Have a read of my short story ‘Art and the Mermaid’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘Art and the Mermaid’ and is one of the stories in my collection ‘Stories from Bondi’ (Ginninderra Press), a series of stories set in Bondi Beach.
I hope you enjoy it.
Art and the Mermaid:
Once upon a time it came to pass, so it is said, that an enormous storm swept the coast of New South Wales, doing extensive damage to the ocean beaches – destroying jetties, breakwaters and washing away retaining walls. Mountainous seas swept Bondi Beach and dashed against the cliffs carrying ruin with every roller. At North Bondi near Ben Buckler a huge submerged block of sandstone weighing 233 tons was lifted ten feet and driven 160 feet to the edge of the cliff where it remains to this day.
One day a Sydney sculptor, Lyall Randolph, looked upon the rock and was inspired. The sculptor was a dreamer. Let us, he said, have two beautiful mermaids to grace the boulder. Using two Bondi women as models he cast the two mermaids in fibreglass and painted them in gold.
Without Council approval and at his own expense he erected The Mermaids for all to see on the giant rock that had been washed up by the sea. The Mermaids sat side by side on the rock. One shaded her eyes as she scanned the ocean and the other leant back in a relaxed fashion with an uplifted arm sweeping her hair up at the back of her neck. Their fishy tails complemented the curves and crevices of their bodies.
It so happened that less than a month after The Mermaids were put in place, one was stolen and damaged. The Council held many meetings to decide if she should be replaced using ratepayers’ money. The council had previously objected to the sculptor placing the statues there without Council permission. The sculptor had argued that before placing The Mermaids in position he had taken all necessary steps to obtain the requisite permission.
The large boulder at Ben Buckler, upon which The Mermaids were securely bolted and concreted, he said, is not in the municipality of Waverley at all. It is in the sea. According to the Australian Constitution high-tide mark is the defined limit of the Waverley Council’s domain. The Maritime Services Board and the Lands Department both advised me they had no objection to the erection of The Mermaids.
One Waverley Alderman said he wished both mermaids had been taken instead of only one. Someone else said the sculptor didn’t need the Council’s permission to put them there in the first place and the The Mermaids had given Bondi a great attraction without any cost to the Council. The sculptor said The Mermaids had brought great publicity to the Council. They had been featured in films, newspapers, television and the National Geographic magazine.
The Mayor used his casting vote in favour of the mermaid and she was re-installed.
For over ten years the two beautiful golden mermaids reclined at Ben Buckler, attracting many thousands of sightseers to the beach.
Poised on the huge boulder they braved the driving storms of winter until one day one was washed off. The Council saw its opportunity and removed the other.
Today, only the remnants of one mermaid remain – but not on the rock. In a glass cabinet in Waverley Library at Bondi Junction all that is left of the two beautiful mermaids is a figure with half a face. There’s a hole instead of a cheek, a dismembered torso, part of an uplifted arm, the tender groove of an armpit. And there, down below, a complete fish’s tail.
Have a read of my short story, ”Jean-Pierre’, first published in Quadrant Magazine. It’s one of the stories in my collection ‘Stories from Bondi‘ (Ginninderra Press).
I hope you enjoy it.
Jean-Pierre
This was in a far distant land. There were Pilates classes but no surfing beaches or vegan restaurants. People said to hell with low-fat diets and tiny portions. Charles, who had wanted her to hire his friend Jean-Pierre as tour guide, had encouraged her in yoga class. ‘Look, Zina, you’re a facilitator—you’ve been running those groups—for what—thirty years?’
‘Only twenty, for goodness sake.’ She had turned forty-nine and frowned at him upside down between the legs of a downward facing dog. She had a face marked by the sun, a face left to wrinkle and form crevasses by years of smoking, a face made shiny by the application of six drops of jojoba oil, although the shop girl had recommended she use only three. ‘I love that word facilitator. It says so much.’
‘Twenty. All right. This guy’s not at all your type. He’s a numbers man. He shows tourists around in between Engineering contracts. He can show you how to buy a bus or a train ticket, how to withdraw money out of the wall—get your bearings. You can hire him for half a day. Or, in your case, half a day and half the night.’
‘Very funny,’ she said, stifling a laugh. Now they were on all fours arching their backs like cats, then flattening their spines to warm up the discs. Indian chanting music took your mind off the fact that the person behind you was confronted with your broad derriere. ‘So what’s the story with Jean-Pierre?’
‘Someone I met at a conference in Monaco,’ said Charles on an out-breath. ‘Large-yacht communications. He’s charismatic, let me tell you.’ Charles dyed his hair and beard a rich brown, and in yoga class it stood on end to reveal a circle of grey at the crown. He had paid many visits to this far away country since he started learning the language. She’d never had the courage to have a go herself. She knew how to say good morning, Madame every time she walked into a shop, how to ask for the bill, how to say please and thank you. What else did you need? Charles had moved on to German classes and was planning a trip to Berlin with his wife. They were even taking their two kids. Toledo and Paris they called them.
‘Look, you’re going to the land of endless rail strikes,’ Charles said. ‘You’ll need Jean-Pierre, or you’ll be stranded on train platforms, not knowing what to do or where to go.’
‘Come on now. You’re such an exaggerator. They’re not always on strike.’
They lay on their backs, legs wide open in the air in a happy baby pose. ‘All right, I suppose so,’ she said. ‘You can give me his email address.’
‘I love croissants and baguettes and all of that,’ said Charles, sighing over his shoulder.
The yoga instructor was walking around the room, checking out their poses and had reached the back row. ‘Focus inwards, be in the moment,’ he reprimanded Zina and Charles.
‘Let the soles of your feet reach for the ceiling,’ he said before returning to the stage to demonstrate the cosmic egg. He eased his face between his thighs. ‘Now bury your eye sockets into your kneecaps.’
‘I’m not trying to fix you up with JP,’ Charles whispered. ‘I really hate that kind of thing.’ He twinkled across at her.
‘Lift your hips high off the mat and boom your heart toward the back wall.’
Jean-Pierre was still charismatic, and, on close examination, was still handsome. About sixty, with a splendid head of hair. His face was persuasive, his forehead, his large nose. They ate croissants at Cosmo, the busiest café in the village. She drank green tea infused with fresh mint, the leaves determined to block the spout of the tea pot. Jean-Pierre sipped on an espresso.
He nodded at her tea. ‘English,’ he said with a note of barely disguised distain. ‘The English drink tea.’
She bristled. A racist. A narrow-minded, insular, arrogant racist.
She looked at his intense face as he stroked the black and white head of his dog who peeped out above the zip of his jacket and felt sorry for his preconceptions and a little sorry for herself when she reflected on it, because, really, he seemed to know very little about Australia. Do you have black Africans living off social security? Poor Jean-Pierre didn’t know an African from an Aborigine.
‘No, green tea is not English,’ she said haughtily, giving him the evil-eye, to show him, to show him this: ‘Green tea originated in China.’
Madame?’ said the waiter, reaching for her empty plate.
‘Merci,’ she nodded.
‘Did you fly Business?’ Jean-Pierre said abruptly. ‘Such a long flight from Australia.’
‘Economy. I’m a poor struggling facilitator.’
‘You have to get out there and promote your courses. Then you can fly Business.’
‘We don’t all do things just for the money.’
Jean-Pierre looked down the narrow cobbled pedestrian-only street. ‘There are two things you must watch out for here,’ he said. ‘The motor bikes … and the dog pooh.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, then, trying to be friendly. ‘In New York they say you can tell the tourists from the locals because the tourists are the ones looking up at the skyscrapers and the locals are the ones looking down for the dog pooh.’
He twisted the gold band that girded the blowsy fat of his finger. ‘I was married to a New York lawyer once. Very clever. She read four books a week. I read only one a month. Are you married?’
‘Not currently.’
‘My son speaks four languages,’ said Jean-Pierre. ‘My mother likes to say that anyone can get a Masters, but if you’ve got four languages—rather than three—you’ll be a success in life. I’ve only got three. What about you? Any children?’
Eli had stayed at her place for the week just before she left home. He’d sat in the lounge room, eyes fixed to his iPad. She would sometimes watch on as he played a combat game. He’d build a village, train his troops and take them into battle. She would watch his face deep in concentration, so focused he seemed unable to hear when she asked him to set the table, or unstack the dishwasher. She didn’t like the every-second-week-deal with his father, so disruptive to getting a routine in place. Eli would come with her to the gym sometimes, or they’d go for a jog around the oval. It’s not as if his father did any of those things. She did her best: drove Eli to cricket and footie, helped with his homework, listened whenever he was willing to talk, always made sure there was meat in the house when it was her week “on”. Eli said to her, ‘When you and Dad were together, we always ate with the TV turned off. Now you’re divorced, you and me can eat dinner in front of the tele if we feel like it. Much better.’
‘Yes,’ she said to Jean-Pierre. ‘I have a son.’
‘It’s different in this country. We’re Catholics. We don’t usually divorce. Not when there are children. Are you a Catholic?’
‘No.’
‘Religious?’
‘Spiritual, but not religious. We could do with less religion in the world, in my opinion. Why?’
‘I was going to suggest I show you the island of Saint Honorat off Antibes, but tourists only go there in order to see the sacred abbey. The thing is, I grew up in Antibes. I know it like the back of my hand. I could hire a car and we can drive to different parts that the tourists don’t see. We can spend a few hours in Antibes, then, after that, if you want, we can have lunch. What do you think?’
‘What would it cost?’
‘Well, there’s the cost of the car, then my time. So … all up, 180 euros.
‘I’ll give it some thought.’
Jean-Pierre lowered his dog to the ground, reached for his wallet, pulled out a ten euro note and placed it on the edge of the table for the waiter.
She unzipped her handbag to pay her share but he patted her on the arm and said proudly, ‘No. No. Put your money away. I’m a Frenchman.’
The second time they met up, they went for a walk into Nice via the foreshore. It was a difficult walk. Eighty sets of steps interspersed with slippery limestone rocks. When she asked why the gate was locked at the end of the walk, necessitating a dangerous climb over a high fence on the edge of a cliff, Jean-Pierre said the authorities probably kept the gate locked because they didn’t want tourists getting washed off the rocks at high tide. It wasn’t a good look.
Now he wanted to have lunch at the Port.
‘Where do you like to eat?’ she asked. She was still thinking about the climb over the gate, when she’d been so afraid that she wouldn’t be able to get her leg high enough and would crash to an early death on the rocks below. She’d needed to sit on the stone wall to compose herself afterwards. It was Jean-Pierre who had acknowledged her courage, had said she’d done well, that she’d even looked graceful when she’d executed the tricky maneuver and swung herself out into the void before throwing herself over the top. Before they’d left on the walk he’d told her he hadn’t followed the coastline into Nice for a long time, and was really looking forward to walking it again. He wouldn’t be charging her his usual hourly rate, as it was something he’d been wanting to do for ages. ‘My wife kept me on a tight leash.’
‘There are plenty of places to eat at the Port,’ he said. They walked down the hill and he leaned in and gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. ‘You did well,’ he repeated. She blushed with embarrassment at the intimacy of his gesture. She’d only just met him, after all. And anyway, she was no good at relationships. There were people she knew who were good at them and people who weren’t. She was no good.
‘What sort of restaurant do you like to lunch at back home?’ he said.
‘We mostly don’t have a big meal in the middle of the day.’
‘No? What do you do?’
‘Well, um, we usually jog around the park, then stand in line to order large skimmed lattes.’
‘Ah,’ he said, and put his hand over hers where it rested on the table. She felt her hand go still like a frightened animal. Jean-Pierre’s hand was rough and warm as it lay over hers. Maybe she shouldn’t have drunk two beers in the middle of the day.
On Saturday afternoon Jean-Pierre took her and a group of American tourists by ferry to an old island prison. ‘You’ll find this place worth a visit,’ he said, as they waited on the wharf. ‘An infamous jail for deportees, prisoners convicted of political crimes, such as espionage or conspiracy.’
‘Interesting,’ she said, stepping across the gangplank. She sat down beside Jean-Pierre at the front of the boat. The four American couples filed down to the back row of seats. ‘We can throw Smarties at you from here,’ one of them joked.
Jean-Pierre tapped on her sunshade. ‘You won’t need this. It’s dark in the cells.’ He pulled a map out of his pocket and opened it out, pointing to the layout of the buildings. ‘The locations of the public toilets,’ he said. ‘That’s what every tour guide needs to know.’ He folded up his map and put it in his breast-pocket. ‘I want to give you a quick kiss now, before we get into one of those dark cells,’ he said. ‘I won’t be able to see you in there.’ He turned towards her, and suddenly his face, up very close, appeared at the end of her nose, floating, as she leant against the back of the seat. He shut his eyes and kissed her, soft and probing, and she kept her sunshade on for privacy, lips, mouth, teeth and tongue, his hand moving very slowly up her arm, up to her shoulder and to her bare neck, and hovered there for only a moment, cradling her face, before he moved away, straightened his trousers, and quietly pulled out his map again.
She adjusted herself and stared out the window to the water. Jean-Pierre gave the signal that they were nearing their destination and to prepare for disembarkation.
‘We don’t do things like that in Sydney,’ murmured Zina. She refreshed her lipstick.
‘No?’ Jean-Pierre grinned and levelled out her visor.
‘No, it’s um, all those coffees. You just keep running. Forever and ever. You spend your whole life,’ her hands juggled an imaginary Tai Chi ball—‘on the run.’
Well-kept concrete walkways led up, over and around the island’s hill. Jean-Pierre steered them through a rustic entrance to the old prison complex.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘we come to that part of our tour most likely to give you claustrophobia. The Reclusion Disciplinaire area.’
They stepped up and through a narrow hallway toward the low, dark solitary confinement cells.
‘This is where prisoners were kept in silence and darkness,’ Jean-Pierre was saying. He led the way into the dark of the single-person cells. ‘You won’t be able to see a thing in there.’
She squinted ahead at the front of the group, which had now gathered by the doorway. It looked scary. She took off her sunglasses and shade, but could see nothing as she stepped in. The blackness lay heavily all around, not like a moonless sky, but like a creepy cupboard with stone walls and low roof, a stone tomb. There was something inhuman in the cruelty of the space, a place where the light never shone, hidden, despair-inducing.
‘I’m right behind you,’ Jean-Pierre said, moving close, ‘in case you’re frightened.’ He gave her hand a squeeze, then placed his arm around her waist. She could smell his after-shave—or was it cologne?—feel the warmth of his breath on her neck, and leaned, unseeing and anxious, into his body. She reached for his arm and clutched at his hand where it rested on her waist.
***
When they went to bed together, she almost broke into joyous laughter. He’d drawn her in without even trying. His face, his voice, his eyes. It was a whole-package thing. He made her feel so special. He was more appreciative than anyone she had ever known. He hugged and kissed and even offered to go downstairs and get her cigarettes out of her handbag.
He got out of bed and went over to the piano. He fumbled with some sheet music in the semi-dark, holding each up to the light until he found what he wanted.
‘I play this sometimes,’ he said, in a quiet voice. ‘It starts with a single note, a B natural, growing in dynamic from a soft pianissimo to a very loud fortissimo.’ She listened as he played the one note, building up to full strength. Who was this guy?
When he’d finished, he turned to her and said, ‘Especially for you. I use my music to express my feelings.’
They made love again. Once more he got out of bed and sat beneath the black and white photograph of himself with his mother and his brother. He began to play. After a while he stopped playing and went into the bathroom to wash his hands. When he returned he wore the hand towel looped over his erect penis. She rolled over to have a look and kissed him, his face glowing with pride.
Morning. The bakeries were laying out their breads and pastries filling the air with the mouth-watering aroma of freshly baked baguettes. In the antique shop windows, as the sun struck them, the cleaners hosed the cobbled alleys. Jean-Pierre rose early and walked to the boulangerie.
He laid the breakfast out on a tray and brought it in to her in bed. Outside the window, the sky was a clear faded blue, and patches of sun, geometric designs of light, streaked the doona. He put the tray on the bed, and she sat up and stroked his face, his skin still chilled from the morning air. She pointed at the pain au chocolat.
‘So I need to forget about the diet?’
‘Oui.’ His mouth was already filled with pastry, chocolate oozing between his lips. ‘It’s good for you. Don’t you know that the flour in this country is so good, and so different, that even gluten-intolerant people can eat the bread and quiches?’
Her workshops, as she wrote to Eli back home, were going well. She’d managed to book a space in an old 16th century Citadel overlooking the Mediterranean. And she’d made a new friend. Something had happened to her in an old isolation cell, she didn’t know what exactly. But she had to get back home. I hope you and Dad are getting on okay and he hasn’t had any more nasty blow-ups. It’s a mild winter here. Some people are even swimming and sunbaking on the beach. Love, Mum
They went on the bus to visit his mother, the music of Bach on a score above his head. In Bach there was not only symmetry and logic but more, a system, a reiteration which everything hinged on. His hair was uncombed. His face had the modesty, the unpretentious lips of someone secretly able to calculate the frequencies of the string vibrations. His mother met him at the door and took his dark face in her hands. She stepped back to see better.
‘Your hair,’ she said.
He combed it down with his fingers. His brother came from the kitchen to embrace him.
‘Where have you been?’ he cried.
At night Jean-Pierre began to sleep with one hand resting on her solar plexus, the other curled around her shoulder, as if to shield her from bad dreams.
When she slept against him like that, her life on the other side of the world crumpled into her backpack that hung on a hook behind the door. Could she live the rest of her life in a far-away-country? Maybe she could. Except for that funny feeling in the pit of her. Like a rock in the guts.
On Sunday morning Jean-Pierre took her for a walk up to Mont Baron. ‘You’ll love the view from the old Fort,’ he said. ‘You can see Italy to the left and Nice to the right.’
‘Sounds wonderful!’ she said, closing the door behind them. They climbed the steep steps that led up the hill. The sky was gold with light.
‘Why don’t you come with me to Australia?’ she said.
‘I don’t think so.’
She listened to the sound of water over rocks.
‘No?’ she said.
He was silent. After a moment he said, ‘I can’t.’
She began to imagine she could hear the sound of a kookaburra laughing.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think I should stay here with you.’ She reached for his hand.
‘No, you can’t. I can see you phoning Eli to tell him you’d decided to stay and him crying, No, Mummy. Come home.’
‘You know us Australians,’ she said, suddenly desperate. ‘We’re like boomerangs. We keep on coming back.’
She went into the bedroom to change her clothes. He started to follow her but sat down again instead. He could hear intermittent, familiar sounds, drawers opening and being shut, stretches of silence. It was as if she were packing.
‘Are you really leaving on Saturday?’ he said.
‘What did you say?’
‘Saturday. Is that it then?’
‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘I could never live in a country with no European history. But I’ll surprise you one day. I’ll ring Eli early and ask what beach you’re walking on and I’ll just turn up on the sand.’
During that last day she thought of nothing but Jean-Pierre as she packed and cleaned out her little apartment.
‘What do you do, you have a stopover in Dubai?’ Jean-Pierre said, standing next to her at the taxi rank in the early morning chill. A bitter wind blew from the mountains. He had come over to carry her bag down the stairs.
‘I go straight through. It’s three hours on the ground in Dubai, so I walk around the airport then read my book.’
Jean-Pierre looked directly into her eyes. ‘I’ve bought you a little gift,’ he said.
‘You have?’
‘Don’t unwrap it until you’re on the plane.’
She smiled. ‘Okay.” Then she looked at his face, to place him clearly in her mind. He was wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans under a padded coat. She kissed him on the lips, then got into the taxi.
‘Something to take with you,’ he said, leaning in the window. In his hand he clasped a small gift-wrapped box. The sun, still low on the horizon, cast an amber glow on his precious face.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She reached for his hand through the window and then put on her seatbelt.
And she thought about this all twenty-four hours of the journey across the Indian Ocean. She would keep opening the little box to admire the marquisite earrings he’d given her. She would catch a taxi from the airport and at home notice the house smelt musty; she would open all the doors and windows to let the air move through, the curtains blowing and air coming in and out. From a far-away-place, and at night, he would ring to say, resignedly, ‘My mother is living with me now.’ His gift, when she’d take the earrings out of their black box, would remind her of something that had happened to her once.
She felt like someone who she had always known, that old friend of herself, grounded in home, decisions already made, and behind her somewhere, like the shadow of an identical twin, her other self, who must remain in the far-off distance, never to be exposed to the light.
Have a read of my short story, ‘Michael’, first published in Quadrant Magazine. The story is part of my collection titled ‘The Crystal Ballroom‘ (Ginninderra Press) – stories of love and loss in the singles dance scene. Hope you enjoy the story.
Michael:
He’s waiting at the bottom of the ramp, just inside the steel fence that cordons off the entry to the station. He said to give him a ring from her mobile when the train passed Gosford. She quickens her pace, adjusts the overnight bag on her shoulder. She is close enough to see the soft fold of his graying hair, the clear smooth glow of his skin. In his white socks and slip-on loafers he looks very English.
It wasn’t easy to get herself on a train and up to the Central Coast. It took a lot of encouragement on his part and a steely determination on her side of things to get out of Sydney. But now she’s glad already that he kept pressing. ‘It will do you good,’ he said on the phone, ‘to get out of the city for a couple of days. It will give you a new perspective on things.’
He knows about her tendency to brood and her struggle to manage the drowsiness that follows. They talk about these things on the telephone. He also struggles to get through the days, suffers with the same lethargy. He says he prefers to tell people he has ‘chronic fatigue’. People understand the term ‘chronic fatigue’.
He sees the deepening of laugh lines around her mouth and eyes, her face browned by the sun, her hair spiked and in shock. He tells her that she looks the same as he remembers. She assures him he looks very well and living away from the city obviously agrees with him.
Would she like a coffee? Or would she prefer to have a shower first? Some people needed to have a shower before they could do anything.
For goodness sake. It was only a couple of hours on the train. She would like to wash her hands though. They smelt of the tuna sandwich she’d eaten on the train.
Sure, sure. He’s been waiting all day for a coffee. They’ll go somewhere close by.
She’d agreed on the phone that there’d be no post mortem. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m happy to be in the present. I don’t need any analysis. You’re the one who goes on and on … on the telephone.’
How well she remembers that first time she had seen him. He was at one of the Saturday night dances that she used to frequent. He was standing at the side of the hall, his thick blonde hair brushed back off his forehead. He’d asked her to dance, said she danced well. Then they’d met up regularly and got to know each other. He wanted them to hire a hall and practice their dance routines. ‘But we mustn’t get involved, you and me,’ he warned. ‘Too dangerous.’ They were sitting in his car at the time, so close in the front seat that she could smell the Palmolive soap on his skin. She watched his hands as he put the car into gear and reversed up the driveway.
Now, he opens the back door of his car and motions for her to get in.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ he says. ‘It’s easier if you sit in the back. Easier than moving all that stuff on the front seat.’
It’s the same car as last time, an orangy-red Mitsubishi with scratches down the side, the same cracked glass of the headlights. She slides across the vinyl of the back seat, her eyes dazzled by a blaze of early-summer sunlight passing through the spotted salt stains on the windscreen.
He puts her bag in the boot and she pushes the tapes and DVDs and beach towels a little more to the other side. She snaps on the seatbelt, looks through the window at an older man in loose baggy clothes slumped on a wooden bench staring at the concrete of the pavement between his knees. She imagines she can hear his sighs.
Michael opens the window across from the driver’s side as he drives, then rests his arm along the empty front passenger seat and turns to speak to her. ‘Is it too windy for you?’
She reminds him his fast driving makes her nervous.
‘I didn’t know that. I’ll slow down, now that you’ve told me. I’d better anyway because I’ve lost my license.’
‘Again? Every time I see you it’s the same story.’
‘That’s a bit harsh. It’s a lesson I still need to learn.’
It’s like being in a taxi in a way, sitting in the back like this, not too close to the driver. A memory flashes into her mind of when she was a child and had seen a taxi parked by the side of the road. She’d looked in as she walked past. The driver had his hand between a woman’s legs and the woman, an older woman, not a young woman, maybe the same age as she is now, had a funny glazed look on her face that she, Madelaine, had never seen before. She remembers it vividly. The man, the odd position of the two of them in the front seat, the look on the woman’s face.
‘How come you’ve lost your license again?’ she asks.
‘The twelve points were up,’ he says. ‘You lose three points for an infringement?’
‘Parking infringement?’
‘No. If you get an infringement in the holiday period they double the points, so it doesn’t take much from there to get to the twelve points.’
‘Speeding?’
‘You’ve got to be very careful where the schools are, which are forty. Six double demerit points.’
With one arm resting on the ledge of the open window he runs his fingers through his hair. He’d been ringing every few weeks since they reconnected. Sometimes she tries to ring him, to save him the expense of the long telephone calls, but he’s impossible to contact. It was only recently that he gave her his address. No answer machine, no mobile, no internet, and he doesn’t answer the telephone. In fact he said he pulls the phone out of its socket.
He belongs to some strange group that he won’t give a name. Calls it a meditation group, but she knows it’s something else. At first she thought it must be AA but now she thinks it might be some kind of a secret sect.
He honks his horn at the woman in front as they wait at a roundabout. ‘This wouldn’t happen in the U.K.,’ he says. ‘They don’t know how to use roundabouts here.’
It was always his dream to work hard and then retire young and live somewhere by the sea. He finds a place to park in the shade on the top floor of a shopping centre, so they can walk straight in. He takes her hand when they get out of the car.
‘We’re holding hands are we?’ she says. She lets him do it, passively leaves her hand in his. ‘Don’t forget they smell fishy.’
He shrugs.
They find a seat near the back. She had been looking forward to sitting by the water somewhere and breathing in the salt air, rather than sitting in a shopping centre, but doesn’t express her disappointment.
On the phone he’d said something about telling people in the cafe that she’s his wife. That they could read their newspapers while drinking coffee each day. She said they’d look like an old married couple if they drank coffee hidden behind their separate papers. That’s when he said he’d tell everyone they were married.
‘They only give you one shot of coffee at this place,’ he says. ‘Other cafes give you two.’
Shots? The word reminds her of the days when his drinking was out of control. Not that she knew him then.
Now that they are seated together he says, ‘I knew it would be like this. That we’d pick up from where we left off. No different from last time.’
*
How dull all sounds are by the water, she thinks. Dull but sharp, like the cheepings in the branches of the trees in front of the motel. It must be the serenity of so much water. She decided to take the motel option even though he said she could stay in the guest room at his house. His front door was broken and you had to climb in through the back, the water taps were temperamental, the sliding glass door on the shower needed to be handled just so, the carpet in front of the television only to be walked on with bare feet.
‘Why don’t you get the lock fixed?’ she asked when they walked back out to his car.
‘Not before I go away,’ he said. ‘When I go to Europe to visit my mother I’ll get the door fixed.’
His mother again. He’s been saying for the last two years that he’s going back to the U.K. to visit his mother.
Madelaine chose to stay at the first place he showed her, a motel across the road from the beach. It was just a couple of minutes drive from his house, so they could still meet up each day. It’s an upstairs room, with two beds and a view of the road and the palm trees in front.
She lay on top of the covers on the spare bed of the motel room, reading. He said if it was him, he’d sleep on that bed. You’d get more of a through breeze.
He’s been to the beach for a swim. He arrived unannounced at the sliding screen door, knocked and walked in. Now he is looking at himself in the mirror in front of the bed. He turns from side to side inspecting his body, admiring his reflection, bare chest above the white shorts, says something about her being a good five years older than him.
‘I’m not older than you,’ she scowls. ‘You say that every time. We’re the same age.’
He rubs her foot a little. It doesn’t really matter so much, does it? We’re friends, aren’t we? He was getting ready to say that they’d known each other for a long time, when she turns on him and says, If you say we’ve known each other a long time again and it doesn’t matter, I’ll scream.
*
The family, who own the motel, are very friendly. The old grandfather sweeps the leaves on the driveway each morning and the grandchildren go off to school with a bang of their screen door. The children’s father hands the local newspaper up to her through the railing when he sees her sitting outside her room eating breakfast. They probably watch when Michael picks her up in his car and she climbs into the back seat.
Now that she’s here on his home territory he won’t go on any walks with her, won’t show her where the tracks lead. Says it’s best if she finds out for herself.
She says in the city she wouldn’t head out on an unknown bush track on her own.
‘The city,’ he sighs from the front seat where she can’t see his face. ‘Ah … I keep thinking they’ll design a new Almanac Cognac.’
‘Cognac?’
He laughs.
It’s a shame he didn’t take her with him when he went for a swim, she would like to know the best place to go for a dip. She’s enjoying being a passenger though, being chauffeured around.
‘I tried to ring you at Christmas to see how you were going,’ she says. ‘I know it’s a difficult time for you, with no family here. I tried at least six times – in the mornings and in the night times.’
‘There’s no point in ringing in the mornings,’ he says. ‘The phone doesn’t go back on till after coffee.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I take it off the hook when I go to sleep, I don’t want people ringing from the other side of the world. They forget it’s an eleven hour time difference. So I don’t put it back on the hook until I come back from having a coffee. I don’t want the phone breaking up my morning routine. And at night time I don’t come back in from the garden until after eight.’
Probably avoiding his mother. ‘I’ve rung after eight,’ she says. ‘You’re so hard to contact. It’s a wonder you’ve got any friends at all. I sent you a Christmas card by the way. Did you get it?’
He shakes his head.
‘That’s a shame. I sent the card to your post office box, like you said.’
‘I’m going to get rid of my post box at the house. Every time the postman rides his bike up he ruins the grass.’ He sniffs deeply, with a heaving of his chest. ‘When I go to the shopping centre there’s nowhere to park in the holiday period and people park on the lawns. I guess it’s like that in the city?’
‘Probably. I try and walk everywhere. I’m trying to lose weight.’
‘That’s good. Cutting back on the pasta?’
Her eyes narrow at the back of his head. ‘I don’t eat pasta.’
He twists around and smirks. ‘That’s right. You’re into healthy foods.’
Back at his place he’d tried to play with her bare feet when he sat next to her on the couch. She’d pulled them away. On the bed in the motel room he’d hugged her and wanted to lie back on the bed.
When he turns off the motor she opens the door slowly and lets the strong salty wind flood into the car in one cool, cleansing breath.
His words are carried off into the breeze.
*
They’ve had an altercation, in a café down near the beach. The diamond in the nostril of the girl behind the coffee machine had flared beneath the fluorescent light. The girl was silently mouthing the words to a song playing in the background when Madelaine got up and walked out.
‘You should speak up sooner,’ he called after her. ‘You should speak up before it gets to this point.’
She has heard this before, or something like it. She turned around briefly but did not stop.
‘You send knives into the heart when you speak like that,’ he called. ‘Madelaine?’
She kept walking until she got to the bush track by the sea. She heard the echo of her own footsteps on the earth. He made her so angry. She wanted to be free of him. He made it so impossible.
‘You need to be careful,’ he’d said. ‘Or you’ll go under. All the way under.’
An insistent fly buzzed near her face.
She walks.
The track keeps weaving away from the sea and makes it difficult to keep close to the water. She has no idea where she is headed or how far she needs to go to escape her anger. Tree roots stumble away from her sandshoes. Flies buzz too close to her ears. She brings to mind a bird that she saw with friends recently. She can’t recall exactly who she was with and where she was, just that someone said, ‘Look at that bird. It’s so big.’ A black and white bird with a large wing span flying through a gorge. Maybe that’s where she was? Cataract Gorge, in Launceston. Walking along that track alone, but with all those other people going in the same direction. The best part was approaching the gorge and being so surprised to see such natural beauty in the middle of a city.
She walks. After all, she’s free as a bird. Her children are grown up and lead their own lives. He always said he prefers a woman who’s had children. There’s something about women who’ve had children that he finds very appealing. The sound of the wind in the trees; the setting sun over her shoulder casts shadows on the dirt track. The sweet smell of earth. So why did she come then? She wanted to get out of Sydney, that’s all. A change of scene. She needed a holiday and she didn’t want to be alone.
As she moves deeper into the bush of the landscape – the ebb and the flow of the waves to her left – she begins to forget his limitations … and her own.
Loneliness. That’s all.
In the mid-afternoon haze, she just feels the need to keep going, to keep moving on. When she’s ready she will go back and apologise for her behaviour. After all, they’ve known each other a long time.
She lets him diminish from her thoughts, and moves deeper into the tender late-afternoon light. The sea, always in motion, not too far away. She walks, and the great swelling of sound begins to recede behind her. Her feet at last on the ground. ‘Put your feet on the ground, sit up with a straight back,’ the counsellor had said in an attempt to get her to pull herself together. Perhaps the counsellor was uncomfortable with all the tears. But who knows? The last counsellor had let her cry, but not too much. Do they let you cry for a set period of time at those places?
They’d slept together only once. It took him five years to speak to her again. Five years. Later, he said something about her breasts reminding him of his mother’s.
The bird sounds have softened, got gentler, more mellow. As the sun makes its slow arch, she observes the changes in the bush, what is revealed, and what is hidden. It’s so peaceful she’s almost afraid to breath.
There is no specific place she is heading towards. She could stop at any time, turn around, go back. The stillness of it all. An insect flitters between the twigs.
The landscape of shrubs and trees she has been moving through is now more like a rainforest. She watches the filtered light between the long thin strands of fern. All around is a canopy of leaves – fern leaves, frond leaves, mossy leaves – bright green leaves skating on the breeze. And tree trunks: hollered out, split in two, grooved and gnarled.
She looks up. What direction are the clouds traveling? She’s lost her bearings. She forgot to look for the position of the setting sun before she entered the forest. It is so hot. She is sweating.
But, as she walks on she is happy in her own self. In a new self, not the old one that she’s left behind.
She looks back the way she’s come.
Is she lost?
She reminds herself not to panic and, standing there absorbing the landscape, breathes in deeply to the count of four, and then out again … four, three, two, one.
She sees another insect on a rollercoaster with the air. The web of a spider made visible in the glow.
In the humidity and sleepy afternoon light, she could keep going forever, all the way back to Sydney.
My short story, ‘Tango’ was first published in Quadrant Magazine. Have. a read. Hope you enjoy it.
TANGO:
Tango is a passionate dance. A conversation between two people in which they can express every musical mood through steps and improvised movement. (Source Unknown)
1.
Just before nine o’clock in the evening, Sofya gets out of her car and looks up at the sky. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another breath of wind, a whispering in the air, but the clouds are stagnant against the dark night. She turns and moves downhill towards the club, ejecting the chewing gum out of her mouth with a loud splat into the bushes, feels the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She passes the public phone box where frangipanis lie on the grass, picks one up, sniffs at it, throws it back, then quickly enters the club.
It is not one of her best days. She doesn’t know why. Her dress is not uncomfortable, her skirt just right around the waist, the outfit not faded or balled, her black strappy shoes high, not too high, wrapped around her feet following the shape of her instep, and the new shampoo and conditioner make her hair curl naturally around her face. For reassurance she strokes the pearl and bronze necklace nestled into the groove of her neck.
At reception she pauses to flash her card and takes the lift to the third floor and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is the thud and bounce of Latin American dance music.
She turns into the room, which is set up with tables and chairs in a horseshoe shape around the wooden dance floor, the dee jay on the stage above and a bar at the back of the room. She sees Nino down the front sitting with that older couple he usually sits with and wonders whether to join them or not. It is not easy coming to these places. It takes a whole day of psyching herself up.
2.
‘Sofya, you’ll never find a rich husband if you’re fat,’ said Mother, raising her glass. It was Mother’s 53rd birthday. Her hair was silvery with flecks of white now that she’d let her own natural colour grow through.
‘How would you know?’ Sofya’s older brother said picking his nose and flicking the snot across the table at his mother. Everyone said he was a radical, that boy. He did things a certain way. But somehow they still thought the sun shone out of his arse. Everyone laughed. The entire family – even the aunt and uncle and the two boy cousins – drinking the kosher wine at the seder table. The moment passed.
Alone in her room, Sofya sang along with the radio station, turned way up. The Happy Wanderer. ‘I love to go a wandering along the mountain streams, and as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back.’
She would practice her leaps across the room in front of the mirror. See how far she could cross in one amazing jump, her back leg extended behind her as she leapt into the air from a running start.
3.
She dances with Nino at the Randwick dance every Friday night. Now that Nino is semi-retired he dances four nights a week, plays tennis and works out at the gym when he’s not working part-time as an accountant. He has grey hair combed back from a high forehead and around his neck is a brown leather thong with a small silver medallion. The leather thong makes him look more attractive, more unusual, more interesting. He likes to show the younger women how to dance.
The tall Portuguese man with the dyed black hair (she assumes it’s dyed), described Nino as a vampire. But then he is probably jealous of the number of different women that Nino is able to get to join him at his table.
Jordan, the taxi driver, who dances to keep his weight down, said that Nino only likes to dance the tango so he can feel the women’s breasts pressed against him.
‘He didn’t say that,’ said Sofya in disbelief. ‘Nino is a gentleman, he wouldn’t say that.’
Jordan was ready to wave Nino over to confirm the story.
Sometimes Sofya sits by herself with her coat on the chair beside her, pretending she is here with a friend, and the friend is on the dance floor and that’s why she’s sitting there alone.
4.
Sofya works freelance and is working on a book of family history that she has been commissioned to write. Things have changed very much, several times since she grew up, and like everyone in Sydney, she has led several lives and she still leads some of them. Since she started the book she has gone out with two South American tango dancers, one Irish dance teacher, and a revolutionary playwright who patted her thigh and said, ‘Where is this relationship going? I would like it to be more. My wife isn’t interested in sex any more.’
Her children are grown up and lead their own lives. Sometimes the sheer unpredictability, the randomness of the way she is living, what she is doing, fills her with exhilaration.
For the past six months she had been seeing a man from Leichhardt. As far as she can see, this is over. She calls him J, as if he were a character in a novel that pretends to be true.
J is the first letter of his name, but she chose it also because it seems to suit him. The letter J seems to give a promise of youth and vitality. It is upright and strong, with very straight vertebrae. And using just the letter, not needing a name, is in line with a system she often employs these days. She says to herself, France, 1993, and she sees a whole succession of scenes, the apricots and salmons of the buildings and the turquoise of the Mediterranean Sea.
5.
Dressed for salsa? said the doctor with a grin as he closed the door behind her.
I don’t remember telling you that I danced salsa, she said as he extracted her file from the drawer of the metal filing cabinet. I think you’re getting me confused with someone else.
In O’Connell Street or Liverpool Street. I can picture it.
I used to dance at Glebe Town Hall on Sunday nights, but that was ages ago.
Your salsa phase, he confirmed.
He moved from the filing cabinet to the large grey seat opposite her.
Any stallions beating at your door? he said with a note of expectancy in his voice.
They’re all pathetic. It’s hopeless.
He gasped in a pretending way.
Not all of them, she corrected herself. Just the ones I engage with.
He wrote that down.
It’s all over with the Fireman, she volunteered. He’s married anyway.
You can cross Fireman off the list now.
I’ve been through the list. It’s been so many years. I’ve met one of everything.
Z, he said with a smirk. Of course. Zookeeper.
She shrugged, remembering the organic gardener.
I’ve probably met one of those too.
6.
The last time she saw J, or rather, what she thought would be the last time, she was standing at the turnstiles at Town Hall station and he came through the gate sweating, his face and body flushed, his hair damp.
It was a hot night in September. They’d had a meal together at a Spanish Restaurant in the city. She remembers how flushed his skin was, but has to imagine his boots, his broad white thighs as he crouched or sat, and the open friendly expression he must have worn on his face, talking to her, she, who wanted nothing from him anymore. She knows she was conscious of how she looked standing there under the neon light, and that in this glare she might seem even older to him than she was, and also that he might find her less attractive.
He went to get a cup of coffee, then came back out. He stood beside her and looked down with his arm almost around her. She sensed his hesitation to touch her. She kissed him on the cheek and he looked deep into her eyes and she knew what he wanted her to say. Saw the pleading expression he must have worn on his face.
7.
Have you lost weight? she asks Dan, one of her regular dance partners as she flicks her foot back and behind his knee into a gancho. The movement is like a horse trying to shake its shoe from its hoof.
Make sure your heel is up when you do the gancho, Alfred had told her. Sweep your leg along the floor and out. Not up with the leg, but up with the heel.
She reminds herself to make sure her shoulders are down. Firm arms, shoulders down. She’s sure that’s why she gets so much neck pain.
Alfred, bald, shiny-headed Alfred, who Nino says looks like a gangster with his shaved head and black tee shirt, still thinks everyone on the dance floor sets out to block his movement around the room. There’s no doubt about him. At least he started out friendly enough.
Dan smells good for a change and he’s lost his big stomach that used to come between them. Sometimes she would gag with the smell of him.
Yes, he says as they bounce lightly to the beat of a milonga. I got sick with the flu for a couple of weeks last year and decided to keep the weight off.
During a break in the sets she sits down next to Alfred.
What do I look like? Alfred says inclining his head towards the dance floor. I wish I knew what I looked like.
I don’t know, she says. I wasn’t watching you.
He sighs with disappointment.
And he’s made up a step. She must tell him she doesn’t want to do his stupid made up step which is a cross with her left leg, but when she feels his opposite hip against hers she doesn’t know if it’s a gancho or not. But the main problem, which she must tell him, is that he pulls her off her axis, her centre.
Would you do it if it wasn’t made up? he says now they’re up and dancing a vals.
It’s not that I won’t do it, she says. I can’t do it. I’m not deliberately not doing it, she says unable to disguise her anger. Should she make a scene and leave the dance floor and leave him standing there because he’s being so rude and aggressive because she can’t do his stupid made up step?
Do you speak to the other women like you speak to me?’ She says not caring who can hear.
I can’t understand why you won’t do it.
I can’t do it.
I wish I knew what that little voice was saying in your head.
His hip pushes hard into her, very hard, so she is forced into the backward lock from the left leg.
8.
Wheep wheep, wheep wheep, wheep wheep, went the big shiny knife against the hard grey stone. Father would carve the roast lamb each week for the Sunday lunch. After lunch they’d go to the hospital to visit Grandpa. Grandpa without his left leg, then without his right leg. Gangrene. He died piece by piece.
Left foot, left leg. Right foot, right leg.
9.
The women at the dances look beautiful in a cruel way, with their blood-red lips and their nails long and sharp. They are not very friendly. Sofya is just a casual, after all. She hasn’t signed up for a ten week course and she doesn’t go to the beginners lesson at 7.30.
Things have not changed very much on the dance scene since she started there so many years ago. ‘Same old, same old,’ as she heard the Turkish woman describe the previous Saturday’s dance at Marrickville to the Egyptian woman with the red red lips.
What a beautiful smile you have, said the woman on the door who takes the money. Did anyone tell you that your whole face smiles when you smile?
She’s nice. She’s the partner of the man who runs the dance. She says she doesn’t mind that she doesn’t get to dance on the Friday nights because she dances nearly every other night of the week at the lessons. She’s very beautiful. Russian with long blonde hair against her tanned smooth olive skin, very long shiny legs and always one of her very short cut up the side skirts that she makes herself. She’s Sofya’s age.
10.
When Father came back from the factory in the evenings, the children, pale and silent, joined him for his dinner. After dinner, Father listened to the radio in the lounge with his newspaper, and at seven Mother, having washed up, joined him. The family were together only at dinner, after which Mother and Father sat behind their newspapers and the children went upstairs to their rooms. Sometimes a stupid child would pull the wings off a fly or even a butterfly and watch it suffer.
11.
A new man makes his way around the dance floor. Good posture. Straight back, strong arm position. Looks like he’d be a good strong lead.
The music stops and he comes over and sits on the spare seat beside Sofya.
‘It’s all too heat making for an old man like me,’ he jokes as he fans himself furiously with a Bingo brochure. ‘I’m a Postman from Perth on holiday in Sydney,’ he says by way of an introduction in a well-modulated English voice. ‘I could have had a two week holiday in Paris for the price of his three day trip to Sydney.’
She smiles. ‘Have you read The Post Office by Charles Bukowski?’
‘We’re not very cultural in Perth.’
‘You speak very well for a Postman.’
‘Well,’ he shrugs, as if that is a whole other story that he will not go into at this stage. ‘Dancing the tango allows me to meet famous people all over the world,’ he says. ‘In Paris, London, New York. My name is Fabian by the way.’
‘That’s a very romantic name. I grew up in the era of Fabian the pop star.’
‘In Perth we all live in one big Waiting Room,’ he adds. ‘We’re all waiting. Not much culture or adventure. There are many French and Italian speaking women who dress like the women you see in Paris. The tango community is very close. If one person learns a new step, then everyone learns it. Two weeks later, we’re all doing it.’
12.
‘You’ve lost weight?’ the doctor said when she’d walked in.
She shrugged. ‘It’s wonderful what black does. Just one item of black.’
He looked down at his shoes with the regular pattern of holes punched towards the pointed toes. ‘What about black shoes?’ he asked.
‘Your feet look smaller,’ she reassured him.
‘You know what they say about small feet,’ he laughed.
She assumed he meant small feet, small penis. She sat down opposite him, a box of tissues between them on the small square table. ‘It’s hands,’ she says. ‘Not feet. Fingers.’
He uncapped his pen, looked down at his notes.
‘You’re not going to start on that track already are you?’ she said. ‘Not so early in the session.’
13.
I grew up dancing the polka in Italy, says Nino as they turn into a Viennese walz.
How was your holiday? she says.
Very boring.
Didn’t you play tennis with your grandsons?
He pulls a face.
Did you meet any nice European men while you were away, he asks.
I was married to an Austrian. From Vienna.
Did you see him there?
He lives in Sydney.
She says this simply to establish that she had a husband once, that she had been married, and to a European man, an interesting man, a man of cultural heritage. She wants to assure Nino that she was not always alone, unattached.
Does Anthony ask you to dance? Nino asks.
No. He doesn’t.
He should.
There are no shoulds. I asked him once and he went off across the floor doing his own thing. It was very humiliating.
Nino nods and grins with no understanding in his demeanour.
Anthony has many choices, he says, as if that would explain it. He’s young and he’s a good dancer. A lot of the women are after him.
14.
She remembers Mother saying to her when she was a teenager: ‘It’s a man’s world.’ But Mother had two children by the time she was 17.
Sofya’s daughter is an artist. Sometimes Sofya minds Kate’s two children while Kate goes out painting. This afternoon she was over at Kate’s house looking after the baby and the two year old.
‘I feel like Superman when I mind the kids and then go out tango dancing,’ Sofya likes to tell her friends. ‘At three o’clock I’m on the oval kicking a football around with my grandson and then at 7.30 I’m changing into my tight skirt with a split up the side and my red top and my strappy high heeled shoes and I’m out the door again. Like Clarke Kent changing into his Superman cape.’
Have you got a dance partner? her friends, or maybe her brother, might ask.
Various, she’ll say. I’ve got various. Several.
Today when Kate got back Sofya told her she’d brought the washing in because it had started to sprinkle with rain.
Was it dry?
I think so.
You think so?
Well I was rushing to bring it in before it poured with rain and I had two children to look after at the same time and the baby was awake and the noise of the builders next door and the electrician with his ladder and his cords everywhere and I couldn’t even get to the toilet.
Well, when you brought the washing in did you do all the ironing? Did you iron all the clothes when you brought them in?
They both laughed. It was a joke.
15.
Sofya doesn’t really own a tight skirt with a split up the side, but she wishes she did have one. And nice long legs to show off. Instead she usually wears the same pair of black trousers that she hopes will slim her down, and one of her many pretty tops. Well, actually, that’s not true either. She wears the same black camisole top, or one of the two similar black camisole tops, and a sheer cardigan on the top to disguise, to cover, to conceal, to pretend, that her arms aren’t so fat, that her freckled skin doesn’t look so blotchy in the light. But usually it gets so hot she has to strip down to the black pants and the black camisole top with her hair pulled high on top of her head so it doesn’t hang in wet cats tails around her face.
16.
‘I think the baby looks like me,’ Sofya said to Kate as she reached for the old brown photo album.
‘Have a look,’ she said pointing to a photograph of herself in Class 8. ‘Here I am. Can you see me?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I’m the one on the end. The little Miss Perfect sitting up so straight.’
‘You do look different to the others.’
‘I’m the one trying too hard.’
‘You’re the only one wearing a tie.’
17.
‘Can we get a photocopy of her,’ Alfred says as Jordan comes over and leads her towards the dance floor.
Jordan’s style is firm and masculine. She likes the smell of the mint that he always sucks or chews. After a good half hour of dancing in the hot auditorium, he speaks, ‘If they have a Latin bracket,’ he says. ‘Will you dance it with me?’
Afterwards they sit back at Nino’s table with the much older couple.
‘You and Jordan dance well together,’ says the man so stiff with arthritis it takes him a long time to stand up, to unwrap his legs and put his whole weight on his feet. But he does. He gets up each week to dance with his lady friend and they shuffle around over in a dark corner after a couple of glasses of white wine and they are into their second packet of potato chips.
‘You look like you should be married,’ the older man continues. ‘Like you should have babies together.’
‘Who? Me and Jordan?’ Sofya says, trying to sound casual about the possibility of her and Jordan. She quite likes Jordan. But only because he dances salsa and rhumba and rock and roll so well. He smells nice, he dances well, what more could she want? But of course Jordan has a regular girlfriend, but the girlfriend doesn’t come to the Friday night dances.
Jordan laughs. ‘She’s a grandmother already,’ he says with a dismissive flick of his hand towards Sofya. ‘We couldn’t have children together.’
18.
‘Here is a photo of Grandpa and me. I’m standing beside his wheelchair. It’s a black and white photo that shows him only from just above the knees, which is where the rug would have ended that covers his lap. I look about 13 in this picture. My tall gawky stage. Long hair pulled back severely, a cardigan to hide my developing breasts. Mother hated my hair. I think she must have spent her whole life telling me how dreadful my hair looked. I’m smiling in the photo and leaning down to put my face a little bit closer to Grandpa.’
19.
Outside a bird chimed in a cheerful tone and the leaves of the jacaranda tree whispered in the wind. The beautiful jacaranda tree. They had one like that once. She thought she’d miss that tree and that house but although she did at first, after a while she came to love the different place where she moved to. And then this place where she lives now, by the sea, the place where J came to live with her. The place where they pretended they could live together. Where he went off to work every day and she kissed him goodbye at the front door. The place where he’d come home to her at night.
20.
‘I’ll fill in a form for you to have a blood test whenever you want. You won’t have to come and see me first. You can go straight there.’
He walks over to his desk. ‘Anything else you want tested?’
‘You’d better add iron. And the test for blood sugar. A family history of diabetes.’
‘Those arms look like they’ve done a lot of work,’ said the nurse as she tightened the strap around Sofya’s arm.
‘What do you mean? How can you tell?’
‘The veins. You’ve got good veins. The veins are connected to the muscles.’
21.
When she was a teenager she’d wanted to have dance lessons. ‘I learnt to dance without lessons,’ Mother had said. ‘So you can too.’
There were huge waves out to sea after the winds of the night. The biggest she’d ever seen in fact. They really were magnificent. She’d listened to the winds as they’d thrashed the ocean waves through the branches of the trees.
22.
Step further across for the forwards ochos, said the visiting Argentinian dance teacher. Step further back behind me for the turn and swivel. Keep your left hip down when doing a forwards ocho. Caress the floor with your feet. No feet in the air. Relax your right shoulder. Keep your shoulders down. Do the cross whether the man leads you into it or not (she thinks that’s what he said). Be heavy on the front foot in the cross. Weight forwards.
Keep your knees together when you do an adornment. Keep the adornments simple. Just do one or two. Polish the leg and then down again; then step over. Slow down on the turns. Don’t run. Keep your right wrist firm. In the open embrace let your arms go up and down the man’s arm. Up to behind his neck and then down to his forearm.’
‘You’ve had a lesson with the best,’ said Pedro.
‘I’ve been saving myself,’ she’d said proudly.
23.
It was about 6.30 on a Friday. Early summer. The bougainvilleas and the jacarandas were already in bloom but no frangipanis yet. She’d been waiting for J to come home, looking forward to his return from the city, hoping they’d sit together with a drink outside on the balcony. He’d have a shower and get changed and then they’d go out for the meal that he’d promised her.
Instead he was on the phone, his face slightly in shadow but well lit enough for her to see the ever present cigarette. Half inside, half outside so he could exhale out the door. His voice droned on and on. The wind increased in force. A strong wind, blowing against her head, her hair, her hands. Her furious heart beat hard against the walls of her ribs. Then the wind died down again and she could only hear his voice ; not the sound of the birds anymore or the movement of the leaves on the trees.
It rained a lot that night. The sound of the waterfall below. The sound of water after rain.
24.
It’s all your fault anyway, she said to the doctor.
He looked puzzled.
You said to me, ‘It’s your body. You can do what you like with it,’ in that moralising tone of yours.
I would have only said that, he said gently, if I thought you were being too generous with your body.
After that bit of moralising I’ve turned that whole side of myself off. Anyway, I have no libido. So it’s not such an issue anymore.
Well, that’s good.
He took a sip of his coffee that surely must be cold already.
There’s more to me than you think, he said.
You’re very blinkered, she said. She held up her hands beside her face to imitate a horse with covers at the side of his eyes. Straight. You haven’t got an open mind, in some areas, she clarified.
He pulled a face.
I bet your daughter, or daughters, tell you that.
They’re too polite.
Your daughter looked lovely by the way. The one I saw last time.
The blonde?
Yes. I thought you had a son and a daughter.
No. I’ve got three daughters.
Three daughters? And a son?
Yes. So you think I need to open my chakras? he joked.
She shrugged. Chakras spin, they don’t open.
You might be surprised. I could be a Buddhist.
Is my time up? She said with an anxious glance at the clock.
It’s okay, he reassured her. I hadn’t noticed.
25.
At dusk the last of the brightness of the pink sighed above the horizon. The sea a woolly blanket of blue and white. The same four palm trees all in a row between the road and the beach. The pale face of the moon two thirds of the way to the sky. One eighth of the side of its face missing but still the moon looked down, almost expressionless. A woman flashed the blue of her helmet as she cycled with strong thighs up Bronte Road, head bent in concentration on the road ahead as a bus bellowed black dust. The pink of the sky turned into mauve mixed with blue as the French cook arrived with his pale blue scarve knotted like a boy scout tight around his neck. With his right hand he checked his balls for reassurance as he mounted the step into the café.
It is unusual for Sofya to be outside these days, but no more odd than spending hours inside at the Mitchell Library looking at microfilm or walking through Waverley Cemetry looking for graves, no more odd than her work, or the people stuck on hot trains and buses trying to get home from work, or other places where people find themselves as they struggle to get through their days.
Times change, your life changes and you need to shift.
26.
At our age we’re not going to improve our game of tennis, said the man on Bare Island.
Speak for yourself, she’d said.
The brown bird with a black triangle on his head jumped on the green see saw of a branch. Up and down he went, up and down, until he flew off again in a southerly direction.
27.
‘The bastards,’ the doctor said as a joke, with a tilt of his head and a puffing out his cheeks as if he was about to spit on the ground in disgust.
‘I love it when you do that,’ she laughed. ‘That’s the way it is exactly.’
28.
Back home after the dance, she’d gone straight to her room. She’d turned on the lamp and knelt on the bed to pile the cushions up. Tears came almost to her eyes, her stomach empty with sadness. It was all such a bloody fantasy. She stared around at the night silence, then huddled in her bed.
She had a box of 100 Dilmah tea bags that she’d bought especially for J. When the box is empty, she told herself, the pain will have eased.
Six months later, she walked outside to the balcony, sat on the chaisse lounge that they’d chosen together and looked down the gully at the grey sea. She drank the last tea bag from the box.
The tea was strong and hot, and so bitter it parched her tongue.
Tango is a passionate dance. A conversation between two people in which they can express every musical mood through steps and improvised movement. (Source Unknown)
1.
Just before nine o’clock in the evening, Sofya gets out of her car and looks up at the sky. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another breath of wind, a whispering in the air, but the clouds are stagnant against the dark night. She turns and moves downhill towards the club, ejecting the chewing gum out of her mouth with a loud splat into the bushes, feels the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She passes the public phone box where frangipanis lie on the grass, picks one up, sniffs at it, throws it back, then quickly enters the club.
It is not one of her best days. She doesn’t know why. Her dress is not uncomfortable, her skirt just right around the waist, the outfit not faded or balled, her black strappy shoes high, not too high, wrapped around her feet following the shape of her instep, and the new shampoo and conditioner make her hair curl naturally around her face. For reassurance she strokes the pearl and bronze necklace nestled into the groove of her neck.
At reception she pauses to flash her card and takes the lift to the third floor and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is the thud and bounce of Latin American dance music.
She turns into the room, which is set up with tables and chairs in a horseshoe shape around the wooden dance floor, the dee jay on the stage above and a bar at the back of the room. She sees Nino down the front sitting with that older couple he usually sits with and wonders whether to join them or not. It is not easy coming to these places. It takes a whole day of psyching herself up.
2.
‘Sofya, you’ll never find a rich husband if you’re fat,’ said Mother, raising her glass. It was Mother’s 53rd birthday. Her hair was silvery with flecks of white now that she’d let her own natural colour grow through.
‘How would you know?’ Sofya’s older brother said picking his nose and flicking the snot across the table at his mother. Everyone said he was a radical, that boy. He did things a certain way. But somehow they still thought the sun shone out of his arse. Everyone laughed. The entire family – even the aunt and uncle and the two boy cousins – drinking the kosher wine at the seder table. The moment passed.
Alone in her room, Sofya sang along with the radio station, turned way up. The Happy Wanderer. ‘I love to go a wandering along the mountain streams, and as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back.’
She would practice her leaps across the room in front of the mirror. See how far she could cross in one amazing jump, her back leg extended behind her as she leapt into the air from a running start.
3.
She dances with Nino at the Randwick dance every Friday night. Now that Nino is semi-retired he dances four nights a week, plays tennis and works out at the gym when he’s not working part-time as an accountant. He has grey hair combed back from a high forehead and around his neck is a brown leather thong with a small silver medallion. The leather thong makes him look more attractive, more unusual, more interesting. He likes to show the younger women how to dance.
The tall Portuguese man with the dyed black hair (she assumes it’s dyed), described Nino as a vampire. But then he is probably jealous of the number of different women that Nino is able to get to join him at his table.
Jordan, the taxi driver, who dances to keep his weight down, said that Nino only likes to dance the tango so he can feel the women’s breasts pressed against him.
‘He didn’t say that,’ said Sofya in disbelief. ‘Nino is a gentleman, he wouldn’t say that.’
Jordan was ready to wave Nino over to confirm the story.
Sometimes Sofya sits by herself with her coat on the chair beside her, pretending she is here with a friend, and the friend is on the dance floor and that’s why she’s sitting there alone.
4.
Sofya works freelance and is working on a book of family history that she has been commissioned to write. Things have changed very much, several times since she grew up, and like everyone in Sydney, she has led several lives and she still leads some of them. Since she started the book she has gone out with two South American tango dancers, one Irish dance teacher, and a revolutionary playwright who patted her thigh and said, ‘Where is this relationship going? I would like it to be more. My wife isn’t interested in sex any more.’
Her children are grown up and lead their own lives. Sometimes the sheer unpredictability, the randomness of the way she is living, what she is doing, fills her with exhilaration.
For the past six months she had been seeing a man from Leichhardt. As far as she can see, this is over. She calls him J, as if he were a character in a novel that pretends to be true.
J is the first letter of his name, but she chose it also because it seems to suit him. The letter J seems to give a promise of youth and vitality. It is upright and strong, with very straight vertebrae. And using just the letter, not needing a name, is in line with a system she often employs these days. She says to herself, France, 1993, and she sees a whole succession of scenes, the apricots and salmons of the buildings and the turquoise of the Mediterranean Sea.
5.
Dressed for salsa? said the doctor with a grin as he closed the door behind her.
I don’t remember telling you that I danced salsa, she said as he extracted her file from the drawer of the metal filing cabinet. I think you’re getting me confused with someone else.
In O’Connell Street or Liverpool Street. I can picture it.
I used to dance at Glebe Town Hall on Sunday nights, but that was ages ago.
Your salsa phase, he confirmed.
He moved from the filing cabinet to the large grey seat opposite her.
Any stallions beating at your door? he said with a note of expectancy in his voice.
They’re all pathetic. It’s hopeless.
He gasped in a pretending way.
Not all of them, she corrected herself. Just the ones I engage with.
He wrote that down.
It’s all over with the Fireman, she volunteered. He’s married anyway.
You can cross Fireman off the list now.
I’ve been through the list. It’s been so many years. I’ve met one of everything.
Z, he said with a smirk. Of course. Zookeeper.
She shrugged, remembering the organic gardener.
I’ve probably met one of those too.
6.
The last time she saw J, or rather, what she thought would be the last time, she was standing at the turnstiles at Town Hall station and he came through the gate sweating, his face and body flushed, his hair damp.
It was a hot night in September. They’d had a meal together at a Spanish Restaurant in the city. She remembers how flushed his skin was, but has to imagine his boots, his broad white thighs as he crouched or sat, and the open friendly expression he must have worn on his face, talking to her, she, who wanted nothing from him anymore. She knows she was conscious of how she looked standing there under the neon light, and that in this glare she might seem even older to him than she was, and also that he might find her less attractive.
He went to get a cup of coffee, then came back out. He stood beside her and looked down with his arm almost around her. She sensed his hesitation to touch her. She kissed him on the cheek and he looked deep into her eyes and she knew what he wanted her to say. Saw the pleading expression he must have worn on his face.
7.
Have you lost weight? she asks Dan, one of her regular dance partners as she flicks her foot back and behind his knee into a gancho. The movement is like a horse trying to shake its shoe from its hoof.
Make sure your heel is up when you do the gancho, Alfred had told her. Sweep your leg along the floor and out. Not up with the leg, but up with the heel.
She reminds herself to make sure her shoulders are down. Firm arms, shoulders down. She’s sure that’s why she gets so much neck pain.
Alfred, bald, shiny-headed Alfred, who Nino says looks like a gangster with his shaved head and black tee shirt, still thinks everyone on the dance floor sets out to block his movement around the room. There’s no doubt about him. At least he started out friendly enough.
Dan smells good for a change and he’s lost his big stomach that used to come between them. Sometimes she would gag with the smell of him.
Yes, he says as they bounce lightly to the beat of a milonga. I got sick with the flu for a couple of weeks last year and decided to keep the weight off.
During a break in the sets she sits down next to Alfred.
What do I look like? Alfred says inclining his head towards the dance floor. I wish I knew what I looked like.
I don’t know, she says. I wasn’t watching you.
He sighs with disappointment.
And he’s made up a step. She must tell him she doesn’t want to do his stupid made up step which is a cross with her left leg, but when she feels his opposite hip against hers she doesn’t know if it’s a gancho or not. But the main problem, which she must tell him, is that he pulls her off her axis, her centre.
Would you do it if it wasn’t made up? he says now they’re up and dancing a vals.
It’s not that I won’t do it, she says. I can’t do it. I’m not deliberately not doing it, she says unable to disguise her anger. Should she make a scene and leave the dance floor and leave him standing there because he’s being so rude and aggressive because she can’t do his stupid made up step?
Do you speak to the other women like you speak to me?’ She says not caring who can hear.
I can’t understand why you won’t do it.
I can’t do it.
I wish I knew what that little voice was saying in your head.
His hip pushes hard into her, very hard, so she is forced into the backward lock from the left leg.
8.
Wheep wheep, wheep wheep, wheep wheep, went the big shiny knife against the hard grey stone. Father would carve the roast lamb each week for the Sunday lunch. After lunch they’d go to the hospital to visit Grandpa. Grandpa without his left leg, then without his right leg. Gangrene. He died piece by piece.
Left foot, left leg. Right foot, right leg.
9.
The women at the dances look beautiful in a cruel way, with their blood-red lips and their nails long and sharp. They are not very friendly. Sofya is just a casual, after all. She hasn’t signed up for a ten week course and she doesn’t go to the beginners lesson at 7.30.
Things have not changed very much on the dance scene since she started there so many years ago. ‘Same old, same old,’ as she heard the Turkish woman describe the previous Saturday’s dance at Marrickville to the Egyptian woman with the red red lips.
What a beautiful smile you have, said the woman on the door who takes the money. Did anyone tell you that your whole face smiles when you smile?
She’s nice. She’s the partner of the man who runs the dance. She says she doesn’t mind that she doesn’t get to dance on the Friday nights because she dances nearly every other night of the week at the lessons. She’s very beautiful. Russian with long blonde hair against her tanned smooth olive skin, very long shiny legs and always one of her very short cut up the side skirts that she makes herself. She’s Sofya’s age.
10.
When Father came back from the factory in the evenings, the children, pale and silent, joined him for his dinner. After dinner, Father listened to the radio in the lounge with his newspaper, and at seven Mother, having washed up, joined him. The family were together only at dinner, after which Mother and Father sat behind their newspapers and the children went upstairs to their rooms. Sometimes a stupid child would pull the wings off a fly or even a butterfly and watch it suffer.
11.
A new man makes his way around the dance floor. Good posture. Straight back, strong arm position. Looks like he’d be a good strong lead.
The music stops and he comes over and sits on the spare seat beside Sofya.
‘It’s all too heat making for an old man like me,’ he jokes as he fans himself furiously with a Bingo brochure. ‘I’m a Postman from Perth on holiday in Sydney,’ he says by way of an introduction in a well-modulated English voice. ‘I could have had a two week holiday in Paris for the price of his three day trip to Sydney.’
She smiles. ‘Have you read The Post Office by Charles Bukowski?’
‘We’re not very cultural in Perth.’
‘You speak very well for a Postman.’
‘Well,’ he shrugs, as if that is a whole other story that he will not go into at this stage. ‘Dancing the tango allows me to meet famous people all over the world,’ he says. ‘In Paris, London, New York. My name is Fabian by the way.’
‘That’s a very romantic name. I grew up in the era of Fabian the pop star.’
‘In Perth we all live in one big Waiting Room,’ he adds. ‘We’re all waiting. Not much culture or adventure. There are many French and Italian speaking women who dress like the women you see in Paris. The tango community is very close. If one person learns a new step, then everyone learns it. Two weeks later, we’re all doing it.’
12.
‘You’ve lost weight?’ the doctor said when she’d walked in.
She shrugged. ‘It’s wonderful what black does. Just one item of black.’
He looked down at his shoes with the regular pattern of holes punched towards the pointed toes. ‘What about black shoes?’ he asked.
‘Your feet look smaller,’ she reassured him.
‘You know what they say about small feet,’ he laughed.
She assumed he meant small feet, small penis. She sat down opposite him, a box of tissues between them on the small square table. ‘It’s hands,’ she says. ‘Not feet. Fingers.’
He uncapped his pen, looked down at his notes.
‘You’re not going to start on that track already are you?’ she said. ‘Not so early in the session.’
13.
I grew up dancing the polka in Italy, says Nino as they turn into a Viennese walz.
How was your holiday? she says.
Very boring.
Didn’t you play tennis with your grandsons?
He pulls a face.
Did you meet any nice European men while you were away, he asks.
I was married to an Austrian. From Vienna.
Did you see him there?
He lives in Sydney.
She says this simply to establish that she had a husband once, that she had been married, and to a European man, an interesting man, a man of cultural heritage. She wants to assure Nino that she was not always alone, unattached.
Does Anthony ask you to dance? Nino asks.
No. He doesn’t.
He should.
There are no shoulds. I asked him once and he went off across the floor doing his own thing. It was very humiliating.
Nino nods and grins with no understanding in his demeanour.
Anthony has many choices, he says, as if that would explain it. He’s young and he’s a good dancer. A lot of the women are after him.
14.
She remembers Mother saying to her when she was a teenager: ‘It’s a man’s world.’ But Mother had two children by the time she was 17.
Sofya’s daughter is an artist. Sometimes Sofya minds Kate’s two children while Kate goes out painting. This afternoon she was over at Kate’s house looking after the baby and the two year old.
‘I feel like Superman when I mind the kids and then go out tango dancing,’ Sofya likes to tell her friends. ‘At three o’clock I’m on the oval kicking a football around with my grandson and then at 7.30 I’m changing into my tight skirt with a split up the side and my red top and my strappy high heeled shoes and I’m out the door again. Like Clarke Kent changing into his Superman cape.’
Have you got a dance partner? her friends, or maybe her brother, might ask.
Various, she’ll say. I’ve got various. Several.
Today when Kate got back Sofya told her she’d brought the washing in because it had started to sprinkle with rain.
Was it dry?
I think so.
You think so?
Well I was rushing to bring it in before it poured with rain and I had two children to look after at the same time and the baby was awake and the noise of the builders next door and the electrician with his ladder and his cords everywhere and I couldn’t even get to the toilet.
Well, when you brought the washing in did you do all the ironing? Did you iron all the clothes when you brought them in?
They both laughed. It was a joke.
15.
Sofya doesn’t really own a tight skirt with a split up the side, but she wishes she did have one. And nice long legs to show off. Instead she usually wears the same pair of black trousers that she hopes will slim her down, and one of her many pretty tops. Well, actually, that’s not true either. She wears the same black camisole top, or one of the two similar black camisole tops, and a sheer cardigan on the top to disguise, to cover, to conceal, to pretend, that her arms aren’t so fat, that her freckled skin doesn’t look so blotchy in the light. But usually it gets so hot she has to strip down to the black pants and the black camisole top with her hair pulled high on top of her head so it doesn’t hang in wet cats tails around her face.
16.
‘I think the baby looks like me,’ Sofya said to Kate as she reached for the old brown photo album.
‘Have a look,’ she said pointing to a photograph of herself in Class 8. ‘Here I am. Can you see me?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I’m the one on the end. The little Miss Perfect sitting up so straight.’
‘You do look different to the others.’
‘I’m the one trying too hard.’
‘You’re the only one wearing a tie.’
17.
‘Can we get a photocopy of her,’ Alfred says as Jordan comes over and leads her towards the dance floor.
Jordan’s style is firm and masculine. She likes the smell of the mint that he always sucks or chews. After a good half hour of dancing in the hot auditorium, he speaks, ‘If they have a Latin bracket,’ he says. ‘Will you dance it with me?’
Afterwards they sit back at Nino’s table with the much older couple.
‘You and Jordan dance well together,’ says the man so stiff with arthritis it takes him a long time to stand up, to unwrap his legs and put his whole weight on his feet. But he does. He gets up each week to dance with his lady friend and they shuffle around over in a dark corner after a couple of glasses of white wine and they are into their second packet of potato chips.
‘You look like you should be married,’ the older man continues. ‘Like you should have babies together.’
‘Who? Me and Jordan?’ Sofya says, trying to sound casual about the possibility of her and Jordan. She quite likes Jordan. But only because he dances salsa and rhumba and rock and roll so well. He smells nice, he dances well, what more could she want? But of course Jordan has a regular girlfriend, but the girlfriend doesn’t come to the Friday night dances.
Jordan laughs. ‘She’s a grandmother already,’ he says with a dismissive flick of his hand towards Sofya. ‘We couldn’t have children together.’
18.
‘Here is a photo of Grandpa and me. I’m standing beside his wheelchair. It’s a black and white photo that shows him only from just above the knees, which is where the rug would have ended that covers his lap. I look about 13 in this picture. My tall gawky stage. Long hair pulled back severely, a cardigan to hide my developing breasts. Mother hated my hair. I think she must have spent her whole life telling me how dreadful my hair looked. I’m smiling in the photo and leaning down to put my face a little bit closer to Grandpa.’
19.
Outside a bird chimed in a cheerful tone and the leaves of the jacaranda tree whispered in the wind. The beautiful jacaranda tree. They had one like that once. She thought she’d miss that tree and that house but although she did at first, after a while she came to love the different place where she moved to. And then this place where she lives now, by the sea, the place where J came to live with her. The place where they pretended they could live together. Where he went off to work every day and she kissed him goodbye at the front door. The place where he’d come home to her at night.
20.
‘I’ll fill in a form for you to have a blood test whenever you want. You won’t have to come and see me first. You can go straight there.’
He walks over to his desk. ‘Anything else you want tested?’
‘You’d better add iron. And the test for blood sugar. A family history of diabetes.’
‘Those arms look like they’ve done a lot of work,’ said the nurse as she tightened the strap around Sofya’s arm.
‘What do you mean? How can you tell?’
‘The veins. You’ve got good veins. The veins are connected to the muscles.’
21.
When she was a teenager she’d wanted to have dance lessons. ‘I learnt to dance without lessons,’ Mother had said. ‘So you can too.’
There were huge waves out to sea after the winds of the night. The biggest she’d ever seen in fact. They really were magnificent. She’d listened to the winds as they’d thrashed the ocean waves through the branches of the trees.
22.
Step further across for the forwards ochos, said the visiting Argentinian dance teacher. Step further back behind me for the turn and swivel. Keep your left hip down when doing a forwards ocho. Caress the floor with your feet. No feet in the air. Relax your right shoulder. Keep your shoulders down. Do the cross whether the man leads you into it or not (she thinks that’s what he said). Be heavy on the front foot in the cross. Weight forwards.
Keep your knees together when you do an adornment. Keep the adornments simple. Just do one or two. Polish the leg and then down again; then step over. Slow down on the turns. Don’t run. Keep your right wrist firm. In the open embrace let your arms go up and down the man’s arm. Up to behind his neck and then down to his forearm.’
‘You’ve had a lesson with the best,’ said Pedro.
‘I’ve been saving myself,’ she’d said proudly.
23.
It was about 6.30 on a Friday. Early summer. The bougainvilleas and the jacarandas were already in bloom but no frangipanis yet. She’d been waiting for J to come home, looking forward to his return from the city, hoping they’d sit together with a drink outside on the balcony. He’d have a shower and get changed and then they’d go out for the meal that he’d promised her.
Instead he was on the phone, his face slightly in shadow but well lit enough for her to see the ever present cigarette. Half inside, half outside so he could exhale out the door. His voice droned on and on. The wind increased in force. A strong wind, blowing against her head, her hair, her hands. Her furious heart beat hard against the walls of her ribs. Then the wind died down again and she could only hear his voice ; not the sound of the birds anymore or the movement of the leaves on the trees.
It rained a lot that night. The sound of the waterfall below. The sound of water after rain.
24.
It’s all your fault anyway, she said to the doctor.
He looked puzzled.
You said to me, ‘It’s your body. You can do what you like with it,’ in that moralising tone of yours.
I would have only said that, he said gently, if I thought you were being too generous with your body.
After that bit of moralising I’ve turned that whole side of myself off. Anyway, I have no libido. So it’s not such an issue anymore.
Well, that’s good.
He took a sip of his coffee that surely must be cold already.
There’s more to me than you think, he said.
You’re very blinkered, she said. She held up her hands beside her face to imitate a horse with covers at the side of his eyes. Straight. You haven’t got an open mind, in some areas, she clarified.
He pulled a face.
I bet your daughter, or daughters, tell you that.
They’re too polite.
Your daughter looked lovely by the way. The one I saw last time.
The blonde?
Yes. I thought you had a son and a daughter.
No. I’ve got three daughters.
Three daughters? And a son?
Yes. So you think I need to open my chakras? he joked.
She shrugged. Chakras spin, they don’t open.
You might be surprised. I could be a Buddhist.
Is my time up? She said with an anxious glance at the clock.
It’s okay, he reassured her. I hadn’t noticed.
25.
At dusk the last of the brightness of the pink sighed above the horizon. The sea a woolly blanket of blue and white. The same four palm trees all in a row between the road and the beach. The pale face of the moon two thirds of the way to the sky. One eighth of the side of its face missing but still the moon looked down, almost expressionless. A woman flashed the blue of her helmet as she cycled with strong thighs up Bronte Road, head bent in concentration on the road ahead as a bus bellowed black dust. The pink of the sky turned into mauve mixed with blue as the French cook arrived with his pale blue scarve knotted like a boy scout tight around his neck. With his right hand he checked his balls for reassurance as he mounted the step into the café.
It is unusual for Sofya to be outside these days, but no more odd than spending hours inside at the Mitchell Library looking at microfilm or walking through Waverley Cemetry looking for graves, no more odd than her work, or the people stuck on hot trains and buses trying to get home from work, or other places where people find themselves as they struggle to get through their days.
Times change, your life changes and you need to shift.
26.
At our age we’re not going to improve our game of tennis, said the man on Bare Island.
Speak for yourself, she’d said.
The brown bird with a black triangle on his head jumped on the green see saw of a branch. Up and down he went, up and down, until he flew off again in a southerly direction.
27.
‘The bastards,’ the doctor said as a joke, with a tilt of his head and a puffing out his cheeks as if he was about to spit on the ground in disgust.
‘I love it when you do that,’ she laughed. ‘That’s the way it is exactly.’
28.
Back home after the dance, she’d gone straight to her room. She’d turned on the lamp and knelt on the bed to pile the cushions up. Tears came almost to her eyes, her stomach empty with sadness. It was all such a bloody fantasy. She stared around at the night silence, then huddled in her bed.
She had a box of 100 Dilmah tea bags that she’d bought especially for J. When the box is empty, she told herself, the pain will have eased.
Six months later, she walked outside to the balcony, sat on the chaisse lounge that they’d chosen together and looked down the gully at the grey sea. She drank the last tea bag from the box.
The tea was strong and hot, and so bitter it parched her tongue.
My short story ‘After the Games’ was first published in Quadrant magazine and is included in my collection of short fictions titled ‘Stories from Bondi’ published by Ginninderra Press. Have a read. Hope you enjoy it.
After the Games:
1.
Anny saw him again today. He looked older. Their paths crossed on the cliffs between Bronte and Bondi. He walked with a woman she had never seen before. The woman had long beautiful legs – bronzed a clear nut-brown. She was wearing a man’s undershirt and brown shorts and had a crochet bag hanging loosely from a black nylon strap draped over her hips. Her hair was long and it flicked out in golden corkscrews over her shoulders and down her back. They were laughing. He walked right past Anny and kept right on walking.
2.
The beach seems unusually quiet today apart from a yoga class taking place on the grassy verge behind the Pavillion. On the ocean, surfers in wetsuits loll motionless on surfboards. On the sand, a gaggle of seagulls stand rigid as Irish dancers. And over on the rocks at the southern end of the beach other seagulls laze in the early sun in groups of three or four, or six or eight – their chests puffed out, feathers bristling in the spring breeze, as they nestle into the face of the rock.
It is shortly after the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and Anny is on a rostered day off from her job with the ABC. She is also a poet but she doesn’t refer to that unless it is something people know already. She doesn’t think of making a living as a poet, not only because the income would be non-existent, but because she thinks, as she has innumerable times in her life, that probably she will not write any more poems.
On the grass a woman works out with her female personal trainer. The trainer holds an oblong plastic cushion at waist height while the woman kicks the bag.
One, two, three, calls out the trainer.
Kick, kick, kick, goes the woman’s leg hard into the cushion.
Four, five, six.
Kick, kick.
That’s the way, the trainer encourages.
Nine, ten, she continues with a rising inflection in her voice.
The trainer is forced backwards slightly with each kick but makes a quick recovery to her original position.
3.
A man and a woman lie together kissing, sheltered by the shadow of the rocks at the southern end of the beach. Anny came here at night with Howard and they sat over there near the rocks with their arms around each other into the night. The pull of the tide kept bringing the waves closer to their feet. Anny saw the froth advancing and retreating and her own toes digging into the sand. All the time he spoke she saw her feet and when they started to go numb in the damp sand she knew without looking up what he was going to say; the whole of her seemed to be in her toes. Her love was in the waves. For some reason she thought that if the waves reached her, things would work out between them. The waves advanced and retreated but never quite reached the rock where they sat: never quite bridged the gap, the space between them and the ocean.
4.
On the sand a one-legged seagull hops towards the water laboring over the crumbs of loose sand which break away and roll down as he passes over them. The one-legged seagull seems to have a definite goal in sight differing from the high-hopping tangerine-footed bird who attempts to cross in front of him, and who waits for a moment with his black beak trembling as if in deliberation, and then hops off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. A line of seaweed with deep green lakes in the hollows lies between the seagull and the water’s edge where the other gulls are pecking for food. The seagull waits, undecided whether to circumvent the mountain of seaweed or to breast it.
Anny stops and watches the struggle of the seagull.
5.
The ocean is grey and flat today. It is so quiet in fact that she can hear the tiny whisper of the breeze, the rustling of the waves approaching the shore, the creaking of the wings of a gull-like bird which flies low over the Promenade and the flapping of her own thin skirt as it blows against her legs. But there is no wind, nothing but a steady pressure forward as she progresses along the beach. Somewhere behind the veil of clouds there is a pale sun which can be seen, in the far distance, that casts a white gleam on the water.
Who would know there had been a Beach Volleyball Stadium here on the beach at Bondi? She bought tickets for the preliminaries for herself and her son. They hadn’t been out, just the two of them, since he was a little boy when she took him to a Kiss concert.
After the game they’d walked back to her place and he’d come in briefly for a glass of water before saying goodbye. She’d kissed him on the neck – on that soft groove that she used to know so well when he was a little boy.
When he’d left she couldn’t think of anything for the rest of the afternoon except that soft part of his neck and the kiss.
6.
Near the end of the Promenade a woman cradles a baby in her arms. Anny can see the baby’s face clearly as it is lit by the sun. She can almost smell the baby’s soft hair, that familiar baby smell she once knew so well. The woman strokes the baby and looks down at it and the baby looks back up at her. She looks up again with a faraway gaze that all new mothers seem to have and rocks slowly from side, to side, her feet shuffling against the cement. The light picks up the woman’s high cheekbones and glints off her glasses.
Anny moves to the left as a woman pushing a three wheeled stroller runs past. The baby clutches the sides of the pram, the front wheel lifting as the woman negotiates the corner.
7.
Anny first met Howard at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s house. He’d talked business with the host and she hadn’t really connected with him. It was only towards the end of the meal when he’d passed her the chocolate-covered strawberries and encouraged her to eat one that she’d warmed to him slightly. Go on, he’d said. Have one. Chocolate is good for you. He was a chunky sort of a bloke, a thick head of brown hair, greying at the sides. She had to admit that she wasn’t attracted to him when they first met. You were disappointed I could tell, he said later. A week after the dinner he’d rung and asked her out for dinner. He’d come over to pick her up and they’d walked down to Bondi. Coming back to her place later he told her he knew she was interested in him because she kept brushing into his arm as they walked up the hill.
8.
Anny trusts what she makes of things – usually. She trusts what she thinks about friends and chance acquaintances, but she feels stupid and helpless when contemplating the collision of herself and Howard. She has plenty to say about it, given the chance, because she likes to explain things, but she doesn’t trust what she says, even to herself; it doesn’t help her.
Because everything and everyone else in his life came before me, she might say. His two businesses, his children, his ex-wife who lived across the road.
9.
The one-legged seagull has now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the line of seaweed or climbing over it. Aside from the effort required to climb the seaweed, he is doubtful whether the slippery texture will bear his weight. This determines him finally to creep beneath it, for there is a point where the seaweed curves high enough from the ground to admit him. He inserts his head in the opening and takes stock of the high brown roof and is getting used to the cool brown light before deciding what to do next.
10.
Howard had said he uses his air rifle to kill birds. He said he’s proud to shoot introduced birds around his house – and has no hesitation in killing dive-bombing magpies and noisy possums.
She remembers his house well. Big, two-stories, red-brick, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a swimming pool out the back. Black leather and chrome, art books on the coffee tables. Huge original paintings on the walls.
He’d stay in the family room when his children were visiting, which was seven days out of fourteen – everyone in their own special seat at a computer or watching television or talking on the telephone. There was no spare seat for Anny and not enough light to read by.
She bought flowers. She bought presents for his children; clothes for the girls; she talked music with his son. She learned pathways around the house and found places outside where she could sit.
She’d felt flattered when he said that he wanted her to move in with him. He offered to build her a studio out the back. A dog house, a friend had said. He wants you out the back in the dog house so he can keep an eye on you. So you can be on hand whenever it suits him.
Howard talked about all the women his friends had lined up for him – waiting to be introduced. He spoke about a former girlfriend and how he wanted her to move in with him but she wouldn’t, so he ended the relationship. Later Anny found out that Howard had kept on seeing the former girlfriend even ringing her from Paris from the conference Anny had foolishly agreed to attend with him. She’d stupidly insisted on paying her own business class airfare, which she couldn’t afford, in order to be by his side.
She didn’t know any of this until it was too late – until she’d become needy and dependent.
You just want a handbag, a doormat, a warm body in the bed, she’d accused him.
I have a fatal flaw, he’d explained. I only want what I cannot have.
And what are Anny’s flaws? Angry, demanding, unco-operative Anny. Anny, the unsatisfactory poet.
11.
Two pigeons waddle along the concrete in search of food. Their tails wag back and forth, their necks jut in and out like finely linked springs moving to the rhythm of their webbed feet. On the grass the men and women practicing yoga twist their bodies into unimaginable knots and drop into breathtaking back bends, seeming to hang suspended in the air as they jump from one position to the next. The clear measured voice of the female yoga teacher calls out instructions:
Push down through the buttocks
Pull up through the rib cage
Relax the head down
Spread the fingers out wide
Toes under
Push the hips up
Keep the mind focussed in the moment
Roll over on to your back
And come into the corpse position
If you live alone and you can’t close your hand, it makes life very difficult as you get older, says the yoga instructor. Not being able to open a jar or turn a key in the lock. Every morning when I wake up I take the time to stretch out my body, she continues. I rotate my ankles, stretch out my feet and arms, and then I stand up and stretch out my neck. How many of you stretch in the mornings? Living in the city takes a toll on our health. We sit at a desk writing or sit at the computer – but we need to stretch the hands, the wrists, the hip flexors and to keep our bodies moving.
Anny wonders if the early morning stretches are only for people who live alone – for people who don’t wake up with their lover beside them.
12.
The last time she saw Howard they sat in her car near Ben Buckler in the rain. She rested her hands against the steering wheel, then leant back and listened as the windscreen started to fog. She felt the rise and the fall of her own breathing but she couldn’t hear her heart or her breath. She knew without seeing that the waves were colliding. Below, the swells rolled against the brown cliffs that she couldn’t see.
When she drove back to her apartment she sat down on a chair in her bedroom. She sat for an hour or so, then went to the bathroom, undressed, put on her nightgown, and got into bed. In bed she felt relief, that she had got myself home safely and would not have to think about anything any more.
In fact her only memory now is of the sound of the windscreen wipers swinging back and forth as she and Howard sat in silence in her car.
After the Maccabi bridge collapse in Israel she rang to see if his daughter had been involved. She left a message on his answer machine but he never returned her call.
He wrote to her care of the ABC, to say he’d pack and send her things.
13.
The grey underside of wings flap as a triangle of seagulls fly past in perfect formation above the rocks. They climb to a thousand feet, then, flapping their wings as hard as they can, they push over into a blazing steep dive toward the waves. They pull sharply upward again into a full loop and then fly all the way around to a dead-slow stand-up landing on the sand.
14.
Effortlessly the one-legged seagull spreads his wings and lifts into the air. In the light breeze he curves his feathers to lift himself without a single flap of wing from sand to cloud and down again.
He climbs two thousand feet above the sea, and without a moment for thought of failure and death, he brings his fore wings tight in to his body, leaving only the narrow swept wingtips extended into the wind, and falls into a vertical dive.
With the faintest twist of his wingtips he eases out of the dive and shoots above the waves, a gray cannonball under the sun.
He trembles ever so slightly with delight.
15.
She had his sweater draped over her shoulders. They were laughing. Anny watched their backs move away. She waited by the sea until the sun went down.
16.
The swell is up, the Pacific Ocean expressing its power across the rocks below Anny in spectacular explosions of spray.
It is colder now and the day is fading. A little wind has blown up. The wind tears at her hair. With a wild gesture she pulls her hair loose from its side combs and lets it stream across her face and then lets it fly back in the wind.
A weak sun emerges. She stands still and lifts her face.
17.
Keep your hips still, swing your arms, keep your lower abdominals tight to protect your back. Try to keep your chest high, a nice long neck. Keep your arms out nice and long. Relax the shoulders. Stand tall. Go over to the right side, keep your knees soft. Very slowly. And the other side. Forward roll. Drop the chin into the neck. Hold it. Keep your knees soft and come back up. Really concentrate on spinal articulation here – vertebrae by vertebrae slowly roll it up, shoulders relaxed. Chin in, roll it down. Keep those knees soft. Bend your knees as much as you have to. Go down for four, push it in. Stretch out the shoulders there. Hold it and release the hands on to the ground and roll it back up. Take your right leg out in front. Hands on the hips, keep the hips square. We’re going over in a nice square line. Should be able to stretch the hamstrings there.
Have a read of my short story, Around Midnight, first published in Quadrant Magazine. The story is part of my short fiction collection Stories From Bondi published by Ginninderra Press (2019).
I hope you enjoy it.
Around Midnight
‘When are you open?’ Anny asks the woman on the telephone.
‘We have a party twice a day. Every day. Twelve thirty to four thirty and seven thirty to midnight.’
‘Oh. Every day? I thought it was Saturday nights only.’
‘No darling. Every day.’
‘So what’s the setup?’
‘$120 for a couple. Nothing if you come on your own. What’s your position. How would you come along?’
‘On my own.’
‘It would cost you nothing then.’
‘But what do you do? I mean, I know what goes on there.’
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘No. A friend told me about it. What do you wear? What’s the setup?’
‘It’s all up to you love. If you fancy a gentleman you invite him into one of the rooms.’
‘What do you wear though? My friend said something about robes.’
‘Towels. They’re towels love. You wear whatever you like. Normal clothes.’
Anny is sitting at a café at North Bondi having breakfast with her friend Dita telling her about it. Anny has ordered the scrambled tofu and Dita is having fried eggs and bacon.
I’m dying to know how you went, Dita says, pulling her chair closer to the table.
Well, Anny says, this is what happened.
It’s eight thirty on Saturday night when I approach a big steel gate with a street number in bold letters. I open the gate and go up the lane way beside the Thai restaurant and follow the fairy lights upstairs. There’s nothing else to indicate what goes on inside this three-bedroom apartment on a busy road in Bondi. I follow the fairy lights along a corridor until I come to a wooden front door with no number on it. I hesitate not knowing whether to knock or just walk in. I open the door.
Inside, draped around the room, are about ten men and women in various stages of undress sitting on stools beside small bar tables – the men bare-chested, the women topless or wearing bras. Some of them are giving each other neck and shoulder massages. And they’re all wearing towels. Not a very attractive sight in my opinion – a man in a towel.
It’s a large room with a pretend-bar, a kitchen on the right and sliding glass doors that lead to a covered balcony with an above-the-ground spa pool. Standing by the door are two Japanese men in black jeans and black tee-shirts. I walk over to the kitchen which acts as the Reception area.
The only other fully dressed people in the room are the man and the woman who run the place. She’s Czech, young and very attractive in a green lace figure-revealing dress. Her blonde hair cascades down her back. She’s in the kitchen and doesn’t exactly greet me but asks me what I’d like to drink. A glass of wine would be nice, I say. She goes to the fridge and from a cask on the bottom shelf pours me a glass. With drink in hand I stand near the door and look around.
And wonder what I’ll do next.
The two Japanese men avoid eye contact with me. They obviously want to keep to themselves. I don’t particularly want to join the group of men and women on the stools as I don’t intend to take any of my clothes off.
I ask the woman who runs the place to show me around. She shrugs without much enthusiasm then leads the way along a narrow hallway. The first bedroom on the right has a double bed with a bedside light on a table and white lace curtains on the window. She looks out between the lace peering around outside before pulling them closed. She shows me another bedroom at the end of the corridor with an en-suite bathroom. We stand at the door looking in to the empty bed but she doesn’t show me in. And then she leads the way to the third bedroom back along the corridor towards the front door.
This is the Orgy Room, she says from the open doorway.
I avert my eyes but I can see from the corner of one eye a double bed and several naked bodies doing things to each other. Backs and thighs and bums exposed. Not very becoming. It all seems tacky and I begin to doubt my wisdom in coming to a place like this. I clutch my handbag across my body and find myself a seat in the front room with my back to the wall.
There are corn chips and an onion dip on a platter that the women in the group hand around. I decline the chips and the dip. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s the smell of onion breathe. A woman in a white lace bra and a towel around her waist stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray in front of me and asks if I’ve been here before.
No, I say. And you?
I come here all the time. What do you do for a living? She continues.
A bit of this and that.
She nods knowingly.
What do you do? I ask.
I’m a psychologist at a clinic at St Leonards.
I’m very surprised. For some reason I thought women with important jobs wouldn’t come to a place like this.
A man edges over towards me and tries to get in on our conversation. He asks the same things as she does. Do you come here often? What do you do for a living? In the old days, or, rather, in the olden days, as my children like to say, when I used to frequent bars from time to time, I’d answer the first question with “only in the mating season” and the second question with “I live off the income from my investments”. Both replies would be met with a stunned silence or an impressed “ah” or, sometimes, “is this the mating season?”
The man keeps smiling at me and I avert my eyes but somehow he is able to maneuver himself around so he’s constantly in my line of vision. It gives me the shits.
Not your type? Dita puts in.
No. Absolutely not.
What did you wear in the end? Dita asks.
Only four items of clothing.
Something you could take off quickly?
Yes. And no jewelry. Apparently the men have to shower and put on a towel as soon as they arrive. Although one woman kept saying to me, where’s your towel? She wanted me to get undressed and hang about in a towel like everyone else.
Another woman tells me I should leave my bag locked up in the kitchen with the man and woman who own the place.
You don’t know these men, cautions the woman. Lock up your bag.
I decide to keep my bag with me although I’ve left my umbrella beside the door. Another man edges his stool over towards me and we have a conversation. At least he’s got a brain in his head and got something to say for himself. He tells me he’s Dutch and he’s here in Sydney on business.
It’s my first time to this place, he says. But I’ve been to others in other cities in the world. I travel a lot for business.
We talk a little about travel and countries we’ve visited.
He lets me know in a non-threatening way that he’d be willing to go into one of the bedrooms with me. I feel embarrassed knocking him back seeing as we’ve had such a nice conversation and I don’t want him to be wasting time with me if he wants to be chatting up some other woman.
I’m not ready, I say politely. Maybe later.
The other man who’s been trying to catch my eye, the pain-in-the-bum-persistent-dag who listens in to my every word, leans over towards me and says, When you’re ready would you go into one of the rooms with me?
No thanks, I say. Sorry, I smile at him hoping all the same that I haven’t hurt his feelings.
The Dutch man tells me there’s no need to apologise.
A few new people wander in. A man and a woman, a couple, a few single men of various ages and shapes and a fat girl draped in layers of chiffon. Then two very well-proportioned young men. I remind myself that I’m the one meant to be doing the choosing here. One of the very well-proportioned young men is quite cute actually. The other young man is not very tall, a bit too muscle-bound for my taste, and has that short spiky hair almost- shaved-at-the-side that I find most unattractive. The two of them are younger than both my son – but that’s nothing new.
One of the women ushers them out into the back bedroom to shower and put on a towel. They don’t return to the main room where I’m sitting jammed up between various men and in front of me a blank video screen high up on the wall. The fat girl does some sort of disco dance in front of the wall under the video screen. She dances in time to the music but nothing special. Then the woman who owns the place uses her remote to turn on a video.
I’ve never seen such an explicit porn video before, Dita. I can’t watch but I glimpse the extreme closeups of women’s genitalia and pierced intimate body parts and things being stuck in and up and it’s all too horrible.
Why didn’t you go home then? Asks Dita.
I thought I’d wait just a bit longer. It had taken such an enormous effort of will to get there.
The Czech blonde who runs the place with her Indian husband enjoys the video immensely.
Look at that, she keeps saying.
I have nowhere to turn my head. In front of me the video, to my left the persistent dag. To my right is the smaller young muscley man who now also keeps trying to attract my attention but I’m claustrophobic and I just want out of there but for some reason I’m stuck to my seat. I don’t want to stand up and have everyone look at me – anything that moves is closely observed in this room. I look at the floor, at the space between my stool and the spa area, and the floor towards the front door. I’m willing myself to stand up, to walk into the spa room away from these men, or straight out the front door.
So that’s how come I end up talking to the young Italian muscley bloke. He reaches his hand out to me and invites me to sit in the spa room with him away from the noise of the video. I use his hand to stand up but then remove it from his grasp before walking outside to the balcony. I don’t want to look as if I’ve been claimed.
I tell the muscley Italian man that the men here are too predatory and I’m feeling guilty because I keep knocking them back and then find myself apologising. You don’t have to apologise when you knock someone back, he assures me. But I’m finding him intimidating right now wedged up beside me and I don’t know how to get rid of him.
We sit on the black vinyl lounge, me squashed in the corner beside him. The tang of chlorine from the empty spa assaults my nostrils.
Can I kiss your cheek? he asks.
No.
Can I hold your hand? he says.
No.
I wedge my hand that lays beside him under my thigh making sure he can’t hold it.
His friend, the cutie, comes out through the door and sits beside us. We smile at each other.
I was very nervous before coming to this place, he says to me. I nearly didn’t come.
I look into his open face and his nice round eyes and thick head of curly hair.
It was the same for me, I say.
When I came in, he says, I saw you sitting there and that woman in the green dress and I thought this looks all right and so I came in.
She’s very attractive, I say. That woman in the green dress.
I asked her husband if she participates but he said no.
Do you think it’s good value for money here? I ask in order to keep the conversation going. I mean it’s concerning me that the men have paid $180 each to come into this place and it’s free for me.
No, he says, I don’t think I’ve got good value for money. Not so far.
His friend puts his hand on my leg. I consider removing his hand but think it may seem churlish of me so I don’t. And anyway if I’ve come to a place like this what am I doing knocking all the blokes back?
What does it cost to have sex with a hooker? I ask the cutie.
He looks at me with horrified wide eyes. I don’t know. I’ve never had sex with a hooker.
I was just trying to do a price comparison. A value for money price comparison.
How many women have you had sex with tonight? I persist.
Two. One on arrival. A woman started massaging me when I had a shower and then we had sex. And then a second one almost straight afterwards. The fat girl.
How was that? I ask. How was the sex?
She had big bruises all over her body as if she’d been bashed up or drugs or something. Her arms and legs were all bruised. It was awful. I wished I was unconscious.
I nod with sympathy.
I noticed you go into the bedroom with the fat girl, I say.
He smiles at me and extends his hands towards me, palms upturned. I could give you a great massage, he says with enthusiasm. I’ve got very strong hands. I’m trained in martial arts.
Mm, I say breathing out with a sigh.
But the problem is I can’t get rid of his bloody friend. He’s latched on to me and has territorial control with his bloody hand resting on my thigh.
There are six of us in the spa room now. The cutie, his friend, a middle-aged Maori couple and the Indian husband of the Czech woman. I’d noticed some of the girls flirting with the Indian husband and then laughing. He stays close by the side of his wife. Now though, he chats to us.
We’ve only had this business for eight weeks, he says. We took it over from the previous owner who’d been here for six and a half years. It costs us $1000 a month in rent and $1000 for advertising on the web, in the Telegraph and in the Wentworth Courier. It isn’t easy to make money.
We talk about business and making money for awhile then he leaves us to it.
Do you think some of those girls are being paid to be here? asks the Italian.
Prostitutes?
Well, why would a single woman come to a place like this? says the cutie who’s disappointed there aren’t more women here. A single woman can go out any time and pick up a bloke at a pub.
I don’t say anything. I don’t say it’s probably safer here than to take a stranger home or to go back to his place in the middle of nowhere. And what are you meant to do anyway if you don’t have a boyfriend?
He complains that when he rang up to make inquiries they told him there is a huge spa that fits twenty people. They could fit about eight people in this spa, he says. And even then it would be squashed. Twenty people – they’d all be on top of each other.
I must say that when my friend Richard, who told me about the place, mentioned that there is a large spa I did imagine a Grecian-type setting with women and men reclining and relaxing around the edges of the water.
If he was a good businessman, says the Cutie, he’d offer to give us our money back at the door. That’s how you do business. Keep the customers happy.
There’s no privacy in the rooms here, says the Italian. People walk in all the time. The Japanese men paid $50 each just to watch.
We had to jam towels up against the door to stop people walking in, says the Maori husband.
Now that the Maori couple have joined in the conversation I use the opportunity to ask them how they’re going. What they’ve experienced so far. I’d noticed them come out of the bedroom at the end of the house.
The wife tells me in a quiet voice that they went into the room with another woman to have a threesome. But it didn’t work out, she says. He couldn’t do any good, she says indicating with a nod her husband’s lap and the area between his legs. We don’t like it much here. We’ve been to other singles clubs where it’s all couples. Much better. Not with all these men hanging around staring at you.
Why did you come here? I ask.
He wants to have sex with other women. So coming to a place like this, he’s not doing it behind my back. I know what he’s up to and I’m included.
Her husband glows smugly.
Why did you come here? I ask the cutie.
Curiosity. Why did you come here? He asks me.
Curiosity. We all came here for curiosity, I say summing up the conversation.
The Italian muscle-man gets up to go to the toilet.
Save me that space beside you, he instructs me. Promise, he adds loudly.
I nod.
When he leaves the room I ask the cutie if he’s been into the Orgy Room.
No, he says. What Orgy Room?
It’s up the hallway. I had a look around when I arrived. But an Orgy Room isn’t something I’m interested in trying.
Me either, he agrees.
I’m just waiting for him to finish with you, he says indicating the empty seat between us, and then I’ll be next.
I lower my eyes discretely and suppress a smirk.
The Italian returns from the toilet and takes his seat between us.
The cutie turns to me and says: You can give him a massage, indicating his friend, and I’ll give you a massage.
I laugh.
The Maori couple encourage me from the sidelines.
Go on, says the Maori husband. Give it a go. If you don’t like it, leave.
Sure, I think to myself. As if I’d be able to leave after going into a bedroom with two men and taking off all my clothes. Although I wouldn’t mind going in to one of the rooms with the cutie, if I could lock the door that is, and if it wasn’t so late already.
I giggle nervously. I have four people on my case now trying to pursuade me to go with the two young men, as if it’s my responsibility to keep everybody happy. Hoping they’ll understand and lay off I tell them I’m laughing because I’m nervous.
Would a drink calm you down? says the husband.
No thanks.
His wife smiles at me. In a gentle voice she says, Would you like me to calm you down?
Thank you very much, but no, I say, feeling guilty as usual.
Her husband makes some more noises along the lines of the two of them could help me out with my nervousness problem.
I sigh and then stand up brushing the hand off my leg. I walk over to the side of the spa where the Cutie is standing.
I ease two fingers into the water as if to test the temperature. Warm, I say.
Not warm enough, he says.
I move towards him then lift the corner of his towel to just above his knee. I dry my fingers.
His friend jumps up from the lounge and moves in front me with his bare hairy back just inches from my face.
My back is cold, he says. Warm me up, he commands.
I hold out one hand and lay it briefly on his shoulder, then take it away.
Let’s go for a walk, he whispers to me.
No thanks.
Give me your phone number and we’ll meet up another time then.
No.
Why not?
I don’t want to.
I laugh nervously. How I hate these situations I find myself in.
I’m now wedged into the corner of the spa room. My eyes fix on the door. I hesitate wondering whether I should be polite and say anything to the Maori couple. But I feel the need for haste. I’m worried he’ll follow me although a man in a towel isn’t going to get very far outside on the street.
Dita adds butter and a sprinkle of salt to her turkish bread and then mops up the remains of her egg yolk and the slimy gleam of the bacon fat.
And then?
That’s it. I leave.
There was a full moon. The silver glistened and vibrated on the sea as she neared the northern end of the beach on her walk back home that night. She passed the Bondi RSL club, the Bidigal reserve and the single Bondi sandhill up on her left. There weren’t many people around at that hour. Heading along Campbell Parade, it was quiet. The pub and the cafes were closed.
The surf was big, the waves crashed dramatically over the rocks, the reef and the swimming pool at the south end of the beach. In Notts Avenue she stopped at the surf viewing area just before the baths and watched the rising swell of the ocean for a few moments. She continued along Bondi Road walking fast up the hill pleased the steepness doesn’t faze her, not panting, managing it nice and easy, even in her high heels. She crossed at the lights near the pub on the corner.
A cold wind blew and then it began to rain.
She passed the laneway on her right and was heading for the shortcut home. She planned to cross the open car park of the block of units, and then down through the little park that leads to the hole in the fence that usually gets her home in no time. It was not until she was in the empty car park that she heard her own footsteps squelching on the wet surface and realized that there was another set of sounds behind her. Her shoes made a squench, squash noise and that’s why she didn’t realize at first what the other sound was – and that the sound has been there for some time.
“The man has a gruff, heavily accented Australian voice, his face was masked with a dark balaclava and he wore dark-coloured tracksuit pants – the same description given by his first two victims. His threats, including that he was armed with a knife, were similar to words spoken in the first two attacks and appeared well rehearsed. After each attack he casually walked away.”
Anny veered left as she changed course and retraced her steps without turning towards the footsteps. After moving some distance away and towards the safety of the lights of the units and a door that she could bang on in case of emergency she turned around to see if the person was still there. He was there all right. In joggers, tracksuit, medium height, average build. He’d stopped at the point where she veered left and was looking down into the empty park.
Sorry, she thought she heard him say as he looked over towards her.
She turned and hurried back towards the road and the street lights leaving him behind. She walked on the side of the road towards the on-coming traffic just like she does when she’s on her solitary travels in Europe and the man receded into the distance.
Dita’s plate looks so shiny clean now after her mop up with the Turkish bread it’s as if the plate has come straight out of the dishwasher. Anny tells her that before she went out that night she’d worried that she’d feel tacky when she got home.
You would have if you’d gone against your instincts and allowed those people to talk you into doing something you didn’t want to do, Dita says.
I feel bad though that this whole sex thing is such an issue for me when there’s all the killing going on in Israel and the Para Olympians in wheelchairs on the television every night.
You’re not going around complaining. You’re doing something about it. It’s better than those singles dances. I only went to a couple but I felt like a lump of meat being looked up and down.
But I’m such a wimp, Anny says.
No, you’re not. You went. You’re not a wimp if you can go.
I’m a wimp when it comes to getting rid of guys. Some boring man always latches on to me and I end up leaving just to get rid of him or some man attempts to follow me home.
Anny breathes out heavily and tells Dita that Richard was the one who’d told her about the place.
You know Richard, the one I met on the internet.
You met him in a chat room?
No not a chat room, Anny says sensing Dita’s disapproval. There are all sorts of loonies in chat rooms. No. A singles web site. Richard said the women at these clubs do the choosing and there’d be lots of young men for me to pick from and plenty who’d want to give me a massage. In fact I got so excited about the idea of me doing the choosing that I’d look at the men in the gym and sitting on the train and I’d think: would I choose you if you were there. Richard offered to come with me as my partner but why would I want to pay $120 to go as a couple when I can go for nothing. And anyway, I wouldn’t want to see Richard with another woman.
It wasn’t very complimentary to you that Richard offered to go with you, Dita says, a harsh satisfaction in her voice. Anny can see Dita is pleased somehow telling her this about Richard – as if Anny doesn’t know it already.
Dita pouts her lips to apply a tangerine lipstick to her mouth. The lipstick matches her perfectly manicured toenails that are revealed at the end of her stiletto sandals. She puts the lipstick away in her handbag, sits back and looks out to the ocean, then twists her wedding ring around her finger.
It’s a can that I’ve always wanted to open, Dita says. To see what goes on in these places.
She stands up decisively and pulls her tee-shirt down at the sides accentuating the waisteless bulge of her torso that protrudes for some distance from her body. She slides her hands up and down over her stomach like a proud pregnant woman, but Dita isn’t pregnant.
She thrusts her shoulders back and her chest out. Who cares if my gut hangs out, she says proudly. I’ve got a gorgeous husband, two mortgages, two kids and a great business. What more could a girl want?
Anny feels depressed. But she won’t tell her that. She’s said enough already.
My short story ‘Towards the End’ was first published in Quadrant magazine a few years ago. It’s one of the pieces in my collection ‘Stories From Bondi’ released by Ginninderra Press in 2019. Have a read. Hope you enjoy it.
Towards the End:
He leaned back on the chrome chair, stretched his legs out under the square black table and placed his mobile phone in front of him. He looked over to the counter at the back of the cafe at the cakes and muffins on display and the Italian biscuits in jars. He turned back to the glass windows and wondered if he had the guts to tell her today. He wanted to. By Christ he wanted to. He straightened up, his elbows on the table, his hands clasped together in front of his face. There’d been some good times, that’s for sure. But what the heck. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.
The sliding glass door clanked open and Anny walked in. He looked over at her, first from the rear as she closed the door and then as she approached, her face flushed, her dark hair flying back from her shoulders. Not bad looking. A bit on the heavy side but not a bad looker all the same. Yes, there’d been some good times. Especially in the sack.
Anny removed her sunglasses as she walked over and he looked into the bright green of her eyes as she bent down and kissed him on the cheek. He felt the moisture on her face as her skin touched his.
She took off her sunshade and hung it on the back of the chair and sat down.
You’ll never guess what happened, she said.
What?
I’m still so angry I can hardly speak. She pushed her hair away from her forehead as she dabbed at the sweat with a serviette.
What happened?
This man, she said. This dreadful man. Anny used her fingers to wipe the moisture from under her eyes. I was walking along the cliff path from Bondi to Bronte, like I usually do, minding my own business, when I heard a jogger behind me.
Nothing unusual about that.
So I moved further to the left to let him pass.
Yeah. That’s the rules, keep to the left.
He must have been about to pass on the inside because next moment I heard a thud and there he was picking himself up from the side of the track.
Anny stopped talking as the waitress approached with notepad and pen.
A spaghetti marinara for me, said Daniel smiling at the waitress. And a coffee.
How do you like your coffee?
He grinned at her. Hot and black, thanks.
Anny turned away from him and squinted at the blackboard. I’ll have the Greek salad and a decaf skimmed cap. And a glass of water, please.
And I’ll have an orange juice as well, said Daniel.
Daniel’s eyes followed her as she walked towards the kitchen. Then his mobile buzzed from the table. He picked it up and held it to his ear.
Yep, he said. I can give them a ballpark figure, but that’s about it. Just a ballpark. Yeah, okay then. Here’s his number. Daniel opened the front of the phone and pressed a button. 0413 501 583, he said. He put the phone back on the table its antennae sticking out towards Anny. I hate it when people say things like that, he said.
What?
Oh nothing. Just the usual crap. They all think they can get something for nothing.
Daniel’s pasta arrived first and he began to eat. He sucked in a spaghetti tail and then impatiently cut some of the pasta with his knife. He dispensed with the knife and continued to eat with his fork. He scooped up the marinara with its splayed-like prongs.
So what happened? he said as he sucked in a loose strand of spaghetti, catching its long skinny tail with his fork.
He must have caught his foot on the edge between the footpath and the grass. I was about to say ‘are you all right’ when he roared out at me ‘it’s all your fault you know’. ‘I was keeping to the left’ I said. He ignored me and ran on, red shiny shorts flapping. How dare he speak to me like that. ‘Asshole’ I called out after him. He gave me the finger up sign and kept running. I was furious.
Daniel didn’t answer as he waited for the waitress to place a plate of salad in front of Anny. He blew on his pasta before placing another mouthful towards the back of his tongue, his thin lips closing over the fork.
When I reached Bronte, said Anny. This man had finished his circuit and was on his way back. We recognised each other and he started telling me off about which side of the path I could walk on. ‘Don’t tell me where to walk mate’ I hissed. That’s when he stopped jogging and moved towards me. I thought he was going to punch me.
Really?
I was a bit scared I can tell you, but I braced myself. That’s when he said ‘you’ve got some chip on your shoulder because you’re fat and ugly’. I laughed at him because it sounded so ridiculous and as far as that was concerned it proved my point. What an asshole. Just thinking about it makes me angry.
Daniel turned away from her. He couldn’t tell her now. Not after that. He looked out the window to the truck parked across the road. ‘Dean’s Premium Natural Fruit Juice: the way it should be’ emblazoned on the side. The way it should be. That’s a bit of a joke. Well I know this is the way it shouldn’t be. He couldn’t get Louise out of his head.. That last time – her tight white t-shirt over those tight little breasts – leaning over her plate. Eating that huge roll. The sight of her opening her mouth so wide he thought the sides of her lips would crack. Stuffing it in she was. Later at her place when he couldn’t wait. Coming up behind her as she cleaned her teeth. Ramming it in.
He tore the crusty white Italian bread into small pieces and used it to mop up the remains of the sauce and wiped the red sauce from the corner of his mouth. He reached for his glass and sucked up the remains of his orange juice through a yellowed straw, then burped. He put the glass down, his broad hand wrapped around the grooved surface and leaned across the table. He looked into Anny’s face.
I have to go.
Go where?
I’ll pay the bill.
What’s wrong?
I want to make a move on that Elizabeth Bay deal.
He stood up, his keys dangling from the loop at the back of his trousers, his rubber soled shoes silent as he headed towards the door. Only the sound of his keys and then the bang of the door.
Outside he pulled out his mobile and dialed.
I’m leaving now honey, he said. I’ll be there in a few minutes.
In the cafe Anny watched from the window. She sighed, stood up slowly and then walked over to the cake counter. He’s a workaholic that bloke.
I’ll have a slice of that chocolate mud cake and a cappuccino, she said to the girl behind the register.
‘Around the World In Fifty Step’ was my first published story. It appeared in Overland Literary Journal Autumn, 2000. Since then, more than 50 of my stories and poems have been accepted for publication in prestigious literary journals including Quadrant, Overland and The Canberra Times.
Have a read of this first one. Hope you enjoy it.
Around the World In Fifty Steps:
Copyright Libby Sommer 2022
Joanna lives in a Sydney suburb with her two sons. It’s 1992 and Australia is in recession.
“I’m sick of licking arse in a service industry,” she says of her marketing business. “And I’m fed up with financial insecurity, the feast or famine of too many projects or not enough and chasing new business and getting clients to pay their bills.”
“I’m thinking of renting the house out and travelling,” she tells her grown up sons after reading “The Pitter Patter of Thirty-Year-Old Feet” in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“You’re ready to leave home are you mum?” said one son.
“Why don’t you just go on a long holiday instead,” said the other.
“I want a new beginning, a change of career, a new home, a community of people, an intimate relationship with a significant other, that sort of thing.”
“You could always get yourself a dog,” suggests a friend.
Her son moves out when she puts his rent up.
“Are you going to wait till he buys a new house for cash before you ask for a decent rent?” her mother had said.
“I’ve decided to go and live with Dad for a change,” says the other son.
“I’ll be away for six to twelve months,” Joanna says as she throws her client files on the rubbish tip.
She spends the spring in Italy. The summer in England, Scotland and Ireland. The autumn walking the gorge country of the Ardeche in France.
In the winter she rents a studio apartment in Villefranche on the French Riviera. The studio belongs to a friend of a friend so she’s able to get it at a good price. She works as a casual deck hand on one of the luxury cruisers in dry dock for maintenance. “The first thing I want you to do,” says her boss when she arrives at work on the first day, “is blitz the tender.” After a backbreaking morning of hard physical work cleaning the small run-about she goes to lunch. She orders a salad nicoise and a coffee and realises her lunch will cost her a morning’s pay.
A young and handsome French man who lives in Paris but comes to Villefranche to visit his grandmother most weekends, pursues her. Joanna comes to realise that French men love and cherish women as much as they appreciate good food.
She shops at the markets, paints and reads and falls in love with the light and the colours of the south of France.
“I’m able to live contentedly alone without a regular job, without a car, without speaking the language,” she writes to her friends back home.
In the summer she moves on again before the tourist masses arrive and the rent goes up.
She gives away to her new friends in Villefranche all the things that won’t now fit in her backpack but keeps her paint brushes and pallet knife.
On the Greek island of Skyros she joins a group of landscape artists led by a famous English painter.
“My purpose in leading this group is to help everyone find their own unique style,” says the woman.
Joanna spends the autumn in London meeting with other artists from the island and the woman becomes her mentor and they meet for a cup of tea every week and talk about the isolation of being an artist as well as many other things.
“It’s important to stop and regenerate before the creative battery runs flat,” she says.
Joanna paints every day and goes out with an English man named Clive.
“Your painting is vivid and alive,” says the famous English artist. “I’ll write you a letter of introduction to my contacts in Australia when you’re ready to exhibit this collection.”
Clive has a strong face with chiselled square cheekbones. Dark brown eyes and dark hair that falls in a square fringe on his forehead. His fingers are long and sensitive for playing the piano.
“What are you doing there?” her mother asks on the phone from across the ocean.
“I’m painting,” says Joanna.
“But what are you doing?”
“My mother is like a poisonous gas that can cross from one side of the world to the other,” Joanna says.
Joanna dreams about her sons every night and Clive tells her she cries in her sleep.
She yearns for the bright Australian light and for the sound of the ocean.
She returns to Australia for her eldest son’s wedding.
In Sydney, Joanna supplements her income from the house rental by getting a job as a casual for a clothing company. She unpacks boxes and steampresses the garments. Her back, neck and shoulders ache and she suspects she’s getting RSI from the steampresser.
Clive rings to say he’s coming to visit her.
In preparation for his arrival she moves all her furniture out of storage and rents a small place near the beach hoping that he’ll love it in Australia and decide to stay.
Two weeks before his arrival Clive rings to say he’s not coming and Joanna finds out through a friend that he’s met someone else and is moving in with her.
She tears up his photos and throws his Christmas present at the wall.
Joanna stops painting.
She reflects on the past and all that she’s lost.
I thought when love for you died, I should die. It’s dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on. Rupert Brooke.
Joanna stays in bed most days but still feels so tired that she can only remain vertical for four hours in any twenty-four hour period.
The phone stops ringing.
She rehearses her own death by going to the edge of the cliff.
From the edge she sketches the waves breaking on rocks, the lone seagull on the shore at the water’s edge.
At home she fills in the drawing, blending black charcoal and white pastel reminding herself the darkest hour is before the dawn.
And, after winter spring always comes.
Joanna sells the house where she lived with her children and spends half the money on a home unit overlooking the ocean and the rest of the money on Australian shares.
Her new home faces the east and she can smell the salt from the ocean.
“It takes twenty years to be a successful artist,” echoes in her mind.
On a new canvas she drags the colours of the sunrise across the blank white space.
My micro fiction ‘When the New Boyfriend Nearly Died’ was first published in Quadrant magazine in December 2021.
Have a read. Hope you enjoy it.
When the New Boyfriend Nearly Died:
In the hospital’s public toilet, your face pleads back at you, white and worried. Far as you know, your new boyfriend had a heart attack while bouncing between your child-bearing hips. Too much of a strain. It’s not your fault. When he was admitted to Emergency you didn’t know if you’d ever see him again.
After five hours of waiting, you ask the receptionist if you can go in. When she asks you, you can’t pronounce his Polish surname. You spell out the letters. She considers you through the gap in the partition. You tell her you’re his new girlfriend. So you’re the one, she must be thinking before pressing the red button that lets you in.
He is lying in bed, a canula in his arm. His eyes are closed. You sit in a chair beside him and hold his hand. This would never have happened if it weren’t for you. Nurses and doctors hurry past clutching clipboards.
Don’t die on me, you plead.
If he dies, what you will miss are his text messages of love, the thwack of his body, and the pots of Japanese tea you shared. In bed you’d sip from tiny ceramic mugs.
You make a mental list of your strengths and weaknesses: you’re good at hedonistic pleasures, bad at Cryptics, bad at lonely Sundays, good at making new friends, bad at staying in touch, good at making loose-leaf tea after sex with an addict, good at falling for men who can’t stop swallowing uppers and downers. Good at loving your new boyfriend who took too many pills and now you’re worried he’ll die.
Are you dreaming, or did he just squeeze your hand?
Libby Sommer, Author 