Dark Roots

by Cate Kennedy

  The Testosterone Club

  I have left my husband: rolled up my wedding linen around my wedding crockery, packed it all into the back of my car wedged safely with my wedding towel set, and left.

  Six years is a long time — especially, as the old joke goes, when you consider you only get four for armed robbery — and the crockery is by no means a complete set any more. It stands testament to the chips and dings and cracks of a careless and imperfect marriage, but I have tucked it in gently around my preserving kit on the back seat. The preserving kit is in pristine condition — perfectly preserved, you might say, if you were in the mood for making jokes. I valued it highly, when I was married. Yesterday.

  Other households greet spring and summer because the flowers come out and lambs gambol and butterflies dance in the meadow; my husband welcomed spring because it meant I could buy boxes of vegetables at knockdown prices and start preserving. Pickled cucumbers and onions were a particular favourite, preferably ingested slowly in front of Saturday Sporting World.

  My husband didn’t excel at any one sport; he watched them all equally. He could work his way through a jar of pickled onions in an afternoon. It’s thirsty work, and several beers were required, forming a lethal cocktail of yeast and vinegar. He had two mates who were unfailing in their support of this. They would arrive on Saturday at 12.15, just in time for lunch, then settle into watching the match. Actually it’s unfair to say they only watched — their participation in the game fell just short of actually playing it. They yelled, they writhed, they spear-tackled each other across the couch and slid crunchingly over the rug, rising with faces of serious concentration and pieces of corn chip clinging to their hair. They even dressed the part, in tracksuits and expensive running shoes. Their hair was damp and tousled as if they’d just stepped from the shower in the gym; they carried with them a misleading but unmistakable hint of liniment. Macka, Chooka and my husband, Barry. Or Barra, as he was known. They were a club. A testosterone club.

  I made up this name myself. It wasn’t so much because of their adoration of sports and each other, the aggressive pawing as one would playfully spring the other in a headlock. It was more to do with their complete confidence in their own majestic sexual magnetism. They woke in the morning with this confidence; it accompanied them into every sphere they stepped, assured and unshakable. Together, they entered a room pelvis-first; it made them sit with legs stretched wide apart to accommodate their mythic proportions, so much so that fitting on the couch together was often tricky. It made them offer me a drink with burly protectiveness as they pulled their own from the fridge and noticed me working in the kitchen, preparing snacks for the third quarter. It made Barry look at me with beery pride when I came in, like I was something he’d won unexpectedly in a raffle.

  One of these club members I was married to, which was worrying enough. But it was from Macka and Chooka that the hormone in question truly asserted itself.

  One Saturday, Macka entered the kitchen and watched me for a few moments at the bench. I was peeling onions and could feel his eyes on me, sizing me up.

  ‘Everything okay, Macka?’ I said finally.

  ‘Yeah, sure, sweet. Everything okay with you?’

  I glanced up and nodded. He strolled around the counter.

  ‘No, I mean, everything okay with you and Barra?’ he said meaningfully.

  ‘Sure. It’s the onions, Macka.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Just wondering, you know, because he’s a top bloke, and well ... you’re’ — he fiddled with the ring-pull on his can — ‘you’re really nice,’ he finished.

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘Well, thanks, Macka.’

  ‘And if you ever need anything, Monica, you know who you can call. You know what I mean?’

  His eyes were boring into me under his brows — well, brow, really.

  ‘Well, yeah, I think I know what you mean. Thanks,’ I said, tears streaming down my face. I turned and stepped into the pantry for something when I was overwhelmed by a cloud of liniment. Macka was behind me. A millimetre behind me, and closing fast on the inside flank.

  ‘I knew it,’ he whispered, enfolding me in his arms but careful not to spill his beer. For a second or so I was too stunned to move.

  ‘Get off me,’ I said, blinking still from the onions.

  ‘I always knew you liked me,’ he was saying.

  ‘I mean it.’ I broke his grasp and wrestled free. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  He smiled, cocked his head towards the living room and nodded. ‘I get ya,’ he said. ‘Some other time, eh? You give me a ring.’ He strolled back to the television, chewing a handful of peanuts.

  And I let it go — call me an idiot, but I did. I had a chance to bring it up the following evening, when Barry and I were lounging on the couch watching the Sunday night movie, full of fruit-and-nut chocolate and cosy bonhomie.

  Hey, Barry, I could have said, snuggling up to him, have a guess what Macka said to me yesterday. Can you believe it? I could have tried for a tone of affectionate amusement. I tried the approach on for size, staring at the TV, then left it unsaid. The moment passed.

  I was hanging out the washing the following Friday when Chooka strolled into the backyard.

  ‘Hi,’ I said with a smile, struggling with a sheet. ‘What are you off work so early for?’

  ‘Let me give you a hand with that,’ Chooka said, reaching up and straightening the sheet uncertainly. He stared at the pegs like Marco Polo first glimpsing chopsticks, then selected a singlet and arranged it carefully next to the sheet. I smiled encouragingly.

  ‘Thanks a lot. Want a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, okay. Barry not home?’

  I looked at him. Chooka knew Barry’s schedule better than I did.

  ‘No — why? Should he be?’

  He laughed, a gurgling, strained laugh. ‘Just wondered.’

  ‘Haven’t you guys got plans to go to the club tonight?’

  I was inside by now, plugging in the kettle, reaching for the biscuits, watching Chooka as he strolled around the kitchen, toying with the eggtimer.

  ‘Yep. We’re meeting down there at 7.00. I just got off work early and thought ... I’d come and pay you a visit.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ There was a pause that couldn’t be called anything but awkward as we both listened to the kettle reach boiling point then turn itself off.

  ‘That kettle going alright, is it?’ Chooka said suddenly, and I remembered he had given it to us as a wedding gift.

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s great. Use it every day.’

  We sat on the couch. As I sipped my coffee a sweaty hand landed across my shoulders.

  ‘So how you doing then?’ Chooka said, giving my shoulder an affectionate squeeze.

  ‘Good ... thanks.’

  ‘You must get a bit lonely here by yourself of a day, eh Monica?’ As he spoke, his hand moved down the space between my arm and my side, the fingers wriggling. A grope. Or, in Chooka’s books, single-step foreplay.

  ‘Cut it out, Chooka.’

  ‘Just bein’ friendly.’ He gave a ghastly grin, then put his cup on the table and grabbed my hand teasingly.

  ‘Yeah, well ...’ I began, then my hand was deposited on his groin, and held there. I yelped, trying not to spill my scalding coffee in his crotch. Again, I was speechless. After all, first Macka and now Chooka — was it something I’d said? I pulled my hand free and very deliberately wiped it on my jeans.

  ‘I think you should leave,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t tell Barry about this, will ya?’ he said as he stood, at a loss. Rejection hadn’t occurred to him; the script was written and directed by testosterone.

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t. Whatever’s gone on between you and me, Monica, that’s private,
okay? Barry doesn’t need to know about this.’

  He stalked out before what romance novels call his visible male hardness could return to its normal dimensions. I sat there, winded. Now what? As I emptied the dishwasher and washed Chooka’s mug, I wondered how I was going to break this to Barry. Again, I had my chance. He came home with a box full of jars the cleaner at work had given him, ready for sterilising for home preserves. On the way he’d stopped off and bought a half-case of vinegar and kilos of mustard seeds, ready for the weekend markets. He’d even bought me a new book, The Home Preserver: Everything You Need To Know About Putting Food By. On the cover was a woman in a frilled apron, who had the simpering, scrubbed look of a fundamentalist sect member, gazing adoringly at a line of neatly labelled jars. Barry seemed filled with an almost evangelical fervour as he glanced through the pages.

  ‘See, look at this, Monica. Snap and colour, that’s what the experts say. That’s what you should be striving for. So we need to get cucumbers no bigger than that, okay?’ He held up a thumb and forefinger. I looked and nodded. These would not be mere baby cucumbers, these were to be premature cucumbers, snatched from the vine before full term, plunged into the humidity crib of the sterilised jar. I nodded, while in my mind sang the sentence that had been hanging there immobile: Hey, guess what happened this afternoon, Barry? Your mate Chooka put the hard word on me. Macka tried the same thing last Saturday. That makes both of your mates, Barry. I stared dreamily at the gap he was emphasising, letting his words drift over me.

  ‘Got it, Mon?’ he was saying.

  ‘Sure,’ I said with a bright smile.

  The next day it was footy as usual — hot dogs and mustard, stubbies of beer and lots of shouting. Macka and Chooka didn’t meet my eye much. At half-time they made a pretence of watching the cheer squad march onto the ground and do high kicks in the drizzle. The three of them went out to the club that evening and I was idly watching an old video when Barry returned. I heard the front door slam and Barry thumped into the bathroom. He re-emerged five minutes later, storming through the kitchen swing doors like Wyatt Earp into a saloon, only in a short white towelling dressing gown decorated with his initials.

  ‘Something wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Bloody oath there’s something wrong. I got a nasty surprise tonight, Monica, a very nasty surprise.’ I looked enquiring. The parking ticket in the glove box? But no.

  ‘When a bloke can’t trust his own wife, Monica, there’s gotta be something seriously wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘First Macca tells me while we’re having a game of pool, then blow me if Chooka doesn’t have the same thing to say while we’re putting a few dollars through the poker machines.’

  I made my face go blank. ‘Tell you what?’

  His eyes flashed. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. About you. You propositioning them.’

  ‘What?’ I made the mistake of letting an incredulous laugh escape me, and sat up on the couch. ‘Listen to me, Barry. Your mates were the ones that came on to me, and did it with all their Neanderthal allure, let me tell you. And now that I’ve been nice about it and haven’t embarrassed them …’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me my best mates propositioned you?’ There was a high note of disbelief in his tone.

  ‘Barry, use your brain for a moment and tell me which seems more likely to you. I mean really. Think about it.’

  I could hear his teeth grinding. And his brain. ‘When, then?’

  ‘Friday and last Saturday.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

  I laughed again, bitterly, slumping back helplessly on the scatter cushions. ‘Because it just seemed so ridiculous. And I thought you’d be embarrassed, too.’ I threw a cushion at him. ‘And because I made the mistake of thinking they’d maybe want to forget all about it, if you want the truth. But I should have known better, I guess.’

  Good old Barry. There he stood, the man who wore a ring that matched mine, who slept next to me every night, who was at this very minute weighing up my word against that of his two drinking buddies. It was me against the testosterone club. But Barry, I told myself, Barry was the man I was married to. Surely Barry couldn’t be that dumb.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Monica,’ said my husband.

  Snap and colour. Barry was as insistent about it as he was about them being no bigger than that. Pickled cucumbers made at home can occasionally go greyish and flabby. You will have noticed how well commercial pickles take lurid food dyes — Barry wasn’t having any of that. After three days of stony, wounded silence, he brought home a box of chocolates and a much larger one of very small vegetables, led me to the chapter in The Home Preserver about old-fashioned ways to keep snap and colour, and left me to it. I could sense this was my test, my chance for redemption. I bowed my head and read it humbly.

  Basically, you add a preserving agent in powder form. My grandmother used to keep some of the powders listed to retain snap and colour in her laundry cupboard. I recognised one she used to put on her hydrangeas, one she applied in a pinch to mouth ulcers, even one, I think, that she used to make her own mothballs. This alarmed me. Surely you shouldn’t eat tincture of iodine sulphate?

  I went to the library, in the interests of the perfect cucumber pickle, and asked for a reference book on chemical compounds — can you believe how conscientious I was? — and waited while they dithered around getting one with fragile, rice-papery pages from out of the archives. I dragged this book over to a window seat and looked up the effects of the chemical agent, ‘available at any reputable chemist or apothecary’, which the cookbook had recommended for pickling.

  I sat back, surprised. Then read it again. I looked at the date of the reference book —1879.

  Used in cases of excitability, said the book, initially stimulates gastro-colic reflex, direct enervating and cumulative effect on male’s production of testosterone, decreases vigour over long period of application, useful in hysteria.

  Snap and colour, Barry? I thought as I gazed out the window. You shall have them. I returned the book and went to a reputable apothecary.

  The Home Preserver, I hasten to add, was quite clear in its application. Per quart of liquid (American measurement) you are meant to add the merest pinch, a half of a flattened teaspoon, to achieve the pickle of your dreams. This, they point out, reacts with the acetic acid in your herbed vinegar to prevent that rubbery effect that can so easily spoil a good cucumber. And I had the teaspoon ready, I honestly did. But I was listening to Macka and Chooka and Barry hooting and crashing in the living room, horsing around in their tracksuits and liniment, and I suddenly thought, Well, who the hell knows what a quart is anyhow? And my hand sort of ... slipped.

  Calm down. It’s not going to kill anybody. But it’s interesting, isn’t it — ironic even, when you consider its long-term effect — that a chemical which does so much to keep cucumbers firm and non-flaccid has quite the opposite effect on the male organ. It doesn’t occur suddenly, the book had said, and you’d no doubt need to injest a fair amount over a period of time before you started noticing any changes, but wilt it will. Oh, yes. You’ll be looking at that space between thumb and forefinger in a whole new light.

  I watched the powder dissolving into the vinegar and drifting around the cucumbers, smiling to myself because it reminded me of one of those kid’s souvenirs where snow falls in a little dome on some little landscape; a desert island, say, or — in this case more appropriately — the Big Banana. I shook a jar. The cucumbers, warty and ghostly in their vinegar formaldehyde, bobbed around like specimens. This many pickles were going to take months and months to eat. And suddenly I realised I had no intention of being there.

  Barry, after seeing my defection as an admission of guilt, will hold me no conscious grudge — I’ve left him and the boys a huge supply to be going on with. It’ll take them an entire f
ootball season to get through what’s left, marinating gently in their dill-flavoured broth. I was generous with the herbs and spices. I was unstinting.

  I hum a tune to myself as I pull out of the driveway, hearing the china clink in the back as I hit the tarmac. It’ll be weeks, probably, before any of them notices anything a little ... amiss. But never, never, never would they mention it to each other. And I doubt they’ll think to change their diets. Nothing like a crunchy, firm, green cucumber pickle, thrusting proudly up from your fingers, no bigger than that. Perhaps with a little cheese, a few dry biscuits, a celery stick. I have left the jars in the fridge, lined up as impressively as show exhibits. Pickled cucumbers, dill cucumbers, pickled onions, artichokes, vegetable medley, baby beetroot. Always have them chilled and crisp, advises The Home Preserver, and I tend to agree.

  They are a delicacy. How shall I put this …? They are a dish best served cold.

  Dark Roots

  You’ll be fitting your key in the lock when you hear the phone start ringing, and straight away your hand will be fumbling with haste. The answering machine will kick in and when your heart squirms up around your throat somewhere, you’ll know. Call it what you like, we think it’s love, but it’s chemical. It’s endorphins, that high-octane fuel, revving the engine and drowning out the faint carburettor warning sound in the back of the head, the out-of-tune chug that says wait, wait, in its prim, irritating little voice.

  At the doctor’s, you’ll keep your eyes on the package of contraceptive pills made into a desk paperweight. Your doctor will look over your card, tapping a pen, then reach for the prescription pad, and ask you if you’ve been on these before.

  ‘Oh, many years ago now,’ you say.

  ‘Any side-effects?’

  You remember being twenty-two, going on the pill for the first time, and lock onto the memory of your own body in a swooping rush. You remember your long thighs in those slimline jeans, and your flat stomach which effortlessly stayed that way, hard with muscles you’d done nothing to deserve. You remember — and what woman over thirty-five doesn’t? — pulling your long hair up over a sun visor and sitting on beaches with boyfriends for hours, squinting into the glaring, ruinous sun, glorifying in being tanned.