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Back The Scent of Eucalyptus Save as PDF
Chapters (36)
  1. Cover
  2. Author biography
  3. Other books by Barbara Hanrahan
  4. Title page
  5. Dedication and Epigraph
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Imprint page

I will join the ranks of the magpie girls at the Tech School where I will learn to cook and clean and dress-make and type and book-keep and do shorthand. I will learn things like English and history and drawing incidentally. When I am fifteen I will leave school and perhaps be a commercial artist like my mother, but probably a typist. When I am seventeen I will go dancing at the Pally and I will wear a ballerina and a hooped petti and scent behind each ear. The scent will be called Junior Rose. And I will meet nice boys in white shirts and charcoal suits and shot-silk ties who smell of brilliantine and after-shave and touch me up in parked cars but always take me home. These boys will be called John or Peter or Robert (no Alistair). When I am twenty-one I will announce my engagement to one of the nice boys at a little party in the sitting-room and there will be refreshments and a silver key. I will get married in a bride’s dress with a scalloped veil and go on a honeymoon to Victor — or even interstate. And then I will settle down and live in a nice house of brick with a wrought-iron gate, bought with a considerable mortgage. Soon I will be lucky because I will have lots of very nice kiddies, and will have pictures of them on a rug. Soon the very nice kiddies will be almost my age — which is twelve. I will be a housewife and shop and cook and clean and water the nice new flowers that are not really flowers but annuals or perennials with rain-water channelled neatly (no drips) through a pretty rubber hose. My husband — John or Peter or Robert — will mow the lawn. And we (I am not I any more — I am we) will have anniversaries and little parties on my birthday. And I will get pretty presents that make it all worth-while — marcasite brooches and lingerie-sets, a camera, a watch. The trees and the flowers will grow and we will not like change. The trees and the flowers will grow and we will plan for old-age. The trees and the flowers will grow and we will die. But not to worry — there will be others, always others, to take our place and live out other lives. Lives that are just as nice and proper — and mean as little, as ours.

That was the plan. That was how it invariably was.

Only this time it was different. There was a canker in the dream that was not a dream; a canker at the core — which was me.