by Cate Kennedy
In this new golden light my hand rested on the outside of her thigh remembering the gentle slap of that calf muscle but unable to reach it now without terminal ruction of the dawn ceremony. The hand mused there, thrall to memory, resolving to seize that flagrant delight at the next opportunity.
Now that the wattle bird is catcher catcher catchering and the wonga pigeons are ratcheting around on the veranda like clockwork toys it is truly a day and she flings the doona from her and rises on one elbow to inspect that day. And I am finally, corruptly, allowed her full survey.
She will permit me to press my face into her breasts, but not take the nipple between my lips. Too early. Too licentious. So I don’t but I do allow my hand the full liberty of swimming across her flanks, all her curves, and finally let that hand off the leash to joggle that calf muscle, feel the full loose slap of it.
So there you are, stranger, it is dawn and you are the only person on earth who will hear this story. For it is forbidden.
Meltemi
SUSAN PYKE
Always I liked Spiros Metropolis, but Mana hated him for all his life. You know why? Because his family were on the other side of politics to us. You think that doesn’t matter? It did. It was all about politics then. Mana lifted her chin to his mother and father but she never did big talking, not like with the people at our church, or in our part of the village up on the hill. The Metropolis family lived down at Megalokima, near the tanneries where they made the leather. Mana told me—told all of us kids—never to go there. She hated Megalokima beach. Too much hurt for her family, too much stink from the animal skins, too much gypsies there every summer. She said gypsies took everything but they never looked at us. We were nothing to them.
I liked Megalokima beach the best. The only people that went there was us kids. Everyone else went the other way, with the tourists, to the beaches with the restaurants and tavernas, where the pebbles are small and the waves don’t hit at you. I went to Megalokima every day in the summer when my three big brothers had to look after me. You could fish there, with no old man telling you it was his spot. You could smoke there, and no one would ask who you stole the cigarettes off. You could tell lies and no one cared. You could swim there too, if you didn’t mind getting bruises from the pebbles jumping up at you when you were getting in the water.
Spiros was always there. That was when I got to know him. I wanted him to be the father of my children from as long as I can remember.
One winter, I changed. I was more woman than girl, very fast. I had to stay inside, only go out with my mother, her sister, my cousins, big girls with big mouths. Sometimes I saw Spiros, at the platia, but he never looked at me, never said one word to me. What for? He was older than me by four years, the same age as my youngest older brother.
Summer came. In Samos the heat never stops, day after day, week after week, the same. From June to July, hot then hotter and then August, too much. This day was the worst. My ksathelfia, all my cousins, they went home, lying down like gria, the old ladies. Mana too, sleeping with her eyes open, waiting for the meltemi, the afternoon wind, to bring the cool from the ocean.
Alone. For the first time for so long. No one saying nothing. It made me light, like a thistle seed. Out, away from the house, from the work, the hot kitchen with the flour and water everywhere from tiropita. The batter would get hard, be glue. My job to clean it but I was too young to worry about more work later. I needed to be somewhere different.
There was only me, walking. Everyone was flat on their beds, shutters closed, waiting for the wind. Half an hour to get to Megalokima, a long walk when the sun’s hot like a tapsi from the oven.
The platia, in the middle of the town, it had no one. Empty tables, geraniums looking down from the sun, too dry to show their red, their pink. I stopped to get my breath when there was a small slice of shade under a big wall. The biggest wall belonged to the bank. It was two stories high, with a marble veranda, every door, window, was closed. Past the school, locked for summer. Dust on the windows, not one cat on the hot concrete where the boys played soccer in the winter.
Past the homes close to the ocean. Big walls there too, where the bosses of the tanneries live, gardens all round, fountains, olive trees more grey than green from the flowers, next to them orange trees, dark green leaves curling from too much sun. Flowers here too, fussy ones, poppies, roses, resting, waiting to be pretty in the afternoon.
Then no houses, only vineyards and tanneries. The sun was like flames coming down. Then the Metropolis tomato farm, the glasshouses from the beach to the road, like my one here, but one after the other, a farm of tomatoes, inside. The tomatoes were cooking, the glass was heating the road like a kitchen. This glasshouse idea was new. Mana, my father, everyone did big laughing at Spiros’ family for putting their tomatoes in a house made of glass. Us kids loved them. No one to see us from the road once they got built.
The road turned to the beach. Past the gypsy camp. I was scared, a little bit, but everything was quiet there too, the tents open but nothing moving, no music, not one kid singing or yelling. I walked at the edge of the sea. The pebbles were loud, banging against each other as they got pushed up and back, making noise like doves leaving the church.
The beach was so empty, not one goat, not one person. I walked until I got to the other end, far from the gypsy camp, the cliff end. The camp was just colour, no one could see nothing. The fishing rock had no one lying on its top. So big, with a flat area wide as a table. The boys always fought over that rock. I went into the open area under it, where it went like half a bridge, a small space before the waves, over the pebbles. Cool shade, almost a cave, almost an umbrella. So many years I’d pretended it was my house, while my brothers smoked and fished and swore and fought. I could hardly fit under it any more, even now, when the tide was right out.
I got off my dress, my sandals, my underwear, ready to put everything back on, quick, if someone came. Then I pushed into the sea, flying into heaven, from the spot where part of the rock went in the water, where the pebbles don’t move so much, where they don’t hurt. Only I knew that spot.
The sea was so cool, so beautiful; a blue the colour of my mati, this one in my necklace, the eye that keeps away the evils. I moved my body with the waves, young again, a small girl, half swimming, half floating on the water. The pebbles were loud, crashing from the waves going in and out, I could hear them even when my feet could only touch water. Not one cloud in the sky. The village a white stain on the green mountain, my house, like all of them, part of the same.
Then I heard the sound of birds. In the middle of the day? They should be resting. But I heard them, past the fishing rock, on the other side, with the cliff and the fallen rocks, where only my brothers and the Metropolis boys would swim. I could never go with them. I couldn’t even go on the flat rock. This was how my mother lost her brother. One minute on the rock, next minute gone. On the other side. He never came back.
Two kicks toward the gypsies. Two kicks toward the cliff, the birds. Gypsies. Cliffs. Birds. Then something turned in my chest and I was doing a long dive, under the shadow of the rock where it stuck out over the water.
I come up for air and I’m on the other side. Nothing dangerous, the waves are gone, I can hear my feet splashing behind me. This is the best spot for swimming, beautiful, the water like a bath. I want to kill my brothers.
Then I hear the birds are not birds. Spiros. His flute. I know its voice like the call of my mother. I look this way, that way, my eyes sharp like a sparrow.
None of his brothers, none of mine, just Spiros, under the shade of another big flat rock, past many sharp ones that have fallen from the cliff, messy, like leaves from a tree before winter. I can see his feet. Big. He’s holding a stick between them with the other end stuck into a split in the rock. The stick’s stripped to the green, so it smells beautiful, just how the crabs like it. A serenade for the crabs, telling them lies with the birds in his music, telling them night was coming, they could wake
up from their daytime sleep, come out from the deep cracks of the rocks.
I stay in the water, listening and watching. His feet, his long toes. His clothes, in a pile on a high rock above him. His body, dark in the shade of the flat rock, bigger than the one I knew. The feet of a grown man. Different, like me, my body now more woman than girl. His toes, moving, like my legs under the water, feeling the music coming from his feet, through the length of the body I could almost see, not so black as the shadow. I want to see his lips, see them breathing his secrets into the mouth of the wooden flute he loved so much. I had watched his lips tell music before.
Then the peering eyes of a big crab, feelers moving, dancing a slow rebetiko, then clumsy legs finding the stick and making it a friend. I hate crabs screaming, turning from creature to food in the boil of the water. I suck in air, loud, and just as I do that, Spiros stops playing his flute. Has he heard the sound of my breath? I go under the water, deep. When I come up he’s standing, his head higher than the rock, above its shadows. I can see his face, his lips, he’s looking at me. I stare back. His eyes are so green.
Everything is still. Maybe only five seconds. It is my whole life.
Then the crab dropped off the stick, ran over his feet, ran up back into its home. Spiros saw it, picked up the stick and tried to get it, but too late. Safe. I laughed and he threw the stick down and took a step out, into the sun. So tall and strong. This is how I see him, even now. Not dead. Never dead. I close my eyes and think of Spiros and this is what I see.
I looked at him, all of him, and he looked at what he could see, under the sea’s waters and then he dived in, came up with his body against mine. He joined me.
I melted outside of myself, into him. He melted into my skin, into me.
The wind, it changed. Meltemi.
A Literary Love Story
(memoir)
CATHERINE BATESON
When he said to me, ‘Mais Mademoiselle, vous êtes triste! Pourquoi?’ I could ignore the formal vous, the thirty-odd years that probably separated our ages and his limp. I could even forget the fact that he was my professor who knew me only as the blonde who always sat at the back, near the window, and could not conjugate her verbs.
I knew him as the dark Rochester of my dreams. I had rescued him night after night from swollen rivers, collapsing towers and wild bushfires. There were two types of girls when I grew up: those who loved Jane Eyre and those who loved Wuthering Heights. I was a Jane girl myself and it marked me.
From the window, I watched Monsieur’s ungainly progress across the Great Court. He was constantly stopped by matureaged female students. They rolled their r’s at him and undid the top buttons on their shirts. On those languid days, they fanned French perfume I could not afford in his direction. Plump and steaming as fresh dumplings, they trickled discreet beads of perspiration that smelled of Chanel and Lancôme. When he limped around the room checking our written work, they leant forward to help him decipher their rounded cursives.
I was all acute accents and flat as a tack. I embroidered le Petit Prince on a pair of op shop overalls. He admired my needlework and the dumplings steamed as they undid a second button. I read Colette and wore too much eyeliner. I felt Jane draw Victorian skirts more closely around her, but Claudine pulled hers up joyfully to reveal rolled stocking tops. Forty-three years separated the birth of Charlotte from that of Sidonie-Gabrielle, my role models. One died too early in her curate’s arms and the other had an affair with her step-son.
I received letters each week from the hippy boy I’d fucked all summer. He’d been charged with possession. Each letter was signed off:
May the longtime sun
Shine upon you
And all love surround you
in his loopy writing. I missed his patchouli oil massages but he was lightweight, a scented candle. I wanted a house fire, a conflagration. I could not imagine my limping Professor signing off his letters with anything other than a line from Sartre. In fountain pen, of course, not biro.
What was a Brisbane girl to do? I draped a second-hand silk scarf over my bedside light and read the journals of Anaïs Nin. The scarf scorched. For weeks I carried a journal with me, describing in rigorous detail my new Grecian sandals, the exact shade of lipstick I had bought at the Myer sale, and how it felt to be in love with a man while receiving letters from a boy. The boy’s skin, I noted in a sudden fit of sentimentality, was the colour of weak Nescafé.
Despite my new fountain pen, my life remained stubbornly more early Fay Weldon than Anaïs.
But in my dreams I still carried mon Professeur from the burning house. Once I woke with a French phrase clinging to my morning mouth, the only language for unrequited love. And that was the only kind that stayed real. Hippy boys—Davo, Tod, Corki—came and went. They played guitars in batik sarongs and left behind a trail of incense and notes in a minor key. I yearned for Paris and a winter I couldn’t imagine. I wore dark tights and black op-shop dresses under a sky the colour of an endless swimming pool.
I invented men who smelt of Gauloise cigarettes, snow and cognac. They were damaged by life. They had frayed hearts and knowing fingers. They waited pensively on my threshold with delicate gifts. I conjured these men from the books that stacked up beside my single bed. I gave them beautiful names that were never shortened—Sebastian, Jean-Luc and Oliver.
These elegant men with their imaginary sorrows do not cause me, years later, to file into a classroom each week with other women—and Bernard—to conjugate verbs and talk about my hobbies in a foreign language. No, it’s that girl with the dusty books under the bed. I’m keeping faith with the one wearing that second-hand dress she pretended was French.
Hey you, I’m waving across the years. Je t’aime!
Crush
KATHRYN LOMER
When I open the mailbox I find a large white envelope with no return address. It is a St Valentine’s card with a heart on the front, painted in something like shiny red nail varnish. It says, To Vonnie, the sexiest woman I know. There is no signature. I open a bottle of champagne in celebration. I can’t find a champagne glass so I drink from the bottle. It feels incredibly decadent. Especially as it is still morning.
I take off my clothes and stand in front of the mirror in Sammy’s room. I look at my body which has become unknown territory. I run my hands across my breasts and wonder at the changed topography. My belly is like a marsupial’s. The thin mauve scar which underlines it is almost completely hidden beneath pubic hair. I put the champagne bottle down on the floor and go into my own room. I rummage in a box and pull out the purple satin dress I found at an op-shop last week. I wriggle into it. The strapless bodice fits like a glove. Above it my shoulders look all wrong, too wide and lumpy. My chest should have the same sheen as the glossy fabric but is instead like dough set aside to rise. I put on high heels, lipstick. I imagine candlelight. I run my palms lightly over breasts, shoulders, down my arms. The skin feels as papery as the bark of ti-trees.
I make sure all the lipstick is gone before walking up the street to collect Sammy from kindergarten. He has a Valentine’s card from a girl called Sky.
The next morning I go to the hairdresser’s. Not for a cut or a style, although that’s what I’ll ask for. I go for the hands that will hold my head just so, lean me back over the sink and stroke the hair from my forehead. Someone will massage my skull, lovingly, the way mothers wash children’s hair. Someone will place my neck there, just a little to the right, just a little lower, hmmm, lovely.
While I wait I flick through a magazine, the kind I never buy. There is a diagram of a woman’s body. It is patched in different colours according to how much touching that part of the body receives. Red is for heavily trafficked areas—the pubis and breasts. Shoulders are orange for a moderate amount of touching. Hands are also orange. There are small spots of yellow for occasional touching scattered over the diagram like outbreaks of skin disease. Lips are yellow; parts of the face. In my mind I colour my own body map
like a rainfall chart of loving. No red. No orange. Some yellow, mainly hands, torso, face. All from my son.
The hairdresser has fingernails painted black. Black hair. Hair and nails shine like the exterior of a coffin. In my purple dress she would look like a movie star.
In the mirror, my new haircut makes me feel as if yet another part of my body has become a stranger to me.
Sammy kisses me goodnight and I am conscious of a little splash of yellow across my mouth and cheek. I hold him to me but he laughs and pulls away.
I go to bed, too. My fingers stray around my body, exploring like a new kid on the block. Scrubby parkland, I think as my fingers creep through tangled pubic hair. Virgin wilderness. Untracked. Pristine. I wonder how long I need to touch myself there to ring the changes from yellow to orange to red. As I imagine it, I feel colour pooling, warming through ochres to bright hot madder.
Last century, women’s hysteria was treated by physicians in clinics. The treatment consisted of massaging the woman’s clitoris until she reached orgasm, allowing release of fluids and restoring her to health. I would like to make an appointment with my modern doctor for an out-dated treatment.
I don’t know if it counts on the rainfall chart if you touch yourself.
I scan through phone ads. There are women for every male fantasy. Every nationality, age, hair colour, proclivity. One or two advertisements feature men. I stare at them until the words blur. I flick over pages till I find ads for healing, reiki, Swedish massage. I telephone.
When I leave the massage room, my body is red from top to toe. I radiate heat and energy as I walk down the street to catch my bus. Anybody looking must see my bright aura. There is one part of me which is achingly untouched, a snippet of bare canvas crying out for paint. I rush inside the house to touch and touch that one part, until it explodes into red, pales, explodes again, pales again, explodes red, and I am stranded on my bed glowing like an ember in shuttered half-dark.