For a while now this blog has been seeing very little in the way of action, and I thought that one way to amp it up a bit might be to shuffle through the dusty files and dig out some stories and poems and things. These will be pieces that were published once, ages ago and have never seen the light of day since, or that have won a competition somewhere or other but never actually been published.

I hope you like them.

This first one was my first big success with a winning story. It was published back in 2000 by Write Spot, the publishers who ran the competition, in a collection called Briefs. When I wrote it, it was just for the fun, but members of a writing group I was part of at the time suggested I might like to submit it to a competition.

A Level of Cool

Chook had been staring into the middle distance for so long that the others thought he’d forgotten the question. Their conversation had veered onto a whole new topic when he finally said: ‘Maggot’s dad.’

Maggot had just taken a mouthful of Coke and it came out of his nose when Chook said that. By the time he’d got over the initial shock there were Jax and Horrie solemnly agreeing with Chook.

‘Yep,’ Jaxie was nodding sagely. ‘He’d have to be right. Your dad really is the coolest bloke in town.’

Horrie patted Maggot consolingly on the shoulder. ‘Too bad coolness isn’t an inherited trait, Mag.’

‘No but I reckon stupidity must be contagious. My dad?!?’

‘Well, he looks cool,’ said Chook.

Maggot’s dad was a lean, lanky man who looked as if he’d been made out of sinew and leather. The thing he resembled most in the world was a knotted stockwhip. With boots on. He had a thatch of sandy hair burnt gold by the sun and piercing blue eyes that could see into tomorrow. There always seemed to be a half-smoked rolley in the vicinity of the grin that lurked about the lower parts of Maggot’s dad’s face.

‘His car’s cool,’ said Jax.

They all loved it when they got the chance to travel in Maggot’s dad’s ute. There was a bench seat in the front so two of them could sit beside him while the other two could squeeze in the space behind, sitting on the car fridge and whatever else was back there.

‘His dog’s really cool too,’ said Horrie.

While his dad’s bluey barely acknowledged Maggot’s existence, it would would do anything in the world for Maggot’s dad. He’d trained it to open the fridge and fetch him a coldie. While Maggot’s dad took care of the tinny, the dog would sit at his feet, gazing adoringly up at him.

‘Cheez, he’s my dad. How can he be cool?’

‘He opens beer with his teeth,’ said Chook dreamily.

‘He only did that once and Mum made him go to the dentist cause he busted his front tooth.’

‘Cool,’ said Jax. ‘Busted a tooth! What about the time he cracked that snake?’

Maggot shrugged. ‘Yeah. Well…’ there was no arguing against the coolness of a man who could break a snake’s back by grabbing its tail and cracking it like a stockwhip.

‘And what about the time he rode Bloodeye?!’ said Horrie.

That was when the rodeo had been in town. Maggot, in an act of recklessness had volunteered to ride Hellraiser, one of the buck-jumping horses. It had given everyone a good laugh, seeing him fly through the air after a few seconds of Hellraiser’s leaping about. After he’d recovered, Maggot made wild promises about being able to ride the placid looking Brahmin bull in the paddock, but it was his dad who had managed to stay on Bloodeye the Brahmin Bastard for five full minutes and take away the rodeo’s grand prize and trophy for his efforts.

‘Face it Maggot, your dad’s just cool,’ said Jax.

‘He farts in bed!’

‘Nice one,’ grinned Chook appreciatively.

‘He falls asleep in front of the TV and snores.’

‘Fair criticism,’ nodded Horrie.

‘He’s scared of spiders!!!’ yelled Maggot.

There was a small, awed silence which was only broken when Jaxie said: ‘Bullshit.’

‘He is. He practically pees his pants when he sees a big one. He runs out of the house like his arse is on fire and Mum has to swat it with the broom.’

‘What, his arse?’ said Chook.

‘The spider, dopey.’

‘Don’t believe you,’ said Chook.

‘Well, all we have to do is ask him,’ said Horrie.

‘Oh, sure. He’ll say yes Nelson dearie. Big spidies give me the willies. Please don’t bring them near me. If you have a problem with one, ask my wifie to deal with it.’

Jaxie shrugged. ‘Then I guess he’s just cool until proven otherwise.’

It was about a week later that Maggot’s dad decided to take them to help out with the ferreting at McKenzie’s place.

‘You can sit in the front,’ Maggot offered graciously, allowing Horrie and Jax the bench seat. Blue had parked himself in the tray, minding the ferrets, and Maggot and Chook squeezed in behind the seat, perching themselves on the car fridge and bunny nets.

It wasn’t until they got started that Maggot slipped the jar out from under his shirt and showed it to Chook. Chook was impressed. The spider was so big, its legs seemed to fill up all the space and overlap each other like a tangle of string. Maggot made a face behind his dad’s back and unscrewed the lid.

It was as if the spider was a rubber toy that had been compressed while it was in the jar. As soon as the lid came off it unwound itself all at once and made a sudden, spastic rush. It raced over Maggot’s hand and was up his arm and onto the inside pillar of the car before he had a chance to make a sound. Maggot’s eyes bulged and he choked as if he either needed to laugh or scream. Chook stifled a nervous giggle as he watched the spider’s long legs carry it to a spot directly over Maggot’s dad’s head. There it paused as if considering its options.

The car slowed to a stop. The spider nibbled one of its legs in a thoughtful sort of way.

‘Get the gate, Jax,’ Maggot’s dad ordered.

Jaxie jumped out of the car to take care of opening and closing McKenzie’s gate. While he waited, Maggot’s dad lit the cigarette he’d been keeping behind his ear.

It must have been a non-smoking spider, because when the blue cloud drifted from Maggot’s dad’s nose to the roof of the car, the spider took offense. Before Jax got back into his seat the spider had moved to the apparently secure spot between the sun visor and the roof.

Maggot and Chook watched in silence, their eyes riveted to the dark space where the spider lurked. They could just make out the paler grey of its body and three black toes that clung to the edge of the visor. It seemed as if it was determined to stay safely tucked away. And then they hit the first potholes in McKenzie’s paddock.

Jax and Horrie, oblivious of the drama unfolding, laughed as they bounced around in the front seat. Maggot and Chook hung on as best they could in the tangle of bunny nets. They jarred through the paddock and Maggot’s dad, grinning away, bounced up and down, his head thumping on the roof of the car. It was all too much for the spider. It secured a bungee cord to the visor and launched itself from its safe spot. It hung suspended in front of Maggot’s dad’s face for a moment with its legs splayed out so that it looked sort of like a surprised asterisk. And then it fell.

Maggot’s dad emitted a noise like a struck bull. He didn’t stop the car, didn’t even slow down. He just opened his door and got out, his long arms and legs bowling him across the paddock in a series of clumsy cartwheels. They were doing forty.

It was just as well Horrie wasn’t the type to panic. He reached one foot across and slammed it on the brake hard enough for the car to shudder to a stall. Tom McKenzie drove the boys home in the ute and Bill took Maggot’s dad to the hospital. They never did see what happened to the spider.

‘Told ya he was scared,’ said Maggot.

‘Yeah, but the way he just got out of the car,’ said Chook.

Horrie nodded. ‘Totally cool, Mag. Your dad has raised being scared of spiders to a level of cool.’

THE END

Yes. These spiders are real. In the big picture at the start of the story, the spider is not life size. Oh no. Huntsmans are much bigger than that. Put your hand over the picture and imagine those legs spread out beyond the length of your fingers and you pretty much have it, because that’s how big they are.

Huntsmans are common spiders that have flat bodies, adapted to slipping beneath the loose bark of eucalypts. They are extremely dumb spiders because they don’t know the difference between “trees” and “houses”. They are also highly controversial spiders, and all you have to do is say the word “huntsman” within earshot of any collection of Victorians and you will get a whole heap of stories about them appearing in the scariest of circumstances. Half of the people telling you these stories will complete the tale with “and then I scooped it up on the end of the broom and put it outside because they’re harmless, you know.” The other half of the stories will not end so well for the spider.

I’m in the “other half” camp. I hate these bastards. They’re sneaky and scary. I do NOT believe the “they’re more scared of you than you are of them” theory of huntsmans. If they are scared of me why have they come into my house/car/motorbike??? Yes. I have scare motorbike huntsman stories and trust me, you do NOT want one of these running up your arm when you’re in traffic. Or hiding under your tank while you’re “seeing what the bike can <cough>”do”<cough> on the freeway. My theory is to feed them to the chooks or pet rats, or empty a can of fly spray onto them until they’re so iced up and toxic they will never move again.

The “they’re harmless” camp suffer under the delusion that huntsmans are not venemous. This is a furphy. ALL spiders are venemous, their venom is harmful to humans in varying degrees from “not at all” to “make out your will”. Since huntsmans are so common in houses hereabouts, they are also the spider most likely to bite people. Strangely, the “they’re harmless” people are also the ones most likely to come down hard against the White Tailed spider, which is no more or less likely to bite than a huntsman, and whose bit is no more or less painful and nasty. I, personally, don’t mind the White Tail. They’re smaller and nowhere near as creepy.

And yes, my dad is scared of them, and quite right too. As he explained to me when I was very young: You can go to the hospital and get some antivenin if you’re bitten by something, but there’s no cure for being scared to death.

Yes, I am still here. Things have been happening. Wild excitement. Fabulous developments.

Okay, not really. Just the usual. Just life going on. Just the moon getting all fat and then getting all thin and then disappearing altogether and then coming back again once or twice and meanwhile I’ve achieved very little in the way of writing or blogging.

On the plus side I went on a holiday with Beloved, the kids are well and more stuff has gone on around the house. Although we went away for the first week of our break, the second week was pretty much devoted to Doing Stuff At Home. A lot of this did consist of sleeping in, yelling at cats and taking trips to Bunnings that started at around lunchtime and didn’t finish until after dark, but that’s another blog. This one is to be about what we have achieved over the past week, and a little about what we haven’t.

Okay, so I’ll start with the bad news. I really did think I was going to get painting done. Lots and lots of lovely paint slapped all over the walls and making them look fabby. I’ll get it over with: not one drop of paint was spilled, looked at, applied or in any way sloshed about in this house last week. The lids remained firmly on the cans as plaster refused to dry, or, worse still, fabulously and even brilliantly-applied plaster had to be scraped off the wall in order to get at errant electricity, and then re-applied, and then scraped off again as devoted but not very experienced plasterer had forgotten to put the tape stuff on first.

About half a tub of plaster bog was applied to the walls of what was once Radio Boy’s bedroom and will someday be the library, as RB’s method of hanging an A4 poster was to grab a 4″ nail and bash it into the wall. Yep, nice, solid bit of poster-hanging there. Maybe put another nail in, just to make sure. I’m not even going to mention the 2cm holes drilled into random spots up near the ceiling so that he could hang up speakers. Nope. Not saying a word about that.

But we did make stuff happen (and by “we” I mean Beloved).

This is just to catch you up to the state of the pantry. No lining, lighting only by way of a couple of lights stuck in the wall cavity, light switch and power point likewise just sort of hanging there. What you can’t see in this picture (but believe me, it was there) was the two black plastic garbage bags which have been taped to the back of the louvre door on account of it’s pretty draughty having a room with no lining. Draughty and dusty. And messy. Look at all those untidy wires. Kind of weird, isn’t it, all those wires all over the place in a simple thing like a house.

The laundry, though I haven’t included any pictures in this blog, was in a similar condition from the middle up. It had no ceiling, just the floor joists for the loft and the loft’s floor above them. Its light was stuck on the wall where it had been for months, and it meant that when you stood at the laundry trough you were completely in your own light. The pantry has looked pretty much like this for about a year now, but last week was our week to make a difference, and Beloved rolled up his sleeves and took it on.

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Now there are some people who say that they love a man (or woman) in uniform, but for me, it’s the guy who knows his way around a shed full of tools. Is this one of those situations where they say that all girls fall in love with some aspect of their dads? I don’t know (my dad was a carpenter). But I do love it when Beloved dons the proverbial tool belt and gets out his tape measure. You have no idea how much I love it when he gets out that tape measure, mainly because it’s a minor miracle when he can find the bloody thing. Many’s the day that has begun with the phrase ‘Have you seen my tape measure?’ and fallen into a complete shambles not long afterwards. What really sucks about this is that Beloved has at least three of them.

During a fact-finding* mission to Aldi last week (*that’s not true. We actually went there to get a new kitchen toy.) I came across a package containing TWO (count ‘em) tape measures. As you do in Aldi. I love that place. ‘Hey love, nick down the shops and pick up some bread and milk and a couple of tape measures and colouring books and a 42″ TV and a USB drive and a compressor and some A4 paper for the printer and a printer and some motorbike boots, please.’ All there in Aldi. Plus chocolate. Anyway, I’ve kept the smaller tape measure for my kitchen drawer (now also featuring Allen keys, a box cutter and a multi-tool with pliers as well as bottle-openers, nut crackers etc) and set the other one free to roam about the house with the rest of the tape measure pack. I’m hoping they breed up enough so that at any given moment Beloved will never be further than an arm’s reach from a helpful tape measure.

You may have noticed the empty condition of the pantry as Beloved works in it. The sad fact is, it’s very hard to wrangle plasterboard when there are boxes and plastic stacking thingies in the way, so this is what had to happen. It was like the kitchen of old, looking at all that clutter over my nice, empty bench. I shudder now, just looking at this photo with its mess everywhere (and yes, that’s my computer sitting on the table, why, one might ask, is it not in its correct position in the study? Because laptops are migratory).

I was torn here, between the mess and the fact that work was being done in the pantry. In the end I just wore a completely painty and plastery track suit for the whole week as a form of camoflague and I sucked it up, buttercup, because sometime the needs of the pantry outweigh the needs of the tidy kitchen. Cooking was a challenge and all of the cats spent their time trying to get into their food box, but we lived through it, and someday we will sit around the campfire with our grandchildren and tell the tale of how exciting it all was, living in this mess.

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Now to get you up to speed with what’s happened. Yeah, that’s the same room. There it is, all plastered up. Okay, still not finished, there’s no archetrave and we haven’t patched up the cracks and (in this photo) the lights aren’t in,  and there’s no paint at all (but I warned you about that) but it’s plastered. There are no big spidery gaps and you can’t see al lthe dust and cobwebs and I’ve even ripped those two big black bags off the back of the door.

It took Beloved the best part of a day to wire the lights in, but they are fabulous. There are 6 in all, 3 above where the sink will go, the one you can see in the foreground, and two more behind where I was standing to take the photo. They are only 11 watts each, and I’ll probably drop that down to 9, because they give a tonne of light.

You can see the tap fittings just next to the broom on the wall’s end. Beloved is going to make a box to fit on the timber just below them and we’ll put the sink in there. There are going to be LOTS of shelves, nice wide wooden ones for storing jars full of stuff, and all of my plastic boxes have been moved back in because even though it isn’t finished, we deserve a couple of weeks of tidyness (and rest) after our hard-working holiday.

So the kitchen is neat again and the laundry is lined as well, with the light now overhead, so you can see what you’re doing in there, and with the shelves I’d always planned to live in the laundry now doing what they should. It’s wonderful. Unpainted and in need of a bit of plastering and probably a bit of tiling as well, but looking wonderful. (The tiles in there at the moment are the same as the ones that were in the old kitchen, and, like those tiles, have now begun to fall off the wall.)

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So here is my hero, just having driven home the last nail. I helped a little, I mean, there was no way he could have got that ceiling plaster up without me on the step-ladder, standing on my tippy-toes, holding that plasterboard in place with my aching arms and my head. What can I say? It’s a skill. Not as much of a skill as measuring stuff though, or cutting and handling that drill like a pro, or knowing exactly how much of the blue goopy stuff you need to put on the wood to help stick the plasterboard in place. Beloved is my hero, even if he does lose his tape measure all the time and expect things to work properly just by swearing at them. Who knows, perhaps he’s right and we just need to employ these magic words with a bit more gusto in order to make them effective.

Maybe that’s the true skill of blokiness that I’m missing out on.

In other news, Radio Boy is doing well and Poss and BF are happy in their new home. Miss Puss went to live with Poss for a little while, but she’s come home now. She’s very much an outside cat and wasn’t allowed out of the flat. I am thinking about what sort of kitten I can get for Poss that she and BF will be happy with. Everybody needs a cat and I know how much Poss is missing Miss Puss.

I’ve actually spent a bit of time working on my novel, and although I won’t get much time this week to do more, at least my brain is getting into the right place, and that’s a start. I know that the words are all in there, falling over each other and trying to get out, I just have to make a nest for them to live in.

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Oh, and one more bit of kitchen awesomeness:

This was my Mothers’ Day present. It’s a red one, so of course you know it goes faster. I’d kind of been wanting a new mixer for a while now. My old Kenwood just wasn’t cutting it any more and I’d seen these about and rather fallen in love with them. I know they are on the trendo side, I mean is there any self-respecting TV chef who doesn’t have one of these somewhere in the background of the set? Even if all they’re making is cheese on toast, you’ll see the KitchenAid there on the bench. They look great, they’re well made and darling they come in such FABULOUS colours.

I had saved up my pocket money and paid for half of the mixer. Now I’m going to have to save up more pocket money and get some of the fabby attachments. I mean, what’s the point of having one of these unless you also have the pasta maker, vegie slicer, grain mill, ice cream maker and mincing attachment to go with??? I’m just wondering where to start. Pasta maker, I think. Beloved and I have an old, broken pasta maker and I do like to make my own. It’s fun and it’s just so much nicer than what you can buy. Besides, it’s winter so we don’t need the ice cream maker just yet. I think I’ll ask Father Christmas for that )

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Miss Puss does look as if she’s up to something a bit, uh, kinky in this photo. Actually, her only intention here is to beat the stuffing out of her toy. Despite being the sweetest-looking little kitty-cat with soft fur and also being very tiny, she is the roughest, toughest cat with the baddest attitude I think I’ve ever had. I think it’s probably because she was a street kitten. Brought up in the wilds of Bega and having to take care of herself, she learned to scratch and swipe with the best of them.

She is also (to my dismay) the most prolific hunter I’ve ever owned. Fortunately we have a cat bib, which is working brilliantly. Without the bib she was known to catch up to 2 birds a day. With the bib on, (and she’s had to wear it whenever she’s outdoors for weeks now) she has only caught one bird. She knows she’s not allowed outside without her bib. Poss’s theory about Miss Puss and her hunting skills is that cats who have to hunt for a living (as we belive Miss Puss once did) have the added edge of desperation, and will leap at prey with their mouths open go in GO IN! I need food!

Miss Puss’s small size would also attest to the resurgence in a somewhat Lamarckian field of study which seems to indicate that some acquired traits can be handed down from generation to generation. The study was done in the Netherlands where a group of pregnant women who were starved during an incident in WWII gave birth. Their children were (understandably) of low birth weight because of the hard times the mothers had been through. The thing is, in the 1960s, when these daughters were having children, they also were of low birth weight. And then in the 80s, the same thing happened again with the grandchildren of the original low birthweight daughters. I’m not sure what happened in the following generation, they never got to that in the radio show I was listening to (and I can’t remember if it was The Science Show or The Health Report on ABC Radio Australia) but it was very interesting.

More cheek is the Fat Cat who has two favourite places to sleep: clean laundry and anywhere black. As you can see, he is more of a white cat with some ginger than a ginger cat with white on him. He’s a classic A-spectrum cat with lush fur and a generous girth and he has RADAR whenever there’s clean laundry about. Okay, I know it’s partly my laziness. First of all: I don’t iron. I really don’t. I don’t mean “I hardly ever iron” or “I only iron once a week” or “I only iron when I need to” I mean I just don’t. My theory is that by the time I’ve worn something in the car to wherever I’m going, it will be full of creases anyway, so who’s going to know? Okay. I know. There are some things that you can tell, but I just don’t care all that much. I don’t notice it. I figure it’s enough that it’s clean.

So anyway, when I bring a load of laundry in off the line, I generally dump it on the bed. This way I will be forced to put it away before I can sleep (because I couldn’t stand to have one thing on the bed, not even a sock. It would drive me nuts.) Maybe the Fat Cat can smell the fresh breeze and warm sunshine in clean laundry and that’s what brings him to come and sleep on it. I don’t blame him. I love the smell of it, too.

Conversely, the Fat Cat’s mortal enemy, Mr Black, loves to sleep on white stuff. Is this some sort of cat-conspiracy, that cats must only shed their fur on contrasting colours? I am currently knitting a free-range baby blankie (it’s free-range because I’m not sure who it’s intended for. It was originally going to be for one of Beloved’s workmates, but she’s gone and had her baby and I didn’t get it finished. So I’ll just have a spare). This blankie is a mostly pinkish pastels with a second ball of dark pink for contrast. You can imagine how great that looks, covered in cat fur. Fortunately my theory with baby blankies is that they should be made of bright, colourful, easy-to-wash acrylics, because the last thing any new parent needs is to be worried about hand-washing some special blankie that’s made of pure virgin lambswool. I’ll give this one a wash when it’s finished and hopefully nobody will be any the wiser (sssh).

This is my third cheeky thing of the day. Not just cheeky but ironic. A spider that builds its web on the open mouth of a pitcher plant, thus depriving the poor plant. Very cheeky, Mr Spider.

I do like my carnivorous plants. I have a collection of Venus Fly Traps on the kitchen window sill and I rotate them to the verandah outside the bedroom when they start to look a bit tired or go into their dormancy. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they don’t. I’m always delighted when they do. As a kid I regularly bought and killed Venus Fly traps. although perhaps if I’d known better I might have just left them for a year and they might have come back.

I only keep the pitcher plants outdoors. They don’t seem to enjoy it at all inside. I have some short, fat ones like the one in the picture, and some long, skinny ones. One of the long skinnies made a flower at the start of summer. That flower is still there. I’m quite amazed with its longevity. The long skinnies have also caught a lot of stuff over the summer. Not sure what because it’s hard to see down their long, skinny necks, but I’m told they’re partial to European wasps, so that’s fine with me.

I also have some Sundews on the verandah. I never bought them, they’ve just hitched along with the Venus Fly Traps and been quite happy to live alongside. They have long leaves, different from the round leafed little Droseras that I sometimes find in my back yard. I am tempted to dig some of the little native ones up and add them to my collection. There’s something cute about carnivorous plants. They have a personality. They don’t even seem to mind when cheeky spiders do them out of a meal. Maybe they have that planty patience, maybe they know that if they wait long enough, that spider will someday slip to where no web can save it.