...She has a postcard of two lions fucking and a photograph of herself and her sister on the edge of a small green revolving world, twenty-two years ago. It was the day that Margot the lamb was born. In the photograph everything looks new and fresh-blooded and clean and possible. In the postcard it is difficult to tell if the lions are enjoying it or hating it. It is like the goblet and the faces, it changes: even as you look at it. And there is no inbetween, no fence to sit on. They are either hating it or loving it...

If she put her mind to it she would make a marvellous hack writer. Like the heroine in Romancing The Stone or the one in Lady Oracle. But Barbara Boulevard is quite happy being the Head Cashier at Coles, and being hated by the Junior Staff. 
     ...In the dim past, she had an Aunty who understood everything. She had a small wooden box that smelt of boiled milk and jelly crystals. 
     Nowadays, Barbara buys nylon-jersey dresses and ceramic bud vases and hand-painted wall tiles. She has the worst lamp-shade in the world (the worst taste in the world). Her lounge-room walls are bile-green. She doesn't care. She lives in Perth, she flew there one afternoon when it all became too much... 

Barbara doesn't want that belly-dive into emotions, ever again. (She keeps a suitcase under her bed with every Erle Stanley Gardner ever written: all one-hundred and fifty.) She had a boyfriend once but now she has lovers. She applied for the job in Coles because some of the happiest moments of her life were spent as a child in Coles Cafeteria. She loved the baked-bean noise, the waitresses whizzing past like bowling balls, apple pies and cream and the tiny little packets of butter and jam. 
    And she lets the man rub against her in the crowd because she knows what it's like to be lonely, to crave touch.

Flying over the Great Australian Bight [flashback]: Barbara has a dream that she is a contestant on Pick A Box. If only she can make the correct wish everything will be hers to keep: the toasters, the mixmasters, the colour tvs, the sedan cars and the glassware and silverware and the Mikemoto pearls...But she loses, and one by one the prizes are sucked out the window with a pfft sound to disappear into the void. She feels sad, but much lighter. Then the hostess, whose name is Dolly, walks down the aisle carrying the Mikemoto pearls. "These are yours," she says, waking Barbara. 
     So she must have got something right, after all.

Barbara can always guess the endings of the detective stories she reads, not because she remembers or is particularly clever, but because she loves the formula. The formula is the web upon which the fly is stuck, caught. It is the casual clue that matters. Not the intricacies of the plot or the suspects' personalities, but the casual clue -- like the parapraxis, the slip of the tongue, the image in the dream. This is the key. 
     As Superintendent Battle says, quoting Hercule Poirot: "keep a murderer talking." Because everyone is bound to speak what's true sooner or later, in the end it is easier than telling lies. So they make some little slip they don't think matters and that's when you get them.

If she were to become depressed she would go to David Jones and try on hats and lipsticks. She liked to sit in the menswear section and feel totally anonymous amongst the tweedy smells. The men are embarrassed and the Sales Assistants click their teeth because she never buys. But Barbara doesn't give a shit. 
     She is like the boy in the headline that said: "Boy Divorces Parents." She knew that she had made the right decision (imagine a headline: "Barbara Divorces Past / Barbara Divorces Nagging Conscience") because her life now not only had everything but was completely her own, the ultimate fantasy. If her options don't suit she can make up others, she can fly away, leave it all behind, send the past packing. Shed it like an old coat. She can avoid reality as one avoids a certain food (simply leave it uneaten on the plate)...

One day on the boat out to the Incan Island she found a tiny dried seahorse under her seat, a beautiful thing. And at the Lost City of Atlantis she discovered the perfect symmetry and impeccable timing of the dolphins. 

The next day she woke to find two bottles of milk in her front garden, lying side by side like two cats in the sun. She decided this was an omen. 

That night she watched the American psychiatrist and his family reaffirm their love for each other in the midst of daily struggle, and as the theme music washed over them all she felt a warm gushing tug at her stomach nerves. She decided it was time for her, too, to have a baby. 

On the train to work she sat opposite a young Aboriginal woman nursing a plump black child. They were a screen that she watched all the way into town: she longed for their perfection (like the dolphins, like the two unasked-for bottles of milk). She was like Dora gazing at the Sistine Madonna, captivated by the young mother (not the child, only what the child meant). Until the train pulled into her station and the woman turned to Barbara and said: "What are you staring at?"

Like sex, the detective novel makes everything ok again: this was its secret. (The perfect symmetry of the dolphins and the Lost City that surely exists even if we can no longer seem to find our way back to it...) 

Deep, deep inside Barbara did not believe in this order promised by the detective novel, but she fervently believed in the desire for it. It was the only reality left.

The days pass: it is a hot night at her new lover's place (the doctor's) and Barbara wanders out onto the balcony. It is two o'clock in the morning. She feels invisible and anonymous, she could be anywhere on any balcony in the world and who would know? She is surprised to see lights on here and there down the street. She peers out towards the lights and counts six more restless naked people, on balconies, in kitchens, putting on the kettle for a cup of tea or, like Barbara, just staring out into the night. 

Inside, the doctor is watching a test replay on his new VHS. Drinking beer. He is Greg Chappel scoring a hundred. Occasionally he jerks slightly, or smiles, or his lips move. The crowd applauds wildly, Chappel walks the last run of a six that makes his century. He shakes his head modestly, looks up towards the hill, smiles back. Barbara tip-toes out of the room, leaving him to celebrate with his mates. 
     In the bedroom she reads a pornographic story from an old Underground Press anthology. The story is about a "hunching contest" in 1968 between Abbie Hoffman and a Pentagon robot. Abbie has a whole regiment of volunteer sex partners from the women's air corps. "Their uniforms had been cut away around the nookie in a gesture of accomodation to Abbie who is known to experience acute metaphyscial distress whenever he is unable to commence hunching immediately." The robot has only one partner, a nameless "Pig" who moans and cries with joy, orgasming over and over, at the humiliation and pain inflicted by the robot and his metallic donger. 
     The writing has a religious quality, a building tense rhythm: a litany of awe to the magnificence of the male weapon, especially such a god-like one as that wielded in the name of truth and freedom by Abbie. It is a disgusting story and Barbara is shamed and disgusted with herself as she begins to feel aroused. She flushes as the "pig" yells "Piss on my tits! piss on my tits!" and "hunch me, Andy, hunch me and fuck me!" while the crowd laughs and titters. She squeezes her legs together and rocks gently, her head spinning. 
     It is the image of the metal penis, working towards the woman like a piston. Rhythmically, inexorably: perfectly programmed for pleasure, infallible. The traditional delaying tactics of the genre: the titillation stage-managed by an improbable plot, the Pig begging to suck the robot's dick "eager as she was to get pumped." The fantasy-formula of a well-oiled, frictionless machine -- massaging, curling and wriggling, pumping in and out, and the image of the woman helpless in the face of this machine: abandoned, desirous. Pure sex: how could you possibly be accused of a romantic attachment to a machine? No, it is merely what the machine can do, promise, threaten to withhold but be trusted to deliver; it is the image of control and the image of being beyond control. And it is the crowd watching. 
     Barbara moistens her finger and pulls up her skirt, runs her finger ever so gently back and forth down her clitoris, barely touching, teasing and rocking. Her finger is part of an elaborate mechanism, custom-designed for orgasm, every tiny part, every stick of furniture in the room, every nuance of the lighting, the distant sound of the cricket ball tapping, the cricket crowd clapping softly, the commentator's slow voice as predictable as butter. A bead of sweat running down her thigh. Everything in harmony, like a thousand hands, producing pleasure. She lays back on the bed and, gives in to it all, comes with a wild deep spasm that shakes her silently, leaves her limp and curled like a baby. ...She rolls over and sleeps. The cricket drones on.

Barbara discovers that A. A. Fair is in fact the incomparable Erle Stanley Gardner writing under a pseudonym. She settles in for the night with an A. A. Fair novel. 
     This opens up so many new possibilities. Another dimension, a fresh layer is added to the world like a new layer to a sponge cake. She feels safe. Erle Stanley Gardner tucks her into bed. A. A. Fair watches from the doorway. The most indulgent, the most wonderful of parents. (Barbara never wants to grow up.) She wants her life to be like the Catholic's heaven: "Motion in rest." ("We will be like arrows flying through the air but grasped by a hand" -- whose hand? The hand of Erle Stanley Gardner, of course: The Incomparable.) 
     She wants to fall asleep gently in the back seat of the car with her parents at the wheel (not her real parents, but these adopted ones, Erle and A. A.). She wants to be where the destination doesn't concern her, just the gentle rocking motion, everything taken care of and every detail given a purpose, nothing left to chance. 

But even Perry Mason lost one case. He wouldn't be realistic otherwise. 
     He had to lose a case to gain our confidence: how could we believe in him if he was infallible, yet how could we trust him if he wasn't? A paradox, like the hymen whose presence shows absence and whose absence shows a presence. But even this can be torn by a doctor's hand. 
     A bit of characteristic flim-flam and Perry loses the case thereby proving his client's innocence. 
     "Your Honour, Your Honour!" shouts Hamilton Burger helplessly. "This is simply another one of those wild-eyed dramatic grandstands for which Counsel is so noted." 
     Hamilton Burger never learns: beware the details, the camouflage, the shuffling of little words that stack the deck.

The radio plays Too Young To Be Married. There is an umbrella in the doorway. I dreamt of an umbrella expanding, growing inside like a magic bean... 
     Climb like Jack into the land of the giants, grab the golden goose.

In the bathroom: barefoot and pregnant. 
     Alex's face behind Beth's face in the misty mirror. Standing there with her twisting knife. (So difficult to kill with your double life.) Slashing at the skin of her thigh like a madwoman, talking calm like a lawyer. The room steaming up, the bath overflowing, the blood collecting in a pool at her bare white feet. (Had your Salem witch dress on.) 
     Blood 
     water 
     salt 
     saliva 
     sperm. 
     Leaky fluids, seeping through the ceiling into the clean kitchen below... 

`Quick, Dan! Now!' someone shouts. 

Your honour, my client held her under the water and strangled her till she stopped breathing purely in self-defence. And when she rose up still alive, there was no choice but to shoot her in the heart. 
     After all, a man's home is his castle... 

The audience trembled in the dark while Dan grabbed her by the neck and choked and pushed her under the water. (Drowning, just the test.) You could see the light flickering on the faces of those closest to the front. 
     Stone her, burn her at the stake, drive a nail through her heart!
     When she rose up out of the water we screamed, and when the bullet went in (the final solution) some people cheered. The blood streaming out of her like a thick black stake, nailing her to the wall, arms outstretched... 

I stayed till the very end, till after the ambulance took the body away and the calm ambient music returned and the last slow zoom shot of the happy family photo in the hallway. 

I guess I wasn't surprised to see Alex (Glenn Close) in the cinema powder room -- white tiles, mirrors, taps -- after all, a bathroom was where I'd seen her just a few minutes before. 
     In the powder room she looked like anyone else. Her curly hair tight and ordinary now, more like her character in The Big Chill (Artemis, the Earth Mother?). 
     She had on a fawn wool wraparound coat and tan stockings and a big black leather bag on a strap over her shoulder and tucked under her arm and she was leaning over the basin, splashing cold water onto her face. 
     When I came out of the cubicle a few minutes later she was gone. 

I saw her again a week later on the Newtown 423 bus...

Light and whiteness, showing up the blood so well when she does her knife trick to get his attention... 

Your logic: thin, sharp, pointed and dangerous. You kept missing and cutting yourself. Even the weather and the music turned against you. 

Gave herself a few gashes to show how she felt: a slit here, a slit there... 

...Got her hands covered in blood; rubbed Dan's face in it. 

Dan says: `That's crazy. You knew the rules.' 
     Alex says: `What rules?'

Grandma! Adam's in the garden. Where's Eve? 
     Eve's waiting. Sleep now.
     Grieve for Eve... 
     This is not for you yet. Wait.
     Adam comes riding on his great white horse, plunging on his horse, down down into my dreams. One day he'll come and touch me into life, there, where my hand.. 
     Guilt in my mouth down my legs warm like heated honey when I'm in bed alone at night beating at the window like a moth diving like a white bird. 
     Left me all alone for thirty years.
     Shh.

There was this guy coming home on the train, and he said, I should tell you some things about my life and you could write about them. I said, Sure. (Heard that one how many times.) My earliest memory, he said, was coming over on the boat from Germany. My Dad put me up on his shoulders and held me out over the rails as far as he could reach. He was that kind of a bastard. We were coming into port. I was so scared I started bawling. My first impression of Australia, he said... 
     A sunny day and there's a boy and a boat. The harbour is riddled with small boats and on the dock toy people shout and wave. The waves are green horses and stampede towards the boat. His father, King of the horses, laughs and holds him up and out. A howl of salt tears like a slap... That's how I'd start the story if it was mine. But it's not. 
     Instead, we're on a train. Beyond the window, a regular dull movement. It's black and invisible, but you know it's there, and you know it's forward. That's what trains are all about. We get more cans of beer from the dining car, and sometime after the lights go down and the carriage is full of shuffling like boxed cattle on a windy night, the tale begins to change. It always does.

Trains, too, are dream material. The blue first-class carriages and the old red rattlers that I went to school on. Tall girls with long blonde hair, climbing out of windows. And being late (always), running along platforms, frantic, clutching my ticket. 
     But this was a silver train, smooth like the inside of a tunnel. The doors opening and closing with a polite wh-oosh. People coming in smelling of rain and newspapers. The high sharp sound of the station attendant's whistle. Graffiti swinging past on walls. Kids in groups with loud voices.

In the spare bedroom the boxes and cupboards are full of junk: old 45s, hot pants, mildewing shoes, bridesmaid dresses cut down to day dresses, Barbie dolls and their extensive homemade wardrobes. There are balsa wood rockets from the year of the moon landing and wooden pencil cases with sliding lids; old compasses and ink pens, exercise books, bits of plastic Tupperware and Stanhome Party goods left over from glory-box days. All the flotsam and jetsam from our lives here in the sixties and seventies, all the stuff thrown overboard when we jumped ship. 
     I pick over it, fascinated. A box of books breathes out the aroma of childhood, making my spine prickle.

...It was in this room on my eighteenth birthday, a year after I left home, that I zipped up my new (and so far empty) vinyl suitcase. It was my birthday present, shiny grey with black piping; an odd present considering how much they resented my leaving. My mother hovered over me. 
     `You're going to hitchhike, aren't you?' 
     It was true. I was getting a lift part of the way, but that's how I planned to get home. I hitched everywhere in those days. Dressed in hippy skirts and good firm boots, feet on the ground. 
     `What would your father say if he knew?' Her voice rose and cracked: `He wouldn't even let your brother hitchhike, and he's a boy!' 
     Something snapped in me, something that had been stuck for years in my throat, a little pane of glass that I hadn't known existed before, a little trap door, and for the first time in my life it shattered and I screamed back. 
     `Just because I'm a girl, you don't treat me as a person!' ...We were like two dolls, arms in the air, facing each other, stiff and awkward with this new thing, anger. 
     My mother turned and walked, half ran, half stumbled round the big double bed in the middle of the room and when she reached the other side she pulled back the covers and climbed in, crying, `Just go, just go', a peeping noise like a wounded bird. 
     I stood there shocked, then grabbed my new empty suitcase and ran out of the house. 

Goat Dream 

As a child I had nightmares, of being chased and my legs would become so heavy, like anvils, like bags of wet cement, and I would be rooted to the ground, paralysed. Until one day I learned to escape from these dreams by flying through the air. Or swimming really, a kind of breaststroke. After this there would always be a point in a dream, where I would be terrified and whimpering, unable to move my legs an inch, and then suddenly I'd remember my remarkable secret and I would start stroking the air with my arms and eventually my body would lift off too and I would begin to swim miraculously up above the ground and be free. 
     I did this for many years, until one night I dreamt I was in a bright green field surrounded by a deep blue starry night and I was being chased by a white goat. As usual, I was petrified. I reached the fence and there was nothing on the other side, just space and night and stars. I looked back to see the goat bearing down on me. Then suddenly, gratefully I remembered I could fly. I started swimming upwards into the night sky, away from the goat and the field and the fences and I felt so relieved and happy and peaceful and powerful. Until I looked down. And there was the goat flying too, pursuing me, relentless, with its little sharp pointed hooves (like knives) an inch away from the backs of my heels, gaining.

I am a touch junkie. I can't get enough, you see, even when it is so dangerous. A touch-junkie inside me, a terrible craving, and when I'm strung out or `in love', I can never get enough. It swallows me up unless I can starve it into submission. 
     I tried to put it on a diet: the occasional weekend, a phone call here and there, nothing upon which it could become too dependent. 
     But even that, it seems, was not enough, and too much. 
     So now in his house I've stopped eating, can't eat. I smoke cigarettes, drink cups of tea. The women offer me food but I shake my head politely. 

`You intrude on my space,' he says. 
     I say, `I don't know what you mean.' 
     He can't explain. It is so obvious.

There are so many gaps in what I offer him, so many flaws and spots in the glass, a white film over my eyes. (Have I offered him anything? Or what can I offer him from 800 kilometres away? Sex. Intellectual stimulation. The occasional weekend.) What is it that he sees in me? 

     Less and less. 
     We make love again and I cry some more and we speak German to fill in the time and the silence and he says later he doesn't understand why I have to be so sad. It is our last night, tomorrow I will be leaving. 

Sometimes, I feel so needy it frightens me. Sometimes my need for reassurance seems to me insatiable. If there is someone there in my life, I want to crawl under their skin. When I get frightened I want constantly to take something into myself (a tongue, food) to fill the emptiness. Something (arms, a mouth) I can fall into. 
     Perhaps it's only by touching another that you can feel the boundaries of your own body and know that you exist. Only by getting warmed by their blood that you can feel your own strength and move your limbs and walk. 
     Then why does this so often become so paralysing? 
     And why do we tend to experience that sense of terror inside as something `missing'? For, when you think about it, in what past life was it there, with us? In what previous incarnation were we ever `whole'? 

I think of the moon men (Major Tom), trying to couple with the space-ship. Almost there, almost home and hosed, and then suddenly a failure of connection and they are spun off into nothing again, this time forever. 
     Alone, with the weight of all the universe and all the stars and the night on their shoulders, seeping into the cracks in their souls. 

Better never to have loved... 

And sometimes I find it hard not to let men feed off me; and sometimes I am frightened of ghosts.

Dear Miss Shirley, 
     Please come to my place for afternoon tea. I have invited Queen Elizabeth and Lady Diana and Mary and John's mother (also named Elizabeth). There will be just us six, although later Jesus and Charles might pop in. Jesus has promised to show us his wounds, and Charles has a new pair of red bathers. I like John's mother, although I was disappointed when I got to know John. Have you met him?

...The flat was precious. Each piece of furniture--curtains, ashtrays, books--they were all unique because they were hers. She couldn't bear to part with any of them. (She kept broken bowls in the cupboard rather than throw them out.) And she rarely added anything unnecessarily. Each thing was carefully chosen--nothing indiscriminately collected as in the past--everything fit, blended, sang of her aloneness and caught the light in a way that nothing else in the world did. It was her womb. 
     Because the flat existed only for her, she felt then that she existed. That we had a right to live, a meaning. 
     It was the womb she could retreat to while she was trying to establish herself as a person out there in the world of real people. Because she could never feel quite real when she was with other people. It was difficult. 
     Sometimes she couldn't say her name. I'd send the words in a message to her brain and she'd recoil and try to close me off. But I'd keep sending it. You are... I am... I'd mouth the words and she'd soothe to the rhythm and eventually we'd be screaming them aloud. This would happen in the car, with the windows rolled up and the night outside like a soft cat.

There are no more dogs so I hand Jane a black pig instead. 
     `What's this?' she says. 
     `A pig.' 
     She holds it in her palm and looks at it as if it's some kind of bug, then looks at me. `A pig at the south pole?'    `Well there are no more dogs,' I explain. 
     She looks at the pig again, picking it up in two fingers and facing it towards her. The pig looks back unblinking, stoic, so she places it delicately in the freezer at the head of the dog team. 
     Jane and I are building a diorama of Scott's expedition to the Antarctic, using an old farmyard set of Gwenda's and several Guatemalan worry dolls. 
     `This is Gwenda Scott,' she says, placing a smiling worry doll with black hair and a blue dress behind the dog/pig team, `and this is you,' -- green dress -- `and this one is me' (yellow). She sits the last doll on top of the glued-together matchboxes that form the sled. `I get to ride first,' she says, `and then we take it in turns.' 
     The floor of the freezer is smooth and shiny and grey; we've just had a big summer clean up. Along the back of the freezer we've pasted some polar bears. We stand looking in at it for a while, then Jane goes and gets her camera and takes a photo. 
     `You know there are no polar bears at the South Pole?' I say. 
     Jane thinks for a moment. 
     `These ones are looking from a very very long way away.' 

Every few days I take a peek. It is not long before the frost is biting at their feet; in a week it is up the sides of the sled and dripping from the dogs' noses. In three weeks it is around their waists. 

I take a trip to the mountains, and when I come back the freezer door is iced shut.

One Saturday night I stayed home alone and watched Wings of Desire on television. 
     When I was a little girl I thought all fairies and angels were women. The day I discovered that cherubim were boys (what? with those curly locks?), and that `Gabriel' was a man's name it was like one of those great big metal candle extinguishers coming down out of heaven and putting out a flame. 
     It seemed like a trick, because in plays at school angels were always girls. 
     And then I thought about it and figured maybe it was because (just like now, really) we always had a shortage of decent boys; and the few capable of memorising lines were needed to play Joseph and the wise men. 
     In fact, wise men were usually girls in disguise, and even baby Jesus was played by a girl doll. 

Angels were like fairies, graceful and beautiful. They wore dresses. They were luminous and wise and happy. (Beatific.) 
     Like Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth... although Screen Goddesses were only ever heavenly for as long as men worshipped them. And deep down inside (according to the biographers) the baby wish.Perfection: Madonna and child... 
     --But she doesn't have a child. She's too busy with her career. 
     --Not that Madonna, the other one. 
     --Oh. 
     In fact, even Divine (if you look close) is just a man in drag. 

`Kiss an angel good-morning...' 
     Don't tell me those cowboys were singing about men.

According to Gwenda, a Worry is a species of small insect-like Faery. 
     And a `worry-wart' is what you develop (on your hand or your elbow) when you've brushed up against a Worry without proper respect for her feelings. 

Note, also, the Australian saying (heard especially at all-male gatherings): `No Worries!'

My favourite story of yours was how you took the girls to see the Fairy Penguin Parade down at Phillip Island. Australia's second-most-visited `natural' attraction: three million people each year wait for hours in the cold to see the penguins waddle up on the beach at dusk. It was a disappointment, you said, you could see them better as you were leaving: hiding under the boardwalks and in the bushes just out of the circle of the light. 
     Samantha (six), afterwards in the car: `I don't think I'm really a Fairy Penguin Parade person, Dad.' She stares wistfully out of the window, strapped firmly into her seat belt, `I think I'm more of a parties and discos person.' 

...With the help of some street fairies, Tinkerbell and I picked up the bassinet and put it on a floating leaf and sent it off to the mainland...

Inside my Glory Box are baby clothes, folded up so tiny that you can't see. Little white knitted mittens with eyelet holes and satin ribbon threaded through, pale green booties, a lemon-wool cap. Tucked away in there with the egg slides and the tea towels. 
     --A lock of hair. 
     --A first kiss. 
     Sometimes a boy will put his fingers in deep and feel something and say, `What's this?' 
     `Oh, nothing,' I murmur, taking the small item of clothing from him and hiding it under the bed, putting his hand back where it was. `Nothing, nothing...'