by Wendy Harmer
‘Oh, sorry, of course. Claire! Hello again.’ She noticed he changed gear very smoothly. He leaned forward and kissed Claire lightly on the cheek. She saw he had a dusting of salt on his eyelashes and thought she’d like to start there and then lick the salt from his entire body.
‘Drink, Connor?’ asked Meg, keen to put an end to this tender moment.
‘No thanks, Peg—’
‘Meg,’ she corrected him.
‘Meg, sorry! No thanks, Meg. I’m literally just passing by. I have to get home and pack.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Claire enthusiastically, hoping to keep the desperate whine out of her voice.
‘Oh, up Queensland here and there. I’m a landscape gardener and I’m going to look at a few tropical gardens. Get some ideas for some inner city patio designs I’m working on. I try to get up there a couple of times a year. Catch some waves at the same time.’
Oh, take me with you! Claire screamed to herself. We could sleep on the beach together in the warm sand. Make love by moonlight with the surf lapping our toes. I’ll watch you digging in the garden with your shirt off! I’ll . . . fill your whipper-snipper. Aaargh! Take me with you!
‘Sounds wonderful,’ she managed in a strangled sort of whisper.
‘Rosie sweetheart, time for us to get moving, I think,’ said Dermott, stepping into the kitchen.
Meg piped up. ‘Now come on, you two, you still haven’t told us where you’re going on this honeymoon of yours!’ She had been trying to get the information out of them all afternoon.
‘No way, Meg!’ Dermott was determined to keep his elaborate secret. ‘We’re staying at the hotel at the airport tonight so none of you can come and see us off. You’ll get the postcards.’
‘Connor, great to see you again, mate, and we’ll definitely catch up when we get back.’ Dermott and Connor shook hands heartily. ‘Come and see the new small-business software I’ve been working on. I think it could be perfect for your landscaping outfit.’
‘Oh, which reminds me,’ said Connor. ‘I wanted to give you these,’ and he handed around his business cards: ‘The Green Wave’ printed alongside an illustration of a bloke with a wheelbarrow walking through a curling barrel of leaves. Cute.
Then the group, led by Meg, was making leaving noises and heading out the door. Claire was alarmed to see everyone going. It was as if a spotlight of intense heat had been turned on in the kitchen and was now about to be turned off, leaving her in the dark once more.
When the others were just out of sight Connor turned and blocked her way. He looked straight into Claire’s eyes and whispered urgently, ‘If you want to get in touch with me, my numbers are on the card. Sorry I have to go. But it is only fourteen days. When I get back, who knows? You might have a few neglected corners which could do with a strong back, a good eye and an able pair of hands.’ And then he leaned down and bit her hard on the neck.
Claire was rocked by a jolt of energy which ran the length of her body.
‘Yeah. I remembered you like that.’ He grinned that luscious grin she recognised from the night before. He turned and was across the yard behind the others in an instant.
Claire fell back against the fridge and fought for breath. She was still in shock when Rose doubled back to the kitchen to kiss her again. She nodded dumbly as Rose hugged her and said goodbye once more.
When Meg returned to find her, Claire finally managed to utter just three vowel sounds: ‘Oh’, ‘Oh’ and ‘Oh’.
Monday
Two Weeks and Counting
‘Well, from everything you’ve told me, Claire, it sounds like you’re perimenopausal.’
This was said in a warm and comforting voice as the doctor leaned forward over her desk. She had clasped her clean, manicured hands in a pleasing arrangement. It was as if, Claire thought, she said this sort of thing casually to women every day. Which, of course, she did. But it hadn’t been said to Claire before. Periowhat? was her first thought, which the doctor must have anticipated, because she went on in the same pleasing tone.
‘You’re about the right age. For the majority of women the menopause happens over the ten-year period from about forty-five to fifty-five. Now, during that time your ovarian function and hormone production decline and the body gradually adjusts itself to these changes.’
There was still no word from Claire. The doctor took this as her cue to step out from behind her desk and refer to a wall chart populated with a rainbow of nude women. She pointed to the red woman at the bottom, which, apparently, was Claire. Her transition would take her through orange, yellow and blue until, at the age of seventy or so, she’d end up as a rather vivid lavender.
Claire noted that Dr Martin was wearing a very stylish wool bouclé suit, high heels and lots of pearls, which seemed an odd sort of outfit for looking up women’s vaginas eight hours a day. But then again, what sort of attire was suitable? A floral apron and matching oven mitts?
‘We also call it the “climacteric”, which means “critical phase” and comes from the Greek word also meaning “rungs of a ladder”. So when you’re perimenopausal, you’ve pretty much just got your foot on the first step.’
A ladder? That was ironic since Claire felt, at this exact moment, as if she was sliding down a snake.
‘Now, Claire. I know you must have lots of questions. But the main thing I want you to know is that this time of life can be fantastically liberating. It’s vital that you develop a positive attitude and that . . .’
Claire didn’t hear much more. She was distracted by the sound of two small muffled explosions, which she took to be her ovaries spontaneously combusting.
Invisible. Isn’t that what they say you become? Claire wished she could be invisible right now as she slid two slim volumes on menopause over the counter at the bookshop. It was amazing to think that just over an hour ago she was a vital young mother dropping her six year old off at the local primary school, chatting with other young mums about the canteen roster, and now, here she was, a foot soldier in the great grey army of menopausal women.
It was true, these women had been invisible to Claire, but she now saw they were everywhere. In fact, if menopausal women were an army then the Edgecliff shopping centre was command central. They were massing in the Medicare office, the optometrists, the hairdressers. They were marching in columns through the supermarket, the fruit shop and the newsagent. And the doctor could point at her rainbow chart of coloured women, but the army had chosen its own uniform of blue, brown and beige, accessorised with comfy shoes and an armful of white plastic bags.
Were they a liberation army? Now free of the daily routines and indulging in passions for the literature they had never had time to read and the gourmet cooking they had always wanted to master but which children would never eat? Or were they a spent force? Reduced to buying roughage from the fruit shop to get their sluggish bowels working and crossword books to fill in the endless tracts of time stretching before them?
Thankfully, the girl behind the counter—who looked about twenty-two—bagged the books without looking at the titles. (Would Claire calculate the age of every woman she saw now? Had she acquired some weird obsessive-compulsive menopause disorder? She’s twenty-five; she’s thirty-two; she’s forty-seven; she’s sixty-one.)
Claire thought that, oddly enough, there was probably some 45-year-old man over at the other counter desperately trying to hide his Big, Blonde and Bouncy magazines. If there was such a thing as male menopause that’s probably the way men would cope with it. Embark on some Jack Nicholson inspired road trip of young chicks, porno magazines and Viagra. While she would probably do what almost every woman before her had done. Go into herself. Read the books, contemplate and be reborn. But as what? A glove-wearing, turtle-necked Diane Keaton? A moth, she thought ruefully. You could dress it in Donna Karan full-length cream satin, but everyone saw it for what it was. A moth on a big night out.
She recalled the doctor’s words: It’s vital that you develop a positive attitude. Whic
h was a revealing statement. If you had to force yourself to feel good about menopause, it meant the reality would be truly fucking awful.
She headed for the last vacant table in a drab little coffee shop. Not that there weren’t plenty of empty chairs, it was just that every single woman there had commandeered a table for herself and her pile of nasty plastic bags. As she negotiated herself to the empty table Claire felt all eyes upon her. It was the ruthless assessment of the older woman she hated most. Their mean little eyes raked you up and down, recording every detail and then dismissing you with contempt. She would rather have braved a dozen blokes on a building site any day.
Claire vividly recalled an autumn afternoon, a long time ago, when she had sashayed past a truck-loading bay in a tiny red and white skirt, her long shapely legs finishing in a pair of black satin Charles Jourdan high heels. She could still hear the slack-jawed silence, the sound of a hundred cardboard cartons hitting the deck as fifty men turned to take in the vision of her flimsy skirt being blown above her waist. Even now, twenty years later, she recalled their mighty cheers of approval with a smile. While she knew that she was supposed to have endured their male oppression with stoic indifference, instead she felt more powerful that day than she had in her entire life. She had merely fluttered her wings and every male in her radius could feel the disturbance in the air.
‘Here’s your raisin toast, love.’ The sad little quilts of toast flipped off the side of the plate as it was dumped on the table. ‘And your tea.’ More clunks followed.
Claire watched the woman in the black apron retreat to her sentry post behind the counter and estimated her to be about forty-nine. She was doing it again. Obsessively. Compulsively.
She opened the first book and scanned the contents page. The doors swung open on a nightmarish world. ‘Hot flushes, night sweats, weight gain, osteoporosis, cancers, lowering of the voice, bloating, uro-genital complaints, skin, hair, eye mouth and nail symptoms, emotional symptoms, intellectual symptoms . . .’ and on it went. When she got down the page to ‘loss of libido’ she flicked the cover shut.
She scanned the faces of the women sitting in the café. They were giving nothing away—just staring blankly into the middle distance as they stirred their tea or twirled their cake forks. She wanted to smash her ugly thick white china cup into the nearest permed head. Fuck all of you! With your bloody padded coathangers, lavender sachets, rhyming greeting cards and stinking chocolate rumballs!
You’ve all managed to keep this thing pretty quiet, haven’t you? Apart from an odd little nudge or a whisper: ‘Oooh, er, it must be The Change.’ How many of you sat there at the family Christmas dinner like smiling, contented boiled puddings while you were secretly nursing your cramps, headaches, swollen ankles and sore breasts? How many of you passed on a game of charades because you were secretly worried you might wee your pants? How many of you spent time in the bathroom quietly patching up your make-up after a hot flush left you dripping with sweat and shame?
And none of you ever told anyone. You thought you may as well just keep it all quiet and sell my generation down the river too! Claire tried to recall if her mother had ever told her anything about it . . . or her grandmother . . . or her aunts. She came up with nothing. She felt like the victim of some vast conspiracy of silence.
‘Bugger this!’ she said loudly as she stood abruptly. Cake forks stopped twirling and cups of tea hovered in midair as all eyes turned to her.
Overcome with an impulse she couldn’t fully understand, Claire took her plate and dumped it on the counter. ‘I can’t eat raisin toast. I have to watch my weight. I’ve just found out I’m perimenopausal,’ she announced to the startled waitress. ‘It’s only five years until I turn from bright red to a nasty drab shade of orange. I haven’t got much time so I have to go and have a lot of sex.’
The women were clearly unimpressed with this piece of unsavoury information. They bent their heads to investigate their fruit tarts and poppyseed cakes in minute detail. When, out of the corners of their eyes, they saw Claire gather her bags, they knew it was safe to look up again. They watched her march purposefully towards the door, pausing only to dump two brand new books into the rubbish bin.
Once she reached the darkened floor of the car park Claire could feel her mask of cheerful defiance starting to slip. Her eyes were beginning to fill up like a leaky pair of swimming goggles. All she had to do was make it to the car.
Where was the car?
She clattered down the concrete stairs and peered through the gloom of the filthy bunker. She was looking for the shiny silver roof of her new Peugeot 307 five-door, which may as well have been invisible. There was no way she could see it through the gleaming fortress of four-wheel drives in front of her. Where was the bloody car?
Now Claire was running along row after row of massive chrome bulldozers. She cursed as she twisted the right heel of her Patrick Cox pink leather kitten heels and cursed again as she fell against the filthy bonnet of a Landcruiser. As she wrenched the shoes off her feet and stuffed them into her handbag, she thought of those sensible old women patrolling the shopping centre in their comfy sandals. Their feet always reminded her of Christmas stockings full of mixed nuts. That’s what you get if you wear high heels and you’re over forty! Bunions and Bad Legs. Just another grim signpost on the road to old age.
She ran in bare feet through the patches of oil and grease. Please, please, please, oh please, where is the car?
She started crying hard. Tears ran from her eyes, snot ran from her nose. Funny, she thought, they reckon you dry up as you get older. Well, you don’t really. Your vagina might dry up, but your eyes are never far from tears. You don’t lubricate, you lachrymate. Ha! Like old blokes who lose hair from their heads and start growing it on their backs!
And that, she thought bitterly, was exactly the kind of fucked-up smart-arsed observation she always produced in a crisis. Here she was, standing barefoot in a patch of black sump oil in a filthy car park, and that was the best she could come up with. Claire stopped running. Her chin dropped to her chest and tears splashed down her cheeks. She felt herself cracking, breaking and falling away into utter despair. Her Prada handbag loosened from her grip and Claire crumpled to her knees.
And there was the car. Its headlights were level with her eyes down there on the concrete floor. She grovelled for her bag and staggered over to the door. A fumble and beep and wrench and tumble and she was inside. She slammed the door, almost severing her own right ankle, and she was safe.
Claire wiped the oil from her knees with a tissue. She was snug in her little extruded plastic cocoon and sat for some time marshalling her thoughts. She had always been proud of her ability to think through a situation with calm and logic, and this episode of blind panic had caught her by surprise.
She knew the fate of her body was inevitable. She tried to think of a snippet of wisdom which might be comforting. I continue neither crushed by the present, nor fearing the future. For such a thing as this might have happened to any man. Marcus Aurelius Antonius, 160-something AD. It was her favourite saying but a bit useless in this situation since this was never going to happen to any man on the face of the earth. And any woman who lived to be forty-five in Ancient Rome was probably left on a hillside to have her uterus pecked at by buzzards. She couldn’t think of anything else except: ‘Shit Happens.’
Of course she had known for years that her menopause would soon be proclaimed. Her menstrual cycle, always as regular as a clock, had begun to skip time. She had found herself skimming newspaper articles about hormone replacement therapy in an idle sort of way, as if in some far-off abstract future they might apply to her. Also, logically, she knew that nothing had changed. Looking in the rear-view mirror she saw the same face she’d seen the day before. Not that different from the face she had looked at in her twenties.
In truth, Claire knew she had sailed into her forties remarkably intact. She didn’t like the sun and had never been seen outdoors for the past
twenty-five years without the Australian equivalent of a burqa—sunhat, sunscreen, sunglasses and sleeves. Her swaddling had been something of a joke back then when all the girls were lying on the beach ladled with olive oil, a row of suckling pigs sizzling on a grill. While all the women she knew had fetched up on the shores of their forties looking as if they’d been adrift for a month in a life raft, Claire had wafted down the gangplank of a luxury liner. A tall, milky-skinned, green-eyed beauty, her chestnut hair shaded by an expansive picture hat.
So, logically, Claire knew she was ahead of the game. She was physically attractive, healthy, happily married, the mother of a divine little girl. She had a lovely home in a wealthy suburb, a successful career as a singer. She had friends, money, sixty pairs of expensive shoes (at last count) and a Platinum Amex Card. Altogether she was a rather tidy and impressive paragraph under the headline ‘Local Girl Makes Good’. So why, illogically, did she want to fuck everything up by ringing Connor?
Claire upended her little black leather handbag onto the passenger seat. First she found her cigarettes and jammed one into her mouth. By the glow of the lighter she could see her face in the windscreen.
‘What the hell are you looking at?’ she said to the accusing self she saw there. She took a defiant deep drag of tobacco.
She retrieved the business card she’d carefully stashed in the zipped pocket of the bag, read the name Connor Carmody and punched his number into her mobile phone before she had time to think.
It rang.
Claire puffed her cigarette again and realised her hands were shaking.
It rang some more.
Her ears were thumping as if her heartbeat was coming through the stereo speakers in the car doors.
It diverted.
‘Hello. This is The Green Wave and I’m Connor Carmody. I’d love to talk to you, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Have a good one. Bye.’
Oddly, Claire did two things at the same time—opened her mouth to speak and pressed the button to hang up. She stubbed her cigarette out and leaned back into the velour seat with a deep sigh of . . . She tried to accurately locate the feeling. It was an irritating blank. A No-Man’s Land existing somewhere between the trenches of relief and disappointment.