by Anita Heiss
2
ADDICTIONS, OBSESSIONS AND DELAYED CONFESSIONS
Xanthe’s dark green eyes popped thanks to her smoky eye make-up and blood-red lips. It was 7 p.m. on a Tuesday and she sat in a hip-hugging black Thai silk frock waiting for her husband to arrive. Although they’d both promised to keep the date free to celebrate, she was still grateful that neither had cancelled due to work, as often happened, which was why they were celebrating four months late. They were both workaholics, but still very much in love, and they remained committed to adding to the other’s happiness in life.
‘Can I get you something to drink, Xanthe?’
The waiter knew her by name. She was a regular at the popular La Trobe Terrace venue as it was within walking distance of home and had the best desserts around.
‘Just some water for now, thanks, Matt,’ she answered with a warm smile. ‘But when Spencer arrives could you bring us a bottle of your finest sparkling?’
Her perfect white teeth looked bright against her dark skin. The eyes she got from her Greek father, the skin from her Wiradjuri mother. As a child she was her dad’s ‘Delphorigine Princess’ (he came from the island of Delphi), and he still wrote the endearment in her birthday card each year. She was reminded of the anniversary card her parents had sent from Mudgee. She opened it and sighed, missing her parents who seemed so far away.
Having already decided what she was going to eat, Xanthe flicked through the brochures she’d picked up from the IVF Clinic in Wickham Terrace on the way home from work. All she could see in the dim restaurant light were key words and phrases: blood tests, egg collection, injections, laboratories, procedures and fertility treatments. Xanthe was physically strong for her petite frame; she lived an almost athletic lifestyle, but she didn’t know if she could physically or emotionally cope with going through the process of IVF. The problem was she and Spencer were growing increasingly desperate as they both headed towards their fortieth birthdays and there was still no sign of fertilisation. As she waited for Spencer to arrive, Xanthe scanned her diary, not only for when she was next due to ovulate, but also looking at the enormous workload ahead of her in the coming months. Then the restaurant door opened and she saw the love of her life. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a pale blue shirt, minus the tie he’d left home in that morning.
‘Hello, Princess,’ he said, planting a kiss on her full lips, holding it for five seconds. Xanthe felt dizzy with desire and grateful that she still got horny even though they were counting days and taking temperatures and having sex when essential in the hope of conceiving. There was still enough lust between them to ensure the lovemaking was about something more than just getting pregnant.
‘You look as handsome as you did the day I met you in Musgrave Park,’ she said. ‘And I still prefer you in jeans and a t-shirt.’ She thought back to the day of the rally against the Northern Territory Intervention in June 2007 when she first saw Spencer holding a ‘STOP THE INTERVENTION’ banner while he bellowed loud and strong about human rights for all.
‘I’ve got a few more greys now though,’ he smiled, running his hands through his mostly sandy-coloured hair. With his white skin and broad shoulders, Spencer was the complete opposite of his wife. He was outgoing, self-assured, with a confidence that always made Xanthe feel safe and secure.
The waiter poured some champagne in two stemmed flutes and the couple raised their glasses in a toast to each other.
‘To us,’ Spencer said.
‘And they said it wouldn’t last.’ Xanthe smiled.
‘I don’t know who they are, but someone upstairs has decided we’ll be together, and I’ve got my money on them!’ They both sipped, not taking their eyes off each other. ‘You look beautiful,’ Spencer whispered, taking his wife’s hand.
‘I look tired,’ she responded, meaning it, feeling it.
‘Babe, you haven’t stopped running since you left Spark HR.’ Spencer was still cranky that she had played a significant role building a client base and developing a niche in Indigenous cultural awareness training, but never got credited for any of it. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you left them.’
So was Xanthe; she hadn’t looked back. Within two years she’d set up her own consultancy and had secured her place as one of the most respected trainers in the country. Her package, directed at upper management and designed to simplify the complexities around history, the diversity of Aboriginal culture, and basic ways of incorporating Indigenous protocols and content in the workplace, was being used by a range of organisations and government bodies nationally. Xanthe was also hoping to move into the education sector to help teachers embed Indigenous Studies into their content, as the national curriculum was soon to kick in.
‘Can you believe we’ve been married for five years?’ Xanthe asked.
‘Can you remember how bloody hot and humid it was that day?’
‘It was a couple of weeks off Christmas, we must have been crazy. You didn’t want to wait to marry me.’ Xanthe smiled coquettishly.
‘I know.’
Outside of the stress of her work, Xanthe retreated to her two-person bubble with Spencer. It had been love at first sight for both of them, and five months later, in the middle of a steamy December, they married in the Botanical Gardens. But it was the day they met that they cherished most, both believing that even with extreme cultural differences, ‘someone upstairs’ – as Spencer often said – meant for them to be together.
The couple were happy and content in their own orbit, needing nothing more than each other, the local cafés and the hills. Everything they wanted was right on their doorstep, including an exercise regime. The rollercoaster hills were famous in Brisbane and Xanthe and Spencer would walk, run and stroll the suburb every chance they got to unwind together. As they both travelled so much for work, often spending days and weeks in the sky and on the road, when they were in Brisbane they just wanted their feet on the ground in Paddington. So they had their Sunday morning organic shopping and breakfast at Fundies and afternoon iced coffee at Anouk, and if they were feeling naughty might indulge in some banoffee or peanut butter pie.
Their home suburb was all they needed, aside from a baby.
‘I’m exhausted,’ Xanthe said to Spencer down the phone, three days later. ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’
‘Big day, Princess?’
‘The usual ignorant questions and comments: why organisations have to have Reconciliation Action Plans, what right do Indigenous staff have to get NAIDOC Day off work? Blah blah blah.’
‘You’ll have fun with the girls tonight though, right? You can relax, I’ll be home by midnight.’
Xanthe sighed deeply, gladly anticipating her tiddas – the Vixens, she moaned to herself, still not comfortable with the name the others seemed to easily adopt – visiting for the April book club meeting, and not thinking about work for a while.
She prepared her home as if nesting was her only role in life; she cleaned like a professional, catered like royalty was visiting, and made sure every cushion and ornament was in its correct spot. Xanthe took great pleasure in playing interior decorator at home, matching the curtains with table runners, rugs with coffee tables, cushions with candles. Her attention to detail in her home was as much a mark of self-pride as her commitment to her own personal style. While she wore business suits and basic black pumps to work, she loved the structured looks of locally designed fashions from Maiocchi and the vintage clothes from Retro Metro, both only a stone’s throw or so from home. And she loved a colourful slingback. For tonight’s book club she wore a fitted red dress that showed off her tiny waist, and black pointy patent shoes she’d picked up while working in Geraldton, on the west coast.
Xanthe gently placed her copy of the novel they’d be discussing on the mahogany coffee table, next to a pile of books about getting pregnant: Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection, Getting Pregnant: What You Need to Know Right Now, and her latest purchase, Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Defi
nitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement and Reproductive Health. She hadn’t started reading it yet but had skimmed it enough to know it could help her maximise her chances of conception or expedite fertility treatment by identifying the obstacles to becoming pregnant. This one book could apparently also increase the likelihood of being able to choose the gender of her baby. Xanthe’s head began to spin.
Her desperation about getting pregnant was like a cloud hanging over her constantly; the only time she wasn’t reading about having a baby, or thinking about having a baby, or actually having sex to make a baby, Xanthe was completely focused at work or catching up with her tiddas at book club.
When she wasn’t on the Internet reading conception and fertility blogs, or searching Amazon for the best books on getting pregnant, she was looking at websites and following Twitter accounts in the hope that the miracle answer would appear in 140 characters. When she was exercising she was thinking about it, when she was on the bus or driving or flying and not reading her work papers, she was thinking about it. She was thinking about it in her sleep.
Ever since she and Spencer had decided to have a family, everywhere Xanthe looked she saw women in various stages of pregnancy, babies in strollers, kids’ clothes in catalogues, baby formula on the shelf in the supermarket. At any given time she had at least one pregnancy test in her bag and one in the bathroom drawer. She’d been known to take a test if she was a day late. To her credit, Xanthe was aware of her obsession, though she wasn’t concerned; she imagined it was normal for any woman who was maternal to be like she was. But tonight, after trying to consume all the IVF literature she’d amassed recently, she was just grateful for something other than work and conceiving to think about, even for a few hours. She was also looking forward to drinking something other than the Chinese herbs one of her clients had recommended.
The doorbell rang, shocking Xanthe out of her pregnancy headspace. As she slipped the books into a drawer in the sideboard in the entry hall, she could hear her friends’ cackles even before she reached the front door.
‘Hey!’ She smiled as her four tiddas stood with books and bottles and gifts of flowers and chocolates in their hands.
Richard had dropped the designated-drinker Nadine to Veronica’s in The Gap and they arrived together. Izzy had picked Ellen up from a memorial service at the Greek Club in West End and like clockwork all the tiddas had pulled up in the leafy street at the same time.
‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ Xanthe said proudly as she ushered the ladies through to the living room.
‘You’ve done wonders with this place, Xanthe,’ said Izzy admiringly. ‘It looks amazing, and tidy.’
It had been five months since Izzy had last been there and she was mentally comparing the spotless space to the mess her own flat was. She had lost all interest in keeping house in the last two months or so as she was trying to work, having to deal with morning sickness and still deciding what to do about her pregnancy. Izzy was clear about her career; it was the most important thing in her life. A child would only destroy her plans – and her waistline, she reminded herself. And between her work and training she’d not even made the time for a consultation with her local GP about a procedure. But she was thinking about herself, number one, and what made her happy each day was still her main concern. Her obsession about not wanting a baby was only matched by Xanthe’s about having one.
‘Oh, it’s home,’ Xanthe smiled with pride as she put the sunshine yellow gerberas and liliums Nadine had given her in a vase while the girls settled themselves on couches. ‘We like it, but it does get hot here sometimes without a breeze. Other than that, it’s great.’
‘Sis, you’ve got a good set up here in Paddo,’ Ellen said. She’d been semi-homeless since the floods forced her to evacuate her riverside apartment at Kangaroo Point. ‘You can’t really complain about life here, eh?’
‘Is this upper or lower Paddington?’ Nadine asked, not meaning to sound as bourgeois as she did.
‘Very funny,’ Xanthe said, pouring Pimms and vodka cocktails from a glass jug into highballs for everyone, only pausing when Izzy put a hand over the top of her glass to decline.
‘I’m good,’ she mouthed silently.
‘I’m never going to be upper anything, and as I’m at the bottom of a hill, I doubt it could be classified as upper anyway.’ Xanthe had never heard of ‘upper Paddington’.
‘Love, if nothing else, at least you live at the top of the food chain,’ Izzy said, always one for a good meal, before she was nauseous all the time, that is.
Xanthe looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Paddo is the top of the restaurant hierarchy, after New Farm which is for foodies, and my own West End, which is far less pretentious than here.’
Xanthe was offended. ‘I’m not pretentious!’
‘Of course you’re not, Xanthe – everyone drinks Pimms, daaaahling!’ Ellen said cheekily, waving her already half-drunk cocktail in the air.
‘What I meant,’ Izzy glared at Ellen who was always trying to be funny and sometimes missed the mark, ‘is that Paddington is a great suburb for food. And in some places it is pretentious, but you shouldn’t be so surprised, or offended.’
Veronica sat quietly listening, loving her own suburb of The Gap and not really interested in the conversation. She was preoccupied with her own home-life woes and didn’t feel like sharing them.
Izzy took a sip of the mineral water she’d poured for herself and continued. ‘I’d live here but I love the river too much. Just own where you live, tidda, and be proud.’
Xanthe hadn’t thought much about status before, and certainly not in recent times with her work and ongoing obsession with getting pregnant. But the truth was she had a mortgage worth more than many would see in a lifetime. She only bought organic produce, and she and Spencer ate regularly at the fancy restaurants along La Trobe Terrace. She wasn’t embarrassed about her lifestyle, but she didn’t like being labelled as ‘upper’. Just as she hadn’t liked being labelled ‘boong’ and ‘abo’ back in Mudgee as she walked to and from school and the kids from the rival public school hurled abuse at her from across the road. It was bad enough she was Koori, they’d say, but she was part-wog too. Xanthe sighed deeply, recalling the pain of a young child who did not understand the racism that was rife in the late 1970s, or the senseless labels that came with it. Labels she now worked hard to explain to her clients were archaic and socially unhelpful. Labels of any kind rarely served a purpose, and she rejected them all.
The little-town-girl-done-good was proud of what she had achieved as an adult in the big smoke – Brisbane being big smoke compared to country New South Wales, even if still ‘little smoke’ compared to London, as Spencer had pointed out. And they’d agreed that Brisbane was warmer than both their hometowns, and aside from each other, that’s what kept them there. They’d worked hard to buy their house and had done most of the interior renovations themselves to make it their home. Xanthe had studied diligently at uni, and worked even harder now that she was running her own business. She did own her lot in life and wasn’t apologising to anyone. It was a mantra that she often repeated to herself, especially when working with people who brought their stereotypes into the room and suggested she had to be poor, welfare dependent and uneducated to be Aboriginal. She was never going to fulfil someone else’s stereotype of being Black in Australia in the twenty-first century. It was why she was so good at what she did as a career: she walked the talk.
‘Actually, we’re saving for a Queenslander,’ Xanthe said proudly. ‘Spencer is already looking around here for one.’
‘That’d be right, the coloniser wants the manager’s quarters; the worker’s cottage isn’t good enough, is it?’ Ellen was only half-joking. She couldn’t imagine ever hooking up with an Englishman, let alone having the means to fund a Queenslander in Paddington.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Or mean!’ Xanthe said seriously, pulling Ellen back into line. ‘The
Queenslanders are on top of the hill, they get all the breeze!’
Xanthe shook her head; she knew that Ellen didn’t approve of Spencer with his posh, plummy English voice, but she didn’t imagine her friend could be jealous of her success, could she? They were tiddas, and tiddas were happy for each other’s achievements. They may have lost touch for some years when studying, moving and having families, but once they re-connected in Brisbane in their twenties, they had been as tight as they were in their teens. And they knew each other’s flaws – and fabulousness – inside out. Keeping that in mind, Xanthe knew that whatever the issue was, it was Ellen’s problem, not hers.
And while her tiddas joked about Spencer being ‘the coloniser’ she never took it seriously. She could laugh about it most of the time. Besides, Spencer liked Xanthe’s tiddas, and they liked him because he adored Xanthe. But at the end of the day it didn’t matter what they thought; all that mattered in her world was that she loved him; he was gentle and kind, they had the same world views, and they wanted to share views across Brisbane from the wrap-around veranda of a house on a hill.
‘Why wouldn’t I want to live in a Queenslander? I want to be able to look across town at the gorgeous jacarandas and the silky oaks and the azaleas in bloom.’ Xanthe looked out the front window towards the house across the street. ‘Right now, I have to go to Eurovida and sit at the window at the back of the restaurant to get a good view.’
