by Liz Byrski
Frank’s reflexes had been honed on the battlefield and were too quick and too powerful for the aggressor. Delivering a chop to the kidney area he was free, as his assailant, who was built like a commercial refrigerator, doubled up, swearing and groaning. Grasping one of his arms, Frank twisted it back into a half nelson, pulling him upright and turning him so that he was now pinned against the car.
‘Fuck off,’ roared the attacker. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ Frank said. ‘You started this.’
The man, who wasn’t as strong as his size suggested, struggled helplessly. ‘What are you up to messing around with my wife?’ he demanded, twisting his head back over his shoulder to look at Frank.
He reeked of stale alcohol, and Frank could see a trickle of blood coming from the man’s nose where his face had connected with the car roof. ‘No idea what you’re talking about, mate,’ he said, keeping him pinned there. ‘Who’s your wife?’
‘As if you didn’t know. You picked her up this morning, drove off with her right under my bloody nose.’
‘Well, your nose is bleeding now,’ Frank replied, ‘and that won’t be all unless we sort this out quick smart.’
‘You know what I mean. You were waiting for her outside and now she’s in Kalgoorlie.’
‘Ah,’ said Frank, ‘the belly dancers. And you, I suspect, are Gayle’s husband.’ He relaxed his hold a little. ‘I haven’t been up to anything with your wife, I’m just the chauffeur. So, if I can trust you to keep your hands to yourself we can discuss this in a more civilised manner.’
Brian grunted something incomprehensible and Frank tightened his grip again. ‘What was that?’
‘Okay, okay,’ Brian yelped. ‘Let me go, for chrissakes.’
Frank released him and stepped back from the car. ‘What’s your name?’
Brian straightened up, rubbed his face with his hand and, seeing the blood, searched his pockets for a handkerchief. ‘Brian Peterson, as if you didn’t bloody know. What’re you writing it down for?’
‘So I know who to arrest for assaulting a police officer.’
‘You assaulting me, more like,’ Brian said, ‘and entrapping my wife –’
‘Look here,’ Frank said, pocketing his notebook. ‘This is just bloody silly. If you’ve got a problem with what she’s doing you’d better take it up with her. And I warn you now, if you’re going to have an argument with her, you’d better not start it the way you started with me, or I’ll be helping her to get a restraining order.’
‘Hey, hang on a minute,’ Brian said, the tone of his voice – indeed, his whole demeanour – indicating that he was backing down. ‘I just want to know what’s happening.’
‘What’s happening with you and your missus is between the two of you,’ Frank said. ‘She’s an adult and can go wherever she likes, even if she does have the misfortune to be married to you. I suggest you give her a call and talk to her about it.’
‘I’ve done that,’ Brian said, still dabbing at his nose. ‘She said the same. And she doesn’t want to talk to me.’
‘Then take my advice and can it, mate. Give her a couple of days and call her again when you’re sober, and if that’s your Saab over there, don’t even think of driving it home. How did you find me?’
‘Car rego,’ Brian mumbled. ‘Got it as you pulled out of the drive.’
‘And?’
‘And yeah, okay, I’ve got a mate in the vice squad. He did a vehicle check for me.’
Frank raised his eyebrows. ‘So, will I book you or won’t I?’
Brian, no longer bleeding, stuffed his handkerchief away. ‘No, mate, sorry. I’ll, er . . . I’ll get out of your way.’
Frank gave him a long hard look. Belligerent though Brian was, there was something pathetic about the man that stirred Frank’s compassion. ‘You just wanted someone else to blame. A punch-up to make you feel better,’ he said. ‘Not very smart. So, okay, Mr Peterson, take this as a warning. If I hear you flexing your muscles on this subject anywhere else, I’ll book you and I’ll add assaulting a police officer to the charge. Now I assume you’ve got a mobile phone, so you’d better call yourself a cab.’
Ten minutes later the tail lights of the taxi were disappearing around the corner of the street, and Brian’s black Saab remained parked on the opposite side of the road. Inside, Frank dropped his jacket on a chair, poured himself a large whisky and stood at the lounge window staring out into the silent street. Brian Peterson was hardly what he would have imagined if he’d been speculating about Gayle’s husband, but perhaps it wasn’t so surprising. He was an angry man, a bully, possibly a drunk. Frank had seen enough strange partnerships to know that they sometimes worked, but he didn’t think this was one of them. Gayle’s decision to tell her husband about the tour less than twenty-four hours before she left would have pissed off the mildest of men. There was something pretty unhealthy happening with the Petersons, and Frank thought he’d better warn Marissa. It was almost midnight and she’d probably be asleep by now. It would have to wait until the morning. She’d been nervous at the airport, checking and double-checking everything.
‘Thanks, Frank,’ she’d said finally. ‘For the lift and for everything else. Might not have got this far without you.’
‘Course you would,’ he’d said. ‘Now, get out there and swing your booty in the goldfields. I’ll call you.’ Instinctively he had reached out to her, and for a fraction of a second thought she was going to resist, but she had hugged him briefly before moving on.
He wished she weren’t so far away and, more than that, he wished he knew how she felt. But as he couldn’t work out his own feelings he had no chance of divining hers. He had rapidly grown accustomed to her being around and he missed her already. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d missed anyone.
TEN
‘Now, we can either rehearse in costume or do a quick run-through before we change,’ Marissa said when they arrived at the hall. There was more than an hour before the first performance but both Sonya and Gayle were tense and distracted.
‘Let’s just run through it as we are,’ Sonya said. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to change before the real thing.’
As soon as she had agreed to it, Marissa knew it was a mistake. The combination of the music and the costumes might have lifted their spirits, shifted their focus from their own problems onto the dance itself. And it wasn’t just them. Her sense of responsibility, the feeling that everything was going to fall into a very big hole, overhung her own performance. She put them through their paces a second time, watching now from the front rather than leading, and her heart sank even further.
‘Look,’ she said going back on the stage, ‘this dance is all about female sexuality. You need to be connected to that part of yourselves, and to be responding to the music and the meaning. What’s happening in your head, what you’re feeling about yourselves, is crucial. I know you’ve both got other stuff going on and it’s hard, but you just have to put that aside for the next couple of hours.’
Gayle ran her hands through her hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to concentrate. It all seemed so much easier when we were rehearsing at home.’
‘It’s not any harder here,’ Marissa replied. ‘Not if you give it your full attention, think yourself into the meaning. It’s all about what you put into it.’
Sonya pulled a face. ‘I keep thinking my mother’s going to show up,’ she said. ‘Walk through that door and demand that I stop behaving badly and go home like a good girl. It’s really unnerving.’
Marissa sighed. ‘I know how it feels,’ she said, and there was an edge to her voice, ‘having to perform when you really don’t feel like it, when you’ve got other things on your mind. But you’ve done harder things than this. Concentrate, give it all you’ve got. You both know what dancing’s done for you – particularly you, Gayle. Find that for yourself now, and find it for all those other women wh
o are going to turn up and who might just need it as much as you did. And you, Sonya, stop looking guilty. Loosen up, have fun, and get those movements flowing again.’
Sonya nodded and started to circle her shoulders. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘let’s give it another go.’
Marissa shook her head. ‘No more time. Save it for the performance. We need to unpack the gear and get changed and made up. We’re at work now so get your acts together and let those women see what you can do.’
Silently they unpacked and shook out their costumes.
‘I look like a spaniel in this hairpiece,’ Sonya said, pulling a long face as she pinned on the fall of red hair and fixed it with a gold sequinned headpiece.
‘Bloodhound, more like,’ Marissa said, hooking a floating veil to one side of her skirt. ‘If your mother does turn up, all she’ll see is a bloodhound in sequins.’
They were laughing now, all three of them, genuinely laughing together.
‘You are such a hard woman, Marissa,’ Sonya said, ‘utterly brutal.’
‘Brutal is good,’ Gayle said, her body loosening up in response to the laughter. ‘We need it. She’s been pussyfooting around us all day.’
‘Well, there’s more brutality where that came from,’ Marissa said, as some of her anxiety began to dissipate.
By the time the community centre organisers arrived, the mood had changed to nervous anticipation and the tension built as the audience began to trickle in through the doors. Soon the rows of seats were filled and more chairs were being pulled out from the stacks at the back of the hall until it was standing room only. They waited behind the screens at the side of the stage, tense and poised for the start.
‘Okay,’ Marissa whispered, ‘any minute now, when you hear that drumbeat and see me move, we’re on, and we give it all we’ve got.’
The lights went down and the drumbeat commenced in eight-four time, then a fast and spirited chiftitelli began and they started. Marissa was in her element now, doing what she did best and knowing that on this crucial night her own performance had the power to make or break the others. There was a rustle of delight in the audience as they swept onto the small stage in a burst of brilliant colour. Marissa sensed that it infected Gayle and Sonya, lifting them out of their distractions and into the spirit of the dance. In her peripheral vision Gayle was a shimmering siren in lavender and purple, and on the other side Sonya circled perfectly, curving her back, using her arms with unusual grace, the gold and green of her costume sparkling and flashing in the lights.
They were in the swing of it now and she could feel their energy mounting as the pace of the dance increased and they circled and shimmied in figures of eight, mirroring each other’s movements. Effortlessly they moved into the next two dances, adjusting to a slower, more sensuous pace and rhythm and then, in the final dance, on to the more demanding moves, the bolder steps and the fast, complex sequences, until, breathless with effort, eyes shining, they ended with a flourish and to rapturous applause.
‘I did have a terrible fit of nerves at the start,’ Gayle admitted later. ‘I was so scared I thought I might faint, but it was about the dancing, not about all the other stuff. By that time it was only the dancing that mattered.’
‘Well, you were great,’ Marissa said. ‘I’m so proud of you both.’
‘Obviously we respond to flagellation,’ Sonya laughed. ‘I’m exhausted – it must be the nervous energy.’
‘Even a brief performance is more exhausting than hours of rehearsal,’ Marissa answered, ‘so you’ll need to learn to pace yourselves, rest whenever you can, try to stay cool and not get too distracted by other things. It’s a big ask, I know, but if you don’t, you’ll burn out really fast. What about that audience, though – so many women, and didn’t they love it?’
Sonya grinned. ‘They really did, I couldn’t believe it. They were raring to go.’
Gayle unpinned her headdress and rolled it into her bag. ‘I really only understood tonight why you wanted us, as beginners, to come with you. When I spoke to the women afterwards they were surprised and quite motivated when I told them I’d only been dancing a few months.’
‘Exactly,’ Marissa said. ‘And tonight you didn’t dance like beginners anyway. Keep that up and we’ll have them hammering down the doors to get in. Gayle, remember to keep working on those shoulders and, Sonya –’
‘I know, I know, the jerky bits. I’ll get there eventually.’
Despite the confident and successful start, though, it turned out to be a difficult week. The nervous tension of the performances and of being watched in the classes took a greater toll on Gayle and Sonya than either had expected. After that first night they had difficulty maintaining the pace and became uncharacteristically moody. Marissa, who was both irritated by and anxious about them, found herself overcompensating, trying to motivate them with humour and encouragement, which drained her own energy. They needed to work better as a team, just as they had at that first performance.
‘Perhaps we could have a bit of a strategy meeting,’ she suggested on the day they were due to leave Kalgoorlie. ‘It’s three hours before we have to go to the airport, so it’s a good chance to talk about how we can improve the way we work together.’
Sonya pushed her muesli bowl aside and got up to fetch more coffee. ‘I hope I’ll be able to put on a better show once we’re away from here. I still feel really tense.’
Gayle nodded. ‘I know. I’m feeling a bit wobbly myself. I hadn’t reckoned on it being so exhausting.’
Marissa gritted her teeth. ‘You’re not going to pull out, are you?’
‘No way. It’s just taking me a while to adjust, and I suppose to get over the shock of what Frank told you on the phone about Brian going after him. Even I’m amazed he’d behave like that, and I feel so guilty about poor Frank – after all, it’s nothing to do with him.’
‘Frank’s fine, he’s a policeman,’ Marissa said. ‘They’re used to that sort of thing.’
‘Just the same –’
‘Marissa’s right,’ Sonya cut in. ‘Frank’ll have forgotten it by now, but I can understand how you feel. Has Brian called again this morning?’
‘Yes, but he’s calmer now. He’s gone from wild and threatening through cold anger and now we’re in hurt little boy stage.’
‘How long since you left him behind to do anything of your own?’ Marissa asked.
‘How long? Well, never really. Angie and I went away on our own sometimes, but only when he was going to be away too. Other than that, I’ve always been there.’
Marissa raised her eyebrows. ‘No wonder he’s freaking out now. By the way, Sonya, was that your sister at the back of the hall last night?’
‘Huh! I doubt it,’ Sonya said. ‘Alannah, maybe, she came to a couple of classes, but not last night. And there’s no way Tessa would come.’
‘I think she was there,’ Gayle said. ‘I meant to mention it yesterday evening but I forgot. It looked like her.’
Sonya shook her head. ‘It couldn’t have been. My sister watch me belly dance? Not in a million years.’
‘Okay,’ Marissa said. ‘Next stop Albany. We have an hour and a half to wait in Perth for the Albany flight. Don’t decide to pop home, either of you.’
‘I bet Frank’ll be there to meet us,’ Sonya said with a grin. ‘Nice man, a lot like Normie Rowe.’
‘But taller,’ Gayle said with a smile, ‘and pretty cute.’
‘Especially when he sings “It’s Not Easy”.’
‘Don’t start that again,’ Marissa said, laughing.
‘What have you got against Normie?’ Gayle asked. ‘I used to think he was gorgeous.’
‘Nothing at all,’ Marissa said. ‘In fact, I used to have a bit of a thing for him myself. But it’s not like that with Frank. And anyway, I don’t do relationships.’
‘Ha! I know that line,’ Sonya said. ‘I’ve used it myself quite a lot, usually just before leaping into some terrible liaison with a
totally inappropriate man.’
‘Not me,’ Marissa said. ‘The last time was so long ago I can’t remember it, other than as the point at which I decided that celibacy was my new career. Now, let’s think Albany. It’ll be coldish, but the bed and breakfast place looks nice. Strategy? Anything we want to change?’
Sonya leaned forward and patted her arm. ‘It’s okay, Marissa, we’re not stupid. We know it was team building we needed, not strategy, and we’ve just done it.’
‘Really?’ Marissa said, startled. ‘Was that it?’
Gayle nodded.
‘So team building is about getting a rise out of the team leader?’
‘Of course it is,’ Sonya said, rolling her eyes. ‘Trust me – I’m a bureaucrat, I know about these things.’
ELEVEN
In 1956, the year Oliver turned seven, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, Britain formed a military alliance with France and Israel to prevent General Nasser from nationalising the Suez Canal, and rock‘n’roll, after a dodgy start a few years earlier, started to take a hold in the US. Not surprisingly, none of these events made much impression on Oliver at the time, although a couple of decades later he would develop an abiding interest in them all and go on to write papers about them in the course of his academic career. None, however, had the long-term impact on him that an event within his own home was to have.
In that same year Joan Baxter read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, closely followed by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Oliver was unaware of the presence of these books in the small terraced house in Claremont, but they were to affect his life in ways rather more profound than the international events of that year. Some years later, Joan was among the first women in Perth to read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and by the time Germaine Greer’s orifices appeared in Suck and The Female Eunuch was published, Oliver was a young man ahead of his time.
Years earlier, Joan Baxter was teaching at a local primary school when she met a merchant seaman called Bruce one night in the pub, and promptly embarked on a live-in relationship of which her mother, had she still been alive, would have seriously disapproved. Her father was otherwise occupied, with a plan to make money from a betting syndicate and barely seemed to notice Bruce’s arrival, or Oliver’s birth the following year. Similarly Oliver, at the age of three, barely noticed his father’s failure to return from one of his trips to sea. Joan did notice and was, by that time, heartily relieved. She went back to teaching and, a few years later, started all that dangerous and subversive reading.