Australian Love Stories

by Cate Kennedy

  My daughter’s hair is auburn and curls delicately at the nape of her neck while my own hangs lank and mousy—it used to be blonde until pregnancy leached the pigment from it. A week after my marriage ended, I had my hair cut really short and dyed it blue. I bought a red push-up bra to lift my breasts, which still hang soft as bags of flour from their brief stint of breastfeeding. I bought lime green covers for the couches and hot pink cushions. Taste returned to toast and tea. It’s been eight months since then. When I drop my daughter off to her father’s for access on weekends, my stomach churns like a washing machine. I still need meds for sadness, and sleep.

  In August, my brother’s fiancé invites me to be matron of honour at their wedding in Sydney. It’s been a long winter. My ex-husband installed the central heating in this house himself, but I’ve closed off the vents in his study and the spare room to save on bills.

  ‘What do you want me to wear?’ I ask, thinking how I might fit this body, still loose and misshapen from childbirth, into that kind of frock.

  ‘Wear whatever you like,’ she says. ‘Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.’

  My brother’s fiancé has been married before. I figure anything formal will do. But it’s difficult to find a dress that doesn’t make me feel like a postpartum cow. In the change room, two girls with spray tans and g-strings try on tight strappy dresses while their mother sits wearily in a plastic chair. The next day my daughter contracts an ear infection and my doctor says she can’t take the airplane. But my brother’s wedding is in two weeks. My only brother. The one we thought would never get married. Fuck it, I think, and book the train tickets.

  ‘What is the name of the antibiotics prescribed for your baby?’ says the doctor on the phone.

  It’s my ex-husband’s doctor, not mine. My daughter is in his care for the weekend. I can hear her father talking to the doctor in the background. I try to remember the name of the script but it’s at home on the kitchen bench and I’ve hit the dress shops again, still trying to find something to wear for the wedding.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ I say. ‘But if you could just give me a minute, it will come to me.’

  But the doctor doesn’t have a minute. She is talking to me like I’m an imbecile. Like she’s about to call Social Services and have them knock on my door, and it’s all too much. I throw my phone down so hard it skates across the floor, and go out into the street, gulping lungfuls of air.

  The train journey to Sydney is eleven hours long. I pack Huggies, baby wipes, creams for nappy rash and cracked nipples, Bonjela, Baby Panadol, dummies and a bear that plays a tinkly song when you pull the cord. My brother’s wedding is at a high Anglican church. My daughter sits feverishly on my mother’s lap as I walk down the aisle in a black velvet secondhand dress with blue glitter stockings to match my hair. The organist plays ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. The bride wears white lace and taffeta. It’s like one of those dreams where you realise you’re about to give a speech in your knickers, or that you’re not wearing any knickers at all.

  ‘It’s too hard,’ I tell my doctor when I get back to Melbourne.

  I’m sitting in his office with pyjamas poking out from beneath the sleeves of my jumper, using up all his tissues. My doctor has thin sandy hair, freckles and pale Irish skin. The kind of skin that makes mothers tell their kids not to stay out too long in the sun.

  ‘It’s not too hard. It’s just very hard.’ He gives me a weary smile.

  My doctor lost his wife to cancer, so he should know.

  ‘Sometimes I feel like Jo Marsh in Little Women,’ I say. ‘You know, the girl who rejects the boy next door then pisses off to Europe and falls in love with the professor.’

  But my doctor hasn’t read Little Women. He looks thoughtfully at the shelves in his office, as if he might find the book there, and asks if I’m getting enough iron.

  ‘There’s no easy road,’ says the nurse in pathology who takes my bloods.

  She’s in her mid-thirties, about the same age as me. Her glossy brown hair hangs in a neat pony tail and bounces from side to side against her white uniform when she walks. I wonder how it feels to fit into a size twelve uniform and take scheduled lunch breaks. The nurse looks like she hasn’t had one bad day in her life, even though I know that can’t be true.

  ‘When can I come back?’ my ex-husband asked, two weeks after I told him to move out.

  I had been sitting in the garden with my baby and the phone beside a shed still crammed with his tools and junk. He’d been staying with his mother in the suburbs. The labrador gnawed happily on her bone.

  ‘You can’t,’ I said with my heart so full in my mouth I felt it beating there. A mouth full of heart, soft and warm, as if I were trying to swallow it back down or eat it the way cows do their placentas. ‘You can’t ever come back.’

  ‘But I don’t have anything for the baby. Not even a high chair.’

  ‘Then get one.’

  When people say, ‘and then my marriage ended’, it sounds like something that came to a gentle halt, like when a train pulls up at the station and some people get off and others get on. But actually, it’s more like a wreck, with everyone terrified and crushed in the twisted, upturned carriages. And sometimes the emergency workers can cut the people out and fix them and sometimes they can’t, or not for a long time.

  In December our Mothers’ Group talks about where everyone’s going over the summer holidays.

  ‘We’ve got a house in Rosebud,’ says Kath, nuzzling the top of her baby’s head with her handsome chin.

  ‘We go to Inverloch,’ says Jude. ‘Been going there for years. Everyone will be wanting to hold this little one. I’ll have to fight to get my turn!’ She holds out a rattle and her baby grabs it with his fist.

  ‘Bermagui,’ says Vanessa. ‘First time we’ve been. But John’s got the boat now so…’

  The Maternal and Child Health Centre where the Mothers’ Group meets has walls lined with grey fabric so you can stick posters up with Velcro. I look hard at the posters on breastfeeding and domestic violence and support groups for postnatal depression, feeling the tears prickling behind my eyes. Because if the stats say one in two marriages fail, then how come I’m the only statistic in the room?

  ‘You could come away with Geoff and me,’ says Kath tentatively, bouncing her baby girl on her knee. ‘We could go to the beach.’

  But her kindness only makes me cry harder. And it’s not pretty, the crying. Because I’m broken and damaged and no beach holiday with someone else’s family, no labrador, chocolate, drugs, wine, cigarettes or girlfriends can transcend my particular longing.

  ‘I want to be held,’ I tell a single friend on the phone. ‘And I don’t care by whom.’

  I tell her how my ex-husband and I used to curl up together like two spoons, and how now when I wake the other spoon is not there and I miss it. Even though it was a stupid, cheap, bent spoon anyway and I don’t want it back.

  ‘You have skin hunger,’ she says.

  ‘It’s pathetic,’ I say. ‘Plenty of women are happy to be single.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not your thing.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m not ready for love. I just want sex.’

  Once an American woman visiting Australia lent me a book she’d bought during her stay here, and I fell in love with the man who wrote it even though we’d never met. Then the woman went back to America before I could return the book, so I put it on my shelf and went on with my life. I was married. It was not the time for falling in love with men I didn’t know. But I still have the book, with sentences underlined. Sometimes I take it off my shelf and read it.

  I post my personal profile on RSVP and put an ad in the local paper: Attractive single mother seeks casual encounters for discreet fun times. It takes me quite a while to get it right. My phone receives 238 text messages in twenty-four hours.

  ‘Well, it just goes to show there are a lot of lonely people out there,’ says my doctor.

  He’s trying
to be non-judgemental. I can tell by the tilt of his head and the way he shifts his glasses on the bridge of his freckled nose. ‘Do you think it was the combination of words you used, or one in particular?’

  I select nos. 29 and 32 from the 238 texts and make arrangements to meet them. No. 29 is a barrister who collects antiques. We walk the path around Albert Park Lake with my labrador and talk about mahogany tables. The water is the colour of steel and kitchen appliances.

  ‘I’m not sure about the blue hair, quite frankly,’ he says.

  The barrister says ‘quite frankly’ a lot. I am feeling fat and tired. It is the day after my thirty-seventh birthday and I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate.

  No. 32 is a fitness instructor. His voice sounds gentle. We meet at the pub on the weekend when my daughter is with her father. He’s buffed, in a black t-shirt and jeans.

  ‘So is it just that you like sex a lot, or what?’ he asks.

  Maybe the fact he drinks orange juice at the bar and spends most of the time playing Space Invaders should raise some alarm bells. But kissing him is nice. I wish I could stop at the kissing. Because sex with a stranger is like fucking a lamp post. You don’t know what it wants and it doesn’t care. The gym instructor wants to come on my stomach, and I don’t come at all.

  Friends who have husbands look at me with pursed lips. My mother informs me I’m committing adultery.

  ‘Maybe you already have a man who loves you so much you don’t need anyone else,’ says my single friend.

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ I say. ‘Who the hell does that?’

  ‘Jesus, of course.’

  My friend is trying to be helpful. It’s just that she’s in the middle of being born again.

  ‘But Jesus can’t have sex with me. Jesus can’t hold me or bring me a cup of tea. Jesus can’t leave the toilet seat down.’

  ‘I don’t think Jesus ever used a toilet. Historically speaking.’

  Sometimes the god-shaped hole is so big even god can’t fill it.

  Casual sex doesn’t work, even if it’s good sex. Because you still get attached; to former colleagues you shamefacedly track down and proposition, to tradies in drama workshops who wear t-shirts that say I’d rather be shagging; to weirdos you meet on dating sites who stand outside Brunetti’s holding bunches of gerberas or who have fantasies of women mud-wrestling each other to death. We are, every one of us, knotted and tangled. I find myself snipping at strings late into the night to get free of them all until I’m running again, with nothing but the laws of physics to keep me from falling apart.

  ‘That man who likes mud-wrestling,’ says my doctor. ‘Flick him off. Fast.’

  I google the man who wrote the book on my shelf and jackpot! He’s a local. I consider calling him and what I might say. But just thinking about it makes me nervous so I go to Centrelink instead to find out about child care.

  ‘You have to take a number and wait till you’re called,’ says the woman when I get to the counter. It’s early, and already there’s a queue stretching right to the door.

  I spend ninety minutes sitting on an orange chair watching The Morning Show on a flatscreen that’s attached to the wall. A saleswoman called Susan with very white teeth demonstrates how some whiz bang new peeler can cut patterns into vegetables.

  ‘That’s it, Larry,’ says Susan to the TV presenter. ‘You’ll be a masterchef in no time!’

  Three toddlers in hoodies are stacking up alphabet blocks then kicking the bottom block out so the stack falls in a heap. My daughter is asleep in her stroller. I rock it gently, hoping she won’t wake. When my number flicks up on the LCD screen, I go to sit at a desk with a man called Frank who is losing his hair in patches. Frank looks like a school teacher. Or maybe he really was a school teacher who wanted a change of pace so he’s taken the job at Centrelink until he figures out what to do next.

  ‘I want to register for child care,’ I say. ‘I need a part-time job.’

  Frank consults with a woman at the desk next to his.

  ‘She’ll need to fill out an FA018,’ she says.

  ‘How about an FA002?’

  ‘Not if she fills out the FA018. If she does that she won’t need the FA002. Has she filled out an SC277? ’

  ‘What’s an SC277?’ asks Frank.

  ‘It’s like the old SPP form,’ says the woman. ‘Only updated.’

  Acronyms and forms always make me cry. I can feel the tears but it’s too late to stop them, as if a tide’s rising up so quickly all the people sitting on orange chairs holding numbers and waiting their turn have to run for it. The woman’s face is blank as a screen. Frank looks dismayed, or disappointed. It’s hard to say which. He passes me a box of tissues.

  When the settlement money comes through and my ex-husband finally agrees to sell, I think about buying my own house somewhere green on the northern fringe where my daughter can grow up amongst trees and animals. It takes a long time to find the right place, but finally I do. I down three scotch and cokes in half an hour and phone my friends. It’s 11 pm but I don’t care.

  ‘No one will visit you if you move way out there,’ says Jude at the next Mothers’ Group meeting. ‘At least rent something first. That way you can always move back if you don’t like it.’

  That’s because Jude walks everywhere and doesn’t drive. She hardly ever goes further than the bottom end of Brunswick Street, except on summer holidays. And it’s too late anyway because I’ve already bought the house. It’s brick veneer and built in the seventies, but there’s a path to the river surrounded by bush. Already in my mind I am filling the backyard with as many animals as it can fit; with chickens and ducks and guinea pigs and budgerigars, definitely budgerigars, and maybe something miniature like a pony or a pig. I clear my ex-husband’s junk out of the shed and sell our heavy oak bed on eBay. My daughter begins to walk. I enrol in the local YMCA gym, put her in the crèche and get strong. I make wild, drunken promises to myself I’m not sure I can keep. Like the next man I have sex with will be someone I love.

  I email the author who wrote the book on my shelf, and we begin meeting for coffee. He’s a professor with sad eyes and a kind smile, like maybe he’s suffered a lot. We talk about poetry and argue about religion. He gives me a copy of Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy.

  ‘How lovely it is to have someone to talk to!’ he says.

  Nothing else happens except for the coffee and conversations.

  Sometimes he kisses me goodbye on the cheek.

  In the meantime a policeman called Jason invites me to a fancy restaurant.

  ‘Was that dinner or was that, you know, dinner?’ I ask him.

  If I lived in America, I wouldn’t have to ask. The American woman who lent me the professor’s book told me that. Australian men can drive you crazy with guessing. Jason at least is straightforward.

  ‘It was a date,’ says Jason. ‘A date with dinner.’

  But I don’t sleep with him even though I want to. Because I know I’ll get bored, the way I did with my husband. Then he’ll hate me and lie on the couch for a year smoking dope and tell all his friends that his life is ruined, and it’s all my fault.

  My born again friend sets me up with a Christian musician called Glen who lives in his brother’s corrugated iron shed on twenty acres of farmland. Glen cooks me vegan meals and teaches me guitar. After dark we go for walks in the bush where we pray to Jesus and say things like, ‘Lord, I just want to thank you for this time of fellowship.’

  ‘One day I’ll meet the right woman,’ he says as he juliennes the carrots and zucchini. ‘And the Lord will give me a sign.’

  ‘All these dinners,’ I say, leaning against his double bed with its black and white Collingwood doona cover.

  The next time I meet the professor at his house instead of a café. It’s brick veneer like mine, and not as pretty as I’d hoped. The rooms are strewn with papers and books. His towels are charcoal and brown. His bed sheets and curtains are maroon. Man colours, I think. The kind of colo
urs a man chooses when he’s living alone. When I stand up to leave, he doesn’t give me a kiss on the cheek. Instead, he puts his arms around me and we just stand there like that, holding each other close, for the longest time.

  ‘Was that coffee or coffee?’ I ask him when we talk later that evening on the phone.

  It’s Sunday night. Tomorrow my daughter will come home from her father’s house. I’m in the kitchen steaming carrots for her lunches. I’m mashing broccoli with cheese.

  ‘It was coffee,’ he says. ‘The kind of coffee you have when you’re falling in love with someone and you want them to stay the night.’

  I open a bottle of wine and phone all my friends. I drink the whole damn bottle.

  ‘It’s past midnight,’ they say.

  But I don’t let them hang up. I just keep right on talking.

  Where the Honey Meets the Air

  CARMEL BIRD

  I call her Honey-Hannah and she calls me Sugar-Sam. It’s pretty sweet at our place.

  And you know how it is with honey.

  I hope you do.

  Otherwise we’re not going to be on the same page for a while here.

  Follow…ME.

  You see it there in the bowl, pot, with the honeybee embossed—is that the word—on the side that curves and fits in the palm of your hand—and you take the silver spoon they gave you when you were born—that was a while ago now wasn’t it— maybe your were actually born with it in your mouth (joke)— and you dig into the viscous—I think that’s what it is, viscous, sounds good—viscous semi-liquid—it doesn’t resist—down goes the soft sharp side of the silver spoon (Shakespeare—joke) and you hold it just above your toast, all buttery and gleaming in the light of the conservatory, and you let that honey run drip dribble flow manifest down onto the butter, the toast—and it glides and pools and glows, positively literally glows as if lit from within—and you think of a word and in the beginning it was, and the word was ‘meniscus’ and you wonder, there at the late morning breakfast table, if honey can be said to do meniscus, so you whip out the iPad (to tell the truth is was already there, whipped, all along) and off you go to Wikipedia and you’re a little bit the wiser because now you kind of know that the ‘meniscus’, plural menisci, from the Greek ‘crescent’, is the curve in the upper surface of a liquid close to the surface of the container, caused by the surface tension and depending on the liquid and the surface—oh blah blah there’s lots more but that’s enough of that kind of talk really, for now—and I conclude that meniscus wasn’t what I was looking for was it—I’m just thinking of the skin of the honey aren’t I—the part where the honey meets the air and where it kind of resists something—pressure? moisture? distant laughter?—in the air, so that faint striations (OMG the old vocabulary is choofing along this morning) of heavenly pale butter beginning ever so delicately to marble (too heavy, this marble word) the envelope of the honey, and it is nearly time (tick tock/ayers rock/silver slippers/brighton rock— Shakespeare again) to put the spoon somewhere—where—not back in the honey, surely—oh bugger it, put it back in the honey and hang it all if some butter or a crumb of toast or the vestige of the dry wing of a dead moth happens to land in there—or an ant, what about an ant? have signals gone out to the bloody ants letting them know that the honey pot—pot or bowl? jar?—oh English it so devilish isn’t it—now if this were French the honey would be, I imagine, simply in a compotier de miel or some such and be done with it, unless some froggy whiz had siphoned it onto a soucoupe (yes I tried to look it up but if I faff around in the French/English, English/French for much longer we’ll be here all day and never get to put the toast and honey into anybody’s mouth, let alone mine)—but the funny thing was that not far from miel there lay a squashed and desiccated ant caught in the pages of the big Larousse, and highlighting the word mignarder which apparently is Frog for to pat, to caress, to fondle—I liked the sound of that—and it goes on to explain that if you do this thing called mignarder son style (yes I too thought we had wandered into porno there, patting the stylus, but no) you are being finical—I could leave you to look up finical in your Shorter Oxford (get real, mister—look it up on google) but to save time I will tell you it means to be affectedly fastidious or precise in one’s use of language, and to engage in mincing metaphors (OMG!!— ‘mincing metaphors’!!!! exclamation mark—think of the dead ant—a metaphor, but is it mincing?) and I feel a figure of speech coming on in any case because the wing of the moth (imaginary) set me thinking that the honey is quite similar to amber, isn’t it, and what do you know—we called our baby daughter Amber, yes indeed we did—to Hannah and Sam, a baby girl—her eyes are as brown (simile alert) as—as what—oh you fill in the blanks—and her lips are as red as—oh no!—blood—some old fairy tale, I imagine it’s Snow White, is crossing wires with me and a witch or wicked queen or step-mother is planning to hook our baby (she’s now nearly two years old BTW and is partial to a spot of toast and honey herself, pat, pat, caress, caress) up with a prince from some minor kingdom by the sea in the distant or not so distant future of the planet, supposing the poor old planet has a future which maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, all things considered, what with the morphing climate and the disappearing bees (bee motif) and the way the sea is rising up like King Neptune reclaiming his rights whatever they were, and the way the sun is a dying star (have I got that right—oh sometimes I don’t seem to know what I am talking about)—and anyhow we were living together for a yonk, me and Honey-Hannah, and happy as two little bees in lavender (that didn’t really work, did it—never mind) when one day HH who had not sighted blood as red as blood for a while came out of the ensuite with a funny look on her face and a funny thing in her hand and said she thought she might be pregnant and she was of course and so we thought we’d zip off to the registry office and tie the knot— something that went out of fashion for a few years, but has come back with a vengeance in the form of the Wedding Industry of which more a bit later—when Her Family swept in and tied us up in knots, ribbons, bows and a certain amount of barbed wire, and whirled us up the aisle of St Francis in the Jolly Old Fields with a huge reception at Quoile, the (her) family home in the rolling hills (have I got that right, Family?) behind Kyneton in Central Victoria, Quoile being named after an old, old castle in County Down where the Family had its Elizabethan roots (joke)—we are the Gunns of Quoile Castle—yes she is Hannah-Margot Gunn of Gunn’s Constructions (not to mention Gunns Wedding Bells, Gunns Hardware and Gunns Honey, and not to forget Wishart, Perpendicular and Gunn, Barristers and Solicitors)—I should have warned you about how this narrative will tie itself up in the knots of several metaphors and coincidences and things—but Honey-Hannah is unlike most members of the Family—unlike particularly in the matter of issue—her mad sister has no children (not a hope in hell)—her brother’s mad wife will have no children (although the brother, Fabian, has probably fathered a bastard or two but they would not count as your proper Gunns or Quoiles) and so when HH put forward the idea of the coming of Baby Amber there was much joyful todo among the constructors and wedding-meisters and hardware handlers and apiarists (at last a real word) and barristers and solicitors, and we were propelled together into the floral archways of matrimony until death did us part (relax, we are still buzzing along nicely in the real world) unlike—oh-oh, here it comes, the fly in the ointment, the snake in the grass, the ant in the honey, the startled grasshopper in the amber—who’s divorced, who’s dead around here? who got together and then got parted by something other than death?—well, in fact it was death—this is why I’m actually at home in the conservatory thinking about honey on toast instead of going to the office I occupy in Gunns Constructions where I hold a very responsible position and where I spend a hell of a lot of my time writing plays—whaat?—yes, that’s what I do as I sit at my vast mahogany desk-arama, I tap away at my plays, some of which (hem-hem) have had readings at places such as the Court House and fortyfivedownstairs, while Sheba my personal secretary takes c
alls and takes care of all stuff such as email and—well— business—Sheba’s the real thing, I just draw the salary and look good—I should explain that I am generally considered to be very presentable, a fucking asset to the whole shebang (ha ha—look at that will you—Sheba runs the whole Shebang—I just thought of that—I had occasion to text her just now to tell her I’ll be late and she texts back saying—you’ll like this I think—saying Take Your Time Solomon, Sheba Runs the Show) you will have seen pics of HH and me around the place—at the opera, at the races, at the charity fashion thingie, at the opening of the super awful reception for minor lovely royalty etc, etc—we get around—and the great thing is we get around together as a genuine social item, an item in every way—HH and SS and their adorable Baby Amber—unlike, as I have intimated just now, unlike Patrick my best friend from school so long ago, unlike Patrick who has—not to put too fine a point on it—who has—um—quite recently murdered his wife Cressida—wh-at? oh yes, he did it allright— and if you don’t know the story I should briefly fill you in—I warn you—it’s ugly—and it’s probably just as well you’ve got me with my finical phrasing—I will caress you as we go—pat pat, mincing metaphor notwithstanding—I will tell you the tale of Patrick and Cressida, one of whom lies at the bottom of the pool with her dead lover, and one of whom lies very much alive, telling himself long lies, just along the hallway, in my bedroom, watching who knows what on TV and drinking scotch and waiting for me to bring him toast and honey and good news as he waits for Deke Perpendicular to arrive with advice and the good oil and the loophole in the noose (I think my mincing metaphor has sidled off somewhere—and anyway we don’t do the noose or any other form of capital punishment in our light and enlightened social system)—look his name isn’t really Perpendicular but it’s something weirdly Greek and I can’t think it or spell it and so I am writing Perpendicular, emphasis on the ‘dic’ because in fact he is one in many ways, but in the matter of getting people out of situations as sticky as that in which Patrick finds himself, he’s almost magic—so, for want of anything better to do, and as a displacement activity, and because this is how I think in a crisis—OMG but is this a crisis!!—I’m watching honey running slowly off the spoon while Patrick is in my bedroom, as I said, and I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I’m actually trying to distract myself from thinking about how Cressida was having this hot affair with Damien Bliss (I know, I know, but that was the name) who was the hot topic that looked after their indoor pool (heated) and everybody knew except Patrick, and guess what, there comes a time when Patrick arrives home in the middle of the day because he suffers from asthma (mild) and he was suffering from it, and—look I apologize for the banality of all this—but this is why Patrick is lying in the comfort of my bedroom waiting for his toast and honey and short black—so he was feeling pretty seedy and he goes in the front door and what does he see but the naked Cressida and the naked Damien hotly engaged in a soixante-neuf on the dark and wonderful Turkish rug just inside the front door—that was apparently, according to Patrick, what got to him—and the shock did wonders for the asthma—it was the location you see that got to him, and so to cut a long story short, he loses it and he grabs Cress by her long chestnut locks with such sudden force that he breaks her neck, and then he king hits dazed Damien who cracks his stupid head on something or other (Patrick isn’t yet clear on this) and he doesn’t get up either—and so what does Patrick do then—you’d wonder, wouldn’t you—well he drags them one by one across the floor leaving trails of blood and stuff—and chucks them in the pool— incredible, mad, but you never know how these things will take you—I said they were on the bottom but I don’t really know do I—maybe they’re floating around like blow-up toys—I don’t know how long the various processes take, what with the body and the water and the air and Archimedes’ Principal and so on—what Patrick did was pretty amazing when you think about it—just goes to show what rage can do—then he rings me—of course he does—and I ring Perpendicular, and Patrick makes what is probably a mistake—even I can see that—he gets back in his car and comes around here where I’m getting ready to go to the office for a late morning meeting, and where I put him to bed and give him the scotch and start making toast—and so far nobody has called the police, but anyhow Perpendicular can work all that out and what I’m really waiting for is for Patrick to have his toast and get the hell out of here and then I’m going to message Sheba again and tell her I’m really going to be late-late, like not coming in until tomorrow week, and I’m going to go and get HH from her mad sister’s where she’s making quince and elderberry something or other (a quaint lot, the Quoile Gunns) and I’m going to collect Amber from Brighton Bambini and we’ll drive out to Quoile and stay for a few days because in spite of anything I might have said, if there is one place I can feel safe and sound and silver-plated it’s behind the great iron gates and up the winding tree lined drive of the Family Home where Hannah’s mama and also old nanny will enfold us in an incredibly stilling and sticky form of love—yes love—and nothing can ever disturb the knot of us—where no Mr Bliss can ever come, where—wait for it—here comes a rushing wave of somewhat mincing metaphors—we will be enfolded in the sweetieness of our own slow flowing honey, and we will live happily, ever after, in love and eternal ease—OMG what dismal, dismal bullshit all this is—because I know, and Patrick knows, and Perpendicular knows, and the police are going to know, and even you know—what has happened to Patrick (has it happened to Patrick, is that it? or has Patrick done it—this remains to be sorted out by lawyer and police and jury and judge etc., not to mention the merry media, social and anti-social) could conceivably happen to anybody, and when you say anybody you could mean me—it could happen to me—I could come home one day and find HH in the arms (so to speak—I can’t go further than that) of, say, Deke Perpendicular (laughter) and I could lose it and I could, say, shoot them with some handy gun or other and there I would be, rushing off to somebody’s conservatory for scotch and toast and honey—oh yes, honey—and I could dip the spoon into the honey and I could lift up the spoon (silver, remember) and I could watch as the honey slowly falls and makes its way down onto the golden and buttery toast and I could think about bees and ants and I could wonder about the surface of the honey and I could ask a kind of question about what happens in the universe (picking up some crossed wires from Hannah’s mad bad sister of the quince and elderberry concoction who has a habit of saying— oooh—everything happens to everybody in the end you know— everybody dies in the end) what happens in the universe when the honey meets the air, or you could say when the shit hits the fan—I prefer to meditate on the honey—what happens when the honey meets the air.