My Mate...

Let me tell you about my Mate.

She was eighteen when I first met her but I thought that she was the same age that I was, which I guess was probably about twenty-three at the time. The absolute first thing that I noticed about her was her Roman nose- then possibly her enormously fabulous natural tits- and then her warm and funny eyes.

We are sitting in a circle with about twenty others, in a darkened green room that our eyes slowly adjust to. Gradually the group introduces themselves to one another- the nineteen ninety six class of Drama one-oh-one...

Among them there's Wierd Al, a talented actor who's proudly Jewish with a mass of black curls on his head. There's the girl that goes by the name of Keating, who assures us that she's no relation of Paul's, just in case we were wondering; which I hadn't been, just in case you were curious. There's Mish and Shaz, who ended up being fairly good drinking buddies of mine, and then there was Lozza, as she was known, or Lozzie, as I used to call her.

She tells the group that she's from the country and that she wants to be a Drama teacher. She tells me, later on the piss, about her father's property, Cornucopia, that had been in her family for the past three generations. I understand how she feels about the land even though I grew up in the city. I know what she means when she tells me how much she loved her Kelpie, Dusty and her horse, Flicka. She might as well have been talknig about my Grandfather's farm; and Boney and my horse, Star. She worries about Flick's bad hooves and that he's too fat and will founder, and sometimes when she gets drunk at parties she calls out to him even though he's more than five hundred miles away.

I went there once, to her father's farm. Her mother didn't like me much- she still doesn't actually; she thinks of me as a 'lamb-roasting lesbian nudist' which is not only-technically- inaccurate, but ironic as well, seeing as her daughter's tasted far more pussy than I have in my time. But anyway. I cook a mean lamb-roast so she wasn't all wrong.

I only visited there once- when her mother and Johnny were on a rare holiday away together in Queensland. It was a spur of the moment thing. I rang her at four and was there by ten. If I have my complaints about the trip then here they are in writing- my little Suzuki Swift that I owned at the time only had an AM radio, whose pissweak coverage cut out when I was only half-way there, so I was forced to listen to static for the rest of the trip so I wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel- a distinct possibility because I was hungover from hell and bored from the monotonous dark country roads. And the glare from the setting sun on my dirty windscreen was almost blinding, even if it did make the red clay at the side of the road even more spectacular...

It was pitch black when I arrived, so I have no real first impression of cornucopia except of walking through the dark towards the lights of the house, which wouldn't have been out of place in the suburbs it was so modern- hardly farmy at all. She explains that the old farmhouse, where her father was born and grew up, is still standng, only one paddock away- though it is now fairly run-down; and her mother- who was also born in the same small-town- had moved to the property, a distance of only ten kilometres as the crow flies, when her parents were first married.

There's a bit of a party going on; if four people can make up a party- her younger brother is home from boarding school for the holidays and is getting on the Bundy with his best mate, Hack, and the four of us ended up drinking late into the night. Surprise Surprise.

In the morning she took me around the paddocks in the battered old Ute her father owns, calling Dusty as we go- who leaps up into the tray of the Ute as if he's been doing it his whole life. Aside from a few thousand head of Merinos and some cattle they also grew various crops there, but when I visited they had just finished with the harvesting- that's why her dad could go on holidays I guess- and the fields were stripped bare again except for the few dead stems in the tri-coloured earth. The Loam is important somehow- but I forget why now...

She told me that everything looked much nicer in the Spring, when the wheat and Lucerne were lush and long and the lambs were small, and I agreed that it would have been. We go into the dilapadated shearing shed where she finds an old pair of her panties amongst some mouldy straw- and she laughingly tells me the story of the neighbouring property's eldest son, and how she used to want to marry him.

Her horse, Flicka, is a small chestnut and splashed-white gelding who came when she called his name; and I could tell she was pleased that he hadn't forgotten her since she'd been away at University. His toes were as bad as she'd said, each curved up like a pixie's shoe, so that he was completly unrideable. She couldn't ride him but this didn't stop her from loving him, or from crying when he died. I owned a Gimp once myself, too, so I understood how she felt about him.

Flick died not long after the property had been sold due to the drought, the new wheat Harvester and Flicka included in the bargain price. Her parents moved away to the sea and opened a Thai restaurant where her father grew a ponytail and loosened up, and her mother got the dream house with the ocean vies that she had always wanted. See; there's another 'Happily Ever After" right there.

My Mate graduated as a Drama teacher just like she wanted, then moved back to the country and got married to a good bloke named Dezzie. She hasn't worked overseas or written a book yet, but I have no doubt that she will one day if she still wants to, because she has the talent and the drive to do anything she wants to, if, and when ,she sets her mind to it.