Adele begins

The first thing you must do, if you’re doing it this way

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.

Varvara dreams

When Varvara dreamed,

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.

top chick

Adele was the kind of woman about whom people would say, ‘And she’ll talk to anyone, do anything for you’. ‘Top chick,’ both men and women would agree. (That was, of course, back in the days when such words had been used, but you are right to think that such days have long since passed).

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.

Introducing Rex

In the mornings Rex sat on the front verandah sipping at cups of tea. He liked it strong, black and sweet which, of all the combinations, is the most difficult to ruin. This, and a tolerance for crinkled clothes, was the secret to his happy mornings.

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.