The Best Australian Stories 2010 (15 page)

The Page

Bound to her desk again, trying to produce
something
for her sole client. The commission: a web page for a cutting-edge Asian-fusion women's-wear label called High Tea With Mrs Woo. The site has had the word
Brewing
on it for two months now. That single word – tea-coloured and generously surrounded by undulating fleur-de-lis and promiscuous curlicues – is the only thing that separates her from rank housewife. Louise opens her computer and the nausea blooms again, infusing her like a foul tisane. It happens every time: open computer, nausea blooms. She thinks she's Pavlov's dog, the computer her bell, the nausea her saliva. She thinks everything she feels is just habituated reaction.

Brewing. Brewing. Brewing. Luckily, thinks Louise, the High Tea girls are Asian. Patient. Respectful. They knew this project would take time. They understood. Some of their dresses take an experienced seamstress twenty-eight full days to construct. Intricate wearable origami. The garments are phenomenally comfortable. Within them you are as insect in flower, nestling and hidden. Louise flips through look-cards from the current season and wonders again which piece she should buy, if she had money, if it would fit. She narrows it down to two. An orange silk floor-length halterneck gown or a black wraparound nouveau-kimono jacket. Brewing. Brewing. Brewing. The jacket might hide her gut? She draws a squat Chinese teapot and, in the steam from its spout, imagines a link to the photographs of the collection. The steaming teapot sits on a laden table. There are fortune cookies and bean cakes and tiny teacups with koi. And then she is cut with the frenzied, rasping scream of a baby being tortured in its flannelette swaddle, abandoned, dying. Louise gently closes the computer. Milk. Milk. Milk. One litre of milk is enough for forty cups of tea, or one hungry baby. She pushes her palms together.

Dough

‘Honey! I'm home! I bought you that breadmaker you've been wanting for ages!'

Louise walks to the front door, frowning.

‘That
what
I've been wanting?'

‘The breadmaker! I researched them and I've bought the super deluxe model that bips so you can add sultanas and nuts, or herbs, or whatever you want mid-cycle? So they don't get crushed by the kneading?'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘The breadmaker! You said they were great and you had to get one, when we went to that kid's ridiculous one-month-old birthday party that time? Remember?'

Louise turns and walks back to the kitchen.

‘Louise?'

‘The dinner's burning.'

‘But I thought you wanted one.'

‘Tom,' she says and spins around, blinking at him like she's trying to clear oil from her eyes, ‘I was lying?'

All This Came from Their One Little Slip

It is tiny and blind and squints when it looks up at her. Squints through opaque blue eyes that are always searching for her, waiting for her. And Tom's body is so hard and always ready, always waiting for her too. Muscular, masculine, gorgeous, terrifying in its ready waiting. And Louise's body – she peeks down at the flabby contours as she steps out of the shower – is this white dough, risen and soft and waiting also, waiting to be punched down or something. And it seems to her that she is separate from all of them that make up this nice little family.

Among Surgeons, a Fat Gut Is Called an Apron

Jewel from High Tea With Mrs Woo calls. Louise imagines Jewel holding her iPhone against the shiny hair that bobs above her origami clothes. Black on black on black. Luckily Louise has changed, and is sitting at her desk in ballet slippers and red lipstick, so she can pose with fingers draped over her forehead, other hand cradling her Bakelite phone.
Sure, sure. The cascading
style sheets are the struggle.
She is sweating.
Yeah, look. It's almost there. I should have the mock-up to you by Friday latest.
The tone is important. There's only High Tea between herself and obliteration. Only this single-thread page. She shakes her hair like a wet dog, trying to clear the fog, and looks down at what she has. Sepiatoned curlicues are not very Asian, but still. She closes her eyes and pushes hard against her eyelids. She once read this could make you faint. She is, in truth, so tired she could splinter, and fainting sounds like bliss. She walks to the bedroom and stands in front of the wardrobe mirror just to check there's something that sort-of-looks-pretty-much-like-her-with-a-stomach really there.
Mother fucker
. She steps closer. She barely fits inside. Breath from her hot lips fogs the mirror and her face disappears.

Check-up

Louise straps the baby's bassinet into the car and drives to her doctor. She's cancelled the appointment three times and is too embarrassed not to turn up. Although she does not need a doctor. What she needs is a new body and a new wardrobe. A new car would be nice – a two-seater convertible. Tom's okay for now, as is the house, but everything else she needs renewed. A doctor cannot help her with this. She skulks inside the surgery, hands her Medicare card to the receptionist, places the bassinet on the floor, baby lulled to sleep by the drive, and takes a seat. She has the first appointment after lunch and is the only patient waiting. She looks at the clock on the pastel blue wall. What does a doctor eat for lunch? Probably lettuce. Mesclun. Radicchio. Mache. Dr Taylor, mid-forties, looking like every other female GP Louise has ever known – sort of mouse-brown and
inoffensive
– calls her in. Louise hauls the bassinet into the room and sets it down again with a sigh. The child is still asleep.

‘So,' says Dr Taylor, hands on her knees, and then smiles in that way they do.

Louise raises her eyebrows and tries to smile back.

‘How old is the little one now?'

‘Three months.'

‘And how's it all going?'

‘Oh, it's fine.' Dr Taylor has a large, bright-red tomato-sauce stain on her cream cardigan, just above her right breast. Louise can't help but stare.

The doctor looks down, touches the sauce stain. ‘I shouldn't wear cream, I do this
every
time. I'm absolutely hopeless.'

And suddenly Louise is crying. ‘I'm sorry,' she sobs into her palms, ‘I never do this, I never cry in public. I don't know what's got into me, I'm fine, really.'

‘You never cry in public? God, you should try it, gets you great seats on the train.'

Louise smiles faintly, tears trek down her cheeks. ‘I'm just so tired … and … so bored … I could start peeling my skin for entertainment. What's wrong with me? Isn't this supposed to be heaven on earth?'

‘Yes. Well. I don't know about that. But. Well. Are you sleeping?'

Louise shakes her head. ‘Barely.'

‘How's your appetite?'

Louise snorts and smacks at a thigh.

‘Intimate relations?'

Louise blinks at the ceiling. ‘The milk.' She waves her hand in front of her breasts. ‘And,' she says, waving her hand over her lap, lowering her voice, ‘it's dryish.'

‘Topical oestrogen will help with that. I'll give you a script. But Louise, do you imagine hurting yourself?'

Louise shakes her head. ‘I'm not going to kill myself. I'm just … unhappy.'

‘You know, some mothers adore this very-young-baby stage. They love the helplessness or dependence maybe. Or they find every little event – wee, poo, burp, fart, the lot – fascinating. And then there are mothers who only start to enjoy themselves when the kid starts to talk … That was definitely me, I can tell you.'

‘Really?'

‘
Hated
the first twelve months, every time. Adore them beyond belief now they're in school.'

Louise smiles and closes her eyes. She opens them. ‘Can I have some diet pills?'

Dr Taylor laughs.

Tuesday

The cries, and cries, and the cries. She picks it up and it blinks long, wet eyelashes. The lips are pink and smell like sweetest milk. She brushes them against her cheek. The baby is happy to let her do it. It is happy just to feel her. All it wants is her skin and her milk. It's Tuesday, but she cannot face all those struggling-to-be-brave faces. She stays at home in a crisp clean white slip, without trousers. Barefoot and barefaced she feels her soft thighs rub against each other and, for the first time, it does not repulse her. It feels only soft. Soft and baby-powder dry. She potters in the kitchen, her baby in a sling. She makes a tomato sandwich, throws chicken, onions and wine into a cast-iron pot, reads the bread-maker instruction booklet. In the afternoon she lies on the bed with the baby on her chest. She hums an old song:
We'll start at the
very beginning, a very good place to start …
She lets it gorge, watches the eyes blink their magnificent lashes, lips against her skin.

‘Hey, baby, if you tell me I'm beautiful I'll give you milk till you're ten.' Baby eyes open and look up. ‘There's a good girl.'

*

She wakes to the sound of Tom opening the front door, the baby asleep in the crook of her arm. Tom drops his bag in the hallway and calls out, ‘Lou? Lou-Lou? … Mmm! Fresh bread!'

Little White Slips

The Eunuch in the Harem

Ryan O'Neill

From
The Sydney Review
, 23 August 1999

The Grass Cadillac
By Frank Harmer
Porlock Press, 96pp, $22

Reviewed by Peter Crawley

Reading
The Grass Cadillac
is a unique experience. It is the first book of poems I have ever read which does not include a single line of poetry. The collection marks the literary debut of Queensland writer Frank Harmer, a name I spent a good half-hour trying to rearrange into an anagram of Ern Malley, so sure was I that some trick was being played on me. But even Ern, I suspect, would not have tried to palm these poems off to an editor, no matter how gullible. To say that the verses in this substantial volume approach mediocrity would be a compliment. Mediocrity does not figure even on the horizon of this book, though ignorance looms large. Harmer has no idea about what alliteration or onomatopoeia are, and I suspect he thinks that a metaphor is someone who fights bulls.

As an example, let us turn for a moment (though this is being overgenerous with our time) to the first poem in the book, ‘The Melting Clock.' The title is apparently an allusion to Dali, and the poem an elegy to a dead dog, or a love letter to a married woman,
I can't decide which. But then, neither could Harmer. The first line is ‘Th'e ni'g''ht cas''cades wh''en she's aw''ay / cuck'old, empo'wer ti'll da'y's da'wn.'

This reads like a poem generated by computer, though surely a computer would do a better job. For some reason most of the poems are punctuated in the above manner, with swarms of apostrophes hovering like flies over the dead verse.

Whilst there is nothing that resembles anything so coherent as a ‘theme' in
The Grass Cadillac
, the ‘poet' himself appears regularly, every two or three pages, like a dog marking its territory. Sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the second, and sometimes in the third, as ‘Harmer.' Unfortunately these three people together do not add up to half a writer.

If the reader can progress past the first twelve poems there is some respite to be had in ‘To My Coy Wife,' at thirteen pages the longest poem in the book, and thankfully free of apostrophes. The 608 lines of this epic begin, ‘I am comforted by your sock / that I carry into the twilight of luckbeams / held next to my philtrums' and grinds on in the same way, with little rhyme and no reason, reaching its zenith with ‘I am filled with hope / that I may dry your tears of semen / so that we may grind as one / labia to labia / in search of the magnificent rainbow of love.'

I will not weary the reader with any more of Harmer's work, though it is tempting to offer a line or two from the accurately titled ‘Shitlines' or a particularly rancid image from ‘The Belly of the Dead Baby.' After I had finished reading the collection, I considered not writing a review at all, in order to spare a new poet embarrassment. But Harmer is obviously proud of his work and eager to show it off, in the same way a newly toilet-trained child is proud and eager to show off the contents of its potty.

A great writer once said that criticising a poem was like attacking a butterfly with a bazooka. That may be so, but when the poem is not a butterfly, but a cockroach, then I believe that the critic is justified in the attack. If, as scientists believe, cockroaches can survive a nuclear bomb, then Mr Harmer's poems will survive the winter of this review. I can only hope that they may be driven into the dark, under the floorboards, where they belong.

The most attractive image in
The Grass Cadillac
is the photograph which adorns the front cover. The caption on the dust jacket informs me that the bookish-looking man is Frank Harmer himself, and the beautiful woman beside him his wife. If that is so, then I can only congratulate Mr Harmer on his luck and advise him that he would be better to concentrate on creating the patter of tiny feet, instead of iambic ones.