There was the river of course, but the kids would be down there by now and she would have to sit pretending she didn’t see the cigarettes hidden behind their backs, she couldn’t hear the flirting and wasn’t bothered by their loud and awkward laughs.

The coffee shop would be okay, but Stella would have a whole day’s gossip she needed to download.

Which only left the pub. The pub was better than you might have thought at four o’clock. No one was in for after work drinks, the juke box hadn’t started, the pool table was empty. If she took the folder of tests and spread them out on the table around her, the rusted on blokes at the bar would ignore her.

She wouldn’t actually mark the tests of course, but she could look down at them every now and then and then stare thoughtfully into space.

‘Usual?’ Pete asked her, but she shook her head and ordered gin and tonic. ‘Double,’ she added as she watched him measure the shots.

There was someone sitting at the table she had planned to use. The one in the corner, but still with a view of the river. A man in a pin striped suit and a buttoned up shirt, but he wasn’t wearing a tie. His long hair was tied back in a pony tail and both of his ears were pierced.  A tower of glasses, each of them empty but marked with traces of beer froth, rested right at the edge of the table.

If I knocked the table, Adele thought, those glasses would fall. Such thoughts, once thought, are impossible to ignore.

‘Are you The Poet?’ she asked and she got the accents right. Interested, but not curious.

‘Yes,’ he said and when he looked up at her and into her eyes, his face softened and moved, but he did not smile.

‘I’m sorry to be so distracted,’ she said. ‘But The Poet’s in town again.’

Adele thinks, but does not have the courage to say, ‘Is that supposed to be refreshing honesty?’

‘He gets lost,’ the doctor said. ‘He gets lost and then he rings.’ She looked at the phone again. ‘I have to answer him. If I don’t answer straight away he does drastic things. You’d be surprised how quickly he moves.’ She looked at Adele and smiled. ‘For a poet.’

They had covered the basics. In between one faded screen and the next, Adele had got most of it out and the doctor seemed to have taken it in nodding where you’d expect her to nod and asking the questions you’d think she should ask. Age. Weight. Occupation. Any previous pregnancies.

‘I know it’s an unconventional approach.’ Adele apologised for herself although it was not something she had intended to do. She had practiced defensive and matter-of-fact, expecting to need them at some time, but not apologetic. ‘It’s not how I saw things happening. It’s not what I would have planned.’

The screen had faded again, but the doctor did not light it.

‘Unconventional?’ The doctor left a silence, but Adele did not think it was one she should fill. ‘Uncommon perhaps, but it’s hard to be unconventional. Harder than ever before.’

The doctor tapped her fingers one by one on the table, her fingernails leaving a rhythm behind. ’Tests,’ she said. ‘We’ll get some tests. Ultrasound and blood work and then we’ll think about referrals.’

The phone started to vibrate, the doctor grabbed it. ‘It’s not him,’ she said. She pressed a button, the phone stopped its humming vibrations. ’I won’t be so distracted next time you come,’ the doctor said. ‘The Poet is leaving tomorrow.’

She forced herself, as she moved from her bed to the bathroom and into the shower, to take the deep and centering breaths everyone talked about these days. Stay in the moment, she told herself. Not long now. She stared at herself in the mirror, but not for too long. The time for such things had gone.

She heard Brenton leaving the bed, he would be in the ensuite soon. She hung the towel.

‘Good morning,’ she said as she left the room. It meant nothing that he didn’t reply.

She flicked on lights, made toast, boiled the kettle, fed the bloody dog.

She yelled when they hadn’t had breakfast and she sighed when they still weren’t dressed. She said, of the dishwasher which had to be emptied, ‘I don’t care who did it yesterday, I want you to do it today.’

Varvara dressed herself in expectation of a day gone right. The black jeans with deep, safe pockets, the red boots with just enough heel, the silver ring from Tiffany’s. The story of why she left the earings behind is one for another day.

She would carry an umbrella, not so much for the rain, more for something to do with her hands. She would need things to do with her hands.

Half past seven, eight o’clock. Time was passing, but it would be hours until she would know.

Is construct a list of attributes, both givens and desired.

Not too short and not too tall, not too round and not too slim

Eyes of blue or eyes of green unimportant in the end.

Absolutely to the smarts, but of an understated kind

The subtle sense of humour of a quick and agile mind.

Dress should be of nowadays, but dashing and refined

A head of hair is preferable, but balding can apply.

Profession doesn’t matter, but dedication does

Youthful daring and bravado should be visible but past.

No melancholy welcome and no tales of should have beens.

.

The list can be adjusted, reweighted, redefined

It can be a rigid policy or a set of loose guidelines

Depending on the specimen the list is flexible

The only thing it cannot do is ever not exist.

it was

of being a lawyer, a doctor, a clown

a swimmer, a dentist, a coach

a mother of twins, the wife of a man who hadn’t been heard from for years

the child of a mother who sewed her own clothes

a gardener, a farmer, a fisherman

still in her thirties, alive in her sixties, dead at ninety five

hair of red or chocolate or charcoal and natural streaks of grey

dressed in silks woven with gold and patterned with gingko trees

shadowed by cats, adored by dogs, covered in talking birds

a vet to exotics, petted by Kings, a maid-in-waiting to Queens

fluent in French, widely read, but never dismissive of soaps

tall and long, finely tuned, a feted tennis double

heard to laugh more than she sighed, never heard to cry

When Varvara dreamed,

it was

of being

anything but Varvara.

There was not a woman in the town who had not, after two too many drinks topped with ice and mixed with Coke, told Adele the types of things Adele would rather not know. Adele hid the secrets she had heard behind crude jokes and under energetic laughs.

She had seven bridesmaids dresses in her wardrobe, and they were the only dresses she owned. The story of why there is no eighth is one for another day. Adele had twice been Best Woman, a job for which she had dressed in a suit, but without the cummerbund or the bow tie.

She wore her grandmothers’ wedding ring on her left hand and lived only with her dogs of which there were always two and sometimes three (if someone was camping in a national park or taking long service leave). She drew the line at four. All of the dogs, even the visiting ones, slept in her bedroom but not on her bed.

Adele used her silence and the flick of an almost-smile to fuel the assumptions that people wanted to make. It was a trick she had learned from her mother before she had even turned ten. Her mother had also used tears, but this was a trick Adele never used.

Adele intended never to marry, a fact which may or may not be related to the missing eighth dress, but on New Year’s Eve when everyone was singing Auld Lang Syne she reminded herself that she was thirty two and it was time to have a child. It was no resolution. She had decided.

In the summer months, Rex might be sitting there by seven thirty, or even, during heatwaves, seven, but in the winters he slept in. He had rarely boiled the kettle before nine.

In the mornings, there was quite a lot of foot traffic on his street. Considering. Rex spoke to the people who spoke to him and smiled at the people who didn’t.

When children who did not yet believe their mothers’ stranger danger talks walked past and smiled or said hello, he pretended to pick at his nails or look at the paper or scratch at Rex’s neck.

It was coincidence, him and his dog sharing a name, but the story of that coincidence is for another time.

In the afternoons, usually at four o’clock but sometimes as early as one (depending what was on the news and what Kat had left for lunch) he switched from tea to brandy. Where his tea was sipped from the fine china cups his mother had left his sister but he had taken, the brandy was drunk from a Vegemite glass its smell and the label removed after a soaking in Milton’s.

He liked his brandy on the rocks, which, of all the combinations was the most difficult to ruin, though he was more careful about the number of blocks of ice (five) in his brandy than he was about the spoons of sugar in his tea (anything upwards of one).

By five o’clock Rex was itching for conversation, but by then, people had stopped slowing down as they passed his house and if they noticed him at all, they just lifted their arm in a greeting or left the shadow of a smile at his gate.

It’s how Rex had always been. Never quite in step.

They didn’t talk a lot of course, this wasn’t the set of Neighbours, but curtains twitched and gardens got watered whenever she came home.

She left the car halfway down the driveway, and some afternoons she forgot to check the mail. She left the porch light on all night, and then through the day as well. The kids played in the front, the gate unlatched, and when people walked past their dogs on loeads, she said, ‘It’s rude to stare, but ruder still if you never say Hello.’ She let them pat these strangers’ dogs and she didn’t once say, ‘Now go and wash your hands.’

She still drew the curtains before it got dark, and when she went to bed she double-checked the doors.

On Saturday morning she said to the kids, ‘We’ve got to get rid of the heritage green’ so she painted the front door red, and the letterbox mango yellow. The roof would have to wait and so would the window frames, but she pulled out the Christmas lights, strung them around the verandah and laughed when they didn’t work. ‘Bloody lights,’ she said then said it again til one of the kids said, ‘Mum! You swore.’

She left a pile of things on the curb with a hand-written sign that said, PLEASE TAKE. FREE and she put new things on the pile every night that week. Of all the things – books, microwave, Christmas lights – the only thing that didn’t go was a bag of rusty coathangers. On Thursday after dinner, she ripped out the icerberg roses and added them to the pile. By midnight, they were gone.

He let his book fall, spine-up, against his chest.

‘Never?’ he asked. ‘You never eavesdrop?’

She shook her head, although on account of the pillow it was more of a rocking from side to side than it was a shaking.

How do you stop yourself? How do you make sure other people’s words don’t drift into your thoughts? Are you never curious, never attracted, never repulsed by the people you see as you wander through your day?

He wondered these things, but he was wary of learning too much more about her. If he took in too much more of her mind or the way she thought, then scratch of her nails as she combed through his hair might no longer be enough.

‘You wouldn’t either,’ she said. ‘Not if you’d met my daughter.’

He had got better at keeping his breaths regular in response to such pieces of news. He had learned not to say, You joined the army, you speak Greek, you sewed your own wedding dress.

But even so, a daughter?

‘It’s set for five,’ she said, then put her phone by the side of her bed. ‘I’ll be gone six. I’ll let you know about dinner, but I don’t think I’ll be back.’

He held his breaths steady, waiting for her to peel the book from his chest.

‘You haven’t said anything nice since 1992,’ he said, and that was another one of his tricks. To fake veracity with detail.

It had seemed, last night when she was planning to be resolved, that today was an excellent day to begin a resolution, what with it being the first of the month and everything, but tomorrow was Sunday which, in anyone’s language was just as good as the first as far as resolutions went.

And so, as early as half past ten on the first of May, she was free to think of the woman lying mound-up on the towel next door:

the space between her legs gives the lie to her unflattened, unspreadable breasts.

She must have tumbled out of Queensland, Lucy thought. Got lost on her way to Dubai, with nothing but a suitcase filled with bikinis and lipsticks in matching shades. Those fingernails, those tits, those lips, they had not been created here, not in this city of forty kilometre streets and sensible shoes.

If you’re wearing perfume, she wanted to say, it’s wasted on me. I woke up one morning in January and I couldn’t smell a thing. Not my perfume, not my coffee, not my toast. I burnt three pieces just to check.

‘Do you think I really lost it overnight?’ she’d asked Ethan when he came home for lunch. ‘I mean I couldn’t have lost it and not noticed it, could I?’

He had shrugged, then said, ‘Stranger things.’

‘You think I wouldn’t notice that I couldn’t smell?’

He had said, through a mouthful of cheese and ham, ‘Dr Johnson said, I stink, you smell, but Dr Johnson hadn’t met you.’ He hadn’t even stopped to swallow before he’d laughed.

Four months later and the memory of it made her scratch at her head and bite down hard on her lip

Next to her, the mannequin cleared her throat but didn’t speak.

Maybe there will be changes, Lucy thought. But it’s not gonna be my ungenerous thoughts. She used both of her hands to pull her fringe away from her eyes. Or my invisible tits.