East

 

With extra rainbows for free today.

This could be my favourite drawing and outlook from the fire tower, because of the profiles of the hills. There are some low lands directly below the mountain which are pretty interesting too, full of yorgum and moodjar trees in flower. Today, as every day, if you wait for long enough in the same place, nature will throw on an event.

 

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.

 

 

On potential isolation

I gave my last hug to a woman named Vikki on Friday. She is kind and wise and met me, lost, at my front door. It turned out she was in the right place, just one hidden driveway away. So good to see her. Ever since I’ve greeted people with a prayer gesture or arms crossed over my chest and a nod. I’m a natural hugger so this whole thing is a bit weird.

Trilby bailed me up outside the parks and wildlife office yesterday. He’s found a ‘dumper’, a habitual dumper of rubbish. Unfortunately. this dumper probably weekends at the place where I live and Trilby is onto them … ‘like a ninja’ he says, karate punching himself on his hard, septuagenarian stomach. ‘I worked as a constable in Hong Kong in the 60s,’ he said. ‘Imagine what will happen to those litterbugs when I get hold of them.’ He then mentioned something about testicles and investigations. ‘I’m not sure which rangers are on today,’ I told him, carefully concealing my cigarette butt in a chewing gum tin. ‘Have you considered writing a letter to the council?’

A major Australian university divests their stocks in fossil fuels. Markets are tanking anyway due to the lurgy but this particular move is heralded as ‘virtue signalling’ in crisis times. There is talk about self-isolation. I feel I could well be the next expert, for once. None of this is new to me. ‘Aren’t you afraid sometimes?’ a woman asked me yesterday. ‘Living out there alone?’

I can hardly believe it myself, but it’s been nearly five years now, since I moved out to the inlet. Apart from the poles, it’s one of the more isolated places on our planet. I live here off the grid and without telecommunications. Famously (it’s catchy) I finished the edits of my last book at the local laundromat in town because there was a power point, a chair and table and mobile phone range.

Now as a new imperative, I’m looking at heading to the laundromat to continue my work as a uni tutor. The beauty of tech means I can continue work as a tutor when the universities shut down, as I listen to my clothes churn around and around (the lint filters need changing by the way), and stay connected with the students. Self-isolation is actually the pinnacle of my life options. What could be better, for me?

Trilby talks about his dreams for an eco-caravan park at the inlet so they can knock down the squatter huts where I live. He looks to me for approval. He may as well be looking under a car seat for that missing hairclip. ‘Eco-caravan park talkers are akin to white-shoe property developers to me,’ I say. He stares forlornly at the orange bag of litter at his feet. ‘Those huts should be heritage listed,’ I say. ‘They belong to the old cattle run families.’ The word ‘heritage’ has power. He nods, but he knows now that I am not an ally.

Where am I going here? Not sure really. Information seems to be at least a week late from the gubberment and meanwhile we make it up ourselves. Flattening the curve involves no more hugs, handshakes or kisses for the foreseeable future (whatever those chicken entrails are) and I’m happy to comply. Just don’t turn my bolt hole, my haven, into an eco-caravan park.

And be kind and good to each other. Consider your workers in retail, education and medicine and give them your most gorgeous (non coughy) juice. The people who heal you and your family, who sell you fuel and a carton of milk and those who teach your kids, they live at the coal face now. They deserve your utter, utter respect and consideration.

*posted from the laundromat*

Women of a Certain Age

"She was not old, nor young, nor at the years/Which certain people call a certain age,/Which yet the most uncertain age appears." (Byron 1817),
I'm not sure what the phrase 'a certain age' means or what age they are talking about. Something to do with the menopause maybe? A gendered observation anyway, seeing as it is never applied to men. Perhaps it is the age when women cut all their hair off, take to wearing loud saris and have an affair with someone thirty years their junior - ie. a midlife crisis if you were male.

Far out. I don't know. What I do know is that when I was asked to contribute an essay to the anthology Women of a Certain Age, I felt a chill in my ovaries and thought oh no, oh no it's begun oh no. No matter. As usual in these situations where I am asked to participate in an anthology, I used the speccies as a leaping off point and wrote what was really on my mind.

So my story 'Living at Clarkie's Camp' is about pig hunters naturally. Pig hunters! Fugitives! Monster dogs! Love affairs! Gateway guardians! Setting net for sea mullet!

Women of a Certain Age is out on Thursday this week. It's a great book with some brilliant pieces by writers such as Anne Aly, Krissie Kneen, Liz Byrski and Goldie Goldbloom. There is one of my favourites in there and you can read for yourself to find your own faves. From the brilliant Fremantle Press. Very proud, I am.

'a great deal of the fictive'

 I found a suitcase full of a young woman's clothes in the gloaming, on the Broke track, yesterday. As I went through the bag later, I thought 'size ten, gorgeous' (the mid riffs, the tiny shorts, the push ups)  and a sense of disaster overcame me. When I got to the bottom of her bag I saw from her payslips that she worked in the next town and today I dropped off her gear to a thankful best mate there. She'd gone to upstate on a girls' weekend and lost her bag off the back of a ute at the Broke Inlet road turnoff. So it was all okay. No disaster.

What to do.

Selkie and Crow

I’m writing a story Crow, I said, the night you loomed out of the dark with a chainsaw as your gift. But I can’t finish it. I don’t know how it ends.

I know not how it ends, you agreed.

Selkie slept until the evening of the next day. She woke bruised in the small of her back, her limbs aching, a bump on her skull. She was wreathed in the smell of wood smoke and sea spray, a pricking knowledge of loss in her body.

It was a simple seduction the first night she came into Crow’s camp. All he had to do was flick open the canvas of his swag and she wriggled in there, boots and all. She nuzzled his ebony pelt and stroked the silken, glistening hairs that lay like feathers at his throat. In the dawn as he shook away the sand and strands of her hair from his bed, he saw her cleaning a fish for them both on the shore.

She wrapped the fish in briny sheaves of paperbark and buried it in coals. When it was cooked she peeled away the skin and inhaled the steam. She sucked clean the bones and then gobbled up its head. He ate the eyes and the tail and some meat between. It was a feast for them; fish and sea lettuce and samphire berries.

They had to steal their time together, a larceny of mere hours, always at night unless it was place where no soul knew them. In the hours before the moon died Crow and Selkie met on cliff tops, inlet shores and caves. He committed every wave in her presence to his memory. They roamed their nights; fugitive lovers who for a few short hours hopped off the edge of the world and all its moralities, strictures, its weight of living.

It would be weeks before she saw him again. Long stretches, swings of time and whole lives went by and they filled the spaces with letters.

“Crow,
I lay back in the passenger seat and closed my eyes most of the way out to the inlet, feeling pulpy and pouty, bruised nipples throbbing a bit, the red black red flash of trees and sky behind my eyelids. Body still in that darkened bed and the red scent of your flesh.”

I have a delicious sense of you there ...

They met on the side of a mountain, by a railway line, in the derelict museum of old and new art. Selkie told Crow to look at the sky and he threw up his head to see the trees frame the emu constellation and by then she was on her knees in the wet winter grass and arum lilies. All that he knew was her hot mouth and the night's chill against his skull. The frogs sang their audience and chorus. He wondered if he could trust her  and he wanted to trust her always when she lay down her coat. The train came across the country, blaring at every crossroad, roaring closer and closer, and then, when her thighs were clamped around Crow proper and she was making noises from deep within her chest, the train barged shrieking close and she spilled over the front of his shirt, so careless and nearly crying. Almost laughing.

But my God, what is to become of me, 

if you have deprived me of my reason? 

This is a monomania which, in the morning, 

terrifies me.

In the morning Selkie could only memory her mercurial nights for Crow had gone and he might have been a delicious dream but for the bramble's scratches and gravel and the muddied clothes that she slept in.

This is not a life. 

I have never before been like that. 

You have devoured everything. 

I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years.

Crow strapped on his wings and flew home but on his way he found the black cat again. She mewled at him as she cleaned her paws on the sun-warmed stone and so he stayed for a while. Then he went home and placed food carefully on the crook of his family’s roost.

He smoothed his beard and tidied his camp. For two weeks he placed twig after twig on a frugal fire. He listened from his eyrie to the inlet waves ebbing and quickening against the shore. It was like the sound of her emerging from the sea to find him. He called her.

Selkie didn’t know about the black cat but it wouldn’t have mattered to her because she was transfixed. She could do nothing but come when Crow called her and then wait, while he lived and loved somewhere else. She was comfortable in her skin but the deals she’d wrangled to stay that way were unravelling. She pined and wisted and her days became a fugue of waiting. The looming damage began to frighten her; the day when the world’s weighty reality would find them out.

The nature of his secrets was not her responsibility, she reasoned but his own. But it meant an ancient narrative for them both, with its accompanying hurts and potential for carnage. It’s not fair! She railed at him. Why did you ask me to come to you? This will do me in. You will do me in.

When he didn’t answer, she wrapped her legs around him and stroked his big head, because how could she speak to his silence? Like Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, Crow responded by saying nothing.

On the last night they climbed over the brindle bosses of stone on the cliffs, passing scented carnivorous flowers that grew in the clefts of the granite and they leapt the slippery black streaks running down to the sea.

 There is a cave up there, he said. Two caves, one for storing firewood, keep it dry.

The big sea was an inky ultramarine but for the startling, giddying mass of white water surging into the groper holes. They trod the flat faces, stepped carefully over the wet rocks made crunchy with calcified leakage and the odd, nasty surprise of slippery black. He shone the torch behind him for her. Over the reed beds and the zig zag ledges of stone, through the little forest of tea tree, down into the jumble of boulders, alongside another massive striped megalith then up to the next outcrop, eighty metres of sloping granite peppered with blocks of square stone the size of houses. All the time, the boom and the crack of water and a buzzing of oxygen in the air.

She felt the salt spray upon her face. Venus was rising. Shadows made a new dark as the moon moved over the hill.

They crawled into one of the caves and he lit a fire. Then they laid their clothes on the granite floor. Naked in the cave, the fire glowed their bodies and made their skin soft and warm against the stone. Shafts of moonlight streaked through the cracks of the cave.

You are the only person who would take me here, Selkie said.

You are the only one who would come with me, Crow said, wondering at the woman who went with him at night across the cliffs and sat before him now, naked in the cave.

I can’t sneak around like this anymore, said Selkie. I’ll miss you. I can’t do this any more. Will you remember me?

Crow was silent then. They looked out to the moonlit sea. The wind turned to the south and blew into the cave, chilled their backs, gave the fire draw.

Sarah,

I feel like I tumbled off a mountain top for the last few days ... deathly tired, bruised in strange places and weepy, a bed ridden Bronte malcontent, thinking you lost forever. I didn’t find your message til late, they always catch me by surprise & my heart skips a little ... oh hello, there she is.

Crow.

*

It can’t end there, here, not like that.

I wrote and thought to you: I don’t know if the story Selkie and Crow is any good or a self indulgent dog of a tale. Perhaps I’m just not being honest. I’ve dressed up an untruth in pretty feathers and fur, presented it as a fairy tale. And fairy tales must always tell the truth.

I invented conflict to give a love affair a narrative structure but it remains an unwieldy beast who defies my best efforts to bully it into a box ... perhaps it is a dandelion head ready to blow – and me, standing around in a northerly with a butterfly net.

As Barthes would have it: “... the lover speaks in bundles of sentences but does not integrate these sentences on a higher level ... no transcendence, no deliverance, no novel (though a great deal of the fictive.)”

And I miss you like sleep.

What to do. Put this story in the drawer for ten years. Send it to someone in another city, someone who does not know me, and ask them what is wrong with it. Roll it up into a scroll, wrap it in paperbark and scented leatherwood leaves, secrete it into the quiet caves, the wild places, its natural home, and leave it there.

***

Some notes.

On Bartleby, silence and secret stories:

“... and it is only when we try to learn the truth, the source or essence of Bartleby’s ‘I prefer not to’ that we condemn ourselves not to know Bartleby at all. If the meaning of Bartleby’s refrain is to be allowed to stay a secret, then any attempt to unlock that secret would be an act of violence. To preserve the secret (to give the secret its secrecy, as it were) we must resist those readings that would reduce the scrivener to an existential or pathological subject, or which would see Melville’s short story as some kind of historically responsive portrait of a modern subject’s alienation under capitalism. It’s precisely because the story does not represent something other than itself (a historically responsive portrait of the modern subject’s alienation under capitalism, for example) that its secret continues to work its effects, which arise from the work of what is called literature.”

Niall Lucy, The Ballad of Moondyne Joe, p. 13.

Italics: excerpts from Honore' de Balzac letter to Madame Hanska, June, 1835.

“Every amorous episode can be, of course, endowed with a meaning: it is generated, develops, and dies; it follows a path which is always possible to interpret according to a causality or finality – even, if need be, which can be moralised: ... this is the love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other, to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him,a painful, morbid crisis of which he must be cured, which he must ‘get over’.

... the love story (the ‘episode’, the ‘adventure’) is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.”

Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 7.