MURDER at the HAIRY DOG Cafe

 

Tablo reader up chevron

Chi ama me, ama il mio cane.

Love me, love my dog.

Italian proverb

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Contents:

SOPHIE and compatible insanities:

a samoyed puppy witnesses a game of violence and murder

BUDDY and love gone wrong:

a golden retriever is in the centre of a bitter divorce

Mr WILSON and 101 ways to wash the dishes:

a newfoundland becomes an accidental accomplice in murder

MONTEZUMA II and the dog shepherd*:

a pottery dog decorates a beauty salon where passions run high

CARLOS and man’s an orchestra:

an Afghan hound is to inherit a collection of fine bone artefacts

MANU and an initiation in life:

a bichon frise, musical and cuddly, causes a mother’s death

YORKIE and the weirdos:

a cup-size Yorkshire terrier lives in a shithouse and anything can happen

GOSHO and her first kiss:

a faithful mutt becomes a lovers’ guardian only to find his own death

LUCY and how a West Highland terrier got her revenge:

a jealous pet turns into a proxy murderer

JOKER and the drunken actress

a mistreated pug is saved by a young vet

DONATELLA and the secret to a perfect friendship:

an apricot poodle is in the habit of biting men’s private parts

PUPPY and the law of madness:

a border collie cub is denied to be a consolation for a grieving woman

FRITZ and the dog sitter:

a Rottweiler demonstrates strange food tastes

BLACK SHUCK and the identity thief:

a blood-thirsty hound is not only an ebony figurine

PROLOGUE

It was a short goodbye; death was making a kennel in his master’s body.

A deafening thunderclap struck but it wasn’t the force of the elements that smashed and obliterated everything on its way. Amid flying splinters and shards, Mr Wilson burst through the glass terrace door and down into the night, where the coffee-stained streets of West End embraced him. The hounds of Highgate Hills barrelled towards their long-standing enemy, howling hair-raising howls, shaking terrifying heads in a whirl of slobber and rage, baring menacing teeth.

A taxi cruised slowly and the driver, a man whose size could have measured up with Mike Tyson’s, saw a heap by the curb and pulled over. A newfoundland was twitching in agony; the tag of the collar read: Mr Wilson. The man scooped the dog into his big arms and a muzzle smeared with blood brushed against his face. “What happened to you, Mr Wilson?”

The hounds had retreated, and silence fell over the Brisbane River, now the river Styx—the boundary between earth and the underworld. It was the hour when the dawn breaks and Sirius, the Dog Star appears.

The newfoundland’s last breath was warm against the man’s whisper, “You are going home, Mr Wilson, because death is everybody’s home. I could have loved you the way your master did, but I am not him; just a Lego player with scruffy tails for bricks.”

1. The day when the hairy mal-shi Frothy went missing

SOPHIE

And compatible insanities

He chopped off my head and cooked it in a stew a la Marie Antoinette.

He killed me.

Let me explain.

My head doctor, who doesn’t want me to call her head doctor, thinks I am …

Let me start again. She is smart, young, around my age but has authority; she has the authority to decide who is a psycho and who is just disturbed. That’s what she says about me. I am disturbed and it’s something that comes and goes.

“Where does it go?” I ask.

“Where it comes from,” she replies.

I don’t think she’s kidding or something, she must have firsthand knowledge about these sorts of things, otherwise how on earth could she survive surrounded by disturbed people like me telling her long, boring stories about lovingly abusive husbands, or should I say abusive loving husbands, stories like this one.

He comes home and his words are like Buddhist gongs against my temples. Nicely picked, forte, vibrant words borrowed from the stock exchange; he is a floor broker.

I close my eyes. I lock my soul. I leave my body outside on the doormat for him to walk on, while I travel among the stars that look like perspiration on the dark and morbid sky, but my daytime fears stay with me. My daytime fears have a sickly metal touch, like honed cleavers that want to chop into pieces my fears of the dark, whimpering, neglected children; children I will never have.

“Poor Bridgit,” he says, “you look like a clown with this makeup!”

He can’t stand the sight of me. I scrub off the lipstick, the eye shadow, the concealer and the blush. I look crisp now. He likes it when I emerge from the bathroom, barefaced, pale and insecure.

“You are a living textbook on neuroses, Bridgit,” he welcomes me. “Spending a fortune on pills, as if they could alter wha t’s inside your head; as if there’s anything there. What did I see in you in the first place? It must have been one of those blind moments.”

He goes to the bathroom and I hear the shower. I try to think of dinner, but soon he comes back.

“Why are you standing there? Come to me.” He bed-bombs, his scanty towel falls. “I want you to warm me. It’s been a tough day for your hardworking money earner, you stupid old mouse. What do you know of life, shielded by me, scurrying between the fridge and the oven, watching movies in which women are loved romantically.” His chuckle could be oil drops escaping from the pan, sizzling dangerously on the burner. “You’re doing well for yourself, yet you’re still unhappy. I don’t know what will make you happier. Perhaps if I take you to Niagara Falls or to another big planet show you think you’re entitled to. Or you’re waiting for me to spill my guts and kick the bucket so you can invite those builders across the road into my bed, all muscles and sweat, all rude noise and radio Triple M, each one a lover of deer jokes, each darting dirty glances at our house screaming ‘I want to be laid’?”

Gravity might have gone berserk. I hardly move my feet. He grabs my arm, I fall on him and it’s like falling on a cutting board.

He whispers in my hair, “Right now, when you reluctantly come into my arms to fulfil your conjugal duties to a man who has worked his head off to please you, you’re planning how to poison me while making it look accidental. What’s on your mind – that I drink the bleach because you put the bottle next to the spring water? You think I haven’t noticed it? I notice everything. Now, come. And you’d better be a good girl. I must love you to provide all these goods for you without any sign of gratitude in return. I must be nuts to do all this for an unworthy woman like you. You’re not even beautiful, especially now. Why haven’t you put on some makeup? You’re freaking spooky like this, as if you’re going to ovulate a ghost or something, as if you can ovulate at all – such a waste. Now, don’t look so sad. What have I said? Come, come closer. Come to your big, burly bear. You’re protected in my arms…”

He cradles me, his arms like a strappado rope around me.

I don’t look at him.

I don’t look at the room but it’s as if the room looks at me making its way over the swaying bridge of our locked gazes; the room penetrates me, making space for itself in my brain, filling me up, cluttering me with online purchased objects meant to induce easy sleep. I feel heavier. I am carrying the room now the way a graceful Indian woman balances a water vessel on her head. I am balancing so I don’t spill the baby blue lovers’ sofa as he goes on.

“Nothing can happen to you, Bridgit, nothing, because you’re precious; a bit confused, but at the end of the day, you need me, a strong, fierce battler to challenge the world and throw goods at your feet. You like your jewellery, don’t you? Maybe it makes you feel special; does something for your ego, because you also have a little ego waiting to be scratched between the ears. There’s nothing wrong with this, so don’t cry. Why do you always cry? It breaks my heart. The last thing I want to see is you crying. If I were you,” his voice suddenly angry, he pushes me aside, “I would have laughed my head off all day long sitting in this lovely house by the Brisbane River, doing nothing. Now go and fix some dinner, Mrs Dolce Far Niente. At least you’re good at that … And don’t forget to play with your little bullion cubes while I sweat over a volatile Bullion Market.”

I get up unfolding slowly waiting for a dizzy spell, carefully step between his scattered clothes; shirt and socks – white pebbles laid as a trail to take me home to me. It’s grim in the woods, what with the Grim reaper and the brothers Grimm, those masterchefs of human roast.

I drink water and hear him talk to someone it’s time to sell and cut the losses…

I tried to leave him once, but there was not a dollar in my name and the credit cards were cancelled. I was ashamed to look for help and I didn’t feel strong enough to find a job and look after myself. My mind was confused, infested with insecurities; the panic attacks rendered me a wreck. After all, he is what he is, the money wizard on the stock exchange, the ruler of the shady land – insider trading, the sniffer dog for moves in prices that turn commodities like oil and gold into infinity of profit.

“I am not a gambler, my little old mouse,” he likes to say to me, “but an instrument of love. The highest pure love of money and don’t tell me there’s another love more loved and coveted. The old Phoenicians invented the first alphabet so they could write to their gods and ask for money.”

He was investigated, his bosses covering for him; yet he was banned from trading for months and started drinking. Tonight I don’t feel it on his breath. What I feel tonight is the taste of money on his lips. The taste of mint and salt, of cedar, gold and shells. The taste of blood diamonds, of poison served from golden rings, of tulips, beads, the taste of death breeding in an oil spill.

Dizzy, I head for the kitchen, but he calls me back and opens his grandmother’s family album.

“You see,” he says, squeezing my wrist between his thumb and middle finger as if it’s the throat of a goose he is plucking, “that chubby kid eating noodles with the chopsticks of his eyebrows? That’s me, and that’s my grandmother in pink, blowing out the candles on her hundredth birthday cake. She came from a family of artists and taught me culture. She knew I was a good man. That’s our Queenslander, painted in rusty red, with the custard apple tree spreading branches over the terrace, and that’s the lychee tree in the background. Sometimes I’d take photos of it at night with the bats feasting on the ripe fruit, so the bats are in the family album, too.”

He moves his hand up to my elbow, still squeezing, hurting, leaving bruises. His voice deep, overwhelming, suddenly friendly, pleasing – that’s what makes me scared.

Sweating, I smell of fear. I know horses smell fear; a nervous, hesitant rider has no chance, fear travelling down the reins like a flame.

“The bats,” he says and he is not with me but way back in time, “I owe them so much. The rustling sound of their wings was like the rustling of crisp paper money. They echolocate the world around them the way I echolocate the global markets. Then I can bend and twist the resounding data…”

Anger bursts inside him. He has talked too much, revealed too much.

The heavy album closes with a thud and he releases my elbow. Fire ants crawl all over my arm. Outside, the stars look like scattered bones. A low cloud covers them in mud.

“What’s this?” He stutters with frustration.

I follow his gaze and I see it, my heart rushes to my throat. I choke and try to reach the curled sepia photo that slips out of his album but he is quicker and seizes it, the faded paper holds no resistance to the brutality of his fingers.

“What’s this?” He repeats and menace covers his face like a tribal mask.

It’s not that he doesn’t know. The implication is I have to feel guilty and ready to be punished; I have bridged the ban to keep things of sentimental value, random things inherited like this one from my ancestors, hidden for security – how naïve – among his ancestors.

Sorry, Kathy. I tremble. I feel protective of her. The only person I can protect and I am failing her.

He crinkles the beautiful young face in the photo. “I don’t need another desperado lying around, messing with your mind, Bridgit!”

I find my voice, “Kathy died a violent death. It was a cold case never solved.”

“Cold case? A century-old cold case is a rigor mortis case. And don’t be afraid. Just get rid of this rubbish, will you? It’s not a Titanic memorabilia, after all.”

I nod and he throws the ball what is my great-great-aunt Kathy’s photo now over his shoulder. I don’t dare to follow its trajectory.

He smiles approvingly.

He puts on this blue-and-blue plaid shirt I love so much, leaves it unbuttoned; I want to touch the shirt. Or him.

Rain drums randomly on the roof; his fingers drum nervously on the table next to the album, a sarcophagus of a past, a chubby boy eating noodles – how was it – with the chopsticks of his eyebrows. I look at him and try to find that child, lost under the rubble of a hard gambling work and years of hostility. He likes to entertain me with funny stories, and tonight it is about how his French teacher went to France and couldn’t converse in French. I laugh to please him, a pathetic squeal coming from my vocal cords, which are used to emitting groans and growls of anguish. I laugh and stroke his hand, the one that was chaining my wrist, my elbow. I don’t know what’s next. Slowly, his eyes acquire the colour of a prisoner’s meal, and I think that death is everyone’s companion. I think about death when his lips touch my ear, the nape of my neck, my bare shoulder. His lips hone their passion on my shoulder blades. I’m afraid to utter a sound. His lips have been a cleaver in another life. My body is stiff, a tree trunk with hollows, into which he creeps to warm himself.

“You are so good,” his breath is moist and heavy. “So good, you qualify for that free brokerage.”

He keeps me squashed.

Suddenly, I hear another drumming, not loud, but distinct, nonetheless – coming from within me. It creates a vortex, drives me into semi-consciousness. I cease trying to resist and submerge into a trance.

In my mind’s eye, I see a black crocodile, a python curls around me, a macaw rests its neck against my bare foot, a Ulysses butterfly glides along the groove between my lips. Heaven and the underworld tune into each other’s mystic channels. Their meeting place is a small, sturdy point somewhere around my navel, where his head lies now unprotected, the neck exposed, at the mercy of my hands. The rain is the tears of Chaac, the Mayan god; in bed, my soul is blasting, roaring, howling.

I know the colour of madness is violet, and violent, like my loving husband. The perfume of madness is filling our suburban home, while outside, the rain is strings in the hands of the moon, the puppeteer, giving a swansong before slashing his wrists and bleeding light … My husband’s hurting hands are all over me, quick like cheating gamblers, messengers of sick love and pain.

“I’ll kill you and give you to the dingoes.” His fingers dig deep into my neck, heading for the jugular, his breath scorching me. He doesn’t know I am no longer there, pinned by the weight of his body. I’m far away, playing with the sun. The Rapa Nui people believe that when a bird mates with a fish, it creates the sun. “Your flesh is appealing only to mosquitoes,” he hisses over me, “but I’m faithful to you. No one else would be. And I’ll never trade you in.” Somewhere further west in the Outback the sun is stabbed to death. The sun is turmeric nostalgia of the time when my husband was still an expectation, anonymous, unidentified by place and time, something in the air due to happen, something churning love and other silly things. But I should have known better when on our wedding day, the bouquet I threw over my shoulder was caught not by a maid of honour but by a magpie, swooping in attack.

Soon his heavy breathing turns to mild, whistling snores.

I try to sleep, but there is a dream that always comes to me. I dream of a woman called Kathy who lived by the Brisbane River like me. She cries for help … I try to shake off the dream but it’s impossible, so I get up and stumble on a cable. His telephone is charging. I touch its warmth and an erotic shiver shoots through my whole body.

I go into the kitchen. It’s in the kitchen that I prove to myself that I am worthy. I listen to the hiss of the gas burner, the arrogant sizzle of frying olive oil, the surprised cry of a broken egg, my knife sharp and long, chop, chop, chop, beheading fennel bulbs, each guillotined like Marie Antoinette, each a fossil of a dream, a star. I have a thing for knives. I feel them as an extension of my hand, an additional obedient finger; so versatile, so tender, so faithful. The metal shines in opaque shades, the blade faceted like a precious stone to kill. I imagine Salome dancing with the tray and on the tray, the chopped head of John the Baptist. I also dream of giving a head-cut to my husband, who loves me so passionately that he is killing me in a loving, playful way, like lion cubs playing with a confused prey their mother had brought so they could practise their killing skills; they keep the prey alive as long as it can last. Onion heads, fennel bulbs, carrot stalks will do for practice.

I get high on knives and danger, and the artist in me comes to life. I draw with the sharp point of my carving knife on breath-fogged glass, working quickly, before my breath-coated patches shrink and disappear on the window. I puff against the glass again and draw things too difficult to put into words. I draw lonely boats sailing in the dark, candles dancing in the wind, pirates’ maps for buried treasures, like love and happiness.

It’s early morning, the sky is empty; then I see a hot-air balloon suspended over the Brisbane River like a piece of hand-painted china.

He walks into the kitchen for his morning coffee talking on the phone about today’s top movers. I feel the swish of his brisk movements. His face expressionless, as if made of fibreglass. He finishes his call and we exchange insignificant words; he promises to return home early; it sounds like a threat. We drink our coffee in silence, engulfed in the hollow fear that life is passing by, never to be seen, never to be touched, never to be felt. At the door, he pinches my cheek. The sharp edge of his briefcase digs a hole in my knee.

“Lucky you,” he hisses. “You have the whole day to prepare for me.”

Alone, I strip and put his blue-and-blue plaid shirt on, infused in his DNA samples he is carrying. It wraps me snugly – we love each other, the blue-and-blue shirt and me, we have the whole day to prepare for slammed doors, smashed objects, hitting words, hitting fists – my body black-and-blue. Then, for the remorse. He brings me a cup of tea, holds my hand, caresses my hair. A martyr preparing scrambled eggs for his sick wife, he adds a flower to the tray, tells off a cousin who phones, pestering me to help with her wedding plans, then presents me with a 22-karat gold bracelet, which he places around my swollen and pulsating wrist. We stay up late into the night, planning our next cruise or a romantic escapade to Noosa, Wellington, or the Maldives while he attends to my bruises, rubbing arnica ointment into my aching flesh. We watch a movie, a Japanese thing with martial arts and acrobatics. I remember the legend of the stars called The Seven Sisters, how the stars turn into birds so they can fly away from their stalker and abuser. I live the moment, the bracelet heavy on my wrist, and I snuggle against his broad chest. He is strong, protecting me from the world and me.

We fall asleep huddled into each other: I, soaked in his words. His love makes him so poetic and he is good in what he does – smuggling with that love of his virtual money across the twilight zone of law. Then I have that dream again. Kathy comes and she is so pale and fearful; something terrible is going to happen to her and she asks me to help her. “I can’t help myself, Kathy … I’m worthless.”

Then another morning dawns, he is impatient having spent too much time, too much energy on something that he thinks is not worthy of his attention.

He leaves.

I also leave, and go to a doctor. A head doctor.

“I can’t have children,” I say, but I don’t tell her that when I was first pregnant, he threw me across the corridor, where I struck the edge of the cupboard and bled our child out. I can’t say this, nor can I say that I still live with him, more than fourteen years later.

“I have to go,” I say, suddenly restless, imagining for a moment what it would be like if he arrives home and I’m not there, so I don’t hear what the doctor says. I am in the grip of fear. It’s between my teeth, like grit, the daytime fear with its metallic edge.

“Don’t bottle it up, Bridgit,” she repeats and this time her voice reaches me. It’s good to know she sees that bottle thing in me, a glass envelop for a distress SOS message from a suicidal lover or a shipwreck survivor, a real one, not like in a Bear Grylls show. Bear Grylls, my husband’s icon. The good broker, he says, makes money even on a bear market.

Then comes my secret. My clandestine love affair.

I go to the orphanage, the place where I can forget myself.

The orphanage is a heaven full of little angels. All those children, I want to have them all. I want to look after them, to change nappies, to feed them and clean their puke or soiled bottoms. I want to play with them and the dolls that have small music things in their tummies so they can sing and talk, some even dance. I want to spoil these little cuties and teach them numbers and letters. The older children welcome me with cheers. Soon it’s Christmas and they are told to make cards with wishes that they can send to Santa.

“Please, Uncle Santa Claus, bring me a mummy. Daddy will do.”

“Santa, I want a Tim Tam biscuit only for myself.”

“Santa, I want a big teddy bear to sleep in my bed, I am afraid of the dark.”

I spend an hour with the children, there’s no way he can trace me there. Still, I rehearse my defendant speech: I’ve been to the doctor. Yes, I admit I’ve been to the doctor. I know I shouldn’t have done this and yes I know I’ll be punished. On the way home I got a panic attack and had to stop and look for cover. There was that orphanage. The carers were sympathetic. They took care of me as if I was one of their flock. I couldn’t answer your calls; I must have fainted there. They called a taxi for me.

I fight my day and night fears by slowly walking home along the suburban streets, watching a life that isn’t and would never be mine. A spoiled child is raising a tantrum, screaming her head off for being ordered out of the pool, nearby the rattling noise of a novice piano player. Open doors and windows look like holes leaking light; clotheslines heavy with washing sailing in the wind. Kitchens unfold shelves of china arranged like hooded Eskimo faces; the tables covered in white linen like operating beds. An old woman, sitting in profile, is knitting. I would love to have a beanie, but then where am I supposed to wear it in this (sub)tropical climate where they even have a name for craziness calling it mango madness.

A dog across the street follows me with sad eyes, remaining suspiciously quiet. I give it a wide berth and proceed faster. A triangle of grass like a patch of pubic hair divides two streets with a common dead end. A skateboarder scratches the skin of the road between the suburban homes. Tonight his older brothers will burn tyres. It’s early for party crashing. But I see her – Kylie. The beautiful real estate agent whose posters I see at bus stops and shopfronts even on a huge advertising sign along Sandgate Road just before the bridge and the golf club. Now I nearly stumbled on her, first on her dizziness-inducing perfume, not that it is overwhelming, not at all, it’s thin and gentle and definitely seductive. Then I see her coming out of a property, self-confident, business-like in her beige linen suit and Jimmy Choo shoes, a life-eater what I want to be but never will, discussing papers she is holding with a younger woman of cheap prettiness in thongs, a tenant probably. I smile and Kylie smiles, the other woman just gives me a prickly stare. I smile again at Kylie but she has forgotten me. Some years ago we bought our house through her and for the first and only time I could see my husband smiling silly, nodding in appreciation with every word of praise she had for what she was trying to sell us. I could see him suddenly small and weak in front of someone of a stronger personality because Kylie was blunt and demanding as if she was buying and not selling. Perhaps that was the secret. She made him believe that he would be an idiot if he didn’t grab the property. “I kept it two hours especially for you,” she said at the end when we were signing the papers and he beamed before she bluntly added. “Because of your wife. She has that elusive sweetness of a lost child.”

And now she has forgotten me. Of course. The immaculate business woman.

Full of bitterness and envy, I return home and wait for my husband to arrive, a spider in the corner dreading the cleaning lady with the broom. I prepare his favourite meal – a grilled 400-gram T-bone steak with oil-less chips and rocket salad – and contemplate suggesting a walk through his grandmother’s album before the dessert – crème brûlée. I will do anything to ensure that he is in a good mood and brings a flower to me. I make a shy attempt to look for Kathy’s destroyed photo but I can’t find it. Still feeling guilty for trying. I better drink water. I read somewhere that drinking plenty of water is the core of wellbeing.

He arrives. He loves me, can’t get enough of me, breathes my breath and we walk along the edge of madness, sharing cannibalistic tenderness. It’s black pearls; a string of shiny black pearls he has bought for me. And a white puppy. He tells me he has already decided on the puppy’s name: Sophie.

“See this little pooch, you’ll no longer need to slobber over snotty children.”

How come he knows about my visits to the orphanage?

“Isn’t she a cute little puppy? You’re allowed to use one of my socks for her sleeping bag. And of course, you can cuddle her as much as you want, feed her, toilet train her, even teach her numbers or the secrets behind buying bonds. How about this? There’s only one thing you can’t buy her: chocolate as you do for those poor kids. Chocolate is bad for dogs. Now come, come here; give me a hug. You see, your old man loves you.”

I love him, too.

I want to remember him like this, loving me, giving me offerings as to a goddess. Giving me himself. I want to remember him like this; that’s the last thought that comes to me before I touch the blade faceted like a precious stone and strike.

When I open my eyes, he is bending over me, smiling. “See! They patched your wrists and told me to get rid of all sharp objects around the house. The paramedics couldn’t believe that someone living in such a beautiful place could be miserable to such an extent that … well, it should’ve been me, you stupid old mouse, but I was quicker, wasn’t I? In my trade, the fastest wins. And you know what? You have no one but me to look after you, because you’re helpless. Hopeless. You can’t even kill a fly. You’re like a child. But you’re my child, and I love you!” He squeezes my bandaged wrists reassuringly. “I’m here for you. You can’t escape from me.”

Outside, somewhere behind the Customs House, the Brisbane River is straddled by the Story Bridge.

Sophie comes to me and waits for me to lift her in my arms.

She doesn’t know I have cynophobia.

I panic.

I can’t breathe.

He watches me lovingly.

Next time I go to my doctor, she keeps correcting me not to call her a head doctor and mentions something like Stockholm syndrome. She says I am in love with my tormentor. It sounds good. It’s like a mentor plus something else. And Stockholm sounds like stock market but I still don’t know what she means and I ask her whether it’s something Freud already said about Stock-holm-market. She looks offended. My female head doctor is a looker, which makes it appear suspicious when I notice the pity masked as professional interest on her face. She averts her gaze when she says with a certain degree of disgust that Freud is passé and all I need are friends to share life with. Friends who are not disturbed, perhaps. Then she reluctantly invites me to tell her about my reoccurring dream. Isn’t it Freudian? I am too weak to argue and challenge her methods, so I relax back on her comfortable coach, close my eyes and the dream comes home.

The dream that hurls me a hundred years back …

Shortly after dawn, whistling a couple of dogs out into the open, Kathy’s husband, Gordon, and their host, Jacob leave the sheep station on horseback, the rifles slung across their shoulders bouncing against their backs in the rhythm of the gallop. Kathy slides into her favourite fawn outfit, a straight tubular column with a dropped waist, the hemline of her silk skirt lingering coquettishly midway between knee and calf. Her seamstress in Brisbane has the latest McCall’s magazines, and can recreate any Chanel or Lanvin design. Kathy looks at herself in the mirror over the metal sink and smiles. Her Mary Jane ankle-strap button shoes take time to fasten. She combs her hair, cut short in a fashionable bob, and slips on a brown cloche hat. She can’t see much from beneath it, but now she is ready to emerge from the room and face the world of their host, an obviously important client. She felt jealous of the way the two men related to each other as she watched them leave, riding side by side, laughing and joking.

When she reaches the dining room, she calls for Jim. The young boy appears without delay, chewing, sticky white juices caking in the corners of his protruding lips. While Jim is serving breakfast, she hears a sudden shrill noise: a clink of metal against metal which makes her jump, causing the teacup to tip over her skirt, the hot liquid scorching her thigh. In sheer panic, she looks at the boy questioningly and traces a momentary, mocking flicker in his eyes, but she can’t be sure. Perhaps she is imagining things again, and imagining things is something her husband is never happy about.

Her shaky voice finds its way through her trembling lips. What was that?

The shearers, ma’am. With this, Jim disappears.

The shearers.

Kathy is about to call after the boy and ask him to stay with her, but feels ashamed. She gently mops her skirt and remains seated, her back straight and her head tilted at an angle so she can see better from under the hat. Her hands clutch the refilled cup for warmth and protection. She feels comforted by the presence of other people at the station, and being hungry, she enjoys her breakfast, savouring the fresh soft-boiled egg, the flat bread with traces of hot ashes on it, the wild honey. She hasn’t had such a good appetite since she’d fallen pregnant with her daughter, Annie, and for a moment, she allows herself to imagine having another child, perhaps a boy as handsome as Gordon.

She stands up, gently shaking small crumbs off her skirt, inspecting it for tea stains, and heads for the front door.

She opens it and wrinkles her nose; the air is prickly with harsh earthy smells. The baa of the sheep, the tinkle of pots from the kitchen, the cluck of the hens, distant male voices from the sheds, the rising sun, generous in light and cheer, are all promises of a wonderful day.

When the same shrill noise pierces the air, she takes a step back, the noise, sharp and loud, pressing her to withdraw deeper into the house.

The clinks of shears being sharpened, honed and tried, blade against blade, handles against handles with the knockers removed, grows louder and louder as the shearers start to cut the air, unlocking their wrists. The cacophony sounds like a brass band on a Sunday afternoon, the instruments tuned before a playful, overwhelming river of ringing sounds turned into a song, a jubilant song of male power and atavistic strength. Kathy smiles. Hopefully, she can remember the savage tune in F-sharp major and improvise it on the mechanical piano in her Brisbane home, which looks so far, far away right now.

She returns to the dining room and pours herself another cup of tea. Her attention is drawn to a collection of golden coins in a wooden box with a glass lid. They are mostly English full sovereigns, the profiles of the kings Edward VII and George V resting on night-blue velvet. Kathy smiles again. The trip was obviously worth it. The future client of her father’s bank is rich.

She is contemplating the coins when she feels a presence behind her. She hasn’t heard any steps, but she senses someone behind her, someone who wishes to harm her unless she is imagining things. Keeping her head at an angle, she turns around. What she sees makes her emit a fearful cry. The cup flies from her shaking hand and strikes the glass lid.

Why? she gasps.

He takes a step towards her; the monstrous shears in his hands aimed at her breasts. She grasps the gold cross that hangs on a chain around her neck, while her lips mouth a mute cry, or perhaps a prayer. Panic-stricken, dizzy, her breathing quick and shallow, her heart racing, she sways and takes hold of a chair for support and protection.

The first blow strikes her shoulder, the second, her chest. Blood gushes, spilling over the wooden box, dripping over the gold coins.

Why? she asks feebly again, still unsure whether she isn’t imagining things, behaving in a way that would make her husband feel ashamed of her, like when she’d imagined he was forging her father’s signature on those blank cheques.

A random ray of sunlight falls on the blade, creating a reflection of a billabong with a white crocodile swimming in it. JNO Baker, Sydney, she reads, red bubbles of Frothy on her lips.

The dream is over.

I must have fallen asleep for real because I feel a nudge at my shoulder. I am covered in perspiration and my heart is pounding like a Pacific Islander crushing kava roots for dreaming. My doctor remains silent for a long time. Quiet and motionless she is, and I start to think she must have turned into a statue or something when she targets her eyes at me and shoots, “You have to do something urgently. Find friends, go to Facebook, it’s easier; or buy an app, do something self-loving! Do you hear me, Bridgit? Urgently!”

I am not telling her that I am banned from all kinds of internet communication. What I say is, “I have a friend. Her name is Kathy.”

My head doctor shooks her head and at the door she hugs me; it’s a notch of a hug but I am not a specialist in hugs. I wonder whether I should pay for this or it’s included.

That night, again I dream of Kathy.

She, as far as I know, belonged to the cream of Brisbane society of Bell Epoque and received a fine education; sang and played the piano, conversed in French, had travelled to Europe, and wrote small poems in her diary. She dressed in the latest fashions, and liked to entertain the guests that her father, a banker by the eminently suitable name of Weller, invited to their eighteen-room mansion in the riverside area of Hamilton. But most of all, Kathy liked to be with her handsome husband, Gordon, the pair of them attracting eyes, gossip, envy. All that must have seemed too much for the type of a small town Brisbane was, built around a wharf from where ships loaded with bales of greasy wool bound for England, a journey that would take several months.

Her father used to tell her, “The Medici and other banking houses of Florence built their wealth on wool, Arte della Lana, long before the flowering of the Renaissance.”

Then her husband took her to the countryside and she met the shearers, the ringers… She was drinking her tea… She…

I wake up in cold sweat and feel Kathy’s husband’s shears holed deep inside my chest. I don’t know where I am. Then I remember, I have a husband, too. I look for blood. The Asian markets are all in red, as is the price of gold. It’s Sunday, they don’t trade but he is still with them. The triple screen is a con-cave where he hides.

We have a late breakfast in bed, which he prepares: two poached eggs fried on both sides the way I like them so they don’t look like poached eggs, darkened with black pepper for me, a piece of Italian Grana Padano cheese, sharp enough, and overflowing coffee in my favourite La Zumba cup that looks more like a soup bowl. He has taken his time blending different brands and the aroma that invades the semi-dark bedroom is next to an orgasm.

Then on the tray, I notice a flower; a modest representative of all romantic gestures, a flower I don’t even know the name of, something yellow and willowy, something lacking life force, something like me. I don’t feel like saying thank you and only look at his tray wobbly under the weight of shaved bacon, tomato cuts, buttered bread; there are even lima beans from a can.

Suddenly, the sizzling, tantalising whiff of crispy bacon obliterates my coffee euphoria, but it’s getting worse with the beans overwhelmingly imposing their acidic undercooked smell. I give up; it’s a habit that I have cultivated, and start to poke around the solid yolks, the pulverised black pepper manages to reach my lungs and I cough, which takes care of the overfilled (the way I like it) coffee cup: it spills over his crispy bacon. He jumps out of the bed hurling both trays against a chair, over which my best house gown hangs. I start to cry; he storms out of the room but not before letting me know that I am a worthless and good-for-nothing nuisance. As if I don’t know.

“Can’t we be friends?” I ask behind his back an hour later, my hands busy unravelling a wrongly stitched tapestry. These days, I am following my cousin’s suggestion (meanwhile, she got married) to do some needlework, which, she knows from her own experience, helps to calm the nerves, aids bad digestion and eases night sweats. My hands scratch on the surface of the canvas, entangle the silk threads, rip them off: ripping shades and colours, something classical turned into accessible commercial objects for a home decoration or for a neurosis cure, the last straw, one last thread away from depression, that heavy, mouldy monster, slimy and hairy, with worms for eyelashes and crooked, rotting teeth nibbling on you, on the core of your being.

Can you catch it, my one and only husband; can you catch my soul, the friar’s lantern that is my soul and a prodigal daughter, while it prays, giggles and leaves small traces in the snow? Can you hold it by its tiny tail, can you love it?

He doesn’t answer my questions. Nobody answers silent questions, no matter how loud the cry for help contained in them. He is feeding the fish in the aquarium. He likes to see them flashing to and fro, mouths open, small red-and-black arrows between the green and wobbly water plants. He likes to know that these domestic fish are dependent on him; he can feed them, or he can choose not to, and they’ll die. He likes to think of himself as a god, the god of the small aquarium fish, giving or taking away life.

“Can’t we be friends?” I whimper, remembering my head doctor diagnosing me with a friends-deficiency!

“Friends!” he exclaims, and a sneer distorts his face into that of a seductive man from an era when cigarettes were in vogue and the click of a lighter inspired romantic adultery amidst the uncertainty of a tobacco cloud. “Remember, my poor old mouse, there is no such thing as friends. And don’t tell me you mean people who hang out together or call themselves followers on Instagram or Twitter. Not to mention that you have affinity to be attracted to ornamental desperados. He looks out the window, across the street it’s quiet, there are no builders there. But I don’t think he means them. “What are friends, actually?” he continues. It’s a rhetorical question, and I don’t answer. He continues to feed the fish, which is wrong. He shouldn’t give the fish so much to eat.

“The fish might be thirsty,” I intervene, but he doesn’t hear me, he hears only his own voice. Silent or loud, he is involved with himself, intertwined with himself and it’s a special relationship he has with himself, and there’s no room for another person, no room for me or for the fish. I see them soon belly-up; I see myself belly-up as my gravely handsome husband thinks he is doing this planet a favour by walking on it.

“Friends are a useless, time-consuming lot: at their best, spies and gossip-hunters.” His voice is harsh and full of venom. Outside, the sky looks like parched kangaroo skin. “You are there for a mirror to reflect their insecurities masked as pretences of significance. They post details of their pathetic lives and expect to produce ripples in other people’s lives making them comment with deep philosophical messages like wow, so cute, really, gorgeous. They keep in virtual touch to assure themselves that they exist. You’re lucky you have me as a husband and not as a follower or friend. And tell your doctor that she is sick in the head if she thinks she can manipulate you, the control freak she is! Small wonder psycho doctors are mental. Next thing she’ll try to fuck you or perhaps something’s going on already?!”

I look at the fish in the aquarium and remember the time when we were still lovers, camping at a pristine site. I remember the pelican –the swagman of the lake –grooming its feathers; the weather was mild, rending us complacent and silly; a gentle breeze was leaving ripples on the surface of the lake and the cormorants were flying underwater to catch a meal. Quietness, light hanging in the trees unaware of E=mc2, clouds passed over us hand in hand with time, trees living a double life with their reflections in the water; two lizards scribbling images and words while playing, chasing each other, scuffling along the elephantine leg of a palm, strange readings of a future turning into a past. I was full of sap like those trees, ready for a life ahead, ready to bud and blossom, ready to bear fruit. His face was a stranger to anger, and he liked to drive with me along serpentines full of cat’s eyes, sharp bends and narrow bridges, like those ghostly roads of Mount Tamborine, like Russell Drysdale’s canvas Road to the Black Mountains. We drove along the ridge of the mountain with our eyes closed so as not to be frightened of the heights because the road shivered. It was like riding a razor blade; somewhere below us a grasstree’s spear gave us the middle finger. Later under the moonlight, I didn’t realise his face was a skating rink of lies and hurt, and continued my dance with danger.

“Friends!” he chokes with laughter. “It’s just one of those words, you know, used, abused, rubbed off, worn out and turned into pathetic gauze or raggy cobwebs. There are no virgin words; virgins, like you when I first met you, where was it – in my car, or in your house? Remember, my little oldish mouse, there’s not a single word that hasn’t been played filthy games with. Even my grandmother knew this and I give her an AAA for this!”

I look at him and pride fills my whole being. Perhaps that’s the way I like my man – slick and toxic, a smooth, confident talker whose voice I drink. I don’t even know what he is talking about. His voice is a canvas on which I embroider my own words only to unravel them, my jumbled mind is good at it. My wish to please him is locked up in freshly-made jelly madness. I have to deliver words conceived in his brain, slipping out into this world through the birth canal of his mouth; words: cherubs and monsters, words of a frustrated ego living on a self-deceit; he is a dreamer but he never dreams he is alive. I have to tear out of the straightjacket of placenta, make sure every word will give out a distinct cry; sometimes I have to pull with both hands to save the message so it’s not stillborn, or place my head as a rock against the orifice to stop the verbal haemorrhage.

A midwife to my own husband.

“When I was a kid,” he starts and then in my mind, I shouldn’t forget – in my disturbed mind – an operetta duet takes over: the voices, a dramatic soprano and a heavy acting bass, fight and mingle, along the way words like Lego bricks construct and easily dissemble semantics as we continue together. “I craved crispy, snappy words dressed in expensive sounds and enigmatic feelings. But all we get in life are words from a flea market, words left over from verbal orgies, words with an incurable neurosis like yours and a childhood like mine around an alcoholic mother and a father who beat the shit out of me; it was my grandmother who saved me! Perhaps we are also words, my little old mouse, without knowing it, catatonic words misspelling our semantic beings. I still dream occasionally of finding words daring and free like nomadic tribes, words rich in meaning, investments growing in value but ‘friend’ is not such a word. Trust me, I know life! And Eva is just an Adam’s rib shareholder.”

It’s my voice that trails to the very end, “For sure, you are going to make your killing in the stock market!”

I can’t believe I’ve said this. He is getting in a bulling mood. His totem animal, the bull, the ruler of the rising market. But then, I see a tear flattening against his chin for cover so I listen to him because he is my husband, perhaps my alter ego, or I am his clone and clown but all I see is his heart hanging like a scarecrow in a cage of hostility and I pity him as he tells me things that nobody else will. I take his hand and look into his eyes and plead for more, but he is already over it, again he’s been too good for too long, and he calls it weakness.

“Now, get out of my way, you annual subscription to sentimental bull and trouble-stirring.” His fists circle my waist, he lifts me into the air, hesitant about where to shift me to, then he drops me, nearly losing his balance, and jumps over me, the legs of his jeans grazing my face. I don’t feel like getting up, but rather sprawling out on the floor, going underground, disappearing into a sinkhole or into another world where the blood of darkness dries on my skin and a murder of ravens swoops down over me.

When I open my eyes, he is bending over me. “Blacking out is becoming a nice habit of yours, isn’t it, my little old mouse?” He is gentle while slapping me on the cheeks. A glass of cold water is ready for me; he lets me sip on it and moistens my forehead. I love every minute of it with all the co-dependency alive and dormant, squatting in my heart.

He scoops me up in his arms and carries me to bed, and it’s as ceremonious as if we were restaging our wedding night; my head nestled against his chest, the animal heat coming from his body wrapping around me, boosting my sluggish circulation. I breathe in the warmth and my lungs respond with a lavish and comforting sigh. I want this moment to stretch into infinity. I know death could be a life chosen wrongly.

Once a Chinese doctor, before my head doctor, diagnosed me with a dry damp condition, whatever that meant, and I do feel phlegm clogging my body. It’s empty, cold and mouldy inside me. I need my husband’s fire to keep the dampness at bay. If he leaves me, I may drown in my own stagnant cell waters and that’s pretty gross, but now in his arms it’s like it’s somebody else’s life I am living and I want this life for me. I am paying for it to last, because one pays for everything, for the fulfilment of a dream, although sometimes the price is such that one regrets conceiving one’s wishes, each wish a strangler fig; in a decade or two it takes over, no trunk left, no courtesy, one has just been used to feed a monster, a constrictor, a parricide of a wish and now all worries are that one day the strangler fig will be an orphan.

He lies in bed with me and I go into submissive mode, deeper than my usual one. He touches my hair and it comes to life remembering all hair things, like Mary Magdalene atoning Jesus’ feet with her hair or Medusa’s hair of hissing venomous snakes. Then my body creaks in agonising fear, like a rusty anchor, its chain covered in stringy algae, will snap against the reef and will no longer detain the madness of the spirit tied to worthless things and hopping hopes. Soon the moon will look at us from above like King Herod’s head and I want to lie motionless, not even breathing so I don’t disturb the moment. His heart is pumping litres of hot blood just to keep the show called life going, and again I want one and only one thing, to please him, to be a move ahead and guess when his mood is changing so I’ll be smart enough to hold the reins, because I don’t want him angry; I want my fears melting away – my daytime fears of metal touch like sharp-honed blades, my fears in the dark of oval, damp and slimy touch; and last but not least, my fear that my fears might vanish, and it’s like a bunch of friends betraying me all at once.

“Never talk about friends, my little old mouse. Never. “His forehead is shone with sweat. “I am here for you, to protect you from friends. Haters are also friends with a minus in front. Sometimes even a company director, sour over a disputed bonus, sells millions of his shares for revenge. As one makes a profit, the others hurt. That’s a money law.”

To demonstrate the law he brings the gas lighter and aims the flame at a paper ball. He scorches Kathy over an empty coffee cup. It’s not even a witch hunt, just looking into the details.

Then he talks fear, “You see, Bridgit, people lose half their lives on fear. Little fears of little things that might never happen. It’s only death that always happens.”

Outside, the sky is like a moving target, bruised like me, heavy clouds carrying rain. My hand slips under the pillow, the metal touch is there and it’s not a fear but a blade faceted to kill. The clouds push the stars away; the stars now look like helpless children in the hands of God, casting dice. My husband’s fingers are like burning candles leading the way to madness, the sweet intoxicating scent of jacaranda blossoms storms the room with a solitary gust of wind – it’s the jacaranda season. He brings me a small glass of date wine – we bought it somewhere near Eulo.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, lying on his back and breathing heavily. “Like a dancing witch celebrating the equinox, like a good-hearted whore announcing happy hour. But you want me to be your friend, and that bothers me. In your pathetic portfolio, I don’t see a safety cushion.”

The sky clears and the stars flash, shark’s teeth. We go outside onto the deck overlooking the river. The deck becomes a basket of a balloon ready to fly off with the wind. I am a poor navigator and bring a heavy ballast aboard, memories of tainted happiness; my husband and his crooked love when he hits me with words, with hands, he hits me with his eyes erupting with a jealousy that blinds them. I close mine and see the chariot of fire on which St Elias ascends to paradise, the little flame in Churchill’s pipe (he called his mental thing a black dog); I see embers under chestnuts and feel the smell of an Eastern European autumn, my childhood autumn; I hear Handel’s Royal Fireworks, as my husband looks like Nero, but Brisbane is not burning, Brisbane is about to be flooded, only we don’t know it yet.

“You are sleeping, or thinking of something? Bridgit, you forgot to bring out our flutes and the spumante, chilled to perfection as is everything in our life.”

Slowly, I open my eyes, and there he sits, turned to me. Behind him, the moon is a Balinese hammock; a Qantas plane is about to land and the red kangaroo is visible, illuminated.

“Sure,” I say, getting off my chaise longue. “We have to celebrate life with no friends.”

“Bring candles, too.” His voice reaches me inside the house. “Remember that little white puppy, Sophie? Dogs, it’s said, are man’s – woman’s – best friend, and you rejected her. Now she’s in an orphanage. You yourself look like an orphan, something that has popped out of an eprouvette, an experiment for an alien form of life …”

I cringe. I didn’t know Sophie was in an orphanage. I have to visit her the way I visit the children who write letters to Santa Clause. Perhaps I’ll die there taking her in my arms.

He fills the jacuzzi and sprinkles rose petals, lights floating candles and invites me to join him inside the hot and bubbly water.

“Your feet are bloody cold,” he whispers, rubbing the sole of his foot along my leg. “Let your breasts float on top the way I like them. They’re my brave armada. Columbus on his voyage to America. This one is the flagship Santa Maria, she’s big and pretty, they put all the casks of wine in her, so I’ll balance my flute on it. Yes, support it from beneath, and it’ll stay there, but even if it tips over it doesn’t matter. The other one is Nina, also pretty, but smaller. It excites me. I must have been a paedophile in another life.”

His hands are squeezing me, kneading me, his breath entering, pushing, mingling with my breath. With my little shrieks of a sex junkie, he is setting the rhythm of a hula movement. I hold his idol, his mythic cry from the depths of Mother Nature; I hold this cyclops who revives corpses like mine. I want to revive him, too, for I have to kill him first. I start by nibbling on him, my thighs circling his neck, pushing his head down underwater. It’s such a lovely play, he chokes, then laughs, his tongue, thick and probing, finds its way between my lips. He looks like a scuba-diver, swimming with the sharks. I clench my thighs like scissors and his head rolls, chopped off, turning the jacuzzi bright red, then he lets go of me and swirls my body around. I lean for support against the taps, one is hot, the other cold, just as my body is now hot and my heart is cold like a glacier. I cry with anger, lashing him, killing him, reviving him.

“Friends!” He wraps me in a bathrobe and I want to lie in bed to rest. I feel tired; I always feel tired and confused. I listen to him, clinging to his words as if they can bring me sanity. “All you know is a friend in need is a friend indeed! Forget it! When good luck, fun and riches come your way, when under your touchstone turns into gold and you spoil yourself then you know that a friend who’s still a friend is a friend indeed.”

“I’m such a friend for you!” I smile and slide my hand deeper under the pillow.

Faceted to kill.

In the morning, I wake up and leave the house.

I walk along the Brisbane River and her lazy and impartial waters make me feel redundant. I leave the riverbank and walk along Boundary Street to the corner of Vulture Street, past cafés, each with its own aromatic veil, and enter the Hairy Dog Café, my second secret venue.

The café’s patio is full, that’s the area with patrons accompanied by dogs. I train myself to overcome my phobia and not to look ridiculous. I brace myself to wave to some familiar faces – Judy with her braced shiny smile and miniature Yorkshire on her lap, Paul, the carpenter who could have been Harrison Ford in another life with his massive newfoundlans Mr Wilson, I try not to look at him, I keep my eyes on Mrs Claire Jones, as a dog sitter, she is one without a dog but rubbing shoulders with the dog owners waiting for a job.

I head inside, the dog-free area, where it’s the empty but for a man at a corner table engrossed in Lego fantasies with yellow bricks, a scrawny bearded man with bulging eyes that stood like applications on his narrow face. I climb onto a stool. Lego’s therapeutic. I should try it.

Behind the bar, an unfamiliar face looks across at me.

“Where’s Jordan?” I ask. Every time I pass by here, Jordan, the owner, prepares my coffee. Exactly the way I like it. It’s such a relief to get something the way I want it.

“I’m Luke,” answers the man. “What are you having?”

I get annoyed. I feel deprived from my only free choice. Something has just been pulled from under my feet. I am losing my balance. I almost have no voice when I say, “Jordan knows.”

“And I don’t know when he’ll be back. Frothy went missing and he went berserk looking everywhere for her.”

Now I notice that the small, hairy mal-shi dog is not occupying her usual high chair behind the bar. Without Frothy the place seems strange. Another familiar thing, though, hasn’t changed. Through the open kitchen door I see the large slow-cooking stew pot simmering over a flame that hardly grazes its blackened bottom; at night Jordan’s stew commands hungry crowds.

“I hope he soon finds her.” I am concerned about a missing dog and it’s disturbing.

Luke’s stare is disturbing, so is his voice. Another chauvinistic pig like my dear husband.

“Espresso,” I give in. “Sorry.”

What am I sorry about?

He serves the cup.

He watches how I devour the burning black liquid.

A screech of brakes draws him to the window.

My heart skips a beat. My husband is coming to collect me like a parcel. I’m paralysed with fear.

Noises in my head loosen; my husband’s words like Buddhist gongs against my temples, my screams electrified, multiplied in the vortex and the cortex of my brain, growls of pain.

I sway, closing my eyes to shut out the vertigo. The walls advance, turning the café into a torture chamber, then I see her again, the woman from my dream, Kathy, all in blood, shears sticking out of her tender breasts. “I love you, Kathy,” I say to her. “I think we deserved a better life, you and me.”

“Are you all right?” Luke is tapping my shoulder.

“Thank you.” I touch his hand. “Kathy was a good friend of mine.”

He turns his back to me.

The Hairy Dog Café is getting crowded. The patio is full of dogs lapping on bone broth. Jordan is still looking for his hairy dog and another man comes behind the bar.

Luke goes outside and I follow him; it’s as if I am a red belly snake slithering out of the old skin, leaving it behind for the wind to toss it in the river.

We walk side by side holding hands along the Southbank.

My phone keeps beeping so I throw it into the river, too – a company to my old shed skin.

A breeze picks up and we head back to the café

I silently thank my head doctor for I’ve found Luke and Luke is the friend I need because Kathy is already dead. With him I feel brave to overcome my dog phobia. Luke and I can go to the dog orphanage and take Sophie back. I will hold her in my arms with no fear.

Only it’s too late for me. This time the brakes don’t screech.

My husband gets out of the car and kills me.

A murder at the famous Hairy Dog Café.

2. The day when a search party was organized for missing Frothy

BUDDY

And love gone wrong

The tantalising aroma of chicken parmigiana wafted into Frank’s nose as Giovanni hobbled by, dish in each hand, a juggler of edible plates, the closer being pollo ala cacciatore prepared with olives, mushrooms and herbs.

It’s wild garlic I sniff, the thyme a note over the bay leaves, Frank thought on a sigh.

In the last hour of the slow stewing when chefs sprinkle sugar over the tomato paste, Giovanni’s secret for pollo ala cacciatore was to add a small diced gherkin to accentuate the authentic, savage moment of a dish that transformed a farmed, flightless chicken into a faux-game meal bursting with nature-borrowed scents, a cock of the wood, perhaps, the funny bird that goes deaf when engaged in an amorous play.

“What did you say, darling?” Frank half turned to his wife, Kylie, but the malicious vapours of the sizzling dishes had hacked into his olfactory system, creating havoc. A budding regret for not ordering them clashed with the sad realisation that what he could fit in was no match to his voracious appetite.

I don’t want to think how the ancient Romans felt during orgies. Overloaded, heartburn-afflicted, cursing their bursting, bloated bellies, the foul air trapped in them not knowing which way to exit.

His eyes continued to follow Giovanni’s hobbling but imperial advance to another table with a couple in their golden years around a lit candle sharing a bottle of Portuguese rosé. The woman had a full head of white, coarse hair and tomato-red lipstick.

Readying for the parmiggiana, Frank thought, visibly envious as he continued somewhat rudely to stare at the woman’s face tattooed with fine wrinkles and shadowed by two teardrop pearls dangling from ear lobes. Her gold bangles gave a Christmas tint to the atmosphere. The husband was older, in his eighties, straight and purposeful, ex-military perhaps. The couple obviously celebrating a birthday or anniversary, they looked lovingly at each other and Frank could almost see himself and Kylie down the years still in love, still holding hands.

“I’m sorry, darling! What did you say?” Frank finally tore himself off the wild garlic whiff of the parmiggiana and flashed a guilty smile at his young wife.

They were in the garden patio of the Fratelli restaurant, which specialised in southern Italian cuisine, looking forward to their favourite speciality of Taranto-style oysters. The music, all love songs, was fine-tuning him for their trying-for-a-baby thing.

“I’m taking the dog!” Kylie’s voice appeared like a rapper featuring in the background of Sinatra’s ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin’.

Did she really say dog?

“The dog?”

It was not a word Frank used for Buddy.

Across the table, Kylie patted her lips with a napkin the size of a pillowcase. Old Giovanni personally draped the napkins over their laps, a ritual preceding the antipasto, which they were enjoying – a culinary canvas created in a Renaissance style to seduce the palate with paper-thin slices of prosciutto crudo, the colour shades achieved through layers carefully folded next to wobbly balls of goat cheese, marinated eggplants, stuffed green olives, sundried tomatoes oozing thyme-infused virgin olive oil into the pancetta structured in frills to encompass all those mouth-watering morsels like a fashionably correct ruff.

No rival restaurant had tried a forgery.

Giovanni didn’t serve anchovies with the antipasto. He kept the anchovies’ sharpness and suggestiveness for his pasta puttanesca, a dish bowing to those tell-all street women loved by the great Fellini. His films showed muted on a small screen inside the kitchen so Giovanni could repeatedly enjoy his favourite scenes mumbling the actors’ lines over pots conjured with what was nothing short of geniality.

Like a baby seal sticking its nose from the ice bucket on a trolley next to the table, was a bottle of chardonnay. Frank tugged out the bottle, wiped the drips and refilled their glasses.

Kylie took a hastened sip, and muffled a choking cough. Frank got up to tap her on the back, but blushing with the discomfort she shook him off, her teary eyes cold and unsettling.

He sat back, stunned by the abrupt turn of what had begun as a promising night out. The sweet dreamy smile on Kylie’s face peeping out of her bouncy auburn hair, the glitter of gold in her almond-shaped and coloured eyes, her words of love gently touching him like hesitant paradise birds on a tropical night in Cape York; all that made her his dream trophy wife, had disappeared as if assigned in care of thirsty removalists.

“The dog comes with me!” she declared, determined and rehearsed, still clearing her throat. He shivered under the demolishing wickedness. He could have been another one of her clients: a frightened, easy-to-manipulate little seller of a flooded house with bank-loan worries for years to come.

The chardonnay turned bitter on his tongue and the headache he had felt during a late-afternoon meeting at work returned, pounding in his temples.

What is she talking about?

He had to admit he failed to understand her at times, like when she decided to learn Portuguese so she could read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist in original, or when she declared she was going to stay vegan every second month, or her total obsession with Sia’s ‘Chandelier’, to which she could listen on and on. Now what was she trying to say about Buddy? And why this attitude? Making a point?

“You’re travelling?” Frank asked. It had happened a couple of times, some difficult Sunshine Coast properties that she had been trusted to handle with style.

“No, I’m not travelling!”

We are humble worshipers in the temple of food which is perfect, what has got into her?

“Kylie? What’s wrong?”

She was looking at him, at his lean muscular frame and deeply tanned face acquired during his one-week skiing escapade to Sapporo, and he remembered how she used to joke that her brows were thicker than his hair. He watched her nervousness and hostility flit across her features: so strange to him tonight. Hers could have been a fake face worse than fake diamonds, which he could easily fog with his breath and expose, worse than a faux fur coat toxic with homicidal Asian factory chemicals.

Oh, come on, Kylie! Don’t tell me you also have a headache. One of those headaches when you’re not in the mood for our trying-for-a-baby thing?

He got concerned. “Kylie? How are you feeling?”

“Empty, consumed, flat, drained, thirsty!” She was toying with her glass, swirling it, but didn’t take a swallow. “Only the dog loves me. That’s why the dog comes with me!”

The Friday evening at the Fratelli restaurant was ageing slowly like wine to its final bouquet. It was a winemaker’s knowledge not to allow it to turn into vinegar.

At the sight of the platters of oysters, Frank had no more senses left for distraction. He watched them arrive configured like a small and brave armada with a cargo of overwhelming aromas. He loved them grilled, the juices blending in premium olive oil, black pepper and parsley, the thin and crispy crest of grated cheese – because of his Swiss heritage Frank preferred Gruyère – and breadcrumbs preparing for the morsel of sea “fruit” that in the hands of Giovanni was never gummy or dry. Frank was careful with squeezing the lemon wedges – a bit too much lemon juice and the authentic flavour was obliterated. He loved his oysters, they were perfect for his trying-for-a-baby thing. He loved them also crude, scraped from an ocean rock and freshly shucked, then served on ice in their unflattering Quasimodo shells with pepper, the inevitable lemon wedge helping along with the weedy smell. He had tried them with vodkas, champagne, wines and cocktails.

The world was his oyster.

Frank ignored the ‘dog’ conversation and ordered a second bottle.

Giovanni brought and opened it and Frank knew that this bottle also came from his personal cellar. The old man fretted around their table and insisted on giving them fresh napkins as Frank complimented him on his Taranto-style oysters.

“I prefer them anytime to Kilpatricks,” he said. “Small wonder the ancient Romans set up oyster farmers around the Gulf of Taranto. They must have also needed aphrodisiacs.”

Both men chuckled and exchanged winks.

Giovanni tapped him on the shoulder. “Never a dull moment, as poor Angelo loved to say!”

Giovanni was grieving the loss of his twin brother, Angelo; both migrants from Calabria, they had started the restaurant some forty years ago.

Wiping a tear, Giovanni hid in the kitchen.

In the background Dean Martin was singing ‘That’s Amore’.

Frank looked at his young wife. Her smooth and creamy skin contrasted with the sleeveless, black dress featuring a mariachi band. She looked gaunt and troubled and unusually silent. Sulky? It was a big no-no to spoil good food.

Is there another man in her life or is it one of those headache?

“Kylie, is there something you want to tell me?”

She burst like a beaver dam. “Thank you for asking! Thank you for noticing I’m here! Thank you for letting me tell you what I’m going to tell you …” She gulped for air before continuing. “I don’t like my life with you, Frank! I don’t! I find Buddy emotionally more connected to me than you … I didn’t mean to break it like this. I wanted to spare your feelings because …”

“Because?”

Well, I also don’t like my life when you cosy up next to Buddy and file and buff your nails and all the nasty nail dust goes into Buddy’s nose and he sneezes and you find it cute and entertaining. Buddy’s eyes get irritated, but he still sits there snuggled against you not protesting and I have to put up with it and drown my anger in ice-cream.

“Because?” Frank raised his glass invitingly; the gesture was ignored.

Was she having her monthly bleed, that monstrous spoiler of their trying-for-a-baby thing? His hand dropped and some of the wine spilled on the pristine tablecloth. His Ferragamo shoes felt tight.

“Because I loved you.”

“Past tense? Just like this, past tense? Kylie?” He impaled an oyster on his fork.

That metal glint in her eyes … The shoes tight and squeaky.

Kylie set to vigorously dabbing non-existent traces of sauce on her chin. “Things have changed.” Her enunciating of each word was infuriating, it reminded him of her mother, the speech therapist; she never missed an opportunity to nag.

“Changed? Things? What things?”

“Frank, you don’t get it! I want a divorce.”

Dean Martin stopped singing. Frank heard the people around them talking over each other, laughing, the chattering of plates attacked by forks and knives, the scraping of a chair, the old couple clinking glasses. “Kylie?”

The music returned with Dean Martin and ‘Mama Roma’.

“Kylie, you have a mote of lettuce stuck between your teeth.” He straightened his back. “And you seduced my dog.”

“What are you talking about, you pervert?” Her breasts heaved, the cacti flanking the mariachi band marching against him like a Shakespearean Birnam Wood.

“The only reason Buddy walks after you is that you allow him to stuff himself.”

She pulled out a small mirror from her Gucci clutch. “Where’s the salad you said was growing in my mouth?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I didn’t!” The popping of a champagne cork somewhere behind him sounded like a gunshot.

“An obnoxious way to make me feel inferior.”

The shoes are killing me. “That’s not true!”

“I’m leaving you anyway, salad or no salad.”

“Oh!”

All hopes for their trying-for-a-baby-thing disappeared but it was Giovanni who reappeared, balancing the pasta dishes. The pasta’s name puttanesca wasn’t random.

“Buddy comes with me.” Kylie looked Frank sternly in the eyes, hers as if saying I’ll beat your eye whites into meringue if you try to stop me!

“I’m not having you back and Buddy is my dog!” A furrow like a pothole appeared in the middle of his brow.

It was nutty to spend so much money on tight shoes.

“I’m changing my Facebook profile.” She sounded combative.

“That gets a ‘like’ from me.”

They finished the pasta in silence.

Kylie wanted him to cut on sugar so Frank asked Giovanni for tiramisu and crème brûlée. The taste of burnt sugar wedded with the vanilla flavour of the unoaked chardonnay against his palate.

She chose a meringue.

He stared at her. What had happened to her? That sudden change!

And she wanted his Buddy!

As if this was not enough, she set her tablet on the table with no intention of taking pictures of their romantic culinary safari, what this all was meant to be. No! She touched the screen with her long manicured fingers and Frank couldn’t help imagining how nice it would be if those fingers touched him instead … Forget it!

“Ah!” she exclaimed her fingers freezing in the air over a posting. “Look what’s happening!” Her voice suddenly different, friendlier, concerned.

Frank stretched his neck, it was hurting as was his head now at an angle to see what’s there on the screen but she was already shovelling it to him.

“Something bad?” he caught himself asking although what could have been worse than her irrational demands over Buddy.

“See for yourself!” She quickly resumed her aggressiveness. “They have stolen Jordan’s dog. They have stolen Frothy!”

Didn’t he catch hysterics in her voice?

“At least it was his dog, wasn’t it?” He murmured only to be showered with what seemed to be an icy cold sneer.

“I have to help them. They are friends.” She started to fret. “Perhaps I chip in if they advertise a reward. As if it’s not enough, what with that tragedy that happened on the premises. That crazy man who killed his wife. It happened just after I left with Buddy.”

He wanted to calm her, his hand cupping hers still holding the bloody tablet but she quickly shook him off.

Giovanni passed by, picked up the plates from the old couple’s table, politely inquiring whether they enjoyed the meal. He cleaned the table, changed their pillow-sized napkins and slunk off towards the kitchen. Frank was sure that the wine Giovanni used for his ala cacciatore was tar-thick and of a young forest bouquet.

I don’t mind a bottle of it.

The sublime moment, the one they used to enjoy most, followed with Giovanni’s own very special Italian coffee. And if one was still suspicious that Frank took his young and beautiful wife to Fratelli for the pasta puttanesca as an undercover pornography culinary moment he could use for a passionate trying-for-a-baby thing, one would be mistaken. Frank went there for that finishing touch of coffee, “St Giovanni coffee”, he called it since it was not only red berry beans and water there brewing together to perfection but something else, a secret Giovanni would never reveal, while laughing with good humour.

“Amore,” he would say. “I put a pinch of amore in the coffee.”

Tonight, pissed-off Frank said, “I prefer amore to that over-priced stuff you get at that Hairy Dog Café.”

Giovanni beamed. “Thank you, amico, but I tell you – some people think the best place to have a coffee is in a coffin …” That was another of his brother Angelo’s jokes and he gave out a sad chuckle before disappearing into the kitchen with his trademark hobble.

Frank felt uncomfortable. Kylie didn’t hide her disapproval of their conspiracy talk against the Hairy Dog Café in West End, the only eatery in Brisbane with a dog menu. She could take the dog there and know that they both would be treated with good food and respect. The place was Kylie’s choice of a café to visit with Buddy while Frank travelled, chasing elusive gold veins and ski adventures.

“They are in trouble right now,” snapped Kylie then flashed an excusing smile at Giovanni. “Jordan’s miniature dog is missing. Stolen.”

Shaking his head Giovanni lifted his arms as if to say ah well that’s pretty bad but there are worse things in life as we all know. He then answered sign from a table where he was needed and walked away.

Kylie gave Frank an accusing stare.

Frank got worried.

Stay calm, man, Buddy is a big boy, no one messes with him.

Frank produced a fat Cuban cigar and started to fuss over it. “The Davidoff Special ‘R’ cigars with the coffee fragrance match better my caffeine hunger than Montecristo ‘A’ with fragrance of cedar, cinnamon and cacao …” He knew that Kylie used to find his weekend habit of smoking a cigar sexy, “as an offering to his very self”, but with all the antismoking bans and regulations, he could only groom it in public, which he did, looking forward to that special moment of “his very self” in the comfort of his riverside two-storey apartment.

Kylie kept her silent indifference, her eyes occasionally on the tablet, now running a program on the real estate market.

He sighed. He wanted to talk, to say something nice to her, but deep inside, he dreaded that the words he used to dress a feeling vocally made that feeling look like a scarecrow.

Sipping on the scorching black coffee, Frank cupped her hand again across the table, his eyes sucking on the creamy skin of her bare arms; in the warm night the scent of bougainvillea suddenly was overwhelming.

“Kylie, next Friday we can go to Bribie Island. I know a place where they serve the best Morten Bay bugs with lemon-and-garlic sauce, and …”

Her hand fluttered like a small trapped animal with an escape on mind.

Frank got up and excused himself. He himself felt trapped in the net of her mood swings. For a moment, he considered lighting his cigar but decided against it. The last thing he wanted was to bring trouble to his old friend Giovanni who was soon standing next to Kylie refilling her wineglass. Frank mumbled something about an important gold vein chart that he had to check in the car.

He circled the restaurant and entered the parking lot. Opened the car, sat inside and let the minutes run, taking deep breaths.

He had met Kylie at a wedding, she was the bride’s little sister and Frank found her sexy. He flirted with her, he wanted her drunk. He wanted to take her to bed and then forget all about it, but they danced and he discovered that her bouncy hair smelled of snow and melting icicles; her hair brought memories of tobogganing down steep slopes, of rolling in snow drifts, skiing with his cantankerous father and befriending the ghost of the white death. It was the smell of his Swiss childhood. You are drunk, man! He had told himself then. Her almond-brown eyes have golden veins!

Kylie’s love for Buddy and vice versa, was love at first sniff. Frank’s two-year-old retriever ran to meet Kylie, tail tapping in a frenzy. Buddy slobbered into her hand, pressed for a pat and Frank felt a pang of jealousy that ran both ways.

He lived by Buddy’s likes and dislikes. Buddy disliked Emily and Joanne, Frank’s workplace crushes, both young women who helped him create interactive images of geological layers in search of gold veins around Australia. Buddy ate their bags, pissed in their shoes, chewed on their phones and Frank had to end the relationships fearing for the girls’ safety. Buddy liked Kylie and Frank proposed to Kylie. At forty, he was ready to share his comfortable income, riverfront flat, latest model BMW and skiing holidays.

Kylie was not only beautiful. As a real estate agent, she was trained to influence other people’s decisions and ignore opinions that didn’t match hers. Her portfolio showed a shark’s appetite for shares in both gold mines and banks; it was like betting on the black and white figures on the chess board, but she played the stock market on small margins at a lightning speed and was building a nice nest for herself. Frank liked it. She was a better gambler than he was.

Soon the three of them were inseparable. Buddy was left behind in the care of Frank’s young niece, Margaret, only when the couple went skiing in Europe. In the tucked-away taverns of Zermatt at the foot of the mystical Swiss pride, Matterhorn, Frank introduced Kylie to the art of melted cheese. Armed with long forks, they dunked pieces of bread into the bubbling fondue, whirling the cheese around crumby pieces in total ecstasy as if re-enacting the bread-rolls dance of Charlie Chaplin. The aromatic warmth brought an additional cosiness in the cold weather. Besides skiing, they enjoyed riding the Swiss Post buses through some still open high-mountain passes visiting small villages like Frank’s native Spruga. They stayed in houses built of pine logs, the exposed beams forming aesthetics with geometric patterns. The landladies prepared breakfast long before the couple was up and their dreams were soaked in the tantalising warmth of freshly baked bread served with homemade butter and cheese, jam prepared of Alpine berries, and syruped chestnuts. Kylie ate Toblerone chocolates with Matterhorn on the wrap as she was gazing at the real glaciers. They both missed Buddy and drowned their longing in their favourite chardonnay. Frank flattered himself by thinking that the affection Kylie held for Buddy was one of those things women do to please their men. He should have known better. Kylie’s feelings for Buddy were genuine. Even worse, Buddy was crazy about Kylie.

Frank became the third wheel. Still Buddy was his dog, had been his tiny puppy before Frank met Kylie and discovered that her hair smelled of crispy icicles and dry powdery snow, sometimes of breakable snow crust.

The Greenlandic Inuit have forty-nine words for snow, Kylie! Forty-nine!

When he turned back at the table, Kylie was still sitting there in the same position, glass in hand, like a frozen statue.

“You missed me a bit?” He threw velvety baritone notes into his voice, but Kylie remained distant, camping inside herself, just about to zip up the tent. “Remember that day in the botanical gardens when all of a sudden there was a shower of white butterflies; thousands of them dancing their mating ritual dance, oblivious to our presence, and we could swim in them, in that incredible butterfly bath, then we went home and you told me you were off the pill and we could do that trying-for-a-bay thing for real?”

Something cute and gentle fluttered across her face. “I remember Buddy chasing the poor things and butterflies perching on his nose and he kept sneezing, and …” She cut herself off and a stern expression swept over her face that again looked strange and unwelcoming to him.

What she said next caught him completely off guard. “I hate fondue!” There was suppressed hysteria in her voice. “I get that heavy lump in my stomach whenever you force me to eat it! And those long forks you use are like surgical instruments, as if readying to take me to an operating theatre and disembowel me!”

He didn’t answer.

On their way out, Giovanni kissed Kylie’s hand and wished them a good night, winking at Frank, who kept a sad face but asked in hushed tones what that nice old couple was celebrating.

“Oh!” Giovanni shook his head. “Tragedia. They are celebrating a tragedy, he was diagnosed with … I don’t know. Diagnosed with death, you can say, so they celebrate a new start in life. On Sunday they go on a cruise around the world.”

“Around the world?” whispered Frank, suddenly embarrassingly aware of the fact that the couple was looking at them and smiling in a friendly manner.

“He wants his ashes dispersed in the sea. He was in the navy once.”

Giovanni turned to the old couple. “Coming, Signora! More rosé? From my own cellar, of course!”

In the car, Kylie’s bad mood was not helping Frank’s digestion and he felt a heaviness that pressed on his bladder. He kept driving, tense and uninviting for his own personal reasons, but that was not what Kylie read in his edginess. The tradition was that on the way home, Frank would drive along the banks of the dark and hypnotic Brisbane River because choosing a bridge to cross was a favourite game to break the early signs of monotony that were appearing almost invisibly like hair-wide cracks in their family life. Soon they would feel guilty for leaving Buddy alone and hurry home to face his slobbery kisses. Tonight all Frank did was drive home to Buddy.

He spent the night in the lounge with the retriever couch bombing, pushing for space. The heat coming from his stretched-out hairy body melted away Frank’s sadness, and before falling asleep, he reflected on life, remembering his old bad-tempered father saying, “Life’s not meant to be fair.” The older Swiss people had to overcome tons of hardship before delivering a chocolate like Toblerone.

The following morning, Kylie packed some of her stuff, refused the coffee and left. Buddy ran after her and jumped into the car, avoiding Frank’s eyes.

Frank was left alone with Buddy’s toys. He cancelled his golf booking and searched for some old movies that he and Buddy liked to watch like Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (Oh, that spaghetti love scene!), Lassie, 101 Dalmatians, Marley & Me. Memories of their happier days unfolded – Buddy still a puppy, no Kylie in their lives. He opened his phone and looked at pictures from that merry, carefree time. He and Buddy, water flying off the bouncy retriever fresh from the ocean; at home Buddy placing his paw on Frank’s knee eager for a pat and a sausage. Selfies with Buddy, half a face/muzzle of each. There were earlier pictures of Buddy as a tiny, blind puppy, his siblings toppling over each other; Buddy in Frank’s flat doing a wee on the carpet, a guilty look in his eyes; Buddy chewing on a slobbered ball, retrieving a stick; Frank rolling on the floor feigning he disliked Buddy’s licks on his face; chasing each other in the nearby park or a walk in that little forest where Frank was able to take Buddy without having to bring a plastic bag to pick up his mess. Buddy twitching his nostrils at the smell of a juicy barbequed steak, lapping water from his bowl, wiping his nose against Frank’s trouser legs.

“I want to talk to Buddy,” Frank said on Monday evening when he rang Kylie after a disastrous day at work: his boss was furious over the delayed chart of an epithermal gold location, and Frank’s personal secretary Alison looking more absent-minded than her menopause period in life could explain.

“You have a bad influence on him,” said Kylie, her voice cold and needly like a blizzard. “Buddy can’t make his own decisions with you around. The same goes for me.”

She hung up.

For the first time in his life, Frank didn’t feel like eating. He went to bed hungry, clutching Buddy’s favourite ball, all DNAed with his slobber. His empty stomach didn’t allow him to fall asleep and around midnight, he painfully realised that he couldn’t afford a divorce because that meant he would never see Buddy again.

The following day, he kept texting Kylie; there was no reply. His headache threatened to upgrade to a migraine. He was walking with pills in his pocket. At forty-three, he felt old and for dinner, he ate only yoghurt.

Wednesday night, he went to bed with an artistic photo of himself and Buddy courtesy of the Hairy Dog Café. In the background was showing Frothy, the owner Jordan’s mal-shi. Frank remembered that this idyllic scene before Kylie. That day, the weather was perfect and the dog-area patio was crowded with pooches, small and big, behaving and misbehaving. Everyone was having fun, dogs and owners. Frank was having a double ham-and-mushroom omelette with a mango smoothie, and Buddy was having a serving of healthy brown rice tossed on grilled chicken breast with a bowl of water. That night, when he finally fell asleep, he felt Buddy jabbing his cold nose into his armpit, then sitting on his head and, oh no!, passing foul wind.

“That’s not fair! Get off me, you farting bastard!” Frank jumped in his bed, fully awake, only to realise that all, even the smell, was conjured in the old realm of Morpheus, the ancient god of dreams.

He rang Kylie before dawn, waking her; something he knew she hated.

“Let’s separate in style,” he did not waste time on the good-morning stuff. “I invite you for a holiday. Switzerland, the Matterhorn. Remember, you called it Toblerone?”

“That’s another thing you never got right, Frank.” Kylie’s voice was flat and dry like the Gobi Desert. “Skiing was never my thing.”

There was silence and he could hear Buddy’s heavy breathing. She had let him sleep in her bed and Frank found it maddening.

“I’d better let you sleep. It was a stupid idea … Say hello to Buddy for me.”

“Hang on!” It was Kylie’s pushy, confident self. “I’d love to think of us as a sophisticated couple that unpairs in style, like that cool guy from Cold Play and Gwyneth Paltrow, so why not? After all, we had our good moments.”

I know, I know. Those trying-for-a-baby moments?

There was a pause, then she added, “I haven’t told anyone.”

Her mother, the speech therapist, had been kept in the dark.

He pressed, “Buddy can’t be left all by himself at your place.”

He heard her sneeze.

Oh no! She had the flu!? Life’s not meant to be fair.

“I can hire that nice lady Mrs Claire Jones, the dog sitter. But it might be a short notice to her. Last I saw her she was off to Germany to look after a dog with travelling parents.” There was a pause and a new sneeze and then, “I’ll bring Buddy to your place, Frank. Temporarily! Margaret can look after him.”

“She’ll be over the moon!” said Frank, on behalf of his young niece. So will I.

“Right now, Buddy brings me my mouse-faced slippers. He is such a gentleman and learned not to eat them.”

His enthusiasm dropped south. If she had wanted to hurt him, she succeeded.

“With a pedigree like his, Buddy is not supposed to bring slippers.”

“Frank, when did you say we’re leaving?”

That night, he went alone to the Fratelli restaurant. Giuseppe didn’t ask questions but served him the pollo ala cacciatore he ordered with a smile that went way back to connoisseurs of the woman’s soul like Dante and da Vinci. There weren’t many customers and the old man kept coming back to Frank’s table and enjoying his wolfish appetite. For dessert, he offered the homemade tiramisu. Frank ate a second piece of the delicious cake soaked in Marsala wine and drank his mocha slowly. Occasionally, he gave precedence to his troubled thoughts.

If he couldn’t have Buddy, Kylie was also going to be separated from him. He knew it came at a price; Kylie would slow him down on the ski runs. He loved to fly down the white powdery slopes and feel the adrenaline pumping. But then an occasion might arise and they could settle the dispute over the dog’s parenting.

Unlikely, he thought bitterly, falling asleep that night with a picture of him and Buddy sharing a platter with pork mosaic, turkey breast rolls and leg ham. How on earth did he let someone wedge herself between him and Buddy?

They flew Brisbane to Zurich business class and boarded a cog train to scale the mountain into the heart of the car-free ski paradise of Zermatt. It was something like the Queensland tilt train because it tugged continuously from side to side then switch-backed in order to climb the heights. Fluent in the local weird version of German, Frank was about to take the upper hand. He allowed the staff’s tourist-patronising attitude to make a dent into Kylie’s self-importance over her demand for separate rooms. A brow twitch betrayed the surprise of the man, however, at reception. He remembered them from their previous visits, and because he was trained to remember the guests by face, name and title, he had difficulties with the latter but decided on “miss” when he offered Kylie her key.

The following morning, the terrace of the luxury hotel was crowded with people sprawled on deckchairs, hiding behind sunglasses, blankets over their laps in the best clichéd style. The weather was perfect; the Matterhorn was clearly outlined against the blue sky, mimicking its own image on a Toblerone wrap.

Frank was adjusting his ski boots when Kylie appeared, sleepy and dishevelled. She announced she was not going to struggle with “the four sticks”.

“I’ll read, do some shopping and wait until it’s morning in Australia to call Buddy.”

Frank seethed but forced a smile. What mattered was that she and Buddy were separated. What mattered was that he could storm his favourite runs without her coming in and out of his legs, to put it mildly.

He helped Kylie into a deckchair, ordered a hot chocolate drink for her and headed for the dangerous double black diamond ski run. Somewhere to the south, there was the casino land of Campione d’Italia. Perhaps his friend Dr Nicollas was there feeding the Black Jack. Dr Nicolas, the strange collector feeding fear in so many hearts; he hadn’t seen him for a while. Since Frank had married Kylie, gambling was allowed only on the stock market and the real adrenaline-cum-pleasure thrill became a memory from the past, like heavy desserts. Perhaps it was also time to change. He shot down the steep slope, speeding past trees and frozen bushes, protruding rocks and steep drop-offs, the wind grazing at him, scraping his anger and hurt, cutting into disappointment and rejection, and burying them deep into the lumpy snow.

Frank didn’t count the runs he did. It was enough that he was jubilant, schussing downhill with all the moderate airborne frills he was capable of performing, his muscles enjoying the familiar strain and flexing, his mind and body bursting with energy. He was so smitten by the beneficial effect of raw subzero nature on him that he missed his lunch. How is it possible? he wondered, during his only rest on the lift on the way up.

He appeared starved and in an aggressive mood for dinner. He met Kylie in the foyer and headed for the restaurant, where they were given a table for two. He gave brisk orders to the poker-faced waiter and it was only when they were served a bottle of Swiss white Fendant wine that Frank relaxed savouring the first thirsty gulp. Now he was one hundred percent gentlemanly (like Buddy), refilling in a ceremonial manner Kylie’s and his glasses, aware of the curious looks and remarks in drawling Russian, argumentative Chinese and shorthand English flew in their direction.

He took his future ex-wife’s hand in his as a teenage Chinese girl with mane-like hair unceremoniously snapped a photo of them. Her older sister was also looking at them. At him? She had a porcelain-doll-like face, eyes operated for more of a Westerner look and a smile like an elusive butterfly on her red-painted lips. The restaurant was grandiose with an atmosphere of searched intimacy – more love seats than chairs, more warmth than light, more staff than patrons inside a collage of luxury.

“Next time we divorce, I’ll take you to Paris,” he whispered over the rim of his wineglass. “Let’s drink to it.”

“I don’t like Paris.” Kylie pulled back her hand and the Chinese girls giggled. “Paris is for people who love Les Miserable and phallic metal monsters like the Eiffel Tower.”

“All right, then.” Frank felt like a cast member of Les Miserables. “How about the Snowy Mountains? The Perisher Blue resort? We used to love it there …”

Dinner arrived and they diverted their attention to the cordon bleu presented with all the frills of expensiveness, leaving taste on the duller side. Kylie kept her, by now permanent, foul mood, he his urge to catch up with the missed food. Even the dessert of heavily creamed Swiss rolls decorated with edible flowers, pansies, nasturtium, marigold, sweet Williams, matched with the delicious mocha couldn’t serve as an icebreaker.

Checking the time difference, they called Buddy. He was at the front door waiting for his walk.

“I’m taking him to the search party,” chirped Frank’s niece, Margaret. “The weather is beautiful!”

“What search party? Margaret, what search party are you talking about?” He wished he could materialize on the other side of the world.

“Oh, uncle Frank, everybody is joining it! We’ll be searching for little mal-shi Frothy.”

“Hasn’t she turned up yet?”

“No, and now we are… Buddy, what are you doing? Stop pulling! Can’t you wait a minute?”

Obviously Buddy couldn’t and Margaret put the iPhone in front of Buddy and he cheered Frank with a series of noisy barks. Frank cast a haughty glance at Kylie. Then Kylie talked to Buddy and Buddy went berserk. He missed her and let her know it. A crescendo of pleading yaps and whining growls gave the Chinese girls another opportunity to giggle and attracted the attention of other people, but Frank could only hear Buddy’s frantic tail-tapping and pleading whimpers meant to make them feel guilty, sooo guilty!

“Margaret, you know where the spare packets of dog food are, but please, please, don’t overfeed him; he is such an eater!” Frank took over from Buddy’s and Kylie’s love-drawling language exchange. “And please keep the wardrobe room locked; given half a chance Buddy …”

“Uncle Frank, he’s already eaten your Ferragamo shoes.”

“Oh no!” He cried, but then spotting the triumph in Kylie’s eyes added matter-of-factly, “They were tight anyway!”

“There’s something else, Uncle Frank…”

His heart skipped a beat. “What is it?”

“Frothy form Hairy Dog Café went missing. We all help to find her.”

That was all he needed to hear. A maniac was roaming the streets of Brisbane snitching high profile dogs as he was on the other side of the world unable to protect his Buddy.

Once the conversation finished, Kylie nodded her goodnight and Frank released a long, suffering sigh. They were strangers again and each headed for their own room.

An anonymous hotel room with impersonal furnishings was waiting for him and he wondered how many people have been here before. How many fingerprints, characterprints, wordprints, dreamprints? Room-service meals, small shrieks of passion or rebuke, muted movie channels, naked bodies between the sheets, a hotel-room history that lingered in the corners, despite the efforts of the cleaning ladies. He brushed his teeth, his even deeper tanned face stared back from the mirror, the white Frothy painting a clown’s mouth. There was nothing clownish in his life. Nothing to make him feel like a kid again with eyes glued to an old circus clown and his silly oversized shoes and predictable yet awesomely funny gags.

Feeling raw and vulnerable, he went to bed and flicked through the TV channels. He watched the news. Children got killed in Syria and he thought what it was to be a father in a devastated country, a father who could not protect his own child. He thought of fatherhood. Fatherhood had been trashed, pushed in the corner, women were the ones parent-important. Anyway, his own would-be fatherhood was trashed, along with those purposeful trying-for-a-baby nights. Kylie was in the room next to his, only a wall dividing them, but it may as well have been the Chinese wall.

Chinese doll-faced girls climbing over it …

Penguins are fantastic fathers. I could have made a penguin father. But then again, if Kylie could hear my thoughts through the wall, she’d accuse me of uterus envy …

He fell asleep, his body tired if not totally exhausted by his greedy and determined skiing down the treacherous highest-degree slopes. His sore muscles induced a much-needed rest for his feverish brain and in the passage between his reality of a healthy man left alone in an anonymous hotel room and the unrestrained images visiting his dreams, he could feel Kylie’s head of bouncy hair tucked in his armpit, his arm over her shoulder reaching her smooth belly so vulnerable, so exposed, so trustful, so afraid that one day it might be covered in “tiger stripes”. Sometimes there would be a purr in her breathing and he would think that he had found his own gold vein in the Earth’s crust. A feeling only matching his favourite Parisian dish – pheasant with truffles prepared by Giovanni using white truffles and drowning the bird in creamy prosciutto-based sauce – overtook him.

There was still hope that Kylie would knock at the door and, warm from her sleep, slip into his bed whispering, “You’ve been a bad boy, Frank. I’m going to punish you!” Or taking his hand murmuring, “Sea otters hold hands when they sleep so they don’t drift apart.”

Nothing like that happened and the night slipped by. The dawn cracked, bringing equally perfect weather the following day.

Young, good-looking snowboarders, overconfident in their self-established supremacy, were already on the most treacherous pistes while performing the annoyingly long list of aerials, spins, tweaks, all tricks of weirdo names like Bloody Dracula, Beef Carpaccio, Chicken Salad, Mule Kick and Gorilla, Rusty Trombone and Swiss Cheese Air. Some male tourists were sitting around, stripped to their waists, catching that high-mountain healthy dark-chocolate tan.

Frank caught a glimpse of the young Chinese girls hiring a toboggan and overheard their infectious giggles.

Soon after her lavish buffet breakfast, Kylie disappeared into the vast hotel area hosting a gym and spa, a hairdresser and a beauty salon. Frank loved buffets. Buffets meant that he could try and nibble and go back if he liked it and there was no way to miss out on something worthy. Today he had helpings of crab salad and diced celery stalks, mushroom-and-chicken-breast omelette, turkey bites, and eggs Benedict on wild salmon and tender chives. He skipped the trivial fresh orange juice and went for a cocktail of guava, pineapple and feijoa. The double espresso was like a kick in the teeth. He was ready for another day of non-stop skiing burning energy and anger.

At midday, Frank, feeling the soreness of his legs, allowed himself a break from his adrenaline-pumped schussing. He spotted Kylie on the balcony of her room, making herself busy taking selfies, searching for the right angle so the Toblerone image of Matterhorn popped into the picture next to her young, still-fresh-from-the-sunny-cold face. Then she started to text frantically.

She can’t text Buddy or can she?

He wouldn’t trust her even on this. For a moment Frank was tempted to interrupt her, inviting her to lunch in a nice nearby tavern but decided against it. The double black diamond piste was waiting for him to enjoy it before the snow was rendered into bigger bumps and moguls by the lovers of Beef Carpaccio. He was actually glad yesterday when he was, perhaps for the first time, really hungry for dinner. Tonight he can tease her, ordering – why not? – fondue or a raclette with those miniature pickled side dishes, long red peppers, tiny onions, baby gherkins, button mushrooms, olives and small juicy sausages … His mouth was watering in anticipation. Then for dessert, he could order a meringue like Kylie. The meringues were special here, their birthplace was Switzerland, the village of Meiringen.

The tantalising thoughts kept him going until late afternoon when, finished with his indulgence for the day, he was having a coffee, reading the forecast tableau when Kylie appeared on the hotel terrace in stunning canary-yellow skiing gear balancing “the four sticks” over her shoulders, an old couple nearly colliding with her and backing away for cover, some of the returning snowboarders gawking at her and speaking loudly to attract her attention. She looked like a snow bunny and Frank joined the snowboarders’ awe by giving out a wolf whistle.

Flabbergasted – What is she up to? he wondered – he abandoned his coffee.

“What were you having?” she asked, fiddling with the straps of her helmet.

“Just a reviving mocha.”

“It’s cheeky to have things without me! Haven’t you got my message?”

“I’m going to change now and read it. I left the phone in the room. What are you up to?”

“Let’s go skiing!” She leaned the poles against a chair, dropped the skis and bent to clip them on.

Frank arched his brows.

“Soon it will be getting dark! Anyway, the bunny piste is illuminated all night.” He chuckled, clumsily trying to conceal his uneasiness.

Spending the day on the double black diamond piste, racing downhill to the base lift and then dangling on a chair up, had left his body tired and his muscles screaming for a break. All he needed was a hot jacuzzi soak and a lot of food to compensate for the omitted lunch.

“Coming?” She was definitely provoking him.

He suggested tobogganing. Kylie sneered and he panicked, afraid that she might head for the nearest airport, board a flight to Australia, take Buddy and leave him alone with his four sticks.

“You are a brave mouse.” He shrugged his achy shoulders.

She made a face, but there was a teasing glint in her eyes.

The last air balloon for the day passed low and some enthusiasts waved down to them as Frank, silent, put his skis back on, his mind trying to analyse the surprising turn of events.

Back in control of his aching body, he headed for a low-grade blue run, but Kylie laughed and trudged to the top of his run.

Before he knew it, she was flying down along the longest and most dangerous black piste of the resort.

Frank shot off after her, calling out for her to slow down.

She didn’t.

His worst fears realised when a narrow bumpy patch, a misjudgement of a mogul, threw her up in the air. She missed a turn and ploughed through a snow drift, her entangled skis colliding with a group of protruding rocks, dark and grim under their powdery caps. His abrupt stop made him skid then plough dangerously close to her. She had done a face-plant and her helmet had gone askew. He dug into the frozen drift to free her when he realised how lucky she was. The rocks called Chocolate Chips in the skiers’ lingo, marked the edge of the piste before an abrupt turn. Beyond them there was an abyss, the bottomless ravine.

Half smiling, half sobbing, she was excusing herself. “I’m such a nuisance.”

“You are not a nuisance!” He assured her. But a thief, a highway robber! You robbed me of my dog. What’s the difference between you and that pup Frothy’s snitcher?

“I wonder what Buddy would think about my poor performance,” she said feebly.

She was hurting and all she could do was think about his dog!

He helped her to her feet. One of her skis was broken. She looked like a frightened child.

“I’ll call the ski patrol,” he said, then remembered he had left his phone behind. He hated asking for hers; when swiped open, the screen showed a selfie of her and Buddy. It wasn’t the time to be fussy. “Can you give me your phone?”

Seductively, she pulled off her glove with her teeth and slipped a hand into the pocket of her canary-yellow jacket, her face shiny with frost. “Oops!” She gave out a nervous laugh. “It’s gone.”

Keep cool, man! Keep cool.

He scanned the run.

For a moment, he considered that the best choice for them would be to continue downhill to where the ski lift was, but realised that it was quickly getting dark. Every facility would be closing soon; the lifties knew nobody went night skiing on double black diamond runs, especially with a forecast for heavy snow.

Frank yelled and yodelled for a while, in case a late skier or a piste basher operator was in the vicinity.

They had to move.

Kylie stepped on her leg with the broken ski and cried out in pain, a piercing torturous shriek, as she clasped her knee with both hands. She had to lean on him for support. They abandoned the skis and the helmets, pulled the hoods out of their collar pockets, took the poles, and set off to climb. She was hobbling and her face cringed with pain. His arm snaked around her waist as he was aware of her body getting heavier and heavier.

Panting, they advanced uphill, and taking pity on her, he stopped for them to rest when Kylie lost her footing and the supporting crook of his arm was not enough to stop her from falling. Tangled arms and legs, she took him rolling downhill with her, entwined, facing each other like praying hands. His mind got confused by their bodies bashing against each other, against bumps, branches and moguls, but he managed a manoeuvre that saved them from crashing straight against the Chocolate Chips. Buried in the drift, he remained motionless in the grip of fear, annoyance and hostility burning within him as she sobbed loudly into his bruised arms, saying how sorry she was. Her loosened hood fell and her face brushed against his.

“You’re healthy,” he said. “You have a cold nose.”

He kissed her. She was freezing.

“Buddy can bring us a cask of rum,” she said, her teeth chattering.

Bone splinters like needle-sharp icicles had pierced through the ragged leg of her label ski pants now changing colour from canary-yellow to red. The splinters had gone through ligaments and tissue, but she was not aware of it. Cold, the best painkiller…

“Retrievers don’t bring rum. St Bernards do.” He hoped he didn’t sound patronizing.

She smiled feebly. “What’s the retriever’s job then?”

“Retrieving dead ducks.” He answered and they both laughed.

There was a pause.

“I’m hungry,” he suddenly confessed. “And I am worried stiff about Buddy’s safety.”

When he pushed her, her hair smelled of the forty-nine words of snow and there was trust in her smile. She spread her arms as she was flying down into the chardonnay-tinted moonlight seeping through the thickening darkness. Her shriek, more of surprise than horror, pierced the air, turning into a weak pulsating echo that hit the slopes and slowly trailed back to him. He knew stories about echoes triggering avalanches. Serious skiers disapproved of boisterous snowboarders and their noisy squawks that disrupted the mountain.

He found his skis, struggling he put them on and worked his way back to the piste. He resumed his way up, duck-walking and aware of pain invading his body with his every movement, his calves were two tight and heavy knots. At least it was easier now that he didn’t have to carry her. If he had something broken, the cold was also keeping his pain at bay.

At reaching the resort he would report the accident. Their unusual love triangle might not have been of Pythagorean proportions, but he solved the equation and could enjoy a good meal of fondue and two pieces of black forest cake drowned in cream, drowned in Kirsch. Or perhaps raclette, another melting cheese beauty, and a gigantic meringue with surf waves of cream to match.

He smiled, envisioning his reunion with Buddy. They could share a meal together, something simple like bacon and eggs, or ham and cheese sandwiches. Buddy also loved his cheese especially when accompanied by those tiny little juicy sausages that Frank himself could gobble like pepitas.

Frank’s smile morphed into a spasm of pain. It was slippery and getting darker. He was stumbling and hurting, but still hoping for a late skier or a resort worker as he was advancing.

He was moving and that was all that mattered.

Frank loved his Alps, the kingdom of the soft leathery Edelweiss, the boisterous chamois. He loved the glaciers as keepers of water memory and the feeling of his gaze skidding along their shiny surface, the milky blue of the glacier lakes making everything look surreal. He was friends with the danger they offered.

There was a painting, Snow Storm, by Turner showing the Carthaginian emperor, Hannibal, who in the third century BC, led his army across the Swiss Alps to invade Italy. Hannibal was using thirty battle elephants to cross the perpetually snow-capped Alps. He led them on foot trails and his march was cursed by continuous avalanches that buried many of his soldiers and elephants. Napoleon also crossed the Alps in 1797 to invade Italy. There were paintings showing Napoleon, as pale in the face as a cocaine sniffer, on the back of a charging white horse; or as a tired, frostbitten soldier pressing his ulcer, riding a short-legged working horse, squeezing through the Great St Bernard Pass.

Elephants. African elephants and mad emperors crossing the Alps, and here I am getting puffed and shattered by this small uphill track.

Frank reached the place where they had stopped for a rest, his heart pounding heavily, his legs caving.

He stopped. He was tired, but most of all he was hungry, fantasising about a good, homely fondue flavoured with garlic and Kirsch. A warming, cheesy fondue with a nice baguette diced into pieces to dunk and whirl in the pot with the special, long fork, then offer it to that holy culinary cave that was his mouth, his tongue at work, his teeth crushing and squeezing more and more orgasmic aromas before shooting the existence-supporting fuel down his throat to his grateful bodily engine. His stomach that was empty now, rebelling, threatening, desperate, was an equal uphill he had to conquer …

The moon above was like a spill of unoaked chardonnay. Giovanni would have liked to have changed the napkin on the lap of the sky if he were here.

Only he wasn’t and the thought somehow made Frank dizzy. He weighed heavily on his poles. The deep breath he took glassed his lungs. He tried to think what his father would have done. Keep moving, keep moving, man; no matter what. The white death wants you to stop and rest. The white death lures you to sit down and fall asleep.

He kept moving, his balance shaky, his mind travelling back in time. He was again a small child, terrified from a nightmare, pleading with his father to stay with him through the night. In the mountain village of Spruga, high up in the Alps, the snow was early to come and late to go. He didn’t remember his mother. Father had remarried, his stepmother was young, almost a girl. Seeing her with his stooped balding father, a mean and difficult character, made little Frank hostile and suspicious. He tried to remember why he hated her so much. Oh yes, she had that freaking habit of calling HIS father MY husband. Little Frank had put something in her plate. He didn’t remember what, but it made her ill. She was beautiful in her small white coffin, like Snow White waiting for the prince to kiss her. There was no bond between father and son except their passion for skiing. They would fly down dangerous slopes, the boy charging his adrenaline, the father killing his grief. When his father died, he left a surprising wealth all in gold coins, jars full of them under his bed. Frank’s Aunt Arianne, who became his guardian, lived in Australia and ordered him to join her. Brisbane became his home and Aunt Arianne his guru into the fascinating world of food. They dined and wined the best as she was writing reviews on restaurants striving for a blue ribbon award winning menus.

The memories of his father were suffused with love and fear. He wanted to be back in Brisbane. With Buddy. As a puppy he fell mortally sick and Frank never left his side sleeping in a chair in the vet’s clinic.

I am coming home, Buddy. I am coming home.

Calling on all his reserves, he stumbled on. His legs trembled with the exertion as he advanced slowly up the slope all ploughed up by the skiers into moguls and deep hollows. He cracked a bitter smile that remained locked in his eyes. He was one of those relentless skiers now facing a familiarly white coffin made of slippery rugged crust over old and hard as marble treacherous ice and forty-nine words for snow.

Seventy-nine protons in the nucleus of the golden atom.

He waved at the moon that shined like a gold nugget. He tried to remember the last time he was hungry. Was it on that long-haul flight back from Brazil? He wasn’t sure.

It was déjà vu when, with his next step, he made a grave misjudgement. His skied left leg skid and caught his right from behind and he tripped himself and toppled with a thud.

The pain was profuse. He was aching everywhere but no scream came out of him. He did his best, succumbing to the physics laws applicable to his fall without obstructing them. A long-travelling cry finally burst out when his body smashed against the frozen branches. They tried to pole him, keeping him in a semi-erect position.

He must have blacked out because when his eyes flew open, he felt the razor-sharp cold was working in his lungs on a whooping cough blocking his throat. A shooting pain started at the top of his skull and engulfed his brain in a sizzling sensation; the throb in his temples made him feel like some wrenched octopus with three hearts. He reached for the throb as if it was a foreign matter, something easy to scrape off, and touched the little red icicles forming from his hair, out of his own blood. He sucked on it. He tried to step on his feet and failed. There was something wobbly in his mouth and his probing tongue set free one of his canines. He kept it in his mouth for a while, swirling it around, mourning it, reluctant to let it go. When he did, the thought of his ridiculously expensive dentist was, for a moment, even more severe and annoying than his physical pain. He spat out the tooth, bit into the snow and washed the slimy blood clogging in his mouth. He lifted his head. The deadly Matterhorn had disappeared like all those lives lost of people who wanted to conquer it.

One of the protruding branches looked more reliable and shifting himself, using his own weight, he tried to claw at it, but his hand fell short. He moved closer by kicking against the drift and grabbing the branch only to see it break. His hand fell against a sharp object and he who didn’t believe in miracles was stunned to see one of Kylie’s sticks lying buried in the snow next to him. He used his weight to lever it out and when he did, he used it to climb onto his feet and support himself. His legs felt like frozen jelly next to an air-conditioner blasting warmth.

He gripped the stick tightly, the thoughts about Kylie and his dentist sent a hesitant wave of adrenaline through him, enough to propel his heavy body.

He had to find his way back to the run. He was born in the snow and he’d managed it all his young life. He felt confident he could continue doing it no matter what. But his body felt like a rag doll. He spat another blob of red saliva.

Struggling, he was losing track in the thickening darkness. His breath seemed to freeze in the air. In his jumbled mind, he could see the ghost of the white death sitting next to him, blocking his vision, or was it the promised heavy snowfall? His father would have known. Young Frank would have known. The good life had dulled his instincts.

Gathering all of his strength, he made a small move. It felt as if he was pumping more lactic acid into his muscles than blood. He could make out the outlines of skis sticking out of a mogul as if another skier was buried there. He found it funny, a raspy chuckle whirled in his throat, then he realised his hands refused to obey. His hands were numb.

Move.

He leaned over the rocks and looked down where there was death. And Kylie.

I am coming home, Buddy. I am coming home.

As if to tap at their energy, he tried to think of the young and noisy snowboarders from the hotel and some of the daredevil freeskiers he followed on Facebook like the great Kai Mahler. They all had their close brush with death and had survived. One of them said he hoped he was like cats and had nine lives, because he was already living life number six. Frank had never tried to climb Mount Everest, but he knew the saying from that treacherous part of the world: A good sherpa is a live sherpa.

Stay alive, mate, stay alive!

The big flapping snowflakes had their own sound and determination. Propelled by the rising wind, they bashed against his face that had lost sensitivity. They remained there, heavy on his lids as he started pulling his gloves with chattering teeth. He nested his frozen fingers inside his bloodied mouth and breathed warmth on them.

The pounding in his head was forging a mental fog. His mind was following the weakness of his body. He loved his Shakespeare. To die is to sleep no more …

Perhaps he could do just that, fall asleep into death. His death.

“I’m sorry. I failed you, Buddy. I love you.”

The words came out light and ruptured. The moon behind the snow curtain winked back at him and it looked like old Giovanni winking at him. Suddenly, all looked good and it didn’t come as a surprise when he spotted the contours of another object in the mogul next to his sticking skis. A small object. No bigger than a phone.

He knew he was going to live.

Jelly-legged and feeling sick, he staggered on his feet but fell back before he could crawl to the phone. With barely moving hands he swiped it open.

Kylie’s selfie with Buddy was gone.

Like on an exquisite restaurant menu two blue ribbons flashed, a promise for an unbeatable palate experience. That’s what Frank perceived in his blur before he realised he was looking at the double line of a pregnancy test.

An agonising roar hit the black diamond slope of Matterhorn.

The ghost of the white death stopped axing the glaciers and listened until, muffled by the falling snow, the echo died.

3. The day a private detective was hired to find the mal-shi

Mr WILSON

And 101 ways to wash the dishes

I look at Marcel, at the wavy grid of paler wrinkles on his sunburnt face, and I don’t think he is the killer. Someone who loves the jacaranda season when Brisbane looks like a child’s drawing with all the shades of mauve, lavender-blue and purple can’t be a killer.

What if I am wrong and he is the killer under the cover of darkness when the jacaranda fragrance reaches us from the street and falling flowers weave into a carpet, when ‘Purple Rain’, Paul’s favourite song, trails from inside his flood-prone house and I am staring at the heavy brown waters of the Brisbane River lapping at the wasted fence, the last standing thing between us and the approaching weather? The muddy waters carry litter and organic debris; a bouillon where life was once conceived, and where there is life, there is death.

It’s not for Marcel or Paul that I am here, but for David. Employing my usual tactics – sticking around, stalking, looking for a kill.

Yet I am not the killer.

A loner she-wolf perhaps, which at the full moon goes out into the darkless night and howls at the celestial rock as her darkful desires gush out, spreading restlessness and fear in this small patio by the Brisbane River, where the four of us, and to say nothing of the dog, Mr Wilson, hang out engaged in non-engaging conversations sipping booze and vomiting words drunk like sailors.

Marcel is a teacher. Paul – an artist carpenter. I am a nurse, raised by an unhappy mother, who taught me that a married woman lives the life of a bonsai tree squashed in her husband’s pot. The unidentified human object across from me is David. All four of us strip down to our souls, basking in the moon on this little, chronically flooded playground of emotions that don’t fit into emoticons. Mr Wilson, Paul’s massive Newfoundland, holds an essential part in it. Dogs also have souls, otherwise why would they always have sad eyes?

Facebook friends for years, we are blending into each other’s company, sharing our lives, knowing everything there is to be known.

There are no secrets between us. We all miss Nina. Each one in our own way as we talk life.

We’ve heard that Marcel has had enough of teaching geography because, as he says these days, you don’t study geography, you do geography; you do countries, like twenty, forty, sixty countries during your backpacking youth and even more during the long and comfortable years of retirement. You read Lonely Planet and next you buy your souvenirs around the markets of the world – carved crocodiles from Papua New Guinea’s crocodile people; dolls with red-painted cheeks and starched polka dresses from a Ukrainian babushka; milky-grey jade pieces from Hong Kong (to get on the harbour ferry, you have to use elbows and employ your meagre knowledge of martial arts – Bruce Lee laughing at you from his statue); an intricate ebony composition of an African elephant family with the grandmother leading the way (a working matriarch society); a set of agate bracelets to remind you of the love heritage and opulence of the Taj Mahal; a miniature kimono and a calligraphically presented haiku from ancient Nara; a boulder opal from a long closed mine in Eulo in the Aussie Outback where you drink date wine and take a dip into the scorching hot bore under the stars… You keep the loot in a corner of a house or in your head, where you are careful not to let any layer of dust rest or cobweb hang, weaving tiny sticky bonds between all these strange items, these foreign objects. And it’s perhaps love that weaves all the geographic places into one big mothball called earth, little universes with which you create your personal geography outside the big five animals or the big five cities of Rome, Paris, London, New York, and the fifth, so subjective, Brisbane.

That’s what I think while listening to Marcel, who carries on complaining about how unrewarding it is to be a geography teacher.

“Come on, Marcel, there are worse things, you know…” I hate wingers, that’s why I didn’t last long with Jordan from the Hairy Dog Café. He was the winging type, wasn’t he, with all that jazz about too many coffee shops popping up like mushrooms in West End stealing his dogless clients?

“Carol, honestly, it’s shit teaching about France and Paris.” Marcel, like a proper teacher, hates interruptions and is about to make a full display of his annoyance but his phone gives out a squeal.

We dart disapproving glances at him, an unwritten rule of our gatherings is to switch off our phones.

Marcel shrugs his shoulders, takes a quick but sharp look at the screen, and says to no one in particular, “It’s not Nina!” He switches the phone off then continues, “When I teach Paris, the students turn up with their Mona Lisa and Eiffel Tower t-shirts. One boy was even wearing a Moulin Rouge cancan-line bare-bottoms t-shirt stolen from his old man. So I stand there and teach about Paris and the little brats correct me like, No, Mr Teacher, the most beautiful bridge over the Seine River is not the Alexander Bridge but the love-lock one. I’ve crossed that bridge. It’s now collapsing under the weight of thousands of padlocks that would sit better somewhere in a farm shed than in front of the Louvre. Most of them little sarcophagi with lovers’ names engraved that are no longer pronounced in the same breath. The French are starting to sell them, they had enough.”

“Why are you so against love symbols?” asks Paul, his voice spiked with pretended innocence.

We all know the answer and Marcel doesn’t surprise us when he says, “I thought Nina and I would be together forever, you know, growing old and all that where-is-my-hearing-aid stuff, and what happened? We didn’t last twelve years – the average span of marriages in Australia. We lasted ten; ten years, two months and seven days.”

When he talks, Marcel’s double chin wobbles and he vigorously rubs his calf against the shin of his other leg. He has a case of worsening psoriasis, but all this scratching makes me nervous so I try not to sit too close to him.

I like his ring, though. It’s chunky, solid silver and has an Inca god’s head on it. Tonight Marcel wears a grey shirt that has endured a lot of abrasive washing; it has two buttons missing and hangs over slacks that could have been the illegitimate offspring of a café latte and a hyena.

For a moment we remain silent; the storm is advancing from the Gold Coast Hinterland. Reports say it’s been already west of Sydney and caused a lot of damage on the way up. The air is thickening with humidity. The storm might bring a torrential rain and Paul is nervous. He looks up at the sky, making his own wishful forecast. At his feet, his slobbery Newfoundland is even more nervous. Mr Wilson doesn’t like thunder and he can smell it coming from far away.

With one hand, Paul holds his beer, and with the other, he pats Mr Wilson, who tries to turn Paul’s metal chair into a kennel. The dog pushes without dignity and tries to squeeze his enormous black, woolly body between the four skeleton legs, putting Paul out of balance and tipping his beer.

I wonder at the sanity behind keeping such a breed in the heat of, they say subtropical, I say, tropical, Brisbane; a dog that would rather romp in the snow. But people are what they are and a good example is that mahogany half-finished kennel behind me decorated with big ebony letters reading BUDDY. Paul says the client is a rich gold coins dealer by the name of Frank but I don’t believe Paul about everything. He likes his fantases.

I cast a lasso=look at David, who sits across from me. He is the only one outside the awning, leaning back against the cracked chimney of a masonry barbeque, plucking at the overstretched strings of a poorly tuned guitar, a cup of black coffee next to him. In an artistic outburst, he sings, addressing the words to Mr Wilson:

I was born crazy

I was born mad

And for Maddy I sang …

We laugh out loud. Paul’s dog is known to make friends with the robbers in the area and chase only the local street cats. A tortoiseshell cat called Maddy, being his all-time worst enemy, makes him especially jumpy. The lyrics make sense, although nothing about David does.

David is from Norfolk Island, a descendant of Tahitians and HMS Bounty mutineers. He has grown up on remnants of penalty settlements, and when he has a job – a rare occasion – he never works more than three months at one place. It’s time enough for his work mates to put up with his unnerving spirit for independence and couldn’t-be-bothered attitude. I’ve seen him once working as a checker-out at Coles, a queue of fretting women toppling over him, leaving all other check-outs empty bar a few fuming men. Women of all ages and social status who, like me, find him irresistible. I wonder what it is like to be so attractive that women act silly in his presence; it’s scary the power he has and, to my knowledge, hardly uses. I compare him to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, with his feral magnetism, part of a raw nature that overwhelms me, nearly hurling me into the river so I can keep company with fish and other creatures …

When I don’t watch David, I watch the Brisbane River flow by, dark and hypnotic, as I sip on cheap Marsala. It’s been over a year since the properties here were last flooded. Paul’s house, a four-room, ground-floor fast-architecture cumbersome thing, which looks like a turtle with all the solar panels covering the roof like shell tiles, is now relatively dry and partially renovated. But he can’t rip off and renovate the smell of lingering rot and mildew. Even the fragrance of the jacaranda trees can’t do much to obliterate it. It’s the mangroves rot that prevails and in which, they say, life began.

I might be eyeing David and watching the river, but I continue to listen to the voice that rumbles and doesn’t necessarily agree with my ears. I have no choice but to follow the story of Marcel, whose appearance brings to mind a magnetic termite mound topped with a crystal skull. He is as bald as a bandicoot.

“… welling up!” Marcel has enough ranting about his teacher’s grievance and is taking us now to a special moment of his life, which we know very well, but it’s the therapeutic moment that counts. We let him talk and don’t interrupt. “The soup in that enormous tin pot was driven by geothermal forces whirling potatoes, aromatic herbs, llama meat cuts, jaws with the teeth still there. It was welling up and boiling away at the side of a rocking makeshift table that was a butcher block, next to it a buckled draining board where stacks of bowls were tossed after a dip into a basin of lukewarm water with a greasy film on its surface.” Marcel stops, drinks from his personal bottle of sparkling, chokes on the fading bubbles, then his booming voice takes to new heights. “After this ‘baptising’, some of the dirty water remained in the bowls. That didn’t go down well with the people queuing for a meal. Those who weren’t squeamish helped themselves to a bowl, tipped out the water and received a generous amount of the soup, a ladle and a half with vegetable chunks and blobs of fat. The locals gorged on it, smacking their lips when coming across an aji chilli. Tourists travelling on a shoe string watched apprehensively, unsure whether boiling the soup could kill the bugs breeding in the washing water. Nina was there, hungry and exhausted after fighting the Machu Picchu famous altitude sickness, soroche.”

Marcel, who has recently turned forty, loves his memories from his volunteer teaching in Peru, the time he had met the young backpacker, Nina, and they hit it off.

He shifts his big frame and the plastic chair under him squeaks before he says, “I made her try the soup. We shared the same bowl and it was like exchanging vows.”

“Lucky Marcel!” Paul’s voice pops like an expiring bulb amid the nearing thunders. “Such a … romantic story! Did you chew the jaws? Bone broth is said to be healthy.”

He pulls all his sarcasm behind the statement and takes a long draught from his beer making it look like part of this sarcasm.

We know the rest of the romantic story.

Paul had eyes only for Nina. More precisely only for her rear-end that, honestly, to me it looked as if she had long forgotten to change out of her babyhood nappies. Anyway, she dumped Marcel and came to live with Paul before, as the rumour goes, she set off to a secret destination. Hence the rivalry between these two men.

While Marcel never wears shorts, Paul on the other hand walks around half naked, proud of his beefy silhouette of an ex-rugby player.

“That’s nothing compared to what happened to me,” declares Paul, preparing us for his own story by wiping the beer froth from his heavy lips with the back of his hand, which otherwise lies on Mr Wilson’s head. Mr Wilson stirs but immediately quietens down, hoping to remain invisible so the thunders miss him and go back to where they belong; that is, with Maddy and the rest of the street cats.

Since we are in Paul’s yard, drinking whatever he and the nearby restaurant provide for months of gratitude for helping them get rid of the stinking mud every time the river bursts her banks, we now diligently listen to his story and gawk at the Story Bridge lighting up in purple and white as it saddles the quivering waters between us and Kangaroo Point. I hope it’s not another fantasy story like the one about blood diamonds and Interpol chasing Paul, who, according to him of course, had crossed some dangerous gun-friendly crooks.

When I analyse Paul against his shady background, I think he actually might be the killer. But then it’s too trivial – the big physical guy touring the wrong side of the law, to be singled out as a suspect. Paul has ambitions in life. He wouldn’t settle to be a new Geppetto carving out Pinocchio puppets, although I would be afraid to cross paths with him.

In his late forties, Paul’s massiveness comes in a threatening, burly way. His shoulders are made for a girl to rest her head on and cry her eyes out if she still has something worrying her with such a solid rock of a man around. As a carpenter working with exotic timber, he is a prospectively good earner, that is, if one day every household would want to have a coffee table made of ebony. For the time being, what he has to show as a professional achievement is his skin mottled with sawdust and freckles. An aspiring rugby player in his youth, he never made it into the Brisbane Broncos, but from all the stuff he has lost in floods, he only mourns his memorabilia of jerseys signed by the NRL legend Darren Lockyer and photos with the great Mal Meninga and Michael De Vere on the day he went for a quick-fix staple-gun treatment on a cut over his eye during an Origin game.

“I was travelling … through Africa,” unaware of my thoughts, Paul begins a story from his short-lived but fabulous time in search of rare timber for hand-carved coffee tables targeting potential Parker-Rinehart-kind of buyers. Think of African blackwood, Amazon rosewood, Brazilian ebony and bloodwood just to name some. One too many head-on tackles on the rugby field, however, must have led to what is a repetitive delay in the construction of his sentences. “Somewhere in Mozambique, I stopped at a restaurant known for its fresh seafood. The owner of the place, a man called … Albano recommended giant tiger prawns, grey-and-black-striped, fat like swaddled babies. It was on Tofo Beach, the thatched-roof bungalows were up to their knees in water that looked like melted turquoise brimming with lobsters. I ordered a cocktail of tiger prawns and what I like best from a peri-peri chicken, the burnt char-grilled wings still succulent and smudged in … lemon so sweet it can only be created by the sun pouring down its own juices into the fruit. There were no other people with one exception. At a table not far away from me, there was a … woman obviously travelling alone, and at that moment at that remote corner of the world we could have clicked because we were both young and, ah well, willing.”

Paul gives out a wheezing chuckle, what with the sawdust and furry mould he has to breathe. Then he asks if any of us has run out of booze. Only he has. We wait for him to fetch another bottle of beer from the kitchen, a time during which Mr Wilson feels abandoned, panics at some loud claps from the sky and tilts Paul’s chair. Marcel straightens it as, influenced by Paul’s recount of events, I have a flashback of my brief African experience when I volunteered to join Médecins Sans Frontières.

On his return, Paul makes some updated weather remarks, hugs and pats Mr Wilson and for a moment they look like two friendly burlies on the field celebrating a try. Their friendship goes so far that Paul actually has a tattoo of Mr Wilson’s head on his upper arm amid axe-like intricate patterns in dark green-grey ink. I don’t know what Mr Wilson thinks of his portrait on his master’s arm, but I find it to be a masterpiece, kind of a canine Gioconda. I also find this to be the sexiest part of Paul’s body, but I keep that to myself.

When man and dog settle down, Paul continues. “I could read in the woman’s eyes she was getting … curious. Her eyes were the colour of premium serpentwood. The hypotenuse of her nose was perfect and made her look classy. The silhouette of her slim back when she … seductively got up and helped herself to a ripe banana from a bunch hanging over our heads brought a … thrill in me. The fact that the restaurant had rooms in the back was fuelling my imagination.”

The winds are moving the storm system our way much faster, but I see that it’s a big job with the clouds heavy and reluctant; clouds that are waiting to burst like water bags.

Now and then, the winds bring a whiff of dead rats and Paul is concerned that many of them chose to drown in proximity of his house. I don’t want to scare the shit out of him telling that Brisbane had its own brush with bubonic plague a century ago and Gibson island in the Brisbane river was turned into a cemetery for the victims of Black Death. Paul is anxious enough, he doesn’t want to sleep in his workshop somewhere in Bowen Hills, where his valuable timber is stored. His dream is to make enough money to buy property that doesn’t inundate and sink like a dinghy jumped by a crocodile, but first he has to sell this one and there are not many buyers; the same goes for his exquisite furniture pieces.

After a long and thirsty gulp, Paul shakes his bottle to make sure there’s nothing left and frightens the already jumpy Mr Wilson, who growls his complaint. The sky responds with thunder followed by Mr Wilson’s terrified whimper; the air is charged with electricity. With a slap to his impressive tree trunk of a thigh, Paul swats a mosquito.

Marcel, who sucks on champagne like it’s a soft drink, murmurs something about life being sacred, regardless of its form, and as he does the soft folders of flesh beneath his chin wobble, a scene I am sparing myself by quickly turning my head in the direction of David, losing my gaze in his glossy, inky hair.

“Don’t ask me about … Samantha,” Paul says to no one in particular, mentioning the name of his ex-wife for the first time. “That was different; a fleeting moment, an opportunity, something that would have never stretched into our public domain or relationships.” A small pause and he goes back to his African adventure. “The owner of the place, Albano, who seemed to have a sixth sense for that sort of thing, was hovering over us, his only clients, as if weaving an … invisible web for us to fall into. I didn’t know whether he was paving his way to extract more of my money or he had an old romantic soul that could never turn into parchment under the scorching African sun and the steady salt cure of the ocean. He was serving the meals on banana-leaf cuts, and after the woman had finished her … lobster he took away her plate and unbelted a sooty cloth to wipe it. With a gesture worthy of a maître d’hôtel, he placed the same plate before me. I looked at it hesitantly, but then I met the eyes of the … woman, and there was amusement in them. I smiled. She also smiled and our smiles locked, as did our eyes, and I went ahead with scooping peri-peri chicken wings, placing them on the … green banana-leaf plate still preserving the aromas of the woman’s meal.”

Like a real master of suspense, Paul pauses. When he talks, I find his voice gritty and distasteful, full of megalomania and aggressive chauvinism. It’s a voice that throws a lasso around the listener’s neck and never lets it go. His delayed words pepper us with ricochet bullets and we fall dead under the brutal force behind that voice. I know why Nina fell under his spell. I also know why Samantha ran for her life away from him taking their only daughter with her. Anyway, I am glad he mentioned Samantha. If Samantha was here she would have told her dish story. While sailing along the Volga river on a small tourist boat she noticed that the plates they used were washed by dropping them into a crab basket pulled by the boat.

Across from me, Marcel shifts uncomfortably, the protesting chair under him scrapes the concrete and complains loudly. We remain silent, waiting for Paul to continue, which he eventually does after opening another XXXX beer bottle and downing a good part of it. “When I reached for the last charred peri-peri wing and dug my teeth into it, the salty scent of the woman’s lobster hit my nose, my senses … my maleness, as if it was an irresistible erotic ingredient, an enigmatic touch across the distance between our two tables. Next thing I know the … woman was gone, vanished into thin air while I was watching Albano bring the plateau of succulent prawns with a piece of rusty mesh for a lid to protect them from the fat … African flies.”

“You didn’t tell Samantha about it?!” My voice is spraying anger. Fat African flies in our makeshift hospital in the middle of nowhere meant mortal infections brewing in briskly patched gun wounds, gushing knife cuts and bleeding raped mothers and children caught in brutal tribal wars.

“No way,” Paul answers. “But she learned, my Samantha, to cook juicy …peri-peri chicken.” His chuckle collapses into an uncomfortable smile, the same smile that accompanies his long fantasy stories about how he is making big money with his custom-made furniture for the wealthy and the social ambitious like his favourite radio guru Kyle Sandilands.

Then it starts. Lightning strikes, tasering the fat, reluctant clouds, and sharp unnerving thunderbolts follow. It smells of electrocuted memories and the jacaranda flowers call off their fragrance from the premises of Paul’s house. The first big and random rain drops fall on the awning. Mr Wilson has somehow fitted half of his shivering body under Paul’s chair, his head on his master’s shoes-turned-slippers.

His intimidation from the booming elements all forgotten with the appearance of the three hounds. A neighbour’s boyfriend swerves behind the corner and dashes into the street in a-beer-too-much mode, the hounds already baring their teeth, barking madly, trying to break their chained leads and jump out of the car tray to confront Mr Wilson who has sprung forward out of his hiding place and given the best blood-coagulating growl of his life.

Much Ado about Nothing. We’ve seen this before. Alex, the neighbour’s boyfriend, waves through the window. He is a builder and occasionally helps Paul with the house. The car with the enraged hounds passes by; Mr Wilson gives another long and low growl, then hurries back under Paul’s chair.

I expect David to move in with us under the awning and grab a seat close to mine, but he is still out there ignoring the elements. Our eyes swipe over each other’s briefly and the feeling is like striking a match. My body temperature rises, my blood wheezing behind my temples. David passes the guitar over to Marcel along with a beedi butt.

Through half-closed eyes I continue looking at him aware of my customized obsessive fixation disorder, which defines me a stalker. The hypotenuse of his nose is uneven due to a glassing attack, a reminder of a night he had spent with expats in a Phuket nightclub. It’s not the storm that accelerates my heart and I avert my eyes to the purple lights garlanding the Story Bridge. Worth more than its weight in gold, once purple dye was the most expensive colour in the world – the colour of the Roman emperor – and for the dye of one toga, ten thousand mollusc shells were crushed. Then I look back at the unidentified object of my dreams only to realise what I already knew. I am never to decode David’s face language.

It’s his turn to tell a story, but he is not in a hurry. Ropes support his baggy pants, braided leather cords and beads coil around his neck and both his wrists, he lights another thin Indian cigarette. His black hair is long. He looks like a young Johnny Depp from his musician’s days. I hope he’ll take up that casual job at the health-food shop next to the ambulance centre where I work answering distress calls, fighting to keep people alive until help comes. Overall, David is what I find at the Woodford Festival and somehow that’s what makes my vagina come to life, sending vibrations throughout my body, blinding my mind. It’s always been like this – other people fall in love.

I fall in sex.

“… travelling through the southern part of India, changing buses,” David’s voice is somewhat flat and non-intrusive, like the corridor of a psychiatric ward that can take one anywhere between Freud and a straitjacket. There is a chance we don’t hear much of his words drowned by thunder, rain and a nervous dog’s whimpers. I prick up my ears. “Many times I’ve been at the brink of losing my one-bag possessions or my life. I had gone down with nasty bugs and fought robbers, but nothing could deter me from crossing from country to country in search of that person bearing my name, waiting for me somewhere. It would have been a meeting of paramount importance. I knew at my birth it wasn’t me they had given to my mother, but a mere shadow of my true essence.”

I look at the river, her levels increasing, moving towards us, and as we sit like a living shield, I think we should be grateful that Brisbane is not Amsterdam or New Orleans. The Brisbane River is not the Mississippi, but right now David’s voice moves, panting like a paddle steamer full of noises from the wheel blades cutting water, scooping it, turning it into power and I shift my eyes back onto David. If Paul’s tattoos are contrasted dark and white as if taken from a Charlie Chaplin movie, David’s tattoos rival the colours of exotic birds of paradise. I imagine touching them with my sliding lips and something inside me wells up, geothermal forces whirling sensual emotions that threaten to burst the banks of my body and flood Paul’s yard, his sorry house, his dilapidated shed behind the barbeque put together with odd pieces of corrugated iron.

It’s this hour of the evening when families go to bed, but up the river in Fortitude Valley, life is mostly a promising action laced with booze, drugs, toilet sex and cowardly punches. The moon itself is like a drunken hobo swaying in and out between the heavy clouds and Paul’s house looks more than ever like someone in need of a hug.

When the rain starts to look as if the Wivenhoe dam has its water released, David finally moves under the awning and sits next to me on an upside-down wooden barrel. With his long, wet hair hanging like a beagle’s ears, he does look like a killer, an enigmatic modern-day killer with a whole range of psychological layers to be unravelled.

The closeness of David stirs the cougar in me. What is that special thing about the age gap? That ten years more of life luggage that I carry around give me the kick, the thrill, that it’s not the usual. He has this elusiveness of manners and a touch of a feminine indecisiveness in him that I find irresistible. He is made of a passive aggressiveness, a subtle barbarianism. I have been married once, a rushed affair that lasted a year until it was clear that I wasn’t pregnant, what we had thought at the time. We were fresh out of school and both greedy to gather experience. We parted and I studied to become a nurse. In that field, I get all the experience I ever wanted because everything I do or witness is the odds life has over death.

Nina was also very young when she married Marcel but remained inexperienced and became an easy prey of Paul’s manipulative nature. At the time, just a year ago, Samantha left Paul to live in Tooloomba to look after the Alzheimer’s patient her mother was slipping into. Sometimes Samantha rang me for professional help, but what help could I give for a person who is turning into a shell of herself? Besides, I think Samantha’s calls had more to do with catching up with what was going on in our little flood-salvage community. Lately she started asking why Nina had suddenly disappeared without a trace.

“I checked,” Samantha’s voice was nervous. “She has no feeds in her internet accounts.”

“I don’t know,” I tried to calm her, although her nervousness was catching up with me. “Things here became pretty ugly with Marcel and Paul in each other’s hair. Nina always talked about relatives in Canada. And you know Canada, at least Marcel knows Canada, it’s a country even less populated than Australia with big chunks dominated only by grizzly bears that eat wild salmon, berries … probably humans.”

Samantha thought about this, then decided that grizzly bears were more dangerous than dingoes.

Half turned to David, I try to read his Johnny Depp–ish face; the way some people radiate warmth he radiates dark secrets and elusiveness. I wait for him to continue his story about India, but Paul gets up and interrupts the setting. I expect him to put on ‘Purple Rain’ again, but he goes to the toilet and doesn’t bother to close the door. We all hear the jet-like sound of his leak subdued by the noise the sky produces. He comes back with a new supply of drinks, cheap, going-off champagne for Marcel, more Marsala for me, beer for him. By the way, it’s lucky the restaurant is still standing and didn’t float away along the Brisbane River like the Oxley one that disengaged from its structure and took off sailing like a raft, leaving us saddened, grieving for the only place where we could have a free meal on our birthdays, sometimes more often if we borrowed a friend’s driver’s licence. On his second cruise back to the house, Paul brings leftover beef stew for Mr Wilson, the latter’s favourite treat. In the grip of primal fear, however, Mr Wilson is unsure whether to gobble the meal or to lie low and pretend he doesn’t exist.

Along the river the CityCat boats commute people hurrying to find shelter, clutching umbrellas. Usually downgraded cyclones come from North, it’s different now. A water-police speedboat zooms by; a TV channel helicopter is hovering low. The city is at the mercy of the unpredictable weather fronts and huddles in the asthma-friendly humidity.

David is not interested in cities. He takes his geography to another level. He travels where life is raw, simple and dangerous. He writes for an online magazine for readers fed up with the so-called civilised life, people who get a kick out of chasing tornadoes, running in front of angry bulls in Pamplona, swimming with the sharks without cages; those who fly in the eye of a cyclone, burn tyres in Formula One, snowboard among white-capped mountain peaks, and stray from their natural habitats to glide and parachute jump.

There is a sudden stillness to the night, then a crushing thunder that makes me spill the Marsala. Mr Wilson rattles Paul’s chair in distress. The wind flaps at the awning so hard that it can turn it into a sail at any moment. Mr Wilson keeps a frightened eye on it as I think of the young private detective who approached me a month ago. Samantha, of all people Samantha, had contacted him over the disappearance of her rival, Nina. Something more, she had hired this private detective. Was it because they used to be friends with Nina and Samantha still upholds the sisterhood, or is she afraid that the police could suspect her in the light of their little suburban family drama? All I see is that Samantha and Nina were first friends and then rivals. So I promised the nice blue-eyed detective that if I notice something suspicious about the two men involved in Nina’s latest romantic throb, I would let him know. Or if Nina, let’s say, sends a postcard from Canada, I would also let him know. He didn’t press, but like they do in the movies, asked me to call him if I find or remember something unusual. Whatever that means.

“Ok, Michael Ferrante,” I said reading the name on the card he slipped into my hand. Missing persons, missing pets, stolen valuables… The guy must be busy. To confirm this he made me know that he had just be hired to find a stolen dog.

Meanwhile, David, in a high mood with the elements thrashing around us, resumes his story. “Sometimes I lived with families that welcomed me in their homes and their lives and listened to my story of a man looking for his true self. People shook their heads but showered me with compassion. I love Indian food, it’s spicy, hot, invigorating; it sharpens the mind. One night, I was sharing a meal with a family and as each of them finished their meals, they dropped the metal plate under the table and retrieved it, polished from the leavings. I leaned over to have a look. Under the table, three of the pariah street dogs were waiting for the next plate. The host nudged me; his wife was holding a plate of food for me, the spices incinerating my olfactory nerve, my brain. I wolfed the dish down, leaving what I thought was a fair tip for the dishwashers.”

As David talks, I turn into a cannibalistic, black hole devouring his words, devouring him with each of my senses. More than ever, he looks like an untamable deity and the electricity in the air is not only from the storm. Mr Wilson feels it and stirs, which makes Paul spill some of his beer.

“Good boy. Good boy,” Paul calms the dog. “Unfortunately, no tips for you, Mr Wilson!”

Then they all look at me, the three men and the dog. The men know my story but insist I tell it again. “Come on, Carol girl! Come on, doctor!”

“Well.” My voice is loaded and on the raspy side. “I was in England studying nursing and had that Swiss boyfriend. Every evening after dinner, I piled the plates to carry them to the sink, and every time with the regularity of a cuckoo clock he would roll his eyes and say, ‘Now the plates are dirty on both sides!’”

I am good at imitating; the accent, the pedantic self-prodding orderliness. Paul, Mars and David laugh, big Mr Wilson clanks his collar tag against the metal legs and pushes even deeper under Paul’s chair.

The sky keeps pouring buckets of water, turning our words into the muddy dough with which we tell our stories and the stories behind our stories. I think we are heading for another flood. The bulk of the storm eventually moves north leaving behind only the occasional drift of drowned rats. It’s a relief and now that the inundation worries are easing, Paul breaks down and says he believes that every beer gets him closer to the day when Nina will come back to him if … she only knew how much we all miss her. Then he gets up again, walks into the house and puts Andrea Bocelli on, and I am surprised to see that this big man has a soul that would go for the tender voice of the blind singer, but then I remember: Nina liked Bocelli, she was mad about Bocelli, and went to see him whenever he visited Australia. Something more, she followed his concerts in the capital cities and went to all of them. She got an autograph on some of his CDs and for days talked nothing but Bocelli, leaving me to wonder as to how it was that she came to fall under the macho charisma of Paul. But the question should not exist because Nina, as I realised too late, was smart enough to pretend that she was leaving Marcel over Paul to have all the protection Paul commanded while actually, she had her eyes on David. Yes, listening to Andrea Bocelli with David in bed was on her menu, but now she has a better bed to enjoy.

Besides David is into Drake.

Behind the flimsy fence of Paul’s property down to the river bank, there are tons of sand bags to prevent a new water surge and severe flooding. In one of these bags is Nina and, in a way, I can say that these days she does her share in preventing a flood. I can’t say it aloud, they would not understand anyway, that it didn’t take me much to dope her one night when she was alone in Paul’s yard pacing nervously, waiting for David to return from somewhere distant where he had been on familiar terms with the locals, somewhere like Ghana or Cameroon, Tibet or Bolivia, or rural Cambodia, speaking to people remembering the harrowing years of Khmer Rouge. She was beautiful, this Nina, with two dream catchers for earrings, the tiny feathers touching her bare shoulders floating in her hair, ‘diapers’ and all... As asexual as David looks, I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t able to make him her lover. Quite conveniently, that night she asked me for the flu jab: small favours between friends.

Remembering what my mother said, that the moment she married my father she started the life of a bonsai human being, a beautiful fruit tree growing in a pot of steel, I decided I was never going to restrict or inhibit myself; I would live a life I choose even if that means that I have to kill over it. That’s why I am not a killer but a follower of my own beliefs.

Samantha and Nina were friends first, then rivals.

Nina and I were rivals first, then friends. But I can’t explain this to the blue-eyed detective because it’s something very wise to the sisterhood.

The garlands of city lights are not sufficient to mimic a day. During the day, I darken my room and go to sleep after a night shift, but the blood that I had tried to stop gushing out of the mutilated human bodies I attended to in Africa is like a river that floods my brain with nightmares, and the screams I hear in these nightmares are worse because we had nothing to dope the sufferers with.

A dull vibration tells me I’ve got a text message; I hope no one pays attention. It’s from the blue-eyed detective and it’s about the missing dog he is searching for; there’s also a reward mentioned. I am about to click off when I look back at the picture only to recognize in it my ex-lover Jordan’s pet, that cuddly mal-shi so fluffy and white to justify her name Frothy. Me and Jordan, it didn’t work but I still have a soft spot for Frothy. Poor Jordan, as they say disasters don’t come alone: first that beheaded woman not Frothy, the apple of his eye, missing!

I alert Paul. a regular at the café, and for a moment he forgets his flood worries.

“That will kill Jordan! We have to join the search party, mate,” he tells Mr Wilson and sticks my phone under his chair so the newfoundland could have a look too. “Your sweetheart got missing!”

Mr Wilson licks the screen and growls, there’s no shortage of drama. I am quick to retrieve the phone and wipe off the slobber.

“This can’t happen to you, mate!” Paul continues and I feel he is angry about what happened to little Frothy and happy, at the same time, seeing an opportunity to go out there and fight for a cause. “We’ll take care of it, won’t we, Mr Wilson?” he finishes menacingly.

The awning is solid and has protected us well; the wind no longer throws buckets of water into our faces. It’s nice and fresh and challenging, so we keep sitting outside, instead of making a beeline into Paul’s house, where inevitably he’d put on the TV with some footy or the Monster Jam, and there wouldn’t be any more communication because we would officially switch on our phones, too and start checking on missed messages, on our missed life.

And that’s exactly what we do right now starting with the weather emergency site over different reasons.

Soon, we are back to our conversations and it’s not that we always talk about dirty dishes. Occasionally we talk about dirty secrets, too, and we know that also occasionally Marcel visits the notorious dominatrix Marian, whose credo is that a good flogging goes a long way when it comes to mental health. We know that Paul once smuggled a blood diamond in order to sponsor his artistic carpenter’s pursuits. He found a rich client for it but had to sell it short because of the same blue-eyed detective asking uncomfortable questions. We know that David went on a marauder spree for cash during one of the floods and that in London the training nurse sensing my dread of blood took me on an abattoirs tour. All these are hush-hush things friendships are made of and not one of us would even think to take them outside Paul’s mouldy, damp and lively-with-tadpoles patio. I might even confess about Nina; another skeleton around here. Watching the swelling waters invading the estuary, I toy with the idea that old Noah with his ark is on the way to save us because after all, we are not that bad; just humans. Paul’s Newfoundland comes with us. Mr Wilson shares a life with us and it makes him human-infected.

Mr Wilson was the only witness that night; the only accomplice and a keeper of my secret.

I had to explain to him that Nina was a pain in the neck, like those sneaky neighbourhood cats. That she was bringing storms, lightning strikes and deafening thunders, so Mr Wilson looked genuinely happy as I stuffed her into the emptied sand bag, hoping that I would be doing the same to his nemesis, the tortoiseshell Maddy.

I promised him and one day I will deliver.

I look at my three men, huddled under the flapping awning, and I feel like a proud and very important mother hen protecting her ruffled and shivering chickens. Each in need of a bird-flu jab.

My eyes swipe along the river, that threatening knotted vein ready to burst and bleed out the life of the city, and I smile. The coffee cup on the barbeque is full of water. I reach for it, my lips claiming the rim where David’s lips have kissed the cup, and I drink the rain.

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

4. The day when a ransom was asked for mal-shi Frothy

MONTEZUMA II

And the dog shepherd

Harry thought it was the fulfilment of a dream to have an Oktoberfest-maid lookalike in bed.

“You know them, Gemma,” he said. “The ones in a dirndl dress with a décolleté that plunges way south, carrying impressive pitchers of beer.”

Then he added something about my profession being so feminine. “Beautician is one of the few jobs that haven’t been invaded by men the way sperm donor is one of the few jobs not invaded by women.”

In our made-in-heaven marriage, the second one for me, the only setbacks are Sundays.

Every Sunday, my only day off, I visit the Hairy Dog Café for a good soak in their famous lemon grass tea and Montezuma II accompanies me. Harry can’t come. Harry works on projects on Sundays for extra money, but Montezuma II doesn’t need to make money. He is with me so I am not alone. If we go and sit in the garden patio full of dogs, I can feel the looks full of pity or outright ridicule, but I don’t care. Montezuma II is what he is, a palm size pottery dog that can sit on the table, not like the other dogs on chairs or at the feet of their owners. The only one who shows interest in Montezuma II is a hairball of a mal-shi – Frothy, the legendary talisman of the coffee shop. She leaves her cosy place on a high chair behind the counter and trots to us, sniffs at my feet and lifts her head to me. I lift her and put her on my lap so she can sniff on Montezuma II too – all this under the watchful eyes of her master Jordan who appears to be jealous and overprotective so I don’t keep Frothy on my lap for too long.

My second stop is The Avid Reader bookshop, which I like because they also have a patio and there I can have coffee without the fuss that coffee is homicidal for dogs so I should be careful that Montezuma II doesn’t lap on my coffee cup. The other reason I like that bookshop is that in their window you can never see any of those action-bull novels, just as you can’t see an ad in the window of my beauty salon spouting “advanced facials and peels, IPL hair removal and injectables”. Especially injectables! While at The Avid Reader, I tend to become philosophical and it’s then that I find meeting points between my profession of an “all-natural” beautician and that of a sperm donor.

Slow-acting, time-proven cosmetics made entirely with herbs, fruit, essential oils and ingredients like clay, organic yoghurt, biodynamic eggs and manuka honey, plus my rejuvenating hand work on the face, that’s what I am known for and women flock in to see me, even from Melbourne. Mostly, it’s when they are holidaying on the Gold Coast and come for a small escape to my boutique beauty shop in the nook of the Brisbane River at Kangaroo Point in a straight line from the Story Bridge.

On Monday the problem I am having with the facial steamer makes me mad. Mad means bouts of hot flushes and palm sweating, and I shouldn’t have sweaty hands when I sculpt a scalp, so to speak. I am ready to strangle Mike, the electrician, with my bare slippery-with-oils hands. I keep calling and texting him, getting the same answer that he’s stuck on the other side of the river sweating on a massage chair, whatever that means, and with the traffic building up over the Story Bridge, ah well, he’ll do his best. That doesn’t help much. I am a perfectionist and don’t like turning clients away. If anything, it makes me slow down on money and I hate slowing down on money. Money is by far the best rejuvenating mask for body and soul and a shortcut to a glowing complexion. I leave clients disappointed, women who have come for deep, cleansing procedures followed by my pomegranate, kiwi, mint-plus facials (I conjure the masks on the spur of the moment, often surprising myself). As if it’s not enough, the rain, the best moisturiser in the world, keeps pouring like a deluge. It’s the cyclone season, called further north the “silly season”, bringing an onset of mango madness. The worst part is that there is roadwork in progress on the street and my clients come in splashed in non-cosmetic mud, so I am busy with the mop, too.

It’s almost evening and I am toiling on my last client for the day, a Saturn-type heavy woman in her thirties, fighting postnatal bulging areas of flesh, the skin on her face still covered in pigmentation. She has developed a mild case of noise neuroses, so she lies quiet on the massage table with plugs in her ears, soaking in the rare moment of silence and tranquillity around her. She hopes for a quick fix and I can understand her with all these Internet trolls, haters and body shamers waiting for half a chance to send a girl’s ego spiralling down into depression.

I lift my eyes and look out the window. The rain hasn’t stopped. If anything it has gained strength, and now the slashing sound trails louder. Then I see him. The shepherd of the homeless dogs, that’s what I call him, because he is followed by a pack of scraggy representatives of the canine world. One by one, the dogs appear in the floor-to-ceiling window of my salon, entering from the left, hobbling along, soaked and flattened by the heavy rain, and slowly exiting to the right. For a moment, the window is a screen showing a scene of desperation and misery. I feel helpless and angry because I can’t help them with my healing hands. The old man looks more stooped than ever. Wearing a long, oversized coat with baggy pockets, a French hat with several badges and a red scarf around his neck, he still looks like the professor that he is. Was. Now homeless rummaging for food scraps in the rubbish bins, sharing other people’s leftovers with his faithful band of canine followers. Right in front of my eyes, there passes a small crew of poor, embittered creatures that constitute such a big part of the population of this world, where behind every great fortune there is a crime, if I can quote Balzac. I might be a beautician, but I know my trivia answers. I also know that James Joyce was happily married to a chambermaid, that of course is not a parallel, but somehow it always comes to mind when I look into Harry’s devotion to me. Harry with his genius, beautiful mind and my beauty-healing hands, we must be an odd pair.

Looking out of the window I know that the old man and his canine companions live under the bridge, which provides shelter from the rain, but not from the Brisbane River in weather like this. Sandwiched by water, that’s what they’ll soon be. Then I freeze. There is something unusual about the shepherd of the homeless dogs today. He is carrying something. Can it be a tiny drenched dog? I can’t see well but it reminds me of Frothy.

There’s so much sorrow out there behind my window that I turn my eyes away and rest them on the small pottery piece on the shelf where I keep my oil bottles. It is supposed to come from west Mexico, the province of Colima, a typical Colima dog with a wide-open mouth, sharp ears, curly tail, striations on the snout and the upper part of the fat body. It’s a fine reproduction given to me by my husband. We named the pottery dog Montezuma II. That II is important because it is the younger Montezuma who fell to Cortez, the Spanish conquistador, with whom they arguably shared a cup of hot chocolate and thus the world was introduced to that precious commodity, cocoa beans. I have an impulsive craving for sipping on a hot mocha. This is my last client, and I’ve already been working on her for an hour; she is relaxed and half asleep.

What I do for my clients is anoint them lavishly in oil – remember that Ayurveda practice where you lie down on plastic sheets and they pour oil on your hair and head, like tons of oil? I actually respect the hairline – a nice carrier like lavender, argan, olive or almond, with drops of rosemary, mandarin, rose or jojoba blended in. Almost robotically, I repeat the warning that they have to keep their eyes closed and mouths shut as I work on their faces, but they are free to talk if they feel like it while I do their bodies. The women shift under my hands, nine - ten a day, all different in size, turgor, smell, body appearance and texture, as I have the feeling of one common flesh, which I knead and roll out like plaits of bread dough until it becomes aromatic and rises plum and smoothly. Some come as hairy as spider monkeys, desperate to get rid of their fur for good, and I pluck them with the pedantry of a leather craftsman, doing Brazilians or killing the roots of coarse black hairs that protrude from the chin or the upper lip of some embarrassed, hormone-deficient female creature. Beauty is about enduring pain, deprivation, abstinence, self-abuse, haemorrhaging money and, last but not least, discipline, rigid masochistic discipline, although the present-day hysteria is far more about the so-called youthful look. The cosmetic technology is churning out all kinds of breakthroughs, but the downside is that none of them has a long-lasting effect. Once you start using them, they have you for life, unless you want to wake up with a face like Charlie Chaplin’s scruffy accordion. I often think that the craze to alter yourself mercilessly so you appear young and beautiful is fear of rejection in a society with an ageist culture. One that is mercilessly discriminative to the ageing and the ones lacking in sex appeal and prettiness. I am not complaining about this since that’s what brings me money and comfort in life. At least, I try to be honest with my clients, as much as I can without denting my pocket. They know after exhausting hours in the gym and dubious results with surgeons that they are going to have the best, the most harmless, the real thing with me. For those who can pay, it could be a champagne-and-caviar face treatment as they sip from a flute and snack on fish eggs bites.

All this in the name of reconnecting the body and soul through identical triggers of pleasure as I whisper rhythmically, inducing images of tropical islands, billionaires’ yachts and a passionate act of infidelity with that young irresistible member of the crew who saves her life during a tsunami. Romance, romance, romance. All of my clients openly or secretly crave romance bent over the laundry machine or the dishwasher, cooking something healthy or stuffing things into the microwave, sorting dirty socks and tripping in a room with scattered toys, fighting heavy monthly bleeds or jitters over wanted or unwanted pregnancy, filing overwhelming bills and shopping for grocery or credit cards or for that wedding photographer who could make them appear like Princess Di. Daughters, mums, grandmas, they all cling to happiness or the idea of happiness as proof that they exist. I am one of them. Happiness loves me, sticks to me like flies to honey. I was happily married, but when my husband died and with two children to raise I thought my personal life had come to an end. Then I met Harry, he married me, and he’s a textbook husband. He looks me in the eyes, he adores me, he puts up with my unflattering menopausal bouts. That’s why I am compassionate and do everything to give away a bit of my happiness to the women I work on. In this respect, I am not only a beautician and a healer, but flatter myself to be a sower of happiness.

I believe in facials. I love doing them. It’s the art moment in my work. I can turn an insignificant-looking face with dull, greyish, sagging skin, folding jowls and dead eyes into a taut, glowing, marble smoothness not unlike Michelangelo, and all this without injectables. The moon-like dough of the women’s faces rises under my favourite tricks. When I massage them, I am tender and rough at the same time.

My hands are strong, but soft and healing when I reach the skin around the eyes, those crow’s feet, those tiny wrinkles that always appear, no matter whether one is still young or not. The skin around the eyes is vulnerable, and everything seems to leave its impressions on it: laughter, sorrow, joy or whingeing, life in the open or in the sfumato of tobacco smoke, a husband who brings security and boredom or the kinky pleasure of rushing between two lovers. If there is a double chin, I have to be choppy, tough, my toughness is beneficial, women become as if hypnotised, exposing their necks as gracious as swans or as withered as tortoises.

I am here to cancel deterioration and unsightliness and morph them into vibrant health and energy; what youth and beauty are all about. I talk to the women, but not with this one right now on my massage table for obvious reasons. Babbling about ordinary things, I have my ways of predisposing them to let go of what’s eating them, what’s sabotaging their belief that they are beautiful. Self-esteem is ninety per cent of attractiveness, and I take care of the last ten per cent with my wonder hands, plus my carefully chosen oils and creams. After my massage session, the women feel different. I feed them with positive energy. When I see a woman for the first time, I get an immediate feeling about what she needs to be rearranged around the edges of her soul landscape, because the soul landscape is what makes the personality, and invites events in one’s life. This auspicious soul landscape could be just a thought of love, or the smell of an exotic perfume, a meaningless whisper that penetrates the pores and gives a boost to the capricious collagen layer of the skin that is hidden beneath the epidermis and the dermis. The collagen has to be awakened. I can do it with the help of a snappy invigorating remark, or with my favourite assistant Mozart and his Eine kleine Nachtmusik, or his Symphony No. 40. But nothing compares what sex can do for your looks, erasing years and wrinkles! As nothing compares to what an elevated spirit can do. I often wonder why those women’s magazines don’t splash a picture of a woman’s soul with perfect vital statistics on their cover, so there won’t be any soul-shaming. Perhaps it’s the same reason why men’s porn magazines don’t publish nude women’s souls with big front pockets so politicians can shirt-front them. It’s a thing we often discuss with my celebrity client Ms Cornelius, the journalist, who travels the world to write features on weirdo collectors. I am also a collector, sort of, but I’ll talk about that later. As for Ms Cornelius, thanks to me and my wonder hands she acquired the most perfect faultless skin and she sends me other clients.

Usually, women never stop chattering about home and family, flicking through the gallery on their phones to show endearing snaps of newlyweds or newborns, or they drone on about shopping and the latest deals online or in that outlet centre near Brisbane airport, we discuss the chances of finding love on the internet, fashion trends, diets, celebrities, work, and health issues, in that or another order. And, of course, we talk about money. And we talk about sex and that mind-blowing orgasm that awakens your collagen and sends it flying up in the sky. We talk about blow jobs, too and how it keeps your mouth muscles tight. The women turn the massage bed into a therapist’s couch and share their life, their past, their present, and their plans for the future. They all have an arsenal of tricks for achieving what they want, and believe me, they want it all. Sometimes, they dig into a painful drama from their childhood, speak about their sexuality problems and love adventures, or dream of their children’s futures. Then they run to the hairdresser next door, and then to the Thai manicurist, continuing to splash out money in an effort to have the wounds caused by stress, age or lack of love stitched up and, eventually, cured. And we, the professionals in the beauty industry and its special department called slow beauty, heal these wounds with our hands, conjuring miracles and magic for the sole reason that we want our customers to be satisfied and come back, because we also want money, although some of us, like me, look at our clients as at canvases, where we create our masterpieces.

The woman on the table doesn’t know that towards the end of the day I become indifferent, like a morgue worker, and handle bodies without caring whether they are alive or dead. I proceed automatically, and count: one whole body massage plus one pomegranate facial, two bills; plus one leg wax, three bills; plus two exfoliation procedures, five bills; plus three is eight bills, and so on, until I catch myself using my husband’s Fibonacci numbers to calculate the amount of so many facials, so many Brazilians, so many bikini lines, so many neck-and-shoulder massages, so many steam baths …

Oops! Sorry. The steamer is faulty, and by the way, the Fibonacci numbers are not my husband’s. He told me they were known in ancient India, in Europe the sequence was studied by a Leonardo da Pisa, the son of Bonacci, in Latin filius Bonacci, hence Fibonacci. Harry, my husband, who is a mathematician, works these days on a project based on the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio, both favoured by nature.

I find it interesting, the story he tells me.

This Leonardo da Pisa in the year 1202 considered the growth of an idealised rabbit population, assuming that in the zero month there is one pair of rabbits, in the first month this first pair begets another pair of rabbits, in the second month, both pairs of rabbits have another pair and the first pair dies, in the third month the second pair and the two new pairs of rabbits have a total of three new pairs and the second pair dies, and so on. It all comes down, as Harry explained to me, to the fact that each pair of rabbits has two pairs in its lifetime and then dies. I get dizzy imagining all those reproducing rabbits, but I like to please my man and listen attentively.

Here, I have to mention that I don’t take men as clients. Quite a few of them are metrosexual these days and wax their backs and chests and go for facials, but somehow I don’t find it comfortable working on men. As I already hinted with Harry’s Oktoberfest fantasies, my bust is impressive, to put it mildly, and most men end up staring at it as if waiting for me to unbutton my coat and offer them a meal. No, thanks. I stick to the traditional women customers; they come, lots of them.

I have to deal with men when it comes to maintenance. Like today with that little bastard Mike. I wonder whether I should make one final call to him when the woman I’m working on gets a calf muscle cramp and I have to use a sterile needle to jab and release it. I cover her in a warm cotton blanket, leaving her arms out. There’s still more work to be done.

It’s not soon enough when Harry will be taking me to Hervey Bay to celebrate our anniversary. That’s after the family gets together at home, where my sons will join us. Josh with his fiancée. And Ben. I sigh: Ben is my worry, he takes after his father whom I divorced long ago, hoping that the children were small and by never seeing him they would stay away of all those focus-pocus experiments my ex made life of. Ben is secretive, ambitious, he had a boyfriend and got hurt and I wait to see him involved again. For the gathering I’ll cook sweet peppers with different fillings: mince, rice, beans, lentils, pasta and potatoes, and they all love the dish. I met Harry at an exhibition of Mexican pottery. He turned out to be crazy about it, a serious collector you could say, of replicas of course, while I was still only an admirer. He’s five years younger than me, which is great, because my boys were teenagers at the time, and used to do a lot of things together with Harry. I’m looking forward to this family reunion, and then just me and Harry staying in Hervey Bay, enjoying some fishing, for which he’ll hire a boat, or spending time on the beach. It’ll be a romantic escapade for both of us; for me, a break from all this women’s flesh I dig my hands in, and for Harry from his rabbits, sorry, from his Fibonacci modem project. These small romantic escapades keep our relationship fresh, but because I am a bit on the superstitious side, I keep a token of fidelity, a clove of garlic, on a red string under Harry’s pillow. Needless to say, it works.

Right now, I am so tired I can hardly stay on my feet. This seemingly endless line of naked women that passes before my eyes and under my hands makes me dizzy. There’s still half an hour to go until closing time. I think of the holiday ahead of me, I think of Harry and Hervey Bay. I think of the rain that gets so heavy that I don’t hear the rehearsal at the jazz club on the other side of the street by the river.

Then I see her.

Alison, one of my loyal clients, hasn’t made an appointment, but knows I’d never turn her away. Once safely inside, she folds her dripping umbrella and casts a bribing smile in my direction. I nod to her to take a seat, but she points at some skinny thing, all freckles and frizzy hair, that has sneaked in and is hiding behind Alison’s back. We understand each other without words. Alison is here to lobby, to ask what I can do for her companion. I finish working on my not-anymore last client’s flabby, bat-like arms, giving them a last knead and slap, while stealing an occasional X-ray-like glance at Alison’s protégé: late twenties, anorexic figure, skin with the texture of gauze that’s been used on an infected cut, white leggings tight around her long bones, drops of mud on the leggings bringing to mind a Dalmatian, a sweater profiling breasts the size of green prawns, a mole on the left nostril giving a false impression of a metal piercing.

The mother with a noise neurosis, puts her cloths on and changes the plugs with phone ear buds. I catch soft relaxation music as she pays and makes a sign that she wants to book for the next week. I pick up the pantomime and hand her a card with her day and time.

She leaves.

Alison whispers something into my ear as if the mother with a noise neurosis has imposed some silence code and we exchange mute greetings, during which I get a wet peck on the cheek. “Please try to make her veeery pretty.”

I nod. I’ve seen worse.

“My niece,” Alison continues to whisper, gently prodding forward to me the skinny thing, and I wonder what the big secret behind this is. “And sorry for the mess we bring in, but I had to park the car a block up the street. They’re doing some roadwork. In this weather!”

“I know.” I sigh. I have to mop again after them so I am a bit cross when I say, this time loud, “Tell her to switch off her phone!”

The new clients don’t know that this is a strict rule to be followed around here. Some go into hysterics over it, they coined a word for it – nomophobia – but I don’t give a fucking fly when it comes to it. They can be without their toy if they want to be beautiful and happiness-magnetised, and all of them want exactly that.

Alison’s niece protests as she undresses and I already know what’s hiding under her sweater: a chicken-like rib cage, shoulderblades like angels’ wings. I sigh again. It will be like digging into gravel with bare hands, and this at the end of what has been a busy and frustrating day, but it’s worth doing it for Alison. She’s never mean on tips.

“An amazing love story, Gemma, I tell you – this child has transformed and blossomed before my eyes!”

If the “child” is now blossoming, I can only guess what she must have looked like before. At this point, the “child” smiles. And it’s not only a matter of parting the lips. Her smile lets me see her dimples, and my heart sinks because they are sweet and make her look so helpless. Appearing on her cheeks like snowflakes that might melt at any moment, so one has to be in a hurry to grasp the beauty. They melt away, and again she is the ugly duckling, while meanwhile I’ve been inspired, and plan an aggressive makeover starting with deep cleansing lotions, fruit-acid based with a slightly peeling effect, followed by a facial massage, including acupressure points on both sides of the nose, next to her mole, and at the edges of her mouth, then above the lips, tapping my way across the dimples towards the corners of her jaw. She might need a bit more calming work around her thyroid gland. I am an expert on thyroid glands. Mine is sluggish, which makes my buttocks heavy and my hands cold when I’m not massaging. My profession is good for me; it keeps my hands warm. The “child” has the opposite problem, a hyperactive thyroid, and if she is not careful she could end up with bulging eyes, which will likely eliminate the heart-melting effect of her dimples. Stomach acupressure point nine is a good point for balancing the thyroid, situated at the base of the neck. For the massage, I have to decide what carrier oil would be suitable: coconut, virgin olive, avocado, jojoba, wheat or walnut. Needless to say, they are all prime-quality organics. Coconut would be great, but somehow I feel like using wheat oil on her because of its massive vitamin E effect. Then, of course, I’ll use one of the nourishing face packs that I make myself, fruit pulp from the freezer to tighten the pores once they have been cleansed and nourished. What I don’t know, however, is what kind of soul landscape I am going to induce in my new client while I work on this freckled face with sweet dimples.

“What’s her name?” I ask as I put on Eine kleine Nachtmusik. I find myself also whispering, even though the woman with the bat-wing arms has long ago plummeted into the rain.

“Stephanie,” Alison answers promptly as she rummages in her bag for her vibrating phone. She checks on the caller, gives me a sign and walks to the other side of the saloon to take the call. She knows I am making the rules to be broken by special clients like her.

“Well, Stephanie,” I say. “First I’ll wash your face with goat soap and lukewarm water, rinse it with mountain mineral water, let it dry, then apply the cleansing lotion. Any allergies?” While I talk, I change towels, and soon Stephanie stretches out on the massage bed. No allergies.

Alison finishes with her phone and we know we have some catching up to do but not before she tells me about that call.

“It’s crazy,” she says. “All Brisbane talks about this. They have stolen Jordan’s little pooch!”

“Jordan? Like at my favourite Hairy Dog Café? Don’t tell me you mean little Frothy?”

“Yes,” answers Alison in a voice of someone important delivering important news.

“I can’t believe it! Who would do a thing like this?”

“Crooks,” she states the obvious. “Now they want ransom! It’s weird how quick after that murder happened.”

I bite my lip thinking of Jordan and how hard it might be on him as a cast a quick look to Montezuma II. He is still there on the shelf, still safe and for a moment I think how I would feel if someone snitches him.

Alison takes a chair and positions herself next to me sipping on a cup of fragrant green tea with apple and lime infusion from a jar that I keep at my clients’ disposal on the table with women’s magazines. The strange thing is, between two sips she continues to whisper, a bit louder now, but still in a conspiratorial way. She quickly finishes with the poor dog and continues with the love story that has grabbed her imagination.

“And he, Gemma, let me tell you,” she chokes on her words or is it the tea, and I notice that she also has hot flushes. “He’s much older than our Stephanie.” Alison thinks it’s funny and giggles while I gently lather the face of her niece. “And, I tell you, sh-sh, he’s married.” She puts her forefinger to her mouth to show what discreet information that is, as if he would be the first married man to have an affair. To her credit, she adds, “But so what?”

“But so what?” I echo, and also giggle, because although I’ve been working with women for years, and gossiping is part of the job as the best form of relaxation, I still can’t help being intrigued when it comes to a new bedroom story. It’s at this point that I decide that the landscape I will introduce to Stephanie’s soul, along with the facial care, is that of a warm and everlasting love, the same one that I introduced to my celebrity client Ms Yvette Cornelius once and it worked for her; she scored a nice boyfriend. It worked also for that elegant and rich woman Kylie whatever her name was. She always insisted on tying her dog, Buddy, to my chair while I was toiling on her. Excuse me!

“I tell you,” Alison continues, allowing conspiracy to tint her voice. As for her face, it’s already tinted red with the flushes. “He’ll be neither the first nor the last to get a divorce for love, that is, for being in love.” She rolls her eyes as if recruiting me or the cause, but she doesn’t need to bother, because she already has me on their side, and I’m about to use my one-hundred-and-one tricks to make Stephanie look like a walking seduction after only an hour in my hands. “And for love, he will marry this little kitten!”

She looks at her niece tenderly, and I’m reminded that Alison has no children of her own, due to some malfunction of her ovaries and her hormonal system as a whole – the hair I have removed from her chin and body over the years would have been enough for a sweater. She has occasionally mentioned her brother’s family. They live in another town, so the niece has come to visit her, and now Alison is demonstrating her unrealised maternal instincts. I am a mother, too, am I not? I soften and come up with a real cosmetic hit: my special acupressure massage for improving the turgor of the skin, while also acting like a booster for the self-confidence. In short, I forget I am tired, and start to get into my stride, rising to the challenge.

“I haven’t seen you lately,” I say casually to Alison, looking at her sideways, checking to see whether she is aware of my effort.

“Well,” Alison grins, “I’ve become a bit of a madam, because the little kitten has no place to see her boyfriend, so they use my apartment. They booked a hotel for me by the sea, four and a half stars – a beauty! It was lucky my boss Frank left for Switzerland to sweeten his divorce. The rumour is his wife dumped him taking the dog with her and honestly without that dog my boss can’t think straight and his boss…”

At this point I stop listening. Alison gets up, puts her cup back on the small catering table with water and tea jars and looks at her reflection in the mirror: red hair, red lips, firm porcelain-white skin. I’m proud of her, because she’s my creation. I can’t remember what she looked like the first time she came into my beauty salon, but a blurry vision of a face covered in blackheads, blemishes, pimples and pores as big as volcano craters appears from the back of my mind.

“So how was the holiday?” I ask, maintaining the conversation. “I’m planning to go away for a while myself.” I wink in the direction of Montezuma II. With its mouth widely open, it looks as if it barks something in return.

“It was good timing and luck to find you here,” Alison says, no longer whispering. “Sorry to barge in like this, but it was kind of an emergency; and, of course, thank you for taking us immediately.”

“No problem,” I say meaningfully. After all, she’s paying.

I am massaging Stephanie now, her skin soaked in prime oil. At the last moment, I’ve decided on a blend of avocado and almond, and add the words warm love, which I’ve chosen for her inner landscape and are starting to produce results, because under my hands the “kitten” is already purring. As for Alison, she remains on her frequency.

“Gemma, if you only knew how happy they are. I still haven’t seen him, as they’re keeping a low profile until his divorce, but I have to confess, it was damn good of him to spend all this money on me. The only inconvenience is that I have to disappear again during the upcoming Easter break. This time I’d better go on a cruise or maybe visit the Kakadu National Park. I’ve always wanted to go there and see Jim Jim Falls and Twin Falls … I like waterfalls, and I like the magnetic termite monoliths, too. They’re real cathedrals; you don’t need Notre Dame or the like.”

For a moment, I think how nice it would be if Harry takes me to Mexico one day so I can see all those Mayan pyramids and authentic pottery figurines, and at the markets outside I can buy another replica of a Colima dog to keep Montezuma II company. When it was given to me by Harry, I thought it was an offering more precious than a ring.

“When did you say Harry was going to call you, sweetie?”

“I don’t know yet …” I start before I realise my daydreaming is interrupted by Alison, who has fired the question not to me but to her niece.

Outside, the rain continues to pelt against the window, splashing mud on it, washing it clean, then splashing mud again.

The “sweetie” moves blissfully under my hands. Right now, I’m pressing bladder acupuncture points on both sides of the bridge of her nose as she twitters, “He’s waiting for his wife to arrive home from work and then he intends to come up with an excuse for sending her on a holiday alone to, where was it … Hervey Bay, I think.”

My hands jerk involuntarily and I spatter her mouth with extra oil. Her teeth must be floating in it, like ritual deathbed candles.

I ask politely, “And what does this Harry look like?”

I cast a lightning-quick fierce glance at the pottery dog, but Montezuma II remains unperturbed.

“Tell us what Harry looks like, Stephanie. I haven’t seen him myself,” says Alison, encouraging her niece.

We both wait for an answer, equally anxious for different reasons.

“Awesome!” is all we hear as she gags on the oil. Her phone gives a ding and for a moment Stephanie sulks with frustration that she is not in a position to check on it. Then she remembers why she is here and relaxes. She hadn’t bothered to switch off her phone. She doesn’t play by the rules. She breaks rules, hearts, marriages …

“Of course he is awesome! We don’t doubt it.” Alison hovers over her. “Tell us something more, like what attracted you to him. My God, I’m dying of curiosity! I only know his name, Harry, but they also call him Fibonacci or something. Gemma, don’t you think it’s a funny name, this Fibonacci?”

The words for darling Stephanie’s inner landscape undergo a transformation from “cosy warm” to “scorching hot”, then “burning red”.

“Leave me alone, Aunty Alison!” The kitten shows its claws. “I have to protect his privacy. The man still has a family, two sons, a wife, no matter that she’s fat, and … limited. At least he …”

She is unable to finish, because I am in that vigorous phase of the massage incorporating tapping, slapping, chopping with the side of my palms, and I am so good at it that Stephanie’s eyes nearly pop out of her head. She shoots a troubled, inquiring glance to Alison, but the latter has so much trust in me that she doesn’t dare to utter a word.

“Ready!” I declare, smiling broadly, and lovingly help the kitten out of the bed.

I lead her to the sink for a quick hot-towel compress followed by a cold water splash before the fruit-pulp ice-cubes rub. That usually signals the finishing brushstroke of my masterpiece creation, but this time I think I can outperform myself.

I pour mineral water into the facial steamer, and add pure aloe vera concentrate among the exposed cables, the reason for my urgent calls to Mike, the electrician. Meanwhile, I can’t help but admire the effect of my work. Stephanie’s skin looks luscious, plump, even her body mass index no longer looks to be about ten, but kind of normal. The glow on her face is a foundation for charisma and sex appeal. She looks, in other words, like a billion-dollar babe, and I am responsible for this. I take pride in my profession, in what I am able to achieve. I am good, so good … at everything. I hope Alison will match up the tip.

“Look at her,” I say to Alison. “Now not only this Harry Fibonacci or whatever his name is will go nuts about her and immediately leave his … what was it … fat, stupid, no sorry, limited wife, but there will be other victims falling head over heels for her charm.”

Alison hardly hears me. She can’t take her eyes off her kitten, and is whispering, “I knew it, I knew it … You, Gemma don’t need those hocus-pocus fads like diamond peeling, 24-karat gold mask, electro-magnetic impulses, acid peelings … Your hands, it’s all your hands!”

To further gain her attention, I raise my voice. “I’m going to do one more thing on her, Alison, just to fix the effect so that it will be long-lasting, something like this permanent makeup thing that’s so in vogue now.”

“Do you think it’s necessary, Gemma?” Alison asks – it’s a sincere compliment – as she slips a couple of notes into my pocket, and a quick glance reveals the face of Edith Cowan on them, the first woman elected to an Australian parliament, so you could say we’re keeping it as a women’s business.

I drag the kitten to the bench under the Mexican pottery dog, sit her on a chair and stick her face into the steamer. I throw a towel over it, in a fit of generosity I gave her a dry one, watching how hungrily she checks her massages, a triumphant smile curling her lips, triggering the appearance of her irresistible dimples. I pretend I need to check my appointment book to see whether I am finished for the day, mumbling something to this effect as I walk away.

Crossing the room, I say casually, “Oh, Alison, could you plug the steamer? I must be really tired, forgetting things like this.”

In awe of her kitten’s remarkable makeover as a result of my treatment, Alison walks confidently towards Stephanie, pleased that I’ve asked her for this small favour. She looks for the cable, grabs the plug and inserts it into the socket.

Nothing much happens.

A hissing spark, a small flame, a pop-up explosion, then silence. The face of тhe kitten has acquired the intransigent beauty of Mexican pottery, more precisely of an authentic pottery dog from Colima, West Mexico, c. 300 BC–300 AD. It can now be a part of Harry’s collection. Dogs were believed to assist the dead in their journey to the underworld. They were a hairless breed eaten at feasts. The only thing I wonder about is why all dogs, living or portrayed in art, have sad eyes. Like that one on the shelf among the oil bottles, for years it has been my marriage consultant, but now it has upgraded to a funeral agent.

The telephone rings and I know who it is.

“Darling.” Harry’s voice licks my ear with the tenderness of an acetylene flame. “You wouldn’t believe it, I’m so sorry, but you’ll probably have to go to Hervey Bay alone. I know you always wanted to go there. Something has come up that will keep me here. I’ll explain when you come home, or do you want me to pick you up, it’s raining cats and dogs here. How is it at your place?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I say, and sag into a chair, because I’m really tired. “Don’t worry, I know why you have to stay behind. By the way, what is the next Fibonacci number after twenty-one?”

There’s a pause, and then Harry’s voice continues, loaded with noisy breathing.

“Thirty-four, dear. If you add thirteen to twenty-one … But how can you possibly know, when I myself only just learned that I have to work during the holiday?” I don’t answer, so he continues, “You remember my old colleague Harry Follent, who used to visit us years ago? We used to call him Fibonacci. He’s in a mess, going through a divorce, I think. Anyway, he asked me to finish something on that Golden Ratio project for him and for an excuse to you offered his sister to keep you company at Hervey Bay. She’s also a beautician and he says he’ll pay her to give you some facials … Not that you need. Gemma? Are you there?”

I am. Staring at the anorexic beauty of Stephanie, at her Mexican-pottery red face. I’ll advise her to put on some chalky white lipstick. It will become her.

Beyond the window, the shepherd of the homeless dogs passes by. For a moment he stops and looks at me and I can swear his eyes are phosphorescing and big like lanterns, but in my state I can even see pigs fly. The old man is on his way back to his shelter under the bridge still carrying that thing and now I do know it’s a trembling little dog. The pack follows him, and I wonder what they are going to do if the river bursts her banks and the city goes underwater. Then I see that Montezuma II leaves the shelf and goes out into the rain to join them. I am really worried, there are sharks, snakes and salties out there.

First comes the ambulance, and then a policewoman arrives and produces a chalky white lipstick. I wonder how come she knows what Stephanie needs for a finishing touch, but instead of applying the chalk to Stephanie’s lips, the policewoman squats and outlines the corpses and it takes her exactly thirty-four Fibonacci seconds. It takes as long for the homeless dog procession to slip out of sight as I stand there worrying that I won’t be able to go this Sunday to The Avid Reader bookshop patio and continue with my philosophical wellbeing pursuits. The point is I had two totally different grandmothers. One was small, slim and never ate more than a spoonful of soup plus half a yolk in case she was not fasting. For breakfast she had only coffee and for dinner a piece of bread crust which she could chew for hours. She didn’t know the taste of meat and grated carrot/celery salad was her feast. She kept regular sleeping hours and went for moderate walks every day. As for her sex life, she hadn’t got much after she became a widow at the age of twenty-seven. I’ve never seen her drink water. She lived to be a hundred.

My other grandmother refused to eat pork steak if it didn’t have a big rind of fat, and ate butter in lumps usually pasted with feta cheese and sprinkled with olive oil and pepper. She stuffed herself to death with the excuse that times were volatile and one never knows where the next meal would come from. For breakfast she ate huge amounts of bacon and eggs and in the afternoon she took a glass of port or green-walnut liqueur. She stayed up late and never walked because she was busy playing poker, smoking, flirting proactively and there were constant rumours of younger lovers like the electrician Mike who, between us, is not bad at all. She suffered palpitations and that gave her an opportunity to show her dancing skills. She shook her overweight if not obese body to some jazz number on the radio chanting, “Now we’ll see who’s on top, my dancing heart or me!” She lived seven months more than my other grandmother, nearly touching a hundred and one. Both of them had lived through the war and what we call stress, but neither had developed depression or neurosis, probably because they didn’t know they existed. They never talked or experienced hot flushes and no need to say they had all their marbles in place to an extent that they both knew off the top of their heads the telephone numbers and birthdays of all our relatives and to my utter annoyance those of my boyfriends. One of them even used to call them. Guess which!

In light of this heredity my chances are not bad. I can continue making facials with meshed bread soaked in thin potato soup and hair masks with raw onion saved from an old salad, you know where. That I am good at mopping comes in handy, and with the help of a spoon I can try to dig a tunnel.

Perfect!

The only thing I am not happy about is that no one paints white lipstick on Stephanie’s lips, so I attack the squatting policewoman and gain possession of her gun.

She is young and has no idea what it is to have hot flushes and a cheating husband that doesn’t cheat.

Now, armed, I can even chase crooks demanding ransom…

5. The day when Frothy’s case went viral

CARLOS

And man’s and orchestra

I take a deep breath and approach the yellow house. Stepping inside the small foyer is like entering a big wedge of parmigiano-reggiano.

There are two doors. The one on the right has a plate with the name Dr Boris Nicholls. I know I am up for a thrilling encounter.

The bell I press produces a strange, creepy sound, a mixture of vultures’ wings flapping over a kill, the whine of a dentist’s drill and Tasmanian devils in fight.

Shivers crawl up my spine as I try to calm my heartbeat over this, no doubt, premeditated effect. Whoever is behind that door wants you pretty shaken before you step over the threshold. The feeling that I am being watched doesn’t help. A surveillance camera, of course. I lift my head and smile in as friendly a manner as I can manage. I hear shuffling steps, rustling with the security chain and the door cracks open. When the door opens fully, a small but robust figure emerges from the darkness of a claustrophobic corridor.

Dr Nicholls is wearing a grey silk dressing gown over an immaculate white shirt, dark-grey trousers and a wine-red bow tie. His gold-rimmed glasses have heavy lenses. His unnaturally smooth skin looks soaked in cream. His perfume is Bulgari. His carefully blown out white hair is shot through with black residue from his younger years.

“Ms Cornelius?” he croaks, giving me a once-over. What he sees obviously makes him happy as his voice mellows. “Of course, of course, Ms Cornelius, I’ve been expecting you for the interview. Please come in.”

Rumoured to be of Hungarian origin, his English is old-fashioned Oxford that hasn’t been maintained properly, but the rustiness gives him an additional touch of an auctioned genuine antiquity. Dr Nicholls could have been one of those men sitting in the café down by the river in South Brisbane toying with their keys to a Mercedes or Lamborghini, wealth written over their faces, ogling me, evaluating me as mistress material perhaps. Or they were just idle waiting for the day to pass by and the mellow southern evening to tune them into a gambling mood? The Treasury casino is a stone’s throw away, as everything else on this territory of the city’s central business district.

I pretended I was not aware of their stares sipping on my latte, checking on the tampon supply in my beg, scrolling my phone for the latest in the women’s netball league; the Queensland Firebirds were doing great and I cracked a smile big like the Aladdin’s cave. The only thing female clubs were missing were male cheerleaders.

As I was killing the slowly passing time until my interview I also made a call to the Fratelli restaurant, speaking to the owner Giovanni, booking a table for four, all of us single independent women celebrating the rise-of-the-vagina era, each of us having a small Cleopatra tattoo in that region. The old Giovanni getting a fit at my request that the sweet red wine, preferably muscato, should be chilled out and not room temperature. Last what I see is the stolen dog posting and recognize Frothy, the talisman of the Hairy Dog Café, and I click a like. Not that I like what’s going on there because me and Jordan, we had history, a moment in my love life I am not proud of but I see that the posting goes viral. Because of what we had with Jordan I refused to cover that murder story that shocked Brisbane but I follow now what happens to the killer husband and I am glad that he will rot in jail with the mates roughing him up.

Meanwhile, Dr Nicholls steps aside, an invitation for me to enter. As I pass through the narrow entrance, my bust brushes against his nose, or is it the other way around and another one of those premeditated actions? He finds a light switch and shuts the door behind me; it’s still semi-dark. Whether or not it’s another effect, his proximity makes me edgy.

He opens a door to the inside of the apartment, and we are showered by sunlight so intense I squint to prevent from almost being blinded by the gregarious sunset.

“Ms Cornelius. Please.” He windmills his arm in an over-exaggerated gesture of politeness and hospitality marred with open mockery at addressing my gender.

My eyes adjust and I face a postcard beauty. The room has a full view of the Victoria Bridge and part of the Southbank grounds. The river is like a muscled diamond python slithering out of its old skin and driven by a professional avarice I make a mental note to visit the museum across and write about the Maiwar, an exhibition about her ancient origin. My attention, however, is quickly drawn elsewhere. The atmosphere around me is like a snapshot frozen in time. The room is full of display cabinets, glass cubes and shelves containing the mere purpose for my visit. There’s also a blue (the boy’s colour!) sofa and matching armchairs framing a coffee table. On it a fine-china coffee set. I smell premium Italian espresso. That makes me relax. Coffee makes me relax, even here in the presence of Dr Nicholls, from whom you can order any musical instrument you want.

Any musical instrument of unusual make.

Man’s an orchestra, I read in several languages on top of the tallest glass cube. The eerie silence that surrounds me makes me think the room might be soundproofed.

Dr Nicholls turns to me with a smile, an extension of his hospitable-mockery gesture. “Shall we have a seat?”

L’uomo e un’ orchestra.

L’homme est un orchestre.

Man’s an orchestra.

I take in the rest of the room as I walk past Dr Nicholls. I don’t answer him. I’m not here to answer, but to ask questions to one of the world’s weirdest collectors.

In the display cabinets there are musical instruments of an unusual nature. They might look like your ordinary trumpet and drum, but they are not. These musical instruments are made of human parts. The glass boxes they are in could just as well be sarcophagi. I look at this bleak exposition and feel as if a hibernating snake is waking, taking his first slither along my spine. My own body is terrified by the thought of what has happened to those other bodies, and I don’t blame it.

“Oh, I see, a lady of style.” Dr Nicholls smacks his lips behind me. I turn to see him admiring my shoes.

“Paying a visit to a surgeon in stilettos! That’s what I call a personal touch.” He chuckles and waves me to a chair. The moment I take a seat, he kneels on the floor near me with a surprising agility and says, “A good pair of stilettos is able to perforate the skull of an old Caucasian man whose calcium has fled the bones, leaving them like Brussels’ lace. Or cabbage, if you prefer.”

“They’re just shoes,” I say, faking embarrassment. Or perhaps I am embarrassed.

I am dressed to kill like any of my other three girlfriends would be tonight consuming spaghetti and red wine under the fatherly watch of Giovanni. Wine from the Barossa Valley, of course. Wine that doesn’t need three crystals of salt in the glass to improve its taste, a taste that turns my sensory system on and I jump into the chaos, the fascinating mess they call life. A life as juicy as Carrie’s in Sex and the City, made bearable by my three girlfriends, in perfect parallel to the show. Well, the city is Brisbane and not New York, but I know that same wine will inspire us to create a new photo series for our social media friends around the world because we are all globetrotters who fear that the number of the countries we have visited is growing larger than the number of the men we have dated.

“Just shoes,” I repeat. Am I flirting with this funny old man?

“Just shoes? I see. If you say so.” He sounds cranky now, and it’s an effort to lift himself off the floor. I anticipate him pouring the coffee, and am prepared to say, “Yes, please, black,” but he is not touching the coffee. “Unbelievable!” he exclaims, staring at my legs. “The longest femur I’ve ever seen.”

The chill continues to creep up my back as he ambles to the tallest box and points inside. “What you see behind this glass, Ms Cornelius, is a rare musical instrument called a rkang-gling. A Tibetan trumpet made of a male femur, the thighbone. You want to hold it, perhaps play a tune?”

I don’t know what to say. I am here to write about him, not to slobber over a male bone. “Can I serve us some coffee, please?” I try my first question.

“Of course, of course. You’ll excuse your old host. Please, by all means,” he says with a gesture towards the pot.

I pour the brew in two cups and swallow mine like medicine. It’s not as good as I expect, but it charges my batteries and gives me strength to cope with our bizarre conversation and even more bizarre surroundings. I look at the rkang-gling, while he looks at my face through his thick lenses magnifying the tadpole-like movements of his eyes, each enjoying a rimmed pond of its own. I notice that he doesn’t touch his coffee but continues to stare at me.

“What nice skin you’ve got, Ms Cornelius; flawless! Do you mind following me to the other room? I want to show you something. No, no there’s no rush, please finish your coffee first, by all mean. Ah you’ve finished it! So, if you don’t mind?”

I do mind, but I ease myself off the edge of the boyish-blue sofa and follow him along a narrow corridor to an even bigger room with a Venetian window that offers an even bigger and better view of the river and the stunning sunset. A CityCat boat full of nervous, rushing commuters and a leisure boat full of laid-back tourists flank for one chilling moment a one-seat kayak with a young girl in it, her blonde hair flapping in the wind like a ripped sail.

Dr Nicholls is following my gaze.

“I am glad that your first question, Ms Cornelius …”

“Yvette.”

“Y-vette. Is there any chance you are in the veterinarian business, Y-vette? Just joking, resorting to stupid ice-breakers. Sorry. What I was saying is that I am glad, really glad that your first question is not why Brisbane? Why not Sydney or Melbourne but Brisbane, everybody knows I have the money for a decent property even in Point Piper?”

I don’t know where he is leading with this. I give a vague nod that could mean anything and focus on the room. A sward, a samurai katana hanging over a king-size bed reflects the sun. A trolley loaded with surgical instruments is positioned as a bedside table. The stainless steel of scalpels and dissecting scissors exudes a cold and menacing gleam. I feel hypnotised. Dr Nicholls approaches from behind and startles me. I shouldn’t be so jumpy! The man is holding a volume he has just taken out of the wall-to-wall bookcase. Silently, he offers me the book, making it look like a rare and special honour. Perhaps it is. I take the book, and feel the smoothness of its cover.

“Bound in human skin,” he says matter-of-factly in the voice of a patient guru initiating an ignorant. The ignorant drops the volume. The fake amicable patience on Dr Nicholls’ face is replaced by a mask of genuine contempt. I stare at the opened book as from the discreet blow of a fan or an air-conditioner its pages move softly, like the limbs of a newborn baby, and I want to pick it up, but my host is quicker to act and our heads meet midway, his gold-rimmed glasses scratching my forehead, which doesn’t improve things between us. He takes hold of the book and inspects it for damage. I feel stupid, my head hurts, my heart is beating wildly.

“I’m sorry,” I manage, thinking I should write off my interview as a fiasco, when he suddenly smiles. A patronising smile that says only women can be so damn awkward and stupid.

“No problem, Ms Yvette. We better go back to our coffee and start your interview. Or would you rather say ‘no drama’ these days?” His voice could have been paved with shards of glass. It feels creepier, but I am not here to judge.

“Now that you have finished your coffee you must have another one,” he continues in a chatty mood. “Coffee beans look like adrenal glands, ready to produce hormones for a fight-or-flight situation.” He finds it funny and chuckles as he inserts the book back on the shelf between the leather-bound editions of Marquis de Sade and Greek Mythology: Orgies.

“The way people react … Really, it’s just another artefact.” With that, he escorts me out of the room. “Brisbane is a city in the making, that’s why I’d rather be here. It might not be a wealthy city, but it’s a weather city, and we know how weather can influence us, although we’re not discussing the weather, are we?”

Still feeling dazed from the headbutt and somehow claustrophobic, I step into the corridor only to bump into something that cascades over me like a crystal chandelier. When I realise that it’s not a materialisation of my favourite Sia song but a skeleton, I scream.

Dr Nicholls is amused. “Come on, Ms Cornelius, come on, Yvette! You’re a big girl. It’s just old Giaccomo, up to his old tricks. He used to be the most inventive womaniser among us, the once poor medical students. All of us working as morticians to pay for our studies.”

Shaken further, I follow him and we return to the first room. With the sun exiting the stage, it becomes less and less cheerful in the house. “Or perhaps, Yvette, you’d like a cup of chocolate. Women love chocolate. When you open a female skull, you can always see that she has indulged in chocolate. The chemistry of the brain is different.”

“No thanks,” I say, and pour myself another coffee. This time he drinks his with me as I am not showing my annoyance that it’s lukewarm. That it’s not wine from the Barossa Valley, which I use to calm my nerves, to dope myself, to forget the bastard who dumped me with a text message, It was nice, and … enough. As if commenting on the 400-gram rump steak he used to order at the Hairy Dog Café, where he went with his permanently hungry bloodhound. But now I have to listen to the creep in a dressing gown, the great collector!

“Talking about skulls, I’d like to show you, young lady, one of the jewels in my collection: the damaru drum.” He gets up and walks to a tall glass box. “What you see here is two joined human skulls and monkey skin attached with human hair. The skulls are first smeared with virgin menstrual blood. You like what you see, Yvette?”

That’s all about who asks the questions. I wonder how Frances Whiting would have handled the guy into a funny juicy column.

I hold my breath and compel myself not to avert my eyes. “Interesting,” I force through clenched teeth, shaking my head as if in amazement. Meanwhile, I take some photos of him holding his drum and check my i-recorder to see whether everything is functioning properly.

My host is becoming more and more enthusiastic. “I am a collector, as you know. These are priceless objects of art, and I was glad that you wanted to write an article on these … let’s call them unusual or unique musical instruments.” His telephone rings somewhere in the bowels of the apartment, but he ignores it, continuing his lecture. “I assure you, each of these instruments is tuned and fit to produce the music you want to play. You see here? This drum is also decorated with a lotus. Another Tibetan musical instrument. Man’s an orchestra, as you see, Ms Cornelius. Every organ, every cell has its own frequency, the brain its own waves, all they weave into music, a cosmic music perhaps not too different from the one that we receive from the stars. Man’s an orchestra,” he repeats.

“He … she is,” I agree. “Woman’s an orchestra.”

He sighs demonstratively. His stare could be a prehistoric device for hurling fire, stones and tar. I could as well be a witch heading for the stake. To put up with his misogynistic views I need more patience than I can manage to scrape on a good day. And today is not a good day. The interview is going nowhere.

“Yes, we can talk about the signature music of each human or animal being. Now, I will tell you something else.” He approaches me with the drum, holding it with such a necrophilic tenderness that I nearly throw up. Dr Nicholls lowers his voice to a reverent whisper. “The spirit, the energy field of a man remains in his skull forever. That’s the reason the Vikings once drank from the skulls of their enemies, to obtain their power.” He brings the double drum to his mouth as if to show me how easy it is to turn the two skulls into grails. Then he lowers it and starts to tap softly on it. “Maori tribal chiefs also drank from skulls of enemy tribe chiefs they killed in battle and ate in peace, to obtain their power. However, if you handle the skull of a weak, insignificant person, you weaken your own energy field, which can lead to your downfall.” He pauses for a moment to enjoy the effect of his drumming. I have to admit that he does it quite artistically. I give him a reassuring smile, and he carries on.

“Let’s take as an example, that unhappy jerk Hamlet. He mucks around with the skull of Yorick, some insignificant jester, long enough to catch profanity like a flu; profanity resulting in an urge to fall from his royal position of an heir to the throne. Weakness of the spirit is contagious, as is greatness. Shakespeare knew that. Hamlet was unfit to be a king.”

I try to object the Shakespeare part. I prefer to think of Hamlet as a protester, a rebel, a dissident, but I decide not to start an argument. That’s the downside of taking interviews. I do the listening, yet I can’t resist arching my eyebrows when it comes down to comments like this. On the bright side, I am gathering a lot of material to make the girls wet their panties with laughter tonight.

Dr Nicholls shakes his head. He drums a little louder, then puts the weird instrument away and returns to the trumpet, which he holds loosely by my side, almost casually, allowing it to sway a little. I am aware of what he is doing. He is comparing the length of the femur trumpet with the length of my thigh.

“This femur, or rkang-gling, turns air into music to accompany chanting and rituals. The cavity in the human bone modulates unique sounds.” Dr Nicholls returns the trumpet to its glass case and shows me another object. “This gourd is entwined with human vertebrae. You can see it in the hands of a shaman, who wears human teeth as a necklace. He rattles the gourd to induce a trance and conjure magic.” Saying this, he himself rattles the gourd. Despite my scepticism, I let myself go along, enjoying it. In a way it has a similar effect as a bottle of premium red from the Barossa Valley. “For some tribes, humans are not only physical, but rather a source of spiritual food. It’s not easy to explain. The Quechua-speaking Incas, my dear Y-vette, had also flutes made of human bones, antara, and drums made of human skin and, of course, they weren’t meant for ordinary playing, they were believed to have a mystic power. It was as if a human voice comes out to tell a story, a voice from the dead to foresee the future. Must be quite spooky, what do you think, Ms Cornelius?”

I think Dr Nicholls himself is spooky, and a buffoon, albeit a fabulously rich one. At least, that’s the rumour. The rumour also says he makes his money mostly in the casinos along the coast.

I hear a scratching outside the corridor door.

Dr Nicholls gets up and opens it.

The dog that enters the room, leaping playfully against his legs, is a snow-white Afghan hound. His long, silky fur is combed with a part in the middle of his long, intelligent head.

“This is Carlos,” Dr Nicholls declares ceremonially, patting the dog’s head.

The tail Carlos wags would be the envy of any Middle Eastern carpet maker.

“Carlos is my only family,” adds my host. “He’s already been kidnapped twice, and I had to pay heavy ransoms for him, but I can’t be without his company. He understands me in so many ways, like no one else. I am sorry to say this, but I read in your eyes, Ms Cornelius, that you, like everyone else, think of me as ‘that old, eccentric, self-conceited piece of shit’. I am not offended, because I know that’s exactly what I am, and as part of it, you are the first to know, and no doubt write about it, that I have recently made my will, in which I leave all my wealth, yes all of it, to Carlos, including this invaluable collection of rare musical instruments made of human bones. You see, my dear, I had the opportunity to buy Napoleon’s penis, the mummified skull of that harlot and double spy Mata Hari with the trade red hair still on it, or other celebrities’ body parts, but I decided to keep it simple and focused on music. Because Carlos also likes music. Carlos likes Bach like no one else. We can spend all day listening to Bach. So, I think he is the one who deserves to inherit my collection known as Man’s an Orchestra. What do you think, beautiful young Y-vette?”

I don’t think. I am overwhelmed and all the questions that I had prepared – intelligent, witty and very original, like how and when he came to the idea of starting this weirdo hording – are cancelled by his stupid questions, like that last one. Right now, I really can’t think and can only hope he’ll stop there. I can’t bear it if my host decides to go into other particularities about dead celebrities’ body parts circulating the market, like Albert Einstein’s eyeball, Abraham Lincoln’s blood-stained shirt collar from the assassination night at Ford’s Theatre, Beethoven’s ear bones and skull parts, or even Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis for that matter. After all, Beethoven renounced his admiration for Napoleon, first dedicating his Symphony No. 3 to him, then scrapping the dedication. Then I remember that Napoleon was rumoured to have a special sentimental bond with fighting dogs, unleashing them in front of his reserves. After the battle of Marengo, a real carnage even in terms of the emperor’s epic war killings, he took some time walking over the battlefield, and according to his account, he saw among the piles of his slain soldiers a poodle killed as it was planting a last lick on his dead master’s face. Never ever on his battlefields, said the cynical war-loving Napoleon, had anything evoked such emotion in him.

“Pathetic!” I say.

“I beg your pardon?” Narrowing his eyes, Dr Nicholls is watching me closely. Two deep furrows form between his brows like an insect’s antennae to accomplish the butterfly impression of his metal-rimmed glasses.

I open my mouth to say what I think of him, even though as a feature writer I have no right to judge my interview victims as I extract information from them. However, my lips continue to stretch into a yawn and suddenly I feel sleepy and unable to suppress the yawn, not even to cover it with my hand out of a sheer habitual politeness. There is a new flicker of amusement in my host’s eyes as he is drumming next to my ear, in a friendly joking way as if to wake me. He rattles the gourd, too, and despite the invigorating rhythm I feel the drowsiness worsen. It might not be a bad idea to rest a little.

“Remember, my poor Yvette, I asked you whether you like to listen to the music of the stars? Now is the moment.” He waves his hand and the room is flooded with mysterious sounds dancing around us, some like the rustling of coffee beans inside a hemp bag, others hypnotic, like the beat of a distant drum in the hands of a shaman flying over the Brisbane River.

Soon we are drowned in a wild rhythm as if from African drums, and he explains it’s coming from Alpha Centauri, the third-brightest star in the sky, mixed with the R Hydrae’s repetitive beat – a cosmic Ravel’s Bolero in deep, velvety tones travelling down from the constellation Hydra. The three are drugging themselves on magic vibrations, reading the heartbeat of our galaxy and of other galaxies so distant that it is impossible to reach them, even in our thoughts, unveiling their secrets. It is another world, that of chaotic, eerie pulsations; the depths of the universe and beyond are opening up for me.

A solemn, distinctive noise reminds me of a grandfather’s clock, a deep pendulum-driven sound, followed by the heartbeat of a bird in a cat’s claws, then suddenly a carpenter’s tools in action, as if old Geppetto was carving a new Pinocchio, wondering why the nose of the puppet kept growing with every lie. Then the cosmic clock is back again, accompanied by the purring of amorous jaguars and the squeal of mice lost in ripening cheese, soon interrupted by bellows not unlike those of Tibetan long horns.

“Straight from the new class star HR3831, which pulses every 11.7 minutes,” Dr Nicolls readily explains while I hope perhaps he keeps some bottles of red from the Barossa Valley. I can do with a glass or two, but I don’t ask.

Crackling, as if from a cat o’ nine tails, reaches me, and I recognise the mighty sound of the Witch Head Nebulae made popular by an American rapper. I lean back on the sofa, a silly smile lingering on my mouth, as if I am not on one but on five bottles of red from the Barossa Valley, when I detect triumph in Dr Nicholls’ eyes.

“Thank you, Boris,” I mumble, my eyelids heavy, and continuing to get heavier. It’s funny that this can happen to me without wine.

“You are welcome, my little Yvette. You are welcome to know my secret – the only way to tune to the music of the stars is by using that special orchestra of mine, those loveable bits of human entities turned into musical instruments with so much love and care.”

I love the guy! He makes me feel special. A much-needed boost to my confidence after being dumped by a man who eats half a kilo of rump steak in one sitting, only sharing the other half with his dog. I give Boris one of my seductive smiles and brush a non-existent hair on the ballooned front of my striped shirt.

Ogling me he continues. “The downside of this, dear Yvette, is that I can’t afford to share my secret, otherwise it won’t be a secret anymore, am I not right? I have to kill you,” he finishes playfully.

I nod. When it comes to men, nothing goes my way these days.

“The good thing is that I can use your femurs for trumpets that herald the world’s tuning to the music of the stars,” he says reassuringly, and I think he is like a dog with a bone about this femur thing. “I’ll put all my love in them, I promise. Sleep now, my beauty, your journey to the stars will be in style.” He touches my arm; I have gone completely limp. “It’s a shame that you can’t hear me, but do you know that in every galaxy there is a black hole and no matter for how long the galaxy is spinning around it, at the end the black hole devours it, doesn’t it? Death is a universal law, isn’t it?”

That’s the mistake he makes. Pushing questions while he knows I am here for the interview and I am the one to ask them. Nothing works better as a mobilising agent than anger. Something inside me snaps. I open my eyes, ignore his total surprise and grab the coffee pot. I miss him and it bangs against the window. The noise sobers me, or maybe it’s just that Dr Nicholls has stopped rattling. The coffee pot suffers a dent. The glass panel remains sound, as before. Anger is not only my shaker. Anger makes my host’s eyes change colour.

“I know why you are here,’ he shouts, and the creepy sounds of his doorbell come to mind. “Humans are not physical, but spiritual food. Here you come, greedy for fame. It’s stupid, and it’s a waste, because when you die nobody cares, Ms Cornelius.” He allows himself a small pause. “Bearing in mind your phenomenal femur size, I am going to tell you my deepest secret. I’ve chosen Brisbane not because of the deadliest animals you can find around; crocodiles, sharks, jellyfish stingers, spiders and snakes with lethal fangs, just to name a few. All because of the music of the stars. Brisbane is the only city in the world named after an astronomer, Sir Thomas Brisbane. An asteroid in the asteroid belt outside Mars carries his name, a moon crater, too. The spirit of this river city is the closest to the stars and their music and now, little Yvette, you know more about me than anybody else is supposed to.”

He takes the gourd and resumes rattling it gently. That bout of artificially pumped vigour punishes me with a worse drowsiness and I let my head fall. Just before it hits the coffee table, I take a loose hold of my shoe, whirl it off my foot, and begging mercy from my adrenal glands I scrape a wobbly energy and launch myself on him. I catch the side of his head with the stiletto, backing the weak blow with my weight. The metal heel gets stuck deep in his ear as, yelping, he doubles over and drops to the floor. He looks lifeless enough to allow me to crawl on my knees, trying to unfold myself with the support of the coffee table, then the sofa arm. What I’ve done overshadows a punch, eye gouging or a crotch kick.

The rattling has stopped and I feel better. What a prick!

“Sorry about the mess,” I tell him while retrieving my shoe, virtually unscrewing it out of his ear, then like a good vet shove one of my tampons in it. “You bloody butcher! You almost made me late for my spaghetti-with-red-wine dinner.”

I take off the other stiletto and, barefooted and dizzy, I head for the front door.

Blocking it is Carlos, the heir to the musical bones collection, sitting on his haunches, his teeth bared, waiting for me. The Afghan’s coat is like a pure-wool dressing gown and makes me wonder about the dress code in this house.

I weigh up my chances of getting my hands on that samurai sword.

It can be used even later, for cutting that rump steak.

6. The day when a little boy thinks kidnapping is when he is snitched away and dognapping is when Frothy is snitched away

MANU

And an initiation in life

Playing the piano with one hand was his mother’s way of showing her loneliness.

From a distance measured in umbilical cords, the boy watched her slender figure sway dreamily into something mythical, half-fairy, half-music, the chimes of the long-case clock the boy was so afraid of, rupturing the melancholy. Balancing on a taboret, occasionally, his mother moved the clock hands at a whim and the chimes merged as she composed her own music, the clock another instrument transcribing her grief.

“You know, Eddie, Beethoven has also written pieces for mechanical clock.”

Seized by fear he was waiting for her to fall and break and would start to cry although it never happened.

On happier days, she would take him and Manu, her tiny Bichon Frise, outside in the garden, where they played with a ball and ran chasing each other. The pooch showered them with joyful high-pitched barks retrieving the ball, laying it at the mother’s feet and never at the Eddie’s, aware that boy and puppy were rivals for her attention, for her love.

The boy, sulky for not being able to enjoy his mother’s presence away from the saddening tunes, echoed the frustration of his father’s guard dogs; the bull Mastiffs were barking, growling in frenzy, bouncing against the fence of their restricted area, the heavy padlock clanking, their bloodshot eyes on Manu as he hopped in the air, ran and tripped in the flower bed, rolled out of it, a furry ball bathing in the mother’s cheering. Behind her, the boy, sore and edgy, felt his heart like a shaky tooth. He hated Manu and didn’t have a name for jealousy that filled the Highgate Hills mansion and the yard that sloped down to the Brisbane River, her heavily moving waters, dark and uninviting. The boy was warned never to go near them over fears of drowning. The river was dangerous and scary, the two blood-thirsty guard dogs were in the yard to protect him from her and the bad people. Also from the three vicious hounds across the street.

Back in the house the mother resumed her seat at the piano, music squirting between her fingers as if it were nourishing and elusive mother’s milk meant to comfort him. Her small narrow hands ran along the keys, fast and slow, grasping the motif, then pulling away in panic as if the keys had acquired an unexplainable scorching power, white keys, black keys…

She told him once, “Eddie, there is music written only for black keys, Irving Berlin hit the black keys of F-sharp major since Irving was musically illiterate.” And he wondered how come the city of Berlin which he could hear his father mentioning in his telephone conversation could have such a poor musical fame. But he loved when his mother talked to him. She couldn’t talk to Manu about music, could she?

They never mentioned him, but he was there, a heavy noise churner, a loud boisterous talker, coughing, grunting, snoring, snorting, slamming doors, trumping around with the thundering steps of a gargantuan man who loved rare roast, red wine, white powder and gambling. The father. His smell, acidy and pungent, not unlike that of the bull Mastiffs he kept locked up and hungry for his hunting adventures, which he shared with a neighbour called Alex and his three vicious hounds.

During the day when the father was away, Eddie could follow his mother and was allowed into her room, where he could sit and watch her comb her long hair, delicately tap cream into her fair, lightly freckled face and gently massage her small bony hands or giving them a nervous rub, fearing that one day they might cramp on her, leaving her without the only enjoyment she had, touching, caressing the piano, merging with the abundance of harmonised sounds from a beautiful yet unattainable world of happiness and freedom. She tried to give Eddie piano lessons, hoping that he might follow in her shoes, but the father was prepared for it and the ban came categorically, with such fierceness that mother and son didn’t dare to continue with the lessons in what the gargantuan man called “her piano madness”.

But he couldn’t intervene with the rest of their lives together, when the mother let the boy be in her room as she changed into her silk dresses, from a cream beige into a pale lavender purple, from a pale lavender purple into a cream beige. Sometimes she asked the boy to help her with the zipper, a cold prickly thing with a life of its own. He pulled the metal tongue slowly as she bent down to a height convenient for him, his tiny fingers tracing the rout of the metal teeth along her paper-thin skin. A pale, smooth, marble-like back, narrow like a young girl’s, was revealed in front of his eyes, and with the rewarding intimacy of the moment he didn’t mind even Manu, leaping around, reminding them that he was there.

After she changed dresses, his mother returned to the piano followed by Manu’s gentle trot.

“Chopin requires subtle lavender colours,” she would say before diving into the melancholic cascade of musical phrases, before sending Eddie away impatiently.

He was supposed to play, wasn’t he, his little boy’s games with toy cars and model planes, but rejected, he sought reassurance with the woman who was their maid and his nanny, Lannie.

The moment he opened the kitchen door it was another world. Lannie was nice and young and big and dark’ his nanny was all smiles, all sweat and cinnamon and fried-chicken smells in one, all movement and gesticulations, all loud voice and contagious cheekiness, vibrant and propelling around the house like his new model plane, all overwhelming in a different assertive way, a counterpoint to his mother’s melancholy, all bravado and senseless joy. In her presence he was scared, but soon he would forget his inhibitions and join her as she moved from room to room to tidy, both improvising a pillow fight, a tag-at-war with a bedspread or a blanket or surprising each other with a push into a bathtub still full of scented water. He was allowed to be with her with one exception – when she was tidying up his father’s room. Then the door clicked locked and he could hear that his father was still in bed and his nanny was asked to be quiet probably because downstairs his mother was beautifully playing one of her molto triste pieces, and there was silence behind the door for a long, long time. Then Lannie would come out, her hair dangling askew, leaving different, enigmatic smells in her wake.

A graphite vase in the shape of an art-deco stylised amphora held a bouquet of off-white artificial flowers on the piano’s top. The flowers represented someone’s idea of lilies or tulips, or both, the stems wiry, thin, the leaves long and oval, the off-white petals made of crispy yet dull material. The little boy wondered what those dead flowers were doing there next to the portrait of Franz Liszt in his late years. He looked to the boy more like a sorcerer than a composer, the white strawy hair, the long, misshaped nose hanging over a clamp-like mouth, the warty wrinkled face. The portrait, frightening as it was, revealed to the boy that old age was a lethal thing; Liszt was like a messenger of death and the boy couldn’t wait to see his father succumbing to it so he, Eddie, and his mother could continue their journey into her piano madness without him.

The rest of the house was full of fresh flowers, roses from the garden or Asian lilies that his mother loved so much, their colours ranging from creamy orange to ashes-of-roses. Eddie was not aware as to why the dead flowers over the piano scared him. Perhaps their immortality did; they were like the music itself, eternal. Perhaps the music lay embalmed in the sarcophagus of the piano, or the piano was an ordinary coffin containing the dusty remnants of the composer Franz Liszt and the artificial bouquet was a token of the mother’s secret sin of having sucked the composer’s blood in a moment of a vampire’s frenzy.

It was the right thing to do for her, thought Eddie, she was so pale, his mother, she needed some blood, and he was not going to betray what she was doing to Franz Liszt.

The little boy watched his mother grew paler and paler and her melancholy acquired a dangerous quality that spread like mould growths inside the dark corners of the house. When Eddie asked her about the dead flowers. Her response was a giggle of a young girl so unexpected that even the heavy brocade curtains quivered as if a playful breeze had invaded the stillness of the room.

“Oh. The flowers. They came down to me with the piano. They belonged to my mother and before that to her mother and before that to her mother’s mother. You see, Eddie, if those flowers were living they couldn’t have lasted for so long, they couldn’t have reached me bringing the spirit of those women who lived before me, all music lovers.” Her voice resonated inside her prayer-turned room, where the piano was an altar and she an ardent follower of her god, the music – a savage and demanding god.

The artificial flowers and their deadliness were in full contrast with the father’s desk ornaments, acquired mostly through antiquity auctions. The objects had a poignant masculine quality about them, a life and dynamics of their own. A miniature sculpture called guns and games representing a coarse metal hook on a stand, a set of knives and a rifle hanging from it along with several dead ducks and pheasants, a retriever at the base of this bronze miniature looking proudly at the catch. A glass top box with Roman coins, so useless, his mother had once sighed, money can’t buy anything for the soul. A collection of silver-capped liquor bottles. A sand watch the boy liked to play with by turning it upside down, watching in awe the fine sand grains travel through the narrow throat. It was a simple glass thing on a square-shaped stand with Tempus fugit written on it.

“Time flies,” his father translated it for him while warning him not to go inside the piano madness. Inside the music. Then his telephone rang and he picked it up saying solemnly, “The club of the plane-crash survivors here. Discount for new members.”

The boy never got used to his father’s jokes. It was also hard to follow his warning not to go near the river or his mother’s equally dangerous music. But the boy adored his mother. She never read him bedtime stories but by the fireplace at night she was telling him about Beethoven as Manu for once chased off her lap was sleeping on her slippers.. It was their privacy moment.

“No one has heard of a blind painter,” she would begin, “or of a mute speaker. And no one ever will. But there he was a deaf composer, the greatest among the greatest musicians of all times. And here I am, his humble servant and interpreter of what he meant to say to people.”

It was her Beethoven moment. Usually the Moonshine Sonata, a lump-in-the-throat thing followed by her favourite Camille Saint-Saens’ 6 Etudes for the Left Hand, the hand that usually played a secondary role, the mother told him.

He saw her placing candles on the piano on both sides of the dead flowers and Eddie asked whether there was a blackout.

“No, there is not.” She smiled and that rare smile caressed his little heart.

She was staging a romantic atmosphere, she continued as moonlight caught in the flames of the candles flickering with disturbing insecurity as she was sitting in her long lavender dress buttoned in front up to her chin, her hair in a plait forming a crown, a small lavender ribbon, loose, touching her quivering shoulders. The music sheets were open, but she hardly looked at them. Her eyes suddenly two key holes hiding something dark and menacing. Scared, he ran to his bed and covered his head, but the image persisted as he sobbed.

She heard his stifled distress and joined him, taking him in her arms, talking gently to him, telling him how much she loved him. That was all he needed and he didn’t consider Manu a threat for her undivided attention. Grateful, the boy would kiss his mother on the cheek, then on her chin, and after a second of hesitation on her lips and she would shiver and drop him back to bed, where he would fall asleep dreaming of music, that piece of The Carnival of the Animals called Pianists.

In the morning, he ran down the steps and found her already sitting at the piano, massaging her hands.

“Can’t you teach me to play while he is not here?” Eddie clung to her embracing her arm, but then he sensed that jealousy was haunting her, too. Jealousy to let anyone but her touch the piano. Besides Manu was there looking triumphantly at him from her lap.

Her silence was oppressing.

Did she hear him?

He backed away slowly turning occasionally his head as she started to play. He stopped. It was something new and there were not note sheets in front of her. She was swaying slightly and everything was harmonious and smooth until…

She emitted a cry and abruptly stopped nursing her left hand. It had cramped up and she sat there crying – tears like whole notes rolling down her tender face. Not knowing how to help the boy ran back to her and touched her hands now both clawed and impaired, the unknown music non-retrievable, dissipating in the air, the piano baring its teeth, a beast she wanted to tame and was paying for it.

After an hour her hands were good again, but he could read on her tormented face that the fear that they might cramp up again remained.

Then there was a pause. Just like between two concerts or symphonic movements.

She didn’t play for days and walked noiselessly like a shadow always followed by Manu who sensing her mood forgot all about his joyful high-pitched barking.

Then one evening by the fire she looked at Eddie as if seeing him for the first time and started talking about her father.

“He was a famous pianist who,” she said placing her bony half-crippled hand inside his armpit as if in search of a miraculous healing, “looked always concerned and exhausted, absorbed in practising his next program. Eight hours a day, ten hours a day, thirteen hours a day, nineteen hours a day, night and day. Because he was a great believer in practising, in working hard, in turning himself into an instrument or at least into a vitally important part of the piano mechanism, always dressed in black and white – the colours of the piano and the mute films – during all those frantic rehearsals at home or in an empty concert hall, all by himself or among musicians, circled around him as if forming a live frame.”

At the end of this unusually for her monologue she stood up and asked, “What’s wrong with a one-tracked mind, and a one-tracked spirit? Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. My father died in a plane crash the day you were born.”

All in tears she ran upstairs to her bedroom followed by Manu.

Eddie felt at loss, asking himself whether his birth had something to do with the death of his grandfather. He got disturbed spending the night tossing between the covers and wetting his bed.

The shame felt like corrosion but his nanny was quick to cover for him. After breakfast Lannie took him on a clandestine visit of the city’s centre, where there were always performing artists. They walked hand in hand along Queen Street Mall gawking at people and shopwindows, each holding a cone of quickly melting ice-cream, mint for Lannie and chocolate for the boy when they became aware of a big commotion around them. A piano player, surprisingly young, in his teens, with fiery black eyes, spiky black hair, and dressed in a black leather jacket and a pair of white velvet trousers that had seen better days, was wheeling what appears to be an old, delapidated piano with a faded green plastic chair balancing on top, a ragged cushion of nondescript colour tied to it, straight towards them. The screeching of the wheels reached a crescendo and the youngster let go of the piano. It landed with a crash and remained teetering for a long moment, as if deciding whether or not to buck. Finally, it decided not to, and the stream of shoppers, bored and now curious, drawn by that pane et circum urge, formed a circle around it. Soon, the pianist, extremely tall for his mid-teens, was crouching over the instrument, which started rolling back and forth on its metal wheels under the fierce, purposeful hammering of the young pianist, who, miraculously, managed to extract every possible sound out of that grandfather of all pianos, on the top of which was now perched a wicker basket containing a few coins, a banal hint as to what it should be used for.

Stunned and deafened by what looked to be a blatantly barbarian approach to music, so different from his mother’s, young Mark exchanged glances with his nanny, not knowing what to think about the nomadic pianist’s performance that seemed to be none other than a virtuoso master class, with its untamed bravura, dizzy speed, torrential effects, the hands chasing each other along the beaten key path, broken chords like broken bones flying through the air, his fingers like predators, bashing then releasing the prey, keeping it alive for a new killing game, the sounds chopped, exhausted from screaming, the left hand jumping over the right in a bungee jumper’s leap. All Eddie thought was that this chap was not afraid of having his hands cramped up.

Eddie recognised the piece: Brahms’ Fantasias, opus 116, No. 1; Capriccio, loved so much by his mother, who might have fainted if she witnessed this desecration, the young performer behaving like a percussionist, the chords under his talon-like fingers tearing fearsome sounds from this piano carcass.

His feet in runners that were once white but now only flaked, pumped the pedals like accelerators, jabbing them, his vigour and passion plunging him into the abyss of total devotion in an almost masochistic trance. He was becoming one with the somewhat cacophonic music, and in the jumble he hit wrong notes, but the growing crowd didn’t care, the effect was so overwhelming, so bold and daring, so contagious and dynamic, claiming Eddie’s sanity, perhaps, imposing him to see his mother’s beloved instrument transformed into an old, jangled coffin, then into a wild bronco speaking an alien language, responding to its determined tamer with equally maddening passion. A hair-raising vision blurred in front of Eddie’s eyes and for a moment the piano looked like a mythical hellhound snarling, baring its teeth, the arms of the young pianist like two monstrous canines crushing the bones of music.

On the way home they walked slowly, Eddie dragging his feet as if delaying or perhaps, as Lannie thought, dreading to go back to his museum-like house with the ancient never-withering flowers, his beautiful mother’s nervous moodiness losing the battle with the father’s arrogant greed for life.

They approached a bus stop shelter. On one of its sides there were timetables and somewhere between them an x-copy with a picture of a dog stood out. The dog looked quite like Manu – hairy, white, small-sized – and Eddie stopped to read the text under the picture. Behind him Lannie was also reading. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Someone has kidnapped Frothy, the Hairy Dog Café’s pooch! What a shame!”

Eddie turned his head to her and asked in a small voice, “Can we tear it off and take it with us, please?”

“Why would you need it?” Lannie was failing to read what was there in the boy’s eyes.

In the same small and pleading voice Eddie said, “We can make a magic for the same people to dognapped Manu.”

Lannie was not happy about this magic stuff.

They didn’t talk much on the way home and didn’t plot, but Eddie knew that their random musical experience was better kept secret even from the father although he was quick to intercept them with the words, “The weakling.” He pointed his red and hairy finger at the boy. “Shouldn’t live the retro life she has us all trapped into! I talk to a nice bloke, a teacher in French, not in French, in Geography, his name is French: Marcel. He’ll be coming to initiate Eddie in life.”

That night, Eddie couldn’t fall asleep, disturbed by a vision that was an opposite to his mother’s melancholy dressed in oppressive almost funereal sounds. In his dreams he saw the young man. Crouched over the piano, scrawny arms and legs pumping, head jerking, the boy kept bashing the keys, the piano swayed and bounced, rocked and juddered, bucked and skidded, overpowered by the fierceness of the performer’s fiery eyes, by this bizarre braveness and challenge to ride the classics and turn their music into a pulsating life.

The next day in the garden, the boy’s playing was interrupted by what was becoming a rare appearance of his mother outside the huge house. She was like an apparition, thin and suave, in a white-and-pale-lilac dress laced around the wrists, her ashen face lost in thought. He watched her for a long time until he realised that she had not moved and was also like him, absorbed in watching. Occasionally, she lifted a lace handkerchief to her eyes.

Careful not to make noise, the boy shifted himself to a position that allowed him to see what his mother was so intensely looking at. At first it didn’t make sense to him. It was his father’s back against a closed window and he was wearing one of his favourite white shirts of raw silk. His father’s back was moving, bouncing against the window and the boy wanted to cry out to warn him that he might break the glass and hurt himself. Eddie made a step forward with an open mouth, ready to shout the warning, but tripped on the edge of the flower bed and fell nose first into a red rose bush.

Startled by the noise and his screams his mother ran away, she didn’t come to his rescue.

When he crawled out of the rose bush, all in smarting scratches, he saw that his father’s back was dead still and two dark hypnotic rivers were running down his white shirt. It took a while for Eddie to grasp that what he took for rivers were the arms of his nanny that carried a strong, intoxicating smells and thorns like the red rose bush as his mother resembled the delicate artificial flowers on top of the piano.

That evening his mother with Manu on her lap played some of the most melancholic pieces, Chopin’s C minor Nocturne and Ravel’s Fugue from le Tombeau de Couperin. She never mentioned the boy’s scratched face and it was attended to by his young nanny. The following days Eddie was often left alone with her at home, his father being at work or hunting and his mother visiting a Swiss clinic.

In their absence Eddie’s nanny sang and danced for him, vibrant and contagious rhythms and the boy would abandon his miniature cars, planes and soldiers, his balls and bikes and follow her around the house, meddling with her domestic chores, both shaking their booties, rolling their eyes, imitating the matted-haired Bob Marley or the Voodoo personality Baron Samedi, the Lord of Death. Even Manu left the piano chair where he was curled waiting for the mother to return and joined them resuming his joyful high-pitched barking.

The special thing about their shared moments was that Lannie treated Eddie like an adult, and being a coffee lover she introduced him to the fascinating world of aromas one could extract from a handful of coffee beans, shiny like her eyes, velvety smooth like her voice. The scene with his father’s white shirt moving against the window was soon forgotten.

Eddie learnt secrets about fragrances different from his mother’s subtle whiffs of flowers, real flowers, not like those on the top of the piano, the same piano that would appear in his dream like a monster baring its teeth. The fragrances of the coffee beans were robust, they made him jump and scream in excitement, they made him dizzy at times, they always stirred something inside him as he chased his nanny around the kitchen as she prepared his father’s afternoon black drink. The coffee boiled and hissed in the pot then burst out of it, all bubbles and lava-like sizzle pouring out onto the hot plate. They ran to open windows and clean the mess, laughing, making jokes about the spirit of the coffee. Then they made a new brew and carried it to his father, waited for him to take the first noisy slurp and loudly approve. “That’s what I call a real Jamaica Blue! You can’t have it better even at the Hairy Dog Café!” And his thundering chuckle made Lannie beamed as she and Eddie retreated back into the kitchen.

When his mother was back from the Swiss clinic he watched her sip on her tea out of an almost transparent bluish-white porcelain cup ornate with cabbage-like pink roses and a gold-painted handle.

Ignoring Manu yawning and stretching on her lap he asked, “Why don’t you never drink coffee?”

She left the cup on the tray in front of her and looked at him for a long time.

Then she replied, “Coffee is for vulgar people, my love, vulgar people like …” She didn’t finish, but he knew. His father and his nanny were such people, only he had to discover what the word “vulgar” meant.

He ran to ask his father and all he got was, “The tea and the coffee lovers are like the Montecchi and Capuleti.” An answer which made everything look even more obscure.

On the morning of his birthday, the boy came down from his room and found that his mother was home, back from visiting a Swiss clinic. She was already at the piano extracting frantic and surprisingly cacophonic sounds with one hand. He sat in his corner where his new model planes waited for him. Imitating a droning sound, he piloted them above his head, letting them collide. Shortly after abandoning them, the boy stealthily walked to his mother, catching the faint whiff of flowery perfume, reaching up unnoticeably for the downy curls on her neck. Manu, the Bichon Frise, lay stretched across her lap, his small pink tongue licking her free hand. The dog’s button-like eyes, shiny with delight, met his and a pang of jealousy pierced the boy’s heart. He moved back and tip-toed to the front door, opening it quietly. Manu pricked up his ears, jumped quickly on the floor and ran through the open door, disappearing into the garden.

The hair-raising squeals, the growls of the hunting dogs choking on the unexpected quarry, his mother’s screams, all burst in one.

The boy ran up to his room. Through the window he could see his mother kneeling, pressing the bloodied mess, what Manu’s little body was, to her chest, sobbing uncontrollably, her pale silk dress drenched in blood, blending with the rose bush behind her into a mythical figure, half-fairy, half-rose, screaming at the guard dogs to back off. And then the bull Mastiffs not backing off, growling, pulling on the already torn Manu’s body, trying to rip it off his mother’s arms, getting fiercer, barking wildly, charging at his mother and more blood gushing from Manu’s body, only it wasn’t from Manu’s body …

His mother lay sprawled on the ground, the dogs baring their blooded teeth, digging their teeth…

Dumbstruck, he ran out of his room and down the stairs, storming into the garden when an iron hand grabbed him by the neck and lifted him in the air.

“Mummy, mummy!” he cried, fighting to break free, kicking the air, trying to turn his head, although he knew who was holding him like a rag dog, although he knew the voice that thundered in his ears. The voice drowning his manic screams, the ferocious barking and growling of the bull Mastiffs and the weakening agonised screams of his mother.

“Let it be, son. Let it be.”

In the river’s dark hypnotising waters his horror was morphed into an eddy, celebrating his initiation in life.

With fierce and familiar bravado.

7. The day when Frothy was spotted by a false-teeth model

YORKIE

And the weirdos

She was a woman of mysterious powers.

No one had seen her leave the house where she lived with other moderate cases of marginal existence, like her friends Ziggy, who was a man of mysterious illnesses, and Judy, a woman of mysterious wealth.

The woman of mysterious powers had a pet, a black ant called Gala, and often rebuked it for crawling on the holy images of saints and martyrs scattered around her room, or warned it of approaching spiders and their sticky webs.

People came to visit her for her psychic abilities. Because that’s what the Duchess was – a courier of subtle messages between the visible and the invisible, between reality and the world beyond, between the palatable knowledge and the elusive occult, between the kingdom of the living and the realm of the dead.

No matter what tools she used: cards, cannellini or coffee beans, sugar cubes, rice, photos or uttering strange animal-like growls, she conversed with Gala and on rare occasions with Ziggy, who was elderly and in the habit of wearing woollen mittens on his feet. But, it was Gala that supplied the right answers.

“When I’m reading somebody’s future, and Gala happens to crawl up a holy image, I know the person in front of me is doomed, so I refuse to read further,” she would say to her friends in her sing-song way of conveying her unusual visions.

The Duchess lived in a trance, with one foot in the living present and the other there, where life transformed into different matter. She was a bridge between the banal and the imperceptible, between the oscillating whisper of the animated world and the wise silence of eternity. Through this bridge ran magnetic and electric currents and energies of a mysterious nature.

She seemed made of two parts. The left side of her face was alive. It was rippled by mimics and nervous ticks, the nostril trembling like a mare’s smelling danger. The right half of her face was dead. A mask, stiff, motionless, with dry scaly skin, thin like papyrus. Everything there suggested stillness, timelessness. Deep underground silence. A cast of immortal death. The history of her gift was rooted in a stroke that left her in bed for a year in the company of her friends Judy and Ziggy, who never separated with the mittens on his feet, even in the tropical summer of Brisbane. Ziggy found Judy not to be a very reliable person, so he was the one mostly looking after the Duchess, reading to her from his books, attending to her pills, and witnessing how the Duchess entered the realm of the dead with the left half of her face and began to pass down coded messages to those who were still lingering on the streets of life in constant fear of Baron Samedi, the Voodoo Lord of death.

Ziggy who had proclaimed himself to be the last Pythagorean was envious of the fact that Pythagoras came from a small village on the island of Samos, a village known for the best dildos in the ancient world while Ziggy’s origin had to do with a town know for its beautiful flowers like Toowoomba, after all no one was perfect. Ziggy thought that humanity was ungrateful because the four big planets with their massive gravity were guarding the Earth from flying asteroids and other violent and catastrophic object and no one had ever said thank you so, he thought, it was to him to avenge this shame and praise Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune for their excellent job; after all the Earth was still in one piece.

On his old face Ziggy’s eyes were pools of youthfulness, the kind that never goes away with years. His whole life was dedicated to one fervent passion, to spread Pythagoras’s legacy among his disciples, the Duchess and Judy, the first a chronic absentee from his lectures, the second trying his patience with her mundane approach to the matter. She refused to understand that while the Pythagoras theorem for the hypotenuse is valid only for flat surfaces and the Earth is not flat, strange enough the straight line between let’s say New York and Amsterdam is not the fastest way to get there. The fastest way is to follow the great arch. The birds flying from America to Europe never fly along a straight line but follow the great arch. Their retina has a sensor and they are sensitive to the magnetic field, they virtually can see the magnetic field. Humans can’t.

There was another disciple, a good mathematician, nicknamed Harry Fibonacci. He came to visit Ziggy occasionally. What they usually did was to sit in silence and tune to each other’s brain’s waves, then pay tribute to Pythagoras citing quotes by him like this one: The oldest, shortest words –‘yes’ and ‘no’– are those which require the most thought. Due to family issues, Harry Fibonacci stopped coming lately. It was pity that instead of spending his life on cracking uncrackable equations Harry was spending it on something useless like a family. Screaming kids had never contributed to anyone’s philosophical achievements. Yet, somehow, loudmouth wives did, what was Socrates’– notorious for her “argumentative spirit”.

Consumed by his obsession, Ziggy was copy/pasting the life of his idol, dreaming of that final moment when his existence could merge with that of Pythagoras. With Harry out of the picture, he had to rely on his disciples the Duchess and Judy to help him along for this. But he also lived in a constant fear that Judy was up to stealing his dentures.

Oblivious of this monstrous suspicion Judy was making popcorn in her room. It looked as if she lived on popcorn and milk she drank from a baby bottle; the braces across her front false teeth made her look like a real kid. Next to her a miniature dog, a tiny Yorkshire that was born last in a litter of pushy siblings, was lapping delicately from his milk bowl. The bowl was a tiny, but Judy was afraid that Yorkie could drown in it so she was keeping an eye on him. And on the cat. Both Judy and Yorkie were afraid of her.

The cat sneaked along the long corridors. In the semi-darkness, she looked like an Abyssinian from the days of Ancient Egypt, or a Siamese, the sacred guardian of Buddhist temples. The cat belonged to the Duchess.

Judy was a silhouette artist, trying to revive what was considered by many a dying art. It resurrected in the mid-1700s after Étienne de Silhouette, Louis XV’s minister of finances, and Judy was convinced that sooner or later it should bring her money. Not that she was poor, oh no. Judy was rich and that was her freakishness, she was rich and had chosen to live in this boarding house, where she thought life had originality and style and people were visionaries. She had a pair of small sharp scissors and lots of silhouette paper and loved to walk around the corridors and the patio of what they all called the shithouse and snap profiles then sell them to the “models”, who had to pay. Everybody bought them because what Judy charged was a hug. She thought that if people hugged all day long like the bonobo monkeys, then nobody would need to go to paradise. At the end of the day she was counting the hugs she’d earned and was grateful to possess such an artistic inspiration.

Sometimes Judy would cut strange unreadable silhouettes and say, “I do also things that I find difficult to express in words. Like people as beautiful as Botero’s characters listening to Albinoni.” And she would turn on her popcorn machine and watch the dance of the popping grains. Plain corn kernels performing step dance, hip-hop dance, tap dance, whirl dance, lap and pole dance. She smiled, overwhelmed by the tantalising aroma of freshly made popcorn with a caramel flavour.

Judy looked like popcorn herself with her crisp golden hair and white cotton dress showing her legs with brown streaks and knots of varicose veins, a shy smile showing her braces. She loved friends, she even had some outside the house like that nice lady Mrs Claire Jones, the dog sitter with whom they shared a hush-hush attraction to young olive-skinned men.

Judy put on the TV. Reporters were in front of the court where that head-chopper killer had been escorted to hear the jury’s decision. The bastard was walking with his head high, he still had one, his arrogance was appalling and Judy quickly switched the TV off. It was always bad news all over on the other channels too. The poor journalists must be like carrion beetles feeding on decomposing flesh, thought July, then she turned to Yorkie and said, “At least, I am safe here among friends. I better show how grateful I am bringing them popcorn.”

Judy found Ziggy asleep. At least his eyes were closed and small air-bubbles were rising from his beard mottled with crumbs from past meals. Judy signed. The beard definitely didn’t make him look like those fatal lumbersexual men on mag covers.

She looked around his room. Kettles – eunuchs. Portraits squashed in silver frames. Flowers made out of plastic bags. Candle butts. Masks of the Japanese theatre Noh. In a dark corner an old computer with cables enough to make it look like a centipede. Wasn’t her friend a bit eccentric the way she liked her friends to be?

Today Judy was wearing her golden brace across her false teeth. The brace was embedded with a diamond the size of a fish eye and her smile was dazzling. Everybody knew the story about the braces in the mouth of this infantile woman – she had spent her puberty with a plain metal one and now in her old age and as the only heir to her late father’s mysterious wealth, she wanted something special. She invented the idea of turning simple teeth braces into expensive jewellery – created by a dentist and a jeweller in a common artistic effort. She was the owner of a dozen of these expensive braces and loved to change them according to her mood, dress or the weather. On a rainy day, she loved to wear her silver braces with a few small jades and a larger turquoise stone; when it was sunny she put on golden ones with an emerald in the middle, a real Fernando Dias one from the famous Brazilian mine; when it was stormy a moonstone would appear between her lips, made of white gold. If her dress was pink, she would wear a bright greenish-pink tourmaline on platinum braces and this was her favourite jewel.

Judy had made a will leaving her jewellery to her niece Elena who was following in her steps. Elena known also as the beautiful Elena was wearing braces incrusted with mother-of-pearl but these days was interested in Judy’s collection.

Judy wanted to leave something also to her friend the Duchess. The Duchess was the only one who listened to her long stories. Yorkie listened to her short ones, like the one explaining why with so much money she preferred to remain living at that miserable boarding house, where the only wall decorations were tattered signs with rules and regulations like Keep the toilets cleen, stupid! and Don’t set fire in bed, use ashtrays for the purpose!

“For the company, Yorkie, I am here for the company. You can’t find fine educated people like you find here anywhere else. A dental technician once mentioned the place to me. He made my first dentures and gave them to me with an amber teething necklace against the hurting of sore spots.”

Judy knew that Yorkie was not of the same opinion. He was afraid of the Duchess’s cat. She hissed at him menacingly at every opportunity along the long, dark corridors; it was as if the whole shaky structure was made of long, dark corridors. Judy first wanted to have a cairn terrier like Toto in her favourite film The Wizard of Oz, but that was at the time when she genuinely thought that Oz stood only for Australia. She couldn’t find a cairn terrier, so Yorkie had to do.

Judy had never been a mother. She liked to ask the Duchess how it felt to be a mother.

“The difficult thing is to be a mother and a child at the same time,” answered the Duchess after consulting Gala, because she herself has never been a mother. “Then, you feel schizophrenic and you fight to retrieve your lost identity ever after.”

Sometimes, bewildered after answers like this, Judy ran along the corridors of the house, shaky like rope bridges. The structure was old, perhaps over a hundred and fifty years, with surprisingly spacious rooms. It must have belonged to a wealthy family once. A family that could afford having over fifty people for tea in a rotunda on the second floor above the entrance overlooking Gregory Terrace. Now, the rotunda was partitioned in wedges like a cheesecake and Ziggy was occupying such a triangle slice. That suited him because Ziggy was a mathematician obsessed with the golden ratio.

“You are beautiful, Judy,” he would say to his friend. “You are three-to-two! You would be a hundred and ten centimetres from the tips of your crooked toes up to the navel against your whole height of a meter sixty-five! See? Perfect! We are not talking about mass here. For Pythagoras six was the perfect number; one plus two plus three is six and one multiplied by two multiplied by three is six. I use the pebbles to decode the last Pythagorean prophecy spelled in numbers. It’s up to me that his legacy is carried on into eternity.”

Ziggy was happy that the Duchess and Judy listened to his theories and the three of them spent time together sharing secrets and oaths, just like the brotherhood of the Pythagoreans once did. The first ancient philosophical brotherhood that was also sisterhood because there were women among the disciples.

Judy, for sure, was a devoted disciple.

Ziggy was not asleep but preparing for what would be dramatic days of sleeplessness.

“It’s the love pendulum of Foucault,” said Ziggy with a notch of guilt in his voice because he was referring to his penis. “Once a year, it reminds me of its existence. I then feel how it moves with the power of a heavy clapper. It turns my head into a pot of shimmering dreams. Can you see them drifting away through the window?”

Judy was still not sure whether Ziggy was awake or was talking in his sleep, but she lifted her head. The window, screened by cobwebs, fat flies like sequins shimmering in them, was closed. Suddenly, a shard of light trespassed the gloomy layer of spiders’ tapestry and Judy could see some golden drops of sun chasing each other, copulating like stray dogs in the sweaty fog of the room.

Judy wanted to offer Ziggy popcorn but he was deeply obsessed with his maleness, which was unusual because most of the time he was obsessed with his mysterious illness. Finding a spot between two kettles – even they looked phallic after Ziggy’s delirious speech – she sat and chomped on her popcorn, listening to Ziggy.

“You know what an artist is, Judy. You cut these silhouettes and you’ve got it. We all are but shadows of ourselves.”

Judy thought for a moment and said, “Gala is also an artist. She walks the land of the holy images.”

“Artist is a diagnosis worse than mine,” continued Ziggy, disregarding her observation, which was fairly disappointing and she choked on a popcorn kernel, suddenly dry and scratchy in her throat. “Happy is the one sick with talent. Perhaps you, Judy, are sick without being aware of it.”

“I am actually,” Judy droned proudly. “They found this Hashimoto disease of my underactive thyroid. They said I produce antibodies that nibble on my thyroid.”

“That’s rubbish,” Ziggy was angry to hear somebody compete with his mysterious illness. “What I have is antibodies that attack the brain and my condition is called Hashimoto encephalitis, although just to confuse the medicine I also have Ross River fever, lupus and Lyme disease antibodies, even though the official understanding among the medical community is that there is no Lyme disease in Australia. What can you say about all this, poor Judy, with one flapping butterfly problem of your thyroid? And honestly, I’m not surprised that your antibodies go there because if they want to attack your brain they would have a job to find it.”

Judy didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended.

Exhausted by the long speech laced with genuine spite, Ziggy closed his eyes then abruptly opened them and reached for a metal tray full of greyish pebbles collected by Judy during her walks with Yorkie in the nearby Roma street Parkland. It wasn’t an easy task because Ziggy was demanding; he didn’t like black pebbles because they reminded him of black holes, he didn’t like white pebbles either because white was sometimes a colour of mourning. Besides there were strange things going on these days in the park. Judy had seen a young blue-eyed man parking his car near by and letting a tiny hairy dog on a leash to do her job on the grass. First Judy was disturbed by the fact that it was not permitted even more that the young man didn’t bagged the poo. Then she thought it was strange that the dog all the time bared her teeth and tried to bite her master. Or was it her master? Judy tried to tell Ziggy about her encounter while she was delivering him the new batch of pebbles but she could have talked to Yorkie or to the cat with the same effect.

Like a proper Pythagorean, what Ziggy did was to configure squares by adding the pebbles in a precise way, like one pebble plus three pebbles gives a square, plus five pebbles gives an enlarged square, plus seven pebbles, plus nine pebbles and so on to infinity, or in this case until the pebbles finished, which was inevitably another source of anger for the man of mysterious illness, an illness that was not supposed to exist. He had explained to Judy that he could well meditate by making squares with lima beans, but it would be a desecration because Pythagoreans were forbidden to eat beans. He had a thing about beans, and the rumour went that Pythagoras chose to die in a burning house rather than jump out of the burning building and cross a field with beans to save himself.

“I hate people of art,” groaned Ziggy. “I never trust them. The emperor Nero was also considered a man of arts, musician, poet, whatever, performing male and female roles in pantomimes, but mainly in bed, that is when he wasn’t watching gladiators and wild animals being slaughtered in the Coliseum, the biggest abattoir in history. Killing was the emperor’s favourite pastime. I wonder whether it was the love pendulum of Foucault that dictated his life.”

“Your books are more interesting than the ones I read,” Judy admitted, finally deciding not to be offended, although she didn’t feel flattered either.

“I’m not reading romance books like you. They throw you into the dust of the multitude.” A smile like a distant echo touched Ziggy’s face. “It’s walking books that I’m reading.” After a pause with a mocking smirk he added, “Every man or woman is a walking book.” He paused again and spat meaningfully, “Nero murdered his mother, Agrippina. To be a mother is not very healthy, darling Judy.”

Here Judy got so emotional that she grasped the shaky frame of Ziggy’s bed with both hands, letting go of the popcorn. The bowl hit the metal tray and pebbles and popcorn kernels scattered noisily among the flowers made of plastic bags that Ziggy kept to honour the sad news about the five continents recently created by plastic debris, two in the Pacific, one in the Indian Ocean, and two in the Atlantic.

Distressed, Judy started to cry.

“You talk too much.” Ziggy frowned. “We have to do something about your tyroid! I hope you’re not going to interrupt me all the time. That’s why I don’t like artists.”

For the sake of their friendship Judy stopped crying, examining the Noh mask instead, wondering whether she could achieve the same change in expression and mood on the images she cut, whether she could create a shadow on the black silhouette paper. Then she left Ziggy to his pendulum and headed back to her room to check on Yorkie.

The automatic lights in the main corridor went out and in the semidarkness Judy saw the cat yawning and stretching, showing her claws.

Given half the chance the little dog would bolt and run away. He suffered from separation anxiety and even Judy’s briefest absence triggered it. Now she was met by gales of squeals, his little nose pushing into her cushiony ankles, he was bouncing on her feet, hindering her advance, nearly making her trip on a mango that he had rolled down from a plate on her bedside table, an antique Japanese thing encased within four upward pointed katanas for legs. She picked Yorkie and, squirming and ecstatic, he licked her ear, trying to set himself free and perhaps make a dash for the outside where there were so many unexplored smells. Yorkie was never allowed to roam the corridors. Judy didn’t trust the taxi driver whose room was opposite hers. Sometimes coming out of the bathroom he tried her door which she wisely kept locked and she wouldn’t know whether he was absent-minded or drunk.

In the afternoon Judy fell asleep – in terms of food a nap was also a snack like popcorn – and a dream came to her.

In the dream she had put on her favourite teeth braces: white gold and moonstone. It was midday, but the moon was shining reflecting in her smile. On the Brisbane riverbank, Judy took off her fancy silk garment and remained in the tender mantle of her fluffy hair. She hadn’t looked at herself naked for a while, but in the dream she looked good and young as she sank her moon-white pedicure into the water, the cold tickled her and she stepped back onto the shore. Then, she felt brave to dive and only her face remained like a white lily on the surface among the grass leaves of her floating hair. That day, she belonged to herself. To herself and to the river. Something tickled her again. Tickle-tickle. She began to laugh and the moon beams from her braces spilt, and for a moment the water seemed to turn into mother-of-pearl. Something gently pulled her down and she saw on the bottom the most beautiful little stones she could have wished for her brace jewels. Yes, she was going to collect them. She reached out, but the little stones slipped through her fingers. She couldn’t get them. Lost in searching, she realised she had entered deep waters and got scared. She had never gone so far in and alone. Was she alone? No, she wasn’t and she smiled widely to show the jewel she was so proud of. “Please watch my braces,” Judy said a moment before the brace got loose and sank into her tender throat.

Coughing, she jumped awake in her bed, nearly squashing Yorkie, who complained with high-pitched whines. They comforted each other and Judy reached for the local newspaper which she had picked on her way home from the Roma Parklands. She was stunned to see a picture of a hairy white dog under the word missing in big fat letters. Instinctively Judy pressed Yorkie to her chest and Yorkie protested in a small complaining yapping. Judy read the text next to the picture and more she looked ta it, more the little pooch in it resembled to the dog she had seen during her and Yorkie’s walk coming nervously out of that car, baring her teeth at the young blue-eyed man supposed to be her master. Was he? There was a telephone for contact at the end of the text which was a passionate cry for help and Judy decided to ring it but Yorkie was hungry and was doing everything to remind her that it was his meal time. Judy decided to place the call after Yorkie’s and her dinner which was usually in the company of Ziggy and the Duchess.

It was dark when the three friends gathered in Judy’s room. For dinner Ziggy had a kettle of wine, Judy a baby bottle of milk, the Duchess a bowl of cold bean stew brought to her by a client who didn’t need it because for him Gala crawled up a holy image.

Through the window, the three friends could see the streetlights of Spring Hill and the lavish greenery of the Roma Street Parkland, and behind it a stretch of the Brisbane River’s elbow nestling the State Library of Queensland. Somewhere to the right of the Parkland, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Paddington, was Judy’s favourite café restaurant, Casablanca, where she liked to have an occasional lunch or enjoy the rhythm of Latino dances in the arms of young, strong men. Not like Ziggy, she thought, observing his knife-like nose and ropy arms under a baggy jumper of nondescript colour, his shoulderblades kneading the space, his elbows jabbing at his words while he was talking. Ziggy you can’t even take to the Hairy Dog Café, there they’d wonder what breed he is.

“What you see in the sky is not a real picture, Judy. People chart the sky using light and sound waves that reach the earth millions of light years later. What a sky map shows might not be there at all.”

Judy gazed at the stars, which looked like small frightened children to her, running for their life. If I become a mother, I can adopt them, thought Judy.

Next to her the Duchess began to shake, and then she cried out and fell backwards, her arms outstretched, her body twitching on the ground, her hands beating on the floor, her fingernails scratching the floorboards. Judy’s first reaction, as always, was to lurch towards the Duchess and try to bring her back to her senses, but Ziggy held Judy back. “The stars are getting her ready for the music.”

Mystical sounds were already dancing around them, some like the rustling of coffee beans inside a hemp bag, others hypnotic, resembling the distant cry of a dingo when the moon hangs like a tasty bone over the Brisbane River.

Judy felt like dancing and she turned to Ziggy, who made such an abrupt eye contact that it scared her. She wanted to tell him that he had the irresistible charisma of an ocean-born driftwood, that she liked the plastic flowers he collected to express his disgust with what he called plastic society, that she liked what he said about people being walking books. She kept silent, instead dreaming that one day she might adopt Gala and finally experience what it was to be a mother. She hoped Yorkie would understand her and give them some space to get to know each other.

The Duchess slipped back to reality and found it as disappointing as the return of Ulysses. She found Ziggy borrowing the braces from Judy’s mouth and sinking them into her tender throat. He had transferred the mittens from his feet to his hands.

“See,” he turned to the Duchess, “everybody knows about the Pythagorean Theorem, only a few know that Pythagoras was a killer. People kill over lust, greed, jealousy or hatred. Only Pythagoras was rumoured to have killed his student because of the square root of two. Hippasus had to die because he proved that the square root of number two was irrational. This went against Pythagoras’s theory that all numbers are rational. Was Pythagoras acting irrational? I don’t know. To me most killers look quite rational.”

“Gala was already crawling up a holy image for her,” the Duchess said with a sigh before swaying. “Where is Yorkie?” she asked.

“It was a long night,” said Ziggy, ignoring her question while transferring the mittens back to his feet. “Once the homicidal energy discharged, the love pendulum of Foucault has lost its power of a clapper raising noise to heaven and I can relax and go back to my work decoding the last prophecy of Pythagoras spelled in numbers. My money is on the presumption that unlike Freud, who bitched that sexual energy transformed into creative, Pythagoras proved that sexual energy on a good day turned into a killing weapon. And it’s not because I don’t like artists.”

The wind whooshing through the long corridor pushed at the creaking hinges of the door and it burst open. The cat came in with Yorkie, hanging lifeless from her mouth. She put him gently down.

“Perhaps that would be the same with cats,” remarked Ziggy on his way out, holding Judy’s box with her strange jewellery under his arm. “But I don’t think Pythagoras said anything about cats. He loved dogs and recognised in one of them the soul of his dead friend. I hope it wasn’t the one he killed. Anyway, I shouldn’t look at Yorkie …”

“Because you are going to recognise your friend Judy in him?” The Duchess stopped swaying what would have been to the rhythm of the stars.

“No way, the dog’s also dead.”

“But Gala isn’t,” said the Duchess. “And I can see her crawling up a holy image for you.”

“That’s bullshit. I pretended I believed all this bullshit because you are a friend and I looked after you. ”

“I know,” the Duchess said with a nod. “And I appreciate it.”

“Now that I killed one of my devoted disciple I am like Pythagoras! I am Pythagoras!” said Ziggy full of pose and vigour coming from his pendulum.

The Duchess was not looking at him when she said, “I was lucky it wasn’t me but I’ll be left with no friends for dinner while listening to the music of the stars.”

Giggling and seemingly joyful and patronising, clutching the box tight, Ziggy headed for the door, waving goodbye to the Duchess. “Now I can create my Pythagorean squares with precious pebbles and decode his prophecy!”

Another gust of wind whooshed through the corridor slamming the door in Ziggy’s face. He staggered, stumbled into Yorkie’s water bowl, and falling he knocked the bean stew, his mittens slipping on it. Between him and the floor was Judy’s bedside table; one of the katanas went straight through his throat. Blood gushed into the water turning it red.

“It’s really sad,” said the Duchess to the cat. “I feel like the accused who, after having killed her parents, asked for mercy because she was an orphan. Now we have to befriend other roomers.”

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

8. The day when dog lovers were urged to answer a call to arms

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...
~

You might like ilinda markov's other books...