But now I am stretching my metaphor, just as I have stretched the patience and forbearance and better judgement of all around me.

I keep these thoughts to myself these days, though. I don’t tell Jo anything, I don’t worry Jo with things I want to say. I don’t think of things to tell him, I don’t remember things to tell him. I let him subside from my difficult annoying thoughts and feelings.

I tell them to the pot plants while I watch them die, and the leaking tap with the tea-towel round its throat. Drip drip drip.

Sometimes I just want to slice a big hole in my guts and let the whole lot fall out onto the floor. Relief!

† † †

PART 4 MONASTERY MAIDEN

1986

Mother’s book made money for Bacchae Publishing. When it came out, in 1986, it was reviewed in national and international journals and newspapers. It was eventually included on a university curriculum. It went into a third reprint. It was translated into Spanish and French and German. Because the poems were accessible, people bought The Poems of Veda Gray who would not otherwise have picked up a collection of poems. Later on, there was a ‘What happened to Veda Gray?’ story in the Age, in which I was interviewed. Mother was, briefly, very pleasantly, Julia’s cash cow.

Yet it wasn’t only about money. Julia really felt something about Mother’s poetry. She went back to the poems again and again. She still does. Her personal copy is dog-eared, bristling with bookmarks (cigarette papers in those days before sticky notes). I have often thought that choosing me was, in fact, a means for Julia to get close to Mother. But we have been together so long now, questions like that no longer apply. We are old battleaxes. We have no reason to stay together except for liking each other: we aren’t married, we have no children. Julia is smart and kind, sweet and tough: a modern-day hard-working hedonist. When she turned sixty, she spent two thousand dollars on dinner and wine for her ten best friends. She loves food. She loves poetry. Perhaps I, in fact, chose her to get closer to Mother.

Still, she is not quite forgiving of Mother, not quite. Veda is a different story, but Mother and Veda remain separate in her mind. She cannot congeal the two women into one.

STEEL CHERRY-PITTER

‘You’re going to be a rich boy one day,’ said Papa. I was sitting on the fence at Hawthorn and he was doing up my shoelaces. I guess it made him feel like I was a lord and he was my servant, the way he had to kneel down and bend his head, while my foot stuck up to regally accept his services. ‘You’re going to be Richie Rich, poor little rich kid. Got that, O-yo?’