The weather is a dictator

Morning. Against the warble of magpies and the call of the currajongs another day emerges, still cool but there’s heat ahead. You can feel it in the way the sap sighs in the trees. The ground dusty and dry through long days of heat. 

The last time I was in a plane, above the weather

At one point in my dreams that skip away as fast as running water down a plug hole, I stand at an ancient laundry trough shoving dirty clothes into a primitive washing machine desperate to reduce the pile beside me.

My wealthy friend leans against the tub nearby, and I sense her contempt for my pitiable ways. Washerwoman and nothing more.  Elsewhere in my dream I was the wealthy one who offered to lend money to a friend with whom I worked. She told me she could not manage a bill that had come in unexpectedly. She had no one to help other than her father who was past it.

In my dream I selected a woman who lives around the corner. Why her? She of the bottled red hair that sits on her head like a red beret. We talk dogs whenever we walk past one another. Her warmth and friendliness towards all who pass, the more remarkable for her dog who seems subdued.

Angus, who has taken the place of another dog who died years ago and whom the woman in my dream preferred. 

Dreams of money and mess and people. Alongside the red caterpillars of dermatitis that crawl up my arms as though they are flowers in bloom.

I do not know what gets into me these days. Fear of Covid. Fear of failure. Fear of death. The muddy cold of winter days or the searing heat of summer.

The weather is a dictator. It decides on how you might feel from one moment to the next. And it is capricious.

Paul’s friend, Roman, had thin reddish hair and his right eye was milky white from disuse. He hung about on the edges, a man of limited confidence but friendly enough towards me, while enthralled with Paul. His off sider at the races. He went with us once on a picnic along with a group of my friends, who were polite towards him and Paul’s other racing cronies, but the two groups never gelled. 

We went one day to Anakie. In search of deer. Paul was experimenting with hunting the only wildlife you could hunt in the bushland of Victoria, deer gone feral. I disliked the idea of a bloodied corpse once the bullet had been dispensed but tagged along with Roman for the companionship and chance to be close to Paul for a day. 

Who was I then? A twenty-year-old child-woman with no mind of her own. No plans to speak of, other than to finish her university degree if luck would have it and to spend the rest of her life in his company. 

Babies one day maybe, but short of accidentally falling pregnant which had not happened, this young woman knew very little about herself other than that she dislikes raw onion.

She still does.

Your underwear is showing

Last night after dinner I walked with my daughter, each of us with a dog on the lead. We walked behind a woman whose dress was caught in her underpants. Though I could not be sure. The dress might be designed that way, a type of culottes. But the woman was my age at least and not someone likely to show off her legs.

‘Do we tell her?’ I asked my daughter. 

‘No, it’s too awful,’ she said, though agreed it was unkind to leave the woman in ignorance. 

When we caught up, I told the woman about her dress. 

‘That’s so embarrassing,’ she said and wrenched her skirt down, then smoothed it with her hand. ‘Thanks,’ she said without making eye contact. 

My daughter and I crossed the road to take the quick walk around the block and avoid the evening heat. That’s when I remembered Mrs P who took us for music when I was in year eight. 

One day Mrs P stood in the concert hall and glared down at us from her place on the dais, which she shared with a piano. There was also a black board behind the piano onto which she turned to write down notes on a set of lines: a gorgeous treble clef in first place. Crotchets and quavers, and demi semi quavers. 

I loved the written language of music. The words for each sign, each black ball with its accompanying tag that told you how long to hold the beat. The open circled ball a full beat, unlike the dark connected quavers. 

When she moved off the piano stool after playing the notes of the doh ray mi and stood to mark these notes on the board, we saw that Mrs P’s dress was caught in her underpants. Her thick fleshy thighs showed all the way down to curve of her bottom. Midway you could see the point where the top of her stockings joined the lines of her suspender belt. No neat panty hose in those days. They had only just come in and were the clothing of the rich and fashionable, not a lowly schoolteacher, a music teacher to boot within the Catholic system whose wages were notoriously less than in the protestant system. 

Our teachers, and especially the nuns, taught for the love of God alone. Out of duty to educate the young. Mrs P, a lay teacher earned a salary, but not enough to get her out of this hideous situation where girls tittered at her exposed behind. Me among them. 

No one told Mrs P that her dress was caught in her underpants and when the bell rang, she left the hall. We filed after her onto the quadrangle and I watched her round behind go up and down in rhythm with her steps. 

What would she think when hopefully one of her fellow teachers finally told her that her dress was not as it should be? How long before someone spared her the greater embarrassment of spending an entire day unknowing that her underpants were showing?