Us and Them

Just inside South Australia we stood with the black line stretching to the heaving sea, and to the west where the sun goes down in a sinking, sunken mass of burning gold.

‘It is time for a wash, it is time for a stranger, for one of them’, he gestured at those soft souls spinning past on the tar burnt black and stiff, ‘for one of them to pick us up and take us in for a stay, for a wash and a feed’.

And I saw his long shape there by the long road, his hard straight body, on the hard straight road, his skin toughened by the sun like the track that takes us all on, and I spun around and saw the mountains and the hills, dotted by trees, soft and blurry, their shapes indistinct, and I saw the women there, out there, in the easy shapes of nature, in nature’s leaves, and twisted trunks, in the billowing gentle hills, in the peaked waves that pound the sand. And I saw her out there in all her glory, and all of man here, in him, and in the road man has built, and in the buildings they erect, reaching tall, and taller into the sky. And I realised that for them it must be created, and that women are already there, have always been there, and that we don’t need to force anything into the hard shapes of man.

And then there was Odette. O-dette. A soft round O, like the soft flesh of a woman where you sink in and travel further, further, the flesh that you emerge from and from where man spends his life trying to return. Odette stopped, and I was in the front seat, woman to woman, and he was in the back, his lean, long straight legs bent to fit in the cramped backseat, and he lay, lengthways, so he could sleep as he wished, while Odette and I exchanged words in the front, far, far from his sleeping eyes, half closed in his world of rest, while the women talked.

She sat, a blowsy blond, her blond hair tousled, and awry, her white nurse’s uniform creased yet clean and before long she asked, ‘'Do you want to rest a night? I know how it is, I travelled with my man from station to station.’

We set up our small green tent in her grassy yard and hung our clean washing on the Hill's Hoist. She sat with us at her plastic table, her husband laid up in bed, broken limbs from a drunken fall, and we were with her children as we ate a lamb roast with potatoes, and apricot pie and custard for dessert. We slept in our small safe home in her small divided yard, in the small divided streets and I had a second shower in the morning, but we didn’t leave then, we had to wait.  During the night a sea mist came in and covered the world with a thick salty dew and we couldn’t dry our washing.