Vertigo Milf

"That's Thomas' first day at Mooloolaba State School. He looked so proud in his new uniform. Hunter was really annoyed he couldn't go with his brother."

"David, look at these handsome young men. They're going to break some hearts when they're bigger."

Hana shyly offers me the phone and I smile at the pictures. Truthfully, I feel a little awkward. Most interviews don't get this real.

Laura returns around the same time and simply announces, "Well, fuck questions. We've only got ten minutes left. Show me these babies."

So, I smile and watch as my two colleagues and a beautiful Polynesian princess browse photographs and talk about how hard it's going to be for Hana away from her boys.

/`------------------------------------------------<><

"She said what?" Tanya asks as we sit around the fire pit.

"She just marched right up to me-"

"While you were fishing." Ebony continues.

"And said, 'I got the job. You know I'm not going to fuck you, right?'"

"Rude!" Says thirteen-year-old Kat from her perch on my lap. "You're old but you're totally doable Uncle Davo."

"Gross, how did we end up with such a cis daughter, Tan?"

"Fucks me. Maybe they shook her test tube up a little too much."

"Mums! There's nothing wrong with me. This is who I am. I just like boys. I don't judge you. Why do you have to judge me constantly!" Then a stormy little Kat stomps back inside, slamming the screen door behind her and muttering to herself about the 'matriarchy'.

"She got you a new esky though, right? That's something. Like, 'here, I'm not going to fuck you but have a new esky.' That's good right."

"Ebby love," I shake my head. "No more beers for you."

"Fuck off, I'm only getting started. I haven't had this much fun since the last time you visited."

"Davo, this weed..." Tanya nods appreciatively.

"Yeah, it's something. Go easy though, it packs a hit. So... It's my story, and it's fucking interesting..." I offer my upturned hands to the night in question. "Can you pair of carpet munching stoners listen for a bit please?"

That was all it took for Tanya to fall sideways off the log she was sitting on and curl laughing into the foetal position while still balancing her beer perfectly. Ebby started slapping her thigh and pointing at her wife while making noises a donkey would be proud of. Tanya managed to get herself upright on all fours and made a show of sniffing the dirt and saying, "Mmm, this carpet smells tasty. Nom nom nom."

I watched the stars for a while and smirked contentedly to myself.

The giggle fits of my favourite people were a perfect soundtrack to the myriad of twinkling lights that lit the night as brightly as the streetlights of home. The smells of woodsmoke and weed intermingle and remind me of thousands of nights like this spent in laughter and the intimacy of family. I feel drunk on the closeness. My skin crawls with memories of human contact and my nieces' cuddles, my sister's hugs, her wife's cheek kisses. Life is good.

"Was there any beer in it?" Tanya is suddenly right in my face, staring intently into my eyes with a prosecutorial intent.

"Huh?" I may also be a little tipsy. I don't usually smoke, especially not when I'm flying, but I have had a few beers.

"The esky."

"Yeah bro... The bitch better have put some beer in the esky if she wasn't going to fuck you."

"Uh..." These two take side tracks at a hundred mile an hour. "Segue much?"

"No! Beers! You can't fit those segway things in a fucking esky. Are you stoned, Davo? Were there any beers in the esky?"

"No Tan. No beers."

"Fucking bitch. I'd fuck you if you got me a job."

"You would not. You're gay."

"I would if you were female."

"Bitch, you're fucking married." Ebony yelled in Tanya's face.

"Rhetorically! I'd 'rhetorically' fuck him." Tanya rolled her eyes at her wife.

"I didn't want her to fuck me." I felt I needed to defend myself. "She didn't get the job because of me. She was just the perfect candidate. She was the most motivated and brought the x-factor that was needed. Just..."

God damn it, I was getting angry and confused and the anger was coming from how I felt back in the moment when Hana believed I had interfered with the process to get her the job so she would be indebted to me and I could manipulate her into the sack.

Suddenly, I'm smothered by two stoned cuddly dykes. "Davo. Shh..."

Ebony lifts my chin and pecks me quickly on the lips and drops her voice an octave to her empathetic best, "We're playing, little buddy. Clearly the poor woman comes from a past where bodies were a commodity. Every girl deals with it at some point. The transactional use of sex is something we have all had to navigate. For her, perhaps it clouded her judgement of you. Tanya and I both love you and know you would never behave like that."

Then I'm just cuddled from both sides until the anger has no choice but to squeeze itself out and ooze away on the dry brown dirt.

The moment is broken by Tanya's yawned question, "Please tell me there's a happy ending to this crazy story, Davey darling."              

"There was a note." I shrug as they both sit on their own log and snuggle like a cosy couple again.

"A note?"

"In the esky."

"No beer but?"

"No, just a note."

"What'd it say?" Ebby smiles.

So, I hand them the note and my big sister reads, "Dear David. I have no idea how you salvaged that munted mess of an interview for me, but I am very thankful. I am also very afraid because I'm going to miss my boys. I don't know you from a pair of jandals but please, while I'm gone can you teach the boys to fish. They miss their uncles and could use the influence of a good man. I think you might be a good man. My sister's phone is blah blah blah."

"What are jandals?" Tanya asks quietly breaking the awkward silence that followed. "Are they like crocs?"

Later I lay in bed listening to the sound of a million singing frogs and the pitter patter of steady gently rain on the tin roof missing my people and knowing I was going to have to visit them tomorrow.

/`--------------------------------------------<><

"I'm going down to the yards." I grumble into my third coffee. I'm procrastinating. I know it. The girls know it and they understand well enough to let me work my way up to it each time I visit.

"I'll drive you Uncle Davo. I know where some of Lulu's Roses are." Ebony and Tanya look up from the table at me, worried that Kat will upset me. For a thirteen-year-old, Kat has a lot of intuition and empathy. My eyes sting a little with the mention of the flowers but it's a perfect gesture. "Only if you don't mind company but. If you want to be alone, I'll go another time."

"I'd love some company kiddo."

"Cool, I'm driving." She grabs the keys to the little utility vehicle from the rack with youthful enthusiasm and makes for the door. "I'll swing around out the front after I've fuelled it up."

"Take it easy on that thing, Kat. You drive like Tanya." Ebony warns over her shoulder.

"If you mean she drives responsibly and safely, I'll take that." Tanya smirks.

"I mean literally, specifically, intentionally and all the other ally's, that she drives like a fuckwit."

"Mreow!" Tanya laughs and makes claws at her wife.

"Go on David," Ebony stands and hugs me. "Say gidday for us. I don't like visiting."

I nod. My voice is untrustworthy. Then I disentangle myself from my sister and wander out to the verandah to wait for Kat. Their faces visit my mind as I wait. I used to be able to remember their voices too but now I just see them like they're in photographs. The pain is gone from the pictures that visit my mind. I'm still sad but it's a bittersweet sadness that comes from letting go of the grief.

Kat picks her way along the driveway steadily. Her look of concentration brings a smile to my face.

"What?" she asks.

"Nothing. Where are these flowers at?"

"Sand ridge. Under the river-oaks. You know the garden? Under the- err..." She replies as she turns to drive along the wheel ruts at the fence line. These half visible tracks are as good as freeways for farm folk. "Sorry, Casuarina Cunningham something."

"She did like all the big names." I smile.

"Sorry." Kat nervously shrugs. "I miss them a lot. Thinking about the big names brings them back. That and the flowers."

"Same for me. Little things. It's good Kat. Don't be sorry."

We travel silently after that. The sand ridge follows a creek that winds around the eastern boundary. The yards are built at its lowest point. My great-grandfather had divined a well there, so it made perfect sense to put the yards where water was available for the cattle. I can see the windmill from where we are as Kat pulls in under the trees with their needle like leaves that whine soulfully in the gentle breeze.

"It's pretty. Lulu loved it when it was like this." I remember aloud.

"Yeah, we had an inch of rain a couple of weeks ago and you remember what it's like." Kat hunches down amongst the carpet of wildflowers that stretches away forever under the trees and picks some waxy yellow flowers. "Chrysocephalum something."

She shows me her handful of flowers. "Um... apiculatum. Chrsocephalum apiculatum. Yellow buttons."

"Lulu's roses are back here a way. Come."

They aren't really roses. Lulu had seen roses in a bunch I bought her mother once and fell in love with them. When she discovered paper daisies in a rare dark pink instead of the usual yellow on one of our drives out west, she collected as many as she could and threw them under the river oaks like her mother did whenever she found a new native wildflower.

"Aster... something." Kat points them out. Where Lulu threw the dried flowers years ago there is now a carpet of them that spots over half an acre or more.

"Helichrysum monstrosum." I correct her, "You're thinking of Asteraceae."

"I always get them confused." She smiles and hands me a big bunch of Lulu's roses. "They'll always just be Lulu's roses to me."

She's been crying as she picked them, so I hug her tightly while she settles. When she's disgusted with herself, she pushes me off and laughs, "I'm such a sook. Come on."

We stop at the yards and as always check the tank for leaks and make sure the windmill is still pumping. The trough looks a bit gross, so Kat drops a trough block in it to clear up the algae. When we've distracted ourselves with whatever tasks we can find long enough, we both turn and look up the hill to the bottle tree.

It's always been here. My grandfather said it was here when his grandfather bought the place. It would have to be almost twenty metres tall and a good two and a half metres across its trunk. Standing proudly on the hill it always struck me as a guardian when I was young. Like it was somehow watching out over the whole farm. You could even see it from the homestead three kilometres away.

It was always a family favourite for picnics and a great shady spot to sit for lunch and a billy tea after a big morning in the yards. Until we got the local telephone tower eight years ago, it was also the only place on the farm from which you could get mobile service. More importantly though, it sheltered the family plot.

Holding our bunches of wildflowers, Kat and I make the solemn climb up the small hill from the yards. A wrought iron fence keeps the cattle and ferals out of the small cemetery and the gate squeals in rusty protest as we let ourselves in. Silently we stop near the two newest looking graves and place our handful of flowers down alongside the other dried ones.

We each sit cross legged and navigate our own emotions for a long while until Kat huffs and starts cleaning away weeds and tufts of grass that offend her.

"I'll have to bring the brush cutter up through the week. This place is disgraceful."

"Ha. You sound a lot like your Mum sometimes."

"Shut up. I do not." Her face is red and her fists are balled. Her blue eyes blaze on mine then she falls to pieces. She's still small enough to pick up so when she launches into my arms, I hold her tightly and let her shake and thunder through her storm. "It's not fair."

"No honey, it's not."

"I know it's a long time ago now, but I miss them like it was yesterday. Fuck, I still turn around to show things to them. If there's a god, I hate him."

"Shh... There's no-one to hate honey. We keep them inside us. They..." I can't finish. My own tears start so I just hold her close and let it go.

/`-----------------------------------------<><

Trust fall.

I'm always a bit of a wreck after visiting the farm. This week my arms are sore and I have a couple of bruised ribs courtesy of a disgruntled calf. Cattle work leaves me almost as beat up as the emotions of visiting my wife and daughter. Sometimes I think it's unfair on Ebby, Tan and Kat that the girls are buried there. Maybe I'd visit more often if I didn't have to think about facing them. Maybe I'm not quite as healed as I should be.

"I've made an appointment for you with Alan." Laura tells me.

"Laura, I said I'm fine."

"Pff... Dickhead. I don't care. This is just a fact of life. You go home to the farm; I make you an appointment. If you don't need it, just sit on his couch and read a magazine. I don't care. Neither does Trish so don't bother asking her to cancel for you."

Turns out I did have stuff to talk to Alan about.

"I'm just not sure if it's ethical." I unloaded on him.

"You think too much. You have three choices. Yes. No. Not decided."

"But she was an interview candidate. Persons could draw conclusions or at the very least, suspicions. It's bothering me in any case as a bit 'off'."

"Jesus Dave, it's not like you're fucking her in exchange for something. You'd just be hanging out with some young boys who from my perspective could benefit from some male company. In fact, if I could write you a fucking prescription, I would include that you have contact with humans three times a week for an hour or so. You need people outside of work. You are not an island. Maybe giving a little of yourself to these boys would benefit you too."

"I just don't know."

"I think it would be healthy."

"You thought skydiving would be healthy."

"And look how that turned out."

"Are you kidding? I was totally shitting bricks."

"Yes, you did something frightening, and it worked out. Following on from that I saw you make huge corporate changes that were quite risky but have been-"

"Yeah yeah, I've heard this all before. For a psych, you're quite a bully."

"For a patient you're quite stubborn. I have to be."

"So, I am teaching these boys to fish?"

"Call it that if you want."

"What if I ring her sister and she thinks I'm some kind of creepy pedo?"

"Jumping out of planes is scary isn't it." With that he closes his diary, looks up at me and says, "I'll talk to Laura when you need to see me next. Goodbye David."

My Boags was looking at me funny. For a green bottle containing beer it had a very judgemental cut to its jib. I'd been staring at it for quite a while. I was daring myself. If I pick up the phone and ring, I win. If I pick up the beer and sip, I'm a gutless loser.

Fuck it. When I sipped the beer, it was hot anyway, so I tipped it down the sink, grabbed another from the fridge and took my phone out by the pool.

She answered on the fifth or six ring.

"Shut up you mob, I'm on the bloody phone, ow? Hello? Who's this?"

"My name is er... David. Um... Hana said I should ring and-"

"Well look at that." I can hear her laughing. "White boy grew some balls. She said I might get a call from an awkward bloke called David. She said to make sure I hid my chilly bins too."

"Yes... Well... Ah. This is weird, I don't really know you or Hana for that matter, but... I don't know. Reaching out."

"Good for you, sugar. Good for you. Now listen. We don't know you from a pair of jandals so we gonna have to meet first you hear? What are you up to this arvo?"

"Um, finished work... I was just cleaning the pool and thinking about the lawn."

"Right then, ow. We all having a bit of a cook up. Got some snags on the barbie. Why don't you grab a few beers and come over meet the boys."

"Sounds good. Do you want me to bring anything?"

"Just your skinny white arse and some beer."

"See you soon Rita."

"My friends call me Amara. It's my middle name and Hana is pronounced Har-na. Like Cara."

"Okay, sorry. Um-"

"I know she introduces herself as Hana cause it's easy for whities. Come on round cuz. This will be fun."

"Um. Your address."

"Oh sugar, we across the road, ow. Number twenty."

"Really? Shit."

"Uhuh. See you in tick cuzzy."

I put my phone back on the bench and went through one of those first-date-jitters shit shows. I thought about what to wear, how to make a good impression and a million other really unhelpful things until I heard Dad's voice, "Son, no one remembers how you dress, what you say or what you do. All they remember is how you make them feel about themselves. Be yourself mate. If they don't like you, fuck 'em."

So, I put nine Boags in the new 'chilli bin' and laughed while I did it at the stupid name for an esky. It was bigger than my old blue one and must have cost a lot more. I sure as shit couldn't break it by falling on it as it was made from some kind of hard insulated plastic. Then I sprayed a little Brut deodorant on and looked at myself quickly in the mirror.

It was a trap. I saw myself and doubted. I saw five ten of stocky dad-bod with stubble and shaggy hair. I saw grey flashes at my temples and every year of thirty-five reflected in the little wrinkles at my eyes and damn...

"Fuck it." I said aloud to the empty house and went looking for number twenty.

I knew the address before I even got there. You know how every Dean Koontz story has a dog in it... Well, here's the damn dog.

A dachshund: more specifically a violent ball of hate-fuelled teeth, accosted me as I approached. I knew this particular land-shark from walking past. Early on, I learned to cross the street to my own side that sported the odd numbers when going past number twenty.

If pure hateful intention could kill a person, I would never have made the door. As it was, my left sock was hanging in tatters above my jogger when the door opened on the first knock.

"Get off him you little shit." A man who looked like Jason Mamoa's older, much larger brother grumbled and scruffed the mutt, chucking it back outside onto the lawn. "Quick Dave, get inside before dogzilla gets you cuz."

"Thanks mate."

He stands with his hands on his hips assessing me. Then he shrugs. "Eh, girls know what they're doing, I don't. Come in. Ah... Actually, lets skip the kitchen and get out back to the barbie. It's a madhouse in there. I'm Nikau. Call me Nikko."

His hand is huge and his grip surprisingly gentle for a man who looks like he could crush a brick. Not a limp creepy handshake but the handshake of a man who knows his strength. He leads me through the lounge of the little duplex past the folded-out sofa bed and mess of pillows, past a kitchen where children clamour and a smiling woman who could only be Hana's sister holds plates of nibbles out of reach.

"You all hold your horses. We got a guest this arvo. Stop acting like some wild mob of pigs. Thomas, you take this salad, Jo-jo get these sausages out to Dad and Hunter you carry the sauce and bread rolls. I'll bring the snacks in a minute. Go on now. Shoo."

She shoots me a sly smile that reminds me of the mischief in Hana's eyes and waves Nikko and I away as well.

"Go on now all ya. I'll be out in a tick."

Nikko takes my esky from me and sits it on the table. "Plenty of beer in the fridge. Don't know why she said to bring that. Hang on."

A moment later he hands me VB in a stubby cooler and I make a mental note to watch my pace with the heavy beer. I'm feeling like a spectator as the family go about the business of a barbecue. Mostly, I'm left to my own devices, having only to answer a few operational questions, like 'can you pass that' while I try hard just to fit in to the mayhem. It's a lot like visiting Ebby and Tan.