Rickshaw

_______ Shet stopped by the next NewsFeed post she came to and stood for a moment trying to get a glimpse of what was on. She didn’t want to push through to the front for a closer view, happy to hang back and see what she could. She timed it and after five minutes, without seeing her face, she set off again looking for a rickshaw. She hailed the first one to go past.

The canopy was a sophisticated solar panel that charged a battery that drove a tiny engine. On a good day some drivers didn’t need to pedal at all.

“I need you to take me to the SpacePort interchange,” said Shet climbing into the pack.
The driver looked at her strangely. He didn’t relish the idea of having to actually pedal most of the way there and back. At 2pm in the afternoon there wasn’t enough charge to get him there and back on the battery.

“Why don’t you just jump on the Solarail out there ma’am.”
“Because it’s a beautiful day and I have some money to burn. And the customer is always correct.”
“If that’s what you want ma’am, who am I to blow off a huge fare in the middle of the day.”
He began to peddle, pulling out into the deserted street heading westwards to connect with the former Western Freeway, to follow the Solarail out to the interchange.

Shet was glad that she had chosen rickshaw to get to the Interchange rather than the Solarail. The Solarail would have got her there in less than 15 minutes. At the current pace it would be at least half an hour before the rickshaw pulled into the Interchange, the driving gagging and struggling to catch his breathe.

The breeze caressed and tousled her hair. The gentle rocking motion of the rickshaw was soothing. Her mind calmed. She needed that. Her whole world had been turned upside down in the same time that it would have taken to have been wined and dined at the Polo Club … and then told that she could still not be given the job. She was used to methodically plotting her course through life. On the moon you didn’t leave things to chance. Leaving things to chance meant death. You checked your distances, you doubled checked your oxygen supply. You planned each job down to the second. You considered and brainstormed salutations to all problems. You thought about and countered potential hazards. Time wasn’t forgiving. If you screwed up, if it took longer than anticipated, if you broke down, got injured there was only so much time and so much oxygen. Then you died. And that made her feel safe, secure.

She’d never had a major incident under her command and she’d certainly never lost a man. She couldn’t say that she’d ever lost a woman … she’d never taken a woman up with her. She’d never given a woman a chance. There had been plenty to choose from, a steady stream of confident, talented and ambitious women coming through and she’d said no to everyone of them. Just what were they willing to sacrifice. Were they willing to make the sacrifices that she had made. She’d decided no, without even asking them. When it came down to it, she was cut from exactly the same fabric as Tennyson.

No job for a woman.

Yet she was confident that she could go into the Polo Club and convince him that she was capable – that she was the only one for the job. That as a woman she could do it. But was she even a woman any more? She never thought of herself in terms of being a woman. She thought of herself as Shet Harmon.

She sat there in the rickshaw, in her crumpled and sweat dampened Chanel suit and wondered who she actually was. Man or woman – or something in between that made even less sense to her. And why did everything have to be reduced down to biology. What ever happened to persona merit.

Now was not the time to get herself into a complicated philosophical debate that ultimately would provide no more answers than she had now, but would twist her mental processes up into knots, cloud her thinking. She needed to think clearly and she needed to think quickly.

She was about to gatecrash the Directorship of her sworn professional enemies. Wasn’t Langely just going to love that? If felt oh so wrong, but oh so right. It gave her a thrill unlike anything she had experience in a long time – since landing on the moon for the first time … since leading a deployment for the first time?

And not only that, she was going to demand that they choose her to go make first contact with aliens on another planet. She was going to insist on being part of a project that didn’t even exist.

Why? Why did she want this so badly, when 24 hours earlier she was chaffing to get back to the Moon, to get back to her team and the end of the project. Why was she ready to give up the accolades that were her due after two years of careful planning, of hard work, of going where no one had gone before to do a job that no one had ever done before.

And that was it. Establishing the Helium-3 mine and overseeing production was never going to make her happy. Her ambitions were currently sated but within a year she would be a manager, behind a desk, running and trouble shooting schedules, transports …

A slow lunar death. She was an adventurer. She pushed boundaries and went places that others were too timid to go.

The fact that it would piss off Tennyson – one of the most powerful, ambitious and well loved men of the Post Apocalyptic period, was just icing on the cake. She was glad that it was straight in her head. Chasing this project was about her, it wasn’t about Tennyson. Because at the end of the day, potentially marooned light years from home she had to drawn on her own individual strength and conviction, not spite for Tennyson.

How she had got herself on a course to undermine and trade blows with a man she had successfully ignored for the past decade was something she had all the time to ponder. To wonder exactly who it was he saw when he opened that door

Creative Carnival: Fugue

The year is some time in the not to distant future. My main character, Shet Harmon - a lunar geologist and engineer, has been summonsed back from an important scientific project on the Moon to meet with the Mayor of New Brisbane about the confidential project that she's been nominated for. Arriving back on Earth the meeting is cancelled, leaving Shet rather pissed off.

In this scene she is returning from a day out driving her car (cars are banned and only an elite group of people have the money to possess and run one as a hobby!) and has been goaded into a rescheduled meeting with the Mayor by his advisor after being told the Mayor refuses to have her onboard because she's a woman. Shet gets on the Solarail and is 'chatted up' by the only other guy in the carriage.

WARNING - this entry contains strong language so if you're offended by such language, best you don't continue on reading!

He half stood as if to move to sit next to her. Shet grabbed her bag and dumped it on the seat beside her, shooting him a challenging look.

“You got a boyfriend?” Shet ignored him, toying with the idea of plugging in her music. “Hey little lady, I’m talking to you. You got a boyfriend.”

Shet played with the idea of telling him she had a girlfriend, but guessed it would just incite him further. “Actually I am a long way from home. I’m normally based on the moon.” At short notice it was the best diversion she had. She’d never been one to have those snapping comments that put people right back in their place.
“Yeah right little lady. Sure you work on the moon.”

He adjusted his crotch with little regard for decency and then spread his legs wide – resting his elbows on his thighs, planting his chin on his hands and staring at her.
“Didn’t your Mum tell you it was rude to stare?” Shet felt it start to build inside her and tried to fight it, to deep breathe it away.

He kept his eyes fixed on her, trying to zero in on her cleavage even though she had a tattered hoodie on. She kept breathing and avoided looking at him.
“I’m not talking about my Mumma little lady. You wanna talk about your Mumma?”
Inside something snapped.
“You know fuckwitt. I’d drop you in an instant if I wanted to. And you are really pissing me off.”
“Yeah right little lady. You look about as dangerous as a fly.”

She looked away, as panic raced through her eyes. She’d have to get off at the next stop and walk back to her apartment. If she hurried she’d make it back before curfew and without arousing the suspicions of the Night Watchmen. The blood began to pound in her ears. Her vision narrowed and she became more acutely aware of the fetid body odour of the pervert across from her and the rich smell of oil. Looking around the carriage she saw that it was just the two of them. There were closed circuit cameras recording every inch of the carriage, on a direct feed back to a control room in the BIP. The TransitCounter had logged the two of them getting on, the time, the location and their citizen number. It placed her on the train.

She groped with one hand for the strap of her bag as an automated voice announced the next station.

They were back in the city limits.

“You don’t have a boyfriend do you little lady. You’re wound up tight – need a good fuck that’s what your problem is?” Shet kept breathing, the blood was thundering in her ears now, her muscles tense with anticipation.

“It’s that damn chip in your brain. All you damn women and that chip.” Her pupils narrowed and there was a sour, dry taste in her mouth. She willed him to shut up. To just shut the fuck up - for his own sake.

The automated voice announced their arrival and the doors opened. Shet never understood why they always automatically opened but this once was relieved to see them slide open of their own free will. Grabbing her bag tight to her chest and launching herself from the seat in one fluid movement, she ran past the sexual prowler who mistimed his lurch, fingers brushing her arm as she flew past him and out on onto the platform. She prayed that he was sensible, that he stayed on the train, but she heard with shocking clarity the footfall of his heavy boots on the concrete behind her. The platforms were all unmanned and unlit beyond 10 metres. She looked up at the camera and saw as she ran past that the light on the camera was red. It was inactive.

The sound of blood forcing itself through her ears drowned out anything else, and she ran, out into the darkness, taking the stairs from the platform three at a time down onto the parkway. Her assailant was faster than she’d given him credit for. But she hadn’t actually sized him up. Racing out onto the parkway she jettisoned her bag, needing both her hands. Any sense of logic had gone, overwhelmed by the black haze.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she tried to put some distance between them. She saw a pole ahead, heard the crack of the advertising banner as the wind caught the material. She took the risk of slowing enough to gauge his distance behind her, and changed her course ever so slightly, her muscles obeying with power and agility. As the pole approached she jumped out to grab it, feeling her arms snap as they took up the momentum and she swung her legs around, bracing with her abdominals and pulled the pole close into her chest to maximise the power of the impact.

Her legs whipped around, horizontal to the ground and her feet crashed into his chest, propelling him backwards. Shet let go of the pole and they moved together through the air, Shet landing crouched over him. Before he could move, register what had just happened, she clenched her fist and jabbed it into his throat, hearing the satisfying crunch of her knuckles crushing his wind pipe. His eyes wide open in disbelief locked into hers and she held them as his body twitched, then went limp. She felt numb … empty ... automatic.

With calculated precision, Shet pulled down the sleeve of her shirt, the one she hadn’t used to soak up the sweat and checked for a pulse. Then she stood, tracked back to where she had thrown her bag, using her hands in the darkness to check the contents of her bag, and then on hands and knees making a quick visual check of the area to ensure nothing that could identify her had fallen out. She stood, surveyed the immediate area, and satisfied that she was still alone, she did some slow stretches to help her muscles cool and her breathing to return to normal. Everything was silent, the rush of blood gone. A night bird twittered nearby. She pulled the backpack over her shoulders and turned the station without a second glance backwards at the dark shape lying on the path behind.

Later, lounging on her king sized bed naked, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, Shet sipped chamomile tea as her computer booted up. With ease she hacked into the Solarail security stream, located the portion of vision she was looking for and deleted it, set up an alternate string of data to make it look like a camera malfunction, checked the vision from the station and any other cameras in the nearby area then cleaned up her own hacking trail.

_____ The NewsFeed screen flashed up the perpetual string of visual and sound bites that constituted news as Shet chewed on a piece of toast, a note pad covered in scribbled ideas pushed to one side. The meeting with the Mayor was in less than two hours.

She amped up the sound with a voice command when she saw a news item about a body found on a residential parkway on the city limits. There was a visual of a lump, covered in a white sheet with words streamed across the bottom - Violent death of a male linked to other parkway deaths? The Commissioner of The Night Watchmen’s voice was overlaid making a statement to deny that this attack was linked to the spate of violent deaths of women in the area followed by the Chief Executive Officer of Solarail commenting that the security system was not working at the time. A viewer commented via text transfer that maybe he was the perp of the other crimes and he’d obviously got what was coming to him. She certainly hoped so.

Shet couldn't remember New Brisbane being such a violent place the last time she was back from the Moon. She was glad that she knew some martial arts to keep herself safe, but she'd be glad to be back on the moon.

Reaching for the second piece of toast, Shet took huge bite out of one corner and stared at the screen. It was happening again. It was as though she was meant to remember something, know something ... a niggling sense in the back of her consciousness, the feeling of something on the tip of her tongue. When nothing came to her, she shrugged her shoulders, took another bite of her toast and glanced down at the points she’d made on the notepad in preparation for the meeting.

KEEP CALM … DO NOT LOSE YOUR TEMPER! .... even if you think the guy is a fuckwitt and you didn't vote for him.

A trip of destiny: Jeff and Abby

It's election night and Abby is about to realise that trusting in the Universe brings things to fruition in a way in which you would never believe ...

In the moonlight she stripped off her long purple strapless batik dress and threw it over one of the wooden outdoor chairs. Quietly opening and closing the gate she stood for a moment on the edge of the deep end before diving confidently in the water. The moon was full and luminescent above her. Instead of swimming mindless from end to end, she floated on her back and stared up at the moon, marvelling at the depth of originality in its surface and how it seemed to morph and change the more she stared at it. The Chinese believed that it wasn’t a man in the moon, but a rabbit. She could see the Rabbit, she could see the man and she could even see what she thought was the Sea of Tranquillity.

“The arms of Orion that's where I wanna be
Since you’ve been gone
I've been searching for a lover
In the Sea of Tranquility
I'm drowning without you here, my dear”

Her eyes stung with the first prickling of tears. It had been years since she’d last heard that Prince song. Immediately she is transported back to a queen sized bed, in a room that smelt like a combination of Kouros after shave and stale sweat from the king gee workclothes scattered across the floor. Above her the thin lace curtains billowed out over her head, as a warm breeze gusted inwards. It was the start of summer and the first storm of the season. The room was lit in weird dark umber and tangerine tones, of the storm smudged dusk. Thunder cracked over head, getting closer each few minutes. Lightning illuminated the room and the two naked bodies on the bed, in brief flashes. On the stereo Prince played as the cataract of sexual tension built, like the storm outside and cascaded through them as they become one in a sweaty heaving mass.

The clink of the gate broke her out of her nostalgia. Diving under the water she swum to the end and broke the surface at the steps expecting to see Cal sitting there. Seeing no one she wondered if she really had heard the gate, or if it were the new next door neighbours indulging in a night swim as well. In the wake of the memory, the water felt ice cold against her hot skin. Looking up at the moon one last time, she climbed slowly out of the pool and walked the few steps over to the pool gate before she realised that the towels that usually hung over the pool fence, were neatly folded by Cal that afternoon and put away in the laundry.

Thankful that the night was warm, she opened the gate and walked under the canvas pergola hoping that the laundry door was still unlocked. Looking about in the hope that someone had left a stray towel behind she saw him sitting there staring at her.

“Nice butt,” he commented in a sarcastic tone. “Too bad I don’t have my camera with me this time.”

Like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, she froze in her naked vulnerability before him.
“Tits a bit on the saggy side.”

She instinctively raised her hands to cup and hide her bare breasts, without taking her eyes off him as the shock of his presence wore off.
“How dare you come into my house,” she finally managed, grabbing the discarded dress from the back of the chair and awkwardly yanking it over her wet body.

“Truth be known it’s actually your back yard. Technically I’m no’ in your house.”
“Don’t be a shit Harrington, just leave or I’ll call my husband down here to get rid of you.”

He laughed in a horrible guffawing manner, that set her skin on edge.
“And he’s no’ going to ask what I’m doin’ here.”
“What are you doing here Harrington?”
“I came to celebrate with you. After all I’m guessin’ that the whole team was here tonight. The delicious Violet Cunningham and all those hippy braless, hair armpitted bitches you call you mates.”
“Just leave Jeff,” smouldered Abby, in a barely contained fashion. “This is my home and I wont have you slagging off at my friend here. OUT!”
“Woooah A-bby” he drawled, relaxing further back into the chair he was sitting in. “As I said I came to celebrate with the team.”

“You’re not part of the team, even in that deluded mind of yours you can’t honestly believe that you in any way contributed to the success of this campaign.”
“Re-ally A-bby. Well lady, that’s where you are wrong.”
“It’s really late at night Jeff, its been a long day and I just want you to leave please.”
“Where’s your hospitality.”
“It fucked off about the same time you let yourself in here uninvited,” she swore, standing with her hands on her hips.
“Well I’m not going until you at the very least offer me a beer and give me a chance to tell you a little story.”

“We’re all out of beer,” lied Abby. “So I guess you’ll just have to be on your way and maybe you can ring for an appointment and we can chat then – like the old mates that we are.”

He reached down beside his seat and lifted one of Cal’s Belgium beers onto the table.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a bottle opener down here?”
Abby reeled at the sight of the beer and the inherent message that it carried – he’d been inside her home. She reached across the table to the waiters friend that had been left downstairs earlier on in the evening and passed it across to him.
“My thanks to the lady of the house,” he mocked, tipping his finger to his eyebrow just as he’d done the night of the debate.

Abby quickly disappeared into the laundry and found a discarded pair of jeans and top to change into, throwing the wet dress into the washing machine. She knew that Harrington was not going to leave until he’d dispensed with whatever story he’d come to tell. She couldn’t risk creating a raucous and bringing Cal down here. Sitting down opposite him, she wrapped her hands around her glass of mineral water.

“Now you’ve got a beer and my undivided attention, please…” she invited, gesturing a welcome with her hands.
“How about we slip on over into the deck chairs. You remember the Addams Family? I always loved Morticia and her moon baking. You reminded me of her floating naked in the pool earlier on.”
“She was my favourite character too,” admited Abby uncomfortably, more than a little disturbed that she had something in common with this person who she detested so intensely.

Laying in the deck chairs under the full moon, Abby remembered what her Mum said about the moon and how the psych-ward was always chock-a-block on a full moon. She was almost certain now that Harrington was mentally unstable – he was not his moody, passive aggressive self though she wasn’t about to be lulled into a false sense of security by his magnanimous disposition. Minutes passed as hours, as they lay there, Abby waiting for Harrington to say something.

“I really pissed my Boss off with you, did you know that Abby,” began Harrington, taking a long swig of beer from the bottle. “You should be greetin’ me with open arms lady. I saved you from inevitable political destruction by taking your money and keepin’ my mouth shut about your little affair with pretty boy footballer.”
“Are you suggesting someone paid you to dig dirt on me.”
“Bingo!”
“Why didn’t you sell it?”
“I could make more money blackmailing. A steady stream of income.”

“Why do you hate me so badly Jeff?” she asked. “I’m pretty sure that I never once did anything to hurt you.”
“It’s not personal A-bby,” he replied, setting the beer down on the paving and staring up at the sky. “I decided a long time ago that I was going to grow up to be the biggest mysoginistic bastard that I could.”
“To be the antithesis of everything that you’re mother wrote and promoted.”
“You know nothing about my mother,” he snapped, sitting up to glare at her.

“You’re mother was Ava Louise. How did she die Jeff?”
“I made her life such a living hell that she didn’t want to be around any longer. I bought up a whole heap of pills, left them lying around in the kitchen and one day she was dead in a pool of her own vomit and shit. Pretty nifty huh?”
“Chas told you about me didn’t he.”
“Now that was pure gold,” he laughed manically, draining the bottle of beer. “I’ll just help myself to another.”

When he came back, he settled back into the deck chair and spent a long time drinking before he said anything.
“I knew about you long before you were anyone. Every weekend durin’ football season Chas would sit there off his tree, and bang on how he was friends with pretty boy footballer. Then he’d bang on about the teacher they had at school with the tight white pants, how they’d all spent three days in detention in your room. How they all wanted to get into your pants and how they all said that you fucked one of them, but no one ever knew who it was.

“He recognised your photo lying on the table. Told me that you were the Miss Paisley.”
“Serendipity,” commented Abby almost believing in some warped fashion that the universe intended for it to be played out this way.

Creative Carnival - Cut and paste

Hauling her suitcase out of the car, Vi was still engaged in an animated phone call with The Enemy, as she was calling them. Abby liked to joke of them being the Spawn of the Devil, just because it appealed to her warped sense of humour, to call the pre-eminent religious political party the antithesis of what they believed themselves to be. So much, she thought for religion and politics be separated in this day and age.

On the second trip to the car, for the pile of newspapers they had been collecting along the way, Vi finally ended the phone call.
“So, what’s the verdict from the God Squad.”
“Really Abby,” chastised Vi. “You shouldn’t say that. Especially in ear shot of anyone who could use it against you.”
“It a carpark in the middle of the country. I think we’re pretty safe. So, is it on?”
“Yep. They agreed and they’ve booked the Town Hall.”

Abby did a little victory dance, with the newspapers in her arms, shuffling around in the gravel.
“Two weekends time, which will give us another two weeks afterwards to repair any of the damage done.”
“Well that’s so much for the vote of confidence,” quipped Abby. “I like my Christians best served up raw with a side serve of humble pie.”
“Abby!”

Abby shrugged in her best nonchalant manner and rolled her eyes.
“I made bookings for dinner at the French Restaurant for tonight. A late booking of 8:00pm if that’s OK. I have some scrap booking to do before bed tonight. So I thought I’d do it now.”
“Sure, I think I might go for a walk. I don’t get to the mountains much.”
“Better go quick, it’ll be dark soon.”
“Unlike you Abby, I’m not scared of the dark.”

“And who told you that!”
“Who do you think.”
“Wil I guess … he’s always my knight in shining armour if we have to go downstairs in the dark. He can’t understand why I’d be scared of the dark.”
“I thought that it was something you grew out of.”
“Apparently not in my case.”
“I hear they halls of the Great House are always lit – they must have known that you’d be making it there someday.”

Abby smiled warmly.

Back in her room, with Mia Dyson playing on the small stereo that she had bought with her, she had a quick shower. As much as she yearned for a long hot, aromatic salt bath, her conscious wouldn’t allow it when there were level five water restrictions. With her hair wrapped in the white Sheridan towel, her favourite grey tracksuit pants and red singlet on, she sat cross legged on the bed. Plugging her mobile in to use it as a modem, she dialled into her savings account and transferred the money over to Harrington; her first payment for his silence. So far he had been true to his word. For a moment, she thought about how she always maintained that she got whatever it was she wanted – yet this time she had paid handsomely for it, both in money lost and time stolen. There was nothing from Hux. No email, no text or phone messages since the weekend.

The strong, single-minded, and selfish part of her was glad that he had obviously finally got the message and disappeared. She had told him at the outset of the campaign that their time together had to stop, though she wasn’t sure if it was a temporary pause or whether it was a proper end. She wasn’t sure though what a proper end meant for their relationship. There had been the naked hiccup the afternoon after her meeting with Harrington, but it had been a moment of weakness on her behalf. She’d been upset and thrown off centre – terrified that her carefully constructed plan would be felled with one foul paragraph from Harrington in any newspaper.

But that was behind them now and she was sticking to the resolution that she’d made in the beginning. Hux was a no go zone during this election campaign. The softer, sentimental, needy part of her missed him with a cavernous ache that threatened to engulf her, if not kept well checked and pigeon holed.

With the secret financial housekeeping done, she turned her attention to the newspapers, to keep herself from dwelling on Hux. For years now she’d been collecting newspaper cuttings from the birth activism that she had been involved in. She found the search, then cut and paste meditative in a way she couldn’t explain - even to Cal who tried hard to understand all of her idiosyncracies. Wil had chosen a new book for the Election. It had a checkered formula one race car on it. She’d suggested the one with fairies but he was insistent on racing car, and the Blu Glue, which was the latest thing he was enthralled with. He asked over and over again how it could be blue when it went on and disappeared when it dried. The wonders of modern science, she’d said and tried to get him to leave it at.

With Mia playing away she switched off to her world and began the slow and methodical process of finding, removing, collecting and then recreating the political landscape again in her book. But it was a landscape of her choosing. She worked from the back to the front of the newspaper, a habit formed from years of following Hux’s career. It had begun back in the days of cutting out the round up from the weekend’s games, when he scored enough goals to rate a mention. She’d followed it as best she could when she was overseas, but the need to cut and paste the growing momentum of his career had gone. Now the focus was on her. For the first time in her adult life she was doing what she wanted to do, and she had her scrap book to prove it.

On the blank pages of the scrap book she pasted the good, having separated it from the bad and the ugly. There were a few references to What Women Want, and her name was mentioned once but nothing more than that. Hux had told her to be careful for what she wished for, and the Harrington incident had told her that. When sending out her affirmations and wishes to the universe, they were framed far more carefully than they used to be.

There was a knock on the door as she pasted the final article in.
“Abby I found the Sunday Mail in the back – thought you might want it. I’ll see you in ten for dinner.”
She tossed the newspaper down on the bed and walked out.

Dressing quickly for dinner, she sat down to flick through the Sunday Mail. She loathed the publication and it had been banned from their home, along with all the commercial TV stations and FM radio. Anything that set the barometer to the lowest common denominator and passed off newstainment for serious journalism deserved boycotting in her books. Vi had told her to get over herself and her high moral ground, because it was publications such as the Sunday Mail that they would exploit to position themselves well in the mainstream population. It felt like selling out to her. Again, Vi had told her to get over herself.

Expecting there to be nothing of any interest, she flicked quickly from the back, stopping briefly at the horoscopes and continued through to the front page. Then it hit her. The headline and the photo … and it was a long time after, through lenses of tears that she forced herself to read the article.

Creative Carnival Extract

...this is an extract from the opening pages of my NaNo novel. The main character, Senator Abby Malone is being interviewed by a well known TV journo. In this extract the interviewer is asking her about her relationships etc....

“I’m not the same person that I was five years ago when I first ran for the Parliament and I’m not the same person that I was two years ago when I was elected to the Senate. But at my core, yes I still carry the same values. I still firmly believe in truth, love, family, community and freedom. How these are expressed in my every day life are perhaps different now, but we’re always growing, learning, evolving and you hope that with every revolution through the spiral that you becoming wiser and stronger.”

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”


“Robert Frost ..” she mused and smiled in recognition of the much loved poem.
“It could pretty much sum up your life to date.”
“I remember the first time I had that poem quoted to me. It was a guy I met online, who was a detective, or so he said, who went off to study law with the US Navy and that was last I ever heard of him. I thought it was all very JAG at the time. But the poem resonated with me. So to answer your question, it could sum up my life to date. I was never content to follow the crowd.”

“Choosing a homebirth definitely fits with the theme of choosing the one less travelled. How has it made all the difference in your life.”
“If I hadn’t chosen to birth at home I wouldn’t be a Senator. In fact, if we’re going to have a sliding door moment, there’s a good chance had I chosen to birth in a hospital I would have returned to study and I might be a psychologist now. I probably would never have experienced a vaginal birth. Who knows.”

“What made you choose to birth at home?”
“I birthed my son at home in 2001 in Brisbane, so it seemed logical to choose to birth my second baby at home.”
“Why the choice the first time.”
“At the time my husband and I chose it because we felt strongly that hospitals weren’t the place for babies to be born – they had and still have strong associations with death and sickness for both of us. We missed the ballot at the Birth Centre, we had no private health insurance so it seemed to us that there really was only one option that suited us, and that was to birth at home.

“As we educated ourselves, we discovered that birthing in a hospital, for a healthy woman with an uncomplicated pregnancy, is dangerous. Medical staff and hospital protocols do not know how to care holistically for a birthing woman. My midwife not only cared for me, in her role as a professional in normal birth, she loved me as a woman in life transition. It’s the Rolls Royce of maternity care, to have an independent midwife, but without the price tag.”
“This time though, there would have been quite a deal of media and public scrutiny of the decision. What if something had have gone wrong?”

“Birth is unpredictable, and the stress that I carried through this pregnancy didn’t make it as easy or as healthy as it could have and should been. It was much harder than my first pregnancy, even taking out that fact that I was older this time around. However, I have an intrinsic trust in birth and so did Jamie and my wonderful midwife. We knew that as people in the public eye we had a really important role in changing the way in which Australian’s view birth. Something like myth busters without the bad goatees and berets.”

The interviewer chuckled and rubbed his chin, waiting for the laughter to subside again.

“Your relationships are rather unconventional. How does a politician and a political satirist team up? Do you make ground rules not to discuss politics at dinner but religion is OK?”

There was more laughter from the audience.

For a moment she turned her head and through the glare of lights sought out the familiar faces sitting in the, wishing that Jamie was up here with her, under scrutiny, holding her hand and offer his support. She wasn’t so sure if she was ready to be grilled about the intricacies of their relationship, of all the relationships in her life.

“On a serious note, your relationship threatened to compromise both of your careers. You can go to Hansard and read about the reactions of your political colleagues in the House. Much was written about it in the media. How do you get through it?”

“How did we get through it? Jamie and I just did. We made a decision that we wanted to be open and honest … we were fed up running around under the cover of night meeting in secret and all the time worried that we would be exposed. We wanted to come out about our relationship on our own terms.”
“You were still married at the time.”
“I am still married,” she corrected matter-of-factly.

“It’s one thing for sexual innuendo to come out about politicians after the fact, in some cases many years after the fact, but its another to do it while still in office. We’ve seen the sex scandals of the British Parliament. How did your husband feel about it?”
“How would you feel Andrew if Jennifer came home one day and said that she wanted to talk to you about your relationship because you had met someone else, but she didn’t want to necessarily end your marriage.”

He shook his head, and thought for a moment ….
“I guess its one of those things that I sincerely hope never happens in our relationship. What did your husband say.”
“He didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t asking for a separation or a divorce … I was asking for some odd kind of time share arrangement. I wanted something that pushed all our boundaries about what we felt comfortable with, how we defined a relationship, of what love is and isn’t … how much we loved each other, and what we would do to ensure each of us were happy. It meant renegotiating all the things we thought we knew, what we trusted and it was hard.