TERRAIN OF THE LEXICO MAN

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
                                                                                                                           George Orwell, 1984

Looking up from his cell in the bunker, Wrede could hear the hail of stones scuttling down the tiles of the ITLib roof and the yells of vitriol from the yahoos beyond the perimeter wall scrolled at the top with barbed wire. The lurch of nerves in his gut signalled warning as he gulped in the first of several deep draughts of air to quell his racing heart. No way did he want to endure another panic attack, snatching at every breath and feint. Behind his pebbled glasses, he sensed that every inmate had instantly come off task, with a gasp or tremble and a pained look, hands stilled on keyboards, heads tilting up at the rust-brick ceiling, all except Aisah in the carrel next to him, who reached down for her tae kwon do short stick.They heard the metallic click of their steel-plated entry door lock automatically, then the stertorous bray of the emergency siren that sawed at their eardrums unceasing.

‘Down keys and lock down!’ shouted Aisah, quickly removing her headset. ‘Save work and close! Next thing, leave by route of escape!’ She pressed four digits on the keypad and the studded metal door behind them swung open with a yawning creak into the dimly lit tunnel. At that moment something heavy clunked the roof and tiles shattered. With a judder of chairs the inmates jumped to their feet, replaced ring-binders of files to their shelves in the compactus and grabbed personals.

‘They’re launching rocks again, the yobbos,’ sighed Wrede with a shake of the head. ‘Sounds more like a raid than a demo.’ In his mind, he could see the wave of protesters muffled up in balaclavas, hooded tops, bandannas, combat jackets . . . Bent over his out-tray, he was quickly checking that nothing significant was left exposed.

No, nothing incriminating.  His latest updating of the Government-sponsored Glossary of Urban Slang he'd sent at the first rumblings.

‘Please, you stay with me, Mr Wrede. All others, you come quick. Come, come!‘You go on, Aisah. I shall only hold you up.’

‘Bullsh! I mind you, so you better do like I tell.’ She grabbed him by the arm, which felt as brittle as a fire-stick that might snap off at any moment, and hustled him along the underground passage.

‘Always happens on Shengo’s watch,’ mumbled Wrede, scarcely able to draw breath as he toddled along as best he could, skirting the black puddles that the others had splashed through, as if he’d stumbled across a suspicious package left unnoticed. ‘Can’t be pure co-incidence.’

‘Slip careful,’ Aisah half-turned her head to say, but her soft, breathy voice drowned in the echoey clip of twelve pairs of chunky wedgies up ahead and the rush of effluent in the sewage pipes gurgling the other side of the wall. ‘Nullah,’ she said. ‘Means channal’, making it rhyme with ‘canal’. She’d noticed the patches of dry rot and dark green lichen almost brown blotching the dank, blackened walls.

In the grey-to-dull orange light of the few working low-wattage globes, Wrede could just discern how firm Aisah’s jaw-line looked, accentuated by the bowl-cut style of her straight black hair. Yes, his new leader seemed a good sort, steady and reliable.

Most of the others he didn’t know too well. D Section comprised a fairly transient group. Usually of an evening they did a bit of moonlighting as translators and interpreters. For some reason, his own position hadn’t changed for years. Probably he was regarded by Security Control as a harmless old duffer, which suited him fine. Half-hidden by the flaky plywood side-panel of his carrel, he was invariably left alone to indulge his pre-occupation with the sub-sets of language.

The dozen workers were gathered round waiting at the foot of a concrete stairwell. Vijay was heatedly blaming the anarchist wing of the e-Literates for the attack. Two of the women wore burqas, not necessarily due to their faith, for lexicos were old-fashioned enough to regard their privacy as sacrosanct; perhaps too the black cloth covering acted as defence against pollutants in the atmosphere outside. More vulnerable was the Jew in black suit and earlocks, Chaim, who was kept in the loop by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem. Classical Hebrew wasn’t used solely for prayer or study or an esoteric pleasure but also by archeologists specializing in the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. Twenty or so new Hebrew words might be added to the lexicon each year after strenuous discussion.

As usual, Wrede was wearing his grey workaday suit; it was wiser to travel incognito.

‘Where is control?’ asked Aisah, bringing up the rear with Wrede in tow.

‘There should be a remote hidden in a cavity beneath this stone ledge,’ muttered the old feller. ‘Ah, yes, here we are.’ He pressed the now familiar code of numbers.

As the heavy manhole cover lifted slowly, an oblique ray of light opened up the shaft. The group mounted two flights of concrete steps, issuing out onto a path of gravel and broken paving stone that cut though swampy nettles and long dandelion stems and seed-headed grasses waving. Single-file, they sloshed through an underpass pot-holed and slippery underfoot, flanked by the stunted black slashes of spray-painted graffiti on walls hinting at the mystical symbols of some violent or angry race.

‘Straight ahead!’ croaked Wrede, a regular evacuee who knew the ropes, except that they had to meander through an ITLib dumping ground for electronic paraphernalia. So speedily superseded, the twisted innards of circuitry mocked like an apt symbol - 'app symbol' flashed across his mind - for the new takeover culture. Can it really be fifty-odd years ago, that debate on the Two Cultures, when C. P. Snow lamented the triumph of the Humanities over the Sciences? When classics and arts scholars could rarely explain such common scientific terms as ‘mass’, ‘acceleration’, ‘entropy’ or much more ominously the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The language of physics back then was . . . what? Wrede was sifting through his mental file of French expressions and cosmic spin-offs . . . ‘le mot juste was nebulous’, he concluded, with a simper of satisfaction.

Whereas nowadays the Sciences were hell-bent as Icarus, the Humanities dickering along to a dead-end.

Ah, such were the days when conversation could be sprinkled with familiar references to the great artists and thinkers of the past, and yes, the discoveries of great scientists and innovators too, even at secondary school. By contrast, contemporary culture revolved around instant gratification of the senses, instant money by electronic finagling. Another observation, his own imagination had been fostered primarily by the printed word. Even now in his sixties, this process held, though the amount of fiction he was reading had declined lately. But kids today, he wagged his head in disbelief, suck on the constant bombardment of impulse imagery fed them by vested interests. With few exceptions, their imaginations had been shackled by hi-tech and crass advertising. Consequently, Wrede felt dangerously out of step. Reading Toffler’s Future Shock in the 1970s had by no means prepared him for cataclysmic change.

‘Call me Luddite, but the e-Literates are winning the Kultur clash,’ he sighed.

Blinking to adjust their eyes to the warm rays of autumn sunshine, the troop emerged among the towers of an electricity grid. Through its silvery pylons mottled dull grey with time and grime, they could make out a razor wire fence spiked with barbed knots not thirty metres away. Security cameras with infra-red trip were mounted atop the gates. At night a detail of guards would be posted. Overhead, a chopper churning the air in a tight circle, racketing away on a lateral tilt.

Infra-red, info read, oh it’s all too much overload. Wrede’s silent complaint wound from his brain as a jingle in half-rhyme. Had he also become a victim of the glib mottoes trotted out pat in the politician’s ten second sound-byte?

‘Our only way out is through those electronic gates and I should be able to remember the numbers for the keypad,’ Wrede perked up, his upper dentures clamping down on his lower lip in the struggle for memory.

‘Come close round me, group. Chop-chop!’ urged Aisah, drumming her fists and bobbing on the balls of her feet.Over the road from the ITLib emergency compound, behind the shops and backpackers’ hostels and hostels for the homeless, row upon row of small, identical kit-built weatherboards went running up the hill cheek by jowl, scarcely a patch of grass or tree in sight, merely trails of over-hanging wires and horizontal lines of washing. On the horizon loured the cement plant sprouting mills and kilns and plumes of brown smoke.

‘Ah, workshop for concrete agitation?’ cried Aisah, squinting into the distance, a hand over her brow. She tucked her tae kwon do stick inside her blue denim jacket; no point in asking for trouble.

‘Sweatshop, more like,’ muttered Wrede to himself, not wishing to enter on a lengthy explanation and feeling another rising squirl of shame in his gut.

Last through the exit, he glanced down Gates road at the funnel of fug, his ears assaulted by blasts on the horn and shouts of abuse, a tailback of traffic harrumphing all the way to the ring road. ‘Plus ca change . . .’

‘Which is direction?’ Aisah’s movement, however, spoke of restless energy rather than anxiety about the impending raid on ITLib.

The pavements were crawling, reminiscent of Old Delhi or Hong Kong towards the end of last century. What never failed to shock Wrede were the obvious stand-outs – kids young as five or six begging from doorway beds of boxed cardboard, plastic green laundry bags, wooden palliasses and stained mattresses billowing yellowy wispy stuff. More scary were the tattooed hard rock chicks with garish hairstyles and clashing colourants - synthetic hair, a wig of mangled mass Medusa-like, tumbling over the ears and forehead to eye-level; or the bushy crescent of fuzzy floss clamped by long French pins and straightening iron; or an orange mane formed with miniature crimpers, two stone-hard eyes ring-marked with dark red eyeliner staring out from beneath the rough-cut fringe. His worst nightmare was a gaggle of punk bitches eyeing off his crotch and wielding a pair of shears in front of his own horrified scream.

As for the male of the species, teens and young twenties, many were shaved bald. Their favoured fashion statement was combat dungarees or jerkin opening in a V down to the navel, chest hair sculpted and/or dyed, with skin piercings and tatts in various part of the anatomy, an anatomy often pumped with sugar, salt and steroids - unless half-starved or drug-besotted. The tatts weren’t completely novel, of course - Maori warriors had punctured their bodies in Herman Melville’s time. Ugliest motif was the Uzi sub-machine gun mounted a few centimetres above the navel.

‘Unreal,’ he muttered, shaking his head, not for the first time since the hippy era gave way to the anarchy of punk. But even this over-used word, ‘unreal’, had changed its texture of meaning to include the biggest philosophical debate on the exact nature of the world of reality, as opposed to the world of forms, since Plato wrote The Republic.

This was a no-go area, all right; definitely after 1800 hours when police patrols handed over to council vigilantes toting Taser stun guns that could sizzle your neck and rigged out in padded vests, bullet-proof on Friday and Saturday nights, and visor helmets. These heavies were backed by watch-houses and lock-ups storing a cache of tear gas canisters and riot shields. But if you were on the razzle for a bit of skirt or tranny, cheap drugs or punch-up, you’d rock up to this all-nighter strip in the northern burbs, no question.

Most in your face were those scum pushing their wares, the dope dealers, ‘White shit, mate? Wanna bag o’ white shit?’

Or the cops, for swinging toward him outside a peep-show or knocking shop, the baton of a barking officer: ‘Where’s your ID, chum?’

Wrede froze.

‘Move it!’

The short-sighted old codger was so nervous he fumbled over his mediscrip card.

‘ID, chum, can’t you read?’

‘Sorry, chief. There you go,’ snatching out a cluster of cards from the pouch in his croc-skin wallet.

‘Jeezus! You look like death warmed up, you old bugger. Haven’t they put youse away yet?’

‘This man A3 Verbal,’ put in Aisah, scurrying back to help.

‘One of them, eh?’ Youse could’ve fooled me. Okay, just keep moving along. Got it?’

Aisah bit her lip and seized Wrede’s arm with a reassuring, ‘It’s okay. We not rush.’

As they pushed and shuffled towards the old Angus and Robertson bookshop, formerly one of his favourite browsing spots, a makeover a few years back to an intimate theatre for cage sports, they were almost bundled over by the rollicking horseplay of youths of all genders aching for a brawl. ‘We wanna knockouts! We wanna blood! We wannit now!'

These roughs, it seemed, were targeting the Japanese tourists and students, many holding disposable paper face masks up to their nose. Then he noticed the neon sign above picked out in flashing red lights: TONITE’S MAIN FEATURE: WELCOME BACK GRIZZLY OZAKAKI!

Suddenly glimpsing Shengo startled Wrede, who ducked and swayed like some derelict wino quicker than e-books become i-books. Falling in behind a couple of girls with cut-off jeans and identical T-shirts that bore the message SAY NO TO BOOKS! Old enough to be uni students in their bleached urchin cuts with dark highlights angled slightly askew by ears cocked at mobys. Probably were uni students, he thought, recalling the increasing hostility shown by first-years when handed the book list in the lecture theatre. Then he’d blown a gasket at the brief item of news that uni libraries were tossing out books and magazines by the thousand into the nearest skip, with apparently no qualms of conscience, no questions asked. The centre cannot hold, he reflected. Yeats?

But at street-level it did, because those bumping along toward him seemed to walk right through him, as if there were no substance at all to his slight frame; the invisible man yesterday’s man. Sad how those passing strangers over forty sought deep in your eyes any threat of menace; younger generations didn’t notice you, except as target to beat the shit out of.

The watchman was still standing on the steps just inside the doorway, putting on his dark glasses and safety helmet before casting a quick glance to left and right, then slinking into the slow slipstream of human traffic.

Shengo loitering about the theatre for caged sports? That meant the police must have been called in and dispelled the riot. Had the watchman noticed the straggle of workers from D Section? Surely, he must have. Was he as clean as he made out?


Texting, still one of the most viral of old-fangled trends, got up Wrede’s nostrils. Many texters had started late at five years of age and possessed, he conceded, astonishing touch control. Their inventiveness in breaking up the building blocks of old meaning with individual semiotics screamed out as a major cause for their eventual breaking with family and joining the global ranks of dispossessed aliens. Rules of syntax and spelling were becoming a foreign language, if not dead already.

To this day, some ten years later, Wrede could still visualise every character of the last written communication sent to him by his lost son, the e-Literate, the freelance hacker and caged warrior. And possibly undercover agent for Security Control.

i h8 wot ur lifes sirpost 2 b fun but ur no fun 2b with so i in10d 2 join the IT uth brigaid we r ant boox + toffe nos kulcher icu as past yr yousebi d8 i want owt + im gunna sqwot on mi lownsum or with sum ynos

                                                                     geny rools ok gr8


With Aisah Verbal A2, Wrede senior almost felt wrapped in a security blanket, for the time being. A fairly recent acquisition to the Lexico depot, this Chinese Malaysian was unusually slim - many would interpret her physique as unhealthily under-weight – and sinewy tall for someone of Asian extraction, with upright carriage. It had taken him a few weeks to get used to her annoying habit of peeking over his shoulder at his console, simply taboo in the depot, with quizzical frown and squinty eyes, making anxious or angry moaning sounds, trying to suss out the nature of his research task. And because of his partial hearing loss and her strange aerated enunciation, he was slow to catch what she was gabbling on about. Somehow, though, she’d collected a utilitarian grab-bag of vocab, such ultra-important specimens as ‘entrenchment’, ‘entitlement’, ‘uranium’, ‘waterboarding’, ‘crack-head’ and ‘avagooday, mate!’; pretty impressive for a native speaker of Bahasa Malaysia, Cantonese, Tamil and, on a good day, passing English or, on a rumpled day, Chinglish. Soon he found himself smiling when in her childish delight at finding the sought-after word or phrase on her screen, she emitted a little squeal of ‘Eureka’ or ‘Gotcha’ or ‘Bingo’ or ‘Yeah, man’ or ‘Yessss!’ Even her bucked teeth seemed endearing.

Never had Wrede wanted to be a lexico man, but there was not much choice these days. Fortunately, there were always jobs available for anyone with half-decent language skills in the global economy. Australians had seldom taken the acquisition of foreign languages seriously, being over-reliant on the world-wide practice of English as lingua franca, but with the rapidly expanding economies of Asia, it was imperative for ‘the lucky country’ to show a more sympathetic understanding of her nearest neighbours. In the 1970s, he recollected, the Government had pushed to train more teachers of Indonesian, but by the time of the Balinese bombings that programme had all but died.

From that moment in his late teens when he discovered Albert Camus, Wrede fancied himself as a novelist in the making. Probably due to his recognition of Camus’ outsiders.  Latterly, what struck a chord was the image of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back down, obliging him to recommence the struggle all over again, together with the character of Joseph Grand in The Plague. Grand was continually wrestling with the task of writing the perfect opening sentence, altering a word here, a phrase there, but never feeling satisfied enough to begin sentence two. In all likelihood, Wrede had never had an inkling of self-belief, commitment or even ideas burning to express. Once, though, in the mid-seventies, he’d submitted a satirical piece to Nation Review.

‘Great story, man!’ one of the sub-editors had rung through. ‘You’ve got it made. No doubt ASIO will start sniffing around and open a file on you.’

Of course, he was young and naïve back then, glowing with excitement that he might have caused a few ripples, even though the story was wacky enough to be infantile. He cringed at the memory. When thirty years later ASIO files became available to the general public, he couldn’t share in the back-slapping celebration of those on the endangered list laughing at the revelations of ASIO’s absurdly petty snooping. ‘Anyone who was anyone’ figured among ASIO’s files; in effect, it had become a status symbol. But notoriety had arrived twenty-odd years too late for the budding author.

For a year or two he’d dabbled in investigative journalism and found himself scraping out the crud and smut on celebs so-called, ‘personality’ radiating out of their super-whitened maws snap-frozen with dazzling cheesiness. Reporting on social goss for airheads meant being exposed to public ridicule by real writers, even a tap on the shoulder by the celebs’ minders, who often appeared to be spoofs of the Blues Brothers in dark glasses. Besides, very few writers made any dosh and those that did were state-funded and therefore hobbled by the party line. Political correctness had been the standard ethic of public life in the west for several years, so that print-bound writers had steadily become marginalised.   The turning-point, Harold Pinter's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, damning American foreign policy from the end of World War II: ‘. . . US crimes . . . have only superficially been recorded,’ Pinter had argued; euphemisms such as ‘low intensity conflict’ disguised the true horror of thousands of deaths shamefully disregarded. Wrede was neither so brave, nor so foolhardy as the English playwright.

Besides, he was developing his genius for self-effacement.


Jermayne Wrede, the only son, sporting a stubbly Mohawk dyed a satanic black and red stripes, was bristling with resentment. The peep-show franchise couldn’t cough up the week’s’ insurance’ to which his protection biz was entitled. Worse still, he’d just been knocked back as virile and virulent lead for a porn flic due to a suppurating closed eye, stitches in the left eyebrow, facial bruising already turning from marine blue to jaundiced yellow and blubbery, blistered lips. Bugger the injuries, sensations in the octagon made you feel alive and alert, even if the blood you could only partially see was your own. Not even the ugly, scarred mug of Jermayne Wrede, The Manningham Mauler, his brand moniker, could claim the $50,000 purse for bulging, bruising middleweights. The ref, Jeez, a right wuss, fouled him for an illegal knee in the groin when that goon of a Samoan had bitten his ear on the ref’s blind side. What’s more, the crowd had gone bananas, baying for even more gougings to break open and weep claret. It wasn’t enough for those blood-suckers that umpteen buckets marked plasma decorated the floor space at the base of the canvas. Yeah, the bloodbath circus was where you proved yourself as man and martial hero, slam-dunking heads downward and flying scissors round the waist, elbowing, punching, wrestling with those butcher’s hooks, even a bit of percussion work on the oppo’s noggin, any bloody trick, kicking seven shades of shit out of the other boofhead. Jeez, that felt so bloody good!

There were times, though, when Jermayne Wrede woke up shivering in a cold sweat, having dreamed of fly-tackling his old man and applying a rear-naked choke that damn near stiffed the stupid git.


‘Just passing,’ said Shengo, amiably enough. ‘It struck me that I’ve never paid you a little visit.’

Blast! Sounds ominous. Shengo was a hefty, sometimes formidable figure. The blue-to-black pouches and lines beneath his eyes reminded Wrede of the rings of Saturn rather than mere half-moons. ‘Come in, Mr Watchman. Welcome to my humble abode.’

‘Snakes alive, what have we here?’ said Shengo, a mixture of surprise and admiration on his dial as he surveyed the interior of an old-style house with lofty ceilings and multiple rooms and space, so much unnecessary space. ‘You’ve certainly kept this shady nook quiet. Live alone, do you?’

‘Yes,’ he snapped too quickly, ‘but Aisah, my leader . . . come through to the sitting-room . . . she’s just helped me home.’

‘Hey lo,’ said Aisah. ‘I say to Mr Wrede, this room has no spirit. He know no feng shui, but he work like water buffalo at depot.’

‘Er, what can I get you to drink?’ asked Wrede, struggling to summon up the phrases from entertaining at home.

‘You don’t have to force me, chum.’ Shengo now had a twinkle in his eye. ‘Now about this afternoon’s little blow-up with the KKK.’

‘We got out the emergency gate without any hassles.’

‘Yeah, I know, that’s the idea, but do they all know Security doesn’t want your mugshots i-peddling round the world on Facebook and i-Pad. The Government counts the lexico team as one of its most valuable resources. Specially, Intelligence.’ The big man made a show of tapping his own forehead.’ Wrede noticed how thick his fingers were.

‘I’m sure they know. In any case,’ he lied, ‘they can’t but help see their treatment is so much better than that of the IT bibliotechs.’

‘Quite so.’ His chubby face creased into a smile, revealing a gold front tooth that invited attention. ‘By the way, the cops for once arrived quick as bunny fucks and kiboshed the whole damn thing. A few rocks and paint bombs, that’s all. Cops did a recce of your depot too. No probs.’

Aisah was fishing around the top pocket of her denim jacket. ‘Look-see, I have ginseng tea packet.’

‘Can you run to something a bit stronger?’ said Shengo, chuckling with a single clap of his hands, trying to be matey. ‘What’s your poison?’

‘I’m strictly gin and tonic, myself. Help yourself to some hot water, Aisah. In the kitchen there,’ he pointed.

‘That’s funny, ‘cause you don’t like other bods drinking,’ said Shengo, with a mischievous stare.

‘No, I never said that. I’m a one-drink-a-night man, I grant you, London gin for medicinal reasons. Juniper berries, you know. But really the dependence on alcohol these days, even by kids as young as nine. When’s it all going to stop? Road rage, drink driving, rising crime rates, random street bashings, brain damage . . .’

‘I’m a bit of a gin-cuddler,’ Shengo chortled, ignoring the issue of blood/alcohol levels, very pleased with his ethnic pun. Then noticing Wrede’s embarrassment and Aisah’s grumpy expression of puzzlement, he added, ‘I hope you’re not going to dob me in, old son. It wasn’t politically correct, I know, but we are among mates here.’

‘I’m no whistle-blower,’ said Wrede.

‘That’s the way.’

‘Do you blow whistle, Mr Shengo?’ asked Aisah.

‘Nuh,’ he laughed again, loosening his collar, ‘my job is to keep an eye on D section, body-search visitors, check your mob isn’t sneaking their i-Phones into the depot, sweep for bugs, run the videos to see if the cams have picked up anything suspicious. That sort of thing.’

‘Could you plant bugs if you wanted?’ said Wrede, glimmering the degree of trust in which Shengo must be held, mulling it over for the first time, his influence and status, his opportunity to wreak havoc inside ITLib.

‘Well, I guess . . . Here, you’re not the one to be asking questions!’ Wrede gave a start unwittingly. Shengo’s abrupt change of tone had shifted suspicions up a gear. Was he eavesdropping on the depot for Security Control? Or could he even be a snitch for the Kultur Kringers Klub?

Must be getting schizoid in my old age, Wrede thought, as he brought his glass up to his lips.

‘Up your bottoms!’ burst out Aihsa, raising a toast, before slurping at her mug of piping ginseng tea.


The fall-out from his highly coloured satire in Nation Review, ‘the work of a raving nutter’ wrote a rival critic, Morgan Lafievre, led to approaches made by Sensis LA representing the advertising agencies. Ad men had tagged his wacky style as a potential gold mine for fast food companies raiding the under 10 market, recording that the little tackers exploited most clout with harassed mums. He’d even been head-hunted for speech-writer by a Government Minister, who was good at solemnity but saying zilch three times over to avoid committing himself to anything substantive. But Wrede, apart from reluctance to be tied to a minority government bleeding from within, knew that he stood behind Professor Don Watson’s condemnation of ‘weasel words’and the decay of public language. He deplored the Minister’s style of killing off fresh visual language with clichés of emotionless and often abstract padding: ‘As I’ve said before, Australia is a great country’; ‘We’ve made the right decision, a tough decision . . .’; ‘We are seeking closure on this issue so that we can move forward.’

As he looked back half a century, Wrede came to acknowledge that language per se had always fascinated him. Perhaps it was his old gran’s comical idioms that seemed to speak from way back before the advent of the motor car. Even at primary school he’d bought himself a thick, blue-covered paperback with the sign of a cross on its cover entitled First Aid in English and spent hours working out correct answers to grammar exercises or providing his own variations if he didn’t know. Give the Collective Noun for parrots (‘parratroop’), hedgehogs (‘quillion’), songbirds in the Lake District (‘divas’). At secondary school it was obligatory to study Latin and French, both of which proved to be his two favourite subjects, but unlike most of his confreres his family were never wealthy enough to pack him off to Aix-en-Provence to study French over the summer hols. In any case, no one regarded him as a natural linguist, least of all himself; his deliberately anglicised French accent betrayed him for starters and later he insisted on calling Parisian waiters ‘Monsieur!’ instead of ‘Garcon!’ for fear of giving offence, much to their sneering disdain. At fifteen he’d picked up the rudiments of Spanish quickly, easy-peasy after all that grammar homework on romance languages. In his first year in Australia he attended Italian school for three hours on Saturday mornings, triggered by teaching migrants. Never, though, did he warm to Esperanto. Owing to its mish-mash artificiality, it lacked the integrity and diversity of organic growth that accompanied tongues that had spoken for at least two thousand years.

Yet ever since he’d been classified as a lexico by the Supreme Council, his physical world had begun to shrink. For ten hours a day he was collaborating with the Galactech search engine - sighting and citing under the harsh glare of mangled strip-lighting poorly maintained and humming sick as well as blinking security cameras that might or might not be functioning. That was the real terror of ASEC – the All-Seeing Eye of Constant Surveillance. Fall-out from 9/11, surveillance 24/7 had rocketed into a major growth industry. Beware eyes and ears both.

That physical world had grown insufferable in its vulgar, practically wholehearted grab at the materialist consumer ethic, an ethic which had steadily eroded, bowdlerised or buggerised the beauty of language and the pleasure of discourse; indeed its very enunciation. People cared not a brass farthing about vocal projection, no longer gob-smacked by labial laxity. Long gone were the days when English - ‘as it is spoke’, so the old linguist’s joke ran - depended upon the BBC‘s Pronunciation Unit to assist its newsreaders, presenters, actors etc, while at the same time deferring to regional differences, such as the ABC in Australia. Or that era (often pronounced ‘error’, such was the linguistic bankruptcy nowadays) when pop groups from Liverpool were dominating the charts in both America and Britain, with the result that Liverpudlian lingo or scouse suddenly emerged as an acceptable, then fashionable accent even on national radio. Ironically, Wrede himself had become fascinated by the Mersey sound, even if it had killed off the ideal of received or standard English. His own curriculum vitae on the web disclosed, to his mortification, that he had in another life deconstructed Lily the Pink and A Whiter Shade of Pale for the Times Educational Supplement.


‘My father was friend to Mahatir. You know Dr Mahatir?’

‘Wasn’t he Malaysia’s prime minister for several years?’

‘Okay, two of them both were against Internal Security Act.’

‘What was that about? Remind me.’

‘Okay, Internal Security Act, it say Government can hold people in prison with no trial, no charge. Soon as Mahatir become Prime Minister, he use this law to stop his enemies. He accuse them to be racist.’

‘What a hypocrite! A typical grab for personal power. I remember now. He fell out with Paul Keating, a former Aussie PM, over some diplomatic incident.’

‘He say Australia’s human rights not good. Australia is racist country. For many years have whites supreme.’

‘Had White Supremacy, Aisah, had: the past perfect tense takes you further back into the past. Even before Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. Now most Aussies would affirm the benefits of our multi-cultural society. However,’ he paused, ‘we haven’t quite squared the ideal with what is exactly meant by “assimilation”.  The definitions of these two descriptors seem contradictory. Moreover, the mainstream culture of Australia is unofficially Anglo-Irish.  Has been for two centuries.  Which blithely ignores the bedrock culture of her traditional owners that has endured for forty or fifty thousand years.’

‘Okay, but Mahatir say Australian Government lie about very bad condition of native peoples. That not multi-cultural.’

‘Hmm, I’m afraid he was correct there: Aboriginal deaths in custody, suicide rate three times the national average, lower life expectancy for indigenous peoples by a staggering eighteen years, inequality of opportunity in employment, housing, health . . . and still we can’t get these policies right.’

‘You see, my father Moslem. Malaysian constitution, it say freedom of religions is okay, but people who Moslem cannot change faith. Christians, Buddhists, yes. My father, he worry Mahatir become like dictator, forget law. So he want to change his religion to Buddhist. Mahatir show fear against my father who Malaysian people like very much. So he send my father into prison as politic activist. Do you know what happen inside prison?’

‘Yes, that grim business is coming back to me now. He wasn’t accused of being gay, was he? A homosexual?’

‘No, that was Anwar Ibrahim, him second in charge of government.’

‘Oh right. Go on.’

‘In Malaysia prisons, there is man with stick . . . ‘

‘A caning officer. He beats the prisoner’s body with a cane, right?’

‘Caning officer, yes. He swing cane very quick, very hard so prisoner he lose . . . err . . . ‘

‘Consciousness. He blacks out because of the pain?’

‘Conscience, yes, my father have many, many scars on his body. He have body searches every day.’

‘That’s Security for you, Aisah. Internal probing as well as external.’

‘No Security. Doctors visit him every day.’

‘Oh, I see. Poor devil.’ What sort of doctors? he shuddered.

‘Yes, but in his heart, Buddhist faith good. Tell him don’t hold resentment in here.’ She clapped her hand over her heart.

‘So he eventually brought your family out to Australia.’

‘No, no. He stay in prison always. Long, long time. Now he dead.’


Perhaps it was because he was an older dad, in his early forties when Gail gave birth, that there had always been bad blood between Wrede and Jermayne, ever since that last year of primary school, when the lad already clodding about in size 11 shoes, big-boned and stocky for his age, was outed in assembly as a bully-boy. He and Elspeth Hitchins were found writing bitchy notes to some petite, innocent lass, then bowling round to her front gate and, calm as you like, bawling out abusive names. The funniest thing they’d published yet on Facebook.

‘How dare he monster my daughter!’ ranted the mother. ‘He should be suspended and placed in a special school. Teach him some manners for Christ sake!’

Wrede wilted on his doorstep. The shame, the suggestion of not caring, an unworthy parent.

‘And I’m going up the school to speak to the Principal. I’ll give her what for!’

Yes, well, perhaps calling him Jermayne was a mistake, but then Gail had wanted to call him Gabriel. Wrede had put his foot down: the boy would never be able to live up to angelic expectations and he’d be dubbed ‘Gabby’ for sure, which reminded Wrede of Hopalong Cassidy’s sidekick in the comics, Gabby Hayes, a stupid old windbag whose spittle flew whenever he mashed out his unfunny monosyllables. How on earth could someone with a supposed sensitivity for words not have anticipated that the lad’s peers would dub him ‘Germ’, the cause of so many stoushes for his warrior son? If it weren’t for that intrusive ‘r’, the course of their lives might’ve run a helluva lot more smoothly.

But it was the school’s policy that finally unhinged Jermayne, its embrace of compulsory computers from years 7 to 11. For a start, he stopped reading, ‘the most unkindest cut of all’ for his bibliophile father; out of spite, Wrede wondered, for his own silent preoccupation with printed books that he loved to handle and breathe their fustian scent like some exotic infusion. Jermayne’s house tutor would inform his dad of the absurdity for such a robust and active pupil to turn surly if the duty teacher at recess or lunchtime encouraged him to go out into the playground and get some fresh air instead of sitting cross-legged in the corridor zapping aliens on his laptop.

Nor was Wrede capable of initiating father-and-son bonding at the consoles, for Jermayne’s computer skills were light-years ahead of Wrede’s; indeed, Wrede had none, was treated with contempt for his inability to grasp basic instructions beyond the use of the keyboard, let alone to comprehend the whole range of programmes and the reach of the toolbar. Perhaps if he’d been a silver surfer . . .

‘Why don’t you show some initiative and take him away for a father/son weekend? Go camping or something!’ Gail was pretty frazzled herself by her son’s glowering remoteness.

‘He’s at that age where he doesn’t want to be seen dead with his parents.’

His wife was a senior English teacher in an independent school and what with supervision of sport, faculty and staff meetings, PD, chapel on Sundays etc. she seldom staggered home before Jermayne, then threw a wobbly trying to balance the preparation of dinner and killing her marking before midnight. No wonder she’d thrown in her career and would eventually decamp to the jacuzzi of a shock jock on Radio 3IMOZ.

Caught in the web, wired-up and Looped-In, their chronic hyper-interactive son was furiously working the social networking outlets, closeting himself in his study-bedroom –what a misnomer that was! - night after night and barely speaking to either parent. The lad absolutely put the chill on his father, emerging with a smile like a toad bloated on sex. It wasn’t long before Wrede felt in the pit of his stomach that his son derived his moral compass from cyberspace.

Virtual reality? Visceral reality? Whatever, an invisible force-field had suddenly been activated.


He hit the mouse as if were on speed. Drumming the podgy fingers of his left hand and jouncing antsy pants on his chair, the cyberpunk kid was now firmly in control of his own destiny. Just itching to make his own stamp on the world, to alter his own identity with the twitch of a finger, to morph into the real Jermayne. Another click and the title screen his window already dissolving his very own interior private space, his avatar stalking . . . Now go go go for it, Jermayne! urged a voice in his ear. Yeah, Jer, go get it!

gunships + choppers scour night sky    thousands of twinkling stars searchlights on full beam racketing lower over canyons of skyscrapers    wailing of sirens    occasional gunshots on the streets cops yakking on intercom with static    feeds into pulsating thump of hard rock


Jed Starr    me    rockerboy muso + rebel warrior    with silver-chrome cyberlimb + attitude like bulldust    roaring off in my red open-top Jag    into Knite City on San Francisco Bay    to collect five Golden Orbs from Montezuma Malkovich    who mean as a meat-axe    golden bronze skin + Roy Orbison specs     president of Pizzaro Corporation


me rescue three voluptuous ladettes    blonde + raven + brunette     busty blouses and cheeky shorts held captive bound + gagged    by Malkovics six musclemen maulers    on floor 10    Malkovichs office suite    chicks claim to be asylum seekers from Irania


Jeds popularity stands at 65%    me yeah

accepts help from bi-guy Rod Ram    to whump Malkovichs muscle-men + stiff his buddy    the Los Angeles pollie on the take    with gambling addiction    who craves to rush the blonde to the altar in Las Vegas    Jed + Rod roar off in red open-top Jag    to Montezuma building    chased by bent cops tooled up    Rod launches mortars from Jags boot    bent cops combust


Jeds popularity soars to 73%    me yeah


but elevator to floor 101 not working    how will Jed proceed Jed accepts ropes + crampons from black concierge    who doubles as guard for Malkovich    Jed sends Rod abseiling up outside wall


Jeds popularity plummets to 29%    me yeah


Jed starts running up flight of steps     concierge alias Phong Phong Li    fires silver arrow at ropes at floor 20    bullseye    Rod falls screaming to death


Jeds popularity soars to 81%    me yeah


Jed wrestles with Phong Phong    who has black belt in kung fu    Jed booted on the jaw    falls to ground almost unconscious    Phong Phong dives for the kill    with switchblade hidden inside vest how will Jed react    reach for piece of cable wire on floor to strangle    or conserve energy to grab concierges wrist    Jed twists Phong Phongs ear stud    forces concierge to mend elevator


Jed holds switchblade to Phong Phongs throat    elevator reaches floor 101    Jed calls for Malkovich who armed with Uzi sub-machine gun    Jed pushes Phong Phong into Malkovich    who drops weapon    Jed wastes Malkovich + cleans up

problem    what to do with the chicks    who are being hunted by their kinsmen    hill tribesmen of Fazal Fuzzhead    who seek to stone and shame them    hand over the chicks who hate Jeds choice of rock music    or wed raven haired Princess Rhianna    with whom hes fallen head over turkey   or lash out $200000 for a super special engine booster     from jump up merchant Joy Popper    to zip him to Graceland


Schezerada has taken a shine to Rod Rams cool partner Rove    who asks Jed for compassionate leave no way Jose nix


Jeds popularity plummets to 43%    me yeah


but Rove will sacrifice Schezerada to Jed    if he can conjure up the password


‘Agggh, no-o-o! Shoot! What’s the fucking password?’


No computer geek by a long stretch, as soon as Wrede settled himself on his vinyl-seated swivel chair with delicate finger-tips caressing the black keys, it was as if his entire body gave a huge sigh and he was about to glide off through Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’; he was content, about to travel forth on his global exploration for new worlds, new words. Indeed, it was a journey towards a semblance of immortality, because there had to be some readers out there, a select few wordies, incidental surfies or accidental stumblers, whose interest would justify his existence; strangers who might search and store, earmark or burn, cross-reference or even read and digest his material, eventually, in this life-time or the next. He might be small fry, but his own treasury of words, little gems, would last forever.

There were a few other nerdy types much more tech-savvy in his province or domain or ballpark who were also lexico-tragics or willy wordsmiths or loquistadors beavering away on the compilation of a texter’s incomplete shorth or flat chat made easy or just occasionally a list of thematic words required by Government officials et al for the explanation in close detail of a more off-centre policy concept; or lexicons of thousands of languages already dead; or the slang of a bygone age being learnt by interest groups, such as historical societies and re-enactment aficionados – ‘greave’ and ‘gauntlet’; ‘farthingale’ and ‘mantua’ etc. Their worth unacknowledged, lexicos were treated at best as copy typist drones from Queer Street; more likely grubbies from Grub Street.

All this for Government mandarins, ‘overseers without oversight’, a phrase he’d coined but committed to memory only. Such polemicists were mealy-mouthed hypocrites.

‘Never let it be forgotten,’ declared the Security Council, frequently, ‘that genuine copy typists have a vital role to play in the modern world of historical now: All our sins will be remembered for time everlasting thanks to the computer operative.’

Even if they are secreted away in some dusty file in Security Council’s memory bank, added Wrede, sotto voce. Ambiguous use of the personal pronoun? he pulled himself up. Does ‘they’ refer to the files or verbal hacks like me?


‘Have you seen his bedroom recently?’ Wrede was busy micro-waving their Lite N’ Easy, corned silverside and creamy leek sauce.

‘Oh give us a break. I’ve only just got in!’ The disappointing grades for her year 12s practice essays had been gnawing at Gail all day. Then there was the two-hour seminar for house tutors at three-thirty: ‘Recognising Computer Junkies in Your Classroom’, for Christ sake.

‘I thought you’d reminded him last week that he was responsible for tidying his own room.’

‘If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times. He doesn’t listen to me. And what were you doing trespassing on his privacy?’

‘His room’s like a museum or a shrine rather. Generations of notebooks and printers, scanners and disk-burners, mice . . . er mouses and cables trailing all over the floor. Consoles for the disconsolate, junk for the junkie. One day he’ll be hoist on his own petard.’

‘Do you actually know what a petard is?’ she asked meanly.

Which he ignored, waiting for the ping of the micro-wave. ‘And why is the plasma screen which I never hear him use still blocking out much of the daylight from his front window?’

‘He probably downloads everything onto his i-Pad. The digital generation are far more cluey than you give them credit for.’

‘Would that they were the digitalis generation. I just can’t read this current lot.’

‘There you go again, sounding off with sweeping generalisations. Let me remind you that I do have several seniors at St Meg’s who cannot abide their PCs, who refuse to use them. “We much prefer to use books for research,” they say. Mind you, they’ve also heard from the horse’s mouth that unis strictly ban the use of quotes from the internet.’

‘Thank the Lord for that small mercy!’

‘And when we surveyed our tutor groups, several of the girls admitted that they’d entirely cut out Facebook and Twitter from their social life so they could concentrate on study. “Only so many hours in the day,” they sigh. So the outcome was far more favourable than we anticipated.’

Wrede was only partly mollified; he’d winced at the jargon word ‘outcome’. Its bland lack of image should have killed it off years ago. Whatever happened to ‘result’? He already knew the answer: it had stealthily upgraded itself to ‘win’.


These lexico-tragics, or lexos for the majority of the population who dared not venture beyond words of more than two syllables (all too frequently, 'laxos' for the aurally impaired or the bloody-minded), were not particularly communicative about the work-place; it was safer to meet up in the teeming world outside if you were going to rub shoulders or noses with your own kind. Most of his co-workers in the depot were classified as obsessive introverts, so could happily cope with working in solitude much of the time, but were also wary of exposing themselves to ASEC, the All-Seeing Eye of Constant Surveillance. Like Wrede, they thrived on privacy and quiet space and loathed deep down i-Person’s current rage for celebrity, notoriety, mass hysteria, i-witnessing so-called history in the moment or even flashing with i-Phones and i-Pads and i-Amacamera-watches. In effect, the i-Con had become the populist attitude of the age. Why not re-cycle the phrase ‘the me generation?’ Wrede wondered. Heaven help us, the Evil–i.

Although his nerves were as highly strung as a Columbian cocaine cartel on the run, Wrede’s stomach settled more quickly when poring over the etymology of words or going giddy over the dance of diction or the syncopated rhythms of incantation, browsing through archival editions of the Greater Oxford’s twenty navy-bound tomes or a hide-bound, liver-spotted Dr Johnson, whose musty fustian he’d inhale with great gusto. But every so often he would stop in his i-Carbon Footprint and ask himself just where his life had short-circuited. Why did he feel such compulsion for premature burial? After all, much of his research was involved in bringing back to life the starbursts of Shakespearean imagery or the argot of smoky-eyed gypsies or the rhyming slang of cockney twang for an extremely small minority; whereas the majority favoured a deadened, dumbed-down, simplified version of the language.

Or the crap of rap.

‘What the dilly yo? All dis bo janglin’. I can’t stand it no mo!’ Such experimental doodlings illustrated Wrede’s shortcomings as a modern lexico. Fortunately for him, the colloquialisms of yesteryear still punched above their weight.


All of a sudden, banging of thunderclaps against the front door.

Wrede spluttered gin over his beige cardigan, choked in getting up from his armchair and coughed all the way through the hallway to the spy-hole.

O god, it’s Jermayne. As a matter of habit, he slid the chain into the door before opening it a few centimetres.

‘Quick sticks, old man, open up. It’s blowing its tits off out here. It’s your son, your one and only, the light of your life, remember?’

Unfortunately he did, reluctantly admitting the tyke who brushed past him without ceremony. He’d got Mt Macedon on his shoulder again.

‘And why haven’t you repaired the chimes? You’re bang out of order not having voxcom at the door or gate.’

‘Is anything wrong?’ asked Wrede.

‘Christ, ain’t it ever! Come to talk business, ain’t I?’ The beefy bulk was already hovering over the mini-bar. ‘Where’s yer Thug Passion then? Not a solitary Jager Bomb! “Depth-charge” and “bomb shot” not in yer dictionary of slang then? What, no Jim Beam neither! Christ, I could do with two shots of amber fire. Now there’s poetry for youse.’

‘I can do you gin and tonic. Or camomile tea.’

Irony was not Jermayne’s strength. He plunked his beef into his father’s favourite well-padded green leather recliner with foot-rest on which to stick his grimy snakeskin pointies. ‘Make that gin, no tonic. And listen up. I ain’t got time to faff around.’

‘I hope you’re looking after yourself,’ Wrede said, discreetly not staring at his son’s bloodshot eyes and pulpy, spud ugly face and ooo! a fresh deep red weal where his forehead had been split open again and recently tracked with mini-stitches.

‘Stuff you!’ the prodigal son blurted, draining his nip of gin and banging down his glass on the round three-legged side-table. ‘Same again!’

‘And to what do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Wrede, fearing the worst, as he measured out another slug at the bar, slowly to prevent the bottle jinking against the shot-glass. Once upon a time he believed that people should take greater care with the language they used about one another, to one another. He’d even coined an acronym, PPP: politesse from preppies to pollies. These days the atmosphere fairly crackled and spat with violence.

‘You know why, old pop. You’re in deep shit.’ How the sneer in that whiny voice of his own twenty-five year old flesh and blood could still grate and cut. ‘Government’s re-homing policy for geris. And you’re fifty plus, so you’re a sucker for re-locating in a Twilight Village. It’s bloody disgusting that a single old fart should still be occupying a three-bedroom brick veneer with all mod cons when Gen Y can’t even afford a kit-built bed-sit. I’m jack of dossing down in squats with all the deadbeats.’

‘Surely now that you’re earning good money . . .’

‘Pig’s arse!’ Then suddenly he was on his feet and making for the wall-to-wall cupboards. ‘You haven’t still got those fucking books, have you?’ Wild-eyed, like suddenly unnerved by a bad trip.

‘Now steady . . . ‘Wrede scrambled up, stretching out an arm as if to restrain this sacrilege.

But Jermayne had already wrenched at the silver handles of the central cupboards and flung them open, so that they dinged back a few centimetres off the adjacent doors still closed. ‘Shit, I can’t believe this. I warned you to get rid of ‘em. You cacked yourself then, but you’ve nixed! Does Shengo know about your oh so precious books?’

‘No,’ said Wrede, sniffily. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘When I was a kid, I’ll never forget it, you opened up this cupboard to show me, a special treat you called it. “Open sesame! Da da! And behold a feast for your mince pies!” he mimicked in a posh ABC Classic FM accent. ‘Expecting me to go, “Wow, daddy pops, what a bewdiful collection of super-duper booky-wookies! Gee whiz and golly gosh!” This is my Aladdin’s cave! you gushed. Like hell it is. It’ll be your ruin. How much dough have you wasted on this sludge?’ He seized a weighty, stiff-bound tome with silky, gold-coloured tassel of a page-marker, pristine as the day it arrived in the mailbag smothered in bubble wrap, carelessly scuffed through some pages to crease and smirch, then tossed it sharply over his shoulder to land at Wrede’s slippers, spine skewed.

His father swallowed hard, fought back the tears welling in his eyes, yet could make out by its Oxford blue hardback cover The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Then that muscly right arm pumping like a piston flung up behind him a flurry of thick, multi-coloured spines and flickering pages that landed with a thud in a dishevelled scatter on the Turkish shag-pile.

Wrede sank to his knees with convulsions of dry sobs.

‘Christ! What’s this?

‘Eh?’

‘Next to the Bible. The . . . Q . . . How do you pronounce this? Q U R comma-thing A N?’

Lifting his pebbled eyes swimming in the thick-woven swirls of oxblood carpet, Wrede muttered apologetically, The Koran.

‘What! For God’s sake, you think you’re the dog’s bollocks trying to get away with this, doncha?’ Reddening in the neck, he volleyed a glob of spittle at his crumpled old man. ‘I’ll have you committed, I will. I’ll be seen doing my duty like the good citizen I am.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Jermayne.’ To his own surprise, Wrede found a little more resolve in a voice that had begun cracking up with fear and anger repressed. ‘It’s my modus operandi.’

Jermayne was stung by a tone of sneaking triumph. ‘What the fuck’s that when it’s at 'ome!’

‘My current assignment,’ he said, slowly getting to his feet.

‘You’re lying through your dentures!’ Jermayne yelled, moving a couple of steps forward with heavy deliberation, as if about to spike the old man. ‘This is gonna impact youse orright!’

Wrede raised two hands, palms out. ‘Surely you wouldn’t dare challenge Internal Security?’

‘What d’yer mean?’ the young man snarled, his bloodshot eyes narrowing with distrust. ‘I’ve got my snitches, yer know.’

‘I’m preparing a state paper on the terminology and interpretation of Islam,’ his father quickly got out, pressing home with as much confidence as he could muster, then swallowed with an awkward jerk of his throat, leaving his son struggling over the import of his words.

'You ain’t got the bottle.’ Jermayne was giving him the death stare, long and hard, then suddenly, ‘Fuck you,I’m outta here!’ with a slam of the front door.

Wrede was lying through his dentures.


Slumped down on the pile as if the blood was leaching from him, Wrede gave himself up to doubt, huge doubts about his role of father. Had he gone the extra mile to encourage Jermayne to read for half an hour every night, even something of the boy’s own choosing? He conceded he’d never permitted him to lay so much as a finger on one of his own classics. No, even then Jermayne would have flung it against the wall in a tantrum of defiance.

Had he used these precious books to armour himself against the tough and getting tougher world out there? A defence mechanism, maybe? Or were they his only outlet for aesthetic satisfaction and more recently sensory pleasures? After all, it had been a few years since he’d actually finished one of his De Luxe editions. He’d given up on Proust one third of the way through volume two of the box-set of six, his weak eyes filming over after a long day’s strain at ITLib. And there were several tomes that he would never get around to reading now. He had run out of time, perhaps the spirit of intellectual enquiry also. In any case, he had nothing of spiritual value to hand down to his chippy son, too overwhelmed to make space in his heart for a moment’s pity. He was prepared to admit that both of them needed a buffer from reality, whatever that meant, in entirely opposite ways. But the breach was irreparable. There was no point in going on with this torment. He’d take the easy way out. So what was stopping him?

Simple - he was a moral coward: always had been, always would be. Oh yes, with his penchant for irony, he had often imagined he might die on a pyre of books, Jermayne with that loathsome sneer of superiority tossing a can of kerosene into his library cupboards, even over his dry old stick of a father’s body. But again he was good at imagining such things, poor at taking action. He’d best check with Security Council as soon as possible, grease a palm or two if necessary. Would they really permit him to make arrangements to fly to Switzerland? He could drum up no moral qualms with euthanasia, especially not for himself.

The lexico dragged himself up, leg muscles still quivering.


Why does the local council never fix up the roads out here? Wrede had got off a bus in the outskirts of Pentonvillea and was walking past a conglomeration of empty warehouses, motley premises boarded up, tattoo parlours, bustling amusement arcades and takeaways. Some lap-dancing joint, whatever that was, was bouncing hard-core lyrics the length of the street. Several stores had installed iron grilles over their display windows. A second-hand dive was still flogging dust-covered DVDs for die-hard sentimentalists or those who couldn’t afford an i-Pad. Yet even here, the odd double-storey McNugget in beige stucco with faux eave stuck out on a quarter-acre block like a dangling participle - columned porch, artificial turf for skimpy lawn, pool out back and BMW in the driveway. Typical.

There was plenty of street parking. Rust-speckled clunkers as well as the huddle of winos supping cans of VB sprawled out against the front wall. Empty phials of crack and bilious green cigarette packets, paper bags and serviettes from takeaways and corner milk bar blew about and rustled the gutters.

‘’Ere, youse got some spare change, mate?’ spluttered one old geezer, nodding in a dozy manner, his bleary eyes blinking, his chin grizzled grey.

Wrede rummaged in his pocket and came up with a couple of dollar coins. ‘There you go.’

‘Good on yer, mate!’

He’d been keeping ears attuned to the gaggle of goons slouching along behind him. Was he being tailed? Their honcho kicked out at the first pair of down-at-heel boots. ‘Get outta my road, yer stinking old dossers!’

‘Stinkos and bludgers, the lot o’ youse!’ rapped out the second lout.

Wrede smartly stood aside next to the winos, not daring to look any of these cocky youths in the eye. The grey army had given up the ghost years ago.

Suddenly he found himself pressed up against a baby buggy by a jittery young mum coming from the opposite direction, a half-chewed apple in hand.

‘Gi’us a bit,’ leered the last wop shambling by, taking one hand out of his pockets.

‘You okay?’ Wrede said to the woman, with arm extended, but already she’d skewed and scraped the buggy round the lolling winos, screwed up her face to avoid infection and went jogging off down the road pushing the buggy.

Phew! It was a ratty neighbourhood all right.

Wrede checked the address again. A block of flats, not so much a tower but ugly squat done on the cheap, washing hanging over balconies, the harsh repetitive boum boum boum of rap thumping out over the estate.  In shadow the stairwell, with a pong of urine.  The lexico pressed the light button encased in a square plastic box, but no response. Starting to mount the steps, but cautiously, he heard murmurs relieved by spurts of chuckling. Someone was smoking a joint; he could smell its trail of sickly sweet smoke curdling the air. As he gingerly rounded the wall at the first landing, the voices fell into a silence that congealed. More slowly he started up the second flight. They were waiting for him, staring beneath a thick cloud of smoke, leaning back against the parapet wall, two youths taking it in turns to have a drag and breathe in deep and heavy, their big-hair mullets gelled up like a dumperabout to smash your face into the sand.

Wrede studied his own chunky wedgies as if he’d noticed nothing and made to turn the corner at their landing.

‘Just some sparrow-fart,’ one muttered, blowing out a long stream of smoke in his direction.

‘Got some pansies there, ‘ave yer love?’ the other said and both cracked up with snorts and brays.

Once out of immediate reach, Wrede was tempted to take the steps two at a time, but resisted; he was puffing already and didn’t wish to betray his fear. Continuing to the third storey, listening to the clip of his own heels but no, he wasn’t being hunted. Chat and chuckles were receding into faint echoes.

'Sparrow-fart'. Wrede tossed the word around. He was fascinated by slang, of course; it went with the territory. Most likely English or Irish derivation. Often witty, original, sometimes stoically understated like convict slang, till it declined into cliché and lost its cruelty.  Huh, maybe.

It was a pokey little flat up on the third floor; one bedroom, Wrede supposed. From his garden he’d brought a medley of pink floribundas - the kind of old-fashioned roses that still emanated perfume - and scarlet fuchsias with purple pearl; half a dozen squishy figs; and a bag of lawn-grown camomile leaves freshly dried.

Aisah smiled ‘Welcome’ at the door, spruced up in a tunic and long skirt of batik dyed lemon. ‘Oh, thank you. You very nice man. Please to come in.’

‘Thank you.’

Wrede found himself in a cramped living room. Four Chinese red lanterns dangling from the low ceiling gave a subdued light. Along three walls hung patterned cloths of batik splashed in bright colours. Potted palms spread their fronds in each corner. A woven basket of fruit dominated the small dining table, pineapple, mango and pears, under which were tucked four chairs of bamboo and rattan. Between the two photographs mounted at either end of the mantel, presumably Aisah’s parents, were three or four abstract creatures carved in wood.

His nose was already twitching at the sweet pungent aroma of joss sticks. ‘This is all very pleasant.’

‘Please to meet my mother . . . Puteri . . . er, it’s better, Mrs Irene Ong. We Peranakan family of mix Malay and Chinese.’

With graceful dignity in a sarong of light but vibrant green and deeper rainforest green shawl to match, the mother minced forward, bowed solemnly and said something Wrede couldn’t understand.

‘She say, “Please be contented in our house.”’

‘Thank you,’ replied Wrede, giving a series of nods to the woman nervously chewing her lip, then practised a slow, deep bow himself.

Irene gave a modest smile and fetched a little woven basket of rice cakes from the table. ‘Please,’ she said. Petite of build, she held her spine straight like her daughter.

‘We say “ketupat”, added Aisah. ‘She cook them in palm leaves.’

‘Kuh-too-paht?’ repeated Wrede, sampling a bite. ‘Mm, delicious!’

‘And she make very good nasi lemak with chili sambal. You like some Chinese tea? Or we drink black tea and green tea also. Or you like decaf?’

‘Black tea sounds good.’ He wondered what that spicy aroma was, with just a hint of coconut milk.

Aisah nodded to Irene. ‘Tolong, dua teh kosong. Now, Mr Wrede, please to come over here and sit on this woven mat. I have somethings to tell.’

Wrede was in the awkward act of crossing his legs when he looked askance at her typical puzzled expression.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have interview with Internal Security.’

‘Have or had?’ Wrede jumped in.

‘I have already.’

Alarm bells began ringing the changes in Wrede’s heartbeat. ‘About what?’

‘Mm, dirty dealings. Government don’t like that workers show understanding for Kulcher Kringers. Take care of sensitive copy and classified info, they say.’

‘Is that all?’ Wrede allowed a long, loud sigh to escape. ‘Huh, what a beat-up!’

‘Beat up? Who is beating? Or beaten?’

‘No, no. It’s the same old warning to strike fear into state workers. Personnel files are always top secret.’

‘They also say I must upskill my English.’

‘Well, I think you are making excellent progress. I understand almost everything you say.’

‘But they not happy. Kapitan Wrede don’t teach you quick enough,’ they say.

Blast! Was this a threat? ‘Do you mind if I stretch my back against the wall? Excuse me.’ The sinews around his thighs were also stiffening up.

‘Ah, here is black tea. I hope you like. Terima kasih.’

‘Sama-sama,’ replied Irene with a slight nod of the head. ‘Sambal?’ tempting their rare guest by gentle thrusting of the arm with a dip and what looked like griddle bread.

‘It spicy hot,’ warned Aisah.

Palm up and respectful smile: ‘Thank you, later perhaps.’

‘I want you teach me how to say “nyooc- yular”.’

‘It’s nyoo-clee-ah.’

‘Nyoo-clee-ah.’

‘Well done!’

‘Can you teach me Australian English, no American English, no English English?’

‘I can but try, my dear,’ he said, with a tinge of resignation. ‘And how does your mother manage? Irene.’

‘She very sad.’

‘But she’s pleased to be here in Australia?’

‘She please to escape politic, yes, but she miss Malaysia very much. Adat? Mm, festivals and traditions. She miss woman friends and talk at longhouse with family . . . sit on mats between big sacks of palm nuts and cacao seeds and coconuts . . . or shop at market . . . mm . . . shadow puppets . . . You see, our family have longhouse in rain forest. In holiday we leave Kuala Lumpur and go to family house. Many relations share longhouse . . . aunts and cousins, grandparents and babies. We share everything. Family very important in Malaysia, very sacred. Longhouse very old . . .’

Wrede noticed Aisah’s widening smile was that of a young girl, her eyes moistening.

‘. . . it made from hardwoods and sit on sticks . . . er stilts, is it?  Ya . . .  above stream. Stream very beautiful. There is path of logs go down to bank of stream. You must walk through some palm trees with big leaves like windmill. They give you cool. You go over bridge and you come to many rubber trees and next rice paddies.’

‘Sounds quite delightful.’

‘Ya, rain forest very green because of monsoon. A lot of rain. Oh and there is basket of dried heads, how you say . . .’

‘Skulls?’

‘Ya, skulls, they hang from main hall.’ She gave him an embarrassed glance. ‘No, we respect ancestors; ancestors bring good luck for rice. My father, he tuai rumah then. You know, chief of longhouse.’

All of a sudden Wrede became aware of sniffling sounds and noticed Irene sitting on the mat away in the shadows of the palm in the far corner.

‘Yes,’ said Aisah, squinting across, ‘she very lonely in flat. She frighten to go outside, so she don’t know no one. She use to family and sharing.’

‘So what does she do all day?’ He took a sip of scalding tea. ‘Yikes!’

‘What is 'yikes'?’ Aisah was alarmed.

‘Ooh, it’s so good it takes the breath away,’ he lied, rolling his tongue round the roof of his mouth.

‘Please be contented. Yes, Irene always do housework, sewing and make clothes, batik. She miss my father too much. He prisoner for many years, half my life.’

‘I can understand,’ said Wrede. For many years he too had felt like a prisoner. A captive of his own cultural inheritance, an employee of Internal Security, a pawn of the e-lusive son he could never read.

The inevitable had caught up with him at last, like the dumper that would crush his frailty to smithereens. There was no escape. No longer could he stretch to a smile at the irony, the paradox that in a security culture his very own mindset was at risk. Perhaps always had been. Driving him back deeper into the life of a frightened bookworm. Hooked on books, words, the hook on which he’d hung his identity. The fact remained: if they were going to put him out to pasture, how was he to go on living? And why would he? With the soldier’s bottle? Ugh, he winced at the ambiguity of that expression. He was sick of it all, trying to find meaning behind the little black symbols. Could he bunk over, become an embed for the Security Council? No, he wouldn’t be game, except the hunted sort. Or cark and croak? The word ‘hemlock’ flashed across his mind, but no image of the plant; not the vegetable sort anyway. Simply a bald-domed old man with long white hair straggling over his shoulders, wearing a sack-like robe and sandals. No, he certainly wasn’t made of the stuff of martyrs. 

The future couldn't come quick enough:  very soon he’d be forced to make a decision about personal arrangements, living or otherwise. Whichever way the die fell, he would have to choose his words carefully.


                                                                                                            Michael Small

February 9-March 31, 2011

SNUFFLING FOR BLACK GOLD

For his seventy-fifth birthday, his daughter presented Jake with an English oak tree, quercus robur, about four years old. It came in a medium-sized flowerpot in which the potting mix was pretty well dried–out. Not a very big oak tree, no more than sixty centimetres in height and surprisingly spindly. In fact, the stem was malformed, splayed half-way up, which made it very vulnerable to snapping in a stiff breeze. The leaves too were mottled with a more luminescent paler green or light yellowish brown on their lobes.

‘Don’t spray with anti-fungals,’ Shirl warned, when he meekly pointed out these stains on his tree. ‘The nursery man said, otherwise you’ll kill the spoor.’

She was speaking more loudly these days because he was hard of hearing, particularly slow to catch the first syllables of words. Occasionally, she would even shout, as if he were stone deaf, impatient at having to repeat whole sentences, all because ‘words’ might transmute into ‘birds’ and fly off to convolute meaning.

Shirl also gave him a half wine-barrel that still smelled of alcohol, which caused both of them some anxiety, for it was essential to have the soil prepared just right. As advised by his daughter through the nurseryman, Jake bought four 30-litre bags of premium potting mix and a gauge for measuring the levels of moisture and alkalinity, the pH. But after emptying three bags of potting mix into the more capacious half-barrel with its three silver-coloured buckles round the wooden staves, the task of carefully removing the tree from its tight-fitting pot was tricky. Having scooped out a hollow in the mix and dunked the pot in water to soak, his easing the stem proved to be a messy job for arthritic fingers. The hollow wasn’t deep enough, so the stem sat up too high in the mix, and holding it while trying to scoop beneath roots that he couldn’t see, the original crust of mix broke, exposing the root ball itself. Already he was feeling anxious and inadequate, trying to hollow out a deeper hole with one hand and holding the forlorn sapling cross-wise in the other, palming over a hasty covering of more mix.

Still the hole wasn’t deep enough. Again he gingerly felt below the roots to scrape, only to realise his worst fears – one of the roots had torn away. How many others had his clumsiness detached?

His second mistake was to position the cask beneath some broken guttering to catch the run-off, but failed to catch the afternoon sun and left a small puddle ringing the stem. The dial on the gauge that he poked down read Wet instead of Moist.

For these winter and autumn rains had offered the most bounty for some twenty years, so that the garden had burgeoned out of control. The rose bushes and silver beets had shot up well above head-high, till the tallest branches of the roses weighed down by several soakings had bent their mops of petals to brush the lawn, whilst the crests of beets had crinkled up into seed heads and in wilting would catch round the ankles, almost tripping him on the slippery earth, so unsteady was he on his arthritic pins these days.

Dismayed at his ineptitude and disgust at his capacity for tarnishing delicate objects, Jake gradually felt better once he had topped up the cask with half the fourth bag of mix, tamped down composted pine bark and coir pith, and added a generous sprinkling of lime to bring the pH reading up to the required 7.5. After Shirl, primarily, along with his own token effort, had heaved the cask on its axis round the back patio towards a water butt and nodding kangaroo paw to gain a more exposed position, the fresh arrangement looked a proper treat there in the sunshine, the potting mix a dark chocolate colour, with flecks of emerald slow-release crystals of water, smoothly tapering down from the base of the stem to the staves of the barrel.

The gift of an oak tree had indeed proved a delightful surprise, in spite of the responsibilities. No ‘green fingers’, Jake liked to while away many hours pottering about his garden domain. He would enjoy strolling out to the vegie patch and cutting off a dark green zucchini that overwhelmed the taste of shop-soiled vegies, or seeing how an asparagus or three had broken through the crust of topsoil overnight, or the Tom Thumb tomatoes had ripened like berries and tasted like little fruits, all of which were succulent enough to eat raw. Not that he was a foodie by any stretch, for he had no idea what such a prized gastronomic delicacy as a truffle would taste like.

Somehow it was its nickname that added to the attraction: black gold. The very oxymoron delighted him as much as the bizarre paradox of a fungus being worth a fortune in the market-place. He didn’t care a hoot about the financial gain, but the image evoked, even the sound and shape of a word, fascinated him. Names like Xanadu or Shangri-la or even Treasure Island conjured a romantic atmosphere far away in distance and time and stark reality.

And truffles breathed the Dordogne.


‘I thought it would bring back some familiar memories of your home land,’ Shirl had said, ‘Hearts of oak and all that.’

If truth be told, he hadn’t given those half-buried memories much thought. Oh yes, snatches of his earliest conscious moments cut back at odd moments, such as being carried into the broom cupboard under the stairs when the air-raid siren sounded, but nowadays he couldn’t be sure whether that was his mother’s memory, not his. But the landscapes cherished in his youth he had long repressed; in any case had probably disappeared or changed irrevocably in contemporary time. In those initial years of migration it was too painful to dream them into being again. Since buying a house in Australia, he had purposefully set about planting exotic trees that in England you might discover only in a hothouse in Kew Gardens or some hidden valley in Devon – loquat, macadamia, avocado, feijoa, and fig, baboca, even though there was Buckley and Nunn of some species producing fruit or nuts so far south in non-tropical Melbourne.

Jake would always remember oak trees, of course, for they had invariably loomed as central motif in his natïve landscape, so much so that he took them for granted, spreading out along downland tracks and reaching far up into the sky with thick boughs stretching into a canopy of dense foliage or a stand of oaks on a distant knoll, under which a herd of fallow deer would be grazing, marking the destination of a delightful hour or two’s saunter from a country house. They were plentiful enough in Australia too. At the same time, he regretted that he could no longer recall the difference between the elm and the larch or the ash and the sycamore with its whirly ‘helicopter’ seeds, a recognition he had gained from Nature Study at primary school backed up by a short-lived enthusiasm for ‘I-Spy Trees’ that cost sixpence. So much of that homespun lore had been overlaid by his new-found fascination with the huge variety of eucalypts that shed leaves the year round, the varied textures of their bark and their quirky manner of stripping it away.

And yet he’d spent his early childhood on a council estate knocked up by German prisoners-of-war, cheap, leaky, flat-roofed, one-floor prefabrications with built-in metal cupboards in a yellowish wash, where the street names did possess the ring of recitation, still: Laurel Crescent, Broom Road, Larch Tree Close, Fir Tree Avenue, Links View, Copse Avenue, Bridle Way and his very own Myrtle Road, which curved round a one-tree island into a wider, staidly respectable Oak Avenue, with its well-to-do, two-storey, gabled houses with garages and treed gardens established before the war.

A little saddened, he rued the fact that he had never bothered to find out what a myrtle tree looked like.


With the mellowing of time, however, one particular image would break in on Jake’s thoughts with gathering frequency, an image which held the stuff of dream. He must have been about nine or ten when taken by his friend’s parents to a bird sanctuary, but these neighbours no longer played a part in that sequence of memory. He would always find himself on the threshold of a large, rectangular, grassy field enclosed on all sides by high-banking coppice and huge trees, many of which were sturdy ancient oaks that barred the outside world. The only sound he could hear on that still warm summer’s day was the perpetual cawing rasp of the high-flying black shapes wheeling overhead hither and thither, squadrons of rooks. Whenever he returned over the years to Surrey, he could never discover the whereabouts of that sanctuary. Until it eventually dawned that this once-visited secluded space set amid impenetrable woodland had been obliterated by a spanking orange-brick housing estate. Why it had taken on the role of a magical place he never fathomed.

Vaguely, he remembered Oak-apple Day, but not as the anniversary of Prince Charles hiding in the oak tree to avoid capture by Cromwell’s men, but rather that squirming self-consciousness that had been the bane of his youth. It was still the done thing at prep school on this particular day in May to adorn oneself with oak leaves, so his grandmother ran up an old brown curtain with cut-out green crepe paper leaves pinned on that he feared would prick him to death if he so much as breathed. Behind and across the aisle, little Jake sensed his mother’s eyes fixated upon him, whereas he could only sink his gaze into the floor boards. Then was mortified when chosen to pick a long coloured ribbon and dance round the maypole when he couldn’t even skip.

Now suddenly, after school it was, he and some boys in his own top primary class were running the gauntlet of a hail of acorns and conkers and stones up a darkly rooted rivulet, pursued by the other, much wilder class eleven. At nine o’clock assembly next morning the dour headmaster, Mr Telford, he of hunched shoulders, withering stare and sarcastic tongue, castigated the ‘fatheads’ - his favourite expletive rolled around and spat out with contempt - who risked being blinded for life or would have it on their conscience for ever, having put another boy’s eye out. Oh, the shame of having to stand out in front of the entire school as one of the ring-leaders of a dangerous and despicable gang.


Shirl was growing concerned that the wind was agitating the stem of his little oak tree and suggested, quite forcefully, that it needed more support. Jake wasn’t interested, especially when asked if there were any pieces of old material she might use to secure the stem. Just like Peg, interfering. From his broom cupboard, he produced an old candy-striped sheet. She stifled a laugh at his kitchen scissors that were so blunt they couldn’t cut, but she tore along the selvedge cleanly, then made a figure eight twice round that she secured to two in-bending plastic rods at the base of the stem, thereby steering clear, he hoped, of any transformative process occurring a few centimetres beneath the roots. At the cross-over point of the two loops, there was some leeway for the stem to give.

Jake, though, remained unconvinced. If you were going to have a supporting structure, surely the strips of sheet should be higher, above the deformity? Otherwise the stem would snap anyway at its weakest point of resistance.

‘What’s the matter?’ she quizzed, as he looked sulkily at her arboreal first-aid.

‘No, no,’ he shrugged, lamenting the loss of aesthetic appeal of the little stalwart all bandaged up

‘Remember, you are growing truffles, not trees, Dad.’ But she knew with an inward sigh he would dismast the tree as soon as she drove off home.


During his last eye test, Jake’s optometrist had told him that he had blind spots in both eyes and it might not be long before he noticed this degeneration, not unusual at his age. Nothing to worry about. An operation to remove cataracts was a straightforward procedure, quite painless. Jake accepted the inevitable with a shrug and a nod. Funny, though, for when his eyesight was at its sharpest, over half a century ago, he saw nothing, nothing in really close detail, even on those far-away woodland walks where he loved the solitude of nature but mulled over his own thoughts, re-enacted bygone conversations ad nauseam, listened to the music of light classics played inside his head. Yet now, thanks to countless dog-walking forays, he could slow down, observe the detail in a leaf, feel the texture of bark, drink in the perfume of honeysuckle or a pink rose straggling over a fence. So that within six weeks of re-potting his oak tree, he espied the first minuscule shootings of new growth, feathers of pale green leaves that slowly began turning an orangey-brown.

Then back from those misty views of his past plodded the stout-hearted Gabriel Oak, the shepherd of Wessex downlands and water-meadows, paragon of long-suffering faithfulness, who in spite of being dealt the devil’s own hand of an over-zealous sheepdog that drove his prized Dorset Horns over a cliff . . . well, there’s Hardy for you . . . he finally gets to claim his treasure, the skittish Bathsheba Everdene.


Four of his own animals he had buried in the back garden. No, five. How could he have forgotten his foundling budgerigar? Bronte, he named her, but where did he bury her? And he had all but forgotten where he’d lain the cumbersome, stiff body of his collie, when he was appalled at digging up at the corner of his vegie patch the long, slender skull, with its dark hollows for eyes and still attached upper jaw, though the lower jaw of rotten teeth abraded had divided into two halves, and the nodalities at the back of the cranium. Which soon became an ivory palace for earwigs when he left it outside on a side wall to clean up later.

The passing of his late wife, Peg, would have been ten years ago. He was more bemused than bereft by the loss. It was the suddenness of it all and the scan, that repulsive scan, which showed a tumour on her brain about the size of the plum-shaped Health Kick tomato ripening on the window-ledge in the kitchen. At first it was the odd headache, then bouts of uncharacteristic irritability, then a slurring of words that alarmed and alerted him. How long had this sinister growth been eating away at her brain? It didn’t bear thinking about, though back than he was wont to disappear secretively into the second bedroom with the scan to contemplate the tumour and shed tears. They scarcely had time or understanding to say a proper goodbye, the shock was so great.

Now pondering more frequently on his own death, he became strangely excited when he first heard about the trend slowly emerging in England of being buried upright. It appeared to be generated by the growing problem of finding space in crowded graveyards and establishing new ones. Also the unfeeling businesslike efficiency of certain funeral parlours, their growing costs and the more natural appeal of being buried at least sixty centimetres below the surface standing up in some quiet woodland retreat beneath the trees, the birds and skies void of pollutants, as if poised to take off for a leisurely Sunday stroll. Sentimental he might be, but the notion of physically decomposing in the earth was so much more comforting than being dissected or cremated, a casket of ashes. Surely, there had to be some peaceful glade in his adopted country that he naturally gravitated to?


With the lapse of another four years, Jake could still be found pottering about the garden, more slowly now with swelling joints on his fingers and arthritic knees that he was reluctant to get down upon, even with a cushion of old carpet. But every time he shuffled out the back door his blurry eyes would alight upon the oak tree first of all. Patiently he had waited, for he believed that within three or four winters he should detect a rich-ripe, distinctive odour hanging about the tree, the smell of truffles. This prospect had given an edge to fondness for his little dwarf, but his long-time patience had blunted all expectation, especially when reminded of that clumsy mashing of the roots. What’s more, who could know what diseases or deformities were lurking beneath the surface? Perhaps he might be fortunate and claim a two-centimetre globule of truffle rather than a lump the size of a grapefruit. It no longer seemed to matter quite so much.

Undeterred, he continued each morning to press the two prongs of the probe down to root level in the mix, read the gauge to check the levels of moisture and pH, then smooth any ruffles on the surface with rough, unsteady hand..


                                                                                                                                        Michael Small

December 25, 2010 – December 30, 2010

THE SCORN OF BECKY PILBEAM

The moment she entered the plaza her rancour began leaching into morbid self-consciousness, but head down, eyes averted, she pressed on, unsteady on rarely worn high heels, feigning keen interest in display windows but seeing nothing, nothing but a pale frightened imitation of a woman in her mid-thirties. This was ridiculous, for why should she feel guilty, she told herself, but was immediately shafted in her mind’s eye by a horrified glare from her gaping mother and an air of incomprehension on the benign, more wordly face of her father.

No, Tyson was definitely going to pay for this . . . this humiliation.

Shame she might shuck off if only she looked up and brazened it out.

After all, there were several single women, mainly Asian, admittedly, strolling around window-shopping, some young and inexperienced, you’d think, some of indeterminate age, several smartly dressed in lightweight woollen jackets and tailored trousers, most in casual western, even shorts, and a few cougarish possibles who stared through you. Hardly any would be rivals, surely.

She wondered if she had shown enough restraint in her application of eye-shadow, the electro blue spectrum, and had never before doubled burgundy lipstick as blush for her cheeks. Tyson had always been repelled by bold ruby lips, more so by wet lippy, reminiscent of Albert Tucker’s schoolgirls and cheap St Kilda brothels, preferring the Nordic penchant for the natural look, so she seldom used any foundation in spite of her freckles scattered like poppy seed beneath deep-set bluish eyes; maybe this time a touch of powder. Even her nails she’d dabbed bubblegum purple rather than safe coral pink. Might as well go the whole hog and put the boot in. O for a steel stiletto!

Although Tyson was her first and only boyfriend, Becky wasn’t entirely ignorant of the whiff of testosterone. She and bosom pal Anita would occasionally sit in the outer at the MCG and admire with a giggle the likes of Robbie Flower and David Polkinghorne and Steve MacPherson, who had kissed her at a fund-raising ball, but it was more of an aesthetic attraction, so it seemed. Her younger brother, Max, though, a farmer out Camperdown way, would rabbit on about the antics of the footy chicks who came on hard about prime beef. Becky did blurt out a laugh or two at that choice of language, designed in a straight-faced, matter-of-fact manner to shock his mother, especially as she knew Mum was squirming inside, but was both saddened and disgusted by the surrender of self-control and dignity by such tarts. Yet here she was behaving in a similarly sleazy fashion. What on earth was she letting herself in for?

It had been such a terribly long time since she had last wriggled into a mini-skirt, too long she now realized, though never would she have dared to wear grenadier red before. She was on fire now, all right. Lou Sickert, her brother-in-law’s tennis pal, had encouraged her with, ‘I didn’t know Beck had legs,’ which both cheered and embarrassed her. But Lou must have several times seen her chicken-white limbs complementing a lily-white tennis dress on court. Or was she wearing white leg-warmers? Lou chortled, trampling over neighbours’ gardens in search of balls he’d clownishly bomb-dropped beyond the base line.

Becky’s pride was still hurting from that last rubber with Tyson, a three-hour five-setter on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, when he had vanquished her for the first time. How the cunning old fox fought back from two sets down, when she was already bored with another one-sided match, could hardly bear thinking about. Instead she trudged off the court in a huff, pouting. ‘That’s the last time I’m playing with you, you meanie. I refuse to play against this rubbishy ping-pong.’ Didn’t even offer to shout him a blueberry milkshake at the corner milk bar, the traditional lot befalling the loser.

She was also nettled that her mother had been right all along. Lorelei was matronly in manner and ample of build, a clucker of fuss, Tyson thought, but generous to a fault, for hadn’t she brought him back a waste-paper receptacle in purple leather from Florence? ‘She never used to be this doty,’ Becky often murmured behind her hand. ‘I love life,’ Mum would burble away, even if the gossip from the Church of Christ was spiked with trials and tribulations, including the mauve and greening black eye that her depressive bully of a husband had inflicted, which led to her taking refuge with their eldest daughter; even then there was no stopping her running round meals or selling raffle tickets or sitting with the elderly noddies on Sunday afternoons. Her jolly mood was seldom dinted. Except Becky’s relationship with a much older man had been gnawing away at her for years. Quite obviously, it was going nowhere, and since her youngest daughter had moved in with Tyson she could no longer bring herself to speak dotingly about the wayward one to friends at church.

‘Is he a kind of father-figure?’ she dared ask over the Sunday roast, eventually, trying hard to understand the attraction. Dr Handysides at church had agitated her by confirming that Becky was missing all the pleasure of marrying a man closer in age, setting up a home together with future guaranteed and bearing children before she was too much older. After all, this Tyson fellow had already experienced that blissful state with another woman, admittedly without the good fortune of kids. At which remark, Lorelei became doubly worried. Would she never fuss over a grandchild by her favourite daughter? If only her Becky were game enough to ask Tyson where she stood. But then, she sighed, a lockstitch of her own creed was that a good wife should always pander to the male ego.

‘No, of course not, Mum. It’s rather more than that.’ Though Becky was abruptly reminded of her thirteenth birthday treat in the City when her own father bustled all three daughters into an adult sex shop to initiate them into the esoterica of sexual mores, disgusting Lorelei by the by, who disowned the lot of them by storming off to Best & Less on the corner, entertaining hideous imaginings of torturous surgical gizmos and those disgusting bilboes.

‘I do feel hurt that you no longer come to church.’

‘Oh Mum,’ Becky said, trying not to reveal her exasperation, ‘Tyson does have a spiritual side. We’ve started attending meditation . . .’ but bit her tongue when she recollected that her other much younger brother training for the ministry had pronounced lugubriously that meditation was evil, the work of the devil. To make matters worse, this was a radical hi-tech variation hot from the debauched west coast of America.


While gloating over his upset victory, still miming his slashing backhand down the line which would have given Ken Rosewall nightmares, Tyson was taken aback by Becky’s funky mood. It was so out of character. And to dismiss his tactical subtlety as ping pong was most condescending. She knew he would always chase down everything, because he was a devil for lost causes. Besides, he did enjoy for pure exercise running to the lines and scampering with desperate lunge up to the net, which she with her lack of mobility would seldom attempt, preferring to dominate from the base line with solid ground strokes and pass him down either wing. But that afternoon his extravagant flourish of a backhand slice swishing across his body with vicious backspin to cut the ball low and suddenly dropping short gave her nothing to hit on the bounce. Whereas he smiled at the hint of blood spilt on court, the red seeds and pulpy rind of pomegranates at the northern end beneath the neighbour’s fence, rotting.


She had brought her pooch with her, a toy mongrel with a yap of Jack Russell, a tricolour waif from Lost Dogs, polka dot with a dash of grey about its head, harried by two much larger, snappy hounds and neglected by a careless old codger working for council maintenance, who was frequently blind drunk over a painful separation. Polky was ageless but old before his time, hairless and defeated, constantly scratching his bald patches and licking the carpet, waddling on bow legs with minute, springy steps, now stopping to scratch his flank with minuscule hind leg.

Tyson did feel sympathy for the poor old thing that frequently suffered bouts of hiccups or coughing and spent his days curled up in a blanket out of harm’s way, still to learn how to bark again. So Becky was reassured, for any man who loved dogs must have a good heart.

‘Remind me to get some cod liver oil for Mr Polky,’ she said, jouncing the pup in her arms and bussing his nervous little head.

‘That’s what got me through the 1940s,’ he replied. ‘That and a thick twist of malt. Now listen, he bit my toe again last night.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Tyson, he says, but you shouldn’t be rough with me. Naughty Mr Tyson mustn’t invade my space, you know. That’s my bed too.’

‘Be reasonable. I can hardly turn over without accidentally kicking him. I don’t always know where he is when I’m in Snoozeville.’

Except when Mr Polky was licking the apparent salt on his hands and legs or burrowing into the crooks of his knees.


It was late Friday afternoon, twelve days before Christmas. Tyson collected the mail and shuffled the envelopes. The name and address on the last letter held his attention for several seconds, rooting him to the pavement: Fosselthwaite and Snype, Barristers & Solicitors. Never get involved with the law cautioned a primal voice and he hadn’t. Or hadn’t meant to. Though the image of a poor blighter in the dock at the Old Bailey sprang to mind, possibly being tried for murder, which Tyson wandering by as a footloose sixteen year old popped in to observe. He emerged sickened by the rapier thrusts of the QC, whose rampant sarcasm reduced the accused to a stuttering idiot, barely able to get his replies out before being withered with contempt of court. A wave of dread surged over him, then a secondary wave of panic. Was he getting up the nose of his neighbours again, the Montovini, whingeing about overhanging boughs or his roots forcing up their foundations? Or the run-off in stormy weather from the lateral slope of the back garden sluicing out their potting shed? Surely, it couldn’t be one of his massage clients – he was ethically sound, for goodness sake. Unless, he’d aggravated some chap’s hernia that he hadn’t been informed about. Oh, my god!

Imagine being shoved by surly-shouldered debt-collectors, hastily selling up dirt-cheap and moving into a packing-case beneath St Kilda pier!

Frantically, he jagged open the envelope.

Dear Sir,
                            Re: Rebecca Pilbeam – De Facto Entitlements.

Entitlements! What entitlements?  ‘Our client has been reluctant to make any claim,’ the letter began, although the list of alleged grievances that followed belied this statement.

‘Specifically, our client instructs that she contributed an amount of $150.00 per month towards the mortgage repayments over some eight years . . .’ Hey, not exactly. I had paid off the mortgage three years before Beck moved in. She had paid a token rent, but it was a hundred and fifty per month for the first four years, an amount nominated by the lady herself. This figure was much less than the sum she’d paid for her previous rental . . . and, I’d have you know, less than the rent demanded of her by her own brother-in-law when she sought short-term accommodation. In fact, now she was renting a house at six hundred per month!

'Given that the value of the home at separation was about $150,000 . . . ‘  Hold on! Who carried out this valuation? And when? And how? ‘We are instructed that our client is prepared to accept the amount of $17,750 as full and final settlement of her property entitlements.’

Eighteen grand! For god sake, that’s an arm and a leg! By what criteria did you arrive at that extortionate figure? Which works out at almost twelve per cent of your supposed valuation of the house. So what other factors did you take into account? And why did you not list them, so that I could present my version of events, or at least gain some inkling of exactly how I had committed any wrongdoing?

‘We advise that we are instructed by our client that should you fail to respond within 7 days to issue property proceedings.’

Tyson slumped deep into the armchair, his insides seething. Property proceedings? The sound of the euphemism with its punchy pontificating alliteration cut ugly incisions. Had he been given seven days from the day that the solicitor wrote the letter or from the day he received it? A mere seven days! It had taken Beck over two and a half years to plan her campaign, collect her evidence, refine her cost-effective arguments, nurse her ill-will and bewitch the solicitor. Fourteen years reduced to twenty lines of bloodless prose! Huh, can’t even write a grammatically correct sentence, these legal sharks!

There was no name on the solicitor’s letter, no face behind the dry tone; only an unidentifiable squiggle of a signature. Beck’s really landed us in the poo.

Fortunately, the fake samurai sword that he’d souvenired in Kyoto had been stolen in a burglary one Friday night when they were caught up in a game of Trivial Pursuit.


Her brother-in-law, Steven Gough Allinson, who puffed himself up as a businessman but didn’t stoop to a serious job since he could comfortably live off his mater’s legacy and who ran both a BMW and his wife’s armoured Land Cruiser, occasionally took on casual book-keeping jobs to keep his hand in the till as well as collecting rent for well-oiled acquaintances of his late father who let their homes for six-month cruises or the Venice Biennale.

‘I’d be screwing the bastard for everything he’s got!’ said Steven, still sulking over Tyson’s unwillingness to go into partnership with four other families to purchase a valley property up near Marysville with a thriving snap-frozen raspberry business. Possessed of a couple of on-site cottages, the six groups could take it in turns to book a weekend, go bush-walking, let the kids learn how to ride a trail-bike, splash about in the dam in summer, live like squattocracy. Besides, in spite of his competitive bluster in the doubles, he was made to look ridiculous and sulky by that bastard’s bamboozling spin and his own fresh-air swipes.

‘Look, I don’t feel comfortable . . . ‘

‘Let’s not pussyfoot around. He led you on, didn’t he? Gave you the impression he was ready to get hitched?’

‘I thought so,’ Beck said hesitantly, frowning. ‘That very first meeting, Max’s twenty-first. At Kooyong, on the centre court. He told me his short-lived marriage hadn’t worked out, a huge mistake, but that didn’t mean he might not re-marry.’

‘Well, there you are. He was testing your reaction, playing with your emotions. And now here you are a dozen years later, no further forward. You have solid grounds, my girl. Now let’s consider his assets.’


Fists clenched, jaw locked, Tyson could see the second-hand silver BMW she had just bought, could see himself slipping round to her carport under cover of darkness and scarring the panels, breaking windows, stabbing tyres. Then as anger, indignation, frustration expired, a sense of pity welled up. She was attacking him not because of any financial exploitation but for his lack of emotional capital. ‘I’ll come back to you if we can get married,’ she’d said forlornly. ‘We can get counselling . . . if you want.’

At nights, sickened with guilt and shame, he’d lived through those last months again and again, the months of Beck’s despondency, her listlessness turning to sickness as her larynx tightened so that she could barely speak, desperate now for marriage but withdrawing into herself further and further beneath fits of coughing, ruffled bedclothes and walls of silence. ‘Why do you reject me?’ she’d occasionally whimper.

But persist he would in his cold-shoulder treatment, for he knew she thought too highly of him; he didn’t deserve her, nor could he cope with such adulation and loyalty, such limpet steadfastness, even though she was gradually becoming less clingy, more a course junkie . . . the Jung Society, Hatha Yoga to undo the knots, Initiation into the Kama Sutra . . .

How do you put a value on feelings? How do you read the happiness index? In any case, how do you remember the ebb and flow and all the muddied eddies of emotion before the final lunacy? And how do you weigh in the balance all those thousands of little everyday favours given by both parties without heed of reward or even acknowledgement?


She’d done everything to capture him, except perhaps be more forthright about her own heartfelt wishes. Her pain when he left for a holiday in the States she recalled with a shudder. So dreadfully did she miss him that she resolved to make an appointment with a GP whose locum lay outside her parish to obtain the pill. On the evening of his return her parents were at choir practice, a perfect opportunity. She collected Tyson at Tulla and brought him straight back home, practically breathless.

‘Just wait here a moment,’ she said coyly, gesturing him to an armchair in the lounge. ‘I’ll call you in a jiff,’ and disappeared into her bedroom. Having taken off her clothes, she arranged her naked body on the counterpane in the most dignified pose she’d rehearsed, one she’d discovered in the local library – Goya’s Maja desnuda. Now, though, at this very moment she’d been dying for, she was trembling, felt the whole embarrassment of seduction too arch, with her arms back behind her head, utterly exposed, indeed, far too yielding.

‘Darling, I’m ready for you now!’ she warbled, with a bit of a croak.

Funny, she’d never called him ‘Darling’ before. Deeming her behaviour more alarming than mysterious, his own thoughts were still gliding smooth and tranquil through the mangrove swamps of the Everglades, where every bubble rising from the murky shadows of mud and knotty roots feigned an alligator’s vigilant eye. In no hurry, he approached Becky’s bedroom, suddenly shocked to find her starkers. Struck speechless he was, a stunned mullet out of his depth. Abashed in turn, but smiling knowingly if not winningly, she opened her arms wide to draw him down out of his rapture.

‘Welcome back!’

Now he did look perplexed, not deliriously happy as was meant.

“I’ve been to the doctor’s. It’s okay.’

‘But you didn’t have to do that.’ Stumbling on difficult terrain, in a tone of dismay and almost annoyance, he knew how much it had cost her to surrender her virginity, how much he must have meant to her, when he didn’t need or particularly desire to have intercourse, yet sensed some kind of entrapment or tacit commitment. And yet she had done this for him, just as she had given herself to petting then oral favours, how could he hurt her feelings, saw the extent of her devotion, her wish to demonstrate she really was an emotionally mature woman.

Reluctantly, he made love, gentle and almost passive, touched by her faith but also sinking guilt that she had saved herself for someone worthy of her, someone whom she could bear off in marriage. Worse still, she had unilaterally moved the relationship onto another level.

For it was something old-fashioned about her, the cleanskin that he had really liked, really cuddly, until he realized that adjective was a euphemism best left to Personal Services in the local rag. In short, he thought he had her measure: her modesty and fondness for family, her church-going that he had given away in his teens, her conservative way of dressing, her genuine willingness to help others less fortunate, her mildness of manner, especially since he was still hurting from a torrid affair with a married woman with three young children under the age of seven, where he had in effect foolishly lost his sense of self, not to mention his dignity and inner calm. By contrast with that manipulative lady, Becky was easy to please and settled for few creature comforts, a homely girl who had a close circle of four girlfriends she’d grown up with, all now salaried professionals together with their partners, who, Tyson admitted, fifteen years senior, he felt ill-at-ease with, as if they too would be chivvying over when he and Becky would tie the knot. Then there were long-time friends from Youth Group, a capella, tennis club, a whole caravanserai of connections. Though very much a people person, she was nonetheless stable and unlikely to rock his hard-fought equilibrium.

Finally, several years having elapsed, he felt obliged to invite her to share his own house at a time when Becky was decidedly unhappy. She could not bear to stay in the same home as her loathsome father with his piggy eyes and vindictive manner, but she also felt stilted with her new flatmates, a loud, domineering party girl who’d romp in late Friday and Saturday nights with a different guy, and another girl who lodged like a fixture in the bathroom and got through several rolls of toilet paper each week, presumably on the removal of cosmetics, and was frequently snippy about Becky’s wardrobe that didn’t do favours, especially from rear vision.

Becky found co-habiting a painful matter to raise with her mother, who would certainly regard this unforeseen shift as living in sin and with – of all rough trades! – a masseur as a challenge to her own nurturing role; indeed, to her own moral values, the integrity of her whole family. How would this shameful development affect her sixty-year old brother’s recovery at Woodend from a triple bypass?


From day one Tyson was scrupulous in making sure they listed all their mutual expenses together with utility bills and divvied them up every Sunday. He attended to the cooking during the week the laundry and toilet; she to the vacuuming, weekend cooking and queasy chocolate cake home-made. It proved a comfortable arrangement for both parties. When Beck offered to pay for half the cost of repairs and cleaning the gutters, he declined, for he was determined not to take advantage of ownership, even offering his house for her collateral should they enter into some business arrangement with Steven Allinson.

Ever the latter-day New Age adventurer, Tyson suggested they go to a presentation of high-tech meditation by a celebrated master at the town hall. He did have misgivings about the inevitable sales pitch and signing up. Suspicious, he was nevertheless sold on the notion of getting back into his personal meditation that had of late lapsed into a dutiful chore and a lazy wander down memory lane.

The packed audience hushed and burst into applause as Master Delmondo’s presence manifested in a silky white robe with fluorescent blue sash. At once, Tyson was put off by the larding of abstract scientific compounds – ‘Alpha level Synchronicity Holodynamic vibrational entrainment technology’ – but he could not help tittering at the slick rat-a-tat patter of a master spruiker that suggested put-downs from Groucho Marx or old music hall routines: ‘Every thought you ever thought appears in your thinking. You’re not an individual, you’re a crowd’; ‘You shouldn’t eat animals, you’re not a cemetery’; ‘We use less than one per cent of our brain function. We are a bunch of walking corpses.’

How on earth does this guy ever still his chattering mind?

But when Tyson adjusted the headphones, he did school himself into an alpha state of promised peacefulness. It wasn’t long, though, before his conscious mind began playing up, trying to recall how many items were listed on the master’s whole-brain product catalogue: DVDs, hanging crystals, jewellery, perfume, almanacs, greetings cards . . .

His own soul’s vibration was obviously out of synch, he admitted, deflated, yet listening to Beck’s easy rhythmical breathing was far more satisfying than concentrating on his own. Feeling virtuous that once again he’d invited her to share a whole new experience, he wondered with a pang of regret whether he might have treated his own imaginary daughter in such a way, sharing life with a loved one as an educational journey. He just hoped Beck wouldn’t notice his fit of the fidgets.

And for her part, she was willing, really excited to learn how to keep both sides of her brain in balance and jumped at the chance to extend the narrow boundaries of her spiritual growth. ‘You must transcend your data,’ advised Master Delmondo, the lanky American radiating health, quips of wisdom and sure-fire conviction. ‘You are the god within.’ She readily gave herself up to the instructions: eyes closed, spine upright, hands joined loosely in her lap. Sounds from the synthesizer and veena and oceanic breakers washed over her afresh again and again; she might have been rebirthing in ambiotic fluid. ‘To be high on life,’ echoed Master Delmondo, ‘live for the moment’, a thrilling idea, till she pulled herself up - her despicable father would’ve entertained the same attitude years ago in the sixties.


Dear Fosselthwaite & Snype,

I am in receipt of your communication of 1st inst, in which you mistakenly claim that your client, one Rebecca M. Pilbotham, is entitled to the exorbitant sum of $17,750 due ostensibly to the fact that I had erred in divvying up our mutual bills equitably whilst said client was residing at aforesaid domus.


I put the case that the aforementioned Rebecca M. Pilbotham, sometime known as Beck, Becky, Bex or The Pill, is on the contrary indebted to my good self for offices rendered to the tune of $17,750.


Such services tendered run as follows:


            • Lender of $35,000 collateral for your client to enter business partnership


            • Male escort to Europe for initiation into a range of diverse cultures


            • Translator of French, Spanish, Italian and a range of English accents


            • Masseur with acupressure speciality


            • Adviser of and Assistant at regular sexual practices – sometimes irregular


            • Spiritual guide


            • Family counsellor, particularly re. her parents


            • Hit-up partner at tennis and church trivia nights


            • Dog-walker and pooper-scooper


No, no, no, too sarky, sailing far too close to the wind. Then he had a brainwave, but was unfortunately brought low by the reply.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for submitting an abstract of your article ‘Heav’n hath no fury like a man scorn’d’ to The Melbourne Inquirer. Regrettably we cannot use it as we receive many similar submissions daily.


When he broke the news as late as he dare that he would be spending Christmas in Europe, he hadn’t bargained at all on her violent reaction: those chestnut eyes smouldering, her hurt, disbelieving stare, her snatch at his hands and pressing them against her breasts. ‘Tell me that you love me!’ she pleaded. ‘Tell me! Please tell me you love me.’ He was in such a state of shock, he couldn’t speak, repulsed by this melodramatic snit, his own helplessness. Still she groaned, ‘Please tell me you love me!’ This was becoming ridiculous, she was acting like a child, but she clung on, sobbing, so that his own gathering irritation and desire to break away from her clutches subsided into pity, her wet face distorted with pain. ‘Tell me! Tell me!’ she growled a grizzle, pulling at the back of his shirt. All he could do was wrap his arms about her and bury her face in his already damp shirt.

‘Of course, I love you,’ he whispered into her ear, doubtful, because he no longer knew what love was. Or at least could never seem to steer that middle way between the Scylla of romance and passion on the bedrock and the Charybdis of a steadfast companionable relationship not hijacked by sexual performance. He was fond of her, of course, but then hadn’t even thought of asking her to accompany him. In any case, she’d be at work.

‘Then take me with you!’

‘What?’

‘Take me with you!’ She was grabbing at his shirt collar as if about to throttle him.

When on Christmas Eve in Venice he was bailed up in his hotel room due to the incessant rain that had flooded St Mark’s, he found himself eagerly looking forward to her joining him in Paris. In fact, enjoyed taking her to those half-empty ultra-cheap underground restaurants off Boulevard St Michel and strolling about Versailles in a flurry of snow. She even forgave him when he mistook the twenty-four hour timetable at Barcelona, where the slow stopping train with no buffet car destined for Granada arrived twelve hours later than he expected, so that they reeled in headachy, parched and starving after a long, sleepless, frigid night on hard, wooden slats.


The first time that he’d asked her to leave his house, their home, he had worked himself up into a state of calm, speaking in phrases measured carefully in recent weeks, but her wide-eyed disbelief and dimples of pain nearly undid him.

‘Now let’s stay calm and rational,’ he was saying, slow and awkward, trying not to inflict too much suffering. ‘Somehow we don’t seem to be connecting any longer. To be blunt, I don’t think I can make you happy, Beck.’

So the time had come at last. She’d been waiting for an ultimatum for months; seen it in the immobility of his face, the terseness of conversation. They had allowed the relationship to grow stale. It was true that his occasional love-making had for years lacked any passion or more recently any genuine involvement at all. But he was usually there for her when she needed him; only nowadays she wondered if she really did need him, what with her new-found interests and widening circle of friends. Bloody hell, why had he waited so long to tell her! For him, the future was winding on and on and on, but happiness always lay round the next corner, never rocked the here and now. But what about me! Even Lorelei had plucked up the gumption to remind her she was wasting the best years of her life.

‘. . . so I think it better if you find somewhere else to live.’

Still she said nothing

‘What do you say?’ It was becoming almost unbearable to look into those brown pebbles. Beck?’

‘I’m staying here.’ Almost inaudible her voice, but she hid her tears in the hum of the vacuum-cleaner she’d re-started, leaving him standing there helpless, trapped in his own domain.


She must’ve been walking about for over an hour and her calf muscles were sore in those high heels, her toes bunched up. How many more laps of the plaza and rounds of arcades should she clock up, already weary, lethargic, hollowed out? There were limits to how frequently you could stare blankly at the window of Hollywood Nails. What a waste that hundred bucks spent on Acqua di Gioia! More annoying, she suffered the nagging suspicion that Tyson was stalking her. She wouldn’t put it past him, now that he’d lost her, especially now that he had no hope of getting her back. She felt a shiver of distaste, that same sensation whenever her estranged father greased to patch things up. Just her luck, for Tyson would occasionally shop at Asian grocers for his piquant spices, aromatic durians and Szechuan peppercorns.

So she attempted to hasten through the throng in the arcades and make her escape to the car park. Clopping woodenly through the plaza, she caught her heel and stumbled.

‘Eh, yer need some help, lady.’ The high-pitched bleat of a voice was quite at odds with the hefty frame bragging belly-gut, the pasty face nicked with port-wine capillaries, the grey, stubbled head.

‘No, I’m fine,’ she bristled, scarcely raising a glance at the man who’d disjointedly lifted himself from a seat next to some stunted box in a concrete tub.

‘D’yer fancy a coffee?’

‘No, no. I must be getting along.’ Although the porky’s line was what she’d been working for all evening. That and something far more blunt and direct.

‘Yer know, I really like you’se. I’ve noticed youse walking about. Yeah, I must’ve met you’se somewhere.’

As she turned to hiss ‘Fuck off!’ she bumped into a girl, Asian, neat and petite, fragile as a doll, hair shiny black as a raven’s wing that fringed a pale face, legs slender as saplings.

‘Sorry, very sorry,’ said the girl.

‘No, no, my fault.’

‘Don’t youse tart with me, yer scuzzbag!’ spat the hulk.

‘That man is trouble for you?’

‘Just a weirdo,’ said Beck in hushed tones, a glare burning her back. ‘I think he’s been stalking me.’

‘Excuse me? My English is not good.’

‘Let’s not worry about him. It’s certainly busy Thursday nights. I’ll let you get on with your shopping.’

‘No, I not do shopping,’ the girl said, staring anxiously at the ground, biting her lip. ‘I notice you two times tonight round shops here. Like you, I’m not happy.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You understand, it is difficult to find work in Australia. There are too many Chinese in town. Also the money is very little for McDonald’s or washing dishes in Chinese restaurant.’

‘What a shame! How much do you need? I think I’ve got some change. Here . . .’ she said, already poking about in her purse.

A dozy-looking, unshaven youth hanging out of his jeans at the knees, eyes hooded to slits, suddenly hove to at her elbow. ‘Can youse spare twenty cents?  'Ere, can you'se . . .’

‘No. I can’t!’ she snapped, stepping away as if she might be contaminated.

‘Any loose change?’ His voice was practically inaudible as he tottered about her.

‘Buzz off!’ Beck turned back to the girl. ‘Jeez, for crying out loud, these men! Now how can I help?’

‘Thank you no,’ said the girl with anxiety, looking warily at the youth rocking on the spot, fixated upon on them. ‘I’m not beggar.’ A frowning moue of defiance or frustration passed her off as even younger. ‘As student, I am allowed to work twenty hours in week only. What can I do? Either work in massage parlour or work cash in hand. If I do massage parlour I must pay owner fifty/fifty. If I work cash, I must walk too much on my own. It is very dangerous at night.’

‘What a bummer! But how can you possibly cope with such degrading work?’

‘So sorry, what is grading?’

‘How do you manage to do this horrible work?’

‘I try not to think too much about this kind of work, but yes . . . yes, I am shamed. But what can I do? It’s a job. I must have job. I cannot phone my family in Shanghai about how I live or they will give me orders to go home very soon. Then I will be shamed much more. I cannot ask for more money. They give me too much already so I can study medicine and maybe stay here after uni.’

‘There’s an old man over there staring at you. Do you know him?’

She turned and gave a radiant smile that lit up her fine features and a delicate little wave at a grey-haired gaffer puffing away on a cigarette, hunched over a pot of tea inside the awning of an outdoor café just off the plaza. Occasionally an attractively dressed girl in bold colours would wave to him in passing its glass sides with a beaming smile and he would nod, flash his gold teeth and flick ash onto the floor.

‘Oh, he’s my boss. It’s okay. Come, we have a cup of coffee and I introduce you. He tells us to use room with bed in Centro even that public people don’t know. He has key. He can give you work. What is your name?’

‘Err, Wanda. No, no, thank you anyway. Must be going. Nice talking to you.’

‘Remember, if you want to be worker in the street, for money, you must look at the man in the eyes and smile real good. If you want to pick up a man, just go for coffee, no money, you understand, don’t look at them straight in the eyes, but out the corner only.’

As for Tyson, next time she really would bury him.



                                                                                                                  Michael Small
October 3 – November 20, 2010