Other people’s words

At the moment I am sitting in
Eleanor Dark’s studio with a rug over my knees and a heater close by, two
heaters in fact.  It’s cold in the
Blue Mountains, colder than I had imagined, but at least today the sun is
shining and the world outside – despite the dew on the grass and the bare tress
in the garden dripping with left over rain – looks almost spring like and
therefore warmer, warmer at least than yesterday when the day was over cast
from morning right through to night and there was a steady misting rain. 

I went out for only one walk into
town yesterday and did not enjoy it, not as I have enjoyed my walks through Katoomba in
the past.  But it goes in cycles.  Exhilaration to misery in as little as
five minutes.  The pressure to do
nothing but write and read and think about writing is a luxury but it’s also a
burden and for some reason I feel it more acutely this time.
I’m stuck in a well of the
familiar and I cannot get out of it.
 
In this studio, once the writing
place of Eleanor Dark, there is a series of drawers in which other writers who
have used this room have left snippets of their writing drafts, a page or two,
no more. And perched on top are two tall chests with flower embossed fronts in
which someone has placed a slip of paper with the words:
 ‘Courage is the first essential.’ 
In the next cupboard alongside but separated by mouldy dictionaries and grammar
books, this same person, I presume, has penned the words:
‘And coffee second.’
In another of the drawers below
where there are countless screeds from countless writers I found one piece that
has taken my fancy.  It’s from
an Australian poet named Jude Aquilina and it reads like this:
First
Penis Transplant
A cutting from The Herald, 2107
Today,
the first penis
transplant
was successfully
performed
on a woman in her
twenties.  I’ve always wanted
one, stated the Sydney
housewife,
to prove that
women
can wear penises too. I
don’t
intend to flash it nor
thrash
it, just use it for its
natural
purposes and I hope it
comes
in handy around the
house.  I want to invent
practical
attachments such as
dusters
and dish mops.  How
many
mothers have wished
for
an extra hand? – crossing
the
street with a child each
side,
I’ll hang my handbag on
nature’s
hook.  And when I
 go dancing on summer nights,
I’ll
wear bangles that jangle
 from side to side. I really
think
they’re going to catch
on,
Women have been without
them
far too long.  Surgeons
say
their lists are full of
women
waiting to fulfil their
masculinity;
the problem at
the
moment, unfortunately,
lies
in the lack of donors.

Clandestine visits

He told me I could drop in at any time, but could I take
him at his word?  What if his flat
mate had been right?  What if he
had a line of women who visited one after the other and I arrived at his
doorstep while he was entertaining one of them?  
I had already said good night to my mother.  My father was asleep drunk. I was alone
in my bedroom.  It was easy to
change into a dress and put on sandals. 
I did not bother to pack a bag. 
It was easy to walk out the front door on tip toes,
undetected.  My parents did not lock external doors in those days.  And so I closed my
bedroom door on what my mother could only assume was my sleeping body.
This walk along Warrigal Road in the dark under stars and
with the occasional flash of headlights did not trouble me as it might were I
on my way home at other times.   Such as after university in the evenings when I took the train from the
city to Cheltenham and then needed to walk for thirty minutes to get home.
Even as I walked along Centre Dandenong and Warrigal Roads
and avoided the side streets, I imagined footsteps behind me;
someone preparing to grab me from behind bushes.
 
On such nights I trembled all the way home, but on this night, almost midnight, when there was no one else about, I relished the solitude.
The only hurdle now involved the knock at his door and the
fear I might not be welcome.  
He was alone in bed without any of the women of my imagination beside
him.  It was easy to slip in beside
him, to hold him, to be held, to try once more this business of having sex and
then when the first rays of light were about to break through the window to dress and say goodbye. 
He offered to drive me home but I preferred to walk.  I needed to put some distance between
me and my mother.
The early morning light had an ethereal glow as if I were
in heaven and it was just cold enough to stiffen the hairs on my arms.  By
the time I had reached home, slipped through the front door and pulled the blankets
back over my head in pretend sleep, by the time my mother stuck her head around
my door to say good morning, I was hot.
 
But my mother was none the wiser, or so I suspect she’d
have liked me to think, but I will never know.
Can you imagine it, your nineteen year old daughter slips
out and is away all night long and in the morning you find her in bed in her pyjamas as usual?  
Only she knows what she’s been up
to.  You have to guess.