Nandita’s aluminium scooter leans against the wall. Her razor is in her right hand. Barbie is in her left. And Nandita’s forearms rest against the edge of the table.

Kyla has a customer to serve – medium takeaway: rice, lamb saag, beef vindloo, chickpeas.

It’s two hours from closing, but already it is too late.

Ten-year-old Nandita brings her razor down to scythe through Babie’s locks. She takes up a pencil-thin paint brush dipped in browns and greens to administer sores and rotten wounds onto Barbie’s naked flesh.

Nandita’s mother licks her right thumb to turn a page. Kyla replaces her disposable gloves as she takes an order for butter chicken.

In 2009, the year of Nandita’s tenth birthday, Barbie has turned 50. When Kyla, 35, was Nandita’s age, Barbie was a toy only the older girls could play with – so sophisticated, with her grown-up boyfriend, her handbag, her high hair and even higher shoes. And her boyfriend.

Barbie joke number one: why does Barbie have no wrinkles? Because of plastic surgery.

In fact, Barbie has grown younger. She’s now the toy of eight-year-olds, and of twelve-year-olds no more.

Barbie joke number two: why does Barbie have no children? Because Ken comes in a different box.

Well, these days, Ken doesn’t come at all. What comes with Barbie is not Ken, but castles – fairy castle, princess castle, underwater castle, a castle in the clouds.

These days, Barbie’s for babies. And when you’re ten, which is almost eleven, Barbie must die.

Behind the bay marines, Kyla serves another butter chicken, and sees how the drumstick resembles the socket joint of the hips of her favourite doll, which she still takes from its box from time to time to gaze at its frozen smile – so warm and complete.

Nandita puts down her razor and takes up a skewer still black from the tandoori oven and pokes its point into each blue Barbie eye, wishing she had something less cumbersome to work with.

For Kyla (wiping the bench where the butter chicken sauce has been spilt) it’s like watching someone spit on her own grave.

Nandita’s mother turns another page of Carrie Ryan’s zombie romance – where the living-that-hide learn how to erase their legacy love for the dead-that-walk.

Nandita paints green and brown and red onto the plastic flesh of hairless – and lately eyeless – Barbie. Nandita’s mother has told her nothing about the book that she his reading. But Nandita loves to sit by her as she turns page after page – under the TV and inside the diner – Nandita steadying her arms to mutilate against the edge of the same table that her mother steadies her arms to read.

When McDougall is in the clear and has options to choose from, Anthea digs her polished nails into Michael’s thigh – then releases when McDougall passes to Keith Lulia who passes to Steve Simpson (playing his 200th NRL game) – who scores. And Anthea rises, and she punches the air. And Michael’s underpants go crinkly has he does likewise. Punches the air, opens his mouth, and makes not a sound.

Once the game is over – 25 to 20 to the Knights – Anthea and Michael re-settle in front of the Millionaire quiz-machine, with its tag – “Lock it in Eddy” – and its promise – “Win $80 Instantly!” They discuss their answers in a whisper, press their buttons, and lose.

While they’re doing this, the video Juke Box of the Cumbersome Viceroy Hotel plays “Rock with me”, from Michael Jackson’s album Off the Wall – “I’ll dance you into day … rock the night away…”

This time last week, the non-footy discussion at the Viceroy was around the approaching shortest day of the year. The winter solstice. Which, in winter’s case, is a misnomer. Solstice is a Latin compound of Sun and Stillness for those long days, when our very own star seems to hang in our sky forever. Using that same word for the shortest day is less than a carry-over. It’s just dead wrong.

Heavy Helen and Happy Larry see eye-to-eye on neither Michael Jackson nor stimulants. “There’s not a fuckin’ lot of point to men,” says Helen, “But a man who can’t be a man – what’s the fuckin’ point of that?” Larry can’t remember a Michael Jackson song title or a lyric – just the shiny toes of those shiny shoes and that zig-zag body pirouetting the lighted footpath as he follows the fictional footsteps of Billie Jean.

“And why would you want to be whiter?” says Helen. “When all your best bits are darker than your other bits!”

Larry’s head is still screwy from his last line of coke. “Michael Jackson,” he says, “didn’t want to be whiter – he wanted to be lighter.” Shiny shoes. Glittering glove. Moon walk.

Just like in “Don’t stop till you get enough”, Jackson’s 1972 cover of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t no sunshine” begins with this cheesy monologue. And then the 14 year-old boy sings…

“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, and this house ain’t no home, any time she goes away.”

A lyric that would have been as meaningless to him then, aged 14, as it was the day died, aged 50.

Having lost at Millionaire, but won at Monday night football, Michael Janson and Anthea Delaware walk out the doors of the Cumbersome Viceroy, Michael taking the opportunity to deliver a gentle pat with his right hand to Anthea’s left buttock as they exit.

And as the doors close behind them, Michael Jackson, 14, and still dark as the day he was born, does this peculiar thing – he leaves the lyrics that Bill Withers gave him, and sing’s – “ain’t no sun” “ain’t no sun” “ain’t no sun”.

These days, we’re like superhero and nerdy cover-identity: never seen together in company. Even in our Cumbersome terrace: Betty is feeding Sam and Ellen at the table while I’m upstairs shoving badly folded clothes into badly arranged drawers; I am bathing, while Betty is laundering; I am dishing, while Betty is wishing our beautiful girls sweet dreams. Then we look at each other in our dining room as if we’ve mistakenly reached for the same suitcase at the arrivals carousel – kind of puzzled and embarrassed – before we each remember a phone call or email to follow up – and we’re gone again.

I am not a crossword. Love does not complete me. But you’d reckon it wouldn’t split you up like this.

Well, I’ve obviously not been paying attention at the gigs at the Apollo Theatre, or even the Viceroy jukebox, where the love dismemberment songs are on high rotation.

“Take these arms” “Take these lips” “If I give my heart to you…”. Butchery ballads of lift and separate: “You just keep me hanging on”.

Sophie has been absent from our Camperdown park meetings for the past few months. I tried to coax her out of retirement by organising a bush-walk through Wolli reserve – the last hunk of bush in Sydney’s inner west. But no.

Then the word came out via Sabina and Colette that Ernie and Sophie were spilt. Isn’t it strange how couples break up, but individuals break down. And, the announcement having been made, Sophie was ready to reappear.

It was the full catastrophe, she told us: Ernie having it off with a work chick definitely younger and possibly prettier. And going on long before the conception of their second child Aaron, now big beneath Sophie’s maternity track pants.

Sophie had made the jump from a Cumbersome house to a Dulwich Hill apartment, with Ruth in tow and Aaron in belly, by virtue of an exit strategy which included paying doctors’ fees from their joint account, then having the medicare rebates paid into her personal account. By buying boots and appliances on the card at DJ’s, then selling them off on EBay.

Finally she was ready.

She marched into Ernie’s open-plan office, holding Ruth’s hand in her left, and resting her right on the bump in the very oldest trackpants she could find. She screamed, she gloried. Tears fell from her cheeks and smacked onto the stylish ironbark floor like tiny chunks of meat. She tore Ernie and her cheap little slut to bits right there in front of everyone. Then she turned her back on them. And it was good.

This morning I closed the gate behind me and walked up our concrete footpath towards Cumbersome Road. And it was bad.

It had been a rough night of shit and spew with our girls. It had been a rough morning of bile and bad temper between me and Betty.

I stopped at the pedestrian lights and looked across the corner. I was dressed in work clobber – a button-up-shirt, vest and jacket – on my way to my messed-up desk at the Ministry of Truth.

Across the corner I saw a man in a maroon sweatshirt; it had a hood, but the hood was not raised. And I thought: “Why am I walking to the station that way? – that’s not the quickest way…” and “Why am I keeping to the shade when the morning air is so cold, and the sunlight is so warm?” And slowly I realised, as the lights changed and a cloud passed overhead, that he was not me, but another person: with legs, arms, and lips all of his own. “… and my heart fell at your feet.”

Leaving the abattoir of love, the suburb of slaughter, I met the train at Newtown for the Ministry of Truth and returned, nine hours later, to Cumbersome.

A woman walks by with thigh-high boots
leading a little dog
her clothes so tight they look they might
just be a tattoo job

A Cumbersome corner on a Cumbersome street
a place where Cumbersome lovers meet

A clarinet trills
above the chimneys
of this suburb west of Sydney
Phil waits for Michael to get home

This is not the way
to make it big
they’ll never get past that local pub gig
they’ll never get a record company loan

One short victory a long defeat
two roads part, two roads meet

Her tack-suit’s pink, his one’s blue
they wander the streets and they mutter to you
but the words they say
have never made sense

They found a typewriter on the ground on day
it’s funny what people just throw away
they wrote a letter (Maria)
under the shade of an old grey fence

Sugar is salt, salt is sweet
on this place two roads meet

Bob’s had no job
for at least two years
I never knew how he could afford his beers
till I saw the car driven by his girl Leanne

The new butcher won’t last
he’s got trouble
I saw him at lunch knocking back a double
then I say him closing up with a bandaged hand

I guess we’ve all got a habit to beat
and that’s just a place two roads meet

And this is just the corner at the end of my street
a place where Cumbersome lovers meet

Two winters before my beautiful Betty summer, I remember wandering the pre-dawn streets of Stanmore, west on Corunna Road, south through Margaret, Charles and Bruce Streets, to Crystal, then over the railway line and east down Trafalgar to Liberty, and then back home.

My 4AM winter: putting one foot in front of the other.

All the previous summer, my relationship with Kathy had been doomed; all autumn, it had been finished – according to everyone but me.

My state of denial having been followed by the enchanting chill of mega-double-denial, I was by mid-winter at last left to nurse a broken heart in the land of the bleeding obvious.

Two summers later, Christmas came wrapped in a kiss.

Betty and I married in the year I turned 40 – which makes me either a late starter or a slow learner – and probably both.

We got married pretty much because we felt like it. Which sounds straightforward until you think how recent the idea is of two people who love each other marrying because they want to.

Stephanie Coontz in Marriage: a history, tells the story of the world through the prism of marriage, and finds family values little different from what you’d see at the stock exchange or the used car yard.

Until very recently (and even today in non-Cumbersome places) marriage was about building on one generation’s assets, and preparing for another. The happy couple standing between Generation Last and Generation Next were Generation Least.

In pre-classical times, marriage was about building a combination of possessions and workforce sufficient to raise corn and keep the lateral wolf from the vertical door. Two families became one: that’s what it takes to do the outside work and the inside work, mind the boundaries, and hedge your bets by sending your weakest to work for the family across the creek.

As communities grew larger and alliances more complex, says Stephanie, blood feuds and double crosses between family groupings became so disruptive and anarchic that the State had to step in. And the great ones of Athens devised rules for how marriage was conferred and annulled, placing loyalty to the State ahead of loyalty to one’s father-in-law (a tough concept to accept, I admit).

In The Other Boleyn Girl, forces fight over a single uterus – forces that might otherwise have bathed in general slaughter. But none the less, if marriage has hands – there’s blood on them.

Marriage is this counter-reactive force – a kind of corrective service – at once inhibiting the worst in us, and creating the means by which our worst can come out to play. Marriage is not society’s building block – it’s its security block.

And love?

Looking for love inside marriage is like looking for velocity inside a motorcycle. It’s not what it is: it’s what it does that’s the question.

This Ducati 996 taking that sweet, sneaky set of curves on Railway; this Virago 535 on Cavendish, with the rotten, flat tyres and a Marrickville council notice pasted to its petrol tank – they’re identical in almost every way that matters.

But only one travels the road to Cumbersome.

Just like deep into each spring a winter week returns, this Cumbersome autumn, a full week past the ides of March, the January heat-wave has come back for one last look, one last sweaty kiss, one last heat-wave good-bye.

In the park across the road from the Bentoni Brothers fruit market, our mothers group kids have been joined by a mob from the church-run day-care centre – herded in with one carer to the front and one to the rear, until their charges explode into the play equipment.

Melville park contains the only oak tree in Cumbersome, and its branches shade two sets of play equipment joined by a rope-bridge. This far into autumn the shade of the oak is less than optimal, as its turning leaves have already started to fall.

Like the Cumbersome oak, the mothers of hotness have been caught off guard. This morning I dressed Sam and Ellen with singlets beneath their t-shirts, singlets that I am last wise enough to remove – noticing how their eyes are starting to go all wonky.

Oscar, who feels the cold, and turns public-pool-tile blue at swimming lessons (honestly, it’s like watching him dissolve), his orange sweatshirt becomes drenched in nose-bleed blood, and we improvise by dressing him in Sam’s sweaty singlet – and he now sports a cute bow at the nape of his neck.

And the mothers of hotness continue to patrol the edges, keeping children to the shade as best we can, while administering doses of water out of plastic bottles.

The steely sheen of Colette’s bottle-blond hair half blinds me as she turns towards Sally’s daughter Jenny who is squirting water from the bubbler in a long plume that splashes into her face and down her neck-front. All the while, circling us, is the long zip of bicycle tyres as Colette’s son Dan rides around and around.

Discussion of the relative merits of Bentoni Brothers, Marrickville Metro, Ashfield fruit market, and that Greek place in Dulwich Hill – along with the anticipated weekend grower’s market at the Everleigh rail works – it all just washes over her. Not benignly like an autumn breeze, not medicinally like a plume of water; but with the slow violence of dead heat.

“And what’s with green beans selling at 16 bucks a kilo – what’s that all about?” I ask turning to Colette, seeking to draw her back in, only to see her gazing at Dan riding past, from shade into sun from sun into shade.

“Might as well buy a kilo of sirloin,” Sally says. “Yeah,” says Sabina: “A market-driven Atkins diet.”

“OK!” Sophie says, “Let’s record this happy moment!”

This is because today’s the day they’re free of me. Today is my last mothers group Tuesday before I return five days to the Ministry of Truth, and Sophie asks one of the churchy childcarers to do the honours with her Canon digital.

It’s just before midnight, with Betty, Sam and Ellen long asleep, when I check my email and find the photos from Sophie’s camera.

And there we all are – Sophie smirking, Sabina with her school-portrait smile, Sally careful to keep her chin just a little raised. Me grinning stupidly, and Colette covering her face to collect a sneeze.

And I browse my Events on iPhoto – mothers group, children, park – park – park. And there she is, Colette, in every one: smothering a cough, turning her head, swishing at a fly.

At just before the very same midnight, Colette is roused from her TV-couch sleep by her husband Colin. Her dreamy eyes glimpse the web address from the community service announcement on channel 7 HD for finding the missing – talkingworks.com.au. Colette switches off the TV with the remote and takes Colin’s hand silently for bed.

Derek’s clean slacks are hanging from his scrawny butt (which, I assume, is clean also) as he leans over the pool table, and as I pass from the bar towards the back room carrying two beers: one for me, and one for Larry.

This is three years back, before Ellen was born. It’s about the time the major effort with Samantha, Sam, began to ease. She could walk now. She could ask for a few simple needs. And Betty and I could ask for a few simple needs in return. So, once more (once a month), I could spend an evening at the Viceroy, playing pool.

Derek rolls the white ball so that it just kisses the 4, deep purple, sending it toward the side pocket, where it rests, right on the lip of the side pocket. He turns to Larry (nick-named Happy) who he’s partnering this evening, and says, tenderly: ‘I’m leaving it for you.’

I’m playing with an islander named Joe, but I’m in a shout with Larry. Life is complex in Cumbersome.

Derek walks gingerly, favouring his left leg, as he hands the cue to Joe, and takes a few paces before climbing onto the stool between me and Larry. He lets a groan escape. And in response to my enquiring look he says: ‘She’s a little tender.’

She, it turns out, is his left foot. He sweeps back his clean, thick, grey, barber-cut hair with the spread fingers of his right hand. ‘It’s the nightmares,’ he says.

Joe has sunk a couple of bigs for me, and now Larry’s up, with Derek’s tenderly placed 4-ball still resting at the lip of the pocket.

Larry, who favours a different flavour of stimulant to Heavy Helen (and on this they’ll just have to agree to differ), strides up to the table and, in one gesture, plants down his left hand, launches his cue with his right, and sends the white ball hurtling toward the purple, from where both balls sail through the air, ricocheting off the juke box, and out the door to the beer garden – and bounce bounce bounce down the tiled steps.

‘Yeah!’ Larry exclaims. And he’s off out the door to retrieve them.

‘I like playing with Larry,’ Derek tells me. ‘We never win, but it’s always very funny.’

Derek has been having nightmares.

He sleeps in the same, narrow bed he’s been sleeping in for 20 years. And it was 20 years old when he bought it. It’s a child’s bed really, and his feet touch the end. Before the nightmares, this had not been a problem. He even felt comfortable and cocooned that way, held between headrest and foot rail.

But lately – these nightmares. In the midst of which he’d kick and kick, just his left foot, against the 40-year-old bars of his child’s bed.

And it was nothing at first. Then it was a nuisance. Then a blasted nuisance. And soon he began thinking on it all day. That foot. So tender. And what would happen tonight, and how would he wake tomorrow’ How much worse could it get before it got better’

He took himself to the bulk-billing doctor, who had no receptionist, and who’s office contained nothing but two chairs and a desk, and a shelf carrying three jars, each of them holding various objects of various sizes in individual plastic bags.

At the Viceroy, Derek descends from his bar stool and walks to the table trying to be gentle to his tender foot. If someone touches you with tenderness – it’s all care, all love: and harm is far, far away. That’s an outward tenderness. But if tenderness is in you, held within you, there’s either a little pain, or a lot. And there’s no way around it.

Tender also means to offer up – to lay out formal terms of a deal. And where the Cooks River spills out into Botany Bay, that battered yacht that trails a tiny tinny with its egg-beater outboard… that little boat is called a tender, as it attends to the on-shore needs of off-shore sailors.

And the doctor was tending Derek, as Derek explained his situation: clearly, but in no greater detail than necessary. The doctor peeled off Derek’s sock and examined the tender foot – bruised, swollen, soft – before replying.

‘Derek, what do you expect me to do about this’ I can’t make your bed longer.’
 

Heavy Helen is weeping amphetamine tears. The ‘Empire Stallions – Dawn of a new day’ race at the Albury track, formerly known as Brown’s Paddock, has been rescheduled to a night meeting because of the heatwave that’s also playing merry hell with the Australian Open.

In her hand, instead of the TAB receipt she’d anticipated, is an ancient hardcover of The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm.

She had retrieved it from the Viceroy bookshelf, where it was being used as a kind of paperweight to keep copies of the City Hub from southerly-buster dismemberment.

It’s Heavy Helen’s custom never to wipe tears from her cheeks. She is proud of them. She lets them dry, leaving on her plump flesh, once the Cumbersome heat has done its work, faint vertical steaks of the finest white powder.

Across the road the Turkish barber is closing his daughter’s shop. Aziz once had two men and three women working for him.

Two years ago, a stack of those space helmets once used to set a perm sat pushed into the back corner, but in full view, as if waiting to return to life. The long walls, north and south, were tiled with mirrors. And Aziz walked up and down this corridor of unnatural light, with the past behind, and the present – one scant-haired middle-aged Turk on one of three porcelain based Koken barber chairs – before – and behind and before and behind.

Then Aziz’s daughter, Aysu, having graduated from TAFE and worked five years in a salon in Brighton-Le-Sands, bought him out.

“She is the boss now,” he says to me as he lights a pinch of cotton wool, dipped in metho and fastened with glue to a Phillips head screw driver, and flicks the flame into his palm to get the feel of it.

“And she bought this! This for me to work with!” The chair I’m sitting on is black plastic. The cushion is grey plastic. The stack of drawers on the floor beside it is black and on wheels, but to wheel them or open them would court disaster.

And with his right hand he flicks the yellow flame into my ears, singeing and curling the tiny hairs, while with his left he pats down any flamey outbreaks.

Aziz then gives me a gentle shoulder massage before Aysu takes my money at the register. The shop is empty as I leave – except for love.

At the Indian diner, Nandita, now 10 and doing her homework, discovers that her mother can add, divide and multiply, but simply cannot subtract. It’s a concept that completely eludes her.

Back at the Viceroy, some blow-in graduate of Our Lady of the Morons, St Peters, has put on the juke box the world’s worst song – There’s no aphrodisiac like loneliness by the Whitlams. How’s this for a song? “Darling I miss you so much I want to go out and fuck someone else…”

And the pity and sorrow that so many people who write or sing about love, or feel themselves to be in it, or seek to be so, have not the faintest clue about it, bares down on Heavy Helen like a January heatwave.

Heavy Helen reads about a book a day. The first chapter on The Art of Loving (six pages in the paperback edition I have since bought) would have taken her to read no longer than the Empire Stallions to run.

Love is an art, says Fromm. Love is not a prize to be won, nor even a state to be reached it’s a faculty to be cultivated.

And all the while we’re searching for someone to love, and someone to love us, with our efforts fixed on seeking the loveable, and making ourselves loveable enough to be part of a reasonable exchange.

In our daily lives we expend our energies on everything – learning to read, to count, to drive, to dress – but so little on learning to love. And Helen weeps her amphetamine tears, and lets them dry in powdery stripes on her cheeks in the Viceroy hotel, because it doesn’t have to be that way. And she, and her super-hot girlfriend, know it.

Heavy Helen is weeping amphetamine tears. The ‘Empire Stallions – Dawn of a new day’ race at the Albury track, formerly known as Brown’s Paddock, has been rescheduled to a night meeting because of the heatwave that’s also playing merry hell with the Australian Open.

In her hand, instead of the TAB receipt she’d anticipated, is an ancient hardcover of The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm.

She had retrieved it from the Viceroy bookshelf, where it was being used as a kind of paperweight to keep copies of the City Hub from southerly-buster dismemberment.

It’s Heavy Helen’s custom never to wipe tears from her cheeks. She is proud of them. She lets them dry, leaving on her plump flesh, once the Cumbersome heat has done its work, faint vertical streaks of the finest white powder.

Across the road the Turkish barber is closing his daughter’s shop. Aziz once had two men and three women working for him.

Two years ago, a stack of those space helmets once used to set a perm sat pushed into the back corner, but in full view, as if waiting to return to life. The long walls, north and south, were tiled with mirrors. And Aziz walked up and down this corridor of unnatural light, with the past behind, and the present – one scant-haired middle-aged Turk on one of three porcelain based Koken barber chairs – before – and behind and before and behind.

Then Aziz’s daughter, Aysu, having graduated from TAFE and worked five years in a salon in Brighton-Le-Sands, bought him out.

“She is the boss now,” he says to me as he lights a pinch of cotton wool, dipped in metho and fastened with glue to a Phillips head screw driver, and flicks the flame into his palm to get the feel of it.

“And she bought this! This for me to work with!” The chair I’m sitting on is black plastic. The cushion is grey plastic. The stack of drawers on the floor beside it is black and on wheels, but to wheel them or open them would court disaster.

And with his right hand he flicks the yellow flame into my ears, singeing and curling the tiny hairs, while with his left he pats down any flamey outbreaks.

Aziz then gives me a gentle shoulder massage before Aysu takes my money at the register. The shop is empty as I leave – except for love.

At the Indian diner, Nandita, now 10 and doing her homework, discovers that her mother can add, divide and multiply, but simply cannot subtract. It’s a concept that completely eludes her.

Back at the Viceroy, some blow-in graduate of Our Lady of the Morons, St Peters, has put on the juke box the world’s worst song – There’s no aphrodisiac like loneliness by the Whitlams. How’s this for a song’ ‘Darling I miss you so much I want to go out and fuck someone else…’

And the pity and sorrow that so many people who write or sing about love, or feel themselves to be in it, or seek to be so, have not the faintest clue about it, bares down on Heavy Helen like a January heatwave.

Heavy Helen reads about a book a day. The first chapter on The Art of Loving (six pages in the paperback edition I have since bought) would have taken her to read no longer than the Empire Stallions to run.

Love is an art, says Fromm. Love is not a prize to be won, nor even a state to be reached it’s a faculty to be cultivated.

And all the while we’re searching for someone to love, and someone to love us, with our efforts fixed on seeking the lovable, and making ourselves lovable enough to be part of a reasonable exchange.

In our daily lives we expend our energies on everything – learning to read, to count, to drive, to dress – but so little on learning to love. And Helen weeps her amphetamine tears, and lets them dry in powdery stripes on her cheeks in the Viceroy hotel, because it doesn’t have to be that way. And she, and her super-hot girlfriend, know it.
 

Ever since lesson-one at ballet school, at age eight, Michelle has been serious about posture. She settles, knees first, onto her imported, German office chair, which, according to the instruction manual, provides superior sitness.

The TV in the next room hasn’t changed channels for a full minute, so clearly Frank is not watching TV. He might be on the balcony watching the stars. Or, in the absence of stars, looking for one.

Michelle types ‘craigslist’ into her browser’s address bar, then clicks ‘Sydney’ ‘ and ‘ ‘Men seeking women’.

Lifting herself out of her Aspire wheelchair, suspending her full weight with those muscular arms, Heavy Helen is in full flight.

‘Drive on now! Drive her on! Sweet as Honey! Go you good thing. Go you sweet thing. Drive her home now. Go. Go Goooo!’

And there it is, Sweet as Honey, home by half a length in the Beenleigh Farm Supplies Pace ‘ at Parklands on the Gold Coast, paying a handy $11.70.

‘Oo!’ Helen returns to our table, tossing back her black curls, ‘It brings colour to a girl’s cheeks!’

Her Fugazi T-shirt is ripped from throat to navel, and held loosely in place by a pair of maxi safety pins. She drinks from the long glass of water from our table, then sucks the slice of lemon that was floating in it.

Passing our table at the Viceroy, on her way to the pokies, is Lilli Lin.

‘See!’ says Helen, checking out Lilli’s ass as she walks by, ‘Gambling is a victory for multiculturalism. Before pokies, when would you see a middle-aged Chinese woman walk into a pub by herself!’

And Lilli does – not every night, but close to it.

Tonight she’s wearing gold slippers, red spandex pants and a white blouse, over which is a pink, short-sleaved jacket with a hood. Her hair is neat as neat in a bun, held by a red scrunchie. She carries in both hands before her, like an offering, a shiny, gold lame clutch bag with rhinestone highlights. On her way to bury her wealth in the tomb of ‘Queen of the Nile’ – possibly the most popular poker machine in the world. In two hours she’ll leave, and in half an hour more she’ll be back. Once I saw her hit on a stranger at the pool table for $20. The bar staff asked her to leave then, and I’ve not seen her do it since.

She climbs onto the bar stool now, with no back support required – because you’re always leaning forward.

Michelle has moved from Craigslist to RSVP – just looking. She is 32. And feels old. In another two years, she thinks, her virtual age of 25 just won’t wash.

What is it that makes a perfect boyfriend a lousy husband’

Frank has the deepest, warmest kiss imaginable. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He would neither hurt, nor notice one. His jobs have always come and gone. But, increasingly, they take longer to come than to go. And the excuse cycle goes around and around: she’s a bitch; he’s an idiot; it could have happened to anyone; life’s too short for that shit.

‘I’m a bitch,’ Michelle mutters, clicking on ‘register’. ‘He’s an idiot,’ watching her computer fill out the form, incorrectly, by itself.

Michelle knows that she only ever looks at profiles that contain a photograph. She’s not a risk-taker. She’s not going to leave Frank without somewhere to go: actually 32 is not virtually 25, and she knows it and she feels it. But if he finds out’ If someone sees her there and spills the beans’

Michelle clicks ‘upload’. And there she is – herself. Wearing the same smile she wore to her wedding – but a better cleavage.

Her kneeling-chair is designed to keep her back straight and her neck upright at all times.

She leans forward and clicks: ‘Submit’.