P: ROMANCE LOVE

<section>

<title> P: ROMANCE LOVE </title>

<sample><id> P01 </id>

<note> 2008 words </note>

<source> Marzipan plan </source>

<bl> By David Astle </bl>

<h> Level Pegs </h>

  TARQUIN was the youngest and most solidly built of the boys, and inarguably
spoke the worst English. His everyday vocab could be counted on all the
Monstrelli toes, Mum included. Shot was his syntax.
  "You doing you is what?" could be translated into "What are you doing?"
  "Pardon?" Art replied.
  "You heard mac."
  Tarquin was the fellow in the fawn coat that had been regulating the queue
which wanted to see the tuxedo lady. Art noticed that he'd popped outside
the tent but thought nothing of it. In fact, Tarquin had spotted the wet
gleam of Art's eye through the tent flap and went round to bust him.
  Art's impulse was to bolt. To lose himself in the black corners of Enklefair
but he wisely saw the man in fawn coat as the more capable athlete.
  He doffed his hat. It made him nuder.
  "You see, you pay, mac, eh?"
  "Yes," agreed Art. Surprisingly he wasn't that worried. Maybe because
of the beer, or the carnival buzz that was surrounding him once again. Maybe it
was because what more had Art to lose?
  He recognised Tarquin as one of the gypsies. Even in the slim purply light
of the evening, Art could see Tarquin's brow and height of cheek as belonging
to the face of one who'd moved his maze, over a year ago now. He was warm
and getting warmer.
  Tarquin didn't recognise Art. The event of pulling down mirrors, for Tarquin,
was not an event. Besides which Tarquin had changed little since that time,
while Art, a year ago, had worn less wrinkles and cer+tainly more clothes.
  Art replaced his hat and backed away.
  "You see, you pay, eh?"
  "Pay? I've no money. Someone stole my money. And my clothes."
  "Well shit up and bloody then!"
  "Yes. I'm clearing off. I'm getting out of your hair. Yes. Everything's
normal."
  Art was saying these words as he paced backwards. Feet on lukewarm earth.
Tarquin didn't move. He watched the old man retreat. Mean+while, on the
other side of the tent's wall, the lady in tuxedo made the sound of an
aluminium tape-measure, much to the delight of the ten or so people before
her stage.
  It was a cocktail of beer and buzz that heartened Art. He boldly walked
about Enklefair in underpants and hat and absorbed the magic of it all.
Tarquin's familiar face was proof enough for Art that he had found the new
home of his mirrors. This was where the gypsies lived. This, there+fore,
was where his maze must live. Mind you, Art could not help feeling crestfallen
with Enklefair. It was in no way comparable to the grandeur and invention of
Tupwick Realm. There were no, what he called, Big Rides. It was really a
very tame affair that all the same had attracted a sizeable crowd.
  As Art walked, the music of one popular song thinned and was then smothered
by another. The image that occurred to Art was that of fried eggs in a pan,
the white of the egg being one song overlapping*ovelapping with the music
of another white, the different yolks representing a ... forget it. For
Art to wrestle with such crap was indicative of such music and its universal
effect.
  It was very small, this Enklefair, only a few acres. Tupwick Realm was
fifty acres. Art remembered that from the brochure. Fifty fun-filled acres,
it read. And the lighting of Tupwick Realm was much more sophisticated.
Enklefair didn't seem to have any electricity, apart from the amount its
puny rides were forced to generate. The hum of these generators melded with
the music and was at times adorned with the meaningless scream of a girl
in love.
  He ambled. The place was mainly stalls and galleries. Each one dimly lit
with gas or by kerosene cressets planted thereabouts. Or by old man moon
himself who had decided to be a capital D on that particular night. But
there wasn't much soliciting going on. None of that twirling cane routine,
the softshoe and the barking or the singling out of bodies from a passing
crowd. For there was a crowd. It walked through the night air, through the
sibilance of gas, the toilings of a generator, a scream, a wheedle, this
numbness of music, this silence.
  The cressets gave off a sharp oily smell, the generators a dowdy fume.
Between both was the smell of cigarettes. The floor of the fair was dotted
with butts. Mostly youths were smoking. This was a familiar sight to Art.
The coalition of night and carnival leased a brief independence for the
teenager, smoker and lover. A chance to fill their mouths with smoke or
another's tongue. Smokers stopped the momentum of mooching peers to steeple
the hands and light up. Lovers were more sly. You could see their interlocked
hands, sometimes the sloppiness of an arm across the top of shoulderline,
but when the business of kissing came, they made for the spots where even
the old man moon couldn't pry. Back at Tupwick Realm the favourite spot
was behind the roller-coaster. There was a bank of grass where the lovers
lay, breathing each other, focusing on them+selves, or sometimes on a
roller-coaster car that cranked its way up to the circuit's peak,
excruciatingly teetered around the half-circle so as to confront the dip's
crest and then, and then, then, scream down rocket up. And of course, for the 
lovers, it was all performed for their eyes, an image with which to redefine 
their lot.
  But at this Enklefair there was nothing like a roller-coaster. A glut
of lovers but no roller-coaster. There was a ferris wheel for infants, a
manually operated carousel and maybe some other things that Art was yet
to find. Either way, the available images were earthier.  
  The gypsies that ran this Enklefair were not stupid. They had seen these
lovers and so filled the fair with silly machines that went to confirm the
boy's strength or the girl's kissability. For a varying number of coins, the 
boy was allowed to punch a bag, swing a mallet or Indian armwrestle against
the plaster biceps of a machine called Mister. While the girl could put
in the boy's money and get a card saying Yeech or Okay or Wildfire. 
  Art was looking for his mirror maze. His search was not a frantic one.
He walked in the warm stupor of the carnival, as though aimlessly. The carnival
was as much part of him as were his mirrors. It was fantastic to be amid
things again. This ambience of fair was what his lungs had breathed as a
less old man, as a man in possession of a maze. The maze was his personal
history, he would re-acquaint himself with this duly. Now was the reunion
with his era.
  There was a cluster of people gathered about the next stall, which was
called Superclutch. It was out in the open, but lengths of ribbon were strung
between stakes to mark its boundaries. The man in under+pants and hat
approached the other people and room, understandably, was made for him.
All the stall consisted of was a long, loose cord covered with pegs. The
simple type of peg without the spring action but two wooden prongs and a
flat little top like a beret. A gypsy-looking girl was running the show.
She had bangles on each wrist and a brilliant smile.
  "And you sir, would you care to take the challenge?"
  It was the gypsy girl that had spoken, but not to Art. Art's arrival had
been recorded by the girl and possibly he would be the next dared, but for
now the girl was addressing a man in a Hawaiian shirt, that even the night
couldn't douse.
  "No, no," he replied.
  "It costs only one blue token, sir," persisted the girl, "and tonight's
record-to-beat is only nineteen."
 "Come on, Les," said a woman beside him. Her profile seemed to complement
the profile of Les, suggesting she was a wife; when they kissed it would
be as snug as the meshing of jigsaw bits.
  "No, no," said Les.
  "Only one blue token," said the girl, "and only nineteen to beat."
  "One lousy token," said the wife, "I'll give her my token if that's what
you're worried about."
  "Come on, Les." This was Art. He was getting into the groove.
  "Look," said the girl, "all you have to do is pull off a peg, like so."
She did this and held the peg in her hand. "Then, only using the same hand,
pull off another one. Like so. See? Easy. You look the type that could hold
more than nineteen pegs in one hand!" She replaced the two pegs. The cord
wobbled.
  "Come on, Les."
  "It's a woman's job."
  "Look, here's the token. Show us how it's done."
  Les took the token from his wife and sauntered up to the girl. There was
waggish applause from the onlookers. Les had become a character for the
evening.
  "Good on you Dad," said a boy who suddenly appeared around the shins
of Les' wife.
  Les gave the girl the token. She dropped it into the pouch of her apron.
Les, with all possible sang-froid, pulled off a peg. The girl told him to
put it back and to join her on the other side of the cord. She was experienced
enough to know the hero Les had become. She held up the cord and Les stooped
under. Again there was applause, even some lewd whistling as the two stood
together, Hawaiian shirt and apron, on the other side of the line.
  "Can I start?" asked Les.
  "You can start."
  Les pulled off a peg. It was the same one that he'd pulled off with his
back to the audience. This was his way of being defiant.
  Spontaneously, the crowd said, "One."
  Les pulled off another one, pulling randomly now, and held them both in
the palm of his right hand.
  "Two," said the crowd.
  A third peg was pulled off, violently. Les was brimming with con+fidence.
The crowd was behind him.
  "Three!"
  The cord still swayed from the violence of the third pull. Les showed
his versatility by steadying the cord with the ball of his fist, and then,
in almost the same movement, snaffled up another peg.
  "Four!"
  His right hand was doing all the work. His left was forbidden to be used.
Just to be safe, Les had tucked that hand into the back of his shorts.
  "Five!"
  Not much longer after this came "Six!"
  Then "Seven!"
  The fingers of the gypsy girl were lost in the apron pouch. She was slowly
turning tokens over and over. Her smile was wide and bewitching.
  "Eight!"
  Les was sweating. The wood of the pegs was growing moist in his palm.
He loosened his grip slightly. If he held them too tight, one might be squeezed
free and the entire exercise would be a fiasco.
  "Nine!"
  Yet if his hold was too loose then the topmost peg of his load might tumble
off. The crowd would swoon. He would not even be near tonight's record-to-beat.
Trix, his wife, would console him, accustomed to his shortcomings. His son,
Nick, would be embarrassed. 
  "Ten!"
  Halfway, thought Les. He was aiming for twenty. He wanted to just pip
the record. He would be a success. What pegs followed that would make himn
a legend. The crowd's counting had attracted more crowd. This was why the
gypsy girl was smiling. Les' pride was a sales pitch. Les cursed that
ever-hungry crowd under his breath. This was what had defeated those before
him, not just in the peg game, but on other stages, performing other feats.
Trying to quench the unquenchable.
  "E - le - ven -"
  This had been a shaky one. A peg central to his load had shifted, so
receiving the eleventh peg unsurely. The line was wobbling again. Les had
lost the audacity to steady it with his fist.

</sample>

 

<sample><id> P03 </id>

<note> 2009 words </note>

<source> Floating </source>

<bl> By Nancy Corbett </bl>

When Hanako heard Jack come up to bed that night after he rang Hannah, she
lay in bed and listened to his move+ments in the next room. He was humming
to himself and she wondered if he was thinking about Hannah. She felt her
virginity as a great disadvantage. Though her mother had twice begun to
arrange a marriage, Hanako had refused to hear of it. Like many young Japanese
women who could neither accept the traditional ways, nor completely ignore
them, she was confused. She bitterly resented the cold and offhand manner
Japanese men adopted toward women, but she did not trust the Western men
she met, either; their politeness toward women was strange, suspect. She
thought it must be insincere. She had accepted her loneliness without question
and had been, she thought, prepared to go on accepting it. Then she had
come to live in this house, where the relations between people were generous
and easy, and where she was the only one who carried tension within herself
most of the time. It was clear that deprivation was not inevitable.
  The house was quiet now. She turned on the tiny night light next to her
bed and took an envelope from a drawer in the night table. In it there was
a picture of her father. His severe, handsome face simply looked out, with
no expression. He did not reveal the things hidden in his mind's silence. She
felt that he loved her, but of course he had never said so. Why couldn't
they talk, as Matthew and Jack and Grace did, with laughter and af+fection?
Why, in her home, was everything always so cold and so quiet? Though her
family was prosperous, it seemed that everything - food, talk, good will
- was measured out in tiny, grudging amounts. Always just enough to keep
from starving; never a plenty. The attitude of her family typified yoyu
ga nai - not enough to share, no margin, no space for strangers, nothing
extra. The term came from the old days, when there was no empty space between
the crowded fields for a stranger and even when it wasn't true, it was an
ingrained habit of thought in her family that there was nothing to spare,
as though only meanness and measuring of everything would permit survival.
  Hanako put away the picture of her father and clicked off the light. She
lay on her back in the bed, with her arms straight along her sides. She could feel
the lightness of her body; too thin, she thought. Still, it gave her her
career. Would a man like it? Anyway, she had seen that afternoon that her
body was not very different from Hannah's, so being small was not, in itself,
a problem. Not with Jack. Hatsutaiken; the first physical experience. She
hated that word, splashed across posters in the Ginza, Asakusa or Shinjuku,
advertising sex films. But her time must come soon. He would be experienced
and would help her. She would have gone to him then but could not, while
his parents were in the house.
  Though her mind was in a turmoil and she lay without sleeping most of
the night, she scarcely moved. In the morning her bed was less rumpled than
Jack's, who had slept soundly.
  At breakfast, Grace looked at Hanako with concern.
  `You look ill,' she said. `Is something wrong?'
  `No,' Hanako murmered. `Nothing wrong.'
  Jack felt restless and excited. He had dreamed of Hannah in the night
and now he noticed Hanako's hair and the curves of her cheek and neck more
directly, more personal+ly than before. He remembered from some book lost
in the past that, for Japanese men, a woman's neck was the most erotic part
of the body.
  Hanako was so aware of his attention that she could not eat. He must know
that she had been in his room, ransacking his belongings like a criminal!
Yes, he was staring at her, letting her know that he knew! She could not
bear it, and fled, her face burning with shame, away from the table and
up the stairs to her room where she threw herself on the bed. She stormed
inwardly at herself for lacking kinoji, the spirit of control. Kinoji is
essential to a Japanese girl's self respect; it is the ability to be calm,
no matter how violent the feelings beneath the surface; the ability to keep
control no matter how strong the urge to act or speak. She felt violated,
but she could blame no one. It was herself she had betrayed. Her father
had been right. She had made a grave mistake in coming to this strange place,
cutting herself off from all the familiar sup+ports of her world. She had
weakened herself. She was alone. She felt raw and vulnerable, and very ashamed
for acting badly. She did not cry. Crying was for extreme anger. For this
feeling, there was no relief.
  Grace knocked then, and came to sit beside her on the bed. Hanako's face
was hot and she could not raise her eyes.
  `What has upset you, Hanako?' Grace asked. `Please trust me, dear; tell
me what has happened.'
  But the younger woman could not answer, and Grace reached out and smoothed
the hair away from her flushed cheeks.
  `It must be very difficult to come to a place where every+thing is so
strange and different,' she said. `You're so young! You must miss your mother
and father, and your friends. You must miss Tokyo.'
  `No,' Hanako whispered.
  `I'm not sure of this,' Grace went on, carefully, after waiting for a
moment, `but I have the feeling that my son has done something to upset
you. You mustn't feel that you have anything to hide from me, or be afraid
that I'll be angry if ... oh, this is difficult! Let me start again. Jack's
a young man, and you are very beautiful. It wouldn't be surprising if he
were attracted to you, here in the same house. I love my son, but men are
men. If he approached you, perhaps you would feel some obliga+tion, because
of us ... Hanako, have you any idea what I'm talking about?'
  `No,' she said. With her mind whirling as it was, and Grace's vagueness,
the words were virtually meaningless to her.
  `Let me try to be more clear. Has Jack done anything to upset you?'
  `Oh, no!'
  `So it has nothing to do with Jack?'
  `Ah.'
  That was different. It had everything to do with Jack. Hanako was used
to hiding her feelings, and besides it is considered insincere in Japan
to tell the blunt truth when it might hurt or embarrass someone else. She
found it hard to know what to do, because she knew Grace wanted to know
the truth, and Hanako would have liked to be frank with her. It would be
a relief. But the old habits were too strong. For her to say that she loved
Jack, when nothing had occurred between them besides simple friend+liness,
would embarrass her, not to mention the unsus+pecting Jack, and it would
certainly puzzle Grace. It might even cause trouble between Jack and his
parents, and they had been so kind to her - no, she could not. So she made
a great effort to get control of herself again.
  `I think, maybe I'm sick.'
  `You do seem warm. Do you have work today?'
  `No work.'
  `Then just stay in bed. You look exhausted, and it's bitterly cold out.
Try to go back to sleep, if you can.'
  Grace's kindness so disarmed Hanako that she was afraid she might cry,
after all, but she blinked back the tears and shook her head, to clear it.
Her glossy black hair caught the light and Grace felt a rush of maternal
feeling for her. She reached to stroke Hanako's face.
  `Just stay there,' she said gently. `I'll bring you some tea later. If
you want anything, call out.'
  Hanako pressed her hand gratefully, and curled up beneath the blankets.
She heard Grace go down the stairs. Soon the morning quiet of the house
settled around her, and she fell asleep.
  She woke to find Jack sitting on the end of her bed, looking at her
thoughtfully. A spasm of panic went through her and she sat bolt upright,
clutching the quilt. She looked around frantically, her eyes glittering
with fear.
  `Hey,' said Jack, raising his hand as if to defend himself from the violence
of her shock. `I won't hurt you. I just came in to see if you were all right
before I left the house. They've both gone out already, and we're a little 
worried about you.'
  The tone of his voice was reassuring, and Hanako began to breathe again.
  `Sorry, sorry,' she whispered.
  `No, I'm sorry. For waking you. Of course you were shocked - you were sound
asleep. I shouldn't have come in, I've disturbed you.'
  `No.'
  `But since you're awake now, can I get you anything? Some tea?'
  `Oh, no!'
  `You don't want it, or you're afraid it's too much trouble?'
  `Too much trouble.'
  `Yes, that's what I thought. Stay here, I'll be back in a minute.'
  Jack bounded down the stairs and Hanako could hear him making the tea
below in the kitchen, whistling a little, like his father did. She got out
of bed quickly and went to the mirror, where she studied her face. She brush+ed
her hair, outlined her eyes with kohl, rubbed gloss on her lips, then scuttled
back into bed and pulled up the quilt. Her heart was pounding. Was she clean?
She ducked her head beneath the blankets and took a deep breath. Nothing,
only a faint scent of her perfume.
  Jack came in a few minutes later with a tray.
  `Here we are,' he said cheerfully. `Tea and sympathy. And a few biscuits,
just in case.'
  He poured the tea and handed her a cup. She was grate+ful, as holding
it and drinking gave her something to do with her hands, and she did not
have to look at him. Tea was just as useful here as it was in Japan.
  `My mother asked me if I did something that upset you,' Jack said. `I
hope not. If I did, it wasn't intentional.'
  `But no,' Hanako said. `You did nothing.'
  `I thought you might have felt I didn't want you here. That I was angry
because you were here. How much do you understand of what I'm saying?'
  Hanako shook her head, leaving him puzzled. She didn't always understand
him, but his words were less important to her than the tone of his voice,
or the expression on his face. Just then what mattered was that they were
alone in the house, and that he was sitting on her bed.
  He could not believe it when she reached out with a suddenly sure hand
and took his cup, still nearly full, and placed it on the table beside her
bed. She did not hesitate. She got up from the bed and unbuttoned the long
silk shirt she was wearing, to let it fall around her feet. One part of her
shared Jack's amazement. But the part of her that was in control was as
calm as though she were just shedding an outer garment during a photo session,
and was still fully dressed beneath it.
  But she was naked. Her body was very pale in the pale winter light. She
held Jack's eyes with her own, calmly, and she reached up and pulled the
comb from her hair so that the smooth dark wave of it fell against her
gleam+ing skin. She felt powerful as she stood there so close to him, powerful
enough to reach out her hand and claim him.
  `I am for you. I'm yours,' she murmured in Japanese, but that wasn't what
she meant. Made bold because, after all, he couldn't understand the words,
she said what she wanted to say: `You are mine now.'
            
</sample>


<sample><id> P06 </id>

<note> 2006 words </note>

<source> Propinquity </source>

<bl> By John Macgregor </bl>

Next morning, a Saturday, I shopped for a new suit in the
company of Sam, Alice, and Sarah. Children, Sam had cautioned
me, were not well tolerated in London's clothing shops. I
wasn't greatly concerned. There couldn't (I reasoned) be a city
left in the world where convention spoke louder than money. Two
years in business had taught me something.
  The pound's stage whisper, it turned out, was audible the
length of Bond Street. Alice and Sarah were quickly accepted,
even occasionally twinkled at.
  I bought my grey three-piece at Brides, from the most overtly
homosexual man I had ever encountered. Even the children picked
up on it, laughing uproariously whenever he spoke, or arranged
the limp, mutinous hair over his bald patch. They had to be
taken out while I organised myself some shoes.
  We moved on to an Oxford Street children's wear shop, where I
purchased the girls each a mauve tutu. This time I was told I
had lovely children; things were looking up.
  When we parted, after a lunch by the Serpentine, it was
arranged that Sam would pick me up at six. I spent the
afternoon in a health studio near Browns, retaliating against
the calls of the flesh, and bottle, to which I had lately
fallen prey. I let the sauna do most of the work.
  Sam buzzed me from the foyer at six-thirty. She seemed
chronically late - no doubt a legacy of single motherhood.
  I looked very nice, she said, herringbone suited me; she
squeezed my arm affectionately. I said she too looked very
nice. And that, ah, birds suited her. Under her full-length
cashmere coat she was wearing a simple black cotton dress, with
maroon seagulls all over it.
Sam's father, whom I was permitted to call Roger, was a most 
unchristian Christian, I thought.
  `How is the Philistine, daughter?' he asked at one point,
referring to David Macguigan. Other diatribe included the
phrase `the stupid Pope', and a colleague was referred to as
`a pestiferous bishop'. Anglicans are the most likable
Christians, I concluded, for they are hardly Christians at all.
  `An icicle formed in the cold air of the dining vault'. Half-
expecting that kind of night, I'd been quoting Under Milk Wood
to Sam in the car.
  In fact the Deanery, which was a part of the Abbey complex,
was a warm, spectacularly decorated priest's warren. Decor
included Richard the Lionheart's armour, and red tapestry
hangings from the fifteenth century. And the Dean, for all his
lack of charity to others, was pleasant enough to me.
  He was a small, dried-up man - but cocky, opinionated and
volatile. He was rather as I imagined Bertrand Russell to have
been, except for the swarthy (Desert Campaign) face, which was
surmounted by a shock of wry, Einsteinian hair.
  He sat us down under a portrait of Elizabeth 1, dated 1594,
and gave us oysters and white wine. I expected to be
overwhelmed by history and erudition, but he seemed more
interested in Australia than the Abbey. I was quite ignorant
of Australian cathedrals, about which he asked me a few
questions. The only one I'd ever set foot in was St Paul's in
Melbourne, where an aunt was once wed to Christ in a white
veil, in the time-on period of her life. I didn't talk about
my aunt, but elaborated, so far as memory permitted, on the
architecture of St Paul's. I rashly called it Norman, but after
I'd described its spire and half-remembered buttresses Dean
Goode said it was more likely Modern.
  I switched topics to spiritual cults. As well as looking like
an old bird, the Dean now started squawking like one,
ventilating his feelings towards `oriental charlatans' and
`Indian social climbers'. The Dean's religion, it seemed, was
nearly always framed in the negative.
  I disagreed here and there, mainly to keep the conversation
going, caring little about cults and not at all about religious
architecture.
  The three of us, partly thanks to the labours of the invisible
cook, had a reasonable time of it. After dessert I drank, for
the first time since my school Speech Day, a quantity of
sherry. Sam was fairly quiet, possibly a little overcome by her
father - who tended to gesticulate more as the evening went on.
  Eventually the movements subsided a little, and we were settled
before a big log fire in his with-drawing room, and told
stories from the Abbey's past.
  Henry IV had died in Jerusalem Chamber, `Through that door,
then down the old cloisters'. His son, Henry V, came to the
Chamber the same night and appropriated the crown. His father's
effigy, the Dean told me, was carved from heart of oak, with
a solid silver head.
  William Caxton had his printery in the Abbey, next to St Anne's
Chapel, and Edward IV would drop in to look at the presses from
time to time.
  During the Duchess of Northumberland's funeral in 1776, as if
that year wasn't bad enough, the front of St Edmund's Chapel
had collapsed. Three tons of iron, stone and timber had fallen
onto the congregation, he told me with a histrionic gleam in
his eye.
  Before coffee the Dean took us into the library. For my benefit
he removed a wall panel near the fireplace, revealing a ladder
leading upwards into a tunnel. Throwing a light switch, he
invited me to ascend.
  The ladder led me up to a small alcove. `Is this the internment
room?' I called.
  He ignored the question. Levity, it seemed, was on the Dean's
terms or not at all.
  `That is the room,' he stated. `where Atterbury and his friends
plotted the Jacobean invasion of England.'
  I climbed down again. `Who was Atterbury?'
  `He was an eighteenth century predecessor of mine.'
  `What happened to the invasion?'
  `Oh, the poor old chap was caught out,' he snorted. `They
arrested him in this house in 1722. He was exiled forever.'
  `Poor old Atterbury,' sighed Sam. `He's one of my favourite
Deans.'
  `Hmm. Well - he was careless.' He turned to me, `He's over by
the West Door now, with his wife. He did come back - in a
coffin.'
  These long-dead clerics were departed colleagues to him. One
could almost see him with them in 1722, discussing the falling
collections, or masonry.
  I noticed a hideous black object staring from the library wall.
  `Pitt's death mask,' he stated.
  I looked at it more closely. `Valuable, I'd imagine ...'
  `Not really. Fellow called Nollekens made six hundred of the
things. Rushed off to do the mould before Pitt was even cold,
then sold the casts to the gullible public. Made thousands of
pounds.'
  `Rather like the bloke who did the John Lennon memorial record.
It was in the shops within thirty-six hours of his death
apparently.'
  `Who?'
  `John Lennon. One of the ...'
  `Never heard of him.'
  The Dean strode off, leaving Sam and I to reciprocate looks.
  During coffee Dean Coode, now finally onto his favourite
subject, began to relax.
  `We are looking,' he began, his thin, bird-like mouth pursed
a little, a frail Second Empire cup balancing casually on his
knee, `We are looking at a mystical tradition which has its
seeds in eternity. England's! And that's why I'm intolerant of
those who leave so-called organised religion for the ambiguous
nonsense of the East.' A wrinkled hand swooped on the cup, and
he gulped some coffee. `Right here on our doorstep - literally
so at the moment - is knowledge which eclipses that available
from any other tradition. Westminster Abbey contains not just
the bones, and mistakes, of ambitious kings and prelates: it
holds direct information as to the nature of God himself.'
  `I don't recall gaining that impression when I looked round,'
I said bravely, thinking of Latin inscriptions, and dead stone
eyes.
  `You wouldn't have,' he answered. `You wouldn't have. And you'll
probably miss it again tonight. Nevertheless, my friend, it is
there.'
  He stood up. We stood up. There were grave farewells, as if a
great voyage were commencing. Sam and I departed. The evening
had ended dramatically.
  `What's going on?' I asked her, as we walked the nine-hundred-
year-old cloisters built by the Confessor for his faithful
monks. I was unsure of what I'd heard. Had there been more
Dark Insinuations - or simply a gratuitous religious lesson?
  `Father likes you.'
  `What do you two know that I don't?'
  `I know all three verses of the national anthem.' she
volunteered. It must have been the sherry: she started singing.

    `Scat-ter her enemies! 
    Con-found their knavish tricks! ... I think.'

  `Listen,' I insisted. `You alluded, when I last saw you, to
certain mysteries here ...'
  `Mysteries!' she sang to the empty cloisters. Mysteries!'
  I grabbed her hand, and it occurred to me she was not nearly
as tipsy as she made out. I held her still.
  `Please Sam.' She looked at me: the body wavered a little, but
the eyes did not. She took my other hand too, and we faced each
other like lovers.
  I spoke more calmly. `Your father. Now he's suggesting there's
more to this place than meets the eye.' We started walking
again, and I took a deep breath. `He could have been referring
to the ancient tradition of Anglican ... whatever. Or he could have
been supporting - unintentionally supporting - something you
started to tell me. Something a little more specific.'
  We reached the North Entrance where someone, it had been
arranged, would let us in. He did - a pleasant young verger.
Greeting Sam by name, he told us to enjoy ourselves.
  The lights were half-up, just short of eerieness, but
sufficient for our purpose.
  We ambled into Poets' Corner for the second time, and stopped.
`Aren't you going to tell me anything?' (I was standing on John
Keats.)
  She raised a finger to her lips. `Please wait a while.'
  She somehow managed to make me feel intrusive, so I kept quiet.
  Silently we made our way into the Confessor's Chapel in the
Ahbey's east. It was nearly midnight. A service had finished
not long before, and the candles were still smoking on Edward's
ancient vault.
  Sam knew the place as well as her own home. We passed into the
Chapel of Henry VII, tacked on to the Abbey's eastern extreme.
She led me here and there, in and out of smaller chambers, past
graves and plaques and enormous leadlight windows, wafting
ahead at times. We were completely alone. There was silence as
we at last stood at the centre of the enormous chamber, and
drank it in. The fan-vaulted ceiling arched high above us over
the crypt of Henry VII and his wife, Elizabeth of York. I
walked the black marble floor from tomb to tomb: Bloody Mary,
Elizabeth I ... Mary Queen of Scots. On one wall I examined
statues of St Matthew, wearing spectacles, and a bearded female
saint.
  `This place is so lifeless,' I breathed, when I'd rejoined her
in the centre of the Chapel. `Beautiful, but lifeless.'
  `You said that before ... It's true of course.'
  Everything in the Abbey had been dead so long it had taken on
the impersonality of stone. There was little remaining even of
death's forbidding splendour. It was all very grey.
  Sam began to move slowly, gently, about the Chapel: it was a
kind of dance, almost, and took me very much by surprise. She
swayed here and there for some minutes, and I glimpsed her face
every moment or two in the gloam. She wouldn't actually look
at me.
  I'd stepped over a low barrier into a kind of sanctuary, and
was watching her, fascinated, with my elbows resting on some
Tudor's shins. She looked over at last, then disappeared behind
a statue. Flirtation? No, the coyness had another message.
  Sam's character, it was already clear, was rather more
amorphous than mine: was always disclosing something
unexpected. Innocence, or strength ... more recently a dry and
satirical wit. 

</sample>



<sample><id> P07 </id>

<note> 2002 words </note>

<source> Leaves of Life </source>

<h> A vision of flames </h>

<bl> By Susan Clarke </bl>

<h> Saturday: </h>
The flames are licking at me - greedy, searing fingers,
trying to pluck at the nightdress I hold tightly about me -
a useless nylon cocoon. The heat is becoming unbearable; I feel
my face aflame with it and the sweat that slips between my
breasts and shoulder blades is making prickly trails. I feel
mesmerised. The room is dancing before my eyes, and I should
escape. Every bone, every fibre of my being is echoing, "Run,
run", but I can't. There is someone else here - still, perhaps
sleeping ...
   There's a window in this room. All I have to do is drag him
across to it. The inner rooms are already ablaze. I know they
are. This is the last to go. I must get out. We must get out.
   I look across to the window, still not touching the figure
- not attempting to do what my instincts are screaming at me
to do. Outside I see vague lights arcing across and it confuses
me.
   Where am I? I must find out. This is the second time I have
been here. The second ...
   Then, abruptly I cool. The second time. The sweat is making
me shiver now. It's night time and I know that I'm home, safe
in my bed with my husband's gently slumbering figure beside me.
The sheets are damp where I lie and this is a dream.
   I will my eyes to open, whispering to myself. "It's just a
dream, just a dream ... "
   Across the familiarity of our bedroom, the flames are still
superimposed. Frightening, destructive flames, framing the
window - the moving, misshapen window and I try to will it to
be still, to let my eyes focus on it: to discover, to learn
where I am.
   But it fades, just out of my cognition and I feel a hopeless
despair.
   It wasn't just a bad dream. This was the second night of its
appearance. So I must find out more about it, be more aware,
more observant when it comes for the third time. I have a
responsibility that no-one else can share and no-one that I
know can understand. I am a psychic.
   "What is it, love?" my husband's sleep-blurred voice comes
to me as I lie, stiff and damp. His hand reaches across to pull
me closer, but stills against my nightdress and a frown furrows
his brow. "You're ill." A statement that sounds faintly
accusing.
   I wish I could confide in him. He's such a gentle man
really, but remote and in some ways untouchable in human
things. He hates mistakes and never dreams and he doesn't
believe in precognition or deja vu. He'd never believe me, so
I roll from his presence and go to the drawers to retrieve a
fresh nightdress and enter the bathroom.
   Warm water, beating hard against my skin. I even let it
envelop my face to wash away the ashes and sweat marks I'm sure
must be there. It's always like this. So real. At least the
water can wash away the sticky aftermath of my vision. But
still, the thought persists, `I must help him' and I close my
eyes to let myself drift back. It began with me standing in the
room - no clues. It was a plain wooden room - old fashioned
- but I couldn't see properly. The flames - they keep coming
back.
   Even here in the sanctuary of my shower I can feel them. The
prickles of heat, and the sharp stream of water are becoming
one -
   "Are you all right in there?" my husband's voice seemed to
penetrate. At least I didn't have a chance to become totally
enveloped in it this time. The thought of becoming a living
flame terrifies me. That man. I mustn't let it happen to him.

<h> Sunday: </h>
I don't want to fall asleep. Not tonight. I know that I will
have that fiery vision again and it frightens me - the flames
and the fear of failure. I must try to disassociate myself from
it - to be objective. But it'll be difficult because I tend
to be swept along with the tides of my emotions. My husband
should have been the psychic. He shoulders responsibility with
such admirable calm and can be so objective when it's needed.
     I astounded him tonight. I dragged such passion from him
with my urgent love-making that he looked strangely at me
afterwards as if he suspected that I were cheating on him.
Perhaps I am in a way, because I dare not reveal my secret
self. He'd laugh and suspect my sanity or even worse, pat me
on the head and smile condescendingly as if he were humouring
an imaginative child, who doesn't know any better, and I need
help right now. I feel older than he could ever be because I
know that only I can help that slumbering man - save him or
ignore him and let his death be inevitable. I would be his
murderer then. My neglect would have murdered him by proxy, by
fire. The house is silent except for the steady rhythm of my
husband's breath. I am filled with a warm lethargy that deters
movement. Outside a breeze is rising. I can hear it teasing at
the leaves. Strange, I can hear the sound of the whisper of a
pine. Two pine trees, maybe more. They crest a hill and
overshadow a wooden cottage. I can feel their needles coarse
beneath my bare toes and hear the cones exploding as they burn.
   Burn.
   A fire is burning in the cottage and the wind, it fairly
hisses through the broken window there.
   The room; it seems to appear about me. Panelled, not for
effect, but in old-fashioned board from boarded ceiling to
floor: a floor already licked with flames, snaking towards me.
Automatically, I gather the crumpled skirt of my nightdress to
me, moving away from them. They have entered through the second
door to the room, they have entered - the one leading inside,
and the fire is burning cleanly, with little smoke so far.
   I try to tell myself that I am an observer - this is not
happening to me, but my body reacts to the fear, pulling away
from the fiery tongues. My arms are already covered with the
sheen of my sweat.
   The man; the only reason I am here. In my dream form, I
cannot touch him to warn him. How can he just sleep on? The
fire roars as it moves through the tinder dry house. If only
I could see him more closely. From where I stand he looks tired
in his sleep with lines of weariness and an undeserved age
etched into his face.
   But the momentary glimpse does not last long, for already
the heat is affecting my vision. The clear lines of a moment
ago are beginning to move insidiously, just blurring the edge
of their clarity. Soon the vision will end. I feel it and
desperately look for something, some clue to where this might
be.
   Help me. What a useless cry. I have to succeed ... by
myself.
   I can see only two windows in the room at present. One
displays a lurid orange-red mockery of its normal view; gutted
gums are grim and the ashes of an old fire have lost their
almost obscene pristine white colour. They all move in a
primitive dance of exultation. The cottage had been saved once
when a fire had marched to its very door, but it would not be
now. It would go and it's occupant with it.
   I shake my head in a defiance that I do not feel. It takes
all my will power to tear my eyes from the scene framed there.
   I will not be wooed from my task, even though I feel that
I am fixed to the floor now until my vision ends. I cannot
fight through the curtain of smoke and fire.
   The window. It's still the same. Almost obscured by smoke,
the second window tantalises me. I make a useless rub at my
eyes, but pain sears through them as if I have really got ashes
in them. They feel red raw from it and nearly all of me is
demanding the vision to cease, to give me respite from the heat
and the noise. Time to think and collate what I've seen into
some sort of order, but my rational self tells me that I must
not lose this opportunity. It will be my last. Three visions,
and three days and my dream-spun prophecy will come about. With
every bit of strength I can manage, I focus on the window but
even as I do so I can feel my strength sapped from me as I fall
downwards into oblivion that is both frustration and relief.

<h> Monday: </h>
I know he'll consider me eccentric - at least, mildly -
but I feel defiant. I've got a mission, a frantic fevered cause
and I need his help.
   It was like a blazened pointer when I picked up the local
newspaper and saw his ad. Hypnotherapy and one of its uses -
memory. It was the recall I needed - the ability to move the
vision in slow motion and to discern the arc of lights I saw
in my vision. Somehow that window had become important in an
obsessive way. It was the key. I've even tabulated all the
facts that I could remember but my mind keeps running back to
the window and those lights.
   This man is sceptical that his talents can help me recall
a dream. Realities are forever imprinted on the memory no
matter how dormant they seem. Dreams have no such substances,
so he thinks.
   Then how do I explain the scorched skin of my arms and face
if my vision had no reality? Thank goodness it was only dawn
light when my husband left for work this morning and he barely
commented on my `flush'. He wants me to see our doctor, which
at least gives me a believable excuse for missing work this
week, and I need all the time I can get before it is too late.
   The flames, they seem brighter about me now. The glare makes
sight colourless and the heat sears in slow motion.
   Hot. So hot.
   The window. It is black. The night must be cloudy outside
and the lights ... a town cresting a hill, a perfectly
rounded hill, topped by a tall chimney stack rising above the
buildings, above a sign. It seems back to front, the lacework
of the iron scaffolding seems to tower over the lettering. Two
words.
   Abruptly I am awake. He looks alarmed at my sweat sheen and
I know he regrets helping me so I smile reassuringly. At least,
I hope it is reassuring. My fingers fumble through my handbag
for pen and paper and whilst I can recall the last image, I put
down what I saw.

<h> Tuesday: </h>
The telephone directories are piled before me. I wish I
could work faster, but my fingers fumble with the thin paper.
Make haste slowly. I hear it in my head but I'm not wise enough
to heed it. The vision did not come last night and when I
finally succumbed to sleep, it was deep and dreamless.
My husband did not like to leave me this morning. It's almost
as if he can sense the tension in me, as if he knows something
is wrong and is looking for a physical reason for it. For all
his gentle anxiety, I have already dismissed him from my
thoughts and worries. He'll have to cope. I have a feeling this
place is far away - far enough to take me from home in my
search to reach there in time. I'll probably have to go today.
I didn't warn him, or prepare him.

</sample>
 



<sample><id> P08 </id>

<note> 2016 words </note>

<source> Leaves of Life </source>

<bl> By Julie Wilder </bl>

<h> Anna Minter </h>


  "Let us take a moment to reflect on what Anna meant to us," said
Lawrence his voice sharp and unfaltering as he competed with
the roar of the buffeting surf. I stared down at the boat on
the shore and the four of us standing beside it as if it were
a monument. Dorothy scattered petals into the little craft but
the wind caught the delicate blooms scattering them across the
sand and into rock ledges. Was this how Anna would have wanted
it? No body, no church and no hymn singing. Out there on the
bay was her favourite spot where she sketched the coastline and
Lyndow harbour depicted in many of her paintings. A simple
service on a stormy day, when the sea turned treacherous with
unseen rip tides, unlike the calm, spring morning when they
presumed she'd slipped, likely hit her head and drowned.
  I prayed to a God that gave Lawrence no such comfort. Anna had
been the source of his revelation that religious belief was no
more compulsory than the wearing of his Sunday best suit. I
tolerated with reservations my son's conviction that shedding
antiquated superstitions had freed his mind. And to the group
of curious onlookers keeping their distance we must have made
an odd assortment; standards turned upside down by two world
wars couldn't change the stonewall attitude of the pious
pillars of our small community.
  Beulah McCannister, the sharp end of a spearhead duty bound to
uphold the town's moral well-being, stood among them tall and
erect like a creaking gate-post. Her seasoned funeral hat
pulled tight over her ears in an attempt to stop the wind
dislodging it, her thoughts glaringly reflected in bead-like
eyes and pinched lips.
  I turned away from her presumptuous*presumptious judgment, for,
even as I viewed the simple farewell, Anna's death wasn't real
to me. Wouldn't she come breezing through the doors of Hill
House, her flaming red hair glistening salty wet, those green
eyes flashing anger at having waited in vain for her rescuers?
As her housekeeper and friend for the six years that she'd
lived among us, I acknowledged that through the eyes of some
she was a sinner, yet adored and loved by others she had cared
to touch. There were no labels to fit Anna.
  My Lawrence with his lame legs nearly as useless as spent
knicker elastic had been stunted more by stifled anger and
self-pity than his affliction. Anna had taught him to laugh,
and shown him that there were ways to jump fences other than
with two straight legs.
  That Dorothy was Beulah McCannister's child was apparent in her
plain features and straight-as-a-yard-of-pumpwater body. With
a future as clear as reflections in still water. She was
destined to fill her days behind the counter of her mother's
home-made cake shop. Until Anna, sensing a talent in Dorothy
that set her apart from ordinary folk, cast pebbles in the
pond.
  Beulah all but ate her fossilised hat when learning that
Dorothy was sneaking up to Hill House for painting lessons
whenever she could get away from the shop. An outraged Beulah
demanded the arrest of the immoral Bohemian as an unfit
influence on the young. Constable Rearden agreed to speak to
the hill woman, but Dorothy was no child in the eyes of the
law, and he wasn't empowered to arrest folk just for their
colourful ways; not even on Beulah's assurity that Anna Minter
ran a devil's workshop. With fiery, pulpit fervour Beulah
accused him of being blinded by provocative flesh. Constable
Rearden reddened to the length of his exposed neck for, defying
the theory that a woman over forty was past her best years,
Anna made an impressive figure.
  She was restrained by neither fashion or conformity. With the
war over women were speculating on a new-found freedom, though
respectable women didn't, as yet, flaunt their bodies the way
Anna did. I voiced my disapproval but she'd laugh the way she
always did at such reprobation and say, "I refuse to strangle
my finest attributes even for you, Esme Brock". Like a child
basking in attention, she encouraged the caustic glances
knowing that every healthy male in Lyndow had his spirits
lifted by the sight of her fluid proportions.
  Fuller Price, standing beside Lawrence, his bulky frame bent
low over his grief, had known such pleasure. He'd been taken
with Anna the day he came to repair the roof. His dark,
smouldering looks that most of the time hid what he was
thinking didn't conceal his admiration. And Anna saw no good
reason to discourage him.
  "You'd best watch yourself with that one," I told her. "He's
not been right since the time he spent in a German prisoner-
of-war camp."
  Fuller fixed the roof. He mended the fences and out-houses, and
by the time he'd finished no house was more painted and
repaired than Hill House. Yet the more startling was the
renovation of Fuller himself.
  Four years in German prison camps had deprived Fuller of more
than just his freedom. He'd gone to war with enough arrogance - 
you'd have thought he was about to change history all on his own.
Bitterness had replaced arrogance and there's nowhere for that
to go but eat away at your innards. Those that told him he was
lucky to be back in one piece found themselves fortunate if he
didn't up and knock them senseless. A carpenter by trade his
quick temper put paid to a regular job. These days he worked
for himself picking up the odd job here and there between bouts
of heavy drinking. Yet here he was sober, spruced up and shining 
like a choir boy.
  Though it was not my business how Anna worked a miracle on
Fuller, this transformation didn't escape the vigilant eye or
scornful tongue of Beulah McCannister who said, "Nature alone
would condemn the union between an old hen and a young
cockerel".
  The blinkered vision of Beulah and her cronies made them
incapable of seeing good where a grain of doubt remained to rub
noses in. If Anna broke the rules I was grateful that she'd
employed me as housekeeper when others were better qualified.
  "Give me a reason for employing you, Mrs Brock," said this
wisp of a woman with copper curls piled on top of her head like
one of those French tarts in a Moulin Rouge poster. Desperation
had brought me to Hill House on learning that a Miss Minter had
taken over the property and was advertising for a housekeeper.
I was a war widow of dwindling means with a crippled son to 
support, yet to evoke sympathy went against my dignity as a 
proud woman. The education my pastor father had thought so 
important was of little advantage for this position.
  "I've no credentials and no formal training," I said, "but I'm
honest and you'll not find a harder worker because that's
always been my way."
 Placing a cigarette in an ebony holder and slowly lighting it
she stared at me with scrutinising honesty. "I smoke more than
is good for me, I'm extremely untidy and I keep irregular
hours. How do you feel about that?"
  "Miss Minter, it's no concern of mine if you cavort across the
hills stark naked when the moon's full. You advertised for a
housekeeper not a nursemaid."
 To this Anna Minter threw back her brilliant head and laughed
so loud we were both at it.
  "Esme, I like your spirit. The job's yours but only if you call
me Anna."
  Our relationship, born out of mutual understanding and warm
humour, mellowed into friendship and my admiration for the
brash Anna. Yet it was her indestructible spirit that
distracted me from the true implication of events leading to
her drowning. Only once in those six years did she stray from
Lyndow. A few months before her untimely death she returned
from a short visit to the city. Though she rarely spoke of her
life before Hill House, I imagined that her low spirits were 
the result of some personal family matter. I had learned not 
to pry, knowing Anna to be tight-lipped when she had a mind to be.
  Her mood lifted and, as I perceived then, the last winter in
Hill House was little different to any other. Though I
maintained my cottage with Lawrence, he spent many long
evenings with Anna. Her passion for books, a passion imparted
to Lawrence, was evident in a house that fair overflowed with
the works of such writers as Joyce, Shaw and D.H. Lawrence.
They would discuss for hours the wonder of the written word.
How different was my son's outlook from his first meeting with
Anna when, chipping away with disarming humour, she slowly
demolished the defensive wall he'd so carefully built. If his
legs were at odds with the rest of him, his mind was clear and
eager for knowledge. When his head wasn't buried in one of
Anna's prized tomes, he was tapping at the old typewriter she'd
given him. No one was prouder than Anna when, having written
several articles that impressed the editor, Lawrence was
established on the local newspaper.
  Young Dorothy's regular visits to Hill House were no longer
furtive affairs since she'd informed her mother she'd never set
foot in the cake shop again if she wasn't allowed to continue
her lessons. It was a side to the timid girl I'd not seen
before, though I reckon it was always there just waiting for
enough fire to burst out.
  Only the relationship between Anna and Fuller changed. Their
spontaneous gaiety was replaced with a conspiracy that on
occasions seemed to weigh heavy on Fuller. Whatever pained them
Anna went out of her way to hide. She'd get all dressed up in
one of her gaudy dresses, with bangles and beads enough to
hear her coming, and take herself off to the market. I remember
Beulah McCannister remarking that good taste was no more than
three good pieces of jewellery. I could understand that, for
had Beulah worn more you'd have sworn her bones were rattling.
But frivolity was part of Anna's flamboyant nature as was her
return from the market ladened with flowers when there were
enough in the garden to fill the church hall.
  Yet there was this particular occasion when she arrived home
with no more than a faded, dog-eared book of love poems. So
engrossed was she in the musty, old book that not until I
brought in the tea-tray did she look up and say, "It's sad,
Esme, that such an intimate possession should end it's days
discarded with indifference".
  She reverently turned the wafer thin pages to reveal on the
inside cover a neat, handwritten inscription; To Sara my love,
David. I could sense Anna getting sentimental over this dusty 
relic that smelt like the cat had died and they'd forgotten 
to bury it.
  "If you picked that up from Gab Stein's stall you'd best scrub
your hands before tea. He's known to acquire his stuff from
some doubtful places," I warned, though Anna was already lost
in the flowery verses.
  It was about this time that Lawrence moved into a place of his
own. I missed him but he had his independence, and I could see
as how he was as happy as a pig in a mucky pen. A few days
after he'd moved to the rambling ground-floor flat, Anna,
nodding her head in approval at the sparsely furnished rooms,
presented Lawrence with a gift, her complete collection of
valuable and beloved books. Against his speechless gratitude
she said she would personally kick the sticks out from under
him if he didn't respect them the way she had. I was unprepared
for this extravagant gift, and my dumbfounded expression
prompted her to remark that at last she had succeeded in
getting my tongue to take a holiday. There was no doubt that the
overwhelming effect this disconcerting bequeathal had on Lawrence
and myself pleased and amused Anna immensely. 

</sample>



<sample><id> P09 </id>

<note> 2001 words </note>

<source> Southerly - April 1986 </source>

<h> The visitors on the beach </h>

<bl> By Geoffrey Bewley </bl>

SHANE felt the movement and turned over on the bed. Daylight was showing
around the shutters, under the palm-thatch roof. Wee Khoon was lying on
her side, watching him.
  "Hi there," he said, He touched her bare arm.
  "Hi," she said.
  Shane knew the still look on her face. He'd learned to tell it in the
last few months. He smiled at her.
  "Smile," he said. "Come on, smile, eh?"
  He widened his smile. She smiled back slightly.
  "What a smile," he said. "What a fantastic looking girl."
  He touched the bridge of her nose, and the freckles she was shy about.
Her mouth pulled down. "They're ugly," she said. 
  "No, they're cute," he said. This was a favourite old argument. 
  He held her to kiss her. Her smooth skin touched him without any sign
of excitement. He didn't like to urge her to react and after a long kiss
he let go.
  "You want to talk?" he said.
  Wee Khoon didn't move.
  "Talk about Australia?"
  "If you want to," she said.
  "Talk about it later," he said. "Talk about it when I get back."
  He opened the plank shutters. The sun wasn't up over the sea yet, but
the daylight made him blink. He pulled on his shorts and sandshoes and kissed
Wee Khoon again, and went down the rattly side stairs. Their room was above
the hut where tools, diving gear and motorcycles for hire were kept, standing
between the Lotus Bungalow cafe and the double row of A-frame palm-thatch
guest huts. He waved to the little Thai girls in the cafe setting the tables,
and he jogged down to the beach for his run.
  Every morning he jogged nearly a mile to the far rocks and back. This
morning his feet crunched on tiny white heart-urchin shells among the rubbish
on the tideline. He passed the other half dozen bungalow places on that
part of the island shore. Three stubby, high-bowed Thai trawlers were chugging
past in line like fighting ships, out to sea.
  He jogged past visitors from the other bungalows. One was doing yoga
exercises. A couple in sarongs were walking by the water, looking at the
dead urchins, looking for shells. He hadn't seen them before. It struck
him that now there were no visitors left who'd been there when he and Wee
Khoon had arrived, two months ago.
  Now Wee Khoon wanted to go too, but he still liked it there. They had
free food and lodging and now Mr Prem was paying them a hundred baht a day
for what they did, hiring out cycles and gear, helping tidy, looking after
the generator and interpreting for the visitors. He did the hiring and Wee
Khoon spoke Chinese, English and Thai. It was a good life for a while. They'd
have to leave in the end but it was good enough for a while yet.
  He kicked one of the rocks and started jogging back. The red sun was showing
now. More visitors were wading in the calm sea. He heard a motor on the
road beside the bungalows. An island taxi was dropping off more visitors
from the night boat. 
  Back at Lotus he showered and dressed. Two French couples had stopped
and Wee Khoon was showing them the cabins. She could understand their English
well enough. She joined him at breakfast after.
  "Do you need locks?" Shane said.
  "No, they had locks," she said. "No problem."
  Shane issued the padlocks for the cabin doors. Visitors had heard of thefts
at beaches and some brought their own locks. Visitors needing locks were
often happier taking them from a white than a Thai. That was part of his
value to Mr Prem.
  "What will you be doing today, anyway?" he said.
  "I've got to get food. I've got to go and buy things."
  "How about going up to the waterfall later on?"
  "Okay, sure. If nothing else happens."
  They were finishing their coffee when they heard another taxi on the track,
and when it stopped Mr Prem came in. He looked plump and clean and happy
in a yellow cotton shirt. Two young Thais in faded denims followed him.
He smiled at the kitchen girls and the people eating, and he smiled more
widely when he caught Shane's eye.
  He spoke cheerfully to Wee Khoon in Thai. "Mr Shane," he said. "How are
you today? I have something for you."
  Shane followed Mr Prem out to the taxi. A motorcycle lay on its side in
the back, between the seats. It was a new-looking Yamaha 125, with the front
wheel and forks bent, and gravel scrapes down one side.
  "See, I buy very cheap," Mr Prem said. "Because it is accident. But I
think, you can fix, okay?"
  "Well, probably if I can get the parts."
  "Ah, can get, can get. Okay, kay, kay."
  Mr Prem liked to see him working. He didn't mind much. He was happy to
tinker with things. Mr Prem sometimes spoke to Wee Khoon in Thai, suggesting
things for her to do. Shane didn't like to see Wee Khoon working harder
than he was.
  He started dismantling the Yamaha alongside the hut. He levered the bent
frame to loosen the nuts, and got the wheel out and the frame uncoupled.
The wheel and forks would have to be replaced. That took till late in the
morning. He stopped for a fruit drink with Wee Khoon in the cafe.
  She had a thick book with the cover missing. "What's that one about?"
he said.
  "It's called Thorn Birds. It's about Australia. Have you read it?"
  "No. I've heard about it. Where did you get it?"
  "I think one of the American girls left it. Is it a good book?"
  "I don't know. It's probably better than that last thing you were reading."
  An Australian girl leaving had given her a book called The Women's Room.
Shane had looked at it. It was the sort of thing he expected to find Australian
girls reading. He'd had enough of Australian girls. Thai girls now weren't
much either. The Thais weren't much, generally. Their national sport was
kicking each other in the face, and that told you everything you needed
to know.
  Now he knew the Chinese were the best people in Thailand. Wee Khoon's
family had a chemist's shop in Bangkok, and they'd sent her to study at
the Women's University in Manila. She was a terrific girl. He knew all about
Asian girls looking for white husbands. But he was happy with Wee Khoon
and if she wanted him, that suited him.
  Wee Khoon wrinkled her nose. "That book was crazy stuff," she said. "I
think this one is more true to life."
  "I'll read it and see, then."
  "And I was talking to the French people," Wee Khoon said. "I told them
what we were doing here. They thought it was good. Maybe they would like
to work for Mr Prem."
  "No, they don't speak good enough English," he said. "But what, you really
want to give up on this?"
  She didn't answer at once. "This is nice with the beach," she said. "But
I think it would be nice in other places we could go."
  "Nice in Australia?"
  "I think Australia would be nice. But there are other places as well where
we could go."
  Shane sucked his fruit juice and smiled at her.
  "Because I know you don't want to go to Australia yet," she said.
  "But anyway," he said, "what don't you like about it here?"
  "It's not too bad here. Only I think we've been here so long."
  "You don't like it with Mr Prem?"
  "No, he's no problem for me."
  "I mean, there isn't anything I don't know about, is there?"
  She glanced at the Thai girls behind. "No, he's just an ordinary Thai
man," she said. "There's nothing to worry about, I think."
  "Well, you know it's partly a matter of money, anyway."
  "But we do have enough to get to Australia, if we want to go," she said.
She was looking at him without any expression.
  "Okay, how about we put a limit on it?" he said. "How about we leave it
till my visa runs out, and then go down to Penang and just don't come back?
Then we could go over to Lake Toba and back, and then down the east coast
to Singapore, and then fly home from there."
  "If it's what you want," she said.
  "Well, it's an idea, anyway."
  Then Wee Khoon was looking round. There were quacking, laughing Thai voices
outside, and Mr Prem came in again. A middle-aged, square-faced Thai in
a smart tan safari suit came in behind him.
  "Hello, hello, hello," Mr Prem said, and he spoke to Wee Khoon in Thai.
She bent her head respectfully and said a few words.
  "He says people are coming," she said to Shane. "These are Thai people
he knows. So, I can't go out today. I have to be in the kitchen."
  "Oh. Well, we can go up there tomorrow, right?"
  "Tomorrow," Mr Prem said. "Tomorrow, okay."
  Shane told him about the cycle in pieces. "So, if we could get the parts,
we could probably get it going," he said.
  "So, you can fix," Mr Prem said, smiling. "Not worry. Okay, kay, kay."
  But he couldn't do any more with the cycle just then. He took flippers
and a mask and a handspear from the store under the hut, and walked down
the beach past the swimmers and sunbathers to the rock spit. The sand under
the warm water there dropped sharply just offshore, and then shelved very
gradually to about twenty feet a couple of hundred yards out.
  Out there he swam over a cluster of live heart urchins, thin-cased lumps
coated with short furry spines, using the few long whiskery spines on each
side like oars, dragging themselves across the bottom, leaving winding tracks
in the grey sand. He kicked in slowly toward the beach and the rocks, diving
every now and then just for the exercise. The only fish about were too tiny
to bother with.
  He dived closer to the rocks, and then he saw a shivering movement, the
fins of a bigger fish hovering over the sand near the limit of his vision.
He surfaced for a full breath, dived again and kicked toward it along the
bottom. It was a fat green wrasse, a good big one, a pound and a half, two
pounds, it had started swimming slowly toward the rocks, and he was closing
on it from the side. He could see its beaky mouth working. The rubber was
tight over his right hand, and he reached forward, aimed over the barbs
and let go, and the fat shiny fish jerked on the barbs and sank under the
shaft's weight.
  Shane kicked in to the shore and worked the fish off the barbs, and walked
back up the beach carrying it on a wire through its gills. It was about
a two-pounder. People on the sand, a couple of French girls in string bikini
bottoms, stopped him to look at it, and he was pleased to show them. It was
good to dive and kill something you could take back to eat. It was one of
the best things about the island beach.
  Back at Lotus most of the visitors had finished lunch, and were on the
sand again or resting at their cabins. But another taxi was parked outside,
and he saw people crowded around a table in the shade inside. Mr Prem was
there and he looked up and waved.
  "You, you, friend," he called. "My friend, Mr Shane."
  Shane waved. He was looking for Wee Khoon in the kitchen.
  "Come, you come, Mr Shane, come."
  Shane looked round properly. There were six Thais beside Mr Prem. One
was the man in the safari suit he'd seen earlier. 

</sample>
 


<sample><id> P10 </id>

<note> 2003 words </note>

<source> Quadrant - May 1986 </source>

<h> A clear conscience </h>

<bl> By Robert Dessaix </bl>

LET THE SCREECHOWLS screech and the moralists snap and yap at my heels -
I am unmoved. I am not to blame.
  My innocence, however, is not the issue. My only reason for retelling
the tale is to establish the truth of what happened once and for all. My
aim, in a word, is lucidity, above all lucidity. As if by vapours from some
putrid swamp, the truth has become so clouded by fabrication and false report
that the facts of the case have all but disappeared from view.
  Our first meeting is etched clearly in my memory. It was at brunch at the 
Foleys, one Sunday in April. Brunch was served on a green tray in the courtyard,
green being more a summer luncheon colour, I should have thought, but the
Foleys have never been sticklers for detail. The warm, crusty croissants were 
a comfort, the coffee a mild Colombian roast, and high up above in the crown 
of the umbrella tree there were honeybirds creating havoc. The womenfolk were 
still pottering in the kitchen, I remember, and Roy Foley was being faintly 
disagreeable, sniffing around the main point of the conversation (my script), 
hesitating to lunge. "Yes, I like it, Roger, I like it very much," he 
kept saying, toying with the Swiss marmalade*marmelade with
those long, unaccountably tanned fingers of his. "Yes, I do like it, Roger,
and God knows I get very little I do like coming across my desk these days."
He really talks like that - "coming across my desk". "But I'm wondering
about the audience appeal side of it ..." Here he trailed off. And at that
very instant she wandered out through the french doors into the courtyard.
  She headed towards us with the air of a child looking for a lost ball,
not exactly disregarding us, but occupied with something else. In a yellow
tracksuit. Of course, the Russians and Germans have written a lot of
high-sounding rubbish about "love at first sight" (so-called), describing
in tedious, overblown detail how it strikes its victims like a cobra, like
cholera or a bolt of lightning. Well, no aurora borealis lit up the sky
for me, I assure you, and indeed I find that whole nineteenth century
dramatisation of a simple first frisson morbid and totally unconvincing.
The yellow struck me, I admit, and the cold, sad, cat's eyes, but that's
all.
  "Ah, Louise, Louise, this is Roger, a friend of ours - or perhaps you
met last - er - Saturday, was it?" Roy was dithering. Louise circled slowly
and sat down. Roy rambled on a bit, trying to light on a suitable topic
for three people who didn't care about each other to exchange views on.
He failed. Louise, I knew, was his sister-in-law. Our wives bustled out
with more coffee, pumpernickel and cheese and swept Louise up in a gust
of sisterly good humour. Borne aloft briefly on their bonhommie, she smiled
and chatted for a few moments and then seemed to sink again, eddying downwards
in a slow spiral of despondency.
  I was beginning to be intrigued. Just pinpricks of quickened interest,
mind you, nothing of consequence. I drew her out. She wrote. Oh? What? Plays.
Oh, really? Anything I'd have seen? Probably not. Try me. And so on. Her
tense stillness was engaging. Did it suggest she was disconcertingly close
or immeasurably far away? My wife, meanwhile, was darting in and out of
the conversa+tion like a wasp - "pass the cheese", "isn't it hot?", "and
where are you living?" (Not "do you live", I noticed.) Like all rudderless
women my wife is forever getting her bearings. Despite her peevish forays,
however, Louise and I forged a delicate link. When the others wandered off
to the far end of the courtyard to admire Roy's bromiliads, I caught her
eye across the table strewn with coffee-cups and croissant flakes and suggested
we meet again before too long and talk about her latest script - after all,
I was an old hand. She wasn't averse to the idea and even smiled, I thought,
perhaps a little kittenishly. As we drove home, I was aware of a pleasant
yellowish blur at the edges of my mind.                               
                                

  On reading my description of our first meeting, I must say, in the interests
of absolute lucidity, that the descrip+tion is, in certain details, somewhat
impressionistic. In fact, to be absolutely candid, it's largely nonsense.
And, again, I mainly blame the Germans and Russians: they've made it quite
impossible for us to grasp the thing in itself any more, stripped of all
the verbal dross and metaphysical flimflam. I mean, "Colombian roast", "first
frisson", "slow spiral of despondency" - God alone knows where I dredged
all that up from. Not that the versions concocted by my wife, or Roy's,
bear any closer relation to the truth - far from it. According to one of
my wife's more hysterical accounts, for instance, I set the whole thing
up expressly to humiliate her in front of her friends and it was nothing
but a cynical, ruthless attempt to murder our marriage, while Roy's wife,
not to be upstaged, claimed for months that Roy had engineered the whole
thing to humiliate her. Why would he bother? Women are born spinners of
tales, as a rule with them+selves as the central character. 
  No, that's all a lot of hogwash and the unadorned facts are these:
technically, I first met Louise quite by chance, improbably as it may sound,
at an ABC staff party in the company of a poet wearing a beard and a Hawaiian
shirt, and I found her attractive and not, I thought at the time, disinclined
to pursue the dialogue we had established. So I asked Roy Foley, who was
hovering, to invite us both to lunch some time. So he did. And quite frankly,
I was captivated. There is nothing more seductive than utter vulnerability
sprinkled with the grit of self-respect. Claws concealed by silky paws.
  We did meet again, of course, after the Foleys' lunch and discussed her
play over Viennese cakes and smoky tea in a smart, colour-coordinated cafe
with bland pastel prints on the walls, near Taylor Square. What drew me
on? I think her restrained playfulness, the grace and tenderness of the
pale hands reaching across the table to fondle petals, napkins, even the
fragile handle of my teacup, together with the feline watchfulness of her
black-edged eyes, as hard, and soft, as amber beads. I tracked her through
the maze of her playscript, pruning here and nurturing there, and when we
emerged at the other end, relaxed, relieved and stimulated, I thought of
home, my wife, my blinkered Trotskyite daughter and my son, his mind askew
with tarot cards and natural living, and knew, with a quiver of certainty
and a sudden dry sticki+ness on the roof of my mouth, that I was about to
commit adultery.
  I was not "in love". I emphasise this point because befuddling notions
such as this have needlessly confused the issue all along. At night, when
the children were out at their futile meetings about solidarity with Bolivian
miners and herbal cures for stomach cancer, my wife would forever be whining
at me: "Are you in love with someone else? You're in love with someone else."
How tiresome it was and ultimately meaningless. What is it supposed to mean,
this phrase "in love"? What specific sensations does it refer to in the
real world, if any, and, if any, why not name them?
  I have been open and frank about my attitude to these questions since
adolescence. I have consistently main+tained that concepts such as
`commitment', `responsi+bility' and `fidelity' are not so much outmoded
as meaningless, and meaningless in the most direct sense: these words do
not refer to anything identifiable in the real world. What is identifiable
is that I entered into a contract of cohabitation and mutual consideration
with my wife. Why such a contract should exclude emotional involvement and
occasional copulation with other persons has never been clear to me and
I have never, or almost never, subscribed to that view of it. However, as
I explained to Louise right at the start, or as near the start as practicable,
the validity of the contract itself was always permanent as far as I was
concerned. My wife is a mean-spirited, snappish creature, and my children
are bizarre and in the thrall of ideologies which are stultifying and alien
to me, yet on the whole the arrangement works well enough. I see no reason
to terminate it. But it includes, as far as I am concerned, the possibility
of my indulging myself emotionally and diverting myself sexually with other
people from time to time. I'm not talking about menages a trois, swinging
couples or asking my wife to entertain my mistress at morning tea or any
of that modern claptrap. I don't claim to be in the avant-garde, I merely
claim to be civilised. I had thought Louise understood that from the outset.
  The winter drew us together. There were picnics in Centennial Park,
surrounded by mallee-hens, Italian children and mohair rugs; there were
dinners at cosy French restaurants and takeaway Chinese on Sundays; we even
hired a car once and drove down to Gerringong to sit on the huge white sweep
of beach, high up where the tussock-grass starts, and watch the milky green
surf batter the sand; and there were evenings at home in her tiny lamp-lit
flat, eating curry with a fork and discussing her play, which by then was
in production and not going smoothly. I noticed, naturally, the growing
insistence that we arrange our next meeting for a specific place and time,
I noted, too, the unobtrusive ways she wove the fringes of our separate
lives together, and couldn't help but be struck by the little surge of
excitement that always came over her when we met. But I always thought she
understood my terms.
  Looking back, I think perhaps Louise mistook the trappings of passion
for passion itself. She misread my responses. The simple fact is that she
invited a sort of gentle savagery on my part, and enjoyed it, and was so
abundantly easy to pleasure. Certain lips may purse with distaste at such
intimate details, but I must record for the sake of complete lucidity that
when she made love to me, eyes closed, awash with pleasure, mewing, arching
and scratching, I found it, for banal chemical reasons, infinitely arousing.
It inflamed me, engorged me. But it wasn't passion. (I honestly believe,
with hindsight, that I've only felt real passion twice: once for my wife,
when we were young and it just welled up inside me, spontane+ously like
hunger or nausea, because everything about her - her legs sheathed in 
stockings, her pale fingers, her baby-talk, her rhythmic walk, the way she
put spectacles on to read a book, her yawns, her shoulder-blades, every+thing,
everything, everything was utterly beautiful; the second time it was for a 
waiter in a spaghetti-house near Taylor Square, it lasted three weeks and was 
a total mystery to both of us. It was not passion I felt for Louise.)
  At some level, it now transpires, Louise and I were writing our lives
into vastly different scripts. Oddly enough, it was Roy who first alerted
me to it, in his heavy-footed way. We'd met entirely by chance at The Stag
near Taylor Square (and not, as Roy would later have it, in the foyer of
the Academy Cinema - Roy is too precious by half about his reputation, there
is nothing remotely louche about The Stag). I'd looked to one side after
ordering a drink, picking out faces and profiles in the reddish gloom, and
my eyes had connected with Roy's. There he was, one elbow on the bar in
the classic pose. He'd been grinning at me (but to himself) for some minutes,
it would seem.

</sample>


<sample><id> P11 </id>

<note> 2004 words </note>

<source> A Bumper Crop</source>

<h>"Again" </h>

<bl> By Adela Rogers McKenzie-Cameron </bl>

  SHE liked her new bathers. They were bottle-green stretchy stuff with
silver leaves and flowers in a front panel.
  They fitted into her body, boys looked, she aware but un+aware.
  She was sixteen and accustomed to being on her own; in the scrub or
investigating the wind-swept wild beaches of her home town. Now, as she
sat on the city beach with people, she behaved as she did at home; not really
aware of the reason for the behaviour of other girls.
  His parents sat on a checkered rug and invited her to share their picnic.
They were warm people and she enjoyed their company.
  "Have another sandwich, sit on the rug. It's only an old one, don't worry
about your wet togs," his mother said.
  She worked as junior office girl in the bakery where `his' father worked
as a baker; a heavy lumbering man in his move+ments, a sparkle in his eyes,
gentle as his wife, and full of humour. She wanted to hug them, be with
them like a daughter, her own father was in a convalescent hospital in
Melbourne. 
  "Come on girlie eat up, gotta keep in shape with all that tea-making you
have to do," said his father. 
  The lunch room at work was at the rear of the building, one of her jobs
was to prepare tea for the office staff. She had to walk through the work
area of the bakery to carry out this task, many eyes followed her as she
walked to and fro with the trolley. The stuffy head accountant often came
mincing along, moving in on the small gathering at the wire door.
  "Have a cuppa dear," his mum said, passing her a steaming mug from the
thermos.
  She finished her tea and thanked them. He said, "I'll see you tomorrow
at the bus."
  She left to rejoin her cousin, it was time they got their bikes and headed
home from swimming training.
  The bus was for the "swim through" Port Wakefield, she would be sitting
with him, her "boyfriend" as she had come to accept him but nothing had
ever been said in this regard, she only knew that something had changed
in her.
  His eyes sparkled like his Dad's, he was strong from bike training, she
liked going to the velodrome and feeling the thrill of his popularity.
  On the way home from the "swim through" it was the usual fumbling session
from him and the usual pushing away from her private places from her, she
wanted him, but knew nothing of how to have him.
  She started quietly singing the latest pop song, "Again." The couple sitting
in front of them heard her and turned around, "Sing it for us," said the
young man. She did, and enjoyed their pleasure, she loved singing but had
never had an audience before.
  "I'm moving next week to stay with Rene and her family.".
  "Let's go to the Piccadilly Saturday then, okay? I'll see you out the
front," he said.
  She wanted to move. The cousins to whom her mum had en+trusted her were
not well known to her. They restricted her movements and she didn't understand
their concern if she was late home.
  The father was a Spaniard, she loved the way he pottered around his garden,
filled with bush, standard and climbing roses; or in his dark little garden
shed, singing Spanish songs as he bottled apricot brandy from his bubbling
still.
  The Mum, her Dad's Welsh cousin, was five feet nil, rotund, rosy cheeked,
and seemed totally unaware of how she had con+ceived her children.
  She cooked bacon, duck eggs and tomato, for breakfast every morning; gave
her husband Kraft cheese sandwiches every day as he set off for work at
the Islington workshops for forty years, same bike too.
  The family knew what was for tea according to the day of the week. She
always washed on Mondays, ironed Tuesdays, shop+ped Wednesdays, and cleaned
on Thursday etc.
  The adventures of independence and the city beckoned her. Rene worked
in the office. She was older, about twenty-five, and had befriended her.
  "It's costing you a fortune for fares. Mum says it's okay for you to board
with us if you like".
  They were a betting-on-horses type family. Saturdays were full of race
results, footy, cricket, bets, prices and ifs. Rene had two brothers. One
was older than she was: tall dark and hand+some; always in a hurry, with
a tall dark and handsome girlfriend, the parson's daughter.
  The other was a late comer of about ten, surly, spoilt, and a proper little
prune.
  As she packed her few belongings she promised her father's cousin she
would be all right, that she would visit them. The little woman fussed,
"I don't know about this I said we would take care of you," becoming more
red in the face and short of breath as she helped, her hubby saying, "Oh
dashy," in the background.
  She breathed a sigh of relief and wanted to run as she headed for the
tram stop. She needed to be with her mate more often and not have to watch
the clock, or to have her cousin in three times removed always in tow. She
looked forward to Saturday night at the Piccadilly.
  They had been keeping company for about six months, usually with the swimming
club kids or the bike track crowd, rarely alone except petting sessions
in shop doorways while they waited for the last tram after dances or the
pictures. It was like battling with an octopus. He never gave her time to
feel her own feelings; she was too busy struggling. But when he kissed her
it was different, then her feelings almost overwhelmed her. It made her
forget, "If you let a boy kiss you, you will get preg+nant." The last kiss
usually caused her to run for the tram going the opposite way to his.
  She settled into her new place of residence well. She rarely had trouble
fitting in with people. She tried to be helpful and kept herself clean and
her area tidy, the way she liked things.
  She saved her spare money after board and personal items. When she had
enough she flew to Melbourne to stay at Mount Martha hospital on long weekends,
Easter etc. where she joined in the activities of disabled and rehabilitating
patients. She became fond of eight ball during the period, and her father
responded to the pleasure given and taken.
  "Come on the picture is starting," he said as he approached her on the
corner in front of the theatre.
  As soon as the lights went out his hand pushed up under her dress. She
pushed it away and held it to keep it in place, but the thought of his kisses
later made her stomach contract and feel warm.
  The fumbling and "dont's" went on throughout the film and her heart thumped
in anticipation of him walking her home, no cousin, no tram, no running.
  The street was lined with houses, and the only place they could be alone
and unseen was behind the old stone church, where he now led her. He pushed
her against the wall behind one of the buttresses and started kissing her.
"Come on, love, it won't hurt, just once," he said. He was hot to touch
and her stomach was giving her problems, it felt hot too.
  His kisses and where he was putting his hands started affec+ting her knees,
they wanted to buckle. "Come on, just one push," he said in her ear, his
face so hot. They were perspiring though the night was cool.
  All she could do was feel, she couldn't speak, she couldn't understand
her fear, she felt as though her home beach waves were smashing into her
body as she loved them to do, but the water was hot instead of the bracing
cold with which she felt at one. Then she felt through the hair of her vagina
something hotter as he pushed against her, it was hard and forced her legs
apart. The next moment something hotter ran down her legs. He released her
and she looked down. She had been holding her dress up, and in the moonlight
she could see blood coursing down at his white underpants, dark stained,
and saying "Christ" over and over again.
  He backed away, adjusting his clothes, then bent and took her feet out
of her panties and tried to wipe her legs, mumbling things like, "Are you
alright?" and "Christ" again.
  Her jelly legs ran her home. She looked through the kitchen window, saw
Rene, and tapped on the window. Rene looked up. She beckoned her and Rene
saw her and grabbed her arm and dragged her into the verandah bathroom.
  "What was it like?" she said, running the tap and rinsing diluted blood
down the washbasin. "My Ron wants me to do it, but I don't want to until
after the wedding." Rene prattled on while she just leaned against the wall,
weak, head spinning and thinking, gradually more clearly, as Rene chatted
and question+ed without waiting for answers.
  "Now, maybe," she said in her head, "Now I'm his girl."
  A few weeks later her place of work was having its annual ball. She laybyed
a new dress: a silk type fabric, cream with sprays of autumn-toned flowers
and leaves, puffed short sleeves, a wide waist band, a low round neck line
and a full circular skirt draped to the floor. She loved it, and was full
of expectation as the night of the dance came around.
  She knew he would be there and was now certain that he would take her
home.
  She took care of her bathing and grooming, Rene talking as usual about
her Ron this and her Ron that and maybe they could have supper together,
the four of them. They put their coats on and set out. The dance hall was
in the city so they took the tram. She was glad she didn't have to talk
much because her thoughts were so busy with romantic images of movie type
love scenes full of heroes: Tarzan, John Garfield, Robert Taylor, Clark
Gable. She felt like Rita Hayworth and Jane Russell all rolled into one.
  They walked into the hall. Ron was there, so that kept Rene busy. She
looked everywhere for her man but he wasn't there. It was early, so she
sat trying to appear nonchalent. The master of ceremonies announced the
first dance and a dozen couples got up.
  The dance finished and the room filled with the hum of voices and the
excitement of the night began to clutch her stomach, she was glad she was
sitting down because the jelly feeling in her knees was starting again,
no wonder there was so much written, said, and filmed about love. It's such
a wonderful thing, as rich as her scrub and her beach: a total wonder.
  A few dances had come and gone, many more people arriv+ed, they had been
there about an hour and he still hadn't come.
  Her palms were sweating and she sat very straight in her seat. The seats
were arranged in a single row against the wall of the hall.
  "I wonder where he's got to," said Rene for the umpteenth time, behind
her hand slightly open towards her. "Even if he missed a tram he should
be here by now."
  The next dance started, Rene and Ron swirled off into the now chattering,
laughing, having-a-good-time crowd. Then she saw him at the double doors,
her heart thumped, she felt her face go instantly hot, she stood so that
he would see where she was, but a pretty girl with a long dress and black
curly hair down about her creamy shoulders stood beside him with her arm
link+ed in his. 
  She sat. Fortunately the seat was in the right place. Rene and Ron came
back and sat next to her.

</sample>



<sample><id> P13 </id>

<note> 2002 words </note>

<source> Westerly - June 1986 </source>

<h> A vision in suburbia </h>

<bl> By Craig McGregor </bl>

  "I just had a vision," he said.
  "What of?"
  "A large space, a room, with sunlight pouring down like treacle and seagrass
all over the floor."
  "Home?"
  "We haven't found it yet."
  She liked warehouses, old factories, lofts, big garages with pillars propping
the ceiling up. No divisions. Space. Soot-greyed windows. They used to be
all over the inner city but the high rises and expressways had razed most
of them.
  "Do you really think we can live like that?" he said.
  "We can try."
  "Bloody cold. Freeze your balls off in winter."
  "Temperate climate, so they say."
  "I was thinking more about - you know, withdrawing. Keeping out of the
system. The urban ghetto."
  "Whatever happened to commitment?" she said.
  "I sometimes think that the primary commitment," he said, "is disengagement
from that which corrupts you."
  Terrace houses fronted the street. They were called bald-faced terraces:
no garden, no front yard, doors opening straight onto the footpath. Narrow
balconies jutted overhead. Plane trees, council brush box. Tar and dogshit
sealed the wounds in the cracked concrete. Trayback lorries and vans shunted
past, heading for the Italian greengrocers and sandwich shops and discount
stores along the main street.
  "I've always liked the idea of getting by on the minimum," he said.
  "You could have fooled me."
  "Reckon we could all live in one room?"
  "With the kids? No. They need space for themselves."
  "So do we."
  "We've had it, they haven't. It's their turn."
  "You know what I like about you?" he said. "You're so damned fair."
  She looked at him quickly. "Sometimes."
  "I don't mind the idea of you sleeping with someone else, its the visualising
I can't stand."
  "Like?"
  "Oh ... all the things you do with me."
  Camellias were dropping in the garden. The edges of their petals were
brown; rottenness sullied their pink and white. Francoise sat on the opposite
bench, both hands cupped around her coffee, her expression changing a thousand
times a minute as she talked about men, the kids, massage, diets, perfidy,
France, the past, bus timetables, shithouse Labor politicians, the sales,
pets, and men. She always looked at her best when she was animated.
  He liked Francoise, but he wouldn't let her massage him. 
  The phone rang. It was Johnston. He wanted the job done by the end of
the week.
  Next morning it was raining. Car tyres sounded like the wakes of power
boats. He ran his hand down her bum but got no response. From himself. He
had to work. The kids went to school. The rain hung like a sump oil cloth
over the harbour. She caught the bus by the depot. The TV set wavered,
soundless. He switched it off. Toast crusts on the kitchen sink. A single
room? We need all the support we can get. He rang Johnston. Upstairs the
drawing board waited.
  Francoise rang. Another fight. No, his wife was out. No, she couldn't
come over. In the garden the camellias turned to a squashy pulp.
  The cars turned their lights on early. He was lying on the floor, sickness
in his throat. There were screams on the TV. Soap opera screams. Worse than
the real ones. Why were there screams anywhere?
  When she came home she had been drinking. She was lighthearted, effusive.
He went into the bathroom and tried to calm down. The mirror was peeling.
The floor was wet. They couldn't afford to do it up.
  "You're late," he said.

  "There was a committee meeting," she said. "It went on and on. Couldn't
stop old Giovanni speaking. We're going to have to get a new chairman."
  It sounded too circumstantial
  "Then I went for a drink," she said.
  "Who with?"
  "Don't be so paranoid. Christine, and that nice young bloke from child
care. Andrew. The one you don't like."
  "Fuckin' cockswain," he said. "Francoise rang."
  "What she want?"
  "I think she wants my body."

  She came over to him and kissed him on the ear. Her breath smelt of gin.
"She can have it," she said, "whenever you like."
  "Are you trying to arrange a swap?" he said.
  "Not me."
  "They've had another fight."
  "What about this time?"
  "I don't know. I didn't ask. I'm tired of being Mr Bleeding Heart."
  "I'll ring her." She paused. "Tomorrow."
  He went to the stereo and put on a Jelly Roll Morton record. The raucous,
ginmill, goodtimey music filled the living room. It would sound even better
in a warehouse. Did the music really crystallize the age, or was it simply
the stage the music had reached in the evolutionary art cycle? Unread
newspapers spilled out of the magazine rack. There was a Petty cartoon on
the wall. He was surrounded by familiar icons to comfort him.
  So why wasn't he comforted?
  The drawing board looked hostile. He checked on the kids instead. They
were asleep. In the First World War sixty thousand Australians were killed,
all volunteers. They found themselves in the blood-and-mud trenches of
Passchendale; some came back from their first artillery barrage crying for
their mothers, senseless. Deserters were shot. The others went over the
top with their guts full of rum. They died of shrapnel, gangrene, gas. Billy
Hughes, the Little Digger, Labor ratfink, called for conscription. One of
the conscripts could have been his son.
  Andrew rang. No, she wasn't there. No, he couldn't leave a message.
  He could get fucked.
  "Who was that?"
  "Johnston," he lied.

  If a current Labor PM tried to introduce conscription he would kill him.
  Johnston would have to help. Johnston had been to Vietnam ... as a cameraman.
A blast of dope and a close-up of what Uncle Sam had done to an Asian race
had turned him into a revolutionary. Now he wanted a poster for his film.
The poster wasn't working. He wasn't working.
  He was trying.
  Thursday was payday. Every second Thursday. This was the first Thursday.
It always seemed to be the first Thursday.
  He didn't have a payday but she did.
  The Playboy centrefolds had faded into the garage walls, along with the
Yokohama calendars, the Mirror pin-ups, the greasy New Year greeting cards.
He left the car for a grease and oil change, cheered by the ambience of
peeling red-painted hydraulic jacks, buckets of sump oil, wheeled backrests,
blackened spanner boxes. Continuity. Stable. There must be something good
about being a postman, too. You do it, and that's it.
  "Sugar, please," said Nina, who was Francoise's friend.
  It was still raining, on and off. There had been black rainwater across
the concrete garage floor. Nina sat with her legs crossed.
  "What were you doing in Love Art?" she said.
  "Porno films turn me on. All those women ... ladies ... they seem so
unselfconscious. I like 'em."
  "Anyone can do that."
  "Is that a proposition?"
  "Yes." She smiled with her goldcapped teeth. "No." She closed her mouth.
"How is it with your wife?"
  "She's good. As usual. It's me who falls apart. Climacteric. Male ...
you've heard of it?"
  She started a catalogue. "Cancer. The Perfect Rooster. Past the year of
the Rat. Show me your irises ..."
  "That's shit," he said. "It was good to run into you. I have to go."
  A drawing board is a loathsome thing.
  Tow trucks were pulled off the side of the freeway. Their cabin lights
went round and round. A car was on its side. As the traffic rushed past cars
flicked their lights on, off, on, off. A man was walking a clutch of greyhounds
along the overhead footbridge. They had leather muzzles except for a grey
one which had a muzzle of steel.
  "We were so close a few days ago," he said, "we had nowhere to go but
apart." 
  They had been arguing, again. About the past. You don't know where you're
going till you know where you've been.
Maybe they didn't argue about the future because they didn't have one together.
  That was wrong.
  It was more likely that no-one, anywhere, had any future once the timeclock
ran out. On the women's toilet wall: NUCLEAR WHOLLY-CAUST BY GREED. Under
which some Christian or maybe some hills-and-dope alternate had scrawled:
FEAR ONLY THYSELF.
  They had been close. They had made love in the afternoon in the sun on
the seagrass matting with dust in their noses and the lorrikeets whistling
and shrieking as they fed on the bottlebrushes, and then again that night
though she would rather have gone to sleep. "I'm replete but my body's greedy,"
he said lightly. Despite herself she seemed stirred by his sheer physical
passion and next morning when she woke up, she felt both sore and fulfilled.
So she said.
  It lasted two or three days and then they started arguing. The past stuck
in their throats. It was inescapable.
  If it had been with Francoise it might have been all right. Francoise
was a friend. She was no threat.
  While on a car trip from the north coast to Sydney Johnston had given
a lift to his mate's wife. It had taken two days. The situation overwhelmed
them, the adventure of it. Johnston decided to leave home. By the time they
got over the Harbour Bridge he had decided not to. Nobody cried. The hurt
of it broke them all up, all the same.
  He rang Johnston again. He needed another week. Johnston swore. It was
a bad line because of the electrical storm over the North Shore.
  He put the garbage bins in the back lane, locked the dogs in the outside
toilet, made a hot Horlicks for his wife, set the alarm for 5 a.m., pulled
the phone out of the corridor wall.
  In bed she insisted on reading. When she turned the light out he was half
asleep. She put her hand on his cock.
  "Doesn't seem very interested," she said.
  "Give me time to wake up."
  He pulled her over and above him. "I don't know that I should do this,"
he said. "It could seem like ... imposing my will."
  "I'm the one on top!"
  Before he went inside her he hesitated again. "This could appear like
a violation," he said, "of your integrity."
  "What's integrity?" she said.
  "We could always go to sleep."
  "Shut up."

  He came first and felt guilty. She rolled off him and lay without speaking
with her back against him.
  "I don't like using you," he said at last. "It makes me feel bad. I've
read too many books. I'm too selfconscious. It used to be natural, I used
to be able to rely on my instinct. Now I worry about it, I worry if I am
impinging upon your independence, I worry if our relationship is unfair,
I worry if I can satisfy you sexually, I worry if you are fulfilled ..."
  The cars sluiced past on the roadway. A mild night wind, the sort that
drifts past in the wake of a thunderstorm, shook their bamboo blind. A blurred
stereo was playing in one of the terraces down the street.
  "I am trying to get to sleep," she said.
  He lay on his back with his hands behind his head. The sperm on his belly
got cold. The disturbed breathing of one of the children came through the
bedroom door.
  Francoise.
  Nina.
  Johnston.
  Andrew. His wife. Him.
  He lay there for a long time. Something scrabbled across the roof.
  A taxi, garbled radio calls, a car door.
  At this time, wrote Mailer, we lose the best of our kind.
  As he turned over she touched him, in her sleep, with her hand. Contact.
Of a kind.

<h> READING SHORT STORIES </h>

<bl> By Craig McGregor </bl>

Music wound through their lives like the gold lame thread in her dress+iest
going-out evening top. They had music on the trannie on top of the fridge
in the kitchen which played Triple J and news breaks and sometimes, when
the packaged media input got too great, a Michael Franks tape.

</sample>



<sample><id> P14 </id>

<note> 2006 words </note>

<source> Unsettled Areas </source>

<h> Nuptials for pan </h>

<bl> By David Myers </bl>

  no fool like an old fool, he thought and grinned. we're put here on earth
to repeat our most productive mistakes over and over. once more with feeling.
he would never have admitted it, but he was a happy man. three years of
midlife bachelorhood had not been what the playboy advertisements had promised.
he had fitted a sexy muffler to his car that gave off macho growls at the
traffic lights, he had worn a personalised medallion around his neck and
he had even oiled his chest hairs. but all to no avail. the centrefold bunnies
with the kinky underpants had not been drawn to him. no moths had flown
to his flame. he had drunk his brut champagne alone or at best with his
dog. he had become hypochondriac and diffident, feeling like a patriarch
who has been disgraced and driven from his tribe. but today he would return
from the desert of solitude and remarry. he would no longer be a pariah.
he stuck his head out the window and boomed in a tuneless but cheerful basso
profondo: get me to the church on time!
  he knows, he knows. a wedding is an exercise in self-deception. the
celebrants smile and carry flowers instead of daggers. but this is no proof
of peace. it is only a moment of nervous truce in a never-ending war of
the sexes. with marriage and divorce already behind him, he's full of useless
theories like this. but when did theory ever affect practice?
  it is summer midday at the end of the world. dust clouds ride in on desert
winds. hot and enervating. a belt of hills strains but cannot contain the
bulging belly of this provincial town. too much self-indulgence, he says.
he a bearded fitness freak in endless mid-life crisis escaping as usual
to the beach. he despises self-gratifying bellies. he loves the hardness
that comes from challenge. sport is his yoga of higher awareness. but his
intolerant credo has a flaw and he knows it. women. he is too scared of
women to seduce them and run. run back to the sports, camping and drinking
that he loves. too timid to be a don juan. he yearns to have a woman waiting
for him when he finishes one of his adventures. the way his mother had waited
when he was a tenny-bopper.
  he booms into song again. singing better than rechewing the cud of failure.
ebullient tones in the slipstream. i'm getting married in the morning. not
morning anyway but high noon. get me to the church on time. except it's
not going to happen in a church. they know what they can do with their church.
the anglican bishop he'd rung had almost yelped leper! unclean! when he'd
confessed he was divorced. what god had joined together, let no man put
asunder. lovely words but not to be taken literally. must be cautious or
religion can be inconvenient.
  no problems, there are other gods. poseidon, eros, pan. now there's a
holy trinity for you. surf, sex and potency. bound to win out against piety
and puritanism any time. so today a procession for hymen in midday sand-dunes
with flocks of randy satyrs cavorting and flashing on clifftops. eerie tones
from pan pipes and in the sea the thunder of poseidon, greatest surfy of
all time, galloping aloft foaming breakers. an amphibious blessing from
the gods of this life.
  but the priestess, almost as broad-minded as she is broad-hipped, is
nevertheless not into orgiastic myths. you can do what you like in the bedroom
dearie but don't do it in the streets because you'll frighten the horses.
she whinnied with delight at having got off one of her standard jokes so
early in the nuptials. all the world's a stage and the players' bodies should
be costumed, she continued. especially the bride's body. nowhere to pin
the orchids otherwise. and she shook with laughter all over again.
  back behind the steering wheel for a while yet. disciple of pan clad
temporarily only in department store loin cloth, standard issue, nylon with
pictures of shellfish and octopi. time for meditation. what's he seeking
aften then? sex with loyalty. he knows that this is an utopian dream, but
no more so than anything else worth having in life. he's tried being a bachelor
with a dog. but as his secretary, miss malaprop, said: there are some ways
in which a dog cannot service you. besides, he reasoned to himself, a woman
has by far the bigger vocabulary. and he yearned for sex with soul. marriage,
this time, would not be a millstone around his neck. more an anchor to stop
his habit of drifting off with the tides and winds.
  he was old enough now to take pleasure in pillow talk. pillow talk before
and after. a slim chance for honesty and intimacy. why does he need loyalty?
self-protection. he's getting old and doesn't fancy his chances in the sexual
salesrooms of the disco fleshpots anymore. competition from upmarket youth
is too intense. maybe a flesh auction instead? what am i bid for this arthritic
antique with a mind of his own? here's a special challenge for a handywoman
with vision.
  successful marriage was a matter of timing, he reflected vulgarly. a man
has got to sell himself before his commodity assets get overripe. there
are always facelifts, toupes, and capped teeth of course. also lunchtime
masseuses. but best of all: walk softly and carry a big cheque book. gustav
aschenbach resorted to blush and mascara for the moments that mattered.
but a man is better advised to retain some reserve in the pursuit of pleasure.
middle-aged men lust for loyalty. they can't get up to the old tricks they
used to do. the back seats of cars are more cramped than in youth's golden
days. the spirit is willing but the joints are stiff. now it's cushions
and double beds and small sighs of satisfaction.
  but don't give up hope. you can rejuvenate your marriage with our elementary
manual complete with stimulating pictures. an essential reference for every
do-it-yourself husband. no longer will you need help from the plumber or
the milkman. think of the pride you and your wife will feel in being
self-sufficient. enroll in our WEA class now: SEX FOR THE SENILE. you may
be forty but your heart is still sporty. let the experts teach you how to
get fun out of your own personalised perversions. there's no need to flash
in the park or flagellate. learn how to do it properly in a WEA course in
your community centre.
  back to loyalty. people work so hard for it and then they're miserable
when they've got it. disillusioned by conjugal duties. the blokes at work
are all into blue movies. hard-core porn before breakfast in the janitor's
basement office. you've got to have a good digestive system but it puts
your lust in perspective.
  the clay and rock track to the beach is a boneshaker. the signpost is
salted white with dust and peppered with bullet holes. it almost says waitpinga
beach. sun is high, sky an unreachable dome of eggshell blue, dust swirls
settle in the sleepy air. a brown river slides through swamps and reeds
to the sea. orange sandhills look like burnt meringues just out of the oven.
green swells roll in with stories from the south pole. they thunder in a
whirlpool of froth and sandbank. backstage right a bombora surf is a necklace
of sharks' teeth in a turquoise sea. romance on the beach, just begging
for it. splendour in the ultraviolet. but incorruptible the council sign:
freak waves claim lives. this coast is dangerous. the voice of prudence
immortalised in black letters on a white board. you have been warned. you
die at your own risk. just the place for a surf and a wedding. the same
principle as tossing witches into the village pond.
  time to prepare in honour of the bride. in the squeaking sand the soles
of his feet burn. wriggle deeper into the cool sand below. but keep your
mind on the here and now. not the moment for time warps to a past of what-ifs
and might-have-beens. there might have been ghosts hiding in the crevices
of the stone church. erotic ghosts. he always seems to be at least one love
affair behind himself. preoccupied with daydreams of old flames, he can
never quite kindle a fullblooded fire in the present. must be disconcerting
for the current lady love. to know she has to be got rid of before he can
give her his full attention. but the beach will change all this. the seagulls
catch ghosts and daydreams in daring swoops and gobble them down in midflight.
the seagulls live in the here and now. and the heavens are blue and gold
with festive innocence.
  human innocence is reborn in action. all the world's a stage but we still
need props. a wonky card-table on the top of a sandhill. transformed by
a bali batik featuring rama and sita. a story of love and war in a blaze
of pagan colour. no christian allegory here. this is a wedding for beachbums,
hippies, bohemians and disciples of gauguin. the marriage will be consummated
in every position except the missionary position in the holy presence of
the seagulls.
  there hadn't been much holiness about the divorce courts. it was a no-fault
divorce they said, though her counsel tried to prove him a lecherer, a
perverter of lolitas, a wife-basher and child hater. ah well, better than
a pederast or a wanker. just give me one of the kids and half the bourgeois
loot, your honour, and i won't be troubling you with the filthy details.
you ass, said his counsel, don't you know when a woman gets divorced, it's
as though all her birthdays had come at once.
  and here he was getting hitched again. we are doomed to repeat our first
mistakes. he explained this to his friends, his taxation accountant and
his lesbian lawyer. we cannot refrain from life just because we are sour
with experiene. let's dip ourselves back into the lollypot again and hope
for a thick sugar coating.
  a column of dust rises from the road and heralds the bridal procession. 
four or five old bombs broadside and wheely around the last curve. no silent 
limousines, no poker-faced chauffeurs, no christian ministrants. instead
instant hullabaloo. the extras jump out, - a catholic carnival of brothers,
sisters and cousins. babies begin tunnelling into sandhills like ant-lions.
stooped grandmas and great aunties with walking sticks gaze in dismay up at the
bali altar on the crest. still more cousins spill over the stage like acrobats,
somersaulting down to the high tide mark where they paddle awaiting further
direction. finally the bride's father, resplendent with sunburnt face and
a mane of white hair, is hoisted up in his wheelchair and borne aloft to
centre stage. his entry adds a touch of ballet to this interdisciplinary
performance.
  the bride and her flowergirl flaunt coquettish ankles as they step out
onto the heat of the beach. the bride's parasol in apricot lace twirls above
her dark curls in which flowers have been twined. her waves of dark hair
toss in harmony with the cresting surf. her apricot silk dress flutters
shyly in the breeze. to the anglo-saxon groom she is exotic because she
is of mediterranean origins with a dash of persian merchant passing through
zagreb a few centuries ago. she is striving to fight back her tears.
  why tears? a dim folk awareness of her role as reluctant bride perhaps.
a dutiful daughter stolen from her parents' tent and ravished by some
infatuated sheik of araby. brutal of course but advanced enough to believe
in foreplay. or had this sheik, smelly but rich, haggled for her semitic
sister over innumerable turkish coffees? a final price of five camels, ten
goats and a pig for goodwill. 

</sample>



<sample><id> P15 </id>

<note> 2011 words </note>

<source> Unsettled Areas </source>

<h> The junkman </h>

<bl> By Kevin Roberts </bl>

  Just another no-hoper, they said when they saw the junkman on his horse
and cart shambling down Gold Dust Way at noon, past the empty stone buidings,
the boarded up hotels and the broken down Goldbreak Opera House. The saying,
`Future of Gold', was carved into the crumbling entrance of the Goldbreak
Opera House. But the gold went up somewhere years ago in a willy-willy,
and so did the people and the mines. The town was derelict except for the
Gladhand Mine. Full of unused Victorian buildings, Goldbreak sat for no
good reason anymore in the middle of gibber plains, where even the railways
had sent men years ago to pull up the rusty nails and ties. Only the Railway
Hotel remained.
  The junkman walked his horse slowly down Gold Dust Way. His dirty grey-white
mare, hips as sharp as plowshares, blinkers over its sad brown eyes, had
an old slouch hat on its swaying head.
  Squatting on the verandah of the Railway Hotel, Digger was offended by
the sight of those two horse ears, one up, one down, jauntily supporting
the slouch hat. Diggers' beer belly quivered in indignation at the sight.
  `I didn't fight for Aussie in two big ones just to see me national bloody
emblem go on a bloody junkman's horse!' he snorted. But Curly Chalmers from
the Gladhand was buying lunch in the Railway Hotel and called out, so Digger
slipped into the bar and the issue just as easily slipped his mind after
the first pint.
  The fourwheeler rolled on down the street, dust goblins dancing at the
feet of the mare and in the wake of the four wooden-spoked rubber tyres.
It was very quiet, the cart and the town noiselessly merging, not even a
squeak from the cart. Above clung dark clouds, heavy as Golden Syrup. Apart
from a guffaw from the Railway Hotel now and then it was like everybody
was too tired, too worn out with living in Goldbreak or too cranky to notice.
Everybody was as bored as the dark slag heaps about the town, as if all
the good human metal had been mined too, and there was nothing but traces
of colour left, or a momentary show of light among the dead heaps of potch.
  But this junkman was different. He slouched forward over the loose reins
and a kind of woollen poncho, maybe red or covered in red dust from the
gibber plain, hung like a tent over his whole frame. He kept his head down
so you couldn't see his face for his broad-brimmed black hat. But I was
a kid and curious and I ran out to have a look. He raised his head a little
to observe me standing there with my hand shading my eyes. He was between
me and the sun and a great fiery haze surrounded his head. I couldn't see
too much except for reddish long hair and a red beard and green eyes, big
ones, and a thin gaunt face. His skin wasn't red though. It was a kind of
look-through skin, one you got the idea might be like potch if you just
turned it to the light the right way and got a shot of green or blue or
yellow fire. He didn't smile or say anything though I yelled, `Good-day!'
But he kept looking at me intently, swivelling his head backwards a bit
as the cart moved slowly past. I wasn't alarmed or frightened though. There
was something comfortable in that tired face.
  I could see Mary Collins over the street at the Modern Cafe looking out
over the pies and pasties, wiping her hands on her apron in her nervous
desperate way and staring at the junkman as he went by. And it was just
as well Digger Rampart didn't see Liz Drogemuller, not that she gave him
the time of day, looking out from the Commercial Hotel, looking down her
long nose in her superior way. She stepped right out from the Main Entrance
and shaded her eyes so her big bust stood out even more. They said she was
too proud for Goldbreak but not proud enough to leave it. When the men wanted
to fire Digger up, they told him she pulled off men for $20 in her room
at the back of the Commercial Hotel after closing. Digger would froth at
the mouth at that and slink about the town gnashing his teeth like a dingo
with rabies.
  Not that the junkman noticed either of the women. He just went gliding
by with his dirty white horse and his noiseless cart with black plastic
tied over a series of humps and lumps and bulges criss-crossed with white
nylon rope. He went gliding on and on until he ended up a black spot shimmering
like glass in the heat a mile or two out of town, like it was all pre-arranged,
like he knew, and the town knew somehow, he would stop by the big rusted
corrugated iron shed next to the mine tailings of the deserted Humdinger
mine shaft.
  Of course it was the perfect spot for him. Anybody coming into town that
way would pass by. And from the other direction, it wasn't too far for some
of the sheep station people or the half a dozen wheat farmers or the handful
of people left in Goldbreak to drive out in their Holdens to have a look.
The junkman had no need to advertise. Even though I thought no one was looking,
they'd all seen the black plastic and there were any number of guesses about
what was under it. Rumours of stolen goods. New mine equipment. Someone
said the junkman was about to start up Humdinger Mine again now the price
of gold had topped $200. Farm equipment. A foundry. Bootlegger. Casino.
Anything that people wanted to do themselves, the junkman was about to do.
Any scheme they'd nursed for years for Goldbreak, the junkman had in mind,
too. The rumours flew, squawking like a flock of galahs from waterhole to
waterhole, pub to pub, bed to bed.
  I was right in on it. I'd been the closest. I'd seen his face. Spoken
to him. Mary offered me a two-day old pie with sauce and questioned me about
his looks as she tore the label off a Rosella tomato sauce bottle in little
strips. Liz Drogemuller gave me a Nestle's milk chocolate bar with only
one edge gone white from the heat. She wanted to know about his hands as
well. I told her they were thin and bony. She bent over to ask me if he
was wearing rings on his fingers and I couldn't answer for a second or two
because the front of her dress fell full open and I could see a great brown-pink
circle pressing against the black lace and my voice kept breaking. I had
to say no. No rings. No rings. I said it a couple of times like a galah
before she stood up and raised her superior nose and looked far down the
road to where the Humdinger shed stood shimmering in the haze.
  Digger brought us the first piece of news about him the next morning.
`He's a bloody septic. Quiet bloke though. He's got a sign up there. Says
he's going into business. Gotta grinder and an anvil and a soldering iron
and stuff. Repairs. That's all it says. Just "Repairs". Yeah, and this circle
cut by an S. Half black and half white. Some hippy sign. Look. He gave me
the slouch hat off his horse. Bloody thing even fits me. It says Khe Sanh
on the inside. But that's a Vietnam issue. I bet that hippie bastard was
never there. Prabably flogged it in a pub! All I gotta find is a rising
sun and an emu feather and Jake's your uncle!'
  Now everybody in the town was interested, but they weren't going to go
running off to see a newcomer right away. Especially if he was a Yank.
Especially if his sign had only one word. No. Goldbreak might not have T.V.,
but we'd all been to Southern Cross, and a few people had been to Kalgoorlie,
and even Perth, so we weren't country bumpkins by a long shot. So we bided
our time. 
  `How's he going to make a living around here?' worried Mary.
  `I wonder if he can fix electric kettles?' Liz asked me. I didn't know,
but it was one of those questions you don't really have to answer.
  `He'll be gone in a week,' laughed Curly Chalmers. `With all your good
stuff, too, if you leave it with him. You can't trust dole-bludgers! How
they let him in the country beats me!'
  But the sign stayed up. And any day you could see the people of Goldbreak
go to and fro like a line of ants when they're onto a good thing, walking
out of the shadows of the town into the bright barren shimmer of the gibber
plain to the iron shed with the Repairs sign on it. They carried all the
old and broken things with them, the women in particular, hoping to get
some further use out of an old clock, or hoping to repair a wedding present
or something they'd loved. The junkman rarely disappointed them.
  `It's amazing,' said Digger from his perch on the Railway Hotel verandah.
Somehow the junkman reached into his boxes and found just the right knob,
the exact handle, the one electric element the bloke in Southern Cross said
didn't exist. He found the right size belt, the proper fuse, the one bolt
or nut that fitted, the little screw, the uncracked lens, the curved lever
with a 7/16th hole in one end, the spigot with the right thread, the zipper
that zipped up, the buckle that would fit, the snap that fastened, the washer
that held, the wing nut that would not come off.
  And if by some miracle the junkman didn't have it, after rummaging about
in wooden boxes, he would make it, there and then. He'd take some metal
or a part and work with his quick hands quietly to fashion something that
would do.
  The wives of Goldbreak heaved sighs of relief again and again, thrifty
souls, when their vacuum cleaners or their favourite appliance, ones their
husbands had been promising to get around to fixing for months or years,
was put back into their grateful hands, renewed, working, and complete.
  If the men grumbled a bit when they extolled the junkman's virtues, the
women bore it. And if the men yelled when their lamb chops and spuds were
five minutes late because they'd rushed something down to the junkman to
have fixed at the last minute, the women gave back as good as they got,
and the men grew quickly to resent anyone who could do so many things so
well with his hands.
  It came to a head on the Saturday night. When the husbands met for a beer,
they all discovered they'd been shortchanged that week by their wives. One
by one they revealed the preoccupation their wives had with getting old
junk fixed. Their meals had been late. They'd had to take off their own
boots, make their own tea, run their own baths. A great fury grew among
them as they drank, fuelled by the collective indignities they'd suffered.
`Over-paid, oversexed and over here!' they muttered.
  When the pub shut and the men staggered home it was as if with one hand
they picked up crockery in the kitchen and flung it out into Gold Dust Way.
Plate and cup and bowl. Their wives tearful or stony eyed, watched in their
dressing gowns. The rest of the town awoke to the thunderous crash and the
great shout, as if with one voice, the men cried in righteous fury. `Let
the Yank bastard fix that bloody lot for you!' and stumbled off to fall
dead asleep in their beds.

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