Proudflesh

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DEBORAH ROBERTSON ... my mother and I learnt about the nature of wounds: between the wound and the scar there is proudflesh ... Across the surface of the wound, stealthy and irrevocable, grow the bridges of capillary and connective tissue. The flesh is now Schiaparelli pink or red; it is drunk with blood. Proudflesh is the flesh of healing but it is too tender and miraculous to last; it has its moment and is gone. London in the Eighties; Perth in the Nineties. Oz Lamb, Meat W e e k l y, the body of the poet; Dregs Draught, C r e a m magazine, the poet’s daughter in the flesh ... perhaps. Proudflesh is a book of stories about bodies — various, human, vulnerable — and the histories they carry with them like suitcases that must eventually arrive, even if ‘last seen in Athens’. In that arrival, anything may happen, including the possibility of love. Stylish, perceptive and highly readable, Proudflesh introduces a writer of power and accomplishment.

Cover photograph by Simon Obarzanek.

Deborah Robertson was born in Bridgetown, Western Australia, in 1959. She studied at Curtin University, and currently teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University.

Photograph by Jane Turner.

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roud lesh DEBORAH ROBERTSON

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS

First published 1997 by FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS 193 South Terrace (POBox 320), South Fremantle Western Australia 6162. Copyright © Deborah Robertson, 1997. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Consultant Editor Wendy Jenkins. Designer John Douglass. Production Manager Cate Sutherland. Typeset by Fremantle Arts Centre Press and printed by Lamb Print. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Robertson, Deborah, 1959 - . Proudflesh. ISBN 1 86368 205 8. I. Title. A823.3

The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through the Department for the Arts.

Australia

Council for the Arts

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation

for Michael and Joan and Marion

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Earlier versions of some of these stories were previously published in Fremantle Arts Review, No Substitute (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1990) and Summer Shorts (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993). ‘Babyhead’ was awarded the Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Fiction Award for 1991. Material quoted in ‘Consuming Passions I’ is from: ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber); ‘I Say A Little Prayer’, words and music by Hal David/Burt Bacharach (Casa David Music/New Hidden Valley Music), reproduced by permission of MCA Music Australia Pty Ltd and Rondor Music (Australia) Pty Ltd, unauthorised reproduction is illegal. Details of Sylvia Plath’s clothes in ‘Consuming Passions II’ were drawn from Anne Stevenson’s biography Bitter Fame (Viking, 1989). Proudflesh was written with the assistance of a Creative Development Fund Fellowship from the Western Australian Department for the Arts.

CONTENTS

Consuming Passions I

9

The Crossing

27

Living Arrangements

37

Little Rex Armstrong

59

Babyhead

79

The Human Kiss

91

Consuming Passions II

113

Black Dog

131

Proudflesh

143

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onsuming passions I

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London 1984 Alone in a hotel room in a new city, Kate hears from Qantas. Ms Kelly, the airline advises her, your luggage was accidentally unloaded at the end of the Perth-Bangkok leg of your flight. It was last seen in Athens. She empties the presentation bag that the airline has given her in compensation for her loss. Gifts for the bereft traveller: a kangaroo brooch to bestow identity, brinylon sockettes, an eye-shield, a sewing kit for small emergencies. All she has in the world was last seen in Athens. The suitcase comes back, still strapped and locked. She takes it slowly. She finds a room in which to live. It is satisfactorily compact and looks down onto the street below. The single bed is good and hard. The walls are as dull as cement. There is a walnut dresser. The previous tenant has left family

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photographs tucked into the frame of its mirror. She throws them away, takes down the curtains and rolls away the rug covering the floorboards. She opens the case. The books are wrapped in plastic. She slowly unpacks them: the 1968 Faber edition of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, the 1966 Colossus and gluedtogether copies of Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, the ‘68 and ‘88 editions of The Bell Jar, an American and an English edition of the collected poems and the Faber 1986 Letters Home, a remaindered hardback of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and The Journals of Sylvia Plath which she had stolen from the Fremantle Library. Inside, a stamped record of the places it has been before her — Nannup, Kondinin, Kojonup, Dalwallinu. There are also six notebooks, empty notebooks, and they are hers. Their pages are as white as snow, which she has never seen. The room is bare. It is immaculate. She puts the books and a candle on the dresser. They look like implements of devotion. It is a room fit for a nun. When Sophie comes down from Leeds she has half a degree from art school and a wild love for Modesty Blaise. On her etiolated body she fashions a perfect, worshipful reproduction of that high-kicking and intuitive freelance adventurer. Over a lift-and-separate bra she wears, as a rule, black. For leisurewear: slacks to the hip and Spanish riding boots, spurs for special occasions, a turtle-neck sweater. When she goes out drinking and dancing it is leather, as close as a second skin, but for the office she steps out in spike heels and a starched skirt cinched at the waist by a six-inch width of leopard skin, collar up. At the kitchen sink every Sunday she retouches her hair blue-black and piles it with concealed pins and lacquer into a conch on top of her head, the fringe draping like lustrous seaweed into her eyes. It is a look

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Sophie considers appropriate for a young woman in the Eighties — full of allusion to the sculpted bodies of classic Hollywood, gesturing towards the French intellectual elegance of, say, a Greco or Signoret, recalling the glacial, feline wit of the Avengers women. The Editor-in-Chief of Meat Weekly looks up from Kate’s CV. I see that your studies have all been in poetry, he says. Kate nods. But I expect, like all Australians, he says, you eat a hearty breakfast? Kate understands what is required. Steak, two sausages and a nice lamb chop, she replies (heartily). First day on the job at Meat Weekly, the entire editorial staff come to help her when she strikes a problem. What is a haggis? she asks. A haggis, they say, is a furry wee thing with two legs shorter than the others so it can run very fast around the sloped sides of hills. Fair enough, she says. And, they continue, there is a Royal Society for the Protection of the Haggis. Phone up the Ministry of Agriculture, introduce yourself, they’ll tell you all about it. She makes the call. The silence on the other end of the line lengthens as her fellow workers, one by one, hurry out to lunch. Having just written the headline THE THINNER THE SKIN, THE FATTER THE PROFIT for an article about a semi-automatic membrane remover, she sees that she has created an aphorism that could be applied to her skin and their profit. She decides to toughen her hide and laugh off their little joke. How’s your haggis? they shout across the office all afternoon, delighted by her good-naturedness. Sophie chooses an advertising agency with offices in New York and Tokyo. At the interview, the Managing Director leans across his desk and places something small and rough

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in her hand. That’s a piece of gravel, he says, in ten words or less tell me how you sell it. Modesty always knows how to get out of a jam. You call it a diamond, she replies. Sophie now sees that how do you do? has been replaced by what do you do? She thinks it’s a logical shift, that people are what they do and what they buy, that the new way is timesaving and information-generating. When she herself is asked what she does, she is at first enigmatic. She will call herself a Troubleshooter but, when pushed, will add that she has one foot on the ladder and the other just leaving the ground. In the office she has gained a reputation for having a good nose — a scent for the times. She understands well the new intolerances registering like hyper-allergenic reactions on the public hide. When there are complaints about the caricature of a black woman grinning from bottles of Genuine Sarsaparilla, Sophie is consulted. When members of the track and field team test drug-positive at the Commonwealth Games, people stop by her desk and ask how they might rescue the athletes’ sponsor, the chocolate health drink manufacturer that is their client. They ask her many questions as she sits typing their memos, filing their work. She sees herself as Red Adair lowering into the flames of exploding imagery; a heroine of the social inferno. Kate begins her notebooks: It’s dark when I leave for work and dark when I return. Outside my room the city breathes, but I cannot manage it. The headaches are back. I might just as well not have left home, if pain is to be my only landscape. I take codeine, perhaps too much. I do not need to visit London’s sights; I am my very own wax work, I am imprisoned within my own Tower, the Black Death is my company.

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The electric fire burns all night in my room. I am so cold. I listen to tapes of Sylvia reading her work in the poetry room at Harvard College Library in 1959. Her cool American tones. I understand her more each day, now that I too am a foreigner in this land. She was cold here too. How is it possible that one day I will be older than she ever was? Sophie makes out a list: * look others in the eye when you’re talking to them, particularly those who have power over you * don’t raise your voice at the end of a sentence, as is the habit of women * identify skills * set goals * stay sharp Kate writes: Codeine dreams are brighter, more real; like film. I dream of my father. A garden of sourgrass, rusted fence, a round Holden disappearing down the narrow dusty road. The colour is faded, or perhaps it was the colour of the time. He is holding me; it is just the two of us. I’m wearing my first shoes, red patent, and he is in loose trousers and a singlet. He smiles like a boy, his hair is perfectly waved and slicked back from his forehead. He is thin; from the slope of his shoulder and the way his hand grips his wrist, I can see I am too heavy for him. The pain is still there when I wake. Listen Sophie, I’m going to give you something you can sink your

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teeth into. Larry pulls a chair up to her desk. Sophie looks him in the eye. New Zealand won’t come to the party and side with us in this latest row with the Muslims, he says. Seems they’re looking after their meat trade with Teheran. So Maggie’s chopped them off. Finished. No more succulent NZ lamb on our butchers’ slabs. Until they decide to come back with their tails between their legs. In the meantime, we’re getting the stuff from Australia. Oz Lamb. Seems that when we joined the EEC in ‘73, there were a lot of sheep left to rot in those big Australian paddocks. So it’s kind of delicate. That’s why we’re bringing you in on this one. The job is to get Oz Lamb back on our tables. I’ll tell you what to do. I hear there’s an Australian sheila working on a butcher’s mag over at Smithfield. Get in touch, make a date, maybe she’ll have something we can hang this on. Kate is asked to take off her jewellery and shoes. She tucks her hair into a net and pulls on wellingtons and a long white coat, slips her notebook and pen into a pocket. The PR man says: Acceptance of stock in good condition is an important criterion of both animal welfare and cost effective man agement. The truck is backed into the reception bay. The cages are unloaded; each is filled by a writhing brown mass. At the flick of a lock, with a release of heat and stench, the mass differentiates and becomes chickens, stunned at first and then frantic. He says: The birds’ fear seeps into their flesh, toughens it, dulls the flavour. A high quality product is got through speed. Men wearing face masks hoist the birds onto an overhead pulley, thousands of beating wings and dangling red beaks, and they pass smoothly across the ceiling, through a door and out of sight. We’ll follow them, he says, and as they move, clouds of feathers rise from the floor and cling to her. In the slaughter room the smell lessens, and it is quieter. Over their heads the live birds chug by as if on some miniature railway. There is

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only the fizzing sound as they cross the electrical stunner and the squeak of the circular blade as it slices through their necks. Is it possible that any of them are sentient when that happens? she asks. He tells her to have faith in automation. On the ground the troughs spill with blood. A man in a black leather apron and thigh-high boots stands by the troughs, motionless; only his eyes move, roll up and down, supervising the rain of blood from above. The dead birds drop into a shining vat that throbs at the end of the line. De-hairing, he says, imagine steel projections plucking away like hundreds of busy fingers. To enter the evisceration area they pass under a line of blue-yellow carcases now clipped of their feet and heads. There are excellent management/staff relations in this factory, he tells her. The management has installed a first-rate sound system and the workers bring their own tapes. The doors open on a white-tiled room; young women stand in a row on a platform several feet above the ground. They too wear starched white and wellingtons but their faces are beautifully painted. Silver eyelids and ruby lips shimmering under fluorescent light. The music drowns his voice. Baby! you hurt me bad. The birds travel in. The women extend their arms above their heads, raise themselves on tiptoe, tilt their heads to one side and wrench the intestines from the carcase. You mess me up. Blood washes over them. The birds travel in again; the women’s arms go up. And leave me sa-aa-ad. Riding home on the train, Kate thinks over and over about the same two things. She remembers that in Hitchcock, after the first bird swoops from the sky, Tippi Hedren takes her hand from her head and there is a single spot of blood on the fingertip of her calfskin glove. And she wonders about the workers in the factory, how as she’d stood and observed them with her notebook and pen in hand, not one of them

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had looked up, or met her eye. It occurs to her that self-consciousness, perhaps even curiosity, might be a luxury. Sophie’s list: 6 am gym workout 7 am jog to laundromat 1 pm 30 laps of pool 6 pm squash game with Larry/discuss pay rise Before bed - wash dishes - do French lesson - cleanse, tone, moisturise Kate’s notebook: I open my books and Sylvia speaks for me: This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. Sophie chooses a brasserie in Soho for her lunch appointment with Kate. The new beaujolais has arrived; she has a bottle opened while she waits. When Kate walks through the door their eyes meet and part in embarrassment at the accuracy of their preconceptions. An Unsophisticate Abroad, thinks Sophie, she’s probably wearing thermals. A Glamour Queen, thinks Kate, she’s probably shallow. They shake hands. I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve had a bad morning with a bacon exporter. I see, what you might call ... a pig peddler?

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Should we order? Actually I’m having a liquid lunch today, the new beaujolais has arrived. I might have the mushroom risotto. I can taste blood at the back of my throat. Morrissey said MEAT IS MURDER. It’s an industry, like any other. Not like my industry, it’s not. Sylvia Plath said PERFECTION IS TERRIBLE, IT CANNOT HAVE CHILDREN. I don’t want children. I was making a comment on advertising. We are what we eat and what we buy. Why did you come to London? You just do, you know. The feeling’s always been there. Like visiting Mother, I suppose. What do you do with your time here? I read poetry. What about fun? I don’t think about it much. I think poetry is a closed book. Why did you call me? I want to talk to you about Meat and National Identity. Kate: I remember the day a presence formed around my father’s absence, like the white outline of an accident victim on the road. I was nearly home. It was time to be home. In someone’s garden I heard a lawnmower kick to life. A man appeared. I could only see the colour of his shirt as he moved the mower to and fro behind cactus blades. It was the green of the shirt my father used to wear, sports shirt we called it, and I remembered its weave, the crest on his chest. My street,

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up on the corner, my house, my bathers sweating in my schoolbag, the late shadows running over the road, smells of bore water, meat cooking, American accents from televisions and, now and again, an uncertain note of music, someone practising the piano or guitar; these fragile protections suddenly failed me. Everything dissolved, as if through tears, and I saw my father. We are together at the Gap. We walk over the rocks to the security rail and look down. An abyss, churning with dark water. It takes no responsibility for the consequences of falling under its spell. White spray flies over our heads. I gather close to him, smell his Old Spice, feel his body sway, see his white knuckles wrapped around the rail. The man pushing the lawnmower came out onto the verge. I could see then: it was a different shirt. Sophie: 10 am 1 pm 3.30 pm 3.30 am

1 small tangerine 21/2 glasses beaujolais chocolate coating of digestive biscuit 15 squares of Marks and Spencers Old English Creamy Fudge

Sophie searches hard for an angle on Australian lamb. At a party, she meets the manager of an Australian rock band. He tells her how they burnt a few thousand acres of canefield for one of their videos. She tries reading some Patrick White but can’t get through the first few pages. The Nick Cave gig doesn’t help either. She talks all this through with Larry. How did you go with the girl at Meat Weekly? he asks. Nothing there, says Sophie, all she said was that she’d always wanted to come to England because it was like visiting her mother. Larry throws his arms in the air and runs to the whiteboard. Mother! he cries. Larry appreciates Sophie’s contribution. Still, they won’t

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be taking her to Scotland when they go to film the television commercial. The picture is indistinct as if seen through the gauze of time. Muted colours. Close-up of woman and child embracing. He is dressed in blazer, tie and cap. She wears a suit and hat. Their frosty breath swirls in the air. Long shot: mother and child now at the end of a tree-lined avenue that leads to a grand Victorian mansion. All around them are other small boys, walking with one parent or two. She fixes his tie and wipes the smudges of lipstick on his cheek. He picks up his suitcase and begins the long walk to the building. Her eyes follow him. A woman’s voice: There comes a time in every mother’s life when she has to let her child go. CUT. A bell chimes. A young man in a suit carrying a briefcase stands on a doorstep. A handsome wooden door opens. It is the same woman, a different hairstyle, lines on her face. She takes him in her arms. A woman’s voice: Australian lamb has come home. CUT. A dining room. It is dark, the table is set, glint of silver and crystal, flowers, warmth of candles. Seated at the table are the mother, a middle-aged man and two girls. The son stands holding a knife, poised to carve the enormous, gleaming roast on the plate before him. Vegetables steam. She looks up at him, her face aglow. The voice: A U S TRALIAN LAMB. WELCOME IT BACK INTO YOUR HOME TODAY. Kate: Last night’s dream. Sylvia and I standing on a salt lake. She is dressed for a Cambridge winter: a wool skirt, a cardigan, a string of pearls. I can tell she has sinus again; her eyelids are dark. We tread in whitened feet over the crusty surface. The

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bone-hard trunks and wracked limbs of trees organise a museum of extinction around us. Only the crows move; this is their arena. Sylvia and I are looking for something. We are searching for the bodies of our fathers. The herbalist’s window is a display of memento mori , arranged on velvet, delicately, like a platter at a dinner table, its centrepiece the bleached skull of a beast. A selection: shavings of elephant tusk, a coil of leathered skin, desiccated seahorse, triangle of silver pelt, the skeleton of a bat, bird claw, a jar that appears empty but contains the essence of a final exhalation. The rain pours down on the Goldhawk Road. Sheltering, Kate thinks: A mysterious pain might require a mysterious answer. Come in, come in, he says in a smooth voice free of accent, like a stone polished by waters. Or, thinks Kate, the voice of an alien sent to Earth to mingle. The quintessential cosmopolitan Anglo-Saxon voice with only the slightest hint of a design problem; a faint whirring sound on the r’s and a click like tin when he swallows. Kate tries to calm herself, she needs to trust him. Besides, she reflects, no alien intelligence would seriously compose a replica that looks like HE does. He is tall; a lean, softening body like the wasted musculature of a tiger in a zoo. His long hair is twisted and held by a tortoiseshell clasp at the back of his neck. The shrouded eyes of an opium-eater, skin a tarnished old gold. He is wearing a white terylene safari suit and embroidered slippers. Kate follows him down a hallway lined with lacquered cabinets. In a room hung with tapestries, a few people are watching ‘EastEnders’ on a portable TV. His office, to the side of that room, is like other professional offices she has been to

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and this calms her. There is etiquette, therefore, and known rules of the game, and she decides she will be polite, relaxed, helpful; she will state a problem and receive an answer. The framed certifications of learning reassure her — the University, the Association, the Institute. The curlicues of lettering make it difficult to read placenames but a name (she hopes it is his name) appears clear and bland as computer print, peppers the walls, as steadying as an incantation. The examination table is high and covered by a white sheet. There are rows of books. This is like any doctor or dentist, she tells herself, surprised when he then lights a Gitane. I’ve got a headache, she says, hearing the trace of apology in her voice, fearing she is symptomatising hysteria or a bad attitude. A headache is a terrible thing, he says. His sympathy undoes her, unlocks her like a key. She confesses: It goes on and on. In my sleep, when I wake. A bad pain. Her hands are up around her head, trying to make a shape that will show him. Yes, yes, I can see, he says in his stone-smooth voice, and you; you are full of tears. She bows her head. Feels the wetness in her coat, the rain in her shoes, her body full of tears. He helps her out of her clothes until she is in only her underwear and she lies down on the table, doing as he suggests because he has seen this thing, this one thing; that she is full of tears. No one else, not even herself, has before seen this. His compassion is narcotic. He holds her wrist, and in his flesh she feels her own sick pulse. He says: Roses only bloom in the blackest of soils. His hand moves to her stomach. She is fixed to the table. Laid out. Pinned by the twin prongs of intimacy and fear. He traces a fine line of hairs with his finger. The problem, he says,

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is one of balance. Yin and yang, Russia and America, the sky over the earth. I think you have too much of the man in you. We need to know more. He snaps the lock on the door. He says: Can I take down your panties? It is like driving a car with the brakes failing. Each time the foot sinks a little further to the floor. You think there is always that small room left for safety and then, one last time, the foot goes down and keeps going, there is no resistance, nothing to save you now. You are out of control. Yes, she says. At the Advertising Awards, Sophie studies the rings on the hands of the man at the table next to her. He’s a fucking genius, says Larry. Who does he sleep with? she asks. Oh, his wife, his lover, one or two women around the place but I don’t know what he does in his private life. Sophie squashes a prawn with her fork and hides it with the others under a lettuce leaf. Watch this, Larry whispers, he’ll get this award too. Like last year all over again. On stage, the envelope is opened. Sophie watches the man push back his chair and clear his legs from the table. The presenter feigns exhaustion as he announces the man’s name again. Jimmy Peterson is an ordinary kind of name, she says. He comes from an ordinary background, says Larry, but he spells it J, I, M, E, E. As he climbs the steps to the stage, Sophie reads on the back of his silky T-shirt ITINERANT WORKER. His jeans have perfectly hemmed, strategic holes. What can I say? he says into the microphone, except — when am I going to finish my dinner? The audience guffaws. Something surges in Sophie. It is like those times in the middle of the night when there is only the glow of the refrigerator as she squats in front of its open door. She knows what

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she wants. Too bad about Oz Lamb, says Larry. Yes, but look at the compe tition, she replies, watching the prize-winner return to his table. Maggie would wear dreadlocks if he told her it was a good idea, says Larry. How do I meet him? Sophie asks. Oh, Larry says, just sit there and look beautiful. Once more, Kate records her life: I go in and show my neck, pull up my hair and go down under his sight as if it were the guillotine blade. He takes off my head and holds it in his hands, turning it like reading a globe. The problem, he says, is one of balance; the continents are all drifting southwards. Yes, I said. When he has finished, he sprays his fingers with eau-decologne and looks down at me lying there. Do you bleed? he asks. I bleed, I reply. Well then, there is no need to worry. Only Women Bleed, he says. Like all good aliens, he is well versed in cliché. Yes, I said, as compliant as a child. Sophie and Kate have more in common than they think. On Sunday evenings they can both be found in their rooms at opposite ends of the big city. While they stand ironing their clothes for the week, they both listen to the same song. It is their favourite song. They think they listen to Aretha Franklin because she sings about being a working girl: The moment I wake up before I put on my make-up I say a little prayer for you and while combing my hair now

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and wondering what dress to wear now I say a little prayer for you. Neither of them could say they know much about the everyday devotions of love. And neither of them would say that when Aretha squalls, when she reaches for a note, what they hear in that sound that goes back to her gospel — the longing — is enough to bring them to their knees.

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he cros sing

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It is said that it was purple and that nothing like it had ever been seen before. The party stood on the river bank and looked across the glittering water to the far side. They saw it amongst the dry grasses and papery barks. It is said that the young blind woman cried Tell me more tell me more a n d although it was only a smudge of colour shimmering in the heat haze, they said: It is not like our flowers in England, it is wildly tall and waves in the breeze, it curls like an orchid but its colour is the passion of the African violet, nothing about it is ordered or well-behaved, each petal leads a separate dance. It is said he was a ticket-of-leave convict tending the grounds of the house on the river at Maylands. Edward Ackers turned the soil and plucked the weeds from the ground as he watched his employer and his employer’s luncheon guests guide the young blind woman in their elegant stroll along the water’s edge. Was it the lie he heard

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them tell? Or did the promise of such a flower inspire this rapist, this horse-thief? Edward Ackers threw aside his spade, gathered the young blind woman in his arms and was in the water within a minute. The ladies on the land cried out, and the gentlemen hurried to free themselves of their coats and hats, but the powerful convict struck out against the river, clasping the young blind woman to his side. Her dress flowed like cream. There is no record of the words that Ackers spoke to calm her but her cry Mother Mother I will see with my own eyes soared like a gull through the blue air back to the party on shore. The flower’s fragrance, it is said, tears heart from mind. The strands of its musk draw melancholy and rapture from the body in such swiftly alternating currents that a person is struck helpless, sunk to her knees, for long and quivering moments. On their return journey the young blind woman’s cry rippled over the water towards her people. I have seen the flower and it was just as you said. There was no more to be feared. She was as wet as an otter but safe. Edward Ackers was granted a full pardon and departed for the East Coast. An annual performance now honours this event. The performance is called Two Who Have A Need for Each Other. It is said that the tradition of these performances was continued by word of mouth until a time in the 1930s when the first organising committee was formed. It was then that the advertisement first appeared, a quiet enigma, in the columns of the Maylands Gazette. Year after year the initiated now seek it and the curious are enticed. The event is not what you would call a secret; it is shrouded for protection but not exclusion. Besides, it is not one to capture the public

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imagination. The drama it enacts does not have the appeal of, let’s say, a football grand final. This year there is a misunderstanding when the ad is placed. It has always appeared among the fetes and jumble sales of FORTHCOMING EVENTS. But things change, community newspapers change too, and this year the advertisement for Two Who Have A Need For Each Other is found in the new classified pages called POSSIBILITIES. The organising committee finds it alongside Men Seeking Women, Women Seeking Men, Seeking Same, Unmarried With Children, Travel Companion and 60s Plus Club. This is a disaster, says Barry. People will think we are a lonely hearts bureau. Barry’s memories of childhood are haunted by these yearly events. But he does not mention this. He simply says that it is important to keep tradition alive. But Barry, our ad doesn’t employ that discourse, says Max. Our text does not inscribe that cartography of desire. He reads from the newspaper: TWO WHO HAVE A NEED FOR EACH OTHER This summer’s performance of courage and humility. An historic re-enactment. Interested participants must have their applications to the organising committee by the last mail Jan 30. Their decision will be final and no correspon dence will be entered into. I still think ‘self-effacement’ would have been better than ‘humility’, says Max. But you haven’t seen an enactment yet, dear, says Mary, you are new to this. That hyphen word is not true to the poignancy of the situation. Mary doubts Max’s motives in joining this committee. She thinks he is too dedicated a follower of fashion. And Max has

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his own problems with Mary. Her intense eye-contact and grey witch’s hair unsettle him. But at this meeting, they must get down to business. The Swan River Authority has agreed to restrict all traffic for one hour on the afternoon of Saturday, the fifteenth of February, says Barry. The applications do not exactly roll in but by the closing date the organisers have a dozen or so to assess. Despite the frame of tradition, each year the choice of the two participants seems like a task of fresh urgency. It is thought that, for many decades of the re-enactment, two people in symbolic costume played the parts of convict and blind girl. But over time the actors came to speak more of themselves. Other stories came to be told. Barry and Mary told Max about some of the past performers. Eight years ago they had chosen as Bearer the owner of a swimming pool in which a neighbour’s child had drowned. He carried across the river a woman who had suffered a paralysing fear of water since childhood swimming lessons at the Maylands’ jetty. In 1946, and again during the Vietnam War, women struggled to and from the purple flower carrying the uniform and kit of their dead soldier sons. Barry and Mary explained to Max their criteria for the selection of the Bearer and the Borne; a sense of composition and an eye for the contemporary. They were trying to create, they said, historic moments of expressive beauty. Repulsed by such language, Max relegated the applications to the categories of Beast and Burden but kept it to himself, kept the merest hint of these thoughts out of his eyes for fear that Mary might find them there, and know him. On the fifteenth of February the purple flower is a smear of colour on the far bank. There are almost a hundred spectators gathered under umbrellas on the grass. They have eskies and

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blankets for the picnic that will follow the performance. In the crowd are those who have applied to enact their stories on the river. Only the organising committee knows its choice. The instant of surprise that bound the convict and the blind girl is cherished and preserved. Barry announces the name of the person who is to be carried across the water. With the help of his companion, Roger Thomas gets out of his wheelchair and shuffles slowly to Barry’s side. As they look at him, there is but one thought in the mind of the crowd: Auschwitz. But when he speaks they hear his body, weak yet defiant, not a body belonging to history but before them now, of the moment. And he has something to declare: I am forty years old. I am dying. I refuse all medical inter vention. I will not be at the mercy of hope. I have AIDS. I am a scholar with no mark to leave. I wish to show my face. Roger Thomas returns to his wheelchair. The crowd is anxious about him entering the water. Many times the river has been contested and defied, never has it been called upon to be kind. I am not looking to be healed, he says suddenly, as if he knew their minds. The name of the Bearer is announced. She disrobes and comes forward wearing a drab pair of old-fashioned green and gold Speedos. Irene Greenblatt holds a yellowed piece of paper above her head. She wants to explain: This is my Certificate of Femininity. It is Cancelled. I was ready to swim the race of my career; my life had been a preparation for this event. It was the eve of my competi tion. The International Olympic Committee has its rules. From the inside of my mouth they scraped some cells and put my womanhood under the microscope. I carry an extra Y chromosome, quietly sitting there, doing no one any

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harm. I was judged too much a man. I was out. Today I will swim again and prove that I Am A Woman. Roger Thomas stands and his companion helps him remove his tracksuit. The crowd sees his long, empty bones. He is wearing blue bathers, it is clear that they are brand new. In anticipation of this moment he has sought to look his best. Roger and Irene face each other: he is paper, she is clay. The crossing begins, as it did for the convict and the blind girl, on the shore. Irene lifts Roger like a mother gathering the belongings of her dead son. The water laps her toes. He lifts his face to the burning sky like a sunbather. Irene turns on her side and takes Roger’s body to her in the lifesaving position. They watch the spectators become smaller as they pull away from them and enter colder waters. Roger is feverish; the water is astringent and soothing. He feels Irene’s strong arm around his chest, her breast against his back, and he enjoys the quickness of his body, the effortless way it skims the water, like light. As she pulls through the water Irene feels rivets of tension locking her body. She hears Roger’s threadbare breathing. Pelicans appear through cloud. What school did you go to Roger? she says. And of course there is a face, a name, a place they both know. It’s a small world, they say, and Roger swallows water. His cough sounds like it will break open his body. Irene turns him on his belly and supports his thin torso; he is figurehead to her boat. The vegetation on the far bank becomes clearer, the blond grasses blow about like hair. The purple flower flaps in the breeze. They both have their suspicions. But they must save their strength; they do not speak.

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The triangle of purple silk is wired to the end of a star picket. Neither Irene or Roger is capable of disappointment. Roger lies on the wet sand and realises that he is too ill for this performance. This is not the ceremony for the loss of himself that he was seeking. The river water smells bad on his skin. Irene stands beside him and stretches, hurting. There had been no younger body within her waiting to claim this day. Roger is coughing again. You don’t want to die here, she says, patting his hand. We’ll just take it nice and slow, she says, carrying him back into the water. She adjusts herself to the load and the tedium; it occurs to her that this is just like the everyday. Roger gives himself over to his senseless pain, her stranger’s arms, the wind, the sun, the water. And the shore finally comes closer. They see the spectators assemble on the sand. A couple of heroes, she says. We’re going to make it. That’ll do me, says Roger. As they reach shallow water the children try to run forward to greet them but they are held back. Tradition has it that the carrier and the carried must touch grass before the journey is complete. Irene moves through the crowd with Roger in her arms. She places him gently in his wheelchair. Max is there, taking notes. The children break free and run to them. The etiquette of the occasion does not permit applause, but the children cannot be restrained from this too, and they gather around them, cheering, clapping in their flat-handed way. Roger and Irene take a deep, professional, gracious bow. For the children. Mary studies the Bearer and the Borne. She watches their eyes. What she sees in their eyes she has seen before. She has seen it year after year after year.

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I needed a massage and a place to sleep for the night. From where I stood at the pub door, the guy with the dark curly hair looked the most likely to be offering. Something to do with his relaxed back and the way his hands played with the beads of moisture on his beer glass. The bus ride had been long and tiring. I threw my pack on the ground and settled onto the stool beside him at the bar. Tobacco was always a good place to start. I asked if I could have some of his. Sure, he said, and I felt there’d be no end to what he’d say yes to. Straight away I got going on some of my best travel stories. It was a long time since I’d had anything that could be called a home with growing things that needed water and frozen relics buried deep in the freezer. I was curious to see how a man made a home for himself since I’d never been any good at it.

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As we pulled up outside in the dark, I could smell the sea. Leon’s house was a flaky weatherboard surrounded by trees. The verandah was piled with large bags of fertiliser, too much for one man’s use, I thought. I suppose any woman entering the house of a strange man should wonder if she might end up in the fertiliser, but Leon had been good company at the pub, he’d got into my stories and kept the drinks coming. I knew we were going to fuck but I didn’t feel desire. It didn’t happen like that anymore. These days it was only young men that I felt a white heat for. Surfers with long knotty hair with clumps of gold in it; their bodies hidden in soft baggy clothes. I met some of these boys when I was travelling. They liked my stories, but there was no sex in their eyes when they looked at me and no static when our bodies touched. Once we were inside his house, Leon got comfortable. He looked different. At the pub he’d worn a black duffel jacket but when he took it off I liked the arms I saw coming out of his T-shirt and the easy way he moved around in the kitchen. I sat at his pink laminex table and rolled a joint with his home grown, watching as he scooped a ginger kitten off a chair and coaxed it to drink from a bowl he’d just filled. It looked like he was halfway through renovations; most of the brown wallpaper had been torn down but it felt like the house was waiting for something to happen. I could see how good it would look with a bit of work. Leon was trying to make coffee but the grinder got stuck, and I watched him pull it apart and put it back together. I wouldn’t have had the patience. If something didn’t respond to a few prods with a knife, I’d chuck it out. Leon made me feel coarse, somehow. He served good coffee and slabs of fruit cake that he’d made himself. He kept it in an old scratched tin with koalas

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on it that he said he’d kept his Matchbox cars in when he was a kid. I had nothing left from my childhood and usually I was proud of it; I was free of things. But all of a sudden I remembered my great-grandmother’s shark’s tooth necklace which had been ripped from my neck while I was sleeping in a Bangkok snake-pit. To get away from the feeling I told Leon the story, making much of the yellow junkies and cut-throat thieves who had been my sleeping companions. Making the tooth larger than it was, and the gold richer. We smoked the joint. Leon had a stack of old records leaning against a wall and I played DJ, choosing tracks I liked and telling him stories about how they fitted into my life. Dancing around on his wooden floor. The dope and the music made my emotions huge and the past seemed so close I could’ve touched it. I sang along to a Neil Young record — welfare mothers make better lovers — and told him all about the Rust Never Sleeps Concert that I’d seen in Sydney in ‘79. It was a story that always went down well with those boys I liked because they’d just discovered Neil Young through Pearl Jam. I must have seemed like a history teacher, which is probably why they didn’t want my body. Leon got up and danced with me. He was surprisingly loose in the hips. When he took my hands he looked questioningly at their calluses and red rawness. I’ve been working on a prawn trawler, I shouted above the music. Leon held his hands up. They were covered in small cuts and ingrained black dirt. And I’m a gardener, he yelled back. At a disabled kids’ home. He sat me down at the table. There was a cactusy thing in a pot on the windowsill and he cut off a piece of it. Put this on your hands, he said, it’ll soothe them. He brought me a tube of tea-tree lotion and some emery boards and we sat together and smoked another joint while we fixed up our hands. I told Leon my plans. That I was going to meet Carlo in

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India in a few months. That I’d met Carlo in Hanoi just before I left to work on the boat. I told him everything so that there’d be no confusion, and no expectation. Leon just smiled at me and said: I’ve gotta get up for work, Rosie. Let’s go to bed. Years ago, in a bar in San Francisco, I met a man who looked like Jimmy Stewart. It was a likeness that had served him well. Next to us at the bar two men were celebrating the births of their babies. They must have come straight from the hospital, which was across the road. We threw back B-52s and listened in. The new fathers were crying into their drinks. Through his tears, one of them said: It’s hard to watch someone you love going through something like that. J i m m y Stewart said: That’s how I feel about sex. And we moved onto champagne. We didn’t go to bed together. I never saw him again. But it’s still the most interesting thing any man has ever said to me about sex. These days there were only two occasions when I could leave my head behind and have the kind of sex everyone else said they were having. One was when I was angry and I wanted to get rid of it and I used my body as a weapon. I used my hands and nails and voice and cunt and mouth and legs. If the other body ever felt assaulted it was never said because what man would complain about too passionate a woman? The other occasion was when I was stoned. Leon and I were stoned. Afterwards, we lay quietly on his clean tartan sheets. Just when the folklore says the man always rolls over and starts to snore, Leon jumped up on his haunches and said: Wanna massage? Bingo! I thought, smiling at him. This wasn’t the

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usual order of things; massage as gift, not lure. He used an oil that smelled of lavender and he found the pain that was lodged deep in my back and legs. I felt like I’d come into port on a very nice island. I always got a sick stomach when I went to the Social Security office. Even when I was there through no fault of my own, or when I’d decided, as I had then, that this was what I had to do for a while, I felt bad, like I was doing something to be ashamed of. I was leaving town at the end of summer. I was tired. I figured a couple of months on the dole was the best way of arranging things. Leon and I had worked out an agreement that suited us both: he would put me up and, in return, I’d paint the inside of his house. I didn’t think it got much more simple than that. I sat and waited. There was a kid screaming, an old guy coughing up his guts, a businesswoman clutching her briefcase as if it held all her dignity. The usual. But someone, somewhere, had understood what you went through in this place, and the walls were a soft blue; trying to keep you calm. There was a water dispenser and toys for the kids to play with. A good supply of New Ideas. Comfortable chairs with a nice paisley thing happening on them. It was all looking a bit faded and run down but someone, at sometime, had made an effort. I’d gone with a guy I’d met to a dole office in London in 1983 — the place was a stinking hole of misery. There were rows and rows of those day-glo orange plastic chairs that are one day going to be all that’s left of our civilisation, outlasting even the cockroaches. Babies sat on the floor in coffee puddles and played with cigarette butts. Workers were separated from the public by steel bars and mesh screens and the flickering fluoro drove you fucking insane. It was a nightmare some evil bastard had dreamt up to make

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everyone feel as bad as possible about themselves. This social security office I was in was a big one; it was processing a lot of lives. When I tried to think of the Government and all these lives, it spun me out. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d voted. I’d never known a politician. I didn’t understand what they did and how it related to me sitting there, feeling sick, and where the person who had chosen the calming blue came in. When I thought of politics, there was only one thing that came to mind. I’d gone to the Gold Coast with Friedrich, a Certified Diving Bore I’d met while I was working at the Barrier Reef. He wanted to check out the theme parks. At Warner Brothers’ Movie World, he talked me into going to a magic show. The stage was set like the Old Wild West with a saloon and a trading post and an undertakers, with tumbleweed blowing across. Cowboys and Indians disappeared in puffs of coloured smoke and re-appeared at the back of the audience. Sheriffs on horseback suddenly turned into bargirls. It was a good show; very professional. A travelling salesman rolled into town with his flashy wagon and flashy ways. He was peddling his special-recipe Strength Elixir. His assistant picked three people from the audience. I didn’t get a good look at them — I was just glad it wasn’t me — but they looked like regular types: a weedy guy, a little girl, a middleaged man going a bit soft around the middle. The first trick worked well. The weedy guy took a drink of the Strength Elixir and then he was put into a tall box that had saloon doors at the front so you could see his skinny calves sticking out of his sneakers. The salesman turned a big handle on the box and sparks flew out the top. When the doors flew open a shining muscle man stepped out. The crowd cheered. No one knew how they’d done it. Then the salesman asked the little girl to drink the Strength Elixir. This was exciting. He asked

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the middle-aged guy, who was her father, to sit on a fancy chair at the side of the box. When the little girl was behind the doors you could see her ankles and lacy socks and patent leather shoes. The salesman turned the handle, sparks flew, the door burst open and the little girl stood there in her blue dress; unchanged. The audience groaned in disappointment. Once more! cried the salesman, and the doors were closed. Again, the little girl emerged as a little girl. The salesman led her to where her father was sitting. He put her hand on the arm of his chair. Lift! he cried. Show us the power of the Strength Elixir! The chair and the father lifted off the ground. The little girl’s eyes popped. In her hand, the chair soared into the air until she was holding it above her head. Aaah!! went the audience. The spotlight caught her father’s glasses and I saw his curly hair and round cheeks and squirming, embarrassed face. Something about him was familiar. In front of me an Indian man sat with his wife and five daughters of diminishing size. They wore beautiful saris. They looked like an unpacked Babushka doll. Suddenly the Indian man cried out: It is Mister Downer! It is the Foreign Minister! In the social security office I pictured this important man hanging above us in the papier-mâché throne, the invisible strings and pulleys lifting him, the sparks and flash, the snake-oil salesman, the applause. Nothing became any clearer. I tried to think of Carlo and Rajasthan, reminding myself that I was in control of my life. A man at the counter took down my particulars. He asked me if others lived at my address. I’d been stupid thinking I could walk in here with my life and that it would be accepted without question. One other person, I said. Stupid. Their name? His pen was poised above paper. Leon Arrivederci, I said. He whipped the form out so fast it sent a wind into my

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face. He’d heard a man’s name. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why hadn’t I said Leanne? The form he gave me was headed Assessment of Living Arrangements. On it there were boxes and slashes and columns and arrows — and they all jumped around like sprites before my eyes. I was supposed to fit my life into these spaces but I knew it wouldn’t fit, it never did. The form pretended to be straightforward. It said it simply needed to determine if I was living in a relationship ‘like a marriage’, but I knew it was out to get me. It was out to get my slippery life. On the form Leon became an X. Do you and X have separate living areas, sleeping areas or utilities? If so, describe the arrange ment (eg. caravan in backyard). Have you and X both paid for any of the following items: microwave oven, clothes drier, video, boat? I knew that if this form decided that X was ‘like a husband’ to me, it would be taken for granted that I was also wedded to him financially. This hadn’t been part of my arrangement with Leon. Do you and X have any joint bank, building society, credit union accounts or other investments? What is the basis for sharing household tasks with X? Do you share social and leisure activities with X? I felt sick. I couldn’t get my writing to lie down on the lines. I was tired. I just wanted the dole. To what extent does X provide care, support or help to you in any of the following circumstances: illness, personal crisis, money matters, family disputes? Finally, after seven pages, they got to the point of all this. Do you have an ongoing sexual relationship with X? Despite all the other questions, I knew that if I answered YES here (ongoing? Yes. But not going on past summer) it would be all over. I would be judged to be living in a relationship-like-amarriage. Leon’s dependant. No dole. No arrangement. No way out.

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I couldn’t complete the form. I remembered times at school when I’d felt sick because I couldn’t do an exercise and I’d gone to the teacher and she’d put an end to my anxiety, showed me how to do it, made it all OK. I can’t fill out this form, I said to the new man at the counter. Is there a problem? he asked. I don’t fit, I said. I was desperate to distance myself from Leon, get my money, seal up my life from their prying eyes. I didn’t even know I was going to say it. I lied straight to his face. I’m a lesbian, I said. He didn’t flinch. He turned to the last page of the form. This page had a place for an explanation of your circumstances. Just write what you’ve told me, he said. So I did that — just three words — and I signed it, and wrote the date. And then, underneath my signature, in smaller letters, I read: There are penalties for deliberately giving false or misleading information. I sat at the kitchen table with my head in my hands. I told Leon about it as he made dinner. I was learning that nothing much ruffled Leon. My theory was that he had an ancient soul, that he’d been on earth lots of times before and had just about sussed it out. I was a brand new soul, a soul in nappies, still ga-ga about the whole deal in front of me. Once in India I’d stopped by the roadside to have a woman read my palm. She took my hand in her long brown fingers but a look of horror passed over her face. You have never been in this world before! she cried. Maybe it explained why I always felt like I was making my life up as I went along. Leon said: They hassle everyone. Don’t worry about it. It was OK for him to say that, in a past life he’d probably been up before the Inquisition and had his balls mashed with hot pincers. It would have given him a little perspective that I didn’t possess.

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It wasn’t as if I had a problem with lying. Lies are a sort of social oil to help the cogs go round. Honesty has a way of jamming up the system. I thought that people who claimed not to lie lacked imagination. But this lie was giving me trouble. It had the potential to bring something nasty down on my head. Along with making my life up as I went along, I’d always felt there was something just one step behind me. Like one day a voice from on high would call out: Y O U CANNOT LIVE THIS WAY, and the leg irons would spring out of the ground to hold me there. I’d lied because I wanted to do things in my own way, but I knew what everyone knew — that women who lied to Social Security were very bad women and they would be punished. What if they raid this place? I said. They won’t, said Leon, washing a lettuce under the tap. What if they come with orders to inspect your bedroom for evidence, to make sure I’m what I said I was? What if they see my clothes, my shoes? Those feet of yours are so big they’d think the shoes were mine, he said. This reminded me of something that had happened a long time ago. The police were looking for a prowler who was operating in the area where I lived. Two gangly constables came by. Do you live alone? they asked. Yes, I said. One of them cast his flashlight around the room even though every light in the house was burning. I thought you said you lived alone, he said, fixing his light on my Doc Martens by the fireplace. I do, I replied. Then who do those shoes belong to? he asked. They’re mine, I said. They both looked at my feet. I was wearing thick bed socks. They each looked down at the Doc Martens on their own feet. Then they looked at the feet of their partner. They left in silent, puzzled haste. Leon threw me the stash and I got a pre-dinner joint going.

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I’d only ever known two lesbians. Or known I’d known. I’d worked with Dallas and Di on the tables at the casino in Hobart. In my head I told them about my lie to see what they’d say. I pictured us as we often were, up on barstools late at night. I could almost taste the Pernod we drank. I could see their platinum manes and their long, curling fingernails. Shame on you, said Di, frowning at me. But Dallas threw back her head and laughed. They went on like this for a while; condemning me, making light of it. While I had them there like this, a bit pissed and keen to answer my questions, I put an old curiosity to them. How do you two, um, touch each other with those fingernails? Leon put the chilli con carne on the table and I lost transmission. Leon wasn’t one of those people who had to understand what you were upset about before they offered comfort. He fed me, he rubbed my neck; pretty soon all my demons were back in their demon-holes. The days were getting hotter. My dole came through. We got up early and walked to the beach for a swim. Leon cooked pancakes for breakfast. After he left for work, I started painting. Leon had done a deal with his friend Frisbee to swap some of the fertiliser he’d nicked from the kids’ home for cans of paint that had fallen off the forklift Frisbee drove at a hardware warehouse. We couldn’t be too fussy about the colour we got — dark red — and anything was better than what was there before; slowly the house started to glow. When it got too hot in the afternoon, I stopped painting and lay down in the hammock under the tree in the backyard. I smoked a joint and read. I’d found a second-hand bookshop a few streets away. The guy who owned it wore creaking motorcycle leathers and read with his forehead pressed on the edge of the counter, a book on his knees. A

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personal fan lifted the ends of his ponytail. He reminded me of someone I’d met in Toronto who’d claimed to be Meatloaf’s brother. The bookshop’s trade was mostly Mills and Boon and Penthouse and car magazines, but I’d found a dusty shelf of biographies of women rock stars. It always happened like this: I’d find the book that was just what my life needed at the time. It was one thing I’d come to be sure of. I wondered if it wasn’t what the universe provided for a new soul; like a collection of guide books to help me on my way. I’d found Tom Robbins just when I needed him, left by a traveller before me in a hostel in Miami. Carlos Castenada literally fell into my lap when a passenger on a higher deck dropped him on a ferry crossing the English Channel. Now, in the long summer afternoons before Leon came home, I wanted to read about other women’s lives. As I painted Leon’s house, I watched the wet red spread over the walls and it felt like I was laying down thin tissue slices of my own internal organs. I felt a kind of pain like I imagined people felt when they had a biopsy. When Leon came home he was always pleased with what I’d done and I’d be pleased too. But when he touched the walls, when he ran his hands admiringly over the new surfaces, the strange feeling inside me would return. I was moving through the shelf in alphabetical order. I’d got through Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful, Deborah Harry, Chrissie Hynde and Joni Mitchell. Along the way I’d skipped over k d lang and Courtney Love because you couldn’t yet tell how things would turn out for them — the books were about them being famous and they became more famous because books were written about them. I was looking for stories about women who had lasted the distance. I’d never known much about other women because the

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main game had always been men. All my life I’d been figuring out how to attract them and how to keep their interest and how to get the most out of them and how to get them to leave me alone. Women were just the other half of the planet, not needing much attention unless they wandered into the space I was sharing with a man. But every afternoon I was reading stories about women and when I went out of the house I started to look at women differently, as if I’d never quite seen them before. Of course, I’d always known about the secret checking-out that goes on between women. How a woman will run her eyes up the legs and body of another woman a second after they meet. How the eyes of women passing on the street will slip and slide as they try to get a take on the other. Once at JFK airport I stepped onto an up escalator as another woman stepped onto the one going down. We both wore baseball caps and leather jackets and shorts and halter-neck tops. Our eyes met like unfriendly animals in the wild. We couldn’t laugh at the joke of our likeness; we fought each other for surreptitious glances of information and we passed each other (our hands on the rubber railing both heavily ringed) in a cloud of heat and cold and matching perfume. I’d always thought that all of this was about drawing comparisons, always measuring yourself against other women because we all understood that we were in competition, and that the prize was men. But now, when I straightened up from leaning into the frozen foods and found another woman’s eyes upon me, I wondered. I wondered when I found that I’d raised myself on my elbows to look, from beneath my sunglasses, at a woman emerging from the ocean. I would agree with Leon when he said this woman looked great in her pink bathers, that another woman’s skin was golden, that another, slashing through the water, had a good overarm.

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I continued to put the red paint on the walls. The little biopsy pain still nagged at me but Leon took care of my stiff neck. I walked to the bookshop and home again. I fell asleep, stoned, in Leon’s arms. His cooking started to show on my hips. I needed to remind myself of my future. I called Carlo when Leon was out. He’d taken some of the kids from the school to the beach but I didn’t want to go. The kids were so badly messed up. Carlo was staying with his family in Bologna. He was having a bit of trouble, he said. His father was threatening to cut off his money if he didn’t go into de-tox. It would only be a small delay, he said. Why didn’t I go on and wait for him in New Delhi? I knew only too well this phase in the unravelling of plans. I usually just moved onto something else. But something had changed. I didn’t know how to get back into my life. I blamed Leon for taking away my nerve. The universe was going to have to come up with something because I was without a plot. I read the last page of the Suzi Quatro book and threw it on the grass. Only Tina Turner to go and the shelf would be finished. I swung in the hammock and watched Leon as he worked in the garden. I liked him in his dirty Akubra; I liked his sinewy legs and the way he looked up every now and then to smile at me, but never spoke. I liked the rocking of the hammock and the magpies dancing under the sprinkler. I couldn’t tell him that I liked all this but I looked at the order he was creating in the backyard and I said: You’re a really good gardener. He turned to me, smiling. But I’m not a natural, he said. You’re the only one who can grow a baby. I saw surprise pass over his face, then fear, then something bold set his features. He locked my eyes; he was challenging me. I got out of the hammock and crossed the lawn to the

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house. It felt as if the ground was slipping from beneath my feet. I knew his eyes were on my back. From the kitchen window I watched Leon put away his gardening things. He moved slowly. All I could think about were the pages of the Living Arrangements form that had made me lie; all the boxes and arrows. All the questions. I put on some music. I hoped that the moment had passed and that we could go back to where we’d been before Leon had spoken. Back to our arrangement. I took two beers from the fridge and went outside. Leon was sitting on the back steps. I came up behind him and said: I love this Neil Young record. And I knew I’d said it before but I said it anyway because it usually worked. I said: Did I ever tell you about when I saw this concert in Sydney in ‘79? Leon spun around and glared at me. Yes you did, he said. Coldly. I saw it too, he said, but I don’t wanna sit here like two old farts talking about classic rock gigs we’ve seen. I wanna die with some dignity. He turned his back to me. I thought of that princess who had to keep on telling stories to entertain the king, or she’d have her head chopped off. She’d just run out of stories. There was only one room left to paint and that was the bedroom. I was relieved that Frisbee’s red paint had run out because all that visceral colour was starting to get to me. When I walked from room to room I felt like someone in a sci-fi film, shrunk to the size of a pea, trapped inside the human body. At night when I was stoned the walls in the toilet seemed to move in and out, like they were breathing. Like I was stuck inside a lung, with my pants around my knees.

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I got Leon to buy white paint for the bedroom. I wanted a blank wall to stare at. To project my future onto. I was in the bedroom one morning, working on the second coat, when a woman’s blonde head passed by the window. I heard her knock on the door. I remembered that the last of the bags of fertiliser were still on the verandah, and I worried that she might be investigating Leon. I took the wet paintbrush to the door with me to indicate that I was busy. But the woman standing there was obviously busy too, and I was part of her busy-ness. I heard her name and forgot it but I understood before she said it that she was from Social Security. She had come to check my living arrangements, she said. She said that the department felt that mine was a case that needed verifying. I knew she meant that the department could smell a rat. I caught the drips from the paintbrush in the palm of my hand. Fuck, I thought. I felt the cold shadow of the thing that was always one step behind me. It was as if all my life I’d been expecting this, as if, after all my dodging and weaving I’d finally been tackled to the ground. I had to let her in. I had to try to bluff my way through this but I felt my face twitching with guilt. I led her into the kitchen and offered tea. I threw the paintbrush into the sink. Was I already betraying myself in some way? Could she see Leon marked upon me? Right at the table where she was about to sit (I whisked it away, leaving a smelly trail) was the ashtray from the night before. Could she see us together in these ashes and butts? Our mouths on a joint and then on each other? She sat where Leon had sat while I cut his hair; there was a glossy loop of it on the floor by her shoe. Could she feel the care I had taken to do it properly? How much care would be too much? I looked around the kitchen and saw that Leon and I were fused in coffee cups and the things stuck to the fridge door, in the

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biscuits in the jar and the fruit in the bowl, in the cobwebs lit by the sun at the window. I didn’t know how this had happened; I was just resting for the summer. I tried to look at all the data in the room through her eyes, remembering the constable flashing his torch over the contents of my life all those years ago, but as I turned from putting the kettle on the stove I saw that she was not studying the evidence at all. She had picked up the Suzi Quatro book I’d left on the table and was looking closely at its pages. I sensed that this was my break, that now I might re-route her attention. Do you like Suzi Quatro? I asked. She looked at me as if I’d said something shocking, and then she lowered her head over the book again. After a while, she said quietly: I used to love Suzi Quatro; I’d almost forgotten. She seemed to be somewhere else and that was fine by me. I kept quiet and made the tea. When I sat down at the table and she spoke, her voice was trembling. With excitement, I thought. I used to play bass in an all-girl band, she said. A long time ago. We did lots of her songs. She lifted the book and pointed to a photograph of Suzi Quatro on stage. I had my hair cut just like that, she said. A shaggy dog, I laughed. Again, I seemed to have said something bad. I preferred to call it a coupe sauvage, she said. There was nothing savage about her now; hers was a look I’d been running from all my life: sensible shoes, sensible skirt, sensible blouse. A faded blonde trying to jazz things up with gold highlights. I guessed we were about the same age but I was sure my face wasn’t as dragged by time and disappointment as hers was. It was in my favour to keep the conversation going. Chrissie Hynde has one of those haircuts, I said. Yes, she said, you’re right, she does. She’s always worn her hair like that. She smiled at me, like I was forgiven. Her voice was steady; the

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excitement was now in her eyes. I dragged something out in a hurry. I saw The Pretenders at The Smash in Manchester in ‘81 , I told her. Chrissie Hynde was great. And afterwards I was in this fish and chip shop and she came in with the band. She ordered 30 p of chips and a pineapple fritter. I think she’s vegetarian. And the guitarist kept playing this Beach Boys song on the jukebox, over and over again. This was before he died. And finally Chrissie slapped his hand when he went to put a coin in the slot and she said ENOUGH JIMMY! Really? said my visitor, that’s amazing. Without thinking, I said: I’ve just read a book about Chrissie Hynde. Straightaway I wanted to kick myself because she might ask to have a look at it and she might find my little story there. But she didn’t. Instead she said: I’ve just read that biography of k d lang. So have I! I cried. Isn’t it amazing! She really smiled at me then. The universe was obviously on my side but I had to be careful not to blow it; this chitchat was dangerous. A new strategy came to mind. It would be a bold move but I suddenly wanted to get this over and done with. I suppose you need to check the sleeping arrangements in the house? I said. Oh yes, yes I do, she replied, surprised to be brought so sharply back to business. A little disappointed too, I thought. She opened a clipboard and uncapped a pen. As she followed me down the hallway I could feel her eyes sweeping my back, which was bare except for the strings of my bikini top. I held my shoulders straight for her. I’m painting my bedroom, I said, you’ll have to excuse the mess. But it was this mess that I was hoping would excuse me. The hallway was piled with furniture and boxes of clothes and belongings, and the mess spilled into the spare room off to the side. The bed Leon and I shared had been dismantled and its wooden planks rested against the wall. The mirror in which we watched ourselves had its face turned away; it wasn’t telling anything. I pointed

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to the spare room. The mess made it impossible to discern its function. This is my housemate’s room, I said. And his name is ... Leon? she asked, reading from her clipboard. Good old Leon, I said, what a pigsty. Typical man, not very domesticated. I smiled at her. And this is my room, I said, leading her into the empty white room. There was no trace of Leon and me here. She looked around the room but I knew it was impossible for her to know anything. I suddenly felt safe, that she would believe me, and go away, and I could go back to making up my life any way I wanted to. I thought I’d make it clear that it was time for me to get back to work. I picked up a roller from a tray and took up painting where I’d left off. My back was turned to her and again I could feel her eyes. There was silence. Then she said: Are you a lesbian? It was almost a whisper. I turned around, roller in the air, as if I had not heard her. Her face seemed twisted with anticipation. I smiled broadly at her. I just remembered this wild story this guy told me once in Glasgow, I said. He was a welfare worker, like you. I hoped that would hook her in. He worked in the slums, you know, the high-rise. One day he went there to check out a report that all the doors were missing from one of the flats. He found that there wasn’t a bath in the flat either — it had been ripped out of the floor. Anyway, the tenant confessed straight away. He said he’d chopped up all the doors and piled up the wood in the loungeroom. And then he’d stuck the bath on the wood, filled it with cooking oil and lit a fire. She was looking at me, her mouth hanging open slightly. I had her. While the oil was burning, he peeled the potatoes and when the chips were cooked, he sold them out the kitchen window. He said the queue stretched as far as the eye could see.

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I laughed as long as I could and turned again to my painting. I could hear her taking steps towards me. Are you a lesbian? she said. Her voice quavered. When I turned around she was so close I could smell the tea on her breath. I could see the scars of old piercings along the rim of her ear. I could see that she had to have my answer. Just as I was about to panic, to curse my newborn soul and the steel trap closing in on me, she moved her arm and a heavy bracelet dropped from beneath the cuff of her sensible blouse. As the silver circle fell in slow, slow motion towards her wrist I saw it for what it truly was: a lifebelt tossed to me by the universe. I saw too that it was the kind of bracelet I’d like for myself. I reached out to touch it. Did you get this in Indonesia? I asked. No, I’ve never been to Indonesia, she said. I got it at the markets. My fingers moved the bracelet slowly around her wrist. Her blue veins were just like Leon’s, only smaller. I had never lied to Leon. I had given him nothing to expect. I’ve been to the silver workshop where this was made, I said, although I couldn’t be sure. I thought of Indonesia, of how nice it’d be to be there, just cruising around, moving on when I wanted to. Leaving her when the time was right.

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little ex rmstrong

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The Armstrong family’s Landcruiser pulls up to the traffic lights. Walter Armstrong turns in the driver’s seat and watches the old man shuffling up the steps of the men’s hostel, cradling a carton of Victoria Bitter. Walter checks his watch so as to be more accurate in his condemnation. Ninethirty. Walter himself is a little thickheaded from the good red he drank with dinner the night before. A carton of VB he calculates to be worth twenty-two dollars, perhaps twenty warm. Must be the old man’s pension money. Why wasn’t there a cheaper brand of beer? There were flagons of wine for people like this, why wasn’t there a beer for them too? Perhaps this was a weakness in the market that might be exercised. The imported beers had developed the top end of the range; why not a beer for the other end? A rough drink, cheap presentation; no need for market creation or imagebuilding strategies — the buyers were already what you

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could call a captive audience. D R E G S , mutters Walter. DREGS DRAUGHT. In the passenger seat Walter’s son tries to ignore the wall of graffiti running the length of the building site. He feels the disturbing energies of the leering neon faces and distorted dog heads swell over the footpath towards him. His armpits are damp. Graffiti is so juvenile, Rex says to his father. Today is Rex’s fifteenth birthday. He knows his imagination is different from that of the graffiti artists. He sees the blue of swimming pools and small sports cars, and across this blue, like clouds in a summer sky, float basketball hoops, all of them conquered by his perfect aim. If this imagining should falter, if a ball should topple on the rim and fall back, unconsummated, then the blue lights will go out and the smell of rust and animals will come. He is swarmed by people; the Roman arena enwraps him with the heat of the masses; the prey is human, the entertainment is Death. A miracle of engineering catches the blood and tunnels it away. The Emperor is in his place. And the wealthy citizens, the judiciary, are in theirs. Underneath the wooden arena, a honeycomb of black spaces contains the cages for beasts and slaves. The body parts are carted away between acts. The sawdust blackens. The lights turn green. In the back seat Rex’s twin sister bows her head from the city sights on either side. Emily’s head is often lowered; to look at the world she twists her eyes through curtains of black, matted hair that is yellow at the roots. As the car moves off she studies the back of her brother’s head and sees the future of its silky blondness in the grey wires her father is trying to grow past his collar. She stares at their heads until she sees only the head of the Magritte painting that she looks at when she lies on her bed. The painting is of a woman’s head; the neck is long and feminine but the face has gone; the

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eyes are now astonished breasts, the nose a navel, the hollows and curves are now the contours of a woman’s body. The mute, shocked mouth is its clefted, hairy pudendum. Emily Armstrong rides in the family Landcruiser into the city but cannot hear her father and brother discuss the Pinin Farina lines of the Mazda RX7 that has raced them off from the lights. Emily cannot hear at all. An unopened pink envelope lies in her lap. Inside it is a card from her mother. Emily knows that the card will be one of the many her mother sells in her shop and awards to her family on special occasions. She opens it at a distance as if it might explode. On the card there is a single pink rose, dewdrops trapped in its heart. Inside, in gold script, an ancient Persian Proverb: The world is a rose smell it and pass it to your friends. Emily posts the card out of the window. Rex is thinking about the birthday card he got from his mother this morning. For many years she has been giving him cards of inspiration. He remembers one of her offerings, containing the words of Benjamin Disraeli: Life is too short to be little. Surely his mother couldn’t know how he feels about his height? She couldn’t know that every night as he works out on the gym equipment in his bedroom, he prays to be taller; as he sweats and cries into the weights he wonders how his mother’s womb could have been so blighted — his sister deaf, himself short. But this day, on this important fifteenth birthday, his mother has struck the right note. He sees the card where he left it on top of his computer: an arm brandish-

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ing an awesome sword bursting through the ring of red flame. Inside, the words of Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Whatever you can do or dream you can Begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. Walter’s phone rings as the Armstrongs turn into Barrack Street. Nah, mate, he says, the deal was five crates of the Mexican glass, fifty Turkish kilims and two hundred of the Peruvian peasant grave dolls. He can get fucked if he’s gunna make a song and dance about it. The car slows to a stop outside Sheepskin Shack. Walter pulls banknotes from his breast pocket for Rex and Emily. His children get out onto the pavement. Bleary-eyed Saturday morning shoppers pass them by. Emily looks into the front of the car and she sees her father say Happy Birthday Honey. She lifts her hands to thank him; her signing is light and eloquent. Walter gets the handsign for money, and waves as he drives off. Rex notices that some shoppers are looking at Emily and he pulls her into an arcade. Hot waffle smells surround them. He grabs the front of her dress and backs her against a shop front. His face is centimetres from hers. Read my lips, he says. Not in public, Emily. You read me? No hands in public. He releases her with a slight shove. Go shopping, he says. Rex and Emily Armstrong’s mother had been christened Angela, a name that soon became Angie, a habit despised by her as being typically Australian. There came a time in her life, after her children were born, when she sought comfort in a new world of empowerment and divination. To give herself

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new life in this new world she became Andromeda. Now people call her Andie. Andie is talking on the telephone in her house-that-wasonce-a-church in the green hills overlooking the city. She stretches out on a long wicker lounge. The room is crowded with potted palms, and a ceiling fan turns. She calls this room The Somerset, after Maugham, who she thinks had something to do with colonial atmospheres. Andie is taking notes. Her assistant is giving her the details of the break-in at her shop the night before. All of the massage oil for lovers? The dolphin whistles? The non-drip goddesses? I can hardly bear to ask, she says, did they take the American Indian buffalo-bone ceremo nial breastplate? She punches numbers on a calculator. Look possum, she says, I’ll handle the insurance. Maybe we can mature our losses a little. Every cloud has a silver lining. Andie hangs up the phone and looks out of the stainedglass window onto the park below. The jacarandas are in bloom, there are children at play on the new-generation swings. Today is no day for business, today her babies are fifteen years old. She recalls the look on Rex’s face as he read his birthday card at breakfast that morning. She believes she has struck his soul. Rex has lots of shopping. He has bought a pair of Nike with height-giving gel soles, and basketball shorts and tops in the unambiguous competitive colours of blue and gold, red and green. He does not like more than two colours together at one time. Outside the entrance to Myers he stops to count his money. There is never enough and he will always be less than — less than — that which he might be. He looks up from his wallet and sees a crowd unusually large for a Saturday morning, a crowd revving like an engine. He fears it is some street theatre they are surging towards;

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fools pretending like children, white-faced mutes contorting their bodies, shrieking harlots in blood-spattered black lace — or worse still, he thinks, as he finds himself merged and travelling along with the crowd — wigged and powdered lunatics lurching around on stilts making awful sounds like moaning or tears. French aristocrats teetering before their fall, or fire-eaters, dumb fire-eaters, burning their mouths, fuming up the air, trying to be heroes, making amateur exhibitions of themselves. When Andie’s children were small, she read to them at bedtime. They were soft and fragrant from the bath, their cheeks red, their golden hair damp at the tips. Emily lay back on her pillows and concentrated hard on her mother’s lips, as she was being taught to do. Let’s have the Ugly Duckling! Andie cried in a tone of high enthusiasm learned in her acting days. Rex sank further into the blankets, disappointed and bored, knowing that in the same book she was reading from there was a story about a king who went out into the street without his clothes on. But Andie sought to move her children with the tale of the ‘different’ little duck. When the ugly duckling gazed into the mirror of the pond and found itself snow-white and majestic, she hoped the children would understand this lesson of actualising the hidden self. Emily had not yet learnt that the mouth-shapes for baby and paper look the same; the story broke over her as a riddle of paper ducks and babies that flew around in the air. When the crowd spills into Forrest Place, Rex sees that many thousands of people are gathered there under the cool civic eye of the Post Office. Rex sees home-made placards and banners, a long stage spiked with microphones, television

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cameras. He is jostled on all sides, he finds it detestable to be touched by so many. He cannot see, he elbows and shoves his way through the crowd. Hearing words from the stage, reading the signs that people carry, he interprets the occasion; this is a call for Law, a call for Order. He is suffocating amongst the masses, he wants out. He lowers his head and butts his way through the people. As the crowd roars he smells theatre and blood and he has suddenly never been this strong, people move to clear a path, he is moving to the front of the crowd and there is a voice in his head and words like froth on his lips. Begin It, Begin It Now! He arrives before the stage with his arm high in the air, delivering the sword through the ring of flame, propelling the ball towards the hoop, and he feels hands lifting him, arms raising him, the sky coming close. At first the people on stage are confused when this young man is deposited at their feet. The ambulance officers had directed security to help out the little bloke down the front — he appeared to be going under the waves of crowd. But now one of the speakers reads the moment differently. The Voice of the People! he cries, and escorts Rex to a microphone. The crowd roars. Rex is bruised and panting but takes the microphone in both hands as he has seen singers do, and voice comes to him. Will we wait for what we want? NO! cry the people. Will we get what we want? YES! they reply. The sky above Rex is his very own blue. Words fall from his mouth like money, the crowd are beggars before him. Rex punches the air with his fist, as basketball heroes do.

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Emily has heard the human voice only once. One winter afternoon while she was playing on the loungeroom floor, her mother took a Carole King record from its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. Emily watched as the needle cut the disc’s black skin and felt her own ear tear horribly; she had heard a note of female song. And now, many years later, on her fifteenth birthday, she follows a crowd of people to a rally in the city. Her eyes move from the gracious columns of the Post Office to discover her brother up high on a stage. He raises his arm and strikes the air, and a human roar of thousands bursts like flame in her head. The Armstrongs gather around the TV to watch the coverage of the rally. As the camera takes in the surging crowd, Emily’s hands fly to her ears. Rex is impressed by the sight of himself above the sea of upturned faces. I’m proud of you son, says Walter, I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you. Andie takes Rex’s hand and whispers: I always had the faith. I didn’t know I had those thoughts until I spoke, says Rex. Your mother never thinks about what she’s going to say before she says it either, says Walter. I speak, therefore I think, Andie retorts, glancing guiltily at her daughter. Emily gets up and stands in front of the television. Time for Charades, says Rex, sinking into his chair. Emily wants to tell them about the terrible cry of the crowd that she has heard. Her parents strain forward to concentrate better on her flying hands. They make a mistake. Emily’s face reddens. They try again. Her gestures are emphatic. They misinterpret once more. Rex laughs. Emily glares at him. They try again. When they finally understand what she is telling them Andie is so relieved she cries: That’s wonderful!

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At dinner parties, in the glamour of candlelight, Andie likes to talk about her days as a television actress. She springs to her feet to replay her lines from Homicide. And then I looked at Leonard Teale, she says, pretending to draw on a cigarette: Aw gee Copper, give a girl a break. Ya reckon I know where Harry is? Gone fishin’ most likely. ‘E loves ‘is fishin’. She takes a good swig from her glass. And then there was Division 4, she says, tousling her hair. She mimes the spreading of bread: G’day Detective Sergeant Bannon, will it be chicken and mayo again today? Andie sits down and there is silence. Then she says softly: What a team we were! Walter knows what she is about to say, countless times he has heard it. But each time Andie delivers the line as if the thought has just come to her, new and surprising. You know, she says, Hector Crawford was the sweetest man I ever knew. Because of the excitement he caused at the rally, Rex is invited to air his views on television. He makes a live appearance. He scrubs up pretty well, says Walter. It’s camera-appeal, either you have it or you don’t, says Andie, hoping Walter will add what she hopes is the obvious — he must have got it from his mother. But the thought doesn’t occur to him. Rex is wearing a new leather jacket, the studio lights excavate a steely glint from the depths of his eyes. In answer to a question he says: We have to return to the old, decent values. You’re very young to hold such strong opinions, says the interviewer. The camera closes in on Rex’s earnest face: Because I’m young I can see things clearly and it’s the simple things we need to understand in these troubled times. It’s a good thing we got his teeth fixed, says Walter.

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The interviewer asks: What are those good, simple things we need now? Rex says: We need Justice. We need Intestinal Fortitude. And we need The Family. Upstairs in her bedroom Emily is studying her Magritte posters. The one in which the woman’s face is obliterated. And the painting of the pipe. Deep-bowled, polished, generously hooked, banded by gold, its mouthpiece of ebony. It looks substantial, straight, you could tell a story about it, you could believe. But below it, in writing: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The people from TV Talk have come to do a story on the family of the local boy making a name for himself with his regular appearances on the small screen. Andie leads Nigel and Mirabelle into the kitchen, and is relieved to see that the sun is streaming photogenically through the skylight and the gold persimmons speak brightly to the spill of purple grapes in the fruit bowl. Nigel and Mirabelle exclaim: What a lovely room! They are professionals; their compliments disguise their inquisitiveness and their eyes are free to dart about, looking for important details. Who are these cuties? a s k s Nigel, lifting one of the photographs pinned to the fridge door. It is a picture of the golden-haired twins in identical rompers on a tropical beach. Andie tells the story of the children’s first trip to Bali. And who’s this? says Mirabelle, pointing to a faded newspaper clipping. They study the snowy hair, the heavy eyebrows, the patrician forehead. That is Hector Crawford, says Andie, preparing to tell another story, the sweetest man I ever ... But that’s not Hector Crawford, says Nigel, that’s Gough Whitlam. Andie looks at Nigel. She looks at the former prime

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minister. Yes, of course it is, she says quietly, I wonder how he got there? Emily will not smile for Nigel’s photographs. In his advertising days he dealt with irascible babies by inserting a plastic wedge between their gums, their mouths then opened in an appealing duck-bill. Now he draws Mirabelle aside and says: Wadda we do about the Goth? Across the room Emily is watching. She stands and moves towards him like a revenant; on her still, powdered, white face she has drawn a drama of Oriental eyes. Her purple-blue lips reverse the glutted lips of fashion and are empty, bled. She passes close by him, her long silks hissing. Andie moves quickly towards her daughter but Emily closes a door in her face. She spent all morning getting ready, says Andie. The room is full of people who do not hear her. Rex and Walter light up like Catherine wheels for the camera. Andie does her best. They sit close together on a sofa in front of a Sally Morgan print. When the photograph appears in TV Talk, the caption reads: The Armstrong family, relaxing at home. Left to right — Walter, Rex, Andromeda, Emily (not pictured). On the TV screen the pink-suited reporter stops the little girl on the street. That’s a very pretty dress you’re wearing. The child giggles. Sweetie, do you know what charisma is? asks the reporter. Crisma is when you get lots of presents and there’s a big tree with a angel, the little girl says carefully. In the Armstrong family loungeroom, Andie cries: Oh! How cute! The reporter looks charmed and says: Perhaps we’d better ask your mother. In the same voice with which she asked the question of the child, she says to the waiting woman: Do you know what charisma is? The woman smiles: Yeh, well, you know ... it’s something special ... it’s well — not ordinary, you know? It’s hard

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to describe but I know it when I see it. Rex and his parents look at one another with satisfaction. The reporter stops a businessman. Raising her voice above the traffic she says: Excuse me sir, can you tell me what controversial means? Sure, he says, resting his briefcase on a rubbish bin, it’s hard-hitting, it pulls no punches, it’s coming on strong, it’s right between the eyes. Thank you sir, she says with a lift of her eyebrows to show she is impressed. An old woman wheels her shopping trolley by. Have you got a moment Madam? I just want to ask you — what do you think caring means? There’s not a lot of caring in society these days, dear. It’s an old-fashioned thing, is caring. My mother could of told you what caring was. Andie and Walter have lumps in their throats. On the screen two teenage boys whizz by on skateboards. The reporter gives chase. Fellas, fellas, can you tell me what cool is? Hey, they say, pushing their caps back on their heads, cool is cool. Andie and Walter give Rex a clumsy thumbs up. The interviewer speaks with great emphasis. Charismatic. Controversial. Caring. Cool. Music swells; it is John Farnham’s ‘The Age of Reason’. I’ll never get used to not calling him Johnny, says Andie, tapping her foot. The reporter’s voice livens. Coming soon to Channel Five, a young man with answers for troubled times. The music soars. LITTLE REX ARMSTRONG. Andie leaps from her chair. Oh Darling, she cries. Walter mutes an advertisement for roof tiles. Well son, he says, crossing the room to shake his hand, there’s no stopping you n o w . Emily too is in the Armstrong family loungeroom watching TV, watching her brother and her parents, watching the voices of the people; looking at all the talking heads. Late at night, while the others sleep, under the surgical light of kitchen and bathroom, Emily searches for traces of herself.

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She empties rubbish bins and reaches into the dark corners of cupboards. From the refrigerator she takes a carton of eggs and smashes them, one by one, into the sink. When she sees that one of the yolks is flecked with blood, she scoops it up and tips it into the empty carton. When Andie comes down in the morning, Walter is searching angrily for eggs for his omelette. She finds the carton in the centre of the table in the dining room. When she lifts the lid she finds in each coarse cup a laconic thing: a bloody yolk, a twist of steel wool coated with animal fat, a bluebird earring held together with superglue, the translucent husk of a prawn, a knot of shredded cassette tape, a wax-tipped cotton bud. Reliquary box for Emily. As the children have grown older it has become harder to organise the Armstrong family’s Sunday outing. But today there is a consensus: they are visiting old Fremantle Prison. They begin with coffee and cake at the Convict Cafe. A child requests Rex’s autograph, a waitress flirts with him. Their tour guide is a raconteur, a former prison guard he tells them, which lends his stories authenticity. As the Armstrong family and a small group of tourists move through the cell blocks, their guide explains how they were built by convicts, the stone hewn from the ground upon which they now stood, the timber having crossed the seas. He points out the fortified cell of the legendary bushranger Moondyne Joe. In the exercise yard he shows them where the floggings had once taken place. He tells them stories of the limits of human endurance. They look at the cracked, grey bitumen as if it might show them a sign. They tour the cells of solitary confinement, and they come to the cell for the holding of the prisoner awaiting execution. The tour party

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crowds into the small space where men and women had passed their last night and eaten their last meal. In this cell the tour party realises that there has been a shape to this narrative of crime and punishment, and that the climax awaits them. The gallows is white-washed and quiet. The guide tells them that a hush would fall over the prison at 8 am on the morning of a hanging. The Armstrong family studies the powerful, motionless noose. They count the thirteen steps that lead to the hanging platform. One by one their hands touch the cold killing lever. Walter brings home a new Sony 78 cm television for the premiere of Rex’s show. Rex glances angrily at the sound of water coming from upstairs, and pushes up the volume. His face fills the screen. He is speaking of Justice. A montage of images speeds by: car crashes, handcuffed wrists, flashing sirens, prison doors slamming, dark city streets at night. Rex is out and about in the world, witnessing, asking the difficult questions, shaking his head. There is an ad break and a montage of images speeds by: barbecue chickens, smiling banks, greyhounds racing, new cars turning on the head of a pin, bright city streets at night. Rex appears on the screen again. He is dribbling a ball on an empty basketball court, dressed to play in striking black and white. Life is like a basketball game, he says. He talks about the winners and losers, the fair and foul play, the penalties and times-out, the bonuses and jam. Every member of society, he says, must play by The Rules of the Game. Rex is wrapping up the show. His expression is weary, troubled, his voice is low. On next week’s show, he says, we take a look at another old-fashioned value: the value of the death penalty. Until then, it’s goodnight from me, and remember — Be Fair, Be Safe. The credits roll.

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Andie covers Rex with kisses. Walter pretends a congratulatory right hook to his son’s jaw. Rex is shiny-eyed, laughing, pacing. But the noise from upstairs interrupts their excitement. Andie asks Rex to bring his sister down for dinner. She believes that Emily has not eaten for days. Rex follows the sound of water to the bathroom. Emily has her head in the basin. He sees red splatters on the white tiles and bright liquid pouring down the drain. As he spins her around Emily’s wet hair flings red beads across his face. Oh Morticia! he says, lifting a strand of her crimson hair, why did you do it? She reaches for a towel but Rex backs her into a corner and blocks her way. You must eat something, he says, our mother is worried. She covers her face with her hands but Rex pulls them away. No hands Emily, no hands. He pins her elbows to the wall. A rubbish bin she kicks at with her foot clatters over the tiles. Rex steps back and looks at her steadily. Sshh, he says, placing a finger on his lips. All night long the Armstrong family dreams. Rex dreams he is wandering amongst the filthy people caged below the Roman arena. Walter dreams of 1950s cafe apparatus. The Wurlitzer, the cherry-red and cobalt-blue anodised milkshake holders, the long frothy nozzle. In Andie’s dream a woman wears a cotton shift, like a hospital gown. She is supported by men as she ascends the ladder; the room is dark. On the landing the woman raises her eyes and sees the thick, still noose; she slumps to the floor but is lifted and the men’s hands compose her body as if she is a doll. Her hands are tied behind her back and her legs restrained. A hood is placed over her head, the curves of her thighs and breasts appear through her light clothing. The noose hooks her body; she sways in air.

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Later, Andie seeks to understand this dream. The hanged man symbolises metamorphosis, says her friend Dimity on the telephone. Andie says: But this was a woman. Perhaps you’re repressing your feminine, says Dimity. Andie doesn’t think so, she says she’s done lots of work on that. The dream’s telling you to pay attention to your body, says Dimity. It’s telling you to hang loose, swing a little. Emily had dreamt that night also, she had talked in her sleep. Freed of the bedclothes, her hands had taken to the air like birds. In the family room Rex and his parents are resting from the incursions of fame. Rex is cutting out items about himself from newspapers, his parents are leafing through catalogues, their minds on business. The telephone rings. The Premier wants to speak to Rex. Andie and Walter smile at one another. Rex adopts a casual tone with the Premier. A fan? asks Walter, as his son hangs up the phone. Rex begins to tell his parents what the Premier has asked of him but the phone rings again. Andie answers. At first the line is silent but then she hears soft breathing and a rasping sound. E m i l y , she says, Emily is that you? She listens carefully and hears children playing. The park Emily? Are you in the park? In the park Emily drops her father’s phone to the ground. Once more she assesses the muscular branches and leafy canopy of the Moreton Bay she stands beneath. She looks at her hands in the green light; warm blisters of sun burst against the skin, the bones vibrate. She reaches for the chair lying on the ground beside her. As her parents and brother emerge from the house, a car drives by and she sees them wave to their neighbours. Placing the chair on firm ground,

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she steps onto it. The noose provides a frame for the picture she has of her family as they cross the road. As their feet touch the park’s soft grass, they see her.

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Was it an accident? They met again in front of the chimpanzee’s cage at the zoo. She saw him crouched by a child in a stroller and thought of hurrying on. His name came to her slowly, and she was ashamed. She could not remember the last time she had seen him, or scarcely why she had paused in her trajectory to lie down beside him on those airless summer nights, how many years ago? She could not say whether he had changed. He and the child were laughing at the apes. When he turned and saw her she was as he always expected her to be, the face in his head all these years; moisture pooling above the lower rim of her eyes, her cheekbones collecting a cube of light, and dazzling. And still, with the ripeness of animals all around, still he knew the scent of her, like sweet biscuits. He had forgotten nothing; the clumsy weight of his hopes bearing down on those flimsy nights. The little boy scrambled into the man’s arms. She watched him

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accommodating the wriggling body, and she recalled his awkwardness. He felt it: all the grace, the coming of ease, the growing into his body with the growing of this child, the slow fitting together of the parts undone now like a puppet released of its strings, undone in the gaze of this woman. She studied the child and compared the amorphous nature of her time since they last met — how many years ago? — with his time; the hatching of this boy, the changes wrought daily. She had never succeeded in changing the nature of the time through which she wandered, amnesiac, shackled intimately to the hours between midnight and dawn. They both looked at the boy. He was wearing a Yankees cap that hung down over his eyes. His father took off the cap as if to show him properly, and he teased the boy’s hair through his fingers. He looks like you, she said, he has your forehead. He wanted to resist any judgements she might make about his body, or the body of his son. He would not concede this observation. And so he said: Oh, you can’t tell these things yet ... he still has his baby head. There is no recipe for magic, but two words can change the world. On this spring day, outside the monkey house, it happened like this: the words baby and head, assisted by the gravity of the occasion, plunged earthward but with the heat of the day (and something of the heat of the moment) the words fused and struck the ground as one. The slight shimmering vibrations of the impact broke like waves on the shores of the imaginations of the two who once were lovers and deposited images raised from the depths: a flame, a matinee jacket, a fingernail moon. The simultaneous release of these images cleansed the atmosphere, the clarion call of one thousand birds shook the trees, for an instant every drop of water and the mind of every person ran crystal clear. And

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then, one by one like the fall of dominoes, like the final taps of a conjuring wand: the seed of a mungumbo nut germinated in the belly of an elephant, a giraffe’s eyelashes brushed along the outstretched inner arm of an unhappy woman, and a lone child arrived at the door of the lost property office. Careless life went on again. The man and the woman parted, sober. The zoo chattered. But under the cloak of invisibility, in the bright of day, the world had given up one of its best-kept secrets. A babyhead was freed. A babyhead comes into being with a burst of joy and a wave of anxiety like a lightning flash followed by rolling thunder. The awful waiting of the babyhead is soon to be over. Its tenancy of the chill, echoing chambers of space will end. It has endured years and decades, sometimes centuries, travelling time, inanimate, suffering the pain of its lonely potential like a clock with only one hand, ticking into the void. For ever it has been a question mark, a loose twist of a thing open and unanswered, waiting, waiting for this miraculous collision of events and now, now, now! this query uncurls itself and its two ends embrace as a circle, a shape that has meaning and agency in this world. It is a circle with a mission. This circle wants the body of a woman. A babyhead must find a womb in which to rest and grow, and then it can be born as all other babies are born except for this one thing: whatever its fortune, a babyhead will always love its mother and value its life. The history of babyheads is not without its errors. Babyheads have been known to rush into things. Some babyheads have rushed into the bodies of virgin women and there has been the need for elaborate cover-ups. Other babyheads, blinded by enthusiasm and frantic for the sappy cradle of a woman, have plunged mistakenly into the dark

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and viscous waters of great lakes where they have grown to become humped monsters of the deep. But babyheads have refined their technique. They learnt a lot when they learnt that the lives of people, like their own, were often a secret. The man and the woman in the newspaper photograph are celebrating sixty years of marriage. There is no one to tell you that the man’s love, the comfort and inspiration of his life, is not the woman whose hand he holds, but the cooing carrier pigeons that own the backyard. And who will say that after the terrible mess was made on the sheets on their wedding night, there was never another night, and she returned happily to the companionship of her bridesmaid, who lived in the sleepout. In the photograph the couple’s grown daughter sits between them, sharing the day, and you can tell from the light in her eyes and the smile on her lips that she loves her mother and values her life. Babyhead loitered in the atmosphere, hardly knowing what to do. It is hard for a circle to express itself. It longed to flap some arms or click its heels but contented itself with bouncing up and down. Soon! Soon! Soon! the babyhead cried, life will begin! A shiver of excitement ran around its circumference. It floated here and there over the world it was soon to join, and it learnt how to catch a breeze and how to hover and swoop; over the lush grounds of the zoo and along the buzzing freeways it travelled, out, out to the salty seas, and as the sun lowered, it came finally to the poetry of the suburbs. Babyhead watched the flowers closing in their beds, it saw the rubbish bins rolling out to the road, it danced to the hiss of the sprinklers lighting up the lawns. The babyhead sighed. Here, it thought, I will find home. There was great warmth in its centre as it came to rest on a

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clothes line and it saw the vitality of the backyard; the underpants swelling in the breeze, the howls of the black dog as it spasmed on top of the brown dog, the ping-pong balls (so like itself) that flew back and forth over the fence and decorated the shrubbery. Babyhead heard fat frying and a toilet flush. It heard the whirr of a power tool and the song of the swimming pool — after an eternity hanging around in the hell of Nothingness, it had arrived at the heart of the real. But finding residency would be no simple task. It had always known: there was only one woman in the world for Babyhead. From rooftop to rooftop it swooped, down carpeted hallways, into the damp of shower recesses, travelling from room to room on the hose of vacuum cleaners, hovering and seeing all. It saw a woman cooking an omelette and a woman exercising to a video and a woman drinking beer with another woman and a woman dyeing her hair and a woman scratching a cat, but the babyhead saw no woman for it. Babyhead gazed at the pale moon and wondered if for all of cold infinity the moon was to be the only mother it knew. Suddenly from a house at the end of the street rose a great heat. It was not the heat of a barbecue or a hot water system but an urgent heat, pulsing, perhaps even dangerous. Babyhead sped towards it. In the bedroom the curtains are drawn and it is night already, the dark is etched by the thin swirling smoke of burning sandalwood and cigarettes that have been forgotten. The heat that Babyhead finds there is of a human kind, it seems the walls drip, red wine flows slowly over the carpet. The lips of the man and woman are stained also; crushed, swollen, dark in the mouth like caves. He buckles his belt and looks at her steadily. She is naked except for a black shawl, its torn fringe

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hangs to the ground. Look, he says calmly, there was never much between us anyway. She grasps his hand with both of hers. How many bones in his hand? She doesn’t know, it makes her desperate. His fingers reaching inside her, drawing water from the well, his fingers on her mouth, drawing words. How many bones? How many? He pulls his hand free. She recoils, as if struck. The door closes, and another. She stands in the room and listens to the engine start and the car pull away. She wraps the shawl tightly around her. As she falls slowly, soundlessly to her knees, the room appears to topple too, the ceiling and mirrors shudder and fall and she is at the centre of the destruction, bowed, rocking, wailing. Babyhead is there; close, covetous, watching every move of the woman it has chosen to be its mother. She does not know that the vigilant eye is now upon her. Babyhead observes her insomnia; she wanders in the land of the midnight sun, burning, whimpering occasionally as if suddenly cut by a sharp blade, a cigarette in her mouth, smoke in her eyes, pacing, curling herself into a tight fist in the corner of rooms, soaking, falling into baths of water hot enough to sear the flesh. All day she sleeps. She covers herself with the shawl. The mattress is bare; the faded stains of blood and rust record her life. The house is silent. The telephone and doorbell are disconnected. In her dreams she sees the scene of an accident, the mangled car body, the jostling crowd. She sees the leg of a woman fall out from beneath a white sheet as the stretcher is lifted slowly into the ambulance. The leg swings emptily, the polish on the toenails is pink. Her sleeping body thrashes. The babyhead wishes she was calm. There are certain powers at its disposal that may be used to prepare her for its

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forthcoming visit. Babyhead sweeps aside the wreckage of her dreaming to make way for a garden. Now in her dreams she sees sweet black soil and the appearance of tender shoots. A mellow rain falls. The green shoots fatten and push through the earth, they are veiled in sun. The shoots segment and bend; become white, become pink, become flesh. A garden of new, wiggling, succulent fingers. A garden of babies’ hands. When she awakes from this dream she is at ease and breathing freely. Babyhead decides to take its housekeeping a step further. It waits until she rises from the bed. As she lights a cigarette and draws the smoke into her lungs, the babyhead goes to work. The sudden nausea flings her against the wall, an icy sweat breaks from every pore of her body, a torrent of avocado and sour white wine pours from her mouth down the front of her shawl. Babyhead spins about with glee and watches her stagger to the bed, and just to be sure of its gifts, it makes her deliver the remaining contents of her stomach onto the mattress. Although she learns quickly and the babyhead is pleased, it is boring just hanging around waiting to be and every now and then, just a couple of times a day, it gets her to repeat the performance. She is tired, too tired to be alive she tells herself, yet as the days go by and she begins to calculate the possibilities of what is happening to her, she feels a surge of hope. When she lies on her bed now she thinks of herself as a lake, a lake of loss, and every time she loses anew the other losses in her life stir and swell and break her banks, like the waters when a heavy stone is tossed. But now she is still, and the lake is quiet; waiting. She lies with her eyes closed and feels the ache of her breasts, feels it meaningfully, and Babyhead is there, mad with excitement, bouncing up and down on her nipples, joyously riding the slope of her bosom.

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Babyhead trembles. It wobbles around in the air. To calm itself, Babyhead rests on top of the TV and gazes down on her curled in the beanbag, bewitched by the new languor of her limbs and the slow and elegant path of her hand between the bowl of potato chips and her open mouth. Like ET, Babyhead gazes towards Home, and it trembles again. Soon the waiting will be over and Babyhead will be inside the original and one true paradise: Mother. Babyhead imagines the glowing cave of her, its fabulous drapery, yearning to merge, now, without delay, to be a stone within its peach, clinging. She is the world before waters, before land, before population. A world waiting for life. There are two ways for a babyhead to enter a woman’s body: like a parasite, quietly burrowing, or (more unusually) by hitching a ride on the food she eats. In 1610 a babyhead is known to have made its way on a piece of dried hog down the gullet and eventually to the womb of a member of the Dutch Royal Family, but it is a perilous path, vulnerable to the gnashing of teeth, the flood of saliva, the trampling of the tongue, the tumult of peristalsis. Babyhead decided to take her by the neck and take it slowly, insinuating itself into her flesh, divining the warm buried streams of the blood that would carry it to its lodgings. Babyhead steadies itself and in one resolute, amorous, devoted leap it flings itself off the TV towards her. But the antenna topples, the top of the game-show contestant’s head slides sideways, a hum like a universe of wasps swarms the babyhead’s weather. She sits up, stands up, her beautiful determined eyes move towards Babyhead, getting closer like the headlights of a car, blinding, Babyhead like an insect trapped in their brightness; crazed, full of fear, faltering, spluttering, it dashes itself on the side of the kero heater and hits the ground.

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The world is agony. Lost between the strands of rosepatterned carpet, the babyhead is dying while dreaming of life. It cries out but cannot be heard. The last thing that Babyhead sees, bearing down on it, grinding down, is the gigantic rubber-rippled sole of Mother. Content now that she has corrected the television reception, she returns to the beanbag and, smiling, cupping her stomach protectively with her two hands, she lies down again. The doctor swivelled in his chair and studied her. In the sunlight from the window he saw that she was not young but that her expression was mild, and expectant. He thought that such cases were seldom seen these days; in his mind hysteria belonged to a time when women were strapped into ribcracking corsetry and kept quiet and still in the hushed dark behind heavy drapes. Nowadays, it was more likely to be the narcissistic disturbances they exhibited; the despair of the drear vacancy of their lives, crying out for substance. He thought he had never seen such florid symptomatology. She sat quietly. The doctor tried to conceal his discomfort by studying her records once more. She waited. I’m sorry, he said at last, but it seems that you are definitely not pregnant. He turned away as tears came to her eyes. When he looked at her again, her face was a ruin. I am sorry, he repeated, but it seems that this baby has been all in your head.

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t he human

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iss

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It seemed to me that my friends and I were nothing but tentacles of One Mind. Together, with our one mind, we were contemptuous of a world in which we had hardly dirtied our hands. We had no articles of faith. We were addicted to irony. We sat around kitchen tables with the same food before us, the same drink, the same fluoro shining on the lino. We talked about the films of David Lynch, seeming to forget how many times we had done this before; the hour after hour after hour of this. I was dreaming of a film that would change my life. He came unironically up my garden path carrying a bag of strawberries that were so big they had to have been encouraged. When he smiled, deep spaces of happiness opened inside his mouth. He had simple questions for me. Would you like to go for a walk? When I said yes, I felt like I’d coughed up

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a surgical swab that had been lost inside my body for years. On the docks the twilight oils spilled on silent people reeling in silent fish. Thin rabbits raced between the shadows. The rat guards on the ships were encrusted with rust. There were blue lights on tall poles over the water and long blue reflections. The lights said yes or no to boats. Isn’t this beautiful? His simple questions. When I was a younger woman, one of the ceremonies of courtship was the meeting with the parents of the beloved. Now it was the meeting with the children. His son was sitting at the kitchen table when we entered, his small brown paw clamped around a pencil, drawing. He looked up at me and I saw his radiance, the gold light from his eyes. Sebastian was a pure distillation of his father, clean of the impurities of age. The last traces of his baby fat lay around his wrists and neck like jewellery. When I looked at the Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt he was wearing, he climbed down from his chair and told me about the movie he’d just seen. Well ... Donatello ... and then Raphael ... swings like this ... and ... Splinter ... Leonardo caught ... POW! Michelangelo. He knew how to tell a story. A perfume came from his shining dark hair. I wondered if it had been washed for my visit. I couldn’t take my eyes off him but I felt his father’s anxiety at my back. I knew there was another introduction to be made. His daughter was watching ‘Melrose Place’ in the loungeroom. She looked like the young women on the screen in front of her; back-combed hair and slabs of cheekbone and a look of cool plotting. Her beauty was as sharp as a knife. Before it, I felt blunt. When her father introduced us, Aurelia kept one eye on the television while the other swept me from head to foot. Moments later, when she asked her father for money, I thought I saw him sway under the force of the full,

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voluptuous gaze she turned upon him. I heard, in her voice, the effort of her nonchalance. He gave her some money and led me out of the room. Against a blue wall, he put his arms around me. He had another simple question. Will you come and live with me? Everyday I felt myself changing. At lunchtime the kitchen was full of the morning’s shopping. The toast burned. The exhaust fan whirred. In a toobig cricket helmet, Sebastian looked like a small spaceman. He threw a ball against the wall. His father scraped at eggs in the frying pan. I’m very sensitive to noise, I said. Sebastian beat his chest and howled like Tarzan. His father began to sing loudly. They banged on saucepans with spoons and opened and closed the squeaking fridge door. I was weak with relief. I felt like I had been diagnosed and connected to a slow drip of Equilibrium. But I couldn’t understand Aurelia. There were days when she was cold and furious; we cowered before her bitter eyes. And then, unaccountably, the house warmed to her goodwill. Her heart was tender. We gazed upon her calm and became calm ourselves. When I asked her father about her moods he would say: She’s moody. His answer didn’t satisfy me. There was a force in this house; an unlocatable passion was troubling at the root of our lives. I took a sleeping pill because the storm was keeping me awake. I dreamt that I was tending orchids at night in a vast, beautiful glasshouse. The rain on its vaulted roof ran like mercury. When I heard the terrible crack I looked up and saw an arc of green lightning split the sky. The shattered roof fell

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slowly towards me, each cutting edge of each glass shard illuminated by moonlight. I thought later that I woke to see an extraordinary man walking across the bedroom floor. He was stooped forward by the weight of the deformity he bore upon his back. The enormous hump of glass that rose out of his flesh might have been mistaken, if it had not been so sharp, for an angel’s wing. I explained him to myself as a dream-creature; if he seemed particularly real it was simply an effect of the drug I’d taken. I linked him to my dream of the shattering glasshouse. In the morning he said: You slept soundly last night. He told me that I had slept on while the glass doors of our bedroom were smashed by a burglar, who had run away into the night. He said that the rain had poured in. While I slept, a man from a 24-hour service had brought new doors, carrying the sheets of glass quietly across the room. I told him about my dreams and he said that he wanted something of what I’d had. The burglar and the hunchback often came to visit us. When Sebastian pinched food from his father’s plate, the burglar was responsible. When we swept up the pieces of a broken glass, we said the hunchback was crying. And when, one by one, items went missing from the house — camera, watches, cheque book, CDs — it was easy to blame those outsiders of the night. I gave him one of my sleeping pills, as he had asked, and he fell asleep beside me. I thought that one of us should be vigilant. The sound of Aurelia’s car stirred me. I heard her close the front door and take the first six steps on the stairs. I knew that she was going to fall. I knew that I would understand everything. Nevertheless, the sound, when it came, hit my stomach like a fist.

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She lay curled on the floor at the foot of the stairs. As I bent over her I encountered a look of such ghastly beatitude on her bloody white face that I had to look away. It was some time before I could offer her my arms, and my strength, to pull her limp body from the floor. In the morning it was my turn to tell him about the events of the night before. Now I had a simple question for him. It’s heroin, isn’t it? Yes, he said. On me, Sebastian practised a repertoire of kisses: The Eskimo Kiss — the tip of his nose rubbed against mine. The Butterfly Kiss — his eyelashes fluttering against my cheek. The Royal Kiss — his lips pressed ceremoniously to the back of my hand. The Polar Bear Kiss — his soft limbs devouring me. The Human Kiss — wet, warm, fierce and only when no one was looking. My discovery of the family secret seemed to drive Aurelia to a new level in her addiction. Perhaps the pressure she felt to conceal herself from me had forced her need into a place where it had grown stronger until released. A pattern was soon established. After a time away from home, she would return quietly to us. There would be hope. And then, as each new day revealed a new theft, she would be gone. Now there was no hope but we were safe again. Soon the waves of her life elsewhere would wash back over us and the visits from the police would begin again, the calls from those she had betrayed, the demands of banks and businesses. If they could not have her blood, then the blood of her father would do.

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She came home one night as we were preparing dinner. He was pulling the chicken out of the oven when we heard the front door open. I saw relief flood his face. Let’s just welcome her, he whispered, maybe things will be different this time. She looked smaller. She looked tired. It was enough for him to have her breathing before him again but my own breathing had stopped. I brought to the dinner table a book of names that I’d taken out of the library. I wanted to show Aurelia something I’d found in it. I wanted to ease the tension. Do you know what your name means? I asked her. She shook her head. She read: Roman family name meaning gold. She looked up, smiling. I didn’t know that, she said. I could see her feeling for gold inside herself. I saw it there but it was in hard little nuggets, as obstructive as blood clots. That sounds like alchemical wishful thinking, said her father, Aurelia’s more like lead. She poked her tongue out at him and took her revenge by finding the meaning of his name — Scots Gaelic for ‘ugly head’ — but I was angry with him for robbing her of the moment and for the parental privilege he had in expressing himself in this way. Sebastian asked to know the meaning of his name. S t Sebastian was an officer in the Roman Army and a favourite of the Emperor Diocletian, I read. That would do it, I thought, that was all he needed to know. There’s more words, said Sebastian, leaning over my shoulder. There was a difference between withholding and being seen to withhold, so I read on: When he became a Christian he was tied to a tree and shot through with arrows before being clubbed to death. Sebastian’s eyes were open wide. Your mother chose that name, his father said, as if absolving himself. One of her madnesses. I flushed with anger again. Sebastian got down quietly from the table and soon we heard him moving about in the kitchen. Not too much ice-

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cream, his father called out. Sebastian staggered into the room and fell to the floor clutching a knife to his chest. His T-shirt was covered in tomato sauce. We laughed at his mock death, and his father pulled him onto his knee and he happily surrendered to the removal of his bloody clothes. He had rid himself of the trouble of his name. But Aurelia had fallen silent and pushed her chair away from the table. The chook was down to its bones. Sebastian was hamming it up and Aurelia was panning for gold. Their father was losing his polish. I didn’t know what I was doing. Every morning our primary school teacher would release a cloud of fly spray into the air above our heads. It fell slowly into our eyelashes. Later in the day one of us might have needed to go to the front of the room, to stand by her desk and ask her help in the solving of a sum. You would be drawn to the cigarette smoke circling her high bonnet of lacquered strawberry curls. If she put out an arm to draw you closer, if she bent her head over the inscrutables on your page, you might peer into the pink depths of her curls and you might find a collection of convulsing flies trapped there. You might hear their death-buzz. You must not, on any account, look at the rest of the class for they would see on your face what you had seen, and there would be no turning back. One day Toby Salmon rose from his chair and threw his maths book at her. What is wrong with you? she said, her gold teeth flashing. Don’t worry about him, one of the boys cried, he’s mad. The teacher said: You must not use that word. Only dogs are mad. Toby Salmon’s face was bright red. He slammed down the top of his desk. But I am mad! he shouted.

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No — you are cross, she said. C l a s s ! the teacher said, take out your writing pads. It is obviously time for some definitions. When the telephone rang early in the morning he went to answer it. I rolled over and closed my eyes, feeling the now familiar nausea of dread. Then he was standing over me. Aurelia’s girlfriends have killed themselves, he said. I knew the names of these girls. I knew of them as I knew of all of Aurelia’s friends, by the tales of injustices that had befallen them (the taxi driver was so rude and all she’d done was ...) or the goods they were amassing (her father bought her this gorgeous little ...). Their eerily light and self-assured voices had once or twice spilled out of the telephone over me. And now they had climbed into a bath and cut themselves to death with a Stanley knife. I wanted to know if they had lain at opposite ends of the bath and entwined their legs, like he and I did when we bathed together, or if they had shared the same end, like we did when he protested about having the tap in his back. I wanted to know if the back of one had rested against the other’s chest; if they had held each other. I felt that knowing this was important. When Aurelia and I talked about their deaths, she said: I would never do anything like that. I was holding her hands and I looked past her wrists into her shadowy elbows. I told her father what she’d said but still I saw his eyes linger on any closed door that concealed her from us. When she was in the bathroom, he would call her. He allowed her no time for the pleasures of water and grooming. Aurelia, he’d call, are you going to be long in there? She shouted back at him: You just think I’m hitting up. No, he replied, no. That’s not what I’m thinking at all.

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I’m Bart Simpson, said Sebastian, who the hell are you? We met in the bathroom in the morning and kissed quickly over the bowl of Aurelia’s vomit that he was carrying. He hadn’t slept beside me for two nights. I had woken sometimes to footsteps and the sound of Aurelia crying, soft music and running water and the kettle on the boil, the thumping of furniture into walls. His eyes were violently red and his hands shook. It’s like watching an animal in pain, he said. He straightened his back and smiled at me: But I think we’re over the worst of it now. I noticed that the bowl he was carrying was the one I’d bought recently; for breadmaking. A week later, he was sick with flu. But he was out of bed and talking on the telephone. He started with her friends. Then the counsellors. The refuges for young women. The hospitals. Have you seen my daughter? I heard him ask them all. The only thing into Aurelia’s life that I could open was the closed door of her bedroom. When I was alone in the house, I went in. Beneath the cigarettes and saturnine perfumes, I could smell despair. I thought of my life before this one. It scared me. In the mirror I saw myself bending over her dressing table, spying. I lifted each one of her dusty perfume bottles and smelt their contents. I wound out her dark lipsticks and read their names. I read her correspondence; trouble was piling up. Debt collectors closing in. Social security cutting off. The courts ordering this and that. A line of coffee cups on her window sill contained sickening contents. The litter of balledup tissues turned my stomach. After her father had forced Aurelia to return the goods she

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had shoplifted, he would always say: At least she’s got taste, she only steals the best. I would sneer at the remark. Now I could see this stolen good taste of Aurelia’s all around me in her room and I understood the force of her will to have what she wanted. Her father did not know this because he would never inquire as I was inquiring now. He had faith in her, as a father should. He told me stories of her spirit as a child, how she beat up children who bullied others and how she tore off her clothes and plunged into icy winter surf. I saw all this as grainy home movies but I could not find his lost child, or perhaps I saw that her fearlessness and liking for intensity had evolved in more banal ways. I didn’t know Aurelia’s childhood, or her life, but I told myself that in her room, if I looked closely enough, some knowledge might come to me. I sat on the bed and looked at the leather boots all over the floor. Fine wool jackets and lace shirts hung on chairs. Everywhere there were tiny T-shirts that cost a fortune but made the wearer look like she didn’t care about fashion. Lingerie spilled from every drawer in a tangle of sportswoman, babydoll, partygirl, seductress. I felt a prickly heat of desire for a long black dress which hung on the door of her wardrobe, its price tag still swinging. In a frame beside her bed, there was a photograph. I had seen it before, I knew it was a photograph of her mother. She’s beautiful, I had said when Aurelia first showed it to me, she looks just like you. Now I could see the deeper truth of my flattery. In the sharp heart of her mother’s face, in her cool blondness, I could see Aurelia perfectly replicated. But there was no trace of Sebastian, and I realised for the first time that Aurelia bore no trace of her father. As if Sebastian had been born of his father’s thigh and Aurelia made of a virgin conception. I didn’t know if this meant anything. Shreds of myth and theory suggested themselves to me but I wasn’t

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interested in what they had to offer. I was only interested in knowing what Aurelia felt when she looked at the face of her absent mother and found herself there. That night I woke from a bad dream. On my way to the kitchen I heard a sound from Aurelia’s room. I opened the door and smelt the despair and once again I met my image as I bent over her bed. Her face was wet and twisted. I drank a glass of water at the kitchen window and looked at the moon. I thought of an auditorium I had sat in once, and I saw rows of students leaning disinterestedly on their arms. The man at the front was telling us that we were never to use the word tragedy to speak of the small losses in life. Aristotle had made it very clear, he said. Tragedy must be about a man’s fall from a great height. I knew that he was not talking about a workman falling off a building site. He said that his blood boiled when a newspaper described a fatal car crash as tragic. The man must be of essentially noble character, he said, but with a fatal flaw. A tragedy must engender pity and terror in the audience. I remembered that he said that the terror was for yourself and the pity was for the other. I was getting the terror and pity bit. But what was I in the presence of if a young woman couldn’t be accommodated by the tragic tradition? What was happening to us felt as big as theatre. On the way back to bed I heard that Aurelia was still crying. I went to get her father. This was something I thought he should deal with. Sebastian arrived home from his first days at school as Aurelia was getting out of bed. All day I’d tried to work but all day my mind had turned to the nearby bedroom where Aurelia slept on through the hours as if, in her sleep, she fought me with her powers of negation. Sebastian took these new days hard. He returned from

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school in a state of shock. For an hour after he got home he would not speak and could only eat and stare at the television, as if it too were nourishment. I thought that this was time he needed to spend alone but Aurelia would emerge from her room, bleary and stale, and sink onto the couch beside him. I watched as she took him over. She cuddled and kissed and tickled him and whispered sugary words; she invaded his exhaustion and his quietude. She sought his love and his warmth and, in her need, obliterated him. His small body stiffened. The toes of his school shoes were pressed together above the ground and his hands trapped between his knees. I knew he could not throw her off as another child might. It was all I could do to draw her away; I’d ask her to walk with me to the shop or prepare a salad or pump up the tyres of Sebastian’s bike. Anything to stitch her back into the surface of the day from which she had become unravelled. Sebastian would ask me, as if it was a test: Who are my favourite Ninja Turtles? I’d pretend to think hard. OK, I’d say, first there’s Raphael. Then Leonardo is second. And then comes Michelangelo. And last is poor Donatello. I still like him, said Sebastian, but not as much as the others. A counsellor told Aurelia to eat an apple every time she felt like using. The house was littered with rotting apple cores. Sebastian wanted another piece of chocolate cake. Have some fruit instead, his father said. Sebastian looked at him as if he was an idiot. On a warm night we walked to the pizza shop. Aurelia had been away from us for a while and I could feel that she was raw. She strolled arm-in-arm with her father. Sebastian ran around our legs. When a honeyed red Cadillac turned slowly into the street we stopped to look at its gleaming fins. I’d give

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an arm and a leg for a car like that, he said. But then you couldn’t drive it, said Sebastian. We agreed that this was true. We came to a row of shop windows and stopped to look. I saw a woven carpet hanging on the wall. I’d give my eye teeth for that, I said. He said: A little kid has probably already given his childhood for that. Aurelia and I agreed that this, too, was true. Sebastian had caught the rules of play and hurried to the next window. He pointed to a small blue tent. I’d give one of my toes for that, he said. And my willy for those rollerblades. He laughed at his jokes. One by one his body parts dropped off as he ran back and forth in front of the windows and sacrificed himself to his desires. Our smiles weakened. We were getting bored. And we had lost Aurelia. She was walking the middle of the road with her head down, a cigarette held tensely in her fingers. She knew more about this game than any of us. The children’s grandmother sent us photographs she had taken at a family gathering to celebrate her birthday. There were two of Aurelia and me. In the first photograph we are sitting together at the restaurant table. It is unpleasant to see our hostility naked before the camera when we thought only our good manners were showing. Our eyes are locked together in distrust. My eyes are haughty. Aurelia’s are insolent. Her father sits beside me with his hand resting on my shoulder. I do not think I sat myself between him and his daughter, for which she would rightfully resent me. I believe he chose to separate himself from her by placing me in the middle and for this she would, of course, still rightfully resent me. In the photograph Aurelia and I are wearing Sebastian’s Donald Duck bandaids on our fingers. We are both clumsy with knives in the few days before we bleed. It is not a photograph for the family album.

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Sometimes he would say: You and Aurelia are tearing me apart. Her father believed Aurelia would be all right if only she could grow vegetables. He knew himself how good it was to get his hands dirty. A judge with clean fingernails ordered her to a rehabilitation farm where she would spend her days doing just that. We enjoyed the parsnips and zucchinis she gave us on our weekend visits. This was to be a new beginning. We were over the worst of it. In the second photograph Aurelia and I have plates of food before us on the restaurant table. Her father has moved out of the frame. Our elbows touch as we each wield our knife and fork. Our heads are lowered but there is movement on both our faces. It could be said that we are smirking. Perhaps a drunk uncle is making a speech. Perhaps Aurelia’s grandmother is unwrapping the third copy she has been given of The Power of One. The bottle before us is empty and both our mouths are stained with wine. Sometimes he would say: You and Aurelia are as bad as each other. It was a house of lies. I felt my intuition grow weak. I was in Aurelia’s room again. I told myself I was just retrieving the dirty coffee cups. With my knuckles looped through their handles as if they were giant rings, I whisked a handful of tissues off the windowsill and plunged my hand into a jagged nest of hypodermic needles at the bottom of her bin. My hand came out as clean as a whistle. But I sat on the floor and looked at the needles for a long time. I lay them out on my palm. The blood in them was dark red and their spikes were infinitely fine.

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I tried to understand why I found them beautiful. Her father appealed to me to let him discuss it with her. I heard her yelling at him: What right did she have to be in my room? You gave up your rights a long time ago, he said. I wanted him to be correct in this matter, but I wasn’t sure. The photographs of Aurelia and me at the restaurant were evidence of the times of war and détente between us. But there was no photograph, and no word, for the other moments, the ones that swept in like winds from a kinder place. Such a photograph would be in black and white, for grace. The image would be barely there. Like a photograph pulled from the developing solution before the process is complete. It would be an image not fixed in time, but travelling. The image would be a face made of our two faces and it would contain the calm of a sleeping child. In this face some of my youth is returned to me. There is no ghost of Aurelia’s mother. The eyes which belong to both of us are open and words are almost on our lips. They were moments when we saw, not ourselves, but each other. They were moments seldom witnessed by Aurelia’s father, or if they were, in some way he understood them less than our moments of enmity and chose not to believe them. He would say: You hate each other. I would say: You don’t understand. He cried late at night in our bed. It’s as though she’s dead, he said. It hurt me to see him this way and I hated her for it. The days began with his anger. I wish she was dead, he said. This hurt me anew, and I hated him for it. My family have died, she told the second-hand dealer she

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called to the house. She said: Take what you want. Under her steady eye, he wandered the rooms of our house. Take that. And that. And that. We struck a deal with Sebastian: if he wanted to go to the circus that night he would have to have an afternoon sleep. We wanted to have sex. We were lying like John and Yoko when we heard the first footsteps outside our door. His father called out: Go back to bed Sebastian, the tigers will get you if you’re tired tonight. I punched him on the arm. Don’t scare him, I said. I thought that my way of handling Sebastian was better than his. Seb, I called out, you won’t enjoy the circus if you’re tired. The door was kicked violently. We opened it and found Sebastian in his little red underpants, hitting out with his arms and legs at an enemy we couldn’t see. His eyes were wet with fear. He rolled into a ball on the ground, whimpering. We called to him but he couldn’t hear. I pulled back the blankets and watched as his father led him gently to our bed. We lay down on either side of him but he didn’t wake. His father’s fingers brushed mine as we smoothed his damp hair off his forehead. My son, I thought. My son. I heard the voice of the hag within me. Every time she spoke there was a chorus of approval from all the other hags who kept her company. Again and again she declaimed to the nagging hag-heads: If there’s one thing I hate it’s a thief and a liar. All day Aurelia had been trying to please. She offered us small gifts of her time and her warmth. I could see that the effort wore her out.

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At night a wail rose from Sebastian’s room. He had been sent there to think about his unkindness towards the cat. He ran out to us, carrying in his hands the pieces of the china piggy which he had found smashed underneath his bed. His savings, as he called them, were gone. We tried to imagine Aurelia’s drug. It must be good, we said. It must make you feel like nothing on earth. We wished for ourselves such consolation. Tall cacti stood along the back fence. Their outstretched blades were lined with shark’s teeth. I pulled the hose down the yard towards them. When I first saw the holes in their flesh, I thought they’d been gouged at by birds. But as I got close and dropped the hose, letting the water gush at my feet, I could see that the wounds took the shape of letters. I knew Sebastian had done this. He had spelt KILL and DIE properly, but not his sister’s name. I knew that the carvings would be replaced by woody scars that would contain his message forever. I saw a sharp knife in his plump hand and his little, concentrating face amongst the sharp blades. I went inside and lay down. I lay there in silence, and then I listened to the radio. I listened to music, and then I listened to two men talking about films. They were discussing Forrest Gump. One of them said that the death from AIDS of Gump’s wife had been sweet and pretty, all cleaned up; nice. He said he thought that such a depiction was evil. The other man, who was a film critic, chastised him for using that word. I wondered why this word, chosen in passion, should be so disagreeable. I thought that the first man had a right to that note of extremity. Perhaps evil did not have to presume intent but could be found simply in effects. I snatched at the word for my own purposes. In a house

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where I had to be careful about what I said, the thought of this word was like the unsheathing of a sword. A force in this house was injuring us all. I saw us all being swept into damage. I saw a proliferation of sharp things and the corrosion of our better selves. The red time on the radio turned over. The hour approached when Aurelia would return from the lock-up. It was OK, her father had said, she had promised that this time things would be different. It was dark when we heard the car in the driveway. I was eating Sebastian’s leftovers as he slid back and forth across the kitchen floor in his socks. She’s home, he said, running off to his room. When Aurelia entered the room the nerves in my face froze. I couldn’t perform a welcome. Her father was wearing his awful look of hope. As I served them food and felt the change that had come over the room, I thought about her power. I couldn’t taste the glass of wine I drank while they ate. Sorry we’re late, her father said. The police kept us waiting, said Aurelia, they fucked up the paperwork. I said: It’s a pity for you to be inconvenienced, Aurelia. Her father glared at me. The blood pounded so hard in my head that I thought I’d faint. I looked at him and hoped that he could see I’d crossed a line and couldn’t go back. I hoped he could see the place I was speaking from. His face was uncovered, as if I’d reached out and torn off his mask. I met Aurelia’s eyes and I saw that we were frightened of each other. I said: I don’t believe that things are going to change Aurelia. I don’t believe you anymore. She started to cry but all I could think about were my

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words, obvious words, and how good it felt to say them. What’s this all about? I was leaning across the table, screaming at her. What are you trying to say? It’s like you’re saying You Owe Me! You Owe Me! Tell me what it is that you’re owed, what you think you haven’t got. What do we owe you? Tell me! Tell me what you’re trying to say. She looked at me, and there might have been a chance, but her father stood and swept his bowl of spaghetti and my glass of wine to the floor. His rage outclassed mine and conquered the space I had made for Aurelia to speak. Once I started to cry I was weakened but there was more I wanted to say. You have no remorse, I said. Without remorse, you’re lost. Get out, he yelled, get out of my house. He lunged forward as if to push me. Aurelia pulled at his arm as I shrunk towards the door. Don’t, don’t, she pleaded. She fell into a chair and threw her head onto her knees. I’m sick, she sobbed, I’m sick. He put his arms around her and looked at me with such hate that I ran from the house. As I reversed the car, my hands shaking violently on the steering wheel, I remembered that Sebastian would be lying in his bed, waiting for tonight’s final chapter of the BFG. When I got back hours later the front light had been left on for me. The mess in the kitchen had been cleared away; the dishes drying in the rack were serene. In the silent hallway I looked at the three closed doors. In our room, I undressed in the dark and got into bed beside him. I kept a distance between our bodies. He reached out to take my hand and when he spoke his throat sounded sore. If this is too much for you, he said, you can leave. From the balcony at the back of the house the view fell away to tiled rooftops. I remembered other views in my life and longed to see rust on a tin roof or a white hen strolling down

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a back alley. My work called to me from inside the house but I was attending to small tasks. Restoring order. I hung out the washing carefully; pegs secure, all the seams straight. I hung up Sebastian’s Hot Tuna T-shirt; he had grown out of the Turtles. The T-shirt had on it a bleached animal skull and a dark, bleeding rose. I hung up his father’s jeans. I thought about how I’d never washed Aurelia’s clothing, I had never scooped it up along with ours. I’d separated it, carefully, telling myself that she should take care of such things. I hung up Sebastian’s school uniform and a row of my underwear. Once my underwear had been white and sensible but I saw now that it had become sordid. I looked at my underwear for a long time, dragging on my top lip with a peg. I knew what I was going to do. I knew what I wanted. I could no more stop myself in my journey towards gratification than I could take my words, once spoken, from the air and place them back in my mouth. Aurelia’s room no longer frightened me. I opened her drawers. I was looking for a special colour; something dark, something that wouldn’t show the dirt. I knew it was unlikely I’d be found out but I planned what I’d say. In my room I undressed and put on the bra and pants. Against the french navy satin, my skin was pale. The pants were cut high on the leg and my thighs seemed longer and thinner. My pubic hair spilled from the sides of the narrow crotch. Soft cups of lace scooped my breasts together and a full shelf of flesh appeared below my eyes. I looked at myself in the mirror.

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C

onsuming passions II

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Perth 1994 The young hotel porter cannot believe his eyes. As he follows the woman along the hotel corridor he tries not to stare — the professional restraint of the butler in The Remains of the Day video made a big impression on him — but he has never seen a person wearing so many spots; they are all over her dress, the bow in her hair, even the luggage he is carrying. She reminds him of a doll that once belonged to his little sister. The woman turns to him and asks for the time. She has an English accent. She adjusts her watch and says: This place is the end of the earth. Uncertain that she is addressing him, he remains silent. But in that part of himself not yet quietened by the habits of service, he thinks: It depends where you reckon the beginning of the earth is. The hotel room is just as she knew it would be, as it always

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is at the luxury level in a provincial city; amongst the jejune discretion of peach upon peach is the lewdly-large bed, as if more than two people might be expected to sleep or to traffic there. The room whispers vice and cover-up. At The Axolotl, the Los Angeles hotel she has just left, the rooms were entirely black. The bedside lamp was a giant glowing egg and the chairs were as wonderfully unstable as amoeba, the swimming pool was red, the forks of the Enzo Santiago cutlery were like the claws of an eagle. And that hotel had a different erotics: the bed might not have been big but the shower had nozzles for two. Sophie unbuckles her pumps and prowls the room in long white socks. She opens her suitcases and unpacks a collection of clothes that might have belonged to a good, fun-loving child of the 1950s: smocked pinafores, Sunday-school pleated skirts, sailor suits, empire-line and puffed-sleeve princess dresses in poplins and taffeta and silk voiles. All the clothes are spotted. It is a look Sophie considers appropriate for a woman in the Nineties — a professional woman not bound by the mannishness of the power-suit; a woman relaxing her guard, playing, confounding expectations, alluding to those gutsy girls in strange and uncertain worlds — Alice in Wonderland, Shirley Temple in Hollywood — and the girl with the greatest obsession of all, Little Dot (surname Polka), creation of Harvey Comics, lover of all that is round and dotlike, an adventurer into the true heart of things: the full moon, a pizza, the drain in the bath, the pupil of her own eye, a pinhead, the belly of the number 6. Sophie hopes that her business in this city will not take long. She needs to get back to her boxing classes. And her hair colour is growing out. She has it done — a darker shade of midnight — at Lox on the Kings Road, Chelsea. She is anxious down here at the end of the earth; the city of London might

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heave and shift under the pressure of some new need or fancy, and she will not be there. She doubts that the winds of change would travel as far as this place called Perth. On Kate’s desk the covers of books rise and fall on the drafts of air from the ceiling fan. On these covers is the face of Sylvia Plath. Kate watches these faces float and feels a familiar panic. She turns again to the computer screen and its dumb waiting. The problem, she believes, is an imbalance of fluids. Her thought is a slush but her writing is as dry as rabbit-droppings. She doesn’t want to know how long she has been here like this, through many changes of season, the ceiling fan going off and the heater humming to life, growing older while the work refuses to grow, as if it has a kind of dwarfism, a stubborn inward decision not to be delivered into the grownup world. When she thinks of the work before her and sees her hands stiff on the keyboard, a memory comes to her: the man on the chair grips the headless bird between his knees. His bare hands tear at its feathers until patches of yellow flesh appear. The clock ticks. The feathers fly. His hands are a blur. He cries out and lifts the naked bird in the air. The judges take it aside; there are no rips in the flesh, no broken bones, no blistering of blood beneath the skin. They judge him the winner and the flashbulbs pop. He is The World’s Fastest Turkey Plucking Champion. Behind him slump the losers, their hands full of feathers and blood. The telephone rings. It is a stranger’s voice Kate hears, the voice of an English woman. It is a voice, if she only knew, not unlike her own; underneath the newsreader tones there is a quiver of emotion. The woman says that the university has told her that Kate is the person to talk to about Sylvia Plath. The woman says she is a reconnoitrer for the London-based

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magazine C r e a m. Kate has never heard of a reconnoitrer before, but every time she looks up from her desk at the world she is puzzled by something such as this. When the woman asks if they might meet, Kate agrees; it will take her away from the desk and she is flattered to be seen as an expert. But it is not until she hangs up that she considers the strangeness of this call. She knows this Cream, its sleek international pages and cool minimalism, its sumptuous surrealist-fashion-celebrity photographs, its knowledge of all that is New or soon-to-be-New combined with a seriousness about supermodels, philosophers, murderers, politicians, heiresses, actors, night-club owners and artists. At first it attracted her with its unobtainable worlds and injury-free glamour, but after a while too much Cream made her sick. What could such a magazine want with her? She had written a few papers on Plath but that was years ago, before the fluid problem began. The papers had been published in small journals read only by the people who were also published in these journals. She sees her world of the desk and the university in relation to Cream’s playground of northern hemisphere affairs. Why were they here and what did they want of her? Kate waits in the cocktail bar of Sophie’s hotel. She sits on a leather lounge and drinks coffee. The piano and the water fountain tinkle. When Sophie arrives they are both surprised by what they see, having expected the other to look like a starchy newsreader. Kate takes in Sophie’s short, frilled dress and polka-dot tights. Fashion for paedophiles, she thinks, what next? Sophie identifies a certain involution in Kate’s eyes, a dullness to her complexion. I know this type, she thinks, literary and depressive. They do not remember their meeting in a Soho brasserie ten years before.

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What is a reconnoitrer? asks Kate. I’m an advance-party, says Sophie. I prepare the field for a flyin by our journalists and photographers and stylists. And why do you want to talk to me? Sophie says: I’m looking for Sylvia Plath’s daughter. Her words find Kate’s heart like a knife. She has tried hard not to think about Sylvia Plath’s daughter. But she replies, as steadily as possible: And why do you ask me? The university told me that you’re writing a biography of Sylvia Plath, says Sophie. I think they would have told you that I am working on a doctoral thesis about the biographies of Sylvia Plath, says Kate. Sophie is briefly discomposed. She calls a steward and orders a strawberry daiquiri. Kate badly wants a bowl of iced pink alcohol between her hands too, but she doesn’t know the fiscal conventions of such a meeting and can’t afford to pay for her own. She takes a firm hold on her cold coffee. But isn’t writing about a biography at one remove from what is real? asks Sophie. And what is real? asks Kate. The Facts. The Life, says Sophie, tossing the paper umbrella from her drink into the ashtray. But there are many versions of this particular life, says Kate. But there are some known facts? Yes. And is it a fact that Sylvia Plath’s daughter lives in Perth? Kate hesitated. Yes it is. But it is not a well-known fact. I would not be here if it were, says Sophie. I do not reconnoitre tilled ground. Why the interest in Sylvia Plath’s daughter? Kate asks, aware of the disturbance in her voice. It should be obvious the appeal such a story would have, says

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Sophie. A lot of people are very interested in mothers and daughters these days. And you have an interest in Sylvia Plath? asks Kate. I had to read her for O levels, says Sophie. I thought she was for the girls who were queasy about life. You’d never find me queuing up to file past the body of a poet. Sophie’s words the body of a poet slit into Kate like glass. She cannot locate the reason for the pain they cause. Kate drives away from the hotel along dull, familiar streets. At traffic lights she imagines her foot stamping down on the accelerator and her hands guiding the wheel towards a pack of businessmen or a mother and child crossing the road. They are brief fantasies, unelaborated beyond the surge of power and the moment when hard and soft bodies collide. She knows she must return to her desk, but the day is hot and she thinks of the coolness of cinemas and the illicit pleasures of the afternoon matinee. She dreams of driving to air-conditioned shopping centres to drink frozen Cokes and wander the homemaker’s aisles of the department stores, letting time run away in front of the Kosta Boda and the stainless steel cookware. She sees all the roads of the city spinning out from her, and every road might lead her away from her desk. She knows that if she stops the car and makes two phone calls she will have the name of the street on which Sylvia Plath’s daughter lives. She already knows the suburb. Gossip flies quickly on its bright wings over this small city. Kate recalls a line of Plath’s poetry, written shortly before her death. Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. From her poem, ‘Child’. The daughter is now older than the mother had ever been. Why had she not just told this Sophie-woman that she could be of no help to her? She knows she will not make the

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phone calls; she will have no information to give her. If Sylvia Plath’s daughter wants to come to the end of the earth, let it be. Kate knows that she is Sophie’s only lead, that it would be impossible for Sophie to flush out the information from the kitchens and outdoor-entertaining areas of Perth. Kate admits it was canny of Sophie to find her, but wasn’t it true that Kate’s life was filled with the stories of Sylvia Plath? It was her work, surely she wore a gloss of it as a miner carried the dirt of the mines? Wouldn’t that gloss shine like a beacon as Fate made its way in the dark? Sophie thinks carefully before contacting her editor in London. She has dropped some stitches lately, first in Paris, then in L A; nothing really messy — a missed opportunity here, a dud story there — but enough to make her doubt her instincts and have her covering her tracks. She keeps the fax simple: * whispers from L A

— the new colour will be taupe. — the Jackie O look is on its way.

* have made Plath contact. No foreseeable problems. But Sophie is not so sure. She is as nervous as hell. This Kate is not a sturdy link in the chain, but she is her only link. Sophie knows these queasy women and their smudgy personal investments in Sylvia Plath, this one might believe it is her role to protect the daughter’s privacy. Others would soon be after this story. She has to get in now before all the players start talking big money. She feels the breath of the popular hot on her neck. Kate decides that the university library is a compromise between the shopping centre and the desk. In a deep armchair by the window she sees that there are similarities

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between libraries and cocktail bars; the decorum, the hush, the consolations of the shelves of liquor and the shelves of books. She cannot forget Sophie’s words. She thinks about the bodies of poets: Shelley washed up on the beach, Berryman floating down the Mississippi River, Pasolini’s heart ruptured by the wheels of a car on a playing field outside Rome, Carver eaten by disease just as he had learnt to be sober. All dead, as if that was the asking price of poetry. But she doesn’t like this style of thinking. How many workers are killed in the mining industry each year? Certainly, some lives are more hazardous than others. She should be working, not musing on job safety. She needs to be pursuing madness and representation, unravelling the threads of the plot that weaves Plath as pathological, a Medusa, death-riddled. She should be writing. But when she catches sight of the latest London Review of Books on the journal stand, she bargains with herself: half an hour’s reading, and then she’ll start. On page three the name Sylvia Plath rises before her. The name is like gold to her, she can find it in any ore. She can scan a page in an instant to discover it, no matter how small the traces. So acute is her eye it will be excited by silver platter or silky plait. On page three, there is a review by Elaine Showalter, and for one moment, Kate thinks the serendipities of research have returned to grace her — just last night she had finished reading Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 in which she had discussed Plath’s metaphoric conversions of her experiences of electric-shock treatment. But the potential of the Showalter coincidence dies when another woman’s name comes into view. On page three, all of Kate’s worst fears come true. Here is a review of a new book by the New York writer Janet

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Malcolm about the afterlife of Sylvia Plath — a book about the biographies. This has been her dread all these years; that someone would beat her to it and produce this crucial work in Plath scholarship, this new way to understand the making of the myth, and here Kate is, still plucking away at her turkey while another has been pronounced the winner. Now all her dreams are laid out like cheap postcards. She had never imagined her thesis ending in a PhD and the anxiety of parttime teaching contracts: she had imagined a book; a big, fat hardcover with a death-veiled photograph of Sylvia in sepia tones and gas-blue titles, a book hailed as mesmerising, coura geous, ground-breaking, a book to stretch a reviewer’s lexicon. Tears come to Kate’s eyes when Showalter quotes from Malcolm’s book: ‘The biographer at work ... is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the money and triumphantly bearing the loot away.’ Kate compares the artistic gall of this writing to the timid rabbit-droppings of her own text: ‘The biographer is presented with a multiplicity of narrative potentialities.’ (At least, thinks Kate, she would not have named the biographer as exclusively h e .) She imagines Janet Malcolm drinking martinis and discussing literary politics in the Rainbow Room high above the streets of Manhattan. The most she gets these days is a middy in the uni tavern while some drunk raves at her about Quentin Tarantino. She folds the London Review of Books and puts it back on the rack. Everything is different now. Sophie waits for a telephone call from Kate. She paces the floor of her hotel room. She takes the lift to the gift shop and is momentarily distracted when she finds the style of indigenous art that is called dot painting. She buys two.

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She faxes her editor, having decided that humour best disguises anxiety: I think my Plath contact is holding out on me. I wish I had a gun. Kate calls Sophie on the telephone. But when the reconnoitrer speaks, Kate finds she cannot give her the answer that has stewed within her all this time, she cannot give up this small authority. She needs to visit the cocktail bar once more to exist in its atmosphere of negotiations, to be part of the theatre of operations that is the outside world. They make a time to meet. Kate sits at her desk. She does not bother with the ceiling fan; she does not intend to work. Books are piled like bricks around her. She tries to imagine the world if Sylvia Plath had lived. She imagines Plath celebrating her Booker Prize with the purchase of a Frida Kahlo painting. Kahlo’s work reminds me of my early poems, she is reported to say, the foregrounded Self, the recognisable repertoire of images. Kate imagines Plath with silver hair and drop earrings, grown softly into the long bones of her face, sharing a television panel with A S Byatt, discussing the wild women in the writing of Angela Carter, so prematurely, and shockingly, dead. She tries to imagine her own life if Sylvia Plath were alive, and she draws a blank. Sophie receives a fax from her editor: re Plath contact — SEDUCE HER. Would you like another strawberry daiquiri? Sophie asks Kate. The pianist is playing Burt Bacharach. Sophie is not convinced that Kate will give her the information she needs. She must choose her words carefully: I believe this will be a

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truly important work of literary inquiry. A daughter is the rightful inheritor of a mother’s story. Finally, it must be the daughter’s voice that is heard. Kate accepts one of Sophie’s Marlboro Gold. Perhaps she can learn something from this international traveller with the expense account and Lolita wardrobe. She notices a handsome businessman ordering from the bar. Sophie is right: this is the last rare drop of the Sylvia Plath story. She tosses her paper umbrella into the ashtray. I will put you in touch with Sylvia Plath’s daughter, she says, if I am contracted to write the story. Sophie’s boxing coach has told her about the invisible blow. The blow that comes screaming out of nowhere, that can’t be predicted, or seen, or defended against; it’s just suddenly upon you, juddering your life. Sophie feels like she’s flat on her back on the canvas. But do you have any jour nalistic experience? she manages, not quite out for the count. Oh yes! says Kate, I worked as a meat journalist in London. The words are out before she can stop them. Out tumble the blood, the offal, the carcases. The injectors, the mincers, the extruders. The pigs’ feet, sheep eyes, chook heads. The fat. The hormones. The salmonella, leptospirosis, foot and mouth disease. The death, death, death. Sophie looks at Kate carefully. If that is the case, she says, then I think we have met before. Kate stares at her blankly. Sophie says: I used to wear black leather. You told me there was always the taste of blood in your mouth. If that is the case, says Kate slowly, then you are right. We have met before. Sophie faxes her editor to tell her about the unfortunate turn of events. She leaves out the part about the meat journalism.

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In her hotel room Sophie drinks whisky. Her dress is unbuttoned and her ribbons are frayed. She sheds tears of rage and confusion. She remembers when she dressed in black leather. When she had intuition and fighting strategies and a scent for the times. For too long she has been playing like a child, rapt in phenomena. She trusted that literary people conducted their affairs in the salon and not in the marketplace, where everyone else was. She has been outsmarted. A reply comes through from her editor: Hermione is most distressed that you have lost the story for her. But we have little choice — proceed with the Antipodean. Get yourself back to London. It is time we had a little talk. As Kate expected, it took two telephone calls to get a number for Sylvia Plath’s daughter. It is written on a piece of paper she holds in her hand. But she is not yet ready to make the call. Within her, echoing, Sophie’s words the body of the poet have become a taunt. Sophie sits on the large hotel bed wearing only her bra and pants. She stares at the wardrobe of child’s clothes before her. She must leave this city but she cannot move. She has nothing to wear. The pretty dresses hang like a row of empty cocoons. She sits on the bed and in her mind she is trying on and discarding the possibilities of who she might be when she steps out into the world. She thinks of Jackie O. Not the Jackie O of the multi-million-dollar marriage, and not the maturing book editor. It is Jacqueline Kennedy she thinks of, the eyes of the world upon her on that fateful day in Dallas. Sophie imagines herself dressed in that pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat. It is a look that might be considered appropriate for a woman in the Nineties — bloody but stoic. Kate finds the notebooks on top of her wardrobe. She had put

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them there, out of sight, when she returned from London. As she opens the notebooks, strands of tobacco fall to the floor. She does not know the young, uncertain hand that swarms across the pages. After a while she finds the words she is looking for. She doesn’t remember if she composed them in the lilac hours of a summer’s twilight or if a cold night had been pressing in. The wall before her might have been smooth and white or mould-dappled, and damp to the touch. She remembers not the time, nor the place, but she remembers: The body of the poet lies at the back of the cave. For thirty years and more she has lain on this hard ground as cold as a kitchen floor, embalmed in the cave’s sour air, as freshly dead as on her last morning. From that morning she has brought with her the chill of her blue, erasing hand and the frozen dawn. Death has not perfected the body of the poet. There is no formal beauty in her sprawl upon the dark soil of the cave. Her body is thin in the rose-sprigged nightgown that wraps her knees, her long shins disappear into a man’s thick socks; the pink candlewick dressinggown is scrolled at the collar and is stained with egg yolk and beige foundation, its pockets contain dried tissues and a child’s rusk, a jar of camphor rub. Her brown hair falls over her waist and is tangled like a net that has ensnared and left her here, her arms reaching out before her as if dragging herself over the inner threshold of her despair. Her face is not easily seen unless a candle is brought close. But it is simply a young face; exhausted, and sleeping. My life shudders. I begin a slow leave-taking of the harbours of reality. There is no permit for grief; I cannot catch sight of that which I leave behind. I am far out, too far, I cannot cross the cold dissociated water. The leaden skies and seas murder me with their days of desolation and listless poisons. The horizon is only an estimate against the grey planes of death.

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And then I hear her, a throat split open, a voice eternally freighted with the urgency of last words. I hear her, the poetry coming to me carrying the reverberations of the cave’s cold walls, the precise and obsessive music that has not the kinetic percussions of tribal rhythms or the aleatory daring of those fearless in the world, but plays to me an embodiment of my own frozen feeling. I feel new subtleties in my body, a lava of unsticking and meltings. I move closer, as I always do, to the body of the poet. Her voice draws me on until I am with her. There is a rind of wax inside her ear, and the skin below her nose is red and dry. There have been other bodies before this one: the beachside blonde practising extro version, the rejoicing mother, the writer bent over her desk at break of day; a body in love, a body in shock, a body shopping for optimism — a new camel suit from Jaegar and toreador pants for cocktails at the BBC — a body of fevers and furies, a body riven by words. And all of these bodies perilous. I come here for the severity of her songs and to witness this body. Her flesh and her poetry have become one. The body of the poet is, too, a body of words. In the dark of the cave the body releases its hooks and its blooded flowers, its candles and cold moons, its iced stars, its mirrors, its horses and bees, its ovens, its jewels, its black trees, its reds and blues, its clocks and worms and babies and pearls, its atoms, its molecules, its monoxides. I take possession of these things of the world with their exact beauty. I say their names and through knowing them I know my life again; the everyday is anointed. The world returns like a harbour through fog. I know this cave is a place of rarefied air and distorted light. But I come here to save my life. Sophie remembers that Los Angeles is already preparing for the Jackie O look — the best shops are carrying big sunglasses. She will have to find something else. Sophie wraps herself in the hotel’s bathrobe and phones down to reception.

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The porter they send to her peach room is the young man who carried her bags when she arrived. Sophie asks if she might borrow his jacket. This is the kind of challenge he rises to as he continues his education in the profession of service. He slips out of the jacket as if he were nothing but a coathanger. Sophie is flung out of the hotel’s revolving doors onto the sun-soaked streets of Perth. She is wearing only her underwear and lace-up shoes, and the porter’s black jacket. She fingers her credit cards. As she hurries along in the heat, the smell of the young man’s sweat rises powerfully from her. Kate remembers. She remembers cold London and the books that sheltered her. She remembers that once, before it became pursuit, there was passion. She has a phone number written on a scrap of paper. If it is blood she tastes in her mouth now, it is the blood of the poet. Of the body she has fed upon. So much anguish for Kate and Sophie. So much excoriation of themselves. All this fighting each other for control. All this desire for the story of a dead woman who could not reply. They have failed to see: Sylvia Plath’s daughter could simply say no.

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lack dog

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He walks with the black dog through the forest when the first frost touches the trees. The dog snuffles on the ground for traces of rabbit or ferret or fox, its strong tail stirring the earth. It butts its large head against the man’s leg and he feeds it shreds of fresh hen from his palm. The man is tormented by the dog’s appetite; he looks away from the tongue licking at his fingers. He huddles inside his heavy coat; there is a disorder in his expression as if a hand is wrenching his features from within. His eyes are stained and oblique. He moves slowly through the forest and leans on his spade as though it is a walking stick, stopping upon it to draw deep breaths of the cold and strong air. The dog has not gone with this stranger just for tasty morsels — it understands that the man has need of it, calling it softly and urgently, as he did, from its home. They have walked a long way in this dark place and the

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man has stumbled on pine cones and the roots of trees, recovering himself slowly, each time bowed a little closer to the ground. He stops to rest against the trunk of a tree and, as the dog licks the last of the juices from his hand, he buries his head in the dog’s black coat and caresses its belly and warm head. He would end the journey here, if he could. If he owned himself, he would lie down on the hard ground and invite the dog to sleep beside him. But he must move on, and the dog must follow. He reaches the place where the trees thin and light pierces the dark. He crouches on the ground and finds the red flowers he is looking for, sees the small round petals colouring the black soil and thinks of the drops of blood on the back of an ox when the yoke is lifted. He stands still and determines the silence, feeling the village and its people far away now and himself alone once again in this place. He takes a length of rope from his pocket. Beneath the red flowers there is a thick stem, warm and strong like muscle; every time he touches it he thinks of the nether place of his wife, its tearing and gushing with blood as the head of their child emerged from her body. One end of the rope he fixes to the stem of the plant and the other he ties around the neck of the black dog. He is sweating in the cold air and his hands tremble. The dog obeys his orders and sits quietly; the rope that tethers it is loose on the ground. He looks into the dog’s eyes and commands it to stay. When he walks quickly away, he is careful not to run for fear that the dog will mistake this for play and set off after him. He covers his ears with his hands as he hurries into the darkness of the forest where he turns and whistles to the dog, and whistles again. He feels a tugging in his chest as though his own heart is leashed, and he waits. There are no barks or pantings, no legs beating against the undergrowth towards him, the man and the dog

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do not greet one another in happy play. The dog is dead, fallen to the ground as it leapt to the call of the man who needed it. At the end of the rope lie the long, twin roots of the mandrake plant, torn from the ground. So that the dog will be safe from carrion or human eyes he digs a deep grave. He lifts the heavy dog and a stream of blood from the dog’s ear splashes onto the ground. As he buries his neighbour’s dog, he weeps with shame. He wishes he was the black dog, the sky above him eliminated by a cloak of earth, but once again the plant is free and hope soon claims him. He tears the red flowers from the brown, tapering roots that look like the legs of a man. The dog’s grave is smooth, the flowers folded into the soil, the rupture of the earth sealed. There is only the journey home, therefore, the roots a consoling weight in his pocket. But his footsteps out of the forest carry the heavy knowledge that he leaves behind him the last black dog. Inexorable winter, dark night. He lies awake and is in pain once more. His wife and baby sleep beside him. Since his wife unwrapped the baby and found toothmarks and dried blood on the tips of its toes, the faintest of scrabblings along a wall or a shadow licking the corners of a room causes her to seize the baby from its crib and hurry it to their bed. Now the baby snuffles with cold and wet bubbles burst in its tiny nostrils, and these soft sounds hammer at the man’s pain. He leaves his bed and is careful not to wake his wife and child, making his way by candlelight to the small shed behind his house. The floor of the shed is covered in sawdust and the ceiling hung with cobwebs. There was a time when the people of the village would come here to talk and watch him work with the wood; he would be making a cupboard for a neighbour’s house or a pew for the church, carving the

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robes of angels onto the chest that held the priest’s vestments, or a family crest onto a cigar box owned by a wealthy traveller. There are no visitors to the shed now. Against the walls rests the work he has not completed and in the candlelight he sees the gouges and splinters in his work, its rough seams and poor angles. He sees the two sheets of golden pine cut in the form of a bird’s wing. He planned a bird of wood and rope for his son; he imagined lifting him and guiding his hand as it pulled at the rope, setting the wings in motion, lifting them on the air. But the pain stopped him at his work and the shed fell quiet, and now he looks at the wings trapped in wood and can’t remember his wish to enthral his child. His chisel and hammer and saw lie covered in dust, and are now implements without sense. Hidden in a dark corner is the cabinet he had begun to make for a friend. His friend does not ask what has become of this cabinet they planned together, like the other villagers his friend now passes him quietly on the street; once he was a maker and now he is one who fails to make. They cannot see his pain, it does not burst blackly upon his skin and his tears are not stained. In candlelight, he kneels before the cabinet. The pain bucks and rears within him like a horse. From the cabinet he takes a small knife and a mortar and pestle, a glass-stoppered bottle, a spoon and a wrapping of muslin that holds the last of the plant gathered in the forest at the beginning of winter. There is only a finger-sized piece of the brown root remaining. He assesses this portion and steadies himself against the exertions of the pain, as if it knows the purpose of these preparations. The fury of this pain must be matched; he judges the will of the pain against the potency of the root, and shaves the plant with the knife until the last scrap of it lies grey-white, like a heavy ash, in the bowl of the mortar. From the bottle he adds a drop of yellow vinegar,

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and then another, and grinds the mix. He hungrily feeds himself this spoonful of paste, licking the spoon and the pestle, scraping for dregs inside the mortar. As he returns the implements to the cabinet, he sees his hands doing this hiding work and declares to himself and the jury of eyes that the hands do not belong to him. He does not need a lantern to light his way as he leaves the shed and walks beneath the cold lid of stars. The village is asleep. Icicles hang like daggers from the eaves of the houses he passes but he does not see the icicles; he feels the black mud underfoot but is otherwise turned inward and waiting at the extreme of need that is begging; he walks but is, in truth, on his knees. The black mud sucks at his boots as if to draw him down, and he walks on without seeing the frozen vegetable plots and the last fire smoke curling from chimneys. He has only one strategy: he must surrender to the pain, for while the pain is exultant it is without caution, and the root’s medicine might steal upon it and overpower its swaggering force. His surrender is a performance for the audience of one that is his own body. He walks on and slowly the pain withdraws. He is left with only pain’s impression upon his body, like a thumb print in wax. The black night rushes into him and he feels the earth warming and hears the icicles crack. He wanders in the place of his birth and passes the houses of its people, imagining their sleeping faces and their dreaming. He reaches back for memories of these people and restores them to his life. Tenderness washes his body. And hope rises up with its fresh face. In these first new moments free of pain it is possible to hope that it will not return. Now that he has fed on the last of the plant that tends his pain, and the last black dog is dead, hope is all there is. He gazes at his wife and child as they sleep, unmindful of

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his going from them and his return. Their curls have fallen out from beneath their bedcaps. He sees that lately a change has come upon his wife’s face, that she carries a burden in her features. He wonders if in her dreams she still searches, as she does in waking, for her beloved black dog, the pup of her childhood, the dog she hoped would one day companion her own child. He lies down in the warm hollow beside his wife and his baby and takes them in his arms. At dusk he wakes to the sound of his wife chopping wood. He cannot endure the pink of the sky or the silhouette of bird and tree outside the window. The black mud of the village streets had flowed through his grievous dreams and filled his body; this is the filth that prefigures pain, a mud of stones and manures and the carcases of many small deaths. Here, again, is the known condition: the sickbed and the aching, flushing sky suggesting a life he cannot reach; the returning pain leadened by the loss of hope. Again, he is waiting; he knows the plant’s assuagements will soon subside entirely, already he feels the weather within him changing, pain’s dark clouds massing. His wife brings him a bowl of soup. She, too, is practised in the ways of pain and the behaviours of the sickroom. This was once the place of her marriage bed and the birth of her child; for this room she stitched curtains and a quilt, and pressed lavender to sweeten the mildewed air, it was here that she lay down with her husband and attended to their married love. She places the baby beside him and he watches his son kick at the air. Once he carried an awareness of his own birth; everything he knew began with a sensation of enclosing darkness pushing him towards light. But this memory has gone from him now, driven from his body by pain. He takes the soup and speaks quietly to his wife,

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seeking to mend their estrangement. Pain is his certainty, but he knows that she is now wedded to uncertainty. Now she must believe that which she cannot see or touch; he knows she works to imagine his pain but work she has enough of already with the baby and the sickbed and the man-tasks fallen to her. The pain silences him. His wife lifts the baby and closes behind her the door which separates the sickroom from the hearth. Although the room is dark he will not light a candle, afraid of its shadows and pitiless burning down to nothing. He lies in the dark and the pain takes him; there are no visions lifting him to the heavens, there is no renewal, the pain does not scour and leave him clean. It pollutes and fouls him. Its axes cleave self from body; the self wastes towards death but the body is vivid with feeling. He has lived until now with gusts of hope and the narcotic of the twinned root. But there are no more black dogs to suffer the violence of the tearing from the earth of the mandrake plant. He does not know what the pain will ask of him now. In his dreams people are the cause of his pain. They look like his neighbours. The farmer scythes his body as if it were corn, the seamstress puts him together with the deep stitches of her darning needles. But upon waking, the farmer and the seamstress dissolve into the light and the pain is again without sense. His wife and child have moved to sleep in a narrow cot beside his bed. He would weep but the pain has stolen his flesh and replaced it with stone. Taut stretched time is pain; the shrunken, rutted mind is pain; his wife’s tight-lipped ministrations are pain. Day after day there is only Horror. A morning comes and despair, like hope, momentarily lifts him. He rises from the bed to wash and dress. Outside it is a day in the village. His neighbours fall away from his stoop

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and pallor. In the village he sees cats and red hens and pigs, but there are no black dogs; he has erased them all as if he were simply a painter altering the figures in a landscape. When the villagers mourned the disappearance of their black dogs, a story was told of a gypsy who wandered the countryside bewitching them; that they grew to be a wild pack, savaging sheep, moving like a giant shadow over the land. In the village square a neighbour passes by on a horse. The man watches the horse’s patient progress and thinks of leading it through the forest. A man will die if he hears the shriek uttered by the mandrake plant as it is ripped from the ground. A man must employ a black dog to bear upon its body the fatal injuries of the plant’s anguish. Might he employ this horse, test the lore, gamble on a different outcome? But he sees the fire in the horse’s copper flanks and its huge wet eye, its veins flowing like streams beneath its skin. He turns his back on the village and takes the path to the forest. The pain lurches and swells while the bare trees turn upon him their loveless winter regard. The cold is but a shallow bite compared to the demands of feeling from within. He cannot hear the silence of the forest for the clamour of his pain. He knows now that the pain will not kill him. He has taken its measure and found that his death is not its purpose: the pain wants only to be known entirely by him, to be the one and absolute intensity. Without death there is only the permanent present of pain; time without memory or imagining. When the forest thins and the unencumbered light falls onto the flowers of the mandrake plant, he sees the red petals colouring the soil and thinks of his wife’s embroidery, delicate and bright, dignifying rough cloth or disguising a patch. When he thinks of his wife now it is with a dull grief

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from afar, as if she were dead. He ties the rope to the stem of the plant and drops to his hands and knees. There is comfort in this, no longer a man upright and withstanding, seeking to understand and confront his pain. He thinks of all the black dogs that have fallen here, and he calls to himself as if he too were a dog, and he crawls forward pulling the rope with him, feeling the plant’s grip on the earth but pushing himself on, calling to the last part of himself that possesses will — he knows not whether it is will to live or to die. For long moments the strengths of the man and the plant are matched, but suddenly through the rope he feels a release, and he prepares for the plant’s shriek as he moves forward to tear it from the ground. The cry that he hears is oddly human, and he meets and smothers it with a cry of his own, like a howl, his pain unfurling in sound. The roots fly free of the soil and his body pitches forward, his face pressed to the ground. The pain informs him that he is alive. He sees the black dogs that lie beneath the earth his hands now close upon. The naked roots are once more within his reach.

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The shoes are outside the screen door. They are white and very clean, almost new. Their hard vinyl looks unrelenting; they are shoes of briskness and efficiency. They are modest, they will do their work and make no demands. But there is a note of defeat about them; the laces hang open in a broken way as if torn at in a fury to release the foot. If you’re curious, if you see these shoes as you’re opening the screen door and crouch to peer at them, you will notice that inside they are covered by a glistening wetness. When you lift the shoes the blood will fill your palms. And then you will see that there are gouts of blood on the step before you, as you open the door you will see that the blood is there too, it has crossed the threshold; the blood is in your house. The day is cold and sunless but as she alights from the bus she brings with her the tropics. Her feet on the step are tanned and strong, the toenails shimmering coral; her sandals

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are nothing but a few elegant twists of copper leather and an heraldic bronze buckling at the ankle. The bones of her feet are light and sure. They might be winged feet; the feet of a messenger, feet dusted with the gold of myth. I cannot lift my head to meet her eyes. Hiding in the crowd, I have already seen her searching for a sight of me from behind the bus windows. Her face shows all that she is, and has been. Her feet hurry towards me and I am overcome by an approaching humidity. There are frangipanis on her dress. She holds out her arms. My mother has great strength as she pulls me towards her, trying to crush between our bodies the time and distance that have kept us apart. The doctor was handsome and chocolate-eyed, he wore a silk tie that my mother admired. She told him that she and her three children were new to the city, that her husband had one day vanished and the money in the bank account had vanished too. Have you looked for the body of your husband at the morgue? the doctor asked. Yes, she replied, he wasn’t there. My mother took off her white shoes. She explained that she had bought these shoes for her job, that she was a cleaner of other people’s houses. These harsh shoes were all she could afford. She showed him the injuries they had committed upon her feet. The doctor said he could help. He said that a young woman with such fine legs should have been a dancer. But what were his thoughts as he loaded his needle and injected the anaesthetic? Did his mind travel up under her skirt to recall the arousal of other men who had held a woman’s crippled foot; the tiny golden lotus, broken and bound? Or perhaps his thoughts were no more than those of a gardener pruning a troublesome rosebush. The doctor snipped the

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tendon that gave life to my mother’s smallest toe; it fell like a sickly bud. Although the anaesthetic had dispensed with the pain, her heart felt the electric drill. The doctor gouged at her wounds, drilling deep holes in her heels and her toes, her soft arches crumbling, long wet curls of flesh falling to the floor. My mother’s voice was underneath her terrible nausea. It was underneath her fear. It was underneath the sound of the drill and the doctor’s voice. He was telling her about his daughter. I am a weak man, he said, if it is a horse she wants, then it is a horse she shall have. The blood could not be contained by pressing at it with a cloth so the nurse brought a bucket, for her to bleed into. The nurse mopped the floor and wiped the instruments, and when the doctor was finished she knelt on the floor and bandaged my mother’s feet, staring into her eyes as if there were something she wanted to say. Outside the surgery my mother checked her purse but there was not enough money for a taxi. She picked up her bags of groceries and started up the hill towards home. The wetness came first, the oily filling of her shoes. This was followed by uneasy thoughts; perhaps the doctor had fitted her into the shoes, into her new life. Perhaps he had cut her down to size. And then the anaesthetic wore off, and the pain began. My mother finds much to delight in as I show her around my flat; the view of the city is fascinating, she finds the jarrah w a r m , my wildflower arrangement t a l e n t e d . But I feel as though we have stepped into a doll’s house and are looking at imitations of the world; the city view is painted on the lid of a matchbox, my books are crayon strokes on a cardboard wall, and I too am flat and substanceless, watched at all times by a giant eye, moved about in this replica life by another’s whim.

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As my mother unpacks she tells me about the work of the American archaeologist she met on the bus, the unusual kindnesses she observed between the co-drivers, and the games she was taught by the Muslim children who were travelling to meet their grandparents. All of these people will know about her holiday with her daughter, she has carried a great excitement with her on the long bus journey from her home. I am racing the clock of her disappointment; I lie and tell her that I like the T-shirt she has bought me and will wear it all the time when summer comes. On the front of the Tshirt there is a koala lounging under palm trees, the koala is wearing a pair of spotted bikinis and sipping a long drink; leading a tropical life. It will make a change from all your black, she says. The headmistress walked me to the door of my new classroom. I had already heard the bell and seen the children flee the playground. I was late therefore; I was not in time. When you sang it was important to be in time or you would be heard, a peep coming after the others had finished their chorus. I was late and apart from the other children; I was in a little boat of lateness, drifting the deep waters of their island, not able to come ashore. I followed carefully behind the stranger’s back while her heels clipped the asphalt. On my schoolcase the name of my old school had been crossed out and the new name written in texta. I thought of the sandwiches I carried in my case; my mother’s hands folding the rainbow paper around them, little triangles at the end, like a present. There was sadness in the sandwiches; I could feel her sadness crossing the roads all by itself, coming down the street, all the way to the school; there was sadness inside the pleats of the skirt bouncing on the stranger’s calves, there was sadness in the sky and in the taste of breakfast in my mouth.

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That night I lay in bed and listened to the sounds of television through the wall and my brothers’ breathing in their beds on either side of me. My brothers’ bodies hurt me. I studied their small shapes described by the light from the hallway. My youngest brother was sprawled wildly across his blankets as if thrown from a great height, the other lay neatly, his arms by his side, in the centre of the bed. He looked like a lower-case l, and the covers over him were smooth; he was hardly there at all. All day I had watched for their bodies; across the playground I had seen them eating their sandwiches, running behind the other children. I couldn’t look at them anymore. I closed my eyes and looked, instead, at the darkness there. My friend has been invited to a costume party in a mansion by the sea. The hostess is a charismatic woman with a gift for the orchestration of spectacular events. For this party she has bestowed upon each of her guests the character of a famous person. The hostess will be Cleopatra. My friend asks if I will help her prepare for the party, and my mother says she is happy to come along. I fill a bag with make-up and jewellery, and arrange for myself an attitude of equanimity and good humour. My friend is waiting for us, smoking a cigarette, at the top of the staircase that curves through the voluptuous interior of her apartment building. I look up at her as we take the first terrazzo step, and see that already, although she is wearing only stockings and a nude petticoat, she is becoming Joan Crawford. She taps a satin toe towards us, as if impatient, and she is able to do entrancing things with the smoke from her cigarette; feathers and even whole wings of smoke fly from her mouth and nostrils. My friend’s personality spills down the staircase over us out onto the brushed lawns and

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topiary. The hostess has perceived an undercurrent in my friend’s matriarchal nature; for this night she has been granted permission to enjoy her tyranny. My mother sits on the edge of the bath and watches as I draw a merciless blooded gash across my friend’s thin lips. Other friends arrive to share the taxi ride to the beach. They are party-excited and besotted with their new selves — practising an accent here, a gesture there — and they do not extend the full courtesies to my mother when I introduce her. The hostess has seemingly flattered them all: Andy Warhol, Dorothy Parker, Robert de Niro, Ivana Trump, Jean-Paul Sartre. They are hyperboles of themselves; their latent identities have been summoned. I expect there will be trouble amongst my friends tonight. As we walk home I try to be as lively with my mother as I was with my friends. I tell her what I have heard about the ruined mansion by the sea; that the ceiling of the lilac ballroom has swollen and burst and a confetti of plaster roses showers the dancers while the chandeliers, broken free of all but one or two of their chains, tip and swing their lights over their heads, across the walls the putti fly with their cheeks and buttocks smashed as if something could not resist biting their gorgeous rounds, the curtains are stiff with salt, the seagulls cry. Punch is served from a gold-clawed bath. My mother says that she is sorry I’m not going to the party. I lie and tell her that I want to spend the time with her. I could’ve had a quiet night watching television, she says, and I realise she would have liked the time alone. I don’t tell my mother that I have not been invited to the party. I provoke no identification with a famous person; for that, one must have clear lines. I try to imagine elaborations upon the theme of myself but I can only imagine a swamp, a column of smoke or at best, for comic effect, a spectre

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costumed in a white sheet with cut-outs for eyes, dragging a heavy chain, moaning. My mother says: You could have gone to the party as Marilyn Monroe. I am too surprised to ask her why she has made this connection. You could have lightened your hair and worn a white dress and stilettos, she says. And then she too looks surprised, and troubled, and it seems neither of us knows why she has said this strange thing. I turn our thoughts towards dinner. There were journeys from which my father did return. He rolled up his sleeve and put his arm out the window, the horizon charmed him, he drove until suddenly, like elastic, he reached the limit of his extension and was snapped back home to us. When my father returned, he rested. The blue Holden cooled its engine in the driveway. The car’s rear fender had been crumpled by a kangaroo and insect juices smeared the headlights, there was a mash of feathers and blood on the windscreen. I would remember this damage when my mother walked. When my mother walked I thought it sounded like birds hitting the windscreen. This, of course, was not true. There was only the faint cracking sound of her ankles and the dull padding of orthopaedic shoes. But I thought I heard it anyway; I heard it everywhere she went. I find my mother weeping in the kitchen. I startle her as I enter the room and see that she has been muffling the sound with a tea towel, trying not to wake me. She has been crying for a long time; the fine blood vessels between her eyebrows have burst and left a mark like a tiny red flower. I remember this now from childhood; we called it the tear rose. I touch her arm and ask her to tell me what is wrong.

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I haven’t eaten meat since I got here! she sobs. I rush to my drawer of vitamins. Do you need an iron tablet? I say. I’ve got three sorts. She shakes her head. Maybe I’m just homesick, she says. Your ways aren’t my ways. You don’t need a mother, I don’t know what it is you need. I need meat. I need fresh air. She flings her arms up. Why do you keep all the windows in this place closed? We walk to the shops in the rain, sharing an umbrella. For this I must speed up and my mother must slow down. It is awkward at first, but then we get it right. My mother cheers up the moment she sees the butcher. I stand outside the intimate circle of their negotiations and remember other moments like this, other butcher shops, chemists, newsagencies, bootmakers; moments of succour. Now I agree with her choice of some comma-shaped lamb chops, and find that I am hungry. We buy sweet potatoes and take the long route home so that we can stop to get a few cans of beer. On the way my mother says, that butcher was a pleasant man, and then she wants to explain something to me. Butchers know about being alone, she says, they might not be alone themselves but it is a way of living they respect. It must be different now, I’m sure when you buy six mushrooms and two bananas and the smallest carton of milk, the person at the check-out doesn’t bat an eyelid. But when I first left here and was alone and not anybody’s mother anymore with the trolley piled high, the shop assistants were different. The kind ones pitied you and the others made you feel you were asking too much of them, they handled your things roughly — the food you had chosen to eat — as if they wanted to shake you or slap your face. But butchers were not like that, they’d stand in front of the chicken breasts, lifting each one up for you to see, turning it this way and that, and they’d suggest green beans and a glass of white wine to go with it. Or if you felt like a roast beef they’d be happy to

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do one up for you. Enough for a meal and a cold lunch, they’d say. And when they handed you the white paper parcel, it might have been small, but it was a treat. The first time my mother went to the podiatrist, she went alone. After the visit she had to cross the bridge from his surgery to the bus stop on the other side of the highway. A strong wind was blowing. She carried groceries, she was late for work, below her the bus she must catch was moving quickly through the traffic. She thought of the podiatrist’s gentle hands touching her feet, his face grave and withholding as if he was in the presence of an atrocity. In her next heavy step was the day before her and the night to follow; on the crest of the bridge she stopped. The groceries dragged on her arms, her bus pulled into its stop and out again, but she could not move. When people passed by and saw her, they moved instinctively closer to the railing. But one woman was curious; she looked once and couldn’t help but look again. My mother held her eye. My mother whispered to her: Help me. And two policemen came; one held her arm, and the other held her shopping, and together they brought her back down to the ground again. After our lunch of lamb chops and beer my mother wants to watch Days of Our Lives. She reminds me that on days when I was home from school she would leave the milk bottles souring in other people’s sinks, the plugs of hair blocking their drains, and we would watch this on television together. Now I open the windows for her; it is raining again. Things are stormy in Salem too; characters burst into the stiff, hushed interiors wearing water-spattered overcoats, shaking themselves down. But this is a night of particular tempest: THE STRANGLER IS ON THE LOOSE. He is killing the

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promiscuous women of Salem. It is easy for him to identify these women because they wear dark lipstick and their laughter is full and throaty. These women work in the service industries; they are barmaids, waitresses, beauticians. Now the thunder begins to roll: the strangler, when he stops his killing and brushes his hair, is engaged to be married. His is a lovely fiancée, golden-locked, moist-eyed, fluffy-tongued, and she does not work for a living. We see her warm and safe on this lousy night: she sits at the end of her single bed, her teddy bear like a magistrate upon the pillows. She turns, with exquisite delicacy, and pain, the pages of a photograph album. Her fingernail caresses a picture of herself as a blond and ringleted child, party frock and sweet smile. Then something happens deep down inside; she lifts her head and sets her chin and her purpose. She defiantly returns teddy’s stare: she has decided she will do this, she will, she will travel through this night of turbulence and danger to The Assignation, to the motel, to meet her fiancé, to give of herself this first time, to MAKE LOVE TO HIM. The plot sickens, says my mother, grinning at me. Life has changed in the little town of Salem since my mother and I last watched this together. These characters are new to me, there is no family here, organising a central plot. It was always the family, suffering deep haemorrhage from within or struck by the wanton cruelties of the outside world, and the traumas were of a different kind: inoperable tumours, obstructed love, the sudden appearance of a hitherto-unknown son or daughter, accidents resulting in lower-body paralysis, appearance-altering surgery, amnesia. The strangler’s fiancée is driving through the storm. Branches lash the windscreen of her car. On the radio there is a newsflash — the strangler is still on the loose. Her eyes widen

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in terror but she is forced onward; the passion of her sacrifice is far, far greater than her fear. I recall tales of amnesia from those earlier episodes. I remember when the favourite son was struck on the head, or perhaps struck by lightning. His name was Mickey. He forgot himself and wandered away from his family and his important job at the hospital and began a simpler, happier life elsewhere. My mother and I did not like this story, we felt uncomfortable when we possessed greater knowledge than a character, we hated having to watch them move about as if in a maze, we wanted to scream — that’s the way out, that’s the way out — it shredded our nerves. And there were other, quieter amnesias suffered by women; they remained within the family and continued to drink the family coffee and sleep in the same clean sheets, but they were puzzled by the love of the people who now were strangers, and spent their time trying to seize something, like sunlight on water, with which to tell their story. The strangler is in the motel room, checking his watch. He paces like an animal, his body twitches. And then there are headlights maddening his eyes; she has arrived. In the car his fiancée applies fresh lipstick. The motel’s neon blinks on, and off. She knocks on the door of room 22. My heart is pounding. I am longing for something, I am full of this longing. I want her to die. I want to see her die. I want to see him wrap his hands around her throat and I want to see the final knowledge in her eyes; and when he has combed his hair and turned from the mirror to face her extinguished body, I want him to take off his fraternity tie and hang himself high from the shower rail. I want no last minute rescues, no sudden police sirens, no recoveries from unconsciousness or inability to go through with things.

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I want her innocence. I want his repentance. My mother’s feet were disfigured by heavy encrustations of scar tissue, unfleshlike; like sedimentary rock, the podiatrist said. After the first time, I accompanied my mother on her visits to the podiatrist. I sat beside her as he worked on her feet, a trolley of shining instruments between us. He would not touch her feet without first explaining his methods. From the podiatrist, his large hands illustrating in the air, my mother and I learnt about the nature of wounds: between the wound and the scar there is proudflesh. After injury, healing begins. Only healing and death are inevitable, he said. Across the surface of the wound, stealthy and irrevocable, grow the bridges of capillary and connective tissue. The flesh is now Schiaparelli pink or red; it is drunk with blood. Proudflesh is the flesh of healing but it is too tender and miraculous to last; it has its moment and is gone. The podiatrist said that the fibrous scar tissue which replaces the proudflesh is numbed and aloof, indifferent to its origins. He wanted, he said, to go beyond the scar, to get back to the wound. With a scalpel the podiatrist cut fine slices of tissue from the mounds on my mother’s feet. He was careful and did not hurry. The tip of the scalpel pierced the scar. There was layer upon layer of scarring, he called each layer a deposit of time. He was precise. He was going deeper. He wanted to go beyond the scar, to get back to the wound. He wanted to restore feeling. I was careful not to wake my brothers as I got out of bed. Through a gap in the door I could see my mother. She was smoking a cigarette, television light flickered over her face. In the bathroom I crouched to open the cupboard below the washbasin. This was the cupboard of bad things. I was searching. I was longing. In the dark beneath my eyelids I had

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seen a place, a place elsewhere, and I wanted to go. I was searching and longing and then I found it, as I knew I would; I found the poison. My mother heard me stumble in the hall. I believed my eyes were liquid and dripping down my face, when she shook me I held up my palms to catch a final sight of her. I only wanted to go but there was her face, wet in my hands, her love staring back at me; she had hold of me by the arms, the sleeves of my nightie twisted; if I went her hands would come too, I would be elsewhere with her hands on me. She held on, she was trying to keep me from going but some of me had left already, burned up by poison and desire, so I let her have what was left, and fell to the floor. The doctor put his stick down my throat and held me over the toilet while I discharged steaming gruel and yellow-green waters until I was empty of longing and could only tremble against my mother’s body. From my bed I could hear the doctor whispering outside the door: How does a child get this into her head? He offered my mother a prescription: Don’t let her watch any more Adults Only television. Beside me there was a glass of milk that he had insisted I drink; a white balm so that I may once again be pure. My mother saw him to the door and then she came to me carrying a teaspoonful of strawberry Quik to stir into the milk. I had taken a nasty blue drink and now I must have a sweet pink one. She smoothed my hair and I could smell the tobacco on her fingers and feel the absolving coolness of her wedding band. She leaned close so as not to wake my brothers. The world was her before me. It’s all right, she said, it’s over. She kissed my temples and pulled her hands over my eyes, drawing the lids, conjuring sleep. It’s over, she whispered, repeating the spell. Her breath in my ear: We will forget that this ever happened.

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My mother and I are serious about farewells; we believe there are right and wrong ways of saying goodbye. We do not farewell one another at the bus station. She travels slowly through one day and into the next, hour after hour drawing away from me, moving towards home. While she travels I sleep nine restful hours, work and eat, I throw out the dead flowers and fold away the bed on which she slept; I suture my life together around her absence. I give her time to unpack and to look around, and then I phone. When I enquire about her bus trip, and she asks if the weather has cleared, we are coming apart, like the slow separations of an egg, or cloud. She tells me that when she arrived the mangoes were thick on the ground and the geckoes raced at her for a feed of mince. We begin to discuss the episode of Four Corners from the night before. In the distance I hear a screeching sound growing louder. The cockies are at the vegies, she says, hang on a sec. I feel the telephone receiver drop at the other end; I imagine her tearing down the back steps past the stiff washing, kicking aside the wasted mangoes, a crimson blur of bougainvillea, hands parting palms, their fronds clack-clacking behind her, the lean branches of the poinciana tree raised like her arms in appeal to the sky mercy mercy m e r c y . I hear her cry shoo shoo, running at the cloud of screeching white cockatoos lowering onto the vegetable patch. She runs fast between the rows of staked tomatoes, the green heads of lettuce and pumpkin globes, her bare feet striking the ground, wings at her heels, the fine red dirt flying. mercy When we were grown, she left us. She chose the town for its warmth and because she had been told: Beyond the Tropic of

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Capricorn the light burns you clear and the rain washes you down. She found her house and in the fine red soil, the pindan, she began her garden. The sand filled her heavy shoes and sweat ran between her toes. No one was there to see or to question; my mother took off the shoes and the bandages and hobbled barefoot on the dirt. She walked up and down the vegetable garden and then further, walked for miles on the hot baking iron-red earth, the heat rising into her flesh like fingers, unknotting, smoothing, and the sand abraded her skin and wore away the scar tissue; sandpapering it down to a polished newness. The changes were small and she took her time, one step after the other along the cool edges of the Indian Ocean, salt biting, looking behind her to see water fill her footprints and erase them from the sand. I hear the screeching of the birds fade away. She picks up the phone and says: Can you hear them? They’re calling: we’ll be ba-a-a-ck we’ll be ba-a-ack. They ate the scarecrow while I was away! What were we talking about? I can’t remember, I say. Neither can I, she says. It doesn’t matter. And then I think I hear trouble in the air and it sounds like the birds are back to play with my mother, she likes to play too and she’ll be off out the door again, fleet-footed, leaving me dangling in the sticky and garish tropics; not my scene at all. So I mention one or two things quickly, and she mentions one or two more. And then we say goodbye.

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