Quipu (11 page)

fondest love

Caroline

A DOG’S WIFE

…Six

And the sun poured down like honey and all the wild meadows of my body ran with long-eared hares and does and quail for my love to chase and bring down in his soft, his sharp mouth, and my soul bobbed like a woolly cloud, all my education rising from my loins to the choking of my throat with my breasts all perfume yes and yes I said yes I will Yes.

“Arf,” said Spot, forgetting himself.

1970: the fox of the earth has his hole

St. Kilda Triangle of the Damned

Monday 19 jan 70

Dear Toad

Intimations of reprieve.

I’ve moved from Brunswick at last! Among my own kind, or a kind of simulacrum. Hooray. Now that my sepulcher is (partly) whitened, double bed and desk in, books deployed, and parents waved a fond farewell, I’m gradually putting out little new green buds.

“Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun” on the radio. I swoon.

Last night was my first true sleep At Home in Shakespeare Grove. I dreaded showering this morning—the toilet bowl is grotty to the point of revulsion—but mere sanitary considerations were the least thing on my mind; it was all quite cheery.

Socialist reconstruction proceeds apace: carpets purchased, curtains whine through the Singer, wine sings through the merry throng, showerscreens are raised, babies diapered and hushed. Various cognates of the residents, ex-lovers, ex-spouses, in one case current but estranged spouse, and their associated small offspring spring in and out, linger the night, lay one another on the newly laid carpets.

The gaping desolation is departing my own room, aided by a new quasar-like 150 watt bulb and the removal of an assortment of black and odorous items from my fire grate that I had tentatively categorized as cat turds but which, from my description, all-knowing Bob identified as used tampons in an advanced condition of decay. Nasty!

I read several accounts of the Wimmens Lib Group in the Sunday papers. Copious scorn, hostility and incomprehension poured liberally forth. (Actually, cough, cough, I still have profound reservations myself. Is it male chauvinism that needs confronting, or just plain power-rat bloody-mindedness? Is female chauvinism just going to replicate this nastiness in a new ecological niche? And so on…) I’m glad your speech went off nicely. Do send me a copy of your pamphlet.

“Lone wolfing” indeed. What a prick. Who do these cunts think they are.

Do come down for a visit to our little nest when you’ve got some bread together.

love Joseph

1970: joseph misses the tram

The artistic contingent in the magazine section has been sacked. Layout and design is now handled downstairs. The department shrinks by the week, but Joseph has been assured that his own position is safe. He has difficulty sustaining belief in this forecast, after calculating how much he is being paid as a B-grade journalist to…

…address envelopes

In the midst of his boredom and misery, Quintilla leaps into the office at a quarter to five. This manifestation produces a measure of stunned consternation, not least in Joseph.

Jesus, Joe, what are you
wearing
?

They make me do it.

But what
is
it?

It’s called a “suit.”

Do you know how
difficult
it is to find anyone in this gruesome building?

Look, there’s a chair over here, why don’t you—

The tie’s incredible.

The tie is Day-glo orange, Joseph’s attempt at modishness. He cowers at his desk, covering his throat with one hand and flapping the other.

Quintilla says: Let’s go and have a drink.

Actually uh I don’t finish until 5.30.

That’s
slavery
!

Not really, I don’t start until nine.

People are looking sideways. She’s a friend of the Gallaghers, the merest acquaintance when all is said and done. Help! Joseph continues shame-facedly to address envelopes, at a loss to know what to do with her. Finally he persuades her to remain on a nearby chair, from which vantage she continues to disrupt the office, complaining delightfully about the trouble she’s had locating him within the Beast of Mammon, the stupidity and fecklessness of all concerned, the absurdity of his job, and sundry other items of valid but tactless denunciation.

Listen, it’s nice to see you, uh, but what are you doing here?

I’ve been in Ballarat, Quintilla tells him, as if this is sufficient explanation.

Joseph is not a hike for nothing. He works out in his head that there must be more to the case than this. He lowers his gaze to the desk, nodding, nodding. He looks up.

You came back by train.

Yep. Horrible. Nothing to look at for hours.

To Spencer Street station, then. Which is only a block away, just down the road but a full half a mile or more from the heart of the city. It makes a twisted kind of sense that Quintilla would prefer to cross the street and search here for a drinking companion than seek out a more suitable chum at a greater distance.

At 5.15 Joseph abandons his pile of envelopes, heaves against his besuited bosom the heavy new carpet he’s bought during his lunch break, and takes Quintilla away. His mind is paralyzed by shock and alarm, so he trundles them home by crowded, knock-off hour tram. It does not occur to him until several days later that they might have taken a taxi, or even, after all, gone straight to a pub.

Further sensation on board the tram. Quintilla is wearing a garment that might fairly be deemed short. Wispy, it alternately hugs and billows. Its hues are not muted. Her hair of course is thick and tawny and wonderfully long, like that of the lion of the gender other than her own. They stand in the breezy open doorway of the tram, pressed by office staff and late shoppers, and while Joseph tries pitifully to think of something to say passing cars skid and honk. Two youths leer across her chest in the aisle of the tram, the better to exchange loud remarks of a complimentary nature.

Have dinner with us, Joseph offers. Martha is a fantastic cook.

They arrive to find low-grade squalor. The baby is being fed, washed, de-crapped. Martha and the others are exhausted from their day’s toil. A pair of dreary visitors skulks in to use the spare room for a bout of dull illicit fornication. Magic flees.

Quintilla sits without a word in the living room for a quarter of an hour while Joseph dithers and moves his tongue pointlessly around the cavity of his mouth. Finally she pisses off. Nobody seems to care. Martha and her lawful husband grumble at one another and prepare for an evening of fun.

Joseph stares at the living room wall with its crayoned outline of a Douanier Rousseauvian jungle all aglint with eyes and feral teeth he knows will never be completed, and finishes the night babysitting two torpid infants while their various parents cavort at the boozer.

1970: conferenceville

Randwick Saturday 24 Jan

My dear Joseph

Sitting with a cuppa & a ciggie, I ponder yesterday’s Activists’ Conference. Three or four hours of hot discussion. People from Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Sydney. We started by explaining to the audience why, at this stage, we are having closed meetings—due to our socialization, the presence of men inhibits us from free expression. A major conference is planned for Easter.

A couple of Melbourne radical women from the Bakery started out with Maoist skepticism but ended wildly enthusiastic when they realized it was not a paranoid anti-male faction. I gather that even some of the ladies in and around your household are interested—that should topple a few gods!

Subsequently we learned that the Anti-Vietnam activities over the road (in another part of Resistance) had wound up in a harangue about the divisiveness of us Women’s Liberationists.

The whole left movement is in uproar. How dare we hold an independent conference that clashed with something the Holy Males had decided was more important!

At the end of our session a few of us went across and found these amazing scenes of yelling and denunciation. There was no absence of men’s voices in our defense, I add. We jumped in and declared this the inaugural mixed session of Women’s Liberation. Meanwhile Albert Langer, Hero of the Student Revolution, was going out of his mind over the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm—not political, he claimed. I jumped up and said this was a bullshit objection. Psychosexual factors are certainly critical in attaining liberation for men as well as women. Bob Gould, who owns a radical book store, defended us, although he says he’s still proud to be a male chauvinist. He informed us that it is a distinctly painful personal change to have to get your own cup of tea, and do your own washing—and your lady’s to boot!

Albert thinks we’re splitting the left. He fails to see that in Resistance no woman opened her mouth. We will come back to the active Left far stronger for an absence while we gather strength, consolidate our true identities. And come back not in a supportive role but as an equal force.

Poor old Albert sat mopping his brow between fits of hysteria.

And don’t think I’m letting
you
off the hook. Before you and your cool logical quipu friends go into similar outbursts of reflex condemnation…think, observe, listen. Then state your opinion. We shall see what we shall see.

I went off looking for a temporary teaching job, but you need a degree. I can’t even get a reference from the last place I worked at—they thought I was unstable. Have to forge something.

Went to see a psychiatrist I was referred to from Melbourne. He was okay, supplied me with Stelarzine and sleeping pills. Told me to come back in a month for another peer.

Lanie gets back in four days and she, I and Sarah (one of the Liberation committee) are renting a house together in Rozelle (nice little lesbian set-up, I hear you mutter.) You can come and stay as long as you like, if your job vanishes—except when we’re having closed sessions, naturally.

fondest love

Caroline

1983: a nice chat

DUD BASH is a special issue (but then, so is every issue) (though hardly ever a March, 1983 issue) of ATYPICAL QUIPU,

not A Typical quipu by any means,

a catch-all bucket as our computing cobber Ray would say for the piles of letters that spill from my crusty desk. Edited & published by Brian Wagner, the Miss Lonely Hearts of Melbourne hikedom. Can be had for love or money, from the address listed on the back. A large X means you’re on my shit-list and this is the last issue you see unless you Act Fast.

::Kicking off with a lament, Joseph Williams (yes folks, you read it here first) the last lark of summer—::

goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit!

Your unsought advice to the socially bankrupt, broadcast on national radio and followed up across four or five beers in a particularly unsavory Carlton pub, got put to use this afternoon, Wagner. I suppose you’ll want to dine out on this sorry tale, so stick it in your rancid sheet. Who has pride? Oy vey. (By the way, did you know that Antonio Egas Moniz, who invented the lobotomy performed by his surgical colleague Almeida Lima, was murdered by one of his post-operative patients whose impulse control had been removed along with his frontal lobes? No shit, as you might well put it, Brian.)

Get out of the house more, you told me. Go to the Lemon Tree and order strange drinks. Chat up the lady advertising executives hanging about there in low cut blouses. Follow them to hot tub rorts in South Yarra. Smoke marijuana and lean against a wall at a dark party. Seek out sleaze bunnies and have my body oiled and pummeled by jaded housewives in search of bent thrills.

Luff, luff, you said to me in your Peter Lorre voice. Ve haf conquered science, vot do ve need of luff?

It’s easy for you to say that, Brian.

My life works by a completely different principle. I will give you an example, because it is still smarting.

I’m pedaling back from Readings bookshop in Carlton, right. Very hot day. Slogging along Drummond St., which has a median strip and not too much traffic. The lure of the library tugs me to the right at Newry St. (I have tickets to something like seven municipal libraries and generally keep them in heavy use, as we encyclopedists will). The door is shut. Wrong afternoon. I wheel the bike up a block, get a carton of coffee-flavored milk and two blue plastic straws. You never know when one of them will develop a dysfunctional kink in it.

On the other side of Rathdowne St. is Curtin Square, which has trees, grass, public toilets marked BOYS and GIRLS, a “recreation center” of sinister mien, and a sandy patch full of clapped-out steel equipment for kids to slide and jump about on. I go the other way, having a fear and hatred of children whatever their size or age, perch my bike against the bole of a tree, and sit down in its fairly defective shade.

In this same corner of the parkette is a group of four: two women reclining, two half-naked youths booting a soccer ball around in their near vicinity.

I drink the milk, stare at trees, regard with quiet pleasure my remaindered John Fowles’
Mantissa
($4.95 hardcover). Shortly I decide that what I witness is not, after all, a foursome, unless it’s composed of mothers and sons. (I’m short-sighted. No I’m not, I just don’t pay close attention to the non-print world.) The boys are now discerned as being about 14 or 15 (but why aren’t the little swine at school? It’s not a public holiday, even though the library is shut. And it’s only about 2.30 in the afternoon.) One of the women is maybe 40ish, the other five or ten years younger.

As you can tell by sticking your head out the window, it’s been bloody hot. So these women are taking the sun, and dressed accordingly. (So am I, for that matter, in shorts and sweaty shirt.) The boys tire and leave. The women ignore me, but that’s okay. I’m fifteen or twenty feet from them, behind and to their left. Neither is wonderfully sexy, though both are displaying their legs and shoulders to a marked extent; the younger woman, resting on her elbows and reading, has hoiked her dress up to her bum and waves her feet in the air in a careless manner.