The Chook House

It is Tuesday afternoon in the middle of May. Time to collect the boy from the entrance of the Fremantle Arts Centre where we meet after school. I am always early and I look at my phone while I wait for him. The Virginia creeper has turned crimson. I take pictures with my phone of clouds and edit them with Instagram. The dog waits patiently too, on the warm bitumen, moving only if he has sat on a trail of ants. His nose is wet and twitching. Waiting for the smell of his boy. Sometimes he is tricked by the shape of another person coming down the hill and he gets up, prematurely, and starts wagging his bum. Then he realises it is not his human and flops back down. Then the familiar slap of his sand shoe. Then maybe the whiff that only a dog can sense. The smell of him hits the Murphy’s nose and the wag becomes sincere.

“How was the test?” It was NAPLAN today. Persuasive writing. The question was; Why cook at home? He was happy with his response. His kicker was that if you got really good at cooking you could become a contestant on Masterchef.

We have football. “Get your boots on.” I have his mouth guard. I have his things ready. It’s what I do.

After footy he is hot, even though it is getting dark and he has lots of bare skin. We arrive home and he is going to go over to the neighbour’s because I am off to a talk by Celia Lashlie; On Turning Gorgeous Boys into Good Men. From our car parking spot outside our fence we can see three dodgy types by the stairs that lead onto the park. Jasper says, Drunks Mum. My neighbour will give Jasper dinner and then Graham will pick him up when he finishes work at 7pm. Jasper is eager to get to the neighbour’s and play with his mate and wants to go over straight from the car. He wants to dump his boots on me. He wants me to hand him the house keys so he can race ahead. But I want him to wait for me, so I can lock my car. After all the drunks might be watching. Also I want him to put more clothes on. “No you cannot go over in your footy shorts and that top. Come inside and change into long pants and a wind cheater.” We have our familiar to and fro. He gets shitty with me. I persist.

It is so mundane and so well-known to mothers. We hate the sound of ourselves, but can’t turn ourselves off. I am thinking why can’t you just do what I want you to do.

He does some storming around but changes into jeans and a sweater and is over the fence and at the neighbour’s. Barely a good-bye. I think, well at least he is warm. I have half an hour before I need to leave to go to the talk. Long enough to heat some left-overs in the microwave, switch off the lounge room light and sit but the window and watch the drunks on the steps by the park. They are twenty feet away but it is as if they are in the next room. Hey, she yells. I sit in the dark with my Malaysian curry left-over on my lap and watch them while I eat. I am forking food into my mouth, and peering from my blackness through slatted cedar blinds, into the growing dusk and cooling night at three drunks on the steps, as if I am watching the television. Hey. A man sits half way up the limestone steps and in front of his splayed legs on the step below is a woman. Prancing about in front of them is a younger man. He is spider-like – perhaps he has sniffed something. He is leaner and taller than the other two. He wears black jeans and a singlet top. He could be in his late teens. The man seated is in a red t-shirt and he has pale skin and a three-day growth. He looks mid thirties. The woman is of an indiscriminate age – somewhere around her twenties or thirties. She has smudgy makeup and a pudgy torso. Her body has lost its youthfulness. She wears black leggings and a low-cut black top that reveals her cleavage and sagging breasts. Hey. The man she has wedged into has his hand across her bare front but is not really fondling her, more just drawing her back into him. Making sure she stays put. She cranes her neck back and around and they start kissing while the lanky man drains some liquid into the funnel of his mouth from the silver bladder from a cask of wine held high. Red shirt is sucking the face of the woman and lets his hand with the cigarette hang down near his side. Lanky man comes round to the base of the steps and eases the cigarette from the hand of red shirt. The couple break off from kissing and yell at one another. Hey. They have a phone between them and are holding it out from them and looking at it. I guess they’re taking a photo. The woman has a green and black checked cap on. Lanky man takes it from her head and she yells at him. Hey. Some tinny music plays from the phone and lanky man dances around in front of them. The couple go back to kissing. Lanky man squats down and watches them, swaying a little on his haunches.

I have to go.

It is getting dark.

The talk is at a posh boys school, full of other western suburb parents of teenage boys. Most of the women are blonde.

Celia Lashlie tells the audience of would-be perfect parents that we need to let go. Over two hours of stories she tells us that we need to help boys find their own intuition and learn to access their own feelings by not riding over the top of them with our mother-need to fill in the empty space. If we ask them a question about how they feel we might need to wait two days for them to answer it, but leave the space for silence. There was a lot of knowing laughter as she held a mirror up to us mothers. Descriptions of women nagging men to put out the rubbish could easily have been from my house. In our desire and want to keep our boys safe we take away their ability to look after themselves. She told the fathers that the boys would walk over broken glass to have themselves seen by them. Fathers; see your boys. She told mothers that we stood atop a box of love. As she illuminated us to ourselves there was that spine tingling feeling and that moist eyed awareness that what she spoke of was wise and true.

When I got home the drunks had gone. The steps were empty and cold, the silver bag deflated and left. I wondered about the parents of the drunks. And who do they parent now?

In this story, “L.Debard and Aliette,” published in The Altlantic, and set during the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 in New York, Lauren Groff tells a gothic tale of love and loss..

“Before them sits a girl in a wheelchair. The swimmer’s glance brushes over her, and veers away when he sees her wizened child’s face, the diluted blond of her hair, her eyes sunken in the sickly white complexion. A nothing, he thinks. That he looks past her is not his fault. He doesn’t know. And so, instead of the lightning strike and fluttering heart that should attend the moment of their meeting, all the swimmer feels is the cold whip of the wind, and the shame at his old suit, holey and stretched out, worn only on the dark days when he needs nostalgia and old glory to bring him to the water.

….

And so, Aliette does something drastic: she unveils her legs. They are small, wrinkled sticks, nearly useless. She wears a Scottish wool blanket over her lap, sinfully thick. L. thinks of his thin sheet and the dirty greatcoat he sleeps under, and envies her the blanket. Her skirt is short and her stockings silk. L. doesn’t gasp when he sees her legs, her kneecaps like dinner rolls skewered with willow switches. He just looks up at Aliette’s face, and suddenly sees that her lips are set in a perfect heart, purple with cold.”

One of the sisters has flown home across the continent. They can’t be much further apart and still on the same land mass. Still. The sisters are sisters. She stayed for the garage sale. Perhaps they made enough to cover the price of the skip. But it wasn’t about the money. It was just to get rid of the stuff. Lots remains. Funny how fussy the charities are. They don’t want chipped crockery. Bacteria live there. The sofa can’t have lost its spring. Someone might sue them if, by sitting on it, they injure themselves. Virtually no one will come out and look at the bed. Even after assurances that there are no stains. Not a one. Someone suggests a charity that helps the refugees. But they decline. Paraquad, a charity for wheelchair users, says they will come out. A time is arranged.

The sister, the one in a wheelchair herself, is waiting. She is there on time. She has made sure of it. She is watering the garden to prepare the house for sale. The lawn is crunchy brown in parts. But maybe it can be revived. Green. Buyers like green. It is a long time since she lay on grass. Tyres on turf is not the same thing. Always above and distant. Not really connected. As a child she lay on the lawn. Her midriff showing and the grass spiking her belly. Her fingers delved the dirt and she found the small black beetles that scurried amongst the blades. She called them tickle beetles, because held in the closed fist they squirmed across the skin and tickled the palm. Eventually she let them go. On the grass of the back yard she learnt to do a forward roll. Her head down on the grass, palms pricked by the spikes of buffalo blades, tree bark crunching down the back of your top.

The scheduled time comes and goes. She rings them. They came, apparently, before the allotted time and finding the house empty drove away.

“But I am here now and waiting,” she says. “I have been waiting for you in a house I can no longer bear the sight of. I have been scrubbing skirting boards and vacuuming and I am over it now and I just want you to collect the bed so I can finish the cleaning and go.”

“Well the bed is supposed to be out of the house, you know.”

“No I did not know that,” she answers. “No one told me that. I can’t get it out of the house. I am in a wheelchair!”

“Well the workers can’t enter a house,” she sounds aghast. “Someone should have told you that. Occupational health and safety,” she parrots.

It appears they can only collect the bed, if they deem it collectable at all, from the verge.

The sister is livid. She puts the mobile phone down on her lap and lets the small voice of the woman speak to the air. The woman is asking if she is still there and perhaps they can arrange another time but the sister refuses to hang up the phone or put it to her ear. Like a fly at a sore a small buzz comes from the phone. The woman, she hopes, is exasperated. Suffer, she thinks, suffer.

Suddenly overwhelmed by all that she still has to do and the fact that she has wasted her time and still the bed is sitting in the front room, she is crying in the front garden of the old house. She is screaming obscenities at no one – just the grass and the wilting rose bushes. But a lawnmower man from the neighbouring house is a witness to the woman’s meltdown and is brave enough to cross into the yard and ask if he can help her. She is snotty and bleary-eyed and very unattractive. She probably looks like a crazy.

“It’s okay,” she manages to say, “it’s just someone has let me down, and I am very angry about it.”

***

June 15th 1964; Alex to Esperance. Left his pipe in car ash tray. Cripple attacked by dog over the road and feathers pulled out galore.

I picture my mother discovering the injured chicken, already a charity case. Cripple. Too slow to escape like the other hens into the safety of the chicken coop. Red on white. A stressed bird. Open beaked. The grass scattered with the bloodied feathers. Does she chase the mongrel dog up the driveway?

June 30th 1964; 10 st 5lbs put on 7lbs - disgraceful

That’s me – the cause of the swelling. The one turning her ashamed of her weight gain.

July 6th 1964; Fay sick. Slight loss liquor. Stay in bed for 2-3 days. Dr Anderson. I sponged her.

Then for the following days she visits the neighbour, three houses down and across the road, a woman she nursed with … Sponged Fay.Sponged Fay. Fay Depressed. Lisa very grizzly. Fay to Devonleigh. ? Miscarriage.

Years later this is the woman who house we go to while our parents go to the movies. She lets us watch her cook, a cigarette always in her hand. She has a piano in the front room and we play on it. She has a teenage son who chases us around the house. We hide under the queen bed in the parents’ room. We watch his feet from beneath the bed. We are in the dark, lying on carpet, breathing hard. He says, “I wonder where those little girls could be?” We are squirming with excitement and fear. I can’t recall him catching us. Richie. We sleep over, top to tail, two to a bed. The sleepout has louvred windows and brown chenille bedspreads. Breakfast is different from home.

July 13th 1964; No word re Fay yet and then two days later Fay lost babe. 8.30pm. Boy. Lived 1/4 hour.

August 1st 1964; Alex bought new Rotary lawn mower. Cut lawn. Cut hedge. Fence made for Lisa side drive.

August 14th 1964; Mama Pulmonary Oedema Fremantle Hospital.

I am about to be born and my mother is losing her mother.

August 18th 1964; Mama clot! very ill. Her writing is clogged with fear. She writes that she visits everyday and she shows slight improvement but that the old woman is very irritable. After another two weeks in Fremantle Hospital her mother’s sister Jean is left to arrange convalescence home.

September 7th 1964; caesarean Nicole born 12.45pm

September 19th 1964; Returned home. Feel jolly weak but will soon recover. 8st 12lbs. And then the diary goes blank. Not another entry all year.

I know her mother doesn’t die till I am about 18 months old. She lingers on with her heart failing in the nursing home. My mother must visit her on the bus with two small children in tow. Fay remains my mother’s friend to this day. She survived a melanoma and a heavy smoking habit. For the remainder of 1964 my mother is too busy to even make her notes. She has a toddler and a baby and a dying mother…

Even though Jasper is turning ten and has grown up in so many ways, he still wants fairy bread for his birthday party.

As he is leaving out the door, on his way to school, I ask him what food he wants me to make for the party.

“Chips. Chocolate crackles. Fairy bread.”

What about the party bags?

“Sour snakes,” comes the reply. Has he got product in his hair? Is that a swagger?

Fairy bread must be made with the whitest of breads. It has no nutritional value. Zilch. It is exceedingly bad for you. It must take years to travel through your intestine, so absolutely free it is of fibre. The bread must be buttered, never spread with margarine, evenly to the crusts (which can be cut off later least the children ingest any roughage whatsoever) and then the bread is tipped over into a dinner plate of hundreds and thousands. The little bits of colourful sugar glue themselves in a single, even layer to the bread, like miniature eggs that only bliss bombs could emerge from, and voila the creation is complete. Sugar on air.

Watch those skateboards fly after that consumption.

It makes me think of my favourite party foods. It was not Fairy Bread. Perhaps my longing was most for the Butterfly cakes that my mother made. Melt in the mouth cup cakes, their tops cut off and dissected to make two wings that sat atop a splodge of fresh cream and finally the whole thing dusted with icing sugar. Even small, we could get them into our mouths in one enormous bite.

Do you remember your favourite childhood party food….

Boy can this Sumell guy write. In this short story from the latest Paris Review Matt Sumell documents the cutting meanness, both funny and sad, of a young man towards a woman as two people find out they are not really suited for the long haul…

Here’s a taste...

Also, one night, when she was standing still and naked and backlit by the bathroom light, I noticed a kind of white, almost invisible fur all over her body. It bothered me. I never said anything about it ’cause I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but she had no problem commenting on how my dick is browner than the rest of me. “It’s like the dark circles around Indian people’s eyes,” she said. I pretended I didn’t care, but I did, but not as much as I cared about her shoes. She always wore high heels, like even on bike rides always, and to the beach and batting cages always, and to a Super Bowl party we went to once. And believe me, it wasn’t so much the height thing, which she thought it was about – it was that I got sick of hearing her clomping around everywhere like a pony. At first I just made little jokes about it, started calling her Trusty and offering her carrots all the time, said things like, “You can lead a lady to water, but you can’t make her sneaky.” Soon enough though, I was promising to shoot her if she ever broke her leg. She got upset, and I said, “It’d be real sad, but I’d have no choice. Sorry.” Then I pointed a finger at her like a pistol and went, Pchoooo.

One Sunday she took an hour getting ready to go to the dog park, and I told her to giddy it the fuck up. She gave me the whole-I-do-this-for-you! thing in the car on the way and I said, “Whoa now. Slow down there, Seabiscuit. If you’re doing it for me, lose the fuckin’ foot ware. It annoys me.”

She got real quiet then, looked out the window at passing stuff, said, “You can just drop me off wherever.”

Two women in their forties are in the house of their childhood. Once they shared a bedroom. They made a cubby between the Jacarandas with jarrah pickets and hessian wheat sacks. They are sorting for a garage sale. Already so much has been dumped in a skip and thrown on the verge. They are hoping gold bars may be unearthed. Instead they find dried apricots, turned black. Neither of them wears much makeup. Both need glasses to read. One chews her nails. One has the start of grey streaking her brown hair. They both have wrinkles, but they have congratulated each other on their flawless necks.

They find old school reports. They find christmas decorations, made in kindergarten, when children were still permitted to use toilet rolls for craft activity. Of course the house feels shrunken, or else they feel giant-sized. So much of it is unchanged. The smell of their parents bedroom…

***

I hear my sister walking up the hallway, taking the steps in an easy stride. She is wearing corduroys. We are both practical, sensible people. Or so we like to think. Neither of us is too sentimental. We don’t wear high heels. We are going to sell the house. The one thing we hope is that they keep the tree. A hundred foot tall Lemon Scented Gum in the backyard. She is enormous and gracious. Her trunk is grey and smooth with muscular branches stretching out from her sides. She can been seen from streets away. She is scary during storms when she hurls her canopy like a mad woman shaking out her long locks. Both my father and mother loved the tree. After all it was living.

I am in the front of the house. We sisters can call to one another. Oh God look at this! My mother has kept her wedding dress. The once white lace is yellowing. We find hand embroidered baby dresses wrapped in tissue paper. Who would have thought our mother had the patience and skill for smocking? On high shelves, where they could no longer reach or see, we bring down all sorts of decaying and rotten matter. Moths have gone to work. The remnants just paper away. We come across the diaries of my mother. She is still living. It is wrong to read someone’s diary, right? Not until they are dead. But my mother is not a detailer of emotions. It is not a journal. It is more a list of what happened when. She would not have written down something she wanted hidden. She is also the type who stops herself thinking, to make it not so. I think she believes that pain and death can be erased by the not speaking of them; a child only seeing a smidgen between the fence of fingers that hide a face.

She read aloud from her diary at night, to my father – trying to get him to remember their holidays; in an attempt to will away his dementia. On finding the box of diaries neither of us hesitate to open them. We don’t ask her, perhaps believing we know she won’t mind. Or else feeling some kind of ownership over them. We think they are about us, after all. We are interested most in the oldest diaries. The ones from when she was more our age. When perhaps we shared the same fears and anxieties. What did she think as a mother with toddlers? We look for a version of ourselves in her. Will we end up the same? What’s in store? Perhaps an understanding of the past will make her more knowable to us…

My sister takes ownership of the one from the year of her birth and I have the one from mine, 1964. So much of it is blank. I have to make up my own imaginings of her daily life. She tells so little in it. She plants ranunculi. Her mother is ill. That much I can tell.

January 13, 1964: 28 days since last period. 2nd babe on the way. How do I tell if she was happy? I know she miscarried many times. Perhaps she doesn’t expect the baby to stick. Why write that you are excited when it could be swept away from you all too soon? Growing up we heard the stories of her driving herself to the hospital, blood running down her inside thighs, a boy baby delivered, formed enough to have a sex, but never given a name.

Then about my sister, who is about 15 months old, she writes; January 31st 1964: Lisa’s eye teeth at last through. Will be 14 teeth. Trying to stand.

Then on February 25th she writes again about her pregnancy with me – told Mama and Aunt. Again I will never know what they thought. Maybe they thought it was too soon. Maybe they feared the pregnancy would slip away.

On March 5th 1964 she writes; Leila killed accident-road. Alice F died. Nothing more. I think about my own accident. In a diary somewhere has a sister written; Nicole car accident – paralysed. A mother written; Nicole accident-road – might die. What tears are hidden beneath the blue fountain pen scrawl? Who was Leila?

March is a bad month. On the 12th and 13th there are entries; Alex heard bad news re job. Gone to see Spencer re job. Alex lost job. Terrible blow – but may get one with Dept Agriculture. Alex v.brave. Terrible blow – it means more because it says so little. Dad struck like the pin belted by a bowling ball. Topple. Fall.

On Easter Sunday March 29th Lisa walked by herself.

9th April 1964 she writes; To Safety Bay, one week’s holiday. Yummee! Lovely cottage all mod cons and we are v happy. Is yummee a code to herself? A word she reads and knows the true meaning of.

On Friday 24th of April they saw Lawrence of Arabia. Wonderful! Peter O’Toole really memorable. And then on Anzac day Baby’s movements, felt quickening. Lisa walking well. But she must have been concerned about my sister’s walking since the next day she visits her doctor at the nurse’s suggestion and she writes; Dr thinks she is alright but she would have to be xrayed for surety. He will see her later.

The following day there is lunch with her mother; Mama lunch. She seemed tired and hectic, to say the least. To say the most, did she argue with her mother?

April 29th 1964; Lisa walking a lot more and going down steps by herself. Looks like rain.

May 5th 1964; 9st 6lbs, 2lbs gain. Dr Pixley, all clear, no wait at all. Fundus correct position. Lisa walking v.well. Seedlings planted. Sweet peas by garage. So in a time before ultrasound a simple measurement of the uterine fundus height suggests the baby was in a normal position. A mother is relieved enough to spend time on her knees in the garden.

May 7th 1964; Alex has job Agriculture Dept. Starts 25th May South Perth. It is a relief. Salary 1011 pounds per annum. He stayed in this job till he retired. His superannuation still funds my mother’s nursing home fees.

June 10th 1964; Dr Linton Lisa eye appoint. Lisa’s eye good. Hooray!

I imagine my mother, pregnant with me, worrying about her toddler who has a funny eye and is slow to walk. Her husband has been out of work and he is earning money doing odd jobs for neighbours, like cement edging for Mrs Elliott. She writes when they receive a hundred pounds from a Dutch relative, Aunty Zus. She visits her mother and her Aunt and plants annuals in the garden. She takes the toddler to the doctor and waits for me to arrive…..

1964 To be continued….

I love my dog. Really. But I ask a lot of him for his species. We unfairly expect dogs to understand our intentions when our method of communicating is so different from theirs. I ask that he accept my adoring eye contact. I often hug him. I cuddle him as if he is a baby. These are not things that dogs, in general, as a species, appreciate. I talk to him like he can understand language; nuanced and particular. We show our teeth when we are happy, the exact opposite of what they do.

For a dog eye contact can be threatening. Between dogs, direct staring can be an invitation to fight. So look away from a dog that is feeling uncomfortable in your presence. Dogs prefer to greet one another side on, and sniff out each other’s rear ends. A dog that barges, head first into another’s space, is asking for trouble. Rude begets rude.

A wagging tail has been taught to children to signal a happy dog. But really a wagging tail is merely an invitation to engage. You need to assess the type of wag. The only truly safe wag is the windmill, whole bum wag; the one where the dog might be attempting to hula hoop, if he knew what such a thing was. The stiff tip wag of the upright tail can mean a fight is on its way. Beware the dog that approaches, ears forward, with the tail erect, like it has been stiffened by wire.

A teddy bear face invites the human to grasp the dog by the cheeks and bring it in close. Kiss it even. Our dog has grown up with our very forward advances. He has been well-socialised to endure the human embrace. What concessions does he make to his own comfort to accommodate our need to smother?

But children don’t often see such teddy bear-faced dogs as from another species. To them they are just like us, but fur-coated and made for canoodling. No one has taught them to stand back and see if the dog comes to them. Instead they rush up, arms flapping, squealing like prey and heading for the face. They fling arms around shoulders and over heads. Pat pat pat. No wonder so many are bitten. It is surprising that more are not. Just as we teach children at school the dangers of strangers and how to cross the road, perhaps we need to instruct on how to approach, or rather how not to approach, a species we have so surrounded ourselves with. I suspect that there is more likelihood of danger from a tethered dog than the chance of abduction from a stranger and yet we seem to let our children go on blissfully unaware of how to safely greet and engage with dogs. Instead we expect our canines to know our intentions are innocent and just submit to our embrace. We have unfairly asked so much of them….

A Youtube clip of a cat and Boston terrier – interspecies love

I make my traditional Norwegian Buns. They are oozing with melted butter and cinnamon sugar. They are Nigella’s – queen of sweets. It is a two-hour job, begun before the house is fully awake. There is the kneading, the rising, the rolling, the rising again and finally the baking. The rings on my fingers are glued to my skin with sticky dough. The stainless steel taps get coated with the stuff. Unctuous. The dishcloth becomes unusable. It is usually a messy affair with lots of flour across the floor but this year it has been better. Uncle Dave comments, Not So Messy, ah. The dog is doing an excellent job, tongue to the floor.

Easter is not a church-thing in our house. Graham barely knows Good Friday is the day of the crucifixion and Easter Sunday is when He rose again. Dead three days, Not bad, says Jasper. How is it that Graham can get the days confused? He is poorly educated in religion. And so too is our son. Neither do we do Eggs or Bunnys. What we do is watch the seasons change. Normally Easter signals the start of cooler nights. There might even be rain. Dew in the morning. A cardigan is retrieved from deep in the drawer. The leaves on the Robinia are dropping. The Western Corellas head North. The dog can wear his “doggy jammies” when he is put out at night. The fan goes into the attic, and down comes the gas heater and the donnas. The sun is still shining, but its heat is toned down. The roses will need pruning soon. The dome of blue is at its most brilliant. Best of all the wind has gone. Still, crisp air. A leaf let loose from its twig, free-falls straight down.

This year the boy is injured. A buckle fracture of the distal radius means he has a blue half-cast on his arm. It is cleverly made by Amanda the OT out in the burbs, with an electric frying-pan full of hot water and a hot air-blower. It has been three days since he tripped in the playground on a ball and came down on his hand. Three days since the phone call from the school where the assistant teacher told me, “he has washed his face and has ice on the injury, but still he would like his mother to come pick him up.” The green stick fracture is barely visible on X-ray. A mere blip on the periosteum. On the third day; the throbbing has gone away and now it is just inconvenient. Or else part of his make-believe armour in a game of Iron Man vs Batman. Reborn as Superhero. Alas; no skateboarding, no Footy, no tennis.

The neighbours have gone South. The houses around us are empty and quiet. Hollow of people. The clothes lines are nude. The bins are already out on the street, waiting. The mini has its car cover on.

My mother telephones in the evening; I’m in Agony. Agony. You must do something.

Her indwelling urinary catheter has blocked. Again. Unexpected. It is something that is happening to her more frequently these days. It is supposed to only need changing every six weeks, but lately it decides it will stop working somewhere around the four-week mark. When it blocks acutely it means her shrivelled bladder, the size of a walnut-shell, is asked to stretch. It doesn’t like it, so unused to being a container. The small muscular organ is not accustomed to filling. Its nerve endings fire off, indignant. It gives her great pain, as her ungenerous bladder expands, and yet the staff at the nursing home are slow to swing into action and get the thing changed. So she rings me. This can’t happen again, she says.

I ring the nursing home but no one is answering the nursing station phone. Perhaps they are eating Easter Eggs. Sucking the chocolate between their teeth.

She rings back. It’s sorted. The catheter has been changed. What a relief. I can hear the return of perkiness. A nurse appeared with a trolley. Hands washed; sterile gloves snapped on. Once the task has been started it is over in three minutes; a nurse has whipped out the old one and threaded up the new. The bag has filled. The bladder has wilted and wizened, back to its peach-stone pip-size. Huddled down into its pelvic bed. Back to slumber.

But it will block again. It is the nature of the thing. The bladder is irritated by the catheter sitting in its lumen and a biofilm (a nice word for gunk) forms around the eyelet of the catheter. Then the drainage gets poor and eventually it blocks, and no urine can drain away into the bag. The catheter needs to be changed for a new one. But it is only a matter of time before that too is coated with the cellular and inflammatory crud that plugs the catheter opening. Bladder failure is what she has. And there is nothing medicine can do to replicate the ingenious functioning of a normal, healthy bladder.

But nurses changing it quickly, when an old woman cries out, I’m in agony, might be a good place to start.

On a crowded bar room floor, with a twenty-something band playing and the music thumping through my rib cage, I feel I don’t belong. It makes me think of the word Belong. Unbelong and Unbelonging appear to be the kind of words that spell check gives a red slash. No results found. But this is the way I feel. Part of the Unbelonging.

I am making my own word for it.

And it is not because of age difference. There are plenty of us middle-aged ones here. The Fremantle Ukulele Collective has just performed and it is full of forty-something blokes, paunches and haphazard, bad shirts.

But it is movement that makes me Unbelong. Other mothers of ten-year old boys are still able to get on the dance floor and move. It is an effortless sway of the hips that they are doing. And they are moving in time. Like back up singers to a cool black dude, and I am watching them. Ravenously. I want their movement. I want their legs.

I am in the midst of hips, and waists, and belts. If she had fluff in her belly button I could flick it out with my tongue, it is so close. I can see up people’s nostrils. I am in my wheelchair. It is slick and titanium and small, and as elegant as a chair can be. But it is still very tipable. Another no-such-word. But it is a word I need. A man, slightly pissed, wants to sit on the edge of the wheel for support or just because he wants to say Hi. After all he likes me. He attempts to sit like someone sitting on a ledge of a window. But I tell him it’s not safe. It is a wheel – designed to spin. Now I am feeling sat upon. I am beginning to feel the crowd encroach on me. Drunkenness is all around and the precariousness of people on skinny heels is, to me, getting more dangerous. I have the feeling that someone will end up on my lap, or worse still, I will be tipped over, legs awry over my head like they are the lifeless limbs of a simple, cotton stuffed doll.

I am sickened by the jealousy I feel watching the movers. Some are moving who would be better served by stillness. But. I see the band in their smoke haze. The blonde boy lead singer has his hair pushed forward like he is walking with a heavy breeze behind him. It could be a Bieber influence. But he is, of course, cooler than that. His shirt has a small dainty print on it. He turns his back on the crowd to concentrate on his guitar. To commune with it. The boys have tight pants. The type that need to be put on lying down and writhing on the bed. This is how I too put my trousers on. The boy on the electric violin has a curly mop top and a velvet jacket. People have their phones in the air taking photos and short videos. Then the phone is pocketed and more swaying. More circling hips. Stirring. I look down at the stilettos in front of me. At they way they move on their centimetre of contact with the boards. Twisting into the surface. Screwing and stamping their humanness deep into the wood.

Along with movement these dancers have desirability. They run their fingers through their hair. They do head flicks, their lips do pouty things. They rub their thighs with their own hands. Unattached to metal, they are all flesh. Watching still, I feel their sex. Sitting, amidst and stagnant, is not sexy. I am a blob of flesh on my island of titanium. A photographer with a camera, as opposed to a phone, is taking pictures of the band. Through all the smoke. The light is red and orange. The keyboard player has milky perfect skin. She could be fourteen. She has so much movement ahead of her. Or does she?

I don’t attempt to use the toilet here. I doubt there is one for the disabled. In more desperate days I might choose to use the toilet and pee, unashamedly, with the door open, unable to close it and still get back into my chair. These days I opt for the third gender toilet.

In the belly of the Unbelonging, longing resides. It seats itself heavy and morose. Here in the very cool bar, the longing is a dull throb. As if in time with the beat of the music there is an aching remembering of ancient movement. Of swaying hips. Of  snaking spine. At other times, mostly it is weak. Weaken by time, years in fact, routine, just plain getting used to it. The longing is gone when we are across the road at the fancy restaurant where people are merely torsos and heads. Here we are all equal. Legs are beneath the table. Crotches are unseen. Ease returns.

I am in the toilet at the fancy restaurant. It is designated for the people who crouch on the c. The symbolic wheel. We of the wheel. The Third Gender. We are not sexless. We have desire. To be free of the thing, with its titanium brilliance, that we both love and hate.

Dessert is finished, the wine is empty and we are going back into the den of the bar. We enter through a heavy door, held open with the working foot of the person in front. The stamped wrist is shown. I am reminded of the sullen, awkward and violent boyfriend of the past. He had a thing about door stamps. He wouldn’t let his inner wrist, where the blue veins coursed beneath the skin, be stamped. Not after his chemistry-clever brother told him about polymers. He said the ink was toxic and likely to seep through into the blood stream and cause cancer. He would tell all the door people, at all the pubs and bars, this complicated story. With him, nothing was ever simple. Mostly they let him have his stamp on a corner of his untucked shirt. But he could make a scene too. And then things might turn nasty. He liked to threaten them with legal action. Talk about rights. He gave people fighting for legitimate causes a bad name.

He too was a member of the Unbelong. For him, it was a desire to stand out. He enjoyed the difference. Revelled in it even. He was the type to shout out at the cinema during a show when everyone else was silent. He used his charisma to make the vulnerable love him; intoxicated them even. Then once, fully addicted, punished them for their devotion. A slow grinding away of any self-esteem.

I am through the other side now. Home again. Not feeling like the third gender. Not feeling so static and two-dimensional. There is music outside on the oval of Fremantle park. There, the tough members of the Unbelonging, will make it across the spongy grass to the elevated ACROD platform and do their best to move to the beat of the music. I ask myself; can I put myself through the Longing again?

In the opening to Larry McMurtry’s memoir about his passion for collecting books he describes the ranch house yard of his childhood;

“The fifty yards or so between the house and the barn boiled with poultry. My first enemies were hens, roosters, peacocks, turkeys. We ate lots of the hens, but our consumption of turkeys, peacocks, and roosters was, to my young mind, inexcusably slow.”