Love is a torn rag doll abandoned in the gutter of dreams. At least this was the impression Abbotsleigh was giving me as he snuffled into his scrambled eggs. We were having a late breakfast at the Tyagarah Entertainment Centre Wetland Restaurant, only a croissant’s throw from the scene of Abbotsleigh’s disappointment of the night before.

While he consoled himself with a massive plate of eggs I toyed with rack of platypus in a gotu kola garnish and we were both attempting to drown my companion’s sorrows in a bottle of Gerry Harvey Compressed Bile Chardonnay, perhaps a touch too edgy on the afterpalate for the occasion.

‘It was a fabulously dumb proposition to begin with,’ moaned Abbotsleigh. ‘I am a roué and she an opera singer.’
‘An opera singer?’ I asked, and suddenly the penny dropped. ‘You don’t mean the utterly gorgeous Isabella Roma?’

If Abbotsleigh had looked any more crestfallen I would have have called for a twelve gauge and put him down. The divine Ms Roma had wowed the crowd at the new Michael Chugg Tyagarah Meat Pool Opera House, which had the original timber building suspended from its grand ceiling. Flower farms within a 50 kilometre radius had been stripped of their stock by smitten admirers seeking to impress the radiant prima donna.

‘Bit of a long bow, what, old chap?’ I asked Abbotsleigh. ‘The prime of the male species is oozing vital juices in pursuit of the young lady and you expect to get a look-in? Disappointment was inevitable, if that is some consolation. You are a hopeless romantic!’

‘Well, she did once look at me, and her eyes sparkled.’
‘Her eyes are trained to sparkle, dear fellow.’

‘I saw her from the carpark last night,’ Abbotsleigh continued. ‘It was like an impenetrable glass wall had arisen between us. Worse still, when I entered the hall, in the section cordoned off for her suitors, there were the Butterfly Brothers.’
Ah. The four Butterfly Brothers were an extremely talented and dangerous family of saltinbanques who also specialised in knife throwing. Abbotsleigh had had a hair-raising run-in with them before over the matter of a gerbil farm in the Bahamas in which he had induced them to purchase shares.

‘As you can see, the situation is hopeless,’ sobbed Abbotsleigh, ‘What am I to do?’

‘I should stick to altered states, if I were you,’ I counselled, emptying an acacia capsule into my flat white. ‘The likes of Ms Roma fall for dangerous men, not plodders, and her sixth sense would have told her you do not have horns enough to be entirely wicked.’

The morning was not a complete write-off, however, as the saucy Gypsy fortune teller Rosa entered the restaurant and gave old Abbotsleigh a cheeky wink. You could fairly see his loins gird up.
Hope springs eternal, don’t you know, and even the rag doll of love can be mended.

– recycled from February 2005