I phone her and she's delighted to hear from me, asks me over and though it's been over 20 years we just talk and talk and talk. So much shared history. Both of us born in 1943, the vanguard of the baby-boomers; both ex-nurses, single now; both struggling with clutter of both a domestic and a historical nature. She was the nurse in the labour ward when I had my first baby, at seven in the evening on 27 February 1968. She was kindness itself.

Historical, herstorytell. She's stayed here, in this pretty hinterland area an hour or two from the city; whereas I escaped and have just come back, tail between my legs (keeps your pink bits warm though) because I'd run out of options, it seemed. Well, options that I could stand, anyway. I sometimes look at women who've stayed with their husbands and careers and I wonder, what is the price of their comfort and security?

You get that. I do anyway, nearly every time. I'm living in this shed on my son and daughter-in-law's property, and lucky that my son is building me a little place here, but I don't quite fit in this area of relative affluence.

Even so I tell some of my stories with a laugh, though I do get some shocked looks and changing of subject. Whereas this poor love is still licking her wounds from her one true love, who I remember way back kept leaving her then coming back, leaving again with mouthfuls of accusations against her that some apparently still believe. J became, from what she tells me, a broken-down alcoholic schizophrenic with leukaemia. It was the pot, she said, some people just shouldn't have it. But her ex-father-in-law still won't let her near him ('he's OK as long as he keeps away from you').

Misguided bloody arsehole.

I can see why so many people have got angry on my behalf, when they've heard me tell of this predicament or that. I hear myself in her, that gentle voice with the question in it, the plaintive why?, the small quiet shock that grows as you find yourself on a beach with the tide going out, dumped by the big lively sea. Still more or less sound, as you look at yourself; not too scarred by your relationshipwrecks; plenty to offer, yet there you are, a bleaching old bit of flotsam in the eyes of the beachcombers. I am angry that after all this time, all her efforts, being a single mum to kids who believed his version of it all, hanging in there in the very place of her humiliation, running tuckshops and local markets while the locals lopped at this poppy who could have been tall - oh yes, brains there all right, it takes brains to get depressed doesn't it, just going off to the pokies or whatever doesn't work, oh no you've got this keen mind and it has to stew and chew and because of innate loving kindness you don't blame others so it has to have been your fault. I am angry to hear her still questioning in this way.

But it's hard to know what it is that's making me angry. I am angry with whatever it is that lets her, and me, at this stage of our lives, still be struggling with not enough money, unwashed dishes, an unmade bed, an unquiet mind. We talk, we analyse via various modes: social, gender, astrological, psychological, Buddhist. We speak these languages. The answer lies in all of them and then some, we decide.

Everything we say leads to more things to say. I forget what led to Beethoven. Ah, it was Tracy.
- Have you met up with T at all, since you've been back? she asks. Do you remember her?
- Slight, dark-haired, Scorpio?
- That sounds like her.
Another story starts welling up, then I decide to leave it. I merely comment on the night in the Littleton pub, the Twenties night, when I was there with my husband all dressed up Twenties style and T was there and I was very naughty indeed. Not with my friend; but to some degree it was her willingness to accommodate my eye for men, to bat with me, that started me on the road to ruin. As my Granny might have put it. Actually I was already on the road: it wasn't T's fault at all.

He did look like Beethoven, in a craggy, pockmarked sort of way. He was there on his own (oh magnet, an unattached man), and had a broody solitary out-of-place look about him. Glasses. Wearing a suit.

As was my husband. He wore a suit I'd found in the op shop, and a wide tie, and a bushy ginger beard, with pipe. Somewhere I have a photo of the two of us taken that night. I am in something black and shiny, sleeveless, a fringe flipping round the bum. Black gloves. Hair scraped back into curls trying to fall to the neck, a band around the forehead. An old black crocheted shawl. It almost worked, the outfit, not that it mattered. But thinking back, fancy dress had got me into trouble before: an outfit I called Ascot 1890, with a long white dress, a fitted black jacket, and a beautiful black hat that you looked out from underneath. A flirting hat. Mother R, as I called her, an Englishwoman and feminine to the core, and a surrogate mother to me for a time, lent me the hat. She told me she'd worn it on a Channel crossing, and how she flirted from under its tilted brim with a young French lieutenant on the boat. The hat was of finest black straw: very little to the crown, with a brim wide enough to balance a pretty face but not overwhelm, and just enough sway in its line to play hide-and-seek with the eyes. I did just that with someone who took my fancy at some party and even though I was there with my husband I ended up in the back of this guy's panel van, or more accurately I ended up creeping home in the wee small hours draggled and sticky with semen and without enough sense to realise I hadn't really enjoyed the sequel to the flirting, even though I'd been complicit.

That's what happened at the Twenties night, too. I was a slow learner. Mind you my mother had never instilled any morality into me, believing as she does to this day that she's 'just not monogamous, and that's all there is to it.'

I think Beethoven was a decent enough fellow. He was probably bowled over to have this woman coming on to him: could you blame him for taking up the chance? I disappeared from the crowded pub with him and we went off somewhere in his ute, and in the passenger seat he put his long skinny dick into me, and I didn't enjoy it but arranged to meet him anyway at a pub in town in a few days' time. When I finally got home that night, about two o'clock in the morning, headachy with grog, cold in those silly clothes, dirty and sticky, my husband was waiting for me. Furious. Understandably. He'd waited for me in the car outside the pub when the do was over, went to sleep, and woke up to find the pub and the street silent and deserted.

I lied:
- I went off to a party. I got a lift home.
- It was a party, in someone's house.
- I was at a party.
The next morning he hid the keys to the car. Wouldn't give them to me. I was supposed to go to college in Brisbane, an hour or so's drive. I badly wanted to go to my class, I begged, I pleaded, he finally gave me the keys in disgust.

I think I still hadn't washed, thinking it would have been a giveaway. Went to my class: late, smelly, hungover, defiant as any teenager. I was about 38 at the time.

I went down to Middleton a few days later, as arranged, to meet Beethoven but got the name of the pub wrong and we both waited in different pubs for an hour or so until he turned up and found me by which time I'd cooled right off. In the mundane light of a Middleton pub at lunchtime it was all different. The town is in the heart of sugar-cane country and, even though this was at a time when hippiedom had penetrated even this far, Nambour was one place you didn't feel right walking round in bare feet, for example.

Beethoven was somewhere in between the extremes of longhaired hippie and square conservative. He'd lost his remote and moody look, and chatted to me in a direct and friendly manner. He was an ordinary, nice enough bloke, not exciting at all. I wasn't in fancy dress any more and as he told me about himself, how he was an electrician, had a block of land somewhere down a valley where he wanted to build and would I like to come and look at it, it all became too normal and I didn't see him again.

I think if my husband had been able to talk to me, engage my interest, things might have been different. Maybe if I'd taken more interest in him ¼ but my mother didn't raise me to look after a man: she taught me to see my father, her husband, as the enemy. I was still, at that stage, comfortable in her mould. I married because she encouraged me to, and because he asked me to, and because we got on well in bed. The photo taken of my husband and myself that night at the pub shows a couple not really connected: there is no animated spark between them. People admired them; they made a nice pair, physically, with names similar enough to be charming; they had a nice property; they had other nice couples to dinner, whose children made friends with their two, a boy and a girl; they seemed ideal.

It was later that same year that I left him, left my comfortable and boring life to go and live in the rainforest with a penniless poet, on the dole. They'd said to me, when I started college, that study put a strain on the marriage. Could I cope? Of course, I said airily, and never gave it another thought. What they didn't talk about was the high of using your mind for something other than meals, and the danger of this to housewives. And when I left it was a matter of days before another of those nice couples split up, a couple who had been close friends of ours, and she went to live with my husband, until he kicked her out. He got her back soon after, it turned out, so he had someone to mind the kids who hadn't come with me (I couldn't afford a decent place) and he kicked her out again when it suited him; she went down to six stone with the humiliation of it. She came to see me a few times, when I was living with the poet in the house I'd bought with the settlement, and she kept saying; thanks for being so nice to me.

I guess I did old Beethoven a favour really, dumping him so quickly; the poet and I had a much harder time of it as we struggled to fulfil the ideal of happilyeverafter. We had about three years of putting our very differing expectations onto each other before I eventually kicked him out. That was back when I still had a house, before another man encouraged me, very subtly, to sell my house and go off sailing with him. And I did, and we got shipwrecked, and I lost money, and so it goes.