Author: dean

I have always been told never to speak to strange children on beaches.

This admonition was uppermost in my mind when having my first paddle for the season on a golden weekend recently.

The first paddle is a solemn rite for an elderly man. We begin as paddlers at the sea and we end as paddlers. Life comes full circle before it paddles by

It was in this sombre frame of mind that I was pushing my old toes through the nippy salinity of the gulf when a small shadow fell across the sand.

I tried to ignore its owner, a belligerent child leaking sea water and with a mouth that had raspberry crumble intermixed with soft-serve ice-cream. He was on the level of my left thigh and he eyed my kneecaps with an awful intensity

Why aren’t you wearing bathers?

Oh child, if only you knew the folds and failures of flagging flesh concealed beneath this old t-shirt, the chest sunken forever in the shapeless sargasso of over indulgence. Only the feet, the face and the freckled arms dare the light of day that beats upon this suburban shore.

If I came out, bathing-trunked, you would scream for your parents or stare even more wonderingly at this old whale belly that has emerged from some urban back-water for a bask in the spring. No, thank you. I shall remain a paddler, old toes supporting fattened ankles, knees of no shapeliness with a tendency to knock together.

Thus I soliloquised. I wanted the child to be off. Never speak to strange children. Never encourage them or they will follow you like jackals and harass you like wolves.

You can make me a castle.

Go away child, I want none of your condescension. We are, all of us, castle-makers.

Make your castles (they cry to the newlyweds). Have a loan from so-and-so. Spend your life meeting payments Visit your bank each month. Castles, child, if you must make them, make them in the air. Give them shining battlements and en suite staterooms. Fill their courtyards with white chargers, their boudoirs with beautiful women, their great halls with feasting and video recorders….

My lip curled in a sneer and my t-shirt hung grotesquely. At this stage a larger shadow joined the smaller one. This was the protective mother, glaring at me as if I had crawled from under the nearest seaweed.

You mustn’t talk to men, child.

Indeed you mustn’t. This man wants none of you. Go and drip elsewhere. Here is your sister also dripping, dripping ice-cream in a long white stream…

Thus I mused, as I wandered on. part of the golden day. But the children would not let me be.

You’re not allowed on this beach.

This from an authoritative child, arrogant with freckles and hung loosely with a pair of floral trunks. The spade was not mere plastic but metal with a wooden handle, a sign of opulence. This child well might go on to be a land developer. He had a highly illustrated bucket with a brilliant marine motif and it glinted in enamelled arrogance Two lackeys were digging moats around his castle. The small tycoon of the tide stood shouting orders and turned insolently to me again

My mum says you keep away.

Yes, child, I can see your mum She is sitting on a nearby rug what is possibly her brother already sun-blackened, chain around his neck and eyeing me with the malevolence of a white pointer.

So I paddled away as unprovocatively as I could, let an old paddler be, young sir, I muttered.

I am doing no harm on the tide of memory, I mused, recalling the young surfer I and once was, belly flopping on the low waves and spouting my watery regards at young mermaids long since grown into matronly shore persons.

Oh the joy of a slow and wandering wade. I promised myself I wouldn’t notice any children ever any more even if they flung themselves at my feet with a thousand mothers tantrumming in the background.

The first paddle in spring. Nothing must disturb it. Yachts made coloured triangles of sail The gulf, sea proud with America’s upmanship written on every passing spar, prepared itself for blue days and white waves while seagulls sideslipped, eye-bright for scraps.

My toes became wrinkly I left he sea accompanied by an old unleashed dog that found in me an echo of its own infirmity.

The dog saluted a jetty pile to the surprise of the barnacles. That’s another thing about beaches. Never talk to stray dogs!

 

Max Fatchen

I can’t understand what all the fuss is about with the proposed tropical conservatory in the Botanic Garden when I have offered our fern house as a gift to the State.

I understand that the offer has already reached certain quarters and Drs Morley and Hopgood have gone into hiding.

Our tropical conservatory occupies an impenetrable position between the septic tank and the swampy environs of the back door. It has all the requirements of exotic plants, dense undergrowth, footrot and is as steamy as an M-rated cassette.

Not for nothing have I named it Dante’s Infernery.

Presiding over this horticultural holocaust, this maelstrom of moisture, this frenzy of fronds and over-grown ponds is that Boadicea of bougainvillea, my wife, the administrator of our miniature Matto Grosso.

I must admit she swings a pretty machete and heaven knows one needs one in the rampaging foliage a blow-pipe shot from our kitchen.

Inside the fern house you can meet mould and decay, humidity and humus and, if you’re named Stanley, you would well stumble upon Livingstone.

My arch priestess of plant and pergola has already brought botanists to our conservatory, and as far as I know half of them are still trying to find their way out.

Certainly, the conservatory scares me. Inside is the world of dimness and voluptuous vegetation, of strange muffled cries, of stealthy movement.

Suddenly the fronds part and one sees in the quagmire a saurian snout, the protruding jaw, the bared, yellowing teeth. Well, I always look like that before meals

Once I was lost in this limbo of leaf and came out trailing maidenhair and eating roots.

Mind you we have no trouble in maintaining the tropical temperature. We just stand there and have a heated argument.

Some neighbours have entered the fern house, staring fearfully at the great overgrown basket inside the door and then exclaiming

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s only your husband.”

So the madness goes on, the shrieks of “Tubs for shrubs” and “Pots for sots” and all the fearful things you find on the borders of civilisation.

The whole place has the debilitating atmosphere of the jungle even to the buzz of some huge airborne object that could easily be piloted by a tropical Premier.

Such indeed are the wild fantasies of the fern house.

Sometimes I hide in our thicket of Queensland cane. My wife is always standing in front of it and shouting. “Come out of there, you slimy toad.”

There is no doubt about the variety of vegetation. Exotic creepers festoon the walls while a pair of local social climbers are also doing well.

I’ve already written to the CIA:

“You provide the agent and we’ll provide the cover.”

I’ve heard nothing yet but I’m sure they’ll plant someone.

Still, we’ve learnt to live with it all.

As my wife says, emerging into the light of day and brushing the rainforest from her eyes:

One good fern deserves another.

 

Max Fatchen

Once it was enough for friends on holidays to send a saucy postcard of upblowing dresses on the esplanade or a picture of a fat man in bathing togs with the caption Sorry our correspondence is all behind.

Or See you can stomach this.

With, however, the keen electronic bent of our society, a new peril presents itself While the coloured-slide evening has subsided people are beginning to send tapes of their holiday experiences.

They cannot even wait decently until they’re home.

They thought it would be a novel idea and would bring us a first-hand account of experiences we were panting to hear, of on-the-spot descriptions of the Mount Gambier caravan park; of the toilet facilities at Portland; at the fact that Port Fairy didn’t have one fairy at the bottom of the garden (Joke, Joke). to say nothing of the load of bool from Warrnambool.

My wife said that we must play the tape because everyone would be disappointed if we didn’t. The thing about having a long touring holiday is to promulgate it to the stay-at-homes, the non-venturers, those who find a simple and inexplicable delight in an armchair and telly Tests.

These roving Philistines must badger and besiege us with their trivia even though we thought, thank heaven, they at least had gone over the border and their offspring were busily terrifying other hamlets and unsuspecting wilderness areas, with their Juggernaut of juvenilia and aromatic sleeping bags.

Then came the dreaded arrival of the tape.

“We’ll sit down and enjoy it,” my wife said “Some people like to travel and is thoughtful of them to remember those anchored to the kitchen sink and to the sin pit of the SCG.

At that she turned on the tape recorder.

The melting tones of Irma came through, amid background shrieking and people upsetting milk bottles:

Hullo loves, we wish you were here. We even wish HE was here because there’s a high cliff nearby. Well we had a lovely journey and now we’re staying at the inlet. What’s the inlet called, Fred?

Anyway it’s an inlet or an outlet or something and the children are very friendly with the neighbours. FRED, get Helen, her pants are off again. Sorry loves, just a little family drama.

Well, the sun is shining and we’ve all got sunburn. No, you can’t have money and what have you got on your face, you wretched child?

Well loves, we arrived about 8 o’clock and had to hunt up the caretaker. Why are caretakers always somewhere else? Fred kicked his door down and that brought him out. Oh, the facilities are nice and there are six toilets and air showers and a vanity bar and washbasin and we had fish fingers last night. Fred, get those kids away from the kiosk. Well, it’s time for lunch. So have a cuppa and I’ll be back with more news.

There was a moment’s silence on the recorder and I thankfully gulped at my cup. I hadn’t heard such riveting descriptions since The Con quest of Everest.

As I said to my wife, six toilets must be the biggest sit-in on the coast; but she seemed interested enough and bade me be silent.

The hated tape spun again.

Hullo, loves, here we are back again. We’ve all been out on the lunch up the inlet. What’s it called, Fred? But they told us over the public address system. Anyway we saw the kiosk and the kids had pasties and ice-cream and Fred met someone who knows you and even knows HIM and we had them over to our caravan and…

As Irma droned on I dreamt of the holiday tape I would make…

I am sitting in a little esplanade outside a cafe and the blue Mediterranean splashes gently against the seawall and Marina or is it Penelope or Helen of Troy smiles at me across the snow-white table and I sip my wine and look into her wine-dark eyes and she says her Daddy is a Greek shipping magnate and to come to the yacht tonight when the Mediterranean moon throws a path of silver over the sea and she will wear something she can slip into and out of while the champagne glasses glisten and tinkle and she whispers “Oh, Ulysses…”

And…

My wife said: “You’re not paying attention. You didn’t hear a bit of the last of Irma and Fred’s tape. I’ll just have to play it again.”

Now I learn to my numb dismay Fred and Irma are thinking of getting a video camera so they can play videotapes for us on their recorder.

Tapeworms? They’re not a medical condition… they’re wriggling all over the tourist environment, with names like Irma and Fred.

Recording and recording.

 

Max Fatchen

I read with interest that a visiting US psychologist says that exercise is for donkeys and people treat themselves like Jackasses when they go running.

His view is that we should go back to basics and learn to move properly, freeing ourselves from poor walking, breathing and sports habits, We treat ourselves like a piece of meat, he says.

Well, a guarded hear, hear, to that.

I was thinking about it as my heap of meat lay on the couch taking one of my back-to-basics rest periods which occur frequently and in a way which could be written down as a kind of sporting activity.

It combines tranquillity and a slackening of the muscles (if they were slackened any more they’d droop all over my body like old bootlaces).

It also involves a certain disinclination to hurl my body into activities which could have a detrimental effect on my being. Thus I am in a state of complete quietude, utterly unmotivated and regrettably described by misunderstanding people, breathing heavily and unhealthy, as bone laziness.

Two people were talking about me as I lay there and it was obvious that they had the wrong slants on just about everything including the unnecessary ambulation to which so many of us are hounded, such as the superfluous walking to the garden tool shed!

“He is,” said She Whose Voice Was Instantly Recognisable, “a heap of meat true enough, he is also anti-exercise although I must admit he is beautifully coordinated for repose fleshy fold within fold like a concertina.”

“Indeed, mother,” said the daughter of SWVWIR, “we may be looking at the ultimate in immobility, the last call on the way to a complete cessation of any harmful activity, in fact the beautiful and even poetical stillness of the born bludger.”

“See” said SWVWIR “that, apart from the faint inhalation and exhalation which is his only concession to movement that enormous figure has achieved the stillness one finds in a frozen lake, or in some great gibber motionless in time on an inland plain.”

“Indeed,” said the daughter, “and he gibbers very little. Yet one must not deny the fact that, here in our own home, on our own couch we have this body awareness, this miracle of the motionless, this excommunication from exercise, partitioned from press ups, the epitome of the incredible hulk grounded forever in the suburban dreamtime.”

“Should we,” said SWVWIR, “tiptoe away and leave him or should we admit the poor stressful world to see relaxation in the ultimate form? Ring up few professors. Bring Neil Kerley, Hooksey, the marathon runners, the downhill skiers. And while you’re about it bring our friends. We could do with a few relaxing and muscle mending laughs.”

“Can he ever be roused?” asked the daughter. “Will we find him bear 10 years hence a sleeping beauty in slobbering somnolency?”

She had her answer. Her mother stepped forward, placed muscular lips to my ear and bawled “SUPPER.”

I was at the table in a split second.

There are times to sleep and times to stir.

Take it from bodily-aware and muscularly limited old me.

 

Max Fatchen

It comes as no surprise that the word “obey” will not be uttered by the Royal bride¹.

Such words are outmoded in this liberated world.

But one young married woman I know said that she was interested in obedience trials.

She said: “First I started sending my dog, but now I send my husband”

And there he was, whining and begging for a biscuit. But like most men, he isn’t worth a cracker,

My own wedding remains something of a blur. I know there was a lot of crying.

Most of her relatives hadn’t seen me before.

The best man shouting “Left, right, left, right, left, right as we went up the aisle wasn’t my idea of a wedding march.

Of course the bride was radiant, assured, moving with grace, her train rustling and her father acting as guard’s van.

The minister rebuked me for not following the service

“For goodness sake,” he hissed, “stop asking ‘whose turn?’”

The music was moving although I was somewhat disconcerted by the bank manager’s rendition of I’ll Walk Beside You”.

Might I say a few words about flower girls. These petals of innocence are the delphiniums of delinquency. Di, and the tiny terrorists of matrimony.

Behind the kiss curls clustering on their innocent brows are razor-sharp wits working on the appropriate graffiti for the marriage getaway car. Under their pretty little gowns they are probably wearing sandshoes, anyway.

I think flower girls should be lined up in an identity parade before a wedding so that the prospective bridegrooms can compare them with mug shots from a central intelligence agency which keeps track of these marauding tots.

Our flower girl nipped in and cut the wedding cake just for thrills, collapsing the two top storeys.

If there’s anything I hate it’s jerry-built wedding cakes.

Well, I served the little dear with raspberry delight right across her precocious, turned-up little nose.

The minister cried “And we haven’t even said grace.”

Still I suppose it all went well My wife maintained that cool rapture of the newlywed, gently asserting herself by snatching away my second plate of jellied custard sponge.

A mere trifle I’ll admit, but it showed the way things might go after the departure with the euphoric relatives parting like the Red Sea to allow us to the car.

Of course we had been through that great Western institution of glazed faces, womanly triumph and the terrible where-am-I look of the groom—the wedding photo graph.

The wedding photographer flushed out every wrinkle, mole and idiosyncrasy of my not over endowed face.

One of the relatives sent the photograph back with the note “Our mantel-piece thanks you for submitting this photograph bur regrets that it is unable to accept it.”

Obey? I turn the word around in my tired old mind The State demands obedience, the boss wants it, the family snaps its fingers

So I’ll sit up on my hind legs, wag my stump of a tail and look at you with my rheumy, pleading eyes.

And if you toss me a biscuit, I DO like cream centres.

 

Max Fatchen

INCOMPLETE²

It had the sound of doom about it.

“We are going fishing with you today,” the women said.

They said it with their beads high, with an anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better demeanour and an air reeking of suspicion and equal opportunity.

“We don’t believe your stories and we want to see what you get up to,” they said.

Why is it that this time of the year when the breeze has the tang of berley and all the merry magots mazurka in a thousand tins, do others mistrust us, seeing in this surrender to piscine pleasure some ulterior motive as murky as an incoming Port River tide?

We don’t care where it is, we’re coming with you, the women said.

No outcry came from my lips but only a sudden dimpling in a cunning smile, activated by a mind as treacherous as quicksand.

I whispered something in the ear of my fishing companion and he winked and giggled with compliance.

Bewdy, Max

The girls, as we euphemistically call them, were hopefully packing vacuum flasks, rugs and cushions and road testing collapsible chairs, little dreaming that they were to be tried beyond belief in an area combining the more stringent reaches of the equatorial Amazon with the nastier aspects of a commando course.

For we were to seek the haunt of the yellow fin whiting in the tidal streams of Middle Beach, not, mind you, from the civilised gunwales of a boat but wading down creeks that would have made Livingstone turn back and Stanley presume no more.

“We’re not going out in that swamp”, shrieked the women on our arrival at this piscatorial outpost. “We’ll stay on the beach and watch.”

I used the dreaded term weaker sex and their angry answer set the alarmed mosquitoes rising in nervous hordes.

***pumped her out and proceeded.

Then we all began baiting and casting.

The wives’ lines waved in awful doubt, hooking each other and after disentanglement they cast again downstream, bringing back a very good specimen of the younger mangrove.

I tried to comfort them with the beauties of the mangrove river, the blue crabs scything their belligerent way, the current shutting the shells while stingrays prowled, small continents of muscle, ready to carve unwary fisherfolk like a Christmas turkey.

It was the passing of a small innocuous fiddler, waving its tall like an undersea cat that sent my wife climbing a mangrove and refusing to come down.

I climbed up to soothe her, singing a little sea shanty, for I am a quick witted man liking the challenge of the moment.

Tree for two,
And too for tree
A branch for you
A twig for me

Suddenly the other female fisher made a sound reminiscent of a soprano seagull for she was in an ooze situation in the Middle Beach mire which shares the qualities of rubber glue with the soft surrender of the marshmallow.

“You wanted to come with us,” I said as I freed her with a loud crack from the elastic mud.

The other male fisher had meanwhile boxed his first yellow-fin as the tide rose and the westering sun lit the beautiful scene of mangrove and morass, of uncaring chauvinists harvesting the sea while their escorts screamed for terra firma.

My wife fell out of her tree and began drifting seawards.

“Sayonara, sister” I said, doffing my berley tin as she passed, “May Neptune be with you. May the White Pointers greet you.”

Shut up and get me ashore she said. It was a slow journey with many a slip ‘twixt the mangrove and the deep.

But the shore was at last ***

 

Max Fatchen

INCOMPLETE³

An insidious pest is creeping into our house and taking it over.

It has been there under everybody’s nose while we have been worrying about other things.

It is a simple affair and its very simplicity makes it seemingly innocuous.

I refer to the dry-cleaner’s delight, the wire coathanger.

Once we had a household where you couldn’t find a coathanger. Once we had plastic hangers that soon broke, and wooden hangers that gave us splinters. Once we went wardrobe robbing each other’s.

Now we have a million. They hang on doorknobs and snag your coat as you pass. They hang upside down from racks and spear your sleeves or lacerate your lobes. An earful of wire coathanger is no laughing matter.

I know of a friend who fell into his wardrobe and was set upon by these coathangers. He was under suspension for three hours.

Not only are coathangers insidious. They have criminal tendencies. Many of them are definitely bent.

I crept upon my wardrobe last night and placed my ear warily against the door. Sure enough, I heard a metallic tinkling, a saucy whispering of wire inside.

It is my firm belief that the coathangers are breeding. Meanwhile, more keep entering the house. The more there are the more we use. This week I rushed out yelling and screaming with an armful of coathangers and my wife immediately hung one on me.

Take the deplorable incident of a couple of days back. I saw my half-dozen shirts, leaping and waving from the line, each with a wire hanger while redundant pegs brooded in their baskets. When I tried to retrieve the shirts it was like furling the sails of the Herzogin Cecilie in a Cape Horn hurricane.

The shirts flounced away from me and the hangers tried to gouge my eyeballs and we wrestled and struggled in a mad maelstrom of fabric, fat, wind and wire with my wife screaming in the background for me to keep my shirt on.

She says that the hangers keep the shirts in shape. She rushes off to the dry-cleaners and returns with reinforcements. Hanger after hanger after hanger, some to be suspended from the wardrobe doors, some swinging from furniture.

She’s coathanger happy slave of wilful wire. They have her well and truly hooked.

I’ve even heard of woman who hangs spaghetti on wire coathangers so that she can tease it and stroke it from the pot.

In fact, hangers are becoming an even more desperate problem than the apricot jam that is left for us at the height of the fruit season.

 

Max Fatchen