On Friday morning she awoke with a dream still freshly sketched in her imagination. She was walking with Jean-Michel, he was holding her hand and his grey hair was cut short in a military style. She preferred his hair like that and wanted to tell him that she was glad he had finally taken her advice and cut it. But she found she could not speak. They were walking through a cold, sun-starved cityscape that she did not recognise. It was a little like what she had imagined Zagreb to be like before she got there. Jean-Michel’s grip on her hand was firm and she felt safe. There was no one else in the city. She was pregnant, she was huge. She was happy.
She showered and dressed quickly. She hadn’t thought of Jean-Michel for a long time. She remembered that even back then his chest was beginning to sag and grey hairs had begun to spread across his thickening stomach. He was always going to age badly, and he would be an old man now. She blushed as it struck her that he had been the age she was now when they were lovers, and she herself had been even younger than Rhys. She found herself mouthing him an apology in the morning light of the apartment. Maybe it wasn’t mere cowardice or professional fear that had made Jean-Michel reluctant to leave his wife and pursue the passionate affair with his Master’s student. Maybe he was only too aware of the ruthlessness of time, saw ahead to the moment when she would no longer find him attractive. She had not possessed such wisdom then and overcame her sorrow by first detesting and then pitying what she had thought was Jean-Michel’s weakness.
Before leaving her apartment she looked at herself, up and down,
critically, in the mirror. She was tall, yes, she was glamorous, her figure was still strong and supple. But she was an ageing woman. In twenty years’ time she would be sixty-three. And Rhys would be a handsome and still-attractive man of forty-four. The thought of her young lover brought a smile, tender and amorous, to her lips. She felt a spasm of desire. Was this pregnancy, this constant awareness of eroticism, this helpless surrender to the body?
Aisha and Rosie were already sitting in the beer garden. Anouk kissed them both, and she gave Rosie a big hug as well. They had been friends for what amounted now to more than a generation. They’d always been different. She did not want to wallow in spite or resentment of her old friend. The glue that bound them together was certainly not history. Their glue was Aish. They both knew this. An open bottle of white wine was at the table and Anouk poured herself a glass.
‘I nearly got run over by three little bitches, just outside the pub.’
‘At the lights?’
‘No.’ Anouk shook her head and smiled. Rosie was frowning, concerned and anxious. ‘They weren’t in a car. This was on the street. They bumped into me and then walked off as if I didn’t exist.’
‘How old were they?’ asked Aisha.
‘God knows. They looked like hookers but they could have been sixteen. They were probably twelve.’
‘Well, you probably don’t exist for them. None of us do.’ There was resignation in Aisha’s tone.
‘Well, I do fucking exist and I want my existence acknowledged when I’m physically dealt with. God, I hate young women. I much prefer boys. They are so much more polite.’
Rosie shook her head in mock derision. ‘We’re turning into our mothers. I’m sure we were bitches to older women when we were young.’
Anouk lit a cigarette and looked down at the table. They needed an ashtray and she quickly surveyed the tables around her. Two men, in suits and with their ties loosened, were engaged in spirited conversation at the next table. She indicated their empty ashtray and one of the men smiled and handed it to her. He was roughly handsome, paunchy but virile. She registered his assistance with a small smile but she was thinking of what Rosie had just said.
‘You’re probably right. We were arrogant. But we weren’t deliberately rude. That is what I’m complaining about and, much as I hate to say it, I think we feminists have helped create it. These little bitches think they have the right to do anything they want but they don’t care about consequences.’
‘Now you sound like some right-wing shock jock.’
Anouk snorted out loud at this. ‘Rosie, that’s bullshit. I think the age of consent should be twelve, I think heroin should be sold legally and I think the American president and our prime minister should be prosecuted for war crimes. I’m not a fucking conservative and I resent the implication. It’s not only the right who can speak on morality.’
Rosie and Aisha glanced at one another and then started laughing.
Anouk blushed. ‘Rant over. I’m sorry. I just wish I could have slapped those stupid little cows.’
As soon as she said it, her thoughts flew back to the barbecue at Aish’s place. She knew all three of them were flashing back to that instant when Harry had hit the child. The man who had handed her the ashtray kept looking up at her. He would be in his late forties, with salt and pepper thinning hair. Strong forearms, fat fingers. No wedding ring.
‘It’s how slutty they look that I can’t stand.’
For a moment, Anouk and Rosie were confused at Aisha’s statement, then they both burst out laughing.
‘It’s true, we are turning into our mothers.’
But Aisha wasn’t laughing as she poured herself another drink.
She reached out and without asking took a cigarette from the packet on the table. ‘I worry about Melissa. I know she’s still a kid but she’s already asking for bikini tops to wear when she goes out to a friend’s birthday. I don’t want her to grow up thinking that she has to look like a streetcorner whore to be attractive.’
Rosie shook her head at this. ‘You’re forgetting what we were like. You’re forgetting how much your mother bitched about the clothes we wore.’
‘Because she thought we were making ourselves look deliberately ugly. That’s true. But our reality was different, we wanted to be punks, to stand out from the crowd. But we were all aware of what it meant to look slutty and we felt sorry for those girls. They were the girls that dropped out of school, the ones that became single mums. They were the girls that boys fucked and fucked over. I wanted to look like Siouxsie Sioux and Patti Smith. I did not want to look like the Happy Hooker. You know who Melissa thinks is wonderful? Paris Hilton. Paris fucking Hilton. Now, there’s a role-model.’
‘At least she has some attitude. I don’t mind her.’
Anouk gulped down her wine and poured another one quickly. Her good will towards Rosie was dissipating. Rosie was a few years younger than both her and Aish, not yet forty, but as an adolescent Rosie had been reckless and harsh: it came from having a puritan mother and an alcoholic loser dad. It had made her suspicious of pieties. But since meeting Gary and especially since having Hugo she had slowly taken on a New Age moral code that retained elements of her mother’s religious ethics but which resisted the hardline dictates of her Calvinism. Rosie had been a beautiful young woman. She could have been a model, an Aryan model, Anouk thought a little spitefully. Rosie had also been a mean-tongued bitch when she wanted to be, with an intolerance of hypocrisy. She could do with some of that cruelty now. She could do with not being bloody earth-mother to both her husband and kid.
The man from the next table had risen to go to the bar. He smiled again as he walked past them. He was tall. It was the one thing that she regretted about Rhys as a lover, that he was not a tall man. A sensuous glow, intensified by the alcohol, spread through her body, waves of pleasure emanating from her loins. She wanted to fuck all the time. She wanted to fuck the man at the next table. She wanted to fuck him tonight. She drifted back into the conversation. Aisha and Rosie were still engaged in a heated debate.
Anouk raised her hand in protest. ‘Enough!’
‘Okay,’ Rosie conceded, then added quickly, ‘But I still think you two are being tough on younger women. You’re forgetting that we had it easy. Free education, social services, feminism. You name it.’
Anouk’s resentment dissipated. Rosie had a point.
‘I think I hate that they are so g
eneric, so Hollywood.’ She was remembering her fury at the young girls’ refusal to acknowledge her physical encounter on the street. Their swagger, their look, their style was qualitatively different from the arrogance they themselves had as young women. The teenagers on the street were emulating a look and a pose of sneering indifference that was manufactured by the media. It was individualistic, it was selfish. There was no world outside the image. And she herself worked in the industry that created these young monsters. She felt sick to her core. The luscious sexual euphoria she had been quietly experiencing completely disappeared. She felt tired, old, her lungs hurt. She looked up to find that Rosie and Aish were nodding in agreement.
‘I hate that too.’ Aisha finally lit the cigarette. ‘I hate how everything is becoming the same.’
‘I’m part of it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I spent a year in Zagreb teaching Croatian writers and directors how to faithfully recreate a soap opera based on a suburban Melbourne family that was itself based on a concept that originally came from a failed German soapie. I don’t think I have any right to accuse anyone of being a whore.’
‘We are all whores. I get free trips for my family from drug companies who get me to give vaccinations to animals that I know they don’t really need. It’s the modern world, Anouk. We are all whores.’
Rosie was silent.
Anouk grinned evily at her. ‘Except you, of course. You’re a saint.’
Rosie blushed. Anouk saw a glimpse of something like fury, something vicious flash across the woman’s piercing eyes but it vanished, disappeared back deep inside her where so much had gone since marrying Gary, since going straight.
Rosie answered with an insincere smile. ‘I’m no saint, Anouk. I just think you don’t have to engage with all that is terrible about this world. You can separate yourself from it. That’s why Gary and I will only let Hugo watch DVDs and videos, absolutely no television but the children’s shows. We want Hugo to get a chance to develop his imagination independent from that vile world.’
Rosie turned to Aisha. ‘I’ve caught up with Shamira a few times. I like her. That’s what her religion is, a way of protecting herself and her family from the shit in this world.’
‘Who the fuck’s Shamira?’
‘You know her,’ Aisha reminded Anouk. ‘Bilal’s wife.’
Anouk nodded. The Aboriginal Muslim and his white Muslim wife. The odd couple. She had found that she had nothing to say to either of them at the barbecue. She could see why Rosie would like them. The three of them had all obviously shed their pasts and grown new, vastly different skins. She glanced over at Aish and she was suddenly convinced that her friend was thinking exactly the same thoughts. It was a shared moment in which they were both pitying and ridiculing the experiences of the three true authentic Australians. Aish and herself, they had real pasts, real histories. Jewish, Indian, migrant; it all meant something, they had no need to make things up, to assume disguises.
‘I had no idea you knew each other.’
‘We exchanged numbers at your party. She’s lovely. And she’s obviously been a good influence on Terry.’ Rosie quickly rectified her mistake. ‘Bilal, I mean.’
‘Yes, they seem happy.’ Aisha’s reply was curt, offering nothing.
Rosie leaned across and almost whispered. ‘We can’t meet anywhere where they serve alcohol. That feels so odd.’
That means you can meet without having to take your husband, doesn’t it? You don’t have to risk Gary getting drunk and embarrassing you. Their wine bottle was almost empty. ‘I’m going to the bar.’
The pub was getting crowded, full of smoke and it was a wait before she could get served. Just as the bartender asked for her order, she felt a tap on her shoulder and she turned around. The man from the table next to them was grinning at her. His face was flushed, pink. His mouth was wide and his lips full.
‘Can I buy you this round?’
‘That’s very kind of you, but I’m getting a bottle for the table.’
‘That’s alright. I’m happy to shout all you ladies.’
Anouk smiled ruefully and shook her head. ‘Afraid not.’ She had let go of the fantasy the second he began speaking. His voice was thin, reedy. Men should not have little boys’ voices. ‘I’m with someone.’
‘Lucky bastard.’
‘Thank you.’
The bartender returned with her order and the man slipped a fifty-dollar note across the counter. She began to protest but he interrupted.
‘My shout. I’m Jim.’
‘I’m Anouk.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘Like the actress?’
It pleased her that he knew this. This was not common for Australian men.
‘Yes, like the actress.’
Jim assisted her back to the table. The noise from the crowd was amplified in the narrow bar and they found they had to shout.
‘Your parents French?’
‘No. My parents were francophiles.’
She found herself a little tongue-tied when she reached their table. Jim placed the bottle before the women and introduced himself. He pointed to his friend, who rose, and walked over.
‘This is Tony.’
Tony was also tall, younger than Jim, slimmer with a thick moustache. He was balding. They all shook hands and then there was an uncomfortable moment of silence.
‘Do you want to join us?’ Aisha finally asked.
Jim raised his eyes at Anouk. He slowly shook his head. ‘You ladies look like you’re having a girl’s night out. We’ll do the gentlemanly thing and leave you alone.’ He looked straight at Anouk. ‘Enjoy the night. I just wanted to buy you all drinks. In celebration of gorgeous women.’
Anouk left it to Rosie and Aisha to thank him. She was making sure she could memorise everything about him. The colour of his hair, his ruddy cheeks, the strong, heavy jaw, the fading sunburn visible under his unbuttoned collar, the thick neck, the smattering of fine blonde hair on his arms and wrists. His eyes, his mouth, his hands.
Aisha waited till the men had seated themselves again at their table before speaking. She leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘I don’t want to giggle but I feel like giggling.’
‘Don’t you fucking dare giggle.’ Anouk’s eyes were imploring her friends to behave. ‘What did I miss?’
The grin departed from Aisha’s face. It struck Anouk that Aisha looked too thin. Her cheekbones seemed too sharply defined beneath her dusky skin; there were dark shadows beneath her eyes.
Anouk took her friend’s hand beneath the table and held it tight. ‘You alright?’
Aish nodded and Anouk loosened her grip. Their hands slid apart.
‘Rosie was saying that Shamira is the first veiled woman she has ever spoken to.’
Rosie looked embarrassed. ‘Not quite, Aish. Obviously, I have shared greetings with strangers or across shop counters. But I’ve never had a conversation with a Muslim woman before.’ Rosie dropped her voice. ‘I feel a bit ashamed, but I can’t take my eyes off her headscarf. I want to forget it but I can’t.’
‘That’s because it appears strange to you.’
‘And it isn’t strange for you?’ Rosie shot back.
Aisha didn’t respond. God, thought Anouk, let’s not have this conversation.
‘Aish simply meant she’s Indian, it’s not strange for her. Or for me.’
‘Because you’re Jewish?’ Rosie sounded incredulous.
Anouk remembered as a child her parents taking her to Sydney for a wedding, and in Bondi, at some stranger’s house, she had first seen women covered. They had not mixed with any Orthodox in Perth. They had scared her, these women; even the young ones had seemed ancient.
‘Yes, some Orthodox women cover their heads. I think they’re doormats as well,’ she added emphatically.
‘Shamira says it gives her strength. It’s given her confidence.’
I’m not going to have this conversation, thought Anouk, let us not have this
fucking conversation again. She was sickened by the return of questions of religion and God. Increasingly she felt restricted by the morality and the confusion of this new century. She had abandoned God a long time ago when still a child. Her athiesm had seemed normal, expected. Of the world. This new century seemed to stretch out before her with an unrelenting, atavistic resolve. She wished that she had been born twenty years earlier. Born a man, twenty years earlier.
‘I hate it when I see women covered. I detest it. It makes me furious that they let men do that to them.’
Rosie’s face registered shock and disapproval. Anouk too was surprised by Aisha’s vehemence.
‘But, Aish,’ Rosie answered, ‘not all Muslim women are forced into the veil. You know that. Surely you support their right to wear whatever they want.’
Anouk couldn’t keep silent. ‘I’m not having this fucking conversation. Let us not have this conversation.’
‘Why?’ Rosie would not back down. She was directing her questions to Aisha. ‘Do you think Shamira is lying to herself when she says the veil gives her strength?’
‘Shamira’s strength comes from being with Terry. Shamira’s mother is a drunk, her sister’s a junkie and her father is God knows where. It’s Terry who gives her strength, not a piece of cloth over her head.’ Aisha’s fingers moved towards the cigarette packet but she didn’t take one.
‘And Bilal’s faith is what gives him strength.’ Rosie would not back down.