This story was awarded a Highly Commended in the Global Short Story Competition (UK) September 2011

It’s important to choose the right earrings to go with my new dress.  Diamonds mean he’ll come, rubies mean he won’t.  I hold to the light the gold hoop from which a tear shaped diamond clings.  They were given to me by Ralph before he walked out smelling of some girl’s cheap scent. 

     Nevertheless they are the right choice for tonight.  I can see a story in the facets, my new blue dress fragmented and the morning sun is framed in diamond shapes.  A similar effect can be had by taking Valium and half a bottle gin.  The door behind me opens and in walks Evie.  She walks across my bedroom, she’s wearing jeans, not dressed for my special dinner yet.  She sits down uninvited.

     “Mum?”

     “What?”  I am sharp, she is not my favourite. 

     “I don’t want you to be hurt again.” 

     The word ‘again’ echoes between us like loose talk in an alleyway.   I ignore her, outlining my lips in a light brown shade, trying to decide on a colour to fill them in with.  Pink is too wishy-washy, too expectant.  Bright red too trashy.  I pick up a golden cylinder from my make-up bag and twist to reveal a dark red, like dried blood.  A colour to make them sit up, a colour which adds gravitas, a serious note to the occasion.  I stand and twirl.

     “Do you like my new dress, Evie?”

     “It’s lovely, Mum.  Is it silk?”

     She thinks it too grand for a birthday dinner at home.  “You asked him?”

     “Yes.”

     Her face appears to collapse on itself, weighed down by doubt and fear.  As a child she was always the cautious one, the one trying not hurt us.  I think she lost herself in the care of others.  I expected to call her Eve when she grew up but she never matured.  I kept back that name, I kept it along with my approval.  It’s hard for a woman with a daughter.  They overshadow or stay in the shade and Evie wears a lot of grey.

     Simon was the one who sat beside me as a child, helped pick out the strands of pearls to match my dress.  He’d work the clasp as his tiny breaths warmed my neck.

     “What about this one, Mummy?”  Cultured pearls in white or oyster, black ones alternated with balls of silver.  When he was six he made me a necklace from cut-up coloured straws threaded on a thin piece of elastic.  I wore it until the elastic frayed.

     “It’s not natural, Joy.”  Ralph would bleat.  “This link between the two of you.”  It made me think of lines of precious pearls, chasing around into eternity.  “It won’t do him any favours.”

     Evie hesitated in corners, not daring to enter rooms.  She once saved up for a bottle of almond essence for my birthday because she liked the picture on the front.  A woman with red hair, like mine, smiling out from her small bottle prison.  Evie placed the bottle in a tartan box lined with crumpled tissue paper and tied it with a bow.  I put it on the shelf in the kitchen.  I never used it.  Evie looked every day to see if I’d opened it, to see me put drops into cakes or biscuits until it drove me mad.  I hated baking, I hated the smell of the essence.  I once read that cyanide smelt of almonds.  Evie would have that hopeful look which pushed her lips apart, it made her look gormless.  I emptied the bottle down the drain.  There’s no point in harbouring false hopes.  Girls like Evie, colourless and pleading, for them life would not be kind.  My mother had raised me not to be hopeful, she said I would never be disappointed.  I believed her then but now I think disappointment sits with those who expect it and it stays.

     “I’ll ring Simon again, Mum.  He’s driving down from Brisbane, he said he’s hoping to drop in.”

     I’d forgotten she was there.  My daughter leaves the room and I don’t say a word.  I feel a heaviness gathering on my chest, a fizzy feeling rising to my face, reaching my eyes.  It must be for Simon, these tears, I haven’t seen him for ages.  He’s been busy.  It can’t be Evie.

     “Couldn’t you give her something?  A morsel dropped from the table while you’re giving it all to Simon.  You’re turning him into a self-centered prick.”  Ralph, the voice of reason.  He couldn’t hack it in the end. 

     An unwelcome image of Evie as a teenager, pulling her sleeves down, trying to hide her arms from me.  I clasped her wrists roughly, pull up her jumper sleeves up beyond her elbows.  Neat cuts crossed the bluish insides of her elbows, a ladder leading nowhere.

     I’ve sat here for most of the day, sponging foundation on my face, filling the cracks, running my hand through my red curls, only red now with the aid of a bottle.  The grey roots appear faster and faster, as time roars on.  The sun is setting. Lights shine from neighbouring houses, white squares on black cloth.  It’s nearly seven, time to go down.

     I haven’t helped Evie with dinner, I seldom do.  I remember my own mother saying, “Boys do so much more for their mums.”  I felt slighted but I understand now.  It’s not about practical things, it’s emotional.

     I squeeze my feet into heels.  Is it odd to wear tights and shoes in your own house?  I shuffle onto the landing and hear Evie and her husband, Brendan, in my kitchen.  Their children are running up and down the hallway, no doubt pressing dirty fingers on my walls. 

     Brendan’s voice rises above the mayhem, over the crooning of my Funny Valentine by Frank Sinatra, my favourite, playing from the living room.  “How can a woman called Joy cause so much pain?”  The sound of laughter, first his, then hers.  Evie stops laughing “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”  She opens her arms for her husband. 

     The scene is distant from me, as if held in a snow dome.  I reach the bottom step before they realise I’m there.  On my birthday you’d think someone would pay attention to me.

     Evie’s head jerks up from its nesting place.  “Mum, I didn’t hear you come down.”    She looks down at my shoes, falters before looking up again.  Eyes steady in her head, they’re green.  Like mine, clear and pale.  “Fancy a drink?  Gin and tonic?”

     I nod and glance around at the table set with a white tablecloth, cutlery laid in order, three wine glasses and two tumblers for the kid’s lemonade.  Three gold candles in pewter candle sticks, throwing light and shadow across the damask. 

     “Mum, I’m so sorry.  Simon had to fly off to Melbourne for a meeting.”  Evie frowns, not meeting my eyes.  She looks stressed, pink cheeks, she scratches her hand.

     Evie hands me a glass and I watch the lemon slice fall slowly to the bottom.  “You could have let me speak to him.  He is my son.”

     Those green eyes, like mine and yet they’re not.  There’s no fear in them, I see pity.  Ice cubes hit the edge of my glass, Evie takes it from me.

     “Mum, why don’t you sit down.  We’ll join you.  I just have to chop some herbs.  There you go.”

     I catch her looking at Brendan with pleading eyes.

     “I’ll join you, Mum.”  He sits down opposite me.  I see him realise too late that we are positioned eye-to-eye in confrontation.  “Girls!  Sit down now.  Draw a picture for Granny.”

     Alice peeks her head around the door jamb, ten years old, or is it eleven?  She looks like her mother, hair straight as a plum line.  She looks at me, defiant.  “I don’t know what to draw.”

     “Ask your sister.”  Brendan turns away from her.  “Kids.  Always running around, so much energy, eh Mum?”

     “I don’t remember it like that.  Simon and Evie were quiet.”  It occurs to me that they were probably terrified.  I couldn’t stand noise.  Simon kept me onside and Evie played in the shadows.  How lonely it was. In the days when mothers would chuck their kids out first thing and not expect them back until dinner time.  No wonder a lot of us drank and took sedatives.  Afternoon quiz shows looked shinier through the glassy frame of a Quaalude.  Shepherds pie had been made by mid-morning, sprinkled with cheese and popped in the oven to heat up in late afternoon.  Perfect family gathered round the table when Dad got home at six.  And when Dad stopped coming home, Evie took beef burgers from the freezer compartment.  She vacuumed around me, out of my mind, sprawled out in my chair, holding a glass of gin.  

     “Mum, are you alright?  I’ll get you some crackers.  You’ve hardly eaten a thing.”

      Evie put down a bowl of crackers and bowl of something sludgy next to it.  It tastes surprisingly good.  She’s right, I haven’t eaten all day.  It didn’t seem that long but I knew it was as I tracked the height of the sun.  It’s so easy to slip under a blanket of the past and it’s not one of those soft wool blankets, oh no, it scratches my skin until its red and raised into welts.  As I live in my memories the real world goes on. 

     “Here you are, Granny.”  Mary, the younger one appears at my elbow holding a sheet of paper.  I take it, a drawing of five figures, our names scribbled underneath; Mum, Dad, Alice, Mary and Granny.  You can tell it’s me because of the curly strokes of a red crayon.  She’s drawn a grin from ear to ear.  I hug her and she smiles smugly at me beneath long lashes.  “Alice hasn’t finished hers yet.”

      Evie looks at me, she’s still wearing her jeans but with a silky short sleeved top.  I can’t help it, I look down at her arms.  In the light of the candles I can see traces of silvery lines.  Evie catches my eyes and grabs one of my hands.  “Happy Birthday, Mum.”  

     Brendan brings through the beef for carving and the girls appear, bumping and jumping, faces shining as only young ones do.  “I want to sit next to Granny.”  “No, it’s my turn.”

     “Girls, you can sit either side of her.  Just move your glasses without spilling your drinks.” 

     My heart hangs in my chest as if I’ve worked out what it’s for.  I was a lousy mother but I’m a damn fine Granny. 

This may be out of left field but I can’t stand Walt Disney. And not because of the anti-semantic stories, although that would be reason enough. 

Walt had a tendency to turn magical fairy stories into crudely drawn, over-coloured spectacles. The wondrous Winnie-the-Pooh was turned from a classic threadbare playmate into an orange lump. The sort of bear won at the fairground after shooting ducks, complete with a too-small red sweater. But that’s nothing to what he did to Snow White and Cinderella. Snow White was made many decades ago now but there was never an excuse for her singing voice. Do you remember when she was getting water from the well and washing steps or something? It sounded like my granny on acid. Sorry, Granny but you weren’t famous for your singing voice. And I’m not suggesting you ever took acid. Undoubtedly the best (in my opinion) version of Snow White was by the Grimm Brothers. 

It starts with a Queen sitting sewing at a window. She pricks her finger on the needle and three drops of blood fall on the snow outside the window (not sure how she manages this but stick with me). The Queen gazes at her blood on the white snow and says, “I wish I had a daughter with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as the ebony window frame.” We all know the story from here. As a child the image of the beautiful Queen and the blood on snow, the ebony of the frame stayed in my memory clearer than it would have if I had seen them in some animated show. 

I also adored the image of the ugly sisters in Grimm’s Cinderella, cutting off their toe and heel in order to squeeze their oversized feet into the glass slipper. The prince discovered their deception, which was pointed out to him by a couple pigeons in a nearby tree, and saw blood pouring from the glass slipper. 

I take exception to the ‘they all lived happily ever after’ phrase. I’ve always been a bit perverse in not liking happy endings. They are two-dimensional and lack depth. Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ ends with the mermaid tragically giving up her prince so he can marry a normal girl and live a normal life. Not Disney. The Mermaid, you guessed it, married the prince and lived happily ever after. Even produced a sequel about their daughter. 

Disney sanitised the Grimm’s and Andersen fairy tales, among many others, and made all the pretty heroines and handsome heroes interchangeable. You may not agree but I also think the bright colours of his films are too intense. They make a child’s real life pale in comparison. 

There are others making animated characters and computer generated villains with the same head-turning-colour storyboards but they haven’t, on the whole, bastardised the old fairy tales from Germany and Denmark, Russia and China. Or anywhere else in the world. Baba Yaga the witch who lived in a house built on chicken legs. The Aboriginal tale of how fire was stolen from the red-breasted cockatoo. I loved ‘The Tinder Box’ by Hans Christian Andersen and my eldest son’s favourite story is by the Grimm’s; ‘The Youth who could not Shudder’. Perhaps you have your own favourite fairy stories and remember having them read to you. 

I’ll climb down and put away my soap box. And live mostly contentedly, occasionally irritably, sometimes sadly. But definitely not ever after.

I wrote this story five years ago. It was awarded a Commended in the Short Story Section of the 2011 Eyre Writers Award.

I watch the ocean.  Grip the cold steel of the rail.  Clouds heavy with rain.  Shades of monochrome.  Silver, pewter and layers of grey.  The eerie sadness of the abandoned fairground.  I hear the forgotten echo of children’s laughter, the laughter of my children, now grown.  I find a bench to sit and unwrap my meagre picnic.  Soup in a flask and a bread roll leftover from yesterday’s lunch.  A small hunk of slightly furry cheese. 

     Still sore from surgery, bruised and cut, I can’t move my arm much.  Can’t raise it in an energetic wave or launch a glass of something bubbly skywards.  Not that I feel like celebrating and I am quite alone.  No one to wave to.

     Incomplete.  A fraud of a woman.  It was ugly, the scar.  Angry in reds and purples.  Rough to the touch.  Tight but not tidy.  My appearance has always been so important to me.  Perhaps this is my punishment for vanity.  Nothing would be the same again.  I feel angry, like the sea, like my scar.  I want to surge and flood.  Spoil somebody else’s life.  I know that this isn’t bravery but it is honest.  Real in a world where nothing is as it was.  Maybe I would die anyway and the offering of my left breast would be a futile one. 

     I shake my head as if to banish such thoughts.  My hair flies around me in the cold breeze, unwashed and matted.  I no longer care.  I take a woolen hat out of my pocket and pull it down tightly over my ears for warmth.  Stretch my fingers around the mug of soup.  Minestrone.  Homemade.  The saltiness of the parmesan tingling in my mouth.  There are a few boats out, bobbing on the briny.  Fishing trawlers.  I feel as if the ground I am on has turned to liquid.  Uncertain.  I am at the mercy of its temperament.  Tossing around as if I too am bobbing on the briny.   

     I had taken care getting dressed that day.  Choosing clothes that would disguise rather than enhance.  I padded round my bedroom with a victim’s stance, accepting my fate as it had been delivered, as if deserved.  The fear in my daughters faces always there, peripheral.  I remembered the shock they had worn when I had told them the news.  I had taken them to lunch, somewhere swish.  I had wanted something positive for them to remember.  Jenny had turned to me questioningly.

     “What’s the big occasion, Mum?”

     Her beautiful face shining in smiles alongside her younger sister Kate’s, in anticipation of wonderful news.  A new man, a promotion or a cruise on the Adriatic?  Cancer.  A brief glimpse of fear flickered on their faces before they gathered their features into the concerned but solid masks that still face me today.  I preferred their fear, it echoed how I felt and I had no time for pretences now. 

     The breeze bites my face and I try not to lick the salt from my lips.  My eyes hold the horizon like a seasick fisherman as my mind drifts like the tide.  Neil.  Neil who hadn’t appeared in my thoughts for decades.  Neil who loved me for myself or perhaps despite it.  Neil who I had let go.  We had gone out for six months, a winter much like this one but thirty years ago.  A winter of staring at each other across old tables in country pubs, of bracing walks over silver fields, collars turned up against a chill wind.  The wind for me which signaled a change.  I left Neil for someone else.  That someone I couldn’t remember.  Couldn’t recall a face or name.  Only Neil remained, preserved in memory like onions in pickling vinegar.

     The girl’s father had been called Phil.  I had met him at an evening class; Cultivating Herbs.  He had sat at the back looking morose.  I thought him deep, interesting.  Now I think he was just miserable.  He had walked out when the girls were barely more than babies.  Never to be seen again.  Not that I missed him.  Couldn’t miss what you never had. 

     We had formed a tight circle, the girls and I.  Shared our sorrows and triumphs over hot chocolate and homemade lemonade.  Camped out in the lounge room in sleeping bags eating marshmallows toasted on the fire until we felt sick.  We had grown together, through the heartbreak of first boyfriends, the heady uni days and job interview nerves.  But what if anything happened to me?  I couldn’t bear to think of my girls as orphans. 

     The mammogram had been a last thought action.  At my age I had to start thinking of my body as it began to wear, slowly eroding, disintegrating as time pulled me reluctantly through my fifth decade.  The doctor, a model of efficiency in starched white, hands clasped on the desk wearing his benevolent smile like a hat he might take out on Sundays.  I sat in his rooms in a smarter suburb of town as he called time on my life.  Rang a bell over the bar, started a giant stopwatch I hadn’t noticed before.  How could I not have noticed it?  Do we all go blindly through life ignoring the inevitable?  Why are we not contemplating our demise, trying to explain the futility of our lives?  We seem to hurry through life in a series of elaborate distractions, too busy to see the shadow of the man in black. 

     I reflect on the choices I have made and how I would change them, make things better.  Would I have stopped backing losers and started putting my money on the first ones past the post?  Would I have stayed with Neil and borne his children, different from the ones I had?  If I had seen through Phil’s black moods, seen them for what they were, not imagined them something more exciting, more dangerous.  I couldn’t imagine a life without Jenny and Kate in it.  Not other children.  I didn’t want perfect kids, I wanted my flawed cherubs with smeared faces, making mistakes and laughing it off.  I had never been a perfectionist and it was too late to start. 

     And what now?  Was I to welcome the enigmatic stranger and take what he had planned for my future?  My girls faces again.  The wedding days I wouldn’t be buying hats for, the babysitting duties I wouldn’t  be resenting.  No, I must choose to live.  I would allow myself just one day to brood and reminisce.  To reflect on past mistakes and errors of judgment.  Then I would stand tall, push my shoulders back and go into battle.  Fight this disease which had ignited within me.  Not as young or as beautiful as I once was but still strong and at least as stubborn.

     A child, wrapped in woolens, plays on the sand, now grey with winter.  His father stands close by, hands deep in his pockets.  Patient, letting the child play until he grows bored and moves onto the next adventure.  A young couple walk by, eyes holding each other, laughter spilling from them.  How beautiful that time is, sacred, fleeting.  Time marches on, the tide ebbs and flows.  How different are we to our mothers or grandmothers?  How different are we to a woman in another century?  Another country?  As I stare at the long shadows cast by strangers ambling past, I savour every taste of my picnic, as if devouring a feast.  No small thing will be taken for granted; every wonder must be marveled at. 

     It turns colder.  What light there is fading slowly and inevitably towards darkness.  I replace the lid on my flask, take a long look at the ocean and walk away.

As a writer one of my worst enemies has to be the cliché. ‘All good things come to those who wait’, ‘blood is thicker than water’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’. It’s my job to make up my own which can be hard when I’m hardwired to trot out these phrases. I remember my mother’s examples. ‘Blue and green should never be seen’ – until the only clean clothes for me to wear was a blue dress with a green cardigan. Then she changed it to ‘blue and green; fit for a queen’. She was fooling no one. ‘Patience is a virtue’ was another. If I didn’t want to scream at her before she made this helpful comment, I certainly did afterwards. 

And when I came running into the room at full speed, brimming with news to tell her she’d look up from sewing, where ‘a stitch in time saved nine’ or peeling potatoes where you can be sure ‘many cooks’ would not ‘be spoiling the broth’, and she’d say ‘you’re like a bull in a china shop’. This sounded awful. Bad enough to be me in china shop let alone a bull. I still have a vision of a china shop with Georgian bay windows and china on every available surface. A bull suddenly appears, walking upright and wearing his best suit. All he wants is to buy Mrs Bull a piece of objet d’arte. Tragic really. 

The husband has a few sayings he over-uses regularly. The most annoying is when he suggests I ‘rustle up a (insert relevant term) salad/meal/picnic’. As if all I had to do was to rummage furtively in the salad crisper and ‘hey presto!’ a lovely big salad would appear. Whilst there is a certain amount of rummaging required, there’s also a lot of rinsing, chopping, slicing, grating and blanching going on. 

Another phrase, he has now stopped using, is when a beautiful woman is being discussed, he will describe her as ‘looking like a model’. Vacuous? In need of a decent meal? Is this the best way to describe beauty? Should Shakespeare have used this instead of comparing a right looker to a summer’s day? Anyway he’s stopped saying it now, he knows ‘which side his bread is buttered’. 

‘Cheap at half the price’. What does it mean? If you halved the price of course it would be cheap! 

Some clichés have wonderful or terrible origins. There are a few theories to where ‘cats got your tongue’ came from. In the Middle East a punishment for liars was having their tongues ripped out and fed to the king’s cat. Or that being whipped with a cat-o-nine-tail was a conversation stopper for the victim. Another from the Middle Ages when it was believed that if you saw a witch her cat would steal control of your tongue so you couldn’t report the sighting. 

‘Caught red-handed’ is used to describe someone who is interrupted in the process of wrong doing. It is thought originally to describe the blood of the victim on his/her murderer’s hands. Although there is a story of the Japanese putting the sap of poison ivy on their money so that any thief would break out in a nasty red rash. 

‘To finish up’ I encourage you to ‘have a nice day’. And if you are a writer ‘it goes without saying’, when it comes to clichés to ‘avoid them like the plague’.

When I was growing up in England in the 1970s (the olden days) there were no fast food outlets. Although I do remember on more than one occasion sampling vegetables which came in a tin. Shudder. Meat was expensive so rissoles and cutlets were frequently served up, next to grey mash potatoes. Or when we were on holiday in the caravan, a lump of ‘Smash’, the preferred food of Darleks. I’d never heard of mangoes, prawns or red wine jus. Avocadoes, mung beans or beetroot that didn’t come in a jar.

If only we hadn’t been seduced by supermarket chains dangling crappy sweet biscuits and a thousand ways to serve bread. If we’d not queued up for beef burgers in a sugary bun. I remember being dizzy with excitement, and with an air of sophistication meeting my bestie at the Wimpy bar. But I was almost sixteen before my first McDonald’s. I was very quickly addicted to thick shakes.

I had, and I’m not boasting, an eating disorder years before it became commonplace. I’m sure that’s what buggered up my metabolism. And I’ve been on every diet know to woman. SlimFast, Lite ‘n’ Easy, The Mayo Clinic, the blood group, the vegetable soup, raw food, Dukan, South Beach, CSIRO. I’ve lost weight, I’ve gained weight and never felt more down than on opening up my Tupperware in the office to find a few spinach leaves and a hard boiled egg.

My mum was constantly on a diet. I’m not saying it was ‘the sins of the mother’ but something happened to women in the sixties. Striving to keep a good house and producing perfectly crispy roast potatoes was superseded by the need to be beautiful. And somewhere sandwiched in the middle feminism was re-born (we can’t overlook our suffragette sisters). In the words of Naomi Wolf:-

‘During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fast-growing medical specialty. During the past five years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal. More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have even had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret “underlife” poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.’

An excerpt taken from “The Beauty Myth’. This book was written over two decades ago but those words are as true today than they ever were. I also think that Naomi hasn’t been taken more seriously because of her obvious beauty. You might not agree. Nigella Lawson is another looker who has copped it. Yes, she’s a TV cook and food writer but she is also a former journalist who graduated from Oxford with a degree in medieval and modern languages.

I’m as guilty as the next person, passing my own insecurities onto someone else. Someone prettier or thinner. There’s a lot more of those types around me than there used to be! Time is marching on and I’m heartily sick of my poor body image. I’m setting myself free. I have a sizeable arse and thighs that look as if they are slathered in porridge. My breasts are still good, if the scaffolding is firm. I’ve finally decided to be a grown-up. No more eating only protein and washing it down with diet cola. No more drowning in shakes and being bored to death by plain poached chicken breasts. I’m giving away my scales. The tape measure disappeared (cut into tiny pieces in the dead of night) years ago.

You might see me on the beaches or in the park, walking with my head in the clouds. I’m going to eat real whole foods, the best dark chocolate I can afford and enough vegetables that you might be wise to avoid sharing a lift with me. Wish me luck. I won’t be wearing a gold bikini by Christmas and those mini-skirts (did I really wear them so short?) are going to a new home. If I can find my waist without having to lift a breast and not feel compelled to wave a white flag two feet in front of me when I hit the beach in my fifties style swiwear, I will be a happy woman. See. It’s not so bad being sensible. Just don’t expect me to give up the champers. You can take some things too far. Chin chin.

One of my boys turned teenager this year. How can this be? I thought I was still wearing Doc Martens, listening to The Jam and drawing my eyes in with Kohl. Truth is I am, but should I be? 

When I was young and kicking,(do we still use that expression?) women of my age had bad perms and debated over which colour rinse to opt for. They wore stout walking shoes and Lisle stockings. Listened to chamber music and possessed a gun license for shooting rabbits. They didn’t go out much save for walks in the country. Maybe they weren’t left alone for long in case they hurled themselves from a precipice, deciding going on was futile. Oh, and they didn’t have sex. 

My my. Haven’t we changed in the last 30 years? I wear high heels with sheer stockings. My hair is long and wild. I listen to Florence and the Machine and Black Sabbath (yes, still, what of it?). I don’t shoot rabbits but I like a glass or four of champagne. I go out all the time, un-chaperoned and everything. 

But I still remember that girl with a 22-inch waist who went to Stonehenge. Watched the sun rise over the altar stone before hearing Hawkwind (a rock band from the 70’s and 80’s for the uninitiated) tune up for a crazy rendition of ‘Brainstorm’. I danced on a table in a Greek restaurant in South London with a beautiful Egyptian waiter. And spent a week in bed weeping when John Lennon died.  

Obviously I couldn’t do those things now. It would be inappropriate (that word still makes me giggle). However, occasionally I raise a glass to that girl and know she’s still within me, egging me on after a few glasses of Veuve. Encouraging me to yell louder when my boys play rugby. And she’s always there when I see my sister (not often enough!) who brings out the pink and glittery in me, when I usually wear a lot of black and serge. 

In the words of another group from my youth, Jethro Tull, ‘I’m too old to rock ‘n’ roll and too young to die’. But surely there must be some middle ground. Leather trousers with incontinent pads. Mini skirts with support stockings. Borrow those old ones from your auntie. Or maybe it’s all tosh and we can rock until we die. With shrinking flesh, dodgy knees and dimming eyesight, we can dance boldly (or badly in my case – the husband leaves the room when I dance) into our future. There should be more dancing. A bad poem I wrote about aging follows:-

When I’m old I’ll wear gold lame

And maybe something clever in macramé

I’ll listen to glam rock

Do my best to shock

While eating bags of sweeties

Ignoring my diabetes

I could enjoy flirtations with sailors

Who’d give me bunches of dahlias

And dance until dawn every weekday.

I have lived in Australia for 15 years. A third of my life. I am an Australian citizen but do I feel more English or more Aussie? 

When I write do I describe gum trees, tall with red, green and ghostly trunks, grey green leaves? Or Kookaburras and Galahs and their forceful cries across the land. Truth be told I’m more likely to write of tenement estates in large industrial cities than of wallabies hopping across the paddock. Strange. I’ve never visited a tenement estate except from the sofa when the watching The Bill. 

Sometimes I hear my voice, in shops, with friends, fighting for my right in a queue. “Excuse me. I’m sorry (when I’m not), I think it was my turn next.” “No really, I think it’s me. I’m English, I know about queuing.” I hear the plum in my mouth, selling tickets on itself.

When I arrived in this sun burnt country I was told I sounded like Princess Diana or Patsy from Ab Fab. “I love your accent,” they said. Accent I thought, I’m not the one with the accent. But as languages go, I love what you Aussies have done with it. The English language that is. You haven’t just scooped it out of the punnet. You’ve enriched it, coloured it in. “What’s a bludger?” I asked in puzzlement in my first job in Sydney. Delighted squeals of laughter filled the air. “Someone who’s happy on the dole.” Here’s a few more for the uninitiated. Cobber is a bloke, Ocker is an unsophisticated person, Larrikin a harmless prankster. Mongrel is a despicable person and we all know what a Pommie is. But my favourite expression has to be ‘To come the raw prawn,’ which means to be generally disagreeable, as in “don’t come the raw prawn with me.” Alas I don’t hear it very often.

I couldn’t get away with anything when I arrived here from Old Blighty. My voice echoed across the partitions in the office and I could always be found. My upright consonants and well behaved vowels gave me away every time. I had trouble with the weather too. “It’s too beautiful” I told my new husband while he looked over the small print on our barely dry marriage certificate. Friends back home were bewildered. I asked them to send me postcards depicting big, ugly London buildings. Where was my overcast sky, my skeleton trees, my beloved Battersea Power Station? 

Homesickness overwhelmed me for many years but over time I realised I was pining for a land that didn’t exist anymore. No, your UK hasn’t dropped off the face of the earth. But mine has. I had sworn I would not become one of those people who leave their country but get trapped in a time warp. People who left the old country (wherever that may be) in the 60s. Who still wear turtle neck sweaters and say, “That’s cool daddio” or  ‘Groovey”, while smoking cheroots and leaning on street corners. That wasn’t happening to me, no way.

So why, when I think of home, is England still in the grip of the Brit Pop invasion. Liam Gallagher is where it’s at and John Major is still in charge. Of course I know that Nu-Labour took over a month after I left my green and pleasant land but I’ve never experienced living under it. And that’s gone too. The Etonions are holding the wheel now. I do love Boris Johnson though, even before he got into politics and was still on the comedy circuit. I watched his Olympic speech three times last week. 

Which brings me up to date and how I found an outlet for my frustrations. A thing of beauty and art that brings me to my knees and connects me with my English heart, feeds and nurtures it. You didn’t think I meant the Olympic Games did you? No. I’m talking of course of ‘Downton Abbey’. Me and the husband, he never did find a loop hole in the marriage certificate, have finally given in. Me because I love Hugh Bonneville (Boris Johnson’s more sensitive brother?) and everyone else I know and love has watched it. The husband was led by me. Unsure and expecting it to be one of those awful costume dramas the BBC loves. Three episodes were consumed last night and I think we’ll be winding the clocks forward to trick the kids into going to bed early tonight. We’ll have gone through the lot by the weekend. Luxury. I slip and wallow in the class system in safety, from this side of the planet. Which brings me up smart to the wonderful line from Dame Maggie Smith in her role as the Dowager Countess of Grantham. “What’s a weekend?” What indeed. 

When I left England my Dutch boss who lived in London for a spell told me that I would belong nowhere, that I wouldn’t have a country, when I moved to the other side of the globe. I thought the same but as the years go on I realise that I love both my countries. And who knows one day I may be lucky enough to live in another. Italy would be good. I’ve seen all but one of the Inspector Montalbano series so I’m ready. To join the police force in Sicily and shout a lot at least.

Before I had children I thought women could be competitive. In the work place, with boyfriends. Wanting to be the prettiest in the room. Things settled down in my late twenties. My female friends became supportive, we could all attract our own boyfriends, and we didn’t need to pinch other women’s. All was lovely in the garden.

Then I got pregnant.

Something started to change, although in the late nineties things weren’t too tough. We’d lived through the battle of the formula bottle and we knew that smoking could harm our babies. But the odd glass of plonk was no problem, was it? Coffee and cocoa-cola? Sure. Sit on the sofa eating Jersey Caramels until your stomach sank and heart burn hit you in the chin. Perk of pregnancy. Cushty.

Then I got pregnant again.

The whole world changed. No coffee, alcohol, smoking or cocoa-cola. No nuts, no sugar, no having fun. Although you could go for a curry, have sex and talk about it openly. And now just off the press, no elective caesareans. Try as a might I was never going to pop one out to the sound of whale music. The inflatable birthing pool was only going to be used in the garden come the summer. Strictly for the kids. Drugs? I was in so much pain that had the baby been a girl I would have called her ‘Epidural’.

Then came breast feeding. Now despite being hopeless at the giving birth thing (failure to progress) this I could do. I really think the word failure should be removed from the notes of new mothers. They have a tendency to cry. Loudly. Breast feeding was easy for me but I have close friends who suffered at the hands of patient nurses, and well meaning relatives who should have just headed for the supermarket and loaded up the trolley with formula. Who said that? Was that me? I know that nature has us squatting in woodland chewing plants and feeding hungry babies with pendulous breasts, while doing a bit of light cottage gardening but sometimes, for some people, this does not work. Making them cry and endure cracked and bleeding nipples isn’t always best practice.

That lot out the way, it’s now time to roll our sleeves up and get down and dirty. Oh my. I was brought up in the 70s. Thanks Mum! There were no safety gates, childproof lids or those rubber things that stop jagged corners hitting baby’s head. The only safety advice I remember was, “Oi put that down or you’ll have your sister’s eye out.”

And yet we survived, albeit with uneven heads and battle scars. Now it’s different.

The childhood industry is a big one. Plastic locks on kitchen doors which mean not even adults can get in them. Toys sanitised in Dettol twice weekly. I confess I didn’t do this one. I figured my kids would build up a healthy immune system by salivating on anything that didn’t move. And we all know about helicopter parenting. Children being driven from play date to piano lesson. When I was growing up there were months when I only saw my parents when it was dark. The rest of the time I was out there, playing in fields which are now housing estates.

Having a child sent me a bit bonkers. A lot bonkers with the second one but that’s a whole other chapter. When No.1 son was a baby I insisted on all his toys being Lamaze. They were bright, soft and educational. Oh, and bloody expensive. When he reached the age of one and was sitting I scoured the earth for wooden blocks. I could only get them mail order and handmade in those halcyon days of the early 00s. But the point is the energy I put into this search.

I also introduced themed birthdays, to help rellos with their choice of presents for my child. How they must have seethed. For his first birthday it was musical instruments, his second; art. By his third I was eight and half months pregnant with his brother and as long as it wasn’t dead and starting to smell I was fine with it.

Was all this for my child’s benefit, after all he doesn’t remember any of it. I tell him now and he looks at me worriedly, wondering if there’s a support group for this sort of behaviour, scrolling through the contacts on his phone.

Or was it for me and my standing in the mother’s group? Those two words can strike fear in any woman’s heart. In my minds eye I can see myself reclining at a table of harassed women, cigarette in one hand (the stress of raising a child perfectly) and a neat gin in the other (same). “Well of course it’s Lamaze or nothing.” I blow a smoke ring and laugh a husky laugh, while the other mother’s jaws drop in blatant admiration.

That was nothing. You’ve got immunization (or not), organic or regular and are dummy’s dumbing our children down, to wade through. And we haven’t got on to the debate on going back to work and the effect of childcare on our precious Fredericks and Genevieves. Then the room divides like the parting of the Red Sea, with stay at home mothers slinging retorts of Tarquin suffering from lack of self-esteem because his mother works and mums in heels and jackets shouting from the boardroom about how uneducated and boring stay at home mothers are. Wearing baby puke rather than Prada.

I can’t help but wonder if a world where we celebrated our differences would support us better. I’d also like to stop the knee jerk reaction I have to smug and lofty comments from other mums. On facebook or in the schoolyard. On breastfeeding, inoculation and organic produce. You, with your high intentions, bring out the worst in me.

We have to remember that most of us only want the best for our children and we agonise over our choices. We don’t want to be judged. Smugness isn’t a good look but most of us have reveled in it at one time or another. By the way, does anyone want to buy a box of second hand Lamaze toys? Barely used.

To pick up a book, to smell it’s cover. Whether it is new and shiny, full of the unknown or musty and old. The pages made thin by other peoples fingers. A spill of food here, chocolate usually. Or coffee stains and yellowing pages that have been highly traveled. It’s an invitation to another world. Your feet tread the streets of the writer’s imagination, instead of your own. You can hang around with characters of the author’s creation, drink in their pubs, dine with them at their homes and share their exploits. Be they large or small. You could be in Middle Earth or the dour streets of the mill towns of Northern England in the late 1940s. 

Before I had children I dipped into and grew with my reading pleasure, one book at a time but something happened to my brain after giving birth. It didn’t turn to mush, at least not where reading was concerned, instead it gave me a super power. I now have the ability to read more than one book at a time, to inhabit more than one fictional world. At the moment I am stretching my legs on the London streets of a parallel universe, fishing in the cold Tasmanian waters where a loved one has recently drowned and discovering a town in the US, not far from Seattle, that I hadn’t heard of before. I am an octogenarian, a pre-pubescent boy and a model recovering from a car accident that has changed my face forever. 

I have a dream. It turns up every now and then. I am reading a newspaper or maybe a new novel. Letters dance across the page, excitement grips me. Where are these wonderful words coming from, who is the author? Suddenly I realise. It’s me. I’m creating them off the top of my head. Just like the cartoon character that walks off the cliff, strolling in the air unsupported until they notice the gap below them. That knowledge alone has them tumbling clumsily to the ground. For me when I realise I am inventing the words, and I can do this for a while, sometimes in another language, I’m quite clever in my dreams, the page turns white. As naked as the Emperor when the small boy points at him. Perhaps that’s why I started writing. To fill in those starkly blank spaces. 

I admit I am at best uneasy, at worst distrustful when someone admits that they don’t read fiction. My husband and father are among that number. Once this would have been a guilty admission, followed by an apology. Perhaps a touch to the forelock. “Sorry Ma am. I’m not much for readin’ and tha’.” Nowadays it seems to be a statement of pride, a boast even. As if mere stories are not to be trusted and all fiction writers are liars. 

It’s a fabulous world out there in fiction. Dark stories, fairy tales, erotic fiction. Whatever tickles your tits till Friday. Science fiction, speculative fiction, psychological thrillers. There are genres to please everyone’s tastes. When I’m writing short stories, yeah yeah, I know you knew I would get to that subject, I am immersed in a world of my own making. I’d like to say that I’m in control, calling the shots, telling everyone what to do as only a big sister can. The truth is it’s like tiny slits that gape slightly, giving me a peak into my protagonist’s world. I wander round, sharing tragedy and triumph, occasionally putting the kettle on. It’s a kind of madness, troweling through the undergrowth where certain wires in my brain are hooked up and somewhat dusty.

Once I win a short story competition or receive an accolade I can no longer re-enter that story to another competition. The stories hang around my hard drive with no one to play with. Next blog I’ll post you one of them and you can let them live, reader by reader. But only if you want to.