It is True

(From the archive again, first published 23 Oct 2003) It isn't the same anymore, I know that. They have pulled it all down and they have rebuilt it, but when I walk into the stands on friday afternoon I will know that it is the same place. It is a different game, a different crowd and I am living a different life but I will feel her sitting there. Every sunday with the other wives and girlfriends, she sat there. Sometimes she laughed and cheered and sometimes she ran down the stairs and through the tunnel and rode in the ambulance. He would hold her hand and tell her that she was all that he had. She felt needed. They would patch him up and he would go out and play the stupid game again. Sometimes she wore makeup and sometimes that wasn't enough and she wore sunglasses. He told her that she was all he had, she felt trapped, but she felt needed, I think, but I am not sure. She seems like a stranger, in fact I think I had almost forgotten that she even existed, until my mother called that day in February to tell me the news and at first I wasn't a bit surprised. I think I had been expected a call something like that, all this time. Suddenly there she was. Standing with me wherever I went. I could feel her thoughts and her pain and her anger and frustration. She told me the stories and all the things that happened and she made me cry and she made me remember. I tried to tell her to go away but she wouldn't leave. She told me where the negatives were and I went into the cupboard and sorted through the boxes. I don't know why I had kept them all this time. So I took the small folded paper packet the the 1 hour photos booth. I must have expected the pictures to print out old and worn as if they had been tossed around in the bottom of a box for twenty years because when they gave me the prints, still warm and a little bit tacky, I had to sit down to calm my shaking because she stared back at me with the freshness of yesterday and I was startled by her youth. She barely looked familiar to me at all and had I seen her on the street I would have walked straight past. I looked at her with pity because I knew things she didn't and I knew she wasn't prepared for what was going to happen. Then I looked at her with anger at all the stupid choices that she made and I wanted to tell her she had no right to do the things she did. Then I looked at her with pride because I knew that despite everything she was stronger than she knew and would fight her way out of the pit that she had dug and she would stand here one day looking back. So tomorrow I will walk back into those grounds, that is where I left her. That last time she spoke to him was there, she said goodbye to him, threw the sunglasses into the bin and turned and walked away. I thought that I could forget her but I knew I would not forget him. It is true that I hate him for what he did to her, it is true that I remember that she loved him. It is true that he killed himself in February and it is true that I do not understand why it makes me cry.

Air

The air is what I remember the most. It is always the air. The feel of it streaming through my hair, buffeting my open mouth or slapping my cheeks out of shape. We would stand behind the cab of the ute, my sister and I, while Dad took the straight stretches as fast as he could because on the bends he would slow, taking peeks in the rear vision mirror to be sure that his girls were safe.

It was eleven miles to the school each morning and that means it was eleven home again. I suppose there were times we were driven in the car, but it is the ute that I remember the best.

My father had the ute modified. Instead of a standard issue Toyota tray back, he had a timber tray with sides and tailgate that could be removed, and and tilt tray mechanism that would lift the tray at the front, so loads like firewood or gravel could simply slide off when the pulley was lifted. This meant we had a tall mast behind the ute cab, so we could stand full height, toes gripping the fixed front tray end, and our frozen fingers hanging on to the cold metal pulley frame for dear life.

If we wanted to speak to each other we would yell into the wind, but our words were ripped away and rarely heard. I imagined the letters that formed them trailing behind us like confetti, finally falling lost and forgotten on the loose dirt road.

We would come around those last few bends, past the rusty drum letterbox of one neighbour and the clean white painted one of another. Then Dad would slow carefully and pull up in front of the one room school building. We'd jump down before the dust settled, bare feet searching for a sandy landing on the dry dusty verge.

I'd watch wistfully then, as he pulled away and his dust trail shrunk down the road. It would be six long and boring hours until that air would blast my face again.

April 1973 - AM

Like in any home almost anywhere in the world the kitchen was the life of the house. In the centre of the narrow room, under the windows, was the ‘Everhot’ slow combustion stove. I can still hear the creak of the firebox door, and my memory can feel the emanating heat, in summer, in winter, early in the morning and late at night, the constant unwavering soul of our home.

Until I was about thirteen I was awoken every morning to the sound of my father chopping kindling to stoke up the fire. I didn’t have a bedroom; instead I slept in the ‘sleepout’, which was basically an enclosed verandah. It had a door that opened onto stairs leading into the side garden. Out there the lemon tree, the orange tree, the peach trees and the plum crowded against the louvered southern wall. The door was weathered though and rather than strain it against the torn green linoleum to force it to a shuddering close each night, it was just left open. As I woke each morning to the sharp splintering sounds of my father’s axe work the open door afforded me a view of the woodheap and the child’s timber and chain swing alongside it. Of the wattle trees and the ironbark silhouetted against the white early dawn of the western sky. I would lie there as my eyes gained focus gazing at those dancing leaves. I saw them filled with creatures and faces. Laughing dancing girls and stern pipe smoking grandfathers. Yapping excited fox terriers and proud contented cats. In centre, facing me, cross-legged I saw an aboriginal man, holding his didgeridoo and staring hard into my face as he made his silent tribute to the beginning of the day.

All this as I listened to the firebox-ready wood crash and tumble into the woodbox by the back door, then the squeak of the firebox door and the scrape of the stoking tool as my father searched for still-warm embers amongst the ash and then laid out a few torn sheets of newspaper with the splintery tinder over it. In moments I would hear the roar and crackle of flames followed by the decisive slam of the firebox door as my father deemed his task as complete, a job well done.

It was wise to wait for a moment until the kettle was boiled before throwing on the warmest clothes I could find. Scrabbling through my ‘lowboy’ for any ill-fitting hand-me-downs from my three siblings and five cousins, the legacy of being the youngest in the generation. It is well that I was not concerned with fashion then, as I must have looked quite lost and unkempt. I rarely wore shoes, so I would run to the warmth of the kitchen before my hardened little feet had time to feel the cold.

Up above the high cupboard was where the ‘Milo’ was kept and I was allowed two teaspoons of the malt chocolate mix in hot water, one sugar and milk if we had any. If not, I would top it with tablespoons of lumpy powdered milk that became a treat in itself, sweet chewy globs of milky goodness. I would have to hide to eat that though, sneak out to the cold front verandah where my mother could not snap at me for being wasteful and greedy. “When I was a child.” Her voice would drone on endlessly.

We lived in the same house that my mother had grown up in. She reminded us every single day how lucky we were to live in such comfort, in a house with running water and painted walls. With fresh bread delivered twice weekly instead of damper made on weevil infested flour, with an actual kerosene refrigerator instead of the air-cooled ‘meatsafe’. According to my mother, everything was better when she was a child. Living on corned beef and unsweetened cocoa, believing that cheese was a treat as wonderful as chocolate and teeth could only be cleaned properly with charcoal was some form of utopia that she seemed to be forever guilty of depriving her children of. Meanwhile I spent my every waking moment straining to hear the sound of a vehicle or an aeroplane, dreaming of what it would be like to have a neighbour that lived closer than 10 miles away or a shop that was closer than sixty miles away. Civilisation called to me like some shining beacon in the far distance, on those cold mornings around the stove in that tiny kitchen my utopia was a land of homogenised milk in a bottle instead of manure laced in a bucket; of electric lights and doors that closed; and most of all of other people. It seemed that even then, my mother’s idea and my idea of the way life should be was somewhat different.

After I had swallowed down the last sweet chocolaty drops of my morning Milo and my mother and father were leaning, smoking cigarettes over the stove and sipping their hot tea I would carefully pour a cup for my Grandmother. She had a favourite cup and saucer and she drank her tea white with none. My feet would feel their way across the wide worn cypress pine floorboards through the dining room across the gold linoleum in the sunroom and to her door.

“Good morning Sunshine” she would say as she unhooked her sliding door and let me in. I loved the mornings in my Grandmother’s room. The “His Master’s Voice” radio and her dressing table top drawer filled with exotic earrings and untouchable pills. My cousin took one once. I always imagine it was one of the little red ones. They bundled her into the car and rushed her to the hospital. An hour and a half of stressful dirt road driving all the way to town. I assume they pumped her stomach when they got her there because she lived to climb the rafters in the shed another day and swallow some strychnine so that the whole panicky process could be repeated. Another survival to add to the family story archive, told and retold until nobody can remember exactly how the original story transpired.

As she drank her tea my Grandmother would tell me stories. Answer my questions about her childhood in Scotland and traveling to Australia by ship to grow up in Brisbane. She would allow me to gaze at my reflection in her magnifying mirror so I could imagine what I might look like when I was all grown up. So there I would be, perched on my grandmother’s bed, with my mismatched hand-me-down clothes, my chocolate ringed mouth, excruciatingly painful screw on drop earrings reflected in that mirror into the future while I thought about Scotland, castle, cities and ships. A world away from the morning bellow of the cattle in the yards, waiting to be fed and milked and drafted in a ritual that comforted and infuriated me all at once.

Grandma would shoo me away while she got dressed for her day and I would race across to the yards with the others. Most mornings I rummaged through the old shoe box by the back stairs, hoping against hope that my feet may have grown enough during the night that one of the pairs of dusty old riding boots might fit me. My mother would snap at me in her panicked voice to check for red-back spiders before I put my feet into danger. So I would use my hand to check as she insisted. That logic still baffles me? I never found a red-back and those boots never did fit, so I would stay barefoot, running across the sharp spiky dry grass as fast as I could so it wouldn’t have the chance to hurt my feet.

The yards were warm with animal respiration and busy as we worked, mixing grains, filling troughs with water and feed drums with hay. Mucking out the bull stalls, milking, letting calves in and out and. It was all hands on deck and conversation was king as we performed our tasks by habit. An hour or so of teamwork every morning and evening without fail. Back at the house Grandma would have a cooked breakfast ready on the table when we returned. We always came into the house through the kitchen, leaving boots outside or scraping the manure from our feet. The kitchen would be warm and filled with the smells of cooking as we crowded through to the bathroom to wash our hands and feet then quickly dress in slightly better clothes for school.

I never remember having to rush yet even after that leisurely two-course breakfast every morning where we delved into the cornflakes for the hidden toy and argued over how many omelettes we each had eaten, we seemed to have time to burn. We helped Grandma clear the table and wash up. Four kids fighting over who was wiping and who was putting away and my brother gleefully flicking me on the bottom with the wet teatowel. The drive to school was eleven miles. We always drove seven but my parents took it in turns with another family to drive the last five. So we met at the “Black Gate”, a gate thus named after it began its life soaked in Linseed oil but had long since grayed in the weather and the sun. We played hopscotch in the sand there as we waited for the other family and then for our parents to stop talking about the weather and the government and the price of fuel.


Then it was time for another day of school.... I hope you have enjoyed waking up with me on some unremarkable day in 1973?

Sugar Flower

In the kitchen opposite the wood stove was a leadlight kitchen dresser painted white. It had panes of glass, green, burgundy and clear. On the centre door which curved outwards the glass was cracked and the design slumped inwards. I used the wonder if the heat from the stove opposite had melted the lead and imagine that one day the whole panel would drip to the floor.

I stood next to the dresser that day and the ledge where the key was kept was very high. If I stood on my tiptoes I could feel it there with the very tips of my fingers but unless I dragged the stool across, there was little chance I would ever reach it.

I considered the moving of the stool and the noise that it would make. My parents took their midday nap just behind the dresser in the other room. If they heard me I might get the "flapper", a piece of bamboo about 20 inches long, with a folded strap of leather bound with "catgut" to it's end. Mum and Dad would threaten me with it what seemed like every day, but perhaps it was only when I was naughty? It was kept on the front veranda high on the coat hooks above the rifles. All those terrifying items dwelt there at our front door. I wonder now what people thought when they called in, to be greeted by that armoury?

The stool was too heavy for me to lift quietly but I remembered there was another outside. I slowly opened the rattling back door knob, it was dented brass kept shiny from many hands and the sound of that doorknob is more keen in my memory than any other sound I have ever known.

The back stairs creaked slightly and the small yellow stool, made from an apple crate is there.

On the way back my hands are full, the door slams in the breeze and I freeze....
All stays quiet. I carefully place the stool and reach the key. My footsteps through the dining room are swift and sure. I sit down cross-legged in front of the china cabinet and the key moves easily in the lock.

I am not allowed in here. In the very back is a small tin, slightly rusted. Carefully I move the breakables aside, fine china teacups and antique figurines. I grasp my prize. The lid squeaks a little as I pry it loose.

The hard sugar melts slowly in my mouth. I close my eyes in bliss. They won't notice just one more wedding cake decoration disappearing, surely?

Remembering the milking yards

I can hear the Happy Families chattering as I hold my arms outstretched either side of me.
The timber beneath my toes feels almost shiny, small bumps where splinters used to be, worn smooth now from the hands and thighs of many bodies, sitting, waiting, watching the daily ritual of "doing the cows".
I look at the beam in front of me and let my feet find their way along with confidence. I am confident, I tell myself, I am I am....but always, as soon as I query my confidence I start to waver and I look at the ground below instead. I choose a spot to place my feet when I have to turn my fall into a jump. I look for a place deep with mud and manure; I know below that mud the gravel is sharp and cruel on my cold bare feet.
As I jump I think of myself as light like a bird and bend my knees quickly to break my fall and then spring up again before the soft skin in the arch of my foot can find the gravel. I am safe.
I hear an order barked from one of my parents.
'Let in that calf.'
The clunk and scrape of the timber gate latch then the squeak of the hinge, in need of oil again. I know every calf by name, they bunt their heads against me and their warm animal aroma is like a balm of contentment to me. I block the others and let the called-for calf in, to feed from it's mother. She lets out an appreciative bellow from above her finished grain bin. The calf knows the ritual and runs in behind the bail, behind the cow.
The cow begins to relax now, and she lets her milk down and we scramble for it. First the young bull then he is led away and I practice my knot tying to keep him aside until the next cow is brought through for him. Then my father sits on the three-legged stool. I watch the muscles in his chocolate brown arms flex and relax as he hand milks the cow, her teats slippery from the saliva of the young bull, I see him fight the calf for the best teat. The bucket fills quickly when my father milks. The deep foam on top, proof he milks well. Whenever I try, my arms get tired before the foam begins to build and I pass it on to him. Yet still now, thirty years later my hands are stronger than anyone's I know.
I pull myself up and sit on the rail where before I walked. In my memory now I can hear the rustle of the animals and the rumble and scrape as the cows lick their grain bins, the rip of milk as each stream hits the foam in the metal bucket. The meow of the yard cats, frantic for a taste of the hot frothy milk.
I can hear the sad desperate bleating bellow of the hungry calves still waiting, the deep bellow of the bulls in their stalls, my mother's voice, talking about this animal or that. I can hear the Happy Family's chattering together.
I can see my father's boots, caked in mud and manure and hay.
I can watch his lips move, but I cannot hear his voice.
In four days it will be seventeen years since anyone heard his voice.

Reposting again - First posted Mar 2004
In fact tonight it will be nineteen years since anyone heard his voice. And excuse that picture, I drew it with the mouse in Corel, and I am not that great at mouse control. Also excuse the slightly morose postings. I just miss my Dad and although I always promised myself I'd try to remember him more on his birthday than on the day he died, it's a hard thing to do, I rememeber him every day.

Sprint Training

In the mornings, after I would wake with that crisp cold air burning my cheeks and the sound of my father splitting tinder at the woodheap, we would crowd around the wood stove fighting for a turn to toast our thick slabs of white bread over the hot coals. My father would lean across the stove, his cup kept warm on the white enamel stove warmers and the ash from his cigarette sometimes landing in the ironstone thunder egg he used as an ashtray and sometimes landing on the floor where he would hurriedly spread it out on the mottled pink linoleum to hide his mistake before someone snapped at him.

The kitchen was crowded and stuffy, the yellow painted vj boards that lined the ceiling, black with grease and soot.

My parents voices starting softly, discussed what would be done that day; the fences to be checked, the cows to be preganancy tested and the performance of the new bull. It seems always that the volume would rise and my mother would begin to speak louder as she sensed my father was not agreeing with her, not bending to her will as she believed then and still believes is the only possible conclusion in all her conversations. Finally my father would dump his cup on the sink, stub out his cigarette and shuffle, sock footed, to the back stairs where his oldest heeled RMWilliams boots would slide over his boot shaped feet and his stained and holey second-best Akubra would land in its familiar groove upon his forehead.

Sometimes I would rush after my father, squeezing my backside onto the stair beside him, working my way through the box of old boots. Always hoping my feet may have grown enough to slide into them like his did but always, in the end, chasing after him my pattering feet wearing shoes of hard skin and painful cold.

His gentle silence and firm brown hands would guide me out past the woodheap, past the feedshed and the utes. Out there, just us in the front paddock, he would spring it on me suddenly. "Race you to the yards?" And I would run on my toes to avoid the sharp frostbitten grass, prancing like Bambi down the hill, reaching out in strides as long as I could make them.

My father never let me win though, he would stay just ahead. He made me try so very hard but when I held out my arms out to stop myself against the rattling hayshed gates he was always already there, slowing to a stop beside me, laughing and puffing and telling me how good I was and how hard it was for him to beat me now.

My athletics coach, my father: 24 January 1926 - 25 March 1987

Barefooted Brats

It started the night before my ninth birthday. Dean and I found the chrome plated cylindrical contraption in the sideboard drawer, all spinning notched disks and fluted brass rods. It had a hinged lid along one side and a scalloped end wheel, which when you turned it would set the fluted rods all spinning. "Here", Dad said, "You lick the cigarette paper and place it in the slot, then lay a measure of tobacco along the length, not too close to the ends or it ends up in my mouth, then you close the lid and turn the end."
So we sat on the floor at his feet, Dean and I and rolled him cigarettes with varying degrees of success, we laughed at our attempts and became loud enough that we were sent the the spare room where we were always allowed to sleep when we had friends to stay. I know it would have been Dean's idea, but there we were hidden by the wall with my father's pouch of drum tobacco and Dean, being the natural ratbag that he was; it was inevitable really.
"Let's roll some for ourselves." he said "We can take them to school and see what it is like to smoke."
I agreed, I always agreed with everything that Dean said, he was bigger than me. He was being nice to me. I would do anything for Dean to be nice to me.
At school the next day we whispered to the others at little lunch and Dean led us all to the chicken coop behind the hit-up board at the far end of the tennis court. We climbed through the wire netting gate into the little pen and found old feed tins and water containers to turn over and plant ourselves on, small relief from the dusty dried out chicken poop, still smelly even a year after all the chooks were gone. Kent demanded the best seat and set himself up as watch peeking between the boards to be sure the teacher was not coming. So we lit the small bent half squashed "rollie" passing it around we puffed clouds of smoke out from our faces.
"That's not really how you do it" Dean told us" You have to suck it right in."
We just looked at him dumbly and kept puffing. Ann held hers elegantly, legs crossed at the ankles. Evelyn swaggered provocatively at eleven years old, swore and spat the bitter tar from her pink perfect lips. I knew I looked stupid doing everything I did, so there seemed little point in trying to be anything other than an untidy little tomboy. At least I was good at that. Little Beth stood defiantly, threatening to tittle-tale to her parents, he carrot red hair stark against the shocked white of her freckled skin. She wouldn't dare, would she?
It became a ritual after that, every day we brought stolen cigarettes to school. We graduated to climbing the tree behind the coop, a better look-out we thought. As if the teacher couldn't see us out the small square window, those little puffs of smoke wafting from between the branches of the whistling pine athol trees.
I remember that time with a feeling of elation, six small children on top of the world. Untouchable.
I can still feel the dread as we watched from our perches that day when he finally stood up from his desk and walked that long 100 metres towards us. I wonder that he left it so long when in honesty he must have known that whole week. Perhaps he simply hoped that we would stop by ourselves. I think a school with six pupils was more than this first year teacher, posted to the back of beyond and an empty classroom of barefooted brats, had ever bargained on. Six defiant, strong minded rebels were harder to control than a normal class of twenty-five.
Watching his slow steady steps towards us that day, we knew that we were caught. I saw Beth's pale white cheeks flush red with fear and defiance, so, she had told on us.
His decided discipline was that we should tell our parents or he would tell them for us. It was the worst punishment of my life.
In time I forgot the punishemnt but I remembered that feeling of elation. The thrill of being naughty and more than any nicotine addiction. That memory took hold of me like a drug. The thirst for that elation has never really left me.
After all, we never inhaled. (Originally posted 27.8.04)

The Waiter

The first time I saw him he was tanned and blonde and strangely exotic, not my type at all. He strode through the kitchen, his steps slow, stretched out and claiming ownership of the space around him. Heads turned as he moved, his energy seemed to glow around him as everyone paused and stared.

He turned the corner and the titter next to me from the other girls proved he had been noticed. "Who was that?" they asked, I grabbed my tray and turned away, I didn't care who that was.

It went on for weeks, like a competition. Every time he turned up for a function, dressed in his black and whites like an arian god wearing the wrong uniform, the waitresses laughed and giggled and smiled coquettishly. He was so far out of my league, I didn't even turn my head.

On Christmas day it was bedlam in the kitchen, I was tipsy from a champagne breakfast with my friends so perhaps my confidence was a little higher than normal. I felt the prickle of his stubble on my cheek as he snuck up behind me and leant in to whisper "Merry Christmas" over my shoulder. I felt his hot body, the day was humid, the kitchen like a sauna, when I turned in total surprise, he smiled and said; "Come to a party with me tonight?", I had a date already. I could see Louise staring daggers at me over his shoulder. He was not my type. I was too tired. I wasn't finishing work until so late. I did not need any more men in my life....

"Yes", I smiled, I'd love to.

He changed my life.

It is 13 years* since I saw him last, I am not sure where he is living now and I don't know if he is still the person he always said he was going to be. Sometimes I get frightenend that something may have happened to him and I will never see him again, but then I think that it doesn't matter,the impact he had on my life I will take with me forever regardless of whether we keep in touch or not.

He was the christmas present that I needed that year. I think he saw me like a project, something broken that he could fix, something small and lost and useless that he could metamorphisise into a new and better thing.

Louise was the one who had propped me up until that day. She had given me refuge when I found the strength to leave my ugly past and I repaid her by winning her crush. I never intended that.

So we went to the party, I fought past my feelings of inadequacy amongst his university friends and I let him drum me up and make me feel that I was someone too. We sat up until daylight talking, he opened a door for me that I never knew existed. It was as if he opened the door to my mind. He made me think. He didn't tell me I was too young, or too stupid or too ugly. He didn't leave me out of the conversation, speak over the top of me or speak down to me. He asked me what I thought and he listened and he took me into a world of new ideas and passion for life and appreciation of little things I had never noticed before.

"Come with me?" he asked and I followed him like a disciple. I met people who had thoughts and minds and rooms to rent and I dug myself out of my suburban pit and moved to a vibrant inner city alternative. At night after work I would go around to his house and hear his harmonica drift out across the lush West End backyards. Calling me like the pied piper called the children to their doom.

"Come with me?" he asked and we hitched the Australian east, drinking beer in western pubs and talking to truck drivers until our throats were sore from helping to keep them awake. One night in a church hall in Tamworth he taught me to dance and to love the people watching. In the Goondiwindi truckstop as we sat at a laminex table he showed me how to fold a map properly, so that every trip I have taken since a little of him has been there with me, being pedantic.

In Melbourne aged 19 I played scrabble for the first time while we sampled Coopers Ale, I had never drunk beer before I met him either, and I looked at him across the room and thought that I was truly happy. The next day he was going fruit picking for a few months and I was going back to Brisbane. It felt okay.

Then he told me.

Two weeks before in Brisbane I had heard him talking to his housemate. He had got a letter he had said..." but I can't tell her, I just can't!"
"But you have to" argued his friend.
"What?" I asked walking in.
His friend changed the subject and somehow I forgot about it.

So after sedating me with a bottle of Coopers that night, he told me it was over.
"I want to say goodbye now", he said, "because in the morning I am leaving at 4am, there won't be time."
I didn't understand, how could I? We were getting on so well.
I withdrew into myself and my shell hardened so much that the next day back at my sisters house in Oakleigh I pretended he didn't exist. I lay in that darkened room, nursing my Cooper's headache, that room I will remember as a room of grief, where the pain of that morning and the pain of the day when my father died all being melded into a hard dark lump. Inside that room.

Weeks later, back in Brisbane, I collected the letter from my letterbox as I walked to the train to go to work. I waited until I was in my seat then opened the pages and the person who I had tried to forget spoke to me in long eloquent sentences of explanations and excuses and reasons. He begged me not forget what we had. He told me that it wasn't all for nothing and that had he known he was going to meet me he would never have asked the german girl to come out here and marry him. "If she had written to say she was coming sooner", he said. "If I hadn't thought that she had changed her mind. If If If..."
I didn't believe a word of it but the tears still slowly dripped down my cheeks, blurring the makeup he always told me that I didn't need. I went to work and quit my job.

I got a job travelling north Queensland and revelled in my new found independence. I didn't think about him, I instead learned to work harder than I had ever worked before and found a new passion for travel and life that I knew I had him to thank for.

Back in Brisbane I became friends with his friends and decided that he was right. It didn't all have to be for nothing. I had learned to think and forge my own path, thanks to him. His friend apologised for him, but I said it was okay, it didn't matter. His friend shook his head at me and would not believe I did not care.

I went back to the football ground one last time then I became a new person, if that is possible.

I met my husband a year later. The first night he was coming to dinner, I had 'evicted' my housemates, lit the candles and put on the music. The knock at the door was a little early and I am not sure what my expression was when I saw that it wasn't whom I expected.

I don't know why he had come around, I never asked him but it was the first time he had ever come around without her. They had had me over to their place to dinner a few times. She had carefully shown me their seperate rooms. It had been strange and I wasn't sure why thay wanted me there, just me and them. So I asked him to make himself scarce that night, while I waited for my boyfriend, he ducked next door for a while, then reappeared and gave my new man the ten questions. I pretended it didn't matter but his approval meant everything to me and his acceptance of my choice sent me down the life path that I am on now.

He surfed with my boyfriend and made friends with his friends. He came and stayed and brought his girlfriends. He entertained and educated me on every turn. His beliefs agreed with my beliefs and when he traveled hundreds of miles to the property for my 21st carrying an expensive gift, I was truly touched. He took the photos at our wedding and wrote long letters from wherever he was.

Then he turned up one summer thirteen years ago without his partner and looked at me in my little life and his eyes told me I had sold out. I haven't seen him since.

It is true I have never surfed the wave of a nuke ship, I have never been arrested for trespassing at Pine Gap, but I don't think I have sold out. I want to know what happened to him after the last time I heard his voice on the radio as he vowed to go to jail for his cause. I want to know why he suddenly put me behind him and why he doesn't write anymore.

I don't seem to have the gift that others have, of leaving the past where it belongs. When I love I love forever. It is not (always) a sexual love, but my soul does not stop loving just because we didn't fit. I don't think my love for him was ever sexual anyway. It was his soul, his mind, that made me feel the way I did.

I accept that it is his choice to take a life path that does not cross mine.
I accept that what he did for me was great and it was awful but I am so very glad I met him. I could so easily have said no that Christmas day, in the hot sweaty kitchen with Louise's green eyes burning hatred into my face.

*This was first posted mid 2003.... I heard last year that he had a going away party about five years ago before he moved overseas to get married. My source is pretty shaky though, a mushroom trip gone wrong whom I really should post about one day too. Other than that no-one I know who knew him seems to know where he has gone. I still hope to see him again one day and sometimes I look for him in crowds. A flash of blue eyes, long brown limbs and a knowing smile. ____ Update Nov 2007..I just 'found' him. He is well, happy and still passionate about his causes and I am thrilled!

The Pedicure

He is concentrating, intent. His hands are so gentle on my feet, carefully he trims each toenail, I giggle when it tickles and he admonishes me, "Be still".

We are sitting either end of the sofa in his parents loungeroom. His mother is in the kitchen. She is always in the kitchen in my memory, teatowel in hand. His father sits across the tiny room from us, his feet up, newspaper dripping over his legs and his glasses halfway down his nose. Occasionally he turns his head and stares me in the eye, a comment thrown into the conversation or just that look again, the one he gave me when I arrived.

I don't remember where we caught up, probably down the main street or at the local pool. He asked me back to his place though and it was like a time warp, as if everything was alright again and when I arrived his parents greeted me the same way they had for lunch every day. Well, almost the same way. His father smiled "Lissie!" his pet name for me, the only one who ever calls me that, then he peered at me that moment too long. He took in my face, the purple marks, the swelling and his sigh said everything and nothing. She came to the kitchen door. Did we kiss hello? I don't remember but then she exclaimed "What happened to your face?"

I muttered something about friends and hockey sticks, her eyes told me she knew I would lie even before I spoke. She started to comment then pulled herself up and turned and went back to the sink.

We are sitting there laughing, chatting, the four of us feel like a family, like it always was. I want so much for this to be the reality and not the dream, he moves onto the next toenail and chides me again for not looking after my feet better. "This is horrible", he says when he comes to the toenail that was infected when I was fourteen, I flinch because it is sensitive and it grows crooked and scarred and because I am more ashamed of it in that moment than I am of my face. His mother comes to the kitchen door again, she leans lightly on the timber frame of the open glass slider.

She starts a conversation asking me about my work and my flat, then she asks about him. Her words are clipped and her eyes are hard and she tells me that I must know what I am doing. I can't look at her and instead I focus on his fingers on my feet, his hand is trembling and his skin flushes red and white. His dad is staring at me hard again, over the top of his spectacles his frighteningly familiar blue eyes bore into me. Inside I am crumpling, I am screaming, my face is hot with unspent tears. Then the dishes clang in the sink again and the I hear the crackle and flick as the next page turns. The man who writes the newspaper all week and reads it all weekend.

He runs his hands gently over my feet now, a light massage like one I gave him not long ago and aeons ago, his eyes hold mine and his touch sends tingles right through my body. It is one of the most erotic moments in my life. "Come on", he says and we stand and I grab my bag and smile goodbye, I will see you soon and his mother turns and looks hard at me again. "Take care.." she says and his father doesn't look up, "See you, Lissie." and we walk out the door.

We climb into the car. THE car. It has a bench seat in the front, it is impossible to sit in his car without thinking about all the time we have spent in there. He starts to drive and we do not speak, he doesn't switch on the radio or the tape player. He drives straight down his street heading to the school, out of town and on towards the weir, he drives by habit. I cry silently. It is very quiet.

He called on friday to wish me a happy birthday and tell me his mother is in hospital. This whole post might sound a bit foot-fetish like(ewww) but it is really about my love for his parents and something beautiful that had to be broken.

Posting and Reposting...Kitchens and Memories...Deleting the wrong files....

Last week I decided that I needed to clean out my laptop, delete files, programs etc. I did the full back-up first, of course, but did not realise that the toshiba "my safe" folder I kept all my writings in wasn't going to back up correctly. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have managed to lose most of my writings. Pretty stupid hey? I have been able to find some though and stumbled across this post, below, written for what would have been my father's 78th birthday a few years back. It is rather similar to the previous post but I thought I would share it again anyway.


Seventy-eight

In the evenings it seems now that it was always just Dad and me. We would sit up late and play cards in a wonderfully comfortable quiet. When I longed for home during long freezing winters at boarding school, I longed the most for those evenings with my father. There was something in me that he understood, a thing that set us apart from the others.

He taught me to play euchre so that wherever in the world I have travelled he is with me. I feel my hands holding the cards the way his did and I rest my finger on my chin to consider my chances, as he did.

He liked a whisky late at night over those cards. He never drank more than a tiny glass or two, so I could never think of my father as an alcoholic, as my mother claimed he was. He was more a binge drinker when the cattle sales were on in town and when you consider his binges were often many months apart, for the most part he was a calm, patient and hard working man.

Every morning he woke me as he chopped the wood for the fire. I would wait until I heard the thump and rumble of the wood, and tinkle of the tinder landing in the woodbox. I would wait for the splash and crackle and roar as he lit the kerosine splattered firewood. I would listen for the sounds of his sock covered feet shuffle to the taps and fill the kettle, the scrape and grating squeak as he removed the fire cover and set the water over the new hot flames to boil. These memories of sound are like gold to me. The kettle would not take long and I would hear him feed the fire with chunks of increasing size, the final hollow pressured thump as he became satisfied with the health of the fire and rammed the firedoor shut. I would wait for this, then stumble out to the kitchen, warm now and welcoming.

We would lean inside the oven door together and let our cold hands sit on the white enamel insulated (asbestos probably) stovetop covers. His first hand rolled drum cigarette would be sending spirals of blue smoke into his eyes, and he would gaze quietly over the back paddock. I wonder now what he was thinking about. I suppose we must have spent this time talking and it seems wrong that the sounds of that room are so acute in my memory but his words seem to have drifted away and dissipated into the black soot on that vj lined ceiling.

Dad would have been seventy-eight last week. I knew even then, I think, that he would not last that long. He often joked about his smoking, that we would see the smoke rising from his grave but I looked last time and there wasn't any. I imagine him laughing and reminding me that he did give up in the end but not until two weeks before he died. It annoys me now that the doctors didn't let him live his last few weeks with that small joy. Instead they pumped him full of nicotine to stave the cravings and his weakness for just one more cigarette placed too much stress on his poor heart.

His dear heart.