For all the Mothers, but moreso for all the Sisters.

As Mother’s day approaches I’m deeply mindful of my own Mum’s wonderfulness, failings, sacrifices, foibles and love.
I recall little magical things: the times home sick when I’d be tucked into a bed so tight I had to fall asleep because movement was impossible. So sleep I would, until around 10am, then it was a chicken-noodle cuppa soup and a white-bread cheese sandwich and a promise that if I stayed in bed until 1 pm I could get up in my jammies and watch ‘The Young and the Restless” then ‘Day’s of our Lives’.
She’d be ironing and the lounge would smell of warm fabric; I’d be hooking my rug or working on the latest craft tapestry.

Or the time she made her first chilli-con-carne using real chillies and got over excited and used sooo much that even my Dad (a business traveller accustomed to the hottest of curries) was gagging and beet-red.

She has her strife (hell she’s Scorpio!) and her lack of sensibility at times- but she’s mine. I get to say that about her, it’s the nature of parenting I guess that for a kid the parent is simply ‘theirs’…

Yet as the advertising sweeps in celebrating this one aspect of Womanhood I’m also mindful of my sisters who aren’t mothers and will not or may never be.
I have friends who have chosen the clear path of not having kids. I salute them for this bravery in a time where ‘family’ still means just one thing in the mainstream.

These smart and beautiful single woman around me who hear the dreaded ticking clock and hope then don't and find ways to somehow push through with open hearts and yet deep introspection.

My lesbian friends who are so strong together and caring and kind but for whom physical motherhood means so much 'assistance' they've chosen to write it off.

My friends and all women who have tried and struggled and tried again and been constantly accosted by the images of babies in most advertising media. It used to be nude gals and sexualization of women I hated in ads, now it’s the notion of the super-mother and super-father with their perfectly clean and cuddly offspring.

I too have tried and tried and struggled and been made little by the medical profession who though they do want to help must have hides of leather to keep themselves sane. I don’t hate them.

But I love my sisters who know the grief, or the choice, or the existential crisis of not being part of this huge club. We stand outside the circle and make our own clubs where the sheer rudeness of strangers and their assumptions, or the sheer arrogance of a culture that celebrates only one form of mothering, are offset by a deep understanding of our times of loneliness and our times of mad and liberal joy.

This mother’s day I ask you to thank any woman you know who has ‘mothered’ you with her care, her cooking, her straight talk or her tough love.

For Jenny, Tracey, Sharnee + Tan. For Aaron and Shona. For Alanna and Sharon and Shellie and Emilie:
My love, respect and abiding fondness for our own 'parenting' cirlce.

The Capacity for Cruelty (draft chapter)

Simon arrives. He is like a raven to her. Black clad, liquorice whip thin, dusty in bike boots; he is incendiary, smoky smelling, his hair wiry-black, bristling like feathers, his eyes the green-black of petrol. His eyes are slanted; astigmatism makes even his most candid glance seem slanted. His fingers are tobacco stained, he reeks of cigarette smoke and hot fumes. His voice when they talk is full of ire and fire- a year’s travels to scorched places, strange dreams dreamt under tin roofs during the shear. He emits sun and dust and sparks and reminds her of the grass fires she as a child saw sweep across the suburban paddocks near her home. Over the next week she learns he’ll pull his weight. His new medication makes him hyped up, manic at times but he burns it up in hacking at the garden with saw, hoe, spade and bare hands. He needs family and home until the next job, until the medication starts doing its level best. One day she finds him squatting under the shadowing ghost-gum examining a single stem of the wild and scrubby garden. He looks slowly from the plant up at her with eyes both flat and brilliant. “Correa Reflexa” is all he says, so that she feels stupid with her mouth full of small hostessy words, and must walk quickly way. She watches him. Her nostrils quiver at his passing odour- hot dust and an acrid tang of sweat. She is appalled by how sharp her lust is, feels the tight pink whirls and coils of her cunt and labia become slick and plumped with blood. She is a creature, an animal, feels every scorching inch of skin, and feels her nipples chafe inside their soft white cup of cotton. She watches from the kitchen window; she wants, and in this rasping state of breathlessness thinks of a match dropped to arid grasslands, contemplates the power and cruelty of fire, of fucking, of this irrevocable thing that she knows must happen.

That night the three of them sit on the veranda drinking beer and wine. Simon rolls cigarette after cigarette from a pouch of Champion Ruby as he and Peter talk of the house, of their boyhood, of Simon’s future.
His voice crackles in the dark against the more soothing hum of Peter’s. Lisa doesn’t talk much, downs the cheap the chardonnay quickly and lies back on an overstuffed and leaking armchair letting Simon’s matches fall at her feet, his voice twine around her like ropes. He is grandiose, drunk, but not as she’s been left to assume, particularly mad. His meds are to help him stop counting and finding numeric solutions to simple acts; the small tablet carefully halved each day allows him to loosen a control he describes as having been so rigid it was bowing his back tight, forcing him to smoke huge quantities of the good grass always available in rural towns. He speaks of people he has known, dogs he has loved. She imagines many women he has loved too, or that have loved him with his petrol eyes and calloused hands. About them the air is heavy and sullen, leeching the dusk sky of all colour save a metallic, toxic silver green. Simon reaches in to the esky for another beer, as the ice tinkles she becomes aware of a faint stirring, of atoms trembling on the brink of some coming shift. As the leaves of the ghost gum dryly flutter on the sudden hot gusts of north wind she realizes she has been holding her breath and lets it our in a sweeping sigh.
She is drunk, twitchy, and sticky with her own sap. She rises. “ I have to go and cool off, too much wine. G’night.”
Peter grabs her hand as she brushes by and kisses it. He is soft and lovely with beer and new company. “I’ll come and scrub your back”
“Don’t, she laughs. “Stay here with Simon or he’ll think we’re a boring old married couple”

Simon looks at her face intently, for what seems an age.
“I don’t think you’re boring” He leans up briefly to kiss her on the cheek, misses and his lips catch the tender skin under he jaw. In an instant her skin communicates this thing to him, flushes against him and she knows he knows.
“goodnight”.


She runs a bath; sometimes a bath is all that will do. When she was a girl if a storm came and the house beneath the hills screamed and shimmied with the wind she would cry and thrash about all electric until her mother dumped her in a bath full of bubbles. Mum would bring in the radio and play ABC oh so soft, sometimes radio-talk would tell a spy story or a torrid romance and the eloquent Shakespearian voices would seem sensible and lulling.
Now she sinks. Into the water to expand like a sponge as the ripples loosen her shoulders and belly. The wind struggles against the violeted window glass and the house creaks and bumps. It is an old house, it breathes in air much the same way she does. If she reclines until her head floats semi submerged she can hear her own heartbeat and water slowly seeping through the plug. She lies like this for minutes, the steady drip of water in her ears like a ticking clock, dulcet, soothing.
When she opens her eyes she sees the dark shadow of him is standing in the slit of open doorway.
She brings her hand up to her ribcage, her elbow making silken eddies in the now cool water. As she touches two fingers to her puckered areola the door softly closes.

....to be continued



copyright Amanda Wilson, 2008

Tourmaline

Selene had dreamed of red the night before she found the lip rouge. In the dream she stood before a smeary mirror in the office tearoom and stared into the image of a face, which rippled as on water. She was taller and leaner and wearing fabrics she struggled against, fabrics she associated with pornography. The lace against her breasts was shiny and rubbed with wear. The silk skirt left her deliberately exposed and nude.
In her left hand, long and coolly pale, she held a delicate black pot stenciled in curlicues of gold gone to brass with the rubbings of time. Poised in her right hand like a cigarette filter dangled a slender brush. She dipped the brush into the pot, still transfixed by her cool other-image, and swirled it so that it emerged coated in redness. Thick vermilion that glistened as brilliant and wet as Chinese lacquer.
With a studied voluptuousness she raised the brush to her mouth and coated over and again the swollen lips. Over and again prod the brush into the pot, rim her mouth deeper and deeper into the red until her lips are sealed and invulnerable, as glossed and impenetrable as cherrywood.
She is asleep behind her mouth and yet in dreaming eases the brush again over the curving swell of her lower lip. It is warm wax. It seals and protects her.

She wakes up to the bass-heavy rattling kump-KA, kump-KA of a hot and rotting autumn wind pushing at the old panes. She makes coffee in the dark and draughty kitchen. No make-up to work today, yet still she is conscious of her mouth, the shapes it makes as she murmurs in the quiet office or sips a half cold coffee from the machine. She keys in data and lets its mindlessness wash over her. The red lip-rouge and all its potency glimmer in her mind, blood-heart of vividness in a room of grey walls, green terminals and shadow. She knows the pot of rouge to be hiding in a drawer; the last of its color caked like shoe polish, smelling of old roses.
That night Selene finds some of her Nana’s old things in a seed pearl purse. She also finds herself frightened by the accuracy of the dream image. She’s not usually prone to deep dreaming, or even to everyday vanities like lipstick. She knows she is colorless and wears her pale peach hair in a ponytail. Her skin is chalky-white and though she’s tried to wear make-up in the past, it always looks garish under the fluorescence at work. Now she moves into the bathroom and flicks her grey-eyed glance across the shelves, looking for the right oil. This is Selene’s private indulgence, fragrant oils for bathing. She loves to bathe, loves to lie in the tub in the darkened bathroom letting her ears drop just below the surface water until she can hear her own heartbeat. She takes a small bottle of macadamia oil, its fragrance already warmly exposed. At the dresser she carefully drizzles oil into the caked pot, watching it moisten and glow brightly red. As she watches this brightening, this process of glimmer and shine, Selene recalls again the dream and how she sucked in her breath as she looked at her final self. She begins to touch her face, and then she opens a bottle and is touching her face with circles of creamy foundation smoothed over her pallor. She puffs talc around her sharp jaw and sees it immediately soften, then with a long pencil rims her eyes in a hint of smudged grey kohl. They are enormous eyes, pools of silver in a blank face. She is a blank canvas that cries out for the red heart/mouth at its center, the color that will twist gazes to her; twist herself into someone new and dangerous. She paints, the color glimmers from the pot, glows on her lips like passion and tastes like old perfume. Selene dresses in a suit the color of milk-touched coffee. She slides pale silk stockings over her smooth legs. The fur collar she found in the old suitcase of her nana’s fits over the jacket and fluffs in a soft amber glow against her throat. Her shoes are oxblood leather. A look in the mirror from heels to head tells her that she is new. She is new and marvelous and shivering with possibility.

She goes perhaps to a darkened jazz club, listens to the sultry music as she sips at short blacks. The saxophonist is tall with long legs and slim hips. She watches and sips, he senses her stare and returns it. Selene feels as though she holds him in place with an invisible thrumming wire of energy that connects their gazes. On the break before the bands’ third set she finds herself being led insistently from the bar, past cables and amps and drum cases and into the half-lit industrial kitchen. His lips are searingly hot as they push aside the fur collar to lick and nuzzle her arched neck. Selene feels his hands between her shoulder blades undoing some hooks, her bra is pulled down leaving her breasts cool and exposed to the air, then his hot mouth finds her nipples, laps and sucks at the tightening pink skin. She is both out of her body with disbelief and immersed deeply in her own flesh as her skirt is hitched up and her knickers eased down. He is sliding incredibly long cool fingers along her thighs and the sink under her arse is icy cold and the sensation of being emotionally detached even as she pushes her breast into his mouth, of burning through her belly even as she shivers against slick metal overwhelms her. Selene pulls at the belt of his jeans then slides the clingy rayon shirt up his smooth torso. He doesn’t say anything to her. His fingers flick against her clitoris sending shimmering heat up her spine, they tangle in her pubic hair as he strokes the skin in low slow rhythms that leave her slack and sprawled and open. She slides her hands into his shorts, delights in the feel of the hard contracting muscles under the hot skin of his arse, then moves her hands round slowly to touch the thick velvety penis that strains towards her fingers.
He bites her throat, her ear; growls ‘God your mouth’ as he pulls her to the edge of the sink and kneels between her wide-flung thighs. His tongues is inside her then lapping and swirling around the whirls of her labia and clit until she collapses, panting, against the tiles, so glad she chose the sax player over the drummer that she laughs aloud…

But maybe Selene doesn’t dig jazz. Perhaps she goes to a gothic club then hides in the toilet fearing her new face in this crowd of strange faces, these ‘petals on a wet black bough’. A woman, tall with a beautiful pale décolletage offset by stiff black ruffles will watch her, then ask her to dance. They go the bar and Violet buys her shots of tequila. Selene drinks and her pink cat-tongue flicks out to lick the salt. They stare at each other and suck on the wedges of lemon. Selene’s mouth is ruby-smeared and tingling as she holds a slice of lemon between her teeth and leans into Violet’s perfumed neck, plum-hued mouth. Violet nips at the lemon, then growls low as she as she twines Selene’s hair into a rope and pulls her inexorably in for the kiss that is soft yet casts a handsome burn. Their knees draw closer together; they finger each other’s hair and napes as their lips slant harder in this kiss. Red lipstick smears with purple so that when they draw apart, panting, their lips looks bruised.

Maybe though Selene tires. Maybe the cat is hungry and wants to play; maybe the flat is warm and safe. Maybe she stays at home, undresses again slowly removing all but the red lipstick at the heart of her face. She reads a few chapters from an erotic anthology with a beautifully photographed black and white nude on its cover. Then, sprawled naked on her old couch she begins to caress herself. She will sigh as her hands glide down her arms against the inner flesh that is white, vulnerable and supple. She muses then that she is glad for this preciousness of skin housing self, for its youthfulness, it’s feeling. She must not waste this skin-communicated thing she has, that people have together. The book drops to the floor as she runs her fingers (so new seeming!) in delicate whirls over her breasts and belly. Her breathing deepens, she feels its heavy ebb and return eddy in the thickly radiant heat of the furnace. She drifts in currents of warm-water pleasure and her cat slinks out an open window.
Here is her form on the old couch: her lips glow softly carmine, her body rises and falls like pale tidal spume; rises, retreats then sinks into the deeps of sleep.

She dreams that she sits in a very hard-backed chair in a row of other people sitting in various poses: upright, stiff, sprawled or coyly cross-footed. In this formation they seem to be flying and so begged on by great gust of wind she stretches out her arms as wings. The one sitting before her does the same, then soon the one behind, and like this, like children in a school game, they turn great arcs against the sky, wheel and dive like birds over a tourmaline-green sea.