Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  ‘Madonna? She’s sooo gross! How old is she? Imagine if my mum did that!’

  ‘Yuck! She thinks she’s sexy! Why doesn’t she just give up?’

  Jo got the message. Women her age could perhaps hope to find a nice, older gent to take them on weekend outings to visit outdoor markets and jazz festivals in vineyards, and when Jo thought about a relationship for herself, the words ‘comfortable’ and ‘easy’ came most readily to mind. As if she was thinking of new soft furnishings for the living room.

  She’d been unsettled by the look Michael had given her across the table. His lively dark-blue eyes and arched eyebrows seemed to issue an invitation. One that promised to be anything but a charming social diversion.

  She would ring Mr Brigden and cancel next week’s dinner. Bow out gracefully from the whole affair. After all, whether Gemma married Yoshi or not was a matter for the Brigden family and she didn’t have a say in it.

  The fizzing aspirin was the only sound to be heard in her white-tiled bathroom. Her neighbours in Bondi Junction had at last called it an evening. She padded on cream carpet along the hall, checked and saw the sofa bed in her computer room was empty. Although it was strewn with Tory’s books and clothes, Madam herself could be anywhere—at Centennial Park, asleep across the corridor from JJ and Carol (the thought made her swig her aspirin), at her new boyfriend’s place (what was his name again?), or she might just stumble in the door at any moment.

  Jo just could not worry about her. All her years of teaching and mothering had brought her to the conclusion that humans were born with their personalities already formed. You fed and watered your children, looked after their material welfare and kept them safe from harm, and the rest would follow. Tory was passionate, thinking for herself and experimenting with her independence, and Jo couldn’t ask for more than that.

  Still unable to sleep, she sat at her computer and, opening her emails, saw there was another message from James.

  Dear Mum,

  I’m in Jerusalem. I visited the Western Wall today. They say you can speak directly to God through the stones. It felt like a holy place and I was filled with the grace of God when I prayed. It felt like I was being welcomed into my own home.

  Thanks for the money. I’m hoping you can send more. It’s as if I’m on a pilgrimage and following the trail already laid down for me that will lead me to my true destiny.

  I’m flying out to Turkey to visit the Blue Mosque in Istanbul tomorrow. I’ll write again from there.

  I know I haven’t told you enough that I love you, Mum, but I do love you very much.

  James x

  James was in Israel? He’d said he was going to Paris! He would be blown up in a bus or a plane by a suicide bomber! Fizzing acid rose in Jo’s throat. Just when James said he was filled with peace and purpose, she had never felt more anxious about him in her life.

  The fervent tone of his writing also made Jo uneasy. If, in the end, he did walk a religious path, she hoped it would be as the devout head of a charitable family or maybe as a country minister like her father. Not as some rabid evangelical—a man who was so anxious to meet his maker that the world and everything in it held no pleasure for him.

  Jo dug her fingernails into her thighs and fought to keep her panic in check. After all, there was nothing she could do to protect him armed with a computer keyboard in Bondi Junction.

  Her boy had said he loved her. Very much. She sent more money, wrote that she loved him too and this time wished him godspeed and protection. Right now, Jo would pray to any god or goddess that would promise to bring her only son safely home.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was just after sunrise on Sunday when the Tweedle and Jacobsen clans assembled on the sand at Bondi Beach. It was Jo’s first baby-naming ceremony and she still couldn’t quite believe she’d been entrusted with the task.

  As a child she had watched her father, the Rev. Albert Brown, get through a few christenings every Sunday at St Luke’s. Her father would dunk a bawling Kevin, Scott or Lisa in the font and then stroll across the backyard to be home in time for the Sunday roast.

  ‘How were they this morning, dear?’ Jo’s mother would ask.

  ‘Two screamers and a sleeper. Three interfering grandmothers, one torn hymn book and—’

  ‘A partridge in a pear tree!’ Margaret sang as she dished up the roast potatoes.

  ‘You are a marvel, Maggie! The Lord truly blessed me when he put you in my path.’

  ‘And the Devil still has to answer for the day you darkened my door, Albert Brown.’ Margaret would laugh and pour the gravy.

  Jo had spent her childhood in the Blue Mountains in the 1970s, but to tell it was like something out of Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage from the Chronicles of Barsetshire, written a century before.

  Her mother, Margaret Elsie Wicks (Maggie, Meg or Margie to her friends), was born in Cheshire, England. She had herself attended boarding school and that went some way to explaining why Jo had been packed off to DPLC at just eleven years of age. Jo’s captaincy of the Darling Point hockey team (St Anne’s ‘Heavenly Eleven’) had been a crowning achievement her mother had written home about.

  Jo’s earliest memories were perfectly preserved like the boiled eggs in aspic her mother made when Jo was feeling ‘poorly’. Snow on the pitched roof of the bluestone rectory in winter; hollyhocks and bluebells in the garden in spring; home-sewn pinnies and hand-knitted twin-sets; toad in the hole or Cheshire pork and apple pie for Saturday suppers with jam roly-poly for ‘afters’.

  Bedknobs and Broomsticks—that was the first movie her mother had taken her to see. ‘Lovely woman, that Angela Lansbury. And still going strong, Lord love her!’ She was Margaret’s favourite actress and mentioned in dispatches only last week when Jo had telephoned and acquiesced to another visit home soon and a weekend of being ‘fattened up’.

  Time moved on, however, and you couldn’t just roll out a production-line Church of England christening these days. As the websites, the books, the magazine articles and your friends all emphasised: ‘You deserve everything to be perfect! Your day should be UNIQUE and full of MEANING!’ This affirmed you as both a sensitive spiritual being and a creative individualist.

  This morning Jo was a hundred years away from St Luke’s in Leura. She was in bare feet on the golden sands of Bondi Beach and about to conduct a ceremony to name Aphrodite Honey-Gold. It was a name a stripper might choose for a stage act, but questionable for a tiny bald person with unfortunate sticky-out ears.

  The baby was in her mother’s arms, snuggled in a white voile wrap, sleeping and blissfully unaware of what life had in store for a girl named after the handmaiden of the ancient Greek goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. Aphrodite might be able to carry it off if she was living on the shores of the Aegean, but the kids at Bondi Public School would most likely miss the mythological reference. This little girl’s fate was to be shouted to as ‘Afro’, ‘Ditty’ or worse.

  As for the middle name Honey-Gold? Jo remembered the hilarity at Darling Point that had greeted the names of Bob Geldof’s daughters—Little Pixie, Fifi Trixibelle and Peaches Honeyblossom. When Jo was a kid in the Blue Mountains they were the names a farmer would have given a herd of dairy cows.

  When Jo had met with Fiona and Clive Jacobsen in her courtyard, baby Aphrodite had been tucked in her capsule and slept the afternoon away under the passionfruit vine while her parents communicated their strong desire to have a baby-naming ceremony that would be ‘an expression of their unique beliefs’. Their beliefs weren’t that unique—they both wanted to piss off their parents.

  If weddings were a battleground for mothers and daughters, then christenings were Ground Zero. It had been made clear to Jo from the outset that she had been hired in the face of stern opposition from both the maternal and paternal grandparents. It wasn’t a particularly enticing prospect. Jo remembered Fiona’s mother from Darling Point days. Patti Tweedle was a fire-breathing dragon who had regularly ba
rged into Jo’s office with reports of girls she had observed fraternising with the Sydney Boys High School ‘louts’ in Oxford Street.

  ‘Loitering and lollygagging and caring not a fig for minimum standards of public decency,’ was Patti’s startling complaint, as if Darling Point was a convent not a college. It hadn’t surprised Jo that her daughter Fiona now wanted to do things her own way. Jo remembered Fiona well from a decade ago when she’d come to class with pink hair and face glitter.

  On Bondi Beach, the sun had risen and immediately disappeared behind a bank of low, grey cloud. There was a fair wind blowing and a promising swell rolling in and Jo hoped that the embroidered cloth on her little table, weighted down with her mobile phone and car keys, would stay put. The Bondi lifesavers were drilling further up the sand and dozens of people were jogging or strolling past with surfboards.

  Despite the imminent threat of a rain squall moving in and sweeping the sand, it was an appropriate spot for the naming of Aphrodite. Although Jo did entertain the notion that if this little Venus were to be painted by Botticelli, she wouldn’t be rising majestically from the sea, but instead surfing to shore using her scalloped shell as a boogie board.

  The older guests were utterly affronted and appalled. Not only because they were in full Sunday-morning church attire and were now being sandblasted, but also by the jiggling of the tanned, bare flesh of the sun-worshippers going about their morning devotions.

  Jo fought to suppress a smile as she watched Patti Tweedle become hopelessly bogged in the sand in her heels. The old biddy refused point-blank to take them off and walk in stockinged feet, and sure enough, she soon toppled backwards and was planted fair on her large lavender raw-silk-covered bottom. From where she was, Jo could hear Patti’s grunts of exertion as she was hauled upright by at least five grown men. She gamely struggled on, muttering oaths of divine retribution under her breath.

  With everyone finally present and baby Aphrodite awake, bright-eyed and taking it all in, Jo began the ceremony by reciting the poem Fiona and Clive had composed. She projected her voice over the rhythmic roar of the ocean.

  ‘Aphrodite foam-born,

  Open the arms of these lovers,

  To receive the gift of a child.’

  The ritual, devised by the baby’s parents, used roses. White for eternal love, yellow for faithfulness, pink for friendship and red for passion. There were salutations to the four winds and the elements. Jo spoke of the wishes the baby’s parents held for her and then Fiona’s young nieces jumped squealing over the foam at the water’s edge to fling blooms and petals from wicker baskets into the ocean.

  Then Jo spoke the words she had written. ‘Aphrodite, you embody all our hopes and joys. You are the expression of our longing for immortality. Through you, Fiona and Clive will live on into the future and through them, you will understand what the world was like before you came.

  ‘The chance of you being born in this time and in this place is, we are told, incalculable. However, we have been waiting for you and you for us. Nothing was surer than that you would be born to your parents. There is nothing more natural and expected than seeing you in your mother’s arms with your father watching over you here today.

  ‘In your coming we are reassured of our own place in the limitless universe. That we matter. That every day we make the impossible come true in the face of overwhelming odds.’

  Then Fiona and Clive recited the famous words from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: ‘You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, even in your dreams.’

  Next, an engraved silver chalice filled with honey mead was passed from hand to hand for the guests to sip from. The baby was adorned with gold. Tiny bangles were clasped around her chubby wrists and a heart-shaped locket fastened around her neck. There were more words and blessings from the spiritual guides to the child (no mention of godparents this fine, pagan morning) and, finally, her father and mother splashed drops of seawater on the baby’s forehead and she was duly declared to have been named. It was odd, but Jo now looked at the baby and thought Aphrodite Honey-Gold suited her perfectly.

  Then the sun broke through the clouds. The Pacific Ocean tumbled and crashed with a pulsing energy that set every nerve-ending in Jo’s body alive with effervescence. Her first outing as a celebrant had gone perfectly.

  The ceremony ended with shouts of glee as some of the younger boys hared off to chase an elderly aunt’s straw hat that had been blown off her head and was now bowling down the beach like a floral frisbee. A mighty cheer went up from onlookers as the sodden mess of straw and silk was eventually rescued from the briny by a trio of Bondi lifesavers.

  The more elderly members of the family turned and trudged up the beach in disgust. Jo watched with a sinking heart as they ploughed manfully through the sand back to their cars. She really did feel sympathy for assorted dicky knees and dodgy hips. If Fiona and Clive had wanted to annoy their parents, it was definitely Mission Accomplished. Jo hoped the christening breakfast at Patti Tweedle’s Vaucluse mansion wouldn’t be a trial.

  ‘Thank you so much for everything you did for us this morning, Jo. We adored the whole thing. It was better than we could have imagined!’ Fiona was clutching a champagne flute and bubbling with excitement.

  ‘Goldie loved it too,’ said her husband Clive. Jo thanked them for their kind words and thought that at least there was one question answered. The name ‘Aphrodite’ had already been abandoned and the child was barely three months old. Jo hoped that the baby’s fuzz of white-blonde hair wouldn’t turn to mouse brown by the time she was a toddler, just as Tory’s had done.

  Jo was thrilled with the compliments. She now understood why her father was always in such a reflective mood for Sunday lunch after his roster of christenings and why he had often paused over his plate of roast lamb and looked at her and her older brother Phillip through misty eyes. She’d heard all the usual platitudes from celebrants who said they were ‘honoured’ and ‘privileged’ to take part in such celebrations, but Jo just couldn’t find the words to adequately express the experience she’d just had. She was just...happy. Human-Hallmark-greeting-card happy. No doubt Father Patrick would have a multisyllabic word like ‘transcendental’ or ‘transelemental’ to explain the simple joy that Jo had just experienced standing with her toes in the foam.

  By midday about fifty people were in attendance at the christening breakfast feast and more guests were arriving by the minute to accept champagne from a waiter in the lobby of Patti and Birdie Tweedle’s tumbling old pile.

  The main reception room was stuffed with chintz-covered sofas and armchairs in shades of pink and yellow and lined with shelves littered with china knick-knacks. It wasn’t Jo’s style, but she did covet the view. From the middle of the room her eye was waltzed across Sydney Harbour to the bridge. It was a dizzying dance. The blue of the water was framed by tubs of citrus trees. The divine aroma of gardenias wafted in on the breeze. The graceful sails of the Opera House and the sturdy spine of the Harbour Bridge arched over the water and the best vantage point from which to see this holy trinity—harbour, bridge and Opera House—was just where Jo was standing. She wished she could take flight like a sea eagle. She could now understand the deep satisfaction one must feel in holding a ticket to the delightful daily performance of myriad yachts and ferries crisscrossing from headland to wharf, pier and jetty, and back again. Jo looked to the west from the dress circle and sighed with the wonder of it all.

  Some of her favourite Australian painters—Brett Whiteley, John Olsen and Lloyd Rees—had been captivated by the very same scene and had rendered it by moonlight, in storm and under the bleaching blare of summer sun. They’d been seduced by the light, colour and texture of the sumptuous panorama and today Jo was too. From this spot, she would be utterly content to have her own endlessly fascinating conversation with her paints and brushes, until the day she died.

  Balancing an almond biscuit on
the rim of her saucer, teacup in hand, Jo attempted to circulate. She was met by the hostile stares of various family elders and studiously ignored by Rev Pottharst, who shuffled past her, flanked by great-aunts tempting him with a plate of egg-and-lettuce sandwiches. She could only imagine he’d been invited along as some sort of rebuke to her and her heathen enterprise.

  Jo turned away and stepped onto the white stone terrace where the younger members of the Tweedle–Jacobsen clan had gathered in the sun with glasses of fruit punch and platters of sweet pastries. ‘Mrs Blanchard!’ The cry went up as she approached. Jo recognised at least five girls from Darling Point.

  ‘We miss you soooooo much!’

  The young ladies crowded around her and it was almost as if Jo was on a school excursion again. Only this time they weren’t visiting a gallery or museum, they were on a tour of the Tweedle Family Estate. Jo’s arms were taken and she was steered down a flight of stairs to the edge of the swimming pool. Rows of snow-white ceramic mermaid statues stood on lifeguard duty over aquamarine waters and a startling sunken golden mosaic of King Neptune. Jo could see any number of Hollywood film stars at home here, but, thankfully, her imagination stopped short of seeing Birdie Tweedle sunbaking in his budgie smugglers. Every square inch of the place trumpeted money and exclusivity and Jo reflected that it was the sort of setting she’d often found herself in when she was married to

  JJ Blanchard.

  The girls chattered like a flock of rainbow lorikeets.

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘Are you coming back to school?’

  ‘Things aren’t the same since you left.’

  ‘Say you’ll come back! Pul-eeeze!’

  Jo laughed as she disentangled herself. She could put names to all the girls: Sarah Turnbull, Lily Rockman, Ivy McIntyre-Jones, Rachel Waterhouse and Clementine Hughes. They were just a year older than when Jo had last seen them. Although in their finery this morning—beaded frocks, kitten heels, lip gloss, highlighted and blow-dried hair—they looked almost grown-up. As immaculately tended as their mothers. A couple, she recalled, had come with notes excusing them from class to attend hairdressing appointments and manicures.