Stumps

I have a stump for a left arm but this story is nothing to do with that—not to do with the diabetic rot that set in and got control before I understood, before the doctors could act and save it. I am, I admit, as I have made myself. And now my late middle age is in accordance with . . .

Nor is it a story to do with the treated stumps houses around her sit on.

Nor is it to do with the paintings I saw while wandering through the art gallery last week—Fred Williams's upturned and rooted-out stumps, burning stumps, the stumps of clearing—but rather a stump, a tree stump, in a suburban backyard thirty years ago; a moment of mutual awareness, of clarity.

The stump of a very old and majestic tree that was felled bit by bit over years until all that was left was a poisoned, abused, and killed stump with roots set outwards like a clasp and deep like an anchor. I thought of it as the Stump of Revenge as I sat on it many a visit, drinking hard liquor. Its 'owner', a friend of mine from school days, offered me a bag of pot to help him finally remove it once and for all from his back garden. After all those times we'd spent sitting on it, raving on about how fucked up the universe is. After all the years of its grotesque fossilisation. It seemed perverse to excise it. But he was set on ridding his life of the stump.

Alan had scored another girlfriend thirty years his junior. And that was why he popped the question—made the proposal—regarding the almost impossible stump extraction. I knew there'd be no going back—the process had been set inexorably in motion.

It's a professional job, mate, I said. Nah, he went on as usual. Nah, we can do it easy. Take five blokes, I said. Nah! he yelled. His missus called out from the kitchen, saying, Stop that barking in there! How can I cook up a feed if you're barking in there! We all had the munchies—this was Alan's own crop we were smoking. We kept our voices down.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Alan didn't respect me, but I often wondered. He blamed me for my own stump, he said I lived in a land of make-believe, what with my interest in art cinema and nineteenth-century Australian art. He told each girlfriend that I was his bohemian mate from school—never done an honest day's work . . . lives off an inheritance or somethin' . . . Then he'd laugh about most of that inheritance ending up in his pocket for dope or the pubs' pockets or the bottle shops' pockets.

I had always wondered if he actually liked me or if I was just a curio to wheel out in front of his girlfriends, who mostly took to me and who he'd say he handed on when they ended up moving out at my place in The Hills for a few months. To tell the truth, most of his girlfriends couldn't stand me. I can't say why, though he sold me as 'bookish' and 'weird' to them, and as one to watch out for. Watch out for what, my stump? For Beethoven's Third Symphony? For Syd Barrett outtakes? I wasn't sure, but I s'pose I coveted his appeal, his ability to get girls who wouldn't give me a half glance. And some of them were really bright and liked movies and the bush and could talk him around the twist. But they didn't like me. Not completely true . . . this girlfriend, Hannah, did at least give me the time of day. And maybe this is a story about a stump and me and Hannah. I don't know, I just don't know.

Okay, okay Alan, we'll remove the stump. It's such a pity—it's an artefact, nature's glorious sculpture. It says so much about our history...