DIARY – LOVE AT CUMBERSOME CORNER – HEAVY HELEN – PT 14
By Bruce Williams
Walking into the Viceroy, I find Heavy Helen, as ever, in animated conversation. This arvo, it’s with a dark-haired, bright-eyed man at least ten years younger than me. I hear the affection in this man’s voice; the laughter, the intimacy in hers. And I’m almost (or possibly almost almost) jealous.
He says goodbye – he’s off to a gig at the Apollo. He stoops to kiss Helen’s cheek, balancing himself on the arms of her wheelchair. And says – till next time…
Not only is the door not closed, he’s nowhere near opening it, still well within ear-shot, when Helen declares: ‘Thank fuck that’s over!’ Heavy Helen is a fearsome swearer – most of which I’ll leave out, not out of prudery, but because it would play merry fucking hell with my word limit.
Helen wears a Tool tattoo across her left shoulder. She sports a black-dyed mullet, and a smile at once warm and dismissive. She has a generous bosom, which she’s generous with – I’m certain that in her wardrobe of black blouses, not one button hole less than four down from her neck has ever known the touch of a button.
Her legs, amputated at birth above the knee, poke out of black, frey-at-the-hem shorts. The stumps are protected from this Cumbersome winter by grey socks knitted by her mother. One sock has two pom-poms; the other one. Helen’s single concession to prosthetics.
‘I get this all the time,’ she tells me, with a smile that’s kind of warm, but not as warm as the one she’s just faked for Mr dark-and-bright-and-out-the-door. ‘People come up to me as if they know me. Look at me! I stick in people’s minds. They meet me once, twice, then come up half an eternity later and start talking to me like we’re mates. And I’m thinking – I have no idea. I have no idea. Smile and wave! And sooner or late – they piss off!’
Heavy Helen lifts her glass of water and drinks deep and burps loud.
‘It’s about the only time I feel at a disadvantage.’
I head to the bar for my schooner of Carlton, and for a schooner of tap water with a slice of lemon for Helen. Which she accepts without thanks. And she raises an eyebrow as I raise my beer to my lips.
Helen feels superior. Is superior. To those who choose organic substances to change their mood.
She comes to the Viceroy wired from two, fat pipes of speed: drinks water with lemon, and bets on the trots. She just loves to see those tiny guys smacking the shiny rumps bay geldings and pinto mares. Go! she calls Go! Go! Gooooooooo!
At the circular table at the Viceroy, Helen taps her nose out of habit, and I sip my beer out of habit.
‘Human ingenuity,’ she told me once, ‘that’s what leads to a healthy person. Not stuff that ferments in a bucket, or grows out of a pile of shit! Stuff that’s made of molecules manufactured because each one is the right one to be just where it is – that’s what makes a healthy person.”
Human ingenuity, like the Aspire electric wheelchair she currently rides upon, or the Feeldoe dildo, the world’s first strapless strap-on: ‘Designed by women, for women’, which Helen swears by and would never travel without.
Helen drinks her water and smiles at me. She says, ‘It’s wonderful so see you.’ But she’s lying. She knows that I know.
Helen is already glancing about for someone else to talk to. She does not love me today. I will not love her tomorrow.
In Cumbersome, what comes around, goes around. And around, and around, and around.
