Snuffling for black gold

M I C HAEL S M AL L, W RITER MONDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2011

SNUFFLING FOR BLACK GOLD For his seventy-fifth birthday, his daughter presented Jake with an English oak tree, quercus robur, about four years old. It came in a medium-sized flowerpot in which the potting mix was pretty well dried–out. Not a very big oak tree, no more than sixty centimetres in height and surprisingly spindly. In fact, the stem was malformed, splayed half-way up, which made it very vulnerable to snapping in a stiff breeze. The leaves too were mottled with a more luminescent paler green or light yellowish brown on their lobes.

‘Don’t spray with anti-fungals,’ Shirl warned, when he meekly pointed out these stains on his tree. ‘The nursery man said, otherwise you’ll kill the spoor.’

She was speaking more loudly these days because he was hard of hearing, particularly slow to catch the first syllables of words. Occasionally, she would even shout, as if he were stone deaf, impatient at having to repeat whole sentences, all because ‘words’ might transmute into ‘birds’ and fly off to convolute meaning.

Shirl also gave him a half wine-barrel that still smelled of alcohol, which caused both of them some anxiety, for it was essential to have the soil prepared just right. As advised by his daughter through the nurseryman, Jake bought four 30-litre bags of premium potting mix and a gauge for measuring the levels of moisture and alkalinity, the pH. But after emptying three bags of potting mix into the more capacious halfbarrel with its three silver-coloured buckles round the wooden staves, the task of carefully removing the tree from its tight-fitting pot was tricky. Having scooped out a hollow in the mix and dunked the pot in water to soak, his easing the stem proved to be a messy job for arthritic fingers. The hollow wasn’t deep enough, so the stem sat up too high in the mix, and holding it while trying to scoop beneath roots that he couldn’t see, the original crust of mix broke, exposing the root ball itself. Already he was feeling anxious and inadequate, trying to hollow out a deeper hole with one hand and holding the forlorn sapling cross-wise in the other, palming over a hasty covering of more mix.

Still the hole wasn’t deep enough. Again he gingerly felt below the roots to scrape, only to realise his worst fears – one of the roots had torn away. How many others had his clumsiness detached?

His second mistake was to position the cask beneath some broken guttering to catch the run-off, but failed to catch the afternoon sun and left a small puddle ringing the stem. The dial on the gauge that he poked down read Wet instead of Moist.

For these winter and autumn rains had offered the most bounty for some twenty years, so that the garden had burgeoned out of control. The rose bushes and silver beets had shot up well above head-high, till the tallest branches of the roses weighed down by several soakings had bent their mops of petals to brush the lawn, whilst the crests of beets had crinkled up into seed heads and in wilting would catch round the ankles, almost tripping him on the slippery earth, so unsteady was he on his arthritic pins these days.

Dismayed at his ineptitude and disgust at his capacity for tarnishing delicate objects, Jake gradually felt better once he had topped up the cask with half the fourth bag of mix, tamped down composted pine bark and coir pith, and added a generous sprinkling of lime to bring the pH reading up to the required 7.5. After Shirl, primarily, along with his own token effort, had heaved the cask on its axis round the back patio towards a water butt and nodding kangaroo paw to gain a more exposed position, the fresh arrangement looked a proper treat there in the sunshine, the potting mix a dark chocolate colour, with flecks of emerald slow-release crystals of water, smoothly tapering down from the base of the stem to the staves of the barrel.

The gift of an oak tree had indeed proved a delightful surprise, in spite of the responsibilities. No ‘green fingers’, Jake liked to while away many hours pottering about his garden domain. He would enjoy strolling out to the vegie patch and cutting off a dark green zucchini that overwhelmed the taste of shop-soiled vegies, or seeing how an asparagus or three had broken through the crust of topsoil overnight, or the Tom Thumb tomatoes had ripened like berries and tasted like little fruits, all of which were succulent enough to eat raw. Not that he was a foodie by any stretch, for he had no idea what such a prized gastronomic delicacy as a truffle would taste like.

Somehow it was its nickname that added to the attraction: black gold. The very oxymoron delighted him as much as the bizarre paradox of a fungus being worth a fortune in the market-place. He didn’t care a hoot about the financial gain, but the image evoked, even the sound and shape of a word, fascinated him. Names like Xanadu or Shangri-la or even Treasure Island conjured a romantic atmosphere far away in distance and time and stark reality.

And truffles breathed the Dordogne.

‘I thought it would bring back some familiar memories of your home land,’ Shirl had said, ‘Hearts of oak and all that.’

If truth be told, he hadn’t given those half-buried memories much thought. Oh yes, snatches of his earliest conscious moments cut back at odd moments, such as being carried into the broom cupboard under the stairs when the air-raid siren sounded, but nowadays he couldn’t be sure whether that was his mother’s memory, not his.

But the landscapes cherished in his youth he had long repressed; in any case had probably disappeared or changed irrevocably in contemporary time. In those initial years of migration it was too painful to dream them into being again. Since buying a house in Australia, he had purposefully set about planting exotic trees that in England you might discover only in a hothouse in Kew Gardens or some hidden valley in Devon – loquat, macadamia, avocado, feijoa, and fig, baboca, even though there was Buckley and Nunn of some species producing fruit or nuts so far south in non-tropical Melbourne.

Jake would always remember oak trees, of course, for they had invariably loomed as central motif in his natïve landscape, so much so that he took them for granted, spreading out along downland tracks and reaching far up into the sky with thick boughs stretching into a canopy of dense foliage or a stand of oaks on a distant knoll, under which a herd of fallow deer would be grazing, marking the destination of a delightful hour or two’s saunter from a country house. They were plentiful enough in Australia too. At the same time, he regretted that he could no longer recall the difference between the elm and the larch or the ash and the sycamore with its whirly ‘helicopter’ seeds, a recognition he had gained from Nature Study at primary school backed up by a short-lived enthusiasm for ‘I-Spy Trees’ that cost sixpence. So much

of that homespun lore had been overlaid by his new-found fascination with the huge variety of eucalypts that shed leaves the year round, the varied textures of their bark and their quirky manner of stripping it away.

And yet he’d spent his early childhood on a council estate knocked up by German prisoners-of-war, cheap, leaky, flat-roofed, one-floor prefabrications with built-in metal cupboards in a yellowish wash, where the street names did possess the ring of recitation, still: Laurel Crescent, Broom Road, Larch Tree Close, Fir Tree Avenue, Links View, Copse Avenue, Bridle Way and his very own Myrtle Road, which curved round a one-tree island into a wider, staidly respectable Oak Avenue, with its well-todo, two-storey, gabled houses with garages and treed gardens established before the war.

A little saddened, he rued the fact that he had never bothered to find out what a myrtle tree looked like.

With the mellowing of time, however, one particular image would break in on Jake’s thoughts with gathering frequency, an image which held the stuff of dream. He must have been about nine or ten when taken by his friend’s parents to a bird sanctuary, but these neighbours no longer played a part in that sequence of memory. He would always find himself on the threshold of a large, rectangular, grassy field enclosed on all sides by high-banking coppice and huge trees, many of which were sturdy ancient oaks that barred the outside world. The only sound he could hear on that still warm summer’s day was the perpetual cawing rasp of the high-flying black shapes wheeling overhead hither and thither, squadrons of rooks. Whenever he returned over the years to Surrey, he could never discover the whereabouts of that sanctuary. Until it eventually dawned that this once-visited secluded space set amid impenetrable woodland had been obliterated by a spanking orange-brick housing estate. Why it had taken on the role of a magical place he never fathomed.

Vaguely, he remembered Oak-apple Day, but not as the anniversary of Prince Charles hiding in the oak tree to avoid capture by Cromwell’s men, but rather that squirming self-consciousness that had been the bane of his youth. It was still the done thing at prep school on this particular day in May to adorn oneself with oak leaves, so his grandmother ran up an old brown curtain with cut-out green crepe paper leaves

pinned on that he feared would prick him to death if he so much as breathed. Behind and across the aisle, little Jake sensed his mother’s eyes fixated upon him, whereas he could only sink his gaze into the floor boards. Then was mortified when chosen to pick a long coloured ribbon and dance round the maypole when he couldn’t even skip.

Now suddenly, after school it was, he and some boys in his own top primary class were running the gauntlet of a hail of acorns and conkers and stones up a darkly rooted rivulet, pursued by the other, much wilder class eleven. At nine o’clock assembly next morning the dour headmaster, Mr Telford, he of hunched shoulders, withering stare and sarcastic tongue, castigated the ‘fatheads’ - his favourite expletive rolled around and spat out with contempt - who risked being blinded for life or would have it on their conscience for ever, having put another boy’s eye out. Oh, the shame of having to stand out in front of the entire school as one of the ring-leaders of a dangerous and despicable gang.

Shirl was growing concerned that the wind was agitating the stem of his little oak tree and suggested, quite forcefully, that it needed more support. Jake wasn’t interested, especially when asked if there were any pieces of old material she might use to secure the stem. Just like Peg, interfering. From his broom cupboard, he produced an old candy-striped sheet. She stifled a laugh at his kitchen scissors that were so blunt they couldn’t cut, but she tore along the selvedge cleanly, then made a figure eight twice round that she secured to two in-bending plastic rods at the base of the stem, thereby steering clear, he hoped, of any transformative process occurring a few centimetres beneath the roots. At the cross-over point of the two loops, there was some leeway for the stem to give.

Jake, though, remained unconvinced. If you were going to have a supporting structure, surely the strips of sheet should be higher, above the deformity? Otherwise the stem would snap anyway at its weakest point of resistance.

‘What’s the matter?’ she quizzed, as he looked sulkily at her arboreal first-aid.

‘No, no,’ he shrugged, lamenting the loss of aesthetic appeal of the little stalwart all bandaged up

‘Remember, you are growing truffles, not trees, Dad.’ But she knew with an inward sigh he would dismast the tree as soon as she drove off home.

During his last eye test, Jake’s optometrist had told him that he had blind spots in both eyes and it might not be long before he noticed this degeneration, not unusual at his age. Nothing to worry about. An operation to remove cataracts was a straightforward procedure, quite painless. Jake accepted the inevitable with a shrug and a nod. Funny, though, for when his eyesight was at its sharpest, over half a century ago, he saw nothing, nothing in really close detail, even on those far-away woodland walks where he loved the solitude of nature but mulled over his own thoughts, re-enacted bygone conversations ad nauseam, listened to the music of light classics played inside his head. Yet now, thanks to countless dog-walking forays, he could slow down, observe the detail in a leaf, feel the texture of bark, drink in the perfume of honeysuckle or a pink rose straggling over a fence. So that within six weeks of re-potting his oak tree, he espied the first minuscule shootings of new growth, feathers of pale green leaves that slowly began turning an orangey-brown.

Then back from those misty views of his past plodded the stout-hearted Gabriel Oak, the shepherd of Wessex downlands and water-meadows, paragon of long-suffering faithfulness, who in spite of being dealt the devil’s own hand of an over-zealous sheepdog that drove his prized Dorset Horns over a cliff . . . well, there’s Hardy for you . . . he finally gets to claim his treasure, the skittish Bathsheba Everdene.

Four of his own animals he had buried in the back garden. No, five. How could he have forgotten his foundling budgerigar? Bronte, he named her, but where did he bury her? And he had all but forgotten where he’d lain the cumbersome, stiff body of his collie, when he was appalled at digging up at the corner of his vegie patch the long, slender skull, with its dark hollows for eyes and still attached upper jaw, though the lower jaw of rotten teeth abraded had divided into two halves, and the nodalities at the back of the cranium. Which soon became an ivory palace for earwigs when he left it outside on a side wall to clean up later.

The passing of his late wife, Peg, would have been ten years ago. He was more

bemused than bereft by the loss. It was the suddenness of it all and the scan, that repulsive scan, which showed a tumour on her brain about the size of the plumshaped Health Kick tomato ripening on the window-ledge in the kitchen. At first it was the odd headache, then bouts of uncharacteristic irritability, then a slurring of words that alarmed and alerted him. How long had this sinister growth been eating away at her brain? It didn’t bear thinking about, though back than he was wont to disappear secretively into the second bedroom with the scan to contemplate the tumour and shed tears. They scarcely had time or understanding to say a proper goodbye, the shock was so great.

Now pondering more frequently on his own death, he became strangely excited when he first heard about the trend slowly emerging in England of being buried upright. It appeared to be generated by the growing problem of finding space in crowded graveyards and establishing new ones. Also the unfeeling businesslike efficiency of certain funeral parlours, their growing costs and the more natural appeal of being buried at least sixty centimetres below the surface standing up in some quiet woodland retreat beneath the trees, the birds and skies void of pollutants, as if poised to take off for a leisurely Sunday stroll. Sentimental he might be, but the notion of physically decomposing in the earth was so much more comforting than being dissected or cremated, a casket of ashes. Surely, there had to be some peaceful glade in his adopted country that he naturally gravitated to?

With the lapse of another four years, Jake could still be found pottering about the garden, more slowly now with swelling joints on his fingers and arthritic knees that he was reluctant to get down upon, even with a cushion of old carpet. But every time he shuffled out the back door his blurry eyes would alight upon the oak tree first of all. Patiently he had waited, for he believed that within three or four winters he should detect a rich-ripe, distinctive odour hanging about the tree, the smell of truffles. This prospect had given an edge to fondness for his little dwarf, but his longtime patience had blunted all expectation, especially when reminded of that clumsy mashing of the roots. What’s more, who could know what diseases or deformities were lurking beneath the surface? Perhaps he might be fortunate and claim a twocentimetre globule of truffle rather than a lump the size of a grapefruit. It no longer seemed to matter quite so much.

Undeterred, he continued each morning to press the two prongs of the probe down to root level in the mix, read the gauge to check the levels of moisture and pH, then smooth any ruffles on the surface with rough, unsteady hand..

Michael Small December 25, 2010 – December 30, 2010 P O S T E D B Y MICH A EL A T 03:03 NO

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THE SCORN OF BECKY PILBEAM The moment she entered the plaza her rancour began leaching into morbid selfconsciousness, but head down, eyes averted, she pressed on, unsteady on rarely worn high heels, feigning keen interest in display windows but seeing nothing, nothing but a pale frightened imitation of a woman in her mid-thirties. This was ridiculous, for why should she feel guilty, she told herself, but was immediately shafted in her mind’s eye by a horrified glare from her gaping mother and an air of incomprehension on the benign, more wordly face of her father.

No, Tyson was definitely going to pay for this . . . this humiliation.

Shame she might shuck off if only she looked up and brazened it out.

After all, there were several single women, mainly Asian, admittedly, strolling around window-shopping, some young and inexperienced, you’d think, some of indeterminate age, several smartly dressed in lightweight woollen jackets and tailored trousers, most in casual western, even shorts, and a few cougarish possibles who stared through you. Hardly any would be rivals, surely.

She wondered if she had shown enough restraint in her application of eye-shadow, the electro blue spectrum, and had never before doubled burgundy lipstick as blush for her cheeks. Tyson had always been repelled by bold ruby lips, more so by wet lippy, reminiscent of Albert Tucker’s schoolgirls and cheap St Kilda brothels, preferring the Nordic penchant for the natural look, so she seldom used any

foundation in spite of her freckles scattered like poppy seed beneath deep-set bluish eyes; maybe this time a touch of powder. Even her nails she’d dabbed bubblegum purple rather than safe coral pink. Might as well go the whole hog and put the boot in. O for a steel stiletto!

Although Tyson was her first and only boyfriend, Becky wasn’t entirely ignorant of the whiff of testosterone. She and bosom pal Anita would occasionally sit in the outer at the MCG and admire with a giggle the likes of Robbie Flower and David Polkinghorne and Steve MacPherson, who had kissed her at a fund-raising ball, but it was more of an aesthetic attraction, so it seemed. Her younger brother, Max, though, a farmer out Camperdown way, would rabbit on about the antics of the footy chicks who came on hard about prime beef. Becky did blurt out a laugh or two at that choice of language, designed in a straight-faced, matter-of-fact manner to shock his mother, especially as she knew Mum was squirming inside, but was both saddened and disgusted by the surrender of self-control and dignity by such tarts. Yet here she was behaving in a similarly sleazy fashion. What on earth was she letting herself in for?

It had been such a terribly long time since she had last wriggled into a mini-skirt, too long she now realized, though never would she have dared to wear grenadier red before. She was on fire now, all right. Lou Sickert, her brother-in-law’s tennis pal, had encouraged her with, ‘I didn’t know Beck had legs,’ which both cheered and embarrassed her. But Lou must have several times seen her chicken-white limbs complementing a lily-white tennis dress on court. Or was she wearing white legwarmers? Lou chortled, trampling over neighbours’ gardens in search of balls he’d clownishly bomb-dropped beyond the base line.

Becky’s pride was still hurting from that last rubber with Tyson, a three-hour fivesetter on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, when he had vanquished her for the first time. How the cunning old fox fought back from two sets down, when she was already bored with another one-sided match, could hardly bear thinking about.

Instead she trudged off the court in a huff, pouting. ‘That’s the last time I’m playing with you, you meanie. I refuse to play against this rubbishy ping-pong.’ Didn’t even offer to shout him a blueberry milkshake at the corner milk bar, the traditional lot befalling the loser.

She was also nettled that her mother had been right all along. Lorelei was matronly

in manner and ample of build, a clucker of fuss, Tyson thought, but generous to a fault, for hadn’t she brought him back a waste-paper receptacle in purple leather from Florence? ‘She never used to be this doty,’ Becky often murmured behind her hand. ‘I love life,’ Mum would burble away, even if the gossip from the Church of Christ was spiked with trials and tribulations, including the mauve and greening black eye that her depressive bully of a husband had inflicted, which led to her taking refuge with their eldest daughter; even then there was no stopping her running round meals or selling raffle tickets or sitting with the elderly noddies on Sunday afternoons. Her jolly mood was seldom dinted. Except Becky’s relationship with a much older man had been gnawing away at her for years. Quite obviously, it was going nowhere, and since her youngest daughter had moved in with Tyson she could no longer bring herself to speak dotingly about the wayward one to friends at church.

‘Is he a kind of father-figure?’ she dared ask over the Sunday roast, eventually, trying hard to understand the attraction. Dr Handysides at church had agitated her by confirming that Becky was missing all the pleasure of marrying a man closer in age, setting up a home together with future guaranteed and bearing children before she was too much older. After all, this Tyson fellow had already experienced that blissful state with another woman, admittedly without the good fortune of kids. At which remark, Lorelei became doubly worried. Would she never fuss over a grandchild by her favourite daughter? If only her Becky were game enough to ask Tyson where she stood. But then, she sighed, a lockstitch of her own creed was that a good wife should always pander to the male ego.

‘No, of course not, Mum. It’s rather more than that.’ Though Becky was abruptly reminded of her thirteenth birthday treat in the City when her own father bustled all three daughters into an adult sex shop to initiate them into the esoterica of sexual mores, disgusting Lorelei by the by, who disowned the lot of them by storming off to Best & Less on the corner, entertaining hideous imaginings of torturous surgical gizmos and those disgusting bilboes.

‘I do feel hurt that you no longer come to church.’

‘Oh Mum,’ Becky said, trying not to reveal her exasperation, ‘Tyson does have a spiritual side. We’ve started attending meditation . . .’ but bit her tongue when she recollected that her other much younger brother training for the ministry had

pronounced lugubriously that meditation was evil, the work of the devil. To make matters worse, this was a radical hi-tech variation hot from the debauched west coast of America.

While gloating over his upset victory, still miming his slashing backhand down the line which would have given Ken Rosewall nightmares, Tyson was taken aback by Becky’s funky mood. It was so out of character. And to dismiss his tactical subtlety as ping pong was most condescending. She knew he would always chase down everything, because he was a devil for lost causes. Besides, he did enjoy for pure exercise running to the lines and scampering with desperate lunge up to the net, which she with her lack of mobility would seldom attempt, preferring to dominate from the base line with solid ground strokes and pass him down either wing. But that afternoon his extravagant flourish of a backhand slice swishing across his body with vicious backspin to cut the ball low and suddenly dropping short gave her nothing to hit on the bounce. Whereas he smiled at the hint of blood spilt on court, the red seeds and pulpy rind of pomegranates at the northern end beneath the neighbour’s fence, rotting.

She had brought her pooch with her, a toy mongrel with a yap of Jack Russell, a tricolour waif from Lost Dogs, polka dot with a dash of grey about its head, harried by two much larger, snappy hounds and neglected by a careless old codger working for council maintenance, who was frequently blind drunk over a painful separation.

Polky was ageless but old before his time, hairless and defeated, constantly scratching his bald patches and licking the carpet, waddling on bow legs with minute, springy steps, now stopping to scratch his flank with minuscule hind leg.

Tyson did feel sympathy for the poor old thing that frequently suffered bouts of hiccups or coughing and spent his days curled up in a blanket out of harm’s way, still to learn how to bark again. So Becky was reassured, for any man who loved dogs must have a good heart.

‘Remind me to get some cod liver oil for Mr Polky,’ she said, jouncing the pup in her arms and bussing his nervous little head.

‘That’s what got me through the 1940s,’ he replied. ‘That and a thick twist of malt.

Now listen, he bit my toe again last night.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Tyson, he says, but you shouldn’t be rough with me. Naughty Mr Tyson mustn’t invade my space, you know. That’s my bed too.’

‘Be reasonable. I can hardly turn over without accidentally kicking him. I don’t always know where he is when I’m in Snoozeville.’

Except when Mr Polky was licking the apparent salt on his hands and legs or burrowing into the crooks of his knees.

It was late Friday afternoon, twelve days before Christmas. Tyson collected the mail and shuffled the envelopes. The name and address on the last letter held his attention for several seconds, rooting him to the pavement: Fosselthwaite and Snype, Barristers & Solicitors. Never get involved with the law cautioned a primal voice and he hadn’t. Or hadn’t meant to. Though the image of a poor blighter in the dock at the Old Bailey sprang to mind, possibly being tried for murder, which Tyson wandering by as a footloose sixteen year old popped in to observe. He emerged sickened by the rapier thrusts of the QC, whose rampant sarcasm reduced the accused to a stuttering idiot, barely able to get his replies out before being withered with contempt of court.

A wave of dread surged over him, then a secondary wave of panic. Was he getting up the nose of his neighbours again, the Montovini, whingeing about overhanging boughs or his roots forcing up their foundations? Or the run-off in stormy weather from the lateral slope of the back garden sluicing out their potting shed? Surely, it couldn’t be one of his massage clients – he was ethically sound, for goodness sake.

Unless, he’d aggravated some chap’s hernia that he hadn’t been informed about. Oh, my god!

Imagine being shoved by surly-shouldered debt-collectors, hastily selling up dirtcheap and moving into a packing-case beneath St Kilda pier!

Frantically, he jagged open the envelope.

Dear Sir,

Re: Rebecca Pilbeam – De Facto Entitlements.

Entitlements! What entitlements? ‘Our client has been reluctant to make any claim,’ the letter began, although the list of alleged grievances that followed belied this statement.

‘Specifically, our client instructs that she contributed an amount of $150.00 per month towards the mortgage repayments over some eight years . . .’ Hey, not exactly. I had paid off the mortgage three years before Beck moved in. She had paid a token rent, but it was a hundred and fifty per month for the first four years, an amount nominated by the lady herself. This figure was much less than the sum she’d paid for her previous rental . . . and, I’d have you know, less than the rent demanded of her by her own brother-in-law when she sought short-term accommodation. In fact, now she was renting a house at six hundred per month!

'Given that the value of the home at separation was about $150,000 . . . ‘ Hold on!

Who carried out this valuation? And when? And how? ‘We are instructed that our client is prepared to accept the amount of $17,750 as full and final settlement of her property entitlements.’

Eighteen grand! For god sake, that’s an arm and a leg! By what criteria did you arrive at that extortionate figure? Which works out at almost twelve per cent of your supposed valuation of the house. So what other factors did you take into account?

And why did you not list them, so that I could present my version of events, or at least gain some inkling of exactly how I had committed any wrongdoing?

‘We advise that we are instructed by our client that should you fail to respond within 7 days to issue property proceedings.’

Tyson slumped deep into the armchair, his insides seething. Property proceedings?

The sound of the euphemism with its punchy pontificating alliteration cut ugly incisions. Had he been given seven days from the day that the solicitor wrote the letter or from the day he received it? A mere seven days! It had taken Beck over two and a half years to plan her campaign, collect her evidence, refine her cost-effective arguments, nurse her ill-will and bewitch the solicitor. Fourteen years reduced to twenty lines of bloodless prose! Huh, can’t even write a grammatically correct

sentence, these legal sharks!

There was no name on the solicitor’s letter, no face behind the dry tone; only an unidentifiable squiggle of a signature. Beck’s really landed us in the poo.

Fortunately, the fake samurai sword that he’d souvenired in Kyoto had been stolen in a burglary one Friday night when they were caught up in a game of Trivial Pursuit.

Her brother-in-law, Steven Gough Allinson, who puffed himself up as a businessman but didn’t stoop to a serious job since he could comfortably live off his mater’s legacy and who ran both a BMW and his wife’s armoured Land Cruiser, occasionally took on casual book-keeping jobs to keep his hand in the till as well as collecting rent for well-oiled acquaintances of his late father who let their homes for six-month cruises or the Venice Biennale.

‘I’d be screwing the bastard for everything he’s got!’ said Steven, still sulking over Tyson’s unwillingness to go into partnership with four other families to purchase a valley property up near Marysville with a thriving snap-frozen raspberry business.

Possessed of a couple of on-site cottages, the six groups could take it in turns to book a weekend, go bush-walking, let the kids learn how to ride a trail-bike, splash about in the dam in summer, live like squattocracy. Besides, in spite of his competitive bluster in the doubles, he was made to look ridiculous and sulky by that bastard’s bamboozling spin and his own fresh-air swipes.

‘Look, I don’t feel comfortable . . . ‘ ‘Let’s not pussyfoot around. He led you on, didn’t he? Gave you the impression he was ready to get hitched?’

‘I thought so,’ Beck said hesitantly, frowning. ‘That very first meeting, Max’s twentyfirst. At Kooyong, on the centre court. He told me his short-lived marriage hadn’t worked out, a huge mistake, but that didn’t mean he might not re-marry.’

‘Well, there you are. He was testing your reaction, playing with your emotions. And now here you are a dozen years later, no further forward. You have solid grounds, my

girl. Now let’s consider his assets.’

Fists clenched, jaw locked, Tyson could see the second-hand silver BMW she had just bought, could see himself slipping round to her carport under cover of darkness and scarring the panels, breaking windows, stabbing tyres. Then as anger, indignation, frustration expired, a sense of pity welled up. She was attacking him not because of any financial exploitation but for his lack of emotional capital. ‘I’ll come back to you if we can get married,’ she’d said forlornly. ‘We can get counselling . . . if you want.’

At nights, sickened with guilt and shame, he’d lived through those last months again and again, the months of Beck’s despondency, her listlessness turning to sickness as her larynx tightened so that she could barely speak, desperate now for marriage but withdrawing into herself further and further beneath fits of coughing, ruffled bedclothes and walls of silence. ‘Why do you reject me?’ she’d occasionally whimper.

But persist he would in his cold-shoulder treatment, for he knew she thought too highly of him; he didn’t deserve her, nor could he cope with such adulation and loyalty, such limpet steadfastness, even though she was gradually becoming less clingy, more a course junkie . . . the Jung Society, Hatha Yoga to undo the knots, Initiation into the Kama Sutra . . .

How do you put a value on feelings? How do you read the happiness index? In any case, how do you remember the ebb and flow and all the muddied eddies of emotion before the final lunacy? And how do you weigh in the balance all those thousands of little everyday favours given by both parties without heed of reward or even acknowledgement?

She’d done everything to capture him, except perhaps be more forthright about her own heartfelt wishes. Her pain when he left for a holiday in the States she recalled with a shudder. So dreadfully did she miss him that she resolved to make an appointment with a GP whose locum lay outside her parish to obtain the pill. On the evening of his return her parents were at choir practice, a perfect opportunity. She collected Tyson at Tulla and brought him straight back home, practically breathless.

‘Just wait here a moment,’ she said coyly, gesturing him to an armchair in the lounge.

‘I’ll call you in a jiff,’ and disappeared into her bedroom. Having taken off her clothes, she arranged her naked body on the counterpane in the most dignified pose she’d rehearsed, one she’d discovered in the local library – Goya’s Maja desnuda. Now, though, at this very moment she’d been dying for, she was trembling, felt the whole embarrassment of seduction too arch, with her arms back behind her head, utterly exposed, indeed, far too yielding.

‘Darling, I’m ready for you now!’ she warbled, with a bit of a croak.

Funny, she’d never called him ‘Darling’ before. Deeming her behaviour more alarming than mysterious, his own thoughts were still gliding smooth and tranquil through the mangrove swamps of the Everglades, where every bubble rising from the murky shadows of mud and knotty roots feigned an alligator’s vigilant eye. In no hurry, he approached Becky’s bedroom, suddenly shocked to find her starkers.

Struck speechless he was, a stunned mullet out of his depth. Abashed in turn, but smiling knowingly if not winningly, she opened her arms wide to draw him down out of his rapture.

‘Welcome back!’

Now he did look perplexed, not deliriously happy as was meant.

“I’ve been to the doctor’s. It’s okay.’

‘But you didn’t have to do that.’ Stumbling on difficult terrain, in a tone of dismay and almost annoyance, he knew how much it had cost her to surrender her virginity, how much he must have meant to her, when he didn’t need or particularly desire to have intercourse, yet sensed some kind of entrapment or tacit commitment. And yet she had done this for him, just as she had given herself to petting then oral favours, how could he hurt her feelings, saw the extent of her devotion, her wish to demonstrate she really was an emotionally mature woman.

Reluctantly, he made love, gentle and almost passive, touched by her faith but also sinking guilt that she had saved herself for someone worthy of her, someone whom she could bear off in marriage. Worse still, she had unilaterally moved the

relationship onto another level.

For it was something old-fashioned about her, the cleanskin that he had really liked, really cuddly, until he realized that adjective was a euphemism best left to Personal Services in the local rag. In short, he thought he had her measure: her modesty and fondness for family, her church-going that he had given away in his teens, her conservative way of dressing, her genuine willingness to help others less fortunate, her mildness of manner, especially since he was still hurting from a torrid affair with a married woman with three young children under the age of seven, where he had in effect foolishly lost his sense of self, not to mention his dignity and inner calm. By contrast with that manipulative lady, Becky was easy to please and settled for few creature comforts, a homely girl who had a close circle of four girlfriends she’d grown up with, all now salaried professionals together with their partners, who, Tyson admitted, fifteen years senior, he felt ill-at-ease with, as if they too would be chivvying over when he and Becky would tie the knot. Then there were long-time friends from Youth Group, a capella, tennis club, a whole caravanserai of connections. Though very much a people person, she was nonetheless stable and unlikely to rock his hard-fought equilibrium.

Finally, several years having elapsed, he felt obliged to invite her to share his own house at a time when Becky was decidedly unhappy. She could not bear to stay in the same home as her loathsome father with his piggy eyes and vindictive manner, but she also felt stilted with her new flatmates, a loud, domineering party girl who’d romp in late Friday and Saturday nights with a different guy, and another girl who lodged like a fixture in the bathroom and got through several rolls of toilet paper each week, presumably on the removal of cosmetics, and was frequently snippy about Becky’s wardrobe that didn’t do favours, especially from rear vision.

Becky found co-habiting a painful matter to raise with her mother, who would certainly regard this unforeseen shift as living in sin and with – of all rough trades! – a masseur as a challenge to her own nurturing role; indeed, to her own moral values, the integrity of her whole family. How would this shameful development affect her sixty-year old brother’s recovery at Woodend from a triple bypass?

From day one Tyson was scrupulous in making sure they listed all their mutual

expenses together with utility bills and divvied them up every Sunday. He attended to the cooking during the week the laundry and toilet; she to the vacuuming, weekend cooking and queasy chocolate cake home-made. It proved a comfortable arrangement for both parties. When Beck offered to pay for half the cost of repairs and cleaning the gutters, he declined, for he was determined not to take advantage of ownership, even offering his house for her collateral should they enter into some business arrangement with Steven Allinson.

Ever the latter-day New Age adventurer, Tyson suggested they go to a presentation of high-tech meditation by a celebrated master at the town hall. He did have misgivings about the inevitable sales pitch and signing up. Suspicious, he was nevertheless sold on the notion of getting back into his personal meditation that had of late lapsed into a dutiful chore and a lazy wander down memory lane.

The packed audience hushed and burst into applause as Master Delmondo’s presence manifested in a silky white robe with fluorescent blue sash. At once, Tyson was put off by the larding of abstract scientific compounds – ‘Alpha level Synchronicity Holodynamic vibrational entrainment technology’ – but he could not help tittering at the slick rat-a-tat patter of a master spruiker that suggested put-downs from Groucho Marx or old music hall routines: ‘Every thought you ever thought appears in your thinking. You’re not an individual, you’re a crowd’; ‘You shouldn’t eat animals, you’re not a cemetery’; ‘We use less than one per cent of our brain function. We are a bunch of walking corpses.’

How on earth does this guy ever still his chattering mind?

But when Tyson adjusted the headphones, he did school himself into an alpha state of promised peacefulness. It wasn’t long, though, before his conscious mind began playing up, trying to recall how many items were listed on the master’s whole-brain product catalogue: DVDs, hanging crystals, jewellery, perfume, almanacs, greetings cards . . .

His own soul’s vibration was obviously out of synch, he admitted, deflated, yet listening to Beck’s easy rhythmical breathing was far more satisfying than concentrating on his own. Feeling virtuous that once again he’d invited her to share a whole new experience, he wondered with a pang of regret whether he might have

treated his own imaginary daughter in such a way, sharing life with a loved one as an educational journey. He just hoped Beck wouldn’t notice his fit of the fidgets.

And for her part, she was willing, really excited to learn how to keep both sides of her brain in balance and jumped at the chance to extend the narrow boundaries of her spiritual growth. ‘You must transcend your data,’ advised Master Delmondo, the lanky American radiating health, quips of wisdom and sure-fire conviction. ‘You are the god within.’ She readily gave herself up to the instructions: eyes closed, spine upright, hands joined loosely in her lap. Sounds from the synthesizer and veena and oceanic breakers washed over her afresh again and again; she might have been rebirthing in ambiotic fluid. ‘To be high on life,’ echoed Master Delmondo, ‘live for the moment’, a thrilling idea, till she pulled herself up - her despicable father would’ve entertained the same attitude years ago in the sixties.

Dear Fosselthwaite & Snype, I am in receipt of your communication of 1st inst, in which you mistakenly claim that your client, one Rebecca M. Pilbotham, is entitled to the exorbitant sum of $17,750 due ostensibly to the fact that I had erred in divvying up our mutual bills equitably whilst said client was residing at aforesaid domus.

I put the case that the aforementioned Rebecca M. Pilbotham, sometime known as Beck, Becky, Bex or The Pill, is on the contrary indebted to my good self for offices rendered to the tune of $17,750.

Such services tendered run as follows:

• Lender of $35,000 collateral for your client to enter business partnership

• Male escort to Europe for initiation into a range of diverse cultures

• Translator of French, Spanish, Italian and a range of English accents

• Masseur with acupressure speciality

• Adviser of and Assistant at regular sexual practices – sometimes irregular

• Spiritual guide

• Family counsellor, particularly re. her parents

• Hit-up partner at tennis and church trivia nights

• Dog-walker and pooper-scooper

No, no, no, too sarky, sailing far too close to the wind. Then he had a brainwave, but was unfortunately brought low by the reply.

Dear Sir, Thank you for submitting an abstract of your article ‘Heav’n hath no fury like a man scorn’d’ to The Melbourne Inquirer. Regrettably we cannot use it as we receive many similar submissions daily.

When he broke the news as late as he dare that he would be spending Christmas in Europe, he hadn’t bargained at all on her violent reaction: those chestnut eyes smouldering, her hurt, disbelieving stare, her snatch at his hands and pressing them against her breasts. ‘Tell me that you love me!’ she pleaded. ‘Tell me! Please tell me

you love me.’ He was in such a state of shock, he couldn’t speak, repulsed by this melodramatic snit, his own helplessness. Still she groaned, ‘Please tell me you love me!’ This was becoming ridiculous, she was acting like a child, but she clung on, sobbing, so that his own gathering irritation and desire to break away from her clutches subsided into pity, her wet face distorted with pain. ‘Tell me! Tell me!’ she growled a grizzle, pulling at the back of his shirt. All he could do was wrap his arms about her and bury her face in his already damp shirt.

‘Of course, I love you,’ he whispered into her ear, doubtful, because he no longer knew what love was. Or at least could never seem to steer that middle way between the Scylla of romance and passion on the bedrock and the Charybdis of a steadfast companionable relationship not hijacked by sexual performance. He was fond of her, of course, but then hadn’t even thought of asking her to accompany him. In any case, she’d be at work.

‘Then take me with you!’

‘What?’

‘Take me with you!’ She was grabbing at his shirt collar as if about to throttle him.

When on Christmas Eve in Venice he was bailed up in his hotel room due to the incessant rain that had flooded St Mark’s, he found himself eagerly looking forward to her joining him in Paris. In fact, enjoyed taking her to those half-empty ultracheap underground restaurants off Boulevard St Michel and strolling about Versailles in a flurry of snow. She even forgave him when he mistook the twenty-four hour timetable at Barcelona, where the slow stopping train with no buffet car destined for Granada arrived twelve hours later than he expected, so that they reeled in headachy, parched and starving after a long, sleepless, frigid night on hard, wooden slats.

The first time that he’d asked her to leave his house, their home, he had worked himself up into a state of calm, speaking in phrases measured carefully in recent weeks, but her wide-eyed disbelief and dimples of pain nearly undid him.

‘Now let’s stay calm and rational,’ he was saying, slow and awkward, trying not to inflict too much suffering. ‘Somehow we don’t seem to be connecting any longer. To be blunt, I don’t think I can make you happy, Beck.’

So the time had come at last. She’d been waiting for an ultimatum for months; seen it in the immobility of his face, the terseness of conversation. They had allowed the relationship to grow stale. It was true that his occasional love-making had for years lacked any passion or more recently any genuine involvement at all. But he was usually there for her when she needed him; only nowadays she wondered if she really did need him, what with her new-found interests and widening circle of friends.

Bloody hell, why had he waited so long to tell her! For him, the future was winding on and on and on, but happiness always lay round the next corner, never rocked the here and now. But what about me! Even Lorelei had plucked up the gumption to remind her she was wasting the best years of her life. ‘. . . so I think it better if you find somewhere else to live.’

Still she said nothing ‘What do you say?’ It was becoming almost unbearable to look into those brown pebbles. Beck?’

‘I’m staying here.’ Almost inaudible her voice, but she hid her tears in the hum of the vacuum-cleaner she’d re-started, leaving him standing there helpless, trapped in his own domain.

She must’ve been walking about for over an hour and her calf muscles were sore in those high heels, her toes bunched up. How many more laps of the plaza and rounds of arcades should she clock up, already weary, lethargic, hollowed out? There were limits to how frequently you could stare blankly at the window of Hollywood Nails.

What a waste that hundred bucks spent on Acqua di Gioia! More annoying, she suffered the nagging suspicion that Tyson was stalking her. She wouldn’t put it past him, now that he’d lost her, especially now that he had no hope of getting her back.

She felt a shiver of distaste, that same sensation whenever her estranged father greased to patch things up. Just her luck, for Tyson would occasionally shop at Asian

grocers for his piquant spices, aromatic durians and Szechuan peppercorns.

So she attempted to hasten through the throng in the arcades and make her escape to the car park. Clopping woodenly through the plaza, she caught her heel and stumbled.

‘Eh, yer need some help, lady.’ The high-pitched bleat of a voice was quite at odds with the hefty frame bragging belly-gut, the pasty face nicked with port-wine capillaries, the grey, stubbled head.

‘No, I’m fine,’ she bristled, scarcely raising a glance at the man who’d disjointedly lifted himself from a seat next to some stunted box in a concrete tub.

‘D’yer fancy a coffee?’

‘No, no. I must be getting along.’ Although the porky’s line was what she’d been working for all evening. That and something far more blunt and direct.

‘Yer know, I really like you’se. I’ve noticed youse walking about. Yeah, I must’ve met you’se somewhere.’

As she turned to hiss ‘Fuck off!’ she bumped into a girl, Asian, neat and petite, fragile as a doll, hair shiny black as a raven’s wing that fringed a pale face, legs slender as saplings.

‘Sorry, very sorry,’ said the girl.

‘No, no, my fault.’

‘Don’t youse tart with me, yer scuzzbag!’ spat the hulk.

‘That man is trouble for you?’

‘Just a weirdo,’ said Beck in hushed tones, a glare burning her back. ‘I think he’s been stalking me.’

‘Excuse me? My English is not good.’

‘Let’s not worry about him. It’s certainly busy Thursday nights. I’ll let you get on with your shopping.’

‘No, I not do shopping,’ the girl said, staring anxiously at the ground, biting her lip. ‘I notice you two times tonight round shops here. Like you, I’m not happy.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You understand, it is difficult to find work in Australia. There are too many Chinese in town. Also the money is very little for McDonald’s or washing dishes in Chinese restaurant.’

‘What a shame! How much do you need? I think I’ve got some change. Here . . .’ she said, already poking about in her purse.

A dozy-looking, unshaven youth hanging out of his jeans at the knees, eyes hooded to slits, suddenly hove to at her elbow. ‘Can youse spare twenty cents? 'Ere, can you'se . . .’

‘No. I can’t!’ she snapped, stepping away as if she might be contaminated.

‘Any loose change?’ His voice was practically inaudible as he tottered about her.

‘Buzz off!’ Beck turned back to the girl. ‘Jeez, for crying out loud, these men! Now how can I help?’

‘Thank you no,’ said the girl with anxiety, looking warily at the youth rocking on the spot, fixated upon on them. ‘I’m not beggar.’ A frowning moue of defiance or frustration passed her off as even younger. ‘As student, I am allowed to work twenty hours in week only. What can I do? Either work in massage parlour or work cash in hand. If I do massage parlour I must pay owner fifty/fifty. If I work cash, I must walk too much on my own. It is very dangerous at night.’

‘What a bummer! But how can you possibly cope with such degrading work?’

‘So sorry, what is grading?’

‘How do you manage to do this horrible work?’

‘I try not to think too much about this kind of work, but yes . . . yes, I am shamed. But what can I do? It’s a job. I must have job. I cannot phone my family in Shanghai about how I live or they will give me orders to go home very soon. Then I will be shamed much more. I cannot ask for more money. They give me too much already so I can study medicine and maybe stay here after uni.’

‘There’s an old man over there staring at you. Do you know him?’

She turned and gave a radiant smile that lit up her fine features and a delicate little wave at a grey-haired gaffer puffing away on a cigarette, hunched over a pot of tea inside the awning of an outdoor café just off the plaza. Occasionally an attractively dressed girl in bold colours would wave to him in passing its glass sides with a beaming smile and he would nod, flash his gold teeth and flick ash onto the floor.

‘Oh, he’s my boss. It’s okay. Come, we have a cup of coffee and I introduce you. He tells us to use room with bed in Centro even that public people don’t know. He has key. He can give you work. What is your name?’

‘Err, Wanda. No, no, thank you anyway. Must be going. Nice talking to you.’

‘Remember, if you want to be worker in the street, for money, you must look at the man in the eyes and smile real good. If you want to pick up a man, just go for coffee, no money, you understand, don’t look at them straight in the eyes, but out the corner only.’

As for Tyson, next time she really would bury him.

Michael Small October 3 – November 20, 2010

P O S T E D B Y MICH A EL A T 03:02 NO

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THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR Security is body-language. You look at human nature for self-survival, chew it over.

As usual, Ron was on the door, looking for signs. Looking for the way they rocked up; looking for a slight bulge in the sock where nine tenths of knives are secreted; looking for whether they were left-handed or right as they paid their dosh to the cashier.

Anything that makes you react quicker. Not anti- but pro-reaction. You’re reading them, so make eye-contact for mood – are they stoked, cranky, spoiling for a fight?

When you go inside, check where they’re parked, how many together? Any fireworks, you can hit the spot real quick. If some tough guy skites he slept with your mother, just tell him to cool it and leave your mother out; don’t shirt-front. And remember to soft soap the locals, more than the regulars even, as it’s their turf, while the regs can nick off to other clubs along the drag.

Most of these bouncer guys landed the gig at the Ace of Clubs because they knew someone. Sure, they’ve done their three-day basic training and they come on strong and six-pack. They can wrap their biceps round a trouble-making prick who’s off his face and they can stare as mean as a cut snake if they have to act Stallone, but they don’t need a punch-up, not inside any rate. They just want to sweet-talk the girls, screw them at night’s end if poss. But root rats don’t know how to read people or even wise up to the necessaries. Nor do they know how to speak to ratbags without riling them some more or how to keep a lid on their own boiler. Off the premises, they might throw one.

Take the honchos of The Ace. They don’t want to get involved. They just want a sweet trouble-free night where they can make some moolah, pay the protection racket a divvy of the monthly take, and nudge the bar staff to water down the drinks.

Doesn’t seem to bother the clubbers, guys on their Scotch and coke or Scotch and bourbon or pot of amber fluid, whereas the cats go wild for mixed drinks, like vodka and lime, voddie and orange, or tequila, which is all the rage on today’s scene. The chicks rub black pepper on their wrist, lick it and suck on a lemon. They die for it, but three tequilas and they’re woozy, so if by midnight they haven’t snared any bod they have the hots for, they won’t be itching for some nookie. Then it’s ok to keep

drinking, like it’s safe.

As a bouncer, Ron was a bit of an oddball. He had no pals in the underworld, but he’d make damned sure he kept his enemies close. Talk sweet to them, don’t ruffle feathers. The last thing you want is slashed tyres. Well, not quite the last thing. Every now and again he’d check the whereabouts of that night’s team, just in case, six bouncers in black shirts, black pants, black shoes. Most clubbers he saw through the door were right on; they just wanted a fun time with a mating dance or five, but he’d stand by his three cardinal rules: first, you can abuse me as much as you like, it’s water off a duck’s back; second, when I say enough drink, that’s it, enough; third, if someone’s bugging you, don’t try and sort it yourself but come straight to me, no messing.

Other times he’d work the interior: ‘How’s your day?’ ‘How’s it hanging?’ ‘Is there anything you want to talk about?’ And now and then find beauhunks as well as teenage birds and thirties-something cougars crying the blues on his shoulder. But the crying buddy wouldn’t tolerate any guy getting into a chick’s grundies in the most intimate areas of the club, where subdued lighting invited a quick grope.

On the door, Ron would squiz the guys, check they weren’t wearing jeans or runners but fronted up decent, not daggy; the girls could get away with virtually anything, often sporting skimpy hip gear beneath their jackets and sometimes smart runners with pants, less as the night wore on, so that by the time they had honed in on a guy they fancied they’d be flaunting their wares, even shimmying their ass against the guy’s crotch. Many of the blokes just shuffled like marionettes poking the air, a bit spacey with it, or still beating the shit out of the funky chicken.

If there were more girls than guys, chances are it would be a pretty peaceful night.

Unless the girls got aggro because of the competition and grabbed the initiative. If more guys were hanging out, Ron would put the mcginnis on the grog artists to even up the numbers: ‘Hey, you guys, I reckon you’ve sunk too much booze. There’s an .05 blitz on tonight, so you’d better get a shifty on.’ Let that be another club’s headache.

Of course, management would tell him not to get his tits in a twist about drugs, but Ron had witnessed what abusive substances had inflicted on a couple of his mates: one from an overdose, the other stabbed for not delivering the bread for some gear

dealt to him. Whenever the cops or council bods dropped by to check restrictions and count heads, the managers would do a speedy Gonzales, calling on the locals to slip into the lane outside and dole out free drinks.

Now pushing fifty, Ron was thinking retirement. The mental strain was catching up with the physical. ‘Am I happy copping all the bullshit?’ This was a young feller’s job and the hotel security men, as they were now called, were pressing to make a name for themselves, big-noting if Sergio Marinelli’s shadow fell across their path or if the mobster even glanced at them. What’s more, the new Mr Bigs were getting younger and ever more vicious. So a sense of the unpredictable might bubble up and hang in the air like the odour of sex barely repressed: would the joint be going off tonight or would the night turn ugly? Besides, those recently installed security cameras were diddley-dick as a deterrent, only serving to show who was right or wrong in a dustup.

Even DJ’s crowd music no longer seemed groovy cool throbbing with sexual promise but more of an incessant, tiresome racket, what with hits from the Top 40 pops or reggae or skunk, even the last rites of techno. Ron put on his earplugs when he patrolled inside, dazzled at first by the two crystal balls suspended from the ceiling above the dance floor which reflected the flicker of multi-coloured impulse lights skittering up and down the wall, the sound and light show in sync with the beat of the music controlled by DJ in his raised box. ‘If you wanna dance, now’s your chance.

Come on down!’

To get the crowd to lighten up, DJ might bring in a few mates to take the floor, encourage the shrinking violets to dance the light fantastic, get the party rolling. A bit of a shocker, DJ, he didn’t always look the real deal behind his console of switches, preferring to dress down - jeans, T-shirt and runners, not even a fluoro shirt, but he did okay getting the clubbers dry as a nun’s tit, alco sales being the biggest moneyspinner. Guys might hold back at the beginning, specially if there was a real stunner on the floor, ‘protected’ by her girlfriends, but when they’d plucked up some bottle they’d mosey over, have a perv, manoeuvre closer, start chatting, probably loosen up when they won a spot prize, like a drinks card.

‘The next birthday request is for Rachel. Where is she? Give us a wave, Rach! Wowee, she’s still sweet sixteen!’ Thirty-five, more like.

A bit antsy about a few beatings he had copped at The Ace, both inside and out, Ron knew the drill if knocked down: curl up tight, dial to the deck, arms over your noggin and never, never show fear. When carted off to hospital after a stoush, he’d always discharge himself the next day so as to confront his attacker that evening, just to let the guy know he wasn’t chicken.

Since Hookesy, the gross behaviour of some security guards, meat and drink to media headlines, was on the nose. ‘We’re creating a violent society,’ Ron reflected.

‘How many dudes have been brain-damaged at nightclubs lately? Or glassed with a beer bottle from jawbone to temple when standing up for their girl after she’s been hit on by three punks?’

On his hand radio Ron had called up Igor, the ex-basketballer, a 215 cm Russian, so he could be relieved from the door to make a final sweep: again check out the mood, spot potential stirrers and those who’d bail out, usually those guys with tatts on their knuckles or propped up stewed against the main bar by the dance floor, have a yarn with the locals, ask if they required a taxi. It was about two o’clock, a warm October night.

‘Come on, get close!’ DJ himself was coming on smoochy for the last groove, dead chuffed with the volume of turps nudged by the clubbers. ‘Have it with feeling!’

Ron wandered outside to air his lungs, his eyes sore from the dazzle and his throat scratchy. He was about to retreat down the steps when two sauced-up ladettes stopped and teetering unsteadily on high heels asked if they might enter.

‘Sorry, love, we close at three.’

‘Aw, come on, be nice,’ implored one, pursing her mauve lippy gloss into an O and leaning forward to reveal ample cleavage, then snuggled real close up under his beak.

‘We ony wanta coupla dwinkies, don’t we, Larwa?’

The other chick, less blowsy, less merry, smiled coyly enough. ‘Yeah, go on, be a sweetie.’

‘I’m sorry, girls, we close at three. It’s too late to let you in.’ In any case, he disliked late entries who’d probably been sousing most of the night away in other clubs. You hadn’t time now to read their character or state of mind. In his early days he might’ve teed up a one-night stand, but had learnt you can’t afford to confuse business and pleasure, not in a nightclub. This was a life-threatening gig.

He’d lucked out in the early seventies when he took up karate during his spell on the Tigers’ footy list to build up muscle mass, but this martial art had also sharpened his senses, speeded up his reflexes, alerted him to a shadow closing up behind or if there was something not quite rigi-dig in a situation that later, with more savvy, he put down to body language. Which was how he discovered Bishido, The Way of the Warrior, rooted in ancient Japanese culture. So he boned up on its philosophy based on the harmony of mind and body.

‘Don’t be such a tight-arse, big boy,’ whispered Miss Lippy, her tongue dabbing the underside of her top lip. We ony want a teeny weeny quickie.’ She measured it out with finger and thumb and held it up to his eyes.

Sergio Marinelli, The Swordfish to his enemies and cold fish to the floozies who hung about his aura of infamy, was coming up the steps flanked by two tall timbers, strapping bodyguards a good 185 cm. Sergio always had a word with Ron since the bouncer did a steady job keeping the tit-suckers away. ‘I wanna be with The Man,’ these show-ponies would sneer with swagger, making as if to push their way towards Sergio’s private room.

‘Don’t turn the girls away,’ Sergio would confide, low, matter-of-fact, deadpan, just a glint in his eye. ‘No dogs, mind. The sluts, yeah, I can be of service.’

‘The crims may be tough,’ Ron thought, ‘but they’re just like puppy dogs when these on-call girls twist them round their pinkie. Shows the skirts can enjoy a power-trip in exchange for sex or drugs or a favour in kind. And don’t they know it.’

Sergio held genuine respect for Mr Reliable on the door. Like all the other crims as well as the local cops, he’d heard the gab about Ron’s frantic dash into the car park to rescue a Hell’s Angel who’d been jumped by ten bikies from a rival gang, bashing the bejesus out of him with knuckledusters and bike chains. Ron had grabbed the cricket

bat kept in the stores for an emergency and launched himself among these hoods, swinging the handle with all his might at their skulls, overcoming his own fear, driven by animal impulse and the surge of adrenaline. For which reckless deed he was made an honorary member of the Hell’s Angels. His skills as a secondary black belt in karate had again come in handy.

‘See you later, Ron. I’m heading off to the Casino.’

As Ron turned to shake the mobster’s hand, he heard a sharp squeal of brakes close behind. Then three shots whistled from a car roaring by with growly exhaust.

With a gasp, then grunt, Sergio Marinelli dropped to his knees. The leading bodyguard, shot in the chest, crashed backward into the other bod, who began yelling: ‘Fucking hell! Where’s fucking security when you fucking need it! Sergio, you’se all right, mate?’ Already he was reaching for his mobile. ‘Christ, he’s been hurt bad!’

The two tipsy girls, who’d hit the deck shrieking, were holding onto each other, tottering to their feet, snivelling. ‘Look, blood!’ stabbing fingers at the doorman’s leg.

Ron looked down, stupefied. A crimson stream was flowing from his own knee. ‘Holy dooley! I’ve been shot.’ And, blacking out, crumpled down on the pavement with a bang to the back of his head, out cold for the next five or two minutes.

Straight into contingency, the unharmed bod was ringing round the clubs for wheels and one of the gang to drive up lightning quick to beat both cops and ambos. ‘We’ll be needing youse urgent, Doc. Can youse stand by? Yeah, two guys. One of them is Sergio. Both is hit bad in the chest.’

Consciousness ebbing back, Ron heard another screaming of brakes, opening of doors, shuffling of footsteps, the prop and drag of limp bodies into a car, slamming of doors, an engine’s roar rapidly receding. Evidently, these guys didn’t intend to make a statement to the cops. Or have the divvy van screech round to bang up the wounded.

Next he knew, the ambo boys were reviving him and had pushed something into his

mush to relieve the pain. Being stretchered into the ambulance, Ron suddenly became aware of two sherlockos standing over him, chiacking: ‘Did you get a good look at the shooter?’ ‘Did you recognise him?’ ‘Who was he trying to kill?’ ‘What model car was it?’ ‘What colour?’

His mind drew a blank. There was numbness in his hands, tingling. Something soft bound his head tight. Funny, he hadn’t felt any impact of a bullet; his brain hadn’t reacted.

The following day in hospital Ron paid Sergio a courtesy visit in a wheelchair.

Bandages confirmed that the mobster had been wounded an inch above his heart.

‘Piss off!’ muttered Sergio. ‘You don’t need to get involved. Ciao.’

But he was already, albeit an innocent bystander, in the City’s turf wars. A bullet had passed straight through his right kneecap into the wall of The Ace. The cops found the stolen car in Sunshine, burnt-out. There were no fingerprints, so obviously the attackers were pros. Someone must have given them the drum by mobile from inside the club the instant Sergio made to light out. Ron recalled the shooter crouched in the back seat with a hood over his mug, recollected the tinted windows. Nothing more.

For six months the police psychiatrist showed him a drawing of the well lit road outside The Ace of Clubs. Forensic had determined where the car had stopped, where Ron had stood, where Sergio emerged from the entrance from the angle of the bullets lodged in the wall, all to prompt Ron’s memory, but he could only confirm the shooter’s gloved hand that held the gun. Try as he might, he could offer no mugshot.

‘How big was the gun?’ probed the psychiatrist, inviting him to squiz the twenty illustrations of various hand guns before him. ‘What shape was it? Did it flash?’

‘Yeah, I did see flashes.’

‘Okay, so they didn’t use a silencer.’

Ron picked out three pictures that were close enough.

Suddenly stripped of a job, permanently disabled, the ex-bouncer discovered to his dismay he had no chance of getting even grunt work, since the patella would never heal. A plastic kneecap was fitted but he was obliged to walk with a stick. ‘Why me?’ bugged his brain. ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m finished. Bloody oath, how am I going to make a quid?’

For fifteen months he was confined to hospital. Complexities were discovered, mainly diabetes, a toe amputated, arthritis. Occasional family visits petered out, but two of the managers who’d found him personable and respected his solid attitude and timely interventions did drop by, until, it seemed, The Ace of Clubs grew concerned about liability.

Out of frustration and a sense of growing helplessness, Ron got narky. And seriously angry when the sharp suits from insurance threw up churlish obstacles. ‘Why were you chatting up those two women outside when you should have been keeping close watch on the people inside?’ ‘Why did you allow those three blokes in? They were obvious trouble.’ ‘What were you doing out on the pavement?’

‘Look, chum, my job was doorman. I’d often step out to breathe some fresh air, check if there was any malarkey outside. And I didn’t blast my own kneecap off!’ The endless form-filling for Centrelink and delaying tactics by insurance were taking their toll. When he claimed compensation through his solicitor, there were X-rays, blood samples, interviews with various medicos and psychs firing same old questions, then legal eagles taking advantage of psych reports to press his buttons. ‘Are these arseholes trying to make me out a complete nutter? They’re going for the jugular. I can’t believe this! I was the one who was shot, for god sake!’

A depresso watching the chips fall, Ron was persuaded by his solicitor to sue The Ace of Clubs. But became ropable on hearing that The Ace’s management threatened to sue him for damaging their outside brickwork. His bloodstains had been located on some bricks alongside the pavement. In any case, so the argument ran, the angle of the street cameras clearly demonstrated that he’d been wounded on the pavement, not within the boundaries of the club.

‘What! Less than two metres out! Where’s the fucking justice!’ he ranted. ‘My life is

ruined!’

Five years dragged by before the insurance company settled payment: a paltry sum at that. What the hell was he going to live on? The disability pension was chicken feed and his medical bills alone were running at $800 per month.

Isolated by family and friends, he found himself with no support anywhere. Apart from his brother, who had the knack in his own life of always being in the right place at the right time. Malcolm had won a scholarship to a spanking new high school opening up in the eastern suburbs. When awarded an army cadetship, he’d trained in catering, where his flair for organisation shone through. As a chef in South Africa, he quickly established a glowing reputation, before being headhunted as a conference manager in Kuala Lumpur. Now he could hire himself out to luxury hotels the world over for whatever fee he deigned to ask.

‘Just snap out of it!’ Malcolm, who worked his mealie off, would advise by phone or email whenever his older bro got the miseries. ‘Things can’t be that bad.’

No one understood Ron’s particular circs or seemed to care.

Shuffling uncomfortably through life, he found himself snatching at lungfuls of air that creased him up in his tracks. His GP dismissed it as a reaction to his diabetes medication. But when compelled to rest on his walks more frequently to ease his bronchial discomfort, he insisted on obtaining a referral. The hospital gave him a blood test, then ‘the rattler’, but after a few minutes of slow padding along on the treadmill he threw up. In the spew were traces of blood.

Following a second x-ray, the medico levelled with him: ‘I’m afraid you’ve got cancer.

The hole in your lung is quite large, but we cannot operate because it is too close to your heart. What we can offer is a course of chemotherapy.’

Ron was still nursing his grievance against his GP’s oversight. In any case, the notion of sacrificing even more of his sense of maleness was a no-no. Who or what had he got to live for? What was the purpose of carrying on? ‘No, I don’t want chemo.’

‘Think carefully about your decision,’ the medico replied. ‘You could live for another

five years, but you might only have two years left.’

Inwardly, he was a broken man. Yet not that long ago, Ron had believed himself fearless, invincible, confident in his own physical prowess in The Way of the Warrior.

Even as a young kid at Technical School, most teachers he couldn’t hack, his chemistry teacher instructing the kids to read the text book, answer the questions, get their heads down while he put his feet up on the desk and read the paper, Ron would throw himself into the ruckery after the final bell when the Tech lads mixed it with the High School kids. So bad were relations between the kids from the Commission estate and those from the well-to-do neighbourhoods lying beneath the leafy canopy of the golf course and creek that five police cars were often stationed in the road dividing the two campuses.

In the Skooll of Hard Jocks Ron could cut it only in sheet metal, just so he could be a motor-head and work with cars. He signed on as apprenticed panel beater for four years. By eighteen, he was rucking for Richmond u/19s. A big, brawny, confident lad, fit as a Mallee bull, he would make sure he threw all his strength into that first tackle so his marker knew he wasn’t to be taken lightly and rub his face into the mud. ‘Hey, mate, you’re a girl. Where’d you get your dresses from?’ After three such heavy tackles, the other guy tended to stand off ten metres. ‘Don’t pike it, sunshine!’ His marker would be broken-winded ten minutes into the second half, mentally gone. If by chance the guy was still up for it, the coat-hanger round the neck and squirrel grip on the balls would do the trick. And then the secondary reward, the groupie chicks squealing outside the rooms, hungering for a close-up of those musclemen’s bulging thighs in short shorts.

But Tigerland in the late sixties was a fierce battleground for selection and he’d never win out over the precocious talent of Royce Hart or Francis Bourke.

Sports mad, he took up kick-boxing and was packaged as The Hammer of Hamer Hall. Against some of the best that Thailand could pitch at him, with their broken noses or jaws slightly skewed or cauliflower ears, he quickly acquired the skill of Matai: keep the knee and elbow up for blocking, grab your opponent by the shoulders and jerk your knee hard up against his jaw, or even better his ear. Invariably, his own calves were bashed black and blue, as the shorter Thai boxers could always spring higher in the air and land on his kneecap or aim to break his leg by kicking from

behind that vulnerable spot between foot and ankle. But by reflecting on the wisdom of Bishido, The Way of the Warrior, Ron was still young enough to believe himself capable of daring bravery in battle, at the same time showing respect for others. That was the Oriental way of the gentleman. Together with the discipline of rehearsing moves and stretching exercises and the mere act of focus that he’d never learnt at school, he was infused with self-esteem in spades.

Unbeaten, he remained. Those were the days.

To kill time, now that he was down, Ron watched hundreds of action or fantasy videos, Bond, Rambo, Dr Who, in his second-storey unit, which was compact but darkly lit with a burnt orange penumbra, sitting in the wrought iron chair with leather cushions and half-carriage wheels for sides that his old man had fashioned fifty years before. Often he would look at the glass frame hanging up on the wall at Carlton jumper number 25 signed by Alex Jesaulenko above a photo of Jezza soaring for a mark on the shoulders of Jerker Jenkin in the 1970 Grand Final, while his own grounded knee was giving him gyp in cold weather.

And there were bonzer highlights, like his bouncing days at the old Sunbury concerts, Fleetwood Mac or Deep Purple playing in front of humungous crowds, some six or seven hundred thou, cracking down alongside the cops on blatant shooting up, when the sickly smell of cannabis was tangible, or the six a.m. sweep, where he’d notice hundreds of condoms in the mixed showers and makeshift toilets on top of the hill in front of the stage. And then the revelation in the idols’ motel rooms, the two glass bowls on a table containing cocaine and amphetamines, uppers and downers, and their bizarre requests for a completely black room to sleep in or one with stars painted on the ceiling.

And then he could chuckle at the memory of casual shifts as a stuntman alongside the likes of Mel Gibson in ‘Gallipoli’, sitting around playing poker or gin rummy in a tent for three days, nursing his bruises from falling off a horse during too many takes; yes, it was tough work all right, waiting for the weather in South Australia to clear up and morph into Egypt or bucket down for the assault on Turkish trenches; but if it didn’t, the crew would resort to a giant water tank and hoses. And he still saw himself going over the top and tripping over his rifle and finding thirty different ways to be shot. ‘I’ve been a bruiser my whole life through,’ he muttered.

Saskia, his Maltese cross with the dislocated hip that he couldn’t afford to have treated, had the sense to realize that Ron should get out of the flat and stretch his legs, even if the arthritic knee caused pain and he was limping slowly with a walking stick. Every day they shambled through the Mall to the local parks and became a familiar sight. Too familiar in their routine.

Gangs of half a dozen youths would breeze in from the Ranges by train to buy drugs in the stairwell of the car park, ride through the Mall on skateboards, bikes and scooters. They noticed a wrinkle, an old fart with heavy build, balding, crippled with a walking stick, who pocketed large sums of notes from the ATM. What’s more, he’d got a small old dog, like he was nuts about the dog. And would protect the critter at all costs, for sure. A soft touch, no worries.

Ron was sudden death, corralled, set upon, kicked and punched. Handicapped by a gammy leg, mobility was impossible, no kicking a kid into touch, but he lashed out wildly like a wounded bear, stick and fist by turns, till the knives flashed. Once knocked down on the ground, he was most vulnerable, jumped on, pants ripped with knives and wallet seized. More youths saw or heard some old bodge being worked over and dashed along to stomp on the old fuckwit, put the slipper in, relishing the frenzy. When at last he hauled himself to his feet, crying inwardly at the indignity, his legs were battered and bruised and nicked by the blades of knives.

‘Used to be a copper on every corner when I was a kid and if you gave cheek he’d slap you round the ear’ole and threaten to lock you up in a cell. Today that’s a mark of honour.’

Several Asian shoppers passing by stubbornly refused to see his pain. ‘I’m a foreigner in my own country,’ he sighed through midget, yellowish artificial teeth. ‘Kids round here would stab me in the back, not front, they don’t want to be recognised, but they sure as hell enjoy taking the piss and belting the crap out of me. I’d swear a couple of them were only ten or eleven, kids with street smarts who can suss out the blind spots of fixed security cameras. Fucking ferrets on speed.’

Wrong bloody place, wrong bloody time. And he no longer had the ticker.

Now a serial victim of these teenage muggers, he discovered that reporting assault and robbery was useless; the cops could do nothing unless they witnessed the crime and in any case the make-up of the gang changed from day to day. ‘Hand over yer wallet, mate,’ they’d demand and how could he refuse? ‘Otherwise yer dog gets it!’ was the implication.

Saskia also drew the attention of a security guard working nights at Centro, as Ron was escorting her through the walkway.

‘Hey, feller, you can’t bring that dawg in here!’ The guard spoke with an American accent as he threw his chest out, the big I AM. ‘I’m the law here.’

Disarmed, Ron was not utterly cowed. ‘No you’re not,’ he retorted, noting the identity number on the guy’s navy blue tit. ‘You can’t make the laws up as you go along.

You’re only head of security. This is a railway entrance after eight o’clock.’

But when he ducked into a café to buy a coffee, having tied Saskia to a bike rack, he eventually discovered she’d been penned up in an electrically wired switch-room.

His world was shrinking fast and he was powerless. ‘Where’s the compassion?’ he bellowed with a splutter of tears. Not out the window, he couldn’t help notice, where a row of old weatherboards was being stripped and demolished with chronic slowness, rotting planks and puddles, snaky bits of wiring and brown-stained porcelain left lying among the scrub of weeds.

On the odd occasion an old cove or biddy in a wheelchair would nod and smile at Saskia. Ron was chuffed his little white terrier with the fringe flopping over her eyes struck a fleeting moment of happiness for the geris, so that he himself began to make a point of stopping and asking how they were and how was their day. They were unable or unwilling to talk, their jaws locked aslant with grim determination; perhaps they’d suffered a stroke or road accident, perhaps they’d also been robbed and were frightened of him. Gradually, Ron found himself looking forward to saying a few kind words to these strangers, began to feel a tad better that he’d given someone a gee-up. ‘What am I whingeing about? This old slowball can still get about,' he said of himself.’

Then his memory clicked: one of the virtues of Bishido was care for the elderly.

Whereupon followed a rush of warmth for his late parents, for it came back to him, of course, how both Mum and Dad’s gang, comprising some forty or so like-minded battlers from various parts of the City whom they used to visit or receive open-house, would always look out for one of the gang who needed support, whether financial or moral. It was an act of generosity that he’d taken for granted as a boy but now recognised: okay, so he still held onto a scrap of respect for his fellow creatures. But that was as much as he could manage.

Nights threw up the toughest enemy. Not just the restlessness, the insomnia, the right leg and broken knee stuck out the side of the bed for least discomfort, but the trauma, the injustice, the callous and dismissive treatment at the hands of the insurance mongrels, those few seconds of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Bolts of anger and drips of resentment would always be boiling away in his bones.

‘No-one understands,’ he whimpered. ‘I just want someone to talk to, a friend, not a girlfriend. One morning I won’t be able to get out of bed. That time’s not far away now. I don’t smile any more and I want to smile. I don’t want to be angry for the rest of my life. I want someone to care for me, but it’s too late. I did try on the Internet, a couple of times, but those birds came to sniff round my living room, cash registers in their eyes, calculating how much all this was worth, this dump. They weren’t interested in me for myself. And why should they be? They could see I’m worth nothing!’ He stopped to brush away the tears with his sleeve. ‘I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d be a quitter. It’s only Saskia that keeps me going, she understands my mood, plants a paw on my foot or wags her tail at me when I’m staring out the window, bored rigid and down in the gutter, but she’s an old girl now, fourteen.’

Ron’s pinched face was creasing up like a wounded seven year old harshly dealt with, the lower lip puckering out and the voice peevish and whiney. ‘What’s going to become of her?’ he sobbed.

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WHERE THERE’S A WILL He was riding the bike trail in the wet, stuttering down inclines littered with sodden leaves and windswept sticks with nervy, super careful application of the brakes. The light patter of rain began to fall more insistently with a sudden gusting of wind at the bridge that reared up in a spiral over the motorway. Now he was gliding down alongside the wetlands, braking cautiously at the bend onto a short level straight running parallel to the creek. Then the snappy tuck at ninety degrees onto the bridge.

Again easy on the brakes and . . . fell clattered on concrete, startled utterly. Fuck! For several seconds he lay still, quite still, to recover from the shock, the indignity, then, after a slight tensing to move his splayed body, the futility, the abject helplessness.

Looking up, he noticed a fellow cyclist riding down the other side of the creek, but dropped his head immediately, crestfallen at the sullen, damp, slate-grey surface so as not to invite attention. That cyclist in yellow waterproofs did stare across the forty metre culvert but kept pedalling away through the drooping boughs of eucalypts.

That’s okay; he would just need a few seconds to recover, regain his breath and he’d be right to re-mount. But when he tensed again to raise his body, he couldn’t, too heavy it seemed but no feeling, save one hell of a lightning strike through his left leg.

Shit, he couldn’t stir, daren’t move, lower body penned under two wheels. Slowly, his head sagged onto the outstretched sleeve of his left arm.

Everywhere seemed still as drops of rain freshened his face and glistened the gum leaves.

Five or ten minutes he might have lain in stillness, resigned, quite calm in bewilderment, not daring or not able to reason, shut down. Then a voice drifted in from behind his limited vision, distant, as if talking to a companion, till the voice repeated close behind, ‘Are you all right?’

‘No, I can’t move.’ More of a carking croak, his own sounds.

‘Where does it hurt?’

‘My left leg,’ he uttered in gasping stabs. ‘Can’t feel a thing till I move. Then a sharp pain shoots through my left leg if there’s any pressure.’

‘Well, you can’t lie like this. Can you sit up?’

‘Not by myself.’

‘If I lift your back, let’s see if we can sit you up against these railings.’

‘Aagh! Aagh!’

‘I’d better ring for an ambulance.’

‘No, no, I think I’ll be all right in a few moments.’ The situation was becoming ridiculous. ‘In any case, I don’t have ambulance cover. Can you help me roll onto my back? Agh! Agh! Mm, thank you, that’s better.’ He released a deep sigh.

‘I could jog back to the office, collect my car and run you home. This is my lunch break.’

Other voices were now simmering. Most likely, cyclists. ‘What’s wrong? Have you phoned for an ambulance? Not yet? Best not move him. Have you got a mobile?’

‘There’s the skid mark across this white line.’ An elderly voice belonging to a local out walking his dog, it seemed. ‘I saw him through the trees come a cropper.’

The gentle rhythm of raindrops soothing his face, the murmuration of voices tenderly solicitous, rags of cannon smoke unspooling across the drift of Tiepolo blue.

‘Look he’s shaking. You’d better ring for an ambulance! I’ll cover him over with my slicker.’

Then the hard cold, the clammy damp were screwing the bones of his back, his teeth chattering; he only wished to reassure them all that he was fine, just dandy, except there was no feeling in his rigidly unmoved left side.

The paramedic had a reassuring, unhurried manner, not at all cross that he had been called out for a twenty-minute run for an unpaid-up phony.

‘What day of the week is it?’ the friendly, chubby face asked as he squatted down.

Now this game he’d heard about and smiled inwardly. ‘Thursday.’

‘What month?’

‘September.’

‘What year is it?

‘2007.’

Behind him, the paramedic said to his offsider, ‘We’ll have to roll him onto the stretcher.’

‘And the prime minister is Gough Whitlam,’ came a cheery gratuitous answer from the injured man.

Prickles of embarrassed silence, before the penny dropped and the cluster of strangers relaxed into polite chuckles.

For that moment, with drops of rain caressing anxiety from his face, the strange lack of pain, the bonhomie and murmur of chatter out of vision from faces he hadn’t seen, strangers whom he’d brought together, he couldn’t have felt more content, more at peace.

Coming round in a hospital bed, he became conscious of a white-coat. ‘I’ve got some good news for you,’ said the benign patrician. ‘We’ll soon have you riding your bike again.’ The doctor waited for a reaction. ‘The bad news is that you need a hip replacement.’

‘Good heavens!’ the patient replied genially, as he would when discovering the sugar bowl in the freezer, naively surprised, thanks to the pain-killers which dissolved the wretchedness of this prognosis, but also his own ignorance of surgical procedures.

‘I’ve felt no pain at all in the hip, only in the lower leg. I don’t even have a scratch or graze on my left side.’

‘We need to remove the ball of the upper femur and the damaged bone. We hope to perform the operation in two days’ time. It’s not a complicated operation.’

Sunday noon, three days later: After fasting for twelve hours Derek was wheeled into the empty bowels of the operating theatre and given an epidural injection. Next thing, opening his eyes, he became conscious of a tight-hugging hutch of netting as if snared by a psychopath and staring out through the mesh at figures shuttling, crossing over, rectilinear white shapes, narrow, the distorted blur of two male voices, a smell of burning, then a relentless hammering with chisel that must be driving deep inside his own thigh, for he found himself propped on his right side, the ringing chink of metal on metal, the swing and force so rhythmically calibrated, so confidently powered, yet miraculously he sensed only the heavy vibration. He was not the wounded gladiator trapped defenceless waiting for the thumbs down to die, but the keyhole witness of muscled medieval sculptors chipping away at a block of stone flesh into slowly evolving definitions of perfected shapes and rhythms, so that during all this persistent hammering his eyes moistened with gratitude, not pain, his sense of being at embryonic peace ruffled only when the surgeons began ripping away at the tape that must have trussed body and hutch, then manhandled him in quick, short, jerky movements that disentangled lifeless limbs from mesh.

When he was wheeled out of the operating theatre into the recovery station, the anesthetist measured his blood pressure. Alarmed and annoyed that it was so low, ‘Breathe in deeply!’ she urged.

‘I generally have low blood pressure,’ he found himself boasting airily.

‘Keep breathing deep and regular. Big breath. You must intake more oxygen to help heal the wound.’

‘That was amazing.’ He wanted to gush now with relief, ecstasy, a philanthropic gratitude to all and sundry. ‘I saw the surgeons hammering away. Just like Renaissance sculptors.’

She looked perplexed. ‘You couldn’t have. It was the anesthetic talking. Rest now, lie still, remember your breathing.’

One of the miracle-workers stopped by to consult the readings on his chart.

‘Thank you so much,’ said the cheery patient, all syrupy. ‘You reminded me of a Renaissance sculptor.’

The surgeon grunted. It might have been just another run-of-the mill job that prevented him from sitting down to Sunday lunch with the family.

That invasion of his body he would always treasure as one of the most indelibly surreal, most moving cameos of his life.

‘Any bowels today?’ exhorted a no-nonsense, middle-aged nurse to four supine cripples, breezing into the ward to take her ‘set of obs.’. ‘Hold out your left arm, darl, so I can check your blood pressure.’

Snapped out of his reverie wherein he’d tried to recall those moments prior to the spill, what struck him was his preoccupation with his brother’s last telephone conversation, a rare event in their lives, when Jerome was more gruff and obnoxious than usual: ‘Derek, old son, have you done your will yet?’

‘Err no, not yet, Jer,’ I replied hesitantly, irritated with such direct intrusiveness. ‘I’ll get around to it some day.’

‘You’re unbelievable, really pathetic!’ he shot back with exasperation teetering towards anger. ‘And bloody irresponsible. You need a kick up the arse and a reality check with all that dosh stacked away, what with your pension pot an’ all. I keep telling you: Keep it in the family (intoned as a mantra sung for a five year old). I get the screaming abdabs when I imagine your bloody Government scooping the lot, unless you plonk yourself down and write out your list of assets and the designated

beneficiary, sign it and deposit the document with your solicitor. Now it’s actually quite simple.’

Perhaps it was. But firstly I’d felt as fit as I’d ever felt in my life before the accident.

I’d caused a sensation when I told the medical staff that this was my first ever stay in hospital and disbelief when I informed them I wasn’t taking any medication.

Secondly, there seemed something obscene and avaricious about Jerome’s reminders about the will. Were he and his daughter, Magda, waiting for me to drop off my perch? Were they calculating my worth and how much they were entitled to?

Entitlement! That was a word that often I bridled against. I was only in my midsixties, after all. No, I wouldn’t let them in. Jeremy was practical, certainly not prescient; my mental replaying of his persistent theme while riding along by the creek on that fateful Thursday morning was pure coincidence.

But there was another reason why I wished to bequeath all my money to the National Trust and the RSPCA. Not only did I not see much of Jerome’s dysfunctional family, I didn’t really know them. Or rather, I didn’t understand that younger generation’s culture which had become so disturbing, so alien; degenerating, in fact. However, Jerome’s goading decided me. Yes, I would make out a will, but a will of another kind that would serve a higher purpose. I would present each beneficiary, namely my niece and her three children, with a copy of my store of wisdom gleaned from hardearned personal experience: a moral will.

In the next bed, but more often observed in the breach, sloping off to enjoy a quiet smoke and mutter, but usually prowling restlessly up and down, was a short man scuffing in slippered feet and springy with energy, his face the roughness of brick accentuated by a buzz-cut of grey spikes. From his right hand held up in a sling sprouted what he called an external fixiter: rods of carbon fibre, pins, castings, a brassy futuristic Meccano set with planetary aspirations. Barely could I bring myself to give time of day to such a flinty man with menacing scissorhand as he paced by the end of his bed without giving me so much as a glance, staring jutty-jawed beyond the window into the blur of distant trees.

Seb, the most kinetic of nurses, seemed to skate his way round the ward in dispensing Panadol here, a bedpan there, a fresh flask of water to the four extremities

of bedside tables and a double-handed pirouette with curtains drawn behind him that hid personal habits from prying eyes, spun into my enclave with a backhanded closure of the second curtain.

The urologist, Raymond Yip, was quietly spoken, gentle to the point of meekness, but must have summoned reserves of intestinal fortitude to steer a bloody size-18 catheter through my lumbar regions. I steeled myself not to sneak an oblique glance at the length of whippy snake he was unwrapping.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Seb cheekily. ‘I could do with the practice.’

Oh, my God! My heart lurching, I prayed fervently, desperate that this lummox wouldn’t be trusted, for Dr Yip did look uneasy about the execution.

Then somewhat roughly, taking me by surprise, the good doctor pulled back my foreskin with his rubber gloves and brushed some white cream on the exposed crown of the penis, then slapped and dabbed as if applying a shaving brush with merry abandon.

I pressed hard back into the mattress, gritting.

‘Just relax. I haven’t started yet.’

Suddenly an excruciating pain expressly bore through the penile tract.

‘Aagh, aagh, eee, owww . . .’

‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Dr Yip. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Ye-es, ye-es, I’m o – k . . . okkk . . . kay,’ I gasped in a husky old man’s rasp, hoping to hell and high water that he was successfully guiding the fish-hook forward through the kinks of my urethra and wouldn’t back-track because of the death rattle stuck in my throat. ‘Aagh, aagh!’ I ground out, baring my teeth to ward off the breath-tearing pain.

‘There, all done,’ declared Dr Yip after what felt a very elastic minute with an

apologetic look of anxiety.

‘Congratulations, braveheart,’ enthused Seb, pumping my hand, before moistening my brow with a napkin.

‘Thanks,’ I gulped, sighed, slumping breathless with relief. And swooned into a silly grin, just as Seb flung back the curtain with a flourish, the runner and yanking swish breaking the deathly silence outside my confinement, revealing a sea of pallid faces of patients, family and friends frozen in fear. Hurriedly, they huddled back round with embarrassment.

I’d never been close to my stand-over brother. Jerome always loomed much older than five years with his stocky-muscled toughness that gave him the nickname ‘Chopper’ down at the soccer club. Even as a youngster, he’d discovered the torture of pressing his thumbs into those pressure points along the shoulder bone so as I would play keepsy for my fag cards, oxbloods and cats-eyes. I never forgave him when he flogged my set of Flags of the Empire and especially The Military Uniforms of the British Indian Army, which still captures my imagination, the Poona Horse and 19th Lancers etc., the diverse layering of turbans in peacock colours, the dazzling splashes of cochineal red on sash and jacket, then trousers in a quixotic mauve. What a contrast with Jer’s coarse khaki!

Jerome used to slick back his hair with Brilliantine. The very greenness of emerald and sensuous perfume of that unctuous grease and its tear-shaped tin fascinated me.

His long sideburns aged and distanced him, while he took great pains with his quiff and duck’s arse. Even today I still fear the difference between us.

My most abiding image of him was one Sunday afternoon when Mum and I were walking up Crown Hill following my confirmation by the bishop and there he was, loitering on the corner with an unruly gang of cronies in their drapes, those woollen, knee-length jackets with velvet lapels and shockingly narrow drainpipe trousers and fancy brocade waistcoats and brothel-creepers, invariably sucking on their fags with a shooting of velvet cuffs, inhaling lungfuls of smoke in a gesture of defiance. I was quite frightened and Mum, though petite and fragile, would not be deterred from walking past, pretending not to notice. She had little control over him in those post-

war years. I never knew my father; Jerome barely remembered him. Our Dad was lost at sea when a wolf-pack of U-boats attacked a convoy of merchant ships in the North Atlantic in March, ’43, so Mum was reliant on her elder son nicking items of food, even clothing and coal, then becoming a fence, adept at swapping bits and bobs down The White Hart. Jer was well known by bikers from the rozz who occasionally hammered on our front door. Seldom was he pinched but details of misdeeds were solemnly noted. When he acquired a second-hand cream and black Triumph Tiger, it wasn’t long before he bragged about how many mates considered it a badge of honour to be buried with bits of handlebar stuck in their belly. Shaved and kitted out with razor-sharp creases and highly buffed boots for the RSM to see his face in, Jer was remoulded in the army’s image, but only outwardly. National Service taught him how to drive a lorry and wave firearms but failed to sort this squaddy out. Stationed on the Rhine, he had risked any number of affairs with bored officer wives and at least twice was beaten up in a dark alley by jealous husbands. Once demobbed, he was living with a barmaid in a bed-sit down Brighton way. The next thing Mum heard was that he’d got a ‘sweet little kid’ of his own and she worried herself sick that Jer would not do the right thing by the child. Oddly enough, he came to adore little Magda, became overly protective and jealous of any interference, so Esme said, the barmaid, when she finally walked out.

‘I’m fucking useless without my hands,’ Karl muttered.

He possessed the build and wary alertness of a flyweight kick-boxer. ‘What’s your line of work?’ I said, for he’d finally looked me in the eye and was clearly agitated.

‘I make guitars. By hand. Mostly acoustic.’

‘Oh really! Craftmanship still alive then?’

‘My oath, thriving! Thriving. I love working quarter-cuts of fiddleback blackwood from the Otways. Can even tell you’se which part of the forest they come from. I finish by hand what the boys on machines prepare. It’s my six apprentices I’m worried about. They like to knock off on the dot. It’s the age of entitlement all right.

Thought I needed a bloody holiday, now this happens.’ He jerked his right arm in its sling.

‘God, what happened?’

‘Fell off the garden ladder straight onto a concrete path. Couldn’t believe the messy pulp of this . . . this meat hook, splattered out all over the fucking place. Had two ops already and they’re still trying to find which splinters of bone go where. I’m bored out of my skull lying idle here, just waiting, fucking waiting. I can’t be sure what those prentice boys are up to with those deadlines.’

‘Someone will surely take some initiative.’

‘No way. I have to explain everything to them. They do the gluing, banding, polishing, buff-wheel the finish etc of the standard models, but it’s up to me to respond to the serious guitarist’s predilection and whim. Each hand-crafted guitar is unique. I chisel and scrape and fret according to customized order. One wants spruce, another Honduras mahogany, blackwood or bunya. And I deter those patriots who insist on gumwood, because it requires a thick coat of varnish that doesn’t lend itself to good quality sound. Above all, you’se need a fucking steady hand to fret the inlay of rosewood.

‘Of course, you’se need to know the guy’s style of playing and his type of music. For example, do you’se need a fixed bridge or tremolo? I’m forever testing the pitch of a vibrating string, tensing the tuning pegs. Then the muso rocks up to listen and advise. See, the air inside the body vibrates. If you’se moan like a spook while holding your ear close to the sound hole, you’se can hear the air in the body resonating. Never need the tuner. Stroke a luck, this fucking fall didn’t burst my eardrum.’

I resented the nurses closing off his bed. I’d come to value his talk, his dexterity with his medium, his heartfelt intensity for his own practical art, his striving for perfection, so much so that I found myself moved to pity for a complete stranger, whose guiding hand was suspended in mid-air, dressed, splayed and effing useless.

Lying on my back, hour after hour, day after day – normally, before the accident, I’d lie on my side or front – my whole world had turned upside down. Often awake during those long nights of convalescence, memories came rushing back of those

early years in England. On my last trip back I had stayed for a week with Magda, my niece, in south London.

An interesting woman, Magda. She’d been an assistant buyer for a store in Oxford Street when she met Hugo. Now, thanks to a friend commissioning art works from Aboriginal communities out west, Magda was involved in selling. She invited me up to town for lunch and I met her at her tastefully decored boutique. Not having been educated in Australia, I was ignorant of Aboriginal culture. I did admire the dot paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, those rich earthy ochres, but I couldn’t read the design, couldn’t get a bead on her dreaming. Certainly, it was remarkable how many of these Aboriginal artists, mainly women of my vintage, were creating their own style in the van of contemporary art.

A forthright lady with exquisite taste, except for a penchant for flowing robes over baggy Arabian pants, Magda had nevertheless shacked up with a smooth insurance salesman who travelled frequently to Asia to break into the virtually untapped insurance market and decided to base himself in Hong Kong, in spite of physical and legal threats from big brother, Jer. Hugo had never really committed himself to the children; in fact, he’d made it abundantly clear that he was disappointed with them, couldn’t even bring himself to like them. Magda had given birth to Jasmine before they were married. These days Mags was less of an imposing saleswoman, more motivated by what really enthused her in the display and allowed customers to browse undisturbed unless they were lingering over her favourite objects.

She suggested Soho for lunch, which took me back forty-odd years to when I’d been a junior clerk in a Savile Row textiles firm and used my 2s6d luncheon vouchers in a cheap dive churning out very bland fare.

‘Jobe feels you sold out,’ Magda was saying in that frank way of hers, filling me in on her son. ‘Whenever you visited from Oz he noticed you’d go traipsing on your lonesome round the Trust properties. You’d talk as if the highlight of your life was hiking across the Purbecks to Lulworth Cove in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy, striding into the teeth of a gale like Gabriel Oak wafting his shepherd’s crook or Alan Bates mooning at the horizon awaiting your Bathsheba to come tripping down in shiny white smock and felt pattens from the Roman battlements. Didn’t you once get Susannah York’s autograph when she played Bournemouth?’

‘I may have done. My memory isn’t what it used to be,’ I mumbled in growing discomfort. I suddenly remembered the shock of stumbling across a camp of travellers squatting on my favourite scarp of the downs on the edge of a bluebell wood where fox cubs used to play.

She was picking at her prosciutto, peach and blue cheese croutons. ‘We’re only half an hour out from London, yet you avoid the city, any city, as if it was still ridden with the Great Plague. Whereas Hugo, as much as I say good riddance to the lecherous sod, did endeavour to make a difference, taking a string of appointments with the British Council in his bachelor days. Jobe still misses his father, though he doesn’t say much, but strange though it may seem the lad’s closer to you in temperament. Yet . . . and I’m very sorry to say this, Derek, I think deep down Jobe dislikes himself for being so egocentric, a loner. Oh yes, he tried to leaven the lot of others far worse off than himself. You remember his work experience in the Easter hols? He signed up to build stone houses on the island of Djerba. On one of his rare time-outs he happened to be strolling along the Mediterranean shore and fell in with a couple of shepherds who invited him back to their encampment, basically a few mud huts. Jobe is an idealist, a dreamer, still believing in the best of people, especially those from the underprivileged world. These Tunisian Arabs made a fuss of him and offered refreshment, a handful of olives, dates and simple sweetmeats, slapped him on the back and joked when he tried out his basic French. Of course, the villagers spoke a dialect he couldn’t comprehend but used a highly excitable sign language. The menfolk invited him to ride a camel, but when the cameleer, a skinny scruff about six years old, repeatedly struck the beast on the nose to get it up off its knees with Jobe clinging on like billy-o, drawing blood and angry snorts and scuffles from the animal, Jobe flung himself off, protesting against such cruelty, much to the puzzlement of the onlookers.’

‘Good on him! That’s the reason I’ve never wanted to visit China - callousness to animals.’

‘Then he was led to a small wooden coop or hutch at the edge of the encampment.

Inside, propped upright on a cushion in the corner, was a young girl, very plump with a dirty face and gaps between teeth if she forced a smile. Jobe was bidden to enter, but grew confused and suddenly anxious. What was he supposed to do? Give this

dishevelled creature some English conversation? Look, I know he’s naïve, but he does have a good heart. The men urged him on towards the bait and fastened the door with a wooden peg. The villagers were shouting encouragement to both of them, then particularly at the girl, which left Jobe panicky, so they yelled abuse and waved their fists and spat at him. Apparently he pushed the girl away, an action quite out of character for a lad lacking in assertiveness, whereupon the villagers got seriously angry. Having wrenched open the door, they hauled him out and rained blows about his head and shoulders. Even the women seized their switches ready to jab at him.

Eventually, he broke away and took to his heels until he could no longer hear their jeering.’

‘What exactly were they after?’

‘There must have been some misunderstanding. Jobe thought he heard the word ‘mariage’, but I suspect it was more like prostitution. So he learnt that he’s not the good-will ambassador he’d hoped to be. Back home, tail between his legs, he locks himself in his room practising the electric guitar. He’s not much of a communicator, not since his father ran off with a cheap bit of skirt to Honkers, but he is beginning to write some songs, admittedly rather doleful at present. Still, he is only seventeen.

Anyhow he felt bitterly betrayed by Hugo, thoroughly black dog, in fact. And Jasmine, who’s lightning quick to spot weakness in others, the little minx harassed her brother mercilessly.’

‘So how is Jasmine?’ To be candid, I didn’t want to hear. On my previous visit an agitated Magda had confided that cross-genders often graduate to sex work. Jas was a mere two years old when it dawned on Magda that the girl’s gender identity was not her sexual identity. She had been a petulant child, bullying her younger brother with sarcastic put-downs, yelling abuse at Magda, wagging school, potentially a bright kid working far below her potential. Her room was a no-go area to her mother, who found anger difficult to deal with: either walk away or get embroiled in a slanging match and regret it later when overwhelmed by guilt. Jasmine would spend hours playing the drums and smashed-up cymbals, sometimes cajoling her brother to accompany her on guitar, more often hammering out her hostile feelings before an unnerving silence settled over her room. It was when Magda was invited to attend one of Jasmine’s sessions with the school counsellor that the trans-gender issue was put squarely on the table.

‘I like to think she’s over the worst. She’s only broken one window this year.’ Magda crossed her eyes and gave a slight shake of the head and took a deep breath. ‘The whole family has finally come to accept that she’s a trans, Hugo’s folks too, so that’s no longer an issue. But she’s wagging school and that is. When her home group teacher rings up to inform me, I don’t always know where she is, so I feel foolish and guilty, a very poor mother indeed. Just recently, though, the counsellor asked me to attend one of their sessions and for the first time Jasmine agreed. I’m not convinced this woman is genuinely sympathetic. Apparently she’s a feminist and some of them argue that only a biological female can truly feel what it’s like to inhabit a woman’s body, not a gender variant. Anyhow Jasmine is pleading to start a new school, so we’re scouting around. Hugo says he’ll leave it up to me. Funny, that. Hugo was always something of a roving spirit who loved to be free, yet he couldn’t cope with Jasmine’s freedom to choose her own gender identity. Of course, now she must decide whether to begin eleventh form as a boy or a girl and stand by that decision for two years. She won’t be able to act the cross-dresser. I suspect she’s still confused about whether she’s attracted to males, attracted to girls or attracted to both or neither. She may even feel like a gay man trapped in a female body.’

‘It can’t have been easy for you, Magda, bringing up three kids by yourself.’ I was so much out of my depth just listening to her.

‘Excuse me - young adults! Otherwise they’ll shoot you down in flames. No, it has been damned difficult at times. I’ve still got major concerns for Valda. She’s going through that hyper-sociable stage. A strange thing happened when she was a goth, though. She used to wear a stovepipe hat, smoky eye make-up and Saturday nights fishnet stockings and thigh-length boots. Yes, I know, she looked like death warmed up, all decked out in black, but she’s sixteen and . . . She was set upon by three older girls who accused her of wearing white powder make-up that was no longer true goth and who did she think she was, being up herself and different. They dished out a dreadful going-over, put Valda off black eyeliner and red lipstick for ever. The upshot was, the poor girl felt so ashamed at how her own witchery might be perceived, she junked that version of herself. But she’s still a bit of a shocker, so don’t rise to the bait and she’ll be fine. Fortunately, she’s resilient; in fact, she has the personality to land on her feet. As for Jasmine, we’ve moved beyond the suicide threats and vows to leave home and the screaming bursts of “I hate you!”’

She took a gulp of wine, swilled it round her mouth before swallowing and puckered her lips in appreciation. ‘And you, you lucky sod, you’ve managed to escape all that . . . responsibilities, kids, family. You don’t know how fortunate you are, but . . .’

I gave an involuntary shudder and didn’t know what to say.

‘No, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The three of them have certainly taught me a hell of a lot about the messy tangles of being human.’

‘Yes, it must have been a bit of a shock when you first realized about Jas.’ ‘No, not really. I knew instinctively when she was two. She’d always prefer to roll those Matchbox cars down an old pastry board; in fact, just like you, so Dad told me, racing your Dinky Toys round the dining-room carpet. And she hated wearing dresses and letting her hair grow long and curly and dressing up. And the little pugnacious tomboy always seemed to be bashing Jobe at the slightest provocation, even though she’s a couple of years younger, winding him up something dreadful, sensing perhaps that he’d be too scared to strike back. Yes, she’s a very angry miss.

But you can understand why she refuses to conform or why she detests people making assumptions about her. She hates being labelled. Mind you, she calls Jobe a wimp or shrimp or shit-head often enough. I‘ve grown used to minding my p’s and q’s. Besides, you have little choice with young folk these days but to love and accept and forgive where necessary. And keep the channels of communication open whatever, even though the little minx orders me never to set foot in her room. You’ve probably noticed a sign on her door: Keep out on pain of death! Jaz. ‘And the eating disorders?’

‘Still the same. Only last week she induced throwing up after boshing an overdose of Panadol. I have a trans-gender anorexic for a daughter. Can you believe it?’ she said; with a long-drawn out exhalation of breath. ‘Still, she’s much calmer and more cooperative since she realized I know. Even helps with the washing-up – at a price.

What gives me heart is that she’s tough inwardly, really tough. So I try not to think about sexually transmitted diseases and what her voice will sound like after a hundred days on testosterone.’

‘I’m sure they’ll all land on their feet.’ In trying to say the sensible thing, I fear my voice wavered.

‘Enough about my probs, what about you? Are you going to visit Dad before you return to Australia?’ The very question I’d been dreading. ‘Well? Come on, Derek, you must go and see him now you’re back. How many years is it now? The man’s seventy for Chrissakes!’

‘No, Magda, not this time.’

‘But it’s terminal, Derek.’

‘Yes.’ ‘I mean the cancer.’

‘You on Facebook?’ Valda was asking, her face of giggling arpeggios drawn to the screen of her ‘pooter’.

‘I’m not interested in the cult of instant celebrity nor the obsession with one’s own ego,’ I declared in a world-weary voice, hinting at more uplifting values.

‘Naff, you coffin-dodger are unreal,’ she said, not taking her eyes off the screen. ‘Nick over ‘ere and cop a load o’ this.’

Three senior students in sloppy casuals, two boys and a girl, were squirming at table in a school quad, hoeing into hamburgers liberally sprinkled by the other two with ketchup, much to the hysterics and ribald encouragement of classmates, directed especially at one of the boys, obviously ‘a character’, whose cheesy grin was etched with extrusions of lettuce and mince, and at the girl, who was choking on her plumped-out cheeks. It was revolting. Circling, a fourth student was barking out a running commentary on a mike with ear-splitting distortion.

‘What’s going on then?’

‘Donkeys ago, right, three months about, we had a comp up the school about who could stuff the most jumbo burgers. Have a looksy at Jake, he’s a scream. All mouth and no trousers.’

‘What was the point of that? These guys look as if they’ve been weaned on fast food.’

‘That was the point. The senior bods were raising the reddies for World Vision. That’s Arleen stoking it away, old bubble butt, she’s a bit of an airhead, already looking woozy. Yuk, that’s icky. She’s into Jake big-style. You watch her barf up in a mo.

Look, get an eyeful o’ this. There yer are. Go, go for it, Leeno! Yuk, that’s gross,’ the chuckles catching in her throat. ‘D.yer wanna looksy Jaz on You-Tube? Hot chicks’ fights, lotionin up, dead pervy. She belts the shit out of this other bitch. D’yer know she’s AC/DC?’ ‘Whatever happened to Bob Dylan?’

‘Yer don’t get it, do yer? Jasmine bats for both sides. You’re not much cop as an agony aunt, let alone my great-uncle.’

‘Your mum did tell me.’

My diversionary tactic was less successful than a tinny ringing tone, courtesy of Ludwig, the opening chord of his Fifth. Valda grabbed at her ‘moby’ as if it were a lifebelt.

‘How goes? Where are yer hangin? Whose pad? Who’s she when she’s at home? O, er.

She’s naff. What yer doin there? Is whatsisface there? Did he chat to yer? So what did you say? You did not, liar! And what did he say? That’s piss weak, that is! You bobbin’ down the chippy or the caff for some chow on the manor? Mickey D’s? No way, Jose! You must be jokin! Nuh, we’re just gettin an eyeful at Arleen chuckin up again. Facebook, yeah. Me ‘n’ Uncle Del. Nuh, Der rick. Like oil. Oh, forget it. A longhair from Down Under. Still wearin’ ‘is mingin’ M & S polo-neck sweater from the Dark Ages. A real ledge. Yeah. Nuh, he’s no durbrain. Hang about. Leen wants to know what gear you dicked around with in the sixties. Nuh, Carnaby Street, allow it.

Talk Bob Hope. Dope to you. Nah, he’s shakin’ ‘is dial. More of an egghead than a

hashhead, so he won’t fess up.’

Now that comment I understood at least: a smart cookie who’s follically challenged. I noticed her eyelashes on the window-ledge. No longer backcombed, her new hairstyle was androgynous – page boy? – and she was wearing bone earrings, a jumper skirt and oxfords with platforms.

‘He’s a bit of a face-ache at the mo, peepers like piss-holes in the snow, but he’s just jetted in an’ had a mare of a trip, yeah, so he’s naffing cabbaged. Nuh, he’ll be kickin’ once he’s catched some zeds. Yeah, we could nip down the offy, get a munch, go on the razz. Get ‘im brahms and listz? Eh, bottle it, bitch. Cor, d’yer hear that, Uncle Del? Yeah, he pricked up his lugs. ‘E thinks we’re talkin classical. Sorry, old chum, that’s rhymin’ slang, that is. I reckon he’d prefer to be on ‘is billy tod till the old lady gets in. Right, wait a jiff. She says, What’s your bag then?’

‘Do what?’ I was meditating upon the black shroud or discarded goth gear acting as an awning over her cave into the dark side.

‘E’s in bits.’ So she enunciated with exaggerated slowness, ‘What are you into?’

‘My line of country? I edit books, magazines, some freelance work.’

‘I bet that’s a cushy little earner. Hey, says he’s a neditor. You know, paperbacks. Nor me neither. It’s a mug’s game, readin’. Nuh, not even electronic. ‘E’s the spit of the old lady, ‘cept he’s had a bad hair day and he’s got specky-four-eyes. Nuh, he’s poncing off us for the week. Nuh, he ain’t got none, he’s jaffa. Bit of a misog with moobs, but sweet he’s mutt n’ jeff, so I can take the piss, all right? Nuh, he don’t care a kipper’s dick. Vanilla, ab-so-lutely. Tight as a gnat’s chuff. Even the old lady says he’s a mingebag. Ciao! Yeah. Ciao! Nuh, shall do. Mustard! Caio!’

‘We’re bezzy mates, but she does chunner on, don’t she? Course, she don’t read nothin’ but Dolly. So you wouldn’t ‘ave the bottle to come wiv us. Any rate, she’s not exactly jailbait, seeing as she’s a pramface on the rock ‘n’ roll. Silly cow is yo-yo knickers. So what’s your brew?’

‘I could do with a peppermint herbal infusion, thank you.’

‘Weasel water? This I don’t believe,’ accentuated by the swing and jingling of bling on her forearms. ‘Don’t be such a yawn! Didn’t you ever mess around with spesh bevvies like tart juice, cocktails to you, when you were a spunky spring chicken? Nuh? You never trogged along to a bar to knock back as many voddies and Red Bull or Apocalypse Now or tequila ‘n’ orange monsters and get blindo? Never heard of a wicked Mahatma? Jesus, when did you slam the anchors on! Baby, you don’t know what yer missin.’

‘I can’t say I –‘ ‘Jeez, the rush off of a bender is so fanfuckingtastic!’

‘Look, I think I’ll go for a stroll through the woods till your Mum gets home.’ Talk about verbal diarrhoea. Articulate as I can be, there was no defence against her.

Besides, she’d be impervious to my injunctions about reduced fertility, dementia or cirrhosis of the liver.

‘Okee-doke. S’pose yer in a total nark now. Take a chill pill.’ Then suddenly soft: ‘Beg pudden if I was dead sarky ‘n’ that.’

‘No worries! Forget it!’ I couldn’t get away from her quick enough.

Early one Sunday morning at my carer’s, I was gazing out the bedroom window at the passing traffic, a staring blank look, seeing nothing but images recollected from my recuperation . . . the mocking plop of the catheter removed by the RD visiting nurse as I lay back apprehensive, my jaw clenched . . . the triumphant return to Urology, flourishing a litre of urine captured in three hours . . . that humid evening of dire panic when I all but blacked out and the veins in my left leg stood out in pulsating black deltas, so that the fear of thrombosis and my carer’s insistence on driving me to Emergency – you’ve simply got old veins, said the triage doctor, there’s no searing pain in your calf, is there? . . . that frightening moment when I tripped down the back step flat on my front on concrete and lay there for several seconds fearful that I might have cracked my titanium hip. My left palm was stinging again and I’d cut both kneecaps, but to my utter relief my pelvic area had avoided contact. I gingerly got

myself up somehow but I was shaken for several weeks about how fragile I was, how unbalanced . . . when a cavalcade of twenty lycra-clad cyclists rode by in martial pairs along the busy main road in amazingly close proximity, so that I suddenly sensed myself looking on from beyond the tomb. It was a fleeting moment, admittedly, but I slid into depression, as if I had done with living and there was no hope of my maimed limb mending or ever riding my bike again. An acute awareness of vulnerability, of uncertainty over my own balance every time my left foot brushed the ground causing some discomfort; in addition, my left knee began to ache – referred pain, said the physio, probably a nerve. Lack of exercise, the inability to bend and lift, a wary awkwardness of simple movements, the frequent stubbing of toes that shook every bone in my body except the titanic hip, all these vicissitudes added to the sniff of mortality that my accident had given me. The old confidence was shot; my legacy was zilch. I found myself struggling to fight down the convalescent’s pity for all vulnerable creatures.

Reinstated in my own home two months later, dickering about, I made the local library an objective for regular walking practice. One afternoon I actually overtook a short, elderly bow-legged gent, no mean feat, pushing a fold-up stroller with brakes, who was swaying with a limp in his right leg. Ever mindful of losing balance and falling or tripping over an uneven stone on the footpath, I asked the old feller whether he’d taken a fall and dislocated his hip. No, he said with a wry smile, he’d had a gammy hip since he was a child. On my watch it seemed like one in three fiftysomethings are disabled, owning a broken leg or ankle or dodgy knees or simply limping along through life.

Ill met, titanium, both my fall and rise: most common metal used for hip replacement; also used in the manufacture of white paint! Ion Man or Ionic Man? I even read up on the difference between gender identity and sexual identity and was shocked to discover that I might have a female brain! The female brain, according to this article, was characterised by a deep interest in language and relationships.

Although I had few alpha friends, I had always absorbed myself in the mechanics of relationships depicted in fiction and the case studies in psych books. I began to obsess about Jasmine, the danger of sexually transmitted diseases. I heard voices, her voices, what she might sound like after one hundred days on testosterone, one thousand days. Still a mere fifteen, how would she possibly manage?

What a pissy little bridge, a hump of boards covered in chicken-wire, white metal railings also strung with chicken wire, two tall white masts at either end. Such an inconsequential scene on that first bike ride eight months later, yet that rain-slick had embedded itself in his psyche as a kind of signpost. Twenty minutes later he was bobbling over a rickety old elevated boardwalk with no safety rail through the wetlands at the same spot where a flock of blue wrens invariably whirred up before his front wheel. Close by a thick fallen trunk lying in amongst the reeds beneath the boardwalk nestled a basket of flowers to commemorate a fifty year old man, out cycling with his wife and wearing a helmet, who must’ve lost concentration for a split second at a meandering turn, fell and somehow struck his head on the log. Without warning, the unfortunate man had met with instant death.

Michael Small September 17, 2009 - July 13, 2010 P O S T E D B Y MICH A EL A T 03:00 NO

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