9. Look who's being served!

When one door closes, a thousand windows fly open.

I'm an eternal optimist, but standing ankle deep in the ruins of my gallery the night before I close, is devastating.  This is so much more than a retail space.  Its walls are lined with treasures from all over the world.  There are a million man hours that have gone into the making of this collection, from ancient Venetian trade beads to silver dowry pieces from Ethiopia. I've a large collection of research books;  stacks of cds of music from Casablanca to Turkey.  Incense burned every day and it's sweet aroma lingers in the wool carpets.  Wood carvings and totems, Mali masks and prayer beads ensured I was safe from harm.

If only I'd sniffed what was going on under my nose.  If only the totem turned to me and said "Beware the tokolosh that sleeps in your own bed."  If only.

I inherited this shop as an STB - a Sexually Transmitted Business. I'd just returned from a photographic expedition to India, and was mounting an exhibition in Perth.  He worked in a framing shop.  I fell madly in lust with his fabulous biceps and smooth brown skin. He made me laugh. He was a world apart from the powerful movers and shakers I'd been involved with previously.  After a few short weeks he moved in with his ironing board and his Homer Simpson boxer shorts, followed me to Sydney and we started making our own history. In hindsight, I could say he mounted, and I was framed, but ... well ... c'est la vie!

We opened our own gallery. We travelled to India, Bali, Thailand where we bought beads that I made into jewellery. The framing side was ditched, we worked together in the shop for a five years then he went back to Perth, leaving me to deliver this baby at the end of a very very long lease, bawling most of the time, although we were still theoretically together.  I've had the full funfair with this one - the rollercoaster, the chamber of horrors, the ghost train, the goofballs, the ferris wheel, the wall of death .. the whole retail patootie.  I don't want to be with D now - at all, ever again - for I have a deep and annhilating rage at a man that can bail out and leave me to the immensity of the task then ahead and call and tell me about his Saturday sports. Unh huh.

So often, I stood behind that counter dealing with a Difficult Customer, putting on my various hats as a fortune teller, a tour guide, a counsellor, a gemmologist, an instructor, while all I wanted to do was go home in daylight or for a walk or lunch with friends as that customer was doing.  I never wanted to have a shop.  I wanted to be a doctor or a pianist.   My family background and my university training is in journalism, and I chomped at the retail bit every single moment of these past six years, but I stuck it out because in the process I learned a lot about my character and personality, and I learned that every woman's shopping experience is so much more than just choosing an object and paying for it.   Women shop because it's a way of being in touch with other women, of hearing their stories and sharing their joys and sadnesses; much like gathering water from a well.

Being in retail has given me an entirely different perspective of how I treat someone who is "serving" me.  Being behind the counter means you have to have a whole swag more interpersonal skills than being in front of it, waving a credit card for services rendered.   Entering a shop is like entering someone's home:  its their private space,  it's been cleaned for you and you've been made welcome.  When I enter a shop now, I greet the owner, and I make chatty small talk, and I say thanks, and bye, when I leave.

Being "in retail" is a phrase that often elicits sympathy.  Excruciatingly long hours; little down time, the notion that you're working primarily for your landlord or the ATO, and the phone, security and insurance companies.  In the olden days, when I told strangers I was a photojournalist and travelled the world, I held court at whatever tables I sat at or benches I shared.  They were pretty fine hours and interchanges were always meaningful and interesting.  I was treated as an intelligent woman. I commanded a sort of respect.  I had a career and I was obviously educated.  I had had fascinating and dangerous adventures and I was a daredevil and was treated often with a mixture of envy and disbelief, but I was always acknowledged.

But being in retail was a whole different ball game.  No matter my degrees, my world experiences, my background, for a lot of first time customers I was just a probably-illiterate someone to pander to their spare time.  A while ago, someone asked what I did for a living, and I began to explain that I had a bead gallery and I made .... I'd already lost his interest.  A mere shopkeeper, he sniffed, not much between the ears here, even though we'd previously talked about Kant, and Stravinsky, and Rushdie.

Hah!  As I write at six am while the chorus of kookaburras heckle and cackle the neighbourhood awake, with my retail life behind me finally,  I can't help but reflect on the skills gained behind that counter.  Patience. Wisdom. Compassion. Listening skills. The magic of humour. How to open and close deals without having to provide mint tea or threaten through narrowed eyes that my mother would die without the operation this interaction would pay for. How not to be insulted when people manhandle  designs that have taken me hours or days to make, as if they were something the dog dragged in.  How to disassociate their PMT or disappointment with their husbands from my low sugar levels. And how not to be disgruntled by their disdain.

But this is not a litany of complaints.  I wouldn't have traded this very recent, now concluded, experience for anything.  I have had some of the most rewarding encounters of my life, and when so many gorgeous, powerful women came to my farewell cocktail party wearing pieces they'd bought from me, and the room reverberated with laughter, I could look back and say "yes, it was all worth it".  These are my sisters, and they have helped me through this insane time of my life.

So seeing you'll be travelling with me for a while, let me fill you in a little about the other insane times of my life, that got me to here, and to you, and to this adventure.

I was born in Prague to English/South African parents round about 50 or 60 years ago.  Only the passport official needs to know the correct date, but my birth certificate does mention that I had - still have - red hair. It's my prerogative to not let you know how high the cabbage plants were was when I was co-erced into this world as a four pound two ounce papoochka, but if you're diligent, love maths and history, and don't have a life, you could work it out. 

I once lied outright on Facebook about my age and in ten seconds flat my daughter exposed my deceipt via that social network so I ditched her - and her three hundred facebook followers - as my friends. Rumour has it that Paul Robeson the singer was some kind of godfather to me. When I asked my mother why she had me, she replied, "it's what we were supposed to do at the time." And when I asked her if she loved me, she replied "I had you, didn't I?"  And when I asked her to hug me, she replied, "You can't force me to do something I don't want to do." And when I asked her about The Big Fat Secret, she left the room.

Susan Storm Bloom is my real name.  I know Jessica Alba tried to poach it in the Fantastic Four bonanza, but I was really here first.  My parents were Jewish communists, and Bloom was a bit too Jewish and far too unsafe for those times so my father changed their surnames to Storm. The Susan bit came from a family nameplate on a friend's door, and my father thought Susan Storm had a cool ring to it, apparently, especially if I wanted to be a writer, like him.  I've had the Susan bit, all my life, and I still don't like it.  It's a tight name, it has to be said with pursed lips, like prune or solemn; it's not a bright open sound like sex or happiness or smiles.  I'm okay with Sue or Suze or even Maya, but its hard to change a name.  When I married, I disappeared under a surname I didn't like, and after I dug myself of that, I stuck with plain old Susan Storm because I was fed up with all the Bloom schenanigans.   (Yes I'm related - somehow - to Mr O Bloom - big story there - you can gargle, and twit, and farcebook my whole tree if you want.)   Yet I don't write my name as Sue.  It's too hokey.  So you can gather already that I'm pretty messed up with my identity.

After Europe, we lived in Johannesburg where my father worked in Orlando and Alexandria townships as a lawyer and civil rights activist.  We moved to Cape Town where I learned to love mountains, mists, and the mellow fruitfulness of the pine forests and the rolling Atlantic and Indian oceans. I wanted to learn the piano. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be taller. I wanted to be able to play tennis and netball.  My mother the socialite didn't notice this, and my father the socialist sent his money to those more deserving. So I learned Latin and Maths, and Literature, and how to tell the difference between Rachmaninoff and Tretchikoff, and I hated sports with a passion.  

I was a wide eyed, quiet child, compliant too, as I didn't like hidings.    I had two school detentions in my life.  The first for standing obediently in line, waiting to go to morning hymns. The next one,  immediately after, for defending that it was not me who talked. I liked Latin. Pyramus and Thisbe, et al. I hated maths and chemistry. I loved Literature and Geography for the fantasy and the possibility of adventures.  My six year old school report declared:  Loves playing in the sandpit and has a tendency to exaggerate.

We had a bullrushes-lined river near the house in Johannesburg, and a creek in the grounds of our home in Cape Town.  I always played outside, inventing my own fantasy world. I drew lines with a stick in the dust to delineate rooms in my imaginary house, and made little cups out of acorns and beds out of nests that fell from the oak trees.  I wanted idyllic domestic bliss.  I wasn't exaggerating.

In my very early twenties I fell in love with G.  Big Stupendous Love. Tantra and Karma.  That would Last My Whole Life. But that got messed up with the Big Fat Secret.  So I married a nice Jewish Doctor with a Porsche and a violin and a nice brass bed and a nice Jewish Doctor family, and we begat the daughter of dark curls. To escape South African bloodbaths and weekly robberies and my having to learn to use a gun, we emigrated to dessicated Perth where I sobbed for two years because I missed the mountains and the mists. We begat the son of silver hair, and fourteen years were swallowed up in domestic not-so-much-bliss because I was always Doing Something For Someone Else. 

One day I was typing a report on floating faeces for a doctor who later would get a Nobel Prize for his research, but that slim claim to fame didn't deter me.  In mid float, I realised what I was destined to do forever unless I Did Something Drastic. So I Did.  I ripped the report out of the typewriter, resigned on the spot and enrolled in Uni as a Mature Age Something, and I learned All About Media.

And I became a photojournalist.   I travelled the world, met wonderful people and did fabulous things. I won prizes; I shared podiums with fabulously well known photographers and writers. I interviewed people who made me cry with their stories;  I slept in mud huts and paddled dugouts and had breakfast with Desmond Tutu. 

Interspersed with all of this was a series of dangerous liaisons, inappropriate couplings, fear and loathing encounters of the Was I Deranged kind, some mad and wonderful lustings, ridiculous misadventures,  and a heart seriously broken and damaged and trampled on. I never stopped yearning for G. But the Big Fat Secret lurked like a ghost in his bones.

Chapters in my subsequent book will read, for starters: Nightmare on Ridge Street, Fear and Loathing in New South Wales, Dr DoLittle, On Golden Pond, The Spy Who Shagged Me, Goodbye Mr Chips, You've Got Mail, Sliding Doors, My Family and Other Animals, Brokeback Mountain, Guess who's coming to Dinner, The Story of O, Oliver; The Cook, the Child, the Dog and the Lover, Lust, Lies, Caution ... I'll have to be dead before I elaborate on those but you get the picture.

I met D; we started our beads business six years ago.  I stood behind the counter, straining at the bit, standing on my own wings.  I stopped writing and taking photos, although we travelled quite a bit.  I consigned my mother to the flames, I got sick in Africa. I woke up as an orphan, with no colours or true direction in my life, and with a need to be my own person again.  I noticed D was standing on my wings ..  so I stepped aside.

So here I am, on my penultimate day - the shop is almost empty,  and the words are flowing.  Tomorrow begins the packup.  Beads are going into storage until I unpack them in Bali, once I've set up the CasaMayaBali thing.

In the past weeks since my last blog, I've scaled down and down and down; the less I have,  the less I want,  the less I need. Yesterday I had my early morning cup of tea on a teak bench in a friends' home;  surrounded by frangipani and dripping water.  It's been the most difficult two years of my life; but I have come to the end of the ordeal.  I cried into my tea.  Then I smiled. And I smiled again.  Travel is at my fingertips.

And I have my friends, old and new, and that's all that counts, always.