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LOVE QUEST
1.
Where's your mother? Isn't she coming to pick you up? A big coat stood outside the school gates. He had already eaten two of my girlfriends down by the sewerage pipe, licking their knees in the reeds and chewing up their hem lines. I couldn't say that my mother would be here soon. I didn't trust her to love me. Instead, I awaited the presence of the slack-jawed sharpie or the truckies that honked their horns all the way through to The Blue Mountains. The lonely kids who stood along the school boundaries applauded them as heroes. He said, 'I have a big cock inside my trousers. I could split your body in two like an apple.' It looked like a finger bun but it could have been a spider. He wanted to hurt me. The feeling was of crooked teeth, stale lollies, smashed bottles, car boots and plastic bags. It was of never coming back to my bedroom. I sent out a silent scream and then another that only the school oval butterflies could hear. The school bell rang out. He was ugly, very ugly. He was drinking custard from a yellow carton. He spat some out onto the concrete. 'What's that?' 'Custard,' I said. 'What is it really?' Now it was sloshing down his lumpy dry throat. He was like a pelican gurgling, then throwing up, a muddy New Zealand geezer. 'It's custard,' I said. 'No,' he said. 'It's sprog.' Finally I became indignant. 'It's custard from a cow's tits!' The form mistress was calling out from a long way off. She wanted to play the piano for us. The custard man and form mistress represented two distinct doorways. The world was empty light from where I stood. When I turned back around, he was gone. With most children now safely inside, a platypus fled from the old storm water drain. Still no sign of Cheryl, Leanne.
2.
To my vain cold-hearted mother, I was the original ugly duckling. She collected the money from my father and stored up her emotions for the rainy day that she hoped would offer freedom. Beneath her pink petticoat and satin slipper, she was that violent man I was with who said, 'I'm going to slash your face with a knife, so that no other man will ever want you.' She slashed my heart vigorously. The terrible wound remained raw and bloody. It was more like the rage in a cyclone battering down streets than a sad disaster. Yet unlike the other deluded women, she wanted her Prince Charming, and enticed them with her long legs and slender waistline. But her face was grey, washed out and starved with longing. She couldn't attract that which waited patiently inside herself, with a basket full of poison apples. Often she said, 'I could have been anything I wanted. I could have played the piano or been a ballerina, but for you. I could have had all the men in the world!' You waited for your mother to love you, always silence. The tree drowned billabong appeared to weep with curlews in the barren rural landscape. You waited for signals that you imagined would arrive. One summer an unexpected thing happened that people often talk about. It felt like a god had caught you unprepared and presto! When he walked in with the message of the glass slipper, your ears pricked up instinctively. A dog once looked at you with tender eyes, so you had not given up. Yet the signals of love had never been received to be interpreted. Soon you began to try and capture a thousand invisible butterflies. You knew their wings were orange and velvet mauve. You could feel them gently fanning your heart. But you had to go on instinct. Now you must listen carefully, when this brave man loves you in his many ways. If at first you must understand it, like the Leopard Wood Tree receives wind through its aridity, then do it, but do not look at him with empty eyes, asking him to love you twice.
3.
Hmmm, fancy yourself as a bit of a knight in shining armor do you? He ventured too close to the cave entrance again. A solitary dragon entered the prehistoric landscape of love. There was an element of mysticism in the air, carbon, nitrogen. Just lick me once there, like you really mean it. And like your tongue is a firm genital. That's right. Now I'm ready for you. It was really your cock that I wanted. Smoke coils from the nostrils of the sad beast. Oh, my breasts. They are soft flesh, so unlike fruit. Oh, and oh your lean muscular body like an Aussie Rules player or so you say, or a lawyer, and we are stumbling down those steps together, reptile slayer. To the basement, sweet knight! Hold my hand. You are not even here. So you won't die. Where did I go again? Damn, I've lost my wristwatch and where's my stupid mobile phone? For crying out loud on choppy seas in the high tide of the tropical harbour, I've moved through time and we are bucking like a yacht. I did promise myself no more Australian men. Now I've gone and broken the rules again. Hey, cute expression. And so she rolled over, bright blonde hair like a trawler net catching her shoulders in knots. She said, 'I need a cigarette and I don't even smoke!' Suddenly born, transformed, captured by the sails of his shirt. Go away, sweetheart. I am crying like a dragon from a dying kingdom. Making a silver web of isolation in my corner of caverns. And there is my childhood, sunning her legs on the front steps. She always arrives like a fairy to the garden of lizards. She wants me to read her the story. Really, I don't need you to understand. In this state of mind I could conquer a castle, an island. Poor prehistoric fiend, so gruesome, lonely and emerald. That's the spell I'm under. You really are sweet, love. But I must get back to sweeping up my hair. So nice to have had you, so nice for you to have come here, to my castle in the air.
4.
My father's penis floated on the water in the bath. It was the biggest one we had ever seen, apart from the dogs. It was like one of those paper boats racing down a storm water channel on a street, with the wild shrieking kids all chasing after it. It was connected to his body, but it could go anywhere. Dale whispered, 'dad's got a big dick!' We sniggered like fools. Brendon poked his tongue out behind his glasses with the black patch over one eye. His tongue looked like it! We stifled a shriek, our tears squeezing out. We would have chased dad's body bit like enthusiastic dogs, if he had suddenly thrown it over a cliff. 'Shut-up you idiots,' I said. We had found the secret treasure of adulthood. 'Get away from your father you lot!' mum called out. We almost died by her discovery. The bath water swirled and shifted. We guessed that dad's eyes were on the open bathroom door. I had only met my father in his sullen black suit, half turned away, drunk and smoking. I'd never met his private part and my brothers were curious. We didn't want to hear about his job. We wanted to see him naked and know he was our protector. He was embarrassed and tried to shut the door without getting out of the bath. We heard him move, the pale Loch Ness monster. The worn grey water sucked up beneath his massive hairy legs and we raced down the hallway as excited as pups. Our small heads peeking around the corners, to await the great sinking of the suburban water beast. Once the soap was lifted we returned. It was so odd it frightened us. There was nothing sexually charged about it, just that my father had became a man. His penis was simply what my brother's bodies would become. It was vulnerable like a pink sea slug awash on his stomach. He was a floating log of skin. Soon the bath water turned milky with soap and his penis sank to the bottom. It waited for him to lift himself out.
5.
He was waiting at the corner table in his green suit, smoking a slim cigar. The big fake looked like he was straight off Neighbours. I didn't like him from the start but he was handsome, so I stayed to listen. It was like mopping a hundred floors for a few pennies. He was very sophisticated and witty, or so he would have liked me to believe. 'You're too good for me.' I was writing down my own phone number in order to identify myself and dropped my pen on the purple shag pile carpet. When I reached down to pick it up the view was shattered. It was beneath the table that I found him, a huge pair of patterned leather riding boots, shining out from the emerald green creases of his suit pants. This is a highly incongruous dress code. Forty-five minutes and a few red wines later, as the bar was filling up, he said, 'did you know that Jews have big noses? Look at that one sitting over there. Hey, big nose are you are Jew?' My mouth opened, slightly downturned. 'It's not what you think,' he reassured me. 'I am very interested in Jewish culture. They have great comedians like Seinfeld and Bob Dylan. He's a Jew. So it Stephen Spielberg'. 'So why are you having a drink with me?' I asked. He said, 'my partner and I need recruits to go to our parties.' 'Partner?' 'Yes,' he said smiling. 'We do it with other interested couples in SS uniforms, mainly in other people's loungerooms.' I imagined a humid, jealous and hung-up situation of swapping. A mirage of groaning hair and tongues, the faded underpants and loose elastic. 'Really and what about the cheap suits that detectives wear, do you have any of them hanging around?' 'No,' he said, 'only militaristic stuff.' 'Huh?!' I suddenly snapped. 'If you can't get hold of a good police uniform there's something fucking up! Look, I've heard enough for one night. I specifically requested a detective, not a Nazi. What the hell do those people think they're playing at?! Last week it was a landscape gardener! That's it, I'm ringing the fucking agency.'
6.
That damn blue dog, he loves me like a slobbered-on ball. His sleek body is streamline silver, like the car we all want to drive. His fat bushy tail whips and shakes me like a fan or a yacht's rudder sliding sideways from an open sea. I abandon my arms around his big blue shoulders and hang on like a bikie chick. We travel this land and he never lets me out of his sight. What I love is his boof head and the way my hand rests on his forehead, broad like a rowboat. His tongue is a smile that he drags along beside himself, as he runs to catch the wind in his mouth. He is flying big colourful kites across the landscapes of childhoods, as all good dogs must. That damn blue dog he loves me and I love him. There's so much staring going on that he's forgotten to eat his dinner and I've forgotten to clean my teeth. Nine years later we can function in love. His shadow falls across my knees and we run. We are the happy hopeless combination. He's my honey, my dream of possibility. He sees the heaven in me and I feel good, solid, wanted. I'm not alone in this fabled kingdom. I adore his soft brown eyes like plunge pools in the Kimberly region. He is dreaming me into a deep landscape and I appear before him with a brush, a dish, a leash and ball transformed. Dogs don't need much and they have given the world its perfect head start on sorrow. He is my centre of attention and he knows it. All faith is restored and joy is suddenly as common as water. This earth has one hundred percent good left on the shaky platform of its crust and I intend to live and breath it. Tomorrow we will go to Casuarina Beach so that the waves drag his tail down, and he will shake wet salt at the shells and smile in his boyish cock-eyed way. He jumps into my arms and if he's allowed to be naughty, he would dissolve in my throat like a sweet. That damn blue dog he's my baby, because of him, I love easily and he just loves me.
7.
This magician gave me sovereignty, throwing the power back at me. I caught the big broad sun and laughed. His masculinity was thunder in a landscape that awaited seasonal rains. He made sudden lightning embedded in Norlangie stone. A few pioneer droplets and I was present in the Top End dawn, a territory rose on the side of the highway. I turned pale pink and my breath was scented across his cheek. It was good to be changing colour after a long dry stretch. When he kissed my hand, I fell down. This was not a weak falling but a stronger one, knowing the place I was living in would catch me. It is a silly girl falling through clouds made of mist, after dreaming they were cotton. Innocence that cannot be transformed, beyond its own bright energy. It was safe to close my eyes while his strong lips were in the centre of my palms. There was nothing bad about him that frightened me. He was like my dog and I don't mean stupid, I mean good and loving. He is open-minded. He said, 'I don't know much but I'd like to understand.' He did everything perfectly. Either he is perfect or the most brilliant con-artist I've ever met. Since I had met the best, I settled for the perfection theory. Soon I had to have his smooth bare chest against my own. I heard his gentle music like a koel through the vine forest canopy, a strange heartbeat outside the door of my tropical shelter. I heard it beat out for rescue on my front steps, a human animal strange and forlorn. He was a young Kakadu dingo, strong but a little unsteady. Rebecca was a white-tailed deer. She said, 'if you catch a frog and kiss him and he changes into a handsome prince, throw him back in.' The next day her daughter kissed my forearms. I stayed who I was, but I was now a receiver of loving acts. I require simple things. Music and sunlight are two of them. Everyone wants to be loved. Some precious flowers are best untouched, but human beings are not flowers. |
