Tag: Anchor and hope

Reckless Youth

In the year I turned twenty-two – two is my favourite number for reasons my analyst once suggested had something to do with my preference for the couple – I went into a crazy phase whereby I threw everything once familiar on its head. 

My boyfriend, a gambler and unemployed for most of the four years we spent together, began training with the Commonwealth Police. Fortuitous in some ways. It offered a steady income for one, and for another there was a time he and I were driving along the back streets of East Melbourne when by chance he failed to halt at a stop sign before taking off into the next side street and an unmarked police man off duty saw and stopped us.

‘You went over a stop sign without braking,’ he said after Paul wound down his window. 

‘I’m sorry officer. I didn’t realise.’

‘Your driver’s licence?’ Paul dragged out his wallet and proceeded to explain; he was in leave from training with the Commonwealth police. He flashed his ID card, and the police man waved us on. 

As simple as that. No ticket and no further explanation needed.

This was one of my first experiences in the world in which certain behaviours are overlooked by virtue of your status. But Paul’s status as a Commonwealth policeman was not enough to keep me with him. 

When he was shipped to Sydney for several weeks for training and I was left alone I began to reassess my commitment to him.

He seemed more dedicated than ever from a distance and arranged that I join him one weekend and visit the Blue Mountains. We stayed in an old chalet in Katoomba. Years later, Delia Falconer’s In the Service of Clouds transported me back there. 

At the time, the trip seemed onerous and without colour. I was restless and on my return to Melbourne and my first Social Work job at Prince Henry’s hospital where every day I trudged down to our basement department and tried to make sense of this career into which I had been launched, already longing for change. 

It came in the form of an invitation to dinner from one of the resident doctors. At first, I said ‘no’. I was in a relationship after all, but then with Paul away I changed my mind and the doctor and I met for pizza in St Kilda and later for sex. 

We continued to meet over several weeks until his rotation ended and the doctor fell out of life as easily as he had fallen in. 

By then the idea of continuing my relationship with Paul had cemented as a no-way in my mind and in time we found ways of splitting up.

It was a tortured break up as these things go with Paul reluctant to say goodbye. We separated but also hung on for several months with occasional get togethers for comfort and more sex until someone told him they knew I had been unfaithful while we were still together and he was furious.

‘Everyone knew but me,’ he yelled from below stairs and threw the last of my possessions from his place at my doorstep. This clinched it. The idea he was in the dark. The tables had turned so fast and far. When we met I chased him. He was the fancy-free bachelor and I naïve and a 19-year-old fully besotted to the point I once stowed away interstate on the Southern Aurora overnight train to be with him.

This is a long story. Save to say, I had declared myself loud and strong until I no longer felt the fire. It burned out and my crazy 22-year-old life began in earnest.

I think of it as the loneliest year of my life. I had moved into an apartment, chocolate brown brick modernist from the 1960s. We rented on the second floor with a small veranda and huge loungeroom, which we furnished with one long red fabric covered couch we bought second hand. 

I moved in with my four years younger sister, ill equipped for life away from home, but desperate to leave the craziness of our father. She had imagined, she told me years later that we would bond together and spend our nights away from work enjoying each other’s company and doing things together. 

She worked at the Commonwealth Bank and although in her teens she was the most rebellious of all the girls in my family, she soon settled into domesticity and longing for a quiet life while I grew wilder and more reckless. 

I picked a stranger up on a tram one night returning home invited him and he stayed for sex then went on his way. I have no recollection of his name or his appearance. But I was fortunate he seemed kind if not bemused by this weird young woman inviting him home. 

In any case, my younger sister was unimpressed. He could have been an axe murderer while she had met a fellow bank employee and fallen in love with him, although he was several years older. 

By the time our life in the apartment reached the end if its one year lease, she was married  (a marriage that did not last) and I had begun in the relationship that was to last the next fifty years of my life and beyond. 

But not before I enjoyed or should I say endured many other assignations with men, young and old, in my search for love. I was as dissociated as a person could be, I see now in retrospect. Finally managing to change jobs from the hospital to a counselling service in Glen Waverly where the work and my colleagues made more sense and offered greater job satisfaction. 

But my personal life tormented me like a stone in my shoe and I could not settle at home other than to go on trips to what in these days were called pick up hotels in search of company. The Anchor and Hope in Richmond jumps out in my memory and clubs like the Love Machine in South Yarra. The nights filled with possibility enthralled me more than the need to learn to drive for my counselling job where domestic visits were mandated and I needed to get wheels. 

But I was terrified of driving. Phobic my instructor told me one day. It took me over a year of weekly driving instructor lessons, at huge cost to my poor purse, to get the hang of it –  clutch, declutch, accelerate – all of it in his turquoise Datsun 120Y through the streets of Caulfield. 

It took me three attempts to pass my driver’s exam and even on the third my instructor felt sorry for me and let me by even though my ability at reverse parking was a joke. I have never tried to reverse park since. Though I can now reverse into car spaces allocated clearly, but trying to squeeze myself off the street between two cars still terrifies me and my daughter’s laugh at my ineptitude. ‘It’s easy,’ they say and offer to teach me.  But there are some things I refuse to master, life being as it is filled with other endless challenges.

I shall never repeat my twenty second year, but aspects of that young woman lie deep inside of me. I think of Jung’s shadow side, the disavowed parts of myself reflected in this story in so many ways I can only pluck at a few. 

You often hear people react in horror at the waywardness of their youth. The things they did which they would never contemplate now. The reckless abandonment of safety in the search for adventure, or he hope that someone will come along and sweep you under their wings and you might fly off together into a life of endless joy. Which never happens  we know but we can always dream.

Un-anchored again

When people ask how we met, I tell them in the Anchor and Hope, a place so named for its reputation as a place in which people sought to anchor relationships for life. At least the women were there to find love, while the men, I can’t speak for them, though he was different.

Or so I thought at that first meeting. 

On a crowded dance floor where I tried hard not to see myself from the outside, to forget that my shoes pinched the back of my heels and were dangerously high on their platform wedges and the point at which our faces met was artificial because I was at least half a foot shorter than he. 

Height was everything to me then. Height and the capacity to lure a man into thinking I was a great catch. 

That’s what people looked for in the Anchor and Hope, but here the fishing analogy stopped because the hotel from which many a marriage had sprung was over the road from the Bryant and May Matchbox factory in Richmond and miles from the sea.

‘Let’s get a drink,’ I said to this man whose name I had not yet determined. I wanted to get close enough to my friend, Jan, the one I’d travelled with. You never went to the Anchor and Hope alone. But hoped that the one you’d return home with was not the same as the one with whom you’d arrived. 

Or so was my reasoning, though I had never told Jan this. Never told her how much I saw her as my entry point into a world that evaded her as she stood alone at the bar twiddling the one drink she’d allow herself. 

‘I just like to watch,’ she told me more than once. 

Watch over me more like. I knew I’d have a job wriggling free of her, when the time came, but I had no hope of anchoring a man if she was my too constant chaperone. 

I muscled my way through the crowd of dancers, as much as I could use my elbows to prize people apart, to make a tunnel through which I hoped my unknown man might follow as I clunked across the floor.

Platform shoes were okay as long as you kept your feet firm in the centre. If you tipped too far forward or on your heels, it was only a second before you lost your balance and fell. 

‘You can go without me,’ I said to Jan. I had to enunciate each word clearly and raise my voice over the DJ’s keyboard whine. 

‘No way,’ Jan said. ‘I can’t leave you here.’ I knew she’d be like that. Just like a schoolteacher I thought, all frowns and wrinkles, or worse still my mother. Who disapproved of most everything I did when it came to meeting men. 

‘I know what you get up to,’ my mother said one time when I asked to stay over at a friend’s. ‘I was young once too you know.’ 

‘Why not leave me to it,’ I said to Jan. ‘I’ll be okay.’ I filled my eyes with all the hope I could muster. All the intention I could summon into my pupils that stared at her as if to say, ‘You do as I tell you. I’m the mother now.’ 

Was it so reckless of me to dismiss my driver, my one point of certainty in this crowd of uncertainties? But I held fast to my bravado. I was ready to take on anything. 

His penis was crooked, I saw that first morning when he tried, not for the first time, to get it turgid. I could see between the sheets the way it tilted at an angle midway up the shaft, not enough to cause me discomfort, nor enough for him to remark on or apologise, not enough for him to suggest there was anything about him that should give rise to concern. 

His name was Robert, but people called him Bob. Bob the stevedore. I had never heard of a stevedore before until Bob explained to me that his job was to manage all aspects of shipping merchandise for a large company. I was in awe. Here was a man who hobnobbed with international glitterati of ships’ captains and their wives. Here was a man who spent his days down at the harbour on board the huge vessels that docked at Port Phillip Bay, vessels bound for Germany and India and all over and here was I in bed with such a man, notwithstanding his crooked penis. 

If it did not bother him then why should it bother me?

I was a femme fatale, a woman of the world, twenty-two years old and full of the confidence of my preened and perfect body. At least I had tried to make it so. Tried to fit in with the movies I had seen where women gasp and groan with delight in the arms of their lovers. Not that I had felt any reasons for groaning and gasping. Sex had been perfunctory from my point of view. A process of arousing Bob’s crooked penis until its bent corner showed and then encouraging a good deal of thrusting and sighing and all the appropriate noises that accompanied the sexual act until it was over and I could lie back satisfied in the knowledge that I gave such pleasure to a stevedore who preferred my company to that of the ships’ captains and their wives.

It was hot that day and my face burned red from too much time in the sun. We had spent the best part of the day at the Karingal trash and treasure market trying to flog a cargo of kids’ toys that someone had offloaded onto Bob for a paltry sum.

Bob, whom I came to realise not only assisted ships’ captains and their wives, but also dabbled in some private attempts at retail sales as well. Things that ‘fell off a truck’, as he liked to say, and along with his crooked penis, his crooked bent as the handler of someone else’s lost goods did not trouble me.

I was in love. He might as well have been a ship’s captain himself for all the glory he exuded and all the promise of a better life somewhere beyond the narrow confines of my home and life in suburban Cheltenham. 

I had hoped to travel alone with Bob that day but his friend Eddie from the flats where Bob lived, a gay guy who was as in love with Bob as I was, not that either would have said as much, insisted on coming along and Bob was happy for the help.

            I was good at talking to customers, but Eddie was good at the heavy lifting. So, there were three of us at dinner in the Thai restaurant where I drank two glasses of wine fast and the waiters were slow to bring food. On the menu, the chilli prawns looked delicious, but I had not thought that the word chill meant as hot as they turned out to be. I had never been to a Thai restaurant until this day and had no idea about tastes other than your ordinary Australian or European fare.

‘You’ll like them,’ Eddie said, and Bob agreed. ‘Go for it.’

            I nearly burst into tears at the first bite. A whole prawn’s body which I tore off and into my mouth to the flames that burned my throat and a sense that along with my sunburned face, I might explode.

‘Water.’ I grabbed for the water bottle and pushed aside my wine glass. I could not eat the stuff, but I was hungry. Hungrier than I had imagined until those first sips of wine when my body told me I needed sustenance to stop me from going under and I was angry. 

There was no bread in this Thai restaurant, nothing to sop up the taste or get rid of the pain. So, I guzzled water and spooned mouthfuls of plain white rice into my mouth by way of comfort.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that chillies were so hot?’ I asked Bob as we crawled into bed that night. Under the blankets and alone my stomach still aching from the mess of wine and white rice before and after the chilli assault. 

‘You think you’re so sophisticated,’ Bob said. ‘Such a woman of the world, but I can see through you.’  My heart skipped a beat. What could he see? What did he know about me? My cheeks burned beyond the heat of the chilli and the sun. ‘You fake orgasms,’ he said. ‘You’re a fake. You just pretend.’ Even in the dark, I could see the profile of his nose against the white wall beside us.

I wanted to blame it on his crooked penis, to say that maybe he too was lacking in the sex department but that was way too cruel, so I stayed silent. ‘When women orgasm, their necks go red,’ Bob’s mouth opened with each word. ‘You can see the real thing. But nothing happens to you.’

When people ask me where we met, I say the Anchor and hope. Anchored to the notion that things between us could be as bright and shiny as a new born baby, I hoped to fit Bob as a permanent fixture into my life but as the weeks passed by I could not get beyond the idea that he thought me a fake just because I didn’t do sex the way he liked and he could not consider that not only was his penis crooked or his habits outside of work hours with those things off trucks but also that he lacked in emotional intelligence. That’s what I came to call it in the years that followed, after we had broken up.

Bob once had a wife and her name was Marlene, back in Rhodesia where his stevedoring days began. He had a wife whom he thought had loved him until one day he came home and found her in bed with another man. The usual story. He ordered them both out. Packed his bags and within days was on board a ship to Australia. He was not one to trust women with his heart, only his body, but I was one to trust with my heart leaving aside my body. My body was the one place he could not get inside, no matter how hard he might have tried. And in time I met him one last evening for a supper of toasted cheese and tomato, his favourite and nothing too hot about that.

‘Why don’t you ever talk about your feelings?’ I asked. He stood with his back to me at the sink to rinse the last plate before he stacked it to dry alongside the cutlery that stood upright in its steely canister. 

‘I don’t do feelings,’ he said.

‘Everybody has feelings,’ I said to his silence. Then something snapped inside of me. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ 

 I stepped out into the night. Stalked down the steps of his flat with its chewing gum wrappers and cigarette butts in every corner and took off for the railway station and the two-train trip home to Cheltenham. I could hear the rattle of a train in the distance and looked up to the wall of sky, punctured by the tops of trees and apartment buildings as a few lonely stars glinted at me.