Jane & the Magic v10.0

From Tales of Boris a Novel in Progress
Jan 1997 to 13 October 2003

2. Meeting Jane

Death came to Elly in a town in the country. Elly was my grandmother but I never called her gran or nanna. I called her Elly. I lived with her and Boris after my parents died in a car accident. I was ten and I stayed with Elly until I went to University in the city. The three of us had noone else. Elly and me; we didn't see each other very much. But I spoke to her often on the phone at least once a fortnight - especially after Boris left. We never spoke about Boris.

I left my flat in the city and travelled to the funeral. It took a long day's travelling to get to the town from the city. You had to catch a bus and then a ferry over through the straits and then another bus to the town. The bus broke down as soon as it left the outskirts of the city.

While we both ate Mars Bars in the service station cafeteria. I told Jane about Elly. She had a large sheepskin coat and wore green wellington boots. She often, albeit accidently, stood on my feet. She would then whip off my shoes and socks and suck the toes better. She drank Chinese tea from a tiny white porcelain cup. She smelt of too much shampoo and not enough soap. She made me Sammy Snake the Sock Puppet.

She ran the best baths; hot and steamy. Bath salts from dry, inland desert lakes, loofahs from the bottom of the sea, plastic ducks from Gowings. She lit a stick of lavender incense and wrapped red cellophane around the bathroom light bulb. She crouched beside the bath so I couldn't see her and stuck her arm up: Sammy Snake the Sock Puppet watching a little boy wash. I can remember her running downstairs, grabbing two containers full of ice cubes from the freezer and rushing back to me, sweating and giggling in the bath. She tossed the ice cubes into the water. I watched them dissappear and she yelled, There you go. Ice is the same as water. Told you so. Ice is the same as water.

I didn't tell Jane about Boris.

Elly knew her cartoons. She would say to me, You and I, we are like Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Cartoon characters in a crazy scary world. But don't worry she'll be right in the end.

Elly told me she lived in the town to entertain the attentions of an unwanted lover. I thought she was talking about Boris.

As I told Jane about Elly, the waitress wiped our table and took away our Mars Bar wrappers. She didn't hassle us.

I don't mind this. I don't mind the delay, Jane said (she called me an albino tadpole when she first met me when she saw me swimming at the beach skinny & white. Glenelg).

I asked Jane to explain her reasons for leaving the town. She told me, she'd woken at 5 o'clock one morning at her parent's house on Main Street. She rose early to walk and watch the end of the night: to see charcoal clouds coloured by the morning light. Instead, she ended up sitting on the edge of the kerb, barefeet in the gutter watching a cat perch on top of a stobie pole. As she watched, the cat began to walk along the wire. It sped up to avoid falling. You could see it teeter and it zapped across to the pole on the other side of the road.

It was as though the cat flew ... and this made me leave.

But why? Why did it make you leave?

I don't know it just did. Does there have to be a reason?

Jane rubbed her head. She almost didn't have any hair, it was cut as short as the fur on a tennis ball. She moved out of town and went to live in a tent outside the Joint Defence Facility/Immigration Detention Centre in the middle of the desert with five women. Her days were spent amking things. She painted 'anti nuclear' murals on large pieces of cloth to decorate the outside of the womens' tents. She built kites from garbage bags and bamboo sticks to fly 'go home' banners across the sky. She created life size paper mache dolls of the Prime Minister and the President to burn in front of TV cameras.

After this but before she met me, she lived by herself in the bush in a house with no running water. She made large fires burning mallee roots and spinifex. At the end of each day, she'd leave two large plastic bowls outside to collect dew or night rain. She'd wash herself with the water from one bowl and use the other for drinking and cooking.

I looked at her and smiled.

I asked, What did you do when the rain stopped and the drought came?

She said, with a fair degree of sarcasm, I came to the city and found you.

I said, Don't make me throw up my Mars Bar.

| Jane & The Magic | Tales of Boris | We Rose Up Slowly |