Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 10, Issue 4 by Tony Birch

Author:Tony Birch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922171603
Publisher: Review of Australian Fiction

Now, she had a strong desire to have it again. She looked at the address book. What would they say? Those days were long over. Before they turned thirty her friends were married and had children and left Chermside. For a while they might have caught up at Queenies in Nundah for high tea, but it was too sporadic, and too flash for Serene; it was something clearly fading. Serene went instead to the Kedron pub on Friday nights. Her mother wasn’t there to see her source anonymous suckling, often recklessly. She was sure she had a repetition, but it made things easier. She was too tired now to be frequenting different spots in the Valley. The men of Kedron knew all she needed was a tit bitten against the TV wall, and they didn’t kiss her.

Van Vliet bakery had long closed, but Serene found herself walking past there and putting a palm against the dusty window, at the news her father had died. She hadn’t had a conversation with him since she was seventeen, her last few days of high school. She went in to get bread. He said she hadn’t come in for a while. She was suddenly angry at the silence in her life, at his hypocrisy. She’d seen him and his daughter, his younger daughter, his real daughter, at the supermarket, heard him whisper, shall we get the juice for Mum? And something for you, honey? In the first years of Serene’s life he had bought her things. A book, clothes, liquorice, hagelslag to put on her toast. But it had soon seemed impossible. When Serene rang her mother up and told her about her father, she made a small noise. The Koori husband told Serene she didn’t talk for days. She’d kept a relationship with Serene’s father for fifteen years. Serene felt her mother’s tears, but she wouldn’t cry.

She was sliding, barely coping in her new job at a ballet company in Boondall. It was a job that hadn’t seemed out of her depth, massaging and providing a general list of exercises for the young dancers with injuries, but without the most basic of her needs met, everything was hard. She was reclusive, and always tired. She had ongoing problems with her digestion. After writing off her car, hungover on her way to work, she thought she’d try to give it up. Live without sourcing mouths for her breasts. She went to the tattoo place between the bicycle shop and the comics store. Something symbolic was in order. She met with the senior tattoo artist, a lanky woman a little younger than her, with short styled hair, a lip piercing, and tatts from sleeve to fingers on both arms. She also had a tattoo of the outline of a shoe on her neck in blue ink. Serene talked to her about what she wanted done on her breasts, and another idea for her shoulder.

The tattoo artist, her name was Monique, rubbed her nose. ‘That’s pretty major.

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