Goodbye Girlie by Patsy Adam-Smith

Author:Patsy Adam-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743432952
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2012-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Alastair

INEVITABLY ALASTAIR AND I FELL in love; inevitable, not because we worked in such close proximity but because we were so similar in vigour, spirit, toughness, roistering good humour and furious, almost murderous tempers that always ended in cuddles and laughter. We both had that nicety of knowing how to keep the lid on the boiling kettle, and when to let the steam blow and the whole shooting match to begin. We never fought in public, but many’s the time we barely made it to privacy and battle began as the door banged shut behind us.

On the Richter scale we would have hit twelve – full typhoon force. Once he grabbed me from the front and ripped the buttons, twelve of them, off my new overcoat in one mighty wrench, not in sexual passion but with bottled-up fury because of something that happened – I can no longer remember, but I do remember those beautiful buttons shooting off as if from a cannon. And our laughter when we got over the shouting.

Once I deserted him on the top of Mount Wellington because he wanted to stay up there in the snow and I wanted to go down and took the car. We never discussed that one again. He had got home near freezing. But neither of us held spite. We both had marital partners who, perhaps understandably, were cross with us although they didn’t know any more about us than did any other citizen. And there were some wondrous, exotic guesses being bandied around.

My most beautiful, tempestuous, furious, and gentle lover warned me about ‘people’ but I said, ‘It’s nothing to do with anyone but us.’ Of course I was foolish, I truly didn’t know what a vicious creature the Public can be. But I soon learned.

Alastair and I shared such years that I cannot regret one hour of our wonderful growing-up together, for that is what our time was. Neither of us had known lovemaking of a real kind, neither of us had had a partner that matched in all ways: mercantile, travel, hard-labour, love, and sexual romping like children discovering it for the first time – as we were.

My children had had such a testing time that when they eventually met him they took to Alastair as if he had been at their birth. He, like me, was young. He was a great picnicker. ‘Hey! The sun’s out! Get the billy and bread and I’ll get the car out!’ We drove from one end of the island State to the other. The kids followed Alastair everywhere. He was interesting, interested, entertaining and firm, never harsh or unfair. They blossomed.

Alastair’s marriage was broken, so was mine, and for each of us work was paramount. And so was money. We both had children to keep. We were both toilers, both had a brain and the want to exercise it, and we separately and together wanted to charter a ship on our own. We ran the Naracoopa for eight months straight, two crews, one off, one on, but we two worked unbroken time.

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