WHITE DUST - a hidden enemy

Even during midsummer a sea breeze used to riffle its way through the back yard. It rustled the heads of lettuce and the row on row of green and red beetroot tops which had so recently fought their way through the sandy soil to a new existence in the open air.

Her childhood at 52 Bondilla Road was as benign as the climate, although the little girl didn’t think so at times. The vegetable garden was the work of both her parents. The father dug the soil, extracting the old tree roots from the loam, and made doubly sure of its purity by passing it through a sieve to extract any wayward bits of rock. He raked that soil until the bed was perfect, and then the mother took over, transplanting seedlings from the boxes where she had sprouted them. She pressed those tiny plants home, ensuring that every row was ramrod straight and NEAT.

The little girl and her sister learned the work ethic at an early age. Their job was to manipulate the hand pump at the garden well, taking turns until the bucket beneath the pump nozzle was half full. They would then each get on one side of the handle and struggle their way, water slopping, and bucket occasionally knocking their shins, until they got to the new bed to spill the contents as carefully as they could into the spaces between the plants. She would have been eight at the time, and her sister six.

‘Five buckets today girls,’ the mother would say.
* * *
They were working people who thought of themselves as ‘middle class’. Her Dad was a ‘builder’ in those days, having worked his way up from ‘carpenter’. ‘Builder’ meant he employed two men to fashion the little fibro cement cottages which littered that small seaside town. ‘Carpenter’ was for when he worked with his own father, the little girl’s grandfather, learning the trade.

The carpenter’s apron seemed a part of him. A wide pocket for nails and a long thin one for the rule, and he’d sometimes hook a hammer to a leather belt at his waist.

To the girl, this was a bit like a cowboy’s holster, and she remembered the handle swaying against her Dad’s well-shaped bottom.

He was handsome as a young man. Not tall, but with a strong body developed by constant physical work and tennis and cricket, and he had a sun beaten complexion. She never saw him in a hat.

The father was never still, and always complaining. When he wasn’t complaining, he was sullen. He ground his teeth in concentration, and the incessant tension stiffened his entire body.

He didn’t even like food. It was as though the act of sitting at the table brought unwelcome bile to his throat, making it hard to swallow. More often than not he’d peck at a few morsels and then he’d push the plate away saying ‘I’m not hungry’.

Because he was middle class, he read Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph, voted for Bob Menzies and was always condemning the unions.

He never swore. That was something you just didn’t do. Church was out, but he worked for charity and was a member of the Masonic Lodge, but didn’t reach high office as his own father had.

Like her Grandfather though, he believed children should be seen and not heard, and paid attention to the girls mainly by imposing discipline with his tongue. He never hit them, but his haranguing was so sharp and belittling that it was worse than the cane the mother used to wield around their legs on occasions, though she did this more in threat than anger.

He’d be charming to all of the women up and down the street, helping them fix an old electric jug here or nail up a recalcitrant fence paling there, but when he got home he became morose. It seemed impossible for him to express any gentle emotions.

To the little girl he was a feeling more than a presence: she would knot up inside when he was around, and even in her later years the smell of old tobacco, sawdust and fibro cement dust brought prickles to the back of her neck.
* * *
If her father’s building job was within walking distance, the little girls would be asked to take a billy filled with scalding tea and pieces of new cake wrapped in grease proof paper for his morning snack. The walk always seemed an eternity.

They’d hold the billy between them, the wire handle biting into their skin. Taking care to keep it balanced so the hot liquid wouldn’t escape, they’d travel maybe a hundred yards or so, in fear they could slip and burn themselves. Then they’d set the billy down, adjust their grips and walk some more. It was like a three-legged race in which one mistake could bring the whole crashing to disaster. The hot air from the container wafted around their legs, menacing. Sometimes one girl would lose the rhythm, and the evil hot billy would sway, nipping the other’s leg with a scorching sting. They always made it safely, but the dread never diminished.

Sometimes when a house was finished the whole family would work to clean up the mess: pick up the chunky bits of left over wood, the bent nails, and sweep up the sawdust and the white powder from the fibro sheets. They would throw it all into the father’s little Ford wagon and he’d take it off to the dump.
* * *
For years she pleaded with him to make her a book case, but it never happened. Instead, her few prized volumes lay in anonymity at the bottom of her wardrobe.

But she’d still gain his interest whenever she had academic success at school and his small eyes lit up when she brought home a book prize for coming top in the class. ‘Well, we have a stewed ant,’ he said. She got the message that he was proud of her.

Mostly, though, she and her sister were just scared of him, and did what they could to stay out of his way.

The back yard was a great place for games of cowboys and Indians when their boy cousins came to visit. Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers would jump around the tank stands and hide behind shrubs, dive in and out of the workshop (when their Dad wasn’t there), and generally shoot things up.

There was a day when the little girl didn’t notice the piece of galvanised iron piping left sticking out of the ground as part of new extensions to the house, and tripped and sprawled full length. Even now, if she ran her finger over her shin, she could still feel the deadness where the wound healed long ago. The deadness was in an area the shape of a half moon left there after the doctor inserted nine stitches.

She sobbed and dripped blood all the way along the path to the surgery, up the steps and onto the waiting room linoleum. Her father’s ultimatum got them straight to the doctor who sat her, cringing, on the examination table. The surgery was dark with heavy furniture and paneled walls, and there were glass cases filled with evil looking medical instruments and specimens of diseased appendices and tonsils. She hated the smells of chloroform and disinfectants, and the bottles filled her with fear.

The starched sheet underneath her crackled as the doctor smiled, belying his intentions. He peered against the light at the sharp end of a syringe, and suddenly plunged it into her skin. She got a surprise more than anything: it didn’t hurt terribly much. But then he got some white cloth and began dabbing at her wound.

The sting was horrible. She tried to close her eyes, but she was fascinated with what was going on. She glimpsed bone and raw flesh and there were spots of blood on the sheet now too. Then the doctor had a needle and a thick thread a bit like her mum used to darn socks, but stiffer somehow. He began sewing her up, just like the socks. He pulled together the two sides of the hole in her leg with one relentless stitch after another.

‘Not much longer now,’ he said.

It was the worst darning job she’d ever seen. The black stitches didn’t even match the creamy pink of her skin. Would she spend her life darned up like that? She decided she couldn’t look any more. When she did open her eyes again there was an imposing looking bandage on her leg, and she was able to walk importantly out of the surgery, in front of all of the other patients.

Altogether, it was a singular day – she was the centre of her father’s caring attention, and there had been anxiety in his eyes. Anxiety for her.
* * *
The garden had a secret. The little girl was small indeed, and greatly impressed, when her father buried an entire Indian motor bike and sidecar very deeply in the left hand corner of the yard, beyond the clothesline. It lies there still in its unmarked grave, hidden by kikuyu grass. Until the poor old engine gave up the ghost the whole family traveled around on that rig for years. She remembered her mother clinging to the pillion seat behind her father, with her sister packed tightly beside her in the sidecar, swamped by the slipstream and the deafening noise from the engine.

A couple of years later her father divided up the yard with a picket fence, leaving a large space at the back. He’d been shooting out west with his mates, and she trembled at the idea of guns. This time he came home with a skinny little kangaroo wrapped in a towel – her Dad had shot its mother and found the joey in her pouch. He brought it home for them as a pet, and to keep the kikuyu down. The girl cried into her pillow that night.

In daylight hours Joey lived in her mother’s apron pocket, and gradually grew fat on milk she fed him through an eyedropper. Graduation day came when the picket fence was complete, and Joey was expected to live full time in the back yard. By this time he was still all legs, but able to hop around and munch grass. However, with his relentless growth, their love for Joey became tinged with fear. The mother would let herself through the gate in the picket fence to put washing on the line.

Thrilled to see his ‘Mum’, Joey would charge, aiming at her ‘pouch’ – the large pocket in her apron. Things got sticky when he was big enough to knock her over, and stickier still when he became so big he could leap the picket fence at a single bound and range the local streets.

One night Joey got out and didn’t return, and she saw her parents exchange a guilty look. Joey, she guessed, had shared the fate of his mother.
* * *
The little girl’s mother’s laundry copper was another source of childhood horror. It lived at one end of an outbuilding in the back yard, alongside two cement tubs that were fitted with a mangle. As a family they would sometimes go prawning, taking scoop nets down to the local lake. The cool crystal water swirled around their bare toes and in the lamplight the prawns flashed as they swam into the traps. On a good night they’d fill a kerosene tin, and she was mesmerised as the green crustaceans squirmed and writhed, like so many maggots with legs.

Her father would build a funeral pyre under the copper, by then filled with water. When it bubbled and fumed, fitting for a scene with the witches of Macbeth, he’d upend the tin into the cauldron and the prawns thrashed and flailed in the heat until they became still, and turned pink.

She hated seeing this torture but, pragmatically, she helped them eat the sacrifice only a few minutes later, on fresh bread and butter. The sweet-salt flesh of the prawns and the scrunch of the crusty bread were just too delectable.
* * *
Next to the tubs, the father built a small aviary, where they kept canaries. Yellow canaries that sang and lay speckled eggs that produced scrawny featherless chicks with huge beaks. Beaks that consumed mashed boiled egg and crushed arrowroot biscuits, and later, special seed the girls bought at the grocery shop down the street.

They were in for a surprise when the second nest of birds hatched out, and one turned out quite different from the rest. This chick had brown feathers and looked for all the world like a sparrow; probably a throw-back of some sort. The little guy was doomed from the start though, because horror stalked him too. One morning they found his lifeless body in the bottom of the cage, torn half way through the bird wire. A cat must have got into the laundry during the night .

The main part of the laundry outbuilding in the back yard was the father’s workshop where he prefabricated kitchen cupboards and other portable parts of his houses.

She hated being around him when he worked as he was always full of tension and created a stifling atmosphere. He didn’t yell; just exuded anxiety and stress. Her problem was that he always liked to have a ‘mate’ nearby. It was as though he was afraid of being alone, and so it fell to the mother and the girls to stand by when he worked at home. This meant they fetched and carried small things for him: ‘Pass that hammer for me.’ or ‘Hold this still will you?’

She still remembers the tobacco smell and the flying white dust, and the taut muscles in his face as he sawed and hammered. Even then, his hands were gnarled and misshapen where he’d occasionally blundered with his tools. He must have driven home hundreds of thousand of nails in his time.

The ‘holding still’ often meant putting her meager weight on a piece of fibro cement sheet in an effort to keep it motionless while he split it with a special cutter. They all inevitably left these sessions covered in white. This was the same dust that was an integral part of her Dad when he came home from work at night.

His hair and his clothing were always drenched in the stuff. This was the dust that lay all over the floors in the unfinished houses, and coated the walls and the window sills. It contained asbestos, and today they know it as a courier of death.
* * *
The white powder from the fibro building sheets always surrounded them, but they rarely gave it a thought. They didn’t even consider it when the mother developed what the doctors called ‘emphysema’, although she’d never smoked. Nor when she and her sister both became asthmatics.

They did think about it many years later when the father became very ill. Scientific evidence about this white dust was at last being made public, and memories flooded back when they diagnosed lung cancer.
* * *
For the first time ever her father slowed down. He had time to think, and he began to talk about his life. He was dying in a nursing home when he and his daughter shared their one and only deeply personal conversation.

On that day he allowed her in. He talked about her mother and his parents. And how his father raised him as a child.

‘Boys were men before they were boys. They had to be,’ he said ‘If a man didn’t have flamin’ blisters on his hands he was a loafer. If his wife worked he was a sponger on his wife.’

Her grandfather embedded the lessons with floggings, he said. With a sulky strap eighteen inches long and half an inch thick. And at other times with his fists.

Her father adjusted his hearing aid.
‘A man had to keep his head up. Play a man’s role …’

He was trying to put his life into perspective. She looked at him closely, probably for the first time in many years. His face criss-crossed with lines like tracks through bushland, battered by years in the sun, the eyes lifeless with sad memories and his body shrunken by age and illness. Not a figure to incite fear.

He was powerless and distressing, so now she dared to cross the barrier which had lain between them for so long, and asked occasional questions.

‘I was the only boy and I copped the lot. I wasn’t allowed to look cross-eyed at my sisters. To him they were little godesses …’

The two of them had been talking like this for an hour: a long time for a dying man.

There was a rattle of cups outside in the hall, and she looked at her watch. Time to leave for the plane. How lives slip by …
* * *
She never saw her Dad again.

His death had taken a long time, and it was often painful. The medical people tried to persuade him and his children to take the central roles in a legal test case against the fibro manufacturer. Her father would be examined and interviewed and there would be a bedside court hearing … There would be an autopsy too, because they couldn’t prove absolutely the cause of his illness until after death.

A win would mean big money, they said, and it would pave the way for other sufferers to obtain just compensation.

His children couldn’t think of anything more horrible for a dying man than having to deal with barristers and courts. They didn’t want him prodded and verbally pushed around. The idea of a postmortem horrified them. They rejected the requests.

So her Dad died poor, and in peace. He’d suffered enough.


© June Saville 2008. Not to be reproduced without express written permission of the author.

HIDDEN MEANINGS - married to a bi-sexual?

In 25 years of marriage I never once saw her naked. We conceived our children huddled under a sheet, with her nightgown held just so, and she locked the bathroom door whenever she took a shower.

She dressed as the nuns taught her to. In layers. With as much as possible hidden from view at any given moment. A work of art, the way she did that. 


In a way it was sexy, having to guess the sum of all the individual parts I glimpsed over the years. An occasional nipple. The soft skin between her breasts. The vision of brown fluff as I entered her. 


I can’t even swear to it that she really ever had an orgasm, although I did try with her. Time and again. She didn’t seem all that interested, but I wanted to witness the explosion of her emotions for the first time. All that penned up sexual energy … The release would have been a mighty sight to behold. So I caressed her softness, and worked at her button whenever I got the chance. But it seemed worse than useless. She never seemed to get a release. And more often than not she was as bitchy as hell all next day.

So, even while she lived, I mostly pursued my own path to satisfaction …

* * *
It was steamy, the night he first came to her room. An enclosing, fierce tropical heat. Sweat seeped from the pores of her skin into the gossamer stuff of her negligee, and little droplets of it clung to her cheeks. She hadn’t known he was coming.

‘It’s so hot,’ she said.

‘Yes, it is,’ he agreed, and sat on the day bed in the corner. ‘So very hot.’

‘A wine?’ And she brought the clear crystal glass to him, and took hers to the deep chair across the room.

‘It was special, last night. The dinner ... You ...’

She said nothing, and sipped pensively.

‘I haven’t been with a woman for so long. Nor even sat with one since she died. My wife. Since she died …’

He raised his glass. There. On the daybed. His sienna eyes pierced the space between them; his silver-grey hair glinted in a shaft of bright light.

She sat in the chair. Occasionally moving to him to pour more wine. And when she did, a shaft of light, perhaps the same one, penetrated her thin gown. It penetrated her gown, and threw her body into relief. When this happened, he could sense the silkiness of her. Sense more than see, the curves of her. Almost see. But not quite. Sense the erectness of her. The roundness of her. Almost see. But not quite.

They spoke for ages. Desultory. In fits and starts. Spoke. Touching here and there on the past, the present, the future. Touching. Almost touching. But not quite.

And then: ‘Will you do something for me? Do something very special?’

She looked towards him. Wondering.

‘Will you? Will you show me you? All of you?’

His entire being asked. Sought her consent.

‘Please?’

Her body had already agreed to his petition. Everything about her poised to meet his need. His need so apparent, so urgent. She nodded.

Nodded and placed the glass on the small table beside her chair. And she rose to stand in the shaft of light. To stand there, and accede to his necessity.

* * *
How to pin down the past, in order to understand the now … To make sense of the half truths, and the contradictions. To apply the filter of reason to the mix of happenings so that one might rid one’s view of contamination by passion and idealism and trust.

To remember the beginning. The comfort of having each day planned on your behalf. The enjoyed laziness of not having to think. Such a contrast to competition in the larger world. Lulled. Lulled into inaction. Lulled into a trap which tightens oh so gently. So gently that soon it surrounds and engulfs you, leaving you incapable, ineffectual … without value.

His first wife was supposed to be ‘a lovely person’. A talented cook, good at flower arranging, sewing, interior design. All those traditional wifely things. 


But in recent times her friends cast little gems of information about. How hard she worked. Always at his beck and call. How she would choose some dress or other at a local store, but couldn’t pay for it until he’d inspected it and given the go ahead. Her distress when he insisted the children go off to boarding school at an early age. Her loneliness when they had gone.

* * *
I put women on a pedestal, to live there untouched by the filth in life. I guard a woman and protect her so that she may go on nurturing and caring. A woman is the mother of my children, so I look after her. Cater for her every whim and fancy.

Men deal with the rubbish.

Even my young second wife … We’ll have no children. Or dogs or cats for that matter. That’s our deal. But I will protect her. Protect her from life at large. In return, I bed her. She’s good in bed. A new age woman, unafraid of impropriety. Exciting. Abandoned and exciting.

Around the time I met this second one I worried quite a lot. Whether I was doing the right thing ... what people would think. In some ways, whether I could keep up with her. She was pretty bookish. An independent sort of person too. I wondered whether this was the way to go at all really. There were so many options …

She’s no madonna. My first wife was my madonna. This one is an exhilarating pastime. An alibi as well. A legal wife removes suspicion. Provides unmitigated respectability.

* * *
In the rainforest one day, not long after they met, she glimpsed a deep and private moment. He was walking a few metres ahead beneath the thick green canopy when he came to a sparkling trickle of a stream. The waters tinkled over round coloured pebbles. 


His frame seemed to lose its strength as he came to that stream, and he sank, slowly, to his knees, to his knees at the edge of the crystal water, and bent forward as though to taste the coolness of it.

But she was wrong, for the sound of his wrenching sobs gushed from him as the water stain spread, unnoticed, on his dampened shirt. His head on his arms, there in the shallow water, he sobbed deeply and painfully. A private agony, flooding from a hidden spring.

After thirty-two years of being there, his wife was gone. His wife and the mother of his children. It hadn’t been the same without a dependable woman to call his own, a woman who was known and respected by everyone in the town. You didn’t get the same respect, as a single man …

And now, with someone new, especially so quickly, they looked at him sideways. A bit shocked. No, it wasn’t the same without her.

Watching nearby, his second wife walked away. Excluded. Excluded and numb. What was the source of this agony? The memory of his first wife, she supposed. He was entitled to his privacy, of course, but would she ever truly know him? Would he ever cry for her?

He seemed so caring, so considerate of my every caprice. He’d plan each day for me. Plan my day ahead for me. With suggestions and arrangements and quiet insistence. Until I found I simply fitted into the mold he prepared. Which, incidentally, also served him well.

We didn’t fight, each day was peaceful, and he seemed quite happy. We were the ideal husband and wife. I cooked and cleaned for him. Wrote business letters for him. Dropped my career for him. Looked good by his side. Made birthday cakes for his grandchildren. Enjoyed our intimate moments. I loved him.

My trust secured my complacency.

* * *
Sex can be a tyrant …

Women seem relatively uncomplicated about it, in my experience. My madonna … Sex passed her by. She didn’t seem to feel much at all. A block of stone in bed. Unbent enough to be agreeable, that’s all. Let him have his way …

The new one. She’s different. She enjoys a bit of rough and tumble. She’s really something. It’s exciting to play with her. Bring her on just when I want. And withhold satisfaction too. To see her reaction. And maybe punish her a bit for bad behaviour …

Sex. It rules from day one. We were a big family … four girls and five boys, and there was always some hanky panky or other. The farm was our education. Animals leave nothing to the imagination, and here was an avid scholar.

I was a big boy. And attractive. Big for my age. So there were plenty of opportunities. I could have whatever I wanted. The trouble was, I suppose, I didn’t really know what I did want. So I dithered around not doing much, keeping myself to myself most of the time. I think I was shy.

We had paying guests at the house when I was about eleven, and there was a knot hole in the wall near the linen cupboard. It was easy to prise a bit bigger hole in the gnarled wood. Enough to see into the bathroom beyond, and I crouched there, and after time I could have passed almost any exam you could throw at me. It’s amazing what bathrooms are used for.

My graduation came that very year, and my tutor was a woman I’d been watching through the knot hole for about a week. One morning I was there, mesmerised by another subject. A man on the other side of the wall. She caught me watching.

The changing expressions on her face were something to behold ... amusement turning to realisation, turning to grasp of opportunities presented, and finally, to lust.

She didn’t do anything just then. But next day I was throwing stones into the creek down the back of the farm, as was my wont, when she walked by, casual-like. She sat down in the long grass, and patted a spot beside her. Inviting me to join her. Inviting me to touch her. Inviting me to undo her buttons. Inviting me to explore her hills and valleys. Inviting me to undress. Inviting me to slip my finger inside her pants. Inviting me …

That was a blowout. The memory stayed with me at school where I concentrated even less than usual. And the nuns thrashed me for inattention, not understanding that I was living my experience all over again, surprised and tremulous at what had happened. There, sitting in the fifth class desk, thinking about it.

* * *
He was such a mixture. Always just out of my reach. The essence of him just out of my reach. Always. There was always something. Something unexplainable. Curious and inexplicable.

With him I felt secure and insecure, loved and hated, central and marginalised, needed and repelled, manipulated, used, cherished, cheated, beguiled, passionate and plundered.

He was charming, stimulating, insincere, perfidious, affectionate, disingenuous, generous, mean, mocking, secretive, bewitching, enigmatic, evasive, loveable, charismatic, a sham. And he drank too much.

I loved him.

Bits and pieces can be crucial. They confirm memories. Without them parts of your life slip away.

I know I’m sentimental, and I don’t see any harm in that. But he did. He resented my sentimentality, and discouraged it. Belittled me for it.

Sometimes there is a sense of loss. Loss for my mother’s silk scarf. For the pieces of rough opal my father gave me. For the marquisette ring of my first love. For the Pete Seeger platter from the sixties. My school badge with the prefect bar swinging beneath the motto. A nostalgic collection of lace handkerchiefs.

Some of my favourite small pieces went missing at times, and I believed they had been stolen. But really, there was no monetary value in any of them, so I must have been wrong.

* * *
Money’s important. It’s power and freedom. It’s necessity. Money. To have and to hold. Strength. Authority. A buttress against invasion. A baton to wield.

She’s different. Mawkish and sentimental. Money comes and goes with her. No problem. But little useless things turn her on. She touches and looks, and tears can come to her eyes. Over the smallest item.

It was a real temptation, just occasionally, to spirit away something or other, and watch her reaction. No harm in that …

* * *
I developed asthma the summer after we were married. A struggle for breath. A nervous tingle and creep through my being and a tight band around my chest.

His children came to visit. Often. An invasion of the house which was never my personal space. They were pleasant enough at first. But they spoke together of underground things. They spoke sentences with two meanings, with forked tongues. Their memories rekindled in malice to confront me. Secrets hinted at, to alienate this stranger who stole their mother’s place.

And he never took my part. Just made excuses for them, and passed me my asthma puffer …

* * *
When I was a boy we would go to town for supplies and I’d run down to the railway yards while my mother did the shopping. Maybe I’d meet a couple of mates on the way, and by this time we knew what we’d find among the tangle of steel tracks and creaking trucks. We’d find this bloke. Old to us. He’d give us sixpence if we’d stand there and watch him jerk off. A bargain eh?

Not much later I earned two bob for other duties …

Experiences with the bloke down the tracks didn’t go astray a year or two later when I went off to the Brothers. It was an agricultural boarding college and because I wasn’t the greatest with the academics, I mostly ended up looking after the stables and milking the cows. It was in the soft hay that I did my time.

My apprenticeship there began when this new brother caught me whispering at Saturday afternoon mass, and he dragged me by my ear all the way down the hall to his office, and he made me take off my knickers. My knickers and my underpants, and made me stand there, bollicky, right in front of him, shirt hitched up, showing everything below my navel. 


He kept me there for a full five minutes while he stared at me, unmoving. With a sort of a leer on his face. Finally he growled: ‘you’re for it son; bend over.’ And he grabbed the wide leather belt hanging ready on the wall behind him and, grunting to improve his technique, brought that thing down on my bum in six agonising sweeps. I bit my lip to stop screaming.

A bit later on that evening I was down checking the horses when this same brother sidled up behind me, and put his hand on my shoulder. He had that leer on his face again, but it seemed he wanted to be a bit more kindly, for he said: ‘You do a good job in this stable son.’


Anyway, he chatted for a while and twenty minutes later I found myself on my back in the hay with his face on my pecker showing me what he could do. Then he asked me if I could manage any better on him. It was weird. My knees really shook when he suggested it. But I had a go and didn’t feel too bad about it. Not too bad at all.

Strange, eh? I mean. A brother!

* * *
Sometimes you’d wonder what went on in his head. There would be hints. Clues, but nothing definite. I sometimes felt there was something hidden about him, something very private and not altogether in my interest. But for the most part I’d toss aside uneasy thoughts and get on with life.

He did some strange things which, in retrospect, and if my suspicions were correct, would give a peculiar slant to his character. For instance, when I was vacuuming the carpet, I’d discover a single coin under a chair where he normally didn’t sit. As though he was testing me. As though he could confirm by the presence or absence of the coin whether I’d cleaned under the chair that week. Did I do the housework thoroughly? It happened too regularly to be an accident, so in the end I’d leave the coin where it was and damn him for his attempt at control.

Then there was the cupboard in the hall which he named as his own. He told me he kept some things there which he wished to keep private. That seemed fair enough, so I respected his request and left it alone. Except for dusting. And it was then that I noticed he’d placed, ever-so-carefully, a thin strand of cotton just-so in the runner of the sliding door of the cupboard. Nice to be trusted …

He told me how he’d read once about domestic servants who wanted to steal something from their masters. The idea was to continually rearrange items in the house, each time moving the target article just a little. Maybe from a shelf to a cupboard to a shelf to another room.


Then, when it was likely to be out of sight out of mind, the item would be filched – right out of the house. He mentioned this in passing a couple of times over the years. And I noticed he was always re-organising cupboards and shifting things from one room to another.

* * *
I’d been married about ten years to her when it occurred to me she was probably approaching menopause. The thought sent prickles up the back of my neck. She didn’t seem to have any of the symptoms they talk about. You know … depression and illness and such. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind, and it started to affect my feelings towards her. 


I like full, ripe fruit. I could not stand the prospect of anything shriveling up. Suddenly she didn’t seem so attractive, and I started to encourage her to do things without me. She enrolled in art classes … that sort of thing. And I was able to spend more time in my own way.

The beach near our place had always been a magnet to me. I suppose I’d been a bit of a voyeur for years, enjoying the passing parade. I loved to watch the young people in their g-strings: succulent fruit, ripe for the picking. The boys really turned me on. 


Now, I decided, I would not try to hide from myself why I was there. I would indulge my feelings more often, dwelling on the impulses within my body as it celebrated this beauty. I would enjoy the quickening, the tingling in my swollen crotch, the breath which came faster now …

It was time.

* * *
A couple of years ago things seemed to change for us. He wasn’t so attentive. Suggested I take art classes, and he gave me time to myself. Mind you, there’d always been business trips for a week or so at a time … 


Anyway, now he didn’t seem to be so intense, and in some ways I felt free.

There was time too for thinking, thinking and remembering … remembering little things.


Like when he left a motel receipt in one of his suit pockets. Made out to him, but acknowledging payment for a room and breakfast for two. I thought it may have been his brother ... company on a business trip. 


One day I came home from art class and as I drove up the hill to our home he drove down and there was a young boy of about fifteen in the car with him. A blonde boy with curly hair, with him in the car. I hadn’t seen the boy before and wondered why he was there. I forgot to ask …

He had an unusual mannerism. When he was uptight, and didn’t realise people were watching, his hand would stiffen and he’d wave it at his side. Effeminate? Almost. But not quite.

I was raking over memories, dissecting a relationship. A search for meanings. For meaning and hidden meanings. Did I really understand our marriage? Was he the man of my dreams after all? Was this all an abomination? Something unimaginable? After all? I began to feel more unsettled each day, but I needed to comprehend some truths.

* * *
Ah… Life is such a smorgasboard. Select an experience here, another there. Taste, select, accept, reject.

I needed a wife, but she was an experiment too. How it would be with a young, vibrant modern woman. Comparing. And controlling. The opportunity for another experience. A new buzz. It can be fun to see women dangle at the end of your string …

I still want her around. She’s a good cook, and people seem to like her … that doesn’t do me any harm. But she can do her own thing and I’ll do mine. Times are different and I don’t care any more. No more double life. No more loss of real freedom.

Time to get on with life in all its possibilities.

* * *
Mourning him. As though he’d died. I am an empty vessel, somehow betrayed and cheated. Without knowing how or why.

I combed through his papers and pockets. Looking for answers. Somehow knowing of his betrayal. Knowing through a sixth sense, of his betrayal. He had been absent so often of late, hadn’t he?

It was time for me to know. To put aside the feelings of apprehension.

And so when I noticed the video tape thrust to the back of his drawer, I took it up and, without pausing, slid it into the slot of the VCR, and pressed ‘play’.

*
© June Saville 2009 All rights reserved. Not to to be reproduced without the express written permission of the author.

SIGNS FROM THE BODY

My shoulders
bear the weight of my heart.
They tighten and scream with tension.
The pain, the tears… the deep distress.

Sometimes I want to live without people,
for the sadness of rejection is too much…
Why should I put myself
in the way of so much melancholy?

Betrayal.

Dare to trust?
Do I dare it?
Trust is a gift which,
when misused,
leaves open the path to a crumbling
of the spirit.
Do love and companionship warrant
the risk?
Should I dare again?
At this moment….NO!

Solitude seems safe and manageable.
But can we betray even ourselves?


© June Saville 19 November, 1998
All rights reserved.
No reproduction without
Written permission of the author

LAMB CHOPS AND APPLE PIE - Childhood in Australia

‘Mother’ meant warm cuddles, love and lots of praise.

She meant the whiff of fresh sponge cake in the oven of the Early Kooka, and pea soup on Sunday afternoons. She was Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. She was floor polish and the pungent smell of ironing. And the taste of Laxettes.

While my father was The Back Yard, Mother was The House.

The Back Yard was often marked by mild horror.

On the other hand, The House was filled with light and bright colours. It was serene and encouraging and good fun. Only when my father came home was there a change; when tension poked its head in the door and stayed there until he slammed that door shut on his way to work next day.

Sundays were different. That’s when my father slept all morning to get over the big working week, and we all went off to tennis in the afternoon. My mother and father had done their courting at grade tennis matches and the game meant a lot to them. They were still great players, and my sister and I used to watch them in awe as they moved around the hard yellow-coloured surface. It was a novel view of these two important people.

In those days my mother shone, with her lithe body and strong handsome face and soft eyes. My father was tenacious, and together in a doubles match they were unbeatable.

To us, the kids, the best part of the tennis afternoon was still the ‘cuppa’ halfway through. That’s when sponges and the slices and the scones appeared from baskets and disappeared along with steaming cups of tea. For some reason my sister and I were the only children there; I suppose because my parents were a little older than the other half dozen or so local couples who played. We became the centre of attention, with the adults seemingly obliged to have fun with us, and ask about school, and pass remarks about our new dresses, or just smile.

When the shadows grew long, the men would roll up the net and throw it and the balls into a big box in the tennis shed and it would be pea soup time. My mother always put a huge boiler of pork bones, onions and split peas on the Kooka on Sunday mornings, and we came home to steaming bowls of the best pea soup in the business. She always invited old Mr Vaughan from next door to share with us, and he was good fun.

I remember Mr Vaughan sometimes asked my sister and I into his little house for lunch and served runny poached eggs topped with a slosh of blood red tomato sauce. It was a love/hate relationship. Not with Mr Vaughan; with the eggs.

* * *
Mother attracted people. They loved her for her kindnesses, her friendliness and her intelligence. I loved her for all of these things too, and also because she passed on to me her own passions which she had been unable to experience in full measure for herself.

She really adored music and won high praise with her early piano lessons. Grandmother was a musician and artist and encouraged her children. But Grandmother died when my mother was twelve, and she took with her the gentle cultural pursuits, including the music.

My grandfather was a rough labourer who drank to assuage his loss, and Mother left school and piano lessons to take up the household chores and be a substitute parent for her two brothers and sister.

So my mother encouraged me in my burgeoning love of music, and when we got our first radio set, we used to listen to the classical request programmes. Our favourite was the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1. I remember crouching to press my ear against the cloth- covered speaker to hear music through the crackle coming all the way from Sydney. Mind you, I did the same to hear ‘Mrs ‘Obbs” and ‘First Light Fraser’.

Later, I was to spend my first couple of pay packets on a huge old secondhand phonograph. It was the wind up variety with needles you had to change with each play, and lived in a wonderful polished cabinet. I bought one vinyl record to begin: Mantovani’s string version of ‘Charmaine’. The Tchaikovsky came in a several record set and was beyond my reach.

I wanted to learn to play an instrument, but my father couldn’t see the point.

* * *
But I did get to run bare foot through the bushland at the back of our home. There was a sweet smelling eucalyptus tree with a gnarled white trunk and scars where the sticky red gum seeped and congealed. That was our climbing tree.

A blue tongue lizard with no tail rustled through the bracken ferns nearby, and there were flannel flowers, and egg-and-bacon, and boronia, and mountain devils. The devils were seed pods that had spiky little ears and pointed noses and we used to take them home and Mum would make miniature dolls of them. Great Big Banksia Men and gumnut babies, and Christopher Robin, and Eeyore and Pooh Bear and even Toad of Toad Hall all lived in that bit of Australian bush. They’d wandered from the books in my wardrobe.

Mother took us for walks down the beach from a very early age. We’d clamber across the rocks and peer into the little pools where magic lay. There would be shells and star fish and sea anemones with their waving feelers. They were worlds of crystal clarity and pink and cream.

We’d drag our bare toes through the sand, and scratch important drawings with a stick, and sometimes we’d find cuttlefish to take home for the canaries.

At home, when it was wash-up time, my sister and I would dry while Mum washed. It was then she would spin stories of her childhood, mostly leaving out the bad bits, and concentrating on the picnics, and the people in her street, about the children’s joy when their father brought home sweets on pay nights, and the dances at the community hall they called the Butterbox. These were dream stories from faraway, with the mists of time blending with the steam from my mother’s dishes.

* * *
Ours was a lovely house for the period, built by Dad over years, and eventually it became one of the finest in our seaside town. But it wasn’t always that way. We started off with the four of us in a garage at the back of my grandfather’s home.

When Dad did begin building the new house he was called up for civil service during the war, and we stayed in the garage. They wouldn’t let him join the forces: carpentry was an essential occupation. During the week he’d work in Sydney as a foreman on search light installations and munitions factories, and most week-ends he’d be at home building the house, with Mum alongside helping. Months later we moved in when it was still unlined, and Mum would paint and sandpaper every spare minute during the week, so that Dad would notice a difference when he came home again.

In those days a man delivered the milk with a horse and cart and we’d rush out with a jug, and the warm milk would gush from a tap at the back. At first we had only a meat safe, a small cupboard with fly wire walls, and keeping food and milk was strictly short term. We soon enough graduated to an ice box, with the freezing blocks brought in a corn sack from the ice works a mile away. By the time we had a Hallstrom Silent Knight kerosene refrigerator the front part of the house was finished. Cold drinks from the fridge were wondrous.

Our mother washed and polished that house until it shone, and she scattered little ornaments and keepsakes around. We always knew what she’d like for birthdays and Christmas, and each year the collection would grow. Small Wedgwood jugs and figurines and vases and fine pieces of bone china made the house hers.

On her dressing table she had a crystal tray and powder bowl, and a silver mirror backed with a picture of Queen Elizabeth roses. These things were her memories and her treasures.

* * *
One afternoon when I was eleven Dad called my sister and I into the house and greeted us with a big grin. There was going to be a visitor to our house and that visitor would be small enough to fit into a shoe box. It would be most exciting. Mum seemed quietly troubled.

I added up two and two and decided we were going to have a brother. There was never any doubt that the new baby would be a boy.

I noticed my mother became more lethargic, taking naps in the middle of the day. I’m sure I didn’t connect any weight gain to the coming birth, although I knew vaguely that mothers did carry babies. There was no discussion at all about the technicalities.

Around that time my sister and I were bouncing on our beds, quite illegally, when Wendy noticed blood on my pants. My mother was horrified, and panicked. I could not go swimming she said, and I’d have to put bits of towelling between my legs, and I’d have to soak them and rinse them out carefully and … and … and …

No suggestion that this was a perfectly normal happening in the life of a young girl, even though I had ‘come’ a bit early. I was convinced I had a terrible illness; an illness that would wrench me away from my favourite pastime, the beach. None of my girlfriends had spoken about this, and we didn’t talk about sex and suchlike anyway. I was in despair.

I didn’t put births and periods together in my mind until I bought a book at the newsagents probably four years later. I could then tell my worried sister that no, she would not have a baby if she kissed her first boyfriend.

So I had no real idea what was going on with my Mum all the way through her pregnancy, and reality set in only months later when we were called out of class at school one afternoon. My father had come to pick us up early: our brother had arrived. He was beside himself. A son filled a void in his life. Girl children were really of not much account. But boys … !

Dad was the only boy child in a family of four, and his father had doted on the girls and even bashed him to make him a ‘man’. He always had to work extraordinarily hard for his father and received no tenderness in return. When his own first two children were girls it was too much to bear, and he had to wait another nine years for a son.

Girls were a burden and boys were mates. My father rarely showed any animation when he was around us and I don’t remember him making any toys or spending time playing. My sister and I often asked for a swing and I wanted a book shelf, but as children we never got them. Dad was the good provider though and we always had excellent food, clothing and shelter.

When my brother arrived we suddenly saw a new side to him. He played with my brother and made him things and they actually had real conversations as he grew older. He was spirited when my brother was around. When he was with us he withdrew into himself and ignored our presence. My sister and I were astounded at first, and later we just got angry.

On the other hand, Mother loved us all, and there was never a shadow of favouritism. Somehow we grew up loving our brother fiercely, and jealousy wasn’t part of the scene. I’m sure that was her doing. Mother the miracle-worker.

* * *
Dad always smoked and we always breathed it in. We didn’t know then what tobacco smoke could do. Later, I blamed my mother’s illness on a combination of this smoke and the asbestos in the fibro sheeting in the cottages Dad built. She began coughing a hacking cough, and could not breathe properly. She gave up tennis and lost weight, and became old before her time: transformed from a vibrant vigorous woman to a tiny gaunt and feeble physical wreck.

The doctors were puzzled. They told her to do away with her pet birds, suspecting they were implicated, and she travelled to Sydney for all sorts of horrific tests. A hospital technician, shaking his head, told one of my aunts that he saw no reason why elderly people should undergo such tortures, especially as they were unlikely to do them any good.

But Mum’s nimble brain remained active, and when they took her to a nursing home her eyes were the same as they had ever been … intelligent, insightful and kindly.

The staff loved her too and helped with little personal things as often as they could.

My sister arranged a small stand with pot plants outside her window and each day the gardener set a can of water out there for her. Mum would struggle out of bed and to a chair placed near the stand. She’d settle painfully onto the seat, breath whistling reluctantly into her lungs and out again. Then, when she had recovered a little, this wizened little person would water each plant separately, admiring the flowers and scratching around for weeds. In between plants she would drop back into the chair to replenish her strength.

When she could no longer do this, nor care for herself in any way Mother decided to die.

And she did just that.

She asked the nursing home chaplain to visit, and made sure she saw everyone she loved, seemingly making peace in her world. Then she ceased to eat and she ceased to drink.

She lay there for many days, as determined in her decision as she had been throughout her life. I saw tears come to her doctor’s eyes because the law wouldn’t allow him to shorten her misery.

‘One day there will be a way for doctors to help people such as your mother,’ he said.

All we were allowed to do was hold her hand and watch her battle to die.

* * *
Our mother asked us to put her ashes beneath a Queen Elizabeth rose bush, with flowers just like those on the back of her hand mirror. I have such a rose bush in my garden now, planted there the week she died. There is always a flower on her rose bush whenever I am troubled. It never lets me down.

© June Saville 2008. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced without written permission of the author.

SHARING A GREAT BOOK WITH YOU

I've begun reading a wonderful book of short stories and want to share it with you.

Nam Le is one of the Vietnamese boat people now making such a mark on Australian society with skills, determination and sheer hard work.

Still a baby in 1979, Nam Le journeyed with his family to make a new life in an unfamiliar land. He became a lawyer but, always a creature of his imagination, turned to writing in his spare time.

These efforts won a scholarship to the famed Iowa Writers Workshop in the USA, and now Mr Le is receiving world wide attention for his first published book The Boat.

The stories which serve as book ends to this collection speak of a Vietnamese background. In gentle rhythmic sentences the first story The Boat draws pictures of a sometimes taut relationship between a father and son. The two are influenced to varying degrees by former culture and new, by a life long lived and youth treading new paths. The dissonance is beautifully drawn.

It is the pages in between the two Vietnamese stories which have the critics gasping. Here Le is able to manifest people and situations naturally foreign to him in most persuasive ways.

He has an uncanny ability to burrow his way into the skins of people of other cultures, producing works of staggering insight.

These imaginary worlds are the results of assiduous research, not personal experience. Locations and the varied characters emerge fully rounded, despite the brevity of the narratives.

This passage is from Nam Le's story Cartagena:

He smiles now: a charming host. In the deflected light, I notice for the first time a flabbiness in his cheeks. His braided hair looks wet. We stand on the balcony and look out over the blacked-out barrio. There are valleys out there, and swells, and rises, all unseen by our eyes. The night air gives off traces of wood smoke, sewage. In the immediate candlelight, the glass on top of the walls glimmers hints of every colour, and it is beautiful.

Each story has a different character. I can't wait to read the rest.

The Boat is published by Hamish Hamilton.

UNKIND CUT! - a short story about a TV romance - by June Saville

Shit! Acting is just so hard.

You wring your psyche dry for twelve hours at a trot. You twist and you squeeze your inner self until reality and fictional character slide together, then at the end of it all you must disengage, and you’re not quite the same person any more.


This time it is a drama for TV and you are a social worker type who cares about people. Each shoot you screw yourself into emotional knots, worrying and caring for the down-and-outs in the story. You scream and you rant and you sob. You are noble and self-sacrificing. And sexy, a siren come-on and sometimes, a slut.


Seeing as you ask, I’d say I became aware of him only when we first went into rehearsal. As the cameras rolled, he impressed me with his acting ability, but I thought little about him otherwise. He was simply my opposite number; a guy who needed to become a leading man … to my leading lady.


Oh yes, he had a good body and a certain charisma, and I liked his smile, but it was work we were on about. Hard work. There was no time and no energy for personal explorations.


He was good at his craft, no doubt about it. And perceptive with his characterisation.


We all chewed the fat about approaches to be taken in the various scenes and I could see what he was on about. We’d sit around, the dramaturge and the cast, pinning down how our characters should react in the next take. He was on the ball all right.


It was in these sessions that I gradually became aware of his spin on the world. In lots of ways, we were spinning together or at least in the same direction. It seemed that we both genuinely cared about humanity. We had both walked across the bridge for
Reconciliation, although not together. We were both angry that Australian film and television had been for years swamped by overseas imports.


That’s the sum total really. Not a lot to know about someone is it?


As actors on the set, we combined well, agreeing easily on how to handle things. He was more experienced than I, but we got to respect each others’ professional points of view.


The plot mainly evolved around some of the more dramatic aspects of life in an inner-city office and the sub-text was certainly that our characters would get together in the long run. In the mean time scriptwriters toiled at delaying the day, and the emotional tension built nicely. You know how these things go …


For our characters, it was almost love on the run. Electricity zinged between us whenever we met, but there was never time to make the connection. Once we set up a dinner date, but his screen daughter from a former marriage took an overdose and shattered our chances yet again. There was a murder in the office on the very day we’d planned another get together. Any possibility of romance seemed thwarted at every turn.


Early in the series he got his gear off for a brief affair with another woman. We always had a postmortem with the crew, replaying the most recent episode, and this one was a revelation. He had great technique in the kissing department, and his hands were gentle and seductive. The other actress seemed to enjoy herself no end …

As an acting professional, I enjoyed watching his work. He moved beautifully, and had great timing, probably because he began his career on the stage. How did he treat me, you ask? Most of the time I don’t think I existed for him except as one of the other actors. He was friendly enough …

Sure, sometimes we sat together during breaks in shooting, sharing cups of coffee and desultory chat. I enjoyed those times, and I think he did too.

One day our characters had decided to meet socially, and something came up to delay the moment yet again. On the next shoot the dramaturge pressed the director to allow them to exchange a kiss, and she agreed. The idea was that the male character would apologise for not being able to make the date and when my character became angry about it, he’d stop her with a sizzling embrace. The scene was to be shot in a corridor near her office.

I was standing there, next to him, stirring my soul as you do, for IRATE. I let him have it – good and deep and blazing angry. Very professional. But then I had to look into his eyes in the middle of this anger, and his eyes were different and there was a rope of tension pulling us together. We lost sight of what was supposed to be happening. It was just him and me living up to the promise of all of those weeks of unwitting self-restraint.

We kissed for an eternity and I lost sense of time and place. He smelled like crisp new apples. When we finally returned to the present, the dramaturge and the director raved about the quality of our acting.

A lot seemed to change after that. We spent almost all of our coffee breaks in each other’s company, and extended this togetherness with dinner once or twice. Our on camera relationship was keeping pace, although often still stalled by writers consumed with delay … delay. To be honest, daily responsibilities hindered our reality as well, what with scripts, filming, PR commitments and others of life’s little problems. The whole world seems afflicted with a shortage of carefree moments.

One evening at dusk, we stole a stroll along the foreshore. An early crescent moon rode in the sky, and slight breezes riffled the casuarina trees. The sea had about it that incredibly deep blue colour that can come with that time of day.

We walked and chatted for quite some distance, delighting in the freedom, when he stopped and took off his sweater, to place it on a grassy knoll not far from the sand. We both sat there, enjoying the sight of a wayward ibis late on its journey home. Then he turned to me and touched my cheek with a fingertip, to trace a wandering line across my lips. I absorbed that dear face, his eyes bent downwards, lashes caressing his cheeks.

Things progressed until we lay full length on the knoll, side-by-side, entranced, and learning secrets. We remained there for minutes, absorbed in each other, not touching, and yet so close I could feel his breath on my skin, sure he could hear my pulsing body. The scent of crisp apples returned and I rose toward him, restrained no longer …

It was then that the director, God bless her, called ‘Cut’.

© June Saville 2008. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced without written permission of the author.

PARENT IN PAIN - a poem by June Saville

Parenthood can spawn the most precious of life's moments, but there are times we don't speak about, when we may experience thoughts and feelings that we don't admit even to ourselves:

They withdraw and return, at will.
We stand punished
For unnamed transgressions.
They need. We need.
They need not to need,
Brutal in their desire for independence.

Oh, the unfairness of being a parent
Aware of the requirement NOT to cling.
Our burden … begin letting go
From the moment of birth.
We live by that creed, however difficult.
However unrecognised.
A helpmate when required.
A punching bag ...
As necessary.

The good times outweigh the bad.
I think.

I know
That right now I feel a wrenching hurt ...
A knife that cuts my heart to ribbons.


© June Saville 2008 All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced without written permission of the author.

SEX AT SIXTY-FIVE - two friends share a confidence - by June Saville

There was something wrong. Something different. And Velma was sniffing the breeze.

Theirs was a long term ritual. Every week day Monica and Velma watched Days of Our Lives while curled up on Monica’s sagging two seater lounge, and sucking cups of Bushells tea. One sugar and a splash of milk for Mon, and for Velma, three sugars and black.

The machinations of the Salem crew always played out in total silence, but Mon and Vel’s post mortem was fierce, and punctuated by a second cuppa and some peanut butter sandwiches.

There was rarely a break in the routine. They’d watched daytime tele together since 1985 when Velma and her Fred moved into the fibro triple front next door. Mon lost Wilbur early in 1980 and had lived alone in their two bedroom brick ever since.

On week-ends when Fred was home Mon kept herself to herself except for a trip to the local club on Saturday nights to play Bingo. But of late, things had been different. Mon had been doing things she wouldn’t talk about.

Velma reached for her third sandwich and broke the triangle of white bread in two. She licked her finger and trawled the plate with it to collect crumbs. She sucked at them and prepared to attack the sandwich itself.

‘Mon … Are you ready to tell me? Come on, spill the beans. It’s a fella isn’t it?’

Monica looked sideways at her friend, and then pushed back a lock of silver grey hair from her face. About six weeks ago she’d had it permed for the first time Velma could remember, and now it was getting too long.

‘Come on Mon. You don’t keep things from me!’

Thoughtful, Mon rose from her lumpy seat and limped over to the kitchen to refill the teapot. The bright purple flowers on her shift clashed awfully with the bright orange of the bench top.


‘Well, I suppose.’

Velma settled her bulk more comfortably, in anticipation.

‘We met at Bingo.’

‘Ah …’

‘He was across from me and we were both going really well with our cards, chalking up numbers like mad. I had only legs eleven to go and it stayed there for about three numbers and I was sweating. I hadn’t won for weeks.’

‘One number for three turns!’

‘Mmmm. Anyway, it came up. Legs eleven. And I yelled “Bingo” as loud as I could, real excited.

Then I realised he’d yelled too. The man across the table. At the same time. And we looked over at each other. And I saw his eyes. And he was as excited as I was.’

Mon had forgotten to put the lid on the teapot, and the window glass was becoming opaque with rising steam.

“So we had to share the fifty dollars, and when we came back to our seats after collecting it, he ushered me into my chair in such a posh way.’

‘Truly!’

‘It was nice to be treated special again. By a man. Before I knew it my heart was saying “Bingo” too.’

Velma waddled over and gathered her friend in a bear hug.

‘Oooh. How lovely!’ She had tears in her eyes.

Mon broke away from the hug, still miles away. Then, as though on automatic, she took the teapot and a second plate of sandwiches waiting ready on the bench top and placed them on the coffee table next to the lounge. She sat down again.

‘ We used to sit on the cliff at dusk, eating ice cream.’

‘Mmmmm.’

‘We had some really nice times ...’

Velma was tucking in, although intrigued.

‘So what’s happenin now? Is it still on?’ An oily glob of peanut butter dropped to her lap, unnoticed.

‘Well, not at the moment …’

‘Oh! Oh well … ‘

‘No. No, it’s not on now.’

‘Oh.’

‘No. It was good while it lasted. In some ways. But … ‘

‘Yeah. I suppose. I s’pose there’s two ways of lookin’ at these things. I s’pose.’

Monica shrugged, and gazed out of the window at a magpie pecking for grubs in her lawn.

‘Yes. There’s different ways of looking at things …’

Velma plumped herself around on one hip so she could look straight at her friend, sitting there on the lounge.

’You know, I s’pose if you look at it fair and square, you’ve probly had a bit of a lucky escape.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Yeah. I reckon.’

Mon was grinning from ear to ear. Suddenly.

‘Yes. I reckon too.’

This was more like her Mon. Velma swirled the tea in her cup to make sure of the last grain of sugar.

‘A bloke’s good for a bit of company. Yeah. But once they get long in the tooth things change.

Then they just want a cook. A servant.’

They shared a long silence. Then Mon said: ‘Men are scared to be by themselves you know.’

‘Yeah ... but it’s more than that. They’ve got egos. Egos are what gets them in knots.’

‘I agree with that!’

‘Yeah, they like a woman around to make ‘em look good, but you try and contradict ‘em or want your own way and you’ve had it. They can’t cope. Nope. They just want a cook.’

The silence was more comfortable this time, and Velma took over the pouring of the tea.

‘Remember, only one sugar please Vel. Trying to cut down on carbohydrates. Made myself a promise to get into a size sixteen.’

‘Don’t forget the chocolate cake I brought in. You’ll have a piece of that?’

‘Oh … Okay ...’ The magpie had caught a grub and she could see it wiggling in its death throws, trapped there in the maggie’s beak.

‘We did share a lot. Movies and books. We liked the same films you know. And books, like I said. Wilbur Smith ... Colleen McCullough.

Velma was rummaging in the fridge and came back with two plates laden with chocolate cake.

She passed Monica a pressure pack of cream, and Monica squirted a tall rosette of airy white onto her cake.

‘That’s what happens, in the beginnin. It’s amazing how many common interests they find. In the beginnin ...’ said Velma.

‘ … And music. He seemed to like everything that I did. Amazing really. The young ones’d call it synchronisity.’

‘Synchron ... What?’

‘I mean, we really got on well. And jokes! Did he have a cupboard full of jokes. Always there ready ... ‘ She smiled in her remembering, ‘Here’s one. Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Old Lady.’

‘Old Lady who?’

‘I didn’t know you could yodel!’

Velma began to shake in mirth, her rolls of fat a dancing bean chair.

‘Oh Mon, you are mad!

‘He was a dreadful driver though. It was like risking your life every time you got in beside him. He didn’t ever seem to see the cars coming. And roundabouts! What a hassle! He should be dead.’

The maggie was stabbing its beak into the grass again.

‘He was nice though …’

‘Now Mon, if it’s over, it’s over. There’s nothin’ worse than a man you don’t want ruling the roost around the place. Don’t forget the bad things Mon ...’

‘Mmmm ... But I reckon you’re wrong about only wanting a cook. One night at his place he sat me down to a beautiful meal. Tablecloth, candles and all. Fillet steak and three veg ... He looked wonderful there, in the soft light. A pretty good looker. For his age.’

The cake was all gone now, and the tea leaves were showing at the bottom of the cups.

‘Do I know ‘im Mon? Come on …’

‘Well don’t go teasing me for the rest of my life if I tell you. Promise?’

Velma drew her pudgy figures over her chest.

‘Cross me heart.’

Monica’s look was meant to pierce right through to Vel’s conscience.

‘True. Honest I won’t.’

Monica looked out of the window again, then said: ‘Harry Roberts down at the post office. You know … on the counter.’

Velma was impressed.

‘Well! I say! You devil you!’

Mon’s face turned pink.

‘Now you promised.’

‘He’d be a good catch. If you wanted a man.’

‘You think so?’

‘Well … Good job … Clean. Nice smile. Funny nose though. And ‘e could have a bit more hair.’

‘Anyway, it was a lovely meal ... It was nice of him to cook for me.’

‘Well, why not? It’s about time men turned their hands to the kitchen. Did you ever have ‘im over?

Here?’

‘Mmmm. You know when you and Fred went to Noosa for the week-end?’

‘Yeah? You crafty thing.’

Velma smoothed the floral arm of the lounge chair.

‘Did you ever … You know …’

Monica’s face turned from pale rose pink to a light shade of vermilion.

‘What? Oh ... Well ...’

‘Come on Mon. Did he ever kiss you?’

Mon balanced on the edge of her chair.

‘Mmmm … Well … Yes. He did.’

‘That night?’

Now Monica looked as though she could crawl under the chair.

‘Not then … no. But we used to talk on the phone all the time. One Friday night we’d been chatting on for a full hour and he said: “Mon, I want to see you tonight; be with you. Damn this phone nonsense.” And he asked if he could come over. Right there and then. I mean what could I do?’

Velma was enjoying herself, eager for the next revelation.

‘I don’t s’pose you minded too much.’

‘He did seem sort of ... urgent. Anyway, he came. Half an hour later. In nice slacks and his dark brown shirt. I noticed he’d put on some Old Spice ... a bit too much really.’

‘And ...’

‘Well ...’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, he came in through the door. And I could smell the after shave right off. Can I have another cup, Velma?’

Velma filled Mon’s cup from the teapot.

‘It’s probly a bit cold.’

‘By this we were standing in the middle of the lounge room when he grabbed hold of me and planted a kiss on my mouth. Hands everywhere. I must admit it made me feel pretty gooey.’

‘How about you!’

‘Anyway, he was breathing deep and so was I. All tingling I was. From top to toe.’

Monica eyes were transfixed on a spot in the middle of the patterned carpet.

‘He was sweating. Then, before I knew it we were tumbling around on the spare bed. Rolling around and all hot ... Us and the Old Spice. We were there about a minute or so, just long enough for me to wonder what I was doing. I mean, it was all a bit sudden ... We’d enjoyed our talks. And our outings. But this was different. I mean. At our age.’

‘Yeah. But only a minute though?’

‘No, I mean ... We were there, on the bed. Rolling on the bed for just about a minute. Before he had my blouse off. And then my bra. And there he was with no shirt. And only his undies. And then no undies. And I had no undies.’

Velma had stopped breathing.

‘I noticed he was still limp, but he began pushin’ himself against me. I could feel the flab on me stomach. Then he sort of angled to get his paunch out of the way ... he’s got a bit of a beer gut.

He grunted and groaned, and it was as though I wasn’t there any more. He was all taken up with himself.

‘I was shy I suppose – too shy to interrupt him. I tried to help him along. Stroking and cooing. But no go. And he kept at it. And time went on. And he kept at it. A lather of perspiration he was.

By this time I was really turned off.’

Velma began breathing again.

‘I remember noticing the glow of the street light coming through the curtains, and the pattern of the bedspread. He had a small tattoo on his back too. A ship’s anchor. And then I noticed the daddy long legs spider clinging to the corner of the room. Must dust that off tomorrow, I thought to myself.’

‘Fair dinkum!’

Monica was deep in the memory and had completely forgotten her embarrassment.

‘True. Anyway, his penis was still the centre of his world. It was a real battle for him. Like forcing a wet chamois into a coke bottle. I was just the bottle.’

Velma’s rolls of fat were jitterbugging.

‘So I tried to hasten things a bit. Swinging with him, trying to get a bit of rhythm going. He grunted with each shove and sighed with each push. Occasionally he would whisper that he loved me. As though to convince himself. But you know, what I might really feel, or want, just wasn’t part of the scene at all.’

‘How amazing. The buggers are just so full of themselves.’

‘I started thinking: “I’m being used here. He’s massaging his own ego as much as anything.” I thought: “Blow this. I’m not putting up with it.” So I quietly slid off the bed and asked him if he wanted a cup of tea.’

‘Oh Mon, what a joke!’

‘Well, it might seem that way now. But it wasn’t very funny. Really. It was sad. It was a case of a man’s ego getting in the way of a perfectly good relationship.’

‘You think so?’

‘I mean, if he’d taken things more slowly you don’t know what might have happened.’ Mon sneaked a glance at her friend.

‘You know yourself Velma that a woman’s most erogenous zone is between her ears. Massage that first and there’s a chance with the rest. A woman’s got to feel good about a fella. Don’t you think?’

‘Yes, I do. ‘

‘Why don’t men learn? They need companionship too. The same as we do. A bit of caring.
Sharing of hopes and dreams.’

She pulled a colourful handkerchief from a pocket and dabbed, absentminded, at the corner of an eye. Then she stuffed the handky down the front of her dress, suddenly angry.

‘They just muck things up by thinking about themselves too much. Keeping up with their own idea about themselves.’

Mon had left the lounge behind and was pacing up and down on the carpet.

‘Me, I’d probably come good in the sexual stakes if he’d only taken things easy.’

‘And he probly would of too. You’re right Mon.’

‘Anyway, next day I was a cot case. Threw my back out with all the action, and I had to go off to the chiropractor. Haven’t been quite the same since.’

‘Oh no!’

‘No sooner had I got home from the chiropractor when he was on the phone again, apologising for being inept. Truly!’

‘You’re jokin. ‘

‘I didn’t give a damn whether he was inept or not. I didn’t want a rampaging bull in my bed right then anyway. I’d been there years ago.’

Outside in the garden, the magpie had flown high into a large gum tree.

‘A bit of gentle petting would have been the ticket. Build up the trust.’

‘Too right Mon.’

‘That way the flames will come.’

‘Too right Mon.’

‘The upshot of it was that he rang me again about two days later. Hadn’t even heard from him in between.’

‘Hurt ‘is ego I don’t wonder.’


‘You know what he said?’

‘Nope. What?’

‘You can believe this if you want to ... He said he was thinking of going to the doctor for a prescription ... for Viagra.

‘I didn’t return his calls after that.’


© June Saville 2008 All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced without written permission of the author.