Thursday, September 18, 2008

Shh... it's a secret

I have a confession to make. It’s a big one; you might not like it. In fact, you might not like me—it’s that bad. You know how we’ve been hanging out for a while, spending some time together …? It’s just that, well, I’ve met someone else. And we’re in love. Well, I am. It was an accident, I never meant this to happen … really, you’ve got to believe me.


It’s not my fault, he’s just everything I’ve ever looked for in a man: charming, funny, erudite … rich. There’s just one problem.

His politics.

Dear reader, I have abandoned you and everything we stood for, because quite simply, I am in love. Rapturously, mind-blowingly, heart-thumpingly in love. With Malcolm Turnbull. I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I love Kevin. I do. I just don’t love him, if you know what I mean. But Malcolm; Malcolm leaves me breathless, giggling like a schoolgirl into my twinset and pearls.


There’s just something about Malcolm; maybe it’s the hair, maybe it’s those rounded vowels, maybe it’s the way he made even the word ‘battler’ sound like it’s dripping with luscious blue blood. I really don’t know, but what I do know is that if there’s any more TV coverage of this particular silver fox, I may have to toss out my leftist sympathies for good.


So what’s a girl to do? If the situation were reversed, I know exactly how things would go. Malcolm would burst through my study door. His hair would be tousled; he would look wretched, tormented. He would possibly be wearing breeches. He would look deep into my eyes and say, through gritted teeth, “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. You must allow me to tell you how much I ardently admire and … love you”.


Upon seeing his magnificent grounds at Double Bay, or wherever it is he lives, and after much ideological foreplay, I would relent. I would ascend to position of stratospheric power and influence to prove that class is no barrier to success in Australia. And he, under the influence of my socialist tendencies, would give away his money to the poor. Well, not all of it; or, at least, not enough to make a difference to us, anyway.


It'd make a great book, eh?


As things stand, however, I don’t have much ammunition on my side. I can’t afford my health insurance, see, so my bright eyes have a bit of a squint these days; with my ill-fitting clothes I’m probably not quite handsome enough to tempt him; I could perhaps get my maid to cook him a seductive meal of tofu, but it might be a little bland, as fresh veg is kind of costly right now. At the very least it will be by candlelight (this will help save on utilities, too).


It kills me to say this, Mal, but it’s just not meant to be. I love you, I do, but you’re living, as I once read in a particularly bad Tolstoy translation, ‘in cloud-cuckoo land’. This doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. I’d do anything for you, really, you have to believe me. You can have my heart, you can have my soul, you can have my body, you can even, tempter that you are, have my self-respect. But my life’s darling, heart of my heart, source of all meaning in my world; it pains me to say this, but you can never, ever, have my vote.

xox

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

And so we return

I’m back. Well, sort of. I’m currently out in the Dandenongs and staying with my grandparents. It’s beautiful up here: the air is clean and fresh, yet still weighty with the scent of eucalyptus, mud, and jonquils. It’s a good smell, an Australian smell, and a smell that I hadn’t realised I’d missed until now.


I really just transited through Melbourne for a couple of days, picked up a new phone, caught up with a couple of my close friends before heading out again. As the one thing I have right now is a flexible schedule, I decided before I arrived that I’d head out to see my family as soon as I could. Both my grandparents were hospitalised almost simultaneously while I was away, and I really needed to see for myself that they were actually back, that they were still mine.


My grandmother bared her wrists and showed me the red, puckering scar that ran up her forearms, a reminder of the time three months ago when they removed some arteries and inserted them into her heart. She opened her collar and showed me the seam that ran from the base of her throat to her stomach. She had a quintuple bypass and is still shocked that she feels tired, and that she has to nap sometimes in the afternoon. She still seems in awe of the fact that she, of all people, was for a while helpless and hurting and unable to maintain her sense of humour.


She is still here.


My grandfather was hospitalised on the day my grandmother went home. He was shunted into an isolation ward as they thought that the TB he contracted as a teenager may have resurfaced. Then they thought he had cancer. Today we found out that he will cough and hack until he dies, but it won’t be that which kills him. So we drank a bottle of champagne, of which he would only have half a glass. But he is skinny now, turtle-like, and his head extends more tentatively than it used to from his rounded shoulders. Now when I hug him, his vertebrae feel like dinosaur bones. My Omi tells him to go outside when he heaves and hacks, as the sound is not nice to eat with.


He is still here.


They live on a hillside block in an Austrian-style, A-Frame house in a town they moved to twenty years ago because it reminded them of their home in Slovenia. They live here alone, drive, do their garden as much they can, and, despite it all, still need to be convinced to substitute low-fat yoghurt for cream in their meals.


They are still here. It’s good to be home.