After the Blues

by Kathy Lette

  Melvyn writes in a love letter that he hopes and prays the planet’s serendipity angels engineer a chance for them to be together again soon … Angels be buggered. Ro rings an airline.

  Because one of the things he loves about Ro is her spontaneity, she decides to book a romantic hotel, arrive unannounced and throw away her emergency list of rellos twice, thrice removed, as well as the address of the maiden aunt of her hairdresser’s lover’s masseuse. Soon she’ll be sipping lapsang souchong and dipping into discussion on existentialism. Melvyn is profoundly, passionately, poetically in love with her. Ro is as certain of this as of the fact that England is a tea-bag free zone.

  England

  Ro tracks him down through his secretary and hurls herself at him in the Harrods food hall. He pulls back in horror. ‘Sorry … My damn classicism …’ he mumbles, looking round nervously. ‘It holds me back …’ Ro realises that Englishmen adore a little spontaneity – as long as they get a warning.

  ‘Well, Ro, what do you, from a younger continent, make of Europe from this visit?’

  All she can make of it so far is that she only has another half-hour in the romantic hotel room. Lying back on the fluffy pillows, he tells her one of the great things about walking around London with her, going to galleries and museums, is that everything suddenly takes on a new aura. She licks the socket of his armpit. He giggles, squirms, then sighs. ‘Why am I, why are we Europeans, so gloomy, so … lugubrious?’

  She tells him it’s not a visit.

  Their cups of room-service tea by the bed are as brown and cold as the Thames.

  ‘There are complications,’ he gulps.

  Ro realises that nobody speaks plain English in England. It’s a surrogate-mother tongue. She needs United Nations headphones to decipher the euphemisms. ‘Spot of trouble on the home front’ decodes as career, kids, mortgage and marriage to Octavia.

  Ro registers her name. Octavia. She just knows she wears a bun and tweed skirts, does cryptic crosswords, moans in Latin and can pull poetic quotes and the biographical details of Donne out of thin (is it really radioactive?) air.

  Ro asks for suggestions about where she should live.

  He looks panicked. ‘Have you ever noticed –’ he distracts her with kisses ‘– that the great lovers of European literature are always dying in each other’s arms? Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Troilus and Cressida? The most beautiful love stories in this continent are always about loss. Loss in love,’ he stresses, ‘is a great European tradition.’

  Topping up the tea, Ro notices the string of a tea bag trailing forlornly from the pinched little mouth of the pot. He takes her to a club called ‘Groucho’s.’ It is chock-a-block with producers and poets and playwrights and dons with multitudes of chins. They’re all signing up each other for books and films of the book and video cassette novelisations of the radio musical. When they discover she’s from Or-strail-yar, it is as though they’ve collectively trodden in a dog turd.

  ‘Your economy’s keeling, over what? Your country’s been out to lunch for too long.’ She detects a trace of envy in the mangled vowels of the man’s educated voice. Melvyn introduces him as a famous Shakespearean actor from the Lakelands. ‘Known in the colonies, no doubt, for its pencils,’ the Shakespearian actor chortles.

  ‘Any lead in yours?’ Ro asks sweetly. England brings out the worst in her. It makes her want to talk about pillow biters and pointing Percy at the porcelain.

  ‘Not another creative little person from the colonies? Surely we’ve taken in enough of you by now.’ She tells him she’s working on an anti-British, all-lesbian review called ‘The Loneliness of the Long-distance Punner on a Hot Tin Spoof ’. Melvyn’s lips tighten as he tells everyone she has jet lag, then hisses in her ear that puns are the lowest form of wit.

  ‘And buns are the lowest form of wheat,’ she replies, devouring her bread roll in a gulp.

  He doesn’t return her calls for three days. She goes to Foyles bookshop and looks up the plots of Troilus and Cressida and Tristan and Isolde in Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book. Stuck in some bleeding-heart plot, they invariably get stabbed and they can’t stop singing. Vocal haemophiliacs.

  It is a strange country. The intellectuals want to fuck Margaret Thatcher. And everybody else wants to work as Lady Di’s hairdresser and sell their memoirs. On freezing-cold days they sunbathe on deckchairs in Hyde Park, nipples rising off their anaemic chests like little pink iceblocks.

  Ensconced in her bedsit (thus named because there is only one place to sit – on the bed), it’s like making love in a knapsack. ‘Constrictus Claustrophobis’ is her big effort at moaning in Latin. She asks him how much longer he’s going to go through the motions of his loveless marriage with Octavia.

  ‘Ah … how homesick you must be. The expatriate’s anguish. Oh, how brave you are, Ro.’ He dresses quickly, each buttonhole stitching him up tighter, his morals now as kempt as his silk cravat. ‘The experience of exile is rather cubist, don’t you think?’

  She pats his black leather elbow patches as though they’re the cold noses of a couple of stray dogs.

  ‘You live in an impacted space, really. The presence of the country you’re living in and the memories of home. Tragic.’ He steeplechases over the bed and is off on the home stretch.

  When she doesn’t hear from him for a week, she writes a list of every Pommy put-down she knows. (An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.)

  After she threatens to drink a death draught, he takes her to the Royal premiere of his new film. Octavia is attending a conference in Brussels on ‘The Revival of Obsolete Dialects’. Melvyn suggests she wears her best frock. A brace of Royals is doing the rounds. Ro promises to raise her corgi consciousness and not to split any of her infinitives.

  ‘G’day,’ she greets Lady Di. She’s amazed how even the lefties and radicals go limp at the thought of meeting a Royal. London is a peerage-hungry principality. Di’s gravity-defying hairstyle is a miracle of technology. Ro wonders if her brains are blow-waved too. She inquires as to Her Highness’s favourite television show.

  ‘Dynasty,’ Di replies, eyeing off Ro’s leather miniskirt. Everyone else is wearing long chiffon. Ro finally learns the difference between a frock and a dress – you wear a dress. A frock wears you.

  Why does she like Dynasty?, Ro continues.

  ‘Oh,’ Di replies, ‘I enjoy the escapism.’

  It strikes Ro that for Lady Di, Dynasty would be a documentary. What she should be watching is a soapie about the Brixton riots. ‘I don’t like the women in Dynasty much,’ Ro confesses. ‘They’re not real. None of those women ever get blackheads or period cramps.’

  There is a sudden intake of breath around her, like a giant asthma attack. Perhaps blue bloods don’t get periods? Melvyn’s face drains of all expression. Ro fidgets and twitches, then lurches onto a new subject. ‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you …’

  Faces freeze as Princess Di’s minders wait for her to ask the duration of her orgasms, the location of her G spot or whether or not she likes the odd bit of bondage covered in custard. ‘Have you mastered the art of yawning with your mouth closed?’

  Lady Di laughs, but is whisked away from Ro’s vicinity. Melvyn rapidly steers Ro from the room by the elbow. As she leaves, Ro overhears the princess telling some cricketing star she’s seen on the back of a porridge pack that what she enjoys most about cricket is the escapism.

  Melvyn’s house is huge and full of panelled, port-stained studies and four-posters. Ro drinks too much then drops her champagne flute. ‘Don’t worry.’ Melvyn’s smile is one of the particularly stiff variety, adopted by a host when a drunken guest drops one of his champagne glasses. ‘The eighteenth century was very long; I’m sure they made many more of them.’

  Draped on the chaise longue, Ro announces that if they lived together, they could stay in bed for a month. Ro tells him the aim would be to kiss the remotest creases of his
human milk-bottle body.

  He informs her casually that Octavia’s father is an Earl. Or is it a Knight? Something related to the personage on the postage stamp, anyway. ‘Divorce lacks that certain noblesse oblige,’ he explains.

  Ro replies that she thought breeding was something they did with dogs.

  ‘Your country’s hang-ups – your isolation and ex-colonial unease – are so much healthier than ours,’ Melvyn pontificates, strapping her into high heels and a corset. As he brandishes a riding crop, Ro reminds herself that the English are more prone to eccentricity than any other nation.

  He is busy. On location. So she eats afternoon tea in the Savoy, as many cream cakes as possible for four pounds. Oh well, she tells herself, you only live twice. Once now, and once after the triple bypass surgery. That emergency list of maiden aunts and rellos she threw away now looks like a good idea. Kerrie and Debbie send her a box of lamingtons, express airmail. She becomes unbearably homesick, catches a cold and jams her stockinged, icicled toes up the hot-air hand dryer in the ladies’ loo at Harrods to thaw out.

  Thatcher is like a cold England can’t shake off. Kinnock runs round with the Kleenex, mopping up, but it has already penetrated deep into the country’s chest. Up close, the punks pictured on the postcards smell of soap and Blue Clinic shampoo. Her cold turns into the twenty-four-hour flu. Her penicillin capsules run out at twenty-three hours. The daily highlight is to watch the passing parade of the Changing of the Guard, England’s version of Disneyland. She begins to think that perhaps Melvyn is right: against the greyness and angst of a wintry London, Australia shimmers with possibilities.

  ‘Australia is the flavour of the month in England,’ Ro enthuses on postcards back to her pals. She sits with fellow expatriates telling each other how famous Paul Hogan and Robert Hughes and Helen Garner and Clive James are, and how fashionable it is for Australians to be sitting round in London, talking about how fashionable it is to be Australians sitting round in London.

  Melvyn must be right when he emphasises to her the importance of Australia on the world map. It is the place of the future. The place for the brave. The last chance of the republican dream. She believes him now when he says he’ll be Down Under often.

  When she’s in a travel agent booking a flight home, Ro decides to stop off in Hawaii, the Cocktail Capital of the World. Browsing through the accommodation brochure, she sees an article about Captain Cook. ‘The greatest discovery Captain Cook ever made was the Hawaiian Islands.’ Raising one eyebrow, she reads on. ‘The Queen of England sent him to sea to discover the Great Southern Unknown land, which he never discovered.’

  ‘Cooee!’ Ro calls out to nobody in particular, in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. ‘We are there!’

  Ro covers Melvyn in kisses. She vows that her Dag Days are over. No longer will she wear blue with black or sprout maverick patches of leg stubble. She promises not to poke fun at his paunch in public – no more jokes about a verandah over the toy shop.

  Since her arrival in England, Melvyn’s emotional terrain has bristled with barbed wire. She pole vaults over it to tell him how much she loves and needs and adores him. But he frogmarches her back onto firmer ground – safer topics, like IRA terrorism and the storage of nuclear waste.

  ‘You Englishmen are so different in your own warren compared with how you appear in my neck of the world’s woods.’ The grey pavement is lumpy with cobblestones; it feels like she’s walking on what they served her up for breakfast. ‘You come to my country and reinvent yourselves.’

  ‘Maybe we are reinvented? But we do all fall to dreams of love in Australia. Is it the light? It must be the light that makes the English male libido never want to wear underpants again!’

  Ro’s tan has faded. Her freckled skin looks like a game of join-the-dots. She worries that if she joined them all up she’d turn out to be a donkey …

  ‘Remember, you are the light in my life,’ he says, leaving for location in Canada. ‘Blossom, I want you to feel secure in the fact that for me there will only ever be you … and Octavia.’

  Bondi

  ‘Well.’ Julia frisbees her sunhat onto Ro’s head. ‘What happened?’

  Ro feels herself dissolving in the midday sun. ‘Australia only exists so that England has something it can feel superior to … oops.’ She remembers Melvyn’s an Oxford graduate. ‘As a place to which England can feel superior’.

  ‘But I thought he loved this country.’ Kerrie lies rigid in a G-string, eyes searching neurotically for stray pubes. ‘I thought he was a direct descendant of Captain Cook, for God’s sake.’

  ‘So?’ Ro talks mock-posh. She polishes her vowels. She tries not to cry. ‘No woman is a continent.’

  ‘God,’ Julia groans, ‘why do females always end up the victims?’

  Once again Julia rattles off the list of the women they know who were done over by their British Romeos. When Gail got dumped by her English fiancé, she sued unsuccessfully for breach of promise. Amanda had a nervous breakdown in Brighton, became celibate, went through EST and is now in full-time therapy with a part-time job at the London branch of the Australia Council. Ro remembers her last day in London. She wept into her copy of Keats’ love sonnets, then scaled Melvyn’s study desk, took down the curtain rail, removed the stoppers on each end and filled the hollow railing with raw prawns. Her noblesse just refused to oblige.

  Back at Bondi, she reads in the papers that England is having an unexpected heatwave. Ro imagines Melvyn tearing up floorboards and ripping off the wallpaper, searching for the source of the odour. Imagine him so deranged by the stench that he’s forced to move house. She pictures the removalist company arriving to pack up the contents of his posh terrace house … and packing the curtain rails.

  Pretty off, she knows. Well, what do you expect? After all, she is just a girl from the colonies.

  The Ned Kelly complex

  I suppose my cause has always been causes. My friends, especially poor Debbie, have survived my fads. They’ve had dinner with the UN expert on world famine who ate all the after-dinner mints. They invited the vegetarian activist to our Bondi Beach sausage sizzle and didn’t flinch when the all-girl Melbourne rock band ‘The Black and White Menstruals’ moved in for two days and stayed for two months.

  But Billy was different; I was convinced that he was more than a hobby.

  I met him on a journalistic assignment: maximum-security prisons for men. My tape recorder set the metal detector wailing. The contents of my bag were searched: novel, anti-nuclear pamphlets, uncashed cheques, lollies covered in fluff, condoms, emergency meds, bus tickets, invitations to book launches and the suburban weddings of schoolfriends, unpaid parking fines … nothing you’d ever see in the ads for Glomesh handbags.

  An officer told me to wait with the other visitors. The women around me looked vaguely familiar. All in their early to mid-twenties, they wore bright designer jumpers with shoulder pads, big earrings and leather skirts, or overalls and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans. One well-endowed chest read ‘The Jails are the Crime’. Another promised ‘Today’s Pigs’ would be ‘Tomorrow’s Bacon’. I realised with a start that they looked a lot like me.

  The auditorium was wall-to-wall men. They were introduced by their nicknames – The Beast, Magpie, Bruce the Tooth … There was a subdued violence about their cracking of knuckles, thumb-twiddling and knees that jiggled up and down like tea bags. Beneath the cheap prison-issue soap and aftershave, there was also a certain smell about them. A hungry smell. Five or six of them swarmed like piranhas ready to savage each female.

  The topic for today’s debate was ‘Conjugal Rights for Long-term Prisoners’. The murmurous crowd used the discussion as camouflage for kissing and the smuggling of contraband. But the final speaker caught their attention. The whole auditorium reeled from the whiplash of his voice. He was passionate, angry, articulate. His speech swung from breathtaking bravado to a luminous gravity. Though peppered with words like ‘oleaginous’ and ‘persiflage�
�, his sentences were chock-a-block with ‘I seen’ instead of ‘saw’, ‘bought’ for ‘brought’ and an abundance of ‘brungs’. As he spoke he slowly centred his gaze on me.

  ‘This is Billy. Billy Bridges. Better known as “The Mouth”,’ Bruce the Tooth introduced us.

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ I extended my hand, supressing my disquiet with professional ease.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ He shrugged. ‘No worries.’

  ‘You argued very intelligently.’ I dunked an Iced VoVo biscuit into a styrofoam cup of scalding tea.

  ‘Brains is what you’ve gotta use if you’ve never had an edge-ja-kay-shun.’

  ‘Education just allows you to get into more expensive trouble,’ I bantered. ‘What are you in for? And for how long?’ I continued.

  Bruce the Tooth grunted disapprovingly and moved away. To a crim, this question is like asking Sir John Kerr if he drinks. Billy Bridges regarded my breach of prison protocol coolly. ‘Just done a five-year graduation course. Jail, see, is a university where you’re sent to figure out ya mistakes and get lectures an’ that in better armed-robbery techniques.’

  I flicked open my notebook and asked him about the changing attitudes to women in male subcultures.

  ‘Get this through your squarehead skull,’ he said, confiscating my pen. ‘It’s not just blacks and women what get treated like second-class citizens. I bin through years of it too. I know what it’s like to be slagged on.’

  Billy had large hands and greedy eyes, and was so top-heavy with pectorals I felt sure that if he fell you’d have to flip him over onto his back, like a beetle, before he could get up again.

  ‘I can understand why none of youse trust blokes.’ His voice was low and intense now. ‘But what I also seen is that youse have never had a real man before, datin’ all them boys. Youse have never had anyone who’d stand up to youse. You ain’t never had a man make love to ya.’