by Robert Drewe
That was sad enough. Then her rebound boyfriend and first husband, Roley Bailey, skiing with a hangover, slammed fatally into a snow gum on the Falls Creek slopes.
For a few years after that, Christine’s old friend Rosie had, in Christine’s view, ‘run amok’, causing Christine to wipe her off her list while the cocaine binge lasted. Eventually, strapped for cash after partnering a succession of glamorous, coke-addicted and eventually bankrupted fashion-industry heterosexuals, she’d decided to get clean and sensible, and turned to more mature, restrained and dependably wealthy men in the legal and stockbroking fields.
This decision, too, nearly came unstuck. Masticating overexcitedly in a hurry to get her home and into bed from their first date at Fanny’s, one of these older companions, Andrew Bushell, a widowed and sixtyish broker, almost lost her interest when he began to choke on a slab of yearling Hereford/Angus cross with bone marrow and bordelaise sauce.
As she’d confided to Christine later, ‘Seeing his hideous purple face and bulging eyes, for a few seconds I wondered whether I could bother with the Heimlich manoeuvre.’
Fortunately she reconsidered in time. Andrew Bushell showed his gratitude by marrying her, then retiring from the Melbourne stock exchange and relocating them to his apartment on the Gold Coast. From the beginning, Rosie enjoyed the eternity-pool ambience, her new hyphenated name, the linen-and-driftwood coastal style and decor, and the company of wealthy fellow Victorian émigrés who quickly accepted her looks and his money. Fully occupied with travel, yoga, shopping, the pool and parties, she found the time passing pleasantly for three years until Andrew’s stroke.
Unsuited to the carer role, Rosie found the next two years a considerable trial. It was tedious that Andrew had to learn to walk and talk again. It wasn’t that he’d ceased looking dapper; he scrubbed up neatly once he’d been washed, shaved, wet-combed and kitted out like an America’s Cup yachtsman. But his yachty dapperness looked forced now. There was always something askew with his hair or the collar of his polo shirt. Since the stroke he couldn’t abide the choking feeling of it being compulsorily flipped up on the back of his neck as style dictated. And his mouth would never appear normal again.
As she ferried him from physiotherapy to health spas and massage clinics, people presumed he was her father. She didn’t bother to correct them. ‘Come on, Dad,’ she’d say, as he limped along behind her in his deck shoes. ‘Catch up.’
Of course, slumped in his La-Z-Boy every evening, watching the news, drinking Scotch and grunting unintelligible insults at Labor politicians, he was far from stimulating company.
‘Don’t get yourself het up, Dad,’ she’d call as she left for a cocktail party. ‘Mrs Chen will be here soon to get your dinner.’
Marital relations having dried up, perhaps it was inevitable that she’d start an affair with an American film producer, Jeff Bloomfield, who claimed to be close buddies with Steven Spielberg’s cousin and Mel Gibson. Bloomfield was visiting Australia to examine the possible tax incentives for a hot script:
Gorgeous but spoiled Victoria’s Secret underwear model from New York inherits a struggling Kimberley cattle station. After butting heads with the chauvinistic and taciturn station manager, she gains ‘character’ during a cyclone (grubby face, broken nails, tousled hair, etc.) by knuckling down and doing his job when he’s incapacitated by a gale-blown tree.
The following drought almost finishes off the livestock, but proving surprisingly adept at outback property management – rounding up cattle, breaking in a previously impossible horse (saving it from being put down), educating the station’s cute Aboriginal kids to a high standard, painting outback sunsets on cyclone wreckage, and assisting a black housemaid in a difficult childbirth – she gains the station manager’s grudging respect.
And more. While digging a new dam for the thirsty cattle, she discovers a rich iron-ore deposit that saves the property, and his changed feelings blossom into love.
His Australian script in limbo with investors, it was less expected that Rosie would run off with Jeff Bloomfield to Hawaii, leaving Andrew in the brusque care of Mrs Chen. But when Bloomfield went back to his wife in LA after three months, a subdued Rosie gathered her wits and returned to Andrew. Gratefully, he changed his will back in her favour and their marriage resumed.
Sadly, the reconciliation lasted only six months. Five weeks after the death of his 95-year-old mother, a Perth descendant of Captain Stirling’s First Fleeters, explorers, sheep graziers, Aboriginal dispersers and mining-lease owners, Andrew suffered a second, fatal stroke. To Rosie’s great good luck, Miriam Bushell had left her considerable estate to Andrew, her only child, and the inheritance flow-down meant that Rosie suddenly came into two fortunes.
For the bereaved but wealthy widow the immediate balm was a holiday in Thailand where the emotional tumult of the past twelve months could hopefully ebb away in the infinity pool and on the massage tables of Samui.
Beside a lily pond overstocked with roiling carp, far from the sordid tourist riot of Phuket, she sat at the bar for three nights sipping champagne poured for her by a handsome young barman, positioning her face and breasts at their most attractive angles and nervously shredding drink coasters into little pyramids of lust.
On the fourth evening, after more champagne than usual, she left her coaster unshredded and wrote her room number on it instead.
After ten days in Samui, for the first time in her life (and, as Hugh reckoned, if she’d been in Christine’s class at school she must now be forty-nine), Rosie decided she’d found true love.
The barman’s name was Arthit, he was twenty-five, and Rosie was captivated by his slender hairless beauty and his smell of ripe tropical fruit. Yes, she knew the mating of a handsome young Asian and an older Western woman, the cougar of the gossip magazines, was such a dreadful cliché that back home they were even making cheeky TV insurance commercials on that very theme.
She didn’t care. Ever since she could remember, the males in her life had been five-o’clock-shadow types, as furry, scratchy and chunky as wombats. Pragmatic, heavy-drinking financial chaps given to brusque after-dinner rutting where they oozed more acetone than romantic praise.
Arthit on the other hand had hurried to an internet cafe on her return home to boldly announce how he missed stroking the ‘moi on your hoy the colour of sweet oranges’ and that the interaction of his Thai hum and her Western yoh-nee, her special hoy, showed that nirvana was possible.
His cheeky hums and hoys and his skin odour somewhere between breadfruit and papaya, with hints of fish sauce, had her head spinning. For once she wasn’t calling the shots in a relationship. As her rapturous tweets and Instagrams recorded, No bird soars too high if she soars with her own wings. She was rapt that his name meant ‘man of the sun’. Wasn’t she a woman of the sun? Arthit must join her in Australia as soon as possible. She wasn’t sure what awaited. But, Go for it now. The future is promised to no one, Deepak Chopra said, approvingly.
Rosie had an all-over wax, scattered the pool with lotus flowers and filled the apartment with orchids and Buddhas. On her way to meet Arthit’s flight at Gold Coast airport she was so excited and edgy that a nerve kept twitching in her eyelid, and she arrived an hour before the plane was due. Twice she went to the ladies to check her hair and make-up, then resumed her anxious waiting position near the Hertz counter, far back enough from Arrivals so as not to appear as ridiculously keen as she felt.
He was the last passenger off the plane and had to push through a throng of small chattering Thais to reach her. There was his beaming smile at last. The smell of papaya and fish sauce.
‘My mother,’ he introduced them. ‘And my wife, and my three children.’
He presented her with a bruised flower. ‘Is OK,’ he said. ‘Chimlin, Buppha, Kulap, Mongkut and Thinnakorn will sleep in another room. How soon before I breathe your yellow hair?’
She was astounded at herself to be participating in such a well-worn joke. Another one.
So this was why clichés existed: because they were painfully true.
People were staring. She flipped the flower into a bin, crammed the Arthit family into her Mercedes, drove them straight to a two-star motel six blocks from the beach, and hurried home to purge the apartment of Buddhas and lotuses. Two days later she packed them onto the first budget-fare flight back to Bangkok.
The new Rosie gritted her teeth and faced her social-media cronies again, the ones who grinned to themselves at the deliciousness of her plight while simultaneously sending big online hugs and emoji representing tears, hearts, kisses, praying hands and sympathetic cuddly animals. Embrace the experiences that push your buttons and stretch your comfort zone.
Rosie’s comfort zone was badly stretched. As she told her 2885 followers on Instagram, When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out – because that’s what’s inside. When you yourself are squeezed, what comes out is what is inside.
‘That sounds sticky,’ Christine said. ‘But let’s face it, she’s got a stack of loot to fall back on.’
Now Rosie’s anti-Asian diatribe was backed up by a furiously nodding and prodding Bronwyn Donaldson, whose finger jabs were hurting Hugh’s ribs and whose inner top lip revealed a central thread of membrane aggressively stained with red wine.
‘You know what I’d do to asylum seekers if I was running the government? Order the navy to hole their boats and let our famous great whites get them.’
‘I see,’ Hugh said. ‘A pro-shark immigration policy.’
Rosie loomed up to him then, grabbed both his hands in hers with what appeared to Hugh to be unnecessary compassion, and looked deep into his eyes. As if he was the only man on the desert island and she was appraising him as mating material.
But Rosie was his drunken cousin, and now she giggled, ‘God, Hughie,’ and patted his Prince Charles. Accusingly, she announced, ‘You’ve lost more hair!’ Then she prodded his stomach. ‘But you haven’t lost any pudding.’
For a split second he pondered making a belittling remark in return. She’d be stunned, then sulk, maybe weep, certainly stop speaking to him. But proper men didn’t make unkind personal remarks to women. He stepped away from her disparaging hands. ‘You haven’t changed though,’ he said.
‘Hugh, you know I’d do anything for Christine’s happiness.’ She greeted the air in front of him with a tipsy kiss and looked deeply into his eyes. ‘And yours too, of course.’
What was that about? Turning from her glistening and irritatingly sympathetic gaze, Hugh glanced around for Christine. Where was she?
Instead his searching eyes found the annoying boy in black again. (Zane? Aaron? Joel?) He was perched on the edge of the inflatable giraffe, an arm fondling his girlfriend, both smoking cigarettes as they bounced up and down, blocking the kids’ access. A throng of protesting children surrounded them.
Hugh waved both arms to get their attention, frowned, shook his head, and mimed taking a cigarette from his lips and throwing it away. He took a step towards them, his hands attempting to portray the explosion of a vinyl giraffe.
The boy stared steadily back for a moment and, deadpan, slowly mimicked Hugh’s gestures. Then he said something to the girl and they stood up, laughing and swaying, and slowly moved off.
23
A few hours earlier than her usual time, Thea escaped down to the creek to smoke her daily cigar. A Romeo y Julieta Churchill Gran Reserva today, apparently Winston Churchill’s favourite. A hundred dollars each here, but only 10 dollars from the Cuban MSF doctors, who were very generous with them.
She didn’t care if she stank of cigar. It helped with the hot flush she was experiencing. Perhaps she should prescribe them to her menopausal patients. She luxuriated in its taste and smell, felt its fumes waft over her brow and hair and baggy T-shirt. A shameless 7 inches, this was a most pugnacious and licentious cigar for a woman to smoke in public. In her present mood she hoped the disapproving old Cleary aunts and grannies caught her at it.
She was smoking a cigar!
You’re kidding What next?
Do you think she’s a ——, you know? Don’t want to be the one to say it but I can’t ever remember a man on the scene.
The Cleary clan was pig-ignorant and smug. The only way to get the haemochromatosis message across to them was individually, through the young mothers. Get them on their own without the elderly moralisers butting in. Young mothers thought of the world as how it affected their children, but the bossy old Cleary women lived in a conservative, anglophone time warp. The sentimental past was all that mattered; the future hardly came into it. Or the outside world.
As for men, they thought of the world as how it affected what, exactly? Certainly not their children or grandchildren, or the planet wouldn’t be in this chaotic state. The economy? The all-important, omnipresent, fucking economy! Their superannuation? Their real estate? Their sex lives? The cost of a beer? Their football team’s chances? Look at Dad and the bloody Tigers!
Morons, all of them.
Brushing ants off a dusty rock, she sat down and blew a brash stream of smoke into the humid air over the creek. The hot flush was fading from her skin, and suddenly she was cool, almost too cold. A hovering cloud of gnats scattered, reassembled into a single horizontal question mark, and flicked away downstream.
All those Sunday bank picnics beside country creeks came back to her: the State Savings Bank staff and their families and boyfriends and girlfriends at Social Club outings in the Dandenongs. Everyone – tellers, loans officers, receptionists, shy wives, mobs of kids – mixing democratically on ferny creek banks in the bush.
From the front of her VW Beetle, the Social Club secretary, Coralie Langhorne – nut-brown, sporty, and a stranger to lipstick – would bring out the trusty Social Club barbecue grille: a blackened old refrigerator shelf wrapped in newspaper. Then the barbecue cook – always Dad – sent all the children off to collect firewood (‘Watch out for snakes!’) while he stacked rocks into a rustic simulacrum of a fireplace and the men opened the beer and the women spread picnic rugs and produced potato salad in Tupperware containers.
Dad would set the grille across the semicircle of rocks. Then he lit a fire – an initial, flaring, pre-cooking fire – and burned and scraped off the crusted fat from the grille’s last picnic. When it was burned clean, he set his beer safely down to one side, and began the serious task. Lamb chops for the adults and sausages for the kids.
No wonder I’m a vegetarian, Thea thought, recalling the shrunken chops curled into frizzled embryos, the charcoaled sausages and burst jacket potatoes. And the witty plastic tomato that delighted the kids with its blurting sauce squirts, in her mother’s view merely exchanging the dribbling coarseness of a naked bottle with the vulgarity of a giant farting tomato.
But prissiness had no place in this quintessential bush picnic. Cutlery was ignored. Enthusiastic greasy fingers grabbed the meat off tin plates. Sudden Neanderthals, savages, set aside their beers, forgot the salads, and wolfed into burned flesh. Then came a self-conscious pause while people wiped their lips, politely picked at the lettuce and tomato, and decorum returned. Now the bank wives shyly produced their cakes and tarts.
At this calming stage of the meal compliments were expected to fly around the picnic rugs, followed by modest female protestations and denials of culinary flair. Any cake, tart or biscuit praise, the women always insisted, should go to their mothers, aunts and grandmothers whose recipes were responsible for the Chinese chew, the gypsy pudding, the Afghans, the Jewish cake or the Norwegian crumble. Thea remembered a definite ceremonial and competitive tone to these dessert presentations, and with no Chinese, gypsies, Afghans, Jews or Norwegians present to say otherwise, a diplomatic picnicker praised a small wedge of everything on offer.
Finally, with people sighing and patting their stomachs and declaring, ‘I’m replete’ and ‘Whew! I’m as full as a Catholic school’, Dad made billy tea with creek water and two nonchalant handfuls of tea leaves, seasoning it wi
th a few gumleaves.
This memory was so vividly heroic that it defined her father for her. In order to steep the tea leaves, Dad would whirl the billy can of boiling water around his head. Perilously close, round and round he spun the billy, his pressed lips confirming the seriousness of the operation, his confident frown indicating that everyone should appreciate the drama and danger of his tea-making, and the neat science of it, too, as the vertical plane and the centrifugal force drove the leaves to the bottom of the steaming and blackened can. Not a drop of boiling water spilled or splashed.
This was Picnic Dad’s finest moment. Like any drover, squatter, swagman or gold prospector, his demeanour scoffed at a scalding.
‘See!’ Picnic Dad’s performance was saying, ‘If the truth be known, I’m much more Mick Cleary the outback bushman than Michael Cleary the suburban bank manager.’
She treasured those memories of her father of long ago. The Dad who’d take her to ballet class one evening, then kick a football with her the next, simultaneously demonstrating and providing a running commentary on his famous ‘Roy Wright’s stab pass’ and his ‘Neville Crowe’s long raking drop kick’.
And now? Now he was seventy-nine he’d clearly changed with age, and so had she, of course, and their relationship was loving but sceptical. She could be scathing, he’d grumbled to her, and impatient, and she realised he was probably right. Nowadays the father–daughter bond frayed during their chief one-on-one time together: their Saturday-morning visits to the food markets, to her a compulsory but increasingly irritating experience where he roamed the aisles being astonished about the insidious way modern vegetables were changing their names and appearances.
‘What’s happened to potatoes?’ he complained without fail every Saturday, scoffing at the various versions on display, most of which he found ludicrous. ‘Kipfler. Bintje. Red rascal. Dutch cream. Pink eye.’