Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 2, Issue 5

by Venero Armanno

  Volume 2: Issue 5

  Venero Armanno & Lisa Walker

  Imprint

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “Sugarbaby” Copyright © 2012 by Venero Armanno

  “Blossom” Copyright © 2012 by Lisa Walker

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  Editorial

  When we started the Review of Australian Fiction, I didn’t think I would one day receive an email response from a commissioned author with the subject line: Sugarbaby. It turned out, however, that Venero Armanno was not disproportionately grateful for being asked to contribute a story; rather, he already had a long story in mind, about the relationship between an older man and a younger woman, between a Sugar Daddy and a Sugar Baby.

  In the hands of a lesser writer, this topic would have been explored with little tact or subtlety. But Armanno is a master storyteller, with all that implies regarding the teasing out of the complexities and the vagaries of the human heart. This craft is on display in all nine of his published books, from his first – the collection of short stories, Jumping at the Moon (1992) – up to his latest novel, The Dirty Beat (2008). I’m sure it will set his forthcoming novel, The Black Mountain – to be published next month – apart from its contemporaries. He is already working on his next novel, tentatively called Last Male of the Species, that will explore issues of sexuality and male violence.

  The topic of “Sugarbaby”, and its deft handling by Armanno, also speaks to the importance of the long story form that the Review of Australian Fiction hopes to create a platform for. At around 17,000 words, this story is not one that would have worked at the usual 3-5,000 word limit for short stories in Australia. The necessary detail of the incremental steps that lead a person into a relationship that they may not themselves fully understand would not have been otherwise available. Alternatively, the theme may have been diluted, or even exploded into melodrama, had it been stretched to fit into a novel.

  I think you will agree that this story, as it currently stands, is just right.

  The emerging author that Armanno has chosen to be paired with is Lisa Walker. Lisa is the author of Liar Bird which was published earlier this year; she already has her second novel, Sex, Lies and Bonsais, scheduled for publication in January 2013.

  The story Walker has written for us, “Blossom”, is a beautiful tale of a chance meeting between an Australian woman and a Japanese woman one New Year’s Eve in Byron Bay, where the breakdown of one relationship creates the opportunity for the development of a new relationship.

  Enjoy.

  Sugarbaby

  Venero Armanno

  One

  * * *

  Duvall wiped his eyes as he concluded this, the final transaction for Sandy, surprised at just how great his sense of loss was. He’d always expected that making a last payment would hurt, but he’d hoped he would be able to contain it to a minor twinge; like the sting of a blood test’s needle at the local surgery run by Dr Laine, or the small sadness of lifting a stiff pet bird from the floor of its cage. But the girl was finished her degree and that was that. She’d never made any pretence about being available to him a moment longer. Her eyes were set on that year of travelling she’d planned: Asia and India, then on to Europe, the Caribbean islands and the Americas. After that she wanted a steady job in a city like Sydney or Melbourne. Now that her mother had passed away and her studies were done, Sandy was clear about having no desire to return. He of course didn’t come into the equation.

  John Duvall knew he didn’t have to give her so much, and maybe shouldn’t, but he’d always been a generous man. He transferred a nice round $2,000 using their regular method, PayPal. Let her upgrade to nice hotel rooms and not rely on so many backpacker hostels, buy herself better dinners, clothes she wanted, whatever pleased her best. She’d given him so much solace and so much satisfaction that it actually hurt to imagine her doing these things without him, or with some boyfriend, the existence of whom he’d sometimes suspected but didn’t have any right to ask about.

  As the transaction receipt arrived in his email account Duvall clicked on a picture gallery he kept of her. Nothing salacious and not too many, just everyday snaps she’d let him take here in his quiet little suburban home. These could have been photographs of a favourite daughter, granddaughter or niece. Something ached deep in his gut. Maybe this was a good thing, a sign that even at his age he could feel the hurt of needing and wanting someone, that the well-furnished but still-empty rooms of this place didn’t define him. Yes, he was alone, nine years now since Mary had died, but he didn’t necessarily want to be alone.

  The pictures showed Sandy as she was. Not a tremendously pretty girl, and the snaps somehow even managed to suggest that she might not be overly bright or creative, but he knew she was warm-hearted and kind. She’d always managed to treat him with a certain respect and deference for his age that had been married to a natural gift for tenderness. One day she would be a good wife and a good mother, no doubt about it. He imagined Sandy was already a good friend to anyone close to her. He’d miss the scent of her hair, the sound of her voice, her young body’s smooth skin, and the unexpected complicity of the handwritten notes she sometimes left him—not to mention those myriad textings of hers, composed in an ispeak perfectly matched to her personality:

  ZZZ, when Sandy had wanted to let him know she was ‘sleeping, bored, tired’ and wanted to come over;

  VSF, ‘very sad face’, when, for whatever reason, he didn’t want her to;

  i h8 it, when something hadn’t quite gone her way, or the best one,

  G2CU 2nite, ‘going to see you tonight’.

  There were a hundred others of course, but he could barely remember them for their hieroglyphic quality. Yet, in some small way, those textings from a person of the current dominant generation had always done something to lift the spirits of John Duvall, a man most definitely of a generation on the way out. He’d come to consider her messages a small connection to this world that age and circumstances had distanced him from, that he could barely find a way to live in anymore.

  Whenever he’d texted her back, he’d used the impeccable language taught him by his schooling and extensive business life, never succumbing to the tempting shorthand of his tiny telephone’s buttons, or the special weirdness of predictive text:

  Dear Sandy, by all means, if you would like to arrive by eight I will have supper ready for us. Sincerely, Duvall.

  It was funny, from the start she’d used his surname only and he’d accepted that, Sandy moving from ‘Mr Duvall’ after she’d first come to help her mother do his weekly house-cleaning, to ‘Duvall’ after she’d sent him that first almost incomprehensible mobile telephone text message, the one inspired by his old-man’s longing gaze, something even a girl with her innumerable outside interests couldn’t miss.

  Sandy’s mother Glenda, now the late Ms Glenda O’Connor, had been coming to his house for almost two years. She’d done a neat job of keeping his rambling old timber home clean, and had always managed to liven it up with sprigs of flowers placed in pots or vases at strategic corners of various rooms. He’d liked the feel of the place after one of Glenda’s visits; she opened curtains and shutters his indifference normally kept shut, letting in the sort of friendly daylight he rarely even thought about. While Glenda was cleaning, mostly Duvall would sit with a book beneath the heavy, shading branches of the trees in the garden, or he would leave her alone and drive down to the shopping centre for a bag of groceries and a haircut. If he wasn’t going to be back soon enough, he’d place her pay in an envelope on a counter by the telephone. She would leave a sho
rt list of any cleaning products that needed to be purchased for the following week. For almost two years things had progressed this way, quietly and without incident, and he hadn’t noticed her slowing down or doing any less of a job. Yet, one day, as she was leaving, Glenda had struggled to get a few unfamiliar words out.

  ‘Mr Duvall… so you know… I’ll come as long as I can, but I need to cut my working hours…’

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he’d asked, genuinely concerned. Now he’d seen the tiredness in her eyes, the way one shoulder seemed a little stooped, a trace of frailty he’d never noticed before. How had he missed all that? She was fifty-five, always slender, but he realised she’d become thinner and much more lined in the face.

  ‘It’s osteo… and when they did more tests, they found some lumps…’

  The next week she’d arrived with a girl she introduced as Sandra. As she’d presented her, there’d been the gleam of both pleasure and pride in her wearying eyes.

  ‘My youngest, Mr Duvall. She’s going back to university to finish her final year and she needs a little holiday income before it starts… and I can use the help.’

  ‘What are you studying?’

  ‘Psych.’

  ‘And it’ll be your last year?’

  ‘I should have finished two years ago but I took a break.’

  Duvall wondered how old she was. Early to mid-twenties? Her voice was soft but not submissive, her eyes were very clear, and she gave the impression of a person who could handle just about any job that was handed her.

  ‘Well, fine,’ Duvall had nodded, trying not to take any special notice of this young woman who, despite making no attempt to impress him, already seemed like an extra ray of light in his home. ‘I’ll give you the hourly rate each, is that good enough?’

  ‘Oh no…’ Glenda protested, ‘she’s just here to help me… we’ll share…’

  He paid double, of course, and as each week passed he continued to do so. With Sandra’s help the cleaning didn’t seem to take any less time, but it was much more thorough, and he would have found it unconscionable not to provide this extra pair of hands their due—and that had nothing at all to do with the almost physical pleasure he found himself taking in the way she moved around his rooms. Duvall could hardly discern what quality of hers attracted him so: Sandra would come to the house in baggy jeans, even on hot days, never revealing her legs in shorts or a skirt, and always wearing something like a man’s cheap checked work shirt with a t-shirt underneath. Usually there were old joggers on her feet and her hair would be pinned up in a bun, keeping it out of her face. Practical stuff. She never spoke to him beyond the basics—‘Mr Duvall, where are the bigger garbage bags kept?’; ‘Would you like the bins moved out for collection today?’—and there was not the slightest hint of attraction or sexual tension. Nothing that spoke of a man and a woman. How could there have been? He was a sixty-eight-year-old developing a longing ache for a girl who was entering her prime. Duvall knew he would have had only slightly greater a chance with Glenda, who had divorced, she’d once told him, more than ten years back and would never, ever, ever marry again.

  After the holiday period—which was of no great note to Duvall, for he no longer had any family close by, and who for a decade had spent every Christmas eve and day as a volunteer serving lunch and dinner to the dispossessed of the creaking old boarding house down the road (in truth, after the first couple of years he’d started to do this by rote, but preferred the activity to the solitariness of his own Christmas alone)—Sandra arrived without Glenda, and after a friendly-though-mostly-noncommittal greeting had set straight to work with her bucket, detergent and sponges.

  ‘Is your mother unwell?’

  ‘Mr Duvall, it hit her hard over Christmas. Then the therapy, and the, you know, the drugs she has to take… The doctors say she shouldn’t work anymore. We’ve got help at the house now, three days a week.’ Sandra spoke quietly over her shoulder, not making a big thing of this news, but he understood that the situation with her mother must have caused her unspeakable grief. She paid great attention to polishing the porcelain wash basin in his bathroom. ‘I can keep doing this till uni starts if you want.’

  ‘Then you’ll concentrate on your studies… and looking after your mother?’

  ‘She won’t let me do that,’ Sandra almost smiled. ‘You know my mum. The worst thing she can imagine is to be responsible for stopping me from doing well. I never thought I’d go back to finish my degree, but now I really want to. And it means a lot to her too. So it’s easier on her if I move out. Lived away lots before, it’s okay. I’ll find a share house. My two sisters are married, got kids, but they don’t work. They’ll go over pretty often. All together mum’ll get everything she needs.’

  So, in-home care for Glenda, then the inevitable move to some sort of nursing home, Duvall thought, unable to stop himself from feeling the weight of his own mortality. Maybe Glenda had years, maybe only a few months. He decided he’d send her something disguised as a severance pay, a tidy sum that might be helpful, his thanks for the quiet way she’d gone about caring for his home, and, by extension, him.

  ‘Are you certain you’ll be all right to keep coming?’

  ‘Unless you want to find someone else now, Mr Duvall?’

  Now she was looking up at his reflection in the large mirror above the basin. He thought that she’d been able to read the answer in his face long before they’d even started talking.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, first semester classes are about five weeks away. I guess that’s five or six more times I can clean for you, plus everyone else on mum’s list,’ she said, dipping her sponge into the soapy water of the bucket at her feet. ‘Would you like me to make you a cup of tea first?’

  ‘Oh, I never expected that of your mother.’

  ‘Got a big long background in waitressing,’ she half-grinned. ‘Cafés, restaurants, everything. So I don’t mind… I noticed you were sitting in your garden just before.’

  ‘I had a book.’

  ‘Then go back, I’ll get you a cup, it’s cool.’

  He’d been about to protest, but immediately reconsidered. Let this girl bring her own touch to this house, he thought. So Duvall had returned to the warm sunlight of his small garden behind the house and had tried to concentrate on the pages of the thriller he was halfway through. Ten minutes later, Sandra, in those baggy jeans and red checked shirt, her dirty running shoes and pinned-back mousy-brown hair, brought him a tray. She placed it on the white wrought-iron table by his chair. He watched her use a strainer to pour him a cup of tea brewed in a pot using leaves, not a bag. She let him add his own milk and sugar. By the teapot was a small china plate with two cream biscuits from the tin in the kitchen.

  ‘That’s all I could find, Mr Duvall.’

  ‘Sandra, this is heaven.’

  ‘Only my mother calls me that, I’m really Sandy. Now you take it easy and I’ll be done in an hour.’

  ‘No rush.’

  He meant it. Duvall found that what he really wanted to do was to sip his tea then go back into the house and make some excuse to talk to ‘Sandy’ some more, find a way to engage her before she finished for the day. It had never been like this with her mother, of course, but he felt something inside himself being constantly drawn to this young woman. He glanced at his left hand, wrinkled, thinning skin and veins showing, a hint of a coming liver spot. He remembered Sandy’s as the sunlight had caught it just now, gently touching the vines of some cherry tomatoes he’d planted and which were coming to ripeness: her skin was young and supple. He knew what some of the attraction was: further decline lay ahead for him, but for her there was just about anything. Dreams of youth and the excitement of trying to capture each and every one. Don’t dying things always edge toward the light?

  She was mopping the kitchen floor when he brought the tray inside and placed it on the counter.

  ‘Tell me—what do you plan to do after you graduate?’

&nb
sp; ‘Travel,’ she said easily, no thought required, still mopping carefully. ‘I’m saving up.’

  ‘Good to have a goal.’

  Sandy smiled then. He liked it when she did and wished she’d do it more.

  ‘That reminds me too, Mr Duvall. If I’m going to keep working a few more weeks, would you mind if we don’t do the cash thing? When the money’s in my pocket it just sort of goes… Have you ever tried PayPal?’

  ‘For online purchases… not a lot…’

  ‘Could you do that with me too? I’ll leave you my email address, that’s all you’ll need. I’m all set up and then the money goes straight into my savings.’

  ‘If that’s what you’d prefer.’

  Later, it had felt strange making that first payment, and when he’d used her email address (sandythesuperkittenbaby@gmail.com, which left him both bemused and curious—‘super-kitten-baby’, did that signify anything in particular?) to ask if she could come to the house and clean for him twice weekly, he’d received an almost immediate response: TGTBT, Yes! and was versed enough in technology to understand that she’d used her mobile phone to email him a reply, even though he had no idea what the acronym was supposed to signify. He carefully wrote, Excuse me, Sandy, but what does ‘TGTBT’ mean? and pressed the send button. The explanation was instant: Too good to be true!

  Her enthusiasm for the extra work pleased him. Duvall had started to wonder if there was some way he could keep her services into the start of the semester and beyond, for the entire year in fact. He decided to email Sandy one more time and ask her if she could anticipate any hours during the week or weekend that might suit her once university really started, hours that she would want to come to his house for the extra cash. He could be flexible, he carefully composed, hoping not to sound desperate. She needn’t even conform to a set schedule. Sandy could clean for him whenever she had a free hour or two.