Friday is writing day.

To misquote Thomas Mann*, "A parent is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Friday is my designated writing day. It's my one day off work a week. Luka doesn't know that. There are lots of things he conveniently doesn't know, like how sometimes he goes to daycare in what are technically pyjamas, and that batteries can be replaced. The day that fucking Elmo guitar with no volume control wore out was one of the best days of my motherhood.

Anyway, on Friday mornings I resist the urge to potter about the house in my pyjamas while my son creates a small yet surprisingly adhesive trail of Rice Bubbles along the lounge room tiles.

Up! Shower! Pants! Relatively clean bra! Top! Shoes!

(that's me)

Nappy! Clothes that may or may not have been intended to be worn as pyjamas! Hair gel so you can see out from under that mop! When did I last clean your teeth! Oh well we'll do them tonight! Shoes! Rice Bubbles!

(that's Luka)

"I want you to do it."
"You want me to do what? You want me to feed you your Rice Bubbles?"
*blonde head nods*
"But you can do that yourself! I need to comb my hair out."
He gently rests his forehead on the edge of the table and pushes the Rice Bubbles away.
*sigh* "All right."

I shovel spoonfuls of breakfast confetti into my son with one hand while running a brush through my hair with the other. Occasionally my multi-tasking limbs get confused and I run a spoonful of warm milk through Luka's curls. He thinks this is hilarious.

Right. We're ready to head to daycare. Then writing day will commence.

"Mum, I've got a big poo."

I stop at the front door, keys and four thousand bags in hand. "Really?"

He stand on his toes and shuffles towards me in poo-stance. I smell him before he gets to me. Birthday cake has a lot to answer for. Bags down, into the bedroom.

"Righto, lie down. No, lie down here, I can't reach you there. You can play with Thomas when you get home from daycare. Lie down here. Luka. Now. We have to go catch the bus, come on, lie down. No, dummies are for sleeping, you know that. Luka. Lie. Down. Now."

10 minutes later the poo has been dealt with. Back to the front door.

"Luka, where have you put my keys?"
"I made a hide-and-seek! You count!"
"We haven't got time, can you find them for me?"
"You count!"
*pause* "I'll count and you see how fast you can find them, okay?"
"Okay!" (Another thing that Luka conveniently doesn't know are the technical points of hide-and-seek.)
"One, two, three, four, five - leave that jacket there we've got another one in your bag - six, seven - you're looking for the keys, remember? Eight..."

Another 10 minutes later and we are successfully on the other side of the door.

"I'm a bit sad," says Luka in a small voice. I squat down.
"Why are you a bit sad?" I ask.
"In my face," he answers. I put a hand to his face. It's pretty warm. I put my hand up under his t-shirt. His back is pretty warm too. I hesitate.
"Do you want some medicine before daycare?" I ask. Maybe Panadol will head things off at the pass.
"Yeeeeeah."

Back inside.

"What do you weigh, Luka?" I study the dosing guide on the bottle of Panadol.
"Okay," he says.

One weigh-in, 9ml and another 10 minutes later, we have made it to the bottom of the stairs and Luka is clipped into the stroller.

"Right!" I am triumphant, we've made it out of the apartment and it's still only 9:30am.

"I want to hold my bag," says Luka.

I reach for his bag. I've left it in the apartment. I glance up and down the hall. There's no one around. "You just stay here, okay, I'll run up and get it?"

"No, I wanna go with you."
"I'll just be a minute, I'll just run upstairs and-"
"Noooooo I wannna go with yoooooou!" He starts to wail. I do some involuntary fist-clenching, followed by some voluntary quiet swearing.

"Fucking," says Luka. I glance around to see if anyone is proffering my Parent Of The Year award, but there are no gleaming statuettes in evidence.

With my teeth carefully pressed together, I unclip him from the stroller, unwind the complex pretzel of my handbag strap from the handles and hold his hand while he takes the stairs one step at an interminably slow time.

"Do you want to put your bag on your back?" I ask, once we're inside again.
"I've got a big poo."
"Really?"
"Yep."
"Can I have a look down your pants?"
"Okay."

Fifteen minutes and another nappy later, I am re-pretzeling my handbag strap around the stroller.

The next bit runs so smoothly that I am quite unnerved. We stagger up to the bus stop three minutes before the bus arrives, and I manage to wrestle my wagon-load of child, stroller and bags onto the bus while only gouging out a relatively small chunk of my calf.

The traffic is light. The bus stops right outside the daycare centre. This is going well.

"This is where we hang up your bag, this is Luka's hook."
"That's MY bag."
"Yep."

"Hi Luka! Our friend Luka is here, everyone!" Winnie waves to Luka and he waves back in that whole-body toddler fashion that threatens to take out any object within arm's length. Toddler arms are a bit like Labrador tails. Enthusiastic and fatal to heirloom china.

"That's a great top, Luka!" says Winnie.
"These are my monster pyjamas!" replies Luka.

Ah. Scratch one thing off the list of 'things Luka conveniently does not know'.

Forty minutes later I'm back at my apartment, cup of tea in hand, laptop on. I glance at the pile of breakfast dishes, but I don't let them distract me. I choose to believe that they will be taken care of at some point during the day by my invisible, domestic-hero boyfriend. He really is a dear, and always knows just the right time of evening to suggest I stop hanging up the washing, put my feet up and order pizza. (I have to order a large pizza, obviously, because there's two of us. Invisible boyfriends can really put away the slices.)

"Right," I say. I say 'right' a lot.

I open the story I have been working on to reacquaint myself with where I was up to, and wonder why my characters roll their eyes and nod so much. I think they need to say 'right' more often.

I've written four halting paragraphs when my mobile rings. I swear, press ALT-F-S (which can theoretically stand for File-Save or Fuck's-Sake) and pick up my phone. It's the daycare centre.

"Hello?"
"Hello, is this Anna? This is Winnie, from the daycare. Ah, was Luka unwell this morning?"
"Um, he seemed pretty okay, a bit warm maybe."
"Yeah, he's seeming a bit unwell today, I think his temperature is about 39, and he just want to lie down on the floor and rest all the time?"

I look at my laptop screen. There's a nice little standoff between Guilt and Annoyance in my head. Guilt pokes Annoyance in the eyes and pulls her hair. Guilt fights dirty.

"I probably should come and get him, shouldn't I?"
"Yeah, I think it would be good. Thankyou Anna, see you soon!"

I gently shut my laptop and pick up my keys. The weather has heated up. When I finally get back to the daycare centre, I'm a sweaty mass of frustration and chafed thighs. I stride through to the toddler room, and each step echoes like a diminishing word count. Annoyance has obviously picked herself up off the ropes and bitten Guilt on the nose.

"Hey, Luka."
He turns his soft face up to mine. He's so pale he's almost translucent, and the rims of his little eyes are red.
"I'm a little bit sick," he says.
I pick him up and he leans against me, resting his head on my shoulder. He's very warm, and I can feel his little arms quivering.
"Can we go home and have a little sleep?" he asks in a small voice.

Guilt pulls an AK-47 from her pants and efficiently obliterates Annoyance.

"Course we can, buddy. I'm sorry you're a little bit sick. Do you want some Tiny Teddies when we get home?"
"Okay."

I cuddle his hot little body a bit closer.

There's a Friday every week.

*In case you're wondering, the original is: "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Mixed selections

"What does 'mixed selection' mean?"

"You don't want to know."

"No, really, what does it mean."

"It means - well, let's just say it's a good idea to keep a note of which meal was served on which day of the week."

"Why?"

"You don't want to know."

***

It's about my fourth week living at a Melbourne University residential college that shall remain nameless except to say it's not Trinity, Hilda's, JCH, Ridley, Whitley, Queens, Newman, St Mary's or Ormond.

All of us first-years have started to lose our country-stunned expressions and drift vaguely into groups. We're all just out of high school, so from the footy-heads to the musical theatre nuts to the science nerds to the constantly drunk medical students, the social groups are roughly the same as in high school. I've determined that all the male students are named Andrew or David, and all the female students are named Jenny or Kate. This saves a lot of time. I personally have decided to answer to Kate, as I am not blonde enough to be a Jenny ('microwave Jenny' or otherwise).

We've gotten past the stage where all we can think of to ask each other are the two first-year-student-from-the-country questions: "Where are you from?" and "What course are you doing?" (Warrnambool; Arts/Science), and have moved on to discovering that we both taped the same obscure 1970s Jacques Rivette film off the telly, and have well-loved copies of 'The Castle of Cats' in our bedrooms.

We've also moved on to the most important and long-running intellectual discussion of our residential years: college food.

College food has a reputation. It starts off okay, I'm told, to lull the first-years (and their nervous parents) into a false sense of security. Then there is an almost imperceptible slide into a kind of tolerable yet soul-destroying mediocrity you can only otherwise experience by listening to Coldplay on the headphones that came with your iPod in a Hoyts cinema foyer while eating supermarket potato salad.

The first thing to note about college food is the smell. It doesn't matter what's for dinner, it still makes the dining hall smell sweet and meaty, a bit like the smell of a McDonalds hamburger bun. It's the kind of smell where for a minute you can't tell whether it's something nice or something rotting.

"What's for tea?"

"Armenian lamb, apparently."

"BMP?"

"BMP."

There are many varieties of stew served at college. They go by such names as Armenian Lamb, Mongolian Beef, Indian Lamb, Mediterranean Beef, Moroccan Lamb and they all look and taste exactly the same: they are basically brown meat in a pot. The BMPs that are supposed to be curry-flavoured are often served with enormous amounts of pale, not-quite-deep-fried-enough pappadums which have been dumped into large metal bowls without being drained properly, so by the time we get them they have cooled, and developed little pockets of solidified fat in their undulations.

It doesn't pay to be vegetarian at college, either. The vegetarians are faced with a seemingly endless procession of 'slice': lentil slice, zucchini slice, and several others that go by different names but are essentially lentil slice and/or zucchini slice. I find this baffling: it is so easy to make tasty vegetarian food, even in slice format. The vegetarians at college go through a lot of tomato sauce.

Friday is the holy grail of college mealtimes. We all come back to college for dinner on Fridays, following some kind of deep, primal instinct that leads us to the dining hall like cartoon mice drifting nose-first after an illustrated ribbon of cheese-scent.

Friday at college is fish 'n' chips and ice-cream night.

*cue heraldic trumpets*

True, the fried-solid planks of fish-like substance are affectionately referred to as 'surfboards', but there's CHIPS and there's ICE-CREAM and there's shitloads of toppings and nuts (which you may also put on your chips if you wish, it's your call. We've all dipped McDonalds fries into a chocolate fudge sundae, so no one's judging). Those of us who return multiple times to the industrial-sized bottles of topping develop a kind of fiddler-crab-esque, overly muscular right arm from pumping the sauce.

I'm a bit funny about food at the best of times, so - Fridays aside - college food fills me with a combination of revulsion and amazement. I attend dinner like I'm performing some kind of experiment:

How many different sorts of soup can possibly just taste like thickened cornflour broth with salt? (Twelve.)

How thin can meat be sliced so as to feed as many students as possible? (0.3mm.)

How many servings of chocolate ripple cake can one footy-head balance up in a single bowl? (Five, but it isn't pretty.)

What is that? (It's carrots. Really. It's actually carrots.)

I try to work out why this sort of food unnerves me so much. I find the volume of it, the sheer enormity of a curry for 160 people, quite repulsive. There's so little detail in that amount of food, it reminds me of feeding the pigs on my friend’s farm. I know it sounds melodramatic, but there's something dis-empowering about being served up 3 mass-produced meals a day. I'm not an individual to this food; I'm an 18-year-old Jenny-or-Kate from the country who needs x amount of nutrients in order to get to three 8am Biochemistry lectures a week. In a way, this is true. So why does it make me feel like I should start learning synchronised gymnastics routines and move to North Korea?

***

“What does ‘mixed selection’ mean?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I’m standing in front of the daily black-board menu next to Sean.

"No, really, what does it mean."

"It means - well, let's just say it's a good idea to keep a note of which meal was served on which day of the week."

"Why?"

"You don't want to know."

I find out what ‘mixed selection’ means that evening. At my college, ‘mixed selection’ refers to the entire week’s leftovers, re-heated and served up in the bain-marie. You choose your poison. The trick is to try to remember if the dried-out Beef Wellington (another form of BMP – brown meat in pastry) was first served closer to Saturday or Thursday.

Sean, Laura and I survey the gently steaming array of food on offer.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“I think that’s Tuesday’s rissoles mixed with Thursday’s risotto,” says Sean.

“Why are there chips in with the croissants?” I ask.

“Oh,” says Laura. “I think I’ve worked it out. They’re serving things alphabetically.”

“That doesn’t explain why the lasagne is next to the zucchini slice,” I say.

Sean and Laura reply in unison: “That’s lentil slice.”

We make our choices. My choice is to move out of college with Laura at the end of the year, into a terrace house in Carlton that has a rosemary bush which threatens to take over the backyard every couple of months, and neighbours who regularly seem set things on fire:

“Who lit the fucken bin?”

“Don’t call the fire brigade Belinda, the car’s on fire but I’m puttin water on it!”

“Look Belinda, I’m a fireman, I’m a fireman!”

On the first night in our little house, I fry an up an onion with garlic, a tin of kidney beans and a tin of tomatoes. In case you can’t tell, I really don’t know how to cook yet. Laura is kind enough not to comment. I ladle the weird concoction into two crazed white bowls that my parents have had since the 70s, and we sit down in the tiny kitchen.

The onion is undercooked and crunchy, the whole thing is crying out for salt, and I didn’t rinse the kidney beans well enough.

It’s one meal, made for two people, to be eaten on one night.

I eat my whole bowlful. It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

We have rendered the impossible into life

We have rendered the impossible into life.
Upended our lives on three words
and found the best things underneath.
We thought ourselves empty flower pots
face-down over earwigs and the skeletons of flowers.
We lifted our terra-cotta helmets
and when the sun hit the dirt
it was full of tiny seeds
curling up toward daylight.

You may as well start now.

“Do I have to write down a birth plan?” I ask. I’m seven months pregnant.

“Well,” says my obstetrician, “You can write down that you plan to give birth, if you like. That one’s a definite. But you can make up the rest as you go along. Unless there’s anything specific you want, of course. I had a woman once who was adamant that she needed this giant red oil painting in the delivery room to focus on and channel energy through.”

“Did it work?” I ask.

He frowns a little and gazes up at the ceiling. “I think by the time she entered transition, her energy was more focused on another channel.”

**

After scouring the pregnancy forums, I pick my OB because the words that come up the most are ‘laid-back’ and ‘non-alarmist’. Also the fact that he doesn’t do internal examinations ‘unless medically indicated’. I’m not a fan of internals. A few months later when I am in labour, I will kick a midwife halfway across the room as she quite roughly performs one on me. She will raise her voice: ‘Come on, be a good girl, it’s not as bad as the contractions is it.’ I will growl ‘YES IT FUCKING IS’ but be in too much pain to point out that given I am currently giving birth, I am obviously no longer a ‘girl’ and probably haven’t been a ‘girl’ for quite a while, thank-you very fucking much you patronising medical professional. Five hours later when I am attempting to push out a baby, I will accidentally shit on this midwife and not mind at all.

I’m getting off track here. Back to just-pregnant.

I phone up to make my first appointment somewhat apprehensively, as my OB’s receptionist has A Reputation For Being A Little Bit Difficult. “Um, I’ve got a referral to see [redacted name of OB]?”

“How far along are you?” comes the terse reply.

“Three and a half weeks,” I say.

“So you haven’t missed your period yet.” She sounds really annoyed.

“Um, no,” I say. I’m standing outside my GP’s office in the wind, and I’m a bit frazzled at all of this. I hate making phone calls at the best of times.

“Then how do you know you’re pregnant?” she accuses.

“I have a positive pregnancy test,” I say. I nearly add ‘it’s a bit of a tip-off,’ but I’m too intimidated to rise to my usual level of smart-arsery.

She sighs. “Hold on I’ve got another call.” I wait for the usual waft of on-hold music and am slightly perplexed to find I’ve been hung up on. I ring back.

“I was just talking to you and we got cut off - ”

“You’re the three-and-a-half weeks?” she says.

“Uh. Yeah.”

“24^th May at 2pm?”

“Uh. Ok.”

“See you then.” She hangs up, and I burst into illogical tears. But hey, I’m pregnant, I now have special dispensation to burst into illogical tears whenever the fuck I want. Also I get to swear as much as I like because once I have a two-year-old with a talent for repetition, I’m going to have to try to behave myself. I may or may not prove to be very successful at this, and my two-year-old may or may not prove to be very good at clearly announcing ‘fucking computer!’ at inopportune moments.

But back to the early days, when my future swearing blonde moppet is little more than a tiny prawn made of snot floating around somewhere a lot lower down than I imagine my uterus to be. Should have concentrated harder when the Life Ed van came round to my primary school.

I like my OB even before I meet him. This is mainly because he has a Playmobil operating theatre and hospital room set up on his office book shelf. I’m easily wooed by the presence of these little German pieces of plastic. When he does enter the room and begin to speak, I’m soothed by his soft voice. He’s kind of like a really nice dad. He’s probably in his mid-fifties, has inoffensive grey hair and wears chinos.

“I have heaps of Playmobil,” I say. “I asked for it for every birthday and Christmas present from age 4 up until I was way too old to still be asking for it.”

It’s probably not the usual first thing he hears from a new patient, but I’m not going to be a usual patient. I am going to be weirdly low-maintenance for a first pregnancy. I’ll have hardly any questions or worries (that’s what the internet is for), I’ll never call him after hours, or even during hours, I’ll never page him and I won’t have a single medical problem even when I go 10 days overdue.

“Do I really have to follow all those food rules?” I ask. “There’s like a million of them. And I really like soft cheese.”

He leans forward and steeples his fingers. “Look, you can be as cautious as you like about these things, really. I would say: don’t eat undercooked meat if you’re in France, don’t eat anything that’s off, other than that just eat whatever you’re comfortable with.”

I must look pleased. “Oh,” he says, “And you’re going to need to drink to get through your second pregnancy, so you may as well start now. A small glass of wine each day isn’t going to do any harm at all.”

It’s official: I am in love with my OB.

I’d like to say the next 9 months fly by, but they don’t. Increasingly, they waddle. I outgrow every bra size ever invented. I stare in confusion at ‘hospital bag’ suggestion lists that insist I pack thank-you cards so I can write my thank-yous while I’m still in hospital. Why don’t I just write a novel and find a cure for cancer while I’m learning to breastfeed?

I manage never to have heartburn or need to wee more often than usual (even when I’m 9 months gone I don’t ever have to get up at night to take a piss. I try not to mention this to pregnant friends or friends with new babies, because their eyes take on a certain murderous gleam that I vaguely think I’ve seen once before and I think it was during ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle’).

Pregnancy is weird. Everyone is suddenly interested in me, and a bit grabby (which oddly enough, I find I quite like). I do consider having a set of business-sized cards made up that say “January. Boy. My first.” in order to save answering the same three fucking questions from every single person on the planet.

I also note one weird pregnancy thing that no one ever told me about: when you’re really, really pregnant and your baby moves around while you’re having a poo, it feels like your poo is alive. True.

And suddenly I’m 10 days overdue, lying on the couch moaning about how I’m going to be pregnant forever. Then something…squirts. I don’t usually spontaneously piss myself, I think. I leap off the couch and in ridiculously stereotypical Hollywood style, my waters break spectacularly all over the floor. It goes everywhere. I get the giggles. “Labour doesn’t start like this in real life!” I exclaim, “I’m an episode of Friends!”

I’ll spare you the labour. It’s actually quite boring, for the most part. It hurts, it takes fucking forever, I get really tired, I kick a midwife, I have an epidural. Epidurals are awesome. Everyone should have one, maybe once a week.

Then suddenly it’s time to have a go at actually giving birth, and I can’t manage to push properly (apart from the aforementioned shitting upon the patronising midwife). My OB, who has arrived with his hair tousled from sleep, says kindly: “I think I might need to give you a hand. You have one more go, I’ll get the salad servers ready.” I assume he means forceps because I don’t recall ordering a salad.

**

I’ve meandered all over this blog post, not knowing quite how to end it. I can only think of one way how it ends, and when I mention it to @matchtrick, he replies: “Then that’s how it ends. You get very few chances to tell a story that ends that way.” He’s right.

**

I admire my stripy Juno-style socks as my numb legs hang in the air, propped up by stirrup thingies. I can’t feel a thing, but my OB appears to be tossing the salad. (This is not intended to be a euphemism, but I suspect it already is.)

A few moments later a curled up creature is slopped onto my chest, apparently covered in tinned tomatoes and cottage cheese. It’s not a bag of kittens after all.

One of his fists clutches around the strap of my nightie. He’s all shiny and gross and a lot bigger than I expected and completely amazing.

I burst into logical tears.

It ends with baby.

Visiting Chats

It’s been a quite a long time since I last visited her. Too bloody long, actually.

When I blink and think of her, she is frozen in place at high shutter speed, a tiny firecracker of a woman who would stride in to Camp Hill Primary School, clasping my little hand, and demand to read to my class (to the bemusement of my Prep teacher, who very wisely allowed this elderly dynamo to entrance our class for half an hour).

Now, as I struggle with the spring on the low gate, it feels like someone else's life. Other children’s sun-faded drawings are stuck to the sunroom glass. The pencil scratch marking my height has long ago rubbed off the front yard lamp post.

My mother is by my side, pleaded along for the visit, just in case. In case of what? If I'm honest, I've asked to her to come with me in case the woman I am visiting has finally grown old.

I push the black plastic button on the wall and a startling string of clangs bursts from inside the house. I’d forgotten the assault of that doorbell.

“Darling girl!” A familiar silhouette, dwarfed by the doorway. Heather Chatfield, or Chats, as I quickly dubbed her as a 6 year old.

She was my mother’s English lecturer, and my childhood provider of endless Tim-Tams and endless aggressive enthusiasm. She is now seventy-eight. Her faded blonde hair is arranged in vague curls around her head, and her open mouth reveals worn down bottom teeth.

“It’s our girl! And mother!” trills her deep theatrical tone. She has the voice of everyone's Aunty Beryl who smokes ten packs a day and sounds like a bloke, crossed with Bob Downe.

“Now give me a hug.” she orders, and I bend almost double to embrace her tiny figure. She holds me at arms length and purses her lips. “Let me look at you, aren’t you a beautiful girl - isn’t she beautiful, mother? Come in, now - will you have a cup of tea?” She bustles into the house and we follow. The darkness inside feels familiar; a stillness of decades in every ornament and stagnant piece of furniture.

The grandfather clock still blocks half the passage, and my Year 7 pottery sculptures (including an incredibly un-lifelike replica of an icecream sundae) still adorn the television. Chats steams through the lounge into the piano room and perches on an embroidered chair. I wonder if the piano’s Middle C still plays two notes at once. For those of you playing at home, neither of the notes are actually Middle C.

“Every time I get one of your letters,” she begins, “I go down to the Bendigo library and search for those books you tell me about. Those librarians must be saying to each other - ” she tilts her head in the air and flares her nostrils “ - ‘Who is this old trrrrollop who knows all about these new books and keeps pestering us about them?” She breaks into the throaty laugh that always threatens to turn into a cough. Sometimes it does, and I remember her emphysema. “It’s all those cigarettes I smoked, dear girl, I’ve had to give them up now.” When I was in Prep I used to hide her fags and she would chase me all over the house with a fly swat, me giggling hysterically. There were a couple of packets that she never found. I think I even flushed some of them down the bog.

Chats presses her hands into her lap. “I don’t regret a single smoke, if they told me I was going to die tomorrow I’d buy a huge pile of them -” she throws her arms wide, “ - and smoke myself to death!”

“I don’t understand all these people clinging desperrrrately to life,” she continues, “Half the ladies down at the Red Cross are grumbling about getting old and how their medicines are prolonging this and that - I think every day after seventy is a bonus, darling, and I won’t be claiming I didn’t get enough time.”

As we finish our cups of tea she presents me with a flat, green book. “This is the latest one darling, I thought you might like a copy before you go.” Chats writes English text books for primary and secondary schools, and now, as she approaches her eightieth year, she has finished another. “Because you’re off to university this year, aren’t you? Oh, you are a clever girl.” Her lips draw back in a sneer. “Not like those girls who think they’re intellectual giants because they can say -” she bursts into a whirlwind of quotation; arms sweeping, r’s rolling, ' - ‘O wearrrry night, O long and tedious night, abate thy hours! Shine comforts from the east! That I may back to Athens by daylight, from these that my poor company detest: and sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye, steal me awhile from mine own company.' " She pauses, and her expression sharpens. "And not like those people who are lazy with their language, either.”

Chats detests ‘lazy language’. God help me if I ever ended a sentence with 'with' (unless I really couldn't think of any other word to end it with). Once, aged seven, I was vigorously told off for starting two consecutive sentences with the word “Then”.

Then it’s time to leave. Then it’s hard to leave, too. But there are relatives who hold polite conversations about school to be visited, relatives who, unlike Chats, will probably not announce things like: “I’ve given up wearing a bra now, darling. I don’t see the point any more.”

We stand at the gate, and her gently trembling hands wrap around my wrists. Her blue eyes shine a bit too brightly from her pink face. “You’re a dear, clever girl, and you must visit again soon. Not very many people like me, darling, so the ones who do I drag close to me. Kicking and scrrrreaming!”

She huffs a laugh and leans closer towards me. “Don’t you let anyone stop you from doing what you want to do.” She wiggles my arms up and down. As I smile and turn to leave she pulls my face down to hers and cups her hands against my cheeks. I swallow, it feels like her eyes are pressing against my own. She square her small shoulders.

“People might try, you know. They might try to stop you doing whatever it is you want to do. Remember darling girl, if one door closes - beat it down.”

The Trojan Bra

It will not surprise you to learn that my grandfather ran a pub, and my great-grandfather ran a pub.

There's something about this publican history that passes with the amniotic fluid in our family. While I am decidedly of Librarian Stadium Status, I often think my library will be the most perfect place on earth on that day where I can pull you a mean pint as I loan you a copy of At Swim Two Birds. Or, if you're that way inclined, mix you up a Mint Julep to go with your Great Gatsby. I can pour you a delicate liqueur to go with your Poirot (sirop de cassis, ou creme de menthe?). If you're borrowing anything by Bukowski, however, I might duck after I heave the four jugs of of vinegar-masquerading-as-red-wine over the counter.

Anyway.

I'm in a very small country town, sitting in the front bar of the pub my grandfather used to run. It's a local bar, for local people, and I'm wearing way too much black (actually, only my socks are black; it's still too much). But I have special dispensation to sit here at ease, as the blood of this pub runs in my veins.

There's a lot of yellow pine paneling and the ceiling feels lower than it actually is. It's 1pm, and the regulars lean against the bar like old tree trunks, curved over their beer mats and occasional exchange of words. There's a comforting smell of stale ale and stubbed-out hot chips. A wishing-well's worth of foreign currency is blu-tacked to the wall next to the register, and beside that is a small picture of a kitten hanging onto a tree branch, captioned: "Lord, help me to hang in there!"

I recall that one of the previous barmen here refused to serve anything except beer, regardless of what you asked for.

"What can I get you?"

"White wine, please."

You get lager.

"What'll it be?"

"Scotch and coke."

You get lager.

"Another round, boys?"

"Yep. 6 tequila shots mate."

You get lager.

"And for the lady?"

"Where are the toilets, please?"

You get lager.

"What's your poison?"

"A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat."

You get thrown out.

There are limits.

Zero tolerance for Simpsons references round these here parts.

The weekly Tinna Shit raffle will come around later. These are so-named because the prize may as well be a tin of shit, that's not the point. You don't weigh up whether you really want a meat-tray or free entry to the footy-tipping, you just buy the bloody ticket. If you're stupid enough to actually ask what the prize is, the reply will come swiftly from the Greek chorus: "Tinna shit."

I'm perched on the cracked leather of a bar stool, attempting not to knock back my beer in one giant mouthful. These days, I only seem to venture into country towns for funerals, and the pub becomes vital because apparently it is a universal law that only chardonnay may be served at wakes. For me, chardonnay has a tang of corpses.

In between 'sensible' sips, for I glance upwards. I'm not sure why. Probably because ever since I got here I've had the distinct impression that the distance between my head and the ceiling is ever-so-gradually diminishing.

Directly above me, fiercely secured with yellow stick-pins, is the biggest bra I have ever seen.

It's tacked to the pine boards in four places. It's very, very beige. The cups hang low: plumped, pendulous, emptily sensuous. There's a kind of drag against the elastic that isn't the result of polyester and gravity alone. The straps have torn a little against the rusted spikes that trap them against the ceiling.

There's something in that bra. I really, really hope it's not a pair of boobs.

The barwoman places an elbow conversationally next to my own. "Punch girl?" she asks. It's not really a question. We Punch girls look alike.

"Yep," I reply. "Mick's grand-daughter." I glace upward at the bra again. The barwoman smiles and her eyes crease into fans at the edges. Her lipstick is immaculate.

"Lady left it behind upstairs in the rooms. It's a double G-cup. The fellas been throwing coins up in it."

I look up at the bra again, and can just make out half-moon edges of coins pressing against the cups. It must be pretty filled out.

The barwoman nods and her verandah of hair bobs stiffly. "Brings them in, of a weekend," she says. "Their bloody aim gets worse as the night goes on of course. Number of times I've had dollar coins bounce off my nut."

I look back at the ceiling, and the men at the bar tilt their heads to match my upward gaze. Does the elastic tear a little further against the stick-pins, or is that the sensible sips of beer talking?

The barwoman speaks again. Her voice is firm and confident. She is in charge here, proud and comfortable.

"When it comes down, all that money's going to the Children's Hospital."

Every pair of eyes is fixed upon the Trojan Bra. Necks crane and chins tilt.

The leather men at the bar lean sideways and fumble in their pockets for change.

I'm turning the world into birds

The last 1.5 hours of my library shift last approximately 5.4 hours (5.9 if Daylight Savings has ended).

10am-7pm is hardly an epic work day, but that dingy hour-and-a-half after everyone else goes home appears to turn my brain into some kind of weary meat soup, and my only intellectual ability is to create more misunderstandings than that time I went to the supermarket and only bought a packet of AA batteries and a carrot.

Typical exchange #1:

Borrower: "Can I borrow these please?"
Me: "Sure." I scan their student card, hand it back and then attempt to check out the dvds. The student card hasn't scanned.
Me, enunciating badly: "Sorry, can I have your card again?"
Borrower, looking down at their cardigan: "Sorry?"

Typical exchange #2:

Borrower: "Sorry, these are a few days overdue. Is there a fine?"
Me: "No, that's fine."
Borrower, frowning: "What's the fine?"
Me: "No, it's fine, no fine."
Borrower: "Can I pay it here?"

etc. I'm tired.

At 6:55pm I wander around the library using my best Mum-voice to break through to the iPod-deaf students in the Science Fiction collection, and the stellar examples of young love that lie entertwined and lust-deaf in the bean bag room.

"THE LIBRARY IS CLOSING IN FIVE MINUTES!"

The iPod kids nod vaguely at me and re-prop their George R. R. Martins back against the door. The young lovers spring apart like I'm their dad and I've just walked in on a particularly practical homework session.

I turn off the music (I've recently discovered that playing the Labyrinth soundtrack just before closing is a good way to get rid of everyone, for some reason), click the bolts across the doors and turn off the lights. There's a muffled shriek and some mad rustling from the other room as someone who has fallen asleep both on and under a bean bag realises they're about to be locked in. They shuffle to the exit and I let them out.

The fluorescent tubes flicker out and I stand alone for a few minutes. Have you ever hung out in a closed library? It's really nice. Warm and dark and booky. Given that I start work again at 8:30am tomorrow, sometimes I consider just making myself a nest of bean bags and sleeping over. Pretend I'm Lynda Day sleeping at the Junior Gazette headquarters. But even without the frizzy perm, it might scare the cleaners to find a bleary-eyed, flannel-pyjamaed librarian where there should really only be empty bean bags and the occasional mouse.

So I wander through the deserted Union House, with its permanent aroma of sushi and feet, across campus to my bus stop. I put on my headphones, partly to listen to music but mostly as a kind of hipster head-band to keep my hair out of my face.

In the peripherest of my peripheral vision, I see two sparrows flitting confidently along the ground towards me. I like a small brown bird as much as the next librarian, but I don’t often, well, hang out with them. I turn my head as slowly as I can so as not to scare them and discover that my new feathered friends are in fact scrunched-up-brown-paper-friends, probably originating from Baker’s Delight, that have blown along the steps towards me.

I’m vaguely disappointed at this dissolution of my prospectively Hitchcockian moment. But only briefly because at that point my bus turns up. One minute early! I wonder why everyone else looks so bloody grumpy about this, but after a few travelers ask the driver “Are you the 6:42?” I realise that this bus is not in fact 1 minute early but 29 minutes late.

The bus skittles towards Clifton Hill and past the tennis courts. I’ve let shuffle choose the tunes and it’s chosen Dolly Parton. While ‘9 to 5’ isn’t entirely accurate for my day, I’m the first to admit that ‘10 to 7’ doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais ménage à trois. (I may have done 1^st year uni statistics, but I only did French to year 10.) And at least it's not 'His Eye is on the Sparrow'.

I gaze into the middle distance as we pull up at Clifton Hill station. My gaze scans lazily along the bottom of the tennis court fence.

At the base of it I see a pair of seagulls. They are waltzing.

Their white bodies shuffle back and forth in perfect three-quarter time, like little pale boats cresting the same wave.

I blink, and lean forward in my seat. The feathered flamencos gradually resolve, and I realise the mesh that covers the fence all except the bottom 30cm is obscuring the very human, tennis-playing legs that are connected to the seagulls that are, in fact, a pair white sneakers. As the player dances back and forth, my eyes still catch a bird-like echo in his feet.

So at this point I'm seriously considering either taking up twitching or getting my contact lens prescription checked.

As the bus flings itself up along towards Alphington, I let shuffle take over again and am pleasantly rewarded by a corny rendition of 'Two Hearts Swing in Three-Quarter Time' by Michael Feinstein.

The bus lurches to a halt outside a shop whose signage simply proclaims "TOOLS!" and I try not to take it personally.

I lean my head against the bus window. An enormous raven whizzes right past my head and I instinctively jerk away from the glass in shock.

"Fuck me dead!" I exclaim under my breath. At least, I think it's under my breath but the looks from my fellow passengers suggest it is more 'under my breath while I have headphones on' than 'under my breath when I can hear the volume of my own voice'.

I peer out the window down the road, trying to catch the flight-path of this over-sized cousin of the writing desk.

I can't see any birds, but there is a cyclist waiting up at the red light ahead. His head is at about the height of my bus window, and he's wearing a large, black, aerodynamic helmet. It doesn't look much like a writing desk, but I think I've located my giant Quoth.*

I'm turning the world into birds. What am I going to ornithologically Rorschach next? Does Rorschach** even work as a verb?

My bus purrs on towards Ivanhoe, and the evening light clicks over to that syrupy golden haze that singles out each tree and tells every leaf it's a miracle. As the bus reaches the top of a hill, a large tree rears into view. It's been pruned vigorously to allow the power lines to run through the middle.

Large leafy limbs curve up on either side, straddling the electric tightropes. The evening gilt fades in an instant and the tree arcs in flightless silhouette. I briefly hold my breath at this clipped delusion. The bus drives on.

My iPod shuffles and the first notes of The Leisure Society's 'Love's Enormous Wings' curl around my ears.

__________________________________________________________

* Apologies to Terry Pratchett.

** Autocorrect suggested 'cornstarch' in place of Rorschach. I expect the next gelatinous mass I see will look like a pigeon.