I pause my concentration like a video still and there is that exquisite moment of quiet I have never had except just before and just after the wave of an orgasm hits. And I am thinking, what is the next move when every move is equivalent and each of them involves a reward and a risk. And thanks for the memory. The sheer sweep of the words as they whip around me. "I am I and my name is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and then oh then I could yes I could I could begin to cry but why why could I begin to cryÉ (In the distance there is daylight and near to there is none.) So, if we arrive at that point which is the beginning of the day, it is called dawn, and we look out across the ocean we will see the sun coming up like a big fat and most determined creature. The fantasies run amok amongst the girls and we all run screaming across the vast reaches of the sand and we are racing, suddenly, these shifts of purpose so perplexing, into the water, into the sea and there we are. Wet through in our best frocks and who cares? Maybe only the hire company who managed to find for us a series of bridesmaid frocks that match and fit us.
It has been a long night.
In Broome I sat there and read Running in the Family and ignored all of the drama. The drama, first, of the commencement of the day -- that fat red thing rising up again like a sea monster. The drama, second, of the love affair that would not work. It was a stand-off, a waste of time, a war without words and for what? We just decided, once I stepped off the plane, that we wouldn't like each other. Easy as that. Me in my preposterous shoes and my cry baby act away from home. Her in her desert mode: a distant and enigmatic phase. Nomadic no doubt. Later, years later, she apologised (or was that in my dreams?). In the boardroom John Elliott the tycoon opens a bottle of Grange Hermitage from 1990. He is such a democratic chap, this one. But look here, the troops are drinking another wine, an inferior drop. That is what they get. That is what he can pay for. The difference between them is as bland and as obvious as that.
Ah! Linguini served with rosemary and caramelised onion. And a good olive oil. Let's drink a verdelho from the Hunter Valley. Hello!
She keeps it quiet and that's not hard. She hadn't changed the sheets on her bed for almost two years. Not since that last boy escaped. She is offering herself a living memorial of a carnal life so she won't forget. I swear, people must have got the whiff of nuttiness because nobody'll come near her now. She's finished -- in the box labelled Eccentric -- Dangerous to the Health of Others. And somewhere between regulated childhood and adult responsibility had stopped cleaning her teeth at night. Mornings were still regular -- to clear out the cocky's cage as her old grandad used to say. But somehow the other ritual slipped off the perch. One day soon, let's hope someone buys her some new sheets. She'll need them. She is the one with another nutty idea (although not all of her nuttiness is expressed in ideas). That a gay man is somehow the equivalent of a woman where a heterosexual man can never be. Her warped logic let her confide in him, even sleep with him for comfort, be with a man in a freer manner. It's OK, he's gay!
You said that I'd never find anyone as good as you if I searched the rest of my life.
You said that opportunities come as a package with you.
You said: stick by me, learn from me. It will be worth it. And, trust me.
Help! Somebody else entered my dream space AND my diary! Remove those thoughts immediately.
No, it is true, my young woman. And don't you ever forget it.
When I was eleven I had a boyfriend. This was when we lived in a town with not enough young single women, where the Malay and Japanese pearl divers and labourers were sentenced to an odd celibate life. That is, I think, why he came after me. But didnŐt I, too, go after him. I was innocent and I met him at the beach after school with my horse and my friend with her horse. She was older; her boyfriend also Malay. They got caught and I think he was flogged or run out of town. I learnt how to kiss with my gentle grown-up man who touched me with great modesty on my breasts. Who also touched my tummy but no further. It was always with a flat hand, my favourite touch still. I can remember his smell: baby powder and grown-up musky. Nicer than any other man I have smelled. I'm shocked to remember how young I was. The sacrifices of girls in the town: until other rivalries in the schoolyard surfaced, when girls were overlooked and others chosen, this pre-pubescent carnival ran smoothly. And then once anonymous letters were circulated to headmasters and parents, there was hell to pay.
"Every board sent down to Aircraft Production carries on it the number of the log from which it was cut and that log number is an index of its place of origin, its location there, its kind of soil, its stance, whether straight or leaning, its position, sheltered or exposed. In short, its log number is a dialectical record of the tree." Along the road and we are driving pretty fast, faster than the limit and we are listening to music very loud. Being melodramatic, wistful, tortured even. It is Henryk Gorecki's Symphony Number One. Before it was used as advertising music, before we heard Marilyn Richardson sing it at the Adelaide Town Hall with our dying friend. You braked and I thought we were gone. We spun around a bit and made a lot of noise. A bungarra on the road, a big goanna, standing to attention there on our lane. We all looked at each other for a few minutes and then had to drive on. (Surely you could have just swerved.) We were driving through the Valley of the Giants. Big trees. A forest of them. Looking for a cottage we found easily where a friend was cooking and had booked out all of her eight tables both nights of that weekend to satisfy her desire to make food people would praise her for. We went twice. My main memory is of the Rhubarb Betty. Who was it named after?
In forests begin kangaroos. And those big red creatures, two of them, stood to attention on the side of the road on the way home from the first night of dining. Upright like that they must have been eight foot tall. Maybe more. In his house he has these impossibly long tables: stretches of karri turned into tables for a ship, for the Captain's table. The surface is supposed to be empty unless you are eating, but he keeps leaving post-it notes and unpaid bills and his lists of who to avoid in order to stay as happy as possible. Ruins that good effect. And he's stopped inviting anyone over, so he eats his dinner on his lap in a reclining rocker. He feels foolish sitting alone at one of those tables.
A dream of an ensemble on stage and the featured player is on typewriter. It looks a bit like a harpsichord but it's a Remington Rand.
Tawdry details that are imprinted on everyone's memory -- it's such a shame -- there is more to life than this -- did it happen to us all? Being the other woman and lying in bed with him and firstly he has to go to the bathroom and shoot up. What? He is a diabetic, he tells me patiently. No sooner is he back and I'm already wishing I was home. And then a car drives up into the carport right next to the bed and he says it's his wife. It's the middle of the night I say. She must be able to smell that there is a woman in the house because she pauses at the door makes a sound that is like a little angry sound and hops back in the car and drives away. And so do I as soon as I can. It takes about ten minutes. Separated from musculature and the mass of what is usually there, it becomes ghost-trading; movement and the body different elements. These ghosts multiply and dance together, dance in my head and I already have the choreography plotted. What to say and what to leave out. He has removed the flesh and blood, banished that; the siblings look at him and what they see is how they will look in their dying. It's strange: he is the youngest of them but there has been an acceleration -- he has aged in front of them and most of them have been looking. In dreams begin responsibilities. I'm detaching myself from a concept of home, looking to land anywhere and feel comfortable and happy. It's working. The illness of living through a life span longer than we were built for means there is no turning back. Parts of the body, specific organs, wear out. It's a cumulative effect that finally clunks down to a close. But wait! Here is a new face. New breasts. That unsightly fold of fat on the rear side of the forearm gone. We had to go to Mexico to manage it all because we were greedy and wanting everything, showing only lines and paths that are left, a de-commissioned living: traces, crystalline threads on the edges of former body occupation. I'm distracting myself with questions about traces, the ghostliness of boys who are really men in jumpers knitted by Mum who can't knit but they can't tell her to stop. They are loyal sons once and for all. We were attracted to each other because we looked just like each other. Same shape, same colouring, same general everything. We even share a diary. It makes sense. She should let herself go more often. The women in the office hunger for some action, sure it would unleash her happiness. She hasn't recovered since she was a hippy and the mainstream ripped off all of their ideas. It's intellectual property! Everyone believes it all and they never did when we were warning them. My dad tells me a story about three people who lived together when we were in Broome. A married couple and a man. Everyone thinks they are having it off, as they say, that it is a kinky little scene. What the couple is doing, my dad reckons, is protecting the gay bloke from being in a town that didn't like poofs. The woman at the corner deli says, the first time she has deigned to speak to me: They put a man on the moon: you'd think they could have fixed up our periods by now. My dad again: singing Don't cry for me Ike and Tina, the truth is I never met you. They hang the big cross at the front of the house to keep bad things away after a series of disasters. What John Howard has given me, the one thing: the correct definition of fulsome. I always thought it meant something else. There is a noise that dancers make sometimes in performance that is so primal. It's the best sound, a rhythmic aahohhh. It comes after breath and exertion.
The artist is perfectly made for her artistry. Her soft musculature: the folding curving shoulders make her quite self-sufficiently comfortable for hours and days on end. Her wide and comfortable bottom gives her no trouble at all.
I am in a routine of visiting, getting to know these people without ever expecting that it will come to anything yet at some point, last week, I find the well-worn path to their door and into their private lives, into their confidences, and I realise that the friendship is fully fledged. We are intimates without even trying. Strong ties link us. I found a cheery mask for this social occasion. Her name was Kalevala Nirvana. She made it up herself and she was very pleased with it. Her original name was Sunflower A Seagull and she had tired of that. She whistles through her teeth and not only in winter when you might expect it. She learnt that one from her father. She goes to see Laura Nyro in concert and her daughter is also in the audience. Daughter wishes mother didn't look so silly and had combed her hair and not worn that witches gown. She believes her mother is a victim of righteous fundamentalism. When I went home I walked through the park: the epicentre of the community. No names. Around it in rings the world goes about its business. In here protected there is sociability and some from that of safety. I am too sociable and I stand and chat to the park friends and I have my back to a breathtaking sunset. They tell me when it is finished. Our faces faced each other and after some of those tender, bold and probing moves I thought, why not? So we kiss and then this is what I do. I unhinge one of my breasts from all of the layers of garments and I offer it to him. I have never done anything like this before and yet my only feeling of self-consciousness comes much, much later, after he has stopped concentrating on my face. I colour crimson. Why did I do it like that after he had told me of himself in baby photographs looking like a scarecrow, not connected to any maternal warmth. He took my breast but it was not the act of a mother: it just approximated one. We are at the beach right now, the noise of the surf is so loud we can barely hear each other. Nearby are other people we don't know. How come we can hear every one of their words and not our own? The woman says, just to remind him, I will make you pay every day of your life for your indiscretion. You need to slough it off, honey, is his reply. He could not care less, by the sounds of him. I want to find a book of abstraction that I can follow, so I can throw out the others and get on with the day. I'm facing west, and west is best. Ours is the century of displacement and west is best. Going down and being immersed in a river. Take me to it, wash me in it. Please. In his essay "The Storyteller", Walter Benjamin writes of the aura of the storytellers in earlier times. The students and the old men gather around tables in synagogues to ward off the melancholy of dusk. My imagination yields a grandfather remembering: Our faith had such a beautiful shape. The sound of prayer and song, the holiness of the people mixed with their love. It was together -- one and the same thing. I still recall an event that took place in our shtetl when I was a small boy. A cantor and his choir visited for the Sabbath. Although it was at the beginning of my life I heard nothing as sweet since. We walked along the river when we left the synagogue and we were a family together. My mother wore a brooch with tiny pieces of precious glass. I pressed my childŐs face upon her wonderful bosom, always warm and welcoming of her sons, and the edges of the brooch made an imprint on my face. ŇBring, bring, bring peace, goodness, and blessingÓ. It has been so much time passed since I felt like a righteous Jew. William Carlos Williams cries in a poem I am lonely, I was born lonely, I am best so. The balance: lonely or otherwise? I am sitting up high and it is late and I am alone. My face reflected in the window I face. These words keep loneliness at bay -- it is not even an idea to consider. Tonight, a woman was discussed who has not one single friend, not even, really, her old dad who she still lives with. She fills up her days with books and films and music. And so do I. But I also talk on the phone and I fall in love. I love, and cease to love. And the residue? A bedrock, a starting point. They seep and lodge elsewhere in the world. The words mean other things by now so let's just take this slowly in the speed factory. Let's remember September and plan to take that pony ride around the park, the biggest park in the world. I was unable to harness my thoughts and so I went home and read the blazon in the hall and I put myself into bed and covered my head. I stayed there until I was dead and they removed me. And still the people in the street and at the Royal Commission yell until they are hoarse just tell us where the money went! Some fellas collect stamps, some barbed wire, some girlfriends, some bottletops. I collect Elvis stuff. And what about funny names? Margaret Smellie Thatcher in the Death Notices in 1995. What sort of a misery must her life have been for those fifteen years? When it was over we parted with a shake of hands, said see ya but we never did. Kafka and the sight of the nightshirts on his parents' beds, laid out for the night. That is an argument against his marriage. And so is being alone, but that is also a reason for marriage. The balance is the hardest thing.
She said to me I'm eager to get beyond talking about my transsexualism so that we can talk about Virginia Woolf. But first of all, I love you. And meantime the music gets wilder in the clubs each year. More risks, noisier, grander, more ambitious.
I do a crow dance around you on my bed, on the bed, and then the ceiling falls in, the sky perhaps. I scare myself in my funny pose, crouching, arms dangling, a focus of my hairy parts. I'm in love with shapes, with letting myself lose some control, I want to go wild, and I am. You, on my bed, are aroused by my wild crow dance, my jumping and humping. Bold with my bravado. A perfect mastery, back where I started. I admit all of my pleasures. Writing my primary erotic expression now, entering into new spaces and explorations. The making, over and again; the erotics of learning and testing out this, and then that. It is spreading all over this joy, my face now pink, I am primed, opened up. What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. We went to bed together, and we both notice something we could not have noticed before when we were fully clothed. Our hands are identical hands. Same shape, colour, with our experience etched into them.
The shameful impermeability of flesh. The door locked and you trembling behind it.