WHERE THERE’S A WILL

He was riding the bike trail in the wet, stuttering down inclines littered with sodden leaves and windswept sticks with nervy, super careful application of the brakes. The light patter of rain began to fall more insistently with a sudden gusting of wind at the bridge that reared up in a spiral over the motorway. Now he was gliding down alongside the wetlands, braking cautiously at the bend onto a short level straight running parallel to the creek. Then the snappy tuck at ninety degrees onto the bridge. Again easy on the brakes and . . . fell clattered on concrete, startled utterly. Fuck! For several seconds he lay still, quite still, to recover from the shock, the indignity, then, after a slight tensing to move his splayed body, the futility, the abject helplessness. Looking up, he noticed a fellow cyclist riding down the other side of the creek, but dropped his head immediately, crestfallen at the sullen, damp, slate-grey surface so as not to invite attention. That cyclist in yellow waterproofs did stare across the forty metre culvert but kept pedalling away through the drooping boughs of eucalypts. That’s okay; he would just need a few seconds to recover, regain his breath and he’d be right to re-mount. But when he tensed again to raise his body, he couldn’t, too heavy it seemed but no feeling, save one hell of a lightning strike through his left leg. Shit, he couldn’t stir, daren’t move, lower body penned under two wheels. Slowly, his head sagged onto the outstretched sleeve of his left arm.

Everywhere seemed still as drops of rain freshened his face and glistened the gum leaves.

Five or ten minutes he might have lain in stillness, resigned, quite calm in bewilderment, not daring or not able to reason, shut down. Then a voice drifted in from behind his limited vision, distant, as if talking to a companion, till the voice repeated close behind, ‘Are you all right?’

‘No, I can’t move.’ More of a carking croak, his own sounds.

‘Where does it hurt?’

‘My left leg,’ he uttered in gasping stabs. ‘Can’t feel a thing till I move. Then a sharp pain shoots through my left leg if there’s any pressure.’

‘Well, you can’t lie like this. Can you sit up?’

‘Not by myself.’

‘If I lift your back, let’s see if we can sit you up against these railings.’

‘Aagh! Aagh!’

‘I’d better ring for an ambulance.’

‘No, no, I think I’ll be all right in a few moments.’ The situation was becoming ridiculous. ‘In any case, I don’t have ambulance cover. Can you help me roll onto my back? Agh! Agh! Mm, thank you, that’s better.’ He released a deep sigh.

‘I could jog back to the office, collect my car and run you home. This is my lunch break.’

Other voices were now simmering. Most likely, cyclists. ‘What’s wrong? Have you phoned for an ambulance? Not yet? Best not move him. Have you got a mobile?’

‘There’s the skid mark across this white line.’ An elderly voice belonging to a local out walking his dog, it seemed. ‘I saw him through the trees come a cropper.’

The gentle rhythm of raindrops soothing his face, the murmuration of voices tenderly solicitous, rags of cannon smoke unspooling across the drift of Tiepolo blue.

‘Look he’s shaking. You’d better ring for an ambulance! I’ll cover him over with my slicker.’

Then the hard cold, the clammy damp were screwing the bones of his back, his teeth chattering; he only wished to reassure them all that he was fine, just dandy, except there was no feeling in his rigidly unmoved left side.


The paramedic had a reassuring, unhurried manner, not at all cross that he had been called out for a twenty-minute run for an unpaid-up phony.

‘What day of the week is it?’ the friendly, chubby face asked as he squatted down.

Now this game he’d heard about and smiled inwardly. ‘Thursday.’

‘What month?’

‘September.’

‘What year is it?

‘2007.’

Behind him, the paramedic said to his offsider, ‘We’ll have to roll him onto the stretcher.’

‘And the prime minister is Gough Whitlam,’ came a cheery gratuitous answer from the injured man.

Prickles of embarrassed silence, before the penny dropped and the cluster of strangers relaxed into polite chuckles.

For that moment, with drops of rain caressing anxiety from his face, the strange lack of pain, the bonhomie and murmur of chatter out of vision from faces he hadn’t seen, strangers whom he’d brought together, he couldn’t have felt more content, more at peace.


Coming round in a hospital bed, he became conscious of a white-coat. ‘I’ve got some good news for you,’ said the benign patrician. ‘We’ll soon have you riding your bike again.’ The doctor waited for a reaction. ‘The bad news is that you need a hip replacement.’

‘Good heavens!’ the patient replied genially, as he would when discovering the sugar bowl in the freezer, naively surprised, thanks to the pain-killers which dissolved the wretchedness of this prognosis, but also his own ignorance of surgical procedures. ‘I’ve felt no pain at all in the hip, only in the lower leg. I don’t even have a scratch or graze on my left side.’

‘We need to remove the ball of the upper femur and the damaged bone. We hope to perform the operation in two days’ time. It’s not a complicated operation.’


Sunday noon, three days later: After fasting for twelve hours Derek was wheeled into the empty bowels of the operating theatre and given an epidural injection. Next thing, opening his eyes, he became conscious of a tight-hugging hutch of netting as if snared by a psychopath and staring out through the mesh at figures shuttling, crossing over, rectilinear white shapes, narrow, the distorted blur of two male voices, a smell of burning, then a relentless hammering with chisel that must be driving deep inside his own thigh, for he found himself propped on his right side, the ringing chink of metal on metal, the swing and force so rhythmically calibrated, so confidently powered, yet miraculously he sensed only the heavy vibration. He was not the wounded gladiator trapped defenceless waiting for the thumbs down to die, but the keyhole witness of muscled medieval sculptors chipping away at a block of stone flesh into slowly evolving definitions of perfected shapes and rhythms, so that during all this persistent hammering his eyes moistened with gratitude, not pain, his sense of being at embryonic peace ruffled only when the surgeons began ripping away at the tape that must have trussed body and hutch, then manhandled him in quick, short, jerky movements that disentangled lifeless limbs from mesh.

When he was wheeled out of the operating theatre into the recovery station, the anesthetist measured his blood pressure. Alarmed and annoyed that it was so low, ‘Breathe in deeply!’ she urged.

‘I generally have low blood pressure,’ he found himself boasting airily.

‘Keep breathing deep and regular. Big breath. You must intake more oxygen to help heal the wound.’

‘That was amazing.’ He wanted to gush now with relief, ecstasy, a philanthropic gratitude to all and sundry. ‘I saw the surgeons hammering away. Just like Renaissance sculptors.’

She looked perplexed. ‘You couldn’t have. It was the anesthetic talking. Rest now, lie still, remember your breathing.’

One of the miracle-workers stopped by to consult the readings on his chart.

‘Thank you so much,’ said the cheery patient, all syrupy. ‘You reminded me of a Renaissance sculptor.’

The surgeon grunted. It might have been just another run-of-the mill job that prevented him from sitting down to Sunday lunch with the family.

That invasion of his body he would always treasure as one of the most indelibly surreal, most moving cameos of his life.


‘Any bowels today?’ exhorted a no-nonsense, middle-aged nurse to four supine cripples, breezing into the ward to take her ‘set of obs.’. ‘Hold out your left arm, darl, so I can check your blood pressure.’

Snapped out of his reverie wherein he’d tried to recall those moments prior to the spill, what struck him was his preoccupation with his brother’s last telephone conversation, a rare event in their lives, when Jerome was more gruff and obnoxious than usual:

‘Derek, old son, have you done your will yet?’

‘Err no, not yet, Jer,’ I replied hesitantly, irritated with such direct intrusiveness. ‘I’ll get around to it some day.’

‘You’re unbelievable, really pathetic!’ he shot back with exasperation teetering towards anger. ‘And bloody irresponsible. You need a kick up the arse and a reality check with all that dosh stacked away, what with your pension pot an’ all. I keep telling you: Keep it in the family (intoned as a mantra sung for a five year old). I get the screaming abdabs when I imagine your bloody Government scooping the lot, unless you plonk yourself down and write out your list of assets and the designated beneficiary, sign it and deposit the document with your solicitor. Now it’s actually quite simple.’

Perhaps it was. But firstly I’d felt as fit as I’d ever felt in my life before the accident. I’d caused a sensation when I told the medical staff that this was my first ever stay in hospital and disbelief when I informed them I wasn’t taking any medication. Secondly, there seemed something obscene and avaricious about Jerome’s reminders about the will. Were he and his daughter, Magda, waiting for me to drop off my perch? Were they calculating my worth and how much they were entitled to? Entitlement! That was a word that often I bridled against. I was only in my mid-sixties, after all. No, I wouldn’t let them in. Jeremy was practical, certainly not prescient; my mental replaying of his persistent theme while riding along by the creek on that fateful Thursday morning was pure coincidence.

But there was another reason why I wished to bequeath all my money to the National Trust and the RSPCA. Not only did I not see much of Jerome’s dysfunctional family, I didn’t really know them. Or rather, I didn’t understand that younger generation’s culture which had become so disturbing, so alien; degenerating, in fact. However, Jerome’s goading decided me. Yes, I would make out a will, but a will of another kind that would serve a higher purpose. I would present each beneficiary, namely my niece and her three children, with a copy of my store of wisdom gleaned from hard-earned personal experience: a moral will.


In the next bed, but more often observed in the breach, sloping off to enjoy a quiet smoke and mutter, but usually prowling restlessly up and down, was a short man scuffing in slippered feet and springy with energy, his face the roughness of brick accentuated by a buzz-cut of grey spikes. From his right hand held up in a sling sprouted what he called an external fixiter: rods of carbon fibre, pins, castings, a brassy futuristic Meccano set with planetary aspirations. Barely could I bring myself to give time of day to such a flinty man with menacing scissorhand as he paced by the end of his bed without giving me so much as a glance, staring jutty-jawed beyond the window into the blur of distant trees.

Seb, the most kinetic of nurses, seemed to skate his way round the ward in dispensing Panadol here, a bedpan there, a fresh flask of water to the four extremities of bedside tables and a double-handed pirouette with curtains drawn behind him that hid personal habits from prying eyes, spun into my enclave with a backhanded closure of the second curtain.

The urologist, Raymond Yip, was quietly spoken, gentle to the point of meekness, but must have summoned reserves of intestinal fortitude to steer a bloody size-18 catheter through my lumbar regions. I steeled myself not to sneak an oblique glance at the length of whippy snake he was unwrapping.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Seb cheekily. ‘I could do with the practice.’

Oh, my God! My heart lurching, I prayed fervently, desperate that this lummox wouldn’t be trusted, for Dr Yip did look uneasy about the execution.

Then somewhat roughly, taking me by surprise, the good doctor pulled back my foreskin with his rubber gloves and brushed some white cream on the exposed crown of the penis, then slapped and dabbed as if applying a shaving brush with merry abandon.

I pressed hard back into the mattress, gritting.

‘Just relax. I haven’t started yet.’

Suddenly an excruciating pain expressly bore through the penile tract.

‘Aagh, aagh, eee, owww . . .’

‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Dr Yip. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Ye-es, ye-es, I’m o – k . . . okkk . . . kay,’ I gasped in a husky old man’s rasp, hoping to hell and high water that he was successfully guiding the fish-hook forward through the kinks of my urethra and wouldn’t back-track because of the death rattle stuck in my throat. ‘Aagh, aagh!’ I ground out, baring my teeth to ward off the breath-tearing pain.

‘There, all done,’ declared Dr Yip after what felt a very elastic minute with an apologetic look of anxiety.

‘Congratulations, braveheart,’ enthused Seb, pumping my hand, before moistening my brow with a napkin.

‘Thanks,’ I gulped, sighed, slumping breathless with relief. And swooned into a silly grin, just as Seb flung back the curtain with a flourish, the runner and yanking swish breaking the deathly silence outside my confinement, revealing a sea of pallid faces of patients, family and friends frozen in fear. Hurriedly, they huddled back round with embarrassment.


I’d never been close to my stand-over brother. Jerome always loomed much older than five years with his stocky-muscled toughness that gave him the nickname ‘Chopper’ down at the soccer club. Even as a youngster, he’d discovered the torture of pressing his thumbs into those pressure points along the shoulder bone so as I would play keepsy for my fag cards, oxbloods and cats-eyes. I never forgave him when he flogged my set of Flags of the Empire and especially The Military Uniforms of the British Indian Army, which still captures my imagination, the Poona Horse and 19th Lancers etc., the diverse layering of turbans in peacock colours, the dazzling splashes of cochineal red on sash and jacket, then trousers in a quixotic mauve. What a contrast with Jer’s coarse khaki!

Jerome used to slick back his hair with Brilliantine. The very greenness of emerald and sensuous perfume of that unctuous grease and its tear-shaped tin fascinated me. His long sideburns aged and distanced him, while he took great pains with his quiff and duck’s arse. Even today I still fear the difference between us.

My most abiding image of him was one Sunday afternoon when Mum and I were walking up Crown Hill following my confirmation by the bishop and there he was, loitering on the corner with an unruly gang of cronies in their drapes, those woollen, knee-length jackets with velvet lapels and shockingly narrow drainpipe trousers and fancy brocade waistcoats and brothel-creepers, invariably sucking on their fags with a shooting of velvet cuffs, inhaling lungfuls of smoke in a gesture of defiance. I was quite frightened and Mum, though petite and fragile, would not be deterred from walking past, pretending not to notice. She had little control over him in those post-war years. I never knew my father; Jerome barely remembered him. Our Dad was lost at sea when a wolf-pack of U-boats attacked a convoy of merchant ships in the North Atlantic in March, ’43, so Mum was reliant on her elder son nicking items of food, even clothing and coal, then becoming a fence, adept at swapping bits and bobs down The White Hart. Jer was well known by bikers from the rozz who occasionally hammered on our front door. Seldom was he pinched but details of misdeeds were solemnly noted. When he acquired a second-hand cream and black Triumph Tiger, it wasn’t long before he bragged about how many mates considered it a badge of honour to be buried with bits of handlebar stuck in their belly. Shaved and kitted out with razor-sharp creases and highly buffed boots for the RSM to see his face in, Jer was remoulded in the army’s image, but only outwardly. National Service taught him how to drive a lorry and wave firearms but failed to sort this squaddy out. Stationed on the Rhine, he had risked any number of affairs with bored officer wives and at least twice was beaten up in a dark alley by jealous husbands. Once demobbed, he was living with a barmaid in a bed-sit down Brighton way. The next thing Mum heard was that he’d got a ‘sweet little kid’ of his own and she worried herself sick that Jer would not do the right thing by the child. Oddly enough, he came to adore little Magda, became overly protective and jealous of any interference, so Esme said, the barmaid, when she finally walked out.


‘I’m fucking useless without my hands,’ Karl muttered.

He possessed the build and wary alertness of a flyweight kick-boxer. ‘What’s your line of work?’ I said, for he’d finally looked me in the eye and was clearly agitated.

‘I make guitars. By hand. Mostly acoustic.’

‘Oh really! Craftmanship still alive then?’

‘My oath, thriving! Thriving. I love working quarter-cuts of fiddleback blackwood from the Otways. Can even tell you’se which part of the forest they come from. I finish by hand what the boys on machines prepare. It’s my six apprentices I’m worried about. They like to knock off on the dot. It’s the age of entitlement all right. Thought I needed a bloody holiday, now this happens.’ He jerked his right arm in its sling.

‘God, what happened?’

‘Fell off the garden ladder straight onto a concrete path. Couldn’t believe the messy pulp of this . . . this meat hook, splattered out all over the fucking place. Had two ops already and they’re still trying to find which splinters of bone go where. I’m bored out of my skull lying idle here, just waiting, fucking waiting. I can’t be sure what those prentice boys are up to with those deadlines.’

‘Someone will surely take some initiative.’

‘No way. I have to explain everything to them. They do the gluing, banding, polishing, buff-wheel the finish etc of the standard models, but it’s up to me to respond to the serious guitarist’s predilection and whim. Each hand-crafted guitar is unique. I chisel and scrape and fret according to customized order. One wants spruce, another Honduras mahogany, blackwood or bunya. And I deter those patriots who insist on gumwood, because it requires a thick coat of varnish that doesn’t lend itself to good quality sound. Above all, you’se need a fucking steady hand to fret the inlay of rosewood.

‘Of course, you’se need to know the guy’s style of playing and his type of music. For example, do you’se need a fixed bridge or tremolo? I’m forever testing the pitch of a vibrating string, tensing the tuning pegs. Then the muso rocks up to listen and advise. See, the air inside the body vibrates. If you’se moan like a spook while holding your ear close to the sound hole, you’se can hear the air in the body resonating. Never need the tuner. Stroke a luck, this fucking fall didn’t burst my eardrum.’

I resented the nurses closing off his bed. I’d come to value his talk, his dexterity with his medium, his heartfelt intensity for his own practical art, his striving for perfection, so much so that I found myself moved to pity for a complete stranger, whose guiding hand was suspended in mid-air, dressed, splayed and effing useless.


Lying on my back, hour after hour, day after day – normally, before the accident, I’d lie on my side or front – my whole world had turned upside down. Often awake during those long nights of convalescence, memories came rushing back of those early years in England. On my last trip back I had stayed for a week with Magda, my niece, in south London.

An interesting woman, Magda. She’d been an assistant buyer for a store in Oxford Street when she met Hugo. Now, thanks to a friend commissioning art works from Aboriginal communities out west, Magda was involved in selling. She invited me up to town for lunch and I met her at her tastefully decored boutique. Not having been educated in Australia, I was ignorant of Aboriginal culture. I did admire the dot paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, those rich earthy ochres, but I couldn’t read the design, couldn’t get a bead on her dreaming. Certainly, it was remarkable how many of these Aboriginal artists, mainly women of my vintage, were creating their own style in the van of contemporary art.

A forthright lady with exquisite taste, except for a penchant for flowing robes over baggy Arabian pants, Magda had nevertheless shacked up with a smooth insurance salesman who travelled frequently to Asia to break into the virtually untapped insurance market and decided to base himself in Hong Kong, in spite of physical and legal threats from big brother, Jer. Hugo had never really committed himself to the children; in fact, he’d made it abundantly clear that he was disappointed with them, couldn’t even bring himself to like them. Magda had given birth to Jasmine before they were married. These days Mags was less of an imposing saleswoman, more motivated by what really enthused her in the display and allowed customers to browse undisturbed unless they were lingering over her favourite objects.

She suggested Soho for lunch, which took me back forty-odd years to when I’d been a junior clerk in a Savile Row textiles firm and used my 2s6d luncheon vouchers in a cheap dive churning out very bland fare.

‘Jobe feels you sold out,’ Magda was saying in that frank way of hers, filling me in on her son. ‘Whenever you visited from Oz he noticed you’d go traipsing on your lonesome round the Trust properties. You’d talk as if the highlight of your life was hiking across the Purbecks to Lulworth Cove in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy, striding into the teeth of a gale like Gabriel Oak wafting his shepherd’s crook or Alan Bates mooning at the horizon awaiting your Bathsheba to come tripping down in shiny white smock and felt pattens from the Roman battlements. Didn’t you once get Susannah York’s autograph when she played Bournemouth?’

‘I may have done. My memory isn’t what it used to be,’ I mumbled in growing discomfort. I suddenly remembered the shock of stumbling across a camp of travellers squatting on my favourite scarp of the downs on the edge of a bluebell wood where fox cubs used to play.

She was picking at her prosciutto, peach and blue cheese croutons. ‘We’re only half an hour out from London, yet you avoid the city, any city, as if it was still ridden with the Great Plague. Whereas Hugo, as much as I say good riddance to the lecherous sod, did endeavour to make a difference, taking a string of appointments with the British Council in his bachelor days. Jobe still misses his father, though he doesn’t say much, but strange though it may seem the lad’s closer to you in temperament. Yet . . . and I’m very sorry to say this, Derek, I think deep down Jobe dislikes himself for being so egocentric, a loner. Oh yes, he tried to leaven the lot of others far worse off than himself. You remember his work experience in the Easter hols? He signed up to build stone houses on the island of Djerba. On one of his rare time-outs he happened to be strolling along the Mediterranean shore and fell in with a couple of shepherds who invited him back to their encampment, basically a few mud huts. Jobe is an idealist, a dreamer, still believing in the best of people, especially those from the underprivileged world. These Tunisian Arabs made a fuss of him and offered refreshment, a handful of olives, dates and simple sweetmeats, slapped him on the back and joked when he tried out his basic French. Of course, the villagers spoke a dialect he couldn’t comprehend but used a highly excitable sign language. The menfolk invited him to ride a camel, but when the cameleer, a skinny scruff about six years old, repeatedly struck the beast on the nose to get it up off its knees with Jobe clinging on like billy-o, drawing blood and angry snorts and scuffles from the animal, Jobe flung himself off, protesting against such cruelty, much to the puzzlement of the onlookers.’

‘Good on him! That’s the reason I’ve never wanted to visit China - callousness to animals.’

‘Then he was led to a small wooden coop or hutch at the edge of the encampment. Inside, propped upright on a cushion in the corner, was a young girl, very plump with a dirty face and gaps between teeth if she forced a smile. Jobe was bidden to enter, but grew confused and suddenly anxious. What was he supposed to do? Give this dishevelled creature some English conversation? Look, I know he’s naïve, but he does have a good heart. The men urged him on towards the bait and fastened the door with a wooden peg. The villagers were shouting encouragement to both of them, then particularly at the girl, which left Jobe panicky, so they yelled abuse and waved their fists and spat at him. Apparently he pushed the girl away, an action quite out of character for a lad lacking in assertiveness, whereupon the villagers got seriously angry. Having wrenched open the door, they hauled him out and rained blows about his head and shoulders. Even the women seized their switches ready to jab at him. Eventually, he broke away and took to his heels until he could no longer hear their jeering.’

‘What exactly were they after?’

‘There must have been some misunderstanding. Jobe thought he heard the word ‘mariage’, but I suspect it was more like prostitution. So he learnt that he’s not the good-will ambassador he’d hoped to be. Back home, tail between his legs, he locks himself in his room practising the electric guitar. He’s not much of a communicator, not since his father ran off with a cheap bit of skirt to Honkers, but he is beginning to write some songs, admittedly rather doleful at present. Still, he is only seventeen. Anyhow he felt bitterly betrayed by Hugo, thoroughly black dog, in fact. And Jasmine, who’s lightning quick to spot weakness in others, the little minx harassed her brother mercilessly.’

‘So how is Jasmine?’ To be candid, I didn’t want to hear. On my previous visit an agitated Magda had confided that cross-genders often graduate to sex work. Jas was a mere two years old when it dawned on Magda that the girl’s gender identity was not her sexual identity. She had been a petulant child, bullying her younger brother with sarcastic put-downs, yelling abuse at Magda, wagging school, potentially a bright kid working far below her potential. Her room was a no-go area to her mother, who found anger difficult to deal with: either walk away or get embroiled in a slanging match and regret it later when overwhelmed by guilt. Jasmine would spend hours playing the drums and smashed-up cymbals, sometimes cajoling her brother to accompany her on guitar, more often hammering out her hostile feelings before an unnerving silence settled over her room. It was when Magda was invited to attend one of Jasmine’s sessions with the school counsellor that the trans-gender issue was put squarely on the table.

‘I like to think she’s over the worst. She’s only broken one window this year.’ Magda crossed her eyes and gave a slight shake of the head and took a deep breath. ‘The whole family has finally come to accept that she’s a trans, Hugo’s folks too, so that’s no longer an issue. But she’s wagging school and that is. When her home group teacher rings up to inform me, I don’t always know where she is, so I feel foolish and guilty, a very poor mother indeed. Just recently, though, the counsellor asked me to attend one of their sessions and for the first time Jasmine agreed. I’m not convinced this woman is genuinely sympathetic. Apparently she’s a feminist and some of them argue that only a biological female can truly feel what it’s like to inhabit a woman’s body, not a gender variant. Anyhow Jasmine is pleading to start a new school, so we’re scouting around. Hugo says he’ll leave it up to me. Funny, that. Hugo was always something of a roving spirit who loved to be free, yet he couldn’t cope with Jasmine’s freedom to choose her own gender identity. Of course, now she must decide whether to begin eleventh form as a boy or a girl and stand by that decision for two years. She won’t be able to act the cross-dresser. I suspect she’s still confused about whether she’s attracted to males, attracted to girls or attracted to both or neither. She may even feel like a gay man trapped in a female body.’

‘It can’t have been easy for you, Magda, bringing up three kids by yourself.’ I was so much out of my depth just listening to her.

‘Excuse me - young adults! Otherwise they’ll shoot you down in flames. No, it has been damned difficult at times. I’ve still got major concerns for Valda. She’s going through that hyper-sociable stage. A strange thing happened when she was a goth, though. She used to wear a stovepipe hat, smoky eye make-up and Saturday nights fishnet stockings and thigh-length boots. Yes, I know, she looked like death warmed up, all decked out in black, but she’s sixteen and . . . She was set upon by three older girls who accused her of wearing white powder make-up that was no longer true goth and who did she think she was, being up herself and different. They dished out a dreadful going-over, put Valda off black eyeliner and red lipstick for ever. The upshot was, the poor girl felt so ashamed at how her own witchery might be perceived, she junked that version of herself. But she’s still a bit of a shocker, so don’t rise to the bait and she’ll be fine. Fortunately, she’s resilient; in fact, she has the personality to land on her feet. As for Jasmine, we’ve moved beyond the suicide threats and vows to leave home and the screaming bursts of “I hate you!”’

She took a gulp of wine, swilled it round her mouth before swallowing and puckered her lips in appreciation. ‘And you, you lucky sod, you’ve managed to escape all that . . . responsibilities, kids, family. You don’t know how fortunate you are, but . . .’

I gave an involuntary shudder and didn’t know what to say.

‘No, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The three of them have certainly taught me a hell of a lot about the messy tangles of being human.’

‘Yes, it must have been a bit of a shock when you first realized about Jas.’

‘No, not really. I knew instinctively when she was two. She’d always prefer to roll those Matchbox cars down an old pastry board; in fact, just like you, so Dad told me, racing your Dinky Toys round the dining-room carpet. And she hated wearing dresses and letting her hair grow long and curly and dressing up. And the little pugnacious tomboy always seemed to be bashing Jobe at the slightest provocation, even though she’s a couple of years younger, winding him up something dreadful, sensing perhaps that he’d be too scared to strike back. Yes, she’s a very angry miss. But you can understand why she refuses to conform or why she detests people making assumptions about her. She hates being labelled. Mind you, she calls Jobe a wimp or shrimp or shit-head often enough. I‘ve grown used to minding my p’s and q’s. Besides, you have little choice with young folk these days but to love and accept and forgive where necessary. And keep the channels of communication open whatever, even though the little minx orders me never to set foot in her room. You’ve probably noticed a sign on her door: Keep out on pain of death! Jaz.

‘And the eating disorders?’

‘Still the same. Only last week she induced throwing up after boshing an overdose of Panadol. I have a trans-gender anorexic for a daughter. Can you believe it?’ she said; with a long-drawn out exhalation of breath. ‘Still, she’s much calmer and more co-operative since she realized I know. Even helps with the washing-up – at a price. What gives me heart is that she’s tough inwardly, really tough. So I try not to think about sexually transmitted diseases and what her voice will sound like after a hundred days on testosterone.’

‘I’m sure they’ll all land on their feet.’ In trying to say the sensible thing, I fear my voice wavered.

‘Enough about my probs, what about you? Are you going to visit Dad before you return to Australia?’ The very question I’d been dreading. ‘Well? Come on, Derek, you must go and see him now you’re back. How many years is it now? The man’s seventy for Chrissakes!’

‘No, Magda, not this time.’

‘But it’s terminal, Derek.’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean the cancer.’


‘You on Facebook?’ Valda was asking, her face of giggling arpeggios drawn to the screen of her ‘pooter’.

‘I’m not interested in the cult of instant celebrity nor the obsession with one’s own ego,’ I declared in a world-weary voice, hinting at more uplifting values.

‘Naff, you coffin-dodger are unreal,’ she said, not taking her eyes off the screen. ‘Nick over ‘ere and cop a load o’ this.’

Three senior students in sloppy casuals, two boys and a girl, were squirming at table in a school quad, hoeing into hamburgers liberally sprinkled by the other two with ketchup, much to the hysterics and ribald encouragement of classmates, directed especially at one of the boys, obviously ‘a character’, whose cheesy grin was etched with extrusions of lettuce and mince, and at the girl, who was choking on her plumped-out cheeks. It was revolting. Circling, a fourth student was barking out a running commentary on a mike with ear-splitting distortion.

‘What’s going on then?’

‘Donkeys ago, right, three months about, we had a comp up the school about who could stuff the most jumbo burgers. Have a looksy at Jake, he’s a scream. All mouth and no trousers.’

‘What was the point of that? These guys look as if they’ve been weaned on fast food.’

‘That was the point. The senior bods were raising the reddies for World Vision. That’s Arleen stoking it away, old bubble butt, she’s a bit of an airhead, already looking woozy. Yuk, that’s icky. She’s into Jake big-style. You watch her barf up in a mo. Look, get an eyeful o’ this. There yer are. Go, go for it, Leeno! Yuk, that’s gross,’ the chuckles catching in her throat. ‘D.yer wanna looksy Jaz on You-Tube? Hot chicks’ fights, lotionin up, dead pervy. She belts the shit out of this other bitch. D’yer know she’s AC/DC?’

‘Whatever happened to Bob Dylan?’

‘Yer don’t get it, do yer? Jasmine bats for both sides. You’re not much cop as an agony aunt, let alone my great-uncle.’

‘Your mum did tell me.’

My diversionary tactic was less successful than a tinny ringing tone, courtesy of Ludwig, the opening chord of his Fifth. Valda grabbed at her ‘moby’ as if it were a lifebelt.

‘How goes? Where are yer hangin? Whose pad? Who’s she when she’s at home? O, er. She’s naff. What yer doin there? Is whatsisface there? Did he chat to yer? So what did you say? You did not, liar! And what did he say? That’s piss weak, that is! You bobbin’ down the chippy or the caff for some chow on the manor? Mickey D’s? No way, Jose! You must be jokin! Nuh, we’re just gettin an eyeful at Arleen chuckin up again. Facebook, yeah. Me ‘n’ Uncle Del. Nuh, Der rick. Like oil. Oh, forget it. A long-hair from Down Under. Still wearin’ ‘is mingin’ M & S polo-neck sweater from the Dark Ages. A real ledge. Yeah. Nuh, he’s no durbrain. Hang about. Leen wants to know what gear you dicked around with in the sixties. Nuh, Carnaby Street, allow it. Talk Bob Hope. Dope to you. Nah, he’s shakin’ ‘is dial. More of an egghead than a hashhead, so he won’t fess up.’

Now that comment I understood at least: a smart cookie who’s follically challenged. I noticed her eyelashes on the window-ledge. No longer backcombed, her new hairstyle was androgynous – page boy? – and she was wearing bone earrings, a jumper skirt and oxfords with platforms.

‘He’s a bit of a face-ache at the mo, peepers like piss-holes in the snow, but he’s just jetted in an’ had a mare of a trip, yeah, so he’s naffing cabbaged. Nuh, he’ll be kickin’ once he’s catched some zeds. Yeah, we could nip down the offy, get a munch, go on the razz. Get ‘im brahms and listz? Eh, bottle it, bitch. Cor, d’yer hear that, Uncle Del? Yeah, he pricked up his lugs. ‘E thinks we’re talkin classical. Sorry, old chum, that’s rhymin’ slang, that is. I reckon he’d prefer to be on ‘is billy tod till the old lady gets in. Right, wait a jiff. She says, What’s your bag then?’

‘Do what?’ I was meditating upon the black shroud or discarded goth gear acting as an awning over her cave into the dark side.

‘E’s in bits.’ So she enunciated with exaggerated slowness, ‘What are you into?’

‘My line of country? I edit books, magazines, some freelance work.’

‘I bet that’s a cushy little earner. Hey, says he’s a neditor. You know, paperbacks. Nor me neither. It’s a mug’s game, readin’. Nuh, not even electronic. ‘E’s the spit of the old lady, ‘cept he’s had a bad hair day and he’s got specky-four-eyes. Nuh, he’s poncing off us for the week. Nuh, he ain’t got none, he’s jaffa. Bit of a misog with moobs, but sweet he’s mutt n’ jeff, so I can take the piss, all right? Nuh, he don’t care a kipper’s dick. Vanilla, ab-so-lutely. Tight as a gnat’s chuff. Even the old lady says he’s a mingebag. Ciao! Yeah. Ciao! Nuh, shall do. Mustard! Caio!’

‘We’re bezzy mates, but she does chunner on, don’t she? Course, she don’t read nothin’ but Dolly. So you wouldn’t ‘ave the bottle to come wiv us. Any rate, she’s not exactly jailbait, seeing as she’s a pramface on the rock ‘n’ roll. Silly cow is yo-yo knickers. So what’s your brew?’

‘I could do with a peppermint herbal infusion, thank you.’

‘Weasel water? This I don’t believe,’ accentuated by the swing and jingling of bling on her forearms. ‘Don’t be such a yawn! Didn’t you ever mess around with spesh bevvies like tart juice, cocktails to you, when you were a spunky spring chicken? Nuh? You never trogged along to a bar to knock back as many voddies and Red Bull or Apocalypse Now or tequila ‘n’ orange monsters and get blindo? Never heard of a wicked Mahatma? Jesus, when did you slam the anchors on! Baby, you don’t know what yer missin.’

‘I can’t say I –‘

‘Jeez, the rush off of a bender is so fanfuckingtastic!’

‘Look, I think I’ll go for a stroll through the woods till your Mum gets home.’ Talk about verbal diarrhoea. Articulate as I can be, there was no defence against her. Besides, she’d be impervious to my injunctions about reduced fertility, dementia or cirrhosis of the liver.

‘Okee-doke. S’pose yer in a total nark now. Take a chill pill.’ Then suddenly soft: ‘Beg pudden if I was dead sarky ‘n’ that.’

‘No worries! Forget it!’ I couldn’t get away from her quick enough.


Early one Sunday morning at my carer’s, I was gazing out the bedroom window at the passing traffic, a staring blank look, seeing nothing but images recollected from my recuperation . . . the mocking plop of the catheter removed by the RD visiting nurse as I lay back apprehensive, my jaw clenched . . . the triumphant return to Urology, flourishing a litre of urine captured in three hours . . . that humid evening of dire panic when I all but blacked out and the veins in my left leg stood out in pulsating black deltas, so that the fear of thrombosis and my carer’s insistence on driving me to Emergency – you’ve simply got old veins, said the triage doctor, there’s no searing pain in your calf, is there? . . . that frightening moment when I tripped down the back step flat on my front on concrete and lay there for several seconds fearful that I might have cracked my titanium hip. My left palm was stinging again and I’d cut both kneecaps, but to my utter relief my pelvic area had avoided contact. I gingerly got myself up somehow but I was shaken for several weeks about how fragile I was, how unbalanced . . . when a cavalcade of twenty lycra-clad cyclists rode by in martial pairs along the busy main road in amazingly close proximity, so that I suddenly sensed myself looking on from beyond the tomb. It was a fleeting moment, admittedly, but I slid into depression, as if I had done with living and there was no hope of my maimed limb mending or ever riding my bike again. An acute awareness of vulnerability, of uncertainty over my own balance every time my left foot brushed the ground causing some discomfort; in addition, my left knee began to ache – referred pain, said the physio, probably a nerve. Lack of exercise, the inability to bend and lift, a wary awkwardness of simple movements, the frequent stubbing of toes that shook every bone in my body except the titanic hip, all these vicissitudes added to the sniff of mortality that my accident had given me. The old confidence was shot; my legacy was zilch. I found myself struggling to fight down the convalescent’s pity for all vulnerable creatures.

Reinstated in my own home two months later, dickering about, I made the local library an objective for regular walking practice. One afternoon I actually overtook a short, elderly bow-legged gent, no mean feat, pushing a fold-up stroller with brakes, who was swaying with a limp in his right leg. Ever mindful of losing balance and falling or tripping over an uneven stone on the footpath, I asked the old feller whether he’d taken a fall and dislocated his hip. No, he said with a wry smile, he’d had a gammy hip since he was a child. On my watch it seemed like one in three fifty-somethings are disabled, owning a broken leg or ankle or dodgy knees or simply limping along through life.

Ill met, titanium, both my fall and rise: most common metal used for hip replacement; also used in the manufacture of white paint! Ion Man or Ionic Man?

I even read up on the difference between gender identity and sexual identity and was shocked to discover that I might have a female brain! The female brain, according to this article, was characterised by a deep interest in language and relationships. Although I had few alpha friends, I had always absorbed myself in the mechanics of relationships depicted in fiction and the case studies in psych books. I began to obsess about Jasmine, the danger of sexually transmitted diseases. I heard voices, her voices, what she might sound like after one hundred days on testosterone, one thousand days. Still a mere fifteen, how would she possibly manage?


What a pissy little bridge, a hump of boards covered in chicken-wire, white metal railings also strung with chicken wire, two tall white masts at either end. Such an inconsequential scene on that first bike ride eight months later, yet that rain-slick had embedded itself in his psyche as a kind of signpost. Twenty minutes later he was bobbling over a rickety old elevated boardwalk with no safety rail through the wetlands at the same spot where a flock of blue wrens invariably whirred up before his front wheel. Close by a thick fallen trunk lying in amongst the reeds beneath the boardwalk nestled a basket of flowers to commemorate a fifty year old man, out cycling with his wife and wearing a helmet, who must’ve lost concentration for a split second at a meandering turn, fell and somehow struck his head on the log. Without warning, the unfortunate man had met with instant death.


                                                                                                                                          Michael Small

September 17, 2009 - July 13, 2010