Michael: My wife and I met at a staff Christmas party and I gotta say, Drew, if a bit of drunken nooky in a park was illegal, I would have been in jail that night.

DN: You’re spot on, Michael. When they start talking about making drunken seduction illegal, they’d be killing romance for most Australians.

DN: Next up, Margaret from Epping. Go ahead, Margaret.

Margaret: We can’t use drunkenness as an excuse for anything else. I couldn’t steal your wallet and then argue that I was drunk and I thought you wanted me to take it, could I? So why should drunkenness be used as a legal excuse in sexual assault?

DN: Whoops, that was Margaret from the Epping fun police. And watch out for your wallet when Margaret’s around, especially if she’s had a few chardonnays.

CHAPTER 8: YOU CAN NEVER HIDE THE SWELLING

CHAPTER 8

YOU CAN NEVER HIDE THE SWELLING

Norma O’Mealley had been a member of the Deception Bay Country Women’s Association for more than forty-five years, president for the last three. Joined as a young newlywed. She’d worked part-time for many years as a locum pharmacist at a time when most of her contemporaries did not work outside the home. Still, Norma looked back on her working life as her saving grace. She always felt more than just somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother. From this vantage point she had observed the women in her community. Weekly meetings in the community hall acted like a barometer of the town she lived in. Blushing brides learned new recipes, smiles faded as bellies swelled, one in a pram, two at the knee, careworn faces, patched dresses. Laughter. Strength. And stories.

While Norma was lucky with her husband, Mick, some of the women who formed the tight-knit group were not so fortunate. Make-up might hide bruises, but it couldn’t hide swelling. In what she supposed was a conspiracy of silence, no one ever said anything about this; no woman ever approached another woman and said: Did your husband hit you? Norma O’Mealley had come to realise that silence was a woman’s worst enemy. And the older she got, the less she understood this silence. Why don’t we just say something? she often wondered.

And now, here she was at the CWA meeting of the executive members held every second Thursday, watching Joyce Tippet, made up to the nines. The swelling invisible front on, but from the head of the committee table, Norma could see the side of Joyce’s face, the distortion in her profile.

‘We just need to decide on the best scone recipe to include in the fundraiser cookbook, then organise the photography,’ said Joyce, touching her fingertips to her jaw self-consciously.

‘Might need to have a taste-testing,’ said Norma. The issue of scones and who had the best recipe was as fraught as any meeting of the United Nations.