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{down the plughole} girija tropp Swift: A man she knew in the biblical sense, before his wife got cancer. Afterwards, an arrangement, weeding the garden in exchange for lunch. He comes out from his office to tell her about a ding-a-ling manuscript, a writer without talent, rehashing the oddities in the work, forgetting punchlines. And when she asks to see, leaning on her spade and turning the pages, he drops onto the bricked path to do push-ups, his body a misshapen quilt on strong femurs. Habit: The way she palms her kidneys after bending over the pot plants, arching, needing to muss the gray and reddish curls on his head. He isn't coming onto her but still? Kinesthetic: The habit of touching, lost; their concern with being clean in a bacterial hell. His wife died of natural causes but the town gossips make him out to be an irresponsible crackpot. These days, she has begun to repeat her own stories: cord around the neck, a twin who died, a father who was so upset at the sound of eating that she cringed over the salad. Inspite of her opinions, she felt for her kin, did not think they deserved to be emotional cripples. Morbid: Thinking about someone else while doing another. Even then, when they used to be passionate, he was not on the planet. It seems fashionable to be distant. When he cooks, he gets an absent drooling gaze and moves about the kitchen, forehead botox-embraced. "Have you washed your hands?" he asks and while she eats her meal, with the bowl to her lips Chinese-style to shovel in the rice, he adds thiamine to bird trays, all the while lecturing her on seasonal patterns and the death of red wattlebirds from vitamin deficiency. His voice drowns out the sound of her teeth bearing down on the bok choy. He crouches to get the rubbish, brushes against her when she takes the plates to the sink. Estranged: From her daughter, her ex, her high-horse moral friends. She applies crushed lavender leaves to her belly, rubbing them in a clockwise motion. Barely the end of winter and the natives are flowering, buddelias white and purple, the boronia drooping yellow onto the esplanade. Her father put her, fourth birthday, on the back of his ute, atop the stacked tree compost. "Hold onto the ropes," he said, the walrus-shaped Parks officer, already drinking before turning up to the Council Xmas-do. When she fell, her leg got caught in a twist and that is how she traveled, with her forehead knocking on a side panel till she became unconscious. When she speaks about the past to a therapist, her sense is of driving spikes into a vampire. She takes the seedlings out of the laundry and places them on the spots where they will be planted. He comes out with a steaming cup of tea and she takes off her gloves. He tells her that it might be a good idea for them to get shacked up and this leaves her in a quandary. She is as temporary as a sliver of light in a cracked-open doorway and cannot afford to refuse. Venial: A memory of how it used to be when his wife was alive; champagne gifts, lacy g-strings, mixed saliva. When she tells him no, she is taking out a diseased apricot tree. Shouting is unnecessary, he says, but keeps putting his side of the argument to her, advising her not to be silly. Impossible to know if she can hold out, but there is still the chook pen to build and the overgrown greenhouse, and now he is treating her like a term paper to be graded. There seems to be a bucket load of time in front of them, stretching on and on without signposts, a misunderstood highway. |
