‘Breathe in. Now out. Good. Sorry, go on.’
‘I’ve been��� getting my bearings.’ Christine fidgeted as Yvonne moved about her, checking the motion of this joint or the action of that limb before taking her over to the scales and weighing her.
‘Mmm-hmm. Do you like it here?’ Yvonne’s voice was crisp, professional.
‘It’s a nice town. Von, I���’ Christine paused. She had expected Yvonne to cut her off but the nutritionist, having sat back down, merely stopped taking notes, put down her pen and waited.
The silence grew awkward. Christine half-wished the other woman would fill it. Yvonne, it seemed, was not going to budge.
‘Von, I’m��� About that time in Melbourne.’
‘Fifteen years ago.’ Yvonne shrugged gently. ‘It was a teenager ago, Chrissy. It’s in the past.’
‘But still���’
Yvonne sighed and sat back in her chair. ‘I’d guessed this wasn’t a chance meeting. You saw my name somewhere, thought you’d come along and talk? Get everything out in the open?’
‘Um��� Something like that.’ Chrissy cursed her nerves. Yvonne, clearly had grown a backbone while she had lost hers somewhere along the line.
‘Well?’ Yvonne spread her hands, palms up. ‘We were little kids. We met. We were teens. We kissed. We were in our twenties, we had a fantastic relationship that I screwed up. We were in our forties, we had sex once, you left.’ Von tilted her head. ‘That about cover it?’
‘I was stupid,’ Chrissy said quietly. ‘You forgot that bit.’
‘No, I just didn’t mention it. And I was stupid too. Now we’re two stupid old ladies and you,’ she added, turning to her computer and tapping some keys, ‘have been recovering well from your cancer treatments, according to your medical history. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’ She glanced back at Christine, concern written across her face.
‘In remission, or gone, whichever.’ Chrissy shook her head. ‘It almost killed me twice, though.’
‘“Almost” means “not dead”,’ Yvonne reminded her, pulled open a letter template in her word processor and began typing.
‘What’s that for?’
‘I’m writing you a referral to another nutritionist. One of the best in the area, mind you, and before you get all misty-eyed and claim it’s because I hate you, Christine Daley, that isn’t it.’ Yvonne took a deep breath and let it out, not looking at the other woman, aware Christine’s eyes were locked to her.
‘Then..?’
‘It’s because I’m going to be retiring within a few years, and because I still love you.’
Silence hit the office. After a few seconds it was broken by a sob.
‘I-I thought���’
‘I know what you thought, Chrissy.’ Yvonne sighed, stopped typing and handed the tear-struck woman a box of tissues. ‘It was written across your face.’
‘Th-then���’
Yvonne shook her head, leaned forward and shut Christine Daley up with a kiss.
Dates always made Yvonne nervous but, for a change, she was feeling pretty good.
Part of that was that she knew Chrissy would be as nervous as she was. Part of it was the gleeful chatter of her daughter, Emma, who was helping her get ready. Part of it was the glass of white wine she’d already drunk.
But most of it was because it was her sixtieth birthday and she finally - finally - simply didn’t care what anyone thought any more.
‘I have - how do they say it nowadays? - I have no more fucks left to give,’ she told her daughter earlier that evening.
‘That’s the way, Mum,’ Emma had grinned, putting the bottle of wine meaningfully out of her mother’s reach. ‘Though you might be getting one later tonight if that dress is anything to be going by.’
‘Emma! Of all the things to say to your dear old mother.’
Emma simply shrugged. Her mother had told her the truth about her sexuality following an awkward encounter when she was sixteen, when Yvonne had walked in on Emma and her then-secret girlfriend having sex in Emma’s room. Since then the two had been open about their love lives; Emma was the only one who knew, for example, that Yvonne had cheated on her husband shortly before divorcing him. Even Donovan was in the dark about that, though Yvonne didn’t lie about why she was divorcing him.
‘We can’t help how we’re born,’ he had said with a sad smile, and not for the first time Yvonne wished she could love him as more than a friend.
Yvonne had chosen to get ready for the date at Emma’s both because it was easier to get her daughter to zip her into the body-hugging silver dress she had bought and because she was eager to see how Emma and Chrissy got along.
In truth she was a lot more nervous about that meeting than the date itself.
They were putting the final touches on Yvonne’s makeup - not too audacious, just simple and flattering - when the doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it!’ Emma sang, even though only Yvonne, and perhaps their visitor, could hear. Emma had no partner or children of her own and the two were alone in the house.
Yvonne sat where she was, touching up her lipstick, suddenly aware that she was a lot more nervous than she expected to be. When Emma came back in she fidgeted, studying her daughter’s carefully neutral expression.
She hates Chrissy, Yvonne guessed, or she’s messing with me. Fifty-fifty odds on either.
The three of them tried a little small talk in the lounge room. Chrissy had chosen a purple velvet dress that Yvonne longed to run her hands over. Slowly the tension eased and even though Emma’s expression remained polite and neutral throughout, she threw her mother a wink as the two were preparing to go. Behind the cover of the lounge room couch she curled the forefinger and thumb of her left hand into an ‘O’ shape and poked through it with her other finger.
Yvonne rolled her eyes.
‘I think she hates me,’ Chrissy said sadly as they rode in a cab through the town.
‘Who?’
‘Emma.’
Yvonne laughed. ‘Uh, no. No, that she didn’t. She just likes keeping people on edge.’ Chrissy’s surprised look made her grin. ‘Want to know a secret?’
‘I guess so?’ Chrissy said, uncertain she actually did want to know.
‘Emma knows me. She knows about us - all about us. We’ve talked a lot over the years.’
‘Uh oh.’
‘No, it’s good. She’s seen me a lot more than you have over the years and she knows what it looks like when I’m happy.’ Yvonne shrugged and leaned over to kiss Chrissy on the cheek. ‘You make me happy. That’s enough for her.’
There was a long pause.
‘It was never enough for Dad,’ Christine mused sadly. ‘He stopped talking to me completely. When you left��� I guess he thought he’d get his little girl back.’
‘But his little girl was never who he wanted her to be,’ Yvonne sighed. ‘My Dad was relieved when I got engaged, ecstatic when I had kids, but he could see I wasn’t happy. He bought me a cupcake with a candle in it when I got divorced.’
Christine giggled at the thought and then took Yvonne’s hand in both of her own. ‘I wish I’d known him.’
‘Me too.’
The date was a roaring success.
The destination was a restaurant, fairly upmarket without requiring a reference to get in. It took a while but by the time appetisers were finished, the two women were talking like old times. They talked about their childhoods, about the time they spent together in their twenties, about politics and the world and everything in between.
By the time dessert arrived, the two were tipsy on white wine and their feet, shed of shoes, were toying with one another under the table. Chrissy was mindful, at first, of other diners looking over curiously at them but Yvonne ignored it all. If others wanted to waste their lives judging people then she certainly failed to care. She had too few years left and had no intention of filling them with spite.
When they left the restaurant t
hey were giggling like teenagers, light-headed from wine and leaning on one another for support. The taxi ride home was spent mostly silent, the driver glancing into his rear-view mirror now and then to see the two ladies kissing one another slowly.
Chrissy’s house was quiet and cold when they got in the door. Hands roamed across clothing - the velvet dress and the body it covered felt as good under Yvonne’s hands as she had expected it would - but the two lovers ended up falling asleep in bed, still clothed, holding one another and simply enjoying the sensation of no longer being alone.
They were still together when they awoke the next day.
Chrissy, one leg pinned by Yvonne’s, gently tried to work herself free. The act awoke the taller woman, however, and the two shared a kiss that distracted Chrissy from her original intent. A kiss turned into a touch, a hand ran down and under the skirt of a dress, fabric was tweaked aside and warm, soft flesh yielded to gentle but insistent probing.
Heartbeats sped. Kisses contained gentle bites. Toying and playing became slow, gentle lovemaking that filled the morning with bliss.
Neither spoke a word more involved than yes or there until the sun hung well overhead. It was hunger - and other biological needs - that drove them from their sweet refuge, just as it had been so many years ago.
They lay back down after lunch and held one another. Soon they were kissing and, again, making love. In the afterglow they talked quietly, though neither could later remember what about. Pillow-talk.
Yvonne remembered when Chrissy turned away, though, selfconscious of her sagging breasts and slack skin. Chrissy remembered when Yvonne turned her back, kissing her neck and telling her that she was more beautiful than Von had dared dream.
‘Will you hold me?’ Chrissy whispered.
‘Of course I will,’ Yvonne told her.
‘For how long?’
‘For as long as we both shall live.’
BIRDS
Lou Kohler
They went up to Kinglake again in late spring, on a brilliant clear Saturday when the sky was a cut crystal bowl flashing through the burnt-out trees. Angus drove them in his car - he was the only one in their sharehouse who had a licence - an off-cast Mercedes of his father’s that was finally starting to look old and beaten-up enough to not be an embarrassment to Angus. He let Patrick talk him into stopping and getting vanilla slices from the bakery in Kingers-proper - the ones Patrick had used to get after school as a kid. They ate them leaning against the treated-pine veranda railings outside, sending up clouds of icing sugar as they bit down.
‘G’day,’ Patrick said cheerily to a hairy bloke walking past in a blue singlet and a Formula One cap.
In a country town, Angus always felt like a critter in World of Warcraft with a text bubble over its head saying, Bonus Quest: Kill the Poofters. Only Patrick, Angus thought, would stand there wearing skinny jeans and a neon-pink T-shirt with a dancing bear on it, his ginger hair gelled three inches high, and his face covered in icing sugar, and just say g’day to a bloke like that.
Angus had not had his own, blond hair much longer than two inches since childhood, and only really liked to wear navy and grey. He felt slightly too neat and clean in the dusty street.
‘G’day mate!’ the bloke said to Patrick, and erupted into a grin. ‘How’s yer mum?’
‘Dunno,’ Patrick said. ‘We’re just going down to find out!’
‘Ah, well, say hello for me, will you?’
‘Yeah!’ Patrick agreed.
There was a pause, in which the bloke looked from Patrick to Angus. Patrick chirped, ‘This is my boyfriend, Angus.’
The bloke - possibly, arguably - did a small double-take, then said, ‘G’day!’ and stuck out his hand. Angus felt obliged to shake, although he could feel that he had vanilla slice custard on his hand. For a slow, terrible moment he was about to lift it to his mouth to lick it off, but came to his senses in time, and went ahead and shook, custard or no custard.
‘Well, I’d best be off,’ the bloke said.
‘Yeah, have a good one!’ Patrick said.
‘Yeah,’ Angus echoed.
The bloke waved affably and opened the door of his ute. He lifted his hand from the door handle and looked at it, then wiped it on the back of his pants. Angus looked away, carefully, at the ground.
After he’d driven off, Patrick hoed back in to his vanilla slice with such abandon that he gave himself a secondary, custard smile.
‘You’ve got so much custard on your face, it’s like porn for pastry chefs,’ Angus said, and wiped a stripe of it back towards Patrick’s mouth. Even the edges of Patrick’s lips had freckles.
‘Have you come to clean the face?’ Patrick said, catching Angus’s finger in his mouth.
Angus took his finger away. ‘Let’s save it to do in front of your mum,’ he said.
‘She’d love it!’ Patrick declared.
Somehow Angus inhaled icing sugar into his sinuses, and was forced to concede the field.
Margo’s was another five k’s out of town, along a thin road between blackened eucalypt trunks covered in startling lettuce-green bushfire regrowth. The trees were so tall, it was like an optical illusion - Angus kept finding himself craning forward over the navy-leather steering wheel to try to correct his perspective.
They turned off and up over a hump of dirt driveway. They were there, suddenly, under an open sky, at the crest of a hill. Below them was a long, narrow rectangle of cleared paddock, and beyond it on all sides a vast, cresting sea of tree canopy stretching to the horizon. The fire had come up to the fence-line on the left, you could see - the bush there was sparse, dark and twiggy - but not into any of the thick green on the other sides. There was a wavy line between the burnt and the unburnt trees, snaking away into the distance, smooth as the edge of a water stain.
‘It doesn’t even look real,’ Angus said, getting out of the car. ‘It looks like Lord of the Rings or something.’
They had pulled up in a dirt turning circle beside Margo’s little fibreboard bungalow, and parked between the caravan and Margo’s car, a filthy white Mitsubishi Colt so ancient it looked like it was made of Lego.
‘I know,’ Patrick got out and looked like he would say more. But Margo, who was also ginger-haired, came roaring out of the house and stumbling down the wooden steps. She knocked over half the collection of visitor gumboots by the door as she passed.
‘Patrick!’ she howled with joy, and enveloped him.
‘Hi Mum,’ Angus could hear Patrick saying from somewhere in her clasp. ‘Brought you a vanilla slice. Only a bit squashed.’
After a secondary morning tea in which they were obliged to bite the heads off a number of chocolate teddy bear biscuits, soak them in their tea and then slurp them up, in addition to each taking a portion of Margo’s vanilla slice, they rolled off down the hill for a walk in the sun.
‘Let’s not venture too far, or I’ll get a cramp and expire in the wilderness,’ Angus said, rubbing his stomach.
‘Oh, come on,’ Patrick said, striding along far too bouncily. Surely, Angus thought, there ought to be a physical limit to how much food you could fit into those jeans.
On the walk, Patrick showed him how to duck through a barbed-wire stock fence without losing your balls. They looked at the neighbouring property’s dam, and at the neighbouring property’s sheep. Something ineffable about Angus was extremely alarming to the sheep.
‘You would think if they were to object to anyone���’ Angus said, looking pointedly at Patrick’s eyesore of a T-shirt.
‘Just stop moving around so much,’ Patrick said.
‘I am trying,’ Angus said, ‘to get away from them. How am I supposed to do that without moving?’
‘You can move. Just stop doing - that,’ Patrick said.
‘Doing what?’ Angus demanded.
Patrick took Angus’s wrists and pinned them down by his sides. ‘Just be quiet, and come along now,’ he said.
They got away from the shee
p eventually. Patrick was so clearly in the wrong that Angus could not bring himself to say thank-you. Angus tried saying, ‘You know, Patrick, I notice you seem to be an expert on sheep,’ in an insinuating tone, but Patrick just snorted.
Then there was the burnt-out part of the bush with its empty earth softened by undignified new green fuzz, exuberant as mould. Beneath a curl of fallen black branch, they looked at a wombat carcass like a leather footstool that had lost its stuffing. Angus reached out with the toe of his shoe, but did not touch it. He saw Patrick smiling at him, and said, ‘What?’
In the unburnt part of the bush was a grove of ferns like a miniature city. Angus watched Patrick pat the soft new growth in the crown of a fern, familiarly, like it was a cat.
Looking back towards the paddock through the trees, Patrick pointed out the shadow of a kangaroo on the far hillside, which promptly hopped away just as Angus was saying, ‘Where?’
‘It’s noon already,’ Patrick said, at last.
By the time they’d hiked back up the hill, Angus was baking hot, polo shirt sticking to him, the seams of his jeans damp and chafing. Climbing up past the neighbours’ dam, the ground underfoot got all spongy and made it even harder to walk.
Inexplicably, Patrick threw his shirt off and said, ‘Right, time for a swim.’
Angus could not make any sense of this. He stood and waited for some sort of explanation.
‘Come on. They’re away: we’re allowed to use it,’ Patrick said, taking his shoes off.
‘In this mud puddle?’ Angus said. Possibly he had spoken too loudly - a flock of birds suddenly took off out the trees nearby. The water in the dam was opaque and mid-brown, almost exactly the colour of a strong flat white. ‘That can’t be hygienic,’ he said. ‘We’ll get - rabies, or something.’
At this point he still believed Patrick could be reasoned with.
‘Come on,’ Patrick said, rather more peremptory now. He unbuttoned his skinny jeans and began to shimmy them down at the same time as his hideous brilliant-orange underwear. Which was really a very good way to put moral pressure on someone. A really, unfairly good way, Angus couldn’t help but think.
Queermance Anthology, Volume 2 Page 7