Alby was a regular visitor to Adelaide, semi-permanent resident of Ro’s spare room. In that year before the flood she was over every month or so. Her father was in a rooming house at Semaphore, but needed more help. She was caught in the exhausting process of finding residential care.
‘I thought you couldn’t stand him,’ Ro said.
‘I couldn’t before. Maybe I can’t now. Old sod.’
‘So why are you doing this?’
‘Someone has to. And it does hurt. You know? To see him so helpless. I must have loved him when I was little.’
‘Would you have him to live with you?’
‘Dad? Move in with a lesbian and a poof? Get away. He’d rather die in the gutter.’
Ro was interested in other people’s fathers, her own having died when she was small. She drove Alby down to Semaphore. The house was shabby, though someone had tried to weed the front yard, an expanse of sand and tufty grass. Paint was peeling off the front door, which clearly had not been opened for a long time. Ro glanced up and down the street. Several of the neighbouring houses had been made-over. Gentrification was on its way.
She followed Alby round the back, where two men were sitting smoking at an ancient laminex table under an almond tree. They grunted and gestured toward the house.
Alby interpreted. ‘Dad’s inside.’
The room was dark and filled with a miasma of unwashed bedding, dirty socks and unemptied piss pots. Alby stumbled across the room, pulled aside a tattered curtain and dragged the window open. Ro saw that the bundle of clothes in an armchair was in fact an old man. A very dirty old man. His bald pate was mottled brown and his eyelids crusted with sleep.
‘Who’s this?’ he said, glaring at Ro.
‘It’s Ro. Be polite for once, could you?’ said Alby.
Ro grinned at him.
‘She’s trying to kill me,’ he told her.
‘Who is? Alby?’
‘Her name’s Roberta.’
‘Roberta then. How come you think she’s trying to kill you?’
But he had lost interest.
‘I was in the war you know,’ he said.
‘Were you?’
‘Oh yeah. I got medals.’ He turned to Alby. ‘Where are me medals? What’ve you done with me medals?’
‘You sold them, Dad.’
‘What would you know?’ he said. ‘Silly cow. Where’s your mum?’
‘Gone, Dad, she died. Remember? Anyhow, you walked out on her years ago.’
He shuffled round in his chair, turning his head away from them.
Ro and Alby retreated to Maddie’s for a cuppa.
The tiny front garden was a muddle of black poly pipe and piles of dirt. Maddie was sitting on the edge of a large wooden frame with a piece of paper in her hand.
‘What are you making?’ Ro asked cautiously. Maddie was not known for her construction skills.
‘Wicking beds.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Raised beds for veggies. You water them at the bottom and it soaks up. Or something. I can’t work it out actually.’
The three of them worked together, scratching their heads over the diagram. Eventually they had two boxes filled with soil and ready for plants.
Alby was thoughtful on the way home. ‘She loves that house.’
Ro laughed. ‘Yeah. She’s digging in. As it were’
‘What’ll happen to us when we get old? Us single dykes with no kids?’
‘Let’s hope for a table under a tree.’
Alby sighed. ‘At least no one will have to force us to wash.’
‘Might have to. I don’t wash much now I’m not working. No point.’
‘You planning to be a dirty old lady in a rooming house?’
‘My sweat doesn’t smell like it used to, not since menopause. Must have been hormones.’
Alby sniffed at her. ‘Mmm. But what about your down-belows?’
‘I don’t smell, do I?’
‘Just keep your pants on. And empty your piss bucket.’
Alby wasn’t the only one drawn back to Adelaide by ageing parents. Other friends turned up, including two members of Ro’s old household. Petra’s parents were managing at home, but their situation was precarious. She was visiting more often from Alice Springs to keep an eye on them. Mikki was making a rare visit from London because her mother was ill. Ro and Sue, both still living in Adelaide, cooked dinner for the visitors at Ro’s place and the four of them talked exactly as they would have thirty years earlier, though the subject matter had changed.
The first topic was parents. Ro was lucky, she knew. So far her mother was at home and independent. But the women weren’t concerned only for their parents. Like Alby, they were wondering how they would get on themselves, who would look after them in their old age, find the best residential care, organise pensions and healthcare.
Mikki’s worry about her mother gave way to more exciting news.
‘I’m going to be a grandmother!’
‘Oh Mikki,’ Petra cried. ‘That’s fantastic.’
Ro stared at Mikki. A grandmother? She had scarcely got used to the idea of Mikki as a mother. And could anything be more respectable, more middle-of-the-road, than being a grandmother? What a thing for Mikki to aspire to.
As the evening went on the conversation became raucous.
‘Remember the Pifco?’ said Mikki.
‘Oh no,’ Sue groaned. ‘Not the vibrator stories.’
‘Why were we sharing one? Between four women?’
‘We were too vanilla.’
‘Too poor more likely.’
Ro objected. ‘It was a political position. Not to own a vibrator. Vibrator one day, S&M the next.’
‘Sisters beware. You have been warned.’
‘Whose was it anyway?’ Sue asked.
‘Mine,’ said Petra. ‘I got it on an impulse.’
‘As it were.’
‘I didn’t want a lecture from Ro so I snuck it into my bedroom.’
‘And then guess who kept borrowing it?’ crowed Mikki.
‘You know what amazes me,’ said Sue, ‘looking back? All that blood. Four menstruating women in one house.’
‘Did we ever get into synch the way you’re supposed to? Cycle together?’
‘I never had a cycle anyway,’ said Petra. ‘Nothing you could call regular.’
‘Bleeding. It’s ancient history,’ said Mikki. ‘A weird memory lost in the mists of time. When my yoga teacher says don’t do inversions if you’re menstruating it takes me a second to understand what she means. I look at those young women and think you poor saps, dripping with blood.’
The pressing issue of their age, apart from parents, was the question of retirement.
‘But do you want to stop?’ Petra asked Sue. ‘You worked so hard to be a doctor.’
‘I’ll keep going for a while. But it’s frustrating, too. So much that’s wrong with hospitals.’
‘Didn’t you ever want to go into general practice?’
Sue laughed. ‘I prefer my patients seriously ill.’
Mikki had already given up her job.
‘So what do you do all day?’
‘Believe me, filling the day isn’t a problem. I always wondered, when retired people talked about being so busy. I thought it must be bullshit.’
‘Putting a brave face on it.’
‘Yes. Now I’m on the other side. By the time I’ve been to choir, a few meetings, a bit of fundraising, the odd protest …’
‘Not to mention looking after our bodies.’
‘Oh yes. Walking. Yoga twice a week.’
‘Gym,’ said Ro.
‘Pilates,’ Petra added.
‘Yoga,’ said Mikki firmly. ‘Not to mention endless appointments with dentists, physios, doctors. Blood tests. Specialists.’
‘You’re not sick are you?’
‘No. Just a rich westerner staying healthy.’
For Ro, promotion to the age pension was a joy. Time to herself, to write. What she wanted above all, had never given up hankering for, was a book with her name on the cover. Nothing ambitious, not her old dream, The Book of Everything We Know. This one would be a simple history, a celebration of the seventies, passion, politics, the second great wave of feminism. It would include the coming-out stories, the mighty clashes over feminist ideology. But she would tell it from a personal point of view. She would start with her own coming out, a fictionalised story of her and Alby, her first woman lover.
She doodled on a pad and thought about Alby.
They’d got off together, appropriately enough, at the Women and Sexuality Conference in Melbourne. Ro was in her twenties, impatient for something. For both of them it was a first, for Alby because she was young, and for Ro because previously she’d been with men.
She went alone to the conference dance on the Saturday night with her heart pounding. She would have turned tail. But she knew that if she ran away she’d never forgive herself. The disappointment of going home to Adelaide with the great question of her sexuality unanswered would be far worse than pounding heart, trembling knees and dry mouth. She pushed open the door to the hall.
It had been a day about sexuality, including the session that had drawn Ro to the conference in the first place. Can You Be a Feminist and Fuck Men? She was fired up. She would stop fucking men and put that question behind her forever.
Over lunch she got talking to a couple of friendly older women and arranged to meet them at the dance. She admitted with a nonchalant laugh that she was a bit nervous. They were reassuring and said they would watch out for her. The two of them were obviously together, which made it a safe aunty-type arrangement.
To her relief she spotted them as soon as she was inside. They waved to her from a long table jutting out from the wall. The dance floor was beyond them and dancing was in full swing, the atmosphere festive, a buzz of talk and laughter and catchy music. The Shameless Hussies were on stage, unapologetically dykey, irreverent and funny. Hundreds of women were swaying, dancing, smooching together.
Ro had known, in principle, that a women’s dance would involve women dancing together. But she was completely unprepared for the effect it had on her. She plonked herself down opposite her new friends with a gasp. She had her back to the dance floor and it was at least ten minutes before she could bring herself to turn around.
One of the first people she noticed, when she did look behind, was a bustling young woman with a stripy waistcoat, hair crew-cut under a houndstooth cap. She was part of a laughing group. She caught Ro’s eye and winked at her. Ro blinked and turned back to her friends. But within a few minutes the young woman had slid into the seat beside her.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Alby.’
Alby was in Melbourne because the Shameless Hussies were playing and Alby would go anywhere the Shameless Hussies went.
She persuaded Ro to dance and Ro discovered the intoxication of that seething mass of women’s bodies. She felt completely safe with Alby. They were about the same size. In fact, they might have been twins. Ro’s inhibitions vanished. She wanted all the women in the hall. After a joint out the back she was entranced. She had never been so happy in her entire life. This, she was sure, was what she was born for.
When it came time to leave she fell in love with Alby’s flying boots and leather jacket. Alby was a dyke on a bike. Ro went home pillion and they spent a glorious night tumbling and fumbling. The sex was less than earth-moving. But for Ro the fact that she was doing it with a woman, free to explore this body so like her own, to lick and stroke and rub against it, was an ecstatic joy. She had read an article called ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’. The night was a practical exploration of the issue. All she wanted now was a truck and a loud hailer. The day of the clitoris had arrived.
From then on Ro and Alby were friends. The sex continued to be fumbling, in a good-natured way, and eventually they went off with other women to learn how to do it more elegantly. And they didn’t live together. But in every other way they were a matching set, loyal and loving, cheering each other on, vetting each other’s girlfriends, sharing joints and hangovers. When they were together they gave off sparks of energy, a miniature double battery pack. Propped against the bar in the women’s pub telling tall tales they were irresistible, at least to each other.
To write about Alby was easy. But when Ro thought about other lovers, early experiments, arguments, collectives, political righteousness, it was another matter. The tone was all wrong. She was trying to describe the seventies as paradise, ignoring all that was hard. And then what about the eighties? Economics dried rapidly, politics moved inexorably to the right and the Earth itself showed signs of mortality. Gay men were struck such a blow that not even a light-hearted lesbian could be unmoved. How could she write nostalgic drivel about all that?
She dropped her pen and tore up her doodle. She couldn’t capture it. Her characters kept sliding off in unexpected directions. When she wanted them to be carefree they showed alarming signs of being ugly, irrational, unhappy. And when she wanted them to be impressive, committed, passionate, they were flippant or cynical. It was a while before she could pinpoint the problem. She so much wanted them to be morally and emotionally superior to the heterosexuals. But alas, they weren’t.
While Ro was tearing up paper and cleaning every cupboard in the house, her mother died.
Ro was devastated. Writing became irrelevant, wrong, and she stopped altogether. She felt stupid, as though everyone else had understood something that she hadn’t. All the platitudes, the sentimental murmurings, you only have one mother, the one you can always turn to, mother and child—the sacred bond. Everything Ro had despised and opposed rose up against her in a fearful wave. She trembled on the crest, alone with the horrifying possibility that it might all be true.
She was incoherently and wildly angry. Mothers can’t die, she wanted to bellow. And it made no difference what age the child was when the mother went. Ro wanted to lie in the middle of the footpath drumming her heels and screaming. Her mother’s death was a personal affront, underlining the fact that death is not only real, but universal. Ro herself would also die. In fact, with no parents remaining to shelter her from the void, she was suddenly at the head of the queue.
Up until now, death had seemed to be accidental, a matter of bad luck. But clearly it was not bad luck. It was inexorable. Inescapable. Ro was taken aback by her own reaction. In recent years she had been on much easier terms with her mother, but she had never imagined that Elsa’s death would be shattering.
With both parents dead, no one to need her, no one to feed her, Ro had to accept that she was mortal. Her skin would sag, become blotchy and thin as tissue, tear and bleed. Her organs would slow down and fail in their work. Her bones would ache and crumble. She would totter on her feet and fall, breaking wrists and hips. A time would come when she wouldn’t remember how to walk.
Her allotted span would end. She would die, like all the other millions of humans who had lived before her. Her paddle boat would be called back to the shore.
From the moment that Ro started to write a eulogy for Elsa, her picture of her mother changed, become more three dimensional. Of course Ro knew, hypothetically, that her mother had been alive long before she herself was born, that Elsa had an independent existence beyond Ro. But the knowledge had been sketchy. Sometimes interesting, lots of stories, but not very real.
Far more real to Ro were the chafing and old resentments of her own childhood, of family life. She had believed that her mother loved Ro’s brother more than she loved Ro. Elsa had expected Ro to help her look after her brother. Ro had never understood why he couldn’t look after himself. Ro had to wash clothes and dishes and floors. Murray didn’t. And even in recent years, when she and her mother had got on well together, Ro knew that she had disappointed Elsa by not providing grandchildren.
Now, with her mother gone, Ro’s perspective shifted. She saw the anxiety her mother must have felt, bringing up two children on her own, trying to equip them to make their way in the world. Elsa’s concern, common enough in her generation, was that her son should be trained for responsibility and her daughter should be trained for marriage. Ro had railed against those ideas, but what was the point? Elsa was the product of her own childhood, of wishes and hopes that Ro would never know. She had been the child of poor Welsh migrants, one of five. No doubt there were things she had longed for and been unable to have.
Ro sat on her mother’s bed with a box of pencil stubs in her hands. Each pencil had been sharpened with a knife and lay pointing in the same direction. The box had once held envelopes and had been neatly trimmed for its present purpose. She pictured her mother’s hands, twisted with arthritis, wielding the knife. Slow, patient. Ro wept.
At last she saw Elsa in the round, a woman with her own thoughts, her own history. A woman with long habits of frugality and care, cutting down a box to hold pencils. One part of Elsa’s life was children and grandchildren, but only one part.
This new perception was humbling, but also liberating. It gave Ro back her own life, her own independence. She was not her mother, any more than Elsa was her. Ro began to write again. She no longer needed to prove herself to anybody. It was too late for parental approval. That would never come now. And what other approval mattered? She wrote whatever she wanted to, or didn’t write at all, as it suited her.
She was more or less celibate, but surrounded by friends, and she had her pension to live on. For once she was satisfied with her life.