city slicker

walnut road

“Have you spoken to your mother?” asks Dad. “I think she’s avoiding me. I called her to see if she remembers a house we lived in when we were first married.”

It’s unlike Mum to let a phone call go unreturned, even if it’s a loaded one. We wait for our tea and think in the sun: Dad, P, Pete and me.

On the ground beside our table, there’s an expandable folder full of my old school assignments and notes – Dad and P frame it as a community service to return it, but also it has clogged their spare room since the 80s. When Pete and I arrived at the cafe, they were thumbing through pages written in multicoloured texta. I feel exposed.

“Which house? Why?” I ask. Beside me, Pete is partly here, but mostly around the corner at the primary school fete where his kids are high on Fanta with their mum and her boyfriend. 

“Just around the corner from us. It’s on the market – P and I are thinking of buying it. Four bedrooms, classic 1960s. Fantastic. I’m pretty sure it’s where your mum and I lived when we were first married,” says Dad.

“That’s weird. Don’t you think that’s weird? Will it go with my ramekins?” I ask. 

“Your ramekins were separated at birth from this house. And yes it’s a bit weird, but it’s a great place and there’s plenty of room for everyone to come and stay,” says P.

She means grandkids. 

Until about an hour ago, Pete was volunteering at the Jaffa Smasha outside the front gate at the fete, while his ex-wife scooped gelati into cones by the bubblers. When I came to find him (head down as I passed the gelati stall), he was wrangling a queue of kids intent on smashing Jaffas with a mallet. I knew he was jack of it when he wrenched the mallet from a ten year old and said You had your turn buddy, move along. 

I tell Dad that I’ll call Mum to check on her when I get home, but get distracted by the concertina folder full of bad reports from maths teachers, pining letters to my first boyfriend, overworked poems on notepads, short stories about ruined marriages. It takes me until the following day to remember to call Mum, and it goes through to voicemail. 

That night I have a dream that wakes me with the words of it, rather than the visuals.

With Dad it was the eating up, with Mum it was the leaving. Cancer spread through Dad’s leg until it looked like a cricket bat. A mould got Mum. It spread up her arm, and underneath her top she looked like phosphorescence. They were co-dependent, Mum and that mould, and when it died and shrank away, she shrank away and died. P still bought the four-bedroom house. I hit my head against the side of the outhouse and yelled no no no until I woke myself up.

In the morning, I leave another message for Mum, text my brother to find out if he saw her over the weekend, check on Dad’s general life status. I still think your mum’s avoiding me, he replies.

Maybe the mould claimed her. Maybe she is avoiding him. More likely she hasn’t checked her messages.

powered by

melbourne marathon

way to work

Wild things

“That goose looks like it’s waiting for something,” says Pete. We’re at Ponyfish Island, huddled against the mizzle, drinking mulled wine.

It looks like an escapee from the Collingwood Children’s Farm, the massive white goose that is skirting the riverbank near the footbridge. It's not so much looking for food as expecting it to fall out of the sky or something. 

We go back to talking about how best to get through Crown to reclaim some old Gold Class vouchers that are going out of date. And when our eye drifts to the river again, there’s a middle-aged woman standing on the bank in her polar fleece with a plastic bag full of bread, feeding the goose one slice at a time.

“Too bad if that goose is coeliac,” I say. 

It’s like they’re the only two critters in the world. She talks to it softly, her mousey bob damp at the ends where it pokes out from under her hood. It feels like the telly and the heater are still going in her apartment and she’s come out to look something wild in the eye. Just for a minute. We watch until the goose eats his fill and the woman outlives her usefulness.

On Saturday morning rage, bands have names like Owl Eyes, Boy and Bear, Fragile Bird, Tame Impala, Buried Feathers, Band of Horses. Some walk the streets in animal masks, while other frail longhaired things in tufts and silk wander through forests. Make nests for themselves. Bathe in streams. Mark their territory with neon ribbons. 

Pete points out half-beast street art and a model stares back at me from a print ad, a drake under her arm like she just bought him on Bridge Road in the sales. When we can’t tame them we turn them into stuffed toys or leopard-print leggings.

We crave our own wild life. 

keele street collingwood

cheer up girl

"Cheer up, girl. At least you've got your legs," says a woman on a motorised wheelchair as she passes me at the gateway to the Edinburgh Gardens. On the front handlebars is a basket full of stuffed toys which look like they've done the shopping with her a lot over the years. "I wish I still had mine."

Kel's palsy

They’re already on their way down the coast when I call. Mr Bies answers Shell’s phone. It’s her birthday on Sunday, I hear her laughing beside him. 

only the beginning

“Hey, can you tell Shell I’m sorry I can’t come down the coast this weekend. I have herpes in my eyes,” I say. I still can’t quite believe it. It’s hilarious and disastrous. 

“Skull fuck!” says Mr Bies.

“Yeah, Quickie told me I don’t have to tolerate a fetish for jizz in the eye,” I say.

“There are so many jokes to make about STDs in your face. We’ll miss you,” Mr Bies says. We hang up and I return to my isolation tank, where the smell of antiseptic hand gel dukes it out with a scented soy candle.

Last weekend the hospital told me it was pink eye and we thought it best I stay away from Pete’s son’s sixth birthday party: it’s not a great look for a new girlfriend to infect the guests at a kid’s party. Instead, I helped make chocolate (conjunctive) crackles with one eye open.

Now, I’m wondering how long herpes can live on patty pans.

On Saturday I started to look like one of those koalas with chlamydia on the TV news, peering at the camera with sad eyes. I climbed a gum tree in the lounge room to wait it out.

Itchy sores clustered on my eyelids. A constellation grew up my right cheekbone, an archer’s bow or an arrow pointing to my crooked nose. They follow the nerve endings, apparently, and when the swelling subsided, this formation fascinated me. If I ever go back to Rainbow Serpent I’ll know which meridian to fasten those little diamond stickers to, for maximum bindi-on-steroids effect.

Don’t use steroids on herpes. Herpes on steroids are really hard to deal with. They explode, behave irrationally, get aggressive. Weep, wither.

Pete found me in emergency at the eye and ear hospital twice and ferried me home. Massaged my feet (the only part of me he felt safe to touch) and fetched dinner and stuff from the chemist. I went into lock down and waited for the antivirals to start working, wondering whether to blame Nan for giving me her cold sore or the irresponsible drinking of dregs I’ve done at house parties over the years. 

I disinfect everything. Often. After a week they’re less angry, but I’m still trying to work out the comms around getting herpes in the eyes. It’s pretty far down on the sexy infection register. Even shingles has to be higher on the list, and at least lepers get their own island. 

“Ebola and hantavirus and AIDS,” says Pete, after listening patiently to my quandary. “In the stakes of stuff you don’t want to tell people you have, herpes in the eye is one step below ebola, hantavirus and AIDS. 

“We’re going to have to rebrand it Kel’s palsy,” he says.

hippopotamus in the IGA

awesome and boring

K (a bit drunk at 9pm, eating a defrosted portion of mum's soup): this soup is delicious. i can't taste it at all.

P (not drunk, ready for bed): so which is it, delicious or tasteless? that's the sort of shit my three year old says ... that's awesome! how boring!

K: it looks delicious. i'm sure it's wholesome, but i can't be sure. so it is both awesome and boring.

High tea

‘She started to get a bit funny in the head for a while there. She had central locking, but she still went around and checked every door, and the boot. Every time she left the car,’ says my cousin. I think she's talking about her best friend.

We’re having high tea in Collingwood for Nan’s 83rd birthday. Three tiers of West Heidelberg-bred women with three tiers of sugar at lunch on Friday, a time that makes it hard for the blokes to come too. 

‘If she couldn’t remember checking the car she’d go out and do it again no matter where she was. She only realised it was a problem when she got together with Ben and he was like, what’s that about? I think her grandparents were dying or something, there was a bit of stress anyway. A lot of stress.’ 

My cousin emphasises the lot of stress. Her mum directs a quiet Nanny dearest, toward the other end of the table, have another scone. Do you want more tea? She wants a say in what’s happening, wants to take the heat off the grandparents-dying part of the story. The tea’s a bit cold, says Nan. I’ll try a coffee instead when the girl comes back. She usually drinks six cups of Liptons before dawn: I thought she’d lose her tiny mind over high tea, but it's not scalding enough for her.

‘Anyway then she woke up at Ben's in the middle of the night and she didn’t have a zit stick beside her bed. You know a zit stick, for pimples. She usually always had one beside her bed but she woke up and it wasn’t there. And instead of going oh well and going back to sleep she got up and checked the car, then went to the supermarket and bought a new zit stick. They medicated her after that.'

‘I count while I’m walking,’ my auntie says. ‘It started out after the operation and it was hard to walk around the block. Now I just do it in the background while I’m talking to Lee on our walks. In in time with my steps.’ 

‘I make pie charts in my head before I go to bed,’ says my cousin. ‘If I’ve got four things to do in the morning I make a pie chart breaking down the time it’ll take to do each thing.’  

'I'm too forgetful to be obsessive, that's the only thing that saves me,' says my other auntie, the one who speaks so soft you must lean in to hear what she says. 

‘Pa had the spot where he’d sit in the kitchen and nobody else sat there,’ I say, bringing him into the room. It's uncomfortable for a second, but then he's there with us.

‘I look at number plates and try to match them to the driver,’ says Mum. 

Numbers don't give me any peace, but I locked down over food for a while there. Does that count?

brushtail

sunglasses in flight

what the family needed

‘Every once in a while, Ruth felt the necessary pull of destiny. When she’d eloped, when she finally took the kids and left, when she’d switched to night duty, when she’d bought this apartment. In each case, she couldn’t have done otherwise. Her decisions had been inevitable.’
– What the Family Needed, Steven Amsterdam, page 137

For me, a big decision feels more like the moment after Wile E Coyote runs into the air over the canyon, just before he realises he’s about to fall. It feels like the intake of breath as I put my head underwater in the early summer ocean. Or the flattening out that happens before orgasm.

Pete and I talk in the kitchen about friends who are deciding whether to hold onto a relationship or let it go. 

‘They’re at the pointy bit,’ I say, making my hands into an apex. 

‘They’re at the bit that goes like that,’ says Pete, pointing his hand to the floor with his fingers fanning out in five directions. 

Occasionally Mum mentions a chap she dated in high school who moved up north to be a prawn farmer. She could have married him, the story half goes. Her eyes get humid when she takes herself there: a maybe-rich fishwife living in a house on stilts, raising burly blond children who run to their father as he comes through the laundry door with the evening breeze, smelling of crustaceans. Would he be kind to them? Would she be happy, with her ankles swollen in the heat?

It’s hard to see. Steven Amsterdam’s character gets off lightly, with destiny dragging her in one direction.

secret dinner party