(inspired by Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds, her sound installation ‘The Loving Tree’
and Mildura Writers Festival session, ‘Reading [and writing] for courage’)
The heady days of a new relationship are equally fraught with dread, anxiety, hope and a dare to dream that pushes nervous animated candidates into unfamiliar and sometimes scary places.
And so it was as she and her tummy lurching love interest embarked on the early days of the tentative square dancing that is a new dalliance.
As a teenager she had read of the unresolved sexual tension gaudily paraded in the racy airport novels stolen from her parents’ bookcase. A shelf or two above the proudly installed World Book Encyclopaedia and its junior companion Childcraft, were the salacious Valley of the Dolls, The Thorn Birds and other middling titles with thinly veiled allusions to illicit sexual desire.
She had no real idea of course; her knowledge of sexuality was limited to the awkward conversations sparked by the embarrassing arrival of her period at eleven. Her mother prided herself on her candid and open discussions with her first born, oblivious to the discomfort of her cringing daughter. Dolly was a more trusted source of knowledge - that and the weather sheds in her country primary school playground where girls took turns in being Sandy Olssen, Danny Zuko and the Pink Ladies. Her favourite Pink Lady was Rizzo - the flawed and vulnerable anti-heroine whose fragility frightened and exhilarated her.
Fast forward to a time when university exams were a distant memory and her career under way.
And enter a new colleague.
A muscular handsome man with wavy dark hair and espresso coloured eyes. They’d met at a staff function months before. Now, the previously dismissed chemistry was finally acknowledged.
The first date was a picnic. He had carefully prepared a generous basket of preserved olives and fatty salami and luscious velvety cheese. A hand formed and wood fired sour dough loaf was nestled easily beside a South Australian Pinot Gris and a pair of chunky Vegemite jars from which they drank.
Bellies filled, fat smeared fingers licked clean and mouths mopped, they settled into easy languid conversations about nothings: the purest scarlet of the nearby bottlebrush flowers, the silly elephants in the clouds, the comforting rhythm of rain on a winters’ night.
“Tell me a story,” she said.
The prickle of the dry summer grass tattooed her hips and thighs with a messy perforation of coupon cut-out lines. His eyes lifted to the tops of the eucalypts that fringed the reserve. From there, vast flocks of cockatoos squawked a daylight reverie each morning as they embarked on their daily travels. In the evenings, they returned just as noisily to reinstall themselves before sleeping.
In late afternoon, though, the canopy of the gums is silent but for the occasional peep of one or two rosellas, painted in complementing plumages and singing of party and celebration.
“What story do you want to hear?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Any you want to tell me.”
He looked at her for a short minute, taking in every freckle and the wine-tinged blush over her cheeks. Then slowly and deliberately, he lifted himself from the ground, contracting his torso and rising to a squat. From there he leant across the repacked basket to where he had earlier laid his canvas rucksack.
The grubby bag was criss-crossed with hand-drawn caricatures etched in permanent texta; a peace sign grinned in vermillion; rainbows, buildings and skyscapes filled the gussets; and a garland of freeform daisies encircled the front pocket that bulged with the promise of a small volume shaped protrusion.
He unbuckled the closure and withdrew a small brown notebook. Its cover bore shadows of raindrops and greasy fingerprints. A large blotch of dried black ink bled from the book’s top edge across the cover and along the spine onto the its back. A corresponding Rorschach inkblot bloomed on the now empty pocket, hinting of the long ago bleeding biro.
“Choose a number.”
“27.”
He slowly opened the notebook and turned each page ’til he reached his destination. He was in no hurry, happy for this to take as long as it would take.
He gently pressed open the book, running the seat of his palm down its spine.
She shuffled along the rug ’til her head rested softly on his left thigh and her body lay perpendicular to his legs. Her hair fell gently around her shoulders and across her throat. He softly collected it in his free hand and rearranged it, gathering wayward strands that lingered around her temple and smoothed them into gently submission.
Lifting her right arm, she searched for his free hand and after balling her own, rested it gentle inside his.
“On a cold winter’s day in 1959, I scoured the shelves of my school library, searching for breathable relief from my clumsy adolescence. I stumbled across a slim volume, wrapped in smooth brown paper, but devoid of any title or other text. Excepting for a glossy black and white photograph, the cover was bare. The photo was square, about three inches by three inches and showed a man of about fifty, steadily gazing down the photographer’s lens.”
“The book was a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I was embarrassed to borrow it because the librarian was a mean spinster who ridiculed my lofty aspirations. So I stole it and kept it jammed under my mattress in case my mother discovered the absence of the witch’s inked initials on the back page.”
Over the next hour, he read memories of growing up in inner city Melbourne: brief interludes with green grocers, bank clerks, a crippled man at a pedestrian crossing, a litter of dumped kittens and a service station attendant arguing with his wife. They were short and succinct, capturing single moments of a boy’s life, each beautifully sculpted and throbbing with the intensity of lived experience.
A natural lull settled over them. Their kisses were sweet and warm.
They gathered their possessions and moved off to cars parked on the bitumen beyond the copper log fence.
And all the way home, she replayed the sound of his voice reading his life.
#mildurawritersfestival #creativevictoria #latrobeuni #writersinaction
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