Author Archives: juliechilver

KEEP YOUR CHILDREN CLOSE AND THEIR NEW UNIFORMS CLOSER

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Time’s almost up. Those rolling weeks of sleep-ins and watching telly in the afternoon are nearly at an end. Days when the only meal I made was dinner. Ahhhh.

Our holiday in a nut shell:

There have been 2 camping trips – one long, one short. They involved 13 days under canvas, two meals at friend’s houses, three lunches out, fish and chips, meals cooked on a dodgy barbecue and no counts of botulism or food poisoning.

5 cinema trips

Countless cups of tea in bed in the mornings

Sleepovers and play-dates

1 chocolate fountain

A very short trip to a Sydney art gallery with sons 1 and 2. They lasted 45 seconds in the Yoko Ono War is Over exhibition, being dragged back onto the streets by their relieved father. (There followed a blissful hour for me which reduced me to tears at one point).

Countless episodes of British comedy. We watched the first series of Man Down in one sitting.

32 episodes of Doctor Who – two doctors, five companions and one metal dog

6 diet days

A game of backyard cricket and touch footie on the beach

Games of cricket and touch footie on the beach that involved me- 000000000

In this time there has been little rain, little writing and no making of sandwiches. Last night on the eve of the last day of the holidays I poured a large glass of red. My husband frowned, as I knew he would. “It’s the only Sunday that isn’t a school night for 10 weeks. I’m having a wine or two.” And I did.

Tonight is the mother of all school nights. New shoes that haven’t been broken in. Uniform polo shirts forgotten to buy for son no.2. Son no.1 has deemed his lunches too unhealthy and wants to make his own; using exotic ingredients.

Exotic ingredients = anything I don’t have in the house.

Tomorrow will be sad, glad and dangerous to know. I may just gather my children to me and insist on one more episode of Dr Who. The next one is the moon resort one and I really want to insist that David Tenant spends the day moon-tanning with Donna.

Let’s tread bravely into Term One!

NEW YEAR INERTIA

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Every year I seem to stumble into the New Year, depleted of energy and looking for somewhere to lie down. Everywhere people seem to be popping up, full of beans, telling me their plans for 2014. Some of them even exercise. You know who you are! Images of fireworks bursting into dark skies, people running around wearing lycra. I mean, is it just me?

I have no vim this time of year. I often wonder if it’s because of the weather here in Australia. But to be honest I’m pretty sure I felt the same in the UK.

It’s true I’m not the sort who forgets the past and runs toward the unknown future. The old year exhausts me before I can get to grips with the new one. The husband nags me to take down the Christmas decorations as soon as the sun sets on Boxing Day. Now why would I want to do that? I know that beneath all that tinsel and fairy lights hide layers of cobwebs and dead beetles. I mean, that’s the point of Christmas decs isn’t it. And Christmas cards.

Here I will also admit that any event involving cards – Christmas, birthdays, mother’s and father’s day – I keep them up, on the mantelpiece, until the next event involving cards. Therefore, only psychics and very very tall people can see the dust.

I think the idea of New Year is, to coin an old fashioned phrase, to take stock of one’s life. I like the sound of that. It conjures up images of me in a clean white coat, holding a clipboard. The clipboard has a list of things that I need to address. For instance:

1. Lose weight (it’s only people like me who say that you should love the body you have.) I know I will get knuckle-wrapped for that. By thin people.
2. Exercise more. Or, invent an exercise that isn’t hideously boring or hard to keep up. If anyone suggests running I will have to stop talking to them. If God meant me to run, he would have made me thinner already.
3. Stop procrastinating. I was going to put that last but thought better of it.
4. Tidy up as I go along (this gem came from my husband). I don’t think it’s going to work. I only clean in response to the shame of my friends discovering what a slut I am about the home.
5. Drink less wine. Obviously I put this one down using humour.

By now I’ve thrown the clipboard across the imaginary storeroom and there are dirty marks all down the front of my white coat.

So let’s get back to the reality of January.

I only change out of my swimsuit when I have to leave the house. It does steam on occasion. I might clean the toilet but that’s as far as I’ll go. If someone wants to visit I need 48 hours notice. I do very little writing as the kids interrupt every time – son no.1 did that just now.
And the only really constructive thing I do is fill in surveys and on-line questionnaires. It is important for me to know how middle-class I am or if I could ever become an assistant on Dr Who.

THE GIFT

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I have a child, a daughter. Twelve years old forever. Her name is Eve and I haven’t seen her for 10 years. She would be a woman now if she still roams the earth. I haven’t seen her since a winter’s day on the beach.
If I had born a son I suspect I would have called him Adam. But I had a daughter and her name was Eve. Born in 1985 in a hospital in Byron Bay, the mid-wife passed her to me and my life began. Life had been an endurance to me. Splashes of sunlight in a dark place but that all changed with Eve, as if all parts of my life were waiting for this moment. Life was all about Eve. My husband, if he ever deserved such a title, had long abandoned me. Not for him the howling of a child or wet nappies in the bathroom. “I’m a romantic,” he informed me.
A sunny child who played in the meadows, gathering wild flowers and singing nursery rhymes, Eve had a head of red curls and the palest cheeks, dotted with magical freckles. Her eyes were the colour of topaz and just one look from those fringed jewels had me giving her whatever she desired.
While Eve was emerging from her chrysalis I discovered I could write. I wrote stories for children and made my living from it. I spent the days, Eve close by, weaving magic for young minds. Fairy stories of enchanted gardens and castles made of ice. Eve loved mythical creatures; unicorns and dragons, King Neptune in the ocean, wet and wild and mermaids. A world of hidden jewels and shipwrecks of long ago.

I missed her when she started school. Sometimes I walked past her school at recess and stole glimpses of my cherub running barefoot in the school grounds, organising the other children in their games.
Chubby fingers grew slender and white. Her curls gave way to waves and then straightened to a long band of burnished copper. The buds on her chest began to grow into breasts. She could be found always, ducking her chores, sitting on the swing in the garden, hung from the big old jacaranda. Strong ropes and timber seat. Her head in a book, sighing as I called her to sweep floors or wash dishes. Such a princess should not have to do such chores but I needed her help, I couldn’t do everything. My daughter had to help and learn the way of the world. We cannot spend all day spinning straw into gold or making daisy chains. We have work to do. She still loved my stories, begging me to write faster so she could read them.
We lived in a small cottage by the sea. Eve collected shells and pebbles from the beach. Her jewelry box groaned with them. She loved the shape of the shells and the texture of the pebbles. She would run their coolness through her fingers. She had gone to the shore to add to her collection that day. Carrying a small basket in her hand which she swung through the air, in which she would hoard her quarry. The morning was shrouded in black leaden clouds, turning the ocean gun metal-grey. I could smell a storm on its way.
“Darling, the weather looks set to turn. Please stay by the house.” I pleaded.
“Mum, you worry too much. I’ll be fine. Promise.” She smiled and left.
I sighed. “I’ll be down as soon as I’ve finished washing the dishes.”
I watched her head down to the edge of the sea while I scrubbed the breakfast bowls clean. I wiped my hands when I had finished and went to collect my shawl, wrapped it around myself and headed for the beach.
The ocean lay before me like a wide belt of mercury, the beach deserted. Had Eve evaporated like droplets of the sea, absorbed into those heavy clouds? My heart beat faster, I called her name. Only the gulls replied. Where had she gone? The beach stretched out right and left of me, as far as the eye could see. A lone figure with a dog approached.
“Did you see a girl?” I blurted out to the elderly man, white haired and smiling.
“No love. Sheba and I haven’t seen a soul this morning, have we girl?” He addressed the black Labrador by his side, as black as he was white. He continued his coast-side amble and I went back to shouting Eve’s name into the wind.
I stayed on the beach, through the breaking of the storm, I hardly noticed the rain, until cold bit into my bones. Alone on this winter’s day with no sign of Eve or her wicker basket.
I don’t think I slept for weeks after she disappeared. I wrote of lovely girls taken by jealous queens or besotted princes. Of children who sprouted wings and flew away with the birds to other realms.
One day Eve’s school mistress came to see me, wondering where her star pupil had got to. I wasn’t making much sense, the police were called. They offered a verdict of drowning. But Eve had been a strong swimmer.
I inhabited another world by then. A world of make-believe. A world of good and evil. Beautiful princesses and wicked sorceresses. I wrote fast. The stories became successful and I made a lot of money. But I rarely left the house, relying on kind neighbours to collect my groceries. The only exception was a solitary walk along the shore every morning, searching for my daughter. Calling her name into the blankness of the sky. Through winter frosts and the scent of summer. Cloudless skies and pelting rain. I found shells and pebbles, pieces of wave-worn driftwood, garlands of seaweed but no Eve.
Grief became me and I became it. The pain of her loss was sewn into the fabric of my life like fine thread. She haunted my dreams and my waking hours. Sadness seeped in and stayed. I grew thin and pale. Tears splashed and filled my home like Alice’s had. But this was no wonderland.
I lit a candle for her on her birthday. I made a wish for her safe return. Her thirteenth, fourteenth, eighteenth and twentieth years. I celebrated without gifts or parties, excited shrieks nor gasps of wonder. Only a house echoing in the emptiness and a lonely woman getting older. Would she look like me now or had she left this world a child? Did she miss me, yearn for me as I did for her?
Sometimes I think if I had called her Jane or Mary, she would be here with me still. And sometimes I think that I don’t have a daughter whose name is Eve. Maybe I fantasised those twelve glorious years. Imagined her pre-Raphaelite beauty and her love of books.
I walk on the beach ten years after I last saw her, my mind skipping and fluttering like a dancing flame. Perhaps Eve is a mermaid now. Adorned with necklaces of coral and pearl. Iridescent and ethereal. Now you see her, now you don’t. Has she become a star, burning bright and strong but many light years from now? A ghost star perhaps, burnt out long ago but still visible and alive to me. I often look up at the night sky and wonder which one is my Eve. Are the stars close together or far apart? Is she alone? Is she afraid?
I beachcombe in my favourite place, the beautiful bay where I live, the bay that may have swallowed her whole. At my feet I find a feather of pure white, as white as Eve’s face. The pebbles on the shore dot the beach like the freckles on her face. The red of the setting sun reminds me of her hair. Like a fire that licked at her face.
A white bird lands at my feet. A dove perhaps. Now I know where my feather came from. It looks at me and sings a song. Is it trying to tell me something? The sadness lifts a little, the pain is less intense. Somehow I know that Eve is alright. She is at peace, wherever she is. She has moved on and now it is my turn. The tears spring from my tired eyes like the tide coming in. I think of my beautiful girl and I know I will never forget her.
I have a daughter and her name is Eve.

THE ODYSSEY

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Jasmine ran a bath in the old tub, letting her fingers fall under the brass faucet, testing the temperature of the water. She loved that the bath was in the bedroom. It felt decadent, like a Parisian brothel. The water was hot and steamy and she added her own concoction of oils; olive, ginger and lemon. Then she sprinkled rose petals in the water and climbed slowly into the tub, adjusting her body to the heat.
So what now? What was she going to do with today and all the days that stretched out relentlessly in front of her? She looked down at the crimson and deep pink rose petals floating around her. Perhaps jasmine flowers would have been appropriate given her Christian name but rose petals felt more exotic. Tea was steeping in the china cup. Jasmine didn’t believe in tea bags or supermarket ceramics. She reached out her hand for the flowery teacup and sipped from it, savouring the taste of herbs, breathing in the fruity scent of her bath while lying in her own tub. She now had her own fragment of the world, where things could be arranged as she wanted them. Her life belonged to her, it seemed.
She smiled but a shadow, was ever present, at the edge of consciousness, clouding the brightness like the mountain she could see from the bathroom window. It was majestic, powerful and slightly overwhelming. She could hear the breeze catching the wind chimes she had hung from the rickety wooden awning that morning. Their musical tinkling made her feel at home.
Home. Would this be the one? She’d moved into the cottage after years of wandering.
A couple of years in Byron Bay, sleeping on the sofas and off the goodwill of friends. She’d worked the markets once her savings had been spent. Savings accumulated from a job in a dress shop, serving spoilt middle-aged women. Evening she walked along one of the most beautiful beaches at sunrise and in the mornings she’d watch the early morning yoga enthusiasts saluting to the sun.
She’d briefly moved in with a guy, appropriately named Storm. She’d met him through the sofa-offering friends and moved into his small place out at Mullumbimby. He turned out to be a man manifested from her mother’s warnings.
Jasmine’s mother, Olivia, was still beautiful, however that beauty had been buried beneath layers of bitterness like a jewel covered with dust and grime, no longer able to shine.
“Never rely on anyone else, Jasmine. Everyone will let you down in the end.” She would put a finger to her nose as if parting with sage advice but succeeding only in looking comical. The wine glass would have been filled and emptied a good many times by now. Always a negative woman, she would become almost Shakespearean in her tragic gestures after a cheap bottle of red.
It was as if with Storm, Jasmine had pushed all the ‘don’t’s’ into a big machine which had projected an image on a wall. The image of Storm. She had so loved that name. Tempestuous, exciting. Like the metallic smell which emanates when thunder beckons. Electric. Dangerous. With gun metal grey and purple bruises under her eyes, shocked at how much she had accepted and passed off as her own fault, she’d packed her red holdall and taken a bus south. Not knowing where to get out she had taken a series of buses going south, until she arrived at the small town of Bega, southern New South Wales.
Creeks wound their way through the green paddocks straight out of the pages of picture books, with cows and horses grazing. Mountains thickly covered with trees. She’d found lodgings in the house of an eccentric local woman called Imogen. Imogen could sniff out a suffering soul with the air of an aristocratic cat sniffing out lunch, and welcomed Jasmine into her home. She’d named the house Nanda, the Sanskrit word for joy. Jasmine enjoyed her time there, mixing with all the broken people who turned up at Imogen’s door, getting drunk on rhubarb wine and surviving on a diet of homemade soup. The wine and the soup endlessly supplied by the obliging Imogen. Like birds with broken wings they healed themselves before it was time to take flight again.
Jasmine stayed there until the frosts began. The cold was too much for Jasmine and the outer scars, if not the one’s that went deeper, had healed. It was time to move on.
This morning she had woken with the kookaburra’s and padded barefoot through to her very own kitchen. Ran her hands over wooden cupboards feeling the grooves and pulled out her old teapot from one of them. She held the teapot under the tap to warm it before adding dandelion leaves. It was ancient and tannin stained. Her maternal grandmother, Freya Spring, had left it to her. She had been a kind woman, so different from her sour daughter, Jasmine’s mother. She had tipped the boiling water over the leaves and left it to brew. The special cornflower blue teapot, the only possession that had always been with her on her journeys. The teapot had been wrapped in newspaper and placed with care in her red holdall many times.
As she waited, various cities and country towns filled the corners of her mind with fractured memories of friends made and lost once she’d moved on, always with broken promises to keep in touch. May be she’d inherited her wanderlust from her father. She’d never known him but her mother had said that he was a sailor. Of course at other times her phantom father had been a circus performer, a writer or an artist. Depending on her mother’s mood and the story she was telling. Still her words rang in Jasmine’s ears.
“You’re just like your father.”
Words not said with pride but spat with reproof. She imagined a tall man, too sensitive to stay around Olivia’s sharp tongue. But what sort of man would leave his child?
Once the tea was poured she added honey from a warmed teaspoon to the amber fluid in her cup. She wrapped her hands around it and breathed in the herby aroma before carrying it carefully through to her room to run her morning bath.
Now surrounded by the petals of roses she allowed her mind to wander. She had lived by the sea, taking long walks along the shore, beachcombing for treasures cast adrift. Wood washed smooth by the sea and tiny seashells. She’d lived in the hills where the air is cooler, surrounded by trees and odd people hiding from life. She’d tried cities where everyone wore uniforms of neutrals; black, grey and navy. No time to stop, marching on like sombre soldiers, unsmiling and upright. Then there were the country towns which had driven her half crazy with their narrow mindedness and slow, drawling music.
The cottage she had moved into earlier that week was small and timber clad. She’d made her mark on it by painting the walls in her favourite shades of lilac, lime green and aubergine. Hung posters, pastel scenes from Europe with French writing, on the wall. Covered the plain chairs with Indian silk throws and blankets knitted in brightly coloured wool. Rolled out rugs, collected from a handful of overseas trips, on the worn floorboards.
She didn’t have much to do that day. Jasmine had put the house in order like a small hurricane working backwards. Fixing things up and enhancing the charm already there. She’d given herself a week to settle before she approached the local market. Jasmine made ornamental hair clips covered in glass beads and silk flowers. She planned to sell them on a stall at the market. She had begun to make decorative hand mirrors and brushes on to which she glued pearls and shaped wire. Her grandmother had always said that Jasmine would have been happy in another century, with her love of delicate beauty and fine antique lace.
It had been an abrupt exit from her last home. She had been renting a room in a poet’s house in a small town called Bellingen, nestled in the hills like a jeweled necklace in the décolletage of a lovely woman. She’d loved the river winding through the town, the Bohemian feel and the local people.
The poet had been interesting; older and quiet. Their relationship had been unexpected. He was a confirmed bachelor living a solitary existence and Jasmine danced in with her henna tattooed feet which didn’t keep still for long. She had intrigued Oscar, the poet whose work was no longer fashionable. He had already made money as a stock broker and lived on the proceeds. Jasmine reminded him of women of the past, although not his past. She swept through the rooms of his house, her hair seeming to flow like party streamers. Her skin smelt of lemons and spices.
Jasmine couldn’t say what had made her leave. She had become comfortable with Oscar and Bellingen. A feeling she wasn’t used to. Fear of loss made her sever the ties she had forged. Now she wasn’t sure whether she felt grief or relief. But first came guilt as she pictured Oscar, making sandwiches for her journey, her journey away from him. His kind face offering assurances of a commitment not asked for. He had a wonderful way of being grateful for whatever she offered him, no matter how small or inconsequential. And what did she feel for him? This man who respected her as no other had before him. Through the idyllic first days of a new love affair still the voice of her mother echoing through the joy.
“Never rely on anyone else, Jasmine. Everyone will let you down in the end.”
And hadn’t they? So far.
Much later she sat on the deck, her long red hair pulled back and held by a tortoise-shell clip. Dressed in an emerald green silk robe, her pale face drawn into a frown. Jasmine placed her damask covered journal on the table, took out a pen filled with violet ink and began to write. Since childhood Jasmine had written in her journal every day. It gave an anchor point to her turbulent life. A life sailing on the breeze like a leaf. Or a magic cloak which landed when the wind died down and stayed until it took it up again, soaring through the air, never looking back, always looking toward the next place. She pulled her graceful legs under her as elegant fingers ran a pen nimbly across a blank page.
The sun was going down between the trees by the dam. Jasmine squinted as it slowly sunk away, giving in to the indigo velvet sky of dusk. Pen clamped between her teeth, thinking about what to write and what to leave out. A stray curl brushed her face. Jasmine immediately tucked it behind one ear.
As with all change there was re-birth. Jasmine’s life was playing it’s song with her accompanying the notes with her own voice. Giving it depth and a timbre not there before. All this coming together whilst Jasmine sat, unaware of the tiny flicker of life starting to grow within her. Oscar would leave his mark yet.

THE MEMORY BOX

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My feet eat up the paved path, shoe leather beating a tattoo, a forwards dance step pushes me onward. The stone buildings, breathtaking in this half-light, throw threatening shadows as the cooling sun slips down the page of the sky.
She hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t let her. If Dee didn’t say the words it wouldn’t be true. It would be a reality that hadn’t played out and he would be sitting up in his bed, laughing that musical laugh of his, apologising for the fuss he’d made, for worrying us. I can see my father, Francis Cole, in his tartan pajamas, spots of pink on his cheeks. His wanton hair refusing to lie flat, smiling and patting my hand. Dee is standing back in the shadows like a harbinger of future tragedy, refusing to enjoy the moment. Overlaid on this scene, like a veil barely seen, Dee is pulling the cover over our father’s face.
Old stone is replaced with glass and metal, office buildings. I reach the park, the grass glitters with dew and time slows. I wait in the space between two breaths, choosing a future with or without him. I know it isn’t my decision, in one choice lies madness, but for a moment I want to hold back the tide of grief and live in a world which still has Francis Cole in it.
“Allie, you could help you know. It’s not all about wallowing. Death brings a lot of work.”
Dee stands with her back to the wall, dressed in black and holding a teacup. We have just buried our father, although I have to admit the arrangements were done almost entirely by Dee. She’s good in a crisis.
The front room of Dad’s old house is full, aunts who’ve got stouter and men with whiskey on their breath. I’m wearing a crimson dress with lime green shoes. I have raised a few eyebrows but I don’t care. Dad hated funereal black and he loved my quirky style. I pick at my nail varnish, letting Dee’s words hit the floor around her sensible shoes. She’s asking why it’s her who does all the work, when she has a full-time job and I work casual shifts picked up randomly. And I can’t answer her fairly. In an attempt to placate my sister I pick up a tray of sandwiches, curling at the edges in the unseasonably hot May afternoon. I walk among tweedy aunties on dry sherry and men with yellow teeth drinking Dad’s Laphroaig which Dee had opened. I can hear the creak of dry bones turning in his freshly buried coffin.
“Wasted on them. Cousins circling with avarice hoping to pick up a morsel or two.” I can see Dad’s red face, blue eyes blazing. “Never here when I got sick or when your mother died. And by the way, my bones aren’t dry yet.”
I stand in the middle of the living room holding the tray of sandwiches aloft for our guests. Aunts and cousins are being helped into their coats, their bat skins, by Dee whose gaze rests on me and then floats to the ceiling. She doesn’t say anything but her disappointment is licking the walls.
I carry the plates scattered with cake crumbs and start filling the blue plastic bowl in the kitchen sink. There’s no washing up liquid. Dad thought it was extravagant, he wasn’t mean but he had unusual ideas. When my friends came round after school Dad would be wearing a pajama top tucked into his trousers, sometimes a tea-cosy on his head. He said he got too hot if his ears were covered. I was delighted. I’d say “That’s my Dad, he’s an academic.” I had no idea what that meant but it sounded exciting, like a trapeze artist or a magician. Dee didn’t bring her friends home at all. She appears holding a carriage clock. I frown. “Wilfred said Dad promised it to him.”
“Isn’t that one engraved by the university? What would Wilfred want with that?”
“Closest he’ll get to a university,” Dee sits down and I notice how much older she’s looking. Jowly around the chin, lines that were sharp gone fuzzy, her thin cheeks paper-like.
I turn away and slide dirty plates through scalding water. A savage pain grips my insides and at the bottom of this well of grief boils guilt.
“It doesn’t matter, Allie. He was fine with it.”
“I know.” My voice is sharp. “You were with him.” Now accusatory.
“Look, I know you were his favourite but there were things I could do for him that you couldn’t.”
I don’t correct her, I stand perfectly still, knowing that if I make a sound it would be an animal moan.
“Sit down, Allie.”
I turn back to the washing up as my sister speaks. “Will you help me with his things tomorrow? We need to clear the house before we sell.”
“Isn’t it a bit soon?”
“He won’t need them and I have to get back to work.”
The open window brings a cool breeze into the stuffy room. Dee is taking Dad’s clothes from his wardrobe and throwing them on the bed. With each item a different story walks through my mind. The rust coloured sports jacket he wore to family dinners, the mustard shirt I can see him in clearly at a picnic in a city park where he’d fallen asleep after too many wines. He must have kept that shirt for 20 years. The smart black jacket he’d had made especially for his retirement dinner at the university, still with the purple silk handkerchief sticking out of the breast pocket.
“I think he only wore this once.” Dee flicked her fingers at the lapels and dust clouds hit the air.
“He was annoyed that Edward Morris gave a speech at the dinner. Remember how he hated him, Dee?”
“He’s still alive, Edward Morris. That would piss Dad off too.”
I noted Dee’s words, uncharacteristically crude. I start to sneeze, dust is crawling into my nasal passages.
“Get some bin liners, Allie. The rest can go to charity.”
“I hope I never see someone wandering around the city in Dad’s clothes.”
“When did that happen to anyone, except in books?”
I sneeze again. “When we’re done here, can we go through the photos?”
“They’re in the drawer under the cutlery.”
“The photos?”
“The bin liners.”
In the sixties style sideboard in the dining room, we find boxes of documents, old birthday cards, childhood drawings by me and Dee which crackled with age. There were four boxes of loose photographs. Black and white, and colour photos that had faded to muted yellows and browns.
We pile them on the table and go through them searching for parts of our lives long forgotten. Birthdays celebrated, bicycles we learnt to ride, family holidays. Two little girls as cute as possums, as happy as the sun high above us. There were a few snaps of Mum sitting on a deckchair in the garden, painting her nails. One of her holding a baby a few days old, she was leaning to kiss her infants head. Was that Dee or me? Mum didn’t live long enough to tell us, to take us through the boxes of photos, telling us stories and Dad hadn’t a clue. A woman would know by the print of a curtain in the background, the style of a dress, what year the moment had been captured. The wallpaper looks Laura Ashley. A mother would never forget the identity of her child. I put away the last of the memories wondering how we were going to decide who was to take what.
“There’s a box we missed.” Dee reaches into the sideboard and pulls out a box which looks cream coloured but on closer scrutiny is a print of pale roses on a faded background which may once have been white. Dee takes the card from its holder on the front of the box and passes it to me. It says ‘Sylvia” in Dad’s untidy scrawl. The box is lined with lavender tissue paper and smells faintly of talcum powder. Inside are photographs and locks of blonde hair tied with ribbon. Dee opens a red velvet covered jewelry box that contains baby teeth.
“This is the start of a memory box.”
I nod. It should have contained photos of us on our first day at school, taken by Mum from the garden while we posed on the front steps. Or perhaps recipes of our favourite cakes devoured after school while telling her about our day. She didn’t know that I loved banana bread and Dee, almond biscuits.
Dee hands me a photo of a smiling woman with two small, brown haired children. I recognise the woman as someone I’d know all my life. The long straight dark hair and striking eyebrows. It is Dee, except it isn’t. Our mother is smiling, Dee rarely does.
“I didn’t know she looked like this, like you. Why did we never ask to see more photos of her, Dee? I only ever saw their wedding photo when Dad had it propped up on the piano.”
Dee’s sad eyes rested on mine. “We didn’t want to know what we were missing.”
“Did you know about the likeness?”
“I guessed. Dad could barely look at me without pain in his eyes.”
I covered her thin hand with mine, noticing the contrast between her white bony hand and mine that had spent too long at the beach.
“I didn’t realise. I’m sorry.”
We spread the photos out on the kitchen table. There are photos of our mother on the beach with us, laughing into the camera with two girls balanced on her hips. Dee and I wearing bathers with flimsy skirts, Mum in a once piece that showed her long legs. In another she bent down between us, holding my hand as I cried at the camera. I recognise our old kitchen which was ripped out in the mid-eighties, the old ceramic kettle gleams as new.
On the back of the photos in a script I didn’t recognise it said, ‘Sylvia and the girls, Manly Beach’. ‘At home’.
A couple on a rock. ‘Sylvia & Francis, honeymoon in Greece’. Another one of a woman with Dee’s face, blowing out candles. ‘Sylvia’s 21st, Sept’.
There were so few of them and the photos I held in my mind were the ones that weren’t there. Mum and Dad’s Silver Wedding Anniversary, the two of them pictured at Dad’s retirement do. There were no photos of her after 1980.
Our father was a decade older than our mother. Mum’s parents had been appalled at the age gap. She’d been so young and vital, who’d have thought that they would be burying her?
I pack the box carefully and pass it to Dee. “You have it.”
My sister nods and I don’t say it but I hope she’d finds whatever she lost along the way in the folds of that tissue paper. If our family had stayed intact she would have been Mum’s favourite, I was sure of that.

HINTERLAND CALLING

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I got out of the car and knew at once, despite the abandoned cars peppering the green hills. I couldn’t even see the main house, hidden by vegetation as high as the roof. I wasn’t put off by the bare brick interior or the dark stained floorboards. I smiled and then I noticed Andrew’s face, a mix of horror and amazement. Apartments in London and Sydney, and a McMansion in a street lined with shiny mail boxes hadn’t prepared us for this.
Reduced to rustic, by choice. A brick cottage with no upstairs bathroom and ventilation holes big enough for snakes and more. “Eighth generation possum.” The vendor told us proudly. Andrew assured me that although the possum could get down into the bathroom, it wouldn’t. What did he know? A high pitched shriek from me and he appeared carrying a piece of gyprock. ‘We won’t block it up completely, just so she can stick her nose out and the kids can feed her.’ My friends would be amazed that I’d even pop in to use the toilet, let alone live here. And that was before a giant cane toad sat by my feet while I sat on said toilet. ‘Andreeeeeeeeewwww’.
That was just the main dwelling. We had another building which was to be my writing and painting space, plus guest accommodation for anyone game to spend some time on the ‘farm’. I decreed that the building should be dismantled. Termites I could have lived with. My dad christened ‘the building that never was’. More accurately he was almost ‘the dad that was no more’. He leaned on the wooden railing, chatting to Andrew. The railing gave way, the building spat him out. Crunch, splat. He jumped and launched himself to avoid a steel post where only yesterday a tree had been tethered. He fell 10 feet, I wailed like a banshee and my mother didn’t speak for half an hour. A black bruised foot and a scar shaped like devil’s horns on his forehead. Unusual souvenirs for the couple who usually played it safe with a bag of local nougat or marmalade from the Ginger Factory. I declared the building evil and Andrew took it to pieces over our first winter, some white ant ravaged walls as thin as paper and as easily torn as sweet wrappers.
And the cottage, I repainted those bare walls in white. My instinct to paint the entire building white, inside and out, strong. To make it clean, to paint out the dark. Then came the stairs, a wooden step ladder I couldn’t imagine negotiating after a glass or two of cab sav. Our first big job, the stairs, until we discovered the wooden floor was full of holes and little white ants. The day we found the little critters was the first day of many hard rains. We ripped the floor up. We had no stairs. To get to bed we had to climb a mud bank four feet from the ground which led to a door giving access to the bedrooms. Emerging from the rain with a determined face, I clutched a bottle of wine, trying not to fall as I negotiated a river of mud. It wasn’t until day 10 that we had stairs and flooring and the rain still hammered on a, thankfully intact, tin roof.
I call it a farm because it is to us, despite the animals being wild; wallabies, rabbits, and once a wandering dingo howling in the night. And two dogs that adopted our boys, or the other way around. Cold Comfort Farm is what I dubbed it in the early days. We planned to live off the land, without a clue we researched. We have clay soil and predators. We’ll turnover the soil with a crowbar, plant legumes. And we have to have chickens, right?
Tough for a girl like me, with a bird phobia. The bush turkeys have lived here for longer than we have. The prince of darkness birds with rudders for tails but no sense of direction, their huge bulk and tiny heads. I asked the locals for advice on how to tackle them, ‘shoot them’ came the reply. I didn’t like them but I didn’t want to shoot them. I would name them to personalise them, make them less scary. Philip, Bartholomew and Lester. Only one left. I asked my boys if they wanted to name it. “Dave,” said Jordan the 10-year old.
Now I’m so used to them, secure in the knowledge that they’re scared of me. We live side by side and I protect my herbs with swathes of chicken wire. Not sure how I’ll go with those chickens.
I love shopping in the local town. I chat on first name terms with the shopkeepers. I know the difference between fresh local produce and the smorgasbord of city choice. For me it’s all about the people. How things have changed since London or Sydney when I’d spend hours searching for an obscure ingredient for our evening meal. Now I’m happy with a locally grown tomato.
Now where was I? Anyone know a good name for a chicken?

HORSEY HORSEY DON’T YOU STOP

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People who know me will know I err on the cautious side. I don’t take risks, I even use hand signals when driving the dodgems. I’m a worrier. I put it down to my imagination but I think it may run in the family.

When we moved to Australia, the husband, who had lived in London for many years, became all outdoorsy and brave. I’d fallen in love with the indoors man who nursed his pint (or should I say pints) and watched back-to-back movies with the curtains closed on sunny days. I hadn’t changed. But I became his project. The ‘let’s make Jules face her fears’ project.

I’d always felt a bit embarrassed by my fears to tell you the truth. I could be coaxed onto fairground rides as long as I was completely oblivious to how dangerous or scary they were. I had to be shuffled on with speed. The husband nearly wet his pants in Chessington World of Adventure whilst on the big swinging boat. I asked him what was the least scary place to sit and he said ‘up the back’. Every time the boat swung my arse lifted from the seat and with nano-seconds to spare it rolled back the other way. The girl in front of me had been terrified too but on seeing my white anxiety-filled face and hearing my screams, forgot about her own fears and laughed herself silly at mine.

Back to the husband’s project. Step one: take wife horse riding.

There is a history here. Me and horses don’t go back a long way. I mean we go back a long way but we don’t get on. As a child I didn’t even particularly like cantering around and clicking my tongue. I didn’t go through a pony stage. When I was 10 we moved to Newmarket (England). Strange. There were almost as many horses on the roads as cars. Every stable exercised their horses, not just cantering on the downs, but crossing streets and heading up avenues. There were special areas where the horses could be walked. Wide pavements with fence-like barriers dividing the horses and making sure pedestrians were under no allusions as to who was boss here.

They weren’t little ponies either but thumping great race horses, walking majestically down sidewalks, occasionally tossing their heads with pride.

When I was 13 my dad decided it would be character building for me to get a paper-round. Looking back I think that the paper shop owner laughed himself silly at this one. I was the youngest, the skinniest and I lived furthest from the paper shop. Unaccustomed to manual labour, I was given the round that was the furthest from the paper shop – but in the other direction. For those who know the area, I lived at the other end of Crockford Park. My paper round started on the other side of Bury Road and continued to a small estate almost parallel with St Felix Middle School. As you can tell, I still feel sorry for my skinny arse.

Where the boys (I was the only girl) didn’t even need a bicycle as they pushed a Daily Mirror here, a copy of The Sun in the next house. Rows of terraces hungry for their morning news. Not me. The most I had in any area was 3 paper-drops then back on my bike for another mile. I struggled with The Guardian, Horse and Hounds, The Observer. Big, weighty papers with gravitas. There were stables here and there and this was where those uppity horses all lived. They were everywhere. I didn’t wear a cap but if I had I would have doffed it. Not so much through respect but fear.

One day a magnificent beast and I rounded a corner together, from opposite directions. I came unsuspectingly, almost whistling, from one direction whilst Red Rum popped up from behind a couple of cottages, a small man on its back. The horse reared up in front of me. It was like looking into the jaws of hell. I must have blacked out for a moment as the rider brought the horse under control. I can still see it in my mind. Shortly afterwards I chucked in the paper round.

Back to the husband’s project. We went horse-riding in the countryside. The husband is an accomplished horseman so I sent him off, waving happily. He’d be bored with me. And hadn’t they given me a slow, fat horse. And wasn’t I surrounded by other newbie’s and an experienced instructor. They lost me fairly early on in the piece. I was alone with a huge beast I didn’t have the faintest idea how to handle. After about another 20 minutes, as I sobbed pathetically, the horse decided it was time to go home. I couldn’t get off the bloody thing as it was too high and I was too timid to deal with it. I mean, I didn’t have any sugar lumps or carrots. I felt like a small child who’d got lost at the fair. Everything had meant to be lovely but it had all gone terribly wrong.

It was the last time I went horse-riding. Even better than that: it was the end of “Project: Let’s Scare Jules to Death”.

COUNTING PEGS

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This story recently won the Albury City Award as part of the Write Around the Murray festival

Helen was in the garden again. Counting pegs. Some days she’d count them as she put out her washing but once she had begun to put them in colour order too. Warms to cools to white. White was the coldest being the colour of snow. From then on she not only counted pegs but followed her colours too.
Sometimes she could hear the baby scream. She didn’t rush inside, not until she’d finished. Then she would run, holding the washing basket in one hand and the peg basket in the other. Across the grass and the terrace, stumbling past earthenware pots crammed with Lobelias and Impatiens, and up the steps to the French doors. She wouldn’t leave the unused pegs outside. Once inside she would count the pegs left over and add up the scores to make sure all pegs were accounted for. Only then would she see to the baby. Scoop him up and unhook the ugly bra, the only one that fitted. Hugo latched on and sucked noisily. Finn would start to yell at the top of his lungs. He’d spent a lot more time at home since the baby arrived.
She hadn’t talked to Alan about the pegs. And the pegs were just a part of it. There were days when Helen sat at the kitchen table, holding her chin in her hands, her eyes squeezed shut. Shutting her mind to her house filled with smooth surfaces, bench tops and tables, now covered with the debris of family life.
“Are you alright, Mummy?” Finn’s voice, curious but not concerned, he was only three and half after all. “Can I watch TV, Mummy?” Helen swept her hands through her hair and stopped at the matted curls which held them prisoner. She looked up at the innocent but still manipulating face of her first born. His white blonde hair cut short on the sides. The glint in his eyes told her that he knew he had won, even before she spoke softly. “Yes”. She wondered if she had the energy to care whether he watched too much telly anymore. Her previous regimes seemed to belong to someone else, someone military perhaps.
How Alan hadn’t noticed was astonishing to her. He must have a lot on at work, she’d stopped asking. Or he’d been screwing one of the paralegals, she had no feelings either way. Helen felt invisible, her form was completely transparent, a substance like cellophane stopped her innards from leaking onto the new carpet.
She hadn’t always been like this, she thought to herself for who was there to listen. The strains of ‘Bob the Builder’ could be heard from the other room and Helen could weep at how her life had shrunk to this. Even the face of her angel baby didn’t touch the fibres of her any more.
She had once been a girl who’d broken men’s hearts, who refused to bow to convention. She’d wanted to be free but in time ended up behaving like the men she looked down upon, leaving before her one night stand awoke, drinking too much. One man did stand out, not Alan, he came later. This one had been called Dave, they’d met at medical school. When they moved in together she swapped their traditional roles. Helen would wash the car on Sunday mornings while Dave would sweat over a roast, trying not to burn the gravy. It turned out that Dave was a terrible cook and she hated cleaning the car. Even now she drove round in a car whose bonnet was marked by rotting fruit dropped from trees, while the inside looked as if she had strewn the contents of a litter bin evenly over seats and in the foot wells. Wet food dried slowly on the baby’s car seat.
She hadn’t even wanted children. She wanted to travel the world, save the planet, dance in Rio, and meditate in the Himalayas. At the end of the day even Helen the brave became a slave to her body, her urges, and the chemical compositions of her. When she met Alan she had recently shaved her head for charity but he saw through the stubble to the woman Helen really was. He saw what no one had seen before. She wasn’t an easy lay who was great fun at parties. She was all heart and soul. And the sight of her scared the be-Jesus out of his mother which could only be a good thing.
She’d been attracted by Alan’s fair hair, his face which turned pink when he was flustered. It touched her insides that he was a vulnerable man. She had no time for heroes. Helen could see in his eyes that he knew she didn’t believe him when he pretended to be the tough guy.
Now Alan came home to a woman with dried milk and cereal stains on her clothes. He tried to help, bunching discarded clothing and carefully folded soiled nappies and putting them down somewhere else. When Helen made a supreme effort and showered, her lank hair curled with tongs for extra body, she had no interest in laying down her besieged self for her husband. She was the hand servant of infants and there was nothing left for anyone else. Least of all herself.
Helen’s mind drifted to the women she used to welcome into her surgery, sad women with washed out faces, limp clothing. She would flash her confident and slightly smug smile at them, prescribe tablets and talk to them in her dulcet tones. “You’ll be fine. Make sure you shower in the morning, it’ll make you feel better. Buy flowers for yourself and don’t expect to be perfect.” She thought she’d got it nailed, the post-baby blues. Now Helen could only imagine how those poor women must have hated her.
After Hugo’s birth but before the pegs she had made up tunes in her head, noises to shut the demons out. Helen hadn’t planned the counting. She was out at the clothes line during one of those wonderfully warm and blustery days, perfect for laundry. She was attempting Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, the notes crowding her brain when she realised that as she pegged each item of clothing numbers flew from her frontal lobe. Numbers clear and certain against a backdrop of mess and madness, they stood up tall and proud, very clean. The sounds of music and Hugo’s wails slipped off beyond the mountains. Only digits ruled here.
After work Alan stormed through the kitchen, effing and blinding. “Damn, damn. I forgot to get those papers to the bank for signing.” Vague thoughts of re-mortgaging floated through Helen’s mind. They missed her doctor’s salary, had fallen behind. Alan looked over at her, a skeptical expression on his face. “I don’t suppose you…? Fuck it, Helen. You’ll have to. It’s just a case of signing them in front of the mortgage manager. Nice girl.” The rosy colour in his panicked face didn’t make her glow any more. Helen felt numb.
Alan didn’t know that it’d been a month since his wife had left the house. A month since the front door had clicked safely behind her. She’d been buying groceries on-line and festering in a range of nightwear during the day since that awful time in the post office. She didn’t want to tell him but she didn’t want to go out either. She had to keep her secret or the contempt he held in his eyes for her could well evolve into pity. Helen would not be pitied.
She planned her moves overnight, while Alan slept. She prepared the bag for the baby, spare nappies, clothes, teething gel and a rattle. She placed them in the bottom of her Mclaren stroller, the Rolls Royce of buggies. Alan had bought it himself, proudly showed her its features. Yet another status symbol where the cheaper option would have done just as well. Helen placed a book and a pop gun in the basket for Finn. For herself she packed a bottle of rosemary essential oil for nerves and threw in one of those miniature bottles of scotch Alan brought home from mini-bars in hotels. He still hadn’t realised he was charged for them.
Helen sat on a dining room chair next to the stroller and heard Hugo’s faint cries, growing more frantic. She ran up to his room, Alan hadn’t wanted their newborn in their bedroom, he couldn’t sleep. If he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t work. And someone had to. Helen felt her inner soul become less visible than it already was. She sat downstairs, baby at her breast, tears on her face. Afterwards she crawled into bed beside her sleeping husband who had no clue to the world Helen now inhabited.
Alan had left before Helen opened her puffy eyes. Finn was sitting crossed legged on the bed, poking sticky fingers at her cheeks. Alan must have given him breakfast. Helen wiped a crusty line that ran from her mouth to the pillow. “Mummy! Hugo was screaming and screaming.”
Helen only heard the sound of next doors car reversing sharply from their driveway. “No, sweetheart. He’s quiet.”
Finn grinned. “He is now. He might be dead.” He began to jump on the bed.
There was no fear at the core of her, only a sense of right and wrong. It would be wrong to go back sleep before checking on Hugo. She launched across the bedroom carpet and ran into the baby’s room. Hugo was passed out on his back, his tears still wet on his cheeks. The room stank of shit.

Helen sat with her coat buttoned up and Hugo in the stroller next to her. Finn ran around with his hoodie on backwards. Surely that was dangerous. All she could think of was how she could murder a cigarette but she’d given up years ago, there were none in the house. She remembered her first boyfriend, older, who had smoked and she’d nicked one of his cigarettes and put it in her jewelry box, along with an American dollar from a childhood holiday in the States. If she still had that ciggy it would be very stale.
She shook her shoulders and wheeled Hugo out to the car, transferred the documents from the basket at the bottom of the stroller to the passenger seat. She un-strapped Hugo and placed his moist, limp body in his seat. Then she went to collect Finn who had his head in the fridge begging for orange juice. “No darling. We have to go out now. Remember, we’re helping Daddy.”
That seemed to work, his face split in a grin. He closed the fridge door and placed his pudgy little hand in hers, it was still covered in honey from breakfast. Why did she not feel overwhelmed with love for this cherub of hers? She didn’t feel safe with him, didn’t know what he was going to do next. Helen’s mind drifted to the laundry she had put on early that morning and found the strength to leave the house, lock all the doors, making sure she had her front door key in her pocket.
The bank was in the centre of town, near the town hall and the library. Parking was difficult unless you got lucky or you used the supermarket car park. On the way there Finn counted trees which Helen understood. She would have counted them herself if she hadn’t needed to keep her eyes on the road. It came from long car trips before Hugo was born when Finn would get bored. Alan asked him to count trees and it worked. “Two, Six, Three!“ She tried not to let the jumbled sequence bother her.
“Look at the play park, Mummy. It’s shiny and new.”
He was right, they had stopped going to the play park because of broken and faded equipment and that awful time when Helen’s friend’s daughter, Freya had picked up a syringe and pricked her hand. Monica had to take Freya for a HIV test which mercifully turned out negative. Now it had a fence round it and slippery dips and swings in reds, blues and yellows, turrets around the top of the slide. Finn loved castles.
As they approached the town, Railway Street, where men and women bustled on both sides of the road, her hands became clammy and sweat beads melted in lines from her forehead. If there’s no parking in the town she would go straight home, Helen didn’t want to crawl curbs looking for spaces. She begged the parking fairies not to find anything, she wanted to go home and stand in the garden, the wind whipping up her skirts, the peg basket in one hand.
And there it was, opened up like a dark chasm, a shady spot where the sun didn’t shine. There were no contenders. No other hurried drivers needing to get their wages from the bank, return that overdue library book, late for their life drawing class at the town hall. It was only Helen. She circled once more for luck and when no one came she slid effortlessly into the spot, as if it were made for her 2005 model Land Rover.
Her heart pounded in her ribcage, she looked at the manila envelope on the passenger seat. Her breath became shallow and the sound of waves filled Helen’s inner ear. Finn stopped counting trees and Hugo began to whimper. He was still slightly pink from his screams of this morning. One whole month, four long weeks, she had stayed at home going quietly mad, becoming lonelier by the day. Friends stopped trying to visit, she’d been hostile at their attempts and couldn’t blame them.
Helen’s damp hands gripped the steering wheel. She knew there was no way she could get out of the car and walk into a building as austere as this bank, with a noisy toddler and fretful baby, her face slippery with sweat, dark wet spots under her arms, to meet this ‘nice girl’ Alan had spoken of. Helen wasn’t a nice girl.
The last time she had left the house she had queued in the post office for a passport for Hugo. The line had been long and Helen held her mewling baby in one arm and restrained a restless Finn with the other. They could travel to the places they had before kids, couldn’t they? Vietnam, India, Nepal. The passport papers were clamped between her teeth as she breathed through her nose. When she eventually reached the man at the counter and handed him the slightly grubby forms he raised an eyebrow and turned down his lips. “Madam, we like our forms in better order. You’ll have to fill in another and re-join the line.”
She didn’t know what possessed her but instead of arguing assertively and getting her own way, Helen burst into tears. Not pretty tears but big globs of salty water, her eyes squeezed in on themselves. The man had shrugged. Helen was determined that today would end on a more positive note. ‘I’m not doing this’ an inner voice struggled to be heard. Helen started the engine and drove back along Railway Street, turned right into The Avenue.
At the park Hugo slept in her arms while Finn ran round in circles, his arms stretched out and his brain full of sugar from the doughnuts she had bought from the bakery.
“Mummy, I’m outside! I’m outside!” Helen couldn’t stop a smile from creeping onto her naked face. She wiped the sugar carefully from her lips, trying not to wake Hugo. Alan would be livid about the paperwork but she would gladly swap him, the house and the Land Rover for the look on Finn’s face. And somewhere at the back of Helen’s mind lurked that basket of wet clothes. It was a breezy day and the sun shone brightly, another perfect day for laundry.

IVORY SILK AND BUTTONS OF PEARL

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I run the ivory silk through my fingertips. Feel its slippery touch. The pearl buttons down the front of the dress iridescent but yellow with age. A bit like their owner. I had taken my wedding dress from the large satin covered box stored on top of the wardrobe where it has been languishing for sixty years. The cake has been eaten, the champagne drained, the groom in the ground but the bride still remains. I am the remains of that bride.
At the bottom of the box is my tiara. Diamonds set in silver. Droplets of ice dancing to their own tune. Here I have also stored the miniature bride and groom that graced the top of our three-tiered cake. The groom in a morning suit and the bride with a fake veil of net.
It was a very big do, my wedding. The wedding of the year. Appeared in the society columns. Absurdly extravagant. I reveled in it. Belle of the ball. Waltzing around the ballroom on the arms of the handsome groom. I was spoilt. This was what I had expected, nothing less.
What I hadn’t expected was the groom’s cruel streak. His infidelities. Then hands which stopped caressing and began striking his lovely young wife. He loved to see her porcelain skin tarnished at his own hands. Cunningly choosing places no one but he would see. Tops of thighs, upper arms, even breasts were not sacred. No one knew. He so handsome and successful. And his fairytale bride in ivory silk with buttons of pearl.
I met Roger at my cousin’s house. He had the kind of looks that stemmed the flow of words from your lips. He knew it, of course. But he was so charming. And rich. I was running down the staircase, late for a game of tennis. David was at the bottom of the stairs talking to an elegant young man. I had thought him one of David’s boys but as soon as I looked into his green eyes I knew he wasn’t. He had fair hair which curled giving him the appearance of goodness. His skin was golden, tanned from a holiday abroad and from his mouth came the most deliciously wicked smile. We were married before the year was over.
Now I leaf through the old wedding album. A sea of smiling faces partially obscured by my water-filled eyes. The photographer had taken a picture of each table. Faded now and sepia-tinged. Old family members sprang to life from the pages. Friends long since departed made real again. My mother with her ever-present smirk of disproval, father laughing despite his unhappiness. My sisters, all three, bridesmaids. In full skirts of palest blue taffeta and Chantilly lace. As fair as bleached meadows in the summer sun. Uncles and aunts gleefully waiting for the wedding breakfast. Cousins, young and playful, now old and incontinent.
Dear Cousin David, delicate and fine. Fragile slim fingered-hands. Skin almost translucent. I have such memories of him as a child. We played monopoly together, learnt to ride and discovered our love of boys at around the same time. He drove his Bentley into a brick wall. Couldn’t live with his homosexuality, the life of an outcast. A sore upon society’s unblemished skin.
Bella, elegant and lovely. Her pretty face smiling, unadorned but still a sparkling jewel set amongst the brassy gold of other girls her age, whose mothers had allowed them to be painted with rouge. I stare at the photograph. Searching for clues of what was to come. A virgin then, before her heroin addiction made her turn, in desperation, to prostitution. How cruel the passing of time can be. And still the bride and groom waltz endlessly in my dreams. Don’t stop turning, keep the beautiful music playing, my full skirt twirling and my husband, keep him looking at me in adoration.
At the corner of a photograph I see my best friend, Nancy, looking at Roger haughtily. My closest friend and my new husband already shared more than me in common. They had shared a love of gin and a bed. It wasn’t long after our wedding day that I found them in flagrante as the expression goes. Both too drunk to care about hiding their lust for each other. I close the wedding album as a stark image of the two of them dulls any desire to continue looking within its faded pages, each one protected with a flimsy sheet of rice paper.
The upper middle class dream in our red-brick semi in a leafy suburb of North London. A flight of white painted stone steps led to our hospitable door. We held the smartest dinner parties, wearing our brightest, shiniest smiles. Danced to the latest tunes with vigour. Embraced the illusion of the daring young things. A thin veneer brushed upon the ugly reality. A reality made up of sordid couplings and icy retorts. Hate ran through our veins like hot water through copper piping.
Through the murkiness of forgotten memories a face rises up like a phoenix, haunting me. He didn’t have Roger’s too-perfect looks. His hair dark but peppered with grey. Wiry, never laying the right way. I remembered touching it, trying to tame its wildness. A comfortable face with kind eyes that seemed to smile at me without needing the curve of his lips. We had but one afternoon in Green Park, holding hands and sharing precious fragments of our inner-most secret selves. He didn’t look at me with adoration but with a quiet knowing which saw through to the essence of me. I didn’t want him to look inside me. To uncover the dark places I was afraid might be found. Here I felt unlovely and raw.
“Can’t you stay?” Robert referring to the lateness of the afternoon but I knew he meant more than today. I shook my head feebly.
“But why? What is it that keeps you going back to him?”
“I’m afraid that leaving him would make me disappear.”
He shrugged and I saw pain in that small gesture which appeared casual. He turned and walked away, leaving me standing, rooted in my misery. Too honourable a man to get involved with a married woman. And me too afraid to leave a loveless union which defined me. Without the appearance of respectability who was I? I wasn’t brave enough to walk that path so the chapter ended, as suddenly as it had begun.
The affairs were many. Casualties littered the passage that our marriage carved out. As time moved on they became fewer and finally stopped, with it Roger’s hand scarring my skin. Perhaps it was guilt that drove him to it. Guilt and disgust. The sins of his flesh which manifested on my flesh. Roger became, while not warm or loving, but kinder. I had thought him incapable of love, of feeling, of tenderness. Until the end when his worn-out body no longer functioned and he relied on me for most things, then he seemed to mellow and was thankful for my presence. Those last days together made me think that maybe there had been something between us, something small and vulnerable that we’d overlooked. Somewhere near the end I had stumbled at his bedside. Tired and sad I had lost my footing on my way to refill his water glass. His hands grabbed at me and his eyes bored into mine with an intensity I had seldom seen in them.
“Lay with me, Flora”.
And I did. I lay down beside my husband for the last time as we held each other awkwardly, as if strangers. We stayed there barely moving all that afternoon. Watching the shadows on the wall grow and fade until evening turned the air cool. I put the extra blanket over his sleeping form and sat in the winged-back chair beside the bed. Maybe this was love. We’d spent a lifetime searching elsewhere and perhaps all the time it was here, at home, our semi in Islington. Begging for nurture and sustenance amongst the flowers that flourished. Searching for light, this delicate flower, overlooked and undeserved of attention.
We never had children. For that I am grateful. Perhaps the seed of his loins couldn’t have grown within me all the time such hatred and distrust existed between us. In the end he became my child. Someone to look after and do as they were told. His gratefulness pathetic, a glimpse of the man he had been. Not a nice man, or a kind one but a powerful one nevertheless. And my man, of course.

MIDDLE-AGED WITH BENEFITS

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How do you know when you’re middle aged? When ‘I Hope I Die Before I Get Old’ no longer appeals. Or the gap between being too old to rock ‘n’ roll and too young to die is patently obvious. Rap makes me want to curl up with my hands over my ears but a blast of Elvis Costello or The Jam has me jumping round the room like I have moths in my undies. I always know when to stop. Just before it seems like a good idea to try the pogo again.

I believe that my generation is the one that didn’t take to rap. Do I hear you protest? Probably not. Build up of wax. I was there at its conception, when the lyrics were truly horrible and the tunes as clever as advertising jingles.

Napping. That’s an advantage. I can fall asleep after my morning cuppa and not feel embarrassed. It’s the natural eking out of sleep privileges. It takes me ages to go off to sleep at night so I make it up by increments during the day. It’s not that far away from when trying to make up for late nights twenty years ago, I used to lean against the toilet wall in the office bogs and doze until I heard someone scream my name.

I don’t go out as often as I used do. At least not under cover of darkness. And do you know what? I don’t care. I love staying in and watching endless British crime dramas, comedy panel shows and dramas with people my age in them. I’m still cutting edge. I am. I don’t watch ‘Mid Summer Night Murders’ or lifestyle shows.

I am no longer as conscious of my looks. But it is a bit sad knowing that I used to have it, oh yes, in spades, and I have no proof of that any more. Unless I carry around photos from twenty years ago proclaiming, ‘really. It is me.’ At least my hair is in the same style and not grey yet. Most of my friends that I haven’t seen for years still think I’m blonde as all the photos I put up on facebook are decades old or under good lighting. You can’t always depend on that light. A friend and I took a photo of ourselves on her phone last week before she returned to the UK for good. She sent it to me and asked me to put it up on facebook. Well, I couldn’t. I looked so old and scary. I keep checking it again, trying to reassure myself. It doesn’t get any better with looking.

We only have mirrors in the house where not to have them could cause an accident. I sometimes check myself in the rearview mirror in the car. Not while I’m driving. Obviously. The person I see looks okay. A bit sunken around the eyes, but quite becoming at a distance. I forget that I’m shortsighted. I just assume that I’m in soft-focus permanently.

On reflection; some good things. Some bad things. I probably give myself more treats than I should. Years of denying myself ice cream then discovering that the local gelato place does a cracking fig and mascarpone doesn’t help. And quite frankly who wants to spend any more time at the gym. I’ll never get those years back or the money spent on leotards.

And how do I feel inside? I feel magnificent. I have a confidence my younger self never had. I don’t mind looking a tit or that my teeth look funny when I laugh. I love to start sentences with “I’m sorry… I don’t want to upset you/I respect your weird uptight views on parenting, really I do but/I’d rather eat my own earwax than eat any more of your homemade gluten-free biscuits.” Stuff comes out of my mouth unsolicited. It’s great.

Another good thing is quiz lunches. Once a week the husband and I do a quiz from one of the weekend papers, over our post-lunch coffee. And I actually get a buzz out it. I mean I’m not doing crosswords or brain teasers, it’s not like we’re sad or anything. We like it. At least I do. Who’d have thought things would have come to this. I remember some of the things I used to do in my lunch hour. I won’t go into that here. Not the place. At least there’s no chance of pulling a muscle with world affairs.

Middle-aged? Who am I kidding? Only if I live to be 96. I do find I dress up more as I age. I won’t wear shorts any more and I love frilly Op-Shop blouses. Pencil skirts and beautiful dresses. I refuse to wear white or pastels. Maybe if I do live to 96 I’ll be swanning around in evening wear before breakfast. Purple with ruffles. Putting on an accent, and wearing a hat at a jaunty angle. I look forward to it.