Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 1, Issue 3

by David Foster

  If Des, as I suspect, were telling the truth, it would appear to have arisen later then went unvetted all the way through to the top and over. Mr Graeme John, our long-term Managing Director, retired in March 2010. In his 16 long years at the helm he took an active interest in the stamp issue program, personally approving every stamp design released and indeed, in 1997 it was actually Mr Graeme John initiated the Australia Post Australian Legends Award and accompanying stamp series, and the 2010 issue – Australian Legends of the Written Word – was the last he personally reviewed and approved for publication. How commendable. I have in my possession a final art proof of that edition, dated twenty second of the twelfth zero nine, a tri-fold pack holding a facsimile edition of the proof, with a signature of the MD himself and an imperforate sheetlet of the 12 stamps comprising the 2010 Australia Post Australian Legends of the Written Word stamp issue and I shall treasure it. All the more as Australia, which lacks the printed matter rate, declares itself, in so doing, inimical to the written word.

  Well no such luck this year with Mr Graeme John retired and headquarters in turmoil. Our new corporate structure in which Australia Post, part of every day, is to be divided into four divisions, including, inevitably, e-Services, intended to bite the bullet, would not take shape before July 2010 and it was during the interregnum – March through July 2010 with no one, as it were, at the philatelic helm, that Ross Commoner slipped through.

  Ross Commoner, ex-SRA. Erstwhile Assistant Station Master. Took over, as I recall, from Bobby Calvary as Dog Rock ASM. A lifelong Dog Rock nobody. Hail, democracy in action! What may have seemed like a good idea at the time and possibly put forward in good faith, I stress ‘possibly’ – ended in what may yet become an embarrassment presented before senatorial committee, for who was it destined to receive – and indeed, might have, were it not for the last-minute intervention of provisional head of Distribution and Express – their 24-carat gold replicas of their personalised stamps, January twenty six, Australia Day? Dot Org, Nick Cave, Camel (aka Kandian Kamelesvaran), Dud – I should have liked to have seen included Geoffrey Gurrumul, make a pairing, in my stamp album, with One Pound Jimmy from 1952, but Ross Commoner? The brother of Coralie Commoner? Frogmore’s Ross Commoner, his only recent appearance, as far as anyone can recall, three years back at the Goulburn Soldiers Club where you wouldn’t be game to park a vehicle for fear of Todd Carney jumping on the bonnet? You wouldn’t ask Ross to sing you the anthem at the Suncorp State of Origin yet here he is on not just one but two of ten commemorative stamps, threatening to join the likes of Nancy Millis and John Tapp as an Australian Legend.

  Someone should have said something. Someone should have been awake yet it went right through to the 24-carat gold replicas and who minted those? Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu? Everyone is blaming someone else but you bet the blogs are aburble, Twitter atwitter. Trots are always alert for a slip-up. My Facebook friends all scoff at me. Thankfully, it’s only just past the end of the month of Jan so very few of this year’s Legend issue have actually been sold – it is our quietest time of year, we’re still clearing Christmas stock and most of the Legends of Popular Song, including the cuckoo chick, were consigned to Dog Rock for a reason I shall delineate, while the two stamps featuring Ross – his gold replicas having been melted down, have quietly, as I understand it, been put to rest, though I have as many as I could get my hands on, buddy, as they’ll be worth a bob. I seized the entire local allocation. I have ninety percent of the issue and they’ll be joining my proof sheets of the Auld Mug that never got won and the four stamps commemorating the boycotted Moscow Olympics. We are bruiting it about there were only four Legends of Popular Song, Dot, Nick, Camel and Dud and as for Neil Finn, a deserving nominee, but he’ll have to wait. He’ll have to wait his time across the ditch, I mean, can’t they do anything over there? Must we honour all their Legends? Russell Crowe gets a wombat gong and what price Reg Mombassa? That said, there was only one artist in ninety-nine, only one operatic diva in oh four. The current issue, including the large-format prestige booklet featuring all ten stamps – one of each Legend pictured as they are now and one of their choice, from the archive, in their prime, because you wouldn’t get to be an Australian Legend until you were, oo, say, at least thirty-five – recalled. The handsome 64 page booklet, a collection of biographical features on each Legend, pulped, though I shall retain one as I must refer to it but the cost, not to mention potential embarrassment to an organisation struggling to survive in a modern e-world – scandalous. Stamp Bulletin, March-April issue, being revamped as I speak. Thank you, Dog Rock. Thank you for your customary bastardry, you postcode you. But we fear this blunder won’t just disappear, though our PR team are doing its best by calling in some Chinese hackers. Sorting machines have been programmed to frank within an inch of their life either stamp featuring Ross but you can bet your life some blogger with time on his idle anarchist hands, some Trotskyite Bolshevik bludger, will stir up trouble for a former employer on WikiLeaks. Some even suggest managerial heads may roll but I say no. Someone lower down the food chain will be found accountable for this breach of trust and that’s where I come in, in a capacity as postal detective sergeant. I wear quite a few Australia Post hats not all of which have chinstraps. I am resolved to start at the very bottom so here I am in Dog Rock. Where better place to start? Someone hereabout, I suggest, is heading for Centrelink. It is my brief to find the culprit. We may surmise we just met him but we must not jump to conclusions, which is one thing I learnt in Madras. See, just because someone is covered in gold jewellery may not mean she is wealthy. It may just mean she has no access to a drawer, or to a strongbox, or indeed a dwelling.

  Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy. Just because you bark at the postman may not be the reason he moves on.

  So I’m off to find myself accommodation in Dog Rock. I expect to be here for at least a week. I need to check out this Ross Commoner, brother of the winsome Coralie, and I expect I have my choice of B and B’s. Always a few about – they live in hope – but it never really took off, did it, the B and B concept, not round here, though some still live in hope. This is not Ireland. I could stay at the pub but I still have a little hearing in one ear and I’m told I need a good night’s sleep if I am to rise at three a.m. each working day, as I must, for Des says I have to get to the Mail Centre, thirty klicks north, to start work at four thirty a.m.

  It’s a fifty klick beat, the Dog Rock beat, always was. Nothing has changed there. You need to set limits. One time, you did it on a pushbike and got some fitness into you. At his best, Lance Armstrong, with domestique George Hincapie, rode for US Postal. Eight hundred drops, though, that’s gone up. No vacant blocks or paddocks now. It is a long beat and that’s a lot of drops, when you’ve no apartment blocks to service, and I haven’t ridden a motorcycle since, oo, was it when I served as a cavalry scout for Operation Barbarossa, Wehrmacht sixteenth Panzer Division, second Panzer regiment, on the Beemer flat twin airhead? No, it would have been when I sold the Royal Enfield, a thumper, on leaving Madras, so I’ll be slow, at first, in the predawn, breaking up my mail. New challenges take time when you’re well past it. Struggling to recall names – what was yours again? Slowly affixing my yellow printed redirections in the magnifiers. Manuel tells me Des battles to finish the run in daylight hours and it’s a bit like surfing, in that you can’t really deliver mail in the dark, well, you can – I’ve done it – but you really shouldn’t try because of the dogs. Cats dive down the nearest drain but dogs go right off by night and they’re bad enough by day. Not to mention the ‘roos and wombats on the nature strips here plus a certain rhinotek Santa with a team of rhinotek caribou. You could do yourself a mischief. Maybe fracture a collarbone.

  Manuel tells me a lot of people who used to have private boxes are having their mail redelivered to their street address as a result of the downtown.

  Notice how wombats always leave a calling card by the letterbox? What is that supposed to say, Jaan
Kirsipuu?

  Australia Post, while part of every day, does have a policy that weekends are not everyday affairs yet I’m told Des often delivers mail on Saturday and Sunday. Claims he has no choice, can’t find anyone to help him. It would only be junk, hey! Bite your tongue. It would only be unaddressed mail. And he wouldn’t want anyone to help him, if the truth were known. He’d have to pay them.

  Shouldn’t have taken on a five year contract. He won’t get another as he’s let us down in hurting himself but you know what? Whether or not he is touching up vouchers I can’t see him voting for Ross Commoner. And he is a Finn fan, did you not see the Split Enz albums among the cricket trophies? He would have voted for Tim Finn ahead of Ross Commoner. I’m pretty sure, being dinky-di, he was alert to the dangers of provincialism.

  The Younger Man

  Zoë Foster

  Abby washed her hands and peered at her naked body in the mirror as she dried them on a technicolour Missoni hand towel. It was a gift, but an expensive one as she had then felt compelled to buy a whole set of Missoni towels to match.

  Her face was flushed, her skin damp with a light sweat. Even with the flattering light of a summer morning bouncing softly off the walls she looked like Twitchy the Tramp: her eyeliner had escaped her lashline and was cavorting around what would eventuate into magnificent bags under her eyes, her thick brows, usually groomed perfectly into position, were unruly and dishevelled, her eyes were red and glazed, and her pixie-short honey-blonde hair danced wildly around her head.

  She felt roughly as terrific as she looked. Her breath was poisonous with the scent of alcohol; her mouth dry from salt-rimmed glasses and smoking the cigarettes she vocally abhorred in Real Life. Her head pounded quietly; warming up for the rousing drum solo it planned to unleash the moment she thought she had a handle on her hangover.

  But Abby did not give a shit about any of this. She had just had heart-pounding, passionate, uninhabited sex with a beautiful man ten years her junior, and she felt fucking fantastic.

  Even in her glorious post-coital glow, she was bound by a bathroom habit she’d been doing since she was 17. She twisted 180 degrees to check on her (minor, invisible to most) cellulite, wondering if by some stroke of incredible luck and/or magic, it had fallen off during that final, excessively athletic romp, and she now had the pert arse of an 18-year-old. She did not. It was definitely the arse of a 33-year-old, and while it was fine, almost good, in jeans and passable in a very low-slung bikini bottom and a thick layer of self-tan, it was not an arse that should be paraded around an extremely good-looking young man in the harsh and unforgiving light of morning. Why the fuck she’d chosen to make the master bedroom the one with the skylight, she didn’t know. Spectacularly bad for self-image.

  It didn’t really matter though, because as usual, her new male friend would be leaving. Abby had a no-sleep-over rule. Didn’t matter if he held Future Husband potential or was a no-strings rascal like the one currently sprawled on top of her crumpled sheets. Didn’t even matter if he was the best lover she’d ever had, and she blushed as she realised this one just may have been. And it wasn’t just because she’d had a bit of a drought lately. He was incredible. So intuitive, so generous, so… skilled.

  She fanned her face and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around her body before walking quietly back into her hot, sweaty room. The dark floorboards creaked noisily under her feet and her breath seemed louder than usual, everything seemed exaggerated, partly because of the hangover and partly because there was a handsome stranger in her bed she had the task of kicking out.

  ‘Marcus,’ she half-whispered, half said.

  The toned body remained lifeless; the face, strands of messy brown hair covering it, remained unresponsive. He was young, so young, she thought. Twenty-two years old. He was a baby! Jesus. How did this happen…Tequila, that’s how.

  ‘MARCUS.’

  Nothing. She sighed, contemplating her next move as she perched on the side of the bed near where his head lay, resting next to a bedside table boasting a pile of impressive but unread books. She checked her phone: 6:02 am. He needed to leave. Now.

  ‘Marcus!’

  ‘Mmmphffh…’

  ‘Come on. You gotta get outta here. My fiancé will be home any second and he probably won’t be as thrilled to meet you as I was.’

  Marcus suddenly sat bolt upright, his face twisted in confusion and panic.

  ‘Fiancé? You have a fiancé?! Whatthefu-‘

  ‘Yes,’ Abby spoke slowly and calmly. ‘He gets home from his business trip this morning, and presumably will want a shower and a kiss before work. Obviously I have to clean this place up before he walks through that door. You know, get rid of the condom wrappers and the scent of mating. That kind of thing.’

  But Marcus wasn’t listening anymore. He was untangling himself from the sheets, and scrambling around on the floor trying to locate clothes that were removed with two sets of very impatient, urgent hands. He found his undies, simple black Bonds (nothing wanky and designer, thank you) and pulled them quickly up over his tanned legs and white arse before hopping into his dark blue jeans. Without so much as a look at Abby, still sitting on the side of the bed, he raced out into the lounge room for his rockabilly checked shirt, tripping over her low, mosaic coffee table. She could hear him swearing in hushed tones.

  Abby padded to the loungeroom and leaned against the doorway as she watched Marcus racing to put his socks and shoes on.

  ‘Got everything then?’

  Marcus stood up and patted his pockets for the holy trinity: keys, wallet, phone.

  ‘Yep…What’s so funny?’ Marcus looked at Abby, his eyes bleary but handsome, his hair the kind of cool mess that stylists spent hours creating for arrogant fashion campaigns.

  ‘Nothing. Why? Nothing…’

  ‘You’re smiling!’ he said in disbelief. ‘I’m about to be intercepted by a furious man in the stairwell and you’re smiling. You’re a lunatic.’

  A grin fought to take over Abby’s mouth. ‘I’m not smiling!’

  ‘No, because now you’re laughing, and that’s worse.’ He looked at her in disbelief for a few seconds before his outrage softened. God she was sexy, he thought. He had a thing for women with short hair. Even with her eyes smeared in black shit and her hair all crazy. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to pick her up and take her back to bed and do very bad things to her. He had half a mind to push her onto the lounge right now.

  ‘’Sjust nervous energy. Now, go, go!’

  Marcus shook his head. How often did she do this? That poor son of a bitch fiancé. He stopped at the front door, and turned to face her across the room, all coy and shy in her towel, despite having been straddled naked on top of him, panting and theatrically moaning not 34 minutes ago.

  ‘Do I get a goodbye kiss?’

  She sighed, enjoying his beautiful face and those deep brown eyes for the last time. She wanted to. Very much. Why not? What would one kiss do? Nothing. It would do nothing.

  She walked over to him, one hand holding her towel up, the other tucking her hair behind her ear, and stopped before him, looking up into his eyes.

  ‘You do.’

  He looked into her blue eyes for one, maybe two seconds before leaning down and kissing her softly on the lips. It was the perfect kiss, gentle, final, lingering. Abby felt her heart do a small pirouette as she pulled away from his lips, and looked into his eyes. Oooh, he was a piece of work, this one. Best he disappears into the dawn, forever.

  ‘Now scat, young man.’

  He turned and opened the door. ‘I don’t call you, right?’

  ‘You don’t have my number, so, uh, no.’

  ‘I could find it if I wanted it.’ He smiled mischievously and pulled the door closed.

  Abby shook her head and walked back to her bedroom.

  The kids of today. Honestly.

  * * *

  ‘You’re sick.’ Abby half-smiled, her eyes wide with disbelief. It was the kind of demented b
ehaviour generally reserved for psychotic ex-girlfriends in Hollywood films, but somehow, as usual, her friend made it cute.

  ‘Wasn’t like I did it on purpose, it was more like, well – ’ Chelsea toyed with her long caramel-chocolate hair and issued one of her trademark smiles, wicked and childlike in equal parts, masterfully created to eschew her of any blame.

  ‘Okay, so maybe just explain how deliberately running up the back of a Porsche was not on purpose, Chels?’

  ‘It was a tap. A little bumper kiss. And it was his fault; he was flirting with me in his side mirror. And I just had this moment when we were stuck in this long trail of traffic where I accidentally pushed too hard on the accelerator and it happened…’

  More laughter from Abby as she tipped her empty cappuccino into her mouth to enjoy some of the chocolaty froth that insisted on clinging to the bottom of the cup.

  ‘Abs that’s so off – what are you, five?… Anyway, whatever, he said he’d pay for the damage. You’re missing the important part – he is hot, funny, and generous.’

  ‘Rich. The word you’re looking for is rich.’

  ‘Tell me that’s not what I’ve been searching for – hot, funny and successful.’