Women of a Certain Age

by Jodie Moffat

  That women or men are defined by their attachment to one another has elements of truth and practice within it, but also excludes those who walk different paths. I have traversed a single life with a few deviations, and if I am to be discontent, I’d prefer it to be on my own terms. That is, I’m perfectly happy to be unhappy on my own. The same goes for boredom. Being single is not so bad in a world where I can earn, and therefore survive, despite the tremendous push, some of it biological, a whole lot of it psychological, to be with someone.

  The pressure for women to comply with societal norms can result in a lifelong lack of upward mobility, as seen in the rising number of older women in positions of poverty, despite, or maybe even because of, years of marriage. In friends and acquaintances, I see a multitude of ways to be normal. Being accepted as such, both inwardly and outwardly is ideal. The trick lies in navigating the terrain.

  Notes

  1 Marian Sawer, ‘The Long, Slow Demise of the “Marriage Bar” ’, Inside Story, 2016; www.insidestory.org.au/the-long-slow-demise-of-the-marriage-bar/

  2 ‘Chapter 2: Population’, Statistical Handbook of Japan 2016. Tokyo: Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication: Statistics Bureau, 2016, p.18; www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/pdf/2016all.pdf

  3 Kyodo, ‘1 in 4 men, 1 in 7 Women in Japan Still Unmarried at Age 50: Report’, The Japan Times, 2017; www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/04/05/national/1-4-japanese-men-still-unmarried-age-50-report/

  4 Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

  5 ibid., p.30.

  6 Penny Russell, ‘Stone, Emma Constance (1856–1902)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, ANU, 2017; http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stone-emma-constance-8676

  Living at Clarkie’s Camp — Sarah Drummond

  Last night I dreamed of the sea eagle. It looked down at me from the spar of a power pole on the overpass into the city. In the morning when I awoke at the inlet it was from the marri tree at the water’s edge that the eagle regarded me. It looked sanguine, interested as I called in its own eerie language. Later I saw the bird cruising the shoreline, hunting, wings tilted up like a dancer’s fingers, as it does every day. I called again but the eagle ignored me.

  When my youngest child left home, I left the city for a place of gothic, dripping cathedrals of trees. It was winter and the potholed and corrugated track to the inlet was littered with curling strips of fallen karri bark and branches. I rented an off-grid cottage at the end of the track crouched under huge marri trees, knotted limbs crazy dancing against a steel grey sky.

  Broke Inlet lies thirty-five kilometres from the tiny farming and national parks town of Walpole on the south coast of Western Australia. If you walked through the bracken and zamia palms from my cottage, past the Creepy Shack with its kicked-in asbestos walls, soaked mattresses and magazines from the 1980s, past the massive burled marri that I call my gateway guardian, you will find the townsite of Camfield. Except that this is not a town but a row of jury-rigged shacks. Corrugated iron, salt-faded weatherboards and face cuts gleaned from nearby timber towns, barred windows and padlocks on anything that can be opened or stolen, rainwater tanks, drop dunnies part way up the primary dune to give run to the septic tank or a decent view. The shacks face out to the inlet in a stoic line. Across the water, a break in the coast hills signifies The Cut, where the sandbar breaches once the inlet has swelled to splitting.

  I came here to research the story of Clarke, a man consigned to an unofficial witness protection program in the 1920s. Apparently, he lived at a place called Clarkie’s Camp, on the same property as me. There must be many other secrets out here but my interest was the secret of Clarke: to divine his presence, to listen for him in the deep, heavy silences of the inlet, when the wind drops and even the birds are censured by lack of sound. An oyster pale Sunday. The crack of my axe, splitting the air.

  A kind of folk mythology surrounds Clarke’s presence at Broke Inlet.

  ‘Didn’t someone live out his days at Broke on the run from the cops?’

  ‘Dad reckoned he was a spy and the government hid him there.’

  ‘Wasn’t Clarke that butcher? With the big knife?’

  The most common story is that Clarke was stashed at Broke Inlet by the state government, and that, once a month, a policeman would leave him supplies at the turn-off from the main road.

  I was in bed and ready for sleep the night my lover’s headlights loomed on the bedroom wall, and his big old diesel coughed to a halt. The dog stirred and wagged her tail, friendsome. The glass door slid open and I saw the blue LED glare of his headlamp.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ he said. He paused at the bookshelf, then rushed to kneel at my bedside. ‘I have two questions for you … will you marry me?’

  And when I said it was a complicated question that required discussion, he said, ‘I’ve got two bottles of red and some dex and I haven’t eaten all day and I’d like to spend the night driving around the back roads of Broke with you and do some discussing. What say you?’

  It is said women can become invisible at a certain age. But the mistress, that unspeakable woman of any age, is kept hidden inside a walled garden. Some would say it is a purer love, without the contracts and obligations of a marriage. Still, she who resides in her lover’s heart remains there on the condition of invisibility, anonymity, and of maintaining the secret. I receive the comment ‘I can’t believe no-one has snapped you up yet, Sarah’ from slightly wistful old men and girlfriends. I say ‘comment’ rather than ‘compliment’ because underneath their words I hear the query: ‘What is wrong with you?’

  I can’t tell you the truth about the man who loves me, I’d think.

  Truth, in this situation, would create social and marital carnage in our little community of friends. The centre would not hold. I maintained the silence, as so many invisible women have done before me. It was feeling shackled by secrets that also led me to the inlet, where I could yell them out loud, or at least find peace of mind to write through them. By then, our affair had been going on for years.

  There was another secret. An old friend, one of the wistful ones, told me something in confidence and this would lead to his suicide two weeks later. During the two weeks, I kept his crimes to myself as he had asked me to but, unbeknownst to me, he was packing up his legacy. He sent his valuables to his son in a trunk, redirected his mail and organised his will. He came to see me two days before he was due to face court. He asked me to call the police at a certain time. He said he didn’t want an innocent to find him. I agreed. On my table he placed his will, enough cash to clean out his flat, a ripe avocado and two dozen eggs.

  Not long after that I moved out to Broke. Friends say that I changed the day I drove his car away from the towing company and now I think they were right. I had to break the coroner’s tape that stuck the car doors shut and the van reeked of exhaust fumes and no-one could ever be the same after a drive like that. Like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, I was half sick of other people’s secrets and foibles. The geographical leap did not keep my lover from me though. He just drove further into the night to find me, bringing me gifts of chainsaws, books, gemstones or rabbit traps.

  I found work at a coffee shop in town. Recently, I made drinks for two elderly, lifelong Walpole residents. Two chai lattes. Pat has hers half-strength and wonders if we have any lactose-free milk. Patti’s hands are cracked, stained deep with her garden’s dirt. They’d just found out I live at Broke Inlet.

  ‘Don’t you get scared?’ asked Patti.

  Perhaps my move to the inlet was a bit reckless. I hauled all of my belongings out here on a car trailer. My final act of commitment was to throw my mattress on the back of the ute. I was moving two hundred kilometres from my home and into the wilderness. The dirt track from the highway was ten kilometres long and flooded on the flatlands where the grass trees and tiger snakes th
rived. What was I thinking? No electricity. No internet. No mobile phone range. A dog. No money. This is mad, I thought as the ute thudded along through islands of karri and burnt-out swamps.

  I assembled my bed in the lounge room that night, lit the fire and took two benzos; leftover morsels from the panic attacks I experienced after my friend died. I sat up in bed and stared through the big windows into the gloom scrawled with the ancient silhouettes of trees. The moon glowed the water. There was no-one else here but me.

  Except there was. My dog burst into hysterical barking at three in the morning. Someone or something was walking around the cottage. I could hear grunts and twigs breaking. Wild pigs? No, because a light flashed. A headlamp perhaps. A gloamy shape walked past the lounge room window. Oh, here we go, I thought.

  I was still awake at dawn when my dog barked again. More growling. Two dogs the size of lions sniffed at the door. The neapolitan mastiff’s coat was blue, like a burmese cat, his huge head grizzled with folds of skin, a flashing LED light the shape of a bone hanging from his collar. He and the brindle great dane turned and loped away, balls the size of a man’s fist swinging against their scarred haunches.

  The next day, driving into town for supplies, I met some pig hunters. The first ute full of men stopped beside me on the track and the driver wound down his window. Skinheaded with a scar down the side of his face and another across his forehead, he chewed as he talked, fast. He looked a bit pinned. His voice was gravelly.

  ‘Gidday, love, seen any pigs?’

  Once I’d wound down the window, my dog peered over my shoulder and all hell broke loose. On the tray of his four-wheel drive, four lean, whiskery lurchers in leather chest harnesses and bristling GPS wires raised a racket at the sight of my dog. Behind the lurchers was the cage of killers: chunky brindled pig dogs with spike collars and teeth like T-rexes.

  ‘No,’ I said in a small voice.

  ‘Well. Whaddya up to then, love?’

  ‘Oh, you know, just heading into town.’

  The second ute stopped behind him. Four men and more dogs of the same ilk.

  ‘She’s a nice-looking dog you got there. Got a bit of rotti in her, ay? She’d be good to have around. We’re going up the Shannon after pigs. Or maybe marron. Seen any marron?’

  The dogs were still bellowing, egged on by the ute-load behind them.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  They drove on, and I drove into town, laughing. The last time I saw men like that was in the Northern Territory. I thought they were extinct on this gentrified south coast. Straight out of Mad Max and here they were on the Broke track. On my return, with shopping bags full of horseradish, cheese, toilet paper, milk, wine and a cooked chook, my internal Deliverance scenarios began to do me in. It was pouring with heavy rain, beginning to feel like it would be inches. What if the hunters decided against the Shannon River, sheltered at the huts and started partying? What if they were at my place?

  I put my big fishing boots outside the front door to make it look like a man lived there. I walked the hundred metres to the gate and shackled it shut.

  ‘Yeah, I get scared sometimes,’ I said to Patti. She stared at me.

  ‘Does anyone else live out there?’

  ‘No.’ Lots of people ask me this. ‘People come out on holidays and weekends though.’

  ‘A bloke lived at Broke,’ Patti said. ‘Now. What was his name? My husband took food and supplies out to him. What was his name?’

  ‘Clarke?’ I hardly dared to hope. It would have been more than fifty years ago.

  ‘Yes! Clarke. Clarkie. My husband, bless him, he used to do the milk run to Manji once a week. Picked up all the milk and cream along the way. He’d come back from town with everything we needed in Walpole, the kids’ shoes, clothes. Took him ten hours or more, that run.’

  ‘He was our lifeline,’ Pat nodded, ‘in those days.’

  ‘He never told me about that, you know,’ Patti said. ‘Just before he died, he told me he’d taken food out to that bloke at Broke for decades. Never said a word.’

  So that was how Clarke was sustained and remained a secret: the milkman bound to confidentiality by an arm of the law. I wondered about the policeman who was supposed to have dropped supplies for him. There must have been a quarrel in the mind of that copper – feeding the man who’d helped hide the hacked-up bodies of his two colleagues.

  In 1926, Clarke testified that he was in the parlour of a Kalgoorlie pub with two of his mates, Coulter and Treffene. He told the court that Coulter had requested Clarke’s help. While stealing gold at a plant that morning, they were surprised by the gold squad detectives, Pitman and Walsh. To avoid arrest, Treffene and Coulter shot both detectives in the face. They told Clarke that seeing as he was part of their operation and had a car, he should help them dispose of the bodies. Clarke drove them back to the plant where they cut up the bodies with butcher knives from the hotel kitchen. After a failed attempt at a cremation, Clarke drove through the night, with the hessian-wrapped remains of the policemen in the boot of his car, to an isolated mineshaft.

  ‘Probably best ease up on the mullet stories now,’ my lover said one evening. The last time I’d been in town and online, I posted a story on my blog about netting mullet but the net season had officially ended and he is a more cautious soul than me. He has to be.

  ‘A good idea,’ I agreed. ‘Now, here is a better caution. Could you please take your matrimonial pillow with you when you go home to your family?’ I threw the patterned pillow aside. ‘It’s too weird.’

  But he never did. Some balmy summer mornings when he slept in, I’d come out of the shower to see him in my bed, his arms and one knee draped over her pillow and his shaggy head resting on mine.

  The dog waited for me ashore, as I rowed out the boat. I thought he was coming to visit me. I’m never sure when he will visit me. Part of being kept secret is the instability and lack of accountability. But he’d said he’d come out this night. If he couldn’t make it, I’m out of contact anyway.

  I set a mullet net, and stumped up the hill in my fishing boots to make a desultory dinner. When it was past ten o’clock and he still wasn’t here, I rowed back out into the inlet. I rowed and rowed and I couldn’t find the net. The depleted headlamp had no reach for a little styrofoam buoy. I clicked off the light and waited for my night vision, for the sound of his car. Sat in the boat, oars stowed, waiting, half sick of this lovelorn poaching. The wind came up and blew the boat west, parallel to the shore, and bless that dog if she wasn’t waiting for me where my boat blew in. Eyebrows like karri moth wings in the dark, stepping into the water to greet me. Not a lover, not a life partner, not even a fisheries officer. Just a dog, watching out for me in the night, waiting for me to come ashore.

  I walked through the bush today to Clarkie’s rumoured hideaway. A rectangle of stone footings covered in bright green moss and sprinkled with tiny orange fungi is all that is left of Clarkie’s Camp. It is about three metres by four and a slender peppermint tree meanders from the centre. I found no hearth but surely there was one, once. This small rectangle seems to be all that is left of his existence. I stood there, patted the tree and looked out to The Cut, where the sandbar guards against a huge, raging sea. Ninety years ago, a man was sentenced by law or fear of death to slide like a needle into the veins of this inlet. Maybe. It must have felt like being tipped off the edge of the world.

  An owner from one of the shacks at Broke handed me a yellowed newspaper article from the 1970s. LIVING IN THE BUSH IN FEAR OF HIS LIFE, ran the headline. It told the story of Clarke, living out his days at Broke Inlet as a secret, a refugee consigned to the witness protection program for the rest of his life, and who’d eventually died in an insane asylum in Perth. I recognised the journalist’s name and so I posted a photograph of the article on Twitter and added the handle of the journalist who’d gone out to Broke to write that story forty years ago. He was enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon in Sydney when I rang him.

 
; ‘Jesus, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d lived that story down. It’s the one story I got so wrong. And here you are today. Posting it on Twitter! We journos always want to get it right, yes? But straight after I published that story, three men came into the office, separately you know, they came in to say, “This Clarke you write of is not the same man. I knew Clarke and he was a different man from the Clarke involved in the coppers’ murders.” My dad, d’you remember his work? He was a journalist too. Had a column in The West. He put the two Clarkes together and I believed him. What else does a son do? Of course, I believed him. We were all wrong. It just wasn’t true.’

  We drink spiced rum. When the inlet temperature rises above twenty degrees there is fire in the water and so we row out to the rocks where we can see it dancing beneath us.

  ‘Row,’ the lover whispers to me. I row and watch our dogs swimming in the wake, their legs and bodies a shimmering fantasia of phosphorescence. He chugs from the bottle of rum and passes it to me. He pushes up my skirt and kisses my ankle, the inside of my knee. I stop rowing and the rum is hot in my throat. Tiny waves talk against the sides of the tinny.

  We find the net’s buoy in the dark. The dogs’ paws shine in the sea, their tails a silvery wake. We pick up the net. Sea mullet flashing silver in my headlamp. The odd bull herring. Some whiting the size of my forearm. We row back to shore where the hurricane lantern hangs from a tree, and there we play in the shallows for a while, dancing on the luminescent shores, thrilled by this magic, by those cool flames firing away from our underwater feet, drunk with the light, the spiced rum, our dogs and our bucket of fish.

  I hear the swell outside The Cut, roaring every night. I’m alone every night now. There is no resolution to the affair.

  ‘It’s my daughters,’ he said to me through tears, when I realised he would never have the courage to tell the truth about me. The moral quandary over my part in my friend’s death has not shifted. ‘I have decided I shall die of shame,’ my friend had said, rather grandly, considering his plans for the afternoon.