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The following article has been written by Jane Fraser. Jane Fraser is a senior writer on The Australian.
Test cases
I BUMPED into someone I know slightly at the butcher's shop the other day and she had the pale, haunted look of someone who has recently emerged not fully intact from a plane crash. "How are you?" I asked curiously, on the sniff for bad news, as one most often is. She sighed, swallowed and leaned against the meat display. "It's nearly all over” Her voice cracked.
What was all over? Must be her marriage. Strangely enough, hers had seemed a fairly stable arrangement and her husband has always been most pleasant to her in public, sometimes even laughing at her jokes and not interrupting her just before she produces the punchline, which is highly unusual in a husband.
Still, you can never tell. Even the mildest mannered men have been known to come over all funny when they've been wed for two decades. It is as if they wake up one morning to find that small trigger has been pulled that releases far too many hormones into their nether regions, which makes their blood and other liquid matter curdle so that there is nothing for it but to lust after young women, even mousy ones with tight sweaters and loose minds.
The tip of my tongue tingled, but before I could nudge the conversation amiably towards the wobbly marital couch, another woman walked in, also looking terminally teary. Without saying a word they fell into an embrace, moaning softly into each other's necks. The butchers, who are kindly men and no strangers to shopping mall dramas, looked the other way and busily sharpened their cleavers, embarrassed. Not another conjugal disaster? In the same neck of the woods! This smacked of first-class grist for the gossip mill.
Having no plausible reason for loitering with intent in a butcher shop, especially surrounded by men who know I work on the principle of one day, one person, one chop, I left no wiser and my frustration almost knew no bounds. Using my trusty mobile I called a good friend, someone who knows both women whose lives were so obviously on the skids, and suggested she meet me immediately for coffee and a bit of a talk about the state of the world in general, with emphasis on the paranormal.
She snorted, her voice not untinged with venom. “Get out of the house?" she shrilled "You must be joking. My life wouldn't be worth living! I'm here for the long haul." This is a woman for whom life is one long sequin of events. A social pterodactyl. Housebound?
"Good Lord, Claude," I thought, my mind racing madly. "She's being held siege by marauding Jedi. There are barbarians at her gate. Seven cars have crashed into her roof. Telstra has promised to call!" Harking to the clarion call of true friendship, I barged in.
She did not look overly pleased to see me, standing with her foot wedged firmly in the door and resisting all attempts on my part to kick it away, even though her eyes smarted. I climbed up my umbrage tree and left.
On the way home, muttering mean platitudes, I passed a church and saw a woman of utter vileness, who has long dissociated herself with Christian acts, running inside, telling her rosary beads as she went. Across the road in a coffee shop a fortysomething couple sat conversing, their faces drawn, their voices a low murmur. Married people, talking to each other? In the middle of the afternoon?
What had come over these people? Why were they behaving like harbingers of some apocalypse? Then the penny dropped.
They all have children writing their final school examinations.
Fraser, J. 2000, “Test cases”, Weekend Australian, 11-12 Jan 2001
