Past tense

Years ago I wrote a story on A WineDark Sea called 'Can't kill him with an axe'. It was an account of the times I'd nearly killed Old Salt on his fishing boat. He'd previously had heart surgery ('they put a bit of pig in me!'), licked asbestos as a kid because he liked the tingling feeling on his tongue, had an affinity for battery acid and thought electrocution was a fine remedy for Ross River Virus.

Bill died on Monday. It's a weird feeling. When a close friend is dying, people ask if I want to visit them but I'm already there, somehow. Several hundreds of kilometres apart and I'm with them. I don't really know how to explain this. Despite this feeling, when Nga told me on Sunday that he was now on morphine, I'd said, 'Yeah, I'll ring him in the morning.' He sounded fine on Friday when he took of his oxygen mask to chat. Fine.

He was my mentor and teacher. He taught me everything about what it is to be on a boat, how to follow the channel markers home to port in the middle of the night. That was one of his first lessons as we motored home from Michaelmas Island. He taught me about family, about how fish think and how to tie knots (still terrible at that).

He seemed incombustible, unkillable. An incorrigible white man with a stout sense of right and wrong, a strong interest in his family's history of fishing the Great Southern inlets. He never gave up. So Bill, the star of Salt Story is gone. Bizarrely and so bloody banal for someone who always sailed too close to the wind, he copped covid at a funeral a few weeks ago. On Monday, we'll go to his.

 

 

 

 

Vale

 

Gentleman John

 He is a quiet sort, Mum's neighbour. A sturdy man with a soldier's gait. One day I pruned the bushes on her driveway and the only good it did was to expose Gentleman John's majestic marijuana growing on the other side of the fence. For the next month, Mum had to see it every time she did the dishes. We all knew he was a good gardener but this was next level.

I'd be chopping her wood and he'd stop by the asbestos fence and say gidday. He'd strung up a dead crow on the apricot tree. There's a riot of dendrophilic orchids bouncing out of a dead marri stump too.

When I worked in the cafe, he came in for a daily coffee and paper and rang his son every Saturday morning. Because he was partially deaf, John was a shouter. The whole cafe was filled with people trying really hard not to eavesdrop. A blow by blow rendition of every show he's seen on TV that week. Every Saturday. Yes, this an obituary.

He was a Vietnam vet who 'never left a man behind', according to another ex-SAS local. When I asked about why he pulled his socks over his trouser legs, he said 'condoms while sleeping too, my friend, those leeches get in any way they can', and who in the depths of his worst PTSD sleeplessness, would walk around town with a backpack full of bricks, checking locks, securing the stations. Once he'd done his nightly round, he could sleep.

I really liked John. He was a cool guy. Two weeks ago he died of Covid and I went to his memorial today. He didn't want any fanfare. From what he said to Mum, he was ready to go. Apart from his pulled-up socks, I liked his hat best of all, how he always called me 'friend', gently, and how he drove through town, looking straight ahead.

How not to die 101

 Raging storm here tonight ... the crashing of branches on the roof as fronts move through and the chill of a nasty sou-westerly.

It's been just over a year since (and you know the rest of the sentence wherever you sit on the globe). Right before our state government shut down regional borders and restricted travel, a few randoms turned up at the inlet where I live. Their thinking was that since this is one of the more remote places in the state, free of people and other anxieties, that it was a good destination to ride out what we all thought would be a month or so of this pandemic. Heh.

Anyway, a man turned up here in his camper van. He's a regular Bibbulmum track walker who normally lives in the city. We sat on the verandah one day and chatted. We were both a bit frazzled. He was contemplating returning to the city and I'd been consigned to teaching via zoom for the rest of semester. He started telling me a bit about his life. His brother had died in what was "a bit of an odd manner".

*Sarah's ears prick up*

Apparently this man's brother was about to go on a fishing trip and needed some worms for bait. The previous night, he'd had a yarn with someone at the pub about how to catch worms. So what you do right, is cut the female end off an extension cord and push it into the earth, then plug the male end into a power socket and turn it on. This punter told old mate's brother that the voltage through the soil would force the subterranean worms to the surface and that he could just go around and pick them up.

Perfect! So simple! So, he followed the punter's instructions to the letter. Unfortunately, when he went out in the morning to collect the worms, he was bare footed and had left the power on.

Bathroom Mirror

This mirror can be brutally honest first thing in the morning. The lines on my brow and fleshy, wrinkled undersides of my arms. The window full of light and luminating the sight of me. Gah!

Skinny Gran looked into this mirror once, long ago. Then her son built her a house in the House Paddock, next to the Apple Tree paddock. It was said her husband, Viking stock, went away to war a good man and came back a bad one. North Africa campaigns. One of the Rats. She survived the car accident, when her drunken husband and some of her children did not. Her son survived it too and left school at ten to go to work. He became adult, slicked back hair, weekly dances at the community hall, shearing teams. Skinny Gran moved with him here, to this house, when he married the daughter of a Dutchman and they staked all of their money into a patch of dirt on the south coast.

Skinny Gran died quietly. The men here die violently as a rule. The women are taken by a more interior means – clusters and squamous cells. For decades, a lifetime, Skinny Gran’s daughter in law, a merry-eyed woman with tight curly hair inspected herself in this mirror before making tea in an aluminium pot in the mornings, quiet time before the children awoke. Listening to the bulls and the magpies. Curly Mum’s daughters were babies and then suddenly they were teenagers, the oldest wielding a tight-lipped authority over her squally middle child brother. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror, she could see the straight brow and nose of her children’s’ genes, the Dutch, the Swede, the hard scrabble life land. 

Sometimes I wonder, as I look in the same mirror, whether Curly Mum thought of the farm as unceded Aboriginal land. It must have been a silent reckoning and certainly not of the times. The work, the constant work and interest rates and carting water for the cattle in the dry years. Her son was old enough now, angry enough and strong enough to take on his old man. Her son went away at fifteen.

Her youngest, who idolised her big brother, sat on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror and cried as Curly Mum stood behind her, cutting her hair into a blonde crown of curls. If only they wouldn’t fight, she said to her mum. Why do they fight? It was a Saturday and the midsummer light through the window was fierce. She was starting high school in a week. Her mum reckoned that there is always a week between a bad haircut and a good one.

They tiled the bathroom, took out the bath with its lion claw feet and installed a sliding glass shower cubicle. No one had baths anymore anyway and the water pressure was improved with the new electric pump. Curly Mum stood in front of the mirror, a towel around her waist, right arm raised and crooked over her hair, her left hand feeling around her boob, seeing if the lump was visible to the eye.

Two years later and, stepping out of the shower in the mornings with bright light shining in, confronting again the scars beneath her absent right breast. So … an Amazon now. Silences from her husband and fearful looks from her daughters. Trips to the city were a necessity rather than privilege. Clearances, cleared, remission. Twenty years. Her son returned.

Her son’s girlfriend was a sturdy, uneven girl who already had a daughter from another man. Curly Dill (‘daughter in law, love’) would seek refuge in the kitchen with Curly Mum when the two men, now bonded in mutual recognition after all those years of antipathy, became intolerable to her in the shed. Curly Mum found this kid’s activism around the forests and feminist thought tilting at windmills and pretty quaint. She’s pregnant, her son said to her one day. How do you feel about that? Curly Mum asked her son. I’m not sure, said her son.

Curly Dill gave birth on the side of the road on the way to the hospital. Not long after that, Curly Mum had a proper hospital bed delivered to the house, and a nurse, so that she could die at home. Which she did.

Grannie Violet had been sweet on Curly Mum’s husband from the days back when Skinny Gran was a single mum and her son was slicking back his hair and going to dances. So when Curly Mum died, Grannie Violet moved into her house and soon became grandma to the expanding progeny of this family. At first there was resistance from them, then acceptance as they realised she was staying for the long run. She would see herself age in the bathroom mirror, over the years. She kept her own house and worked still, cleaning houses and government department buildings, as her partner grew older and his heart condition worsened. Grannie Violet went into the house two days after he died to ‘collect her things.’ I’d like to think that she stopped in front of the bathroom mirror but maybe she didn’t.

Curly Mum’s son took over the farm when his father died. He worked full time at a sand carting company to pay back the loan incurred by his father’s lack of a will, and spent his nights in the calving season with a calf-puller, a torch and his four-wheel drive. He looked drawn and shadowed. The next woman to look in the bathroom mirror brushed her teeth, inspected her fringe, eyebrows and hair, before rushing her daughter off to the school bus that rumbles along the gravel road past the gates, every morning. She hoped for a future, any future. At the gates sit concrete casts of a pair of lions, an Italian plea that the people within own this piece of land. 

Yesterday, Curly Dill looked in that bathroom mirror, remembering this history. She first looked into that mirror when Curly Mum was still alive and she was 24, and in love with her son. If she looked a bit emotional in the mirror, it’s because the farm is about to be sold after the death of her own son’s father, Curly Mum's son, and so this whole story comes to an end, of sorts.

 

 

Another sterling delivery

Today after work, I arced up my old laptop in the resource centre to find that the faithful machine I've been working with for the last five years had completely broken down and was sending me dire hard drive and error messages in bright blue. She had the digital version of the flu. I only have a two day writers workshop beginning tomorrow, that I've been working on for weeks. It was a horror moment, that electric blue notice, and the old puter kept sniffling and shutting down every time I tried something new.

Once the stomach churning settled and I'd got my wits about me again, I rang HP support and a kind woman called Rasha talked me through rebooting the whole shebang. Now this is not a sponsored post, far from it, but as a freaked out pleb with a failing five year old laptop, HP's customer support today was amazing. So ... winning on that front.

Then I ambled down to the post office for a mail check. There are no letterboxes where I live and consequently no street numbers either. People describe their house when I am trying to find them as 'it's three houses past the yellow house on Park Avenue, about four houses before the turn off to Swan Street.'

I digress. I went to the post office to pick up my mail and the post mistress (yes we still have them here) handed me over a bubble-wrapped parcel. I fingered the plastic lining of this parcel. Whenever a book that I've written or that I have a piece in comes out, my publisher tends to send it with no return address, like a mystery gift, like they know us authors will unwrap it and find their new baby swaddled inside.

The book: Women of a Certain Rage, edited by Liz Byrski, will be out on Monday and I received my copy today.

 So yes. Love affairs! The bikie wars and then a strange reconciliation! My story The Club goes into what happens when we are forced to understand that people who may not think like us ... no bugger it. The story is about a culture that I seriously disliked and how I realised that the men within that culture loved the same man as I did.

It was one of the hardest things I've ever written, for several reasons. I'm so glad that it is on the public record now, within this anthology. My editor, in her note wrote 'Another sterling delivery from Drummond!'

That's a pretty nice sentiment to drive home with. Computer fixed. Anthology out in the world. Sterling delivery.

A good day.

Canteloupe

I saw him on the town road driving towards me and rather than our grinning windscreen greetings, it was a terse raised hand from me and a concerned look from him. How I would love to smash that windscreen, must have flashed my eyes, seeing his knowledge that I was beyond cajoling now, or lies.

You know it is over when he stops enticing you on midnight adventures and day time rain time trysts; when he begins to wife you and you oblige. You know it is over when you make him toast in the morning instead of cooking him kangaroo meat in a cave at midnight. You know it is over when he provides just enough goodness for his pass card to embark on his next adventure without you.

My phone rang as I pulled into Crypt’s house. No Caller ID. I switched it off and then Crypt opened his front door and said, how you going Sarah?. Aussie’s birthday ey? Party, party! Do you want a beer? It’s cheap beer. Just shit beer really but something to get started on.

I’ve dug her up an orchid for her birthday, I said. I think it will take. They’re amazing.

I showed him the orchid, sprouting long, crimson stalks in an old tin stock pot I’d found in the Creepy House. I’d cut some flowers too and wrapped them in wet tissue, alfoil and wreathed them in a copy of the Weekly.

That’s impressive, better than my effort, he said. I just bought her a pile of sausages. Crypt's night shifts usually involve cleaning the blood and bits of bone off the floors, the walls and sometimes even the ceilings, when the arterial sprays hit the light fittings of the surgery room at the hospital.

You know it’s over when you can’t stop thinking about the night your lover's last lover was the usher and his wife took the stage alone and her father had just died. The white orchid in the usher’s dark hair. His wife's red lips stretched into what was supposed to be a stagey hilarity. Project that voice, actor. Put on that mask, usher, and usher us through the night. Go on. Both of you.  Break a leg.

Both women looked terrified.

Crypt’s house is immaculate; shabby fibro chic. Now that he has a Kindle he reads three novels a week. He has printed out the periodic table and pinned it up in the kitchen. Most days on my commute, as I shoulder through the door with my back pack full of work clothes, a lap top and a dog, Crypt is asleep, or trying to sleep, or recovering from lack of sleep. But this day he was a bit spiky after a week of night shifts. Someone knocked at the door.

Who the fuck is that? shouted Crypt, throwing open the door. Who the fuck is knocking on my door?

I already knew who it was. I saw his car through the torn lace curtains, parked across Crypt’s driveway, and then I heard his voice, asking for me.

Well I dunno, said Crypt. Who are you anyway? And Sarah? How did you know she is here? Sarah! He turned to me. Do you wish me to let this gentleman onto the premises?

Of course, I said. Come in.

He looked sunburned and intense. He didn’t really smile and that thing he normally does with his eyes when he sees me wasn’t there. I assumed he was reflecting the same lack in mine.

Sit down, sit down, said Crypt. Do you want a beer? It’s not that great but it’s a beer. Crypt slammed down a can in front of him.

He nodded and sat down. He said,

I tried to ring you, just then, from a pay phone. My phone has died a terrible death …

You know it’s over when you block his calls, messages and face time on your phone. You know it’s over when you resign from your secret internetty game with your secret internetty name - he changes his name according to whomever he plays with - and then you delete the app. You know it’s over when he is still too wary, secretive and careful, even in the face of losing you forever, to acknowledge this fact, to ask in Crypt’s presence: why did you block my calls and cut contact with me a week ago? What happened?

Because if he had asked me that, Crypt may have well put up his palms, backed away and left us at the little laminex kitchen table to let us talk some truths. Crypt may have gone outside to gaze over the verge action of the debacle’d meth house next door, or at my orchid in a tin pot, or decide that it was bin day even though it was a Saturday. 

But my visitor didn’t ask me that. He is just a man who has affairs. 

Truth is no option for the romantic strayer, and so the three of us sat around the table, drank beer and talked about toe tags, the day’s sailing, fish paintings and science fiction. I was aware of his discomfort and thought, his discomfort is not a single fucking stitch on the tumult I’ve worn the last four years. Pain expressed repeatedly by me and ticked off on his mental clipboard.

Tick.

No Action Required.

You know it’s over when you realise the futility of explaining why this unequal relationship succours your damaged self and dismantles your true one. He hasn’t listened to you, he never will. Explain yourself woman. Again. Enough. You know it’s over when you recall his complaints about his previous mistress’s bleak, black heart. You always thought you were better than her and now you’ve become that same bleak, sad heart. A once-wild soul, black-mantled by secrecy. And that there will be another soul after you. There probably already is. You’re just not that special, Miss Sarah.

I was feeling restless. Finally I stood, exhausted with the hopping between chit chat pleasantries around Crypt’s kitchen table and the cool narrative going on in my head.

I’m off to Aussie’s place, I said, putting on my coat. I want to help her set up.

Yes, said my visitor, standing. I should get going too.

I’ll see you over there later, said Crypt to me. Are you taking her the orchids?

Of course.

I turned. Goodbye, I said to him.

I felt a small twinge of … something, when I saw his beer can ringed neatly with indents from his thumb nail. I hadn’t noticed he was doing that.

See you, he said.

I was out the door, collecting up the tin pot and the Weekly-wrapped corsage, and I was down the street, stalking along with the pot on my hip, holding it like a baby or maybe a washing basket. I was angry but I didn’t use the pot to break his windscreen. I didn’t feel so wronged after all. I just felt a million different furies spawning from an ancient hurt. I heard his car start and rumble along the road behind me, slowing as he reached me. This was where he would stop and say, can we talk now? But Aussie’s house was right there and I crossed the neighbour’s lawn to get to her driveway. I didn’t look to the road as I waved the spray of orchids at him, waving him away, and so he drove away.

What was all that about? Crypt asked me later and so I told him.

I call him Crypt here, not because he cleans blood and bone fragments off walls for a job but because he is really, really good at cryptic crosswords. He just has that kind of brain. Later he sent me this message:

I couldn't remember your friend’s name so I called him Rockmelon to place him in my mental catalogue. I got it later: Cantaloupe. 

Can’t elope. Can't. Elope.