A Hand in the Bush. Jane Clifton
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All strangely attractive men who are gruff, withdrawn and socially inept, generally turn out to be just that. They won't change. They will not blossom and grow in the sunshine of your love. You think you see a spark of something in them? You don't.
And yet, there will be that moment when you make love, and it's good and some part of you thinks to itself, but not in so many words, 'I could change this one'. But it won't happen.
The leopard, the old dog and the plus ça change bay for acknowledgment.
Somewhere, in the deep recesses of the past, his amphibious heart was created cold, selfish, incapable of love, and cast like a rock inside a handsome prince. While your heart was spun from fairy-floss.
His good looks are not a reflection of some hidden, sunny person ality, waiting for the touch of your enchanted lips.
A frog is a frog is a toad.
Decca Brand lay in the dark, between safe sheets, drifting in the pre-dawn shallows of consciousness, running through possible candidates for her impending blind date: the beef-jerky sports jock, the dandruff-frosted bank manager, the chinless CEO with the low IQ, all swirling around her head alongside sleaze buckets and anger-management fodder.
At first alarm she threw back the bedding and leapt to her feet. A moment's hesitation and the day would be lost. Clothes, water bottle, helmet, bike; then out into the moist, still, refrigerator air.
Jagged, pink streaks blundered their way through purple clouds, as birds twittered and the dull grey water of Port Phillip Bay lurked somewhere up ahead. Tyres swished on wet grass as she walked to the track, her head floating in a halo of frosty breath.
Shoes into clips, then off.
Push and stretch, push and stretch: blood coursing through her calves, thighs starting to burn; damp air freezing her cheeks, slicing into her sleepy eyes, welding her gloves to the handlebars.
Three or four gear-shifts later she was warm, awake, and rounding the bend past the beachfront swimming pool. A sliver of gold foil wrapped in cerise tissue peaked out above the distant city skyline promising light but no hope of warmth on this mid-July morning.
Past the Timeball Tower she rode, all the way to where the Titanic was permanently beached in the Lord Nelson Hotel on the corner of Kanowna Street.
Her pulse was up to 159 when she hit the western end of Nelson Place. There she turned, in a slow arc, back towards her home on the old rifle range (where the fish and the pelicans play), her day perfectly on course.
Two months shy of her forty-eighth birthday, it was not a case of move it or lose it for Decca Brand. The coffee hissed into the steel bowl of the Atomic, as she towelled dry her hair and flicked on both computer and television on her way to the kitchen sink. Excess weight had never been a problem for her. At a kitten-heel over six feet, with long legs and big feet, the avoir du had never got its hands on the poids. All food intake was marshalled into fuelling her giant frame. The punishing start to the day was for fitness and for the calm engendered by natural endorphin release. In her job, Decca needed all the calm she could get.
A daily parade of stressed-out nutters and victims of that curse of modern life-the panic/anxiety reflex disorder-filled the pages of her appointment diary and the comfy couches of her consulting-rooms on the money side of the Westgate Bridge.
She pulled a pink angora hooded sweater over her head, smoothed it over grey suede pants, then turned off the gas beneath the Atomic and reached for the single coffee cup in the dishrack.
Her coffee cup. No need for a name, or the letter 'D', or a pattern of stripy cats to distinguish it from anyone else's cup. Her coffee cup in her dishrack, in the kitchen of her one-bedroom apartment. And when she had drained the cup of her second long black of the morning she would run it under the hot tap and replace it in the rack, where it would remain untouched until she used it again.
Did she really need company? Someone else's dishes? Someone else's shoes under the bed? Toothbrush and Philishave and wet towels on the bathroom floor? All the complications that might ensue from a blind date? Wasn't Boofles enough?
She winked at her victory-of-custody battle, her marmalade cat. He preened and nuzzled her leg in return as she bent to fill his bowl with Super Kitty Brunchette 'enriched with Scampette for healthy active cats', safe in the knowledge that there was no product known to man or beast able to transform Boofles from sloth to puma.
Two apricot poptarts sprang from the toaster as Decca clicked on her email and deglazed the Age from its shrinkwrap sheath.
The weather? Cold. The Odd Spot? Mildly amusing. The Middle East Crisis and The War against Drugs? Bubbling away quite happily, thank you very much - so much for Nostradamus. The State Opposition accuses the government of nepotism and corruption? No surprises there - comes with the job. The Sports pages? Awash with sex, politics and no goals. The Business pages? Cat-tray liner.
Business as usual, in fact, for a Thursday morning at 7.45. Decca grasped her poker-straight blond hair and twisted it up into a French roll, clamping it with a wide-toothed clip, before bending to zip up her pink, crepe-soled, fur-lined ankle boots.
A childhood of quasi-orthopedic footwear, followed by a desperate, adolescent patronage of drag-queen shoe shops all over Melbourne, was Decca's justification for her worldwide search for pairs of funky size elevens. The pink boots were a find in Les Puces - the Paris flea markets - and, almost twenty years later, they were still hip.
Decca carried the poptarts and coffee to the computer desk. Two emails: yet another petition against the oppression of Afghani women - no worries, click on Forward, that should solve that in a jiffy; and one from Zan.
Dec, just got back from Penang-I am knackered! Hope you haven't forgotten the Xmas in July thingy at the winery this weekend? It's not one of mine so we can chill.
Can't wait to see how Lizzie O handles Mr Woodstock-woodabeen, Mr God's-gift to the wah-wah pedal. He was a complete twat on that last tour. 'Hendrix is dead mate!!' That's what he reduced me to saying. 'No-one gives a fuck!! Just get on the fucking stage and play or I'll set fire to your big nylon afro rug!' Remember I told you about the rider? And Lizzie Ojay's letting him loose in a winery?! The other band- my guys-are to die for.
I'm leaving Zsa Zsa with Ainslie. I know, I know, I just got off a plane after five days away...Let me tell you ZZ actually prefers Ainslie's company to mine.
Besides, she's only charging me the flat 200 for the whole weekend instead of the hourly rate. Bargain! It's like that gal actually enjoys making her own play-doh and playing dress-ups with a 7-yr-old! Sometimes she worries me, but not enough to stop hiring her. ZZ asked me to adopt her...and don't think I wouldn't. That's what I need, you know, a wife. Let's take the Merc I'm not doing another trip in that heap of yours. I don't care how groovy it looks, a heater is a heater!
Might drop by tomorrow evening-ZZ's got a birthday party with one of her new Wesley friends, at a pool over yr way, if you don't mind! They're letting anyone in these days, the school's gone to the dogs!
Z xox
Ps got yr Chanel
'Damn!' said Decca. Of course she had forgotten. Zan sent so many emails and invites to her shows it was easy to lose track. Zann McGann's event management company and booking agency covered acts from jugglers to jazz, the Olympics to a suburban wedding. 'NO JOB TOO BIG, NO JOB TOO SMALL, OR ELSE IT'S NO JOB AT ALL' read the bright-red stencil on the wall behind the front desk of her offices in South Yarra.
Even in the late sixties, when she was plain old Susanne Higgins sitting next to Decca at Dandenong High School she had had a furious work ethic. Always one for a motto, back then it was 'Rich and famous by thirty-five, or die'.
That plan was way out of whack well before the unscheduled arrival of baby Zsa Zsa, at the less-than-ripe age of thirty-seven. As for fame, she had enjoyed enough of her thirteen-and-a-half minutes, to make her more than content these days with bankable notoriety.
Decca made a note to ring