wedding speech

her: you know what i love about being with you? i can finally relax, because i know i'm never going to get herpes.

him: can you please say that in your wedding speech? if we get married?

Wizzy hill

There’s a box full of Barbies waiting for me over the wizzy hill at Liesel’s place. I don’t know what I'm more excited about, the wizzy hill or the Barbies. Our stomachs rise into our ribs as Dad takes the Renault over the top – in the back, my brother and I lift off from our booster seats, squealing. Time hangs with us up there, then seatbelts snap us back into place.

Do it again! 

My stomach is still wizzy when we get to Liesel's. We sit on the steps out the front, the sunlight in her curly black hair, her shoulders bare. Dad stretches out a hand and rests it on her shin, they laugh and talk while my brother looks for lizards in the cracks in the concrete and I scratch behind my knees. Can I play with the Barbies? 

Tiny plastic shoes spill onto the bricks, a little apron and hospital gown and sparkly mini skirts, a knot of dolls tangled at the elbows and legs, a hairbrush the size of my pinky, a silver gown and a diamond ring you press through Barbie’s finger to fasten, like pierced ears. I don’t have my ears pierced yet. Liesel does. Today she's wearing big hoops I can almost fit my hand through.

Gentle, darling, says Dad. 

I want this light feeling to come home with us. 

If there are no other little girls who play with them, can I take the Barbies with me? I ask this one more time, even though I know they’re Liesel’s very special Barbies and I can't take them home, but I can play with them whenever we come over. Maybe Liesel can come over to our house one time and bring the Barbies.

Maybe one day, Dad says. Or maybe we can get you some Barbies for home.

When we get back to Jindalee, Mum puts her arms loose around me then goes back to grating vegetables. Her eyes are red. Dad vanishes out the back and while Mum stands at the sink, I climb into the Tupperware cupboard and tell her again about the wizzy hill. About Liesel’s earrings. About the Barbies. 

Maybe if I’m a really good girl, I can have some of my own.

Albert

on the landing

guy: i'll see you down the bottom.
girl: that's not the first time i've heard you say that today.
guy: yeah but i swear that was a total accident.

white trash

old friends, Salamanca

going places

fast mover

November 2011

January 2012

enter sandman

'I can’t turn my head in trikonasana,' I tell Lee before yoga. My old karaoke injury is playing up. The one from headbanging to Enter Sandman. I woke it up again wrangling with a trampoline.

In downface dog my little finger misbehaves. It’s off at right angles.

‘What’s this?’ asks Lee as he walks past. I remember: This is from grade six netball, flush-faced and buried by the coach in wing defence where I can only damage myself. My fingers strapped every second week from catching the ball wrong. 

In tadasana, there's a familiar click as my right rib pops back into place. That’s not normal. That’s from getting drunk on brown spirits at Nicole’s place in year eight and falling down a flight of stairs to vomit a waterfall while the guy I like punches cones from a coke can out the back. I still carry the click with me, this and a sour face when I think of brown spirits.

My hammy frays as I tighten the kneecaps in prasarita padottanasana. 

Iyengar does it the right way.

Nobody should pull a hammy doing yoga but I did, years ago, in McBikram while shaking off a year of vanuatu pastries. This is my reminder of what happens when you stare in a mirror and exercise in 40 degree heat. 

Our eyes are closed, muscles exhaling before we slip into corpse pose. The room is still and quiet, Lee shows us ways to breathe. I think of old injuries – finger, rib, thigh, neck – and how they connect me to forgotten moments, when he’s beside me. ‘You can breathe better than that,’ he says. 

I might be distracted, but that faulty diaphragm, it’s also asthma. I feel panic, a baby’s gasp for breath, the trashbag who can’t find a ventolin with any juice left. A body shaped by years of shallow breath. I don't run, not even for public transport, because i might die, I decided years ago. Something else to be unthunk. 

Jess once wrote that the world’s conflicts are marked on our society by waves of migration, like the rings on a tree. I want to twist this phrase so it refers to my body and how its idiosyncrasies record where I’ve been. But her idea is too beautiful to tamper with.

hard rubbish

Photo: Pete Haydon

your mama

nine of ten

‘Yeah I said grace at Christmas. Thought of this great line, waited til the right time, then: “May god keep the wolves from the door and the women in our beds”.’

He holds his cardigan arms out and recounts waiting for warm laughter from his family. ‘Great, right? Didn’t go down so well – I got clobbered by all my sisters.’ 

‘How many kids in your family?’ 

‘I’m nine of ten,’ he says, disappearing out the front to deliver a beer to someone before taking the stage. One minute he’s a toddler in a 1980s lounge room, learning from a shoal of siblings how to hold court. The next, he’s that soft, dishevelled post-hipster again, singing break-up songs while his maybe-new girlfriend beams at him from behind a glass of red.

stacks on

seven lemons

p: everyone's got their price. what's yours?
k: seven lemons.
p: seven lemons? what do i get for seven lemons?
k: you get to give me seven lemons. a day. no, a week. make that eight lemons because one always goes mouldy. and they have to be organic.
p: it's not my problem if one of them goes mouldy. and you don't just get seven lemons, it's a price. you have to give something in exchange.
k: how about a reasonable chance of regular loving?
p: i want more than that. i want your car. and i want another car to pick up the lemons in, because i don't want to pick up the lemons in your car. and two boxes to put the lemons in. and $50,000.
k: how about we get a lemon tree in a pot somewhere north facing until we find some ground to put it in. and you can wee in it whenever you like. i'll wee in it too. and while we're waiting for the lemons to grow you can buy them and sometimes i'll buy them too.
p: and the reasonable chance of regular loving?
k: as long as it's organic, you get that too. but if we want lemon meringue we'll need more lemons. seven lemons is the bedrock.
p: you're a bedrock.