And that was it. I sneaked out of earshot, feeling guilty and wondering which gods had contrived this scenario for their amusement. I glanced back and the old women had turned to silently watch the deck quoits. I had to start thinking of my show. I had to rehearse the same old tricks before going on and doing it live in front of an audience who hid behind ship eyes. I told myself that I didn’t bother myself with Mother’s Day because it’s a different day in different countries and my mother knows I love her wherever I am, whatever I am doing, regardless of who is watching me.
WRESTLING MATCH IN THE THEATRE OF OSTIA ANTICA
Dog days of summer. In the ruins, two college girls separate off from their group and find their way to the steps of the theatre, where they sit, check their phones, talk of America, and pick insects from their Sunrise Christian College of Texas T-shirts.
On the dusty stage, two boys notice the girls and call to them: Signorine! The girls look up, look at each other, and laugh awkwardly.
The boys yell out in English, Watch, as if they can tell. Maybe they heard the girls’ college-speak when they were in the long line waiting for tickets. There’d been a delay in opening – a meeting of the guardians of the ruins, of the old city. Guardians of the secrets of Ostia.
So the girls nudge each other, one eye on their faux iPhones, and watch. What they see is the start of something. Within three minutes a large crowd has seeped in, seated itself, some even standing, cheering the boys on. Boys of maybe twenty or twenty-one in Rage Against the Machine T-shirts; educated boys who yell at each other in four languages and quote Horace. They shout lines from Rage songs, and turn on a show. They wrestle and throw each other; they land with deathly thuds on the hard ground, white dust coating their dark hair, their pale bodies.
Many of the onlookers are filming this spectacle. But the American college girls know the show is just for them. They know that no amount of mosaics and amphorae, columns and Latin letters carved into stone, will affect them as much as this moment, as much as this show. This is what the place is about, this port city of trade and warfare, of language and entertainment, of wealth and survival. They feel it in the pit of their stomachs, and they hope the boys hurt, but not too much. They hope their sweat will fill the dust and seep out through the ruins to the small section of the city set aside for them to dig in, to excavate. The wild sexual acts of the Romans, they imagine, are embodied in this moment. And they won’t have to tell their parents; they won’t have to tell themselves.
*
A family have noticed both pairs and noticed their coming together and watched on, bewildered. The wrestling match has finished to cheers, the boys have bowed to each other and to their audience. And they bow to the two American students as well. The family, adults and children, see the girls are anxious and eager and waiting for something. They are offering each other mints. To freshen the breath. The boys are dusting themselves off and climbing the rows of stone seats, and are in front of them. A few steps, so they are just a head or so over the girls, looking down. The boys chime as one, Do you have boyfriends? No, no, we don’t. Well, not in Italy.
*
The family are having a day out of the city, outside Rome. They are searching for something. As they step gingerly through the ruins, exclaiming at each new mosaic or ruin lizard sunning itself on ancient stone, they knit together a narrative of the day. This is the Shrine of Attis. See Attis ‘reclining’ – that’s what the guidebook says – and watching us like a demented liberty. The American college girls will like this and fear it as well. One of the mothers is whispering this to the other. They are the same height and dressed in walking shoes, jeans and T-shirts.
They saw a little of the wrestling match but grew bored quickly and said, Let’s come back to the theatre later when the rowdy crowds have left, then they caught the looks the college girls were giving the boys. Why were they so fascinated? Because it is horrible seeing the birth of horror. The disaster unfold. No good can come of this, they all thought, even the children in their precocious, over-wise way. Within their register of language and experience. Something was amiss, out of kilter.
They are two mothers, with a daughter and a son. The children are eleven and a half and twelve and a half, the boy being the elder, which he considered just. He thought the college girls sort of hot, and his sister said they thought they were fashionable. For her, being overly fashionable was a sign of stupidity. They will make mistakes, she said, turning her attention to the forum. On some ‘breathtaking frescoes’. She was a serious girl. The boy was serious too, yet felt he was missing out on something, and sort of admired the wrestlers, though he wouldn’t admit it.
The family had been wandering the world for two years now, since they came into money. Before that, it’d been tough. The children were home-schooled by their mothers, who had been teachers in a large country school in Western Australia when they met. The children were two and four when their mums hooked up. Their fathers were both dead. The women had met in grief and decided that they could make a go of it as a family. That simple.
The boy had found this more difficult. He was easily embarrassed. His new mum had a really old car, which she loved because it was the first and only car she’d ever owned. She would drive him to school in it – to primary school. She and his real mum taught at the high school. His real mum taught music and his unreal mum taught science.
It was incredibly hot. They were burning in the midday heat and moved up to the kiosk where drinks and food were sold. There was a long line, and ahead of them at the counter the college girls were buying four Cokes. Slick operators, said the science teacher. The music teacher said, Maybe it’s evolutionary. And the science teacher said, No, I can assure you it’s not.
The family sat under the pines on the half-grown green grass with dead and poisoned patches, dirty sand breaking through, pine needles offering comfort and irritation. But the shade was good, and the drinks cool. The boy said to the girl, I bet you’d fancy those wrestlers if you were old enough.
She punched him in the arm and said, I would not, I am no American Christian girl. I am a pagan. No, I am a goddess.
And the boy believed her. She scared him. There was something goddess-like about her. He picked up a piece of ruin and threw it onto the large stone cobbles of the path, and it bounced off into more grass. Don’t, yelled his mother. She yelled it. Shame!
*
These are insulae, said the music teacher to the science teacher. They must have been quite cool even on a hot summer’s day like this. But then the college girls and the wrestlers were there before them, tucked into an archway, a doorway. They were rubbing against each other. I hope they know about Neptune’s horses! It is Neptune, isn’t it?
*
It hadn’t always been this prosaic. For the first year or so, the travelling had been exciting and enriching. None of them had felt they belonged back ‘home’. What was home, anyway? Back there, the children were ostracised by the peers for one reason or another, and their parents just didn’t fit into the school, the place, or the era. A country town. Just big enough for a high school. A politician had come to the town and spoken outside the Anglican church and promised them it would grow, that it would be a special place of the future. That it wouldn’t die off like so many wheatbelt towns. Royalties for Regions, money siphoned off from mining royalties (just a little, not so much as to disturb the right-wing voters or the mining companies) would pour into the town. Sports infrastructure. More sports infrastructure.
When their mothers had first got together, the boy and the girl were wary of each other. The boy liked the outdoors; the girl liked making cubbies inside and reading. Neither spoke much to other children, never mind each other, though both were highly adept at talking with adults, impressing them, and getting what they wanted. Both were in ‘gifted’ programs at school, but that made them homeless as well. The cry of You think you’re better than us from the other kids wasn’t a problem, but Don’t think it’ll get you an
ywhere special from the sports teachers was difficult. Especially when it meant doing a few more laps of the oval or being made to demonstrate elastics to the rest of the class when you couldn’t do elastics. It’s no advantage having a mum as a teacher, they both agreed. In fact, it might well have been the first conversation they had.
And the second conversation went along the lines of: Did you like your dad? Yeah he was okay. Do you miss him? Yes. Do you like having two mums? It’s okay. You? It’s okay.
The boy made friends with the girl by making her a cubby in the gnarled old pepper tree near the shearing shed. His house was the one they all moved into before going overseas. It wasn’t a farm, really a farmlet, but had an old shearing shed and a Federation house with a bullnose verandah on it. Better in the heat, and being just outside town we’re away from the gossip, one of the mums said. His mum, probably.
You see, he said, you can be indoors and outdoors. I love the smell, she said, the smell of the tree. Squeeze the little berries in your fingers. Pop. Pop. And up there in the dappled light and with crows shitting down from overhead, cawing into her psyche, she read Hans Christian Andersen and The Complete World of Greek Mythology. That was before she got an iPhone and remade the world in her own space, to fit her own image.
One time the boy and the girl had a fight. It started in the cubby in the pepper tree and continued in the dirt below. They got covered in chicken poo because the chickens were always clucking and scratching around there. They were wrestling and scratching. The boy had the better of it as he would expect, but she scratched and kicked and bit. Neither said a word, and there was barely a sound. On the shady side of the tree was an old wooden fruit box with a couple of old hessian sacks jammed in. One chook always nested there and laid her daily egg. The girl broke free, ran behind the tree, emerged with the egg, which was warm and messy in her hand, and threw it at the boy, hitting him fair in the balls.
You bitch! he yelled, looking at the mess, astonished. Then he cried and cried. You’ve ruined my jeans, he said. Why did you do that? She put her hands on her hips, whipped her ponytail round so it hung around her neck, and said, That’s a chicken’s menstrual cycle. One day I will get periods and I will be able to make babies. And with that, she ran off.
*
Come here, look at this, the girl said to her sort-of-brother, as their parents were studying a map and fanning each other with it. Deft movements. They’re wrestling!
And sure enough, the wrestlers were struggling with the girls in the ruin with the Via Delle Tombe sign on it. The girl showed the boy a picture of the spot on her phone. Look, it’s on Wiki. Yes, said the boy, though I think it was probably at the end of winter when they took that. Is that where they kept the dead bodies? he asked? They kept ‘urns’ in there. I guess the dead were all turned to ash. All the grass in there is dead, said the boy. Maybe it will be brought back to life? said the girl. Why? Because the wrestlers will water it with their stuff. You’re sick, said the boy. Look at that giant cat slinking along the wall! The girl said it so loud that the writhing couples stopped, looked up, and leapt bolt upright. One of the college girls said, Oh God, they’re kids! The wrestlers grabbed their hands and led them away, out through the opening and quickly down the ancient street.
The mothers watched them go. Disturb them, did you, children?
Not really. They just embarrass easily.
*
It was near closing time and the family were sitting high up in the theatre of Ostia Antica. One mum said to the other, quite loudly, for anyone to hear, Well, our little wrestling lovebirds have flown the coop! Ah, to be young again, the other mocked. A fleeting summer-school romance. All good American Christian educations require an injection of the revolutionary and exotic. Not to mention a good … Ssh, the children! Once, neither would ever have spoken like this in front of the children. The children seemed barely to register – they were intently studying the screen of the girl’s phone.
So what should we do tomorrow? asked the music teacher.
I will give the children a biology lesson in the morning and they can finish up their ancient worlds project, don’t you think?
Yes. And don’t forget tomorrow night that open-air concert is on at the Baths of Caracalla. You know … don’t look so surprised, we talked about it! The Teatro dell’Opera is performing. It will be exquisite.
Sorry, yes, I remember. Well, it will be good for the children. Another string to their bow.
Good for the adults.
Yes, I guess so. We should try to remember everything. Every experience. Keep talking about them. I still marvel at the mechanics of the Parthenon, you know.
Yes, I know you do.
Hey, kids, would you like an apple? The apples were left over from their lunch, which they’d eaten under the pines near the great amphorae. The day had vanished beneath their feet. In the ruins, time was all bent and warped. They seemed to be everywhere at once.
The kids took the apples, bit into them, then threw the apple cores at each other.
Hey, pick them up! Have some respect! Where are your manners?
But suddenly, the children were bolting, almost stumbling down the stone steps to the stage, before lunging at each other and rolling in the dirt and soundlessly wrestling. Their parents watched on, silent also, nonplussed. And then from the centre, from the entry, a massive cheer and a goading of Go for it! in four languages burst forth, and the boys, glowing and full of the history and presence of the ancient city, stepped forward and watched their young protégés indeed going for it, hammer and tong, also aware that the theatre was built around 8 to 12 BC, could hold 4800 to 6000 locals and foreigners, had a cavea width of 65 metres and an orchestra width of 23.5 metres. This they had learned from a student archaeologist, one day of summer girlfriends, just as the boy and the girl had learnt it from the iPhone screen, just as they would write in their projects tomorrow during lesson time. As Horace would say, and they would write: ab ovo usque ad mala!
TRAPS
It isn’t legal to keep wild rabbits, but it is legal to trap, shoot or bash them. Laurie dispatched thousands of rabbits throughout his childhood and teenage years using all of these methods. Nineteen now, he is losing interest, though he promises me a good weekend in the country; he says rabbit will be on the menu. I have never seen a rabbit in the wild, or, for that matter, outside a zoo or laboratory. I have eaten many at French restaurants around the world. I am a bit of a foodie.
The first rabbit he shows me comes as a surprise – a grey rabbit in a cage, limping gingerly over fresh straw. Had him for a year, says Laurie – old already by rabbit standards. No idea how old he really is, but when I found him in a trap he was pretty small. Spent his whole life rootless, he laughed. A virgin male rabbit – now that’s one for the cards, he said.
He opened the hutch, took the rabbit gently out and stroked it; then, holding it snug under his chin with one big hand, reached into a bucket and took a piece of lettuce, which he fed to the interested, twitching rabbit. I know what they’re thinking, he said. Yeah, I replied: ‘I’m hungry’. Laurie laughed, They’re always hungry. Nah, I mean I really know what they’re thinking, especially this one.
*
Laurie’s father was a professional roo-shooter. When Laurie was a small boy, his father had taken him out on his first shoot, had him pull tiny joeys from the pouches of shot mothers, and then showed him how to ‘snuff ’em’ by crushing their heads with his sandshoe or bashing them with a rock. Like all roo-shooters, his dad told him it was the kindest thing to do. Wiping foam from his mouth and saying, Bloody good beer, he explained this in an intelligent, almost self-analytical way. Fwoot fwoot went darts into a board next to him.
Laurie’s father had died two years back; was found on the fence line of a station in the north-east, slumped in the front seat of his ute, next to his rifle. Heart attack. Laurie hadn’t shot a roo since then, but was still after foxes and rabbits. Vermin, he said, they’re not native, though he di
dn’t sound convincing. Still, I’ve got a soft spot for the bunnies, he said, tracing the black and red squares of his cotton shirt with a neatly manicured fingernail.
He was telling me all this the first time we met over a beer in the M. Hotel. I was there as producer–director for a touring youth-theatre production of As You Like It. Laurie was happy to yarn about anything. He said, You look a bit wet around the ears for a mature gent! He had zest about him. He was wry and funny. I found his good spirits infectious.
By closing time we were dancing to Sweet’s ‘Fox on the Run’ and ‘Ballroom Blitz’ (last drinks, folks, last drinks!) which Laurie told me he had specifically requested be loaded onto the jukebox. Some of the codgers at the bar grunted at us, but in an affectionate way, as Laurie was clearly an honoured son of the pub, if not the whole town. He could do no wrong in that establishment. He paid for his drinks on a tab, the same one his old man had – keeping up the family tradition.
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