A Happy Story I turn forty-one. I buy the car. I drive it to the river-bank and park it under a tree. The sun is high and the grass on the river-bank is brown. It is the middle of the morning. I turn my back on the river and walk along the side of the Entertainment Centre until I find a door. I am the only person at the counter. The air inside is cool.
The attendant has his feet up on a desk in the back room. He sees me, and comes out to serve me. ''Two tickets to Talking Heads,'' I say. He spins the seating plan round to face me. I look at it. I can''t understand where the band will stand to play. I can''t believe that the Entertainment Centre is not still full of water, is not still the Olympic Pool where, in 1956, Hungary played water polo against the USSR and people said there was blood in the water. What have they done with all the water? Pumped it out into the river that flows past two hundred yards away: let it run down to the sea.
I buy the tickets. They cost nearly twenty dollars each. I drive home the long way, in my car which is almost new. I give the tickets to my kid. She crouches by the phone in her pointed shoes. Her friends are already going, are going to Simple Minds, are not allowed, have not got twenty dollars. It will have to be me. ''I can''t wait,'' says my kid every morning in her school uniform.
The duty of going: I feel its weight. ''What will you wear?'' she says. I''m too old. I won''t have the right clothes. It will start too late. The warm-up bands will be terrible. It''ll hurt my ears. I''ll get bored and spoil it for her.
I''ll get bored. I''ll get bored. I''ll get bored. I sell my ticket to my sister. My daughter tries to be seemly about her exhilaration. My sister is a saxophone player. Her hair is fluffy, her arms are brown, she will bring honour upon my daughter in a public place. She owns a tube of waxed cotton ear-plugs.
She arrives, perfumed, slow-moving, with gracious smiles. We stop for petrol. My daughter gets out too, as thin as a clothes peg in narrow black garments, and I show her how to use the dip-stick. My sister sits in the car laughing. ''You look so like each other,'' she says, ''specially when you''re doing something together and aren''t aware of being watched.'' On Punt Road the car in front of us dawdles. ''Come on, fuckhead,'' says my sister. I accelerate with a smooth surge and change lanes.
''Helen!'' says my sister beside me. ''I didn''t know you were such a reckless driver!'' ''She''s not,'' says my daughter from the back seat. ''She''s only faking.'' My regret at having sold the ticket does not begin until I turn right off Punt Road into Swan Street and see the people walking along in groups towards the Entertainment Centre. They are happy. They are going to shout, to push past the bouncers and run down the front to dance. They are dressed up wonderfully, they almost skip as they walk. Shafts of light fire out from the old Olympic Pool into the darkening air.
Men in white coats are waving the cars into the parking area. ''We''ll get out here,'' says my sister. They kiss me goodbye, grinning, and scamper across the road. I do a U-turn and drive back to Punt Road. I shove in the first cassette my hand falls on. It is Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: she is singing a joyful song by Strauss. I do not understand the words but the chorus goes ''Habe Dank!'' The light is weird, there is a storminess, it is not yet dark enough for headlights. I try to sing like a soprano.
My voice cracks, she sings too high for me, but as I fly up the little rise beside the Richmond football ground I say out loud, ''This is it. I am finally on the far side of the line.'' Habe Dank! Postcards from surfers ''One night I dreamed that I did not love, and that night, released from all bonds, I lay as though in a kind of soothing death.'' Colette We are driving north from Coolangatta airport. Beside the road the ocean heaves and heaves into waves which do not break. The swells are dotted with boardriders in black wet-suits, grim as sharks. ''Look at those idiots,'' says my father. ''They must be freezing,'' says my mother.
''But what about the principle of the wet-suit?'' I say. ''Isn''t there a thin layer of water between your skin and the suit, and your body heat.'' ''Could be,'' says my father. The road takes a sudden swing round a rocky outcrop. Miles ahead of us, blurred in the milky air, I see a dream city: its cream, its silver, its turquoise towers thrust in a cluster from a distant spit. ''What--is that Brisbane?'' ''No,'' says my mother. ''That''s Surfers.'' My father''s car has a built-in computer.
If he exceeds the speed limit, the dashboard emits a discreet but insistent pinging. Lights flash, and the pressure of his right foot lessens. He controls the windows from a panel between the two front seats. We cruise past a Valiant parked by the highway with a for sale sign propped in its back window. ''Look at that,'' says my mother. ''A WA number-plate. Probably thrashed it across the Nullarbor and now they reckon they''ll flog it.'' ''Pro''ly stolen,'' says my father.
''See the sticker? all you virgins, thanks for nothing. You can just see what sort of a pin''ead he''d be. Brain the size of a pea.'' Close up, many of the turquoise towers are not yet sold. ''Every conceivable feature,'' the signs say. They have names like Capricornia, Biarritz, The Breakers, Acapulco, Rio. I had a Brazilian friend when I lived in Paris. He showed me a postcard, once, of Rio where he was born and brought up.
The card bore an aerial shot of a splendid, curved tropical beach, fringed with palms, its sand pure as snow. ''Why don''t you live in Brazil,'' I said, ''if it''s as beautiful as this?'' ''Because,'' said my friend, ''right behind that beach there is a huge military base.'' In my turn I showed him a postcard of my country. It was a reproduction of that Streeton painting called The Land of the Golden Fleece which in my homesickness I kept standing on the heater in my bedroom. He studied it carefully. At last he turned his currant-coloured eyes to me and said, ''Les arbres sont rouges?'' Are the trees red? Several years later, six months ago, I was rummaging through a box of old postcards in a junk shop in Rathdowne Street. Among the photos of damp cottages in Galway, of Raj hotels crumbling in bicycle-thronged Colombo, of glassy Canadian lakes flawed by the wake of a single canoe, I found two cards that I bought for a dollar each. One was a picture of downtown Rio, in black and white.
The other, crudely tinted, showed Geelong, the town where I was born. The photographer must have stood on the high grassy bank that overlooks the Eastern Beach. He lined up his shot through the never-flowing fountain with its quartet of concrete wading birds (storks? cranes? I never asked my father: they have long orange beaks and each bird holds one leg bent, as if about to take a step); through the fountain and out over the curving wooden promenade, from which we dived all summer, unsupervised, into the flat water; and across the bay to the You Yangs, the double-humped, low, volcanic cones, the only disturbance in the great basalt plains that lie between Geelong and Melbourne. These two cards in the same box! And I find them! Imagine! ''Cher Rubens,'' I wrote. ''Je t''envoie ces deux cartes postales, de nos deux villes natales.'' Auntie Lorna has gone for a walk on the beach. My mother unlocks the door and slides open the flywire screen. She goes out into the bright air to tell her friend of my arrival.
The ocean is right in front of the unit, only a hundred and fifty yards away. How can people be so sure of the boundary between land and sea that they have the confidence to build houses on it? The white doorsteps of the ocean travel and travel. ''Twelve o''clock,'' says my father. ''Getting on for lunchtime,'' I say. ''Getting towards it. Specially with that nice cold corned beef sitting there, and fresh brown bread. Think I''ll have to try some of that choko relish. Ever eaten a choko?'' ''I wouldn''t know a choko if I fell over it.
'' ''Nor would I.'' He selects a serrated knife from the magnetised holder on the kitchen wall and quickly and skilfully, at the bench, makes himself a thick sandwich. He works with powerful concentration: when the meat flaps off the slice of bread, he rounds it up with a large, dramatic scooping movement and a sympathetic grimace of the lower lip. He picks up the sandwich in two hands, raises it to his mouth and takes a large bite. While he chews he breathes heavily through his nose. ''Want to make yourself something?'' he says with his mouth full. I stand up. He pushes the loaf of bread towards me with the back of his hand.
He puts the other half of his sandwich on a green bread and butter plate and carries it to the table. He sits with his elbows on the pine wood, his knees wide apart, his belly relaxing on to his thighs, his high-arched, long-boned feet planted on the tiled floor. He eats, and gazes out to sea. The noise of his eating fills the room. My mother and Auntie Lorna come up from the beach. I stand inside the wall of glass and watch them stop at the tap to hose the sand off their feet before they cross the grass to the door. They are two old women: they have to keep one hand on the tap in order to balance on the left foot and wash the.