Veedon Fleece
We roll into the Otway ranges at dusk as Putin’s tanks are rolling into Ukraine. So soon after Covid and it feels like the world is ending all over again. But in our little bubble we are on an intense emotional high. The chemistry between us is a wave that keeps cresting. The world unravelling in the background just makes our little bubble feel safer and more special. We follow the detailed instructions my late father’s friend has given me and find the old farm gate high on a hill. Down the bottom of the long drive stands the old farm shed that has been turned into a guest house with big wooden columns and beams filled in with glass and steel. We find the key in its hiding place and open the door. Tess goes in ahead and starts opening windows, but they are old windows that haven’t been opened in years and bits of paint flake off. She tries to close one again, but it gets stuck. I laugh to myself. Tess is always so bull at a gate about everything. We have escaped the city, just the two of us now and we are miles from anyone, we can faintly hear the waves crashing further down the hill. We make a simple dinner, have sex like we do multiple times a day and snuggle up to do some reading.
It's the middle of the night and my car alarm is going off. A jealous fight about our sexual histories has broken out and Tess has decided to sleep in the car. But she’s pressed the wrong button on the keys and now the alarm is blaring. She’s lying down in the back seat pretending it’s not happening.
“Tess, come on, come back inside.”
I plead with her.
“Fuck you, Joe!”
She shouts back.
I go back into the house and the alarm switches off; she must have found the right button. I bury my head under the doona and try to get some sleep, but I can hear her stomping around outside. The door opens. Tess bursts into the house screaming.
“You like fat arses?!? You like fat arses?!?”
I get up out of the bed and I’m standing there in my boxers.
“What’s going on Tess?”
She comes right up to me and grabs my hand and puts it on her small round bum.
“Is that fat enough for you?!?”
“Tess, stop.”
With her other hand she reaches towards my boxers and starts to rub. Involuntarily I become aroused.
“No Tess, stop, I don’t want this.”
She continues to rant about me liking fat arses as she makes me cum. I am crying. She goes back out and sleeps somewhere else.
The next morning, she comes back inside as if nothing has happened, and I make us both coffee.
“So, what are you going to tell your friends now? What? That I raped you?”
“Well Tess, I was screaming no”
We sit there in tense silence then I get up and take the coffee out of her hand. I pick her up, she is half my size, she looks up, her huge green eyes assenting. Wordlessly I walk her over to the old wooden kitchen table and throw her on it face down. She sprawls across it as I pull her pants down and start fucking her. She screams out in pleasure and as I cum this time something deep deep inside me feels like it’s being released, and I fall on top of her shuddering.
I do like fat arses. A couple of years before I had met Nat for lasagne for a first date. We had talked about climate change, and I had said I was quite stressed and scared about it.
“Nothing you can do about it so who gives a shit?”
I had felt my nervous system calm down then. Here was someone less scared than me, maybe she could help me? After the next date we had ended up in book shop and I was staring at her big round arse in blue jeans, while she leafed through books. We ended that date like the first with a peck on the cheek. Afterwards I sent her a text.
“Was nice hanging out with you Nat. I enjoy our conversations. BTW you have a GREAT arse.”
The reply came immediately.
“7 out of 10 date, 11 out of 10 text message”
Soon I was regularly waking up in her share house in the inner north of Melbourne. She was 10 years younger, and the share house was like time travelling for me. 3 women’s assorted products overflowing around the bathroom sink. I was talking to Tess back then, but it was as “friends”, and she was in Northern NSW where she grew up. I would talk to Tess about the one problem with dating Nat, that eventually she wanted to have a baby. I already had two daughters and I had had the snip. I told Tess how I’d told Nat there was a 1% chance I would have vasectomy reversed if I fell madly in love with someone. Nat accepted those odds. Tess was dating an airhead primary school phys-ed teacher with a great body. It seemed like a good healthy friendship between us back then.
I had left the film industry after 15 years and started a new job working on a psych ward as a support worker. It was walking distance from Nat’s place, and I would almost skip to work some mornings after a great night of sex, cuddles, and chats with her. But part of me wasn’t all in. I had reconnected with Tess after seeing an incredibly sexy photo of her with some younger local surfer boys on Instagram. I ignored my intuition and rumours I’d heard about her being unstable and sent a message. We had first hooked up back in 2003 when she was 18 and I was 23. She had walked into cocktail bar on High St Northcote wearing long stripy socks which had always been a fetish of mine. It didn’t amount to much, some fumbling around in her room in the back shed of a share house nearby, and we left it at that. A few years later we ran into each other on a plane to Europe. We swapped seats with someone and cuddled all the way to London. Then we parted ways again.
Nat didn’t know about Tess, but I had lots of female friends and Nat was very level-headed. She told me there was a part of herself “stoic Nat” that always sat high up in the background observing everything. If things went wrong, she would just retreat to that place, so she wasn’t as scared of everything as I was. I was half in and half out of the relationship when the bodies started piling up outside hospitals in Italy and the first lockdown was called in Melbourne. We could choose one “intimate partner”. Suddenly me and Nat were all in. It felt great.
During the lockdowns Nat would make handmade pasta while I doom scrolled. She had bright orange hair she’d had dyed the exact same colour as Jessica Rabbit and a super cute face with chubby cheeks. We saw only our housemates and each other for months, we would have time apart when I was with my kids. It was a calm and happy time when I wasn’t on the internet. Eventually she met my kids who basically blanked her. The had become a bit hardened after meeting JP, my first girlfriend after their mum. She had had a wild domineering ADHD kid, and it was all too much too soon. Now my daughters were leery of any of my so-called girlfriends. But Nat made a real effort which I appreciated.
Every workday she would get up at 6am and do exercise classes online. I tried to join her once and lasted 5 minutes, I was not really looking after myself outside of staying sober. After about 5 months together I decided I was going to tell her I loved her. But the words wouldn’t come out. One of the lockdowns ended and we went down the Mornington Peninsula to meet her parents. Her Dad showed me around the property, with it’s beautiful overflowing garden and we talked about playing cricket, something we both still did.
“It was never about the premierships or the individual awards, (I’ve won the bowling averages six times), it was all about the friendships I made”.
He said to me. Nat told me it was the first time she’d brought a man home. Previously it had just been boys. Her parents made a real effort to impress me and I was touched. That night more of her family came over and they all got drunk. Having not had a drink in 4 years, thanks to a huge amount of hard work, I excused myself and went to bed early. They seemed like decent people. My new in-laws perhaps? It seemed hard to conceive of.
After a month of trying to say “I love you” to Nat I ended things abruptly. The next day she called me in tears and I went over there in my cricket whites, telling the captain on the way that I’d be late to the game. I sat there on the bed as she cried and cried. Her face went all puffy. I tried to access the correct emotion, but I just felt numb. Why had I done this to this lovely person? I should never have said there was any chance I would have another kid. We should have left it at lasagne and climate anxiety. I felt like a monster for not feeling anything as she cried. I was only 10 minutes late for cricket.
Within a month of that breakup Tess and I were messaging every day. We discovered a lost Van Morrison album called Veedon Fleece and played it non-stop thousands of K’s apart. The phys-ed teacher would take her on weekends away and let her drive his 4WD which she loved. I stayed on the dating apps. Eventually the phys-ed teacher fell by the wayside and everyone I was chatting to on the apps paled in comparison to my chats with Tess. We started having long chats on the phone and I asked her to start at the start and tell me her whole life story. I would walk by big black dog along the creek near my house in Melbourne’s grimy western suburbs with my air pods in and ask her question after question. I could tell this was an unusual experience for her. It felt like we were falling in love over the phone, but for me it also seemed like somewhat of a game. A game I was winning.
Soon enough she booked a flight to Melbourne, and she appeared from behind a row of cars on a busy inner-city street. She was tiny, with huge breasts filling out a band t shirt and cut off denim shorts. I gulped. I’d forgotten about the wildness in her eyes. It was intoxicating. We drove down the Surf Coast to Point Addis and walked along the beach. She wouldn’t let me touch her or kiss her. It was both thrilling and maddening to have so much tension between us. She was now winning the game. I took photos of her in scrub behind the beach. She looked beyond perfect to me. That trip she stayed with friends and nothing physical happened between us. Long distance continued and then she came back to Melbourne. This time when I saw her, I felt a deep unease. We had a coffee, and something told me she was a really unsafe person for me. I called the whole thing off, but a few nights later she texted to say she knew things weren’t going work out but why don’t we just have sex? The moment she arrived at my house led her into my room by one hand, threw her down on the bed and ripped her pants off. She came in my mouth within two minutes. That would be the first of many times that would happen over the next 6 months. I had gone against my deepest intuition. Walked into the fire.
We are driving down the expressway towards Sydney. I have one hand on the steering wheel and one hand in Tess’ pants as I sit on 113. She looks angry and stares straight ahead while I finger her. This goes on for 30 minutes.
“Pull over”
She barks. I find take the next exit and we find a rest stop. She commands me into the backseat and jumps on top of me. It’s angry sex. Out of control. When it’s over says she’s driving now and careens out onto the 5-lane expressway. I’m terrified. She tries to adjust the seat and rear-view mirror for her tiny body at the same time and has to swerve violently around another car. I can’t convince her to slow down, she seems possessed. We make it into Sydney, my knuckles are white from gripping the car door, but the traffic banks up and the car slows down. Within an hour we are swimming at the stunning Balmoral beach in crisp late afternoon light and taking selfies like the happy couple we sometimes imagine ourselves to be. That night we stay at her sister’s house. She is younger and more beautiful than Tess and seems kind of afraid of her. Early the next morning I drop Tess at the airport and go to give her a hug. That is too intimate for her, and she pushes me away and says:
“High five?”
I meekly ascent to this distancing, give her a half-hearted high five, get back in the car and watch her walk away in her denim shorts and cowboy hat. She doesn’t look back. As I start to head out of Sydney and south down the coast a feeling of freedom washes over me. What strange spell have I been under? I pull into a lookout and stare out over ocean; it’s a stunning sparkling day and bright yellow beaches stretch south along the coast, boats dot the glimmering water. I’m a free man now. I don’t know when I will see her again, and this fills me with elation and relief. I get back in my big black Commodore wagon, put on Veedon Fleece and gun it down south towards Melbourne. The song is about the search for a mythical object that will answer and resolve everything. An emptiness starts to open inside me. A kind of gnawing ache. She’ll be landing in Alice Spring in an hour, maybe I’ll just send her one text, what harm can it do?