because they used to say that money has no smell that was because one smart dude of an emperor by the name of Vespasian introduced tax on urine collected from the public urinals and then widely used in bleaching clothes or treating leather. The story goes that the emperor’s son objected the tax and Vespasian brought some gold coins to his nose and asked what they smell like. No smell, answered the youngster and his triumphant father said, Yet it comes from urine. You can substitute urine with anything like drugs, weapons, prostitution, bribe, curruption, it still will be Pecunia non olet, money has no smell or even better money doesn’t stink. That’s what you think when we talk money, Elizabeth, and you want to puke, and you are full of despise because you are young, rebellious and like every young person you want to change this world for better and for a start you think that money is evil, money is behind every injustice. You side with the poor, the abused, the mothers with dried breast milk, the homeless, the ones not ready to compromise in the name of getting somewhere, the ones who refuse the modern slavery of nine to five, the ones who doesn’t sign contracts for the privilege to be sucked dry for life by banks, credit institutions and the likes so they can have a roof over their heads and a car to drive from home to work and back. What you dream of is freedom and a simple and healthy life in nature, you want to travel and you want to love but most of all you want your time for yourself and you don’t want to worry about bills. You want to spend your days synchronized to your moods and you want to make a point that your life belongs to you.
To be honest, Elizabeth, you look like something that even the cat wouldn’t drag home. With all my respect I can understand this. You have been through so much lately with everything that happened and couldn’t be undone in your young life. But it’s time you pulled up your socks up and made a life for yourself if you don’t want to finish with a severe depression in a suicide-prone protocol.
Watching you, always keeping my watch guard pose, I hoped you could scrape the leftover of energy that’s still in you and make some decisions concerning your health, love life and financial situation. Mainly your financial situation which could resonate beneficially on everything else that now looks stagnated and hopeless. But it’s not happening. So I am here to help. Remember me, Liam, your little friend who once you wanted to snitch from the Dubbo zoo? The little scruffy meerkat you fell in love with some twenty years ago when you were a little girl and your mum and dad were together, happily married. A happy family tavelling all the way down from Brisbane to the Western Plains, paying crazy money to sleep in a lodge with a panic button in case a cranky lion decided to pay you a visit. Your dad loved the loins and your mum loved the zebras because they reminded her of piano keys but all you wanted was to stay in the meerkats’ enclosure and feed me under the watchful eyes of my important family. Each one of them standing straight and alert as if we were not in Dubbo but in the Kalahari desert where we came from with the knowledge how to deal with predators. Unintentionally we have swapped the wild life of freedom and insecurity, life full of danger and thrill with a life in a zoo where I was fed regularly, looked after and even immunized, the only thing required from me to perform my little act standing tall on my hinder legs and entertain dudes like you and your parents paying money to see me. See I was earning my secure living but have lost my freedom and the thrill of fights and foraging that comes with it. Sorry to say but your parents were already showing the first cracks of incompatibility and it was you like a little fairy dancing between them, the only link left, but not enough to keep them together.
Don’t look around, Elizabeth, you are not going to see me perching on your desk or foraging for snakes outside in the garden once blooming, now covered in weeds. Why don’t you pluck the weeds by the way? The only place we meet is the virtual world of your child’s memory. You introduced me during one of those long and boring sessions with the beautiful Indian-born psychiatrist of yours, Amruta. She asked you what that only thing that you would love to hold and never let go was. Your answer rattled her and she talked about girls’ crushes on sexy late personalities like Elvis bringing her own experience by telling you how as a teen she was sleeping with his portrait under her pillow. A looker, wasn’t he? You said no, Liam is an animal, which cooled her down but send her brows high, touching her glossy black mane. You told her how you held me tight and I scratched you knee, how you wanted to take me home and the keeper finally had enough of you and prodded you out of the enclosure. You said to your father that you wanted to stay another day at the zoo so you could still be with me, your first innocent crush, but your father was disappointed with your pick of an animal and bluntly refused. He said he brought you to the zoo in the hope that you rub off the wild and raw magnetism of big and powerful animals and never expected that his daughter would settle for a mangy and insignificant meerkat like me, not even a cat but meErelya cat. You cried and your mother cried with you under the disgusted gaze of your father who hated sentimentality and shared the belief that women were not capable of anything else being blind to the importance of power and money. He was busy building fortune and career so your education as everything else was left in the hands of your mother.
Your mother’s hands…
ELIZABETH
Playing the piano with one hand was my mother’s way of expressing her loneliness.
From a distance measured in umbilical cords, I watched her sway dreamily into something mythical, half-fairy, half-music, the chimes of the long-case clock you were was so afraid of, rupturing the melancholy. Balancing on a taboret, occasionally, your mother moved the clock hands at a whim and the chimes merged as she composed her own music, the clock another instrument transcribing her grief.
“You know, Elizabeth,” she would say. “Beethoven also created pieces for mechanical clock.”
He was also there, a heavy noise churner, a loud boisterous talker, coughing, grunting, snorting, slamming doors, trumping around with the thundering steps of a gargantuan man who loved his roast rare, his wine the red of bull blood, his arrogance satirical , his belief in the power of money obsessive. The father. His smell, acidy and pungent, not unlike that of the bull Mastiffs he kept locked up and hungry for his hunting adventures, was scary, wasn’t it?
During the day when the father was away, I could follow my mother and was allowed into her room, where I could sit and watch her delicately tap cream into and gently massage her small bony hands or giving them a nervous rub, fearing that one day they might cramp on her, leaving her without the only enjoyment she had, touching, caressing the piano, merging with the abundance of harmonised sounds from a beautiful yet unattainable world of happiness and freedom. She wanted to give me piano lessons, hoping that I might follow in her shoes, but the father was prepared for it and the ban came with a categorical fierceness I was to stay away from what he called “her piano madness”.
A graphite vase in the shape of an art-deco stylised amphora held a bouquet of off-white artificial flowers on the piano’s top. The flowers represented someone’s idea of lilies or tulips, or both, the stems wiry, thin, the leaves long and oval, the off-white petals made of crispy yet dull material. I wondered what those dead flowers were doing there next to the portrait of Franz Liszt in his late years. He looked to me more like a sorcerer than a composer, the white strawy hair, the long, misshaped nose hanging over a clamp-like mouth, the warty wrinkled face. The portrait, frightening as it was, revealed to me that old age was a lethal thing; Liszt was like a messenger of death and I couldn’t wait to see my father who was quite older than my mother succumbing to it so I and her could continue their journey into her piano madness without him.
The artificial flowers and their deadliness were in full contrast with the father’s desk ornaments, acquired mostly through antiquity auctions. The objects had a poignant masculine quality about them, a life and dynamics of their own. A miniature sculpture called guns and games representing a coarse metal hook on a stand, a set of knives and a rifle hanging from it along with several dead ducks and pheasants, a retriever at the base of this bronze miniature looking proudly at the catch. A glass top box with ancient Roman coins, (my mother had once sighed, money can’t buy anything for the soul). A collection of silver-capped liquor crystal decants. A sand watch I liked to play with by turning it upside down, watching in awe the fine sand grains travel through the narrow throat. It was a simple glass thing on a square-shaped stand with Tempus fugit written on it.
“Time flies,” my father