Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley

question of substantiating her reasons to one of the persons concerned, it was as if she were trying to write on water. So often she had been the one wanting,and at the same time the one unwanted, that she now achieved a keen, unexplored pleasure in this new-found indifference, this resolution not to become emotionally involved. Lashed on like all members of her sex by the warnings of cosmeticians, the couturiers, the milliners, the retail stores, all of which sold the idea that not to achieve marriage was the greatest misfortune that could overtake a woman, she knew with the desperateness of one now entering her twenties that at all costs she must keep one man. Which one?
    â€œCouldn’t bear it wivout you,” insinuated Harry into the whorls of her ear. “Don’t get around much any more.” Oh, the grief, the unquestionable grief of the saxophone urging her decision.
    â€œYes,” replied Elsie not daring to catch Laura’s eye. “Yes, he was. You mustn’t blame me,” suddenly she protested with a new urgency creeping into her voice. “You know yourself the way it is in these God forsaken holes. No music, no books, the upper crust some small-time shopkeepers comparing cheque-butts and reading the papers avidly each day hoping to see their friends’ downfall. I think Harry’s type stands up to the comparison fairly well. He’s only a little more illiterate than the average primary school headmaster,” she added, thinking of Duffecy, “and with a great deal more humour and simplicity and anxiety to please.”
    â€œOh, don’t give me that! You know you probably felt
la grande patronne
. You were slumming, Elsie,mentally slumming and getting a kick out of playing the intellectual bigwig to that poor ruddy drain-digger. I bet he feels like slicing you up, and serves you right.”
    She crushed out the butt of her cigarette and lit another.
    â€œNow take Joe. At least he’s presentable. He might only be ground staff but he’s got the looks, the poise and plenty of . . . well, if not intelligence, then know-how.”
    â€œAnd a wife,” put in Elsie tartly, wearying of this one-sided criticism.
    â€œDrink up,” said Laura indifferently, “and don’t be a bitch. And be nice to him when he calls after dinner, or I’ll let you find your own way to the station tonight.”
    â€œMy remark was quite in order. I have my own warped moral sense still, foundering perhaps, but beating along its course as far as it’s able. At least Harry hasn’t a wife and child. I’m only making one person unhappy.”
    â€œYou sure needle a girl, don’t you?” queried Laura, with a still good-tempered smile. “What Joe and I do is surely the business of Joe and me. Not for one minute am I going to explain or justify the situation. It exists.
Satis est
. But not sated, mark you, not sated. Nothing libidinous so far.”
    Like Elsie, she knew it was basically due to boredom in a small town. She rose with her innategrace and went to the door where she turned her acquisitive profile north and then south. The street, save for the line of parked cars and bicycles propped up against the kerb and three small girls playing skipping on the far side, lay emptily along the quiet afternoon that almost floated in pale pinks and washed-out blues over the coast.
    She turned back into the darkening interior and, spreading her hands in a gesture of ignorance, conveyed much to Elsie through that and the raising of her fussy shoulders.

IX
    May
    I T MUST have been the longest jetty she had ever seen. It reached out brazenly into the swelling water to the point where it became deep enough to take the launches plying between the island and the town. Watching Daggoombah as they swung towards it over the bay metamorphosed from a big grey-green hump against the sky to a volcanic outcrop with dazzling new-moon beaches and lush green