‘Ah, my next client,’ Chelsea said, bustling through. ‘I’ll be right with you, Lee. By the way, have you met Sonia?’
There was a twinkle in Chelsea’s eye as she disappeared again. Lee stood and stretched out his hand. As was her habit, Sonia swiped her hand on her backside before taking his. His palm felt soft and warm. Hers, despite the manicure, was hard and calloused. She flushed. But Lee’s grip was insistent, his touch jolting, even demanding. Sonia felt him politely commanding that she stay with her palm pressed into his. With his eyes he almost begged her to not let go.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For the other day.’
‘It was nothing.’
‘You saved my life.’ He pressed his other hand over hers. ‘I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but you did.’
‘No, I didn‘t.’
‘You were an angel.’
‘Well, you possibly saved my life too,’ she said softly. ‘So we’re even.’ She looked up at him with a smile in her eyes.
‘Dinner?’ he asked. ‘Please? This time say yes. Please.’
From the back room Chelsea called, ‘Room’s ready for you, Lee.’
‘Yes,’ Sonia said, to him before he walked away. ‘Yes, dinner would be lovely.’
As Chelsea settled Lee into the massage room and shut the door, she galloped back to the front desk.
‘Am I not good? Oh, this little Chelsea is so good,’ she sung as she did a happy dance and thrust her fingers forward as if scoring a footy goal.
‘Shush!’ Sonia pleaded, then whispered in a shout, ‘You knew, didn’t you? He told you last week and you made the appointments back to back! You knew!’
‘Maybe. Maybe I did. So, same time next week?’ Chelsea said, pulling an innocent face. ‘Now, I can’t keep Lee waiting. If you don’t mind me breaking client confidentiality, I’ll give him your number if you like.’
‘My number? My number! Yes, of course.’
As Sonia stepped from the salon, she looked skywards to see blue spread above her with not a cloud in sight, and she found herself smiling from the very core of her being.
The next six months passed and Sonia’s world seemed rich in colour, like jockey silks of spectacular hues, and her nights were lit with silver and gold. Before work, she and Lee met for coffee at the bakery. On the weekends, Lee spent race days hovering near the mounting yard as Sonia carried out her strapper’s duties, no longer wearing oversized worker’s clobber, but now dressed by Chelsea in her best impersonation of Gai Waterhouse numbers, pieced together from Portmans. Lee seemed to love the crush of boozers at the trainers’ bar and thrived on the banter between Ali-Cat and the crew. On Derby Day, Old Hands triumphed, struggling down the straight but winning by a nose to the favourite. Frank almost had a coronary, until Lee shoved a whisky in his hand and gave him a correct weight clearance with a back slap.
Afterwards, Sonia and Lee made love in the horse truck with the betting slip still tucked in Sonia’s lacy bra, tipsy on champagne, drunk on new love. The next day at work Frank wrote a letter of support, and the lengthy paperwork needed for Sonia’s trainer’s licence application seemed to fill itself out with ease. Lee backed her all the way. And life flowed. Smooth, like Lee’s Mercedes that Sonia travelled in. Now she sat in it drenched in happiness and new perfume. A gift from Lee. He took her to restaurants in the city she never knew existed. She tasted food she had not eaten in years. His world was lux. His place was an architect’s dreamscape, a large minimalist house on a bush block in the hills.
At first she had been ashamed of her bedsit flat and barren back yard, made all the grottier by her two little mutt-dogs and pet parrot, but Lee didn’t seem to mind. When she spoke of the impossibility of their relationship, their different worlds, he would silence her with a kiss. He stopped her thoughts from bolting with a touch or a look. He told her she was bringing him back down to earth. A place he hadn’t been for years, not since the death of his father, when Lee had been only eighteen. Despite her dowdy living space, they still rumpled the sheets as if Parisian lovers, and spent their days and nights leisurely running their fingertips over each other’s skin. Hers olive-brown Italian, his golden Chinese-Australian. If she panicked after their love making was done that they were mismatched, he would rein her in and patiently explain again how he’d taken over the role of provider for the family far too heavily after his dad was gone. The money, the medical degree, the flash car and fancy clothes, the status meant nothing since that rainy day. He saw now that something had been missing in his life. Something real. Something earthy. Something like Sonia. And the life she lived with horses and racing people. All he said reassured her. That was until the day he asked, ‘Will you come to the harbour and meet my mother next Saturday? Please.’ That was when Sonia knew her princess castle could come crashing down.
For the next week, thoughts of ‘the mother’ rampaged through Sonia’s mind. It was the mother who could undo it all and prise her and Lee apart, she thought. Surely an obscenely wealthy stockbroker’s widow would not take kindly to the ‘dalliance’ her son was having with a stable hand. Hadn’t Chelsea said she’d not approved of the nurse girlfriends? Sonia felt her palms grow cold and clammy from fear. On the day of the lunch she took her fears to Chelsea’s salon. At first, no matter how much Chelsea soothed her thoughts with her fingertips and massaged her worries as she shampooed Sonia’s hair, Sonia could not let go of thinking of the mother. But as Chelsea dabbed cream on Sonia’s doubts and powdered make-up over the cracks of her insecurity, Sonia began to calm. Chelsea dressed her in a pretty cinnamon-coloured dress and chunky cork-heeled shoes and at the doorway kissed her and said, ‘You look beautiful. Go!’
Standing at her ute with the high-vis boys eyeing her hungrily through the bakery window, Sonia was almost convinced. She could handle the mother and she would handle the mother.
In the ute she gingerly turned the key, so as not to ruin her still-damp nails.
Then the phone rang.
Frank’s voice, cracklier than static, was on the end of the line.
‘Get your skinny little butt down here, Luglio! Old Hands has colic. Looks like he’s about buggered.’
And before Sonia could lament that the universe was cruel she was swinging out of the car park and back to work.
In the stables she found the giant had fallen. Old Hands’s sides heaved and he tossed his head about and flailed his legs in agony. Sonia threw herself into the catastrophe. This horse was Frank’s ticket to retirement. This horse was her leg-up into the world of leading horse trainers. This horse was also a beautiful, big-hearted, big-spirited horse. She loved this horse. In her shoes, in her dress, in her hair, she raged at the horse with all her pint-sized might to get him to stand. For him to live he had to stand. Jerking at the headstall, whacking him on the hip. Bullying him. Pleading with him. Praying for him. In her desperation, Sonia discovered the warrior woman within herself.
‘Get up! Get up!’ With an almighty heave and a prayer she gave it her last shot. She could not see her dream die like this. And then, at last, Old Hands gave a groan and rolled his body upwards. His head flopped back and forwards but slowly he cast one leg out in front of his chest, then the other. Then with a grunt he was up. Sonia hugged the horse. She hugged Frank. They laughed, she cried. And they walked and walked, out in the courtyard. In circles they walked and Sonia could feel the horse ease down and the relief flooding through her. It wasn’t until an hour later, when Frank took the lead rope and thanked her, that she suddenly felt the pain her shoes had given her.
‘You looked mighty nice,’ Frank said as she half hobbled to her ute, ‘before.’
On her phone were six missed calls. Lee. He had left her the address to the mother’s. Said to meet him there. There was worry in his voice. As if she had done a runner. The dark angel blocked her way again. Look at your hair, a mess, your nails ruined, your dress dirty – and there’s horse shit on your shoes. Mascara all over your cheeks. You should give up now, the
dark angel warned. Go home to your bedsit and get into bed and don’t come back until the blackness returns. His world is too light for you.
But as Sonia revved the ute through the track’s high-security gates, she willed the dark angel with the golden hair to be shut in behind them and gone from her. Forty minutes later she was driving her rust-bucket Hilux along the leafiest, poshest street she’d ever seen and the angel was back, eating at her thoughts. Every now and then a glimpse of the harbour would sparkle into view. When she pulled up in front of the double electric gates and saw the spectacular three-storey house and garden, Sonia sucked in a breath. She looked down at her dress stained with horse saliva and grime.
‘Oh, shit.’
No time to drive off. Lee was jogging over, a beaming smile of welcome and relief on his face.
‘Sonia! You made it!’
He frowned when she got out of the ute.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Old Hands. Colic. He’s fine. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh! Poor horse,’ and Lee swept her up in a hug. ‘Come this way. Mum’s in the garden.’
She imagined Lee’s coiffured mother sipping tea at an outdoor setting overlooking the water view, the lunch ruined thanks to her. Instead, as she rounded the house she saw a small Chinese lady bending over a vegetable garden. Sonia wondered at first if she was a gardener but when the woman straightened as much as her little old body would allow, Sonia saw that she wore a regal peacock-blue designer silk shirt and blue jeans. Her round wizened face shone a smile as she stepped out from a small crop of perfectly formed cabbages. She opened up her arms in welcome as she surveyed Sonia.
‘Sonia had a sick horse, Mum. But he’s fine now.’
The woman’s eyes creased to slits as she nodded.
‘Good, good,’ she said as she held out her hands in welcome. The harbour’s sparkle was reflected in the fabulous diamond rings she wore. But the most striking thing Sonia noticed about Lee’s mother was that her hands were covered up to her wrists in dirt. The mother quickly wiped both filthy hands on her jeans before offering up a handshake. Sonia felt her own grubby fingers encased in the soil-stained warmth of the older woman.
‘At last,’ said the mother in a thick Chinese accent. ‘He has brought me a woman of substance.’
‘But how can you tell?’ Sonia asked, smiling.
‘You have old soul. Old soul in your eyes. And you have true hands. True hands good thing. Hands show truth.’ She nodded and smiled at Lee.
It was then, shaking Lee’s mother’s dirty, wrinkled, bejewelled old hand that Sonia felt her path clear suddenly, like a cloud shifting to reveal sunshine. She felt the dark angel fly away. Instead the love of Jessie, her baby, settled on her like a gentle blanket comforting her shoulders. And in an instant she knew the choice of her future lay not outside herself. But within. Within her very own hands. No one else‘s. Her own true hands.
Thank you to Krissy Harris, of Hawkesbury Rivers Saddle Co and Harris Entertainment, for the story concept.
Dangerous Goods
Gloria Rogers held the pen over the firm black line and asked herself again, ‘Does this parcel contain dangerous goods?’
Mavis the post mistress sighed loudly, frowned, looked at her watch and shifted her ample weight to her other hip.
‘Nearly done, Gloria?’ she asked, folding her arms.
The name Gloria came out of her mouth as if it was coated in foul-tasting medicine. Gloria glanced up at Mavis from the dented, pen-marked counter and licked her dry lips.
‘Yes, Mavis. Almost.’
Her eyes turned back to the glaring red print saying No Dangerous Goods Declaration and Gloria read the fine print again.
I hereby certify that this article does not contain any dangerous or prohibited goods. The sticker on the parcel had a space saying Sender’s Signature, followed by a long black empty line. Gloria scratched her newly dyed hair with the end of the pen. Mavis pursed her lips and sighed again.
Well, thought Gloria, I’m simply returning the items, after all. They’ve barely been touched. So it’s not me sending dangerous goods – it was the company who made them and sent them to me in the first place.
They had arrived a week earlier in the very same package, which was now crisply folded over and stuck with new parcel glue. Now, a week after Gloria had excitedly torn open the package and scattered the contents on her bed, the soon-to-be-returned parcel looked cheap and used. It was stapled crookedly and stuck unevenly together with sticky tape.
Gloria heard Mardy Hankworst’s throbbing truck pull up outside the general store, and felt relief when Mavis moved away from her. She watched Mavis’s large backside rock down the aisle of the canned goods as she walked out of the store and into the dusty, shimmering street to the diesel pump.
Mavis always wore a floral frock with low sensible shoes. All the ladies their age in the town wore floral frocks with low sensible shoes. Even behind the pie and chips counter at the local football, the ladies wore them – except there they threw flower-print pinafores over the top of their ample floral busts. Cluttered flowerbeds of tiny pink cottage-garden daisies clashed with blooming blues and reds of too-ripe rose buds. The cascade of flower prints fell safely below the knees but still revealed expanding calves, sheathed in stockings, the black hairs smeared by nylon onto skin.
The thought of clothes made Gloria hitch her sagging panti-hose up underneath her flowered hips. She poised the pen again to sign her name and thought of the dangerous goods.
She’d ordered them out of a catalogue. Gloria had flicked past the floral-print dresses until her eyes fell on racy reds, silky blacks and shimmering silvers. She neatly filled out the little squares that said Size, Colour, Quantity, and wrote a cheque. Ten days later the parcel had arrived in a cloud of dust on Fred Dandy’s bus along with Mardy Hankworst’s fertiliser order and milk and bread for Mavis’s store.
In the narrow mirror of her bedroom Gloria ran a hand over her thigh, clad in black stretch capri pants. The word S-t-r-e-t-c-h had run in red type over the thigh of the model in the catalogue. Gloria did the same with her hand and tried the word.
‘Strrrreeetch,’ she said as she turned her rounded bottom to the mirror and bent over. Next she tried the top. Red material clamoured its way over her large bust to her neckline, which shone with chunks of silver. She tottered in her new Fashion Marie shoes and applied a rich layer of red lipstick to her lips. The crowd hushed when she entered the bowling club for the end of year get-together. It was Bernard Morgan who bought her the first drink. Then Mardy Hankworst. Then Ivan Peterson. Mavis and the other ladies clustered in the corner of the lounge and breathed and seethed heavily, fluffing up their florals like upset hens.
Now, Mavis was taking Mardy’s money for the diesel at the counter and they were both looking at Gloria as she stood in the store’s post office area, pondering the dangerous goods question.
In small print it read: eg. Explosives, Flammables, Corrosives, Aerosols, etc. Gloria thought again. The sherry at the bowling club had exploded in her head. It was like someone had detonated Gloria Rogers’ whole being. Her bust heaved and seemed to rise up of its own accord towards Ivan Peterson’s already bulging eyes. The alcohol and the crush of bowling club men around her made her face flush red … like it was on fire. She actually felt flammable, as if she would explode into flames if Ivan were to touch her. Dancing yellow and red flames, there and then at the bar, in front of Mavis and Sandy Saunders.
Later in the car park she had felt Ivan’s corrosive stubble from his unshaven face rub on her cheeks, neck and cleavage. As for aerosols, she wasn’t sure about that one. She looked again at the parcel. If in doubt ask at any post office. She laughed when she saw it. Imagine telling Mavis how her husband’s hand had slithered over the s-t-r-e-t-c-h fabric!
But the smile fell away from Gloria’s face when she read: A false declaration is a criminal offence.
As he left the store, Mardy Hankworst tipped his ha
t and smiled at her, saying, ‘Gloria’, as if her name was wrapped in honey. She called over her shoulder to Mavis.
‘I’ve decided not to return the parcel. Thank you anyway, Mavis.’ As she walked away down the dusty street with the parcel under her arm she was sure she heard Mavis say, ‘She’s a dangerous woman, that one.’
The Mysterious Handbag
Dr Posthlewaite had been dead exactly a week. While his wife thought of this, she picked up her needle, bent her head and began to stitch buttons onto silk. A tingle of delight ran up her bony spine while she imagined sewing the eyes of his corpse shut tight. Prick of cool needle, thread running, tugging, through cold skin.
He had been ‘the good doctor’ – a much admired surgeon. A pillar of the community. And, for the past forty years, she had been the doctor’s wife.
Life with the doctor made her feel like an empty handbag. It was a strange way to feel, but Mrs Posthlewaite would often sip her chamomile tea at her sewing table in a patch of afternoon sunlight and consider her handbag theory carefully. From the exterior she looked like a neat, functional and socially acceptable handbag. She knew she was a touch on the old-fashioned side. But she was certain she had more style than the other bum-bag-wearing, gym-going grannies like Mrs Smithers, who lived in the flat next door.
The very personal and private space inside ‘Mrs Posthlewaite-the-handbag’ had been emptied over years of living with the puffed-up, self-important doctor. Now, at the sewing table, she felt the anger simmer inside her empty space again as the doctor’s little white dog clawed runs in her stockings and whimpered to be fed.
With cool, polite distance Dr Posthlewaite had come home to her each evening. She, the neat wife in the neat home with no children … just an annoying little dog. Mrs Posthlewaite would hear the doctor’s pompous booming laughter coming from the stairwell as he flirted relentlessly with Mrs Smithers. The smile on his red round face evaporated when he crossed the threshold into the plush flat and placed his wooden box of personally engraved surgical instruments on the bedroom chair. The little dog, so delighted to see him, danced in circles at his feet and piddled with excitement. Steaming dinners were placed before him while he sighed and frowned.
Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare Page 5