They sit emporched, like seals in the sun, drink tea and that, and natteron. Yes they natteron till the creek of talk reaches a little pool of quiet, across which floats a slow leaf to a trickle of falls on the other side. Then the creek starts up again, and they natteron, just natteron …
What could be left to say after all the decades? Ah, they go small, so incredibly small. They find new veins in a loose paling, a neighbour child’s cry, a slammed door. Nothing is beneath notice or note, of rheumatic anecdote, as a world of affairs gets shrunk to a suburb, a street, a yard.
And they smoke. Yes, unbelievable! In this sourdough village of gymnastic drag queens these ladies lead extreme and dangerous lives. They eat sliced white bread, slabbed in butter, full fat milk and gristly cuts of cheap red meat. They gnaw giblets and brains, lamb’s fry and tripe.
No, don’t muck with these old eaters of innards. Benign they may seem, but they’re weathered leather poppet dolls witching baristas’ nightmares with International Roast and Nescafé. They’re the last links in a rusty chain reaching back to a land of dirty dunny lanes, with mother-mangled sheets on crucifix clotheslines.
That gilded age, with still a Victorian lick of soot on the blade, when pollution was unashamed and the afternoon Sun was tabloid king, full of husband poisoners and backyard baby buriers … and speak of the devil where is your Father? Six o’clock swilling, pissing against the crush of the bar.
They’ve outseen them all, shelled like peas husband, father, grandfather, that starvo line of horse and beer men, brewery drivers and anvil smackers from the rail yards, when the suburb screamed to shift whistles and tramped to work boots, when school was a shoeless option, and chicken a Christmas luxury.
I can almost envy your kingdom, ladies, of hibiscus and azalea, and the straight-razor impulse of your days, and how you fill them with good sense, like a petrol tank on payday, and the smallness of your voyages, crossings between hydrangea and bougainvillea, vines trained like those dead men never were.
If they can’t talk to each other they talk to their animals – a palsied foxie, a fat ginger tom, last pets they’ll have, and the game’s become a slow sack race of who’ll be first there. They eye their creatures with rheumy love – ‘don’t you go first, Doxy, just don’t you dare, don’t you dare …’
Charles Dickens would have all their hearts cease painlessly upon the same midnight pulse, ladies and animals, all abed, as the bar heater ticks off and the stewed rhubarb cools in the fridge, their suburb snug and silent of song. But for now, sweet ladies, let the creek run on, just natteron, please natteron …
