The Secret Lives of Men by Georgia Blain

Author:Georgia Blain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC029000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Escape

My father liked to think of himself as an intellectual, a tad bohemian, handsome, a bon vivant and a raconteur. All admirable traits, but perhaps not so essential for the job of parenting — one that he managed to avoid for most of the year and then was forced to embrace each summer holiday.

He picked us up in his frog-green Porsche Roadster, the engine throbbing in our suburban street. The fact that there would barely be enough room for our suitcases never occurred to him, let alone the problem of how we would fit into a car that didn’t have a back seat.

‘Both of you in the front,’ he would say, and my sister and I would squash, awkward and embarrassed, into the tiny leather bucket seat, straining to wrap the belt around our bodies.

Our mother stayed inside for our departure, telling us she’d prefer to stare at the ceiling and pray we’d get there alive than witness his driving.

‘And off we go!’ Foot to the floor, gears sliding smoothly into place, the wind in our hair, Pink Floyd booming on the stereo, we were headed out of ‘Dullsville’ (my father’s word) and off to the land of pot, lissom young women, meals when you felt like it, and six weeks of parental neglect.

Sass was thirteen that summer, and I was twelve. She rarely spoke to us anymore, hiding in her room as soon as she got home from school, listening to records and reading books. I missed her, and didn’t understand why she had withdrawn.

‘Good god, you’re a woman,’ my father said when we arrived at his house.

She glared at him and then picked up her case and walked on ahead of us.

My father’s house was a low-lying brick-and-timber building with more windows than walls, built alongside similar houses, each hidden from the next by tangled bush. There was no garden, just scrub: callistemon, hop bush, gold-dust wattle and yellow box, all pressed tight against each other, leaving no space to play, no lawn.

‘Lawn belongs in Dullsville.’ My mother would imitate my father when I complained about having nothing to do there — no backyard cricket, nowhere to kick the football. ‘Don’t tell me you belong in Dullsville, too.’ She would roll her eyes. It was only six weeks: I had to grin and bear it, and before I knew it I’d be back in the suburbs in my dull house with my dull mother.

Usually Sass and I slept in the den, a box-like room that faced south, our camp beds side by side, one end wedged in under our father’s desk, every surface covered in papers, books and recording equipment — headphones, a Nagra and several microphones — as well as metal canisters containing reels of tape: interviews he did outside the studio and off-cuts from edits.

There was no reason to think there would be any change to our accommodation, and our father certainly hadn’t mentioned that he had another guest — not that we would have been

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.