Finding a voice by Helen Carr

I suppose I thought it was going to be like something out of Katherine Mansfield; cabbage palms rustling in the sea breeze… garden parties where young people learned that life was suffering as well as falling in love and ices… day trips to the beach, the sea a sigh a whisper… loud voices assailing delicate sensibilities… dim gardens lamp lit on warm nights, white dresses like moths in the darkness… laughter when things really are not funny… secret lives colliding… people being introspective when they least expect it… kindness… loneliness. I was somewhat out of touch with reality.

Though I suppose that in some ways it was like that.

He said it was my romantic nature which first attracted him to me. We lived in a shabby clapboard house in an unimportant suburb and every week day he drove off to work while I tried to write short stories. They were very derivative, as you can imagine. I felt inhabited by KM. At weekends we went to the beach where the sea sometimes whispered and sighed and the cabbage palms rustled in the breeze. Most evenings we sat on the crumbling porch and shared our frustrations. I bemoaned the fact that I was unable to find my own voice as a writer. He railed against the way the city council neglected the roads, leaving dangerous and damaging pot holes unrepaired. He sent endless emails to the council which were never replied to. We were spending more than we could afford on car repairs. In our own ways we were both becoming obsessed.

Then he started slipping out at night. He said he was going out for walks because worrying about the pothole situation was affecting his ability to sleep. In the end I followed him,one night, across the empty city to SH 16 near the Brigham Creek roundabout.

 From the cover of some roadside shrubbery I watched him take a can from his pocket and spray the road. I ran across to him and he nearly had a heart attack. I thought you were the police, he said. We stood side by side looking down at his work, a green penis surrounding a large pothole. Back home, in bed, he said that it made him feel better to achieve something rather than nothing.

At least he’d found his voice, I said.

Months later I was sitting in a café with a notebook in front of me waiting for inspiration. I picked up a copy of the local newspaper which someone had left. There it was: Possibility of prosecution for pothole penis painter.

Here was my inspiration, my chance to shake off the ghost of Katherine Mansfield, to get in touch with reality and write a truly contemporary story in my own contemporary voice.

As far as I knew she had never mentioned potholes or penises. Well, certainly not penises.