods, clusters of rusty iron artefacts, and even the skeletons of dead birds and lizards. With these she decorated her studio much as a bower bird adorns his bower.

Mitzi was the kind of woman other wives never invite to lunch. Other wives were wifely. They bred their husband’s children, cleaned their underpants, cooked their pot roasts and in their own turn were permitted to grow gently fat. Not Mitzi. Mitzi had a personal trainer, gay as it turned out. Each morning she ran the boardwalk from Teneriffe to Waterfront and back, causing the glands of quite a few city gents to stir as they opened their briefs for the day and watched from behind the glass walls of their cages.

And Mitzi flew annually to Paris and New York, spending her husband’s tax havened income at Sabbia Rosa in Rue des Saints-Peres in the 6th or at Agent Provacateur just off Broadway near Washington Square Village. Her French lingerie was so sublime that even thinking of her in her tiny silk panties could make her lovers hard.

She’d married Warren for his money of course. Warren’s mates were all worldly enough to know a dullard like him could never land such a beauty without the lure of a thick wallet. Warren was the after-thought of their school-boy group. He’d arrived in the middle of the year wearing cheap shoes and the wrong hat. His blazer was second-hand. At the end when they all planned to meet up at Uni Warren went straight home to his father’s green-grocer business. Not that he wanted to, but Senor Franchisi had no time for the protesting students with their street demos and Chez Guevara posters.
‘Lazy bums,’ he pronounced. ‘Don know the value of a day’s work.’
That was something Warren learned very quickly.

So, while his mates swotted through Law or Medicine or Dentistry, Warren bought his first Ferrari, second-hand. Only one of them, Digby, had taken another path and he’d become an Antique dealer. By the time Warren was forty and husband to Mitzi he was travelling Queensland in his own ‘Twin Beech’ inspecting newly acquired copper mines, or investing in natural gas so near the earth’s crust you could light fires on the bare ground using nothing but air and matches.

‘Course Mitzi’s a trophy wife,’ Warren used to brag. ‘You gotta be a winner to bag a beauty like Mitz. But she’s more than that.’
Did that mean the rest of his school boy friends felt like losers? As each of them approached Mitzi and earned an afternoon in her busy week they didn’t think so. On Fridays after the poker game they returned to their weekend arrangements for sex and to the Internet for extra activities. And each of ‘The Boys’ felt that life was good and fair.

The poker games began long before Warren broke his neck. In hindsight they seemed to erupt spontaneously after a mate’s funeral, when in a middle-aged surge back towards their old school bond someone suggested a poker night. Mitzi instantly took charge. They had a big house, there was a games room downstairs. Why didn’t everyone join them on Friday? Warren was now importing high end beers. He would love a few ‘samplers’ to try out the Hefeweizen he was thinking of stocking in his Queen St boutique bar. This was the first time many of them had met Mitzi, and even Warren’s Ferrari had not impressed them as deeply as she did.
‘Mate,’ Hugo slurped to Digby on their way home that night. “I’ve gotta get me a piece of that.’

Mitzi had the build of a race horse with long delicate legs and a backside pert with energetic promise. Her breasts were high and full, like two delicious ice-cream scoops. And her long wheat coloured hair and deep black eyes drew the male gaze like an Iranian bomb factory in need of an Exocet. Warren watched with amusement as one by one his friends succumbed to the allure of Mitzi’s bossy voice and her arresting physical presence.

Mitzi and Warren had bought their award winning Newstead house Au bord du monde because it had everything they wanted: turrets and a built-in boatshed, a flat roof for parties and walls that folded back to open the whole house to the elements. The house hovered above the river like a Venetian Palazzo. On the ground floor was a games room with a full billiard table. There was also a cold room, a bar, a pizza oven and access by dumb waiter to the kitchens a floor above. But in the house there was no space anywhere for children.

The games room exterior wall opened out onto a long pool. And sitting on the decking which sat at the pool’s edge Warren could admire Forty foot, his Sunseeker Manhattan moored on the river in front of his house. But it was the lap-pool which was his pride and joy.
‘Mitzi likes to take it in the pool,’ Warren said with a wink. ‘And in the boat-shed when it’s raining.’
They looked at the mossy studio Mitzi had built for herself at the bottom of the garden almost at the river’s edge. By then each of them also knew that she liked to ‘take’ it there too.

After Warren’s accident, when Warren no longer left Au bord du monde except to go to the hospital, the poker nights became a fixture. He was close to Royal Brisbane if the need was urgent. And inside the house he’d modified the lift to take a full stretcher. On the very top floor which housed an observatory, Warren now had his suite of rooms. Unable to move anything below his neck the huge telescope and dome were a particular pleasure for him. He could access them by orienting his electric bed. Like his wheelchair it had been made with levers he could operate by moving his head.
‘I want to live in the sky,’ he said to Mitzi. ‘When I wake up at night here I can see straight out into the universe.’
‘Close to heaven,’ she said, patting the flat cheeks of his face which she shaved each morning with care.

Mitzi took care of Warren’s head, but nurses attended upon his body. Mitzi fed him his eggs Benedict and coffee, trimmed his nostrils and ears and cleaned his teeth. She shaved him closely and patted Rosewood oil into his skin. The nurses bathed him, emptied his bladder and bowel, and changed his incontinence pads. After his shave Mitzi put on his shirt and tied his tie for him. The nurses applied creams to his bottom and where there were any signs of ulcers or bedsores.

Each morning by the time Warren’s business day began and he switched on Skype not one of his business partners knew more than that Warren Franchisi had lost his voice. This was something he could not disguise, with his robot tones leaking from a tracheostomy stoma. There was nothing wrong with his brain however. Every day he made more and more money.

Once Mitzi’s wifely ministrations were completed she in turn attended morning Mass in the little side Chapel Warren had built for her. To Warren she looked particularly fetching in the black mantilla she’d brought back after walking the Camino de Santiago. In her Chapel and alone with the Divine presence Mitzi kneeled at the foot of the Cross and prayed for her husband’s soul. Warren stuck to the view that his life was his own creation. He believed in nothing but himself and Mitzi. And Mitzi herself went to confession every week to be renewed.

Phil was the handsome one of the four men. If he were part of a Royal Flush he’d be the Ten Mitzi thought, undistinguished but perfect and necessary as a ten was. His jaw was lean, his eyes deep-set and blue, and his skin a thin tan. There was a flourish of virility in his heavy brows which promised more, but sex with Phil was dull and disappointingly quick. Mitzi might have crossed him from her list but leaving him out would not give full expression to the spirit of poker night. And in his way Phil was kind, and almost reflective.
‘You don’t worry how Warren would feel about us?’ he asked her once.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think he would feel betrayed.’
‘By me?’
‘And by me.’
‘We can always put a stop to it,’ Mitzi said, knowing that he wouldn’t.

Mitzi’s power over men arrived around her 15th birthday. Now after twenty years she had much to draw upon. Phil was the sort who would continue calling her long after she terminated their relationship. Closing doors in his face or slamming down phones would have no effect. He was the man he would forever yearn for her and keep coming back in the face of all her rejections. But that future hadn’t yet entered Phil’s life. So each Wednesday they consummated their pleasure at a time Mitzi reported Warren was having his afternoon nap.

Did the men know of each other’s arrangement with her? Mitzi didn’t think so. Their disloyalty to their disabled friend was shameful to them. Not one of them would confess to the others his liaison with her. Shagging your mate’s wife was a far greater betrayal than cheating on your own. And a mate who could no longer pleasure his wife should not find out that his best friend did.

It was a Friday night when Warren shocked them all badly. During a break in the game, with Warren ahead as he always was, and all four men at the bar sampling his Glenfiddich 40 and smoking his Partagás Salomónes, Warren croaked into his amplifier.
‘Fresh air.’
His words had the flat lined timbre of a translating machine.
‘Please.’
The men turned to watch as Mitzi pushed her husband onto the terrace in his wheelchair. Her perfect legs and the faint outline of her Francois de Loire panties tantalised through the material of her white linen trousers.
‘Sorry darling,’ Mitzi said. ‘I should have been thinking of you.’
She pushed the wheelchair close to the cooling water. ‘We will join you shortly. Once I find that bottle of Veuve.’
As she returned each of the men smiled slyly around his fat cigar. The memory of that week’s encounter with Mitzi hovered deliciously in the smoke of their Cuban cigars.

When they heard the splash, each person there, except Mitzi, assumed that a bull shark had leapt in the river to take a swimming dog. Not Mitzi. She turned instantly towards the pool and ran across the room in bare feet, sliding dangerously on a black silk Turkish prayer rug. Her voice was a wail.
‘Warren.’
The men were slower to understand.
‘He is drowning,’ she called. ‘Somebody. Please help. Magnus?’

Magnus was a doctor. And once a champion swimmer. If Phil was The Ten, Magnus was The King. He dived straight into the water where Warren’s wheelchair floated upside down with its tyres gleaming emptily into the air. The wheels sparkled with colourful refractions of light from the Kookaburra Queen. It trundled by on the river. ‘I will survive’ was belting through the loud-speakers as Warren’s dark shape floated in the water below his drifting chair.
‘Lights,’ Mitzi called. ‘Turn on the lights.’
Then she jumped.

The men drew breath at the thought of Mitzi in wet linen, and then the thought of their drowning friend seemed to paralyse them. Luckily Magnus, shouldering the dead weight of Warren to the side of the pool, was strong enough to heave him upwards and out onto the wet tiles. His brawny arms and hairy chest then surged out of the pool in one movement, cascading water like Neptune, King of the sea. At this point the others came towards him in a cluster, each offering suggestions and advice. While Magnus began pumping the lifeless Warren Mitzi gave orders.
‘Go to the cupboard,’ she commanded.
‘Bring towels and the bathrobe.’
‘Get the whiskey bottle.’
‘Where is his oxygen tank?’
‘Ring an ambulance.’

Once Mitzi and her husband were safely on their way the school friends stood sombrely by Hugo’s Morgan Roadster, parked in Warren’s driveway.
‘Self-inflicted,’ Magnus suggested.
No-one liked to answer. Each man thought guiltily of his own part in Warren’s misery.
‘Surely not,’ Phil said. ‘A man like Warren. So much to live for.’
‘Yes,’ they all agreed.
‘Still running his businesses. Wonderful wife.’
‘Adores him,’ Hugo said heartily. ‘Absolutely adores the man.’
And they each drove off into the night not wanting to imagine too much of Warren’s state of mind once he woke up in a hospital bed, not dead, and as incapacitated as ever.

Mitzi was only able to cry when Magnus returned to her the following Monday.
‘Thank you so much for saving him,’ she whispered through her tears. ‘I cannot allow him to do such an awful thing.’
They made love for hours, like Gods, and Mitzi wept during the sex, a sight not often granted to her lovers. Magnus drew upon his knowledge of the human body to transport his mistress to some sphere he had never seen her enter before. It reminded her of her afternoons with Hugo.

When they had recovered their energies and it was time to talk, Mitzi asked something of Magnus, a request she made in turn to each of the ‘Boys’ during the course of that week.
‘Can you watch over Warren when you are with us, make sure he cannot do anything to harm himself?’
Of course Magnus, who had taken the Hippocratic Oath, readily agreed. In their turn each of the other friends agreed too, but not without qualms. Each of them felt an individual guilt at Warren’s sad attempt to end it all.

So the Friday nights continued but the mood was different. And the lovers continued their attentions but something had changed. Each had independently begun to look upon Mitzi in a new way. If one of them mentioned her in passing he joked about her as the Grieving Widow. Her gorgeous underwear and wanton spirit seemed an affront in the face of her husband’s misery. And something in each of them recoiled at her efforts to protect Warren from himself. Privately each man assumed it was money that tied the beautiful Mitzi to the wreckage of her husband’s life.

Warren himself did his best to cheer everyone up.
‘An accident,’ he assured everyone. ‘How could I leave you fellers. Without your Mitzi. And your poker nights?’
The laughter was uneasy. His voice with its lack of nuance made everything he said ambiguous. Mitzi, seated at his side was slowly feeding him Beluga Caviar along with shots of Grey Goose Vodka
‘My night-cap’ Warren croaked through his artificial voice box. ‘Before Mitzi finishes me off of course.’
‘That old Ace in the hole,’ she said with a throaty laugh.
Warren coughed as the Vodka went down.
‘I know you can all imagine how well I sleep once she’s had her way with me.’

But Warren’s sleeping ritual was nothing like their pretence of it. Instead, after her husband was settled into his hydraulic bed by the night nurse Mitzi lay beside him waiting for the sleeping pills to take hold. She held his useless hand in her own and kissed the poor head with its frightening urge towards self-destruction.
‘You know what I want you to do,’ she whispered.
Warren, without his voice amplifier, just shook his head.

But on his way towards sleep his thoughts circled, returning over and over to the same point. He loved and trusted Mitzi. But his life was his own. He had never let her put one over on him and he wasn’t about to start, helpless though he seemed. In any case with his money all hers Mitzi would be better off without him. And she’d finally have the thing she most wanted. He had set up through Magnus a bank of sperm. Now she could have his children, something hehad always denied her. In her turn Mitzi must love him enough to let him go.

And long after Warren had reached sleep Mitzi would stay on, gazing into the darkened garden below where a tiny light still flickered through the branches above her studio roof. Flying foxes squabbled deep inside the huge fig. And tiny nocturnal craft made their way along Newstead reach. She listened to the murmurings of sailors and fishermen as their lives intersected briefly with her own. It was at this time of night that Mitzi took most comfort, when she was alone with her husband in his eyrie and with her sense of God watching over them both.

The one Mitzi loved of all ‘The Boys’ was Digby. She loved him like a brother. He was an erratic partner. Sex with Digby was punctuated with teasing and jokes. Sometimes it was dramatic, thorough and satisfying. At other times it was perfunctory, petering out under the diversion of stories and laughter. Each week the two of them ate a proper afternoon tea, using the Royal Doulton tea things Digby had brought from his shop. After nibbling on Petits Four and sampling an Oloroso sherry they were just as likely to begin a discussion of Mitzi’s art collection as repair to the daybed. Mitzi, in her tea frock and Digby in his Gatsby-esque trousers entertained each other with made up tales and imaginary gossip, exhausting themselves with their own fun. Digby understood Mitzi as a performance. He saw the deeper self she kept hidden from the others. And for her he was The Queen, a mysterious feminine man.

Warren loved Digby too, as companion in arms and mutual survivor of their boys’ school. Each had resisted the grinding conformity their parents had sent them there to acquire. As school-boy friends they had even shared a few sexual encounters, not something known to their wider circle of mates. So it was to Digby Warren felt he could turn once his plans were properly thought through. Next time he tried to kill himself there would be no failure.
“Need to get Magnus inside. The tent,’ he croaked. ‘Neutralised.’
‘You mean because he’s a doctor?’
‘Yes. Hippocratic oath. Can’t compromise. A man like that.’

Disturbing though such a discussion was Digby agreed to do whatever Warren asked. It was a sombre moment.
‘Giving him the last great gift,’ he said to Phil and Hugo later when enlisting their aid.
They nodded their heads. Before all else Warren was their mate, and when injured on the battlefield mates did what they could for one another. None of them liked to think what daily life entailed when all control over the body is lost. It was enough to imagine the helplessness of a man who could no longer lift a gun to his head or jump from a bridge. A man who could no longer have sex.

Mitzi’s feelings were not considered. It was the duty of Warren’s friends to do what they could for him. And deep in the heart of each lay the idea of blame. Surely giving way to lust for such a woman was something she was responsible for. Helping Warren outwit her might be some compensation for the guilt that each man felt.

Magnus was the only one of them Mitzi felt she could trust. So on the selected night when Digby and Magnus began joking with her about her dowager’s hump she was hooked into it without suspicion.
‘Those little lines around your eyes Mitz,’ Digby joked. ‘Better get them seen to before it’s too late.’
He turned to Magnus. ‘Don’t you agree?’
Magnus, ever earnest considered her face, urging caution.
‘A little bit of work,’ he said. He was quite unsuspecting. ‘Don’t damage your beauty with more than a slight eye lift.’

Horrified Mitzi picked up a silver platter and tried to examine herself in it. It was useless, too flat and distorting to take a closer look.
‘Where?’ she asked. ‘Tell me the truth. Am I looking old?’
‘No. No,’ Magnus said. He had a slight accent retained from his Swedish parents. ‘In Europe women are admired for their beauty even as they age.’
It was quite the wrong answer.
‘Wait here,’ Mitzi said. ‘I need a mirror.’
And she rushed the up the stairs to the kitchen where there was bright fluorescent lighting and a wall mirror.

This was what Warren had been waiting for. He nodded to Phil and Hugo who gently opened the doors for him. Phil had already moved any furniture out of the way. So as Warren tipped himself into the water Hugo put on an old Blues LP that both Warren and Mitzi loved, turning it up so that the speakers boomed Leadbelly’s gravely goodbye all through the games room. This was the song Warren had asked for.

So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh.
What a long time since I've been home,
And I've gotta be driftin' along.

Digby continued his conversation with Magnus, forcing himself to hide the awful dread that lay at the back of his throat.
‘I have another armoir you could be interested in,’ he said taking his digital camera from his pocket, then fiddling to find the shot amongst all the pictures he had of Louis chairs and Georgian tallboys and French display cabinets. Magnus began looking through them all one by one. By the time Mitzi was back into the room, it was all over.

‘Where is Warren?’ she said. And then much louder. ‘Where is Warren?’

She rushed to the water’s edge but it was too late. This time Warren had died, and in the way he wanted to. And Mitzi could do nothing but collapse and wail.
‘Now he is condemned,’ she said. ‘And cannot have a Christian burial.’

She knelt by the poolside, rocking back and forth in the eerie shadows cast by the underwater pool lights, murmuring the same phrases to herself in the ancient words of the Latin Mass that was her heritage.
‘Miserere nobis, miserere nobis. Donna nobis pacem.’
Have mercy upon us.

Embarrassingly each of her lovers felt a surge of lust. Only Magnus felt able to approach, raising her to her feet, and apologising that he had been tricked into abandoning his care.
‘I would not have agreed to it,’ he said, smoothing her hair with his big capable hand.
‘But it was done out of love.’
‘That’s not love,’ she said. ‘He died without consolation. Without the last rites.’
‘He didn’t believe in it darling,’ Digby said. ‘You know that.’
‘He would have. He would have come round.’

This idea was a delusion.
‘He never believed in anything,’ said Phil. ‘Thought it was all twaddle.’
‘Suicide is an offence against God’s charity,’ Mitzi said seriously. She stood amongst them all, so slight but so strong in her beliefs. ‘Warren will burn in hell.’
And she began to cry again. No-one understood.
‘It was what he wanted darling,’ Digby said. ‘What he asked us for.’

The police arrived and no-one was allowed to leave. There was suspicion, especially upon the widow. But she had been upstairs, not even on the same floor when the men had let it happen. And no-one was giving anything away, except to verify that Mitzi was absent from the room. After taking statements, and photographing everything, the body was enclosed in a long covered stretcher, which Mitzi rode with in the hospital lift to a place where it could be wheeled away. After that she could not stay with him any longer.

In the games room again, and hot with anger and pain, Mitzi said what she wanted to.
‘You let him play you. Just as he did with your afternoons in my studio.’
Phil’s handsome face showed his embarrassment. ‘What do you mean?’
Mitzi looked at him assessingly.
‘I did it for him,’ she said. ‘That’s what Warren asked me to do. He wanted me to take you all.’
This was when they each understood. Each one of them was not the chosen. And no-one had got away with it. She laughed meanly.
‘None of you is the man he was. Now you’ve taken him from me. And you’ve lost him too.’
It was shameful to learn they had all been her lovers, and that Warren had manipulated them all, like a puppet-master. It was shameful and humiliating.
‘When he asked me to do it I agreed,’ she said. ‘Because I knew how he would enjoy it. He enjoyed watching you all with me, especially you Hugo.’
There was a horrible pause.
‘Now you’ve sent him straight to hell.’

After the city lights had dimmed and deep night began Mitzi went up to the top floor where the equipment of Warren’s daily life still waited there for him. She curled up on the sheepskin mat he slept on, and smelt the Rosewood Oil that permeated his bedding. The domed roof of the observatory was half open. She looked up through the cloudless sky where distant stars faded and glowed and an occasional Iridium Flare brightened the darkness. The moon was in Old Crescent. To Mitzi it was like an eye turning away from her sorrow. She felt abandoned and alone. And she lay there and wept.