Confessions of a Tim Tam hostage

We had a succession of cleaning ladies when I was growing up. They were both big game and a big game to me, and I hunted them around our house with water pistol, peashooter and cap gun. Year after year they were shot for lions, buffalo, gorillas, Comanches, Nazis and burglars, and I metaphorically mounted their hair-curlered heads and hung them in our hall.

When our own kids were little Sarah and I employed a cleaning lady named Anthea who came every Tuesday. She didn’t cost much and seemed happy enough to pretend to clean for a few hours. It wasn’t onerous work - Sarah always cleaned the house on Monday night, before Anthea arrived on Tuesday, so she wouldn’t think us lazy and foul.

My mistreatment of my childhood cleaning ladies left me awkward and ashamed in Anthea’s presence. I was younger, fitter, with better eyesight and a keener awareness of germ theory than she, and guilt forced me to retreat into my study whenever she showed up. I wasn’t writing much then, having become disenchanted with the Australian literary world - an environment as particular to one type of mind as a spider web is to its host. I’d just realised it’s all the same book. Each rhapsodised new novel is the same woke registry of grievance as the last.

I took shelter at my desk as Anthea smoked her half-dozen cigarettes out in my garden. And while it would speak well of me to tell you this pastoral scene of a worker at smoko, at rest, contemplating life’s oscillations, gratified me - in truth, paying her to suck down Winnie Blues grated. But Anthea knew she had me. From day one she’d recognised how uneasy I was with the whole employer/employee dynamic, what a reluctant boss I was. Most Tuesdays I’d brew Earl Grey, and she’d sit at my kitchen bench drinking it while defaming her layabout daughter. Except the Tuesdays when she brought the defamed layabout daughter along - a figure who had become so folkloric to me, it was like being in the presence of Chopper Read. This devotedly sullen teen would lie on my sofa racially vilifying the Mario Brothers while her mother smoked in my garden. Nothing much was being cleaned... or written.

I don’t know if Anthea was sourcing invalids from some last-chance labour hire facility to enhance my shame at being a boss, but one day she showed up with an assistant, an old guy with a hole in his throat. As he wheezily mopped my floors I fled to the study, where I blocked my ears, fearing the sound of him crashing to the floorboards whereupon I’d have to deliver mouth-to-throat resuscitation. All the following week I dreaded this frail, neck-breathing Methuselah would turn up again to labour away while I hid with my head in my hands, but he never reappeared.

Instead, Anthea developed a nasty addiction. One morning there came a timid knock on my study door. “Hello Anson? Sorry to interrupt. I know you’re beavering away at your potboilers in there. Do you mind if I have a Tim Tam? Only, I didn’t have any breakfast.” Anthea had the morphology of an oil drum, and the lack of breakfast, if true, seemed good policy to me.